Helixtrolysis: Cyberology & the Joycean "Tyrondynamon Machine"

by Louis Armand

It is an intriguing feature of cybernetics, cognitive science, psychoanalysis, critical theory & particle physics that at key moments in their recent evolution their major practitioners have turned to the work of one particular "experimentalist" writer, James Joyce, in whose key works -- Ulysses & Finnegans Wake -- they have sought an articulation of the emergent virtuo-real universe which since the mid-20th century we have increasingly come to inhabit. From these two books have directly been drawn the name for the fundamental constituent of the nucleon (Murray Gell-Mann's quark), a new model of cognition (Daniel Dennett's Joycean machine), a radical cybernetic conception of language (Jacques Derrida's Joyceware), a psycho-analytical paradigm (Jacques Lacan's sinthome), & the foundations of post-War media theory (Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, originally called The Road to Finnegans Wake).

This volume examines a series of counter arguments to the conventional account of literary cybernetics in light of developments which have accompanied the encounter between critical theory and cultural studies, namely 'hypertextuality' and 'posthumanism.' In each instance, the continuing legacy of Joyce's works is examined in detail.

256 pages, Paperback

First published December 10, 2014

About the author

Louis Armand is a writer and visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor and publisher, and as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and is an editor of VLAK magazine. He is the author of eight novels, including Breakfast at Midnight in 2012, "a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil" (Richard Marshall, 3:AM), CAIRO (Equus Press, 2014; short listed for the Guardian's Not-the-Booker Prize), and THE COMBINATIONS (Equus Press, 2016). Described as "Robert Pinget does Canetti (in drag in Yugoslavia)," Armand's third novel Clair Obscur was published by Equus in 2011. His previous novel, Menudo (Antigen), was described as "unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopaedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring!" (Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown).