2024/03/22 by Marietta Schmutz · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Cybernetics and Technology in Society #Psychoanalysis and Social Critique
paper · doi:10.16995/gc.10516
openalex publication_date 2024/03/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
The article deals with Sibylle Berg's novel GRM Brainfuck (2019), which focuses on a 'working world' that is being transformed by digitization processes. This world is anchored in a 'post-human system' in which non-human objects emerge as 'active' and humans recede into the background, which is why the text is examined against the background of critical post-humanist and neo-materialist approaches. In addition, media-theoretical and philosophical examinations form the framework for an analysis that first and foremost deals with the dystopian potential of the novel. It is then to be shown that the novel makes legible a gendered amalgamation of transhumanist ideology on the one hand and processes of reification on the other in a world 'populated' by artificial intelligences. Finally, it is argued that Berg's aesthetics unfolded within the narrative evoke what Günther Anders has called a "Promethean gap", meaning the inadequacy of human language and imagination with regard to man-made (technological) entities.