There is little to be gained from seeking to isolate any artistic form or movement from its antecedents and counterparts. Myopia is the product of critical segregation, wherein readers disengage practices from those contexts that have forged their contours. This might seem obvious, but there is value in rearticulating the axiomatic in times of transformation—when something “new” emerges, many of us fall into the trap of isolating our darlings, whether old or young, from all those other contexts that play a significant role in their construction. How does one look at electronic literature without considering the literary, the ludic, that which we can see, touch, and hear—how does one look critically at anything without such frames of reference, and how do we overcome natural limitations in capacity when attempting to do so? The best we can do is look to those who have gone before, build upon their foundation, and indeed, emphasise those aspects of an exploration we deem worthy of greater emphasis.

This task is all the more difficult in emerging disciplines, where the existing critical scaffold is sparse, but the contextual pool is just as wide. Consequentially, we often find ourselves returning to the broader facets of tradition in an effort to situate the emerging within the existing, a hallmark of fledging fields which might be construed as novice to the established, but as foundational to those who do not have the benefit of centuries of refinement. I once foolishly believed that new fields were those in which there was plentiful room for pioneers, when it is actually those who come after that often make the most worthwhile contributions to a discourse—they benefit from both the strong and weak foundations set down before them, and changeable intellectual contexts which can be shaped to their purpose. Tradition, then, both in acceptance and rejection, is the key to understanding.

The significance of tradition has long been acknowledged by artists and critics, the reasons for which are most aptly articulated by Eliot:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (1932, 4)

This is what art is, a continuation of that which has come before, and a foregrounding of what is yet to be. History and potential are both vital parts of artistic practice, both in its doing and appreciation. But this awareness needs to be tempered, and Eliot also writes that artists must discourage “following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes” (1932, 4). Bloom calls this “clinamen”, the tendency of poets to swerve from the past: “The poet so stations his precursor, so swerves his context, that the visionary objects, with their higher intensity, fade into the continuum” (1997, 42). In a respect for tradition, artists gain insight into the heterocosm of their precursors, knowing how to be both the same and different, resulting in, as Bloom states, “a shuddering sense of the arbitrary—of the equality, or equal haphazardness of all objects” (1997, 42).

It is in such a manner that we should approach reading contemporary electronic literature, attentive to those precursors and contexts which have shaped the current situation, without being distracted from aesthetics as they exist at present and might exist as we enter subsequent contemporary moments.

It is considerably problematic to think of electronic literature as new —what is new, how can anything be new? New is colloquial, useful, in that it hints at the allure of art, at the intangible quality of a style the hallmark of which is elasticity and an inherent resistance to periodisation. New is what we use to express the appeal of the strange, and there is some value in that, but it should not be overstated. Considered in relation to those traditions against which electronic literature’s aesthetic deviations should be measured, yes, there are significant degrees of difference, but we divorce influence if we focus too readily on the new—we run the risk of neglecting the swerve. The possibility for neglect emerges from a general hesitancy to acknowledge the fallacy of new media—emergence of newer media is a cultural cycle that has long persisted, and so to describe a medium as new tells us nothing of that medium. It is easy to be seduced by the hype of the new, seduction which leads to the adoption of revolutionary rather than evolutionary discourses.

Recent advances in creative technology might appear revolutionary, but culturally, we have been here before: Alan Liu distils the advent of digital literatures into an “encounter … between the literary and the digital”, an encounter which is the next juncture in the “long lineage of such first contact narratives” (2013, 3). This field, the creation and criticism of electronic literature, is the consequence of contact between screens and the literary, and so our concern is, quite simply, screen literature, and new has nothing to do with it. Of course, it is not at all simple, in that the contemporary screen is entirely liquid, and literature is literature, indeterminate through both nature and design. The objects of concern in this space are the product of contact between screens and literature, but the elements of this constitution emerge out of a constellation of contacts.

Dismissing the rhetoric of the new is no excuse for the critical status quo to be maintained—there is something going on here, and electronic literature, while literary, cannot be read and interpreted in the same precise ways as its counterparts. The present “first contact” can be likened to the “long lineage” that has preceded it, but it is nonetheless unknown—what we have here is the repetition of a trend that has persisted throughout cultural history, but with its own distinct characteristics and traits. We have been here before, but “here” is the unknown, and to say that we have been to the unknown before is to recognise that the consequences of the journey might be different each time. That is to say, the screen revolution is not the same as its print-based predecessor, that the rise of literary games is not the same as the emergence of cinema—many of history’s first contact narratives belong to a shared lineage, but lineage and being are not the same thing.

Paradigmatic shifts in contemporary artistry have presented previously unforeseen—what I suppose one could call new —literary and multimodal phenomena which warrant exploration, and that exploration needs to show loyalty to its subjects. When film first emerged, we recognised its artistic value, value based in visuals, sounds, and words, but one does not treat a film as they would a painting, novel, or song. All modes of artistic expression warrant specific critical frameworks suited to the nuances of form—this is not just about developing a vocabulary, but encouraging a network and exchange of ideas embedded in peculiarity. Doing so requires recognition of the tension between the historical and the universal, a tension which exists across all philosophical and cultural explorations. Defining a digital poetics, venturing an explanation of digital culture, is a dialectical process, and one which, in its attempt to identify the universal while remaining conscious of the historical—alluding to a Foucauldian school of thought—is inherently aporetic.

But even in the most chaotic of fields and most dissonant of cultural contexts and academies, aesthetic consistencies will always be present, and these are what we should look to as readers and critics. There are two forces essential to any aesthetic—order and disruption. Order is that which constructs art out of the many elements which are needed throughout the act of composition, imposing a system upon a limited selection of infinite variables. Disruption is the intentional or unintentional disintegration of existing or prevailing systems for the purposes of constitution by systematic displacement, or simply, the construction of a new system, or the absorption or manipulation of one into or by another. Order and disruption are commutative, wherein the manner of their implementation can alter both the artistic process and product, but the end result is always the same—art. This persistent dance between order and disruption has received renewed emphasis from critics treating forms which avail of the most contemporary processes.

Writing on the “complex dynamics” that exists between literature and science, Hayles refers to the discourse which has emerged alongside the growing symbiosis between the arts, the humanities, and the sciences as “the science of chaos” (1991, 1). Some sixteen years later, Gendolla and Schäfer were still expanding on this idea:

As a rule, events are characterized as upheavals if they have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences, both negative and positive. This entails natural or cultural catastrophes, massive destruction of things, circumstances, structures, or systems and their elements just as much as it does their completely new construction, i.e. the long-term establishment of other, historically not yet existing constellations. Both meanings only refer to two poles of one single process: the radical capsizing or the sudden end of conditions and orders of things. Typically, their partial or complete dissolution is followed by new sets of laws, different circumstances, structures or new stabilized conditions. (2007, 17)

Shift forward yet another decade, and here we are, still considering literature and logic, words and screens—the general “order of things”. Digital culture is not so different from that which came before that it should be considered in absolute...