Graduate Student Conference

co-organized with Dafna Shetreet and Marlene Reich

NYU Department of German

April 16, 2020 - April 17, 2020

“Our software and wetware are constantly glitching. Rather than try to perfect order, let’s embrace the glitch and find out how else it all could play out.”

McKenzie Wark ( on Legacy Russell’s Glitch feminism)

In recent years¨ the “glitch” has become a prominent subject in the arts and cultural discourse. Glitch as an art form, as a music genre,, and – arguably somewhat less popular– glitch literature and poetry. Deviating from an aesthetics of perfection, accuracy, and authenticity, glitch art and theory deals with malfunctions, perceived errors, and a lack of control over systems.

In a typology of errors, maybe the glitch could be defined as an interference – something that disrupts the expected or conventional flow of information, block transmission, jams the code, prevents sense being made. As an eruption within the material, we immerse ourselves to, glitches corrupt our suspension of disbelief – and call our attention to the underlying structure (and infrastructure) of the system in which they appear – be it a poor digital infrastructure that is being exposed in the stutter of a video communication app); be it a linguistic system that glitchy poetry, misspellings and challenge.

While media and cultural studies, design– and political theory, have addressed the implications of the glitch, it has received little attention in literary theory.  Yet, different forms of interferences, errors, and mistakes have always been at the core of literary works and critique. Indeed, the general wisdom in cultural– & psychoanalysis has it that a mistake, a slip, a misunderstanding is always hermeneutically charged, revealing meanings otherwise concealed. But if the concept of the error takes its meaning from the idea that it is a deviation from the norm of correctness, credibility, function, reliability or objective truth – isn’t labeling something a mistake always already a normative endeavor that reproduces the opposition between truth and falsity – thus stabilizing the very norm, the glitch challenges?

And if textual and contextual discrepancies arising in the reading process are hastily attributed to a mistake of the implicit author, or the narrative voice, aren’t emerging textual problems all too easily aligned – and resolved – with a model of reasoning that doesn’t allow for ambiguity and destabilization of contemporary commonplaces, norms, truisms, and platitudes?

And on the other hand, if no mistake shall be disregarded, and even the slightest slip of the tongue is supposed to alarm our hermeneutic instincts, how do we prevent ourselves from following a paranoid hermeneutics, in which everything has meaning and nothing may escape the grasp of interpretation?

We would like to inquire whether the concept of the glitch might serve as a critical tool for literary analysis, or vice versa: how literary texts shed light on the theoretical and aesthetic concept of the glitch. Where is a glitch located within the different typologies of mistakes? If a glitch interferes with the systematic order, what is the relation between resistance and error? Can we conceive of an epistemology of errors? Can we formulate a poetics of the glitch?