in terms of where i’m at, my background is physics and some philosophy, so i’m pretty much ignorant of literary theory and literature as a whole. my approach to netsub was mostly along the lines of a scientist drawing tentative conclusions from the data presented (as well as bringing some preconceived ideas to the table). i’m still learning much of this stuff as i go. it’s very likely netsub is simply an extension or an extended version of pomo, as you say; honestly my understanding of mod and pomo is not much better than a best-of-hits compilation with catch-phrases from the liner notes. first and foremost netsub is a literary theory, never meant to coin a new social or economic order (neither of which i know anything about) as mod and pomo are sometimes used as an interpretative lens for. whether or not we are in the network age, as samuel r smith proposes, i think network cognition is going to factor more and more in the arts. one of my main intentions behind writing the essay (aside from being intrigued and fascinated and wanting to play with everyone else in the sandbox) was to start a conversation, all the while knowing that my extremely limited knowledgebase would probably generate some inaccuracies (which is where any criticism, such as your own, is helpful and informative), but hopefully overall the essay would serve as a catalyst for thinking about some of these recent and emerging literary texts that are little fireballs of language and logic.

And Keith, literature nor reality are compounds, one could say their textualities, virtual and actual, are in consistent negotiation. And postmodernism, isn’t it bound up in a dialectical opposition to modernism? Netsub is thereby – even if we are to speak your way and allow philosophy or theory to describe terms as having their own positive or negative charge, own reactivity (which is inevitably representational if you ask me) own distinct characteristics that could describe Mod and PoMod as elemental chemicals and therefore indissoluble as units, mixable but also singular – a structural attempt at conjugating two supposedly distinct “gases” as you put them, which are not in fact singularly distinct. You cannot conjugate and produce offspring from the already-fucking.

Where are you? I ask this earnestly, because to assert your model your M and PM have to be in an abstract void with no relationship to the artwork, to cultural phenomena or even to each other, and any notion that it apprehends current or potential phenomena within a theory relies on immense reduction, representational calculation and static articulations of the ever-mobile, ever-elusive to make it work. I say this with all respect due to what is a fascinating model of meta-narratology. Also, Netsub strikes me as fascinating in its conception of a proliferating relationship between reality as we knew it before the creative act, and then the meshwork developed by the creative act, its particle and that particle’s relationship to reality. It is a revitalised, very postmodernist notion of metafiction and the development of reality. But it is not an alchemical assertion of a new order that is a new compound simultaneously the off-springing of the modernist and postmodernist, it is most certainly within horizons of the postmodernist. Doesn’t Lyotard say much the same of the emergence of the new, I’m out so I don’t have ‘The Postmodern Condition’ with me, that the properly new is impossible a la the modernists and instead the new is always a construction of fragments of what has come before? So like Netsub, we can look at the ‘new’ as constituted of elements singled out, as well as a new construction.

And Matt, the surreal finds its way interestingly into debates on the avant-garde, doesn’t it. I think the surreal is a different kind of opposition, if we’re to speak again of a generalised satellite of small press writers and bloggists then I think in part its sometimes surrealism might be due to frustration with popular fiction – literary or otherwise – and its reliance on very specific apprehensions of reality that would call any deviance ‘magic realism’, if not the avant-garde. Some wonderful authors still writing have broken through, McCarthy or Pynchon for example. But that isn’t the avant-garde is it, really. Surrealism is inextricably a part of comedy now, it’s a success story and the movement itself has permeated many facets of our aesthetic understandings. Its resistance against grand narratives over spatiality and temporality is perhaps enduringly relevant, as we can see by this fiction. But it’s an adjective now more than anything, I’m frankly bored by its psychoanalytic ‘rigour’.