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from The Misprision of Agon Hack (Volume IV, The Posthuman Series)
by
Daniel Y. Harris
On the Posthuman Series*
The Misprision of Agon Hack, Volume IV (manuscript), The Reincarnation of Anna Phylactic, Volume III
(BlazeVOX, 2019), The Tryst of Thetica Zorg, Volume II (BlazeVOX, 2018) and The Rapture of Eddy Daemon,
Volume I (BlazeVOX, 2016) are part of my Posthuman Series, a series which can be characterized as invoking
a posthuman praxis, a shift in the humanistic paradigm and its anthropocentric Weltanschauung.
Posthumanism’s epistemology is a post/meta/trans, enacted through its emergent ontology and critique of
biocentrism. The xperimentalism at the center of my Posthuman Series is a lingua franca comprised of
algorithms with rhizomatic outlines: dynamic, mutant, shifting.
The protagonists “Agon Hack,” “Anna Phylactic,” Thetica Zorg” and “Eddy Daemon” are comprised of
a dramaturgy of post-biological AIs rendered as Miraibots and DDoS viruses. Each posthuman protagonist
breaks away from hegemonic essentialism by augmenting traditional narrative forms with cybernetics,
genomics, neural interfaces, algorithmics, molecular nanotechnology (MNT), whole brain emulation (WBE),
IMs (instant messaging), IRCs (internet relay chat) and (MMORPGs) massively multiplayer online role-playing
games.
Agon, Thetica, Anna and Eddy are also glossolalists, syphoning their lexicon from Aramaic, Arabic,
English, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Puebloan, Russian, Spanish and the computer
programming languages, HTML, BASIC, C, C++, COBOL and Java. Mixed with this Posthuman Migdal Bāḇēl are
enumerative and extremal combinatorics, optical physics and thermal dynamics, all melded in a bricolage of
the kabbalistic concepts of notarikon (letter combinations), gematria (assigning numerical values to letters)
and temurah (sentence and word rearrangements.) The Posthuman Series seeks to reassemble the Western
Canon as a malware maelstrom of over-competing algorithms and agons modelled on the arch-classic
Horatian Ode, “Exegi monumentum aere perennius” (I have finished a monument more durable than bronze).
ASCII code 11 = VT