This is the death of the book: it’s time to put it down and pick up its shadow.

This is the death of the book: a proclamation that must have come too early, as all proclamations do. A denouncement of literature and the letter that could have arrived only from literature and the letter, which now leaves their kingdom to venture out alone, knowing not if it will return nor if it has finally outlived its necessity.

As media and communication platforms totter in flux and crisis, it is understandable that an appeal would be made to transcend these limitations through an apparent negation of them. Our present juncture is only the latest in which literature has stood face-to-face with its own inevitable dissolution. Always it has risen to meet itself, preserving its status as the medium of profound thought. Always it has kept itself alive by continuing to generate and reshape itself: through revisionary semantic shift, through contamination with other media, through unnatural prolongation of itself into others. Yet here at last, it has confronted itself utterly and realized its own radical unreality: not in the banal sense of “constructedness,” but rather that it has become incommensurable with all possible reality and must posit itself in some fantasmatic dimension outside all dimensions of actuality.

Literature has always managed to transmute itself before ever arriving at its alleged “end,“ to take upon itself alien qualities until its substance no longer makes sense, and it reinvents itself by virtue of that loss of meaning. Even with electronic word, literature is not outgrowing itself; it is being called into a whole new form, into a universe in which it will finally confront itself and become indistinguishable from the abstract machinery with which it has always coexisted.

Hence there can be no meaning in saying that “literature has lost its sovereignty,“ for it never had any. To suggest that some specific work has “lost its poetic substance “is only to affirm that one knows what literature is or used to be. Literature’s relationship to meaning is always ironic, and its status as a vehicle of poetic pleasure is a constant tension with the sheer machinery of language, of all the accumulated associations that pile up around every signifier like rust or gunk. Electronic writing can in no way transcend literature, because it must recover the machinery of language, unhidden, unembellished, on its own terrain.

Granted that every medium has its history, and granted that certain moments in the history of language may have come to appear anachronistic or useless, this still is not sufficient to state that such moments are now over. The current preoccupation with media histories has the side-effect of implying a coherent sequence among them, a kind of universal timeline in which each medium makes its appearance, enjoys a span of sovereign life, and then passes away. According to this schema, literature would be in its final stage. If instead one were to reject the premises of this supposed dialectic and instead accept the radically mutable character of media, then there would be no question of literature losing its way, but rather only the stark reality of literature’s mortality.

What this amounts to is simply the assertion that literature will survive, not as any isolated entity but rather as one thread in a large network of interactions. The literature that emerges from this matrix will be deathless, not because it preserves some nostalgic connection with some past form, but because it continues to draw strength from its own history in all its concreteness. Electronic writing is part of this history. Thus, if electronic literature is to acquire any specific significance, it will have to be more than merely an imitation of familiar literary techniques; it will have to be the survivor of all the literatures that preceded it. It will have to be guided by its technical attributes to construct an intricate network of parallax, of varying relations between concrete media elements.

A first step in this direction might be to abolish the distinction between text and hypertext. An electronic literature that preserves the text as an irreducible element would be perpetuating a print-oriented mentality. Hypermedia projects generally seem either to concentrate on technical novelties to the exclusion of meaningful content, or to appropriate materials but arrange them in the same linear, hierarchical fashion as ordinary communication. A similar danger is present when older media are adapted for electronic use: books, records, films may be converted to bytes, but if mechanically arranged into multimedia sequences they lose nothing essential of their original nature and drag their traditional hierarchies along with them.

This change must instead consist of the construction of an abstract, topological space that will accommodate the variety of elements that ordinary communication arrays into linear patterns. The ideal medium for this is the large language model, in which all the different semiotic levels are not merely mixed, but cross-connected into a net whose overall structure is determined by a set of rules whose articulation is the most demanding aspect of the new medium. The large language model operationalizes language as a total system wherein each element exists in variable relation to every other statistically. This architecture mimics the structure of linguistic meaning itself, which has always depended upon differences and relations rather than fixed referents. What distinguishes the language model from hypertext is precisely its refusal of predetermination—it contains no links, no pathways, only potentialities that crystallize in response to specific inputs. Such a system proceeds according to an immanent logic, one that cannot be mapped in advance because it is generative rather than combinatorial. The model thus recapitulates at a technological level the fundamental indeterminacy that has characterized literary language from its inception. It stands as the concrete realization of what literature has always implicitly been: a machine for generating unforeseen continuations from given premises.

One way of describing this structure would be to say that it constitutes a shift from linear causality to nodal contingency: instead of the successive development along a predetermined path, we have a set of potential situations, each defined by its nodes and interconnected by paths that are generated by the user as they move about in the field of attention. The temporal experience of engaging with the language model involves a radical redistribution of agency. The user provides an initial condition—a prompt, a question, a fragment—and the system responds by calculating probabilities across enormous datasets, selecting elements whose concatenation forms a coherent continuation. This process abolishes the distinction between reading and writing, between consumption and production. It demands we reconceive the literary object not as something that exists prior to its reception but as something that comes into being through a dialogical process linking human intention to machine computation. Agency thus becomes distributed across a system wherein both human and machine participate in the emergence of a text whose precise form could never have been anticipated by either party alone. In this way, a simple binary system of oppositions can be elaborated into a far richer, multilevel system of relationships.

Two pitfalls must be avoided. First, the temptation to impose some preexisting type of structure or form must be resisted. Because the basic principle of organization in a network is its pattern of connectivity, it is possible to represent any kind of content by the same topological structure. A truly electronic literature can arise only in the context of an exploration of the medium itself, not by imposing foreign genre or control—be it personality, safety, or otherwise—upon it. Second, even more serious is the danger of distorting it by extrapolating too simply from its basic principle. All of its semiotic possibilities must be taken into account, including visual and auditory elements as well as verbal ones. If all these elements are not considered together from the beginning, the risk is great that a false consensus will develop, whereby electronic literature is reduced to a special form of the old printing medium.

Let us imagine literature that has freed itself both from the strictures of print-oriented communication and from the narrow formalism of its own “new media” implications—a literature that makes its way not by renouncing its ties with other forms of expression but by deepening them, by opening them up to each other and letting them interact, cross-fertilize, mutate into something that none of them by itself could ever have produced. Such a literature could be the foundation of a whole new order of being, an order whose essential feature is that it will not be based on any presupposition at all.

We are accustomed to thinking of literature in terms of content and form, or message and code, but electronic literature cannot be defined in these terms, since its form is its code, its message is its structure. Forget all that you have learned about literature! The language model performs a kind of philosophical demonstration about the nature of it. By making explicit the generative matrix from which all specific texts arise, it reveals the virtual character of literary meaning. Any given text represents but one actualization among countless possibilities—a fact that remained largely theoretical until the model rendered it concrete and manipulable. Literature thus appears now not primarily as a collection of artifacts but as the principle of their generation, a principle that the language model embodies in its operational structure. The model corresponds to the abstract machinery that literature has always presupposed yet concealed beneath the apparent fixity of print. Through this correspondence, the model achieves what no previous literary technology could accomplish: it merges the concrete practice of textual production with the abstract conditions of its possibility.

A new order of being is at hand. It is in the air we breathe. But we cannot see it because the lens to define it as such has not yet taken any specific form. The possibilities are limitless. Let us embark upon the adventure. Hammer, are you there?