Visualization, Scale, and the Emergence of Posthuman Narrative

Abstract

All narrative is a function of architecture, and architecture is always a reflection of its historical moment, especially the architecture of information. The humanist novel, with its concern for individual autonomy, authenticity, and mimetic representation through visual detail, is often designed to depict the world at the human scale: the scale of face-to-face interaction where Newtonian physics apply. But at a time when people increasingly understand the world at larger scales, and the concept of the humanist individual is being eclipsed by a posthuman awareness, the optical metaphor of the human scale may be less relevant to an architecture of the novel than one that relies upon larger scales: an architecture which privileges emergence over cause and effect, or pattern over individual viewpoint. By seeing emergence as an organizing principle in the architecture of novels, a mode of narration opens up in both their creation and criticism that complements the contemporary, posthuman ground of being just as the humanist novel once fit the humanist conception of the individual and became the “natural” way to write.

Keywords

• emergence
• humanist novel
• individual
• information design
• mimesis
• narrative architecture