Today on Buried Text we discuss a truncated publication of Theory of Vibe in the 2017 edition of Glass Bead: Site 1. Logic Gate: the Politics of the Artifactual Mind. We are joined today by poet Jake Reber, doctor of Poetics, co-founder of the online PDF publishing platform Hysterically Real, and author of the sort of recently published ZER000 excess, a book Tan Lin wrote, “unleashes a host of graphically pixelated contagions along the pathway of the book. The results blown out, dark matter, black holes you are reading, recombinant delays, auto scripts spliced to your eyes, fascination, terminal, and transgenic.”

Peli’s Theory of Vibe seems like it has been stalking the literary scene now for many years as a haunting ghost story told around acephalic campfires. Sure, his dissertation is freely available on ProQuest, but those watching on twitter have been witness to this concept’s ongoing development beyond a precocious literary theoretical Harvard dissertation, as it moves with ludic inertia toward divulging a secret that spells out the confounding idea that the mathematization of literature will in fact not destroy poetry, but instead lead to a new kind of defense of poetry’s necessity, one quite sympathetic, it turns out, to Kant, Shelley, Sylvia Wynter, and Adrian Piper. Math and computation, even a new rationalism, he claims, will not lead us toward the kind of stultifying soul-deadening neoliberal analyses endlessly performed by a certain realm of “digital humanities,” nor will it inevitably fall victim to some putrid and adolescent faux-Bataillean Manichean utility-as-hedonism accelerationist transhuman fantasy. Instead, Theory of Vibe, and its blockbuster future iteration Big Mood, suggests that computation might provide new insights into poetry’s identity as an essential generator of intersubjective moods, frameworks of structured experience and feeling that cannot be produced any other way but in and as poetry.