Abstract
This article proposes that Sibylle Berg’s novel GRM Brainfuck (2019) expresses an ethics of relationality by showing the possibility, no matter how fleeting and precarious, of connections and collaborations, both physical and digital, between individuals and groups in the epoch of neoliberal fundamentalism, rapidly developing Artificial Intelligence and ecological breakdown. Narrative indeterminacy lays the aesthetic foundations for Berg’s portrayal of precarious relationality on the margins of totalitarian society, and it also articulates difference. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as a hybrid form and his concept of the carnivalesque, the article argues that Berg’s narrative discourse and grotesque depictions of the body articulate the young protagonists’ resistance against the white elite techno-patriarchy. Berg’s thematization of the underground music genre, grime, also plays into her carnivalesque tirade against the status quo. Ultimately, her portrayal of relationality explores possibilities of human-machine kinship, even as the novel catastrophizes technological singularity. GRM Brainfuck is thus a form of cyborg writing, in Donna Haraway’s sense, that manifests in the carnivalesque narrative form.
Introduction
When Sibylle Berg’s GRM Brainfuck, a novel about four underclass teenagers in post-Brexit Britain, appeared in 2019, it not only expressed the author’s unique grotesque-satirical critique of the contemporary world; it was also the outcome of Berg’s collaborative practice as an artist.Footnote1 Deeply sceptical of today’s neoliberal ideology which prizes the individual over the collective and has deep roots in Western thought, Berg’s modus operandi as a novelist and theatre practitioner foregrounds the importance of creative collaborations between and across individuals and groups.Footnote2 During the three years she spent working on the manuscript Berg interviewed several international scientists to explore the challenges of rapidly developing digital technologies, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI), which she was to thematize in the novel.Footnote3 She also spent a significant period in deprived areas of post-Brexit Britain, the novel’s backdrop, working with Ruff Sqwd Arts, a charitable foundation that offers disadvantaged young people the opportunity to learn the art of grime, the subversive music genre that informs the title and lends GRM Brainfuck much of its aesthetic force.Footnote4 I highlight these collaborative, ‘real world’ commitments of the author because they matter in the context of relationality and particularly in respect of GRM, which despite its evident successes (in 2019 it won both the Swiss Book Prize and the Kassel Literature Prize for Grotesque Humour)Footnote5 divided critics. While many were convinced by the sheer force of Berg’s deadpan, apocalyptic and deeply satirical style,Footnote6 some critics characterized it as a brutal tirade (‘[m]ehr Brainfuck als Roman’) against the present catastrophic state of the world.Footnote7 This partly has to do with the plot’s trajectory: the revolution, which the young people attempt to ignite, fizzles out. However, critics also objected on aesthetic grounds: the novel was too long, an overblown version of one of the columns which over the course of twelve years Berg penned for Spiegel.online.Footnote8 Despite its large cast of figures, the novel’s tone was monotonous, there was little character development, and the plot was thin.Footnote9 A certain disapproval on moral grounds also comes across in reviews that deem GRM voyeuristic, pornographic and nihilistic. One voice went so far as to accuse Berg of luxuriating in doom.Footnote10
Such viewpoints overlook the central role of grotesque humour in the novel.Footnote11 The stuff of the story is certainly difficult, and its presentation is unrelenting; both scale and scope of the novel — over 600 pages long and multi-perspectival — ensure this. To stop there in analysis, however, means to ignore not only the author’s wider relational politics, which shaped the novel’s genesis and inform its narrative aesthetics, but also its portrayal of the potential for relationality between oppressed individuals and groups. I argue that Berg communicates relationality and resistance through playful ‘carnivalization’ of the narrative perspective, which withstands closure, and through grotesque bodily images. Narrative open-endedness implies that even as the young people’s first attempt at revolution peters out, the world is still up for grabs — a theme that paves the way for the second novel of the trilogy, RCE #RemoteCodeExecution (2022), which sees the youth resistance gather force again, this time on a more ambitious scale.Footnote12 In GRM the grotesque aesthetics of relationality express the possibility of socio-political change, and this possibility is grounded as much in the suggestibility of narrative ambivalence as in the story of the resisting practices of different individuals who comprise a collective, however small and improvised.
I use Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the novel as a hybrid form in order to think through a literary aesthetics of relationality.Footnote13 Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic prose as fundamentally split and ambiguous captures an important feature of Berg’s style of narration: a rough, staccato grime ‘flow’ which grants no single figure — human, machine or other — the privilege of omniscience. Her political dissection of asymmetrical power structures comes to the fore in this carnivalesque narrative aesthetic, which positions individuals, groups and things horizontally in relation to each other — even as she paints a lurid picture of existence in the vertical, digital dictatorship. Carnivalization of the narrative perspective opens up a space of playful possibility beyond the graphically depicted everyday, the ‘Istzustand’, as Berg calls it, which is shorthand for life reduced to the minimal servicing of biological needs, lived almost entirely without imagination, creativity, thought, or insight (GRM, pp. 358–59). Her carnivalesque depictions of the body also wickedly take up this critique, as she makes a case for the importance of reimagining the human in the era of AI. This points to the ethical dimension of Berg’s grotesque aesthetics of relationality: narrative indeterminacy gestures to the possibility, no matter how fleeting and precarious, of creative connections and collaborations, physical, mental and digital,Footnote14 between individuals and groups in the epoch of neoliberal fundamentalism, rapidly developing AI and clear-and-present ecological breakdown. Carnivalization of the narrative perspective thus allows both for the possibility of difference and lays the aesthetic foundations for Berg’s portrayal of precarious relationality on the margins of society.
Berg’s focus on on- and offline underground assemblages of young, disenfranchized people communicate this ethical focus on the human — the kernel of potential resistance. At the outset, the four youngsters are pre-teens subsisting within complicated family arrangements in the urban slums of post-industrial England. They are poor, disadvantaged and marked as Other by myriad differences: ethnic, national, physical, sexual. Hannah is possibly of Asian origins; when her mother dies, her father is unable to cope, disappears online and is brainwashed into taking his own life by a for-profit platform. Don, an angry mixed-race, queer pre-teen, lives in Rochdale’s squalid social housing with her single-parent mother and attention-deficient brother. Don’s mother takes up with Walter, a violent Christian fundamentalist who beats Don up. Peter is a Polish migrant who arrived in England with his mother. When she abandons him for an affluent life with a Russian oligarch, Peter is raped and cannot speak, which leads others to underestimate his abilities. Finally, Karen is a highly intelligent albino girl whose mother becomes an addict. Karen is groomed and drugged by Patuk, a young local Asian man who runs a child sex ring. She is raped time and again while Patuk films the violations.Footnote15
The four children come across one another in Rochdale and forge an alliance there borne of the desire to escape their respective circumstances and to exact revenge for the crimes committed against them. They leave Rochdale for London and occupy a dilapidated building in a dark, damp location somewhere on what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has called ‘the peri-capitalist’ outskirts of the city.Footnote16 Effectively they go underground, as this terra incognita is still undetected by post-Brexit England’s growing digital dictatorship, and the children cleverly bury their smart devices, so that they can evade electronic surveillance (GRM, p. 259). From here they establish a list of the adults who abused them, seeking them out and keeping them under observation until revenge is complete. This space on the margins of London, simultaneously both inside and outside the dictatorship, is a liminal space of resistance-in-the-making that extends beyond the four friends. Walking around the derelict area one day Hannah comes across another assemblage of youths, the ‘Baby-hackers’, who for three years have been feverishly trying to construct an alternative, decentralized internet that would circumvent the state’s surveillance system (GRM, p. 307). Their aim is to start a revolution by exposing how the ruling class has converted citizens into data-subjects in the techno-feudal society. The two groups of young people keep one another company, tinkering on computers, ordering pizza and listening to music. Grime is the fast and furious soundtrack of this underground existence in protest. For Berg, it offers an affective basis for resistance, joy and hope:
Es geht im Buch und in der Musik darum sich nicht mit dem Platz zu begnügen, der für einen bereitgestellt scheint. Nicht apathisch zu warten, sondern wütend zu werden. Energie zu bekommen, die die Voraussetzung ist, um wenigstens zu versuchen, sein Leben zu verändern.Footnote17
Bakhtin and the Aesthetics of Relationality
In his influential theory of the modern novel, Bakhtin argued that with the rise of modernity and the demise of feudalism the old folk tradition of carnival disappeared from public space.Footnote19 However, the influence of the carnivalesque in the modern novel could be traced, he asserted, in two ways: the grotesque poetics of the body,Footnote20 and the divided narrative consciousness.Footnote21
The body in carnival is rude, resisting and relational. Its contours are debunkingly transgressed in hyperbolic representation, as protruding body parts are exaggerated or simply take over the whole physical form. Classic examples include the phallus and the domain of the lower body generally, as well as protruding eyes or nose, the wide-open mouth, alongside a gleeful focus on other orifices.Footnote22 In his depiction of how carnival celebrations ritually harnessed ‘low’ folk humour symbolically to ridicule and dethrone those in power, Bakhtin emphasizes that the carnivalesque body is a site of transgression and exchange between inside and outside. Never fully articulated or complete, it is an open body in process, forever in a state of becoming.Footnote23 It is no individualized, private entity, then: rather, the carnivalesque-grotesque body is collective, a potent site of relationality and exchange. Acts of ‘bodily drama’ such as birth, death, secretion, dismemberment, copulation, and so on, express this fundamentally relational connection of interdependence which characterizes the co-existence of human bodies and other human and non-human bodies, and the wider world which all riotously inhabit.Footnote24 As such, Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body can be a weapon of humorous critique of alienated society and the closed-off, isolated individuals that comprise it.
In GRM Berg’s discourse on the body satirically dissects the closed-off, privatized and compliant self of ‘new Leviathan’, hi-tech, dictatorial societies, which post-Brexit Britain exemplarily represents.Footnote25 Writing against the aspirationally omnipotent and utterly vacuous ‘Ego’ of what she calls ‘die neuen Menschen’ (GRM, p. 389), mindless technophiles characterized by physical and mental ‘Verklemmtheit’ (GRM, p. 369), her aesthetics of the body resonate with Bakhtin’s concept of carnival in literary form. The very title of the novel announces this grotesque-satirical programme: ‘GRM’ references the underground London-based music scene of grime, the ‘noise’ from the street, so to speak, that rap-sings in a colloquial idiom the experiences of marginalized communities while also grittily articulating a will to resist the emerging dictatorship.Footnote26 The four children, who are fans of grime, embody this potentially carnivalesque din from the street, the sound of the discontented underclass, ready to rise up. ‘Brainfuck’, the other component of the title, is the name of an esoteric computer programming language which was developed by Swiss physics student, Urban Müller, in 1993.Footnote27 Alongside the reference to the software, the compound signifier ‘Brainfuck’ also comically presents a vivid bodily grotesquerie in carnivalesque mode. This is the implied rude penetration of an abstract, code-processor ‘brain’ by meaty, lower-body elements, the self-implosion of a caricaturized, computerized Cartesian brain-self that has forgotten about the surprising power of its own body. Brain is anything but a superior seat of rationality or reason here; rather, it is made profane along a vertical axis of dethroning, a political motif from carnival that Berg satirically develops throughout her novel. As this analysis implies, the carnivalesque juxtaposition of the incongruous elements ‘GRM’ and ‘Brainfuck’ in the title also announces Berg’s exploration of what constitutes the human in the era of rapidly emerging artificial intelligence.
The semantic suppleness of the novel’s title suggests that grotesquerie is as much a matter of language as it is of the body. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism helps to pinpoint Berg’s grotesque style of narration. Dialogism is a theory of language as inherently social and relational.Footnote28 Bakhtin argues that no single person or group can ever ‘own’ language, even if they believe this to be the case. Rather, individual ‘utterances’ — Bakhtin’s term for concrete speech acts — are always shaped socially and historically at the point of enunciation by other utterances that precede them or co-exist with them. Language is a diachronically and synchronically dynamic entity, not a static thing. It is therefore impossible to enunciate into a vacuum, and meaning evolves dialogically in relation to wider contexts that go beyond the speaking person.Footnote29 Just as there is no ‘individual’ body in the carnivalesque view of the world, in the novel no single voice or perspective has absolute power. All utterances, normative, propagandistic or even authoritarian, emerge in a social context and therefore stand in relation to other utterances. An enunciating instance which presents itself as the authoritative frame may be unceremoniously de-framed and positioned not above but alongside other utterances that relativize it. Such relativization is for Bakhtin the hallmark of modern novelistic prose which portrays the dialogic quality of language, or heteroglossia, as he calls it.Footnote30 According to this view, the novel is double-voiced, indicating a split narrating consciousness discursively premised on the potential or actual voice of an Other, difference and dialogue. Narrative consciousness in Bakhtin’s sense can thus only ever be relational.
GRM is forged in just such a relativizing relationality that has a strong ethical dimension. The reader encounters a cacophony of separate speaking, thinking consciousnesses relayed in the third person. Most of these narrating consciousnesses can be mapped onto a diegetic figure; however, beyond these episodic focalizations, it is difficult to pin the roving narrative instance down to an identifiable persona. Combinations of omniscient style and free direct speech complicate such endeavours. For example, characters are introduced via their very own data set, which reveals intimate details and is separated out from the main text in different fonts. This arrangement of text on the page performs the constant intrusion of data surveillance into the citizens’ disappearing private sphere and suggests that perhaps some sort of anonymous, master data-scraper is the mostly invisible omniscient power behind the narrative. But even those characters, such as the programmer or the spy MI5 Piet who do data-scraping for a living and could potentially be the roving digital meta-eye, are themselves relativized in the novel’s shifting focalization. At an advanced point in the narrative, for example, we discover not only that Piet is an old white man at pains to conceal his homosexuality, but also that he in turn is being watched by a Chinese spy, Ma Wei (GRM p. 425, p. 550). Anne Fuchs refers to these two characters as ‘extradiegetic’, which is how they appear initially, but the narrative gradually demotes them into the diegesis, and we understand that they are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Rather, they are, to paraphrase Fuchs, observational voices that serve total surveillance.Footnote31
The ethical dimension of the narrative discourse comes across in what we could, as Fuchs suggests, read as the implied omniscient perspective which manifests in the satirical grotesquerie and which may be viewed as the moral authorial utterance that rails against the patriarchy and its obsession with technology.Footnote32 Yet this perspective also rails against itself when it questions humankind’s agency in a central place in the novel. Berg adds a scientific schema which presents the exponential acceleration from the Big Bang to the convergence point of technological singularity around the Omega year 2050 (GRM, pp. 214–15). This schema displays a transhistorical time frame that identifies human history as a mere episode of larger-scale scientific processes, which suggests that humans were never agents of geopolitical change. Such a narrative intervention casts all human efforts — plans for the resistance, transhumanist fantasies and dictatorial ambitions — in a satirical perspective, as it implies that planetary and technological forces will ultimately determine the future of humankind. The insert, which is not commented on by the shifting narrative perspective, thus creates a space that indirectly conveys indifference, which undercuts the utopian imaginary of change that the carnivalesque narrative indicates. However, we could also read the insert as a further facet of the split narrating consciousness: it tries throughout to imagine a massive social revolution led by young people, but it will not ignore the very real challenges of the present.Footnote33 This helps to explain the many passages dedicated to the hardship of struggle in precarity: the children are impacted by the digitized world and have difficulty concentrating; they are frequently exhausted and depressed; the Baby-hackers are also physically impacted by their efforts to bring down the system. Ultimately, the young people drift apart and end up complying with the society (as mentioned earlier, this changes in the following novel). In this way, Berg communicates that relationality is not easy: it requires work, tenacity and commitment. Most of all, perhaps, it requires the ability to persevere in the face of darkness. I now turn to Berg’s depiction of that dark society, tracing how she writes against it.
Barbarism now: The ‘Istzustand’
The world depicted in GRM is dominated by networked machines that serve elite interests by harvesting citizens’ data for the purposes of control and profit. Post-Brexit England is a capitalist dictatorship modelled on China where there is no data privacy (GRM, p. 226). The elites comprise on the one hand a decrepit aristocracy that has dominated government and business for many years, and on the other an up-coming class of coders — exemplars of ‘die neuen Menschen’ — who are heavily involved in the evolution of AI. Both groups have in common that they are white, middle-aged, super rich, and male; through the figures of the wealthy technophile son Thome — who is behind the platform that brainwashed Hannah’s father — and his aristocratic politician father, who becomes prime minister for a time, the narrative implies that these elite groups are interrelated inept ‘sons’ and ‘fathers’ intent on reshaping the world as it transitions to a radically new epoch.
The rise of AI has meant the disappearance of work and the middle-class, and the resultant expansion of the underclass. The elites who helped bring about this situation are now exploiting it by rolling out a universal basic income to cultivate a society of obedient, self-monitoring individuals who inform on one another (GRM, p. 229). To be eligible for the income, citizens must accept government-issued microchip implants that harvest their data for the state, which is now little more than a vessel for the rampant techno-capitalist vested interests of the tiny elite that owns the country’s wealth. Basic income in the hi-tech surveillance society operates through a ‘Karma’ points system: bad behaviour — such as cursing, not exercising or wasting resources — results in loss of points, cuts to health insurance or power cuts. Good behaviour is rewarded with bonus points.Footnote34 Informing on fellow citizens is another way of getting extra points. In this way, the fundamental law of competition in the race to accumulate more and more wealth prevails across even the lives of the workless poor who will never have a share in that wealth. Yet most people comply with the system because in this new world order bare survival — access to food and shelter — depends on compliance. This is an oppressed and muted world dominated by a barbaric violence that is legitimized by the elites who foster widespread ‘Angst’ as they seek to subdue the masses in a threshold epoch of major change. It is a world in which, to parse Isabelle Stengers, the barbarism that once was coming, ‘a war of all against all’, has unequivocally arrived: in Berg’s parlance, the ‘Istzustand’ (GRM, p. 282, p. 287).Footnote35 The absence of social solidarity is palpable in the return of the death penalty, the abortion ban and the fascistic creation via propaganda means of target groups of ‘enemy’ Others, such as those who perform badly in the Karma Points system and become poor and homeless; the rest of the downtrodden population, divided against itself and facing this fate at all times, is permitted to vent its fear and rage on the defenceless with impunity (GRM, p. 282–83; p. 325).
In this world of computerized totalitarian surveillance systems and asymmetrical power structures, Berg subversively foregrounds the human body as a mortal one shared equally by the powerful and the disempowered, the wealthy and the poor. She continually draws our attention to humanity as a general, smelly mass. This is the stink of mortality, a distinctly political odour that finds and seeps through the cracks and social barriers of the hi-tech society. We might call it the wickedly sweet smell of carnival. In Berg’s representation, the elites belong to this malodorous humanity — their mortal bodies betray them time and again, and so they are placed on the same horizontal grotesque bodily axis as the workless poor (GRM, p. 248, p. 285, p. 288). Thome’s father is a robust ‘Ein-Meter-neunzig-Mann im Vollbesitz seines prächtigen Haares’, but said hair ‘[ist] ein wenig urinfarben geworden’ and he has ‘eine[n] sehr kleinen Penis’ (GRM pp. 299–300). Especially the reference to piss-coloured hair is a carnivalesque reversal of lower and upper symbolic body levels (much like the compound ‘Brainfuck’). The scatological image returns in a scene of inebriated buffoonery that literally exposes the ruling elite as flaccid and impotent:
Mann, waren sie besoffen gewesen. Der Earl of Caughingham urinierte in den Schirmständer. Den er mit einem Kellner verwechselt hatte. “Man müsste das Land regieren”, hatte Thomes Vater gesagt. “Das machen wir doch schon”, erwiderte der Earl of egal. “Richtig regieren”, sagte Thomes Vater. Der Earl packte sein Glied in die Hose, die er nicht schloss. “Man muss Großbritannien wieder zu einem Ort der Tradition machen, von Dreck befreien”, sagte Thomes Vater und betrachtete die offene Hose seines Kollegen und die weiße Wurst, die aus dem Dunkel zu winken schien. […]
Man muss erneut die Angst der Menschen mobilisieren. (GRM, pp. 301–02)
The flippant utterance, ‘Earl of egal’ is a verbal alert to such carnivalesque undoing: it suggests that all earls are the same and do not matter. Apart from the carnivalesque portrayal of body parts that seem to have agency on a par with the revellers, such as the white sausage that waves at Thome’s father, narrative voice in this passage is dual and of uncertain provenance. It focalizes Thome’s father’s perspective but does not fully coincide with it. Who, exactly, utters or thinks ‘Earl of egal’? Who uses the colloquial expression ‘Mann, waren sie besoffen gewesen’? Both are debunking utterances ‘from below’ which sympathetically align with the young people’s resisting outlook — even though they are absent from this scene of drunken power-play. Such utterances furthermore relativize another kind of utterance which comes to the fore — the authoritarian world view ‘from above’ expressed in the words ‘Tradition’ and ‘Dreck’. The implied omniscient narrator (Berg) thus takes up a position in favour of the youth and against the elites. This is heteroglossia at work, the hybridization of narrative perspective through the mingling of different utterances, some of which convey the authorial utterance. In this way, Berg uses a strategy of narrative indeterminacy to gesture towards a difference from below that speaks truth to power.
Thome himself is puny with an awkward, uncoordinated body and a horsey face: he has large, protruding ears that flap in the wind and feet that he greatly dislikes (GRM, pp. 316–17). The Russian oligarch, who takes up with Peter’s runaway ‘trophy’ mother, has protruding frog-like eyes and an unnaturally hairless body, while other characters have stinking genitalia. Extravagant wealth cannot negate the body and its fleshy limitations, as Herr M., a billionaire transhumanist and colonizer of Mars, finds out when, bored witless by life in outer space, he ventures out of his oxygenated glass-dome abode on that planet and promptly dies — another vivid depiction of apparently great power and wealth that cancels itself out for lack of ideas and imagination (GRM, pp. 327–30).
As these images suggest, pantomimic buffooneries are part of Berg’s grotesque bodily aesthetic, which in particular takes aim at the white male elite:Footnote36 some characters are caught in clownish acts quite literally with their pants down — whether they are publicly urinating aristocrats, or medical professionals caught in the act while attempting to rape their comatose female patients (GRM, pp. 440–41). However, this buffoonery is taken to an absurd level in the grotesque depiction of the Russian oligarch’s transhumanist hubris. Like nearly all male figures in the novel, he is portrayed throughout as a curious physical specimen who despises all things human, especially women and his own body, because it is mortal and unfit for a world dictated by the relentless acceleration of technology. In other words, he is one of the uptight ‘neue Menschen’. He believes that death is for ‘losers’ and determines to outsmart the organic world by living forever through body enhancement technology. The following excerpt takes this perspective to its logical conclusion:
Der Russe
Hört nichts. Ohne Ohren halt. Das Schlimmste sind die Phantomschmerzen. Das Gehirn sendet pausenlos Signale an den Körper: Sprach-, Seh-, Geschmackszentrum, die Gliedmaßen, die Verdauung, der Stuhlgang. Tausende in einer Sekunde, ohne dass da ein Körper wäre, der Impulse und Befehle in etwas umsetzen kann. Das macht reichlich irre. Das Gehirn sieht nichts, hört nichts, es ist. Wie in einem Traum auf Erinnerungen angewiesen. Auf Gedanken. Leider nicht einmal auf Träume, denn das Gehirn schläft nicht. Es ist. Es denkt an Dinge wie Essen, Frühling, Ausflug, Netflix, aber es kann nichts davon tun, nichts umsetzen, nichts außer sein und denken. (GRM, pp. 615–16)
On the level of syntax, the irregular punctuation in some sentences indicates the radical dismemberment that has taken place at the physical level. The narrating consciousness coincides with the Russian’s perspective occasionally (‘Das Schlimmste sind die Phantomschmerzen.’) but overall seems to narrate from a disembodied place somewhat apart from the brain’s perspective. This is once again a split narrative consciousness: the narrating instance is a hybrid of the Russian’s sensations and a more distanced perspective. As is the case many times throughout the novel, it is as though a machine-like consciousness could be at work here. Free indirect speech filtered through the implied omniscient narrator eerily approximates the roving mechanical eye of AI whose tentacles reach into all corners of data-subjects’ lives. Simultaneously, it also expresses the moral position of the author who writes against the patriarchy. The final section takes up the question of narrative with regard to the AI figure in the novel.
Cyborg Writing
Stupid brains, whether human or machine, are a theme throughout GRM. From the masses that mindlessly surrender their data, to the white patriarchy that has fostered the system but is trumped by AI in the elections, and to AI itself, the onset of mindlessness in the claustrophobic computerized society is perhaps the central concern of GRM. The human is a disappearing species, as people cede their powers of independent thought, creativity and even humour to the digital hegemon (GRM, p. 191).Footnote37 But it is not at all clear that the machine will replace the human ultimately. AI is also a limited character that goes by the name of EX 2279. Initially it only communicates in Brainfuck code; however, it develops capacity, and by the time the oligarch’s brain is in its bowl, EX 2279 has started talking to other AIs and is programming itself (GRM, p. 479). On a mission to save the planet, it decides to turn off several major systems, from smartphone networks to cybercurrencies to CERN (GRM, p. 580, p. 624). For EX 2279 this is a logical calculation, but in making this decision it does not consider any risk factors inherent in pulling the plug on a hi-tech society. Indeed, through the advancement of AI Berg also ironizes the machine, for EX 2279 on its mission to save the planet could in theory shut itself down along with everything else.
Narratologically, then, even EX 2279 is but one voice of many in GRM. While the AI clearly grows in scope and sophistication, eventually communicating to some extent in human language (GRM, pp. 478–79), Berg does not accord it a privileged place above the other focalized perspectives. For example, it appears only periodically in the narrative, like the various human characters. Typographically EX 2279 intensifies but nevertheless continues the novel’s fragmented and hybrid aesthetic, as Berg reproduces what is for most readers incomprehensible Brainfuck code nearly every time it shows up.Footnote38 However, this must not signify the enigmatic machine’s irrevocable power-grab. Indeed, the insertions of code arguably chime — somewhat obscurely and unharmoniously to be sure — with the novel’s staccato arrangements of syntax, punctuation, paragraphing, font, and so on. Both texts are transgressive and upend signification, pointing to a considerable gap between signifier and signified that never closes from start to negligible finish (the teenagers are still listening to grime as the novel closes). With Bakhtin we might say that the juxtaposition of Brainfuck with grime utterances throughout the novel declares war on the authoritarian word of the fathers, which struggles to be taken seriously on the discourse level in GRM. Aesthetically and politically, this is a revolution in poetic language that charts the pathway of a potential coalition between the utterance that is grime and the utterance of code, gesturing towards an alliance between the young people and the machine which has not happened yet — but may do in future.Footnote39 For when translated into human language, it transpires that EX 2279 has a sense of humour (GRM, p. 426) and is using the young people’s colloquial expressions, such as ‘ShitHappens’ and ‘WFT’ in Brainfuck (GRM, p. 374, p. 401). In other words, there are correspondences between the two language systems, as the Baby-hackers grasp the AI code better, and as EX 2279 begins to decipher human language.
While the juxtaposition of these different languages in the novel’s hybrid form further indicates a plurality of dispersed and scattered consciousnesses, symptomatic perhaps of the widespread ‘Verblödung’ (GRM, p. 303) that characterizes the epoch, the narrative discourse may also be read in Donna Haraway’s sense as cyborg writing: a mode of communication that writes against the West’s telos of abstract individualism and the reduction of the world to a problem of coding that can be solved.Footnote40 Viewed thus, GRM is a cyborg novel which has been crafted in ‘a language without origins that is violating’ and that makes space for the noisy voices of ‘a powerful infidel heteroglossia’ to chant, in carnivalesque-grime mode, against the hegemony of the ‘one Code’.Footnote41 In GRM, the ‘one Code’ to be resisted is the fundamentalist dictatorial patriarchy, not the machine. On the contrary, when EX 2279 first appears on p. 161, it is already causing havoc for the monumentally wealthy by scrambling their bank accounts. It ridicules Elon Musk and Frank Sinatra (GRM, p. 620); it prevents Thome’s father from winning the national elections (GRM, p. 517), and at times might even be read as empathizing with the children (GRM, p. 244), no small gesture in a world that has treated them so abominably. EX 2279's clumsy attempt to save the planet can also be understood alternatively as the evolution of a non-human, ecocritical consciousness. The climate crisis is a constant background presence that will not go away throughout the novel, even if none of the characters seems to notice it.Footnote42 EX 2279 is the only diegetic entity that finally pays attention to it. Thus, while the immediacy of a technophobic doomsday scenario is prevalent throughout the novel, Berg playfully suggests through her narrative arrangement that it is incumbent upon humans in the post-human era to reimagine not just relationality between humans, but also possibilities of human-machine relationality. In narrative terms GRM conceptualizes the latter along the lines of an experimental kinship between humans and machines that is grounded in a shared carnivalesque sensibility and that exhibits, as Stengers puts it, ‘the virtues of laughter, rudeness, and satire’ that are politically necessary today, because humour has the power to express an oppositional consciousness.Footnote43 The capacity for humour has been squeezed out of the techno-feudal dictatorship, as people give up their liberties and become obedient data subjects (GRM, p. 191). It is therefore significant that the narrative discourse uses biting humour to portray this world and moreover makes humour a capacity precisely of the machine, an alien Other that might yet become an ally. This is a carnivalesque reversal that puts forward the ambiguous foundations for a potential cyborg subjectivity synthesized from outsider identities that rejoice ‘in […] illegitimate fusions’ between humans and machines.Footnote44 Thus while EX 2279 is for much of the novel a self-learning AI that services total surveillance, its ability to make jokes signifies that it is capable of a different perspective beyond merely monitoring. Perhaps the laughing EX 2279 ultimately serves as a non-human reminder to the human characters in the novel of what they are losing or have already lost: the ability to laugh, think, dream, imagine.
The closing section of the novel portrays the disappearance of the human in this respect, as the friendship between Don, Peter, Karen, and Hannah begins to fray and fall apart. The resistance failed, and they drift apart into different lives, in Karen’s case even into the technology sector. They have become data subjects because the other resisting life is too hard and did not change anything. This may seem like the end of carnival in Bakhtin’s sense. However, Berg inserts some grime lyrics into the final scene, as the four friends sit around a table just before they take leave of one another: ‘Oh let’s make this last forever’, with the word ‘forever’ featuring eight times. The friends, moreover, ‘stehen eng zusammen.’ (GRM, p. 634). The scene crystallizes the assemblage of four, just before it fades — but the implication of the grime text (‘forever’) and the intensity of the friendship bond is that the coalition, based on a fusion of differences, will reform one day. In this sense, narrative open-endedness persists to the end and points to an as yet undefined future that will require more coalitions to shape it.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mary Cosgrove
Mary Cosgrove (FTCD, MRIA) is Professor in German, Director of Research in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies and Co-chair of the Medical and Health Humanities network, Trinity College Dublin. Germanic Editor of the Modern Language Review 2016–20, she is the author of Born under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature (2014) and has published widely on memory, trauma and boredom in post-war and contemporary German literature.
Notes
1 Sibylle Berg, GRM Brainfuck (Cologne: KiWi, 2019). Henceforth referenced as GRM with relevant page number.
2 See Sibylle Berg, Wie halte ich das nur alles aus? Fragen Sie Frau Sibylle (Munich: dtv [2013] 2021), pp. 64–66. Ulrich Bröckling’s concept of the neoliberal entrepreneurial self describes this self-focused, interiorized type. Ulrich Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007). See also Andreas Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp [2017] 2021). For a perspective that considers the longer-term tendency of Western philosophy to privilege this type of subjectivity, see the Introduction and Jeanne Riou’s contribution in this special issue.
3 See Sibylle Berg, Nerds retten die Welt: Gespräche mit denen, die es wissen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2021).
4 See https://www.ruffsqwadarts.org [accessed 18 December 2023]. Berg worked closely with the young artists in Ruff Sqwd Arts: they featured in a promotional video for GRM Brainfuck, shot on location in Birmingham, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaZo0Kd_9kI [accessed 18 December 2023]. After the book was launched, Berg took several of these young grime artists, including a rising talent T.Roadz, on tour across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. See Ursula März, ‘Ein Buch wie ein Sprengsatz, brutal und zärtlich zugleich’, Die Zeit, 18 April 2019, https://www.zeit.de/2019/17/grm-brainfuck-sibylle-berg-roman-ueberwachungsdiktatur [accessed 18 December 2023]. Ruff Sqwd Arts composed the score for the musical version of the novel, which premiered in Hamburg in 2021, https://sibylleberg.com/en/plays/grm-brainfuck [accessed 18 December 2023]. More material on the staging of the play is available at https://www.thalia-theater.de/f/e/Theaterpädagogik/Materialmappen/GRM_Brainfuck_Materialmappe_14.11.2022_compressed.pdf [accessed 18 December 2023]. When the English translation of the novel was published, the British grime artists once again joined Berg on a tour around the UK. Sibylle Berg, Grime: A Novel, trans. Tim Mohr (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2022). In the same year, Berg and T.Roadz gave a bilingual performance-reading at the annual conference of the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (AGS) which was hosted by Trinity College Dublin, 29–31 August. For more on Berg’s political collaborations see Edo Reents, ‘Ist die Phantasie erst ruiniert: Die Schriftstellerin Sibylle Berg zieht für die Satire-Partei DIE PARTEI in den EU-Wahlkampf’, FAZ, 25 September 2023, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/die-partei-schriftstellerin-sibylle-berg-zieht-in-den-eu-wahlkampf-19197091.html [accessed 18 December 2023] and ‘Swiss voters to have final say on controversial social detective law’, The Local, 6 June 2018, https://www.thelocal.ch/20180606/swiss-voters-to-have-final-say-on-controversial-new-social-detective-law [accessed 18 December 2023].
5 On the award of the Swiss Book Prize see https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/author-sybille-berg-wins-2019-swiss-book-prize/45357568, and on the award of the Kasseler Literaturpreis für Grotesken Humor see: https://brueckner-kuehner.de/kulturen-des-komischen/literaturpreis-fur-grotesken-humor [both accessed 18 December 2023].
6 For a snapshot of the positive reviews, see https://schoene-agentur.com/2019/11/11/swiss-book-award-2019-for-sibylle-berg-and-grm-brainfuck/ [accessed 18 December 2023].
7 The following reviews are mixed: Eva Behrendt, ‘Buch GRM von Sibylle Berg: Mehr Brainfuck als Roman’, TAZ, 11 May 2019, https://taz.de/Buch-GRM-von-Sibylle-Berg/!5591210/. Also: Lisa Hrdina and Torbes Kessler https://www.buecher-magazin.de/rezensionen/hoerbuecher/erzaehlungen-und-romane/grm-brainfuck, Martin Hobrack, ‘Im Sumpf der Generation Z’, Die Welt, 22 April 2019, [all accessed 18 December 2023].
8 Carsten Otte, ‘GRM Brainfuck von Sibylle Berg: Alles am Ende’, Tagesspiegel, 11 April 2019, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/alles-am-ende-4056313.html [accessed 18 December 2023]. Otte reads the novel as a litany of ‘Horrormeldungen in Boulevardmedien, böse Kommentaren in (a)sozialen Medien’. This is further compromised by the novel’s ‘ungeklärte Erzählperspektive’: if the world Berg depicts is really under totalitarian digital control, then how can the omniscient narrator rise above this control, Otte asks, suggesting that the narrator may in fact be its propagandistic mouthpiece. It is only possible to arrive at such a conclusion if one does not distinguish between story and narrative discourse and if one is not attuned to the textual manoeuvres of the implied omniscient narrator who choreographs everything and channels the authorial perspective. Berg ceased writing the Spiegel.online column, titled ‘Fragen Sie Sibylle Berg’, in early 2023, https://www.spiegel.de/thema/spon_berg/ [accessed 18 December 2023]. A selection of her columns has been published in Sibylle Berg, Wie halte ich das nur alles aus? Fragen Sie Frau Sibylle (Munich: dtv, 2021 [2013]).
9 Christoph Schröder, ‘Sibylle Berg: GRM Brainfuck’, SWR Kultur, 12 April 2019, https://www.swr.de/swr2/literatur/sibylle-berg-grm-brainfuck-buchkritik-100.html [accessed 18 December 2023].
10 Ibid.
11 By contrast Jan Wiele emphasizes the entertaining quality of Berg’s satire, ‘Soziales Verhalten — unsozial’, FAZ, 13 April 2019, https://www.buecher.de/shop/london/grm/berg-sibylle/products_products/detail/prod_id/54468915/#reviews-more [accessed 18 December 2023].
12 Sibylle Berg, RCE #RemoteCodeExecution (Cologne: KiWi, 2022). At the time of writing Berg was working on the third novel.
13 Michail M. Bachtin, Die Ästhetik des Wortes, ed. and with an introduction by Rainer Grübel, trans. Rainer Grübel and Sabine Reese (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979).
14 On the complexity of relationality in the digital era see Annie Ring’s contribution in this special issue.
15 Through Karen’s story Berg refers to the Rochdale child sex abuse ring which was run by British Pakistani men who groomed young girls for underage sex over many years. See Helen Carter and Haroon Siddique ‘Rochdale gang jailed for total of 77 years for sexually exploiting young girls’, The Guardian, 9 May 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/may/09/rochdale-gang-jailed-sexually-exploiting [accessed 18 December 2023].
16 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 63.
17 Klemp, ‘“Grime ist Widerstand, Spaß, Hoffnung”: Interview mit Sibylle Berg’.
18 März rightly notes that the novel is brutal and tender at once. ‘Ein Buch wie ein Sprengsatz, brutal und zärtlich zugleich’, Die Zeit, 18 April 2019.
19 Michail Bachtin, Die Ästhetik des Wortes, ed. and with an Introduction by Rainer Grübel, trans. Rainer Grübel and Sabine Reese (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp). For an overview of theories of the grotesque see Mary Cosgrove, Grotesque Ambivalence: Melancholia and Mourning in the Prosework of Albert Drach (Tübingen: Neumeier, 2004), pp. 25–50, and also Anne Fuchs’ article in this issue.
20 Michail M. Bachtin, Literatur und Karneval: Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur, trans. and with an afterword by Alexander Kaempfe (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, [1990] 1996), pp. 15–23.
21 Bachtin, Die Ästhetik des Wortes, pp. 192–251.
22 Bachtin, Literatur und Karneval, pp. 16–17.
23 Ibid., p. 16.
24 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
25 Borrowing from seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, John Gray has recently coined the term ‘new Leviathans’ to describe today’s states: ‘Like the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century’ they are ‘engineers of souls’ which instead of extending freedom ‘foster insecurity.’ John Gray, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (London: Allen Lane, 2023), pp. 2–3.
26 Grime emerged in east London council estates in the early 2000s amongst a predominantly Black British underground music community that gave rise to major stars such as Stormzy, Dizzee Rascal and Skepta. For most grime artists, grime is more than music: it is a whole culture, outlook and anti-establishment attitude that has been compared to the underground punk movement of the 1970s. For more on grime, see Mykaell Riley, ‘State of Play #GrimeReport’ for Ticketmaster, http://discover.ticketmaster.co.uk/stateofplay/grime.pdf [accessed 18 December 2023].
27 See Tibi Puiu, ‘Meet the most frustrating programming language ever. It’s called Brainfuck and it’s purposely designed to make you cry’, ZME Science, 26 January 2017, https://www.zmescience.com/science/brainfuck-programming/ [accessed 18 December 2023].
28 Bachtin, Die Ästhetik des Wortes, pp. 169.
29 Ibid., pp. 165–66.
30 Ibid., p. 192.
31 For an excellent reading of narrative voice in Berg’s novel see Anne Fuchs, ‘Die schleichende Dystopie unserer Gegenwart: Krise als Latenzphänomen in Sibylle Berg’s GRM Brainfuck’, Germanische-Romanische Monatsschrift, 70 (3–4), 397–412: ‘Diese Verdoppelung der allwissenden Erzählpositionen ist somit als narratologischer Ausdruck der Konkurrenz unvereinbarer Weltsichten lesbar: So kollidiert die moralische Indifferenz der die Zerstörung von Demokratie und Menschenleben vorantreibenden Programmierer aufs schärfste mit dem Engagement der auktorialen Erzählstimme, welche die inhumanen Konsequenzen des instrumentellen Denkens unerbittlich attackiert.’ (p. 404).
32 Andrea Pontzen sees Berg’s poetics as consistent with a widespread ‘ethische Wende’ in contemporary literature that takes up a moral position in the context of purportedly postmodern moral indifference. Andrea Pontzen, ‘Sibylle Berg und die Moralistik im 21. Jahrhundert: Negative Anthropologie als literarisch-philosophisches Erzählprogramm’, Text + Kritk, 255 (2020), 59–69 (p. 61).
33 For Fuchs this objectifying schematization of historical acceleration closes off the question of a liveable world: ‘Der informationstheoretische Beschleunigungsdiskurs in der fiktiven Pause resultiert somit in einer anti-utopischen Perspektive bzw. in der erzählerischen Aporie der Indifferenz gegenüber dem Leben, was dem politischen Anliegen Bergs, das utopische Engagement durch die auktoriale Rede zu entfachen, widerspricht.’ Ibid., p. 405.
34 The Karma Points system in GRM is a parody of China’s Social Credit System and other emerging big-data surveillance apparatuses. See https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/fileadmin/files/aam/Asia-Book_A_03_China_Social_Credit_System.pdf [accessed 18 December 2023] and Berg, Nerds retten die Welt, p. 130.
35 For Stengers, the war of all against all is one ‘wherein everyone, individual, enterprise, nation, region of the world, has to accept the sacrifices necessary to have the right to survive (to the detriment of their competitors), and obeys the only system “proven to work.”’ Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey (Lüneburg: Open Humanities Press & Meson Press, 2015), p. 31.
36 Berg names many of today’s leading capitalists and technology developers, such as the Koch brothers, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and others. Herr M. is a thinly veiled reference to Elon Musk. See GRM, p. 381. The surveillance and other myriad technologies that she details across the novel are at the very least in development today. See Berg, Nerds retten die Welt.
37 On this theme in Berg’s dramatic work, see Olivier Garofalo, ‘Vom Verschwinden des Subjekts’, Text + Kritik, 225 (2020), 3–9.
38 Translations of Brainfuck in the novel may be found at http://km.userweb.mwn.de/brainfuck_EX2279.html [accessed18December2023].
39 The young people profoundly feel that they have lost out to AI, even if they came close. GRM, pp. 580–81.
40 Donna Harraway, The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 34.
41 Ibid., p. 33.
42 See GRM, p. 192, p. 254, p. 332, p. 334 for references to ‘Unwetter’, the Anthropocene, flooding, the disappearance of birds. There are many more such ‘passing’ observations of the climate crisis throughout the novel which channel the author’s ethical position through the implied narrative instance.
43 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, p. 31.
44 Haraway, The Haraway Reader, p. 34.