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This essay explores the fascination with performance and performance art in contemporary fiction in relation to post-Fordist culture and society. I employ the concept of general performance in order to analyze configurations of artistic, professional, and economic performance in Niña Weijers’s novel The Consequences (2014) and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015). The readings demonstrate that, in different ways, both novels imagine performance as a key practice at the intersection of art, life, and labor. While Satin Island presents a bleak view of generalized post-Fordist performance, The Consequences insists on discontinuities between artistic and other forms of performance. The essay makes a case for general performance as a key concept for the study of the imagination of immaterial and creative labor in twenty-first-century fiction.

Het hoofdpersonage van Yves Petry’s roman Liefde bij wijze van spreken (2015) kijkt in een gracht en ziet een brein: ‘Ik liet mijn blik ontspannen over het water glijden. Het wiegende web van fonkelingen deed denken aan een brein in actie: dendrieten van licht, gedragen door een grijze massa, vormden wisselende patronen die kwamen en gingen als gedachten, golven, dromen.’ In Petry’s roman is dit niet meer dan een terloopse vergelijking, maar ze zegt veel over de verbeelding van de hersenen aan het begin van de eenentwintigste eeuw. Dit brein op de golven is plastisch en voortdurend in beweging. Het kent geen duidelijk afgebakende regio’s en vaste structuren, maar bestaat uit variabele verbanden tussen neuronen, die, dat zouden neurowetenschappers beamen, in een fMRI-scanner fonkelend kunnen oplichten als de golven in de Amsterdamse grachten op een zonnige dag.

‘See the world we come from. There is no green there. They killed their mother. And they are gonna do the same here’. This is earthling Jake Sully speaking to Eywa, the Gaia-like goddess and balancing force of the ecosystem of the planetoid Pandora. At a dramatic narrative juncture of the film Avatar (James Cameron 2009), Jake calls on Eywa to intervene in the battle between the Na’vi, the tall and blue-skinned native inhabitants of Pandora, and the military forces of the Resources Development Agency (RDA) from Earth that colonize the planet. Having just learned from a fellow resistance fighter that the fibre-optic lianas of the so-called Tree of Voices provide a ‘direct line to Eywa’, Jake connects his native avatar’s neural queue to one of the threads and starts to talk. He urges Eywa to access the memories of his deceased colleague Dr. Grace Augustine in order to get an impression of the destruction that humans have inflicted upon the ecosystem of their own planet. Against all odds, the distress call is answered. From the depths of Pandora’s jungles Eywa sends herds of dinosaur-like creatures that launch a counter attack and run over the RDA war machine. The ecosystem strikes back and the invaders are sent home to Earth.

This article explores the poetics of the neuromolecular gaze in Bart Koubaa’s 2007 novel Het gebied van Nevski and James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar. It considers the novel and the film as artistic reflections of contemporary neuroculture and argues that they both employ their central metaphors - the brain as battlefield and the brain as network - in such a way that the same basic principles seem to return on various levels of biological and social existence: the micro-level of nerve cells and synapses, the meso-level of individual brains and human beings and the macro-level of historical events and socio-political interaction. In doing so, the novel and the film both suggest a natural continuity between the neurobiological and the social that closely resembles manifestations of the ‘neuromolecular gaze’ (Rose/Abi-Rached) in contemporary science and neuroculture at large. Significantly, however, these poetic extrapolations of neuromolecular knowledge to personal identity and society do not lead to a homogeneous and reductionist view of the ‘cerebral subject’ (F. Vidal) but to quite diverse, ambiguous and contradictory interpretations of what it means ‘to be one’s brain’.

In the form of provisional notes, the authors offer suggestions for an intensification of the theoretical debate on the digital humanities and computational literary studies in particular. From the perspective of poststructuralist theory, they address some of the epistemological underpinnings of current projects in computational literary studies. Against the backdrop of international debates in the digital humanities, they focus on the Dutch situation and argue for a further integration of various forms of (digital and non-digital) literary studies.