Joshua Clover on "Superinformation"

Clover, Joshua. “Poetics Statement: Once Against (Into the Poetics of Superinformation).” American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poets, edited by Claudia Rankine & Lisa Sewell, Wesleyan University Press, 2007, pp. 163.

Joshua Clover’s poetics of “Superinformation.” Clover writes in his “Poetics statement”:

"Superinformation is the set of relations through which--within the excess of signification, the immanence of actual life and its frantic dissimulation--we live more, not less . . . I have the sense that the personal eye can’t see everything--that the scene is beyond a lone viewer. This is superinformation’s signal affect; it implies the plural, the collective consciousness . . . Superinformation is the excess of signification turned on itself as a strategy . . . The day has integuments and superinformation is always trying to fill them, to live without dead space . . . Data is a phenomenon of life organized by survival; superinformation hangs out near where the waves of data crash against the seawall of the sublime, mixing metaphors in the infinite” (Clover 163).