The Library of Maria Wutz : Large Language Models, Capitalist Illiteracy, and the Unreality of the Time of Writing

Abstract: Deleuze and Guattari’s fifty-year-old claim, in Anti-Oedipus , that capitalism is “‘illiterate” needs reconsideration in the age of large language models (LLMs). This essay argues that such computational language-generating novelties augment their original verdict because they constitute the historical actualization of a paradoxical linguistic form—machinic illiteracy—that finds its most salient prototype in Maria Wutz , an eighteenth-century novella by German author Jean Paul. Six key theories—Brown’s periodization of literary history; Enzensberger’s ordinality of illiteracies; Baudrillard’s notion of communicative overload; McTaggart’s discretization of time; Kittler’s media genealogy; and Blanchot’s great refusal—are focalized through Paul’s novella. This is to diagnose the historical emergence of an ecstatic cacophony and temporal unreality that define our late-modern regime of capitalist legibility and its profuse “illiterature.” These forces are then related, in their inchoate historical forms, to the work of Swiss author Robert Walser and American author William Gaddis, whose visionary texts demonstrate immune responses, within literature itself, to their overpowering disorientation.