Cybernetic melancholia: Chris Ware’s Building Stories and cultural informatics

Abstract

ABSTRACTChris Ware’s formal and stylistic inventiveness in his 2012 graphic narrative, Building Stories, presents a challenge to traditional theories of the form. This essay argues, however, that Ware’s experimentation can be understood through the descriptive language of cybernetic thought. Whilst the use of informatics may suggest a neutral or affectless register, Building Stories in fact presents a convergence between cybernetics and the affect of melancholia. Indeed, this is a convergence already suggested by Freud’s model of the melancholic, which functions analogously to a reflexive feedback system. Having located Ware’s graphic narrative within a longer trajectory of the exchanges between informatics and post-war literature, this essay identifies three concepts from that tradition – homeostasis, autopoiesis, and digitality – to understand Building Stories’ formal properties. The term, ‘cybernetic melancholia’, is proposed to describe the convergence between such properties and the register of melancholic affect; a convergence which, it is argued, represents a significant means of expressing the experience of a contemporary moment in which information systems are an epistemic ubiquity and melancholia is a prevalent affective register.