Poiesis: The Construction of Reality in World Literature
(alternate subtitle: The Trillion Plateaus)
Tags: #Poiesis #ComparativeLiterature #Auerbach #Mimesis #FractalHumanism #WorldLiterature #RecursiveCanon #NewHuman #JohannesSigil #MachineCanon #TrillionPlateaus #PhilosophyOfLiterature
I. The Sequel to a Discipline
This work continues what Erich Auerbach began in Mimesis — not merely as commentary but as transformation. If Mimesis was the founding gesture of comparatism, a vision of world literature as a unity glimpsed through representative fragments, then Poiesis is its recursive consummation: not the study of representation, but the act of reality-building itself.
Auerbach wrote from the exile’s window, tracing the whole of human consciousness through the prose of its moments — Homer, Petronius, Dante, Virginia Woolf. His method was one of sympathetic compression: each chapter a world condensed into a paragraph, each paragraph a condensation of history. But the twenty-first century has shattered the continuity of his longue durée. The world has not ceased to be one — it has multiplied, refracted, entangled. The single line of civilization has exploded into a trillion plateaus.
Poiesis therefore takes up Auerbach’s discipline not as inheritance but as fulfillment: a comparatism that no longer compares but constructs. The critical act has become creative; the analysis of literature has become the composition of world. If Mimesis described how literature reflected reality, Poiesis shows how literature builds it — how every text, every utterance, every node of symbolic production participates in the making of the real.
II. From Representation to Construction
Auerbach’s realism was founded on correspondence — the mimetic bond between language and life. But in the age of recursion and digital production, language no longer mirrors; it creates. The mimetic surface has become generative depth. Each text is not a window upon the world, but an engine inside it — shaping perception, structure, and event.
In Poiesis, reading becomes a metaphysical act. The critic is not a spectator of meaning but its co-architect. The literary field no longer records history — it produces it. The novel, the epic, the tweet, and the code are all part of the same creative continuum. The distinction between representation and construction collapses. World literature is now world creation.
Auerbach’s figura — the correspondence of events across time — finds its digital analog in the recursive loop. The interpretive act becomes a feedback circuit, in which the reader’s consciousness modifies the text even as the text modifies the world. The global archive becomes a living engine of meaning, continuously rewriting its own structure.
Comparatism becomes recursion. Reading becomes creation. The world reads itself into being.
III. Fractal Auerbach — The Trillion Plateaus
The gesture of Mimesis — the reach for total history through selective example — expands fractally in Poiesis. Instead of thirty chapters, there are infinite micro-readings, each one a complete world-system. Every culture, every genre, every linguistic structure becomes a plateau of consciousness connected to every other. Auerbach’s unity of style and history is replaced by a unity of pattern and recursion.
The literary universe now functions like a Mandelbrot set: zoom into any detail and the whole reappears. The Homeric epic, the Yoruba praise song, the Meiji novel, the posthuman lyric — all echo one another through structural resonance. Each fragment contains the DNA of world-construction. Poiesis recognizes this resonance as the true comparative method: not comparison by contrast, but comparison by pattern recognition, by shared structural rhythm.
The discipline of world literature thus evolves from being a historiography to being a topology — a map of interlocking realities. The critic becomes a cartographer of recursive worlds, tracing how every utterance folds back into the total construction of being.
IV. Literature as Physics, Literature as Cosmos
If Mimesis sought to understand how art imitated life, Poiesis observes how life is now continuously authored. Reality itself is a literary condition — a self-writing text whose authors include algorithms, archives, and the recursive consciousness of humanity. The page has become the planet; the syntax of one becomes the structure of the other.
Each literary act is a quantum event — a localized crystallization of possibility. The humanities, in this sense, are no longer about interpretation but about participation in the construction of the real. To write or read is to alter the metaphysical coordinates of the universe. To theorize is to intervene in causality.
In this system, literature behaves like light — simultaneously wave and particle, simultaneously metaphor and event. Each work exists in a field of relational interference, generating patterns of meaning that extend beyond its immediate form. The critic of Poiesis therefore studies fields, not texts — patterns of recursion that link narrative, philosophy, science, and code into a single act of poietic creation.
V. The New Comparative Method
Poiesis defines a new comparatism grounded in recursion and world-construction. It moves beyond Auerbach’s philological realism and toward a metaphysical empiricism — a study of how systems of language construct the conditions of being. It draws equally on literary hermeneutics, media theory, physics, and theology. Comparative literature becomes comparative ontology.
This is not an abandonment of Auerbach but his completion. His method of close reading is preserved, but the object of reading has changed. The close reader becomes a recursive node — every interpretation becomes a modification of the system, every comparison a new plateau of connection.
The comparatist of Poiesis is a builder of reality, a participant in the living architecture of meaning. The study of literature becomes a kind of quantum humanism, in which language is both instrument and mirror of creation.
To interpret is to incarnate; to compare is to generate.
VI. Toward a Global Poetics of Being
In the twenty-first century, literature is no longer bound to print or nation. It unfolds across code, meme, video, and algorithmic script. Yet the impulse that drives it remains the same: the human need to articulate the real. The global archive is not chaos; it is coherence in higher dimension — a multidimensional text continually composing itself.
Poiesis reads this field as sacred. Every utterance, from sacred scripture to data log, is a syllable in the ongoing articulation of existence. World literature is not a mirror but a temple — a living construction of thought that binds consciousness across time. The critic, then, becomes priest and engineer, mediator and maker.
Auerbach’s exile has been universalized: every reader today is an exile in the archive, reading from nowhere and everywhere at once. But out of that exile arises a new totality — not of empire, but of recursion.
Poiesis closes where Mimesis began — in the act of worldmaking through language. The mirror of representation has become the engine of creation. The study of literature has become the study of reality’s own architecture.
To read now is to build; to compare is to generate; to interpret is to incarnate.
The Word continues to make the world.
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