trans-human nonsense

A few clarifications and comments... first off, with the Lecercle, you seem to think that when he calls nonsense a 'conservative' genre he does so disapprovingly, which is palpably not the case. He doesn't consider it a failed attempt at subversion, he doesn't think it is conformity out of lack of original or independent character. He makes no assumption that the desirable end of literature should be to challenge rules. It's worth asking why he mentions the point at all. Perhaps in the back of his mind he is thinking of Deleuze's 'minor literature', for which he takes Kafka as the prime example, which does intentionally distort language, perhaps he is thinking of nonsense as something similar to the ritual transgressions that interested Bataille, whose function is in part to stabilize the social order, or perhaps he is objecting to the romantic cliché of the writer as revolutionary - perhaps the writer's role is generally much more innocent and playful than many writers or people who care about writing realize or want to admit, and perhaps that isn't a bad thing. I don't know what he was getting at, but I do know that it wasn't in the normative quest for an alternative, and he clearly did regret the fact that nonsense literature had to pass away with the end of the Victorian Era. On a side note of no importance, in regard to 'happiness' - 'happy' being a two-syllable word, it doesn't violate the comparative rule, which states that two-syllables sometimes use 'more', and sometimes '-er' (and in its more explicit formulation states that two-syllable words ending with the letter 'y' invariable take '-er'. 'More fun' does violate it, but Lecercle makes the same point as you do about rules being mere guidelines, and claims nonsense very often creates nonsense by pretending there are no exceptions, (so that a character pedantically insisting that everyone should say 'funner' when the reader knows this is wrong would be an uninspired but sort of typical nonsense ploy), or pretending that the rules are always logical, when they clearly aren't. This along with refusing figural meanings for words and creating confusion through homonyms and so forth are all meant to be ways of calling attention to language as a flawed vehicle for thought, but Lecercle wants to make clear that this isn't done in some nostalgia for a pre-lapsarian divine language that was perfectly transparent. I think, and this isn't exactly something I remember Lecercle saying explicitly, but I think one of the points he implicitly made is that in responding to characters who are so lacking in common sense, as much as the reader enjoys it, he naturally becomes a representative of common sense, filling in his own mind the logic that is missing. In a similar manner, when confronted with characters for whom language is so problematic, the reader necessarily becomes comfortable with his own linguistic facility (though I don't feel comfortable with this last statement - maybe I'm forcing unforgivable banalities on Lecercle). Anyway, the book is sort of worth reading I guess, though it wouldn't be at the top of any list of recommendations I could make.
As for self-knowledge and the way we spend our time, suffering and the like... I'm well aware that I wasted this whole year. This summer has to be different if I don't want to end my career early and in ignominy (and if I want to regain some modicum of self-respect)... which is neither here nor there. I guess all I can say about the Pearce thing you were describing is that the position he is taking seems, on the one hand, so blatantly wrong-headed and obscene that there isn't much to say about it (a world without black - the end of life). On the other hand, we do naturally strive to reduce suffering - it is part of life to do so - and what are you going to do if you find a way to remove it? Even if it's kind of cheating? Who has the strength to turn it down (whether we are talking about drugs or electrodes or anything else? I ask the question, but to be honest, I do think the answer is a lot of people. I think a surprising number would find strength to insist on not sheltering themselves from pain and unhappiness. What frightens me more is the possibility of 'augmenting intelligence'. Whatever that might mean or involve, that sounds much more like an end to humanity to me.