Aurature at the End(s) of Electronic Literature John Cayley, Brown University, Literary Arts Means and ends. Within the very phrase ‘electronic literature’ its ends are implicated in its means. ‘Electronic’ refers to means in a way that is well understood but promotes quite specific means as the essential attribute of a cultural phenomenon, a phenomenon that was once new, a new kind of literature, a new teleology for literary practice, an ‘end’ of literature having its own ends, the end of electronic literature in its means, ends justified by means. This brief essay will not remain bound up within the conceptual entanglements of a name. 1 We will move on from ‘end(s)’ to means, to media, and finally — as we shall see — to medium. 2 We understand that ‘electronic’ in ‘electronic literature’ — now indisputably one end of a field of serious play for the theory and practice of literature — refers metonymically to computation and all its infrastructure: hardware, software, interface & interaction design, networking, and today also, since at least the mid 2000s, to a particular de facto historically-created world built from all of this infrastructure within which most of us now ‘live’ for a considerable portion of our lives, our cultural and, predominantly, our commercially implicated, transactional lives. The existence of a particular world, or, to use a less charitable if more accurately constrained term, a regime of computation is worth recalling as we establish some 1 I have discussed problems with the terminology of digitally mediated literary practice in a previous contribution, fully published here: (Cayley 2012) 2 This essay was first presented as a paper for the 2015 conference of the Electronic Literary Organization, University of Bergen, Norway, August 5-7, ‘The End(s) of Electronic Literature,’ and shares the conference’s concerns with the special ambiguities of the word ‘end(s).’