Manuel Portela is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Coimbra. He is a team member of the research project
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Rereading the digital, rewriting the literary: Hayles, Kirschenbaum, Machines, and Texts.
The emergence of electronic literature can be seen in a growing body of digitally born artifacts. Most of these works are now published online and they are produced, distributed, and executed by digital machines. The parallel evolution of electronic computers and communication networks during the past twenty years has transformed writing and reading practices, and has deeply altered the electronic landscape itself. Mutations in media technologies have originated not only new sets of relations between print codex and computer display, but they have also redefined the ecology of all other media. These momentous changes are part of a large cluster of social and cultural transformations that characterize contemporary culture, which can be accurately described as a software culture. In their new books, N. Katherine Hayles and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum refine our understanding of electronic literature and digital materiality. In this review essay I look at their critical approaches and try to explain why both books make outstanding contributions to the field of new media studies.
Linking subjectivity with computational media is a highly
contested project in which the struggle for dominance plays a central role:
should the body be subject to the machine, or the machine to the body? The
stakes are nothing less than whether the embodied human becomes the center for
humanistic inquiry within which digital media can be understood, or whether
media provide the context and ground for configuring and disciplining the
body.
In
N. Katherine Hayles’s approach in
This book continues her intellectual project of examining the
interactions among digital media, literature, and posthuman culture (cf.
Hayles contextualizes electronic literature within the present digital media ecology. As in her previous work, she selects and reads most of her examples as self-reflexive engagements with electronic materiality. She then uses the self-referential and metatextual elements in these works to interrogate the specific mediation introduced by networked computers in cultural, economic, and social transactions in contemporary information societies. As a methodological and interpretive move, it is critically and theoretically productive in the sense that it illuminates both the works themselves and the difficult questions concerning digitality. This broader contextualizing of electronic literature has far-reaching consequences for a deeper understanding of the social dynamics of digital culture. Its products and tools are now embedded in so many administrative, commercial, political, social, and cultural practices that we are increasingly becoming a software culture — a change so fast and so pervasive that the specific message of digital media seems to be that the posthuman human is/will be the extension of his/her software.
In
a device capable of manipulating itself as well as the reader
non-trivial efforton the part of the reader to co-generate the textual field. Aarseth calls this type of literature
ergodic
technotextsand
cybertextshave in common is the fact they work as
In computerized technotexts/cybertexts, emergent readings are the result of this intermediation that connects author and reader to computer through automated formal processing of signs. Human and machine are seen as parts of an interlocking cognitive system. Hayles makes the point that at the present level of complexity of computers as quasi-autonomous sign machines, machine-human borders are less and less defined. Computers and humans become increasingly linked by recursive feedback loops. This process of machine-human intermediation gives rise to emergent behaviors which are a function of the systemic relation between machines and humans across a range of fields. In electronic literature, semiosis — i. e, the process according to which signs are interpreted and translated into other signs — partakes of cybersemiosis, i.e., the automated processing of signs that takes place in the machines themselves. According to Hayles, the result is a hybridization that brings together human cognition and the cognition of intelligent machines.
Thus a significant part of her study of electronic literature is dedicated to conceptualizing this human-machine interaction as the defining element of our contemporary mediascape.
Hayles adopts the concept of human-machine dynamics of human-computer
interaction
Intermediation
means the emergence of complex patterns from local
interactions resulting from recursive feedback and
feedforward loops
In electronic literature, this dynamic is evoked when text
performs actions that bind together author and program, player and computer,
into a complex system characterized by intermediating dynamics. The
computer’s performance builds high-level responses out of low-level
processes that interpret binary code. These performances elicit emergent
complexity in the player, whose cognitions likewise build up from low-level
processes interpreting sensory and perceptual input to high-level thoughts
that possess much more powerful and cognitive powers than the computer does, but that nevertheless are bound together with the computer’s subcognitive processes through intermediating dynamics. The cycle operates as well in the writing phase of electronic literature. When a programmer/writer creates an executable file, the process reengineers the writer’s perceptual and cognitive system as she works with the medium’s possibilities. Alternating between writing modules and testing them to ensure they run correctly, the programmer experiences creation as an active dynamic in which the computer plays a central role.
Hayles’s analysis of the intertwined role of electronic media and certain
cultural patterns in global finance transactions
In chapter 4 (
open-ended recursivity with one another
Through such intermediations, computation evolves into something more than a technical practice, though of course it is also that. It becomes a powerful way to reveal to us the implications of our contemporary situation, creating revelations that work both within and beneath conscious thought
Hayles examines both the continuities and discontinuities between print and
digital textuality: on the one hand, digital literary genres are dependent upon
print conventions and print modes; on the other, they are close to contemporary
networked media, such as computer games, animations,
digital arts, graphic design, and electronic visual culture
Whereas earlier surveys included web publication as part of the digital
literature field, Hayles restricts her corpus to works that can only exist
within the computer environment. Loss Pequeño Glazier defined three forms of
electronic textuality (hypertext, visual/kinetic text, and works in programmable
media), but he also examined web-based electronic writing as a distribution and
publication platform for the dissemination of forms of innovative poetry a first-generation object created on a computer and (usually)
meant to be read on a computer
The term [Electronic Literature] refers to works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.
(Cf. http://eliterature.org/about/).
Electronic works of literature come in many forms: network fiction (a term Hayles
adopts from David Ciccoricco, who uses it to refer to hyperfiction); interactive
fiction, which combines novelistic and game components (referred to as playable media
by Wardrip-Fruin); exploration of three-dimensionality on the screen; immersion in three-dimensional spaces, as represented by works produced at Brown University’s CAVE virtual reality laboratory; site-specific or online interactive dramas; generative literature, such as has been developed by Philippe Bootz, Jean-Pierre Balpe or Noah Wardrip-Fruin; exploration of the dynamics between programming codes and natural language codes, as in the genre called code work (Alan Sondheim; MEZ; Talan Memmott); and many others, such as animated poems, e-mail novels, locative narratives (dependent on GPS technologies), or short fiction for cell phone. Multimodality, a common property of networked and programmable media, explains the contiguity between electronic literature and digital art. The invention and dissemination of handheld mobile and networked devices, from i-pods to e-books to electronic paper, is likely to continue to multiply digital genres and forms.
Hayles underlines ad infinitum
electronic text (…) cannot be
accessed until it is performed by properly executed code
Thus certain generic properties of a digital work will derive from the structural and formal properties of its particular code and application, even when they originated in graphical conventions of print genres. This is clear when we look at kinetic poems: conventional features of the ideogrammatic visual poem have been re-inscribed by properties of animation programming, such as the Actionscript language used in Flash. A similar specific software inscription can be seen also in the contrast between early CD-ROM hypertext fictions — that depended upon the formal capabilities of the lexia-and-link structure of hypertext programs such as
Code work— a genre of digital text that plays with the relations between natural languages, alphabetic writing, computer codes or pseudo-codes, and various processes of verbal and visual translation — is one good example of the self-reflective work that explores the recodings and remediations in electronic literature. Such works probe into the nature of natural and programming languages, directing our attention to the formal materiality of writing as code and inscription.
Hayles lists four major characteristics of digital text: computer-mediated text is layered
; computer-mediated tends to be multimodal
; in computer-mediated text, storage is separate from
performance
; and computer-mediated text
manifests fractured temporality
Hayles analyses a number of digital works in order to clarify the material specificities of electronic embodiment and the formal workings of intermediation. Her model for digitality in
mergent subjectivity inside the machineand as a
metaphor for the co-construction of embodiment and media technologies
an interrogation of global microsociality and temporality as a place to inhabit
By using electronic works as tools for her interrogation of computation and digitality, Hayles is sometimes close to the point where her readings turn into allegories of her own media theory — a reading practice that is all too frequent in professional readers. This can be a productive conceptual move — as she has brilliantly demonstrated here and elsewhere — but it can also obscure other issues, particularly if the works are read as symptoms of a certain media regime or if they are treated as autonomous objects. This mode of reading plays down the role of heterogenous discursive fields as sources for their signifiers. A self-referential reading can be illuminating in grasping the specific formal dialectics of a given work, but at the risk of extrapolating, as medium-specific, properties that are in fact the result of certain formal manipulations upon a given material and its discursive basis. It also tends to ignore the actual conditions of production, circulation, and reception of those works, conditions which cannot be accessed by close reading the works themselves.
Some of the properties Hayles equates with digital materiality in these works are the result of certain operations with the code that translate into certain types of display and interaction. They are not inherent in digitality, or they are only in so far as digitality may be redefined in a given work by a specific formal operation. In fact, similar self-reflexive features (and the ensuing recursive dynamics) would equally apply to works in print, cinema, or other media. And this is particularly true for the semiotic and semantic import of those operations. Such properties have to be seen as particular instantiations of digital materiality achieved by certain formal operations. This means that their self-reflexivity is work-specific rather than medium-specific. Digitality is retroactively redefined by a formal intervention, as much as printness has been re-enacted and re-displayed by specific printing codes in novels such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) or Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006). Such metatextual and metamedial processes are a function of those particular interventions and of the semiotic loop they help to sustain.
Most of the works Hayles has chosen can be read in meaningfully self-reflective
ways (a growing body of work that interrogates networked
and programmable media as the material basis for artistic innovation and
creation
Generating text by the use of algorithms as a way freeing discourse from certain syntactic and semantic structures for producing textual coherence and textual cohesion is one example of such experimental procedures. Textual constraints, as defined and practiced by Oulipian authors since 1960, already contain the basic principles of computational literature. The text as potential textual field, i.e., its eventuality, has been perceived and explored as a function of the generative codes of language and writing. Similar perceptions and experiments with the generative features of programming codes have originated certain types of self-referential and metatextual forms of digital works. These properties, as far as they bear upon the medium itself, result from a particular formal and aesthetic engagement with its material basis.
The possibility of semiotic interaction, that is, of an interference that alters sequence and outcome of display or narrative, is one of the formal operations being explored in digital texts. Iterations of algorithms that respond to readers’ interventions result in unpredicted automatic semiotic permutations of file components and display elements, but all other textual features, particularly when considered as reading fields, are not unlike print, film, or sound textuality. The crucial phenomenological question is what is the nature of eventuality in digital media as opposed to, or different from, other forms of eventuality? The fact that files have to be executed and performed by specific programs in specific machines, and reassembled instantaneously from across a network, produces a new kind of eventuality, and thus a new kind of textuality? A textuality that can be said to be different from the general eventuality of reading acts as specific instantiations of the symbolic transaction that defines all textual fields?
Hayles is right in pointing to certain limitations of the early technophile hypertext theory in representing digital media (and hypertext in particular) as a material embodiment of the post-structuralist theory of infinite text and deferral of meaning. Landow, Bolter and others certainly overstressed the liberatory effects of hyperlinks as reader-oriented structures and mis-represented codex dynamics. Bolter and Grusin’s conceptualization of the electronic writing space as a remediation of print and other media is much more accurate. In fact, many digital works (both in poetry and fiction) foreground this metamedial dimension of the digital, i.e., the use of its new material properties as formal investigations into mediality (i.e., graphicality or kineticity or aurality) in meaning production in general. Print is thus re-represented within digital textuality in forms that replicate, transform, and interrogate its topographic and typographic materiality. Even when they are not digitally born, as is the case with many digital archives that migrate print and manuscript works to a digital space, such literary works are redefined by the digital dynamics created by their hypermedia structure of networked marked-up files.
N. Katherine Hayles’s overview of the field is accompanied by Volume One of The Electronic Literature Collection, one of the first attempts at producing an executable, interpretable, critical, and teachable canon of electronic literature. This anthology (available as a CD-ROM appendix to this book, and also as an online archive, at http://collection.eliterature.org/1/) contains many remarkable works in new media. Selected titles include Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue (1996), Shelley Jackson’s My Body: A WunderKammer (1997), Stuart Moulthrop’s Reagan Library (1999), Jim Andrews’ Nio (2001), Talan Memmott’s Self-Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] (2003), Millie Niss’s Oulipoems (2004), and Jason Nelson’s Dreamaphage (2004), among others. One criticism to be made is that this anthology is entirely English-speaking and, with a few exceptions, North-American-centered. Even if the development of information technology has meant that the U.S.A. has led the electronic communification of the world, one would expect to see more works in other languages, such as French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese — languages in which there has been a tradition of experimenting with new media since the 1960s and 1970s. Universities have become major players in the networked media environment that defines contemporary culture. Reflecting the dominance of English-speaking institutions in contemporary knowledge production, critical work on new media replicates the cultural and linguistic hierarchies characteristic of other fields and modes of knowledge production and distribution. As a post-WWW electronic canon,
My argument, then, is this: computers are unique in the
history of writing technologies in that they present a pre-meditated material
environment built and engineered to propagate an illusion of immateriality; the
digital nature of computational representation is precisely what enables this
illusion — or else call it a working model — of immaterial behavior.
At the present transitional moment, file structures modeled on book structure and book surfaces are challenged by specifically digital forms of inscription and organization, both in literary and artistic production, and in scholarly work of all kinds. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s
For Kirschenbaum, the fungibility and the volatility of screen display should not
be essentialized as the phenomenological manifestation of the electronic writing
space. Like Espen Aarseth The hard drive, and magnetic media more generally, are
mechanisms of extreme inscription — that is, they offer a limit case for how
the inscriptive act can be imagined and executed. To examine the hard drive
at this level is to enter a looking glass world where the Kantian manifold
of space and time is measured in millionths of a meter (called microns) and
thousands of second (called milliseconds), a world of leading-edge
engineering rooted in the ancient science of tribology, the study of interacting surfaces in relative motion.
In the chapter
instantaneous access to any portion of the physical media);
writing and reading to and from the disk are ultimately a form of digital to analog and analog to digital signal processing);
the read/write head measures reversals between magnetic fields rather than the actual charge of an individual magnetic dipole);
a hard-disk drive is a three-dimensional writing space);
the volumetric space of the driveis mapped
by an intricate planar geometry comprised of tracks and sectors);
motion and raw speed are integral aspects of their operation as inscription technologies);
the surface of the disk, in order to fly scant nanometers beneath the air bearings, must be absolutely smooth); and
just as important as magnetic disk storage’s nonvolatility was the fact that its same volumetric area could be overwritten). It is this forensic description of the mechanism for electronic writing that is absent from most accounts of electronic textuality.
Kirschenbaum’s analysis thus adds an important layer to media-specific analysis:
the consideration of the relation between hardware inscription, on the one hand,
and software configurations, formal modeling, and presentational display, on the
other, i.e., between forensic materiality and formal materiality. A series of
multiple-order representations (or translations) allow for the inscription,
processing, and presentation of data. His analysis of digital image
representation as a data set provides a clear example for the particular nature
of the cascading inscriptions that define digitality. He explains, The tendency to regard one image as correct and the other as
deviant is to misapprehend the nature of computers as digital systems, and
indeed allographic sign systems in general
an electronic document is being modeled by a cascade of formal or semantic values that materialize it in relation to the electronic environment or system that supports it
Understanding the modeling and metatextual function of computer programs and
coding languages in general, particularly as they manifest themselves in certain
formal properties, is crucial for understanding the ideological dimension of
data structuring and data representation My word processor
presents me with a certain document model, and while its formal behaviors
ultimately come to rest in the forensic materiality of chips, memory, and other spaces of the hardware configuration, much of what we tend to essentialize about new media is in fact merely the effect of a particular set of social choices implemented and instantiated in the formal modeling of the digital environments in question
Kirschenbaum applies procedures of textual criticism and analytical bibliography
to the study of new media objects. His book signals a much-needed departure from
studies of digitality that only address the semiotic level of presentation.
Instead, he examines the whole material and social process through which digital
texts are produced, transmitted, and transformed: Crystallizing at the nexus of storage, inscription, and
instrumentation, the forensic imagination stands in contrast to the medial
ideology and screen essentialism that has held sway in the theoretical
conversation’s critical formative years for new media as a field
Kirschenbaum recalls McGann’s description of the double helix of linguistic and
bibliographic codes in bibliographic objects, and he explains the
interdependence of formal and forensic materiality by referring to the unique monodimensionality of the Möbius strip, at once
separate and coextensive
the forensic principle of individualization
and the formal principle of identity:
Formally or allographically identical, forensically or
autographically individualized and discrete: this conundrum becomes the
methodological lever with which to pry open the relentless symbolic cascade
of computation and understand what is unique about computers as writing technologies — that they are material machines dedicated to propagating an artificial environment capable of supporting immaterial behaviors.
Thus Kirschenbaum’s electro-bibliographic perspective refines our notion of what
an electronic object is, and refocuses our perception of computation and
digitality by pointing to the manifold negotiations that constitute electronic texts as material and social objects. His extreme materialism is thoroughly tested in his detailed analyses of the textual and reception history of Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story (chapter 4) and William Gibson’s Agrippa: A Book of the Dead (chapter 5). Social and cultural setting, platforms and operating systems, hypertext programs and electronic networks, various kinds of physical artifacts at both genetic and social levels (reflecting intentions, variations, versions, editions, porting or versioning) — all of these spell out the textual condition of the electronic object. Both analyses assert a fundamental similarity in the way bibliographic codes and electronic codes work in relation to their respective textual fields, and how these fields in turn are shaped by social interactions. Consideration of the forensic materiality of electronic objects — which brings difference
to the theory of electronic textuality
The study of transmissive variation in electronic objects — greatly facilitated by the self-documenting nature of electronic media — brings textual studies into the field of digital media. Diachrony, i.e., historical temporality (and not just the temporality of its machine execution), is part of a digital object. Kirschenbaum’s careful consideration of the historicity of electronic reproduction offers a critical model for studying electronic literature that integrates the forensic and the formal at both material and social levels. He shows how electronic objects are never entirely and simply electronic. They partake in many other social and physical materialities, as is amply and brilliantly demonstrated by his case-studies of Joyce and Gibson. In
In my view a fully adequate scholarly citation forAfternoon would specify the text’s edition (according to the colophon), Storyspace software version, platform, and operating system; for example,Afternoon, a story , 5th edition (1992), Storyspace Reader 1.0.7, Windows XP. […] The general flattening effect whereby all versions and editions ofAfternoon are assumed to be more or less homogenous is, in my view, symptomatic of still commonplace attitudes toward electronic textuality among the critical community, which assumes electronic objects exist absent of any meaningful diachronic dimension.
Agrippa’s trajectory from text file to the commercial matrix of the Web is also perhaps loosely analogous to scribal publication of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whereby poems in manuscript achieved widespread circulation from one reader to another in commonplace books before being acquired and printed as a saleable edition. Of course, vastly greater numbers of readers have readAgrippa for free on the Internet than have ever paid for one of the e-book distributions. But the key point is thatAgrippa’s afterlife as an e-book should remind us that the termelectronic text is never rendered homogenous merely by virtue of a text’s electronic pedigree, and should instead be understood as a thick constellation of historically visible inscriptive practices, determined both by technical considerations and by market forces.
Projects such as The Rossetti
Archive (1993-2008), The
William Blake Archive (1996-), and Artists’ Books Online (2004-)
have created multi-layered semiotic systems around digital facsimiles. As
electronic editing environments, they simulate their objects’ graphic and visual
materiality as a function of the difference between bibliographic and electronic
codes. Such operations are performed within a critical and institutional
apparatus which is built into the digital archive as an edited space and a technocultural practice. By stressing the configured nature of signifying marks, documentary editing in digital form reengages scholars and readers with the visual and bibliographic materiality of literary signifying processes. Heightened awareness of the medium caused by remediation results in a de-naturalization of familiar print forms and genres. Differences between codex codes and computer codes reveal the complex topology of bibliographic inscriptions. Recursivity works both at the level of language structure and at the level of visuality, producing feedbacks between visual and linguistic forms as reading acts map onto the writing space. Bibliographic recursive operations are now being simulated in the electronic space, as a way of exploring its inscriptional potential for cognition. If Jerome McGann
Hayles’s and Kirschenbaum’s new books offer critically rigorous, intellectually
provocative, and highly productive perspectives on new media literary objects.
Their technical, sociotextual, and interpretive analyses raise our critical awareness of the specifics of digital materiality and electronic literature to a new theoretical and analytical level. Hayles’s readings of electronic works are exemplary in the way they relate electronic performability to interpretability. Using tropes such as recursive dynamics,
intelligent machines
and emergent cognition,
she has tried to capture the embodied nature of technology and the distributed nature of subjectivity in human-computer interactions. Kirshenbaum’s approach, in turn, opens up electronic objects to textual criticism, extending the genetic and social text approach of the last two decades to digitally born artifacts. He offers a critically nuanced and technically rigorous description of the multiple layers of formal and forensic materiality, and stresses their interdependence. Taken together, the electronic
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