hayles: how we became posthuman

 

Critical link on virtuality (and its materiality): Hayles. A version, more complex and historicized, of the remediation argument: of the material reality of mediation, despite and because of its apprent claims for transparency (immateriality, virtuality)

How We Became Posthuman

Page 28: medium’s materiality.

All information (despite the postmodern view towards immateriality and disembodiment) always tied to a medium [p. 13]

 

26: difference between the signification of type and how electronic changes that (returns us to its visual as well as mediational. Note that the apparently immaterial actually turns into greater sense of the material and embodiment; but also a resistance to abstraction, comprehension. Absorbing—but then note it is absorbing the recognition of dispersion.

Seems to me she is envisioning a reader’s touch with text that Whitman is imagining—where reading doesn’t stop.

 

Her argument here sounds like version of remediation: the erasure of the medium is in effect (or should be) the focus of the information, and where the information derives its effect.

I see here a particular place to apply to what digital textuality is revealing/remediating of the erased materiality/mediacy of print texts.

“As the emphasis shifts to pattern and randomness, characteristics of print texts that used to be transparent (because they were so pervasive) are becoming visible again through their differences from digital textuality… The pattern/radnomness dialectic [the information binary that seems to have replaced the presnece/absence binary of embodiment and earlier textual bodies] does not erase the material world…This illusion of erasure should be the subject of inquiry.

 

p. 29: uses term ‘informatics’ to define relation between human and textual bodies

[echoes of WW—the links sought in the body of work

 

Hayles then not only reminds us that virtuality (and information) always has a material base in a medium, a body of information; she argues that the very locations of virutal bodies and texts that today seem to take us further into immateriality, into the dispersion of information, in fact can serve to highlight the erasures of embodiment that are not new to 21st c. virtuality. Thus: erasures also of the print age. Isn’t this the case with Whitman—who sought the virtual as a form of embodiment?

 

 

3.6..07:

Thought is to frame the exploration through three areas/issues of virtuality that the digital archive offers. My effort is to re-think distraction: as a textual condition that resists abstraction. The three areas—which emerge in the focus on the materiality of the medium, hypermediacy:

–embodiment: focusing on Whitman’s textual body (especially the images, the books); ties to Mcgann

–empathy: the reader; tie to Remediation’s focus on virtual empathy. Focus on summoning of the memoranda?

–error: Joyce—fervent error, extravagance—issues of hypertext and pedagogy; mcgann’s notice of the interdiscilinary—the moving across boundaries.

For Whitman, error tied to wandering, to dispersion and deferral to reader (to future readers, incomplete texts, specimens). A serious question to raise is always how far do we take students in that direction—how seriously can they enter into error (or into Emerson’s circles, another version: another circle can be drawn). To the extent that digital archive shifts toward a writerly environment, I believe it makes this possible without falling into deconstructive versions of error, call it ruminant textuality. And a middle ground I can end with: interdisciplinary (and related: multimedia). These are things we as scholars and teachers know are important to books and reading and writing and learning—and which we have left out of our classrooms for too long.

hayles: my mother was a computer

 

7: intermediation

irreducible complexity

 

in this focus on intermediation, a key in this book is ‘emergence‘, understanding that the embodied/material textuality is emergent property (thus link to ‘code is deep’ article, a richer understanding of materiality of any text)

 

101: electronic text as process rather than object

distributed phenomenon; dispersion that exists because storage and delivery vehicles are not same.

103: thus textuality redescribed as: instantiated rather than dematerialized, dispersed rather than unitary, processural rather than object-like, flickering rather than durably imprinted.

[for Hayles, this re-seeing of materiality provides a more robust understanding of materiality as always an interaction of the physical and signifying, as emergent (and thus interpretable) rather than pre-given.

 

 

Chapter on Patchwork Girl: "Flickering Connectivities"

 

Begins by situation the novel in discourse of late 18th century context of emergence of intellectual property and copyright: which abstracts work away from material embodiment, puts abstraction of idea/style above emodiment of book

144: cites Mark Rose, Authors and Owners; notes gender implications (male writers)

145: a chain of metaphorical deferrals the slides from embodied to disembodies, book to work, content to sytle, style to face, face to authors personality--toward a transcendental signified: author's genius/ possessive individualism

 

146: anxiety that writing was a commercial enterprise haunts defenders of literary property.

Erasure of technologies of production as well as economic networks that produce the books.

 

147: Jackson's fiction: pushes against the represssion of textual production, materiality of medium that, ignored in favor of 'originality'--and foregrounds the production/collaboration of text

148: distributed nature of the monster's subjectivity (eg, graveyard, parts): performed in the hypertext

149: radical text depicts monstrosity, and must be itself monstrous (dotted lines as scars, disruption of traiditonal boundaires--metalepsis)

 

151: intermediate step: computer decodes then re-encodes before reader decodes the text on screen.  Mutability, the flickering signifier already mutated.

 

154: the specificity of Patchwork Girl as electronic hypertext: way it mobilizes its resources and restrictions of the software/medium to enact subjectivities distributed in flexible and mutating ways across author, text, interace, user.

And note that this distrubution of authorship/subjectivity [deconstruction of the transcendental/disembodied] is a key subject of this text, also of the novel.  To extent that such forms of emboided,associational writing is (as she notes in Stitch Bitch) associated with the feminine, bad writing. [link here to Lanham: looking at vs looking through]

 

Further: note how Birkerts does not deal with the embodiment of his favored medium–seems to replay the disembodiment of the material practice of printing (so little focus on gutenberg)

 

Key term from her analysis: distributed authorship.

Historically, this returns/remediates the suppression of distribution (not only in the economics of publishing, but in the aesthetics of writing). In effect: my argument with Whitman and distraction: about distributed writing.

 

Where else in new media or the electronic world do we see distributed authorship? Is there a gender bias with this–is it feminine/suspect? Wikipedia?

 

159: monster is ‘mixed metaphor’

If this is also a sign of bad writing, indecorous (cites 18th c. rhetoric, addison): is metonymy also viewed as lesser than metaphor, as indecorous?

 

161: text foregrounds the materiality of fictional bodies, authorial bodies, users bodies, writing technologies that produce them

 

165: how does a text achieve closure?

Central dialectic of text: oscillation between fragmentatin and recombination