hayles: print is flat

 

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Print Is Flat,Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis. By: Hayles, N. Katherine. Poetics Today, Spring2004, Vol. 25 Issue 1, p67-90, 24p Abstract: Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters. Central to repositioning critical inquiry, so it can attend to the specificity of the medium, is a more robust notion of materiality. Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent property, so that it cannot be specified in advance, as if it were a pregiven entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text’s “meaning” will also take into account its physical specificity as well. Following the emphasis on media-specific analysis, nine points can be made about the specificities of electronic hypertext: they are dynamic images; they include both analogue resemblance and digital coding; they are generated through fragmentation and recombination; they have depth and operate in three dimensions; they are written in code as well as natural language; they are mutable and transformable; they are spaces to navigate; they are written and read in distributed cognitive environments; and they initiate and demand cyborg reading practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]; (AN 12795217)

PDF Full Text

 

Some links:

Cathy Davidson/HASTAC: a workshop by Hayles on electronic literature:

http://www.hastac.org/node/468

 

• Begins with the poststructural shift ‘from work to text’ (barthes): dematerializes the text, eliding differences in media [68]
• 69: understands all literature as the interplay between form and medium
• MSA in seeing this interplay in all literature is attuned to the following, moving from language of ‘text’ to more precise vocabulary: screen and page, digital program and analogue interface, code and ink, and from issues of similarity and difference to simulation and instantiation.
• 75: digital computer not entirely digital; the electronic polarities of the digital bit are analogue (correspondence, continuous)
• 76: fragmentation and recombination
• 78: scripton (surface image) vs. texton (underlying code) [Aarseth]
• 79; hypertexts are bilingual, code as well as natural langauge (and some are creating creoles.

‘Rigorously speaking, an electronic text is a process rather than an object, although objects (like hardware and software) are required to produce it.’

[critical of McGann's claim that all texts are algorithmic, marked--for eliding this difference with the computer processed text]

80: discusses McGann’s redescription (back-formation) of print texts by terms normally employed for electronic

understands that simulating print texts in electronic environments involves radically different materialities than the print texts [appreciation for the materiality of literature--reading and writing as material practices

 

for Whitman essay: what aspect of this materiality (and this re-focusing/redescription of print materiality) learned from 'deep code' is most relevant to my distraction?

something to do with what she means by 'distributed' generally: more specifically--recombination and transformation [the materialities of the reader who is also a writer? this seems to link to the wiki]

 

84: cognition is distributed beween writer, reader and designer; also between humans and machines

85: thus reader necessarily constructed as a cyborg, spliced into an integrated circuit

 

86: traditional view that text is immaterial verbal construction (part of Cartesian split of mind and body)–when it ‘is in actuality a dynamically interacting whole.’

this traditional view also separates class/economic division between activity of author and work of producing the book–something we are seeing changes as means of production moves into hands of writers (desktop publishing)

 

Can see Whitman here: where the writer was also a producer, and interested in a dynamic relation with the reproduction of the reader.

hayles: writing machines

 

33: digital media give us ‘the chance to see print with new eyes’

42: material metaphor: the entwining of medium and work

note: cites Mitchell and his critique of literary criticism neglect of visual specficity of literary medium

thus her ‘technotext’ seems to be a version of his imagetext: or places where the work reflects on its own instantiation in a medium.

43: key point–seeing print again as medium, not ‘transparent interface’

 

• Media ecology
  • 5: relationships between different media are complex as beteween different organisms
    • Cites Remediation
    • Robust interaction between media
  • 6: materiality: so ecology is one way for her to re-think the materiality of representation/simulation (against the Baudrillard, everything simulation)
    • Grounding in the materiality of literary artifact
    • Media-specific analysis: mode of critical interrogation alert to ways medium constructs the work and work constructs medium [back to a dynamic relationship of ecology
      • Consider examples from ecology: how are we constructed by our environment? Notice also how this focuses attention right away on a way we usually don't think of 'machines' or even writing.

 

• Autobiographical frame/perspective: why? What does it do?
  • 10: vivid sense of the world's materiality--from childhood; books, imaginative literature
  • 12: books, paper, ink made her environment as much as the landscape
    • Notice the contrast with SB: not exactly solitary reading--and not de-materialized
  • 14: the literary game played differently than science: value ambiguity over clarity
  • 15: first encounters desktop computer: material-semiotic object
    • Binaries that always interested her: media and materiality, imaginative immersion and delight in physical [again, think how this revises SB by showing how he reinforces these binaries, yet in the name of a more material experience of literature]

 

• Materiality
  • 19: notes that it has generally been ignored by literary studies, in favor of literature as immaterial verbal constructions
    • Notes exception of concrete poetry–link to Lanahm here: the issue is that literary study generally looking through, suspicious of AT–of the medium

 

• Robust: note her use of this word: wants a more robust and nuanced account of literature and impact from information technologies
  • Define robust: assume she is thinking computer defintion: robustness refers to fact that digital signal degrades less than analog
    1. Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses, pressures, or changes in procedure or circumstance. A system, organism or design may be said to be “robust” if it is capable of coping well with variations (sometimes unpredictable variations) in its operating environment with minimal damage, alteration or loss of functionality.
• Cites Mitchell: literary studies should include recognition of images
  • Argues that printcentric view similarly neglects “all the other signifying components of electronic texts (I would add any text): sound, animation, software
• Material Metaphor: 22
  • Book as material metaphor (traffic/transfer between a symbol or network of symbols and material apparatus): artifact whose physical properties structure our interactions with it.
    • Seems she is recognizing in this materialiaty of metaphor/symbol of books/reading something closer to an underlying metonymy [or my version of the at inhabiting the through, the medium]
  • Inscription technologies: 24–defined
    • Thus seems that all inscription is a form of material metaphor (in sense that symbol processing is read through material changes that can be read as marks