N
Katherine Hayles
Writing
Machines
MIT
Press, 2002
The book, this 'pamphlet' surprises you immediately, it is a black-covered hardback with a lovely feel and design that says this book is different from other books. Pages of shiny paper (you can't write on them) and blocks of text that zoom out at you, or that are printed right up to the page edges, secret inscriptions, screen shots and new terminology introduced as underlined CAPITALS. The outside of the book reflects what the inside of the book is saying, before you even read a word. Ann Burdick has done her job of design very well.
The 'I' that writes is never the 'I' that is written and so
N Katherine Hayles chooses a character 'Kaye' to tell of her journey of
discovery from childhood to the present. N Katherine Hayles has been one of the
earliest and most active supporters of digital literatures. In sharing her
discoveries through the fantasy and honesty of her persona Kaye, she makes the
transition a little easier for others who want to understand. However in doing
so it was more than a little reminiscent of
Whilst Kaye is free to play, the critic and theorist N Katherine Hayles infuses the text with observations, critiques, questions and theories about books and electronic textuality in the age of digital media. Hayles contends that the materiality of the work is important to the experience of it and that works in different media require their own media specific analysis (MSA).
Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA. (p 29)
Her goal is stated clearly;
This book is an experiment in forging a vocabulary and set of critical practices responsive to the full spectrum of signifying components in print and electronic texts by grounding them in the materiality of the literary artefact. (p 6)
Young Kaye skips backwards to see what in the past she overlooked, and sees that the material qualities of print were there all along. She concludes that a media specific analysis of works is required, so that the inscription technology is taken into account in the interpretation of the work. She may very well be skipping back to previous debates about the inseparability of mind and body, not only from her own How we became posthuman but also the post-Kantian debates. Hayles seems unable to separate the materiality of the content and the corpus, and never separate these two although at times she speaks of a works physical material construction and at other times refers to materiality as its meaning-making system or information system.
Hayles said in an interview, prior to the books publication,
Each reading attempts to show how the text engages the materiality of its medium, and how this materiality becomes so entwined with the content that the two cannot be adequately understood apart from one another. (Hayles in Gitelman)
This would indicate that she sees materiality and content as two separate things brought together in a work. She also gives a definition of materiality, which is avoided in the book and which contradicts her earlier statement;
Materiality, as I use the term, does not simply mean all the physical, tangible aspects of the construction, delivery and reading apparatus. Rather materiality is a selective focus on certain physical aspects of an instantiated text that are fore grounded by a work's construction, operation, and content. These properties cannot be determined in advance of the work by the critic or even the writer. Rather, they emerge from the interplay between the apparatus, the work, the writer and the reader/user. (Hayles in Gitelman)
It is possible, as Hayles implies, that almost every student of literature over the last fifty years has received a very narrow education as to what constitutes a literary work, a very rigid print-centric view.
Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view. (pp 29-30)
We have only to recall the resistance to the paperback novel as opposed to the hard-back, the resistances to the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, concrete poetry, sound poetry, the New York school and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the roneo presses and self-publications, French theory, slam and ethnic poetries, and as Hayles points out, artist's books, to prove how rigidly the idea of literature has been associated with the printed book, and the right publisher. But I am not convinced about the importance Hayles places on the materiality of literary works. Digital texts may have made her realize that a work can have other representations, and made her see that even in print culture there was a variety of ways in which the material qualities of the book could be a part of the system of interpretation as well as the means of distribution. Yet the extension of this to the theories she proposes are confused and inappropriate to the domain of electronic textuality or to the wider domain of the literary work.
Remediation: the re-presentation in one medium of material that has already been represented in another, e.g. CNN on the Web. (LEXICON)
The Writing Machines Web Supplement states that it "rethink's the scholarly apparatus" of the book by providing "alternative mappings of the book's conceptual terrain in a manner specific to the web with additional functionalities unavailable in print. But does it? And is it remediation i.e. the passage of one medium through another?
Completing the cycle of remediation, the Supplement gives the user the ability to customize his or her own copy of the book (Supplement)
The supplement is divided into sections. Firstly the LEXICON is a collection of key concepts that appear throughout the printed book, clicking on words provides the page number and definition for each entry by clicking on the highlighted words. Cleverly constructed, I found myself playing with the interface, involving myself in its opaque materiality, I engaged the technology but found the plain text option easier to access the information, which could have been published as two alphabetically listed pages in the book. Clearly missing were definitions of materiality, instantiation and embodiment.
The NOTES, the entire set of footnotes are presented simultaneously along with the block of text to which they're connected. Arrow-shaped handles open each footnote into a box. This could have been a really useful feature but the whole printed text was not there, and jumping from book to computer screen is just as troublesome as consulting the end-notes to printed chapters. If the full text was available there would be no book to sell. So what is this notes section included for? It does not do its job better than the book; it contains information that isn't in the book; but it does show us that had the full text been available how this technology would have made that task easier. In a project that wishes to promote the material robustness of the book, surely this function proves the superiority of the digital medium for this project.
The BIBLIOGRAPHY should be more correctly called a 'thematography', not only because it contains more than books, but also because it can be accessed according to filtered content grouped into themes, just as the INDEX allows the user both to search by keyword and to browse the book's content sorted by distinctions such as "behaviors", "knowledge practices", or "literary criticism in print". There are no alphabetical listings by author or by subject matter, nor are there in the book. I found this section more difficult to navigate. Both methods, alphabetic and thematic, could have been included in the web supplement, but were not.
The SOURCE MATERIAL section re-creates pages referred to in the text and users can open and view reproductions of the original sources in full colour, at actual size, which I found very useful compared to the small black and white images in print.
The ERRATA allows the user to view and print revised replacement pages.
In the absence of the whole printed text the Web Supplement is not a remediation of the print book, but rather a glimpse of what a remediated text may look like on the web, and strangely makes the argument that the digital medium may in fact be a more efficient medium for this text's materiality. It makes an argument against Hayles' MSA as well. By placing information referred to in the book, things that are usual navigational devices we are used to from print, alphabetic indexes, only on the Web Supplement then something is missing or lacking from the book. To make the book whole both parts must exist, a print part and a digital part. It also makes an argument against the concept of remediation, for if it had succeeded in the remediation of Hayles' book then Hayles' Media Specific Analysis would have been disproved, because nothing would have been added or subtracted from the print text experience of reading. If the end-user interpreted the text in the same way in two different media, then how can it be said that each media's materiality adds to the meaning-making function of the text.
Lastly I'd like to comment
on the WebTake at the MIT MEDIAWORK site
which presents an interactive, digital reading of Hayles' book by Eric Loyer.
Loyer introduces his piece;
In the world conjured by Hayles and Burdick, it's OK to talk about how your childhood shapes your theoretical approach; it's OK to allow the texts you analyze to bleed visually into your own written words; it's OK to treat a literary work's materiality as an essential element of its message. In all of these examples, things traditionally unseen have been made visible. – Erik Loyer
The first action as the end-user of Eric Loyer's on-line WebTake is to choose connection speed, immediately you have agreed to proceed, you have become engaged. The screen fills with a graphical representation of a book binding which creates four areas of text centred around the spine, the piano music begins softly and you begin to read the four blocks of text, the music becomes more complex, but still driving. The initial text is Loyer's poetry inspired by Hayles' theories.
There is a book that's
left its past,
right its future.
To which book does he refer; to all books, for they are no longer what they were in the past, but who is to know whether the book's future will be right, or if there is a right, or if this is just an opposition for poetic purposes? The other stanzas/textblocks seem to lament the change, which indicates a damage has been done
On the way there
the hollow has been bruised,
or at least a reconfiguration and books written by machines operate on opposition of one or zero, true or false, on or off. Taking the narrative position of a non-visible narrator, the "hollow" of the spine of the book, the invisible entity is what holds the book together, and all the thoughts and arguments therein contained, and has done so unacknowledged in the past. Loyer divides the book into oppositions, past/future, print/digital, left/right. The hollow is Loyer's metaphor for Hayles' book.
The mouse and movement within this screen affects the three glowing white balls attached to each other with bars, the middle ball rising up the screen as the mouse moves up the screen, you are playing with the bounciness of the other two balls, bouncing up and down in response to the central ball. In the next screen the balls change colour and numbered text appears at each ball, the central ball remains glowing white and uses a quotation from Hayles firstly about the operation of universities and the left and right ball divide into structure and people. Moving through the four central statements and their right and left oppositions we get an idea of the restrictive and prejudiced nature of universities and literature in general and arrive at Loyer's interpretation of the aim of Hayles' 'Writing Machines'; to see what the book may look like in this post-digital era. The hollow continues to speak, to try and bind these different concepts which now appear as single words orbiting the left and right balls, coming together as one sphere as you ascend the screen with the mouse. The coming together symbolizes the development of a single language to speak of the effect of digital culture on book culture.
The next screen is three textblocks sampled from the book on the topic of print-centric literary culture, comments on a new media artwork by Talan Memmot and the third which always sat above the other textblocks as a transparent layer that stated Hayles' agenda of understanding technology from a literary point of view, addressing the materiality of each medium. This is a very clever metaphor as well as a feature of the digital devices which allude to the interconnectivity of texts and the users active role in unravelling them, a device used by digital poets like John Cayle, Jim Rosenberg and others in the past, but still effective. Loyer concludes with the 'hollow' of the book now finding the space to inhabit, celebrating its non-invisibility, its recognition of its materiality, yet we are left wondering if Loyer is not still wary of the way ahead.
The question I would like to ask is that if this book, Writing Machines, addresses a literary audience of book readers and wants them to appreciate the importance of the materiality of books, and that engaging with the new technology has led to this realization, then why was Eric Loyer asked to create this WebTake? And if the WebTake distils the book, why was the book written and published and not just authored directly for the web? But the WebTake is not the book. The WebTake is Loyer's interpretation of the book, or certain arguments from the book, and his writing of it in a digital medium; it is his interpretation of Hayles' text; not remediation but re-writing. So the WebTake is not the book but must be considered as part of the book, and so too the Web Supplement referred to in the book, at http://mitpress.mit.edu/mediawork. The materiality of the book then is not just print and paper and spine and binding but includes the visible design elements and a digital materiality; the website. That would make her own multimedia book unable to be analysed by Hayles' definition of Media Specific Analysis.
Media-Specific Analysis: a mode of critical inquiry attentive to the specificity of the medium in which a work is instantiated. (LEXICON)
Hayles says "I do not mean to advocate that media should be considered in isolation from one another" (Hayles, p30) but that would seem the logical conclusion of her theory.
I suggest that the book, its text and design and the supplement and the WebTake are aiming to address a wider audience than the book culture audience. I feel Hayles' multimedia book does not belong to book culture; it belongs to New Media, as do the works she analyses. But Hayles, whilst admitting that the three technotexts she analyses could also be classified as hypertexts, rejects the notion of Cybertext and Ergodic literature which Espen Aarseth introduced to the field of cyber theory as having no consideration of the materiality of the inscription technologies that produce them. (Aarseth, 1997) I suggest that is precisely the reason Aarseth proposed the cybertext theory, to develop a language and framework in which to discuss works produced in different media with differing material qualities
Materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create meaning. (Hayles, p33)
But the agenda of tying body and mind has been prominent in Hayles' writing for many years, and even before How We Became Posthuman, she was defending materiality;
One belief from the present likely to stupefy future generations is the postmodern orthodoxy that the body is primarily, if not entirely, a linguistic and discursive construction. (Hayles, 1992)
In a past persona 'komninos the professional spoken word performance poet', I was fully aware of the prejudice that exists within the academy which privileges print over all other material actualizations of poetry. Personally I think if a work gives me a poetic experience then it is a poem irrespective of the presentation/distribution medium. For me poetry is an immaterial thing, an idea, a virtual thing (virtual in the Deleuzian sense) an unsolvable problematic with many actualizations in many different media.
The Idea is not the element of knowledge but that of an infinite 'learning', which is of a different nature to knowledge. (Deleuze, p192)
Deleuze introduces the concepts of the virtual, the real, the actual and the possible in Repetition and Difference;
The only danger to all this is that the virtual could be confused with the possible. The possible is opposed to the real; the process undergone by the possible is therefore 'realisation'. By contrast, the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality itself. The process it undergoes is that of actualisation. (Deleuze, p211)
If we consider the idea of poetry and take the perspective on the virtual being a problematic, an immaterial idea, that gives rise to questions, then its actualisations, its attempts to solve the problematic, have material form represented by real poetry in real books, or real performances to real audiences, or real screens/interfaces on real networks and real computers and with the possibility of further real examples of the actualisation. These actualisations of the virtual, irrespective of medium, may be material or experienced in a material way. Yet there is something that allows us to think that all of these actualisations are poetry, some immaterial quality that is contained in all the actualisations and that thing is the virtual problematic, poetry, which encompasses all the past actualisations, all their realisations and all possible realisations, as well as all future actualisations of poetry. This is not to say there is an essence of poetry or that the problematic can be simply stated as 'what is poetry?', or what is technotext for that matter?, no, it is more about the imperatives of this thing poetry, the questions of why certain aspects are important at certain times in certain spaces, and how these things change. A new actualisation as affected by the introduction of a new technology or a new theory creates excitement and interest and forces us once again to consider the problematic, and to rethink previous actualisations.
electronic textuality is bursting on the scene, it seems we have a magnificent opportunity to think again about the specificities of both print and electronic media, which can illuminate one another by contrast. (Hayles in Gitelman)
Hayles is an astute observer but what I think Hayles is doing, and many others do, is associating the right questions to the wrong ideas domain causing her to compare two different actualisations of the same virtual. She has seen the real products, material products of the actualisation of the virtual of poetry or literature in electronic environments, but fails to acknowledge that the virtual exists because it is not material. She experiences hypertext and the questions it evokes and explains it with literary theories of the past print culture. And it may be true that hypertext asks some of the same questions as literary theory, particularly postmodernism. The idea of print and the idea of electronic textuality and the idea of spoken word performance all have their own problems to address, these problems are expressed as questions, but they are all part of the problem and ideas domain of literary work. They present as solutions to the problematic, the virtual of the literary work, but in turn generate their own set of questions. What may appear as a development from one material form to another may in fact just be two different solutions to the same problem, two different actualisations of the same virtual. My impression is that Katherine Hayles does not want to understand the virtual but continues to defend the material, via the material she knows best, the book.
Whilst Hayles has contributed to the ideas domains of Cybernetics, science, Book culture and Cyber culture, she claims quite firmly to be speaking from the ideas domain of the book culture. To set herself in one ideas domain and try to answer the questions of other ideas domains is an impossible task, like trying to describe the outside of a prison when you've only ever been inside a cell.
Deleuze points out that an actualisation can only be compared to the virtual it comes from, that is print literature can not be properly compared to electronic literature or spoken word literature, or any other actualisations of literary work, otherwise we are comparing a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind, and as philosophers know this leads to a false thesis and confusion.
I believe the book fails in its aim of developing a set of critical practices responsive to the full spectrum of signifying components in print and electronic texts but attempts to ground them in the materiality of the literary artefact. This book may in deed bring more of book culture into contact with and engaging electronic texts, or even acknowledging their impact on print texts, but you can lead a horse to water……or as Paul De Man said, "the greatest resistance to resistance is resistance itself."
Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of
hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would
keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her
childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make
their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the
dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple
sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own
child-life, and the happy summer days. (Lewis Carroll,
N. Katherine Hayles - The Materiality of Informatics - Configurations 1:1Configurations,
1992, 1.1:147-170.
"MATERIALITY HAS ALWAYS BEEN IN PLAY"
AN INTERVIEW WITH N. KATHERINE HAYLES BY LISA GITELMAN
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/hayles/interview.htm
N Katherine Hayles
Writing Machines
MIT Press, 2002
Hollowbound Book
Erik Loyer's interactive, animated WebTake,
http://mitpress.mit.edu/mediawork
http://MITPRESS.MIT.EDU/MEDIAWORK
Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
Lewis Carroll,