To risk making a fool of myself, I think I'm gonna post one of my four exam answers; this particular question concerned the relation of new media as a theoretical field and my interest in poetry and poetics. My third exam field was experimental poetry in North America post-1950, emphasizing three strains: the oral/musical; the visual; the procedural. In this exam answer I try to sketch out one of the ways I think new media as a theory field offers some useful tools for writing about poetry. My dissertation will be focused on the modernist period and a media-inflected analytic will be part of that project, I'm sure. Anyway, one of my answers, before I come to my senses and erase this post . . .
Question 2: New Media & the Author/Reader Continuum: Writing/Speech/Gesture
In his influential foreword to Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, David Wellbery enthusiastically constructs some ramifications for Kittler’s emphasis upon the relation of corporeality and media and the pall it casts upon traditional notions of intention and interpretation for “the notion of society itself is abandoned in favor of an investigation of interacting subsystems endowed with their particular technologies and protocols” and therefore “the sufferance of the body, its essential pathos, becomes a privileged locus for the analysis of discourse networks in terms of both their systematic character and their effectivity.” While it seems that Wellbery overstates Kittler’s actual stance, his enthusiasm stands as indexical for me for the most excessive claims made for the emerging new media theoretical field as a complete re-consideration of literary and critical norms. While my current critical stance doesn’t follow Wellbery into the replacement of contemporary discursive systems of analysis (whether ideologically and/or historically inflected) with a new discourse system of an exclusively physiological grounding for textuality (and its seemingly always attendant discursive collapse of human and suffering), I do see the work of critics and theorists such as Kittler, Bernard Stiegler, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, N. Katherine Hayles, Brian Rotman, Mark B.N. Hansen and others as opening new lines of inquiry into questions of literary production and expression.
N. Katherine Hayles’ call for a media-specific analysis I find to be both extremely timely and self-limiting—while she rightly admonishes fellow critic Jerome McGann for a tendency to read media texts and projects through the critical norms of the previous, traditionally page-bound regime, it seems that her call stops short of fully comprehending the extents to which media condition literary production. That is, Hayles’ call limits itself exclusively to analyzing the means by which the presentation of a work is media-specific; quite rightly, she describes the limits of applying willy-nilly conceptions of expressiveness or accomplishment of one media (the traditionally bound book) to works created in a differing media (works composed for the computer, whether hyper-text or flash media or otherwise): a new media cultivates new norms and traditions. I see part of my project as extending this insight to questions of production. That is, the regime of the book is not a regime of a singular logic of production or signification. As Hayles herself writes elsewhere, “The materiality of an embodied text is the interaction of its physical characteristics with its signifying strategies.” And yet, two texts embodied in the same printed format may suggest counter signifying strategies; this much is clear, as it is clear that even a single text may suggest counter signifying strategies to a Marxist or a feminist or a deconstructionist heuristic, or even suggest differing strategies to a singular reader in the duration of its unfolding. What I would like to explore though is the extent that even a traditionally bound literary text may suggest its own discursive network(s) and therefore signifying strategies, and that emerging theories concerning media may help an analysis of how varying media-inflected properties may condition (and describe the limits of) the reading and writing acts as well as help create and describe the operational perspectives involved.
One path of inquiry is the consideration of writing as a storage and retrieval system, a means by which memory is externalized (or always maintained as already external) as a kind of technics, and that access to this system presupposes a set of norms about how that system is maintained. In “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” Kittler addresses the influence of modern technologies upon notions of absolute knowledge, a realm of knowing registered at its own plane of persistence: “Instead of hooking up technologies to people, absolute knowledge can run as an endless loop.” That is, writing is a technical endeavor, and writing in particular in which the typewriter and keyboard maintain the linguistic materials as external is an entrance to a pre-existing array of signs from which the person selects the appropriate sequence; this Kittler opposes to the previous, Romantic regime that posited the alphabet as internal and “natural” and is only pushed outwards through the speaking mouth or moving hand. In this manner, one may come to realize, in any discourse network, “Writing can store only writing, no more, no less” and “writing stores only the fact of its authorization.” The key historical project, then, is to read how technologies of writing and communication underwrite what, at any moment, writing is. Kittler is at his most interesting when framing these questions: “Since 1865 (in Europe) or 1868 (in America) writing has no longer consisted of those ink or pencil traces of a body, whose optical or acoustical signals were irretrievably abandoned in order that the readers, at least, might flee into the surrogate sensuality of handwriting. In order to allow for a series of sounds and sights to be stored, the old European storage technique had first of all to be mechanized.” For Kittler, it is the twin occurrence of Nietschze’s early embrace of the typewriter and the failure of his eyesight (he begins to write books without recourse to reading) that allows him access to the primal scene of the new discourse network in which writing is completely mechanized: the primal scene of the writer is that of a blind man crouched above a machine with the white noise of memory and a mechanized alphabet harmonizing with one another: “Mnemonic inscription is, like mechanical inscription, always invisible at the decisive moment.” Each simply proffers its “blindly chosen victims” to the reader and writer both.
Addressing our contemporary moment, Hayles works to delineate an emerging discourse network: “with electronic texts there is a conceptual distinction—and often an actualized one—between storage and delivery vehicles, whereas with print the storage and delivery vehicles are one and the same.” Here, Hayles is delving into a close reading of the conceptual and structural importance of a new materiality to a textual experience, of the significance that adheres to a written word that is stored as byte and yet read as a flickering of light. This she contrasts with the regime of the book, which functions more statically as vehicle for both storage and presentation. “Although print readers perform sophisticated cognitive operations when they read a book,” Hayles writes, “the printed lines exist as such before the book is opened, read, or understood. An electronic text does not have this kind of prior existence. It does not exist anywhere in the computer, or in the networked system, in the same form it acquires when displayed on screen.” Here, I believe, within Hayles’ insightful analysis, are the seeds of the limits of her approach: the historically conditioned imposition of understanding as the telos of reading. The implicit scene in Hayles’ aside is of a familiar loop of open-read-understand played in static continuity; more interesting questions arise, perhaps, when reading is not linked exclusively to a system of perpetual and pre-existing understandings but rather is linked to other systems, including actions, curses, rituals, hallucinations, or seductions: in this sense, the pre-arrangement of lines that Hayles claims is symptomatic of book culture is less constrictive when not pre-linked to the loop of understanding. Similarly, an electronic text currently has a potentially disruptive and troubling character not simply because it has a different form in storage than in presentation, but because it hasn’t yet been brought completely into the loop: it can link itself to its own systems with or without the reader’s assent: one can open and read a spam email or attachment and it can be well on its own way to its own system of activation regardless of one’s understanding. In fact, the most insidious of electronic texts would seem to prey upon a previous open-read-understanding assumption to textuality. Kittler links the technics of modernity to such a reading habit that I claim underwrites Hayles’ analysis: “Not until the emergence of a technical storage capacity, such as that which shaped the discourse network of 1900, would hallucinatory sensuousness be abandoned to the entertainment industry and serious literature renew its commitment to the ascesis that knows only black letters on white paper.” It is the ascetic regime of understanding (usually colored as a kind of repressive Victorianism), in fact, that many of the poets and writers of my previous response attempt to move their work away from: their tendency is to hew closer to a written poetry that suggests oral properties, sensualities, and networks of interaction.
This is precisely where questions concerning author-reader lines of communication and questions concerning writing, speech and gesture intersect for me. Perhaps an explication of a single Greek term and its relevance to my notion of a media-specific analysis of textual production will be useful. In his Preface to Plato, a book of monumental importance to the post-Modernist poet Charles Olson, Eric Havelock reconstructs the Greek culture at the moment before the instantiation of logos as being privileged to muthos, a moment he aligns with the development of writing as a technical system. That is, prior to this moment both logos and muthos signified as being spoken, from the mouth, with both having equal claim on what could be taken as “the truth”; after this moment, however, logos signifies as fact or truth, while muthos signifies as myth in the (still) contemporary sense of a fiction or fancy. Within this context, Havelock elucidates the complex term mousike, which may suggest a notion of “music” but is better understood as a technique within Greek oral culture, “a complicated convention designed to set up motions and reflexes which would assist the recording and recalling of significant speech.” The structures and systems that allow for this complicated convention for perpetuating “significant speech” suggests an approach to language and poetry extremely discordant with Kittler’s suggestion of quote-unquote serious literature’s “ascesis that knows only black letters on white paper.” Havelock sketches the seven principles of the technique: 1) that speech is created physically; 2) that once preserved, significant speech is created the same way; 3) that speech can be preserved only if repeated; 4) that the motions of the mouth are organized so as to ease repetition; 5) that organized motions of the mouth are to be grouped rhythmically; 6) that these rhythms and motions can become automatic reflexes; 7) that the body parallels the mouth’s reflex with ear and limbic reflexes. It follows, then, that the poet, as central memorizer of cultural stories, genealogies and norms, would weave together previous instantiations of the tribe’s tale with current conditions and transmit it to his fellow citizens who, entranced by the musical repetitions and rhythmic groupings of the words and lyre, would repeat and conjure the poem-song back to him, thereby setting in motion a discourse network that, for Havelock, stood as the interrelation of education, pleasure and experience.
What Havelock’s invocation of mousike suggests is a completely different technical system than the supposedly normative open-read-understand loop, a technical system with poetry (and the poet) at its center and with a “readership” of participants involved in its construction and transmission. Such a model has proven a seductive one for American poets such as Olson, Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and others—setting aside for now the long and complicated question concerning whether such a “discourse network” that the mousike convention illustrates is intelligible outside of the geographical, technical and economic situation of pre-Platonic Greeks, the importance of this orally grounded situation (and others like it) as an overt or implicit model for 20th century writing is of interest to a media-specific analytic. When Rothenberg claims that the written poem should be read as a notation for a performative equivalent, he is discussing competing medialities at the core of his experimental poetics, for his claim is not (only) nostalgia for a previous (irretrievable) situation but also an interjection and complication of assumed norms, including norms of what it means to read and write as well as the limits of those terminologies in describing the event of the poem and its participants.
Brian Rotman’s forthcoming Becoming Beside Ourselves, his book on “the alphabet, ghosts, and distributed human being” is among the most relevant new media texts in this regard, especially in his deliberation on varying “ghost-effects” of media. His sense of the separation between the spoken and written mediations of "I" can be glimpsed by his location of that “I” inside a sequence of four distinct media in which some kind of declared reflexivity or self-referential indication occurs:
1) A pre-linguistic "I" in the medium of gesture. “A proprioceptively continuous ‘me’, experienced haptically and manifest as reflexive touching and pointing [. . .] the precursor of the currently observable human gestures which co-evolved with language, and is close perhaps to contemporary gestural forms of primate signaling of self presence.”
2) An uttered "I" in the medium of speech. “Here the self-pointing body has been assimilated into the voice, its gestural affect present as vocal gestures, that is, as prosody or tone, joined seamlessly within utterance to the words uttered.”
3) A written "I" in the medium of alphabetic inscription. “Here, within ‘speech at a distance’ or virtual speech the vocal gestures are eliminated and the body of the spoken ‘I’ is transduced into a floating agency.”
4) A digital or networked "I" in the medium of communicational technologies. “Here the written ‘I’ is assimilated into and overtaken by a digitally enabled form of self-reference, an enunciation intrinsic to and only possible within interactive and distributed electronic networks.”
For Rotman, the latter three media—speech, alphabetic inscription, communication technologies—each project their own ghost-effect. Speech’s ghost-effect arises from the ability to refer to non-present or transcendent entities, thereby incorporating the ghostly presence of this non-present “other” into the speaking “I.” Alphabetic writing’s ghost-effect is derived from the ability “to signify across space and time in the absence of a speaker" and it is the presence of "a transcendental agency, the hypostatizations of God, Mind and the Infinite Agent." Digital writing’s ghost-effect is yet to be determined, but Rotman feels it will be related to the ability to “range over the characteristic abstractions and processes of the alphabetic, pre-digital, pre-information age”—that is, it seems, a certain repeatable ghostly-presence will be the effect of a subjectivity couched in a medium that claims and re-mediates previous communication regimes. My understanding of Rotman’s speculation is also tied to his distinction between notational and capture media. For Rotman, notational media operate with the logic of metaphor: alphabetical writing notates some of the signifying sounds of speech: that is, an equivalence is set forth, as in the manipulation of shape and color to form a landscape painting. Capture media, for Rotman, operate with the logic of metonymy: “the movement or duration of an entity” is described or recorded by a medium, as in the action paintings of Jackson Pollock.
Although capture media are discussed by Rotman (and a similar notion occurs in Mark Hansen’s work) mostly in terms of the capture of bodily gestures (as in Pollock), such a concept also suggests a literary precedence: collage. Such a precedence may be masked, however, by an overemphasis on understanding as the inherent or desired end-game of a text: a system of understood equivalence presupposes a singular, intentional agent communicating to a singular, understanding reader, all along a singular signifying or semiotic plane. To evoke Peirce’s distinction between iconic, symbolic and indexical signs (and in which the reader’s mind also functions as a virtual sign) the aesthetics of collage (often claimed to be the aesthetic principle of the 20th century) suggest the means by which the symbolic or iconic can be read as indexical: a reading not of a particular meaning or intention but rather of these subsumed under the heading of a situation. Or, to use Rotman’s terminologies, the inscriptions of a notational media (which have a material, endured basis of their own) can be arranged as a captured media by which “the movement or duration of an entity”—both an entity’s physically and socially proprioceptive oscillations—may be read. It is also in this way that a traditionally bound text suggests a multiplicity of medial properties; a collage or montage of notations, read as index or as captured media, also may suggest a collage or montage of technical systems, as it may also be a collage of the ghost-effects of a media.
In the case of alphabetic writing, for Rotman, the ghost is the transcendental agency, the now-absent speaker communicating across time and space. Robert Fitterman’s This Window Makes Me Feel, published in 2004 and constructed out of material found online and dedicated to “to those who were lost in The World Trade Center bombing” strikes a different note from the work of Flarf poets who utilize a similar technique. The following is a representative sampling from Fitterman’s extended piece:
This window makes me feel like I have been taking care of myself since I was 12 years old when I got the boot from mom and dad. This window makes me feel sad for many reasons, but I don’t want people to think I’m going to hell—that’s between me and God. This window makes me feel out-raged… after all, I don’t need the credit card… my track record has proved that I’m a poor manager of credit, okay? This window makes me feel nervous because he has been on medication lately but he hasn’t been getting any professional help. This window makes me feel like I don’t have my head on straight—I don’t know, the idea kind of appeals/appealed to me which I suppose is strange. This window makes me feel like I need a summer job to hold me over until the Fall. This window makes me feel like reflecting on the mountain bike community and the ripple effect… for me, I never had a problem with hunters or trappers. This window makes me feel like I’m having some strange mental problem. This window makes me feel uncomfortable and I know he’s uncomfortable too because of his age he cannot be moved to another division. This window makes me feel like what a bubble we all live in and what is the world coming to. This window makes me feel like a wrench has been shoved into my chest and turned around and around.
Playing off of the sense of “window” as screen to the outer world of a city (one imagines a series of individuals gazing out of their windows towards the World Trade Center) and as screen into a multitude of electronic discourse networks (Windows 2001-2004, perhaps), Fitterman plays off of the metaphorical implications of the “This window makes me feel” refrain to stage a metonymic assemblage. In our searchable and cut-and-paste discursive regime, one may extend Rotman’s claim for a written ghost-effect not only for the “speaker” of the written text but for the addressee; that is, the occasion itself communicates across time and space even after its participants move on. The windows of the text, therefore, become a rotation of interfaces by which one may read the “lost” as they communicate from the other side of a darkened glass, and the poem serves as a series of indexical signs for the ordinary situations and concerns that come to be lost. Alternately, “this window” can be read as a singular frame—the 9/11 attacks themselves a momentary spot of time—through which Fitterman stages the captured movement or duration of a polis caught within history. While neither reading grants Fitterman nor his text the privileged placement of Havelock’s poet or a poetic mastery of a contemporary mousike, I believe such a text does move what it is uttered or expressed, the muthos of a historical moment, closer to the heart of the matter, and demonstrates why the presentation of a text in book or on screen cannot adequately address its medial properties. Texts such as This Window Makes Me Fell introduce us to a seemingly endless series of questions, as do previous texts that initiate Fitterman’s techniques even before the onset of electronic writing, works such as Lyn Hejinian’s My Life or Ron Silliman’s “Sunset Debris,” itself being (it seems) literally an endless series of questions that assemble a multitude of their own:
What are you heating the water for? Why is it that painters now are so obsessed with the elimination of space, that composers want to obliterate time, that writers feel compelled to remove the referential? Are you tired to the point of being dizzy? Why does the old man trill his rs? What are you going to do? How will you get there? How will you handle it? Will it worry you? Has it changed you? How could it be that our knowledge is limited, not by the state of the universe (existence, whatever), but by cognitive capacity, that we should only know what we can know, which is not what there is, the whole story? Are you certain? Are you sure? What if you removed the words from your work? How can you say that this poem would have existed, even had it never been written down, because it would have been “logical” for it, at a certain point, to exist? What is Bo Diddley’s hair like underneath that hat? Did you make out the rent check? Do you know the difference between speech and writing? Would you sincerely like to be rich? Does each potholder strewn about this honey-caked, crumb-ridden table articulate a separate story? Do you use oregano? How many systems do we involve just to name one thing? If we lie on the mattress in the closed-off old back porch at 90 degree angles, your legs lifted so that, lying on my side, I enter from behind, the fingertips of my right hand stroking your clitoris, and we go about this slowly, almost lazily, does it make for better understanding? Have you noticed how there are no fathers in the park playing ball with their daughters? Do the words fold, fold back? Is it time to think time? Do the words time?
