The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine
“The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine” is a review essay on Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2008), by N. Katherine Hayles, and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. Both works make remarkable contributions for the emerging field of digital literary studies and for the theory of digital media. While Hayles analyses the interaction between humans and computing machines as embodied in electronic works, Kirschenbaum conceptualizes digitality at the level of inscription and establishes a social text rationale for electronic objects. 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. Literature as Human-Machine Intermediation 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. [Hayles 2008a, 87] In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich defined new media as the result of the combination of modern media and computers. He synthesized the features of new media in five principles: numerical representation, modularity (these are the two basic material principles of data processing upon which the other three depend), automation, variability, and cultural transcodification. Manovich’s fifth principle — which describes the social effects of the intertwining of computer and cultural layers — provided a sound theoretical basis for the relatively new field of software studies, i.e., for the cultural analysis of the interactions between computer programs and human practices (cf. [Manovich 2008]). Software mediation is perhaps the main cultural aspect of digital culture because all human-machine interactions are enabled and shaped by features of the software. N. Katherine Hayles’s approach in Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) follows a similar software and cultural analytics rationale. A survey of contemporary electronic literature in English functions, at the same time, as a theoretical investigation into the aesthetic and cultural materiality of digital media. Hayles analyses digital genres and
My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
We live in a world, according to N Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles' latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices. "My Mother Was a Computer" explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: as language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. "My Mother Was a Computer" gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define our culture and us. Heady and provocative, "My Mother Was a Computer" will be judged as her best work yet.
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited