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
Machine Co-authorship(s) via Translative Creative Writing
This paper argues that machine translation and a symbiotic ecosystem of authorship are central to the poetic works of Aaron Tucker and reveal larger ethical paths for machine-human relationships. In particular, the elements of chance alongside the intersemiotic translative acts that are the nature of human-computer relationships give space to a potential futurity that challenges a human-centric understanding of “reading” and “writing” and generates a type of literature that encourages a reader to better understand their own interactions within their daily digital environments.
Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism
"English literature," Yeats once noted, "has all but completely shaped itself in the printing press." Finding this true particularly of modernist writing, Jerome McGann demonstrates the extraordinary degree to which modernist styles are related to graphic and typographic design, to printed letters--"black riders" on a blank page--that create language for the eye. He sketches the relation of modernist writing to key developments in book design, beginning with the nineteenth-century renaissance of printing, and demonstrates the continued interest of postmodern writers in the "visible language" of modernism. McGann then offers a philosophical investigation into the relation of knowledge and truth to this kind of imaginative writing.Exploring the work of writers like William Morris, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, as well as Laura Riding and Bob Brown, he shows how each exploits the visibilities of language, often by aligning their work with older traditions of so-called Adamic language. McGann argues that in modernist writing, philosophical nominalism emerges as a key aesthetic point of departure. Such writing thus develops a pragmatic and performative "answer to Plato" in the matter of poetry's relation to truth and philosophy.