Katherine Hayles’s observation that “digitality also leaves
its mark” (98) seems to resonate with
the most recent developments in media delivery and consumer technology. This is to say, phenomena like identity theft
and the mash-up seem to point to some significant incursion into the everyday of
digital processes and so surely print, too, should bear some mark of these
changes. Specifically, she points to the
increased “vitality” (98) of best-selling novels, and understanding “vitality”
in a cognitive frame as evocative of an abundance of images one would have to
agree. What she is asking, however, is
whether “computation” has not come to work both metaphorically and literally in
the production and consumption of literature.
A similar line of questioning appears in the Ciccoricco article: Is close
reading doomed when words and windows tend toward perpetual movement? Ciccoricco’s call for “new bibliographical
units” (7) rings hollow when he claims digital literature doesn’t necessarily
require slow reading (only that a text be read again and again – presumably
quickly), although the thrust of the claim is sufficiently clear: be they
digital or digitalized, such texts seem to significantly enhance the cognitive
processes in reading.
This dynamic is captured in
Hayles’s historicized “intermediation.”
Intermediation relies on the perpetually refined tools built into a text
that facilitate “fluidity,” with consequences for narrative, orthography, and
ultimately the human-text dynamic. In
her words they become “partners in a dynamic heterarchy” (100) in which the
partnership intends toward increasingly sophisticated levels of cognition. In an electronic text, this is performed for the reader – a phenomenon emphasized
by Ciccoricco in his discussion of the tendency in electronic texts to enfold
within themselves their own paratexts (7). The question of “performance” in a text,
however, still remains. Ciccoricco
writes that a close reading of imagesand sound in relation to a text is
possible in print environments but “only to an extent” (8). Print texts, he suggests, do not execute their
code. What of the hypothetical text that
includes passages consisting of code embedded in its prose? Does he exclude the print textbook that
includes images and sound collections on a CD-ROM? In these cases, isn’t the performance merely
a matter of time and space?
"the print textbook that includes images and sound collections on a CD-ROM" --
ReplyDeleteYes, exactly! Hayles allows for the analog and the digital to coexist within the same "heterarchy" -- so she would have no problem with books that have accompanying web sites etc. But with Ciccoricco -- does his typology of close reading practices allow for such "hybrid" works?
Or--to open the discussion more broadly--do y'all think that the close reading tools honed in the academy for the purposes of analyzing poems & novels are useful for engaging mixed-media texts? Can you read a graphic novel the same way as a poem? A map? And--of course-- is close reading a work such as "The Jew's Daughter" or "Star Wars One Letter at a Time" yet another thing altogether?
First of all, addressing the concern in the broad I want to say I was excited by Johanna Drucker's approach, particularly where she recognizes what she calls the "residual legacies" of the codex.
ReplyDeleteMy litmus test for the positions staked out this far has been the 18th- and 19th-century manga-like illustrated texts that proliferated in Edo (which would become Tokyo after the emperor is restored to power in 1868). These were wildly popular, but what is notable about them for me is their insular humor -- many celebrated and lampooned newly emerging "types," some well-known examples of which are the Edokko (the genuine, born-and-raised "son of Edo"), the tsujin (street-wise sophisticate who frequents the entertainment district) and the profligate son.
Later texts feature grotesque amalgamations -- perhaps the most famous of which is a male-female pair conjoined at the torso. The madcap story of their journey to Edo and their climb to social notoriety is considered to be self-referential in broad, satirical strokes, as if to say: "Is there nothing in Edo that isn't a sideshow?" What I am trying to get at, here, is that there is a geographical awareness present in these texts, and a self-awareness that points to these comics' monastic origins.
So, briefly, I think the question regarding the applicability of our analytical tools and our needs in an e-book universe is best begun with a critical look at the transition from monastic to scholastic "performance programming" in the digital precursors. I first want to know precisely what changed in the course of this transition.
Hi--For week two posting, just wanted to share a performance of Amaranth Borsuk's _Between Page and Screen_ mentioned Monday in relation to Hayles "Intermediation": http://voca.arizona.edu/index.php?reading_id=603
ReplyDeleteI think that close reading tools can be applied to mixed media texts. You could read a graphic novel similarly to how you would read a poem: you could consider the individual frame, the words, and images that make up the frame, and the relationships between frames, words, images, and other frames. This might be my bias as a graphic designer, but I think one unit of communication can be studied like another, whether its verbal, visual, or temporal (as in The Jew's Daughter, in which the timing of the disappearance and appearance of text seemed more affective than the text itself on any given page). Ciccoricco talks about institutionalized close reading being unable to accommodate text that is always changing ("We know that, on the surface, the popular — or what we might call the institutionalized — conception of close reading conflicts dramatically with the object in question here: a multimedial multimodal digital artifact that simply refuses to stay still"), but I'm not sure that that has to be the case. If the text changes according to some logic or pattern, we might be able to do a close reading of that framing in addition to the individual changing units.
ReplyDeleteThe part of Hayles article that really struck me was her use of the DNA-RNA-protein metaphor (101) to describe digital and analogue interactions. The individual base pairs are discrete units, but the form of the protein they ultimately compose is analogue: it continuously interacts with other parts of the cell and its identity is not necessarily destroyed if one of its base pairs is off. The digital and analogue are inseparable and must exist at the same time for the protein to function. Key to its function is how the protein is received by those around it. This seems related to Ciccoricco's concern that institutionalized close reading is inadequate for digital texts in that he views such close reading as paying attention only to the units, not to the structure, nor to the structure's reception by readers. I think as long as that interaction is not completely random, it can be also be read.
"If the text changes according to some logic or pattern, we might be able to do a close reading of that framing in addition to the individual changing units."
ReplyDeleteYes. And this is where I find Drucker's suggest that we "ask 'how' a book 'does' its particular actions, rather than 'what' a book 'is'" to be the most helpful.
But the shift in object of analysis (a performance of "doing" rather than a static "being") also brings a shift in method of analysis. It seems that the primary orientation of "being" analysis is necessarily pointed inward, within the object. The goal is to understand element A in relation to element B--for example, the relationship between a poem's title and its repetition of a certain phrase. (Of course, there is no reason to limit analysis to two elements...)
In contrast, the primary orientation of "doing" analysis is outward. It draws attention to repetition, so that elements within an object are put in relation not just with themselves, but also with other elements in different iterations of the same object.
To use the example of the blog: One could close read a blog as a static object, consider the relationship between individual posts, readerly comments, and the blog's "About" section. Or one could ask what the blog does: How are each of those elements responses not only to content within the blog, but the potential for changes in content? How do these "sub-routines" of the blog contribute to the overall blog "program"?
In light of our discussions about the possibility of text having agency in digital formats, I wonder if we can continue to assume that we will determine the proximity of our reading. As computers increase capacities for "cognitively sophisticated acts" we may find that close reading is engineered into the partnership of dynamic heterarchy differently (Hayles 102). Of course, this argument takes Hayles at her word, both in her envisioning of the way reading functions in digital formats, and in the anticipation of further research in the computer sciences bearing fruit. As a humanist, it is difficult to quarrel with ideas of the possible in other fields, but hearsay tells me that most of the advances in teaching computers how to do things are hard-fought battles forward.
ReplyDeleteBack in the day, when I encountered another person who liked to read, we would sometimes get into a conversation like this one: "Do you read lots of books at once, or just one and then another one? Do you ever read the ending first? Do you skim, or do close reading? Do you ever give up if you don't like what you're reading, or are you in it to the death, even if it's misery?" I couldn't predict the answers; it all seemed so personal. But I wonder with a text like The Jew's Daughter if a predictive quality could emerge. In other words, what would it take to teach texts to read us -- and to report their findings back?
The primary anxiety I would have as a professional close-reader of electronic literature concerns the trend toward greater and more sophisticated degrees of interactivity between player and text. As long as there is a certain uniformity in our experience of a text, we can at least attempt to speak in universalities about the way it works on us. But once the text starts truly interacting with us - not simply branching onto one path or another, but fundamentally altering in reaction to our play-style - the scholar's task may well grow exponentially more difficult.
ReplyDeleteIf literature (and film, video games, et al.) continues to move in this direction, the scholar could be forced to abandon entirely any attempt to conquer a text on his/her own. An attempt to do so could end up telling more about the psyche of the scholar than the content of the work. As I see it, the greater the effect the player has on the text, the less any one experience of it can hope to encompass the whole of its workings, and the more an interpretive exercise would benefit from a plurality of voices. Perhaps in the future a scholarly explication will consist of (or begin with) a series of many accounts offered by a number of different players, recounting their unique experience with the text. The aggregate of such a study could then be used to help see the whole.