Books vs. Art: Naming Altered Texts

Book?

Or art?

When reading the section of Writing Machines that detailed Kaye’s interest in artists’ books and her treatment of Tom Phillip’s book A Humument, I was reminded of my recent discovery of Oak Mot, an artist book by the actor Crispin Glover (he plays Micheal J. Fox's dad in Back to the Future).  One of the presentations at the conference I recently attended analyzed Oak Mot (Crispin’s version) and its divergences from the original similar to the way that Hayles' did with Phillip’s text. After encountering these two different artist’s books and the respective criticism that accompanied them, I was struck by the difference between the two analyses and the ways in which their attention to the original novel affected their reading of the altered text. In Hayles' discussion of A Humument, there seems to be a strong connection between the characters in Mallock’s original book and Hayles analysis of Phillips work. She even uses specific quotes from A Human Document to reveal certain ways that Phillips is interacting with Mallock’s novel in his erasure (84, 85).

Hayles' reading interested me mainly because of the degree to which it diverged from the reading of Glover’s work, Oak Mot, which dealt very little with the original novel. I believe one of the reasons for this difference may come from the language that the two critics used to refer to their objects of study. Hayles refers to these reconfigured texts as artists “books” but the presenter at my conference (who actually had an argument with Glover over this very issue) insisted that Oak Mot was a piece of art and not a book or novel. 

This difference becomes even more interesting when thinking about Hayles' ideas about materiality and the influence of computer software on writing and culture. If something as simple as the difference between a piece of “art” and a “book” could affect the reading of these reconfigured texts, then how much more does something like a complex computer program configured in a certain way affect the way that we write and even think? For example, why does Microsoft Word, by far the most popular writing program, function in no way like a piece of paper? Although there are certain things considered very important that Word can accomplish such as spell check and word count that a piece of paper cannot, in what ways has this computer program affected our writing? Does it matter that we cannot turn the paper a certain way when we write? Or that we do not read our work in our own handwriting anymore? Does it even matter? I’m not sure, but I believe that Hayles is correct in her position that attention to materiality is nothing new and we should not stop considering it now even if it something strange and complicated to people more familiar with words than with computer code.

Memories of Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media

In his first chapter “Interface,” Collin Gifford Brooke grounds his theoretical approach to new media rhetoric in the now common narrative of a shift from criticism to invention which he describes as a shift from “what has been done” with new media towards “what might still be done with new media” (10). Indeed, Brooke notes that this theoretical shift is paralleled by a medial shift from text to interface in which the feasibility of generalizing a theory from an individual reading dramatically decreases.

Referencing the interpretive approaches inherited from literary theory, Brooke writes that the kind of “exhaustive” structuralist approach to textual criticism promulgated by the likes of New Criticism “wouldn’t really be a ‘reading’ at all, but rather the generation of a sort of ur-text that cannot possibly exist for any reader” (13). Brooke is then quick to point out that attempts to reconcile individual readings of hypertexts to theoretical analyses often degenerate into little more than “poststructuralist abstractions” and render the isolated text as little more than a pre-text for discussing Deleuze and Guattari (13). 

For Brook, the limitations of criticism arise due to the emphasis placed upon a singular and static object of study, something which new media problematizes through its shift to the interface. Thus, Brooke proposes a concatenate shift for rhetoric from a focus on objects to ecologies, a move which mirrors the shift from product to process in his particular discipline (composition studies).

In his chapter on ecology, Brooke latches onto recent trends in new media rhetoric that emphasize a methodological shift towards complex systems or ecologies that attempt to map the unique singularity of rhetorical situations as opposed to imposing static models upon them such as rhetorical triangles.  He justifies this approach by noting that “what is ‘effective’ at one scale or location within an ecology may fail utterly in another context” (for more on the pedagogical application of ecological rhetoric see Bryon Hawk’s chapter on inventive composition pedagogies in A Counter-History of Composition: Towards Methodologies of Complexity).

After referencing the various permutations of the term “ecology” within both composition and media studies, Brooke describes his use of the term in this book as an “ecology of practice” which focuses on “the strategies and tactics that we bring to bear on new media at the same time that our technologies constrain and empower us” (41). This approach places Brooke’s work less in the hermeneutic realm of cultural analysis (e.g. Mathew Fuller’s Media Ecologies) and more in the realm of methodological analysis that offers not just a critique of how media ecologies function within new media societies but explicitly promotes strategic interventions that seek to alter how these ecologies function in relation to our various modes (practices) of writing.

Thus, Brooke proceeds to outline these ecologies of practice using the rhetorical canons as “analytic and productive starting points” (41). 

Memory

Out of the five classical canons of rhetoric, Brooke notes that the canon of memory has received the greatest amount of neglect due to its conflation with the mnemonic strategies of oral rhetoric which reduce memory to a synonym for storage capacity, thus mitigating its potential as an active practice and reducing it to a passive account of a “quantifiable amount of information” (143). This leads Brooke to locate the central binary of historical memory as presence/absence. Either a memory is there (present) or it is not (absence).

Brooke exchanges the presence/absence binary with N. Katherine Hayles’ pattern/randomness. He uses Hayles’ analysis of knowledge formation within virtual networks as evidence for this needed shift in memory form storage to practice. In opposition to conceiving memory as a bit of information, memory becomes the act of identifying patterns.

In addition, Brooke deftly locates the presence/absence binary at work in popular fascination with new media “distributed cognition” (digital databases, search engines, etc.) which he claims devalues memory in the same way that Socrates devalues writing in the Phaedrus (149, 151). Brooke notes that we conceive of distributed memory as unproblematic storehouses of information without considering their potential in better engaging this information or, in other words, recognizing new patterns within it. This is similar to the way that Socrates conceived of writing as little more than a static memory container, neglecting its revolutionary potential in allowing for new modes of thought.

Brooke notes that these inherited conceptions of memory as storage relate to the often unspoken teleology of academic referencing as the culmination of a “super text” of our shared efforts. In reaction to these accumulative models of reading, Brooke writes “Although in an ideal world we might have the time and inclination to read, reflect, and synthesize all potential sources in anticipation of writing our own texts, this is neither practical nor realistic” (155).  

In formulating his new media rhetoric for the canon of memory, Brooke borrows the visual concept of “persistence of vision,” or the phenomenon that is enacted when we perceive motion across a set of still images. Neologizing this term for his present purposes, Brooke proposes “persistence of cognition,” which he defines as recognizing “the construction (and dissolution) of patterns over time” and “the practice of retaining particular ideas, keywords, or concepts across multiple texts” (151, 157).

For me, this is the most intriguing aspect of new media memory because it transforms the notion of memory from a passive re-membering of information to an active re-cognition of the connections (“piece together”) within the information. In this way, academic research is guided less by the arbitrary totalities embodied by individual authorship (books, journals, etc.) and more by the ideas and concepts that transcend these various iterations. Indeed, academic publishing even seems to be moving in this direction (albeit very slowly) as large publishers take notice of the enormous discourse generating potential of networked writing technologies such as wikis, blogs, and social media. 

De-scribing the Human with Sean Cubitt

In his chapter “Drawing Animals,” Sean Cubbit discusses the constitutive function that drawing serves in delineating the human/animal binary. Cubitt first differentiates human and animal drawing by arguing that although an animal marking its territory could be described as “drawing a boundary or a map,” this is not the same as human mapping, which creates a drawing that “can be lifted, either mentally or physically, from its environment…it occupies a space other than the surface on which it is marked” (29). He says that human drawing “marks a moment of becoming,” instilling our creations with a space and time separated from its worldly correlate. Cubbit considers this unique abstractive (and extractive) aspect of human drawing to be significant in revealing our ability to grant dimensionality to our drawings, thus affecting our perceptions of what is rendered and, implicitly, our ability to alter it.

Because he limits himself to a rather reductive notion of “drawing” rather than human inscriptions in general, Cubitt fails to account for the degree to which alternate forms of human communication, such as orality and phonetic writing, have drastically altered notions of the human/animal binary in ways that cannot be bracketed through his narrow analysis of visual representations. His focus on drawing seems to neglect the kind of ecological thinking that he champions.

Early humans’ initial abstractions of other animals undoubtedly occurred in a multi-sensory manner. Spotting a far off wooly mammoth for the first time, a Paleolthic hominid may have re-presented this encounter in a variety of ways (verbal, tactile, visual, or combination) but it would be difficult to grant primary causation to any one of these signs in determining the degree to which it exclusively altered conceptions of the thing (Wooly Mammoth) to which it referred. While I agree with Cubitt that these representations of the world necessarily exclude its “unruly and unthinkable complexity of detail” and create “an object of knowledge, and…control” in its place, I do not think that we can grant exclusive significance to visual gesture in initiating and reinforcing this process. A prehistoric grunt seems just as capable of circumscribing something as “distinct from its activities and its environments” as a picture.

            Bridging off of this narrow view of human representations of animals, Cubitt argues that recent trends in digital cinema (“the mechanization of drawing”) have resulted in an increased distance of the abstracted image (CGI) from the animal it portrays.  Due to what Cubitt describes as the loss of the “auratic trace that marks the presence of a making hand,” we have extracted gesture from our ability to make meaning, an inseparable pair for animal drawing (33).

In this case, Cubitt is describing a correlated shift in technology and culture that does not actually exist. His essential claim that “the mechanization of drawing works by fragmenting movement into discrete cells,” neglects the mechanizations that occur in other forms of inscription. In shifting from orality to phonetic writing, a similar fragmentation of movement occurred in the way that previously complete morphemes were broken up into meaningless phonemes, or “discrete cells.” With drawing, Cubitt believes that there is some kind of natural, human form of inscription that is somehow corrupted by the technology of CGI. What he fails to realize is that previous drawing techniques (new shading techniques, complex geometries, etc.) are technologies as well.

In Paper Machine, Jacques Derrida notes the fallacy of privileging the presence of physicality within an inscription because (as is usually the case with Derrida) we are “always already” instantiated within a system of segmented units of communication that has preceded us. Discussing the differences between computer and pen mediated writing, Derrida writes that “[h]aving recourse to the typewriter or computer doesn’t bypass the hand” because “hands are not only in hands” (21). By claiming that the separation of the physical body from the act of inscribing diminishes human agency, Cubitt fails to account for the ways in which other technologies delimit what constitutes an act of inscription (meaningful gesture) in the first place.

Overall, Cubitt seems to be offering little more than a general analysis of the function of language within human thought and perception, writing that the image “creates an image not of the phenomenon but of the idea of the phenomenon” (36). Thus, it is quite ironic when he writes that “the economy” is “not visible, but can be visualized,” yet he fails to mention that the phrase itself (“the economy”) has already allowed us to abstract it from its various manifestations in reality.