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SSHRC Research question #2

My SSHRC Research question #1 can actually be broken down into two questions:

1. What aspects of reading cannot be accounted for by the types of digital textual analysis done so far in the digital humanities?

2. How can technology (be “used” to) account for such possibilities?

In the previous post, I deal mainly with the first question, and it’s primarily from a negative perspective, as in, “the computer is used in the wrong way unless a better understanding of language can be attained. Linguistics and information theory are inadequate to the task of properly understanding the dynamics of the literary experience”. Here, I will focus primarily on the second question, and I believe that we need to stop seeing the computer as a “means” (i.e. we “use” a computer) and to start thinking about the computer itself as a part of the literary process.

This question says that technology is not a problem or something to be feared. It’s the people that use it. (“Computers don’t kill the text, people do…”) Indeed, the computer could enhance the literary experience and highlight aspects of the text that weren’t noticed before. This can occur through visualization and sonorization, and even through the body, as we will see. I will use my own digital humanities project to demonstrate this. As Martin Jay has stated in Downcast Eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought, Western culture until the 20th Century is very oculo-centric (this prejudice is “visible” in the word “illustrate” and “demontrate,” and of course, the “Enlightenment”), and 20th-century thinkers started to challenge this by thinking about the body. When it comes to literature, especially poetry, we cannot ignore sound, yet sound has been embattled by the visual since the literary has been predominantly in print (cf. Genette, Mimologiques), and now increasingly on a monitor near you.

Still, literary studies have benefited from the consideration of the visual in the literary, and this “visuality” needs more self-reflexivity. The literary is also an “inter-artial” or “inter-medial” mode. But, I will argue, the potential of technology can illustrate a “hyper-medial” nature of the literary text, where the text is seen in and for itself (not in comparison with or as another art/medium), and is “hyper-” in the sense that the medium exceeds itself. However, the inter-artial and inter-medial is very important and we cannot split things so easily. One the one hand, we have literary texts that speak about themselves in their own textuality. On the other, these very texts are in a medium (voice, handwriting or print; analogue or digital), and this medium becomes “the message,” as McLuhan would say. Yet, since the literary text thus doesn’t suffice to itself, to reformulate McLuhan, it is more the case of “the medium” being “the message” about another medium. This awareness can also contribute to a better understanding of the role of computers. As I said, computers aren’t just there to be “used,” just as language isn’t simply a “means,” without presupposition (the assumption of the Enlightenment and information theory). We need to think in terms of “interference,” “symbiosis” and parasitism (such as with Michel Serres’ work) or in terms of thinking through such problems as “homeotechnical” where the means is taken in and for its own terms, creating a “dialogue” between humans and nature, as opposed to “allotechnical,” which has been humanity’s predominant relationship to nature (cf. Sloterdijk, La Domestication de l’être), bearing in mind the problem of the medium. And we need to broaden such an experience to include not only the visual but the other aspects mentioned.

Visually speaking, there are ways of displaying the text that can show us just how dynamic reading is. In my Coup de Dés project (mallarme.uvic.ca), a digitized version of the famous poem Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé, we can see that, through this difficult poem that is anti-hierarchical and decentered, the eye moves is any possible direction and the text is therefore very open (indeed, it is a prototype of the “open work” that so characterizes 20th-century art). Interpretation is multiple and the text is as much a visual experience as it is one about its content. In fact, this poem highlights the very visual nature of reading, especially of reading poetry. It brings out what was only implicit or latent in the standard forms of poetry, such as the sonnet, which is nevertheless quite visual. Yet the computer only represents the text here as a collection of links and nodes, which presupposes that the text is simply about linguistic content. The challenge is to find more sophisticated ways of displaying the text that can account for other aspects of language. One could, for instance, superpose the Mallarmé text onto Google sky, much like Ollivier Dyens uses Google Earth to superpose fragments of text from his La Condition inhumaine. Or, as Dyens collects fragments of text and finds interesting ways of visualizing this in his hypertext project Continent X. Another model, perhaps better if it can be open-sourced, would be the Visual Thesaurus. All of these ways show how the text is dynamic, and they manifest visually what happens implicitly in the process of reading.

But as I’ve said, reading is much more dynamic than this, and we also have to consider sonority. For Mallarmé’s poem is also an aural experience. Actually, as I have argued, it is a poem that subsists on the threshold of poetry as an oral and a visual mode, between the lyrical poet who sings and the poet as a writer. Penny Florence attempted to put The Coup de Dés to Débussy’s music, and this brought out a major problem, because it favoured the sonorous, which is a linear medium, and it forces a particular reading order for the text; whereas we’ve seen that Mallarmé’s poem is anti-linear and spatial, like architecture. Yet the sonorous would be radically transformed were such openness exploited through digital media. It is possible to identify sound patterns in the poem and to display these, thereby adding new depth to the poetic and digital experience.

A more “corporeal understanding” of the literary text seems to be on the horizon. A friend in Germany who will remain unnamed is developping what his research group calls “thinking as bodies,” and I believe that this corporeality can greatly contribute to a better understanding of electronic textual encounters, and could further deepen the “dialogue” that Sloterdijk talks about. Such thinking comes in part from the Nietzschean tradition of the body as inseparable with thought, and is in contrast to the Western denial of such a connection, such as with Descartes, but already present in Plato. Nietzsche, in some ways, goes back to the pre-Socratics to recuperate the body. In the 20th Century, we have Deleuze and Foucault continuing such a trajectory, but in different ways. For Mallarmé, the experience of language was very much a physical or bodily one (even though he called himself a Cartesian), for he recognized that “conversation” exceeds the words being used. In terms of digital reproduction, how is the body implicated in seeing and hearing and are other aspects of the body enlisted that might not be with the print edition? How can we thus develop a hermeneutic and phenomenology of reading in the digital?

Finally, what can we add? If for Rimbaud vowels can have colours, how could the computer display such associations? It would be important to abandon the need for certainty here, and embrace the randomness of literary experience. Once this is done, we could actually get closer to an understanding of a “dialogue” between the literary and the computer. Mallarmé’s poem is interesting in this respect as it is all about “le hasard,” or randomness.

These points, I believe, can contribute to a better understanding of my research question #1, in that they ask what aspects of reading have not been accounted for in digital literary studies.

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