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[This continues from a series of posts on my home page, the most recent of which is here]
I will consider the following things in my research question:
- I would like to think through the implications of enacted criticism and corporeality, since thinking about the body is key to my research questions. In particular, how can our interaction with technology and literature modify the physical experience, or vice versa, how can the physical modify our interaction with the former?
- Consequently, how can such a technology-literature-body triad be self-reflexive? How can we engage in this triad without reducing it to a relationship of “use” or “means” (“allotechnics”)? How can we encounter the triad where things are taken for their own good or value (“homeotechnics”)?
- Lastly, there is an excessive focus on form to the detriment of content in modern criticism. How do we address this problem when dealing with technology, since we are actually interrogating the medium?
1. Corporeality
What the members of the Enacted Criticism group in Germany (manifesto soon to appear on http://enactcrit.org/) assert is that scholars have not sufficiently taken the body into consideration for it’s own sake. Western thought in particular is very Cartesian in that it cleanly separates mind from body. The question thus is to figure out how the body can be thought about when it comes to the cultural artefact, and this question becomes increasingly important when we involve technology and literature. Thinking about the body has tended to melt mind and body, showing the co-dependency of the two, but this is usually in order to focus on mind. What then is the physical experience of cultural and linguistic experience, and how can this help us to better understand our relationship with technology? How do we account for such questions? What approaches to this can be taken? Beyond a purely theoretical point of view, what are some of the ways in which to examine the the body? Do we look at people interacting with technology, using eyetracking devices (such as this — thanks to Lori Emerson), or tracking their use of technology through other means of monitoring? What are the ways to think about the body when it comes to very mental processes such as literature. Yet when it comes to electronic literature, the body is in a very different state than when we read a book or listen. Furthermore, we need to think about our bodies as submitted to technology. It’s a commonplace that we are physically addicted to technology: we don’t know what something is, we need our smartphone with us so we can look it up on the internet. This puts us in a new relationship with knowledge, and it because a consequence and a part of technology. What artistic experiences have been created to account for this, and how can we apply this knowledge to the implementation of electronic archiving? This is in keeping with the general idea in my SSHRC application, which seeks ways in which we can account for the literary and the digital literary experience that go beyond the traditional notion of language as information, or of the word as beyond simply related to concepts.
2. Self-reflexivity
We are now used to the notion of self-reflexivity in literary studies: e.g. a poem or a novel that refers to itself or to its form, through various means such as through ekphrasis. French poet Stéphane Mallarmé took this further by writing poetry which attempted complete self-referentiality in that we were forced to think about form because content was inaccessible. All of this coincides with the philological crisis in the 19th century, one that would lead to the realization that there is no separation between form and content, and that meaning depends upon the way language is used, which is contradictory to Cartesian absolutes (think of language as a body). From then on, we have become more and more aware that language has its own purpose, its own becoming, and lives its own existence separate from any given content. This leads to the notion that an awareness of such a becoming is necessary: we need to be aware of where we stand because this very becoming of language threatens intellectual institutions and their claims to absolute knowledge. Hence thinkers like Bourdieu, Foucault etc. interrogating the institutional determination of knowledge. When working with digital humanities and electronic literature, we need to be aware of such questions. We need to see how our use of computers affects what we study and how this affects us. But at the same time, we cannot assume that what we study has no effect upon how we study. The literary can play a significant role in this. A higher degree of self-reflexivity needs to be taken into consideration. This will not only help us to understand our objects, but our objects will transform how we do things. This will create a “dialogue”.
3. Form and Content
Nevertheless, when I attempted to define the literary in my previous post, I tended towards a formal definition. Part of the problem with structuralism in the 20th century was that it was excessively formalistic, and did not take biography, for instance, into consideration. We should not repeat this when thinking about the encounter between literature, technology and bodies. There is a historical reason for this. That we tended towards excessive formalism was a product of the domination of science, and was the result of an underlying nihilism. When you know everything, as is the tendency of all disciplines, the fact that you cannot ever know everything leads to an acute sense of nihilism, which is the major symptom of science in modernity. The crisis of hermeneutics was itself a product of such a process: the emergence of thought about interpretation coincides with the loss of meaning, and occurs at the very point when the Enlightenment is renewed through Romanticism at the beginning of the 19th Century in Germany. The problem of formalism needs to be accounted for in any approach to the literary, and not any less in digital literary studies. This would contribute to better sense of self-reflexivity.
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