wordyweb

Here it is, short and sweet, a rough draft of a proposal for the conference “Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age: Text and Beyond” (in Kyoto, Japan, Ritsumeikan University: http://tinyurl.com/4yakpa7):

In theorizing reading the digital text, I will take a two-pronged approach: a) what aspects of reading cannot be accounted for by the types of digital textual analysis done so far in the digital humanities, and b) how can technology (be “used” to) account for such possibilities? To answer the second question, 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. To ask such a question is perhaps to blur the distinction between e-literature and media studies on the one hand, and digital humanities on the other. At the same time, it presupposes that technology is not something to be feared (as “tampering” with the text), but that it is rather something intrinsic, to be conceived in its own terms. Indeed, the computer can enhance the literary experience and highlight aspects of the text that weren’t noticed before, and vice versa, in a sort of feedback circuit, bringing with it hermeneutic questions that hitherto have been only indirect. What might we discover from exploring the symbiotic relationship between the text and the machine and about the minds and bodies that encounter these? Such encounters occur not only through visualization, but through sonorization and through the body. Such work requires a broader view of language than that provided by information theory, which has apparently dominated digital literary studies. I will use my own digital humanities project on the visualization of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s works (http://mallarme.uvic.ca) to explore this.

Thanks to Lori Emerson (UC, Boulder) and Stephen Ross (UVic) for some insights into this.

[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:

1. 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?
2. 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”)?
3. 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.

OK, so SSHRC Question #1 was defined negatively through what has gone wrong in terms of language theory and digital humanities, and seeks to find out what aspects are missing from the information-theory and linguistics approaches to the literary.

SSHRC Question #2 seeks the possibilities for accounting for the otherness in language, and this entails not only the purely linguistic (language as information = the common-sense notion of communication), but the visual, the sonorous, the body, and perhaps other aspects such as free association and an embrace of the arbitrary. I do not mean the arbitrary in the structuralist sense, because that definition, even though it undermines the stability of the signifier, still upholds the signifier as signifier. One would seek the way a word, a string of words or a lose patch or any sort of combination of words might get away from the  notion of “signification,” and explore the ways in which words exceed themselves.

This is where the relationship between the inter-artial and the inter-medial (the distinction is important) gets mixed with the hypermedial: a vowel can be associated with a colour or a musical note, a word with a sense, a phrase with a memory or a desire, a rhythm with a beat and a physical action (or lack thereof), a textual configuration with a painting or a piece of music, a long poem with a wide hall or a vast wasteland etc. Typically, these associations might be done in an “encyclopedic” way. If a mention is made of a skylark in a poem, then, just as with footnotes in annotated editions of a poem, the literary allusions and references are made. In this sense, the digital humanities would simply be an improvement on the printed annotated editions, in that more annotations, intertextual cross-references, pictures, music or the sounds of the skylark, interpretations and commentary and so on could be added, which is wonderful and all. Yet this would fundamentally alter the reading experience, and it presupposes that the reading experience is an encyclopedic or informed experience, and that an “uninformed” reader or reading is inferior.

Jacques Derrida already warned about this type of annotation, and what I am calling the implied “encyclopedic” reader, when talking about Joyce’s Ulysses, in Ulysse gramophone (1987). There, Derrida argues that we have to hear Joyce’s text, and warns about an impending literary archive such as I’ve described, one that will overdetermine the literary experience. Another similar warning is made by J. Hillis Miller in Illustration (1992) when he discusses the then new Thoreau Project. He says that, despite the democratic potential of such a project,the database

will presuppose, for example, that it is helpful in understanding Walden or A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to hear the songs and see annotated pictures of the birds Thoreau mentions there. That would depend of course, on the critic’s interpretive goals.

And this project “embodies a set of assumptions about the way scholars do work and ought to work” (40).

Yet a look at some of the readings of difficult poets from the past that did not benefit from the help of scholarship is proof enough that critical apparatus does not a good reader make. Mallarmé and Joyce are cases in point: sure, early readers of these texts didn’t need the critical help because they had the cultural baggage to help them through the texts, but I think this is where the literary institution has failed. It has placed a great deal of emphasis on the literary as “content” (as either saying something: a moral, a lesson etc. = i.e. the allegorical definition of literature) and lost sight of the singularity of the literary experience. Inversely, Dante knew that it was better to “sweeten” the moral lesson with allegory. Granted that my definition of the literary is principally a formal one. Nevertheless, we can say, with some exceptions, that most literary texts cannot be translated into regular, constative prose. Besides, most so-called “constative” writing has been deconstructed and shown to be quite performative in that it plays with rhetoric. Even the scientific text plays the neutral game.

So the computer needs to be used differently. We are not afraid of, just as we aren’t afraid of the printed text. These can all open up not only the literary experience, but, as I’ve said in the previous post, our relationship with the tools we use, in this case the computer.

What I am then asking is, how can we do scholarship differently? What forms other than traditional literary scholarship are made possible by the computer, and that don’t presuppose a particular view of the text or overdetermine reading? Obviously, there is no such experience, but there is surely a way to self-reflexively encounter the text.

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.

What aspects of reading cannot be accounted for by the types of digital textual analysis done so far in the digital humanities, and how can technology be used to account for such possibilities?

Most approaches to the electronic text assume that the text is “information,” and so apply linguistic computing models to the text. However, the information theory model of language is inadequate when it comes to a fuller understanding of the experience of language. By way of example, it is well-known that poetry cannot be translated, because there is much more going on in a poem than the simple communication of ideas. If the Enlightenment saw nothing but danger in the poetic text, because of its rhetorical nature (some even went as far as saying that anything in poetry could/should be expressed in prose), the 19th century was in part a reaction to such a limited view of language. There is nothing really to distinguish such an Enlightenment view of poetry from the information theory view of language, since both presuppose that language use does not alter the information. The literary text (and there has been a lot of debate as to what it actually is) can highlight the problem of language in special ways since a poem, for instance, has layers of (often conflicting) meaning and ambiguity that cannot be captured by the usual linguistic-semantic structures; nor can the signals and codes of information theory compute such things as rhyme, rhythm or enjambment within its own notion of communication. Furthermore, the experience of reading also entails much more in terms of association. As with 19th century French poet Rimbaud’s famous poem, “Voyelles”: because the reader can associate colours with vowels, what else happens when a reader encounters language that is rich with imagery, that is synaesthetic? Indeed, the poetic language from the mid-19th century on is increasingly rich in this sense, and has moved the linguistic experience beyond the common-sense notion of language that information theory represents. Yet, computing is rich in potential and can help us to see the text differently, even when we can only see the limits of such technology. The goal is to find new ways to explore the text with digital technology without limiting what the reading experience could be.

Much work has been done in terms of interface and display recently (cf. Drucker, and Ruecker, Sinclair et al.), and some with metrical and sound patterns using phonetic transcription (Plamondon). What are some of the ways of displaying poetry that allow us to see the text differently?

Is language an organism? Ollivier Dyens seems to agree with this idea, go as far as to say that language is a virus (in a forthcoming paper, but implicit in La Condition inhumaine, Paris Flammarion, 2008). To what extent can this hold true for 19th century philologists? If Max Müller claimed that language is nature, and if nature is organic and evolutionary, is Müller Darwinian? And if viruses and genes are the substratum of life, can we go as far as Dyens? The question is at least worth pursuing.

We have evolved genetically because of language (those who couldn’t use it died). We contain it, but do we do so as a virus?

A quote by the biologist Jacques Monod:

Beaucoup d’esprits distingués, aujourd’hui encore, paraissent ne pas pouvoir accepter ni même comprendre que d’une source de bruit la sélection ait pu, à elle seule, tirer toutes les musiques de la biosphère. La sélection opère en effet sur les produits du hasard, et ne peut s’alimenter ailleurs; mais elle opère dans un domaine d’exigences rigoureuses dont le hasard est banni.*
Le Hasard et la nécessité, Paris, éd. du Seuil, 1970, p. 135.

Can this be said of language? Is language nature, as the philologists of the 19th century claimed (such as Max Müller)? Does language, though operating upon the “products of chance”, equally operate “in a zone of rigorous requirements from which chance has been excluded”? This opens up a whole panorama of questions, to be pursued…

* [Quoted in the Trésor de la langue française: "Even today, many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even understand that, from a source of noise, selection could have drawn, for its own sake, all the music of the biosphere. Selection operates in effect on the products of chance, and cannot nourish itself in any other way; but it operates in a zone of rigorous requirements from which chance has been excluded." My translation.]

Language is “Hazard”. The word “hazard” (“hasard” in French) supposedly comes from the Arabic az-zahr:

HAZARD: 1167, from O.Fr. hasard “game of chance played with dice,” possibly from Sp. azar “an unfortunate card or throw at dice,” which is said to be from Arabic az-zahr (for al-zahr) “the die.” But this is doubtful because of the absence of zahr in classical Arabic dictionaries. Klein suggests Arabic yasara “he played at dice;” Arabic -s- regularly becomes Sp. -z-. The -d was added in Fr. in confusion with the native suffix -ard. Sense of “chance of loss or harm, risk,” first recorded 1548; the verb sense of “put something at stake in a game of chance” is from 1530. Hazardous in the sense of “perilous” is from 1618.

Well, with this we can see that language is indeed perilous and full of chance.

When looking up the etymology of the work “same”, how can one not feel wonderment and mystery? OK, maybe not everyone can get excited by such details:

SAME: perhaps abstracted from O.E. swa same “the same as,” but more likely from O.N. same, samr “same,” both from P.Gmc. *samon (cf. O.S., O.H.G., Goth. sama; O.H.G. samant, samt “together, with,” Goth. samana “together,” Du. zamelen “to collect,” Ger. zusammen “together”), from PIE *samos “same,” from base *sem- “one, together” (cf. Skt. samah “even, level, similar, identical;” Avestan hama “similar, the same;” Gk. hamahomos “one and the same,” homios “like, resembling,” homalos “even;” L. similis “like;” O.Ir. samail “likeness;” O.C.S. samu “himself”). O.E. had lost the pure form of the word; the modern word replaced synonymous ilk (q.v). 

That was the dream of 19th century philologists, anyway, to find the common root of all languages, leading up to the original, pre-Babelic, Adamic tongue! And yet, as another French poet said (I will be quoting many more), “Etymologists, don’t jump too quickly! Isn’t it the case that two plants with very distinct roots sometimes mix up their foliage?” (“Étymologistes, ne bondissez pas! N’arrive-t-il pas que deux plantes aux racines fort distinctes confondent parfois leur feuillages?” Francis Ponge, Méthodes).

If we are talking about the “same” things, we are talking about similitude. Etymology often assumes similitude (that is, that an organic link exists between words and meanings), but the history of language has destroyed such easy connections between words. This destruction starts with the discovery that words don’t have a natural link to a stable concept. The “same” isn’t always the “same”, as in “together” and “same”. Yet we can sense this connection. One also assumes that the concept to which a word refers remains the same. So there’s a double movement, with the change of words and the change of concepts.

What’s left? Playtime, the sandbox; but seriously.

Ponge, the poet I referred to, had a book written about him by the late Jacques Derrida, titled Signéponge (in English, Signsponge). This title, and its translation, illustrates much about this change.

Signé Ponge = Signed “Ponge”, that which is signed with the name “Ponge” (the person and, more-so, the signature itself).

Signe éponge = sign spong, that the sign is a sponge.Signe et Ponge = Sign and Ponge, the sign and Ponge.

In English, you have the added element of pronunciation. Might we have a “punge” (as in a “pungent” sign)? Anyway, you can see that the word “signéponge” cannot be reproduced in English, and when an equivalent does come about, it produces different effects.

The signature is subject to scrutiny. What and who is “Ponge”?

I went to the supermarket and had to pay with a credit card. The cashier told me my signatures didn’t match. I replied, “well, if it was identical, wouldn’t I be copying, i.e. fraudulent?” Needless to say, she must have thought I was an idiot…