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DIGITAL MATERIALITY 29/05/09

Extract from dissertation:

How do we account for the affect of materiality in a particular work? One way to think about it is as a process. This is not an original point. In “The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event”, Katherine Hayles develops a more sophisticated description of materiality than Writing Machines. Analyzing the distributed structure of the material in digital poetry, she concludes that rather than a discreet object, the poem can be seen as an event, “brought into existence when the program runs on the appropriate software loaded onto the right hardware” (182). If a digital work only exits through multiple layers of material, it cannot be “performed” if any level is interrupted (185). Therefore, the digital work is an “event” or “performance” because it requires the operation of multiple points of materiality. Under this scheme, materiality becomes a “dance between the medium’s physical characteristics and the work’s signifying strategies”; it is “contingent, provisional, and debatable” and therefore considered more of an “event” than a pre-existing discreet object (206). Paradoxically however, the risk of treating the digital poem and its material as an autonomous “event” is a perception of immateriality. Johanna Drucker, cited by Brian Lennon, suggests a similar approach. She identifies the conflict between immanence and nontranscendence in applications of materiality (72). The concept cannot be based in an immaterial Derridian deconstruction, after Derrida however, nor can it return to a self-evident presence (71). This conflict “disappears” if materiality is understood as a “process”, where the material of an artefact only exists in the activity of interpretation (72). As a “process”, the material can never be located before the text, however, the text cannot exist without the material. Heidegger discusses a similar dilemma: “the artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artists. Neither is without the other” (Heidegger, 143). The text therefore can only exist between the two.

A potential difficulty with this model is the absence of the reader. As Sartre demonstrates:

the literary object is a peculiar top which exists only in movement. To make it come into view a concrete act called reading is necessary, and it lasts only as long as this act can last. Beyond that, there are only black marks on paper (1337)

Therefore, just as material instantiation is required for a work to exist, so is the reader, in order to recognize and read the work as a work. The reader “is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (Barthes, 1469). Espen Aarseth also situates the reader as a necessary part of a triad between an “operator”, “verbal sign” and “medium” that constitute a “textual machine” (21). Though attempting to account for the loss of material specificity in digital texts, Hansen, with reference to neuroscience, also describes the importance of the reader (22). The body is the site where materiality is actually experienced, where all sensory information is processed, “it is why there is sensation at all” (27). It is the body that is responsible for the “self-differing condition of media” in the digital environment (32). Therefore the reader is not just required for the text, it is required for the materiality that produces that text. This relationship also implies a process (though not necessarily an event) that does not permit the material to be predetermined and immanent.

A potential issue in the material analysis that Hayles and others develop is the work as singularity, where each instance of each artwork would become a singular entity or different work. If the material of the text changes (e.g. a different edition of a printed work, or a digital work played on a different platform or computer) and the material is what creates and defines that work, then it is a different text. Hayles states: “in attending to the materiality of the medium, MSA explicitly refutes the concept of the literary work that emerged from eighteenth-century debates over copyright and that has held considerable sway since then” (WM 31). In other words, the theory of MSA suggests a particular work never transcends each instance of its materialization. This is emphasized by the notion of an “event”; not only is the work a different work if its material changes, but it is different if it is experienced at another time (though the material stays the same).

A model for thinking about this, and the issue of materiality generally is Matthew Kirschenbaum’s description of the relation between the forensic and formal level of materiality, with the terms “allographic” and “autographic”. When we read a literary artefact, we do so symbolically or “allographically”. We read each word as a sign, and its identity as a text is determined by “sameness of spelling”. We are like “allographic” reading machines that sustain the illusion of immateriality because we have constant error detection and correction systems (programmed socially) that read texts symbolically within certain tolerances (digitalization, for some, exceeds these tolerances). Material analysis still reads the text “allographically”, but also considers its “autographic”, singular identity. How far a text has a singular existence depends on how far we set our tolerances. Are texts the same text with different materials? Allographically, yes. But that is only because we are not programmed to be sensitive to the autographic differences yet.

Internet works such as “Computer Psych Application” attempt to highlight the material process or “psychology” involved in the production of an Internet “text”. A looped sound file is programmed to play itself according to the “computation” of the user’s or reader’s computer (see Figure 7). The user hears a stuttered, fragmented arrangement that is specific to the materiality of their own computer.

We cannot treat works as wholly autographic (or material) entities that are singular and unrepeatable. To do this completely would mean it would cease to exist. As Derrida notes: “what is is not what it is, identical and identical to itself, unique, unless it adds to itself the possibility of being repeated as such” (1875). The very condition for its existence and transmission is its repeatability and therefore its “allographic” or symbolic existence. Otherwise “there are only black marks on paper” (Sartre 1337). However, what material analysis suggests is that neither can we treat the text as wholly “allographic” or we may miss something of the meaning in a text.

How do digital works affect the discourse of materiality? Where print works allow the reader “access to the entirety of the materiality of the work” (Bootz), the materiality of digital works is distributed across multiple levels. In exchange between a real physical reader, materiality is revealed to be a contingent process.

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