Anthological and Archaeological Approaches to Digital Media: A Review of Electronic Literature and Prehistoric Digital Poetry (review)

 
N. Katherine Hayles’s Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary and C.T. Funkhouser’s Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995 exemplify the current disciplinary drive to establish a critical language for speaking about digital literature. The publication of these two modes of scholarship—an anthology and an archeology—demonstrates that a field of inquiry has already stabilized and is working to establish a canon and history. Hayles and Funkhouser have undertaken scholarship that reclaims as much as it reforms an “underlying sense of the literary,” as Alan Liu writes on the first page of Laws of Cool, “that is even now searching for a new idiom and role” (1).
 
Both Prehistoric Digital Poetry and Electronic Literature have a stature and significance each in its own right, but taken together their emergence signals a larger shift in literary-humanist studies, also seen in the rise of new interdisciplinary and transmedial humanities programs. As conflicted as this development might be (simultaneously promoted and critiqued by media scholars such as Alan Liu, Marcel O’Gorman, and Gary Hall), the humanities are going digital. This can be seen in the growing attention paid to literature that is “digital born.” Just as significant, digital research tools have allowed older works to be substantially rethought in light of new interpretive models.¹
 
Hayles’s Electronic Literature is a companion piece to a projected multi-volume anthology of electronic literature co-edited by Hayles, Scott Rettberg, Nick Montfort, and Stephanie Strickland. The first volume in this series produced by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is available online and as a CD-ROM accompanying Hayles’s book. ELO’s definition and selection of electronic works directly intervene in the constitution of the field. Hayles takes up ELO’s definition of electronic literature as “work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer” (3). She accepts their tautological definition of electronic literature as literature that contains an “important literary aspect” on the basis that works will inevitably be shaped by a priori assumptions from past traditions (even in their attempts to redefine what constitutes the “literary”).
 
Expanding ELO’s definition, Hayles characterizes the literary as “creative artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts, and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper,” adding a critical, self-referential element to her notion of the electronic literary (4). Hayles’s definition of electronic literature by default includes works that attend to the specific conditions of their medium and historical context; they are explicitly oriented by self-reflexive relays between multiple orders of textuality.
 
Just as popular culture studies and postcolonial theory have broadened concepts of the literary in the humanities, Hayles suggests that electronic literature performs the same gesture through an expansion to include technologies beyond print. Despite this acknowledged kinship, her analysis of electronic literature remains distinct from the causes and concerns of popular culture studies. Hayles’s examples of electronic literature are generally taken from academic or fine arts contexts; the works included in ELO’s collection are the product of a relatively small and networked group of artists, critics and artist-critics including Philippe Bootz, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Stuart Moulthrop, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Works that Hayles discusses substantially, such as Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter, Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue, and Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, are self-consciously avant-garde and not created for mainstream audiences.
 
Thus there are notable exclusions from Hayles’s discussion of electronic literature. Collaborative artistic projects or forms that tend to be more consistently associated with popular traditions such as web comics, fan-fiction, .gif building, and meme generation, are not—for a number of disciplinary reasons—part of the canon that ELO is building. This is not an insignificant issue, as the setting aside of collaborative, serially constructed works from the field of the literary reinscribes into new media forms a Cartesian model of authorship that is the legacy of the print monograph.
 
The extent to which the selections in the first volume of the Electronic Literature Anthology are technologically determined should also not be overlooked. ELO required that the material be viewable across different platforms and easily downloadable from the Internet. This eliminated a substantial number of important early works for possible inclusion (and thus implicitly shapes the direction that future production and study of electronic literature will take). As Hayles’s book and ELO’s collection are considerable achievements that will no doubt become standard texts in university survey courses, it is important to understand that canonicity in this context is not solely generated through the perceived aesthetic or historical value of a work, but the particular medial and technological conditions that govern its development and reception. Funkhouser’s discussion of the substantial body of digital poetry that is no longer easily accessible (or even still in existence) serves as a vital complement to the approach taken in the ELO anthology. Criteria for inclusion in his archaeological project were not dictated by any site, platform or software-specific requirements.
 
Electronic Literature surveys and discusses works which Hayles defines as “digital born.” These are artworks created and generally intended for viewing on a computer—to distinguish them from digitized objects such as print books originally created for other media outputs, or print works refitted to the requirements of e-book hardware and software. Through examination of historical trends and the emergence of different branches of electronic literature, both she and Funkhouser establish 1995 as an important historical threshold that distinguished different generations of electronic literature. For Hayles, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) is the culminating work of the “classical” era of hypertext fiction—the end of a generation of works made using programs such as HyperCard and Storyspace (6-7). The classical era of hypertext eventually gives way to works that are more multimodal. These works feature a greater diversity of “navigation schemes and interface metaphors that tend to deemphasize the link” (7), and make more extensive use of multiple data streams containing sound, images, film, and animation.
 
In addition to web-based forms of electronic literature, Hayles also touches on a wide range of other forms: interactive fiction (IF); “code work,” an aesthetic form that emphasizes the way in which code and literary effects may be cross-pollinated; “locative narratives,” a common sub-species of which is the Alternate Reality Game (ARG); and “generative literature” or text generators, which make use of complex algorithms to produce textual effects. Hayles also borrows Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s terms “textual instrument” and “playable media” to describe electronic works that move away from traditional notions of gaming yet retain a high level of playability. Some similar experimental practices in print that serve as antecedents can be seen in the work of the Oulipo, the “new novelists,” and William Burroughs; electronic literature serves to further facilitate these kinds of practices.
 
Central to Hayles’s argument is her concept of “dynamic heterarchies.” Dynamic heterarchies are a “multi-tiered system in which feedback and feedforward loops tie the system together through continuing interactions … different levels continuously inform and mutually determine each other” (45). Hayles characterizes the interaction between different media, between humans and machines, and between code and language as forms of dynamic heterarchies. This model shares considerable family traits with the dialectical tradition, but it lacks the politicization built into dialectical forms. In place of an adversarial framework, she heavily relies in her theory on sexually reproductive metaphors, invoking, for example, images of a mother and fetus to describe these feedback systems.
 
The dynamic heterarchy comes to serve as a kind of all-purpose model. It affects Hayles’s analysis on multiple levels and fits in with an idiosyncratic rhetorical tendency in her work to use reproductive imagery. She extends this trope to a discussion of the relationship between different branches of scholarly thought, producing her own dynamic heterarchy using Mark Hansen’s discussion of embodiment and Friedrich Kittler’s techno-determinism. She maps their scholarship onto her model of a dynamic heterarchy in which they exemplify two limit points engaged in a kind of (re)productive oscillation. This tendency to replace conflict with (re)productive cooperation recurs in Hayles’s scholarship. For example, Hayles (2007) has recently challenged Lev Manovich’s now notorious claim that “database and narrative are natural enemies” (225), proposing an alternative theory in which each is instead viewed as “a natural symbiont whose existence is inextricably entwined with that of its partner” (“Responses” 1606).
 
To complement Hayles’s overview of the field of electronic literature, Funkhouser’s Prehistoric Digital Poetry presents an impressive genealogy of digital poetry from 1959 to 1995, historicizing many of the digital practices Hayles reviews. Funkhouser labels the era between 1959-1995 “prehistoric.” His terminology draws attention to the large amount of information now already irrecoverable from the early history of electronic poetry. The book is a record of Funkhouser’s archeological excavations—it is a project of reconstructing fragments of works made inaccessible through the vagaries of technological progress and a collective, sometimes alarming lack of foresight about the importance of data preservation in digital environments. In some cases, Funkhouser does not have direct access to the artworks he discusses, as they no longer exist. He reconstitutes them through exhibit programs, correspondences with artists, catalogues, and through other creative approaches.
 
Given Funkhouser’s herculean efforts of archival collection, it would have been useful had he gone into greater detail about his own viewing process and the specific ways in which he gained access to many of the works he discusses (e.g. the process of emulation or technical troubleshooting on obsolete computer hardware). Funkhouser has put together a rich collection of obscure, barely remembered works, and it is a sad conjecture that much of what he has gathered will likely only be preserved through the screenshots and technical descriptions he provides. As much new media scholarship has recently emphasized, access to older technologies is a pressing issue because much gets lost when work migrates across platforms, even when this migration is motivated by the desire for preservation. This can have significant consequences for the history of electronic literature.²
 
Funkhouser uses the term prehistoric to emphasize the irony surrounding the immense archival challenges of writing a history that is only fifty years old. He also argues that “[t]he work discussed here is prehistoric because no masterpieces or ‘works for the ages’ emerged to lodge the genre in the imagination of a larger audience” (6). Although Funkhouser includes many artists (Philippe Bootz, Eduardo Kac, Alan Sondheim, etc.) who have made significant contributions since 1995, he defines this pre-1995 era as a kind of anonymous, ill-recorded pre-history before digital poetry coalesced into a stable field. These digital poets can be compared to bards prior to the invention of writing, whose anonymous, collective legacy is retained through their epic poetry. Yet, to regard post-1995 digital poetics in terms of the establishment of distinguished authors actually departs from some of the poetic approaches Funkhouser promotes in later chapters. He laments, for example, that the Internet did not model itself more after Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, which could have yielded, he suggests, borrowing Nelson’s terminology, a more “deeply intertwingled” form of de-subjectivized, participatory poetics (DM54). Such a poetics would be, presumably, predicated on a model of collective authorship that is antagonistic to the one that he uses to demarcate contemporary digital poetry from the pre-historic.
 
Funkhouser’s archaeological method sets his work distinctly apart from ELO’s anthological approach as he focuses on works that have become largely inaccessible to a lay audience using only contemporary technological devices. There are no “masters” or canons of early digital poetry not solely because of the aesthetic quality of early digital poetry, but also because of the technical constraints that surrounded production and reception. Herein lies the superb value of Funkhouser’s archeology: his book serves as a direct intervention against what Terry Harpold in Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2009) calls the “conceits of the upgrade path”—the most often market-driven momentum with which new technologies of the reading surface supersede the old with little interest in historical preservation (3).
 
It is not only specific digital works, but also entire technologies that are forsaken on the path of medial innovation. Funkhouser’s discussion of MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and MOOs (multi-user dungeons, object-oriented) aptly conveys the problems of data loss and obsolescence. As the conditions produced in these systems were not reproducible in the emergent technology of the World Wide Web, the technology surrounding the MOO itself was prematurely arrested by the release of an incommensurable upgrade.
 
In addition to an archeological framework, Funkhouser creates an interesting classification system through his chapter organization. Borrowing from the conventions of previous scholarly works such as Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Digital Poetics (2002), Funkhouser moves from discussion of text generators to visual and kinetic poems to hypertext and hypermedia and finally to online networks. In one illuminating section, Funkhouser compares a system of digital poetry classification he had set down in 1996 with his current model in Prehistoric Digital Poetry. He lists his previous organizing principles: “hypermedia, HyperCard, hypertext, network hypermedia, or text-generating software” (237). This taxonomy shows how smitten nineties new media criticism was with hypertext. Like Hayles, Funkhouser marks the historical shift away from the classic hypertext of the 1990s by demonstrating how nearly the entire spectrum of new media production was once defined in terms of the link. Funkhouser’s comparison clearly conveys that it is not only technologies, but also theoretical constructs that have an accelerated obsolescence in the field of digital literature.
 
One can detect a kind of liberatory shift through the chapters in Prehistoric Digital Poetry. Each new form presented seems to offer an increase in agency and greater intervention on part of the reader/user of digital poetry. Throughout the book Funkhouser indicates his preference for works that open up the field for both reader and creator. Funkhouser regularly resorts to a rhetoric of “interactivity” in a way that, although it may not put pressure on this concept in terms of human-computer interaction, stretches the limits of the definition of poetry. The chapters move away from more rigidly conceived author/reader distinctions to a model of poetics in which production and reception are interleaved with one another. Whether through the discussion of the interpretive (or non-interpretive) flexibility of the aleatory text generator or the open writing space of the MOO, the progression of Funkhouser’s chapters works to expand the possibilities of reader agency in both mechanical as well as hermeneutic terms.
 
As the horizon of digital arts and literatures expands, the question that both Hayles and Funkhouser must confront directly is how to define their field. Digital media has become ubiquitous, and the convergence of media has further eroded the boundaries between fields that were once imagined as distinct from one another. The ontological differences between work categorized as digital art or as digital literature, for example, are not as important as the fact that these works address and are situated within two different discursive contexts. These distinctions do not focus on any intrinsic technological or formal quality of the medium in which the work is produced. Both “digital poetry” and “electronic literature” self-consciously borrow from print traditions and affix a technological signifier to the conditions of writing with networked and programmable media. Both scholars devote considerable attention to defining the way in which the adjectives “digital” and “electronic” reshape older models of poetry and of literature more generally. Yet both also seem to take for granted that the terms “poetry” and “literature” have commonly understood meanings. As Funkhouser writes of “poetry”: “I examine texts made with computer processing that identify themselves as poetry, have an overtly stanzaic or poetic appearance on the screen, or contain other direct conceptual alignments with poetry as it has been otherwise known” (25). For Funkhouser, poetry is either that which defines itself as poetry or, following Hayles, that which alludes to the idea that there are commonly accepted notions about what falls into the category of poetry. Hayles, ELO, and Funkhouser are comfortable acceding to prior conventions to leave a certain undecidability in their terminology. The result is that the specific works presented shape and delimit what is included within the borders of digital literature.
 
As with much time-sensitive new media scholarship, both Hayles and Funkhouser conclude their books with prognosticatory chapters in which they attempt to look to the future of their field. Hayles argues that the future has basically already arrived in that nearly all print literature is now inflected by the conditions of digitality (Electronic Literature itself, which comes with a CD-ROM and makes reference to supplementary materials on the ELO website, serves as an example of this). Hayles chooses to end her book with a discussion of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a work that is not digital born, but that embodies this state of medial interpenetration. Hayles portrays the future of electronic literature as one of undecidable flux in which code, medial output, humans, and machines are in a constant play with one another.
 
If Hayles recursively selects print as a way of inaugurating the future of digital literature, Funkhouser moves in another direction. He looks to video games, proposing a model for future digital poetry based on Espen Aarseth’s notion of “cybertext” and “ergodic literature”—works that require the “nontrivial effort” of a user. Funkhouser sees the growth of participatory, ergodic texts as “crucial” to the future of digital poetry, and ties the fate of digital poetry to that of games. Gaming technologies and logics offer the potential for digital poetry to be produced in an open, multi-authored, collaborative dataspace. Yet while he casts a hopeful eye in this direction, he does so with a strangely limited definition of a video game. The peculiar result is that Funkhouser both looks toward and is strangely dismissive of games, offering generally reductive characterizations of a form he would have digital poetry colonize. Like Hayles, Funkhouser reveals a blind spot about the popular and its intersection with the comparably isolated objects he examines. He pessimistically suggests that “Given a new set of stimuli—a slower pace of presentation, materials absorbed as words and artwork—the typical video game audience might change its tastes, but I do not see those radically different modes ever conjoining in titles that reach a high level of popularity in mass culture” (251). After dedicating a book to works that have never achieved more than minor subcultural fame, one wonders why Funkhouser raises the issue of commercial or mass popularity. While popular commercial videogames are still certainly dominated by a highly restrictive set of generic conditions, there is a growing movement towards avant-garde gaming—a movement that has been co-opted by the industry to varying degrees.³
 
But this cavil is not meant to de-emphasize the significance of either Electronic Literature or Prehistoric Digital Poetry. Both discuss a fascinating collection of texts. Hayles provides useful readings and re-readings of the works of better known artists (John Cayley, Michael Joyce, Talan Memmott, and others) while Funkhouser unearths examples of early digital poetry that even specialists will delight in learning about. The importance of these works for both teaching and scholarship in the amorphously defined field of the digital humanities is substantial. Funkhouser’s archaeology and ELO’s anthology take two complementary approaches to the problem of new media historicism. Making a great deal of electronic literature freely available across platforms as ELO has done is an impressive achievement. This anthology of electronic literature will play a significant role in defining the perception of contemporary electronic literature, thus shaping the practice of future generations of digital artists. The very fact that the Electronic Literature Anthology will no doubt have a significant impact on the field as a primary resource makes a work like Funkhouser’s all the more valuable. Funkhouser’s goal is not to pass judgment or to emphasize the value of a work as much as to record that it was once there.
 
The production of digital literature is tied quite closely to its criticism and study, as many digital poets are scholars and vice versa; the shifts and developments in one area are never without consequence in the other. This is why both an authoritative anthology and an archaeology are valuable interventions against ahistoricizing trends in digital media. They oppose claims surrounding the “newness” of new media and recuperate not merely specific histories but a larger sense of the importance and necessity of taking an historical approach to the digital—a logic always at risk of being lost in a field so deeply enmeshed in the rhetoric of technological progress.