New Media Critical Homologies

Ideally perhaps one should, like the novelist, have one’s subject under control, never losing it from sight and constantly aware of its overpowering presence. Fortunately or unfortunately, the historian has not the novelist’s freedom.
 

–Braudel, The Mediterranean

I.

 
The computer is one of those swerves in the history of built things that bring whole ways of life to an end–and seldom with the drama with which the first to sense a change often pronounce it. Real change is painfully slow, building to crisis well off the range of dailiness-numbed sense: a pattern of sun and shadow filtering into a room, here illuminating a particular object for no particular reason, there, with precisely the same absence of portent, shrouding another. There are regressions, and some habits and routines left precisely as they were or are, while others vanish or metastasize. Newness covers the old with a creeping patina, in which what will be and what no longer is exchange places and seem to intermingle, at the same time.
 
New media studies, we might say, has discovered temporality. After fifteen years in which its cultural dominant was presentist prognostication, even–often enough–a kind of bullying, the field has folded on itself with such new guiding concepts as the “residuality,” the “deep time” or “prehistory,” and the “forensic imagination” of a new media now understood as after all always already new.¹ This is a more absorbent fold, perhaps, than that embedded in one of the field’s originary figures, “remediation”–a determinedly modern progressive figure, though one whose conceptual plasticity always suggested the possibility, beyond linear reframings, of non-modern medial cycles or folds (see Bolter and Grusin). Without a doubt, it is that depth that sends us searching, now, for a reading of the temporal turn that seems all at once to discard and even undermine the prime rhetoric of a field of study settled in self-establishment. Read symptomatically, there is perhaps more to all of this than the usual need for professional distinction in the field itself, which like any mode of absorption of surplus, needs a manufactured boom and bust, on a regular cycle. To the shaming of the slow, the skeptical, and the selfrespecting who refuse the unfunded mandates of technocratic reactivity, in the New Economic home-classroom-office pod of unrelievedly public life online, new media studies now adds to its figural repertoire a synchronic complement, in the reflection of what the Jameson of the 1970s, writing Marxism and Form, calls the “commodity structure of academic intellectual life” (393).
 
Were it not for the institutional dynamic of critical desire through which one is forced to embrace what one declines, in order to scale the heights from which to renounce it again, one might have begun there. But what is done is done. With the swap-file virtualities of an endless present suffering stain, again, we might suspect this anachronic return to time, in a new media studies that seems never to have known it at all, of being sensitive, registrative, or even merely, vulgarly reflective of the sociotemporal order-as-disorder of U.S. imperial and global capitalist crisis, as an apparent crisis of progress. To materialist critiques of the disembodiment of information, which corrected the intellective disposition of an early euphoria without doing much to blunt its complacent productivity, one can certainly imagine being attached, now, a materialist critique of the conditions of the critique of disembodiment, itself, in a resource-intensive field of inquiry into disproportionately resource-intensive social behaviors whose future is inseparable from the future of U.S. consumerism–above all, the consumption of energy. Our appetite for the materiality, as much as for the virtuality of new media, is also a form of systems maintenance. One might say that the specter haunting new media studies today is the late imperial “peak energy” spectacle of middle-class U.S. Americans in sweaters, riding their bicycles to work.²
 
This is no merely elected sentiment. Rather, it marks a disposition that is hidden in plain sight, today, in so far as its material conditions of recognition burden it also with gratuitous blindness. To come to accept the long duration of intellectual history, without which episodic conurbations of research cannot thrive, is to accept the destiny of decline, compressed in Braudel’s formula “All conquests lead to exhaustion” (166). Necessarily, it is to come to permit the presentation of unavoidable, and unavoidably disturbing, questions.³ Let me air only one that comes to my own mind, without suggesting that I imagine my own way of life and work, in the field of new media studies, as in any way immune from its most damaging imputations. That question is this: is it possible that we may have lost literacy, all at once and already, without yet, or without ever, gaining “electracy”?–and that in some unimaginable future, we might be charged with simply getting it back–of retrieving literacy for sheer survival?
 
I think we can say that we are, at last, officially of two minds on this issue–which is what one of our first leaders, and first seceders, insisted we be. I speak, of course, of hyperfiction pioneer and demiurge Michael Joyce, about whose legacy I will, in what follows, have something I believe is unprecedented to say. But first, we need to ask a second set of questions, comprising the frame for the first, in an inversion that carries with it all the abject cruelty of admission, at last, to the club that one would never want to belong to if it had one for a member, just as it is about to close. That in some ways, literary studies now appears prepared to absorb new media studies, as once upon a time it absorbed (and then purged itself of) cinema and cultural studies, certainly prompts some reflection.⁴ What can explain our radically untimely embrace, in English studies, of gaming, Second Life, and (naturally) “netlish,”⁵ along with (at last) the old hyperfiction and ergodic literature, just as global food, energy, and political and environmental security re-enter the second of two major postwar systemic cycles of scarcity–now canonically bound, in the immensely influential world-system historiography of Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, and others, to the historically decisive routine decline of empire?⁶
 
In comparative literary studies, meanwhile, where something more than cinema is now definitively on the extraliterary agenda (see Andrew and Poster), one wonders why the comparative project, in its essayistic substitution of transitive (and translative) articulation for critical substantiation, should be so eager to seize what it already predicts must elude its (as any) grasp. Hasn’t comparative literature “won its battles,” in dissemination to fields once supremely confident of their objects (Saussy 3)? Isn’t it the unacknowledged legislator of our humanities disciplines today? Why would it go prospecting now, when anticolonial comparative methods and models are firmly entrenched even in departments of English, in the study of peoples without a phone? Hasn’t comparative literature always embraced its own amateurism, anyway, even at its philologically rigorous origin? (Picture once more Erich Auerbach, famously marooned, without a working library, in wartime Istanbul.) At their very best, we might say, all the innovative formations of the last thirty years of literary studies have demanded respect for the indiscipline with which they resisted and lamented the objects of their own disciplinarity: on their radical work of the imagination, finally closer to the mode of production of the literary object, itself, than anyone dared to dream.
 
In response to the unanswerable question implicit in my opening gambit, here–that of how, and why, new media studies might all at once have “arrived,” and how its arrival takes the form of a temporal loop, cycle, or fold–let me, before proceeding any further, offer something of a frame for the frame. Always, in attempting to look through the reified critical object of a disciplinary research field, we are necessarily attempting to look at the technocratic procedures producing that object. Inasmuch as it can be said to have emerged as such, new media studies, as a disturbance in both the practices and production regimes of humanistic discipline, is and always has been best thought less as an emergent field than as a site of such double vision.⁷ For this question to be of any use to us, we must frame it critically, in the sense that that term has always carried in the history of Euro-Atlantic philosophical modernity, where it denotes the impossible secular task of structural self-understanding. To confront the question of how something eventally new, for going on at least a decade and a half, can only now have emerged, let us do what comparative criticism is supposed to do, and compare. Let us look, in this case, for new media critical homologies embedding new media literary-critical formations, in a non-selfevident temporal relation, in their historical antecedents. To honor the convention of providing an example, I suggest one such homology in a moment.
 

II.

 
During the New Economic 1990s, as new media invaded literary-critical workspace through the portals of the Web, the discrete and combined hazards of deconstruction and cultural studies for autonomous art as manipulable object reawakened in anxieties focused on the ephemerality of critical writing and publishing “on line,” in time and in motion. Such fear of the virtualization of the literary-critical took many forms, of course, from Gutenberg elegies, to new formalisms, to the ballyhooed returns of sincerity, nature, personal voice, affect, pleasure, and any number of other monads said to have been squashed by demoniac posthumanist theory. If the lessons of modernity and postmodernity had already been learned, that only means, perhaps, that routine vulgar dialectics provided the means to affirm what one salvaged, in such operations, without its preening innocence. And yet latent in this double reading of the standing present, we might say, was an entirely accurate sense that matters had already grown very complicated, indeed, in the interanimation of cultural time and critical history–and that it was that complication itself, if anything, that was going to have to be what post-modernization would come to mean. Already, then, what Benjamin, then read to excess, pictured as “an orchid in the land of technology” (“Work” 233)–an impossible palpability, within the impassable virtuality of the film set–at once described and militated against the quest for pre-virtual critical authenticity, not because such quests were hopelessly doomed, but because as the Jameson of the 1990s put it, they offered “the expressive raw material of a deeper comparison” (Postmodernism 301) that needed to be made.
 
Many of us, in those days, conceived things straightforwardly. We proposed to consider the impact of electronic media–specifically, the document formats or “sites” of the so-called World Wide Web–on United States literature, just for example, at the turn of the twenty-first century: an inquest that took as its narrative flashpoints 1991, the year Jameson completed a provocative U.S.-centrist statement of ephemeralist postmodernism, and 1993, when the appearance of the Mosaic browser began to renegotiate some of the ground terms of publication in the literary arts.⁸ To the extent that such impact was presupposed and determined, by the question itself, to construct an object-pattern or trace of itself as legible, we might say that it hardly occurred to many involved in this enterprise that it might take the form of erasure before the archival fact. That the secession, not so many epochal years later, of Michael Joyce from the field he was now to set on its feet might in fact proceed from the very logic of that pursuit of the new, rather than obstructing or contravening it.
 
The proximity of artifactual life to death, in this new field of critical awareness, was underscored by the panic over object stability that followed discovery forthwith, in a radical compression of the purview of antiquarian desire. Such efforts as the Electronic Literature Organization’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) project, which registered widespread alarm at the developmental precocity, velocity, and caprice of the new literary artists, were no better prepared to question the mandate for conservancy itself than to uphold it, on a U.S. scene yoked to the startup venture-capitalization of proprietary data file formats and dominated by freelance coders making Web art in their Gleitzeit. The running battle between an art culture producing faster and faster–indeed, living art online (see Breeze)–and a curator culture determined to find careers in it, nevertheless, offered a dramatic update of the antitheses on the avant-garde formulated by Paul Mann around (snail) mail art, earlier in the decade.⁹
 
It is clear, in any case, that Jameson’s postmodernism was a vital branch of the storyspace charting the complex relation of the literary art practice of the time to its academic theory, and that it had specifically recursive effects on the relation of art practice to theory and criticism, in its wake. As a publishing medium, the WWW invited U.S. literature to a set of changes that would recursively alter the Web-as-medium without collapsing into it, or expiring within its limits. By 2001, for example, one could speak of an overlap zone populated on the one hand by print poetries radically animated by cybernetics, and on the other by “code poetries” importing and renovating the interpreted conservatism of a lyric tradition.¹⁰ Within such a new order of things, Monique Roelofs’s “Zwischenology” was a handy figure for the study of such paradox, overlap, or betweenness, which resisted the easier postures of apocalyptic and utopist futurism. And yet print literature was already being used to augur the ruin of post-print irreality. In the commentary on Bob Perelman’s poem “China” that formed such a controversial sideshow within Postmodernism, for Jameson’s readers working in literary studies, the figure of the poem’s absented referents or unities is used to illuminate what the Jameson of the 1990s calls “the crisis in historicity,” a temporal limit in, of, and to contemporary cultural criticism become a limit-site of postmodernist euphoria in dissolution.¹¹ While for Jameson, the danger lies in the seductions of irreconcilability in situ, his dialectical critic’s characteristic ambivalence pursues a discussion of Perelman’s poem to its peremptory conclusion (or break), which finds Jameson now famously pitting the ephemeral video art of Nam June Paik against the nihilism of a “traditional” poetic poststructuralism enjoined to no longer dare utter its name.
 
And yet all this is better re-read, in 2009, as a problem of research and temporality, posed by the critical life-span of a “reading” itself, than as a debate over the form (or content) of the curator’s object, now or then. Not least of the durable provocations of Jameson’s project, in Postmodernism as everywhere else, is the tropism of his dialectical prose, which has always invited, and received, many comically speculative and many more ploddingly positivist thetic refutations. Among the alignments in what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a contemporaneous and complementary stylization, terms “the battle between marxism and deconstruction” (314), the Jameson of Postmodernism is illuminated, on one side, by the novel and generous use he found for the Baudrillardian chiasmus of the simulacrum, and on the other by his doggedly restricted Lukácsian insistence on cognitive mapping. It is from this conjuncture that the new media literalists of the 1990s, stalking auguries of the brave new office, drew their sanctions for reading Jameson, poorly, through a McLuhan read even more poorly, in a mode of reception remarkably alienated from the long intellectual history of a philosophical concept of mediation–and so unable to imagine “virtual reality” as a descriptor of unavoidably abstract critical thought itself. Looking back in counterpoint, it seems that Perelman’s poem suffers, in Jameson’s never less than withering estimation, not only as an artifact of print culture, but in its typicality as a vanguard expression of the avant-garde type, itself; in the Jamesonist typology, the materially practicing poet was the ephemeralist, fixing “joyous intensities” in the self-celebrating play of shallow disjunction (Postmodernism 29), while the video-tracer recovered a “positive concept of relationship” (31) in transient screen flicker.
 
All along, it was a matter of the relationship between the time of the work and the temporality of criticism itself, in their mutual imbrication, from which no historical materialist can or must dare to retreat. Video, the Jameson of Postmodernism tells us, disembedded us from the fictive phenomenological-subjective time of film and television representation as always already destined for entertainment, re-embedding someone–or something–as dematerialized subject-in-relay with dematerialized object, in the flow of radically neutral (and deadly boring) social-machine time (Postmodernism 76). In the process, it bypassed altogether the blank parody of schizomorphic postmodernism, as a “virtual grab bag” of creatively pure and ahistoric selfpresence, and as a breakdown of temporality itself, in the infinite jest Jameson thinks he discerns, correctly or incorrectly, in Perelman’s “China.” But where that chaff promises enduring diversion, we must, Jameson suggests clearly, rather be prepared to be bored, in order to be critically stimulated at all. If to identify video as the most important and distinctive new artmedium of late capitalism was, then, to arrive on the scene an epoch too late, from the point of view of those needing to promote something new (the World Wide Web as re-remediation), Jameson’s demand for lassitude, in its all the hazard it poses to research productivity at an urgent moment of innovation (none of which, of course, blunted Jameson’s own prodigious output one whit), refused to apologize for that.
 
From the beginning, Jameson had linked the resistance of Adornian prose style to the simple difficulty of temporality, in his exegesis of negative dialectics as the rescue of philosophy, as of all the object pursuits descended from it, from “a fetishization in time, from the optical illusion of stasis and permanency” (Marxism 58). Such “falling into time” (to reproduce a tropism Jameson extracts, for his purposes, from Barthes writing on Proust) mandates the production of dialectically comparative sentences, whose strength grows “proportionately as the realities linked are distant and distinct from each other” (54)–producing just that “massive failure” affirmed, in Adorno’s project, as a kind of success.
 
It is here, perhaps, that we can mark a form of reserve in Jameson’s work, through which the more or less gentle criticism Adorno receives, at his hands, rebounds. “No doubt the emphasis on method and on the theory rather than the practice of negative dialectics,” Jameson observes, “risks giving an exaggerated and distorted importance to the moment of failure which is present in all modern thinking: and it is this overemphasis, more than anything else, which seems to me to account for that lack of political commitment with which radical students reproached Adorno at the end of his life” (59). The history of Marxist literary criticism is the history of an advocated interpenetration of (literary?) theory and (literary?) practice, which in Lukács and Jameson, no less than in Adorno, produced nothing more or less than another magisterial scholar-critic, who abandons the primary production of works of literature to that division of labor affirmed as the very price of Marxist modernity–though never without secretly protesting it, again. In an earlier critical review of Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Perelman himself toes this austere, if never ascetic line, observing that “in the arena Jameson is working in, ‘theory writing,’ writers, the producers of the raw material, are a bit dispensable” (175). And who can forget the outburst of Mike Featherstone, protesting in his contribution to the 1989 volume Postmodernism/ Jameson/ Critique that Jameson was “unwilling to become an advocate of the new methods and practice postmodernism in his writings” (129)? For every one of the terrifically prolific critics in Lukács’s direct or indirect line of descent, it is precisely that nonproductive boredom Jameson theorizes that, in so many ways, is really a nonstarter.
 
Thus it is that Jameson throws into relief, in the nascent new media studies of the epoch of the postmodernism debates, the substantive reifications of the “commodity structure of academic intellectual life” (Marxism 393)–while not escaping from them himself, any more than Adorno might or could have. We might say it is this unbearable distance of cultural criticism from cultural practice that drives the trope of comparison, in Jameson’s work, as the maximal flex of critical discourse to–but never over–the brink of critical silence. To speak, again, of the impact of new media on literature, it might be imagined that cultural opacity or noise, in any such composition of influence, would necessarily grow alongside complex critical transparency or “silence”: indeed, a Jamesonist mind must posit “homologies” between them, structured affinities whose very dynamic consumes something of the tissue of resemblance itself. Here is this thought, as expressed late in Jameson’s “Conclusion: Secondary Elaborations”:
 

There may also be structural parallels to be established between these new “informational” machineries that are neither basely physical nor “spiritual” in any nineteenth-century sense, and language itself, whose model has become predominant in the postmodern period. On this view it would not be the informationality of the new technology that inspires a meditation on language and spurs people on to the construction of new ideologies centered on it, but rather the structural parallels themselves between two equally material phenomena which equally elude physical representation of the older type.
 

(Postmodernism 386)

Is it through just such a negative dialectical construction that the disciplinary object of new media studies has to have come at once, now, to embrace disciplinary “information” and noise? For the transpositions, paradoxes and regressions of media to “replace” their remediative linear displacement and (and or) succession, in a kind of noctilucent disturbance that might be understood, now, always to have been underway, if only, suddenly, self-evident? If in 2009 scholarship in literary studies yet evinces precious little of the real possible impact, as one must think it, of new networked and programmable media, is it possible that that is because the structural-historical configurations of print culture and electronic publishing have been mingled–sometimes deliberately, often by chance, in a Babel of avant-garde, epochally middling, and “dead,” dying and spectral media, in a process that no one may regulate, and to which all are accountable?

 
But one of the consequences of that might be that we would have to learn to learn in two drifts, moving contiguously both forward and backward in time, in that flexion the desire for objects impedes. Indeed, to do that, we will have to accept the unacceptable fortuity that tells us that new media studies might, for those of us most invested in it, always already have come to an end. To get back to where we went back to, then, we must skip forward to the near past.
 

III.

 
Last modified on March 3, 2004, the Vassar College faculty Web page of Michael Joyce offers little more than a telegraphic summary of Joyce’s work and teaching, prefaced by a small photograph image of a rock cairn and the statement: “Michael Joyce is no longer maintaining a public web presence.”¹² One cannot exactly say that this end of events, and the order of things marked by it, is much of a secret, as by any measure Joyce has, in the years since he thus returned to writing books in print, made his absence as pivotal to new media studies as his presence had been. We might say that the power of such end-punctuation has always rested in its injunction not to exercise one’s hermeneutical training on it–to honor its apparent nihilism as both something more and something less than a simple, baffling “no.” And yet, that the undisputed leader of an emerging field might so decisively step back, on what might have been considered the verge of something like victory, is apparently something of a scandal for new media studies. The wrench that Joyce thus threw into the perpetual motion machine of bureaucratic culture–his implicit demand that we simply stop for a while–is not discussed at any length or in any depth in any peer-reviewed published scholarship on Joyce’s work currently on record.¹³ That is understandable, of course, given that when I say Joyce implicitly demanded we “stop,” I mean, of course, that he demanded we stop speaking (and writing) with such consensually unadulterable zeal on our topic of choice: an endeavor which, as most every reader of this essay will know–for reasons I will therefore not bother to detail–is structurally impossible.¹⁴
 
All supervisory protestation aside, we scholars, who have been gifted with speech, know that we will always be haunted by those who cannot speak, whether or not we choose to regift or to yield them speech, and even if we do finally just choose to be quiet. The sources of Joyce’s enormously influential work lay in the sociality of a twenty-year career as a writing educator at Jackson Community College in Jackson, Michigan, on the one hand, and in the textuality of the essayist counter-tradition of poststructuralist French feminism, on the other. Joyce went out of his way, in his critical and personal essays, to advance these elective affinities, which describe two of the territories most evenly at odds with the bureaucratic research-intensive regime of the new object for whose sake new media studies, in its self-constitution through Joyce’s work, was embraced. For literary scholars eager at once to seize the object “hyperfiction” and to both subordinate and elevate themselves, in traditional fashion, in the critic’s relation to the writer, the institutionalized activism of writing pedagogy, at the intake valve of the educational system, represented an anonymous form of professional labor conveniently discarded with Joyce’s transition to the more rarefied environ of Vassar. And if a determinedly continental écriture féminine was never wholly marginal to the first-wave U.S. hypertext theory that hitched its critical wagon to Joyce’s writerly star, it was certainly never central, either, at least to the extent that the usual alchemies of Anglo-American import substitution, administered by both masculinist and feminist notaries, transformed its practices and procedures into works and theories. The red thread of Joyce’s life-work might thus be said to traverse a blind spot in the voluminous body of scholarship chronicling it, to the extent that the lesson it leaves for the curator’s habitus has always already, in a way, been unlearned.¹⁵ That lesson lies in the capacity of the literary artifact to make counter-claims on the method and form of the criticism literally regarding it: and not because what we call social and historical “context”–a wealth of found or imagined realia–impresses the work, in an emplacement the critic can demand from the research object while tactically bracketing it in her own effort. Rather, in the unavoidably sublimated and so inadmissible homology, or structural affinity, of critical with literary writing itself (which finds departments of English studies, for example, serving today as common homes for dedicated “creative writers,” who create literary objects, dedicated literary scholars, who analyze their creative colleagues’ published products, and dedicated rhetoric and composition scholars, to whom the theory-praxis of writing about writing itself now falls and belongs). To begin to discern the outline of the new media critical homology I am proposing, one would have to look to the theory of the essay as it lives, today, in U.S.-based rhetoric and composition studies, in its constructive intimacy with democratic statism. Simultaneously, and with tolerance for their conflict, one would have to look to its legacy in what Todd May has called “poststructuralist anarchism”–and its afterlife in the early hypertext theory of Joyce’s moment.
 
To “see” both at once, one would need something like what the compositionist Douglas Hesse, combining concepts from Ricoeur and Heinrich Schenker, calls the Auskomponierung or “composing out” of the essay, as the diachronic prolongation, in sophistic narrative, of the synchronic chord of the scholastic proposition (“Essay Form and Auskomponierung” 292ff). Already, in the very first of the “theoretical narratives” of his book of densely tropological essays, Of Two Minds, Joyce writes in the collective first person of being “too late at the end of something and unable to speak” (1). To write, as Joyce writes, that the book’s “interstitial” documents were not composed from nomadic and iterative detachments, but rather were composed as such Bruchstücke,¹⁶ in a form that places them radically at odds with the generic professional self-reproduction constructing a field, is after all only to remind ourselves that fourteen years after the University of Michigan Press published Joyce’s radically essayist multigraph, traditionally peer-reviewed scholarship emerging from literary studies itself into the research field of new media studies, as such, remains scarce.¹⁷ That Of Two Minds is a book of critical fragments introduced by a parable reproduced from the author’s unpublished “twenty-some-year old” novel (1) invokes a homology on which I have elaborated elsewhere,¹⁸ between the productive activity contained and managed by the term “creative writing” and the act of invention, rather than discovery, constituting a new field of inquiry. That a few pages later Joyce goes on to invoke a “tradition of hypermedia studies” is in turn arguably something of a feint, in so far as the division of labor solicited here is metastasized to the point of failure as division:
 

We had generally completed the underlying functionality of the [Storyspace] program before we heard the term hypertext or read Ted Nelson’s Literary Machines (1990). Yet from the earliest point in our collaboration we progressively found ourselves in contact with the tradition of hypermedia studies, beginning with Bush and Engelbart and continuing to Nelson. That tradition of scholarship and active collaboration existed as something of an iceberg–or, more aptly, like some huge octopus with only its eye above water but with submerged tentacles reaching almost everywhere around us, including pedagogy, linguistics, cognitive science, literature, physics, database theory, classics, media studies, medicine, and so on. Because it was a tradition concerned with links and interrelationships, it observed no intellectual boundaries.
 

(32)

 
A credulous reading of the first two sentences, here, will overlook their excavation by what follows them, the concealed inertia of the iceberg yielding to the life of the disciplinary octopus, itself exceeded and erased in its substantiality by an abstract conceptual image–of the genrecidal impossible possibility, as it were, of a tradition recognizing no bounded corpus or archive or division of labor. Here is the double writing of much of Joyce’s body of work, in its both critical and creative forms, which finds its reception, for the most part, in uncompounded readings: that of the eager scholar-entrepreneur who seizes on the historical trope of discrete continuity (a “tradition”) essential to the institution-building project of discipline, and that of his counterpart for whom that discretion itself, more (or less) than a pragmatically ineluctable, bureaucratic fiction, is the very trace of that disavowal without which such fictions may never come to be.
 
It was the extrusion of the computer itself, Joyce explains, as a mediator of scholarship that epistemically reframed our “work” on, in, and of knowledge: an event whose meaning lay in the negative critical disturbance of discipline, rather than in the positivized fulfillment of “interdisciplinarity” that it certainly always suggested:
 

As we appropriated computers to our uses and modeled complex understandings upon a foundation of low-level concerns, we found ourselves in dialogue with others who, though they proceeded from much different disciplines, shared a common process of tool building and intellection with us.
 
I knew of, and for years had given lip service to, the interdisciplinary nature of my professional life. I had done my work at the Iowa Writers Workshop and so was in touch with a widespread and active artistic and learning community as well the scholarly and critical community that Sherman Paul had introduced me to. I had trained myself as a composition theorist in the line of fire, as chair of a community college English department, and knew that field through research, practice, conferences, and anxiety attacks. Not only did each of these domains interact with one another; they also actively espoused essentially interdisciplinary stances.
 
Despite all this, the problem was that, if we talked at all, my colleagues and I more often than not spent more time talking among ourselves about interdisciplinary learning than we did putting it into practice.
 

(32-33)

Read attentively, in 2009, such meditation perhaps displays some of that patina of enigmatically recent age, so disturbing to the temporization of research, to which Nietzsche, writing of the utility and disadvantage of scholarly historiography for life, gave the not entirely translatable term unzeitgemäß. If the narrative through which Joyce appears to construct the fulfillment of interdisciplinary desire in computerization thus seems, in its presentist or futurist naïveté, like something from what Glenn Willmott calls the “junk pile of critical history” (207), that is because, ever the rhetorician, Joyce knows how to declare one thing while suggesting another or, what is another way to put it, how to use language to suggest the difference of language from code, without reducing that insight, itself, to transmission. It is in this respect that, then as now, many of Joyce’s more comfortably technocratic peers and promoters simply have not, and do not, read him.

 
Through all the periods of the periodizations that followed, from a first generation of link-focused “verbal” hyperfictions received with inflated deconstructive claims, to the structural-functionalist restoration of Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), to a third wave as yet exposed to reification,¹⁹ Joyce’s legacy has perhaps too often turned on readings of his hyperfictions–above all, the inaugural Afternoon, a story–which reconstruct the work implicitly or explicitly as the work of a working artist or writer, demandedly distinct from that of the thinker, critic, theorist, or essayist Joyce always already also was (and is).²⁰ To be sure, such readings have often made good use (if often in precritical fashion) of Joyce’s various declarations of authorial and other forms of procedural intention, as a mode of indulgence of such hyperprofessionalized ethnographic consultation. It is less often that the critic of Afternoon is committed to reading the thinker’s essays in Of Two Minds (just to start with) in determined counterpoint with the writer’s artifact. And never, as far as I can tell, has anyone pondered the modification of that counterpoint, itself, by the self-consciously Bartlebyesque resignation of the intention declared on that very strictly access-controlled and verified means of publication, Joyce’s personal “not at home” page.²¹ Let me suggest, by way of a kind of testimony, if not an accomplishment of compensation, that if we still want to consider Joyce’s work a founding moment in new media literary studies, in the United States, we have to recognize the radical untimeliness of, and at, that foundation. I mean the extent to which the negativity of Joyce’s secession from this emergent field must be understood not as the end of his influence in it, but in antinomian fashion, as its beginning again.
 
For the reduction of Joyce to hyperfiction author, in the new media studies scholarship that more or less brackets Joyce’s critical project, is in fact nothing new as a disciplinary gesture; rather, it is a repetition of the founding ruse of literary-critical modernity, in what Clifford Siskin has called “novelism”: the generation, from a heterogenous and yet unified (or combined and uneven) field of writing, of the separate positions of the self-identified critic and her critical object, produced by the writer. In the subordination of writing, a discourse and an institution, to the (fabricated) research object “the novel,” modern disciplinarity in the literary sphere naturalizes writing as mimesis–that is, gives it a job to do, in determined opposition to the radical self-reflexivity of writing as mass professionalization itself, in its capacity simultaneously to expand and to contract the division of intellectual labor. Over and against this “novelism” of U.S. new media literary studies, I am suggesting, Joyce’s work must be read–must be reread–in context of the German and French counterconcretions of what R. Lane Kauffmann and Claire de Obaldia call “Continental essayism,” and which has to be seen as a legacy of the moment of “high theory” and its import substitution in the U.S academy. As a problem of form and of style in the temporizing of the knowledge-object, that legacy, as Jameson observes apropos of Adorno, is nothing if not the incitement to rereading, itself, as juxtapositional comparison, the generation of critical homology:
 

Such essays are thus the fragments of or footnotes to a totality which never comes into being; and what unites them, I am tempted to say, is less their thematic content than it is on the one hand their style, as a perpetual present in time of the process of dialectical thinking itself, and on the other their basic intellectual coordinates. For what as fragments they share in spite of the dispersal of their raw material is the common historical situation itself … which serves as the framework within which we understand them. To this concrete situation itself the language makes fateful and monitory allusion: the administered world, the institutionalized society, the culture industry, the damaged subject–an image of our historical present which is Adorno’s principal sociological contribution and which yet … is never expressed directly in the form of a thesis. Rather, it intervenes as a series of references to a state of things with which our familiarity is already presupposed …. The mode is that characteristic German sarcasm which may be said to have been Nietzsche’s contribution to the language and in which a constant play of cynical, colloquial expressions holds the disgraced real world at arm’s length, while abstractions and buried conceptual rhymes compare it with the impossible ideal.
 

(Marxism 52-53)

IV.

 
The capacious and considered retrospective treatment of Joyce’s Afternoon offered by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, an ambitious and successful recent attempt to bring U.S.-based new media studies to disciplinary self-consciousness, is a good place to start. Kirschenbaum’s reading, if he would want to call it that, begins with the dramatic historicizing, in a journalistic mode, of Joyce’s conversion from print novelist to hyperfiction writer, upon his seduction by the personal computer as writing tool:
 

Storyspace was a product of the early 1980s personal computer boom. At the time, Joyce, whose first novel The War Outside of Ireland (1982) had just won a regional literary prize, was interested in exploring what he termed “multiple fictions,” the concept that would eventually be made manifest as “a story that changed with every reading,” the mandate with which Joyce wrote Afternoon. He had become a home computer hobbyist, acquiring first an Apple II and later a Macintosh. Early in January of 1982 (the same year “the computer” would be dubbed Time Magazine‘s “Man of the Year”) Joyce wrote to Howard Becker, a sociologist at Northwestern who had read and admired his first novel and whom Joyce has since characterized as his earliest hypertext supporter. Becker was a self-professed Apple evangelist.
 

(168-69)

Kirschenbaum’s account ends, meanwhile, not with Joyce’s own authorial closing parenthesis of 2004, under that sepulchral rock cairn, but with an equally moving first-person narrative of Kirschenbaum’s own archival work with the Michael Joyce Papers now housed at the University of Texas. This was singularly temporizing work, involving the emulation of obsolete software environments and other forms of “hacking” at the intersection of what Kirschenbaum distinguishes, in a conceit fundamental to his argument, as “forensic” and “formal” concepts of medial materiality. Fittingly, perhaps, it is the one moment in this industrious and exacting work of structural retrospection when its author yields to the melancholy of the digital archive’s unavoidable juxtaposition of immaterially presentist facilitations with the future anterior dilations of software and bit rot:

The digital objects in the DSpace repository are what are known in the trade as BLOBs, Binary Large OBjects. DSpace knows how to manage both item-level metadata and access to these files, but it does not facilitate the use of them. To actually work with the Afternoons or with any other material it must first be downloaded to the desktop of the Ransom Center’s laptop, where I use what means and know-how I can to make cranky old binaries execute on the up-to-date operating system. Sometimes I am unsuccessful…. At the end of every work day I leave the Ransom Center and cross busy Guadalupe Street to a coffeehouse that offers public WiFi service. I log on and immediately copy and paste my notes into an e-mail message that I send to myself, the bits beamed into the late Austin afternoon to be sprayed across the surface of a hard disk spinning in the silo of a server farm I will never see.
 

(207-8)

 
Objects hidden in space and vanished in time are juxtaposed, here, in an analogy for the distinction between forensic and formal materiality (the bit as inscribed, yet only microscopically legible, vs. the bit as manipulable self-present symbol), itself designed to facilitate a procedural intervention in the wayward idealism of new media literary studies, without allowing it much of an answer. To the extent that that distinction informs Kirschenbaum’s approach to Afternoon as an archival object, it includes a pointed demonstration of critical distance from one of the fancies of so-called first-wave hypertext criticism, in a gambit that does more to emplace Kirschenbaum’s study in the dislocations of its own moment than anything else in the book. That fancy is the euphoric identification of electronic writing or textuality, in its play of absence and presence, with the theses of poststructuralist literary and cultural theory, as exemplified in George P. Landow’s landmark 1991 study Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.
 
Landow’s book, Kirschenbaum reminds us, was typical in placing Joyce’s Afternoon at its center, as a reunion of the mutually alienated cultures of the writer and critic, as well as a triumphally performative material enactment of antithetic poststructuralist “theories” whose thetically conceived credibility was under assault, then as now, from latter-day Johnsons willing to bruise their toes on the rock of positive common sense to score a point. This untimely “convergence,” which Landow more or less continues to defend in the updates producing Hypertext 2.0 (1997) and Hypertext 3.0 (2006), was right from the start, Kirschenbaum tells us, “oddly out of step with mainstream literary studies,” which had already sloughed off its poststructuralist torment for (a presumably less culpably faddish) cultural studies and the new historicisms (165). But it turns out that the impairment of Hypertext‘s critical modernity, as Kirschenbaum sees it, has another, deeper or wider source, in the “latent Romanticism” of literary studies of which poststructuralist criticism was merely a single convenient symptom, and which Kirschenbaum suggests infected “much of the writing about the experience of reading (or playing) Afternoon” (166).
 
Aware, for all that, that the period under discussion was not simply a moment of addled hallucination, but a meaningfully different critical-historical conjuncture, Kirschenbaum makes a somewhat cursory nod, in Mechanisms‘ coda, to the simultaneously ethnographic and philosophically critical concept of media appropriate to cultures that still, so to speak, believe in ghosts–or modernities in revolt:
 

The recovery of the past through objects in the present is our one recourse, besides spiritualism, to satisfying a desire to speak with the dead. Storage, which I have discussed throughout this book, is all about creating a systemized space in which this activity can unfold.
 

(251)

But Kirschenbaum does not seem all that interested in the negativity of the spectral that was integral to the French poststructuralist teratology of Nietzsche with Freud and Marx, through which we might say the subject of Euro-Atlantic techno-modernity, at a particular criticalhistorical conjuncture, pursued the ethical imagination of the unheard (or the violently silenced) speech in its “dead” peripheries. That, if anything, needs to be taken as the most charitable understanding of the impulse that drove what Kirschenbaum calls “high poststructuralism,” read not for its theses on the administered world of literary criticism, but for the indirection, both modal and stylistic, through which it operated as what the Jameson of the 1970s, himself barely tolerating its challenge to Lukácsian Marxism, calls a “problem of continuity” (Marxism 50).

 
To be sure, Landow’s exponence of hypertext was characterized by an eagerness to make connections that were always, in his own eyes (and his own words), slightly embarrassing.²² But that is perhaps merely a way of pointing to its roots in a tradition (Jameson’s word) other than, and other to, the Anglo-American tradition in which Kirschenbaum’s own determinedly empiricist work appears to move–and which carries what Jameson calls an “anti-speculative bias,” in the emphasis placed “on the individual fact or item at the expense of the network of relationship in which that item may be embedded.” The liberal positivism of that tradition, Jameson tells us, is characteristically resistant to the forging of fanciful links (Marxism x)–among such ostensibly irreconcilable categories, for example, as a software program and a theory of reading. To this observation, one would perhaps have to add Adorno’s trenchant readings of that chorismos or “block” in the Kantian modernity to which he saw Euro-Atlantic thought as having regressed today–yet which he characterizes, with something more (or less) than uncomplicated hostility, as “what a Romantic artist once named the innermost life of the world” (Kant’s Critique 178). It is no pointlessly arcane disclamation to observe that Jameson’s dialectical thought shares with poststructuralist theory (or whatever we want to call it) a stance inimical to that disavowal of reflexive critical attention that is in some ways implicit in thirdwave new media criticism’s disavowal of its first-wave pro-theoretical naïveté–as it is explicit, perhaps, in a now vast corpus of restorationist work on literary studies “after theory.” Implicit and explicit, we might say, in the disavowal of poststructuralism, is a disavowal above all of the need to read that massive corpus of cultural criticism, grounded in Continental European philosophy and social theory, that was generated in its name–and to read it, so to speak, closely: a term marking not claims for the ontological primacy or exclusivity of texts, but simply the practice of not taking things literally, of thinking twice, looking before one leaps, and so on. All the uncomfortable pauses in textual practice, that is to say, that in truth do interfere in the regimented progress of a properly professional body of work (Joyce’s own irregular and finally negative path to his professional profile today is ample evidence of that). Counterposed with such ritual circumscription, Landow’s inadroit claim for hypertext as the embodiment of literary theory (and later, as the disembodiment of postcoloniality)²³ might be described as sincerely enthusiastic.
 
But Landow’s pronouncements were perhaps never as unreflectively thetic, in the first place, as Kirschenbaum, with others before him, makes them out to be. In the tropisms of those “shocks of recognition,” of those concepts that “cry out for hypertextuality” (Hypertext 3.0 1, 53), one finds not, in fact, the advancement of theses, but rather imagined comparisons between factical and fictional worlds–offered not to falsifiability tests, but to what Elizabeth Bruss, writing in 1982, calls the criterial, rather than evidential ground of argument (44). Indeed, one might say this was the very premise of the now justly famous opening gambit of Hypertext:
 

When designers of computer software examine the pages of Glas or Of Grammatology, they encounter a digitalized, hypertextual Derrida; and when literary theorists examine Literary Machines, they encounter a deconstructionist or poststructuralist Nelson. These shocks of recognition can occur because over the past several decades literary theory and computer hypertext, apparently unconnected areas of inquiry, have increasingly converged…. A paradigm shift, I suggest, has begun to take place in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Theodor Nelson, Roland Barthes and Andries van Dam. I expect that one name in each pair will be unknown to most of my readers.
 

(Hypertext 3.0 1)

To be sure, Kirschenbaum’s extended argument for the diachronic remanence of data in inscribed storage, over its static ephemerality in the endless present of screen memory, is a successful corrective of some bad habits in the reception of new media literary artifacts–including what he would call the “medial ideology” of self-evident representation, as marked by the volatile enthusiasm Landow imputes, in this more or less famous passage, to the “encounter” between theory and machine. Quite plausibly, those bad habits were themselves built on bad habits in the Anglo-American literary reception of the endgame of continental European philosophy, as an import substitution scheme and editorial racket the legacies of which have yet to be sorted out coherently even today. Speaking as a literary scholar, writer and humanist partisan who for five years has used a Concurrent Versioning System repository for all of my text production, itself taking the form of document-records simply numbered in time, I was delighted to find in Kirschenbaum’s book a substantive meditation on a problem I had so far been unable to frame for myself with any degree of critical adequacy whatsoever. While checking into my personal CVS repository successive drafts of the essay you are now reading, on this page or screen, I realized why, for reasons Kirschenbaum’s book has helped me think through, that practice of self-archiving has displaced my own previously vigorous interest in “screening” individual new media literary artworks, as a primary mode of “doing” new media studies, in the sense that one “does” one’s work in one’s field.²⁴ It is the cyclic or folded temporality and historicity in critical practice itself, we might say, that goes missing in the acquisitive pursuit of critical objects whose volatility our very profession forces us to undermeasure.

 
I must admit I am haunted, on the other hand, by the confidence implied by Kirschenbaum’s emphasis on the persistence of data, in the legacies of the inscribing technologies of nineteenth-century Euro-Atlantic imperial modernity–and in the confidence it implies in that modernity as a civilization.²⁵ Among other places, it was precisely in that firstwave hypertext theory, which Kirschenbaum (not without precedent) now proposes we discard, that what we might call poststructuralist essayism “survived,” in the sense of that term familiar to readers of Derrida’s readings of Benjamin’s altogether too famous essay on translation, where it marks the fragile founding twilight of “our” modernity as a guarantor of secular truth. Indeed, this emphasis on continuity seems to sit at some odds with the reaching for figures of cyclic or folded temporality, in some of the more imaginative new work emerging from the field into which the argument of Kirschenbaum’s book is crafted to intervene²⁶–work one can read as embracing a newly self-conscious and justly sensitive form of temporizing attention to its own imperial Euro-Atlantic First Worldism. To its own dependence, that is to say, on wealthdependent (and as such, highly leveraged) habits and levels of energy consumption. If, among its many valuably singular insights, Mechanisms contains one potentially fatal intellectual infelicity, it lies in this emphasis on the remanence of data, deployed against the virtualities of the poststructuralist imagination, at precisely that cultural moment when the permanence of the progressive civilizational legacies of Euro-Atlantic modernity is a question, rather than an answer, for more core subjects of the United States empire than at any time since the 1970s.
 
In postwar U.S. literary studies at its boldest, anyway, “literarity” has always been understood to include the undisciplined Nietzschean temporality of the event, as well as its Weberian secular avocation. Kirschenbaum glances in this direction, I think, when he concedes that “software is also ineluctably part of a proleptic now” (203), empirically affirming Joyce’s own assertion, in the lines echoing Marx and Engels that Kirschenbaum quotes from Of Two Minds, that “Electronic text appears as dissipate mist” (233). But that assertion, like others in Joyce’s essay into which it is woven, is rhetorical–by which I mean simply that we are forced to find in it the possibility, the certainty, even, that Joyce was and is saying something other than, or in addition to, what he actually wrote. What we call poststructuralist theory, which we would do better to call poststructuralist writing, was not a body of falsifiable propositions, least of all about the positive qualitative ephemerality of anything, including the object “writing.” What we call poststructuralist theory, in its particulate presence in U.S. literary culture, was an intensity of writing practice through which the works of Derrida, Deleuze, and all the other usual suspects served temporarily to reverse the programmatic suppression of rhetoricity in bureaucratic academic modernism. As a committedly literary user of the Concurrent Versioning System whose arborescent constraint Kirschenbaum delicately counterposes with the rhizomorphist euphoria of literary theory,²⁷ let me insist that, all revisionist hopes and dreams notwithstanding, the disciplinary question of what we call “theory” is still very much unsettled. Because as an essayist I set out (with no illusions of freedom) to write rhetorical essays, rather than deliberatively structured text, the hierarchical tree that I cannot escape is something for which I nevertheless have no substantive use. And to speak of archiving, rather than writing, I find little need, in preserving my own work, for the disciplined programmer’s branch invoked by Kirschenbaum against early hypertext theory’s imagined comparisons, which he permits to be marked, in his text, as another form of humanist naïveté. That he claims, on one page of Mechanisms, that the appeal of poststructuralism for new media studies has been “abandoned, or at least … diluted” (43), and on the next that the “medial ideology” it promoted remains entirely intact (45), speaks to the weight that the CVS tree is being made to bear, in the strife of faculties marking Kirschenbaum’s clearing of space for himself in critical history:
 

From this perspective the poststructuralism that has held sway over discussions of electronic writing since the late 1980s is a demonstrable medial artifact, one that had more to do with its moment (and marketing) than with the fundamental nature of electronic textuality. By contrast, an industrial-strength CVS environment is perhaps the ultimate realization of the kind of document science that has been practiced since the first stemma were printed in 1827 to display the relationships amongst a group of Swedish legal manuscripts.
 

(201)

 
To demand, as Kirschenbaum demands, that those who study books also study software, is to make claims on the modernity of literary studies itself, asserting priority for the mechanism and its technical administration (and administrators) at a level that exceeds the modesty, and indeed the genuine appeal, of Kirschenbaum’s proposals for those of his readers already with him in the letter, if in agreement or disagreement in spirit–and rather than not yet there. New media studies has always generated forward momentum through grandiose claims for renovation and threatened consequences for those left (or staying) behind, and while it seems only fair to grant Kirschenbaum’s own theses their own aspect of indirection, it needs to be said that since no “poststructuralist theorist” has ever asserted thetically the ideal rhizomorphism of anything, be that anything textual or nontextual, first-wave hypertext theory cannot credibly be accused of doing that, either, no matter how crudely and schematically some of its individual exponents may have (and have been) read. The critical clout of Kirschenbaum’s intervention pales where its foils are literally spectral, in this sense–a kind of ghost data, or intrasystemic ideal–and where “poststructuralist theory,” the thing he pursues to debunk, eludes him only because it was never there.
 
Joyce’s sentence “Electronic text appears as dissipate mist” was written in the language of manifesto–which as Janet Lyon observes in her study of the form, “marks the point of impact where the idea of radical egalitarianism runs up against the entrenchment of an ancien régime” (1) and is difficult to read, in so far as “its apparent rhetorical straightforwardness obscures the degree to which the form is embedded in the contradictions of political representation” (2). In its “literally, inexorably, and grindingly absolute” linearity, the genetic CVS architecture that Kirschenbaum mobilizes against the misguidedly rhizomorphist theses of poststructuralist theory (and its hypertext-theoretic avatars) seems in some ways to serve to reproach Landow not only for his bureaucratic First-Worldist left anarchism, but for the still more irredeemable excess of a vision of hypertext as decolonization, as well.²⁸ But it was Edward Said himself who, in the essay that places the anti-systemic form of the essay at the heart of what Said calls “secular criticism,” describes Euro-Atlantic imperial modernity as a product of the inexorably democratic displacement of the natal and vertical filiations of family and culture, by institutions such as the university, whose social character was best figured as agenealogically horizontal (17). To the extent that such “affiliation,” whether conservative (in, e.g., Eliot) or progressive (in Lukács), tends to recreate a “systematic totalizing world-view”–that is, to reinstate, in new form, the authority previously evacuated from genealogical filiation–Said argues that affiliative orders become cultural systems through which university-based intellectuals, for example, lose touch, in time, with “the resistance and the heterogeneity of civil society” (26). Despite the abdication of the genuinely insurrectionary literary theory of the 1960s (Said is no more sympathetic to “poststructuralism” than Jameson), this compensatory cultural system, Said suggests in 1983, is now feeling decisive pressure for the first time, as the dynamic legacy of decolonization replants the world-system’s peripheral regions squarely in front of (and even within) the campus gate. That one looks in vain, in the pages of Mechanisms, for any sense of that pressure, leaves one wondering what has replaced it–and what form its own criticism must take.
 
An antipositivist might take a page, so to speak, from the double negation of a romantically ironic book on note-taking entitled “How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think.” That “book” is a freely available PDF document authored by software programmer Lion Kimbro, who advocates the deliberate creation, in note-taking practice, of what, with doomed aspiration to polysyntactic perversity, he calls “imaginary false links.”²⁹ Here is a useful point of convergence–or opposition–between comparative literary-critical practice and new media studies. In the now strategically anachronistic first-wave ephemeralist concept of the differential hyperlink, a liminal interval traversing and demarcating at the same time, one might determine a homology with what Adorno (writing in 1958) calls the essay as form, in which our non-elective capitulation to modernity is balanced by a non-frivolous dream of freedom (“Der Essay”). Is it really too much to say, lending the word all the weight it deserves, that this matters?