Materiality is the Message

Del Doughty

Department of English
Huntington College
ddoughty@huntington.edu

 

Review of: N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines.Mediawork Pamphlet. Cambridge: MIT P, 2002.

 

The first thing I noticed about N. Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines was its design: its slimness (138 pages) and its texture. The pages are printed on the heavy, glossy paper typical of fashion magazines or catalogues, and the book’s cover is slightly corrugated, so that in running one’s fingers vertically down the front it feels smooth, but in moving horizontally one gets the sensation of tiny ridges. Inside, its slick black-and-white pages–with their variety of font styles, cut-and-pasted text samples, and handsome illustrations–contribute to the book’s visual appeal.

 

That Writing Machines is a lovely book to hold, and to behold, is no accident, for it is a book about books: specifically, it is a book that inquires about the material aspect of books in a digital age. Peter Lunenfeld, editorial director of the MIT Mediaworks Pamphlet series, characterizes the volume as a “theoretical fetish object” with “visual and tactile” as well as intellectual appeal, and media designer Anne Burdick, who collaborated with Hayles on the project from the early stages of its development, has accomplished nothing less than a reinvention of the codex as a textual interface.

 

Burdick also designed the text’s website–a virtual space where the interrogation of the concept “book” continues (< http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork>). Indices, notes, bibliographies–these we usually consider to be important parts of the academic monograph, but in Writing Machines these elements have been displaced to the website, along with navigable entries for errata, source material, and a very useful “lexicon linkmap,” which offers succinct definitions of key terms. The site has the appearance of an open book with sticky notes marking its various sections, and it thus embodies the theme of remediation, which is a recurring motif in the texts that Hayles discusses.

 

Hayles is Professor of English and Design | Media Arts at UCLA, but she holds a graduate degree in chemistry from Caltech and has for two decades written persuasively on the intersections between chaos, computer science, informatics, and literature, which is to say, the emerging field of posthumanism. Indeed, her previous book, How We Became Posthuman (U of Chicago P, 1999), defines that very field. Here she once again proves herself an unapologetic champion of embodiment at a time when many people are enamored of the idea that the essence of life is an abstract code, or that the human body is a prosthesis that can be configured seamlessly into/with machines. As Hayles writes,

 

a critical practice that ignores materiality, or that reduces it to a narrow range of engagements, cuts itself off from the exuberant possibilities of all the unpredictable things that happen when we as embodied creatures interact with the rich physicality of the world. Literature was never only words, never merely immaterial verbal constructions. Literary texts, like us, have bodies, an actuality necessitating that their materialities and meanings are deeply interwoven into each other. (107)

 

Readers of How We Became Posthuman will recognize Writing Machines as a logical extension of issues addressed in the earlier book.

 

The question that prompts Writing Machines is in fact a simple one: why don’t we hear more about materiality? Hayles complains that only in a few of the less glamorous, more specialized academic fields, such as bibliography or textual studies, does materiality merit much attention. Even cultural studies might do better. For Hayles the digital revolution is not so much about the triumph of computers over books, but a chance to rouse literary studies from the “somnolence” induced by “500 years of the dominance of print.” She therefore raises the call for more media-specific analyses. Two key terms involved in such a project would be “material metaphor” and “technotext.” The former term signifies the “traffic between words and physical artifacts,” while the latter denotes the literary work that “interrogates the inscription technology that produces it.” Computers, which process symbols according to programs that embody sets of instructions, are obviously material metaphors, but so are books, Hayles reminds us, and their interfaces can be every bit as sophisticated as literary machines with phosphor screens.

 

So what does a media-specific analysis look like? Part of the value of Writing Machines derives from Hayles’s close readings of three recent technotexts: Talan Memmot’s web artwork Lexia to Perplexia (2000); Tom Phillips’s artists’ book A Humument (1987); and Mark Danielewski’s “postprint” novel House of Leaves (2000). The first of these pieces almost defies description, and Hayles’s patience in unfolding such a challenging work deserves praise. Lexia to Perplexia is a hybrid theoretical text that, for all of the difficulty it presents readers/users, actually “performs subjectivity” and thus turns out to be, in Hayles’s estimation, an important piece of evidence for the argument that humans co-evolve with their inscription technologies. Hayles contends that Lexia works by configuring its users as simulations through at least four strategies:

 

• the user actions (choosing links, pointing-and-clicking, mousing over) required to navigate the site;
• a sophisticated set of evolving images and hieroglyphics (eyes, funnels, curly brackets) that “invite the user to see herself as a permeable membrane through which information flows”;
• a creolized, neologized language of English, computer code such as HTML and Java, and mathematical formulae; and
• an allusive retelling of the familiar Echo and Narcissus myth in that very same–and very unfamiliar–creole.

 

In defamiliarizing the conventions of reading and symbol-processing this way, Memmott’s text exposes the low-level assumptions that undergird our own human reading programs. Reading is seen here as an artificial behavior, not a natural one.

 

One of the chief difficulties of reading Lexia stems from the fact that the writing on the screen is often illegible. Rather than supplant one screen or piece of text with another, as is the custom in hypertext writing, Memmott piles one swatch of text on top of another, so that the resulting occlusions make it laborious, if not impossible, to read. Hayles sees this very illegibility as another of Memmott’s ways of telling us that humans are becoming posthumans:

 

the text announces its difference from the human body through this illegibility, reminding us that the computer is also a writer, and moreover a writer whose operations we cannot wholly grasp in all their semiotic complexity. Illegibility is not simply a lack of meaning, then, but a signifier of distributed cognitive processes that construct reading as an active production of a cybernetic circuit and not merely an internal activity of the human mind. (51)

 

Tom Phillips’s A Humument is every bit as palimpsestic as Lexia and every bit as amazing. Phillips is an artist who, so the story goes, wanted to make the visual equivalent of a Burroughs-style cut-up. He browsed the London bookstores one afternoon and selected at random the first novel he could find that cost less than three pence: William Mallock’s A Human Document (1892), a conventional Victorian-era love story of two young people, Robert Grenville and Irma Schilizzi, whose sad account is pieced into a tactful and seamless whole from journals, diary entries, and letters by an unnamed editor. In cutting up or “treating” the novel, Phillips reverses the flow of the fictional editor’s narrative work by turning the whole back into fragments. Phillips accomplishes this feat by visually decorating every page of the novel in a different style. Sentences and even whole paragraphs are blocked out, cross-hatched, scribbled over, painted, or otherwise rendered into the elements of some new design. (Phillips’s inventiveness seems limitless–A Humument is a stunning book of portraits, landscapes, tableaus, and abstract designs.) The story, which is now told mostly in illustrations and a few scraps of surviving text on each page, concerns Irma and–in a twist–a character named “Toge,” whose name derives only from the words “together” or “altogether” in Mallock’s original text. Like his predecessor Grenville–and like virtually all Romantic lovers–Toge yearns for Irma, but unlike other heroes from nineteenth-century British fiction, Toge lacks even a hint of an autonomous, independent self. In Phillips’s world, Toge’s subjectivity is clearly a product of Mallock’s text as it is sliced and spliced by the designer’s set of inks and brushes–or, as Hayles puts it, “the processes that inscribe Toge’s form as a durable mark embody a multiplication of agency that, at the very least complicates, if it does not altogether subvert, his verbal construction as a solitary yearning individual” (89). She then notes how, on page 165, Phillips renders an “amoeba-like” portrait of Toge’s face with Mallock’s words bleeding through the shadowed portions of the image. Hayles is ever attentive to reading images this way, and, knowing that Phillips’s work is not a best-seller, she and Burdick give ample space to the pages of Phillips’s work in Writing Machines so that their readers can see first-hand the illustrations Hayles discusses.

 

Hayles notes that in A Humument “the page is never allowed to disappear by serving only as the portal to an imagined world as it does with realistic fiction. In many ways and on many levels, A Humument insists on its materiality” (96). In her final piece of analysis, Hayles demonstrates how the same is true of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. While the novel may have gained a cult following among horror fans, it is also very much about writing and mediation, and Hayles effectively shows how these subjects dominate the story (which concerns, briefly, the assembly of a book about a book about an unpublished analysis of a documentary film about a house that, by the laws of physics, cannot possibly exist). None of the major characters, for example, can be known apart from the material practices through which they are presented. To wit: Will Navidson, the owner of the house, appears only in his photographs and his documentary film; Zampano, the old man who researches the film, becomes known to us only as the subject of a book by Johnny Truant, tattoo artist; Pelafina, Johnny’s institutionalized mother, writes letters to her son that form, along with the text of Johnny’s edition of Zampano’s writings, the novel as we receive it. Even the very typography of the novel reveals to readers that House is a book that explores the material properties of the codex: flipping through the pages, one sees that the orientation of the print runs riot in all directions (forwards, up and down, around the page, in reverse), that footnotes occasionally take over the main text and, in the case of note 144, challenge the opacity of the page itself.

 

At one point in her discussion, Hayles offers a provocative comparison to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In that touchstone of modernism, Conrad layers his narrative voices through Marlow, but he does not account for “how these multiple orations are transcribed into writing.” Not so in House, says Hayles, where “consciousness is never seen apart from mediating inscription devices” (116). If Heart of Darkness provides us with the paradigmatic unreliable narrator, House of Leaves provides us, at the turn of the posthuman era, with the paradigm of the “remediated narrator”: “the speaker whose consciousness cannot be separated from the media used to represent him/her” (Lexicon Linkmap).

 

Writing Machines marks more than just the passing of an old narrative strategy: it also marks the beginning of an indifference to old critical methodologies. Often in Writing Machines Hayles cites personal encounters with the writers she’s discussing–she cites emails she exchanged with Memmott and describes a conversation she had with Danielewski one afternoon at a Santa Monica bar. It is hard to imagine Cleanth Brooks or Robert Penn Warren taking the same approach to their readings of, say, Faulkner. Hayles is too committed to embodiment to suffer the foolishness of the affective fallacy. She shares a material infrastructure with these people, and while Hayles and Memmott and Danielewski would all likely acknowledge that their respective subjectivities are nodes embedded in a vast social, textual network, Hayles, at least, would not accept the idea of an enforced separation between the informational entity that is “N. Katherine Hayles” and the physical agent to which it is attached.

 

And it is this refusal that accounts for a fair amount of the book’s richness. The odd-numbered chapters of Writing Machines recount the intellectual biography of an author-surrogate named Kaye and provide a sort of counterpoint to the even-numbered chapters, which discuss the three works already mentioned. Here we see Kaye as the product of a typical Midwestern small-town home, a bright young curious girl who reads voraciously and then goes off to study at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Caltech, where she is torn between science and literature. She gets graduate degrees in chemistry and literature, but it is not until she is a few years into her first job at an Ivy League job that she finds the object that allows her to bring both interests together: the desktop PC. Her English colleagues are slow to warm to this new tool, but Kaye, intuiting its possibilities and its promise, thrills at the little-known texts written in what she understands as a new medium: Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story; Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl; M.D. Coverly’s Califia; Dianne Slattery’s Glide; and Espen Aarseth’s prescient study Cybertext: Toward a Theory of Ergodic Literature–all of which are canonical texts in what she calls the “first generation” of hypertext.

 

Chapter 5 relates, with particular vividness, the story of a serendipitous discovery for Kaye: the tradition of artists’ books. Throughout Writing Machines it is apparent that Hayles has a richer idea of what a book is than most people, and this is why: Hayles describes a research trip to New York City’s MOMA and offers her candid descriptions of Kaye’s pleasure at finding such treasures as Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover, Karen Chance’s Parallax, and Roberta Allen’s Pointless Arrows–books well off the beaten commercial path and that most literature professors are, sadly, unlikely ever to know. Indeed, Hayles does not go out of her way to hide the fact that she likes the books she reads–in cataloging her favorite things about Danielewski’s book, for instance, and trying to decide among them, she finally gushes: “for my part I like all of it, especially its encyclopedic impulse to make a world and encapsulate everything within its expanding perimeter, as if it were an exploding universe whose boundaries keep receding from the center with increasing velocity” (125).

 

Chapter 7, the final autobiographical chapter, reflects on the meaning of theory in the sciences and the humanities and returns us to Hayles’s present-day concern–that is, the establishment of a field of media-specific analysis. Hayles hopes that this discourse will produce more texts like her Writing Machines, more “double-braided texts” where “the generalities of theory and the particularities of personal experience can both speak.” And in the spirit of her work, I would affirm that her hopes would soon come to pass.