d i a p s a l m a t a

A Blank Poem (1723); or, the Present of Absence

2010-08-29T10:25:00.009-04:00

Can you read that?

It's a catalog entry for "The First of April: a blank poem in commendation of the suppos'd author of a poem lately publish'd, call'd Ridotto, or, Downfal of masquerades," printed in London in -- 1704? Sometime after 1723 is more likely, since that's when the Ridotto; or, Downfall of Masquerades was published. What's curious about this poem --

-- is that it's a blank poem. After the title page and a dedication -- "To No Body," of course -- the paper is blank, save the occasional asterisk indicating footnotes. One, marked by a dagger in the center of the page, reads: "An Elleipsis, or leaving something to be understood by the Reader."

Has anyone seen this pamphlet?

I haven't. I originally noticed its citation while poking through D. F. Foxon's English Verse, 1701-1750 at Rare Book School. Quite helpfully, Foxon includes a index of oddities he came across during the twenty-five years he spent compiling and refining his bibliography. One category, "blanks," caught my eye, given the recent interest in the topic of "blankness" by Lisa Gitelman (see the video below) and Peter Stallybrass.

A Short History of [Blank] - Lisa Gitelman (2009) PT 1 from joncates on Vimeo.

I dug around a bit more and found this copy -- the only extant copy? -- in Penn's collection, as well as a single mention in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Vol. 45) of the poem's mention in the London Mercury of May 1928.

A queer little book has recently come into the hands of Messrs. Hodgson, of 115 Chancery Lane, who have been kind enough to send it for me to see. This is a quarto pamphlet of six leaves, called The First of April : A Blank Poem, In Commendation of the suppos'd Author of a Poem lately publish'd, call'd, Ridotto, or Downfall of Masquerades, and it was published, "Price Three-pence," by "J. Graves, next White's Chocolate House, St. James's-Street." There is no date but it looks as if it had appeared late in the seventeenth century, or perhaps early in the eighteenth. At any rate it must have been after 1693, for Francis White did not set up his chocolate-house until later that year. [Good to know.] The whole publication is, of course, an April Fool's Day jest, and the humour lies, or is intended to lie, in the fact that the reader (having paid his threepence) finds himself faced with a title-page, a long dedication, and then three pages with a woodcut ornament above the heading The First of April, a number of asterisks and footnotes, and "Finis" at the end, but no text! [...] The Dedication is, naturally, also facetious, and is addrsesed "To No Body," to whom many extravagant compliments are paid, since No Body "was born before Adam," and "No Body is exempt from dying." Further than this, "Who believes," asks the Author, "that the Tithe of the English C---gy lead exemplary Lives? No Body believes it. What a glaring Instance is here of your Superior Charity, and more unlimited Faith!" There is, of course, a good deal more of this "No Body" joke, which, elementary as it is, seems to be one of which mankind never tires. [...] The joke does not seem to me to be quite funny enough to merit a life of two and a quarter centuries -- and probably a great deal more than that!

Williams is right about that. It's clever, though. We tend to see the poetic deployment of "blankness" as modern or even post-modern; it's terrain for Derrida and Blanchot reading Mallarmé writing about the "blankness of the white paper; a significant silence that it is no less lovely to compose than verse." It's the silence of Cage; it's the whiteness of margins whose vacuum of signification has sucked up an excess of significance. It's the blank stare. If Shakespeare invented human nature through language -- and Keats inked the blank pages of Shakespeare's Poetical Works with his own handwritten sonnets -- we've perfected the alchemy of turning absence to presence, of creating from a profoundly uncreative void.

So what is this "queer little book" doing? Paper was still expensive around this time, we're told. It would have made up the bulk of any printer's expenses in producing a book. Studies in marginalia, like Will Sherman's Used Books, show how earlier Renaissance readers often exploited the blank paper in books as writing pads; and why paper-intensive projects, like John Foxe's commonplace book of 1,200 all-but-blank pages, were such a risk for printers. (Foxe's commonplace book failed, the unsold sheets recycled to print two later texts -- take a look at Sherman's discussion around page 138 of Used Books). Although produced over a century later, this blank poem still seems a "waste" economically, especially for an April Fool's joke.

And clearly "blankness" isn't being theorized the way it is in, say, Mallarmé. Here, the "First of April" is the blank -- the Ridotto it "commends" is the blank -- in short, blankness is sarcasm; it signifies the nothingness and "No Body" of what it's supposed to celebrate. It's a conceptual poem that exploits its medium, but doesn't, it seem, rise to the level of a "poetics of blankness." Which is probably why I'm drawn to it. It's absence isn't theorized presence, but stands for simply absence itself. A No Thing ironically made known through the very "thingness" -- the necessary "thingness" -- of itself.

Of course, all this is written about a poem I've never seen firsthand -- whose existence to me is no more than a constellation of bibliographical citations. In other words, the blank poem is blank to me, blank to scholarship, blank to all but the very few who have left traces of its presence in their own work. Difficult to reproduce and impossible to anthologize, the very absence of text makes its material presence necessary, since its physical form bears the weight of signification.

So, short of trip to Penn, blank it shall remain.

A model for creative digital scholarship.

2010-08-24T19:17:00.003-04:00

Leibniz is endlessly drawing up linear and numerical tables. With them he decorates the inner walls of the monad. Folds replace holes. The dyad of the city-information table is opposed to the system of the window-countryside. Leibniz's monad would be just such a grid -- or better, a room or an apartment -- completely covered with lines of variable inflection. This would be the camera obscura of the New Essays, furnished with a stretched canvas diversified by moving, living folds. Essential to the monad is its dark background: everything is drawn out of it, and nothing goes out or comes in from the outside.

//Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (27)

Early Modern works on Librivox

2010-08-10T11:02:00.001-04:00

Today, I completed my thirty-sixth -- and final -- hour of Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, the audiobook.

I've tried (and failed) to complete Tom Jones the "old-fashioned" way on two earlier occasions, but only managed success by marrying the wonder of spoken word to a hand-eye task just routinely dull enough to make the novel comparably exciting.

To celebrate, I'm posting a few of the early modern English works I've found on Librivox. Librivox -- a site that provides audiobooks of works in the public domain -- is a surprisingly decent resource for early modern literature, since (of course) it's all already in the public domain. (It's okay for medieval, too, but great for nineteenth-century stuff.) Unfortunately, the site's search is limited to, more or less, "Author," "Title" and "Category," making it difficult to stumble across works in your period unless you know to look for them. Having users curate private collections of "favorite listening" could fill in the gaps. This list is a step in that direction.

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

--------------, Essays

George Chapman, "Hero and Leander"

Richard Crashaw, "Love's Horoscope", from Short Poetry Collection 019

John Donne, "Death Be Not Proud"

------------, "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions"

------------, Holy Sonnets I-XIX, other divine poems

------------, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", from Short Poetry Collection 088

George Herbert, Selections from The Temple

Robert Herrick, "Cherry-Ripe", from Short Poetry Collection 057

---------------, "The Night-piece: To Julia", from Short Poetry Collection 060

---------------, "Saint Distaff's Day"

---------------, "To Anthea", from Short Poetry Collection 017

---------------, "To Violets", from Short Poetry Collection 036

---------------, "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time", from Short Poetry Collection 052

---------------, "To the Western Wind", from Short Poetry Collection 036

---------------, "Upon Julia's Clothes," from Short Poetry Collection 020

---------------, "The Vine," from Short Poetry Collection 039

---------------, "Whenas in Silks", from Short Poetry Collection 029

Ben Jonson, The Forest

-----------, "Farewell to the World", from Short Poetry Collection 083

Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love", from Romantic Poetry 001

Andrew Marvell, "The Definition of Love", from Short Poetry Collection 013

----------------, "The First Anniversary of the Government Under His Highness the Lord Protector", from Short Poetry Collection 083

----------------, "An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return From Ireland", from Short Poetry Collection 083

----------------, "On a Drop of Dew", from Short Poetry Collection 065

----------------, "To His Coy Mistress"

----------------, "The Garden", from Short Poetry Collection 086

John Milton, Areopagitica

------------, Paradise Lost

------------, Paradise Regained

------------, Samson Agonistes

Sir Thomas More, Utopia

Dorothy Osborne, Love Letters

Katherine Philips, Poems

Sir Walter Raleigh, "The Lie"

William Shakespeare, "As You Like It"

---------------------, "Fidele"

---------------------, "Hamlet"

---------------------, "Julius Caesar"

---------------------, "King Lear"

---------------------, "Measure for Measure"

---------------------, "The Merchant of Venice"

---------------------, "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

---------------------, "Much Ado About Nothing"

---------------------, "Othello"

---------------------, "The Passionate Pilgrim"

---------------------, "Richard II"

---------------------, "Richard III"

---------------------, "Romeo and Juliet" (other versions available)

---------------------, Sonnets (other versions available)

Sir Philip Sydney, Astrophil and Stella

-----------------, "My True Love"

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (all 6 books)

-----------------, Prothalamion, from Long Poems 005

Sir John Suckling, "The Constant Lover"

John Wilmot, "A Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover"

Have any others to add?

Sir Hugh Platt's "Poem on a Fart"

2010-08-05T17:23:00.012-04:00

Looking for an e-text of Henry Power's poem "In Commendation of the Microscope" -- the manuscript of which is cited here, in this 1782 Catalogue of the manuscripts preserved in the British Museum hitherto undescribed --

-- I notice this:

Sir Hugh Platt, "Poem on a fart." An unpublished manuscript poem from the same Sir Hugh Plat (1552-1611) known for his pioneering work on helping tender-footed horses and composing cole-balls? Methinks mayhaps.

This catalogue is the only record that appears on a Google search, and EEBO doesn't contain a published version. The only other "Poem on a Fart" turned up by Google is much later: Don Fartinando Puff-indorst's 'e The Benefit of Farting explain'd: or the Fundament -- all Cause of the Distempers Incident to the FAIR-SEX: Proving, a Posteriori, most of the Dis-ordures In-tail'd upon them are owing to Flatulencies not seasonably vented (1722), appended with, you guessed it, "On a Fart, let in the House of Commons":

"On A Fart, let in the House of Commons"

Reader, I was born, and cried;
I crack'd, I smelt, and so I died.
Like Julius Caesar's was my death,
Who in the senate lost his breath.
Much alike entomb'd does lie
The noble Romulus and I:
And when I died, like Flora fair,
I left the commonwealth my heir.

Look -- it's even published in LONG-FART, for the use of the Lady Damp-fart of Her-fart-shire! Do the puns ever stop?!

Unfortunately, they do not. I wish I had the last hour of my life back.

An annotated catalog of conference ephemera, with promises and pictures

2010-08-01T18:51:00.007-04:00

The long silence is due to traveling, from Digital Humanities 2010 in London, to Material Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, and finally to Rare Book School at UVA to get drilled in the principles of descriptive bibliography. I learned and experienced too much to share it all; so, instead, here are a few bulleted memories in no particular order. Inclusion does not imply especial significance; exclusion doesn't imply uninterest. Read it as a Sunday evening exercise in cataloging a few scattered moments from across a month.

On my panel at Material Cultures were two other speakers whose research is worth highlighting: Amit Ray, who is doing interesting work on Wikipedia as a new "tower of Babel" (anglocentric though it may be); and Lisa Otty, who's doing wonderful work on digital poetry and modernism. Lisa looked at examples of "unbound" distributed narratives like Shelley Jackson's Skin, arguing that -- far from being materially "unbound," simply because they lack the codex form -- these works actually bind together new forms of textual communities, temporally and geographically. I liked her play on "binding," and her sensitive approach to materiality across literary media.

Alan Galey's work proves exactly how book historians can help digital humanists, and digital humanists can help book historians -- or maybe how the one can successfully be the other, I'm not sure. But you already knew that.

John McVey's investigations into several copies of John Todd's nineteenth-century Index Rerum have me wanting to take up book collecting more seriously. Index rerums were tabulated notebooks (a kind of printed commonplace book) for recording quotes, poems, books read and places visited. They were usually prefaced with instructions on moral rectitude and right learning, framing the practice of notating one's life as a kind of individual growth. The examples John has collected, though, quite delightfully resist these structures, telling us much about identity and memory, manuscript and print, the "blanks" of the printed page, and in fact how much book culture we neglect by focusing on literature, poetry, or the notebooks of notables. Check out some images from the Indexes John's collected, along with an introduction to their uses.

Some of the most interesting work being done in "Digital Humanities" right now is by those who may not explicitly identify with the community at all. A good example is Nate Matias, whom I had the pleasure of grabbing coffee with in London. He's been going back to the basics of visualizing (and notating) alternative pathways through a narrative in ways very similar to what excited me about combinatorial literature. Another good example is James Ascher, whom I met in person at Rare Book School last week. As a librarian and scholar, he's been thinking about models of collaboration between those trained in information management, those skilled in programming, and those who can provide intellectual leadership -- and, more importantly, how these collaborations will shape how we safeguard and access our cultural heritage. If asked, both of these thinkers would agree, I imagine, to being called "digital humanists" (correct me if I'm wrong, guys!) but are approaching their work from such radically different angles, driven by different motivations, that in a sense it's odd to call them part of the same community.

I got the chance to visit Little Gidding, where Nicholas Ferrar founded a religious commune in the seventeenth-century, and where the cut-and-paste "harmonized" Bibles I've mentioned here before were made. Also famous for the T. S. Eliot poem. I don't have much to say about it, except I highly recommend literary nerds, cut-up freaks and obscure seventeenth-century commune aficionados all make the pilgrimage.

I want to know more about the history of descriptive bibliography. As a little "code," collational formulae seem like such a rich area for historical inquiry. How did they come about? Under what needs/conditions -- driven by what assumptions? And what's with all the condensing, when the difference between a "conservative" and a "liberal" formula is only a character or two? (Could this be an artifact of the paper card catalog?) If anyone has any reading recommendations, please, please send them my way!

I also want to know more about how new media have changed descriptive bibliography. I hear tell of a program that visualizes the gatherings of a book, identifying where different pieces of type show up in any given text. This sounds amazing to me. Anyone have any links to share?

Smaller personal updates:

My piece "The Alphabet of Stars / This Fold of Lace," a reimagining of a Mallarmé quote for screen, was shown as part of the Deus Ex Pagina project at this weekend's Printer's Ball in Chicago. Fuller post on the piece coming soon.

I'm back at work on Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants (1682), researching how seventeenth-century microscopy -- and the technology of the book -- changed the relationship between plants and animals. It's a complex project, but will see publication both in print and as a piece of creative digital criticism (the digital is supposed to support the print, I imagine, but it will be entirely reversed in my case). More on this to come, but, in the meantime, if anyone knows any solid work on Grew; the changing "book of nature" idea in the Royal Society; the arbor inversa trope; mandrake roots in early modern botanicals; or any other examples of "planimals" (plant-animal hybrids, shared spirits), please do share! I'd also love to hear if you're working in a similar area.

I started a ~~wiki~~ Whiki to record my notes on articles,books, classes, conferences, talks, etc. Right now, only I can edit it (for the obvious reasons -- this is my personal record when it comes time to study for exams or write), but I welcome suggestions on reading and encourage anyone else to use it as an open resource to augment their own studies.

..and two relatively recent works of fiction that I highly recommend:

Q, by Luther Blissett (a pseudonym; actually collaboratively written). About identity (or lack thereof), anarchy, the Reformation, radicalism and a world of infinite possibilities. Super smart, ridiculously thought-provoking, and includes an entire section on a recent interest of mine, the Münster Rebellion of the 1530s, in which Anabaptists transformed an entire city into an anarcho-communist utopia (burning all bills of debt, making all property communal) before flipping it just as quickly into a horrifying theocracy, in which women were treated like cattle and dissidents beheaded. Q does amazing things rewriting the history -- replaying one of it's possibilities? -- of Anabaptism.

The People of Paper, by Salvador Plascencia. I've noticed Mark Sample pushing this book on Twitter a few times over the last few months and put it on my summer reading list. The first third had me interested, but not enthralled; then the metafictional section began, as characters stepped from the page as a way of proving how "paper" they are. It's a truly brilliant book about the materiality of the novel, about reading practices, about writing, and about, as Plascencia (a character in his own novel) puts it, "the commodification of sadness." Lovely for anyone with a deep interest in the structure and physicality of the book (or anyone else, really).

More to say, but until then, I have to catch some sleep. To a productive, but relaxing, August --

"Mass Media" --> Pack Media

2010-06-13T11:24:00.009-04:00

Print culture, mass media -- terms of convenience, yes; but also the terms we use to homogenize differences across structures of communication.

What's lost?

I've been thinking quite a bit about multitudes, particularly the rarely-mentioned "many"s that crop up throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature -- (that will have to remain for another post) -- and it's got me wondering about multitudes of media. It's become common to think of our current media ecology as one of mass media, by which hordes of people experience the same media content, simultaneously or at least closely in time. Television, film and radio are mass media; newspaper are mass media, as are magazines. Cable news is sometimes confusingly referred to as "mass media," since CNN, Fox News, et al. broadcast the same content countrywide. Printed books stretching back to the fifteenth-century are also lumped together with "mass media," even though prior to the nineteenth century print runs rarely exceeded 1,500 copies and, as Adrian Johns and others have shown, the "sameness" of any given copy within an edition was disputable due to rampant piracy and the use of stop-press corrections. In fact, although the term wasn't first used until 1923 in a book on Advertising & Selling (OED), the category "mass media" now anachronistically subsumes any form that delivers its content to more than one individual: the alphabet as mass media, manuscript as mass media, sound as mass media.

Quick media studies background for readers not acquainted: scholarship on media effects often takes the "mass-ness" of mass media for granted. Here, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's idea of media as "manufacturing consent" within a political populace is perhaps the best known and most widely influential example. However, influenced by the Birmingham school of cultural studies, other scholars like Henry Jenkins have challenged the notion that mass media and popular culture in general brainwash us, turning us all into consumeristic automata. Here, sites of resistance -- fan cultures, remixing, acts of appropriation -- are put forth to exemplify how the channels between creator and consumers are open, active, and contested, always subject to negotiation. For both groups -- the Chomskyan media effects crowd and those who attempt to legitimate popular culture -- the question turns on how active or passive the consumer is.

As much as I love Chomsky, I'm the kind of person who just has to believe in resistance -- in the freedom to resist, the freedom to challenge authority, power. Losing this capacity means losing the capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. Thus I want to believe that remix culture is a complex negotiation of values -- that the "textual poaching" of fan communities tears down the autonomy of authors and the relentless "sameness" of the work they produce. But this has never sat well with me. If appropriative uses of popular culture in some way challenge the hegemony of the very stuff they're made of, then revolution is reduced to a novel arrangement of old conditions -- in fact, is thereby premised on the very conditions it hopes to challenge. Mash-ups, cut-ups, remixes and rewrites expose virtual potentials in popular culture -- alternative dimensions, hidden absurdities, its underbelly of nonsense -- but are rarely productive of new worlds in themselves. They make us want revolution; but they aren't necessarily revolutionary.

I don't think the problem lies in popular culture itself, but with our very notion of "mass media." Mass -- from the Latin massa, a lumpish clump of dough; what is "mass" about television, radio, print? So-called "mass media" content is produced by relatively small groups of people negotiating particular sets of values and institutions; it's disseminated to large, diverse groups of people, broken into individuals or small clusters spatially isolated from each other, and is increasingly consumed on multiple scalable platforms, at different points in time. Even in a media culture less fragmented than our own -- say, for instance, 1950s television -- content was consumed in anything but a lumpish way. The "masses" sat alone in their living rooms, physically and psychologically insulated; they read alone in crowds, on subways and buses. Even the dark, raucus space of a movie theatre, crowded with noisy strangers, is designed to produce singular moments of connection between a film and its viewers or, at most, the viewer and his or her date, locked into an affective triangle.

I find myself unquestioningly typing the phase "mass media" over and over again in a paper on Dracula. I stop myself. Why?

Another fragment. I've been reading Elias Canetti on packs -- packs of wolves, packs of people:

In the pack which, from time to time, forms out of the group, and which most strongly expresses its feeling of unity, the individual can never lose himself as completely as modern man can in any crowd today. In the changing constellation of the pack, in its dances and expeditions, he will again and again find himself at its edge. He may be in the center, and then, immediately afterwards, at the edge again; at the edge and then back in the centre. When the pack forms a ring around the fire, each man will have neighbors to the right and left, but no one behind him; his back is naked and exposed to the wilderness.

// Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, 93

Deleuze and Guattari "recognize this as the schizo position, being on the periphery, holding on by a hand or a foot" (A Thousand Plateaus, 33-4). While, contra the pack, the mass subject identifies the "individual with the group, the group with the leader, and the leader with the group," forcing one to "get close to the center, never be at the edge," the ring-shaped pack has no "inside" or "outside," since each point along its surface is wholly equal in relation to every other point and to its surroundings. By arranging itself in this way, the pack can fluidly traverse its environment, molding itself to the topography of the terrain and its inhabitants without its structure hardening into hierarchies of leadership, as happens with the "masses"; for each member is as safe or as vulnerable as the next.

Thinking about mass media as pack media breaks through the producer/consumer dichotomies without appealing to awkward portmanteau like "produsage." It refuses a hard distinction between those who make media and those who consume it, since the pack produces and consumes in toto, each producer also acting as a consumer, and each consumer also locked into a productive relationship with other pack members. It allows for thinking of individuals as operating together without dissolving themselves into the lumpish mass. And it helps us think through how culture -- media culture, popular culture, remix culture -- makes meaning from minute points of connection, rather than a one-size-fits-all one-to-many schema.

This is hacking the academy.

2010-05-28T13:15:00.007-04:00

I began writing something for Hacking the Academy, a collaborative "book" of blog posts &c. produced in one week, on why I'm done writing papers; how limiting I find their structure of argumentation (limiting in good ways, limiting in bad ways); why the process of doing digital work better fits how my brain works. But after using 25 minutes of my self-alloted hour, I decided just to make something.

Using a very simple jQuery shuffle plugin, I created a one-line permutation poem: "THIS IS HACKING THE ACADEMY." This line produces some great combinations. This hacking is the academy; hacking the academy is this; the academy is this hacking; is this hacking the academy? In the spectrum from sense to sense to nonsense, certainty to doubt, sit all my feelings about doing scholarship at this moment of media in transition, as well as this project, digital projects, and "hacking the academy" (or Hacking the Academy) in general.

Quick prototyping and creative, media-aware criticism is my hack of the academy. Learn; explore; do; teach others to do. This is hacking the academy.

'The Sound of the printed Letter': Orthography, Orthoepy, and Print Culture

2010-05-26T21:17:00.006-04:00

For fellow dictionary lovers: I've posted a late draft of my undergraduate English Honors thesis on the naturalization of orthoepy through orthography in early English dictionaries, completed at Hood College in 2007. I was impelled to do so not out of any delusion regarding its (in)significance -- really, no one should let an undergrad read that much McLuhan -- but because an excerpted portion on John Wilkins, one of my favorite Royal Society nutjobs, will be presented at "English Dictionaries in Global and Historical Context," held at Queen's University the first weekend in June.

I'm very bummed not to be able to attend, especially since a deep an inexplicable love for enormous dictionaries is what drove me into media studies and book history in the first place. However, I'm grateful that the organizers have generously offered to read the paper in my absence. Any conference attendees who find their way here are welcome to leave comments on the paper at the bottom of this post, or email me at whitney [put a dot here] trettien [put an @ here] duke [put another dot here] edu.

Both the thesis in its entirety and the excerpted portion are available here.

Abstract:

Early language reference works and, in particular, dictionaries are not passive mirrors reflecting linguistic trends but are themselves media objects, circulating among speakers and writers of a language. Shaped, to some extent, by the material constraints of print, they propagate a mediated view of language, constructing social attitudes even while presenting them as the inevitable progress of civilized communication. In four case studies, this paper explores this process of naturalization, arguing that dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by synthesizing speech and writing, attempt to construct a monolithic super-English – a third, typographic "classical tongue" that both conquers Britain's savage past and marches it toward a colonial future.

Beginning from premises established by Peter Ramus and Francis Bacon – two sixteenth-century philosophers whose work epitomizes the shift from manuscript to print culture – John Wilkins constructs one of the earliest universal languages in 1668. The printed characters in his scheme, based on an ideographic system, bypass speech to represent named objects directly. Although it never became the "new Latin" for scholarship, as he hoped, Wilkins' universal language lays the foundation for Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, the cornerstone of England's "metaphysical empire," in Adam Beach's words. By constructing a canon of printed texts and a standardized orthography based on John Locke’s linguistics, Johnson’s Dictionary frames "civilized" English culture in typography, shaping speakers' relationship with their language according to the standards of print. Shortly after the Dictionary’s publication in 1755, the elocutionist movement, lead by Thomas Sheridan and John Walker, more rigorously connects orthography and orthoepy in their pronouncing dictionaries, popular lexicons delimiting rules for a homogenized English pronunciation that, as John Jones envisioned, "sound[s] all Letters according to the printed Word." Circulating as both products and producers of print culture, these four dictionaries establish print as the ingenerate standard for both verbal and visual discourse, a naturalization that continues to influence linguistic scholarship today.

Plants, Animals, Quires; or: what I'm working on.

2010-05-11T10:47:00.008-04:00

[From the dedicatory epistle to Nehemiah Grew's The Anatomy of Plants (1682)]

Digital Humanities vs the digital humanist

2010-04-13T13:52:00.004-04:00

[Note: I'm cross-posting this, an article I wrote for the official HyperStudio blog, since this space allows for comments.]

What does it mean to be a Digital Humanist?

In a Dave Parry's widely-circulated, post-MLA2009 blog post, tauntingly titled "Be Online or be Irrelevant," Parry argued that social media should be front-and-center in Digital Humanities:

The more digital humanities associates itself with social media the better off it will be. Not because social media is the only way to do digital scholarship, but because I think social media is the only way to do scholarship period.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this claim sparked fierfce debate over the role, nature and future of digital scholarship. Who can claim to be a digital humanist? Do you have to have a PhD? How much coding do you have to know? Are humanities bloggers and twitterers participating in e-scholarship? At the root of it all: how do we (or do we not) want to delimit our community?

Last year, I completed a born-digital thesis for the Comparative Media Studies program here at MIT. It was written as a media archaeology that attempts to take its methodology seriously, excavating the deep history of text-generating mechanisms through a text generating mechanism and thereby forcing the reader to participate in the writerly, combinatorial practices I was theorizing. At the time, I considered my work deeply implicated in Digital Humanities: I was doing e-scholarship, I thought, making a webtext that rethinks the relationship between media form and media content. Wasn't this exactly what I spent my days doing as a research assistant for HyperStudio -- designing web-based scholarly tools that remediate our relationship with texts, artifacts and history?

Since its completion, though, I've found my work doesn't have much resonance with the Digital Humanities community. Labs like those at UVA or GMU direct their energies toward large-scale, database-oriented resources such as NINES or scholarly aids like Zotero -- tools that, in themselves, tend to support research whose end is in print. Meanwhile, to many university presses, "e-publishing" still means PDFing printed journals. Somewhere in the push to build an infrastructure supporting web-based research (an infrastructure which, I should underscore, we need, and I use), we lost the idea of web-based scholarship. It's a difference between means and ends in academic work.*

A few months ago, I exchanged emails with Cheryl Ball, editor of Kairos, regarding another webtext I was working on. I naively asked her what had happened to all that early '90s excitement over multimedia essays. Her response (accompanied with a chuckle, I could tell) was that it only seems like nothing has been done in these areas because "most folks have ignored the work that rhetoric and composition has been doing on multimodal scholarship since the late 90s." While the "literary-critical digital humanities scholars" have pushed to produce archival, collaborative resources to support scholarship, others (often producing scholarship digitally, and in doing so rethinking what scholarship itself means.

So what was I doing? My born-digital thesis was not a scholarly resource: I wasn't and never intended to present or curate a collection of digital artifacts for others to browse. My work was critical and individualistic, conscious of its methodology and historical moment. It strove for self-awareness. In this respect, it had more in common with the essays on Kairos than with the work of NINES; yet it never emerged from the disciplines of rhetoric and composition. I was more interested in challenging notions of "old media" literacies, or even "literacy" itself, than exploring those of "new media."

I was positioning my work as Digital Humanities, but Digital Humanities didn't really want to claim it. Ultimately, my nomadic thesis found a home in the digital arts community, where it's been shown and circulated as "art." Perhaps this shouldn't surprise me -- artists are people used to rethinking the fraught form/content relationship.

I want to use this example to revisit Parry's question about social media -- a question that I think, now, can be reformulated as one of methodology. On the one hand, the Digital Humanities community -- the community formed around institutions and labs and grant cycles and funding structures -- has set itself up as a production house, a place where the infrastructural work of digitization, marking-up texts, and producing tools to facilitate research gets done. Many of these tools, like text mining applications, attempt to rethink the boundaries of texts and artifacts in a digital space, and all -- even the most minimal PDF work of university presses -- have made scholarship easier and quicker. On the other hand, though, is the promise of a more radical, and radically individual, break with university structures: Parry's social media-savvy digital humanist. This is the twitter-blogger who follows her passions across interdisciplinary boundaries, the Facebooker who makes the personal the political and in doing so humanizes the humanities. Against the disciplined Digital Humanities and its large-scale iniatives, this model is lower-case and personified, enacting micro-revolutions that reframe our mundane interactions with new media as points of connection and collaboration. If the digital humanist emphasizes pedagogy, it's not through class websites and digital resource-based assignments, but by signing students up for a WordPress account, giving them a camera and saying, "Here; make something."

I'm not sure Digital Humanities, even a big-tent Digital Humanities, has room for all these digital humanists. Samuel Pepys as digital humanist, Doris Lessing as digital humanist -- they quickly crowd the field. Conversely, I'm not sure these digital humanists fit under a tent; for what I'm proposing is not interdisciplinary, but fundamentally antidisciplinary -- an uprooted methodology that's productive, always in process.

* To be clear, I admire the work done on NINES and similar large-scale archival projects. I use these resources, have worked on similar projects, and see them as integral to the work of the "digital humanist" I posit later in the post. I'm not challenging their value, but their primacy within Digital Humanities as a discipline.

Leibnizian dreams in reason's limbo.

2010-04-12T18:03:00.002-04:00

The most fertile methods today concerning the mythical text in general are regulated by an algebra and, more precisely, by a combinative algebra. There exists to begin with -- or, better yet, it is possible to constitute -- a set of discrete elements, of units. Out of this reservoir circulate combinative sequences that can be mastered. Hence the theory of musical forms that is certainly the most general available organon, both practical and constructible, for these operations. This algebraic method is, to my mind, a local realization three centuries later of the Leibnizian dream of an alphabet of human thoughts for which its author had forged an ars combinatoria -- first invention, precisely, of combinative algebra as well as of a logic of the note, of any discrete note. From which Leibniz derived the ideathat music was indeed the language closest to the universal language, or to the mathesis universalis. This was an idea to which philosophers turned a deaf ear, but which was heard by musicians, since at Johann Sebastian Bach's death, Leibniz's De Arte Combinatoria was discovered at the composer's bedside (which, in return, permits us to read several fugues). All this occurred in the midst of the classical age, at a moment when the discourse of rationality was definitively replacing the mythical text. The art has now become a science, a productive and fertile method, the operational realization of a project left in reason's limbo during that period.

//Michel Serres, "Language & Space: From Oedipus to Zola," in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (45-6)

reading allegorically / reading symptomatically

2010-04-10T14:19:00.009-04:00

At ACLA earlier this month, my colleague (and housemate) Lindsey Andrews presented on Melville's Moby Dick -- on C. L. R. James reading Moby Dick, on her reading James, and on the process of literary criticism itself. I'm no Americanist, and certainly no Melville scholar; but I think what she has to say about how literature makes meaning, and how we make meaning from literature, is pretty brilliant:

Throughout the history of American academic literary criticism, Moby Dick is most often read as allegory. Though we’ve heard some of our own speakers discuss the refusal, on the part of many of Melville’s novels, to be allegorized, which I think is right in the case of Moby Dick, this is not the dominant trend. Even the back flap of my own copy of the novel begins: Moby Dick is at once a thrilling adventure tale, a timeless allegory, and an epic saga of heroic determination and conflict. But for [C. L. R.] James, even in 1953, and Melville-through-James, novels aren’t allegorical, and they aren’t symbol-filled surfaces through which one looks and aligns the symbol with the deep (true) meaning. Novels don’t "mean," they produce, and the act of criticism, too, produces. If in the moment of Moby Dick’s own exposure of its being written we see the possibility of being other, followed by the actualization of a world of the Pequod, it becomes clear that that world itself contingent on the multiplicity of virtual worlds, unrealized worlds, that it leaves in its wake. A novel could never be an allegory of the real world because it’s a part of it; it’s always a synechdoche, a real encounter in miniature. So, criticism, then, doesn’t “read” the inherent allegory in the novel; it makes an allegory of the accumulation or extraction of parts. And, more than that, it immediately exposes the allegory, refusing to allow meaning to accumulate in the form of an allegory; instead, it collapses or explodes its allegorical status, making it literal (i.e. in the act of producing a “symbol” in the novel, it also explains it, collapsing the very allegorical form to which it made a pretense of a claim). And criticism produces this explosion precisely from this possibility of being other; or more explicitly, from the impossibility of being the same. Criticism actualizes the multiple virtual worlds of the novel.

I (we both) have been thinking much about reading allegorically and reading symptomatically -- about how deeply ingrained these methods are in students of literature, and how ultimately dissatisfying they tend to be in a world in which the humanities are increasingly under attack for their irrelevance. I struggle with this most in the early modern side to my scholarly personality, since political allegory and symptomatic readings form the basis for practically all criticism on Renaissance literature. How can we read novels not simply as reproductive of particular cultural milieus, but as themselves productive machines, machines of possibility -- as Lindsey puts it, as virtual worlds, actualized through individual moments, singular acts of reading?

[Filippino Lippi, Allegory of Music (c. 1500)]

Deleuze is clearly a guidepost here. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, he rejects archetypal readings of Kafka's bizarre characters:

We won't try to find archetypes that would represent Kafka's imaginary, his dynamic, or his bestiary (the archetype works by assimilation, homogenization, and thematics, whereas our method works only where a rupturing and hetereogenous line appears). Moreover, we aren't looking for any so-called free associations (we are all well aware of the sad fate of these associations that always bring us back to childhood memories or, even worse, to the phantasm, not because they fail to work but because such a fate is part of their actual underlying principle).We aren't even trying to interpret, to say that this means that. And we are looking least of all for a structure with formal oppositions and a fully constructed Signifier; one can v come up with binary oppositions like 'bent head-straightened head' or 'portrait-sonority' and bi-univocal relations like 'bent head-portrait' or 'straightened head-sonority.' But that's stupid as long as one doesn't see where the system is coming from and going to, how it becomes, and what element is going to play the role of heterogeneity, a saturating body that makes the whole assembly flow away and that breaks the symbolic structure, no less than it breaks hermeneutic interpretation, the ordinary association of ideas, and the imaginary archetype.

// Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (7)

[Franz Kafka]

Kafka's becoming-animals -- his critter burrows and cockroach squeal-language, his literalization of symbols -- parallel the buffoonish "rude mechanicals"of Midsummer Night's Dream, who insist on presenting their own representation. "All I have to say is to tell you," the Moon says, stepping on stage covered in symbols of his 'moon-ness', "that the lanthorn is the moon, I, the man i' the moon, this thornbush my thornbush, this dog my dog."

Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word.

It would be a great error to refer the points of connection to the aesthetic impressions that subsist in them. Everything Kafka does works to an exactly opposite end, and this is the principle behind his antilyricism, his anti-aestheticism: 'Grasp the world', instead of extracting impressions from it; work with objects, characters, events, in reality, land not in impressions. Kill metaphor.

// Deleuze, Kafka 22; 70

I'm extremely attracted to this model of criticism, and am beginning to see it as crucially related to the kinds of "distant reading" talked about by Peter Middleton and Franco Moretti, as well as Jonathan Boyarin's "ethnography of reading." To read allegorically -- to read beneath the surface of the text, seeing the text as instantiating some cultural milieu -- is to elide the material moments when fingers hit paper, where eyeballs meet text; it's to forget that the text is text. In If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino famously retraces the process of reading itself: "Find the most comfortable position," he tells you, the reader; "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel ... Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought." Suddenly, the very bodily positions that novels are thought to dissolve become crystallized, and the reader becomes aware of her own reading: the book in her hands, the position of her legs, the smells of the room, how hard the spine cracks back when she flips the page. This is the metamorphosis that kills metaphor, the Moon pointing at itself and its own insistent "moon-ness" -- this is how we read, even when we pretend it's not. Although indicating an about-face for most literary scholarship, these radically individual, material encounters with a textual artifact are where criticism begins; and, sometimes, where it should end.

Book history, text & context.

2010-04-04T21:28:00.004-04:00

Reading Ron Silliman on "The Political Economy of Poetry"; thought the juxtaposition he makes between contextualizing vs. textualizing literature might resonate with those interested in book history or histories of readers. In 1929, Valentin Volosinov writes:

The actual reality of language-speech is not the abstract system of linguistic forms, not the isolated monologic utterance, and not the psychophysiological act of its implementation, but the social event of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances.

Thus vebal interaction if the basic reality of language ... A book, i.e., a verbal performance in print is also an element of verbal communication. It is something discussable in actual, real-life dialogue, but aside from that, it is calculated for active perception, involving attentive reading and inner responsiveness, and for organized, printed reaction ... (book reviews, critical surveys, defining the influence on subsequent works, and so on). Moreover, a verbal performance of this kind also inevitably orients itself with respect to previous performances in the same sphere, both those by the same author and those by other authors. It inevitably takes its point of departure fro msome particular state of affairs ... Thus the printed verbal performance engages, as it were, in ideological colloquy of large scale: it responds to something, objects to something, affirms something, anticipates possible responses and objections, seeks support, and so on.

Any utterance, no matter how weighty and complete in and of itself, is only a moment in the continuous process of verbal communication. But that continuous verbal communication is, in turn, itself only a moment in the continuous, all-inclusive, generative process of a given social collective ... Verbal communication can never be understood and explained otuside of this connection with a concerete situation.

In 1942, New Critics Rene Wellek and Austin Warren write:

What is the 'real' poem; where should we look for it; how does it exist ... ?

One of the most common and oldest answers is the view that a poem is an 'artefact', an object of the same natures as a piece of sculpture or a painting. Thus the work of art is considered identical with the black lines of ink on white paper or parchment or, if we think of a Babylonian poem, with the grooves in the brick. Obviously this answer is quite unsatisfactory. There is, first of all, the huge oral 'literature'. There are poems or stories which have never been fixed in writing and still continue to exist. thus the lines in black ink are merely a method of recording a poem which must be conceived as existing elsewhere. If we destroy the writing or even all copies of a printed book we still may not destroy the poem ... Besides, not every printing is considered by us, the readers, a correct printing of a poem. The very fact that we are able to correct printer's errors in a text which we might not have read before or, in some rare cases, restore the genuine meaning of the text shows that we do not consider the printed lines as the genuine poem. Thus we have shown that the poem (or any literary work of art) can exist outside its printed version and that the printed artefact contains many elements which we all must consider as not included in the genuine poem.

The distinction here -- used by Silliman to draw out an interesting argument about context vs. text, in relation to the poem as a "commodity" art -- is between reading as a radically singular moment, or an incomplete encounter with a concept that exists in totality elsewhere, in some ideal. Besides the obvious implications, this seems like an interesting angle, by a practicing poet, on the values of book history, histories of reading/readers, and bibliography.

On Being Productive.

2010-04-02T16:44:00.005-04:00

I'm a quasi-neurotic, close-to-type-A personality who sorts things like a damn squirrel. I keep calendars and measure my days by the marks made on my to-do list; as I read, I thumb the edges of the page, keeping a running tally in my head of what fraction of the book I've completed. It isn't something taught-- I just have to do it to refresh my own sense of being-human. If I don't, I start pacing my house, chattering aloud with the things in my head while plucking the little hairs under my chin until they bleed.*

In other words, my days -- every day, weekends not exempt -- are spent in various states of Being Productive -- a phrase that has, for better or worse, come to define every waking moment of my life, and sadly a few of the sleeping ones, too. It used to be that Being Productive was a matter of calculating which Activity would be Most Productive for me at any given moment, so that any losses would balance out in long-term gains in health and overall happiness. For instance, if I didn't feel like I could get any writing done, I would cut my losses and go hiking, or clean, or make yummy food. That way I maintained a certain form of Productivity (i.e., exercise, fresh air, being healthy & organized) that would facilitate other forms of Productivity later (i.e., writing with a newly-fed, newly-exercised brain).

This perhaps sounds ridiculously corporatized, this Productivity calculus, but it worked. I would take whole weekends off, telling myself I needed a "mental health day" -- a phrase I got from my mother, who would, once a month, let my brother and I stay home from school and do something we actually wanted to do, like fly kites or go to the beach or read Nancy Drew books in a hammock while eating mountains and mountains of cookie dough. Now, though -- lately, at least -- my calculus has failed me. I urgently feel (it may not, probably is not, true, but I feel it desperately) that I have so much work that I can no longer (I feel like I can no longer) justify a few hours spent hiking; it's just too much, even the enjoyment becomes a point of anxiety -- must consume, consume, consume those blooming cherry blossoms before they go -- quick quick, you could be doing work so make it worth the time (I tell myself). Relaxation no longer figures as its own form of Productivity.

I'm not sure how this change came about, but it's really sick.

Rather than encouraging Productivity, like my little calculus did, this new method is the dead-end of diminishing returns: I worry more than I do; I mumble things like how can I salvage this day? Since I no longer see, for instance, doing dishes as part of my "To Do" list, I find myself shuffling these chores-of-living off into separate lists, lists which accumulate without getting marked off because, really, they're lists of things I don't see as worth doing, given everything else I have to do. I stupidly get mad at my partner for not helping more with these lists -- doesn't he see that I just can't mark that as "Productivity"? -- and let things that make me feel healthy, things which used to make my other practices more fruitful, become worthless. How -- when -- why did relaxation become worthless to me?

Don't leave some comment like "Welcome to grad school." I just finished two years of graduate study at MIT, a place that proudly touts is model of education as akin to drinking from a firehose. And did this while working -- something I also did all the way through my undergraduate education, which included a double major, two senior theses, participation in an honors program and a very active life outside school as a community activist. In short, I'm someone who can navigate the white-water rapids of a busy life -- more than that, I'd credit my absurd little Productivity calculus with my often extreme ability to get shit done. Defining moments of relaxation as essential to and in fact part of my own Productivity brilliantly allowed my moments of reading/writing became hyper-focused, and unburdened my moments of relaxation from the fretting over Not Being More Productive that crushes so many students.

I was balanced; I could live in the present moment and enjoy it wholly. How did I lose that?

I love to garden; I spend my time gardening thinking about what a waste it is, in one world, even as I know how much I desperately need it, just to be me.

How do others cope?

My twitter feed is just rotten with people worrying about their Productivity. It bothers me, it bothers me so much -- we feel the weight as so crushing today, to mark oneself as someone doing something, so we can get into schools and get jobs and get tenure and get noticed -- we obsess over these things. Shut up, you know you do. I don't think anything in particular (media, universities, systems and structures) is to blame; well, no, maybe it's us that's to blame. There's a fine line between commiseration and competition, especially when it comes to public fora like blogs or Facebook, especially in academia. Perhaps we pressure ourselves to pressure others; maybe we do need to just turn off, shut up and focus for a little while.

At least, I do, if I'm ever going get back in the groove of Productivity.

*Don't mistake obsessive organization for being a neat freak. My bathroom has dangerously high levels of germs, my Camry can only seat one because of the piles of old food wrappers, and my bedroom is little more than a mountain of clothes in various states of disgust. Also, I wear clothing with stains on them. A lot.

Conversation about Digital Humanities & disciplinarity

2010-03-31T10:30:00.001-04:00

A quick note to invite participation in a conversation about Digital Humanities and disciplinarity over at the blog linked up with Shakespeare Quarterly's forthcoming issue, "Shakespeare and New Media," currently under open review through MediaCommons. Katherine Rowe asks:

But it is as useful for the field [of Shakespeareans] to ask ourselves how we behave just like everyone else on the web: puttering or sprinting or wandering along heterogeneous paths of habit, exploration, or avoidance that we share with others outside academia. ... Take this post as an invitation to expand on the question.

I think it's healthy that this forum is off-site from blogs of the usual Digital Humanities crew, since it opens up a space for cross-disciplinary conversation. Anyway, check it out.

This thornbush my thornbush, and this dog my dog.

2010-03-28T14:49:00.008-04:00

As a student of literature, one of the things I love about theory -- and trust me, I am no defender of theory-for-theory's-sake, at least not of ramming every text through the mill of some idiom -- I feel like I had to get that off my chest before I can mount a defense -- so, starting over, one of the things I love about theory is its ability to freshen up any reading.

Over the past year, I've read more Deleuze and Guattari than I ever thought I would, certainly more than I ever wished to. I have ongoing problems: problems with understanding, problems with systematizing fundamentally anti-systematic work, problems with playing one's politics out on paper. I have problems (so many problems, all senses of the word "problems") discussing Deleuze and Guattari with those who explicitly identify as "Deleuzian," or perhaps "Deleuzoguattarian," "Guattarodeleuzian" (poor Guattari always gets the shortshrift in litcrit) -- the cart always ends up before the horse. But putting these problems aside -- and refusing to run theory parallel to literature -- my recently Guattodeleuzian-ized eyeballs have been seeing texts that never existed for me before, within texts that did. Like Midsummer Night's Dream.

What can one say about Midsummer Night's Dream -- any Shakespeare -- that hasn't been said already? (I'm sorry, early modern pals; I'm not a Shakespearean.) Themes and threads, eyes and ears, translatability, mutability, "the changing of costumes," plays-within-plays, love and fatalism. There. You know the play. Drop something about the queering of heterosexuality and a few quotes on postcolonialism, and you're entirely up-to-date on the scholarship.

Then I read it again, this time lounging on a warm rock in a perfect garden on a perfect day, imbibing a perfect glass of honey-sweetened pineapple juice. Wearing a flow-y skirt that ruffled in the breeze. In short, it could not have been any more stereotypical: someone should have taken a picture and captioned it "FAIR-LOCKED NYMPH-ISH GIRL MOUTHS PRETTILY OF FAIR-HAIRED NYMPHS UNDER CHERRY BOUGHS; POETRY LIVES!" That's how cliché the experience was. Only missing the garland of flowers.

[William Blake; Titania, Puck and the Fairies Dancing; 1786]

And yet -- it wasn't that Shakespeare that I found in the garden, but a weird postmodern monster. What I'd previously underlined as metathemes of performance -- for instance, the play-within-a-play trope that runs through the comedies, drawing attention to the artificiality within theater -- suddenly seemed to be much more radical statements on the impossibility of representation; or more precisely, on the unrepresentability of and in language, which can never be rationalized. The "crew of patches," those "rude mechanicals" who put on the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe before the wedding parties in Act 5, don't just ironically comment on the indirectness of performed speech, but on the problem of signification -- on the paradox of fiction's existence at all. Snug is not a lion, but Snug-qua-lion-qua-Snug; Snout is not a wall, but the wall that breaks down "the (fourth) wall" between audience and stage, inviting Bottom/Pyramus to directly address Theseus with a literal narration of events to come. In fact, by stating that "this loam, this roughcast, and this stone doth show / That [he is] that same wall," Snout transforms signifiers of his "wallness" – intended to encourage a suspension of disbelief – into ironic markers of "Snout-ness," drawing attention to the very human body it he seeks to erase.

In short, the play's hearing in the present moment tugs in two directions at once, toward both signification and a simulacrum that can never fully signify. This constant dissembling of the play's own mechanics through the "rude mechanicals'" excessive narration -- their constant pointing into an anticipated future through language -- means that the play can never cohere to form a whole; "performance" insists on bursting out in moments that deny the very possibility of "performance" itself. It is and yet cannot be Snug performing the lion that makes the ladies quake; it is, but cannot be, the afraid audience who, lion-qua-Snug insinuates, must always be feared as fearful superiors.

There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the [play]) and a field of subjectivity (the [audience]). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a [play] has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several [audiences] as its subject.

Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundances.

//Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (23; 167)

The Moon can never been the moon; the Moon can never be an aggregate of symbols. A horned human covered in twigs runs from the stage.

MOON: All that I have to say is to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon, I, the man i' the moon, this thornbush my thornbush, and this dog my dog. (V.1.241-3)

This is deterritorialization; it's a pulling-apart and rendering-literal of signifiance. It's a play-that-refuses-the-possibility-of-a-play.

[Emil Orlik; actor Hans Wassmann as Nick Bottom; 1909]

There's gads of paintings of Puck, Titania, even Bottom. No one draws inspiration from Snug-qua-lion-qua-Snug.

Faciality is always a multiplicity.

// D & G, ATP 182

This isn't a criticism of those scholars doing the other kind of work, the play-within-a-play thematic work. Hell, what I'm circling around is not so different from what others have been saying -- someone most likely wrote this very thought, in a parallel dimension. The more interesting question is how, if at all, contemporary critical theory -- so rooted in continental philosophy of the twentieth century -- should be applied, enacted, performed in/through or read onto texts that speak from four centuries ago. My newly-freshened eyes are finding the paradoxes of logic in Shakespeare; for whom is this message?

What's left to say, after the Moon exits?

The Electrochemical Society reads Mallarmé.

2010-03-23T10:07:00.002-04:00

The paper intervenes every time an image on tis own, ceases or retires within the page, accepting the succession of the others, and it is not a question, unlike the usual state of affairs, of regular sound effects or verses -- rather of prismatic subdivisions of the idea, the instant when they appear and during which their cooperation lasts, in some exact mental setting. The text imposes itself in various places, near or far from the latent guiding thread, according to what seems to be the probable sense.

// Stéphane Mallarmé, Preface to Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard ("A roll of the dice will never abolish chance"), 1897

// From Transactions of the American Electrochemical Society, Volume XXXVII, Thirty-Seventh General Meeting, Boston and Cambridge, Mass. April 8, 9, and 10, 1920

Appositions e-conference, review of Shakespeare Digital Humanities sites, purple shutters

2010-03-14T18:52:00.007-04:00

A few things:

Appositions, an e-conference in Renaissance / Early Modern lit and culture, is going on *right now*. The theme this year is "Digital Archives & the Field of Production"; included in the line-up is an early version of my paper on the fore-edge paintings. Actually, fore-edge painting [singular] might be more appropriate: it focuses on a image of King Charles II, found along the edge of a mid-seventeenth-century Bible and Book of Common Prayer at the Houghton Library. Hidden under gilt edging until the book is opened, it presents an interesting case study for histories of reading that extend beyond the two-dimensional space of the page, as well as digital scans of "books" that defy the flatness of the screen. In any case, lots of great work on things like "hypertext" Wyatt, "diplomatic transcriptions" in digital reproductions of documents, and more -- so check it out.
I've written a short review of some Shakespeare-related Digital Humanities sites for a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, "Shakespeare and New Media," edited by Katherine Rowe. But here's the cool part: essays are entered into an "open review" process, in which scholars, colleagues and the public at large can comment using CommentPress. I'm excited to be a part of this process and hope you early modern and/or Digital Humanities folks will participate.
I've painted most of the front of my house bright, shiny purple. That is all.

digital storytelling, Zola, experimentalism, & the scientific method

2010-02-17T16:33:00.007-05:00

I managed to make two panels at CHAT today before I had to dash back to Duke for class -- one on audience size in digital projects, the other on digital storytelling. I won't rehash them, since others have already done that better than I could. I encourage you to visit these posts, or follow the #uncchat twitter feeds.

Instead, after a brief summary, I wanted to follow up on a few mental sparks lit during the "Soundbyte" session on storytelling. The panel has two titles on the CHAT website: on one page, "Scientific Method and Narrative Form"; on the other, "Transforming Narratives." Both descriptions pit the "electronic literature expert," embodied in Kate Hayles, against the "computer scientist," Michael Young, who works with the Liquid Narrative research group at NC State. The panel itself intended to "explore the intersections and the opportunities" of such a pairing.

Young started the conversation, using analytic theories from cognitive science and linguistics to construct a computational, generative model of narrative. As I tweeted earlier, his approach to storytelling reminded me very much of Nick Montfort's talk to HyperStudio on designing his new interactive fiction programming language: like Montfort, Young is interested in building comprehensive systems for users to engage in, interact with and act within stories, themselves conceived as an unfolding series of events (i.e., plotlines) constructed by an (external) author-agent. As Young underscored, this approach to storytelling is governed by the "clash between control and coherence," as users must be given the freedom to make choices within a nonetheless scripted narrative.

Hayles provided a counterpoint to the kind of causal, plot-driven method of Michael Young. In several mini-close readings of three pieces of digital fiction -- Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue, Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter, and Kerry Lawrynovicz Girls' Day Out -- she pointed out that that visual metonymy of "threaded" details (Twelve Blue), the complex temporalities of textual palimpsests (The Jew's Daughter) and fragmented subtexts (Girls' Day Out) all offer complex, non-causal methods by which narrative can emerge in digital fiction. She concluded by asking whether any of these stories could be described as algorithmic or generative, and whether audiences would accept these more nuanced narrative strategies.

I think the differences between these points of view -- which is really the difference (for me personally -- this isn't a value judgment) between what's interesting about literature, and simply what isn't -- came out in one of the questions. Someone asked: when talking about causality and literature, where does the scientific method fit in?

Michael Young said he was inspired by the scientific method -- that he, like other scientists, takes a theory, builds a model of that theory, then runs human subjects through a controlled experiment to see if it validates his hypothesis. The challenge, he added, is to design a model that is controlled enough that you can attribute the result to the theory itself, and not outside factors.

Now this is fascinating to me. I recently read Émile Zola's novel Germinal, alongside Claude Bernard on experimental medicine and Zola's essay "The Experimental Novel" in which he explicitly positions his work as a novelist in terms of producing a scientific experiment -- that is, of setting up a controlled, contained environment in which characters act out their own socially-determined possibilities. The results are nothing less than a total scientific understanding of human psychology:

[T]he novelist is equally an observer and an experimentalist. The observer in him gives the facts as he has observed them, suggests the point of departure, displays the solid earth on which his characters are to tread and the phenomena to develop. Then the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for.

// Zola, "The Experimental Novel," 8

We are making use, in a certain way, of scientific psychology to complete scientific physiology; and to finish the series we have only to bring into our studies of nature and man the decisive tool of the experimental method. In one word, we should operate on the characters, the passions, on the human and social data, in the same way that the chemist and the physicist operates on inanimate beings, and as the physiologist operates on living beings.

// Zola, "The Experimental Novel," 17-8

In a widely-read essay on the differences between realism, which narrates, and Zola's form of naturalism, which mechanically describes, Lukács criticizes Zola's methods as merely accumulating detail for the sake of some external (and, although he doesn't use the word, experimental) purpose, at the expense of the "inner life" of literature. He writes:

When the artistic literature of a period does not provide actions in which typical characters with a richly developed inner life are tested in practice, the public seeks abstract, schematic substitutes.

// Lukács, "Narrate or Describe," 124

In failing to provide an adequate narration of the "inner life" of the human, Zola's experimentalist naturalism inadvertently spawns "abstract, schematic substitutes," by which it seems Lukács means detective novels and hardboiled pop fiction. I wonder, though, if we can't map this distinction onto the differences articulated by Young and Hayles, in a panel of course called (on at least one site) "Scientific Method and Narrative Form." If Young's computational model of storytelling is the new Zola-ian experimental fiction -- and I think his own description of his work as a "controlled experiment" makes the analogy fairly solid -- then the fictions Hayles describes are the new "abstract, schematic substitutes": a literature sunk deep in an obsession with words, with language and the materiality of letters. It's perhaps no surprise that digital storytelling splits along these lines. Although we tend to think of Young's form of algorithmic literature as arising from video games and more recent forms of "interactive" narration, it may have a longer lineage to turn-of-the-century schools of naturalism, narratology and the push to scientize literary fictions as experiments played out by constructed human subjects, as a means of sparking understanding in socially-determined reading subjects. In fact, programmable interactive fiction systems may just be the latest stop in the search for a perfectly controlled, and perfectly controllable, narrative microcosm.

So why does this matter?

First, none of my comments should be taken as a criticism of the kind of work that Young (or someone like Montfort) does. I deeply appreciate the ways in which digital storytelling models merge hardware, software, structure and text into a perfect little machine driven by user experience. It's a thing of beauty that, unlike the novel, never forgets its own medium.

At the same time, these methods are not new. Placing past methods in conversation with the present helps delimit the boundaries of the conversation by probing our own assumptions. For instance, a longer reading of Zola alongside interactive fiction systems would perhaps illuminate the nuances in a term like "virtual worlds" or "simulations," both narrative models which I think Zola would shy away from in favor of a more determined notion of experimentalism -- that is, of seeing his narratives as controlled experiments which assemble and operate on literary objects with the explicit goal of furthering our understanding of the human subject. What can the machinery of Zola's novels -- very like video games or film in their accumulation of detail and excessive attention to environmental conditions -- teach us about the built-in hypotheses in our digital storytelling models? And (the question that I personally find more interesting) what literary methods escape the scientizing of literature? What forms of narrative exceed the experimental method?

In her response to the question on the scientific method and narrative -- the question that started this tirade of mine -- Hayles pointed out that experiments often begin with a state of initial confusion, in which the observer is bombarded with information that must be sorted out, not unlike reading a novel such as Gravity's Rainbow. The payoff only comes after a significant amount time, and only emerges through nuanced and multilayered textual strategies. This strikes me as right, and perhaps provides a way of bringing these two divergent strands of thought back together. Only through the act of interpretation can stories, interactive narrative environments, or scientific experiments find, and make, meaning in the world.

CHAT Festival at UNC-Chapel Hill this week

2010-02-15T15:02:00.003-05:00

An order innate to the book of verse exists inherently or everywhere, eliminating chance; it's also necessary, to eliminate the author: now, any subject is fated to imply, among the fragments brought together, a strange certainty about its appropriate place in the volume. It is susceptible to this because any cry possesses an echo -- motifs of the same type balance each other, stabilizing each other at a distance, and neither the sublime incoherence of a romantic page, nor that artificial unity that adds up to a block-book, can provide it. Everything is suspended, an arrangement of fragments with alternations and confrontations, adding up to a total rhythm, which would be the poem stilled, in the blanks; only translated, in a way, by each pendant.

// Mallarmé, "Crisis of Verse"

I'll be at the CHAT Festival at UNC-Chapel Hill this week. Some interesting talks are planned, and my thesis is displayed amongst the "digital art." If NC folk will be there, come say hi. I'm the one with the blonde dreads.

I'm finding that strange work, my thesis -- which now looks intensely ugly to me, though I still have unnatural love for it -- is increasingly pinned down as art, rather than criticism. Like the "art world" -- whatever that may be; its discourses, at least -- are more open, more used to, perhaps even expect to encounter form as rhetoric. Something inside me cringes at this. I'm not against tagging myself as an artists; I'd just rather not be penned in on either side of that fence.

Anyway, come out if you're around.

Is Google Good for History? revisited: a case study in Pepys

2010-02-03T14:53:00.008-05:00

Doing a million little tasks at once these days -- a kind of academic death by a thousand cuts that we're all familiar with -- one of which is securing image permissions for an essay I co-wrote with Martin Foys on the re-, dis- and unmediations that frame, shape and even softly determine our readings of two literary classics, Beowulf (Martin's portion of the essay) and Samuel Pepys' Diary (of course, mine).

Part of my argument rests on a re-reading of the now legendary story of John Smith, a poor beleaguered student who (the tale goes) spent years decoding the Diary's shorthand, never knowing that the "crack" to the "code" was sitting on the library's shelf all along, "just steps away from where he worked." The scare quotes do intend to scare: as I found in my research, a number of buried references to the Diary crop up throughout the eighteenth century, indicating the work was not entirely unknown until Smith's transcription. In fact, a now all-but-forgotten biography of William Weller Pepys, A Later Pepys by Alice Gaussen (1904), includes facsimile scans of a plan to transcribe and publish the Diary that presumably pre-dates Smith's work, thereby (I argue) exploding the typical origin story. The need for textual provenance is retroactive, applied only after a seventeenth-century manuscript is circumscribed by print scholarship -- "edition-ized" for academic consumption, as it were.

How did I find these traces of an eighteenth-century Pepys which have puzzled scholars for a century -- including the two editors who devoted a large chunk of their lives to studying this text? It has nothing to do with intelligence, and I (sadly) have no tales from the archival crypts. You can chalk it all up to Google Books.

In the introduction to their edition of the Diary (the only unbowdlerized edition ever published, and therefore for the purpose's of contemporary scholarship, the only edition), Latham and Matthews note finding a single reference to Pepys' Diary pre-transcription: a puzzling fact, they say, since (the narrative goes) the Diary mouldered on the stacks for 150 years before finally being "discovered." How could this individual have had 1) access to the Diary to quote it, and 2) knowledge of Pepys' shorthand to read the text?

I googled the quote and unearthed a few more references in early nineteenth-century periodicals, indicating that a particular entry on "tea" was somewhat known among the late-Enlightenment literati. Tracking the beast as far as Google Books would let me, I finally stumbled over the biography mentioned above, I think through the word "transcription," and found the two facsimiles of a pre-Smith plan to transcribe the Diary.*

This research -- an exciting alternative history of a canonical story -- would not have been possible without Google Books or a comparable search engine and database of OCRed texts. So is Google good for history? Uh, hell yeah. That should be a given by now, folks.

Here's where the story get sticky, though. Thinking my work was done, I finished up the essay without ever consulting the physical book (don't judge me, we all do it), even took a screenshot of the facsimiles from the biography, now out of print, and dropped them in as figures for the essay. The time for permissions rolls around, and we realize the scans are too low resolution for publication. So I order the dusty 1904 tome be dragged up from Duke's storage facilities; open it up to scan the figures myself; and find this:

What I thought were scratches from the scanner, or -- honestly, I don't know what I thought they were; my intuitive curiosity as a literary historian and digital humanist failed me -- turned out to be full pages. The dunce that scanned the text for Google Books didn't bother to unfold the paper; and, since Google Books doesn't have any mechanism for indicating moving parts and fold-outs on their flattened scans, whatever was tucked between the folds was lost to the database.

I've talked about interactivity in the digital archive here before; this incident brought the issue home for me. Like all media, tools like Google Books inevitably (re-)frame our research, opening exciting new possibilities; but in doing so, other potentials are foreclosed. Beyond the dampening effect on research into the codex as a form, the digital archive's absences produce an image of "print culture" that slides frustratingly toward the very reductive models that many book historians have challenged in recent years. We need to start thinking seriously about what aspects of the book are elided by the screen; how a text's materiality is mediated by scans; and how the structure of databases disallow us from documenting these bookish anomalies.

Databases are themselves media structures, and the historical artifacts we read in and through them have to take this into account. Perhaps more importantly (and I'm saying this to myself, as much as anyone else), we need to learn to be better skeptics of our own resources, finding new methods for verifying our research when using digital scans. While ultimately this incident didn't put a dent in my argument, it will make me think twice next time a see an odd little scratch on Google Books.

*If you want the whole argument, you're going to have to read the book when it comes out this summer.

railway guide rambles & disciplinary dichotomies

2010-01-18T15:45:00.009-05:00

Reading from Pogglioli's Theory of the Avant-Garde, I just came across a chance mention of Evgeni Zamyatin's We (1921), often noted as a precursor to (and the inspiration for) Orwell's 1984. Zamyatin, Pogglioli writes, "imagines a distant posterity considering the timetable or general directory of the railroad as the unequaled and supreme masterpiece bequeathed them by this [the twentieth] century." Here's the part in We he's citing (the narrator is speaking from the 26th century, a time of Taylor-inspired standardization):

As schoolchildren we all read (perhaps you have, too) that greatest literary monument to have come down to us from ancient days -- "The Railway Guide." But set it side by side with our Table, and it will be as graphite next to a diamond: both consist of the same element -- carbon -- yet how eternal, how transparent is the diamond, how it gleams! Whose breath will fail to quicken as he rushes clattering along the pages of "The Railway Guide"? But our Table of Hours! Why, it transforms each one of us into a figure of steel, a six-wheeled hero of a mighty epic poem. Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour and the same moment, we -- millions of us -- get up as one. At the same hour, in million-headed unison, we start work; and in million-headed unison we end it.

// Zamyatin, We [seems to be a very bad, but free, text here; audiobook in English is available here]

Railway guides, timetables, train schedules -- these are spatializations of time that strictly standardize its passage, chopping the hours into minutes, the minutes into seconds, the hills into latticed tracks. Indeed, this is Zamyatin's satire, a world gone Taylor-mad with its six-wheeled precision. Yet.. there's something not untrue about the railway guide being our greatest literary monument. It's romantic, experiential, subjective; it's directed to audiences in motion, interpretive communities tra(i)ned in railway literacies; and most of the guides themselves are beautiful. From a poetic stance, the train timetable is a pinnacle of achievement in the marriage of form and content -- perhaps the most perfect data visualization ever created. Leaves of forgotten William Blake fall from between its pages.

There's been a lot of discussion online about disciplinarity in media studies and digital humanities. It's useful; and it's boring. Unlike the sciences, the humanities have the benefit of openness, flexibility, creativity, the proverbial "Big Tent." We don't need to depend on false dichotomies to sustain ourselves (although we do a grand job acting like we do). We can mine texts; we can tag texts; we can read texts; we're even granted supreme authority -- the audacity -- to interpret them, using whatever tools may be at our disposal.

And when we leave our offices and classrooms, where railway guides are historical/artifactual/industrial/literary/representative/significatory/everthing-but ... we don coats, fumble for metrocards, and wait wait wait for that "TRAIN ARRIVING IN 5 MINUTES" sign to flash -- the most mundane avant-garde in the world.

This isn't a response. It's just what we do.

the accretion of minute elements of signification

2010-01-17T21:01:00.005-05:00

Checked to see if Duke Libraries has Umberto Eco's latest, The Infinity of Lists; was, appropriately, directed to the Direct support and general support maintenance manual including repair parts and special tools list, a US Army technical manual.

Lately my own life has tended toward the cohesive fragmentation of an infinite list. Not surprising, since it's the beginning of a new semester, in which I'll be exploring everything from female sovereignty in the Renaissance to gothic fiction in the rise and history of the novel, with a little bit of "experimental" literature thrown in for fun. Yes, it's a very English kind of semester -- my first in over two years. I'm treating it as a test. I want to see if still stand (handle, take, suffer) my own chosen discipline.

The accretion of minute elements of signification into crowds, arrays, and clusters allows a reverberation of these cultural particles between them and together, the connotations of one into flying off the lick of another. ... Elements in a paratactic list always open up into a matrix of immanent universes. Each of the elements in a list is hypotactically stacked in relation to the immanence of what it is next to, what it abuts to and differs from. such hypotaxis is virtual, that is, for its actualization it demands power to the imagination.
// Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture

Best Ideas Under the Sun(R)

2010-01-12T19:56:00.000-05:00

Days Inn planes of immanence.

Bergson on memory in two hours and one page

2010-01-12T19:07:00.000-05:00