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Issue 6. Medium Theory

The Book as Technotext: Katherine Hayles's Digital Materialism

Author: Jan Baetens
Published: February 2003

Abstract (E): review of N. Katherine Hayles. Writing Machines. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002 (Mediawork Pamphlet Series, 1).

Has writing books become an anachronism in the age of digital communication and cyberculture? The answer is clearly no. Never have we written so many books, and the publication rhythm of printed works continues to increase at a tremendous pace. But it is one thing to observe that books are surviving pretty well, and another thing to critically analyze what this survival means or implies in an environment that is shifting swiftly towards new models of writing, reading and thinking, and how one has to interrogate the unexpected dialogue or symbiosis between electronic and print culture in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. The first question is a matter of sheer numbers, of quantity. The second, which is qualitative, is what interests N. Katherine Hayles in this unusual book (unusual because unusually autobiographic and exceptionally designed, but more on this later).

The basic stance Hayles takes in this essay (the word pamphlet sounds too polemic to my ears and cannot be motivated by the sound and unagressive argumentation of the work) is that cyberculture should help us rethink the relationships between form and content, more specifically between the material aspects of the medium used and the generated content. In the case of the so called "new," i.e. electronic media, this relationship is blatantly active: new media shape their own content (everybody agrees that one can only "say" what the medium allows us to "say" and "think"), and vice versa (since the medium is not something that is "given" once and for all, but a structure that is discovered and produced by its use and content in an infinite movement of critical reappraisal). Following Hayles this observation should encourage us to see what until now has only marginally been accepted, for instance by artists or specialized scholars: namely the fact that a book (and print culture in general) is not just a channel carrying the "voice" of an "author," but a material structure which not only helps us to think and write, but which determines our thinking and writing in every possible way.

For scholars and readers familiar with theories based upon concepts such as "medium specificity" (in art history, but also in literature) or with theoretical frameworks such as the "actor network theory" (in science studies or in sociology), the Copernican revolution preached by Hayles will sound a little strange since the "materialist" ideas promoted by the author are in some disciplines so well known, and so widely accepted, that their defense sounds a little déjà vu. Neither the notion of body-machine interaction (here mainly focussing on the "traffic between words and physical artifacts" Hayles calls "material metaphors") nor that of "technotext" (a kind of text foregrounding the idea that "the physical form of the literary artifact always affects what the words and other semiotic components mean") can be considered innovative, although it is always useful to remind the romantic (i.e. non materialist) reader of these fundamental media constraints. Hayles may have had in mind a particular (and particularly anti-materialist) readership when writing her book, but she exaggerates the supposed rejection of her ideas in current cultural and literary scholarship.

Beyond technological determinism

Much more interesting than the global plea for this materialist rethinking of textuality through medium theory, is Hayles's refusal of technological determinism, which so often undermines every serious discussion of the impact of cyberculture on literary writing. This technological determinism takes many forms, the best known of them being the teleological "supersession" theory stating that the emergence of "new" media condemns the "old" media it replaces to anachrony or even oblivion. Hayles's book is one of the most exciting examples of technological anti-determinism I have ever read, since it splendidly combines theoretical and practical arguments. First of all, she argues convincingly that our contemporary media networks escape linear sequentiality on the one hand and binary relationships on the other; that it is no longer possible to suppose that "one" medium is taking over "one" other medium. Second, she also demonstrates that there exists a gap between what we think one medium is or does, and what this medium really is or does. For instance, she indicates with great clarity that old-fashioned concepts such as "referent," "representation," "reality," etc. do continue to play a crucial role in cyberculture, which is much more "business as usual" as we would like to admit. Finally, she brilliantly proves that the digital revolution has not relegated the book to the status of an antiquity, but on the contrary, that it has proven a fabulous way to reinvent our analysis of print culture, emphasizing revolutionary uses of the book our phonocentrism had always managed to hide and inviting us to reread traditional uses of the same object from a revolutionary point of view (that of the text as technotext, a way of reading until now limited to the small circles of book historians or specialists of avant-garde print culture). One cannot but applaud enthusiastically when discovering in a wonderful reading of a Tom Phillips's book theoretical hypotheses such as:

Readers are consequently less likely to read the text cover-to-cover than open it at random and mediate over a few pages before skipping elsewhere and closing it for the day. This mode of reading reminds us that in the Middle Ages the codex book was heralded as a great improvement over the scroll precisely because it allowed random reading. in contemporary parlance, we might say that the book is the original random access device (RAD). Contrary to much hype about electronic hypertext, books like A Humument allow the reader considerably more freedom of movement and access than do many electronic fiction. In this respect the book is more RAD than most computer texts - a conclusion that the bibliophiles among us will relish (99).

Hayles & Co

Maybe the most interesting thing about Writing Machines, however, is its "ars poetica" dimension, that is the fact that the book not only says what it does, but also does what it says. This autoreferential dimension, which one can only read as a supplementary proof of the exactness of its theses, appears on two dimensions. The first one can be seen on the level of its global composition. Indeed, after the general theoretical comments on technotextuality (which alternate with semi-autobiographic fragments, embodied by a persona "Kaye," on the progressive discovery of cyberculture by a book-lover oscillating between science and literature), Hayles proposes a triple illustration of her theory through three exciting close readings, first of Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia, then of Tom Philips's A Humument, finally of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. The essential feature to notice here is the order in which these texts are placed under scrutiny, since the author does not start with a printed novel, continuing with an artist book and stopping with a web hypertext. Hayles follows the opposite itinerary, from web hypertext to print novel via artist book, in a very "anti-chronological" move that perfectly suits the demonstration: the "new" medium" does not simply succeed the old; it does not simply "remediate" it (in the double meaning of the word made familiar by Bolter and Grusin); it paradoxically "precedes" it, and helps to disclose the unsuspected possibilities of the old medium, of which the complexity and richness remain unchallenged. By the way, and here I am only repeating myself: each of the three close readings is exemplary in its depth, precision and freshness.

The second level of the "ars poetica" mechanism has to do with the design of the book, which has been made by Ann Burdick (the designer of Electronic Book Review, one of the publications defining the standards of outstanding web design in the humanities). What surprises most, is the relative minimalism of Burdick's approach, whom I consider one of the finest representatives of the less is more philosophy in art and design. First of all, Burdick and Peter Lunenfeld, the series editor, have decided to radically split Hayles's work, not in two parts, but in two worlds: that of print culture and that of cyberculture. The book, whose structure is amazingly linear (one really has to read it from A to Z, and there is nothing except the illustrated and finely designed text), is indeed completed by a website (available at http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/#) offering a beautifully conceived survey of the academic background of the work (one finds in it a list of errata, an index, several bibliographies, a set of excerpts form the novels analyzed etc). The surprises of the book itself have to be discovered slowly by the reader during his journey through the pages. It is a pleasure to see how Burdick avoids gadget-like use of modern technology, in order to make a theoretical statement through her design increasing the impact of Hayles's theory. The work on the 3-D aspects of the book is a good example of this (every good book designer knows that a book is not a stack of flat pages, but a volume in space that can be elaborated like a sculpture). Burdick focuses for instance on the edges of the object, which are not banally gilt-edged, but offer the reader not only a supplementary message, but a double message, one to be read forward and one to be read backward (when you curb the book slightly backwards, the word "WRITING" appears on the edge, when you curb it slightly forward, it is the second word of the title that becomes visible). The same compliments should be given to the way the book includes its quotations: instead of being reworked in order to fit the all-over typographic design of the host medium, their original form is maintained and it is with those quotations of textual images that Writing Machines establishes a new kind of dialogue. One can only hope that it will proliferate.

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