Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms

"Textual studies should be recognized as among the most sophisticated branches of media studies we have evolved" (16), provocatively argues Kirschenbaum at the beginning of the book, a book whose "forensics"is a "theoretically and technically rigorous account of electronic texts as artifacts - mechanisms- subject to material and historical forms of understanding" (17). What a fascinating and complex topic! The encounter of 'traditional' philological and textual studies with electronic editing and digital storage and preservation is undoubtedly one of the most exciting challenges for digital humanists.

Kirschenbaum makes us rediscover the materiality of texts in their digital realm, and makes us ask questions about versioning, variations, volatility that are central not only for digital born literature. His argument that "forensics is a signature discourse network of modernity at the juncture of instrumentation, inscription, and identification"(250) invites me to ponder about the work of the Walt Whitman Archive, with which I have been collaborating for a couple of years. The epochal watershed for Whitman Studies was represented, by the appearance on the site, by April 2005, of all six, full length American editions of Leaves of Grass as XML files but also in facsimiles images, freely accessible to general readers: something that had never happened before in the same printed volume collecting Whitmans' work. The internationally widespread tendency to read, study, write about and translate Whitman's writings almost exclusively by using the first (1855) or last edition (1891-1892) of Leaves, which are also the editions usually published – a tendency that heavily overshadowed the extremely evolving nature of Whitman's creative work – was in this way seriously, and finally, undermined. As argued by Prof. Price, the constantly expandable nature of the electronic Archive seems to be particularly suited to Whitman's work, since this latter  “defies the constraints of the book. Whitman's work was always being revised, was always in flux, and fixed forms of print do not adequately capture his incessant revisions.” (“About the Archive”) The opportunity to collect the editions in the same, digital space is also paralleled by that of offering high-resolution images and the corresponding transcriptions of Whitman’s manuscripts (not only of poetry, but also correspondence, annotation and notebooks materials) otherwise scattered at over 100 different repositories across the world. 

Are we doing it in the 'right' way? What is the 'right' way, anyway? Is one of the keys to do it 'right' that of profoundly understanding the tools we use for our digital representation and preservation of what we call 'texts'? In these days, I am in the process of starting to work on an electronic bibliography of Cather's works: the aim is to reproduce a bibliography printed on paper and to trans-port it and trans-form within the digital Cather Archive. How do I do it? How can I use the different resources I have, in comparison to what the author of the printed bibliography had? How can I do an old job in a new, more thorough scholarly way? How can I engage, acknowledge, and favorably apply the renewed materiality of my philological act of textual preservation?
 

Beyond the Aura. On Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

I read "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as Benjamin's draft of a prognostic theory of cinema within a larger reconsideration of the role of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin historicizes the changing role of art in different ages and studies "the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production" (2), for he is convinced that "during long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. " (2). Before the advent of technological reproducibility, the value assigned to art was a cult and ritual value and/or an exhibition value, and art was relegated to a dimension completely separated from that of politics, but mechanical reproduction has destroyed the idea of art's aura, i.e. the traditionally idealized authenticity and precious uniqueness assigned to art creations, which originated from concepts such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery.

But Benjamin sees beyond the aura, beyond the realm of art pour l'art (and its Fascist instrumentalizations) that the concept of aura implicates. He sees a series of redemptive (and Communist) potentials in the new conditions of art creation and fruition. He sees that the technological reproducibility of the artwork "changes the reaction of the masses toward art” (15) by substituting the old "unique" experience with a mass, simultaneous experience, and also by altering the usual distinction between author and public and by altering the type of receptive attitude traditionally expected from the audience. In this sense, Benjamin is far from, if not opposite to, Adorno's rejection of the fruition of art by masses and from his defense of art's autonomy and disinterestedness, and "The Work of Art .." can be taken as a theory of cinema that deals with questions such as the transformation of our perception of the world through cinema, the audience's identification with the camera, the collective reception-in-distraction. But it is also, more largely, a draft of a new theory of an art that "instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics" (9).

No more cult, but politics, then. And if Fascism tends to re-introduce the cult function of art (i.e. to aestheticize politics) in order to create a mass politics for which the status quo remains untouched, Communism responds by politicizing art, by formulating "revolutionary demands in the politics of art" (2). Ok, Benjamin's ending is controversial, but perhaps it is useful to consider these categories as less fixed than what they seem to be. Perhaps it is useful to consider the regressive/progressive understandings of art's function that Fascism and Communism respectively embody in Benjamin's famous formulation. Perhaps it is still useful for us to go back to this text to strengthen our understanding of an art finally beyond the aura, of a technological art of the masses that can help us change (instead of escaping from) social reality. 

Post scriptum: I went to watch Alfonso Cuarón's "Gravity" yesterday, and I suspect Benjamin would have hated it. But I'll let you guess why. 

Mc Luhan's "Instant Inclusive Embrace"

How does Understanding Media understands media? What are its epistemological and argumentative strategies? I chose to quote Mc Luhan's own words (on page 349 in my 2011 MIT Press edition, in the "Automation" chapter) in my title because I think they represent both the author's thought on the nature of media as "make happen agents," (48) and his own way to tackle this topic.  Mc Luhan's writing seems in fact to proceeds via instant illuminations, via moments of electric divination, and it is founded on a totalizing, inclusive approach which seeks to describe the same redefinition of 'classical,' distant cognition into a sensuous intellectual embrace that is being operated by media. 

One thing that struck me in reading this book is to have found some analogies with Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology," notwithstanding the authors' stylistic, critical and ideological differences: with Heidegger, Mc Luhan shares a theoretical faith in the possibility of , and the need for , an understanding of the "nature" of media. Also, the attempt to show how automation, i.e. "the invasion of the mechanical world by the instantaneous character of electricity" (349) can abolish old dichotomies between science and art, culture and technology, work and leisure (347), seems to be one point Heidegger would have favorably looked at, and certainly called for, within his understanding of technology. 

Another striking part of the book for me is Mc Luhan's interest in language, his argument that "the first technology was the spoken word" (57), and the consequential idea of a total and inclusive translation operated by media that could gradually make it possible for us to not need "any verbalization whatsoever" (80). This ideal community of thought would do away with the "separateness of the individuals created by phonetic alphabet" (84), and with all that derived from it. It would be an organic world of gestalts rather than a mechanical world of language. In this regard, I am perplexed about this idea of a serene, unified global village, a "single consciousness" (61), an embodied global network-central nervous system of perception that does away with language's schematisms and perceptual limitedness and numbness, and eliminates any separation. I believe this question of separation/(re)unification is fundamental in Mc Luhan's thinking. The relationship between media, for example, is fundamental for creating a new non-linear ratio, and "the hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which freedom is born" (55), but, at the same time, Mc Luhan underlines how there is a sort of oppositional 'relational identity building' reaction between media: "the film has confirmed the writer in verbal economy [...] where the film cannot rival him" (288). In this sense, media influence each other but they also contrast, battle each other: so, how can that unity, that freedom, be achieved? Should we think that this unity and freedom only happens occasionally, only when artists as Ejzenstein and Rene' Clair are able to create "a free interplay among the senses and the media" (289)?

While reading this book, I concentrated on this idea of separation, and I started thinking about Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle." (1967) I did not remember his harsh criticism of Mc Luhan, to be honest, and now that I re-read it, I find it rather exaggerated and unfair. Yes, Mc Luhan writes that "electric changes have nothing to do with ideologies" (352), which is what mostly upsets Debord. Yes, Mc Luhan does have moments of technological determinism to which some readers are tempted to respond: ok, "media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios (also among themselves)" (53) but can you also concentrate on their political, economical, social uses and effects, and not only the changes in cognition and the implosion of space and time you are talking about? And these same readers would ask: what comes first, anyway, social, ideological processes or media processes? And yet Debord, just as well as Mc Luhan, just as well as Heidegger, share a fundamental thing, i.e. a radical understanding of technological media, one that is far more complex than the common debates about mass media in the way we generally intend them and perform them ( in terms of representation, simulacra, etc.). In this sense, I want to conclude my post by including some old notes of mine about Debord's concept of separation, because  I believe they can work here as an interesting dialectic force in connection to our reading of Mc Luhan. 

In "The Society of the Spectacle," chapter one is entitled “Separation perfected”, and, in fact, separation is a recurring, pivotal concept used by Debord in his description of the spectacle. On page 25, he even calls separation “the alpha and omega of the spectacle”. For Debord, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The spectacle “is a world vision which has become objectified” (5), “the main production of present-day society” (10), “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue” (24) and “the preservation of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence” (25). The separation of the worker and his products implies the end of personal communication among producers and the constant reinforcement of this isolation, and the alienated worker, and spectator, finds him/herself in a world which has become foreign to him/her, and this brings to the total estrangement of men and women among themselves and in relation to their products.

The abstraction of labor and the abstraction of production are perfectly represented by the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is also abstraction. In this sense, “in the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintans their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate” (26). Separation is, then, the central factor that founds the spectacle, and at the same time the spectacle founds and continually strenghtens this new type of alienation, no more based on the shift from being to having, but on that from having to appearing.

I like to compare Debord's view of thinking with Pierpaolo Pasolini’s ideas on the passivity and repression imposed on people by what he called the new fascism of the new communication media, which produced the total, illusory, omologation of the proletariat  to consumerist ways of life, with the consequent abandonment of any sense of class consciousness and, therefore, any  possibility of struggle for the abolition of the classes. But Debord’s idea of the spectacle seems to me a more profound and creative rewriting of a Marxist understanding of capitalism, than Pasolini’s one, because it does not concentrate so much neither on mass media or consumerism, but is instead, radically aimed to reveal the total commodification of reality and the ways in which “the commodity contemplates itself in a world it has created” (51).

Would Mc Luhan agree or not with this? Can a meeting point between Debord and Mc Luhan be found? What do we have to say about media and separation, from our present 2013 perspective? Anyway, I hope placing Debord, Heidegger, and even Pasolini here did not distract you from Mc Luhan too much. I admire the revolutionary and prophetic value of his thinking, and I value his "concern with effect rather than meaning" (26). I would love to write on the use of the image of light all over the book, but this would take another post. And perhaps I should stop before it's too late, for I feel very much like the professor in the theater queue of Woody Allen's Annie Hall, at this point.