ENGL 668K: Digital Studies

     To trace the genealogy of the digital media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin co-authored Remediation, announcing the new media as a form of remediation, evolving itself from the old media through “the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy,” two competing principles of digitization which demonstrate the same desire to crossing over the limits of representation so as to achieve the reality—an experiential authenticity (5). While hypermediacy promises multi-focus competitiveness and random access, immediacy requires necessary transparency which signifies a process of erasure, making the medium itself invisible in representing the real. Despite their theoretical contradiction, Bolter and Grusin reached a conclusion that hypermediacy and immediacy came to their convergence in the advancement of networked communications, wherein two different versions of “the contemporary remediated self” are constructed in correspondence with the double logics of remediation: the virtual self and the networked self (232). In response to “the two-fold relationship with the media” (229), the virtual self comes into being when the subject is immersed in the digital environment, able to assume different perspectives freely, whereas the networked self, or the hypermediated self, is “a network of affiliations, which are constantly shifting” (Bolter 232). It appears that both forces interacting in the digital media without conflicts in terms of Bolter and Grusin’s remediation. Interestingly, not only in criticism like Cybertext but also in literary works such as Transmission takes place the same logic of accommodating the two contrary concepts concerning the “remediated self” within the two-fold principles of hypermediacy and immediacy.

     In Espen J. Aarseth’s Cybertext, the twin logics of hypermediacy and immediacy resound in Aarseth’s discussion on the rhetoric of hypertexts. According to Aarseth, the hypertext ought to be considered as a textual game in which readers have two authentic experiences of reading: “an aporia,” a kind of “impasse” because of readers’ lack of control over the text containing multifarious links, and the “epiphany,” an effect of linking out and regaining the control over the text in the co-authoring process of meaning production (91). While “reading” hypertexts like Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, Natalie Bookchin’s The Intruder and Jason Nelson’s net poems, readers have to assume the task of “mapping the network and reading the map of her own reading carefully” since the inception of running the media (Aarseth 93). Aarseth claims that readership has been restored—though not transcended—in the reading experience of such a hypertext since, in his definition, a hypertext is “a dense, multicursal labyrinth,” in which the reader searches and then discovers the meaning of the narrative presented not by the author but constructed by the reader’s oneself (91). In this aspect of multiplicity, Aarseth seems to concur with the double logic of the digital media elaborated in Remediation. As proclaimed by Bolter and Grusin, hypermediacy gratifies the need of the reader/user/player to link out through random access, whereas immediacy diminishes the presence of digital media and the presence of the self replaces the absence of media; likewise, a similar logic works well with Aarseth’s definition of how hypertext discourse operates within the triad of text, reader and author. In Aarseth’s description of hypertext poetics, readers will first have no control and experience “an aporia” when encountering the multi-cursal links, a similar condition when hypermediacy dominates the digital space; as readers continue their reading in the labyrinth of the text, they will later attain a hypertext epiphany, regaining the control of the text in the similar way as what occurs in transparent immediacy functioning in digital visual media.

     Therefore, due to such a fine line between the double logics of hypermediacy and immediacy, Hari Kunzu depicted in Transmission his own version of a delicate interplay between the hypermediated self and the virtual transparent self in a world saturated with digital media. For Kunzu, the binary logics of hypermediacy and immediacy interact and interdepend on each other, enabling his heroes doing crossovers from the virtual self to the networked self, and vice versa. In Transmission, both Arjun Mehta and Guy Swift represent well a composite configuration of a self immersed in the virtual reality and a network of selves in the hypermediated world around him. Kunzu didn’t just create an easy comparison between Arjun and Guy, between a daydreaming computer engineer, whose virtual self collapses with the networked self, and a materialistic CEO, who owns a business firm and strives to secure his business from the attack of the Leela virus. Instead, in a detailed write-up at the very beginning of the novel, Kunzru characterizes Guy as a game player, who, just like Arjun, immersed himself in “playing Tetris on the armrest games console” and engaged himself in the enjoyment of having “just beaten his high score” (11). Adopting a virtual identity eerily similar to Arjun’s, Guy is also capable of moving swiftly to and fro with various “media” around him: digital devices such as cell phones or laptops and mass transportation like aeroplanes or automobiles. Even his residence is an arena of hypermediacy as the Vitro is equipped with multifarious facilities along with “a bank of video monitors” (Kunzru 112). Bolter and Grusin declare that digital media tend to “place point of view under user’s control” and thus endorse the user’s/player’s freedom of “navigation” within the digital space; with “the freedom to move through space,” this virtual self will be able to occupy multiple, diverse perspectives (243-5). In Transmission, Guy is given the freedom to navigate the virtual space, “the freedom to be oneself is the freedom to become someone else” since he is both aware of the discrepancy between VR and RL and capable of adopting a multiple point-of-view selfhood controlled by himself whenever he would like to pick on and put it on (247).

     In introducing the theory of how immediacy functions in remediation, Bolter and Grusin quotes from Michael Joyce’s significant writing of hypertextual pedagogy to remind readers of digital media that “replacement is the essence of hypertext, and in a sense the whole World Wide Web is an exercise in replacement: ‘Print stays itself; electronic replaces itself” (43-4). It is also obvious that Guy Swift as a counterpoint to Arjun in the novel embodies the concept of constant replacement in digital remediation. Guy’s transformation in last section of the novel signifies the interplay of hypermediacy and immediacy, making it easy for him cross over the limit between his net-worked self, the hypermediated self or the windowed self he assumes when he has his laptop in hand presenting his projects to his clients, to the new virtual self, immersing himself within the virtual space really controlled by himself for the first time. The interaction between hypermediacy and immediacy shatters the binary opposition and blurs the demarcation in between, enabling easy crossovers from the transparent virtual selfhood to a social network of multi-selves.

Bibliography

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: the MIT P, 2000. 

Bookchin, Natalie. The Intruder. 24 Oct. 2006 .

Borges, Jorge Lois. “The Interloper.” Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Dibbell, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace.” 10 Oct. 2006 .

Joyce, Michael. Afternoon. CD-Rom. Eastgate, 1987.

Kunzr, Hari. Transmission. New York: Plume, 2005.

Nelson, Jason. 31 Oct. 2006 .

The material and the immaterial form a special kind of binary: one cannot exist without the other. Focusing too hard on one side of the binary is much like gazing at one side of a coin – there is an inevitability to the other side. There cannot be a one-sided coin. At a certain juncture, it is easier to think about the coin as an object rather than as the sum of its sides – not collapsing the binary, but also not slavishly beholden to it – and I offer that model as an ideal way of unpacking materiality, particularly in a post-digital setting.

Consider the painting Cloister Cemetary in the Snow by Caspar David Freidrich, which was destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II. That painting no longer exists as a physical object; there is no materiality. And yet, just a click of the mouse away, there it is, almost as though it was just hiding from us. Although after having followed the link we are viewing a reproduction of the painting, we are not looking at the painting itself. The “itself” of the painting does not exist. The digital reproduction of the painting does have particular materialities: it is 663 by 436 pixels, it is black and white, it is fifty kilobytes; but it also is not material in the same way that the painting that it reproduces once was. Bolter and Grusin spend a few sentences of their discussion of digital photography speculating about similar questions: A digital photograph “is recorded by photosensitive cells and never exists except as bits. Is such an image a photograph or a computer graphic? If the image began as a conventional photograph and was scanned into the computer and digitally retouched, is it then a photograph or a computer graphic? (105).” Lest I appear as though I’m rewriting Benjamin, I’ll stop before the question demands its follow-through, and suggest that these concerns are innately material concerns even as they consider objects that have no material object (as such) they are associated with. Immateriality is a material concern.

What most propels Dibbell’s “Rape in Cyberspace” is neither the sexual violence nor the grass-roots community building that follows, but is the effervescent nature of the crime: there is no raped body, yet unlike a “real world” rape, there is a (material) transcript of the rape that is as immediate as the rape itself. A video or photograph might record real world actions in part, a transcript of a MUD dialogue is that MUD dialogue. The reader of the Mr. Bungle transcript is actually witnessing the rape, is present as it occurs however removed in time that reader is from the chronological moment in which it took place. The rape itself is an immaterial crime, its only point of access both as it happened and afterwards is through a material medium, and it is made more present, more truly material, once that experience is set down by Dibbell, and published, either as a newspaper article or as a codex. The crime literally becomes tangible.

There is another configuration of the material/immaterial binary at play in Joyce’s Afternoon, which I have alluded to briefly before. Though the text itself is opaque in its mechanisms to all but the most dedicated reader (the one who owns Storyspace), there are editional changes, such as the introduction of graphics, changes in the interface (as in the Norton edition), and revisions to the text itself from edition to edition: the same sorts of material concerns that are of interest to the bibliographic scholar trained in codices and manuscripts, but with a key difference. Cross-reading, the traditional methodology for such practices, falls apart at the level of the “naked” reading of the hypertext. The program’s design – the materiality of the Afternoon text – eschews the sort of permanence that is an otherwise innate property of the material – the object can be trusted to remain more or less the same. Afternoon does remain the same inasmuch as its component parts – its scriptons – are fixed from reading to reading, and are fixed differently from edition to edition. In the chimerical variability of the text from reading to reading, each reading of the (material) text becomes irreproducible. While a poem from Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes could easily be reconstructed after it is first assembled, there is no way to have the same experience with Afternoon twice. The reading experience, though grounded in the material text, assumes immateriality as an aspect of its materiality.

The immateriality of the individual experience, or at least the ways in which the specific materiality of individual experience becomes immaterial (once it’s gone it’s gone) plays an important role in both Gibson’s “Agrippa” and Montfort and Rettberg’s Implementation in very similar ways. In both cases, the texts are created as mass produced objects – in “Agrippa”’s case, in a factory; in Implementation’s, on a computer printer – that are designed to be used and experienced only once. Gibson’s “Agrippa” is more extreme in this case than Implementation is, at least at first glance, since “Agrippa” self-encrypts after it is played, and after being experienced once it can no longer be played at all – it is a text that has more in common with a match than with a traditional book: there is an artifact left after its use, but it is a shadow of its former self, its material properties have radically changed. The encrypted “Agrippa” disc is not the same as the same unencrypted disc was a few moments before it was played. Likewise, the material “hard copy” of the Implementation text is neither the same as the digital PDF designed to be printed, nor as the (equally material) implementation of the text, which necessarily changes from one reader/participant to another.

In each of these examples, there is an interplay within the material/immaterial binary, but never does it transgress the binary boundary. Materiality and immateriality are able to coexist, but never actually infringe on each other outright. The binary remains intact.

Works Cited

The Agrippa Project, http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/

Bolter, David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1999.

Dibbell, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace.”

Joyce, Michael. Afternoon: A Story. Eastgate Systems, 1990.

Montfort, Nick and Scott Rettberg. Implementation. http://nickm.com/implementation/

The definitions of hypermediacy and immediacy can be seen as rough descriptions of aspects of media, or as two ideals set on opposing ends of a spectrum.  When placed in this binary, it is virtually improbable that either will sustain itself indefinitely.  Ultimate hypermediacy, a constantly self-conscious piece of media, would at best be uninteresting and at worst not be media or art at all.  Ultimate immediacy would resemble some kind of a virtual reality device, with the ability to, either temporarily or permanently, destroy the user’s memory and consciousness of the world outside of the virtual reality.  This is a distant possibility, both for technological and political reasons, so is not reasonable.  If we construct a binary between hypermediacy and immediacy, however, that consists of a set of characteristics, outlined in Remediation, that we can file examples of media under, the binary cannot hold up.  It is perhaps the case of all binaries that one cannot exist without the other, but in the case of remediation, hypermediacy and immediacy are not only defined by one another, but they often are responses to each other.

Instances of immediacy are easy to find, and tend to be the default way we look at casual pieces of media we view.  When watching television, we like to suspend disbelief and get into the story, which is what makes it enjoyable.  When we are reading an article online, we use the interface as the means to the information end.  These examples are far from purely immediate.  We certainly notice the browser interface we use to surf the internet every time we use it.  We sometimes notice the network logo at the bottom right of the screen when we’re watching our favorite television show.  Even when we go to the movies, we are aware that we are watching a movie.  Even the phrase “to suspend disbelief” is suggesting that we are taking an active role in pretending that we are not aware of the media we’re confronted with.  Remediation mentions the movie Strange Days, showing a futuristic virtual reality that removes interface completely from the visual field.  Total immediacy is impossible, however, as the user is aware of the technology.  The question in the end is whether the ultimate goal of immediacy is to make us unaware of the media or to merely make us forget it.  Another example of extreme immediacy is the 2004 film Final Cut, where computer chips implanted in the brain record the visual and aural experiences of the user.  After death, these images are viewed by the survivors.  The viewers of the movie are certainly aware that they are viewing the images on the screen, but they are real experiences of the deceased, not subject to the tropes of storytelling.  Interestingly, the raw footage is not subject to the tropes of filmmaking, but the films are heavily edited, restricting immediacy in the interests of the emotions of the survivors.  Nevertheless, if immediacy’s goal is only to make us forget that we are viewing an artificial media, the techniques used by that particular media are often what cause us to forget that fact.

Perhaps the best examples of hypermediacy we observed in class were the “Skin” project and the “Implementation” project.  Bolter and Grusin suggest that hypermediacy is a state that artists turn to once the media itself has lost its inherent transparency.  These two projects are extreme examples of this, in that the point is the media itself.  There is not a story that one can glean from “Skin,” (except on the part of the author herself,) and no greater narrative that can be gleaned from a single person viewing a piece of “Implementation.”  There are conclusions that can be made by the viewing of a single example of either project, but they are entirely dependent on the state of that particular piece, and have no understandable relationship to the project as a whole.  The meaning that can be found in a tattoo that is a part of “Skin” is found through the fact that is a tattoo on someone’s body, and that it is a part of a larger, unseen narrative.  One aim seems to be to destroy immediacy, but while hypermediacy is obsessed with the media itself, immediacy is more involved with story and human condition, and these aspects do inevitably come out.  Similar examples of individual example narratives can be found in the “Implementation” project.  While there is certainly only a small amount of immediacy in these examples, the fact remains that one’s response to seeing an example of “Skin” or “Implementation” is, firstly, a reaction to the usage of the medium, and secondly, a question of, “but what does it mean?”

The binary between immediacy and hypermediacy is not only difficult to define, the two are unavoidably linked.  Since we cannot have media where either is absent, they will coexist, but they also are defined by each other.  Immediacy is what a media can obtain only by using hypermediate elements.  If we could have a virtual reality experience that consisted of no equipment and complete interaction, along with a deletion of knowledge of reality, we would have something more than media.  Extreme examples of hypermedia inevitably revert to more immediate themes when the technique is more deeply investigated.  If “Skin” had no point other than to create an unreadable story through scattered tattoos, it could hardly be defined as media at all.  As they are, the two concepts are reactions to each other, and a true binary can only be upheld in characterizing aspects of media.  We cannot say, however, that a certain piece of media is hypermediate and not immediate, or vice-versa.

Espen Aarseth rests his definition of ergodic literature on two terms, the importance of which can easily be overlooked. Aarseth says, “The actions within the game [of football] are not narrative actions […] The adjective I propose for this function is ergodic, in which a chain of events […] has been produced by nontrivial efforts” (94). The terms that can easily be overlooked are action and event. In Aarseth’s example of football the action and event take place in an unmediated physical environment. I am interested in exploring how media shape events and actions and if a binary of immediacy and hypermediacy is useful in describing the difference between actions and events dependent on digital media. In exploring this question I will look at Afternoon and at the experience of the MOO described by Julian Dibble in “A Rape in Cyberspace.” In the case of Afternoon, I argue that the use of the medium is a hypermediated event and that this event is grounded in an awareness of the materiality of that medium. The event I look at in LambdaMOO is the rape, and while this event is dependent upon the medium, the materiality of that medium is effaced. I suggest that this rape is an immediate event, and one that must be dealt with according to the emerging standards of a virtual world. The binary between hypermediacy and immediacy holds as the events possible in both environments yield very different results.

For Aarseth the reader’s involvement in Afternoon, depends on the reader’s initiation of a series of events that require nontrivial effort. Manipulating the program is an action, but perhaps beginning the story with a car accident, another type of event represented in the story, is not a coincidence. While the car accident only represents a material event, the effort it takes to assimilate the accident into the narrative makes one aware of the materiality of the medium. The car accident often influences the entirety of one’s reading experience. If the accident initiates the story, then the story comes to revolve around that event, but one becomes increasingly aware of the medium as he or she tries to fit the car accident into the series of passages that follow. The reader becomes aware of both the deep structure of the program and the physicality of the medium. Nontrivial effort has some overlap with hypermediacy because some ergodic literature, like Afternoon, has the potential to render the medium visible. Even if a reader cannot see the deep structure without the right version of Storyspace, the links, history, and other components of the interface reveal that there is a deeper structure hidden in the program. Unlike in the world of a MOO, one does not get lost in the world, one only becomes more aware about how fragmented that world really is and the mechanisms of manipulation used in navigating that world become transparent.

There is some comparison here to the blank pages and crossed out words of Tristam Shandy which make the reader aware of the physical medium as well of the book and its limitations. But unlike Tristam Shandy the event is not simply a representation in Joyce’s work. The reader is more actively engaged in manipulating the medium; saving readings, clicking words, tracing links, and trying to piece together different aspects of a narrative. The events in the narrative if one can call the fragments such are subordinated to the action of piecing it together or simply navigating it randomly through the medium.

In a very different sense, the immediacy of the MOO experience in Julian Dibble’s “Rape in Cyberspace” offers a very different kind of event, and demonstrates that technology that emphasizes immediacy has a powerful impact on human relationships. Dibble’s argues that the “classic liberal firewall between word and deed […] is not likely to survive intact” under the shifting paradigm of the information age. The rape committed in the MOO cannot be distinguished from a rape in the real world. The words on the screen equal the deed. I am not arguing the impact of the rape in the MOO is any more or less damaging than a physical rape. Indeed, the activity of comparing a cyber-rape and a physical rape seems reductive. They are different events, not reducible to one another, and as virtual communities grow it becomes increasingly important to evaluate such events on their own terms. The rape, while not material is immediate. Lost in the event, and certainly in Dibble’s description, is the interface, the keyboard, the monitor, the ability to shut off the machine; the material presence of the medium is lost. The medium lends itself to its own effacement. This quality comes I would argue from its social dynamic. Unlike Afternoon, the medium is centered on facilitating human interaction and offers an environment of immaterial immediacy for that interaction. The human interaction effaces the materiality of the medium. The MOO while a slight representation of the real world also operates by its own properties. It may start out as a “model-of” “real” social interaction and as such remains hypermediated, but it winds up being a “model-for” a new type of immediate interaction that does not need to reflect interaction in the real world. Because the MOO is more a model-for, the rape needs to be judged and is judged by the emerging standards of that social environment.

In another sense Dibble’s description of the ways in which a newbie becomes an experienced MOOer represents ways in which nontrivial effort can degrade. Nontrivial is a very relative term, and after a period of time what seems nontrivial becomes trivial. New MOOers must make more of an effort to project themselves into the world of the MOO and the events seem very mediated. For newbies the medium seems ever present, so the events is using and experiencing the medium. This is why the rape seem unreal for Dr. Bombay at first. Afternoon on the other hand is more resistant to the degradation of both the effort it takes to use the program and the reader’s awareness of the medium.

Aerseth, Espen. Cybertext. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1997

Bolter, David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1999.

Dibbel, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace.” December 1993. http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html>

McCarty Willard, ““Knowing true things by what their mockeries be: modelling in the humanities”: http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/legacy/staff/wlm/essays/knowing/Knowing.html

When the dichotomy between narrative and game is debated by most contemporary scholars, they are usually talking about whether or not there is a divide between traditionally narrative texts and video games. On one side of the debate are narratologists, who believe video games can be examined as narratives the way we examine other narrative media forms, like novels or movies. On the other side are ludologists, who believe games are not narrative, and should be looked at for their game-like qualities first. In recent months, this binary has weakened considerably, with theorists like Jesper Juul becoming more open to other theories. “I [have] real trouble identifying with this discussion anymore…At the end of the day, it consists of two parts: Real issues such as, ‘When and how does the fiction of a game matter for players?’ and a plain battle of words that tells us nothing about games, but is mostly about how to define narrative” (Wallace 15). What ultimately collapses this binary between narrative and game, though, is not just the realization that games can have narrative elements. It is also the fact that narrative texts frequently have game-like elements in them as well.

An examination of all the possible definitions of narrative is beyond the scope of this essay (for simplicity’s sake, we will leave out some of the broader definitions of narrative in favor of narrative that tells stories) (Ryan, “Narrative”) but defining what is meant by “game” is important. One of the crucial texts to the study of games is Caillois’ Man, Play, and Games. In it, Caillois defines play as a voluntary, unproductive activity that is make-believe, governed by rules, separate from everyday life, and possesses an uncertain outcome (6). Games organize play, either through formal or informal rules. Games are classifiable in several ways: as agôn (competitive) games, alea (chance) games, mimicry games, and ilinx games (disruption or vertigo) (14-26). Rules exist in two forms: paidia, or informal rules, and ludus, or formally agreed upon rules (27-9). Many of the texts I will examine will exhibit a mixture of different game and rules types.

Of the texts we examined in class, the most obviously video game-like one was Bookchin’s The Intruder. The Intruder merges Atari 2600-style games with an audio reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Interloper.” One proceeds through the telling of Borges’ story by completing a series of short games. The minigames are agôn games; the user either competes against the computer programming that provides the competition in some of the games, like the quick draw or Pong sections, or he is competing against himself, trying to figure out what goal must be met to progress to the next game. The rules present are ludus rules; while the user isn’t always aware of what is necessary to complete a certain game, there is a formal system of rules present for each game to be successfully completed (users can chose to skip games, but they will miss out on hearing the entire narrative). In making the games subservient to the presentation of narrative, Bookchin has presented a text that is more narrative than is immediately evident.

On the other hand, Joyce’s afternoon: a story seems to be more literary than game-like at first glance, since the text almost entirely consists of written text. However, afternoon exhibits both agôn and ilinx gameplay. The competition comes in trying to figure out how to proceed through the text and receive a satisfactory narrative. The disruption comes from when a user is unable to find that narrative, when they get locked into looping sections or can’t follow the shifts in narrative and perspective. Rules-wise, afternoon exhibits strong ludus rules. In order to successfully navigate the text, one must understand how to find words that yield and how to overcome guard fields that block certain pathways. In addition, the system of lexias and links that progression through the text is based on contribute to the ludus rules of the game. Although strongly inspired by postmodern literature, afternoon also owes a debt to computer adventure games and interactive fiction.

Most interestingly, we should see game elements even in texts like Kunzru’s Transmission. Not just in the occasional references to video games made during the novel, but the novel itself. How is Transmission game-like? If someone chooses to read Transmission for pleasure, they are choosing to immerse themselves in the illusory narrative world of the novel, or a mimicry game. What are the rules of this illusion? Simply put, the book’s format. In order to see the illusion, one must be able to read (or listen) and they must read through the book starting on the first page and finishing on the last one. The rules of reading are both paidia and ludus rules: there are no limits to how you visualize the characters or the settings of Transmission, but there are limits in successfully making sense of the narrative events of the novel. In general, while a novel or short story may not possess the level of physical interactivity that afternoon or The Intruder might have, there is still interaction that exists that fits the definition of play and game. Reading can be voluntary, unproductive, make-believe, has rules, is separate from everyday life, and has an uncertain outcome (one either succeeds or fails at finishing the book).

I conflate narrative and game not to make the differences between the two meaningless, but to suggest both a way out of a fruitless debate about the two, and to remind scholars of something that is often overlooked: reading can be fun. There are certainly texts that are not read for play, and a text read for play can also be read for work or school, but I think many times we forget to look at the primary reason most media forms exist: to entertain us. Figuring out what entertains us and why it entertains us is more important than drawing lines between narrative and game that, ultimately, are mostly arbitrary.

___________

My title is inspired by the title of an essay written by Sacha A. Howells titled “Watching a Game, Playing a Movie: When Media Collide,” located in Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, edited by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska.

___________

Works Cited

Bookchin, Natalie. The Intruder. Created 1999. Accessed December 20, 2006. http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/intruder/.

Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Trans. Meyer Barash. New York: The Free Press, 1961.

Joyce, Michael. afternoon: a story. CD-ROM. Watertown, Massachusetts: Eastgate   Systems, 2001.

Kunzru, Hari. Transmission. New York: Plume, 2004.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Narrative.” The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds.       David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005.           Accessed 8 November 2005.             http://lamar.colostate.edu/%7Epwryan/narrentry.htm.

Wallace, Mark. “The Play’s The Thing.” The Escapist Issue 36. Published March 14^th,             2006. Accessed December 20, 2006. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/36.

In one section of Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, which expands on the psychodynamics of orally based thought and expression, Walter J. Ong rhetorically crafts the binary opposition orality versus literacy by repeatedly placing in between the idiosyncratic features of these two terms an adverb of degree contained by the comparative expression “rather than” with the aim of marking the extent to which this comparison favors orality over literacy simply because the former one is “additive rather than subordinative” (37), “aggregative rather than analytic” (38), “situational rather than abstract” (49). Out of Ong’s inventory of nine contrasting traits, this paper focuses on three: close versus away from the human lifeworld (42), participatory versus objectively distanced (45), and “antagonistically toned” (43) and analyzes them throughout works such as Skin, “A Rape in Cyberspace,” and Transmission in an attempt to illustrate that the orality-literacy binary opposition is no longer sustainable in these literary projects.  

Perceiving oral cultures as devoid of intricate analytic categories, on the presence of which writing thoroughly relies in order to organize knowledge at a distance from the lived experience, Ong explains that this absence inevitably requires oral people to conceptualize and articulate their knowledge in close connection to the human lifeworld (42). Accordingly, whereas literacy, contingent on writing’s power to foster abstractions, denaturalizes the human “by itemizing such things as the names of the leaders and political divisions in an abstract,” orality assimilates the inanimate by bringing the “objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings” (42). In this respect, Shelley Jackson’s Skin project significantly epitomizes the author’s skillfulness to objectify the partakers in this “mortal work of art” who, ultimately, become converted into her words, “participants will be known as ‘words.’ They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments. . . . Only the death of words effaces them from the text.” The constraints that Jackson imposes on participants with regard to the irrevocable acceptance of the given words and the apparent free choice of the location of their tattoos, excluding those words that name explicit body parts, subtly recall Ong’s remark on print’s tendency to monitor the handling of the typographic space, and, mainly, the way “print controlled not only what words were put down to form a text but also the exact situation of the words on the page and their spatial relationship to one another” (128). And yet, what this project recaptures from orality resides in the animate nature of the material on which words are tattooed, which is the human body, as opposed to the flat, lifeless paper that the culture of literacy would have called for.

Along the same lines “A Rape in Cyberspace” reiterates literacy’s itemizing tendency particularly at the end of the story when the database explains the disappearance of Mr. Bungle’s virtual identity not necessarily in terms of a previously existing body, yet only as a mere name, “Mr. Bungle, it would have said, is not the name of any player.” Despite the fact that, in some regards, this space accommodates literacy that is, it envisions LambdaMOO as “a world made of words” in which the only thing you really see is “a kind of slow-crawling script, lines of dialogues and stage direction creeping steadily up your computer screen,” these words’ idiosyncratic value stems from “the conflation of speech and act that’s inevitable in any computer-mediated world.” Recalling their orality-based roots, these words do not only defend their original magical potency when language disclosed itself as a performance-oriented act, as “a mode of action and not simply a countersign of thought” (Ong 32), but they also reaffirm their performative nature as, once typed on a computer, they “make things happen,” they become a “textual clutter of utterances and gestures.” Furthermore, what also adds to the actual repercussions of Mr. Bungle’s violent act is that these debates take place in the “social-issues forum,” engaging the entire community of “word-costumed characters,” which means that, in this space, written words are no longer “isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being” (Ong 101). Once more, orality and literacy intermingle, as situated in a communal space such as the cyberspace, literacy, and, implicitly, writing, no longer preserve its “solipsistic” nature (Ong 101).

What also counts Transmission as a remarkable example in this argument is that, by repeatedly alternating the typographic characters of the written words, the novel visually displays writing both in print and transmission that is, sent via any type of media. For instance, the welcoming memo, “It was a simple message.” “Hi. I saw this and thought of you” (3), in which the latter sentence takes the form of a transcription from an online message and the CNN news “Breaking news: virus suspect held” (148) instantaneously locate readers in the informational space, in a network-based community. This time, the message itself consists actually in the image of Leela Zahir “dancing in jerky QuickTime in a pop-up window on your screen” (3), a person which, despite its initial objectified description as “a thing with a name” (101), “a string of code that had hidden itself in an innocuous floppy disk” (102), ends up representing a “carnival virus” (101), which at “every restart had given birth to another generation. Life” (102). The ability to take this “animated” form favors the development of a friendly environment for the virus in its interaction with the humans who, hesitant about the real nature of its sonority, unsuccessfully struggle to conquer this unknown. Eager to diminish the distance between the knower and the known, which, initially, were kept close by orality, but, then, got separated by literacy (Ong 44), Leela researchers acknowledge that in this new type of communication, “information is not the same as knowledge” because knowledge is accessible through transmission, a process during which “perfect information” is impossible as “In the real world, however, there is always noise” (253).

Works Cited

Dibbell, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace.” 17 Dec. 2006

.

Jackson, Shelley. Skin. 17 Dec. 2006 .

Kunzru, Hari. Transmission. New York: Dutton, 2004.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York:

Routledge, 1997.

The establishment of the word/image binary has gained considerable attention in recent decades with the increasing development of extratextual technologies. However, as Jay Bolter and David Grusin have noted, “all media are at one level a ‘play of signs,’” (19) a lesson they directly attribute to poststructuralist notions of semiotics. They add that such a “play of signs”, however heavily weighted with words or imagery, is largely a function of the mediation and remediation by successive technologies, such as history has shown with the printed word, perspective painting, photography, film, and television, and as is now occurring with new media. In this essay, I will examine several facets of contention over this word/image binary and whether the binary itself is sustainable.

Bolter & Grusin suggest that any debate over word or image must inevitably arrive at arguments over which is more immediate, a question perhaps resounding more prevalently as new media rises in remediating the visual, textual, and auditory forms of communicatory technologies preceding it. In a footnote, Bolter & Grusin acknowledge the trend amongst theorists of the later half of the twentieth century to “consistently deny that an image is a more direct presentation of the world than is written or spoken language,” and thus “their approach has generally been to textualize the image and therefore to take it into the discourse of poststructuralism.” (30) This perhaps is due to our utter dependency on written or spoken language to describe the workings of an image—a problem that tends to marginalize any other semiotic considerations of the relationship since we must continuously defer back to words in order to speak at all about images.

However, as the most quotidian adage goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words,”—clearly along the way there has been a prevailing notion of a sensorial primacy of images, as well as other non-textual sensorial experience. Many might point to the origins of written language, and semiotics generally, as being greatly pictorial in communication. Walter Ong thus reminds us that words can be broken down to two discriminate qualities: the auditory (spoken) and the visual (typographic), where the visual aspect of the typography serves to symbolically represent the sounds or ideas of spoken words. The typographic word itself is an “image” of a visual symbolic sort that can quickly become utilized as one would with other forms of imagery, thus blurring the word and image distinction. A number of works we’ve examined in class embody this blurring, such as Bookchin’s The Intruder and Nelson’s interactive poetry, both of which engage the viewer with remediations of the text/image hierarchy—where text was once preeminent, other mediating devices such as imagery and sound come to the forefront to arrest the senses. Jackson’s SKIN project as with Montfort and Rettberg’s Implementation also take text in new directions as material objects that give words (quite literally with SKIN) an organic form of their own as they ruminate out in the world, suffering the same vicissitudes of life as their carriers and distributors.

These works tend to wreak havoc on the preeminence and believed immediacy of text. Are not the most primal impressions upon our minds raw neural feeds from our senses, be they visual, auditory, tactile, etc. antecedent to any structured cognition? These same questions have troubled philosophic and scientific inquiry for centuries, and only continue with the developments of postmodernity. Where Derrida had attempted to subvert the Western world’s biases favoring a hierarchical binary of speech over text in their corresponding relationships to the “extramental” world (“the pipeline model”), Ong concurs, but ultimately questions the corresponding nature of any linguistic structure:

Writing breaks the pipeline model because it can be shown that writing has an economy of its own so that it cannot simply transmit unchanged what it receives from speech. Moreover, looking back from the break made by writing, one can see that the pipeline is broken ever earlier by spoken words, which do not themselves transmit an extramental world of presence as through transparent glass. Language is a structure, and its structure is not that of the extramental world. (163)

Ong thus reinforces the idea that words, and thus linguistics, are models of phenomena being signified and abstracted so as to be graspable and malleable enough to be communicated. As Willard McCarty discussed, models are by definition incomplete representations of phenomena in the world and can be quite deceptive when viewed at a one-to-one level. At the same time, however, they are eminently useful for all practical purposes in cognition and communication.

Just as words may represent linguistic models of phenomena, images too, are representative visual models—merely representations of phenomena that have already preexisted in time that are then visually interpreted by a viewer. A photograph is captured of a landscape, but the existential moment of that landscape is nevertheless a mere partition in time-space. No photograph can completely capture the phenomenological entirety of that landscape, though advancements in (re)mediating technologies make attempts at inching asymptotically closer to such a singularity of experience. As poststructuralists have expressed, the relationship between signifier and signified are of two realms that never fully meet.

Viewed in terms of structural models for communication, the binary of words and images may be reducible to mere modalities of signification limited by the confines of segmented time-space allowing for communicable abstractions of experience. Perhaps another way to view words and images is as components of a semiotic metacode of our continuing stream of consciousness, which in its rawest form is without sequential divisions. As I type this, my mind considers the words to be typed as segmented entities, yet the entirety of my consciousness would include a continuous stream of all sensory input as well as my conscious and unconscious thought patterns—the entirety of this experience is irreducible to any finite array of words, images, or any other mediating devices at our service. The totality of phenomena is far too great to ever be completely reduced and communicated, thus ultimately collapsing any binary configurations of mediation, however intrinsically useful they might be.

Works Cited:

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. London: MIT Press.

Natalie Bookchin, The Intruder: http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/intruder/

Poems by Jason Nelson: http://www.heliozoa.com/

McCarty, Willard (2002) Knowing true things by what their mockeries be: modeling in the humanities. London.
http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/legacy/staff/wlm/essays/knowing/Knowing.html

Ong, Walter (2002) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

The term “game” is ill-defined in the humanities. Bolter and Grusin in Remediation define computer games as “a range of forms, including violent action games, strategy games, role playing and narratives games, erotic and frankly pornographic applications, card games, puzzles and skill-testing exercises, and educational software” (89). This is a thoroughly unhelpful definition due to its self-referential nature, and other theorists such as Aspen Aerseth in Cybertext do not provide any further assistance—as he tends to use the terms “interactive fiction,” “ergodic literature,” and “adventure game” when referring to the same examples. Jerome McGann, for his part, talks a little about games when discussing his IVANHOE project, but even he admits that the term “game” may not fit the scope of what IVANHOE is trying to accomplish.

The result is that within the humanities, the distinction between game and narrative is not sustainable because no such distinction truly exists. It cannot exist. Half of the debate, the nature of games, is not even defined. Much like the problems Marjorie Perloff described in debates on the future of the humanities, the discussion on how games are literary or produce narratives tend to boil down into: “it’s just a matter of convincing those crass others, whether within the university or outside its walls, that they really need us and can use our products” (Perloff).

McGann, again, seems to take this ill-conceived approach when he discusses IVANHOE. He is very convinced that the project will allow scholars a “way to escape” into a “playspace” of “discourse fields” and so on (McGann, “Textonics”), but there is no clear discussion of the reasoning behind why this needs to occur within a game—or using gaming elements—in order to occur. McGann sites a hatred of statistics as the exigence for the project; this is simply not a compelling enough reason. The goals of IVANHOE, vague as they are, could probably have produced a number of different outcomes besides a game, maybe a collaborative wiki or some sort of shared workspace tool for the humanities. Surely, McGann and Drucker could have done a more traditional treatment of the “multivalent narratives embedded in literary works” (The Ivanhoe Group). But why a game? What is the benefit of approaching narratives from a gaming perspective?

That is not to say, of course, that such benefits do not exist or that IVANHOE has no purpose—only that the purpose is not well-defined because the term “game” itself is not well-defined. McGann seems to get around this problem by forcing critics to experience the game first:

As a piece of software, IVANHOE can only be learned by putting it to use. You don’t want to read about playing games of interpretation with IVANHOE, you want actually to play the games (if you want anything to do with IVANHOE in the first place). (McGann, “Ivanhoe: An Interface for Interpretation”)

Indeed, the perspective on the project does come into focus after it is experienced. There is something intriguing about watching the game develop, unfold, and to generally see things happen. But where does the narrative that the players are developing come into attention within IVANHOE? There is that impressive discourse field and some nice graphical linking to each narrative, but realistically any text can be entered by player without any defined literary merit. The demos for the product use “bla bla bla” as the sample text along with citations of classic poems, perhaps indicating a certain light-hearted atmosphere in the product development but also a complete lack of distinction between the two types of narratives in the system.

John Unsworth mentions that IVANHOE is a tool “crying out for exegesis,” when he discussed the project in relation to the future of tools for the humanities (14). There is certainly a lot of room for interpretation on what the project will ultimately produce, but as a game the results seem to be dependent on the player’s interaction in order to produce any narratives for this narrative game. The game could probably operate independent of narrative, with only junk text, but that could possibly strip the project of all positive meaning (leaving only cynical or satirical interpretations on the outcomes).

A similar problem exists in “social texts” like MOOs. As the piece, “A Rape in Cyberspace” by Julian Dibbel observed, the narrative of a game is dependent on how the game is played. When a game is played through interactions with both the game system and other players, the results can be unpredictable—possibly damaging. Even in a more traditional solo experience such as Adventure, there is a tension as to who is creating the narrative: “just as the game becomes a text for the user at the time of playing, so, it can be argued, does the user become a text for the game, since they exchange and react to each other’s messages according to a set of codes” (Aerseth, 162).

IVANHOE, as a game and as a tool, is also making use of the players as a source of narrative source material. The bibliographic theme affords players a multitude of opportunities for cross-referencing each other’s work, resulting in the emergent narrative that is so prominently displayed in the center of the game. Like Adventure or a MOO, the end products could be very fascinating, but the lack of definition over just what the game is and what its purpose is (beyond the need for first-hand experience) makes the difference between the game aspects and the narrative aspects very difficult to discuss. As such, there can be no distinct line between the two in this new gaming tool for narration in the near future.

Works Cited

Aerseth, Espen. Cybertext. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1997

Bolter, David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1999.

Dibbel, Julian. “A Rape in Cyberspace.” The Village Voice. December 1993. http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html>

The Ivanhoe Group. “About: The Ivanhoe Game: an ARP Project.” 2005. 20 December 2006. http://www.patacriticism.org/ivanhoe/about.html>

McGann, Jerome. “Ivanhoe: An Interface for Interpretation.” The Literary Magazine (December 2005). 1.1.

McGann, Jerome. “Textonics: Literary and Cultural Studies in a Quantum World.” http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/%7Ejjm2f/old/textonics.html>

Unsworth, John. “Forms of Attention: Digital Humanities Beyond Representation.” http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/FOA/>

Espen Aarseth, in his book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, is quick to define ergodic literature as that which requires non-trivial effort in order for the reader to traverse the text.  However, this definition comes under fire in that it does not differentiate ergodic texts from any others, for surely other texts require more than just trivial reading and page turning to traverse plots, characterizations, etc.  Aarseth thusly differentiates ergodic literature from other literature by claiming that the non-trivial effort in ergodic texts results in non-linearity, that is the obfuscation of possible text, and thusly possible plots, from the reader, dependent on the reader’s decisions.  In this way, ergodic literature is defined most narrowly as texts that require non-trivial effort and consequences for the reader resulting from such effort.  This definition thusly sets up a binary between ergodic texts and linear texts.

However, it seems as though a linear text can require non-trivial effort that results in consequences for the reader without obfuscating possible text.  In this way, linear methods could be used to achieve ergodic status.  If this scenario is possible then the binary of linear and ergodic seems ultimately collapsible.  But is such a scenario really possible?  By examining the reading experiences of Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon:  A Story,  and Natalie Bookchin’s “The Intruder” (a web adaptation of Borges’ “The Interloper”) it should become clear as to how sustainable the binary between linear text and ergodic text is.
Transmission requires non-trivial effort in that the plot is not presented in a chronological fashion.  The reader must assemble the plot themselves and without any explicit instruction from Kunzru.  In doing so, it is possible for the reader to make decisions that influence exactly how the plot is constructed (in this way the book has ergodic tendencies, yet it still allows accessibility to all of its text and so remains linear)  An example of such a decision is when a phone call takes place between Guy and Gaby and this call has many similarities with a phone call between the same two characters in a later chapter.  However, despite the similarities that might force the reader to decide there is only one phone call shown from different viewpoints, there are enough differences where the reader could just as satisfactorily claim that the two scenes are indeed describing two different phone calls.  In this way, the text offers the reader a choice that can be made through non-trivial effort and the result of that choice has definite consequences for the way in which the plot is read.  The book allows for such a decision and consequence without changing the accessibility to the text and thusly appears to achieve ergodic status through linear means, which would help to collapse the binary between the two states.
Joyce’s Afternoon:  A Story offers choices to readers in a much different way.  The readers can select almost any word or phrase on each screen and then, based on that choice, a new screen of text will appear.  In this way, the “book” operates like a hypertext in that a unique pattern of choices by readers leads to unique patterns of text.  It is notable that Afternoon does not allow full access to any kind of linear text, but rather its text is solely displayed based on readers’ word/phrase selections.  In this way, the reader’s choices actually bring into existence certain pieces of texts and disallow other pieces of text, thusly reconstructing the story with each choice.  Afternoon, therefore, is quite ergodic in that it requires much non-trivial effort and offers direct textual consequences in response to readers’ efforts.  However, perhaps in defining Afternoon as ergodic, the analysis of Transmission must change.  It seems that this ergodic work offers textual ramifications for readers’ choices, not just interpretational ramifications and so perhaps the pliability of Transmission’s plot is not as ergodic when compared to the reading experience of Afternoon.
Bookchin’s “The Intruder” also proves to be quite ergodic as one must play and win computer games in order to receive text from Borges’ “The Interloper.”  In this fashion, the non-trivial effort and choices (read:  gameplay) that readers make are responsible for the displaying of the text.  A reader with less skill will get text in a different way than one with more skill at the games.  “The Intruder” is much different than both Afternoon and Transmission, though,  in that its goal is not to relate a story, but is rather to be ergodic for the sake of being ergodic.  The piece does not allow any real transmission of Borges’ story; however, it does neatly point out the difference between ergodic and linear texts.  “The Intruder” points out how trivial the effort is to read Borges’ story by bringing non-trivial effort to the forefront of readers/players’ focus.  Besides forcing attention to the differences between trivial and non-trivial effort in reading, “The Intruder” also shows how ergodic literature forces readers to make choices that define how the text is displayed (unlike Borges’ story, where the text is always the same).  In pointing out these differences, it seems that textual ramifications to non-trivial effort, and not just interpretational ones, are essential to ergodic literature.  Therefore, Transmission appears ever more linear and ever less ergodic.
While Transmission appears at first to be ergodic, relative to these other two works, it must be labeled as non-ergodic literature.  The linear text remains separate from the ergodic, despite its ability to produce reader driven consequences, because those consequences determine the interpretation of a text, whereas in ergodic literature they determine the text itself.  While the affectation of the text most definitely affects the interpretation of that text, ergodic literature forces readers to make choices that affect what they read rather than how they read it.  In this case, linear texts may approach some aspects of the ergodic, but do not reach complete ergodic-ness and thusly the binary of linear and ergodic is perhaps pliable, but most definitely not collapsible.

Works Cited

Aarseth, Epsen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1997.

Bookchin, Natalie. “The Intruder.” 1999. 20 October 2006. http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/intruder/.

Joyce, Michael. Afternoon: A Story. Eastgate Systems, 1990.

Kunzru, Hari. Transmission. New York: Plume, 2004.

In the 2004 “Reading at Risk” report, television and other new visual technologies are mentioned as possible reasons for the decrease of reading in America (14-15). Indeed, just by looking around one can see that we are becoming an increasingly image driven culture. Yet, if we are to list within our present cultural wars a battle pitted between the printed word and the visual image, it is important not only to have a full understanding of what these elements are but also of the binary that many claim exists between them. This essay examines what defines the printed word and the visual image from perspectives of composition, function, and expression. As word and image are translated into and presented through different mediums, many of the supposed distinctions between image and word do not hold, yet there are some levels at which the difference between word and image remain, particularly when one considers the relationship between words, images, and spoken language. Ultimately, it is of the utmost importance to acknowledge both the distinctions between word and image and the places where these distinctions breakdown in order to understand the power of these forms of communication as they work individually and in tandem.

Distinctions are typically made between words and images according to how they are formed and function. Ong discusses the development of the written word, defining it as “a coded system of visual marks” (83). Words can be broken down into discrete units, i.e. letters, and these letters correspond to pronounceable sounds. Words do not represent things, per se, they represent utterances. Images, on the other hand, represent things or ideas directly, or one might say, borrowing a term from Bolter and Grusin, with a greater degree of immediacy. An image of a tree can represent a tree, while the word “tree” contains letters that can be sounded out to produce the utterance “tree,” which in turn represents a tree. Finally, unlike words, the surface of visual image cannot be separated into discrete units.

As words and images are presented through different mediums, however, many of these distinctions breakdown. Words, for example, can function like images, representing ideas that they do not necessarily enunciate. In Jackson’s SKIN project, the words of a story are presented through the medium of tattoo. As noted in my blog on SKIN, the singularity of each tattooed word appearing in isolation highlights the way that language itself functions as a system. The individually tattooed words not only stand-in for a particular utterance, but they also represent the abstract idea of language itself. In a similar fashion, Montfort and Rettberg’s Implementation project presents written words through the medium of stickers posted in public places. The words on these stickers convey part of a written text, a novel called Implementation. However, the image of the words, as they are presented on these publicly displayed stickers, also represents, mocks, and undermines the omnipresence of the American media and government propaganda, a theme also undertaken by the novel.

Even when presented in the traditional medium of the page, words can be used to create images. McCaffery and bpNichol have noted how in the presentation of poetry, page and type can often interact to create a kind of “verbal sculpture” that enhances the meaning of the work (61). This verbal sculpture could be visually concrete, such as Herbert’s wing-shaped Easter Wings, but it could also be more abstract. McGann, in “The Rationale of Hypertext,” discusses the example of Dickinson, who often used the visual relationship of words and their particular medium to enhance the meaning of her poetry. In these examples, words are used in their traditional sense, but they are also used to create images or are in themselves presented as images that represent ideas not directly tied to utterance.

Just as, when presented in a different medium, words can function as images, so can images, when translated into a new medium, be deconstructed like words. As mentioned earlier, on the visual level images typically cannot be separated into discrete units. However, when presented through a digital medium, images possess what Aarseth calls a “dual materiality” (40). They exist on two levels, as “scriptons,” meaning images as they appear on screen, and as “textons,” meaning the underlying code that is translated into the visual field (62). This code itself can be broken down into discrete units by individuals ‘literate’ in whatever computer language the image is written in.

Images, both digitally and non-digitally created, can also be seen as functioning within a system of meaning. Like words, many images can and are designed to be ‘read.’ Such an argument stands counter to the claim that images have greater immediacy or transparency. For example, Bolter and Grusin describe how the image of the Windows computer interface runs on the cultural signifier of Alberti’s window (26). Individual’s familiar with Western culture, even if they would not recognize the name “Alberti’s window,” still recognize and understand the concept of how a computer screen can itself contain multiple movable windows each containing its own set of images. Many images we see everyday, whether produced digitally, developed from film, or painted on canvas, are designed to trigger shared cultural knowledge and communicate a particular effect or meaning. From photos of Iraqi children waving American flags to MOO icons of Warhol’s Monroe, these images are not transparent communicators of reality, rather, like words, they contain meanings that can be ‘read’ by someone who is ‘literate’ in a particular cultural tradition.

The distinction between word and image cannot be eliminated completely. Regardless of the fact that images do function within a logical system of meaning, they do not have the same relationship to utterance as the written word. Images function within their own system of meaning, which can be orally expressed but not determined in the same way as a printed text. Ultimately, to claim that there are no distinctions between words and images would be to ignore and devalue aspects of these tools that make them unique and give them power. To respect their differences is to both reaffirm the need for continued literary studies and to acknowledge the ways that visual images may affect and enhance this pursuit, and vice versa. Image and word are two overlapping systems through which human beings act to communicate, create and explore meaning. Reading them, we read ourselves.

Works Cited

Aarseth, Epsen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1997.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

Jackson, Shelley. SKIN. 17 December 2006. www.ineradicablestain.com/skin.html>.

McCaffery Steve and bpNichol. Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine the Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group 1973-1982. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992.

McGann, Jerome. “The Rationale of Hypertext.” The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. University of Virginia. 6 May 1995. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html>. 17 December 2006.

Montfort, Nick and Scott Rettberg. Implementation. 17 December 2006. http://nickm.com/implementation>.

National Endowment for the Arts. “Reading at Risk.” June 2004. 17 December 2006. http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf>.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 2002.

Wellman, Jennifer. “Remediation and the Reality of Body and Language: Shelley Jackson’s SKIN Project.” [Weblog entry.] ENGL 668K: Digital Studies. University of Maryland. 1 November 2006. http://mith2.umd.edu/teaching/courses/f06/engl668k/?cat=2&paged=4>. 17 December 2006.