Metamorphoses of (New) Media [1 ed.] 9781443887670, 9781443880596

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Metamorphoses of (New) Media

Metamorphoses of (New) Media Edited by

Julia Genz and Ulrike Küchler

Metamorphoses of (New) Media Edited by Julia Genz and Ulrike Küchler This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Julia Genz, Ulrike Küchler and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8059-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8059-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Part I: Discursive Metamorphoses Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 World Wide Web and the Emotional Public Sphere Raili Marling Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 The Structural Transformation of the Cybersphere Mary Nickel Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 49 Algorithms in the Academy David Beer Part II: Transmedia Metamorphoses Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 65 Spectator, Player, ‘Modder’: The Transition from the Cinematic Cave to the Digital Dispositif Cathrin Bengesser Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 85 How To Do Words With Things: Paul Auster’s Typewriter and the History of Writing in the 20th Century Martin Roussel Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 103 Bloomsday? On the Theory of Intermediality and the Production of Photo-Essays and Film-Essays Christian Sinn

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 119 Speaking Up in the Age of Media Convergence: Patrick Neate’s Babel (2010) and Plan B’s iLL Manors (2012) Christoph Reinfandt Part III: Fictional Metamorphoses Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 141 Space, Change, and Statements in Literary Representations of Virtual Worlds Nina Shiel Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 161 Literary Reflections on New Media: Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark (2000) Nina Peter Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 185 New Media – New Literacy? The Digital Reader’s Creative Challenges Ulrike Küchler Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 207 Non Finito: Fragmentary Narration in Transmedial Worlds Susanne Marschall Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 225

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A collection such as Metamorphoses of (New) Media is not assembled without the help of many people contributing to its completion behind the scenes. We would therefore like to take the opportunity to thank Anthony Wright, Sam Baker, and Amanda Millar from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. With their constructive feedback, encouraging support, and infinite patience they helped us navigating safely through the process, from proposal to press. Additional thanks go to Carol Koulikourdi from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, whose early encouragement and assistance helped us to move the project ahead. We would also like to thank our many authors who accompanied us in greeting the challenges of developing such a project and whose ideas, professionalism, and enthusiasm were a great source of inspiration. This book project was initiated at the 2012 CLAI (Comparative Literature Association of Ireland) First International Conference Transitions in Comparative Studies in Cork. We would like to thank Brigitte Le Juez, president of CLAI, for the stimulating programme and encouragement. Over the past three years the project and the cast of contributors have developed. Yet, without the opportunity that the twosection panel with its engaging discussions afforded us and the inspiring conversations and general atmosphere of the entire conference programme, we are certain the overall project would never have evolved as it did.

INTRODUCTION JULIA GENZ AND ULRIKE KÜCHLER

Definitions of ‘medium’ differ as much as the disciplines and discourses discussing them: we can look at media from a materialistic, communicative, technological, or aesthetic perspective. Media scholars sometimes even suggest media to comprise old, new, and digital media, that is to say, media in their entirety.

Old and New Media: Twins and Rivals The emphasis of this collection lies on new media, albeit without being limited to them: there are no ‘new media’ without ‘older’, or even ‘old media’. ‘New’ and ‘old’ media only exist in relation to each other, or, in other words: ‘new’ can only be a transitory description for a medium. This is why we decided to put the ‘new’ in the title of this volume in brackets. Of course, beside all—materialistic, technological, functional, historical, aesthetic etc.—differences, old and new media share a lot of common ground. And of course, new media do not simply supersede old media. Rather, old and new media often coexist. But how can we describe such coexistence? To tackle this question, Marie-Laure Ryan introduces the concept of “twin media”: From drama to film, photography to painting, architecture to music, virtually every ‘old medium’ has a new, digital twin, though whether or not this twin counts as an autonomous medium is a debatable question.1

This duplication process suggests both a certain continuity of the functions that new media ‘inherit’ from old media and a variation (and diversification) of the medial presentation over time (“from drama to film…”). These two sides of the same coin we refer to as ‘metamorphoses’ in the title of this volume. Yet, by itself the idea of “twin media” does not fully describe the 1

Ryan, Narrative across Media, 30.

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relation between old and new media but rather raises an interesting followup question: What are the implications of “twin media”, do they involve a correction process in which the newer medium amends the shortcomings of the older one? This is what Jay David Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s concept of “remediation”2 suggests: What is a medium? We offer a simple definition: a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real.3

Such rivalry between media and refashioning of media, however, implies a certain teleological perspective that involves an on-going medial optimisation process.4

Reciprocity of Old and New Media From this teleological perspective, the concept of remediation implies that new media are developed to compensate the deficiencies of old media, suggesting a ‘genealogical line of development’ between those media.5 In our collection, this thought is critically examined, amongst others, in Cathrin Bengesser’s essay “Spectator, Player, ‘Modder’: The Transition from the Cinematic Cave to the Digital Dispositif”. It examines the gamelike viewing experiences of films in DVD formats and links them to Jenkins’ notion of participatory culture. Numerous examples in media history, however, lack such an unambiguous genealogical relation. The present-day functions of many new media are the result of various cross-medial experiments with different initial purposes. Take the telephone as an example: apart from transmitting the human voice, it has been invented to broadcast music and theatrical plays.6 Moreover, the concept of remediation does not address 2

Bolter and Grusin, Remediation. Ryan (Narrative across Media, 31ff.) also discusses Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation to support her own notion of “twin media”. 3 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 65. 4 Cf. Ryan (Narrative across Media, 32–33) who discusses nine variations of remediation, eight of which understand the concept as a correction process. 5 In the present context we use the notion of a ‘genealogical line of development’ in analogy to the comparative method of “genetical comparison” as proposed by Peter V. Zima, Komparatistik. 6 Cf. Höflich, “Telefon,” 188. See, for instance, Philipp Reis’ music telegraph (1863) and Clément Ader’s Théâtrophone (1882).

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the question of why old media continue to exist alongside new media, as in the case of many non-digital media and their digital ‘twins’, such as printed books and e-books or records and mp3. We therefore suggest complementing the concept of remediation with the following observations: 1. Similarities between old and new media not only result from intended improvements to old media but also from the (reflexive) process of new media development itself. Various contributions in this volume reflect this observation by showing how many media are not so much twins by genealogical relation than by retrospective, heuristic construction: it is only the magnifying glass of certain discourses and theories that uncovers their (typological) resemblances. In his essay “Bloomsday? On the Theory of Intermediality and the Production of Photo-Essays and Film-Essays”, Christian Sinn shows how to apply the notion of writing essays to films. Similarly, in “Non finito: Fragmentary Narration in Films and Television Series”, Susanne Marschall suggests to apply the concept of non finito, a 16th century concept originating from the fine-arts, to contemporary developments in film and online. 2. Similarities between old and new media can develop independently of each other, based on comparable structural conditions in media history and its related discourses. An example in this regard is Mary Nickel’s discussion of “The Structural Transformation of the Cybersphere”: she examines the emergence of the public sphere in the coffeehouses and salons of the 18th century and their 21st century equivalents in the age of social media. 3. As a result, we can describe the relation of old and new media as being determined by reciprocity rather than (teleological) linearity. While the influence of old media on new media is apparent in many cases, it is also old media that benefit from the emergence of new media.7 With the emergence of new media, old media can adapt new functions while new media can employ the qualities and properties of old media. This results in a spiral of mutual influence. Also, the notion of reciprocity extends beyond the immediate relation between old and new media and their respective purposes and effects on the aesthetic and theoretical concepts related to those media. Using the examples of the digital and the literary, Nina Shiel’s “Space, Change, and Statements in Literary Representations of Virtual Worlds” and Nina Peter’s “Literary Reflections on New Media. Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark (2000)” discuss this mutual influence. To capture these varied relations between old and new media we 7

See for instance the current rise of the graphic novel in its relation to the digital turn.

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therefore draw on the notion of ‘metamorphoses’ instead of the more narrow term ‘remediation’.

Discursive, Transmedia, and Fictional Metamorphoses Considering the manifold possibilities of approaching metamorphoses of old and new media, the discussion in this volume will focus on three aspects that recur throughout the book, connecting the essays: 1) the social discourse that is dealt with and changed by media, 2) the transformations of media resulting from their transmedial interplay, 3) the aesthetic reflections on these metamorphoses of old and new media in literature and the arts. The three parts of this volume each focus on one of these aspects. The essays in the first part, Discursive Metamorphoses, discuss the different functions and potentials of old and new media in various discourses. They are concerned with the macrostructural effects of the shifts in (recent) media history—in social, political, economic, and academic contexts. In her essay “World Wide Web and the Emotional Public Sphere”, Raili Marling first discusses the ways in which the Web facilitates a release of tension between the private and the public sphere, and functions as a site of ironic, parodic, or intimate engagement with the rational public sphere. The Web is an important constituent of the “emotional public sphere”. Online forms of private involvement not only personalise social interactions but also have an impact on the functioning of society. They offer a means of empowerment for a private person achieved by ritually breaking taboos, mocking public myths, de-heroising leaders, and inverting power relations. Online communications contribute to the transformation of the public sphere and the development of counterpublics. The essay explores this topic through an analysis of parodic memes produced and distributed by Internet counterpublics on platforms such as Twitter during the 2012 US Presidential election campaign. Mary Nickel’s discussion of “The Structural Transformation of the Cybersphere” takes a closer look at the social networking sites behind such online communications. She traces the trajectory of online communication and self-representation from their early stages, on USENET, to their present-day consolidation on social networking sites. Drawing on Habermas’ seminal discussion of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, she shows how the mechanisms that led to the disintegration of the public sphere in the 20th century are also at work in today’s digital communities. Against this backdrop, the essay argues that it is the institutional arrangement of social networking sites and

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the economic incentives that motivate their founders, which trigger these mechanisms. Although being very popular, devices such as the ‘Like’ button and the ‘News Feed’ may also promulgate particular detriments for democratic societies. The essay contends that, as a result, these devices further foster the individual self-segregation that already occurs offline, and therefore may not be as beneficial to democratic societies as they have been portrayed by some. While the first two essays in this section examine the social, political, and economic effects of new media, David Beer examines their impact on the academic discourse. In “Algorithms in the Academy” he looks at the ways in which software algorithms are transforming the university sector. Drawing upon a range of works on the social implications and power of algorithms, the essay explores how these various algorithmic powers are now becoming implicit within the university sector: in research, in teaching, and in the general administration of university life. Beer argues that these transformations, which are often unnoticed, are quietly reshaping and re-sorting academic practices and experiences in various ways. As such these developments require attention in order for us to see how algorithmic and human agency now mesh in the context of the university and to see how algorithms might now already have some power in shaping research outcomes, teaching, and other parts of academic work. The second part of this collection ‘zooms in’ and focuses on Transmedia Metamorphoses. From a more microstructural perspective on the transformation of the media landscape, the contributions examine examples where old media assume functions of new media, where new media employ the qualities of old media, and where theoretical approaches to old media are adopted for new media productively. The section opens with Cathrin Bengesser examining the role of the DVD recipient in “Spectator, Player, ‘Modder’: The Transition from the Cinematic Cave to the Digital Dispositif”. The essay traces the effects of the arrival of the DVD in the late 1990s, when film moved from the cinematic dispositif to computers and gaming consoles, and thus to the dominion of interactive entertainment. These new, interactive dispositifs still allow for traditional lean-back consumption of film, but they also offer additional, interactive pleasures for the viewer. This new dimension is not limited to DVD menus or extras but also reaches into the films themselves. Once inserted into a DVD drive or a gaming console, complex narratives with non-linear or branching storylines, conflicting perspectives, puzzling twists, or richness in references can be turned into ‘game boards’ by viewers who are familiar with the possibilities and pleasures of interactive media. The essay thus examines various game-like

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pleasures of digital film consumption: immersion, navigation, discovery, puzzle solving, and competition. The examples of the ways in which viewers ‘play’ with film show how the success of interactive new media is ultimately working back on the old medium of film. Adding a more production-oriented view to the mutual influence of old and new media, Martin Roussel examines the history of writing. In “How To Do Words With Things: Paul Auster’s Typewriter and the History of Writing in the 20th Century” he draws a line from Walter Benjamin’s OneWay Street (Einbahnstraße, 1928) to Auster’s The Story of My Typewriter (2002). While the first was written at a time that marked the transition from handwriting to typewriting, Auster already reflects on his typewriter as an old-fashioned dispositif of writing. Yet, throughout the 20th century the typewriter has written its very own success story. Not only has the idea of authorship been closely tied to the typewriter. While the typewriter allowed for a measurement of literary productiveness, the process of typewriting also individualised printing techniques. In contrast to mass printing techniques, typewriting figured writing as a three-dimensional interaction of man and machine where the writer appears as a ‘sculptor’ chiselling text bodies (Adorno). Today, it is digital technologies that change the scene of writing. The new media dispositif thus helps to unveil the limitations but also the potentials of old media such as the typewriter. The first two essays in this section thus contrast processes of transmedia production and reception: old media exploring functions of new media (Bengesser) and new media assuming and expanding qualities of old media (Roussel). There is, however, another interesting dimension to the mutual influence between old and new media, namely adopting theoretical approaches to old media for new media. Such a theoretical transfer and its aesthetic appropriation are central to Christian Sinn’s discussion of conceptual parallels between written and visual essays in “Bloomsday? On the Theory of Intermediality and the Production of Photo-Essays and Film-Essays“. Sinn first examines the rich historical background of essay-writing. Beginning with the Pyrrhonist scepticism in Michel de Montaigne’s work he then draws a line to Theodor W. Adorno’s dialectical notion of a philosophical essay as a “reciprocal interaction of its concepts” and to Walter Benjamin’s more recipient-based approach to the essay as an emblematic form. Against this backdrop, Jens Schröter’s typology of intermediality then provides a link to a “thinking in images” as it is also suggested by the two examples that wrap up the discussion: Bazon Brock’s photo-essay Bloom-Zeitung (1963) and Jem Cohen’s filmessay Lost Book Found (USA 1996).

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In the light of transmedia production, reception, and criticism, the final essay in this section is concerned with the transmedia metamorphoses of an original work of art. In “Speaking Up in the Age of Media Convergence: Patrick Neate’s Babel (2010) and Plan B’s iLL Manors (2012)”, Christoph Reinfandt traces the multi-medial fate of Patrick Neate’s text Babel from its origins as a ten-minute piece of performance poetry to the twenty-five minute TV version of the text shown on Channel 4 in 2005 and on to the sixty-minute dance performance produced by avant-garde choreographers Liam Steel and Rob Tannion, which was touring in the UK in 2010 and led to the book publication of the text later in that year. The essay combines a close reading of the text with minute attention to the consequences the various media formats and discourse positions have for the act of speaking up against the discursive restrictions and determination imposed by these very same media formats and discourses. Hereby, the essay addresses the enabling and restricting impact of the contemporary mediascape on individual speaking positions and reflects upon the historical trajectory of media history behind this state of affairs. The essay refers back to the varying discursive functions of old and new media discussed in the essays at the beginning of this collection, and, at the same time, anticipates the poetic potential of old and new media that is central to the final part of our book. In this last section, Fictional Metamorphoses take centre stage: metamorphoses of (new) media as an artistic subject and aesthetic technique—in films, novels, digital art etc. Opening the discussion with a classic of both ‘media fiction’ and science fiction, Nina Shiel’s “Space, Change, and Statements in Literary Representations of Virtual Worlds” traces the subject back to William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Not only has this work famously coined the notion of ‘cyberspace’, but it also offers an excellent starting point to discuss the cycle of mutual influence between the virtual and the real as suggested by Pierre Lévy. Against this background, Shiel argues that representations of virtual space in fiction have changed dramatically, as the general familiarity with its associated technology has increased. To test this hypothesis, the essay refers to Bertrand Westphal’s concept of geocriticism and then examines three literary representations of virtual space, each from one of the three decades that have passed since the publication of Gibson’s seminal novel. The essay thus draws a line from Neuromancer, where the virtual is still an alien (and frightening) realm of modern mythology, to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) whose virtual world is already a social space for business and leisure activities, and closes with the multiplicity of different virtual ludic worlds in Charles

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Stross’ Halting State (2007)—which, ironically, closes with the protagonist’s Game Over and return to the real world. These three stages of virtual worlds in literary history provide an interesting framework for Nina Peter’s discussion of a novel that has been published in a phase of transition and links the virtual space to questions of creation and authorship. In “Literary Reflections on New Media. Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark (2000)”, Peter examines how the two narrative threads in Power’s novel correspond to different motivations for creating virtual (and fictional) worlds: as an escapist endeavour and as a place of survival. In the novel, the virtual thus is a space of social consequence and a ludic utopia at the same time. Against this backdrop, the essay is particularly concerned with the functions that old and new media assume in art creation, the modes of representation in dealing with them, and the poetological potentials that arise. When dealing with Power’s novel, the essay therefore first focuses on the creatorprotagonists’ desires for ‘electronic transcendence’ through digital technologies (based on their belief that digital media are superior to older media), then examines their strategies and techniques to create invented worlds, and finally outlines the contrast between the protagonists’ poetics of escape and diversion and the novel’s own poetological concept. The next essay complements this authorship-oriented view on the aesthetic potential of the digital. Ulrike Küchler’s “New Media—New Literacy? The Digital Reader’s Creative Challenges” examines digital worlds of fiction that are, in their own ways, still based on literary modes of narration, but go far beyond them, and the role of the reader within them. The essay suggests to distinguish three different qualities of interaction that influence the individual approach to digital art: the instrumental, phenomenal, and aesthetic experience of the recipient. The argument then centres around three browser-based examples that set various tasks for the new recipient and focus on different aspects of new media literacy: The 12 Labors of the Internet User (2008) is a collaborative bilingual English-French project that translates the myth of the Herculean labors into technological challenges for the new media recipient. Dadaventuras (2004) employs these technological potentials of new media to link various pieces of Spanish-language literature—from 15th century Catalan poetry to popular culture—to the artistic modes of the Avantgarde and asks its recipients to trace and (re-)compose the history of literature and the arts. In the interactive narrative Loss of Grasp (2010), the reader finally assumes the role of the author and has to face the different stages of the process of transmedia storytelling itself.

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With any ‘old’ medium once having been ‘new’, we can be sure that any discussion examining the Metamorphoses of (New) Media is certainly an interminable endeavour. Consequently, the section and this collection conclude with a look at the renaissance of the fragment as an aesthetic concept in new media. In “Non Finito: Fragmentary Narration in Transmedial Worlds”, Susanne Marschall argues for a renewal of the finearts term non finito in interactive (mass) media. Fostered by phenomena such as fandom art and the rise of the paradigm of seriality, blockbusters such as the Harry Potter movie series link epic traditions with fragmentary storytelling. Inviting their audiences to the storytelling process, they initiate an infinite follow-up communication that continuously expands the story universe and develops countless parallel narratives, even creating entirely new genres such as mobisodes. Against this backdrop the essay explores how movies and series such as Sita Sings the Blues (2008), Avatar (2009), and Lost (2004-2010) explore the aesthetic potential of the fragment. In adopting strategies of myth-making, scientisation, and the rereading of history, they transform into transmedia hypertexts that create a network of references between storylines and discourses. This is also the place, where the discussion of the various fictional metamorphoses in the field of old and new media refers back to the beginning of our book and the relation between media metamorphoses and the challenging of established discursive structures. The eleven essays collected in this volume thus approach the Metamorphoses of (New) Media as an on-going process of change, in which the emergence of new media not only allows for a repositioning of old media but for a revaluation of related discursive, medial, and aesthetic models.

Works Cited Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Höflich, Joachim R. 1998. “Telefon: Medienwege von der einseitigen Kommunikation zu mediatisierten und medial konstruierten Beziehungen.” In Geschichte der Medien, edited by Manfred Faßler, and Wulf Halbach, 187–225. München: Fink. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2004. “Introduction” In Narrative across Media, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 1–40. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press. Zima, Peter V. 1992. Komparatistik. Einführung in die vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. Tübingen: Francke.

PART I: DISCURSIVE METAMORPHOSES

CHAPTER ONE WORLD WIDE WEB AND THE EMOTIONAL PUBLIC SPHERE RAILI MARLING

The media landscape of the Western world has undergone a radical change in the past decade. Traditional or ‘old’ media, especially major daily newspapers, are losing their audiences, while ‘new media’ are becoming increasingly dominant sources of information. Although new media derive many of their stories from the traditional media, the narratives are represented in a different format. New media (e.g. news aggregators like the Huffington Post or online news channels like Vice News) are able to react to events faster and with more emotional involvement. New media democratise knowledge production and also allow more interactivity to the readers/viewers.1 As a result, the very definition of news and consumption of news is changing. This change has generated an active debate about the fragmentation of audiences and the potential impact of this fragmentation on the democratic process. Cass Sunstein believes that people can avoid meeting views different from theirs online and tend to retreat into “deliberative enclaves” which leads to social polarisation and fragmentation.2 In contrast, other authors, like Douglas Kellner, see new media as an engine of greater democratic involvement that offers a wider range of opinions and critiques than traditional corporate media.3 However, although new media may seem inherently more democratic, Dahlberg points out that online—like offline—discourses are dominated by corporate interests and users are often framed as passive consumers.4 Many complex issues intersect in the discussion of new media and democracy and there is as yet little scholarly consensus. 1

Livingstone, “Audiences and Publics,” 63. Sunstein, Republic.com, 67. 3 Kellner, “Media and the Crises of Democracy,” 51–52. 4 Dahlberg, “Rethinking the Fragmentation of the Cyberpublic,” 840–841. Dahlberg offers an interesting critique of Cass Sunstein’s position. 2

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The spread of new media has also led to wider debates about the public sphere and public debate. This essay seeks to contribute to that discussion by analysing the ways in which the Web functions as a site of ironic engagement with the rational public sphere. The Web is an important constituent of the “emotional public sphere”.5 Online forms of private involvement empower private individuals by allowing them to mock public myths, de-heroise leaders and invert power relations. Such forms of private participation reveal conflicts between tacit knowledge that guides people in everyday life and official hierarchies. The essay contends that Internet information communities and counterpublics, as conceptualised by Nancy Fraser, contribute to the transformation of the traditional public sphere. The essay will, first, discuss the applicability of Habermas’ notion of the public sphere and Mouffe’s concept of agonistic public spaces for the discussion of the Internet as an emotional public sphere that encourages the creation of counterpublics. The theoretical framework will be tested on the example of parodic texts counterpublics created in the online emotional public sphere of the 2012 Presidential elections in the USA.

Rhetorical Public Sphere, Counterpublics, and the Web Jürgen Habermas defined the public sphere as a collection of “private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society within the state”.6 For Habermas the ideal public sphere is based on dialogue and rational-critical deliberation that results in a consensus. The Habermasian notion of the rational public sphere has faced serious challenges since its introduction7 and critiques have increased after the advent of the Internet. The Internet age has not only radically altered the boundaries of the public and the private sphere but also challenged previous interpretations of the public sphere and public debate. On the one hand, the Internet seems to be a universal, democratic, and antihierarchical site of interaction, lauded by many as a means of empowerment and freedom.8 Its many-to-many communication appears to have overcome the problems of limited participation in the bourgeois 5

Richards, Emotional Governance, 57. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 176. 7 Cf. Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere. 8 Even Habermas (Between Facts and Norms, 514) expressed optimism about a world public sphere. For contemporary research, see e.g. Dahlberg “Rethinking the Fragmentation of the Cyberpublic”. The optimistic visions were especially visible in the analyses of the Arab Spring events (see e.g. Khondker, “New Media”). 6

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public sphere and enables a wider circle of people to express their opinions, speak back to power, or debate issues. On the other hand, critics have pointed out that the Internet serves to privatise politics, promote consumerism, and increase surveillance. 9 The Habermasian definition of the public sphere also imposes its own limitations, with its focus on rational deliberation, consensus, and a narrow definition of the public. Jodi Dean argues that “to territorialize cyberia10 as the public sphere is to determine in advance what sort of engagements and identities are proper to the political and to use this determination to homogenise political engagement, neutralise social space, and sanitise popular cultures”.11 The notions of publicness, consensus, and debate that are derived from the model of the traditional bourgeois public sphere cannot be automatically transferred to the Internet. Dean believes it is more useful to see the Internet as a “zero institution”,12 one with no positive function but just signifying “the actuality of social institutions”.13 It, more specifically, allows very different constituencies to see themselves as belonging to the same global structure. It [the Web] provides an all-encompassing space in which social antagonism is simultaneously expressed and obliterated. It is a global space in which one can recognize oneself as connected to everyone else, as linked to everything that matters. At the same time, it is a space of conflicting networks and networks of conflict so deep and fundamental that even to speak of consensus or convergence seems an act of naiveté at best, violence at worst.14

This openness to expression and antagonism is important to this essay as well. Instead of trying to fit the multilayered Internet interaction into the Habermasian model, it would be more useful to rethink the public sphere and its politics. One possible alternative is Chantal Mouffe’s concept of “agonistic public spaces” as “places for the expression of dissensus, for

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E.g. Buchstein, “Bytes that Bite”; Kahn and Kellner, “New Media and Internet Activism”. 10 To refer to the internet-based interconnected world, Dean uses the term ‘cyberia’ as a synonym to ‘cyberworld’. 11 Dean, “Cybersalons and Civil Society,” 246–247. 12 The term is borrowed from Slavoj Žižek (Enjoy Your Symptom!, 253–254), who in turn borrowed it from Claude Lévi-Strauss. 13 Dean, “Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere,” 105. 14 Dean, “Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere,” 106.

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bringing to the floor what forces attempt to keep concealed”.15 Mouffe suggests that public spaces are always plural and that social actors passionately articulate different perspectives in them without reaching a definitive rational consensus. The public is exposed to a diversity of viewpoints in this agonistic struggle and this forms the basis of a truly pluralist democracy. Dean also emphasises the contestation and conflict characteristic for the Internet: its users “reject the fantasy of a public and instead work from the antagonisms that animate political life”.16 This focus on radical pluralism is well suited for the multiplicity of voices and positions on the Web and enables us to see the Web not merely as a public sphere but as an “information community”.17 However, although the Internet contains diverse public spaces and radical dissent, people are not using the choice they have been given and stay within their “deliberative enclaves” to reinforce their beliefs.18 Both the public sphere and the public space depend on the agency of social actors. In the present essay I am interested in the social actors who come together as publics. I use the term ‘public’ to refer to a group of people with an orientation towards collective action, not just in a political context but also more broadly in social life.19 Participants in online discussions are not passive consumers of information and entertainment, but—at least potentially—also authors who shape the information community and, through that, also society at large. For example, Dayan argues that a public is not simply a spectator in plural, a sum of spectators, an addition. It is a coherent entity whose nature is collective; an ensemble characterized by shared sociability, shared identity, and some sense of that identity.20 15

Quoted in Carpentier and Cammaerts, “Hegemony, Democracy, Agonism and Journalism,” 973. For a longer discussion, see Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy”. 16 Dean, “Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere,” 108. 17 MacKinnon, The World-Wide Conversation, 10. 18 Carpentier and Cammaerts, “Hegemony, Democracy, Agonism and Journalism,” 968; Sunstein, Republic.com. 19 For a longer discussion, see Livingstone, “Audiences and Publics,” 25. Livingstone points out that there is considerable conceptual confusion between the terms ‘public’ and ‘audience’. Political science has tended to see publics as public and active, audiences as private and passive, but this contrast no longer holds in today’s “mediascape”, to use the term coined by Appadurai (1990), with its increasing blending of the public and the private (Livingstone, “Audiences and Publics,” 18). 20 Dayan, “Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists,” 46.

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The Internet, despite its commodification and co-optation into a global surveillance system, continues to promise greater access to the public debate than the traditional bourgeois public sphere. It appears as a platform for voicing their views not just for hegemonic groups, but also for a variety of counterpublics.21 Nancy Fraser coined the term “counterpublics” to refer to “parallel discursive arenas” that create and circulate alternatives to the hegemonic public discourse.22 According to Palczewski counterpublics generate “alternative validity claims”, “alternative norms of public speech”, “oppositional interpretations of needs”, cultural identities, and even energy.23 David Faris believes that new media, by creating spaces for counterpublics, “increase the carrying capacity of the public sphere”.24 Recent research has also suggested that Internet-based means of communication such as blogging are consciously being used to create counter-discourses and “engage in a contest for the representational resources that are necessary for redefining social reality”.25 In the present essay I am not interested in counterpublics that are allied in social movements or organised around certain social causes. My argument, rather, focuses on counterpublics as constellations of individuals who come together in unorganised, yet mutually energised online events or locations that challenge the dominant ideologies of today or point out their internal inconsistencies. Warner elaborates that counterpublics are characterised by a “tension with the larger public”: they are structured differently, they make different assumptions and are aware of their subordinate status.26 This places counterpublics in a critical tension with power structures, be it in political stances or chosen speech genres and idioms. Warner believes that counterpublics “try to supply different ways of imagining stranger 21

Dean (“Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere,” 96–97) believes that just pluralising the notion of the public does not constitute a solution as the sharing of the same norms makes them the same public; not sharing the same norms makes them interest groups. However, I believe that the notion of counterpublics is valuable as it allows us to single out online publics that take an explicitly antagonistic stance towards the public consensus. 22 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 67. 23 Palczewski, “Cyber-Movements,” 166–167. 24 Faris, Dissent and Revolution in a Digital Age, 123. He also notes, however, that network connections also matter in the new media as it is better connected individuals who are more effective in getting their voices heard and spread. 25 Eckert and Chadha, “Muslim Bloggers in Germany,” 939. 26 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 56. Warner himself, in his theoretical discussion, uses few explicit examples, but he does refer to gay/queer counterpublics.

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sociability and its reflexivity”.27 They are “spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poiesis of scene making will be transformative, nor replicative merely”.28 Although he does not investigate it per se, Warner believes the Internet can change the understanding of the public sphere profoundly.29

Emotional Public Sphere The present essay argues that developments in Internet communication, especially in social media, have made the Internet more dialogic than the traditional public sphere. This democratic public space has enabled not just citationality (from repostings to mash-ups) but also a web of interlocking responses that empower individual private persons by giving them a safe space for political speech, using new modes of expression like digital heckling and dialogue (commenting, reposting). More than anything, new media thus generate a more effective sense of reciprocity. Tropes and memes are generated, circulated, and re-performed in different Internet locations to different emotional ends. Emotions are crucial for the present essay because they are excluded from the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, but play an important role in public spaces, including Internet spaces, where antagonistic debates about different social issues take place. Moreover, it is shared passions that often fuel counterpublics in their challenges to social consensus.30 Discussions of the public sphere have focused on reason since Kant, who distinguished public and private uses of reason and associated only the first with enlightenment.31 Emotions have been largely excluded from the discussions of political sense-making because of their association with irrationality. Media scholars have also viewed emotions with ambivalence, for example in criticising the emotionalisation of political life32. Widespread concern over the tabloidisation of the media and the attendant

27

Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 121. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 122. 29 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 97. 30 Kingston, Public Passion, 201. For a specific case study of the use of emotions in the creation of counterpublics, see Sziarto and Leitner, “Immigrants Riding for Justice”. 31 Cf. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 44. 32 Thompson, Political Scandal; van Zoonen, “After Dallas and Dynasty”. 28

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“sense of declining cultural, educational and political standards”33 is typical of the tacit belief in the need for rational public actors and unbiased, informative media. In research on the public sphere, emotions have been treated with, at best, caution and, at worst, disdain as sources of irrationality and manipulability. However, in the study of new media emotions merit a new and closer look. Emotion and affect are among the academic buzzwords of the 2000s: in the humanities and social sciences we even talk of an affective turn.34 In political sciences there has been increasing attention to the fundamental role of emotions in political decision-making.35 Although media studies do not seem to have experienced an affective turn per se, media scholars have also taken considerable interest in emotions.36 Thus, the attention to affect has generated more interest in affective communication and the role of emotion in mobilising action. “Emotions do not merely offer temporary and comforting communities of feeling […] but can also trigger public deliberation and public actions, for the latter only survive if held up by firm emotional commitment”.37 This is, for example, evident in public emotional outbursts like those following the deaths of Princess Diana, the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, or the Swedish politician Anna Lindh38 or after the events of 9/11.39 This link between the Internet as a space of deliberation and the increasing awareness of the role of emotions in public discussions raises the question of an emotional public sphere that manages emotional conflict and emotional responses—often by marginalised voices—to political issues in the public sphere. In media studies, the emotional public sphere has been analysed from the perspective of traditional media. Scholars have, for example, studied how traditional media create moral

33

Barnett, “Dumbing Down or Reaching Out,” 75. These often alarmist critics of “dumbing down”, as Barnett shows, ignore the fact that tablodisation has also created a less elitist form of media communication. 34 See e.g., Thompson and Hoggett, Politics and the Emotions. 35 Cf. Marcus, Affective Intelligence; Marcus et al., The Sentimental Citizen. 36 Demertzis, “Emotions in the Media,” 85. Demertzis claims that some sub-fields of media studies have engaged with emotions from their inception but that this interest does not extend to the discipline as a whole. Madianou (“Audience Reception,” 334), in contrast, believes that media studies have been affected by the general affective turn in social sciences. 37 Pantti and van Zoonen, “Do Crying Citizens Make Good Citizens?”, 210. 38 Pantti, “Masculine Tears, Feminine Tears”. 39 These emotions were also encouraged by political communications, as shown by Altheide, “Creating Fear”.

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panics and “impoverished images of the public”40 or, in the context of talk shows, ironic engagement with rational public discussion.41 Also, much of the research has focused on the traditional sphere of political participation, but in contemporary public life, spaces of debate and dissent exist in locations that are traditionally seen as apolitical. Recent work on, for example, the blogosphere demonstrates that emotions play a key role in spurring activist interventions and building communities. However, emotions can also have a deleterious effect as the anonymity of the online public sphere also unleashes emotionally heightened criticism, also by actors whose views cannot be articulated in the traditional public discourse.42 The present essay argues that it is in this emotional public sphere where we encounter ironic, parodic, or intimate engagement with the rational public sphere. As more of what has been recognised as the rational public sphere moves into the agonistic space of the Internet, traditional political deliberation comes into contact with the more anarchic and more emotional online commentary and debate.43 It has to be remembered, however, that political parties and interest groups also use emotional online devices to stigmatise opponents or to promote their own candidates, at times disguised as members of the public or even counterpublics (e.g. through astroturfing44). Online counterpublics have the potential to not just raise topics and voice criticisms, but also to challenge the commonly accepted “feeling rules”45 or “emotional regimes”.46 Online counterpublics may consciously violate social taboos and challenge social norms. One example is the questioning of the normative striving for individual happiness and material success in the current neoliberal consensus, which—despite the public celebration of material success—has become increasingly impossible to even middle-

40

Richards, Emotional Governance, 72. Lunt and Stenner, “The Jerry Springer Show”. 42 E.g., Lopez, “Blogging While Angry,” 422. 43 E.g., Jenkins et al., Spreadable Media, 28. 44 Astroturfing refers to hiding the sponsors of a political message and disguising it as the spontaneous product of grassroots citizens. Fake election ads have been discussed by Tryon (“Pop Politics”). Daniel Kreiss analysed the ways in which the presidential campaigns of 2012 used social media, specifically Twitter, to supply journalists with their interpretations of events. See Kreiss, “Seizing the Moment”. 45 Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 56. 46 Riis and Woodhead, A Sociology of Religious Emotion, 11. 41

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class Westerners. For instance, a website like Despair, Inc.,47 which satirises the motivational language of today’s corporations, is a means of channelling social and psychological aggression, but also of coping with failure by demonstrating the problematic premises of success. As “affect aliens”, to use the term of Sara Ahmed48, counterpublics offer emotionally charged challenges to the consensus of the rational public sphere, but also a potential form of social catharsis. This catharsis is partly achieved by what could be seen as an extension of the Bakhtinian culture of laughter, with its liberating reversal of hierarchies and ridicule of authority.49 Hariman suggests that “by doubling discourse into a self-consciously comic image of itself, and then casting that image before the most democratic, undisciplined, and irreverent conception of a public audience, parodic performance recasts the hermeneutics of public discourse”.50 The parodic forms, in other words, reveal the constructedness of institutional norms, values, and achievements. Hariman sees this parodic replication as a necessary element in the retention of a vibrant public speech: the ridiculing echo of public speech opens the latter up to a certain “semantic indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with the still-evolving contemporary reality”.51 In Hariman’s opinion, this inevitability of display in other contexts expands public speech and thus also reduces official/elite control of public discussion.52 The audience’s active and critical engagement, which is revealed in mocking, is more relevant to vibrant democratic discussion than mute consensus that masks passivity and political inertia. Some forms and structures of parodic texts achieve their effect by cognitive dissonance. Our social existence forces us to accept some elements of social life (e.g., power structures, triteness of political slogans, 47

For a detailed and ironic discussion of the rationale, see Kersten, The Art of Demotivation. The most recognisable products of Despair, Inc. are their Demotivators, posters that imitate the aspirational language and imagery of motivational speakers, but send the opposite message (e.g. ‘Believe in yourself. Because the rest of us think you’re an idiot’, see http://despair.com/collections/ demotivators/products/believe-in-yourself, accessed May 15, 2015). 48 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness. 49 In this regard, my argument compares to that of Hess (“Purifying Laughter”) who, also building on the work of Bakhtin, has analysed Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show as a radical critique of the news industry. 50 Hariman, “Political Parody,” 255. 51 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 7. Bakhtin speaks about novelisation, but Hariman applies this idea to the parodic. 52 Hariman, “Political Parody,” 258.

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hypocrisies of people in power, etc.) that are inherently absurd. Online parodic texts, like the ones analysed below, uncover this dissonance and thus offer liberation through laughter. Parodic revelation of the vacuousness of public ideologies produces laughter that releases the grip of these ideologies over a person. Thus “the annihilating laughter at the momentary triumph of the absurd is a moment of freedom”.53 This freedom may translate into distancing oneself from alienating power structures but also potentially into increased political and public engagement. Parody nurtures healthy scepticism and hones critical skills by showing the constructedness of standard political content and ideologies. The public is released from the constraints of alienating political ideology and is encouraged to engage in their own proactive forms of political participation, either online (blogging, posting on social media websites) or offline (by voting).

New Emotional Public Sphere and Political Deliberation in the 2012 US Presidential Campaign New media have become a staple of today’s political campaigning. The 2008 US presidential campaign of Barack Obama was notable in its use of social media and also the social media’s intervention in the campaign. It is impossible to say precisely what role social media played in the actual election results, beyond energising young voters, but they created a new and emotionally invested area of political campaigning and new forms of political dialogue. Social media were even more prominent in the 2012 election, with roughly 31.7 million political tweets, at 327,452 tweets per minute at times.54 Barack Obama’s Twitter account had 22,112,160 followers, Mitt Romney’s 1,761,442 by Election Day.55 The campaign of 2012 was a multi-directional information event that involved not just the traditional public sphere but also a multiplicity of counterpublics in the emotional public sphere of the social media. The 2012 US presidential elections also demonstrated that what could be called digital heckling, posting derisive content online to mock a candidate or a position, had matured as a form of popular political response. The present essay chose the presidential election because it is a contained media event and now also lies far enough in the past for us to have gained some perspective. Within the election campaign, presidential debates receive special national 53

Hariman, “Political Parody,” 257. Finn, “Election 2012”. 55 Kreiss, “Seizing the Moment,” 6. 54

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media attention and hence the analysis focuses specifically on social media responses to the debates. The following section will discuss two statements from the debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the 2012 elections that generated viral digital heckling in the emerging emotional public sphere of the Internet and spilled over to the traditional public sphere. Although there are increasing attempts to harness social media to political campaigns56, in this essay I am interested in responses to the debates generated by online publics, with emphasis on the visual and verbal texts posted on social media platforms like Tumblr. In my opinion, these responses, generated by individual users, constitute a counterpublic that employs parody to engage with the traditional public sphere, and, in the process of doing so, alters its emotional tenor. The discussion below will focus on two meme threads generated by online counterpublics on the basis of statements from the second and the third debate between the two presidential candidates. The first example derives from the second presidential debate, held at Hofstra University, New York, on October 16, 2012 in which a woman from the audience asked Mitt Romney about pay equity. He responded by explaining that when he was forming his cabinet as the Governor of Massachusetts, he seemed to have only male candidates until his aides brought him “whole binders full of women”. The phrase immediately spread on Twitter and generated a blog of the same name on Tumblr and a Facebook page with 220,000 likes overnight (at the time of writing, the Facebook page had 315,744 likes; the Tumblr page stopped posting new content in 2013). Searches about “binders” exploded by 425 per cent and “binders full of women” was the third most popular query on Google that day.57 The phrase even appeared in reviews of standard three-ring binders on Amazon, which were reposted on different popular sites like Buzzfeed and The Daily Beast.58 The quote became a popular Internet meme and different traditional news organisations (e.g. The Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio, NPR) discussed its impact by reposting the parodic images created online.59 The social media event was exploited by 56

Kreiss points out how campaigns attempt to shape social media commentaries because journalists have come to consider commentaries on platforms like Twitter a reflection of public opinion. See Kreiss, “Seizing the Moment,” 10. 57 Sakwa and Ngak, “The ‘Big Bird’”. 58 See e.g. DeLuca, “Binders Full of Women”. The user-generated Amazon.com reviews of binders that derive from this meme can be found at Read, “Too Small for Women”. 59 Kwoh, “‘Binders Full of Women’ May Help One Woman”.

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traditional campaigning as President Obama made references to the binders in his campaign speeches.60 Internet publics used the meme, many examples of which can still be found online61, primarily to ridicule Romney. Most of the examples discussed below come from the Tumblr site “Binders Full Of Women” that offers 57 pages of user-generated content, with each page containing nine to ten images.62 Many of the images were re-blogged and re-posted on other sites as well, but tracing this movement is not among the aims of the paper.63 Rather, I am interested in the raised topics and the emotional tenor employed by the counterpublic. There were, for instance, hints to the polygamous history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that Romney belongs to and associations with men known for their serial affairs (like Hugh Hefner or Henry VIII).64 These two forms of digital heckling did not carry an explicit political message, beyond pointing to the underlying sexism of Romney’s statement. However, many staged photos and photoshopped images made explicitly feminist points about the political positions of the Republican party on issues like reproductive freedom or gender equality. For example, users took the word “binder” to its root verb and represented Romney as somebody who seeks to bind women to a secondary and silenced status in society. User-generated photos played with the idea of forcing women into binders. Statements from women who had served in the military or references to women like Mother Teresa whose public work is unassailable were mixed with more parodic material. In several Tumblr images the binder appears as a dark and scary place, investigated on one image by the FBI profiler team from the TV series Criminal Minds who specialise in pathological killers and on another by the sex crime unit of the NYPD from Law & Order.

60

NBC, “Obama, Seizing on ‘binders Full of Women’”. Although the Tumblr site “Binders Full Of Women” no longer posts new material, the old user-generated content was still available in January 2015. The Daily Beast website still contained the best and worst examples of the meme in January 2015. 62 Since I am interested in the webpage as a counterpublic, I will not specify individual users but the emerging community as a whole. 63 Many of the images discussed in this paper appeared in a compilation created by Salon.com. See Gupta, “Mitt Romney’s ‘Binders Full of Women’”. 64 An example of the Latter Day Saints reference can be found on the Tumblr site quoted above; the Hefner comparison appears in many repostings, for example, on NPR, “Presidential Debate”. 61

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Users blended the binders meme with other memes trending at the time such as “Texts from Hillary”65 that showed Hillary Rodham Clinton texting “Romney still uses binders? LOL” and proclaimed the datedness of Romney’s policies. The popular Ryan Gosling “Hey girl” meme66 reappeared, with the promise that Gosling would not put women in a binder. Thus, although there are instances of anarchic mocking with no particular political intent, many of the popular responses to the gaffe add critical and political force in connection with gender, a contested issue in the election cycle. The free-form content of Tumblr stands in contrast with the more traditional websites like bindersfullofwomen.com, created by American Century 21st Century PAC, a liberal political action committee that fact-checked Romney’s comments. While bindersfullofwomen.com creates a deliberative atmosphere by placing Romney’s claims against facts, the users on the Tumblr site seek to create an instant emotional response. This visceral response cathartically uncovers the inherent hollowness of traditional political rhetoric and, in the process, creates a dispersed counterpublic in this emotional public sphere, joined by the topic of gender. As can be seen from the examples above, the emotional public sphere that emerged on Tumblr and was spread through Facebook and Twitter also spilled over to mainstream media and political campaigning, suggesting that the emerging counterpublics in the new emotional public sphere are also potential political actors and opinion shapers in the traditional public sphere. Although the meme was used overall in an anti-Romney vein, the coverage was somewhat bipartisan, with jabs at the former president Bill Clinton, invoking his notorious womanising. He was shown in different images as lighting up at the notion of access to information on many 65 “Texts from Hillary” was a meme that originated on Tumblr (http://textsfrom hillaryclinton.tumblr.com, accessed May 15, 2015) in 2012. It featured a photo of the then Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, sitting behind a table, wearing sunglasses and looking at her smarthphone, with different messages superimposed on the image. The Tumblr site had over 45,000 followers, was actively shared over Facebook and crossed over to traditional mainstream media as well. Although the original authors stopped posting in April 2012, the site was still up on Tumblr in May 2015. 66 The Ryan Gosling “Hey girl” meme includes an image of Ryan Gosling and a text that starts with the words “Hey girl”. A popular development of the meme appears on the Tumblr page “Feminist Ryan Gosling” where the image of the actor is attached to some feminist message. The Tumblr material led to Danielle Henderson’s book Feminist Ryan Gosling. Feminist Theory (as Imagined) from your Favorite Sensitive Movie Dude (2012) as well as coverage by traditional media outlets like The Guardian or Time Magazine.

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women or wanting the debate to be stopped so that the binders can be examined.67 Although the target of most of these images was Bill Clinton, they also extended to Hillary Clinton who had been a presidential contender in the 2012 race. By recalling Bill Clinton’s philandering, the images repositioned Hillary Clinton as a scorned spouse, not a political candidate.68 This series of digital heckling was primarily geared to mocking the former president, albeit one whose shadow loomed large in the Democratic Party, especially after his wife’s presidential bid.69 The image series shows the democratic potential of the meme, as it is not so much attached to a specific political perspective as to the parodic potential inherent in political discourse. The agonistic space of the online emotional public sphere does not neatly follow party alignments as content mocking both Republican and Democratic politicians can appear on the same Tumblr or Pinterest site. The second example originates from the third and final presidential debate, held at Lynn University on October 23, 2012. During the debate Obama responded to Romney’s criticism that the size of the US navy was smaller than at any time since 191670 with the comment “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military has changed”. The comment went viral on Twitter (the hashtag #horsesandbayonets was the most popular trend in the US and the third in

67

Images involving Bill Clinton can be seen in, for example, Gupta (“Mitt Romney’s ‘Binders Full of Women’”). The images were widely reblogged and reposted. 68 Hillary Rodham Clinton experienced extremely negative media coverage as First Lady because she refused to conform to the traditional political consort role ideal (see e.g. Põldsaar, “Framing Hillary Rodham Clinton,” 160–161). An example of her resignification into scorned wife can be seen on Tara Genzel’s page of memes on Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/192458584047444 236/, accessed May 15, 2015). 69 I also found one image of the Obamas, based on the Internet Husband meme, in which a sad wife in pyjamas watches a husband immersed in a computer screen. In the political version, it is Barack Obama who is glued to the computer screen while Michelle Obama is watching him, with the tag line that Obama does not need binders of women because he has gone digital (see http://knowyourmeme.com/ memes/binders-full-of-women, accessed May 15, 2015). Since there have been no marital scandals in the Obama household, the image did not prove as popular as those of the Clintons. 70 Some websites erronoeusly give the year as 1917; Romney himself used that year in an earlier speech (Jacobson, “Mitt Romney”).

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the whole world). It is claimed that it was used 60,000 times a minute.71 The phrase also topped the list of Google’s trending search terms by the end of the debate.72 In the context of this popularity, it is not surprising that Twitter quickly filled with comments and platforms like Tumblr and Facebook featured fan pages that provided more content, mostly photomontages. The majority created a visual connection between military images from World War I or the Civil War era and the Romney campaign (e.g. “Romney 1916”). The images collectively called attention to the datedness of Romney’s military and foreign policy strategies and reinforced the message with photoshopped images of Romney in historical uniforms.73 The parodists suggested that these dated approaches to American military strength are foreign policy nonsense (e.g. horses and bayonets versus nuclear weapons). The popular Keep Calm T-shirt was remade, emblasoned with “Keep Calm. We have horses and bayonets”. Again, although there were images that were simply mocking, the parody had an edge, giving voice to a counterpublic ironic about the standard narrative about the might of the American military and the continued high levels of military spending. Although the majority of the content was pro-Obama, anti-Obama images also emerged in the emotional public sphere. The core idea of the anti-Obama parodies was the continued use of bayonets by the most macho military units like the Marines, suggesting that Obama was out of touch with the military. The tough images of the Marines in action either in training or on the ground in the Middle East were contrasted with text that hinted at Obama’s elitist distance from the fighting men of the country and thus, by extension, from the common people.74 The “horses and bayonets” meme was widely reposted, but less popular than the “binders full of women” because it did not incense as large a counterpublic. At the time when the wars in the Middle East were winding down, the size of the military did not create as deep emotions as continued lack of women in positions of power. The parodies uncovered 71

Stenovec, “Obama’s ‘Horses and Bayonets’”. Bloomberg.com put the per minute figure as high as 105,767 (see Woolley, “Digital Heckling”). 72 Schultheis, “Top Debate Google Searches”. 73 Some examples can be seen on ABC News website (http://abcnews.go.com/ Politics/OTUS/photos/horses-bayonets-dominate-debate-memes-17540450/image17540470, accessed May 15, 2015). 74 See, e.g. the conservative site The Patriot Perspective (2012), for its memes (https://thepatriotperspective.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/on-bayonets-and-horses/, accessed May 20, 2015).

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the problematic premises of political rhetoric that feeds public paranoia about American strength, but did not segue into a wider political discussion. The present essay has discussed two exemplary viral parodic memes that online counterpublics generated on the basis of the presidential debates. There are many other examples about both presidential candidates and their running mates and it would be impossible to cover them all. These two memes not only created a huge follow-up online on multiple platforms, but they also were picked up by traditional media, thus allowing the parodic online counterpublics intrude into the traditional deliberative public sphere and challenge its view of the current political debate. The parodic engagements with the political processes can be interpreted in multiple ways. They allow the usually voiceless voters to speak back to the political establishment and generate new dispersed counterpublics around shared disillusionment with the political process. The popularity of these political parodies allowed the counterpublics to enter into the more restricted space of traditional media, proving that the emotional public sphere is no longer limited to social media but also has the ability to intervene in the public debate. The use of laughter provides cathartic release to the members of the counterpublics, but also challenges the conventional understanding of political participation.

Closing Thoughts The US presidential campaign of 2012 involved not just the traditional public sphere but also a multiplicity of counterpublics in the emotional public sphere of the new media. Not only were ads and election-related information sent to voters via mail, TV, and social media, but the public spoke back to the candidates and, perhaps most interestingly, also to each other. Images posted on platforms like Tumblr generated more content by other users. Much of the content was produced unprofessionally, but fuelled by shared emotion and outrage at the continued marginalisation of women in the case of the “binders full of women” meme. The counterpublics had no formal organisational structures, beyond the network of repostings, likes, and comments. Social media became a space where many spoke to many, unmediated by traditional information brokers, and did so by citing each other’s material and engaging in emotional politics via image and text. Because of the chosen medium and event, the evidence cited above is skewed towards the supporters of President Obama who, as has been widely recognised, won the social media campaign in 2012 because his supporters tended to be tech-savvier (Obama had over 20 million Twitter

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followers and also spent around 10 per cent of his advertising budget on social media).75 This picture, however, would be different and more balanced if we examined some other political event such as the passionate debates over the Affordable Care Act or the US tax policy. Conservative counterpublics are more visible in these social media debates. What these instances of political heckling demonstrate is that although they are all undoubtedly part of the emotional public sphere, driven by emotion and also designed to evoke emotion, they nevertheless also contribute to the political deliberation. As the use of the “binders of women” meme has shown, the idea was extended by different counterpublics from mere political mockery to raising different political questions about women in the workforce and women’s reproductive rights. The emotional tenor of the digital heckling allows the issues, when distributed among democratic online counterpublics, to get under the skin of the electorate more effectively than one-way political communications, to encourage reflection and further information search. Traditional media picked up the viral parodic memes, suggesting that counterpublics created on social media may be having an impact in the traditional public sphere. These emergent counterpublics respond not just to specific political and social topics like the presidential campaign but they also parodically engage with the wider public sphere, pointing to and challenging its social norms and emotional rules. They point to cognitive dissonances in the societies we live in and liberate us through laughter, making us less naïve but not necessarily less engaged members of the new emotional public sphere. This new public sphere is one of dissensus, indicating not so much social disintegration as a more wide and heteroglossic public debate.

Acknowledgements The research for the present essay was supported by the Estonian Research Council grant PUT192.

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icles/2012/10/18/binders-full-of-women-invades-amazon-com.html. Accessed August 1, 2014. Demertzis, Nicolas. 2011. “Emotions in the Media and the Mediatization of Traumas.” Media Perspectives for the 21st Century, edited by Stylianos Papathanassopoulos, 83–99. Abington/New York: Routledge. Eckert, Stine, and Kalyani Chadha. 2013. “Muslim Bloggers in Germany: An Emerging Counterpublic.” Media, Culture & Society 35(8):926– 942. Faris, David M. 2013. Dissent and Revolution in a Digital Age. Social Media, Blogging and Activism in Egypt. London/New York: I. B. Tauris. “Feminist Ryan Gosling.” Tumblr. http://feministryangosling.tumblr.com/. Accessed May 20, 2015. Finn, Greg. 2012. “Election 2012 Breaks Records with 31.7 Million Political Tweets.” http://marketingland.com/election-2012-breaks-recordswith-31-7-million-political-tweets-26086. Accessed August 1, 2014. Fraser, Nancy. 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26:56–80. Genzel. Tara. nd. “Don’t Even Think About Asking Mitt.” Pinterest. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/192458584047444236/. Accessed 15 May 2015. Gerhards, Jürgen, and Mike S. Schäfer. 2010. “Is the Internet a Better Public Sphere? Comparing Old and New Media in the USA and Germany.” New Media & Society 12(1):143–160. Gupta, Praci. 2012. “Mitt Romney’s ‘Binders Full of Women’”. http:// www.salon.com/2012/10/17/mitt_romneys_binders_full_of_women/. Accessed January 15, 2015. Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. Between Facts and Norms. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge: MIT Press. —. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hariman, Robert. 2008. “Political Parody and Public Culture.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94(3):247–272. Henderson, Danielle. 2012. Feminist Ryan Gosling: Feminist Theory (as Imagined) from Your Favorite Sensitive Movie Dude. Philadelphia: Running Press. Hess, Aaron. 2011. “Purifying Laughter: Carnivalesque Self-Parody as Argument Scheme in ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’.” In The Daily Show and Rhetoric. Arguments, Issues, and Strategies, edited by Trischa Goodnow, 93–112. Lanham: Lexington Books.

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Hochschild, Arlie. 2003. The Managed Heart. Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jacobson, Louis. 2012. “Mitt Romney Says U.S. Navy Is Smallest Since 1917, Air Force Is Smallest Since 1947.” http://www.politifact.com/ truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/18/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-saysus-navy-smallest-1917-air-force-s/. Accessed January 15, 2015. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media. Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Kahn, Richard, and Douglas Kellner. 2004. “New Media and Internet Activism: From the ‘Battle of Seattle’ to Blogging.” New Media & Society 6(1):87–95. Kellner, Douglas. 2004. “The Media and the Crises of Democracy in the Age of Bush-2.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1(1):29–58. Kersten, E. L. 2005. The Art of Demotivation. Manager Edition. Austin: Despair Ink. Khondker, Habibul Haque. 2011. “Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring.” Globalizations 8(5):675–679. Kingston, Rebecca. 2011. Public Passion. Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kreiss, Daniel. 2014. “Seizing the Moment: The Presidential Campaigns’ Use of Twitter During the 2012 Electoral Cycle.” New Media & Society (online version): 1–18. http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/ 2014/12/04/1461444814562445. Accessed January 20, 2014. Kwoh, Leslie. 2012. “’Binders Full of Women’ May Help One Woman Get a Job.” The Wall Street Journal, October 17. http://blogs.wsj.com/ atwork/2012/10/17/romney-binders-full-of-women-sparks-fame-forlaid-off-blogger/. Accessed August 1, 2014. Livingstone, Sonia. 2005. “On the Relation between Audiences and Publics.” In Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere, edited by Sonia Livingstone, 17–41. Bristol: Intellect. —. 1999. “New Media, New Audiences?” New Media and Society 1(1):59–66. Lopez, Lori Kido. 2014. “Blogging While Angry: The Sustainability of Emotional Labor in the Asian American Blogosphere.” Media, Culture & Society 36(4):421–436. Lunt, Peter, and Paul Stenner. 2005. “The Jerry Springer Show as an Emotional Public Sphere.” Media, Culture & Society 27(1):59–81.

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MacKinnon, Rebecca. 2004. The World-Wide Conversation: Online Participatory Media and International News. The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy Working Paper Series, #2004-02. http://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/20 04_02_mackinnon.pdf. Accessed January 25, 2014. Madianou, Mirca. 2009. “Audience Reception and News in Everyday Life.” In The Handbook of Journalism Studies, edited by Karin WahlJorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch, 325–337. New York/Abingdon: Routledge. Marcus, George. 2000. Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, George, Russell Neuman, and Michael McKuen. 2002. The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics. University Park: Penn State University Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 1999. “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?” Social Research 66(3):746–758. NBC. 2012. “Obama, Seizing on ‘Binders Full of Women,’ Aims to edge Out Romney.” http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/17/145180 53-obama-seizing-on-binders-full-of-women-aims-to-edge-out-romney ?lite. Accessed January 15, 2015. NPR. 2012. “Presidential Debate Spins ‘Binders Full Of Women’ Meme, Fact Checks.” http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/17/1630 71667/presidential-debate-spins-binders-full-of-women-meme. Accessed January 15, 2015. Palczewski, Catherine Helen. 2001. “Cyber-Movements, New Social Movements, and Counterpublics.” In Counterpublics and the State, edited by Robert Asen, and Daniel C. Brouwer, 161–186. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pantti, Mervi. 2005. “Masculine Tears, Feminine Tears – and Crocodile Tears: Mourning Olof Palme and Anna Lindh in Finnish Newspapers.” Journalism 6(3):357–377. Pantti, Mervi, and Liesbet van Zoonen. 2006. “Do Crying Citizens Make Good Citizens?” Social Semiotics 16(2):205–224. Patriot Perspective. 2012. “On Bayonets and Horses.” https://thepatriot perspective.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/on-bayonets-and-horses/. Accessed May 20, 2015. Pew Research Center. 2010. “New Media, Old Media.” http://www. journalism.org/2010/05/23/new-media-old-media/. Accessed January 15, 2015.

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Põldsaar, Raili. 2004. “Framing Hillary Rodham Clinton.” In Transnational America. Contours of Modern US Culture, edited by Russell Duncan and Clara Juncker, 157–171. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Read, Max. 2012. “‘Too Small for Women’: Amazon Flooded With Hilarious Reviews of Binders in Wake of Debate.” http://gawker.com/ 5952799/too-small-for-women-amazon-flooded-with-hilarious-reviewsof-binders-in-wake-of-debate. Accessed January 15, 2015. Richards, Barry. 2007. Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror. Houndmills: Palgrave. Riis, Ole, and Linda Woodhead. 2010. A Sociology of Religious Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sakwa, Jenna, and Chenda Ngak. 2012. “’Binders Full of Women’: The ‘Big Bird’ of the Second Presidential Debate.” CBS News, October 17. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/binders-full-of-women-the-big-bird-ofthe-second-presidential-debate/. Accessed August 1, 2014. Schultheis, Emily. 2012. “Top Debate Google Searches: ‘Horses and Bayonets,’ Tumult’.” Politico, October 22. http://www.politico.com/ blogs/burns-haberman/2012/10/top-debate-google-searches-horsesand-bayonets-tumult-139276.html. Accessed August 1, 2014. Stenovec, Timothy. 2012 “Obamas ‘Horses and Bayonets’ Comment Goes Viral.” The Huffington Post, October 23. http://www.huffingtonpost .com/2012/10/23/horses-and-bayonets-debate-obamavideo_n_2004038.html. Accessed August 1, 2014. Sziarto, Kristin M., and Helga Leitner. 2010. “Immigrants Riding for Justice: Space-time and Emotions in the Construction of a Counterpublic.” Political Geography 29(7):381–391. Sunstein, Cass. 2001. Republic.com. Princeton: Princeton University Press. “Texts from Hillary”. Tumblr. http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com. Accessed 15 May 2015. Thompson, John B. 2000. Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, Simon, and Paul Hoggett, eds. 2012. Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies. New York: Continuum. Tryon, Chuck. 2008. “Pop Politics: Online Parody Videos, Intertextuality, and Political Participation.” Popular Communication 6:209–213. van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2002. “After Dallas and Dynasty We Have … Democracy: Articulating Soap, Politics and Gender.” In Media and the Restyling of Politics, edited by John Corner, and Dick Pells, 99–116. London: Sage.

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Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. West, Darrell M. 2012. “Communications Lessons from the 2012 Presidential Election”. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/ 2012/11/06-election-communications-west. Accessed August 1, 2014. Woolley, Suzanne. 2012. “Digital Heckling: Vox Populi.” http://www. bloomberg.com/slideshow/2012-10-22/digital-heckling-voxpopuli.html#slide2. Accessed January 15, 2015. Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London/New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER TWO THE STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE CYBERSPHERE MARY NICKEL

In his foundational 1989 text, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas traces the development of a series of institutions and practices that led to the rise of the public sphere. As we have come to understand it, the public sphere is an arena for public discourse about matters pertaining to the public interest, where various voices are represented, irrespective of social position. According to Habermas, 18th and 19th-century salons, coffeehouses, and Tischgesellschaften (table societies) provided an unprecedented platform for rational-critical discourse. Critical discursive exchange about, say, works of art and literature was abstracted to discourse about the public and the public good. Habermas’ emergent public sphere was comprised by discursive exchange—in stark contrast to the exercise of state power or the exchange of money in market economies, which are “non-discursive modes of coordination,” and which “suffer from tendencies toward domination and reification”. 1 Ideas were evaluated according to their own merit, rather than according to the social position of the person espousing those ideas. While it must be admitted that the participants in Habermas’ public sphere were mostly members of the bourgeois class, the import of this emergence of discursive exchange, as Habermas argues, is undeniable for modern democratic society. However, according to Habermas, this democratic progress was hindered when the distinction between market economies and discursive exchange was confounded. In a later section of his text, Habermas gives an account of the infringement of market forces upon democratic exchange in

1

Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 6.

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early 20th century media. To “the extent that the press became commercialised,” he writes, the threshold between the circulation of a commodity and the exchange of communications among the members of a public was levelled.2

As a result, “within the private domain the clear line separating the public sphere from the private became blurred.”3 Whereas the bourgeois public sphere had comprised space for disinterested discourse about matters of public interest—largely irrespective of social position—the introduction of advertising into that space reorganised it again according to social position. As market forces encroached upon discursive arenas, the discourse lost its critical quality. Instead, public interactions increasingly took the form of acts of private consumption. In this essay, I trace a similar encroachment of market forces into more contemporary online democratic discourse. I answer Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere with an account of a structural transformation of the cybersphere. In this essay, the kind of democratic discourse that Habermas suggests took place in coffeehouses and Tischgesellschaften is observed on online exchanges called “listservs” and on personal webpages hosted on sites like Lycos and Geocities. Where Habermas found that the disintegration of the 19th-century public sphere is attributable to the manoeuvres of consolidative media firms, in the narrative presented here, online communication deteriorates as a result of the encroachment of market forces on online websites. The advertising mechanisms instituted by Google and Facebook invade online exchange, and hasten the disintegration of the threshold between private and public. Attention to these dynamics, I argue, is absolutely pressing today, amid the fair but potentially omissive assertions that social networking sites facilitate democratic progress. The parallel drawn to Habermas here reminds us that, like the magazine and the coffee shop, social networking sites have great potential to contribute to democratic society. Yet, we must be savvy users of such resources and maintain keen awareness to the undemocratic possibilities that arise when market forces encroach upon public discourse. Following a more in-depth review of Habermas’ account of the rise of public discourse and the deterioration of such discourse wrought by advertising firms in the 20th century, I survey the growth of online discourse in the last several decades. I introduce examples of online public 2 3

Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 181. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 181.

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discursive exchange, and thereafter narrate the rise of online advertising enterprises, demonstrating how that narrative parallels the encroachment of market forces upon public discourse Habermas argues gave rise to the 20th century deterioration of the public sphere. I uncover and examine two specific mechanisms that contribute to the disintegration of online democratic discourse: the atomisation of persons into fragments and data points which Deleuze called “dividuation”, and the fabrication and proliferation of inherently broadly appealing content generated by devices such as the “Like” button. Finally, I explore what might be done to curb the effects of this turn.

Habermas and the Degeneration of the Public Sphere Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was the foundation for deliberative theory and its derivatives. In that text, Habermas describes the factors that contributed to the development of the bourgeois public sphere in the 18th and 19th centuries. These included, among others, the privacy derived from the intimate sphere of the conjugal family, the public use of reason derived from literary and art criticism, and the “audience-oriented subjectivity” derived from the novel and letter. 4 Individuals began to envision a divide between their roles as economic actors and reasoning human beings just as they began to discuss in semipublic institutions such as the London coffeehouses and Parisian salons, which already numbered in the thousands in the beginning of the 18th century.5 The discussion that came to pass at these sites was predicated on “norms of reasoned discourse in which arguments, not statuses or traditions, were to be decisive”6 These norms were institutionalised within and without parliamentary complexes. The public opinion that flowed out of the public sphere—that space for disinterested, critical discourse about matters of the public interest—became a foundational link between state and society. However, by the 20th century, the demarcation between private and public, between economic agency and critical-rational exchange, began to disintegrate—and the public sphere deteriorated. This was no mere happenstance; particular, moneyed interests played an active role in the process of degeneration. Habermas writes that

4

Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 28. Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 12. 6 Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 2. 5

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the laws of the market governing the sphere of commodity exchange and of social labour […] pervaded the sphere reserved for private people as a public.7

As a result, rational-critical debate had a tendency to be replaced by consumption, and the web of public communication unravelled into acts of individual reception, however uniform in mode.8

Mass media, financed by advertising, began even to reshape the content to appeal to the broader public, making it “consumption-ready”.9 Discourse about art and literature—especially within nascent media like television and radio—transformed into “the soft compulsion of constant consumption training”.10 As a result, the public sphere, both literally and figuratively, disappeared. “With the loss of a notion of general interest and the rise of a consumption orientation,” Calhoun summarises, the members of the public sphere lose their common ground. The consumption orientation of mass culture produces a proliferation of products designed to please various tastes.11

The “common ground” to which Calhoun refers entails not only the basis for discussion—the conception of public man—but also the very spaces in which conversations transpired. Public spaces themselves vanished, and were replaced with sites for consumption. Before long, even the state had no choice but to participate in this cycle of consumption. Habermas calls this a “refeudalization” of the public sphere.12 “Because private enterprises evoke in their customers the idea that in their consumption decisions they act in their capacity as citizens,” Habermas observes, “the state has to ‘address’ its citizens like consumers.”13 Where the divide between public and private had dissolved, representatives were no longer able to confer with their citizens qua citizens. Today, this is visible both in the electoral process (when political 7

Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 161. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 161. 9 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 166. 10 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 192. 11 Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 25. 12 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 195. 13 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 211. 8

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advertising assumes identical forms to product advertising) and during political leaders’ tenure (when political leaders’ decisions are evaluated on the basis of their approval rating, like a car or business service). So long as the citizen is conflated with the consumer, this state of affairs is bound to endure. While Habermas’ account uncovers the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in the 18th and 19th centuries, in coffeehouses and salons, we can see evidence of a similar trajectory in more recent years online. In the next sections, I would like to offer a history of a handful of online platforms, and trace the effect of the emergence of advertising on those platforms. As we shall see, the quality of discourse suffers as a result of the proliferation of online advertising schemes.

Online Discourse on Usenet and the Eternal September Unlike contemporary methods of communication on social networking websites, in which users post and exchange messages on standardised platforms, the earliest discussions on the Internet did not transpire on websites. In fact, online discourse predates the World Wide Web and internet browsers by several years. One of the earliest and most important networks for discussion, called Usenet, was developed by students at Duke University in 1979, over a decade before Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web.14 The Usenet network, linked in part to ARPANET15, was comprised of a number of different “newsgroups.” Each of these newsgroups related to a general topic of interest: the newsgroup “FA.sf-lovers” invited discussion about science fiction, “NET.cooks” invited recipes, “NET.games” hosted discussion about computer games, “NET.music” entertained discussion about music, and “NET.space” hosted discussion about the space program. The function and format for discussion was itself developed in an array of newsgroup posts, suggesting a fairly democratic procedure of self-regulation. Michael Horton, one of the founding developers, offered this general policy on one Usenet board:

14

In fact, Usenet was the venue for Berners-Lee’s (“WorldWideWeb: Summary”) announcement in which he shared the first details about his invention of the World Wide Web. 15 ARPANET was a Department of Defense project established in 1969. It created connections between four computers at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The project was one of the major precursors of the Internet as we know it today.

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Chapter Two USENET is a public access network. Any User is allowed to post to any newsgroup (unless abuses start to be a problem). All users are to be given access to all newsgroups except that private newsgroups can be created which are protected […] The USENET map is also public at all times, and so any site which is on Usenet is expected to make public the fact that they are on Usenet.16

Horton also recommended that all Usenet articles be held to a high standard of quality and be signed. He proscribed “distasteful or offensive articles,” and insisted that those who failed to follow the policy be removed from the network. However, these high standards did not necessitate strict supervision; instead, early Usenet users shared in a general esprit de corps of mutual respect and courtesy. Like Habermas’ bourgeois coffeehouse goers in the 18th and 19th centuries, these users participated in discourse about matters of public interest, exchanging ideas that were judged on their own rational-critical merit rather than according to the social position of those who expressed the ideas.17 As Hauben and Hauben explain, “the earliest newsgroups were all unmoderated. Everyone had the right to participate and contribute their views”.18 What emerged from this discussion was a “rich and interesting content […] that surprised even the participants”.19 Another poster, Carl Zeigler, observed: All these people seem to have one thing in common—the willingness to discuss any idea, whether it is related to war, peace, politics, science, technology, philosophy (ethics!), science fiction, literature, etc. While there is a lot of flame, the discussion usually consists of well thought out replies to meaningful questions […] much of the discussion can be seen as examples of man’s need for *meaningful* [sic] conversation.20

The atmosphere did not last long. In 1993 came what the Usenet user Dave Fischer famously called the “September that never ended”. 21 He was referring to the “September” phenomenon—that yearly period when an 16

Hauben and Hauben, Netizens, 175. Of course, it is appropriate here to draw a related parallel to Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere; like the bourgeois participants in coffeehouse discourse, most of the early users on Usenet shared particular social locations. Nevertheless, though the shared experience of users may have enhanced their ability to follow a certain protocol, the spirit of the discourse was largely disinterested, and concerning public, rather than private, matters. 18 Hauben and Hauben, Netizens, 185. 19 Hauben and Hauben, Netizens, 185. 20 Zeigler, “Net names”. 21 Fischer, “Re: Weeks? Hah!!”. 17

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influx of new college students would flood the network and, as one Usenet moderator, Tom Seidenberg, wrote, they would start to post stupid questions, repost MAKE MONEY FAST, break rules of netiquette, and just generally make life on Usenet more difficult than at other times of the year.22

Usually, these new users would gradually adapt to Usenet decorum—socalled ‘netiquette’—and integrate into the online discursive community. However, as online services like America Online and CompuServe proliferated, which gave exponentially increasing numbers of Americans access to Usenet, the network saw the influx of dozens of thousands of users. The throngs of newcomers, unversed in netiquette, failed to participate in the decorous discourse, and the Usenet esprit de corps evaporated. By around 1993, the explosion of new sign ups was such that Fischer could exclaim “September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended”. 23 The aforementioned Usenet moderator Tom Seidenberg was even more unenthusiastic: Unfortunately, it has been September since 1993. With the growing sensationalism surrounding the ‘Information-Superhighway’ in the United States, the current September is likely to last into the next century.24

This development closely aligns with Habermas’ account of the degraded public sphere. As Habermas demonstrates, one of the sources of the degeneration of the public sphere, paradoxically, is the expansion of the public’s access to it. Calhoun synopsises Habermas’ account of the bourgeois public sphere thus: “in the expansion of access, the form of participation was fatally altered.” 25 When meaningful communication ceases to be the objective of political or social discourse, the resulting discourse disintegrates. Thus, while tools that open access to the public sphere—including the book, the newspaper, and perhaps the personal computer—are “worthy of praise,” Calhoun asserts, alongside these there has been a psychological facilitation of access by lowering the threshold capacity required for appreciation or participation.26

22

Grossman, Net.wars, 10. Fischer, “Re: Weeks? Hah!!”. 24 Grossman, Net.wars, 10. 25 Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 23. 26 Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 23. 23

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CompuServe and AOL, like the ever-cheaper book and magazine, broadened access to the medium. However, as the barriers to entry are lowered, as Habermas saw, there can be a breakdown in the discursive sphere. The greatest loss that results from this disintegration, however, is the loss of “the willingness to discuss any idea” that Zeigler observed was the shared goal of early users of the Internet. Rather than participating in a discussion that was directed, as Zeigler observed above, towards the goal of common understanding through “*meaningful* communication,” after the endless September, new users focused on their own “stupid questions” and get-rich-quick schemes, to the detriment of online discourse. Though the influx of users in the early nineties may have degraded the quality of exchange on Usenet, it was the evacuation of the lion’s share of users that ultimately led to the network’s effective demise. This decline came around the turn of the millennium, when flashier graphics and user interfaces attracted most users away from Usenet. Columnist Sascha Segan writes that [a]s the ‘90s went on, the eye candy of the Web and the marketing dollars of Web site owners helped push people over to profit-making sites. Usenet’s slightly arcane access methods and text-only protocols have nothing on the glitz and glamour of MySpace.27

Now, most of those that remain on Usenet, according to Segan, are “pirates and pornographers.” This is compatible with the observation Habermas makes that mass media, in the 20th century, “adapt[ed] to the need for relaxation and entertainment on the part of consumer strata with relatively little education.”28 Internet start-ups equivalently recognised the profitability of “glitz and glamour,” and built websites that would attract throngs of users; they were, as Segan’s lament suggests, quite successful.

Personalised Advertising and Dividuation Yet, though these companies attracted the attention of many newly arrived online users, the start-ups were not as successful at commoditising their enterprises. Sites like Geocities, Lycos, and Go.com had no difficulty accumulating interest, they were unable to develop a sustainable capitalisation model. Many such shrewd online advertising start-ups could sense that online fora might present ample profitable opportunities, but were not certain how to capitalise off of the medium. Amid the slew of 27 28

Segan, “R.I.P. Usenet”. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 165.

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online venues for discussion, it was unclear how particular firms might reach their particular audiences. Failing to achieve effective marketing strategy, many of these early online start-ups suffered a slump in revenues, a major component of the “dot-com bust” of 2000–2002.29 Amidst the downturn, however, there was another development on the horizon. In the late nineties, two computer scientists at Stanford had developed a new algorithm for searching the web, resulting in a search engine that before long became wildly popular: Google. By 2000, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page began to monetise the site by placing conspicuous, but simple text-based advertising within search results. Early on, it was fairly straightforward: companies (such as, say, a shoe manufacturer) could pay to have ads placed in the results of certain searches (for instance, among other results for “sneakers,” or “stilettos”). Google has always insisted on their commitment to providing useful and relevant information—as CEO Eric Schmidt has declared, “[t]he primary mission of Google is to get you what you want, rather than what someone thinks you want”30—and in keeping with this policy, the company made sure that sponsored advertisements were patently so. They identified each ad with a separator or shaded background and the disclaimer “Sponsored Links.” This emphasis on text-based, contextual advertising set Google apart from many other advertising schemes offered by personal website hosts like Lycos and Geocities. It was early in 2002, however, that Google really distinguished itself from the competition. Whereas similar mechanisms—like that of advertising rival Overture—displayed ads in order of the price paid for them, Google began to integrate an ad’s clickthrough rate in the algorithm that determined which ad would be displayed. The clickthrough rate served as a measure of the relevancy of the ad for other searchers, and relevancy, we recall, is Google’s doggedly avowed objective. John Battelle describes it as follows: Imagine that three accounting firms are competing for the right to target their ads to the keyword “accounting services.” And assume further that Accountant One is willing to pay $1.00 per click, Accountant Two $1.25, and Accountant Three $1.50. On Overture’s service, Accountant Three would be listed first, followed by Accountant Two, and so on. The same would be true on Google’s service, but only until the service has enough time to monitor clickthrough rates for all three ads. If Accountant One, who paid $1.00 per click, was drawing more clickthroughs than

29 30

Raine, “Dot-com ads”. Kawamoto, “Google CEO speaks out”.

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Chapter Two Accountant Three, then Accountant One would graduate to the top spot, despite his lower bid.31

Of course, it did not hurt that, because Google had instituted a pay-perclick payment scheme, increasing clickthrough rates also directly increased revenue. Not only would Accountant One’s ad be more relevant for users—fulfilling Google’s goal of providing useful, relevant information—but it also made the company more money. This was markedly visible in Google’s yearly profit reports; in 2002, Google’s advertising revenues had shot to $411 million from $66 million in 2001. The next year, Google reported $1.4 billion in advertising revenue.32 The key, then, was relevancy. How could Google find out what would be most relevant for its searchers? Certainly, it had extensive data about users’ search histories.33 Around this time, Google began to appreciate the real value of personal data. The collection of search histories was the first move in the development of contextual advertising and ad personalisation. But why stop at the gold mine of data they were sitting on when the company could do even better? On April 1, 2004, Google introduced what was to become one of their most popular, free services: Gmail. 34 If Google’s database of search histories was a gold mine, Gmail was El Dorado. Eli Pariser points out that, though it was the sidebar of ads that would be displayed on Gmail that was most discussed in press reports about the launch, it’s unlikely that those ads were the sole motive for launching the service. By getting people to log in, Google got its hands on an enormous pile of data—the hundreds of millions of e-mails Gmail users send and receive each day. And it could cross-reference each user’s e-mail and behaviour on the site with the links he or she clicked in the Google search engine.35

By April 2004, however, Google was already a step behind—though they did not yet know it. The company had a lockdown on personal information about search queries and related advertisement clickthroughs, but it had overlooked another, equally large data bank. Atop a mother lode of 31

Battelle, The Search, 142. Google, “2003 Financial Tables”. 33 Google nearly sold much of this data to the advertising service DoubleClick. This was Google’s fallback plan, according to founder Brin, if their monetising mechanism fell through (Battelle, The Search, 124). Ironically, the tables were turned in late 2007, when DoubleClick itself was acquired by Google. 34 Markoff, “Google Planning to Roll Out E-Mail Service”. 35 Pariser, The Filter Bubble, 33. 32

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interpersonal relationship data stood Mark Zuckerberg, who, in February of 2004, had introduced an appealing, exclusive network for college kids. Inasmuch as his new platform enabled and encouraged members to link to each other, to interact and share photos and messages, all of those exchanges could be compiled in a powerful database of data points about users. If he ever was unaware of the power these data wielded, Zuckerberg would not remain so for very long. His company has unremittingly highlighted the potential for personalisation in their materials for prospective clients—that is, for advertisers. “Reach exactly the people you want with ads that let you target by age, location, interests and more,” reads a recent Facebook appeal to businesses.36 The mechanism by which Facebook acquires personal information, however, is different than Google’s in many ways. Whereas, early on, Google utilised their database of search queries to track users’ behaviour, Facebook’s data set derives from the self-representations of users. As Pariser notices, there’s “a big difference between ‘you are what you click’ and ‘you are what you share.’”37 The structures of the sites evidence this. When a prospective member signs up for a Facebook account, she is directed through a series of forms to complete with details about her past employment, her favourite movies, and even her sexual orientation. As a result, she no longer can introduce people to her own idiosyncratic world, but instead she plays a more passive role in her self-representation. Rather than actively making every choice about her self-representation from a blank slate, she merely chooses whether and how to fill in the fields in Facebook’s standardised form. The self is refracted by Facebook’s template—it is represented by an aggregation of interests, shared media, and “friendships.” For their part, social networking sites encourage users to utilise these self-templates not simply because that makes them easier to manage, but because they generate mountains of extremely valuable user data. This process is the quintessence of what Deleuze called “dividuation”. Today, he observes, people increasingly lose their status as “individuals” —that is, entities that are not dividual, but instead indivisible. The process of personalising via “profile” exemplifies Deleuze’s observation that individuals “have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’”.38 Instead of being an indivisible whole, the entity of the self is constituted merely by the sum of one’s favourite movies and employment history. “I” am no longer “me.” Instead, I become the constellation of my 36

Shah, “Facebook Launches ‘Facebook for Business’”. Pariser, The Filter Bubble, 114. 38 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 6. 37

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connection to other users in the network I call my “friends,” and the aggregation of photos tagged with me in them. I am the things that I Like. Lanier thus laments that online tools “serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments” or entities.39 In the breaking up of ideas (or people) into bite-sized portions, he says, we forsake the most valuable elements of those things: We know a little about what Aztec or Inca music sounded like, for instance, but the bits that were trimmed to make the music fit into the European idea of church song were the most precious bits. The alien bits are where the flavour is found. They are the portals to strange philosophies. What a loss to not know how New World music would have sounded alien to us! Some melodies and rhythms survived, but the whole is lost.40

Lanier’s example of the loss of “alien bits” is instructive as we consider the fragmenting performed by online social networking sites. What “alien bits” might be lost, say, in the limitation of communication to 140 characters? Yet, no online mechanism exhibits a more fragmentary representation of people than Facebook’s News Feed, which was launched in late 2006. An announcement on the Facebook blog explained the new tool. “Now, whenever you log in, you’ll get the latest headlines generated by the activity of your friends and social groups”.41 The mechanism serves the most relevant fragments of friends’ personal information on a user’s “Home” page on Facebook, displaying details about the latest break up or a recent favourite song. As Pariser observes: “It’s hard to imagine a purer source of relevance.”42 Users immediately organised in an outcry against the News Feed. Zuckerberg himself posted on the Facebook blog, assuaging users that the tool was simply developed to ensure “[y]ou don’t miss the photo album about your friend’s trip to Nepal”.43 It wasn’t until the spring of 2012, though, that Facebook took the step of finally integrating advertising directly into the News Feed, integrating friends’ photos and “Likes” into the ads. 44 These simply augment the kind of work Facebook did with “Sponsored Stories,” whereby brands and corporations can pay Facebook to privilege status updates and posts related to their products. Dividuation becomes fully and patently privatised. Not only am “I” constituted by the 39

Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget, 47. Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget, 48. 41 Sanghvi, “Facebook Gets a Facelift”. 42 Pariser, The Filter Bubble, 37. 43 Zuckerberg, “Calm down”. 44 Cox, “Facebook to Show Sponsored Ads”. 40

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things that I buy, but now corporations can pay to ensure that those consumptive self-fragments are disproportionately circulated. Notably, users are not able to opt out of this mechanism.45 Google has consistently tried to catch up with Facebook’s everexpanding cache of personal connection data. The company’s first foray into social media, Google Buzz, nearly landed them in court. Their newer network, Google+, seeks to correct the mistakes the company made by providing users with more nuanced privacy tools. Today, with over 500 million users, it is second only to Facebook. Again, the quest is for relevancy. The more that ads can be tailored to the user through personalisation, Pariser writes, “the more ads they can sell, and the more likely you are to buy the products they’re offering.”46 The use of templates of self-representation and communication facilitates the tailoring of ads to specific users. Dividuation—the fragmenting of individuals into data banks of, say, interests and search histories—is intimately related to personalisation. The former directly facilitates the latter. In the eyes of business firms, as we’ve seen, the personalisation this information powers has a distinct advantage over public advertising. Personalised messages are much more effective than those that target general demographics. Personalisation allows the message to be tailored to be relevant for the viewer of the advertisement. Making messages relevant through personalisation, however, diminishes that which might call the user to consider the common concern. As Calhoun presciently wrote almost three decades ago, there has been a substantial regimentation of communication fostered by many uses of computer technology. 47 Computer-assisted direct mail campaigns, for example, may be a means for a politician to subvert public discourse by tailoring messages to different mailing lists, thus effectively saying different things to different groups of voters or potential donors. The result of the invasion of competition between private interests in the public sphere, according to Habermas, is the loss of its “communal basis.”48 Consequently, individuals fail to get a comprehensive view. Even ostensibly public communication becomes private. As we saw above, when the rules of the market are grafted onto the rules of the public fora, discourse is “replaced by consumption, and the web of public communication [is] unravelled into acts of individual reception, however

45

Facebook Help Center, “About Sponsored Stories”. Pariser, The Filter Bubble, 6. 47 Calhoun, “Populist politics,” 234. 48 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 203. 46

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uniform in mode”.49 Economic incentives drive personalisation—and the dividuation that underpins personalisation—and public discourse suffers as a result. It is hard to imagine a purer platform for “individual reception” than the News Feed. Habermas cites and echoes Bahrdt’s lament that citygoers no longer receive an overview of the ever more complicated life of the city as a whole in such a fashion that it is really public for him. The more the city as a whole is transformed into a barely penetrable jungle, the more he withdraws into his sphere of privacy which in turn is extended ever further.50

When the advertising and information that we receive is so fully personalised, our prospects of discussing public matters diminish. However, one of the most insidious consequences of the personalisation process is not simply the segmentation of reality, but the development of information ecologies that tend to distort reality altogether. This is epitomised in the development of Facebook’s “Like” button.

Like... +1 Writing about the presses of the mid-20th century, Habermas wrote that there emerged a pleasant and at the same time convenient subject for entertainment that, instead of doing justice to reality, has a tendency to present a substitute more palatable for consumption and more likely to give rise to an impersonal indulgence in stimulating relaxation than to a public use of reason.51

Similarly to the ways the monetisation of the presses in the 20th century affected the content of the books, we can discern a parallel development in the springing from the establishment of the Like button. Launched in 2009, the “Like” button is a small icon users can press to express a fondness or appreciation for some piece of data—a photo, a status update, or even a product. According to the Facebook team, “‘Like’ is a way to give positive feedback or to connect with things you care about on Facebook”.52 As a data gathering tool, the “Like” button might be the 49

Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 161. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 159. 51 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 170. 52 Facebook Help Center, “What is the Like feature?”. 50

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data point par excellence—a binary switch denoting a positive connection between any two pieces of other data. It figures prominently in Facebook’s new advertising scheme, whereby friends’ “Likes” can be sponsored by corporations and displayed as ads. The name of the device is not insignificant. For a time, the company had considered calling it the “Awesome!” button, but thought wiser of it and changed it to “Like”.53 Pariser perceptively suggests that the choice of the word “Like” is a small design decision with far-reaching consequences: The stories that get the most attention on Facebook are the stories that get the most Likes, and the stories that get the most Likes are, well, more likable.54

Why not, instead of “Awesome!” or “Like,” might the company allocate space for an “Important!” button? Simply put, the company’s objective is to keep people using the site, and to continue to make connections between people and their data. This is facilitated by the exchange of pleasant, not important, content—or, as Habermas noted, content that is “more palatable for consumption,” rather than content that challenges readers. “Social media is all about building networks, being accepted, being ‘liked,’ sharing information... positive things,” affirms blogger Paul Sawers.55 Facebook wants to generate as many clicks on links as possible, and it knows full well that people are immensely more likely to follow links to posts others have “Liked,” rather than media that are “Important!” “Like” has another advantage: as a transitive verb, it performs the essential connecting function even more effectively. As well as “Liking” news stories and notes, users can be persuaded to “Like” Coca-Cola much more than to call it “Awesome!” This transitive function has also contributed to the integration of Facebook with virtually every other large site on the World Wide Web. As of November 2013, seven and a half million websites had incorporated the Like button somewhere on their site.56 Google, of course, followed suit. With the launch of Google+ in 2011, the company offered a “+1” button, which performs largely the same function, albeit with more impersonal language. These buttons, along with Twitter’s “tweet” button, and many other share buttons—from Tumblr, Digg, and Reddit—are present on virtually every corporately owned 53

Bergen, “Facebook’s Like Button”. Pariser, The Filter Bubble, 149. 55 Sawers, “Facebook Dislike Button”. 56 He, “Introducing new Like and Share buttons”. 54

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website, and countless personal blogs. They allow information to be passed on and integrated with data stores on each of those respective social networks. Because people want to generate content that will be Liked, the very information that is generated and published in the first place privileges a certain, particularly rosy outlook from the outset. This parallels what Habermas observes in the print advertising of the 20th century. “The laws of the market have already penetrated into the substance of the works themselves,” Habermas laments, “and have become inherent in them as formative laws.” 57 The insight undoubtedly translates; it is perhaps the most significant reason that Facebook chose not to incorporate the “Dislike” button that was clamoured for by millions of users. “Like” is a social lubricant; it encourages connection. “Dislike,” on the other hand, is socially corrosive. Because Facebook is cognisant of this, the “Dislike” button will assuredly never be instituted. The content of communication, as a result, is fundamentally altered—it is sanitised. After all, many fewer people feel comfortable “Liking” something such as a news article detailing human rights abuses, or a recent natural disaster, rather than “Liking” more positive reports. However, the problems with “Like” lie not only in the collective sharing of information, but also on the personal level. The algorithms used by Facebook (and Google+) are developed to give us information that we might also be prone to “Like.” The mechanism does not simply facilitate the creation of content that is generally likeable; it also provides us with information and opinions that are personally likeable as well. Consequently, we personally encounter less unfamiliar or uncomfortable information. As one interested in politics, I may be served a platter of status updates about the latest health care debate, or other political news— which I would quite likely “Like”—rather than titbits about, say, the latest sports game. Pariser thus sardonically exalts the personalising technologies for their capacity to make us feel good. We’re never bored. We’re never annoyed. Our media is a perfect reflection of our interests and desires... It’s a cozy place, populated by our favourite people and things and ideas.58

Nothing has ever been able to facilitate such personal customisation as the personal computer. Perhaps this is why Neil Postman surmised that,

57 58

Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 165. Pariser, The Filter Bubble, 12.

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[i]f the press was, as David Riesman called it, ‘the gunpowder of the mind,’ the computer, in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind.59

In being offered things we might like by the network’s algorithms, we are often given things that are familiar to us; after all, critical public discourse can often be uncomfortable.

Restoring Democratic Possibilities Habermas was not optimistic about the possibility of reversing the conflation of public and private. The domination of moneyed interests in the distorted shadow of the public sphere does not provide much opportunity for a restoration of the disinterested, democratic discourse that first appeared in those early coffeehouses. Instead, it propagates the status quo: Were one to compress into one sentence what the ideology of mass culture actually amounts to, one would have to present it as a parody of the statement, “Become what you are”: as a glorifying reduplication and justification of the state of affairs that exists anyway, while foregoing all transcendence and critique.60

To some degree, we can see similar developments over the last few decades in the emergence of the advertising industry online. Pariser calls this the “You Loop”61—the cycle whereby users, who control their media via clickstreams and personal data, are then reinforced by that personalised media. If I “Like” a National Public Radio story I see on my News Feed, I’ll get more of them. My interest in NPR is amplified—to the detriment of my exposure to, say, Fox News stories. In a sense, as Habermas wrote, I become who I am. The encroachment of markets upon this medium feeds this feedback loop. The reason that personalisation is so widespread today is not simply because it is what users want, but because it generates revenue for online corporations like Google and Facebook. Insofar as those companies are motivated to provide us with information and advertising we are prone to click on, personalisation exacerbates the phenomenon of homophily—the tendency of people to seek out like-minded others, for birds of a feather to 59

Postman, Technopoly, 116. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 216. 61 Pariser, The Filter Bubble, 125. 60

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flock together. Targeting, advertising, and data collection all aggravate users’ homophilic tendencies, to the detriment of critical public discourse—just as in Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere. Nevertheless, Habermas offers one prescription: “freedom of assembly and association,” he insists, “needs a guarantee of active promotion.”62 Corporations are so monolithic and so “publicistically effective” that they need present and active alternatives to challenge their solidified position in the market, and in the public in general. The activities that were encouraged and safeguarded in salons and in novel and journal readership must be actively redeveloped. To that end, sociologist danah boyd has suggested that we begin to think of Facebook as a utility. The conception is certainly not unfounded—Zuckerberg himself has used the language.63 But Facebook’s apparent status as utility must be met with boyd’s blunt reminder: “Utilities get regulated.”64 Defending a critical public discourse involves not only regulating the corporations themselves, but also challenging the homophilic tendencies they exploit in their pursuit of revenues. Because, as Mutz writes, “[h]omogeneous networks occur regularly,” we must put a priority on “promoting greater heterogeneity.”65 This may involve demanding that the algorithms that are used to curate the information we are exposed to are transparent. It also requires that we, as users, demand personalisation that does not broadly extricate difference from our media ecologies. We must also, as Calhoun wrote, nurture a public discourse in which these various groups and individuals may consider their respective and collective wants and possibly modify them.66

This entails our commitment to reaching beyond simple consumption and “individual reception,” into a more public arena. We ought, as Young suggests, aspire to communicate across lines of difference with the purpose of cultivating mutual understanding67—as did the earliest users of Usenet. We cannot merely put faith in the democratic nature of social networks. Rather, with Habermas’ account of the bourgeois public sphere 62

Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 228. “We think of ourselves as a utility,” he once told Viacom CEO Tom Freston (Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 160). It was not the first time he had compared Facebook to a utility (Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 144). 64 Boyd, “Facebook is a utility”. 65 Mutz, Hearing the Other Side, 148. 66 Calhoun, “Populist politics,” 227. 67 Young, Inclusion and Democracy. 63

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in mind, we ought to remember that these online networks, like the novel and salon of the eighteenth and 19th centuries, are resources that ought to be shared, utilised, and protected.

Works Cited Battelle, John. 2005. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York: Portfolio. Bergen, Jennifer. 2010. “Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button Could Have Been Awesome.” PC Magazine, October 6. http://appscout.pcmag.com/ mobile-apps/269436-facebook-s-like-button-could-have-been-awesome. Accessed April 1, 2012. Berners-Lee, Tim. 1991. “WorldWideWeb: Summary.” alt.hypertext, August 6. http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/395f282a 67a1916c. Accessed March 31, 2012. boyd, danah. 2010. “Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated.” Zephoria.org, May 5. http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/ 05/15/facebook-is-a-utility-utilities-get-regulated.html. Accessed March 31, 2012. Calhoun, Craig J. 1988. “Populist politics, communications media and large scale societal integration.” Sociological Theory 6 (Fall):219–41. —. 1992. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cox, Carmen. 2011. “Facebook to Show Sponsored Ads in News Feed in 2012.” ABC News, December 21. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ facebook-put-sponsored-ads-timeline-newsfeed-january-2012/story?id =15205346#.T4dvhsXwtUV. Accessed April 2, 2012. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter):3–7. Facebook Help Center. 2012a. “About Sponsored Stories.” https://www. facebook.com/help/?page=154500071282557. Accessed April 2, 2012. —. 2012b. “What is the Like feature?” https://www.facebook.com/help/ ?faq=200273576682757. Accessed April 3, 2012. Fischer, Dave. 1994. “Re: Weeks? Hah!!” alt.folklore.computers, January 24. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.folklore.computers /wF4CpYbWuuA/jS6ZOyJd10sJ. Accessed December 15, 2014.

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Google. 2003. “2003 Financial Tables.” http://investor.google.com/finan cial/2003/tables.html. Accessed March 31, 2012. Grossman, Wendy. 1997. Net.wars. New York: New York University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hauben, Michael, and Ronda Hauben. 1997. Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Los Alamitos: Wiley. He, Ray C. 2013. “Introducing new Like and Share buttons.” Facebook Developers Blog, November 6. https://developers.facebook.com/blog /post/2013/11/06/introducing-new-like-and-share-buttons/. Accessed February 15, 2014. Kawamoto, Dawn. 2003. “Google CEO speaks out on future of search.” CNET News, October 7. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1024_3-5088 153.html. Accessed March 31, 2012. Kirkpatrick, David. 2010. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lanier, Jaron. 2010. You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Markoff, John. 2004. “Google Planning to Roll Out E-Mail Service.” New York Times, March 31. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/31/technol ogy/31CND-GOOGLE. html. Accessed March 31, 2012. Mutz, Diana. 2006. Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pariser, Eli. 2011. The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You. New York: Penguin Press. Postman, Neil. 1992. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Knopf. Raine, George. 2005. “Dot-com ads make a comeback.” San Francisco Chronicle, April 10. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/ 2005/04/10/BUG1GC5M4I1.DTL&ao=all. Accessed March 31, 2012. Sanghvi, Ruchi. 2006. “Facebook Gets a Facelift.” The Facebook Blog, September 5. https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2207967130. Accessed March 31, 2012. Sawers, Paul. 2010. “Facebook Dislike Button: Why it Will Never Happen.” The Next Web, October 10. http://thenextweb.com/social media/2010/10/10/facebook-dislike-button-why-it-will-never-happen/. Accessed April 11, 2012.

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Segan, Sascha. 2008. “R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008.” PC Magazine, July 31. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2326849,00.asp. Accessed March 31, 2012. Shah, Pathik. 2011. “Facebook Launches ‘Facebook for Business’ To Woo Brands After Google+ Fiasco.” Techie Buzz, July 27. http://techiebuzz.com/tech-news/facebook-for-business.html. Accessed December 15, 2014. Young, Iris Marion. 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Zeigler, Carl. 1981. “Net names.” The Usenet Oldnews Archive, November 2. http://quux.org:70/Archives/usenet-a-news/NET.news/81.11.02_wol fvax.53_net.news.txt. Accessed April 2, 2012. Zuckerberg, Mark. 2006. “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” The Facebook Blog, September 6. https://www.facebook.com/blog/blog. php?post=2208197130. Accessed April 3, 2012.

CHAPTER THREE ALGORITHMS IN THE ACADEMY1 DAVID BEER

“This article has just been recommended to me by Google Scholar, you should take a look.” This is the type of statement we might hear a colleague utter across a department corridor. The choice of things to read has always been a crucial part of the practice of academic research. We stumble upon things, we discover, we search, we locate. But often we hear things. Books and articles are recommended to us by friends and colleagues. Most academic fields now fuel such industrious publishing that it is hard to keep-up, so these types of endorsements carry some weight. “You should read this,” “have you seen that book on ………,” “…………’s new book is great,” “you have to read ………..” These comments are quite powerful in shaping the directions that academic research takes. They are the junctions at which future ideas are placed onto particular tracks. What I’d like to suggest in this brief essay is that such processes are being subtly reshaped by media metamorphoses. The old means of discovery—library catalogues, publisher catalogues, attending talks at conferences, flicking through journals, and the like—still exist, but there are also some often unseen ways in which changing media infrastructures may be intervening in these processes. This essay reflects on how these new processes, based upon new media, software, code and algorithms, might be reshaping the formation of knowledge. As the opening line of this paragraph indicates, algorithmic processes may already be sorting academic practices, manipulating choices, shaping encounters and ultimately then having some unforeseen influence upon the production of knowledge. Algorithms are already filtering and sorting knowledge. The suggestion I make is that human and machine agency are blurring in research practices. This is to say that the performance and 1

Some short parts of this piece are adapted from an opinion piece previously published in Times Higher Education on the 30th of August 2012.

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production of knowledge is already being shaped by the power of algorithms. In this essay I suggest this algorithmic ordering of knowledge production is an issue that will need closer attention over the coming years, and particularly as software sink into the practices of academics. Even as recently as the 1990s, technologies that have the capacity to ‘think’ were considered to be a part of the “cyberbole”2, which can be thought of as the hype associated with the early stage of the information age, and futurism of “cyberspace” and even “cyberpunk”.3 But, without us really noticing, these technologies have become an ordinary part of everyday life. That is to say that as we have entered an era that might be described as the “digital mundane”4, where digital technologies have become a routine part of ordinary life, these lively software have moved into the mainstream. This is a part of the broader narrative of the “sinking” of software into the “background”5 of everyday life and the general rise of the information dense infrastructures and flows of consumer capitalism. Amongst this range of visions the issue I consider in this essay is very specific. As software comes to be involved in shaping everyday life, how do their decision making components, algorithms, come to be active in the social world? This essay suggests that academics across disciplines need to take algorithms seriously so that we might begin to see the underlying politics of our everyday infrastructures and how these then come to influence and shape our own academic practices. The implicit suggestion here is that the social sciences tend to overlook the power of these infrastructures, and in particular the power of software algorithms, for actually shaping the social world. Understandably the focus of the social sciences tends to be upon people, interactions, ordering, organisations, and various types of connections and divisions. It is suggested here that we need to also think in more depth about the material context, the infrastructures, that shape all of these interests and concerns.6 By focusing upon what algorithms might mean analytically for the critical social sciences this essay is at the same time highlighting a need for a more detailed engagement with the material dimensions of everyday and academic life. This is particularly pressing, as I show through the example of algorithms, because of the changing nature of media infrastructures— with mobile devices, software based systems, and everyday integrations of 2

Woolgar, Virtual Society?. Featherstone and Burrows, Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk. 4 Beer, “Power through the algorithm?,” 985–1002. 5 Thrift, Knowing Capitalism, 153. 6 See for example: Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out; Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism. 3

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social media forms, and the like—and the active part they are playing in various social sectors ranging from health, to the financial sector, to universities, to consumer culture. In particular, this essay will look at the potential ways in which software algorithms are transforming the university sector. The suggestion I make here is that the organisation and ordering of the production and dissemination of knowledge is already being reshaped by algorithmic processes—from how we discover resources, to the way that we are perceived and visualised, to the way that the knowledge we produce circulates out into the social world. The piece draws upon a range of work on the social implications and power of algorithms. It explores how these various algorithmic powers are now becoming implicit within the university sector; in research, in teaching, and in the general administration of university life. It is argued that these transformations, which are often unnoticed, are quietly reshaping and re-sorting academic practices and experiences in various ways. As such these developments require attention in order for us to see how algorithmic and human agency now mesh in the context of the university and to see how algorithms might now already have some power in shaping research outcomes, teaching, and the other roles that make up academic work. The argument of this piece is that we need to apply these ideas from media studies, software studies and human geography in order to see how transformations in new media infrastructures are morphing the university. We can begin by reflecting upon how algorithms might now be intervening in the practices of researchers and in the production of knowledge, before then thinking about the implications of algorithms for the dissemination of knowledge and for the ordering of the university sector more broadly.

An Imagined Future… In their song “Life’s an Ocean”, which appeared on their 1995 album A Northern Soul, The Verve sang of imagining the future and waking up with a scream because they were buying some feelings from a vending machine. It is unlikely that we are waking with a scream, but we might imagine a future in which academic practices have reached a similar state of efficiency, ordering and control. Put starkly, the day cannot be far away when there is an app that tells us what articles to read—in fact this is already in development given that Google Scholar already makes recommendations to you when you create a citation profile (presumably using information about your publications and searches). I imagine that things will develop further, with a simple application that builds up a

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personalised profile about the research articles we read, and that then uses that profile to predict what we are likely to want to read. Such devices are everywhere around us informing us what music to listen to, what films to watch and what books to buy—from Google Scholar profiles, to Academia.edu, to Spotify, Last.fm, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook and other social media platforms. Indeed, apps like ArticleSearch and Papers, which are already available on iTunes, are moving in the direction of providing us with filtered, personalised access to readings through mobile devices. In this context it would be surprising if there were not some applications that are designed to help us to do our research. We might imagine a day when, as Donna Haraway7 predicted all that time ago, we will become more inert and our research devices will become more lively. In this context, of both established media and also emergent predictive analytics, we need to pay at least some attention to the liveliness of our research environment and think about its potential implications, including how it might shape the way that knowledge is produced. We will be encouraged, by the marketing materials associated with such media, to imagine the ease of researching in a world where the research materials ‘find us’. Where we need only switch-on to see what we must read in order to complete a research project. No more searching around, no more wasted time reading the wrong things or looking in the wrong places, no more aimless flâneur wandering around libraries or flicking through e-journals to see what we might find. None of this will be needed because the power of algorithms, as Scott Lash8 has put it, will be reshaping academic work. These algorithms will be streamlining, making efficient, predicting, making decisions for us, doing work on our behalf, taking some of the agency from researchers and the research process and making it their own. This is Nigel Thrift’s Knowing Capitalism9 playing out in the academy. This sounds extreme but these things are not going to part of a sudden rupture or a grand explosion of social change in higher education. Algorithms are already sorting out the academy in lots of ways, many of which we have little awareness of. I’ve opened this piece with something that might seem like futurism, but the reality is that software algorithms, as with many sectors of the social world, are already shaping practice as they become integrated into ordinary everyday processes of research, teaching and administration. 7

Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. See Lash, “Power after Hegemony,” 55–78. And for an overview see Beer, “Power through the algorithm?,” 985–1002. 9 Thrift, Knowing Capitalism. 8

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I’ve been quite speculative in suggesting that research articles will come to find their readers, but in many ways this is already the case with books. We also need only to think here of how the now famous predictive algorithms of Amazon are already quite powerful in shaping our encounters with academic books. Here our profiles, the things we have purchased, are used, along with data about other people’s purchasing practices, to predict what books we might be interested in buying. We might question their accuracy in predicting, but these systems nevertheless shape our literary encounters. Amazon’s algorithmic recommendation system is by now quite familiar to any social media user, but have we thought about how this might already be shaping research outcomes? It is likely that we have all had moments where the recommendation system on Amazon has made a suggested purchase, which we have then gone on to buy, read and build into an article, book or even a lecture. Clearly here these algorithmic processes have implications for the way that our research or teaching turns out. This is just one visible moment in which the algorithmic processes are at their most obvious. In Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s10 recently published book Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, the authors demonstrate the importance of software for the functioning of the social world—ranging across sectors from the home to air travel. It would be remiss to think that higher education somehow sits outside of these broader social developments. In the book Kitchin and Dodge explain: .

Software applications like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop are flexible and open-ended tools, but they come loaded up with structures, templates, default settings, algorithmic normalities, and path dependencies that often subtly but necessarily direct users to certain solutions.11

Here the transformations might be quite subtle, but it is to suggest that the basic software that we use in the routines of academic work are embedded with “algorithmic normalities” that shape the types of outputs we create. We can quickly add the potential for something like PowerPoint to shape the “performance of knowledge” in lecturing practices or research presentations.12 We can then begin to imagine how deeply algorithms have infiltrated so much of what we do. Think for example of how algorithms are an implicit part of our research practices. From simple search and sorting processes that underpin literature and resource searches on 10

Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space. Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space, 122. 12 Knoblauch, “The Performance of Knowledge,” 75–97. 11

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everything ranging from the Social Science Citation Index and Sociological abstracts, to Google Scholar and Academia.edu. The last of which has a news feed that is open to the same type of analysis of visibility that Bucher13 used in the case of the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm. As Bucher points out, there is a politics of visibility at play, as these new media forms make certain content visible. Again, given that social media forms like Twitter and Facebook are an integrated part of academic work, we might wonder how something like the EdgeRank algorithm might be defining what academic knowledge is visible and what gets read. We can expand upon this to think about the type of algorithmic rich processes used in the analysis of data. There has already been some reflection on the history and functioning of Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and how this particular “inscription device” has shaped the direction and practices of the social research.14 We can add the algorithmic sorting and ordering processes of Atlas.ti and NVivo, which help to code, order and analyse qualitative data, in order to think about how algorithms play an increasing part in classifying, highlighting and making particular patterns in data more visible than others. Again, imagine the outcome that the active algorithmic components of this software are having on research findings, which then, of course, feed into public and academic discourses and potentially into policy outcomes and the like. Indeed, many of us are now engaged in algorithmically defined forms of analysis of various sorts, particularly as we begin to explore the use of digital data and the forms of analysis made possible by commercial data resources. In some ways we are already seeing a kind of posthuman15 social science emerging without us really noticing. What this indicates is that algorithmic processes are also now an implicit part of the research itself, as software becomes an implicit part of analytical processes. In research across the social sciences and humanities many forms of software now perform the task of sorting out data in various ways. I was recently trained in the use of SPAD, which is a software package used for conducting Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Here the algorithms perform the complex mathematics that enable survey data to be mapped onto geometric space, thus revealing all sorts of apparent cultural oppositions and tensions. All of these incorporate some form of algorithmic process in the analysis of the data. These algorithmically aided analyses feed into findings, shaping knowledge and 13

Bucher, “Want to be on top?”. Uprichard, Burrows, and Byrne, “SPSS as an ‘inscription device’,” 606–622. 15 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman. 14

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then perhaps playing out in material ways through policy, planning and the like. Elsewhere the power of algorithms might be more pronounced but perhaps less acknowledged. In research in particular we might not have yet reached the point where our research is performed for us by algorithms, at least not to the extent that articles ‘finds us’ perhaps, but algorithms are nonetheless implicit in our research practices. We can begin by thinking about how powerful Google’s famous PageRank algorithm is in shaping knowledge by influencing what we find, encounter and learn—this algorithm has recently been beautifully described by John MacCormick16 in his book 9 Algorithms that Changed the Future. Google is an interface that almost inevitably plays a part in social research, as we search around for other researchers in our fields, as we look for background information, as we check on a speaker we spotted talking at a conference and perhaps even when we unwittingly discover something that triggers an idea for a project. We can of course add to this the growing use of Google Scholar as a means of finding materials and readings, which, again, is likely to be shaped by the ranking of the relevance of the articles it locates within our search terms. Some of us might also be following news feeds about our networks on places like Academia.edu, and in turn drawing upon such information to guide our reading. Of course, all of this is before we even begin to think about how algorithmic processes converge with higher education’s systems of measurement in the distribution of funding, the production of league tables, the allocation of resources, the outcomes of research excellence frameworks, Key Information Set widgets, the use of citations, the ordering and ranking of journals and so on. Admittedly there has been significantly more said, largely indirectly, about these more visible forms of sorting in the university sector, with numerous articles in academic publications like Times Higher Education. This topic has recently been explored by Roger Burrows in an analysis of what it is like “living with the h-Index”17. Here Burrows describes the different ways in which universities and the sector have been changed by new forms of metrics and their attendant algorithmic sorting processes. Burrows considers what this then means for individuals who work in the sector. His article describes the type of affect that metricisation has had on working practices, bodies and senses of confidence. Central in this argument is the way that algorithms use these metrics in different ways as they calculate outcomes 16 17

MacCormick, Nine Algorithms that Changed the Future. Burrows, “Living with the h-Index?,” 355–372.

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and then make comparisons that are central to competition centred neoliberal forms of education.18 When considering the implications of algorithms for departments and individuals we need then to think about how these broader alterations and reworkings of the sector in which we operate, and therefore the organisations in which we work, might also have some say in how academic work is done, what types of knowledge it produces and what type of publications and communication activities are promoted. The outcome is that we need to, as the geographer Stephen Graham19 has put it, look into the “very guts” of these systems. We need to see these algorithms as powerful and largely unacknowledged agents in academia. Researchers are now looking at the social power of algorithms in various sectors including the financial sector, the military, and in bioinformatics, but at the moment we are leaving out the higher education sector.20 It is important for us to begin to acknowledge and think through the power of algorithms as they come to order and shape our research and teaching practices, and as they come to play a part in the formation and communication of knowledge. At the moment we are paying little attention to these developments. As a consequence we are being reworked from the inside-out with little reflection. The possibility of our research materials ‘finding us’ is temptingly convenient, but it is a future in which the academic practices of the past will have been quite drastically reworked. I am not saying that we should automatically resist such processes, this would not really be feasible given that they are already deeply embedded in routine academic practice, but I am suggesting that there is a need to develop some further understanding of the power of algorithms in the performance of academic life.

Closing Thoughts This brief essay implicitly suggests that algorithms have implications for our understanding of the relations between human and machine agency. The changing infrastructures of everyday life have some agentic or thinking properties that mesh with human agency in different ways. But 18

Gill, “Breaking the silence,” 228–244. Graham, “The Software-Sorted City,” 324–331. 20 For some other examples recent of groundbreaking work on the social power of algorithms see: Amoore, “Lines of sight,” 17–30; Amoore, “Algorithmic War,” 49–69; Amoore, “Data Derivatives,” 24–43; Cheney-Lippold, “A new algorithmic identity,” 164–181; Introna, “The enframing of code,” 113–141; Kinsley, “Futures in the making,” 1554–1569, Mager, “Algorithmic Ideology,” 769–787. 19

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this is far from straightforward. We must consider the human origins of the models and norms that shape algorithm design and the way that data derivatives are incorporated into these designs.21 In turn these algorithms then become an active part of the social world. As Kitchin and Dodge22 have described, there are iterative or recursive sets of relations emerging here. Similarly, we can see how algorithmic functioning is potentially shaping decision-making. Much of the existing literature focuses mainly on judgments about potential risk, but these examples also make clear that such assessments are a part of wider consumer capitalism.23 Even on a quite mundane level we have obvious forms of algorithmic functions shaping decision-making in consumer culture through Amazon, Facebook (through news feeds), Google, Netflix and the Genius function on iTunes.24 Algorithms are already deeply interwoven into the fabric of the social world, and universities are no different. The scale of the implications of algorithmic functioning for our understanding of agency is significant. This suggests that we might need to think again about our analytical models allowing us to consider how these active infrastructures might be reshaping social action and behaviours, and how they might play a part in opportunities, social ordering and social mobility. We should make sure that within these explorations we do not leave out the influence of such infrastructures on the very practice and performance of academic knowledge. In the literature there is even some suggestion that algorithms are active in shaping and engineering social norms. As Jordan Crandall25 argues, algorithms are powerful in that they “construct the norm”. This is where we find some demonstration of the importance of “algorithmic logics that designate anomaly on the basis of a screening of the norm.”26 We have to wonder what this means for how social norms form and how they become part of socialisation processes. Cheney-Lippold27 has also argued that the power that algorithms have is in differentiating data, which, he similarly claims, generates normalising behaviours and identities. It is for this reason that Mackenzie and Vurdubakis argue that code and algorithms need to be understood “not

21

Mackenzie, Cutting Code. Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space. 23 For an account see Crandall, “The Geospatialization of Calculative Operations,” 68–90. 24 Beer, “Mobile music, coded objects and everyday spaces,” 469–484. 25 Crandall, “The Geospatialization of Calculative Operations,” 71. 26 Amoore, “Lines of sight,” 25 27 Cheney-Lippold, “A new algorithmic identity,” 177. 22

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only in terms of software but also in terms of cultural, moral, ethical and legal codes of conduct.”28 We begin to see in these discussions how algorithms then might move from being apparently technical components of systems and infrastructures to becoming a part of our social and cultural lives.29 This is the classic vision of the sociological imagination,30 as we see the broader social context becoming a part of individual biographies. The difference is that these connections are now also much more infrastructural, with code moving to the inside of everyday practices.31 We have seen how the decision-making and sorting properties of algorithms have direct implications and material outcomes for individuals. Indeed, it is the very embeddedness of algorithms in the everyday that makes them powerful in translating social occurrences, issues and problems directly into people’s lives. Mackenzie and Vurdubakis32 illustrate how broader crises, such as financial crises, are translated into individual lives through their presence in code. Indeed, the recent global financial crisis of the last five years has done a great deal to inadvertently show how embedded and powerful algorithms are in contemporary capitalism, and particularly in the operation of banks and trading.33 Algorithms, Mackenzie outlines elsewhere, allow “software to flow into everyday life.”34 This we can add to the way that algorithms apparently transfer norms, values, cultural encounters and social ordering to the inside of people’s lives. As Lash35 has claimed, the power of algorithms is “immanent,” that is to say that it acts on the inside of everyday life. Algorithmic infrastructures then are very effective at translating broader issues into personal biographies in a very direct way. In the case of knowledge formation, we might need to consider how the models that are used to produce algorithms might then feed into what is discovered and what is knowable. Alongside this, the data assemblage in which academic knowledge is produced is churning out data that then folds-back into the performance of university life. This combination of data and the use of algorithms to filter, sort and predict, mean that there is the scope for knowledge to be shaped and cajoled in particular directions, but without us necessarily noticing. These, like other 28

Mackenzie and Vurdubakis, “Codes and Codings in Crisis,” 4. Beer, “Power through the algorithm?,” 985–1002. 30 Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination. 31 Lash, “Power after Hegemony,” 55–78. 32 Mackenzie and Vurdubakis, “Codes and Codings in Crisis,” 3–23. 33 Lenglet, “Conflicting codes and codings,” 44–66. 34 Mackenzie, “Cutting Code,” 64. 35 Lash, “Power after Hegemony,” 55–78. 29

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algorithmically defined social processes, can be quite subtle and difficult to discern. The risk is that the algorithms come to reinforce dominant positions, to guide research away from particular areas—creating analytical blindspots—and to limit the scope for encounters and discoveries that escape the logic of these algorithms. All of these present us with some important issues. We need to understand the infrastructures in which knowledge is produced so that we can understand their innate politics and implications. This suggests that algorithms have the potential to intervene in a range of social processes including academic labour. My argument here is that the media infrastructures in which we live, including software infrastructures, are changing and that this material dimension of everyday life is politically charged and has constitutive powers of various types—as had the previous infrastructures. It is just that as these infrastructures transform so too do their implications for practice. We should really now open up the analysis to see what these lively material infrastructures are doing to the university sector along with various other social spheres. This is no longer the stuff of science fiction, it is now an embedded part of our everyday lives. Yet the politics of our everyday infrastructures need to be foregrounded in our analysis in order for this to be made visible. Kitchin and Dodge argue that we need “to prise open the black boxes of algorithms […] to understand software as a new media that augments and automates society.”36 They add that [t]here is also a need to develop a subarea of software studies—algorithm studies—that carefully unpicks the ways in which algorithms are products of knowledge about the world and how they produce knowledge that then is applied, altering the world in a recursive fashion.37

Given that this has such wide ranging implications for academic research and scholarship, it seems important that we now become part of such a project. My hope is that this essay will provoke such an engagement.

Works Cited Amoore, Louise. 2009a. “Lines of sight: on the visualization of unknown futures.” Citizenship Studies 13.1:17–30. —. 2009b. “Algorithmic War: Everyday Geographies of the War on Terror.” Antipode 41.1:49–69. 36 37

Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space, 246. Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space, 248.

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—. 2011. “Data Derivatives: On the emergence of a security risk calculus for our times.” Theory, Culture & Society 28.6:24–43. Beer, David. 2009. “Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious.” New Media & Society 11.6:985–1002. —. 2010. “Mobile music, coded objects and everyday spaces.” Mobilities 5.4:469–484. Bowker, Geoffrey, and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bucher, Taina. 2012. “Want to be on top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook.” New Media & Society, doi: 10.1177/1461444812440159. Burrows, Roger. 2012. “Living with the h-Index? Metric assemblages in the contemporary academy.” The Sociological Review 60.2:355–372. Cheney-Lippold, John. 2011. “A new algorithmic identity: soft biopolitics and the modulation of control.” Theory, Culture & Society 28.6:164– 181. Crandall, Jordan. 2010. “The Geospatialization of Calculative Operations: Tracking, Sensing and Megacities.” Theory, Culture & Society 27.6: 68–90. Featherstone, Mike, and Roger Burrows, eds. 1995. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London: Sage. Gill, Ros. 2010. “Breaking the silence: the hidden injuries of the neoliberal university.” In Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, edited by R. Ryan-Flood and Ros Gill, 228–244. London: Routledge. Graham, Stephen. 2004. “The Software-Sorted City: Rethinking the ‘digital divide.’” In The Cybercities Reader, edited by Stephen Graham, 324–331. London: Routledge. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Introna, Lucas D. 2011. “The enframing of code: Agency, originality and the plagiarist.” Theory, Culture & Society 28.6: 113–141.

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Kinsley, Sam. 2012. “Futures in the making: practices to anticipate ‘ubiquitous computing.’” Environment and Planning A 44.7:1554– 1569. Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. 2011. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Knoblauch, Hubert. 2008. “The Performance of Knowledge: Pointing and Knowledge in Powerpoint Presentations.” Culture Sociology 2.1:75– 97. Lash, Scott. 2007. “Power after Hegemony: Cultural Studies in Mutation.” Theory, Culture & Society 24.3:55–78. Lenglet, Marc. 2011. “Conflicting codes and codings: How algorithmic trading is reshaping financial regulation” Theory, Culture & Society 28.6:44–66. MacCormick, John. 2012. Nine Algorithms that Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today’s Computers. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mackenzie, Adrian. 2006. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang. Mackenzie, Adrian, and Theo Vurdubakis. 2011. “Codes and Codings in Crisis: Signification, performativity and excess.” Theory, Culture & Society 28.6:3–23. Mager, Astrid. 2012. “Algorithmic Ideology: How Capitalist Society Shapes Search Engines” Information, Communication & Society 15.5:769–787. Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thrift, Nigel. 2005. Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage. Thrift, Nigel, and Shaun French. 2002. “The Automatic Production of Space.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27.4:309– 335. Uprichard, Emma, Burrows, Roger. and Byrne, David. “SPSS as an ‘inscription device’: from causality to description?” The Sociological Review 56, no. 4 (2008):606–622. Uprichard, Emma, Roger Burrows, and Simon Parker. 2009. “Geodemographic Code and the Production of Space.” Environment and Planning A 41.12:2823–2835. Woolgar, Steve, ed. 2002. Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART II: TRANSMEDIA METAMORPHOSES

CHAPTER FOUR SPECTATOR, PLAYER, ‘MODDER’: THE TRANSITION FROM THE CINEMATIC CAVE TO THE DIGITAL DISPOSITIF CATHRIN BENGESSER

A look at the billboards of 1999 reveals that digitalisation hit cinemas right before the turn of the millennium: Star Wars Episode I (Lucas, USA), the top-grossing film of the year in the US, was among the first films to be digitally projected.1 With Toy Story 2 (Lasseter, USA) Pixar sent the sequel of the first fully computer-animated film onto the screens and reached number three. Number five, The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, USA/AUS),2 created a digital dystopia not only by using computer generated imagery but also by expanding the story universe to other digital media such as websites or computer games.3 The true digital revolution, however, was taking place in the homes of the film viewers. In 2000, the DVD version of The Matrix became the first title to ship over three million units in the US.4 By the end of 2002, DVD sales and rentals already exceeded the grossing at the box office and in 2003 the DVD superseded the VHS in US rentals.5 Only one year later, DVDs were already grossing twice as much as the major studios’ theatrical releases.6 This shows the sweeping effects of the introduction of digital home media on both the movie industry and the dominant mode of film consumption. However, after its 2004 sales record of over 22 billion US Dollars the US home entertainment market has faced a steady decline.7 1

Cf. Belton, “Digital Cinema,” 108–110. Bordwell, “The Way Hollywood Tells It,” 235. 3 Cf. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 94–95. 4 Bordwell, “The Way Hollywood Tells It,” 236. 5 Bordwell, “The Way Hollywood Tells It,” 239. 6 Bordwell, “The Way Hollywood Tells It,” 4. 7 Fritz, “Sales of Digital Movies Surge”. 2

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Today, viewers are even encouraged not to buy their films on disc by being offered the download weeks before the DVD release.8 This indicates a second wave of the digital revolution on our home screens. Therefore, according to Paul Benzon, “the DVD offers a fruitfully complex and contradictory testing ground for issues of materiality, temporality and media history”, because it “occupies the uneven space and time of a transition between the traditionally physical media object and the more purely digital media dynamics yet to come.”9 During the 1960s and 70s filmic entertainment already experienced a comparable phase of transition, the shift from the predominance of the theatrical to the television screen. This change was not exactly greeted by film theorists at that time. In 1975, Roland Barthes for example claimed that “[i]n the darkness of the cinema […] lies the very fascination of film (any film)” and bemoaned the domestication of film on the television screen, which “doomed us to the family” and foreclosed the “eroticism” of the movie theatre.10 In the same year, Jean-Louis Baudry’s second founding paper on ‘apparatus theory’11 reacted to this crisis of cinema, triggered by new technologies and changing audience habits.12 In “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema” he compares the cinematic experience to Plato’s cave allegory and describes it as a dreamlike state that offers illusionary images to the spectators, which they readily take for real. Apparently, times of competition and transition in the dominant modes of media consumption help to carve out one medium’s or technology’s particularities. Dating back to the 1970s, Baudry’s apparatus theory focuses on cinema and denies the possibility of audience activity, making it appear rather inadequate to the analysis of newer modes of audiovisual consumption. Criticism mainly focused on the theory’s psychoanalytical implications, especially the lack of proof for Baudry’s central claim: spectators mistaking screened images for reality.13 Noël Carroll even goes as far as to argue that Baudry’s entire argument is based on nothing more than mere analogies between dreams and films, that is between Plato’s cave and the movie theatre.14

8

Fritz, “Sales of Digital Movies Surge”. Benzon, “Bootleg Paratextuality and Digital Temporality,” 92. 10 Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 346. 11 Baudry, “The Apparatus”. 12 Hagener and de Valck, “Cinephilia in Transition,” 22. 13 Cf. Allen, Projecting Illusion, 21–23. 14 Carroll, Mystifying Movies, 14. 9

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Yet, if stripped of its psychoanalytic implications and the dream analogies, Baudry’s basic differentiation between the technologies involved in film production and projection and the viewers’ position in relation to them is still a useful perspective. In the words of Frank Kessler the theory’s “configuration of technology, text and spectatorship […] could […] serve as a heuristic tool for the study of how the function and the functioning of media undergo historical changes.”15Albeit with a certain skepticism towards Baudry’s conclusion about the ideological ‘reality effect’ of cinema, his apparatus theory can therefore still be applied to the “investigation of historical and present dispositifs […].”16 This paper traces the transition of filmic entertainment from the cinematic to the digital environments of home cinema and computer screens by comparing Jean-Louis Baudry’s description of cinema to the forms of digital film consumption that emerged around 2000. The shift in film viewing behaviour raises some key questions: How is film viewing via digital home media different from cinematic consumption? And: How is ‘purely digital’ film consumption from a hard drive or via online streaming different from playing films from physical discs? To discuss these questions, Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory will be presented as a framework structure for the analysis of home viewing situations on the DVD player and the computer. Examples from online fan communities and magazines, mostly concerning films popular around the turn of the millennium, will help to illustrate the changes in audience activity. This analysis will highlight a two-faced trend: The changing modes of film consumption lead audiences towards more autonomy and activity. At the same time the very pleasures they derive from their autonomy and activities enforce deeper immersion into the filmic narratives, not least because the films themselves have adapted to the digital environment of their consumption. Finally, an outlook on current developments in television will sketch trends that may shape the evolution of technologies and dominant modes of watching film and television in the future.

Actualising Apparatus Theory for the Digital Age Following Plato’s cave analogy Jean-Louis Baudry describes cinema as a cavernous space in which the viewer has a dream-like experience of a projected ‘reality’ on the silver screen.17 Baudry refers to the spectator in 15

Kessler, “The Cinema of Attractions,” 61. Kessler, “The Cinema of Attractions,” 62. 17 Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 302–305. 16

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the cinema as the “cine-subject”18 and thereby suggests that he readily subjects himself to the overwhelming audiovisual experience of the screening. The only activity granted to the otherwise immobilised and muted spectator is “the choice to close his eyes, to withdraw from the spectacle, but no more than in dream does he have means to act in any way upon the object of his perception, change his viewpoint as he would like.”19 This implies that the cine-subject cannot influence the screen(-ing) by any means. Tapping into Freudian dream theory, Baudry claims that the cavemen are reluctant to leave, because they enjoy this “‘hallucinatory psychosis of desire’ […] in which the mental perceptions are taken for perceptions of reality.”20 According to Baudry this is due to the “pleasure principle”, which he deems to be “the basic condition for the satisfaction produced by hallucination […].”21 This illustrates the different layers of Baudry’s cinematic apparatus: First, there is the technical setup, “the ensemble of the equipment and operations necessary to the production of a film and its projection”, which Baudry calls the “basic cinematographic apparatus” (l’appareil de base).22 Secondly, within the appareil de base, he identifies the dispositif “which solely concerns projection and includes the subject to whom the projection is addressed.”23 Frank Kessler points out that the common English translation of both of Baudry’s concepts as “apparatus” obliterates their distinction.24 Therefore, this paper keeps the French terms: Appareil de base is used to describe the technical setup for watching a film while Baudry’s concept of the dispositif describes the impact this technological setup has on the subject when watching a film. The dispositif includes the spectator’s opportunities for physical and mental activity within the technological setup, the pleasures he can derive from his actions, and the ideological effects the entire viewing situation may have on him or her. As regards the comparison between film consumption in cinema and digital home media, Baudry’s distinction between appareil de base and dispositif raises some follow-up questions: What elements does the appareil de base consist of? What kinds of activity does the resulting dispositif allow for? Which pleasures cause the subject to stay within the

18

Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 313. Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 314. 20 Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 309. 21 Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 314. 22 Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 317 (footnotes). 23 Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 317 (footnotes). 24 Kessler, “The Cinema of Attractions,” 60. 19

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dispositif? And: Which ideological effect does the combination of appareil de base and dispositif have on the audience? In contrast to Baudry’s all-encompassing concept of the cinematic cave, one answer to each of these questions is not enough to describe the plurality of technologies and viewing situations in today’s multi-screen society. The following analysis will therefore only focus on two main ways of watching film in the private context: home cinema as a combination of a DVD player and a TV screen and playing a film from a computer’s DVD drive or hard drive. The viewing situations which result from these technological setups will be presented as varieties of the ‘digital dispositif’, each offering several possibilities for audience activity with corresponding pleasures and ideological effects.

Home Cinema The technology of digital home media continued a process of filmic domestication that had already started with televised movies and the VCR. During this technological phase the filmic image had been modified (and violated) by the deterioration of the VHS tape and the resizing of widescreen images for the 4:3 TV screen through scanning processes. Together with the widescreen flat TV sets, first available for consumers by the end of the millenium,25 the DVD promised to revive the cinematic experience, because it allowed for a better and more consistent image quality as well as for storing the data necessary for 5.1 surround sound. Blu-Ray discs, which became commercially available in 2006, added High Definition (HD) to the digital home cinema. Digital production, at the same time, allowed studios to tackle the problem of aspect ratio for the home screen. With A Bug’s Life (Lasseter and Stanton, USA 1998) Pixar, for example, not only released its first DVD but also started to produce its digital animations in two versions, one for the theatrical and one optimised for the domestic 4:3 screen.26 By now, High Definition widescreen TV sets and computer displays are the norm for new products and screen-sizes are still increasing.27 These technical improvements in the appareil de 25

Brinkley, “Flat TV’s”: While still being too expensive for the mass market (over 10,000 US Dollars) this New York Times article from 1999 presents plasma flat screens as the “future of television” because they can display High Definition (HD) images, because their screen size was already reaching up to 50 inches at the time, and because their prices were dropping. 26 Cf. Cossar, “The Shape of New Media,” 1–14. 27 Ofcom, “Communications Market Report 2012”: According to GfK-data published by the British media regulator Ofcom over one third of TV screens sold

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base of home cinema moved it closer to the cinematic cave. At the same time, the dispositif changed, too. The film fan of the 21st century has not only a choice between millions of individual titles—a choice already offered by VHS libraries28—the DVD also allows him to customise the cinematic ‘dream’ to individual desires. He can choose between languages, subtitles, audio commentaries, and even different versions and alternate endings. Such extras can be grouped into two categories: First, there are audiovisual paratexts which provide more information, i.e. more factual knowledge and invite the viewers to become “insiders”29. The sleeve of a special DVD edition of Titanic (Cameron, USA 1997) from 2005, for example, promises “hours of spectacular, never-before-seen special features that will give fans a brandnew, in-depth look at how this Academy Award winning film was created.” In addition to this ‘behind the scenes mode’ the DVD offers a “Spectacular NEW Alternate Ending”, which extends the cinematic ending with deleted scenes. This shows the second category of extras offered to the spectators, the extension of the fictional story-world. The special DVD version of the The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson, NZ/USA 2001), for example, features 30 minutes of additional material which promises “more character development, more humor, more story, more of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world.”30 These options for choice and customisation offered by the DVD create a ‘pleasure of more’ for the spectator. While for Baudry’s cavemen the only option for influencing the continuous stream of images in front of their eyes is closing them as live ‘reality’ flashes by, the audience of broadcast TV is granted the power of zapping between different channels. The next evolutionary step is using the remote control to navigate through the very film as offered by DVDenabled home cinema. Regarding TV Knut Hickethier pointed out that the remote control only became useful once there was a choice between programmes.31 Similarly, the DVD player’s remote is only useful as a navigational tool if there is a temporal space that challenges the viewer to navigate within it. In fact, the rise of DVD technology at the turn of the millenium coincided with a rise in films which “embrace non-linearity,

in the UK in the first quarter of 2012 were 33 inches and larger. In 2001, these “super-large” or “jumbo-screens” only made up for one percent of sales. 28 Keane, CineTech, 21. 29 Klinger, “The Contemporary Cinephile,” 139. 30 Mikos, “Understanding Text,” 208. Mikos quotes the DVD booklet of the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring. 31 Hickethier, “Dispositiv Fernsehen,” 75.

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time loops, and fragmented spatio-temporal reality.”32 In Memento (Nolan, USA 2000), for instance, a progressive storyline, shot in black and white, and a regressive storyline, shot in colour footage, intersect. Remembering the ‘correct’ order of the reverse narrative is hardly possible when watching the movie in cinema, since the inter-cut progressive black and white sequences ‘wipe out’ a spectator’s working memory of the events shown in the colour sequences.33 In the home cinema, however, viewers can pause in order to think and retrace their steps through the narrative or they can choose to only follow one of the story lines by skipping the colour sequences. In addition to nonlinearity, mind-game plots also pose a challenge to the audience in terms of unreliable narration. Again, the key to living up to complicated plots is the dispositif of home media. This can be illustrated in Wired magazine’s reaction to Nolan’s Inception (Nolan, USA/UK 2010)34: Ever since Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster hit theaters in July, we’ve been trying to suss out dream from reality. Now that we can bring the movie home, we can put our freeze-frame thumb to use. […] The trick isn’t the plot—come on, it wasn’t that complicated. The challenge is picking out Nolan’s lies.35

In their resulting six interpretations of the film the authors return to specific lines and images and measure them against Nolan’s interview statements and the logics about the differences between diegetic dreams and reality which Inception taught them. They for example take the similarity in the physical appearance and clothing of the protagonist’s children as proof for the dream status of the film’s finale, because his children do not seem to have grown up. However, Nolan ultimately contradicts their argument by claiming that he had different children acting in the scenes.36 With this piece the authors make up for the fact that the home cinema version of Inception was published without audio-commentaries by the director.

32

Buckland, “Puzzle Plots,” 5–6. Ghislotti, “Narrative Comprehension Made Difficult,” 95. 34 As of June 2013 Inception is number four in all-time US Blu-Ray sales according to the ranking by Nash Information Services LLC. 35 Capps and Di Justo, “Inception Explained”. 36 Capps and Di Justo, “Inception Explained”. 33

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Playing Film on the Computer The appareil de base of watching a movie on a computer allows for every activity that is already offered by the DVD player, but with a higher degree of convenience and customisation. Skipping parts of the movie no longer means speeding up the projection in the fast-forward mode. Spectators can simply click on their media player’s time line or type in the exact time code they want to jump to. Every single frame of the film can be accessed with equal ease and at an instant. With the technical help of the computer it is possible to carefully inspect or even manipulate stills to reveal more details. This allows viewers to switch into an explorational ‘close-viewing’ mode. Furthermore, the computer can display any other digital artifact or medium parallel to the film such as websites, pictures or online videos. These features of the computer as an appareil de base add further possibilities for audience activity to the dispositif of home cinema. While the spectator is still physically immobilised in front of the screen, he may choose to keep his hands on the mouse or keyboard at all times. Mental activity such as wondering about what is going on in the complex narratives immediately results in digital action. This practice can be illustrated with another article about Inception. While the Wired authors left Nolan’s statement about the children in Inception unchallenged, their colleague Bilge Ebiri from vulture.com, the New York Magazine’s website for film fans, juxtaposed screenshots of the very brief sequences in which the kids are visible. These images show how visually close the scenes from the beginning and the end of the movie actually are: Both boys wear a shirt checkered in the same colours and pattern, both girls wear a dress in the same shade of pink, and a difference in age is hardly noticable. Ebiri concludes that within the film Nolan left things more unclear than his comments in Wired suggest. This exposes Nolan’s strategies for unreliable narration within the film and makes him appear as an unreliable authorative figure behind his films.37 Thus, in contrast to his colleagues Ebiri did not take Nolan’s comment as the last word but made use of the computer dispositif to come to a deeper understanding of the film, thereby creating his own look ‘behind the scenes’. With the help of the computer, spectators can even go further, accessing its ‘purely digital’ nature. Following Manovich’s proposition of the double-layered nature of the digital image—representational surface versus underlying digital code—the computer allows viewers “to go ‘into’

37

Ebiri, “Six New Things We Learned”.

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the image”, thereby turning it into an interface by which the user can access the image’s depths.38 The VLC media player, for example, offers several options for manipulating a running DVD and thus for plunging deeper into a filmic image. It is possible to slow down projection, zoom into the moving picture, to rotate the image, and to increase image sharpness and brightness. By slowing down and inverting a sequence from the first fifteen minutes of Memento, in which its protagonist Leonard undresses, one can assume his perspective on the tattoos and thus read what is written on his stomach. In normal speed and orientation of the film this is hardly possible. Most tattoos are facts and routines the amnesiac who cannot form new memories would otherwise forget, such as “EAT”. Less profane, however, are the tattoo “condition yourself”, which appears central on his body, and the tattoo “I’m no different” close to his right hip. This sentence is then among the last words uttered in the film and of importance for raising the final doubt about the credibility of Leonard’s story. The repetition of the tattoo’s words hints at the fact, that Leonard is indeed conditioning himself not only to remember to eat but also to manipulate his own knowledge, feelings, and (deadly) actions. In line with many mind-game films of the era, a clue toward the final plot twist has been planted much earlier, but can only be found in repeated and close viewings of the film. The computer dispositif proves to be of help in making these discoveries. Again, it is interesting to look at how these possibilities offered by the dispositif of watching a film on a computer affect also the production of new films. Pixar has made a name for including numerous ‘Easter eggs’ in their movies: (hidden) gimmicks usually found in software or computer games.39 Some, like cameos of characters from other Pixar films, are easy to spot, especially since the audience expects them. Others require viewers to make use of their computer skills: Enlarging a screen-shot of Toy Story 3 (Unkrich, USA 2010), for instance, reveals a postcard with the address of Carl and Ellie, the protagonists of the movie Up (Docter and Peterson, USA 2009). As Hypable, a website covering online fandom, rightly points out, this could only have been discovered by “Pixar (over?)enthusiasts [who] have screen-capped every play-by-play moment of the movie.”40 While zooming into Leonard’s tattoos in Memento gives clues about his self-deceit that is central to the story, the discovery of the postcard in Toy Story 3 is just a gimmick but still pleasurable in its own right. Instead 38

Manovich, The Language of New Media, 290. Cf. Distelmeyer, “Spielräume,” 399. 40 Quiñónez, “Pixar movie easter eggs”. 39

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of leading to a deeper understanding of the story, the numerous references between the films create a consistency of the Pixar universe that extends beyond the individual film. Fans thus can enjoy bumping into familiar characters or discovering witty details which also makes the films appealing to an adult audience: They can explore the Pixar universe on this deeper level and enjoy the digital challenge within the pictures, while children may only be occupied with the representational surface of the story. This possibility for further exploration of fictional worlds can also extend the story world into other media offering the ‘pleasure of more’ within the computer dispositif. The website which accompanied Donnie Darko (Kelly, USA 2001)41 shows how the Internet provided producers with new possibilities of expanding filmic fictional worlds. The website keeps fictional Middlesex, Virginia, turning even after the end of the movie marked by the protagonist Donnie’s death. What appears to be the local paper’s website offers a weather forecast for the town, obituaries that report deaths of other central characters in the film and an article that announces the anniversary of the plane engine crashing into Donnie’s house. Furthermore, after the visitor has successfully solved a few puzzles which require deeper knowledge of the film, chapters of the fictive book The Philosophy of Time Travel can be found. Reading it gives the spectator a missing key to understanding the multiple universes and conflicting temporal levels of the film. Fans of the film are thus rewarded for their explorational efforts that led them beyond the feature, because the web-extension of the story world offers them a deeper understanding of the entire film. Specially designed websites as well as carefully planted Easter eggs spur treasure hunting and exploration as desired by the producers. At the same time, producers lose control over what the former cine-subject does once he inserts the DVD into the computer. Not only did 1999 mark the big break of the DVD in the American market, but it was also the year in which DVD encryption was broken by a Norwegian teenager.42 Still, the problem of movie piracy is only the most obvious loss of control. In the computer dispositif fans can also enjoy their independence of the producers’ intentions on a smaller scale. While the cinematic cave imposed muteness upon the cine-subject during the projection, home-viewing on TV or DVD has lifted this ban, turning film on screen into a communal matter of discussion on the couch. 41 42

“___donnie darko___”. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, 235.

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Furthermore, the participatory qualities of Web 2.0, offered by fan forums or blogs, broke the hegemony of professional critics over the evaluation and interpretation of filmic works. Today, not only journalists of Wired or New York Magazine can publish theories about the ‘true’ messages of films and expose the mistakes or lies of filmmakers, but the film fans themselves can try to solve the puzzles of complicated plots. Similar to online gaming communities they go to hunt for discoveries together, thus merging their desire for ‘more’ with the pleasure of exploration and discovery. One example for this is the community around Mulholland Drive (Lynch, F/USA 2001). Challenged by the “10 Clues to Unlock the Mystery” David Lynch revealed with the movie’s DVD release,43 the members tried to reconcile the swap in actors/characters that takes place in the final half hour of the film.44 Following Lynch’s clues the community made use of the computer dispositif to solve this plot puzzle. The hint “Notice the robe, the ashtray, the coffee cup”45 made them collect galleries of screenshots of these objects. The similarity between the cup Diane drinks from at home and the ones at Winkey’s diner, where Betty and Rita had coffee in the first part of the film and where Diane orders the assassination of Camilla in the second, is used to sustain the theory that most of the film is actually a dream or fantasy of the Naomi Watt’s character: Betty/Diane might have integrated her own household object into her idealised dreams of her past relationship with the Laura Elena Harring character (Rita/Camilla) and the fantasy about taking revenge.46 Furthermore, the community members turned to other films with similar props, such as the similar coffee cups featured in Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, USA 1992).47 Rather than pursueing their interpretation of the movie this ‘hunt’ satisfies their interest in trivia, which are usually excluded from film criticism in established media.48 With regard to digital special effects John Belton has argued that “[d]igital technology has transformed the photographic image into a truly ‘plastic’ object that can be molded and remolded into whatever shape is

43

“Lynch’s 10 Clues To Unlock the Thriller”. Laura Elena Harring is not amnesiac Rita anymore but Camilla Rhodes, the exlover of Naomi Watts, who no longer acts as the aspiring film-star Betty but as the bitter Diane Selwyn. 45 “Lynch’s 10 Clues To Unlock the Thriller”. 46 Cf. “The Coffee Cups”. 47 Cf. “The Coffee Cups”. 48 Cf. Klinger, “The Contemporary Cinephile,” 140–141. 44

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desired.”49 This description of digital film production can be extended to digital film reception. With the help of image manipulation and editing software, viewers creatively remold and remix their favourite films and thereby cater for other fans’ needs for customisation or extensions of the fictional world that go beyond what is usually offered on DVD. Among the reworkings of Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, USA 1994), we for example find a re-dubbing in a Kerry accent,50 a version with superimposed muppet masks on the original footage51 and a catchy rap song and music video created from snippets of the film’s dialogue and images.52 These examples show that gaining access to the digital film material, together with the image manipulation and video editing tools of the computer, enables viewers to shape story worlds according to their own imagination and to watch their own versions, which would never have been thought of, let alone be published, by producers. These creative fans follow the practices of computer game ‘modders’,53 a term that refers to gamers who modify commercially published games by changing the players’ possibilities for action, the characters, the story or objectives of a game. As in the case of Counter-Strike (1999), a modification of Half-Life (1998), the ‘mod’ may become more popular than the original. In contrast to the film industry which fears the digital availability of their products because of movie piracy, some game publishers even encourage modifications.54 The examples of film remixes and remoldings show that ‘modders’ of films can turn moving images into interactive ones, because the digital dispositif allows them to shape the original story worlds according to their will. However, the possibilities for ‘modding’ both films and games highly depend on the spectator’s computer skills.

Autonomy versus Immersion: Ideological Effects of the Digital Dispositif So far, the transition between the cinematic cave and the digital dispositif has been presented as a liberation of the cine-subject: choice, customisation, and navigation make viewers independent of theatrical 49

Cf. Belton, “Digital Cinema,” 100. ‘Bowlfulosoul,’ “Pulp Fiction Kerry Shtyle”. 51 ‘416film,’ “Pulp Muppets”. 52 Rao, “Pogo’s ‘Pulp Fiction’ Remix”. 53 Cf. Scacchi, “Computer game mods”. 54 Cf. Scacchi, “Computer game mods”. 50

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schedules and the broadcast-like cinema screenings from beginning to end. Furthermore, the audience may be granted insight into the production process or can set out to explore challenging filmic narratives in greater depth. At the same time, spectators are no longer dependent on the extensions offered by the producers, as the computer enables them to access and even create user-generated extensions. All in all, the digital dispositif offers pleasures that reach beyond the mere enjoyment of the narrative. Once spectators become ‘players’ of the film they can take up challenges, make discoveries, or creatively modify the cinematic dream according to their will. However, it would be wrong to conclude that this increasing autonomy leads to a similar decreasing fascination with the filmic object, which Barthes diagnosed for televised movies. To use Baudry’s imagery of Plato’s cave: While the shackles of the cine-subject have been loosened by the apparatus of home cinema and computer, each additional pleasure the viewer derives from this autonomy lures him deeper into the film. Still, this fascination is different from the hallucinatory dream state described by Baudry. The ideological effect central to his argument is that the cinesubject takes the images flashing in front of his eyes for real. With regard to the audience’s fascination with the mind-game movies of the early 21st century, Thomas Elsaesser found a similar precondition for their enjoyment: The “patently impossible or at least highly implausible ‘realities’” of the movies must be taken for real.55 However, following Richard Allen’s critique of Baudry,56 it must be stressed that viewers have a choice about whether they want to subject themselves under this precondition or not. The community around Mulholland Drive is a case in point: Believing in the consistency between the two (fictional) universes of Lynch’s plot puzzle is the rule they play by. Or as one of the commentators in the forum puts it: [...] I believe that ‘critics’ who dismiss MULHOLLAND DR. are relatively literal-minded in their approach to looking at the world, and in particular— art. This literal-mindedness facilitates a failing to understand it (or wanting to understand it) and consequently appreciate its beautific structure. [...] I don’t think you can TRULY understand this film and dislike/hate/loathe it;

55

Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” 35. Allen, Projecting Illusion, 23: “Presumably the spectator in the cinema is not simply the dupe of cinematic illusionism but can recognize and resist the illusion in the same manner as the theorist. […] the spectator must simultaneously be capable of recognizing and resisting the ideological effect of the image.” 56

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Chapter Four with understanding comes appreciation. And that appreciation manifests itself as ‘love’.57

Today’s spectator can either assume a critical outside perspective or may else succumb to believing in Lynch’s surreal world. The latter, of course, promises more pleasure: If you believe in the ‘Lynchville’ world you can take up the challenge, set out to make discoveries in the digital nature of the film and thereby learn to appreciate the narrative. In this respect film consumption in home cinema or from a computer is similar to the experience of interactive media. With regard to computer games Janet Murray argued that they also require more than a mere suspension of disbelief; they require an active creation of belief, for which the digital environment offers new opportunities.58 One of these opportunities to create engagement with the story world is offered by digital extensions such as the website accompanying Donnie Darko or the computer games, comics, and animations around The Matrix. These extensions explore the plot more deeply and may even contain information the feature only hinted at. According to Henry Jenkins such “[r]eading across media sustains a depth of experience and motivates new consumption.”59 Hence, the experience of the story depends on the time viewers invest in exploring the story world and on the personal trajectories taken through several films. The trajectory may lead through all the films of the Pixar universe, or through several media such as for The Matrix. The more time spectators invest and the more extensions they consider, the deeper they immerse themselves into the story world. Thus, what is the ideological effect of the digital dispositif? On the one hand, spectators experience an unprecedented autonomy thanks to the DVD and through the ‘purely digital’ versions of films on their hard drives. On the other hand, they are as reluctant to move from the computer screen as the cavemen in Plato’s allegory, exactly because of the pleasures their new autonomy brings. Thus, the subject in the digital dispositif experiences a double bind between autonomy and immersion. However, in contrast to cinematic immersion, which Murray describes as a “mere flooding of the mind with sensation”, immersion in the digital dispositif, due to its participatory qualities, implies what Murray calls “learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible.”60 57 ‘Aqueryan,’ Comment in the thread “Film review: Atrocious self-indulgent nonsense from David Lynch”. 58 Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 111. 59 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 96. 60 Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 99.

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Of course, not everybody will want to embrace the possibilities of the digital dispositif, but today’s audiences can choose how they want to be immersed into a film. They can either enjoy drowning in an overwhelming audiovisual experience of the film’s representational surface or they can try to swim in its digital properties by navigating through the films’ temporal structures, surfing across several digital extensions, diving into the digital image, to uncover hidden treasures, and finally by modifying the stream of purely digital filmic images.

The Future of the ‘Purely Digital’ Dispositif Over fifteen years after the DVD’s introduction, the cinematic experience has not lost its appeal. Increasing image resolution on ever-growing screens enhances the home cinema experience. At the same time, the pleasures of the digital dispositif are more accessible than ever. In 2013, the US-American on-demand entertainment provider Netflix, which was founded as an online DVD rental service in 1997, for the first time earned more money with streaming films and TV shows than with sending out DVDs in the US.61 This shows that purely digital distribution makes the choice for a movie even easier than buying or renting discs. Furthermore, Smart TVs, i.e. TV screens that are connected to the Internet, not only deliver the purely digital film via streams or downloads, they also turn home cinema into a more and more computer-like experience. On their Smart TVs viewers can access the web, YouTube or other communities while watching a film or broadcast programme. Additionally, parallel to the broadcast, TV stations can send interactive content such as web links or games onto the Internet-connected screens. If your screen is not ‘smart’ enough yet, apps that accompany a show can sync smartphones or tablets with the programme flickering over the first screen. For their last season of Breaking Bad (Gilligan, USA 20082013) AMC, for example, sent background information like a calculation of the value of the chemicals stolen from a freight train onto the viewers’ second screens.62 Such trivia are reminiscent of the fans’ own discoveries shared on the web and show that producers acknowledge the pleasure film fans derive from them. The app for the TV film App (Boermans, NL 2013) sends video clips that show perspectives or events that happen off-camera

61 62

Roettgers, “Netflix”. AMC Networks, “Breaking Bad—Story Sync”.

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onto the second screens.63 Thereby the spectator’s experience of the story is enhanced similar to the extended or alternate DVD-versions of movies. While video-on-demand services make TV audiences independent of programme schedules, and additional gimmicks sent onto their ‘smart’ first or second screen devices may increase their immersion into the story world, dedicated opportunities to act upon it, i.e. influence fictional narratives, are still scarce. A notable exception is Arte’s series About: Kate (Nandzik D/F 2013) which invited viewers to submit photos and video material that could become part of the show. Viewers responded to weekly tasks, such as sending photos illustrating the phrase “oversexed and underfucked”, and the producers selected submissions to be spliced into the upcoming episode. Thereby the audience’s creativity, previously only experienced and published in their private modifications, is allowed into the original broadcast version. These ongoing developments highlight the importance of looking at the new media contexts within which we watch the ‘old’ media film and television, and point towards a possible future of film spectatorship in the ‘purely digital’ post-disc era. Watching film in the dominion of interactive media, that is on computers or (Smart) TVs connected with second screens may lead to expecting more opportunities for activity, reaching from customisation and extension to opportunities for creatively shaping the story world. Furthermore, the possibilities of the appareil de base in combination with the spectators’ abilities to make use of it have the power to shape the production of films, either because filmmakers create narratives that sustain active scrutiny in the digital environment or because they respond to the demand of factual and fictional extensions into the web or onto second screens. As a result, just like the appareil de base of movie camera and projector which transformed stills into moving images, the digital dispositif has the power to enforce the transition between the moving images of film and the interactive images offered by computer interfaces, websites, or computer games. Yet, this time, it is not merely the technology that enforces the transition, but it is the spectator’s activity that determines the status of the image.

63

Cf. Bujotzek and Leinhos, “ZDF-thriller ‘App’”.

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Works Cited “_____donnie darko_____.” http://archive.hi-res.net/donniedarko/. Accessed May 16, 2015. ‘416film’. 2006. “Pulp Muppets.” YouTube. Uploaded November 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSvJwUFI_es. Accessed May 16, 2015. AMC Networks. “Breaking Bad - Story Sync: Season 5 Episode 5.” http:// www.amc.com/shows/breaking-bad/story-sync/season-5-episode-5. Accessed May 16, 2015. Allen, Richard. 1995. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ‘Aqueryan’. 2002. Comment made by the user ‘Aqueryan’ in the thread “Film review: Atrocious self-indulgent nonsense from David Lynch.”. Rotten Tomatoes via Internet Archive. Published July 29 (07:30 pm). Archived November 5, 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/2012110510 5931/http://vine.rottentomatoes.com/vine/showthread.php?threadid=15 4103. Barthes, Roland. 1986. The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1986 [1975]. “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema.” In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 299–318. New York: Columbia UP. Belton, John. 2002. “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution.” October 100:98–114. Benzon, Paul. 2013. “Bootleg Paratextuality and Digital Temporality: Towards an Alternate Present of the DVD.” Narrative 12.1:87–104. Boermans, Bobby. 2013. App. NL. Bordwell, David. 2006. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. ‘Bowlfulosoul’. 2012. “Pulp Fiction Kerry Shtyle.” YouTube. Uploaded November 29. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi9q45GK4T0. Accessed May 16, 2015. Brinkley, Joel. 1999. “Flat TV’s, Still for the Fat-Wallet Set, Improve as Prices Fall.” The New York Times, January 14. http://www.nytimes .com/1999/01/14/technology/flat-tv-s-still-for-the-fat-wallet-set-improveas-prices-fall.html?pagewanted=2&pagewanted=all. Accessed May 16, 2015.

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Buckland, Warren. 2009. “Introduction: Puzzle Plots.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 1–12. Chichester: Blackwell. Bujotzek, Rafael, and Luten Leinhos. 2014. “ZDF-Thriller ‘App’ – der Film.” ZDF heute Journal, Mai 26 (21:45). http://www.zdf.de/ZDF mediathek/beitrag/video/2162864/ZDF-Thriller-App----Der-Film-#/beitr ag/video/2162864/ZDF-Thriller-App----Der-Film-. Accessed Mai 16, 2015. Cameron, James. 1997. Titanic. USA. DVD Version. 2005. UK: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. Capps, Robert, and Patrick Di Justo. 2010. “Inception Explained.” Wired, December 2010. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/pl_incept ionexplained_infograiphc/ [sic.]. Accessed May 16, 2015. Carroll, Noël. 1988. Mystifying Movies: Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York/Oxford: Columbia UP. Cossar, Harper. 2009. “The Shape of New Media: Screen Space, Aspect Ratios, and Digitextuality.” Journal of Film and Video 61.4:3–16. doi:10.1353/jfv.0.0045. Accessed February 3, 2014. Distelmeyer, Jan. 2007. “Spielräume, Videospiele, Kino und die intermediale Architektur der Film-DVD.” In Spielformen im Spielfilm: Zur Medienmorphologie des Kinos nach der Postmoderne, edited by Rainer Leschke and Jochen Venus, 389–416. Bielefeld: transcript. Docter, Pete, and Bob Peterson. 2009. Up. USA. Ebiri, Bilge. 2010. “Six New Things We Learned From the Inception Bluray.” Vulture.com, via Internet Archive. Published December 2. Archived April 5, 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20120405053757 /http://www.vulture.com/2010/12/six_things_we_learned_from_the.ht ml. Accessed May 16, 2015. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2009. “The Mind-Game Film.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 13–41. Chichester: Blackwell. Fritz, Ben. 2014. “Sales of Digital Movies Surge; Delaying Availability of DVDs, Rentals Nudged Consumers.” Wall Street Journal (Online) January 7. ProQuest document ID 1474887675. Accessed February 16, 2014. Ghislotti, Stefano. 2009. “Narrative Comprehension Made Difficult: Film Form and Mnemonic Devices in Memento.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 87–106. Chichester: Blackwell. Gilligan, Vince. 2008-2013. Breaking Bad. USA.

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Hagener, Malte, and Marijke de Valck. 2008. “Cinephilia in Transition.” In Mind the Screen: Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser, edited by Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters, and Wanda Strauven, 19–31. Amsterdam: Amersterdam UP. Hickethier, Knut. 1995. “Dispositiv Fernsehen: Skizze eines Modells.” Montage AV 4/1:63–83. Jackson, Peter. 2001. Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. NZ/USA. DVD Version. 2002. New Line Home Entertainment. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York/London: New York UP. Keane, Stephen. 2007. CineTech: Film, Convergence and New Media. Hampshire/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, Richard. 2001. Donnie Darko. USA. Kessler, Frank. 2006. “The Cinema of Attractions as Dispositif.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, edited by Wanda Strauven, 57–69. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP. Klinger, Barbara. 2001. “The Contemporary Cinephile: Film Collecting in the Post-Video Era.” In Hollywood Spectatorships: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, edited by Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, 132–151. London: British Film Institute. Lasseter, John, and Andrew Stanton. 1998. A Bug’s Life. USA. Lasseter, John. 1999. Toy Story 2. USA. Lucas, George. 1999. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. USA. Lynch, David. 2001. Mulholland Drive. F/USA. “Lynch’s 10 Clues To Unlock the Thriller.” Lost on Mulholland Drive. http://www.mulholland-drive.net/studies/10clues.htm. Accessed May 16, 2015. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. Mikos, Lothar. 2008. “Understanding Text as Cultural Practice and as Dynamic Process of Making.” In Watching The Lord of the Rings, edited by Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs, 207–212. New York: Peter Lang. Murray, Janet. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nash Information Services LLC. “All-Time Best-Selling Blu-ray Titles in the United States”. The Numbers via Internet Archive. Archived June 8, 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20130608080743/http://www.thenumbers.com/alltime-bluray-sales-chart. Accessed May 16, 2015. Nandzik, Janna. 2013. About: Kate. D/F. Nolan, Christopher. 2000. Memento. USA.

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—. 2010. Inception. USA/UK. Ofcom. 2012. “Communications Market Report 2012.” Published July 18. http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/cmr/cmr12/CMR_U K_2012.pdf. Accessed May 16, 2015. Quiñónez, Ariana. 2013. “12 of our absolute favorite Pixar movie easter eggs.” Hypable, June 21, 2013. http://www.hypable.com/2013/06/21/ pixar-movie-easter-eggs/. Accessed May 16, 2015. Rao, Mallika. 2012. “Pogo’s ‘Pulp Fiction’ Remix: The Gore-And-FoodFilled ‘Lead Breakfast’.” The Huffington Post, June 21. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/21/pogo-pulp-fiction-remix_n_1615708.html. Accessed May 16, 2015. Roettgers, Janko. 2013. “Netflix May Ditch DVDs Sooner Rather Than Later.” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 21. http://www.business week.com/articles/2013-10-21/netflix-may-ditch-dvds-sooner-ratherthan-later. Accessed May 16, 2015. Scacchi, Roy. 2010. “Computer game mods, modders, modding and the mod scene.” First Monday 15:5, May. http://firstmonday.org/ article/view/2965/2526. Accessed Mai 16, 2015. Tarantino, Quentin. 1992. Reservoir Dogs. USA. —. 1994. Pulp Fiction. USA. “The Coffee Cups.” Lost on Mulholland Drive. http://www.mulhollanddrive.net/studies/cups.htm. Accessed May 16, 2015. The Wachowski Brothers. 1999. The Matrix. USA/AUS. Unkrich, Lee. 2010. Toy Story 3. USA.

CHAPTER FIVE HOW TO DO WORDS WITH THINGS: PAUL AUSTER’S TYPEWRITER AND THE HISTORY OF WRITING TH IN THE 20 CENTURY MARTIN ROUSSEL

In The Story of My Typewriter (2002), Paul Auster reflects upon himself, his authorship, and his typewriter as an old-fashioned dispositif of writing. Living among “digital converts”1, as Auster puts it, he considers himself to be the last person on earth to rely on his “pagan” typewriter. Following these religious rhetorics, one might imagine the different writing-scenes— the computer’s ‘word processor’ on the one hand, the manual typewriter on the other—as a Pauline redemption story. However, digital codification as the basis of a miracle at Pentecost does not convince Auster. His insistence on paganism draws attention away from questions of meaning to those of—to vary Austin’s initial phrase of speech-act theory2—how to do words with things.3 Rüdiger Campe’s notion of “writing-scene” allows to conceptualise this shift from the ‘enactment of words’ to the concentration on the interplay between language and aspects of instrumentality as well as of gesture.4 The 20th century’s writing-scene has been dominated by the use 1

Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 22. Austin, How To Do Things With Words. 3 The importance of the question ‘how to write’ for our understanding of ‘text’ has been recognised particularly in media theory, particularly the history of technical improvement (notably since Kittler, Discourse Networks), as well as in recent research on the genealogies of writing (cf. the book series Zur Genealogie des Schreibens, ed. Martin Stingelin, München: Fink). 4 Campe, “Die Schreibszene. Schreiben”. For a more literature-focused perspective see Gasché, “The Scene of Writing”. 2

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of typewriters instead of handwriting. How do we describe and contextualise the transformations of writing during the 20th century and towards the 21st century? This essay will examine this question in three steps. First, the idea of an ‘author’ in the 20th century is closely tied to the idea of a typewriter, which indicates the automation or mechanisation of writing. Secondly, the idea of typewriting individualises printing techniques and is opposed to—archaic, anthropologically originated— handwriting (Heidegger). Thirdly, whereas printing techniques are applied by typesetters (not writers) and by machines (not an individually operated mechanism), typewriting figures writing as a three-dimensional interaction between man and machine; the writer thus appears as a ‘sculptor’ chiselling text bodies (Adorno). In a far-seeing writing fantasy, Walter Benjamin in Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street; 1928) argues that in future times, new systems with variable design options would replace fluent writing by the “innervation of commanding fingers”.5 Benjamin’s foreshadowing helps us to reflect on the transformations in writing systems that are going on today.

Authorship and Typewriter It is not until the late 19th century that the age of the typewriter begins. Certainly, there had been writing apparatuses ever since Henry Mill patented his typewriter avant la lettre in 1714. Although the typewriter had been invented or reinvented throughout the decades, it is not this prehistory of technological achievement that remains important. Giuseppe Ravizza’s Cembalo Scrivano (1855) for example used piano keyboards alongside the later generally used type bar, platen and ink ribbon. Peter Mitterhofer’s models (since 1864) were perfectly usable but misconceived by technical experts of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1866. In media history, a famous example is Friedrich Nietzsche’s use of the Skrivekugle by the Danish pastor Rasmus Malling Hanson (developed in 1865, patented in 1870). It was the first serially produced machine, although Nietzsche’s typescripts provide a great deal of evidence of the machine’s malfunctions. At the same time, Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé from Kleinsteuber’s Machine Shop in Milwaukee reached series maturity from 1873 on with their “Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer”—a machine that was put on the market by Remington Arms Co., New York, previously known as a producer of weapons and sewing machines. In fact, it was Sholes who invented the 5

Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, 64.

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QWERTY keyboard that is (more or less) still in use today. Thus, the ‘invention’ of the typewriter goes back to a series of ideas, products and improvements. Against this backdrop, Nietzsche’s famous typewritten aphorism “SCHREIBKUGEL IST EIN DING GLEICH MIR: VON EISEN” (“WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF IRON”)6 is often regarded as early proof of the typewriter’s impact on the selfreflection as writer.7 Mark Twain is often reported as the first person to write a book on a typewriter, a “Remington No. 1”, although he dictated the manuscript of his Life on the Mississippi to a typist.8 In his autobiographical essay “The First Writing Machines” (1905), Twain claimed, “that I was the first person in the world to apply the typemachine to literature”. He continued: “That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones. […] After a year or two it was degrading my character”.9 For some decades, writers remained sceptical of the typewriter’s usefulness for “high-cultural” products. In this regard, Kurt Tucholsky’s polemic, if not symptomatic, question (instructively published under his pseudonym Peter Panter) “Darf man tippen—?” (“May one type—?”)10 is neither genuine nor rhetorical: it rather pinpoints the yet unanswered question if a writers’ fate is tied to the typewriter and thereby the mechanisation as well as the automation of writing. However, this scepticism did not inhibit the typewriter’s success story: already by the turn of the century, typewriters were widespread. The Austrian writer Robert Musil, for example, used a model called the “Underwood”, which was produced more than 12 million times after 1896. Even the invention of the electronic typewriter did not change much in the way typewriting shaped the scene of writing. Until the late 1980s the electronic typewriter seemed far superior to any alternative, including early computers with connected matrix printers. The last typewriters were upgraded with fast memory, display techniques etc. whereas matrix printers still produced a print layout with very low resolution. Although printing techniques have since improved considerably, the great success of the computer derives from its ability to include multiple options of output, 6

Nietzsche’s typewriter experiment is very well documented and commented on in Nietzsche, Schreibmaschinentexte, 61 (English translation after Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 207). 7 Cf. Giuriato, Stingelin, and Zanetti, Schreibszenen. 8 Darren Wershler-Henry reports many of those early anecdotes in The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. 9 Twain, Letters, 587; emphasis in the original. 10 Published in: Vossische Zeitung, 01.01.1931, Nr. 1 (translation MR).

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on screen as well as by printer or sound devices. Keyboards still remain important as analogue input devices. Nevertheless, methods like copy and paste, the use of a mouse as a control instrument or of a graphics tablet have undermined the importance of typing, even in the field of writing, keying and prompting. For a long time, the influence of typewriting on culture has not been acknowledged, although the typewriter influenced our changing understanding of authorship in a way that is not to be underestimated, even though it was initially subliminal. Few writers reflected on the author’s relationship to his instrument. Annotations like those of Nietzsche or Twain remain ambivalent if not moodily subjective. Paul Auster’s essay on his Olympia typewriter should therefore be considered as a unique case study on authorship and the question how writing techniques advance as well as inspire the author’s imagination. Again, the reflections of the potential as well as the limitations of the apparatus in use are of greater importance than the technological change itself. In the case of Auster, technical aspects come together with more emotional ones that characterise the more literary status of Auster’s reflections. Actually, Auster was first encouraged to reflect on his long-time companion by the artist Sam Messer, who painted a series of pictures—paintings as well as drawings—of the Olympia typewriter in a quite expressive style.11 The beginning of Auster’s essay informs us about the machine’s predecessor: It was July 1974, and when I unpacked my bags that first afternoon in New York, I discovered that my little Hermes typewriter had been destroyed.12

With the case “smashed in, the keys […] mangled and twisted out of shape”, and with “no hope of ever having it repaired”, he himself felt “dead broke.”13 Thus, the relationship between machine and man is introduced as an allegorical love story, the next step being a relationship that was going to last: It was an Olympia portable, manufactured in West Germany. That country no longer exists, but since that day in 1974, every word I have written has been typed out on that machine.14

11

Auster, The Story of My Typewriter. Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 9. 13 Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 9. 14 Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 10. 12

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As an allegorical one, the love story is mirrored by the effect of being painted: It was never my intention to turn my typewriter into a heroic figure. That is the work of Sam Messer, a man who stepped into my house one day and fell in love with a machine. There is no accounting for the passions of artists. The affair has lasted for several years now, and right from the beginning, I suspect that the feelings have been mutual.15

The above mention of West Germany as a country that “no longer exists” may be understood as a marginal, historical reference, giving evidence of a really long-term partnership that outlasts even political systems. But it also unveils a melancholic tendency, suggesting that Auster and his machine both date back to an era that no longer exists. Those of Sam Messer’s paintings that imitate the letters of the Olympia intensify this melancholic undertone. In one of his pictures you can identify a passage from the essay on the typewriter. The iconism of the painted thus indicates the togetherness of machine and author: “I remember pointing out the typewriter to him the first time he visited”.16 “He” is of course Sam Messer, and with Auster and Messer becoming figures in the discourse of a painted typewriter, the typewriter thus becomes a self-reflexive image of the writing in the instance of Auster’s The Story of My Typewriter.17 A certain melancholy that has turned the former instrument into a “he”, into “a heroic figure”18 is the second guiding theme in The Story of My Typewriter, next to the allegorical structure of a coincidental emotional state of being. The story of Paul Auster’s typewriter did not start until the 1990s, when, unlike his friends and colleagues, Auster realised that “[t]here is no point in talking about computers and word processors.”19 Retrospectively, he noticed not only that his machine had increasingly become something solitary but also that this machine had changed the figure of the writer and author Paul Auster and how it had done so. It now seemed to him as if not

15

Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 27. Despite this “affair”, Auster can say: “We have been together for more than a quarter of a century now [that is, as the article is dated, July 2, 2000].” (Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 39). 16 Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 13 and 28. 17 The relationship of text to image (if not the primacy of Messer’s pictures) is discussed in Bachmann (“Paul Auster und Sam Messer”) in regard to the tradition of the livre d’artiste. 18 Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 27. 19 Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 21.

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only were he part of its story, but also and increasingly part of the story of the typewriter: I began to look like an enemy of progress, the last pagan holdout in a world of digital converts. My friends made fun of me for resisiting [sic] the new ways. When they weren’t calling me a curmudgeon, they called me reactionary and a stubborn old goat. […] Why should I change when I was perfectly happy as I was? Until then, I hadn’t felt particularly attached to my typewriter. It was simply a tool that allowed me to do my work, but now that it had become an endangered species, one of the last surviving artifacts of twentiethcentury homo scriptorus, I began to develop a certain affection for it.20

We may thus conclude that Auster, considering himself to be “the last pagan holdout in a world of digital converts”, is able to tell his typewriter’s story because the times when you used a typewriter are now “old ways”. Calling the users of computers “converts” sharpens this line of argument: usually converts are known to be devout believers (they must actually have reasons to believe one thing and not another), and in this case, Auster for his part does not see the need to ‘convert’. In a certain way, he even emphasises that his way of writing is more essential. The relation between a computer and a typewriter is basically that between a calculating machine and a writing machine. Whereas computers claim a certain universality as tools with various functions, typewriters are devices for writing purposes only. And if there has ever been something like a “homo scriptorus”, then we talk of a certain species of homo in the 20th century. This explains why Auster strongly associates his authorship with the use of the typewriter. Looking back from the era of ‘word processors’, the age of typewriting looks like the era of a certain professionalisation of writing. With his typewriter as subject, Auster expresses this eminent re-discursivation of authorship as the counterpart of the aesthetics of genius where ‘to write’ seemed to depend on nothing but the genius’ inner thoughts. Whereas aporia stands out as the typical figure of the genius, this 20th century authorship builds on categories such as reliability, steadiness and continuity. However, these ideas depend on the physical substance of the writer himself—unlike in the age of “digital converts” with keywords like ‘processing’, ‘layout’, ‘formatting’ etc. which all allude to the fluidity and therefore the transitoriness of the writing medium itself. Thus, the typewriter remains as a “relic”, odd and seemingly out-dated: 20

Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 22f.

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Battered and obsolete, a relic from an age that is quickly passing from memory, the damn thing has never given out on me. Even as I recall the nine thousand four hundred days we have spent together, it is sitting in front of me now, stuttering forth its old familiar music.21

It even sounds a little bit malicious when Auster continues: We are in Connecticut for the weekend. It is summer, and the morning outside the window is hot and green and beautiful. The typewriter is on the kitchen table, and my hands are on the typewriter. Letter by letter, I have watched it write these words.22

To put it another way, without the Olympia typewriter, Auster would not have written The Story of My Typewriter; he would not even have written any of his works. Again, he stresses the machine’s reliability (“Letter by letter”), but actually reverses the relationship between active and passive: “I have watched it write these words.” If we take into account that “these words” are those that at the same time once, on this beautiful summer’s day, appeared on typing paper in Connecticut and still appear on the page in front of the reader’s very eyes, the noteworthiness of this writing-scene lies in that the typewriter connects writer and reader by distinguishably separating the writer from the written piece of paper. To overstate the case: It is the typewriter that writes with its ‘fingers’. Hence, Auster’s text does not allow for an idealisation of the author’s creativity, of how the final text was formatted, printed or whatever. Like a printing press in nuce, typewriters mechanise and thereby formalise the transformation of the author’s text to the reader’s piece of writing. Typewriting is all about texts that were handed over, letter by letter, from the author to the reader. The idea of automation by typewriting is an underlying matrix of modernity. We find it for example in movies like Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (USA, 1960). Here, the idea of an open plan office is impressively created and backed with the „clicking sound of business machines, […] that reduce people to mechanisms“.23 Following Wilder’s social analysis of the 1950s in the United States, it could be argued that modern times, as exemplified for example in Charlie Chaplin’s depiction of assembly line work in the film of the same name (USA, 1936), are transferred to the middle class employees. Yet, it is only to a certain degree that the situation of the typewriting author is comparable to theirs. It is basically not his creativity or imagination that are bound to some sort 21

Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 55. Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 55f. 23 Mast, The Comic Mind, 275. 22

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of mechanical device, but the idea of the script. In contrast to manuscripts, a typescript marks a certain level of accomplishment. Like Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type printing, the invention of the typewriter pursues the idea of a standardisation of the letter. With typescripts, you can never tell who was actually writing or who was dictating. In other words, the typewriter normalises writing, whereas manuscripts always seem to have a ‘personal note’ and therefore retain something of the individual’s personal aura.

Technique and Gestures of Writing Frequent typing indicates the mechanisation of the gesture of writing. Typewriters prosthetically extend handwriting.24 They are instruments or mechanical devices, but not machines with their own propulsion, as we might expect from Auster telling us how his Olympia typewriter was itself writing. As recently as in its final, electronic stage, typewriters were able to take on functions of computer-based word processing (e.g. memorising letters). The examples of Auster as well as of Nietzsche, Twain and—seen in a wider context—Wilder’s Apartment show us how the activity of typing deindividualises the scene of writing. In contrast to the intellectual notion of authorship in the age of Goethe and the Romantic period with its emphatically expressed topoi of individuality, a corporeal and practical conception of the author as writer becomes more and more prevalent. Certainly, the underlying idea of authorship is no less phantasmatic than in the case of the ingenium est ineffabile, the inexpressibility of the genius.25 Whereas typing denotes the yet unintellectual aspect of mere mechanical activity, Auster’s designation of the “homo scriptorus” signalises a revaluation of the act of writing/typing within the context of authorship. His almost existential relationship with his typewriter leads to questions about how exclusively the idea of authorship in the sense of a “homo scriptorus” is within the era of typewriting and how we describe the authorship of “digital converts”? Don Birnham in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (USA, 1945, based on the novel by Charles R. Jackson) recognises the existential bond of man and his typewriter when his life reaches rock bottom and he finally tries to sell his typewriter and seems to accept his wrecked attempts to become an 24

Cf. for the technical background: Kunzmann, Hundert Jahre Schreibmaschinen. The aftermath of this formula throughout the 19th century is pursued in Günter Blamberger, Das Geheimnis des Schöpferischen.

25

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author. This link between typewriter and authorship is well because the typewriter represents writing, even handwriting. “[T]he typewriter made it inevitable that handwriting should come to resemble type”,26 noted Friedrich Kittler with respect to Stefan George’s typified handwriting. In this regard, typing formalises authorship and redefines the authors as a writer of a uniform text. Vilém Flusser even considered typewriting to be—at least with reference to the alphabet—more closely related to the idea of writing in general than handwriting: “The structure of writing is linear”, argues Flusser, and this linearity is programmed in the typewriter, which is a machine for writing lines from left to right and for jumping back to the left side. […] It may be held that if we type a text we perform an entirely different gesture from the one the Mesopotamian scribes used to perform. But such a conclusion is hasty. […] It may […] be held that if we type we still engrave, (at least as far as the intention of our gesture is concerned) […]: we no longer engrave with a stick, but with a series of hammers. […] To type is thus a more penetrating gesture than is wri[ti]ng in longhand.27

In his anthology of small essays on Does Writing Have a Future?, Flusser sharpens this phenomenological line of argument. To write with a pen, he argues, contradicts the essence of writing and recalls the practice of drawing, from which writing freed itself in a development of hundreds of years. […] Those who write by hand find themselves on the outskirts of writing culture, where calligraphy and graphology, these ways of writing that seem medieval, hold sway.28

While Auster’s Olympia almost seems to write on its own, there have been many reservations about the prosthetic character of the typewriter throughout 20th century philosophy and philosophical anthropology. Martin Heidegger, for instance, was apprehensive of the keyboard as it might wrest writing from the “word as the realm of the essence of the human hand and therefore the word” (“Wesensbereich der Hand, und d.h. des Wortes”) by degrading “the word to a means of communicaton” (“das

26

Kittler, Discourse Networks, 316. See Flusser’s typescript of “The gesture of writing,” 3f. 28 Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future, 121f. Flusser always derives writing from “to in-form” (in the sense of engraving) instead of “to form” (in the sense of to shape). 27

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Wort zu einem Verkehrsmittel”).29 The assumed qualities as a ‘product’ seemed to expose writing to a kind of anthropological namelessness. “In typescript all human beings look the same” (“In der Maschinenschrift sehen alle Menschen gleich aus”).30 Mankind and at the same time civilisation as a whole seem to “be effaced in the crepitation of teletypewriters” (“s’éteindre dans le crépitement des téléscripteurs”).31

Chiselling and Touching Despite Heidegger’s anthropological reservations, typewriting faced a success story almost until the end of the 20th century. This success was due to an ongoing mechanical optimisation, although it may be considered surprising that more radical improvements like the “noiseless” typewriter did not succeed.32 A cultural diagnostician, such as Theodor W. Adorno in his reflections on typewriting and handwriting, made it plausible that the noise of typing should be considered part of the physical activity of engineered writing. In sharp contrast to Heidegger, Adorno conceived of typewriting as a primary way of writing, in the sense of separating the gesture of writing from the outcome: The hand hitting the keys does not care about the written product that is floating way up on the horizon of the typewriter. Rather, it chisels text bodies out of its keyboard, clear enough for us to imagine holding those words in our fingers that are shaping them with pressure out of the surface of the keys. It is only on the machine that the process of writing has again changed from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. (Die Hand, die ins Material der Tasten schlägt, kümmert sich nicht um das geschriebene Resultat, das weit oben am Horizont der Maschine vorüberschwebt. Sondern sie meißelt aus den Tasten Wortleiber, so deutlich, daß man sie oftmals in den Fingern zu halten meint, unter deren Druck sie sich plastisch aus der Tastenfläche ausformen. Der Prozeß des

29

Heidegger, Parmenides, 119. Cf. the English translation, Heidegger (transl. Schuwer/Rojewicz), 79–82. 30 Heidegger, Parmenides, 119. Cf. the English translation, Heidegger (transl. Schuwer/Rojcewicz) 1992, 79–82. Heidegger’s argumentation is based on the alleged “essential affinity between hand and word as the essential action of humankind” (“Wesenszusammengehörigkeit der Hand mit dem Wort als der Wesensauszeichnung des Menschen”, Heidegger, Parmenides, 125). 31 Bassy, Machines à écrire, 368. 32 Cf. Campbell-Kelly, The User-friendly Typewriter.

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Schreibens ist auf der Maschine aus einem zweidimensionalen wieder dreidimensional geworden.)33

We do not have to decide between the anthropological primacy of the hand with its flow of writing and the regained physicality of writing. Rather, what we see are the contours of a new media era that amounts to nothing more than the either positive or negative antithesis to handwriting. Since typing does not exclude the hand, the era of the typewriter teaches us to reflect fundamentally on the act of writing and the need to determine the anthropological sense of writing. This might even lead to a mixing of cultural general principles. Significantly, the Swiss writer Robert Walser uses the typewriter as a metaphor of progression to ironically describe his own handwriting. Accordingly, looking down on many sheets covered with small letters, he wrote in 1920: “Haven’t I almost been a typewriter?” (“War ich nicht beinahe eine Schreibmaschine?”)34 Here Walser uses the typewriter as metaphor to emphasise his productiveness. The mere accumulation of writing (“many sheets”) apparently creates the effect of typing, i.e. automated writing. During the 1920s Walser then developed an experimental setting to treat cramps with writing. For this purpose he miniaturised his script and began to draft each of his literary texts in this kind of micrography. It was not until the 1970s that these draft papers—all in all 527 slips of paper have survived—were partly deciphered and transcribed. In one of these microscripts Walser tells us about his “I-hood that is thinking about a typewriter while considering going to a coffeehouse” (“an Schreibmaschinen denkende[ ], kaffeehausbesucheinbetrachtziehende Ichheit”).35 When associated with a coffeehouse (Kaffeehaus), the typewriter is transformed into a metaphor of distraction from the daily business of focused writing at home. However, Walser apparently never used a typewriter. Instead, he tells us that he overcame this “concern against the typewriter” (“Schreibmaschinenbedenklichkeit”) as it “gradually evaporated” (“[sich] nach und nach verflüchtigte”), adding that he was able to cope with his concerns “by sticking to the idea of handwriting, the precept of the fingers.” (“daß ich der Handschriftidee, dem Fingerprinzip treu blieb.”)36 However, the antithesis of handwriting and typing plays a part only metaphorically. 33

Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 20.2, 542f. (translation MR). Walser, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 16, 270 (translation MR). 35 Walser, Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet, Vol. 5, 49 (translation MR). 36 Walser, Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet, 50 (translation MR). “Fingerprinzip” (“precept of fingers”) was newly deciphered instead of “Fingergesetz” (“law of fingers”) by 34

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Yet, it remains interesting that Walser introduces the metaphorical features of typewriting (distraction, the use of fingers instead of the whole hand) in the reflection of his scene of writing.37 Walser’s practice of writing thus includes older semantic attributes of ‘language’ and ‘meaning’. As the fingers are actually the more expressive part of the hand, the symbolic performance that is commonly attributed to the hand is in many cases more accurately described by the finger. ([Die] finger sind eigentlich der ausdrucksvolle theil der hand, daher wird die im allgemeinen der hand beigelegte symbolische verrichtung in vielen fällen genauer durch finger bezeichnet.)38

Walser’s varied associations with fingers bring to mind Adorno’s chiseling of text bodies and therefore of the world of forms given by the keyboard.39 Instead of a sliding scale within a flow of writing, the scene of writing appears to be rather diverse. What Walser thought of as “Schreibmaschinenbedenklichkeit” develops a perspective on writing that finds its counterpart in a passage from Walter Benjamin’s 1928 anthology of fragments, Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street). Benjamin’s thinking resonates in our times, with everyone being Bernhard Echte instead of the previous hypothetical decryption (Groddeck, “Robert Walsers ‘Schreibmaschinenbedenklichkeit’,” 178). Cf. Roussel, Matrikel, 263–272. 37 Cf. Utz, “Digitale Fingerübungen”. 38 Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer, 194 (translation MR); emphasis in original. 39 Walser’s microscripts have always remained “drafts”, which eventually became readable as clean copies. This also indicates the metaphoric influence of typing instead of the hand as the focal point of writing. Hegel for instance thinks about “free-hand drawings” (“Handzeichnungen”), noticing “that the whole spirit of the artist passes over immediately into the manual dexterity which with the greatest ease, without groping, sets before us in the production of a moment everything that the artist’s spirit contains.” (“daß der ganze Geist unmittelbar in die Fertigkeit der Hand übergeht, die nun mit der größten Leichtigkeit, ohne Versuch, in augenblicklicher Produktion alles, was im Geiste des Künstlers liegt, hinstellt.” Hegel, Werke, Vol. 15: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, 69. Cf. the English translation Hegel [transl. Knox], Aesthetics, 838). What matters is his stressing of the immediacy (“ohne Versuch”) which binds Geist (mind) and Hand, while “painting gives to the life of the soul its really living external appearance” (“bringt erst die Malerei durch den Gebrauch der Farbe das Seelenvolle zu seiner eigentlich lebendigen Erscheinung”, Hegel, Werke, Vol. 15, 69. Cf. the English translation Hegel [transl. Knox], Werke, 838) without affecting the outline of the whole.

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familiar with such things as ‘joysticks’ with ‘force feedback’ or ‘touchscreens’ with ‘hidden sensor technology’, in which the phenomenon of typing (in the sense of a gesture of touching) has already undergone radical changes. The synchronisation of the ten fingers, which are potentially equivalent, to a touch method40 has given way to a more complex field of touching (screens), swiping (smartphones) and of controlling sticks. Benjamin, in 1928, anticipated a future reality like this under certain conditions: The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers. (Die Schreibmaschine wird dem Federhalter die Hand des Literaten erst dann entfremden, wenn die Genauigkeit typographischer Formungen unmittelbar in die Konzeption seiner Bücher eingeht. Vermutlich wird man dann neue Systeme mit variabler Schriftgestaltung benötigen. Sie werden die Innervationen der befehlenden Finger an die Stelle der geläufigen Hand setzen.)41

Benjamin still thought of this future as an age of typewriters, albeit more advanced ones, although he might induce one to understand typing as a bridging technology for today’s innovations. His visionary words outline a certain utopian substance for our times that helps us to reflect on the transformations in writing systems that are going on today. Any utterance of words should be understood—to get back to Austin’s How To Do Things With Words—as acting with words, a speech-act. The nature of written language encourages a reformulation of this phrase that assumes the distinction between the act of writing and the act of reading. The question “How to do words with things” therefore involves the agency of the typewriter and hereby separates writing and reading. More precisely, the history of the mechanisation of writing, that happened long after Gutenberg’s mechanisation of printing techniques, teaches us how to do words with things individually: A typewriter may be defined as the ultimate device to produce a personal text. At the same time, the text as a

40

Of course, the equivalence is limited by the QWERTY system that divides the keyboard into different areas of importance. 41 Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, 63–64 (German: Benjamin, “Einbahnstraße,” 105).

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product is being released from any graphological notion of individuality.42 This product therefore coincides with the “apparently obvious fact that the gesture of writing aims at texts to be read by others.”43 It is this historical outline that gives plausibility to Paul Auster’s The Story of My Typewriter, which allows the author as writer to imagine himself as his first reader: “Letter by letter, I have watched it [the typewriter] write these words.”44 It is only as a reader that one can see how the “writing-machine”45 produces text. All of the early typewriters hid the paper during the process of typing, and, as Kittler reminds us, most of the early typewriters were constructed “for the blind and/or the deaf”.46 Even Underwood’s innovation, that the paper remained visible while typing, in 1896 “did not change the fact that typewriting can and must remain a blind activity.”47 This blind spot between writing and reading marks the incidence of Auster’s typewriter eulogy. In an interview for The Paris Review (2003), he even considers typing as a kind of “reading with my fingers” and thus excludes the manufacture of text—letter by letter—from his reflection.48 Auster’s selfidentification as “one of the last surviving artefacts of twentieth-century homo scriptorus”,49 thus reveals an ironic undertone. His exclusion of text production brings technical equipment into sight and evidently distinguishes Auster from the “digital converts”50 and their techniques of word processing—from ‘copy and paste’ to ‘hyperlinks’—, which tend to hide programming knowledge and hardware structures.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1998. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, Vol. 20.2: Vermischte Schriften II. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 42

This thesis is limited by detailed examinations of typescripts, e.g. Eberwein’s analysis of Nietzsche’s stroke on the keys (cf. Eberwein, Nietzsches Schreibkugel, 73). 43 Flusser, “The gesture of writing,” 16. 44 Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 56. 45 Cf. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 187. 46 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 189. 47 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 203. 48 Auster, “The Art of Fiction”. 49 Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 22f. 50 Auster, The Story of My Typewriter, 22.

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Auster, Paul. 2002. The Story of My Typewriter. Works of Art by Sam Messer. New York: D.A.P. —. 2003. “Paul Auster, The Art of Fiction No. 178,” interviewed by Michael Wood. The Paris Review 167, Fall 2003. http://www.theparis review.org/interviews/121/the-art-of-fiction-no-178-paul-auster. Accessed March 14, 2014. Austin, John Langshaw. 1962. How To Do Things With Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bachmann, Christian A. 2011. “Paul Auster und Sam Messer: The Story of My Typewriter.” Lecture, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, March 9, 2011. www.academia.edu/3210279/Sam_Messer_und_Paul_Auster_ The_Story_of_My_Typewriter_. Accessed March 14, 2014. Bassy, Anne-Marie. 1985. “Machines à écrire: Machines à séduire ou machines à détruire?” In Écritures II., edited by Anne-Marie Christin and Monick Amour, 367–379. Paris: Le Sycomore. Benjamin, Walter. 1928/2006. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London/New York: Verso. —. 1928/1974. “Einbahnstraße.” In Benjamin, Walter: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 83–148. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Blamberger, Günter. 1994. Das Geheimnis des Schöpferischen oder: Ingenium est ineffabile? Studien zur Literaturgeschichte der Kreativität zwischen Goethezeit und Moderne. Stuttgart: Metzler. Campbell-Kelly, Martin. 2005/2006. “The User-friendly Typewriter.” The Rutherford Journal 1, http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article0101 05.html. Accessed March 14, 2014. Campe, Rüdiger. 1991. “Die Schreibszene. Schreiben.” In Paradoxien, Dissonanzen, Zusammenbrüche. Situationen offener Epistemologie, edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht und Klaus Ludwig Pfeiffer, 759–72. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Eberwein, Dieter. 2005. Nietzsches Schreibkugel. Ein Blick auf Nietzsches Schreibmaschinenzeit durch die Restauration der Schreibkugel. Schauenburg: Typoskript-Verlag (author’s edition). Flusser, Vilém. 2009. “The gesture of writing.” Flusser Studies 8, May 2009, http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files /media/attachments/the-gesture-of-writing.pdf. Accessed March 14, 2014.

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—. 2011. Does Writing Have a Future? Introduction by Mark Poster. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Gasché, Rodolphe. 1977. “The Scene of Writing: A Deferred Outset.” Glyph 1:150–171. Grimm, Jakob. 1922. Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (1828), 4th edition, Vol. 1, Leipzig: Mayer & Müller. Giuriato, Davide, Martin Stingelin, and Sandro Zanetti, eds. 2005. SCHREIBKUGEL IST EIN DING GLEICH MIR: VON EISEN. Schreibszenen im Zeitalter der Typoskripte. München: Wilhelm Fink. Groddeck, Wolfram. 2005. “Robert Walsers ‘Schreibmaschinenbedenklichkeit’.” In SCHREIBKUGEL IST EIN DING GLEICH MIR: VON EISEN. Schreibszenen im Zeitalter der Typoskripte, edited by Davide Giuriato, Martin Stingelin, and Sandro Zanetti, 169–182. München: Wilhelm Fink. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1986. Werke. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1975. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by Thomas Malcolm Knox. 2 Volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1982. Parmenides (Freiburger Vorlesung WS 1942/43). Gesamtausgabe. II. Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1919-1944, Vol. 54, edited by Manfred S. Frings. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. —. 1992. Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1990. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Translated by Michael Mettler, with Chris Cullens. Foreword by David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kunzmann, Robert Walter. 1979. Hundert Jahre Schreibmaschinen im Büro. Geschichte des maschinellen Schreibens, Rinteln: Merkur. Mast, Gerald. 1973. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Schreibmaschinentexte. Edited by Stephan Günzel and Rüdiger Schmidt-Grépaly. 2nd Edition. Weimar: Universitätsverlag Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Panter, Peter (= Kurt Tucholsky). “Darf man tippen?” Vossische Zeitung, 01.01.1931, Nr. 1. Peyrière, Monique, ed. 1994. Machines à écrire. Des claviers et des puces: la traversée du siècle. Paris: Edition Autrement.

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Roussel, Martin. 2009. Matrikel: Zur Haltung des Schreibens in Robert Walsers Mikrographie. Basel/Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld. Stingelin, Martin. Zur Genealogie des Schreibens. Book series. München: Wilhelm Fink. Twain, Mark. 2002. Letters. Vol. 6, 1874–1875. Edited by Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Utz, Peter. 2000. „Digitale Fingerübungen auf traurigen Tasten—eine Fußnote für Schreibhandwerker.“ Gingko, http://www.gingko.ch/ cdrom/Utz. Accessed March 14, 2014. Walser, Robert. 2003. Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet. Mikrogramme 1924–1932. Edited by Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1985. Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben. Edited by Jochen Greven. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wershler-Henry, Darren. 2007. The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. Cornell: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER SIX BLOOMSDAY? ON THE THEORY OF INTERMEDIALITY AND THE PRODUCTION OF PHOTO-ESSAYS AND FILM-ESSAYS CHRISTIAN SINN

In 1982, Canadian artist Michael Snow produced the short film So Is This, which suggests a theory of intermediality by showing a text: A silent film of 45 minutes consisting of single words of this script or score placed on the screen one by one, one after another, for specific lengths of time. Facsimile photos of the original hand-written “script” are printed here. The number written beside each word indicates the number of frames (time on the screen) to be shot of each word, and a space of black between words. Twenty-four frames—one second. Several different strategies were employed on timing words/passages of the film. Image quality changes too, and the situation of an audience reading a film is a special one, not to be duplicated by reading this.1

Snow’s resistance to categorisation leads back to the connotations of the English word ‘essay’, which covers a wide range of meanings, beginning with ‘to assay’ and ‘to weigh’ and going on to ‘to attempt’ and ‘open ended search’; all of these, of course, being not at all the same thing. This comes as a surprise given that the English language is usually said to be more precise than the German philosophical language. While Snow’s short film focuses on the essay as an ‘open ended search’, in this contribution I examine the concept of ‘essay’ in the sense of ‘to assay’. We might thus speak not of assaying the weight of gold but

1

Snow, Collected Writings, 209.

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of arguments, and thus of words, as in the saying of ‘weighing one’s words’.2 Photo-essays and film-essays are visual experiments that use photographic and filmic media to describe and extrapolate abstract concepts and transform them into concrete images. Film-essays thus substitute philosophical thought experiments with pictures.3 Against this backdrop, the key question of this essay is whether photo-essays and filmessays can at all be called essays—essays, in the mentioned sense of ‘weighing one’s words’? I will address this question by discussing various historical and philosophical fragments on essays, which are gathered from various sources in a patchwork fashion, since the most important point about an essay is “not the verdict […] but the process of judging.”4 My essay is an attempt to show that and how my primary sources—the writings of Montaigne, Adorno, and Benjamin—accomplish this process of judging. Ever since the emergence of writing, people have wondered to what extent it is possible to imitate ‘reality’ and especially ‘history’ in written texts. Philosophical and aesthetic history have shown the complexity of such an approach. Still, the link between scriptuality and historiography as suggested by Montaigne proves useful to understand the complex aesthetics of Walter Benjamin—and even sheds some light on the production of photo-, film-, and video-essays. From this point of view the difference between old and new media seems not as significant as the question of their epistemic complexity. In their discussion of old and new media, however, the humanities mainly focused on a technically and materially detailed analysis and historicisation of the components of old and new media. How these components interact to create a certain epistemic complexity is an open question, which this essay addresses. Looking at the discursive tradition of the humanities one might expect that its answer would depend on certain points of transition in history. Yet, as I have shown in Dichten und Denken (2001), certain literary forms that create epistemic complexity recur irrespective of historical changes and we might assume the same for other old and new media. This suggests that the question of how to differentiate between old and new media is insignificant—at least for the purposes of this essay. Looking at the choice of authors and primary sources, the literary style of Montaigne with its characteristic brevity, lightness, and humour stands in stark contrast to the German philosophical prose of Adorno and 2

Alter, “Translating the Essay,” 45. See film theorist Edward Small’s concept of direct theory (Small, Direct Theory). 4 Lukács, Soul and Form, 18. 3

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Benjamin. Yet, despite their different styles, all three of them unveil the limitations of science in their own ways. In the following, I will re-read extracts from the writings of Montaigne, Adorno, and Benjamin with a particular focus on a certain kind of fragmentation that seems crucial for both the authors’ concepts of essay-writing and a contemporary theory of intermediality, as, for instance, suggested by Jens Schröter. Schröter’s thesis on media specificity will help me to argue for a direct impact of text-essays (Montaigne, Adorno, Benjamin) on photo-essays and filmessays. In conclusion, this leads me to the proposition that many properties of what we commonly refer to as new media can be designated as both old and new. This shows that what often seemed irrelevant to the discussion of new media, i.e. old media and their history, rather is closely linked to what is now considered a photo-, film-, and video-essay. This historical background is particularly important when it comes to the question of whether or not images make use of an autonomous language of their own—and whether or not theory depends on language and textual forms.5 In this regard, the emblem is a useful historical and aesthetic paradigm—a 16th and 17th century allegorical picture usually inscribed with a verse presenting a moral lesson. An emblem is a combination of motto (inscription), picture (picture), and moral lesson (subscription). In most cases, the words match the images, but there are also some seemingly contradicting combinations that challenge the interpretational acumen of the recipient. The emblem is not only an example for the possibility of an autonomous language of images but also reflects and comments on it. Historical research thus helps to clear the way for understanding photoessays and film-essays as thinking in images. This does not imply the preference for an autonomous visual medium, but rather critically unveils the general precedence for texts over images. I will illustrate this thesis in the final section of this essay that discusses some examples for photo- and film-essays: Bazon Brock’s photo-essays reflect on perception in the context of images while Jem Cohen’s film-essays encourage thinking in images. Looking at the historical framework and the process of creating essays through the lens of philosophy also allows for addressing some important issues related to the theoretical foundations of photo-, film-, and videoessays: Not only are the older, written, forms of essays closely linked to theoretical insights that already foreshadow the newer, visual forms. Moreover, these older, written, forms of essays find their predecessor in 5

Lethen, Der Schatten des Fotografen.

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the philosophical tradition of Pyrrhonism, documented in Montaigne’s Essays as the foundational concept of essay-writing.

Montaigne: Composing Literary Essays with Pyrrhonist Scepticism In his essay On Idleness (1580) Montaigne suggests that our knowledge is actually based on deceptions. Although we might have imagined that such deceptions would be more sophisticated than those performed by natural language, Montaigne’s essay implies that they are not. He argues that reason depends on natural language. It is this dependence between natural language and complex thinking that makes deceptions unobservable.6 According to Montaigne, we find out more about the nature of such deceptions by examining both spoken and written language. While letters signify the spoken word, in turn, the spoken word signifies the object. And whereas the relation between the spoken word and the object is determined by historical contingency, the relation between the letters and the spoken word reflects this contingency. Montaigne therefore suggests that we can benefit from writing essays as the process of essay-writing allows for a more nuanced awareness of how not only deceptions but many concepts in general are born out of language, reflecting the historical conditions of human life and behaviour.7 Central to Montaigne’s argument is his introduction of the distinction between gaining future orientation versus gaining present orientation in the service of a possible future.8 Both processes of orientation are shaped by reason, which is supposed to create great things through science, technology, and art. However, reason and language are not just anthropological facts but rather historical and medial phenomena. Thus, discussing an essay in Montaigne’s sense as a form of self-awareness through weighing one’s words also means discussing the various historical conditions for composing an essay. In the following, I will show that Montaigne’s approach, based on the writings of the radical sceptical philosopher Pyrrhon of Elis, anticipates the character of many medial phenomena that previously seemed quite modern. Pyrrhon of Elis is Montaigne’s main point of reference in his Essais II, 1. However, for Montaigne Pyrrhon’s concept of universal scepticism not only offers a method for the critical examination of all sciences. In fact 6

Montaigne, Complete Essays. Montaigne, Complete Essays. 8 See particularly part III of the Essais (Montaigne, Complete Essays). 7

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Montaigne extends Pyrrhon’s concept of universal scepticism to the theological claim that man is a fool compared to the true divine.9 This change of perspective indicates the great differences between classical and pre-modern scepticism.10 Despite his adjustments to Pyrrhon’s concept of universal scepticism, Montaigne retained his method of citing pro and contra arguments, which preempts the possibility of drawing any definite conclusions. All arguments are as good as their opposites and this has radical consequences for Montaigne’s definition of an essay. According to Montaigne, it is impossible to define an essay without writing an essay since it is the most complex semiotic form reflecting all other discourses.11 Accordingly, a discussion on the concept of essay-writing should be based on cultural history rather than abstract theories.

Adorno: The Reciprocal Interaction of Concepts in Philosophical Essays Theodor W. Adorno shows how an essay creates a high level of complexity by the “reciprocal interaction of its concepts”.12 In fact, such reciprocity applies to many features of essays and provides a reference point for a wide range of new models for essays in new media—even for describing the imitation of old media by new media. Ultimately, the reciprocal interaction of concepts thus also applies to photo-, film-, and video-essays. Adorno explains the process of “reciprocal interaction” as follows: Not less but more than a definitional procedure, the essay presses for the reciprocal interaction of its concepts in the process of intellectual experience. In such experience, concepts do not form a continuum of operations. Thought does not progress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. The fruitlessness of the thoughts depends on the density of the texture. The thinker does not actually think but rather makes himself an arena for intellectual experience, without unraveling it.13

9

See particularly part II of the Essais (Montaigne, Complete Essays, 361ff). Cf. Horkheimer, Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie, 96–144. 11 Montaigne, Complete Essays, 124ff. 12 Adorno, Notes to Literature, 13. 13 Adorno, Notes to Literature, 13. 10

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This definition of the essay mirrors the theme and poetic style of Henry James’ short story The Figure in the Carpet14, where the reader-narrator struggles to disclose the secret of the elusive master-author Vereker whose work resembles “something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet.”15 Similarly, Adorno’s concept of an essay offers its reader the figure of an implicit author who, in the course of the essay, interweaves the strands of various traditions and, more importantly, keeps this process of weaving visible for the reader, so that the reader is being made conscious of this process. This principle of the reciprocal interaction of concepts that intersect in the figure of an implicit author can also be applied to photo-, film-, and video-essays. The essay is fragmentary, wandering, and does not seek to advance claims of truth as would, for instance, the documentary genre in the case of film. Traditional aesthetics might even claim that films in general aim at creating a certain reality.16 Referring to Lukács, however, Adorno argues that to reach this end would also lead to the end of art, which both philosophers defined by its autonomy. Adorno suggests that even a film with very strong documentary claims will create pictures with distinct aesthetic qualities—for beyond his interest in films, Adorno’s main interest lied with aesthetics. This leads to Walter Benjamin, whose works, in this context, may serve as a link between essay theory and film theory.

Benjamin: Misleading the Recipient with the Essay as Emblematic Form In his Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project, 1927-1940) Benjamin examines the tension between memory—the central theme of his theory of history—and the filming technique of movie collage, which puts a series of short shots or images into a coherent sequence to create a composite picture. To describe the relation between memory and movie collage, Benjamin uses a textual collage of citations, comments, and aphorisms. In contrast to a movie collage, his textual collage does not follow a coherent structure but an alogical form like a dream. He thus encourages the reader of his textual collage to fill ‘the blank spaces in history’ with his imagination. Such, for Benjamin memory is the creative appropriation of

14

See Henry James’ short story The Figure in the Carpet (James 1907-1909). James, Novels and Tales, 240. 16 Nichols, Representing Reality. 15

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history. At the same time, memories are highly permeable as far as historical facts are concerned. Against this backdrop, in his Passagen-Werk Benjamin discusses the difference between his interpretation of dreams and Adorno’s dialectical approach, between philology and philosophy17: There is a wholly unique experience (Erfahrung) of Dialectic. The compelling—the drastic—experience, which refutes everything “gradual” about becoming and shows all seeming “development” to be dialectical reversal, eminently and thoroughly composed, is the awakening from dream. For the dialectical schematism at the core of this magic process, the Chinese have found, in their fairy tales and novellas, the most radical expression. Accordingly, we present the new, the dialectical method of doing history: with the intensity of a dream, to pass through what has been, ib order to experience the present as the waking world to which the dream refers! (And every dream refers to the waking world. Everything previous is to be penetrated historically.)18

Benjamin argues that even in traditional philosophical models, a method of (philological) reading was implied and required. Theory produces knowledge, reading enables experience and judgment. Benjamin is therefore not interested in conveying knowledge but in activating experience. He does not start with an assumption of historical continuity but wants to show how changes in media history—just as the transition from written essays to film—are effects of the structure of collective memory. Benjamin’s theory is based on the observation that certain social systems behave in a way that depends on uncertain initial conditions. What Benjamin shows is that even if the initial conditions of social systems are simple they still produce highly complex behaviour. For Benjamin the essay is a method of reading and interpreting these initial conditions, while Adorno’s concept of the essay makes history irrelevant. Benjamin argues that social complexity should be studied in essays with a filming technique, a collage of memories. In his understanding, film and essay are strongly connected through the combinative method of short shots.19

17

See Benjamin’s letter to Adorno, 9.12.1938 (Benjamin, The Arcades Project). Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 838. 19 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.”. 18

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In Benjamin’s work, this method is part of an emblematic methodology, which, first and foremost, implies that there are no so-called single media. In fact, the development of new media such as film-essays depends on an intermedial constellation first noticed in the emblematic forms of the 16th and 17th century which are of main interest for Benjamin’s work on baroque drama. These emblematic forms encourage the recipient in his search for reason—as conceptual coherence—by misleading him.20 Such misleading seamlessly complies with Benjamin’s combinative method. For, in contrast to Adorno, Benjamin’s argument is not based on the reciprocal interaction of concepts but on the logic of abduction.21 Drawing on Baudelaire, Benjamin criticises Adorno’s notion of the essay as a concept that reifies cognition under the pretence of objectivity, while the process of cognition is dynamic and contingent.22 In contrast to the syllogisms of the Aristotelian logic, the logic of abduction tackles presumptions that are silently taken for granted with conceptual changes and displacements.23 It uses emblematic syllogisms to encourage recipients to create evidence by abducting general theses and empirical examples. One single emblematic form hence links a great variety of general theses and empirical examples. It is therefore only with the help of the imagination that emblems can be translated into syllogisms. Each emblematic form thus also asks why we read and interpret it in one manner and not another. Consequently, the emblem, by definition, includes the possibility of misreading and the contingency of its meaning. Like mental experiments emblems create and structure concepts. It is therefore not surprising that Benjamin discusses the epistemic role of emblematics in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928). Here he applies emblematics to the concept of the essay and shows how this new kind of essay uses gaps and fragments in history to reconstruct the actual political situation24—which Adorno criticises with the reciprocal interaction of philosophical concepts.

20

Sinn, “Noli altum sapere”. Cf. Wirth, “Die Phantasie des Neuen als Abduktion”. 22 Cf. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 239: “‘Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable.[…]’ Baudelaire, L’art romantique (Paris), p. 70.” 23 Althaus, Epigrammatisches Barock, 3–48. 24 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 28, 92, 165, 184. 21

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Jens Schröter’s Typology of Intermediality Visual art, especially in the context of emblematics, may be the realm of what Hans Blumenberg called a “Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit”, a theory of the non-terminological—the condition of philosophical concepts, according to Blumenberg.25 Yet, while each theoretical determination operates with language as speech or text26, each medium needs other media for its theoretical determination.27 Until the end of the last century, media theory mainly focused on the analysis of singular or structurally comparable media. During the late 1990s, however, the upcoming theory of intermediality began to emphasise the importance of relations between seemingly arbitrary media and argued that such relations are common in all media.28 Jens Schröter offers a useful typology of intermediality that not only traces the discursive tradition of intermediality in the history of media, but also distinguishes four kinds of intermediality, based on epistemological complexity. Schröter’s systematic approach helps to clear the way for more accurate future readings of the history of media in general, and photo- and film-essays in particular: 1. “Synthetic intermediality” designates the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk where the boundaries between the arts and the differences between art and life are suspended as, for example, in Richard Wagner’s concept of opera. The effects of synthetic intermediality are diverse: while it may certainly overwhelm the recipient, it may also encourage critical thinking by disrupting automatic forms of perception.29 2. “Formal” or “transmedial intermediality” analyses different media and provides objective evidence by comparing their common structures like fictionality, rhythmicity, seriality, and narration, or differences in terms of homogeneity/heterogeneity, repetition/singularity, story/plot, fabula/sujet etc.30 In the perspective of formal intermediality, the analysed structures are autonomous, and only, if at all, partially dependent on medial bases. In contrast to synthetic intermediality, formal intermediality understands intermediality not as a given fact but as an activity: The scholar constructs or reconstructs a set of artistic techniques, thus 25

Cf. Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit, 3. Cf. Pantenburg, Film als Theorie, 23. 27 Cf. McLuhan, Understanding Media; Schröter, Intermedialität. 28 Schröter, Intermedialität. 29 Schröter, Intermedialität, 130–135. 30 Schröter, Intermedialität, 136–143. 26

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abstracting from the specific mediality—and disregarding McLuhan’s famous notion that “the medium is the message” as it is the “medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.”31 3. “Transformational intermediality” criticises the scientific approach to intermediality, i.e. formal intermediality, by emphasising the identity of medium and message, which can also be understood as the reflection of one medium through another. For example, the performance of telling is not independent from its media. In contrast to the constructive thesis of formal intermediality, transformational intermediality assumes that the relation of different media is the only relation that matters. As regards the holistic thesis of synthetic intermediality, transformational intermediality points to the many questions that this first form of intermediality leaves unanswered: How for example are the intricate patterns of reflection in art produced? What is the basic mechanism that allows art to develop complexity?32 4. “Ontological intermediality” radicalises the media-specific thesis of transformational intermediality. Relations between media are seen as a priori conditions giving rise to the possibility of scientific terms and definitions, i.e. intermediality refers to the relation between media previous to their scholarly analysis.33 The synthetic, formal, transformational, and ontological type of intermediality construct a hierarchy in which the ontological type as the supreme form reflects the fact that there are no single media and that all media refer to each other in specific ways. From this perspective it makes no sense to speak of words without pictures, or vice versa. The emblematic forms of the 16th and 17th century provide historic evidence to this thesis. The disintegration of the relation between words and pictures starts only at the beginning of the 18th century.34 The following example of Bazon Brock’s photo-essays sheds light on this disintegration in the reflection of perception in the context of images.

Thinking in Images: Bazon Brock’s Photo-Essays and Jem Cohen’s Film-Essays In his photo-essays Bazon Brock intended to explore how emblematic forms can be used as a tool to analyse the manipulation of social behaviour 31

McLuhan, Understanding Media, 9. Schröter, Intermedialität, 144–146. 33 Schröter, Intermedialität, 146–150. 34 Warncke, Symbol, Emblem, Allegorie. 32

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and individual attitudes by strategies that he called ‘Sozio-Design.’35 He offered the photo-essays in an analogue and a digital version that differed considerably: While the book is based on the emblematic hierarchical structure of inscriptio, picture, and subscription, the Internet version presents an incoherent linking of words and images. Both versions systematically present no theory. They stage theory as performance. In both versions of his photo-essays Brock investigates various areas of society to attack what we believe is the conventional wisdom about them. Yet when we study them in the context of emblematics we see that large parts of this wisdom could not be correct. While traditional methods avoid reflecting the epistemological conditions of perception, Brock’s examples show that illustrations as the means of textual deconstruction and lines of text as image de(con)struction are two sides of a single intermedial relation. In other words: media practice shows the possibility of thinking in images in the sense of a ‘direct’ theory, i.e. the act of reflexive, contemplating perception in relation to a context of images. To understand this thinking in images often involves a remarkable amount of scholarly work. It is not enough to be able to (re-)produce intermedial constellations, rather, it is necessary to develop a sufficiently broad and deep social and aesthetic understanding to be able to reflect a social situation as an aesthetic feature. As Schröter and Brock show, this requires experience in all sorts of different areas in society and aesthetics. First and foremost, however, it requires accepting that there is no direct access to a so-called reality. The experience of and thinking about reality depend on medial operations. Both, the scholarly argumentation of Schröter and the artistic practice of Brock show, that the relations between media, i.e. intermediallity, precede any single medium and any scientific analysis. Intermediality is therefore inherent to all our perception and knowledge. The theory of intermediality asks what happens if the established relation between word and image is challenged through the transformation of media such as in Brock’s photoessay. Schröter’s notion of intermediality helps to address this question, particularly his distinction between formal and transformational intermediality: formal intermediality compares two media in terms of a common structure such as rhythm whereas transformational intermediality reflects specific differences in media. An important characteristic of films is their potential for self-reflection through intermedial references. Jem Cohen’s film Lost Book Found (USA 35

Brock, Sozio-Design.

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1996) for instance comments on the construction of his film-essay by citing a forgotten notebook. At the same time, the camera captures not the view of objects but rather changes its position and orientation. And if there is a plot, it consists in the observations of a nameless narrator, a pushcart vendor in New York: I made a film sparked by memories of being a pushcart vendor and by experiencing New York at street level, but what you see on the street is often determined by economics, so even a shot of pile of cardboard boxes has another, hidden meaning.36

If there is a fundamental key to Cohen’s film-essay it is the idea that the ephemeral life of human beings is not to be reflected on in abstract philosophical concepts but has to be experienced visually. To achieve this, Cohen’s film-essay composes images of the fragmented human existence in a series of over one hundred non- or rather omni-directional shots. In every shot the forgotten notebook determines the filmed places and objects, which has to be constructed by the viewer of the film-essay. As the film progresses, the narrator disappears giving way to a radically modern understanding of the medium film, which in a way encourages the audience to assume the role of the omnipotent author.

On the Asynchrony of Old and New Media In his Bloom-Zeitung Brock parodises the German daily tabloid BildZeitung and suggests to undermine the dominance of textual forms of thinking—even in the context of mass media. Similarly, in his own critique of the Bild-Zeitung, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, 1975), Heinrich Böll shows Katharina’s meta-textual reflection of the colourful plan of the lines and installations of the high rise.37 These examples not only criticise the rhetoric of mass media but also deconstruct the implied author by staging the theory of intermediality as performance—as Joyce and Beckett have done long before. This suggests that, in a way, all media at times use strategies of this kind. At the same time, we should not forget about the specific historical relations between form and information and the fact that the human history of terms and ideas is full of conflict and contingency. This implies an asynchrony of old and new media: old media are not replaced by new media, but rather the form of an old medium can be the 36 37

Cohen, Punk Planet, 178. Böll, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, 85.

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informational value of a new medium, and, vice versa, the informational value of an old medium can be the form of a new medium. Looking at the six examples for concepts of essays examined in this essay (Montaigne, Adorno, Benjamin, Schröter, Brock, Cohen), we can observe a recurring dynamic constellation of different historical media and contexts. Also, the common differentiation between ‘old’ media, i.e. texts, and ‘new’ media in the sense of photo, film, and video turns out to be misleading. Rather, the examples of photo- and film-essays show that the what Schröter calls “transformational intermediality”, the reflection of the specificity of a medium through another, resembles the process of reflection in written essays.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. Notes to Literature. Vol. 1. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Shierry W. Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press. Alter, Nora M. 2003. “Memory Essays.” In Stuff it. The video essay in the digital age, edited by Ursula Biemann, 12–23. Zürich: Edition Voldemeer. —. 2007 .“Translating the Essay into Film and Installation.” Journal of Visual Culture 6:44–57. http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/ 6/1/44. Accessed April 17, 2015. Althaus, Thomas. 1996. Epigrammatisches Barock. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Auster, Paul. 1987. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber & Faber. Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1927-1940]. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. —. 1977 [1928]. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: NLB. Blumenberg, Hans. 2007. Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit. Aus dem Nachlass. Edited by Anselm Haverkamp. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Böll, Heinrich. 2007. Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum. München: dtv. Brock, Bazon. 2004. Bloom-Zeitung. 8. April 1963. Sonderdruck für die Joyce-Leser von Zweitausendeins. Anlässlich des 100. Bloomsdays am 16. Juni 2004. Original Faksimile. Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins.

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—. 1986. “Sozio-Design. Zur Frage der Gestaltbarkeit von Lebensformen.“ In Bazon Brock Ästhetik gegen erzwungene Unmittelbarkeit. Die Gottsucherbande. Schriften 1978-1986, edited by Nicola von Velsen, 338–334. Köln: Du Mont. http://www.bazonbrock.de/werke/detail/?id =38§id=580#sect. Accessed February 26, 2013. Cohen, Jem. 2008. Punk Planet. The Collected Interviews. Edited by Daniel Sinker. 174–181. New York: Akashic. Horkheimer, Max. 1971 [1930]. Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie. Hegel und das Problem der Metaphysik. Montaigne und die Funktion der Skepsis. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. James, Henry. 1907-1909. The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Vol. 15. New York: Scribner; London: Macmillan. Kramer, Sven, and Thomas Tode, eds. 2011. Der Essayfilm: Ästhetik und Aktualität. Konstanz: Uvk. Lethen, Helmut. 2014. Der Schatten des Fotografen. Berlin: Rowohlt. Lukács, Georg. 1974. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw Hill. Montaigne, Michel E. de. 1958 [1580/88]. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Translated by Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pantenburg, Volker. 2006. Film als Theorie. Bildforschung bei Harun Farocki und Jean-Luc Godard. Bielefeld: transcript. Plante, Mike. 1999. “Film In Social Context. Reading for class #8: Jem Cohen.” http://socialcontextfilm.blogspot.ch/2011/02/reading-forclass-8-jem-cohen.html. Accessed February 26, 2014. Plotinus. 1984. Ennead V. Translated by Arthur H. Armstrong. Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library. Richter, Hans. 1993 [1940]. “Der Filmessay. Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms.” In Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte zum essayistischen Film, edited by Christa Blümlinger and Constantin Wulff. Wien: Sonderzahl. Schröter, Jens. 1998. “Intermedialität. Facetten und Probleme eines aktuellen medienwissenschaftlichen Begriffs.“ montage/av. Zeitschrift für Theorie & Geschichte audiovisueller Kommunikation 7:129–154. http://www.montage-av.de/a_1998_2_7.html. Accessed April 17. 2015.

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Sinn, Christian. 2014. “Noli altum sapere. Anmerkungen zur emblematischen Form metaphilosophischer Sentenzen.” In Sentenz in der Literatur, edited by Alice Staskova and Simon Zeisberg, 68–88. Göttingen: Wallstein. —. 2001. Dichten und Denken. Entwurf einer Grundlegung der Entdeckungslogik in den exakten und “schönen” Wissenschaften. Aachen: Shaker. Small, Edward M. 1994. Direct Theory: Experimental Film/Video as Major Genre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Snow, Michael. 1994. The Collected Writings of Michael Snow. With a foreword by Louise Dompierre. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Warncke, Carsten Peter. 2005. Symbol, Emblem, Allegorie. Die zweite Sprache der Bilder. Köln: Deubner. Wirth, Uwe. 2003. “Die Phantasie des Neuen als Abduktion.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 77:591–618.



CHAPTER SEVEN SPEAKING UP IN THE AGE OF MEDIA CONVERGENCE: PATRICK NEATE’S BABEL (2010) AND PLAN B’S ILL MANORS (2012) CHRISTOPH REINFANDT

So even as I wrote this I knew there was only one solution To stop writing and notice To stop watching and see the system To stop speaking and listen —Patrick Neate, Babel I am the narrator The voice that guides the blind Following not with your ears but your mind And allow me to take you back and forth through time To explain the significance of things you may think are insignificant now But won’t … farther down the line! —Plan B, “I am the Narrator”

There is an urgency to the two voices printed above. They want to make the reader aware of where the world stands, they insist on the necessity of making the reader see the significance of things. Only the first of the voices, however, actually reached me in printed form, i.e. the Oberon Modern Plays edition of Patrick Neate’s rant Babel (2010). The other one came to me through the headphones of my iPod while listening to Plan B’s album iLL Manors (2012). Why did the voices reach me in particular? Because I have a history with both ‘speakers’, having enjoyed their previous work in my spare time and then ending up publishing academic



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papers on them. 1 All things considered, this is a highly unlikely constellation, but there you have it: voices are speaking to you in all kinds of media formats, and how seriously you are going to take them or how strongly you will let yourself be affected by them depends on the moment and context of their occurrence. Or, as Henry Jenkins memorably put it in 2006: Welcome to convergence culture, where the old and the new media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.2

In this essay I will tackle the unpredictability of convergence culture from the producer’s point of view: How can I make myself heard if I feel the urge to speak up for, against or about something? As opposed to the qualified enthusiasm about participation and spreadability expressed by Henry Jenkins and others,3 I will adopt a spoilsport’s position by following German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s counterintuitive hint that successful communication actually becomes less likely when the opportunities and occasions for communication proliferate in the course of media history.4 Luhmann formulated his argument only against the backdrop of the emergence of writing and print, which supplemented face-to-face interaction with more occasions for mediated communication in reaction to written or printed texts. If this is the case, then the age of media convergence should all but prohibit successful communication and make the position of the ‘speaker’, author or media producer much more precarious than it used to be. But then, as Luhmann’s work shows, the increasing “improbability of communication” has been counterbalanced by social and cultural differentiation, which in turn led to the emergence of what Luhmann calls “success media” of communication.5 As Niklas Luhmann’s media theory has not been widely received and discussed in media studies circles, the first section of this essay will give a brief outline of his basic assumptions and discuss the possible significance of his ‘improbability of communication’-thesis for an inquiry into the possibilities and limitations of ‘speaking positions’ in convergence culture. 1

Cf. Reinfandt “White Man Tells the Blues” and “Greeting from Forest Gate”. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 259–260. 3 Cf. Jenkins, Convergence Culture; Jenkins, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers and Jenkins, Textual Poachers as well as Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media. 4 Cf. Luhmann, “The Improbability of Communication”. 5 Luhmann, “The Improbability of Communication,” and Luhmann, Theory of Society, 120–123. 2



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The second and third sections will then introduce two instances where voices have entered convergence culture in different media formats: Early versions of Babel, written by established novelist Patrick Neate, seem to have their origins in much shorter pieces of performance poetry in the context of Neate’s involvement in poetry and book slams.6 A longer version was then commissioned by Channel 4 as the basis for a twentyfive minute TV version shown in 2005, which has been available in four instalments on YouTube since 2007 (for URLs see Neate 2005). On television it was watched by avant-garde choreographers Liam Steel and Rob Tannion (also known as Stan Won’t Dance), who decided to turn it into a sixty-minute dance performance, which was touring successfully throughout the UK in 2010 but was, again, never issued on DVD or any other medium beyond the original performances (and even YouTube provides only the briefest of fragments in very poor quality). Success in the theatre however, led to the book publication of the text in the Oberon Modern Plays series later that year. iLL Manors, on the other hand, is the title of a feature film written and directed by Ben Drew (also known as Plan B). It marks his debut as a director. The film’s premiere took place at the Empire Cinema on London’s Leicester Square on May 30, 2012. It was subsequently released to cinemas in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and the Netherlands, and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Festival do Rio in September 2012. A DVD was made available in the UK in October of that year.7 Central to the film’s plot are six hip hop tracks, which were also released on Plan B’s album of the same title in July 2012. Though partly marketed as an Original Soundtrack Album the CD nevertheless contains five additional titles and stands on its own as the third album by Plan B, following in the footsteps of his quite aggressive hip hop debut Who Needs Actions When You Got Words (2006) and his mainstream mega-success as a retro-soul crooner with The Defamation of Strickland Banks (2010). What makes these examples so interesting for our current purpose is that in both cases convergence culture has opened up opportunities for the speakers’ authority and cultural capital to move from one cultural sphere 6

Neate is on record on the Internet as one of the inventors and founders of “Book Slam: London’s Best Literary Club Night” (cf. http://www.bookslam.com/, last accessed March 7, 2014), which has been running successfully for years. There is, alas, no trace of Babel on the Book Slam website, and Neate’s author website has been, as I will describe later, defunct for a while by now. 7 Plan B, iLL Manors: A Ben Drew Film. In Germany the film was only released on DVD under the title Ill Manors. Stadt der Gewalt in February 2014.



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to another: in Patrick Neate’s case from literature to television, the Internet (YouTube) and dance theatre, in Plan B’s case from hip hop to mainstream pop and on to feature film-making. How does this work? Did it work? And what can we learn about media convergence and the metamorphoses of (new) media from these examples? These are the questions that the present essay will discuss.

The Improbability of Communication Why should communication be improbable, especially when there is a widely shared feeling that we are living in “the age of communications overload”? 8 Niklas Luhmann arrives at his thesis by simply not taking communication for granted “despite the fact >that@ we experience and practice it every day of our lives and would not exist without it.”9 Instead, he asks “how communication is possible at all”10 given that (at least) three improbabilities can be identified: At the zero point of evolution, it is, first of all, improbable that ego understands what alter means, given that their bodies and minds are separate and individual. Only in context can meaning be understood, and context is, initially, supplied by one’s own perceptual field and memory. Furthermore, understanding always includes misunderstanding, and if one does not add on presuppositions, the component of misunderstanding becomes so great that the continuation of communication becomes improbable >…@ The second improbability refers to reaching the addressee. It is improbable for communication to reach more persons than are present in a concrete situation >…@ The problem lies in spatial and temporal extension >…@ The third improbability is success. Even if a communication is understood by the person it reaches, this does not guarantee that it is also accepted and followed.11

What counters these improbabilities are media of all kinds, which assume an increasingly central position in Luhmann’s work. Beginning with an abstract distinction between medium and form which provides the

8

Cf. Harper, Texture. Luhmann, “The Improbability of Communication,” 87. 10 Luhmann “The Improbability of Communication,” 87. 11 Luhmann, Social Systems, 158; emphasis in the original. 9



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foundation for a multi-layered expansion of the media concept,12 Luhmann discusses meaning (Sinn) as the foundational medium of all social and psychic systems. 13 On this basis, language emerges as the interface between meaning and media in a more conventional sense, and Luhmann goes on to distinguish ‘dissemination media’ (writing, printing, electronic media) from symbolically generalised ‘success media’ which are countering the improbability of communication that comes with increasing dissemination by utilising the differentiation of communicative spheres that comes with the functional differentiation of modern society. While meaning and language address the problems implied by the first improbability of communication, ‘dissemination media’ actually solve the problems implied by the second improbability, but they do so at the cost of intensifying the third through the sheer proliferation of occasions and opportunities for communication provided by media texts of all kinds. So while it becomes potentially easier ‘for a communication to reach a person’, the likelihood that this person ‘accepts and follows’ it dwindles given the innumerable interpellations by texts (in the broadest sense of the term) that a person has to field. In the course of the evolution of modern culture, this is in turn counteracted by communicative specialisation along the lines established by functional differentiation: social systems, Luhmann argues, superimpose success media on the dissemination media which, in spite of their success in overcoming the second improbability, create the communications overload that intensifies the third. These success media foster connectivity within the systems by establishing a distinct symbolically generalised horizon of meaning and a specific binary code for each system. In some cases, these success media are not textual, such as, for example and most prominently, money as the medium which facilitates the continuous negotiation of +/– ownership in the economic 12

Cf. Wellbery, who sees this as a major advantage of Luhmann’s media theory: “From the perspective of systems theory >…@ the terms medium and form are relative; what counts as a medium will depend entirely on the plane of analysis selected. On this model, media studies is free to investigate meanings while nonetheless remaining true to itself, and the theoretical alternatives of Platonism and materialism can both be consigned to the junk heap of outmoded thought.” (Wellbery, “Systems,” 302; emphases in the original). 13 Cf. Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vol. 1, 18–28. While ‘meaning’ seems to have established itself as the official translation of Sinn, the closeness of the original German concept to the English phrase ‘making sense’ is so strong that ‘sense’ can also occasionally be found in English translations or discussions of Luhmann in spite of the fact that it does not always make sense given the predominant English meanings of ‘sense’. See for example Moeller, Luhmann Explained, 225 in his otherwise excellent introduction.



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system. In others they are: publications such as this essay, for example, facilitate the continuous communicative negotiation of +/– truth in the science system, and readers who are reading this sentence most likely do so because certain markers of academic interest and respectability (the titles of the volume and the chapter, the publisher, the reputation of editors and author, whatever) have led them here. Ideally their reading of this essay should foster connectivity in the science system by provoking them to publish academically in reaction to it themselves. Similarly, literature partakes in the mode of communication that Luhmann has described for the art system:14 works of art facilitate the continuous negotiation of +/– beauty, interestingness, aptness or whatever symbolic preference value one would want to propose for modern art and literature.15 So how does this differentiation of communicative modes and spheres respond to the de-differentiation that comes with the digitally boosted media convergence of recent years?16 The answer is: it depends. As the science system with its rigid specialisation makes sure that participation is largely confined to professionals who both read and write academic publications, margins of interaction with the general public (on interactive websites, for example) can be policed, and “disintermediation”17 through open access is more of a problem for academic publishers afraid of losing their cash cow and only occasionally for an academic author in terms of the prestige (and sometimes even financial success) of a book. However, the much fuzzier fields of art, music, literature and popular culture, which were traditionally characterised by audiences who did not actively produce works, seem to be in greater disarray due to the increasingly (inter-) active modes of reception and seemingly barrier-free possibilities of going public with whatever creative undertakings on the Internet. With digital copying, mechanical reproduction or reproducibility in Walter Benjamin’s sense has reached its technological and democratic apotheosis, with as yet

14

Cf. Luhmann, Art as a Social System. ‘Works of art’ may or may not be textual in the narrower sense. When communicated in the art system or the literary system textual and non-textual works of art share a similar horizon of concerns (representational vs. nonrepresentational, education vs. entertainment, affirmation vs. subversion etc.). 16 While de-differentiation does not figure prominently in Luhmann’s theory of modernity, it has begun to feature in more recent discussions of his work (cf., for example, Borch, Niklas Luhmann, 121–123). On the implications of Luhmann’s Theory of Society for an assessment of the emerging computer culture cf. Baecker, “Niklas Luhmann in the Society of the Computer”. 17 Cf. Bhaskar, The Content Machine, 61–70. 15



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unforeseeable consequences for the publishing industry,18 and a persistent erosion of the gatekeeping functions which are necessary if the ‘work of art’ is to maintain the promise of relevance on which its function as a symbolically generalised medium of communication is based. What is more, the seemingly clear-cut boundaries between art and popular culture established on Romantic and modernist grounds seem to erode, too, in the face of a clash between a (post-)modernist production aesthetics based on criteria of formal complexity on the one hand and persistently Romantic reception co-ordinates based on more general registers of performativity on the other. ‘Works’ in both registers frequently address similar concerns or move from a media format that suggests a preferred connectivity in the art or literature system towards a media format that indicates a less specific mass media or popular culture context as in the examples to be discussed presently. 19 There are, of course, innumerable openings for ‘speaking up’ in this partly de-differentiated sphere of communication—in fact, more and with greater reach than ever before—but it is doubtful whether this quantitative increase will automatically increase the chances for “meaningful participation” either in Jenkins, Ford and Green’s sense of “creating value and meaning in a networked culture”20 or in Luhmann’s less emphatic, merely functional sense of fostering connectivity in a particular system—or if not that, then at least in the undifferentiated sphere of general social communication and interaction that surrounds the functionally differentiated subsystems of modern society.21

“We are living in Babel. Did you know that?” In the television version of Patrick Neate’s Babel, the (original) act of speaking up in the institutional framework of a poetry slam figures prominently as a framing device: On a black screen the face of a 18

For the most recent and exhaustive stocktakings see Thompson, Merchants of Culture, 313–376, Bhaskar, The Content Machine, 41–77 and Hall, The Business of Digital Publishing. 19 In Luhmann’s understanding, the mass media mark the culmination point and convergence of dissemination media, establishing the fully-fledged virtual reality of modernity. As he puts it in the notorious opening sentence of The Reality of the Mass Media: “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media” (Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, 1). 20 As the subtitle of Jenkins, Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, suggests; on “meaningful participation” cf. 153–194. 21 Cf. Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vol. 2, 131–140 on “Interaction and Society”.



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recognisably black announcer appears behind the contours of a microphone, both dimly lit from beneath. He announces the speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, I like to welcome to the stage tonight poet, writer, and novelist, and self-appointed cultural critic (cause there really isn’t any other kind)—would you please make some real noise for Mr Patrick Neate!22

Then the face of Neate himself appears behind the microphone and it takes him quite a while to fully focus himself to shouts of encouragement from the audience, leaving enough time for the title credit to appear, which provides the following explanation: babel. noun. a confused noise made by a number of voices ORIGIN from the Tower of Babel, where God confused the languages of the builders. (Genesis, 11: 1–9).23

After this opening, the film leaves the original performance situation of the text behind and begins to depict days in the life of the speaker who is time and again woken by his alarm clock, goes through the motions of preparing for the day and finally leaves his flat for seemingly random walks as well as occasional tube and taxi rides in London. Parallel to the visuals, the free form poetry of Babel with its flexible and frequently virtuosic and surprising insistence on rhyme and rhythm is continuously railing against the abuse and misuse of language in contemporary Britain in terms of commodification, racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, violence, hypocrisy, and other grievances. After an initial voiceover that clearly continues the rant that was about to be forthcoming on the poetry slam, the words are for long stretches taken over by the character Patrick Neate in the film. Occasionally, however, Neate gives way to a variety of other characters such as an elderly gentleman beggar dressed in coat and hat whom he meets repeatedly in tube stations and on the streets (Part 1, Part 3), a black woman, perhaps a teacher, with a bunch of black girls, a black friend who visits Neate in his flat and contributes to the writing process (Part 2), another black man whom Neate meats in the streets and with whom he shares a virtuoso rap based on brand names (Part 3)24, and a 22

Neate, Babel, 2005, Part 1, 0:00–0:26. Neate, Babel, 2005, Part 1, 1:04. The book version (Neate, Babel, 2010, front cover, title page, epigraph to text on p. 19) omits the explicit reference to the biblical origin. 24 This culminates in “Lycos we’ve gone Microsoft / Can’t you Intel? / Stuck in our Microsoft Office / At our Microsoft Works / And our only Outlook Express is 23



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number of liberal friends with whom he shares a meal (Part 4).25 At the end of the film Neate enters the location of the poetry slam, walks up to the microphone and speaks the final words of the text: The tower of Babel is here / It stretches above us and pierces the sky / And we have to notice now / Or when it collapses we’ll be left asking … // How? / What happened? / And, above all, why?26

Only here does the text of the film fully coincide with the printed version published later, while the thematic foci have come in a seemingly random order suggested by Neate’s chance encounters in the streets of London. This general impression of uncontrollable randomness is supported by the rapid montage of material from a handheld (mobile?) camera ranging from close-ups of speakers and random details to long shots of the city landscape at strange angles supplemented with closed circuit television footage as well as repeated motifs of tunnels, slamming doors and voices through telephones. At the end, the visuals actually continue after the last words have been spoken with the alarm clock going off once more, but Neate is no longer able or willing to get up to face the day.27 This sense of futility is supported by a joke which appears exclusively in the TV version: When Neate is visited by his black friend (who may actually be the announcer at the poetry slam opening the film), they proceed to work on the text of Babel together. After his friend has come up with some particularly punchy lines (“It’s not important what you say / But to say it long and loud / WMD—Words of Mass Distraction / Doesn’t it make you proud?”)28 Neate answers: “Ok. We’re gonna go to Part 2. But first: Break for Ads. >…@ Someone’s gotta pay for this stuff.”29 And when his buddy looks at him in exasperation, he keeps it up for a moment and then breaks

 from our Windows NT / Yahoo! / There is no Netscape” (Neate, Babel, 2005, Part 3, 1:16–1:31). In the printed version, this is updated and expanded with a succinct punchline: “>…@ / And our only Outlook Express is from our Windows 7 / Yahoo! We broadband of brothers! We podcast of / thousands! We Internet Explorers on Safari who are iPhone / app to wikithis and wikithat and Twitter the hope that / information might save us … / But there is no Netscape now that they’ve got us by the / Googles!” (Neate, Babel, 2010, 37). 25 Here, a climax is marked by the clinging of classes and voices exclaiming “Cheers!” after climate change is mentioned in the poem (Neate, Babel, 2005 Part 4, 1:42–1:45). 26 Neate, Babel, 2005 Part 4, 4:54–5:11. See also Neate, Babel, 2010, 54. 27 Neate, Babel, 2005 Part 4, 5:13–5:32. 28 Neate, Babel, 2005 Part 2, 4:53–5:03. 29 Neate, Babel, 2005 Part 2, 5:17–5:42.



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up laughing. 30 While this scene positions Babel vis-à-vis the fully commercialised world it lampoons without too much hope of success, a second TV-specific addition links Babel to the realms of history and cultural criticism: The black teacher is engaged in dialogue with her pupils who reproduce soundbite messages and begin to trade quotations identified in response to the teacher’s question “Who said that?” to be by Napoleon Bonaparte and George Orwell. 31 The last quotation brought forth by a pupil is “We’re living in Babel,” and in response to the question “Who said that?” the pupils all shout “He did!” pointing at Neate.32 Here, the text claims its historical, political or critical relevance in a move which seems as precarious as its relation to the commercial world. The printed text, on the other hand, transforms the TV version’s insistence on orality and polyphony (of the poetry slam performance, of Neate speaking to himself and others, of dialogues and phone calls) into something altogether more focused and abstract. After opening with the line “We are living in Babel. Did you know that?” the text oscillates between the speaking ‘I’ and the addressed ‘you’ (“I ask you this”) on the one hand and an assumed complicity encapsulated in a persistent ‘we’ on the other (“We speak one language,” “We hardly use words anymore”).33 While generally maintaining the impression of randomness, the printed text is more clearly focused upon a conclusion or even solution at its end, and here the authority is actually handed over to the individual reader in the passage quoted as an epigraph to this essay, which is preceded by “So / What do we do? / Is the only solution revolution?”34. The answer to this question (“No”) leads Babel into an insistent plea for heightened awareness centred around the triad of ‘notice’, ‘see’, and ‘listen’, which is repeated backwards thrice with individual commentary for each injunction 30

It is interesting to note that the ‘Words of Mass Distraction’ are still intact in the printed text (Neate, Babel, 2010, 43) but become ‘Words of Mass Destruction’ on the back cover of the book, thus robbing the allusion of its subtlety in linking the topic of Babel to early 21st-century Anglo-American politics. 31 “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter / What do you think? Yes? / One man’s politician is another man’s terrorist / Good. Get it off your chest >…@ History is just a lie that nobody can contest / Who said that? / Napoleon / During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act / Who said that? / George Orwell” (Neate, Babel, 2005 Part 2, 1:45–2:07; see also Neate, Babel, 2010, 35). 32 Cf. Neate, Babel, 2005 Part 2, 2:08–2:15. 33 All quotations are from the very first page of Babel (Neate, Babel, 2010, 21; the text is prefaced with material on “Stan Won’t Dance” and an Introduction by Liam Steele). 34 Neate Babel, 2010, 52.



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and then once more in the original sequence before the final words with their insistence on “we have to notice now” close the piece. 35 But this enlightenment impulse directed at the individual remains sceptical given the complete arbitrariness of the culture that is going to receive it36 and the reduced likelihood of anybody heeding the call at all given the overdose that comes with the new media, as the text itself points out earlier in a passage reminiscent of Luhmann’s improbability-thesis: So we’re free to choose to represent ourselves on blogs / Or forums / Even demonstrations / But we live in a nation where freedom of speech / Now means the freedom to be ignored.37

This scepticism seems fully justified in view of the subsequent reception of Babel, which, in both the television and the book format, sunk without much of a trace: All in all, YouTube registered some 160.000 hits for all four parts between 200738 and now, and there is no substantial review of the book whatsoever anywhere. And while the Stan Won’t Dance production at least received generally positive reviews, it does not seem to have made any lasting impact: Neither did the performances (or at least substantial excerpts from them) find their way on to YouTube nor were they issued on DVD.39 In fact, the crossover from literature to new media has turned out to be a dead end for Neate in spite of his early enthusiasm. Even his quite inspired idea to produce a provocative video clip in which a gang of rappers kidnap the Queen to the sounds of a hip hop version of “Jerusalem” (with which a guy called Nobody has a hit in Neate’s 2009 novel of the same title) bombed completely, 40 and afterwards Neate 35

Cf. Neate, Babel, 2010, 52–54. Cf. Neate, Babel, 2010, 44: “And even creativity is now commercially specific / With a novel, piece of art, or song / No more than a list of brands / >…@ / And critics >…@ / Claim it’s clever, relevant, postmodern / In the way it draws attention to convention by the very / invention of its absence—/ Suckers!” 37 Neate, Babel, 2010, 38. See also: “We know that information’s everything, information is the / key / But what we need to know about information is it’s quality / not quantity / And quality describes the message not the medium of / transmission” (48). 38 For details cf. footnote 59, below. 39 For reviews of the dance performances see, for example, Wilkinson, “Babel,” Watson, “Babel Is Brilliantly Organized Chaos,” and Roy, “Stan Won’t Dance”. 40 Cf. Neate, “Penguin Books – Jerusalem – Patrick Neate”. By the time of writing (early March 2014), the version available on YouTube had a mere 222 (!) hits. The novel Jerusalem, let that be stated here, is actually a brilliant take on contemporary Britain which should have been much more successful. 36



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retreated from the brave new world of the new media on which he had for a while maintained a quite active profile. When you go to patrickneate.com these days (i.e. March 2015), you will get the following ‘handwritten’ notice: This is the website of writer, >sic@ Patrick Neate—me. Sadly I’ve long since dropped my public persona down the back of the radiator and I can’t get it out. Besides, it’s probably starting to smell and I’ve got work to do. If you want to find out about me, why not use Google. I believe the Internet is probably a more reliable source of information about me than I am. If you want to contact me, e-mail’s fine—[email protected]. Thanks X.

“Let’s all go on an urban safari” This kind of neglect has been unknown to Ben Drew ever since his phenomenal international success as Plan B with the album The Defamation of Strickland Banks (2010), and it is to his great credit that he did not take the soft option of following this up with more retro-soul crooning but turned to filmmaking instead after earlier attempts had met with some success.41 iLL Manors (the film) opens with the main character Aaron (Riz Ahmed) watching some TV documentary on neglected children before a voiceover narrator (for those familiar with his work clearly recognisable as Plan B) addresses the audience: Are you sitting comfortably? Then put your seatbelts on cause you’re in for a harrowing ride. Cause this is Ill Manors where dark shit goes on at night,42

followed by the passage quoted as an epigraph to this essay (“I am the narrator …”). This is in turn followed by the opening credits over a montage of sped-up footage from the setting of the film in East London as well as various characters of the film engaged in typical actions (drugs,

41

See the short film Bizness Women (2006), which was produced for a film festival at very short notice and then shown on Channel 4 (just like Neate’s Babel), available on YouTube (Plan B, “Bizness Women”), and later the slightly longer “Michelle” (2008), available on Vimeo (Plan B, “Michelle”), which then fed into iLL Manors, with the title track of this film evolving into “Deepest Shame”. 42 Plan B, Ill Manors: Ein Film von Plan B, 0:39–1:50. On the album, this passage actually marks the end of track 2, “I am the Narrator” (cf. Plan B, iLL Manors (OST)).



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mobile frauds, prostitution etc.) to the soundtrack of “I am the Narrator”.43 The film is thus clearly framed by a narrator who self-reflexively comments on his activity in the chorus of the track: I’ll be that … / Lyrical narrator, social commentator, / Socially commentating, what I say’s verbatim, / Verbal stipulator, oral illustrator, / Orally illustrating, what I’m stipulating.44

At the end of the film, this narrator is also (again, for those in the know) clearly identified as Ben Drew/Plan B, who has a cameo as the taxi driver whose face appears in the rear view mirror of the taxi which takes Aaron away.45 Taking its cue from this programmatic introductory comment, the film oscillates between a verbatim illustration of East End reality which, in its specific montage and narrativisation, offers social commentary, criticism and stipulation on the one hand, and lyrical idealism on the other: In all its gritty and at times quite devastating realism and its unflinching engagement with the social deprivation and pointless violence of the depicted milieu, the film identifies remnants of humanity and hope in most of its characters, even to the point of sentimentality and sometimes bordering on melodrama.46 This concession to mainstream film aesthetics is, however, always kept at bay with a degree of irony that is recognisably not of the relativist postmodernist kind and thus never undermines the seriousness of the agenda. And while the filming techniques of some scenes show a clear parallel to Neate’s Babel (handheld mobile cameras, defamiliarising long shots and close-ups, quick and seemingly random cuts etc.), 47 other passages go for a more polished surface: Especially the 43

Plan B, Ill Manors: Ein Film von Plan B, 1:51–4:19. Here and in the following, the lyrics will be quoted as heard on Plan B, iLL Manors (OST) and verified with recourse to various Internet resources. 45 Plan B, Ill Manors: Ein Film von Plan B, 1:51:50–1:51:53. 46 For a scholar of English Literature the idea that this is the kind of script that Charles Dickens would come up with were he alive today is not at all far-fetched: Aaron and Ed (Ed Skein) share a background as orphans in a children’s home (repeatedly alluded to in flashbacks during their occasional moody moments), Aaron hears from his mother for the first time at the end of the film, Ed insists on selling Katya’s abandoned child to ‘proper parents’ and then saves the child from the burning pub before failing to save himself, and Michelle (Anouska Mond) frees Katya (Nathalie Press) from her Russian pimps. 47 iLL Manors was actually produced on a very low budget, but these strategies were also part of an authenticity seeking agenda in line with hiring many amateur actors from the neighbourhood in which the film is set and where it was also shot. 44



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accelerated panoramic ‘Timelapse’ sequences which punctuate the action of the film time and again provide a fraught link to the polished surface of contemporary London in the summer of the Olympics, which were taking place in the very same area when the film was released one year after the 2011 riots, thus indicating a similar rift between polished and real reality in reality at large.48 All in all, then, the author-producer-narrator of iLL Manors seems to be an idealist or even moralist at heart, as had already been clear after closer scrutiny of his hard-hitting hip hop debut Who Needs Actions When You Got Words. 49 But it is also clear that this moralist does not easily distinguish good from evil characters. Instead, he is acutely aware of the influence of the environment on people’s actions, and Ben Drew has pointed out in interview after interview that he needs the medium of storytelling for dealing with just this complexity. At the same time, he also seems to be acutely aware of the demands of different media formats, which would explain why the album iLL Manors does away with some of the Dickensian sentimentality and provides a somewhat starker resume: While the sequencing of tracks basically remains the same,50 the album opens with the title track “iLL Manors”, which in the film plays only over the closing credits after not having been completed in time. When the video was released separately, the track was hailed by the Guardian as “the greatest British protest song in years.”51 What is most striking about the lyrics is the acknowledged complicity between the narrator and the outsider audience: Let’s all go on an urban safari / We might see some illegal migrants / Oi look there’s a chav / That means council housed and violent. 48

These ‘Timelapse’ sequences were collected as an extra on Plan B, Ill Manors: Ein Film von Plan B. 49 Cf. Reinfandt, “Greeting from Forest Gate”. 50 “I am the Narrator” is followed by “Drug Dealer” introducing drug dealers Kirby (Keith Koggins) and Chris (Lee Allen), “Playing with Fire” introducing youngsters Marcel (Nick Sagar) and Jake (Ryan De La Cruz), “Deepest Shame” introducing crack-whore Michelle (Anouska Mound), “Pity the Plight” introducing the murderous triangle of Chris, Marcel, and Jake (and incorporating an amazingly old-fashioned poem by punk poet John Cooper Clark who appears in the film as himself), “The Runaway” introducing Eastern European prostitute Katya (Natalie Press) and her baby daughter, and finally “Falling Down” as the closing track of both film and album. Album only tracks are “Lost My Way” (between “Pity the Plight” and “The Runaway”), “Great Day for a Murder” and “Live Once” (before “Falling Down”). 51 Cf. Lynskey, “Why Plan B’s Ill Manors is the Greates British Protest Song”.



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This is followed by a change of perspective for the chorus that is clearly antagonistic to the implied audience: Oi! I said oi! / What you looking at, you little rich boy! / We’re poor round here, run home and lock your door / Don’t come round here no more, you could get robbed for / Real because my manor’s ill / My manor’s ill / For real / You know my manor’s ill, my manor’s ill!

Here, the tension between realism and idealism as well as between inside and outside perspectives that is only obliquely alluded to in the film—Ben Drew as someone who made it out acting as a taxi driver who takes Aaron out at the end—is explicitly addressed. The very title itself leans towards the inside by combining the territory (‘manor’ in the sense of residence, seat of power) with the antagonistic behaviour of its inhabitants (‘manor’ in the sense of ‘manner’), but the epithet ‘ill’ seems to be ambiguous here (‘bad’ in the sense of ‘good’ as inside slang usage has it and ‘ill’ in the sense of pathologically afflicted as the outside perspective sometimes suggests). Similarly, the music on the entire album combines all kinds of influences, from being “basically bassline, soul, with a bit of hip hop”52 to clear echoes of reggae and other ‘subcultural’ and politically oppositional genres for many of the main tracks on the one hand to culturally more ‘established’ sources for the narratorial frame on the other, with prominent samples of Shostakovich (by way of Peter Fox’s 2008 German hit “Alles Neu”) and Saint-Saens establishing the sonically defining features for “iLL Manors” and “I am the Narrator” respectively. While definitely not as mainstream-oriented as the film, the album was arguably quite successful on its own terms (which is to say, if you do not compare it to The Defamation of Strickland Banks), being attested ‘universal acclaim’ (83 out of 100) by the aggregate review Website Metacritic,53 spending time as #1 in the U.K. album charts and being the first soundtrack album to be shortlisted for the Mercury Prize in 2012.54 The film, on the other hand, did not quite reach the mainstream audiences that it seems to envisage and was not quite as unanimously well-received as the album, with aggregate review website Rotten Tomatoes documenting a 6.4 out of

52

Plan B, “iLL Manors interview”. Cf. http://www.metacritic.com/music/ill-manors/plan-b (accessed March 7, 2014). 54 Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ill_Manors_%28album%29 (accessed March 7, 2014). 53



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10 rating based on 28 reviews.55 So it seems that the agenda of getting an inside view of the underlying causes of the 2011 London riots across to the mainstream was only partly successful.56 But then, both film and album are there for the taking, and even the initial outing had a far greater reach than Patrick Neate’s Babel could ever dream of.

The Improbability of Being Heard As these two case studies indicate, the probability of being heard has not necessarily increased with the proliferation of media formats and outlets, and tried and tested forms of safeguarding the connectivity within specific spheres such as the reliance on the ‘work of art’ as a symbolically generalised medium of communication have come under pressure from the erosion of demarcations between art and literature on the one hand and popular culture on the other. The two examples discussed in this essay have willingly moved into this open field, albeit from different directions. Given the relative success of iLL Manors in two registers (film and music), the insistence on improbability might seem somewhat implausible at first glance. But if one considers that Plan B moved into the newly open field from a position of huge mainstream popularity, it is significant that this popularity was then reduced (though by no means catastrophically so) by his insistence on relevance, both artistic and political. This seems to indicate that convergence-induced crossover does not necessarily result in greater quantitative reach. Both film and album seem to mark interesting compromises between artistic autonomy and institutional integration, and it has to be noted that in spite of its low budget and its partly oppositional stance the film had to (and could) rely on public funding by Film London, the UK Film Council Lottery Fund and the BBC when private funding appeals ran into a stalemate due to the financial crisis. Ultimately, then, in spite of providing an interesting example for the convergence of music and film practices and media formats, iLL Manors is fully institutionally and commercially embedded and utilises the formats of ‘feature film’ and ‘album’ as symbolically generalised communication media on the border between the art system (in its film dimension) and mainstream popular

55

Cf. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ill_manors/ (accessed March 7, 2014). This agenda is most clearly spelled out by Ed Skein in the interview accessible in the ‘Making of’ that comes as an extra with Plan B, Ill Manors: Ein Film von Plan B (cf. 13:26–14:02). 56



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culture. Its fate in the wild west of the Internet, on the other hand, remains to be seen, but currently its visibility is high.57 Babel, on the other hand, seems to demarcate the limits of spreadability. While topical and, once the TV version was made freely available on YouTube, an excellent example for an attempt at “creating value and meaning in a networked culture” in Jenkins, Ford, and Green’s sense58, it did not catch on, neither enticing viewers enough to watch the whole piece nor provoking debate.59 And even the book version, in spite of relying on the established symbolically generalised communication medium of the book as literary work, did not receive any attention in the literary world at all. 60 Thus it seems that Patrick Neate’s foray from literature into other formats remained firmly entrenched in the art world of late-night television, avant-garde theatre performances and special interest book publication, and while it only met with a limited response even there, the initial impulse to cross over into popular culture in the register of poetry slams evaporated in its subsequent mediatisation on television and the Internet.61 Why this is so is hard to say, but it seems that the systemstheoretical framework with its insistence on the (post-) modern trajectory of differentiation and de-differentiation on the one hand and the functional and qualitative dimensions of successful communication in their dependence on technologically available media formats on the other could be an indispensible tool for approaching the chances and limitations of convergence culture induced by the metamorphoses of the new media.

57 By the time of writing (March 2014), a title search on Google yields c. 920.000 hits, with quite extensive treatments on Wikipedia and elsewhere among them. 58 Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media. 59 The hits count on YouTube seems to indicate that the film is not sufficiently absorbing to merit watching all four parts (Part 1: 124,745, Part 2: 21,298, Part 3: 4,338, Part 4: 5,909 by March 7, 2014). While some viewers were enticed enough to at least check out the ending, one can also assume they would not have made it to the end of a late night broadcast. Even more worryingly, the film has stirred up barely any discussion, which is quite striking, given its provocative and quarrelsome stance. 60 While yielding some 50,000 hits on Google, there do not seem to be any substantial reviews or other engagements with the text available on the Internet. 61 However, Neate is still mentioned as part of the Book Slam team (see footnote 6).



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Works Cited Baecker, Dirk. 2006. “Niklas Luhmann in the Society of the Computer.” Cybernetics and Human Knowing: A Journal of Second-Order Cybernetics, Autopoiesis and Cyber-Semiotics 13:25–40. Bhaskar, Michael. 2013. The Content Machine: Towards a Theory of Publishing from the Printing Press to the Digital Network. London/New York/Delhi: Anthem Press. Borch, Christian. 2011. Niklas Luhmann. London/New York: Routledge. Hall, Frania. 2013. The Business of Digital Publishing: An Introduction to the Digital Book and Journal Industries. London/New York: Routledge. Harper, Richard H.R. 2010. Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2006a. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York/London: New York University Press. —. 2006b. Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers: Essays on Participatory Culture. New York/London: New York University Press. —. 2012 >1992@. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. 2nd updated edition. New York/London: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York/London: New York University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1990. “The Improbability of Communication.” In Essays on Self-Reference, 86–98. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 1995. Social Systems. Translated by John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 2000a. Art as a Social System. Translated by Eva M. Knodt. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 2000b. The Reality of the Mass Media. Translated by Kathleen Cross. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 2012. Theory of Society, Vol. 1. Translated by Rhodes Barrett. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 2013. Theory of Society, Vol. 2. Translated by Rhodes Barrett. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lynskey, Dorian. 2012. “Why Plan B’s Ill Manors is the Greatest British Protest Song in Years.” http://www.theguardian.com/music/music blog/2012/mar/15/plan-b-ill-manors. Accessed March 5, 2014. Moeller, Hans-Georg. 2006. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. Chicago/La Salle: Open Court.



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Neate, Patrick. 2005. Babel. Channel 4 Productions. Available on YouTube: Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vohtcdSFCQA. Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYO-OcexpOA. Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61R5kHiGV4I. Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPB3KrJAYL0. Accessed February 24, 2014. —. 2009. “Penguin Books – Jerusalem – Patrick Neate.” Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giw6VtRVzvA. Accessed March 4, 2014. —. 2010. Babel. London: Oberon Modern Plays. Plan B. 2006. “Bizness Women”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeD7jebwiM8. Accessed March 7, 2014. —. 2008. “Michelle.” http://vimeo.com/channels/farrahtv/46693012. Accessed March 7, 2014. —. 2012a. iLL Manors: A Ben Drew Film. DVD. Revolver Entertainment. —. 2012b. iLL Manors (OST). CD. Warner/Atlantic. —. 2012c. “iLL Manors interview BBC Radio1Xtra.” Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9B0y9oV7Mk. Accessed March 5, 2014. —. 2014. Ill Manors: Ein Film von Plan B. DVD. Koch Media. Reinfandt, Christoph. 2006. “White Man Tells the Blues: The Power of Music and Narrative in Patrick Neate’s Twelve Bar Blues.” ZAA – Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54.1:33–49. —. 2011. “Greeting from Forest Gate: The Metoric Rise of Ben Drew aka Plan B.” Hard Times 89:37–42. —. 2012. “Systems Theory.” In English and American Studies: Theory and Practice, edited by Martin Middeke, Timo Müller, Christina Wald, and Hubert Zapf, 231–237. Stuttgart: Metzler. Roy, Sanjoy. 2010. “Stan Won’t Dance. Laban, London.” http://www.the guardian.com/stage/2010/mar/10/stan-wont-dance-review. Accessed March 7, 2014. Thompson, John B. 2012 >2010@. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. 2nd updated edition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Watson, Keith. 2010. “Babel Is Brilliantly Organized Chaos.” http://metro. co.uk/2010/01/20/babel-is-brilliantly-organised-chaos-43407/. Accessed March 7, 2014.



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Wellbery, David. 2010. “Systems.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, 297–309. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Wilkinson, Sarah. 2010. “Babel.” http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/ review.php/27009/babel. Accessed March 7, 2014.



PART III: FICTIONAL METAMORPHOSES

CHAPTER EIGHT SPACE, CHANGE, AND STATEMENTS IN LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF VIRTUAL WORLDS NINA SHIEL

In 2014, it had been thirty years since William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromancer. The neologism was created by merging the previously existing, if obscure, term, ‘cybernetics’1, with the concept of space. Subsequently, the term was picked up by technology developers, journalists, critics and commentators. The term conceptualised, for the first time, an essential difference between the computer, a new device, and other, older, appliances used for accessing electronic media, i.e. television and radio. According to this new notion, a computer enabled its user to access another space, connected to our ordinary reality, and yet, paradoxically, something fundamentally different from it. The crucial difference between the computer and the old media was the connectivity of the computer. In the novel, Gibson envisions a setup of personal computers connected to a vast, shared data repository that encompasses the whole world. Further, the cyberspace that Gibson posits is not solely a realm of raw scientific data: it is intrinsically connected to human affect and creative potential. In the following three decades, the concept of cyberspace inspired a series of interlinked literary reflections and technological inventions. 1

The term ‘cybernetics’ had already been invented by the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener in his book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, first published in 1948. The English term was derived from the Greek word kubernites, meaning ‘steersman’, i.e. one who controls. Wiener intended this new discipline to study control and communication in humans and machines alike. His discussion on the parallels of the human brain and the inner workings of a complex machinery opened the possibility that machines might one day think independently.

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Pierre Lévy has suggested a constant mutual influence between the virtual, that which is non-physical and imaginary, and the actual, that which is physical and part of our real world.2 The virtual is inherently full of potential, which can be employed for the creation of something real. This is to say, a virtual concept inspires its actualisation in the real world. In this case, Gibson’s invention of the concept of cyberspace inspired further experimentation with that concept. In addition to the concept’s entrance in the contemporary vocabulary, the first prototypes of what we now know as ‘virtual worlds’ emerged in the mid-1980s. The Lévyan cycle of mutual influence suggests that once a concept has been actualised in the real world it inspires subsequent imaginary instances of the concept, i.e. further virtualisation. Experimental instances of a computer-generated space accessible by human users, as shown in Gibson’s novel, in proto-virtual worlds and in discussions of the prospect, inspired further leaps of imagination. Other science fiction authors, such as Neal Stephenson, Melissa Scott, Jeff Noon, Tad Williams and Charles Stross, have shaped the concept of virtual space in the 1990s and in the 21st century. In this essay, a ‘virtual world’ refers to a graphical computer-generated environment, defined by its non-physicality. It can be accessed by a user in an immersive experience, made possible by means of technology. For instance, the user’s sensory input may be simulated through a set of earphones and a set of goggles that cover the field of vision. Alternatively, the user may ‘enter’ a virtual world on the computer screen, by means of a graphical avatar, a computer-generated representation of the user. In this respect a virtual world differs from the genre tropes of an alternate reality or a mystical otherworld. Although a user can step from one to another, and experience the virtual world as an illusionary three-dimensional space, usually significantly different from the user’s everyday reality, the user is usually aware of the virtual world’s artificial nature. In contrast to the nonphysicality of the virtual world, the normal physical world is termed in this essay the ‘mundane’ world. The concept of the virtual has rapidly increased in familiarity in society at large. Whereas, in the early 1980s, personal computers were rare and expensive, by today almost everyone in the West has access to the Internet, the virtual realm, through a desktop or a laptop computer or a portable device. Computer programming, or ‘coding’, has changed from a mysterious skill mastered by few to a skill that is considered worthwhile to teach children of elementary school age.3 Even those who are not interested 2

Lévy, Becoming Virtual. The CoderDojo network was founded in Ireland but has now spread across the world, with the intention of teaching children to program in a comfortable and 3

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in back-end programming can now easily create their own websites, blogs, broadcast channels, TV or radio stations online, or spend their leisure time playing any of the numerous Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs). For anyone reading fiction that deals with virtual space today, the experience is very different from that in 1984, when the concept was very new. Against this backdrop, I suggest that representations of virtual space in fiction have changed dramatically, as the general familiarity with its associated technology has increased, reflecting the presumed attitudes of the authors and their intended readership. To test this hypothesis, this essay will examine three literary representations of virtual space, each from one of the three decades that have passed since the publication of Neuromancer. Besides Gibson’s novel and its concept of cyberspace, this essay will discuss the “Metaverse” in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash from 1992, and a fictional MMO called Avalon Four in Charles Stross’s Halting State from 2008. While Gibson’s and Stephenson’s novels both draft highly innovative visions of the potential of new technology, Halting State focuses more on representing the current technology, or technology that is within reach of the then-present day. We can thus observe a shift in the representation of virtual space, as the distance between the intended reader of each text and the situation that text presents grows smaller. Ultimately, this paper asks whether there is a connection between the general societal familiarity with the virtual and the textual representations of virtual space.

Geocriticism and Virtual Space The question whether societal familiarity with a particular technology affects the way that technology is represented in fiction requires a methodology that considers fiction in close connection with the society in which that fiction is engendered. Lévy’s suggestion of a cycle of mutual influence between the virtual and the actual can be connected to another theoretical cycle. The geocritical approach, as put forward by Bertrand Westphal, examines the meaning of space as a constantly evolving cyclical

collaborative environment. In Estonia, first-graders have been coding since 2013 (Olson, “Why Estonia Has Started to Teach Its First-Graders to Code”) and in Finland, coding is being introduced in the national curriculum in 2016 (Haaramo, “Future will be built by those who know how to code”). In the UK schools, the 2014 curriculum includes coding from the start (Curtis, “Teaching our children to code: a quiet revolution”).

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dynamic of fictional and real world representations.4 Furthermore, because of the constant interaction with the real world, each representation is fundamentally bound to its wider historical context. Therefore, that wider context and its relationship with the fictional representation must be examined together when analysing space. Westphal’s theoretical framework offers an approach to literary texts that, from the beginning, considers the changes in the meaning of a space at different points of time and in different contexts. This supports our enquiry into the attitudinal development of our relationship with the virtual. Westphal proposes that any space can be imbued with meaning by way of symbolism, values and attitudes. In order to analyse that meaning it is necessary to approach the study of the relevant space from a perspective of multiple voices. Therefore, the geocritical methodology is intertextual, interdisciplinary and intermedial. It calls for studying spaces through several relevant texts, and, ideally, using comparative material from outside literature, such as visual arts, including computer graphics. The comparative material is relevant because the geocritical approach encourages stepping out of the bounds of the literary canon, to explore other directions such as genre literature, i.e. romance, science fiction and fantasy, or crime literature. As an example relevant to the present essay, Westphal suggests that science fiction offers an opportunity to explore “mythic elements between the real and the imaginary.”5 To this, we can add that formulaic genre literature can be particularly useful for analysis of space, because it often focuses on the construction of a particular space, rather than on creating particularly well-realised three-dimensional characters or on innovative plots. The fact that Westphal allows the study of imaginary spaces as well as real ones enables us to apply the geocritical approach to the study of virtual space in literature.6 Geocriticism acknowledges that wholly fictional spaces can be studied as well as specific, named physical spaces 4

Geocriticism is a comparative theoretical approach, which does not limit itself to literary studies. Westphal’s monograph, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, draws strongly from previous studies of space, but he sets apart his own approach by proposing a specific methodology to explore how space communicates meaning. 5 Westphal, Geocriticism, 118. 6 As geocriticism is a very new approach, it is still very flexible and very much under development. Experimental applications are encouraged in order to advance the concept further, as seen in the collection of essays edited by Robert Tally, titled Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (2011).

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in the real world, provided that a sufficient amount of intertextual comparative material exists for the fictional spaces. Furthermore, virtual worlds offer a strong illusion of physicality. Their relevant language uses terms of physical location and movement. The user can move around the virtual space and interact with the virtual objects or other users using an avatar. Crucially, the users imagine that they temporarily leave their ordinary world and step into another world entirely. This psychological willingness of users to suspend disbelief and to treat the virtual spaces as ‘real’ spaces into which the users can enter is an example of how conception of space requires interpretation through experience. In other words, if we experience a particular situation in specifically spatial terms, we can treat that situation as a space. As representations of virtual spaces have existed since the early 1980s to the present day, alongside real-world examples of virtual worlds, we are able to establish a solid geocritical continuum of representations and reality. This enables us to explore the changing meaning attached to virtual space: how, and with what kind of values and attitudes, we have approached this new concept. Although a comprehensive geocritical study of virtual space that covers the past thirty years is unfortunately far beyond the scope of this essay, we are still able to gain insights to the process using the material of the three texts introduced above.

Virtual as Alien: William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) In the year 1984 computers were no longer wholly unknown. In universities and other institutions, students had been constructing and playing text-based single-player fantasy adventure games, such as Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) and Zork (1977-79), and multi-player games such as MUD1 (1981).7 These proto-virtual worlds were first restricted to a very small percentage of the population, mainly staff and students in research institutions. Personal computing was then gradually becoming more mainstream in the early 1980s, with the arrival of Commodore 64, the Atari models, and the Amstrad CPC 464. In 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh, the first successful personal computer with a graphical interface. While a computer was no longer simply considered machinery reserved to academic institutions, a personal computer remained a state-of-the-art appliance, affordable only by a small segment of Western society.

7

Kushner, “Dungeon Master”; Anderson and Galley, “The History of Zork”.

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In the meantime, the first literary representations of virtual worlds as we know them today were emerging. In 1980, John M. Ford’s Web of Angels depicted a communications network in spatial terms. Another pioneering text was Vernor Vinge’s novella True Names (1981), which presents a full-immersion virtual reality known as “Other Plane”. Meanwhile, film industry produced Tron (1982), which imagines a programmer stuck in the unexpected space inside an arcade game. Such games were widely available in the 1970s and early 1980s. Despite being single-player games, the arcade games served the function of today’s MMOs: they were easily accessible, they could be played in the company of friends, and they created a degree of immersion that could transport the player emotionally to the game world in question. Thus, Gibson’s notion of cyberspace did not emerge from nothing. The development of technology, present in the real world as games, and other texts contributed to creating circumstances, in which enough Lévyan potential could be converted into an idea. In particular, Gibson’s inspiration was sparked by his watching of children play arcade games. He was so impressed by the focus of the children on the games, their immersion and physical involvement in the scenarios that it seemed to him that the children were in a different space behind computer screens.8 Around the same time, he also saw an Apple advertising poster depicting a businessman’s arm holding a computer. The picture spurred him into thinking that in time, everyone would want to possess a computer, and, significantly for his concept of cyberspace, to “live” inside that computer: “everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.”9 As an example of the geocritical principle of fictional and realworld spaces coming together in an idea of a space, Gibson integrated his own real-world experience into his interpretation of the new kind of space. In Neuromancer, Case, a talented but down-on-his-luck programmer is hired to conduct mysterious data heists with a promise of permanent restoration of his access to cyberspace. The novel’s wholly imaginary technology, invented by Gibson who had little technological knowledge of his own10, envisions a direct neural connection between the user’s brain and the computer. With Case’s neural connection broken as a punishment for crossing his former employer, he is no longer able to access cyberspace. The notion of the human experience of a space being essential 8

McCaffery, “An Interview with William Gibson”. Gibson quoted in Wallace-Wells, “William Gibson”. 10 Gibson often makes this point at interviews. See McCaffery, “An Interview with William Gibson,” and Wallace-Wells, “William Gibson”. 9

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for that space to be conceived is taken to extreme, as the new space literally takes place in the user’s mind. The user and the space are in close, even intimate, contact. Consequently, Case’s forced separation from cyberspace causes severe psychological withdrawal, leading to a destructive lifestyle through drug use and petty crime. Drugs and cyberspace become two sides of the same coin. While Case is unable to access cyberspace, he transfers his addictive mindset to feed on another, less satisfactory source. When his access to cyberspace is restored, his road to chemically-induced stimulation is blocked and he becomes unable to receive pleasure from drugs. The “artificial” stimulation is no longer necessary, as demonstrated by his ecstatic re-entry to cyberspace: [The matrix of cyberspace] flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country [...] And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.11

The vocabulary of the passage is strong with mystical symbolism: Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.12

The references to “inner eye”, “stepped [...] pyramid”, and “spiral arms” mixed with names of corporations pick up on the theme of cyberspace as a quasi-mystical dimension that is coming into being amongst the corporate behemoths that runs throughout the novel. A key factor in the emerging ‘transcendence’ of cyberspace is its opposition to the physical, mundane world. While in cyberspace, a user is in no way conscious of the mundane world. Instead, the user becomes a disembodied consciousness, which has a complete freedom of movement in all directions of cyberspace. In terms of the concepts coined by Deleuze and Guattari, cyberspace becomes a “smooth space”, where affect, distance and freedom of existence and movement dominate, set in opposition to the “striated space” of the physical world, a partitioned field that prohibits free movement in its tangibility.13 In the novel, the transcendental nature of cyberspace is indicated by its descriptions as “consensual hallucination” and “bodiless

11

Gibson, Neuromancer, 68–69. Gibson, Neuromancer, 68. 13 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 474 and passim. 12

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exultation”.14 In contrast, the hackers, called “console cowboys”, feel contempt for what they disparagingly call “meat”: the body and the bodily input. When describing Case’s separation from cyberspace, the text observes that Case “fell into the prison of his own flesh”15, invoking associations with the fall of Adam and Eve and the fall of Lucifer in biblical mythology. Thus, in addition to drugs, cyberspace is also compared to religion and religious experiences. The true purpose of Case’s tasks turns out to be to unify two sentient artificial intelligences (AIs), godlike beings native to the virtual dimension. They are compared to demons, with whom “men dreamed of pacts” in the past, but “only now are such things possible”.16 The text expresses the fear of new technology coming at a great cost to humanity, despite its enabling things that people may have dreamt of for centuries. The AI Wintermute, called “A lord of hell, surely”17, displays a cynical self-awareness of its relation to humans by enquiring of Case, with a biblical reference to God, “You want I should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush?”18. On the space station of Zion, its residents explain to Case, with an eschatological implication, that Wintermute has chosen him “to serve as a tool of Final Days”.19 Case becomes the chosen one, a figure of a devoted mythical knight on a quest for the metaphorical Grail. The novel uses the language and concepts of old, well-established myths and legends to present a set of new concepts, to prepare the reader to deal with the idea of a technological space from a perspective that is already familiar. Further, the language of religious concepts draws new technology itself in to the set of myths and ideologies. Technology is expressed as religion and the AI-gods of that religion act as obstructive, inexplicable deities. New technology suggests the potential for salvation or enlightenment, but, ultimately, the novel suggests that technology-religion is as much opium to its followers as any of its predecessors. In the course of the narrative, Case is forced to leave behind the familiar, abstract cyberspace, in which data appears as geometrical patterns, and to encounter a new representational cyberspace, which is a simulation of people and places from the mundane world. The plot recalls the ‘hero’s journey’ motif, put forward by Joseph Campbell and requiring a complex multi-stage process through travel, mental challenges, and 14

Gibson, Neuromancer, 12. Gibson, Neuromancer, 12. 16 Gibson, Neuromancer, 193. 17 Gibson, Neuromancer, 221. 18 Gibson, Neuromancer, 202. 19 Gibson, Neuromancer, 136. 15

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dangerous opponents before leading to the fulfilment of the quest via a transformation of the hero.20 Case undergoes a physical ‘death’ three times, each time when experiencing the AI-created representational virtual space, but each time he is ‘resurrected’ with a greater understanding. Tempted by the AIs to remain forever in the simulated virtual space, in a technological afterlife, in the end Case chooses the mundane, physical world, having learned to appreciate the physicality of human existence in the process of making love to the virtual ‘ghost’ of his former girlfriend. It was a place he’d known before […] Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.21

Paradoxically, although the girlfriend is only a virtual construct, Case comes to realise that the human body is even more intricate than the virtual realm; that the body has value that the virtual cannot reach. Consequently, he returns to the mundane world, triumphs, and, at the end of the novel, settles down into a conventional life. The virtual in Neuromancer is a realm of modern mythology, which encompasses old stories and suggests new ones, although many in the old guises. While acknowledging the attractiveness of virtual technology, the novel warns against its overuse, proposing that a full uncritical embrace of the virtual would lead to a rejection of humanity and the physical world.

Virtual Socialising: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) In contrast to Neuromancer’s mystical, fascinating and frightening virtual vistas, Stephenson’s Snow Crash presents a virtual world that is firmly pressed into service to human users. By the novel’s publication year, 1992, significant new developments had taken place in the culture of computers and the new media. The Video Graphics Array, invented in 1987, significantly improved the colour, memory, and resolution of images on personal computers. Between 1985 and 1988, the first graphical virtual world, named Habitat, was developed.22 The graphical representations of its users were called ‘avatars’, although the term was not popularised until 20

See Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Gibson, Neuromancer, 285. 22 Damer, “Meeting in the ether”; Rossney, “Metaworlds”. 21

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Snow Crash, for which Stephenson had independently invented the same term.23 The first web browser-editor, called World Wide Web, was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, the same year as the institutional information network was decommissioned and opened up for commercial and public use as the Internet. Companies such as IBM, Dell, Compaq, and Apple were becoming powerful on the personal computer market and as well-known corporate names even outside their immediate area. In 1991, Howard Rheingold published his influential textbook Virtual Reality, which enabled large numbers of students and other interested individuals to familiarise themselves with the concept that computer technology could be used in the real world, not just in fiction, to create immersive virtual environments. In fiction, Gibson continued on the theme of the virtual in Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Virtual reality was explored in film by The Lawnmower Man (Leonard, USA 1992) and by the television mini-series The Wild Palms (produced by Bruce Wagner and Michael Rauch, USA, 1993). By this time, the concept of the virtual space, in varying forms, could be expected to be sufficiently familiar to the audience for the concept to feature in an increasing number of works of fiction. With the above kind of cultural background to the notion of virtual space, Stephenson was able to develop the concept further. No longer represented as alien, mysterious, and frightening—and, crucially, as the domain of only the select few—the concept of a virtual world is depicted in Snow Crash as a social space, called the “Metaverse”, available for purposes of leisure and business alike. It is accessible to everyone by means of a personal or a public computer. Users log in to meet friends, date, go to nightclubs and concerts, participate in games, and explore. Such interactions require an environment to which its human users can easily relate. Consequently, the entire virtual space is humanised. Users assume representational graphical avatars that move in three dimensions around the virtual space. The space itself is shaped to meet with human expectations and needs. This new humanised virtual space features private ‘residential’ areas, public spaces and even public transport. In order to express their identities, users ‘wear’ striking avatars and decorate their ‘houses’. In contrast to the fear and unsettledness that representational simulated space triggers in Neuromancer, Stephenson’s novel suggests that realistic simulation inspires playfulness and creativity. In a play of words, the Metaverse is divided into “developed” and “undeveloped” areas. The former refers to the core of the virtual world, called “The 23

Damer, “Meeting in the ether”.

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Street”, an urban landscape with residences, public transport, and facilities, “developed” in the sense of a technological focus and also in the sense of real-world urban development. Similarly, the “undeveloped” area refers to the areas that have not received much attention by programmers, and consequently it appears visually as wilderness or wastelands. Because the Metaverse is constructed as an alternate human space, a simultaneous and immanent ontological layer next to the mundane world, the plot of the novel switches easily between the two worlds, with none of the dramatic transitions exhibited in Neuromancer a decade earlier. The two worlds are closely connected throughout. As the virtual has its specific, capitalised name, “Metaverse”, so does the mundane: without exception the latter is called “Reality”. The driving force of the plot concerns the resolving of a situation in which a virus has the power to cause damage to not only the computer it infects, but also to the brain of that computer’s user. When users connect to the Metaverse, they do so by the realistic means of a computer, earphones, and goggles, rather than through any semi-mystical neural interface as in Neuromancer. Consequently, instead of the sharp Cartesian separation of body and mind in Gibson’s novel, the Metaverse users remain constantly aware of their mundane world surroundings, to the extent that they can “exist” in both worlds simultaneously, even in motion. When the point-of-view characters Hiro Protagonist and Y.T. phone each other, the question, “Where are you?” can be met with a return question, “In Reality or in the Metaverse?”24 The two layers of existence have become near-equal. The awareness of the physical body during the non-physical existence in the Metaverse has a significant consequence in terms of the human experience of virtual space. The novel constantly reminds the reader that the virtual space is not physical, but, at the same time, the users of the virtual space are shown to actively follow certain rules in order to retain full psychological illusion of the virtual space. The text constantly stresses the artificial nature of the Metaverse by describing the virtual environment in terms such as “imaginary”, “computer-generated”, “not real”, “appear”, “represent”, and “render”. The artificial residents of the Metaverse, “daemons”, mini-AIs of sorts, who here serve instead of dominating human users, also function to remind the reader on the division between the virtual and mundane worlds. A daemon known as the Librarian frequently asserts its lesser status in comparison to humans. By examples such as advising Hiro to “Ask someone real”, and noting that “Since I’m just a piece of code, I would be on very thin ice to speculate,” the daemon 24

Stephenson, Snow Crash, 191.

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demonstrates ironic self-awareness,25 very similar to that of the AI Wintermute in Neuromancer. Stephenson combines these opposing drives—the reminder of the artificiality and the desire to forget it—in the concept of metaphor. It is often used in place of the term ‘immersion’, as, for example, when the text discusses the process of entering and exiting the Metaverse. An avatar appearing seemingly out of nowhere “would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor”.26 An extreme example of leaving the Metaverse is brought up in the instance of Hiro “killing” a quarrelsome fellow avatar in the Metaverse’s swordfighting game. It breaks the metaphor. The avatar is not acting like a real body. It reminds all The Black Sun’s patrons that they are living in a fantasy world. People hate to be reminded of this.27

Similarly, in terms of avatar behavior, and for the same reason, avatars do not attempt ‘physical’ gestures with each other, because tangible touch is not available in the virtual world. While the daemons mimic sentience, they are to humans as the Metaverse is to the mundane world: a metaphor. In the afterword of the novel, Stephenson explains that a significant influence to his thinking on the Metaverse was the collection of Apple Human Interface Guidelines, documents intended to improve the user experience through an easier use of the interface. A significant concept in the Guidelines was the concept of metaphor, explained as concrete, familiar ideas already known to the user, so that the user can apply those expectations to the use of the computer interface.28 By focusing on the human factor behind the virtual space, the novel rejects any kind of mystical overtones of the virtual. Instead, the novel presents a virtual that is emphatically under human control, as something of a counterbalance to Neuromancer’s mysticism. In the decade following the publication of Snow Crash, the general familiarity with computers and the virtual grew further. A series of virtual 25

Stephenson, Snow Crash, 196–197. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 34. 27 Stephenson, Snow Crash, 95. 28 As examples, the Guidelines give the ideas of the ‘desktop’, ‘folders’, ‘trash’, and ‘menu’, all of which are long-established physical concepts applied to the computer user interface. The computing metaphors widely used today, such as the ‘cloud’, enable the user to get a sense of the function of an application or a programme without having to concern him- or herself about its exact workings, particularly in cases where little background knowledge is present. 26

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worlds sprang up from the mid-1990s onwards, which at first focused on conversation, exploration, and leisure, until at the turn of the 21st century the trend moved towards ludic virtual worlds in the form of MMOs. An introductory 1995 article in the Wired magazine concerning virtual worlds uses references to Snow Crash to explain the concept to the magazine’s readers: Snow Crash portrayed a metaworld that’s a few technological and cultural notches above what’s possible right now: the Metaverse, a virtual world so immersive and detailed it rivals the real one. One feature of Stephenson’s Metaverse that these real-life meta-worlds all share is the avatar. 29

The concept of a virtual world is still new enough to require explanation, but the article assumes that even if the readers have not read Snow Crash, they have most likely heard about it. The optimism about virtual technology is palpable: the article notes that the technology of Snow Crash is only a little bit beyond what is possible at the time, although the difference between the global Metaverse and the very small userbases of the 1990s’ virtual worlds was considerable.

The Ludic Turn: Charles’ Stross Halting State (2007) The first large-scale MMOs, Ultima Online (1997) and EverQuest (1999), together with their successors, demonstrated that online fantasy gaming had the potential to be a very commercially viable form of entertainment. The success of MMOs was made possible by the continuing increase in access to the Internet from personal computers towards the end of the 1990s. Personal computing sales kept rising, while Internet connections became faster and more reliable at reasonable prices. Likely because of the promotion of these ludic virtual worlds by the entertainment industry, open virtual worlds such as Second Life, based on the Metaverse30, have proved to be less attractive to the general public than games that offer strictly linear narratives, quests, and opportunities for achievements. In contrast, the global subscriber numbers of the most popular MMO of the past decade, World of Warcraft, launched in 2004, peaked at ten million in 2010.31 Along this ‘ludic turn’, as we might call the shift of interest from open virtual environments to those focused on narrative gaming, another, 29

Rossney, “Metaworlds”. Sydell, “Sci-Fi Inspires Engineers to Build Our Future”. 31 Reported on the games website Joystiq on 7 November, 2012 by Alex Ziebart. 30

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subtler, attitude shift to the virtual took place. When the dotcom bubble, a period of unrealistic optimism over information technology stocks, crashed in 2000-2001, it became evident that even that technology could not be the source of the boundless optimistic potential. Information technology and its applications inevitably became more casual, less intriguing. As the market recovered, new inventions arrived in the form of portable computing. Apple’s 2007 release of the iPhone and its successors meant that the virtual sphere was now easily accessible at any time—much as in Stephenson’s Snow Crash. The new casualness of the virtual has been visible in fiction, as elements dealing with the virtual have moved towards the mainstream. In Plowing the Dark (2002), Richard Powers explores the virtual from the perspective of the relationship between language, the virtual image, and the human experience. In Cosmopolis (2003), Don DeLillo comments on the artificial nature of what we call reality and its financial crises. In Air (2004), Geoff Ryman asks questions about the mutual confrontation of cultures and about the role of the media in modern society. Texts about the virtual are increasingly set in the present or in the very near future. Features of information technology can now play supportive roles as elements of high-tech, high-success society. The ludic turn and the increasing casualness of the virtual are very much reflected in the final example of this paper. Halting State by Charles Stross presents a multiplicity of different ludic virtual worlds, each clearly defined by name, identity, and purpose. These worlds are in clear contrast to the single, monolithic, open virtual worlds of Snow Crash and Neuromancer. Here, the virtual world under focus is the fantasy game world called “Avalon Four”. It provides escapism to Jack, the novel’s programmer-hero, who is struggling with loss of family and work. He is comparable to Hiro of Snow Crash, who finds excitement in the Metaverse that is lacking from his ordinary life, and to Case of Neuromancer, who finds spiritual bliss in cyberspace in the face of his mundane troubles. Here, the virtual worlds no longer attempt to simulate the mundane world: instead, they embrace the imaginative potential that the virtual provides. Examples of the novel’s virtual worlds are noted as being based on the high fantasy adventures of the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying games, in which adventurers seek out treasures and great deeds while battling monsters, on the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett and on the horror works of H.P. Lovecraft. The virtual in Halting State is no longer a transcendental dimension or an alternative layer of existence—it is a collection of other, fictional worlds entirely, accessible through a setup of a computer, goggles, and earphones, or through a mobile smartphone. The virtual bleeds into the mundane world even further in the case of the

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novel’s augmented reality technology, which allows the overlay of virtual elements on the mundane world. The borders between the virtual worlds and the mundane are in constant blur, but this is accepted by the characters in the novel as normal, rather than as alien or frightening or as something requiring explanation. Ironically, even though the appearance of the virtual, in its various fantastic guises, is removed further from the everyday mundane experience, the virtual space in Halting State is entirely humanised, brought under human control. The automated non-player characters in the games have no longer any resemblance of sentience or self-identity, as in Snow Crash: the virtual is only inhabited by human users. Yet, despite the seemingly utilitarian, everyday status that the virtual appears to have in the novel, it is still shown to evoke experiences of wonder. When Jack introduces one of the other characters, Elaine, to Avalon Four, we are presented with a reaction in his voice, in the voice of an experienced computer user, rather than, as we might expect, her first reaction to the fantasy world. A series of three rhetoric repetitions of “How do you describe […] How do you describe […] How to picture” the virtual landscape relates Jack’s inability to put in words the wonder he still feels at the encounter.32 He makes references to Dante, the painter Hieronymus Bosch, and to the mathematicians Alonzo Church and Alan Turing, in an indication that the affective virtual space is the result of the efforts in the areas of the arts and sciences alike. Further, the affectiveness of the virtual is implied to possess the power of inspiration: “It’s funny how it takes game space to bring out the poet in you.”33 A plot twist at the end reveals that in certain ways, Jack’s experience of the virtual is not very far removed from that of Case, over twenty years earlier. As we learn that his family, believed to have been under threat, are imaginary, only part of a game, we realise that the form that Jack’s addiction takes is a refusal to distinguish the imaginary from the non-imaginary. In the end, he is helped by Elaine to accept his situation in the mundane world through their romantic, physical connection: again, as Case, Jack accepts his physicality through a romantic encounter.

Game Over: Return to the Mundane We hypothesised at the beginning of this paper that representations of virtual worlds might become more positive over time when examined 32 33

Stross, Halting State, 100. Stross, Halting State, 100.

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against their historical context, as the general familiarity and comfort with the topic increases. Two separate streams arise from the three novels. On the one hand, we see that as the general public familiarity with the virtual increases, the representations of virtual world in literature certainly undergo changes. Despite the seminal influence of Neuromancer in conceptualising virtual space, its presentation of that space as a conglomeration of mystical influences was short-lived. In its ignorance of real-world technology, its interpretation of the virtual as mysterious, neartranscendental, but ultimately dangerous in its lure, is an understandable response to the new kind of space. Snow Crash is at pains to emphasise the rationality behind the technology of the Metaverse, how the virtual cannot subsume the physical world because of its ‘metaphoric’ quality, despite any attempts of the virus to bridge the gap between the virtual and the mundane. The rationality, predictably, comes at the greater cost of imagination, as the users must put in effort to suspend disbelief in the ‘metaphor’. By the time of Halting State, the enforced rationality has given way to a mostly comfortable dynamic between the mundane and the ubiquitous fantastic virtual, paradoxically at a closer connection to the mundane, and yet further removed from it, than before. Yet, the cycle seems to at least partially bend back towards itself, as Jack’s unwillingness to distinguish between the virtual and the mundane can be considered another example of the addictive power of the virtual. Further, it is worth observing that each novel ends in the mundane world. We have seen that Case settles down. While the last glimpse of Hiro that we get is in the Metaverse, his sidekick Y.T. is the one who closes the novel with her remark, “Yeah, home seems about right”34 having been picked up by her mother in the mundane world. In Halting State, the narrative of Jack and Elaine ends in the mundane world, with her statement, “Game over”35, echoed by the final closing line of the novel, “We’re not playing games anymore.”36 In each case, the mundane world, the textual reflection of our real world, is valorised above the virtual. Each novel, despite its respective historical context, presents the virtual as a temporary state, which has potentially harmful consequences for the users if their presence there is prolonged through excessive attachment.

34

Stephenson, Snow Crash, 438. Stross, Halting State, 327. 36 Stross, Halting State, 335. 35

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Works Cited Anderson, Tim, and Stu Galley. 1985. “The History of Zork.” http:// samizdat.cc/shelf/documents/2004/05.27-historyOfZork/historyOf Zork.pdf. Accessed September 16, 2014. Apple Computer, Inc. 1995 [1992]. Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. http://interface.free.fr/ Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf. Accessed September 16, 2014. Campbell, Joseph. 1993 [1949]. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. London: Fontana. Curtis, Sophie. 2013. “Teaching our children to code: a quiet revolution.” The Telegraph. 4 November. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/ news/10410036/Teaching-our-children-to-code-a-quiet-revolution. html. Accessed September 23, 2014. Damer, Bruce. 2008. “Meeting in the ether: A brief history of virtual worlds as a medium for user-created events.” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1 (1). https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/285. Accessed March 13, 2013. DeLillo, Don. 2003. Cosmopolis. London: Picador. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ford, John M. 1992 [1980]. Web of Angels. New York: Tor Books. Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. —. 1986. Count Zero. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. —. 1988. Mona Lisa Overdrive. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Haaramo, Eeva. 2014. “Future will be built by those who know how to code.” Sitra. 11 July. http://www.sitra.fi/en/artikkelit/well-being/ futurewill-be-built-those-who-know-how-code. Accessed September 23, 2014. Leonard, Brett. 1992. The Lawnmower Man. New Line Cinema. Lévy, Pierre. 1998. Becoming Virtual. New York: Plenum Trade. Lisberger, Steven. 1982. Tron. Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Distribution. Kushner, David. 2008. “Dungeon Master.” Wired. http://archive.wired. com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2008/03/ff_gygax?currentPage=all. Accessed September 16, 2014.

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McCaffery, Larry. 1991. “An Interview with William Gibson.” In Storming the Reality Studio. A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery, 263–285. Durham: Duke University Press. Olson, Parmy. 2012. “Why Estonia Has Started to Teach Its First-Graders to Code.” Forbes. 6 September. http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmy olson/2012/09/06/why-estonia-has-started-teaching-its-first-graders-tocode/. Accessed September 23, 2014. Powers, Richard. 2000. Plowing the Dark. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rheingold, Howard. 1991. Virtual Reality. New York: Summit Books/Simon and Schuster. Rossney, Robert. 1996. “Metaworlds.” Wired 4.06. http://www.wired. com/wired/archive/4.06/avatar.html. Accessed February 25, 2013. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Ryman, Geoff. 2004. Air. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Books. Stross, Charles. 2008. Halting State. London: Orbit. Sydell, Laura. 2010. “Sci-Fi Inspires Engineers to Build Our Future.” NPR, 21 August, Technology section. http://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=129333703. Accessed February 25, 2013. Tally, Robert. T., ed. 2011. Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vinge, Vernor. 1981. “True Names.” Binary Star 5:133–233. Wagner, Bruce, Oliver Stone, and Michael Rauch. 1993. Wild Palms. MGM. Wallace-Wells, David. 2011. “William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211.” The Paris Review No. 197. http://www.theparisreview.org/ interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson. Accessed February 26, 2013. Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert Tally. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wiener, Norbert. 1961. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Ziebart, Alex. 2012. “World of Warcraft subscriber numbers remain over 10 million.” Joystiq. 7 November. http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/ 11/07/world-of-warcraft-subscriber-numbers-remain-over-10-million. Accessed September 23, 2014.

CHAPTER NINE LITERARY REFLECTIONS ON NEW MEDIA: RICHARD POWERS’ PLOWING THE DARK (2000) NINA PETER

New media—especially since the so-called ‘digital revolution’—not only generate new literary forms and genres, they also constitute a prominent topic of literary texts and have an impact on their narrative modes. Richard Powers’ novel Plowing the Dark, published in 2000, is a novel about old and new media. It explores hopes and imaginations associated with the emergence of virtual realities and digital immersive environments during the 1980s and 1990s, namely the idea of “electronic transcendence”1. The novel creates a fictional panorama that places the longing for a transcendence of the limits of the physical world, which found a pronounced expression in the posthumanist ideas inspired by new media, within the broader context of the development of the arts. In two story lines the novel explores two different attempts to retreat into immaterial worlds, mediated either by digital technologies or by the imagination: one is centred on Steve Spiegel and Adie Klarpol who work at the high-tech company TeraSys in Seattle, the other is centred on Taimur Martin, an Iranian-American English teacher who is taken hostage by Islamic fundamentalists in Lebanon and spends five years in captivity. Whereas Spiegel and Adie2 work on the creation of technically advanced digital full-immersion environments, Taimur Martin, confined to a small cell in Beirut and stripped of all diversions, seeks consolation in memories and imaginations. The two narrative threads, connected by common motifs and a sophisticated set of cross-references, elaborate on two different motivations for creating fictional worlds. The novel identifies Adie’s and Spiegel’s 1

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 75. By addressing Adie with her first name and Spiegel with his last name, I follow the novel’s use of the names.

2

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attempts to create credible digital environments as an escapist endeavour, trying to achieve a release from the perceived constraints the physical existence exercises on humanity. By retreating into the virtual reality they try to replace their lives in the physical world with a digital simulation that is fully controllable. For Martin, on the other hand, the imagined worlds have a life-sustaining function. His invention of a fictional domicile is an attempt to overcome his isolation and to survive the time he spends in captivity in order to return to his former life. By combining a plot centred on the hopes evoked by new media, namely to create an alternative living space within the realm of the digital, with a story about the imagination as a means to survive in a hostile environment, the novel not only “asks how literature can address and represent a different medium within its own modes of representation”3, but, more broadly, investigates the question of “the functionality of art”4. In a self-reflective turn, the novel refocuses the question elaborated on in the two story lines with regard to its own goals and functions: While narrating and reflecting the use and function of different media in two stories of retreat, the novel simultaneously describes and implements a poetological concept which is presented as an alternative to Adie’s and Spiegel’s escape from reality into an invented world. Powers’ novel proposes a poetics of disruption: On the one hand, the novel allows the experience of immersion into the realistically narrated worlds of Spiegel, Adie, and Martin, on the other hand the text disrupts the reader’s temporary “suspension of disbelief”5 by integrating an event that seems to defy the rules of the fictional story world. Thus, the novel not only contains a literary representation of predominant discourses on new media and a media-theory which places the creations of digital media in one line with art’s attempts to create artificial worlds, it also includes poetological and metafictional reflections and gains a self-referential dimension: The literary description of new media and their impacts serves to reflect the capacities of the older medium of literature. The following analysis will focus on the novel’s reflections on different uses and functions of old and new media. The first part of the essay will trace the novel’s description of the desires for ‘electronic transcendence’ associated with digital technologies. Powers’ character Steve Spiegel not only presents posthumanist thoughts and ideas, he also sketches a theory of the emergence of the arts that considers digital media a superior successor to earlier artistic forms and media at the close of an 3

Pock, “The Fabulous Persian Machine,” 132. Löffler, “The Ability to make Worlds,” 99. 5 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 6. 4

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age-long development. The second part of the essay will concentrate on the two complementary stories of retreat developed in the two plot lines of the novel. They can be read as two ‘case studies’ exploring different strategies and motivations to create invented worlds. As I show in the last part of the paper, the novel not only devises, but also implements a poetological concept, which deviates from the poetics of escape and detachment that dominate the protagonists’ creation of invented worlds. As the reading of the novel shows, literary texts allow for an exploration of new media that not only draws upon theoretical language and concepts, but also brings into play specific literary features such as fictional and counterfactual accounts, intertextual references, motives, and rhetorical figures of speech as well as self-referential and metafictional elements. Literary reflections on new media thus add a complementary perspective to the theoretical discourse on new media. At the same time the topic of new media enables literature to reflect on its own characteristics and potentials as a medium by adopting a comparative perspective focusing on the similarities and differences between different media.6

Desires for ‘Electronic Transcendence’ In the first part of the novel, Adie, a former artist, joins a research team working on the development of a Computer-Assisted Virtual Environment, short “Cavern”7. The scientists and software engineers try to develop both the soft- and the hardware to construct a virtual reality that is supposed to generate the impression of being a “walk-in”8 threedimensional space. The Cavern’s “total-immersion environment”9 is programmed to generate a full body experience, to achieve “believability through total immersion”10. The research group works on the embodiment of thought, trying to create “[i]nvented worlds that respond to what we’re doing, worlds where the interface disappears.”11 In doing so, the researchers aspire to transcend former limits of representation, to bring

6

Poppe, “Literarische Medienreflexionen. Eine Einführung,” 15–16. Powers, Plowing the Dark, 5. 8 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 124. 9 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 24. 10 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 61. 11 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 159. In the novel, in most cases dialogues are indicated with italic print instead of quotation marks. I will adopt this style in the quotes. If not indicated differently, italics come from the original text. 7

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into being an “art form” that “play[s] directly to [the] body”12 and thus becomes indistinguishable from material reality. By including visual, auditive, and haptic attractions in their designs, the researchers try to exceed the immersive quality of literature’s and art’s creations; their goal is to exceed “the threshold of belief”13, the creation of credible alternative worlds by technical means. Before Adie joins the team, she visits the first prototype of the Cavern, a small room whose walls, floor and ceiling consist of “movie screens”14. Special glasses allow her to navigate through the 3D projection of a landscape: Each time she cocked her head, the trailing wires that tracked her goggles pulled the whole landscape along in her sight’s wake.15

Adie is fascinated and overwhelmed by the Cavern’s virtual space and experiences the intended “suspension of disbelief”16: “after a few seconds, Adie stopped noticing the conjuring act and began to believe”17. Although the Cavern’s computers make her feel uneasy, the technique and its effects appeal to her: “Some part of her had never wanted anything else. Had never hoped for more than to play in such a place”18. After having dropped out of the New York art scene several years ago, disappointed by the commercialisation of the arts, Adie enjoys the Cavern as a playground for graphic experiments. During her first months in the “Realization Lab”19 she sees the Cavern merely as an innocent source of “pleasure”20. By contrast, her colleague Steve Spiegel fosters greater ambitions. Spiegel, a former poet, emphatically advocates the vision of a computerassisted immaterial utopia.21 He believes that by creating virtual 12

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 160. Powers, Plowing the Dark, 62. 14 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 12. 15 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 16. 16 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 6. 17 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 15. 18 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 17. 19 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 7. 20 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 163. 21 As Kley points out (Ethik medialer Repräsentation, 448), Spiegel is also aware of the experimental and reflective potential of the Cavern. Most of the time, however, he focuses on the immersive qualities of the digital environment. What seems to excite him most is the prospect of creating immersive interactive environments, which would make the world outside of the Cavern and the technologically created virtual spaces indistinguishable. He is interested in “the final disappearance of the interface. Future operators would engage simulation in 13

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environments the researchers bring into being a world superior to the one of bodily existence. He aims at creating a new kind of anthroposphere: It [the Realization Lab] hoped to mechanize any brute incident that existence offered. But imitation was itself just the first step in a greater program, the final escape from brute matter: the room that would replace the one where existence lay bound.22

It is not by chance that the name of the virtual reality—“Cavern”—brings to mind Plato’s allegory of the cave. In accordance with Plato’s suggestion that the immediate impressions of the world perceived by the senses are mere “shadows” derived from a higher level of reality—a sphere of “ideas” or “forms”23—Spiegel assumes that the material world is deficient and has to be overcome in order to reach another, more perfect level of existence24: That, finally, was the hope. To live in the room […]. The soul simply wanted better accommodations. Something more spacious to fasten to. Something more like itself than that dying animal.25

Spiegel’s idea of a virtual reality that would allow people “to break the bonds of matter”26 and to burst the boundaries of material existence is one of the prominent “technological narratives”27 of the “digital age”28. Powers’ description of the laboratory and the hopes and goals of its members reflects in great detail the “promise of computer-mediated the same way that humanity’s current version engaged material existence: using all the degrees of freedom built into their sovereign bodies” (270). The ‘disappearance of the interface,’ the invisibility of the medium, would create a state of “total immersion” (61). The more perfect the invented worlds become, the more they lose their potential to reflect their own ontological state as media-generated human-made works, since “immersion cannot be reflected upon by immersion” (Ryan, “Allegories of Immersion”). 22 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 62. 23 Platon, Politeia, 554–567. 24 The fact that in Powers’ novel, it is the projection room which bears the name that alludes to Plato’s cave already suggests that the virtual simulation in the end does not allow its users to grasp a higher form of reality. Despite the hopes of its creators, it rather creates some new form of confinement, a mediated ‘world of shadows’. 25 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 268. 26 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 396. 27 Coyne, Technoromanticism, 4. 28 Coyne, Technoromanticism, 4.

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improvement”29 of the late 1980s and 1990s which culminated in the posthumanist idea of the “transcendence of mortal flesh”30. Hans Moravec is one of the prominent theorists of this idea. In his book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988) he sketches the vision and project of digital immortality31 and argues that “it will soon be possible to download human consciousness into a computer”32. Virtual reality is one of the important topics of the posthumanist agenda that becomes relevant in conjunction with the idea of the digitised mind: We could construct artificial experiential worlds, in which the laws of physics can be suspended, that would appear as real as physical reality to participants. […] Uploads [digitized human minds], who could interact with simulated environments directly without the need of a mechanical interface, might spend most of their time in virtual realities.33

Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the “grand narratives” or “metanarratives”34, defined as narrative versions of “large-scale theories and philosophies of the world”35, Richard Coyne identifies the discourse on digital media, especially on the use of digital technologies that enhance human capacities, as an influential “grand narrative”36 of our time. In opposition to Lyotard’s assumption that postmodernist thought will cause a delegitimation and, in the long run, the end of metanarratives37, Coyne describes “digital narratives”38 and technoromantic imaginations39 as the new contemporary grand narratives. Coyne shows that at the core of the contemporary technological narratives resides the promise of “a return to a primal unity”40. According to Coyne, the digital narratives respond to 29

Scholz, “Narrating Technology” 297. Scholz, “Narrating Technology,” 293. 31 Krüger, “Gnosis in Cyberspace?,” 77–78; Scholz, “Narrating Technology,” 293– 94; see Moravec, Mind Children. 32 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 1. 33 “Transhumanist FAQ.” 34 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. 35 Du Toit, “Grand Narrative / Metanarrative,” 86. 36 Coyne, Technoromanticism, 9. 37 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 37–68. 38 Coyne, Technoromanticism, 8. 39 The term ‘technoromanticism’ was coined by Richard Coyne who points out the “romantic legacy” of “digital narratives” (Technoromanticism, 7–8). According to his interpretation the discourse on digital media draws on Romantic topoi, first of all the idea of creating an imagined world that allows for a holistic experience of existence. 40 Coyne, Technoromanticism, 4. 30

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people’s desire “to progress from one sphere of existence to another”41; they promise “immersion in an electronic data stream”42 and thus seem to offer an “electronically induced return to the unity”43. Drawing on the Platonic concept of an immaterial sphere of ideas as opposed to the realm of the material world44, the technological narratives maintain the idea that digitalisation offers a new form of living beyond the alienation and fragmentation experienced in the world of physical existence, even the possibility to overcome death.45 At the same time, the romantic interpretation of computer technology implies the “presumption that we can have total control or omnipotence, play God, by simulating, mastering, redefining, manipulating, and controlling space, time, community, thought, and life”46. Powers’ character Steve Spiegel clearly echoes this technoromantic rhetoric when he expresses the hope that “[t]he computer alters the human. […] It builds us an entirely new home.”47 While Spiegel’s thoughts and ideas identify him as a member of the IT community, he is not presented as a computer-obsessed ‘nerd’, a typical stereotype of this field of interest.48 His interest in the Cavern derives from his work as a poet and artist. For him, software programs promise effects that he originally hoped to achieve by writing poetry: A good, polished program was everything I thought poetry was supposed to be. […] I was going to get inside reality and extract its essence.49

Instead of seeing digital technologies as opposed to artistic creation, Spiegel assumes that their future accomplishments will fulfil the hopes 41

Coyne, Technoromanticism, 9. Coyne, Technoromanticism, 10. 43 Coyne, Technoromanticism, 11. 44 Coyne, Technoromanticism, 10. 45 This especially holds true for the concept of the digitised mind: The uploaded self would literally become part of the very medium that constitutes the virtual realities; both, world and self, would consist of electronic data and thus melt into each other. The concept of the digitised mind supersedes the idea of an immortal soul, which is one of the reasons why digitisation, software programming and the idea of cyberspace not only hold an affinity to Romantic ideas of transcendence (Coyne, Technoromanticism, 5), but also generate new discourses on religion and metaphysics (Aupers, “Where the Zeroes Meet the Ones”). 46 Coyne, Technoromanticism, 4. 47 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 159. 48 For a detailed description of the prototypical ‘nerd’ see Leitner, “Hacker, Nerds und Übermenschen”. 49 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 215. 42

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and goals that—according to his understanding—motivated the emergence and development of the arts: You know what we’re working on, don’t you? Time travel, Ade. The matter transporter. Embodied art; a life-sized poem that we can live inside. It’s the grail we’ve been after since the first campfire recital. The defeat of time and space. The final victory of the imagination.50

Spiegel sees the digital as a successor to previous art forms (“the first campfire recital”), more adequate not only to the presentation of data and mimetic representations of reality, but also able to change the laws of nature and to redefine humanity’s basic conditions of existence (“time and space”). Implicitly, his account presents a theory of how and why the arts emerged and developed. By postulating that the potential inhabitability of the virtual space fulfils the primary ambition of the arts, Spiegel expresses the assumption that, more than anything else, the production of art aims at the transcendence and transformation of the conditions of physical existence.51 This perspective on the history of arts presumes that at the beginning of all artistic creations is the desire to create an alternative world motivated by the assumption that the material world has to be overcome in order to capture—or ideally enter and inhabit—a different sphere of existence which is associated with ideas of immateriality, essential knowledge, and unlimited agency. Far from being a consistent, elaborate theory, this diffuse urge to overcome the current state of physical being seems to react to the feeling that the contradictions and imperfections of the human condition require some kind of ‘solution’. Most of the technicians, programmers, and artists working on the Cavern see their project in the context of this idea and share the feeling of standing “on the leading edge of the thing that humanity was assembling—this copious, ultimate answer to whatever, in fact, the

50

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 159. The author Richard Powers himself seems to share the idea that the desire to transgress the limits of the body is one of the most influential driving forces for the development of literature—in one of his many interviews he stated: “The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we’re disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning. I strongly believe poetry has always explored that same split, needing the body and yet constantly on the verge of discarding it as irrelevant or debilitating. It’s right at that same untenable split that I want to position the digital revolution and virtual reality” (Powers in Blume, “Two Geeks On Their Way to Byzantium”). 51

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question was”52. In this perspective, the digital devices of the computer age—rather than being a fundamentally new phenomenon—appear to be a refined tool deployed in the context of the continuing endeavours of representation and, more importantly, creation that occupy humanity since its very beginnings. The idea that the development of the computer is pushed on by the same motivation as the formation and development of the arts is repeated several times in the novel: Adie saw this primitive gadget morph into the tool that humans have lusted after since the first hand-chipped adze. […] However much the Cavern had been built from nouns, it dreamed the dream of the unmediated, active verb. It lived where ideas stepped off the blackboard into real being. It represented humanity’s final victory over the tyranny of matter.53 Art made all this happen, you know? The whole digital age.54

As it becomes clear in several dialogues, most of the Cavern’s technologists view the development of the arts and the (new) media as a continuous endeavour of “approximation”55 fuelled by humanity’s archaic longing to get a grasp on the ‘essence’ of reality and to finally bring its own creations to life.56 In this way, the Cavern’s genealogy as presented by its creators goes back to humanity’s very first works of art—“the Upper Paleolithic caves were the first VR [virtual reality]”57—and finds its precondition in the capability of the human imagination to think beyond the ‘here and now’58: “The mind is the first virtual reality”59. According to Spiegel the Cavern and its digital technologies take over a task that up to now was one of the privileged domains of the arts: “[t]he ability to make worlds”60. He is convinced to have come across “a thing that rivaled even speech in the ability to amplify thought”61, “the ultimate

52

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 113. Powers, Plowing the Dark, 267. 54 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 216. 55 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 77. 56 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 267. 57 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 129. 58 See Menninghaus, who, drawing on Helmuth Plessner, ascribes to the imagination the capability to establish an “eccentric position of suspended reality” (Wozu Kunst?, 204, my translation). 59 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 130. 60 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 159. 61 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 267. 53

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medium”62, which is going to annihilate the difference between signifier and signified.

Stories of Failing Retreats The description of Adie Klarpol’s development and her moral struggles with the Cavern provides a critical perspective on the desire to retreat from the physical world into an immaterial virtual environment. Adie’s attitude towards the creation of virtual realities changes several times in the course of the novel, as well as the goals she hopes to achieve through her works. In the beginning she is fascinated and overwhelmed by the immersive quality of the computer simulations. Although she approaches the digital worlds with a feeling of great ambivalence (in spite of her fascination she still feels “a general hatred for all things that the cabled world hoped to become”63), she finally gives in to the captivation the “high-tech wonderland”64 exerts on her. Adie never fully adopts Spiegel’s enthusiastic idea of the virtual as a future home for the human mind65, but she comes to understand “why the mind raced to convert to digital”66. She is torn between the seductive potential of the Cavern’s creations67 and an indistinct feeling which tells her: “We’re not meant to be able to do this. It’s not good for us”68. For Adie, art serves as a stimulus for her own digital simulations: She creates interactive versions of Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910) and the Van Gogh-painting Bedroom in Arles (1888) before she moves on to work on a virtual construction of the Hagia Sofia, inspired by the poem Sailing to Byzantium (1927) by William Butler Yeats. This reference indicates what direction Adie’s creative process takes: The poem laments the sufferings of old age and mortality and describes the “search for the spiritual life”69 symbolised by a journey 62

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 216. Powers, Plowing the Dark, 17. 64 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 22. 65 When Spiegel gets carried away with the thought of future possibilities of virtual realities, she counters: “Why not life, then? […] Life itself, as our final art form. Our supreme high-tech invention. It’s a lot more robust than anything else we’ve got going. Deeply interactive. And the resolution is outstanding” (Powers, Plowing the Dark, 160, emphases in the original). 66 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 39. 67 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 265. 68 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 39. 69 Yeats in Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, 217. 63

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to Byzantium.70 By travelling to the city of culture and philosophy the poem’s speaker “seek[s] to move beyond nature into a more permanent world of spirit or intellect or art”71. Similar to the poem’s Byzantium, Adie’s simulations serve as a “sanctuary”72, springing from a “supreme, useless, self-indulgent escapism.”73 Whereas the “worldwide protest”74 in spring 1989, especially the Tiananmen rebellion, causes hope and excitement in the researchers and challenges Adie’s conception of art’s and the Cavern’s “sheer inconsequence”75, the later developments—most of all the violent ending of the Beijing protests—make her turn to the virtual reality in order to avoid the confrontation with the “unbearable”76 historical events: She moved back to the jungle [the animated version of the Rousseau painting] full-time, away from the press of all facts, out of the reach of news.77

Like “[a]ll of this virtual country’s immigrants”78 Adie comes to see the Cavern as fundamentally opposed to the “[n]on-simulated reality. […] The secular world”79. The Cavern allows its creators to retreat temporarily from the complex and “opaque”80, “real world”81 into a “paradise of

70

Yeats in Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, 217. Yeats’ poem is the most prominent of the many intertexts of the novel. The novel’s description of the Cavern as an attempt to create “better accommodations” (268) for the soul, “[s]omething more like itself than that dying animal” (268) is an almost literal quotation from Yeats’ poem whose lyrical self describes his heart as “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal” (Yeats, The Collected Poems, 218). The reference to Yeats underlines the idea presented in the novel that both old and new media aim at overcoming natural existence. But, like Powers’ novel, already Yeats’ poem is ambivalent with regard to the desire to overcome the human body (see Holdeman, The Cambridge Introduction to W.B. Yeats, 82–85). 71 Bornstein, “Yeats and Romanticism,” 25. 72 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 327. 73 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 398. 74 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 125. 75 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 163; see also 126. 76 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 154. 77 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 141. 78 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 59. 79 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 337. 80 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 337. 81 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 61.

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detachment”82. Despite her recurrent doubts (“It messes us up, Adie decided. It really screws us over, representation”83), Adie enjoys her “escapist program of beautiful delusions”84: “For her, the electronic dollhouse’s sheer inconsequence had returned her to pleasure”85. But, as becomes clear in the further development of the plot, Adie’s retreat from the disturbing eventfulness of the real world does not succeed and her hope for the Cavern’s inconsequence turns out to be wrong. Not only does her experience with digital environments change her perception of the material world and thereby proves to have an impact on her personal life86, but she also comes to realise that the work on the development of new media is deeply related to events in the real world. For Adie the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1990 turns into a moment of truth when she sees that the Cavern’s technologies are used to train soldiers in a simulation environment and to locate targets during actual attacks: Smart bombs beamed back video to even smarter bombs. […] Babylon became a bitmap. Pilots took its sand grains apart, pixel by pixel, their 82

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 145. See also Harris, “Technoromanticism and the Limits of Representationalism,” 114; Kley, Ethik medialer Repräsentation, 435. At the same time, the description of the team’s reception of the news on the Tiananmen massacre already hints at the fact, that the strategy to retreat from the ‘real world’ by entering the Cavern works only temporary. The shocking events literally intrude into the Cavern: “By the time Lim succeeded in piping the massacre into the Cavern, a small crowd had gathered. […] Tiananmen filled the horizon, at eye level, all around them. […] Only when the cameras cut for a commercial could she [Adie] breathe” (Powers, Plowing the Dark, 141). 83 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 298. 84 Löffler, “The Ability to make Worlds,” 107. 85 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 163. 86 Like her opinion on digital technologies, Adie’s ‘look back’ on the real world is deeply ambivalent. In the beginning her own material everyday-life seems to pale in comparison with the intense digital simulations: “One visit to that high-tech wonderland and her old urban cityscape collapsed into back projection. Her friends shrank to animated spirits” (Powers, Plowing the Dark, 22). Later in the novel she shows “a preference for the irreducible materiality of the natural world” (Harris, “Technoromanticism and the Limits of Representationalism,” 115) and doubts the possibility to replace it with digital simulations: “When the sun chiseled its ways through a chink in the stratocumulus and, for fifteen seconds, blazed the cityscape into highest contrast, Adie discovered the real use of the binary. The greatest value of the clumsy, inexorable, accreting digitization of creation lay in showing, for the first time, how infinitely beyond formulation the analog would always run” (Powers, Plowing the Dark, 155).

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soldier bodies tied to weapon systems by electronic umbilical, their every joystick twitch duplicating moves overlearned in years of nowconsummated simulation. Nightscopes revealed minute movements, at impossible distances, in pitch-dark. Robot stalkers chased living targets. Formal edge-detecting algorithms told heat from cold, friend from enemy, camouflaged caches from empty countryside.87

Seeing on the news how new media and technologies serve to make a new kind of war—the ‘Operation Desert Storm’ turns out to be deeply influenced by the “electronic storm”88 of the digital revolution—Adie realises her own involvement in the business of war: “We did this?”89. The one question she willingly blocked out during the past years—“Who’s buying what we’re selling?”90—receives its fatal answer: “Of course the Joint Chiefs wanted what art promised: to break the bonds of matter and make the mind real”91. Understanding that her intention—“All I wanted to do was make something beautiful. Something that wouldn’t hurt anyone.”92—has been misapplied, Adie decides to destroy everything she contributed to the development of the Cavern. Whereas the description of Adie’s failing attempts to create art for art’s sake criticises the effort to draw back from disturbing events of the real world into the world of the imagination by showing that she contributed unwittingly to the development of technologies applicable in warfare, the second plot line centring on Taimur Martin’s kidnapping in Lebanon emphasises the life-sustaining power of imagination. Like Adie, Taimur Martin looks for a “hideout from the real world”93, but his attempt to escape his immediate surroundings differs fundamentally from the technological approach Adie and her team are working on. Both his means and his motivation for retreating are in stark contrast to Adie’s situation. After his kidnapping, Martin lives for several years in strict isolation, “stripped of any touchstone but [him]self”94. Desperately looking for something to occupy his mind, he only survives by entering an imaginary world of memories and fictions which enables him to escape at least mentally from the brutal and monotonous reality of his cell and which at least simulates, although not establishes, the contact to someone else’s 87

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 394–395. Powers, Plowing the Dark, 393. 89 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 395. 90 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 396. 91 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 396. 92 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 397. 93 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 8. 94 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 241. 88

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thoughts and experiences. Martin recapitulates past experiences and conversations and finally turns to art and literature, re-imagining plots of books he once read and evoking paintings he once saw. Without books Martin is forced to turn to the “used bookstore” of his “brain”95, to his imagination: “In the absence of books, you make your own”96. When he tries to explain to his turnkey why he needs books, he tells him that they allow him “not to be me. For an hour. For a day. […] I need someplace to go. I need something to think about. Somebody else, somewhere else”97. Unlike Adie, Martin tries to retreat from his actual situation in order to establish “a connection to the world outside his cell”98. On the one hand, the Beirut plot shows the power of the imagination which proves to be at least as powerful as new media in creating worlds and overcoming the ‘here and now’. It is only by the force of his imagination and the possibility to escape into story- and art-worlds that Taimur Martin survives his captivation without going insane. On the other hand the plot shows that a permanent retreat from the “room of shared experience”99 proves to be deeply destructive for the individual mind.100 Imagined worlds and especially books can serve as a temporary replacement and allow for the individual to experience the interaction with another mind, but in the end, only the return into the social world of reality can sustain Martin’s sanity and personhood, although not without difficulties. The two narrative threads mirror and echo each other. Several recurrent motives suggest a close relation between Adie’s computer-based simulation and Martin’s mind-travelling101. They not only try and—

95

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 381. Powers, Plowing the Dark, 241. 97 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 292. 98 Kucharzewski, Propositions about Life, 410. 99 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 402. 100 Exhausted from years of isolation and physical decay, Martin is finally ready to give in. Crying out in desperation (“Make it stop”, Powers, Plowing the Dark, 390), he smashes his forehead against the wall, unable to bear his captivity any longer: “For years, you’ve hung by your nails over this drop. […] All life has been a fight against this slide into chaos, and here, at the end, you feel the slide win” (390). 101 For example the description of Martin’s cell brings to mind the projection room of the Cavern. For a detailed description of the many connections between both storylines see Harris, “Technoromanticism and the Limits of Representationalism,” 117; Kley, Ethik medialer Repräsentation, 424–25; Kucharzewski, Propositions about Life, 403. 96

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partly—manage to “inhabit”102 the same painting103, moreover, by alternating between both “contrapuntal”104 narrative threads, the novel suggests an affinity between Adie’s and Martin’s efforts to develop credible alternative realities, to create, build, and “furnish”105 virtual “rooms”106. They both turn to the arts and the imagination to establish a reassuring distance to the disturbing events of reality. But more importantly, the confrontation of the two stories discloses the difference between the two attempts of retreat. While Martin has no choice but to retreat inwards, Adie voluntarily tries to avoid engaging with a reality that dissatisfies her. The combination of the two stories shows the complexity and the multiple functions of invented worlds and avoids passing a general judgment on the retreat into the imaginary. In the end, both Martin and Adie fail to reach a “place past place”107: Adie is confronted with her entanglement with the real events of the war; Martin falls back into the reality of his cell after (and during) every single of his imaginative travels to the “galleries of the hypothetical”108. As the final part of the novel suggests, it is not retreat, but the imaginatively achieved re-evaluation of reality that provides a solution for the dilemma disclosed in the two plot lines. The end of Powers’ novel proposes an approach to the arts which suggests using the power of the imagination to 102

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 171. Part of Martin’s inner “galleries” (Powers, Plowing the Dark, 352) is the painting Adie chose for one of her interactive animations. Like Adie, Martin relocates himself into Van Gogh’s bedroom-painting (354). While her simulation is put into effect by technical means, his is mediated only by his imagination. Still, the novel’s descriptions of both experiences of the painting show a striking resemblance. Both of them create a personal retreat. Adie’s version is described as follows: “This is the room life lends you to sleep in. Bedroom Slaapkamer. Chambre à coucher. […] Bed, washstand, chair, window, mirror: everything that you need to live. […] This will be your kamer, your chamber, for who can say how long. A place to enter and inhabit at will.” (170–171). This description is mirrored by Taimur’s imagination of the painting: “Soap and water and towel, a spare shirt, a wall of tilted pictures: what more does a life need to live?” (354). Like Adie, Taimur enters his room several times: “Then the warehouse gray refracts into all the colours of a furnished paradise. […] All here again: the shirt, the towel, the toiletries, those few crooked paintings on the wall. All human misery vanishes from earth. You curl up under the moth-eaten red feather tick, intent on sleeping the sleep of the completed” (357). 104 Harris, “Technoromanticism and the Limits of Representationalism,” 111. 105 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 357. 106 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 353. 107 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 353. 108 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 352. 103

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re-assess the real world: For Powers, “[a]rt offers a potential (contingent) space of detachment from the tumultuous world, not to renounce the world but to consider it anew.”109

Meeting within the Medium: Poetics of Disruption and Re-entry The literary associations between the two different developments of mediated worlds—one by algorithms and computers, the other one by human consciousness—culminate in the final chapters of the novel when Adie and Martin meet within a space which can neither be identified as a mere fantasy nor as a product of Adie’s digital simulation. The event is recounted two times, from Adie’s and from Taimur’s perspective.110 The novel does not provide a satisfactory explanation for the meeting of the two characters and leaves open ‘where’ the encounter takes place. The first account of the occurrence is narrated from Adie’s perspective. Entering her virtual version of the Hagia Sophia for one last time, she stumbles upon another person in the programmed space who has not been put inside by her or her colleagues and who did not enter the simulation by using the usual technological appliances: And deep beneath her, where there should have been stillness, something moved. […] The mad thing swam into focus: a man, staring up at her fall, his face an awed bitmap no artist could have animated.111

The inexplicable experience causes a crash in two respects. Within the simulation Adie falls from her elevated position near the ceiling of the Hagia Sophia while at the same time, her simulation crashes: “The winch of the code unthreaded. She fell like a startled fledgling, back into the 109

Strecker, “Powers World,” 192. The two accounts differ in their narrative perspectives. Latour observes that Powers deploys “a whole gamut of different levels of realism” (“Powers of the Facsimile,” 269). Whereas the Seattle-plot is presented by an omniscient narrator, the Beirut-plot is presented as a ‘you’-narration which addresses the reader and draws him into the narrated world. A third kind of narration complements the two plot lines: In what Kucharzewski terms “room chapters” (Propositions about Life, 405) the novel evokes different spaces whose ontological status remains unclear. They seem to render the impressions the different animated ‘rooms’ of the Cavern are supposed to achieve. Thus, these parts of the text could be seen as an (enhanced) imitation of the digital medium, which at the same time shows the power of literary descriptions to evoke worlds. 111 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 399. 110

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world’s snare”112. Adie’s fall is mirrored in Martin’s description of the encounter, who turns out to be the ‘mad thing’ Adie meets with: A hundred feet above, in the awful dome, an angel dropped out of the air. An angel whose face was filled not with good news but with all the horror of her coming impact. A creature dropping from the sky, its bewilderment outstripping your own.113

In Martin’s perception, Adie turns into a falling angel, a description that brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” and indicates her changing attitude towards the Cavern. Whereas during one of her first sojourns in the Cavern she felt like “God’s recording angel, attending the day of Creation”114, the meeting with Martin turns her into an iconoclast of her own work115: The encounter prompts her to create a virtual environment which not only includes pictures of the Gulf War, but also its own collapse. Her new work lays open the Cavern’s ‘unholy’ entanglement with the business of war as well as its status as a human creation that can’t serve as a permanent replacement of reality. It does not try to be taken for reality, but instead both hints at its connection with real events and at its own artificiality and thus circumvents the effect of complete immersion and detachment: “A shattering barrage drives you from this paradise”116. Although Adie’s new simulation does not offer an alternative reality, it still allows for real experiences within the virtual space that can change the perception of reality—as Deleuze put it: the virtual possesses full reality as virtual.117 Adie’s new simulation focuses on the real world “through the broken symbols”118. In consequence, the way out, the return to reality becomes a decisive part of Adie’s creation: The inner church goes dark; fluorescents blaze back on. Transcendence collapses again to the width of a walk-in closet. The future’s clients—the

112

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 399. Powers, Plowing the Dark, 414. 114 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 265. 115 The referent of Adie’s simulation foreshadows this development: The Hagia Sophia is not only Yeats’ symbol for the idealised eternal space of the arts, but also the actual historical place of recurring religious fights and acts of iconoclasm (Powers, Plowing the Dark, 391). 116 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 409. 117 Deleuze, Die Falte, 264. 118 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 401. 113

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The encounter helps not only Adie, but also Martin, to re-enter the outside world. The meeting happens when, after years of struggle against isolation and madness, he is ready to give in. But instead of losing his mind he experiences “how the walls of your cell dissolved. How you soft-landed in a measureless room”120. He enters what he takes to be a “vision […] that made no sense”, a “hallucination”121, but at the same time more than that: “A temple on the mind’s Green Line, its decoration seeping up from awful subterranean streams inside you, too detailed to be wholly yours”122. For Martin, his lack of understanding becomes a force that keeps him alive and “sane”123. It gives him the strength to endure the rest of his captivity and to confront the challenge of re-entering the outside world after his release: “It left you no choice but to live long enough to learn what it needed from you”124. With the description of the disconcerting meeting of Adie and Martin, Powers’ novel implements what Steve Spiegel hoped to achieve with the Cavern: to create “[p]laces we can meet in, across any distance. Places where we can change all the rules”125. What Spiegel’s and Adie’s mighty tool could not possibly achieve—the confrontation of two individuals by some mysterious transcendence of the material—literature does. But instead of serving as an escapist replacement of reality, the mysterious meeting in “the nonspace of a text”126 causes an unsettledness, both for the reader and the protagonists, that undermines a strict dualistic distinction between the real and the imagined and instead introduces a disruption which focuses the attention on the complex correlations between invented worlds and reality. Like Adie’s re-programmed simulation which finally leads its visitors back into the real world beyond the virtual space, the meeting of Adie and Martin within the novel disrupts the reader’s immersion in the fictional world and brings to mind the artificiality of the imagined world he is dealing with: The “defamiliarizing move

119

Powers, Plowing the Dark, 410. Powers, Plowing the Dark, 413. 121 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 413. 122 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 413. 123 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 413. 124 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 414. 125 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 159–160. 126 Kucharzewski, Propositions about Life, 437. 120

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momentarily dislodges our willing suspension of disbelief”127. While up to this point the rules governing the events of the novel seemed to comply with the rules of the non-textual world of the 1980s and 1990s, Adie’s and Martin’s meeting disrupts “the novel’s allegedly mimetic narrative frames”128. Like Adie and Martin, the reader, too, is forced to try to make sense of the inexplicable event, and cannot do so without focusing on his own process of reading the novel and imagining the novel’s world. The “epistemic shift”129 thus forces the reader to refocus on his own cognitive activity; it makes him reflect the way he deals with media in general and the novel in particular. The self-reflexive turn brings the reader back into his world and ideally opens up new perspectives on processes of reading and media perception. Like his earlier novels, the two story lines of Powers’ Plowing the Dark explore the “tension between narrative [and, in this case, old and new media] as therapeutic escape and irresponsible escapism”130, “the good escape / bad escape dilemma of the imagination”131. The novel describes and offers an example for a third way to deal with narrative and invented worlds, namely to experience them as a reflexive space that does not replace reality, but opens up new ways of seeing life in the real world: “Inside this room, the world re-forms itself. Outside, there is no saying. […] But from the demonstration room, no one walks out the way he came”132. Accordingly, Powers sees the potential of artistic creations and digital technologies not in more and more perfect representations of reality133, but—as he states in his theoretical essay Being and Seeming (2000)—in their ability to sensitise us for the complexity of the irreplaceable material world: For like a book, digital representation, in all its increasing immersiveness and free agency, may finally locate its greatest worth in its ability to refresh us to the irreducible complexity of the analog world, a complexity

127

Harris, “Technoromanticism and the Limits of Representationalism,” 118. Kucharzewski, Propositions about Life, 401. 129 Harris “Technoromanticism and the Limits of Representationalism,” 123. 130 Hurt, “Narrative Powers,” 33. 131 Dewey, Understanding Richard Powers, 130. 132 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 410. 133 Powers observes that “[o]ur dream of a new tool inclines us to believe that the next invention will give us a better, fuller, richer, more accurate, more immediate image of the world”. He counters this dream with the assumption: “The more advanced the media, the higher the level of mediation” (Powers, “Being and Seeming”). 128

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Powers develops a poetics of disruption, which both describes and implements processes of immersion on the one hand and elements of interruption on the other hand.135 His novel depicts and questions hopes that have been triggered by the development of digital technologies and calls for an artistic practice that does not try to overcome or simulate reality but opens up new perspectives on it. In this way, the novel’s content finds a complement in its composition: Plowing the Dark not only features the topic of immersion and the ambivalent status of imagined worlds, but simultaneously offers to the reader both “a poetics of immersion”136 and a self-reflexive dimension which foregrounds the novel’s qualities as “that unconceivable device: a cunning made world”137. Whereas the realistically narrated events in the lives of Adie and Martin favour the reader’s immersion in the story-worlds, the recurrent motives, the intertextual references and, most of all, the implausible meeting of Adie and Martin suggest a metafictional reading. Thus the text allows the reader to experience different ways of approaching the novel and allows him to switch between different modes of reading. Powers’ novel allows for reading in (at least) “two complementary ways”138: as a “simulation that runs on minds”139 which allows “immersion, make-believe and emotional participation in the events”140 and as a “system of signs”141 which establishes a reflective distance to the narrated story-world and allows to explore the mediality of the text. By using this strategy Powers’ novel shows that, in opposition to Spiegel’s opinion, the ‘old’ medium literature can bear comparison with new media’s potentials—and that it can provide a profound contribution to the discussion of new media.142

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Powers, “Being and Seeming”. As Kley (Ethik medialer Repräsentation, 454) observed, Powers further elaborates his poetological reflections by re-writing Plato’s allegory of the cave. 136 Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality, 92. 137 Powers, Plowing the Dark, 253. 138 Ryan, “Allegories of Immersion”. 139 Oatley, “Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact,” 101. 140 Ryan, “Allegories of Immersion”. 141 Ryan, “Allegories of Immersion”. 142 For their very helpful comments I want to thank Daniel Scott, Michael Strobl, and Alfred Stumm. 135

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Works Cited Anonymous. [Humanity+]. 2015. “Transhumanist FAQ: What is virtual reality?” http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-faq/#answ er_27. Accessed June 4, 2015. Aupers, Stef. 2010. “‘Where the Zeroes Meet the Ones’. Exploring the Affinity Between Magic and Computer Technology.” In Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital, edited by Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman, 219–238. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Blume, Harvey. 2000. “Two Geeks On Their Way to Byzantium: A Conversation with Richard Powers.” The Atlantic Online, June 28. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/interviews/ba2000-0628.htm. Accessed June 4, 2015. Bornstein, George. 2006. “Yeats and Romanticism.” In The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats, edited by Marjorie Howes and John Kelly, 19–35. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1907. Biographia Literaria. Vol. II. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coyne, Richard. 1999. Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Die Falte. Leibniz und der Barock. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Dewey, Joseph. 2002. Understanding Richard Powers. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Du Toit, Angélique. 2011. “Grand Narrative / Metanarrative.” In The Lyotard Dictionary, edited by Stuart Sim, 86–89. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harris, Charles B. 2004. “Technoromanticism and the Limits of Representationalism: Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark.” In The Holodeck in the Garden. Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris, 110– 29. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Holdeman, David. 2006. The Cambridge Introduction to W.B. Yeats. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Hurt, James. 1998. “Narrative Powers: Richard Powers as Storyteller.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 18:24–42.

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Jeffares, Norman A. 1968. A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kley, Antje. 2009. Ethik medialer Repräsentation im britischen und USamerikanischen Roman, 1741–2000. Heidelberg: Winter. Krüger, Oliver. 2005. “Gnosis in Cyberspace? Body, Mind and Progress in Posthumanism.” Journal of Evolution and Technology 14:77–89. http://jetpress.org/volume14/krueger.pdf. Accessed June 4, 2015. Kucharzewski, Jan D. 2011. Propositions about Life. Reengaging Literature and Science. Heidelberg: Winter. Latour, Bruno. 2008. “Powers of the Facsimile: A Turing Test on Science and Literature.” In Intersections. Essays on Richard Powers, edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 263–291. Champaign/London: Dalkey Archive Press. Leitner, Florian. 2013. “Hacker, Nerds und Übermenschen. Die Helden der Cyberkultur.” In Ästhetischer Heroismus. Konzeptionelle und figurative Paradigmen des Helden, edited by Nikolas Immer and Mareen van Marwyck, 435–451. Bielefeld: transcript. Löffler, Philipp. 2012. “‘The Ability to make Worlds’: Lukácsean Aesthetics, Self-Creation, and Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark.” In Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers, edited by Antje Kley and Jan D. Kucharzewski, 92–117. Heidelberg: Winter. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Menninghaus, Winfried. 2011. Wozu Kunst? Ästhetik nach Darwin. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Moravec, Hans. 1988. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Oatley, Keith. 1999. “Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation.” Review of General Psychology 3:101–117. Platon. 1990. Politeia. Edited by Gunther Eigler. Translated by Friedrich Schleiermacher. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Pock, Benny. 2012. “‘The Fabulous Persian Machine’: The Function of Narrative Patterns in the Age of Networked Media and in Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark.” In Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers, edited by Antje Kley and Jan D. Kucharzewski, 119–142. Heidelberg: Winter.

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Poppe, Sandra. 2008. “Literarische Medienreflexionen. Eine Einführung.” In Literarische Medienreflexionen. Künste und Medien im Fokus moderner und postmoderner Literatur, edited by Sandra Poppe and Sascha Seiler, 9–23. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. Powers, Richard. 2000a. Plowing the Dark. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. —. 2000b. “Being and Seeming: the Technology of Representation.” http://www.wildethics.org/essays/being-and-seeming.html. Accessed June 4, 2015. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1995. “Allegories of Immersion: Virtual Narration in Postmodern Fiction.” Style 29:262–286. —. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Scholz, Carter. 2008. “Narrating Technology.” In Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 292– 304. Champaign/London: Dalkey Archive Press. Strecker, Trey. 2008. “Powers World: Refuge and Reentry in Plowing the Dark.” In Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 187–197. Champaign/London: Dalkey Archive Press. Yeats, William Butler. 1967. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. London/Melbourne/Toronto: Macmillan.

CHAPTER TEN NEW MEDIA – NEW LITERACY? THE DIGITAL READER’S CREATIVE CHALLENGES ULRIKE KÜCHLER

[W]hat withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura. This process is symptomatic; its significance extends far beyond the realm of art. It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced.1

This is how Walter Benjamin summarises the effects of modern technology on the work of art in his seminal discussion of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Benjamin observes reproduction technologies to have a ‘dissociating effect’ on the work of art, detaching “the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition”. As a result, the aura of the work of art inevitably decays—even more so today, when the digital space has opened up infinite possibilities of technological reproduction. At the same time, it is these very technologies that allow for an individual appropriation of the work of art on the side of the recipient: it is not him or her who comes to the work of art but it is its reproduction that “reache[s] the recipient in his or her own situation” thus “actualiz[ing] that which is reproduced.” Against this backdrop, the arts shifted their attention in the digital age—from the singular aesthetic object to the art-experiencing and performing subject: a recipient who brings along a very own “sphere of 1 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 22.

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tradition” that equally concerns his engagement with different media, the perceptions related to them, and the artistic potential they allow for. As a result, Friedrich W. Block observes, that a “new” active recipient who understands and completes the creative process appeared on the aesthetic stage: an ideal reference point, not only for open and self-reflexive perception and interpretation processes, but also for creative intervention in the art process.2

This new role of the recipient raises some interesting questions: Do artistic works created with new media call for a new kind of inter-medial literacy on the side of the reader? While the reader of the past was first and foremost required to be able to read written and, at times, understand illustrated language, today’s reader has to master different technologies, understand the language of different sign systems (words, images, sounds) and playfully interact with the work of art.3 How does art that is created with new media reflect on this changing role of the reader? We remember how Roland Barthes pointed to the changing reader function in literary works of the post-modern era, describing the text as a “tissue of quotations”4 that has to be deciphered by the reader—a notion that has been reflected upon since by many literary works, for instance in Richard Power’s Galatea 2.2 (1995).5 Yet, while those literary works depend on the fictional devices of written language to envision the aesthetic potentials of other media, artistic works created with new media can actually perform and stage those potentials and their relation to the recipient. Digital arts are thus primarily interested in the interaction between art and recipient, the latter assuming an active role in the aesthetic process. 2

Block, Heibach, and Wenz, P0es1s, 31. See, for instance, works such as Chris Joseph’s and Kate Pullinger’s famous interactive story Inanimate Alice (www.inanimatealice.com, last accessed June 12, 2015), in which the boundaries between game and story are challenged when the recipient assumes the first person (‘ego-shooter’) perspective of protagonist Alice in a 3D environment that reminds of adventures of the early 2000s. 4 Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 146. 5 The semi-autobiographical novel is about an author with a writer’s block who joins forces with a computer scientist to create an artificial intelligence that shall be able to pass an exam in English literature and, to reach that goal, works through the entire canon of English and World literature. A recurring motif throughout the text is the narrator’s very own media literacy, for instance when he tries to talk to Helen, the AI, by different means of communication, including a text editor, a voice recorder, and a camera (e.g. Powers, Galatea 2.2, 73). 3

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Drawing on the implications of Block’s observation, I suggest to distinguish three qualities of interaction between recipient and digital art. All of them link digital art’s aesthetic condition with the recipient’s “sphere of tradition”: (1) Digital art employs the entire spectrum of digital technologies, from interaction via camera and microphone to orientation in 3D and Virtual Reality (VR) environments. For the recipient, this technological setting can create a certain inhibition threshold. It is hence the instrumental experience that helps the recipient to interact creatively with the technologies employed by digital art. (2) Another characteristic feature of digital art is its combination of various sensual dimensions to create a unique synesthetic experience. The recipient has to navigate simultaneously different primary sign systems such as written language, image, and sound. His phenomenal experience and ‘sensual biography’ offer orientation in these ‘multilingual’ environments. (3) A last characteristic of digital art (in the present discussion) is the staging of a dialogue between different aesthetic traditions. Only recipients who are familiar with these aesthetic and historic contexts (music, literature, painting etc.) can follow the dialogue. What is more, the recipient’s aesthetic experience is actually the key to his active participation in the dialogue. It is the combination of these three dimensions of experience that forms the aforementioned “‘new’ active recipient who understands and completes the creative process” in digital art.6 Against this backdrop, this essay focuses on the reflection of the role of the recipient in interactive fiction: a genre of digital art whose tradition reaches from the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure book series’7 to text adventures and that in some way or other uses literary language as a main point of reference and structuring element but enhances the storytelling with other artistic languages, such as images and sounds.8 The three browser-based examples 6

Block, Heibach, and Wenz, P0es1s, 31. The Choose Your Own Adventure Books Series has been a popular book series that started in 1976 and introduced the second person narration to (children’s) literature: previous to the rise of first person adventures in computer games, this sort of ‘interactive’ storytelling allowed for the reader to decide upon the progress of a story after each of its chapters and continue reading at different points in the story, depending on his decision. 8 In the following, I will therefore also use the term reader to refer to the recipient of such art, although such a reader has to draw on another spectrum of literacies (see above) than the reader of a book. 7

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I have chosen focus on different aspects of the new reader’s new media literacy: Les 12 Traveaux d’Internaute / The 12 Labors of the Internet User (2008)9 is a collaborative bilingual English-French project by Serge Bouchardon, Mathieu Brigolle, Aymeric Briss, and others that is based on the myth of the twelve Herculean labours. With each Herculean labour corresponding to a technological task for the recipient—such as dealing with cookies—the work tackles the “question of experiencing technology in an epic mode” 10 . Chris Joseph’s and Maria Colino’s award-winning project Dadaventuras (2004) intertwines Spanish-language literature with the modernist art movement in the tradition of Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and others: Don Quijote meets Dada. Its recipient assumes the role of the Barthian reader and literally traces and composes a literary history through a web of quotations. After mastering technology and literary history, in Serge Bouchardon’s Loss of Grasp / Déprise (2010)11 the reader finally has to face the challenges of the writing process itself. The winner of the New Media Writing Prize of 2011 is an interactive narrative that invites the reader to assume the role of the author while entering into a dialogue, both explicitly and implicitly, with Benjamin on his notion of the work of art in the age of its technological reproduction.12

The 12 Labors of the Internet User (2008) In The 12 Labors of the Internet User “[t]he Internet user is regarded […] as the Hercules of the Internet”13, thus introducing the digital reader as a reader of mythology while emphasising, if not ironising14, the challenges and promises of modern technology. The analogy between Hercules’ labours at ancient mythological places and the challenges of the digital 9

For the sake of simplicity, I will only use the English title in the following. Bouchardon et.al., The 12 Labors of the Internet User. 11 For the sake of simplicity, I will only use the English title in the following. 12 The 12 Labors of the Internet, Dadaventuras, and Loss of Grasp, will also be included in the European eLiterature Collection (publication planned for 2016) along with parts of my discussion of them in this essay. 13 Bouchardon et al., The 12 Labors of the Internet User. All quotations are taken from www.the12labors.com, last accessed June 12, 2015. 14 There are various moments of irony throughout the narrative. Early into the story, for instance, the recipient is promised: “If you succeed, you’ll survive on the web and maybe even become immortal.” And in one of the tasks, the reader has to log onto the Internet in the environment of an early point and click adventure. After dead-end options such as writing an email or a letter to the provider, the recipient discovers, that it is just the WLAN cable that is not plugged in correctly. www.the12labors.com, last accessed June 12, 2015. 10

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space creates a work of digital mythology that raises media literacy to an entirely new level. In the course of meeting the digital challenges the reader rereads the myth, learns a lesson in technology, and (re-) experiences how certain fictional and communicational structures persist throughout time and media while their material preconditions change. The project interprets the most important challenges on the Internet as Herculian labours and links them to the structures and technological environment of new media. On his path through the World Wide Web the digital user has, for instance, to cope with modes of resistance such as the Lernaean Hydra (pop-up windows), forms of disorientation like the Erymanthean Boar (hyperlinks), and figures of disambiguation such as the Apples of Hesperides (Wikipedia). Although these tasks are arranged in a linear row of buttons at the bottom of the screen, they can be played in a non-linear fashion and are assigned—but not sorted by—several levels of difficulty (from 1 to 5): easier challenges such as handling the Cattle of Geryon (2), i.e. social network impostors, are contrasted with more demanding tasks such as cleaning the Augean Stables (4), i.e. your mailbox. Additionally, the work demands a high level of instrumental and phenomenal involvement by encouraging a lot of interaction: The recipient has to use the microphone and literally call off the Stymphalian Birds (banners) or uses the webcam to catch the Ceryneian Hind (digital materiality) and to feel—paradoxically—the gap that virtual space leaves in our range of perception. Each labour is presented in a similar fashion, that intertwines the technological present and the mythological past: After choosing a labour by its mythological name the recipient is first provided with a short text that establishes the analogy between the respective task on the Internet and its corresponding mythological framework, as, for instance, in the case of “The Erymanthean Boar”: You click on a hyperlink, then on another … and another one still. Slowly, you can feel yourself drifting away… You don’t know, where you are, you’re lost, disoriented, like Hercules, chasing the Erymenthean Boar. On Mount Erymanthus, a wild boar terrorized the farming community. The animal was not easy to find, hiding itself in thickets and bushes. Hercules had been assigned by Eurystheus to capture the animal alive, so the chase went on for months. […] At the overwhelming sight of the boar, Eurystheus was so frightened that he hid in a jar.

This juxtaposition links mythological concept and technological realisation as part of the same process and not only promises orientation for the upcoming task but, more importantly, also offers a piece of (ironic)

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commentaryy anticipating the experien nce the recipiient has yet to t face— what if the answers we trry to find on the Internet bby following chains of hyperlinks ffrighten us as a much as th he boar frighhtened Eurysttheus? If, despite all m mythological forebodings, the recipient accepts the challenge, c he has to faace the actual assignment. Each assignm ment raises thee relation between myythological conncept and tech hnological reaalisation to a new n level by translatinng it into an actual a action that t the recipiient has to peerform. In our examplle we literally have to “[b]rowse throough the hyp pertextual labyrinth” inn order to “finnd the Erymen nthean Boar”. Our journey, or rather odyssey, begins on a blaack screen witth words grouuped around a leading motif—one time it is “W Writing”, the next n time it is “Poetry”, and d another time it is “ELO”15—that link l to a netwo ork of other w webpages (Figure 1).

Figure 1: “Thhe Erymantheann Boar” – the en ntrance to the “hhypertextual lab byrinth”

Many of theese new webppages are digittal fictional arrt of their own n, such as Mark Ameriika’s work FIILMTEXT (20 001-2002), thee final part off an entire new media ttrilogy16, or Hank H Hartmut’’s and Robert Sanders’ digiitalisation of the Oulip ipo manifest, Raymond Queneau’s Cennt Mille Millliards De Poèmes17, w which invites thhe reader to im mmerse into a network of references 15

ELO referss to the Electroonic Literature Organization, currently coord dinated by Nick Montforrt, associate proofessor of digitaal media at MIT T. 16 See Amerikka, FILMTEXT T; the trilogy allso includes thee works GRAM MMATRON and PHON:E E:ME. 17 http://100000000000000poems.atspace.com, last accesssed June 12, 201 15.

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between words and images in an infinite re-composition of Queneau’s sonnets. Each of these interactive fiction projects then refers to new web pages and other works of digital art creating an endless three-dimensional web of references that makes it easy to get lost and forget about the Erymenthean Boar—until, quite unexpectedly, the boar appears and the task is solved clearing the path for a new one. The tasks’ increasing virtual quality and complexity corresponds to the medium’s technological development and their arrangement mirrors certain stages of involvement with(in) the digital space: whereas the user’s engagement with the task at the far left of the screen (the Nemean Lion, i.e. logging onto the Internet) leads into a static scenario that unfolds the virtual aesthetics of point and click adventures of the early 1990s, the challenge at the far right (Cerberus, also known as dead and inaccessible web addresses) is set in a dynamic environment that links on-screen movements to quests within the World Wide Web. Similar to The Erymenthean Boar it thus points to the digital space’s expanding spatial dimension as well as its limitations. In facing The 12 Labors of the Internet, the digital ‘reader’ hence transforms into a Herculian ‘writer’ who chooses amongst, reads about and thus actively reconstructs the twelve parts of the myth while at the same time deconstructing the myth of digital space as a representation of reality.

Dadaventuras (2004) Dadaventuras uses the technological potential of new media explored in The 12 Labors of the Internet User to stage an inter-medial journey through time and explore the relation between written and visual language. In combining pieces of Spanish-language literature with the artistic modes of the Avantgarde, the “experiment in aleatory narrative” 18 by Chris Joseph and Maria Colino asks its recipients to trace and (re-)compose the history of literature and the arts. It creates artistic adventures in mada (portmanteau of ‘multimedia dada’) that perform and produce various effects and affects of alienation: by staging a dialogue between the leading narratives of Siglo de Oro, Avantgarde, and contemporary culture as well as by combining digital multimedia variety with Dadaist formal complexity. Dadaventuras is a composition of images and texts that engages the recipient in an interplay of semantic appropriation and loss of control. On the main screen the reader is presented with three options of interaction 18

Joseph and Colino, Dadaventuras. All quotations are taken from www.391.org/ issues/34, last accessed June 12, 2015.

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with the proj oject’s visual part: p either he passively obsserves how, att a steady pace, a randdom combinattion of imagess or parts of im mages—enlarrged or in original sizee—forms into one big pictu ure; or he moodifies the seq quence by clicking intoo the central image i field to o add new parrts to the pictu ure; or he prompts a new picture to build up choosing froom one of teen visual ‘pretexts’ onn both sides of the central im mage field. Thhe choice of pretexts p is a semantic game of channce: only som metimes actuaal parts of th he chosen pretexts are then represennted in the maain field, at tim mes, other picctures out of a total of 66 are quotedd instead.

Figure 2: Thee image-text syynthesis with ex xtracts from Luuis Borges’ La Biblioteca de Babel (19441)

In addition, various (interr-)texts leave their traces iin each picture: speech bubbles thaat the recipiennt can activate and deactiivate and thaat contain various, seeemingly incom mprehensible text fragmennts (Figure 2). 2 While they thus m mark the text as a an image, th hese text fragm gments also reefer to the project’s baackground narrratives, which h are accessibble through an n icon on the lower rigght of the screeen. The ficttional framew work of Dada aventuras covvers the high hlights of Spanish-langguage literaryy history and d draws a linee from a 15thh century Catalan songg to 17th centuury works by Miguel de Ceervantes, Felix x Lope de Vega, and P Pedro Calderónn de la Barca, to early 20th century artistts such as

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Federico Gaarcía Lorca, Frrancis Picabiaa and Jorge Luuis Borges to, finally, a the song Quuijote (1982) by b Julio Iglesiias, that referss back to the beginning b of the geneealogy. The eight e literary excerpts aree complemen nted by a Dadaventura ras “original”,, which, basically, creates a ‘Spanglish’ synthesis of the preseented literaryy canon. Thro ough a ‘play’’ button, any of these pretexts cann be automaatically linked d with and— —mixed in a Dadaist fashion—bee inserted intoo the speech bubbles b of thhe images on the main screen. In tthis way we may, for insttance, embedd re-arranged elements from Luis Borges’ La Biblioteca dee Babel (19441) into the colourful context of tthe modern sketches s (Figu ure 3). Addinng a more ch hallenging level of inteeraction, the recipient may y also alter aany of the pretexts by rearranging,, adding, or deeleting single words or entirre paragraphss, thus not only creatinng an entireely new tex xt but also performing the very collaborative principle suuggest by Borges’ universaal and infinitte library. Finally, if thhe reader deciides for “la marcha m real” (““the real way””) he may also enter ann own text crreation into an n empty text field and thuss literally fill the blankk spots in liteerary history. Each E of the neew or altered texts can of course alsso be ‘played’ in the imagees on the mainn screen but will w not be saved.

Figure 3: Thee text field wheere the recipien nt can change thhe pretexts from m Spanish literature, in tthis case Luis Borges’ B La Biblioteca de Babell (1941)

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In offering these two points of entry to the work of art—from image to text and from text to image—Dadaventuras not only re-arranges literary history but also encourages to explore the rich aesthetic tradition concerned with the semantic tension, transition, and translation between written and visual language. Re-playing elements from the 15th century Catalan song “Dindirindín” (Anonymous) as speech bubbles, subtitles, or inscriptions in the modern sketches, thus, for instance, cross-references historical aesthetic concepts such as the Renaissance emblem with contemporary genres such as graphic novels. In engaging with Dadaventuras, the recipient thus explores the many layers of experiencing a work of art: on a very sensual level, as part of intertwined discourses and aesthetic concepts.

Loss of Grasp (2010) Serge Bouchardon’s award-winning work Loss of Grasp is a far more linear interactive narrative than Dadaventuras and concerned with the literal loss of control of author, the text, its hero, and its reader. In six episodes the first-person narrator resumes his life story’s golden thread and relates it to the pivotal tension between losing and gaining control—as a husband, father, and narrator. The work’s formal and material composition reflects this development creating a comparable tension between the recipient’s recurrent loss and retrieval of control. It reexamines and re-interprets basic fictional concepts (such as what a text or a reader is) against the backdrop of a postmodern era that has been mainly concerned with their deconstruction. Each of the six episodes employs various modes of interaction with the digital medium that challenge conventional conceptions of reading and transform the reading process into a synesthetic experience. Such, the creative intervention Block ascribed to the digital recipient is not so much a given prerequisite but rather the result of an aesthetic process in interaction with digital art. Central to this process is a repositioning of boundaries: between the material and medial preconditions, the involved sign systems, and, finally, author, text, and recipient. Loss of Grasp performs and meta-poetically comments upon these metamorphoses by staging tensions and interruptions: between diverse modes of instrumental interaction using cursor, keyboard, loudspeakers, webcam; between various phenomenal qualities combining and contrasting acoustic, optic, and haptic perception; between diverse aesthetic phenomena intertwining literary narration with music, painting, and the like—and, in doing so, also between reader and narrator. It is thus

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the liminal space both between different sign systems and between various communication systems that comes to the fore. Staging such transitions, the narration quotes and denotes strategies of ‘non-digital storytelling’ and at the same time defines the particulars of ‘digital storytelling’. Loss of Grasp is thus characterised by an aesthetics of transition and continuously reflects upon the potentials and limitations of its very own processes of telling a story: how and from which angle to get a grasp on digital narration. This is already reflected upon from a macro-perspective: First, on a paratextual level, the introductory screens link the actual and the implicit reader and thus define the role of the recipient as a dynamic function and active part of the narrative. Here the recipient chooses whether to use the computer’s sound and camera function, both of which contribute essentially to the narrative’s construction. He also has to decide whether to explore the story in French, English, or Italian, none of which is signified as the ‘original’ language, establishing a certain semiotic polyvalence from the outset. Secondly, there is the fictional construction itself, its comparatively conventional, linear line of narration: In six episodes, the first-person narrative spans from the narrator’s present condition shaped by a feeling of increasing disintegration (ep. 1), back to that point of no return in his life when he met his wife (ep. 2), to the present day when first her note of leave shatters their twenty years of marriage (ep. 3) and then his son’s note of rejection decomposes his paternal role as a hero’s role (ep. 4), both leaving him with the challenge to redefine that very role as one determined not by the decisions of others but by what he himself chooses, feels, and believes (ep. 5). This linearity, however, is broken: the dramatic five-act scheme of classical narration is extended to a sixth act that performs and redefines the role of the digital reader (ep. 6). Finally, already from a macro-perspective, Loss of Grasp tackles some more general aesthetic problems: Is it after all possible to still speak of a text or a reader (which the narrative itself does) when we discuss a multimedia piece of fiction such as this? Each of the episodes examines a different aesthetic relation that changes in the age of digital media and explores its effects on the reader: between sign and image (ep.1), image and text (ep. 2), text and music (ep. 3), aesthetic concepts (ep. 4), strategies of media acquisition and aesthetic biographies (ep. 5 & 6). This redefinition process is essentially related to the interrelation and interaction between narrator and reader who, in a way, are presented as each other’s doppelganger. From the first sentence on the first screen onwards the narrator’s story is closely intertwined with the reader’s

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interaction on screen: “My entire life, I believed I had infinite prospects before me” 19 describes not only the narrator’s world in a nut shell but mirrors the reader’s experience in interaction with the digital space and thus explores the boundary between the inner and the outer communication system: every time the cursor moves across the text, its letters successively change into other letters, signs, and numbers thus evading the reader’s grasp (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The narrator’s sentence “I am the king of the world” changes into incomprehensible chains of signs when the cursor moves across it.

At the same time, this also highlights the temporal and figurative level of narration. The change from one sentence into another visualises what digital media usually conceal: the transition from one image to another makes the space in-between perceptible and, at the same time, refers to the linguistic and semantic space between these signs. This emphasises what Ferdinand de Saussure defined as one of the characteristic qualities of linguistic signs, that is, the arbitrary relation between the sign’s materiality and the concept it comprises. Eventually the mixture of signs forms into a new sentence: “‘The whole universe belongs to me’, I thought” is not only the story of the narrator’s past but also the story of the reader’s present. Increasingly, in this first chapter the reader explores the potentials and limits of his new role and thus experiences a process of media acquisition that hovers between immediacy and mediacy: on the one hand he makes the digital territory his own and builds a synesthetic universe of meaning. It is his interaction with the screen that creates a background of forms, colours, and sounds for the narrator’s account of how he “followed his own path” and “browsed beautiful landscapes.” The reader’s clicks literally change the colourful landscape into something more or less 19 Bouchardon, Loss of Grasp. All quotations are taken from http://lossofgrasp. com, last accessed June 12, 2015.

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vibrant, depending for instance on the pace of clicks and the cursor’s direction of movement and thus mirroring the effects of a brush while drawing (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The movements of the cursor change the colours and forms on screen.

Such inter-medial references mediate between the textual experience and the phenomenal experience, merge the abstract and the concrete and thus create a presence effect that is unique for the digital medium. Yet, this medial immediacy is broken when the reader ultimately believes to have gained a grasp on what role this medium holds ready for him. “Everything escapes me” is not only what the narrator experienced in his relationship with his wife but also what the reader experiences in relation to the fictional construction—he loses both cursor and control: signs, forms, sounds, and colours start to move by themselves. What is left in the end is a black screen, the materialisation of the reader’s blind spot. From the first chapter onwards, the narrative thus follows what Bouchardon described as the intent “to get the reader to experience through gestures events which the narrator had already experienced.”20 The second episode tries to transform this blind spot into meaning by exploring the boundary between written and visual language. At the same time, it challenges the conventional (Romantic) aesthetic distinction between the written word as a medium of reflexion and the image as a medium of present perception by quoting filmic language: While a line of subtitles summarises the narrator’s fleeting impressions of his first meeting with his wife, the wife’s picture emerges slowly from numerous layers of colourful sentences—a process that emphasises the actual length of their relationship (Figure 6).

20

Bouchardon and López-Varela, “Making Sense of the Digital”.

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Figure 6: Numerous sentences create the picture of a woman, the narrator’s wife.

As a consequence, the arbitrary relation between both a literary and a graphic sign’s concept and materiality is stressed opening up new modes of representation. At the same time, the episode stresses the interdependency between written and visual language. Already in the beginning moving questions and statements condense the emotional density of the day the narrator got to know his wife: “What do you do for a living? You have gorgeous eyes. I feel we have a lot in common. Do you often come here? […]” Soon enough, though, they transform into sentences with mixed-up signs, structures, and meaning—“Dew often comes here?”—reflecting how the narrator, back then, could not “say anything coherent” and how his present memories get blurry. The lines play with rhymes and sentence structures and increasingly undermine any meaning at all, turning the narrator’s words in an arbitrary construction whose pure written materiality comes to the fore, the meaning eluding both the narrator’s and the reader’s grasp (Figure 7).

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Figure 7: The narrator’s memories of his and his wife’s past blur as do the changing words and letters in the sentences on the screen that increasingly lose their meaning.

Fragmented and disjoined as the text presents itself, it already anticipates and mirrors the misbalance between the length and quality of their relationship. In interaction with the episode’s second part the reader experiences this misbalance as a semiotic misbalance: a click on a question in the first part makes it part of the image in the second part of the episode. This not only emphasises the materiality and spatial character of the written signs but turns the text into a picture itself. Gradually the text thus transforms into the painting of the narrator’s wife leaving the reader with the expectation to end up with some sort of photography that eventually makes it possible to identify the woman it shows. Yet, the ‘translation process’ between written and visual language remains unfinished: the blind spot persists both in the painting’s impressionist character evolving from the overlapping letters and in a black space in its lower left corner. The third episode approaches the boundary between text and music in an attempt to retrieve a grasp of meaning. Similarly to the previous one, this episode links music’s alleged temporal immediacy to a text’s seeming mediacy only to reveal tensions and fractures—this time, however,

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simultaneously and in conjunction with the music commenting on the text and vice versa (hence the episode’s brevity): the sentences of the break-up note, that his wife left for the narrator, are accompanied by melodies from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875).

Figure 8: With the cursor, the recipient can move the sentences to and from the middle of the screen and thus change the sound of the music.

While the note’s sentences range from “All I feel for you is love” to “I don’t want to stay with you”, Carmen’s Habanera offers an interesting inter-medial and intertextual pretext. In the opera, Carmen is staged as a seductive woman—dangerous for the health of every man in her vicinity— who could promise love in one moment and deny it in the next. Accordingly, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (Love is a rebellious bird) is its leading line. Yet, on the other hand, Carmen is one of the first emancipated women: a dimension of both the opera and its pretext, Prosper Merimée’s novella of the same name (1847), that is often neglected. Such dissonances, both with regard to the relation of man and woman and to that of opera and text, are mirrored in this episode. Depending on the cursor’s movement, the lines of the break-up note move apart and back together and with it the music’s tune and speed changes

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into slow-motion disharmonies, at times leaving hardly any recognisable music of the original opera sound (Figure 8). This way, the reader literally has to listen to the text and read the music. Again, his attempt to put the lines and music into tune, ‘translating text into sound’ or the other way round, remains without success, always leaving some dissonances in sound and text. Thus, the narration is ultimately referred back to its very own construction that evolves from the reader’s interaction with the digital space. In the fourth episode, the narration enters another dialogue, this time with aesthetic discourse itself. It is the son’s letter in which he rejects his father, the narrator, as a hero-figure, that opens up some interesting metareflexive dimensions. The text is materially composed of ‘falling’ letters and concepts impossible to be focused upon. Successively the text fragments transform into a letter in which the digital narrative both dissociates from and appropriates the traditions, modes, and concepts of non-digital storytelling: I don’t have a hero. As far back as I can remember, and even after thinking hard, I have never had a hero. The hero figure doesn’t appeal to me. [...] If one considers that what makes a hero is what he does, his title is a reward for his feats, his heroic actions, his uniqueness. But what is he left with once his heroic deeds are over? Nothing but the title. It can be assumed that the hero retains an aura: the action shines through him. I tend to believe that the deed has to free itself from its creator to live a life of its own. The author’s offspring will meet their own audience, occasionally finding on their way a few harsh and envious reviewers.21

The letter thus rereads traditional aesthetic concepts such as the hero figure and the aura of the work of art in the context of digital narration. According to Benjamin “the distinctive feature of genuine aura is ornament, an ornamental halo, in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case.” 22 The narrative links this notion of the aura to its own, 21

http://lossofgrasp.com, last accessed June 12, 2015; emphases added. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 327f. For Benjamin, the ornament is the most important of three aspects of the aura: “First, genuine aura appears in all things, not just in certain kinds of things, as people imagine. Second, the aura undergoes changes, which can be quite fundamental, with every movement the aura-wreathed object makes. Third, [...] the distinctive feature of genuine aura is ornament, an ornamental halo, in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case. Perhaps nothing gives such a clear idea of aura as Van Gogh’s late paintings, in which one could say that the aura appears to have been painted along with the various objects.”

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interactive mode of story-telling: in its second part, the episode even more explicitly performs the link between the work of art’s formative dimension as Benjamin conceived of it and the digital space’s performative dimension. With each mouse-click the reader whirls the letter’s characters only to reveal more sentences ‘behind’ their surface (Figure 9).

Figure 9: The recipient unveils the meaning behind the son’s letter by literally whirling and moving its letters to read the sentences beyond the surface.

“[Y]ou don’t know me” is not only what the son accuses his father of, but characterises the relation between reader and text: it is only the ongoing interaction with the ornament, ‘the world of surfaces,’ that preserves the aura. Whose interaction, then, we might ask? This final question is addressed in the last two episodes. In the fifth episode the narrator’s observes that “[m]y own image seems to escape me.” At the same time, a strangely deformed picture appears on screen. Depending on whether the webcam is turned on, the image either shows a deformed picture of the

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actual reader or else (as in this example) of the video artist JK Keller (Figure 10).23

Figure 10: The screen shows a distorted image of the reader or, if the webcam is turned off, the video artist JK Keller.

This visual mixture points in two directions. On the one hand it literally focuses on the recipient’s very own medial and aesthetic experiences and their crucial role for the creation of the narrative: the reader’s mind is no tabula rasa to be imprinted with a work of art, it is formed by its own biography that determines his interaction with the narrative. On the other hand, however, the deformed image also emphasises that the narration is not to be identified with the reader’s performance and perception: the narrative is still a composition of figures and concepts that lie beyond the reader’s exclusive reach. This tension is performed in the last episode—introduced with the line “It’s time to take control again.” Flying letters ultimately transform into a 23

In his project Living my life faster, JK Keller took a daily picture of himself over a period of sixteen years and made a 2-minute movie out of it, see http://jkkeller.com/daily-photo, last accessed June 12, 2015.

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black box to be filled with the story’s end. This is, when finally its blind spot materialises in the form of a text field and a cursor. As soon as the reader begins to type, letters appear on screen. Yet, they do not show what the reader types but what the narrative wants him to type: a box full of sentences spoken by the narrator’s voice, typed, however, by the reader (Figure 11).

Figure 11: While it is the reader, that has to do the typing, it is the narrator’s voice that provides the meaning.

It is only when the narrator finishes his story—“At last, I have a grasp”— that the reader’s story ‘begins’ and that what he types is actually shown on screen.

Conclusion All three works of digital interactive fiction discussed in this essay, have approached the “‘new’ active recipient who understands and completes the creative process” from a different angle: The 12 Labors of the Internet User challenged the reader’s technological and instrumental media literacy linking it to various communicative tasks. In Dadaventuras the challenge for the reader rather lied with exploring various points of connection between Spanish literary history and modern visual art, applying Avantgarde techniques of storytelling. Finally, Loss of Grasp asked the reader to join the narrator on his journey through a synesthetic storyline that intertwined both their individual pasts.

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In a different way, all three examples have also invited their recipients to engage in a “creative intervention in the art process.” 24 In The 12 Labors of the Internet User the reader decided upon the order in which to ‘play’ the story. It was his role to combine the various mythological threads into a new storyline and thus—to borrow from Benjamin—to actualise the myth of Hercules within the context of digital technologies. While in this case the fictional framework was clearly defined (the story ended when all twelve tasks were completed), Dadaventuras offered a far more open-ended process of creative intervention: although the work’s number of predefined literary and visual pieces that could be rearranged by the reader was limited, there was always the option of adding new text fragments to compose new “aleatory narratives”. In Loss of Grasp, the recipient had, at first glance, less opportunities of creatively intervening with the linear narrative. On the other hand, the blurring line between narrator and reader turned the recipient into a part of the story universe. In key situations, it was only him who could move the story forwards and finally even type its last letters and words. What connected all three examples, however, was their playful mode of making their recipient’s instrumental, phenomenal, and aesthetic experience a vital part of the storytelling process. We may thus add a fourth quality of interaction between recipient and digital art to the range of aspects that define new media literacy: the recipient’s game experience, both in the analogue and the digital world.25 While the postmodern reader was a writer who rearranged the threads of the world library, the recipient of the digital age is a creator and player whose past shapes the future of the story.

Works Cited Amerika, Mark. 2001-2002. FILMTEXT. http://www.markamerika.com/ filmtext/. Accessed May 15, 2015. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Death of the Author.” In Roland Barthes. Image Music Text, edited by Stephen Heath, 142–148. London: Fontana Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2008. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its 24

Block, Heibach, and Wenz, P0es1s, 31. Eric Zimmermann even suggests that in the 21st century “[g]aming literacy is literacy—it is the ability to understand and create specific kinds of meanings […] based on three concepts: systems, play, and design,” Zimmermann, “Gaming Literacy,” 157. See also the essay by Cathrin Bengesser in this volume.

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Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 19–55. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Block, Friedrich W., Christiane Heibach, and Karin Wenz, eds. 2004. P0es1s: Ästhetik Digitaler Poesie. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Bouchardon, Serge, and Asunción López-Varela. 2011. “Making Sense of the Digital as Embodied Experience”. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/ iss3/7. Accessed June 12, 2015. Bouchardon, Serge, et.al. 2008. The 12 Labors of the Internet User. http:// www.the12labors.com. Accessed June 12, 2015. Bouchardon, Serge. 2010. Loss of Grasp. http://lossofgrasp.com. Accessed June 12, 2015. Colino, Maria, and Chris Joseph. 2004. Dadaventuras. http://www.391. org/34. Accessed June 12, 2015. Hartmut, Hank, and Robert Sander. Cent Milles Milliards De Poèmes. By Ramond Queneau. http://100000000000000poems.atspace.com. Accessed June 12, 2015. Keller, JK. Living my life faster. http://jk-keller.com/daily-photo. Accessed June 12, 2015. Powers, Richard. 2004 [1995]. Galatea 2.2. New York: Picador. Zimmermann, Eric. 2013. “Gaming Literacy: Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the Twenty-First Century.” Intersemiose 13.4:155–165.

CHAPTER ELEVEN NON FINITO: FRAGMENTARY NARRATION IN FILMS AND TELEVISION SERIES SUSANNE MARSCHALL

Based on the old Romantic idea of the fragment as conceptualised by Friedrich Schlegel1 at the end of the 18th century, this essay will focus on the renaissance of unfinished works of art as elements of films and television series under the conditions of transmediality. Since the 15th century, the fragment or so-called non finito has been a well-known, sophisticated form of fine arts mostly presented in the form of plastic art or visual oeuvres that should be intentionally incomplete. As a matter of fact, the decision if or when a piece of art could be defined to be ready is one of the fundamental steps during the process of creation. But in the case of the non finito, the point of perfection is more difficult to define than in an oeuvre that should be completely executed. Nowadays, the paradigm of seriality has become a special form of narration that joins the two mediums of cinema and TV and is creating completely new forms of non finitos. One famous example of literary and filmic seriality is the Harry Potter saga which must be mentioned as one of the paradigmatic formats pushing fan cultures in a unique way. The production and reception of the story, the novels, and the films cannot be separated any more. These are the two parts of the dynamic process of media convergence that also can be defined as a non finito on a meta level. One can easily recognise the subversive power of the contemporary freestyle movement called fandom that breaks the rules of authorship and composition in a very playful way. The point of departure of this essay is observing the status quo of contemporary media development in the field of fiction. Although it seems to be a contradiction, many mainstream movies and most of the series 1

Schlegel, Athenaeum.

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belonging to modern Quality TV are likewise linked to epic traditions and to fragmentary storytelling. Looking at Harry Potter, it is obvious that J. K. Rowling’s modern, gothic fairytale is formed by a bricolage of myths from all over the world. The same happens with television series. Some of the shows run for more than one hundred hours, unfolding a huge cast and innumerable plots and subplots, playing a complex game with texts and intertexts, but also with lacunae. Series offer numerous gaps to be filled by fan fiction or fan art. This endless process of producing, screening, watching, reading, writing, painting, and finally posting the newly created content inevitably results in an inexhaustible universe full of narrative, visual, and acoustic fragments. The question is how to deal with this chaotic mass of content first as a consumer and second as a media scholar who is interested in creating a theoretical discourse about the influence of new media on fiction and seriality. We all know that cutting off one of the Hydra’s heads will cause two more to take its place. Fiction and seriality in the age of the Internet has become a similarly powerful monster. But nevertheless, let us start chopping off and examining heads even though we know it will never be possible to finish this work.

The History and Aesthetics of the Non Finito First, it will be essential to discuss the old fine-arts term non finito in the new context of contemporary media aesthetics. Formerly used for a special kind of willfully unfinished artwork, mostly drawings, graphics or even sculptures, the term itself comprises the complexity of the old debate on the question of if or when a painting, a sculpture or a text is perfect and ready. The term non finito suggests that the artwork cannot be accomplished by anyone but the creator himself, and that it is only he who can decide if the process of creation is complete. Well known paradigmatic examples of the creative struggle with the non finito are the paintings of Paul Cézanne and the sculptures of Auguste Rodin, both of which are discussed by the art historian Hans Belting in his book The Invisible Masterpiece.2 On the one hand using the powerful and pure expression of the unfinished piece of art, and on the other hand reenforcing their claim of perfection, the famous artists were re-working the same images again and again. Viewers of these unfinished works could imagine for themselves all the details of the figures and bodies that Cézanne and Rodin did not paint or form. The artists did not intend for the spectator to make his own intimate imagination visible to others. 2

Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, 202.

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Perceiving the non finito remains part of the mental process because such inner resonances cannot be verbalised easily. Against this backdrop, the significant differences between the traditional aesthetic of the non finito as an oeuvre, and the different forms of movies and series dealing with open forms of narration and the millions of non finitos moving through transmedial worlds in convergent media culture become obvious. Keeping this in mind, the traditional gap between so-called high and low art becomes smaller as the avant-garde and mainstream media continue to cross-pollinate one another with various attributes: Camp affects opera and theatre, art-house movies and all other kinds of fine arts. Crossing the border between cinema and TV, avantgarde art and soap opera, David Lynch’s masterpiece Twin Peaks (USA 1990-1991) seems to be a good example of something grown from the lacunae of an artfully disrupted narrative structure, a riddle, which according to the author, can and should never be solved. A large number of videos on YouTube demonstrate the creativity of fans who, for example, put together supercuts of every dance- or coffee leitmotif from Twin Peaks, pairing the heuristic power of the mash-up with a serious analytical impetus. In this way the process of re-reading cult movies and series that had long been part of fandom before digital media and the Internet bundled all forms of communication escalates with the appearance of Web 2.0 in 2003. These and other examples of non finitos are the outcomes of fan cultures and remain unfinished because of their status as heterogeneous compilations produced by a more or less anonymous crowd. Anyone who is able to use digital media can complement or transform original media formerly released by official producers or television broadcasters like Showtime or Home Box Office (HBO). Copyright owners are often advised by the reality of these convergent media systems to allow and even promote the creative activity of fandom, otherwise they endanger the success of their product. If nobody was interested in producing fan fiction or fan art after the release of a new series, the program would fail. Regarding the relevance of fandom-(inter-)activities, authors of films and series often purposefully construct their plots with lacunae or—to borrow a word from Wolfgang Iser—“Leerstellen”.3 Additionally, it is necessary to emphasise that every fragment is an absolutely unique form. Nothing in the material world can exist without having an individual form. But many things also simultaneously belong to a cluster and can be identified as parts of systems, for example, a chair as a 3

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tool to sit on. We can identify them because of their simple form and we also recognise if they are incomplete. Most of us are also able to estimate the fragmentary nature and the incompleteness of texts, pictures, dramas, films, or music. Therefore, people who are familiar with the basic rules of picture or music composition and the dramatic structures of exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement, are furthermore able to distinguish between intended and unintended incompleteness that cannot simply be attributed to dilettantism. In today’s context, we have to accept that it would not be possible to recapitulate the countless variations of fragments and incomplete works scattered throughout art history. Finally, attempting to reflect on the plentiful examples of fragments and incomplete works in today’s media landscape, where content can be produced in an endless flow, would result in a complete collapse. Answering questions of quality and values has become more complicated than ever because of the predominant directness of fandom. Fans write about desires, emotions, sexuality, and taboos mostly without being worried about creating art. All forms of queer reading, for example of Harry Potter or the BBC-Show Sherlock (2010-), demonstrate the intimate dimension of fan fiction that cannot be ignored by the producers of those blockbusters. While analysing the transformation of narration under the conditions of media convergence, it becomes obvious that narratives represent a sophisticated mixture between epic compositions and various forms of add-ons supplied by the creators and the producers of media texts on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by the fans who involve themselves deeply in the fictional universe. This behavior involves some highly precarious aspects of self-denudation. The relationships that users build in the digital labyrinth seem to be manageable to them, even intimate and full of emotions. Users play different social roles in this dark universe in a risky, open-minded manner, feeling at home inside the non-transparent global network. Most of them do not question their loneliness and the real dangers of their insecurity in terms of psychic stress. As this is currently one of the most debated aspects of human behavior within the realms of media theory, I will not further elaborate on this point.4 Otherwise, these forms of fandom can be understood as a form of content dealing not only with the authorised and intended cognitive and emotional effects of films and series, but also with the unspoken subtext in fiction which builds the nucleus of queer-reading. In my definition, transmediality means the fusion of fictional productions that have been conceptualised for different kinds of media in a way that expands the plot 4

Turkle, Alone Together.

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of a film or a series with innovative surpluses. If the heterogeneous follow-up communication of the grassroots culture then supports a transmedial narration with surprising results, the multi-dimensional format can be analysed as a (new) paradigm of transmediality. In the case of older formats like Twin Peaks, another form of transmedial follow-up communication arises within the time delay between when the original was produced and media convergence reached its first peak after the millennium. If older films and series are composed with lacunae, new groups of fans feel inspired to rethink their objects of interest with the direct response of like-minded people. In this sense, the World Wide Web has established a special form of semi-anonymous, face-to-facecommunication even if this seems to be a contradiction.

The Renaissance of the Non Finito My research questions are strongly influenced by the assumption that earlier forms of fragmentary narration are rooted in our oldest forms of oral storytelling, and bring together creators of fiction (formerly known as myth) with readers, viewers, and listeners of both fragmentary and endless stories, thus bridging the gaps between them. Lost (USA 2004-2010) as a paradigmatic transmedial narration was and is surrounded by floods of fan fiction and fan art. New pairings of the main characters or the re-creation of important scenes with computer games like The Sims were and are especially popular. Sometimes, the work put into fan fiction is immense, and it is surprising that people are willing to spend a lot of time and also money to produce this content. As there is no real mastermind behind this form of an individualised mass media system, one of the effects of interactive media is the renaissance of fragmentised artwork or—in other words—the renewal of the non finito. We need to realise that fragmentised narratives cannot be taken into consideration without paying attention to the two principal dimensions of aesthetics—creation and perception. These two key words are gateways to other fields, for example: the conditions or cultural dynamics of the production of art, the psychophysical dispositions of a given individual, or the development of different media such as painting, literature, theatre, or film. The heterogeneity of these vast fields as parts of the discourse of aesthetics leads not only to different academic disciplines like art history, film studies, media studies, and sociology, but also to psychology or the neurosciences. As mentioned previously, cutting off one of the Hydra’s heads only produces more and more dangerous heads. Who are these fans? Why do they produce such add-ons to films and shows? Do these activities

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help them cope with their everyday problems? Are special indicators of female or male fans identifiable? Are fans influencing the work of the authors and producers? How do different cultures respond to global media events like blockbuster movies and series belonging to Quality TV, mostly produced in England or America? Do global media blur cultural differences? Nevertheless, these hard to analyse new and interdependent forms of creation and perception that create transmediality cannot be ignored.5 One methodological step of research projects must be the collection and description of the material that is not as well organised as the oeuvre of an established author—collected in a library—would be. Innumerable websites, fan fiction texts, self-made graphics, and videos are finding their way into the Internet every day. It is impossible to keep track of the quantity and quality of this gigantic mass of data spreading all over the world. The only way to make progress seems to be the close reading of certain exemplary texts. Another methodological step will be the classification of the follow-up communication and its content, but one has to accept that this also will lead to a never-ending process. It is time to say goodbye to the idea of self-contained research projects. The fragment will become the new paradigm of scholarship (which it has always been, though not widely accepted), and this will set us free to think on opposing levels, risking shots in the dark, while not forgetting the close reading of the concrete material. Trying to fuse these bottom-up and top-down perspectives, relating interpretations of paradigmatic films and series, and spotting processes of media convergence and transmedial narrations result in some interesting effects: the renaissance of narrative and aesthetic principles of avant-garde art, the success story of myth and fairytales in present media, and the scientisation of fictional plots as well as the fictional reconstruction of history.6 It would be absolutely understandable to argue against such a hybrid list of concepts and that these elements normally could not be matched to one plot or story, but media reality proves the opposite: adding fragments of these different concepts and combining them into new forms of narration and aesthetics. The authors of Lost, Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, for instance, use the master-plot of the Robinsonade to reflect a worldwide post-apocalyptic scenario after 9/11. Characters are named after famous philosophers such as John Locke or fictional characters such as Tom Sawyer, and they read novels such as 5

Jenkins, Convergence Culture. I am currently working on a book exploring these ideas (and others) as a theory of seriality under the conditions of media convergence. 6

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Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). The island is, in fact, a giant laboratory masked by a natural environment. The scientists who built this laboratory were influenced by Indian spirituality and moral concepts such as Dharma and Karma. Every single episode of Lost moves between the dreams and the real experiences of the characters, regularly switching between the space-times of past, present, and future. The style of the show resembles an experimental, non-linear and nevertheless very well composed montage of fragments. Films like Christopher Nolan’s blockbusters Memento (USA 2000) and Inception (USA 2010) or Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (Germany, USA, Hong Kong, Singapore, 2012) obviously demonstrate a distinct trend toward the fragment in cinema. High quality series adapt such forms of narration from art-house cinema and—the other way round—new cinema productions react to the innovations of Quality TV. Fragmentary narratives are currently very well established as a trend in mainstream cinema. Nevertheless, the real homes of the fragment are and have been art-house and independent cinema all over the world. The artistic potential of the fragment lies in the deconstruction of power relations as has been demonstrated by examples such as Christoffer Boe’s Reconstruction (Denmark 2003) or Nina Paley’s semi-documentary Sita Sings the Blues (USA 2008). Both films deal with famous mythological stories from ancient Greek or Indian mythology. As they break various stories and plot structures into fragments while repeating smaller pieces again and again, they do not give the audience a chance to immerse in the fantastic and powerful world of mythology. As a part of the process of deconstruction, the two filmmakers Boe and Paley use the clash of fragments in a comparative montage as a meta-textual heuristic structure. In this context, but not only restricted to these two examples, it is important to point out the relevance of fragments as parts of puzzles that do not and should not necessarily fit well. This point will be duly discussed further down, analysing Paley’s film. If novels break the rules of continuity and causality, they indicate their classification as pieces of avant-garde literature. This relation is part of Western art history, but it is not necessarily valid for other cultures, for example Asia or Africa. Fictional worlds are framed by myths, culturespecific symbols and varied concepts of time, space, and continuity. Plot structures that seem to be chaotic and not well proportioned from the perspective of traditional Western aesthetics could be very well accepted in cultures that are more open-minded to the heterogeneity and contingency of life. Films and series build an environment around fictional characters created by artists who belong to different cultural or

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transcultural contexts using various concepts of beauty, gender, or identity. Notions of wholeness and entity also vary as widely as the ideas of family or the rules of communication. Being aware of this diversity, but also understanding the similar ways in which different cultures analyse character- and world-building as a part of our globalised media system seems to be like walking in the darkest forest with only a flickering candle. But in between all those dark zones, several aspects of narration become visible once again if one collects and compares enough material such as series, films, fan fiction, blogs, websites etc.

The Renaissance of Mythology One of the most interesting phenomena in the current context is the renaissance of mythology. What was once an oral form of narration has now become a puzzle-piece of fictional world-building. This is largely because the narrative structure of mythology represents a compilation of very old stories told by different people over a long period of time. The philosopher Hans Blumenberg describes mythology as the essential creative act of human beings, a work in progress on the history and the condition of life.7 Large communities very well know myths in their essence, their structure, their figures, and their motifs, and it is exactly this quality that makes them interesting for transmedia storytelling. Mythology is handed down over generations in its various forms—through fairytales and epics, as well as through later written texts with one or more writers forming and expanding upon the available material to complete epics and, more often than not, proclaiming authorship. On closer inspection, the complicated structure of mythology uncovers its own status as an unfinished narrative like the non finito created by a collective and, from this perspective, it becomes obvious that the idea of a closed composition of art is relatively new and was initiated during Renaissance exactly at the same time the non finito had become a “new idea.” Mythology helps people deal with risks and disasters in their lives and offers them interpretations to understand various situations—natural disasters or the miracle of death for instance.

Sita Sings the Blues (2008) as an Example for a Non Finito As long as mythology belonged to the collective of narrators and not only to individual poets, everybody could modify stories by integrating 7

Blumenberg, Work on Myth.

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personal elements. As a consequence of the shift from oral myth to scripted mythology under names like Hesiod or Homer, the culture of narration has become dominated by the ideas of authorship, oeuvre, and literacy—but around the turn of the last millennium, with the rise of digital media, a new movement of grassroots authors came into being. Acting on the one hand as a collective and on the other hand in a very individualised style—or non(-sense-) style—these grassroots authors established the special form of non finito that is being dealt with here. Though these authors often ignore or sometimes even break the rules of traditional aesthetics, they also offer radical forms of deconstruction of power and authority, which in turn inspire professional authors, filmmakers, and showrunners. Sita Sings the Blues is an apt example for the fusion of transmediality, mythology, and fragments, and deconstructing traditional perspectives on gender issues. The animated film by Nina Paley was released in 2008 and narrates stories from the Indian epic Ramayana from the perspective of an American Filmmaker. Sita Sings the Blues is also a very good example of hybridity, a ‘film sitting in between’ that is to say between documentary and animation, between painting, graphic, comic, and puppet theatre and finally between cinema, TV, and the Internet. Paley resisted the current right holder of the songs performed by jazz-singer Annette Hanshaw (1901-1985) and released Sita Sings the Blues as an open source project on the Internet. She insisted that everyone should be able to watch the film anytime and to transform or to remix it. Her film deals with the non finito, the fragment and mythology as an episode in a transmedial series universe that will never end. And Paley was inspired, in large part, by the idea of similarity between the stories and worlds of different cultures.8 To elaborate on this point, I shall dig deeper into the semantic and semiotic material of the experimental way in which she narrates her own life from within the perspective of Indian mythology. Paley’s experimental animated film also tells a true story. Nina receives an email from her husband who has been offered a new job in India. He asks her for a divorce. Lonely and offended, Nina starts reading Valmiki’s Ramayana (possibly dating from the 5th to 4th century BC), the famous Indian epic about the endless love and pain of women. Reflecting on her own sad story in the mirror of Indian mythology, Paley establishes a transcultural “bricolage” (Claude Lévi-Strauss) of different visual and acoustic strata to build a fragmentary world where everybody can see the

8

Bhatti, Culture, Diversity and Similarity, 33–49.

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overlapping layers of different textures pushing the ironic humor of the scenes as a weapon against the idea of gender normativity. The film’s syncretic overlay of biography and mythology, of Western and Indian aesthetics, comes to life in the very beginning of the film when a beautiful woman rises slowly out of the water just like Botticelli’s Venus, while the blue painted waves of the endless ocean are flowing in harmony. We all know the famous picture showing the goddess of love from Greek mythology well enough to recognise it at once in this film scene. But as soon as the wonder of this over-decorated, yet still recognisable female body becomes visible, a technical device, a gramophone, is applied for the perfect orchestration of this scene. A peacock helps to play the music for the following performance of femininity. We see a cartoon version of the old Indian ideal of an innocent and devoted wife named Sita who was treated very badly by her husband, the god Rama. To actualise the figure of the unselfish Indian heroine, the film uses the voice of Annette Hanshaw, a jazz singer from the roaring twenties who mixed the relaxed vocal style of the ingénue with the more frenetic image of the flapper. These first few minutes of the film already reveal its fragmentary and experimental structure that combines several things together: Indian myths, American Jazz music, comics, shadow puppets, traditional paintings … without considering style or narrative continuity. This act of deconstruction—and it would be easy to find other examples—opens the door to imagination and interactive communication like the kind found in fandom. At the very beginning of the film Paley thus introduces an aesthetic of disruption that characterises this semi-documentary of abandonment. At the very moment Hanshaw sings the words “a woman like me,” the record stops, and the four words are repeated again and again until Sita interferes—and is faced with negative consequences: the screen explodes and Paley’s film starts running again. Demonstrating her vitality and her will should not be part of Sita’s performance. An integral part of the dramatic structure of this animated film is thus the repetition and variation of possible beginnings. As simple as these post-production effects seem to be at first sight, describing them analytically is complicated. Without cultural competence concerning the multi- and inter-medial re-writing and reception of Indian literature in theatre, comics, films, and series, one cannot discover the critical aspects of Paley’s film, which—overall—does not correspond to traditional genre categories. Neither a feature film nor a documentary, the film changes from scene to scene. The next scene starts with the intertitle “San Francisco,” the cultural context changes and the visual style shifts to a flickering hand-drawn

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aesthetics with dark, warm, and—compared to the Indian locations—less expressive colors. The private life of an American, middle class couple seems to have no connection to the hypertrophy of imagination in the old Indian world. But Paley’s memories shift between these two different spheres according to her personal experience of having been abandoned by her husband. After the next intertitle, “India,” new protagonists—shadow puppets or silhouette figures—enter the scene and discuss the cultural roots of the old story of Sita, which is the most well-known part of The Ramayana. Valmiki’s epic has been an integral part of the collective imagination of India for more than 2000 years. This master narrative about the god Rama and his devoted wife Sita, who is kidnapped by the monstrous demon Ravana and rescued by the brave ape-warrior Hanuman, has generated numerous variations all over Asia. In order to push a critical discourse on this myth, Paley uses three shadow puppets in her film that discuss the variations of The Ramayana. They can be identified as the three main characters Rama, Sita and Hanuman. As a means of disaffecting the audience, their conversation stimulates people to reflect upon the structure and nature of mythology which, after all, is always constructed by artists, i.e. real human beings. Looking like the shadow puppets of India and Indonesia coming from an old theatre tradition called Wayang Kulit, the voices of the shadow puppets belong to young Indian immigrants who discuss the variations of the myth and the different interpretations of its no-longer-traceable origins. Maybe there never was an original story, just variations. Paley’s animated documentary Sita Sings the Blues can be regarded as the result of a complex process of transcultural reception of narratives and also as an example of transmedial experimentation with different visual styles of ancient paintings, traditional shadow plays, modern comics and cartoons. The film resembles a bricolage of visual fragments, gestures, and “pathos formulas”—to use a term by the art historian Aby Warburg—in order to demonstrate the “work on the myth” (Hans Blumenberg) by artists and other people over a long period of time. One important aspect of this history is the increasing distribution of these visualisations going hand in hand with the development of media technologies.

Exemplary Concepts of Fragmentary World-Building Pointing to the aesthetic of deconstruction and aggressive disruption in the film Sita Sings the Blues helps me to distinguish independent art-house films and popular mainstream concepts of fragmentary world-building such as in James Cameron’s Avatar (USA 2009). Similar to Paley,

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Cameron uses fragments of different cultures and historical eras and melts them into a syncretistic unity. Though structured like a monomyth (to use Joseph Campbell’s term9), the world-building of Avatar seems to be a fusion of heterogeneous fragments belonging to different times and cultures all over the world. But the cultural intersections and sutures between these textures are carefully covered so that it becomes very easy for the audience to immerse into the story universe and ignore the obvious gaps. Avatar builds a new world all of a piece—but also of lots of pieces—so that this example helps reveal the differences between fragments in art-house-films and mainstream-movies. Taking an old Sanskrit word for its title, the blockbuster movie Avatar is linked to the important belief of rebirth in Hinduism and Buddhism. The original inhabitants of the planet Pandora, named Na’vi, are blue-skinned, androgynous figures like the Indian goddesses and gods, and they live in harmony with plants, animals and everything in their natural environment. For example, they use the ends of their tails to connect organically with other beings. It is easy to recognise the reference to USB-ports, which were invented to easily connect computers. The movie Avatar is full of cultural fragments from all over the world and has scores of references to technical devices with which almost everyone, not just digital natives, is familiar. Cameron melts all these heterogeneous elements into a traditional dramatic structure and uses highly immersive effects such as colour and light or camera movements to support the audience’s identification with the film. Keeping these two different examples in mind, I will now reflect on the characteristics of fragmentary storytelling and transmediality in the case of Quality-TV series10, switching between the avant-garde aesthetic of disruption and the mainstream model of a syncretistic unity. All these elements can easily be found in Lost which runs for over one hundred hours—time to tell lots of things being one of any series biggest benefits. Part of a theory of seriality under the conditions of media convergence is the recurrence of antagonism like the longtime narrative build from fragmentary puzzle-pieces which Lost presents very well. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, another remarkable series, rejects causality, logic, and narrative transparency. Others like The Sopranos, created by David Chase (USA 1999-2007), force their initially linear narrative into the meta-text of more and more confusing day-and-night-dream sequences. The most successful series produced in the last few years brilliantly maintain the 9

Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. McCabe and Akass. Quality TV; Spigel and Olsson, Television After TV.

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new trend to linear storytelling, for example Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men (USA 2007), Adam Price’s Borgen (Denmark 2010-2013) or Michelle Ashford’s Masters of Sex (USA 2013).

Scientisation of Fiction and Fictional Reconstruction of History Nourishing the sample of elements that build fragmentary worlds in transmedial fictionality, I will add two more aspects now. Beside the non finito, the fragment and mythology, lots of series plots are affected by science, often neuroscience or psychology. Twin Peaks, Lost, Heroes, The Mentalist, Orphan Black, Real Humans—all these series tell their stories while integrating actual discourse from neuroscience, psychology, or medicine. This trend can be described as a scientisation of fictionality. The topics of the scientisation are elements of discourses popularised by scientific magazines, documentaries, and websites. All these successful formats have a strong influence on society by helping people define themselves. If mythology helps human beings by providing narratives about the big and unresolved questions of existence, science attempts to explain the same by more or less rational methods. Another outstanding and meaningful element of Quality-TV series is the fictional reconstruction of history. At first sight, this works against the power of deconstruction which belongs to the non finito and the fragment. Different narratives like the fragment, mythology, the scientisation of fiction, and the fictional reconstruction of history seem to be incompatible at first glance because each carries an authoritative claim to the interpretation of the world. It is fascinating to observe how series like Lost, Heroes, Carnivale, Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead mix these different narratives together with different results. I suggest that the hybridity of these narratives creates a special form of “Leerstelle” exactly where the fragments overlap. After 9/11, a new genre of series dealt especially with post-apocalyptic scenarios. Series such as Lost start with the overture of a disaster like the crash of an aircraft, a war, or an unexplainable epidemic that transforms people into zombies. Postapocalyptic series deconstruct the world and the social environment of the characters into fragments. All the plots deal with similar situations: they witness how an isolated group of people succeeds or fails in a neverending life-or-death struggle thus establishing a hopeless, fatalistic worldview. Re-constructing the imagination of a livable future is the key challenge in this series.

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Some post-apocalyptic series like Jericho (Stephen Chbosky, Josh Schaer, Jonathan E. Steinberg, USA 2006-2008) remain unfinished. Examples that were allowed to reach an end and went on to a final season—like Lost—demonstrate the problems creators have faced in finding a good solution for the ending of the post-apocalyptic story. Like the non finito, post-apocalyptic series also cannot find a satisfying finale. They are necessarily process-related. Picking up historic events, transforming them into a dystopia mixed with fantasy elements, interrupted narratives, bursting fictional worlds, tearing significance to tatters, offering scientific statements for possible ways of understanding the irrational, and the illogical side of the story: All these elements of postapocalyptic series are rooted in the five narratives that comprise the non finito, the fragment, the mythology, the scientisation of fiction and the fictional reconstruction of history. One special effect of the non finito is that it imitates nature, because it is process-related, always beginning and never ending.

Lost in Lost: Transmediality in the Context of Rhizome and Hypertext Let us now jump into the never-ending process of transmediality in the context of media convergence. On a macro-level, transmediality can be described as an enormous non finito that cannot be defined or reviewed by anyone. Only the micro-level (which takes place in the form of blogs and viral spots with comments or on fan fiction-websites) provides options for research, necessarily as a non-representative small cutout of the bigger system. There is no oeuvre anymore with a centered composition, but a bulk of follow-up communication. Content sprawls like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, covering the hypertextual structure of the Internet.11 Understanding transmediality means thinking about two models at the same time: the organic rhizome as a metaphor for creativity, and the technical system of hypertext that builds the ideal ground for user interactivity. A visualisation of the two models can clarify their intrinsic design: while the offshoots of the rhizome grow wildly outwards, hypertext uses a system of constant feedback in which the flow of information happens between indefinitely many, yet ultimately closed circuits. The organic metaphor of the rhizome is analogous with the organic synapse structure of the brain, which processes the things it perceives in complex and uncontrollable ways, while hypertext, as a 11

Deleuze and Guattari, Rhizom.

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techno-centric metaphor, helps to visualise a narrative hyper-construction. Ultimately, the rhizome and the hypertext offer opposing heuristic models for the analysis of hypertrophic narrative structures without explaining why these formal experiments of the artistic avant-garde function so well in TV series and why they are so positively received by a growing audience. During the last ten years of media evolution, people got accustomed to new forms of communication and social activities in the World Wide Web. Two of the most striking aspects of the usage of the Internet for communication are the experiences of simultaneous perception and permanent disruption while reading, writing, listening to or watching something, or talking to someone. Open forms of bricolage and syncretism have been established as paradigms for world-building and also relating in private and intimate dimensions. Fragmentary world-building—in former times a sign of avant-garde art—is now therefore much more widely accepted. Grassroots authors overwrite series via weblog, wiki and YouTube, and act like epigones of the series’ authors. Their importance in the merchandising of the product has increased significantly. For instance, the complete official narrative time of the series Lost runs around 100 hours. The follow-up communication grows endlessly. Fan fiction and fan art reach out for heterogeneous parallel narratives, publishing and commenting on subjective sensations and competing readings, reorganising character constellations and critical entries—regardless of their artistic aspirations. Lost tries to add an additional philosophical discourse by naming its series characters after famous philosophers like John Locke, Rousseau or Bakunin. In the end, the fans indulge in their attachments to the characters. When the character of the drug-addicted musician Charlie died in the third season, not even the DVD copy protection was able to hinder the fans from mourning his death creatively and collectively in homemade music videos. On an emotional level, the casting of the Hobbit actor Dominic Monaghan from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) also stimulated a doubly coded reception of the anti-hero, perceived as an innocent victim needing protection. Serial experiments that adapt the structure of the hypertext on the narrative, media-historical, and inter-medial levels encourage the activity and creativity of the recipients through lacunae that interrupt the hyperconstruction of the plot. The non-linear fragmented plot leaves many more opportunities for the viewer’s imagination to run wild than a conventionally closed dramaturgic composition. Several stylistic devices add to this effect: the series juggle genre conventions in a meta-format that escalates to an epic discontinuity, illogical and non-causal, decentralise

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venues and character constellations, combine radical subjectivity with multiple perspectives while using all dimensions of the space-timecontinuum, and continually switch between micro- and macro-levels, translating even the synaptic level into scenography. By means of a thick fabric of intertextual references, series provoke their fans to study the connections, quotations, meta-texts, and subtexts, which only repeated viewings and a willingness to search the Internet for further clues can expose. Series assign homework to their viewers and directly lead their fans to Wikipedia and other websites, such as those of the producers. These websites are perceived as catalysts to an expanding story universe. One of these trends includes officially produced, so-called Mobisodes or Missing Tales, one- to three-minute films for viewers to watch on a mobile phone or tablet that stimulate new readings of already aired scenes and present themselves as dramaturgical variants. The first of the LostMobisodes, “So it begins,” starts one minute before the originally aired beginning of the series and amplifies the particular reading that the island is a Sartrean Hades. Jack’s dead father sends his dog to wake his son, one of the main characters of the series. In the background of these artistically interesting interpolations of serial plots, companies negotiate mergers and cooperative deals, such as the agreements between Disney and Apple. Lost in Lost—this is how one could characterise the encounter with this particular form of serial fictionality. The story grows fragmentarily out of an airplane crash on a mysterious island and then grows rampantly and monstrously in a very short time without authoritatively confirming the frequently implied structural patterns. Despite these conditions, or perhaps because of them, the series stimulates reflection and communication. Lost is considered to be a textbook example of an intensive exchange between producers, authors, and fans and is thus a pioneer in an interactive media culture. From the point of view of its reception, the structural organisation of Lost reacts like the rampantly growing rhizome which Deleuze and Guattari characterised as the principle of open narration. From the perspective of Lost’s authors, who relate to the plot like a team of designers, the hypertext computer-model perfectly describes this relationship, as the hypertext functions as the conditio sine qua non of interactive communication between man and machine. The subtle collapse of the narrative structure of Lost after the fourth season, and first and foremost the failure of the final season, are particularly significant for this double-layered process. Lost unintentionally ends as a non finito. Within this paradoxical space of the rhizome and the hypertext, series like Lost or the superhero story Heroes

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(Tim Kring, USA 2006-2010, Miniseries 2015) develop and grow and end. The post-apocalyptic series tells the story of a group of genetically enhanced people who live in America, India and Japan and who, because of these enhancements, possess different supernatural powers and abilities. They fight against each other to save or destroy the world. In Heroes, the hypertext model, which serves as the basic structure of transmediality, is openly demonstrated in one scene. The studio of an artist who is able to paint the future has been transformed into a narrative space installation that leaves no room for doubt in its direct reference to hypertext. It is littered with notes, clippings and pictures in which empty crossbars bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Windows-icon hang. This spacetime tapestry visualises the narrative principle of the superhero series like a meta-text that encompasses all the dimensions of the room, including the floor onto which the paranoid nucleus of the story is painted.

The Readers’ Choice: Series as Hypertexts At this point, I would like to focus on the current multidimensional media path of series because this path is constitutive of various forms of reception. Though conceived for television and therefore linear consumption, and dependent on a given program rhythm, the design of series with a hypertrophic fragmentary structure is actually more conducive to repeated viewings on DVD or as downloads. Comparable to the book, a digital file (and the software used to view it) allows users to ‘page up and down’ at their convenience and, in doing so, meets a requirement for a highly complex text. This second mode of ‘broadcasting,’ which is increasingly becoming the first encounter with series for young, media-interested adults, supports this nonlinear reception and, at the same time, fulfills the fans’ desire for discovering commentaries and finding bonus material. Yet, transmediality reaches its climax only in the World Wide Web with its technologically enabled interactive feedback mechanisms: it is the only place where officially produced content can blend with inconceivable quantities of usergenerated content. Hypertrophic serial narrative structures generate dynamically growing sense-and-nonsense encyclopedias on the Internet that are interspersed with traditional knowledge, which—as should be verified separately—likely re-actualises itself through these processes. The boundaries between fact and fiction become blurry, especially since these fantastic constructions appear in the guise of factual reports, mockumentaries, pseudo-documentaries, texts or video reports. The (supposed) trustworthiness of these fictional elements affirms itself

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through links to pseudo-official websites. Thus, series, it seems, can realise their ideal mediality in and as hypertexts. The particular anti-format of the hypertrophic narrative experiment transforms the supposedly passive spectator into an active co-author within a rhizomatically growing encyclopedia of the serial world.

Works Cited Belting, Hans. 2001. The Invisible Masterpiece. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bhatti, Anil. 2009. “Culture, Diversity and Similarity. A Reflection on Heterogeneity and Homogeneity. D. D. Kosambi Birth Centenary Lecture, 2008.” Social Scientist New Delhi 37.7/8:33–49. Blumenberg, Hans. 1990. Work on Myth. 2nd printing. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press. Campbell, Joseph. 2012 [1949]. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 2nd edition. Novato, CA: New World Library. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1977. Rhizom. Berlin: Merve. Iser, Wolfgang. 1993. Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York/London: New York University Press. McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass. 2007. Quality TV. Contemporary American Television And Beyond. London: I.B. Tauris. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1983 [1798]. Athenaeum. Eine Zeitschrift, edited by August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel. Darmstadt. Spigel, Lynn, and Jan Olsson, eds. 2004. Television After TV. Essays On A Medium After TV. Durcham, NC: Duke University Press. Turkle, Sherry. 2013. Alone Together. Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

David Beer is Reader in Sociology at the University of York. His publications include Punk Sociology (2014), Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation (2013), and New Media: The Key Concepts (2008, with Nicholas Gane). Cathrin Bengesser is completing an international MA degree in the studies of film and audiovisual media at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Birkbeck University of London and Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris. She received an MA degree combining American Studies and Literature & Practical Media Studies from the University of Duisburg-Essen. Since 2011 she has been working on different projects and publications in the field of media literacy for the Grimme-Institut. Her research focuses on the influences of new media on storytelling in film and television. Julia Genz is a Professor of Comparative and Modern German Literature at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. From 2010 to 2015 she held various chairs in modern German literature at the universities of Witten/Herdecke, Cologne, and Essen. She completed her second book (Habilitation) in the field of Comparative and Modern German Literature in 2009. Her publications include a study on discourses of evaluation (Diskurse der Wertung. Banalität, Trivialität und Kitsch. Munich 2011), a general theory of media (Medialität, Materialität, Kodierung, with Paul Gévaudan, in print), and several articles about reflections on mediality in literature. Ulrike Küchler is an independent scholar and content developer for storybased serious games. She worked as a lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany, and Brown University, USA, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her creative practice and research focus on themes and modes of digital storytelling, the aesthetics of old and new media, and art and artificial life in science fiction. She has published on cultural history, science fiction, and media aesthetics and is co-editor of Alien Imaginations. Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism (2015).

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Raili Marling is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Senior Researcher of Comparative Literature at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research has focused on gender and power in public discourse, literature and popular culture. Her most recent research interests have been the politics of masculinity, gender in the post-socialist context and affective narratives. She is an editor of Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History and Ariadne Lõng, Estonian journal of gender studies. Susanne Marschall is Professor of Media Studies with a special focus on audiovisual media, film, and TV at the Department of Media Studies and Director of the Center of Media Competence at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. As a film expert she has published monographs and essays, film critiques, and TV and radio interviews on subjects such as film and TV studies, literature, and theatre studies as well as visual and cultural studies. Mary Nickel holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy & Human Rights from Juniata College and a Master’s degree in Politics & Government from Illinois State University. Currently, she is pursuing a second Master’s degree in theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. She has presented her research in political theory and theology in almost a dozen conferences in the United States and internationally. Nina Peter holds a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature (Freie Universität Berlin, École Normale Supérieure Paris). Currently, she is research and teaching assistant at the University Bern, Switzerland, and works on her dissertation project on economic speculation and financial crises in contemporary literature. She has several publications on economics and literature, literature and new media, semantics of genre and narratology. Christoph Reinfandt is Professor of English Literature at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He has published three monographs in German on systems-theoretical approaches to the history and theory of the novel (Der Sinn der fiktionalen Wirklichkeiten/The Meaning of Fictional Worlds, 1997) and on Romanticism (Romantische Kommunikation/Romantic Communication, 2003, Englische Romantik/English Romanticism, 2008). (Co-)Edited volumes include Systems Theory and Literature (2001), The Cultural Validity of Music in Contemporary Fiction (2006), Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts (2008), Romanticism Today (2009), and Voice and Perception in Transcultural

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Realities: Focus on India (2013). His main current research interests include the history of textures of objectivity and globalised mediascapes. Martin Roussel is Associate Director of the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne since 2009. He completed his studies in German, Education, and Philosophy with a dissertation on Robert Walser’s Micrography (published in 2009). Since 2007 he is editor of the Kleist-Jahrbuch and since 2008 board member of the Directorate of the Heinrich-von-Kleist-Gesellschaft. His fields of research include (mainly) German literature from the 18th to the 21st century (among others Kleist, Karl May, Musil, Robert Walser) and writing cultures. Most recently he as edited a volume on the Seven Deadly Sins (with Ingo Breuer, Sebastian Goth and Björn Moll). Nina Shiel received her PhD degree in Comparative Literature from Dublin City University, Ireland, in 2015. Her doctoral research, supported by the Irish Research Council, examined literary representations of virtual worlds as contemporary instances of the poetic device of ekphrasis. She is a member of the respective Executive Committees of the Comparative Literature Association of Ireland and the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies. Her main research interests include the mutual influence and inspiration of literature and technology, intermediality, and literary study of interactive games. Christian Sinn is the Director of Studies at the Department of Language and Literature at the University of Teacher Education, St. Gallen. Publications include Vorschule der Ästhetik. Zur Verbindlichkeit unverbindlicher Definitionen bei Jean Paul (2015), Noli altum sapere. Anmerkungen zur emblematischen Form metaphilosophischer Sentenzen (2014), Dichten und Denken. Entwurf zu einer Grundlegung der Entdeckungslogik in den exakten und ‚schönen’ Wissenschaften (2001), Jean Paul. Hinführung zu seiner Semiologie der Wissenschaft (1995). His research focuses on the early modern period, the age of Goethe, Romanticism, and the history and methodology of the humanities, literary ethics, and anthropology.