Week 10: E-text
Nelson, A file structure for the complex, the changing, and the indeterminate
Early on, Nelson makes his goals for the file system clear. The system must help by “making the fragments easy to find, and making easier the tentative sequencing and juxtaposing and comparing.” Rather than a hierarchical filing system, Nelson proposes an amorphous file system that can hold dynamic connections between any number and variety of files. The trend towards tags/annotations/metadata seems to be a trend in this direction. The talk about dynamic, connected texts in which one text is changed and the texts it is connected to are changed to reflect changes in that original text reminds me of how CSS works. As Nelson notes, a central characteristic of his theory is the notion that ELF needs both historical trails (versions) and associative trails (tags). Most importantly, the ELF should have the ability to evolve into new file structures, as the needs of the user and the nature of the information change.
Aarseth, Nonlinearity and literary theory
Re. the editor's intro to this text -- “One of the signs of the maturity of new media scholarship is that it has started to generate approaches that apply to objects outside the field.” Wait, new media scholarship is mature? Then what am I /are we doing? (j/k)
Aarseth begins the essay by laying out three metaphysics of text: reading, writing, and stability, claiming that the nonlinear text approaches each of these differently. His question of whether an author is part of the text has also been addressed by Foucault (What is an Author?) and Barthes' concept of the anchor. Aarseth also questions our idealization of the text: the notion that we presume text to have a particular form, and if that text deviates from that form, we assume that a copying error must have taken place, and therefore reach out for this other, idealized, “complete” text. To move past this, Aarseth suggests we forgo the metaphysics of text as we've known them and instead consider text as information-information as a potentiality ready to be actualized. He introduces the term texton to denote a basic element of textuality, which derives its meaning from the relation of the texts around it. The readerless text presents one with multiple incompossible worlds, allowing the user to choose between these worlds, while being unable to simultaneously experience both worlds at the same time. Aarseth's argument for the corruption of the critic seems misguided to me. He sets up a straw man when he implies that immersion somehow subverts our critical institutions. One of the first things I learned in my lit. crit. class was that immersion is part of reading, as is identification with the character(s). Therefore, the critic must distance oneself from these immersive qualities in order to be a good critic. Let's for a moment forget the argument about whether or not “objectivity” is possible (and whether distance is needed to achieve said objectivity) and assume it is. A good critic can always distance oneself from the text. Furthermore, a critic will always miss some scriptons, particularly by paying more attention to some than to others (since no critic can ever catch every scripton, even in a linear text). So, the whole corruption of the critic argument seems like a sham to me.
Hayles, Material metaphors, technotexts, and media-specific analysis
Hayles posits materiality as a way for critics to consider the relationship between the construction of a text and--for lack of a better word-- its constituted components. As critics, we can begin to ask ourselves questions such as: how does the technology preclude certain texts from being produced? how does technology encourage a particular text to be produced in a particular way? how do we develop technology to better create a type of (idealized?) text (this inverts the technology-text hierarchy I imply in the first two questions)? Following this line of thought, we can begin to think about the text-technology interaction almost in a Foucauldian, discursive sort of way.
Hayles, Translating media
Hayles argues that print-turned-electronic-text undergoes a type of translation. Her stated purpose is to show how our assumptions about the text are print-biased. The first part of the essay delineates between work/text/document as a way to show that we've always had hierarchies embedded in our understanding of how text operates, and-moreover-we also have an ideal-real dichotomy when ti comes to text, because we're always (like Aarseth notes) looking for an “ideal“ text, though Hayles disagrees with Aarseth, writing that the ideal text is “not platonic“ but rather ideal for the situation, whereas Aarseth seems to be arguing for a platonically ideal text. Hayles distinguishes between the book (print) text and electronic text by pointing out the stability of print texts (which ontologically preexists our opening of the book) and the instability of electronic texts, which come into being through the interface and through our interaction with them. Again, we can bring Manovich (interface/databse) and Deleuze (actuality/potentiality) to bear on our understanding and theorizing about text. In fact, Hayles ultimately shifts her conversation away from an emphasis on materiality and more towards a discussion of the ideal(ization) of text, and how this is problematic for critics. Importantly, we didn't realize our idealization of the text until we began examining new media. So, while it's tempting to say that new media does not idealize the text, it's false; new media gave us a second look at older technology, while also giving us new things to look at. The upshot of Hayle's argument is that we shouldn't search for a unity in text or in a text across media; that there's no necessary correspondence between a text and how it is written or how it is read. The textual experience itself seems to be singular, which in some ways brings us back to the book and the advent of print, which instantiated private/public dichotomies and helped us rethink notions of identity, self-reflection.