The Literal Shape of Things

Time for a confession: I love talking about things I don't understand just as much as the next aspiring scholar. It's fun! It's frustrating! It often feels like painting while wearing a blindfold! But we all have limits, right? Sometimes I just want to create moments where my academic comfort zones work for me. (Incidentally, if you ever need to know about the deaths of American modernist novelists, or innovations in mid-19th century prosthetics, you know who to ask....)

So, as I read Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter this week (incidentally another text translated from German, thankfully not nearly so dense or so inscrutable as Heidegger), I was thrilled to see not just one, but many avenues for connecting what I know of writing and what Kittler knows and theorizes of technology.

It would be presumptuous and inaccurate to reduce Kittler’s book to just one, or even several, “big ideas,” but he does return, in all three sections of his book, to the idea of form: the form of emerging technology as a re-purposing of a human neurological phenomenon, the form of technology as it shapes the content it creates, form as impetus to the pendulum that swings between real and imagined.

Now, poets generally know a thing or two about form. Even people who profess a profound indifference about poetry generally know a thing or two about poetic form—you know what a sonnet is, or a haiku, or—come on now—a limerick? You probably have a handle on stanzas, too: basic division of parts, an idea we share with music.

To write poetry is to inherently interact with the concepts of form. Even the most free-wheeling of free-verse poets, even the Beats, even Whitman’s sprawling lines and occasional disregard for margins are working with form; to disregard a convention is still to have a relationship with it, if only in the sense that whatever you’ve done will be first understood by others in the context of those conventions.

So, then, how to connect this back to Kittler? I want to start with a Gottfried Benn quote that he uses:

The poem impresses itself better when read….In my judgment, its visual appearance reinforces its reception. A modern poem demands to be printed on paper and demands to be read, demands the black letter; it becomes more plastic by viewing its external structure (228).

In some ways, this seems a perfunctory observation: the visual appearance of poetry has been up for discussion for centuries—since Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, since ornamental drop caps first adorned copies of the Bible, in some way since poetry began to transition from a primarily verbal to a primarily written art. Even Shakespeare was thinking about it:

O fearful meditation! where, alack,

Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O, none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright. (from Sonnet 65)

There’s something to this, then, to the physical act of putting words down. Kittler is arguing that the typewriter, specifically, is a game-changer. I think that he’s right, and not only because I think that the phrase “discursive machine-gun” is brilliant. But if he’s right about that, if the mechanization of the previously manual task of writing has fundamentally altered the future content of writing, then oughtn’t it go all the way back? We know that the rise of water-powered paper mills impacted the availability of writing, but did it also impact what was being written? Of course, if only because it impacted who was writing…

You can see how this gets digressive, and how all these ideas are tightly bound in one another. I’m still chasing the ultimate why of this, trying to figure out what it is about the set of constraints that make up the typewriter that does something to us. Is it the “automated and discrete steps” of the typing process? Is it that somehow building from letters is different than building from words?

And, to end by going forward: what about the incarnations of these basic sensory experiences that were still in the future when Kittler’s book was published? I’m especially curious about the idea of touchscreens. If to build letter by letter, keystroke by keystroke, is a fundamental shift, then what of building without any tangible representations of letters? If writing letters is to commune with ghosts, as Kafka implied in his letters, then what is it when the letters themselves are ghosts?

My Date with Heidegger: An Epistolary Saga

My Dear Heidegger,

I hate to say this, but people warned me about you.

They said you were difficult; they said you weren't worth the trouble—all those things that people tend to say about philosophers, especially ones they don’t like.

So I tried to prepare myself: I brewed an entire pot of coffee. I made myself a batch of scones (I’ve always thought that scones are the most academic of baked goods). I readied my pile of differently-colored highlighters. I even Googled your picture—incidentally, I wonder how you would have felt about Google?—and you don’t look like a difficult man. Just serious. Thoughtful.

But, as will come as no surprise, I’m not writing to you to talk about your face.

You see, Heidegger—can I call you H.? I’m going to call you H.—when I read philosophy, I always try to figure out why the ideas are being presented in the way that they are. Structure and content go hand in hand, right? And so I asked myself this question about you. Because you really weren’t satisfied with the job that language was doing, were you? I confess that I don’t speak a word of German, and I do wonder if I’d be coming to you with a different set of questions if I’d read things as you’d written them originally. But, alas…

I’m going to cut to the chase here. What is it with the re-definitions?  I’m as much a fan of the flexibility of language as the next person; I freely admit that sometimes I make up words, too. But I’ve never read anything written by anyone who liked gerunds as much as you. I read things like “Enframing is an ordaining of destining, as is every way of revealing” and the cynic in me just wants to clock out. But I didn’t want to do that to you…even though after a re-read, and another re-read, I’m not sure I understand. You know, H., you were a beautiful writer—not beautiful in the way that flower are beautiful, or even in the way that sonnets are beautiful, but more like the beauty of a well-preserved skeleton. It’s very precise, your language, and completely dependent on a series of interlocking parts—like a spine, like the twenty-seven bones in the human hand.

I’ve been wondering, H., how much you knew about programming. You see, what you did to examine the essence of technology feels an awful lot like what programmers do to get at the physical, or instrumental, if you will, side of technology. When the code doesn’t work, you rewrite it. When the proof is broken, you fix it. And so you do here. You were creating your own way to communicate, just like the originators of symbolic logic, or the creators of HTML. You take this very magpie approach—look to the Greeks, look to science, look to poetry (a nice touch, by the way)—and you build us up to this triumphant place, where all of a sudden we are not just dealing with technology, but something more:

…enframing propriates for its part in the granting that lets man endure—as yet inexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future—that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth. Thus the rising of the saving power appears.

            The irresistibility of ordering and the restraint of the saving power draw past each other like the paths of two stars in the course of the heavens. But precisely this, their passing by, is the hidden side of their nearness.

            When we look into the ambiguous essence of technology, we behold the constellation, the stellar course of the mystery.

            The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the essential unfolding of truth propriates (338).

You—like so many others—are bringing it back to Truth. The question concerning technology, you write, is the question that holds the essential notion of Truth. And how is it that you and so many other of the early builders and makers and thinkers all zeroed in on this idea of technology as a vehicle for truth, or a way into the concept of truth, when so many of us now are just really into Angry Birds and cat GIFS? Which bus did we get on? Which constellation are we looking at? In the balance between ordering and restraint, I have to imagine that you’d be putting us squarely in the former territory—but what does that do to us going forward?

I’m trying, H., I really am, to make sense of this, but I’m just not there yet. 

If you want to send along any cosmic hints, from the afterlife, well—you know where to find me.

Best wishes,

L. 

Claw Machines and the Question of Truth

My father used to teach an undergraduate chemistry course for non-majors that he semi-affectionately dubbed “Chemistry for Poets.” All of us—the chemists, the poets, and everyone in between—can imagine what that class was like; we can imagine—circa 1975—the kind of student that class would have attracted. I can well imagine his frequent exasperation; I know well enough how I treated my introductory geology course in college.

I bring this up not to bore you with anecdotes from my family’s past, but to serve as one example of the strife—sometimes major, sometimes minor—that occurs when the domain of the right brain and the domain of the left brain feel as though they’re enduring too much togetherness.

It’s this particular split—the two ways of thinking, the two kinds of people—that I’ve been thinking about this week as I read through Martin Davis’ The Universal Computer. As an origin story, it’s a successful outing through several centuries of history—which of course means that it problematizes and complicates all manner of concepts and objects for the reader. Even just typing this post is a more complex activity than it would have been last week—now that I finally understand what RAM is and what Random Access Memory actually means, I can imagine the well of data buzzing in my laptop, the precision of direct accessibility. (I should say that now when I try to picture the inner workings of my computer, I imagine one of those arcade claw machines, reaching for just the right file or string of code…)

Clearly, this book has just been one more enabler for my non sequitur metaphors. 

But there’s something to this intermingling of the knowledge styles, isn’t there? In fact, it seems to me that the entire story of the computer, the centuries-long grappling with questions of infinity and truth and the physicality of numbers, is one that has required a total engagement of all the brain’s reasoning. If I gleaned anything from this book, it was the sheer messiness of generating something that, from the outside, has always seemed incredibly precise. Really, what’s more imaginative than essentially trying to recreate the brain outside of the body?

To get back to the actual history for a moment, let me share this brief quote from Davis:

“[Leibniz] dreamt of an encyclopedic compilation, of a universal artificial mathematical language in which every facet of knowledge could be expressed, of calculational rules which would reveal all the logical interrelationships among these propositions. Finally, he dreamed of machines capable of carrying out calculations, freeing the mind for creative thought” (4). (Emphasis added.)

It is remarkable to me that Leibniz didn’t envision his logical work, his “wonderful idea” of a symbolic alphabet, as being itself “creative thought.” Regardless of its eventual use or the background of its inventor, the initiation of a new language is always a creative act. For all that language has grammar, and for all that grammar is a logical structure, the impetus must always be more nuanced than that. (Besides, anyone who argues that the rules of English grammar are 100% logical is delusional and should not be trusted.)

Really, he seems to have been a paradoxical thinker in a number of ways. The ideas he put forth—the exhaustive compendium of human knowledge, the universal characteristic, the eventual automation—were creative; new ways of answering mathematical questions. At the same time, Leibniz saw everything—everything—as part of God’s best possible world, each action and connection in some way necessitated.

I wonder about the moment when he realized that he wasn’t going to see all his questions answered; I wonder if he ever questioned the combination of his religion and his research, the ways that they complement and contradict each other.

Leibniz wasn’t even close to the first one to ask questions that stretched beyond his time, but I think his style of questioning—proposing concepts that seem both supremely rational and supremely out-of-reach—is what we continue to rely on.

It also seems to me that we’re all trying to talk about truth—truth as it lives inside the human mind, or truth as it lives inside a set of numbers; truth as something a machine can enable us to realize, or something we can teach it to recognize. If we bear that it mind, our future questions might all have more interesting answers. 

As it turns out, "what's in a name" is still pretty interesting.

Sometimes it seems as though there are as many answers to the question “What is digital humanities?” as there are people who call themselves digital humanists. Reading through the many definitions and explanations that exist is, luckily, one of those times when—like with so many moments in DH—the structure is just as relevant as the meaning contained within.

Let me elaborate.

If you were to Google “What is digital humanities?”, as I have, you would find a happy cacophony of suggestions. You would read pieces that sounded like straight philosophy;  you would read pieces that sounded like rebels who are thrilled to have finally found a microphone; you would read pieces that are so technical they become hard to parse. Thinking about all of these different approaches to the same questions should tell you almost as much about what DH is, as what they are actually telling you. This is not the eye of the needle; this is the floodgate.

When I read pieces like “The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” (incidentally, the best use of clip-art-style graphics that I’ve seen in a long time), or the more restrained Rafael Alvarado’s “The Digital Humanities Situation,” I can’t help but try to picture myself in a place somewhere other than the sidelines. To me, it seems that both the beauty and the curse of the state of DH stems from its expansive set of possibilities. Coming fresh into this discipline (or maybe I’d rather call it a confederation of disciplines all flying the same set of methodological flags), it’s hard to know where to look first, let alone where to jump in.

It should be said, of course, that the hesitation I feel was born from my own mind, and not from any perceived closing-of-the-ranks from any writing I’ve read on this topic—or any of the lovely DH professionals I’ve talked with. The field is vast, yes, but it’s marked (I think) by a deep enthusiasm; the kind that wants nothing more than to pull you in and make sure that you, too, are excited about what could be next.

I may have found my way in, though, and it was beautiful to read something and feel, if not a full-on, mad-scientist “EUREKA!” moment, then at least a moment of clarity. To spread my cards out on the table for a minute: I see myself working in a library or archive, once I’ve gotten all my degrees in a row, and in the past I’ve struggled to articulate why a trained poet (if there is such a thing) not only wants to be a librarian, but also a librarian with a hand in the murky world of DH. On the surface, it doesn’t seem to connect. In my mind, the creative work of poetry and the creative-yet-logical work of digital scholarship pair perfectly with each other, but that’s probably deserving of its own post later on. To get to the point: there’s a place in the Manifesto (can you tell that I loved it? It’s a joy to read, how could I not love it?) where the conversation comes around to the idea of curation. Let me quote a little of it for you:

Curation also has a healthy modesty: it does not insist on an ever more possible mastery of the all; it embraces the tactility and mutability of local knowledge, and eschews disembodied Theory in favor of the nitty-gritty of imagescapes and objecthood….

Curation means making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds….

Curation also implies custodial responsibilities with respect to the remains of the past as well as interpretive, meaning-making responsibilities with respect to the present and future. In a world of perpetual data overload, it implies information design and selectivity….(9).

This may not seem like a groundbreaking excerpt, but for me it might as well have had a giant neon border. “See here?” it said to me, “THIS is what you’ve been waiting for. Here’s the reasoning you’ve been trying to articulate for the past year.” And it really is. Curation is obviously not the only skill I can or will latch onto, but it speaks to my sensibilities as a poet and my strengths as a scholar. What is poetry if not the selective promotion of some details and not others? What is storytelling if not a means to preserve what we find most important? Flash fiction and haikus from the New York Times came to be for some of the same reasons that DH came to be: a need to push on traditional boundaries of genre coupled with an unwillingness to completely divorce from traditional guiding principles; clever people getting bored with a horizon they can comfortably discern. 

One more connection with my home base of creative writing, if you will: I would argue that what separates an average poet (or prose writer, or essayist, etc.) is the ability to revise. The initial shape of an idea is not nearly so important as the shape that we leave it in. In that vein, I find the word of DH compelling because it seems to be another discipline that has embraced the guiding principle of revision. Whether you want to think about it from the vantage point of individual projects growing and morphing, or whether you want to go big-picture and think about the fact that digital editions are essentially revisions of traditional print books, it seems to be a deeply embedded concept. 

So, to all those throwing this party under the Big Tent (another great Google search waiting to be made, by the way): Thanks for inviting me! It's good to be here.