Bound and re:Bound

Fill in the circle completely. 

Don’t make any marks outside the box. 

Use only a No. 2 pencil.

If you went through the American public school system after the dual rise of the standardized test and the Scantron form—as I did—then instructions like those above probably sound very familiar. I’ve always hoped that no kid ever had the makings of a masterpiece in a standardized essay response—for all we know, a brilliant re-examination of the reasons for the War of 1812 has been lost forever, because to write it would have been to mark outside the box.

This, of course, qualifies as an especially extreme example of artificially restrictive boundaries, and even this has its benefits. For one, the many, nameless readers of the thousands of responses to the same generic essay prompt probably appreciate not having to read any more than is necessary. But even when constructed from some perceived need, both literal and metaphorical boundaries to writing can have pervasive consequences. I see this firsthand teaching introductory composition classes here at the university. I’ve constructed assignments that are open by design; especially when it comes to topic choice, the lion’s share of the intellectual work is left up to the student. Some of them thrive, developing interesting and unusual avenues to explore; more often, though, the freedom makes them uncomfortable. Even brainstorming seems to be to be constrained by the mental version of rusty pipes—once you open the tap, it takes a while for things to really get going. And why wouldn’t it? The most ruthlessly efficient way teach writing is with a formula: three supported points equals a conclusion. After twelve years of that, I can’t blame them for looking like deer in the headlights when I introduce them to the concept of a lyric essay or a non-linear argument.

What really resonated with me in Matt Kirschenbuam’s Mechanisms is the same wrestling with boundaries, this time located in new media. He’s constantly evaluating, and then questioning, the barriers that have been established that separate traditional textual studies from digital media analysis, with some fascinating results. Early on, he quotes from a 1991 book by George Landow and Pauel Delany:

So long as the text was married to a physical media, readers and writers took for granted three crucial attributes: that the text was linear, bounded, and fixed. Generations of scholars and authors internalized these qualities as the rules of thought, and they have pervasive social consequences. We can define Hypertext as the use of the computer to transcend the linear, bounded, and fixed qualities of the traditional written text. (42)

To take this view, it’s no longer just the box for the standardized test essay, but the whole expanse of print literature before it that leads to internalized boundaries. Here, new media is the liberator, the breaker of pre-established roles. And in some ways, for some situations, this is true. (I keep trying to imagine how one might translate the “write lines on the chalkboard” punishment into the 21^st century. With CTRL+C, after all, to reproduce a line of text is the work of seconds, not hours.)

But if it was really that simple, if the seemingly ever-expandable Microsoft Word document was all that we needed to reformulate our relationship with text, then my students should already be free. They, even more than me, should have the free and flexible relationship with digitally recorded words that continues to be propagated—electronic composition is flexible! It’s changeable! The freedom is exhilarating, right?

Right. 

Except…

Except when it’s not; except when changeability doesn’t mean transparency, or removability. One of my favorite recurring images in Mechanisms is that of the computer as a ‘black box,’ that seemingly impenetrable record of what has been. The book also spends quite a bit of time with the mechanics of a bitstream; these both add up to the same idea, which is this: like picking up glitter spilled from an elementary school craft table or the removing the smell of sauerkraut from a poorly-ventilated kitchen, removing the traces of computer activity is no small feat. To bring in another, more elegant image of digital resonance, this time from the text itself:

The interactions of modern productivity software and mature physical storage media such as a hard drive may finally resemble something like a quantum pinball machine…files leaving persistent versions of themselves behind at every point they touch—like afterimages that only gradually fade—and the persistent versions themselves creating versions that multiply in like manner through the system. (52)

At some point, our record-keeping became self-perpetuating. This, too, is something that my students know better than almost anyone. Try arguing the impermanence of the internet to someone being chased by an embarrassing photo. We haven’t done away with media boundaries at all; if anything, we’ve just suppressed them into the gears-and-guts layer of the composition apparatus so we don’t have to look at them anymore. 

A composition notebook only has so many pages; a terabyte of memory, though it seems vast, only has room for so many bytes. I keep wondering: will we even know what to do with uncapped storage when we finally get it?

Back to Babel

Growing up, I had a particular habit with much-watched movies. When I got to the point where I could basically recite the lines along with the actors, I would start watching them in other languages for fun—Spanish, usually, or French if the mood struck me. It wasn’t that I was trying to actively teach myself another language, though I’m sure I picked up phrases here and there; it was more about how the movie both changed and stayed exactly the same. The story was the story that I knew so well, but by switching languages, it also felt like I was watching things unfold for the first time.

It was the same, later, when I was learning Latin (an ever-practical choice) in college. I’d read the Aeneid previously, in English, but it wasn’t the same; the essence wasn’t the same—the feeling of the words as they hung aloud in the room was markedly different.

It’s natural while thinking about technology to think about language; technology is often utilized in the service of communication, after all. It’s natural, I think, to question how technology can be made universal when the practicalities of language and location are not. I’ve seen eloquent arguments for the value of this universality; technology itself is sometimes the language that allows this type of engagement. And it does seem, when we take a wide view of things, that a swiftly-moving blanket of interconnectivity is spreading itself out; it is challenging to keep it from slipping over our heads; the buzz of the global is a distinct layer of sound that runs under everything else.

So in the midst of this, it is perfectly right that Donna Haraway should ask the question: is a common language actually what we want? What is lost when the narrative becomes universal?

She gets to this question—among others—in the delightfully provocative “A Cyborg Manifesto.” First, she crystallizes something about technology that I think is paramount to the way things crack things open later on. Observe:

Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.

Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move — the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language.

I am completely taken with the idea of technology acting as a preservative for a social moment. It’s the “why” behind the incredible nostalgia of outdated pieces, but I hadn’t ever had the wherewithal to conceptualize it that way. The beauty is this: now that technology—the churning, buzzing behemoth—gets forced into a moment of stillness, we can lay hands on it. To continue with the metaphor of freezing, it’s simple work to shatter something made of ice—and shatter it does. Haraway’s summation comes to this:

This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

Questioning the effect of universality becomes a move of power, rather than one of weakness. To embrace a cyborg’s mentality is to seek friction between previously bounded dichotomies—not to eliminate it, but to capture what sparks may form. So, what might it mean to study like an infidel? To create meaning like a cyborg?

These are questions that all disciplines can ask of themselves. For me it means, among other things, looking towards blended media rather than away. When it comes right down to it, the book has always been a cyborg—first birthed from the oral tradition and the inception of the alphabet; then from the alphabet and the revolution of printing; now it stands reborn as the child of print and digital. The mutable boundaries are what clue us in to its definitive properties, if we look.

A common language—literally, technologically—would allow for one dialogue, it’s true, but would we in fact be saying less? Can we instead harness what comes of cacophony? 

In which I continue to puzzle over typewriters

Several years ago, I came by an electric typewriter at a garage sale. It cost almost nothing, but it also didn’t have a ribbon, so for years it sat in a case in my closet. Finally, this summer, I got around to getting it up and running. A writer and her typewriter, together at last! (Were this a movie, there would be a nice montage of me learning which keys need to be repaired. It’s a good thing I don’t have occasion to use the letter z too often.) I’m someone who grew up writing by hand, and who now primarily writes by laptop keyboard, so it was strange how much those first strokes on the humming Smith Corona felt like a homecoming…or perhaps a unification?

Writing about the typewriter (was he writing about a typewriter ON a typewriter?), Marshall McLuhan says this:

Because he is an audience for his own mechanical audacities, he never ceases to react to his own performance. Composing on the typewriter is like flying a kite. (261)

Using the example of E.E. Cummings, McLuhan explains the more tangible writerly acrobatics that the typewriter encouraged—he doesn’t completely credit the typewriter with the free verse revolution, but it’s given some pretty significant credit. (Cummings also once wrote that "Progress is a comfortable disease," so I'm somehow not surprised that he gets brought in here as an example.)

I continue to be fascinated by this format/content relationship, especially as it pertains to writing, and I have to admit that McLuhan’s summation of “the medium is the message” is about the catchiest way to communicate the connection that I’ve read thus far. He also does an admirable job, I think, of tracing these concepts back to the root. I—numb to the real impact of the medium as apparently I am—would never have focused so much power with the alphabet itself, naked even of any vehicle. I find it challenging to conceptualize the phonetic alphabet the way McLuhan does, though I think it might have more to do with the contrasting forces at play in his theory than with what he’s actually saying. Here I’m thinking mostly of the strange wave-like pattern of our advancement; the way the electric age is in some ways a…not a regression, exactly, but perhaps a corrective action? A way of imploding us back together? Whatever it is, it’s not quite on the typical axis of understanding.

But, back to my pet puzzlement of the moment:

One of the game-changing aspects of the typewriter is supposed to be the way it compresses and combines the composition-to-publication process. I suppose that was true when McLuhan was writing (which, as I had to continually remind myself, was in the 1960s), but the forward motion of the intervening years has made it even more true. I’m typing this post into a Word document before I paste it into the ‘new post’ box on Blogger, but I wouldn’t have to; I could leave myself with a single click between my thoughts (as they appear on the screen) and the wide and instantaneous realm of the internet.  

So, that much is technically true. But what does it matter? It can be challenging to be conscious of one’s own writing process, but I think I can work out this much about myself:

I’m more likely to write a really terrible, rough-from-the-edges-to-the-core draft if I’m writing by hand; I’m more likely to draft something from start to finish, without pausing to correct anything, if I’m writing by hand.

Put me a keyboard in front of me, and the stakes are somehow heightened. I agonize more about individual words as they come; I am more aware of my writing as it will eventually exist in front of an audience. Why is that true, when I could just as easily hand my notebook to someone, or lots of someones? 

It must be something about connectivity--the handwritten page might be more connected to me--my personal handwriting, one of the closest extensions of my own self--but the typed page seems more connected...or more connectable, to everyone else who knows the orderly lines of the alphabet. 

Frankly, this whole business is getting a little eerie. But, if I’m to get to the point of Understanding Media (and doesn't it seem more and more of an uphill climb?), then those moments of awareness are necessary. To borrow from McLuhan’s amputation metaphor, I guess I’m ready for a bout of phantom-limb syndrome?