“MATERIALITY HAS ALWAYS BEEN IN PLAY”
09:35 PM Interview
BY LISA GITELMAN
Lisa Gitelman: Your book (How We Became Posthuman, Chicago 1999) is one that I find myself returning to again and again. I keep discovering new things in it, and it keeps informing the work I do on technologies of representation. Are you still working on the same or on related issues? Could you describe your current project?
N. Katherine Hayles: Right now I am finishing up a book called Writing Machines to be published in September 2002 with MIT Press in their new Mediawork series edited by Peter Lunenfeld. It carries on some of the arguments of Posthuman but in a different vein. I have become very interested in the possibility of media-specific criticism–a mode of critical inquiry attentive to the materiality of the medium in which a literary work is produced.
Writing Machines argues that literary criticism has for much too long tended to regard the literary work as an immaterial verbal construct. My claim is that with significant exceptions, print has become transparent for us because it is ubiquitous, the sea in which we swim. Your own work on inscription technologies is one of those exceptions, of course, along with the criticism of theorists such as Johanna Drucker, Jerome McGann, and Matthew Kirschenbaum. The connecting point with Posthuman is an emphasis on embodiment, now understood as the interplay of a work’s physicality with its signifying practices.
Now that electronic textuality is bursting on the scene, it seems we have a magnificent opportunity to think again about the specificities of both print and electronic media, which can illuminate one another by contrast. I hope to electrify the neocortex of literary studies into recognizing that the print book is after all an interface with its own presuppositions, assumptions, and configurations of the reader.
In Writing Machines I discuss three texts as case studies in the specificity of media: Talan Memmott’s electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Tom Phillips’ artist’s book A Humument, and Mark Danielewski’s print novel House of Leaves. Each reading attempts to show how the text engages the materiality of its medium, and how this materiality becomes so entwined with the content that the two cannot be adequately understood apart from one another.
I also wanted to devise a form that would invite in people who have not yet thought much about electronic textuality, which I think includes the majority of literary critics. So the theoretical/critical chapters alternate with narrative chapters centered on an autobiographical persona, Kaye, as she makes the journey from a print-oriented perspective to a media perspective. This scheme is consistent with the aim of the series, which is to produce small-format, richly designed books that will appeal to a general reader as well as an academic audience.
The series matches each author with a print designer to ensure high visual quality for each book. My collaborator is Anne Burdick, a wonderful designer who has won major awards for her print designs and who also designed the new interface for the “Electronic Book Review.” Her design will be very much an integral part of the text, instantiating in visual form the major themes and ideas. In exploring what a print book can be in a digital age, the Mediawork series seeks to integrate the visual and the verbal, an enterprise that also is central to the arguments of Writing Machines.
LG: Sounds very exciting. Does Writing Machines preserve the category of “the literary”? It seems to me that the literary often goes unquestioned and unexamined in ways that the liberal humanist subject does not, although the two are obviously overlapping or mutually acting constructions.
NKH: Yes, I do put considerable emphasis on the literary. With the proviso, however, that what constitutes this elusive category is continuously changing and mutating.
Part of what I want to demonstrate is that interfaces in both print and electronic works are reconfiguring the readerly subject by establishing new relations between voice, (sub)vocalization, articulation, and mark. At least since Marshall McLuhan, we have been inundated with claims that information technologies are transforming subjectivity; I count myself guilty on this score.
But now I think we require microanalyses that show precisely and rigorously how this transformation is being carried out by particular texts, both print and electronic. Not that general claims will be abandoned, of course, but we need a much more detailed understanding of what is involved in the transformations and how they depend on effects specific to the medium in which the work is instantiated.
Source: The Iowa Review
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