Abstract
The research experiment described in this article, “Readies Online,” started as
a database to make accessible a rare manuscript of important modernist poets and
writers including Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, F. W.
Marinetti, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, Eugene Jolas, and many others. Each of these
contributors had sent works prepared for Bob Brown's machine, and he called the
prepared texts readies. In the midst of building the collection of texts, the
researcher realized that moving the texts through an electronic version of Brown's
machine, or through the interface constructed on the website to simulate Brown's
machine, changed how one read — even changed the essence of what one read. Speed,
pace, direction, and visual cues took on new importance already apparent in reading
printed texts, but not stressed. Punctuation now represented an illegible and
non-representational, visual cue rather than a direct link to the phono-centric
pauses and stops that are more commonly represented by punctuation. The futures of
reading, and the use of new devices like e-readers, will have consequences for the
definition and practice of what we call reading.
As a matter of principle, the book is illegible, and it calls for
or commands reading in the name of that illegibility. Illegibility is not a
question of what is too badly formed, crossed out, scribbled: the illegible is
what remains closed in the opening of the book. What slips from page to page but
remains caught, glued, stitched into the binding, or else laboriously jotted as
marginalia that attempt to trip over the secret, that begin to write another book.
What is illegible is not reading at all, yet only by starting from it does
something then offer itself to reading.
[Nancy 2005, 27]
In 1931, in the French Côte d'Azur village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, a group of expatriate
avant-garde artists and writers gathered to try out a prototype of a reading machine
built by Ross Saunders, according to the plans and designs of Robert Carlton Brown II
(1886-1959), known to the avant-garde writers as Bob Brown. Brown, a bestselling writer
and international publisher, was part of the modernist circles not just in the late
1920's and early 1930's, but also since 1916 when he first started publishing his
avant-garde poetry. After traveling the world for two years with the profits from his
publishing empire, Bob spent a few years in Europe, mostly in France, publishing a
handful of experimental books with prominent presses as well as with his own imprint,
Roving Eye Press.
After publishing two versions of his plans for the machine, Brown decided to invite the
most distinguished expatriate modernist writers to contribute to a new volume, The Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine. The authors included in
the original anthology included poets and writers like Gertrude Stein, William Carlos
Williams, Ezra Pound, F. W. Marinetti, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, Eugene Jolas, and many
others. Each of these contributors was asked to send texts prepared according to Bob’s
instructions in what he called “readies” style. Bob also transferred at least some
of these texts on rolls of paper with one single line of text, and he prepared at least
one other sample of a text printed in “readies” style to show to engineers who
might build and manufacture the machine. He never found a manufacturer, but his dreams
for a reading mechanism were similar to the eventual microfilm machines. Brown wrote to
the inventor of microfilm and microfiche readers, worked with engineers, produced rolls
of literary texts (such as one of the novel Candide) for
his machine, and wrote to many admirers about his plans to produce the machines for a
popular market. He later wrote to television producers trying to get them to produce
poetry on television that would look much like a proto-Sesame
Street with visual poetry. Because he never manufactured the machine, one
could only read a poor and inadequate printed translation of these texts instead of
reading them as readies for, and in, the reading machine. It was as if we had the sheet
music to Sean “Puffy” Combs’s song “Come with Me,” but not the sampling
machine or player to listen to it. Brown’s readies, like sampling in music, are
inseparable from the machines used to play the texts.
I wanted to address that problem of recovering the previously un-publishable readies
(because of the lack of a machine). This article is part of a series of my publications
and research projects that concern my effort to re-publish and make accessible rare
manuscripts associated with the machine, and to make Bob Brown’s remarkable life known
to a wider public (and even to scholars who know only about the few years he lived in
France). In order to publish works specifically prepared for Bob Brown’s reading
machine, I decided the publication of the texts in the anthology should not simply
consist of a printed text – even if those texts were a facsimile of Brown’s published
anthology. Instead, the project would make these texts available online in a way as
similar as possible to Brown’s presentation in the prototype of the machine. I began by
constructing a database, using MySQL, to make these works accessible to a much wider
audience.
This strategy of using databases online to make otherwise rare texts widely accessible
and searchable was in keeping with what we now call “digital humanities” research.
What happened next, in the middle of building the database, was a recognition that
moving the texts through an electronic version of Brown's machine — or through the
analogous interface standing in for the machine and constructed on a website
(readies.org) — did not simply present a database of searchable texts. Instead, it
simulated how one might have experienced using Bob Brown's machine back in 1931 as if it
was made in the twenty-first century. That is, the simple database and peculiar
interface, changed how one reads; it even changed the essence of what one reads. Now,
issues of speed, pace, direction, and visual cues took on new importance. Yes, these
issues were already apparent in reading printed texts, but they were not stressed or
highlighted as they became in the interactive interface. Mundane aspects of every
literary text, like punctuation, now represented an illegible and non-representational
visual cue rather than a direct link to the phonocentric pauses and stops that are more
commonly represented by punctuation. Usually an em-dash, for example, cues a reader to
pause, but in the readies, the em-dash cues the eye to increase the speed and skip to
the next word. At high rates of speed reading becomes a visual experience without any
sounding out words. Punctuation cues a reader’s voice, whether reading aloud or
silently, but in the readies, the punctuation circumvents the voice to cue the reader’s
eyes. Suddenly, the “digital humanities” effort looked more like a Derridean
experiment in grammatological reading, or what Greg Ulmer would call an “applied
grammatology.” That is, the project suggested a future of reading, that will
involve new devices like e-readers, and will change the definition and practice of what
we call reading and even introduce an electracy.
As the project progressed through iterations, I published critical editions of two other
experimental works by Bob Brown designed explicitly for his reading machine. Those
critical editions appeared as part of a series edited by Jerome McGann and Nick Frankel
on “literature by design,” and they strengthened my appreciation that visual
non-phonocentric design might form the basis for literary meaning and a marginalized
aspect of literature. My publications received much attention because they corresponded
with the release of a number of new (or newly improved) e-readers. The New York Times Book Review published an essay that discussed my ongoing
research and mentioned one of the new critical editions. That essay also included a link
to my reading machine, and on one day I received five thousand hits to the website and
many more over the course of a few weeks. The reading machine on my website offers an
e-version of what Bob Brown's machine proposed, in one iteration, in the late 1920s and
early 1930s. He called the texts prepared for the machine “readies.” The texts
running through the machines on my website include some of the readies produced for
Brown's machine by modernist poets and writers.
As the project continued to attract interest, I published a series of other articles
and chapters and continued to do biographical research on Brown’s life and his machine.
In the early 1930’s, the beaming out of printed text over radio waves and the televisual
poetry that Brown predicted and advocated for had an absurd air of science fiction,
which has led many to read Brown’s plans for the machine as simply an art-stunt. In
support of that view, in 1931, Brown wrote in enthusiastic hyperbole, similar to the
style of other avant-garde manifestos of the time, about the machine's potential to
change reading forever. For those interested in the digital humanities now, Brown's
research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of the phenomenon of
text-messaging (with its abbreviated language) and electronic text readers. You are no
doubt reading this article online with the words beamed out tele-matically. And Brown's
practical plans for his reading machine include precise details that evoke both
steampunk design and Kindle:
Extracting the dainty reading roll from its pill box container
the reader slips it smoothly into its slot in the machine, sets the speed
regulator, turns on the electric current and the whole 100,000, 200,000, 300,000
or million words spill out before his eyes [. . .] in one continuous line of type.
My machine is equipped with controls so the reading record can be turned back or
shot ahead [. . . ] magnifying glass [. . .] moved nearer or farther from the
type, so the reader may browse in 6 point, 8, 10, 12, 16 or any size that suits
him.
[Brown 1931, 154]
Brown's reading machine was designed to “unroll a televistic readie” in the
style of modernist experiments; the design also followed the changes in reading
practices during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Gertrude Stein understood
that Brown's machine, as well as his processed texts for it, suggested a shift toward a
different way to comprehend texts. That is, the mechanism of this book, a type of book
explicitly built to resemble reading mechanisms like ticker-tape machines rather than a
codex, produced at least for Stein specific changes in reading practices.
On the one hand, the inspiration for Brown's machine certainly includes Duchamp's
machines and poetics. Artists like Raymond Roussell built their own Surrealist reading
machines relatively soon after news of Brown’s reading machine appeared on the scene. It
seems fitting that Brown would call the processed texts the readies, explicitly alluding
to talkies and movies, and implicitly to readymades. In light of his own claims in
The Readies to do for reading what Pablo Picasso did for
painting, or what James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and e. e. cummings did for writing, one
might call Bob Brown the Marcel Duchamp of reading. The fascination with machine
aesthetics among the avant-garde was very much of the moment in June 1930. In an issue
of the modernist magazine transition, in which Brown
announced his machine, the magazine's editor, Eugene Jolas, declared, “The mechanical surrounds us like a flood. The machine and its relations
to man is doubtless one of the major problems of the age. Ever more accelerated
becomes the tempo, ever more whirling are the pistons, ever more violent is the
influence of this titanic instrument upon the thoughts and acts of man” (379).
The context of his literary and artistic tastes and writings make it easy for even the
best critics, and sometimes for Brown himself, to think of the project only in terms of
the modernist revolution of the word and as a “stab in the dark at
writing modernly.”
On the other hand, Brown seemed to consider his machine and the changes to reading in
much more practical and even commercial terms like microfilm than like Duchamp’s
toy-like machines. Unlike microfilm, in Brown’s machine the text would roll out in
“one continuous line of type”. The magnifying glass,
spools of one line of type, electric current, controls and regulators all seem both
quaint and futuristic. Using his machine one could see “microscopic
type on a movable tape running beneath a slot equipped with a magnifying glass and
brought up to life size before the reader's birdlike eye”. One could also
control the speed, bringing the usual relaxed pace of reading up to the fast modern
speed of the day.
Whether avant-garde provocation or patent-pending application, the printed form of the
readies used punctuation marks as visual analogies, and this essay seeks to examine that
aspect of textual production usually effaced in tagging, digital humanities databases,
and in phonocentric readings of texts whether online or not. Readies function as a
printed analogy for what reading will feel and look like “spinning
past the eye out of a word-machine,” and, in that sense, em-dashes on a
printed page are, for Brown, a “crude” attempt to simulate motion.
How does digital humanities account for motion in texts and reading? How does one tag
motion? How does one include motion in a concordance? These are not simply avant-garde
provocations, but practical questions that digital humanities must begin to
confront.
In Brown's readies, the em-dashes have a visual equivalent in the cartoon action lines
that sometimes alternatively indicate light, surprise, or inspiration (Eureka). They are
also synonymous with the xxxxxxxx of redacted texts. In either case, instead of
punctuation serving a phonocentric system, those marks now serve a visio-semantic system
much like the system of visual poetry. The style of preparation and reading of these
texts led, counter-intuitively, to modern realist novels by James T. Farrell and in
Brown's own You Gotta Live! In those cases, it did not
break with realist illusion, but it suggested the condensed, rapid, and cartoonish
qualities of the dark gritty urban novel often of crime and detection. The staccato
could find itself as a speaking style even as it suggested the visual equivalent of
flickering images One of the ongoing debates about visual poetry concerns whether the
marks on the page should serve the voice, serve to represent what a voice speaks, or
should explicitly visual poetry have no syntactic alphabetic translation ; that is, the
poems, like Bob Brown’s work, have no alphabetic equivalent nor a syntactic structure
that one can decipher from the visual (and possibly moving) marks on the page (see for
example, Drucker 1996, 120). Is writing a slave to speech? Are there poetic and
aesthetic effects that have no translation in speech? The visual poets set out to write
poetry not intended to represent an author's voice, but to directly imprint a process
and a visual aesthetic that has no equivalent in speech. This poetry demands a tactical
visceral literacy. Among the avant-garde poets who prepared texts for Brown's machine,
F. W. Marinetti sent a visual poem, titled “Words in
Freedom/” Marinetti’s poem pointed to one lack in the particular machine Brown
conceived. One section of Marinetti’s poem, “Olfactory
Poetry,” only suggested smells when the words were read as representations of
odors rather than as olfactory objects. The machine did not cue a sense of smell, but if
Marinetti prepared his poem today perhaps he would use some digital equivalent to a
scratch-and-sniff design.
In Brown's Readies, punctuation marks become visual
analogies. For movement we see em-dashes (––) that also, by definition, indicate that
the sentence was interrupted or cut short. These created a
“cinemovietone” shorthand system. The old uses of punctuation,
such as employment of periods to mark the end of a sentence, disappear. Reading
machine-mediated text becomes more like watching a continuous series of flickering
frames become a movie. The reader’s ability to recognize punctuation marks as analogies
for cinematographic zooms, close-ups, and special effects also allows the scenes in the
Readies to function as an allegory for the process of reading in the age of machines.
Readies sought to illuminate the form of a process rather than the form of a medium.
Mechanical poetics (like Marcel Duchamp's descriptions of an impossible fourth
dimension) magnify reading as a cultural technological medium without a single essential
form. Using punctuation in this way as a visual score rather than as a set of cues for
reading aloud problematizes traditional literary interpretation. Precisely because
punctuation marks usually function to guide the voice to read prosody, the use of
punctuation as an analogy for motion and other optical effects moves reading from an
interpretation of words in connection with an author's voice toward an interpretation
that emphasizes design, visual aesthetics, and movement. Readies do not efface
expressivity, but they put the tone of voice in doubt. That kind of visual pun logic was
common at the time in works by such artists as Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists.
Duchamp, a formative influence on Brown's experimental and visual poetry, designed,
built, and found readymade machines that suggested one could build or plan a machine
that would never produce the same result twice. They also parodied the conception of
machines as being only in the service of efficiency, reproducibility, and market
economies. Does Brown’s machine simply parody microfilm machines as an elaborate art
stunt?
The em–dashes do not make the prepared texts, or readies, easier to read or more
accessible, rather those marks change the very rules and constraints of what constitutes
reading. The visual punctuation suggests the 3-D sculptural apparatus involved in
reading and a precursor to future reading machines — perhaps not hand-held, but spatial,
sculptural and dependent on the place for the reader's body. In describing how to read
digital poetry, Roberto Simanowski describes the process of transforming text into a
post-alphabetic object that allows for both reading and playing with a text [
Simanowski 2010, 160–164]. One discovers a similar process in the
readies only when using my e-version of Brown's machine because only then does the
reader move the text at a pace that changes the printed text from representational to an
object of perceptual presentation. Without using the machine, the most noticeable
aspects of the texts concern their representational meanings. The visceral object-ness
of reading as a process is left undiscovered until one uses the simulation. Without the
machine, the printed readies are, in many cases, unremarkable. When one uses the
machine, the readies are about the process of reading. In that machine-reading, the
illegible aspects of reading, like the perception of speed, pace, directionality (those
usually implicit aspects of reading a printed or pdf) become foregrounded Now, using the
machine one notices un-translatable visual effects of pace; for example, moving the text
at a high rate of speed creates an optical illusion in which the text direction seems to
reverse. This sort of effect is outside the realm of thinking of reading only in terms
of literacy and representation. Literacy depends on thinking of decoding in terms of
alphabetic and syntactic equivalents, and dismissing any other “stray” visual marks
as illegible.
The electronic project described here began as a mere supplement for my publications and
research on Brown. From the initial motivation, work on the project led first to a way
to think about databases, interfaces, and mechanized procedures as alternatives to the
dominant processing technologies and procedures, and later to a realization that one
could simulate reading and experiences much as one simulates running with a Wii Fit; one
could experience alternative constraints to the dominant print-based styles of reading —
alternative styles and processes (like reading from a scroll) usually only described
rather than demonstrated in scholarly studies. So, the Brown machine simulation became a
prototype for a series of simulations on other reading situations both in the past and
in potential futures.
To better illuminate this important moment in literary history, and to avoid the
problem that Brown identifies as using printed analogies to crudely simulate movement,
the online simulation moves beyond the goal of making accessible and available the works
published as readies. I began to suspect this other theoretical aspect when I consulted
with Michael North, one of the leading authorities on modernist literature and on Bob
Brown's work. North suggested, in terms of my simulation project, that the computer was
the machine; so, we did not need to draw a picture of a machine in the machine. The
machine should scroll the text. Finally, unlike Simon Morris, the British
publisher and artist whom I had consulted with about the machine a few years ago, North
thought I should model my machine closely on Brown's readies and machine. Morris thought
the machine we built should look to Brown for inspiration, but not be modeled closely on
the readies. N. Katherine Hayles, a leading scholar of electronic literature, asked me,
“Did Bob Brown build the reading machine or just imagine
it?” My answer was that the evidence of the works he produced for a reading
machine and his patent proposals for the machine make the answer ambiguous. Was it
analogous to a ticker-tape machine or a microfilm machine? There is evidence for both
and perhaps some combination of these two types of reading machines. That ambiguity of
the model of Brown’s machine also makes building an actual machine a challenge – perhaps
an impossible challenge – a challenge of making a representation, an analogy, a metaphor
for a provocation meant to unsettle our facile and received ideas about reading,
analogy, and representation itself. This was no simple task.
In thinking about the implications of how the machine compiles, cites, and indexes a
database of texts, one might overlook other issues, like motion and optical illusions,
that we usually do not include in databases. How does one cite the pace of a reading? Is
it something that applies only to specific uses and readings and therefore is not cited
as part of the text itself? To answer this question, I needed to better appreciate how
citation is normally handled in printed on paper literature rather than in the age of
machine-reading. I turned to the definitive source for the consensus view of how to cite
literary works, the MLA Handbook.
As the epigraph from the MLA Handbook makes clear, how one
accesses a text becomes a necessary component of the text's contours at the very least
for the dominant citation system in the humanities. In that situation, the type of
reading (a genre of reading procedures) and the mechanisms used to read are no longer
secondary to the essence of the word, page, or book. The Modern Language Association has
recently amended their guidelines for the style and format of the “Works Cited”
section. The word “Print” must now follow some of the references,
indicating that the dominant textual medium is not the printed text. The word
“print” follows books printed on paper, bound, and published (see
the MLA Handbook, 7th edition, 2009, 126-128). The change
is relatively recent, and appears in the 7th edition of the MLA
Handbook and the third edition of the MLA Style
Manual (2008-09). The guideline for authors to specify which medium they cite
from seeks to recognize the increasing diversity and importance of non-print media.
Considering the increasing prominence of journal services like JSTOR or Project MUSE
(subscription services that make available journal articles and other scholarly material
online in electronic format), and the fact that sometimes these Web editions may vary
significantly from print editions of the same text, the MLA wanted to make it as clear
as possible where and how readers retrieved cited documents, and to account for any
apparent discrepancies. How you read changes the type or genre of reading practice.
In the preface to the latest edition of the
Handbook, the
current Executive Director of the MLA, Rosemary Feal, remarks that in the 1977
MLA Handbook the instructions stressed that using “fresh black ribbon and clean type are essential” and that
edition of the
Handbook also advised against using “thin paper except for a carbon copy.” Feal notes that “in just thirty years, there has been a dramatic shift in the way
we conduct research, find primary and secondary materials, process information,
and prepare a paper for submission”
[
Feal 2009, xv]. Mentioning typewriter ribbon as the index of the shift suggests that the shift
concerns production of manuscripts and publications rather than the change in how we
read and access texts that the new
Handbook addresses in
the discussion of the formatting of the Works Cited section. The works cited must now
indicate how one accessed or read particular texts, not indicate how those texts were
produced (but the Preface does mention that parts of the handbook assume “that all students write papers using word-processing
software”
[
Nichols 2009, xviii]). The distinction is crucial — adding “Print” or “Electronic” in a
bibliographic record is not indicating anything about how the text was written,
prepared, or published originally, but rather in what medium it was read. The inclusion
of that one word changes how we cite texts. No longer do we cite its means of production
(publisher, author, date, etc.) alone. We now must cite the means of consumption: we
cite the technology or the type of reading machine (e.g. printed book device, DVD,
microfilm, etc), and that small inclusion shifts the ground of reading and suggests two
aspects of the readies.org project that are easily missed. One must now include the word
READIES after a citation of a text from that site, and one must recognize a fundamental
difference in reading readies in the machine online and reading only the transcript in a
printed collection. The texts are different – the meaning, look, affective impact,
ideological positioning, and genre are different. Perhaps, in the future, scholars will
think of reading (or how we consume texts) as having genres in the way that we readily
accept genres of a text’s production. Scholars will specialize (and have already begun
to specialize) in the machines used to read. Instead of focusing on periodization,
genres of production, or languages of literature, the digital humanities are opening the
door (and readies.org leading the way) to appreciating genres of practices and their
comparative readings, for example, reading a phrase spray painted on a wall versus on
readies.org. The readies.org project demonstrates one genre of reading, and it also
demands specialized interpretive perspectives.
Other critical perspectives, like reader response approaches, stress the importance of
the reader, but with the new requirements from the MLA the entire profession of readers
(professional readers of the modern languages) makes reading an ontological aspect of
the works cited. Reading now has genres, and the future of digital studies will include
the study of these genres and their corresponding poetics in the way that literature
programs study the genres and poetics of texts (e.g. romantic sonnets, realist novels,
modernist visual poetry, etc.). What seemed bizarre, creative, or beyond the structure
of a text has now become a widely accepted and crucial aspect of a text's structure.
Elsewhere I have coined the term infrastructuralism to highlight the new
importance of the apparatus — not a singular apparatus like the cinematic one described
in ideological film theory, but rather varied and multi-modal access machines (e.g.,
e-readers, web-readers, search engines, indexing bots, DVDs, iPads, etc.).
The key discovery is that how one reads a text (the machine one uses) is part of the
works cited, not separate from it. Reading is always already mediated by machines, and
therefore, always already virtual, simulated, artificial, and dependent on the illegible
mechanism supporting it. As the opening epigraph by Jean-Luc Nancy explains, the
binding, glue-marks, the bookbinders markings, and other illegible aspects of the book's
apparatus make reading possible. Reading is always already depended on the illegible. In
the age of e-reading devices appearing (and changing) regularly, the illegibility of
these delivery systems (i.e., the props for reading) have a more obvious stress and
exposure. There is no direct reading outside of technology, and the current interest in
digital access technologies will open a field of reading different from the histories of
reading in the West to examine how the access technologies become essential aspects of
the texts themselves. What is the difference between the book and its support
(paper,computer screen or vellum, etc)? Or, put another way, how does reading change the
database (in books, online, or some other medium)? Digital humanities research focuses
on the infrastructure of texts, but almost exclusively on databases rather than on
reading interfaces. Much of the research focusing on databases assumes the medium and
interface apparatus as a neutral ground, and depends on a monolithic idealized reader.
Throughout the last decade through the current day, much digital humanities research
has examined and used databases; in fact, one might argue that the database is the
foundation and goal of digital humanities. In the database driven research, of which
readies.org is certainly a part, digital technology allows not only for expansion of
concordances, but also, and more importantly, for new types of tagged, hyperlinked, and
radiant texts. The term “database-driven” and “database” are more metaphorical
than literal structured data. Databases changed the experience of reading, and that
change served as the initial focus on the readies.org project. In
Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web, Jerome McGann
locates the rise of these new types of database driven reading practices as occurring in
the context of a resistance to advances in processing texts; he explains that “[i]f
certain features of the new information technologies have overtaken us – for
instance, the recent and massive turn to word processing – more advanced developments
generate suspicion”
[
McGann 2001, 53]. The readies.org project began as a way to mine the
archive of materials related to modernist poetry, but as Peter Stallybrass, in a special
issue of
PMLA on databases in the humanities, explains,
“if database has been an incitement to the use of archive, it has changed our
relation to the ownership of knowledge.” And he continues:
One of the most radical aspects of database is its power to
separate knowledge from academic prestige and from its attendant regime of
intellectual property. Scholarship, as traditionally conceived, has maintained
its prestige partly through its privileged relation to the protection and
retrieval of scarce resources. Now, however, millions of people who cannot or do
not want to go to the archives are accessing them in digital form. In addition,
digital information has profoundly undermined an academic elite’s control over the
circulation of knowledge.
[Stallybrass 2007, 1581]
Readies.org, starting as a simple database project, demonstrates an advanced word
processing and makes an alternative form of reading available outside of academic
publishing systems; that is, the project is available on the web without the protection
of the rare and scarce texts. Stallybrass sees this simple situation of access as
intensely creative, and he connects it to a necessary step in Shakespeare’s creativity.
The databases “will also reveal the extent to which the gatekeepers
are themselves trespassers who do, perhaps unconsciously, what Shakespeare
deliberately and shamelessly did in the construction of his poems and plays. He
appropriated for his own use what he read or heard, as can readily be seen in his
most famous soliloquy”; Stallybrass goes on to list many variants of to be or
not to be — for about 25 years before
Hamlet appears [
Stallybrass 2007, 1581]. He cites Mary Carruthers’s argument that
“having ‘inventory’ is a requirement for ‘invention.’
” Not only does this statement assume that one cannot create (“invent”)
without a memory store (“inventory”) to invent from and with, but it also assumes
that one’s memory-store is effectively “inventoried,” that its matters are in
readily-recovered “locations”
( [
Carruthers 1998, 12] as quoted in [
Stallybrass 2007, 1582]). The scholastic tradition taught students to organize “one’s reading as a database. In this pedagogy, reading is a
technology of inventorying information to make it reusable”
( [
Carruthers 1998, 12] as quoted in [
Stallybrass 2007, 1582]). The readies.org project makes reading into an inventory process; it allows
everyone to simulate the creative genius’s process, who, like Shakespeare, could quickly
choose among texts, process them, and produce startling results.
The shift from database to simulation begins in thinking about the
inventory, since the use of the inventory is not originality, but rather
a simulation of invention and discovery. One might argue that there is never a base-line
invention, but rather more or less fertile inventories. Readies.org, at the locus
between database and simulation, suggests how reading has a usually effaced visual
aspect that opens a generative practice of discovery. One needs to run a simulation with
the inventory to produce the simulation. Put another way, in
Radiant Textuality, Jerome McGann argues that “the general field of
humanities education and scholarship will not take the use of digital technology
seriously until one demonstrates how its tools improve the ways we explore and
explain aesthetic works — until, that is, they expand our interpretational
procedures”
[
McGann 2001, xii]. The expansion of interpretational procedures to
include simulated reading experiences, as in the readies.org simulation, allows for
students to conceive ideas “all at once” in simulation rather than “relying on step-by-step sequential processes that auditory
learning styles favor”
[
McGann 2001, 106]. He asserts that the inclusion of both processes advances comprehensive learning,
and readies.org all at once-ness adds a non-logocentric or illegible aspect to
interpretation; one easily missed, dismissed, or ignored without the reading machine.
McGann “stresses that learning to interpret literature through
visual methods is a skill of increasing importance in a world where images have the
capacity to dominate and direct human behavior.” The visual aspects of
readies.org enter the database-driven digital humanities much like a Trojan horse or
Pandora’s box: once the databases’ interface allows for movement, inventory practices,
and the non-logocentric visual, then reading and interpretation change; the foundation
of the digital humanities changes too.
McGann calls for a move “beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge
involved in performative operations — a practice of everyday imaginative life”
[
McGann 2001, 106]. His discussion seems to borrow from a modernist
visual poet-publisher-and-inventor, Bob Brown, whose reading machine now appears on
readies.org. McGann writes that “[Texts] are not containers of meaning or data, but
sets of rules (algorithms) for generating themselves: for discovering, organizing,
and utilizing meanings and data,”
[
McGann 2001, 138]. And, in doing so, he suggests that one could use
a machine (perhaps the machine on readies.org) to not just present a direct and
transparent representation of a text, but to move that text through a set of algorithms.
In doing so, one would discover aspects of reading usually effaced by the demands of
literacy and representation. The online readies machine of readies.org moves the texts
through a set of algorithms (both in the preparation of the texts by eliminating
“unnecessary” words, inserting the em-dashes, and in the variable speed and
direction available in this online machine), performing precisely this move away from
the direct and transparent representation of a text. In the same
PMLA mentioned above, McGann explains the relationship between database and
interface.
No database can function without a user interface, and in the case
of cultural materials the interface is an especially crucial element of these kinds
of digital instruments. Interface embeds, implicitly and explicitly, many kinds of
hierarchical and narrativized organizations. Indeed, the database — any database —
represents an initial critical analysis of the content materials, and while its
structure is not narrativized, it is severely constrained and organized. The free
play offered to the user of such environments is at least as much a function of
interface design as it is of its data structure.
[McGann 2007, 1588]
Again, what he describes moves close to the notion of what I am calling a simulation in
readies.org (the online reading machine began as a database); the machine demonstrates
this physical narrativization of the absolutely particular reading practice of each user
and each specific reading (using the machine). If
database is a base onto
which we put things that are given (data), then simulation involves imitating and
building models; the online reading machine (readies.org) builds a model, imitates a
machine, and sets data in motion using a specific algorithm of constraints, much like an
OULIPO experiment. The database sets the stage for simulations, but without thinking of
the new role of the humanities as a ground for simulations of creative genius,
invention, and discovery. The inventory is available every time we log on, and simply
takes a few clicks to set the data in motion as a simulation. The reading machine
simulation makes the user aware that reading is not simply decoding a meaning. Instead,
reading depends on an inventive visual and physical activity. The demands of literacy
usually discount the physicality of reading making it part of an invisible apparatus My
research in the reading machine also involves a database, but the consequence of
building this peculiar database led to an investigation of the next major aspect of
research on the experience of reading: simulation of reading or moving reading away from
literacy and toward something more like an athletic ballet or acrobatic display, a
cirque du lecture. Of course, pretending to read is like pretending to
pretend, it immediately challenges the binary between real authentic modes of reading
and simulated, or artificially constrained, models of reading. The distinction between
pretending to read in a certain way using the readies machine online and actually
reading is a false distinction that has been deconstructed repeatedly: “To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only
pretended to pretend”
(
Vincent Descombes, 1980,
137, discussing and loosely paraphrasing Jacques Derrida's writing on
Levinas and Bataille, but universally attributed as a direct quote from Derrida in
collections of quotes and blogs). The reading machine online asks the user to perform, pretend, and simulate
reading even as the user does the real activity we call reading. It allows for what
Patricia Clough would call the absolutely particular affective (as opposed to the
general abstracted subject positioning usually found in discussion of the politics of
reading practices); she explains that “digitization fundamentally changes the idea of
recording and transmitting,” and now “ideological interpellation and subject
disciplining can no longer be the centerpiece of an understanding of sociality, even
though disciplining and socializing go on. It would seem necessary that we add to an
understanding of sociality the modulations of the affective background”
[
Clough 2009, 51]. Readies.org demonstrates, and implicitly argues in
those absolutely particular performances, that reading depends on the “modulations of
the affective background” before and beyond subjective interpretation, as well as
on a physicality of eye twitches, enervations, and constant rapid movements.
We usually associate electronic simulations with physical activities like driving,
flying, or guitar playing. We also associate simulations with social systems, urban
planning, or athletic activity, and products like Wii and Sims suggest a visceral
interaction with databases of information. In the humanities, walk through simulations
of ancient buildings, art museums, plans for cities never actually built, or historical
events like world's fairs are now commonplace. The reading machine online asks the user
to consider that sedentary reflective Apollonian thing we call reading as an acrobatic
inventive thrill ride. Instead of rolling your eyes, the machine rolls the text by
forcing the user to engage muscles atrophied in literacy, waiting to experience the
visuality of reading in which serifs, dashes, and (( stray punctuation set in motion an
animated cartoon of what reading will look like from the viewers of the future. In the
1950’s, Bob Brown suggested to a television producer a children’s program that would
animate letters and words, and, although the ideas was quickly rejected, animated
letters and words later made up much of the content in programs like Sesame Street, The Electric
Company, and Between the Lions. The reading
machine, beyond Brown’s hopes, animated the words in absolutely particular ways with
each use; so, if the goal was to use the machine as a tool for teaching generalizable
linguistic rules of literacy, then it certainly failed. Now, more than fifty years since
Brown passed away, the machine suggests aspects of an emerging literacy, different every
time, affective-physicality, and visual non-logocentric reading; it is more APP or game
than animated cartoon version of reading.
In the midst of building the online reading machine simulation/analogy for a machine
built in 1931, and preparing the database of readies texts, the art-stunt (but
nevertheless prescient and practical) aspects of everyday reading became obvious. Speed,
pace, direction, and visual cues took on a new importance that was already apparent, but
not stressed, in printed texts. When Bob Brown published his proposal for a reading
machine, he had been thinking about it for nearly 20 years. He thought of the reading
machine as a tool to inventory all literary and non-literary texts. What he did not
fully realize is that he also suggested that one could simulate an unfamiliar reading
practice [one that might have worked to increase the rate of reading or frustrate it]
using something like a reading machine; that simulation is precisely what my online
machine suggests. The reading machine set in motion the next great stage of humanities
research: using simulations (of reading) to study alternative reading practices — past,
future, or imagined.
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