The Category of the Literary and the Essence of Digital Humanities, or Some
Notes on the Context of My Essay for Digital Humanities
Quarterly
Literary criticism says nothing about the category of the literary. It describes
literary works and makes distinctions between them because they are
literary. A novel or poem may be good or bad, but it is a subject of criticism
because it is literary.
I assert this categorically. You may disagree. You may say that literary
criticism’s distinction-making criteria are criteria about the literary. True
enough. Criticism is the application of these criteria. True enough as well that
the history of literature is tracked by the history of criticism and by the
revision and renovation of the criteria involved. In short, I am not asserting
that the literary criticism does not deal with literature. Clearly it does. It
knows precisely what literature is and addresses it as such. But still, none of
this, none of literary criticism, says anything about the literary. We all know
the complexity and extent of the set of critical classifications and theories
applied to literature. Knowing this makes us good literary critics but does not
equip us to consider the literary. The self-evidence of literature – the
given-ness that there are works of literature – makes literary criticism the
worst way to consider the literary.
What is the literary? What is its existence, occurrence, and condition? I find
this very hard to answer, but at least I make an attempt, which makes my work
not or no longer literary criticism. For literary criticism, the literary is
precisely a category, as announced in the call for papers for this special issue
of Digital Humanities Quarterly, inviting “essays that consider the study of literature and
the category of the literary to be an essential part of the digital
humanities.” I was asked to comment on the form of my essay
contribution. In particular: why did I write it in the form I did, and not in
literary critical form? The question was put to me and I am happy to respond,
though the response will no doubt only deepen the question. The simplest
response is that I took the question literally, or at least part of it: I
focused on the “category of the literary”
as an “essential part of the digital
humanities.” You might respond in turn that I took this too
literally, that what was asked for was some description of digital
humanities projects that adopt a more creative and thus
“literary” approach, or a reading of precedents for
digital humanities in literary works, or a survey of the advanced status of
studying literary works as the content of digital humanities projects. All this
is not a bad response on your part, though I am left with the simple
counter-response that taking it literally is exactly the
consideration needed for understanding the category of the literary. Is not the
reading of a text that is swept away by the literal, one that is taken in by
words that state the impossible or the fictional, is this not precisely
too literal and literary? Is not the idiotic focus
on the words precisely the literary?
N. Katherine Hayles’ benchmark study
Electronic
Literature is subtitled
New Horizons for the
Literary. Given this, one would think that the book would deal with
“the literary.” The burden of Hayles’ argument is that “electronic literature can be
understood both as partaking of literary tradition and introducing
crucial transformations to redefine what literature is”
[
Hayles 2008, 3]. What the book repeatedly refers to as “the category of the literary” is tied to this both/and, a category
both in tradition and redefining it. The term “horizon” is complicated as well. It invokes phenomenology and its
concern with the given. Horizon implies a permeable boundary. On the horizon,
objects stand out and are perceived, as the sun does as it sets on the horizon,
but the horizon is also a threshold to another space beyond perception. As a
horizon, electronic literature lets us perceive the literary with a particular
intensity but also forces the question of the boundaries or boundlessness of the
literary.
So far, so good. But Hayles does not deal with the literary in this book, at
least not in any direct way. On the page following the quote above, she offers a
provisional definition of the literary as “creative artworks that interrogate
the histories, contexts, and productions of literature, including as
well the verbal art of literature proper”
[
Hayles 2008, 4]. Perhaps it is odd that the promised definition is a list of attributes
of a certain kind of creative artwork. The definition is no definition of the
category but a description of elements that fall within it. Perhaps this is not
so odd and perhaps the literary can only be defined by such a lateral
approach.
It easy enough to show that any and all “creative
artworks” – any one, all of them, you name it – interrogate “the histories, contexts, and productions of
literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper.”
The premise of literary criticism is that works offer this evidence and there is
no literary work that does not offer at least the minimum of such interrogation.
The literary in this definition is exactly a category: the definition says
“there is literature.” In the end, Hayles can say nothing about the
literary. But then, her book is a work of literary criticism (simply look at the
publisher’s label on the back cover, not to mention the overall technique of the
book). Hayles’ definition of the literary re-asserts the self-evidence that
there are works of literature.
When I situated my essay in what I termed the idiocy of digital
humanities, I was not simply or only trying to be provocative or playful. Such a
naïve position was my best attempt to displace more than twenty-five years of
training as a literary critic. To focus on the literary requires a disinvestment
in the task and vocation of the critic. The same applies to the digital
humanist, insofar as that task and vocation recapitulates epistemic commitments
to critical monuments and methods. As I show in my essay, the literary is
announced and invoked whenever digital humanities is described. The literary is
inscribed in the natural history of digital humanities.
In a similar way, the adaption of information theory to texts can set literature
in the circuit of information but can say nothing of the literary. At best, it
offers compromises such as a “code” of the literary added on
to the other semiotic codes. Yet the place or event of the literary may be the
opening and condition of information. My essay briefly addresses Roman
Jakobson’s use of information theory in distinguishing the poetic code (which
functions as a useful though problematic synonym for the literary). Claude
Shannon’s work, the first work of information theory, is complex and would need
to be dealt with at length elsewhere. On the one hand, literature has no place
in his mathematical model. On the other hand, it functions as a differentiating
example of extreme information. The most sophisticated contemporary version of
such a communications-based approach is Philippe Bootz’s account of the
communication situation of electronic textuality and authorship. As Bootz
quickly pointed out to me in personal conversation, his model is equally suited
to describing literature as it is to any other text, but for this reason has no
theory of the literary.
The convergence of literary criticism and information theory repeats and does not
resolve the question of the category of the literary. To consider the
category of the literary may require turning away from
literature. In fact, this is precisely the astute claim in the call for papers
for this special issue: essays that consider “the category of the literary to be an essential part of the digital
humanities.” This medial — or perhaps better and more McCluhanesque,
rear-view medial — appearance of the literary clarifies the category by
situating it elsewhere and, in doing so, burns away the self-evidence and
“naturalness” of literature.
“Category” is notoriously difficult to categorize. I will
only mention the major points involved. In philosophy, the Aristotelian concern
with categories as the many ways being is given is not compatible with
mathematical category theory that deals with transformations of objects. As a
term, category involves foundational problems within disciplines. There is no
easy way to arbitrate these disputes and define the term across disciplines, no
easy way to define the category category. I am not being obscure or playful:
this is obvious, an obvious aspect of the term category. In fact,
“obviousness” is part of what a category is.
Category names a class of things. It deals with things within this class in the
most general possible terms. Mathematically this generality may be qualified as
isomorphic relations and philosophically as ways of given-ness. Because of this
generality, a category “names” in a logical and existential
way. A category is not simply a name in the sense of an arbitrary and contingent
choice of language applied to a thing. No, category extends and exhausts the
thing it names in naming it. A category extends the thing that it names because
the term (the category) is the most general possible name for the thing. And it
exhausts naming through this same generality. It announces what can be said of
the thing.
My idiotic take on literary criticism shows the extension and the exhaustion of
the category of the literary in the announcement that there is literature.
Literary criticism can say no more about the category of the literary. But this
does not mean there can be no category theory, no understanding of the
transformations involving the literary as it announces itself.
My essay submission to the special issue concludes with a rudimentary attempt at
such an understanding. It is equally an attempt to consider the category of the
literary as an essential part of digital humanities. Simply put: I show that
the literary as a category is the differentiating momentum that
enables something like digital humanities to take place. I write “something like” because the literary as an
essential part of digital humanities makes digital humanities never entirely
itself, always inhabited by this other part, by literalness at its essence, by
the transformation enacted by the literary on the digital. In the same way, I
write “take place” because the literary
is an event that occupies digital humanities and that digital humanities needs
in order to exist.
It is the question of the literary, literally of the letter on the screen, that I
consider the essential part of digital humanities. What an idiotic part it is! I
underline and insist on a chiasm that separates matter and conceptuality,
appearance and abstraction. In this chiasm, the digital letter is both literal
and figurative. It is, in short, literary. Not only this, but the letter is
poetic. It produces the system that will enable digital humanities. The
resulting conditions for codes (for Unicode, in the case of my essay), for
storage, for processing, and so on, are produced poetically from the literary,
that is, from the letter as the given-ness of a category, as an announcement
that extends itself and exhausts itself in doing so.
The Idiocy of the Digital Literary (and what does it have to do with digital
humanities?)
“... literature begins at the moment when
literature becomes a question.”
(Maurice Blanchot)
“Literature is debugged.”
(Ted Nelson)
“I can't seem to speak / the
language.”
(Iggy Pop)
How can we discuss the literary in digital humanities? I will do so in three
ways.
First, through an “idiotic” text. By this, I mean a
speculative meditation, setting out questions and propositions on the relation
of digital humanities to the concept of the literary.
Second, through a more explicit reading of the place of literature in the current
state of the field of digital humanities. I survey digital humanities projects,
the place of digital humanities in the press, and the way the field defines
itself.
Third, through an examination of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) as a site of
what I call the idiocy of the digital literary. I argue that text encoding
engages in the problematic, non-conceptual, differentiating momentum of the
literary through the literal mark of character rendering.
I. Idiocy
I almost wrote “the idiot of digital literature” in the title of this
essay. Idiot that I am, I ask: is not such a slip of the pen, the wrong word
on the page, or the wrong fingers on the wrong keys, is not such an
almost written and
almost taking place
precisely the domain of the literary? Or equally literary: the right words
and the right keys, the pen in exactly the right place, and yet still a
slippage in precisely this,
an almost not taking place yet written
down. How can you know? What is the
literary
literally? The otherness of the literary is inextricable from
“it could be otherwise,” subject to Theodor Adorno's judgment in
the essay “Commitment” on the work of art as
entirely artificial and constructed artifact, as “instructions for the praxis
they refrain from: the production of life lived as it ought to
be”
[
Adorno 1992, 93].
(I wonder: how can digital humanities deal with the almost
written and the almost taking place or almost
not taking place yet written down? I find nothing in digital
humanities – even amidst the poetic turns and explorations of figurality –
that engages with this potentiality of the literary.)
The idiot of digital literature: would this not be a way of entitling myself?
Are not all titles, of and in whatever genre, to a greater or lesser degree
“signed” by the author? As in TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange by the
TEI Consortium Originally edited by C.M. Sperberg-McQueen and Lou
Burnard for the ACH-ALLC-ACL Text Encoding Initiative Now entirely
revised and expanded under the supervision of the Technical Council of
the TEI Consortium? All this appears on the front matter of the
TEI P5 Guidelines. I admit that I am unclear and cannot discern or read
whether this is a single title, a title with authorship attributions, or if
it is several titles, or partially not a title (or something else)? Or is
such a question of the author's name really only the case within a certain
kind of very literary author function? Is this only the case for literary
works, where a title adheres to the writer's name? As in: Shakespeare's
Hamlet or Mark Twain's Huck Finn? But it is this very particular and very literary
effect that interests me when it comes to examining the literary in digital
humanities: this stickiness of the name, this effect of reference in the
formal feature of the title. The most unreadable scrap of text is signed by
its author, and this is part of what qualifies it as literary.
In this sense, “the idiocy of digital
literature” is named for me; I am announcing myself as the idiot.
Such abjection is strategic, of course. Here are my strategies: I mean to
use “idiot” in the ancient Greek sense of an individual,
an ordinary person, a non-professional person, a private person. Towards
this, my inquiry poses simplistic and particular questions about digital
humanities projects, about popular accounts of digital humanities, about
historical affinities between digital humanities and literary studies, and
about core protocols of digital humanities.
But also, I mean to bring to digital humanities a sense of the idiot in the
Dostoyevskian or Sartrean sense of saintliness through naive questioning. Or
even the Iggy Poppian sense of the idiot, bringing a bit of snarling
punkiness to digital humanities. At the least, this is a question of style,
of an inquiry wandering in and out of the space of academic discourse.
Finally, and most particularly, I mean idiocy in the sense that Clément
Rosset wrote of “the idiocy of the real”
[
Rosset 1989, 111]. Idiocy as inescapable and yet obdurate; as singular, immediate, and
useless. Idiocy as a
passion for reality. I find this passion
in characters on the screen, in the literalness of what the computers
displays, and in the way this literal is played out in digital humanities
practices. Is this passion not a description of the literary?
In what follows, I ask idiotic questions of digital humanities, seeking the
occluded but productive literary core of this field. At first glance, this
still-emerging field is systematized around a priori sets
of categories for objects and discourses that presume literature without the
literary. By this, I mean the literary to signify a domain of
excess and difference that is institutionalized as creativity or innovation.
At the least, digital humanities is uncomfortable with this sense of the
literary. Digital humanities handles and presents this domain but, at least
explicitly, does not participate in it. It assumes the productivity or
poetics of the literary, and builds on this assumption. One might say: it
follows the trajectory of the literary but is not literary itself. It
insists that it is methodological. Such insistence lets digital humanities
operate on and make a project out of the literary.
By literary, I also refer to the legal norms of an archivable work with an
author, as well as the modern profession that this work implies. Digital
humanities is expert at dealing with the literary in this sense. It employs
diverse, complex methods and means of studying literature. To be clear:
literature is not (and never was) literary, and for this reason literature
can be a subject of digital humanities. Literature is a noun, literary an
adjective. Literature is a work and an archive, literary an activity and
process. Literature is not literary first means that the
institution of literature is bereft of the literary. Every work of
literature can be said to cite the literary but any account of it (the
literary) falls short: it locates it in this or that feature, this or that
theory, which is not the literary but a particular formalism, a form that is
repeatable and extractable from the text (by definition).
Literature is bereft of the literary means literature refers
to, tells the story of the literary. Literature is the institutional memory
of the literary. Literature means the literary has left the building.
Literature can be a subject of digital humanities for this reason, but the
literary cannot. The many monuments of the digital humanities canon already
include archives and tools built around literature but not around the
literary. Can we imagine a meta-digital humanities on the literary? We
cannot. Not in any current imagining of digital humanities, not without
rethinking both the digital and the humanities.
This is demonstrably true both in the large scale configuration of the
digital humanities — such as the mission and practice of the National
Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities — and in
paradigmatic digital humanities literature projects, such as those developed
and exhibited at sites such as Institute for Advanced Technology in the
Humanities at University of Virginia (IATH) and the Maryland Institute for
Technology in the Humanities at University of Maryland (MITH). My strategy
is to invert the problematic to ask: what is literary about digital
humanities? What if digital humanities is a “field” only
in that it is literary?
[1] Digital humanities may take on or remediate
a poetic function in its premises and claims, but this function is the
outcome of the literary and not literary itself. Models of a discrete domain
of
the literary, particularly Jakobson’s “defamiliarization” – though Fry’s “non-construction” would be equally
applicable – repeat and extend rather than resolve the problem of situating
the literary vis a vis digital humanities.
[2] In the end,
I turn to text and character encoding as fictional sites of the trajectory
of the “character” and the mis-directed wandering of the
literary mark. The character is one direction for reading the singularity of
the literary in the digital humanities. I return to the digital humanities
with an understanding of the literary in its projects, but — unfortunately —
with no proposal for reconciling the system of digital humanities with the
singularity of the literary.
A bit more on the passion of the digital literary. It is a
matter of characters on the screen. My problem is: should I read or should I
look? I look at the screen — which one? this one, every one? — and see
characters turning to images, characters destined for figural and literary,
and not communicative, ends. In short, I see only mojibake. If you read in
Wikipedia or elsewhere you learn that mojibake refers to incorrectly
rendered characters, a case where the characters in a computer document are
incorrectly tagged, or where the system displaying the characters does not
support the encoding, and the resulting display or rendering is described as
incorrect and as gibberish. Similar terms deal with the concept in other
languages, but the Japanese “mojibake” sticks, seemingly
for the proximity of the pictoriality of the problem and of Japanese
graphemes; and for the exoticism involved, the suggestion of the problem as
fundamentally other. Mojibake is a problem of interoperability, a breakdown
of a system intended to encode, decode, represent, and display every
possible character. A breakdown, therefore, in a universal system of
communication based on direct and correct presentation of characters. In the
breakdown, the display does something else. It fails in its universality and
interoperability, and in failing produces an image or set of images.
I feel unclear and idiotic on the notion of incorrect character encoding. I
look at a screen and it may appear beautiful, it may appear horrendous, it
appears in many ways, and — idiot that I am — I find it difficult or
impossible to insist that a display is
correct or not. I insist
that no method can account for what the screen displays. Let me add: I
worked hard to arrive at this insistence. It is the same way that I find (or
seek to find) it impossible to distinguish any writing on the net from
spam.
[3] In the face of a
universal and interoperable technics of the written character, all writing
is spam and all characters mojibake. It seems to me that correctness in
rendering is not self-evident but partakes of the same desires for universal
interoperability as digital humanities: to move from displays and images to
abstraction and knowledge, to make everything into
projects
(fundable, publishable, tenurable, etc.).
[4] Is any project possible without correct character
rendering?
I started with the question of “should I read.” I could add,
should I write: What if characters displayed or rendered on
screen are not read; instead, they matter, precisely in the way literature
matters? Every
should I? and every
I should is a
literary question, a question of permission and of otherness. “The
literary” is and must be asserted and discovered. The ethical
should is inextricable from the literary and remains
secreted in the digital. The matter of characters displayed or rendered on
screen is intensely human and humanistic, an intensity that goes to that
last paragraph of Adorno's
Aesthetic Theory,
which tells of the suffering that is art’s “expression and which forms its
substance. This suffering is the humane content that unfreedom
counterfeits as positivity”
[
Adorno 1997, 260]. What if the positivity of the character displayed or rendered, their
thingness, is the intensification of the world's suffering? Even in the most
incorrectly rendered characters?
The literariness of the digital as
this expression. What if? Keep in mind that every “what if”
is also a literary question, a question of latency of the world, and of the
poetics or productive latency of the world’s narrativity.
I should write of rendering, as in rendering characters on the
screen. To “render” is to express, to represent, to give,
to produce, to surrender, to narrate, to vomit, to melt down and clarify the
fat from an animal, and to extract by means of heating. The last brings us
back to the phenomenology of characters, as inscribed intentional glyphs,
however technically occluded the agency and pragmatics of intentionality; as
surfaces intensified through graphematic marking; and as necessarily given
to the eyes for reading subjects, however distant and mechanized those
readers may be. In other words, rendering brings me to an organic
continuity, an epigenetic landscape of the organism within the technical
display, a flesh infrastructure. And to narrate: every rendering is a tale,
a story of the flesh. All this is found in the problem of
literature.
II. Digital and Literary
The passion and problem of the literary takes place today in digital
humanities. If digital humanities exists — I am not sure it does, though I
wish it did for the possibility of what it might be but is not yet — if it
exists, it is as a miasma or screen covering deep desires and even deeper
problems. It certainly would not be what it purports to be now: a set of
tutorials for the latest tools. If it existed, it would deepen the desire
and the problematic, and name both clearly: the name of the desire and the
problem is literature.
First the miasma. “Digital” is a widely used term that
remains loosely defined in principle and clarified as needed in practice.
Since digital humanities claims to be a method or set of methods, it implies
clarity and definition (just look at the many articles staking positions on
“what is digital humanities”). Fortunately, there is a clear one:
“digital” is defined as dealing with discrete
information and the processes around the storage, transmission, and
reception of such information. The definition is self-referential, since the
modern understanding of information following Claude Shannon is premised on
the discrete. To write “information” is necessarily to
engage with the digital.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of digital humanities projects in no way
require digital information. They are not digital in any significant or
necessary way. I will make this case with several arguments, some better and
some worse. I see these arguments as obvious, even idiotic. Let me be clear:
as I claim below, protocols and standards such as the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI) do engage with the digitalization of text, and do so
precisely as a displaced engagement with the literary, but in ways intended
to lead to projects that, as “projects” (or intentional
works), are not digital. I argue idiotically, two incompatible positions:
digital humanities is not at all digital and only exists as a warmed over
version of the institution of literary criticism; and if digital humanities
is in fact digital, it is only because it is focused on the problem of the
literary (and not on the institution of literary criticism). A program is at
work here, a tropology of inscription and displacement. The several
arguments I offer separate
projects from
encoding
practices to focus on the poetic core of digital humanities, a
core that is the contained and muted (discrete) problematic of the
literary.
[5]
As a start, you must admit that the broad field of visualization and
multimedia presentations — undoubtedly useful re-imaginings of humanities
work beyond the page and book, and the examples most vividly invoked in
popular accounts of digital humanities in the New York
Times or elsewhere — do not require a computer. Or,
if we (you and I) insist on the computer in this case, it is for its ability
to display many media forms, no doubt an ability enhanced by flexible
digital storage and processing, but an enhancement and ability not in any
way impossible without such storage and processing. If I create a humanities
project with paper, with images cut out of magazines, with film, with
cassette tapes, the result may be retro but is not in any substantial way
different from what appears on my computer. Digital humanities projects are
undeniably prettier and more exciting than the paper and scotch tape project
I described. (Is that what we mean when we say it is an exciting new field?
Digital humanities is pretty humanities?) Let me add: I see nothing wrong
with this, as long as we come clean and admit it.
Social media or crowdsourced or semantic web projects are no better. If we
grant that such Web 2.0 concepts differ from Web 1.0, and this is not
self-evident, it must also be granted and truly self-evident that these
again do not require digital information. Crowdsourcing is perfectly
implementable outside of and prior to digital encoding, as are
“friends” of various sorts. Even more: the very
impulse to recreate a social network in “digital media”
seeks out and leverages not “the digital” but the hiding
of the digital aspects of the medium. Visualizing a social network uses the
computer as a medium to picture relationships that are not digital. Such
applications go to great effort not to be
“digital.”
Things are equally vague with the seemingly similar notion that digital
humanities involve humanities “beyond print.” This is a
repetition of arguments such as Marshall McLuhan's in The Gutenberg Galaxy and also does not relate to digital
encoding. This “beyond” could be addressed in terms of
radio, film, and so on. This is not to say that computers do not fit in the
sequence of media moving beyond the printed page, but the computer fits in a
sequence of media and not of analog to digital encoding. Or
rather: the new threshold of media using digital encoding would be part of
the trajectory of media described by McLuhan. We should talk of media
humanities.
What exactly do we get in insisting that this work is digital? The work under
consideration is certainly displayed on computers and using new media
devices, but such devices are not “digital.” The phrase
“digital media” seems to describe the computer, but
that object is plastic and wires, glass and tubing, and only the data stored
in it can be called digital. Digital data could just as well be stored and
computed in other devices, including abacuses and fingers (i.e. digits).
Digital refers to the domain of the discrete and
computable, but it does not equal a computer. Discrete computation can be on
paper, and indeed the characters we use for writing and enumeration are
already discrete elements. A computer can just as well be implemented out of
Twinkies or rocks, Lincoln Logs or atomic particles. To speak of
“digital media” or “digital
technologies” is to refer to the fact that such media or
technologies encode or carry digitally encoded information. We easily move
from this to the medium itself through a synecdochal rhetorical trick, the
encoding extended to the whole, moving from digitally-processed information
to the content and semantics of that information, as if the fact of the
encoding spread across the whole, allowing for a marketing style boosterism
of the all that takes place on the computer as “digital,”
a labeling that suggest a novelty and innovation that is not evident but is
everywhere.
At this point, you may be annoyed or even infuriated, and you may insist that
it is clear that the powers of display, transmission, storage, and so on,
associated with these media only became possible with the development of
digital information processing. Perhaps, but such a counter-argument means
we deal with by-products of media using digital encoding, and not with
discrete digital processing. The speed, storage, and so on are part of a
lengthy history of speeding up, a “logistics
of perception,” in Paul Virilio's useful phrase, of which
computers with their digital encodings are only the latest version. Such a
history could be centered on the discrete mark, on the digital as a
long-range phenomenon. Any such explanation must recognize a shift in
literacy that includes the impact of television, film, paperbacks, the
printed book, and — why not — papyrus. We might be better to speak of modern
humanities or faster humanities, or anything but digital humanities. Perhaps
we should talk simply of humanities, since this speeding up is
part of the era of knowledge that makes humanities possible. Or, in a
rigorous move, cast the digital back into the fundamentals of discrete
elements (e.g. Stiegler 2009). This is a persuasive but complex argument,
and destroys “digital humanities” as an emerging field.
Television, film, print, papyrus, all are digital, taking us into the very
fact of the graphic mark as digital, to arrive at the question of the
letter, that is, of the literary.
If the majority of digital humanities projects are not digital, arguably what
remains is a minority of projects that are digital but are not humanistic.
The use of computational models such as hidden Markov chains, Backus-Naur
forms, rewriting systems, and so on, can treat humanities materials as
formal languages in the computer science sense. The premise of discrete
alphabets of digital characters is precisely the condition of such
languages.
I will deal with these models elsewhere, but I argue that encoding practices
such as TEI are ways of treating text as aggregates of discrete characters.
Character encoding builds on the already discrete qualities of written
traces, and in a way that poetically extends the non-identity of these
qualities and the literariness of the inscribed mark. Early discussions of
the roots or fundaments of language focused on
“stochoie,” which Max Müller described as degrees or
steps making up a whole. The term came from physics, naming basic elements
of nature, but was applied to the letter of the alphabet by the Greeks. In
Latin it was translated as “littera” or letter. As I will
elaborate below and elsewhere, formal languages and encoding are engaged
with that long history of the literal, a history inextricable from a
material and prosthetic exteriorization. At which point the humanities no
longer deal with human utterance and expression, even if such applications
are applied to the archived traces of natural language.
Let me consider, secondly, in what ways digital humanities is
literary. It is hard to know how to begin to answer this question, given the
still uncertain status of digital humanities. The 2011 conference at
Stanford billed itself as “Big Tent Digital Humanities,”
emphasizing heterogeneity and lack of a single method or view. I began
earlier with the literariness of the act of naming, and “Big Tent
Digital Humanities” said almost too much by publicly airing
the problem and poetics at the core of digital humanities. As a phrase
referring to political gatherings where participants forsake their
philosophies for the sake of the overall movement, the ideological
concealment of “big tent” is perfect. (Think of the
connotations: the carnival, the religious gathering, the Sunday picnic, and
so on.) The fuzziness at the core is both a problem and the true method of
digital humanities. A program is at work, or is executed, in the broadly
sketched opposition between the chatter and glamour of digital media as
faster and pretty forms of humanities projects, on the one hand, and the
inhuman calculability of formal language, on the other. The digital is a
poetic tropology posited at the core of digital humanities: on the one hand,
encoded information paratactically referenced in screen outcomes; on the
other, deep computational structures beyond human comprehension. This
spectrum is the occluded problematic of the literary. There appears to be a
“field” of digital humanities, given the availability
of project and infrastructure funding, such as the vanguard NEH program of
Digital Humanities Start-Up grants; the establishment of an essential
journal such as Digital Humanities Quarterly;
and the many job offerings now featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education
(at the same time as openings in other fields dwindle). Of course, remarking
on this rapidly developing yet unclarified and uncodified state of digital
humanities is itself part of the self-understanding and heroic emergence
narrative of the field: to discuss it is to comment on its newness and
innovation.
At first glance, there is little literature in digital humanities. Consider
the showcase NEH Start-Up grants. A search done in early October 2011 of
grants awarded by this program finds that out of 251 funded projects, the
keyword “literature” appears less than ten percent of the
time (16 times) and “literary” even more seldom (13
times). When these terms are used, literature refers to a disciplinary
rubric (a project might appeal to “literary scholars”) or
to generic distinctions for identifying certain types of texts as literary
texts, (e.g. as verse or as a novel). These distinctions are then typically
opposed to other clearly demarcated classes of scholar and text, such as
“historians” and “historical
texts.” To broaden the search to uses of terms such as
“narrative” includes a wider range of projects but
also deepens the question.
In general, no digital humanities project directly deals with literature as a
topic, or with literariness. Based on the descriptions in the NEH library of
funded projects, the only project that directly engages with the
“literary” as a research question is the “Electronic Literature Directory: Collaborative Knowledge
Management for the Literary Humanities.” This project asks what
role literature, in its specificity and as against other forms and
practices, can play in the digital humanities. The project concludes that
literature can play a critical role in the traditional sense of literary
criticism as humanistic discernment. I will address the question of
“electronic literature” at length elsewhere. It
stands in its own problematic and troubled relation to digital humanities,
or to “digital” and “humanities.”
What is clear is that all projects in the grant program, and indeed all
projects appearing under the rubric of the humanities, are concerned with
textuality in some way. All the projects are proposed in a document and lead
to a variety of texts, most typically a “white paper.” At
one extreme, “literature” means “it is
written.” At this second glance, digital humanities seems
deeply literary. It is clear that the crucial monuments of digital
humanities are built on literature. IATH, undoubtedly the template for
digital humanities centers nationwide, incubated well-known
literature-oriented projects such as “The World of
Dante,”
“Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture,”
“The Walt Whitman Archive,”
“The William Blake Archive,”
“The Rossetti Archive,” and “The Dickinson Electronic Archive.” All are famous examples of
digital humanities. Projects such as the Rosetti Archive are not simply
excellent examples of digital humanities projects but function as paradigms.
The application of digital humanities to these canonical literary works
produced canonical digital humanities projects. The Rossetti Archive is an
exemplary and long-lived digital humanities project — begun in the pre-web
days of 1992 and conceptualized even earlier — and now functions as a
touchstone for scholarly discussion of the development of digital
humanities. Jerome McGann uses it to frame his consideration of Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide
Web. If the project is at some level “simply”
a place for storing and retrieving documents by and about Rossetti, it is
understood as far more: a prototype and reference point, an argument in the
form of an archive. “The Dickinson Electronic
Archive” is the same, and also notable for its role as a
switchpoint of energy and interest from Virginia to Maryland, where its
creator and curator Martha Nell Smith built on the success of the IATH
project to found the Maryland Institute for the Humanities. Inseparable from
the archival is the foundational, institution-building quality of these
literary projects. Of course, I could go on and list other projects at other
centers, many of which are paradigms of digital humanities scholarship.
The visibility of this paradigm is displayed or staged even more intensely as
digital humanities becomes the star of the humanities in public discourse.
Take a look at the “Humanities 2.0,” a series of
articles by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times, begun in November 2010,
where literature plays a crucial but somewhat mysterious role. Cohen states: “A history of the humanities in
the 20th century could be chronicled in ‘isms’ ― formalism,
Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism ― grand intellectual
cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature,
politics and culture spread.”
[
Cohen 2011] She then adds her claim: “The next
big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.” While Cohen
introduces digital humanities as a whole, the majority of her examples are
projects dealing with literature, and the status of literature in these
projects is troubling for all concerned: it is an exemplary display of the
success and danger of the method. One researcher describes being “excited and terrified” by the way
digital humanities is “actually shaping the
kind of questions someone in literature might even ask.” The
“potential of electronic tools to reduce
literature and history to a series of numbers, squeezing out important
subjects that cannot be easily quantified” hovers over these
articles.
At the same time, we are repeatedly told that literature remains beyond the
method of digital humanities, despite re-shaping and reduction to
quantities. Anthony Grafton declares to Cohen: “I don’t believe quantification can do everything. So much of
humanistic scholarship is about interpretation.” The exemplary
status of literature as the unclarified core of the humanities is never
clearer: it is the text that digital humanities never tires of, it is the
perfect crash text dummy for the new methodology that always emerges
unscathed.
My point is that Cohen's suggestion that digital humanities replaces the
humanistic focus on interpretation with data processing methodology is too
simple, or rather too little as an explanation. Instead, you should
recognize the literary tropism of digital humanities: on the one hand, it
re-energizes the study of literature in a way that goes beyond the various
“isms” of theory and is rigorously grounded in
method. Of course, digital humanities does this for a variety of fields, not
just literature; but literature surely was and remains the apex of debates
about “isms.” The bloodiest battles of the
“ism” wars were fought in literature departments.
On the other hand, and more than this: literature is not just one case among
others. If it is returned to again and again as exemplary, this repetition
goes beyond the fact that literature is resistant to data-driven methods.
“New digital tools are bringing new ways
to teach humanities courses, even Shakespeare” writes Cohen. The
“even” is supposed to indicate
both the supposedly transgressive move entailed in applying digital
humanities to the Bard, but also to indicate the expected and inevitable
place of Shakespeare in this argument, where “even Shakespeare” means that the argument could not
be complete without Shakespeare. Cohen's examples belong to an existing
motif of understanding media through the lens of re-situated literature
monuments, a motif that includes “Shakespeare on
Film” — in all its configurations, from books to films such as
Shakespeare in Love or the recent Anonymous, a film that cloaks pseudo-questions of
Shakespearean authorship in a core re-assertion and intensification of the
survival and of humanities through interest in literature — or similar
versions of this motif, such as Jay Clayton's Charles
Dickens in Cyberspace or Jerry Flieger's Is
Oedipus Online? (testifying to Freud as literary author). In
such works, the literary functions as a topos mobilizing well-read cultural
materials to understand new forms. The anxiety around the danger of the new
is a way of re-asserting the literariness of literature. Indeed, the
exemplarity of literature rubs off on the other projects Cohen looks at, so
that history or art become equally rich but also inexhaustible subject for
digital humanities. Literariness circulates in the description of other
fields, without any clear conceptualization or without even being named (no
need to state that digital humanities treats history and the rest as
literary).
In all this, there is no need on Cohen's part to read literature, no
requirement to cite texts by Shakespeare (or other authors). I would argue
that the projects at IATH and elsewhere discussed above possess similar
citational value. Literature “itself” is the citation, an
invocation that adds literariness to the digital humanities overall. What is
the point of this citation? Firstly, proof of the survival value of
literature, “even” in the digital era. Literature is the
survival value of texts, it is the name of what lives on in texts, in this
and every era. Literature is stored up and hidden in every digital
humanities project.
And so, secondly, the renaissance of digital humanities is a literary
renaissance, a renewal through the “project” (through
every digital humanities project) that finds its paradigms in self-declared
literature projects such as the Rossetti Archive. Moreover, the citation of
literature implies “depth” in digital humanities
projects, a deepening of projects that ensure their value and return on
investment. Literary texts bear repeated reading, including repeated
critical readings. (How many books are there on Hamlet?) So too digital humanities projects will bear re-use
and add something, some specific “digital” something to
the work. The point is not what is added but that literariness provides a
place for this value. Does it matter if the projects are used or is the
point simply that they exist? Surely the frantic desire to build or
“start up” monuments of digital humanities exceeds
any possible use of the projects? Unreadability is the point,
unreadability of a literary “core” or
“origin” to all products, unreadability as the
guarantee that we need new projects.
What can we make of this unreadability? How do we take it? Perhaps the deep
ambiguous unreadability of the literary is the name for the
satisfaction of the digital humanities project. Is this
really so? How can we tell? It is troubling to say that literature, with all
its fictionality and delusiveness, stands for the satisfaction of the desire
named digital humanities. Literature is necessary to the humanities — if the
humanities is not literary it is nothing else. Literature is the promise of
the humanities' survival. But is the survival of the humanities anything but
this promise? Is the survival anything but a story told, a figure of
language, a bit of writing? The literary in digital humanities is an
occluded tropology promising monuments and “projects.”
What is a project, that core object of digital humanities,
other than a version of the literary work? At the same time,
the literary in digital humanities is a productive, or more precisely, a
poetic momentum.
The project is a monument built on the momentum of poetics.
III. The Literary in Digital Humanities
It is remarkably difficult to distinguish literary texts from other texts.
Close scrutiny of so-called non-literary texts always brings to the
foreground problems of the poetic turn, authorial voice, or figural
language. Where text declares itself to be literature, announces its
literariness, it remains equally difficult to define the literariness given
in the text, beyond the fact of this announcement. No end of definitions are
possible, but the sheer ongoing existence of literary criticism is a tribute
to the non-conclusion of this project. You can decide that a text is
literary because of metaphor or tropological play, but the only clear thing
is that such a decision guarantees that anything other than these qualities
determine the literariness of the text. The distinguishing characteristic of
the literary is our inability to distinguish its character. Literature is
always something other than itself.
I will not rehearse the complex history of the discourse on “the
literary.” Instead, I will briefly examine TEI, the Text
Encoding Initiative, surely one of digital humanities' great
accomplishments. My argument is in three parts.
First, literature functions as the core example for TEI. By
“core,” I mean to highlight that TEI begins its
self-definition by invoking literary texts. Literature is necessary to the
definition of TEI.
Second, digital humanities scholars already recognize the literary potential
of TEI. I focus on Julia Flanders’ provocative arguments about text encoding
as a “world-generating” performance
that opens the possibility for “poetic” markup.
Third and finally, TEI builds its momentum on the poetics of the letter, on
the literary mark. Character rendering is a literary performance, and we
follow the figural turns of this performance when we speak with and engage
with the computer and its displays.
Literature functions as the core example of TEI. As originally set out in
1987 and formulated over the following years, TEI principles are oriented
towards humanities texts. The principles are well known: they make “recommendations about suitable ways of
representing those features of textual resources which need to be
identified explicitly in order to facilitate processing by computer
programs.” Specifically, TEI provides tags added to text to
“to mark the text structure and other
features of interest.” Encoding text leaves the text in place but
adds a surplus coding of marks. The monuments of digital humanities I
described above are variously enabled by TEI tagging.
The primary examples in the TEI guidelines are drawn from literary texts,
both hypothetical and actual. The guidelines begin with a markup of William
Blake's “The Sick Rose.” The example
concludes:
<!-- more poems go here -- >
The standard adds that this “is an XML
comment and is not treated as part of the text.”
The example of the boundary between TEI and text is exemplified by the
boundaries of a poem — in this case the canonical Blake poem familiar from
Norton anthologies — and the larger unit of a hypothetical anthology of
poems. The burden of marking “text structure
and other features of interest” is carried by the example of a
poetry anthology. For our purposes: poetry is the analog boundary of
discrete digital tags.
The guidelines continue with many more literary examples. Of course, the
presence of these examples no doubt indicates the preference and background
of the authors. Guidelines such as TEI are protocols, in the sense of the
Internet Request for Comments (RFCs) that provide recommendations for the
operation of the Internet. Such protocols describe the behaviors of a
community. They are prescriptive and binding but not absolute. They
constitute a crowd. In this case, the crowd of digital humanities is again a
community of poetry readers, who agree in principle on recommendations for
marking up. Once again, a program is executed and at work.
Digital humanities scholars already recognize the literary potential of TEI.
Julia Flanders and Jacqueline Wernimont, in a presentation given at the
Digital Humanities 2011 conference at Stanford, proposed approaching TEI
markup as a practice of poetics [
Flanders and Wernimont 2011]. Flanders and
Wernimont proposed to adopt the concept of “possible
worlds” from philosophy, and from its deployment in
narratology, to “describe how
authorial markup might leverage the formal tools of a structural model
in order to enact a generative or poetic mode of markup.” My
short summary will not do justice to their argument. To define what they
mean by “authorial”
markup, they begin from “long-standing conceptual tension within the markup (and especially the
TEI) community between two models of markup.” The first is rooted
in “mimesis and
surrogacy,” while the second is “is more concerned with meaning creation and the
domain of annotation, interpretation, authoring.” The authors
focus on the second model, which they propose is suspended between
representation and production. “The most common examples in the present day include annotation,
interpretive markup such as the association of themes and keywords with
spans of text (e.g. using the TEI @ana and
<interp> mechanism),
and the creation of new documents such as articles using an XML markup
language as an authoring system.” Flanders and Wernimont conclude
that “the markup itself becomes
a world-generating mode of knowing that must carry several registers of
meaning arising from different kinds of scholarly agency.”
While Flanders and Wernimont set out an argument about two different forms of
markup, the ground of their claim is the “performative and illocutionary qualities of markup.” Which is to
say: all markup is performative, all markup must be authorial and
world-generating. The most “mimetic” markup, devoted to
the straightforward representation of the text would surely be a great
achievement of authorship, where the registers of meaning would be cunning,
almost ironic in their silent overlay. The momentum of this poetics is such
that there can be no way to determine whether markup is a representation of
the text or in a fictional relation to the text.
TEI builds its momentum on the poetics of the letter, of the literary mark.
It is not that the text turns poetic and thus digital humanities is large
enough to accommodate this turn. No, the computer is not textual, or rather
is only textual after the fact. It is not that we read the screen and
possibly discover literary texts in our reading. On the contrary, we read
the screen because it is literary from the first. The
literariness of the computer is the condition of our reading.
Much more could be said. There is always more idiocy. What do you make of
Saussure’s remarks on the written sign that the “actual mode of inscription
is irrelevant, because it does not affect the system. […] Whether I
write in black or white, in incised characters or relief, with a pen
or a chisel — none of that is of any importance for the
meaning”
[
Saussure 1983, 118]? Or for that matter Freud's remark that “the single letters of the
alphabet […] do not occur in pure nature”
[
Freud 1965, 261]? The trajectory of the problem of the literary as digital can be
unread, tracked, allegorized, and lost through a much more complex history
that casts the discrete back into text encodings that include Morse and
ASCII and FIELDATA, but also Viète and Bacon's ciphers. Still, you want the
literary. You want me to address the literary in digital humanities, whereas
all I do in this essay is speak to its absent efficacy.
Anthony Wilden, in his short essay on “Analog and Digital
Communication,” which after forty years still remains little-read
and yet one of the few useful texts on the topic, respects the complication
of distinguishing the analog and digital. In fact, he sees such
distinction-making as itself implicated in the boundaries of the analog and
digital. For Wilden, the negation of the literal is what orders
the analog and digital. In short, any communicational
“ensemble” may be understood as analog or digital
depending on the boundary drawn and the position of the observer vis a vis
the communication. In terms of character encoding, Wilden's argument about
negation is important: he argues that there is only negation in the digital
order, and that negation corresponds to relational meta-organization of
information. The presence of zero as the simple flip of the digit is enough
to negate the letter.
Encoding sites the letter. Encoding grants the letter presence, while a
different encoding negates it and puts another letter in its place. For
Wilden, this structural fact is introduced into the analog in a way that
negates the material substrate bearing or carrying a mark, and poetically
and punctually produces the digital mark. The digital mark is information
only as it negates or re-marks what bears it (178-188).
The informational and energetic actuality of the discrete mark is a problem
of boundaries and systems. It is, in short, the problem of the literal,
which itself is another name for the problem of the literary. (The literary:
a problem with multiple names, already a story at work, a story of the
letter and its literary literalness.) We deal with the remainders of
system-generating literary inscription, with the guarantee of a narrative
resting on the meaning and sense-making around sites of literal inscription.
It is written: literature specifies topics of contention
and debate, including specifying conditions of authorship and of the nature
of the work, and of topics that are carried out as discourses identified as
digital. Open source or file sharing are examples of such topics: part of
the institution of literature that programs in advance the debates and
contentions. Literature names the discreteness — the digitalization, if you
want — left by the literary. Discreet and discrete: literature’s fictional
narrative is poetic, productive, but not at all truthful, and can tell us
nothing of the literary except that it is written.
[6]
Let me stick close to the concerns of TEI and digital humanities to focus on
the literal inscription on the screen and in the computer. As an XML
document, TEI-encoded text relies on the Unicode standard. Unicode
guarantees that all XML documents, and thus all TEI markup, “whatever languages or writing systems they
employ, use the same underlying character encoding (that is, the same
method of representing as binary data those graphic forms making up a
particular writing system).” The guidelines continue: “Unicode provides a standardized way of
representing any of the many thousands of discrete symbols making up the
world's writing systems, past and present.”
Following this statement of the importance of Unicode, the TEI Guidelines
immediately turn to “textual
structures,” stating:
A text is not an undifferentiated sequence of
words, much less of bytes. For different purposes, it may be divided into
many different units, of different types or sizes. A prose text such as this
one might be divided into sections, chapters, paragraphs, and sentences. A
verse text might be divided into cantos, stanzas, and lines. Once printed,
sequences of prose and verse might be divided into volumes, gatherings, and
pages.
While TEI will foster an awareness and understanding of the complex relation
between text and its units, the fact of this differentiation is fundamental
and unquestioned, a fact that is given literally as a datum through the
literalness of Unicode.
The story I am telling you might climax here, here is my climax: Unicode as
the literal, defining digital writing. On the Unicode Consortium's “Acclaim for Unicode” page, James J. O’Donnell, the
classicist, digital humanist, and provost of Georgetown University declared:
“Unicode marks the most significant
advance in writing systems since the Phoenicians.” The
significance and advance need to be followed and understood. There is only
one code on the net and it is Unicode. Read the following carefully: it is
“the universal character encoding
standard for written characters and text.” The Unicode
Consortium’s “What is Unicode?” webpage,
providing their central definition, begins with the following mantra: “Unicode provides a unique number
for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the
program, no matter what the language”
[
Unicode]. From most points of view, the capacity of Unicode is enormous.
“The majority of the common characters
used in the major languages of the world are encoded in the first 65,536
code points,” but the sixteen-bit encoding has the capability to
encode up to 1,114,112 code points. Unicode even encodes fictional writing
systems such as Elvish or Klingon. Its codespace includes any writing system
whatsoever, without regard to whether this writing was ever employed by
human culture. “It provides the capacity to
encode all characters used for the written languages of the
world.” What an achievement! To encode all humanities writing
systems, past, present, and fictional! More than this: since streams of
ASCII are the basis of all file transfers on the net, since ASCII is now a
subset of Unicode, and since Unicode provides a structure for exchange and
storage of data, then we must recognize that this encoding is the
fundamental writing of all that is on the net.
Brian Lennon's excellent discussion of Unicode focuses on the limits of its
claims to totality: “As a system defining
universally efficient transmission, it must emit redundant waste in
the form of merely local variation, precisely to claim its place
as system”
[
Lennon 2010, 170]. As with the ASCII standard, Unicode is easily critiqued for the way
it inevitably re-maps geopolitical concerns and contentions. But it is the
distinction between character and glyph, central to the logic of Unicode,
which accounts for the literariness involved. The enormous range of
encodings, on the one hand, and the flexibility in transmission, storage,
and display of characters, on the other, all come down to this distinction.
Joe Becker’s original 1988 draft proposal for the Unicode standard states
that a “clear and all-important distinction
is made between
characters, which are abstract text
content-bearing entities, and
glyphs, which are visible
graphic forms.” This distinction is carried on in the Unicode
standard as implemented and maintained to this day. The distinction is in
operation within all encodings and implies a philosophy of the screen and of
the object. The current standard Unicode 2.0 Core Specification released on
February 17, 2011, states: “Characters are
the abstract representations of the smallest components of written
language that have semantic value.”
What is meant by “abstract”? Character
refers to the “abstract meaning and/or
shape, rather than a specific shape.” What is meant by “semantic” here? Not that a given
character is meaningful. The character “a” may or may not be
meaningful. Rather, as Korpela’s
Unicode
Explained argues, it “would be better to say that a
character has a
recognized identity and it may be
sometimes used as meaningful in itself”
[
Korpela 2006, 11]. Meaning and semantics are part of the recognizable identity of the
character within the system of Unicode. “The
character identified by a Unicode code point is an abstract entity, such
as ‘latin capital letter a’ or ‘bengali digit five.’ The mark
made on screen or paper, called a glyph, is a visual representation of
the character” (5).
What is a glyph? A glyph is perceived. “Glyphs represent the shapes that characters can have when they are
rendered or displayed.” A glyph is also technically produced. It
is an outcome of technology. “In contrast to
characters, glyphs appear on the screen or paper as particular
representations of one or more characters.” Glyph and character
are part of a single writing technology, the one side abstract, encoded and
conceptual; the other side, material, perceived, and undefined.
Obviously, glyphs outnumber characters. There are multiple possible
renderings for a character: many sizes, many resolutions, and many forms of
visibility, any of which may be recognizable as characters. There is no
comparison with glyphs: they are fundamentally unnumbered. They appear and
are seen, but are not and cannot be defined by Unicode. Glyphs are
recognized for the encoding that they render. Codes are set out in tables
and carefully controlled. Appearances are disordered and without accounting.
The difference is between wild phenomena and specific forms or characters.
The character on the screen, the text that I see and read, is not a body.
There is no character there but only an encoding that I read through the
appearance. What I see, but not what I read, is an innumerable disordering
of appearances. Characters are the logistical construction of
“reading” and “seeing” through a
systematic technical distribution of the visual and symbolic.
The subjectivity of the writer and reader of character codes is not a
function of the so-called gaze of psychoanalysis, a concept that involves
the problematization of the object in relation to the eye. Unicode empties
out appearances of any subject-object relations. There are no relations in
the visible, no subjects and no objects, only a vast and innumerable field
of appearances. Code is the truth that appearance is not: all that appears
is nothing but the negated world of matter, nothing but flows of intensity,
outside the abstraction of code. The gaze, the site of the subject and of
all of our anxieties and traumas, is an undefined surplus effect left on the
screen, never penetrating or seeping into the code.
Of course, I recognize that code is visible too. Gaze seeps across code and
smears its surface. Therefore, the visible field must be controlled. It is
paradoxical that Unicode must be represented in charts, not to mention in
books and other writings: tables, guides, diagrams, and so on, all
displaying what is not possible to make visible. What are these charts? They
are depictions of “character” as the gaze on the encoded
character. The charts come with a disclaimer: “Character images shown in the code charts are not
prescriptive.” Not prescriptive but narrative and poetic. For
this there is the “representative
glyph,” which is “not a
prescriptive form of the character,” and yet “enables recognition of the intended character to a
knowledgeable user and facilitates lookup of the character in the code
charts.” It is a paradoxical appearance through which the symbol
is recognized. The representative glyph is immediately false, not to be
taken as the abstract character but as its perfect fiction.
The visual and symbolic churn and turn within this mess of glyph, character,
and representative glyph, a mess of allegorical narratives of the literary,
narratives that go by the name digital humanities, are all built on markup
and method as the poetic turning and returning to (and in relation to)
literary inscription. It is a return leaving not the literary but literature
as the wayward trajectory of marking. I tell you: the entwined source of the
literary and digital humanities is here.
The history of character and glyph are similar. The earliest English usages
of both refer to a carving, a cutting, or a marking. In short, usage refers
to the problem of rendering. By the seventeenth century, character came to
refer to the mental and moral qualities of an individual, while glyph
continued to refer to the material and physical engraving. As Marshall
McLuhan detailed in the Gutenberg Galaxy, the
emergence and dominance of print led to the perceived equivalence of the
qualities of individuals and printed characters. I tell you: not just a
letter but also any appearance on the screen is a glyph etched
or inscribed on that surface. Every screen is a glyph; every screen is the
stochoie or littera. The literal is always
being screened. Character encoding means I write it, it writes
me. To screen is to touch, is to contact the other. Such a
terminal screen is never touched by the other; it is never
smearing the same fluid on my fingers, on my tongue. How rigid is this
“never touched”? What relation exists through this
rigidity?
Much more could be told of the theater of the screen, of character armoring,
of the gender of the letter, and the satisfaction found through rendering
and display. I remind you: the computer is not digital. Computers melt,
overheat, shed light and lose data.
[7] They exist in a narrowly-controlled thermal
range. The website for Intel Corporation, producer of many of the world’s
microprocessors, states that “thermal
management” refers to “two major
elements: a heat sink properly mounted to the processor, and effective
airflow through the system chassis. The ultimate goal of thermal
management is to keep the processor at or below its maximum operating
temperature.” The computer is not discrete and differentiated,
not an archive of texts, not an enclosure of circumscribed inscriptions, but
a radiating sun in a constant state of decay. Using a computer is handling
the decay and dispersal of thermal management — not to mention managing
hardware interrupts, breakpoints, and quantum tunneling.
On any given day the amount of energy used to power Facebook pages, recipe
searches, news sites and all that the internet entails is about 20 or 30
gigawatts. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, power consumed daily by the
internet is roughly the same as the airline industry.
And yet you say the computer is digital. By “you,” I
imagine Julia Flanders, because I admire her work and her argument:
cogently, persuasively, correctly, arguing for the world-generating poetics
of markup. By “you,” I address digital humanities. The
digital is this narrative: deceptive, fictional, a narrative of the
otherness of the world, a narrative of project management as management of
otherness. Digital means a narrative imagining the other through
information. A delirium of data as absence of the world, as mourning this
absence, as telling the closure of data. Unicode turns every project into
narrated knowledge that can be handled and managed.
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