I am interested in Kelty's discussion of recursive publics especially late in the book in the discussion of Creative Common &c. What I find particularly useful his understanding of infrastructure and the necessary shifts required therein to make emergent forms go. To define infrastructure, Kelty refers to the "no longer...settled practices of authorship, collaboration, and publication" (277). He argues that this entire network of processes are what have to change to produce a new public. This is to say that the simple change in means of production--book to internet or otherwise--will not single-handedly create a change in these essential social constructs.

What I find so interesting about this is precisely why I feel so un-compelled by electronic literature (and I would say similarly other forms of avant-gaurde art). Electronic literature specifically attempts to predict and/or produce the form of its consumption. It posits this form as somewhat new, though it seems to come directly from the idea of an active or engaged readership that was already largely courted by print fiction. There is not yet, however, an infrastructural set of practices that support the individuals engagement (and as such they are more prone to fall flat). Now, I certainly don't mean to bad mouth the avant-gaurde in any way. Certainly predictive/productive art is part of the process that develops what will become infrastructure. But I mean here is that I find this way of thinking about the consumption of art (or any other cultural object) quite useful for thinking about these relationships.

In some respect, this allows me to see House of Leaves as an even more interesting text, that functions as an emergent form invoking a sedimented and recognizable discourse community at one end and an openness to some new public of reader's at the other. The combined effect produces something like a scaffolding for managing the shift that will become infrastructure.

Work Cited
Kelty, Christopher. Two Bits. Durham: Duke UP, 2008.
...and House of Leaves I guess. Mark Z. Danielewski.

Forum

Here are a couple of snaps I took of today's adventure. We are quite a comely group.

I Don't Know Where Metaphor Ends and Reality Begins (and so I ramble)

Anything that divests itself from the “real world” makes me nervous. Already I realize that my scare quotes are necessary. Real and synthetic/virtual aren’t stable and clear-cut terms that define the earth against those worlds that currently live behind our screens. I’m anxious because I don’t want things to pass unnoticed over here while everyone is busy looking over there.

While I am made nervous, I’m also endlessly intrigued and immersed because the synthetic worlds Castronova describes are predominately concerned with community and social formation. What happens socially in these worlds is certainly real. My concern, however, is for the limits of feedback into the real world. While Castronova makes pains to demonstrate that MMO adherents are not the anti-social basement dwellers of myth, it seems that there are continually increasing rifts between the “real” social world and the synthetic. While these rifts may already exist all throughout someone’s many social circles, the distinction between the real and synthetic worlds’ governing rules makes this an extreme case. Again concern, but excitement. MMOs are creating new, formerly impossible links precisely because they can change the way laws and rules function (governmental but also physical laws). Can this, however, feed back into the world and produce change? Or is the division such that a bridge between in unimaginable and the ruling metaphors become partitioning and divesting?

Castronova argues that part of the function of synthetic worlds is to provide people with different game/value/reward structures than the real world provides. This leads him to claim that multiple synthetic worlds will be produced to accord the variety of desires (both aesthetic and ludic) in the pioneering populace. This reminds me of Fredric Jameson discussion of multiple utopias in Archaeologies of the Future. His argument is that only a utopic system made up of many utopias and allowing free access between them could possibly account for people’s distinct desires. This is think is the strongest argument for the potential for MMOs to function politically, allowing rule/law shifts that can offer diverse solution for contentment.

My favorite discussion that emerges in Castronova (and appeared in The Meaning of Video Games as well) is the discussion of MMOs as frontier space fully capable of accepting immigrants and refugees. While Castronova attends to the metaphor by discussing immigrants earning money to send home, it likes we could say more about the split inherent in the metaphor. Again I feel compelling to argue that the distinction between the two world’s governing rule systems implies a fissure that won’t be easily sutured. We continually butt up against the fact that Earth never gets cut out of the equation. Perhaps this was always the case (see Eurocentrism) and people have always maintained their connections home. If this is the case with MMOs as well, will there be a moment when a real break with the old world occurs? What might that mean? And is it desirable?

I (Could) Love Bees Too

As an avid non-gamer, it was important for me to immerse myself in what Jones refers to as the paratext of Bioshock. I visited official websites, unofficial wikis and watched gameplay videos (and some of their hilarious parodies). All of which reminded me that other people are gamers in a way that I am not. Gamers are way better at this stuff than me.

Jones sketches a variety of distinct and possibly opposing, but not contradictory, versions of game play. At some level of opposition he describes both an immersed game play and a meta-game play that might be better referred to as a constructionist, world making game play.

I experienced first hand playing Bioshock the total immersion in the immediacy of game play, reacting to requirements in what was for me a totally unfamiliar world and in a totally unfamiliar way (evidence my extreme confusion attempt to look and walk simultaneously). Nevertheless, my experience of the immediate was often at the abandonment of narrative and backstory. I would play tapes and be distracted from their stories while being attacked by security bots. Bioshock, however, anticipates this phenomenon and has already embedded it in the game by placing "vital" plot information as physical items to collect and attend to in the game. Similarly, the integrated cut scenes often allow you to ignore them by simply turning to look out the glass enclosure into the sea just outside. All of this works to produce the effect Jones speaks of. The game is unique for each player and allows them to know and care as little or as much about the narrative and the "world" as they desire.

On the other extreme, the world-builders, Jones's discussion of collective intelligence. It was to these people I turned with their wikis and parodic retellings of end scenes with action figures. This produced for me a lot of the "meaning" of the bioshock world. They produce the collective reading of the world and also some new writing. And while I feel more at home on this side, this level of attachment must be bred on some other more fundamental engagement with the game.

The kernel of all of this, it seems, is the game itself. Whether you play for immediacy in the loop of haptic feedback or telescope out to the creation of bridges between the world and the game world, gaming is at the heart. What Jones might miss (or not turn enough attention to) in his attention massive media objects with their capitalist cores, is the type of play by the creators themselves. He begins this discussion with Katamari and by thinking about fan-based game mod's and fanfic. What would this co-creation look like if it didn't have a recognizable center? A position that can always declare something canonical or not? What if the fans didn't have to look for a nod of approval? While clearly some fans go on creating without concern of the initial creator's limits, an object without an identifiable center would presumably produce a much more dynamic interaction between the levels of immediacy and world-building. Maybe if it wasn't a marketing company that was founding all of these amazingly creative acts, I could want to play too.

Hyper Meta Textuality & its Discontents

I'll begin with what is becoming an all too often repeated personal reflection. I started reading House of Leaves (notice the refusal to use blue) several years back, but had to put it down because I got too scared. Quite seriously. The reason I ascribe to that particular fear is that the concerns (or dangers) the book describes are a result of obsessive interest, in many of the cases with reader itself. This is nothing new, neither as a means of talking about this book or in the history of literature, but what it is--or at least was for me--is a potent manifestation of readerly engagement.

Now, my question to the book is: is there anything new in this hyper-self-referential system or is this just the extreme case? My sense is the latter and that the latter anticipates the former and includes it. I envision myself asking "Is there anything new? Is there an outside to this text?" and the text responding (in some fashion) that asking that question is the point and of course "no," there is no outside, just more turns into the labyrinth, the spiral. Great.

My follow up question is then: does taking it to a limit or extreme offer anything new or elsewise why should I care? And this is something I'm still pondering in my head and here right now. It seems like House of Leaves might be doing synthesis work between postmodern literature and poststructuralist theory in a way that hasn't ever been done. Maybe this synthesis makes clear some of the differences between theory and literature. Maybe my affective fear response was always something inherent in Lacan or Derrida's theories that only literature could make me feel.

But I suppose my real question remains: did this book have to be written or could you have simply told me it existed and have achieved the same effect? (Or like so many people, like me so recently, could the book's full effect be had sitting on a shelf and occasionally being leaved through?) I'll tentatively answer my own question: no. Like all books, no matter how they construct your readerly engagement, it is this engagement that is unique, interesting and worth gaining a better understanding of. And off I go to write my paper...

Oh so inhuman

David Wellbery nail-on-the-heads-it when he claims that Kittler "presupposes post-structuralist thought," that he takes it seriously and uses it as "the operating equipment, the hardware" (viii). While this is subsumed under the heading of post-structuralism, it seems more to the point that it follows directly out of Derrida and deconstructionist thought. This quote itself follows directly from a condemnation of the American academy's own fashionable and fleeting engagement in the sport of deconstruction.

(This next section gets a little rambly and lack some citation, but I want to try to work out the relationship I see between Kittler and Derrida's projects. So I'm going to shoot from the hip a bit and see about the rigour after the dust settles.)

And indeed in Kittler's two introductory sections we see the working of Derrida's foundational speech v writing statements. Kittler is documenting precisely the written word's--in its technological form--move inward to become the transcendent spirit. While Derrida draws the connection back to Plato as the founding moment of Western culture, Kittler attends to the very material shift that he is linking to 1800, the internal voicing of written words in a private study. The focus on this era isn't unique to Kittler however. Derrida too seems to have focused on a dramatic shift that floated seemingly from Descartes until arguably now. Kittler's (intense) attention to media and technology is the marked difference.

In the place of Derrida's abstracted movements of humanism whose sites appear always to be the writing of philosophers, we have Kittler's picture of a solitary, fictional man reading to himself and shifting the words in his translation until they "feel" right. What matter here is the technological apparatus that allows the scene to be constructed and replicated. It doesn't have to be Faust or Goethe. It can be anyone that the new technologies have allowed to fit the scene and internalize the word.

The Nietzschean counterpart then is the end of one technological regime and the beginning of the line of thought Derrida is to inherent. Nietzsche--as he is presented here in is grammar books and then in the demise of his sanity and beyond--takes literally the system he can see. He see the technology that is the human living in the book and he ends up completely severed from it with nothing but inhuman noise he is without tools to decipher (183-4). Again this is a meditation on technology, its tricks and its ruses.

Ending my own perturbed run through of these positions, my own interest is in a better articulation of the distributed network relationship with technology as it finds its home in each person. In Faust and Nietzsche we have the picture of two forms of neurosis. First the failing to grasp the working of technology on the individual (literally misrecognizing its effects). And secondly, the excessive realization of technology that is self-alienating. Can we have a new 2000 discourse network in which we can resolve our relationship to the tech? Or at least have some means of cognizing that relationship (and the relationship to the distributed network in general). This is similar to what I was reacting to last week in Kirschenbaum. He seems close to accounting for the gap between mechanism itself and our screen ideology (though I feel like he never quite got there). Where does the tech end and we begin? And how do these things change?

Excuse me while I go and howl my inhuman wail.

I ain't never been in a clean room / But I've broken down some black boxes

I'll admit that while reading Hayles "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" I kept thinking to myself: There is a material reality here, even if we aren't thinking about it. Reading Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms doesn't so much make me regret that thought as require me to be more articulate about my desires.

Kirschenbaum is doing--it seems self-consciously--his due diligence, articulating in at times excessive nuance the material reality of the hard drive to a lay audience who keep dipping their fingers into digital texts without really getting into the tech. Commendable work and extremely educating. Perhaps I was thinking something more Marxist however. The intense focus on the material seems to run directly into a form of commodity fetishism even as it seeks to probe our cognitive relationship with technical minutia (or lack there of as the case may be). For all the detail and historical situatedness, I can't help but feel that moving further into the black box is moving further away from the real world. Hayles at least turned her attention to the advent of cybernetics through war systems. Kirschenbaum invokes the Air Force in relation to IBM only to address their rather mundane filing concerns. Even in his discussion of the World Trade Center attacks, he is prone to think more of the data and its 'heroic' recovery than any potential connection that data might have with the state of the world.

Kirschenbaum's point might may be, however, that our current mystification (and its presumptive continual increase) at the world's black boxes creates all kinds of unarticulated disconnects between us and our world, disconnects that we are all to content to consign to "virtuality" without further scrutiny. Perhaps Kirschenbaum's legwork allows for the type of connection that could begin to return social materiality to an examinable place. In part, I'm thinking simply about tracking the labour that builds the machine and harvests their elements from the ground. But I'm thinking too about something that better bridges the gap between Hayles sense of the multi-modal connections between person, computer and world at large (often in the form of corporations and programmers) and of Kirschenbuam's shedding of light upon the bits that elude Hayles.