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Codework, Metaphoricity, Technotexts [sandy baldwin]

last edited 2 years ago by sbaldwin

Assertion: In Kate Hayles’ recent account of self-reflexive “material metaphors” in “technotexts,” the point is not the meaning of the metaphors but metaphoricity itself, understood as the withdrawal of the context producing the technotext. The true reference involved is not reducible to the rhetorical play of metaphor but presupposes something beyond metaphor at work within metaphor. The point is not the metaphor nor the materiality involved, pace Hayles, but the articulation of the two as proof for the withdrawn efficacy (or “technicality”) of metaphor arrived at through reading. The allegorical practice of media theory stiffens the interface, leaving figures – e.g. Hayles material metaphors – animated by the medial play of history. The artifice of the media allegory is a temporal scanning and selection out of a realer time, and the total allegory of media theory is nothing more than the single narrative of history in flight.

Here I’m summarizing what I understand Hayles to be doing. I’m stating what I take her argument to be, but I’m also forcing it, exposing the assumptions behind it. I see her first step as identifying the use of figurative language in a text. She then shows that thse usages are ultimately all metaphors – this move is part of the way rhetoric has been understood in the last several centuries, as reducible to one or two master tropes (i.e. the “shipwreck of rhetoric”); this move also participates in the general agenda of providing a totalizing reading that situates the text in a technocultural milieu (Hayles now calles this the “age of computation” or something like that).

So, an example of all this – the most famous of her examples – is her reading of Talan Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia.” She locates figurative play merging the language and imagery of human subjectivity and computer programming. At the same time, Hayles underlines that we should not take these tropes as literal, they do not mean what they say, but we should take the fact of these tropes, in aggregate, as a response to the materiality of the text, specifically to its technological substrate. (Here I think Talan differs: he takes his language, its neologisms, as true in a strict sense.) For Hayles, this material substrate produces a generalized figurability which plays out in metaphors (she never quite puts it like this…). It would be a mistake to think that any given metaphor in the text means anything – so reference or specific intertextual contexts are voided – but the sheer fact of the metaphor becomes proof of the media substrate. Proof as trace, proof as withdrawal (or re-trait via Derrida and Heidegger). Reading the texts can give no knowledge of this substrate other than the fact of its existance.

As Derrida points out of such readings of metaphor, this is both a radical theory and at the same time the metaphysical version of metaphor. I’d say its also the structure of metaphor necessary for something like “media theory.” No context presents itself, but in reading the technotext we deal with the force of the context. I find all this a tremendously powerful and tremendously troubling theory. It’s certainly enormously popular in my field and among those working in this area. What it takes for granted is that the appearance in metaphor is true – not true as in a name but true as the remainder of some exteriority.

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Here’s a second take on this:

My goal, is in part, to push Hayles’ claims to the point where I can ask why she’s making them, what is produced by these claims (certainly the point is not “results”).

Hayles’ succinct definition of “material metaphor” is a “traffic between words and physical artifacts.” This traffic is a “transfer of sense.” These metaphors appear in “technotexts,” defined as a literary work that “interrogates the inscription technology that produces it.”

So, how does this interrogation happen? (Actually, a nice term: interrogation is literary criticism.) A particular figure or set of figures in Talan Memmott or Mez is isolated and unpacked for its connotations. At this first level, the figure(s) thematizes body, writing, code – of course, the “best” or choice figure for the critic are those that condense all of these. In Lexia to Perplexia Hayles notes the various interactions required of the user; notes the use of a kind of “creole” of neologism, code, theory; notes the images and myths; and so on. Since Hayles purports to offers a “media specific analysis” (MSA), she is clear that her goal is not the field of codes revealed through reading these figures. For her, such a reading of the cultural text has been the mistaken and print-based purview of literary criticism. She assures us that she is not reading the cultural meaning but the materiality. How to make this move? Well, to say that the figure is a “foregrounding” of the specific materiality of the digital text. This specificity is not itself part of the coding, it is rather the sheer fact of the trope. The poetic merging of cultural codes in the trope is a reflex of the underlying materiality – the trope is a trace that we can read quite smoothly and regularly. She consistently uses the term “foregrounding,” which implies and echoes a kind of gestalt effect, and builds on – without saying so – the presumption of “transfer of sense” in the trope, a kind of phenomenality perceived in reading. This is where I see an aesthetic ideology. It is an absent sense, an aesthetics of disappearance, in Virilio’s sense – and as he makes clear, such an aesthetics is always about conservation of structures of power.

So Hayles argues that the difficulty and illegibility of Talan’s work, above and beyond the reading of the cultural codes involved, is a kind of signifier of the technotext’s materiality. (Hayles: “Illegibility is not simply a lack of meaning, then, but a signifier of distributed cognitive processes that construct reading as an active production of a cybernetic circuit and not merely an internal activity of the human mind.”) (Another question is this positing of difficulty. Would it be a kind of dilletantism approach to the experimental and avant-garde?) There is, of course, value in this second level of allegory, but it’s the assured movement to conclusions that troubles me – it’s this that keeps it within an institutional practice of literary criticism. I would say it’s also this that keeps it from truly engaging with literature, since the critic is not troubled by the illegibility or its projection into her own domain… There is illegibility but its always legible.

(I note that Talan himself is carefully ambivalent about what he thinks of this. Would he say that Hayles’ reading elides the issue of subjectivity and poetics that interest him? I’m not sure.)

Media theory is fascinated – transfied – by the heuristic function of metaphor. I would say media theory is nothing else. Yet metaphor is really a way of destroying the heuristic, destroying the fiction. Really what is being made legible is the institutional assumption of a binding between representation and materiality. The aesthetic ideology testifies to this institution. There’s a kind of legal force to this assumption: it’s taken as a law, and enforced as such. I think that’s why there’s so much excitement around Hayles’ work: it lets literary critics feel important because they feel they are revealing something – but what they reveal is the same thing over and over. I think this also goes to Hayles’ notion of embodiment (also institutional).

Or rather: what is shown is “the normative texture of writing.” The institution I describe above might be the institutional symbolics of discourse and technology, something like how discourse says the machine.

In all this, metaphor is assumed as not literary but rather explaining what literature already is doing. The transfer is always there, unless a more radicalized account of metaphor and rhetoric is adopted, e.g. Richards in an odd way – who is vastly misunderstood or misplaced as a “new critic” and who was involved in cybernetics from early on – where the tenor-vehicle relation amounts to a self-deepening and projective model of metaphor, rather than a referential model. As it stands though, every mention of metaphor in literary criticism – the very word metaphor, in the institution I’m describing – is a form of policing, a way of maintaining the institution of reading and commenting. Literary criticism is built on distance from literature. Hayles: “The crucial move (SB: in Media Specific Analysis) is to reconceptualize materiality as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation.”)

Codework – qua literature – is the chance and gamble that everything is foreground already (still not a good formulation…). What interests me in Memmott or Mez are not the metaphors – a focus which turns the text into ornament – but the disruptive opening.

I should add that Hayles – and, it seems to me most critics following Hayles, e.g. Rita Raley (and again, this is not to deny the fine work of Hayles or Raley) – do not deal directly with more disruptive work of Jodi, Alan Sondheim, Florian Cramer, neomata, NN, etc. They may mention these names but then they will actually quote and promote Talan Memmott and Mez (nice for Talan and Mez, of course). So, if they deal with the first group, it’s in order to bring them into the space where “Media Specific Analyisis” is possible.

We must start from a more subversive and troubled writing and thinking.