One view on ‘Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary’
The present-day diversity of the works which claim or can be naturally allotted a place under the heading of “electronic” literature has caused the critical and theoretical debates accompanying the development of this new field to move on to a new level of approach consisting in attempts to delineate the extent of the emerging literary area, to offer flexible yet unitary perspectives on it as a whole and, most important, to ask questions about the aesthetic value of these productions. Such preoccupations reflect the need to organise e-literature as a coherent domain and to describe it in a systematic way. What seems to be at stake is the validity of this field as a distinct section of the larger area of literary studies. At this point, when the objects of study appear so varied that one can barely see the wood for the trees, it seems more and more necessary to look back and meditate a little on what has been accomplished so far.
One of the simplest ways to approach such difficult aspects would be to start by listing the most notable creations and to sum up the major theoretical contributions and this is exactly what Katherine Hayles does in her latest book – Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, 2008). This book, which has an explicitly didactic and introductory purpose, is accompanied by a CD comprising the first part of an anthology of electronic literature (edited in collaboration with Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland) and complemented by a website with additional resources.
As a matter of fact, only the first chapter, built as an extensive answer to the plain question – Electronic Literature: What Is It? – is conceived as a summary of various contributions, while the other four represent extensions of ideas developed by the author in her previous books, mainly Writing Machines and My Mother Was a Computer. This introductory chapter opens up by quoting the definition of e-literature agreed upon by the ELO. Despite its tautological formulation, the definition seems to be still functional, particularly in the case of the intermediating perspective adopted here. “The important literary aspect” it stipulates represents the inheritance from print literature which many readers of electronic literature keep at the back of their literary (in)formed minds. This may not prevent us from wondering how long the definition is going to last considering the fact that the connection with the literary tradition is wearing thin especially because the cultural background of the artists and of the public is changing, which makes them less likely to evaluate electronic literature through the lenses of customary literary criticism. However, an easily noticeable difference consists in the fact that e-literature is not limited to verbal art, as the works collected in the anthology prove. In fact, Katherine Hayles expresses preference for a term less likely to generate confusions – “the literary” – defined as a collection of “creative artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper”.
The definition is followed by a short inventory of the most relevant e-genres presented along a historic timeline: “Hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, ‘codework’, generative art, and the Flash poem”. The next section of this chapter is a brief revisiting of some theoretical turning points, from the early approaches indebted mostly to the concepts of print literature to the most recent ones, which are more accurate in their attempts to identify the specificity of this area.
The second chapter is illustrative for the overall perspective Katherine Hayles has developed on electronic literature, a perspective whose origins can be traced in earlier works. In contrast with other points of view, her approach does not “sweep the board clean” for electronic literature. What she argues for is the coexistence and the interaction between print and electronic literature manifested in the form of “feedback loops” (one of the most frequent expressions in her books). Despite the fact that this connection is not as obvious and popular as it used to be, it is still relevant to remember that “when literature leaps from one medium to another (…) it does not leave behind the accumulated knowledge embedded in genres, poetic conventions, narrative structures, figurative tropes and so forth”; in fact, the early attempts tried to replicate this knowledge in the new medium. Even after leaving behind the first strongly print-conformist stages characteristic of the beginnings of e-literature, one can still notice that “the accumulated knowledge of previous literary experiments has not been lost but continues to inform performances in the new medium. For two thousand years or more, literature has explored the nature of consciousness, perception, and emergent complexity, and it would be surprising indeed if it did not have significant insights to contribute to ongoing explorations of dynamic heterarchies”. This balanced attitude seems the most reasonable perspective that could be adopted towards the new phenomenon since by now it has become clear that in discussing electronic literature one cannot overlook previous literary theories. Otherwise why call such works “literature” at all? Using the term necessarily means invoking the entire tradition of its interpretations even if only in order to change its meaning. This is a point which has been most of the time wrongly approached: the connection between print and electronic literature has been either denied so as to enhance the originality of the latter or exploited to such an extent that it obscured the same originality. On the contrary, the peculiarity of Katherine Hayles’s point of view consists in its flexibility: it is neither linear nor simply contrastive. The movement from print literature to electronic literature implies neither the apocalypse of the first nor the genesis of the second out of thin air: they naturally coexist in the larger sphere of media ecologies and develop a relation based on the mutual exchange of features described as “intermediation”.
Intermediation is a notion which covers a large surface and which is given considerable attention in K. Hayles’s works. In this chapter the discussion is limited to the intermediation between humans and computers. Informed by research in adjacent fields (such as artificial intelligence, neural connectionism, simulation science or computational research), the interpretation of this concept is meant to reduce the differences between machine “thinking” and human thinking in order to create a framework within which the novelty of electronic literature would be better grasped. The common ground becomes visible as a result of the new interpretation of the way in which meaning is attributed to information and of the new valorization of the “subcognitive processes”, which also generate meaning. Both computers and human beings perform such lower level interpretations that actually prove to be the basis on which high-level meanings are progressively built. The difference is given by the degree of complexity of the resulting high-order meanings. As far as the interpretative abilities of the computers are concerned, it is difficult to decide if the author’s oscillation between literal and figural formulations is caused by prudence or hesitation. Despite arguing that computers can perform “cognitively sophisticated acts”, the author refrains from roughly calling these processes understanding or cognition. When such terms appear in relation to computers, they are written between inverted commas and complemented by carefully formulated paraphrases meant to draw their semantic limits as exactly as possible: “the program can ‘understand’ the words it assembles – that is, understand not semantically but philologically and linguistically in terms of grapheme and syllable formation”; “the programs create the computational equivalent of ‘understanding’ the problem”.
On the other hand, the perspective on human thinking itself is overturned as well. In order to identify the points where human and electronic interpretation abilities meet it is also necessary to rethink such notions as “human understanding” and “cognition” which are commonly correlated with “consciousness”, “intentionality”, and “agency” on the part of the thinking entity. What the author does is to try to change the established view on these terms by proving that they are culturally dependent constructions: “human intentionality too is an artifact that must have emerged from subcognitive processes” (as the experiments of Daniel Dennett would suggest); “underlying the conscious attribution of meaning are many interrelated processes of interpretation” ranging from the simplest to the most elaborated. As a result, “aboutness” “is now transformed from an absolute condition to a cascading series of recognitions”. Thus, the analogy between human and computational generation of meaning becomes all the more obvious. Yet, even in these terms, the interpretations performed by the computers are still far from actual understanding; they still work below the cognitive threshold proper: “the experience of electronic literature can be understood in terms of intermediating dynamics linking human understanding with computer (sub)cognition through the cascading processes of interpretation that give meaning to information”.
The question arising in this context concerns the advantages of a theory which, on the one hand, argues for the computer’s creative abilities and flexible manipulation of information (coming close to cognition) but which, on the other hand, stresses that this is, objectively speaking, an illusion, despite the fact that it is a strong one: “recombinant flux,’ as the aesthetic of such works is called, gives a much stronger impression of agency that does a book”; “the computer’s real agency as well as the illusion of its agency are much stronger than with the book”.
Actually, these linguistic intricacies are caused by the fact that the critic keeps in mind both the surface results and the actual processes: at the surface level the impression is that the communication between computers and humans is real; at the technical level this exchange is nothing more than a series of calculations of increasing complexity.
The benefit of this doubly oriented perspective consists in the fact that it brings out another distinct feature of present-day e-literature without falling prey to mystification, namely that its main objective and accomplishment is the attenuation of the mechanical impression and the acquisition of greater fluidity and complexity of response: “However the effects are achieved, the importance of fluidity to the analogy-forming processes is evident in the richly diverse senses in which flow has become central to (…) literary dynamics for contemporary literature”.
The next chapter also follows the logic of intermediation. The author demonstrates that the two opposite approaches to the new media – exemplified by Fr. Kittler’s and M. Hansen’s works, each favouring only one component of the computer-human system – are liable to reductive interpretations. The solution would be the development of a model which “entangles body and machine in open-ended recursivity with one another”.
A new theoretical twist is added in chapter four, which states that not only is literature changed by the programmable media, but it also contributes to the revaluation of how the new media work. This is actually accomplished by taking into account the variety of types of knowledge involved: rationality, embodied response, technological nonconscious and the peculiarities of the cultural background of each individual reader.
The last chapter nicely performs a sort of “feedback loop” in the sense that, after investigating the novelty of the electronic literary field, the author returns to its term of reference – print literature – in order to analyse the marks left on it by the new media. It must also be noted that the book has an elegant design as if to illustrate the idea stated in the last chapter concerning the increased sense of materiality that print publications have acquired as a result of their being contemporary with electronic texts (and as a result of their being, technically speaking, electronic).
On the whole, Electronic Literature offers a very coherent, well-articulated and evenly-balanced perspective on the current state of this (no longer very) young literary field, each theoretical assertion being complemented and supported by carefully explored examples.
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