Comments on: On Mechanisms

By: Jim Andrews

Jim Andrews — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:30:03 +0000

I had a look at MIT’s description of your book at http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11336 and read Eliza’s review, Matthew. I see that at the above URL one may also read 50 pages from the book, which I’ve just finished doing.

Here’s something I posted some time ago to netpoetic concerning ‘spiritual materialism’: http://netpoetic.com/2009/07/spiritual-materialism . This relates to your concern in Mechanisms with materiality. I expanded a bit on the notion at http://netpoetic.com/2009/07/re-spiritual-materialism/

I’ll have to get your book. It sounds interesting. I think that showing how materialistic concerns do not exclude the deepest concerns of the literary imagination is very useful these days. Particularly concerning writing or art in which materiality is at issue.

But, more generally, it seems that several key issues in our world today key on concerns relating to materiality. Such as who and what we are. For instance, many people feel that the idea that we are machines reduces us and denies our humanity, our spirituality, what makes us human. However, just as an understanding of Darwin’s ideas opens up whole vistas of our being and history and future, so too does the idea that we are machines, properly understood, open up whole vistas without reducing or denying our humanity.

And understanding both Darwin’s ideas and the idea that we are machines involves looking at the relation between our materiality and our past, present, and futures in the world. Both involve a kind of materialism that has a long history in science and is quite different from very limited notions of materialism that refer to consumeristic zeal and a denial of the importance of things like spirituality.

By: Eliza Deac

Eliza Deac — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:56:17 +0000

What I would add is that the textual studies concerned with the materiality of the book may provide useful insights not only for researches in the field of electronic textuality, but also for the ‘aged’ literary theory, which seems to be prone to a type of ‘medial ideology’ similar to the one described in Mechanisms in the case of digital texts, despite the existence of some noticeable contributions which highlight the importance of the notion of materiality in the case of print texts as well.

By: John Vincler

John Vincler — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:51:08 +0000

This post is an excellent concise introduction to a very important book. Your summary is elegant, but I would add that one of the great accomplishments of Mechanisms is that it renews the relevance of textual studies to literary scholarship.

Kirschenbaum’s book points us toward the potential of textual studies–e.g. bibliography (the study of books as material objects), textual criticism, genetic editing, and the history of the book–for the serious consideration of electronic literature. He opens the door and begins doing the work, but I hope Mechanisms also encourages other literary scholars interested in elit to revisit the theory and body of scholarship associated with these fields. As Kirschenbaum illustrates the theories and practices of analytical bibliography need to be radically reoriented for the electronic environment but these theories and practices provide the general framework for understanding texts as (material) products of complex social and technological processes.

It is interesting to examine chronologically the work of N. Katherine Hayles. In her early work, you see her making typically bibliographical claims (emphasizing the materiality of literature). But it isn’t until her more recent books, My Mother Was a Computer (I believe), that she seems to actually start seriously reading (or at least citing) the work of bibliographers and textual critics.

This is not a critique of Hayles or of your post (which is as excellent a summary as I’ve seen), rather it reflects the (institutional?) divide between those working at the forefront of contemporary issues in literary studies (the digital, the post-human, elit, etc.) and the dusty and seemingly out-of-fashion realm of textual studies. Of course textual studies is coming back in fashion, thanks in part to Kirschenbaum, but mostly because it is needed to help us understand texts in the digital realm.

By: Eliza Deac

Eliza Deac — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:22:21 +0000

Thanks for the feedback. Concerning Agrippa, what I had in mind, although I did not make that very clear, was the fact that the ‘hacking’ of the text appears to have resulted in overshadowing the work’s conceptual level. The salvage operation seems to have given precedence to the text, which is indeed interesting in itself, over the way in which it was supposed to function (and therefore over its ‘theoretical statement’). Also, the present-day permanence of the text on the author’s site does not communicate much about its initial design; in fact, it contradicts it. But it is true that the work’s succeeding metamorphoses enriched and modified this level as well and that is why it cannot be read independently of its well-documented history.

By: Matt Kirschenbau,

Matt Kirschenbau, — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:46:32 +0000

Thank you, Eliza, for this generous and careful review. You’ve emphasized exactly what I hoped the contributions of the book would be.

One point: Agrippa, while not originally intended for distribution on the internet (though even this is somewhat debatable) *is* a born-digital work, or “e-poem.” Gibson, in fact, claims that he never produced a hard copy, but more importantly the original software interface which ran on the poem on the diskette in the collector’s edition was an important and innovative piece of code art, designed to execute the text only once and then irreversibly encrypt it. We’ve recently been able to produce an emulation of this original environment, which is available on the Agrippa Files.

Best, Matt