Entanglements: an exploration of the digital literary work FISHNETSTOCKINGS

Introduction

Entanglement, Environment, Matter, and Meaning

We offer this Scalar book as critical entanglement with FISHNETSTOCKINGS, an immersive work of digital literature that invites us to immerse and submerge ourselves in text, image, and dance.
In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke UP, 2007), feminist and theoretical physicist Karen Barad establishes the importance of entanglement as a guiding concept for understanding matter and materiality. Barad argues that “Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge thorough and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (iv). Matter and meaning are thus inherently entangled. Entanglement is the natural state of being and the condition for making meaning. This condition permeates from physics to poetics in FishNetStockings, a work that takes meaning-making as embodied material action in ways that demonstrate Barad’s concept of “intra-action,” a neologism poised in opposition to “interaction.” 

Barad writes, “’intra-action’ signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that preceed their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action” (33)

“Interaction” was a central term in the development -- and debate -- around defining digital art and literature.  It became a banner of what we then called “new media.”  Critical texts, such as Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns        Hopkins University Press, 1997), offered “interaction” as a key component of what would distinguish the literary text and the cybertext, a hybrid form, a cross between written text and digital platforms, marked by an ability to respond to input. Aarseth’s now-canonical book helped found the field of “game studies” around the importance– dare say, fetishism– of interaction. Barad’s theory of intra-action shifts our focus from genre (games) or readerly activity (interaction) to environment.

A shift from object to context, from text to environment is a vital shift in critical perspective, and it is one that FISHNET STOCKINGS promotes and that situates the work in the emergent field of Blue Humanities.

Steve Mentz, in Ocean (Bloomsbury, 2020, Object Lessons), asks us to consider changing our vocabulary in order to change our ways of thinking. He asks “What if instead” of using the term and concept of “field,” “we redescribe the adventures of thinking as currents, as rates of flow and change? Why not emphasize movements and connections between or through difference?”(xvi). Mentz asks, “What happens to ’grounded’ metaphors when everything solid becomes liquid?”

Melody Jue, in Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater (Duke UP, 2020) answers: “oceanic environments challenge some of the most ingrained and sedimented concepts in media history: interface, inscription, and database storage” (xi). Water changes our ability to see. Moreover, submersion changes orientation. So too does language: the shift from “field” to “current” changes everything. FISHNETSTOCKINGS registers and aestheticizes this shift.

In this Scalar book, we offer our close reading of FISHNETSTOCKINGS as an entanglement of methods and approaches, of media forms (text, image, video, sound), of minds, and of species and environments. Flow and swim through its contents as you will, following the paths that pull you or making your own way through the waters.  

This page has paths: