Section VIII: "The Machine in the Text, and the Text in the Machine"
Manuel Portela's article reviews and summarizes two recent texts, from Katherine Hayles and Matt Kirschenbaum, that mark large contributions to the field of new media studies. Portela begins with Hayles' work, Electronic Literature, which he covers for the majority of the piece (7 of 10 pages). Hayles' interests are wide ranging, but primarily centered around "electronic textuality as it manifests itself at the formal materiality level, and in what it tells about its own signifying process." Hayles is extending her previous explorations of "the interactions among digital media, literature, and postman culture" to create a "context for digital literature and to propose a new digital media theory." She explores reading/writing and several aspects of those processes and how they are impacted by digitality, and ultimately gestures towards the embodiment of computing machines.
Portela writes about Hayles' attempts to contextualize electronic literature in the larger ecology of digital media, noting the ubiquity of computing technologies and their use in culture, which is called "a software culture" and an "information society", with handheld mobile networked devices and the use of such technologies in government, business, education, etc. Because of the pervasive use of such technologies and softwares, Hayles forwards ideas of humans being "post human," in that "the postman human is/will be the extension of his/her software." Portela begins the section which reviews Hayles work by asking a question from her book: "...should the body be subject to the machine, or the machine to the body?" Ultimately, this binary breaks down as Hayles argues for an intermediating, hybrid, co-evolution of society, humans, and technologies.
Hayles posits that the code and software, executed by "the machine," happens in conjunction with meaning-making that occurs by the coder/writer as well as the reader/game player. An "open-ended recursivity" between computer and human takes place, where meaning making comes as a result of the interactions, the intermediation, between humans and machines. What is significant to Hayles, though, is the way that this process suggests an embodiment or cognition on the part of the machine--Portela even questions whether she treats machines "as autonomous objects," which he would not agree with since machines do not provide their own signifiers. He also critiques the white, English speaking, North American focus of all the content in Hayles' work.
Next, Portela explores Matt Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms, which moves from Hayles' interest in textuality and the materiality of the digital towards exploring various levels of inscription, storage, and re-inscription. He suggests that code (writing, binary code, and other allographic inscriptions) needs to be explored forensically in electronic writing to understand electronic textuality; a forensic layer considers the "relation between hardware inscription... and software configurations", how data moves from screen to the disc and back to the screen.
Kirschenbaum argues that without exploring these multiple layers of inscription, we risk further neutralizing and naturalizing graphic user interfaces and other software tools. Portela writes, "Kirschenbaum applies procedures of textual criticism and analytical bibliography to the study of new media objects. His book signals a much-needed departure from studies of digitality that only address the semiotic level of presentation. Instead, he examines the whole material and social process through which digital texts are produced, transmitted, and transformed: "Crystallizing at the nexus of storage, inscription, and instrumentation, the forensic imagination stands in contrast to the medial ideology and screen essentialism that has held sway in the theoretical conversation’s critical formative y ears f or new media as a field". Without these explorations, we will be unable to see how computers are unique from other writing technologies. He also calls for a new bibliographic approach which would include several more factors required to read or create content, including operating system, hypertext program, electronic network, and other social and material factors which would inform readers of a work's place in history, socially and materially. Thus, Kirschenbaum's text deals more closely with the text in the machine whereas Hayles deals with the machine in the text.
Portela summarizes, in conclusion: "Hayles’s and Kirschenbaum’s new books offer critically rigorous, intellectually provocative, and highly productive perspectives on new media literary objects. Their technical, sociotextual, and interpretive analyses raise our critical awareness of the specifics of digital materiality and electronic literature to a new theoretical and analytical level. Hayles’s readings of electronic works are exemplary in the way they relate electronic performability to interpretability. Using tropes such as "recursive dynamics," "intelligent machines" and "emergent cognition," she has tried to capture the embodied nature of technology and the distributed nature of subjectivity in human- computer interactions. Kirshenbaum’s approach, in turn, opens up electronic objects to textual criticism, extending the genetic and social text approach of the last two decades to digitally born artifacts. He offers a critically nuanced and technically rigorous description of the multiple layers of formal and forensic materiality, and stresses their interdependence. Taken together, the "electronic" in Electronic Literature and the "mechanism" in Mechanisms clearly resonate in the way they both attempt to link the deep level of machine code to the formal level of textual and metatextual code to the social level of cultural code. The machine in the text and the text in the machine — quintessential expressions of our present postmodern technotextual condition — are now more fully conceptualized in their technical, aesthetic, and social materialities."