Date: Thu, 15 Feb 96 11:04:04
fucking screens
notes toward a diagram
Jordan Crandall
I am thinking about some graffiti that Warren Niesluchowski found on a wall in Paris--VOUS ME DITES, JE T'EDITE--and an NEC ad that I found in Newsweek (or was it Time?).
"Everything you know about multimedia is about to change. And fast. Call it 'virtual reality' if you like, but before long you'll actually be able to step into magazines and other information sources. Images and words will surround you. You'll be able to control, even touch, what you see. Instead of simply reading or watching the news, you'll be able to participate in events. Sound ridiculous? Think again."
How does one respond to such an ad? Aside from the obvious fact that the environment it describes sounds remarkably like life as it already is, thank you very much, and aside from the fact that the ad is evidently geared to compel some sort of liberatory experience for a couch potato (imagine! -- you can ACTUALLY PARTICIPATE IN EVENTS), it is one that nonetheless invites further study, because it clearly speaks for some curious drive in the contemporary mind. We might call this the drive toward editorialization.
After glancing at the collaged graphic that cascades down the page of this advertisement and noting that it truly sucks, one's eye is subsequently drawn to what appears to be a surrogate reader (this could be YOU) running atop a large field of water, carrying a burning torch, surrounded by lines of floating text. You are to be encouraged by the promise that someday--and fast!--you will not be left simply reading this ad, but sucked into its very body, gleefully sprinting over oceans and frolicking with its cut-and-paste images and words (and their meanings). Think again! While to any critical mind this would constitute nothing less than a nightmare--one imagines, for instance, that the sprinting reader is not gleefully running toward the technological sublime but rather running from it, like a frightened citizen fleeing Godzilla--it is nonetheless easy to get momentarily swept away by the kind of adventure it promises.
On one hand, you can choose to "step into magazines and other information sources" in this way. On the other hand, you can get your ass off the chair and go outside. Either way, "images and words will surround you" and, as the ad fails to mention, pull you in all directions by their vast networks and the agendas to which they are harnessed. VOUS ME DITES, JE T'EDITE. What experience is not in some way mediated by these representational nets? Our relations are already thoroughly editorialized and instilled with the desire toward further editorialization through ever-new techniques.
Our relations are editorialized in two directions. First, in our communication with others--for example, when we state our opinions on current events or views on the status quo either directly or in the ever-expanding variety of media at our disposal. Second, in the ways that we are described by, and form ourselves in relation to, the editorializations of others--for example, when we assume a position, such as standing for or against something, within a normative field that has been established. The first is an externalizing process; the second, an internalizing process. In the internalizing process we describe ourselves, and circumscribe ourselves, in accordance with the bounds set forth by some entity whose agenda it is to contour us in that way. In the externalizing process, we speak the language set forth by that entity: we speak within the conditions set forth by it. We mime its terms, as "thought," and we locate our bodies and relations within these terms, as "being" (though not in terms of "thought" and "being," since they don't make good headlines).
Processes of editorialization--inward and outward --weave meshes of circuits, in whose patterns we discern publicational bodies. These publicational bodies include both publicational forms and the various embodiments implicated in their processes of production. (In the NEC ad, they include the reader, the surrogate reader, the body of the publication that carries the ad, the corporate body of NEC, the body of the advertising agency, and so on.) They give coherence and form to editorial processes, bound them, establish conditions for their appearance. They systematize them. It is the business of publicational entities to generate the normative fields within which we editorialize, and it is also their business to disrupt those normative fields. The formation of bodies of editorialized information is neither top-down nor bottom -up, but at all points an open flow.
What stands between these internalization and externalization processes of editorial is the interface. The interface was once simply a page, then it was a screen, and now it is both and more--as technologies allow multiple windowing and extensive ad configurations that allow intertextualities and access points between various media manifestations. (For example, the NEC ad offers a toll free number, a URL, and notes that "in the future, you can just walk over.") These circuitous editorial processes leave before-and-after-effects on interfaces like electrons passing through screens in quantum experiments. These traversals constitute codes.
We therefore have a diagram of these editorialization processes, in the form of a circuit that connects bodies, interfaces, and codes. This circuit differs from information and network metaphors in its inclusion of bodies--as well as multiple embodiments and their processes of incorporation--in the textual process. It opens up a space between codes and the interfaces on which they appear, to allow for alternate configurations in ways that links-and-nodes metaphors do not. The transformation of "link" to "circuit" generally opens up new possibilities for conduction, replacing the disembodied vectors of the former with the traversal functions of the latter.
But wait: before I continue to lay out this diagram: Why am I framing it in terms of editorial practices and publishing, and not just "information"? Because the former include social practices and group formations that the latter "wants to be free" of. "Publishing" implies some kind of social systematization and identification through an erotic upload and download process that traverses the body (through an interface). From desktop publishing to disks to online conferences to newsgroups to zines, e-zines, and Webzines, everyone is transformed into a publisher simply by uploading into some larger body, some larger system of circulation. The attraction of jacking into a publicational body and uploading can be viewed across the board in contemporary culture, especially in America, where it has become a religious experience, a kind of cosmic ascension--visible in the eyes of the talkshow guest as s/he confesses all at the televisual confessional, poised at the brink of salvation. There is also a process of fixity and sedimentation at work, as the "soft" body --primed and made all the more pliable for new techniques of the body--downloads new identifications and group alignments, forming communities of mind, sexual identity, and politics. The speed of this cybersexual transloading process, and the proliferation and fragmentation of its forms, changes our entire experience of publication and presence.
To consider what kinds of editorial formations and publicational bodies are emerging in this landscape, then, is to give insight into the kinds of group formations that we are defining as they are defining us, and therefore the mechanisms and agendas behind their appearance, coherence, and modes of control. This necessitates an exploration of the ways that such relations and forms are normalized through various means--that is, the practices of systematization and containment that publicational entities register and initiate.
The call, then, is for alternate editorial formations that disrupt and outflank these normative practices. It is vital to realize that "normative practices" include not only the fixed writer-reader relations of print media, but also their variability under the marker of "interactivity." Much of the technotopian rhetoric of the latter passes unscrutinized as we march gleefully into our NEC ads and into the digital future. Not only must interactive ideologies be questioned, but also their problematic separations of print and digital media, and their network or web metaphors. The circuitry diagram sketched out here offers one alternative.
By now nearly everyone has accepted the network metaphor as the best way to visualize and map new textual formations. Diagrams composed of lines and blocks, indicating links and documents, illustrate the new paradigm. However what do these links actually represent? What is the space upon which such a diagram is composed? Why is it so rigidly geometrical? What is the outside, the empty space, that surrounds the text?--an unarticulated ground, ready to bear the marks of signification? Why does the diagram employ a modernist, bird's eye view of mapping instead of, say, a psychogeography? Instead of dismantling or problematizing the writer/reader division, does it not position a new "outside"? Even in areas outside of hypertextual studies, the network metaphor predominates, and such questions go unheeded; for example, this metaphor completely fails to articulate what occurs on the MOO and it limits alternate visualizations of the Web.
What are the components of the net metaphor? First, there is "inscription"--the linear encoding on a surface. Second, there is an "interface"--that surface upon which an inscription appears. Third, there is a link. But what is a link, and what does it indicate? A direction of movement, potentialized or performed, by some embodied agency. That link is not only a detached vector, then, that connects block to block, but also part of some larger circuit that connects embodiment to text and interface. Our diagram must then include "incorporation"--that body, instantiation, or process of embodiment that encodes and forms itself in relation to code. In the face of the net metaphor, the erotic circuit posited here connects incorporations, interfaces, and inscriptions in new patterns, and these patterns configure through alignments and dispersions. This diagram allows us to position the embodied inscriber within the textual formation, not on the outside of it staring at the page or monitor ("Images and words will surround you..."), and to understand the extent to which embodiment is a part of the textual process, in terms other than as that appendage needed to click a mouse or turn a page. And, as it is important to understand that there are as many embodiments as there are inscriptions and interfaces in a given situation, and social elements present themselves: the textual formation includes a practice--a social use--and a history. We are therefore dealing with multiple configurations, not isolated elements.
Incorporations, inscriptions, and interfaces align in different ways to produce "fields of alignment." Such a diagram could be mapped horizontally, in terms of overlapping fields of alignment, which connect to you, becoming part of the social-spatial horizon, leaving you no distance from them. So, rather than "nodes" linked in a web metaphor, we have fields that align and disperse in alternate ways. There may be many advantages to seeing textual formations in this way. It could allow us to include its multiple forms, instead of making misleading distinctions between media and forms of text such as "print" and "electronic"--in fact, it allows to incorporate corresponding formations in alternate contexts, such as art. For "inscription" is generally the making of marks by any means, by pen, ink, brush, or whatever, and "interface" is generally the field on which those marks appear, whether that be a monitor, a printed page, or the control panel of a vacuum cleaner. Indeed, one can think of engaging a textual formation as the performing of an activity, like vacuuming, in a combination of signification, interface, and body--the latter in two senses, the body of the machine and the body of the person who performs the activity and gives it meaning. (In the case of the virtual body in telematic space, there is yet another body present.) It allows us to maintain productive tensions, such as between text and hypertext, where each realm is not parcelled out but actively engages, and complicates, the assumptions of the other. If this tensional space is foregrounded, as connected through the conduit of my own bodily agency and others and intersected through various interfaces, I resist parcelling these elements out and locate constitutive editorial relations within a tensional arena. The immersive experience promised by the NEC ad becomes something far richer, as does the process of engaging art. We find ourselves already within the constructions that bid us entry, and we understand the mechanisms through which we are seduced to believe otherwise.
Within this schema, there are no longer solely representations of artworks, but only components of the very body of the artwork--for, as our relations become editorialized, it is in publication-space that artwork is formed: it is here that its coordinates are established, and its materiality reworked.
[Jordan Crandall is the editor of BLAST: http://www.interport.net/~xaf/]