Engl507

Class Notes: Meeting 3

Here's a quick review of some things we've discussed thus far in the seminar:

• This course is about "Arguing with Computers," which carries at least four valences:
• 1) We will make arguments with computers (here, the computer is assumed to be more or less invisible; as an instrument, it facilitates the act of exegesis, discovery, aggregation, expression, or the like);
• 2) We will develop a skepticism of computational approaches (here, we enter a sort of hermeneutics of suspicion, where we will dig beyond what's obvious or superficial about computation; we may also question the very act of using them for the purposes of exegesis);
• 3) We will become frustrated with computers, especially when they are not user-friendly, instrumental, or conducive to efficiency (here, the computer resists immediacy and immersion; there is a resistance in the materials); and
• 4) We will read computational approaches to literary and cultural criticism back onto a longer history of critical practice, in order to see what tensions and resonances emerge (here, we are entertaining the idea that something's indeed different/distinct about computational approaches, and that the machine/network affords something that previous models for criticism do not).
• When conducting this work, mediation will often be our object of study. We will ask not only why certain media are relevant to particular research topics, but also how the act of criticism is tied to questions of perception and attention, not to mention how mediation can be historicized.
• The four points above correspond somewhat neatly with our recent discussion of "Love of the Middle" (by Galloway). In the list, we have clear communication, deep communication, stresspoint communication, iridescent communication, and furious communication.
• On page 62 of Excommunication, Galloway writes:

  hermeneutic interpretation and immanent iridescence are, at the turn of the millennium, gradually withering away; ascending in their place is the infuriation of distributed systems. In other words, and in more concrete terms, we can expect a tendential fall in the efficiency of both images and texts, in both poems and problems, and a marked increase in the efficiency of an entirely different mode of mediation, the system, the machine, the network.

  We can take this statement as a sort of challenge for the seminar: Do we agree? Where is this statement persuasive, how, and to what effects? What does it assume? And where does it fall short?

Today (20 January, Meeting 3), this line of thinking brings us to the question of what new media are in the first place. We should also ask how we understand new media in relation to old media. In other words: What's new about new media?

Before we discuss “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory”, let's quickly review Manovich's principles of new media. And then during our discussion, let's focus on the following remarks that Chun makes in the article:

• "key to the newness of the digital is a conflation of memory and storage that both underlies and undermines digital media’s archival promise" (148)
• "The major characteristic of digital media is memory" (154)
• "I contend that this uncertainty stems not from the lack of devices such as the memex but from the act of reading itself" (159)
• "Digital media, which is allegedly more permanent and durable than other media (film stock, paper, and so on), depends on a degeneration actively denied and repressed. This degeneration, which engineers would like to divide into useful and harmful (eraseability versus signal decomposition, information versus noise) belies the promise of digital computers as permanent memory machines. If our machines’ memories are more permanent, if they enable a permanence that we seem to lack, it is because they are constantly refreshed so that their ephemerality endures, so that they may store the programs that seem to drive our machines" (167)
• "To put it most bluntly, this nonsimultaneity of the new—this enduring ephemeral—means we need to get beyond speed as the defining feature of digital media or global networked communications" (170)
• "The pressing questions are, Why and how is it that the ephemeral endures? And what does the constant repetition and regeneration of information effect? What loops and what instabilities does it introduce into the logic of programmability?" (171)

In "Media Studies and the Digital Humanities," Tara McPherson writes:

With a few exceptions, we remain content to comment about technology and media, rather than to participate more actively in constructing knowledge in and through our objects of study. (120)

Elsewhere, in "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?", she writes:

scholars must engage the vernacular digital forms that make us nervous, authoring in them in order to better understand them and to recreate in technological spaces the possibility of doing the work that moves us. (n. pag.)

At this moment, why make these arguments? What are the ostensible benefits of McPherson's suggestions? Why might they make us reluctant?