accidentals and substantives

magic

Arthur C. Clarke once quipped that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I always assumed this was a demotic axiom that applied to the millions like myself who seldom bother to look under the hood of a car, computer, or tv set to figure out how things actually work. In other words, I assumed advanced technology to be magic just to the extent that it remained a black box to the end-user.

Now I'm not so sure. After reading Matt's stellar work on the grammatological primitives of the hard drive, I find it difficult to imagine that anyone--even a computer scientist fully initiated in the arcana of a hard disk--could fail to see the magic of this device. A read/write head that inscribes a material substrate without ever touching it: now that's magic. There's something in the instrumentation and operation of a hard disk that aligns it with paranormal technology--automatic writing, seances, telepathic communication. (Matt once compared the read/write head in passing to the planchette of a ouija board.) Talk about haunted media . . .

As a textual critic, I view Matt's work in yet another vein: the practice of bibliotextual studies in the twenty-first century has reached a crossroads. We must decide either to cede our ground once and for all to computer scientists or to bite the bullet and dedicate ourselves--feverishly, jealously--to the material study of new media. That means the whole kit-n-kaboodle, including chasing inscription "down to the metal." Matt's made his choice. His gamble--and it's a brilliant one--is to stake out a role for the humanist in an age of "extreme inscription."