"There is no exquisite beauty," Edgar Allen Poe once wrote, quoting someone else if memory serves, "without some strangeness in the proportions." Katharine Hepburn had Poe's strangeness in spades: that long, angular body; severe cheekbones; flaring nostrils. Hers was not the utterly nondescript prettiness of a Britney Spears (who iconifies a quintessentially American aesthetic) but something more akin to the winsome beauty of a young Audrey Hepburn, whose own disproportionally large mouth, slightly crooked teeth, and stick-out ears miraculously combined to create a picture of surpassing loveliness.
She wasn't only beautiful, though; Katharine Hepburn was also smart. There are some Hollywood actors who deliver brilliant lines for the camera, but are painfully inarticulate in RL. They do just fine as long as they are heavily scripted by screenwriters, agents, and PR personnel (it's not hard to think of a few politicians who fit into this category as well). But Hepburn was every bit as smashing and regal in candid interviews as she was on the silver screen. Her unique brand of intelligence was almost palpable.
She will be missed.
Tomorrow Matt and I drive to Charlottesville to attend Blake Camp, the annual pilgrimage to the IATH roundtable in the recesses of Alderman library at UVa to strategize the future of the William Blake Archive. I'm already bracing myself for the perennial heated discussion of our textual transcriptions. Like many other thematic research collections on the web, the WBA delivers both high-quality digital facsimiles and carefully prepared ascii transcriptions of its primary source materials. The images enable the study of iconic codes that are unceremoniously flushed out of a low-res letterpress or ascii reproduction, while the transcription offers increased legibility (Blake's serried calligraphy can strain the eyes) and, perhaps more importantly, finely structured search queries and other character-based manipulation. These two demands--one pictorial, the other textual--are met by separate documents rather than unified in one. But the desire for unification is ever-present. The debate over the transcriptions nearly always revolves around issues of iconicity: how far should we go in trying to render the iconic codes of Blake's poetry and prose? Can we capture his vertical and horizontal spacing, his mirror-writing, his multi-directional text? One might suppose that because the transcriptions are accompanied by images, the former might not feel the onus of the latter. But in contemporary editorial theory, the word is never just a word, it is always first and foremost an image. So we strain the limits of current browser technology to deliver granular representations of course ascii marked up in sgml. Phenomenologically we want an image, but ontologically we want a text. Or, to put it another way, we want a machine-readable text and a human-readable image to coalesce in one and the same object.
The next phase of the project involves freeing ourselves from a proprietary software package called Dynaweb and converting all our sgml files to xml/xsl. Theoretically, the implementation of xsl stylesheets should finally allow us to have our cake and eat it too. I've seen stylesheet-rendered ascii that can float over other text, drop the ascenders and descenders of letters, and lay claim to the screen in a breathtaking variety of spatial configurations.
Theoretically words converged on images long ago. Technologically they have yet to do so, but certainly xhtml/css and xml/xsl style sheets are a step in that direction.
[For excellent thumbnail histories of words and images "joined at the hip" yet "enmeshed in histories of separation" (as Morris Eaves has astutely put it), see Eaves, "Graphicality," in Reimagining Textuality, ed. Neil Fraistat and Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux (Madison: University of WP, 2002) 99-122) and Matthew Kirschenbaum, "The Word as Image in an Age of Digital Reproduction: Lessons Learned from Humanities Computing," in Eloquent Images (Cambridge: MIT P) forthcoming.]
I've been following the GrandTextAuto comment thread , mostly as excerpted and commented on by Jason, who singles out this by Nick:
The difference between the virtual environment of a novel (or a poem like the Inferno) and that of a computer game is the difference between description and simulation. They're not the same; the latter requires not just interpretation but operation as well. Theories of textual interpretation don't explain how people operate cybertexts. (my emphasis)
I agree with Jason that textual criticism (what he more loosely calls "textual studies") has something to contribute to the discussion. The interpretational reader has historically also been an operational editor. Melville's Moby Dick or Shakespeare's The Tempest may be non-ergodic from a synchronic perspective, but are intensely ergodic from a diachronic one, as anyone who has ever picked up a critical edition with a table of variants can testify. I'll bet Thomas Bowdler, purging and rewriting the Bard in the nineteenth century, had the writer's cramp to prove he was an operator and not just an interpreter.
We've had ergodic editions for thousands of years . . .
I wonder, too, how long before these kinds of distinctions are finally obsolete, quaint even. In some respects the interpretation/operation distinction is already living on borrowed time. What happens when the individual graphemes of Moby Dick, Aarseth's quintessential example of a non-ergodic text, become graspable media, subject to general reassembly? By scooping up a handful of letters, I can toss Ishmael over the side of the Pequod to join the rest of the crew. Farfetched? Not if The Tangible Media Group at MIT has its way. Given the pace of technological change, maybe we need to build next-generation theories of interactivity, virtual worlds, etc. now. My own guess is that we'll start to see a tangible or operational or kinetic component to standardized, institutional literacy programs in the very near future. For readers of tomorrow, living in an age of ubiquitous computing, understanding the historical decoupling of operation and interpretation will require an exertion of the imagination.
Maybe the Cybertext theorist has the responsibility of writing simultaneously to a future as well as a contemporary audience?
Thought I'd try to use the blog as a research tool to float some dissertation ideas. What follows is a rough patch of dissertation writing, something I wrote a couple of weeks ago as part of the semiotic chapter of my dissertation. The material presented here is preliminary--alpha release--and subject to several further rounds of revision.
I won't try to contextualize the passage--it's actually vey peripheral to my main line of thought, and I think it works pretty well as a stand-alone blog piece (although it cuts off here in medias res).
Indexical Relations
"In the graphic arts," Philip Gilbert Hamerton emphatically states, "you cannot get rid of matter. Every drawing is in a substance and on a substance. Every substance used in drawing has its own special and peculiar relations both to nature and to the human mind."[1] The ineluctable fact of the autographic work is that its ontology resides with its materiality. A painting, for example, is not something that can be bootstrapped out of its substrate into a higher-level, abstract realm for the purposes of analysis or transmission. The problem, then, for reproduction appears on the face of it almost insurmountable: theoretically, a painting, drawing, or other autographic work demands lossless transmission: perfect iterability with zero degradation, addition, loss, or other change. Nelson Goodman, in his formidable Languages of Art, formulates what has become a canonical definition: "Let us speak of a work of art as autographic," he writes, "if and only if the distinction between original and forgery of it is significant; or better, if and only if even the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine" (my emphasis). [2]
If genuineness by Goodman's account is a fool's errand, it is at the same time the holy grail of autographic reproduction. Rather than search for a workaround to the materiality conundrum, the more daring or romantic or benighted (according to one's point of view) have embraced it as the road, not the roadblock, to genuineness. Ramified to its logical ends, this means that a reproduction of an autographic work must strive to achieve not only a consummate iconic relation to its original, but also, to use Charles Peirce's terminology, an indexical, i.e., physical, relation. The desire for a representation and, by extension, reproduction that is an effluence of the real runs deep. It is a desire that finds poetic expression in John Ashbery's seascape painter, who importunes the waves in all their grandeur to usurp his canvas, and dips his brush in their foamy pigment, as if the sea itself were his palette. [3] Susan Sontag has argued that photography as a reproductive and artistic medium actualizes this indexical relation:
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. [4]
But what the photomechanical processes finally give us are technologically enhanced iconic relations that Sontag here romanticizes as indexical relations. Unlike the seascape painting in Ashbery's poem, a photograph of the sea is not a metonymic extension of it. Film and half-tone screen dots are self-evidently different from two hydrogen atoms combined with an oxygen atom. To live up to Sontag's boasts, our hypothetical photograph would paradoxically need to harness the light-sensitive properties of the waves themselves to act as an emulsion on which to permanently affix the sea's image.
Technically speaking digital media are allographic not autographic in nature, composed of discontinuous bits of information that can be manipulated in a variety of ways. But the density of the code in some instances is such that phenomenologically we experience them as autographic, making it appropriate in select cases to study these digital objects as hybrid autographic/allographic works. If the icon crossed a technological line in the sand in the photographic age, the index promises to take the same fateful step in our own electronic milieu. Iconic mimesis stakes out its ground in imitation: the subliminal codes of photography, for example, excel at impersonating the codes of other media (paintings or engravings, tapestries or woodcuts). [5] Indexical mimesis, because it seeks to close the material gap between original and copy, represents the next frontier in autographic representation. Today's virtual environments--for all their immersiveness and three-dimensional animation; their special effects, interactivity, and intuitive input/output devices--still relate to the physical world as moving icons--icons pushed to extremes--but icons nonetheless. We are, however, phase-shifting into a new indexical order: the announcement of the first bionic chip by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley in 2000 is a straw in the wind. Assuming scientists continue down this path, we can look ahead to a time when our computer-generated simulacra will run on hardware whose complex circuitry is part machine, part living tissue; our avatars spun from organic matter, more real, somehow, than their progenitors. Galateas, all of them, and we their Pygmalions--or they ours.
If all this sounds hopelessly pie in the sky, we can turn our attention back to the present for more sublunary examples. Indexical relations, as a conceptual corollary of autographic reproduction, often play a token role in more run-of-the-mill reproductions of a predominantly iconic nature. The resulting hybrid can be curious: in January of 2003, Heather Cleary, a librarian, posted a query to the Visual Resources Association listserv requesting feedback on how to shelve a new acquisition. The item in question was a catalogue published in concert with a European exhibition of the work of Czech-born artist Jiri-Georg Dokoupil held in Summer 2002. The catalogue contains two foldouts and eighty-four photographic illustrations of some fifty or more paintings executed in a range of unconventional media, including soot, car tire prints, fruit juice, and inky soap suds.
What makes the so called "bubble book" a potential thorn in the side of librarians everywhere, and what prompted the query from this particular librarian, is the striking binding, which boasts a green liquid precariously sealed inside a clear acetate cover that, were it to leak, could threaten other items in a collection. As Cleary notes, the liquid is "evocative of the soapy fluid the artist uses to create his soap suds paintings." The indexical component is faux, not genuine (the green liquid wasn't spirited away in buckets from Dokoupil's studio, and more than likely its chemical properties differ markedly from those of the artist's own concoction.) But the pure hit of materiality preserved in that binding gives the impression of having been drawn off directly from the source. The invocation of the index is unmistakable.
[ (c) Copyright Kari Kraus 2003]
1. The Graphic Arts (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1882), p. 1.
2. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1976, p. 113.
3. Ashbery's poem, "The Painter," is reproduced in Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1997) p. 319.
4. New York Review of Books, 23 June 1977.
5. See Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts (New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1974) passim.
I made a meatloaf for dinner last night. It's not just that I made a meatloaf, it's that I made a meatloaf in the crockpot. Now I know what you're thinking: Thurston Moore would never eat a meatloaf. Okay, maybe that's not what you're thinking, but that's what Matt was thinking when I told him of my culinary intentions. "Thurston Moore would never eat a meatloaf," he said, adding that Kim Gordon "would make a percussion instrument out of it." Granted, Thurston Moore is too cool for meatloaf. If my stock in cool were greater, I'd have made spanakopita or risotto or, if I were feeling like seafood, maybe grouper served over a bed of black beans and rice with Florida shrimp on the side topped with chipolte sauce. Instead I made a meatloaf. In the crockpot. And you know what? It was pretty damn good.
Tonight we had leftovers.
Just noticed my last entry didn't update in Matt's blogroll. Trying to diagnose the problem . . .
The title of my blog and, more locally, this entry originates with W. W. Greg, whose "Rationale of Copy-Text" remains a touchstone in bibliotextual studies today, some 50+ years after its original publication. Greg called "accidentals" those features of an author's work--spelling, punctuation, style--generally regarded as contingent rather than constuitive. In his textual universe, they were distinguished from "substantives," or linguistic content, the real locus of authorial meaning. Greg found it useful to differentiate the two types of codes--bibliographic and linguistic, accidental and substantive--for reasons editorial in nature, too involved to go into here. But the phrase "accidentals and substantives" has to some extent lost its moorings in Greg's famous essay and subsequently taken on a life of its own over the course of the last fifteen or so years, becoming a flashpoint in contemporary editorial theory. In one camp you have the elder statesmen of the Greg-Bowers tradition; in the other you have a younger generation of mavericks who hold that accidentals are substantives, a variation on the old saw that the medium is the message. In practice, this line of thinking has given birth to an entire fleet of archival editions, many of them electronic, of such canonical figures as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. One of the distinguishing marks of these archives is that they are image-based: by providing high-resolution images of original works of art, they are able to capture both accidentals and substantives with degrees of fidelity unimaginable in the pre-photographic era. Underwriting this reproductive model is the idea that form and content are an organic whole: you can't shoehorn Blake's expansive multimodal works into the cramped codes of letterpress transcription without grave semantic loss. Instead it is incumbent on the editor to transmit the gestalt--both substantives and accidentals--through the ultra-granular medium of photography. Things like font size and style, page layout, white space--all are semantically constuitive of the work.
"Every literary work that descends to us operates through the deployment of a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes, on one hand, and the bibliographic codes on the other." Jerome McGann's double-helix metaphor is familiar to any student of bibliography and textual criticism (The Textual Condition, 1991, p.77). In the context of Matt's entry on the strict separation of style and content in current web-design practice, I am struck by just how "organic" the metaphor is: each of the strands, linguistic and bibliographic, intertwines about a common textual axis. The free variation of style in electronic environments--the ease with which one skin can be swapped out for another--throws a monkey wrench into contemporary editorial theory. It will be interesting to see how textual theorists respond to it.
In an entry on artist programmers over at GrandTextAuto, Michael Mateas writes that computers are at core "meaning-making machines":
"Fundamentally, the computer is a meaning machine. Inside the computer, long meaningless chains of causally-linked physical events take place. The magic lies in the fact that these meaningless events inside the machine can be connected to the world of human meaning – correspondences can be established such that we can read the computer’s behavior as meaningful."
I'm not a programmer, but for me this idea recollects a basic linguistics tenet known as "duality of patterning" or, alternately, "double articulation." Double articulation denotes the structural organization of natural languages, thought to consist of two abstract levels: a lower level made up of segments of sound (phonemes), and a higher level of morphemes and words. Segments are generally regarded as meaningless in and of themselves until they combine to form morphemes. The locus of meaning is thus this upper level. I wonder if double articulation isn't useful crossover terminology for capturing Michael's sense of a double-tiered structure in programming, a "meaningless" level of "causally linked physical events" that "connect" to form "human meaning."
If blurring the line between natural and artificial languages in this way is reckless, it is also, to some extent, normative. "Algorithm" receives an entry in
David Crystal's standard dictionary of linguistics--and not in the context of linguistic computing, but rather with reference to the formal rules of Chomskyian generative grammar. Makes me wonder what articles are out there that explore the overlapping ontologies of human and computer languages.
It's not a well-appointed blog at the moment, but it looks like I've got basic functionality (thank you, Jason!). I've been thinking about blog metaphors while getting things up and running. Jason compared his to sagging skin in need of fleshing out. After watching Matt blog over the last few months, I've become convinced his is a Sims character dressed up in a blog skin. It's got to be coddled, fed, tended to, played with, and nurtured. But for some reason the image of the Little Prince rooting out his baobabs, tending to his rose, and cleaning out his active volcanoes also springs to mind. My blog is a small plot of earth to be tilled and cultivated.