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."
As part of my dissertation work on media ontology, I've been wondering about the ideal audience for an autographic reproduction. Gravid with information, it seems to presuppose a bionic sensorium: an artificial eye capable of processing wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum that are invisible to its human counterpart; an eye so acute that, like Borges' Funes the Memorius, it can perceive vineyards and grapes in a goblet of wine. Such an eye is delphic, temporally optimized for discerning photonic information about the past or future in the present. My point is that the excesses of the autographic are simply lost on the human visual system, which, as Rudolf Arnheim reminds us, is highly “purposive and selective.” Our eyes scan an image via a series of rapid movements or jumps called saccades, whose purpose is to continually update vision by registering a new area of the visual field onto the depressed part of the retina known as the fovea. Visual continua, then, are processed digitally and temporally: we sample an analogue image over time rather than perceive it _in toto_.
In an experiment jointly sponsored by the National Gallery, London and the Applied Vision Research unit of the University of Derby, scan-paths and fixations of participants looking at Paul Delaroche's 'The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” on a computer screen were recorded using state-of-the-art eye-tracking software. The experiment ingeniously demonstrates that the painting contains a number of visual lodestones that serve to direct the viewer’s attention. Figures and especially faces function as hotspots toward which the eye gravitates. The search patterns are so regular and iterative that they appear like grooves in vinyl or lines etched with acid. As conspicuous as the scan-paths are, however, the vast arid regions of untrod visual ground are even more so. There is an optical debris field here that is impossible to ignore.
Autographic reproduction, however, is patently indifferent to this discriminatory power of the human eye-- indifferent as well to its meaning-making powers. The human visual system is an interpolative machine capable of filling in missing detail, integrating visual information across saccades, and actively producing the world it perceives. Indeed the predictive and generative behavior of both eye and ear have spawned a generation of scientific R&D that computationally models visual and auditory processing using state-of-the-art probability algorithms, notably Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Wordsworth’s poetic formulation antedates the computational one by almost two hundred years: “all the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, / And what perceive.”
In a recent post to the C18 list, Robert Dawson points to an inadvertently ludic phenomenon of the eighteenth-century book trade: texts were sometimes translated into a foreign tongue on the continent only to be translated back into the native language at some later point. He gives the example of Diderot's _le neveau de Rameau_ (_Rameau's Nephew_, a satiric dialogue), which was translated into German by Goethe, and then back-translated into French.
Interesting that the culture and commerce of one generation becomes the parlour game of a later one: the surrealists' various chain games capture something of the spirit (not to mention absurdia) of eighteenth-century translation. And if you listen carefully, you might hear the babel of Enlightenment texts echo in your computer monitor (via Jill) . . .