Interview with N. Katherine Hayles, continued

LG: Is this instantiation of a work in a medium what you've called "materiality," or is "the material" another category you think about in newly specific ways? I guess I'm worried that many critics are using the word to mean many different (and different amounts of) things. Is the materiality of a text the literal fact of its existence in one medium or another, or is it some range of forensic properties that help to produce its meaning?

NKH: Materiality, as I use the term, does not simply mean all the physical, tangible aspects of the construction, delivery and reading apparatus. Rather materiality is a selective focus on certain physical aspects of an instantiated text that are foregrounded by a work's construction, operation, and content. These properties cannot be determined in advance of the work by the critic or even the writer. Rather, they emerge from the interplay between the apparatus, the work, the writer and the reader/user.

Determining what counts as the materiality of a given work is thus both a creative act by the writer and an interpretive act by the user, as well as an engagement of the cognitive properties of an intelligent machine for texts written and implemented on a computer. I don't see this as a cause for anxiety. Materiality has always been in play, even when it was relatively suppressed within literary criticism by considering the work an immaterial verbal construction. In works that foreground their interaction with materiality --"technotexts" is the term I have coined for such works--the material properties are actively constructed by the text and made resonant with significance, becoming semiotically important components of the text's meaning-making processes.

LG: I think I had misunderstood your use of the term and see how rich the notion of materiality as a textual practice can be, in effect, as something that happens rather than something that exists, almost like opening the notion of reader response criticism wide enough to let the varied and variable conditions of the medium in. This seems directly related to the work of what you call the "flickering signifier." Is that right?

NKH: When I coined the phrase "flickering signifier," I had in mind a reconfigured relation between the signifier and signified than that which had been previously articulated in critical and literary theory. As I have argued elsewhere, the signifier as conceptualized by Saussure and others was conceived as unitary in its composition and flat its structure. It had no internal structure, whether seen as oral articulation or written mark, that could properly enter into the discourse of semiotics.

When signifiers appear on the computer screen, however, they are only the top layer of a complex system of interrelated processes. Marks on screen may manifest themselves as simple inscriptions to a user, but properly understood they are the visible, tangible results of coding instructions executed by the machine in a series of interrelated processes, from a high-level programming language like Java all the way down to assembly language and binary code.

I hoped to convey this processural quality by the gerund "flickering," to distinguish the screenic image from the flat durable mark of print or the blast of air associated with oral speech. The signifier on screen is, as you know, a light image produced by a scanning electron beam. The screen image is deeply layered rather than flat, constantly replenished rather than durable, and highly mutable depending on processes mobilized by the layered code, as for example when a writer uses Flash to create animation or layers that move. These qualities are not merely ornamental but enter profoundly into what the marks signifier and, more importantly, how they signify. We need a theory of semiotics that can account for all the qualities connoted by "flickering."

LG: In my work I've been trying to work through what that semiotics might mean for history,--not the gee-whiz we're making history sort of history, but rather the history that historians do, the disciplinary practice of history. Do you have any suggestions on that score? Clearly there are mutual changes emerging between the literary and its subjects, and your work is crucial to explaining how that's happening. But what about mutual changes that may be emerging between history and its subjects? What if, for instance, the Macy Conferences you discuss in Posthuman had all been on-line proceedings instead of stenographically recorded and then printed in proceedings? In short, mustn't cybernetics have emerged the way it did because of ITS (decidedly non-cybernetic) materiality somehow?

NKH: It remains an ironic fact that our most durable record of information processes and digital writing are print inscriptions. The deeper we advance into digital technologies, the more apparent it becomes that print is a far superior medium for archival purposes.

I think we are still sorting out our relation to the important and intractable problems of digital archiving. I am especially concerned with building and conserving an archive of electronic literature, in a technological environment where any electronic work is likely to be unplayable in 3-5 years, certainly by a decade. How will we achieve the depth, breadth, and quality of the print archive--a treasure store without which the practice of literature would be unthinkable--for electronic works? This crucial issue is currently being addressed by a number of organizations, including museums, text-encoding initiatives, and in the case of literature, the Electronic Literature Organization. Historians accept the idea that without an archive, the discipline would be impossible. The same goes for literature. >>

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