Inscribed in Ether: New Media Studies Excavates Mysteries of Communication
“…[M]agic is not lost, as it was in the age of enlightened fathers, when the Elf King’s whispering voice became rustling leaves” (Kittler, Discourse 219).
“A trick applied with intelligence can make visual that which is supernatural, invented, or unreal,” Melies quoted by Kittler (GFT 154)
The act of inscription, the production of any part of the human record, is simultaneously a radical individual and communal assertion of a range (or syntagum) of meanings for inscriber and audience in a given paradigm of communication. Leaving one’s mark, either in stone, in ink, in flesh, or in spirit is no easy task.
The “trick” of Melies is the application of the human will and imagination to use embodied (voice, dance for example) and disembodied (chisel, pen, or HTML, for example) technologies to make “visual” in the mind’s eye or on the page or in the ear the producer’s point of view. The structure and function of communication has been continuously in a state of change as people have learned to manipulate, contain, transmit, and store messages intended to close the interpretive gap (defined emotionally, economical, politically, spiritually) between producer(s) and consumer(s).
Responding (in the short-term) to the work of Bruno Latour, Michael John Gorman, Jeffrey Sconce, Robert Brain, Len Manovich, and Jerome McGann (in a March 28 class session) has sparked efforts of mine to respond (in the long-term) more completely to the issues they raise for this moment of emergence for the digital humanities scholar.
McGann models the predicament of the late-twentieth century scholar in what might be read as a kind of stand-up bit of scholarly vaudeville, The Textual Condition. With Charlie Chaplin-like brevity and decisive gesture, McGann models in miniature a larger puzzle: how does the modern scholar accumulate truthful expression given the constraints of the chosen medium in a larger cycle of accumulation of intellectual (and other types) capital. John Michael Gorman’s “immutable mobile” ponders a similar rhythm of “call and response” between producer and work in a given culture of knowledge production. Both vignettes show the gaps in the communication circuit of print communication specifically and the role of the textual scholar to refine the interpretation of scholars whose primary methods and objectives were not those of an editor. The Latourian loop (220, Figure 6.1), the Cybernetic feedback loop (Weiner, N. 84), and the revisions of the textual scholar are linear and circular, confounding students today much like ether (long described as a kind of vortex) confounded scientists of an earlier age.
Sconce, Brain, and Manovich share thematic challenges, constraints, difficulties (a matrix of similarity and difference) among them in their inter-connected disciplines as McGann and Latour share as textual scholars. The puzzles of form faced by the textual scholar become magnified in the mind’s eye of cultural analysts of a different tribe such as Sconce, Brain, and Manovich. The cycle of revisions of both the producer and the consumer of McGann’s conference summary and Latour’s explication of the role (or lack of a role) of pre-printed tools in the observation of Mars’ transept in 17th century Europe become meditations on what “noise” lives in the knowledge production channel when viewed through the lens of mechanized writing tools to record research data (Sconce), and the structure of databases used to interpret and disseminate later generations of those same tools (Manovich). While facing similar barriers to the use and interpretation of communicative forms with simultaneously ether-like linearity and circularity, these two sets of scholars differ in the scope of the application of their ideas when the center of calculation moves closer and closer to the disembodied and the scale of the more modern media explodes the theater of action and meaning from being a set of a few scholars to the means of macro-level, group, mass communication assisted by database-driven communication to whole populations.
Communication has always been associated with the “other worldly.” The higher truths of a society have come from oracles and prophets, from interpreters of dreams. The arts and sciences’ progress in the production of means to automate this essential element of human expression, to externalize it, allows for a business model of Pygmalion proportions. Narcissus’ mirror takes not the form of a shallow pool of water as ancient mirrors were just that, but in the form of telegraphs that pound out, letter out, messages with ghosts or wireless Internet connections that reach out into space with their signal to give the illusion and the reality that your interlocutor thousands of miles and many time zones away sits beside you.
Students of human expression have marveled at that space between, the gap, in which mysteriously meaning is transfered. They stand with their noses pressed to the glass, peering in at the theatrical employment and deployment of one Rube Goldberg after the next. In conversation, on the page, or through the channels of mass communication the energy or effort expended to act becomes the input, and interpretable performance the output. No matter in which discipline, the construction of meaning that holds an audience’s attention is a process that both producers and consumers find mysterious in some manner. The sciences have intellectual control over the physics, the arts control the message, and the spiritual (or the lack of spiritual–or other systems of value and ethics) influences the interpretation—but then each simultaneously has and lacks a piece of the truth that lies elsewhere. A discourse of ether spans the work of ancient philosophers to contemporary scholarly efforts to forward knowledge production using the best of what has gone before, leaving in the ethereal space between trace elements in the human record.
Ether has been to the history and philosophy of science what meta data has been to the information professional: a world between, a portal into the circularity of self-referential systems and the linearity of mass communication via radio, television, and the Internet. Ether holds a unique position in the history of the production of the human record and the human understanding of itself and the cosmos. By what method and with which tools is the Book of Life written, is any meaning inscribed? Has it happened or is it happening? For divine blessing to be written on one’s heart, how does that work? Is the Book of Life (or an analgous source of the highest level of knowledge) written on vellum or with UTF-8? (Is it written at all?) What wonder is a world that contains these multiplicites simultaneously? For the language arts scholar (any student of literary production, reception, interpretation, and application) the multiplicities (the internal and external and the vortex’ linear and circular aspects) of ether reveal new opportunities for collaborative, synthetic, knowledge production.
Ether has defied definition for thousands of years. Is ether in us or in the stars–or both? Like the debate over the wave versus particle theory of light, a definition of ether has challenged understandings of heat, motion, gravity, form, time and space. Indeed, ether could simply be seen as the metaphor invoked to permit those in communication to visualize in a personal way the limits of their knowledge. Yet the fuzziness of ether is not simply a tool to mythologize human ignorance (set completely aside any possibility of the Divine into the landscape). Human efforts at stabilizing expression of the glue of the universe leaves scholars today, who face an increasingly modular, fluid, digital world, to set a new course through the wilds of communication theory and practice. If ether is fairy dust and one does not believe in fairies, substantive interpretive gaps exist. If ether is both analog and digital, how does a generation in the midst of a paradigm shift in literary production (soap operas began on radio, thrived on TV, and emerge today in cell phones; poems are Perl scripts that self-destruct after a single reading) accept a synthesis of forms while material demands of one’s earning potential, the political and economic demands of segmented distribution, and the compartmentalization of knowledge production disciplines (secular and non-secular, artistic and academic, etc., etc.) “makes eyes” at only the mastery and exploitation of the digital? Enter, stage left, the digital humanities scholar: the magic Kittler mentions then indeed is not lost, in fact it is with us still.
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May 7th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Kevin,
This is vigorously written and engaging throughout. By far the most important claim seems to me to be this one: “Ether has been to the history and philosophy of science what meta data has been to the information professional: a world between, a portal into the circularity of self-referential systems and the linearity of mass communication via radio, television, and the Internet.” Ether as metadata: this, indeed, could be the hook for your whole paper. What’s necessary, though, is that you thoroughly historicize the ether, and take the time to walk the reader through the ways in which it has been variously constructed, by who and for what ends.
There’s also a tendency towards totalizing in your writing; can we flatten all inscription, for instance? HTML and ink, stone and keyboard? What does it mean that “Students of human expression have marveled at that space between, the gap, in which mysteriously meaning is transfered.” What, specifically, are you referencing there? Can you offer citations and specific examples? And so forth. This is an ambitious and exciting project, but you will have to do your homework to make it work.
March 5th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
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