actor-network theory

In my earlier research, I have drafted a theory of literary communication using programmable and networked media based on Actor-Network Theory (e.g., “Reassembling the Literary: Toward a Theoretical Framework for Literary Communication in Computer-Based Media”, in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, eds. Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla, pp. 25-70). In this optic, the conceptions of “actor-networks”, or more precisely, the conceptions of distributed agencies and of chains of translations between human and non-human actors provide us with a framework that helps to relate human dispositions and corporeal activities, variable activity roles of human actors in the literary system (as “author”, “editor”, “reader”, etc.), changing media technologies and various literary procedures. The semantic field of “nets” and “networks” acquires a special significance because it stresses the uncertainty about sources of action.

It goes without saying that “electronic literature is situated as an intermedial field of practice between literature, computation, visual and performance art”, as the conference organizers argue appropriately. This does neither mean that literature as a specific medium of expression has come to an end nor that digital media are not suited for literary communication. However, what is still needed is a theory of literature as well as analytical methods that are able to conceive of and to observe “open” and unfinished processes between humans and non-humans that only lead to ephemeral materializations on displays instead of works as “closed” materialized objects. Using approaches from STS, Semiotics and Media Studies as well as from Literary Studies, the proposed paper aims at replacing notions of the “work” with an awareness of the local and temporal emergence of specific material-discursive reconfigurations “for another first next time”. Karen Barad’s elaboration of “posthumanist performativity” suggests that writing and reading practices should be regarded as entangled by a web of “non-human” material-discursive practices (cf. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003), pp. 801-831).

In literary projects such as Stephanie Strickland et al.’s slippingglimpse, John Cayley and Daniel Howe’s The Readers Project, Michael Mateas’s and Andrew Stern’s Façade or Caitlin Fisher’s Andromeda, to name a few, a congealing of physical, semiological, technological etc. agencies can be analyzed in action. Here, subjectivity does not only refer to the experiences of the human recipients, but also to that of the machines, which recursively observe their own operations (cf. Francisco J. Ricardo, The Engagement Aesthetic: Experiencing New Media Art Through Critique). Therefore I propose not to define “the literary” as a special domain but as a “very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, p. 7). I will try to identify particular poetic effects of the brief moment of a network’s “becoming-literary”. From there on, the decisive questions of literary studies need to be brought up again and partially revised:

How do the relationships between “text” (contains letters), “work” (contains texts), “material medium” transform in electronic literature?
How, when, and through what does a specific aesthetic experience develop for the (human) recipient in these associations or entanglements?
How does the translation between the agencies of human actors acting in the “real word” and those of literary characters or actions in the fictional space of a story or an interactive drama like Façade or a Cave installation like Screen or those of an avatar in a computer game take place?

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Traversing a variety of digital and print formats, this critical prelude introduces the possibilities of tracing the networked associations enacted in Heath by Tan Lin. The writing explores Actor-Network-Theory across platforms, considering Heath both as an actor-network in ANT terms and a coterminous mode of sociological accounting. Like ANT, Heath attempts a process of demystification through detailed description, tactical citation, assemblage, and the critical deployment of mediators and their relations, where every actor is understood as network. More directly, this paper traces the ways Heath translates diverse mediators from the digital event (the non-events) of Heath Ledger's death into an actor-network exploiting a material book format. Thus the task of the critic is to crunch the details of these manifold relations as they are situated in Heath — to describe the network enacted through Lin's ambient citations and novelistic formulations.

(Source: Author's abstract)

“Everyone seems to know with what sort of forces and in which sort of materials the social world is made. I have always been struck, on the contrary, by the huge gap between the vast variety of attachments with which people elaborate their different worlds and the limited repertoire we possess in social science to account for them. I found this gap widening even more when I began, thirty years ago, to provide a social explanation of scientific practice. While most people said such an enterprise was clearly non sense; while some of my close colleagues claimed it was, if not easy, at least feasible within the normal limits of the humans sciences, a few friends and I decided to take the enormous difficulties of this task as the occasion to rethink the notions of society and of social explanation. Starting from the new insights of science studies, we have since explored many other domains from technology to health, from market organisations to art, from religion to law, from management to politics. This alternative way of practicing sociology has been called Actor-Network-Theory or ANT. Although it has been widely used, it has also been largely misunderstood — in part because of the ambiguity of the word ‘social’. To clarify those misunderstandings, I thought useful to write an introduction to this small school of thought — or rather to propose my own version of it. In this book I show why sociology may be construed as the science of associations and not only as the science of the social. (Source: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/70)

In two essays, "Toward a Semantic Literary Web" (2006, ONLINE at http://eliterature.org/pad/slw.html) and "Electronic Literature as World Literature" (2010, Poetics Today), I set out a project for identifying literary qualities and marking literature's present transformations within new media. The idea in these essays was to discern aesthetic and communicative qualities that I felt could be carried over to the present (e.g., Goethe's and Marx's unrealized call for the formation of a world literature "transcending national limits"), and those that could easily go missing (e.g., the materially bounded object whose aesthetic can be recognized and repeated by a generation of authors in conversation with one another, and renewed, revised, or renounced by later generations).

Trying to hold onto both of these desirable literary qualities, the aesthetic as well as the communicative, I turn my attention in the present talk to the one place where such conversations are now being staged - not in stand-alone scholarly journals or social media (online or in print) but rather, in databases. Specifically, I consider the open source, open access literary database. I settle on database construction as a necessary scholarly and technical complement to the creation of works, not for wholly archival purposes, but as a condition or destination for present creativity. The electronic database, by granting authors (and their critics) access to present discourse networks and a means of identifying works,opens possibilities that appear unique to literary writing in new media.

One point of reference in my talk will be the Electronic Literature Organization's Electronic Literature Directory (ELD version 2.0). The ELMCIP Knowledge Base, developed in Scandinavia, the U.S., and Europe, offers another, complementary point of entry. Brief descriptions of other literary archives, developed or in development in Montreal, Providence, Siegen, Sydney, and elsewhere, will indicate how interoperability can work at the level of databases, and how literary collaboration might at last begin to work across disciplines and institutions. I argue that the current, wide-ranging database construction (already a trans-disciplinary collaboration among scholars and programmers), is the necessary precondition to the emergence of the electronic 'world literature' that I described some years previously.

Literary works by John Cayley, Jason Nelson, Simon Biggs and others (who turn, or detourne, informatic databases into literary works) will be accessed through the above databases and discussed during the course of the talk.

In two essays, “Toward a Semantic Literary Web” (2006, ONLINE at http://eliterature.org/pad/slw.html) and “Electronic Literature as World Literature” (2010, Poetics Today), I set out a project for identifying literary qualities and marking literature’s present transformations within new media. The idea in these essays was to discern aesthetic and communicative qualities that I felt could be carried over to the present (e.g., Goethe’s and Marx’s unrealized call for the formation of a world literature “transcending national limits”), and those that could easily go missing (e.g., the materially bounded object whose aesthetic can be recognized and repeated by a generation of authors in conversation with one another).

Trying to hold onto both of these desirable literary qualities, I turn my attention in the present talk to the one place where such conversations are now being staged – not in scholarly journals or social media (online or in print) but rather, in databases. Specifically, I consider the open source, open access literary database. I settle on database construction as a necessary scholarly and technical complement to the creation of works, not for wholly archival purposes, but as a condition or destination for present creativity. The electronic database, by granting authors (and their critics) direct access to present discourse networks, opens possibilities that appear unique to literary writing in new media.

One point of reference in my talk will be the Electronic Literature Organization’s  Electronic Literature Directory (ELD version 2.0). The ELMCIP Knowledge Base, developed by Scott Rettberg in Norway, Simon Biggs in Scotland, and colleagues throughout Scandinavia, The U.S., and Europe, offers another, complementary point of entry. Brief descriptions of other literary archives, developed or in development in Montreal, Providence, Siegen, Sydney, and elsewhere, will indicate how interoperability can work at the level of databases, and how literary collaboration might at last begin to work across disciplines and institutions. I argue that the current, wide-ranging database construction (already a trans-disciplinary collaboration among scholars and programmers), is the necessary precondition to the emergence of the electronic ‘world literature’ that I described some years previously.

(Source: Author's abstract for HASTAC 2013)

A review of Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, edited by Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer.

While literature in computer-based and networked media has so far been experienced by looking at the computer screen and by using keyboard and mouse, nowadays human-machine interactions are organized by considerably more complex interfaces. Consequently, this book focuses on literary processes in interactive installations, locative narratives and immersive environments, in which active engagement and bodily interaction is required from the reader to perceive the literary text. The contributions from internationally renowned scholars analyze how literary structures, interfaces and genres change, and how transitory aesthetic experiences can be documented, archived and edited.