mutability

The term "new media" is a current buzzword among scholars and in the media industry, referring to the ever-multiplying digitized modes of film/image and sound production and distribution. Yet how new, in fact, are these new media, and how does their rise affect the role of older media? What new theories allow us to examine our culture of ubiquitous electronic screens and networked pleasures? Is a completely new set of perspectives, concepts, and paradigms required, or are older modes of discussion about the relationship between technology and art still adequate? This book reconsiders the seminal work of German media theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Kracauer in order to explore today's rapidly changing mediascape, questioning the naive progressivism that informs much of today's discourse about media technologies. The contributions, by internationally-recognized critics from a variety of academic fields, encourage a view of the history of media as structured by difference, complexity, and multiplicity. Together, they offer intriguing ways of understanding the changed position of media in today's Germany and beyond. Contributors: Nora M. Alter, Michel Chaouli, Diedrich Diederichsen, Sabine Eckmann, Margit Grieb, Boris Groys, Juliet Koss, Richard Langston, Lev Manovich, Todd Presner, Juliane Rebentisch, Carsten Strathausen. Lutz Koepnick is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies, and Erin McGlothlin is Associate Professor of German and Jewish Studies, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Source: Publisher's Peritext

As Ludwig Wittgenstein observes in Culture and Value, “a work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself.” My paper uses the Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy (OLP) perspective to show how e-lit works often encourage a coalescence of various uses of the word ‘meaning’ in literary contexts. Beside the transitive meaning [what something means], the word “meaning” can be intransitively used in at least three different ways, denoting (1) value [how much something means], (2) a specific Gestalt [meaning as expressive of a specific structure], or (3) an (apparent) appropriateness [something as meaningful element]. The difficulty to neatly separate these uses during e-reading can be put in relation with the reconfiguration of our reading experience in terms of what Anna Munster calls inter-facialization.

Digital works, in fact, often visually offer themselves to the reader as organic entities
interweaving permanence and mutability, i.e. as so-called changing expressive Gestalts whose
configurations of words are purposefully meant to undergo readjustments and modulations. “Facing” digital literary works as wholes can produce for readers, in Wittgenstein’s terms, “the same strange illusion which we are under when we seem to seek the something which a face expresses whereas, in reality, we are giving ourselves up to the features before us.” Far from the reductionist “friendly face” and “interface erasure” dynamics discussed by Munster in relation to users, I use Annie Abrahams’s Separation/Séparation, Stuart Moulthrop’s Deep Surface, and other e-lit works as duck-rabbit models able to show how the interface condition (“facing” digital literary works as wholes) is itself an impermanent one. Besides ‘contact surface’ (Brenda Laurel), “obstacle” (Donald Norman), or “space for interaction” between entities (Joanna Drucker), e-literary interface can be construed – from the OLP perspective – as a flickering entity in relation to the variegated language-games we enact in relation to the word “meaning”.

Such construction can also help in framing the artistic use of the contemporary
computing idiolect in so-called Codework by Alan Sondheim, Mez, Talan Memmott, John Cayley and
others within Wittgenstein’s view of thinking (speaking) as an activity governed by rules and procedures. Although carefully crafted in written form, some of the Philosophical Investigations’ remarks can be seen as examples of a ‘mind at work’. The procedural aspects of Wittgensein’s writing can therefore reconfigure our reading experience into paying attention to the indiscernible interconnection of value, appropriateness, and expressiveness mentioned above. Well beyond the dualistic signifier/signified conceptualization, reading Codework can therefore be constructed as facing snapshots of the thinking (i.e., speaking) process with consequences that are contingent on the various language-games we enact in facing algorithmic 'meaning[ful(ness)]'. In conclusion, by using OLP, my paper brings the issue of where to find e-literature, strongly encouraged by the ELO 2012 conference theme, in close contact with what we are actually able to see in front of us (i.e. to face) as the ‘object’ of the e-criticism’s search.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

Looking specifically at the genre of adaptive narrative, this article explores the future ofliterature created for and with computer technology, focusing primarily on the trope of mutability as it is played out with new media. Some of the questions asked are: What can the medium of a work of literature, that is its material aspect, tell us about the text? About character? What can it possibly matter if narrative is recounted on papyrus, retold on parchment and rag, and then remediated in pixels? Isn’t it the message carried by the medium we are most concerned with, stable or unstable the process of inscription, reinscription, encoding and decoding, translation and remediation? This paper speculates about possibilities rather than attempts to answer these questions, but the structuring and mean-making components considered here stand as examples of some we may want to think about when developing future theories about literature – and all types of writing –generated by and for electronic environments.

Source: Author's Abstract