Article in a print journal

“And one should understand tact, not in the common sense of the tactile, but in the sense of knowing how to touch without touching, without touching too much, where touching is already too much.” Jacques Derrida

A “hasty conclusion”, perhaps, as stated by Derrida, yet, one that was (and still is) able to cause an intense discussion among philosophers. In his questioning of touch, Derrida draws on Jean Luc Nancy’s philosophy of touch, particularly on the latter’s paradox of intangible tangibility, as a way to explore a slightly different meaning of the verb haptein (to be able to touch, to grab, to attach, to fasten), but also meaning “to hold back, to stop” (Nancy [2003]: 2008, 15).

By contrast, the intensification of research media devices that summon tactile/haptic functions, along with efforts to increase tangibility in the Human-Machine Interface (Gallace & Spence: 2014, 162), are often attached to literalizations and instrumentalizations of touch and gesture that seem to obliviate a long tradition in philosophy dedicated to these aporias. First, by representing touch and gesture as a superficial contact; second, by making promises of presence, transparency and intimacy that often resemble a fetishised and ancestral need of direct access to knowledge by means of tactility.

Calling attention to the non-superficiality of touch and gesture, there is evidence of a branch of digital literary works particularly concerned with multisensory perception in digital multimodal environments. Making use of a contercultural and metamedial poetics largely influenced by early avantgarde artistic proposals, these works enable us to question the ways we read and write in digital interfaces by means of another paradox: an intended loss of grasp in order to raise awareness.

Concerning digital interfaces’ transparency and ubiquity, Lori Emerson states that “[a]ll of these interfaces share a common goal underlying their designs: to efface the interface altogether and so also efface our ability to read, let alone write, the interface, definitely turning us into consumers rather than producers of content.” (Emerson: 2014, 1) Still, for Emerson there is some light at the end of the tunnel, namely by means of this “growing body of digital literature” that courts “difficulty, defamiliarization, and glitch as antidotes (…) against what ubicomp has become” (id.: 2), the “nearly pervasive multi-touch interface” included. (id.: 4) Such “antidotes” can be resumed to the aforementioned loss of grasp (for instance, glitch as a visual loss of grasp), a necessary

condition in order to raise awareness. However, taking into account specific materialities of digital devices, in spite of a continuity of disruptive operations of estrangement, we may ask what are the differences between previous understandings of “loss of grasp” and the ones enabled by digitality.

Loss of Grasp is also the title of a digital literary work of art, created by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert (2010). Briefly described by its authors as “an online digital creation about the notions of grasp and control”, Loss of Grasp is an interactive narrative featuring a character who paradoxically loses grasp as he tries to have a grip on his life. Serving as a metaphor for the ways we tend to see functionality and transparency (for instance in digital multimodal environments), the subject is led towards a gradual state of awareness that only becomes possible by a total loss of grasp.

I argue that close-readings of such works of digital literature may help us to better understand what are the consequences of touch and gesture in contact with digital interfaces.

This paper argues that attending to the tropes of circularity featuring in print-based literature proves to be a useful foil for an analysis of electronic literature. Based on the idea that digital literary mechanisms do not obliviate previous circularity-inducing structuring motifs in analog literature, such as labyrinths, chess, rivers, and clockwork, this argument arrives at a crucial time for literature, which is currently the object of intensified debates on beginnings and ends, especially in the context of digitality and multisensory perception becoming central to some aspects of its processes. Accordingly, circular motion is here analysed in its depiction and actuation across several kinds of literary / literal machines, in reflection also on how sensory perception both mediate and is mediated. If literature is conditional upon a series of unique, though interconnected, mechanisms, it seems reasonable not to discard a certain circularity of the senses that is brought into play there and, indeed, given both thematic and formal substance in analog and digital works. In other words, representations generated at the confluence of both biological and technological bodies cannot but instigate a circularity on which they are dependent: an idea which this article examines and critiques with reference to canonical and electronic literature, particularly Borges, Beckett, and Joyce.

As the genre is still unknown to many in the Netherlands, this article serves as an introduction to computer-generated poetry in the Dutch-language field of literary studies. Via an analysis of the canonical Taroko Gorge (Montfort) and its remixes, the article considers how three characteristics of generative poetry - namely temporality, overwriting, and remixing - play with the idea of authorship.

Throughout this paper, I argue for a reapplication of those theories set out by George Bornstein in Material Modernism. More specifically, I suggest that Bornstein's work should be considered in the context of the textual and literary constructs of the digital age. I begin with an account of those elements from Bornstein's argument that I consider to be of most relevance to this particular discourse, giving particular consideration to what he refers to as the ‘bibliographic code.’ I argue that this notion has gathered fresh momentum now that its potential has been enhanced through new forms of computer-based media. What the material modernists of the modernist movement sought to achieve with the material elements of their works, contemporary scholars and critics can seek to replicate and explore with greater clarity and creativity. The bibliographic code has gained new importance, as the degree by which it can be manipulated, I argue, has been extended significantly.

The article considers "first generation digital objects" from the standpoint of textual studies, considering "digital media themselves from the specific vantage points of bibliography and textual criticism." Kirschenbaum discusses in detail different editions of Michael Joyce's afternoon and Deena Larsen's work in editing an edition of William Dickey's electronic poetry in HyperCard.

Fitting the Pattern is an interactive, animated ‘memoir in pieces,’ that explores aspects of my relationship with my mother, a dressmaker. The design of the user-interface repurposes sewing patterns and their instructional symbols to fuse the interactive process into the narrative world. The familiar mouse pointer is restyled as a series of digital dressmaking tools so the reader becomes actively involved in cutting through memories, pinning down facts, stitching fabrications and unpicking the past. Thus the reader becomes repurposed as the tailor who brings it all together to make the pattern fit the cloth of narrative coherence.

So now I will untangle various repurposed threads of Fitting the Pattern and expand upon these themes.

Programmable computation is radically transforming the contemporary media ecology. What is literature's future in this emergent Programming Era? What happens to reading when the affective, performative power of executable code begins to provide the predominant model for creative language use? Critics have raised concerns about models of affective communication and the challenges a-semantic affects present to interpretive practices. In response, this essay explores links between electronic literature, affect theory, and materialist aesthetics in two works by experimental writer and publisher William Gillespie.

Focusing on the post-digital novel Keyhole Factory and the electronic speculative fiction Morpheus: Bilblionaut, it proposes that: first, tracing tropes of code as affective transmissions allows for more robust readings of technomodernist texts and, second, examining non-linguistic affect and its articulation within constraint-based narrative forms suggests possibilities for developing an affective hermeneutics.

My project was prompted by calls for more in-depth critical interpretations of works of electronic literature; an appreciation of how Gillespie problematises tropes of proximity and distance used to characterise modes of critical reading; and a desire to explain Gillespie's commitment to both conceptual, constraint-based writing practices (facilitated by computational media) and the intentional production of meaningful narrative affect. Ultimately, my analyses showcase Gillespie's countertextual achievement: assembling a network of texts, both electronic and analogue, that functions as a literary ecosystem resistant to the instrumentalism of the neoliberal publishing industry. Gillespie's Spineless Books provides an exemplary model of and working platform for collaborative, conceptual, and countertextual literary writing across media.

(Source: Author's Abstract)