anthropology

What makes electronic literature interesting for researchers?Maybe not its artistic and literary value, but rather its heuristic value.Indeed electronic literature not only permits previous media to be reexamined (paper for instance), but it also allows several well-established notions to be questioned (cf. figure above) such as:- narrative in narratology;- text in linguistics and semiotics;- figure in rhetorics;- materiality in aesthetics;- grasp in anthropology;- memory in archivistics;- literariness in literary studies…

Exploiting the heuristic value of electronic literature has two consequences:- an evolution of some notions in certain scientific disciplines, and maybe of the disciplines themselves;- a revealing effect regarding both digital technology and interactive and multimedia writing.

Where does electronic literature derive this capacity of interrogation from? From its sometimes hybrid status (paper vs digital) and its internal tensions (static vs dynamic text). Yet we should consider that this heuristic value is also due to the Digital and its properties: the need to be explicit - regarding formats for example - and the tendancy to objectivize the processes. This need to explicit formats and media is obvious for example in the HTML language : the metatags allow information to be given on the file itself, on the way it is to be interpreted and indexed. The media and its various formats are thus verbalized. The Digital entails a form of explicitation, and thus reflexivity, on its own formats and frames of production. It is this explicitation of format which invites us to revisit previous media, or at least to further interrogate what wrongly seemed inherent to the printed media.

Just as the Digital supposes a need for explicitation, the works of electronic literature objectivize certain properties of the literary. In this sense, they play a revealing role. One can even wonder to what extent digital writing may end up using conceptual tools made explicit by literature theoreticians. Let’s take the examples of the categories used by Gérard Genette to characterize the narrative speed : pause, scene, summary and ellipse. In a digital work, we could consider integrating these concepts into a DTD (Document Type Definition). It is indeed in a DTD that the poetics (from the Greek poiesis, meaning “making”) appears. DTDs specific to digital literary works could thus be elaborated, which would unveil their poetics. We would have here the principles of an objectivization of their stylistic devices.

However, electronic literature remains, from an anthropological point of view, “an experience that goes beyond us”, as Bruno Latour would say (« une expérience qui nous dépasse » ). Besides its heuristic value, electronic literature provides an experience of limits.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

"Visualizing Cultures In The Age Of Digital Media" is a hypertextual interactive work designed for DVD, that explores the ways media shape our understanding of cultural places and events. The work incorporates original material on West African performances and events recorded in Ghana as well as clips from a number of early and exemplary documentaries. The project includes an analysis of theories of montage, tropes, visual cognition, and cultural practices within the context of hypermedia and the new technology, bridging the fields of visual studies, cultural studies, media studies, art history, visual anthropology and communication. It suggests new tools and methods of representation available to students, scholars and filmmakers and raises questions about the relationship of language to text and theory to practice in the arts of digital representation.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

Social science in general and anthropology in particular has long attended to core concerns with the structure and form of societies, and with the constant interplay of individual and collective elements. These concerns are obvious: how we understand the emergence and form of human worlds necessitates an approach to creative agency alongside the conditions under which that agency is exercised. As Marx famously wrote in 1852, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’. But recent scholarship in the field of anthropology has taken theorising beyond the familiar impasses of structure and agency through an emphasis on practice (e.g. Bourdieu 1977) and on to the embodied and improvisational nature of knowledge and social action (e.g. Ingold 2000, Hallam & Ingold 2007). Creativity is central here. But creativity conceived not as individual genius (an approach that generates questions about how the individual and the collective collide; one clearly linked to other assumptions Westerners make about the bounded-ness of individual minds, and the proprietary nature of the self), but creativity as an emergent (and necessary) aspect of social relations.

As anthropological study is based in a deep engagement with the potentialities and differences between human life-worlds (e.g. Descola 1994, 2005; Vivieros de Castro 2009, 2010), much of the best anthropological work has taken as its inspiration (and guiding its methodology) ideas and concepts generated in the ethnographic encounter with other traditions, traditions where those concepts of individual boundedness and self-propriety do not dominate. At present this approach is well represented by the work of Marilyn Strathern, whose reformulation of the problems of western epistemology in dialogue with the detailed practices and understandings of people in Melanesia has shown the possibilities not only for understanding other ontological systems, but for this understanding to illuminate core theoretical assumptions and approaches within western society, and in anthropology itself (e.g. Strathern 1988, 2005 etc.). So alongside the recent turn in theorisation, a long standing tradition of questioning assumptions that lie behind our theories is adding to the need to re-think creativity as more than the work of exceptional individual minds.

What this anthropology has made possible is the formulation of conceptual approaches that move us outside and beyond the recurrent divisions between persons and objects, individuals and society, creative genius and slavish replicators.

(Source: Author's introduction)