line

A line is a string of letters, and letters are the "atoms" of textual materiality. Letters build words and lines in a manner that allows far greater significance and affect to emerge from modulation in processes of compositional or programmatological generation.

Linemakers, poets and writers generally, have long lost all claims to a mastery loaned to them by so-called print culture, by the discourse network of 1800. They must once again serve the literal matter of language, and as such they must serve the machine: typewriter, word processor, programmaton. Its literal symbolic materiality should, in turn, be recognised as intrinsically and necessarily, not only historically or momentarily, engaged with the entire gamut of cultural production that emerges from the generalised, networked use of programmable machines.

... [Kittler] provides us with one of the most sophisticated arguments explaining the most recent recasting and downplaying of the materiality of language, the subordination of line to pixel, in the context of so-called digital art and culture. How can one justify an engagement with verbal art, with language, when symbolic manipulation may be indistinguishable from the machinic symbolic? It's far too tempting for workers in sound and light to adopt this supposition or to proceed with their work on its basis, in a hypercool posthuman irrational.

Kittler's statement that there "would be no software if computer systems were not surrounded by an environment of everyday languages," (my emphasis) is crucial and telling. They are so surrounded.

I'm trying, as it were, to turn our attention from lines of verse to the letters of literal art and to place the latter in a significant constructive relationship with the pixels of digital graphic art. My argument is that the material manipulation of pixels derives, culturally, from an underlying gasp of the manipulation of letters.

For me digital characterises any system of transcription with a finite set of agreed identities as its elements. It follows that such a system allows: (1) programmatological manipulation of its constitutive elements (without any threat to their integrity); (2) invisible or seamless editing of cultural objects composed from these elements; and (3) what we now call digital ("perfect") reproduction of such objects.

The world of letters has played a crucial role in the development of digital art and culture. Text is indeed "the web's primary and foundational media" and the artists of texts are poets.

Much of the novel's alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last. Of course, through print's long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line's power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic, not to exclude the form's father, Cervantes himself. But true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text.

Although hypertext's champions often assail the arrogance of the novel, their own claims are hardly modest.

With hypertext we focus, both as writers and as readers, on structure as much as on prose, for we are made aware suddenly of the shapes of narratives that are often hidden in print stories. The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create.

How does one resolve the conflict between the reader's desire for coherence and closure and the text's desire for continuance, its fear of death? Indeed, what is closure in such an environment? If everything is middle, how do you know when you are done, either as reader or writer? If the author is free to take a story anywhere at any time and in as many directions as she or he wishes, does that not become the obligation to do so?