listening to repeating

So, I’ve been working on an abstract for my dissertation project, tentatively titled “Media Ecology and Its Cultural Histories.”  A draft is below.  Here, I’m drawing upon Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past and Matthew Fuller’s Media Ecologies, among others.

Enjoy…?

My project, which is a genealogy of the relationships between sound reproduction technologies and Anglo-American literature (1874-2005), historicizes media interaction as a culturally embedded, aesthetic practice.  Engaging media ecology’s oft-cited affiliations with ideologies of humanist environmentalism and technological determinism, the project aims to de-naturalize sense experiences and contextualize them in the emergence of new media.  By mapping media aesthetics onto cultural studies, my method explores how literary production blends with the telegraph, phonograph, magnetic tape, and MP3.  I select these technologies because the environmentalist and determinist tendencies of media ecology are frequently mobilized through sound, which becomes synonymous with the immediate and ephemeral experience.  However, my research demonstrates how sound reproduction technologies exteriorize sound—storing, transmitting, and manipulating it in tangible ways that are not only comparable to print, but also intermediate sound production with literary production.  My project situates these intermediations in particular media ecologies to study the variability of media and historical changes in sense experiences.  Consequently, rather than articulating a history where senses remain constant over time, or where technology determines how people perceive change, my genealogy stresses differences in perception across contextualized media ecologies and argues that media interaction enables creative and critical interpretations of technology.

I’ve been working on a condensed version of my research interests before I flesh out the prospectus for my dissertation. That said, here’s a draft:

As a PhD candidate in English at the University of Washington, my research interests are framed around three primary areas of study: sonic modernity, the digital humanities, and science and technology studies. My dissertation research, in particular, emerges from the argument that most approaches to digital media and humanities computing are subtended by visual paradigms of knowledge-making, which tend to stress, for example, the stable space of the page, the architecture of typography, and the mass reproduction of images. With this premise in mind, I am in the process of writing a critical genealogy of sound technologies in the 19^th and 20^th centuries in order to not only diversify and enrich approaches to literary criticism, but to also augment and make more complex our existing understanding of digital media and their relation to the senses. For this project, my primary artifacts are novels, poetry, and other forms of fiction, including 19^th century telegraphic fiction, Harlem Renaissance novels, and mid-20^th century experiments with magnetic tape conducted by writers. The time periods in which these artifacts materialize are crucial, if nothing else, because they correspond with the rise of specific sound technologies. My investment, however, is in exploring how these technologies—the telegraph, the phonograph, and magnetic tape, in particular—intermediated with new ways of writing, storing, and transmitting experiences, especially those experiences where the interpretive agent is ambiguous or difficult to locate. Indeed, in a post-press, pre-Internet era, new sound technologies did more than allow for the mass reproduction and circulation of sounds. They helped produce new forms of materiality, movement and embodiment. And by unpacking these new forms through a critical genealogy, I hope to conclude my dissertation with a chapter on what that genealogy suggests today for the creative and democratic uses of digital technologies.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time now. It’s about the spring course, “Animating 1919,” and, more specifically, a collaborative digital media project that emerged from that course. One of the groups in the class did something really, really smart: They animated the first newsreel from Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel using Flash and some serious attention to the physical text itself. Here’s the final video:

What I like about it is that it’s Flash without being flashy. They kept it simple and deliberate, and, what’s more, they were able to frame it around questions about materiality and texture. The texture of the digital. Digital texture, as they called it. I like that. A lot.

Why? Well, for one, it refrains from rendering digital media “flat” or without depth, as if they don’t have a materiality of their own. Also, it lays bare the connections and intermediations that can be made across textual studies and digital humanities research. These are overlaps that I never imagined being interested in; nevertheless, what this video does so well is capture the material richness of language and the printed text and make it move. In so doing, it demands a new type of reading (of the text in multiple materialities), highlighting the simultaneity and noisiness of Dos Passos’s newsreel without even using sound.

To situate the project on the institutional and pedagogical registers, it is, I think, an example of what Alan Liu wonderfully refers to as “Literature+.” Not only did it involve collaboration, the creative use of digital technologies, and the synthesis of technical skills with critical competencies, but it also demands interdisciplinary acts of interpretation and making—of working with, across and through texts, their materiality and cultural embeddedness, and how they make meaning over time, in time.

What I’m getting at is that digital humanities trajectories like this one need not be reduced to fetishizing technologies and all things new and 2.0. They can be, sure. However, where they are truly productive is in their process of making a digital texture that’s about more than interfaces.

I’ve emerged from my exams and am posting the introductions for each of my three responses. Here’s the third, from list one: “Anglo-American Modernism.” All footnotes have been removed. For whatever reason, if you have want the balance, then just email me.

Reading Gramophonically: Noise, Intermediation and Poetic Form

Young Greenberg forgot his gramophone.  True, it was the medium he was after; however, that medium wasn’t the media.  We could put it another way.  He had eyes and ears for the singular and the pure; it was noise he abated.  That required some detachment.  In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” he argues that, “The nonrepresentational or ‘abstract,’ if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original” (29).  This discipline—this purposeful, abstract character of art and poetry—is precisely where the two earn their autonomy from “common, extroverted experience” (29).  And as Juan Suárez observes in Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday, the site of Greenberg’s modern aesthetics is located in “traditional materials (or media) of artistic expression” (125), including music, painting and literature.  Of course, Greenberg is correct to include these traditional media; nonetheless, per Suárez, what was once new media, such as the gramophone, was also influential in the modernist avant-garde scene.  One of Suárez’s goals, then, is to show how new media, as well as popular culture, played a significant role in how we currently understand cultural production in various modernisms.  From my reading, he succeeds, and he does so through a multimedia archive of Anglo-American modernism.  Given the range of his archive, however, mobilizations of Suárez’s arguments could be more concentrated, particularly in the study of poetry.  To this end, in this essay I further Pop Modernism through a comparative approach to poetic form, with noise as my refrain. First, I replicate what might be called a Greenbergian formalism by reading four avant-garde poems through the lens of the traditional media, specifically music, that Greenberg identifies in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.”  I then give Greenberg his gramophone by re-reading those same poems through what I refer to as “reading gramophonically.”  While neither of these approaches relies upon the psychobiographical intent of the author, each requires situating poetry in a distinct position.  The former demands that poetry is self-reflexive, self-contained, and harmonious.  It is poetry for the sake of poetry.  The latter articulates poetry as a noisy intermediation that hiccups or pops along the way.  Both are media.  One is a machine.

Works Cited:

Greenberg, Clement.  ”Avant-Garde and Kitsch.”  Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. 3-21.

Suárez, Juan Antonio. Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2007.

Dear Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (hereafter referred to, in the soup fashion, as “YHCHI”):

I’ve been reading your moving words and taking notes on your Flash styles. I also read an interview (conducted by Thom Swiss) in The Iowa Review, which ends with your saying:

There’s a tendency to read quickly on the Internet. Speed is everything, and densely written texts, be they creative or critical, seem to make the reader anxious — maybe because of the phone bill. Then again, maybe another reason for the dearth of critical Web writing is that there’s nothing to criticize — Web writing might not be very good.

Well, I’ll tell you this, YHCHI: your web writing is quite good, particularly in all of its consistency–sticking to language, forgetting about graphic design, and maintaining (unlike some of us) an engaging aesthetic across your work.

And in light of the “Animating 1919″ class, the 2008 SIAH on “Media and the Senses,” and, generally speaking, my growing interest in mapping the digital humanities onto Anglo-American modernism, I’m glad to see that critics are picking up your work and writing about it, namely Jessica Pressman, in “Reading the Code between the Words: The Role of Translation in Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Nippon” (in dichtung-digital nr. 37).

The future of the past, in motion, is looking good.

Tho I need to take my time with these moving words and watch each one again, right now “Beckett’s Bounce”, “The Art of Silence” and “Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site” (ENGLISH, K0REAN, FRANCAIS, or ESPAN0LA) are top on my shelf.

But, to answer your question, at least in regards to my own cyberpractices, I AM! That said, let me stop wasting your time. I know that you–and everyone else–are in quite a hurry.

Yours truly,

The Cyber Selfish

I’m looking for a translation of the prefix to the third section of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” That prefix reads:

I understand that the quote comes from Aristotle’s De Anima (or On the Soul); however, I have not found consistency in the translations. The most common, it seems, is: “No doubt the mind is something divine and not subject to external impressions.” Anyone else have a translation?  The same?  A different one?

I also just realized that there are some interesting connections with Eliot’s 1919 “halt at the frontier of metaphysics” and the course on animating 1919. Those connections are not quite what I originally had in mind, either, namely the potential associations of animation with the mobilization of an essence and its attendant ideologies (e.g., the essential canon for which Eliot might argue). Of course, a theory of animation does not have to follow that line of inquiry.  Nevertheless, I now realize that particular line is a possible reading of the course.

But the translation? Anyone?