Published in American Letters & Commentary 12 (2000): 72-76.

(Invited response to an essay by Stephanie Strickland, for feature "Hypertext: Facts Fictions and the Brave New World.")

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version. Original version copyright (c) 2000 American Letters & Commentary, Inc.

Literature and the Transposition of Media
Brian Lennon

Primarily I am interested in things that don't make sense. But where sense begins and ends is a matter of gradient, and the class-bound security of traditional literary forms notwithstanding, I think that most people who still read at all read for the unknown, and deserve more credit as readers than they may get. From the point of view of literary practice, it seems to me that hypertext utopism--the notion of the revolutionary hyperlink--has had its day, and that creativity in the electronic arts is concentrated, for the moment, in practices of programmed visual and kinetic poetry that have their roots (acknowledged or no) in the experimental typography of the historical avant-gardes (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism) and European modernism, as well as the internationalist Concrete poetry of the 1950s. This is due in part, no doubt, to accelerations in the programmability of Web browsers and the spread of high-speed Internet access, but also, I think, to the transformation of that utopian link-click into the "submit" button on a credit-card-accepting e-commerce page. Indeed, the new advertising bears a discomfiting resemblance, at times, to the new, technically dynamic Web-based art--Web artists' frequent corporate freelancing being no trade secret here. Which suggests, perhaps, that programmed "code poetries," the forms of the moment, will suffer a similarly pained relation to utopia (and/or apocalypse) as did hyperfiction, which has been hyped and debunked, and hyped and debunked again, at dizzying net-speed. At its best, hypertext literature has been a specific, and specifically prolific, meeting of science and art, furnishing a pragmatics for poststructuralist cultural theories that, lacking concretion, had always been mocked as the imaginings of crazed academics. At worst--and for the same reasons--it's been merely an alternative, in the rapidly emptied sense of "alternative music" or "alternative lifestyle" (both of which require a fabulous Midwest of the imagination as point of contrast).

A touch of polemic, perhaps. Yet, as Strickland clearly implies, it's the hype about hypertext, not hypertext's actual practice, that might be (might need to be) questioned. I don't mean to displace attention from those currently extending hypertext literature's original, pure-lexical models into the dynamic visual/iconic--indeed, all this is finally more a matter of mediatic evolution (the evolution of what is technically possible) than of aesthetic strategy per se, which moots the "discerning" wheat-from-chaff function of criticism. What N. Katherine Hayles has recently termed "media-specific analysis" might see hypertext at once in its (contingent) "uniqueness," and at the same time in its "remediation"--imitation, quotation, citation--of historically antecedent forms. An important task now presents itself to the contemporary critic--who need not, in the tradition, be an academic, failed artist, or other outsider (if criticism is usually time-lagged by art practice, this is, I would suggest, because artists are taught that if they theorize, they will lose the ability to "do" art, which is like worrying that if you talk too much you will lose the ability to sing). As the globalization of "information glut" (the information glut of globalization?) makes it more and more difficult to keep track of what's going on, where, new media artists and writers ought not to decline the job of articulating roles for information culture in an information economy whose ultimate logic is information war. For the moment, such a criticism has found its avatar in the apocryphal "integer" (http://m9ndfukc.com/), whose anarchosocialist sloganeering ("m9ndfukc macht fre! korporat fasc!zm macht ganz gluckl!ch + fre!") is a redoubtable presence on the Net (anti-)art "scene" today. It seems likely also that the influential literary artists, if not of the present generation then of the next, will also be programmers--a proposition sure to chill any romantic heart, and not entirely without, yet also not entirely with, good reason. I mean that these writers will be capable of far more than the manipulation of a markup language. If "avant-garde" is to mean anything today--and I am not entirely certain that it should--it will have to address the complexity with which the paradigms and products of computer science are changing the arts and humanist knowledge generally, as well as taking this change seriously, imagining both new social enrichments and social horrors to come: mere Gutenberg elegies will not do.

That said, it is the paradoxes and regressions of media--"remediations"--which interest me, far more than their utopian-futurist contours. Print culture and electronic media continue to interact, crossbreed, surge and ebb across and through each other in patterns that are mutually repressive and stimulating at the same time, and one would almost, at this point, have to include within a poetics of media the notion of a psychoanalysis of media: their critical treatment as massively conflicted inventions. A contemporary "betweenus" or "Zwischen" is currently populated on the one hand by print poetries radically animated by data, and on the other by code poetries that import and renovate humanist traditions like the lyric. Strickland's observation that "the existence of a work in two or more media, in itself, allows one to induce translation or transformation rules" suggests a more crucial role for contemporary poetry, and for cultural criticism, than simply "looking ahead": for what happens when (as in a recent first volume of poems by Jena Osman) a work created in and for the electronic medium then evolves "backward" onto the page? To say "it all clicks" is purely mendacious. From this vantage, Walter Benjamin's claim that "the basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state [of] his own language... instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue" opens new avenues for mongrel media as platforms for extruded static, noise, interference, and regression--in a word, poetry--in the line and life of the work of art. Strickland's own True North, among other works, continues to live out a double life as static book and dynamic e-text, seemingly unwilling to rest on the laurels (which are considerable) of either.

The task, then, is not only to notice proto-cybertexts like Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, but also to think about what it means to produce a version of digital art for plain old paper. It seems to me naïve to avow that printed books will someday finally disappear. I suspect, rather, that writers will retain a print aesthetic in the model kit of literature, not out of technophobia (though this will often be the case), but because its analog technology, like so many others, is less being replaced by digital technology, in our time, than being crossbred with it. The art I love is sumptuous paradox--complexity, contradiction, reversion, interference, noise--and how could I fail to notice the obdurate messiness of "mixed media," its unsortable universe of mingled attachments? The decorative brass clock hangs over the late-model PC not as a token of the (linearly) obsolete, but because the logic and the illogic of their compatibility are one. Hypertext utopism risks coming to ruin if it can't see not only where its structures were in print, but where they will be when the next nextness arrives. Shelley, writing Prometheus Unbound among the ruins of the Caracalla Baths, found that "poets... are in one sense the creators and in another the creations of their age": our own cultural criticism now stands facing Internet ruins--expired sites, abandoned languages, Strickland's "dump of dead media"--as the future inscriptions of what we have most recently, with psychoanalytic thought, termed desire.

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