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Is There a Message in the Medium? The Materiality of Language
The initial argument of this essay is absurdly simple, obvious, literal: language must be embodied and thus its particular medium is—literally, ontologically—the matter, the flesh, the materiality of any message that it articulates. Marshall McLuhan urged us to recognize that media signify, that the matter in which the message is embodied also traces differences that were already what we have come to call ‘writing’ in a poststructuralist, Derridean sense: grammatological practices. However, McLuhan’s copula was not ontological. It expressed a concern that these other, parallel messages were more significant than any linguistic message they embodied. This same anxiety has reached a kind of apotheosis in recent criticism of digital literature—from Christopher Funkhouser and Roberto Simanowski—revenant as no less than our ancient fear of cannibalism. The message of the medium literally consumes the materiality of language: its own body, flesh of its flesh. But this cannibalism would only be literal—and thus taboo, thus truly terrifying—if McLuhan’s copula were ontological.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 30.08.2011 - 12:34
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A Topographical Approach to Re-Reading Print Books About Islands in Digital Literary Spaces
This paper interrogates the ‘topic’ of islands displaced from print books into digital literary spaces through a discussion of a web-based work of digital literature ...and by islands I mean paragraphs (Carpenter 2013) http://luckysoap.com/andbyislands/ In this work a reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space veined blue by a background image of graph paper. Whereas horizontally lined loose leaf or foolscap offers a guide for linear hand writing, horizontally and vertically lined graph paper offers a guide for locating positions, or intersections, along orthogonal axes such as latitude and longitude, and time and distance. In this graphic space the horizon extends far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating this space (with track pad, touch screen, mouse, or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands… and by islands I mean computer-generated paragraphs.
J. R. Carpenter - 22.11.2014 - 10:54
