Last year MIT published Eloquent Images, an essay collection that includes my chapter on “The Word as Image in an Age of Digital Reproduction.” Print publishing has such a different dynamic: if I write something here on my blog, people react with comments. If I write something for ebr (say) I get email, and maybe a threaded response. If I write something for print I get silence, then the reviews come in. So the other week, Googling around, I came across a review of the volume in Leonardo. It’s written by Dene Grigar, who I know passingly through the Electronic Literature Organization. Turns out I must have done a pretty poor job:
. . . Matthew Kirschenbaum’s “The Word as Image in an Age of Digital Reproduction” interrogates Stuart Moulthrop’s claim that “’the word is an image after all’”(137), from a rather limited perspective––he argues from the premise that the qualities of text that Humanities Computing scholars value and understand are the qualities that must be found in images and should be valued and understood by all other scholars (149). The argument works this way: Images are not texts because they do not behave as texts do for Humanities Computing experts.
What bothers me about this is not that she didn’t care for my argument or approach, but that the review proceeds by caricature. “Images are not texts because they do not behave as texts do for Humanities Computing experts.” Really? I mean, really? “The qualities of text that Humanities Computing scholars value and understand are the qualities that must be found in images and should be valued and understood by all other scholars.” Why would anyone make such an argument? Would anyone who knows my work think I would make such an argument? Would such an argument, having been made by anyone (for whatever inexplicable reason), really have proven compelling to the volume’s editors? To the press’s review board? Would no one have raised an eyebrow or asked for a revision or two along the way? And by the way, are we capitalizing Humanities Computing to take the pointy-headed authority of that field down a notch or two?
Of course that’s not what I argued, or wrote. (Nor did I capitalize Humanities Computing.) The piece is, in fact, very much in line with the tradition of textual materiality developed by scholars like Johanna Drucker, Jerome McGann, and Kate Hayles—but that point seems to have been lost on Grigar (go check page 149). Still, there are always more reviews. Here’s one I like better (you’ll have to scroll about 2/3 of the way down, it’s print page 104).
Posted by mgk at March 11, 2005 08:33 AMMatt,
The quotation from Drucker in your contribution to Eloquent Images places the word "word" in scare quotes and these are subsequently dropped in your discussion. As has been recently mentioned on the Humanist discussion list "word" in computing has a technical meaning. Could Drucker have been signalled that meaning?
I find it very revealing that "word" has been conflated with "text" by one of the reviewers. There is a slight shift in vocabulary towards the end of the piece which might give rise to such conflation. It equally might give rise to a better understanding, an eloquent seeing, that in the discursive space you create, the discussions of word and image intersect with the text-graphic data types. One can create a text image (witness instances of ASCII art) just as one can create a graphic word.
I think the discussion of VRML suggests a progression at work in the essay:
bit, pixel, [scene in VRML; frame in animation (MacroMedia Flash, Animated GIF, Shockwave, etc)]. It seems that in some fashion there is a lucid dream at work in the writing. It is a dream of parsing. A dream that unites the realms of production and reception, that plays with the fluid identities to which Drucker points. In the field of resistence and rapture that the electronic form of word, image, text, graphic engender, parsable pixels exist and are manipulable. But as in the classic dreamwork of Freudian psychoanalysis, the parsable pixel is neither a word nor an image yet it is inherently textual. The parsable pixel functions almost like computing's unconscious. Almost like a hint of irreducible materiality as the other face of textuality.
Almost at most.
Francois, I'm pretty certain there was no specialized usage intended. As for the rest of your comments, would that the reviewer had read so thoughtfully.
Posted by: MGK at March 12, 2005 10:08 PM | Link to Comment