Russell Coldicutt – ENGLISH 890S-01 Contempory Literature and Digital Media

November 11, 2017

Sign, Icon, Emoji

I’d like to consider for a moment Ch’ien’s description of how icons function:

Icons communicate meaning to an individual without his or her fluency in a specific or local linguistic culture. They have the capacity to moderate behaviors in global spaces as they have nonlocal specificity. (38)

“For anyone who imagines a global world,” Ch’ien continues, “icons might represent a possibility for a universal language” (38). I’m interested in how this translates into Xu Bing’s desire for “pursuing the possibility of a universally intelligible system” (Ch’ien 63): what are the assumptions that drive this project? Is a universally intelligible system of communication desirable?

It doesn’t seem to me possible to detach signs completely (whether words or emoji) from the contextual (i.e., local) associations they accrue over time. We need only think of how the eggplant emoji has taken on phallic associations, so that for some discourse communities and in some contexts it can signify an eggplant or the category of “vegetables” more generally, whereas other interpretative communities and contexts turn on its phallic signification. These multiple usages overlap temporally: one “meaning” does not supplant another. A sign’s signification in this sense would appear contingent upon the discourse community in which it is used and the prior associations it has accumulated. Signs are understood through an interpretative grid developed prior to an agent’s encounter with the sign or the system of signification.

Xu Bing seems to know this, based on his statements about comprehension (see the extract in Ch’ien on p.43). “You will be able to read [Book from the Ground] as long as you have experience of contemporary life”, Xu Bing posits (qtd in. Ch’ien 43), but what exactly does “contemporary life” entail here? As Ch’ien notes, a “language” such as Xu Bing’s “does not represent a shared sense of one culture – ideologically or aesthetically” (44). To be sure, Marcel Danesi has pointed out in his recent book, The Semiotics of Emoji, that the “thumbs-up” emoji takes on very different meanings (or “signifieds”) in different cultural contexts; while for many this symbol might take on positive valences, it is “hideously offensive in parts of the Middle East, West Africa, Russia and South America” (31). Of course, this is not to mention the limitations of a “digital divide” or the prerequisite of the sort of “technical capital” described by Brock et al. in our reading from a couple of weeks back – both of which might play a role in restricting who is able and who is unable to access this information or read it “properly”. This is to say that emoji, and other icons, do not completely transcend local fields of interpretation.

But Book from the Ground also requires another kind of cultural proficiency: think of all the references to “high” art – for example: Duchamp’s Fountain (25, 56), Andy Warhol’s Munroe (42), Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (43); and works of theatre such as The Phantom of the Opera, Lion King, Cats (43) – although these could arguably have become “middle brow” today as a result of their increased circulation or, as a result of the processes whereby an artwork accrues cultural capital, such as by being awarded an Oscar (an event referenced on pages 72-73). Likewise, there’s an assumed knowledge of works of pop culture, from movies like Silence of the Lambs (21) to Batman (72), to games like Mario and a game contributing to the Marvel universe (110-11). But think also of the references to economic fields, which requires that readers recognize brand logos (say, of postal services [45] or commercial products [[43]) or entire mythologies built around the stock market: i.e., the signifying system of Wall Street, which associates a bull (both verbally and as an image) with price increases and a bear with stocks that are heading down (this same signification system is used in Book from the Ground on p. 21). If Xu Bing develops a signification system that doesn’t require a prior knowledge of localized languages, it does require a “cultured” subject that is aware of and participates in a field of consumer capitalism.

This is not to say that Book from the Ground is entirely complicit in representing (and potentially reproducing) this capitalist subject, but that it might be a problem on our end to limit our understanding of what this text does to prior systems of signification. In other words, by interpreting Xu Bing’s project in terms of the development of a universal system of signification (even though Xu Bing’s statements encourage this reading), we might be missing the potential of a text like this to transform the associations we already bring to signification systems like icons and emoji. I’m going on, so I won’t delve into it too much here, but this is where I find Ngai’s argument to be very useful and convincing: if one dimension of a gimmick is to save us labor (e.g., as a “speedy transmission of meaning” [Ch’ien 45]), then Book from the Ground prevents this function by asking readers to sit down and spend some time with these funny little pictures. I think it’s possible to bring to this text all of the antinomies of the gimmick Ngai identifies, and I think in so doing it’s possible to read in Book from the Ground a use of signifying systems and their corresponding interpretative expectations that is more complex, and potentially more transformative, than a project of developing a universal system of communication could be.*

*If only because I can’t seem to imagine a world in which a global system of communication is possible unless some sort of regime is developed that requires all the participants of this signifying system (which raises its own sets of questions about inclusivity) to learn a common skillset and set of indexical associations. Perhaps it’s possible to argue that the English language, and the people and institutions that require people to become increasingly proficient in this language as a sort of lingua franca, is already performing such a regimentation. This process of instituting a lingua franca enacts a specific kind of violence: one that inevitably changes the interpretative frameworks that a person uses to interpret their world, and which, regardless of whether it intends to or not, begins a process of systematically annihilating difference (which I take to be undesirable and aggressive).

November 4, 2017

Marxism and Infrastructure

On reading Levine’s article, I was reminded of a move typically associated with a classical Marxist aesthetics: namely, the metaphoric logic that separates but simultaneously connects the different domains that order lived experience. For classical marxist aesthetics this is often the metaphor of base and superstructure, which tends to designate “the economic” as the base (or, depending on the context of the work, what is sometimes called “the infrastructure”) against the superstructure (which loosely correlates with “ideology”). I found myself wondering: is Levine’s article a way of reformulating this distinction? And, if so, why would Levine want to reinscribe this logic: does she perceive a deficiency with the base/superstructure metaphor? Is such a reformulation a way of “saving” a logic (i.e., of the base-superstructure metaphor) that has become overburdened by associations that undermine its potential to transform the organization of lived experiences?

I don’t mean to suggest that Levine’s infrastructure-structure model is simply a rearticulation of the marxist metaphor (i.e., I’m not saying that Levine simply gives the base-superstructure model another name while retaining what this metaphor was meant to describe), but rather I’m asking why Levine chooses to use this infra/structure model when there was already a critical apparatus in place (and one fairly well entrenched in literary criticism, although not without its problems). To put my historicist hat on for a moment, I’m wondering whether Levine’s article can tell us something about how we approach a mode of contemporary realism and our capacity to formalize a way to understand it.

To be sure, the base-superstructure model has largely been used by marxist aesthetics to theorize realism, and such theories will often describe realist fiction as interiorizing the base-superstructure distinction by mapping it on to a form / content dichotomy. Henri Arvon can explain this rhetorical move better than I can:

The relations between content and form correspond to the more general relations between the economic base and the ideological superstructure; content is always the governing factor and though form in the final analysis is always necessarily subservient to it, it is not thereby shorn of all autonomy whatsoever.” (Marxist Aesthetics, p. 41).

In this way, people writing through the framework of a classic marxist aesthetics would understand a work of realist fiction as interiorizing the base-superstructure relation in everyday experience by “capturing” it in the relation between literary form and content. As Arvon’s language of “governance” and “subservience” might suggest, this is also a way of formulating a relation between what we would now call technological determinism and cultural constructivism. In other words, does realist fiction produce or construct a “reality” or does it merely describe or reflect a “reality” already external to it? Does content “govern” form, or the other way around?

The work of poststructuralism and the various theoretical paradigms to follow in literary and media studies for the most part put these dichotomies to bed (although not entirely): content was shown to be part of a literary work’s form, and form was also subject to the demands of a text’s content (or even to become content: the medium as message); likewise, many argued that technologies were not entirely responsible for producing cultural formations, and cultural formations were not entirely responsible for shaping cultural forms (this is what Rettberg called last week “co-construction,” as Maggie’s post pointed out). Levine is also careful to do this by “defamiliarizing” the language of structure and infrastructure, emphasizing that each are flexible, pervasive, and codetermined.

And yet, it seems we can’t stray too far from “form” here (perhaps unsurprising, given Levine’s prior work on form). The processes of defamiliarizing the habituated infrastructures taken up in Americanah are linked in Levine’s article to the bildung form (or structure?) of an outsider. Similarly, Lupton’s article traces how novels like Remainder and The Accidental defamiliarize the habituated infrastructure of the material book form. Maybe such frameworks encourage us to think about how the form-content (which, as with Levine’s infra/structures, we might think of as codetermined and, in a way, inseparable) of novels practices a digital logic without necessarily becoming digital.

Take this extract from one of Ifemelu’s blog posts in Americanah:

So light skin is valued in the community of American blacks. But everyone pretends this is no longer so. They say the days of the paper-bag test (look this up) are gone and let’s move forward. But today most of the American blacks who are successful as entertainers and as public figures are light. (265)

Note how Ifemelu writes “look this up”. I think it’s safe to say that someone writing an actual blog would just link to the information referenced. But of course the material conditions of the book don’t permit this in the same way. And yet, this imperative allows another sort of connection to occur: this statement is simultaneously a demand for the reader of the material book to “look this up.” Although operating by way of different material mediums, both a blog using hyperlinks and the representation of a blog in a novel are techniques of “linking” to information beyond their own forms. This action supposes an infrastructure that connects a book like Americanah or blog posts to sites (not only websites) where people can access additional data. The book and the blog are part of a wider information network.

Maybe this is why Levine turns to the model of infra/structure: these terms (once demystified by Levine, of course) lend themselves to uncovering underlying logics for the production and reproduction of texts (as well as structures like racism) that don’t always, or don’t only, turn to economics as the determining factor for explaining how people act and the forms things take. The infrastructure and structure model seems (to me) a formulation that could be applied to basically any situation, which makes it very promising but also makes me a little suspicious of it.

September 17, 2017

What’s true about language?

As Kevin’s post astutely points out, it seems like the reading material for this week orientate us towards a discussion of Language and language. That being said, I’d like to take up Kevin’s point about the relation between Language and truth. Does an entirely different relation occur between Language and truth if we substitute an understanding of ‘Truth as an immutable and transcendental series of facts’ with ‘truth as the processes of selection and evaluation that provide the conditions for truth claims to occur in the first place’? That’s to say, what happens to the relation between Language (and language) and truth if we understand this connection in constructive terms (i.e., language plays a part in constructing truth) rather than mimetic ones (i.e., language represents an already given truth out there)?

I think that the Ariekei’s system of Language explicitly participates in such acts of construction. Take for example Avice’s explanation early in the novel of the role of Language for the Ariekei:

‘For Hosts, speech was thought. It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. Without Language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them; they were vaguer by far than dreams. What imaginaries any of them could conjure at all must be misty and trapped in their heads.’ (83)

This shows that, rather than there being no distinction between Language and Truth, the latter entirely depends upon the former to come into existence (or to manifest as anything other than ‘misty’ pre-thoughts). If the Ariekei are Hosts, then truth is a sort of parasite that feeds from their Language system. We might also look to the Ariekei’s construction of similes by manufacturing situations for (post?)human bodies and inanimate objects. This construction could be understood as a sort of truth-making: for something to be true, it must be said; if it cannot be said, then new forms of expression must be constructed to produce this information as truth.

This, then, begs the relationship of language to Language to code. Perhaps the mimetic understanding of the relation between language and truth (i.e., language as representing an external truth) is the same relation that Chun describes with the fetish of code: when the ‘outcome’ or ‘end’ of code obscures the coding process that enabled this object’s construction. In other words: can we draw equivalencies between, on the one hand, the situation in which representation through language masks the role of language in constructing this representation and, on the other (posthuman bionic) hand, the situation in which the outcome of code (e.g., an application or a game, etc.) distracts us from thinking about the underlying code that produced this outcome in the first place?

I think Kevin’s question about the defamiliarizing of language is a pertinent one here. And, so as to not to disappoint his expectations for theoretical conceptions of language, it might be interesting to think not about Hegel but Friedrich Kittler, and especially his idea of language as a sort of code. For Kittler, there was a time (which he calls Discourse Network 1800, which approximately correlates to the Romantic period) in which writing was a way of storing a transcendental meaning: trained to read for this meaning, audiences were able to bypass the material codes used to communicate and ‘hallucinate’ a meaning from the alphanumeric symbols arranged on a surface. With the development of new technologies, however, writing lost its monopoly as the primary material storage system. Reduced to but one mode of communication among many, the material conditions through which data was transmitted became apparent: audio playback is accompanied by the hiss of a gramophone needle; writing is exposed as a sort of code used to create a representation, rather than some sort of lossless transmission system for transcendental meaning or ‘Truth’. As Kevin noted, the lie makes truth conceivable: this is not to say truth was never there, but only that it becomes apparent through its opposite.

It’s certainly interesting to see a text like Mièville’s novel defamiliarize its own raw materials (i.e., language); I’m out of space here, but I wonder if such acts of defamiliarization could be trying to get us to think about the relationship between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, between representation and lived experience? On a different note, I think it would be helpful to scrutinize further the relationship between linguistic or natural languages and coding or ‘computer’ ‘languages’. Is it useful to associate natural and coding languages? What if we didn’t think of coding as a language at all, would that change our understanding of digital media? (By the way, these are genuine questions I don’t really have an answer to – but, especially given how most of the reading we’ve had so far has drawn a relationship between language and code in some way, I think it’s something it’d be worth thinking about!)