The title of this post is a comment that I received a number of times during my hours spent at ITS working on my final project. It came a couple of times while I was sprawled outside ITS, poring over my printouts of floor plan maps and hundreds of thumbnail images. And then several more times, while I was sitting in front of Dreamweaver’s split coding/design screen, the same brightly colored printouts spread out all around me.

I’ve been frustrated writing critical papers before. I’ve been frustrated writing fiction. I’ve had writer’s block. I have never, in my entire life as a student, been as frustrated as I was at many points during my work on this final project. A solid twenty-four hours of hair-pulling and tears spent trying and failing to recover the crashed (coughcoughpirated) copy of Dreamweaver and the pages I’d already built from off my computer (the ITS staff tells me Dreamweaver software will never run on my computer again); hours wasted figuring out how to convert full-size images into thumbnails; and don’t even get me started on how long it took me to figure out silly, little things like that in order to lay out text/images in horizontal columns I had to use the “Insert Table” function.

Magoo's post "Which Patterns are Good to Eat?" raised some new dimensions of Hayles' work for me, so of course I'm going to devote more words to pattern versus absence. The example of a the bunny and carrot is an interesting one, particularly because it depends on the primacy of an external reality. It is provocative that the bunny does not percieve the carrot as a carrot until smell compliments vision, at which point the "noise" becomes a tasty "pattern." The interesting thing here is that presence seems to separate from pattern as the bunny momentarily fails to represent the carrot.

Night Owl's recent piece on Hayles and pattern raises some interesting points. Hayles' dichotomy between pattern and noise seems fundamental to our neurology. I recall reading in some piece of pop science about an experiment with rabbits.

(Maybe someone with some neurological or cogsci background could extend this or improve it)

The experimenter would draw a carrot before the bunny's nose. When the bunny didn't inhale, the pattern in said bunny's olfactory lobe was stochaic. (For stochaic, think something like snow on a TV set or "white noise" on the radio; it's not technically random, but that's the way we generally take it). When the bunny inhaled, the increased input stimulated a set of waves that crossed back and forth through the olfactory lobe. A different stimulus produced a different pattern.

I was fairly suspicious of N. Katherine Hayles' essay, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers," when I first began reading it.

First off, my feelings about the notion of "materiality" go back and forth. On the one hand, it does sort of make sense that the physical embodiment of words -- or lack thereof -- would be an important issue. This just seems to be a more nuanced take on the tension that exists between writing and speech, which people have been writing and speaking about for a long, long time. And despite these roots in antiquity, it's thoroughly postmodern to suggest that we are shaped so significantly by our environment. On the other hand, I think that language exists and interacts in more abstract states (another idea at home in the writing v. speech and language v. thought dyads) than materiality addresses. I don't think that an emphasis on materiality is necessarily antithetical to an understanding of language as something partly insubstantial, but I do think that materiality is a convenient tool in the hands of a reductionist. It's easy, when materiality is foregrounded, to pre-emptively decide what the concerns of a piece are. I think we've often been guilty of it this semester -- we look at a work, and maybe even without reading it in its entirety, conclude that its chief concerns are all the technological/theoretical ideas that we float in class. Sure, form can be as crucial as content... but materiality as a dominant mode of thinking threatens to let form obscure content as violently as content has often obscured form.

So, with no ill will for being put there in the first place, I feel like I essentially floundered when presented with the opportunity to soapbox on embodiment in the last five minutes of class today. Really, embodiment and Katharine Hayles' essay are interesting to me, just difficult. Here are my thoughts, late and still partially-formed.

I was reading the Hayles at like 4:30 in the morning in an over-crowded, really ugly airport, so I'm not sure that any of my thoughts on her paper will make much sense, but bear with me!

I have this feeling that Hayles is trying to change the way we view the world altogether in this piece--on every page there are big claims that ring a bit like McLuhan's "the medium is the message." (Actually, doesn't her discussion on 73 about how the literatry corpus is similar to the human body, in that it "is at once a physical object and a space of representation, a body and a message", smack of McLuhan?)

In class, we discussed the importance that Hayles gave to materiality/design, not only in the text of her book, but also in its visual design. For their book, First Person, Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan also hired someone, Michael Crumpton, whose sole job was to design the visual aspects of their book. A few other people have discussed the materiality of First Person; here are my thoughts:

When I compare Crumpton's design for First Person to Anne Burdick's design for Writing Machines, Burdick comes out ahead, I think. Both designs incorporate screenshots into the body of the text, which is certainly helpful. But apart from that shared feature, the two books use different design elements. We've already discussed Burdick's design some-- the magnified text, the "hyperlinks," the screenshots and actual text incorporated into the text. Crumpton's two most unique and visible design features are the top/bottom split text and the brief outline at the top of the page that shows which authors and responses are in the current chapter, and which one you're presently reading.

I've been mulling over this question for about a week now: How important is Hayles' discussion of textual materiality in the grand scope of all literature? I mean, it's clearly pretty important for new kinds of media like hypertexts, and it's also important for avant-garde novels like House of Leaves that choose to be aware of (and play with) it. It can even be significant for a traditional novel like A Human Document that is 'treated' by another artist into something new and materially interesting.

But what about the vast array of books whose authors either weren't aware of or didn't care about the materiality of their books? Is there really something unique about the materiality of these texts? Hayles seems to imply that there is.

There's been a fair amount of discussion of the idea of "avatars" or created personas, mostly in reference to Hayles' Writing Machines. I think it's interesting in that it makes Hayles' critical process into a narrative, with the critic (and the authors) as characters as opposed to disembodied voices, which I would say is the more typical model. Beyond making the book a lot more readable, I also think that this decision represents literary criticism as a personal process, not a purely rhetorical one.

It is interesting given the personal tone that this decision gives the criticism that Hayles decides to insulate herself from it by working through a persona that she insists is not purely autobiographical. She mentions in her explanation at the beginning that she is repelled somewhat by "self-display," which seems to me to stem somewhat from an idea that the critic should not speak with a personal voice, a convention that I've encountered at Pomona on many occasions. Perhaps Hayles' refusal to engage in overt autobiographical narration is a recognition of the fact that even in such writing there is a degree of mediation owing to the fact that such works are written reflectively, and therefore represent the persona or image of the writer that they have developed in their own memories. An assumption that the image of oneself is not to a degree a created persona, doesn't seem sustainable, so perhaps it is fitting that Hayles doesn't try to maintain that illusion.

After reading through all the posts I somehow sort of got fixated on the idea of avatars (although I don't really know much about how that term is used other than as a visual representation of a person or a kind of virtual body used to represent the actual body...but I guess I'm bringing it up because I'm trying to convey the idea of a self-representation). A representation of an individual can exist as an autobiographical text or maybe a self-portrait or a musical composition...but now it can also exist as this big jumble of different types of media. Online profiles, for example, can have text (including lists and links to websites), pictures, videos, songs, blogs, ways of contacting the individual (which takes different forms like phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, screennames), representations of networks of friends (with their pictures and names that they choose to represent themselves), results of online surveys (are you a slut, what cocktail are you, etc), animation, and other things I'm probably forgetting. I guess I'm just interested in how people use interactive media to represent themselves and how our view of an individual changes depending on how we interact with their personal representation.