Book, Text, Medium: Cross-Sectional Reading for a Digital Age 1108834590, 9781108834599

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BOOK, T EXT , MEDIUM

Book, Text, Medium: Cross-Sectional Reading for a Digital Age utilizes codex history, close reading, and language philosophy to assess the transformative arc between medieval books and today’s e-books. It examines what happens to the reading experience in the twenty-first century when the original concept of a book is still held in the mind of a reader, if no longer in the reader’s hand. Leading critic Garrett Stewart explores the play of mediation more generally, as the concept of book moves from a manufactured object to simply the language it puts into circulation. Framed by digital poetics, phonorobotics, and the rising popularity of audiobooks, this study sheds new light on both the history of reading and the negation of legible print in conceptual book art. garrett stewart is James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. He has written five books each on literary analysis, art history, and film theory, most recently The One, Other, and Only Dickens (2018), Transmedium (2018), and Cinemachines (2020). Stewart was elected in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

c a m b r i d g e st u d i e s i n t w e n t y - fi r s t - c e n t u r y l i t e r a t u r e a n d cu l t u r e Editor Peter Boxall, University of Sussex

As the cultural environment of the twenty-first century comes into clearer focus, Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture presents a series of monographs that undertakes the most penetrating and rigorous analysis of contemporary culture and thought.The series is driven by the perception that critical thinking today is in a state of transition. The global forces that produce cultural forms are entering into powerful new alignments, which demand new analytical vocabularies in the wake of later twentieth-century theory. The series will demonstrate that theory is not simply a failed revolutionary gesture that we need to move beyond, but rather brings us to the threshold of a new episteme, which will require new theoretical energy to navigate. In this spirit, the series will host work that explores the most important emerging critical contours of the twenty-first century, marrying inventive and imaginative criticism with theoretical and philosophical rigor. The aim of the series will be to produce an enduring account of the twenty-first-century intellectual landscape that will not only stand as a record of the critical nature of our time, but that will also forge new critical languages and vocabularies with which to navigate an unfolding age. In offering a historically rich and philosophically nuanced account of contemporary literature and culture, the series will stand as an enduring body of work that helps us to understand the cultural moment in which we live. In This Series Joel Evans Conceptualising the Global in the Wake of the Postmodern: Literature, Culture, Theory Adeline Johns-Putra Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel Caroline Edwards Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel Paul Crosthwaite The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction Jennifer Cooke Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity

BOOK, TEXT, MEDIUM Cross-Sectional Reading for a Digital Age

GARRETT STEWART University of Iowa

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108834599 doi: 10.1017/9781108876216 © Garrett Stewart 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Stewart, Garrett, author. title: Book, text, medium : cross sectional reading for a digital age / Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa. description: Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Series: Cambridge studies in twenty-first-century literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2020028005 (print) | lccn 2020028006 (ebook) | isbn 9781108834599 (hardback) | isbn 9781108876216 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: Books and reading – Philosophy. | Books and reading – History – 21st century. classification: lcc z1003 .s84 2020 (print) | lcc z1003 (ebook) | ddc 028/.9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028005 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028006 isbn 978-1-108-83459-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To and for the challenging students who keep me productively off balance in moving to and fro between media

Contents

List of Figures Prospectus

page viii ix 1

Intro\Retro part i. the hold of the codex 1 Bibliographics 2 Platformatics

27 29 57

part ii. the grip of inscription 3 Reading In 4 Reading Out

91 93 118

part iii. the give of medium 5 Phrasing the Sayable

139 141

6 Between Language and Text

173 215

Parting Words

225 241

Notes Index

vii

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Buzz Spector, Off the Shelf (November 2012) page 34 John Cayley, The Reading Room (2011) 40 Marco Palmezzano, St. Jerome in an Extensive Landscape (1503) 47 Marco Palmezzano, St. Jerome in an Extensive Landscape (1503), 48 detail Jacques-Emile Blanche, Portrait of Arthur Acton and Harold 49 Acton Seated in a Room at Villa La Pietra (1913) Antonello da Messina, St. Jerome in His Study (c. 1475) 51 Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen 54 (2013) John Roach, Pageturner (1997) 60 Nick Yulman, Index Organ (2014) 71 Alexander Rosenberg, Hyperpyrexic (2014–17) 73 Mika Tajima, Negative Entropy (2018) 78 Mika Tajima, Negative Entropy (Paris: Three Star Books, 79 2015), Vol. 5, detail

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This is the first book to venture, in a fully material sense, a sustained conjunction of book studies, textual studies, and media studies: or, better put, book history, verbal analysis, and media theory. It convenes them as equal partners in marking, as anagram might have it, the long arc between medieval bookes and today’s e-books. First such book – at least, that is, from the standpoint, a never-fixed point, of literary immersion. In an age of screen reading and the phonorobotics of self-taught machine intelligence, old demarcations are collapsing fast. Not just verbal delivery, in voice or script, but the signature power of human speech has ceded irreversible ground to digital processing. Yet that encroachment of computerization has a way, we’ll find, of clarifying the nature of literary writing rather than obscuring it. Reading (so it’s still called), along with listening and utterance, is often now done by machines, whether in microphonic or graphic traces. But unless we were simply to say that the medium of our language has become electronic – algorithmic rather than linguistic – distinctions persist. This book pursues and secures certain of them in a three-way reading that cuts across the once dominant physical format of the codex and the different materiality of the silently performed language it channels. This is how an account of literary texture, anchored in the codex tradition but not necessarily bound by it (in either sense), enters into conversation with media theory. Ultimately, the strata of investigation – not by turns, but in a rethought continuum – are physical, philological, philosophical. They address each other inextricably. The simplest questions get analysis underway. Has the phrase “book reading” always been a colloquial misnomer – long before it may have come to sound like an anachronism? Outside of antiquarian circles, or the book studies protocols of academic research, has it even really been the book itself that is read? Rather than merely opened for its “reading matter”? And how materialist, in turn, is the usual understanding of that very idiom? ix

x

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Or, more pointedly: what does it mean that such explorations of the codex and its post-print successors have been featured, lately, in art galleries as often as in libraries? That question arises from no idle notice – or exaggeration. Computerization has put the traditional codex back in the spotlight and the gallery track light at once. In terms of traditional reading, however, what to make of the ongoing conceptual work of book sculpture – the bibliobjet rendered by way of simulation, appropriation, or desecration – as distinct from the more artisanal and decorative mode of artists’ books? How, in these more forensic works, does the book study itself by proxy or displacement – and often in the light of its partial digital eclipse? And how might recent parodies of artificial electronic voicing by conceptual poets and sculptors help delimit the alternate and primary focus of this study on the silent charge – and reverberant medial feedback – of language executed and performed on the literary page? Cued by such inquiry, the first phase of Book, Text, Medium (Part I) offers in part a guided tour of recent innovations in contemporary book sculpture, bringing its refashioned objects into relief against a longer tradition of the painted scene of reading and the “bibliographics” – the scriptive wordworks – descendent from it. When read as a plastic form in its own right, the bound book comes bearing a received “iconology” whose altered sculptural platforms or surface arrays may be figured in a given case as resilient or outmoded, transformed by computerization or usurped by it. An analysis of recent gallery bookworks looks in part to their often harbored verbal tropes (or outright visual puns): their plays on the very wording they seal tight, distort, or efface, including the phonetic “volume” they deliberately mute by illegibility. Building especially on the latest exhibit in this vein, “The Internal Machine,” at the New York Center for Book Arts in 2017, discussion then moves, by contrast in Part II, to a close linguistic scrutiny of the alphabet-driven literary event, the text itself, in exploratory writing from reflexive modernism forward (from Virginia Woolf to contemporary novelist Bennett Sims): the engaged page where densities both phrasal and palpable were for centuries conjoined. It is here that a media theory of reading grounds itself in the exemplary disclosures of literary readings. Next, via triangulation in Part III with newly translated work by philosopher Giorgio Agamben on the ontological crux of human language (“On the Sayable and the Idea”), his metalinguistic tenets, intersecting those of media theorists Friedrich Kittler, Régis Debray, and Vilém Flusser, are tested on prose examples from Herman Melville through D. H. Lawrence to Don DeLillo, as well as on poetic instances from Walt

Prospectus

xi

Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Adrienne Rich. At this point, the crosssectional comparison developed by Book, Text, Medium exerts a closing pressure on its third term. Against a millennial backdrop spanning from “anthropogenesis” in the very fact of speech (Agamben) to the electronic intonations of artificial intelligence, including recent experiments in digital fonts meant to adjust rates and scales of linguistic comprehension, what results is a revisionary leverage on the matter – a matter phonic, graphic, and cognitive at once – of verbal texture in action. This often thickly layered and overlapping action, this generative process, emerges as a function independent, even “for a digital age,” of any one technical platform, whether paperback or so-called tablet, imprint or screen, spewed ink or liquid crystal. Reading syllabic language closely enough takes us not only back to the cultural imaginary of the tangibly ingrained page, vestigial or not, but down to any text’s expressive possibility in the structuring force of language itself. That back and down is the way in which closeness not only digs in but cuts across. And the force revealed is to be grasped not just as a differential system but as a medial circuit, volatile by definition, foundational in its channeled flux, alive with the material static entailed by transmission. In what we might call this variable grammar of engagement, books open upon writing; writing opens to the conceptual space of text; text opens out to meaning; meaning opens back to the medium that is its means; and this last (and first) instrumentality opens up in turn the whole question of material bases in the cross-sectional disposition of the book/text/medium nexus. Opens up – and closes in on. Exactly where – and how – is the topic ahead. In expanding on this brief front matter, what follows next, by way of a fuller introduction, is meant to spell out the implicit codex historicism on file in that wide and otherwise ungainly range of gallery and literary objects sampled in subsequent chapters. If the net effect inevitably favors, after all, the library over the museum – as the testing ground of textuality – to say so isn’t to concede that the topic is intractably centered in this way as book/ text\medium. Instead, the greater the spread of separate evidence amassed at either end of the spectrum – by graphic or codex artifacts, on the one side, and by a philosophy of language, on the other – the greater the elucidating pressure on the evinced materiality of literary enunciation. Focus sharpens amid a dense and restive field of view. It is across such a field, back and forth, that investigation now moves.

Intro\Retro

If such, in prospect, are the main concerns about to be developed – the variable cognitive and tactile overlaps of book, its text, and the latter’s medium – what about them? This is to ask, first of all, what about them invites comparative inquiry? With its scope extending across graphic, plastic, and literary examples, what this one book is finally about emerges from just such interplay. On a sliding scale of association, it is about what the material dimension of the printed and bound support (or its vestige in the e-book) puts us in touch with regarding the different but still palpable materiality of written text, including its phonetic substrate – and about what this brings out, in turn, regarding the linguistic materiality of an entire medium. Given the escalating pressure of computerization in reshaping the cultural imaginary of verbal communication at large, in vocal as well as lettered forms, the question of reading itself is much contested of late. It may thus need no further explanation to suggest that for the particular issues variously constellated, by visual artists and writers alike, around the depicted as well as actual reading of booked language – and pursued here, in and against the digital, under both a theory of mediation and a philosophy of language – it is about time. Time not just for such attention, either, but as part of it. Reading takes place and time together. In the all but simultaneous stages of tangible access, page gives way to print, in the available form of text, on medium’s way to meaning. What we are thus setting out to read is reading itself: its paper (and now screen) sites, its imagined mental sightings filtered through the weft of lettering and enunciation, its formative linguistic incitations – or, in that last case, as first condition, its very possibility as a channeled verbal potential. One broad path has already been well cleared. To ask in retro fashion – not necessarily in nostalgia but within an unavoidable historical frame – whether a book is still a book when, with its “paged” words only digitally manifest, no ink has flowed into their linguistic reservoir, is not the purpose of this particular book. That topic has been 1

2

Intro\Retro

fully pondered elsewhere, and many times over.1 For three decades at least, the fate of reading per se, along with that of the book, has been worried and adjudicated in scholarly and popular commentary, with literary culture’s inherited formats lamented in passing – or actively revamped. A modest irony, of course, rears its head. At least in published book form, as with Book, Text, Medium, such studies confer a certain measure of extra longevity on their very topic. But this investigation is aimed otherwise. Rather than scrutinizing, in marginal regret or not, the new forms of electronic mediation in the delivery of text, these pages look precisely to what holding the original physical platform in mind (if no longer in hand) – and thus holding it to tactile account – in the traditional case of book reading can begin to suggest, by material association, about the play of mediation more generally, in everything from codex binding to algorithmic code. In the traditional case, the “bulk” (originally cargo hold) of a book lends paradoxical weight to the lift-off into imagined scene or exposition. Material apprehension, that is, has a certain welcome contagiousness in the move from the tooled object of imprint to the language it puts into circulation. The more we’re used to feeling the page beneath our fingers, the better the feel we may have for the textures of wording. To exaggerate this point, on the one hand, would be to curtail the intended scope of the present book, which reaches into digital poetics with a stress on verbal texture that, even on screen, has by no means foresworn a material dimension to its phrasal effects when produced in subvocal comprehension. To deny the point about a broader associative range for the tangible grain of language, on the other hand, or in other words to sever all sense of literary wording from the paper material that once traditionally backed it, would be at least as damaging to readerly intuition. Literature has survived the partial decline of the codex without eschewing a history wed to just such bookhood. Welcome contagiousness, to be sure: any association between the heft of the book and the density of text – welcome and suggestive, though it doesn’t in any sense level the playing field. Certainly there’s no denying the heuristic use of computer-manifested sentences, like these I’m currently (or was once) word-processing, in helping us to spotlight the difference between verbal delivery systems – the bound page versus the flow, not of ink, but of the liquid crystal screen – even while one remains alert to shared lexical functions in the textual generation of each reading mode, syllable by syllable. Lending attention to those gathering syllables – in the phonemic basis of their graphic shapes – is the purpose of this study’s central phase, “The Grip of Inscription,” its textual evidence stressed in the process (both

Intro\Retro

3

senses) as inseparable from the medium such writing both divulges and exploits. This emphasis follows from an opening look – in the first paired chapters ahead – at the surface of inscription itself, graphically displaced in painting, volumetrically in sculpture. This move from such physical inscription to its literary grip is thus completed by a third and incumbent level of attention in “The Give of Medium.” Under analysis there is precisely the verbal current maximized in literature, often equivocated in the process, and open – beyond any phenomenology or stylistics of reading – to further inquiry into the ontology of language as medial performance. Again the triadic frame: what is mostly denied us in the materially represented (let alone defaced) book, and made available in a book’s own internal representation, has a materiality all its own as medium: one that the middle term of text brings out without using up for consideration. One thing builds on the other – precisely in how different their “thingness” is: from sewn or glued paper through deciphered markings atop it to the underlying roots of human speech in all its potentially materialized (and even corporealized) forms. Things add up only in our bearing down: physical book; silently enunciated phonetic text produced by the reader’s passively engaged body; latent medium of writing or speech. The threefold rubrics don’t divide up a convergent domain of exploration, compartmentalizing it, so much as cross-section the issues at an increasing, yet still interactive, degree of generalization. What takes shape are categories of analysis: consubstantial even in their material discriminations. They mark, it might be said, stages in a receding immanence to be traced – in reverse order of manifestation – from a given if not grounding medium (Part III) up through text (Part II) to its conveyance by the physical book (Part I) or by some newer reading platform for the display of text. But it is part and parcel of this threefold distinction, in its interlocking nature, that the categories can be engaged (wherever attention takes you first) in any order of interpretive – and historical – priority. Unlikely as it might seem, a decision to read these chapter pairings back to front, for instance, and thus to sample their encounter with linguistic ontology well before their instanced disruption of it in gallery art – with literary writing, in between, as the very dimension of bookhood rethought by philosophy and missing from conceptual sculpture – would not be unworkable. Instead, it would only be to connect, from a different perspective, with the argument’s ultimately inextricable concerns. Where medium is among the perceptions delivered by message. And where the implicit paratactic syntax that might hold Book, Text, Medium together in loose if unified grammar

4

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of perception derives from the correlated angle – or bias – by which one’s readerly imagination cuts aslant across the book/text/medium system in the first place. In that threefold constellation, it would be wrong for book studies to see its discipline relegated to some cultural periphery by strictly linguistic concerns. Book/text/medium: book abuts text in that template by supporting its operations, whereas medium emerges otherwise to recognition, from within rather than beneath writing and its surfaces. The codex is not the medium of text per se, as opposed to that of script, where ink and paper carry the reading matter. Books are, instead, the vehicle of such matter, which is why my study of the unreadable museum bibliobjet turned on the notion of “demediation”: an idea contested in print at the time from the ranks of book scholarship.2 The return to this question on my part for a fuller look at the material spectrum at stake is in no way meant now, anymore than before, to deny book studies its mandate in my more dedicated turn to verbal analysis. Precisely the opposite. When the linguistic medium is sensed working overtime as the channel of meaning, its true verbal materiality – its audiovisual skein – draws metonymically on codex and page for its own disclosed version of tangibility, its attenuated weight and grain, in any fully engaged “passage” from graphemes through phonemes to literary mimesis. Discussion thus directly intersects book history when it explores sculpted forms executed under the notion that to some extent books “are history” (in the idiomatic rather than scholarly sense). But these emphases do not necessarily augur a book, yet another one, on electronic reading – as we are no doubt destined to know it from here out, if never so much again from here on in, layer by layer, page upon tactile page. At play, instead, is a consideration pitched between codex history and media theory: again between medieval bookes and proliferating e-books in the long reign of the bound volume. What we’ll find should help to confirm Christina Lupton’s intuitions about a parallel between mid-eighteenth-century anxieties over print dissemination, on the one hand, and the regimes of circulation in our own digital moment, on the other. Enlightenment sparring in philosophical discourse over the matter(s) of paper surface and typeface at the rise of mass printing offers, on her account, not just a distant anticipation of deconstruction in regards to the arbitrariness of the signifier, but something more. Involved in these issues of worried materiality is not just a detachment of scriptive signification from referent, but the foretaste of a later unrest in contemporary culture about screen rather than paper surfaces – including their retinal alphabetic arrays – in the revolutionized mediality of our own data delivery systems.3

Intro\Retro

5

Intro\Retro, yes. And we can take a further step back in looking, and then going, forward. One might think of the focus sought for here as comparable to the track-zoom shot in cinema, pulling back while zeroing in. In this sense, the enmeshment of the book/text/medium triad in a communications network is philological as well as historical. The genealogy of the English language, as enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary, frames the whole question of mediality quite suggestively. In 1605, in his essay on the “Advancement of Learning,” Francis Bacon distinguishes the “Medium of Wordes” (given by the OED in its original early modern spelling) from other means of expressing “cogitation,” as for instance gestures or hieroglyphs or ciphers – other relations established between the “note” and the “notion.”4 English usage waited two and a half centuries for the emergent modern sense of “medium” (first in connection with painting) in the Victorian era (1861 is the earliest OED citation). Bacon’s broader usage falls under the OED definition (and is cited there) of “intermediate agency, instrument or channel; a means; esp. a means or channel of communication or expression,” with the crucial added clarification that the word typically appears in such phrasing as “by (also through) the medium of.” In short: “by the means of.” That of is the key, if partly to a door as yet unlocked by philological development in Bacon’s time.5 Still waiting until the mid-nineteenth century to emerge as idiom (in the manner of an equative genitive): the medium that is worded speech, a usage we’ll notice approached in stages by George Eliot and Oscar Wilde in Chapter 5. This lag time in nomenclature derives from the fact that the operations of language, let alone of literary writing, had not yet been fully separated out – under the pluralized umbrella of “media” in the evolved modern sense – as an inked form distinct from pigment or, down the road, from photography or film. That evolution is certainly presupposed in what follows, even as we will be tracking it back in the last chapter to a turning point at the end of Bacon’s seventeenth century: a pivotal moment marked by the rise of the novel, in unspoken medial terms, as both prose and mass print form. Ultimately, we will have fast-forwarded across a vast historical transition. We will, that is, have traversed the space between the dawn of print – and of prose itself as we now identify it, a streamlined expedient facilitating the spread of such mechanical production – and certain contemporary arts of the codex. Book forms are lately rendered as unrecognizable by sculptors and conceptual technicians as if they were anthropological relics from a lost civilization. Centuries after Gutenberg, culture has arrived, in many cases, at the occlusion of the legible page format altogether: the foreclosure of

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continuous print by the abstract configurations of recent book sculptures and assemblages. These constructs, as estranging bookworks, involve prototypical codex shapes reconceived now in cement, now in lead, sometimes in glass or straight pins or even vacuum-sealed human skin, including found volumes spray-painted or water-logged, slashed, singed, or cauterized. In between early modern dissemination and latter-day conceptualist irony, then, lies, by contrast, the career of the serviceable codex as we have known, and partly known our world through, its accessible pages. It is thus, in the central two chapters, that attention falls on the linguistically availed textual experience of such pages – especially when read over against those alternate devices designed for reading’s aesthetic arrest and prevention. With the aberrant physicality of the inert and unreadable bookwork as initial leverage, these middle chapters are out to discover, instead, what sense of language itself, as literary medium, derives from the tangible as well as linguistic sensation of the turned and discerned page as well as from the entrainment of lexical forms it regiments: a sensation, including a justperceptible friction or resistance, that approaches the palpable in more ways than one – textural but also textual, physical and syllabic at once, haptic and subvocal. So, in regard to the onetime dominance of the codex, let me rephrase my own title page by spelling out its descriptors in light of the level of investigation they elicit: material page/imprinted words/linguistic mediation – where only the third facet is retained unaltered by electronic text. And a word more, too, about what follows in the subtitle: “CrossSectional Reading for a Digital Age.” Not the age – monolithic and irreversible, and marked by the rhetoric of catastrophic upheaval – but instead any phase or stage of computerized writing and reading that may await. And for it, rather than just “in it”: for – on behalf of – its ongoing historical (both technical and philological) orientation. Yet our stilltransitional moment can claim a certain special point of vantage within the ongoing. However ubiquitously electronic the labor of textual transmission has become, ours – as in fact the first digital age – is also the site of an inherent medial retrospect. For which, of course, the codex is the residual benchmark: codex as book and text together, so much together that, still today, volumes are spoken of as interchangeable with their contents – even in a query like “What book are you reading?” when asked of a Kindle “user.” For a digital age, then, in helping to understand, by contrast, where we’ve been for half a millennium until now – and doing so in direct light of the changed and changing media landscape we will continue to inhabit.

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To this purpose, there is the subtitle’s intended further suggestion of “cross-sectional reading” in the associated plural sense of test-case readings (analyses). The scope of such reading(s) entails a broad account of the deciphering act across the registers of platform, text, and medium, but one anchored in and by a certain considered interpretation of the structures, verbal or plastic, that call it forth. Some intensive reading for a digital age, then: that’s the plan – as well as the cross-sectional design (as contrasted with, though not “opposed to,” the extensive reading that goes lately under the name of digital humanities in the “corpus stylistics” of literature). Attention in these chapters ranges from the hinging of the codex to the contingencies of textual inference and on (or down) to the propellant force (whether tactically constrained in visual art or fully elicited in literature, and brought to emphasis either way) of the verbal medium itself. This amounts to observations for an age in which the end of paper’s necessity rescinds none of the elusive linguistic materiality intrinsic to both the serial inscription of text and the time-based subvocal (and thus somatic) responses that were, together and inseparable, once reserved primarily for the portable codex rather than the mobile screen and its remote access. The purpose of what follows, in short, isn’t to assess new electronic protocols for reading in the age of digital reception, but instead to offer – for readers of just this era, and contextualized first of all by book art’s address to such changing times – a closer account of the interplay between material basis and textual experience in any period. Books thus help in assessing their own texts, one materiality in support of another – just as text can offer a reading of its own medium. But not, certainly, at just any, let alone every, moment in the reading act. No readers in the thick of comprehension have their eye on each facet or echelon of verbal transmission at once. No one traverses these three zones or levels of manifestation (book/text/medium) in the same breath of subvocal processing, alert equally not just to meaning but to material platform and the magic of language alike. Part of that magic, after all, is that it largely disappears – into sheer functionality – in normal and absorbed decipherment. With bookhood and linguistic ontology mostly edged to opposite ends of the spectrum in standard practices of reading – sidelined, suspended, repressed, and thus making way for their own ends – that’s exactly the functional latency that cross-sectional readings are intended to recover. In traversing these layered aspects of realization, such readings may be performed by graphic artists of one stripe or another (in bookworks or wordworks), by the ingrown pressure of literary expression upon its own fungible words (the reflexes of textuality), and in

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response to either or both, of course, by interpretive analysis. The interplay among the separate “media” entertained in the process of that analysis in the coming chapters – including painting, sculpture, and the rhetoric of drawn language on museum walls or their displayed canvases – is perhaps most surprising when it reaches out to include moving-image mediation as well. Yet it is there, in Chapters 3 and 4, that a recent theoretical exploration of written words on the film screen helps establish an unusually clear distinction between the inwardly variable temporality of alphabetic script and the otherwise time-based flow of filmic imaging in its automated lockstep. And this emphasis has the additional result, for our purposes, of stressing that what a semiotics of film, in its heyday, would have meant to identify as “the film text” is thus to be distinguished in such cases, and with broader implications too, from “text on screen.” So a word more on that sometimes partisan word “text.” In this book’s interleaving of levels, there is, on first pass, nothing out of the ordinary in the strictly common-sensical use of that term, no theoretical abstraction, no agenda. Text is meant in the same everyday sense as is book, with no poststructuralist pressure on the term itself – whatever indeterminacies may be incurred in a given reading event by a particular instance of such text.6 Centering the threefold distinction invoked here, text is simply what books offer up on their written pages when print is activated by attention: the meaningful inscription, the reading matter. Genre by genre, we may identify this textual matter as the story, the lyric, the dossier, the so-called play text, what have you: whatever form the linguistic medium takes in the case at (and in) hand on the tangible page. With the added advantage that the term tends to cover, even at first blush, a whole range of digital inscription as well. In any event, everything the complexities of literary theory might think to posit or interrogate by the name of text and metatext may well come into play when the engaged verbal mediation of any one instance is put to the test – but not as stressed up front by the more straightforward use of this study’s titular middle term. Since the physical book (or platform) is not the essential “medium” of printed writing in any but the simplest understanding of conveyance, “text” is merely a better name for verbal mediality’s primary manifestation in delivery, otherwise parsed in this triadic form: book/writing/language – where it may seem all the clearer that localized features and force fields are therefore a matter, once again, of pre-positioning. Within a book, the page on which writing is found locates the potentially triggered scene of reading through which, as text, the medium can alone make itself, as well as anything else but the page surface, felt. I don’t hesitate to dispel any aura of technical abstraction

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9

around the term “text,” any halo of the rarefied, in spelling this out. That the three linked terms – book and text and medium – should seem obvious going in doesn’t rob the coming distinctions of their force, but simply grounds their cross-sectional opportunities in advance, including the new theoretical pressure to be placed upon their common-sense interplay. Questions aggregate in this way around vernacular usages, like “book reading,” rarely interrogated. It is therefore important again to pose the question raised in the Prospectus. Does the codex platform take any ordinarily appreciable part, even if only by imagined vestige, in what we understand as reading’s medium? And if so, in what relation to the linguistic continuum mounted on it, in the form of text, from sheet to sheet or so-called page to e-book page? What is the difference, even within simultaneous encounter, between a book in its relay of text and text in its transmission of idea or reported event? These are just the sort of questions normally left aside in getting on with our reading – whether we call it, and loosely or not, the reading of book, page, or text; and whether we mean by page a uniform rectangle, either front- or back-lit, or its variably paragraphed content; and whether in turn, by text, we think of its manifested medial procedures or just its semantic take-away. In what follows, those whethers will be summoned to confront each other more directly than usual – not as alternatives but in their inherent correlation. Even while all those previously asked questions are to remain in play. That field of play is ultimately my topic: a play among bound objects, read words, and an account of their conveyance as a multi-channel delivery system. Such is the particular cross-sectional perspective underway. Material culture, literary linguistics, and media theory (in its truest philosophical dimensions) are meant to cooperate fully in this triangulation, each disposed to speak more directly than usual to the other. Partly this disposition results from my own scholarly backlog, including more than one book of my own on each topic separately, now shelved together for consultation and cross-reference in the face of new evidence. So that the “retro” cast of this introduction is not just a looking back on the long tradition of the codex from the vantage of the digital, but on my own writing about what I think now to call its codextuality – as both pulped matter and impressed messaging. And on more than that, too. An anonymous press reader saw the draft of this manuscript – in its marked crossroads at the intersection of my longstanding critical interests – as a “kind of summa.” It wasn’t conceived that way, and certainly not as a deliberate retracing of convergent paths. But it can stand as such – summative – if that helps highlight the way that literary poetics, painted codex script, book

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sculpture, conceptual works across a restless spectrum of transmedial irony, and the flux of cinematic temporality – attended in the shift from photographic to digital cinema – might helpfully join forces, both by analogy and contrast in varying ratios. In doing so, they would begin eliciting the micro-structures of a verbal textuality dependent at once on a physical support, a graphic surface, and the fluid materiality, sustained by variable sound waves, of an activated linguistic medium – in no way negated in screen text, but, in the pace of decipherment, thrown out of alignment with the optics of the moving image.

The Digital Vantage Computerized writing, let alone computer script at the level of code, highlights all that it must either depart from or claim continuity with. The textured heft of the codex and its impressed surfaces alike; the contours of worded text under exerted stylistic inflection; and, fusing them in process, the linguistic mediality of any lexical inscription when triggered by the eye–ear coordinations of reading: such is the normative overlap assumed and pursued in Book, Text, Medium. Leaving surface texture aside, the glazed feel of a so-called touch screen makes the same connection with text and medium, though of course not with sewn pages, as does the conventional book. The difference is largely what the sculptural bookworkers of Chapter 2 seek to annotate – and sometimes to archive by exaggeration – with their curious objects. Highlighted there, yet again, in the material bookhood (or its simulations) of volumetric form, is the first of the three senses – by applied contrast – in which this particular book is “for” readers in “a digital age.” The other two entail convergent operations rather than divergences of form. Surely, any thought bestowed on the computer platform in its wordsummoning function is not likely to blunt the everyday mystery of words on tap in that thing we term language, arising to use from equally unreckonable depths. The wonderment there is undefeatable. As it is for the wellsprings of binarism in the unseen depth of computer files. In contrast to the folded and seamed book page, for most of us the unreachable innards of computer code – hoarding its algorithmic syntax not merely out of sight but out of mind’s grasp – might thus seem to intimate its own ubiquitous technical allegory of the “linguistic” miracle itself in the broader semiotics of code. To intimate as much, perhaps, but not often to tantalize with it in any tangible form – as artists have done with the book’s emblematic shape in everything from Renaissance landscapes in oil, the

The Digital Vantage

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holy book open toward a natural expanse in the saint’s hands, to the codex’s descendant and ironized sculptural forms when, for instance, punctured with nail holes and bolted to its gallery plinth as if by two steel eyes. That’s the aesthetic spectrum for which e-text, as yet, even in its inbuilt further mystification of the “scripted” medium that generates it by computation, has no sustained parallel.7 Yet no little cognitive purchase to offer, nonetheless, in distinguishing the materialities of physical support versus operable code. In any case, we can’t help looking back in light, and sometimes in the wearing glare, of these latest and dominant screen parameters. Though with all new examples since my previous writing on the diverse but associated matters of contemporary codex sculpture and its earlier painterly lineage, as well as on the roughened fabric of literary language, the categorical coinages that originally arose, also in their own portmanteau form, to focus the material hybridities of those studies are again invoked here. These include the Conceptual art of the bibliobjet in codex reshaping, the graphonic force (grapheme/phoneme) of verbal poetics in the processing of textual import, and, third, the reflex action (in one inherently conflated term) of mediarchaeology.8 This mode of terminological intersection does, I trust, do more than help answer a single author’s lingering curiosity, in hindsight, about the nature and weight of some abiding center of gravity in his own work. More important, the triad of investigative terms entertains – and then, as sponsored by their own material conflations, begins to explore – a potential new template for the meeting of book history and communications studies: not through the computerized offices of digital humanities but over the live body of literary language in its near rather than far reading, close rather than “distant.” In the conjunction of literature and the theories of reading that best account for its force – including exactly its graphonic density – there is a certain technological loop, if not quite a transhistorical irony, worth remarking on. We may well agree that digital writing on the computer screen, e-literature included, though apart from the intervening scripts that generate it from its numeric basis – and quite apart from the geological and ecological materialities of electronic production, its extractions and pollutions – introduces a new degree of immateriality into the flow of text. And into reading as well, in its function as a timebased, though variable, medium – its pace elective unlike that of the computer clock, let alone the film strip. But computerization can look back as well into the nature of deeply ingrained cognitive functions, tacitly retro (anthropological) in its latest interventions. Putting it

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differently: computers are reading more about the reading process these days than anything circumscribed by their own “word processing” on screen. For digital brain scans that probe the way reading – the way language itself – works in human acquisition have a deep linguistic reach, quite beyond any parochial interest in the digital interface. They might indeed claim some of their most immediate impact not on any specifics of e-reading, certainly, but rather on the palpable slipperiness of word discrimination in literary processing more broadly, including a progressively heightened phonetic attention in individual subjects. In fact, the latest work on the neurology of verbal decipherment by French brain theorist Stanislas Dehaene elucidates the pathways of “neuronal recycling” in the letter and word recognitions of everyday reading, including the progressive enhancement of phonological discrimination in literate rather than illiterate subjects: the ear itself schooled in functional difference by reinforcement over developmental time.9 If one were to think of this as sensitivity training, then we might designate it as precisely the nuanced aural response that abets, in literature’s own terms, not just the harmonics of recurrence but the calculated illiteracies, the fluctuant ambiguities, of just the kind of lexical juncture this book will be pursuing in its central poetics of silent reading. Book/text/medium: such zoning of engagement, material through and through, certainly invites an emphasis on the cognitive impact of literary inscription – as impressed lettering, belle or otherwise – whose concerted linguistic assessment overcomes the typical delimitations of authorial stylistics by pushing through, beyond appreciated nuance, to the inferred force of wording’s medial slipstream. Now as codex, now as e-book – or then versus now, and material either way – what comes under examination is again, in ways not otherwise fully measured, the system of literary transmit intercepted in disclosure of its defining linguistic medium. Whether electronic or not (my own pages in this volume included, depending on your preferred format at some potential future date), such textuality – in an inherent materiality linked by association to the oncethumbed and digit-turned (if now swiped) page – thus retains its relation to the haptics as well as mechanics of book form. Bookhood persists, at least as prototype, even as its pages may be submitted to morphophonemic, then phenomenological, then ontological (Agamben here) analysis in their referential function as language act, language event. As acknowledged, this book has no interest in claiming that we read with each aspect equally in mind, even in unconscious mind. It proffers simply

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one attempt, the first that I know of, at accounting in theoretical terms for the simultaneities, however unevenly felt, of their variable interaction. And this, in practice, ends up meaning three separate pairs of broad-scale “readings,” two per part: in Part I, of conceptual objects in relation – or open address – to the graphics of inscription, as the latter may serve to objectify, in order to dismantle or ramify, certain features of the book’s traditional physical format in respect to its resultant cognitive functions. Next (Part II): a reading of literary wording in just those latter functions, as linguistic text and its textures, in close comparison with the graphic and sculptural displacement of Conceptual art, experimental typeface included, as well as the foregrounded writing and signage of narrative cinema as an alternative time-based medium. Finally (Part III): a delving into the ontology of human speech by a contemporary philosopher (Giorgio Agamben) whose own work in poetics often brings to light an underlying philosophy of language prosecuted in action by literary texts. What is thereby uncovered, within linguistic ontology, is a tacit theory of literary mediality to which Agamben nowhere gives that name – but about which he could hardly be more eloquent. And which a comparison with German media theorist Friedrich Kittler will help bring out. Besides mapping Agamben’s terms more closely onto those of media theory, then, what Part III will also add to his philosophical rumination on “linguistic anthropogenesis” is a complementary historical account linking the advent of the print codex to a new Enlightenment premium on uncluttered empirical language: a language celebrated for its achieved “plainness,” at first, but that nevertheless – as prose per se, more broadly understood – was soon to shed its simplicity and diffidence in spreading its literary wings. In moving from book as format through its proffered legibility to the legitimizing structures of human speech that are the sine qua non of any such readability – in calibrating, that is to say again, the spectrum or nexus book/text/medium as it tends to fuse into an unpunctuated literary continuum – we thus begin with the sculpted rather than enunciated book, the codex degree zero. Potently off limits to reading, the 3-D bookworks ahead, as bibliobjets, continue their material – and often metaphorical or emblematic – investigation into the “space of reading” (and its foreclosures) begun, centuries before, with the book in the hands of a painted saint, then later of a novel reader, projecting various graphic tropes of its implicit spiritual or emotional contours into a surrounding landscape or domestic interior. Gone but not forgotten is the “keep” of such words in canonical – and iconographic – book form:

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their hold, their very safehold, and their page-based holdability as such, whether depicted on canvas or actually on call, in the clutch of the reading subject. It is thus the subsequent work of Part II to return us, against the previous backdrop of exaggerated textual cancellation in the sculpture mode of “altered books” and their like, to the unrolling – over syntactic time – of all such words in their inherent mediating import: their serial meaning via linguistic means. Those means are placed under scrutiny, within the held book, as the further grip of inscription upon us – and then theorized as the give and yield, the pliability and upshot, the flex and extension, of mediality per se. What grows clear is correlation itself. The more closely one gauges the language of a text, the nearer one comes to the apprehension of a techne linking the oscillations of graphic imprint – in or out of sync with phrased (graphonic) sense – to the operable mechanics of book form. These alternating points of abstracted tactility, so to speak, include the structured momentum of pagination, the granular intermittences of script in the play of white against black, the very impending of the marginal upon the serial, the paced evanescence always combined with various scales of recursion across phrase, paragraph, or page, the sheer verticality of columnar accumulation in the “deepening” of sense, to say nothing (so far) of the leafthin fragility of abutting word borders in the vacillation of transit. Affiliated here in theory – as they clearly are, in practice, between canvas and page – are thus obverse if complementary considerations: the graphic representation of reading and the reading of graphic (or typographic) representation. Broad media-historical circles are often redrawn in this regard – and just as soon closed by certain aesthetic performances.

Book to Text: Edition to Audition And the leading question by which these performances are to be approached in the paired first chapters: what does either the merely represented page or the appropriated and denatured actual codex, the latter whether shorn of words or closed upon them, call forth about a book’s typical (and here missing) lexigraphic materiality? What does the bibliobjet summon, undone on the spot, about the reading experience? Even with no answer yet ventured, the basic question alone – by noting an inverse emphasis in the material reduction of the codex shape – begins to suggest that the matter of literary style, when thought through in connection with the books or screens that deliver it, never remains quarantined as entirely or purely “verbal.” The aura of substance precedes that of significance – even as

Book to Text: Edition to Audition

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the former returns otherwise in the act of deciphering. Substance before content: as odd as the distinction may sound in regard to literary discourse. In an interplay of veritably tangible factors, the materiality of language’s morphemic structure – in delivery by even silent lungs and tongue, inwardly sounding out its own graphemes in production – requires, in textual transmission, some kind of underlying material conveyance as well. By which the combined drive of shaped phrasing may at times be troped. Troped . . . even technologically refigured. To this end, many a deliberate electronic anachronism comes to mind in rephrasing what neurologists call the “inhibited” anatomical work of silent enunciation in the reading of prose as well as poetry. It is in this general orbit of transmission that writing becomes, in receptual process, not just a silent “synthesizer” of sorts (captured, again, by the conflationary term graphonic), but its own kind of premotor “phonography” – in another sense, a remote corporeal “tele-phony.” Or, to hark back a few years earlier in the litany of Alexander Graham Bell’s innovations, the essential fact of phonemic reading is the both anatomical and cultural prototype for the telephone’s as well as the phonograph’s precursor in the “phonautograph,” with actual body parts there too (in its case, the segment of a corpse’s skull and ear) as the mediating transmitter from speech to silent traced wavelengths. These were stored indices of speech with no mechanism for phonic recovery. Such is the somatic conduit traversed otherwise, and in reverse, from script rather than graphic ripple in the standard reading act – or call it the normative work of data retrieval by human agency. Further initiatives in the technology of sound storage and broadcast invite one to characterize the standard reading function as that of a portable “audiobook,” jacked-in for silent audition.10 Or consider it a vocalic “streaming” device, a translation “software” from mark to remark, a remote “playback” mechanism at virtually zero volume, a muted “voice-recognition” affordance, and so on, in each case with the suppressed musculature of the reading body – as intermediate textual driver – operating as the page’s necessary external hardware in the somatic register of abeyance and latency. And in each case conjured in various ways by the whole panoply of verbally denuded bookworks whose latest experiments we will soon be “reading.” As these détourned (and detooled) bibliobjets tend to stress, many of the delivery systems for textual activation, and long since the turned page of mass imprint after Gutenberg, have – in finding names and trademarks for their technical advances – actually figured at the same time, with those very terms, the fundamental reading act as a silent feed of phonemes bunching into words by graphonic means. Graphonic, then, because inseparable in

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their visible alphabets from the sound cues incurred in the deciphering of morphophonemic language. Some consequences of which – tested via evidence from recent Conceptual art, sometimes parodically audible, as well as from the inherent sound play of literary writing – are what these chapters can only begin listening in on. And in this implicit technologizing of the textual machine as audiovisual engineering, we may make common cause with book history’s interest in the physics and mechanics as well as the architectonics of the traditional codex form – as well as with that latest and most intriguing of book arts exhibitions, “The Internal Machine,” to be revisited in the second chapter. But what can bring us from these, or any such, bookwork fabrications of the galleried bibliobjet to the deep structures – and deeper assumptions – of language philosophy? On the one hand, many irreverent installation objects seem bent (sometimes quite out of shape) on the arrest of canonical text-messaging in codex form – while many seem, on the other hand, preoccupied with exactly the problematic of language transmission that carries a contemporary philosopher like Agamben all the way from Plato and Aristotle to the post-human speech of algorithmic code. One encouraging feature of the present study’s cross-over pursuit, at least, should be apparent in the material heft of its own codex form. For only a short book like this could hope not to get lost in the differences unfolded by such an inquiry – while tracing out certain focused common inferences.

The Banned Widths of the Waiting Page And focus is everything. So let me put into evidence, in anticipation, a composite example from literary prose that is as concerned, for instance, as conceptual textwork is with the material “face” of inscription; as preoccupied with the exact setting of the eyed page as is any painted scene of reading; as taken up with material surface as any avant-garde codex sculpture – all while recruiting the graphonic energies of our own lingual recognition as we read. Book sculpture stripped of words, as suggested, is the return of the estranged in a useless mode of essentialization: the codex in reduction to its rough-hewn rectangular format rather than function, reverted to bulk rather than semantic inculcation. Useless as messaging – but compounded, compacted, sometimes almost composted, in its formal and cultural ironies as weighted object. Or, elsewhere in museum display, featuring forth the pure uninscribed texture of the page’s waiting surface, vulnerable and inviting in the ambivalence of its own blankness. Perhaps one book narrates this last evocation better than any gallery catalog. Recall

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the erotics of the unlettered page in the otherwise neutered world of George Orwell’s 1984. It is no accident that, for a master of precise language like Orwell, any vision of a numbing dystopia would involve eroding the very roots of the human in regard, not least, to the expressive capacity of words on paper. And not last. In the very first extended episode of his 1949 narrative, the hero, Winston Smith, alone in his bleak flat, has edged himself just outside the purview of a wired surveillance monitor that could ordinarily “command the whole room”: the audiovisual mediation of the ubiquitous “telescreen,” where no text is ever needed.11 Beyond technology’s line of sight, sidling into a wall recess originally designed for a bookcase when there still were such things as bound volumes available for shelving, indeed sequestered from electronics (we may say, proleptically) in deference to codex mechanics, Winston thus secretes himself in an invisible silence with the blank pages of the contraband “book” he has purchased on a risky whim. It is a blank notebook, really, the repeated description of its forbidden “cream pages” almost a synesthesia for the luscious haptic taste of their forbidden gratification in expressive text. Licking the head of that “archaic instrument” known as the nib pen, rather than “ink-pencil” (ballpoint) to start the flow (7), he inscribes the implicitly rut-like (numerically oppressive) date of his inaugural authorship, 4/4/84 (“April 4th, 1984”), and then wonders how exactly, and what, to write. All he has given way to so far is a physical, not a discursive, temptation, a sensual impulse regarding the virgin page: “It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past” (6). It is, to this point, only a cellulose objet. Even just these few pages into the book you are reading (and here I mean mine rather than Orwell’s text), you are already primed to recognize the legacy of Winston’s fetishized book in the sculpted codex of arrested – and thus re-examined – cultural investment. All the scrubbed and blank, or chemically washed, or paint-drenched surfaces in contemporary book art – or such over-scale page portraits as the giant blank volumes, with their marbleized endpapers, painted as outsize wall art, in 2013, by the former innovator in the mode of the artist’s book, Ed Ruscha12 – all these may seem captured in anticipation here by the fascination of the unreadable, with its sheer enticement to the ex-pressive pressure of applied ink. Or, in an alternate relation to contemporary book sculpture, one can think of Winston’s empty “alcove” (for which a bookshelf was once intended) as the architectonic equivalent of one of those negative bookshelf molds by British conceptual sculptor Rachel Whiteread – nomen est omen – that give us the blank plaster chasms

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where books once were: whited sepulchers of actual reading matter in its ghostly absence. In any case, Winston’s bound pages, bearing no more than text in potentia, are very much, in context, “the book” as outmoded emblem of human transmission: more obsolescent under Newspeak totalitarianism than is the textured codex today under the shadow of global computerization. We thus enter upon a kind of historical chiasmus. With Orwell publishing thirty-five years before the date of his own dystopian prognosis, we now look back from exactly thirty-five years later on a different supersession of the book form. And this for media-historical reasons. The paper of Winston’s pages is nearly half a century old, but the object seems to bear witness, by inference, to a far longer history: “He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that” (6). As category, much. The statement seems lifting off the page as we read, translated to generalization. This book, “the book”: the layered planar space for individuated writing and ultimately private reading. Call it a relic of humanity itself, before the atomic deluge and the speech-depleting stranglehold of the Party. Only later, more specifically, do we learn from the underground bookseller – and with no lessening of its pages’ erotic lure, certainly – that it was a “young lady’s keepsake album” from the last century, implicitly awaiting the preservation of excerpted words other than her own: history, so to say, in the curated making, a personally invested archive. In regard to his own bibliobjet, Winston’s original urge is primordial, almost atavistic, for in a repeated emphasis on “the beautiful creamy paper” he feels simply, “furtively,” that it “deserved to be written on” (6–7), but not scratched – just caressed – by the stroking of a nib pen. Yet he has lost the somatic knack of handwriting, addicted instead to the dictaphone at his workplace in the Ministry of Truth, where he is engaged in the over-writing and thus effacement of all historical records. Not by accident, that audio-graphic technology is mentioned for the first time just here, in this pending scene of inscription, as “the speakwrite” (7) – perhaps with its self-policed overtones of speakright – and, in any case, as the functional opposite to the domestic spyware of the telescreen, which listens and transmits without letting the subject record. Or without needing to spell anything out (in the age of vocabular depletion under Newspeak) beyond the wall panel’s own cacophonous harangues. In a further inference, the vilified screen thus operates to expose, beyond this apparatus of espionage, how technology has – in another indirect forecast of our digital age – rendered handwriting (rather than texting or voice-recognition software) a vestigial skill. In

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this sense, our own versions of tele-screened text, for all the differences in machination and intent between a futurist 1984 and our later now, insinuate yet another uncanny Orwellian prognosis sprung from Winston’s alternate eroticized love of the book. Moreover, along a different medial route, the merely functional “speakwrite” transcription is at the same time the inverse, as we will be auditing its manifestations in Part II, of that writespeak – that sounding of scriptive speech ciphers – that characterizes the subvocal force induced by both alphabetic writing and reading in their shared phonemic increments. Such is the inscriptive circuit seared or scoured away in the suppressed legibility of book sculpture – rather than awaited by the delicious stitched pages of Winston’s found object. So far in 1984, that is, “the book” of Winston’s is only a tabula rasa in bound form – in contrast, shortly, to the repeatedly italicized “the book,” more notorious but no more forbidden: the shoddily printed and use-worn copy of Goldstein’s heretical exposé of the Party that is later slipped to Winston: “A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover” and whose print “looked slightly irregular” (184). But no more irregular, no more anomalous, no more aberrant, in its implied deviance, than the instances of clean, block-print lettering that, after a first bout of scrappy free writing, Winston will soon produce in the opening scene – out of his own unconscious – in unwittingly filling half a page with the iterated, crisply scripted denunciation “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” (18). All books under dystopian censure, in their availability for upstart expression, are thus as fully criminalized as the book. Well before his reiterated and heretical four-word rejection of state power and the status quo, Winston has begun to write, fumblingly, in an illpunctuated montage of his own, describing the propagandistic war films he had seen the night before. But from quick-cut cinematic ekphrasis he soon moves, in the midst of “musing” (18) on a triggering memory, to his stream-of-the-unconscious execration. It is only after he has discovered his repeated anathematizing of Big Brother that Orwell describes the prose recognized by Winston as “no longer the same cramped awkward handwriting as before” (18) – the free indirect discourse snarled there in an unpunctuated cramped phrase of its own – but instead as an unprecedented freedom of erotic outflow discovered only ex post facto: “His pen had slid voluptuously” – a cause visible now, at grammar’s pluperfect remove, only in its effect as script – “over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals” his deepest libidinal instinct (18): for revenge against constraint. In a novel where transgressive sex is later rendered inseparable

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from anti-regime violence, Winston has found himself lost in a consummation achieved in the self-lubricated glide of defiant ink. In other terms, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the bibliobjet has hereby been not just caressed but ultimately impregnated – as text. But first, importantly, “the book” has come before us, as opposed to “the book,” as an abstraction, a form without content. In Winston’s case, it is the book as an antique convenience, a piece of cultural furniture from a lost past, an object not yet made over into – or recovered as – a tool. In its creaminess, smooth to the touch, we have, like Winston, noted it as a thing to be handled before it is implemented: the book as object rather than instrument, palpable without being just serviceably at hand. Its use is deferred by its beauty: artifactual before equipmental – and thus its anticipation of the post-digital bibliobjet. At which point we verge on a landmark philosophical distinction between objects under perception and their differently perceived being when underway in use. Martin Heidegger’s famous example of the hammer – “present-at-hand” (Vorhanden) when looked at (or conceived, or named) as a wood-andmetal object, whereas “ready-to-hand” (Zuhanden) in immediate use – is therefore one model for the shift of focus across this book’s first two sections, as reprised and deepened in the third.13 For Winston, the page as object is a thing of smooth beauty after long collective denial, handled luxuriantly even before being rendered handy. By contrast, the page in action as inked platform is “known” exclusively through its use – so much so that, in Winston’s case, its provision for writing, along with the pen’s, has risen from the unconscious to only subsequent recognition. The tabula rasa of revolutionary eros has thus emerged from being present-at-hand, in its creamy look as object, to a function ready-to-hand – but only, in this oblique yet quintessential case, when bypassing premeditated discourse altogether and accessing the unintentional animus of pure assertive desire: almost, and “voluptuously,” the sheer body language of resistance. And Heidegger intervenes here from another angle as well. Though complicated by this reach into the precognitive on Winston’s part, the way in which, according to Heidegger, a general discourse of world perception precedes and impels individual speech acts entails a philosophical distinction (Rede versus Sprache, “discourse” versus “speech”) that comes to mind in Orwell too.14 This can be taken together with that other dichotomy – which we may now recast, around the present example of Winston’s bibliobjet, as the distinction between objects present-to-view and equipment ready-tohand. Operating here is a toggle between what we might call the aesthetic discourse of the book form – the codex, blank or otherwise, available for use

The Banned Widths of the Waiting Page

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in writing or reading – and the immersive transmission achieved by any individual page under employment, which is to say lexical and syntactic deployment. The overarching – or is it underlying? – possibility of discourse needs the outcropping of speech for full realization, or at least for transmission, if only the written speech of the page. As such, this distinction should also help forge a transition between the codex forms in the gallery precincts of Part I and the manifestation of language – from within the functioning energies of linguistic messaging – in the time-based literary sequencings of Part II. For it is there, in the turn from museum to literary archive, that the cleft between format and function in the paired opening chapters gets refashioned at the level of active page rather than foreclosed codex – where alone, in the former case as legible print surface, the field of discourse finds its chance of silent speech. At stake in Part II, then, is the difference not between appropriated cellulose bulk (or its sculpted simulacrum) and its viable codex function, but between, one level up, writing’s own materiality and its communicative matter – as it will then be submitted to a further and postHeideggerian verbal analysis, via Agamben, as literature’s abiding medial possibility. We are to be concerned throughout, then, with a sliding scale of distinction. As the book format oscillates between the sculptural and the functional, so does the work of inscription play between lettering as linear sequence and alphabetic enunciation as active decipherment, between a script now present-at-hand on the page, now ready-to-hand when taken up in reading. Taken up – and taken in. Between visible means and immanent medium, the legible passes over into the phonetically read. On the latter score, before the investigations that center this book in Chapters 3 and 4, one need only think here, in the very passage “to hand” from 1984, of the muted play between graphemic script and its inner reverb that gets called up – via writespeak, if you will, in Orwell’s own honed and “phonographically” crafted prose – by the echoically fit (because slightly self-widening) “shallow alcove” phrased to locate this very act of transmission where a bookshelf once was. To call this, in its least histrionic of manifestations, a bookish phrase is to have mapped one bridge, if not yet crossed it, between the first two parts of the present book. Compare, as well, the transition from book I to book II of Orwell’s own text – when, after a meditation on the certain death inherent in his “thoughtcrime,” Winston hears again the clanging formula of the Party motto (“WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”) droned out as the fused, leveled enunciation of a quasichiastic alphabetic chime: a deadly “leaden knell,” or “leaden knell,” whose

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double phonetic pivot seems in both cases to implode on itself in mimetic echo of monotony’s most pervasive ideological node (104). So broadly subsumed to free indirect discourse is this whole focalized opening onto the claustrophobia of consciousness in Winston’s world that these minor chimes – now hollowing out a shallow trench of echo across two words, now capturing a numb onomatopoeia of political cacophony in another pair of linked lexemes – can seem in themselves, in company with the stroked cream page, to mark by association the first stirrings of the hero’s verbal animus. As such, they await our last chapter’s attention to the frail philosophical stand-off, proposed by Agamben as the basis of “anthropogenesis,” between subjectivity and language.

Medium Deep Just there in Orwell, in the phrased interspace between narration and the inward verbalism of consciousness itself, is the kind of “stylistic” effect – audiovisual in its own right – to which, when observed at all, the term medium is less often applied than, in full illumination, it might be. Beyond this “concrete” example in Orwell of a multiple mediality operating, in a single episode, across tangible page, variable script, and activated language, we are broadly concerned with that notion of materiality so axiomatic for bibliographic study and so elusive for hermeneutics. It is what Agamben (following Gottlob Frege) refers to, we’ll find, as the “material reality” of the name, the word, but only when he notes its signage disappearing into meaning, where it is then to be queried by ontology rather than literary linguistics. Instead, we will keep note, keep track, of the material weft and density of wording as it retained, however unstably, in the very work of meaning as text. Or, more to the point, as the medial underlay of text – where the formative pulse of meaning is to be found entering into an all but tangibly weighted, spaced, and manifold counterpart to the swivel mechanics of the codex manifold as composite form. Such is the phonic grain of reading mounted in what we might call reciprocal sensory alertness upon the imprinted haptics of the page – yet surviving as well, by the very nature of verbal semiotics, into the disembodied precincts of computerized screen reading. In sum, yet again, we move in our level-jumping across (Part I) the materiality of the book as platform, traced page by page, through (Part II) the phenomenology of the text as read, with all its ingrained linguistic and even representational slippages, to (Part III) the ontology of language as medium. The shifting force of these traversed distinctions is exactly what

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turns the sequence into a cross section. For artworks – now plastic, now literary, now reconceived as both – pose their elucidating resistance at each stage. With the result that the physicality and function of codex conveyance is arrested in sculptural metaphor when the book, cancelled or blocked as tool by material contravention, becomes object; when the conjured phenomenal world generated by verbal structure is occluded or deflected by wording itself in moments of thickened signification; and when the being of language, obtruding the elusive conditions of its own possibility, is intercepted in the very work of delivering the language of being. What is at stake here, at all three levels, is a return of the repressed – an axiomatic materiality – as a definitive common denominator. The cellulose basis of platform use that is sublimated and refigured in book sculpture speaks to a different, but no less textured, materiality that remains latent in the disengaged medium of language itself in such contrarian (and clarifying) works. For thrown into relief by the wordless book form is the entire cognitive weight of all it has closed out. To stress only writing or its absence in all this, or only text and the language that funds it, is to overlook the key term of the communicative linguistic act – or, equally, of its reduction to mere physical shape (without visible language) in conceptual bookwork. Which is to say that if one speaks only of text, present or not, or of language at large, plumbed in its ontological possibility – if one looks only to text richly vexed (literature) or wholly excised (sculpture), or to language at large in the imponderabilities of its being (philosophy) – the term that goes missing is medium. Instead, the present cross-sectional venture is an effort at media theory rooted in, but not limited to, the codex as conveyance, however denatured in recent conceptual formats: a conveyance whose underlying materiality neither exhausts, on the one hand, nor is forgotten, on the other, by the entangled tangibilities of the medial reading act. As just a single token of what might be leveraged by this approach, albeit a kind of negative exemplum, one might note how the recent fashion for so-called surface reading in the literary academy – much vaunted rhetorically, though seldom offered in evidence by way of method or result – draws its implausible polemic (and its attenuated model in defiance of all “subtext” in a hermeneutics of suspicion) from an unspoken false cognate with the page surface of book studies.15 Except in its manifestation as mere ink, or in some likeness of imprint on screen, literary writing has no surface; its mediations run deep, ontologically deep in the abiding and bidden sense of human language. The self-fulfilling fallacy of the surface school gels in

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a question: upon what kind of material could critical attention hope to put pressure if to bear down were never to bore deep? Pursuant, instead, to a logic of cross-sectional encounter at descending strata of apprehension, this book’s alternate approach recognizes that it is perhaps the digital “page” – rather than that of the codex – that can best help us apprehend, in historical retrospect, the operation of written language not just as a medium but as its own mode of “interface” between text and reading. Hold that thought, at least, until Part III in our probe, with the provisional confidence – I want to say promise – that Parts I and II will have helped tighten, by triangulation, any such interknit claims. At that point, literary criticism, having caught up with art history, will be met on new ground by philosophy as well as media theory. On one front, what will have been freshly seen by then is a transferred logic of the eye. Our gaze at all those painted gazes directed upon open and mostly illegible pages – within a larger marked rectangle conveying the “look of reading” as presumed canvas event – will have been closely contrasted by that point with the quite different work of our look at real pages. For the latter looking involves the lines of sight by which actual printed lines are scanned – and then subvocalized – by each of us in our own version of the reading act, more often in libraries than in museums.16 So it is that when, and wherever, you are reading the present pages, you will soon realize that their threefold sectioning is, as with the eye–ear coordinates of word di/vision itself, inseparable from overlap. Call them, instead, Parts I, I–II, and II–III. Change book to digital array – in the manner of grid/text/medium, or even to artificial voice technology, let alone recorded recitation, in audio/ text/medium – and text remains defined, output route aside, by its medium in language, whatever the innovations of its instrumental support. In media-archaeological terms, there is no “missing link,” at any stage, in the juggernaut of technological breakthroughs. Language rests speciesdeep in literature across all the debated perturbations of mediumspecificity. One axiom behind the cross-sectional reading pursued ahead seems uniquely suited in this way “for” a digital age – suited by being situated to chasten any claims, in evolutionary terms, for “catastrophe” rather than graded transition. Hence the closer than ever analytic bond between a broadly conceived book history and an attention to literary textuality under the sign of media theory. For here is where electronic lettering or digital phonics can be found helping to distinguish – and thus to interrelate on that scale of variant materiality augured by my title – the physical support of script, once on the paper of a Book, now via monitored

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pixels, from the linguistic substrate of literary Text graphonically activated in the Medium of language. In it, not just (pace Bacon) through it. To note the obviousness of such a claim goes some distance toward appreciating the medial tensions that converge in academic debates – around various artifacts as well as theoretical articulations – from attempts to deflect or repress this linguistic priority. No such policing here, even in the name of sharper demarcations. Not just in its codex prototype but in its posttypographic digital pagination, repeatedly the published or otherwise engineered “book,” and whether in hand or on desktop screen, directs us straight through text to medium, from words to the condition of wording, the formal to the formative, verbal energy to its generative drivers. This study offers one way of following that direction – and its tacit literary directive. The plan, then: nothing to be fenced off, just differentiated; demarcations in the book/text/medium nexus there to be overlapped, overridden: not partitions so much as the borderlines of a more deep adhesion, each term inherent in the other, a terracing of material conception itself. Overriden, yes, and at times overwritten by the reach of language in just such engagement. The goal, therefore: that the lifted book should weigh in for consideration along with – not just alongside, in some categorical segregation – the phonetic mass and specific lexical gravity of the words whose text, when actively read, may take in turn the epitomizing measure, the weight and pulse, of an entire linguistic medium. It is in just this way, realigned with book studies, that an art history risen to the occasion of bookworks or lexigraphs might enter an unprecedented dialogue with textual explication under the broad umbrella – and clarified parameters – of media theory. An introduction to such an imbricated correlation of levels will have done its work only if sufficiently evoking the complexities, however intuitive, of any such intertwine of evidence. In the first stage of transition, from platform to text in Part II, we will by then have seen the reading act summarily abrogated by another modality of art – in the form of codex sculpture, whether appropriated or surrogate, lifted from normal use or shaped in simulation. Operating between the realms of virtual and actual page consumption, that is, in a 3-D space alongside the merely pictured reader on nearby museum walls, are gathered and categorically grouped certain gallery bibliobjets that ask us to reconceive, at least reexamine, the normal processing of a codex format (inscribed paper matter in bound folds) in this new and anomalous zone of reductive materiality and displaced textuality. For here are reading’s physically refigured contours – and

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mechanical infrastructure – erected over against those actual sounded words for which the supervening sculptural shapes may provide only spatial (if still in their own way “discursive”) metaphors. A rehearsed tour of more than one recent exhibition in this vein awaits, as well as of adjacent galleries in which books (or their scrawled pages) are flattened into representation on canvas. No queues; all anticipated queries addressed; admission gratis; and even, in the running captions offered by the first two chapters, an ecumenical cross-gallery catalog of comparisons given out free of further charge. Doors now open.

part i

The Hold of the Codex

chapter 1

Bibliographics

Whether or not listed together under any rubric, alphabetized by author or title or otherwise sorted, books are comprised of pages that are always graphic in treatment to begin with. The emphasis in this chapter’s title has nothing to do with the citational compendium of so-called bibliography, but rather with the graphics of the biblos, whether writing or drawing, alphabetic forms or visual illustrations. Bibliographics, then: the look of page-formatted script or image, whether between real covers or – and here is the first and crucial interpretive extension – on the diptych spread of pages represented on canvas. First and crucial, because tacitly canonized as aesthetic subgenre well before the advent of electronic script or picture. The low-fidelity look of reading on canvas, of reading matter, is a crossmedial pressure point. And more: a prod to interpretation. In such depictions, the nature of language, in the form of writing, is placed under analysis by illegibility itself. Such a moment is by its nature hard to overread. And the principle at issue is widespread in its manifestations. Media do not always behave themselves, do not necessarily declare their operations most openly within strict boundaries – taking definition instead from proximate or impinging alternatives. The brush-tip scrawl on the painted page – not of illuminated manuscript, but of represented book – may seem to paint writing itself into an illustrative corner at the very flange of the pictured book. And, in turn, this graphological field is precisely what gets buried beneath material objectifications of the codex form, in the subsequent chapter, apart from any image, let alone activation, of inscribed lettering. From this avoidance of all bibliographic texture, with its inevitable lure of the legible, another aesthetic mode emerges. Platformatics, then: the reduced look of codex formats in drastically redacted sculptural form, any expected sketch of content blanked out in material foreclosure. Engaged in such bookworks is a curtailed “reading” that does sometimes involve censorship’s objective correlative in the line-by-line effacement of 29

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an open page – if not the sealing shut of the volume altogether – by the tonnage of others like it. Or by other modes of lockdown or erasure: staking, gluing, nailing, cauterizing, chemical decomposition, what have you. So that the quotes around “reading” in any gallery encounter with such objects, or their equivalent in the inaccessibility of painted text, mark the rudimentary interpretive displacement at play in these first two chapters. Such is the reading of the illegible that cuts deep into any transmedial aesthetics of the booktext fusion. And from which literature is thus better felt to release us into an operable phonetic materiality in Part II. Though sometimes overlapping in practice, the categories that will by then have divided up the preceding discussion – approximated (or exaggerated) textual graphics over against codex deformation – remain distinct in their genre force and potential diagnostic torque. But by no means quarantined from each other – and certainly not rigidly policed in their differences by the inmixed continuum of these first two chapters. Right from the start, the sculptural fad for “altered” or damaged or ersatz books offers, partly in retrospect, a latter-day context for the graphic evocations of represented book pages and their fonts in the longer pictorial tradition. This is true both for the history of easel painting and for more recent ironies in the textwork of conceptual wall art. And it is from this conjoint baseline in marked paper surfaces and their volumetric binding that the middle phase of this study will then move beyond the graphic inscription that constitutes the sheet as book page, beyond “coverage,” to the linguistic sequence whereby reading activates that marked surface as text. In the meantime, it is worth noting that the pairing of these first two chapters sets a template for the rest: parsing an issue in its adjacent aspects without unduly partitioning the evidence. The very idea of a spectrum (graphic/textual/linguistic) – and therefore of a potential cross section – depends on the staggered lamination of categories. This is evident, first of all, via the plastic counterpoint between page-associated graphics and their book-based support. At the alternate pole of consideration, the operative overlap entails the graphophonemic nature of inscribed language and its function as medium. Since last going into print on the long arc and rapid millennial waning of print dominance as treated in painting, postmodern “lexigraphs,” and conceptual sculpture – or, in other words, as manifested in the whole iconology of codex reading and related forms of textual interface – I find that times (recent times, that is) haven’t changed so much as have aesthetic responses.1 Well into a computer-saturated age, there has emerged a shift in the “thinking” of conceptual artists, it would seem, from architectonics to

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engineering in figurations of the codex. Monitoring this, follow-up lectures of mine on various facets of the issue – and, more recently, two important gallery exhibitions – converge to motivate a pair of launching chapters that take up not just where my previous coverage had left off, but where the intertwined art genres it tracked have taken their own new turn. The title phrase for this broad initial stage of consideration happens, in the process, to anticipate the lexical and syntactic tensions that the rest of the volume explores at the level of text rather than codex or its graphic imprint – and then, in philosophy as well as in literary example, at the level of the linguistic medium itself as an ontological crux. For the phrasal headword in “The Hold of the Codex” is meant to call up – in three overlapping senses – first, the preserve of decipherable words in the graphically traced verbal stockpile of the codex interior; second, the tangible handful – or clutch in that sense – of their imprint surfaces (apart from grasped meaning) in the pages of that weighted book object we cling to in reading; and third, the staying power of that object’s long aesthetic clench on the Western cultural imagination – and on its iconographic imagery. In all three regards, a question remains very much in the air in recent gallery treatments of the book object, as well as at colloquia about the fate of paper reading after the ubiquity of computer font. Can it be said, whether in literacy’s everyday action or in literary art, that we are currently held in the same way by what was once exclusively on hold in the physical book – or, alternately, in images of such codex reading given back to us by painting, sculpture, photography, or installation practice? It is in matching that question to provisional answers – by way of textured examples in e-book and codex encounter alike – that the held page must cede its material prominence. It does this not so much in deference to “subject matter” in the abstract as to the grip of inscription itself in process: the very tangibility, both graphic and phonemic, of the sensed letter (whether impressed on a paper page or not) in the semantic work of making sense. It is only then that books fully yield to, and up, their textuality: this, when the mind enters the materially, even physically, triggered but ultimately disembodied space of reading as a representational field. Consider a touchstone remark by French “mediologist” Régis Debray: “Until the very recent emergence (four thousand years ago) of processes for the linear notation of sound, the image took the place of writing.”2 In Debray’s archaeology of transmissive functions, long after language emerged from animal sound (as formerly mere “signal”) into the new abstraction of “sign” (541), early pictures were more like signs than representations. Only with the invention of phonetic alphabets by the

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Phoenicians and the Greeks did the “graphisme” (541) separate out into drawing, on the one hand, wording on the other: the latter, again, as “a linear notation” of phonic process. Yet the isolated graphism, when unenunciated, still presents itself – as stressed by the metalinguistic writing of poet–theorist John Cayley – as the visible exclusion of reading: grapholect with no trace, as it were, of dialect.3 Closer originally to the “index” (material trace) or “icon” (optical depiction) in the evolution of script, in the terms from C. S. Peirce that Debray elsewhere draws on, the graphism – in its semiotic function – only eventually became coded: arbitrary, conventional, “symbolic” (hence phonetically legible). And in a separate passage tracing a devolution in the indexical overtones of the icon in sculpture, from the facsimile version of mold or cast to more arbitrary forms in modern practice, we hear in Debray how “the effacement of statuary in modern sculpture would attest to a will,” on the artist’s part, “to affiliate with the pure, more abstract order of the symbolic” (538–39). And never more, we might well think, than in the forced affiliation – a liminal postmodernist confrontation between statuary and optical signage – staged by the rounded wooden bodies invaded (“degraded”) by abstract geometric form in the work of contemporary Taiwanese sculptor Hsu Tung Han. In an explosive collision of pictorial and arbitrary form – a representational logic pulled (apart) between analog and digital paradigms – these realist anatomies are s(p)liced into or split open by chunks of various elongation, from cubic cysts or hollows to terraced blank armatures.4 With human image intermittently “blocked” out in this way, the evocation is unmistakable. In their arresting craft, these splintered woodworks resemble the uncanny pixel breakup of a 3-D image, less like coherent gallery forms than like the hologram Joi in Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2018) when her remote “emanator” is on the fritz. One of Hsu Tung Han’s sculptures is actually framed as if its fractured surfaces were obtruding in disintegration from an outsize iPhone screen. Well beyond cubist modernism in acquiescence to symbolic code, sculpture has become here the failed maintenance – and glitched transmission – of a data aggregate in indirectly exposed algorithmic abstraction. In any case, linking Debray’s two metahistorical claims as they bridge this first pair of chapters, we may say that the reduction or transference of any graphism (including bibliographism, on the visibly depicted page of a painted monk’s bible or the lounging ingénue’s latest romance novel) – its extralingual translation from symbol to icon, language to plastic art – is answered elsewhere by the inherent reduction of the sculpted book. When the tool shape becomes mere artifact, the book

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form closes one out rather than in. Marked here is a shift from the iconic platform of the conventional (in every sense) symbolic order to a mode of plasticity whose discursive and figural ironies arrive through the backdoor of an impeded, but also pervasive, aura of “transmission.” What is first of all apparent – as held in common between the unheld painting and the immobile sculpture of a textual object, immobilized by representation – is a medial silence that only goes to recall the given artifact’s contradictory stance toward reading in the first place. For what is excluded by the gallery art of the book is precisely the subvocal zone of a legible graphism that resolves into lettering – and hence legibility – as we look. And hence listen. But short of this tacit figuration of muted discourse in the shapes of altered or surrogate books – whether refashioned appropriations or wholly fabricated tomes – there is the rendering of actual language shapes in graphic art: returning in a way to the cohabitation of picture and signage in the earliest strokes of human communication on rock face or tablet. The depicted page of the reading scene in painting is only one of many examples that mark – even when operating below the threshold of legible fidelity – the convergence of scribing and pictorial drafting on the way to the “overall” wordworks of conceptual wall art. Moreover, what has grown clear since I first wrote on the variable sculptural bookworks in the conceptualist tradition, clarified by a certain fading of the trend since its late twentieth-century heyday, is that the first flurry of “de-accessioned” book art in the wake of mass digitization – when appropriationists gathered up library discards as ready matter for metaphoric configuration in the mode of illegible codex evocation, with volumes solo or en masse – has receded as a trend lately, despite the ongoing availability of dumpstered books. Whether for stacking or shredding or compacting, the aggressively disorienting charge – the overt cultural shock – of such radical disuse has waned, with alternative formats and tropes visible in the most recent exhibit the next chapter will be considering. Epitomizing a once familiar gallery exhibit, here is an eponymous retrospective installation by pioneering book artist Buzz Spector, at Indiana University’s Grunwald Gallery, titled Off the Shelf (2012, Fig. 1.1), an image subsequently included in a film about Spector’s work called The Rise and Fall of Books (Jake Gorst, 2017). In all their uncompromising force, Spector’s aggregate forms modeled one kind of book practice lasting at least three decades. The mode has had its own falling, or at least tapering, off with an increasing emphasis instead on reading not as a buried cultural norm, succumbed in part to the weight of its own archival

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Figure 1.1 Buzz Spector, Off the Shelf (November 2012, installation view), Grunwald Gallery of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington. Photo Kevin O. Mooney

backlog, but as a time-based experience in itself – linked to, and taken over in part by, computation. And thus with the book reconceiving its own technological status as data processing machine. Then, too, the abrogated text of codex sculpture had, even in its first post-digital flourishing, a curious – and longer – history. The American artist (Byron Clercx) who pulped books into a canoe punningly called Passage, for the voyages of imagination otherwise undertaken by such onetime texts, or the Slovak conceptualist (Matej Krén), during the same 1980s decade, who shaped similar cellulose debris into stone forms for a humanist rock garden, suggesting books as the veritable ground of culture – were engaged in transformative gestures that turn out to have been anticipated, in strictly (or at least mostly) material rather than symbolic practice, by a more anomalous (and altogether unsentimental) form of textual discard and physical repurposing. In an anecdotal sidebar to the evolution of book sculpture, one learns from descriptive placards at the Hermann Hesse House, in Gaienhofen on the Bodensee, that the Nobel laureate, besieged with unsolicited manuscripts and review copies, would save the string in which they were held together in their mailing, for use in tying up plants in his ambitious garden, and would then layer the

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unwanted books and manuscripts as a more stable foundation – in this stone-scarce, mud-prone terrain – for the otherwise spongey garden path to his toolshed as well as for the cattle-rutted road to his house. For this one writer, apparently without either pointed irony or fetishistic qualms (saying simply that “my path is lined by German literature”), it is palpably the case that the undergirding of books is found to bed the very walks of life. Short of this, or apart from its conceptual variant in a more sculptural massing and pulping of the codex, when American writer James Salter recalls his early fascination with the “thick” novels of Thomas Wolfe, the adjective hovers, in reference, between physical depth and verbal conception in a familiar way – turning more notably figurative only when Salter evokes their “dense and overwritten prose,” as if plastered upon itself in heavy buildup, turning the pages into “slabs.”5 These are the tropes of sculptural bookwork as well, but Hesse had gone way beyond metaphor – to manhandling the slabs as such. Overarching that prewar aberration on the Hesse grounds, an epochal shift in aesthetic practice from represented (painted) to repurposed (sculpted, compacted, or singed) books organizes this first pair of chapters. On this score, the proceedings at three European conferences over the last half decade can be made to confer with each other under a broad historical span ranging from pictured books in the Renaissance to smashed or splattered ones, crushed or over-painted, in postmodern iconoclasm. In 2012, at Utrecht University, scholars, press editors, and book artists gathered to consider “Book Presence in a Digital Age.” Three years later, at the University of Konstanz, a comparable topic was parsed for discussion in meetings about “Medium, Object, Metaphor: The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture.” And two years later, at the NYU Villa La Pietra in Florence, lectures and workshops attached to holdings in the library and art collection of Sir Harold Acton, the estate’s former owner, offered the centerpiece of an international Victorianist conference that, given the Villa’s painting collection especially, led my lecture back to previous evidence in The Look of Reading concerning the codex page when represented in mostly silent internalization by figures framed in the silence of canvas art. On display in such work is a topos in art history that, of course, long predates the various erosions or redirections of book culture (and sculpture) in the computer age on which the earlier two symposia had closed in. Yet the disparate emphases of my three papers, delivered up here in a new dialogue, do speak to each other in not entirely unexpected (and I trust clarifying) ways. Such at least is the scope (and hope) of Part I. Beginning with the two-dimensional pages of painted reading in canvas

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frames, this representational point of departure in the bibliographics of surface treatment – rather than in the solid geometries of the sculptural bibliobjet – should only return us to the codex format in Chapter 2 with a more “hands-on” appreciation (even under the gallery edict of “Do Not Touch”).

From Codex to Codecs.docx The terms of this return to codex objects are already there in that first conference topic. Book presence in a digital age? Posited – and so posed – as a question, and if we mean by book the traditional codex, one answer has to be (at least technically, if not statistically) “vestigial.” For a rooting assumption of this present book could readily be restated as “book’s rapid aging in a digital present.” In any case, attention to the matter must begin with the bound volume’s exponential obsolescence as cultural instrument and icon. Instead of the eye’s engagement with imprinted paper, it is the codecs devices of digital text (its term an official portmanteau merger of coder-decoder) that now interpret the data stream, so as to “file” it away (to speak loosely, anachronistically) as a “document.” Bookstores still exist, of course, and the books they shelve and market, but the predominant storage of words (as of photos) has gone elsewhere. And the difference between writing and reading has narrowed in the process. A “senior scholar” embarks on a commentary like this in a manner unrecognizable to his younger self. At every turn, I’m gently queried by an advance editingdevice – avant la lettre, so to say, of press publication – that automatically checks (in both senses) my potential accidents or expressive freedoms (like an etymological emphasis on alphabetic letters in my French borrowing right there). This happens in a prose “marked up,” before any printed marks hit paper, by a spell-check function inherent to the word-processing program wired to my screen. For instance, even before that French phrase, I was warned in serpentine underscore that my opening question in the second sentence of this paragraph has no verb, nothing to pin it down to a temporal frame, no copula to situate its tense. If that is part of my point – in an indeterminate and escalating digital present that is allsubsuming – I have to ignore the redlining and move on. Keyboard writing is haunted by a new kind of drawing: the regularized squiggles of an autounderlining. Computerized bibliographics have thus exceeded either word or book form. This isn’t “typing” as anyone from my generation first learned to know it. Words, now, are indeed “processed” rather than merely tapped (let

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alone scrawled) out. Nor, of course, has the reading rather than the production of typeface, or better to say text fonts, remained unchanged. Or been left unexplored by artists in this electronic transformation, whose ironies of compromised or composite lettering join conceptual forces with book sculpture to address the partial eclipse of the normative codex in its culturally residual status. The latter involves, in fact, a “cross section” of gallery works in their own diverse right – as the latest iterations in that mode I have previously termed bibliobjets: whether found and altered volumes or simulated ones that have been “demediated,” relieved of all words – and thus openly bereft of textual purpose. As a rule, this happens so as to bring into new conceptual prominence the codex platform (more means than, strictly speaking, medium) that was for centuries the taken-for-granted, the often underattended, format of print circulation. Quite apart from such museum objets, of course, book’s presence in and for a digital age is a matter of often retrofitted electronic function. In this manner the long reach of the book form, or at least its formatting – say its codextension into electronic practice – is, in its most obvious facet, the frequent work of the skewomorph. Even if that last word were properly spelled, which it deliberately isn’t, Microsoft’s spell-checking (or its nowallowed one-word spellchecking) hasn’t, so it seems, caught up with it. The “skewing” of platforms is not the true etymology of the properly spelled skeuomorph, which derives instead from the Greek for “tool use.” Use – and reuse: indeed, symbolic recycling. I mention this early, because I wish to return to it – moving beyond my previous writing on the topic6 – as a newly elucidating category for the bibliobjet more generally, now that the nonelectronic must make its way in the age of read-on-demand circulation. In its specific technological application in the language of industrial design, skeuomorphism names – beyond just anachronistic nomenclatures like “document” and “file” above – the refunctioning of new technology by what we might call optical allusion to the old, everything from the faux wooden siding on a “station wagon” to the simulated gaspump nozzle for the recharging of electric cars – let alone your portable laptop’s own “dashboard.” When it is not just a decorative “touch” detached from tool application, as in chandelier lightbulbs shaped like candle flames, the computer skeuomorph more actively familiarizes by atavism: a throwback to help consumers forward. It is a ubiquitous device in post-book screen culture, in everything from “paging” and “scrolling” to the inert play “button” that is merely clicked on rather than depressed. I think also of the rectangular tab on the vertical scroll bar to the right of this page as I originally drafted it, deleted in updated

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operating systems (i.e., streamlined for the knowing and disabused user), with its poignant little “grips” for the index finger: four horizontal lines figuring either ridges or indentations, one can’t be sure, that in fact only serve to focus the eye for a quicker scurry of the mouse function. We’re beyond that now, it seems. Yet we still file away chapters like this in the likes of our BookTextMedium “folder,” that least pliable (however expandable) of algorithmic repositories. The skeuomorph is the engineering equivalent of the more strictly “design” trend that Jessica Pressman writes about under the category of “bookishness,” as in the marketing of a laptop case with the soft-sided shape of a leather-bound antique folio (with zipper!).7 In such design ideas, though often in a merely tongue-in-cheek gesture, a major advance in “digital” convenience like portable computerization helps clear the cultural stage for itself by pretending to cling to a former “tool use,” just as we are urged to “Look Inside” a now rotated and pseudo-3-D “volume” on Amazon (a complex bibliographic icon and sampling tool) that is really only a flat-screen image – or invited to select a Kindle title from a pictured wooden bookshelf. Innovation is licensed and acclimated by continuity, rather than rupture. Often, yes, the effect is more gimmicky than in any way elegiac. Think, for instance, of those end-table books comprised of horizontally stacked painted and gilded antique volumes made of painted wood, awaiting a real functional book – and perhaps its reading lamp – at the top. Similarly, and constituting a kind of madcap asymptote in this repurposing of the book form – in a nostalgia that is itself almost vestigial – there is the unlikely new product (museum-shop targeted, as usual) called “Bookniture.” Though this trademark might invoke, at first guess, some sold-by-the-yard library filler for domestic decor, instead such branding indicates how the millennial storage function of the book has been reduced to sheer packaging, in this instance, for a fold-out (fanned-out) squat wood-slat table illustrated as perfect (so the promo images suggest) for using your laptop on the run (if your lap isn’t handy). Out of a codex-style slipcase comes no longer a book, then, but a table that would be ideal as well (so the website also pictures) for the reading lamp traditionally used to peruse such a protective cover’s once prototypical – and now superseded – contents. Alternately, when displayed with coffee cups resting on it, such “bookniture” – an awkward portmanteau term meant in part, no doubt, to capture the compression of the wood slats in storable form – resembles, if only distantly, the rebus function of a somewhat more conceptual allceramic work I saw years back (artist forgotten). This was a three-part

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“piece” in which one molded open book, placed vertically and topped by a closed ceramic one like it, and in turn by a coffee cup, is offered up, in sculptural charade, as a kind of deconstructed idiom: coffee|table|book. Conceptual artifacts in this vein of book sculpture, that is, tend to turn the “conservative” (preservative, residual) cast of “bookish” imagery inside out, or upside down, by outmoding the object before our eyes, rather than upgrading its functions by various graphic ingratiations in screen format. The latter, when tagged with the revisionary term “bookishness,” might be thought to isolate in scare quotes a trivialized nostalgia – in contrast to the term’s former use to indicate the mentality of an assiduous and devoted reader of text. In contrast, bookhood (my term for the ontology of the codex) is a condition that commercialized “bookishness” merely fetishizes rather than replicates – or excavates. Museum (rather than museum-shop) works, in grappling with the codex icon, may thus be said to overleap the design schemes of “bookniture” (in all its forms, copyrighted and otherwise) with a more pointed exploration of bookiture: the very process or function of book use, a term standing in relation to “reading” as “literature” does to “literacy” – its investiture in material form. A gimmick like that simulated bookcase (shrunken to slipcase sans book) must thus be contrasted with the bibliobjet in its more active demediation of readable text, not just when pages are effaced or painted over or simulated in foreign material (fur, lead, carved soap block) for plinth display, but often in a manner more processual than sculptural, serially negated rather than forfeited en masse. Which is to say, in the emphasis of this chapter, more bibliographic. Such aggressive gestures include, to name but two, the appropriated hardbound novels “burned through” line by line in Ann Hamilton’s famous performance piece tropos (1993–94) or, two decades later, the evanescent book printed by the small Argentine publisher under that house’s ironic imprimatur Eterna Cadencia. Here is a volume that arrives safely wrapped in plastic, but whose ultimately invisible printer’s ink, once exposed to the air breathed by its reader (or not), disappears completely in two months. Called El Libro que No Puede Esperar (2012), its actual cover reads as if its text were already on the way out: E LIBR QU NO PU DE ESPER R. In English: TH BO K THAT C N’T WA T. The marketing gimmick in this case, in an age of uphill bookselling challenges, is also, of course, an allegory in an apocalyptic key: the codex format, all told, playing a metatextual waiting game with what one may fear to be the numbered days of its own cultural shelf life. Hence, even with this aberrant codex from Eterna Cadencia, is implied an invisible l/ink to the broader

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phenomenon of dematerialized text under the alternative computer regime as well – its most pointed symptom being, in this slipstream of ephemera, the bibliographic (in the standard sense) requirement of “last accessed.” In the radically time-sensitive context of this Eterna Cadencia aberration, however, that pro forma citation mode is placed under unusual pressure by the graphic evanescing of the text font itself. Regarding storage and retrieval functions, one may say that in this case the norms of bookhood are hoodwinked from within by their own inked medium. The larger point: books are as books do. And if they don’t store what they transcribe, but only scrub it clean, their bookhood is reduced to the pulp cellulose, stitchery, and glue of a post-instrumental object. Another mode of art production in the bibliocentric vein – a conceptual mode that may be contrasted to commercial “bookishness” as a retro fad, its objets not manifested as commodities but analyzed in discursive (if counter-textual) practice – is the punningly titled The Reading Room (2011) by language theorist, conceptual poet, and electronic experimenter John Cayley (Fig. 1.2).8 In the absence of living book users, LED “reading lamps” do all the reading there is by leaning into – in various anthropomorphic twists of spine – an array of plastic-sheathed poetic texts on several lecterns.

Figure 1.2 John Cayley, The Reading Room (2011). Photo Mimi Cabell

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From these shiny script surfaces are reflected numerous shapes onto the wall of the installation in overlapped page-like folds and curves so evocative that, given a soundtrack of poetic enunciations from an uncertain electronic source, it is as if the room itself, as well as each instrument of illumination within it, were doing its own decoding of text. Only, of course, by audial intervention via digital processing. Opposite poles of conceptual perspective starkly reside in these first two illustrations: the material bulk of obsolescence in a parodic stockpiling, on the one hand, and the disembodied luminescence of both reflected text and textual reflection, on the other, in a travesty of a lit (almost as if backlit) textual access with no reader there to direct either beam or gaze. Though far from the obvious purport of this assemblage by Cayley, longer spans of art development may find themselves reinscribed in such conceptual work. For, at a glance, the stooped “spines” or “necks” of these “reading” lamps play upon an entirely canonical mode in the Western tradition of painted reading that can almost be thought to derive in its own right – by tacit verbal association alone, and as an optically “punning” installation work like Cayley’s indeed helps us “conceive” – from the preGutenberg “illuminated manuscript.” Recall, for instance, Rembrandt’s radiant Old Woman Reading (1655), her frontal image lit as if solely by reflected light from the not entirely material glow of her unseen spread pages. Now, in the deserted cubicle of that frozen display of texts assembled by Cayley for oblique dissemination, human immersion gives way to the auditory computer “read out” – and this from an electro-textual bricoleur whose work with phonorobotic computers will come in for further discussion in Chapter 3, as well as for theoretical amplification again in Chapter 5. But we need to back up and out before going forward: widening the historical as well as theoretical purview on the evolving nature of book design in secondary representation – and its sometimes illegible designs upon us in aesthetic response, even when graphically evoking the open page of inscription.

Picture Books The cross-media nexus, however, should be clear enough already. Every piece of book sculpture, by the very nature of such a term, and concerning both its spatial form and its surface treatment, enters into the history of plastic art. But no less into the history of book culture as it has evolved ever since the advent of the codex. That presumption is more obvious, however, than what follows from it: namely, that one

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inescapable point of departure for the double lineage of functionality and artistry in this tradition is manifested in the transmedial seedbed provided by the illuminated manuscript before Gutenberg – in precisely the forked legacy derived from it across painting and sculpture as well as book history. And further, I would suggest, across the tensed interplay between strictly visual and operably linguistic signage on the page surface itself. Thinking back to the shared decorated space of verbal and visual inscription in the handmade illuminated book, then, can offer a first step (beyond those separate valences of the visible divided between writing and painting) in clarifying the gestalt of strictly graphic signifiers and their inferred phonic triggers in the silent vocalization essential to the reading act. In this way, a phenomenology of reading leaves any tradition of decorative marginalia behind in opening inward upon a verbally described rather than superficially pictured space. Alternately, of course, and highlighting the exiled reading experience by its very denial, is the bound codex of conceptual innovation that is all pictures, no words, rejecting text in the reductive bookhood of sheer seriality, as in Ed Ruscha’s famous “artist’s book” All the Buildings on the Sunset Strip (1966). These accordioned deadpan “pages” are more like a fractured cinematic tracking shot in black-and-white than a legible volume – and no more decorative than the pedestrian architecture they document without comment. Many of the bookworks to follow over the next decades take the codex format directly to task, if not to pieces, more drastically yet. In just this manner, by way of reminder, are we usefully cued to the fact that art movements have their short as well as long-term histories. Short, long, and in-between. The artist’s book of earlier modernism, treating the page as drawing paper, when revived as a conceptual initiative in the 1960s as a less institutional (and indeed more quasi“discursive”) mode of dissemination than gallery display, was accompanied at the time, or at least followed shortly, by a quite separate rise in the more artisanal artist’s book: the lavishly fabricated or delicately carved book as art piece. Short, long, and middle-term histories, yes, especially when the work of such art – in the case of book form – becomes historically complicated in the age of digitalization. The codex objet in gallery art is now geared to all such contextual changes in the venues of reading, addressed to cultural currents extending well beyond the book’s own traditional workmanship by compositors and binderies. Such is certainly the case with the evolving nature of conceptual book art when manifesting – in various tacit or explicit ways – bookhood’s confrontation with the computer, page with screen, codex with codecs.

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Yet it is worth stressing again, and specifying further, how this history of the present has its place in a far longer view of the codex form. In a recent translation of essays by German media theorist Bernard Siegert, we find his striking sense of a post-Gutenberg legacy in Renaissance painting, whereby the illusionist marginalia of insects and slotted-in flora in the illuminated manuscript – on a material and “bibliographic” continuum with hand“drawn” lettering – gives way to the freestanding easel mode of trompel’oeil in Dutch art.9 It is there that three-dimensionality has left the codex form entirely behind – except of course (my point, not Siegert’s) in all those cases, in trompe-l’oeil itself, where a book or a paper text extends past a tabletop into our space as part of the illusion – thus tilting the viewed space toward a reading experience. Matching the overlap of eager insects superimposed upon painted flowers in the illuminator’s decorated page, here is what we might call the outlap of the codex itself from both the horizontal scene of its pictured platform and the finesse of its former illumination. Hence the cross-sectional work even of the present sub-sectional heading. The phrase “Picture Books” deploys its grammar, in part, as an imperative motto for analytic book sculpture in the reassessed form of the codex. But the heading emerges also – when “picture” is allowed as merely a noun modifier – in the form of an evolutionary hint. What I had previously argued, in The Look of Reading, as the transition from manuscript illustration to the easel painting of open illuminated pages under readerly scrutiny (and later the images of printed codices), is differently tracked by Siegert – regarding the illusionistic dimension of the former illuminations – as the seed of an entirely separate genre in the still life “deception,” as trompe-l’oeil came to be called. Or is it so separate? The residual question, when such representations are viewed in association with a manuscript culture from which both their dexterity and their decorative mission descend: in the appreciation of still life, are we perhaps still imagined to be “reading the world” in its now virtual presence to us? How deep-going, in short, is the lectoral paradigm in this moment of epochal transition within what Régis Debray calls the graphosphere: the epoch of print and painting alike – in the long cultural plateau between the medieval logosphere of the supernatural icon (or idol) and the videosphere of remote imaging? This kind of question survives even into our full-blown computer age, where the effect of a shift from analog to digital production on the typographic book serves to replay the earlier fate of manuscript culture. Further, in Siegert’s titular formulation, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters,

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Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, we might see the bibliobjet not as a disused medium but as a medial “grid” or template, whose volumetrics alone speak to the “cultural” space of meaning. Where manuscript illusionism had once led to a new genre in a separate medium – this in its leap from painted codex to oil painting – the print book has also evolved to the point of its own sculptural image under negated conditions of decipherment. But here too we are still “reading”: analyzing the book as form rather than content, with all the figuration thereby called forth. Though this is not Siegert’s emphasis, it is nonetheless apparent, in the present context, that the lineage he traces in visual media from the teasing 3-D filigree of a manuscript page to the fuller conviction of trompe-l’oeil still life on canvas offers a gloss on textual mediation per se. For one of the things trompe-l’oeil achieves, when recognized in such a derivation from the painted page, is to have detached one obviously supplemental facet of production from a mixed-media conflation. It is to have stripped away picture from text – or in other words, to have isolated in retrospect, by contrast with pictorial elaboration, the primary medial function of the illuminated codex: codex first of all, that is, a book to be read, apart from its illuminated (bibliographic) surplus. To be read – or, far more recently, to be demediated as text, reduced to 3-D “volume” in only the physical sense (rather than its mere illusionism on a still life canvas). So we need to take up, if never pick up, the contemporary bibliobjet where reading breaks off, so to say, in recent museum display. But not before one more instructive look back – from the on-site venue of the most recent of the bibliocentric conferences mentioned above – at the pre-print codex on canvas, which is come upon there in the densely bookish context of a more than representational sort: namely, a collector’s mansion of private libraries and their accompanying wall art of the read book. That Florence site is thus as overdetermined as it is quintessential for this chapter: the complementary space of bibliographic evocation on canvas and of library cataloguing in the traditional work of bibliography. Picturing books in the hands – or eyeline – of a devotional reading, and later of an engrossed secular fascination, is indeed a dominant topos, and what we might call a prominent scenario, in the history of representation down through, and beyond, cubist modernism. It persisted, through Picasso and Matisse, as well as its later contortions by Francis Bacon, into the moment in postwar art when, after the sidelining of figure painting altogether and the quasi-idolatrous treatment of Abstract Expressionism by critics like Clement Greenberg, suddenly Conceptual art started to put words alone on canvas: as in the punning 1967 send-up titled Abstract Art No. 8 by

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Michael Baldwin, from the British school of Art & Language, that merely silk-screens onto the privileged canvas surface of canonical painting the paragraph-long abstract of a book from a philosophical journal. Or, from across the Atlantic in the American flank of the Conceptual art movement, consider another punning exercise in this vein from Los Angeles-based Allen Ruppersberg: his transmedial textwork of process art entitled The Picture of Dorian Gray (1974). This is from the artist whose earlier drawings had annotated “Reading Time” in hours and minutes under pencil replicas of famous book covers. In the later project based on the eponymous ekphrastic novel by Oscar Wilde about a magic portrait that itself changes over time while its model is freed from aging, we encounter a full-length canvas avatar of said Picture – twenty canvases strong, in fact. It is a serial work that puts viewers/readers themselves through its own kind of aging process (as suggested in its recent display at MOMA) whenever (if ever) they take the time to decipher the lines of indelible black marking pen that have transcribed every word of Wilde’s parable of defied time in so-called longhand. In this transmedial appropriation of bookhood, such a conceptually dismembered and respatialized codex has put time, anomalously enough (but, for conceptualism, definitively), on the side of canvas art. Until then, the time of reading was a meditative theme of sacred and secular art, rather than either a wry travesty or a performative riff.

Interface as “Extensive Landscape” Centuries before Baldwin or Ruppersberg, before either of such antimodernist inversions in the treatment of paged text, figure painting had, nonetheless, its own way of refiguring time by spatial design. Among other facets of its formal repertoire, such painting often involved the graphic delineation of bodies leaning into scribed or printed words in a sacred codex, bible, missal, psalter, or breviary, where the time of a spectator’s looking might be said to sample, by osmosis, the rendered time of spiritual meditation. This tradition was borne in upon me again, and quite vividly, there in Florence at the Villa La Pietra, when first helping to plan workshops for that upcoming conference based on the varied collection of paintings, sculptures, tapestries, photographs, stereo cards, and, yes, especially books amassed there before the Harold Acton willed the Renaissance estate and its family collection to New York University for scholarly use. More than I could have expected from the website, which reproduced many of the paintings of reading, sacred and secular, on display at the Villa, its Renaissance setting itself lent new coordinates and parameters to the

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integral tropes of such work, widening their very “frames” of reference according to the unique orientations and dimensions of their architectural display. So take the introductory tour again with me, including my two most prolonged stops. The house-museum at La Pietra, as both built villa and shifting structured viewpoint, is a space not just of accumulation but of restaged perspective. In particular, it does indeed offer a new architectonic frame around certain representations of the reading act when housed within the outside-in ideals of Palladian space. In this sense, the Acton Collection redoubles itself: a stately house with three libraries crammed with books becomes a storehouse for the iconography – and even more, the iconology – of reading’s variously mystified inwardness in representation. Amid some dozen early Italian pictures of saints with bibles – including an intarsia diptych of the Annunciation on the doors of a credenza used for book storage; a double portrait of two female martyrs reading; a saint on his bier en route to burial with his bible, read over by a priest in the cortège from his own holy text – amid all this repurposing of sacred emblematics as room decor, two images in particular can serve to bracket a 500-year arc of represented codex reading in Western art. One was of a saint and biblical translator reading, one of a young boy beginning to translate the world through books. Between them, situated within the strategic sightlines of the Villa’s windows and mirrors, the visitor finds triangulated a certain cognitive vanishing point in all such representation. Whereas (also at the Villa) a terracotta sculpture of St. Jerome Penitent with his breviary embeds the three-dimensional scene in ambient display space, it is instead the case, with the alternate two-dimensional canvases, that each serves to project back from its inhabited room-with-a-view (the first edition of E. M. Forster’s eponymous Florence novel there in the library as well) to another kind of optically incorporated exterior space than that configured by the Palladian architectural ideal: a recessional depth wholly virtualized and indeed strictly figurative. The first of the two paintings that preoccupied me is a knockoff by Marco Palmezzano (c. 1503) of the Bellini masterpiece (c. 1480) down the hill at the Uffizi – there at the Villa by the wonderfully overexplicit descriptive title St. Jerome in an Extensive Landscape (Fig. 1.3).10 One notes how Palmezzano’s composition reverses the right-to-left gaze of Bellini’s figure and lifts the saint’s eyes from the book to an open-armed, meditative embrace of reading’s aura rather than its immediate act. For the famous sacred translator, this may be the very moment of internalization and linguistic transfer. Further, Palmezzano borrows Bellini’s trope of

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Figure 1.3 Marco Palmezzano, St. Jerome in an Extensive Landscape (1503), oil on canvas, 81 x 52.7 cm. New York University, Acton Collection, Villa La Pietra, Florence

slabbed granite topography as a stack of naturalized books impending over the translator’s head – the very rock of the faith in multiple dissemination – so as to figure, by synecdoche, the whole receding and “extensive” world as God’s book. Installed thereby is an increasingly familiar pictorial schema in the evolution from sacred to secular reading: a double phenomenological register of perspective’s outer and reading’s inner distances in the history of representation. It is just this perspectivalism of literacy, one might call it, this deep space of reading, that the conceptual bibliobjet will later so summarily close out – shut down – whether built of carved ice or wood or hinged glass, or found and then glued, bolted, or melted shut (to name

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Figure 1.4 Marco Palmezzano, St. Jerome in an Extensive Landscape, detail of Figure 1.3

but a few of the frequent “demediations” at play). And in the Palmezzano Jerome, so much does the receding topography “extend” and ramify the topos of reading – its space and fallout – that it is actually penetrated by another miniature library of waiting volumes (or already translated ones?) wedged into the horizontal rocks just above the saint’s assimilating brain (Fig. 1.4). However one interprets the specific iconography of this canonical scene, Jerome’s pose, in the Palmezzano version, would ultimately seem to picture, literally to embody, the primal “translation” from word to a subject rendered open to meaning.

The Architecture of Textual Inscape But secular painting, as it happens, is not always so ventilated in its sense of the book’s mental horizons, its “landscape” of interpretation. By contrast

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to the saint’s spiritual inscape at La Pietra, there is a rather unnerving work by early twentieth-century French artist Jacques-Emile Blanche – known elsewhere for his portraits of James, Proust, Joyce, and Gide, the last with the writer’s index finger place-holding his closed book. Blanche’s work at the Villa, however, is the uncharacteristic and rather spooky, indeed almost disciplinary, portrait of a spectacled Arthur Acton overlooking – from behind (and at a good impersonal distance, at that) – his young son’s reading (Fig. 1.5). In their intensive and immersive nature, books in the normal metaphorics of secular painting are poised to bring the outside in, encompassing little worlds in themselves. Blanche’s rendering, however, quite dramatically lacks that often celebratory feel. This double portrait has in fact been

Figure 1.5 Jacques-Emile Blanche, Portrait of Arthur Acton and Harold Acton Seated in a Room at Villa La Pietra (1913), oil on canvas, 76.2 x 62.3 cm. New York University, Acton Collection, Villa La Pietra, Florence

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“sat for” in an artificial sitting room of La Pietra with a ruinesque fantasy on the wall behind and a trompe-l’oeil window above, the latter opening onto no skyward vista of external perspective but merely an illusory curtained dead wall, as if in an unwitting travesty of those religious windows (as in Antonello da Messina’s famous St. Jerome in His Study, c. 1475) that break back from the scene of sacred reading to the world that the Word itself sanctifies and explicates. Here, then, from opposite ends (and dispositions) of what one might call the bibliconic tradition (four syllables, not five, as in the non-portmanteau spelling “biblio-iconic”), are works whose spatial logistics can genuinely be said to speak volumes. And invite volumetric reconception as well. Antonello comes to mind there because of how, in my museum research, he had recently come to view – and in ways designed, unwittingly enough, no doubt, to occlude or foreclose the “extended” mindscape of the sacred codex in a fabricated reconstruction, not of its whispered pieties, but of its audiovisual surround in social space. In 2015 at the National Gallery, London, in a show called “Soundscapes,” various conceptual musicians and sound artists were asked to accompany a chosen masterpiece from the collection: to “audialize” it in some inventive way. The celebrated Canadian duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, influential manipulators of ambient sound, chose to “translate” none other than Antonello’s St. Jerome in His Study (Fig. 1.6) into a meticulous 3-D model at the same scale as the painting, complete with a fully horizoned backdrop of earth, sky, and clouds of the sort only glimpsed through the sightlines of the diptych windows that repeat Jerome’s open bible behind and above him. Yet in these sound artists’ rethought study (both senses), there is suddenly no Jerome. The space of the replica is instead filled with the sounds of medieval life – natural and human, including birdsong, muffled voices, and wagon rumblings – that might have distracted the saint from his transcendental labors. Might have, that is, if a replica of Jerome were anywhere to be found in the 3-D projection of his library, his “oratory.” Instead, his focalizing consciousness (and responsive voicing) is entirely gone from the scene. To appreciate what is missing, and in immediate relation to the “soundscape” of this Renaissance “historical” painting, doesn’t in the least require that one recall – before the introduction of word breaks into Latin somewhere late in the first millennium – how sacred reading was done aloud in clerical practice in order to disambiguate the borders of enchained lexemes. A modern lexigraphic riff on such primeval codex array might go this way: lettherebelightbetweenwords, where the blurred alphabetic

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Figure 1.6 Antonello da Messina, St. Jerome in His Study (c. 1475), oil on lime, 45.7 x 36.2 cm. National Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York

characters of “letter” versus “let there” would have to be sorted out – and the former phonetically repressed – straight off. Even without access to this philological footnote from book history about unbroken syntax, a viewer would realize that the true “sound” of Jerome’s “study” would thematically include – and this by spiritual exclusion, shutting the world out at the same time that it lets it back in under the auspices of worship and illumination – his reverent inner voicing of alphabetic word forms: a sacred saturation of lectoral space by the hush of legible prompt and its meditation. In the Cardiff and Miller reconstruction, instead, the book remains open on his lectern, miniature and unreadable still, complete with a sideways glimpse of the evocative bibliographic slurs and squiggles that are the codex’s signature effect in painting – while the saint’s reading chair is angled slightly outward and unoccupied, as if he has just left. The space Cardiff

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and Miller have thus reconstructed and extrapolated from is no longer the scene of reading’s inner voice in activation, but, rather, the picture of a silent book in a busy and impinging world of other than phonic energy. In fulfilling the fantasy of three-dimensionality in response to perspective painting, and in adding auditory time into the resulting spatial “inflation,” this “take” on Antonello (in its unintended take-away) robs the work of its own sponsoring genre in the audiovisual process. If this misfired installation felt in the least ironic or distancing, which it doesn’t, rather than spuriously engulfing, if it asserted any wry distance from the iconology of the painting it reworks, it might have counted as its own conceptual book sculpture in extrapolated collapse of the demediated reading act. For it is certainly the case that a book without any possibility of reading, in or outside the space of representation, however immersive that space is made to sound, has become the objet as cancelled cultural object. Everything left in abeyance by this work, as contrasted with what is inferred by the original painting, will return to our purview in Part II. The problem isn’t that we can’t read the little miniature book inside the architectural model, but that Jerome can’t – because he isn’t there to do so. But this is also to say that one shouldn’t ignore what the scene’s initial genre (as represented quintessentially in this one painting) steals in its own right, or peels away, from any real codex encounter. Indeed, it is part of the genre’s constitution not to permit this avoidance, this cultural amnesia, but rather to force its recognition upon us: namely, that, at best, the read book in painting has in effect arrested the codex, as time-based instrument, into the availability of only one frozen frame. Even if Antonello had painted Jerome in close-up, his open book enlarged far more than Palmezzano’s, with the hatch marks coming clear as legible text, there would be only one slice of its continuum: no real textual experience. Nothing makes this more explicit than its sardonic treatment in a modern narrative text. When, in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Parker’s Back,” the beleaguered husband of an evangelist’s daughter is frustrated by her contempt for the “vanity of vanities” emblazoned by his many tattoos, and tries to imagine pleasing her with some new and more spiritual picture, he “thought of an open book with HOLY BIBLE tattooed under it and an actual verse printed” – or more like stencil-carved – “on the page.” But instinct quails before her probable response, “and he began to hear her say, ‘Ain’t I already got a real Bible? What you think I want to read the same verse over and over for when I can read it all?’”11 Her suspected rage against “idolatry” (244) would certainly constitute a blind spot regarding one of the longest traditions in easel, if not flesh, painting in the West.

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No one faced with the Palmezzano Jerome, or any of the other reading saints at La Pietra, to say nothing of the Bellinis and Lottos and Antonellos in this vein, would ask: who needs a functionless emblem of spiritual meditation, an inert open book, in a life supposedly encompassed by God’s Word? Art concentrates ideology, rather than being rendered irrelevant by it. The painted book is there to remind sacred readers of their private devotional experience – or the illiterate worshiper of the beauty otherwise induced by the suffusive Word as captured allegorically in the canvas World (as in the oratory that surrounds it in cathedral space). In Debray’s terms again, it is a case of the logosphere returned via iconic trope into the subsequent rhetorical function of the graphosphere: the age of the idol lingering into the time of the icon. Centuries later, in and for the digital age, the conceptual bibliobjet locates the vacuuming out of all this from a rectangular solid that functions, at least to some further iconographic extent, as an outlived (and thus vitiated) cultural “platform.” This chapter has thus repeatedly overlapped into anticipations of the next, and must continue to do so, within precisely these terms – where the bibliographics of pagination, in the conflated spheres of painted reading, distill the graphosphere into its two abiding facets: writing and drawing, literature and visual art.

Reading Screened With Jerome’s translated pages left far behind, the projection from page to “extensive” space has arrived at a millennial escalation in a recent “book” of page-based screen manifestation in what amounts to a digital pop-up book, read only by webcam, designed in 2013 by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse under the title Between Page and Screen (Fig. 1.7). With no typographic pages engaged, the interspace is occupied only momentarily by those onetime surfaces for outmoded print ciphers, now activating instead an “augmented reality” download. Here, that is, the hand-held book is only the platform for a stylish abstract marker – like a QR code, though with its thick bars interlocked more in the graphic manner of puzzle pieces. This is a page-based “image” submitted to recognition by today’s more typical reading machine (the laser scanner) – but, this time, with the computer operating from the inside out to mediate a book form in transmission to electronic font. And this time, too, with its own “stereo” overlay of the reader’s face on the rotating planarity (almost holographic at times) of the encoded “text” now mobilized on screen.12

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Figure 1.7 Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen (2013). Photo Brad Bouse

As an exaggerated vestige, the codex platform delivers only the arbitrary triggers of its own supersession. And this from a practitioner–theorist of computer textwork, Borsuk, who has since published, in the MIT Press “Essential Knowledge” series, an exemplary survey called simply The Book, with its tagline, rather than subtitle: “as object, as content, as idea, as interface” – aspects, of course, grasped not all at once, but separately emphatic, in given textual encounters.13 Bridging, in effect, this book’s first two chapters, this electronic bibliobjet’s digitized prosthetic legibility operates at once like lexigraphic screen art in the shuffling, spinning, and overlay of letterforms and like a bookwork valediction to the codex as in any sense directly or pertinently legible – except by the software programming of a laptop webcam, with all alphabetic keystrokes rendered inoperable in the instrumental space between. Broaden the titular space “between page and screen” to that “between page and image,” however, and this program grows allegorical – as well as metahistorical. Between text and imagined world: such is the cognitive augmentation traditionally known as reading. What this explicit “augmented reality” book now does instead is to space out, and hence clarify, the originary gap – in readerly virtuality – between the held physical

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surfaces of bound and marked planes and the mobilized word forms that time-based mediation works to process, often as peopled scene, in the motivated act of reading. While also, of course, putting the reader into the picture. And recent developments in “affective” computerization have taken this yet a step further. Face-recognition software has become sophisticated enough to read the squint of an eye or the clench of a jaw, the wrinkled brow, the risible twitch, what have you, for their emotional signals of textual response. This new demystified version of a real-time phrenology has been applied to an all-purpose book slipcase, with keyless electronic lock, that allows potential readers access only when their affect is so neutralized – neither resistant nor falsely expectant – that the text can be sure of being received, as it were, objectively.14 The brainchild of Dutch designer Thijs Biersteker, this contraption involves a book filled with already awardwinning content about which, supposedly, no further judgment is to be applied. This pre-policing text hails from 2015, the same year in which The New Yorker ran an article on “affective” computerization that included the idea, well along in development, of embedding tiny high-definition cameras in movie screens to “read” audience reaction – giving, as it were, new meaning to the “focus group.”15 In his travesty of this advanced technology’s leading potential applications, with Biersteker’s fortified or “gated” book the right to look is “screened” in advance. From the combined bibliographics and platformatics of “augmented reality” lettering on the laptop screen to the biometrics of scanned reception within the same manner of altered codex apparatus, it is hard not to see such digital developments on a cautionary continuum with those cream pages of Winston’s Smith’s thoughtcrime in 1984, his script defying the protocols of “speakwrite” technology under the ubiquitous threat of the “telescreen” and its surveillant eye. The normal reading and rewriting proscribed in a dystopian technocracy thus returns by conceptual irony in the quirks of later electronic technique. In one of the most influential pronouncements on the phenomenology of reading in the annals of literary theory, Georges Poulet writes that, in the act of deciphering a text, “I am the subject of thoughts other than my own.”16 It is as if I am the generator rather than the recipient of the discourse, whose, say, first-person grammar needs my enunciating “I” for its own activation. In that “as-if” of Poulet’s is something like a primal switch point between book as window and book as mirror, both operating to open the circuits of comprehension. In this vein, from the German Zero school in the late 1950s and early 60s, as surveyed in a full Guggenheim

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retrospective in 2014, one encounters the Mirror Shard Book (Spiegelscherbenbuch, 1962) – whose glazed surfaces serve to screen out actual reading, rather than reflect it electronically. This piece of what we might call neo-Cubist bricolage by Christian Megert, binding transparent glass shards together with jagged mirrored “pages,” is a work of fragmented optic surfaces irregularly fanned out in splayed codex fashion – whose materiality captures the gestalt between access and reflex that textual engagement tends to constitute. In reading, you get what you put in. If not a satire of identification and projection, in Megert’s platformatic composite we find something like the refusal of the given by the contingent. If not a satire of narcissism in one degree or another, does such a “reflex volume” offer perhaps a quasi-phobic troping of the book that too easily sees me coming, that panders, up front, to my desire? Whereas the bibliographics of painted pages in traditional canvas representation may have reminded viewers of real books, sacred or secular, many conceptual bibliobjets denature the book to the point of satirized reception if not cultural obsolescence. The graphically sketched page gives way to the multifariously vexed platform. Separate gallery offerings tend to reflect this difference, and not least, as we are to see in the next chapter, when the platform is rethought – not just as surface, opaque or reflective, but as a more complicated machination. So far, we have looked mostly at the graphic planes of textual representation, where words get their start in stroke and turn, line and curve. We have tracked these markings spottily, to be sure. But then, especially in painting’s impressions of the open page, they are often little more than spots, splots, and squiggles in their own right. Marks, not communicated message – rolling nodes of hinted inscription falling short of “notes,” to say nothing of “notions,” in Bacon’s sense. In the move from lexigraphic wall art to sculpture, the purpose of reviewing such disparate works has been to shore up, for analysis, the iconography of reading on which both artists and writers tend to draw, and which 3-D book artists in contemporary experiments – clamping down on the codex as prevented reading machine, or impeding its operating system in other ways – tend to call up by negation. Concerned with the behavior of the codex, not just its look, these oblique investigations of the reading apparatus operate in the shifting conceptual space broken open between a text’s suspended surface treatment, as such, and the internal event of reading: an inward cognitive action synced with the mechanics of text. Into that conceptual breach the next chapter now moves – across any number of pointed material hurdles in the figuration of the book as engineered platform.

chapter 2

Platformatics

Codex in effigy – and often in elegy. Such conceptualist ironies shape many of the most intriguing contemporary works, sculptured or installed, to be found engaging with book culture in galleries rather than libraries. In moving now toward the first of the two promised, and in their own way definitive, exhibits on codex form rather than function, the 2014–15 “Odd Volumes” show at Yale, let me return briefly to Florence’s Villa La Pietra for a curious prototype – stationed halfway between the library quadrant of the Villa and its extensive wallworks in other chambers. Modestly ensconced in a corner of one of the lesser rooms (as modestly, that is, as its bulk would allow) is an unexpected seventeenth-century model for the late twentieth-century bibliobjet. For there on an oversized lectern plundered from a church choir is an even more oversized folio volume, too big to open and too high to read anyway, in the same brown, weathered tones as its wooden platform. It is a looming codex form that may seem to resemble, at something of the same “inhuman” scale, one of the many leaden tomes of Anselm Kiefer’s outsize assemblages, including most recently a 2018 bookwork installation, Uraeus, in Rockefeller Center Plaza. The true denatured irony of the Pietra faux-lio emerges only when it is explained by the curator that, upon opening the book, one finds its pages to be only a pastiche of torn oversized sheets from other volumes, both of text and music: a discontinuous clump of paper meant to simulate the depth of a bound codex – and, in this way, just as virtual (or almost) as the rotated spine of our everyday Amazon sampler, though with no “Look Inside” option (at least without further staff permission and oversight). There, that is, in a corner of the Villa’s piano nobile – roughly halfway between the downstairs library of real books and the bed chamber housing Jerome’s pictured engagement with a merely painted book – is another inadvertent art-historical allegory to compound the windows and mirrors of the Palladian structure’s own orchestrated optics. The lectern with phony codex is an intermediary as well as a transmedial object. For it 57

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constitutes a distant anticipation of the deliberate halfway house established by one salient aspect of recent conceptual bookwork: namely, between the easel scene’s 2-D rendering of the codex in imaginative activation by an intent reader and the 3-D residue of the actual (either found or fashioned) book in the era of digital reading. That dun lectern and matching book comprise a work so unphotogenic and inconsequent that it was never destined for the NYU website gallery, where, of course, its own vestigial status, apart from simulation in the first place, would only be reinscribed in pixels instead of imprint as part of an electronic rather than paper catalog. So the fake paper book of recent conceptual devising, often scissored and filigreed into lavish nonverbal tendrils, if it can be imagined in descent from that La Pietra folio, has what we might call a long family tree. In this line of imaging, the iconography of the codex form is so strong that it commands attention even in mock-up – let alone vivisection. The progeny of that displayed codex resting as sheer emblem, rather than instrument, on that superannuated Florence lectern – form abstracted from all content, the site of reading demediated of any textual surface or inscription, bookhood emptied into sheer objecthood – populates one contemporary gallery after another, from Berlin to Los Angeles. In such conceptual bookworks, the manipulations of print, page, and codex formats – whether in the piling or carving of found books, or in the sculpting of their simulacra – tend to avoid anything like sentimental elegy or nostalgia while still stressing history: the history of the book form’s own statistical supersession. The history, that is, of technology. With such work arisen increasingly in the age of digital reading, and now so-called digital printing, one waits for the closing of the loop in some artist’s ironic 3-D computer sculpting of an ersatz antique volume in polymer buildup. The electronic technology that has long generated textual pages at both ends of the production spectrum, for writers and readers alike, could also now spew out a credibly simulated bound volume in a plastic slipcase all its own. True, this fantasized object, along with many an actual bookwork, could be temptingly “read” as an act of mourning for the hegemony of the codex. Yet, in view of the exhibited bibliocentric objects next coming in for notice, another explanation dawns. Any such vaunt of 3-D printing would certainly address the book/text/medium convergence – and from a curiously affective angle at that. As one form of printing outmodes another, the impress of moveable type has become the agglutination of polymer sculpture, all actual text disappeared in the new medium. There is almost a psychoanalytic mode of loss at play in such an imagined

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bookwork – and sensed elsewhere in other illegible sculptural forms of this sort. For one may sometimes suspect that, if only in a mode of selfconscious irony, the potentially therapeutic mourning staged by bibliobjets – remaking the doomed mode in a new iconic form – takes a perverse turn into melancholia instead. On that model, the “lost object” of print textuality is resented in its surrender to death, consequently abused and abjected, and all but suicidally internalized as a cultural deadness within the inert illegible form.

Oddities Archived At Villa La Pietra the strictly iconic (rather than instrumental) book – whose former ubiquity in legible form one may well miss and lament – can be seen resting on its lectern in purposeless effigy. It represents for me there, if not for the Actons in residence (who knows?), not just a binding of useless paper rather than integral “pages,” but a deep abstraction of the codex function – one that is elsewhere, and long since, carved out of impenetrable wood, of perishable ice, of mock-biblical stone tablets, or, most recently, in a new cult of mummification, buried in its actual paperback manifestation under a vitrine on a bed of preservative salt crystals.1 Four centuries after its fabrication, not just in the lead (and often glass) sculptures by Kiefer but in many of the other aberrant material reductions of contemporary book art, the oversized dummy codex at La Pietra thus finds its true proliferating legacy, I’m suggesting, in the baldly objectified and demediated spatial volume of the irreverent bibliobjet. And so it is that we arrive at New Haven for the extensive “Odd Volumes” exhibit held in 2014–15 at the Yale University Art Gallery, drawn from the holdings of New York collector Allan Chasanoff. It was a show, curated by book sculptor Doug Beube, that covered the broad panoply of such works in artisanal and appropriated form alike, extravagantly fashioned or found and defaced. Mostly artificial, rather than appropriated and scissored – but with samples aplenty from each end of the conceptualist spectrum – the odd volumes were often even odder than they may sound (as visible on the extensive website). Most of them were to one degree or another radically demediated of textual message, with words absent entirely from their blank, dyed, crumpled, or shredded surfaces. Or if not absent, swept from recognition: too fast for reading – as illegible in apparition as if their pages had been glued together and buried in another mode of tome as tomb. Amid the mostly sculptural volumes singled out for refashioning, one installation above all broke with that

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pattern to enter the time-based precincts of reading, even while eliding the very focal point of language in transit. This was a 1997 piece by John Roach, called Pageturner (Fig. 2.1) that played in a doubly prescient way between the exacerbation of electronics in surveillance technology and a fading culture of the codex – and this exactly a decade before the launch of the Kindle “reader” (that noun once personal, now mechanical). It is just the distance between human agent and the book instrument that was exaggerated and disabled by Roach’s work. An electronic sensor spotted any viewers (and potential readers) in their approach to an open suitcase, as if a variant of some Fluxus assemblage, containing in this case a book whose pages were turned arbitrarily by four small electric fans. This mechanically rendered illegibility of material, but not textual, continuity was transmitted by video camera to a blurry TV image that made the pages hard to discern even before their being swept past by currents of an air having nothing to do with the breath of phonetic enunciation. Not only a lampoon of “reading machines” – to vary N. Katherine Hayles’s term “writing machines”2 – this assemblage was a parody of the “audiobook” as well, here a small monaural speaker that

Figure 2.1 John Roach, Pageturner (1997). Image Credit: Yale University Art Gallery

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accompanied the image only with the murmuring whoosh of the fan blades, no articulated text. When the well-chosen book thus denatured was the obsessively phonetic prose and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, this euphonic loss seemed only foregrounded by Roach. And there is notable avant-garde precedent in regard to this enforced temporality. In his Encyclopedia Britannica (1971), conceptual provocateur John Latham thumbed through every two-page spread of this multivolume work with a stop-action camera – thus, in gallery projection, “assimilating” the amassed bulk of human wisdom at 24 pages per second rather than frames per second. Not only did Roach’s alienated book encounter look back to Latham’s predigital irony of auto-reading the Britannica, however. It also looked forward to the voluntarily recalibrated settings of the speed-reading technology known as Spritz (its tag line “Reading Reimagined”). This is an Android app that flashes one word after another past the reader, centered on what is known as its ORP, its Optimal Recognition Point, graphic not phonetic: a technique explicitly designed and advertised to impede all “subvocalization” and thus to speed cognition in an override of phonetic production. Everything the viewer was invited to imagine in the body of the reader leaning over her page in the history of art, the phonic intensification of that body as well as its projection outward into imaginative space, is reduced here to the treadmill of paralinguistic efficiency. As much as in Roach’s Pageturner, what was a cognitive joke in Latham’s Britannica is now, with Spritzing, an electronic exercise machine for the weakening of the reader’s literary muscles. No robust lexical investments here. Even so, the rank instrumentality of digital technique under the Spritz trademark may also recall another “filmic” rather than electronic precedent: an experiment in a similar mode – yet from the precincts of quasi-surrealist fantasy rather than applied technology. This is the famous cinema-inspired conceptual stunt in Bob Brown’s 1930s sketches for his “Readies” (the ready-to-reads, analogous in coinage to “the talkies”). This conception of sped-up text was geared for the electrical spooling of paper-printed words on vertical tapes that would not only increase reading efficiency but liberate word flow to new combinatory possibilities on the dynamized strip of inscription. Such an imagined moviola of prose was to wait decades, however, for its actual electronic implementation – and aesthetic degradation – on the Spritzed screen. Only part of the bigger contemporary picture, though, are such commercialized techniques of word sequencing. Tampering with the normal gait and serial focus of reading is also to be found, not just in that brand of

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marketed digital product, but in electronic art as well – where the process is radically dialed back, in one striking case, to the witty longueurs of sublexical pattern recognition. New Media poet John Cayley slows over the old medium of spelled text, remaking the “optimal recognition point” of single letters rather than words as composite graphic elements in a network of subsidiary strokes and curves. His Orthographics video (2012) puts white-fonted, sans serif words, one at a time, to the left and right of a black screen and then, at slow intervals, transforms a given lexeme (on alternate sides of the blank background) by the instantaneous replacement – or more like the internal optic shift – of one letterform into its geometric (rather than phonetic) cousin.3 Writing in print is here reduced to a sheer graphic function. Among many reversible examples, changing back and forth so that we recognize not just the difference but its “pictorial” trigger: rapid rapidly becomes rabid by the mere flip of the letter stem; bested, ousted by the deletion of a comparable appendage (b decapitated to o) and the evacuation and closing of the e; whore, where when, in reverse of “ousted,” the o is laterally bisected by e; qualities, qualifies by the bent twig above the crossbar of t. And amid other graphically targeted (and at times semantically loaded) shuffles, nationalization is exposed as rationalization by the amputated second leg of the initial n near the top of its own bend. The transformations are pictographic in emphasis more than phonetic, let alone etymological, with the eye given prominence over the phonemic ear in this curiously arbitrary raid on an outré paradigm of word length and letter shape. Dissociated from any “bibliographics” of the material page, but zeroing in on the raw materiality of the letterform, this is less an act of linguistic analysis than of typographic comedy. In the somersaults, backflips, and internal arcs of lettered characters, the eye’s work in reading – and not least in the arbitrary shunt between nonbinocular word positions on Cayley’s lateral display – is under isolation and unique emphasis. Certainly to think this way about letters would baffle any speed reading. Nothing is centered on the “optimal recognition point,” just decentered and overturned from within – and this by a student of language whose more fundamental emphasis on orality, on what he calls aurature, will later concern us. For now, though, a permutable Orthographics can be seen, not heard, to confront the Readies and their descendants in Spritzing software on pacing’s own balked and continually diverted terms. Apart from video’s own clocked duration in Cayley’s lexigraphic experiment, there have been many other ways, in museum treatment, for the time-based nature of reading to achieve formal articulation. Across the gallery at the same “Odd Volumes” exhibit from Roach’s Pageturner was

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another bookwork broaching, in an opposite though equally motorized fashion, a tacitly anachronistic figure for the reading process at large. Mary Ziegler’s The Necessity of Friction, from 1994, was identified by caption as “found copy of [Leonard Gross’s] How Much is Too Much?, electric motor, steel, magnesium, and sandpaper.” Braced spine-up by a cantilevered armature over a kind of mock turntable, the identified hardback text by Gross was pressed against the rotating sandpaper plate, its abraded circular striations resembling nothing so much as the grooves on a quasi-vinyl disk. In this madcap vicious circle, it was as if the codex had become in its own right a bulky stylus wearing thin the mock-phonography of its own satirized “resistant reading” on the wheeling plate it scraped against. This produced, of course – as the appropriated and entirely silenced volume implied – decidedly too much friction, constituting thereby, in its hypermaterial mode, too much a travesty of any inherent textual phonography to count as reading. Once again the bibliobjet offered the repudiation of bookhood in the very service of its consideration, its rethinking as estranged instrumentality. In the broader vein of conceptual bookwork, such parables are familiar enough: book reading under palpable erosion, the codex itself in planned obsolescence. And in our present context, if this suggests that books have always been phonographic records in some sense, then yet again anachronism can help concretize a media archaeology. This is what I was attempting at the start in conjuring the phonically oriented redubs of the book as phonographic streaming device, graphonic synthesizer, and the like, including a kind of quasi-aural teleprompter. Compare Ziegler’s work with another conceptual book, an actual hand-held object in this case, appearing in 2005 under the punning phonocentric title Flip Read (2005) by British artist Heather Weston. This is a traditional precinematic “flipbook” whose artificial motion is reduced to photo close-ups of a woman’s lips miming in serial pages the question: “What would you do with the volume turned off?” It is every book’s at-least tacit question – as the next chapters will inhabit at close audial range in the phrasal tenor of script itself. And never made more explicit, before Weston’s pantomime codex, than in Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992). In this novel openly named for the eponymous phonetic syncopations of its own prose, the personified book speaks to the reader in apostrophe on the last page, and about just such “speech.” We audit the very libido of the writing, stoked by textual transference: “Talking to you – and hearing you answer – that’s the kick.”4 Again, in codex hardware, the textually engineered silence of pretechnological voice recognition. Colloquial high aside (“that’s the kick”),

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here is the textual reflex of reading spelled out. For the talking and the answering are one and the same, simultaneous, phonetically coengendered. They are part of the closed-circuit auricular (because to begin with, and to coin another conflated – and in its own way crosssectional – phrase, aurocular) economy of silent phonation in bringing the visibility of printed talk to mind. And mind’s ear. In looking back over the array of “odd volumes” at the eponymous Yale show, each more or less sui generis, I’ve singled out the two that shifted concern from the carved volumetrics of codex space to the implied volume of its processed wording. If the installations by Ziegler as well as Roach, then, were perhaps the most thoroughly conceptual of the pieces exhibited, at least in installed and mobile form, it is perhaps no surprise that a complicated and “motorized” work of hers, specifically directed at the kinetics of page surfaces rather than their wearing away with the volume as a whole, would be included in a show curated by Roach himself two years later – even though his own work was not on exhibit there – in “The Internal Machine” exposition at the Center for Book Arts in New York. Ziegler’s metalinguistically titled Babel (2017) used magnets beneath an inverted braille surface, with holes (rather than raised marks), to direct obstructing metallic inserts in the path of a mobile horizontal wire instead of the normal scanning of textual lineation – all to figure reading as an obstacle course for those not in command of a given language. The book’s instrumental difficulties were, for this show, quintessential. For it was there in Chelsea that the serial (temporal) engineering of decryption, and sometimes its aberrant imageering, rather than the fate of the codex shape, was uppermost in the ironies of these mechanized bibliobjets. The shift appeared typifying. Referred away to the digital age in which its screen variants partake, the vestige of book reading under gallery investigation was more likely than ever to stress its temporal mechanics rather than the spatial shape of its mere artifactual instrumentality. And why not? This is where the utilities of the codex page, one by one, one after another, have computational programs to compete with. In such experimental structures, and in the interlocked terms of our ongoing cross section, book form can become the figurative text of its own medium. Once again, the self-tallied losses of illegibility in the bookwork tend to carve out and reshape their own history. Implicitly at least, they cut across absent text as such, a missing script, to the underlying cultural fact of medial transformation. In so doing, they prepare for the remaining chapters of Book, Text, Medium – in which actual literary writing looks both ways from its

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textured center, splitting the difference between materialities haptic and linguistic while participating in the feel of both.

Technomaterialisms of the Page One can’t, of course, judge what decisive reorientations may be “exhibited” by an evolving art genre from a single artifact, or even from a single exhibition. But from any broad-based gathering of quite recent works, one might well detect, or at least begin to suspect, a trend. On the evidence of the recent sampling of works brought together in that major New York exposition assembled by Roach, book art may be passing from a phase of media crisis regarding the codex to a more open-ended rumination on the technicities of reading itself. Most of a decade had elapsed since I closed my files to begin writing up, for Bookwork, what I had been finding, here and abroad, in both the previous decade’s Conceptual art of the codex and its own immediate predecessors after the heyday of the more conventional artist’s book. This was gallery work executed only implicitly, for the most part, in address to digital encroachments on the legacy – and envisioned future efficacy – of the print codex, some exemplary pieces of which were on view at Yale. Then, in late 2017, the New York Center for Book Arts mounted in their Chelsea space, under Roach’s oversight, the show that recapitulated and advanced many other of the architectonic and immersive tropes deployed in the kind of codex sculpture I had previously discussed – but returned to such themes then with something of a more dispassionate and speculative tone. In this respect, “The Internal Machine” traced an implicit shift from sculpture directed at the shaped dimensions of the longcanonical reading platform – the autonomous volume, as often manifested at the Yale retrospective in the hand-crafted efflorescence of its threatened end – to the mechanics of textual transmission per se: a revised focus that may alone speak volumes concerning a new emphasis – and perhaps a new trajectory – in book art. On what adjusted grounds, exactly? As distinct from the frequent luxuriousness of the artist’s book, as even in the most picturesque waterstained ravages of found volumes, no pages in the Chelsea show were seen fanning their obsolescent peacock feathers in strutting the codex’s last stand. Nor were these bookworks warped, slivered, or carved away into inutile beauty – or pinioned, clamped shut, in the disposable flourish, or even literal burn-out, of the outmoded. (I review there, in rapid mind’s eye, various tendencies – cutting and sealing and searing – in the previous works I had written about, versions of which were represented in the “Odd

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Volumes” show as well.) As confirmed by the different tone of its accompanying captions and catalog texts, the works at the Center for Book Arts – curated by that least “artisanal,” most conceptual, of the exhibitors at Yale – were more analytic than retroactive: neither sponsored by nostalgia nor steeped in either regret or anxiety. They looked inward as much as back, to the gearing of optical decipherment – and its silent hearing – in the cognitive engagement with the generative mechanism of text support. In this potentially refurbished phase of bookwork, and to lift a mixed metaphor from its own precincts, a page may well have been turned – indeed an inner (“internal”) leaf – in ruminations upon the original “reading machine.” The vantage of the exposition was historical, archival, but not epochal or catastrophist. We are long used, inured even, to what electronics has done to the sanctity (because the inner sanctum) of the codex, to its privileged cultural utility – and spatial iconology. This outplayed rule of the book form was manifested by proxy, in Roach’s new gallery consideration, not so much as elegized but rather as catalogued in its overlapping facets and functions, understood now within a history of technology rather than over against it. So that if a so-called corner had been turned, it was one associated with the inner fold of utility itself in what, including the pivot of facing pages, had always been, since Gutenberg, the engineered space of reading. Rather than reframed, antiquated, in its lost hegemony, the codex, under figuration as “the internal machine,” stood exhibited – indeed excavated, autopsied, and alchemized all at once – for what it always was: a feat of mechanics as well as of cultural instrumentation. But on the latter score, concerning the book’s cultural longevity, and in probing the internality of its mechanics in just this regard, there is a notable touchstone worth revisiting – especially in connection with our coming chapters in Part II on the linguistic textuality of the literary codex. I. A. Richards’s famous maxim, “A book is a machine to think with,” is regularly quoted out of the context of its own compound sentence.5 The first clause of 1924’s Principles of Literary Criticism seems a sufficient principle unto itself. By immediate phenomenological engagement as well as by further interpretive work, a book is operated in reading so that we think “along with” it as prompt, but also by means of it (“with it” as tool) in further empowered cogitation. A book is not just an object but an instrument, yes, “but,” as Richards wryly adds, “it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive.” To deliver its goods, it doesn’t need to be stentorian or monolithic – and only now do we realize, one sentence in, that Richards is in part specifying the nature of his own

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miscellany, “this” particular book of brief pieces. The kind of machine in question, for his present volume at least, involves a shuttle – and not in the railroad sense – rather than a stoked engine. “This book might better be compared to a loom,” on which the author hopes, in this case, to “reweave” certain atrophied principles, some “ravelled parts of our civilization”: a modest affair, neither polemically driven nor thesis ridden. Yet, at an implicitly different scale, certain further “principles” (of criticism’s literary mission) come through even in this casual nest of inferential metaphors. With the book as such operating neither as a puffing bellows nor a racing engine of disquisition, and in its etymological relation to weaving as “text-ure,” we recognize, beyond Richards’s immediate emphasis, how the machine of the codex is engineered by the internal momentum of a silently entwined lexical enunciation. For which loom is itself a returning trope – most arresting, as we’ll find, when undergoing transmedial displacement and return in the split between electronics and craft in the work of Mika Tajima below, where the very engineering of factory weaving is reframed – and potently refocused – in digital hindsight. And via an unexpected triangulation with codex form, at that. The textured loom of verbal strands, the threads and tucks of lexical enunciation: just what book sculpture ordinarily tends to clamp down on – and thus call up in absentia. As antechamber to its own overview of the Chelsea installation space, the Center catalog begins with frame grabs and a transcript from the wellknown Norwegian video send-up called “Medieval Help Desk,” where a twelfth-century technoklutz monk, acclimated only to reading on scrolls, must be instructed by a member of a “dark ages Geek squad” (as the curator puts it) in the opening and shutting of the new and more efficient search engine known as the codex.6 The media-archaeological note is thus sounded, or at least inked, from the first move of the catalog. “All this is to say . . .” trails off the curatorial annotation, until finishing the thought with a new paragraph in red ink, “the book is a piece of technology.” Or, say: several operational pieces in the correlation of their moving parts, including font and color at the level of impress itself. And there is another keynote here, struck by image alone rather than typographic inference: the catalog’s early inclusion on adjacent versos (14, 16), without comment, of the full-page image of an ornate and multi-storey Victorian library in contrast to the banks and aisles of a computer facility for storage and relay. Once trove, now transmit station. In a catalog piece tacitly bracketed by the logic of these images, Shannon Mattern summarizes, in “Bibliographic Machines,” the overriding sense,

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when historically situated, that books have always been understood as “works of mechanical production, textual embodiments of machinic precision” (15). Even Gillian Brown’s throwback technology of a scroll suspended from the ceiling – and covered with antiquated mathematical and cosmological templates from various explanatory systems across world cultures – gets its title, Creationes ex Machina, from the laser printer out of which the scroll sketchily and tentatively emerges, and to which, blank near the end, it returns. Where once an imagined repository, now a machination.

Internal Works With the striking exception of Brian Dettmer’s X-Acto-blade “mining” of the codex’s material densities – in terraced strata of glimpsed word forms and illustrations – the main emphasis in this exhibition lay elsewhere.7 It didn’t in fact center, despite its title, on “The Internal Machine” – if understood as the stratified inscape of the codex bulk. Its focus was instead on something else internal(ized) in the nature of the book as linguistic support. To be more exacting about the adjective of the show’s title – over against the sense, say, of an “inner machine” – one wants to ask what the book form, under the aspect of an instrumentality, is internal to? There were two basic answers, one explicit in the catalog, one inferred from the conceptual workings of the works themselves. On the former front, the book is always “internal” to the entire commercial engineering of data culture. As Mattern’s essay has it, “our tiny machines are part of big machines at the scale of infrastructural systems” – including industrial production, on-line marketing even of physical books, and computerized routes of “distribution” (15). On the other hand, and more to the point of certain bibliobjets on display, the mechanics of book reading are internalized by the processing subject, their mechanical features transferred through cognition to affect. This second “internality” remains unsaid in the Center’s copy, but was enacted indirectly by several of the works. By no means all, it should be said. In a few of the displays, the book form was reduced to more of a volumetric object without pertinent innards. But the alternate associations remained prominent. Books are internal data depositories with their specified mechanics of access – or, in one case, a private collective archive of the unthought. This latter scalar inference emerged from a suite of photo collages by Caroline Bouissou entitled Subconscious, where the popular substitute for the Freudian term “unconscious” appeared stationed, quite deliberately, not as solecism but as

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cognitive schema. The “sub” would seem, that is, to evoke the substrata of hand-held, page-turned open codices layered thickly in these composite photos, one beneath the other, with no optical vanishing point. The quasiCubist animation effect that resulted had a way of suggesting that every new page seems to jump-start – or upload in optical recess – the memory of a predecessor. In this multiple regress, not unlike Freud’s sense of a palimpsestic unconscious, the staggered photo sedimentation of receding pages grows emblematic: in the throes of comprehension, we are what we have already read, so that each new page is weighted by associations – these in the mind’s eye not of the surface glance, but of a verbal “internalization” long at work. So it is that this work by Bouissou has left the standard mechanics of the codex entirely behind: its pages, instead, an internal regress rather than any progression one by one, let alone line by line within each. Any phonic energy in the work of actual textual enunciation (as is triggered by words found inside dumb, but not dummy, books) – any sound generated by the codex at this level – was downplayed in certain of these works by the sound its pages made in themselves, by their own mere turning rather than induced by any turn of phrase, at least when remediated in one or another post-codex format. We’ve seen (which is to say heard) this before in the curator’s own Pageturner at the Yale show: not pages fanned out for reading, but fanned past by humming electric motors. To this end, with no particular emphasis on “internalization,” but rather on mechanization, Juan Fontanive’s contribution to “The Internal Machine” exhibit had built out of Victorian clockworks a rotary reading machine (in an update of the Renaissance wheel of open and crosscheckable volumes). This involved a kinetic rotation in which separate Audubon-style “snapshots,” ornithological drawings of individual birds on the wing, were rotated into the apparent animation of one moving composite, so that the viewer received the cartoon of bird flight traversing separate avian bodies on extracted pages. In the catalog essay by Seph Rodney we find, concerning Fontanive’s Ornithology (2013) this rather unexpected gloss: “The piece alludes to the higher critical flicker-fusion frequency (around 90–100 cycles per second or higher) of birds that allows them to resolve rapid movement that would seem like a blur to the human eye” (“Regarding a Perceptual Tool,” 22). Come again? By what circuitous route, this allusion? More obvious by way of association, one might think, the animation effect of this instrumentation calls up the flicker-fusion so crucial in the development of cinema. In the first decades of cinematic evolution, the new technology’s fully achieved potential as realist medium required the fused intermittence

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that allowed frame speed to “blur” ever more persuasively into continuous movement for the spectator – not for the projected agent, whether bird or human figure, flying or running. Such is an artificial continuum staged by marked discrepancy in Fontanive’s work, of course, as a focal point for the “page”-flipping “reader” – and thus viewer – not the artificially animated birds in composite profile. As the artist himself puts it, about what we might call the mimetic mechanism of his post-codex assemblage, “the wings hinge like paper and the paper cards flap at the rate of the bird’s wings” (40). And as the curator adds further, about the whirring of the device as it reaches the ear – not as alphabet text but as the platform of “cited” motion – one is likely to recall in this audible flutter “the satisfying sounds of using your thumb to flip through the backs of a thick book” (40). Exactly the further sound, beyond that of Poe’s words, precluded by the extraneous noise of thrumming fans in Pageturner. Again, in the material cross-sectioning of book/text/medium: the haptic dimension of time-based ocular process. To put it more specifically, a classic Audubon codex has been rewired as a Rolodex of internally disjointed cellular animation. In Fontanive’s work – be the predisposed audition of the flipped page as it may – any such mobile effect would set itself apart from more prevalent motifs of the exhibit. It would certainly operate in contrast to any tangible whisper of traditional book use that one came upon in those “internal machines” that aggressively transmuted – and in this way, trans-figured – the sound associated with the dead metaphors of voice and tone in text, to say nothing of the actual sound of subvocal reading. In Nick Yulman’s Index Quartet, the very idea of a book’s “internal” mechanics was ingeniously equivocated. A series of closed volumes (pictured here in Fig. 2.2 from a related installation of several more books under the title Index Organ) were struck from beneath, rather than read from above, in their suspension on underlying plexiglass supports. They were, in effect, drummed by the tips of electronic “actuators” whose signals were then fed through synthesizers (in the technological rather than cognitive sense) for a percussive broadcast in the installation space. In the role of viewer/listener, the gallery-goer’s electronically recognized approach to these volumes, as in Roach’s Pageturner, activated this process, here in a reductive “sounding” of the book for its strictly material, rather than affective, resonance. The thumping beat began only when you approximated the status of reader by opening the book before you, thus figuratively touching off a flex sensor installed in the spine. The closed cover amounted in this way, as in effect it always does, to the mute button (here automatically depressed) that would arrest any reading act. Yulman’s

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Figure 2.2 Nick Yulman, Index Organ (2014). Courtesy of the artist

wry process converted all activated textual energy – the “indexical” trace of a sound made from rather than by the books – into something like a punning sense of volume, ambient rather than merely encased. As elsewhere in this exhibition, logic was repeatedly put backward to set things straight in the end. Once more, then: the lurking metalinguistics – or call it the plastic troping – of the unheard page. But other works occupied distinctly different positions on the acoustic spectrum of any such readerly reverb. How different? Or, more pertinently, different how? Less like the externalized harmonics of the machinated book in Yulman’s case – and surfacing from within something more like what we might call the linestrung instrument actually “played,” or performed, across the word rows of even silent (“internal”) reading – was the intricate construct of “secondary orality” in Ranjit Bhatnagar’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (2017). This is a work named for those “little songs” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning whose evocation by a “collage of words and music” (another name, in a sense, for imprinted verse) was quietly broadcast from embedded microtransmitters. This phonic collage could only, as we say, be picked up by the ear from the closed Victorian volume: not by holding open the codex, but by holding up to its embossed antique cover a glass jar fitted with a microphone in its cap. It was like listening through walls in some espionage setting – or, in

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another implicit verbalization of textual constraint: like keeping the lid on the secret signals of the “internal machine.” Or better yet, to quote another Victorian writer on the phonic space of poetry – namely, John Stuart Mill, from “What is Poetry?” – it was like some quirky illustration of the maxim that, whereas eloquence is “heard,” poetry is “overheard,” as if eavesdropped upon.8 And this with the full phonetic implications that our remaining chapters will keep touching down on – and drawing out. In comparing these two divergent innovations on the “audiobook,” Yulman’s against Bhatnagar’s, it is fair to say that the codex brusquely “tapped” from without, just as the antique volume message-equipped from within by updated electrical vibration, artificially produced in each case, rather than induced, what their texts, if visible, might otherwise have brought to ear on the way to mind. Neither work, of course, sounded (out) a straightforward text. Nor did this happen in a bibliobjet more immediately concerned, if aberrantly, with words on a once visible page. The subvocal ear of phonemic production was there bypassed altogether, in envisioning the mind’s eye of response, in the show’s most highly contrived and processual work. This was a complex and time-based installation by Alexander Rosenberg that – rather than invoking the phonic activation of alphabetic text, or even the visible recognition of letterforms – disappeared each into a radically abstracted, even while still reductively material, understanding of mediality per se. This is an understanding well beyond containment by anything resembling the shelved availability of writing in the traditional bibliotheque.

Bibliotech (1): Beyond Hypertext The drastic disappearance on display in Rosenberg’s assemblage, exceeding any mere vivisection of the book’s “internal machine,” was laboriously achieved – laboriously is the only word, given the lab work of its outlandish chemistry – under the title Hyperpyrexic (Fig. 2.3). The very letters of text were liquefied – liquidated – in advance, leached away from found books before the viewer had any glimpse of these material signifiers – all in a byzantine closed circuit with reconfigured prose content. As bizarre as it sounds, dissolved text became the refracting medium for the adjusted mind’s eye. Any careful description of this occulted procedure, in its inevitable drift into figuration, into discourse, would seem to be the work’s own point in submitting legible surfaces to something like a negative alchemical process older even than the codex’s own invention. In the staging of this experiment, its phases were everything. Beginning at

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Figure 2.3 Alexander Rosenberg, Hyperpyrexic (2014–17). Courtesy of the artist

one technological remove, already, from book mechanics by their passage through laser electronics, bound pages concerned with fevers literal and metaphorical were photocopied, with these replicas then sliced up in turn to isolate the passages most explicitly about such somatic and psychological overheating – and then left to ferment in an alcohol-based compound that removed the laser-jetted ink overnight, at which point the muddy blend was gradually heat-distilled and purified until transparent. Under the onslaught of thermal chemistry, amid a nest of flasks and testtubing, Hyperpyrexic (derived from the technical term for extreme feverish states) thus “burnt away” the words from a series of texts evoking just such mentally inflamed conditions. Their own imprint matter, that is, in this ad hoc chemical furnace, was siphoned off from the dissolved page surface into reductive distillates. These were the thick and “essential” oils that – wait for it, as you must (indeed over the run of the whole two-month show) – only gradually filled up the inner chambers of a hollow magnifying glass trained eventually on inverted visual diagrams and other images (etched on more glass) representing the fever states otherwise verbally described in the s/melted books. Trope again, surely: words reduced, filtered, and purified – consumed only in this sense – as the magnifying medium of the virtual intensities they depict.

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The parabolic logic advanced by Rosenberg seemed unflinchingly clarified (distilled) by the fastidious eccentricity of method. Imagine it this way: in the warmth of engrossed reading, whether or not at fever pitch, the intensity of overheated lives does not remain on the page, but appears to dissolve wording itself in a transparent picture of the febrile said. In their very invisibility as such in this scouring case, discrete word forms had deliquesced into the sheer flow of their own focalized designation. So imagine, then, to pin this to specifics, some similar laboratory distillation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where, in a further meltdown of Cathy’s fatal brain fever, its narrative wording becomes nothing but the nondiscursive optic interface – or lens – of its plot’s hallucinatory fatality. And think, by contrast, of digital artist Jim Campbell’s palimpsestic but self-occluding photograph of the novel Wuthering Heights (2001) – not the book but the textual (rather than narrative) through line itself, its sampled pages in overprinted spectral lamination: a codex form read all at once in the thick density of its dark, fateful, and here totally redacted tale. Such an impacted capture of duration appears like a composite shot of Latham’s smeared “reading” in the Britannica film – or of Roach’s video-transferred Poe. More baroque yet, though, Rosenberg’s installation of dematerialized word forms offered the ne plus ultra of the Chelsea show’s conceptual ab-straction – in this case, in the root sense, summarily stealing away the book’s letters (demediation by any other name) in order to refigure their function. At which point we saw straight through the dissolve of text, so to speak, into the schematized ideas portrayed. The phenomenology of reading, with its referential investments, is thus reduced to laboratory travesty – and parable. By such means, the traditional mechanics of book reading, in our standard access to its “internal machine,” burns through all physical objecthood to decipherment’s parody and apotheosis, passing through the alembic of chemical technology to transfigured conception. Reading, we might see this assemblage as saying (see, in the visual magnification of its irony) – reading can seem to lift the words right off the page in the very process of their understanding. And to round out the emblematic inference: it does so by catalyzing their import in the mediating fluidity of the reader’s every reactive image – the machination gone “internal” again after all. So that there in Chelsea, we were also back at the Villa La Pietra in Florence, if only by a convoluted transmutation. The “extension” (into landscape) posed by the open book in the saint’s hand had, instead, in the case of Hyperpyrexic – by the logic of

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its extreme demediation and displacement – been transferred onto another textual surface under magnification. But then again landscape for the reading saint was only God’s book in the first place: the logocentric intertext (the Word made world) given anchor by metaphor in the codex microcosm. Either in a transcendence of the lettered page or its chemical obliteration, one was in each case still reading one’s way into the circumstances in question, whether the vale of tears or the science of fever. The process, in Rosenberg’s treatment, was as tortuous as the point was simple. Simple, that is, only given the intricate, even when instinctual, gist – the cognitive white magic – of the reading act itself.

Bibliotech (2): Entropic Threads If that severe, weirdly cerebral workshop installation by Rosenberg can’t help but return us by allusion to something like a primitive alchemical process – to refigure the “translation” of base matter into the spun gold of text – then such mysteries of quasi-technological transformation are surely meant to be generalized. For its operations took place in none other than an exhibition, as we know, on the reading apparatus as an “inner” mechanics. An equally demanding and even more media-historical work is perhaps more surprising yet in its venue – as well as in its luxuriant optic materiality. With or without the “inner machine” exhibit in mind, one approaches this work, a few blocks south in Manhattan, and one year later, knowing full well that the codex format has a deep but ultimately weakening hold on the cultural imagination, attenuated by the advent of global computerization. A student of the book object in gallery space, like myself, was therefore not likely to find much confirmation of its paradigmatic status, nor even much direct resistance to its (lapsing) dominance, in a 2018/19 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art called “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018.” Yet there it was: a lone codex object in a twofold installation with a correlated wall hanging framed next to it – literally backed into a corner among a broad-gauged survey of “generative art” ranging from the processual works of Sol LeWitt to the present-day experiments in computerized multi-screen video. Framed by this larger context, the bound digital metatext of this open volume stands in for the media-historical issue of stored inscription with challenging – which is to say, in this case, cryptically layered – rigor.

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It is just this exhibited counterpoint – between the framed and the bound – that organized this Whitney installation by New York artist Mika Tajima. Under the shared heading of Negative Entropy, a subtly toned weaving in muted blues and pinks – a wallwork tightly and rhythmically threaded – may at first have seemed hung as if to enlarge in comparable terms, though softer hues, the textured weft of a “page” from the bibliobjet in question, displayed under a vitrine at right angles to the weaving. Or vice versa, perhaps: the page as illustrative document, as “figure,” of a related loomed artifact. We don’t know yet – and may never be quite sure of the priority. In any case, open to view next to this spun pattern on the wall rested, in a conventional binder, a comparably striated miniaturization in a rectangle of taut but bolder color bands, chrome yellow tinged with burnt orange this time, serving as something like a minimalist codex page. Together, if only on considerable reflection, the two flanks of this display tacitly bracketed a vast swath of media history in their enfolded associations. But the pairing did so in a stringent reduction of representation to medium that fell, in its indirect link with codex culture, as far as possible from the phenomenological parable of Rosenberg’s exercise in textual distillation. In connection with Tajima’s anomalous book object, the idea of reading was out of the question – in every sense. Only storage was performed and interrogated, not literate retrieval. Any speculative explication of its logic had no choice but to go slowly, given the tricky inferential circularity of its technical displacements. Negative Entropy, Vol. 5 (2015), the pedestal-supported codex, might have made its mark more immediately, it must be said, under the inverted title of “Entropy” alone. Its implications were, however, actually more roundabout and exacting. We were thrown back at once on our grasp of definitions – or left clueless without curatorial intervention in various forms of accompanying text, from wall caption to catalog. Entropy, yes, is the cumulative disorder in a system; negative entropy identifies moments where order is achieved at the expense of energy elsewhere in circulation. Form is thus the negentropy of chaos and exhaustion. Here is where inferences far exceeded even the adjacent wall precis and its intricate precisions. For if one thinks of the conservation of energy in the inscriptive system or discourse network at large, with the book having lost ground to electronic textuality, that is only a start in decrypting the transmedial programmatics of Tajima’s newly recoded informatic channeling. Which works upon our historical imagination as follows – if, that is, one follows out its logic along parallel chains of association. The codex, yes, was the original data depository, its bits of information banked, indexed, and

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retrieved at will. A campus like New York University’s still has a traditional library full of such books, if open only to electronic pass holders: a temple to print culture often photographed for its dramatic atrium and the tempting vertical stacks of its bound volumes. But, as it happens, the university also has another “data center,” entirely computerized, not for any public access, securitized against even photographic record – and connected directly, in a dedicated version of “global communication,” with the university’s international locations in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. That is where Tajima’s mode of experiment comes in, or takes off. It is there that an electronic record of its off-limits computer space was permitted to the artist only if manifested in a computationally “screened” abstraction – one based, not even on pictorial evidence of any sort, but on a digital sound file – recording the hum of one of its servers, then processed through a spectrogram conversion in the open book’s uppermost image. Equally removed from optical document was the woven “image” on the wall as well, again the transformed sound recording (in cloth rather than digital imprint) of another data center for cloud computation in Manhattan, trademarked “Digital Ocean.” The weaving’s serial strands of chromatic pattern, in “watery” blue and pink, served to transliterate the mere hum and buzz of machinery to a nonrepresentational grid in the form of an originary, abstract, and tangible craft (Fig. 2.4). The mainframe Ocean had been displaced to the wave motion – the minuscule crests, riptides, and chromatic backwash – of arrested flux itself. All that is pictured is rhythm per se. Absent all trace of electronic communiques from the data center, the secondary sound file that instigates this image – derived from a dedicated computer installation (“4U, NAS” identifying the electronic server) – has thus been automatically transferred to the processual (in terms of the larger exhibition, “programmable”) work of a Jacquard loom for textile (rather than text) weaving. It is just this fabric(ation), and its evoked technological history, that was framed on the wall next to its reduced codex incarnation in a spiral binder. There, in the full circuit of this logic, lies the true conceptual spiral at stake. Often asserted as the precursor of the computer in the original 1804 innovation of the Jacquard process, and leading to Charles Babbage’s later experiments in programmed automatism, the loom’s binary “paper” instructions articulate this whole allusive technological tapestry, we might say, that Tajima has reworked for the digital age. An example of the stamped cardboard placards (or heavy “pages”) that automatically passed along their punch-holed commands to the threadwork operation of the Jacquard factory loom was under the vitrine as well – and thus on

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Figure 2.4 Mika Tajima, Negative Entropy, Digital Ocean, NYC2, 4U, NAS, Pink, Quad (2018), photo Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles; Taro Nasu, Tokyo

correlative archaeological display. Here a single brown punch card, a narrow vertical strip, offered a left-side facing page to the horizontally striped and luminous image in this anomalous open book, the latter not woven in this case, but streaked in print-out from nothing but those traces of ambient noise at the NYU center (Fig. 2.5). Such was the “illegible” soundscape (of engines rather than messages, cooling systems rather than cold text) transferred through “linguistic audial software” to the chromatic recoding of a spectrogram, its thinly layered braids of color not unlike the automatically generated Jacquard effect – where even the sound dampening wool that backs the framed weaving next to the codex (its material composite identified in some displays as “cotton, polyester, rayon, wood, wool acoustic baffling felt”) seemed party to the provocative displacements of an audiovisual loop. Whether these sonographic as well as fabric transfers recorded the muted din of data processing or the actual noise of

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Figure 2.5 Mika Tajima, Negative Entropy, New York University Central Data Center, 5 vols. (Paris: Three Star Books, 2015), detail of Vol. 5. Courtesy of the artist; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles; Taro Nasu, Tokyo

factory looms elsewhere, the resulting images not only rehearsed the scene of their own displaced digital documentation but did so, as displayed here, in relation to the book form that computerization has by now made an optional aesthetic choice. Even the bilateral symmetry and weighted hues of the loomed surface in this exhibit’s particular weaving may well have seemed, in the vicinity of that bibliobjet, to call up the facing pages, across a darkened gully, of a tall and narrow codex record. But it is the book Tajima opened for us in exhibition, rather than the one her weaving might evoke, that demands further explanation in the Whitney context. This exhibited volume contained, we learnt, full-page photographs of several industrial locations where the Jacquard process is still operable in factory production. But “shown” here, as at the Whitney, was the book’s first, non-pictorial image. It witnessed to the NYU facility where no photography was allowed: a “portrait” (as Tajima calls it, in the absence of optical representation) made by digital transfer from an audio field recording. And then, bound as verso, we saw one of the numerous Jacquard punch cards – with its vertical chain of one-hole-per-pixel-line of the opposite JPEG – by which the artist (in a further twist, or backflip, of

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technological evolution) had reverse-engineered the automatized loom process in order to store for comparison the serial “data” of her striated, tinctured abstraction on the facing page. Via the Jacquard card cutter still in industrial use, pixel reverted to incision in this replay of computational prehistory around the elided center of prohibited imaging at a documented mainframe bunker: a contemporary cyber maze eavesdropped on not for its messages or medium but for the mere “noise,” in the other sense, of its industrial operation and maintenance. Thus, in something like a closed metahistorical circuit, did this tandem installation by Tajima divide between its reversible poles of proto-computer breakthrough and traditional bound record. The difficulty of “placing” her Whitney work, once finding it there, is its own lesson – or test. Belated maker of artist’s books, experimental spectrographer, oblique historian of recording technology, digital theorist, intricate transmedial fabricateur: the convergence point, for this one innovator, is our data present . . . where, in perhaps the most extravagantly tacit – not just roundabout, but almost vagrant – trope in the history of conceptual bookwork, the etymological hinge between textile and text emerged in the interspace of gallery installation between a Jacquard weaving and a cryptic ring binder, the latter displaying, rather than constituting, a “volume” under double deflection by the spectrogram print-out of a “translated” audio file not of language in action, but merely of its industrial transmit. Not of writing’s phonic storage, but of messagefree noise. More than any silent reading and its suppressed respiration, recognition of this regressive spiral may take your breath away. Bound or not, such facing unreadable pages constituted nothing less than an antibook. It is quite impossible, in any case, to exaggerate the layers of remove from normal codex use to which this upturned surface of Tajima’s unreadable bound object, this binder of old and new technology over the absent ground of legibility, had deliberately exiled itself. Anything like electronic documentation was put at an insistent distance from the data flood whose dispatch centers are being abstractly evoked. History repeats itself, not as farce but as reflexive metatext. Relayed information has exceeded its own representation at antipodal limits – but this only as the sign of our times in an age of invisible digital infrastructures and their machinic genealogy. So back into a mutely audiovisual book of photographic and spectrographic pages alike – if one has the imprint parable right – go the colorfully saturated and entirely deflected remnants of a sonic materiality (in distinction from reading’s generated images) that silent enunciation alone, in its role as inward “data streaming,” once summoned from its horizontal

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strands of legible text. Convention inverted, these were sound scans bound up now along with the precursor of cyber input in that bland tan punch card. For just that extra facing leaf in this unlettered Vol. 5 figured the binary prompt – on/off, punch or none – whose w/hole synecdoche for the advent of digitization backdates all electronic production in this composite work. Though bound between canonical covers, anything like writing in Negative Entropy, Vol. 5 disappears entirely into the digital streams – now stripes – of coded output. One may think of this assemblage as the strictly inferential text of media history. An unlikely new way has been found, in the ongoing ironies of the bibliobjet, to silence the work of assimilated text. Where once there was the phoneticized grammar of silent reading in the sounding of text production, here, between covers, and uppermost to view, we confronted only a spectrogrammar arranged to trace, not actual data, verbal or otherwise, but just the whirring engines of its dissemination in unrevealed forms, whose passage through linguistic software only italicizes the informatic dysfunction. Secondary data without message, bound without destination: I go on for so long about this codex abstraction because of the mental work its conception puts the viewer through. What was previously identified as “the bibliographic machine” – in connection with that illustrated library/ data bank diptych in the “Internal Machine” catalog – has met here a quite exhaustive extrapolation. Ink on paper, data holes in thicker stock, electronic sound captures, textile and spectrogram transfers via translation software: the circle doesn’t really close, it spins out of plausible recognition altogether. In Tajima’s loomed, intertwined visual transfers, the classically sewn and verbally woven juncture of book/text, when stripped of writing, has equivocated the third term of medium all the more openly as the recto – itself strictly rectilinear, not alphabetic – of a bookwork display. It is in this way, by anomalous gallery resurrection, that the first modern storage medium, the codex, can lay momentary if refigured claim to the transmedial proliferations of both cyber flows and material imprint since. Surprising, if not ultimately peripheral, amid the “programmable” artifacts at the Whitney, it would be hard to overstate the centrality of Negative Entropy, Vol. 5 in intercepting from a retro angle the book/text/medium nexus. By the oddity of a single extraneous bibliobjet, modern media evolution was tethered again to its point of mechanical departure in bookhood. So Tajima’s volume, as residual (and functionally negated) book form, is deservedly titled Negative Entropy after all. Under the rubric of both cultural and technological exhaustion, the bound book loses its dominant

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force as storage medium to other digital functionalities. But negentropy emerges when the new data fields are assimilated in order to recharge the outmoded form, if only momentarily, in a conceptual codex format. This can only happen, of course, by the enacted, rather than just presumed, draining-away of other transmedial processes, visual and audial. It is by this logic that censored photo imaging, once displaced into digital recording of unidentifiable sound streams, is then transferred both to binarized textile transfer and, via digital spectrography, to its place in an “illustrated volume” of media history. Among these reductive traces from the hubs of industrialized data, what the spectrogram translation of found noise delivers is the freeze frame, in effect, of an abstract sound film. Here is an arrested image arranged to capture the textures of postfilmic mediality itself: all referred away, and back, to its codex progenitor in the archiving of informatic sequences, whether punched or inked. There at the Whitney show, then, from our perspective at least, Tajima’s lone codex form has, in one way, said it all: binding up the devolution of print dominance in a single volume. Said it all – because with nothing really to say about reading, just about the binary systems that have redefined, among broader transformations, its entire media base. Certainly, our lingering over the trope-upon-trope of illegibility in this fifth volume of Negative Entropy should return us to the main thread (and verbal weave) of the remaining chapters quite starved for words: words on the pages of an open volume, words and the medium they bespeak. Tajima’s bibliobjet, her cryptic artist’s book, though something of an anomaly in this one Whitney show on programmable art, would therefore have been more nearly representative – backing up for a moment – at the previous Chelsea exhibit. Through whatever lens of transparency and attention in “The Internal Machine” exposition – there, and in other bookworks lately as well – the page surface becomes a repeatedly technologized plane of investigation. Numerous more assertive bibliobjets – objectifying the form of bookhood in the gutting of its utility, and with whatever degree of implied recoil from the increasing pressures of the digital in the dematerialization of the codex – are works that reflect upon the form of the book as a structural system, a dedicated apparatus for data recovery and information display. Granted, this is a variable system so deep-going in our culture as to be in some sense invisible in the actual reading of its delivered words. Certain artists are there to recall our attention to it, whether in anatomy or elegy – as, for instance, in a piece by prolific bookworker Fiona Banner that prints a blank book with only three personifying terms, “Face,” “Spine,” and “Back,” on its respective

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cover surfaces. Or there is a more recent bibliobjet by this artist – to whose composite digital font-work we will turn in the next chapter – that embosses the words “No Image Available” on the cover of a bound hardback in parody of such website regrets. In the wide variety of aesthetic gestures, the objecthood of the codex, as part of its implicit bookhood, is under study even when undermined. And its pages as well. An instinct persists in such art practice to address the iconology of the book, as cultural repository, within the whole mix of nostalgia and techno-allergy its fading storage hegemony may call up under the sway, even when only implicit, of digital dominance. So summary is invited by the most deviant and displaced of instances there at the Whitney. It is, in fact, under the book/text/medium paradigm that the general “entropy” of bookhood is most sharply revealed – when coming through in the reductive materialities of the bibliobjet. The effect is often that of schematic recast – and reversion: more like the implosion of book \text\medium, a system collapsed upon itself in illustrative dysfunction. The general tendency is readily noted. With all alphabetic text evacuated from the volumetrics of the codex stand-in, even less abstruse instances of such bookwork than Tajima’s serve to demote the activated materiality of language to the raw matter of suppressed lettering in massed or macerated, pulped or sculpted, form. Taken to an inner and conjoint limit, however, Tajima’s loomed electronic textures – giving us, in her visualized transfer, for instance, the sound not of data flow but of its sheer mechanical support – puts the “noise” more generally, the lateral commotion, back in the optic static of illegible threadwork lineation as well. Derived at once from wordless digital audio and translation software, her work builds a book from both the relics and the surviving (but converted) energies of its own technological defeat. Across an entire archive of such installation “machines” and platformatic displacements, numerous further ironies impinge in the grip of such reconceptualization, as we’ve amply seen. A surveillance sensor that answers our approach with a reading not synchronized to human perceptual need (in Roach’s mockingly robotized Pageturner), together with an adjacent video camera that could easily be trained on the frustrated reader rather than the book – these effects, over two decades back, eerily prognosticate that electronic book (from the last chapter) locked from the get-go if our image is amiss. In the act of reading, “I am the subject of thoughts other than my own” (Poulet again). Those were the old days, where the reader was the only activating agent of a waiting text. Now books can insist on having my thoughts, by facial inference, even before

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I have access to theirs. But biometric recognition software is only the extreme case of a mercantile norm, including a whole panoply of useranalysis, from highlighting in Kindle to “will also like” data profiles and pop-ups. Digitization is a new form of monetization, to be sure, but, more importantly, it induces a new register of dematerialization – by contrast not just to codex engineering but to the very imageering of word forms in print culture, now codecs-driven at every stage of the process. But the process itself may be left entirely in the dust, and not just the dust of crumbling folios in storage libraries either. A report has recently come out on a new use of paper not as scribal surface but as wired antenna. A research collaboration between technicians at Disney and digital labs at the University of Washington has devised a web-legible radio-frequency transmitter that can be taped to the surface of an ordinary paper sheet to make it computer interactive.9 Simply moving the onetime “page” can instruct the dials on a computer-activated audio system, for instance, or waving it one way or another can be part of a tabulated ballot in a classroom situation. The odd myth explicitly enshrined here by the technicians – of paper as still the handiest of student (or human) tools, the blank page rather than the blank screen – is like a wholesale skeuomorph in its own right, naturalizing computer “messaging” with its predecessor surface. The result is to rematerialize the network itself at some fantasy level – as the channel of an actually palpable transaction. And if so goes the page, so the codex. Whatever the Argentine imprimatur Eterna Cadencia may have in mind with the time-based half-life of its fading font, the book format does not seem eterna in its claims on data relay, with many aesthetic reconstructions of its traditional operations meant to invoke a tailing off, a temporal “cadenza,” of the form itself in anything like its former dominance: a flourishing in only one sense, a valedictory flourish, on its irreversible way out. If the Center for Book Arts may have set a new frame around this question, what our last chapter’s TH BO K THAT C N’T WA T is newly impatient for, in its dwindling reign, is a further appreciation, in its role as “internal machine,” for its perennial engineering of the literate imagination. And precisely, even in the digital epoch, as this will have spillover value – hence, for instance, the present book – for a better understanding of text in action, language as medium. For all that, it is worth adding that nothing drawn out here about certain altered paradigms evident in the shift from the sculptural dominance of “odd volumetrics” in the retrospective Yale exhibit to the more processual and mechanistic operations of the newer “internal machine” works at the

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New York Center is meant to be predictive, still less prescriptive. One can’t be sure what’s coming next, or how much of such speculative codex experimentation will remain active in the aesthetic consciousness of an ongoing digital era. The shifted focus in New York is meant to point forward with any certainty here (though a long way back in textual history, at that) only to our Part II. For in the turn from the sculptural to the timebased bibliobjet or installation, as anticipated even at the Yale show by none other than Roach and Ziegler, one of the defining aspects of the read page finds its normative process newly blocked: thrown back on itself as object for contemplation in the absence of readable text. More explicitly, or at least more often, than before in this conceptual tradition – in the flapping of video pages, in the synthesizer-transmitted friction of codex surfaces, in the embedded miking of literary writing – it is precisely the “internal mechanics” of sound production in subvocal reading that is featured by disfigurement. In this oblique way does an essentially sculptural diagnostic finally get under the hood of meaning’s combustible pulse. The latest refashionings of the decommissioned codex, then, in one or another way crossing out our normal textual access, help accentuate a logic of complementarity in gallery display. When cross-read, there is something like a broad material gestalt operable in the museal division of labor at stake in differentiating bookworks from wordworks, the bibliobjet from the lexigraph, and thus of both together from the unestranged verbal decipherment of the book-reading act. The structural distinctions emerge from a toggling on and off of permitted engagement. Detext the book – and emphasis is weighted toward the sculptural medium, whether abstracted cellulose or some other approximation of codex form, anything from foam rubber to marble, clay to aerated concrete to aluminum. In the same gallery context, debook the text in transfer to its vertical wordwork as wall art – and the question of medium is displaced from paper page to a spatial display of pencil or crayon, woven tapestry lettering or stenciled acrylic words, reflective magnifications (Rosenberg) or LED light (Jenny Holzer), what have you. Only when blending the two, book and text, on the page of the hand-held object – rather than its wall-hung or plinth-borne avatar – does the norm come back into balance, into synthesis. It is there that the heft of weighted matter gives way to the weft of inscription, where the foregrounded mediation of inked or pixelated shapes, on the one hand, amassed bulk on the other, recedes behind the interface of invested lexical decipherment. Beneath which, the continuous provision of language as medium.

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At this face-off of considerations across Parts I and II, then, and awaiting theorization in Part III, a further generalization seems not just advised but actually feasible. What bookwork does in its estrangement of the codex form – via the text-excised bibliobjet – is to reacquaint us by negation, not with any specific verbal art, but with the absent mystery of exactly what such sculptural logic occludes: with the wonder, that is, of writing read. The unlettered, the neutered, book form thus reduces to the register of sheer manifest materiality all those intangible cognitive energies that are elsewhere instigated and released – writing gone inert otherwise – by the visible (yet not strictly visual) triggers of wording. In reading – to adjust an earlier irony launched in connection with Megert’s Mirror Shard Book – what you see is always less than what you get, once script is activated as medium. Like the book form on display, in suspension of all content, as sheer cultural talisman or engine, the word shape too – we are reminded in denial by the bibliobjet – can only command and manifest the signifying phonemic force we bring to it in reading. Command, manifest, induce, distribute, and remix – until the fixed inscription may seem exercising its grip on us as much from between or beneath words as from within them. Such – even in the books that hold us, as we them – remains the volatile space no codex borders could ever delimit or police. It is this that the reductions of bookwork can’t help remind us of – concerning exactly those expansive moments when we would otherwise have a present text on offer, real words on call. To which reading matter, in actual books, we next look and listen. Every cross section has an angle. This book cuts at a bias, comes in aslant, to expose the conceptual seams between bound pages and their graphic surfaces in decipherment, as well as between the latter, as text formats, and an immanent feel for the medium that both fuels and diffuses them in received meaning – again, in minor philological divergence: the medium that language is as well as the mediation (etymologically earlier) it provides. Concerning exclusively cellulose rather than screen reading, the bibliographics of inscription, in conceptualist reworkings, can often be palpably linked to the platformatics of the flanged volume. Whereas given texts depend entirely on the sewn page that turns them up in sequence during the act of reading, such texts, reduced to mere surfaces for slicing rather than syntactic splicing in the more radical forms of artist’s books, depend only from the scissored depth of the codex when X-Acto-bladed strands of no-longer-legible printed paper bloom from the cavern of the book’s rectangular form to festoon the gallery display case: mere frail streamers rather than data streams. A recurrent principle attends such

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instances. Ordinarily, the book mostly disappears from consciousness in our reading of its words. By enforced and foregrounding contrast, in the moment of its dysfunction, such stripped script returns us, rather than itself, to the book form for renewed contemplation. A similar displacement, as conceptual event, occurs in the most complex estrangements of readerly cognition, including the hyper-phenomenological reductions of those disembodied and alchemized fever texts at the far conceptual horizon of Hyperpyrexic It is, instead, the standard ignition of the reader’s audiovisual synapses, in the everyday heat of invested literary reading, that – in this book’s gradual cross-sectioning from platform to medium – we next slice through to. After a sidelong glance first, however, at a related aspect of literary hypermediation across explicitly linguistic parameters – and paradigms. A philological angle here makes unexpected connection with the graphic and sculptural dimensions of recent gallery works. In lectures following up on her volume Born Translated – which tracked, in current literary distribution, the growing publication practice of simultaneously released “world novels” in multiple languages – Rebecca L. Walkowitz has been stressing a new inbred multilingualism in the dialectic(al) tensions of hybrid English, as for instance in the uneven layers of Dominican-American Spanglish in the prose of Junot Díaz or the anachronistic Anglo-Saxon simulations of Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake: A Novel (2014).10 If one were to concentrate simply on the lexical and syntactic impact of such mongrelized pages and their conflicted vernaculars, the effect would be, front and center, a marked refusal of national medium-specificity in the art of language. What emerges from these and like-minded, multi-tongued works is thus, one might argue, a kind of mixed-media lingualism. Yet the roughened textwork does not stop there; nor its medial outcropping. In the experiments Walkowitz has been archiving, lexical and grammatical pressures of this sort are accompanied by graphic correlates in everything from irregular italics, dated font choice, eccentric lineation, recto/verso ironies and other page-based anomalies, to alternate print runs of variant narrative sequencing – all of which may be said to regiment, even while augmenting, an estrangement of tongues at the level of codex display itself: the platform and its decipherable interface encountered in strategic deformation. Not just in an aesthetic of “altered books,” then, but in the altered options of international publishing formats themselves – formats that are, in fact, often facilitated by digital printing – one finds intriguing elements of contemporary bibliographics and platformatics alike. Though otherwise mostly reserved for Conceptual art objects, such alienations of

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routine typographic prose also serve, in these new print publications, to objectify (by departure) the verbal and rectilinear determinates of the typical book page – and in express connection with any sense of receptive reading. In an untoward complementarity of halving and doubling, for instance, the phenomenological irony that encourages a contemporary German artist (Kirsten Pieroth) to cut away half of a Jules Verne translation in paperback and retitle it Around The World in 40 Days is not so far removed from the publisher’s release of a diptych narrative like Ali Smith’s 2014 How to be both – one of Walkowitz’s exhibits – in variant print formats, with one half of the narrative now preceding, now following, the other in an alternate sequencing of the text’s chapter blocks. The traditional book as engineered spatial format: a series of diptychs, but also a two-way street. In all of this, we may suspect the logic of a cultural and cross-media feedback loop in which the lexigraphic and bookwork irreverence of Conceptual art over the last quarter century – both its tampering with wording on the wall and its play with codex structures that wall us out – has been reconceived for the global mainstream of readable literary production. This is the case even as the former aesthetic of distortion in gallery art has advanced (so we’ve just seen with Tajima’s intricate and demanding work) to ever more varied and drastic levels of illegibility in the oblique figuration of normative textual reception. That oblique relation is nonetheless an intimate one. So that a counterintuitive thrust of this study’s threefold sequence invites further comment. What may seem at first like a progressive dematerialization in literary transmission – from codex infrastructure (the “internal machine”) through the textuality of imprint surface to a fuller apprehension of the lingual medium itself – is arguably no declension at all in texture or density (no attenuation, say, of critical mass) in that work of verbal transfer known as reading. For it is there that book, text, and medium excavate and inflect, weigh and calibrate, each other – one might say read each other – in the different yet inherent modes of their operable materiality. From the scope of evidence to this effect we need now to take a step back – back to its common denominators – in going forward. Paintings that display the page while withdrawing fidelity from legible script, and thus picture the codex instrument in the abstract, as icon, its true behavior curtailed; sculptural stabiles and mobiles alike that install, or otherwise fabricate and display, the image of bookhood while taking to pieces its inner operation: these treatments in the history of plastic art give way, next in our investigations, to a page-based grapple with language’s own plasticity. To the extent that the linguistic substrate itself, as well as the book as

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cultural repository, is inevitably reconceived in the cultural imaginary by the historical moment of digitization, that “Internal Machine” exhibit remains an exemplary pivot point. Analysis by anomaly has moved from the oddest of volumes to the maddest of machines and laboratory procedures. Engineering, chemical and physical, is the new key. And time-based processing an increasingly definitive parameter. A link between the reeling past of word forms and the flicker effect of the photogram chain in film is thus secured in passing, or at least inferred (as we saw in Fontanive’s wingflutter work, and as we will build on, at different scales of temporality, in Part II). More important: given the unseen digital machinations incurred in the computer processing of a text’s motoring codes, numeric and quasiverbal alike, and amounting to a time-based electronic reading of its own signal stream, it grows clear that the study of language transmission in a digital age – as tested from here out on literary texts – gets closer to an appreciation of language as medium the more fully it engages with New Media studies. Books: folded scrolls as precursors of the download. Books: arrayed word chains as homologies for live streaming. Book/text/medium, then: a conceptual ladder with no firm rungs or direction, neither up nor down, whether with e-reading or its codex predecessor. Book, text, medium: each level of transmission, regardless of material platform, busy articulating the other (within a kind of paratactic continuum) in the variable steps, and technological emphases, of attentive reception.

part ii

The Grip of Inscription

chapter 3

Reading In

Books then, “books” now – books still and throughout, e-texts or otherwise: their medium linguistic script, or more accurately inscribed language, whether backed by paper or computer glow. Their secondary representation in another medium, from paint to plaster in the case of the traditional codex, is only that – secondary. But nonetheless exemplary. In the preceding linked chapters, the graphic treatment of the painted readerly page and the platformatic transformation of the codex volume were found to complement each other – at the level of bookhood’s physical, then mental, dimensions – around the logistics of verbal silence. Such is the silence sustained not just in the long history of reading on canvas, of course, but in more recent book sculptures – unless ironized there by certain miked effects. A silence deader than ever, one might say, as in Tajima’s Negative Entropy page, when its lineation is none other than the visual translation of ambient noise. The pairing of these subsequent two chapters may seem more contrastive than complementary. One eventual point of this one – as carried to the point of travesty, at that, in the final work taken up – is to isolate for inspection a furor of syllabic over-reading in film. This is done to clarify, in opposition, the norms of silent sonority in worded text. On exhibit in that coming example is the verbal narrative of a tendentious and demented “reading in” of specific phrasal intent, that is, when lips are seen moving in conversation deep in the mute background of a classic Hitchcock film. Emerging by contrast in Chapter 4, and this time genuinely in the grip of inscription’s own phonetic grooves, is the corrective to such hallucinatory attunement: namely, the sounds one’s “overheard” inner breath and inflections may actually draw out, and thus read out in silence, not from willfully manipulated film scenes but from the purposeful audition of literary sentences.1 Separate media, film and prose, are found in this comparison, if only in one sense, to screen each other for defining features. What thus joins these 93

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middle chapters on actual reading most directly to those of Part I, within the historical era – and aura – of the codex, is the interlace of inscription on the already stitched page. The absolute punctuality of recto/verso, of sheet and gutter, can thrust into relief those alternate bindings – between words, rather than pages – that come and go. Or say, again, that the materiality of the book (weight and texture in hand) may serve to foreground the intermittent enunciative materiality of its conveyed text – and of all the frictional back-and-forth, the folds and overlaps, to which that vehicular delivery is prone in the body’s own silent processing of words. I began the first chapter with a premise to be amplified now across this middle phase of discussion: the assumption that media regularly come into definition by distinction from “proximate or impinging alternatives.” This still seems to me true enough to organize our ongoing discussion. Media do not always behave properly – with proprietary and exclusionary clarity – in the “texts” they activate. But they often perform their intrinsic behavior most clearly in contrast with neighboring systems. How so? Just so – since it’s exactly this that’s been under consideration in Part I: the force of actual writing brought to a head over against easel script in the bibliographics of Chapter 1; data storage over against sculpturally occluded access in the platformatics of Chapter 2. Detaching now from book form in a shift to textual functions, we continue with a probed distinction that sets timebased signage in writing over against the temporality of recorded motion on film (rather than on an e-text screen): a motion whether of whole bodies or just their lips. We saw at the close of the previous chapter how the conceptual reformattings of word arrays and page sequences have been enlisted as graphic correlates to the hybrid linguistics of certain “post-Anglophone” prose fiction and related computer-assisted publication formats. But let us look, which is to say listen, more closely to one of those restructured codex exhibits: in this case a dual narrative either part of which can be read (and is alternately printed) first. Inaugurating the punning undertext of Ali Smith’s 2014 novel How to be both, as if the spirit of the text’s frequent wordplay were partly signaled by the title itself, one half of the book, whether encountered first or second, puts the reader on reflexive alert when a boy, seen from the back looking at a painting during the Italian Renaissance, is suddenly introduced across the terraced indentations of a dramatic and immersive grammar (hello: / what’s this?).2 Crept up upon by this last in a series of enjambed lines in the manner of a shape poem (“a mighty twisting thing”), here is an unidentified figure who, fixated by the painted image before him, can’t hear his own metanarrative

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hailing into the plot – even when the narrator’s chin is on his shoulder, “right next to his ear” (7). The “old argument about eye or ear being mightier” (7), about one sense in ascendency over the other, is invoked only to be immediately rejected: a consideration, we’re told, that is “neither here nor there” (7) for a fictional being who – as the narrator repeats, in full ontological irony for this prose figment under vocal summons – is himself “neither here nor there” (7). He is, in fact, neither hearing nor even seeing, since neither there in the past in front of the painting, nor here in the textual present, but somewhere in between, virtualized rather than in bodily evidence. It is only there that he is, so to say, provisionally spoken for – as we, too, without thinking to get his ear in hearing of him, look over his shoulder at the described painting. The wordplay of “neither here nor there” thus resonates from an idiomatic to a homophonic register at the level, not just of the novel’s pictured world (including its gallery picture), but of its reception as launched story: an interface at once phenomenological and phonetic, or say ontological and textual. By echoic association, neither ear nor eye alone, but the two in collaborative performance, establish the mode of lexical attention enhanced in these enjambed lines but operable everywhere in the subvocal co-ordinations of standard reading. And, more to the point here, lent multilingual density, given Smith’s Scottish equivalent of Joycean Anglophonic ironies (with their explicit premium on “an earsighted view” of the text world).3 These are the ingredients of reading brought out in unique piquancy by the ingrown otherness of double entendre and its phrasal self-alienations in the turns of Smith’s opening run-on lines. Again, and more broadly, an anomalous platform may speak indirectly to the medium it floats. Books may be printed in separate editions, their dual narratives split down the middle and bound in alternate order, their prose staggered by optical if not grammatical disjuncture in variable lineation. But the language of fiction is, in itself, always locally prone to its own backand-forth in the flux of utterance and the flow of association. The bound or downloaded book may reveal itself to be a machine of more than ordinarily moving parts, but its essential operating system persists. In our typical application of the codex appliance, language is neither heard nor not here. It is sounded. Not out, but in. In cognitive terms, the dizziness involved may have a real aesthetic zing. In Smith’s novelistic counterpoint between modern London and Renaissance Italy in How to be both, with its ongoing exercises in ekphrastic prose, the opening intermedial dialectic between seeing eye and reading ear is scarcely incidental. And besides its own internal slippages along the

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“ear”/“neither here” groove, such phrasing calls up broader mediahistorical perturbations. In Multimedia Modernism, Julian Murphet stresses the transformation from the Enlightenment communicative systems of print and personal letters to the dawn of technical media with photography, telegraphy, and phonography. On the way to its modernist confrontation with film, Murphet sees Victorian literature, within its own nascent “media ecology,” struggling to “be a thing” alongside those more “substantial” modes of transcription, not least that of photography, where, say, an “image” really is one, palpable, portable.4 This is a continually rivalrous and frustrated urge for medium specificity in literature that culminates, in Murphet’s account, with the fetishizing of modernist “technique” (30) – in the works, the worked prose, of authors, writers, like James and Conrad – where literary language, detached more than ever from vernacular orality, had become a reified object unto itself. The present focus, in this and the next chapter, is more specific, more particulate, with the asserted substance of literary script brought out at the level of letters, syllables, and lexemes: things in themselves to begin with, cogs in the technical machination of enunciated language – or call them increments in the techne of writing that technique makes palpable. Here, then, even in the enjambed prose lineation of Ali Smith’s mannerist passage, but no more there than in the run-on English of George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, let alone of the Irish Joyce, is a phonic accent in prose – a material claim on the reader’s generative body – that no visual transformation of the page, no bibliographics, can outplay. What all wording in a phonetic alphabet – all morphophonemic language – must permit, make room for, within its primal modularity: this is what some reading matter, in the surprises of its very face, its font, radically materializes. Yet what is catchy about the graphic hooks, so to speak, of such anomalous fonts doesn’t begin to exhaust, but merely to exaggerate pictorially, the texture of inscription in the readerly rather than retinal sense. Even Smith’s marked lineal enjambments only model the unseen hover and meld between syllables to which any writing may be prone. It is in this way that these central (which also means transitional) chapters, when moving back and forth between verbal and (audio)visual art – especially in the direct run-up to close literary reading in this one – do more than anticipate, but actually prepare more broadly, the coming emphasis on a specifically verbal medium in Part III. In these fulcral treatments, with their own cross-sectional readings of separate media anomalies (not just altered electronic fonts but computer-printed sculpture, ersatz Chinese pictograms, contrapuntal wording in screen montage,

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etc.), the topic of inscription has obviously made no clean break from museum or theater to readerly use, from wall to desk, lap, or laptop. And it is for this reason that “inscription” – moving toward the literary from the strictly visual – keeps fruitfully reverting, all the while, to the isolated graphics as well as platformatics of the preceding two chapters, in all their optical rather than verbal (their asemic) variety. Among these medial sidebars to the work of read lettering, one particular “exaggeration” deserves noting first off. It arrives in 2017 from the realm of conceptual sculpture quite apart from the bookworks last considered – as if to clear the air, the actual air space, it so aberrantly claims and molds as its own. In one of those transmedial reversals characteristic of recent Conceptual art in a hybrid wired mode, we encounter not the computerizing of voice but the computer-seizing of speech’s own “form.” Yet in literalizing the weightless shapes of speech, this automatic sculpting of enunciation seems more like a send-up of the material signifier than its genuine examination – even as its effect is tightly located within the media history of voice capture. This is a work by contemporary Mexican– Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, called Volute 1: Au clair de la lune, a sculptural transform that departs from his usual time-based installation work focused (optically as well as conceptually) on the transfer of voice and pulse to video projection. Volute 1 is based on the famous folksong that was recorded in 1860 on the pre-Edison phonautograph by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. This device was a precursor of phonographic recording that merely graphed the sound of the human voice in traced wavelengths, with no capacity for aural playback. So what appears here by way of secondary manifestation? The question has a pointed answer. But one not imaginable before computerized options waiting a full century-and-a-half further down the paths – and byways – of technical mediation. Whether or not the lyric was originally selected (and how could it not have been?) for its opening lines about the act of inscription itself – “By the light of the moon,” sings the speaker to a friend, “Lend me your quill to write a word” – the next stanza’s answer, that “I have no pens,” applies equally well to the Martinville’s electrographic tracing and to its updated voice transcription, so to say, by Lozano-Hemmer. For the latter’s metallic “volute” (rather than the papercoated cylinders of the original) is a twisted, rippling form – like a fossilized molten cloud, swollen and gullied and creviced – that results from the 3-D printing in aluminum of the computer-scanned spume of breath exhaled in the very utterance of the song’s opening sound.5 Where Martinville gave us indexed speech sounds (rather than coded language)

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for the first time, a kind of halfway house on the road to recoverable audio record, Lozano-Hemmer gives us an actually embodied sound that remains equally impervious to playback: a kind of sonic rather than phonic speech bubble, all bulges and furrows where the syllables should be. In the work’s transfer of a time-based to a plastic medium, it is as if a launched acoustic sequence were frozen, like winter breath, in mid-air. Inscription’s usual grip on us, secured only in our (usually silent) textual enunciation, has a material dimension that can only seem inflated to the point of corporeal lampoon in this wall-hung chunk of illegible utterance. No “reading in” possible. Everything to follow in the explored graphonics of literary enunciation comes into a moderated, and clarifying, perspective against this conceptual extremity of computer-printed phonetic respiration. What discussion is building toward in Part III has to do with two phases of the “disappeared” in the philosophy of language: with phonetics vanished into semantics; with wording into indicated being. Such are the two governing dimensions of the verbal medium when at work in its own suppression of sensation by sense-making, its own deference to reference – and, in turn, its own ceding ground to ontology: to the existence of things, including speech itself, indicated in language’s own sound shapes. In another but related sense, the transition now underway in this chapter is similarly concerned with disappearance – or call it a forgetting bred of inscription. On a sliding scale of impact, book reading begins with a sensorial disregard, more or less, of the weighted thing that occasions – or at least permits – it. Deciphered text requires the sublimation of held object into the imprint manifestation of the same definitive phonetic alphabet that must in turn vanish into the virtualities of its discourse – into the imagined space of its designations, that is, or the zone of its ideations, suspending any immediate sense of either the grasped book or the linguistic grip of its inscription. But this whole system of disappearance – of book and text into what (and where) it brings you – is a vanishment never complete. Same with the double subsumption to be pursued at linguistic and referential, semiotic and semantic, levels in the closing two chapters. Erratically, the weight and texture of the held volume – as we all know in nodding off over a dropped and recovered one of our own, or in being distracted momentarily from its pages before palpable return, through them, to its words – oscillates in consciousness, and precisely as a physical instrument, with the words that, paradoxically enough, exceed it from within. One might say that the nowyou-feel-it-now-you-don’t materiality of the platform thus acclimates us to a parallel waver in the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t of word versus

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summoned world in literary experience, let alone the frequent gestalt of grapheme versus phoneme in the generation of that textual springboard in the first place. Yes, book reading, it is fair to say, does exceed pages and their covers precisely from within their facilitating materiality. Yet it is just that surplus of text in its codex storage – that override of paper and ink by their instigated recognitions – that brings the issue of verbal text, of lexical manifestation, into a varying cross-medial alignment with another kind of representational continuum in the current chapter and the next. On this comparative front, the varieties of inscribed speech in an alternate timebased and audiovisual medium like film, with its own form of incremental modularity as text, opens an unexpected but revealing field of comparison for the generated vistas and events – and micro-structures – of immersive reading. In the process, the intersection of literary with film and media theory, though proceeding on other grounds at first, will ultimately converge upon a full transmedial apprehension of wording’s inherent verbal montage, where the letteral phonogram operates at something like the subliminal scale of the celluloid photogram. That very simile, between two separate time-based media, taps directly into this book’s whole method in its efforts at cross-grained analysis. Yet, for all this, nothing in these tandem central chapters, in their brush with cinematic temporality, is meant to lose touch, lose hold, of the codex as material platform in its own right. Other quasitangible supports (like backlit screens) for the generation and transfer of meaning emerge only by analogy or contrast. The broader the perspective, the clearer this becomes. In their bearing on the manifold function of the actually folded paper book, discussion has looked, and will continue to, at various transmedial conjunctures in today’s art practice. It does so for their heuristic value in zeroing in on the selfevaporated audiovisuality of time-based textual process in the composite graphonic medium of literary writing: text disappeared, that is, into what one thinks it is about – and thinks about it. Yet whenever the alphabetic/phonetic gestalt lifts away into the phenomenological zone of response, the new ubiquity of digital reading may at first tend to obscure the underlying medial issue. Reading on-line can be so interactive in its cuts and pastes, and reading a backlit e-book so much like other portable visual uploads, movies and games included, that one can easily ignore or dismiss what is specific to the medium of linguistic decipherment in the throes of such platform remediations. These half-dozen chapters are staged very much to resist this dismissal

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from the inscriptive ground up, which includes its historical foundation in the marked page. To this end, as we’ve seen, the heft (and so clarifying force) of the codex serves partly, in the aggregation of its textual layering, to drag us back to – or, say, ballast us by – just such an acknowledgment of material form(ation). Otherwise, reading and image watching can seem too fully conflated with each other, rather than merely alternatives on a given lit plane – alternatives that cinema itself makes clear, as we’ll see, well before the invention of portable screens. Taking the longest possible view, then: even if paper reading were to evolve into a mere thing of the past, the more decisive and specific materiality of the book, the codex, would, as historical model, retain its clarifying weight in distinguishing merely visible image surfaces from the legible – the different and differential – work of material words. Materialized in themselves – on the way to what they work, in the other sense, to manifest. The lifted book versus the liftoff from words to unbound and unframed images, from text to (and into) the phenomena of its own low-wattage mode of virtual reality: that’s the media-archaeological model on which cinema will be recruited, in this chapter and the next, to cast its alternate light. To say so, of course, is to recall the way in which, precisely in throwing various facets of the digital alternative into frequent relief, the “sculptural” operations of 3-D bookworks sampled in Chapter 2 tend also to throw us back, in recognition, upon the codex form itself. And – as the present book wants to stress and re-estimate – upon the tripartite functionality of reading it installs: as platform, discourse, and medium alike. Thus, alone, can the benign vagaries of language be brought, as it were, to book – made as if to own and explain themselves. In the realm of the codex, with no onbutton, no other screen associations, no liquid crystal display, no inner voltage – with all sourced light cast upon its pages rather than coextensive with them (yet still available for optical allegories in art making, from Rembrandt’s reflective pages to the lamp-only Reading Room of John Cayley) – the stacked rather than just paginated layers of text come more clearly to mind, as well as to hand, as we execute the decipherment of their signs. The ground is cleared for recognition: no LCD glow to obscure the lowest common denominator (LCD) of read words. In a chapter called “The Book to Come” in Paper Machine (2005), Jacques Derrida tracks the etymology of the codex volume from the Greek biblos (“the internal bark of the papyrus”) through biblion (for writing in general) in its drift toward booked text per se in the bibliographic tradition. And in then noting parallels in the Latin lineage by

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which liber (also for cellulose matter) came to mean the discrete form of library archiving known as the “volume,” Derrida is stressing the consolidation of the bound paper platform as metonymy for all linguistic inscription.6 Such is exactly the sense meant to be deliberately upended by the French (rather than English) force of his own book title, which deploys the post-nominal adjective of Papier machine (2001) in articulating the notion of “machine paper”: the secondary system, that is, of electronic “print-out.” His title’s emphasis does not fall on codex mechanics (as in that “Internal Machine” exhibit), but instead on electronics: new digitized modes for the dissemination of verbal data in a global network requiring, in effect, “no paper support” and thus not constituting – in the unbacked, weightless flow of its new disembodied visibility – the otherwise etymologically freighted status of “corpus or opus” (7). Yet in this post-type processing of word streams, a remaining metonymy still applies. Though this is not Derrida’s point, one notes that we still think of such text production as writing. Why should this be? What is it, in other words, about the production of discourse that confirms the tight fusion of the book/text/medium laminate even in the absence of the first term? As Derrida puts it in his following chapter, “The Word Processor,” computer writing involves more than just an ongoing debt to codex form, a derivation including such diverse markers as lines, numbered pages, and the inflection of bold or italic fonts, which in themselves “still respect the figure of the book – they serve it and mimic it” (30). More surprisingly, as if derived from the bibliocentric fantasy of text as a repository for traced speech, he adds – in a rather impressionistic end run around the deconstruction of Voice in text with which he is otherwise so famously identified – that electronic speed has produced an almost “pneumatic” effect, “close to breathing: as if you had only to say the word and it would be printed” (30). This may be an odd “as if,” but is not problematical here. To normalize this conjecture in our present terms, writing, even (or especially, should we think?) in the case of computer input, is at one with the mechanics, however displaced, of enunciation. Even “texting” on a cell phone remains in touch with what I am calling, in literary reading, “the grip of inscription” – as borrowed from the graphonic (and tacitly muscular, or “pneumatic”) pulsions and adhesions of speech itself. Inferences proliferate. Estranged by comparison in digital bookwork, the imprinted book is seen anew. Seen, heard, weighted, and put into contrast with the space of its discourse. As a reader it is everywhere up to you, open to you, to let the material book operate as support for the

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recognition of other materialities incident to the production of text. This involves knowing what you are doing in releasing through, and from, a given book as instrument – and from its thus supported text – the particular verbal medium that triggers your cognitive work in activating just that text. There is nothing circular in this formulation except what honors the silent circuit of literacy in those eye/ear coordinations – or productive disjunctures – of assimilated text and its sponsored virtualities, of word forms and their phenomenologically realized beings and events. Literary circuit breakers kick in only when a given phrase has discharged, from within syntax, an uncharted spark of recognition.

Art Grown Fonter In any transition, like this chapter’s, from book to text under the shadow – or in the glare – of the digital, no contemporary work is more wittily apt, in its material involution, than the most recent bookwork by Fiona Banner previously mentioned: the image of a real book embossed (in red on its bright yellow cover) with only the three words No Image Available (2012) – as if it were, instead, an embedded promo icon on an Amazon page. Nor is there any “Look Inside” invited. This isn’t a book still awaiting its cover design from the press’s art department. Nor lapsed into antiquarian status for low-tech (if on-line) resale. It is the implosion of the whole marketing apparatus in codex form – and was even to be found publicized at one subversive point on Amazon as an apparent internet prank the artist somehow managed to stage. Subsequently taken down from the marketer’s website, Banner’s faux volume was temporarily portrayed as an “out-ofprint” limited edition no more available – as museum bibliobjet rather than print book – than was its cover image. Building on earlier work of Banner’s in the “dummy book” mode, No Image Available is, in fact, by “cross-wired” material parody, a mock book of the sort that needs no such jacket these days – having nothing physical to wrap – when otherwise “made available” in the common form of electronic upload. Banner often plays between and across media in this way. Her work involves, in one case, a wall-wide transcript of every word and narrative action of the film Lawrence of Arabia under the title The Desert (1994/95). This is a hypertrophic inscription characterized not as a reading experience instead of a spectacle – since it is almost impossible to follow the syntactic continuity from one long “Super Panavision” text line back to the start of the equally dilated next. The work is instead spread wide merely as an extensive wordwork: meant to participate, and its “audience” with it, in

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a “great moment” – as if captured here in a single freeze frame – “in the history of wideness.”7 Banner’s screen-scaled work (she has a similar treatment of Apocalypse Now) negotiates repeatedly in this way, if on uncertain terms (as with many of her other projects), between text and image, each exposing its codependency on the other – here, of course, in the throes of cinematic dysfunction and denuded spectacle. And as a further transition from the status of codex to print text, there is her self-styled and eponymous Font (2015), free for download from her website, designed in an unsettling digital mash-up of previous typefaces used in her prolific textwork.8 Operating as objet – or more like process art – in its own kind of limbo between codex housing and medium determination, this maverick print format, perturbing smooth legibility at the textual level, may be thought to approach certain radical departures from bookmaking standards featured by the broad purview of the Center for Books Arts, in their more artisanal displays, well before the “Internal Machine” exhibit. I refer to an enigmatic mode of practice that one of the Center’s web pages is devoted to elucidating (see below): to wit, the long tradition of “asemic writing.” Here is a term coined in the 1990s for a practice going back to the high modernist likes of Henri Michaux and Pablo Picasso, the latter with his “Imaginary Alphabet” calligraphy, and including Roland Barthes’s own exercises (literal, sub-letteral doodles) in the mode of what he called the illisible (the “unreadable”) – and championed by Barthes in the wordworks of Cy Twombly. Such are the modes of hypotext, or sub-legible scrawl, whose framefilling evolution I have in previous work tracked back, by a logic that now bonds this chapter with the first two as well, to precisely the low-res image of the open page in the reading scene of easel painting. And even this tradition of classic representation seems to have found a kind of mixedgenre parody with Banner’s 2019 oil-painted seascapes in which end-stop punctuation marks in variable font types float as black buoys on cresting waves under titles like Helvetica or Optima. Or in one case, with three wave-tossed periods spaced out across the horizon, Ellipses – where the represented elision between phases of textual content has become the zeroed-out content itself. More broadly in such practice, it is the legacy of what I term the lexigraph (with Banner’s legibility-straining Desert as one late variant) – involving the look of writing without easily processed content, rather than the narrated look of a reading scene – that is often so pointedly asemic as to mobilize a counter-semantics all its own. If this places Banner in the orbit of Chapter 1 as well, with her gravitation toward

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“bibliographic” density, her work is also linked, via that embossed No Image Available, to the platformatics of book sculpture. And with Font, of course, she directly straddles both phases of consideration: a strictly graphic affordance for a text, a book, not yet in production. Yet Font’s place in Part II of this discussion is secured, as well, by its status as inscription degree zero. As a textually empty template, it also looks ahead to Part III by giving us the exaggerated graphic resistance of print entities – in their impure channeling of any speech message – without a specific realization of its lexical medium. It reminds us that language, rather than print, is the true conduit of sense in writing, as against the graphic flow – and quirks – of strictly visual objects like letterforms. More than this, in its composite of previous font patterns in Banner’s textworks, Font reminds us that all new writing bears the trace of its predecessors. Antecedent graphics are found emblematically inflecting the new script, in this case, with the loops, furrows, and outcroppings of previous formats. And they are seen to do in its roman as well as italic version, stressing the foreignness not of its own language – none yet activated – but of its estranged typographic (hence bibliographic) norms. For hers is a typeface that captures from the midst of its own digital bricolage – in the seeming default or defiance of technical regimentation – the deep historical kinship between gesture and script, cave painting and alphabetic picturing, icon and indexed speech, mark and remark, image and glyph. Rather than actual ‘asemic” writing, Banner’s uneven font – instanced always in its copyright-free access – is both presemic and obtrusively visual. Even the perverse way in which a British inverted comma as opening quotation mark reverts to double in closing off a phrase seems to put its own metascriptive version of scare quotes around any waiting ‘word” ever to be cited as such. Banner’s jaunty concoction operates, throughout , as a palimpsestic memory of previous print enterprises now entirely facilitated by the digital, so that , in its rough edges and jagged curves, it resembles the kind of faux antique printing effects, as well as other font and page fantasias, that recent commentators see as characterizing a resurgence of reflexive bookhood in the post-digital world of contemporary print publication.9 The particularly truant and obscure ‘Z” in the odd swipes of Banner’s lower-case italic form – right here: z – seems only a further reversion, from within print, to the ink flourish of the scribing hand. Yet at the same time, in its salient computer facilitation – if only under erasure in its apparent artisanal irregularity – Font offers yet another sign that the dominion of the codex and its traditional print surfaces have been supplanted. Especially with that zany (ZANY, not ‘any,” by any means) version of a lowercase z, the somewhat clogged or frayed edges of her font, with its aura of fuzziness,

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while reminding us perhaps of the sometimes frazzled phonetic edges between words, does also distantly recall that aesthetic zone of asemic writing that the Center for Book Arts traces all the way back to ‘Crazy’’ Zhang Xu, ‘a Tang Dynasty calligrapher who was a fan of combining booze with calligraphy.”10 So irreverent is the conceptual zest of Banner’s invention that, from within digital facilitation, it seems to have reached back into the facture and patient zeal of the handmade – yet never losing sight, especially not sight, or at least not a visual intuition, of the linguistic medium itself in its less exclusively graphic and palimpsestic materialities. So that when I wrote above, many pages back about such zones of phonemic byplay in connection with Ali Smith’s prose, that the ‘dizziness involved may have a real aesthetic zing,” the zap of Banner’s snazzy self-obscured z can’t have been far from my mind. In the bibliographics of her jostled alphabet, ranging flamboyantly from a to z, Font thus passes through the substrate of platformatics in conceptual book production to enter upon the resistant textures of aesthetic inscription itself: a poetics of the letter before any word forms thus actively realized.

Font, to say the least, pushes to an impossible lower limit any tendency, in the titular idiom of this chapter, for reading in, since there is nothing written at all yet to entice such excess: sheer graphic latency – or pre-text – awaiting all primary input with its arsenal of stored letterforms. So is Font’s claim to relevance in this chapter only by negation? Not so. But neither by mere recapitulation either. In another idiom, unique to our digital age, the particular analysis underway in Book, Text, Medium may misleadingly seem working at times to reboot itself. In fact, it harbors no desire to start over, building up anew from the graphic to the lexical, from plastics to poetics. Rather, it’s simply in the nature of cross sections to be reversible, traversed by comparisons looking both ways at once – and thus finding laminated, in this case, various strata of scholarship and art practice alike. Given this book’s interest in bringing contemporary museum-going – in regard (closely analytic regard) to the conceptual art of book and page and other scriptive surfaces – into material proximity with literary reading, the variable alignments that result offer no one-way street of approach. With the imprint sheets of an open book, for instance, the look of writing is seldom surrendered entirely to the feel of reading. Nor in sketched abstract pages or effaced real ones, in painting or sculpture respectively, is the subvocal texture of literary enunciation likely to be brushed or scraped entirely from mind – even when from any and all view of legible characters. Gallery experiment and the engaged literary page thus speak alternately to each other across – and about – the very ground of shared, as well as divergent, mediation. No sooner do we advance upon the reading

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of prose fiction in a chapter like this than we are returned to the retinal intricacies of semic or asemic bibliographics by way of comparison. So even as we approach here the cross-medial parody of screen reading, it’s back again, first, to the museums. But only after fully appreciating Banner’s electrographic departure from gallery art to an on-line participatory affordance with Font. Given our triadic focus, what we find in her case – and with such an unmistakable heuristic charge, as we will again with a very different digital font in the closing chapter – is a computerized bypass of the book that serves to foreground the latent medium in whatever waiting text the software template is activated to process.

Inked Doubt Font assumes a semiosis before semantics; there is nothing asemic about it. With aberrant calligraphy in mind as well, it is all the clearer that bibliographics can take experimentation along quite separate optic paths. Obliteration is one thing; letteral uncertainly another. Both the inking out of word forms and their dubiety, when visible, as actual language – these twin blockages within the communications circuit – converge in the ironies of Conceptual art on the very concept of reading, of textual transmission. No gainsaying it: one reads first of all, or begins reading, with the eye. Inebriate letterforms in the works of the boozing Zhang Xu aside, the calligraphic tradition is taken up in various counter-cultural gestures by contemporary Chinese artists featured – two years after Banner released (published?) her Font – at a 2017 Guggenheim show entitled “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World.” The grip of inscription, of its reduction to printer’s ink itself in nondifferential application, exerts its absolute stranglehold on the reading act in several of these works. Geng Jianyi, in his Misprinted Books from 1992, takes the graphic quality of Chinese characters and redoubles their forms by overprinting, at the expense of content, into more florid and scintillating smudges of inscription line after line. Appropriating zinc printing plates discarded by a publishing house commissioned for official Communist Party textbooks, among other printed books, he has superimposed a second layer of impress upon the original. According to the Guggenheim catalog, “one’s initial inclination is to approach the work as a text,” yet “Geng makes reading impossible”:11 except, that is, as one tends to read, critically, this satirically turbid and blurred flood of party rhetoric. In each of these recent Chinese works of graphic recalcitrance,

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and thereby ideological resistance, what has come into doubt is in effect inked out. In a quite different vein, the transition from calligraphy to print impress generates a striking case in point from the latest innovations of electronic aesthetics. As described in the oxymoronically titled Wired magazine, this is a dedicated typeface invented for the small-run print venue Sub Rosa. It is an electronically stored font dubbed “Memoire” that, like memory itself, loses its clean edges over time, softens and blurs its outline, and in this case blunts its serifs in sixteen barely discernible stages of eroded sharpness across the page spread of the publication.12 Even in the technological rather than biological sphere, then, we may say that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It does so when capturing here, in one single textual sequence, in part the degradation over time of traditional lead type in a predecessor medium of imprint. Conflating process and product, the “Memoire” fontprogram is itself an unmistakable work of Conceptual art, introducing time-based transformation into the traditional fixity of impress. Such, again, is the case as well – if more narrowly autobio-graphical, we might say, in its rehearsal – with that instrumental temporality in Banner’s Font. In its electronic conflation, previous alphabetic formats deployed by the artist get visibly rerun from within the deliberately stop-time mechanics of imprint. The history of writing itself as a preservative for speech, an aidememoire resisted by the logocentrism of early Platonic philosophy, is reversed by the alternate work of the disappearing “Memoire” font and its progressive material amnesia. In contrast, the textures of typographic density are saliently engraved and paraded by the zest for zig-zag eccentricity in Banner’s letterforms.

Part of the irony of Banner’s digital graphic is that its palimpsest of computerized lettering serves to drive it back toward an irregularity that more closely resembles handwriting, though stopping short of the merely simulated alphabets pursued across his whole career by renowned Chinese artist Xu Bing. Here again Conceptual art bears on the same question of “reading in” – and all its inked doubts – to which this chapter is soon to turn in satiric prose. Though Xu Bing’s work was only spottily sampled, along with other Chinese scriptive ironists, in that 2017 Guggenheim show, in the summer of 2018 an extensive retrospective exhibit on his career, both as conceptual calligrapher and as bookmaker, was mounted at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, reviewing the whole spectrum of his bookwork from the earlier “deconstruction” of the Chinese alphabet (faux pictographic letters) for a phantom book, to his more recent textual erosions and near-miss calligraphic evocations. Setting out to

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compose, or more to the point to composite, a book no one could read, early in his career he devised woodblock characters that approximated the multi-stroke Chinese lexicon without actually settling into recognized word forms. Dubbed eventually Book from the Sky (1987–91), based on the Chinese idiom for things incomprehensible (like some array of undecipherable omens), this script’s latest iteration filled a large hall at the Beijing gallery in floor-to-ceiling hangings and rows of codex installments – all under the sweep of a several-meter-long tent-like scroll imprinted, like all the other surfaces, with the artist’s “signature” gnomic glyphs. When, by contrast, graphic characters are recognizable in Xu Bing’s work, rather than just conjured under negation (as in the traced stony furrows of the Great Wall’s building blocks), it is then likely to be the platform, rather than the script itself, that has undergone transformation. The words of Chairman Mao appear, for instance, in vertical rubber-stamped rows upon cigarettes lined up in a metallic flip-top case called a “book” – for the associated verticality of Chinese inscription. In turning from textwork to the appropriation of books themselves, Xu Bing certainly runs the gamut from the simulated to the discarded book with an almost grotesque abandon. In the process, the leaves of a codex tradition that were once made, not of vegetation, but of animal skin, and thus came at that extra anthropocentric price, have come back to haunt the library – become breeding ground – of Xu’s imagination. For most bizarre of all in this show, in the text-bearing work of non-codex imprint, were the calligraphic and lexical forms stamped – as if branded – onto the bodies of two pigs. Here was the video record of a performance piece from 1994 banned from the Guggenheim exhibition, in response to animal-rights protestors, but subsequently purchased for their permanent collection by an anonymous donor. It was there on full view at the Beijing retrospective. In an installation video displayed on two monitors within the vestigial scene of textual damage and desecration, the “textualized” animals are seen copulating, in the full grunting weight of their tattooed bodies, across the open surface of hundreds of “penned” books (the pun being part of Xu’s English-language irony?) in a crowded lexigraphic corral. What we’re examining in these middle chapters as the “grip of inscription” has been reduced here toward a raw animal branding. Called A Case Study in Transference, and not just for the displacement of writing onto the backs and flanks of these illiterate farmyard creatures, this work of refigured animal desire is im/pressed upon already printed volumes – so the viewer might at first “figure” – in an unprecedented erotics of reading’s prepared bibliographic space, its confines, its site of release. That would be

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a plausible enough reading, unless or until one gets close enough to see the overriding figuration: to see, that is, how the mounting male pig is inscribed with fake English words, the female with more of Xu’s familiar nonsensical Chinese characters. In this allegorical case, then, it may be that the damage done to books is specified as a result of the lust for Western infusions, both literary and cultural, the yearning for international crossfertilization – which no great wall of mere illiteracy in the language of the other can hold back.

Language’s “Silent Silo” So we turn again to an American artist and theorist who has in fact written about Xu Bing, and whose interest is drawn elsewhere, as well, to the various forms of transient and illegible signification in the zone of the asemic.13 Recalling in part the idea of a time-sensitive font in the case of “Memoire” – its sharpest (serif-tipped) delineations disappearing in process, but only as that process replays one level up the inbred evanescence of word formation itself – another work by John Cayley offers its own cross section of sound and sense. At which point the foundational, and forever refurbished, play between graphic and phonic materiality on the inside of physical books can find itself relocated in the new realm of robotic voicing and audition, driven by invisible digital coding rather than alphabetic inscription. A contemporary digital poet’s move from literature to aurature can thus help in grasping the invisible phonography of all poetics. Aurature: with its overlap – and undertone – of aura and erasure at once, of phonic ambience floating free of inscription. According to the conceptual poet Cayley – he of the former animism of so-called goose-neck lamps in a “reading room” of simulated textual preoccupation (Fig. 1.2) – the enunciating body of the writer is tethered only ambiguously to its newest forms of machined audition. Repurposing the voice-recognition protocols of Amazon’s phonorobotic Alexa technology for a 2015 experiment called The Listeners, Cayley’s own voice poses the question: “Where are the listeners?” The halting pre-programmed answer, after the robot’s drawing of a “deep breath,” is eked out in these new wavelengths of linguistic transmission. This is the space that Cayley’s installation renders allegorical, it would seem, as well as implicitly corrective, in a plywood closet angled like a giant ersatz codex lined with sound-absorbent material – like the surface of the literary page itself, perhaps, suffused with the sound of a phonetic script whose aurality it cannot give back directly. Hence, for any phonemically

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attuned textual auditor, the metaphonetic overtone of “sigh” – and the undertone of “low” – in Cayley’s associated image of aurality’s holding pen, or “silo,” captured via the swamping of “loud” in the cyber “clouds” across the mimetic descent of enjambment when “every word you speak / falls echoing through the clouds of the silent silos” (his variant of a line from Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners” that runs “Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house”).14 Richly cadenced in its muted selfexemplification, let this anticipate the phonetic “reading out” – or the “sounding in” of reduced enunciations – in the next chapter, sprung loose from the obsessional “reading in” lambasted in the story up next for review. Its parodic stance toward the divergent temporalities of viewing and reading enters a conceptual zone about which film theorist Michel Chion has given us a compelling account.15 But Chion’s argument turns on a distinction all the more striking, in its audio/visual division of screen labor, when brought alongside a satiric fiction about the lip-reading of inaudible film extras in this satiric story by contemporary American novelist Bennett Sims. From such an unexpected cinematic quarter, then, comes a revealing interdisciplinary leverage on the nature of reading-time in its phonemic basis – exactly what the digital speed-reading technology called Spritz (discussed in Chapter 2) would override in its high-tech campaign against the low-tempo slow-downs of subvocalization. And this with its built-in overthrow of the codex form altogether in the electronic recentering of each lexical unit on the run. Short of this, of course, phonemes take their own good swift time, with the result that the transmedial appearance of words on screen is more hybrid and disjunctive than one might ordinarily have recognized. For the lexical rather than scenic image operates, so Chion has recently highlighted, not just as part of the visual space, or retinal field, it may share with indexical images or other filmed scenes. Rather, it drops away into an articulatory space all its own. Cinema’s temporality in the interchange of images is at every moment distinct from the differently geared cognition of alphabetic shapes on the same screen. In insisting on this, Chion’s latest film commentary foregrounds, as forcefully as any literary theory I know, the acoustic, because phonemic, substrate of processed writing.

The Seen of Sound Put it this way for now: inscribed phonemic signals rub the photogram chain the wrong way. They don’t disappear invisibly into the visual.

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Before noting how such legible written wording, according to Chion, can only have a very different effect from other images in cinema, we benefit from a drastically imagined alternative, helping us rethink the “actual” nature of reading from within a wry lampoon of its misapplication to another medium. Literature, of course, may often teach us how to read, even across media – and, by the same token, how not to. In this respect, the title story of Sims’s White Dialogues triangulates with the audiophile term “white noise” in ways that connect with the literary-theoretical notion of “white voice” advanced by critic Steven Connor – for whom even the question of where reading happens, let alone how, is rightly (and, more to the point, resonantly) indeterminate. Connor is glossing “what is called subvocalization,” as I had done over two decades back – at book-length and by titular inference in Reading Voices: four syllables proffered as an intransitive clause, not a participial phrase, turning on the gerund form of “reading” as subject.16 Reading accomplishes the only voicing inherent in textual activation. In his own related terms, Connor stresses how literature “does not silence sound: it auditises the field of the visible” (113). Note even there how the latent ambiguity of “silence sound” (verb/noun or inverted noun/ verb) evokes the variable inflections of text production in the muted sounding of its silences. In any case, no unexamined falling back on a simplistic “inner ear” for Connor. His explicit point, in stressing an ambient “white voice” in the aura of silent aurality, is that “one who reads silently . . . is suffused by his or her inner sonority, if inside is exactly where it is, if sonorous is exactly what it is” (106). Connor comes down more decisively two pages later, proposing this voice as neither inside nor out. In its “pantopicality” (his play, perhaps, on an irresolvable locus beyond the [pan]optics of the reading eye), the reading function has “absconded from space, or instituted another” (108). Such is the “white architecture of vocality” (111) in an “arena of internal articulations” (107). This is a zone not “vestigial,” in derivation from some primary orality, but “virtual” and encompassing: an “inner hearsay” (107) that, varying Connor’s phrase for the resultant “field of the visible” (44), we might term the generative force field of the auditive, if not the audial. Energized there is what I have more recently termed, varying Walter Ong’s influential notion of “secondary orality” since the phonograph, a “secondary vocality” endemic to the functions of literacy long before machine recording.17 For it is a simple fact of morphophonemic language that syllables are not herded into wording until heard – somewhere, if heard is the word, or place its locus

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(Connor’s sense of equivocation again) – as formative syllabic entities and increments. Once more: the source of literature’s ultrasound. Such is the understood premise of literary language so bizarrely inverted and hollowed out by Sims’s story about a misjudged lip-reading of silent screen zones: mobile glyphic cysts, so to say, in the audiovisual system of “talking film,” little irrelevant pockets of muteness, invisible speech bubbles, bursts of pertinence-free facial motion. Here is the plot of “White Dialogues,” such as it is: a present-tense act of witness stretched on the rack of the narrator’s intermittent tortured responses – in a university basement screening room – to a lecture by a young scholar named Bereyter about such sensorial non-sense in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It is no accident that the screen on which the looped evidence of such a silent locutionary act is so confidently projected by Bereyter is called, from here out, the “canvas” of his both trivial and unconvincing revelations. For it is upon the plane of this representational blank slate that he must de-pict (vocally motorize) what can’t, on the other hand, be actually heard – as if in a travesty of Voltaire’s remark that “writing is the painting of the voice.”18 The initially deadpan tonalities of academic satire in this story are as familiar as they are, in this case, deliciously confected and relentless. Bereyter’s arcane and maddeningly lauded initiative respects no narrative arcs in its attempt to read, in one disjunctive scene from Vertigo after another, a pointless “message in a bottle” corked up until now in its vacuum of silence:19 namely, what uncredited “extras,” when mouthing arbitrary word forms in the background of shops and restaurants, can somehow (though with no microphones in earshot) be deciphered to be saying from mere facial motion. It is as preposterous as if every bit player could claim the kind of speech balloon contrived by Lozano-Hemmer’s Volute 1, though in this case actually decipherable in its inaudible curves and tucks. Our vanguard scholarly entrepreneur has, we’re informed, combed the film for all such moments of background facial activity. In pursuit of what the narrator dismisses as “chitchat exegesis” (177), Bereyter has then sent his selected clips to a professorial expert in lip-reading, who decodes these snippets phrase by phrase. The results are brandished now by Bereyter, while looped in permanent obscurity on the “canvas” behind him, even though the actual content of the educed remarks is admittedly inconsequential. Against his better judgment, it is up to the paranoid narrator gradually, more and more frenetically, to fixate, to overinvest, to make them mean something. In the story’s own insidious hermeneutic ecology, the lecturer is skewered in the end for his slackness rather than his pointless

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overexertion. Clueless even when he strikes gold, the feckless pedant lecturer claims that a woman at Ernie’s bar in the film is seen to say, as repeated dozens of time in his illustrative loop, “Read my lips . . . It’s Jeff” – without Bereyter apprehending the power of such a find (and its unacknowledged confirmation of the narrator’s own published theory that the broken-legged “Jeff” Jeffries from Rear Window comes back in the film’s “second half” as the injured Scottie in Vertigo). Yet it’s not only balked and frustrated self-interest that sets the narrator’s teeth on edge, given a failure to recognize this potentially ratifying clincher for his own argument. At least in the narrator’s earlier responses from his festering silence at the back of the screening room, he has objected strenuously to any such violating of the mere “scenery of speech” (173) with faux precision. Ambiguity in such matters has an almost absolute sway, since what is written on those faces “in invisible ink” (174) will not plausibly submit to any definitive “crackpot cryptology” (177). As opposed to a normal “screenplay,” let alone to reading otherwise, these motor functions push any trace of sounded data back into the radically indecipherable.

Invisible Links The narrator’s leading case in point makes this abundantly clear. “All right” has been the first snatch of dialogue dredged from silence and oblivion, but it could never pass the necessary test of the unmistakable. Proof positive right there, as if we needed it, that Bereyter’s methodology “is not even (if I may put it this way) sound” (178). Sims’s story now spells this out in ways that bear directly on the deceptive simplicity of everyday phonemic reading even in alphabetic display rather than screen pantomime. As the narrator asks in high dudgeon: how is one, when “lacking any semantic context,” ever “supposed to distinguish between two homophones (two and too, for instance)”? Or “even resolve an ambiguous viseme?” (178). His informed rant deploys there the technical term for those variations in facial signage (the visible semes of motor speech, as it were) that accompany oral enunciation and, for the hearing impaired, facilitate the reading of faces (lips, teeth, tongue) in the piecing out of syllabic language. How, then, he asks combatively, is the lip-reader able to tell that “the florist is mouthing all right, rather than all ride or hall write or something else [h]altogether?” (178; my phantom aspirate) – as, say (in silence) for instance, holler it? Such are the invisible links of such “invisible ink” in Hitchcock’s fantasized underscript. Aside from any literary valence in the useless punning thereby evoked and marginalized, the technical

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hurdles (to semantic disambiguation) are further itemized in confident linguistic terms: “How does she,” the reader, “distinguish one bilabial stop from another? One alveolar stop from another? One mid-front vowel from another?” (178). She doesn’t, she can’t. A lingering implication here: nor can we either, even in the “actual reading” of already transcribed and encoded syllables. We remain unable in our own right to keep certain uppity phonemes at bay. And if all is a nest of mere differential traces up for phonic grabs (and whatever semantic grip they might provide), what about the odd trisyllabic name Bereyter itself on the story’s pages, with its openmouthed diphthong “ey” as another node – or black hole – of uncertainty? It is up to us alone to wonder; the narrator is otherwise preoccupied and repelled. Is this new junior luminary, his name slurred or purified to two syllables, the Breyter one after all? Or the “be-writer,” imposing his own script on the aleatory Hitchcockian place-holders? Or the “be-righter” who (as opposed, say, to be-smircher) is out to set things straight? Or, instead, the “be-rator” of cinematic coherence itself, denigrating in his audio autopsies all that gives film its spatial depth and conviction as a feasibly receding soundscape? None of this syllabic wavering matters to the explicit satire, finally, but it certainly is “material to” the story’s metalinguistics. Indeed, any such enfeebled readerly confidence in the syllabic matter of pronunciation serves to ratchet implication one further notch beyond anything implicit in the story’s discourse. For in the wake of the narrator’s outrage and contempt, abated only in his late attachment to the corroborative “It’s Jeff,” what the story (accidentally? connivingly?) leaves us to intuit – not to audit, but to perform somatically on our own recognizance – is a digressive logical and then corporeal byplay that takes us (me at least, when I tried it) beyond inscription altogether. In the phonetic freefall thus induced, one begins by realizing that the putative miming of an epiphanic “Read my lips . . . It’s Jeff” (189) would not, with any likelihood, have been spoken in this form to the woman’s male partner at the bar. Even above the ambient noise, he ought to have heard her well enough without resorting to visual decryption. If credibly phonetic at all, which of course it isn’t, such a remark would be addressed sardonically to the lecturer and especially at us instead (according to the paranoid logic of the narrator’s sense of apostrophe and mute appeal from the screen in other scenes) – so as to expose, from within its nonsensical premise, the futile phonic excavation underway. By visemic rather than phonemic translation, that is, at play here is a potential vocalic implosion of Bereyter’s whole procedure: “Read my lips: it’s chaff.” Not

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“lacking semantic context,” but overdetermined in its satire. Which viewer is to be sure, that is, from only looking, that the voiced palatoalveolar affricate (j) – to inhabit the narrator’s skeptical technical groove – isn’t in fact its voiced fraternal twin (the digraph ch)? As extraneous dross, as the last straw in all this sheer “chaff,” the whole “absurd” method of textual sounding (from surdus, for “deaf” or “dull”) would thus be written off by objecting lips other than the narrator’s – but this only through an enhanced itch for the heuristic shaping of sound in a puzzle-solving hermeneutic furor of our own. We don’t know, can’t know, whether the story “intends” that we play its own game long enough to see (more than hear) this strictly visual acoustic. All we know is that the narrative’s insistence on such eyed (or eye-eared) ambiguities as those knotted up in the likes of w/ri(gh)t/de (“write”/”right”/”ride”) have teased us over a further edge (I speak again for myself) into this enacted facial play, this projected test-case mirage, of a non-acoustic match between “Jeff” and “chaff”: performed, if so, only visemically – facially, not phonemically – in a non-homophonic sight pun never available to “actual” reading at all. Or put it that, in a segue to the next chapter, we have entered upon the muffled buffer zone between image and inscription, between viseme and marked phoneme, between reading in and something credibly there to be read out. And as if the story weren’t self-theorized to a fare-thee-well, there has been an initial further lead. Among the sparse notes on Bereyter’s blackboard, preliminary to the paucity of evidence on his looped “canvas,” is an “aphorism” from sound theorist Chion about silent film being “deaf film” (173) – unable even to hear itself. The acoustic false bottoms that Bereyter’s method pursues into the recesses of sound film amount to vestigial sedimentations of that primal deafness, that horizoning silence. There is no mention, naturally, of Chion’s more recently translated work, published in the same year as Sims’s volume: namely, Words on Screen. But filaments of connection there are. Instead of the focus on pointless mouthings, asks Sims’s narrator, “Why not close read the billboards, or the shop-window signage?” (178). The sarcastic question actually points to Chion’s latest screen concerns – but with a crucial difference: the difference in cinema between simply seeing word forms, foregrounded or not, and the process of “actually reading” them. Reprinting a small-frame litany of cinematic inscriptions from corporate logos to street signs in cinema, including Carlotta Valdez’s inscribed gravestone in Vertigo (28), Chion’s point, again, is that writing on screen operates within a separate order of visibility, of legibility, from the surrounding optic text of its encompassing mise en scène. This is precisely

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because of such script’s necessary silent sounding, an internalization (or “endophasia,” 59) cognate with Connor’s “white voice” or my “evocalization”20 – as ultimately derived from the “acoustic image” of traditional linguistics. Chion slots all this into the broader spectrum intended by his coinage “athorybos” (60): the image without its inferred noise. Though placing no emphasis on out-of-earshot dialogue, Chion does associate all lettering on screen with a wide array of other soundless manifestations that would, at a nearer acoustic distance, be audible – as with a locomotive whose chugging smokestack is glimpsed on the other side of a forest, say, or a jetliner gaining altitude in the urban distance, that sort of thing. Particular to silent signifiers in the form of alphabetic writing, however, is the deciphering somatic apparatus of the viewer/reader, whom we might thus term by portmanteau the viewereader. This is the engaged agency through whose phonetic performance, according to Chion, wording exceeds the regime of the visual without becoming part of the soundtrack, though nonetheless tracked aurally in the mind’s ear. Connor’s phrase comes back to mind, transferred to screen as well as page, where writing “auditises the field of the visible.” In contrast, Bereyter’s program, though perversely indebted to Chion on the idea of “deaf film,” is nonetheless – with its privileging of viseme over phoneme – the structural opposite of any such claims about visible writing in screen projection. Chion’s is in fact a para-literary emphasis on “actual” reading as alphabetically cued and silently activated. Here, then, in this latest trajectory of his influential work, is a new version of “off-screen” sound: in this case, however, located before the screen, not behind or beside its visible frame, where it is operable only in us: not manifest through a viseme but spurred for us as a phonemic cue – in (again) that third-dimensional inner space of virtual audition. Epitomized in isolation when pitted against sheer visual manifestation, such is the medial passage of writing – on the way to any subsidiary meaning or depiction: its passage through just that function of secondary vocality to be found intimately sprung from lettered impress. And, when encountered outside the movies, read out from its generative bibliographics. If what I’ve evoked as the grip of inscription – that traced shape of speech in the file of the filmic (as well as lexical) register – has a stranglehold on common sense in the unchecked phonetic mining of Vertigo, it elsewhere holds us spellbound in its very slipperiness, with words spun sideways and awry under ongoing frictional tension. The looped, knotted, and altogether irregular pace of text, of fictional utterance per se, when found activated in books rather than projected in futile imposition onto the narrative screen, locates our continuing focus in ascertaining the

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precise cast of its linguistic medium in the engaged event of literary textuality. Put another and now familiar way: medial behaviors are once again performed by structural contrast, here between the codex appliance and the cinematic apparatus. Film may be a writing in light and shadow, a cinécriture, a spool of textual generation and its coded signage . . . on and on by analogy. But Bereyter’s invasion of silence’s background privacy exposes, nonetheless, the fundamental difference between alternate modes of visible wording – lexical versus gestural – across the text base of these separate media. Bereyter’s lunacy thus deviantly intervenes between the rounding out of “a script” by the speaking population of a mise en scène and the quite different operation of inscription per se, its only bodily dimension being our own enunciation as we read. A film hermeneut’s “white dialogues” may have no more cogent legibility than that of white ink on white paper in a fantasized if impervious film script. In contrast, “white voice” is the sound made by a never entirely silent textuality whenever activated – “evocalized” – by that sounding in that is so often potently entailed by decipherment’s reading out.

chapter 4

Reading Out

Between the last chapter and this, silence changes its sign. Compared to the contorted reading in of significance to the visual filler of screen text – inundating the image with imposed semiosis, forcing silent moving bodies into the shaping of knowable speech – the reading out of sounded lexical forms from visual signs on paper is, by contrast, the necessary tethering of meaning to its embodied production as a stream of unvoiced but still vocal signifiers. It is for this very reason that words on (or in) screen, in the form of anything from subtitles through road signs to election banners – whether in silent or sound film, and whether or not, in the latter, ever read aloud by a character – take their own good (different) time in giving up what they spell out. Such words must implicitly be read off – sounded out in silence from within the process of viewing – if that viewing is to constitute an actual reading, rather than just a recognition, of word forms. This line of thinking is, of course, inevitably entwined with the history and technology of film sound. But it is more deeply rooted yet, as we have been stressing, in the language act itself. This is what Michel Chion’s sights are mostly set on – or ears tuned to, especially in his previous studies of sounds (rather than words) on film. His concern has been the operations of classic cinema long after the tactical interruption of image flow by silent title cards, with their potential for independent wordplay when not simply functioning as the lip-reading of actual dialogue (the former as maximized, for instance, by the veritable slapstick punning of Buster Keaton’s intertitles). And it is Chion’s consequent distinction between lettering and “real time” speech in sound film (as, for instance, between on-screen theater marquees and dialogue) that unleashes a metalinguistic account of silent reading as much as it offers a theory of visible lettering on screen. The gist of which, when triggered by cinematic inscription, is that the time of reading in cinema is always a decoding of graphic signage within a more capacious visual frame: the written words dropping back and away from the chain of images into 118

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a pace (and a space) semantic rather than retinal – dropping back, that is, before being read out from this different plane of articulation: an inscribed surface rather than framed view. A further lesson one may garner from this, in the drawing out of verbal inference, is to take words on the page as seriously, as singly, as one does words within a screen scenography: as elements foreign to unmediated perception; elements – increments – requiring serial work in decipherment.

Image vs. Signage Certainly canonical examples don’t escape Chion’s purview, as, for instance, the viewer’s reading in close-up of the titular Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951).1 Or, in another film famously coextensive with the text of its title, Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948), where, before the letter’s full unfolding in voiceover, we are already arrested by the optical masking of its famous opening line, in all its melodramatic grammatical buildup: “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead” (70). Many films weave in and out of page and voiceover, as Letter will soon do, to keep the flow of the narrative varied and dynamic. But other effects are more dramatic yet. Indeed, one might expect that the ultimate proof of Chion’s method should come when the specifically time-based nature of phonemic seriality is thrown into juxtaposition, and inevitable asynchrony, with the flux of words in a legible motion of their own. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) offers a famous case of this. The eponymous newspaper magnate, guru of imprint culture – threatened by the cinematic newsreels that also court his image – is finally mourned in his death in two contrastive modes of announcement. After a round dozen international papers are seen in montage to headline it, with the camera closing in finally on a Cyrillic text and then on a fully pictographic Chinese, the news goes more collectively public – for the English-language audience – by the lateral scrolling of an electric billboard around the upper corner of a metropolitan building: in its own right, a sign of the times (“LATEST NEWS – CHARLES FOSTER KANE IS DEAD”) as the nation turns a corner in its history of yellow journalism. Here, then, within the “News on the March” documentary that includes this moment, text is manifested in the actual march, crawl, or electric scrawl of letters themselves: timed as if to the acoustic eye of silent reading amid the otherwise variably illuminated plane of Welles’s mise en scène and its signature deep focus. Reading has its own automatized speed at a moment like this, proving the rule of its typically contingent temporality in the audience decipherment of inset signage.

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Over half a century later, a movie playing in theaters as I was working on an early draft of this chapter entertains an even more complex and dramatic interplay between writing and the screen rectangle. This occurs, twice over, in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh, 2017), beginning with the title image itself. This serial triptych, so to speak, is composed of three drive-in-movie-sized rectangles, in close spatial sequence, that bear the giant block-capital legends “Raped While Dying” / “Still No Arrests?” / “How Come, Chief Willoughby?” The driveby necessity of reading these outsize placards – one at a time, but then in semantic tandem as a motorized syntax – paces quite explicitly, in this case, the separate time frames by which their words depart from the strictly visual orientation of their own vertical frames. The poetics of a BurmaShave-style running hook is co-opted here for a bitter apostrophe. Commissioned by the furious mother of the dead girl, the billboards are later set fire to, engulfed, and eventually replaced – with the very same lettering. In this assault on the power of wording, the fire also predicts the later “acousmatic” turning point (as Chion might call it) entailed by the benign power play of a posthumous letter from Chief Willoughby – with his enunciating voice not just off-screen but off-world, as it were, like the posthumous Letter from an Unknown Woman, and so preoccupying its reader, his former deputy, that he almost dies in a fire set in retaliation by the author of the billboards. For Chion, the term “acousmatic” names an off-screen sound, especially voice, that is layered over, and thus saturates, the visual field from an unseen source.2 The truncated point of origin, however, does not curtail the mastering force of this sound, this voice – but rather suffuses it across the diegetic field, where it can commandeer the very enunciation of the narrative. But we need, now, some more literary reading matter in our audiovisual sights before returning to the full weight of Chion’s argument – in its inferences for page rather than screen.

Inscription’s Sonar Probes In contrast to the hallucinatory visemes of cinematic lip-reading in a manhandled Hitchcock, that is, the tightly fastened alphabetic clusters of visible typeset do set in resonance certain unwritten sounds. If film theory, concerned with the time-based medium of projection, can help precipitate out, from this same medial flow, the disclosed structure of linguistic recognition as another unique order of time-based activity, a separate realm of “word processing,” then so might a landmark debate in poststructuralist literary circles be usefully brought (back) to bear here. It

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is fair to assume that reader-response theorist Michael Riffaterre would have ruled out any usable pun in Sims’s story on the comparable mouth formations of “Jeff” and “chaff,” for instance, as not rising (with their different soundings of e and a) to the standard of phenomenal manifestation in alphabetic text – if that story’s dimwitted screen evidence were such a written text (which, precisely, it isn’t). This follows from the way Riffaterre vetoes, in a passing mention, another critic’s offered anagrammatic play on “gold” in Edgar Allan Poe when dependent on the mere graphic trace of a silent g in “right holding.”3 Such a retrenchment against free association is, according to Paul de Man’s extended critique, a typifying conservative move in Riffaterre’s semiotics. For here is precisely what de Man drills down on as the normalizing nature of Riffaterre’s method, which has chastened the piecemeal chaos of Ferdinand de Saussure’s notorious anagram studies into tenable lexical units. “Up till very recently, French critics never bothered to read at all” (21), de Man stringently quips. Unphased by the Anglo-American protocols of close reading, French scholars wrote about literature from the top down. Not so the French-born American expatriate Riffaterre, de Man is quick to acknowledge, although insisting still on a deep and abiding blind spot in Riffaterre’s work. For after the painstaking process of moving from anomalies at the mimetic level of poetic discourse to reconciliations at the hermeneutic level, Riffaterre’s admittedly exemplary “interpretations” are exposed by de Man as seeking premature closure in a descriptive system of figuration – rather than in its further dismantling, its (to coin a phrase) deconstruction. One of Riffaterre’s own litmus-test poems, a short text of Victor Hugo’s, celebrates the tonalities of a Flemish carillon as they generate audiovisual figures for the abstraction that is time itself in affective comprehension by the mind. Yet this choreography of proliferating tropes spun from that of a Spanish dancer in performance up and down a crystalline staircase, explicitly invisible, is turned against Riffaterre’s own method by a complex argument on de Man’s part captured most succinctly in his noting that Riffaterre fails to consider the poem’s very title, “Lines Written on the Pane of a Flemish Window” – and precisely in association with the resonant “crystal invisible” of the staircase trope. For the whole exfoliated analogy of time’s dance is only actualized in reading – upon such a transparent support – once it has been etched into opacity by script. All is materially written, not phenomenally perceived: all made possible only, as it were, from scratch. The move is in its own way decisive. For the poem to exist, as the title’s own allegory suggests, the window must be deciphered, not seen through.

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It is the rectangular frame only of differential marks: a page manqué. One itches (I speak at least for myself) for some adaptation of this in a conceptual lexigraph: an inscribed and gallery-inset windowpane, say, with a foreshortened model of the bell tower recessed out of reach in a closed narrow space behind – like a natural history panorama, but refusing pure transparency by the intervening lines of scraped text. And all the while dimly pealing with the chime of barely audible bells overlain with the sound of scraped glass. The book is an appliance, a machine, an engineered experience, yes, but so is a page of text itself. Even in the Hugo original, lines on the window have resulted, for literary theory, in a line drawn in the sand. Riffaterre’s figural hermeneutic, charges de Man, forgets that all is at base inscription, sheer symbol in the linguistic sense. And not just in poetry. Time is conjured as a Spanish dancer because it has no content otherwise as a noun; it is merely our word for an immaterial a priori. In the philosophic terms from Part III, its homonymous bond with concept is at the heart of language’s own mystery. Even if it had been named in the poem, rather than openly figured, “time” would remain a sheer figure of speech: four letters (five in French) for what no one can actually perceive. Exhaustive in its way, and supposedly devastating, this critique. But in our terms, de Man hasn’t bothered to read the poem either, barely a line of it, which he treats for the most part in the primal paraphrase of translation, phrase by intermittent phrase. The closest he comes to actually reading what does strike the senses, in any immediate experience of the “timed” verse lines, is to register time’s counterpart, the equally empty abstraction of “mind” (or “l’esprit”), figured problematically as “a watchman made of ears and eyes” (34): a grotesque catachresis for which (as with the unsaid “time”) there is no literal tenor. De Man highlights this, however, without noting the contradicted privilege etymologically accorded to sight in “surveilleur” (“watchman”) when followed first by “d’oreilles” rather than “d’yeux” (ears rather than eyes, and with the fleeting undertone, a slant chime, of l’oeil as well) in a poem that is first of all about the conversion of sound to image, the peals of the carillon translated to personified figuration. To audit this reverb in the original French, for any but non-native readers of the language, is to gain the leverage of estrangement on the issue of lingual force per se, beneath any particular langue/parole dyad – and thus to carry the debate to a fresh chance of resolution. For such is the auditory focal point (of the surveillant ear) stressed – in its phonic rather than sonic traction – neither by Riffaterre’s commentary nor by de Man’s. To track this, I quote the closing three lines in question, beginning with the somatic mixed

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metaphor for an eye-eared mind in attendance on the inexorable (and here lyricized) march of time (italics added): Et l’esprit, ce veilleur fait d’oreilles et d’yeux, Tandis qu’elle va, vient, monte et descend encore, Entend de marche en marche errer son pied sonore.

Following the translation offered in the first place by Riffaterre: “And the mind, that watchman made of ears and eyes, / As she goes and comes and climbs up and down again, / Hears her resonant foot wandering from step to step” – with that final touch (of double disembodiment) that fails to distinguish one version of the trope from another, personified footstep from figurative stairstep. And there is a further blurring of terms, unnoted in either critic’s approach. At just this final turn, the sonography of the poem in French locates a decided medial crux. Ultimately, it identifies the point of lexical audition – via the ringing stairsteps of the imagined dancer’s chiming footwork, and here via the capping and grammatically inverted last metrical line – from which “de marche en marche” (“from step to step,” in the translation given by Riffaterre, though more idiomatically “walking on”) is heard (passive voice) “to wander [errer] her resonant foot.” That is: the mind or spirit hears wandering the dancer’s very footfalls in passing. The odd verb “wander” for an entirely non-errant sequence of clocked passage, as forced into that further strained inversion, calls attention to its own heard motive, as it were – and twice over. With subliminal elisions marked, the final line strikes the ear, as well as the hour, as follows: “Entende de marche en marche errer son pied sonore.” Dental sounds first absorb each other, as, next, does the long a sound of the cross-lexical “cher” tend to sweep up the silent e of “marche” into its own half-step forward – to say nothing, since there is nothing to say with it, of the adjectival form for “dear.” Not only does this syllabic sequence draw out from itself the phonetic hinge-work of its internal rhyme (er/r/er), as slanted off in the coming second syllable of “sonore.” In the other sense of verbal things drawn out, the internally “enjambed” phrasing stretches just far enough into phonetic air space to anticipate a verb form not in fact forthcoming (de marche en marche e/r . . .) – as if distilling, for the split second of a splintered syllable, the inoperable infinitive “marcher.” Moreover, and following on from this pressure vested in and released by the self-chiming “errer,” certainly the full span of this phrasing “Entende . . . errer son pied sonore” (hears . . . to wander her sonorous foot) – if enunciated into meaning in the referential moment, rather than

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just remembered afterward for comment – “actuates” that moment not by inscription alone, nor merely by description, but by the sounded sense of the “pied metrique,” the poetic “foot” itself, chiastically set off by an extra homophonic play. Extra, but hardly extraneous, since the poem lands in conclusion upon the ur-pun of all internal echo, call it the archehomophone: an echo entirely outplaying description, exceeding even inscription, in the son-ic chiasmus that turns grammatical possession (son) into the reverberant dance of belled time, “son pied sonore” – a phrasing immanently re-son-ant in the beat of its own evocalization. Here then, in reading, pace de Man, is where the mind’s time becomes, rather than a tenuous abstraction, “actual” after all. To say so, of course, is a way of bringing the latent texture of phonemic sound into the space of its more obviously material inscription, even as together they displace any sense of transparent image thus made visible. And it is further, in this way, to resist the too-schematic division of labor in Friedrich Kittler’s model that triangulates real sound, imaginary cinematic images, and the merely symbolic impress of abstract characters in typescript or print.4 Then, too, it is the reading out of an underlying French phonetic inference in this case, rather than in comparable English examples, that helps us in getting to the bottom, so to speak, of the linguistic issue as such, beyond the comfort level of a “transparent” vernacular: what the next chapter will plumb as saying’s very potential in the being of words. Where, in metrical script, the “son pied sonore” is more than a blip on reading’s textual sonar.

Synced Speech/Lips Inked Not, perhaps, until Virginia Woolf’s paean to sounded time in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a century after Hugo, is temporality to be found again so musically figured in the tread (and potential dread) of its stylistic as well as sonic demarcations. Though scarcely healing all wounds in Woolf, time puts its seal on life across the rush of sounds spanning a set of embedded repetitions in the moment when Big Ben “boomed” at last.5 Here the effort of Angela Leighton’s study Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature – part of whose own work is to bridge the phenomenological gulf between scenes of listening and the audited text itself – would have found an apt example in this prolonged moment from Mrs. Dalloway.6 For here the palpable sonic transfer between nonhuman sound and its verbal manifestation puts an extraordinary pressure on the aural contours of enunciation. This, of course, we can listen in on only by reading it out. To this end, it is worth recalling that a Bloomsbury

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compatriot of Woolf’s, the novelist E. M. Forster, in a superb turn of phrase of his own, helps orient us to Woolf’s lyrical achievement. Forster’s, in passing, is a manifest effort – almost an indirect manifesto – to include even his own prose oscillations, by freestanding example, as part of a nonpartisan poetics that would embrace the flexions of prose as well as the metered music of verse. For the latter is described, in his own crossbonded lexemes, as “the union of shadow and adamant that men call poetry.”7 Where better to register this “poetic function” (in Roman Jakobson’s sense of “paronomasia” as projected iterations from the axis of selection into that of combination) than in the interlaced antithesis thus inscribed (ad/ow/and/ada/ant/oe)?8 Woolf’s prose poetry, in the spirit of such transience and precision, such glint and flint, is more like the meeting of eddy and architecture across a built channel, a shaped “stream,” where syntax ferries words across their own rippled recurrence and revision. Such is the flex of the lexeme: or say its flux and reflux – or, in our present example of a time-based registration of time itself, the blend of leaden form and atmospheric levitation. “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable” – a phrasing marked by that associated widening (of vowel sound as well as phonetic bracket) from “cal” to “cable” (4). Before the figurative pressure of the resulting “leaden circles” is said to have “dissolved in the air,” that unlikely transferred epithet seems borrowed by displacement from the materiality of the resonance in question – even, by further association, from the unseen circular shape of the metal bell itself: displaced outward in attenuation, that is, to the heavy concentric rings (one residual sense only, in “circles,” though almost a pun on the sound they figure) in a kind of acoustic lingering. The passage is saturated almost beyond containment with the sonority it evokes. The actual linguistic term “vocable” broached in the phonic hint of “earrevocable” is followed by two cross-word (rather than cross-syllable) reverbs, first in the “suspense before Big Ben strikes,” then in the muted echoic “din” of “leaden circles dissolved in the air,” where the last described attenuation also seems to offer its own vocalic thinning-out, in “the air,” of the exclamatory “There!” To be sure, one proof of the ear in actual reading is indeed its occasional disrespect of the eyed word edge. Borders become in this sense linguistic limit tests – with soundings elusive, elisional, given frequent leave and leeway. But such rippling vocalic granularity aggregates again to the kind of metaphysical slippage we saw in Hugo’s “view” of time. Operating within the broader “symbolic”’ status of language at large, in Charles Sanders Peirce’s familiar terms (arbitrary symbol as opposed to mimetic icon or

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material index), Woolf has more specifically deployed “indexical” and “iconic” features as well: in other words, a deictic (or “pointing”’) adverb (“There!”) plus an onomatopoetic verb (boom “ultimately imitative,” says the OED). And after the inverted grammar (“Out it boomed”), as if the force of sound precedes its naming – virtual before actual once again – we come, two sentences later, upon that associational metonymy that in its own right indexes, though by a sheerly figurative contiguity, the metal belling of leaden rings. Yet in between these two evocations (boom and reverb) of first impressions (firstness in Peirce), the intervening sentence has closed its own circle in the move to thirdness (symbolization).9 It has done so, as we’ve heard, across another echoic iconicity that performs what might be called a syntactic onomatopoeia of ding-dong iteration, this in that rhythmic shift from sensory impact to meaning: “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable” – all carried on the homophonic inner ear of one “vocable” after another. This last is to say that such a condensed phenomenology of time is as insistently subjective in its way as the Hegelian intuitions drawn out from Hugo by de Man – and as resistantly phonemic in the time-based mediality of its prose. In this fashion, Woolf’s phrasing negotiates a transition across its Peircean trichotomy from sensed duration and suspense (firstness) through identified sound waves (secondness) to the interpreted signage of the hour (thirdness) – even as what comes first for the reader is the pulse of prose itself. In another variant of Peirce’s multiplied triadic formulations, the “virtual” (i.e., potential or hypothetical) experience of lived duration – with Woolf’s Big Ben as much as with Hugo’s carillon – approaches the only “actual” to which it can attain when audition is made to signify as “interpreted” hourly indicator. Beyond the received wisdom of indexical versus symbolic signage, then, in applying a more complex Peircean logic of sensation to the content of Woolf’s passage, one thus suspects a missing term. For Peirce, the firstness of an impression, leading to the secondary recognition of its source or name, and thus to a thirdness in its understanding, cannot exhaust the literary (more broadly, representational) experience of these categories. To explain what “communicates” the semes of firstness, secondness, and thirdness (quality, quantity, interpretation; potential, actual, categorical) in secondary representation (in literature, film, painting, sculpture, dance, etc.), one requires an account of medium as well. Gilles Deleuze may have been radically misjudging Peirce, as recently claimed in an exacting position paper by media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen, in thinking that one therefore needs, in screen viewing, to posit a feature of sheer potential

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before the onset of firstness (the image materializing before our eyes). As Hansen has no trouble showing, the latter term already includes all conditional possibilities in Peirce’s definition, a “perceptual hypothesis” rather than a perceived object or entity.10 Still, it does seem sensible (I choose the word advisedly) to insist, in literary rather than screen studies, that when reading about the way the world reaches us in gradually abstracted signs of itself (the Peircean premise), we are already transacting with a separate and precedent set of linguistic signals: that is, arbitrary signs. Compared to Deleuze’s insistence on the serial engramme (or photogram) before the moving image – a dubious “zeroness” (according to Hansen) elided in process (which one might just as well call the underside of firstness) – we may nonetheless identify, as hinted in the last chapter, the equivalent motoring unit of literature as the phonogram.11 The linguistic legacy of such enunciation – as tapped by Woolf, in her always palpable debts to an English Romantic sonority comparable to Hugo’s – has a rich progeny since as well. In the voice of a later female persona – less sanguine about temporal immersion, a psyche torn asunder more exhaustingly by time’s competing demands, her expression thus bent out of shape into a more aggressive wordplay – we hear the way in which phonetics may mark a schism in the very “I am” of female pro/creation. As if in a variant of Woolf’s lament for Shakespeare’s sister in A Room of One’s Own, such is Adrienne Rich’s deep-going rift in articulation itself. Pulled between the roles of woman as mother, drained of energy, and woman as poet, robbed of time for writing, the first two words of Rich’s “To a Poet,” in figuring the winter of this conflicted discontent, are actually – across the sibilant shiver – three: “I/ce splits.”12 The unforgiving subvocal “play” between the rending plurality of such an I and its phrasal option (frozen in ice) splinters the verse itself, as it does for Emily Dickinson’s earlier American persona when confronting a more metaphysical divide between mortal and transcendental states. Traversing a purgatorial interspace across a flickering phonetic interstice – a borderland figured, by metonymic association with trees carved into coffins, as the “Forest of the Dead” (where “Before – were Cities”) – the soul is heard bordering, lexically as well as spiritually, on the “fore-rest” of resurrection.13 In the cross-word brinkmanship of such vectored syntax, in contrast to the brittle ligature of Rich’s “Ice splits,” the syllabic after-rimmage can limn the eternal itself. Given our recent examples, the point may be put this way: like the full syllabic fracture in Dickinson or the riven sliver of identity in Rich, “son pied sonore” honors – ear-revocably – the metrical footwork of its echo as much as does the suspense of Big Ben’s sensed peal by phonetic displacement along the swings of the prose line.

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The Field of Reading as Acousmatic Screen We need to stand back for a moment, to see what we’ve actually listened in on – before forging ahead to the groundwork of its ontological possibility. What has inscription really had to say for itself, however silently, in this chapter so far? By comparison with the textwork of script art, for one thing? And especially in regard to the film theory recruited to triangulate the force of lexical inscription more accurately? Certainly, on a translingual spectrum that includes even the misprints, overlays, and drenchings of ironic Chinese inkwork in a sabotaged calligraphic tradition glanced at in Chapter 3, the force of the illisible and the asemic in Western art reminds us – by default of all semantic potential – that in the normative look of writing more things might ordinarily be operable than meet the eye. Reductions radical enough thus prove the rule within the order of words. And under such pressure, the leak is often phonemic first of all. Further, in the preceding chapter’s broad optico-audio range, Banner’s downloadable Font and Cayley’s Listeners installation have put into action, respectively, the aleatory nonsemantic weighting of her variable print characters and the displacement of his poetic address into robotically registered apostrophe. Together, they have thereby sketched, indeed stretched, the exaggerated poles of mediation from impacted marking to auto-activated digital address. And, into the breach between, we have followed a striking case of literary satire, in “White Dialogues,” that sets us up for a quite different audition of silent speech in literary writing. At which midpoint on the spectrum between warped if legible script and artificial audition, the vacuous hyperacuities of what one might certainly call overhearing (in the excessive sense) – in Sims’s fable of a perverse academic oculistening – tend to displace the more arresting questions, as evoked by allusion to Chion but ignored by Sims’s anti-hero, regarding actual reading matter on film, rather than mere delusional enunciations. In thinking this through, we were guided by both the overt and the latent wordplay of Sims’s prose in its cues to literary listening (as with the sound pun itself on un-“sound” methods). We have, in turn, pursued Sims’s nod to Chion into the French theorist’s more recent argument about text/image disjunction in the temporal experience of projected ocular data on screen, alphabetic versus indexical – and this with all its tacit ramifications, unmentioned by Chion, for the literary reading act as well. Indeed, considering the separate switch points of this book’s threetiered consideration, it is, first of all, at the interface between book page and text that the medium of language makes possible the “screening” – because,

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in effect, the “projection” – of its signaling words. This is what would appear to bring Milton’s Eden and Austen’s Pemberley immediately to the mind’s eye as we read, as well as Brontë’s Heights, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Roth’s Upper West Side, and the rest. The page, as interface, can thus seem, even as it is turned over in series, like a curtain always going up on what it indicates. Such is the phenomenology of reading that makes Kittler’s template seem so overschematic, on the face of it, in hiving off “the imaginary” as the Lacanian correlative only of film – restricting typescript, instead, to the “symbolic” order, “phonography” to the “real.” Independent of this, we have seen how another media theorist, Mark Hansen, critiques the Bergsonian philosophy of Gilles Deleuze’s film writing for its misunderstanding of the Peircean system. This is a purportedly false step on Deleuze’s part begun by his wishing to isolate the photogram, or “engramme,” as primal category of the movement-image on screen – operating at a level beneath (or say between) the stages of a moving image. In contrast to any such understandable precision on Deleuze’s part (pace Hansen) about the incremental medial substrate, Kittler’s Lacanian model veers too macroscopically in the other direction. His cross-medial division of labor among film, typewriting, and sound technology gives short shrift to the symbolic (the strictly differential and inscriptive) nature of film in contrasting it so absolutely with the arbitrariness of alphabetic imprint. Not only does film have its own syntagmatic codes, but, more important in the present context, language has its own imaginary. On just this point, the philosophy of human speech in the remaining chapters, turning on the recognition of wording’s “material reality” within the abstracted ideation of its naming function, takes us more radically back to basics, to the linguistic base itself – and does so by granting initiatory credence (perceptual and constitutive alike) to the phonological contours of such wording. It is in this respect that earlier and foundational work by Kittler seems closer to the mark: to the mark, in fact, that he finds Enlightenment oral pedagogy programmatically designed to avoid. The phonetic “alphabetization” of language pedagogy in the run-up to German Romanticism stresses the middle ground of the phoneme between the single arbitrary letter and the rote memorization of words. The new science of language was restricted to a kind of etymological philology; this constraint, paving the way for the enshrinement of poetry, was imposed in the form of a double taboo. “In 1800 linguistic analysis was not allowed to approach the two forbidden borders of the word and the letter.”14 Between them in writing – both as symbolic

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import and as real if muted sound – passed the turbid channel of phonic matter registered only in the third dimension of inward enunciation on the run. It is only through such momentum – operating across the imaginary and the symbolic, and naturalized as image through the naturalization of its voicing – that “Poetry could let its film roll” (166). To what Kittler downplays in this supposed representational continuum we will return in the final chapter. As we proceed to a fuller account of linguistic mediation in literary form, the on-screen node of lexical temporality within screen time should at least have heightened our alertness to the s/pace of wording. But it has done more. And so a moment more. The transmedial cast of this chapter has engaged the unexpected pertinence of Chion’s argument about verbal imprint when embedded disruptively in the screen’s feed of image – especially, by association, when the assumed model of verbal signage, under cognitive enactment in a moving-image medium, is relocated to the zone of page rather than screen. Though he never casts it in these terms by way of medial comparison, what Chion is suggesting invokes, when transferred to literary reading, a full 180-degree inversion of the way retinal data, whether visual scenes or their revealed inscriptions, are seen to operate in cinema. An explicitly medial comparison is everything at this stage, though left untapped by Chion. Yet the chiastic inversion is hard to avoid. Put it this way: a book’s text, released to the mind by its medium, in and through it, is virtualized in the process as inscription’s own filmstrip – running laterally rather than vertically. This is a sequencing whose subvocalized acoustic track, once its modules are reconceived as falling somewhere between a subtitle and a silent dub, is only to be engaged by the reader’s mute ventriloquism in the “thrown” voicing of text – its throw, its projection, that is, into whatever entirely off-page images it thereby releases. And thus realizes. The result, coming full circle in the received terms of intermedia theory, is that the non-acoustic sound of read words by the “white voice” of the codex user is literature’s equivalent to an acousmatic over-voice in sound film – or, in this case, under-voice. There is no exaggerating the torquing of paradigms involved at this juncture. How did we come to this – where the supplementary sounds encroaching on narrative cinema’s screen space in the solicited processing of its inscribed wording can help us appreciate what no page space in itself contains, only instigates? Transmedial pressures have been closely attended in this logic. What Chion’s latest book thus sets out to append to his previous thinking, in the almost oxymoronically titled Audio-Vision of 1994, actually upends its hierarchy. The uncanny power of the off-screen

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voice, as previously theorized, can only be fully grasped in the examples of Words on Screen, we realize, when its enunciation finds itself inscribed from within the image of lettered text. Without advertising it as such, Chion has thus advanced, in this latest work, a theory of text rather than cinema: or say, beyond letters on screen, the very screening of words in the normative reading act. The reading that voices, phonemically construed in the silent production of literature’s linguistic forms, is thus seen (heard) to offer – in a sense comparable to any such reading on screen – the felt but unlocalizable “real” of decipherment: the true “voice-off” of the text page, awaiting its phenomenological “imaginary.” Here by distillation, in other words, is the medial aurality of semiotic cognition – and semantic force – understood as the sine qua non of the mobilized codex as its own kind of referential screening room. And here is where the very grain of writing, acousmatically produced by the off-page reader, exhibits, in phonemic equivalents, its own step-time images and sprocket jams alike. Apart from voicing, certain writing may try to evoke just this. To give Banner’s Font its full due in download, then, one comes to suspect that even its own graphic ridgings, densities, and apparent glitches – when processed as text – have their intended way of evoking the contours of phonic as well as graphic imprint. For in the tug and give of enunciation – even within the narrowed playing field of her impacted font forms – no sooner is wording settled into script than it may have another zing coming, or at least another zap, in the racing haze of phrase.

In this respect, these paired chapters of Part II have certainly bridged between extremes. Thickened lexical semantics stand over against Banner’s tacit return, for instance, to the opening chapter’s interest in a primal bibliographics of page form – font types included – even when digitally engineered. Contrasts persist. Adduced by antinomy to bracket the foregoing textual encounters with poetry and prose, the graphic reduction of Banner’s Font (alphabetic script as artifact passively awaiting all specific lexical instances) – or the case of a time-sensitive, self-eradicating typeface like that delivered by Sub Rosa – has been situated in direct contrast to a fantasy, concerning Hitchcock, about hallucinatory silent syllables organizing the phonic backdrop of film space. In between the mere graphic provision for wording in estranged alphabetic form, on the one hand, and, on the other, moving pictures of a time-based imaging bereft of the very words imputed to it, flows the actual course of the phoneme along the emphatic furrows of devised language in literature – and even of text on screen. Extravagant outliers – and more coming – have thus cleared a way for the rethought norm. Excluding the strictly graphic palimpsest of

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previous wordwork experiments in diverse and now digitally merged font characters in the case of Banner’s invention, as well as the ludicrous obtrusion of speech sounds in the skewed disposition of the screen scene for lip-read Hitchcock, there operates everywhere else, from page to page, or from one lettered window to another – Flemish to laptop – the latent sound of syllabic language in readerly engagement. Yet what is really happening when this occurs needs the fuller cross-examination in Part III ahead. As well as a further knot of exemplification from two very different novelists more than ordinarily self-conscious about how their prose – their writing as medium – is to be read out. And between them, a conceptual installation at the far limit of reading theory in the drastic reduction (literally microscopic) of literary text.

Thoraxial Contact: Breathing Out, Breathing In Consider the 2010 British novel by Tom McCarthy cryptically titled C – partly for the ubiquitous element C (“carbon,” misheard by the hero as “sea” at first, when proffered as the source of life).15 In summarizing just enough of the novel’s intricate techno-allegorical plot to foreground its interest in the grip of inscription as such, I’ll be recurring to an earlier mention of the phonautograph (in connection with Lozano-Hemmer’s Volute1): that pre-Edisonian scribing of voice without playback mechanism which the father of McCarthy’s hero, Serge Carrefax, is posthumously discovered to have experimented with. Carrefax senior is a self-proclaimed “oralist” in the debates over deaf-mute pedagogy, rejecting sign language as a semiotics too remote from the natural body. In his view, only when accessing the “engine room” (20) of the thorax – the speech box – can the voicing animal attain the true “suspirio” of the “human spirit” (18). Certain underlying metaphysical assumptions of the next two chapters, regarding the suppression of mere animal cry by the sound-shapes of human meaning, are here given a period cast in Victorian therapy. In the father’s pedagogic regimen, vocal technique is introduced well before (and prized above) encrypted gesture or sonic technology. This supposed humanization through voice is first exemplified in a public demonstration of speech acquisition by the father’s deaf pupils, where the onomatopoetic hum of “hmmm” (with its pinched gesture toward the word “human” itself) is followed by a forced vocalic series begun with the open-mouthed “Ee-ah” of one student, and ultimately channeled into “ear, area, eerie” (22). When one of the deaf pupils demonstrates his schooling in language via literature, it seems no accident that the proof text is the “withered pipes” (23) passage

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from Piers Plowman, sounded out from a strange subzone between mute body and inchoate speech. Like all reading, in fact, the voice of this particular textual recitation appears to “issue not from him but rather to divert through him” – a sound “spirited in from another spot, some other area, eerie, ear” (24). What McCarthy’s scrambling of his own previous sequence (originally “ear, area, eerie”) has done is to release a reverberant third term in the intensifier “eerier” of “eerie, ear.” It is only in growing up that the oralist’s son, Serge, with a pun on “surge” for electrostatic emanations, has learned of his deceased father’s preoccupation with sound technologies associated with the somatic apparatus of speech – including, first, those “lamp-blackened glass phonautographic plates” (52) found in the family attic along with some early Edison phonographic rolls and disks.16 The graphemes of that proto-recorder offer, as we know, only a running hieroglyph of noise without lexical segmentation, semantic content, or any playback capacity. McCarthy’s novel, in its obsession with disabled orality over against the social privilege of voice, connects in this way not just with Lozano-Hemmer’s Volute 1, in homage to the Victorian phonautograph, but with an even more ambitious installation by that artist. And an even more radical slice across the book/ text/medium conjuncture. It is a vaguely spiritualist as well as technological belief of Carrefax senior in C, that the air itself is a perpetual latent aerial in the transmit of once-emitted sound. Further, the inventor father, stirred by early cinema, intends before his death to patent the “Carrefax Cathode” for “remote projection” (141; an early fantasy of TV) – even as he warns against the cumulative danger of electric messaging bouncing back from the ionosphere and, with no phonic signal ever fully lost, causing environmental damage to plant life through this hypertrophic media ecology of recirculation without genuine recyclability. Yet even this ironic premonition of the greenhouse effect for electric vibrations rather than carbon emissions is a phobia the son finds tacitly redeemed by the marvelous possibility of replay for any and every message ever released, including the death gasp of the Logos Himself, the “last vowels and syllables” (248) of the Crucifixion. Total storage implies total retrieval: a notion going back to British speculative scientist Charles Babbage and his belief in the atmospheric stockpiling of sounds, like texts in the euphemized “cloud” today. This Victorian idea is the source of a complex “book” study by Lozano-Hemmer that takes vocal capture even beyond the logic of its digital “print-out” in Volute 1, with its sculpted breath of phrase, all the while negotiating again the interspace between language as medium and text as its manifestation.

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If, according to Babbage, all vocal emission is on hold in the atmosphere – as transfused in the very air we breathe, as if offering in turn, for the contemporary artist, some electrostatic emblem of cultural currency – then such a traffic in messaging may well suggest a two-way street. LozanoHemmer’s reach for the Babbage intertext is as bizarre as it sounds – without ever sounding out the proposition in question. But that may be the deepest insinuation of his 2015 Babbage Nanopamphlets. The setting: an installation gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City. On one plinth, a book at normal scale opened to the relevant excerpt from a facsimile first edition of The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment by Charles Babbage. More radical fragmentations were entailed in this work, however. A few feet away, on a second pedestal, was a vial of churning liquid, with suspended metallic flecks being stirred by electronic pulses, vibrated (we might guess from the Babbage text) like sound waves themselves. These were first impressions only. In fact, the flecks were microtexts in their own right. As with so much Conceptual art, a further paratext on site was necessary to explicate the logic – and the irony. For here the medial entirely trumped the ordinary boundaries of the museal. The captioning amounted to its own interpretation. In the technical enterprise of this artifact, two million nanotexts were printed on “elemental gold,” higher in purity than 24-karat gold, by Cornell University’s NanoScale Facility. The multiple engravings, with each nanopamphlet backed by a physical support only 150 gold atoms thick, were verbal excerpts taken from the 1837 treatise by Babbage, indentified here as “father of the computer,” where he lodges his claim that the atmosphere is a vast repository of everything that has ever been said. The issue is only access. All that would be necessary for audio download is to “rewind” the movement of every molecule of air to recreate the dense choir of lost voices. Instead, in Lozano-Hemmer’s materialist reversal, molecular text-bits of this nontoxic gold backing (250,000 copies in all released from the codex cradle of the master text) were distributed through the museum’s ventilation system, to be inhaled by the patrons – as if, by some logocentric conversion, they were charged to materialize the recovered voice, in particular, of the long-dead visionary. The metatextual media fantasy in that loaded moment from McCarthy’s 2010 novel, about universal ambient phonography, was thus exceeded five years later in Babbage Nanopamphlets when the flux of written enunciation – staged first here in something like a surrealist “message in a bottle” – returned to the throat of breath itself. Museum-goers, we may say, were made to swallow the fantasy as its very proof. The gold leaf that once may

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have decorated an illuminated manuscript was here engraved as its own illuminating text. So that this version of “taking in” the Babbage claim managed a rare convergence of parody and apotheosis. Ingested, the texts of his proposition are their own medium. Deviance once again elucidates the rule, clarifies an alternative norm. The eerie air-eared wavelengths of McCarthy’s perpetual phonic archive met here the new gold standard of assimilation. Whose oral intake returned inscription, the wrong way round, to its passive pulmonary source in the generated comprehension of silent breath.

“To Let Language Press Meaning”: Medium on Call in Text From McCarthy’s deadpan British irony, we turn next to a more famous and influential American writer equally preoccupied with his own literary medium and, at times, with its electrotechnical touchstones – though, in the contemporary setting of his fiction, more digital than mediaarchaeological. As Don DeLillo once expressed his calling in a muchcited Paris Review interview, “what I mean when I call myself a writer” is, he explains in a wonderfully deceptive tautology, that “I construct sentences.”17 And what is the temporal infrastructure of that construction? “There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence” so that if a word has one too many syllables, out it goes. “I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me.” Such is the call of his art from within the fund of its utterance. Remove the first person there, and keep the idea of temporal rhythm, and you have a quite good definition of style: the press of language upon meaning – rather than its disappearance into it, the forgetting of language in meaning. In the coming terms from Part III, such a definition would offer a propositional apotheosis of the linguistic medium in action, of phrasing in receipt, of the “sayable” made good in the said. More specifically, of course, DeLillo is testifying to what he calls the “sensuous pleasure” of prose’s phonetic rhythm. “I might want very and only in the same sentence, spaced a particular way, exactly so far apart. I might want rapture matched with danger – I like to match word endings.” Match – and of course interlace, as here in a kind of dizzy syllabic enjambment on the subject of pigeons on a New York City rooftop, where it is their all but overheard flapping – that of “a hundred-birded tumult and blur” – that is manifested as a syllabically imbricated phonetic mesh.18 The forced past participle intrudes its dentalized extra tap at “birded” rather than “-bird” – so the seasoned DeLillo reader is at first

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primed to suspect – for just the sheer pointless rhythm he unabashedly celebrates. But is that all? Isn’t the added touch of the mental tongue beyond the more logical “hundred-bird tumult” – an oscillation barely made phonic space for in advance of the all-but-simultaneous t-noun (bird[d]t) – part of the flutter rather than just a reference to it? Phonetic chiasmus could scarcely be more mimetic; we hear the very trill of the wings at work. To put it even more impressionistically (in order to register an elusive but cogent impression it will take two more chapters to make good on), aren’t we hearing the medium itself taking wing? And if the syllabic flap of that “hundred-birded tumult and blur” recalls the sonic mimesis of avian pages in Fontanive’s machinated (cinematized) ornithology text from the “Internal Machine” exhibit, the whole press of phonetics upon sentencing in DeLillo also returns us to exactly what Sims’s satire of manic lip-reading served, for us, to bring into alternate relief. Aphorism turns inside out along with logic in the leverage afforded by that story. The many slips between lip and hallucinated script, in the academically deranged misreading of soundless oral gestures, points up the inherent (rather than aberrant) reading by, rather than of, lips – lips and throat and lungs – in the silent mouthing of literary inscription. Later in the same 1997 novel of DeLillo’s that flourished those worded birds, Underworld by title – and naming in part the stratum at which language itself asserts its pressure, as well as the new digital substrate of computer translation – we read about satellite photos adjusted to translate data into image, including “thermal bursts” that precipitate the sibilant buzz of “sizable cities pixeled into mountain folds” (415). Cartography: where, prominent among many other inscriptive systems, the onetime atlas page gives way to the forefront of radical computerization. Phonetic topography: where the remediated cartographic surface passes back to the graphonic play of text function, the originary art of codex surfaces thus retrieved from the field of the digital codecs. The sculptor of sentences, in short, interlopes on an alien beauty and recoups its surface features as his own. The morcellated (rather than digitized) sound play – the word shuffling and shivering, or say the dispersive pressure of wording on meaning – is even more phonically marked in this episode when the narrator recognizes “How sweeps and patches of lustrous color, how computer fuschias or rorschach pulses of unnamed shades” might elicit nonvisible information (415). Altogether, the pixelated underworld of the digitized image, in transfiguring landscape to data grid, has found its objective correlative in the serried conversion of syntax into phonemic “folds” and their own aural Rorschach topography. Synesthesia itself is encoded and reconfigured.

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Here, then, is reading out, not in, and explicitly “for a digital age”: not because computerization is the topic, but because the pixel finds its own acoustic palette. In these satellite-cam arrays, that is to say, vocalic mosaics act upon graphic semantics as digital processing does upon optical documents, alchemizing index into the trace of fresh revelation. Hear, for instance, the echoic labial play, turned plosive, in those “thermal bursts” that first named the pixel blooms and that now reach for something like their stereophonic equivalent in the appositional fireworks of “some hallucinatory fuse of exactitude and rapture” (415). By such a sure and thorough saturation of the u sound is materialized a deep lingual transfusion. In this explosive pressure of language upon meaning, of medium upon means, the vocalic fuse is lit from within. The author who admits that “I might want rapture matched with danger” – in the chime and charm of antimony, presumably – has found its equivalent in the pulsional pull between precision and ecstasy, “exactitude and rapture,” four syllables to two, and this in the paraphonic substrate not of digitization’s compressive grid but of prose’s own phonemic weave. Where, after all, the distinction between reading in and reading out seems all but abolished by medial intensity. In DeLillo’s earlier novel, White Noise (1984), it is a mysteriously reiterated “toxic cloud” – announced by, yes, noxious loudspeaker in the streets (and thus ripe for contrast with the electronic “clouds” of Cayley’s “silent silos”) – that has finally been diffused into the toxic loudness on which the book closes via a mock-apocalypse in the grocery aisles.19 Swathed by the “ambient roar” of commercial space, the aged patrons wander half blind, unable to discern ingredients or prices on the new generic packaging – an illiteracy of “Smeared print, ghost images,” a new brand of asemic graphics – but drawn forward inexorably to the so-called laser-readers at check-out: “holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly” (326). A novelist’s worst fear, no doubt: that authoritative close reading would be left to machines, whose automatized recognition affords the zombie-like customers time to read the “tabloids” – those texts whose generic name derives from the Victorian invention of medicinal dosages in compressed tablet form. Here is the opiate of the people in cheap reading, stripped of any of that “white voicing” (Connor) that keeps DeLillo’s more venturesome readers on alert for soundings beneath the mere spell of words – where reading out rewards the ear the more and more inward the eye. Inward: closing upon a somatically activated medium – one scanned syllabic increment at a time – in the channeled provocations of its vocables. This is DeLillo’s explicit materialist program, one might say, amid the metaphysical

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attenuations of modern life’s being in time – and against the numbing buzz of its routinized commercial circuits. Whatever permits such a distinction between laser scans and human reading is one more issue awaiting elucidation from a philosophy of language under the revised sign of media theory and its discourse channels. As Lozano-Hemmer figures it in an extreme limit case – with those digitally composited but preciously material nanopamphlets in ambient gold-leaf circulation – a verbal medium is the very air we breathe in silent linguistic process: consumption at one with production.

part iii

The Give of Medium

chapter 5

Phrasing the Sayable

How might the sayable remain unfixed in the said? That’s one “stylistic” question – for want of a better term. Or call it a question of form, intercepted in unfinished progress. It has, as anticipated, its deeper philosophical roots, toward which these last paired chapters are directed. Intuited at this level (not just in a realm before a particular textual manifestation in a given phrasing, but within it) is a medium’s immanent give: its give – and yield. Give, in the sense of give-and-take, as well as yield in two senses: the medium’s result in comprehension as well as its often contributory tensile play, its giving way in the very act of wording, yielding to (and up) the unwritten around the edges of the textually said. In making a clause of it, the point can further be made by self-exampling contraction: a medium’s give, all give. Conveyed but not constituted by the imprint of a page surface, medium is what allows the performance of any distributed lettering as text – because, first of all, as the formative work of wording: formative, phonetic, material. That’s why a medium is, in yet another and more colloquial sense, the gift that keeps on giving. A book is the support and sponsor of reading, not directly of meaning. In our merely holding a book, its content is withheld. No measure is taken except of size and weight and surface. In merely looking at pages, one sees first print, not words, then word forms before their message. One level in (or is it up?), one may well grant from experience that the generative tactility of reading rather than holding or looking – the thought-work, so to speak, of breath, tongue, teeth, and lips – is associated in process with the “passive” tangibility of the page, precisely as that page disappears into meaning. If so, then what is left either to theorize or historicize about the medium of that disappearance, the materiality of that move from printed paper to import? The obvious answer (whose obviousness is not belied by two full chapters waiting, but explored in them for its deceptive simplicity) is this: that any link between held book and the latent somatics of enunciated text, between tangible prompt and corporeal activation, depends on 141

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the primal link between not just objective surfaces and subjective space, the visual and the envisioned – but between, in linguistic particular, word and reference (or, in philosophical terms, name and idea). This humandefining link is implicit in the marked page, of course, yet no less mysterious there in the array of its visible signals. But even for the abstraction involved in the lift-off from lexical shape into mental landscape, the matter of signification is a felt catalyst: the sensed path to semantic sense. It is in this way that the recognized third term of medium, at the activated book/ text interface, is made available for a cross-grained apprehension in touch with those adjacent layers of materiality, physical and phonetic, inked and linguistic, that are traditionally bound up with it in process.

Beyond a “Summary Medium” It is none too soon to historicize the terminological node at stake in this last twofold phase of discussion – and, by this point, all the more reason to do so in terms of literary history, bringing both book and text into the question. From the greatest of Victorian realists, George Eliot’s 1859 novella, The Lifted Veil, is an anomalous Gothic allegory of telepathic intuition as novelistic omniscience gone bad, gone mad. It is also a fable of romantic lyricism curtailed, choked off, extinguished – except in the circuitous rivulets of Eliot’s own prose. In this respect the story may be said to mark – tacitly, and not in terminological usage but in stylistic manifestation – the emergence of a modern sense of “medium” (as material conduit of transmission) within the circulation protocols of printed text. This implicitly new, and partly aesthetic, sense, rather than any pointed designation in the story’s own variable nomenclature, arises from an inferred triangulation with older applications of the term in the mouth of the narrator–protagonist. A neurotic and morbidly unreliable narrator, Latimer is a self-styled failed poet: with no release in words for his intense inward sensibility – aside, that is, from the tortured prose poetry of a deathhaunted tale reaching out in print for our posthumous empathy. Latimer’s was, in childhood, a “nature” so detached from suitable nurture that its withered psychic result is indeed spoken of in third person as an “it,” not an “I.” All autobiographic idiom is under objectified distortion with the phrase “it grew up” – grew up, matured, but all the while in deprivation – “in an uncongenial medium.”1 Uncongenial: leading in his misanthropy, by a kind of transferred epithet, to a far less than genial attitude toward other people ever after. Medium: atmosphere, ambience, environment, social and familial surround (a long-received usage). Further,

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in the throes of his confessional retrospect, Latimer subsequently laments the “few sentences” (34) he has had time, or heart, to devote to years of mental agony in an embittering marriage. For any such “sentences,” he adds – with their “neat syntax” and “well-selected predicates” – offer only a “summary medium” (34) that pales before the extremity of his endurance. Medium, there, in the early modern sense we began with in our Intro\Retro perspective: a means of transmission, as with Bacon’s mention of the “Medium of” – among other communicative forms – “Wordes,” rather than the medial function that wording itself constitutes. Still pending in etymological history is any separate sense of that storage and distribution medium, for instance, that we know as writing – even as, in the case of Eliot’s narrator, that very notion seems called up, by association in this same passage, in figuring the unspeakable impact of personal misery, beyond wording, as “printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves” (34; emphasis added) – so subtle and elusive that they are best captured by the play between silent and sounded b in the tensed weft of the very phrasing “subtle fibres.” Between social and neurological registers (“uncongenial medium”), on the one hand, and verbal (“summary medium”), on the other – each termed mediums (though not yet located on the full modern spectrum of pluralized “media”) – fall Latimer’s balked powers as a poet, all the while ironically recuperated in Eliot’s own prose medium: one able to operate, as in the passage at hand, via the blurred interstices between any “neat” sequence of the grammar (“syntax”) of “predication.” In the narrator’s regretted lack of expressive force, his “dumb passion,” he suffers – albeit by the canny internal echo of a slant rhyme, and with an extra tease of false etymological connection to boot – a “fatal solitude of soul” (7). As opposed to the “listening ear” (7) in which any true poet must put faith – synecdoche for an imagined responsive audience, that is, but also for the autoaudition of phonetic writing itself – we learn of the narrator’s crippling doubts about any artful words of his ever being received in a sympathetic spirit. Encapsulated, again, in merely a “summary medium,” but leaving a resonant “imprint” in Eliot’s syntactic predication none the less, Latimer’s is the eviscerating, and here insistently iterated, crisis – the palpable rut – of “the poet’s sensibility without his voice, the poet’s sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny bank” (7; emphasis added on the stalled condition). It’s not just that any and all “vent” is shut down, by being swallowed up, in the off-rhyme of “silent.” More than this – and supposedly in contrast to any healthy flow of expressive language aimed, in the phrasing just before, at a responsive “listening ear” – we may well give

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the lie to this phase of unhearing indifference by ourselves auditing, in a phonetic irony above and beyond the call of strict sense, the dentalized release of that very organ of reception in “silent t/ears.”2 If so, and by another oblique transferred epithet from something like “deaf ears” (reciprocal fate of his “dumb passion”), the prose narrator’s stifled poetic instinct seems still struggling to emerge, in the prose of no longer “neat syntax,” from its own warping frustration. There is, to be sure, the painful silence of the unsaid, the inexpressible. But there is also, even in grieving it, the mordant music – the graphonic counterpoint – of writing per se, traced in its own “subtle fibres,” in this case, across an internal alphabetic paradigm of silent versus plosive alphabetic marks. Such, yet again, is the slippery grip of inscription’s listening gears: the medium as engineered enunciation. At the text/medium juncture isolated here in the Eliot example, as in the one coming from Oscar Wilde, is something beyond or beneath style – a linguistic factor or quotient, rather than a unified signature feature – that operates more like a series of turnstiles between lexemes. The rest of this study will need to bear down in just this way, in literature but also in theory, which is to say in philosophy, on the less than obvious sense in which language per se, on paper as well as in speech, is the true “medium of word(e)s.” And in historicizing this, not just backwards but forwards – or, in other words, in its valence “for a digital age” as well as at the onset of modernity – it’s also none too soon to notice the one unique vantage the contemporary reader has on such oscillating alphabetic effects. Whether a phrasing like Eliot’s is read on paper or screen, and quite apart from the algorithmic “scripts” of computer code, one may still draw on the new binary unconscious of textual generation in registering the flick of phonemes at play in the force field of wording. As that lamentational phonemic rip opens in “silent tears,” across the either/or toggle of the two t’s, the second now on, now off – as in a related vein with the two previous b’s (“subtle”/“fibres”), one under the thumb of the mute button, the other returned to cued volume – language is caught in transaction with its own still viable (or at least traceable) alternatives. Phonemic waver – phonemic quaver – approaches the 1/0 function of the text/medium interface. That oscillation – together with the resulting semantic negotiation – is the stuff, the materialized aural grain, of verbal slippage itself: syntax at its inner limit in the ever-rotary turnstiles (or as the French say, tourniquets) of sequence, where syllabic matter is separated only the better to conjoin. In the present case, the flicker of laxity, or leeway, in the abutting syllabic units of “silent tears” turns ambiguous elision into a full-blown,

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if small-scale, dialectic of articulation: as the return of the repressed audition – an embodied lyric hearing – in the lachrymose moment of its own regretted absence. This is the rare case that thematizes the mostly dormant rule. The titular veil thus lifted in Eliot’s tale is not just that, as intended, between self and other minds in telepathy, then, nor between life and death in clairvoyance, but – in polyphony – between textual marks and the whole linguistic field from which they variably emerge. With the reader, it becomes a mode of entirely pre-mechanical tele-phony – even, as in this case, when a phantom phrasing like “silent ears” could only operate illogically (or say ungrammatically), under the pressure of context, to conjure the heard silence of the narrator’s unsung poetry. The fact that “medium” has not been mentioned in a way that allows any direct or definitive application to this fleeting twist of linguistic turmoil, or ferment, does not prevent us – even policed by the threat of anachronism – from recognizing that language is quite tensely cathected at this micro-turn around its own portrayed blockage. That you the reader can audit more than, technically speaking, you can actually read here in the disposition of this silent script about a would-be writer’s silenced verse: such is the reflexive point of this self-embroiled node of prose poetics. But in mediahistorical terms, again, it is at just such moments that the latest electronic dispensation in the matter of delivered text, its binary generators, may well help interpret an earlier form of alphabetic coding and its differential border erosions. Hence, from turned page to turned phrase to determining medium, our continuing cross-sectional approach for the age – but also from the perspective – of digital inscription.3 This may be to suggest, as well, that the “glitch aesthetic” of optical noise in video art finds, in prose friction of this sort, its own distant precedent.

Medium as “Instrument”: Wilde after Eliot Like the particular language that potentiates it, English, Russian, French, what have you, the verbal medium is certainly a given in the realization of text: presupposed, but known only in the moment – in all the internal variabilities of its streaming force. Streaming, yes: an encoded flux well before our contemporary sense of electronic generation and the on-line flow of its numerically triggered permutations. In contemplating the oscillations of textual sequence in this typical sense of its cumulative lexical function – short of maximizing or alienating its flow, as we’ve seen literature do, not to mention the more radical denaturalizations of book art – philosophy has much to say in its own vocabularies. This chapter and

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the next bring some of these vocabularies together, with a related historical account of English writing in the germinal prehistory of literary prose fiction. It is there, in the century before Eliot, that the page surface itself in mass production – or say textual print in its early proliferation – helps explain the epochal mark made by the Enlightenment’s programmatic simplifications of a received oratorical medium, tempered now by an epistemological premium on clarity rather than rhetorical color. If books, as we saw in the latest sculptural demonstrations of Chapter 2, are “internal machines,” their status as such is inseparable from the machinic history of imprint technology as well as from the evolution of verbal “technique” and its empirical obligations. As part of this picture, the graphonic readings of the last chapter (in a lineage of Romantic sonority and subsequent phonetic tensility from Victor Hugo and Emily Dickinson through Virginia Woolf to Adrienne Rich and Don DeLillo) are renewed again with George Eliot in connection to a “summary medium” manifestly different from the granularity, pull, and beat of her own prose. And the passages highlighted have been chosen not quite at thematic random. Each in its way, if sometimes obliquely, offers a certain touchstone moment in literature’s address to the human psyche in its broadly founding relation to being and time, to conscious existence and the world’s duration. Not least in the case of Eliot’s narrator, who endures “the vision of my death” in “continually recurring” horror (42) at the foreseen completion of his manuscript. In the process, and drawing out an even more obvious common thread, these passages are all heard – in their own lexical and non-clockwork chimings and dissonances – to depend on the time-based medium of syllabic writing. Before returning to the seedbed of prose itself as an emergent “new medial function” in Enlightenment discourse, we can look ahead to the arrived consolidation of the term in application to aesthetic materiality. Half a century after Eliot, the word “medium” has certainly moved further toward its modern sense of instrumental substance in the production of art (awaiting the subsuming plural of “media”), rather than a term for some generalized “method” or “means” of expression. When in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), however, the painter Basil Hallward recalls certain epochal turning points, like Hellenic sculpture or Venetian painting, that introduce into the history of representation a “new medium for art,” the “for” – rather than “of” – does retain some of that residual generality, for delivery system rather than physical specificity.4 He means of course, respectively, human modeling in the round and easel painting in perspective – not oil paint versus gesso, or marble versus stone. In any case,

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fashioned in the two-dimensional medium of stroked pigment, Dorian’s portrait is thought to introduce not a new medium, but rather a revolutionary “mode of style” (13) – or, in fixation on androgynous beauty itself perhaps, a “new motive” for it – by unmistakable association with the fin-de-siècle flourishes of Wilde’s aphoristic prose. The oil portrait operates in the inherited medium of paint, of course, but all the while by pervasive analogy, in The Picture, with the play of prose between scenic descriptors and verbal paradox – each in a marked break from realist standards of portrayal. Thick on the ground in the “Preface,” those salient paradoxical aphorisms are the twists of phrase that lend force to Wilde’s own terminological distinction there, not between medium and mode, but between technique and topic, manner and narrative “material” (the last anticipating a notion of “motive” that is associated as well with “motif”). Wilde’s prefatory dichotomy avoids the term “medium” per se in favor of a broader sense of “instruments” or methods. As follows: “Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art” (3), he writes. And in immediate contrast, with another “for” instead of “of,” we read: “Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.” Materialized through the “instruments” of linguistically captured thoughts are the “topical” issues, as we now say, of mere “subject matter.” At work there, certainly, is a distinction never more suggestively realized in this novel than when a heightened style of prose operates to capture the magic corruption of an alternate visual art: this, climactically, in the titular picture drenched in and corroded by its own material emblems of degeneration. A single example of such implicit two-ply phrasing, pitched between pictorial description and verbal trope, comes bearing its own etymological torque in the context of portraiture’s various tones, tints, and strokes – and in particular its unsaid (but conjured) “hues.” Having come (again) to indicate “shade” or “color” in general (rather than “skin tone” in particular) by the mid-nineteenth century, despite its Swedish origin as “skin” in Anglo-Saxon lineage, the monosyllable “hue,” in this now common use familiar from contemporary English, had in fact to be revived as such after fading into archaism after 1600. For over two centuries the understanding of “hue” was subsumed to the figurative (rather than literal) sense of something like “complexion,” as, for instance, in the different political “hues” of parliamentary debate. Given this layered philological history, the word is primed for Wilde’s deployment – even in its hairsbreadth avoidance. Its whole variable spectrum of association perfectly suits the “horrible sympathy” (89; in the sense of resonance rather than empathy) between

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Dorian’s ageless body and a decaying portrait that mysteriously indexes his leprous soul. In Wilde’s climactic description of the befouled canvas image, instead of the word “hue” for the dreaded, blood-red traces of murder’s extruded guilt – in what I would stress, in fact, as its phonetically marked stead – we find an odd transfusion between medium and matter, pigment and somatic taint. Internal rhyme is the least of the stylistic motivations when “the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled” (189; emphasis added). And certainly any pastoral euphemism for such incriminating evidence is counter-indicated. The dental clot at “scarlet dew,” which tends to slow enunciation to a necessarily clipped drip of phonemes, can’t help but tempt lexical fate with the differently pronounced but more immediately normalized and apposite (as well as more readily enunciated) “scarlet hue.” Christopher Ricks has canonized the “anti-pun” – the flicker of instantaneous r/evocation in an unwanted second sense. Here instead is a case of the anti-phone, but with more claim to the intentionality of a pointed ironic disjunction.5 Let it be clear: there’s no likelihood, even aloud, of mishearing “dew” as “hue.” There is just the intuition of a suppressed alternative: the ghost of the readier phrase deflected to figuration in the reading event. One may think it through – and think through it – this way. Etymology aside, what the dental tension of that t/d hinge does, in “scarlet dew,” is to reverse engineer a literal sense, in faint outline, from the discrepant metaphor of an oddly gentle dampness. Ironically gentle – since any delicate moisture, any red wet or sweat, offers at the canvas surface a perverse emblem for the spectral image of as-yet-uncaked homicidal blood. Mimesis and materiality flow into each other ineluctably. Personifying the portrait years and chapters before, at the moment of completion, while lodging the idiomatic matrix for its sitter’s whole coming career of so-called self-indulgence in the reflexive defacement of his own soul, the painter Basil, divesting himself of proprietary rights, assures Dorian that “as soon as you dry” you can be “sent home” – from then on to “do what you like with yourself” (27). By the final conflation of stained body and its clammy image, then, the stylistic instrumentalities of “thought and language” are working overtime in “scarlet dew” – including perhaps the unsaid censorious undertone of the differently skewed moral “due” – and doing so to evince a kind of secondary mimesis for the phonetic bleed itself: ekphrasis degree zero, blurred in a single phrasal seepage. In comparing Eliot’s “silent t/ears” with the merely proximate dental assimilation of the sublexical “scarlet d/ew,” we see – by hearing – that

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what may be most effective about each is that, in one register or another, neither quite works. They merely work a disturbance – or expose an ongoing process – in the conjoint instrumentality of “thought and language”: variables of the prose medium transpiring in unstabilized excess of strict sense. Putting the “ears” back in “silent tears” for the failed poet Latimer, grieving as he does for the lack of a “listening ear,” isn’t a rigidly logical, even though a decidedly aural, deduction from any vocalization of the phrase, since “silent” isn’t quite a full idiomatic substitute for “deaf.” In this cross-word temptation, the reader’s own ears are given a headway that stalls at the cross-roads of too-free an association. Nor does “scarlet dew” operate in anything like pure homophony with “scarlet hue.” The aurality of each abutment is variably at odds with sense. Such slivered differentials of sense and sound are precisely what the molecular aggregates of signification depend on. The slipping loose of one lexical pattern is under no obligation to knot up another any more tightly. Undertones need not be overdetermined. In the thereby exposed materiality of language, verbal stuff just happens. As event. No policing has final authority, no thematization automatically mandated. Put differently: in the “give” and take-back of medial operations, not all muscle relaxants in the yield (either sense) of meaning need give way to flexed, full-bodied puns. So that our related double takes in these instances from Eliot and Wilde – related samples of lexical slack in the serial latches of syntax, pure homophony and its near miss alike – become limit cases for medial analysis in the sequencing of prose. In terms of lexical boundaries as well as narrative grip, such sound d/effects are in every sense marginal, if in this sense edgy as well. What they equivocate at word borders, if only momentarily or obliquely, is thereby related to the figure/ground oscillation of the gestalt image. To say, as I did, that “neither quite works” is only to say that what one hears in them, given their veering off from immediate discursive “matter,” is the materiality, the mediality, of language still at work, sorting itself before our ears, repressing (if only barely) the unsaid by the nudge – and sometimes cognitive smudge – of intent: again, the noise of a prose instrumentation caught, across inscriptions, still in the process, however belated, of channeling sound into sense. In this study of book form and the performed textuality it leagues with medium to relay, nowhere is a step up – and back – to overview more obviously invited and advised. Indeed, the close-grained literary readings that remain, as aligned with linguistic philosophy, will continue to rely on the logic that has been evinced so suggestively in Eliot and Wilde across the evolving sense of “medium” in their prose century. As the opportunity of

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such examples prompts us to ask, what is it that might most integrally link a microstylistics of such fictional writing, or in other words a narratography of these novelistic pressure points, with the tangibility of the codex object in the book/text/medium triad? Phonic association tethers “ears” to “tears,” “dew” to “newly,” to be sure. But beyond all assonance and internal rhyme, there is a more pervasive principle of metonymy as well – not just lateral but cross-sectional – that this volume, in its partial claim to a venture in “book studies,” has been implicitly contemplating. In the intuited spread of bibliocentric materiality – from codex through paper page to medial transmission in the felt pulse of silent reading – any such chain of association incurred by literary texture, even in the disembodied process of its own descriptive envisionings, may bestow an extra quotient of thematized palpability upon local sites of its narrative power. And vice versa: as prose thickens under narrative duress, other thicknesses and densities may be called to mind by the object in hand. The choked-up and choked-off lyric drive of Latimer, breathing the poetry he cannot write; the soul’s bloody stain in dammed-up lexical run-off even before the eyes – and implicitly perturbed ears – of Dorian’s free indirect discourse: these respective impressions of swallowed voice and preternatural pigment, of blocked language and despoiled canvas art, may seem to borrow back from the abjected medium described a material force all their own by association. In this way the ear may sometimes be said, gripped by a paper-thin equivocation, to have flipped back the page – from reading’s first scanned reaction – for a second adjusted go. Or turned over a fresh leaf in the auditory inferences of inscription. This, then, is one deep medial metonymy of text-consciousness when registered across the serial surfaces – serial but layered, tangible, reversible – of an open book. Wording may sometimes seem to have its own recto and verso. But regarding any such wafery, wavering sense of the book/text/medium system, another aesthetic genre has centered our attention – by negation – at the start. In respect to the unstable linguistic materializations just explored in Victorian fiction, the denatured codex of the bibliobjet remains, again in Heideggerian terms, the model of inverted use. Whereas reading makes the whole codex ensemble “ready-to-hand” as instrumental function, rather than merely “present-at-hand” on the desk or shelf, an illegible bookwork resting on a plinth tends to represent a reading absent-at-hand – yet in precisely the vividness of sheer induced conception. That conception is of course the main part of the work’s art. In what way, we now ask, might such art continue to help in conceiving, here in ontological terms, the very medium of reading – the coursing of

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language itself – it has eliminated? To begin putting the question in more rigorous ontological as well as linguistic terms: what, first of all, is the being of language in itself? What deep incapacitation, then, what negated being, has the sculpted book performed? And in pressing the question, we move from a focus on the wordable, alphabetic and graphonic alike, to a philosophical emphasis on the underlying “sayable” (Giorgio Agamben’s loaded term) of human speech all told – yet as tracked at times along the frayed inner lining and loosened seams of subvocalized prose as well as poetry. And as driven at other times to travesty in the miked or synthesized tomes – or elicited under negation by the blankly illegible ones – of conceptual platformatics. One spectrum for such consideration, proposed as early as this study’s title, can now guide any such shift in focus from the phonetic to the axiomatic, from the material signifier to its metaphysical condition(ing). Book/text/medium: three ongoing strata of apprehension in the prehensile tensility of the reading event. Sometimes, of course, as the previous discussion has reminded us, the page of a given book may seem to textualize its own medium, rendering it all but legible in what the wording has more specifically to say. To speak less in paradox than by way of a material gestalt, concerning the graphonic channel itself, it is in this way that the literary medium is to be fathomed only at a depth registered by its surface tension in a given moment, a tension inseparable from the springs of its production. This is how, in the grip of inscription, we find the give of possibilities, and their yield, still in and at play. This we’ve repeatedly seen – and heard. It’s time to say how so, and so what – or at least to approach some version of an answer. That approach must of necessity, and by definition, turn philosophical. And for that turn, there is a powerful guide in the career-long work of a single postHeideggerian philosopher, Agamben, whose most thorough study of the being of language never quite fully reconnects with the distinction that might seem to have triggered it: the difference in Heidegger, that is, between cognitive “discourse” and emitted “language,” Rede and Sprache. It is a distinction between, let’s say for now, a mode of articulated experience, on the one hand, in which the world comes to (the) mind as if fashioned for comprehension, and, on the other, the mind’s communicative means in any attempt at expressing that perceived world.6 We will look back to the frequent empirical tension, in effect, between discourse and speech, mental formulation and its phrasing, in the early evolution of English prose after tracking Agamben’s grapple with a related distinction: that between idea and name (concept and its linguistic intercept, one

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might say), whether in spoken utterance or in the speech of an imprint page. But how, first of all, does the world seem wordable? To ask this is to move from any mere “summary medium,” as derided by Eliot’s narrator, to a summary of the unsaid mediality in the orbit of Agamben’s inquiry.

Homo Loquens and the Homonym The longest essay in the most recent Agamben translation, “On the Sayable and the Idea,” ballast of the collection, addresses most directly the interrogative thrust of the book’s title, What Is Philosophy?7 It does so by returning to the very question of discursive possibility. “The fact that sensible things and the idea” – meaning the idea of them – “are homonymous, and that things thus receive their names from participating in the ideas is restated many times in Plato” (48). In Plato – and then often reengaged by Aristotle when noting, as stressed by Agamben, that “we speak homonymously of both the absolute circle . . . and the individual circle . . . since there is no proper name for each of them” (51). Here is Agamben’s real genealogical point of departure, since he faults Aristotle for assuming that Plato meant by his emphasis, at one pole of a shared nomenclature, a “universal ‘the circle’” (55). Rather, the pre-supposed idea named as such in any particularized reference is not the same as the universal under specification. The rule of homonymy is more elusive than that, and philosophy must find a way “to mitigate” (52) its intractable equivalences, to discriminate its conjoint functioning, with more analytic rigor. What’s in a name? The work of philosophy is to set out, again and again, according to Agamben, to expose just this mysterious co(de)termination of idea and its indication in the nominative operations of human speech. Leaving aside for the moment any such homonymy (and homophony) as that which might bedevil a response to Dorian’s portrait in the red-hued “dew” of his ethical “due,” Agamben is asking what makes either of those ideas separately inherent in a word. Given the founding homonymy between objects and our names for their manifestations, it is, therefore, more than just a superfluous twist of phrase to locate – in the time-based workings (I would want to say medium) of an actualized language (say English) – the common denominator of idea and name in shaped phrasing. It is on just this score that Agamben’s discriminations recall, without calling directly on, Heidegger’s distinction between Rede and Sprache, discourse and speech, concept and its diversified wordings – overlapping binaries that literary textuality can be seen to address with unusual force. But before launching full bore into Agamben’s approach to the human

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speech act, a caveat in the form of an inverted motivation. The logic that carries the present book from the undergirding physicality of the codex through the graphonic materiality of text to the materialization thereby – the disclosed immanence – of linguistic mediality itself: this terraced structuring of chapters, moving first upward from physical platform and then down to generative verbal energy, may not appear to benefit at all directly from Agamben’s higher-order abstractions concerning the metaphysical imponderabilities of the name, of linguistic designation itself. And it doesn’t, not directly. But that’s only the beginning of Agamben’s real textual purchase, both lexical and grammatical, in this recent translation, where he has little to say directly, less than usual, and certainly by any example, about the poetic function of writing. It is, in fact, important to find his discriminations here too abstract for immediate textual traction, too preliminary for any achieved literary phrasing, too ontological for local contour. Important, because what grows clearer as a result, what closes the gap between the elusive conditions of the sayable and the force of a sayably inscribed phrase, is precisely the missing middle term – medial, transmissive – that shapes discursive idea into material wording, literary or otherwise. It is just this missing term in the supposedly paradoxical simultaneity of sayable name and idea that finds, not a stable grounding in the reservoir of language, but a time-based grasp of such language in action as a differential medium. At which point one is tempted to suggest, again, that no greater philosophical, rather than technological, service is performed by the coded variables of newer digital media than to help, by comparison, in apprehending this. As pursued by Agamben, homo loquens is the first problem for philosophy. The question of human expression, the expressibility of things when perceived, doesn’t therefore begin in linguistics, but rather in ontology: in the speaking being and the being of speech, again virtually inextricable in language. The philosophical power of speech rests not finally with language in the human, nor with the human being-in-language, but with the being of language itself, its coming to be. Not historically, but anthropologically: as a shared potential of cerebration and evolved vocal cords, of anatomy under mental direction. This eventuates, takes place, takes over, only in the surrender, that is, of animal sound to divisible speech, of expressive noise to conceptual articulation. These originary contentions are familiar themes in Agamben’s writing – and not least in their impact on his thinking about poetic language.8 To note just how his signature emphases, first on the relation of voice to speech, then on the contribution of poetry to metaphysics, are introduced into What Is Philosophy? – and where we may note

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each of them implicated in an unexplored convergence – is the purpose of this rapid digest of Agamben’s patient intertextual expatiations across the history of metaphysics, theoretical linguistics, and modern science. That central essay, “On the Sayable and the Idea,” begins with one of the author’s most intriguing logical turns: a seeming paradox outflanked by a deeper logic. Philosophy isn’t there to plumb the enigmatic reaches of the “unsayable.” The idea of the unsayable is, after all, linguistic, whereas, in contrast, the notion of the sayable cannot be exhausted by the study of language. On the one hand, the unsayable is an integral part of linguistics, its negative complement. This is because, at once and decisively, the unsayable is “eliminated” (35) by language when words are found for it. Rather than the contradiction of speech, things unsayable are thus the “presupposition of language” (35) in the event of expression. In diametrical contrast, the possibility of the sayable, the human ability for speech, is “a genuinely ontological category” – whose “exhibition” is the “philosophical task” (35). In the process of isolating this work of ontological disclosure, Agamben recurs to an issue that he has explored at some length before: his both Hegelian and Heideggerian claims regarding the disappearance of animal “voice” into human speech. Again, not historically – but in his view ontologically. Or in this chapter’s case, in more strictly linguistic terms, phonologically. Compassed by Agamben in this emphasis is not some seamless evolution from grunt and cry and whine and yelp to lyric apostrophe in iambic pentameter. Tracked in any one speech act, rather, is the present suppression, moment by moment, phoneme by phoneme, of the aural sense or sensation of voicing in order to release the higher-order abstraction of its intelligibility, where the problematic bond of idea and denominated object arises. On well-established ground(s) of his own, therefore, Agamben returns to Aristotle on the “indivisible” sequence of animal sounds, a “voice” without the systemically marked subunits, the phonetic variables, needed to differentiate it into those increments of meaning we associate with the lettering of articulate language.9 “Animals utter indivisible voices,” writes Aristotle, but, among their sounds, “none that I should call a letter” (17), an elemental unit primed for signifying combinations. Voice without speech is orality without segmentation, at least in the sense of a systematized phonetic code. This is a keynote for Agamben, struck explicitly in this first chapter. “Anthropogenesis coincided with a splitting of the animal voice” (15): the splitting, that is, of a sonic outflow into marked phonic increments. At which point his summarizing proposal that “Language takes place in the non-place of the voice” (15) is homologous, in the matter of

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aurality, with the previous statement about language’s “way of being, which amounts to the fact that it must remove itself in order to make the named thing be” (9). Two vanishing acts: the disappeared sound and sense of voice into the sense-making of phonetic speech, as well as the ceding of that speech’s signifying space, in turn, to the object itself as apprehended. The result motivates Agamben’s most characteristic play on words – or, say, the deepest bivalent poetry of his disquisition. This is his repeated stress not on speaking but on the “taking place” of speech: its double displacement – of voice, on the one hand, and, momentarily, of named object on the other – in the very emplacement of the material word. We know speech when we hear or see it, but how – Agamben keeps tasking himself with asking – has it happened, taken place, in intelligible form? My own book’s question comes later, concerning the impurities that attend the sensible: call it the noise retained from voice, from raw vocal emission, in the sensed spacings of speech and even in the marks of its writing – or, in more medial (or informatic) terms, the interference in the channel on the underside of manifest enunciation. But Agamben himself, as we are to find, edges toward this same zone of consideration in What Is Philosophy? For – to anticipate – linguistic mediality (on an unexpected continuum with mathematics and even computer code) emerges as one inevitable name (even if unannounced) for what makes indication possible. But between ordinary language and the pure abstractions of calculus falls the nonlinguistic use made of mathematical signifiers in computerization. . .

Digression\Regression We pause here, as technological history hasn’t. Agamben, in the mid-1980s, detects a cycling back, via digital process, to a pattern of signaletic (im) pulses before human speech; in other words, a retrogression in the human ontology of the name function. His passing loose analogy – the reversionary common ground between animal “voice” and a post-analog transmission that recovers the sublingual noise of abstract sign rather than enunciative utterance – is as surprising, in its ontological point, as it is prescient. Agamben’s merely passing remark – not on robotic speech as such, but on digital “language” more broadly, as he associates it with a return to the prelinguistic variables of animal code – is an idea being more actively pursued (without allusion) over three decades later in a developing aesthetic agenda by conceptual poet and theorist John Cayley, whose ironic re-programming of Alexa we’ve earlier noted, as well as his very different video play with the strictly optical transformations

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of lexical units in Orthographics. In full view of speech’s role in the somatics of anthropogenesis, Cayley’s latest work in this electronic vein, both in practice and theory, is meant to resist the capitulation of literary experiment to what we might call a new electronic orality; not recorded and stored but digitally manufactured, not archived but auto-activated. Moreover, the pursuit of this digital limit also directs his attention, at least implicitly, to the representational history of reading. Between such extreme paraliterary poles – the performed codex in a secondary visualization of its silence over against a “read” voicing with only derivative script above the level of the algorithm – we find bracketed again, of course, the broad considerations of the present study. It is in this light that the “regression” entailed by the present theoretical interlude (or at least its own doubly retro orientation) involves not just, as topic, the imagined reversion of human speech to the radically pre-aesthetic condition of animal noise, but also a return, via certain inventions of Cayley’s, to the bibliographic ironies of visual lettering in the first chapter’s look back at the open page in easel painting. Cayley always comes at these questions from both ends: here the mark of legibility, there the somatic engine of enunciation. Thus, again, does a cross-sectional apprehension of book/text/medium, in spatial rather than temporal terms, find experimental testing in the laboratory of Conceptual art. Indeed, one specific computer laboratory is described by Cayley in his collection of writings on the persistence of reading in electronic times, called Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art. When he and his students enter the digital “Cave” at Brown University (an “immersive VR device”) to experiment with virtual reality lettering in simulated 3-D space, Cayley confronts (and confirms) something essential to the volumetrics not of the book but of the word itself amid the veritable third dimension of its delivery.10 Axes x y z? Why z? How is writing threedimensional? Or ask: how do graphic experiments in a VR setting offer more than just the visual art of graphic plasticity, rather than some revealed inherent aspect of language in reception? Even when involved with alphabetic shapes, how are such optic effects metalinguistic, rather than just pictographic? Cayley’s thinking on this circumscribes an exhaustive intuition on his part regarding a kind of ontological closed circle. Of note for any materialist study, his primary insistence on the unique materiality of written language – as a one-dimensional series of differential indicators graphed in two dimensions on a visual plane – is highlighted, in contrast, by his sense of orality as entering the third dimension of audition in real space. And it is this that is in part figured by his work with script in the graphic overlays of 3-D virtual reality.

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The figural inferences seem definitive, air-tight, at least when the air of breath releases the spoken linearity of semantic production into the volumetric zone of audition (Cayley’s main point). Again, in conceptualizing this, one is implicitly oriented across the book/text/medium template – less a divide, as usual, than a calculable spectrum of materiality. Think of it this way, with a book like this (as, of course, with any other as well) in hand – to do so is merely to take Cayley’s argument from dimensionality one notch further back to the condition of reading’s traditional material vehicle. In the standard practice of book reading, only the three dimensions of the codex, in layered support, allow, page by page, a perceptual focus on the two dimensions of script, vertical and horizontal, in deciphering the socalled print “line”: its activation, that is, as the onward, one-dimensional force of meaning. It is, nonetheless, only a further, third dimension, beyond that of the codex apparatus, that extends between page and operating body. This is where the visible curls and turns of script are processed as silent phonemic matter. Ultimately, then, what we might call the textrapolations of virtual signage in electronic word art serve to enact – by a histrionic new literalism – the inbuilt virtuality of subvocal decoding in all reading, or in other words the 3-D volume of reading’s inner theater under phonetic generation. In this sense, in the ultimate transmedial ramification of his experiments, Cayley’s textual exfoliation in the VR “Cave” can seem to map the inhabited cavern of vocality itself in graphic pantomime. And another of his “pictorial” ventures, as reproduced in Grammalepsy, is even more theoretically concise and compelling. In a chapter titled “Reading and Giving: Voice and Language,” Cayley’s colon scarcely prevents the unsaid (silent) notion of reading as “giving(:)voice.” (Quite incidentally, it took me three tries right there, in our current digital dispensation of non-grammatical input, to block the auto-complete smiley face.) In this essay, Cayley reprints his 2013 metatextual collage, offering a conceptual uptake, in effect, of the still life with books: a checkerboarded quartet of photos, first of the barely legible cover of The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith, with another open volume in a tousled bed next to that novel. In train to the initial image is a photo collage ironically allographic rather than autographic, despite the novel’s teasing title: mechanically reproduced, that is, like the printed book itself, rather than indexical like a signature, an “autograph.” This sequenced demonstration involves a set of gradual photo close-ups (and their final optic fidelity as readable language, not just as lineated print) over the course of the next three panels (191, fig. 12.2). Achieved only in the last frame of the series is the serviceable

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print resolution – so rare in the painted scene of book perusal – of viewereading (my term, not Cayley’s). His is a conceptual work that happens to recapitulate in this way much of the logic of the painted codex in the art history of the reading scene – especially the bibliographics highlighted in Chapter 1, where the page’s own separate, sequential, and internalized grammar is withdrawn into what Cayley repeatedly calls in this volume the “diegesis” of textual access. This is a phenomenal “world” shaped by decipherment – yet as separate from (even while dependent on) the subvocalized linguistic contours of its ongoing prompt as it is from any picture, whether photo or easel scene, of its imprinted surface. His four photos thus accumulate to what I have called, in regard to a comparable art history, a “reverse ekphrasis”: on canvas, the freeze frame of a duration, with the fixity of paint bearing transmedial witness to the temporality not just of a particular sitting (“Philosopher Reading,” “Girl with French Novel”) but – if only by inference, amid the illegible – of wording’s own work in action.11 Beyond this, however, what Cayley’s sequence (the quartet of images identified a, b, c, d) puts into serial play is the time it takes, not necessarily to get close enough to the page’s grapholects (his favored term for the unsounded scratchings of alphabetic script) to activate reading, but rather to turn word decipherment into comprehension over the variable course of a read page. There need be no approximate clocking of this process for it to be evoked by seriality alone – as collage encroaches upon temporal montage. In any case, four pictures rather than one make of the scene of reading a scenario of decipherment. Here is the abc of reading after all – and then some – made manifest when the difference between the last two photo close-ups shifts in focus so that only the fourth image comes into legible resolution. According to Cayley’s gloss, we have moved from a “depiction of language” to the thing itself, at which point we “can now, if we wish, perform it as such, and ‘give it voice’” (190). In art history’s related bibliographics of easel treatment within a single frame, the plastic realization of a time-based lexical succession in uptake often comes complete, as we know, with its formal graphic ramifications across the canvas surface – including, as discussed, certain iconic tropes of rectangular-windowed openness, recessional landscape, reflected trapezoids of illumination, and so forth. More to the point of the present discussion, Cayley’s four-square optic of the accessed page – entirely at the load-bearing surface of inscription – works to rehearse by inference the book/text/medium overlap: again, that cross-sectioning sense by which, once we have recognized a marked surface in its latent function as linguistic text, literary cognition may then

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access the medium itself of any discernible wording. Only then, with any booked text, is reading engaged. Only then, we might add, has the toolusing animal rendered its instrumentality constitutive in a different sense: becoming the human being as speech-bearing biped. The same lag time applies between marking and articulating, for Cayley, in the case of electronic text as well, which is why he consistently rejects the notion of “digital poetry.” Computerization has no poetics in itself. The defining vehicle of poetry is not binary code, but natural language, oral in origin. The “computer language” of algorithmic prompts is not a language at all in the same sense as are the textual messages it generates, nor is it the immanent medium of such messages. This is as important for Cayley as it is obvious. Such “writing” is merely, at base, the numerical cueing (via an intervening coded sequence) of quite different syllabic differentials in screen visibility. At base, such inscription is “read” by machine only in the sense of being processed as a string of signals, a cumulative set of instructions: data relays not encountered as wording. Even if uncovered as the numerical drivers of text, their flow induces no “grammalepsy”: Cayley’s central and titular term for the advent (or, more like the onset, an uprush from within) of language recognition. This temporal condition of reading – variable for centuries, at the personal disposition of each reader, but now increasingly automated by digital voicing in both recorded “books” and voice-recognition technology – remains a matter of the pace of phonemes rolled over and absorbed into morphemes even as those formative units are turned over to syntax. As contrasted with Cayley’s own isolated and denaturalizing experiments in Orthographics, we see this alternate sense of phonemic constitution in unremarked operation even in titles alluded to later by Cayley himself from the on-line work of Stephanie Strickland (194): what I would call “graphonic” waverings like the punning “WaveSon.nets” (2002) or the lexical overrun of slippingglimpse (2007). Only in the grips of a grammaleptic recognition do these names, these punning homonyms, pin down something about their own mediation in the morphophonemics of language itself. Need it be said by now that where textual optics are concerned, any unfolding lingual glimpse is open to similar tempting slips when lipped in silent sequencing by the enunciating agent? But when all is t(r)ending toward “CGV” (computer-generated vocality, if you will), the terms of grammaleptic access need reassessment. This is Cayley’s brief. He has already waxed anthropological in noting the anatomical changes that are thought to have birthed speech production in homo sapiens, when the

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“threshold” was reached at which phonic gesture came to recognition as “distinct phonemes or letters” on the way to “words, phrases, clauses, sentences” (3). Artificial intelligence may be said to return vocal gesture to raw difference. On this horizon of zeroed-out human agency in vocalized informatics, the incidental connection with Agamben – and the reversion to the on/off logistics of sublinguistic animal signage in computer speech – is thus closed in a striking circle. Cayley must warm to the etymological sense of “cata/strophe” (a sudden, pre-poetic “turn”) in using that noun repeatedly to describe the leap into language, the seizure of and by meaning in the grasp of grammar – before finding, in the electronic affordance of voicerecognition technology and digital orality, a new denaturalized plateau in aesthetic production. This latter is a transformative moment that must be claimed by the poets of “aurature” (219–20) lest the cultural valence of “the literary” might, in the absence of lettering itself, be lost altogether to technology. Symptomized by the decline of e-books and the rise of audiobook downloads, a new phase of grammalepsy needs to renew its force from within the code-generated auralization of the algorithm. The efforts of any such vocal poetics will always, in this sense, be resistantly metalinguistic. Unlike the “legible” code of computer script before manifestation as text at any level of decipherment, there is nothing in machine “language” that is fundamentally audible rather than electrographic – not until digitally transposed to sound bites (just as the electronic code for an on-line color photo has no chromatic constituents in its own right). The gap – between the machinated phonemes of computerized voicing and its generative nonphonic (prelinguistic) base – makes even more obvious (than does a comparable gap between e-text and code) how the medium of discernible speech forms is not, even in the case of phonorobotic AI, essentially digital (an abiding stress, again, in Cayley’s revisionary thinking). Rather than a strictly binary engine of signage, even e-speech is instead revealingly lingual. And the leverage of just such a recognized mediality – even within his general media agnosticism regarding language art’s variant platforms – continues to be Cayley’s best hope for poetics in the age of robotic voicing. It is a hope that, clearly enough, intersects with the medial poetics at stake in this chapter and the next. For between bark and remote call/response apparatus, between animal expression and machine speech, stretches a humanizing linguistics of the name to whose career, as explored at its source by Agamben, we now return.

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Nominally Speaking So this excursus has been, of course, no digression at all. The notion of grammalepsy – the conceptual break from mere script, on any platform, into the felt medium of language – is what Agamben’s approach submits to a deep species history: or say, whose anthropogenetic origin he pursues with an ontological philosophy attempting to frame the intrinsic being of language. Early in the opening chapter of What Is Philosophy?, “Experimentum Vocis,” the venture thus indicated, the experiment of philosophy at its wellsprings, is one “in which humans radically question the role of language in the voice and try to assume being a speaker anew” (23). “Assume” in both senses, one is quick to add: (1) take on the role by (2) presupposing it – and doing so, in both cases, through a definitive separation of speech from the sheer musculature of “voice.”12 In his essay’s focus on “anthropogenesis,” we should note how the isolated philosophical crux comes into sharpest outline against Émile Benveniste’s stress on the difference between semiosis and semantics (6), roughly parallel for Agamben to Saussure’s langue/parole distinction. As highlighted in the labor of translation but present everywhere, this is the difference later specified (following Benveniste again, 62) as that between recognizing a lexeme as an operable linguistic unit (in whichever way it is phonemically constructed and construed) and understanding a name, or in other words between the forms of a given langue and their useful extrusion as parole. The process, however, is clearer than its limits – and certainly than its potential equivocations. For words can drag into the open other facets of language formation beyond those that get slotted neatly into intentional expressive formats. As maximized in the byplay of literary text, such stray sayings may make their fleeting mark as both the residue and the proof of the sayable. Sound gels into syllables under linguistic pressure, voice into speech patterns. But once phonemes have bunched into morphemes, syllables into lexemes, what might be left of this semiotics (this sign-making) in the ontological semantics pursued by Agamben? Whatever we are to find, it no doubt remains odd, or at least notable, that the differential auralities of the voice/speech divide never return in What Is Philosophy? as a determinant (or even residual) fissure in Agamben’s ontology, even though the variable sound streams of poetry (as evoked in other studies of his) are recognized as a collaborative disciplining of verbal thought, the true adjunct to philosophy. There are hints only in this volume, no persistent lines of inquiry. One point of entry, however, is momentarily opened in Agamben’s

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mention in “On the Sayable and the Idea” of Frege’s distinction, curious though its own terminology may seem at first, between the “sense” of a word (in its enunciated constitution as word) and its “meaning.” Elaborating Frege’s point, Agamben writes that “sometimes we use a term intending to speak not of its meaning, but of the material reality of that very term (as when we say ‘the word “rose” has four letters’) or of its sense” (Agamben’s syntactically delayed equivalent, from Frege, for “material reality”): an alphabetic or phonetic fact operating “independently” of the word’s “actual referring to a real meaning” (56). Or a when, as one might wish to add in a given poetic case, “rose” is a monosyllable whose “material reality” as acoustic form operates in an assonant match, for instance, or even full-scale rhyme, with “grows.” This weighing of the word as such, Agamben adds in the spirit of Frege’s point, is the reason for “quotation marks” (56) around the lexeme in such cases. But the “material reality” (the audiovisual “sense”) of lettered language more broadly, which is to say of morphophonemic utterance, scarcely disappears in the codependence (of idea and thing) that defines the act of naming. Further, in an inference to which everything in this book’s own response is meant to come round: to say that poetics puts tacit quotation marks around nearly all of its words would only be to anticipate how the word’s “material reality” might return through the backdoor of homonymy in regard precisely to the name’s problematic hinge – Agamben’s own main and insistent point – between idea and its denotation. To vary just slightly, but crucially, Agamben’s allusion to Frege, it is also true that sometimes we use a term intending to speak not of its meaning only, but through the material reality of that very term. This is where name as unit, elemented by letters, is subsumed to wording as an aggregating force of auralized sequence – “through” whose channels semiosis returns, in poetry, as in “poetic” prose, to retard or erode the march of semantic operation with extra overtones of association. That throughness, that passage, including that occasional voicing harbored vestigially in the flux of inscribed speech: this is verbal mediation at work, where the “sense” or sensuality of speech can often take its namings by surprise. One unique pair of names comes to the fore here in Agamben: “What we call poetry and what we call philosophy name the two polarities . . . in language. Poetry could thus be defined as the attempt to maximally stretch the differences between the semiotic and the semantic series, sound and sense . . . toward a pure sound” (“Experimentum Vocis,” 26). This, for Agamben, stands opposed to philosophy in its aspiration to pure “sense.” The complications that swirl round all such dichotomies, even in their

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attempted equilibration by Agamben, are especially obvious at this point in noting the problematic divergence of this antinomy (sound versus sense) from the earlier citation of Frege on the difference between the “sense” (sensory makeup) and the “meaning” of words. Perhaps it’s clearest to say that poetics stands watch over what linguistic philosophy lets slip – within its variable application of the word “sense” – across the space between sensation and denotation: in other words, between “material reality” (Agamben’s paraphrase of Frege) and the name function. Or, reverting to our opening passage from Bacon on the “Medium of Wordes,” between the “note” (or notation) and the “notion.” Wittgenstein is more than once recruited by Agamben as an aphoristic as well as metalinguistic predecessor – including one of the earlier philosopher’s characteristic approaches to epigram in “Objects can only be named . . . I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words” (“On the Sayable,” 58). Yet, for Agamben, the ontological recession does not stop there. His analysis takes up where this proposition leaves off. Named objects can be spoken about, yes, but not made present in speech, but neither can the possibility of their having been named. For the capacity for naming there is no name – except, of course, tautologically, speech. This last Agamben never quite says. But there, in any case, lies one philosophical crux. And, for another kind of approach, there begins the poetic interface (or more like interlace) – because the abiding noncoincidence – between the sequential wording of speech and the circumscribed denomination that is naming. Not only can you not put things into words, but, even in writing, the phonetic ingredients of verbal things don’t stay put under the enhanced phonemic pressure of sequence. Or have it this way: at a scale of phonetic perception below that of the name as unit, in its very formation rather than its form, more things go into wording (in its semiotic makeup) than could ever be extracted from it (via semantic capture). That input is the condition of language as medium, seldom more sharply demonstrated than by Agamben’s avoidance, not just of the term, but of its determining if inchoate relation to the sayable. In a way, an emphasis on mediality would foreclose too soon, and thus perhaps short circuit, his problematic. The longer he can ponder the mysterious reversible transit between signifier and signified in terms less strictly semiotic, the more philosophical, rather than just metalinguistic, his results. Another way to put this, and quite apart from any critique, is that – as distinct from the kind of essays on poetics one finds in Agamben’s The End of the Poem, with poetry’s goal residing in sensory deferral of propositional sense – here,

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instead, the “materiality” of language, and hence its medial density, is sacrificed to an emphasis on the problem of ideation itself.13 But that materiality may well, this chapter is suggesting, come into finer apprehension, by contrast, as a result. In the cognitive topography entailed by naming, Agamben keeps coming back to the imponderable “passage” between incommensurate (and noncommutable) “levels” (7), here the “sayable,” there the “idea.” Yet the planes of conception at stake aren’t just parallel (one stratum detached from and surmounting the other) but fused and indissoluble. One doesn’t catapult from language to some separate plane of conceived instance or manifestation. The latter aspect emerges out of the former, in each case, as the activation of its possibility: in Agamben’s most influential term elsewhere, its potentiality.14 So that existence under a given name is not a leap away from what is essential in that named being, but rather its veritable “citation” in place: the site-specific manifestation of its being one such thing or event. Think: “That’s a circle; I know one when I see it.” Then, too, a comparable coalescence operates between word(ing) and idea in the broader fusions of descriptive language, where a lexicon that would include “circle,” together with a syntax for positing it, results in (or “passes” through to) an activated formulation about such a named shape, including – as we’re about to note from one minor exemplary turn – its dramatic evocation in the pace of literary writing. And what to say about (or what else to call?) the medium of that latter formulation when materialized in a predication like this – circles in fact at its center – from the fatal alliterative climax of Melville’s Moby Dick, where “concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole”?15 For only in the flow of wording, not the fact of naming, and here rippling out to engulf more and more objects (physical and grammatical), does the suction of the murderous whirlpool seem enacted in the very swallowing up of sibilant juncture across the second of those impacted word borders, phonic (s/s) rather than just graphic (c/c). The whole conjured vortex is marked by the “material reality” (Agamben on Frege) not just of lettering per se, but, once triggered by it, of the click and hiss of semiosis still met in the act, or caught in the throat, of voicing its way – swirling its phonemes – to semantic shape.16 Let us say – unsimply enough, but with the same directness as that of the process involved – that the sayable passes into the said in literary writing, becomes manifest in it, through the medium of language in action (not just due to its presupposition, nor in any “summary” form): a medium phonemic, syllabic, lexical, grammatical all at once. And let’s therefore turn to

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a literary passage more directly and explicitly concerned with the ontology of the psyche – and the difficulty of wording it – in the very throes of desire. In the erotic epiphany of “being” in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, homonymy melts away into its own orgastic third term in the noun/gerund (or is it gerund/participle?) slide between existential status and transfiguring ec-stasis. For here is articulated “a consummation of my being and of her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality,”17 with the ambiguous shift, as well, from cross-reference to essence in the word “one” (name versus pronoun, transcendence versus mere antecedence) when pitched indeterminately between the “sayable and the idea.” To hear “being in a new one” break open an ontological space between the idea of being and its progressive action – and thus split the difference between the poles of gerundive noun and present participial vector – is not just the poetry of grammar but the “consummation” in its own right of linguistic mediality: giving way, yet again, even in taking hold, always potentially in flux, shadowed by the still sayable in the already inscribed. Language displays what amounts to a polymorphous libido in its own right, which Lawrence’s narrative repeatedly tries channeling as the stream – the medium – of its own consciousness.

“Imprint-Matter” – and Its Resonant Hesitations Just like recognition derived from paradigmatic understanding – or, in other words, instance from idea, a whinnying horse from the homonymous idea of a horse – speech is also a simultaneous derivative: a molding, into specific form, of its base (not separate “level”) in language. Or say base matter: its linguistic substrate, understood as a thing always on the cusp of mutation. In this respect, it’s no accident that Agamben borrows the Greek philosophical figure of malleable gold as a base material (“imprint-matter,” “On the Sayable,” 71) that takes the impress of a coin in the way that language receives that of a name – though without his going on to compare the molten material of phonemic and syntactic language to the particular mold, in English, of the so-called verbal coinage (Italian conio). Of which, as it happens, idea and instance are two sides. What his borrowed analogy does further suggest, however, is that the morphophonemic (or “semiotic”) substrate of language, especially in literature, makes its way into molded semantic shape while bearing stray traces of options and possibilities not entirely overcome in the expressive selections – or impressed denotations – of a particular speech act. The medium, one notes again, is what raises the latter into consciousness from the former field of its potential. Medium is,

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in other words, the vehicle of reference under the sign of sayability, with all the impurities that the amplitude of such sheer verbal potential may entail – or audibly entrain – in settling out (sometimes never quite down) as a fixed expression. Articulation, especially in poetry, may thereby bring alternate verbal forms – or flashes – in tow across the wake of a particular wording. Inscription is often turned back on its own echoes, other soundings taken in the given: in Agamben’s own terms elsewhere, and mine at book length in The Deed of Reading, other “potentialities” still on deposit – not just held in reserve but held open to audition. This happens in precisely those moments where poetry gathers to definition as the attempt, again, to “maximally stretch the differences between the semiotic and the semantic series, sound and sense” (“Experimentum Vocis,” 26). This is how, and with what resistance, the possibility for saying – the very concept of the sayable – passes through the affordance of language in the mode of phrasal formation, word by word, sometimes word athwart word. Poetry is the place, we might say, and by extension literary writing all told, where phrasing hasn’t, in arising from the condition of language into an active performance thereof, entirely shaken off the residue of this functional medium in the setting out of expression. When appreciated at a scale more modest or at least modular than Agamben’s ontology, poetry is thus the place where traces of the sayable still inflect the said, even while the very sound of the latter may be a sensory deferral of the sense-making faculty. Paul Valéry, no doubt on Agamben’s mind in his own formulation about “maximal” delay in poetry’s sensuous delivery of its sense, speaks with memorable concision (and as cited elsewhere by Agamben) of poetry as “a prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning” – a hesitation not free of further orthographic suspension in the le son/le sens slide of the French original.18 That lag time is the space of defamiliarization, both of language and its referential intent. Philosophy wants to understand how this always latent prolongation, this inherent deferral, is typically overcome in ordinary language. It thus wants to master the ontological process by which the intelligible is virtually laminated upon the sensed, the sensible – the abstract nomination upon the concrete name – in order to “exhibit” this in no uncertain terms of its own. Yet these are terms, in Agamben’s case, whose resonance is borrowed from the linguistic wisdom of poetry – as witnessed here in citing Wittgenstein’s call for philosophy to be “written only as a form of poetry.”19 To return, then, to our point of departure in Agamben’s paradoxical gambit: if linguistics can be said to liquidate the

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unsayable as its own point of departure by finding expression for it, and if philosophy closes upon the sayable as its ultimate challenge, “exhibiting” it (without ever quite explaining it) as the foundational human possibility, there is also, unexamined in this particular volume by Agamben, a third energy in operation – in the form of a conduit. Medial poetics enters not some demilitarized zone between the disciplines, but rather into a literary transmission channel whereby the sayable, when coming forth in the said, is at any moment likely to be found banked by the unsaid: both braced and funded in reserve, even while shored up by the inner economies of speech production. What isn’t sayable in the said is the possibility of saying: that’s Agamben. What never appears in the message, as such, across the stream of communication – this now is media theory – is the channel that doesn’t merely convey but manifests each message: more than just code, its sensory efficacy, its way of taking effect. Literature is transmitted in language, but it is also the poetry of language itself. We return here to the opening chapter of What Is Philosophy? for perhaps its deepest axiom: “Language is in the voice, but is not the voice” (15). Or say, rather: voice, in the mode of originary articulation, is the medium by which, in (rather than after) its own transformation to language, any meaning is made, made to appear. In the volume’s later terms, the higher mysteries of homonymy, once loosed to the off-ramps and byways of a more sensorial homography and homophony, flow forward in a way that both hews to semantics and eschews it – as right there – in the backwash of extraneous aural semiosis and even faux etymological antithesis. Wording in action thereby drives forward as medial event – even while the noise in the system may be either sloughed off or refashioned as something like a continuous residuum of “phonemic voice” on the heels of speech. Beyond Frege’s emphasis on the “material reality” of wording apart from meaning, then, we might say that poetry is most likely to cite “rose” as a word rather than a thing (or as that thing called a word) – most often disposed, that is, to put quotes around it – precisely so that, in company with another four-letter word and echoing phonemic triad (r-o-s/z), for instance, it and its floral kind might be found, in a given case, generatively arrayed along a verse line in carefully gardened “rows.” With perhaps something of the same unsaid plural (“rows”) growing upon the ear as peripheral and useless homophone against the rut of an equative prediction, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” offers Gertrude’s Stein’s version of Agamben’s problematic: equilibrating the homonymy arisen, estrangingly there, between idea and thing.20 And arisen there, though ambiguously in

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the capitalized wording of the lexical row’s first line, by a deliberate play – in the act of naming – between proper and common noun. But the principle of poetic homology, of echo and recursion, reaches far more widely. We see a trace of this in a kind of chant-rhyme in “Canticles for a Passion” by the British poet-critic Angela Leighton, author of such apposite critical books as On Form and Hearing Things: The Work of Sounds in Literature.21 It is in one of her own homophonic verses that the faintest of personifications – as in standing upright in animistic association with a stand of trees – helps mediate the sound play of “Trees in the garden stand like guards.”22 With sense and intelligibility rubbing each other the wrong way for all the right reasons, here is a phonetic fallout, indeed “windfall” of breath itself, that opens, in its fictive etymological backcast, upon a fantasy landscape of philological semiotics, where “garden” and “guard” might claim real kinship. Glimpsed in interplay are both a single sub-semantic homophone and its “unguarded” pun when buoyed together on the medium of a hybrid tongue like English and its continuously unleashed homophones. At (and on) just this point, generalization is invited. On one side of the shared “stumbling block” of philosophy and linguistics – turned to watershed divide in this discussion – there is the homonymy that binds idea to instance without being able to say how; on the other side, and thus broaching the poetic as well as the linguistic, lurk homography and homophony. These are operations that split the lexeme across two divergent rather than laminated orders of sayability. They do so by activating in process those shifting borders of phrasing that have been identified here, in mimetic evocation of their own slipstream, as graphonic – as we’ve seen, for instance, with Eliot’s departure from the mere “summary” work of phrase in the tearing asunder of “silent tears” to cock the very “ears” supposedly closed to her narrator’s poetic yearnings. And yet Agamben also has his sights set on another order of differential signification altogether, as his pivotal essay comes to pose it against all ordinary notions of “the sayable” – in the realm, that is, of pure mathematical signification.

On Point: From Indication to Calculation My introducing the question of medium (a morphophonemic one in Western languages) into the ontological problematic surveyed by Agamben – oblique though it is to his terms – is a move meant not merely to intercede in his procedures but to elicit a minor chord in their own orchestration. True, it is only through Aristotle (on the lapsed ingredient of animal noise in its subsumption to the language of a differential alphabet) or

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Frege (on the fourfold alphabetic signifiers in the sense of “rose”-in-quotes) that Agamben, in What Is Philosophy?, seems disposed to mention the letteral composite of either the language per se or a given name delivered by it. In both of those isolated, yet typifying, cases, however, the idea of mediality encroaches. This we readily glimpse – if only by association. For when Agamben, with elucidating counter-force, switches gears in “On the Sayable and the Idea” – switches from “natural language” to geometry – the idea of saying is left behind by ideation. What Is Philosophy? is no longer focused at this turn, for instance, on the issue of a circle versus the circle. It has taken up, instead, the question of any point on such a circle, on any curved or even straight line, that takes part in what one calls, in geometric terms, “describing” it. The mathematical point becomes the zero-degree signifier: the increment of intelligibility and calculation that can, unlike a word, be broken down into no subsidiary structures. The logic here is as cogent as it is oblique. Yet the turn to the abstraction of number, and even to its teleology in the post-anthropological languages of computation, may be less surprising in itself than for what it will soon make connection with in the next chapter, where the enshrinement of the new scientific signifiers roughly coincides – under the sway of Enlightenment empiricism – with the invention of modern prose. In Agamben’s own terms, such is the efficiency of mathematical signification that it builds not on alphabetic materiality but on pure abstraction for its content. Even within a geometrical grid, the point has no dimensions. In describing (following and citing Euclid) this coordinated and thus graphable “point” as “a sign, of which there is no part” – not a material entity (like a dot, say) but a sheer “quantum of signification” (78) in the algebras of line and vector – the argument dwells within the bracket of familiar Agambenesque symmetries. With the sign thus shown passing over into pure unverifiable conception, a name for forces and motions no longer necessarily sensed at all – deferring thus to “a mental reality whose identity is totally independent of the word in its auditory materiality” (66) – Agamben is soon positioned to summarize, rather cryptically, as follows: “the idea is the limit of the semantic, whereas the number is the limit of the semiotic” (82). Number locates the lower limit of the latter, that is, precisely in being the erasure of all but virtual sense from the features of both the signifier and the abstract signified alike. At the other end of this spectrum, this sliding scale, the abstract limit of the semantic, as the immanent idea of any statement, is nonetheless approached, one must remember, only through the sensory intervention (medium) of language in its own material semiosis.

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As Agamben has it, the introduction of the point as concept at the dawn of geometry began the “de-linguistication of knowledge” that led to “modern science” (65). Contast this with the literary history advanced in medial terms by Friedrich Kittler, whereby the blanket “alphabeticization” of language in Enlightenment oral pedagogy offered a grounding in maternal (hence material) sound, or originary voice, that sustained a dawning Romanticism and its cult of the internalized Muse – until, that is, the phonic materiality of this so-called discourse network gave way under technological modernity to the digitized (de-alphabetized) differentials of a nonlinguistic numerical code.23 For Agamben, too, with the logical minim of the mathematical sign no longer homonymous with a sensed phenomenon, number passes beyond language. And thus beyond the founding moment of “anthropogenesis” itself. Here, as the destiny of mathematical abstraction in computer “language,” is a signifying procedure of strictly algorithmic form that, as Agamben strikingly puts it earlier in “Experimentum Vocis,” is a mode of inscription that “fixes” the signaletic intent of human transmission “in a communicative code that rather recalls that of animal languages” (13), just ons and offs – as if closing out the very arc of the Anthropocene in digital signage.24 Where, we might say, the immaterial point is the ancestor of that generative nowhere between 1s and 0s. Animal expressivities are there called “languages,” note, rather than just voices – even though differentiated by non-letteral oral emissions. But only imagined as such in the rear-view mirror provided by the supplanting of acoustic materiality altogether in human messaging – and thereby suspending the poetic potential of phonetic speech – under the silencing thumb of computer code. Not to mention the new modes of artificial intelligence and phonorobotic articulation it engineers – in which context Alexa technology, for instance, is plausibly a-lexic only if language is thought to be an exclusively human prerogative. The geometer’s revolutionary abstraction of the nondivisible “point” may thus be understood to have introduced into the mechanics of designation, in sum, even a more purely differential (and ultimately binary) function than that provided by the phonology of word formation. Such is the weight of the disembodied point in any mapping of the infinitesimal: a signifying quantum operating by ideation rather than sensation. This mode of mathematical abstraction posits, it doesn’t say. In this respect, of course, it both resembles and underlies the procedures of binary computation: a so-called algorithmic “language” that completes what we might call (conflating Kittler with Agamben) that de-materialization of signals in returning the culture of Western communication to the pluses and

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minuses, the bursts and arrests, of pre-literate (as well as post-human) code. The ex-pressive urge of homo loquens has been superseded by the quantifications of “output.” From this perspective, it seems barely exaggerated to propose that media theory is indeed, if not in so many words, the largest metahistorical frame around Agamben’s entire philosophical project in What Is Philosophy? For it is ultimately in contrast with the quanta of mathematics as medium, based on the absolutely discrete point as a nonpartite signifier, that we may better apprehend how the qualia of verbal “materiality,” the resonant marks of graphonic enunciation, oscillate in concert across single lexical spans. One might, therefore, want to call modern poetry the re-“linguistication” of naming in the face of pure calculation. Poetic speech: a mode of saying that, precisely in the freedom of its traversed silences, never tires in its tries for that extra something, beyond denotation, that can be – if not (after Wittgenstein) put into – at least distributed among words. As Agamben’s world-historical plot thickens, and his privileged mathematical signifieds thin to invisibility in the measures they designate, three emergent – and converging – preconditions urge a bypass at the start of the coming chapter, though only a temporary detour, from his emphasis on the “discourse” of geometry, calculus, and quantum physics to the Enlightenment “speech” of science before returning to his central position paper – and, in extension of his premises, to the fate of “saying” tout court under computer technology. If, following Agamben’s metalinguistic timeline, human thought came to be perched, with the Enlightenment’s higher mathematics, on the verge of a newly theorized cosmic order only by closing an immemorial gap between name and thing in a radically abstract signification; and if the history of science (before evolving into the escalating history of technology, to whose current ontological asymptote in artificial intelligence we will, and indeed via Agamben, come round) thus clearly deserves correlation with an ontology of language; and if, thirdly, the notion of “medium” is one reasonable name – and, in Agamben, a missing term – for the previous cohabiting of idea and the sayable in the processes of human thought (human “discourse”) – then, given all this, a new perspective may well dawn. A whole new understanding, that is, might be won for exactly the historical turning point, literary and bibliographic now as well as mathematical, evoked by Agamben in the rise of “modern science.” We approach in the final chapter, then, historically as well as theoretically, an unexpected intersection between a pivotal moment in Agamben’s epochal trajectory of the human sign function and a closegrained philological account of Enlightenment “style” in the discourse of

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empiricism – together with its latent literary impact in the epoch of expanded print circulation. Along with that technological revolution, those two further measures of modernity, scientific and linguistic, turn out to complement, and help define, each other’s motivated semiotic transformations – with a later Victorian prose like George Eliot’s or Oscar Wilde’s, part of English literature’s long post-Romantic heritage, waiting on a far horizon beyond the as-yet-unlifted veil of literary destiny and the new textured density of its never-just “summary medium.” Only time, including the time of syntax itself in syllabic amplitude and overlap, will tell.

chapter 6

Between Language and Text

Waxing exact, language can make discoveries about itself, as a linguistic function, in addition to reporting on those of other discursive disciplines and experimental procedures. The verbal flank of the scientific revolution cleared a way for literature, in this sense, as well as for emergent empiricist protocols. The progress was slow and uneven, but decisive. In casting back to origins in order to assess subsequent text/medium nodes in the generative originality of modern writing, as both techne and technique, the terrain of demonstration is a crowded one. The resulting interplay between theory and practice, philosophy and philology, makes for the longest as well as the last chapter in this study’s associative field of codex, text, and medium. In the process, Giorgio Agamben’s anthropogenic model of sayable ideation is linked to a specific historical watershed in Enlightenment poetics that brings back for discussion the ideological critique mounted by Kittler’s media theory concerning just this period. And it is this that will here be adjudicated, after a brief listen to British Romanticism, via exploratory comparisons among the insurgent turns of literary writing from Henry James back to Whitman and forward again past D. H. Lawrence to contemporary prose fiction. As Enlightenment scientific discourse, avoiding the florid periods of the Renaissance treatise, labored to simplify itself in alignment with the new precision of experimental data and abstract quantification, it grew at first not just less rhetorical, as we’ll see, but further from identifiable “poetic” liberties in any indulgent deferrals of sense by sound – or of meaning by periodic rhythm. A backlash was inevitable: a return to the rule of rhythm, phonetic and syntactic, in some revised key – and thus an opening for a new and post-oratorical poetics of prose. It is fair to say that a championed plain style made plain certain other stylistic possibilities latent in the eventual release of language from the bridle of a stringent simplicity. But the revolutionary moment was, in the broadest terms, irreversible. A chastened mode of linguistic 173

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presentation, with its baseline of lucidity, was here to stay – even as it was later varied, enriched, and introverted by literary experiment. Under its strictures, however much loosened over time, evidence and its formulation aspired to an unusual simultaneity within what Agamben might characterize as the fulfilled regime of homonymy, including its most mathematized prose forms – where names could be counted on (in every sense). What this chapter addresses, then, by title and coming examples, is an inherent medial dynamic to be disclosed only over time, as maximized first in Romanticism and then in a subsequent novelistic prose. This is the initially uncharted space between a reformed linguistic basis for modern writing, at large, and the more textured material reveal of literary text in mobilizing a progressively self-conscious fabric of transmission. A premium not merely on elucidated ends, but on means. Not just the informational relay of Francis Bacon’s “Medium of Wordes,” but an aesthetic conduit – and expressive conduct – verbal through and through: call it a thing of words. Not just the mediatory operations of language as transit or go-between, a vehicular operation forgotten on arrival, but a recovery of the medium that language materially is. Incurred in this way is a gradual recoil from anything like the mathematical condition of “the point” in Agamben – “a sign,” again, “of which there is no part” – in fuller engagement with a lexicon that is all shifting parts, from letters to syllables, in the felt press of expression. The early modern overthrow of decorative rhetoric by a language born of scientific empiricism, decidedly not poetic in cast or aspiration, bespoke a reach for something like pure Rede, for the achieved discourse of essence. In the effort, it tended to forget, or to imagine overcoming, the generative distance between language as dormant resource and any emergent speech act: between, in short, a narrow recruiting of linguistic options and their intended documentary formats. Prose of that sort, or under that understanding, was short-lived as an exacting cultural benchmark – but it cleared the air of descriptive language, the very lungs of enunciation. Other innovations followed, with other standards than those of sheer transparency. Under impetus from the print codex in popular circulation, for instance, the novel as genre may be seen to constitute the return of a certain muted poetic impulse within a fuller channeling of its streamlined prose medium. Literary history may well, in this way, be called upon as a responsive complement to the philosophy of language explored, via Agamben, in the previous chapter. Philological transformations scarcely

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leave behind, but instead renew, any ontological inquest into language as possibility.

How “Prose” Arose: Print/Text/Medium Our continuing focus: the elusive relation of ideas to their sayability – and ultimately, in more literary terms, to their phrasability. Exactly where (via the two-ply nature of homonymy) Agamben’s argument worries over the relation of name to the simultaneous conception or presence of the thing, his ontological thinking comes into an oblique but revealing alignment with that of contextual literary critic Hugh Kenner. This meeting of minds, or at least of mental templates, occurs at just the historical turning point of modern empiricism and the new science that – together with secular individualism, a burgeoning middle class, and the affordability of mass print dissemination – are regularly adduced as cultural seedbeds for the rise of prose fiction. But before the novel, as genre, came its prose – its prose as instrumental medium, born in the service of manifold scientific breakthroughs. When the precisions of calculus, for instance, open up a whole new realm of signification beyond language, at the outer limit of abstraction, ordinary alphabetic writing must struggle to keep up. And literary language has its own way, at first, of reflecting this upheaval, this new stringency – along with various compensatory gestures developed later as well. Kenner tracks the technological analogues he famously finds for High Modernism – in typewriter (Pound), telephone (T. S. Eliot), linotype and urban tram systems (Joyce), and early computerization (Beckett) – back to the dawn of modern technological discourse in the reformist agenda of the British Royal Academy in the seventeenth century. Theirs was an emphasis, according to Kenner, on one word per thing: a practical homonymy, one might say, of experimental procedure in laboratory-like thought. The literary register of this scientific exactitude all begins, for Kenner, with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), where the correspondence of word to thing helps validate the early novel – by an infrastructure of quasi-scientific exactitude – as a fledging literary venture in a mode of plausible fictive realism. Such prose, according to Kenner, reads less like an invented representation than like a workaday recipe for reenactment – as if certain fictive moves could be accurately replicated under prose instruction, at least in the imagination. “A novel enables you to repeat the experiment. You can relive, plank by plank and crop by crop, Crusoe’s recreation of a habitable world.”1 Plank by plank, word by word.

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In a fuller examination of the transitional moment in Royal Academy debates around the proper language of report, without mention of Kenner, a recent essay by John Guillory follows in detail the way in which a corrective seventeenth-century call for “plainness” effected a revision in formal descriptive protocols that deliberately pared away the periodic affectations and rhetorical color of Ciceronian oratory. This shift in stylistic manner arose, in Guillory’s emphasis as well as Kenner’s, from a revisionist agenda fueled by scientific empiricism, whose verbal manifestation was not long, of course, in being felt on the page as well as podium.2 As if rehearsing, at narrower scale, the whole millennial transition from orality to literacy tracked famously by Walter Ong, Guillory patiently traces out – across the transition from declamatory to explanatory (or scientific) models – the functionalist turn from a prose figuratively elaborated to one rigorously straightforward, from the ostentatious to the strictly ostensive.3 And ultimately a transformation, in the escalating dominance of printed prose, from the oratorical to the literal, the lettered, the textual, the booked – with prose fiction, in the wake of such a discursive breakthrough, eventually becoming print’s most popular aesthetic format. From this historical vantage, it is worth noting how the cleansing of signification in the name of transparency accounts as well for what Michel Foucault (also unmentioned by Guillory) influentially noted as the regime of “representation” in early modern discourse, as detailed in The Order of Things: an order not imposed, but needing to be processed, by a language taking its clarifying distance from (as Foucault’s second chapter title has it) “The Prose of the World,” with its mystified (sixteenth-century) sense of stable resemblances, including between words and other objects in the world.4 And within the subsequent semiotic paradigm of representation, in order to translate the once seemingly legible messages of things in the open book of nature into scientific prose, as Academicians on both sides of the Channel recognized, one needed to disembellish the instrumentation of report. Empirical knowing required a new and forthright way of showing (to complement precisely this new order of “Representing,” Foucault’s third chapter, 51–85). Similarly, the gist of Guillory’s research – in both his finds and his theoretical finding – is that the touted transparency of this new style was initially mistaken for the advent of a definitive new verbal process (or “medium,” his recurrent term), rather than just its first specialized and constrained manifestation: what Guillory calls a transitional “misrecognition” (Mercury’s Words, 60). Over the long term, modern prose did emerge as the dominant discursive form in the wake of demoted oratory, Guillory wants to show, but only as its ultimate

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textual fallout – rather than through those first experiments in the unadorned transcriptions of “the plain style.” That “style,” understood precisely as a specialized construct, is the catalyst rather than quintessence of the prose regime, disappearing in the world-historical transition it crystallized – and thus into the new and abiding linguistic affordance, the more aptly grasped “medium,” it revealed. Yet it is that cusp moment isolated and rethought by Guillory that remains so revealing in any attempt to assess the full media-archaeology, so to say, of prose at work. The seventeenth-century pruning away of ornament in diction and syntax, its stripping back to a seemingly unmediated directness of grammar and vocabulary alike, was so successful in clearing the air of transmission that it was mistaken for the thing itself: the pure essence of said verbal transmission. In Guillory’s terms, what resulted from the Royal Academy’s concerted scourging of rhetoric came to seem so transparent that it was identified as a whole new form of mediation – a sheer unfiltered channel for thought in expression – rather than merely one instrumental and tendentiously invested form of such delivery. A promoted rhetoric of unadorned and streamlined precision was mistaken for the communicative stream itself, rinsed of all distraction. Yet, although the plain style was over-eagerly championed by the Academicians as an “imaginary zero degree of style” (80) rather than a marked effect of directness, its short-lived hegemony was instead the symptom of its role, for Guillory, as a “vanishing mediator” (73) in the history of verbal protocols. Catalytic agent of modern writing, plainness offered the disclosure, rather than the cynosure, of linguistic mediality in a newly apparent and palpably manipulable form: a form soon to be less chastened and constrained in its literary manifestations, but nonetheless efficiently postoratorical. In Guillory’s sense, what the original hasty equation between style and medium, between plainness and prose per se, tended to foreclose – in the whole spectrum of effects now made prospectively available – served at the same time to dispel certain contemporaneous vanishing points in the matter of literary forms. The embryonic idea of prose, of stylistic form without the codified formulas of rhetoric, worked to anticipate in this way “the possibility of new genres, novel kinds of writing” (83). In such a formulation, the italics might just as well have fallen on “novel” instead of “new” in delimiting the chief – and indeed etymologically preeminent – beneficiary of this post-oratorical inscriptive practice. The involutions of Ciceronian eloquence give way to plain style in the consolidation of prose as category, point taken. But not without reconstituting (as in Crusoe)

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a revisionist form of non-declamatory rhetoric in its wake, found(ed) in the new channels of diction and syntax themselves rather than the playbook of received figuration and syntactical flourish. And foregrounded thereby, as well, is an always latent form of print orality: readerly subvocalization. Here is what Foucault might have recognized as the first literary manifestation, in the modern era, of that much later and strictly linguistic (rather than representational) episteme that he finds breaking away, with later modernist literature (read: Mallarmé and company), into pure écriture. This is a phase of lexical fragmentation and graphological insistence, including a valorized phonetic materiality, captured by title in “The Return of Language” (Order of Things, 330–35): its return as a set of manipulable scriptive things in manifestation as sounded marks. But we can profitably linger at the earlier threshold for a moment longer – for a further historical clarification. In the “vanishing mediator” (73) afforded by the plain style – covering over the inchoate underlay of prose per se as category – Guillory acknowledges, beyond the catalyst he has placed under his philological lens, a cultural and technological “prime mover” (83) that remains, he suggests, insufficiently noted in any such account of stylistic transformation. More tentatively than one might expect, and with two references to Marshall McLuhan (86, notes 44 and 47), Guillory allows that the spread of print itself, in the wake of manuscript culture, may well be the missing term in this precipitant historical process – with the linearity and clip of the plain style, as opposed to the suspensive loops of the Ciceronian period, offering a special efficiency in the new higher-velocity decoding facilitated by print arrays. So it was the print book, in this sense, that was codeterminate in the new linguistic medium of prose: speeding writing along by the very convenience of the normalized and hyperlegible mechanic rows – just as the electronic Spritz technology would, half a millennium later, require a superseded codex format in order to execute its computer-sampled recognition points in the optimization of speed by the digital exclusion of subvocal decoding. First as public rhetoric, then as “white voice” (Steven Connor’s term, again, for silent enunciation), orality is twice displaced by technological literacy, first mechanical after Gutenberg, now electronic in the new rapid-fire affordance of such an automatized reading prompt.5 In the latter case, and given our abiding rubric, suffice it to say that neither book nor text survives this anti-literary flattening of the medium to its minimum mobilized ingredients: a new version of George Eliot’s dismissively phrased “summary” means for verbal predication.

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But this last electronic intervention has been centuries in coming. In the long historical arc of media history, the dawn of prose as we know it – as reigning discursive medium – was at first, and for long afterwards, inseparable from the very stuff of paper impress as a material platform. Glimpsed here, if underplayed by Guillory, is the deep league of print codex and accessed text. Of all the beneficiaries of this alliance – this convergence of physical vehicle and medial actuation, of material support and verbal substrate – there is none more obvious than the novel as genre, the success of whose formal “newness” arises directly from the material as well as cultural innovations of Gutenberg. At this point, looking back at the literary popularization of prose in the new genre of the novel, one may well wish to lift the often highlighted distinctions of our organizing triad, evoked again (but without borderlines) in the subhead above, and thus to turn the first two nouns adjectival: rendering them subordinate descriptors rather than separate substantives. In these adjusted terms, Enlightenment linguistic reformation, crossbred with print technology, can be seen to have generated for Western culture a new printext medium. Such is a medial provision that even now – apart from latter-day, fitful, and mostly forgotten experiments in hypertext, and with Spritz adepts notwithstanding – continues to hold sway over the way we read: a sway conceptual and terminological if no longer so definitively material. So that, if the “plain style” was the self-dissolved catalyst in the original distillation of a more linear prose from the recursions of periodic rhetorical complexity in a Latinate mode, the codex form itself, maximized as cultural force in print circulation, may appear today as having served the role, again, of “vanishing mediator” – if over a much longer span of unplanned obsolescence – in a shift to the streamlined (and now, in the other sense streaming) habits of current “book reading” on screen. Call this once again book history “for a digital age.” Reconnecting with Agamben, we can now estimate the historical force of the turning point spotted in the arguments of both Kenner and Guillory by revisiting it in more theoretical (or metalinguistic) terms: terms engaged perforce with the ontological space between not just thing and word, but between the sayable and the said. The anti-rhetorical ferment noted by such literary historians as Kenner and Guillory might thus have promised a defining intersection of the language of science with a revisionary science of language, through which the verbal medium as such might have come to full definition. Might have. But didn’t – or not quite. Given its premature foreclosure in a single (“plain”) style, the polemical agenda just missed the mark. Yet we’ve been lingering here at what must seem a proleptically familiar

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intersection. All it takes is to rewrite our ongoing triad, in closer attunement to this watershed moment, as imprint/text/medium (with or without the canted uprights) – and one begins to see how a robust genre all its own, “novel” as all get-out, got underway. And did so on underlying terms now better apprehended as the work of a mutable rather than stringently instrumental prose, more versatile than narrowly serviceable. The modern book finds the apt texture of its text in a “realized” (both senses) and broadgauged medium of indeterminate pattern, whose felt oral rhythms and symmetries are not surrendered entirely to ornate and outmoded classical patterns but internalized, especially under Romantic impetus, as the shape of wording itself in graphonic decipherment. Though unpursued by Guillory’s resolute historicism, the sense here is that unembellished prose, scoured of rhetorical opacity, offers from phrase to phrase a purer glimpse into the propellant form of language itself, not just its latest mode of choice – where the “sayable and the idea” had their best and most lucid chance of coinciding. But not, for Agamben certainly, in any stable center of an uttering subjectivity, the myth of which, as we’ll see, is one of the first victims of a fully problematized consideration of name versus idea. With literary inscription being what we might call its frequent (non)proving ground. Before looking again at examples of language in literary action – examples not entirely novelistic, but say broadly prose poetic (Whitman’s blank verse included) – we have thus needed to recognize how the elided concept of medium in Agamben might clarify the vexed zone of contact between “the sayable and the idea,” and how literary history can help fill in this blank. For within the range of sayability in the wake of the plain style, it is certainly the emergence of an openly courted phonic materiality into prose poetics, as we are further to see, that ties this chapter to the last. And tethers it to Agamben’s multifaceted work elsewhere in the densities and suspensions of poetic language: in precisely Valéry’s understanding of such features in their postponement of sense by sound – dear to Agamben, and no doubt especially in its echoic and selfillustrative French – as a structured deferral (no matter how momentary) of sens by son. Not least among the implications of this paradigm, when recast as an ontological rather than a rhetorical lag, is the way the brief fissure in consciousness on which this depends – of phrasing from meaning, from being – also maps, for Agamben, onto the proverbial decentered (or split) subject of enunciated desire. The historicized abstract signification of mathematics aside, Agamben’s What Is Philosophy? – the question as well as the collection – returns

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unmistakably in this way to the busy crossroads of deconstructive critique and psychoanalytic theory in post-1968 thinking, even while characterizing such issues as a far deeper return to metaphysical forerunners. Just ten pages in, the agon at stake is personified as a millennially pitched battle of inveterate antagonists in a kind of nonchivalric allegory: “Western philosophy originates from the hand-to-hand combat between these two very weak beings that consist of and take place in each other”: namely, the subject and its language (or, alternately phrased, language and its speaking subject).6 Shrinking from direct confrontation, they wrangle with each other merely in laying frail claim to what ends up being a shaky common ground. The shared weakling status of subject and its manifestation or avatar in speech, or say of their involuntary sparring within a common lingual medium, is thus a symptom of their own mutual instability – and in poetry as much as in prose. After the birth of the novel, even poetry would never again be so involute and vestigially oratorical as in its classic forms of rhetorical furnishing. It would – under the sign of blank verse – own to an increasing cousinship with prose, and hence to a shared medium of textual manifestation known as writing, as stored language, where even a heroized self-presence like Whitman’s pays its dues to the slippages of inscription. Yet to say so is to question, in its deepest metahistorical premise, the work of one of our digital epoch’s leading media theorists in regard to precisely this same post-Enlightenment watershed. What, then, for Friedrich Kittler, is the nature (tactically naturalized at every turn) of the eponymous “discourse network,” in its 1800 phase, when attempting to outplay its own technical basis in linguistic signaling, its own materiality as sheer script? The foregoing discussion has positioned us not just for an answer but for some English-language exemplification. What rides on this is the extent to which, in its richest moves, one finds modern literature alive to, rather than avoiding, the operable conflation of printext medium. Moves, and their conceptual momentum – where print serves to channel and discipline, but also to incite, the obtrusion of linguistic mediality in the byways of both its programmed and its insubordinate revelations.

Network vs. Medium Agamben’s ontology, so we’ve seen, complicates the matching of word to idea, each consubstantial in the other, in what we might follow the linguists in identifying as language’s vertical axis. In the horizontal plane, however, the question of temporal operation intersects the paradigms of nomination with a different order of potential mismatch and relatching.

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Considering this flow of code is another way in which the vantage of our “digital times” can shed light on the whole historical spectrum of reading time: not just on the page-turners of the codex tradition but on the turn and return of syllabic matter in aggregation on any lettered surface. And in this respect the emergence of prose out of Enlightenment empiricism, in Guillory’s account, prompts comparison with Kittler’s claims for the ethos of Romantic poetry bred by metaphysics at a comparable historical threshold. The use in reviewing this overlap of models, by moving swiftly through Kittler’s closely annotated trajectory, is to notice, in further philosophical detail, how what gets minimized by Kittler’s account of poetics is just what we have been finding in the formative (rather than just formal) texture of prose as well as verse: namely, the self-conscious mediality (technical, linguistic) he finds denied by poetry (in its mystification as soul’s speech) until its modernist phase – and abetted in this repression by literature’s critical establishment, the latter in an analytic as well as institutional sense, including its hermeneuts as well as its educational bureaucrats. Soul’s speech: an ironic and brilliantly supported claim that revolves around German educational reform elevating the role of the mother, in a shift to phonetic pedagogy circa 1800, so that literacy persisted thereafter in such an affective derivation. This was an agenda that threw over the more patriarchal protocols of rote memorization, both of letters and words, in favor of the somatically visible shapes of variably assembled phonemes on the lips of nurture itself over the domestic lesson book. Thus the male child, coming to have rather than merely, like the woman, to be language, when turning in certain privileged cases to poetry – or, as was more common, to a social role as literate state functionary – was imagined to have internalized this fecund matrix of originary voice. In specialized cases thereafter, the poetic vocation was thus primed to grant access, not just to some nostalgic domesticity or founding eroticism, but to the translatable organic fluencies of mother nature as well. In his “Afterword” to the second printing of Discourse Networks, Kittler targets what amounts to a presumed deficit, at once, in book studies, literary studies, and cultural studies, though he levels the charge against “literary criticism” as a broad umbrella term for such zones of oversight (neglect as well as purview): “Traditional literary criticism, probably because it originated in a particular practice of writing, has investigated everything about books except their data processing.”7 This neglect results, for hermeneutic and sociological approaches respectively, from an alternate emphasis now on meaning, now on labor, that diverts attention from the

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middle ground of writing itself – as “informatic” receptacle, and vehicle. But one pauses, surely, over that overly tentative “probably” in his summary critique, since hundreds of his pages before this have been mounted to trace the occlusion of literary “data” channels back precisely to a falsified view of just such “writing” as extruded inwardness: the myth doubly vouched for by the limited liability partnership of German metaphysics and Romantic philology. This whole line of thought is deeply enmeshed in that ontological conjunction of human being and human language that, in Kittler’s earlier demonstrations, rendered writing the work of expression rather than inscription. On his view, certainly the temporal moment of the reading experience allowed, for Romantic theory, no recognition of literature as a time-based medium, but merely as a closed interpersonal “network” participating in the lived undulations of natural (and mortal) duration, phonically evoked on the page. Time-based: easier said than parsed, then, in its implications for print textuality, at least in a long view of linguistic theory. For such implications are ultimately dematerialized in the throes of German idealism – whose epoch and its aftermath, as Kittler reads them, tend to drain mediation of its recognized channeled matter, rob literary discourse of its textured “data base,” ignore storage functions, and even the seriality of access, in the name of spiritual immediacy. But this is where Kittler ironically dogs the heels of idealism so closely that his own terms for its mystifications inherit a certain deaf spot in respect to the audial signifier and its operable slipstream. One must go carefully here, but not by sweeping the problem from sight – or audition. When phonetic language is understood in a truly “material” sense, it is always divorced to that extent from ideation (even as serviceably fused with it in referential usage). In this sense one readily locates the drawback in Kittler’s sustained wry irony concerning idealism’s bias toward voice rather than script. And this, in particular, with regard to the grounding thereby provided for Romantic poetry in aspiring to the internalized rhythms of nature. For Kittler settles too quickly, even on his own distancing terms, for the phenomenological abstractions he renders steadily suspect. The most rigorous of media theorists thus ends up missing, to some strategic extent, the operable mediality, the vacillating data channels, of the period’s own poetic evocations at the level of differential vocalization itself – quite apart from any fantasies of natural presence, maternal or environmental, they might be summoned to manifest or authenticate. But in missing this (more generously: underplaying it), he has nevertheless amassed a full panoply of theoretical evidence for it – even with tongue often in silent cheek for his deadpan renderings of the

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metaphysics that would suppress any such linguistic instrumentality in the name of Muse-inspired effusions. Under a proto-Romantic aesthetic, as Kittler shows in extensive cullings from late-Enlightenment commentary, poetic measures approximate the time signatures of a nonlinguistic music. They do so not as an inter-art gesture but as a mode of essentializing the relation of language to the transient rhythms of the given world. Intoned in this sense, poetic language proceeds not first of all as a train of signification, and not as another thing among the world’s material substances – and certainly not just as written glyphs – but as participating immanently in the world’s felt duration. This is to say that, for Enlightenment philology, the work of humane letters disavows its (their) very basis (the grammatical ambiguity, just there, being quietly definitive in the split between the literate and the lettering that facilitates it). In the case of belles-lettres especially, fixed graphemes – text markers on the page – are flashed away in their own vanquished letteral form: a materiality denied, evaporated, by the physical soundings they induce rather than produce – and these merely en route to feeling in conveyance. Elicited in Kittler’s rendering, and tacit undermining, of Hegelian phenomenology is thus the philosophic idea that poetry does not emit music, but is met by the mind’s own internal tonality. Hence, for Romanticism, poetry’s ontological force as a temporal experience more than a time-based medium. In the phonetic regime of “alphabetization” (rather than inscription), poetry annuls its own lettering in the letting loose and slipping away of sounds. But these ripples of enunciation disappear less into the meanings they are barely recognized to signal, via the techne of writing, than into the thoughts they seem to educe, the unfolding nature – the naturalness itself – they manifest as inward idea. Early on in Discourse Networks, Kittler draws support from Foucault on how German philosophy at the turn into the 1800s served to shore up German metaphysics by separating language from the material esoterics of script. Direct human expression, as Foucault is borrowed to phrase it, “has acquired a vibratory nature which has separated it from the visible sign and made it more nearly proximate to the note in music” (32). And it is a reprise of this articulation by Foucault that coincides later with Kittler’s citations from Hegel on “tone” as “the fulfilment of the expressiveness by which inwardness makes itself known” (43). This phonically inflected inner life, this innerness of life, is manifest in a cognate relation to tonal production as a “determinate being within time” – which is to say that it is thus recognized as a “determinate being which disappears in that it has being” (43). Call tone, in this sense, overdetermined: as transience embodied, at once

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instance of and figure for inward duration – and this in response, as reiterated by Kittler, to the world’s no longer quite outer rhythms, whether in reading or in other forms of internalized consciousness. The titular “phenomenology of spirit” in Hegel’s masterwork, one might summarize in this case, is that of flux itself – and language its articulation in the same experiential vein: the paradox of ephemerality concretized. Immediacy incarnate.

Sensed vs. Sounded To convict a leading media theorist like Kittler of skimming just above the avowed subliminal channel of poetic mediation in his materialist literary history is not as unlikely as it sounds – if exoneration is included, which certainly it is here, for his having brought us closer to this level of perception than most previous writing on literature. His psychosociology of the phoneme (one tempting way to characterize it) bites right to the core of textual enunciation as practiced in the laboratory of poetics – but not, there, by excluding medium from the naturalized work of the literary book, as he would claim, but by energizing its latent features apart from any maternal ideology of naturally sourced word sounds in a Romantic aesthetic. The scope of the book/text/medium nexus – as a continuum – is not thereby dismantled in the resistance exposed by Kittler, in contemporaneous late-Enlightenment philology, to both the constituent letter and the lexical unit under the auspices of auditory flow. Identifying and parsing the ideology behind this linguistic negligence – and here the main turn in my departure from Kittler – isn’t necessarily to follow the discourse network’s own 1800 creed, its philosophy of spirit speech, in charging Romanticism at large with an implicit denial of technical mediation, of “data processing,” in the intuitive pulse of a natural enunciation. Poetry, even at the time, may have known better than philosophy. To repeat Kittler’s critique (from our citation of this summary remark in Chapter 4): “In 1800 linguistic analysis was not allowed to approach the two forbidden borders of the word and the letter” (43). It was concerned instead only with whole words and their naturalized familial roots. Synchrony was bypassed by diachronic backfill; etymology trumped structure. Yet literary wording, one wishes to insist, beat back this veto on the lexical incrementality of reading. Between the upper and lower limits of word and letter, even if granted in the rigidity of their exclusion by Enlightenment thought, and even if for English as well as German philology, the phoneme could still, as we’ve noted, bring the syllable to life as a writing effect. That would be one

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aspect of poetry’s operational backlash, even if not deliberately counterideological, against the linguistic science of its day. How sayable some ideas may be, of course, remains an open question – and to what degree wording may exceed all direct saying. The premises of ideation can, in fact, turn back on themselves quite forthrightly – and in forceful phonetic terms, where alphabetized graphemes do more than effortlessly disappear into a presencing of thought and its rhythmic perceptions. So a longer view of technical mediation is of use here – and not least Kittler’s own. We know, from his later work, how film constitutes for him a fulfilment of the imaginary rather the symbolic order (in Lacanian terms), and we can further see, in Julian Murphet’s related approach to multi-mediation in its cross-over aesthetics from poetry to film, how a later century’s new medium of mechanical reproduction, recognized as such, thus arrives as, in its own way, the technological naturalization of a Romantic myth. The world can suddenly be made present (visually rather than just spiritually so) by the virtuality of art. It is in contrast to this, as we’ve noted, that Kittler understands the invention of phonography as a capture of the “real” (rather than the imaginary or the symbolic). This is exactly not the material reality to which subvocalization is said to aspire in the Romantic verse circuit, where all such physiological vibrations (ultimately Muse-derived via maternal rather than material phonics) are ultimately deferred away to the ruse of referential access and pure conception. Phonography comes later, in a different relation to writing and the mind’s eye. The earlier results of oral pedagogy are imagined to feed achieved poetic speech directly into the flow of the world’s duration. When insisting, early in the Romantic trajectory of Discourse Networks, that it is only by means of such dematerialization – in the tonal dissipation of the word’s mere signifying function – that (again) “Poetry could let its film roll” (166), Kittler is thereby conjuring the hallucinatory override of symbolic language as if pure enunciated thoughts and images were spooling past on the invisible sprocket catches of the graphemes and their fleeting phonemic clicks. If writing were only that easy; facility, that much of a sheer flow. Unlike the traditional stress in phenomenological film theory on the world “becoming-image” before our gaze, the myth here is an equally “lifelike” vanishing of alphabetic operation that evanesces literary tonality into mental image. So that the taboo imposed by an audiophiliac philosophy of expressive spirit on the too-obviously structural, rather than natural, facets of literary speech, letter and word, is often lifted by the word/s/play (cross-sectioning degree zero) of the period’s own verse. And it is precisely for this reason – in the syllable’s quiet (murmured)

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collusion with, rather than exclusion of, both lexeme and contributory letter – that I have wanted, here and elsewhere, some shared focus on the filmic photogram and the literary phonogram. About literary writing, however, there is a further way to rephrase and engage the premise of incrementality against the presumption of Kittler’s “forbidden borders.” If modern poetics began in thrall to an ideology of an entirely natural rhythm of ephemera rather than of built phrase, poetry itself, literature in general, has a way of answering to this dematerializing specter. It speaks back in the only terms available to it: speech form itself, wording in process, the nexus of syllabification in precisely the bridge between letter and word. Literature a time-based function, yes – but not, as we’re seeing, to be taken lightly or at face value as such. Here media archaeology can reward any attempt to understand text production in its slippery graphonic terms. It’s not a matter (material or otherwise) of the time it takes to read a sentence or a page. Paintings take time to “process” as well. It is not the overall duration of semantic comprehension that is at stake in the temporality of reading, but the pace of reading’s own serial linguistic process: the time a word’s formative elements must take to fade – or say flicker – into meaning; not just to disappear as language into grasped sense all told, like wind on a purling stream, but to slip away into sense-making succession. If this constitutive linguistic feature of enunciated language – as what we can only call ephemerality incarnate (bodily emplaced) – were repressed in reading, for instance, only the shape of lettering would appear as the scaffold of signification. No “grammalepsy” (Cayley) whatsoever. Instead, Kittler again cites a key phrase from his earlier recourse to Foucault, stressing once more the syllabic increment as a “pure poetic flash that disappears without a trace, leaving behind it but a vibration suspended in the air for one brief moment” (43). Not unlike, say, all that wind through the trees (not to mention through Aeolian harps) that the maximization of tone in Romantic verse made reading so uncannily connatural with. Hence – no argument here – the ideology of such verse. But the Romantic period’s enacted poetics may operate otherwise, aslant to its ideology, with a resistant syllabic granularity inherent to linguistic flux but not detached from inbuilt graphic tensions and their own ineradicable mediality: tensions whose small-scale velocities, within a time-based continuum, remain all the while variable, recursive, sometimes concussive. In moving to English-language examples in Romantic verse, who can think that Keats’s projection onto the figured pipes of his fabled Grecian urn – in imagining certain harmonies “more endear’d” than actually audible (to the

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“sensual ear”) – has not generated an interlinked and embedded phrasing inviting us to linger over its own linguistic play on internalization? How to ignore, in the counter-syllabics of “endear’d,” such an exemplary instance of densened phonetic sensation – rather than simply thinking of it (thinking it) dissolved into a described and strictly idealized fantasy of mental audition? Why wouldn’t one wish to compare this with the counteretymological play (in an often-refrained example from Kittler) that hears an exclamatory “ach!” (“Oh!”) released in its verse context from the subsignifying core of Schiller’s lexeme “sprach” (speech)? Or, returning to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” what reading would so fully sublimate sound into semantics as to forbid hearing an “end-ear-ed” undertone in those famous “ditties of no tone” – hearing in the latter phrase itself, that is, and even as the effect operates under micro-temporal erasure, the graphonic trace it both conjures and mutes? For there, at least for a splitword second, staring us between the ears from between its own words, is a “note” (via cross-word notation at the retained long-o of “no t[one])” that is alone manifest in the sound, rather than surfaced lexicon, of language at work in its incremental sayings. Submitted to there, admitted by the ear, is a cumulative process that no mere imprint status for “ditties of no tone” can interdict. How could one deny this as a transient monosyllabic pun, accidental or otherwise, and thus refuse it all air space – even in its tacit resistance, against the ideology of naturalized temporal flow, to just that bodiless and strictly idealized apotheosis of fluted tunes on the inner sounding-board of spirit? In poetry’s temporal basis, the music of flow is constitutive, to be sure, but not without its material counter-flux. It’s not a case, a pace, of phoneticized verse attuned to, and dissolved into, the tempi of sculpted musicianship on the urn. It’s a matter of language chiseling away at its own successive inscription. Francis Bacon on the “Medium of Wordes” comes back to mind: a matter (and a materiality) at play between “note” and “notion,” notation and ideation. And when Nature rather than Art, in the quintessential move of Romanticism for Kittler, is summoned as a force answered to by poetry in the ideological closed circuit of sympathetic and resonant inwardness, as with a complementary English example next from Shelley rather than Keats, the gap between poetics and ideology is only further exacerbated: the fissure, that is, between an implied (or confessed) mediality and the soul’s speech (Kittler’s ironized mantra). How can we presume, even within Shelley’s rapturous apostrophic trope, that the poetic spirit actually aspires, via breathy inspiration, to meet the “wild West Wind” (in his famous “Ode”) solely on atmosphere’s own ontological terms (“thou

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breath of Autumn’s being”) – given, that is, the etymologically complex letteral and phonetic imperative of internalization to come in “Be thou me, impetuous one!” For splayed open there, in the “Ode to the West Wind,” is a phonetic whoosh that doesn’t simply dial up – even while quickly suppressing – the “impetus” of a partially anagrammatic “tempestuous.” Caught up in the aural rather than letteral flux as well, and once setting to one side that impet-root, the line’s phrasing sweeps right over that etymological ripple with the phonic trilateral pun on a conflationary “you us one” (read “Be thou me”). If this might seem like the zephyr-rush of a natural mimesis – words offering (by participating in) the world’s own whirl of energy – it is a momentum retarded, at the same time, across its own quasisyllabic terracing in the lingual feat of its measured trochaic footwork. Shelley didn’t necessarily stage this in advance, this punning on grammatical personhood, in order to have heard it in contingent process – and thus to have retained its happy accident after the fact. And suffice it to say further – despite Kittler’s minimizing of any such verse urge, any surge of contrapuntal force against the “tonal” run of alphabetic translucency – that the voiced soul of poetry, or say the speaking subject of Romantic verse, has no aesthetic interest in dissolving the signals of its intensively phoneticized alphabetic combinations into the deliriousness of sheer sense perception. Rather, such poetry keeps these phonic signals in generative tension with its letters – as the very magic of its craft within the persuasion of its art. Nor is there reason to minimize the extra charge here, in this three-way pun on personhood (“-uous one” for “you us one,” as compared with Lawrence’s “of my being and of her being in a new one”), in exposing a flashpoint for that perpetual skirmish between language and subjectivity in Agamben’s ontology. Equally in these examples from Keats and Shelley, we may say that when, in Kittler’s terms, “poetry lets its film roll” – as if conjuring the natural continuum it “screens” for us as temporal interface – such surcharged poetic energy has no desire, any more than cinema itself in its own moments of intense technical self-consciousness, to repress the plasticity of its cellular flow, but rather to revel in – by revealing – the play of its increments on the run. Here, again, is where a relentlessly materialist media theory of reading’s data retrieval, like Kittler’s, may nonetheless – when bent on exposing the idealist end-run around acknowledged mediation in the explicit Romantic appeals to nature or art (western breeze or Grecian sculpture) – risk inclining us toward a slackened vigilance in encounter with the actual oscillation of poetic wording. One does well to note instead, with all ideology of the

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enunciating subject suspended even in the process of its consolidation, how the immanent poetic force, via activated data channels, of a graphonic medium may well (pace Kittler) seem more forthrightly to know – and show – whereof it speaks. Not apart from their phonetic alphabeticization, then, but often across and athwart it, the letters of language do not simply provide catalysts that disappear in the chain reaction they precipitate. (Guillory’s chemical metaphors for the transitional innovation of the plain style have, therefore, a different valence at this scale.) The density of poetic language only intensifies, rather than transcends, this fact, this condition of persistence, this drag on rapid vanishing. On the literary page, the etched shapes of literary letters operate in racing (rather than entirely erased) counterpoint – and frequent syncopation, at times semantically dissonant – with the already thick and potentially scratchy channel noise that their phonic stylus is aurally imagined to trace out in transmission to the inner ear. Against any blanket ideology of unmediated presence in inward speech, here is the continuous pushback of poetics in action, where more is performed than in any preformulated fit of word to world. So it is that the rhythm of signage is repeatedly heard to signal itself, mediatized, in the interstices and ligatures of “processed” sense. In the hands of a master stylist like Henry James, when writing is put under the contextual pressure of a narrative involving the commercial word counts of turn-of-the-century telegraphy – versus the auditory transmission channels of its electric data pulses – such recognitions of linguistic process may well warp the prose of its narrative’s own delivery.

The Counted Word From George Eliot to Oscar Wilde, in the last chapter, and forward now to Henry James: a range of very different prose, to be sure, yet in each case keyed, in some overtly medium conscious way, to the audition of internal variances at the structural nub of literary writing. And in James’s case, actually thematized around the work of telegraphy’s own key taps of transmission. Whereas, in the case of Eliot and Wilde, a vocabulary of “medium” was differently if explicitly brought forward, in James, without reference to electric transmit as a “medium,” an entire data technology is at the disposal of his plot. In attempting to register certain infra-syllabic currents that might contest the otherwise denigrated granular linguistics of Kittler’s model – essentially unrevised in this respect, at least for mainstream writing, from 1800 to 1900, just demystified in the ousting

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of soul as verbal touchstone – examples aren’t far to seek. On the contrary, the supposedly banned consideration of letters and words, alphabet and its constructs, as the carriers of discourse at the level of its essential medial ingredients, would be hard to prove from their bidden, rather than forbidden, play across English writing – and across Kittler’s two epochal break points – from the namesake Wordsworth to Virginia Woolf.8 For all the ample evidence of what we might call these subsemantic currents operating all along, despite Kittler’s argument, in audible service and insurgency alike, it should nevertheless help – in clarifying any demurral from his position – to favor an example that plugs directly into the thematized informatic ironies of his own second turn-of-the-century paradigm. This includes his 1900 emphasis on the leveling of Woman (or Muse) by her entrance into the workplace of clericalized women (plural) in the new media pools of discourse transmission. So look first – and not just look, but listen – to Henry James’s 1898 female telegrapher from In the Cage rather than, as in Kittler, to Bram Stoker’s female dictagraph transcriber in Dracula from the previous year: namely, to the nameless “our young lady,” otherwise “personage,” as mere transmissive function(ary) in a tawdry London post office, rather than to the working-wife role of shorthand expert Mina Murray Harker.9 In so listening – to a Jamesian prose saturated with a quirky free indirect discourse, and thus often channeled by transferred mediation from the mind (and mind’s ear) of the heroine herself – one hears, not a graphological modernism in action (James is in the line of George Eliot, not Mallarmé), but rather, in exactly the vocalized tension between letter and word, the legacy of Romantic sonority gone ironic. “Our” young protagonist, caged in the punningly “wired” lattice of her electrical transmission booth, is an impoverished, lovelorn clerk enamored with the dashing upper-class Captain Everard, who employs her supposedly impersonal services as electronic go-between in scheduling his amorous affairs.10 In the final reveal of her vicarious lover’s fate, we hear that “in the cage” she had “sounded depths,” but nothing comparable to this new yawning “abyss” (205). Phrasing echoes there, with an almost metallic clang, against the actual electromagnetic “sounder” that audibilizes Morse code in the transmission of telegrams, a device operated at her post from the inner sanctum of a “cage within the cage” (123) – and developing its own figurative subtext-within-the-text in the phonic underlay of novelistic (rather than telegraphic) inscription. As if in marked contrast to this “innermost cell of captivity” (123), the very different work of “sounded” literary writing releases its cellular increments one

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entwined syllable after another. Any latitude or gap imagined there – especially between a numb tapping out of code in quotidian drudgery and the plumbing of untold depths in the throes of obsessive erotic interpretation – can come to seem a kind of medial “abyss” all its own in this story. Or at least a phonetic mise en abyme. Disjunctive textual functions are certainly more than simply contrapuntal. The merely counted (not necessarily read) words of a submitted telegraphic message, together with the sounding outward of its signals for decoding later at the receiving end, leverages an exaggerated division of labor – and dilated cognitive lag – that might well seem to travesty the normal silent enunciation of deciphered script. But lexical undercurrents prevail after all. In James’s often impacted script, one echoic effect leads to another more obstreperous yet. When mindlessly counting the words of a crucial message from the Captain’s mistress, before its transfer to any other mechanism but the automatism of the telegraphist’s own unthinking labor, “our young lady” fixates on “Ostend” as the destination of the message – and therefore as the whereabouts of her Captain. That fixation is couched in the terms of her own mediatory function, and with a secondary metonymy that inflects the very description of this moment. When first scanning the telegram, she sees the words “as through rippled, shallow, sunshot water,” and soon a similar blur of eddying refraction – turned now to the tinny reverberation of a slant rhyme – attends her prolonged concentration on the place name: “This hooked on with so sharp a click that, not to feel she was as quickly letting it all slip from her, she had absolutely to hold it a minute longer” (153; typographic emphasis added to the phonetic). The effect might seem more negligibly stagey – rather than rhetorically, say, cagey – if it weren’t built on, and confirmed, by later and related sound play. For this free association between impression and duration, drawn from the logic of an engineered transcription, is nothing compared to the phonetics of auditory hallucination when the heroine catches herself fantasizing that the Captain may have left her post just then – after concluding his official business – only to wait for her, yearningly, in the world outside. This routinized agent of verbal transmission, whose mind clicks like her office’s own apparatus, now directs her medial powers toward a kind of sonic (ultimately phonic) telepathy when thinking herself almost able to “hear him, through the tick of the sounder” – over the din of, but also as if through, its hammering transmit – “scatter with his s/tick, in his impatience, the fallen leaves of October” (179). Only the preceding auditory pun, in its cross-word homophony, could steal the thunder of that last melancholy cadence, that unexpected dying fall. The former would of

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course be ludicrous if it weren’t grappling so thematically with the novella’s deepest issue of dehumanized mediation. In the “rippled” trip-up between “the tick” and “his stick,” with James at this late point in his career dictating to a Remington-equipped typist, such are the quick clicks of a thickened tongue in the metalinguistics of literary inscription. In the flush – and Jamesian flourish – of free indirect discourse, the triggered pulse of the heroine’s data-mediating desire and the phrasal impulsions of an auditory fantasy coincide inseparably. This isn’t textual self-parable alone, let alone self-parody. It’s language doing its material thing, its differential things, in letting the animating static of erotic longing break through the discourse network by its own speaking in tongues. There’s no argument with Kittler, on my part, about female characters often reduced to mere streams of mediation in turn-of-the-century fiction. Taking us back to the previous century’s turn, the question here is only the scale at which this stream – and its wavelike, “sunshot” flux – have always been propelled in verse. As well as in prose poetics. Whether German Romanticism knew it consciously or not. In short, it is only by engaging Kittler at the level of his own most scrupulous discriminations that one may find, instead, then as now, no functional taboo on the recognition of letters or lexemes – his “forbidden limits,” including their own liminal border crossings – when mobilized in the syllabic crests and phonic restlessness of English literary phrasing.

Script T/ripped Up But let us return more directly to the fray concerning Kittler’s broadest claims on their own evidentiary terms. Regarding time’s own tonalities in evanescence, what happens when language has its “film roll” in either fast forward or slow motion? Unexpected evidence can be produced to address this question. Bearing on a material but demystified sense of subvocal “internalization,” an odd digital complementarity emerges in recent screen-reading technology. This involves contrary electronic reading aids targeted in each case, though oppositely, at the aural weight (and retardation) of graphonic decipherment in strictly utilitarian (non-literary) contexts: one (already noted) devised to prevent it, one almost unwittingly to capitalize on it. We’ve seen, in Chapter 2, the counter-materialist cognitivism of the Spritz speed-reading technology, reducing lexical units to their center of alphabetic gravity rather than phonetic mass. The result is that (via its “optimal recognition point”) word after word goes directly to meaning without passing through the body – without any such degree of

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internalization – as if its semantic shell could be peeled away at boosted speed without the dead weight of its semiotic infrastructure. That’s one side of the coin. An alternate approach, also driven by cognitive research, seems closer to the logic of subvocalization (without mentioning, and certainly not inhibiting, it). Emphasis veers, in this sense, from the automatic to something more atomistic and resistant. As if it were a conceptual stunt by Fiona Banner, Australian cognitive researchers, in collaboration with graphic designers, have recently defined (indeed delineated) a broken, elliptical alphabet in a backhanded italics. Very much sans serif, and pitched against the modern streamlining of Helvetica, it is called, in a punning mash-up, “Sans Forgetica” – where a more active grasp of written data is the built-in reward for the extra effort of mental labor required in its visual decoding. The erosion of individual alphabetic recognition thus slows and cements retention when the material (as information) is important to master (as for school tests). It does so when the e-text in question is fed through the “Sans Forgetica” template for highintensity screen decipherment. Examination results are said to improve by approximately 10 percent.11 The metalinguistic test lies elsewhere, however, in these exceptional but still exemplary cases of computer-adjusted reading “for a digital age.” Examination is what the lettering itself of “Sans Forgetica” requires (variously sampled on the Web) in order for us, quite literally, to fill in the blanks, the graphic breaks, rendered by subtractions and gaps. Effects, however, are not entirely letteral, since part of the fixative aspect of this text delivery, in practice, depends on the wording’s active mobilization as sounded phonemes rather than just rounded-out puzzle pieces. Think of it as grammalepsy in action. Enunciation drives home the discontinuous glyphs as your own, naturalized as language the moment they are made out through inner speech. Poulet’s phenomenology is notched one step further: the other’s, the writer’s, thoughts are had by you because you’ve had to reassemble their intermediately phonetic cues from their graphic dismemberment. Sound comes to the aid of sense, reminding us of that medial substrate where meaning is always in part generated. Excommunicated by Spritzing and excluded as acknowledged function by the promotional rhetoric of “Sans Forgetica,” nevertheless the prompting shape of the phoneme, now distracting, now activating, emerges from this contrast as ordinary language’s elusive middle term – unspoken but marked – between even delinked half strokes, the broken arches of the “Forgetica” font, and what they betoken. One doesn’t redraw the complete alphabetic character

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in one’s mind’s eye so much as draw out from it what Saussure called the “sound image” of its signifying force – that last word, for instance, like that one too in the “Forgetica” mode, completed by inferred sibilance (there again) rather than by a fully legible ce coming to the redrafted rescue in some inner vision. A lexeme’s closure is in these cases phonemically reassembled from its fractured shards. We may put it this way concerning such a new discourse network of bureaucratic efficiency (as Kittler might have it): glitches and interference in the medium, injected break-ups of this sort – noise and commotion in the very circuit (the closed graphic circuit) of letters themselves – only clarify the transmissive network as such, as medium, recuperated in process at its morphophonemic roots. Here, with “Sans Forgetica,” as with Banner’s Font in a different key, is a reading where the book must by definition be entirely left behind. The effect is therefore a kind of postcodex footnote to Chapter 2. As if some materialist stunt of platformatic irony were to display letters peeled away from their paper pages, and half shredded in the process, the digital text file involved instead – in any manifestation of the “Sans Forgetica” font – passes through its disintegrating sieve almost as if the resulting discontinuities were those of pixel breakup rather than just pixel generation in “eroded” form. Such an electronically engineered post-book affordance can thus be understood as a case of template\text\medium in yet another – and unwittingly revealing – cross-sectional disclosure for a digital age.

Pre-digital Text(ur)ing On the assumption that literary language may help evince that abiding third term of mediality in something of its full philosophical dimensions, and precisely in view of Agamben’s other terms for it, it is time to do some further reading of that writing. When, in the last chapter, “concentric circles seized” Melville’s whirling ship in its death spiral – without having eased its fate in any way (an audible homophony actively overruled, le son by le sens) – we had only begun to note some hint of voice’s wake in written speech. So, too, in the matter of grammatical undertow, with the play in Lawrence (our “being in a new one”) between “being” as noun and gerund at once, “one” as pronoun and/or metaphysical substantive. Always unstable in relation to any speaking subject, wording does not immediately submit to the regimen of naming: only mediately (i.e., medially). And sometimes, in the temporal sense, by “hesitation” (Valéry) – or call it dilation (a lingering very different from that imposed by “Sans

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Forgetica”). So let us test the ontological combat between subjectivity and its speech, being and discourse, at two extreme poles of Western literary personae: first in Walt Whitman’s version of the Wordsworthian “egotistical sublime” – as if the divided loyalties of subjectivity and language could thus be sublimated – and then in the evacuated, post-ego discourse of speculative fiction in the paradoxical mode of a “first-person” clone novel. These examples generate discursive “subject positions” (as we tend to say) whose manifestation (indeed whose materialization, whose “material reality”) in blank verse and prose, alternately, should help isolate the linguistic medium as transmissive underlay in each articulated form. The poles involve the hypertrophic subjecthood of the Whitmanian Self – bursting the seams of even species limits in the reach of a “being” protean, global, and transanimate – over against the tenuous human subjectivity of a genetically derivative “voice” in the cloned narrative speech of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. That novel’s title, of course, could otherwise be Whitman’s imperative plea, down through the generations, to the reader in the apostrophic grip of his verse. To this end, “Song of Myself,” in the 1891–92 version of Leaves of Grass, begins with one odd and disconcerting grammatical knot in each line of its inaugural tercet. And under the verbal scrutiny thus elicited, it should be obvious again that a philosophy of language doesn’t go into remission, but instead finds itself thrown into new relief, by explicitly literary pressures. Here are the famous launching lines: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.12

Leaving aside the elliptical substitute for “as good as” in the third line, as it might seem to realize an ethical discrimination in the sharing only of “good” molecular stuff, we note how the previous grammatical tensions in the first two – a conundrum and a homographic pun, respectively – are more immediately philosophic. Orthodox reflexive grammar, if not conventional rhetorical tact in verse, articulates the logic of self-celebration. But one can’t “sing myself” in the same way that one congratulates oneself. Or let’s say that one can announce and honor oneself (as discursive object) without being able to enunciate one’s Self, to bring it to be in alphabetic (let alone melodic) form. Unless, of course, such a selfhood, such a “subject,” is indeed so weakly grounded in existential parameters that its own language, its own song, goes a good part of the way toward constituting its presence in the first place: not just as a verse persona, but

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as a presumed autobiographical agent embarked on an extended epic of self-utterance. For at least a moment, in the slippage of seeming apposition, the subject introducing himself here may seem all song, all tabled identity. In any event, the ultimate power play in Whitman isn’t just a power sharing with the apostrophized reader but an admission of the codependency they institute in the moment of transmission. Certainly the enfeebled contest between speaker and speech in Agamben’s combat trope would, if it were a literary historical rather than philosophical claim, attach directly to Whitman’s famous gambit in the second line. Language, writes Agamben, “comes to life and lives only if a speaker assumes it in an act of speech” (10): that is, to probe again this lexical duality, takes it up (“assumes” its operation) only via the presupposition (“assumption”) of its possibility. What one takes as given, the language of poetic song, must be taken up in a given utterance. In the cleft between axiom and act, this split in the lexicon and grammar of “assumption” is, in Whitman’s case, foisted off onto the writer/reader dyad, where the precarious identity of the grammatical subject may seem, rather than transcended in solidarity, more like disinfected by projection: displaced onto a pronoun (“you”) with even less of a name to call his own than Whitman’s ego can boast: “And what I assume you shall assume.” Not just my vision will be delegated to you. More definitive yet, the language I assume, the “sayability” I presuppose in my “experimentum vocis” – when read by you in your own enunciation of my “I” – will be less the gauntlet you accept than the full mantle you adopt, the identification you presume, in the reading act. The “hand-to-hand” conflict figured by Agamben, between the human subject and the being of its language, is here diagnosed, enacted, and rectified in the bracketed interspace of textual phenomenology – as if in the intimate space of handwriting itself on dispensed leaves. This is, again, that legible reading space where “I am the subject of thoughts other than my own”13 – and precisely, in linguistic terms, because the “I” of such phrased thinking can only be produced by me in the readerly uptake of such discourse in the very act of its enunciation. Here, then, is the base-line grammatical fact that Whitman works to transfigure into an interpersonal epiphany. And not only does the democratizing Bard thereby blur the boundaries between himself and his human “auditor,” who actually produces and renews, assumes and resumes, his words in the sheer process of deciphering. Beyond this, the poetic persona submits his own discourse, further along in Leaves (“Song of Myself,” stanza 52), to an eavesdropping animal sentience: that of a “hawk” who

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objects, by a vocalic echo of the bird’s very name, to Whitman’s own onomatopoetic “yawp.” The hawk somehow intelligibly “complains of my gab,” and yet not in sensible words, instigating Whitman’s not quite logical riposte: “I too am untranslatable” in my “barbaric yawp.” Yet the vocalizing subject is “untranslatable” only in so far as his omnivorous ego has not entirely vanquished and consumed its opponent in that faltering battle between subject and language, persona and his poetry: only in so far, that is, as language is felt to remain partly in him, as well as he (in) it. Grammar waxes philosophical right there in my own (at first inadvertent) formulation, for the elliptical “he it” of my initial draft had in fact secured the same reductive equation (he being no more than it) that is at risk in the ontological face-off between alphabet and subject. If Whitman is for us what he sings (by signing) himself on the page, then his page is entirely translatable. So that, to maintain otherwise, his speech must instead retain some embodied timbre and pitch of animal cry – as clearly this episode with the gawking and squawking hawk is staged to suggest – in order to elude all reductive interlinguistic capture. But this claim of a voice unbested by utterance, or of a raw song still at work in interpretable words, remains – in the linguistic, even philological, sense – eminently legible. For at just this point a phonic wrinkle of Whitman’s verse serves to foreground an unexpected inflection to his metalinguistic vaunt about translation-proof originary voice.14 As noted, the assonant off-echo answering to “hawk” with “yawp” may well seem, in itself, an attempt to reclaim that Agambenesque animality of voice not yet subsumed to the elements and increments of discourse, not yet translatable. Such, although not literate speech, would be an expressive language still – and, more to the point, a “yawp” to be heard (with another broad a sound) as “ba(h)rbaric” precisely in the long-forgotten etymological sense (“imitative” in dictionary parlance) of that babbling “bar-bar” (as in the modern idiom “blah-blah-blah”) by which civilized self-image is fortified by the denigration and exclusion of foreign tongues. All barbarism is a “yawp” to the ears of the ethnographically entrenched, and it is just this othering that Whitman purposes to transcend: a gap to be crossed heroically rather than a meeting of the minds taken for granted. Hence, this admission in the same section, in further address to his silently sounding (because listening) audience: “You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean.” How disjunctive in fact is that “or”? Are being and meaning just co-present alternatives, as Agamben might have it in querying this turn of phrase? An ensuing contradiction two lines later, when the “I” posits itself as the agent who will “filter and fibre your blood” – installing

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the enunciating subject as sieve and element at once – is resolved only if one senses that the speaker can rightly be said to filter the reader’s thoughts in the very grain or “fibre” of the former’s own language as it undergoes silent channeling in the osmosis of reading by the “you” of apostrophic outreach. This is the addressee for whom, of course, all the speaker really is is what he means. Whitman, then, has here hypostatized his sung self so that the untranslated weft and filtration of his uttered being is more like a medium than a discourse: sifting the reader’s latent thoughts as well as his own through the very substance of their fibrous syllabic manifestation. At this turn, and quintessentially, the Agambenesque stand-off between subject and language seems overcome not by Pyrrhic victory but by the sheer energy of audible will. Certainly Whitman’s persona is repeatedly diffused into forces beyond the ego, most notably when death rears its limit case. Even this foreclosure, however, is recast as only relative, for in a famous passage from “Song of Myself,” the bardic voice, depersonalizing any such threat, insists that there is always the same amount of living and dying in the world, the ubiquity of Thanatos answered by a diffused Eros of the existential libido. “I do not talk of the beginning or the end.” This is because there “was never any more inception than there is now, / Nor any more youth or age,” nor “heaven or hell” (where the “nor” shades laterally there into “heaven or”). By way of horizontal phonetic drift, that is negligible compared to what’s coming – as the passage unfolds across its own self-furrowed slippages. All is a matter of beginning again from inherent phases of closure, with no more afterlife, no more aftermath of joy or pain in prospect, than that which exists in the felt ephemeral present of lived time. All is subsumed to what brings it forth, the impetus toward “being” understood as, in Agamben’s terms, a pure potentiality: or in Whitman’s, “the procreant urge of the world.” His is a phrase found spelling out there, with that teasing but lexically contained dentalized “t,” the phantom syllabification and liaison that, through the counterpart of a more malleable “d,” have already seized upon wording in the immediately preceding line. And the effect has been, even in its extravagant words-play, less narrowly metalinguistic than, if one may put it this way, medialistic. For the pleonastic “Urge and urge and urge [. . .] of the world” becomes in its own process, or overcomes, a contrapuntal and dichotomous rhythm of life and loss that has been leaked to the ear at meaning’s own expense – and by its own vocalic expenditure. This transpires – if only as an aural shadow-play of logic and language – in the pulsional transform that sweeps those procreative urges together, one after (and upon) the other – “Urge and urge and urge,” as if indeed self-

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generatively – into a death-absorbent “urgent urgent dirge” that would nonetheless only sing of renewal. The tenacity of the metrical thrust cannot override, but only reinforce, the unlatching of lexical units and their new fusion. Book\text\medium risen, yet once more, to entwined recognition backwards as well as forwards. By analogy with a sewn volume in the passage through scanned text back to the self-reshuffled forms of its medium, again we’re caught up – microcosmically, as it were – in the blade-thin turning of a cognitive leaf in its sometimes tendrilled bend from word to(ward) word.15 Or to return to a trope already on hand in a motorized bibliobjet from the “Internal Machine” exhibit of Chapter 2, recall the electric flipbook of differential bird flight, from one discontinuous avian body to the next, accompanied In Fontanive’s mechanism by that feathery whoosh deliberately reminiscent of a swiftly thumbed picture book, leaf by leaf. At a certain point of conceptual intersection, all materialities interpret each other, optical and auditory alike. In any case, there in Whitman, surely, is a deferral of word borders that “maximally stretches” the material semiotics of sense-making not just to, but beyond, the point of breakup – into the syncopated force field of alphabetic regrouping. Words, that is, answer the call of Whitman’s metaphysical dialectic on the ground of our own palpable, disabled, and rebunched reading, in the very terms of a medium whose flow is indistinguishable from the life force of the poet’s go-between aesthetic. It is in this way, in the reciprocal generativity of “urgent”/“dirge” that an overload of homonymy (in bald repetition) converts to a double churn of homophony; philosophy becomes poetry; the possible is laid bare within the actual. With noise like this in the circuits of communication and iterative naming, such is the medium itself speaking up, filling in the fissures of discourse. Loosed to perception is the pure lingual pulse not just of voice but of speech on the cusp of the letter that secures it; and not just of speech, but of the vitalized temporality in which it is floated. Subsuming in this way the otherwise recursive clutches of enunciation in “Urge and urge and urge” is a more resurgent voice than the law of the letter allows: a hammering stammer of emphasis for an “untranslatable” subject whose rhetoric undergoes its own transliteration on any ear that “assumes” its effusions – as here in a particularly “resumptive” fashion. But, to repeat, this isn’t primarily a metalinguistic nod to the flexible contingencies of Whitman’s revolutionary bardic rhetoric and its lexical slipstream. It is instead – and thereby participating fully at one level in Kittler’s sense of thematized as well as mystified natural duration – the mimesis of a writing’s deep urgency at the existential level. We are expected to confront, in this case, not Bacon’s

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“Medium of Wordes” – and certainly not George Eliot’s “summary medium” – but, rather, the world’s own restless flux and its continually interpenetrating impulses, in which all antinomies, including life and death, reside and propagate in the suspension of their own mutuality. To put most simply the climactic service for Part III that these lines from Whitman might be found to provide: that unforced, almost accidental trick of cross-word language does more than instance, it enacts in hyperflux, the channel characteristic of a uniquely malleable medium mated to blank verse and known, in Whitman, as life itself. These are not exactly Agamben’s terms, of course, and yet his founding binary, in the amorphous conjunction between “the Sayable and the Idea,” can be thought to tremble in these Whitman lines. More ideas are sayable in one breath than just the shared names of concept and object. Or to return to the starting point of Agamben’s volume, and of language itself, the split from voice into speech, determined by the splitting of the animal voice from sonics into phonics, is one condition – and retained mode – of poetry’s advent. Alive and kicking, the being of such speech amounts to the variable speech of being: this in Whitman’s uniquely brokered rematch of those millennial sparring partners (summoned here in a duel-to-the-birth) identified by Agamben as the invincibly reversible frailties of subject and language: each the other’s vehicle, this chapter would add, in the realm of medium. In citing Julian Murphet’s Multimedia Modernism in Chapter 3, regarding the material as well as representational rivalry induced upon literature by the technical media arising in the mid-Victorian era, I quoted Murphet on literature’s sudden urge to be “a thing,” and proposed that belles-lettres sought satisfaction in this respect, not only by an escalation of “technique” tout court, as in Murphet’s emphasis, but (more in the spirit of Foucault’s account of modernism) by foregrounding its words, even its letters, as things in themselves, elements in the techne of expression.16 And never fully stabilized as such. Regarding the “material reality” of the word-as-word in Agamben’s resort to Frege in pursuing the elusive ontology of language, let me now propose – with the argument of this final chapter in full swing – that, within the ambit of so-called object-oriented ontology (quite apart from Agamben’s focus), the word again returns as object, as independent thing – and precisely in its resulting misfit with the enunciating subject whose essence it might otherwise have been thought to coincide with and bespeak. Whitman certainly tends to sweep aside all obvious discrepancies between self-presence and enunciation, and yet in the rhythmic flux of vitalism and decline discussed above, a not-unrelated tension in the

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maintenance of being might be heard to lurk unexplored. In any case, we may well have discerned something similar to that mortal balance in Whitman between self-declaration and decease, procreative impulse and elegy, in his contemporary, Emily Dickinson, with the coffin-figuring “fore-rest” of the dead noted in Chapter 4: the dying selfachieved in phrased transition on the brink of its own extinction. If such phrasing keeps company with the libidinal asymptote of death residing in the very pulse of life, as in Whitman’s “urge an/d/ urge,” and if one wants to see in the Dickinson, as well, an anticipation of Heidegger’s being-toward-death (as one might also have entertained, in the preceding chapter, the Heideggerian dyad of Being and Time in connection with Hugo’s mind meld of spirit and hour, or Woolf’s later version of Big Ben as the rhythmic beat of subjectivity itself), still such literary intertexts for philosophical ontology are only the epiphenomena of those deep medial possibilities of language as such that these passages have actuated, channeled, and energized in their very wording. Compared to the richly irrigated phonemic loam of such syllabic writing in the efflorescence of identity on edge, however, a quite different battle between expressivity and being, language and subjecthood, might help further clarify Agamben’s broader underlying point. And do so while acknowledging how the thingness of language is not just one kind of thing, a matter of syllabic intensification, but can instead be maximized or minimized in relation, among many other pressures, to the density of the speaking subject it may be called upon to articulate – so different in the coming case from any Whitmanesque expansiveness.

Speaking Demeaned As against the open luxuriance of Whitman or the reverberant compressions of Dickinson, a question may well be asked of a far sparer style – as well as of a more conflicted ontology: what happens to the grammar of being as well as the being of grammar when the “procreant urge” has been replaced by recombinant DNA and its artificial coding? What takes lexical shape when we move beyond the proxying out of all “songs of myself” (objective and subjective, about and by me) in address to the investiture (again, the “assumed” mantle) of invested reading? What happens, in short, to the grammar of being at the level of steadily neutral first-person discourse when dealing with an actual clone narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go? It seems fair to say that nothing could be more foreign to the inwardly sourced self-authentication of “soul’s speech” in Kittler’s critique of Romanticism. In turning to that dead end in Ishiguro, we

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thus bring into contrast the most hypertrophic and the most attenuated forms of articulated literary “being.” In the latter case, the ingrown struggle between the etiolated status of both subjectivity and its enunciation – sketched by Agamben as the primal antagonism of metaphysics – can only enact, when operating within Ishiguro’s compromised “cellular” composite of both body and its word forms, a more enervated contest yet. And a far cry, as well, from anything like Lawrence’s grammatically elided “consummation” of a copulatory “being in a new one.” It may be that the international audience reached by the stripped-down, almost neutralized style of Ishiguro’s readily translated prose has found its perfect topic in lives whose genetic core is itself transferable, all but automatically approximated. But this suspicion on a reader’s part, even if entertained, can scarcely vitiate the local power of such prose in this context of its brutally curtailed affect. The plot of Never Let Me Go, with its premise of biologically engineered lives in planned obsolescence, living in wait for their own time-stamped “completion” as organ donors, augurs a trauma for narrative closure as well as for pending ontological shutdown. In the last sentence, with the narrator–heroine not knowing “where I was” exactly at a point of dreary respite – a no one out in the middle of nowhere – “I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”17 Spatial locators are not the only coordinates in default here. The “I was” of predication feels hung out to dry in each of its bottomless eruptions. Four escalating to forms, cross-paired as prepositions and infinitives, thicken the prose with a pallid and waning sense of vectored intent. And in all this empty impetus, the vaporous trajectory of motion is further equivocated by the clausal object of the preposition in the adverbial “wherever it was I was supposed to be.” The stumble of the grammar momentarily disrupts a reader’s sense of rhythm and direction alike, its lumpiness producing a momentary warp induced by “to drive to wherever it was I was.” If anywhere. The language of dubious being and the being of indeterminate language – hobbling each pole of Agamben’s combative stand-off between subjectivity and discourse – are rightly felt here as a telltale hiccup in the iterated verb (and existential predication) of “human being” itself (wherever, and however, “it was I was”). So that “wherever it was I was supposed to be” can be sensed, recognized, understood – all at once – to convey the merely conjectural nature of being in the first place (“supposed” in its biotech simulation): a genetically engineered being to be as strategically truncated in its “life”-line as is the arrested thrust of this mimetically hesitant sentence. Again, words are no less things when disposed under

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a thematic of entropy and enervation than when surcharged with jolts of ignited energy. In Ishiguro, and the trope remains potently philosophical, Agamben’s hand-to-hand battle between the deficient autonomies of human subject and human language – a battle here being lost by stalemate as we read, vitiated on the very brink of an artificially induced mortal finitude – is indeed a face-off bleak, depleting, and internecine. The sayable “I” of “I was” has lost its hold on any deep homonymy, has become only a name and not an idea. Or perhaps – to put it in media-theoretical terms – the speech of the subject has become a vexed articulatory interface in the place of expressive transmission. With the human organ-ism radically mediumized in its own right, in a cell-coded iteration as genetic duplicate, so is her language reduced to an almost automatized minim of individuation. There are mostly just stutters in the channel left, glitches, jumped iterations, dead spots: emblems of the end for any uttering subjectivity stripped of all sense of origination in the resurgent dirge of a “being” – of and in language – both biogenetically programmed and mortally foreclosed. Rendered cruelly instrumental for these vessels of organic spare parts, Heidegger’s metaphysical being-toward-death has become a de-authenticating social schema not unlike Nazi eugenics. With the “always procreant urge” of Whitman reduced to a genomic calculus, the Anthropocene triangulates its own vanishing point in the lingering narrative medium – and barely residual ontology – of that vestigial “was I was” and its vacuously prospective “to be.” From this last human(oid) soliloquy, it is only one epochal step further to the computer voicing alluded to by Agamben and manipulated by conceptual poet John Cayley. Compounding such a contemporary destination for linguistic evolution, a broad loop is also closed in the philological metahistory of this chapter. It is as if the so-called “plain style” has returned from the historical repressed as a pointed stylistic irony in Ishiguro. Long since the potentially decorative deployment of language as object rather than representational medium (Foucault) in the late medieval period, as might be thought epitomized in the florid lettering of illuminated manuscripts, the sparer arrays of printed prose – spurred in their own serviceable pace by the scientific bent of Enlightenment humanism, with its need to streamline empirical notation – has become, four centuries later, the “plain” blank first-“person” discourse of a mordant post-humanism, whose inadvertent ontological puns (“was I was”/“supposed to be”) serve to level rather than invigorate the tailing off of an ultimately abortive narration for the cloned subject.

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In the poetics of sayability, then, regardless of how a rose arose again and again in Stein’s fourfold phrasing, an urge isn’t just an urge isn’t just an urge after all. As much as in Whitman’s blank verse, the shared medium of prose friction, in its restless graphonic underlay, knows more snags as well as propulsions than it can name, more differentials in its discourse channel, more hum on the line – and more ways, as Ishiguro shows, of numbing utterance from within. Breaking from the philosophical sine qua non of homonymy, a literary-historical analogy is clear. What the vacillations of homography (“assume”/“assume”) as well as homophony (“urge and”/ “urgent”/“–d urge”) were to Whitman in his quite literal (or letteral) expansiveness, so the relapse to a faux homonymy in the language of being is to Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. What emerges is an ontological predication that becomes, in the case of that novel, reduced to a mere ancillary grammar in the syntax of duration (“it was”/“I was”) – either that, or a limp infinitive homography in “supposed to be” (intended as destination/presumed as sentient condition). On such a brink of philosophical freefall, the language of being enters only through the underside of a pun or the porosity of mere syntactic filler. The enunciative medium is stretched as thin as the presence it articulates. That very equivalence, of course, takes us back, though in negative terms, to Agamben’s conundrum of sayability. And in all this, to say the least, opposites corroborate. Now in Whitman’s ontological expansiveness, now in Ishiguro’s withering existential contraction, once in epic aggrandizement, long since in humanist eclipse, the fundamental ontological conjuncture of “the sayable and the idea” – the being of language and the language of being(s) – enters the poetics of literary speech along the tracked backdraft of wording itself. Where reading’s mute button is not only rarely pressed but hard to locate. Subvocal pulses keep wording half heard on its instantaneous passage to meaning, the sense of “material reality” still operative in, or at least shadowing, the sense-making faculty. The rhythm of phonemic voicing is thus evinced – evocalized – even as it is eviscerated in the intelligible. It is in this way, by these means, that the work of the lingual medium (as middle term between subjectivity and language) foregrounds the latent content of its own form, its phrasal shape and urgency. Foregrounds it in Agamben, certainly, against another medium, that of number, that depends on the autonomy (again) of a sign “of which there is no part” (78). Names instead, indeed most all words, are composed of definitive and fertile moving parts. Poetic words, especially, seethe with semiotic particles not necessarily settled into script: sensate aggregate matter still in flux. Yet their reign is by no means absolute in the long history of human meaning-making.

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From homo homonymous through quantum geometry and differential calculus to an organized noise (almost a reversion to the continuum of animal voice) in the nondiscursive signals of computer code: such is the trajectory, as traced piecemeal by Agamben in What Is Philosophy?, that can still be pertinently intercepted, under thematization in any one literary text, by the ingrained traces of phrasing in process. Which is to say: by the differential substrate, whatever the physical support, of language materially at work along the text/medium interface.

Between Machinese and Medium Agamben’s triggering distinction comes back to mind. The unsayable is a linguistic category, obliterated by the lettering of actual speech, whereas the sayable is a philosophical problem. Not least today, where, varying Hamlet, there are not just “more things . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” but more things, rather than beings, more entities engaged in the act of saying, than philosophy has developed names for. Ishiguro’s clones have their own voice, yes, but not their own full or individuated life – and hence no confident grammar of being. They are not machines, just treated like them, as instruments, organ repositories. Though fully literate, they do not quite know what to say for themselves. And that’s only the middle ground on a spectrum of the post-human. Far more radical in ontological terms than computer text or programmed speed reading, artificial intelligence is a new sticking point in any poesis of human enterprise. Self-learning robots are certainly not learning a self when they batten on the feedback loop of new data input in the varieties of vocal expression. Rather, they are unlearning for us, yet again, any secure and privileged notions of self and verbal consciousness. And if cognition is what they boast instead, the teleological mastery of these phonorobotic agents (as pure systems) leaves at least one question still undecided on this far horizon of technology. It’s hard to avoid the problematic at stake. If the human being is, by definition, the speaking animal, homo loquens, as well as the tool-using animal, the fact that tools themselves are now speech-using entities throws a potential wrench into previous ontologies of the word. But this fact also calls to mind Heidegger’s phenomenology of the equipmental event yet again, this time from a new angle – and one which artificial enunciation only begins to exhaust. In their recursive philological functions, machines can grow progressively articulate without being in the least theoretical, the least contemplative, about the computergenerated ontology of their language skills. If this means that machines,

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though intelligent, can never wax truly philosophical – thus shoring up, in contrast, the one last refuge of the human – our comparative advance in this one respect might be cold comfort in a computerized global network. The robotic voice – intervening between “the sayable and the idea” based solely on its accrued data bank of syntax and lexemes – may thus locate a philosophical question forsworn rather that brought to the terms of a new answer. John Cayley’s apostrophic address to Alexa from the “silent silo” of stored human language – “Where are the listeners?” – is one sardonic question. Another: where is the “speaker,” except by terminological metonymy in the upright tabletop machine? Printed book, verbal text, linguistic medium: what each reveals of the other, in descending order of immediacy, are perceptions lost to any available evidence in the subterranean lair of the algorithm. Yet this dimension of our current “digital age” must be left here, finally, to the vanishing point(s) of its own evolving devices. All this book can do, in drawing to a close, is what it has done from the start: bear down on the materiality of human speech forms in print, whether effaced or foregrounded by graphic exaggeration. Even within the realm of the sayable as a strictly philosophical problem, as Agamben claims, its actual saying remains a linguistic function nonetheless. Pursuant to this, literary analysis is most likely to concern itself with how language works, rather than how come. And that’s where the “material reality” of medium, letteral and subvocal alike, comes in: not between langue and parole but as the emergence, over syntactic time, of wording from the conduit of its own potentiated options. With language its precondition – that is, within an ontological interchange of names-for-things – we can thereby define the textual medium as the process by which the sayable reaches manifestation in the said, finds its phrasal imprint, its expressive stamp – even at times against the grain of inscription. Medium is the possibility of the sayable made material. And in that making, that material shaping, medium is what never disappears entirely into what it delivers. It is time, then, to return from the long shadow of Heidegger’s Rede/ Sprache distinction, as it might be felt to have cast itself over Agamben’s middle ground in “sayability,” to the more specific terms of the former’s object ontology, as anticipated in the Intro\Retro – even though seemingly far afield from Agamben’s concerns. In doing so, however, we can suggest, in a fusion of shared terms, that literary writing – when gone mediumdeep, and responded to as such – is a case of language on hand in its own discourse. Although not at-hand, or on call, until used in the oral or scriptive act (or their silent blend), language remains nonetheless potently

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present-in-potential when contemplated as the latency of the sayable. If, in Heidegger, mental discourse is the mode by which we understand being, and language (speech) is its specific communicative means, then the logic of transmit is clear: Rede via (rather than versus) Sprache, discourse via the totality of words at its tacit and selective command. But the other, and it may now appear overlapping, Heideggerian distinction with which we’ve dealt – between presence and handiness, say, or recognized availability and its availed function – persists. And needn’t be seen as erecting a categorical barrier, rather than a continuum, when reframed within the domain of language rather than (other) tool use – as I hope the previous crosssectional readings have shown by example so far, as now by claim. That claim (always implicit in our building toward it) is this: that language, like the pen, is only ready-to-hand in the act of written speech or its reading; it remains, in contrast, and both before and after such processual events, importantly present-at-hand when disinterestedly contemplated – not as message solely, but as mediating means. Contemplated, meditated upon, perceived as medium: not as a glitchfree equipmental function but as a material and cognitive affordance – and a unique ontological phenomenon. Including when it is recognized under negation by its exaggerated absence, as in the demediated bookworks at which we looked, if rarely found open, early on. Hence the dialogue these chapters have encouraged between physical page, textual process, and medial disclosure. The book in the abstract, vessel of tradition, is typically absorbed by that tradition as self-evident object or cultural icon. Sculpting it, or with it, serves to alienate its status one irreversible step further from use value in what Heidegger would call, instead, the evaluative work of “unconcealment.”18 Here in the realm of plastic art, on the one hand, is the fact of bookhood, and by association of textuality, often unveiled in its essence by blockage, contortion, or even effacement, just as in literature, on the other hand, the fact of language as medium is frequently laid bare through the studied congestion and estrangement of discourse (“studied” in both senses) in the granularities of speech. To qualify this by what might be Agamben’s further stipulation: if one can never quite access the “being” of language at such moments, given its ontological regress, one does nonetheless engage, beyond semantics, even beyond semiotics, with the fact of “there being language”: a medium in its immanence, as routed from the haptics of physical sensation to the contours for phrasing itself, for instance, in the fine echoic translation of Hermann Hesse’s phrase “the enchantment of the tangible.”19 The Nobel laureate who repurposed books, as we saw in Chapter 1, to stabilize the

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grounds of his estate also wrote, at the same time, a phonetic prose whose evocations, even when dredged from the resources of a second language, tap the underchant of language’s very medium. Here, then, is breached the outer limit of phenomenology in a default to mediality. According to the former, in Poulet’s formulation, the thoughts of the other are transferred to me as mine. I enunciate the understanding of the “speaker” whose words I read, and they are thus internalized as self-generated. But in a luscious phonetic involution of silent speech like “the enchantment of the tangible,” one doesn’t have to settle for knowing what is meant. One feels it, inhabits it – in the very act of producing the oblique but palpable mimesis of its syllables. And, to say the least, one feels by contrast the exclusion of any and all such lexical wizardry in the reductive tangibility, the fixed inert physicality, of the bibliobjet. So again we may circle round to the sculptural architectonics – rather than the “internal machine” of the turned and actually read page – displayed by certain types of book sculpture. What the bibliobjet often does, in philosophical terms, is to twist instrumentation toward investigated “presence-at-hand” by the aesthetic route of damage or absentation. In a single conversionary figuration, the conceptual bookwork may well evacuate all usable words, even visible pages, from the instrument justified only by them, thus alienating use from physical form by removing text from any accessible surface, medium from the support system of its cancelled manifestation. Spectators aside, in all the provocations to decipherment by which such objets elicit their figurative recognitions, conceptual book sculpture remains an installation of the codex form without any potential reader. Cathected thereby is a decidedly exploratory “without” – an investigative and often metaphoric negation, where the obviated page serves to evince the missing vitality of wording in little and at large. It hardly requires a Heideggerian reductio ad absurdum to clinch this point, but it can’t hurt. Byron Clercx, one of the conceptual appropriationists I discuss in Bookwork, and who was later represented in that “Odd Volumes” show toured in Chapter 1, pulps and remolds print and newsprint material on art theory into a kind of return-to-wood handle for a metal axe blade by the punning title Axiom (1993). Yale University Art Gallery description: “Found pages from newspapers and postmodern art criticism and theory books with glue, resin, and metal.” Not a hammer, as in Heidegger’s famous example of an object ready-to-hand in use, rather than when broken or stored – though Clercx has earlier fashioned just that tool out of the bludgeoning polemic of two Susan Sontag texts.20 But Axiom nails the point anyway, or slices through the mode’s central

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distinction in order to clarify its function: illustrating how the bibliobjet transfigures a former site of reading matter into a newly refigured but nontextual materiality. To what end such violated means? – as we long ago asked. If a book is indeed ready-to-hand only when read, where lies the aesthetic motive – and philosophical use – in rendering merely present-athand, instead, the materialized idea of the readerly superstructure, drained of content or strained to the far edge of recognition? The question should by now answer itself. Within the conjured aura of the otherwise functional codex, it is absence (instrumental exile) that crystallizes the missing or twisted page as concept rather than equipmental feature. Ditto, whenever visible textuality in its lines of print is isolated as such by abrasion, scorching, or intermittent erasure. So, too, in turn – to round out our spectrum of evidence as an inherent sliding scale – the same logic prevails whenever, in actual reading moments, the linguistic medium throws us back on its own analysis in process, or even in momentary abeyance, rather than just being instrumentally activated. This intrinsic parallel – this cross section of effects in different scalar frames – is, of course, just what the threefold dovetailing of this book’s paired chapters has both presumed and moved to demonstrate.

Figuring the Linguistic Ground A last subsection in such a chapter deserves, I like to think, its own phonetic subset – or subtext. Figuring the ground? Is that just another figuration of a gestalt flip, or one gesture toward a more stable disclosure? In any case, such manifestation of the base need not be as directly circular as may seem this phrasing itself in its shadow play, by elision, with the subliminal “linguisti/c round.” Words slide past in reading, sounds cycle round, letters slip out from under themselves without eluding all recognition of their underlying possibilities as such: as lingual components. One can in fact break back from the circle of inscription’s grip into the underlying field of variables – the grounding options – that activate its traction from one sentencing to another. On consideration, and on balance, then, it needn’t seem in the least reductive or tendentious to come at the Agambenesque crux as follows. What links the sayable and the idea – what coheres under the two auspices of the name – has a name. That name is medium – where the names for things work to summon what they aren’t, as words, in the necessary but not sufficient form (because otherwise inexpressible) of what they are: verbal structures. Trees don’t bend and swish in the wind because of the long-vowelled exhalation snapped back by

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the sibilant hiss (in English) of their plural noun, but they nonetheless depend for English speakers on that name in discourse: the name as the idea of them for us. It is in this way that their being is mediated by a language brought to life, in its own being, whenever wording the world. Hence, yes, we can rightly delimit a continuum inscribed as book/text/medium – in which the third and common term is often discerned from within the estrangement, whether by occlusion, disruption, or outright damage, of either physical platform or verbal apparatus. No longer simply equipping the gripped reader, the booktext medium is given over to new scrutiny, in both gallery and library, in various skewed forms of unconcealment. The spirit isn’t closely Heideggerian, only the overtones of the terminology. For here the “self-evident” (the given, say a book or its language) is resisted by analytic distance, rather than overcome by immediacy in the moment athand. Only when a book – or its text, that is – no longer holds us entirely in its thrall can we know analytically, rather than “merely” experience, what we hold. Only when a world is no longer being transparently worded for us can we entertain the working, rather than just the work, of words: in sum, to evoke precisely those escalated keywords of the preceding treatment, the medium (Part III) of their inscribed text (Part II) on the pages of a codex support (Part I). In the grip of inscription, then, but only when keeping its referential vistas or intimations at a certain intermittent distance: this, by the unconcealment of medium. As the previous chapter began by parsing it: the medium’s “give – and yield.” A yielding up, yet less by any sense of surrender than by revealed delivery system. When such loosed formative energy is probed beneath effect, what occurs in performance is a giving over to recognition, a laying bare, a bearing forth, of the medium’s own formative linguistic drive. This mode of disclosure persists into the digital age, yet precisely as it exposes, by contrast, an extra and incommensurate stratum of semiotic coding in screen reading – or viewing. And the screen itself has mutated over time, of course. In comparison with literary reading, cinema, like electronic text, has its pertinent analogies to linguistic mediation, to be sure – but with clear limits to any shared seriality, as with the turn cinema has taken from celluloid imprint to digital storage. Certain privileged refractory effects on the modernist screen find various ways of disclosing (unconcealing) the filmic increment of the strip; since then, certain motivated disintegrations of the image plane may, at a comparable depth, confess the pixel composite of the framed view – but never (so far as I’ve seen) the algorithms operating to shift those optic minims. Computer language is, we may say, a submedium that brooks no ready material

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confession. The linguistic vehicle operates otherwise. Just as, for centuries, reading knew – and at one level felt – its tactile support in codex page surfaces, so has the differently “material” (morphophonemic) basis of inscribed and activated text – this comparably requisite underlay – simultaneously made itself felt in pressurized nodes of literary phrasing. Though text is fixed in script, grammar still percolates beneath and within a given syntax; lexicon remains on call in a manifest wording. At a certain pitch of alertness, beyond all communicative efficiencies in the suppression of means by discursive ends, we may often catch ourselves, in just this way, reading the medium in the meaning itself. Wittgenstein has his usual (his “ordinary”-language) way of saying it best. Again: things, though posited or described, can’t actually be “put into words.” Only mediated for us by them – a process only fully grasped, and almost palpably at that, when we attend to what otherwise constitutes that verbal medium, in exactly its give and its yield. Although being(s), spaces, and events can’t be incorporated by words, contained by them, the event of reading may show us what goes into words themselves – precisely as such lexical conveyance passes between the reader and the thereby “comprehended” world under description. Though its evocative and interpretive powers are never to be discounted, language cannot finally move to unconceal any being but its own, its zoned intensities, its sown seeds of recurrence, its somatic amplitude when read in full-throated silence. But that’s plenty of revelation to expect from the next page or two of any literary text you may have at – or in – hand. In the ensuing process, “reading matter” is ordinary language’s way of noting how, for instance, the three levels or aspects of a study like this can blend in any such moments of normative comprehension. If the read text is in book form, chances are that the “enchantment of the tangible” will make its charge felt in the sensory interplay between the tactility of the bound volume and the impressed sensory traces of a verbalism unbound. Reviewing this book’s overlapping strata of concentration has been an ongoing process – and a cumulative one, I trust, in its variable crosssectioning. Three phases or levels of discussion: one sliding scale of manifest materiality. The painterly approximations or later graphic deformations of written script – on a broad spectrum of asemic writing from approximate representational gestures to conceptual ironies – as well as the sculpting of book shapes: no question there, on either front, about the materiality of verbal matter and its depicted, redeployed, or decommissioned vehicles. But bibliographics and platformatics (Part I) only figure rather than perform the grip of inscription in reading, whose

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immanent materiality defines, instead, exactly the interface between print and silent enunciation, graphics and phonetics, page and engaged body (Part II). This is where one reads out (even without speaking out) the phonic matter of syllabic wording, turning print to text in the process. At which point one recognizes what it is in the philosophy of the sayable (Part III) that might find itself clarified by stressing how language’s abstract system (or differential template) – the whole vast and malleable fund of lingual options and operations – only becomes material, in writing and reading, in stroke and unspoken voice, when it is summoned as medium in a given verbal act. Across our shifting span of examination, then, a metonymic run of association has served to link the physical through the corporeal to the semiotic in the matter, as well as manner, of mediation. Book text medium: unpartitioned (in a cultural history that no digitized computer screening can wholly displace), each term serves in this way – in the medium of a booked text – to stage the entwined material complement and possibility of the other in the yield of verbal transmission. The disparate contrasts are as marked as their common denominator in mediality is ultimately unmistakable. On the surface, certainly, a broad dispersion of approximation and blockage operates in quite different registers. Stroked paint on canvas in replication of manuscript or print; imprinted bond, cardboard, and leather, either awaiting readers in its role as cultural tool or warped into a defamiliarizing artifact; the simultaneous engagement and corporeal inhibition of vocal musculature that, whether sensed or not at syllabic pressure points, conveys (converts) print to text in the receiving mind, manifesting the very grain of the sayable in its passage into the said; in the digital age, the firing of microchip circuits and the resultant serial flaring of pixel alphabets: few manifestations of the tangible could be more divergent. Yet each, we may say, at least within the shared ambit of media theory, keeps the other honest in resisting any disembodied and idealized model in precisely the matter – which is always to say the material channel – of human communication. In the work of writing, such is the persistent interspace, the breathing room, between language and text. Breathing room – and medium: whereby language flows forth as text. In stressing again this point, let me also point us back to the last narrative example above. As the internal dynamic of “was I was” flickers in Ishiguro between predication and grammatical filler, with an icy ontological irony asserted only to recede across the phrased suspension of first-person purpose, we may productively associate this with the coming (forward) and going (under) of other cross-lexical effects previously discussed. In doing so, we may even return to the unintended conceptual work of the digital

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font “Sans Forgetica” in figuring a paradigm that sends us, in turn, all the way back to the bibliographics of the painted page in the history of art. For effects like those we find in Ishiguro or Whitman, or of course in Dickinson and Woolf, can be rethought under the aegis not just of unstable gestalt ironies like the duck/rabbit flip – a syllabic phantom now here, now nowhere (grab it though you try) – but more broadly yet in terms of the figure/ground oscillation in art theory. Even just in optical terms, what functionally completes the gapped lettering of “Sans Forgetica” is our need to recover, partly through subvocal “recognition,” the inert unmarked ground as a passive part of the line or curve: thereby processing it as a broken link rather than a semiotic vacuum. One level up, from alphabetic character to lexical succession, effects like the audition of Whitman’s “urge and urge” as passing – through the mesh of graphonic sound defects – into a self-denominated “urgent dirge” can be thought to mark (or, better, motivate) a surfacing of ground as figure: an activated latency. Emerging here, then, is a clarified concept of aesthetic mediation at large – in the special case of linguistic inscription. In the history of art, the graphic space between brushed word shapes in a pictured open bible on a saint’s lectern is as much pigment (white) as are the words themselves (black, red, decorated or not) – the shared work of painting’s plastic medium. So, too, are the temporal unfoldings and recursive overlaps of legible word forms on an actual book page disposed (both senses: placed and inclined) to apprehend the undergirding linguistic medium as a continuum that remains open – precisely between scripted units – to the reciprocal leak or bleed between scripted figure and its subvocal semiotic ground. Open to it by making it possible, in the first place, through its own materialization as continuous medium. These border raids on scriptive fixity are of course the unusual symptom of a general principle. They are, one stresses again, altogether marginal. In the oscillations of such anomalous median spaces and their cross-word slippages, we are reminded of that normal channeling of language into text, with its less impeded flow and backwash, that makes for the everyday give and take of a verbal medium. But the limit cases – at the liminal edges of lexical succession itself – serve still to reframe the norm. In driving a disruptive wedge between syllables instead of just words, the eccentric – and literally (letterally) decentering – word/s/play involved at such vexed junctures offers its own kind of figure (in the metaphoric rather than visual sense) for the shifting ground – and coming round again – of language beneath all textual delivery. To fold the terms of this final chapter back directly, then, into our study’s broader third phase: between language and text, the yield of medium.

Parting Words

Mine in closure, these parting words, looking back on many a word parted and regrouped in textual passages behind us: words annexed or merely wrenched wide by the next in line, all as allowed – as if aloud – in that medium of reading known as language. Given the “sustained conjunction of book studies, textual studies, and media studies” promised at the start, what has actually been sustained in this alignment (as initially rephrased) of “book history, verbal analysis, and media theory”? Sustained – and amplified. How and where have the tactilities of the codex under the estimate of Conceptual art, on the one hand, and the abstractions of language philosophy as media theory, on the other, converged to energize a more tangible sense of the linguistic text? Only the “where” can by now, through example, have answered the “how,” but the briefest review can help affirm the why as well. Amid the critical and theoretical overlap across the tiered levels of this study – more (as acknowledged at the start) like Parts I, I–II, II–III in structural sequence than like partitioned sectors of a demonstration – further subsidiary facets have been unfolded in turn. Painted pages and book sculpture, on the one hand; the craft of writing and the event of reading, on the other, each as distinguished from the timebased flow of the visual image on screen: that’s been the arc of exemplification, together with the linguistic medium evoked but neutralized in the former comparison of aesthetic objects while revealed in performance by the activation of the latter. Revealed, that is, by the distinctiveness of read writing as verbal (indeed audiovisual) process – even when embedded as text within the seemingly cognate duration of screen image or action. In contributing to a university press series on literature and culture in the twenty-first century, the thread of these investigations leaves two questions most obviously open, at least for the author, among no doubt many more. How will literature be gradually reconfigured from here out – beyond already traceable impacts – by technoculture in particular? And more specifically yet, what awaits in the field of Walter Ong’s secondary 215

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orality under computerization? With the escalating popularity of the audiobook in a social climate of remote access and multi-tasking, will phonorobotics one day soon, with a plausible timbre and pitch, be able to simulate the voices of once recorded authors, from a radio speech or interview, so that we might hear them posthumously reading their own novels? Virginia Woolf sounding out The Waves? Through the artificial wavelengths of – what, tertiary orality? Or sooner yet perhaps – but how to measure, or test for, it? – will the rapid spread of literary listening bring some new, even if unconscious, appreciation for the phonic texture not just of a Woolf novel, but of Hawthorne or Dickens as well, Austen or Henry James? Or of a Toni Morrison text even when not read by the author, but from the codex or e-page? And not just a new respect for texture, but for its materialization – as the previous chapters have gone to show – directly from the generative function of language as act. More than academic candor made me eager to admit, early on, a threefold revisitation about to take shape in just this way. There was every reason not to downplay the fact that bookhood in painting and sculpture, the aural grain of literary text, and the manifestations of the medial subtext (as well as substrate) across material forms – from literature to film and back again through alternate aesthetic modes – have been ongoing topics for me. Here, it was to be their ventured interplay, rather than their separate premises or manifestations, that would be new – and, when pursued together under the conceptual rubric book/text/medium, mutually clarifying. Medium was, is, to be understood not just as the bound paper-based vessel of literary delivery but, linguistically as well as physically, its textual materialization in the veins and capillary vessels of phonetic activation from phrase to phrase. It is just this sense that responds to the missing or effaced dimensions of book art in its plastic forms, whether painterly or sculptural, by a newly tangible feel for legibility itself. Legibility, one may say, even when just listening. Nothing narrowly programmatic has directed this study’s three-way alignment of book, its text, and the different mediating service each mode of conveyance provides the other – as illuminated by various moments in the history of fine art, realist or conceptual, as well as by literary reading. Beyond a general interest in intermedial nodes of disclosure, I’ve had no wish to cast the shadow of any particular methodological stance over page, wall-hung frame, or gallery plinth, nor over screen imaging of any sort, by intruding some determined interpretive procedure in the path of reading lamp, track lights, movie projector, or, for that matter, the pixel reception of electronic “script.” The point (the focal

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point) has only been some flexible attempt at what we may by now call lateral attention across related manifestations of textual encounter – or its motivated prevention. Securing the norms they violate, instances of this second and more denaturalizing sort include any number of reading’s arresting displacements: from page to sketchy paint on canvas; to pulped paper; to leaden sheet or transparent glass pane; to mechanical friction and wordless audio-synthesizing in pursuit of the codex’s “inner machine”; even to melted, distilled, and refracted print residue in “hyperpyrexic” alchemy; or then back again into codex display from the computeresque punch card of loomed rather than written lines. Through it all, the intensified lateral notice thus involved arises in contrast to the distracted, pastiched, and largely disembodied reading – optic skimming – of the everyday video screen, which explains part of what such an analytic experiment is “for” in this “digital age.” This book’s topic is set apart, at every turn, from the escalating computerized blitz of retinal data, verbal or visual – including on-line streams in which any association of enunciated phrase with the haptics of the thumbed codex page has been attenuated if not entirely annulled. It is, in fact, lately the case that other interpretable forms, graphic and sculptural, may fill – or at least limn – that palpable gap: that gap in codex palpability itself. And other surprises have arrived to round out the contemporary picture. When, in the last chapter, in a new instrumental version of alphabetic pedagogy (something like the obverse and complement of Kittler’s orally mystified Romanticism), the digital splintering of a font alphabet in “Sans Forgetica” is offered as computerized mnemonic boost, a curious circle is closed. For an unexpected continuum links bibliographics and platformatics in traditional painting as well as Conceptual art to this new praxis of an “unforgettable” informatics. Yet though reading is superficially obstructed and retooled in that new affordance, its abiding medium is all the more clearly realized. And for all its graphic dependence on subvocalization, it is, along with Banner’s Font, as far as possible from that pre-Romantic trope of Voltaire’s according to which “writing is the painting of the voice.” Instead, the quite invisible latency of voice in all alphabetic (graphonic) decipherment is an orchestration of the sayable made said. The internal tempi of response entailed by literary writing, of course, rather than the digital enhancements of retention time, have previously centered our analytic attention. Spanning a broad spectrum of aesthetic experience in plastic as well as phrasal making, the effort has been to register how various transmedial instigations of this sort, conceptually

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linked, might serve to cross section – and with a certain fresh edge – the material intuitions of an always “reading’’ eye. Concerning the literary event in particular, the fact that this deciphering vision repeatedly takes us to the textured substrate of a thereby “textualized” materiality in all fashionings of the sayable (when thus committed to writing) is the claim pursued in the last two chapters – via both the challenges of language philosophy and the orientations of literary history. This is where new conceptual tensions, as well as explanatory patterns, can be discerned in ricochet. And can sometimes be heard by inference in the very fiber of imprint: the weave of phrase more than of paper, of course, or of fabric loom, but each in association with the horizontal weft of the other. And all in touch with the braided operations of language first of all. Framed by our current age of digitization, one extreme polarity in this book surfaces, fitly enough, by an accident of nomenclature in a split verbal derivation: between the expressive and the executable, phrasing and platform. The socalled initial that shortens a word – without exacerbating the already deep mystery of the name function – operates at exactly that crossroads of linguistics and philosophy, Agamben’s aerial purview, that remains very far from the “initialized” operating system of a computer program for word processing. The one sense of “initial” remains textual, even though sublexical, the other simply the function of an EXE file extension. In between, where words work, it is precisely their weave that recalls Whitman’s invention of “fibre” as a verb. Why not “to timbre” as well? Allowed in silence, permitted by imprint, is the giving back of inscription, its giving way, to the sounds that coalesce – and evanesce – into phrase: rendered “aloud,” only in productive passing, on the inner ear. Which may mean, again, the parting of words along their own inseams, with syllables reapportioned in variant exposures of their pliable force. What seems kept apart by syntax may claim a part in what just passed, a permissible drift incident to form in process. Allowed, admitted, summoned, “unconcealed.” The strict partitions of written language are left behind in their silent enunciation as medium, even as phonic borders may dissolve on the cusp of one word taking sudden part in the next syllabic wording. This is where the deep graphonic synesthesias of text on the page show forth as severed, bent, lambent in their anomalies, broken up and open to new shimmers of inference. Heidegger again, after our encounter with Agamben: the ready-to-handness of language in the work of signification, where the present possibility of human discourse (simply present-at-hand when contemplated) is made actively manifest in the literary handiwork itself of worded speech. Between the idea of

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discourse and a given syntax: their common cognitive function in sorting the world. Between idea and lingual act: a mediation and its medium. And between reading and recognition, in pixel or ink: that underchant of the tangible triggered by inscription in somatic – paraphonic – uptake. Now, all media admit the place of art among their range of functionalities. Certainly so-called New Media are no exception. But in the electronic case, the aesthetic thereby entertained is not necessarily, and certainly not prima facie, an art of the medium at its deepest. For computerization mobilizes an algorithmic sequencing so impenetrably withdrawn from aesthetic image – including from the image of text on screen – that it cannot be summoned to the senses in the felt shaping of its manifestations in anything like the way that the language of even its own pixelated words can be, whole or broken. Say, then, for instance, that the e-book, when read, has two substrates, algorithmic and lingual, and only the latter has its credible poetics – at least as yet. But of course there is digital art in the visual domain, where the pixel is foregrounded from within – and against – its sheer vehicular utility. And these screen processes throw a suggestive light on the levels of reading under review here. This study has had, as noted, every interest in making sure at the start to dispel any sense of text as an over-freighted theoretical term. As with book and medium, the force of the lateral assessment at stake needs to assume the most commonplace understanding of these transmissive facets of the reading experience. It is only then that their cross-sectional examination could achieve the comparative torque intended. Yet this everyday parsing of a conventional delivery system in the matter of print discourse may now seem to reveal, by something like mirror inversion, and thus to be clarified by it in turn, a counter-logic in certain anomalous electronic projects. These are ventures operating across the divide not between codex and e-reading, but between legibility per se and other outcroppings of graphic and electromagnetic invention. Here the avant garde in New Media art can help interpret the terms of medial analysis more broadly. Think of work by Fiona Banner in Chapter 3, both with the hand lettering of cinematic transcripts and with the hypergraphism of Font. The latter is a work that introduces ocular resistances into the flow of inscription in a way that locates her electronically composite alphabet at the near end of a roughened surface aesthetic whose spectrum of estrangement ends (with other practitioners) in “asemic” script or imprint. This is not unlike the modes of more recent digital glitch art, in video practice, that tamper with the interlacing of pixel compression so as to produce engrossing distortions of the mobile electronic image – or,

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in other words, so as to undermine the efficiencies of its medium in the service of innovative retinal output. In related diversions from the norm, asemic “text” (a set of glyphs, for instance, evoking alphabetic coherence without delivering on its optic promise) installs the alienation of writing within its graphic ingredients of line, stroke, and curve. In video instances of the aborted image, what is “cutting edge” in such digital innovations is often the literally sliced or jagged transition between optic frames. With comparable erosions of the legible – in what I had previously dubbed the lexigraph – the edge frayed in asemic writing is conceptual as much as visual: the blurred optic border (cognitive rather than spatial) between mark and meaning, shape and character, squiggle and alphabetic microsquib, flourish and word. As with the faux Chinese word forms of the conceptual calligrapher Xu Bing, asemic writing might even be understood as a case of text switching media, from scribed language to sheer drawing, from script to hatchwork, textwork to mere bibliographics, or, in more recent electronic venues, from operable lexemes to strictly digital geometries. Among the first victims of this asemic reduction: enunciation. The graphonic vanishes into the purely graphic. But it is just as plausible, rather than calling up transmediation in an account of this, to suggest instead that the mere look of writing – without either semiotic or semantic grip – is an instance, in literary terms, of “text” drained of medium: an abyss of signification, the regress of a lexical event horizon. If, in contrast, one wishes to call the frequent densities of semiosis in the phonic contours of literary style a hypersemic writing, then it is a case of medium making undue claims on the semantic traction it more typically disappears into facilitating. Or call it instead, once again, a case of meaning intensified in text to the point of deconcealing its means. The result is both hypersemic and ultrasonic at once. Mystery is not necessarily an aesthetic quality, nor occlusion, nor any radical disjunction between means and ends. That’s why the category of “unconcealment” in Heidegger has such a potent ring. Ontological epiphany: that’s one way of taking, of reading, the revelation of medial power, for instance, in a peculiarly charged literary phrasing. Beneath the given, the pressure of its making unmasked. Which, as in a passage like the booming out of Big Ben in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or in the both figuratively and phonetically troped steps of time in Hugo, may come with the force of what can only be called epiphony. In the case of electronic text, it is not at all clear that we have in store for us some new aesthetics of code in literary disclosure, where the algorithm will find a way to manifest itself in sublexical rhythm, the codecs brought forward in a richly tensed

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execution of the post-codex e-page.1 One may suspect as much, or rather as little, even without denying what this study has proposed as a certain heightened consciousness – in regard to oscillating word borders in phonetic script – afforded by reading’s tacit acclimation to an on/off imaginary of screen writing. For this is no more, in the long run, than a mediahistorical analogy, not a technical given. Certainly nothing in the focus of Digital Humanities, one should add, as opposed to digital art, seems aimed at such aesthetic unearthings, nor framed to imagine them. Prognosis aside, it remains the case that the algorithmic flux is never open to us in the way that phonemic oscillation is. So this book has limited itself mostly to cross-sectional disclosures of the materially booked text, tabling any strictly computational media emanations for an as yet unglimpsed initiative at some later stage of this our digital age.2 Yet it remains important to stress – with regard to screen reading, for instance – that the invisibility of number in pixelated words does not suggest, in contrast, a relaxed or in any way requisite perspicuity in the material underlay of other aesthetic modes. Each medium has its own structuring (and at least semi-occulted) underside. Bringing this out, unconcealment is a force, not a condition. Pure transparency would be imagined to divulge little but the obvious. In art, it is often opacity that actuates reflection, estrangement that brings home a deeper recognition. In the linked (dys) functions of codex, text, and medium, respectively, we may thus summarize the aesthetics of indirection organizing – by cutting athwart – the previous three levels of investigation as follows: abuse illuminates use in the disfeatured book; on decipherable pages, a resistant thickness of phrase marks the extraction of linguistic depth and its viscosities; through a certain static in the open channels of prose or poetry, language thereby probes its own fluctuant potential as medium – a potential manifest only as tapped, yet latent at the same time, polyvalent, in what remains alternately sayable via the unspent fuel of the said. That far we’ve come. The codex under whatever means of suspension or simulation – nailed shut or mocked-up, carved of melting ice or hardwood, chemically dissolved or rebuilt as mechanism, travestied or transfigured – offers the suppression of text function by one level of blunt materiality or another. A marked suppression: and thus an analysis, often metaphoric in itself, of text exiled from its canonic codex form. Under whatever means, yes, but with no verbal medium in operation. Materiality without precoded meaning. That was Part I. Complementary disclosures followed. Reading is the release of writing’s secondary materiality, not as cellulose page form but as linguistic energy channeled by the lived body of neuromuscular

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articulation. In its instructive contrast with book sculpture (a tacit contrast, by textual exclusion, that is often the whole point of such bibliobjets), book reading is thus a return of the materially suppressed textual event. That was Part II. Further scrutinizing any such event, the investigations of Part III can only have begun to account for this very possibility: that language is. A possibility, a primal mediation, already summoned under negation by illegible bookwork and plumbed in its ontological given by philosophy. Philosophy – and literary history, where the evolved formats of both prose and print can help delineate their formative preconditions in language at large. And by media theory, where what is allowed in silence is the hearing of that “white voice” (Connor) that instigates meaning in the first place, without mystifying it as recorded speech. Midway through these and related considerations there was, by a kind of conceptual inversion, what we can think of as Banner’s “black noise.” So let us return to her artwork – to its “interactive” graphic working – for a conceptualist gesture on her part, that uncopyrighted Font, that might have seemed an outlier in these chapters when first introduced, but ends up more like their parable. Form awaits content in a software file, all wording held in abeyance by a slate of stored alphabetic graphemes. But how so, a parable? And of what, exactly? What happens in recourse to her “styling” of the alphabet, in download, is that the irregular refigures the norm. In the roughened loops, nodules, thickened jagged nubs, and seeming minor glitches of Banner’s computer-mashed graphics, let alone in the obstreperous sudden slashes of that irreverent italicized z, the template seems visibly to have troped a noise in the system that is essential to the interface between language and its every written enunciation. Hers is the ultimate conceptual reflex in a metatextual vein. Font, by name and graphic content, rather than via any further lexical utility, is the artwork: the overt means of mediation is the message at the material level – and by inference at the metalinguistic as well. Seemingly contingent alphabetic exaggeration, and its irregular weights of curve and recursion, may well seem to figure the phonic thickenings of the reading act apart from any actual script, let alone decipherment. In this sense, Font has thought through, in conceptual advance, what “Sans Forgetica” ignores – or takes for granted. And in offering, as titled artwork, a mere digital template – a battery of available alphabetic imprint, an affordance without an achieved form – Banner secures a distinction important across all six of our paired chapters: that between the means of literary delivery (codex, page, text, or just font itself) and the medium of reading in engaged language.

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Materialities of eyed shape collide, elide, and realign each other in reading. Print implicates a cacophony – and a contrapuntal pulse – all its own, whose irregular flow swells to notice only now and then in the filing past of the legible. It can certainly be ignored, even in its propulsive force. But if and when attention closes in, this lingual energy stands out in varying relation to both its platform and its medium. Regarding the codex and its progeny alike, for such signifying energy the book is the place of storage and retrieval, the page its server, print its cue, text its manifestation, language its possibility, ontology its conceptual vanishing point. In the hold of the book, as well as the grip of inscription, the palpabilities figured by a font like Banner’s are those of the silent motile body meeting both the engine of the turning page and the synchromeshed gears of wording. Palpability is diffused, often subliminal, transferred, and, yes, cross-sectioned in its own right between imprint and uptake. Font gets this just right. When its aberrant characters are, so to speak, channeling actual text, as in my examples of this alphabetic face – which is, of course, by example, the only way they are manifest – you can’t just look at the hypertrophic graphics elicited by the Font file; they only exaggerate the need (as with “Sans Forgetica”) for “making them out” by listening in – as in all phonetic reading. At which point, in their reflection back on the whole spectrum of text production, it’s not easy to say what is the ground of what. Print may stay in touch with the surface it covers, phonetic production with the text it generates – each the complement of the other. And in contemplating this, thanks in part to Banner, rather than merely activating it, we make connection, all the way down – yet without ever touching bottom – with the deeply imponderable fact of human speech itself: not as system only, but as immanent medium, caught in the act of transmission. This “interface” called language – “inter” between concrete sounds and ideas, or, on paper, between marks and what they prompt us to articulate as discourse – is clearly, as medium, a performative go-between. As a reach across separate networks of cognition between constituted human subjects, it is a connectivity always latent in the bound book, surfaced on print pages, manifested by resultant text, and sometimes recognized – while always necessarily operated – in the phonemic momentum that propels such text in reception. To repeat an opening formulation whose oddness I was quick to acknowledge at the time: we are engaged here with the substance rather than the content of both paper book and verbal text. And one variable name for that substance, that substrate, once activated, is indeed medium.

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An underlying recognition of that sort is what this book has been about: underlying only because cross-sectional to begin with. Not yet subsumed (except by parody) to the domain of phonorobotics – even in and for a digital age, at least this one so far – it is literary writing, which is only to say writing under the allowed pressure of its own unstable possibilities, that remains the most fertile testing ground of such recognition. In roundabout fact, it may well be the automaticity of the self-learning computer that, by contrast, puts a new premium on any such alternative thinking in Conceptual art: such thinking in and about words. Certainly, in regard to language – and language digitally refigured as such – few works seize so directly as does Font, sans predetermined content, on Hesse’s ‘enchantment of the tangible.” Nor task the eye so consistently with the contoured irregularities of inscription. Again: a model of the hypermediatized. Nothing lazy about it. Reading is called forth as the restlessly sensitized act of staying tuned. So it is that Banner deserves the last word(s) in the densened word forms of her post-codex, neo-codecs composite. These are verbal shapes, as shapes, that testify in sheer potential to the age-old amazement of writing by which, through whatever interference, the quasi-specular dazzle and haze of signifying sounds are heard – heard to mean – by the sheer eager gaze, however productively impeded, of the deciphering eye. Only thereby, as one salience in the wizardry of writing, is attention laid open to the buzz of epiphony.

Notes

Notes Intro\Retro All URLs and websites cited in the notes were accessed in June 2020. 1. Addressing much of this backlog, with a title borrowed from Gertrude Stein, Andrew Piper’s Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (University of Chicago Press, 2012) pursues a balanced historical synthesis attuned to what abides, as well as what has changed, in the experience of worded text. Discussion and debate have continued since, of course. Even as I write, my university library’s “New Book Shelf” (as well as, yes, its on-line catalogue) offers a translation from the award-winning German writer Burkhard Spinnen, The Book: An Homage, trans. Aaron Kerner (Jaffrey, NH: David Godine, 2018). In contrast to this personal meditation on book love, there is Amaranth Borsuk’s swiftly authoritative work on the prehistory and evolution of the codex – and its aesthetic refashionings – in The Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 2. John Lurz registered his complaint to a seed article of mine on this point in “Mediation and the Object of the Book,” Critical Inquiry 37.2 (Winter 2011), 348–54, answered by me in the same issue (“Book Quirks,” 355–63) before a fuller demonstration in Garrett Stewart, Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (University of Chicago Press, 2011) later that year. 3. See Christina Lupton, Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), a volume in the “Material Texts” series, where Lupton’s “historical perspective” – with its discerned “affinity” between periods – is shored up by the fact that “in the mid-eighteenth century printed books and paper went, in the way that screens have in the twenty-first, from being fairly limited educational and institutional devices, to being prolific forms of entertainment, portable, private, and increasingly available, even threatening, in their number and popularity” (xi). When the present book returns to this early modern period in its last chapter, to calibrate the rise of prose itself as a print-impelled measure – or registered “consciousness” – of “mediation” (to 225

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8.

9. 10.

Notes to pages 5–15 borrow Lupton’s titular terms), discussion will be connecting at that point with philological scholarship as well as with the history and philosophy of language and the book form. Francis Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning,” in Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 230–31. On Bacon’s use of the term in its contemporaneous understanding, as well as within the broader history of thought on language, communication, and mediation, see John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010), 321–62 (328–29). For the fullest account of “text” in the alternate cross-cultural sense arising from poststructuralism, with a polemical insistence on the scope of textuality being no longer limited to the words of a written discourse, see John Mowitt, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). This is by no means to ignore the kind of algorithmic poetics programmed, for instance, by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland in Sea and Spar Between (2010), which plays between the aleatory permutations of found texts from Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville as well as between their mousedriven combinations and the source-reveals of their own command codes – one level up, that is, from the no-man’s-land of their binary generators: htt ps://nickm.com/montfort_strickland/sea_and_spar_between/. For the material compactions in conceptual book sculpture, literary poetics, and film theory that have previously invited my portmanteau terminology, in these and other medial conflations, see especially Stewart, Bookwork and Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) and Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). The very title, since, of my book Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020) sustains this conflationary perception of screen imaging emerged from the discourse of previous volumes. See, for instance, Stanislas Dahaene et al., “How Learning to Read Changes the Cortical Networks for Vision and Language,” Science 330.6009 (December 2010), 1359–64. When, in The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), Matthew Rubery finds “reading” to be no misnomer for the audiobook’s mode of consumption, this isn’t primarily because, in his recovered historical context, the phono-graphed text constitutes bookhood all told for the blind listeners militating for such recordings. It is also implicitly because the audiobook offers, as well, a prosthetic extension of (rather than a wholesale alternative to) the “read” page in the case of sighted readers. And alongside Rubery’s

Notes to pages 17–24

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

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emphasis, another recognition – in reverse: for, in any attentive and intimate listening, certainly of the sort an invested literary “reader” is likely to bring to the audiotext, there is the frequent need to “read back” from heard phonemes to scripted syllables in imagining the sentence in the mind’s eye (as in, for instance, any attempt to remember a given phrasing after the enunciation has gone past). Such are the checks and balances of syllabic energy in the closed graphonic circuit of the linguistic medium, as they help justify the envoi of such audiotexts as produced and marketed by the trademarked Recorded Books, for instance, a company that – strategically collapsing medial differences – identifies its professional readers as “narrators” and wants to “thank you for being a Recorded Books reader.” George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet, 1950), 5. On these paintings by Ruscha, with illustrations, see Carol Vogel, “Conceptual Inspiration, by the Book,” www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/arts/ design/ed-ruschas-books-and-landscapes-at-gagosian.html. For key passages in the distinction between ready-to-hand and present-at hand, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962; first publ. 1927), 15:98 and 16:103 respectively. For Heidegger, the “intelligibility of Being-in-the-world . . . expresses itself as discourse” (Being and Time, 34:204), a point to which we will return in the closing chapter. For the most influential position paper in this “school” of criticism, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” special issue on “The Way We Read Now,” Representations 108.1 (Fall 2009), 1–21. A related and welcome corrective to the misplaced resistance in such work to the textual “unconscious” is spelled out by Marjorie Levinson in Thinking Through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). She reminds us that, in the psychoanalytic model itself, the goal isn’t to extract something buried beneath the surface of consciousness but to track its dispersal across all levels of understanding. “I prefer the term topological reading to surface reading for topology’s emphasis on the depth of the surface itself,” whenever and wherever that “two-dimensional manifold undergoes the kind of deformation” to which it is prone (10). In this respect, the present cross section of means and delivered meaning in textual transmission traces the full arc between such once-entirely-compartmentalized investigations in my own writing, such as in Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), with its equilibrated theories of visual representation, and the wedding of linguistics and philosophy The Deed of Reading: Literature • Writing • Language • Philosophy

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Notes to pages 30–37 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). All in all, the retrospective dimension of this introduction, going forward by looking behind, the stock-taking, is not a matter of testing the sum of previous accounts to find it hopefully greater than its parts. Quite the contrary. It means asking how – ever more specifically – the broad realms of indisputably separate considerations may share at least certain contiguous borders worth newly mapping.

1 Bibliographics 1. Mentioned in the Intro\Retro, my two studies on the aesthetic figuration of books, Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text and Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (University of Chicago Press, 2007, 2011), have attempted to bracket this difference between the codex in 2versus 3-D representation. I have pursued these and related questions in two subsequent essays: “Between Print Matter and Page Matter: The Codex Platform as Medial Support,” in Media|Matter: The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 47–68, and “Visualizing Books, Virtualizing Readers,” in The History of the Book: Yearbook of English Studies, ed. Sandro Jung and Stephen Colclough (MHRA, 2015), 262–79. More recently, contributions of mine to the European meetings mentioned in this chapter, appearing in conference proceedings since, have been so compressed and redistributed in this chapter – and then expanded with new exhibition finds in the next – as to be almost unrecognizable, no doubt, to the editors whose invitations, and whose advice, I am nevertheless happy to acknowledge: Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Kári Driscoll, and Jessica Pressman, eds, Book Presence in a Digital Age (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), with my contribution titled “From Codex to Codecs” (44–59), and Heike Schaefer and Alexander Starre, to whose co-edited volume, The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), I contributed the “Afterword.” 2. Régis Debray, “The Three Ages of Looking,” trans. Eric Rauth, Critical Inquiry 21.3 (Spring 1995), 529–55 (541). 3. This distinction of John Cayley’s tacitly pervades his collection Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), to be taken up here in Chapter 5. 4. For a sampling of his wood sculptures, see https://mymodernmet.com/hsutung-han-wood-sculptures/. 5. James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection (New York: Picador, 2007), 42. 6. Initially described and illustrated in Garrett Stewart, Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 32–33.

Notes to pages 38–59

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7. Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48.4 (Fall 2009), http://hdl.handle.net /2027/spo.act2080.0048.402. For a fuller account of the texts that figure in her argument, see Pressman, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), as followed by a more general volume, frequently indebted to her terms, by Adam Hammond, Literature in the Digital Age: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016) – and, in between, by the comparable investigations of Alexander Starre in Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2015), with a specific emphasis on the all but ironic digital provisions of the new print materiality in high-profile fictional typography, from Mark Z. Danielewski to Jonathan Safran Foer. 8. For other views of Cayley’s installation, see http://programmatology .shadoof.net/?p=installation/pxl2011/pxl2011.html. 9. See Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), chapter 9, “Figures of Self-Reference: A Media Genealogy of the Trompe-l’oeil in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life,” 164–91. 10. For the Bellini reproduction, see www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/st-jerome-in-thedesert. 11. Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965), 231. 12. Here is a work of conceptual interface that arrives on the digital scene, aptly enough, as if named in allusion to the publication, the year before, of Kiene Brillenburg Wurth’s anthology, Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 13. Amaranth Borsuk, The Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 14. www.yahoo.com/tech/this-book-uses-facial-recognition-to-judge-whether109975974319.html. 15. Raffi Khatchadourian, “We Know How You Feel,” January 19, 2015, www .newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/know-feel. 16. Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1.1 (1969), 53–68 (56).

2 Platformatics 1. I refer here to the 2009 traveling display by Stephen Barney, called Ancient Evenings: Ka Libretto, that includes, in its meta-Egyptology, a dissevered copy of Norman Mailer’s novel, Ancient Evenings, as if supine on a miniature

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

Notes to pages 60–97 literary–historical bier (comprised of two intact Hemingway titles), with all three texts resting on salt crystals in a ritualized cult of preservation. Under just such a technological rubric, see a perceptive and searching encounter with the logic of the altered book in N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). See John Cayley, Orthographics (2012), http://programmatology.shadoof.net /ritajs/orthographics/. Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Plume, 1993), 229. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2003), vii. John Roach, curator, The Internal Machine (New York: Center for Book Arts, 2017). This is the same Brian Dettmer who carved the page proofs of my 2015 book, The Deed of Reading, for its trompe-l’oeil cover – carved, delved, parsed – so as to evoke that other mode of data mining, in the sense of deep reading, that literary writing tends to elicit. John Stuart Mill, “What Is Poetry?” www.uni-due.de/lyriktheorie/texte/1833 _mill1.html. For this anomalous mating of Hollywood high tech and university pedagogy, see www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/uw-disney-team-up-tocreate-pieces-of-paper-that-connect-to-the-digital- world/. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

3 Reading In 1. These paired chapters involve in part a division, reworking, and considerable expansion of my argument in Garrett Stewart, “Actual,” chapter 9 in the anthology Further Reading, ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). That essay’s contrast between a satirically disreputable over-reading of unsounded speech in film, on the one hand, and, on the other, the responsible audition of the phonetic weft in verse and prose on the literary page is elaborated here with a fuller discussion both of words in the mind’s ear and, by contrast, of visible lexemes on the narrative screen. 2. Ali Smith, How to Be Both (New York: Pantheon, 2014), 7. 3. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1999), 143. 4. Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5. 5. See an image of this work, hung as a wall sculpture, at www.google.com/search? q=lozano-hemmer+volute&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj

Notes to pages 101–11

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

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UjOf06YTiAhUmgK0KHaprATQQ_AUIDigB&biw=1508&bih=663#imgr c=pGVzyxg5W4GVFM:&spf=1557074338967. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine [Papier machine], trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 6. See my discussion of Banner’s The Desert, in resistance to the cult of medium specificity, in Garrett Stewart, Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 195. See www.fionabanner.com/works/index.htm#work. See the convergence of Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Alexander Starre, Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2015), on such effects of digital printing. “Making Sense of Asemic Writing,” https://centerforbookarts.org/makingsense-of-asemic-writing. Alexandra Munroe with Philip Tinari et al., Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2017), 107. In a “graphics interchange format” (GIF) – in its own right derived, via the flipbook, from predigital thumbing back-and-forth of pages and their imprint bibliographics – see a run-through of this font’s serial “degeneration” at www.wired.com/2016/01/the-memoire-typeface-changes -like-a-memory-as-you-use-it/. From a conceptual poet whose work has been discussed more than once earlier in these pages, see John Cayley’s lecture, “Reading Unreadable Chinese: A Brief Introduction to Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky,” www .youtube.com/watch?v=SHS9xyHz4wwhttps://www.bing.com/videos/searc h?q=john+cayley+on+xu+bing+book+from+the+sky&src=IE-%20. See transcriptions from Cayley’s conversation with Alexa in “The Listeners,” cited in a full review of such aurature by Ana Marques da Silva, “Speaking to Listening Machines: Literary Experiments with Aural Interfaces” (May 16, 2017), https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/speaking-to-listening-machin es-literary-experiments-with-aural-interfaces/. See Cayley’s own discussion of The Listeners installation, with illustrations, at his extensive website, http:// programmatology.shadoof.net/?thelisteners. Michel Chion, Words on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). Steven Connor, Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 106. In contrast to “secondary orality” in Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), see chapter 2, “Secondary Vocality,” in Garrett Stewart, The Deed of Reading: Literature • Writing • Language • Philosophy (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015), 41–75.

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Notes to pages 112–24

18. Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, Vol. IV (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1879), 157. 19. Bennett Sims, White Dialogues (Columbus, OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2017), 174. 20. Garrett Stewart, “Evocalizing Prose,” in Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 192–231.

4 Reading Out 1. Michel Chion, Words on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 118–20. 2. This is the notion of “acousmatic” force that Chion’s previous books on sound have put into wide circulation in cinema studies, as illustrated here by the off-screen power of the Chief’s voice as if generated from the words of a letter meant to chasten and counsel his former deputy. See, for example, Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 3. This is an early pressure point in Paul de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterre’s Poetics of Reading,” Diacritics 11.4 (1981), 17–35 (22), the rest of whose critique is summarized in what follows. 4. My departure from Kittler is laid out in Garrett Stewart, The Deed of Reading: Literature • Writing • Language • Philosophy (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015), 98–99, where I engage with his sense of the Lacanian triad of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic – rethought in respect to “technical media” in Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Kittler’s instinct to identify the real with phonography, in its direct capture and transmission of actual audial content (as opposed to the symbolic medium of type or the imaginary of film) informs my adjusted sense of the literary medium in its letting – by of course lettering – the real of phonetic voice back into the grooves of inscription through the subvocal semiotic decoding entailed by the reading act. This is the overall burden of my chapter in The Deed of Reading on “Secondary Vocality,” 41–75, as pursued from another angle in the present book’s closing chapter. In bringing such issues into focus, it only helps when a theorist like Kittler feels the need for the specifying adjective in an emphasis on “technical media.” As opposed to – yet by deep comparison with – such a material medium as paint or language. 5. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, 1990), 4. 6. Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), where she mentions instead the response

Notes to pages 125–33

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

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of characters in To the Lighthouse to the phonic rhythms of Tennyson (chapter 2, “Tennyson’s Hum,” 42–62). E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey, ed. Elizabeth Heine (London: Penguin, 2007), 141. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350–59. See Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2017 Edition), https://plato .stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/peirce/. Such is the main thrust of the critique in Mark B. N. Hansen, “Algorithmic Sensibility: Reflections on the Post-Perceptual Image,” in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, ed. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer, UK: Reframe, 2016), chapter 6.3 (no pagination). The article is mounted in opposition to Deleuzian film theory, which, as Hansen cogently demonstrates, underestimates the ontological exhaustiveness of the Peircean trichotomy. And yet in any given manifestation of screen image, as in any verbal text, especially when the cusp between firstness and secondness seems actually to be the subject of representation (as in the Woolf passage about the suspended audial impression of Big Ben), one can see the need for recognizing an underlying transmissive means as first cause for any such staging of the signifying triad – or of any other scene set in words. On the seeming need for an engramme beneath all grammar of recognition, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 32. Adrienne Rich, “To a Poet” (1974), https://thatpoetrylark.wordpress.com/2 016/11/04/adrienne-rich-to-a-poet/. Emily Dickinson, “Our Journey Had Advanced” (c. 1862), in The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 303. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 43. Tom McCarthy, C (New York: Vintage, 2010). For a fuller reading of this highly Kittleresque novel, see Garrett Stewart, “Contra Modernism: From the Mediatic to the Transmedial,” Affirmations: of the Modern 2.1 (2015), 1–24. This technological fascination extends, in fact, to the household’s “projecting Kinetoscope,” including a short film in the father’s collection that would seem to allude to Henry James’s In the Cage (discussed ahead, for its sounder-generated wordplay, in Chapter 6). This is a melodrama called Caught by Wireless about an adulterous affair leaked by telegraphic intervention.

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Notes to pages 135–51

17. Don DeLillo interview (1993), www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/dondelillo-the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo. 18. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 771. 19. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1984), with reiterations of the “toxic cloud,” 146, 150, 157.

5 Phrasing the Sayable 1. George Eliot, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob, ed. Helen Small (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 7. 2. For “authorial context,” see my extended treatment of phonetic density in Eliot’s writing in Garrett Stewart, Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 3. It is in this respect that the digital may leverage, for literary self-awareness, what Victorian technical media did for post-Romantic writing. Julian Murphet, in Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the AngloAmerican Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), sees nineteenth-century new media breaking with the Enlightenment hegemony of print communication, and foregrounding literature’s own (attenuated) medial nature – and inducing in the process a yearned-for further sense of verbal substance in rivalry, for instance, with optical or phonographic imprint. But in this he is locating an evolutionary tension manifested here by Eliot in the tongued “thingness” of language itself in a reader’s productive (even before empathetic) engagement, setting off such an uncanny prose poetics over against the uninvolved “summary medium” of mere report. It has been the recurrent assumption of my books on nineteenth-century prose fiction, in the post-Romantic valence of just that prose, that what Murphet sees in the modern consolidation of technique, in contest with new media techne, had its strong and traceable Victorian roots. 4. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 13. 5. See Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 98, 268–69, for the fertile hesitations that animate such phrasing. 6. See Stephen Mulhall , On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (New York: Routledge, 1990), 118, for a gloss on the foundational status of Rede: “Discourse, as the necessary structure of the field of meaning, is the ground for the intelligibility of Being-in-the-world. It permits the disclosedness of entities within-the-world by Articulating the disclosedness according to significations” (author’s upper case).

Notes to pages 152–66

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7. Giorgio Agamben, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 13 (“On the Sayable and the Idea,” 35–90). 8. See my summary of Agamben on animal voice in Garrett Stewart, The Deed of Reading: Literature • Writing • Language • Philosophy (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015), 49–53. 9. Giorgio Agamben, “Experimentum Vocis,” in What Is Philosophy?, 1–28 (17). 10. John Cayley, Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 121–22. 11. See the discussion of reverse ekphrasis in Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 39ff. 12. The “experimentum” is an ongoing enterprise through which it is repeatedly seen how the voice that “writes itself” (Agamben, “Experimentum Vocis,” 11, 24) has in fact written itself (at least mostly) out of existence – leaving a disembodied signage in its wake: the office of the name. In prefiguring much to come in “On the Sayable and the Idea,” we read here that the “entity as entity . . . and the entity insofar as it is said to be an entity are inseparable” (5). They bear, and are borne into consciousness, under the same name. That inseparability, in the coils of the “sayable” itself, is what gets stressed later as homonymy. But it is earlier, in the opening chapter, where the “experiment” vocis (in and of voice on the way to its reconfiguration as speech) is most lucidly mapped against the philological evolution from “phonetics” (the sound of words) to “phonology” (their significatory function) in the tenets of modern differential linguistics (21): an evolution never fully brought to bear again on the very order (and texture) of the sayable in the central chapter. 13. Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 14. See the full ramified exfoliation of this concept across various separate essays in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 15. Herman Melville, Moby Dick or, The Whale (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 576. 16. In the shunt from semiotics to semantics, from word-formation to meaning, one marked sticking point for Agamben has to do with the word’s always incommensurate “material reality” – making, as it does, no logical transition from sensation to mentation. Yet sticking points can be the source of a certain poetic traction – and, in this case, even some leverage on a broader theory of the sayable in regard to the materialist immersions of literary speech. 17. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lyndeth Vasey, and John Worthen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 369. 18. Valéry’s definition quoted by Agamben, from another sector of his interdisciplinary aesthetics, in Giorgio Agamben, “Difference and

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19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

Notes to pages 166–70 Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate, 2008), 328–33 (330). Agamben, “Experimentum Vocis,” 27. Accompanied by Agamben’s anticipatory explanation that “poetry and philosophy are actually internal to each other, in the sense that the properly poetic experience of speech is accomplished in thought and the properly thinking experience of language [lingua] takes place in poetry” (27). I would only stress here that such convergent “experience” is that of language as medium: disclosed only in operation, not as a structure but as a process. From the poem by Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily,” in Geography and Plays (Boston, MA: Four Seas Press, 1922), 178–88; quoted in full at www .writing.upenn.edu/library/Stein-Gertrude_Rose-is-a-rose.html. See Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Leighton,Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Angela Leighton, “Canticles for a Passion,” in Spills (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2016), 113. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 25–69 (“The Mother’s Mouth”). Kittler’s media theory, in probing the ontology of phonetic speech in nineteenth-century German practice, is intercepted at an off angle here, in an Anglo-American context, by the claims of technological history and its precursive technical practices on the page. In Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), Lisa Gitelman sees the appearance of Isaac Pitman’s Stenographic Sound-Hand (London, 1837), titled by the received term for “narrow writing” – but soon renamed “phonography” by Pitman (24) in its touted closer match to the vocal inflection of transcribed speech in the reporting of oral delivery – as an innovation anticipating, in more than name only, Edison’s mode of direct material recording. Aside from its own exaggerated claims for registering voice rather than mere word forms in compression and inflection (as with the suggestion of elevated script for the conveyance of raised oral volume), the publication of this new method in the year of Dickens’s first novel, Pickwick Papers (1836–37), ironically marks the end of an earlier dispensation in the “brachygraphy” (“short writing”) that Dickens had learned from the reigning Thomas Gurney method for his previous stint as a parliamentary stenographer. So “narrow” was this compressed Gurney system, squeezing out all medial vowels, that I have wanted to trace a career-long impact from its stringent formative regimen in the return, time and again in Dickensian writing, of a once-repressed vocalic sonority into the thickened text of his books. Evident in all this is

Notes to pages 170–76

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an attachment to what Kittler might call the re-“alphabetized” vowel and its euphonies: a recovery adjusted more to the rich linguistic work of subvocalization itself (Kittler’s “internalization”) than to the transcripts of public speechifying – and where, as a result, anything like a “phonographic” effect is achieved less in accuracies of intonation than along strictly linguistic grooves we have been calling graphonic. See especially “Shorthand Speech/ Longhand Sound,” chapter 2 in Garrett Stewart, The One, Other, and Only Dickens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). Regarding the impact of his shorthand labors on Dickens’s imagination, see also Hugo Bowles, Dickens and the Stenographic Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 24. Without stressing any such reversion to animal voice, here media theory would nonetheless confirm the advent of the post-human. In his privileging of the digital in exposure of channeled mediation rather than human expression in the evolving “discourse network,” certainly Kittler is not alone. In the work of a contemporaneous German media theorist, Vilém Flusser (Gestures, trans. Nancy Ann Roth [University of Minneapolis Press, 2014]), pursuant to his arguments against writing as a dated and laborious “gesture” that needs to yield place to computerization as the new mode of human thought, opens his brief chapter on the subject of inscription as follows: “It is about bringing material to a surface (e.g., chalk to a blackboard) to construct forms (e.g., letters)” (19). But it is also, as we have seen, about bringing to the surface (in the other sense) the passive vocal forms activated in and by that inscription in the responsive sensorium of the reader – as Flusser quickly acknowledges. Regarding these “sounding bodies” – not of speakers but of materialized words themselves, marked by “vibrations in the air,” Flusser writes: “The dialectic in the gesture of writing plays out between me and the words of a language whispered sotto voce” (23). This is what his celebrated thinking in numbers, instead, would avoid in being sped up. In foregoing the fetish of writing, whispers disappear into the conceptual efficiency of machine-read ciphers.

6 Between Language and Text 1. Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 121. 2. John Guillory, “Mercury’s Words: The End of Rhetoric and the Beginning of Prose,” Representations 138.1 (Spring 2017), 59–86. For a broader philosophical history contextualizing the issue of perspicuity (plainness) in the ongoing asymmetry between notions of communicative “mediation” and the materiality of a given “medium,” the latter often revealed only in the contrast – and hindsight – of remediation, see Guillory’s “Genesis of the

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3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

Notes to pages 176–96 Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010), 321–62, where his emphasis on medium as the “possibility” (357) of communication is not unlike the sense of linguistic “potential” developed here from lines of thought in Agamben. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). Michel Foucault , The Order of Things (New York: Routledge, 2002), 19–50. Steven Connor, Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 106. Giorgio Agamben, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 10. As if to complete his own metaphor of frail but mutually invasive assailants, Agamben rounds out this trope of a “hand-tohand” battle with the idea that only in this way can these weaklings (subjecthood and utterance) “grasp . . . each other” (10). An elaboration on this inwardly braced tension (within any enunciation of or by the subject) has begun a paragraph before, where it is said that “Not only language but the subject itself is a very weak being – the subject that is produced in language and that must somehow cope with it.” Or, in the vernacular sense: must somehow deal, transacting with the very possibility of its words in dealing them out. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 370. For the definitive reading of this inborn and baptized wordplay, see “Shades of Will + Words + Worth: What’s in a Name?,” in Susan J. Wolfson’s Romantic Shades and Shadows (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), chapter 2. For Kittler’s brief, influential treatment of Dracula , under the Musedethroned suggestion of the rubric “Queen’s Sacrifice,” see Discourse Networks, 353–56. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw & In the Cage (New York: Modern Library, 2001), from the story’s opening sentence, 117. Richard Menke, in his field-mapping study Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), notes the “spectacular metonymic logic” of this trope of “wired” enclosure early in his chapter on the story, “A Winged Intelligence,” 197. Developed at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), its invention and intent are described, along with an option for download, but with no note of the role subvocalization might play in the productively delayed cognitive repair of the fractured font ciphers, at https://sansforgetica .rmit/. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891–92), 27, https://whitmanarchive.org/p ublished/LG/1891/poems/27.

Notes to pages 197–208

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13. Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1.1 (1969), 53–68 (56). 14. Sharon Cameron has a not-yet-published essay called “Whitman’s Translations” that explores the full figurative range of this term in his ontology and poetics. 15. Implicitly adduced here is a version of Marcel Duchamp’s inframince (ultrathin) distinction between functions on which Conceptual art often depends, as discussed in principle, as well as in connection with particular book objects, in Garrett Stewart, Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), where in debt to the reflections on this matter by Conceptual poet and theorist Craig Dworkin, I cite “the impression formed between two sides of a thin sheet of paper” as Duchamp’s own striking example (116). Duchamp’s notion has since been called up by Marjorie Perloff as the “infrathin” differential (72, 82) – separating same from near-same – that characterizes modernist phonemic play at word edges, as well as within their anagrammatic shuffling. See Perloff, “Eliot’s Auditory Imagination: A Rehearsal for Concrete Poetry,” Raritan 38.3 (Winter 2019), 69–91, where her emphasis on textual flexions in this subvocal register is very close to the spirit of the present analysis when “auditing” prose as well as poetry. 16. Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5, 30. 17. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2006), 263. The analysis of the sentence to follow is an expanded treatment of its exemplification as a “stylistic microplot” in Garrett Stewart, The Value of Style in Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 18. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 261–62. See also Mark A. Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 19. Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund, trans. Ursule Molinaro (New York: Picador, 2003), 73. So deeply tapping into the potentiated fund of language is this effect that its displacement from German to English only improves on the off-rhyme of “Verzauberung des greifbaren” with the play of so-called “voiceless” fricatives in “enchantment of the tangible” – in full attestation, nonetheless, to the voicing of language all told, as embedded further in the metavocalic “chant” when shuttled into the soft g-ed “tang.” On the other hand, the German title of the novel as a whole is more effective, for in Narziß und Goldmund the bonding conjunction of the complementary title figures is built into the very name of the counterpart (und/mund), tightening the dyad even at the plane of phrasing.

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Notes to pages 209–21

20. See, however, Garrett Stewart, Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 29, where Clercx’s hammering compression of the Sontag texts – as if anticipating that entitling trope for the “Internal Machine” exhibit over two decades later – bears the mechanistic title Power Tool (1991).

Parting Words 1. One might adduce, as an experiment aimed in this direction – at least as a suggestive halfway house – the images of altered books rebound by Paul Chan, in New New Testament, ed. Karen Marta (Basel and New York: Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation/Badlands Unlimited, 2014). Their overpainted surfaces are reproduced on the rectos of this reconstituted volume from one thousand torn and defaced covers previously used in this way as makeshift abstract “canvases.” These are displayed now, page by page, opposite versos containing brief “concrete” texts of Chan’s own devising, often equally abstract, whose alternation of alphabets, punctuation, numerals, and the like – in various irregular weights, scales, and lineation – tend at a glance to evoke the cryptic strings of computer language. And thus to call up another undermining of the codex in its textual monopoly. In a conflation of bibliographics and platformatics, from our first paired chapters, one senses that the mass-produced technology of the book object has here undergone artisanal undoing in the evocation of its own electronic successor. 2. If such thinking should ever achieve a full-scale literary valence in the probing of a decimal rather than a linguistic basis for wall art, there will have been precursors. In the 2018/19 Whitney exhibit, “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1995–2018,” for instance, that featured the loomed bookwork of Mika Tajima discussed in Chapter 2, there appeared, from as early as 2003, the largeformat monitor work of W. Bradford Paley’s called CodeProfiles. In the optic claustrophobia of its difficult ouroboros logic, this experiment in software art reveals the underlying coded functions that make the algorithmic strings visible on the HDTV screen – with separately colored “guidelines” tracing out the differences between the discontinuous manner of the code’s initial inscription, its consecutive but nonfunctional line-by-line reading by a scanning viewer, and its actual execution by the computer in the reflexive generation of the image before us. This is not easy to take in. But it reminds us that neither, and similarly perhaps, are the richest moments of reflexive phrasing – and its phonetic loops – in the texts whose substrates we’ve been excavating.

Index

Acton Collection (NYU Villa La Pietra), 45–46 faux folio, 57–58 Agamben, Giorgio anthropogenesis, xi, 13, 22, 154, 161, 170 End of the Poem,The, 163–64 geometry and the “de-linguistication” of knowledge, 168–72 homonyms and “the sayable,” 151–53, 167 medium as missing term in “the sayable,” 220 “On the Sayable and the Idea,” x, 169, 211 Antonello da Messina, St. Jerome in His Study, 50–52 (fig.) Aristotle, 152 artist’s book evolution, 42 asemic writing, 103

and conceptual sculpture, 45, 63, 88, 93, 208, 216 and digital publication, 104 vs. bookishness, 38–39 Borsuk, Amaranth, and Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen, 53–55 (fig.) Bresson, Robert Diary of a Country Priest (film), 119 Brown, Bob “Readies,” 61 Brown, Gillian, 68

Babbage, Charles, 77, See also Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael Bacon, Francis, “Medium of Wordes,” 5, 143, 163, 188, 200 Bacon, Francis (painter), 44 Baldwin, Michael, 45 Banner, Fiona bookworker, 82 Desert,The, 102, 231 Font, 103–6, 129, 131, 219, 222–23 No Image Available, 83, 102, 104 punctuation seascapes, 103 Barthes, Roland, the “illisible,” 103 Benveniste, Émile, 161 Beube, Doug, 59 Bhatnagar, Ranjit, 71–72 bibliconic tradition, 50 bibliobjet, x, 4, 11, 13, 14 Biersteker, Thijs, “gated” book, 55 Blanche, Jacques-Emile, Portrait of Arthur Acton and Harold Acton, 48–50, see (fig.) bookhood, 2, 3, 7, 58 and the artist’s book, 42 and the bibliobjet, 81–83

Campbell, Jim, Wuthering Heights, 74 Cayley, John aurature (vs. literature), 109, 160 Grammalepsy, 155–60, 187 immersive VR, 156–57 Orthographics, 159 The Listeners, 170 The Reading Room, 40–41 (fig.) Chan, Paul, 240 Chion, Michel, 110, 115 Audio-Vision, 130–31 Words on Screen, 115–17, 118–19 Clercx, Byron, 34, 209 Connor, Steven, “white voice” of silent reading, 111–12, 116, 137, 222 de Man, Paul. See Riffaterre, Michael de Martinville, Édouard-Léon Scott. See phonautograph Debray, Régis, mediology, x, 31–32, 43, 53 Deleuze, Gilles, 126–27, 129 DeLillo, Don laser reading in White Noise, 137–38 phonetic topography in Underworld, 136–37 syllabic echo in prose, 135–36 demediation, 4, 39, 74 Derrida, Jacques, Paper Machine, 100–1 Dettmer, Brian, 68 Díaz, Junot, 87

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242

Index

Dickinson, Emily, 127 phonetic effects in, 127, 202 digital poetics, 2 Dracula, 191, 238 Eliot, George cross-word phonetics, 143–45 medial wordplay compared to Wilde, 149–50 “summary medium” in The Lifted Veil, 146, 152, 172, 201 epiphony, 220, 224 Eterna Cadencia disappearing font, 39–40 TH BO K THAT C N’T WA T, 84 Flusser, Vilém, x, 237 Fontanive, Juan, 69–70, 89, 136, 200 Forster, E. M., 124–25 Foucault, Michel, 176, 178, 184, 187, 201, 204, 238 Frege, Gottlob, 22, 162 in Agamben, 161–63, 164, 169, 201 Geng Jianyi, Misprinted Books, 106–7 Gorst, Jake, The Rise and Fall of Books (film), 33 graphonic text, 11, 15, 16, 98, 146, 151, 159, 171, 190, 205, 217 Guillory, John on “the media concept,” 237 on the origin of modern prose, 176–80, 182, 190 Hamilton, Ann, 39 Hansen, Mark B. N., 126–27 Hayles, N. Katherine, “writing machines,” 60 Heidegger, Martin, 151, 202, 204 present-at-hand vs. ready-to-hand, 20, 150 Rede vs. Sprache, 20, 151, 152, 208 unconcealment, 208, 211, 220, 221 Hesse, Hermann, 34–35, 209 Hitchcock, Alfred. See Sims, Bennett Holzer, Jenny, 85 Hugo, Victor, 127, 202. See also Riffaterre, Michael “The Internal Machine” exhibit. See New York Center for Book Arts Ishiguro, Kazuo, eroded language of being in Never Let Me Go, 202–4, 205, 213 Jakobson, Roman, 125 James, Henry, In the Cage, 191–93 Keats, John, 189 phonetic play in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 187, 188 Kenner, Hugh, on the rise of novelistic prose, 175 Kiefer, Anselm, 57

Kingsnorth, Paul, 87 Kittler, Friedrich, 13, 129, 173, 184 alphabetization, 129 and Agamben, 170–71 critique of naturalized language, 181–84, 188 Lacanian media model, 124 on limitation of Romantic philology, 184–87 Krén, Matej, 34 Latham, John, Encyclopedia Britannica at 24 pages-per-second, 61 Lawrence, D. H., Women in Love, 165 Leighton, Angela, 168 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael breathed speech in Babbage Nanopamphlets, 134–35 materialized speech in Volute 1, 97–98, 132, 133 Lupton, Christina, 4 Mattern, Shannon, 67, 68 McCarthy, Tom, phonographism in C, 132–33 McDonagh, Martin, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (film), 120 mediarchaeology, 11 medium and figure/ground gestalt, 214, 223 and the suppression of sensation by sense, 98 as engaged body, 3 as material base, xi, 4, 6, 101–2, 141–42 as missing term, 23 as read by text itself, 7 in linguistic disclosure, 85, 88 vs. materiality of platform, 98–99, 100 Megert, Christian, Mirror Shard Book, 56, 86 Melville, Herman, Moby Dick, 164 Michaux, Henri, 103 Mill, John Stuart, 72 Montfort, Nick, 226 Morrison, Toni, Jazz, 63–64 Mowitt, John, 226 Murphet, Julian, on the modernist media ecology, 95–96 New York Center for Book Arts, “The Internal Machine” exhibit, x, 65–75 O’Connor, Flannery, 52 “Odd Volumes” exhibit (Yale University Art Gallery), 57, 59, 62, 66, 84, 209 Ong, Walter, secondary orality computerized, 215 Ophüls, Max, Letter from an Unknown Woman (film), 119 Orwell, George book fetish in 1984, 16–20, 55 phonetic prose, 21–22

Index Paley, W. Bradford, 240 Palmezzano, Marco, 52 St. Jerome in an Extensive Landscape, 46–48 (fig.) paper as digital antenna, 84 Peirce, C. S., 32, 125–27 Perloff, Marjorie, 239 phonautograph, 15, 97, 132 phonorobotics, ix, 216, 224. See also Cayley, John Picasso, Pablo, 103 Piper, Andrew, Book Was There, 225 Poulet, Georges, phenomenology of reading, 55, 83, 209 Pressman, Jessica, on “bookishness,” 38 Rembrandt, Old Woman Reading, 41 reverse ekphrasis, 158 Rich, Adrienne, 127 Richards, I. A., book as machine, 66–67 Riffaterre, Michael, critiqued by Paul de Man, 121–24 Roach, John, Pageturner, 60–61, 62, 69, 70, 83 Rodney, Seph, 69 Rosenberg, Alexander, Hyperpyrexic, 72–75 (fig.) Ruppersberg, Allen, temporality of reading, 45 Ruscha, Ed, 17, 42 Salter, James, 35 “Sans Forgetica” typeface, 194–95, 196, 217, 222, 223 Schiller, Friedrich, 188 secondary vocality, 111, 116 Shelley, Percy Bysche, phonetic telescoping in “Ode to the West Wind,” 188–89 Siegert, Bernard, 43–44 Sims, Bennett, 110 White Dialogues, 111, 112–15, 117, 121, 128, 136 skeuomorphism, 37–39 Smith, Ali, audiovisual play in How to be both, 94–96 Spector, Buzz, Off the Shelf, 33–34 (fig.) Spritz speed reading, 61, 110, 178, 179, 193

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Stewart, Garrett, The Look of Reading, 35, 43, 227, 228, 240 style, hypersemic and ultrasonic, 220 Sub Rosa, disappearing typeface (“Memoire”), 107, 109 subvocalization, 7, 19, 61, 85, 95, 111, 157, 178, 186, 194, 239 Tajima, Mika, 67 Negative Entropy weaving and bookwork, 76–83 (fig.), 93 Valéry, Paul, poetry as hesitation between sound and meaning, 166 Villeneuve, Denis, Blade Runner 2049 (film), 32 Voltaire, writing as painting of voice, 112, 217 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 87–88 Welles, Orson, Citizen Kane (film), 119 Weston, Heather, Flip Read, 63 Whitman, Walt, 180, 181, 196, 200, 204, 205, 218 wordplay in Leaves of Grass, 196–202, 214 Wilde, Oscar “new medium” in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 146–47 cross-word phonetics, 148 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 163, 166, 171, 212, 234 Woolf, Virginia, 202 A Room of One’s Own, 127 Mrs. Dalloway, 124–26, 220 wordworks, x, 7, 33, 85, 103 Xu Bing, 107–9 Book from the Sky, 107–8 Case Study in Transference, A, 108–9 Yulman, Nick, Index Organ, 70–71 (fig.) Zhang Xu, 106 Ziegler, Mary Babel, 64 phonic parody in The Necessity of Friction, 63