Notes and Quotes: Chapters 5 and 6

Notes and Quotes

Pressman: Chapters 5 and 6

Chroma explores the idea that mathematical code is a universal language (127).

From Chroma: What appears to be real and true is actually a constructed façade based in forgetting and erasing history (128).

This is a work of digital modernism because remembering requires excavation and this excavation is (according to Pressman) the novel’s subtext (128).

Cyberspace is not natural and the ideologies that represent it as such have deep histories in need of excavation (129).

Chroma introduces itself as a multimodal work deeply concerned with exposing the different ways in which information is accessed and understood (129).

Something is always lost in the translation of content across media platforms (131).

It was built in Shockwave. Its obsolescence is ironic and possibly poetic (131).

Marrow “transmits information just as the air transmits sound” (131).

Pressman’s take on this is that Chroma is about the necessary failure of efforts to seek universal language through computer code and within cyberspace (132).

Alan Liu: “the governing ideology of discourse network 2000: the separation of content from material instantiation or formal presentation” and the “ideology of division between form and presentation” becomes “a religion of text encoding and databases” (132).

Writing code to create a gameworld encodes biases, cultural hierarchies, and power structures that remain unseen but present and powerful (134).

Duck sees ideological problems rather than technical problems (134).

Universal language is not possible, even in cyberspace, because languages are codes programmed by human beings which infuse specific ideological positions into their protocological endeavors (135).

Universal language projects are part of both media studies and media history. Pressman attempts to expose the intersection of literary and media studies (136).

Terry Winograd says that the computer is not a mathematics machine but rather a language machine. It manipulates linguistics symbols (136-137).

This chapter strives to illuminate the interconnected histories that continue to foster a cultural imagination that universal communication is possible through computers (137).

The idea that computers and digital code can enable universal languages lies at the heart of computationalism (138).

Computationalism depends upon the idea that rational calculations can describe the world (138).

Rational and computational projects might be technical but that does not mean that they are devoid of human and cultural biases (138).

It is precisely because Pound could not read Chinese that he could claim that the Chinese ideogram is a universal medium for poetry (140).

Pound’s editing and forward of Fenollosa’s work turns it into a treatise of aesthetics (140-141).

Fenollosa focuses on literature as a means of addressing larger, political issues. He also recognizes literature to be a cross section between national and poetic registers, and an ambassadorial act to understand “the other” through their language and literature (141).

Pound is not only an editor but also a kind of medium through which messages flow and are transmitted (142).

It is in this way (turning Fenollosa’s text into a treatise on universal poetics) that Pound “invents” Chinese as a new medium for modern poetry (143).

I don’t really take to the ideas on pages 142-143.

The idea that a binary operating function underlies a universe of dualities becomes the foundation for the mathematical structure of binary states in digital computing (144).

Poets, philosophers, and computer scientists use the ideogram to serve their own, individual ideals. They use it to hallucinate about supposedly universal truths (145).

The idea that code is a natural language turns it into a contemporary equivalent of the Chinese ideogram (145).

Efforts to repair the ruptures of Babel through the digital computer thus depend upon a substitution of English for universal language (146).

Basic English is an International Auxiliary Language constructed to enable universal communication through a simple but potentially global language. It is a pared-down version of English comprised of 850 words (147).

An extension of Basic English was into the realm of cybernetics and computer science (147).

Recognizing the connection between Basic English, Printed English, and their derivatives should remind us that the heart of these foundational computing projects is an English-based effort to achieve universal language (148).

The web developed into Web 2.0 in the mid 2000s (149)? Is this a typo or am I missing something?

The result of cultural and technological layers is a new computer culture—a blend of human and computer meanings, of traditional ways in which human culture modeled the world and the computer’s own means of representing it (149).

Recognizing that English dominates computer code despite its mathematical relations might cause us to pause before identifying the computer and its code as universal (149-150).

Interesting views about Spivak’s comments (150).

The quest for a universal language is as much a technical challenge as an ideological one, and this is shown by the need for constant emendations to translation software and machines, among other things (151).

Ironically it is Chinese that disables contemporary hallucinations about universal language (151).

Pound’s later cantos are similar to YHCHI’s Nippon (152).

Nippon reorients the ways in which we read to remind us that computers, their operations and codes, and the ways in which they are discussed are never separate from but always embedded in specific cultural context (153).

Pages 153-154 are a stretch, to me anyway. On 155 she lists the conceptual dichotomies portrayed in Nippon, which make sense, but her explanations before that were a real stretch. I’m not saying I couldn’t be convinced but the way it was written was almost painful to read. It might be different for other people, though.

Nippon and Chroma are digital works which expose message to be dependent on medium and remind us that neither are ever universal (155).

YHCHI employ the ideogram as a poetic symbol in order to resist Pound’s earlier usage of it (155).

Recuperating and asserting the importance of the literary in a digital age tis the main point of this chapter and of this book more generally (156).

Translation is at the heart of digital literature, despite rhetoric about the potential of digital code and computing to produce universal communication (156).

Digital modernist works resist the hallucinations of cyberspace and illuminate the importance of literature in our digital age (157).

All literature, regardless of its output platform, is impacted by digitality (158).

The book is a mediating technology (160).

Only Revolutions encodes a digital influence in ways that promote the types of literary critical reading practices that Pressman has been advocating: close reading and comparative, media-specific, media archaeological approaches (160).

Reading Only Revolutions is an act of recycling (161).

Only Revolutions challenges simple distinctions between print and digital (162).

How does April 15, 1992 relate to the terror of post-9/11 life? (165).

Only Revolutions is so obsessed with visual details that the subtle but clear visual and intertextual detail to Ulysses should not be overlooked (166).

Danielewski says that the thing about the internet is it’s just an extension of a capacity that was already understood when the encyclopedia was being written, when Joyce was writing Ulysses (167).

Only Revolutions is about technology because technology is specifically missing from the book. You have to ask, “What’s not here?” (168).

The embellished words extracted from readers’s emails serve as figurative hyperlinks connecting unseen readers of Danieleski’s previous novel to this one (170).

As archaic as it is, Only Revolutions could not exist without technology (170).

Jenkins describes convergence culture as a paradigm shift—a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels…and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture (172).

Acts of concluding by refusing to end are poetic statements (174).