Monday, September 10, 2001

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Katherine Hayles 'A Flickering Signifier': Putting a Word Online Changes Its Very Nature, Scholar Says By SCOTT CARLSON Electronic literature is a nascent field of study, but it already has a prominent scholar as its advocate: Katherine Hayles, a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. Ms. Hayles, who was a chemist before she got her doctorate in literature, is a widely respected expert on hypertext fiction and poetry. Recently, she played an instrumental role in persuading the Electronic Literature Organization to relocate to UCLA. This summer, she led a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar that brought scholars from major universities to UCLA to discuss the future of electronic literature, hypertext, poetry, and fiction. Q. How does electronic literature expand the possibilities for fiction? A. For example, the work by M.D. Coverly called The Book of Going Forth by Day is a story in ancient Egypt that parallels a story in contemporary Egypt, and the text is also about an exploration of inscription technologies, so there is a vertical register and a horizontal register on each page as there would be in an Egyptian hieroglyph. The reading metaphor is based on the complex ways in which the Egyptian hieroglyphs work. So instead of simply linking to other screens, this offers a very complex navigational apparatus that has changed the metaphor. It's no longer page to page. ... One of the things that is very much at play is the interaction between word and image. It's even more complex for an illuminated manuscript, because the words themselves are dynamic -- they can change shape and metamorphose. So the words are both text and image. That has been done in print with certain types of poetry, but with electronic media the possibilities of making the text dynamic are much more varied. There is also the interaction between text and images as such, so there is text that performs like images and images that perform like words, and the interaction between them can be extremely rich and interesting. Q. What are some of the challenges that electronic literature faces? A. There are a number of them. One, it's still the case that it's much more pleasant to read a page of print than it is to read a computer screen. Most people I know prefer to print out a long text rather than read it on-screen. That's a nontrivial factor. There is also the problem of obsolescence. These writers are spending thousands of dollars to create these works, but the works are specific to software and hardware platforms. When that goes out of date, how do you access those texts? And then there is the question of expense. Creating these works is expensive, requiring technical expertise and software. So it puts a price tag on the production that is very different from the traditional 25-cent pencil and the $1 pad of paper. Q. In a traditional work, the author takes you from A to Z. In these works, is the author giving up that control, or is he controlling a far greater sphere? A. That's a complex question. There is really no point in creating an electronic text that works exactly like a print text. If you're going to do that, you might as well work in print. The only reason to go into electronic media is if you want to achieve different kinds of effects, and one of those effects is certainly ceding some measure of control to the reader. The area that is usually ceded is sequence -- it's the reader that determines the access, and if it's a narrative, they are creating narrative order. And that influences the nature of the work. The author cedes control in another way, and that is that the author is always, always a coauthor. The other authors involved in that process are the people who created the software and the hardware, which are essential to the kinds of effects that can be created. And then there is the computer itself, which is performing sophisticated cognitive activities. That can be seen as a limitation -- someone like Nabokov would hate it because he wanted absolute control of his text. But from another point of view, it can open a collaborative field of play that can be exciting. Q. So what conclusions did you come to in the seminar? A. We were very interested in what happens to narrative in these electronic works. As I said, sequence is in the control of the reader, so it becomes an interesting creative and critical problem: How can you create interesting and compelling narratives when you are not in control of sequence? Reading under these conditions becomes a cyborg activity. ... So it becomes a distributed cognitive system in a much different way than a book becomes a distributed cognitive system. The computer plays a much more important cognitive role. Q. How is the computer playing a cognitive role? Isn't it just presenting pages in a different format? A. Absolutely not. You know that with print technology, words are durable images, pressed onto the page. But with the computer, the words don't exist except as processes that the computer runs through and creates. The computer isn't just reproducing words that appear in print. The computer is running through algorithmic procedures that generate what appears on the screen, which is not durable but is produced by a beam running across the screen. So that means that the very nature of what the word is changes from a durable inscription to what I call a flickering signifier. That mutability, that dynamism, that is inherent in the production of screening text, is then a whole area for literary exploration and experimentation. The words are not objects, they're processes. They're verbs, not nouns. Q. Isn't that more of a philosophical point? A. No, it's a very material point. Eyestrain is greater at a computer screen. That's so because you're looking at a flickering image, and that's sensed by your body. It's not a philosophical point in that aspect. But I also mentioned the ways that word and image can work together -- all of that is based on the fact that they aren't durable inscriptions. So it is a philosophical point, but it's a physical point and a literary point about what the text can do. Background article from The Chronicle: Electronic Literature Organization Moves Its Offices to UCLA (8/28/2001) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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