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Mar 19 2008, 6:37 PM EDT (current) kevin_of_los_angeles 18 words added
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“The end of literature is at hand. Literature’s time is almost up. It is about time. It is about, that is, the different epochs of different media. Literature, in spite of its approaching end, is nevertheless perennial and universal. It will survive all historical and technological changes. Literature is a feature of any human culture at any time and place. These two contradictory premises much govern all serious reflection ‘on literature’ these days.” (1) J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (2002)

For the twenty-first century literary critic attempting to reconcile enthusiasm at the breakdown of traditional departmental boundaries with an increasingly bleak fiscal outlook for the humanities in general, Matthew Fuller’s Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture offers an intriguing model for how to proceed theoretically and practically. From the first line in the book’s introduction, Fuller breaks our media expectations not just in terms of analytic object but also in terms of form. He begins, “This is a media ecology made in bits of paper” (1), indicating that even an example of that most change-resistant print form—the academic book published by an academic publisher for little profit—belongs to a larger “ecology” to which it must respond and from which it cannot pretend to be autonomous. Fuller writes with no illusion that an abstraction like “academic freedom” might render his book titled Media Ecologies somehow separate from what it attempts to describe, for the concept of “media ecology” itself is necessarily grounded in material reality and, therefore, process. In fact, objective description and described object close completely in Fuller’s estimation: “the only way to find things out about what happens when complex objects such as media systems interact is to carry out such interactions” (1). “Media Ecologies” may be a theoretical book, but it is also a document that attempts to incorporate and respond to other media forms as a matter of practice.

Yet Fuller also manages to create—not in spite of himself, but also—a text that could easily be placed into that most elusive academic genre: the scholarly text that maintains an investment in what used to be openly called the literary. Take, for example, the extraordinary creativity of Fuller’s rhetorical moves: “So here’s a list” (15); “Call up too the ruse of clarity” (48); “To carry on reading this, switch on the radio, make a transmitter” (52); “To rescue ourselves, though, from missing out on a trip through boredom to its other side” (72); “And this allows us to spiral back to the image that we almost began with” (73). These sometimes dramatic, sometimes ironic, usually meta-theoretical moments of inflection do not necessarily depend on the particular print medium by which Fuller’s ideas are transmitted, yet they clearly reflect a high level of ingenuity and/or play on behalf of the writer and at the very least indicate Fuller’s skill at the technology of writing, however influenced he may be by other media forms (or, as Kittler might suggest, by the word-processing software in which he likely carried out the writing. See "There is No Software," in which Kitter expresses his sense that our current "state of affairs," defined by the dominance of computer technology, "seems to hide the very act of writing" (147)). Given the benefit of the doubt, taken as a coherent whole, Fuller’s project seems to imply that a book written as a media ecology can attempt to break the “form-content model” without necessarily breaking all traditional humanist values in the literary. Like the Deleuze and Guattari of the “Rhizome” introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, or perhaps the Donna Haraway of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Fuller writes with the passion of an activist but under the sign of the provisional. Accordingly, what stirs in the murky subtext of his book resembles the Derridean “kind of question, let us still call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today… the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies” (293, italics original). The difference is Fuller’s radical departure from the birth allegory, which is essentially a formal allegory; the difference is his departure from the meta-theoretical narrative on which media follows a direct path into a recognizable form. To put it another way, with Fuller we are forever in the moment of the Derridean “species of the nonspecies."

If literary criticism is to survive as a viable discursive category for humanities scholars in the twenty-first century, we suggest that it should exploit rather than fear the internal, formal tension present in a text like Fuller’s book.[1] Whereas many literary critics have taken up new media texts as analytic objects, most still rely on close reading and exegesis of the sort practiced by the mid-century New Critics as their primary analytic tools, which often and ironically take on the appearance of the scientific method in their new context. In an attempt to experiment with the possibility of a literary future for literary criticism, we will in this project attempt to invert the trend of methodological innovation and attempt to read an “old media” text as part of a media ecology in which our own project is also a responsive part and procedure. We will focus our attention on Bruce Sterling’s Distraction, a cyberpunk novel (the term is contentious) that itself proposes possible trajectories of new media technologies, and attempt to read a work of literary fiction according to the logic of the wild technologies it formulates and, we suspect, simultaneously interacts with to form its own imaginative media ecology.

Notes:

[1] Galloway and Thacker might call this “tension” a sign that Fuller’s book is also a “network”: “A network is, in a sense, something that holds a tension within its own form—a grouping of differences that is unified (distribution versus agglomeration)” (61).

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