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Project methodology

kevin_of_los_angeles — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:37:56 CDT

“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).

Works Cited:

Deleuze and Guattari. "Introduction: Rhizome." A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987. 3-25.
Derrida, Jacques. "Stucture, Sign, and Play." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1978. 278-294.
Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.149-182.
Kittler, Friedrich. "There is No Software." Literature, Media, Information Systems. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997. 147-155.
Miller, J. Hillis. On Literature. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Sterling, Bruce. Distraction. New York: Bantam, 1998.

Textual analysis and the "cheap net-trick"

LitPeejster — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:53:42 CDT

SPOILER WARNING: Significant story details below.

"These are difficult times, sir."

"All the more reason to assure some stability during the new Administration's transition period."

"I fully concur," Oscar riposted at once. "Continuity, and a firm hand in the lab's administration, would be extremely helpful now. Prudence. Nothing hasty."

Nakamura nodded reflexively, then frowned. For a moment, Oscar thought he had overdone it. Nakamura had twenty years of recorded public appearances in the federal files. Oscar had taken the trouble to have the man's speech patterns analyzed, ranked, and sorted. Nakamura was especially fond of the terms "prudence" and "continuity," with "helpful" and "a firm hand" on strong upward trends lately. Verbally mimicking Nakamura was a cheap net-trick, but like most such tricks, it usually worked.[1]

One of the main endeavors of this project is to observe the results of deploying technologies referenced in Distraction. Of course, a certain reflexivity already arises from the awareness that the very act of tracing a recurring word like "doable" - even with pre-computer technologies - evokes the same sense of alternating curiosity and embarrassment associated with the "cheap net-trick" Oscar Valparaiso uses to "read" his interlocutor, a longtime Senate Science Committee staffer known only as "Mr. Nakamura" (160-175).

Whatever controversies attend the use of literary computing for data mining of the rarefied aesthetic literary work, they ultimately cannot squelch a critic's curiosity over whatever kernel of insight might emerge from this "cheap computational trick," particularly in a theoretical environment already open to the idea of the "technohuman hybrid" reader who, as a human immersed in computer technologies, cannot help but read with a fraught, yet synergistic biological/computational intellect (Hayles 59).[2]

While an analysis of the full text ofDistraction offers a wealth of possibilities, in the interest of time and fair use our data mining has focused on one episode from the novel, where Oscar Valparaiso visits Senate Science Committee staff in-person in Washington, DC - during which Oscar performs his "cheap net-trick" (160-175). Originally plans included analysis and presentation through the Valence script developed from processing by Ben Fry; time constraints have temporarily diverted the analysis through the freeware version of analysis application Tropes. Salient and surprising observations from the texual analysis appear below:

The Tropes analysis of text style returns "style rather enunciative," "setting: in the real," "setting, involving with I" and "some notions of doubt has [sic] been detected" [fig 1]. "Enunciative" style, according to the support documentation, involves "setting some influence, or revealing a point of view." The verbal settings "in the real" (use of simple past tense), the use of "I," and the expression of doubt all reveal an intriguing rhetorical stance - an attempt to persuade from the appearance of shared recognition of an "objective" reality. But because this analysis includes the entire text of the section - the character dialogue has not been isolated for analysis - description and narration inform this analysis as well. While not performed, a breakdown of style along the lines of narrative and dialogue - or even the isolated speech patterns of individual characters - may offer useful information about levels of free indirect discourse, or other concordance/discordance between and among these polyvocal strands.It may also yield compelling insights about the rhetorical function of the novel as a whole.
The relationships that Tropes establishes between words that occur together frequently offer (not altogether surprising) multiple connections between Oscar and "telephone," "id" and "nakamura," reflecting Oscar's characteristic multiple engagements of attention [fig 2]. Significantly, Tropes returns two instances where "nakamura" is associated with "face," and selection of this item returns the two moments in the text where the narrator offers Nakamura's affective response through this facial "reading" [fig 3], offering further evidence of Oscar's own reading practice.

Over the course of the novel, Oscar keeps an ever-vigilant eye on streams of virtualized data from multiple interfaces and adeptly synthesizes the data in his ambitious efforts to take over the Buna Collaboratory, representing a "dual-brain" distributed cognition already profoundly evocative of the "technohuman hybrid" that - setting aside the material metaphor of his "personal background problem" - literary critics may more easily embody with the maturation of literary computing. Not that his virtuosity is sufficient: with his increasing involvement in the political intrigues of Gulf Coast neuro-politics, he too approaches a state of complete overwhelming, one instance of which sends him into a hyperanxious "fugue state" where his thoughts randomly bounce:

It was all just too much. It was chaos, madness, a writhing nest of eels. It was just too complex. It was utterly unmanageable. Unless . . unless somehow the process was automated. With more specific goals. Some reengineering. Critical path analysis. Decentralization. Co-optation. Thinking outside the box. But then there were so many other people. They all depended on him. He had to deputize. . . .

He was stymied. He was surrounded. He was through, finished, crushed. There was no possibility of coherent accomplishment. Nothing was ever going to move. (194-195)

This seeming disruption of functionality in Oscar's current system of distributed cognition is ultimately "hacked" by Green Huey, who chemically splits the brains of Oscar and scientist Greta Penninger - offering a new way of thinking (as it were) of distributed cognition within the same body, and an oddly naturalized response to the psychotic split of the United States into distinct administrative loci separating undocumented proles from the rest of the citizenry. These extreme representations of the reading and interpretive practice we already engage with this exercise may arise from print anxieties, or they may simply suggest that the future of reading, and of literature, may simply require more than one brain - although it remains to be proven that these practices have not always already informed literary study.

Works Cited:

1 ^ Sterling, Bruce. Distraction, a Novel. New York: Bantam-Spectra, 1998. All subsequent references are to this work unless otherwise specified.
2 ^ Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002.

Welcome to our project wiki!

LitPeejster — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:41:10 CDT

Welcome to the home page for New Criticism from New Media, a project for English 260, Winter 2008 at UCLA. The analytic focus for this project will be Bruce Sterling's 1998 Distraction: A Novel. While you are here, please browse the following pages and conversations:

Methodology

Learn about our critical approach here.

How to read this wiki

Our suggestions for how to engage this site.

A cheap narratology trick

An essay testing the limits of narratological close reading, and attempting to determine its usefulness in reading a novel about imagined technologies. This page also summarizes much of the plot of Distraction, and would be a good place to start acquiring a working familiarity with the novel.

The "cheap net-trick"

A section involving some neat data analysis of a scene underpinned by data analysis.

The project team

Kevin Moore
P.J. Emery

A Cheap Narratology Trick

kevin_of_los_angeles — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:07:14 CDT

At the beginning of Bruce Sterling’s 1998 novel Distraction, strategist Oscar Valparaiso and his “krewe”—armed with “goals, a mission, options, tactics, and a future” (8)—seem equipped to deal with any political situation as they make their way across the unstable landscape of the American South in November 2044. Valparaiso has just designed and operated a successful senate campaign in Massachusetts for Alcott Bambakias. Now, he enjoys the proceeds: he is “a brand-new policy analyst for the U.S. Senate Science Committee” on his way to East Texas to investigate and reorganize the political structure of the Buna National Collaboratory, a giant, domed biotechnology and genetics lab complete with its own power supply and atmosphere (8). Nevertheless, before the they are able to cross the border from Southwest Louisiana, the “krewe” encounters a unexpected and apparently unprecedented obstacle. Even in this vision of a United States with “sixteen major political parties,” even in this vision of the U.S. that has been wholly changed and destabilized by “[t]he horrific speed of digital communication, the consonant flattening of hierarchies, the rise of net-based civil society, and the decline of the industrial base” (119), it is still apparently an anomaly for the U.S. Air Force to stage a roadblock-fundraiser of this kind on an interstate in order to drum up funds.

Like most other members of the krewe, what surprises Valparaiso is not the imposing roadblock itself. In a country of “privately owned cities with millions of ‘clients’ where the standard rule of law [is] cordially ignored” (119), a rural encounter near a state border with a military force is hardly a notable event. Nor is it the prospect that the Air Force, now highly factioned, could become strapped for cash and forced to pursue its own fundraising under the thin, ironic guise of a “bake-sale.” Rather, it is the technological method of fundraising used by the Air Force that attracts Valparaiso’s attention. Learning that the Air Force is not only stopping out-of-state vehicles to ask for donations, but that airmen are using a database to “‘run credit scans and marketing profiles, [and] pick out the people likely to make generous financial contributions without any fuss’” in an “‘alternative, decentralized, tax-based scheme,’” Valparaiso responds, “‘Can they do that?’” (18). It would seem, at least on a first reading, that even is this dystopian future of American governmental and cultural institutions and practices rendered hollow, commodified, and put into the service of light-speed consumerism, the ethics of micro-marketing are still questionable, at least for Oscar Valparaiso.

But the question “‘Can they do that?’” is rhetorically unstable. Grammatically correct or not, it has at least two meanings for Sterling’s 1990s audience, and the response Sterling provides to the question from Valparaiso's security chief Fontenot cleverly exploits the meaning of that instability by ironically refusing to read it. Valparaiso appears to be asking about the ethics of the situation. He appears to be asking about will, not feasibility, and the late twentieth-century audience Sterling had in mind for his novel no doubt would imagine the word “can” as a grammatical mistake so common that it is a functional synonym for “may.” Yet Fontenot responds as if Oscar had asked the question that he literally asks, and not the question we imagine he is asking: “‘Sure, it’s doable.’” In this moment, the difference between the world of Sterling’s real audience—readers of cyberpunk fiction (or of post-cyberpunk science fiction; see this thread for more of the debate behind the term "cyberpunk")—and the world Sterling imagines and presents to his readers comes, after a slight delay, into striking relief. Oscar Valparaiso voices a more succinct version of the question that is clearly on the reader’s mind: in the middle-distance future that can be extrapolated from the social and technological trends of the late 1990s, would the United States Air Force set up a roadblock on a federal highway and use high-tech, highly invasive consumer marketing techniques as a way of collecting what is essentially a tax? But he simultaneously asks a literal question with a literal answer about the logistics of such an act in the represented world of the novel, which Fontenot answers without even flinching.

Ultimately, the move is more interesting for what it demonstrates about Sterling and his third-person narrator than for what it reveals about the characters of the novel. On the one hand, the move follows the logic of what Ian Watt famously called “delayed decoding” in his landmark study of Joseph Conrad—the device by which the particular details of a narrative event occur before the reader knows how to interpret their meaning—and suggests the presence of a quasi-modernist impulse toward epistemological reticence on Sterling’s part that clashes with what is otherwise a highly transparent mode of narrative transmission. Yet for Sterling, the disconnect between the world of the telling (our world) and the world of the told (the novel’s represented world) does not have an aesthetic so much as a rhetorical or political purpose, as the ironic quality of the move implies. Consider, for example, the reason the narrator gives for Fontenot’s deadpan reply. Here is the passage, which constitutes complete two paragraphs, in its entirety:

Oscar glanced at Fontenot. “Can they do that?”

“Sure, it’s doable.” Fontenot said. Fontenot was ex-Secret Service. The USSS had always been very up to speed on these issues. (18)

The narrator’s free indirect reasoning is almost as pokerfaced as Fontenot’s reply, and yet it distances the narrator from his twentieth-century reader in the same way that his characters seemed designed to distance themselves. In other words, Sterling seems as interested in calling attention to the differences between our world and the extrapolated world of Distraction as he is in bridging that imaginative gap, and our future a concept that is at once the bitterly ironic consummation of many of our present fears and something we must nevertheless confront and begin to imaginatively enter.

A novelistic world that simultaneously invites and alienates the reader: however fraught with seeming internal contradiction, this narrative dynamic is not disruptive so much as emblematic of science fiction, where the success of an imagined world often depends on the very interplay between what is plausible and what is novelty. But in Distraction, the matter is further complicated by the influence of technology on the experience of language Sterling imagines for the inhabitants of his novelistic world. The response, “Sure, it’s doable,” notably, does not just have significance as a word used by a character to indicate the semantic differences between our world and Sterling’s. Rather, it is the first use in the novel of what subsequently becomes Oscar Valparaiso’s—or is it the narrator’s?—favorite word. Considering his Boston girlfriend Clare during a conversation in Chapter Two, the narrator reveals that the word has entered Oscar’s thoughts, or at least that it can be used as a free indirect approximation of his thoughts: “Don’t get anxious, [Oscar] thought. Don’t think too fast. This isn’t one of the other ones, this is Clare. This is Clare, this is doable” (62, italics mine). Then, as the narrator paraphrases Valparaiso’s thoughts on the frustrating, practical contingencies of his job in Chapter Three, the word occurs again: “Scratch the old bus, inhabit the brand-new hotel. Just keep the krewe together, keep up the core competencies. Keep the herd moving. It was progress, it was doable.” (86, italics mine). The word finally infiltrates Valparaiso’s speech in Chapter Four, when he explains to star Collaboratory scientist Greta Penninger that saving her lab “‘might even be doable’” (141, italics mine). Then, the occurrence of the term in the novel begins to accelerate in Chapter Five—“‘Boston is totally doable’” (165), “‘Well, that’s doable’” (177)—and becomes a frequent feature of Valparaiso’s speech for the remainder of the novel.

Since this is a novel that begins and ends deeply in medias res, offering a snapshot of a few characters from an imagined world that the reader is prompted to suppose has a history and future beyond what is described within the book’s physical limits, it is difficult to know whether the word “doable” is new to Oscar or simply new to us. It is difficult to know if we observe the development of a personal speech pattern or a general feature of the American English dialect of Oscar Valparaiso’s social and intellectual class in 2044. The question, moreover, is one a literary narratologist might otherwise discard: traditionally, the aesthetic effects and semantic meaning of a novelistic word-use pattern take precedent over its identity as a pattern (a tradition that admittedly may be on the verge of shifting more generally, considering what Katherine Hayles--after the vocabulary Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon--has suggested about the increasingly dominance of the pattern/randomness binary in the context of informatics (32)). But in Distraction, and more importantly in the chapter of Distraction where the word “doable” begins to occur with increasing frequency, Sterling also imagines in the represented world of the novel a “cheap net-trick” that can be used to analyze speech patterns. The passage occurs when Valparaiso briefly returns to Washington DC to meet with other members of the Senate Science Committee for the first time, and describes the reaction of committee staffer Mr. Nakamura to several sentences spoken by Valparaiso . Here it is:

Nakamura nodded reflexively, then frowned. For a moment, Oscar thought he had overdone it. Nakamura had twenty years of recorded public appearances in the federal files. Oscar had taken the trouble to have the man’s speech patterns analyzed, ranked, and sorted. Nakamura was especially fond of the terms ‘prudence’ and ‘continuity,’ with ‘helpful’ and ‘a firm hand’ on strong upward trends lately. Verbally mimicking Nakamura was a cheap net-trick, but like most such tricks, it usually worked. (170)

The significance of this concordance is hard to overestimate. If until now the reader had been consciously or unconsciously picking up on the frequency with which Valparaiso attracts and uses the word “doable,” here, in a chapter in which its use, like the terms from Nakamura’s vocabulary, also begins to accelerate “on strong upward trends,” the attentive reader inevitably becomes self-conscious of the act.

In Distraction, Sterling plays on the difference between the meanings of words for the reader and for the characters of the medium-future represented world of the novel. At the same time, he proposes in the novel’s imagined world a technology used for reading a character in the novel that could undoubtedly be useful for an external observer hoping to read the characters of the novel and, for that matter, any recorded text. Whereas the narratological close reading of novels often reveals synecdochic figures that can be extracted and used to read a work as a whole, what may be Sterling’s most compelling synecdoche appears to be a technological replacement for narratological close reading itself. It is as if Distraction contains embedded within its represented world an analytic tool that might—if it were to come to pass, if it were to become as easily accessible as it is for Valparaiso—seriously threaten the literary critic who took the time to notice it.

But would the word “doable” really show up on an “analyzed, ranked, and sorted” speech pattern readout? Or does the possibility of looking for “doable” on a speech pattern analysis depend in the first place upon the recognition of a subtler narratological pattern in the text, the sort that—for now at least—is only accessible by the reader’s ability to detect tonal ironies, to pick apart the referents of various and often competing shades of free indirect discourse? This is, after all, a science fiction novel and not a prophecy, and the technology Sterling describes, while now readily available to companies like Amazon.com, is by no means accessible enough to be considered “cheap” or easy to obtain for, say, scholars in the humanities. Perhaps the matter is the "price" of the technology versus the cultural capital necessary to pursue literary close reading, for wouldn’t speech pattern analysis as a tool for reading novels only be of real value to the literary critic who took the time to recognize it? The situation seems, at best, a paradox: the technology described in Distraction that might finally undermine the literary critic would only be useful to a literary critic, and would perhaps mean nothing to the lay reader of Distraction. Because as a rhetorical presence it rests precisely on the border between the literary and the critical, the “cheap net-trick” as a textual object is a perplexing hybrid that seems half what Edgar Dryden calls an “enabling contaminant”—a literary trope or figure against which a text is written, but which also makes that text possible (e.g. the genre of chivalric romance for Don Quixote)—and half a quantum particle that changes when you attempt to observe it. In other words, the “cheap net-trick” depends upon and opens an interesting critical problem by rendering obsolete the very discursive apparatus that would find such problems interesting.

Cheap narratology tricks aside, what we might finally attempt to suggest is that the order of technologies in Distraction must be considered before an accurate impression of the meaning of any particular technology described by the novel can be formed. My impulses as a reader are conservative: to suppose that Sterling’s novel contains the best set of instructions by which it can be read, to take the “cheap net-trick” as seriously as possible and to imagine how it might be used to interpret the novel. But the “cheap net-trick” seems a trap laid by a shrewd writer for the attentive reader, and nothing short of a bottomless fall for the literary critic who would take it too seriously. Distraction is not concerned with resolving this problem. It is, on the other hand, the central provocation of the book: the shift of human intellectual activity from the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of the “doable,” a trend which seems to be taking place both inside and outside Sterling’s novel. For the literary critic, perhaps the largest question, and what remains to be seen, is the function and therefore the future of the novel in such a world. Clearly, the genre of the novel, in the hands of a writer like Bruce Sterling, can imaginatively support such a world complete with irresolvable semantic paradoxes to keep the literary critic busy, working, and funded. But can such a world imaginatively support the genre, let alone the critical apparatus, of the novel?

Works Cited:

Dryden, Edgar. The Form of American Romance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.
Hayles, N. Katherine. "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers." How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999.
Sterling, Bruce. Distraction. New York: Bantam, 1998.
Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: California UP, 1979.

How to read this wiki

kevin_of_los_angeles — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:59:57 CDT

Along with providing a fresh, authentic, experimental reading of Bruce Sterling's Distraction, our goal in this project is to take Fuller's notion of the "media ecology" as seriously as possible. That is to say, our methodological goal is not just to re-imagine but to construct a dynamic apparatus for re-imagining the future practice of literary criticism. For Fuller, the concept of the media ecology offers a Deleuzian "line of flight" from the form/content dialectic that has bound writers and scholars to obsolete genres. By suggesting that his own book Media Ecologies is at once a book about and an example of a media ecology, Fuller opens the epistemological borders of his print text to the pirate radios and civic light switches (among other non-print texts) he describes. As an electronic document with open borders epistemological and also authorial and technological, let this wiki be a media ecology which has the added capacity to break down the difference between reading and writing. To put it simply: our hope is that reading literary criticism and writing literary criticism might merge in this wiki to become part of a single experience.

As you browse the site, we encourage you to try the following:

Create a real or imagined wiki-identity. Although the concept of media ecology and wiki technology both place considerable pressure on traditional notions and operations of what Foucault called "the author function," it here remains necessary to limit "the proliferation of meaning" by means of an "ideological figure" (119): the wiki-identity. In order to fully interact with this site, you will need to create one or more WetPaint logons. And when you do so, take the idea of creation seriously. Imagine your literary critical avatar: project your self, your favorite critic or writer, your favorite theoretical approach, your tone, your good side, your bad side. Better yet, create a hybrid identity. Better still, create several hybrid identities. Allow them to compete for attention, to stage--by creating and engaging threads--the internal debates literary critics have long worked to efface from the readable surfaces of their print essays. On New Criticism from New Media, you cannot be an author, but you can demonstrate how the author function persists in the schizophrenic subconscious of a collaborative text.
Take the time to read the threaded discussions. It seems difficult to emphasize this enough. Many of the most important debates on this or any wiki site take place backstage, in the threaded discussions attending wiki pages, rather that in the wiki documents themselves. There, readers who might hesitate to make sweeping changes to a critical argument can still voice their take, or to highlight what their influence might have been in the wiki if they have already made changes. Consider these "threads" supplementary (if less formal) reading whenever you read one of our wiki articles.
Break down the difference between theory and practice. The creators of this page, who by launching a work of literary criticism in wiki format are implicitly attempting to cast off the conventional shackles of their discipline, are nevertheless trained literary critics who have developed the habit of separating theory and practice for organizational purposes. Break down these differences whenever possible. Why does a wiki media ecology arguably "about" the Bruce Sterling novel Distraction need to theorize and name itself as such, after all? Why does it have to do so on a separate methodology page? Interrogate these questions. In fact, consider this entire project an attempt to progressively answer these questions by progressively rendering them unaskable.
Don't forget style. Although tracking who writes what on a wiki is possible, a better way to read (and/or assert!) a real or imagined wiki-identity is to read for (and/or write!) style. One of the greatest threats to "literary criticism" as a coherent intellectual activity in any medium are the formulas of the discipline that so often put off the very "literary" readers and writers it is ostensibly the project of criticism to comment upon. As a participant In New Criticism from New Media, be engaging. And be engaged. Be dramatic and funny. Be an activist, a poet, and a scholar while reading for activism, poetry, and scholarship.
Accordingly, consider, respect, and exploit tonal differences. Unlike some wikis, particularly Wikipedia, a literary criticism wiki--like any highly-specialized, scholarly wiki--will necessarily will have a small audience and therefore a small pool of reader-writer-editors. This inevitably renders the overall tone of the wiki somewhat more various, and the tone of individual pages more stagnant. It also, we suggest, asks users to consider edits more carefully, particularly when it comes to disrupting the tone of an article. As in any wiki situation, there is no one stopping your from changing a critical argument completely. But think hard about the changes you make: what will they highlight, what will they undermine? How subtle can they be and still carry your point? Are they better suited for a thread discussion?
Cite your sources. The creators of New Criticism from New Media recognize that a wiki website occupies a liminal space and accordingly must make certain concessions to the same cultural institutions it seeks to critique, and to which it attempts to offer an alternative. Please cite your source in MLA format whenever you use someone else's work, but do so knowing that this "suggestion" can be modified when and if necessary.

Works Cited:

Deleuze and Guattari. "Introduction: Rhizome." A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987. 3-25.
Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
Sterling, Bruce. Distraction. New York: Bantam, 1999.