The Baroque Technotext

Elise Takehana

Description

To date, most criticism of print and digital technotexts – literary objects that foreground the role of their media of inscription – has emphasized the avant-garde contexts of a text’s production. The Baroque Technotext opens new perspectives on this important and innovative literary canon, analysing the role of baroque and neo-baroque aesthetics in the emergence and possible futures of technotexts. Combining the insights of poststructuralist theory of the baroque, postcolonial theory of the neobaroque, and insightful critique of the prevailing modernist approaches to technotexts, The Baroque Technotext reframes critical debate of contemporary experiments in literary practice in the late age of print. Analyses of works from authors including Jonathan Safran Foer, Chris Ware and David Clark are matched with reflections on other media texts – film, visual art and interface design – that have adopted baroque aesthetic tropes.

 

Introduction: An Anamorphic Projection of the Title 

Reconciling Literary Study with Materiality 

Technotexts as a Focus 

Technotexts Beyond Modernism 

Baroque as the Other Focus 

Baroque Reason as Modernity’s Madness 

Prologue 

Choice 

Monads: A Harmonic Subjectivity for Technotextuality 

Mirrors 

Mise en Abyme: Mirrorish Dimensions Down to the Code 

Illusion 

Trompe L’Oeil: Blending Media and Synesthetic Knowing 

Surface 

Minoring: Baroque Cosmology and Criticizing from Within 

Code 

Collections and Navels: The Horror Vacui of the Database 

Coda 

References 

Index 

Sujets

• Loisirs
• Arts Numériques
• Computers
• Informatique
• Película fotográfica
• 20th century in literature
• User interface design
• Graphics
• General officer
• Visual arts
• Media studies
• Modernism
• Design
• General
• History
• Avant-garde
• ART
• Film
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 19 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789381672
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Baroque Technotext

The Baroque Technotext
______________________
Literature in a Digital Mediascape
Elise Takehana
First published in the UK in 2020 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Alex Szumlas
Copy editor: MPS
Frontispiece image: Olivier Richon (1989), A Devouring Eye, C type print, 24 in. × 30 in.
Production manager: Laura Christopher
Typesetting: Newgen
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-165-8
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-166-5
ePub ISBN 978-1-78938-167-2
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
About the Book
Introduction: An Anamorphic Projection of the Title
Prologue
CHOICE
Monads: A Harmonic Subjectivity for Technotextuality
MIRRORS
Mise en Abyme: Mirrorish Dimensions Down to the Code
ILLUSION
Trompe l’Oeil: Blending Media and Synesthetic Knowing
SURFACE
Minoring: Baroque Cosmology and Criticizing from Within
CODE
Collections and Navels: The Horror Vacui of the Database
Coda
References
Index
About the Book
To focus on what is represented is to relish the zuhanden where the reader depends on the author to provide a product they can enjoy without much thought to its construction. When readers begin asking how of their representational texts, they become invested in the process of its making and the assumptions they adopted while interacting with those texts, placing them in a vorhanden state. 1 Readers start to see how they read as a layer that affects what they understand. In that spirit, I write this book not just to argue for the relevance of the baroque as a point of comparison to technotextual literature, but to act out baroque reason and assume baroque tropes as structurally foundational. 2
In charting relevant baroque aesthetic practices, I catalogue five concepts 3 explored in twentieth-century post-structuralist thought but which are ultimately based on baroque aesthetic practices. I apply each concept to technotexts that demonstrate how literature exercises baroque aesthetic techniques to adjust to digital culture and emerging models of subjectivity and textuality. While this theoretical backing and application to a technotext constitute the bulk of the book that follows, I prime each chapter with a discussion of a nonliterary text spurred on first by personal experience, thus grounding the theme of the following chapter. Concepts presented as theoretical or abstract are also quotidian. By including some workaday observations and nonliterary texts, I hope to make clear that baroque aesthetic techniques are not only at work in literature, or even just artistic expressions across media, but affect human perception and perceptions of humanness. While each chapter is separate and complete on its own, there are many overlaps and resonances across their limits. The book’s structure can result in a dizzying, labyrinthine experience, but an unavoidable one when acting out the baroque, not just discussing it. The chapters are essentially fugal: five chapters, five melodic themes, with the personal experience and nonliterary text introducing each theme. The theoretical portion of the chapter develops the theme, and the application of theoretical concepts to technotexts resolves the theme.
From its beginnings, I imagined the book as a Jacob’s ladder – a line of blocks looped to move cyclically even if they appear to exist linearly. Because the baroque makes clear its critique on representation when it shifts between exposing and obscuring the frame, perspective or medium, so too does this book attempt to show the moment when the Jacob’s ladder reveals itself as a circle of blocks tumbling upon one another. The end of one chapter flips the block over to its reverse so that ‘Monad’ closes with the idea of representation folding in on itself, while ‘ Mise en Abyme ’ opens with representation unfolding outwards. ‘ Mise en Abyme ’ closes with the idea of looking at the materiality of representation, while ‘ Trompe l’Oeil ’ opens with the reverse approach of looking through material structures to reach the supposed content. Even closing with accumulation in the final chapter ‘Collections and Navels’ flips back into the opening chapter ‘Monads’, which begins with the idea of choice and arrangement. Turning the chapters over into one another helps replicate the inclusivity and variety of the baroque ellipse 4 over the unity and stability of the classical circle.
The book is condensed in the prologue and expanded in its chapters. Its introduction, like a perturbance on a baroque pearl, is an outgrowth of the chapters and an expansion of the title. Once you arrive at the chapters, the book is a cycle, you can start with any chapter as your entry point. If you start with ‘Choice’, you start with constructing identity. ‘Mirrors’ would begin the journey with exposing functions of representation. Commencing with ‘Illusion’ sets the starting line at immersion and its pleasures. Originating at ‘Surface’ is to begin with criticizing hegemony. Setting forth from ‘Code’ is to start with the blunt claim of meaninglessness. Begin where you like. You will always end in a conceptually oppositional place from where you began.
If you do not care for the Jacob’s ladder or ellipse metaphor, you could also imagine the book as a looped tour of Gilles Deleuze’s Allegory of the Baroque House. The first floor of the house contains all possibilities available in the universe and the second floor includes only those possibilities that a subject has chosen or that chance and circumstance foisted upon them. Going up the stairs narrows one’s reality and supports a zuhanden state of ignoring form to exercise a function. Going down the stairs reveals one’s second-floor reality as only one possible iteration, given the infinite recombinations available on the first floor and ushers in vorhanden moments of interrogating form to infer multiple functions. By doing and then undoing – of walking upstairs and downstairs in Deleuze’s baroque house – we can experience the representational crisis the baroque embodies. Technotexts also encourage readers to run up and down those stairs by imbricating literary content with its material substrate. This book uses this vertical movement to replicate the repeatedly changing states between zuhanden and vorhanden that make the baroque technotext both perplexing and pleasurable. ‘Choice’ and ‘Illusion’ run upstairs. ‘Mirrors’ and ‘Surface’ travel downstairs. ‘Code’ sits midway through the staircase considering which way to go.
As you move through the book, there are a handful of concepts that appear across chapters. I do not repeatedly explain these concepts, so, instead, you may find it helpful to know the location of its most detailed explanation:

• Allegory of the Baroque House pp. 25–26
• ellipse pp. vii n4, 121–22
• major and minor strategies pp. 119–21
• monad pp. 24–27
• technotext pp. 6–8
• vorhanden and zuhanden pp. vii n1, 7.
Otherwise, traditional chapter summaries immediately follow and the prologue that condenses the entire book to one page appears after the introduction.
Chapter Summaries
‘Choice’ opens with the conundrum of choosing from 94 vodka bottles and a brief reading of Jaco Van Dormael’s 2009 film, Mr. Nobody , to address the crucial role of choice and arrangement in building subjective perspectives.
‘Monads’ considers how Gottfried Leibniz’s monadology inspired Deleuze’s The Fold and a reimagined subjectivity that perceives all entities as entangled with one another but differentiated only via their perspective. Entities establish their perspective by the choices and circumstances they make or experience. To bridge these differences, entities find resonant harmonies with one another and communicate through allegory. 5 The chapter culminates with a close reading of David Clark’s net.art work, 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand), an insistently digressive, recursive, born-digital meta-biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein as a showcase of monadic subjects who are inherently allegorical and rife with harmonic potential.
‘Mirrors’ starts with a misguided use of a disposable camera and continues into a reading of match cuts and applications of mirrors in Joe Wright’s 2012 film, Anna Karenina.
‘ Mise en Abyme ’ borrows the concept of the mirrorish from Jean-François Lyotard as a broader explanation for what one experiences more specifically in the literary and visual trope of mise en abyme . While the mirrorish unfolds higher dimensions, the mise en abyme reveals co-centric layers of representation. The chapter closes with an analysis of Kevin Gold’s interactive sci-fi novel in app form, Choice of Robots , specifically regarding how paratextual features such as running metadata function textually .
‘Illusion’ moves on to the robo-telemarketer before providing a brief exploration of the augmented reality app NOAD as a return to baroque challenges of the divide between representation and reality.
‘ Trompe l’Oeil ’ takes up illusory practices of the quadratura, bel composto and trompe l’oeil that mean to smooth over media boundaries 6 and erase the presence of the frame so that illusion is easily mistaken for or bleeds into reality. Here I exercise Jacques Derrida’s idea of the parergon as a fr