literature in all its media

If machines awaken in the imagination an « uncanny strangeness » (Unheimlichkeit (1)), they also constitute a material environment that interferes with the arts. To what extent does the development of technology condition creative practices?

Bartolomé Ferrando, Texto poético, 9 – Obra poética, 1999. Photo: D.R.

There is no doubt that artists have always had a choice in their medium of expression, and that there is only voluntary technological art and literature (2). However, « mediological mutations »—which Jean-Pierre Bobillot defines as a technological innovation reinforced by a symbolic innovation (3)—are radically changing the conditions for producing and distributing works. But whereas visual and sound arts, for which the medium is essential, have had no difficulty admitting the role of technology in their creative process, literature remains surrounded by a strange aura of idealism. Even if it is generally accepted today that the transition to the printing press or mass media has considerably marked writing practices, literary studies have hardly been preoccupied with the relationship between literature and its immediate technological environment. The use of « writing machines » is regarded, at best, as self-evident, at worst, as a guiltily materialistic indifference toward the intellectual, if not spiritual, nature of literary art.

This denial of the influence of technological transformations on the modalities of writing does, however, reveal two distinct movements, which are also two attitudes: on one hand, these new technologies are being gradually integrated (when a medium becomes dominant, its common usage makes technology less of an issue); on the other, these same innovations (and their effects) are being questioned. The recent development of digital writing shows that it is possible for these two movements to coexist. If the first, widespread, takes into account extra-literary phenomena (technological development, accessibility, ergonomics…), the second, founded on experimentation with new devices and the invention of adequate writing procedures, manifests the attention that literary creation has always paid to the development of these technologies.

From multiplying media to media-literature

Full awareness that the use of technology could affect literary practices comes late, and is linked to reproduction and communication technologies. A growing interest for these media emerges in the last third of the 19th century, as an important, if poorly studied, dimension of European symbolism. Books are questioned as objects, as in Mallarmé’s exemplary Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (« A roll of the dice will never abolish chance ») in 1897. At the same time, the material conditions for distributing writing evolve (invention of the typewriter in 1868, linotype in 1885), just as writers encounter new media (photography, telephone, phonograph), even if their use is not widespread until the early 20th century. Thereafter, books are clearly designated as outdated objects, or at least to be completely reconstructed (along with a dense contemporary analysis of typography). From poster to record to radio, literature explores every medium of modernity.

As literary media diversify, a conscious sign that « everything can become a medium » (4), they attract more attention to their function as media (particularly in the context of communications criticism, which has become dominant since the mid 20th century). But contrary to digital literature, which developed rich theories on the changes brought about by the medium in terms of both creation and reception, reports on the preceding innovations are rare. Those that do exist are shallow, focusing on the way the machine is explored, exploited for what it is—the same relationship that exists between concrete poetry and the typewriter, or between sound poetry and magnetic tapes and the microphone. Here, the machine is not limited to an auxiliary function but makes possible a specific work, which in turn renews the relationship between the author and the reader.

Bartolomé Ferrando, Texto poético, 9 – Obra poética, 1999. Photo: D.R.

New perceptions of « me, here, now »

Besides its capacity to invest in the medium itself, the changing mediasphere conditions new modalities of perception. Modern communication devices transform our relationship with time and space, sharpening our awareness of the synchrony of events and giving the illusion of ubiquity. This accelerated experience of the modern world finds a parallel in the increasingly instant nature of machine-based writing. According to McLuhan, the coincidence of text production and reproduction is the main advantage of the typewriter (5), just as « real-time processing » is one of the more fruitful uses of computers.

This immediacy, which has also led to the gradual disappearance of crossed-out text (industrially produced paper favors it, while typewriters make it complex and computers erase it), is paradoxically accompanied by a distancing effect. The common characteristic of these communicating machines, which both fascinate and perturb the latter part of the 19th century, is that they lead to depersonalization, or literally, disembodiment. The typewriter obliterates the traces of the handwritten gesture, just as the telephone and the phonograph detach the voice from the body, and photography and film separate one’s appearance from the being that animates it—a phenomenon that recalls the immobile projection of logging in to cyberspace. In the act of writing itself, this dematerialization is also expressed by the growing distance between the artist and the artwork, which Abraham Moles analyzes, in the case of computers, as an « objectification » of language (6).

The paradox is reversed, however, when the double effects of dissociation and exteriorization imposed by the machine bring the body back. Just as the plume or the pen is grasped like a tool and an extension that adapts to the body (the plume fits the hand), typewriting assumes an adaptation of the body (a constraint) that involves a rhythm, a « gesticulation » (7). The rising practice of sound in literature and, to a greater extent, in performance, confirms that machines not only amplify but also reveal the body by manifesting its interiority (François Dufrêne, Henri Chopin). The return of the body through the machine and the emphasis on immediacy coincide with a new way of considering an artistic act, not as that which produces beauty, but as that which, like machines, transforms the world. Hence the more valorized definition of art as « intervention » or « action », which is a common trait among avant-garde practices.

Writing informed by technology

In this rapid overview, we must finally consider the consequences of technology on writing procedures. Many studies attest to the stylistic changes that have accompanied the changing technosphere. Friedrich Kittler reports the claims of several writers who, because of the typewriter, have gone « from rhetoric to telegraphic style » (8). For ergonomic reasons, as much as the intent to translate modern modes of perception or material effects related to the machine, a « technological style » has developed, focused on mechanical procedures. In response to the efficiency, absence of emotion and rhythm of the machine, we find concision, objectivity or a taste for permutation in literature. Language is transformed and accelerated—we « abolish syntax » (9), prioritize the word, even the letter, as this elementary link of language; we give precedence to verbal material, which echoes the new materiality of the act of writing.

In addition to this « translation » of mechanics, some writers question their relationship with these new media and develop new literary forms, voluntarily dependent on their chosen format. But while the historical avant-garde of 1920-1930 live it as a euphoric fusion, the neo-avant-garde of 1950-1970 seem to consider the relationship between the artist and the medium as a power struggle. The two attitudes are opposed, even if the machine always appears as a constraint. On one side are those who use the tool according to its potential—concrete poetry adopts the minimalist aspect of the impersonality and stark visual style of the typewriter, while in the audio field, literature integrates the sounds that can be recorded and fixed. On the other side are those who intervene on the machine in order to thwart its use—interventions on magnetic tapes and sound collages blur audibility, while delinearized, even illegible texts produced by « typist-poets » mirror the useless machines of the dadists and the self-destructive machines of Jean Tinguely. In both cases, the machine is reappropriated to produce art and becomes an esthetic object in itself. In this sense, even as literature develops under the constraints of technology, it offers in exchange new uses that invite reflection.

If McLuhan’s affirmation that « the medium is the message » may seem extreme, at least this research invites us to recognize the medium in the production of meaning. In the face of « passive » literature, which requires a tool for mass production, « media-literature » (10) emerges, going beyond technological concerns to focus on the medium’s impact in the creative process as well as its use to challenge academicism and social attitudes regarding esthetics.

Isabelle Krzywkowski
published in MCD #76, “Writing Machines”, march/may 2012

(1) This was the term used by Sigmund Freud in the essay Das Unheimliche (1919), referring to the automaton in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, The Sandman (in The Night Pieces, 1816), an essential text about the relationship between human and machine.
(2) According to Raymond Queneau, there is only voluntary literature (quoted in OuLiPo, La Littérature potentielle: créations, re-créations, récréations, Gallimard, 1973, coll. Folio essais, 1988, p. 27).
(3) Jean-Pierre Bobillot, POésie & MEdium (2006), p. 2. Accessible online at:
http://www.sitec.fr/users/akenatondocks/DOCKS-datas_f/collect_f/auteurs_f/B_f/BOBILLOT_F/TXT_F/Doc(k)s-Bob.htm
(4) Trois leçons de poésie: du bru(i)t dans la pointCom, films by Jean-Pierre Bobillot and Camille Olivier (2006 / 2008) : www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylcxSz33c2w — www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwxjgXwALn4
(5) Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (McGraw-Hill, 1964), Chapter 26:  The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim.
(6) Abraham Moles, Art et ordinateur, (Casterman, coll. Synthèses contemporaines, 1971, p. 108).
(7) Adriano Spatola, Verso la Poesia totale (1969) — Vers la poésie totale, (Éditions Via Valeriano, 1993, p. 112).
(8) Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typerwriter, (Berlin, Brinkmann & Bose, 1986, p. 294).
(9) Filippo Marinetti, Manifeste technique de la littérature futuriste (1912).
(10) This term was inspired by the anthology Media Poetry conceived by Eduardo Kac in 1996.

is there anyone in the machine?

The theorist Friedrich Kittler, who died last October, is still relatively unknown in France. His originality was to create a dialogue between the ideas of Foucault and Lacan and media theory, especially McLuhan. His own theory postulates that today, writing is linked to computer code—code which has become increasingly user-unfriendly.

The Hansen Writing Ball,1865. Photo: D.R.

In an interview, the Germanist and media theorist Friedrich Kittler stated: I can’t understand why people only learn how to read and write the 26 letters of the alphabet. They should at least add the 10 digits, the integrals and the sinuses (…). They should also master two programming languages, in order to possess what, at the moment, constitutes culture. Elsewhere, he denounced the computer industry for wanting to rob users of their grip on the machine.

The question has haunted the debate between technophiles and technophobes: Are humans using machines to produce meaning or is it the machines that are producing humans and their productions? In a word, who are the masters and the slaves of our digital century, where computers have become the ubiquitous managers of our practical and theoretical activities? This question may still be relevant in media theory, but not so much in reality, considering that humans have never mastered their own meaningful productions, in the sense that they would have been fully aware and autonomous. This is the starting point for Friedrich Kittler.

What is his dominant thesis? That the writing system of a period, i.e. the techniques used by a culture to record, transmit and treat information, determines what we are, what we think and how we see ourselves. But while we may speak of Kittler’s technical determinism, his theories were more inspired by Foucault than by Marx. Like his French predecessor, who wrote in The Discourse on Language: If there are things that are said, do not ask for an immediate reason of the things that have been said or of the people who have said them; first consider the system of discourse, its possibilities and impossibilities of enunciation, Kittler is dedicated to shining a light on the conditions that would make possible different types of discourse allowing successive productions, by period, (from the flight of birds among the Romans to the symptoms of neurosis) to become meaningful to their contemporaries. In any given period, and independently of the speakers’ intentions, not everything can be said, or heard. But where Foucault is exclusively interested in the orders of discourse that determine language production, Kittler expands his field of investigation to the technical environment as a whole.

Writing was the first technical system used to record, transmit and treat information. For a while, it was the only channel for memory and the constitution of the world. Its monopoly was challenged in the early 20th century by the phonograph, photography and cinema. Beyond the fact that they offered a new plurality of representations of reality, these new media caused a break—contrary to writing, which reproduced reality symbolically, their mode of representation consisted of recording the physical effects of reality, thus preserving the traces of the body or event. In Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, Kittler analyzes this in Salomo Friedlaender’s story Goethe parle dans le phonographe (1916), which imagines the possibility of hearing Goethe’s voice again by recording the vibrations of his speech, among which some, bouncing from object to object, still persist today, albeit much weaker. Recorded sound, like photography, was thus mechanical proof of the object’s existence. Writing produces meaning through symbols, the phonograph and photography through recording.

A new system for producing meaning in the 20th century.

The new media acted on the education system that had instituted this writing system of 1800, putting an end to what could be called the rule of meaning. Up until 1800, it was the mother’s voice murmuring gentle words into her children’s ears that taught them how to speak. Between these syllables and the first words pronounced by the children, continuity was established from an instance of meaning. In the same way that the syllable « ma » was born from maternal love, little by little transforming into the word « mom », speech came about naturally from syllables establishing the affectionate mother-child relationship from the very first meaningful words.

Thomas A. Edison, Home phonograph, 1906. Photo: D.R.

But the rule of new media has changed the modalities of speech transmission. Now, just as the phonograph records the sounds emitted from the vocal cords before any ordering of signs or meaning whatsoever (vibrations are frequencies that escape our perception of movement and cannot be transcribed or written), learning language consists of processing data, itself devoid of meaning. Learning to talk and write has become a process of learning meaningless syllables, which are combined to form words and sentences. The syllable « ma » has lost its emotional value to become little more than the result of a systematic production of sounds based on the letters of the alphabet (ma-me-mi-mo-mu…). Children no longer memorize through a natural and continuous process of language spoken by their mothers, they acquire language through a series of syllables with no meaning. The writing system of 1900 rolls the dice with discrete units ordered in series. This is what media are in the modern sense of the term: meaningless building blocks, designed by random generators, selected to form arrays.

The resulting discourses are no longer the same. According to Kittler, we must radicalize Walter Benjamin’s idea that cinema produces dispersion, which opposes bourgeois concentration. This is much more general and systematic. Film has no primary role among the media that are revolutionizing art and literature. All are provoking a flight of ideas in the psychiatric sense. In Das Aufschreibesystem, Kittler relates the experimentations of the Viennese psychiatrist Stransky (1905). The subjects of his experiments, including both colleagues and patients, had to speak into the tube of the phonograph for one minute (if possible quickly and profusely). He observed the same behavior among all of them: saying sentences with no regard to meaning. The phonograph produced provocative responses, which no self-respecting civil servant or educator would dare to write. Individuals who must talk or read faster than they can think necessarily wage their own little war against discipline.

This new paradigm is still affecting the production of meaning today. Since 1900, the instance of producing discourse that transforms inarticulate babbling into meaning has been replaced by a random process of recording and combination.

A new role in the system for the digital revolution?

Computers have only served to accomplish the meaningless aspect of discrete elements which combine to produce meaningful statements. With binary code, the flow of acoustic, optical and written data, formerly differentiated and autonomous, are now coded by the same basic elements and transmitted by the same fiber optics. The monopoly of writing has been succeeded by the monopoly of numbers, while the link to reality introduced by the phonograph and photography has been broken— reality is no longer reproduced by recording, but by coding. Sounds and images, voices and texts are nothing more than interfaces created by a series of digits. The differences between media are only superficial.

Logically, the technical level of producing meaning (the code) is not the semantical level of the existence of meaning. Kittler emphasizes the gap between the code, becoming increasingly inaccessible to the users, and the interfaces, and points out the efforts of the computer industry to restrict consumer access to the machine, transforming the computer into a ready-to-use tool, which it is not. Thus, the possibilities of intervening on the machine and modifying its technical parameters are limited, while users’ desire to do so is channeled by immediate and easy-to-use interfaces.

If humans have never mastered their meaningful productions, as stated earlier, if today we are only determined by our own binary system of writing, the digital era leads us to ask ourselves if there is an author in the machine, that is, if and how users can overcome these digital determinations to reappropriate a meaningful intention.

Frédérique Vargoz
Associate of philosophy
published in MCD #76, “Writing Machines”, march/may 2012

between evolution and sanctification

Can text be saved by the book? As writing and reading practices evolve within the digital environment, French theater defends itself above all logic of the printed text…

Illusion.com, 2009. Photo: © La Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon

Theater of text or theater of the book?

Now that the profound changes which have transformed writing and reading practices have finally been acknowledged, theater is more than ever reaffirming literary values linked to book culture as a way of legitimizing itself. While new artistic practices develop in relation to digital technology, « text » stands as the last bastion of theater. Or perhaps it should be the book—after all, those who support theater of text refer primarily to theater of the book. In this context, it is sometimes difficult to convey that textuality is evolving on new formats which contribute to renewing and opening up theater art.

Claiming the primacy of text accompanies a complementary discourse that values the interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and transversal natures of theater, but only to assign them ancillary roles, where issues surrounding text are most often diluted. Recent developments in writing have thus troubled our cultural « networks of discourse » structured more around collection of data than openness to ideas. There is no specific difference by which they can be indexed and categorized; instead they produce new effects, which have yet to be evaluated. Therefore, a historical approach is best suited to renew these issues and put them into perspective.

It was in this context that I directed for four years at La Chartreuse – Centre National des Écritures du Spectacle a project entitled Levons l’encre, in order to give perspective to developments in textuality and writing for theater. Within a cultural structure dedicated to writing, it may seem only natural to take into account current writing technologies, as well as necessary to adapt to the evolving practices of authors and artists. While the myth of the writer’s hand scribbling away on a blank page still exists, the fact is that the vast majority of authors today write on a computer.

This approach aims to radically re-examine the issue of text in theater by confronting it with the history of writing and its current developments. It suggests that text, far from being one of the fundamentals of theater, is changing in ways that have a crucial effect on all theatrical components. Separating text from print denounces our typical confusion of text and book. If we replace the notion of theater of text with theater of the book, we will no doubt see more clearly. The problem is that many people tend to sanctify theater in relation to digital technology—through « text », although in reality through print—rather than explore ways in which new forms of writing can contribute to mapping out new territory for theater.

Writing spaces beyond the book

If text written for theater was not originally presented in the form of a book, we can just as well imagine dramatic text that is not printed. Has print influenced theatrical practices? If so, what is it like to write for theater without following the logic of print? If digital technology offers new forms of writing, can it create new spaces for writing that call for new forms of composition and other ways of making theater?

This angle of attack goes against the usual ways of thinking. While it overlaps in several points the post-drama debate, which has contributed so much in recent years to esthetic debates concerning theater in Europe, it filters the topic through the materiality of writing. It does not specify theatrical forms related to images and screens on the stage. Writing and reading media are all part of the debate on writing for theater. In short, by revealing a blind spot, we attempt to spotlight a new territory to be explored, both invisible and ubiquitous, where writing and reading in digital environments are nothing short of routine.

As we were experimenting with these topics at La Chartreuse, it occurred to me that we could try to reread the history of theater through successive changes in the history of writing. If historians put new writing modes into perspective through the history of the alphabet and printing, have these textual milestones had any effect on theater?

sonde03#09 – Chartreuse News Network. Photo: © Alex Nollet, La Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.

Several works by historians and anthropologists have made evident a constitutive and structuring relationship between writing media and the history of theater practices. The emergence of new media for writing invites us to reconsider the articulations between writing and theater that underlie and organize theater practices. We have developed this historically themed research elsewhere, placing particular emphasis on the complex articulations between theater and print, which are key in understanding the extent to which digital technology is deconstructing practices and devices linked to print.

While theater persists in theorizing, administrating, gaining expertise and perceiving itself primarily through the framework of print, a coherent series of mechanisms that link page and stage, and in fine a way of instituting theater practices, is obsolescent. After the specific typographic conventions of the drama script, we are discovering a burst of diverse materialities of writing for theater. Some authors—to mention only those in French theater: Noëlle Renaude, Matthieu Mevel, Sonia Chiambretto…—are digitally reinvesting print and exploring new materialities of drama writing that incorporate typographic wordplay, graphic design and singular layouts.

In parallel, some authors are experimenting with new media writing online, in social networks, projected on various types of screens on stage, on mobile devices. La Chartreuse encouraged this exploration of the field by commissioning four authors to create an online work (Illusion.com by Joseph Danan, Sabine Revillet, Eli Commins and Emmanuel Guez), by producing an audio journey by Célia Houdart, and by supporting Eli Commins’ Breaking, which uses Twitter testimonies to write about world events such as political resistance in Iran, the earthquake in Haiti, etc.

Opposing the affirmation of authorship in theater is the reality of multiple forms of practices, which lead the author to develop the text directly in relation to the physical and technological environment of the stage. While print distanced the author from the stage, new media for writing have reintroduced the author into the theatrical creative process. They reactivate theater as a collaborative process, neither structured hierarchically around the author’s message, nor directed and controlled remotely by the text. Far from institutionalized routines and lack of curiosity, these transformations call upon a new dynamic that welcomes experimentation, research and innovation.

Theater as a metaphor of the computer, not the book

The evolution of writing is also the evolution of reading. The viewer as displaced reader—more precisely, reader of books—is joined by the viewer as displaced TV viewer, moviegoer, Web surfer, hypertext reader or gamer.

More generally, we can compare today’s emergence of theater within the digital environment—from control room to communication, from set design to video archive—to the way it once took possession of print. The revived motif of theater of the world, which leads the way for theater and books, revolves around the idea of the stage as a metaphor of its technological, media and cultural environment, where it is critically confronted.

Theater of the book remains the central paradigm of theater today. But it can no longer be the only paradigm. As a metaphor of the book, the stage is becoming more and more of a metaphor of the computer, or even a metaphor of the relationship between the two, influenced by a new relationship between writing and orality. Linearity or simultaneity/discontinuity, prioritizing stage materials to serve the text or hybrid writing, remote or active participation of the audience, constructing meaning or constructing a sensitive and intelligible experience… are all contrasting cultural conceptions of the theatrical arts. They refer to the way the media informs our practices.

Theater coordinates writing techniques, ways of thinking, diverging perceptions. It’s a rich asset. It reflects the complex situation of writing within our society. But it can also be an invaluable vehicle to explore the evolution of writing throughout our society.

Franck Bauchard
researcher and critic, artistic director of La Chartreuse (2007-2011)
published in MCD #76, “Writing Machines”, march/may 2012