Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace

Chapter Five Intermediation

chapter five Intermediation The Pursuit of a Vision n . k at he ri ne ha yl es Literature in the twenty-first century is computational. Almost all print books are digital files before they become books; this is the form in which they are composed, edited, composited, and sent to the computerized machines that produce them as books. They should, then, properly be considered as electronic texts for which print is the output form. Although the print tradition of course influences how these texts are conceived and written, digitality also leaves its mark, notably in the increased visuality of such novels as Mark Danielewski’s brilliant hypertext novel House of Leaves, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper.1 The computational nature of twenty-first-century literature is most evident, however, in electronic literature, literature that is ‘‘digital born,’’ created on a computer and meant to be read on it. More than being marked by digitality, such works are actively formed by it. For those of us interested in the present state of literature and where it might be going, electronic literature raises complex, diverse, and compelling issues. In what senses is electronic literature in dynamic interplay with computational media, and what are the effects of these interplays? Do these effects differ systematically from print as a medium, and if so, in what ways? How are the user’s embodied interactions brought into play when the textual performance is enacted by an intelligent machine? Addressing these and similar questions requires a theoretical framework responsive both to the print tradition from which electronic literature 101 102 N. Katherine Hayles necessarily draws and the medial specificity of networked and programmable machines. Computation is not peripheral or incidental to electronic literature but central to its performance, play, and interpretation .2 Consequently, we will begin our interrogation by considering the cognitive capacities of computation for participating in the kind of recursive feedback loops characteristic of literary writing, reading, and interpretation. dynamic heterarchies and fluid analogies Many scholars in the humanities think of the digital computer as an inflexible, brute force machine, useful for calculating but limited by its mechanical nature to the simplest kind of operations. This conception is both true and false—true in that everything computable must be reduced to binary code to be executed, but false in the belief that this inevitably limits the computer to simple mechanical tasks with no possibility for creativity, originality, or anything remotely like cognition. From the field that includes artificial intelligence, artificial life, neural connectionism, simulation science, and related computational research, I will focus on two central concepts to develop the idea of intermediation : dynamic heterarchies and fluid analogies as embodied in multiagent computer programs. The simple computational devices called cellular automata, as Stephen Wolfram’s research demonstrates, can create complex patterns that emerge from local interactions between individual cells (or agents).3 The problem then becomes how to bootstrap such results into increasingly complex patterns of second-, third-, and n-level emergences . One proposal is intermediation, a term I have adopted from Nicholas Gessler, whereby a first-level emergent pattern is captured in another medium and re-represented with the primitives of the new medium, which leads to an emergent result captured in turn by yet another medium, and so forth.4 The result is what researchers in artificial life call a dynamic hierarchy, a multitiered system in which feedback and feedforward loops tie the system together through continuing interactions circulating through the hierarchy. Because these interactions go up as well as down, down as well as up, such a system might more appropriately be called a dynamic heterarchy. Distinguished by their degree of complexity, different levels continuously in-form and mutually determine each other. Think, for example, of a fetus growing inside Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision 103 a mother’s body. The mother’s body is forming the fetus, but the fetus is also reforming the mother’s body; both are bound together in a dynamic heterarchy, the culmination of which is the emergent complexity of an infant. The potential of this idea to explain multilevel complexity is the subject of Harold Morowitz’s The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex.5 Its glitzy title notwithstanding, Morowitz’s book is essentially a revisioning of well-established domains of scientific knowledge...