47. The Epitaph or Writing Beyond the Grave – Henk Oosterling
We browse a lot. What used to be written in thick books hidden away in shadowy libraries and which could only be consulted after negotiating a lot of red tape is now available virtually, fully illuminated, for everybody, at any moment. With a single click of the mouse or a gentle stroke of the touch screen, thousands of hits are compiled in a fraction of a second. At the end of the twentieth century, reading was given back, unnoticed and unintentionally, its original significance: collecting by hand. This urge for collecting still echoes in the old Dutch expression ‘aren lezen’ – reading the are. After harvesting, the farmers allowed the crowd of poor creatures who were looking on in hunger to collect the broken, discarded corn stalks.
We are collectors when we read. Not collectors of ideas, but of material symbols. The blind are the most sensitive readers. More even than the are readers, they read with the tips of their fingers. From within their dark universe, they inspect dexterously every pleat, groove, dent, or bump in the material. They stroke graphemes: symbols that are engraved in the world, such as the spoils on the hunter’s stake, to reverse the volatility of transitory existence. The grapheme offers resistance to oblivion. That is why the world’s graphic design is, in a literal sense, the material basis for a script culture. The grapheme is a grave in which the past is buried. But paradoxically, this epitaph gives eternal life to all that is past.
The reader is a laser. The seer touches the material with his eyes. First his eye flash back and forth across the medium on which the symbols string together meaninglessly. But unlike the illiterate person who, searching in panic for meaning like a Dutch tourist lost in China or Libya , only gathers senseless symbols, the reader sees meaning at the same time that he scans. The reader reads the world. Collecting is one of the meanings of the Ancient Greek legein that also means ‘reading’. Logos is derived from this. In logic, collecting becomes calculating. In science, calculating becomes, via registering, chronicling. Counting becomes recounting. Sciences arise from the urge to manage in rulers thirsting for power, the coquetry of megalomaniac priests, and the urge to collect of inquisitive world travellers. Through this combination, every form of systematic collecting eventually changes into an authoritarian -logy: astrology, archaeology, psychology, neurology. Knowledge is power. World is truth.
With the World Wide Web, we are back to the beginning and yet far past it. The circle closes. Data is meaningless and information contains no truth. Information is friction-less. WWW is like a sixteenth-century collection of knick-knacks. But through cunning communication technology, an ICTheological message is given: somewhere there is a resistance-less, eternal world. A world in which each fact is itself in a virtual current event where everything is possible. The world of pure potentiality is not made up of atoms packed together into matter. They punctually unite in a brightly lit, shimmering 1-dimensionality that is created by double passes between infotomes. We are beyond the depth and with it the epitaph. On the touch screen we stroke, without meeting resistance, as if reaching for Michelangelo’s The Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the foundation of our existence.
Henk Oosterling is a philosopher, and associate professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
48 Jumping Frames – David Ottina
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My experience of reading is dominated by the experience of browsing the web. I meander, dipping into conversations then jumping out to essays, sometimes settling into books. Yet ultimately it is a linear way of reading and although it may branch, the path I follow is only visible to me from ground level. I think this is changing though.
Every word that travels through the Internet is parsed and stored. Every touch sensed and recorded. Every connection routed and logged. We are identified and located. Our meanings and moods are derived and noted. Profiles are built. Our relationships are graphed and analyzed. Histories are compiled. As we read, so we are read.
The question is what sorts of texts are being written with these traces? Who are their authors? Who are their readers? And how are they being read?
We can think of the authors of these computed texts as the people who write the algorithms that set the conditions of narrative possibility. Rather than writing the stories themselves, they simply create the frames in which stories can occur. The readers are the ones who extract the narratives from this multidimensional space to create a coherent story. The creative role of the reader has of course been theorized, but for these sorts of texts, it's an imperative. The reader comes to the foreground while authorship recedes into the shadows, a purely technical function.
These texts are read in the hopes of monetizing our every communication, of securing a perpetual rent on culture. As long as the texts are created for exploitation and control, it seems unlikely they will lead to new understandings of ourselves. In this context, the social can only be cast in the image of the individual, like the aggregate figure in the frontispiece of Leviathan.
However, algorithmic authorship and creative readership can be put to other uses. What interests me is the potential of multidimensional texts. The ability to read/see a text through multiple contexts at once. The chance to try out different frames. The opportunity to see discourses from a perspective other than ground level. Such a thing is difficult to envision, but it can be analogized to the current media implosion/genre explosion.
Digitization undoes the materiality separating media, collapsing them into one, multifaceted medium. This, in turn, erodes the barriers under which genres have developed. All of a sudden we are free to mix genres, causing an explosion of possibilities.
Through the same kind of move, barriers between texts/readers can also be eroded. Of course we can and do mix contexts and jump frames with texts already, but the process is laborious and difficult. This is compounded by the fact that our discursive traditions make transcending disciplines near impossible. Computational media have the potential to make such frame jumping easier, to become a normal part of reading.
What would such networked texts look like if not framed by the conditions of capital, but by free and open cultural production? One certain outcome would be the massive proliferation of frames that flow from the diversity that openness invites. Might we see another image of ourselves in this process, not as an aggregation of individuals but as a social entity?
David Ottina is an interaction designer, free culture advocate, and a co-founder of Open Humanities Press.
49. Pictures and Words – Peter Pontiac
Asked to share his or her views on reading, no serious comic strip artist can ignore the bad reputation comic art (or 'sequential art' as Will 'The Spirit' Eisner preferred to call it) appeared to have and still does: it spoils young readers and makes them unqualified for reading true literature.
In the fifties Dr. Fredric Wertham proposed a total ban on comics in his book Seduction of the innocent. A Dr. Schückler claimed that comics were 'the Esperanto of the illiterate'. And to this day the comic book is generally deemed the defective cousin of the pictureless novel. Pictures, however successful in telling a story, are simply considered inferior to words.
Neither the 'Classics Illustrated' comic series that started in 1957 with its boasting motto 'Lees feestelijk, groei geestelijk' ('When reading pleases, knowledge increases'), featuring stories by Shakespeare, Verne, Homer, et al (not always drawn by the most inspired artist, I'm afraid), nor the fashionable new label 'graphic novel' (also coined by Eisner) have yet changed this arrogant view.
Presumably 'word art' is seen as superior to 'picture art' because a writer, simply by using well-put phrases, provokes the reader's imagination to breathe life into a story and its characters, whereas the drawing storyteller shortchanges the reader, leaving less elements to the imagination. According to this way of thinking, film should have even less value than comic art, as film is one of many art forms that use more than just words to touch the beholder – art's core business after all.