Media Structures

begin by reading the rest of Vismann 2008, begin pg 13

will have to confront Galloway 2012 critique of formalism --> failure of formalism -- trying to define medium with reference to a specific 'language' or set of essential formal qualities, which then, following the metaphysical logic, manifest in the world a number of instances or effects" (19) -- object-thinking begets the problems of formalism

to read:

• http://www.performance-research.org/past-issue-detail.php?issue_id=67

Kirschenbaum, "Editing the Interface" -- updating edition / impression / state / etc. for digital objects

Kittler: there is no software (http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74)

John Durham Peters, Information: toward a critical history

Platform

bookroll

• Johnson 2009

codex

• Flusser, "Book," Does Writing Have a Future?

palm-leaf books

khipu:

• Urton, Gary. Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. Austin: University of Texas Press, Austin, 2003.
• Gary Urton, Inka history in knots : reading khipus as primary sources (2017)
• Galen Brokaw, A History of the Khipu (2010)

Format

Sterne 2012

Tenen 2017, “Form, Formula, Format”

• distinction between print and digital books: print static, “we have no trouble operating a several hundred years old book”, digital changes on a monthly/daily basis (114)
  • this word operating shows up often in these distinctions — Ernst also makes it about manuscripts — but this seems wrong; depends on an entirely materialist concept of “operation”
• “Whatever one designates as core content is enveloped within a multiplicity of standards, references, models, and formats, which in aggregate define the medium — the physical preconditions — of laminate text.” (123)
  • is the difference not that such protocols exist but that they’re materially instantiated in networks of control? (Galloway) — by ignoring cultural codes of print, we strip away history from the investigation and set up a false binary, missing the actual difference (materialization of control)
  • so in some ways the different is not the dematerialization of text so much as a much stricter materialization of protocol

Substrate

parchment

• Holsinger, "From Pig to Parchment"

hand-made European paper

• Calhoun 2011

amate paper

Code

David Berry, "Contribution toward a grammar of code": http://thirteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-086-a-contribution-towards-a-grammar-of-code/

Rita Raley, "Code.surface | Code.depth": http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2006/01/Raley/index.htm

Mark Marino, "Critical Code Studies": http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/codology

N. Katherine Hayles, "Print is Flat, Code is Deep"

formalism

Marjorie Levinson, "What is New Formalism," PMLA 122.2 (2007): 558-569

review of post-2000 turn toward formalism and what it means -- is a movement, rather than a theory or method

points out that many formalist interventions trace literary studies' "neglect of form to new historicism's alleged denunciation of form as an ideological mystification. The remaining studies see the eclipse of form as an unfortunate by-product of the institutional authority enjoyed by the historical turn." (559)

this leads to a practical division between 1) those who want to restore historicism to its original focus on form and 2) those who want to sharply distinguish history and art, discourse and literature, with form as the prerogative of art

"In short, we have a new formalism that makes a continuum with new historicism and a backlash new formalism." (559)

reinstating close reading at the center of the curriculum

"another feature marking new formalism as a whole: reassertion of the critical (and self-critical) agency of which artworks are capable when and only when they are (a) restored to their original, compositional complexity (the position of normative new formalism) or (b) for the activist camp, when they are released from the closures they have suffered through a combination of their own idealizing impulses, their official receptions, and general processes of cultural absorption." (560)

normative new formalism "makes a strong claim for bringing back pleasure as what hooks us and rewards us for reading" (562)

"new formalism as itself a kind of aesthetic or formal commitment. It seeks to fend off the divisiveness encouraged by the kinds of cognitive, ethical, and juridical commitments -- as it were, content commitments -- rife among and effectively defining all the critical practices summed up by the term new historicism, commitments that paradoxically (so new formalism argues) rob our scholarship of its potential for emancipatory and critical agency." (562)

Arthur Bahr and Alexandra Gillespie, "Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text," The Chaucer Review 47.4 (2013): 346-60

special issue on formalism + book history / codicology

Leah Price and Seth Lerer, special issue of PMLA, "The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature" -- shows how book history has been set up in distinction to literary theory and formalism

book history has found a home in new historicism, which it itself often seen as in opposition to formalism (see Levinson above)

in this issue, want to ask:

"Book history -- much like the New HIstoricism with which we here loosely group it -- has been set up as a foil to formalism and New Criticism. What can its role be now that questions about form and practices of close reading are of renewed interest?" (348-9)

Dennis Yi Tenen, "The Emergence of American Formalism," Modern Philology 117.2 (2019): 257-83

slew of plot devices and automated plot-generating machines in late 19 / early 20 c -- precursors to Russian and French branches of formalism and structuralism, forming a "school of American formalism, as I propose to call it, [which] differed fro mits European counterparts in being addressed primarily to the purposes of composition rather than analysis." (258)

a school "not only in the literary-theoretical sense -- manifested in preference for terms such as form, function, structure, technique, method, organizing principle, or mechanism -- but also more broadly, relating to the translation of abstract, often nebulous concepts, such as genius and creativity, into a set of concrete physical operations or procedures." (258-9)

"formalization of literary labor at the turn of the 20c" (260) -- a "species of an industrial modernism" (260)