May 312013
 

 

Update: Our panel is scheduled for Saturday, January 11, from 12:00 noon-1:15 pm in the Purdue-Wisconsin room of the Chicago Marriott.

I’m thrilled that my proposed special session “Deletion, Erasure, Cancellation: Negative Textualities” has been accepted for MLA 2014 in Chicago! I’m excited to be presenting with Laura AllChuk MoranMarjorie Luesbrink, and Andrew Ferguson — a truly interdisciplinary group of thinkers who I think will bring great insight and creativity to a provocative topic with broad appeal. Our original proposal is below, and I’ll post more information closer to the convention — join us in Chicago!

This roundtable offers a new approach to textual and media studies through close consideration of practices such as deletion, erasure, and cancellation—acts that might collectively be termed “negative” textual operations. Recent critical trends in media studies have drawn crucially necessary attention to the materiality of media, expanding scholarly attention within the field beyond its early focus on narrative and representation. Our conversation seeks to build upon and extend this attention to materiality through a specific focus on texts, practices, and histories that hinge on various forms of textual removal. In attending to these negative operations, we intend to foster discussion of a framework in which qualities such as absence, removal, residuality, blankness, and illegibility become essential criteria for critical analysis as well as for authorial and artistic production.

While the question of deletion and erasure has roots that date back at least to early poststructuralist thought, it has new relevance within a moment in which textual materiality is newly at stake in a variety of critical conversations. How might we describe the aesthetics of deletion and erasure across various media forms? What do these practices, and the textual absences they produce, tell us about the materiality of inscription? About authorship, readership, and memory? About how textual artifacts circulate between public and private domains? How might they reshape the very ways in which we write the histories of media and literature?

Laura All begins our consideration of these questions with a textual history of asterisks, dashes, and ellipses as placeholder marks within eighteenth­century novels. She groups these blanks under the category of expletives, marks that stand in for content that is outside the printable, whether obscene or sublime. All shows how expletives play a pivotal role in early print’s constantly shifting process of self­ calibration. As literally unspeakable characters, they draw attention to their printed status, constituting a unique visual grammar. All argues that expletives’ textual idiosyncrasy is a powerful hermeneutic axis for the history of the book, revealing a permeable epistemological border between author and reader and negotiating between public and private in print.

By tracing the early history of the computer undo command, Chuk Moran offers a theory of the temporality of digital deletion. While computer users today expect that any action on the computer can be undone, the undo command did not become common until the 1980s. In providing a new means of error correction, it also shifted the temporal and textual axes of a wide range of knowledge work. Before real­time computing, users entered an entire program at once and the computer processed it all at once, whereas interactive computing let users fix mistakes along the way through the undo command. Moran argues that by allowing users to reverse the commands they entered—in other words, to delete and re­enter information—the undo command positioned deletion as itself a consistent action that was central to a wide range of textual labor.

Marjorie Luesebrink discusses erosion in “born digital” literature in order to consider deletion and erasure with regard to the archive and the literary canon. Tracing the technological history of electronic literature, she shows how changes in hardware and software have dramatically changed readerly experience and access, with some significant phases of electronic literature effectively deleted from any possible historical canon. Early works from the 1990s, for example, cannot be “read” in their original form on contemporary computers, and working computers that can read these texts are increasingly rare, resulting in a historical friction in which seminal developments in this form are effectively erased from literary history, caught between the conflicting vectors of obsolescence and innovation. Considering the historical erasure of several pioneering works, Luesebrink argues for a more sensitive approach to the curation of electronic textuality.

Andrew Ferguson focuses on how digital deletion links video game culture to the archival dimensions of the recent National Security Agency surveillance scandal. In the course of justifying his agency’s massive data hoard, NSA director Keith Alexander recently spoke of his desire to “collect it all”—a phrasing that draws a curious parallel between the NSA and Pokémon. Ferguson carries this parallel to Pokémon Red & Blue to an analysis of the “Missing No.” glitch, which when captured can delete the entire game cartridge. The lesson of Pokémon, he suggests, is that the erasure will eventually escape the archive: the claimed rewards of totalizing collection are always balanced by much vaster risks (or, from another perspective, liberatory potential), up to and including systematic overwriting.

In order to explore how negative textual operations trouble the boundaries between public and private, Paul Benzon turns to redaction, the process of blacking out, overwriting, or otherwise concealing sensitive political information in order to make a private document suitable for public dissemination. Benzon argues that redacted documents occupy a paradoxical middle ground between the public and the private, and between writing and cancellation: at the same time that the marks of redaction effectively remove crucial information from the public record, they cannot help but add to that record through their own blank, mute testimony. Reading several technical briefs on redaction from the National Security Agency alongside Jenny Holzer’s 2006 series Redaction Paintings, he shows how redaction’s profoundly material concealments of text frame censorship as a form of writing that is uncomfortably hybrid and uneasily public.

Whether deletion, erasure, and cancellation take place as a result of authorial intervention, of material technological affordances, or of institutional or cultural tensions, they are ripe for a more fully articulated critical and historical context. In seeking to establish such a context, our roundtable brings together perspectives from book history, media studies, the digital humanities, and poetic practice, offering a conversation that will interest MLA members working in a wide range of periods, genres, and media. With each participant offering a timed opening provocation of no more than ten minutes, this session sets aside considerable time for discussion, in hopes of instigating a dynamic exchange on a novel topic with broad appeal.

Header Image from Google Books, courtesy of Krissy Wilson, The Art of Google Books

Electronic Literature, Fall 2013

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May 172013
 

I’ll be teaching Special Topics II: Electronic Literature this coming fall at Temple — I’m really excited about this course and about exploring this material with students. I’ll hopefully post more specifics as the fall semester gets closer — in the meantime, here’s a flyer with the course description and information. Any interested students are welcome to sign up or contact me with questions at pbenzon at temple dot edu!

Continue reading »

Jan 282013
 

Recent critical trends in media studies have drawn crucially necessary attention to the materiality of media, expanding scholarly attention within the field beyond its early focus on narrative and representation. Questions of storage, inscription, and circulation have become vital avenues of inquiry in relation to both alphabetic and nonalphabetic texts, allowing for a reconsideration of what it means to produce, consume, and possess textual material in a wide range of media, from print codices and digital files to hard drives, servers, and fiber-optic cables. This panel seeks to build upon and extend this focus on materiality through a close consideration of practices such as deletion, erasure, and cancellation, acts that might collectively be termed “negative” textual operations. These practices, while considered relatively infrequently within media and textual studies, have a great deal to tell us about textuality and how we understand it as scholars and as agents within a culture of information. Indeed, attending to these practices raises a range of questions that complement the recent scholarly focus on the materiality of media, posing a framework in which qualities such as absence, removal, residue, blankness, and invisibility become essential criteria for critical analysis as well as for authorial and artistic production.

While the question of deletion and erasure has roots that date back to the early waves of poststructuralist thought, it has new relevance and urgency within a contemporary moment in which textual objects from throughout history seem increasingly permanent and redundant. Whether deletion and erasure serve to distort the public record and bolster state power or to craft an alternate, fugitive history; whether they take place as a result of artistic or authorial intervention, of random error, or of politically resistant counterstrike; they are ripe for a more fully articulated critical and historical context. How might we describe the aesthetics and poetics of deletion and erasure within and across various media forms? What do these practices, and the textual absences they produce, tell us about the materiality of writing and other media? About authorship, visuality, and memory? About how textual artifacts circulate between public and private domains? About the limitations and paradoxes of the archive? About the very ways in which we write the history of media?

This roundtable invites presentations that address questions of deletion, erasure, cancellation, and similar and related practices across all periods, genres, and media: approaches from book history, textual scholarship, media studies and media archeology, sound studies, videogame studies, the digital humanities, and other critical frameworks are all welcome. In order to allow for both a wide diversity of approaches and contributions and a fruitful, in-depth discussion among participants and audience members, participants will be asked to limit their remarks to ten-minute provocations. Please send inquiries and abstracts with short biographies to pbenzon at temple dot edu by March 1.

Jan 112013
 

I’m posting below the text and slides of one of the talks I gave at the recent MLA convention. This talk, “Lost in Plain Sight: Microdot Technology and the Compression of Reading,” was part of a panel on “Reading the Invisible and Unwanted in Old and New Media” that I organized with Mark Sample, Lori Emerson, and Zach Whalen. I really enjoyed presenting with all of them, and the conversation in the Q and A period and on Twitter was fantastic as well.

My contribution to the panel is part of a new project that’s still in formation — it may become part of Deletions, or it may end up as its own piece. Either way, I’d love to hear any comments, suggestions, questions, or other responses — thanks for reading, and enjoy!

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Lost in Plain Sight: Microdot Technology and the Compression of Reading

Before I start my talk in earnest, I want to offer up a little backstory by way of introduction. When I posted my abstract for this talk on my website back in the early fall, I started casually following the traffic on that page, and I noticed something intriguing: in addition to the usual spambots and a sprinkling of anonymous visitors, I found that one visitor had found his or her way to my site from the Department of Defense in Alexandria, Virginia, by searching for the terms “emmanual goldberg and microdot,” which are indeed the topic of my talk.

I felt a strange mix of flattery and paranoia about this, but beyond that I couldn’t help but wonder what someone from the DoD in the early twenty-first century was hoping to learn about an obsolete Cold-War technology, or why, or why they thought they might learn it from a literary scholar, of all people—but then I realized that their project is in many ways the same as mine, and that I and this person, whoever they might be, are strangely intertwined doppelgangers. This is a pretty crowded room for the evening of the first day of MLA, and I don’t see anyone lurking in the back with dark sunglasses and an earpiece, but if you’re here somewhere, I hope you get what you came for. Continue reading »

Atari Archaeology on In Media Res

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Aug 272012
 

My post “Hipster Archaeology” is up today at In Media Res as part of their theme week on Media Nostalgia. This piece builds on work I’ve recently presented at MLA 2012 and ACLA 2012 on questions of digital materiality, archives, trash, and temporality in relation to the Atari video game burial, and comes from a current book project, Deletions: Absence, Obsolescence, and the Ends of Media. Please visit and comment, and be sure to check out the other upcoming posts in what looks to be a great week!

Two Talks at MLA 2013

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Aug 262012
 

I’m giving two talks at the MLA convention in January 2013, one on experimental form and digital labor and one on microdot technology and media history. I’m excited to have the opportunity to present alongside the other speakers at these sessions, some of whom I’ve known for a while and some of whom I’ll be meeting for the first time. Click on the links in “Upcoming Talks” to the right for more information.