Mechanisms. New
Media and the Forensic Imagination
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008
316 p., illus. 33 b/w. Trade, $35.00/£22.95
ISBN: 0-262-11311-2.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
In the reflection on new media, this book is undoubtedly a watershed publication.
Its basic stance is that electronic writing can only be understood if we
accept to consider it a real form of writing, i.e. of material inscriptions
on material surfaces, and therefore to leave behind many of the myths that
surround digital culture. This grammatological stance, which the author borrows
as much from Jacques Derrida (whose Archive Fever is one of the major sources
of inspiration of this book) as from Friedrich Kittler (whom Kirschenbaum
criticizes however quite vividly for his often sweeping overgeneralizations),
goes against the grain of what many of the first generation thinkers on digital
writing in new media environments had too easily taken for granted, namely
the idea that electronic writing was evanescent, ephemeral, multi-authored
(if not authorless), permanently shifting, freed from all kinds of fixed
form, and so on.
Against these myths, Kirschenbaum opens his book with two stunning examples
(which at the end of this work the reader will no longer interpret as
‘stunning’ but as ‘perfectly normal’): first the impossibility
to realize the announced self-destruction of a piece of e-literature (William
Gibson’s Agrippa); second the possibility to
recover many data from the physically damaged hard disks of the 9/11 attacks
(various companies had by then already developed the necessary software to
restore the content of the computers’ black boxes). The lessons that
can be drawn from these two examples are then extended by the author to a new
theory of electronic writing, which puts a great emphasis on the materiality
of both the process and the product: inscription, storage, retrieval, and transmission
are the master words of a renewed form of philology, no longer bound to the a
prioris of
the old discipline, but updated and adapted to what writing and reading have
become in the digital age (in this regard, Kirschenbaum continues the groundbreaking
work launched by scholars such as Jerome McGann, although in a slightly different
direction).
What makes Kirschenbaum’s work so thrilling and innovative
is, however, not only the demonstration that electronic writing is
also a way of writing, even if the computer is a machine meant to
withdraw its own material operations from our attention (its technology
is a typical ‘black box’ technology, and it is very refreshing
to notice that Kirschenbaum’s view of this type of technology
helps to avoid Vilém Flusser’s influential attacks in
his amply read and discussed Towards a Philosophy of Photography). At least as important is
the humanist viewpoint defended by the author, whom some may know
as a very careful reader of Foucault. In this regard, a key role
is played by the notion of ‘forensics’, a branch of criminology
known as ‘trace evidence’, whose inventor, the French
investigator Edmond Locard, coined the ‘exchange principle’ (which
one can freely paraphrase as: ‘every contact leaves a trace’).
In his book, Kirschenbaum uses forensics as a tool to think of electronic
writing as a chain of contacts which are never materially lost, while
at the same time insisting on the fact that it is much more than
just a sequencing of inscriptions on a hard disk (of on other types
of surfaces, although the hard disk has now become the dominating
form).
On the one hand, he argues that forensics breeds a new type of
attention and imagination, both similar to and different from the
reading of clues in general. What defines the specificity of forensic
imagination in the case of digital writing is the split between
forensic and formal materiality, the former having to do with the ‘product’ (which
inscriptions have been made, which marks can be read?), the latter,
with the ‘process’ (how are these inscriptions and
marks being transferred from one surface to another). From a semiotic
point of view, inspired by Nelson Goodman, Kirschenbaum calls the
forensic materiality ‘autographical’ (no two marks
are identical, each mark has its own signature), whereas he calls
the formal materiality ‘allographical’
(the difference between two marks is put between brackets if they
display, to quote Goodman, ‘sameness of spelling’).
On the other hand, Kirschenbaum does not separate electronic writing
and other, non-electronic forms of writing. In an important theoretical
move indebted to Latour and others’ actor network theory
as well as to the social approach of information (the author follows
here Shannon very closely, who gives priority to mechanisms of
inscription and dissemination rather than to the vague idea of
content), this book makes a strong plea for a ‘holistic’ (my
word, not Kirschenbaum’s) approach of electronic writing.
Such a perspective leads him to study all the documents and communicative
acts that surround and make possible electronic writing.
The theoretical insights are brilliantly illustrated by three case
studies, which have everything to become classics of what Foucault
would have called a genealogical as well as an archaeological reading
of new media writings: first, the rereading of an ‘old’ game
(Mystery House) helps the author to make a very convincing demonstration
of the multilayeredness of electronic writing (the forensic imagination
discloses many other traces of writing, which Kirschenbaum manages
to peel away –or to reconstruct– stratum after stratum);
second, the close reading of the archives of the first great hypertext
novel, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, which enables Kirschenbaum to disclose not just the
making of this famous work but to analyze also the multiple versions
and variants of the same Ur-text; third (and here the book’s
inquiry has something of a real detective story), the social life
of Gibson’s Agrippa, which helps the author to
make his major point, namely the profound intermingling of electronic
and non-electronic writings, and the even more profound combination
of text and society.
Kirschenbaum’s book may not always be easy reading, but
that is in part the fault of the reader, whose ideas on digital
literacy are often an alibi to turn away from what he or she
is doing when electronic writing is produced: the inscription,
storage, transmission and exchange of material marks. Mechanisms, which opens totally new grounds
for electronic textual scholarship, will be one of the books
that can redefine what it means to be a digerate.
