“Books Are Machines”: Materiality and Agency from the 1960s to the 2010s

Abstract

In the first section of this chapter, the materiality of digital media—that is, the progression from huge machines in the 1960s to the ubiquitous computing of the twenty-first century—is juxtaposed with the notions of fear, shifting from Bomb to Virus, tentatively as a result of the Y2K scare. This is exemplified with a few examples from art and literature. In the second section, two Swedish literary experiments, one from 1965 and the other from 2010, are analyzed in their staging of digital technologies and in the effects this staging has on the notion of agency. The final section of the chapter raises the question of whether digital epistemology should be part of the digital humanities field or not.

[T]he general field of humanities education and scholarship will not take the use of digital technology seriously until one demonstrates how its tools improve the ways we explore and explain aesthetic works – until, that is, they expand our interpretational procedures. (Jerome McGann 2001, xii)

4.1 Digitization as a Lens

So far, we have repeatedly described digitization as an epistemological phenomenon. In the following, the perspective of digital epistemology will be developed through two historical examples, which intend to illuminate some aspects of the history of digitization related to cultural artifacts. The first part of this chapter examines how the change in the materialities of digital technology from the 1960s and 1970s is also reflected in how our threat scenarios evolved from the H bomb of the Cold War to the threat of networks and viruses. This is illustrated by analyses of both poetry and a couple of text-based works of art. The second part of the chapter examines two Swedish works which at intervals of about half a century stage a machine intelligence, a digital agency, which in different ways also install the agency of the human body.

The primary purpose here is to show that the perspective of digital epistemology is not a constant: a digital technology with machines as large as classrooms is of course different from personal computers, search engines and networks, which in turn have been supplemented with today’s ubiquitous systems. These different ways of organizing digital technology have epistemological effects: a strictly place-based, almost monstrous technology, a privilege for states and large corporations, generates metaphors and images that differ considerably from systems distributed to laptops and smartphones, or through networks and intelligent textiles. The second and more analytical purpose of the text is to relate these various technological arrangements to cultural artifacts, texts, and show how the staging of agency can also be related to the history of digitization.

The chapter ends with a discussion on whether the concept of digital epistemology could be considered to contribute to the field of digital humanities.

4.2 Digital History and Threats

Despite the fear of criticism from media archaeologists, let us actually follow the Gutenberg lead in a report of historical progression and accept the obvious: digital technology from the 1950s to the 2010s has seen some remarkable changes in size, mass, infrastructure and patterns of distribution. Through the lens of digital epistemology, we can observe this historical narrative in relation to the technologies of death.

Let us go back to the turn of the new millennium, or rather the last shivering seconds of the old one. These seconds vibrated with a certain intensity and these vibrations had a formula: Y2K—“Year 2000”—the digital bug that would end all functions, everything would just stop, as the zeroes and ones would not be able to make the transition from 99 to 00, creating chaos and mayhem in the civilized world.¹ It should be stated that the digital systems that were under threat in this transition were actually mostly site-specific and well-established technologies, such as telephone networks, industrial control systems and mainframes, which had in common that they could not handle dates of more than three digits.² This being said, the metaphorical effect—or the message—of Y2K was something else: Despite the fact that practically nothing happened (which may or may not be because we actually were prepared), Y2K announced that digital technology had moved away from calculators and computers, from laboratories and office spaces, from the distinct materiality so visible in science fiction and spy movies, to the entire culture. For a decade or so we had been familiar with personal computers, but it was Y2K that came to symbolize a shift in our digital awareness: The zeroes and ones had moved from the Machine to the Network. No coincidence, then, that our threat scenarios changed as well: from the Machine, the State and the Bomb, to Networks, Cells—and Viruses.

Y2K as a digital disaster is for example very different from the apocalyptic scenario depicted a couple of decades earlier in the movie War Games , when the omnipotent computer W.O.P.R. converts a young boy’s gaming to a real nightmare, and a possible World War III (War Games 1983). The film is an excellent example of the close relation between “the Machine” and “the Bomb” that was so prominent in postwar scenarios.³ Another, we must say substantial example of the postwar relation to the Bomb is Anselm Kiefer’s monumental lead library Zweistromsland (Kiefer 1985–1989). Kiefer’s library, also known as The High Priestess, is a construction almost eight meters wide and four meters high, making its very size to a “bigger than life” (or “…death”) experience. It contains some 200 large books with covers, and pages, in lead, standing in two accompanying bookcases constructed in steel, decorated with wires and glass. The bookcases are named “Euphrat” and “Tigris,” respectively, and the German title of the artwork also addresses the Garden of Eden—the biblical origin of life on Earth.⁴

However, it is not Life but rather the Apocalypse that is at stake here. The ambiguous title of the work—the Land Between the Rivers and the High Priestess—establishes double references: On the one hand, thoughts are led to the place of Eden’s garden, on the other to the powerful symbol of the Tarot card game, which can also be associated with the significance of lead in the alchemical tradition that was a particular interest of Kiefer’s (Badger 1989). The materiality of the book, here, is grotesquely exaggerated, and not only by lead and steel, but also by being associated with both biblical and occult discourses. But the context that interests us here is the Bomb.

Kiefer’s library was constructed in the late 1980s, in the heyday of computational bureaucratization and the early days of the personal computer. In this context, the lead books signal a celebration of the medium of the codex, in the midst of the current flow of deterministic or pessimistic media philosophies, with their recurring prophecies about the death of books and the decline of reading in the era of television and digitization.⁵ Thus, there is a message in the medium of lead books. In the final destruction to come (the 1980s also marked the peak of the Cold War) everything solid would melt, but lead, of course, was regarded as armor against radiation.⁶ The very mass of this work of art—and the bare thought that this library will survive us all—tells the story of the enormous impact of the technologies that proposed the threat in the first place: the Bomb and the Machine.

4.3 Without Us: UKON

The Swedish psychologist and poet UlfUKON Karl Olov Nilsson, alias UKON, debuted in 1990 with the poetry collection Kung-kung (King King). In 1992 he was represented in the anthology En elva från Göteborg (A Gothenburg Starting Eleven—a pun derived from the fact that Gothenburg was the football capital of Sweden, with up to five teams in the premier division), where he published the poem “Utan oss” (“Without Us”), which soon became a recurring feature in his readings during the 1990s. It is a typical performance poem, where the intensity and the manic repetitions actually work better in oral than in written form. It is still the printed version we have to content with here, though:

it is the earth without us and the words the trees the fire without us it is the wind the water the spring the blowing and the stillness the summer stillness it is the brown animals without us it is horse cow dog deer beaver elk ferret bear hedgehog it is rust fungus grass and the green silvery animals like frog snake silver fox silverfish plain fish toad and the sick soil water ice the happy snow rain sometimes hail and it is the black animals flies scorpions cockroaches panthers ravens magpies penguins the white animals that are polar bears shark lynx rabbit mouse grouse whale seal it is moon sunrise sunset and the animals of the sun lion chaffinch canary golden retriever some butterflies and aquarium fishes the cheetah the bumble bee it is the children without us it is the work the sowing the the harvest the war the the solitude the summer solitude it is the rest without us it is the party the meeting the simultaneity the dance it is waltz foxtrot jenka ballet bug bossanova twist hambo farandole gopak jig landler mazurka schuhplattler polka cha-cha mambo schottis trepak tarantella flamenco bump without us it is the cold the abscess the aching without us the leprosy the cancer the acne the leg ulcers the tennis arm the pneumonia the sprained ankle the worn ligaments the meniscus the cataract choreomaniacs atopic dermatitis electrical hypersensitivity pulmonary edema earache child diseases like mumps rubella chickenpox, scarlet fever, whooping cough measles and the elderly diseases the infections the senility the pathetical the femoral neck fracture the varicose the prostate the flashbacks the dreaming the shakings the atherosclerosis the incontinence it is the pinpricks the heartsink the samplings without us bandage sling cast plaster walkers crutches transportation service it is the nervousness without us the underarm sweat, the anxiety, the farts the tinnitus the crudities the nail biting the police the nurseries the post office the bank the scouts the railway instruments such as piccolo balalajka trombone electric organ games such as yatzy risk gin rummy battleship war volleyball it is earrings rings diadem things you got given away or just bought armbands brooches barrettes porcelain animals necklaces small cactuses it is flavors without us salty sour sweet bitter pungent spring rolls bacon edamer cheese pie and mash lemonade mille-feuilles without us biscuits meal of the day rye flour ranch dressing bouillabaisse dumplings it is ham rockets robots foetus group dynamics highways hotels terraces porches balconies bowls with fruits and nuts now I know what to think about. (UKON 2005)

Obviously, a shorter quote would have been enough to demonstrate this text’s “point,” but on the other hand the sheer length of this monolog constitutes an important factor in the materiality of the poem. At least in order to demonstrate what is left, without us. It is “we,” and not the environment or our cultural expressions, that disappear. At first glance, the text can be read as a comment (or companion) to Danish poet Inger Christensen’s poetry suite Alfabet (“Alphabet”) from 1981, where another manic order is established based on the alphabet and Fibonacci numbers, occupied with describing objects that “exist” (Christensen 1981).⁷ The initially hopeful and poetic designation of Christensen’s text occasionally turns into threats, as when “the rifle” with its “peaceful precision” takes place in this “enlightened chemical ghetto.” Christensen’s suite ends with a trip across the globe:

it looks like	Barents Sea
is always alone with	Barents Sea
but there behind	Barents Sea
the water strikes	Spitsbergen
and just behind	Spitsbergen
the ice is floating around	The Arctic Ocean
and just behind	The Arctic Ocean
the ice is stuck on	The North Pole. (ibid.)

The approach is naivistic and apocalyptic simultaneously. The child’s wide-eyed journey across the various fields of the globe is addressed in a poetry suite about nature’s presence and threatening extinction. Christensen’s combination of hope and threat is matched in UKON’s rant by the exhilaration that characterizes the poem’s scenario of annihilation. “Without us” contains several paradoxes. What is there “without us”? How are the underarm sweat, the tennis elbow and the group dynamics maintained when no people are there? Who dances mazurka, schuhplattler or polka if there is no one there to dance? Where are these things?

The poem at once becomes apocalyptic and philosophical—it begs the question of whether a phenomenon can remain after its carriers and practitioners have been wiped out, a question that concerns notions of embodiment, materiality and perception. Just like the word “exists” in Christensen’s Alfabet, it is the phrase “without us” that constitutes the lasting impression of UKON’s poem. In both texts, these particular words accentuate to a great extent a paradigm that we, after N. Katherine Hayles, call the “presence-absence” pattern (and to which we shall return shortly). Written during the 1980s and 1990s, these two poems depict notions of the physical obliteration of humanity from the place where we live. If Anselm Kiefer had wanted to include poetry in his lead books, Christensen and UKON would have been suitable choices.

4.4 Ubiquitous Viruses

It is some distance from the notions of the Bomb and the Machine to the threat from Y2K and what we—if we want to be a little intrusive—can call “digital mites” (we do not see them but they are all over the place): nanotechnology is everywhere and has provided us with a new community that is connected to, or constitutes, what we can call a digital subconscious. What has happened over the past 40 years is a shift among the carriers of digital technology: a shift from Monster to Mites, or from Machines to Networks; from States to Cells; and from Bombs to Viruses.

At the turn of the millennium, N. Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman, described this change as a shift between two epistemological paradigms: from the Gutenbergian era’s “presence-absence” to the “pattern/randomness” paradigm of the digital age (Hayles 1999, 25–30).⁸ Both the Bomb and the Machine manifest a presence that, even in its absence (few people have had access to nuclear weapons or the earliest computers), is associated with a complex threat: the state apparatus’s inhuman bureaucracy, the computer’s possible self-realization in the singularity, the total devastation in a nuclear war. However—as with the false binary analog/d6igital—the concept of pattern/randomness does not establish the same kind of dichotomy as presence-absence. Randomness is not contrary to the pattern, quite the opposite—both are often operative at the same time. In the pattern of the code, the presence of the virus or the mistake is always a possibility.

It is easy to see the Bomb and the Machine, and even classic book culture, as an expression of a presence-absence paradigm: The Gutenbergian practice is characterized by the same dualism that shaped all modernity. The materiality of media point to the conditions in which the book’s printed text (and the book itself as object), or the physical presence of the computer, constitutes a material factuality also in its absence (it exists—there). The same goes for the Bomb: it is not in itself a code, not something that is replaceable or arbitrarily distributed—it is where it is, in the Cold War laboratory, on the firing ramps, on the equipped submarines. Even in its absence it is presence; mass, materiality.

File sharing and ubiquitous systems have made us much more likely to accept an order where we distribute data—and viruses—instead of physical artifacts. Both biological and digital viruses have the property that they cannot be fixed to a given material carrier, but create their identity precisely through their instability, their way of spreading.⁹ The W.O.P.R. in War Games and Kiefer’s High Priestess are intimately associated with the Cold War; at the same time, the Bomb ( “A” or “H”) is related to the discourse of the Machine. Visually, popular culture from the 1950s to the early 1990s is full of examples of technologies which represent spectacular and strange but never abstract or randomly distributed examples of this presence-absence in print-based order, as opposed to the pattern/randomness paradigm of the digital age.¹⁰ Q and MI6 agents had good control over the computers with their rotating magnetic tapes and their punch cards, and the nuclear weapons rested calmly in the superpower’s missile launch facilities, or for that matter in the mad scientist’s headquarters on a mechanical island, where they waited to be fired at his target and then let the ingenious ruler, or his computer, control the world. These fantasies remained as long as the terror balance prevailed on the international agenda. Machines with a capital M. Bombs with a capital B.

What happened during the 1990s and beyond was that not only nuclear weapons—and the know-how of the nuclear age—but also new information technologies were distributed to more or less reliable powers around the world. When the computer was no longer perceived as a controlling device but rather as a personal tool, the machine with a capital M disappeared, together with the bomb with a capital B. No one really cared if the machine could learn to play chess—and no one feared any longer the mad professor in his hollow island. The machines still existed, of course, but they became more generally distributed, from offices and laboratories to our homes, or to the laps of seminar attendants and café visitors.

Today, two decades after the Y2K panic, file sharing, digital networks and phenomena such as ubiquitous data processing have transformed our management of physical artifacts into a distribution of patterns, temporary formations, clouds, rhizomes, cells—and viruses.¹¹ The point here is that the technologies which distribute information reflect the technologies and metaphors for our own extinction: Y2K signaled that the bomb had been replaced by the virus, and that nuclear mass destruction had been replaced by epidemics and terror cells. Doomsday prophets do not preach when obscure liberation fronts in Asia or rednecks in Georgia get hold of nuclear warheads; although the threat of an atomic bomb attack may be much greater today than during the Cold War terror balance and top diplomacy (Brill and Luongo 2012). No, doomsday prophets bang the drum and ring the bell when pigs or birds cause new forms of influenza that could possibly haunt Western civilizations (not to mention the corona virus of 2020, still haunting us as these lines are proofread).¹²

In other words: the unique Bomb has been replaced by the ubiquitous Virus. The lesson from the Y2K bug was—and this is the message of ubiquitous data processing—that from now on, the digital is no longer tied to desktop devices, but is really present everywhere, inside everything. In addition, the alleged threat to our open society, and thus the threat to world peace, is organized not in totalitarian or imperialist bomb shelters, but in networks and cells. The terror, as Douglas Rushkoff pointed out a decade ago, is a virus (Rushkoff 2009).¹³

4.5 The Number of the Beast

One final installation in relation to Y2K to be considered here is Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter’s artistic research project “Bugs in the War Room” and the book project Endless Endtime (Ritasdatter 2016–).¹⁴ The point of departure for her project is the Y2K scare, in particular as it was expressed in a 1999 letter to the apocalyptic Christian magazine EndTime, in which a reader named O.J. Briant (at least that is what Ritasdatter tells us) invented his own number system (A = 6, B = 12, C = 18, etc.), with which he reaches the conclusive evidence that the word COMPUTER with this formula will be translated to the number 666—the disintegration of digital culture thus coincides with the arrival of the antichrist and the apocalypse. The end of the world is thus near, something that apocalyptic Christians not infrequently greet with joy, as it foretells the return of Christ.

In a continuation of this Y2K prophecy, Ritasdatter has set out to create a never-ending—hence the name Endless Endtime—encyclopedia of all the phenomena that, according to O.J. Briant’s numerology, can be seen as manifestations of the number of the beast, and thus as a harbinger of the apocalypse. By copying the letter from 1999, but replacing the word “computer” with a variety of other words—generated by an algorithm that Ritasdatter designed according to Briant’s number system—she creates an encyclopedia of the apocalypse, an encyclopedia that every year (in May) is to result in a new edition with 666 different entries. The book is bound by hand by the publisher and artist Olle Essvik at Rojal publishing house. Not only this: Every new entry is also posted to the journal EndTime. In the 2016 edition, the first three words (which in addition to their connection to the number 666, are also explained with a brief note) are the following:

• ACCU-CHEK MOBILE n.; A proprietary blood glucose measuring system used for home monitoring of glucose which has a menu-driven screen and analyzed lifestyle data.

• ADIDAS CAMPUS May refer to: (1) n.; Classic 80s suede sneakers featuring a supportive cushioned collar. Suede upper; Textile lining. (2) n.; Corporate campus: At an All-Employee Meeting in November 2011, the CEO Herbert Hainer announced that the Adidas Group will invest further in their employees by building a Corporate Campus.

• ADVANCE WARS n.; The Wars series is a video game series produced by Nintendo, also known as Famicom Wars (Famikon Wzu) in Japan and Advance Wars in the West. (Ritasdatter 2016)

In an essay published in the online magazine DATA Browser, Ritasdatter expands her investigation of the Y2K bug (Ritasdatter 2018). She interviewed a security engineer in Chennai, India, about how she worked with the Y2K threat. The technician says that they had set up a “war room,” a 360° meeting space, where everyone had their monitor and maintained contact with various clients through both digital and alternative communication channels (ibid., 141). Ritasdatter makes the observation that this crisis room is strikingly similar to movie history’s perhaps best-known war room, namely that in Stanley Kubrick’s (1964) tragicomic atomic bomb dystopia, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (ibid.). In a continuation of this parallel, Ritasdatter points out that the war room of the Cold War—where, let us remember, the Bomb and the Machine were at the center—was characterized by a hierarchical structure and a linear ordering system, an order that in the film’s diegesis is disrupted by an eccentric and crazy General Ripper. It is, then, linear and binary structures that form the foundation of Kubrick’s war room. In the 1999/2000 Indian war room, however, there is another order (Fig. 4.1):

Fig. 4.1

Linda Hilfing Ritasdatter, from Endless Endtime II (2016), detail, photograph

The table of the Y2K war room did not assemble top leaders, or represent a top-down hierarchy of order and execution. On the contrary, it was a gathering as emergency-brigade, or the caretakers of global information architectures, ultimately calling for a different understanding of the war room’s relation to power; away from top-down management, with orders followed by execution, towards a model of continuous executable maintenance and feedback. (ibid., 145)

This coincides entirely with Georg Rushkoff’s observation of the viral qualities of terror, which also confirms the shift from bombs to viruses, and from the paradigm of presence-absence to one of pattern/randomness:

Just consider the difference between a [Charles] Manson, whose commands to followers depended on his in-person charisma, and today’s terror cults who are capable of inciting activity entirely memetically through social media. (Rushkoff 2009)

In Ritasdotter’s text installation, digital technology is linked to the apocalypse, not as a bomb but as a cultural implosion, the digital collapse. The immense irony of the work is embodied in the fact that, in the words of the publisher Rojal, “we are committed to producing this Encyclopedia forever.” Although “forever” is understood to mean a fairly short time, given that the apocalyptic prophecy is to be realized, the book project sends rather an optimistic signal by ironically deconstructing, and contradicting, the initial letter’s predictions.¹⁵

These examples, which in different ways are related to bombs and viruses, show that digital epistemology does not function as a single theory of knowledge in the fold of history—it must be analyzed and considered as variants dependent on the materiality of communication at specific historical moments. The materiality of digital history, from the huge machine monsters in the 1960s–1970s to the ubiquitous “mites” during our own 2010s and 2020s, shows that different expressions and attitudes can be seen as reflections of this materiality. The bomb’s presence can be read manifestly with Kiefer, ironically and indirectly with UKON. The code’s pattern and its relation to Y2K are continually manifested in Ritasdotter’s art and book projects.

What does it mean, then, to relate cultural artifacts to the communication and organizational logic that—in various ways—has been promoted by digital technology since the 1950s? One way to investigate this is to draw attention to two Swedish literary works with almost half a century between them: Torsten Ekbom’s Signalspelet, which was published in 1965, and Johannes Heldén’s Entropy Edition from 2010.

4.6 Torsten Ekbom 1965

The Swedish author-critic Torsten Ekbom (1938–2014) produced a handful of radical prose experiments during the 1960s, from variations on the French nouveau roman to cut-up exercises and ambitious collage experiments. Alongside this production, Ekbom—also a literary critic and avant-garde theorist—introduced to a Swedish public concrete poetry, game theory, cybernetics, William S. Burroughs, Susan Sontag and Marshall McLuhan, as well as European authors such as Lawrence Durrell, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Uwe Johnson and Witold Gombrowitz.

Ekbom’s third fiction book, Signalspelet (1965, “The Game of Signals”), declares itself not to be a novel but a “Prose Machine.” The book starts with five blank pages (only the page numbers at the bottom indicate any progress), followed by a page with the single line “Fem minuter gick” (“Five minutes passed”). This line is repeated with increased intensity on the following pages:

• Five minutes passed

• Five minutes passed

• Five minutes passed

• Five minutes passed. (Ekbom 1965, 10)

And after a few pages this statement is interrupted by the line “Bilen rusade vidare”:

• Five minutes passed

• Five minutes passed

• Five minutes passed

• The car rushed on. (Ibid, 12)

However, the actual “Prose Machine” is never mentioned or described in the text, and thus we could conclude that “the book” itself constitutes the machine (and, after all, that is what it says on the title page: Signalspelet: en prosamaskin – “The Signal Game: A Prose Machine”). If so, the text could be seen as a statement echoing Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés and symbolist machine aesthetics in its wake.¹⁶ It also could be seen as a critical remark upon the novel genre itself, regarded at the time by Ekbom himself as “dead” and “petrified” (Ingvarsson 1994). Even so, it is more likely that what we read is a representation of a real-time output from a computer, a machine now programmed for making prose narratives. And this machine slowly spits out, fragment followed by fragment, a not very coherent story, including a hotel and a bunch of agents (conveniently named A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H) communicating with each other by knocking signals on the walls. Somehow “Room number 17” plays an important role, as does Chapter 17, which appears several times in the book (a translator and introducer of William S. Burroughs in Sweden, Ekbom of course was no stranger to the literary cut-up and collage technique).

Unlike many electronic texts today, though, the machine in Ekbom’s book is obviously not subject to any interactive processes—no more than the commonplace interactivity that any reader of any book is entangled in. No, the machine has (on a fictional level) been programmed, and what we read is its tentative output; the reader just has to accept its more or less literary result. Sometimes the computer malfunctions and the output, then, will only be dots and commas spread over the pages. This functions as a reminder of the vulnerability of the machine in those days, and of course is also a reminder of the dangers lurking in letting the machine control our everyday lives. In the 1960s and 1970s, the “state apparatus”—a phrase inherited from Marx, but revived by computer technology—became a metaphor for the bureaucracy that was the flip side of the emerging welfare states of the postwar Nordic countries (not to mention the East European states). The Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg (1898–1973) expressed this in 1959:

Thus, instead of the ancient, personal, patriarchal oppression, they have introduced a state apparatus that exerts an impersonal, anonymous, mechanically functioning oppression. They have laid a solid foundation for a state capitalist society, where the gates on the backside slowly are opening up for the authoritarian state, in which the individual is obliterated by the collective and transformed into an object for state benefit. (Moberg 1959)

Around a decade later, in the 1970s, Swedish author Lars Gyllensten (1921–2006) connects the same state apparatus to computer technology:

One example is the extension of various computer systems and other methods for the authorities to obtain information about citizens in aid of the bureaucratic state apparatus – censuses, compulsory surveys, increased powers for different authorities to require citizens’ data and accounts, etc. (Gyllensten 1979, not paginated)

Ekbom’s machine, though, is programmed to create literature. And sometimes, somehow, it does (or, rather, it does so the whole time, albeit in different ways). Even though the diminutive plot describes a bunch of agents, Ekbom’s prose experiment, on both a fictional and factual level, sets up a structure actually devoid of human agents, or agency. The text “is produced” by a computer. And the actual text fragments are not written, but just chosen and assembled, by the author. As a result, the author is absent in a double meaning: both on the level of fiction (the machine that produces the text fragments) and on the actual level of conception (the cut-up process performed by Ekbom). The actual “story” that unfolds, with the agents knocking on walls, desperately trying to find something out, paints a sometimes funny but absurd and claustrophobic vision of a futile mission. The absurdity of the text echoes the bureaucratic angst of Kafka, but technologically updated.¹⁷ The Game of Signals, then, clearly establishes an opposition between the machine and human agency in 1965.

4.7 Johannes Heldén 2010

The Man/Machine confrontation of the 1960s differs quite radically from the positions taken in many electronic texts from the new millennium, and this can be illustrated with another Swedish example. Johannes Heldén’s digital flash installation Entropy Edition (published alongside the poetry book Entropi in 2010) is de facto programmed with text fragments but—as opposed to the bulk of Ekbom’s scattered prose—these fragments are (seemingly) written by the author himself (Heldén 2010a).¹⁸

The interface of Heldén’s work reminds us of classic arcade games, those with falling stars or shells to be shot down by the player.¹⁹ In Entropy Edition, though, what happens when you “chase” the dots is that poetic fragments appear at the top and the bottom, lines like “the consciousness is searching” or “a smoky edge.” One poem emerges at the top, typographically more or less like a printed poem in a book. At the bottom, text fragments will soon flash, appearing and disappearing in a horizontal space of six rows stretching from side to side. Heldén often operates with digital interfaces in his poetical practice, but technology itself is rarely a motif. Apart from scattered lines such asVerse

Verse the books are machines or a new presence confirmed real

the text itself does not explicitly deal with “electronic” or “posthuman” themes. Rather, the actual text fragments in Heldén’s poetic construction are biased towards impressions from nature; in fact, he is a distinct nature poet with a soft spot for postapocalyptic scenarios, where it is the ecological disaster rather than the bomb that figures as the Reaper (Fig. 4.2).²⁰

Fig. 4.2

Johannes Heldén, Entropy Edition (2010), screenshot

“The poem about the beautiful sunset has run into some problems,” a Danish critic wrote in 1971 (Hejlskov Larsen 1971, 172). If nature poems during the 1960s were put into question—with Göran Palm’s “new simplistic” poem “The Sea” as perhaps the clearest statement—this can be said to have its origin in fatigue towards the overly lyrical, and overly elaborated, poetry of late modernism (Palm 1964).²¹ Nature poetry, along with central lyrics, was under attack, both from concretist poetics and from the so-called “new simplicity” movement. “The crisis of the beautiful sunset” is also, in particular from the concretists, a consequence of an affirmation of the mechanical composition principle that also influenced Ekbom’s prose experiment. The depictions of nature that occur both in the Game of Signals and in his following collage novel, Spelmatriser för operation Albatross (1967, “Game Matrices for Operation Albatross”), are demonstratively flat, and in the latter case usually in the form of theatrical stage directions.

When nature, 50 years later, is under scrutiny by a poet such as Johannes Heldén, it is not in the form of sublime experiences or romantic metaphors, but as a warning of the apocalypse to come.²² The book (in which Entropy Edition is included as a CD-ROM) has on its cover a grayscale photograph of a forested hill, with leafless trees in the background and a couple of bushes with the leaves left in the foreground—ecological concern informs the picture. The electronic edition generates sentences in the top poem like:

the vegetation	watches over you
	when you sleep
a new presence	confirmed real
roadside, riverbank, star,

And in the rows at the bottom, you may read:

• Dumping grounds in the woods.

• The trees defoliated. At least you get a clear view. (Heldén 2010a)

The emerging lines of text are projected against a slowly shifting background depicting abstract postindustrial and almost Escher-like labyrinths, or, as suggested by Hans-Kristian Rustad, reminding one of the etchings of eighteenth-century artist Piranesi (Rustad 2013, 28). In his essay on Heldén’s various versions of Entropi, Rustad emphasizes precisely the dystopian approach in the works: “We can thus conclude that Entropi portrays a civilization after a major disaster, or as a result of technological and industrial development, where nature’s resources are utilized for the last drop” (ibid., 29).

Thus, just like many other of Heldén’s works, including the Primary Directive (2006) and Evolution (2014), the reader is situated in various oscillating movements: between medium and “text”; between technology and body; between book and screen; and, especially in Heldén’s case, between “culture” and “nature.” One effect of this is that the pair quoted above has somehow been realized. “A new presence confirmed real”: the reading has installed this presence of body and text and thus the “books” have indeed become “machines.” But the statement also encourages us to reflect on the book as just a “machine” or as Johanna Drucker suggested already in 2003:

Instead of reading a book as a formal structure, then, we should understand it in terms of what is known in the architecture profession as a “program” constituted by the activities that arise from a response to the formal structures. … The literal has a way with us, its graspable and tractable rhetoric is readily consumed. But concrete conceptions of the performative approach also exist. (Drucker 2003, my italics)

Through its staging, its interface, Entropy Edition raises the question of why it could not suffice to present this text in analog, printed form. If we could claim that the paradigm of pattern/randomness generates the text in Entropy Edition, then the work also establishes a presence-absence relationship between the printed and the electronic texts. N. Katherine Hayles writes in Electronic Literature that some of the printed novels she discusses “both acknowledge their position within the print tradition and reproduce on their surface the mark of the digital” (Hayles 2008, 161). This holds true of the book version of Heldén’s Entropi as well.

The printed text, the poetry book Entropi, accentuates its digital identity through a typographic “haze,” as each poem page operates with different shades of gray in the printed words. On the one hand, this can be said to reflect the grayscale on the book’s cover (which strengthens the codex’s analog identity); on the other, this technique seems to correspond to the electronic version’s appearing and disappearing text fragments (which strengthens the digital identity; Rustad 2013, 32). “If the seductions made possible by digital technology are endangering print, that same technology can also be seen as print in the making,” Hayles writes further (Hayles 2008, 162). “Print in the making”—in Heldén’s case this is almost a literal truth, since the grayscale of the text seems to simulate or represent a textual agency which is reinforced by the printed text’s relation to the electronic. Through this typographical measure, Heldén’s text adapts almost demonstratively to Johanna Drucker’s notion of the codex’s program; the grayscale of the text guides the act of reading in the direction of this expected creation, even in printed form.

The reader thus has to engage in several bodily processes to make the text readable: turn on the computer, launch the browser, load the webpage, and then search and click the small falling dots in order to make the text and the visuals appear. These are, of course, obvious activities in the encounter with the digital text and with every digital interface. But they can be put into a context that simultaneously separates the work from the experience of reading a literary codex, and at the same time establish a connection (and an “always-already-relationship”) with the body’s interaction in the codex-bound reading act. Cecilia Lindhé writes in one of the essays included in the printed edition of Evolution about Heldén’s negotiations between paper and screen:

[w]hether print is flat and code is deep is of course significant here [Hayles 2004]. But is the page really flat? Perhaps we may say yes at first but if we look, touch and feel it closely enough we sense the fibers and pores “that give every page both the texture and the depth into which the ink must sink without penetrating.” [Butler 2001] In Heldén’s work the page is never flat. Here it matters, claims a space and a particular presence. It forces us to reconsider our habituated view of paper. The page is perhaps not always what we think it is. (Lindhé 2014)²³

She then quotes a randomly generated text portion from the generic poetry machine Evolution, which is an important reminder of the printed text’s digital materiality:Verse

Verse and at the end of every page it should say: this also will disappear

What characterizes Entropy Edition, and Heldén’s work in general, is an ongoing negotiation of the relationship between technology and nature. It is a form of cybernetic ecocriticism where writing and reading are bodily activities. The involvement of the body in the act of reading electronic texts is, of course, a trivial observation when describing these works (and should be self-evident also in how we describe the reading of books and the turning of pages), but it is also a relationship that is repeatedly articulated. The point here, however, is that the programming and the presence of the machine in Heldén’s case—contrary to Ekbom’s text—actually encourage agency.

It seems almost ironic that the fragments in Entropy Edition to such a high degree are occupied by nature. Why not just write nature poetry collections, or ecocritical debate books, or get involved in some Green Party? One answer to this is that the agency (or fiction) of interactivity installs another critical approach to the literary experience—an activity that could be related to such modernist phenomena as the epic theater of Brecht with its effects of “Verfremdung,” or to different interactive and Fluxus installations during for example the 1960s.

The observation that agency—in relation to the machine—in Heldén’s work realizes the work to a greater extent than in Ekbom’s prose machine half a century earlier has an ambiguous effect: It is still the author who provides the text fragments—and in Heldén’s case also picture, sound, music and animation—which constitute the final poetic and aesthetic product. Perhaps in Entropy Edition, after all, we should be reminded that action is possible—and necessary.²⁴ But at the same time, the activities of the texts in Entropi and Entropy Edition (both in the printed and electronic versions, that is) accentuate the dystopian tendencies of the work. The language is somehow decomposing, and thus establishes a congenial commentary on ecological decay, or on entropy as such. Rustad also notes this: “as if the words are disappearing or have already disappeared from the surface of the paper, perhaps as a result of the energy being gradually drained from the system” (Rustad 2013, 31). Action is possible, but our environment is still fading away.

The entropy of the title, of course, refers to thermodynamics, the diffusion of energy and the decreasing order of existence.

Rustad, Hans-Kristian discusses this title and notes: “The fragments are locked on the screen and are available for interpretation, not just once, but at each reading of Entropy. In other words, the digital text is stable and permanent, and in that sense the text differs from what it is trying to thematize” (ibid., 30).²⁵ This is evidently true, but we can also note that when the real entropy as a factual process is constantly proceeding, then, with each new staging of the text, neither the reader nor the outside world is the same.

4.8 On Digital Humanities

These various examples drawn from political history and (mostly) Swedish experiments were primarily aimed at, once again, showing digitization as a perspective—or as a lens—rather than as a collection of machines, techniques, networks and databases. Ekbom and Heldén capture in their respective works—and at almost half a century apart—important aspects of the history of digitization and its relation to human and mechanical agency. These texts also show that digital epistemology (or “the computer”) does not constitute one single perspective, one lens, but changes in relation to the manifestations of digital technology at specific historical moments.

That digitization today, through its ubiquitous qualities, permeates all aspects of our daily lives is a fact that naturally affects our perception of this reality; and this, in turn, should clearly influence the questions that academics ask in their analytical activities. By relating literary works and text-based works of art—in both print and electronic form—to digital history, these works can be read as expressions of various stages in the development of computers and digitization. Whether we investigate change in the threat scenarios or analyze text-based experiments, we can observe how history, filtered through the digital lens, affects our perception of them.

So then: Does digital epistemology, as presented here, make a contribution to the ever-expanding field of digital humanities? Digital humanities as an emerging field of research has often been associated with studying texts using digital tools or building up extensive text databases (and theorizing around them). In a productive continuation of these approaches and established archives, the emergence of the distance reading techniques mentioned earlier can be noted, with Franco Moretti and Mathew Jockers as prominent names (Moretti 2013; Jockers 2013). Surely, their pioneering work will be considered to be of great value for today’s and future humanities, and the epistemological implications of this practice are yet to be evaluated. Nevertheless, this book leaves databases, topic modeling and big data aside for the benefit of other epistemological and historical approaches to digitization and the humanities.

An illustrative example of the field’s somewhat ambivalent relation to epistemological perspectives is the anthology Digital_Humanities from 2012 (Burdick et al. 2012).²⁶ In the short section “Digital Humanities Fundamentals,” the authors argue that digital humanities is not so much a defined field as a handful of practitioners who have a common point of view; that is, that the printed text is no longer the culture-bearing medium for storing and communicating knowledge (ibid., 122). This opens up a broad definition of the field. Another section of the same introductory volume also discusses digital humanities in more epistemological terms, and the consequences this could have for the organization of academic activities:

Digital Humanities is engaged in developing print-plus and post-print models of knowledge. Both involve more than an updating of the knowledge delivery system. They entail the cognitive and epistemological reshaping of humanistic fields as a function of the affordances provided by the digital with respect to print. (ibid., 125)

The questions and perspectives raised by digital humanities challenge the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines (ibid., 82). This is completely in line with the epistemological implications of digitization as suggested in this book. The authors of Digital_Humanities, though, reject the idea that the very use of digital tools would qualify a work as digital humanities—a pretty decent statement, since virtually every academic product today is digital at some level. However, when they move on to describe what they see as necessary competences in digital humanities, it is only about technical abilities, which also applies to the learning objectives for digital humanities described in the volume (ibid., 132–134).

There are now many manuals and anthologies in the field of digital humanities and the reason for this is, naturally, that it is still an emerging field. Nevertheless, it seems somewhat significant that a volume that holds a number of very open approaches to epistemological issues lands in a fairly instrumental practice when the scope of digital humanities is to be exemplified. Whether the concept of digital epistemology can be said to be contained under the digital humanities umbrella is really unimportant, but could of course give an indication of how (and if) the field perceives itself epistemologically rather than technically, and—in a continuation—also of how the field relates itself to the humanities in general.²⁷

Two decades ago, in his Radiant Textuality (2001), Jerome McGann made the following observation:

[T]he general field of humanities education and scholarship will not take the use of digital technology seriously until one demonstrates how its tools improve the ways we explore and explain aesthetic works – until, that is, they expand our interpretational procedures. (Jerome McGann 2001, xii)

As we know, digitization has for a long time since then developed our modes of interpretation, but from an epistemological point of view these practices have not yet significantly influenced the curriculum of the humanities in regular classes. However, it would be deeply unfortunate if digital perspectives on the humanities were relegated to parallel activities that run alongside regular course offerings. In many respects, Jerome McGann’s challenge from Radiant Textuality has still not been answered—but we are working on it.