Materiality and Meaning in Digital Poetics

Buchsbaum, Julianne. Humanities Librarian, University of Kansas

Title: Materiality and Meaning in Digital Poetics

Abstract: Poetry is highly self-reflexive, even hyperverbal, in its construction. Poets pay a great deal of attention to the formal properties of language—its textures, rhythms, graphical representation, materiality (the way words sound, the “mouthfeel” of words), down to the level of the actual syllable and phoneme—all of these nonsemantic aspects of linguistic signs (the aesthetic forms they take) inform a poem’s construction and its process of meaning-making. Therefore, a poem is always, in a sense, revealing, disclosing, or calling attention to its constructedness. Some poems try to veil their constructedness, by being “transparent,” but modernist and postmodernist works tend to be more self-conscious in calling attention to their writtenness as verbal constructs. Therefore, poetry, as a practice, is helpful for understanding the ways writing and meaning-making change in a digital medium. What does it mean to “write” in a digital medium? When the tools of one’s medium are constrained and/or liberated by bits and bytes, zeroes and ones, by the plasticity and multispatiality of cyperspace? “Materiality” is a term that has been used to write about digital texts since the 1990s by at least a few critics of new media. What exactly, though, is meant by the “materiality” of new computer media? How can digital poems even be said to be “material” at all, as opposed to analog, print-based works?

One might claim that the elements of cyberspace actually enter into and inform the production and reception of digital texts, that they change the very nature of those texts. Are the seemingly behind-the-scenes codes and web addresses of a page on which a digital poem is published actually part of that poem and inseparable from it? In the same way as the spine of a book, its binding, its page numbers, its index and table of contents, the font of its type, page format, etc., inform (to an extent) the experience of reading a poem in a print-based book of poems? In the “text-environment” of a digital poem, what is meant by materiality when there is no corresponding physical, palpable artifact that exists behind the work in the extensional world? Are we, in fact, looking at the demediation or dematerialization of physical culture? Without a material substratum, can we in fact speak of a human body’s interaction with technology? Can we translate a kind of materialist hermeneutics into the digital realm? In this presentation, I will examine the assumption that simply because we cannot reach out and touch a digital text object, electronic objects are disembodied and immaterial. I propose to take into consideration what it means to treat a digital text object from a textual-material angle, taking apart the anatomy of one or more pieces of born-digital writing and analyzing them from the perspectives of platform, interface, data standards, file formats, operating systems, versions and distributions of code, etc., keeping in mind that they are artifacts subject to embedded, historical, localized modes of understanding. I propose to speak not only of the “tiny junctures of silicon and metal,” but also of how exactly encoded data is always literally situated or embedded in a material site.