Mechanisms.
New Media and the Forensic Imagination
by Matthew
G. Kirschenbaum
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008
316 pp., illus.33 b&w. Trade, $35.00/£22.95
ISBN-10: 0-262-11311-2; ISBN-13: 978-0-262-11311-3.
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 Gibsons
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 Kirschenbaums 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 Kirschenbaums
view of this type of technology helps
to avoid Vilém Flussers 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 Kirschenbaums) 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 Joyces 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 books inquiry has
something of a real detective story),
the social life of Gibsons 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.
Kirschenbaums 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.