This comparison of the house with the figure of an unobservable Labyrinth furnishes the genetic schema for House of Leaves' critique of orthography. Crucial here is the move, exemplified in the comparison, to flip over an initial aporia between mediation and experience in a way that reinvests the bodily dimension of experience that the aporia is designed to undermine. Thus, if experience is necessarily mediated by orthographic recording (film as exact registration of the past) and if such recording is necessarily incomplete (film as labyrinth), then there simply can be no transition from mediation to embodied experience. However, if what we are dealing with in the first place (the house as a figure for the digital) is something that cannot in principle be recorded—and here is where the flipping over occurs—then the aporia is a vicious one: no more adequate recording apparatus could potentially reconcile mediation and experience because the object in question absolutely resists orthographic capture to begin with.
If the house-labyrinth comparison forms an exemplary instance of this schema of reversal, that is because it takes the reader through this process (flipping over the aporia). The act of recognizing the house as a figure for the labyrinth of the digital—for an impossible, unsolvable labyrinth—catalyzes a fundamental shift of approach, an abandoning of the project of orthographesis thematized in the novel and a renewed concentration on the embodied, and thus necessarily partial, framing of information by the reader. To put it in the terminology of systems theory, which is germane here, the impossibility of an external, first-order observation of the entire system functions to ennoble second-order observations that take this impossibility—always from their singular standpoint within the system—as their content.xx No wonder, then, that Ruby Dahl, Zampanò's invented expert on space, "fails to consider why the house never opens into what is necessarily outside of itself" (165, note 202).
The reinvestment of what we might call bodily observation correlates directly with the reconfiguration of the novel as a copy with a difference. As yet another analog of the impossible, unrecordable house, the novel can only be said to exist through the series of embodied second-order observations to which it gives rise. If House of Leaves is able to speak exemplarily of this reconfiguration that is because it poses itself as one “medial presence” among others—as a specific medium (a house of leaves) with no pregiven privilege within the larger media ecology to which it necessarily belongs;xxi House of Leaves thereby opens itself to the infinite matrix of information outside it in a way that is almost unprecedented, even among contemporary novels. In this way, moreover, the novel is able to take the question of its specificity as its content.
THE DIGITAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HOUSE OF LEAVES
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