{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","uuid":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","normalized_title":"bodiesincodeinterfaceswithdigitalmedia","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","isbns":["0415970164","0415970156","9780415970167","9780415970150"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":348,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Bodies%20in%20code%20%20interfaces%20with%20digital%20media","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/search"},"page":{"printed_page":223,"pdf_page":236,"physical_index":236,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"dacdcab083f304e59e258d4d70ccc28aeb915bef08233458daa5e7fce82e85a5"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"Paradoxical as it sounds, the privilege of literature stems less from its capacity to ape the flexibility of technical media than from the novel's longstanding correlation with the body (the exemplar of which would certainly have to be Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel). By updating this correlation in the context of today's complex and hybrid media ecology, Danielewski manages to submit the novel to a formal transformation, one that compels its adaptation to our allegedly \"posthermeneutical\" informational culture. It does so by treating the novel as a body subject to development and deformation.\n\nIn the broadest sense, such an updating of the novel's tie to the body is precisely what is at stake in its central thematic engagement—with the topological figure of a house that is larger inside than outside. The effort to document or otherwise make sense of this physically impossible object generates a series of mediations which, as Hayles has shown, stand in for the void of referentiality at the novel's core. Lacking the force of indexicality, these mediations can only acquire the force of conviction by eliciting embodied reactions in their fictional and actual readers. They garner their rhetorical effect by triggering what I shall call \"reality affects.\"\n\nThe conjunction of the novel's host of mediations and the reader's embodied response comprises yet another type of body-in-code, one that is robustly distributed between the embodied selective framing of the singular reader and the peculiar embodiment of mediation that characterizes the novel in our contemporary culture. As a frame for the nonrepresentational impact of the digital, the novel furnishes a source of exteriorization for the embodied reader, taking her outside and beyond the scope of habitual existence and thereby allowing her to experience something new, something that would not be otherwise experientiable.\n\nIn this way, House of Leaves not only exemplifies the most general sense of virtuality as a dimension of human life—virtuality as the power of the imagination or, better, of the imaginary (following Cornelius Castoriadis³) but also specifies how language forms an important medium, perhaps the medium, for the actualization of this virtuality. By subordinating its orthographic function—recording something that exists elsewhere, in absentia— to its role as a trigger for the production of meaning via embodiment, House of Leaves exemplifies language's capacity to produce new images understood as material realities in their own right rather than as representations of something else, following Paul Ricoeur's conception. Indeed, the process of embodied response catalyzed by House of Leaves perfectly exemplifies how, as Ricoeur puts it, the \"emergence of new meanings in the sphere of language generates an emergence of new images.\"4\n\nTHE DIGITAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HOUSE OF LEAVES\n\n223","previous_page":222,"next_page":224}