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# Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media

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xvi. Eisenman characterizes his work on the three just mentioned projects as

primarily linear parts which attempt through various striations to deny their axiality and thus interrupt narrative. At the Wexner Center, two grids, each of which define[s] a different narrative axis, collide to disrupt not only each other's dominance but also each other's linearity. This collision is not marked by any formal entry point, thus the building does not provide entry for the subject into the narrative. At the Columbus Convention Center, while there is a linear axis parallel to the main street, the spatial striations of the volumetric mass of the building cross this axis, interrupting its linear continuity. At Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, while there is again an axial spine of circulation that runs the entire length of the building, the architectural narrative is defined by a wholly other geometry, that of a series of articulated volumetric boxes that twist, turn and step through the spine. (“Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences: Escape from New York (and the Guggenheim)," 23)

xvii. Specifically, the issue is not whether and how the trope of folding (or any other trope for architectural form) better captures the virtual dimensions of the site, as John Rajchman suggests in writing:

There exists a “complexity," or a potential for folding, that is not contained within any frame or grid; on the contrary, a frame or grid only exists within a larger virtual complexity that exceeds it. What is thus implicit in a space, which it cannot frame, may at any point or moment break out of it and cause it to be reframed. (John Rajchman, “Folding,” 18/20).

From Eisenman's final perspective, no trope can access the virtual without the mediation of embodied spacing.

xviii. As Eisenman explains in a 1997 interview with Zaera-Polo, he is interested in a "conceptual formlessness which requires a beginning ... from a void, and produces form out of formlessness" (Zaera-Polo, "Interview," 20).

xix. This is a notion I have developed in my work on new media art. See New Philosophy for New Media, Chapter 6.

xx. Like the Deleuzean notion that is its source, the digital ASW exploits the untapped potential lurking in empirical spaces. (Deleuze develops the ASW in Chapter 7 of Cinema 1: the Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986].) Yet, whereas the cinematic variant liberates spatial forces from their determination, deploying them "as they are expressed for themselves, outside spatiotemporal coordinates, with their own ideal singularities and their virtual con junction," the digital ASW expresses a supplementary analogy that actualizes the virtual force of the digital in the form of bodily affect. In his study of the cinema, Deleuze links the cinematic ASW specifically to the shift in the experience of space following the Second World War, in which the human being was confronted with “disconnected" and “deserted” spaces that short-circuited the capacity to move and to act.

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As if in response to this existential crisis, cinema invested space as a kind of character, freeing it from its function as “ground" for action and mining its “pure potential," its being as a “perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways." In the ASW, space becomes “a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible" (109). Matters are quite otherwise in the digital realm, where the problem is not how to reenergize disinvested space, but how to forge a connection between bodily lived space and the topological possibilities afforded by digital manipulation. Whereas the cinematic ASW emerges out of what is, in the end, a lapsed analogy between embodiment and spatiality, there is nothing similar to build upon in the case of the digital.

xxi. This is precisely why Eisenman insists that the processes of the machinic have no necessary correlation with the interiority of architecture. It is precisely what informs his characterization of the contemporary electronic era-and the central example of the fax-as autonomous from human interpretation: "noninterpretative vision" can and must be distinguished by the absence of any originary analogical correlation with human experience. As the experiential cipher of such an absence, noninterpretative vision is what makes framing necessary—framing, that is, as the activity of forging a supplementary analogy through the embodied activity of the receiver. As a figure for the production of such a supplementary analogy, the digital ASW helps explain how the body is capable of generating spatial experience from a purely intensive space, one without relation to any independent coordinates or external ground.

xxii. Indeed, in the expanded sense theorized by Cache, the body remains the "source" (no matter how occulted) for all derivative forms of (technical) framing, including those internal to architecture (e.g., the grid or the cube) as well as those external to it (the cinematic frame, the photograph, but also all the so-called "external texts," liquid crystals, brain waves, etc., to which Eisenman has had recourse in his recent work). In this respect, it is not without relevance that Eisenman's career can be understood as a progressive movement away from the cinematic metaphor to a notion of architectural framing that includes the body (embodied spacing). For an account of this movement, see R. E. Somol's "Dummy Text," the introduction to Diagram Diaries.

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xxiii. In "Designing Inefficiencies," Ashley Schafer pinpoints the mechanism for this technification of the weather in Blur—namely, the 8-minute intervals in system self-regulation:

This lag time made adjusting for lone gusts of wind impossible, and even gradual weather changes were accommodated slightly after the fact, producing a constant variation in the density, shape, and limits of the fog. This instability affected the form of the cloud as well as visitor's experience inside. The most intriguing areas of Blur were not those that manifested the architect-specified “acceptable fog quality," but those that, in the grip of this delay, were almost devoid of mist. Within 8 minutes ... those locations became the setting of dramatic visual, tactile, material, and aural transformation. On an auspiciously warm, humid, and variably windy day in June, I gravitated toward these fog-deficient areas, chasing the possibility of witnessing the change. The hiss of the nozzles grew louder as the water pressure increased—a process that took about a second—followed by large plumes of drenching mist that almost immediately reduced visibility to near zero. This profoundly apparent temporal displacement attenuates the relationship between cause and effect, dissociating instruments of technology from means of control. In these intervals, Diller + Scofidio construct spaces in time that resist the modernist tyranny of efficiency by framing and questioning our present condition." (101, emphasis added)

CHAPTER 5

i. I discuss Kittler's conceptions of media separation and digital convergence at some length in "Cinema beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital-Image."

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In a reversal altogether typical of Danielewski's novel, the categorical force of this declaration is put into question, though certainly not entirely undercut, by the editors' insertion of a supplementary section entitled “Contrary Evidence” and consisting of five exhibits—including a comic book depiction of the rescue scene, an architectural mock-up, and, most strikingly, a still image from the film, "Exploration #4"—all of which would seem to furnish contextual and, most importantly, indexical evidence of the film's existence.

iii. This is a claim advanced by Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory in Appendix 1 of their interview with Danielewski:

Perhaps even more important than what these revelations about Zampanò's past may add to our understanding of [the] novel is what they imply about the overall narrative structure of House of Leaves. Once we assume that the Zampanò who wrote the novel in House of Leaves is literally the character Fellini created in La Strada, we are forced to revise our assumptions concerning the status of the world projected within Johnny Truant's framing narrative. That is, if Zampanò is only an imaginary character existing in a work of art, then everything else in the framing tale involving Johnny—including his mother, his (re)construction of the manuscript, and everything relating to the world in which this framing tale occurs—would necessarily also have to be “unreal," even in the sense of the imaginary “real" posited in most works of fiction. (Danielewski, "Haunted House—An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski," 126)

Although this analysis is certainly correct, it is merely one of many examples in the novel of paradoxical fictional framing, and thus it serves as part of what I am taking to be the novel's sustained assault on orthography, the inscription of the past as real and exactly repeatable.

iv. Indeed, Barthes categorically distinguishes photography from cinema, which is said to sweep away and deny the pose, the "thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye" (78).

v. Stiegler has developed a broad-ranging and original philosophy of technology in the last decade. His ongoing project, Technics and Time, now comprises three volumes: The Fault of Epimetheus, La Désorientation, and Le Temps du Cinéma et la Question du Mal-Être. Stiegler's basic argument is that the human has always been technologically exteriorized and has evolved following the operation of "epiphylogenesis"—evolution by means other than life (i.e., via the passage of cultural knowledge). In volumes 2 and 3, Stiegler turns his attention specifically to contemporary technologies and develops a forceful argument for the primacy of culturally sedimented, technically stored memory as the condition of possibility for the human synthesis of memory and hence for the experience of time. 'The core of this analysis concerns Stiegler's critical expansion of Husserl's account of internal time consciousness and the distinction between primary retention and secondary memory. In this expansion, Stiegler introduces a third form of memory, "tertiary memory," which is defined as the storage of experiences not lived by present consciousness that nonetheless become available for adoption by that consciousness. This mechanism is precisely that of cultural inheritance, and Stiegler's great merit is to show how much it is intertwined with technics and how it is inseparable from the issue of our human experience of time. For further discussion of Stiegler's project, see Hansen 2004 (“Time”).

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vi. Stiegler develops a complex account of how memory serves to condition perception that expands Husserl's account in the Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1905). According to Stiegler (here following Derrida's deconstruction in Speech and Phenomena), “primary retention” (the now of perception, including the “just-past" that is retained for a short interval as part of the present) is contaminated by secondary retention because the inclusion of the past (even the just-past) in the present introduces the role of memory, and hence imagination, into the inscriptional modality of perception. Stiegler builds on this deconstruction of Husserl by demonstrating, in great detail and with great force, that primary and secondary retention are in turn made possible by the prior existence of what he calls “tertiary retention," meaning the inscription or exact recording of the past that has never been lived by present consciousness so that it becomes available to be representified by that consciousness. Much of the force of Stiegler's analysis comes from his correlation of tertiary memory—and thus the entire Husserlian apparatus of memory—with technical recording. It is, Stiegler reasons, only with the possibility to experience the exact same temporal event (or “temporal object") more than once that the contamination of primary by secondary retention becomes manifest. See Stiegler 1996, Chapter 4.

vii. The novel repeatedly brings home this transfer of focus from postmodern epistemological play to orthographic critique. Consider, for example, the passage documenting Navidson's efforts to read, by matchlight (and "paperlight"), the one book he brought with him on his explorations of the house: a text called (not surprisingly) House of Leaves. As the passage detailing the so-called "Navidsonmatch question" hilariously recounts, Navidson had only one pack of matches (from the Learnèd pub outside Oxford, England), which, despite being “good matches," only afford him time to read six pages of the novel. Accordingly, to proceed with his reading, Navidson is forced to use already read pages as “raw material” to produce light. Despite the “calculations" of obviously fictional researcher Hans Staker, which, we are told, turn out to be "more a form of academic onanism, a jerk of numeric wishful thinking," rather than anything to do "with the real world," Navidson is “forced to light the cover of the book as well as the spine" causing him to burn his fingers and lose some of the text. Left in the end with one page and one match, Navidson literally consumes and allows to be consumed the last remnant of the book:

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First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption. And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson's eyes frantically sweep down over the text, keeping just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark. (467)

We experience here an inversion of the postmodern topos of the mise-en-abîme: stripped of its epistemologically debilitating impact, this episode of Navidson reading the text in which he figures as a fictional character functions to foreground the equivalence between the two forms of consumption—reading and material destruction— thematized here. The point then is to emphasize the absence of any sacred text"—literally instanced by the destruction of Navidson's copy of House of Leaves—and the primacy of the singular act of reading that forms its necessary correlate.

viii. Here, to avoid confusion, we should note that House of Leaves is not a science fiction novel, which makes its engagement with the impossible distinct from that engagement constitutive of science fiction as a literary genre.

ix. For a useful discussion of this uneasy correlation in the world of today's so-called "cyberarchitects," see Kloft (198–205). Kloft conceives this tension as that between form and performance:

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What is currently promoted as "digital" architecture is marred by a fatal assumption that innovation in architecture is today mainly expressed through form. No doubt, the topological geometry is presumed to be the basis for an adequate formal language. With unrelenting eloquence, somewhat like an adolescent rebellion against the formal dogmatism of Modernism, the focus has been on visualizing what is believed to be its greatest asset—the extravagance of form--thereby ending up with a new dogmatism that is no less rigid. The fascination with the new digital processes for the creation of architectonic form is certainly understandable. But it is equally obvious that the formal experimentation they permit cannot by itself lead to a new architecture.... One can only hope that architecture will resist such trivialization and, having discovered the form of this new paradigm, will go on to discover its performance. (204–205).

x. If this is the case, it is hardly surprising that The Navidson Record begins with an invocation of the digital as its guiding theme:

While enthusiasts and detractors will continue to empty entire dictionaries attempting to describe or deride it authenticity" still remains the word most likely to stir a debate. In fact, this leading obsession—to validate or invalidate the reels and tapes—invariably brings up a collateral and more general concern: whether or not, with the advent of digital technology, image has forsaken its once impeachable hold on the truth. (3)

It is not insignificant that this introductory passage ends with a footnote that directs the reader to Chapter IX, precisely the point where this thematic concern shades over into a symptomatology of the impact of the digital on the text.

xi. The citation is attributed to one Murphy Gruner, who informs us that “as the recording time for tapes and digital disks increases, as battery life is extended, and as camera size is reduced, the larger the window will grow for capturing events as they occur" (144).

xii. Though devoid of any consequential narrative action, this preliminary section does serve to reveal the potential tension between literary narrative and visual recording that will become central to the novel as a whole. When Zampanò seeks to reconstruct the film Navidson “set out to make" from the seemingly straightforward surveillance images and the innocent intentions motivating the project, he very deftly illustrates the medial difference between film and text, where what can only be the accurate registration of an innocent intention in film becomes, in effect, a portent of events to come. Thus, film transfigures Navidson's intention simply "to create a record of how Karen and I bought a small house in the country and moved into it with our children," to "see how everything turns out" (8). "In many ways," Zampanò observes, "the opening of The Navidson Record ... remains one of the more disturbing sequences because it so effectively denies itself even the slightest premonition about what will soon take place on Ash Tree Lane" (8). Once the house is revealed to be a physically impossible topological figure, however, this division of labor between technical recording and writing—simple registration of the event vs. imaginative supplementation—breaks down, and the two forms of media become far more complexly interarticulated.

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xiii. “... The motion sensors were never triggered.... Virtually a week seamlessly elided, showing us the family as they depart from a house without that strange interior space present only to return a fraction of a second later to find it already in place, almost as if it had been there all along" (28). Mediated through Navidson's surveillance system, the house's transformation registers as a deformation of the temporality of daily life, an erasure of the duration of lived experience that leaves instead a practically seamless punctual transition: life compressed to fit the limits of recording.

xiv. This theme of the superiority of writing to technical recording is reiterated countless times throughout Zampanò's narrative, always in close correlation with the impossible figure of the house. Thus, for example, the drawings of Navidson's children are celebrated for their capacity to capture “the awfulness at the heart of the house". In contrast to the stark, sanitized perfection of the photographic renderings, "the shallow lines and imperfect shapes" of these drawings “narrat[e] the light seeping away from their lives" (315). Embodying the force of imagination over the merely reproductive, these examples attest to the truth of (invented?) photography critic Kadina Ashbeckie's claim that “technology's failure is over[]un by the onslaught of myth” (335).

xv. I must therefore take issue with Kate Hayles' reading of the novel as a celebration of the medial flexibility of print. "The computer," Hayles writes, "has often been proclaimed the ultimate medium because it can incorporate every other medium within itself. As if learning about omnivorous appetite from the computer, House of Leaves, in a frenzy of remediation, attempts to eat all the other media" (781). Beyond its implicit (and in my opinion, inadequate) view of the digital computer as a mere extension of the orthographic project of technical recording media, Hayles' reading significantly downplays the way in which the deformations of the text point to the failure of print and the novel as recording technologies (or, in the terminology Hayles borrows from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin [and, ultimately, from Marshall McLuhan], "remediations" of such technologies). Hayles can thus remain blind to the extraorthographic vocation of the text which, as my reading suggests, can only be worked out through a consideration of embodied response.

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Here, the mediation of the text by its reading—by Johnny Truant's reading and by ours—must be differentiated from other layers of mediation and, as I shall argue, accorded a certain privilege. I would nonetheless wholeheartedly concur with Hayles' conclusion that “House of Leaves recuperates the traditions of the print book—particularly the novel as a literary form" and that "the price it pays for this recuperation is a metamorphosis so profound that it becomes a new kind of form and artifact" (781).

xvi. As I see it (and as my argument in this section will substantiate), Truant holds a privilege within the novel precisely because of his status as the "first reader" of Zampanò's narrative. I am therefore in disagreement with Danielewski, who, in a recent interview, claims that “there are many ways to enter House of Leaves" (“Haunted House," 111). Certainly the reader can follow the suggestion of footnote 78 on page 72 and read the letters in Appendix II-E from Johnny's institutionalized mother, Pelafina, before resuming the narrative. Perhaps some readers will make their way to House of Leaves by first reading The Whalestoe Letters (the independently published, enhanced edition of these letters); nevertheless, whatever information these letters furnish about Pelafina serves first and foremost to introduce further information about Johnny: in short, they are subordinate to his function as narrator/first reader. In a sense, this situation is well captured by Larry McCaffery's experience of following the path suggested by footnote 72: MacCaffery's return to the text is affected by his reading of the letters, but without in any way changing his reliance on Johnny as the primary mediator of the story and model of interpretation. McCaffery recounts:

Once I finished her letters and returned to page 72, several things had occurred. First, it was now clearer to me that the author of this book had a much wider range of styles and voices than I had suspected up to that point. And second, throughout the rest of the novel, I was very aware that I now had a completely different perspective on Johnny Truant than if I had not turned from page 72 to appendix E. (“Haunted House," 112)

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If McCaffery was "quite literally reading a different book from the one most other readers would be reading," it was still a book whose primary narrator is Johnny Truant. Truant's privileged position requires a similar subordination of the potential themes that Pelafina's letters make available, such as family dysfunction. One need only consider the example of her typographically complex letter of January 3, 1988 (p. 627), which forcefully demonstrates that her letters are not direct conveyances of her inner voice and that her character is a figure for the necessary mediation of the voice, the living present, the self-identical self. Because Pelafina simply could not have typeset the complex overlay of the word "forgive" on the typewriter available to her, her letter confronts us with evidence of the irreducibility of mediation: her alleged "direct" expressions are thoroughly mediated and subject to all of the interpretative intrusions that comprise the novel's sustained assault on orthography. The important point here is that any effort to recuperate a level of thematic interpretation falters in the face of the material-epistemological-ontological hurdles the text insistently sets into place everywhere the reader turns.

xvii. This claim forms the basis of my analysis of the digital in New Philosophy for New Media.

xviii. As we shall see shortly, the text asserts the impossibility of being outside all frames—something that would amount, following the governing analogy with the digital, to processing raw digital data directly, without any mediating interface.

xix. As if this were not sufficient to prove the point at hand, the narrative goes on to enumerate various instantiations of the theory of subjective space, including Günter Nitschke's notion of “experienced or concrete space"; Michael Leonard's conception of the "sensation of space' where the final result ‘in the perceptual process is a single sensation—a “feeling" about that particular place ..." (175); Kevin Lynch's concept of the personal basis for the emotional cognition of environment; and Jean Piaget's understanding of the perception of space as “a gradual construction” (177).

xx. See Tabbi (2002) for an interesting account of contemporary fiction in the context of systems theory.

xxi. The term "medial presence" comes from Rick Poyner's review of the novel in Artbyte, as cited in Tabbi (145, note 3).

xxii. Accordingly, information in the technical sense can be defined as a statistical measure of uncertainty equal to the logarithm taken to base 2 of the number of available choices. Thus, if a message can be specified following five binary steps or choices, the statistical measure of uncertainty (or information) can be specified as: C = log2 32 = 5.

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