Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

Despite its etymology, this function is neither limited to nor best exemplified by writing and, indeed, assumes its purest form in the technical domain—in the phenomenology of photography. Roland Barthes pinpoints this elective affinity between photography and orthography when, in Camera Lucida, he champions the specificity of photography as that technical medium capable of bringing together reality and the past:

I call "photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often "chimeras." Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and the past.6

This conjunction of reality and the past is the principle of photographic certainty and the basis for its specific intentionality; photography's noema, Barthes tells us, is “that has been" [ça a été].

Whereas Barthes takes pains to distinguish photography from other media, philosopher Bernard Steigler deploys Barthes' analysis as the basis for an account of orthography in general.iv Orthography, or straight writing," has been adopted by Stiegler as a paradigm for technical recording, from writing to more recent, real-time, literal inscription technologies like phonography and cinema.' According to Stiegler, orthographic recording allows for the exact inscription of events and thus for their exact repetition, the possibility of experiencing the same exact thing more than once (the possibility upon which Stiegler's neo-Husserlian analysis of memory is based).vi

In his analysis of Barthes, however, Stiegler suggests that photography should be distinguished less for its technical singularity (which it shares with other mechanical inscription technologies) than for its exemplary resistance to phonocentrism: “The photo will in effect place us at a remove fromphonocentric' temptations. And it will also permit us to discover that alongside orthographic writing there exist other types of exact registrations," an ensemble of “orthothetic memory supports" (supports orthothétiques de la mémoire) (Stiegler 1996, 24). What Stiegler has in mind here (on this point, his analysis certainly converges with Kittler's) is the host of technical recording instruments from photography to the digital computer—"straight-positing" (orthothetic) memory supports-that today function to inscribe our experience or rather, on

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Stiegler's neo-Husserlian, phenomenological account, the memory of (our) experience.

Because of its dual principle—at once reality and the past—the photograph forms something of a paradigm for orthography: because it makes present a past that, however, cannot be a part of my past, that cannot be lived by me, photography insulates the past, the “that has been, even as it allows for its representification. Photography thus preserves the past in a way that avoids the phonocentric privilege of the present. Put another way, because its orthographic force stems from a technical (or, as Barthes says, a chemical) source, photography assures the autonomy of the past in the face of its inherent potential for representification. In this way, it forms a model that can help us conceptualize orthographic writing in its proper sense as the inscription of the past as past and not simply the copy of the voice, the writing down of the phonē (the voice):

The meaning of literal orthothesis [orthothèse littérale] is not fidelity to the phonê as self-presence, but the literal registration of the past as past, as passage of the letter, or of the word [parole] by the letter-a certain mode of repeatability of the having-taken-place (if not of a having-been) of the play of writing. (Stiegler 1996, 48)

With his realization that it makes no difference whether the film is a fiction, what Johnny Truant effectively pronounces is precisely the waning of the orthothetic function in general. At stake here is more than simply the contamination of photographic orthothesis by the fictionalizing power of discourse; it is not just that, in the age of Photoshop, the alleged certainty of the photographic is subject to generalized suspicion. In question is the possibility for accurate recording per se, the capacity of technical inscription to capture what Danielewski celebrates, like Pynchon before him, as the singularity of experience.

In an age marked by the massive proliferation of (primarily audiovisual) apparatuses for capturing events of all sorts, from the most trivial to the most monumental, House of Leaves asserts the nongeneralizability (or nonrepeatibility) of experience—the resistance of the singular to orthography, to technical inscription of any sort. This is precisely why House of Leaves is particularly well suited to theorize the medial shift in the function of the novel. As a corporeal palimpsest of the effects of mediation—including the mediation that it performs—House of Leaves practices what it preaches, always yielding one more singular experience, one more body-in-code, each time it is read.vii

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1. THE DIGITAL

Danielewski observes that most people, if asked what House of Leaves is about, would say "it's about a house which is bigger on the inside than the outside" (Danielewski, "Conversation"). Put another way, the novel is about an impossible object, a referent that is absent not simply in the sense of being lost or unlocatable or even in the sense—common to all fiction—of lacking any existence whatsoever prior to and outside the fiction that conjures it up. House of Leaves is a realist novel about an object that, for precise technical reasons, cannot belong to the "reality" we inhabit as embodied beings: even the fictional existence of this house is, in some sense, impossible.viii

If we locate House of Leaves at the end of a long line of antimimetic novels—a line running from Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler—we can better grasp its (relative) novelty. Here, the referential impossibility is not narrative-based and epistemologically-focused so much as it is material: at bottom it stems from an incompatibility between the "topo-logic" of digital processing and the phenomenal dimension of human experience. House of Leaves is a narrative, as Kate Hayles has noted, that forthrightly admits the void at its center so as better to foreground the role of belief in its "reality" claim. Embodied belief is precisely the allegorical object of the hyperactive proliferation of mediation that comes to fill in the novel's central void.

Despite its referential impossibility, it remains the case that the house, as Hayles has astutely observed, "nevertheless enters the space of representation."7 In a quite literal sense, it is the intrusion of the house into the lives of the novel's characters—not to mention those of its readers-that generates the narrative. This fact should not, however, be taken as license to interpret the house too narrowly as a figure for the novel in which it figures (a literal house of leaves). Although it certainly is that, the house must also and more fundamentally be viewed as a figure for the otherness of the digital as it enters thematically into the world of the novel and also as it punctures the surface of its textuality.

Not unlike the uneasy correlation between parameter-driven design techniques and built form in contemporary architecture (where the design possibilities materialized in the former vastly exceed the geometrical realities of the latter),ix what we encounter in this impossible house is a figure for a spatial dimension—a topological figure—that cannot find adequate representation in the forms of orthographic recording exhaustively inventoried by the novel. Its resistance to representation notwithstanding, this spatial dimension still manages to exert an immense impact as the very motor force driving both the host of recording technologies thematized in the novel and the recording technology that is the text.

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This figural labor becomes quite explicit at the moment when Zampanò compares the house to an actual, physical icefall:

Similar to the Khumbu Icefall at the base of Mount Everest where blue seracs and chasms change unexpectedly throughout the day and night, Navidson is the first one to discover how that place also seems to constantly change. Unlike the icefall, however, not even a single hairline fracture appears in those walls. Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one. (68–69)

Here, through its difference from an actual, physical entity, we can see the house for what it is: a flexible, topological form capable of infinite and seamless modification; a postvisual figure immune to the laws governing the phenomenology of photography, cinema, and video; a logic of transformation whose output is disproportionate to its input. In this perspective, the house is nothing if not a figure for the digital: its paradoxical presence as the impossible absence at the core of the novel forms a provocation that, as we shall see, is analogous in its effects to the provocation of the digital.

That this analogy-by-effect surfaces most insistently at the point where the text's thematic concern with the digital coincides with its most extreme typographical deformation can hardly be a coincidence. Indeed, this point might be considered the culmination of the text's thematic engagement with the digital, the moment when this latter shades into a concern with the digital as a subterranean deformational force which threatens the integrity of the (traditional) text.\* Chapter IX recounts “Exploration #4," in which the adventurer Holloway and his team encounter further evidence of the house's warped expansions as well as the bestial growl that, precisely by concretizing the unknown danger, will wind up driving Holloway out of his mind and ultimately to his demise.

Interspersed through the narration of this exploration and serving to interrupt its progression are a series of typological innovations—upside down and horizontal footnotes that literally carve into the space of the text. Certainly the highlight of this experimentation is, as Hayles has noted, footnote 144, a blue-lined frame, set near the top of the page and containing a (necessarily partial) list of everything that is not in the house. Because this list could be extended indefinitely, this footnote inscribes, in a particularly destabling manner, the way the outside world punctures the closure of the fictional world. The formal deformations to which it submits the novel put the latter's longstanding stability as a storage technology into question. This list of what is not in the house runs on through fourteen right-hand pages of the manuscript; in its appearance on the left-hand pages, it presents the text in reverse, as if the normally opaque text were suddenly rendered transparent or at least punctured by a see-through or reflective portal. This play with page layout and function culminates in a blank blue-outlined box followed, on the next page, by a solid-blue box, and on the next by a larger unframed box of blank white space imposed directly on and obscuring a single passage devoted to the capacity of digital technology to manipulate images.

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Thus, although it playfully alludes to the capacity of text to mimic the effects of technical recording media, this culmination also foregrounds a deeper engagement of the text with digital technology. Made to coincide with a citation championing the improvements in real-time (analog) orthographic recording technology, the abrupt growth of the text box into an unwieldy blank field obstructing the text beneath hints at the potential disjunction between textuality and technical recording media.xi Here we can see clearly how the novel's thematic interest in coupling orthographic recording with textual deformation is a pretext for a more important argument concerning the rehabilitation of fiction in the wake of the digital.

That is why the previously invoked passage championing improvements in orthographesis goes on to conclude with a consideration of how the digital differs categorically from "low-end"—that is, analog, technology. Rather than extending the scope of orthographic recording, digital manipulation threatens to suspend the orthographic function of recording per se: "Digital manipulation allows for the creation of almost anything the imagination can come up with, all in the safe confines of an editing suite ..." (144). The digital here signifies the wholesale substitution of the productive imagination for the registration of the real—the triumph of fiction over documentation. It is in this sense that the fictional house can and must be understood as a figure for the digital: it challenges techniques of orthographic recording and, by evading capture in any form, reveals the digital to be a force resistant to orthothesis—the force of fiction as such.

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1. MEDIA

Much more than just a thematic focal point, the impossible house that is larger inside than outside plays the role of catalyst for the events and actions that transpire within the novel. More than just a motor for narration, it triggers a media agon in which print's capacity to mimic technical orthographic recording attests not only to its flexibility, but also-far more significantly in my opinion-to its special aptitude for documenting" the nondocumentable impact of the digital. Even as it reconfigures the novel from story-telling vehicle to interface onto a virtually limitless universe of information, the thematization of mediation serves first and foremost to foreground the paradoxical privilege enjoyed by print in today's new media ecology.

Consider, as an initial example, how the house jumpstarts the narrative: only once the house's peculiar spatial properties are discovered in Chapter IV do film and text acquire a plot. Prior to this moment, the void of narration had been filled by Zampanò's description of some altogether innocuous documentary footage from the daily lives of the Navidsons in their new house on Ash Tree Lane.xii Abruptly puncturing this static picture, the discovery of the house's transformation triggers a frenzied proliferation of recording that will drive the plot of film and text from this point forward. It is hardly insignificant that this proliferation occurs in direct response to a failure of technical orthography—the failure of ubiquitous Hi-8 video surveillance cameras to capture the house's uncanny transformation.xiii Indeed, this plot-instigating incident puts into play an odd logic that will recur throughout the narrative: rather than leading to a disinvestment in technical recording, as we might expect from such a bizarre event, orthographic failure will, time and again, only intensify orthographic desire.

Yet, even as it literally sets off an escalating multiplication of layers of mediation, this odd logic will also cause the relation between text and technical recording to evolve in ways that speak directly to the changing status of the literary in the new media ecology. As the resistance of the house to orthographic capture yields an ever more complex deployment of technical mediation (to the point where, in Exploration #4, photography, film, video, surveillance video, and sound recording are all deployed together), the text undergoes a kind of internal functional division. On the one hand, its apparent seduction by this escalating orthographic frenzy causes it to join the fray and demonstrate its flexibility as a form of media capable of mimicking other media; on the other hand, it differentiates itself from technical recording in what amounts to an assertion of the novel's privilege within today's complex media ecology. House of Leaves shows itself—and therewith the novel as such—to be the appropriate vehicle for documenting the incapacity of orthographic recording technology to document the impossible house—that is, the being of the digital that, as Friedrich Kittler says, today determines our experience.

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Before exploring this privilege further, let us pause to take stock of the impact of this plot-instigating function of the house—specifically the way in which it correlates the structure and function of the narrative with the orthographic task thematized within the novel—on the other generic elements of the novel. Effectively, by placing Zampanò's narrative into a competition with recording media, House of Leaves subordinates traditional characterization to allegorical functions that serve the ends of media agon. (In general, my argument here builds upon observations made by Hayles in her consideration of characterization in House of Leaves.)

Consider, for example, the portrayal of Navidson. Navidson is, literally, a cipher for orthographic desire: all of the aspects that, traditionally speaking, contribute to well-rounded characterization—psychology, past experience, personal idiosyncrasies, and so on—are in his case mere subfunctions, indeed true epiphenomena, of this overriding function. This is why Navidson's character furnishes the emblem for the paradoxical correlation of orthographic failure and orthographic desire we have just observed:

Perhaps one reason Navidson became so enamored with photography was the way it gave permanence to moments that were often so fleeting. Nevertheless, not even ten thousand photographs can secure a world, and so while Navidson may have worked harder, taken greater risks and become increasingly more successful, he was ultimately misled in feeling that his labor could make up for the love he was deprived of as a child and the ultimate sense of security such love bestows.... More than just snapping a few pictures and recording daily events with a few Hi 8s, Navidson wanted to use images to create an outpost set against the transience of the world. No wonder he found it so impossible to give up his professional occupation. In his mind abandoning photography meant submitting to loss. (22-23)

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What this passage so clearly shows is how Navidson's character encompasses both sides of the paradox of orthography. His history as a Pulitzer-prize-winning photographer, for example, stands just as clearly behind the desire that causes the family to retreat from the public domain as it does his inability to do so without documenting every step of the process.

Like character, relations between characters are also a direct function of the agon of media. Such relations develop only because and to the extent that they come together in the common task of documenting the impossible house. One striking instance appears in the renewal of Navidson's relationship with his brother, Tom-—a relationship that, we are told, has been strained “for over eight years" (31). Although we might expect the coincidence of the house's transformation to occasion a reconciliation between these characters, this possibility is soon put to rest by nothing other than the house: “... the moment and opportunity for some kind of fraternal healing disappears when Tom makes an important discovery: Navidson was wrong. The interior of the house exceeds the exterior not by $1 / 4 ^ { \dprime }$ but by $5 / 1 6 ^ { \mathrm { { \infty } } }$ (32).

This pattern holds for the remainder of the narrative, as if offering an allegory for the capacity of the house—because of the orthographic crisis that it occasions and figures—to subsume all possibility of independent character relations: at each point at which Will and Tom begin to address the substance of their estrangement (Will's success, Tom's drinking, etc.), some more pressing need related to the documentation of the house supervenes.

In an even more direct expression of its obsession with the problem of orthography, the novel enacts a subordination of face-to-face relations between characters in favor of ever more highly mediated forms. For example, Karen and Navidson communicate best across the distance of media interfaces: they speak to each other through Hi8 video diaries and learn more about one another, not to mention themselves, from viewing their documentations of the other than from any form of direct contact. One need only consider Karen's perspective on the relationship: her estrangement from Navidson mounts as his orthographic fervor intensifies, to the point that she feels compelled to abandon Navidson and the house. Only after having assayed her own documentation, "A Brief History of Who I

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Love," can she begin to see Navidson "as something other than her own personal fears and projections." Through this mediation, Karen is able to witness how much Navidson "cherished the human will to persevere" and to glimpse the "longing and tenderness he felt toward her and their children"(368).

Even as it testifies to the irreducible complicity between character and mediation in this novel of mediations, this example also folds into itself supplementary layers of mediation which obscure even that measure of reconciliation that would seem to be effected between Karen and Navidson. Here, the fact that Karen's method is to let “Navidson's work speak for itself" could not be more significant. The Navidson she rediscovers is not the private Navidson that she so desires, but rather the Navidson that appears through the lens of his photographic mediation.

This conflation is symbolized by the conclusion of Karen's film which, despite showcasing material from Karen's own hand (a home video of Navidson and his children at play in their new home), serves above all to highlight the inadequacy of film as a documentary medium. Unable to follow Navidson's actions as he grabs their daughter Daisy and holds her up to the blinding sun, the film culminates in total overexposure, showing Navidson (and the children that tie Karen to him) simply vanish[ing] in a burst of light," as if transmogrified into the materiality of film (368).

This recognition of the limitations of orthographic recording technology is not, however, restricted to localized "character" perspectives, but rather is woven increasingly tightly into Zampanò's unfolding narrative. At first this takes place thematically, as events reveal the utter impossibility of documenting that space. Following Exploration #3, in which the house appears for the first time in its immensity, the adventurer Holloway matter of factly pronounces the eclipse of orthography: "It's impossible to photograph what we saw" (86). For Zampanò, the force of this pronouncement suspends any lingering faith in the redemptive power of Navidson's extraordinary gift:

Even after seeing Navidson's accomplished shots, it is hard to disagree with Holloway. The darkness recreated in a lab or television set does not begin to tell the true story. Whether chemical clots determining black or video grey approximating absence, the images still remain two dimensional. In order to have a third dimension, depth cues are required, which in the case of the stairway means more light. The flares, however, barely illuminate the size of that bore. In fact they are easily extinguished by the very thing they are supposed to expose. Only knowledge illuminates that bottomless place, disclosing the deep ultimately absent in all the tapes and stills—those strange cartes de visites. (87)

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Later, when it is taken up by Navidson, this contrast between orthographic illumination and some kind of deeper, sightless knowledge serves explicitly to introduce the superiority of print. In a snippet from "The Last Interview" detailing the rescue of Billy Reston (a document curiously missing from the inventory of supplementary materials assembled in the appendices, as Hayles underscores), Navidson recounts his discovery of the incongruity between mediated representation and reality:

When I finally went back to the house to retrieve the Hi8s, I couldn't believe how quickly it had all happened. My leap looks so easy and that darkness doesn't seem dark at all. You can't see the hollowness in it, the cold. Funny how incompetent images can sometimes be. (344)

Confirming the validity of Navidson's pronouncement, Zampanò goes on to observe that “only the interviews inform these events. They alone show us how the moments bruise and bleed" (344).xiv

This same pattern of mediation serving to highlight the comparative superiority of print over technical recording informs the novel's investment in the capacity of print to mimic and thereby subsume the operations of recording technologies like photography and film. Consider, for example, the text's simulation of the film running out, smack in the middle of the rescue. Spread out over the space of five pages (307–311, with slashes indicating page breaks) and located at various heights on the page, the following words are inscribed: "The film runs out here, / leaving nothing else behindbut an unremarkable / white / screen." Here the blank page functions as a material analog of the blank screen and the word “blank," giving a sensory correlate to the abrupt cessation of visual information that occurs when a film runs out or when the meaning of the word “blank" sinks in.

A closely related example helps show that the line between mimicry and the differentiation of media can be a very fine one. Just prior to this moment, as Navidson, Tom, and Reston seek to rescue Holloway's assistants, Jed and Wax, from the now homicidal and heavily armed Holloway, the film captures Jed's assassination in footage that would later permit frame by frame analysis “as diligent as any close analysis of the Zapruder film." If, like the Zapruder film, this documentary footage affords "ample information perhaps to track the trajectories of individual skull bits and blood droplets, determine destinations, even origins," it does not contain "nearly enough information to actually ever reassemble the shatter" or, in other words, to document exhaustively the irreversible process in which Jed's life transitioned over into death (193).

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