Back to Medium Theory

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Review of Guillaume Soulez, ed., “Le cinéma éclaté. Formes et théorie”, special issue of Cinémas, vol. 29,  1 (2018).

Online available: https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cine/2018-v29-n1-cine05458/

All modern media are characterized by permanent change and mobility. This fundamental observation concerns all of their aspects: the technological infrastructure of the medium, the social use as well as the experience of the user, and last but not least the actual content of a given medium.

To give some examples of what this involves in the case of cinema, often a privileged example in the field of medium analyses, one can think of the following. The changes in the formal layer of cinema are frequently illustrated by a large series of technological transformations that structure the history of the medium as a chain, not of innovations but of ruptures: changes in projection techniques, changes in camera equipment, changes in the combination of sound and image, etc. The changes in social use and user experience are no less important: watching a movie in a theater is not the same as watching the same movie on television or watching it on the screen of an iPad, not only because of the formal and material changes that come to the fore, but also and more importantly because of the differences in viewing context and viewers’ expectations (in a theater, for instance, not everybody will accept that other viewers are talking aloud during the viewing). Finally, content is a no less crucial aspect of medium change, since there is a huge difference between for example a medium reproducing another medium’s content (this occurs when we watch an already existing movie on television) and the same medium attempting to create its proper content (which can in its turn be reproduced by other media, such as for instance a television series offered for binge-watching in a movie theater, with all kind of fringe activities, almost as a kind of circus experience).

The exceptional mobility of modern media is both exciting and a source of great confusion, if not anxiety. The ceaselessly increasing speed of these change adds a sense of urgency to this situation and it should thus not come as a surprise that modern medium theory is –among many other elements– a thorough attempt to cope with this situation. Roughly speaking, one might currently distinguish four major ways of addressing these problems. These approaches and the solutions they offer, which I will immediately present in more detail, cannot be arranged in a chronological order (although it is of course perfectly possible to historicize each of them) and in quite some cases they are combined in medium research (which does not mean that all of them and certainly not all of their aspects are mutually compatible).

First of all, there is the very radical attempt to supersede medium change and diversity by the introduction of a paradigm shift in medium studies: the shift from medium to post-medium, which tends to involve the eventual merger of all media in one new supermedium, usually defined in digital terms and outlining totally new questions that focus on the political dimensions of medium theory.

Second, there is the historical approach of medium changes, which generally takes two directions: on the one hand, Bolter and Grusin’s remediation theory (which builds upon certain aspects of the pioneering work by Marshall McLuhan); on the other hand, media archeology (often inspired by Foucault).

A third approach is that of media essentialism, which has been recently updated by the success of the notion of “expanded media”, allowing a very pragmatic take on the combination of what a medium “is” and what it can be “on top of that” (by the way, the title of the special issue of Cinémas under review is a direct critique of this approach, since it replaces the almost stereotypical syntagma of “expanded cinema” by that of “shattered cinema”).

Transmediality can be seen as a fourth (and certainly neither last nor least) of these answers. It is an answer that dramatically emphasizes the openness and mobility of media, while systematically analyzing media structures and products in the perspective of media networks (transmediality is probably the approach that can most easily be combined with other theories, hence its strategic position in the global field of medium theory).

In spite of the great theoretical and analytical insights produced and discussed in recent medium theory, there remains however a certain number of major issues, which continue to handicap all research in the field. One may think here of questions such as:

  • 1) the terminological labyrinth of medium theory and medium studies,
  • 2) the lack of a shared theoretical framework (which does not signify the lack of a Grand Theory, but the lack of a fruitful dialogue between the various approaches, which more than once tend to focus on their own specificity),
  • 3) the problematic relationship between theory and practice, as shown by the fact that certain theories only work with a certain corpus and not with other ones (a Foucault-based reading of the “archive” for instance will inevitably struggle with the presence of non-written documents such as sounds and images),
  • 4) the very refusal of theory (which some discard as no longer relevant or useful).

The essays gathered in this special issue of Cinémas are a direct reply to this suspicion and their common effort to shed new light on the notion of medium as well as the many facets of medium change in the field of cinema can be seen as a profound commitment to the raison d’être of theory in medium studies.

In this context, two major notions come to the fore: first that of “medium”, of course, and here the attempt of Souliez and the other contributors will be to bring some clarity in the very definition and terminology of what we call a medium; second that of “dispositif” (sometimes translated as “apparatus”, in the technical-theoretical meaning the word given to the word in the field of film studies), which can be circumscribed as a way of clustering technology, use as well as user’s experience and content in a single, but always shifting structure. However, both the notion of medium and that of dispositif often fall prey to a double problem: that of essentialism and that of teleology. In the case of cinema, the problem of essentialism is demonstrated for instance by the countless polemics on what cinema “is” and even more on what it is “not” (film historians know very well that from the very beginning certain innovations have been condemned in terms of “the end of cinema”, the case of sound cinema, a “betrayal” of the visual “essence” of cinema being a good example of this). Concerning the problem of teleology, more precisely of some of its underlying techno-determinist axioms, similar remarks apply: cinema is often seen as the progressive disclosure of the “possibilities” of the medium, each new form or technology “adding” something to a previous, more “primitive” stage of the medium.

The articles gathered by Guillaume Souliez (Université Paris-3) are a remarkable and inspiring initiative to solve some of these problems, without having the pretention to provide answers to all questions. The introduction and five essays that compose the thematic cluster mainly tackle four different issues.

The article by Laurent Jullier (Université de Lorraine and Paris-3) focuses on terminological and epistemological questions. It presents a very detailed overview of the ways in which medium theory has tried to define and distinguish the two major dimensions of a medium, which are its formal and technological aspects and its social and cultural aspects. The close-reading of the many pitfalls and difficulties encountered by nearly all theories encourages Jullier to foreground a user-based approach of the notion of medium, which he proposes to reframe in light of the different attitudes users can take towards a medium. While recognizing the difficulties involved in all attempts to radically separate both, Jullier maintains the heuristic value of a focus on these differences, which allows him to produce a taxonomy of practices, the user having a (varying) degree of agency and empowerment in her or his contact with media and media works.

A second approach is offered by the contributions of Frank Kessler (University of Utrecht) and Oliver Asselin (Université de Montréal), who represent the more historical stance towards these issues. Kessler, a key film historian specialized in the so-called “early cinema”, convincingly demonstrates that the notion of dispositif cannot be reduced to the still relatively hegemonic definition proposed by Jean-Louis Baudry in the 1970s (a definition heavily depending on the theatrical infrastructure of that period as well as the prestige of Lacanian psychoanalysis in a certain type of heavy theoretical film theory and therefore much less general and universal than often claimed). Instead, he close-reads the large variety of the practices of “watching movies” in the early twentieth-century, in order to make a plea for a radically contextualized reading of the “dispositif”. Asselin’s forward-looking and almost futurist vision of “neuronal” cinema based on the uses of special glasses, contact lenses, and implants, can be read as a complement to Kessler’s archeology, since it contributes to a further fine-tuning and contextual differentiation of the notion of dispositif.

The joint publication by André Gaudreault (Université de Montréal) and Philippe Marion (UCLouvain) tackles the very heart of medium theory questions. It is a new step in their work on medium history, as exemplified for instance in their last book The End of Cinema?, and it foregrounds once again, but with great clarity, their key concept of “cultural series”, which is their way establish bridges between media forms, contents and uses and thus part of their larger attempt to build a less linear and radically non-teleological history of cinema. A cultural series as defined by Gaudreault and Marion is not an empirical fact (in that sense, it is neither a dispositif nor a cultural practice), but a heuristic tool that helps medium theoreticians to create if not to invent  inter- and transmedial links capable of revealing new and different takes on medium history.

In their article, their starting point is the intriguing mix of cinema with other media (television, for instance, and nowadays video and digital media), which raises unsolvable questions to all those who stick to a traditional vision of cinema as illustrated for example by Baudry’s well-known and still largely accepted apparatus theory. Yet instead of seeing what happens to cinema when it is shown on television or on a computer screen or what happens when cinema seems to stop being cinema and starts projecting the live version of an opera, Gaudreault and Marion propose a different historical and genealogical hypothesis. Referring to the “belinograph” (an early twentieth-century forerunner of the telex, allowing the electronic transmission of pictures), they suggest a cultural series bringing together the medium of cinema and the various ways of technologically decomposing and reassembling images. From that point of view, showing movies on television or displaying them on screen is part of a larger “belinographic” history, of which film itself can also be a part.

From a broader point of view, the notion of cultural series proves an important contribution to the theoretical toolkit of film and medium studies: a comparison with for instance the medium theory by Lev Manovich (whose views on digital culture as a continuation of Soviet montage by other means seem to go into similar directions, although in a much more speculative way) and the fundamental redefinition of film as the combination of projection techniques and moving images (this was the paradigm shift of cinema after the rediscovery of early cinema, which put an end to the conception of cinema as visual narrative) will certainly prove highly stimulating.

The essay by Guillaume Soulez has a double scope. On the one hand, it focuses on the terminological and theoretical questions of the notion of dispositif, the central role of which is clearly highlighted. On the other hand, it also proposes a rereading of Pierre Schaeffer, an artist and theoretician whose work is mainly related to the field of sound media, more specifically of “concrete music”, but whose writings for television contain fundamental ideas for the elaboration of a renewed dispositif theory in particular and medium theory in general. From Schaeffer, Soulez is mainly borrowing a fundamental claim on the genesis of new media.

First of all, Schaeffer rejects the idea that media function outside a certain dispositif, which organizes the way in which media forms and formats are used and above all experienced.  In other words, he adopts a strongly user-based take on the dispositif, which is never a clustering of forms and practices initiated by a new environment, but a new media use that has to cope with already existing dispositifs and practices which unavoidably inflect the way in which a new dispositif is being appropriated (by producers as well as consumers, both being users of a medium).

In this regard, it is to vital to stress that the dispositif ceases to be a structure or a mechanism in order to become a process with in principle five different stages:

  • • step 1 is a kind of “zero” position where the new dispositif is merely used to retransmit already existing material (this is what happens when a movie is shown on television, after its theatrical release);
  • • step 2 is that of the search for a new and original use of the medium (this is what happens when television starts creating tv-movies, no longer meant for theatrical release);
  • • step 3 is the time of experimentation and the attempt to explore the medium as a device for totally original and medium-specific works (in the case of television, this happens when the medium does not only appropriates other media formats, for instance movies, but starts invent formats that do not exist in other media –but which these media can of course reappropriate in their turn: film can for instance play with “typical” television formats and aesthetics);
  • • step 4 is the institutionalization of the new medium as a independent dispositif (that is a dispositif whose rules are no longer defined in relationship with previous media);
  • • and finally step 5, which has to do with the social and political presence and impact of the medium (in modern societies, television has become part of the so-called “fourth power” (next to the trias politica model of the legislating, the executive, and the judicial branches of power).

As this brief recapitulation makes clear, Souliez also admits Schaeffer’s non-canonical positioning of the experimental use of a medium not as an initial but as an intermediary stage in this process. Unlike many theoreticians and historians who depart from an experimental phase that is then progressively softened and adapted in order to become socially accepted as well as commercially viable, eventually finding its way and place in the existing mediascape, Schaeffer defends the idea that experimentation always follows use, not vice versa.

The combination of these elements (a user-based approach of media, a radically temporal reading of their dispositifs and a  renewed interpretation of the role and place of “research and innovation”) enables a more fine-grained analysis of the life of media, both in themselves and in the larger context of a mediascape. And this is actually what all the essays in this special issue of Cinémas try to achieve: they all go back to some fundamentals of medium theory in order to provide us with more powerful and more nuanced instruments to make sense of the moving target of medium history.

Authors: Jan Baetens & Domingo Sánchez-Mesa

Digital Writing: Transmedia versus Storytelling?

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Gilles Bonnet, Pour une poétique numérique. Littérature et internet . Paris, Hermann, 2017 ISBN : 9782705694975

The new book by Gilles Bonnet on the poetics of digital writing –not in general but as an artistic practice– is an absolute must-read. It gives a well-informed, jargon-free and attractively written overview of the contemporary scene, striking a right balance between theoretical reflection and critical close-reading. It also proves that it is possible to undertake this kind of research by relying on a primary and secondary corpus that is not in the very first place Anglophone. Bonnet’ work on digital writing as it is happening today in France can and should be taken as an example by all those eager to reflect on digital culture in their own language. Bonnet’s book demonstrates that there is more to learn from a fresh approach of local and glocal cases than from the umpteenth second-hand and watered-down compilation of an amazingly small set of Anglophone works and authors (as we all know, no field has been canonized in so terrifyingly fast and narrow ways than that of electronic writing). 

Pour une poétique numérique is also a truly original work, which addresses issues that most studies on electronic writing fail to take into account. Some of these issues can be called semiotic, such as the blurring of boundaries between words and images. Bonnet pays a lot of attention to the use of photographs by the new type of digital authors he calls “écranvains”, a portmanteau word mixing “écran” (screen) and “écrivain” (writer). For him, these “screen-writers” or “scriters” –no, the word is definitely too ugly– signify the return of the post-World War Two “camera-pen” (caméra-stylo) aesthetics, an aesthetics that has longtime be seen in antagonistic terms (“camera-pen” authors were those who swapped their pen for a camera, not those who did simultaneously both the writing and the filming) but that has now become a daily practice, as shown by almost all writers’ blogs. Other issues are institutional, such as the spread of the “residency” system in the digital era, a kind of modern sponsorship that offers the author a grant in exchange for a web-documented stay in some city or arts center. Institutionally speaking, the residency has become a criterion of distinction that replaces the no longer really functioning editorial gatekeeper system (since everybody can access the net and get published online, authors and readers are looking for new systems that help make distinctions, and the residency is one of them). Still others, finally, are literary in the broad sense of the word, such as the emergence of new genres (Bonnet is mainly interested in the autobiographical blog and author’s website) or the radical transformation of existing genres, in the first place the essay, which Bonnet rightly identifies as fundamentally linked with the very characteristics of digital writing. Writing on screen provokes a shift from the final product to the open an virtually unending process of both individual and collaborative writing and file-processing (words, images, sounds), and this shift brings the essay (in Bonnet’s terms, the “e-ssay”) to the center of literature.

For Bonnet, digital writing is inextricably linked with the work on transmedia storytelling. However, his approach is very different from what the currently dominating meaning of this term involves. On the one hand, transmedialization in digital writing does not necessarily implies the actual split between various works and media. What digital writing shows, is that the tendency toward a larger mediatic gamut –the writer is no longer just a writer, he or she is also photographer filmmaker, sound engineer, archivist, etc. – is perfectly compatible with the longing for a unified composition, even if the rapid expansion of a writing networks is always in danger of becoming hopelessly decentered (the critique that books produce an “artificial unity”, as some digital prophets liked to say thirty years ago, is a hollow one: culture is by definition “artificial” and moreover decentering is much easier and therefore less interesting than re-centering). In that sense, digital writing helps us rethink transmediality in light of intermediality, which may prove the more fundamental category.

On the other hand, digital writing also displays the obstacles raised to narrative and narrativity. Although it cannot be denied that narrative continues to be the master cognitive framework of the reader’s approach to digital writing, this writing itself is structurally speaking anti-narrative. Digital writing is permanently victim (true, often a rather consenting one!) to disruption, digression, interruption, dead end, repetition and breaking down, and this frailty in terms of sequential continuity is fundamentally at odds with the narrative drive or impulse. In this sense, digital writing is closer to what is called elsewhere the “cinema of attraction”. As the history of cinema makes clear, the aesthetics of attraction can be as challenging and inspiring as that of narrative, but we should be aware of the fact that narrative is not the natural horizon of digital writing. If there is narrative in it, it is because it has been (yes, artificially) constructed, not because our machines make us tell stories.

To finish, some words on the critical dimension of this book. Bonnet is not afraid of criticizing certain aspects and products of digital writing. Not because there are works and authors he dislikes (he has the elegance to avoid any personal attacks), but because digital writing involves certain structures and mechanisms that engender serious problems for all those wo dare take the risk to become screen-writers and to write digital-born works. Bonnet does not fall prey to naïve praise: his analysis of the residency system is ruthless, for instance (and one feels vicarious shame for all the authors who are forced to more or less hypocritically play a game that most of them have never chosen). The most crucial issue is however that of “quality”, for even if it is often difficult to define what this term means, most readers feel that quality is not always present in what they are reading (and they show what they feel by stopping to read the often endless blogs and sites that try to invent the new forms of writing in the digital era). 

The reasons of this failure are not unknown. First of all, digital writing reshuffles the traditional mechanisms of literary mediation and selection (and without selection and mediation, culture, which is a social phenomenon, is simply not possible; for an analysis of the selection issue in the pocket book industry, see Jan Baetens: “Les livres de poche: une littérature exposée”, in Image (&) Narrative 18(4), 2017). The classic gatekeepers are no longer capable of (partially) controlling publication and reception, and this prompts much confusion: quality markers have to be reinvented, while the number of available texts is literally beyond any control (not only because too many works are put online, but because these works tend to become too long). Second, digital writing is by definition experimental and one cannot know in advance the rules and best practices of what is now being explored by trial and error. Yet this uncertaintly should not be a blanco cheque for anything goes. There is trouble in paradise and we have to say it. Bonnet clearly identifies all these problems, while resisting the temptation to build a canon. One can only hope that his example will be followed and implemented. Digital writing is not only in need of great apologists. It also needs critics fighting the silly idea that something is valuable because it is digital-born. That kind of technodeterminism may have been necessary when digital writing emerged in the literary field. Today, however, it has become harmful.

Literature outside the book and transmediality

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Ceci est mon corps (“This Is My Body”), an expression with strong biblical connotations, was the title of a three days gathering at the University of Montpellier 3 on the theme of the literary performance, more specifically on the performance of writers on stage (1). Mixing traditional communications, various forms of interactions between academics and authors, and a very rich program of actual performances (all one man or one woman performances, with relatively little technology involved), the conference had a twofold ambition, historical as well as theoretical. On the one hand, it aimed at challenging the idea that authors on stage are just a recent phenomenon. On the other hand, it tried to offer a new mapping of the field and to establish a workable taxonomy of the myriad of practices that characterize the general topic of literary performance.

The general context of the conference was the growing awareness of the fact that even traditional literature, that is literature made to be read in books by silent readers, is questioned nowadays by what is called in France literature outside the book (“la littérature hors du livre”) (2), a rather general label that refers to both intermedial and transmedial expansions of the text. The literary performance, which goes beyond the well-known public reading of a text in order to produce on stage a unique event that is not supposed to exist the hic et nunc of the actual performance, is one of the most striking examples of this move from literature in print to literature outside the book. It is the symptom of a dramatic change, which demonstrates the exhaustion –yet not the death or the disappearance– of print culture, which is already adapting to the new situation. At the same time, the literary performance is also of interest for transmedia theory, since it discloses a certain number of tendencies that are not always closely examined by the emerging theoretical mainstream in the field.

Two elements come here to the fore. First of all, it seems that the literary performance, which at first sight can be read as a new aspect of the increasing transmedialization of literature in print, is somewhat at odds with the general idea of transmediality itself. Stressing the unique and specific features of the performative event, most lecturers and practitioners of the conference defended the idea that the literary performance, even when it is part of a larger set of media forms a work can take, is itself so unique and so specific that it cannot be considered part of a larger whole (that is: the transmedia network produced by an original idea or project). In that sense, one might even have the impression that the literary performance is less an example of modern transmedialization than a new attempt to reinvent the absolute uniqueness and distinctiveness, not only of each work, but of each actual realization of this work. In that sense, it should not come as a surprise that certain performances do no longer emphasize the “work” that is being read, shown or produced on stage, but the very “process” of doing something on stage. At the center of the performance one does no longer find the work, but the body of the author and its interaction with the living audience.

The second observation has to do with the relationship between the various media forms a transmedial work can take. Even if one accepts (for not everybody will follow the radical stance of absolute uniqueness explained above) that the literary performance remains part of a work that now exists as a transmedial network, the various forms such a work can take should not be seen as equal. It may be true that the spirit of transmedia writing (it would be too narrow to focus on storytelling alone) is to explore and use as many media as possible. In practice however, not all of these media are equal. According to the specific project one tries to elaborate, certain forms of transmedialization simply do not work and are therefore either progressively abandoned or excluded from the beginning. The examples of literary performances that were discussed or shown during the conference were often very clear in this regard. Transmediality is not only a success story (always more, always better, always better, etc.), it is also the story of many failures and dead ends, often more interesting to study than the actual successes –and absolutely necessary for the more nuanced theory of transmedia we try to build.

(1) The detailed program can be found here.

(2) For a recent and already very strongly institutionalized example, see the “ festival EXTRA!” at Centre Pompidou-Beaubourg in Paris (6-10 September 2017).

Digital Archives and/as Transmediality

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On October 27th, 2016, representing the NarTrans project, I have opened the “II Jornades Internacionals de Poesia: arxius, poètiques i recepcions” (at MACBA, Barcelona, Spain) with a Keynote entitled “Curating Digital Archives: Interoperability and Appropriation @ PO-EX.NET”. This post is a short and revised version of some issues discussed during my presentation.

Digital archives contain surrogates, encoded simulations of material objects and artifacts. Because their contents remain in flux, they also constitute performances of archival materials. By default and in its very nature, digital archives move their contents across media and platforms, adapting and metamorphosing them according to the specific materialities of the medium. In a networked environment, digital archives constitute an opportunity to revisit our concepts of mediation, representation and materiality. Moreover, digital archives (re)presenting electronic and experimental forms of literature (digital-born artifacts as well as other material artifacts) constitute a good ground for addressing the limitations and possibilities of remediation, translation, and materiality in our current media ecology.

Digital archives, thus resembling the impermanent and the fluid that we find in open forms textuality, have a variable and indeterminate quality that Wolfgang Ernst described as “not primarily about memory as cultural record but rather about a performative form of memory as communication”. Ernst further observed a transition from a fixed order into “permanent reconfigurability”, or “permanent state of latency” (2013: 99).

Jan Baetens and Jan Van Looy, discussing the digitalization of cultural heritages and the role of interpretation in their preservation, have argued that the web’s “primary function is not that of conservation (of inscriptions, archiving, possibly reproducing and diffusing), but one of transformation (of computer data and representation, mixed media)” (Baetens & Van Looy, 2007). The digital medium thus seems the appropriated interface for experimental forms of literature (both material and digital), which integrate different techniques and technologies, promoting the dissolution of boundaries between genres, between art and technology, enacting complex intersemiotic processes that invoke various sign systems. Digital archives enact transmedial processes, and experimental forms of literature, thus obliged to move across media, can be revisited, reprocessed, recontextualized.

We need to consider some of the affiliations between experimental and electronic literature(s) in order to better understand and recover these discontinuous textual relations across histories and forms.

One good example of a remediated process that discloses these affiliations is Jorge Luis Borges’ “La biblioteca de Babel” [The Library of Babel] (in El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan [The Garden of the Forrking Paths], 1941), where Borges imagines and conceives the infinite library, an idea that was later expanded to the infinite book, one made of sand (“El libro de arena”, 1975). One contains the other, and vice-versa. “The Library of Babel” is an interesting example for our discussion because Borges conceives and elaborates a recursive labyrinth for the unique (and therefore total) universal library from where all books stem. It’s almost a question of mathematics: each book is composed of 410 pages, each page has 40 lines, each line has 80 characters.

There are many possible ways of developing this idea with computer machines and programming languages, transmediating and transcoding its materiality into a new medium. Among many possible examples of re-readings and interpretations of the idea behind “The Library of Babel”, we could refer to Nick Montfort’s “Una página de Babel“, Jeremiah Johnson’s “BABEL“, Jonathan Basile’s “Library of Babel“, or André Sier’s “410“.

Untold archeologies between electronic literature and other expressive and material practices seem to surface in these works, embracing Borges’ fictionalized concepts and ideas. Other examples of affiliations abound, articulating the multiple diachronic and genealogical perspectives about electronic literature, providing room for comparative studies between art and technology.

Facing a new textual condition, one that is procedural and fluid, common to all experimental forms of literature (perhaps common to all literature…), these books of sand help us characterize our new textual condition: one that is variable and performative, indeterminate and procedural.

The performative and metamorphic dimension of experimental and electronic literature challenges our archival practices in ways that draw attention to the performative nature of digital archiving itself. Archives are about preservation and inscription, organization and relation. In a context characterized by increasing fragmentation and impermanence, re-reading and emulating become important strategies for enacting and curating the archive.

Digital Archives are networks of relationships in constant metamorphosis and renegotiation, as Osthoff has written (2009). Embodying these performative and reconfigurable possibilities, they indicate the replacement of the “archival order” by the dynamic nature of the “archival field”, as Ernst (2013: 99) has argued, and instead of being infatuated with the “static memory” of the traditional archive, we should move towards “an economy of circulation: permanent transformations and updating” (99).

Is this a new form of representation and preservation of our cultural memory? Are we moving from media to transmedia, and therefore from mediation to transmediation?

The intrinsic complexity of multimodal databases is a challenge that can stimulate the translation of data into new interfaces, and strategies for curating digital archives seem to also new forms of understanding the experimental nature of electronic literature and digital archives, may be achieved.

References

Baetens, Jan; Van Looy, Jan (2007). “Digitising Cultural Heritage The Role of Interpretation in Cultural Preservation“. Image & Narrative, no. 17, n.p.

Ernst, Wolfgang (2013). Digital Memory and the Archive. Ed. Parikka, Jussi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Osthoff, Simone (2009). Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art from Repository of Documents to Art Medium. New York and Dresden: Atropos Press.

One Story World, but Two Story Spaces?

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The research in transmedia narrative, which is just a small part of the larger field of transmediality, often falls prey to a kind of “essentializing” gesture. Transmedia narrative, that is the simultaneous materialization of a story (including a story world) in a wide range of different media, is then seen as a new, theoretically all-encompassing form of narrative that brings together the features and experiences of supposedly less complex or at least less efficient forms of storytelling.

There are at least two reasons to challenge such a vision of transmediality as “super”-narrative. First of all, there is of course the (relative or partial) resistance of media to smoothly materialize the form and content of the initially defined story and story world: not everything can be told in any medium, on the one hand, and the specific way of telling of each medium may affect the initial story and story world to the extent that the very unity of the transmedia narrative may be jeopardized. Very simple ideas, but which resist the possibly homogenizing effects of transmedia storytelling. Secondly, and this is a much stronger and more interesting claim, there is also the fact that new forms of storytelling (and there are good reasons to suppose that transmedia storytelling in the digital age is an example of such a novelty) does much more than expand on existing forms or combine them in innovative ways. What may happen instead, is that new forms of narrative enable or even oblige to dramatically revise our existing vision of certain narrative categories.  

This is exactly the point made by Daniel Punday in a fascinating recent article: “Space across Narrative Media” (Narrative, January 2017, 98-112; accessible via Muse). To crudely summarize: Punday observes that digital games often present a double spatial structure, that of the “primary” space as experienced by the characters (and/or the players) and that of the “orienting” space which serves as a background and which helps the reader (who is her different from the character/player) to get a larger framing of the story. To give a simple example (which is mine, not Punday’s): the “primary” space of the search for Eldorado may be an environment that resembles some exotic jungle in which the characters and players are deeply immersed; the “orienting” space may be a map of the world containing for instance details on commercial sea routes, which do not directly interfere with the jungle story but which definitely frame the narrative experience for the reader. This basic distinction is then reinterpreted by Punday with reference to Bakhtin’s distinction between two approaches of the chronotype: the view from inside the chronotype (the “primary” space) and the view from outside (the “orienting” space).  

The next step in Punday’s argumentation is very logic. He notices that Bakthin’s distinction, which everybody “knew” without actually using is, is now become clear and ready for use thanks to a cliché of digital gaming, where space is generally presented this way. Punday gives the example of Tetris, where one finds a kind of baroque visual framing of the game itself (see image above).  

This mechanism is not very different from Borges’s play with literary history in his text on “Kafka and His Precursors”, where he demonstrates that instead of being “prepared” by his precursors, Kafka actually “invents” them (that is: makes visible that before him there had been other writers doing something similar). At the same time, the return to Bakhtin is not a passive recovery of an understudied aspect of his theory: thanks to digital gaming, one realizes for instance that the combination of primary and orienting space is utterly artificial and that it does not (always) make sense to try to bring them together in one unified story space. The combination of both spaces is an artificial construction, but with major effects on the act of reading, which is generally reduced to the study of the primary space.  

What has all this to do with transmedia storytelling? Basically this: transmedia storytelling is often seen as the “remediation”, that is the transformation of existing media in order to make them more powerful. But form the very moment that “remediation” is no longer seen in terms of linear transformation, the old being remediated by the new, but in more complex forms as an invitation to permanently revise our current knowledge of the past as well as the present and the future, it is of course no longer possible to define transmedia storytelling as a simple continuation or expansion of previous non-transmedia forms of storytelling. What transmedia storytelling should encourage us to do, is to use it as a tool to rethink the very notions of medium and narrative themselves.