The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines

Abstract

This lecture looks at self-reflexive mechanisms in codices and computers. It contains a brief introduction to the use of books and computers as expressive media in literature. I want to explore the hypothesis that self-reflexivity in artists’ books and in digital poems is useful for understanding the literary dynamics of writing and reading. Self-referential enactments of reading will be shown in works by Johanna Drucker and Jason Nelson. In the selected works, bookness and digitality are foregrounded by a performance of reading that has been formally scripted, in page layout and in computer code. As they travel the sign field of the work, readers experience how their own haptic actions and eye motions co-instantiate the text that they have to read. By means of specific interactions with the material codes of codex and computer, their reading acts become scripted in the writing. This lecture is structured into four parts: (1) On Codices and Computers: A Charting of the Field; (2) Dis/Assembling the Page: A Physiology of Reading; (3) Embodying Bookness: Reading as Material Act; (4) Programmable Signs: A Choreography of Reading.