Dissemination

The following is an outake from my Hauntologies manuscript. It no longer seems to really fit, but maybe someone can find some use for it. It’s on William Gibson’s Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

Such a flickering status enacts a central concern to the whole project. Kevin Begos’ stated goal with the whole project was to criticize the way the art world worked; the increasing value which works of art gained as time passed, the almost religious connotations given to a work of art and the whole capitalist inflection of buying, selling and re-selling art simply in order to turn a profit (“Kevin Begos on Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)”). In other words, what Begos was dissatisfied with is what we also know as the aura of the work of art, as articulated by Walter Benjamin in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). By creating a work of art that would die in the process of reading and viewing it, this auratic process would be circumvented and disrupted. They did this by making a book that would literally die and disappear and so lose its value.

Walter Benjamin’s argument about the aura of a work of art is of course well-known, but it is worth rehearsing here, to read it against the Agrippa project. Benjamin’s basic argument is that the aura of a work of art comes from its “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” and that the “presence of the original is the prerequisite of the concept of authenticity. (Benjamin 1969, 220), which is equally important. The unique authenticity of the work of art comes from the fact that it cannot be reproduced, it cannot exist in more than one place at a time and that only the original can be authentic.

At first glance, Agrippa fulfills all of these criteria and it is also evident that due to the limited print run of both the deluxe edition (fewer than 95) and the standard edition (an unknown number of copies, certainly less than 350). The fact that every deluxe edition was hand-bound (by Karl Foulkes) and then signed by both Gibson and Ashbaugh further increases the aura of the book and makes every book unique, as well as a truly collaborative project with several ‘authors’ or creators (Hodge 2005). Although Agrippa is thus in one way mechanically reproduced and so should have no aura in Benjamin’s sense, it’s uniqueness and rarity means that it has ended up as an object with a very strong aura. Seeing the actual book thus takes on a deep meaning of authenticity. As Benjamin points out,

reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. (Benjamin 1969, 223)

The very unique nature of Agrippa thus provides it with an aura of an authentic art object which cannot be reproduced. This much is certainly true; the complicated process of making the book and the fact that the poem encrypts itself as we read it, means that the book cannot be reproduced without losing its uniqueness. Conceptually and performatively Agrippa is a transitory object, since it disappeared from public circulation after its publication and since the poem will vanish upon execution. Agrippa is thus a very strange aesthetic object; it is both unique and transitory at the same time. In fact, its uniqueness is dependent on its transitory nature, on its very act of disappearance. In other words, the work of art enacts its own death and exists only as a ghost –  the aura of Agrippa becomes spectral, a function only of its own death and disappearance. Agrippa is authentic only because of its death, since that is its very aesthetic device – to die and exist only as a memory. Benjamin argues that the

authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. (Benjamin 1969, 221)

Agrippa, particularly the poem “Agrippa”, certainly had a substantive duration but most of what we are examining (here and what others have examined elsewhere) is the history of the poem; the corpse of the poem as we may now find it on Gibson’s website, as well as the permutations it underwent before its interment. But this deathly existence, this disappearance of the book (if only of the readable text that it contained), is not as rare or unusual as we might imagine. Peter Schwenger cites Maurice Blanchot as an inspiration for the entire project, and further argues that a “book never realizes its desired full presence; its realization occurs only and paradoxically through absence” (Schwenger 1995, 278). The realization of the book occurs only through its absence. That is exactly what Agrippa (re)enacts and makes explicit; yet, this absence is what Schwenger (citing Sartre citing Mallarmé, plenty of ghosts lining up here) terms a “resonant disappearance” (Schwenger 1995, 278). Resonant because it generates and creates meaning; as Victor Vitanza points out (writing explicitly about Agrippa):

The centermentalist idea here is a book disappears. It is not about a professor selling his books; it is about a writer sky-writing, that is, writing the disappearance. “Writing” that doubly disseminates and dissipates. It is about remembering is forgetting. (Vitanza 2001, 81, italics in original)

Disseminates and dissipates. Only by dissipating, by disappearing, can the book become what it was meant to be: a textual and digital ghost. The material form of the book and the poem both attempt to enact the theme of the poem; it attempts to become what it thematizes – the passing of death into memory. Yet there is something which we should keep in mind here and that is the already planned rarity of the book as physical object – even the small edition was only meant to be produced in 350 copies, a print run which is exceedingly low, especially considering Gibson’s status at the time as a bestselling author. Furthermore, the fact that the book was supposed to disappear and that the poem can only be run once before being lost, it is rather evident that the book and accompanying floppy diskette would become extremely collectible. With the print run being cut off before completion and no records of the actual number of copies made and the fact that only three copies plus one inspection copy being accounted for, the book has in fact become more of a sacred object imbued with more aura and uniqueness in time and space than is the case for most books published.

Certainly, when I went to the New York Public Library on November 5th, 2009 it felt more like a quest for a long lost artifact than going to read a book. With the need for a special appointment, sending my research ahead for the librarians to judge if it was worthy, being required to hold up my newly acquired New York Public Library Card against the glass door before it being unlocked so that I might enter, handing over my bag, ensuring that I only brought pencil and a notebook (no exploding pens in here), finally being presented with Agrippa and pieces of foam to place it on so that the table would not damage the book, this certainly felt like a Work of Art – more like the Mona Lisa than a novel. Because of the rarity and scarce circulation of the book, it has also been natural for most critics who have worked on Agrippa to primarily focus on Gibson’s poem and its logic of disappearance and transmission. While most have invoked the physical book and its unusual status no serious work has really been done on the book or on the connection between the book and the poem-program; yet it is clearly evident that much of the aesthetic effect resides in the book and in the space generated between the book and the poem-program. In order to fully appreciate the work, we need to analyze this hauntological space and the status of the book.

What do media do? Not simply what do media mean but what operations do media perform on us and how do we understand the function and purpose of mediation in these operations? While there are many different operations which media perform on us, distinct for each specific medium, what concerns me here is when our encounters with media turn uncanny; when the media themselves become strange or behave strangely. The reason for this focus is to suggest that one way of understanding the workings of media on us is best analyzed in liminal cases, when the medium protrudes and becomes noticeable. This argument comes from the fact that so often the desire of media is to be invisible, to retreat into the background and run its operations on us unnoticed. This is what Bolter and Grusin dubbed immediacy in their book Remediation and what a host of others since then have also referred to as transparency. The flip side to immediacy is hypermediacy, when the medium thickens and its operations and presence becomes noticeable and sometimes this thickening becomes uncanny. To investigate such uncanny operations, I have chosen to focus on five different media here: electronic writing, film, the novel, music and photography; all chosen because they perform a number of different operations both inherent to their medium and at the same time foregrounding that very medium as a material object. In this context, I understand media to be

socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaging with popular ontologies of representation. (Gitelman 2006, 7)

However, this definition little to suggest the experience of interacting with media, which is why I argue that we encounter individual works of media as phenomena, objects that are in the world and which engage our senses and our minds at the same time. The advantage to this approach is that it enables us to insist on the materiality of media objects as inherent to any operation of a medium, while at the same time remaining sensitive to the cultural embedding of every medium. Furthermore, it also locates one of the most important aspects of a medium – its mediation – as inherent of our experience of that medium. A media phenomenology would therefore insist that media are an inherent part of the way we structure our lifeworld and that we cannot separate object from experience, but that media objects are part of the operations which media perform on us as much as the operations we perform on them. This notions of media performing operations on us obviously brings up the thorny question of agency and media. On the one hand, I find myself agreeing with Lisa Gitelman when she argues the media do not have agency and are not autonomous, that we write this way because agency is so hard to specify. (Gitelman 2006, 9) However, at the same time it seems to me perfectly obvious that Bruno Latour is right when he insists that objects have agency in themselves. (Latour 1994) When my dishwasher fails to work, I do not blame the engineer or the salesman at first, I blame the dishwasher. When I cannot find a significant quote, I do not blame the author or myself, I blame the confounded pages of the book for not yielding the information I crave. In our experience of objects, they appear to have agency and we react accordingly, yelling at the dishwasher or throwing the book in a corner.

In order to be able to discuss media more analytically and concretely, I will proceed from the idea that media may be broken into five different dimensions: form, materiality, practices, protocols and mediation. To sketch briefly what I will discuss in detail later, form covers the patterns, structures, and aesthetic devices of the individual work. Materiality is a shorthand for the material embodiment of said work, although as we shall see it is of a much higher level of complexity. Practices suggest the cultural embedding of the medium, ie. the different uses we put it to and the cultural work the medium does. Protocols describe the social, economic and material relationships in which every medium exists. Mediation is the force which takes place between two bodies, whether human or nonhuman, occurring through several different strategies including transmission, signification, representation and presencing. It is my argument that these five aspects enable us to understand a medium’s being-in-the-world in full, in other words the ontology of the medium. There are two things to be said about this notion of medium ontology, the first being that every medium always stamps its own ontology on its products and processes. This argument comes from Adan Evens regarding digital media, arguing that the digital “it never submits entirely to the simulated, stamping its products and processes with its own ontology” (Evens 2009) but I take this to be true for every medium. A medium always simulates reality and its ontology determines and limits how it simulates reality. The other thing is that the reality status of a medium is always under renegotiation. This argument comes from Edward Branigan in his book Projecting a Camera, where he states that “The reality status of a new medium is relative.” (Branigan 2006, 119) I agree but I do not think that Branigan goes far enough; the reality status of every medium is relative for when a new medium loses its newness and instead becomes an old medium or perhaps even a dead medium, it also loses its reality status. It should be evident that for me, Evens’ simulation and Branigan’s reality status amount to the same thing – do we believe, so to speak, in a medium’s mediation? Does it convince us about its true and accurate representation of reality and does its embodied nature recede and become transparent for us?

These questions and more like them, can only be answered historically. There is no definite or ultimate level of reality status which a medium can achieve, and even though in our current media climate digital networks have assumed the pinnacle of media representation, I agree with Gitelman when she points out that this idea is simply an overdetermined sense of an ending. (Gitelman 2006, 3) Certainly all the cultural practices and media protocols which surround our media are subject to the same historicity as anything else in our culture and so are the forms and objects which make up our media. A media history is the only way which we can understand the changing nature of the operations media perform and how these operations change and alter our perceptions, not just of the media themselves but of the world around us. The lifeworld of media changes, just as we change it and it changes us. As Gitelman points out, media are denizens of the past in a double sense; 1) a medium always comes from somewhere and 2) a medium is integral to our sense of pastness because we access the past through media representations. (Gitelman 2006, 5) There is, I believe, also a technological-material aspect to this sense of past media representations, in that certain histories are only accessible through written texts, while others (newer) histories are accessible in a number of different media, such as pictures, phonographs, videos and so forth. The reality status of each of these inscriptions matter as much as the mode of representation employed. For this reason, it is not accident that the works I have chosen to deal with all engage with this sense of pastness both in their representations and in their very materiality. Of course, it is impossible to separate representation from materiality, something Gitelman herself points out when she says that media are integral to a sense of what representation itself is and that media both represent and delimit representation. (Gitelman 2006, 4)

Before the waters become too muddled, let us turn to my five aspects of media, starting with form. With the question of form, I wish to suggest that we must pay attention to the specific configuration of any given work in order to fully appreciate the effects of said work. In other words, we need to pay attention to the patterns, structures and devices employed by the work. Rather than try to suggest any kind of separation between form and content, I would rather say that form creates content and content shapes form. There is only an oscillation between the two, as certain kinds of contents may only be expressed in specific forms, while specific forms lend themselves to particular contents. With this in mind, I do still wish to keep my focus on the form of content rather than any kind of meaning which may be inherent in the content. Here, I wish to inscribe myself into a specific methodology identified under a helter-skelter banner of new formalism, which considers form as an essential part of understanding historical, political and cultural concerns of a work. In this way, I wish to suggest an emphasis on what we know as the poetic function, that melodious noise which heightens consciousness of the medium and disrupts the referential function. (Guillory 2010, 352) We recognize this concept of the poetic function as one of the main fields of study for the Russian Formalists, concerned especially with the literariness of literature even as this sense of literariness cannot be separated from other forms of writing. Literariness is obviously a poor phrase for my study of media, so instead I propose to use the term mediality as the overarching term for the thickening of the medium and the corresponding estrangement which takes place through this thickening.

One other part of form which is important here, lies in the fact that any formal feature of a work must necessarily be inscribed in some way, which is where my concern with form connects with my concern for materiality. The inscription of the work, it is important to keep in mind, is always both semiotic and material (Gitelman 2006, 6) but just as significantly inscription is a material use of inscription technologies. Inscription technologies are defined by N. Katherine Hayles as any device which initiates “material changes which can be read as marks.” (Hayles 2002, 24) So far so good, but Hayles’ definition overlooks the fact that

Inscription is a form of intervention, into which new machinery continues to interpose. Ink is imposed on paper, while pens and keyboards intrude into the posture of hands. Grooves are incised into phonograph records, while sound echoes in our ears. The genealogies of inscription allow what anthropologist Michael Taussig calls “particular” histories of the senses, as different media and varied forms, genres, and styles of representation act as brokers among accultured practices of seeing, hearing, speaking, and writing. (Gitelman 1999, 3)

Gitelman’s suggestive quote first of all clarifies how media have agency, in the way the technologies themselves “intrude” but with her reference to the senses, we can also see how both McLuhan and Benjamin will become relevant alongside the entire discussion of presencing. For now, however I wish to focus on the way that inscription serves as a transformation, which carries us into an understanding of materiality as an emergent property, most usefully explained by Johanna Drucker’s argument that materiality consists of “two major intertwined strands: that of a relational, insubstantial, and nontranscendent difference and that of a phenomenological, apprehendable, immanent substance.” (Drucker 1994, 43) Here we can see a separation parallel to that of the typical Western separation of mind/body, where the content of a work of art (should) target the receiver’s mind and is therefore conceived of as an ideal form, above the concerns of gross matter. The apprehendable object might be fetishized as an auratic object because it has been in contact with the maker’s hands but even here this is only to ground the idealized, aesthetic experience in an authentic sender-receiver relationship. Drucker is careful to point out that her distinguishing between form and substance constantly involves a dialectical, interpretive encounter and so goes against the notion of idealized representation.

In a later work, Drucker takes issue with the supremacy of code, arguing that even though code may be conceived in mathematical terms, as ideal form, it can never be expressed without recourse to some kind of materiality. Information is always lost or altered when it is stored or transmitted; “ Materiality cannot be fully absorbed into ideality, nor can it be understood as a mechanical, self-evident literal identity. Something is always lost when, for instance, a text is translated into ASCII format.” (Drucker 2009, 141) Another way of putting this, would be to say that there might be an idealized code conceivable in mathematical terms, but as we know from information theory, there is always an element of noise no matter what channel we use. Furthermore, this noise is not necessarily a negative property which destroys communication but may itself be a productive property of the channel and employed in different aesthetic ways, such a work’s mediality. As Drucker puts it, materiality constitutes a system in which there is always both loss and gain in the processing of information, which amounts to a transformation. It is this transformative process between form and substance, in which production, expression and interpretation exists through means of subjective inflections – both of sender and receiver. (Drucker 2009, 142-143)

This view of materiality is similar to and most likely inspired by Hayles’ view of materiality as emerging from interactions between physical properties and a work’s artistic strategies. For this reason, materiality cannot be specified in advance, as if it preexisted the specificity of the work. An emergent property, materiality depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops – strategies that include physical manipulations as well as conceptual frameworks. In the broadest sense, materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create meaning. (Hayles 2002, 33) Here, Hayles is continuing a form of media analysis originating with Benjamin which sees meaning as intertwining with the artefact itself. Meaning is partly material, in other words, and not simply representational.

Furthermore, the meaning of a work is also determined in no small part by the practices in which the work is embedded. It is the established cultural practices surrounding a given medium which ensures that I read a book from front cover to back cover rather than vice versa, that I do not place my painting in my record player and do not hang my records on my wall. Except, of course, that I may very well (and in fact do) hang my records on my wall, in order to enframe the album cover as a visual work of art. Here, then, is the connection between the materiality of a media object and the practices which support it, becomes evident in what Latour has termed the resistance inherent in objects. It is my contention that the most fruitful way of thinking about this resistance is through what Bill Brown has done in his “Thing Theory” piece, where he posits that “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” (Brown 2001, 4)

We always exist, then, in a specific subject-object relation to our media and to a given work and most of the time we are perfectly aware of how to use and employ these objects, because they bring with them certain cultural practices to guide our understanding if them. As these practices are historically conditioned, we may lose them when a medium grows old or not have them at all when a medium is new. Alternatively, a work may require strange or old-fashioned practices as part of its configuration. It is in cases such as these that the materiality of the medium intrudes the most but we find a more common operation at work in our notion of transparency, which occurs when we completely forget the norms and standards involved in employing the medium. This is what Bolter and Grusin refer to as immediacy, when the medium retreats and allows immediate perception, “experience without mediation.” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 22-23) As they themselves establish, such an experience of immediacy is not located in the medium itself but in the practices which surround the medium, such as “linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 24) all of which are cultural practices employed through technologies to generate specific forms of representation. The most significant point we can take from Bolter and Grusin is their emphasis on perspective as “seeing through,” which is precisely what immediacy purports to do – see through the medium. However, just as with linear perspective, any use of a medium to represent reality depends on learned behavior. We may return to Branigan’s argument that the reality status of a medium is relative – a medium may obtain a high degree of realistic representation (such as the photograph) but it may lose it again (such as the photograph) when newer media generate new practices and uses which suggest that these forms are better at representing reality (such as 3D technologies).

This brings us to the protocols of media which are equally a matter of use, but in this case I take it to be on a macro level of society rather than the micro level of cultural and individual uses. As Gitelman points out, protocols are “a vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere like a nebulous array around a technological nucleus. Protocols express a huge variety of social, economic, and material relationships.” (Gitelman 2006, 7) While it is evident that cultural practices and social protocols blur together in the employment of media, I see protocols as more involved in organizing and reorganizing our relationship to the media and the media’s relationship with the world. Whether a medium remains in use or not is thereby a matter of protocols and social change, more than a matter of cultural practices. In this case, we can underline the social interactions that are in operation during our engagement with the medium, once again understood historically. Consider reading literature as a social practice. Not only do specific reading protocols control how we engage with literature – such as reading quietly rather than out loud – or how we interact with specific forms – our understanding of genres, for instance – or the cultural purpose of literature – meaning, entertainment and cultural integration – but also that we pay for books, that we find books in bookstores rather than grocery stores and that certain authors have a higher value than others. Any of these protocols may change over time, such as the move from reading out loud to reading quietly, or our potential move to ebooks rather than physical ones and the fact that books can be found in grocery stores and are increasingly pirated, something which will only increase with a move to ebooks. We can also see how specific institutions arise to solidify certain other protocols, such as schools and universities which control what literature is (meaning) and which authors carry the highest validity (the formations of canon), or fan communities (Horror Society), author organizations (Horror Writers Association) and evens (World Horror Convention) to police forms of literature.

With the concept of protocols, I also wish to suggest the means that the network of media is distributed along specific hierarchies according to the protocols employed by the media themselves. In other words, the authority of a given medium depends on its place within a hierarchy network of other media, where a given protocol at any moment holds supremacy. As we know, for our current historical moment the digital protocols reign and any medium which cannot be digitized or made to conform to the digital holds a lower authority. At the same time, insistence on a different protocol may disturb or disrupt the network. Consider the emergent insistence on vinyl albums as a refuge of audiophiles; this fetishization of an outmoded form does not fit within the larger network of a complete shift to digital means of production, distribution and consumption. Evidence of mainstream resistance to this old-fashioned protocol is evident in the way that no mainstream artists release their music on vinyl. Yet audiophiles maintain that sound fidelity is in fact higher on vinyl than their digital counterparts, which means that they consider the mediation of the vinyl album and the turntable gramophone superior to that of digital audio players.

This brings us to the concept of mediation. As I have already argued, I consider mediation a force. What this force does is transform experience into new forms. In saying this, I follow McLuhan’s argument of media as translators (McLuhan 2003, 85) through which we access reality. In order to discuss the process of mediation as a transformation of experience in more detail, I wish to suggest that there are two broad strategies of mediation, the one being representation and the other sensation. The first strategy of representation is inherently bound up with the force of signification and is inherently interested in presencing, in making the absent present. Representation, then, is always interested in some form of power over the world, and in this manner it connects strongly to the transparency side of mediation – we gain access to the world through representations. The strategy of sensation, however, is less concerned with truth and meaning instead arguing that mediation cannot be reduced to representation but always includes something below the threshold of representation. (Hansen 2000, 4) Rather than presencing, the sensation strategy is interested in affectivity, in taking power over the perceiving subject and generating specific sensations. These sensations are often experienced as bodily and perceptual shocks and fall under the category of mediality, where we feel the presence of the medium rather than the presence of reality.

I do not wish to separate the two strategies too much, for I do believe that both representation and sensation are integral parts of every mediation and that we generally engage with cultural works with a desire for both strategies to be present; we both want to be affected by the work as well as understand the work. I do believe, also, that there has been attached a certain charge of obscenity against works which mostly attempt to affect us, as well as a charge of intellectualism against works which mostly attempt to challenge our understanding. In either case, what we are discussing is the power of media, encapsulated in my earlier guiding question about what media do. This power of mediation should be understood as a relation we enter into and therefore is part of the entire concept of media as phenomena; media help translate/mediate our relation to the world, either by way of representational understanding (this is how the world is) or sensational affect (this is how the world feels). As such, and very simplistically put, representations tend to do cultural work while sensations tend to do bodily work. Of course, things are never this clear-cut and we can easily find examples of representations which do bodily work (images of death, for instance) or sensations which do cultural work (the transgressive effects of carnival, for instance).

If we take representation as an attempt to take power over the world, we immediately see how the cultural work of mediation becomes apparent. We are already familiar with the ways in which forms participate in structures and techniques of power and how works become fields of struggle for different ideological convictions, even opposed and conflicting views within one work. The configuration of a work’s semiotic and material resources thus become actively engaged in the process of culture, which is why representation has become such a problematic, yet important term. I feel that the most useful definition of representation is W.J.T. Mitchell’s in Picture Theory, where he argues for an understanding of representation which encapsulates “the totality of cultural activity,” where representation is

understood, then, as relationship, as process, as the relay mechanism in exchanges of power, value, and publicity: nothing in this model guarantees the directionality of the structure. On the contrary, it suggests an inherently unstable, reversible, and dialectical structure. (Mitchell 1994, 420)

I am satisfied with this definition of representation because it almost substitutes “cultural work” for representation; every representational act is somehow engaged in the cultural field and the aesthetic deployment of form is simply one attempt at negotiating power, value and publicity. That is why presencing is so significant an operation of representational forms, in that they make the world present in specific, concrete ways for reasons of power, value and publicity.

This leaves us with the place of sensation as bodily work. As perceptual categories go, we tend to argue that we feel things before we understand them, which squares well with the previous argument that the strategy of sensation deals with what is below the threshold of representation – it comes prior to our understanding and before we can place it in an operation of power, value and publicity. Instead, sensation relates to a more material level of response, one which Michael Taussig designates as an operation of mimesis which implies both replication and material transfer. (Taussig 1992, 145) We are brought into perceptual contact with the material presented by the medium, which is what engages and at times overwhelms our senses. This is why many people have argued for a tactile dimension to mediation; our bodies respond to the sensations of media, which is why McLuhan argued that the medium is the massage, not just the message. (McLuhan 1967) It is through media that we engage with the world, and when media change they “evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world.” (McLuhan 1967, 41) As we know from Benjamin, our perception is structured according to the dominant mode of production, which first of all means that it is historically conditioned and so changes with the forms of technological reproduction available to a given culture. I have continually argued that there is no endpoint to this process and that no media ever retains a fixed position within its cultural mode of production, so that while photographs and the cinema imploded human perception in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these two media no longer hold the same position now that digital networks reveal new aspects of our world.

We may say, then, with a combined argument from McLuhan and Raymond Williams that media reconfigure our perceptions. While it may seem peculiar to combine McLuhan and Williams’ arguments, due to to Williams’ polemical disagreement with McLuhan, I believe that Williams’ structure of feeling is in fact an accurate assessment of what McLuhan was trying to articulate; that material practices (which includes media as we have seen) historically actualize culture. Media as extensions of our senses then precisely describe a reconfiguration of our perceptions, which also follows from Benjamin’s argument about media impacting our perceptions. This should not surprise us, as I have argued throughout that the way we understand and relate to the world is constantly bound up with the double logic of mediation as moving between transparency and mediality, itself understood as part of cultural practice. As such, if a certain medium at one point in its cultural history, such as film, obtains transparency then we understand the media simulation as identical with reality, and we get “reality at 24 frames per second” as Jean-Luc Godard put in Le Petit Soldat (1963) prefigured of course by both Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin. Conversely, if we foreground the operation of the medium – the thickening of the medium into mediality – we get an attention to the sensations produced by the cinematic medium, as argued by Dziga Vertov.

Today, we would be content to say that cinema may do both and that films tend to employ both strategies of mediation. While I have no intention of discarding the insights gained by the study of representations, my concern in this book is with the study of sensations and one sensation in particular – the sensation of the uncanny. The uncanny has a long critical history and obviously, no discussion of the uncanny can be complete without reference to Freud’s “The Uncanny.” However, it still seems prudent to look at the precursor to Freud’s essay, namely Ernst Jentsch’s “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906) which is explicitly the essay Freud reacted to in writing his own essay. Jentsch’s essay is brief but interesting in the way it posits the uncanny as a sensation of doubt and uncertainty, particularly in relation to whether something is in fact alive or not:

Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate – and more precisely, when this doubt only makes itself felt obscurely in one’s consciousness. (Jentsch 2008, 221)

As we see here, Jentsch locates what is the most powerful cause for the uncanny but as is also evident any form of uncertainty leads to an uncanny experience. It is this uncertainty which frustrates Freud to the point of writing his own essay, in which he distances himself from Jentsch’s argument and instead locates the uncanny in the heart of the familiar. For Freud, then, the uncanny is in a sense a displacement – what is known becomes strangely unknown.

It is here that I wish to draw more on the phenomenology of the uncanny as suggested by Dylan Trigg in his Memory of Place (2012), in which he argues that one of the major strengths of phenomenology is precisely is ability to make things strange. (26) Trigg goes on to argue for a connection between aesthetic experience and ontological disruption as one of the effects of the uncanny and at the same time suggests that the uncanny is precisely that – an effect which must be experienced. At the same time, Trigg also suggests that this effect leads not just to experiential anxiety but also to conceptual doubt, (Trigg 2012, 27) thereby neatly encapsulating and accommodating both Freud’s and Jentsch’s concepts of the uncanny within one framework. It should also be evident that Trigg’s positioning of the uncanny as both experiential anxiety and conceptual doubt lead straight to my concern for mediation’s primary strategies of sensation and representation, respectively. Conceptual doubt leads us to representation’s force of signification and meaning, where we cannot determine how to interpret and understand the uncanny event or object. With experiential anxiety, we suffer the sensations of having a familiar media object become unfamiliar before us. This is how we may define uncanny media, when mediation turns into an uncertainty of what exactly we are experiencing.

Uncanny media are hardly a new phenomenon and as many scholars have shown, there is a long history of representations of the uncanny in emergent media. Consider Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria (2006) for its genealogy of uncanny presences in a wide variety of visual media or Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media (2000) for a more media archaeological approach to uncanny and fantastic fictions in new media through the late 19th and 20th century. What these and other works acknowledge, is a concern with presencing through new media technologies. Whether we are talking about the phantasmagoria and the flickering ghosts projected onto a screen or smoke, or the anxious-ridden television screen, all these new media seem to attempt to come to term with this new form of technological reproduction by investigating how this medium achieves presence. Possibly paradoxically, this is achieved through a flurry of uncanny and fantastic images and narratives, presumably generated from an anxiety over the new medium’s ability to work through a process of becoming transparent. Yet while the medium is working through its reality status, it is experienced as uncanny and cannot hold a proper reality status. At the same time, of course, old media regain their uncanny status as they fall into disuse and we suddenly encounter their unfamiliar operations in what we thought was familiar. Remediation may thus often be experienced as uncanny, in the way that something obsolete returns with renewed force. The inscribed pastness of the medium reinvigorated thus brushes uncannily against the new medium, creating an effect which is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

For my media phenomenology, media become uncanny precisely at the moment when we become unsure of their being-in-the-world, in other words when we become unsure of their ontology. It is here that I wish to turn to Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology as a way of articulating what happens when the ontology of a medium is disrupted. First of all, as we know from Derrida’s many writings, his larger project is to undo the metaphysics of presence which may also be seen as a way of forgetting the mediation which is always already occurring, as Joost van Loon points out. (van Loon 2008, 53) For Derrida, ultimately, the concept of hauntology indicates that “no signification can be unproblematically sutured to the originary context of its production, as the sign is haunted by a chain of overdetermined readings, misreadings, slips and accretions that will always go beyond the event itself” (Buse & Stott 1999, 12). This is what Derrida means when he argues that “it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology” (Derrida 2006, 202). We see how, for Derrida, even the sign becomes a space, a space between signifier and signified. This is a concept that we encounter other places in Derrida’s writing (especially in his Writing and Difference), such as the trace; how presence is best understood as constantly deferred. However, as Steven Shaviro points out,

In his earlier writings Derrida tends to emphasize differance or the trace as a sort of negativity, an infinite mediation disrupting any claim to presence. But in Specters of Marx (as in much of his later work) Derrida (more radically, I think – and in line with Blanchot’s formulations) shifts his emphasis to the way that this trace is a radical non-negativity, a kind of residual, quasi-material insistence, that disrupts and ruins every movement of negation or negativity. (Shaviro 2006)

Hauntology, then, is a positive version of the trace which significantly has a materiality at its core. For me, this means that hauntology for Derrida includes a consideration of materiality, even if it is a left-over trace. One the one hand, hauntology undoes representation but at the same time emphasizes the sensation which is left over. The ghostly trace is therefore an absent presence, wavering between presence and absence but never reducible to either. When media begin to waver in the same manner, they become what I call uncanny media; the force of their mediation makes their ontology unstable and generates a range of hauntological shocks. In this manner, I follow Benjamin’s argument about mediation resulting in experiences of shock. Furthermore, it seems evident to me that the hauntology of mediation may be located either in modes of representation or modes of sensation; any work which puts the absence-presence dichotomy into positive play will partake in the hauntological, brushing them against the grain, as it were, deforming and dislocating them and in the process creating a space in which the absent and the present uncannily converge. Both representation and sensation are mechanisms of space, in the sense that they structure and guide our experience and for hauntology this space always become the space of a haunting, of an undoing of absence-presence with the insistence that we need a third, interstitial term which we may then call spectrality – a term Julian Wolfreys says

appears in a gap between the limits of two ontological categories. The definition escapes any positivist or constructivist logic by emerging between, and yet not as part of, two negations: neither, nor. A third term, the spectral, speaks of the limits of determination, while arriving beyond the terminal both in and of identification in either case (alive/dead) and not as an oppositional or dialectical term itself defined as part of some logical economy. (Wolfreys 2002, x, italics in original)

Wolfreys notion of spectrality and the ghostly has become a powerful tool in representational analyses of forgotten histories, suppressed relations and the problems of the present as rooted in an unresting past, expressed most clearly by Jeffrey Weinstock in his introduction to the collection Spectral America:

The ghost is that which interrupts the presentness of the present, and its haunting indicates that, beneath the surface of received history, there lurks another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the authorized version of events. As such, the contemporary fascination with ghosts is reflective of an awareness of the narrativity of history. (Weinstock 2004, 5)

For reasons that are perhaps then obvious, the figure of the ghost now has a massive presence in both the cultural and critical production surrounding African American history (one should say histories, I suppose), exhibited in fictions such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but also in critical practice with books such as Kathleen Brogan’s Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature and Marisha Parham’s Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture. Such haunting need not only be located in problematics of race and ethnicity, but may also reveal other cultural struggles which is what Julian Wolfreys does in his book Victorian Hauntings.

However, I believe that there is more to spectrality than simply being an intellectual uncertainty. Wolfreys describes well the conceptual doubt of the uncanny as conceived by Trigg, but lacks a framework for the experiential anxiety, which is expressed more clearly by Shaviro when he claims that the ghost is “something that is gone, or dead, but that refuses to be altogether absent; something that is not here, not now, but that continues to stain or contaminate or affect or impinge upon the here and now.” (Shaviro 2006) In other words, spectrality as an experience may be understood as a lingering which is not absent and not present but still affects us. This is the sensation of the uncanny as disruptive of our experience of the work itself, something which goes beyond the modes of representation employed by the work. Trigg discusses hauntology and criticizes the appropriation of the term into contemporary cultural theory, claiming that the term is used too easily

to describe a certain mode of cultural effect and production. As such, it retains the limits of being a concept imposed upon experience, rather than giving credence to experience itself. Indeed, one of the results of a concept such as “hauntology” is that it too readily becomes an aestheticized idea, bearing minimal relation to the phenomena it purports to face. (Trigg 2012, 285)

Instead, Trigg claims, it becomes an index rather than an experience. I agree that all the counterhistories written by ghosts perform exactly such an operation; reading the absent presence of the ghost as the absent presence of something else, something which should be part of cultural history or which can never be part of cultural history because of the limits and norms established by a culture. But I believe that the sensation of something lingering may be our guide to understand how sensations of the uncanny are generated. When we feel the presence of something which is not there, then we feel experiential anxiety because we do not understand how to relate to this absent presence. Anything which fulfills this category is what Trigg would call displacing and estranging. (Trigg 2012, 291) We are then experiencing something immaterial through something material, which is the uncanny mediation of a work; our body is engaged with the ambiguous presence of the work, aware of the mediation taking place but not sure which experiential category to place our experience in. Form and matter collide to generate an effect for which we have no practices or protocols; this experience, this sensation of the uncanny is below the threshold of representation, it is the immaterial manifestation of something material. K-punk (Mark Fisher) has shown us that,

The spectres are textural. The surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we are listening to is a phonographic revenant, and second, ontologically, by introducing the technical frame, the unheard material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content. (k-punk, 2006)

While k-punk is discussing music here, we can recognize his argument as what Hayles has termed a material metaphor, “a term that foregrounds the traffic between words and physical artifacts.” (Hayles 2002, 22) The materiality of the work is thus very significant in the discussion of sensations of the uncanny, because it is the material conditions of the work which engages our senses and our body and by reconfiguring the materiality of a medium, our senses and bodily reactions to the work are also reconfigured. In other words, when our relations to the work is changed by introducing ambiguous practices, the work becomes an uncanny thing and is displaced from its usual cultural history. This is what Bill Brown describes as “the very ontological instability expressed by the artifact itself, the oscillation between animate and inanimate, subject and object, human and thing.” (Brown 2006, 199) A medium performing uncanny mediation, therefore retraces its mediatic articulation at work within the boundaries of the work and so calls attention to the material processes inherent in the work, revealing that what was previously “considered to be accessory and intermediary – the program, its transmission, reception, storage, recycling, retransmission, etc. – infiltrates the inner integrity of the work, revealing it to be inscribed in, and as, a network.” (Weber 1996, 2-3) The mediation thereby transforms our experience into something uncanny, turning a docile media object into a volatile media thing; this sensation is both displacing and estranging, allowing the work to protrude as spectral and haunting, our experience not certain or ontologically stable.

All the works that I deal with here are in this way uncanny media; their phenomenal status is uncanny in the way they not only allow their materiality to protrude but also in the way they employ the protocols and practices of old media in conjunction with that of new media practices. It is by allowing old and dead media to brush against the new, and vice versa, that these works gain part of their hauntological status and part of why our experience of them is uncanny – we do not fully understand how to interact with them and are unsure as to how to consume them. These works resist, in other words, and it is this resistance which becomes uncanny; at times aesthetic but always disturbing.

The draft conclusion to my Hauntologies manuscript.

Wherever we find media, we find ghosts. These ghosts are articulations and absent presence of the mediation process, an intensification of the materiality of the text which leads us to see that the hauntological is textural; aesthetics are gleaned from the interface between text, medium and reader because of the foregrounding of what is usually transparent background. Bolter and Grusin have already showed us how our “culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 5). Yet as we have now seen there is a range of texts and artists that go against this grain of our culture by instead making mediation visible and even more than that; part of the text’s aesthetic expression, which means that it becomes impossible for us to disregard the materiality and medium-specific ontology of the text. Such an effect is hauntological because the textures of the media only emerge subtly, and because in paying attention to mediation, we are searching for what is normally excluded and what we otherwise take for granted – that media representations are meant to bring us into the very presence of the thing represented.

Such a concern with mediation is a response to how we are affected by media and technology and reveals a certain concern and even anxiety over these processes which constantly seem to indicate a further and further blurring of the boundaries between the human and the non-human entities of media and media texts. With this proliferation only intensifying in recent decades with no signs of slowing down, artists inevitably begin to engage critically and creatively with media as a resource rather than simple storage and transmission technologies. Part of the self-reflexive movement it is clear that these hauntological texts engage with layers in order to bring to the fore issues of the technological and media frame used in producing the text in question.

Far from being a technophobic reaction, it is evident that most of the texts discussed here are intensely interested in and fascinated with the presence of media and what aesthetic affordances media provide us with. Much of what has been dealt with here has been a dismantling of a rather unexamined assumption; that a text’s medium is something that can get in the way of the text. There is no way to reduce the presence of a text’s medium and we must constantly pay attention to the textural ghosts that are conjured up in this assemblage between aesthetics and media materiality. This argument, however, is a form of meta-argument because we are used to arguing that the more transparent a medium becomes, the closer it is to achieving its primary function. However, hauntological texts set up different standards than the typical art function of emotional response and instead interrogate and investigate the meaning potentials inherent in allowing the media frame to intrude upon content. In a mediasphere of vanishing mediators and a rhetoric of transparency, we can see how hauntological texts reconfigure the position of the reader by emphasizing a multistability between form and content. Aesthetic objects thus become uncanny as they intensify their own media status and employ media processes for aesthetic effects; this is the hauntological effect.

We are now at a point where we can identify the main strategies which structure hauntological text aesthetics. These strategies are what unifies what are otherwise quite separate and distinct texts and so begins to give us an idea of the hauntological in the arts

Textural – Hauntological texts are textural in the way they depend on several layers of aesthetic modes, particularly the tension between the frame of media materiality and the frame of content. It is this ontological instability which gives power to the expression hauntology, because we cannot reduce the media text to either materiality or content but must accept the ontological violation of blurring the boundaries between the two. In many ways, this harkens back to an older argument about the inseparability of content and form, only here form is not just the poetical construction of the text but rather its full expressive material form as well, giving us three levels to work with – form, content and medium. The textural is thus one example of what N. Katherine Hayles has called a material metaphor (Hayles 2002, 22), and by productively interrogating the inscription technology the medium of transmission, the hauntological text generates a textural aesthetic, emerging from the network of form, content, medium. These three dimensions inevitably fold back on each other, shaping and re-shaping the dynamics of our interaction with the text. The hauntological effect is thus one emerging from the intersection of a text’s semiotic resources (verbal, visual, etc) and its media-specific materiality of the full range of physical properties which engage with the text.

Layering is therefore the main strategy employed by hauntological texts, precisely to engage with all three aspects of a text’s existence. We must pay special attention to the productive interplay between form, content and medium and not assume that there is any specific, stable relationship for every hauntological text. Each text allows for different forms and kinds of interaction, hence there is no single, unified hauntological effect, only specific, concrete hauntological effects, even as we can gather all these different strategies under the common name of textural layering. This layering in essence reveals a gap between two ontological categories – content and medium – which is exploited by hauntological text to initiate a swirl of resonances between these two categories. This form of textural layering brings us to the second strategy which hauntological texts employ, poetics of the apparatus.

Apparatus poetics – By employing textural layers, hauntological texts also bring the materiality of the medium into the foreground, which is in opposition to most media production in the past decades. Hauntological texts may thus be seen as a reaction against the notion of transparent mediation and immediacy in recent media culture. The rhetorics of transparency which have emerged as our cultural dominant stand in opposition to hauntology which emphasizes the productive interplay between form, content and medium and so are engaged in how the apparatus – that is, any form of inscription technology or container technology – may generate new aesthetic forms. In other words, the argument of hauntological texts is that new media technologies engender new aesthetic forms. One might wonder at the slightly clumsy phrase ‘poetics of the apparatus,’ but it is chosen for two reasons. First, it resonates specifically with Vilém Flusser’s black box apparatus analysis and so enables us to engage with the structural complexity of any given medium and the technological assemblage which said medium depends upon. Second, the word apparatus itself has lost current critical usage, which makes it sound appropriately out of joint while still carrying on connotations of a certain form of the mechanics of representation with its associated meanings of semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism. All in all, a useful temporal disjuncture to keep the complexities of the hauntological effect in mind.

Rather than focusing on the mechanics of representation, however, hauntological texts emphasize the mechanisms of representation which underlines the more active engagement with the technological aspects of the media apparatus. As we have seen, the mechanisms of transmission are also mechanisms of transformation, since any transmission that does not change the text in fact does nothing at all. Hence we must pay particular attention to how these mechanisms work and intersect with the other layers of textural aesthetics. In this way, hauntological texts make clear through their poetics of the apparatus, that these effects are not in the medium but rather off the medium. There is no way to separate the expressive dimension into one of content effect and medium effect – they are one and the same, emerging as a process of textural layers. Hauntological texts thus intensify and make thick the mediation process itself, again resisting a cultural dominant of medium transparency. Instead, we are dealing the resonances which emerge from the bringing together the materiality of the medium with the poetics of the text. This is hauntological because this process makes the absent present, making the stable divisions between content and medium vacillate. This opens up for the third strategy of hauntological texts – displacement.

Displacement – Hauntological texts are inherently both displaced and displacing. They are displaced because their ontological integrity and stability is undermined. We have seen how these different texts all have unstable origins, either diffused across several releases: Dark Night of the Soul with its double release date and its blank CD; a release that was cut short and only partly transmitted: Agrippa where the print runs were stopped and the primary text has only circulated on the Internet with no real official release until 2004; or self-reflexively playing with the text’s own ontological status as object: Shadow of the Vampire with its playful remake of Nosferatu and its blurring of Murnau, Schreck, vampire and film. House of Leaves with its unstable editions and deft eluding of the authorial subject and playful enacting of its primary text being a found manuscript. This displacement of ontological stability is either very deliberately crafted or becomes an inseparable part of the text’s broader circulation and continued existence. In either case, we find a text which is inherently unstable and which exploits this instability for aesthetic effect.

It is this instability which makes the texts displacing because their effect is always in process and in transition. By locating its aesthetic effects across three layers, hauntological texts displace the stable division of the inside and outside of its textual frame. It is precisely in the displacing of this boundary that the hauntological effect takes place. All the texts dealt with here are deeply ambiguous about any form of closure. Instead, these texts introduce disruptive elements into their very core, in the process dislodging any clear sense of representation. As we have seen, the introduction of the technological frame is the typical effect which displaces the text, yet each text employs different strategies. Therefore, every text is filled with hesitations, often both in terms of Todorov’s fantastic hesitation but equally prominent is the ontological hesitation about the status of the text itself. The mediation process is registered on the text as grain, strain, tain and even stain – the hauntological stain which cannot be removed. Hauntological texts thus depend on this structural dislocation of form, content and medium. Every text here reveals a productive anxiety over the presence of media and so dislocates and displaces the coherence of the text by the uncanny co-presence of the medium.

Lastly, hauntological texts are displacing because they, as we especially saw with House of Leaves, turn stable, familiar places into uncanny spaces. This is an extension and continuation of the stain of mediation where the disruptive intrusion of the media upon the frame of content turns the stable place of the text into the uncanny space of the hauntological text and reveals that hauntological texts are in essence phantasmatic and generate in Julian Wolfrey’s words “a space in which representation is fragmented” (Wolfreys 2002, 6). Such intensification of the mediation process becomes uncanny because of the way that these texts employ spatialization as a technique. Writing is spatialized in page layout and typography, time in film and photography and music is spatialized through duration but also through the inherently spatial strategy of echoes and reverberation. This realization reveals how the different forms of spatialization which the different hauntological texts all employ in essence function as a form of destabilization of the text’s ontological fixity.

Liminal – Hauntological texts are liminal texts, exploiting the in-between gap between medium and content. This liminal space is the uncanny space of mediation, the ‘third place’ of mediation (van Elferen 2009, 124) which adds a layer of the technological uncanny to these hauntological texts. The liminal state is a liberating in-between state where the texts are engaged on a complex and ambiguous process of projection and introjection. By hovering ambiguously in-between, we are confronted with an uncanny void which we cannot help but try to fill, yet which inevitably also fills us – hence the uncanny doubling of the mediation process as the lines between human and media are blurred into a liminal network of protruding hypermediation, encapsulated in the blurring of subjectivities between Murnau and Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire; they blur into each other through the technological apparatus of the cinema camera, engendering a liminal state of connection between them. Much the same can be said for the echoes of Dark Night of the Soul, which come from a liminal space between the container technologies, the dead media reinvigorated in the recording and the production itself. Motion blurs make the human liminal in Lynch’s photographs; these liminal spaces proliferate all over hauntological texts and so reconfigure our relationship with them. In other words, in engaging with these liminal spaces we perform a spectralizing extension of ourselves into the medium and back.

Spectralizing – Hauntological text employ and generate a particular configuration of the subject to the text, an extension and an uncanny feedback loop as lines are made ambiguous and spaces blur and mutate. As our perceptions are engaged in the mediation process, we are refigured as parts of the mediation process – we become a continuation of the medium much as the medium is a continuation of us. The Gothic body of the ghost and the abhuman becomes the posthuman specter as we align ourselves with the interfaces of our media and project into them while they introject us. We fall along a sliding scale – the humanization of the medium is the mediatization of the human (Kochhar-Lindgren 2005, 90). Hauntological texts employ external signs which in turn disrupt the subject internally, as the reconfiguration reveals that the inside/outside dichotomy is outdated a mode as the inside/outside separation of content and medium. The hauntological texts become interfaces as we engage with their textural layers, displaced ontologies and liminal spaces.

This spectralizing process is a result of the fact that these hauntological texts rejects and refuses to provide us with a stable location from which to engage with them. Rather than accepting introjection and projection as any kind if stable place, we see it as an inherently unstable process, engendering liminal spaces and forcing us to acquire a certain and distinctive media sensibility and sensitivity where we accept and realize that we are always-already deeply implicated in the textural layers and liminal spaces of media. This spectralizing process simply underscores the fact that media are spaces, we must continue to examine what they contain and how they configure us.

A ‘snippet’ from my Hauntologies book-in-progress. Part of my chapter on House of Leaves, expect errors, omissions and typos.

A significant aspect of House of Leaves is its dependency on frames and the way that these frames collide and intermingle. At the core of the narrative is the so-called the Navidson Record, a documentary film about the Navidsons and their life in the house on Ash Tree Lane. The film is then the first fictional frame, yet we never have direct access to the film as it has only survived in fragments, primarily a fragment known as the “Five and a Half Minute Hallway” but also “Exploration #4.” Our access to this film fragment comes only from a manuscript written by one Zampanò. This manuscript contains one of the main narratives of House of Leaves and is also the one which contains most of the horror genre conventions. There is a subframe, so to speak, to Zampanò’s narrative in his use of footnotes and references, all adding authority and authenticity to his narrative voice – these are not simply his observations but verifiable through the books he references.

Adding to Zampanò’s manuscript is the frame of Johnny Truant, a tattoo parlor worker who came across the manuscript and took it upon himself to collect it into a coherent whole and annotate as much of it as possible. He contacts many of the people referenced in Zampanò’s manuscript to validate their comments and translates as much of the non-English text as possible, but throughout the book Johnny ends up adding another narrative of his own life and experiences with the manuscript. Johhny’s frame then has the unidentified “Editors” comment on some of Johnny’s work, correcting or adding to his translations, but also adding the passages that Johnny was unable to translate. This frame is no story discourse, only indicating what was added for the second edition.

The outermost frame consists of Mark Z. Danielewski as the actual author of the book, along with the actual paratext added by the publishers (either Pantheon or Doubleday). Between this factual frame and that of the fictionalized “Editors,” we have three frames where the narrative level remains in doubt. These three floating narrative levels establish what is a constitutive part of the book’s aesthetics – the disruption of borders and boundaries. There is nothing to suggest that these three levels are in any way connected – different typefaces would in fact seem to indicate the opposite – and so we cannot assign them to any one narrative voice. Instead, we may connect them thematically to the rest of the book, since they seem to generate an ambiguous response.

The first floating narrative level we encounter is the (anti-)dedication of the book “This is not for you.” which could conceivably be by Danielewski directed at the actual reader, yet for me it seems to be more a part of the playful nature of the book. Also, the dedication is written in Courier typeface, which generally indicates a different narrative frame – most typically Johnny Truant’s. What this dedication also does, is to immediately destabilize our reception of the book and question who exactly the intended audience might be. The most immediate and most playful reading of the dedication is to attribute it to Danielewski, teasingly letting the reader know that this book was not written with him or her in mind, but instead someone else – one could easily imagine the trite cliché of the author only writing to please himself, here. Another, slightly more unsettling reading, is that it is not a dedication but a warning; that we are reading something we were not meant to read – as if we had come upon the manuscript much like Johnny Truant, maybe even that the book contains something dangerous or frightening. Certainly this reading leans more towards the Gothic connection of the found manuscript tradition which House of Leaves explicitly draws on. In either case, we are confronted with uncertainty and ambiguity right from the start, leaving us with a degree of hesitation as we move further into the book.

The second floating narrative level is the epigraph “Muss es sein?” between Johnny’s introduction and The Navidson Record. Again, the narrative voice is unknown – the typeface is italicized Times New Roman, which would indicate that it belongs to Zampanò, yet it is placed outside his frame and it is unclear to what extent he spoke German. So, the epigraph remains ambiguous as to the narrative voice and also in terms of its meaning. A literal reading of the epigraph seems to indicate the same slightly ominous tone as when we read the dedication as a warning – must this thing (the book, the story, the house – again, the meaning of ‘it’ remains unclear) be, or would it not be better if it never existed? However, ‘muss es sein’ may also be seen as referring to Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16, where Beethoven noted “Muß es sein?” under the opening chords of the last movement, while responding “Es muß sein!” later in the movement. This entire movement is named “Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß,” which once again generates ambiguity – what is this resolution and why is it difficult. The intertextual reference thus folds this uncertainty back into the epigraph of the book, indicating that the book might in itself be a difficult resolution. Finally, it seems peculiar that in a book obsessed with typography, the German ‘ß’ is not used. Again, uncertainty proliferates as we find it impossible to attribute this mistake or deliberate use to either Danielewski, the publisher or a narrative voice. We have, in other words, no stable ground from which we may proceed into the main body of the book; everything is cast into doubt and left open for the reader.

The final floating narrative level comes at the book’s very end, after the index and credits. There is a large black dot and the text:

Yggdrasil / What miracle is this? This giant tree. / It stands ten thousand feet high / But doesn’t reach the ground. Still it stands. / Its roots must hold the sky. (Danielewski 2000, 709)

which is followed by a large, bold ‘O’ the interior of which does not entirely match the black dot above. The typography of this page is far more unusual than the two first floating narrative levels; in this case the word ‘Yggdrasil’ is bold and divided: ‘Ygg’ is written horizontally with ‘drasil’ written vertically, centered on the page. The prose poem is also centered on the page with the line breaks noted in the quotation above. The final ‘O’ has a larger, bold typeface than the rest of the words and can be seen as the final end of the book, which indicates a form of looping back or infinity, taking the mythological implications of Yggdrasil into account. In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the World Ash from which extends the Nine Worlds and at the roots of Yggdrasil lies the dragon Nidhug, eating away at the roots.

This playful engagement with the world of publishing is then our first immediate clue that the book engages in a poetics of materiality. House of Leaves plays around with the concept of its physical origin – the edition(s) available claim to be the second edition, with a Foreword by “The Editors” stating that the first edition was privately distributed and did not include Chapter 21, Appendices II and III or the index, and that there may be errors of translations and the accreditation of the sources (Danielewski 2000, vii).

Of course, there is no self-published first edition and the second edition is the actual first edition and the Foreword from the editors is simply a playful element along with the inclusion of fake sources alongside real sources, an index, the title page stating that the book is written by Zampanò, with an introduction (and notes) by Johnny Truant. This fictional paratext is meant (playfully) to add to the authenticity of the novel as a found object and so it inscribes itself into the Gothic tradition of fictions posing as long-lost manuscripts recently discovered. And yet there are reasons why one might not immediately realize that there is no lost first edition; the novel was actually published in three different versions (called editions): a full color, a 2-color and black & white edition. Which edition the reader has is mentioned at the bottom of the copyright page, where four editions are in fact mentioned – an incomplete edition is also noted, which could conceivably be the lost first edition, since it misses appendices and index. However, in the full color version published by Pantheon Books, the words ‘First Edition’ are printed with a line going through them, thus undermining the authenticity of this as being the first edition.

In other words, the stability of the editions is placed under erasure and so become ambiguous and uncertain; how much can we trust this paratext and if that paratext is unreliable, then how much may we trust of the fiction inside the paratext? We might even go so far as to propose the concept of the unreliable publisher, since we are clearly being deceived (although obviously not maliciously) by the publisher, even if it is at the behest of the author. Yet due to the unusual nature of this unreliability, it is likely that many readers will never notice these small signs of instability, even as they proliferate throughout the book, with references to non-existing books, false references and many other smaller ontological slips. There is even more slippage between the different versions, an invisible touch which has faded away unnoticed. In the Doubleday Black & White version and in the Pantheon Books 2-Color version, the Full Color version is referenced as having braille (“Braille and color plates”), while all the other versions are listed by the laconic “No Braille”. However, the Pantheon Books Full Color version is listed as having “Xxxxxxx and color plates.” Something has slipped away from the Full Color version, an alteration has taken place without making itself felt. It is of course unclear why the braille script has been removed from the Full Color version, yet it does play into the whole concept of the materiality of the book, since this flickering stability of the editions and the different versions of the book is an aesthetic effect, what we may term a material metaphor after Hayles, “a term that foregrounds the traffic between words and physical artifacts” (Hayles 2002, 22).

What does this metaphor of the slipping and fading editions and versions implicate for House of Leaves, then? First of all, maybe paradoxically, it foregrounds the materiality of the book at the same time as actual editions and braille script fade away. Yet for those who pay attention, it becomes evident that the construction of the book is extremely deliberate and significant; the absences (of the first edition and of the braille) reveal an interest in what can be done with the book as a physical object. Our flickering hesitation as to whether or not there might be an actual first edition or if perhaps another version exists with the braille script precedes much of the hesitation we will encounter throughout the book, and this paratext will haunt us and inform our reading, as much as any other structures we bring with us. In this way, the technology of the book informs House of Leaves; it is clear that Danielewski (whether deliberately or not) proceeds from Walter Ong’s observation that writing restructures consciousness and that print culture encapsulates the word in very specific ways (Ong 1995), ways that are challenged and investigated in Danielewski’s book.

This should not surprise us, since fiction – especially supernatural fiction – has often narrativized the impact of various technologies and machines and mechanisms take on uncanny meanings, as Fred Botting has shown (Botting 2005). What House of Leaves does, then (among other things), is to investigate how technological and media-specific strategies inform and change our experience of the book. Much of the aesthetic appeal of the book comes precisely from its engagement with its own materiality and as much as the narrative of the book is contingent on this materiality, it is already in the paratext that we are alerted to the book’s unusual nature. Of course, as has been noted, the entire book could be considered one large paratext to a text which does not exist (Sørensen 2007). Still, what remains fascinating about the book is the way that it engages and structures our understanding of the book as a medium, which is certainly also why Hayles has used it as much as she has, to discuss issues of media-specific analysis.

As a haunted house story, we might proceed from Maurice Blanchot’s argument that all literature carves its own space in which it (dis)places its aesthetic concerns and that this space is of one constant deferral, because it is a void introduced “in place of the place it takes” (Blanchot 11); indicating that our experience of the literary work is always located somewhere else than in the physical object we hold in our hands. Such a view is consistent with what Walter Ong has discussed about the book being considered at first as an enunciation rather than a material object and is also consistent with Mark Rose’s intricate history of literary copyright, where he shows how the author is granted the rights to the ideas and concepts in the book, but not to the physical layout of the book, which became the property of the publisher (Rose 1995).

House of Leaves, along with a number of other literary texts, wishes to give the lie to the immateriality of the book and instead revels in a broad variety of typographical play, iconic prose arrangement and insertions of visual materials (primarily in the appendices). While certainly playful, all of these material devices are significant parts of the aesthetics of the book and often mirror, represent visually or engage with the narrative(s). We know that Danielewski himself took part in typesetting and designing the book, which is unusual for the publishing industry but also indicates that the visual layout is not simply an afterthought or left to an in-house designer. We need to pay attention to the design, then, in order to see how the book’s materiality impacts our reading of the novel.

The cover of the Pantheon edition has a fold-over flap containing on the inside of the flap a mock blurb meant to indicate that the book is in fact a collection of a lost manuscript by Zampanó with added material by Johnny Truant. The inside cover is a color plate collage consisting of a confused design of notes, a compass, tape measures, a shell, pills, thread, stamps, comic book pages, drawings and most disturbingly what appears to be smears of blood. While not immediately decipherable, this color plate does indicate a lot of what is part of the book’s narratives, yet without revealing anything for the first-time reader. What is, however, immediately clear is the obsession with measurements and hence space. This spatial obsession is further visible in the way that the fold-over flap is a ½ inch gap between the cover and the pages of the book. This missing ½ inch is mirrored in the narrative of the Navidson Record, where the Navidson’s house is discovered to be larger on the inside than on the outside. The exact dimensions of this extra space changes constantly from practically nothing to what appears to be almost infinite. It is uncanny space which The Navidson Record focuses on – how can this house defy the laws of physics and what happens when hallways and spaces suddenly open up?

The book has the same anxious preoccupation with space in its layout, not simply mirroring it in the missing ½ inch flap, but constantly throughout the entire book typographic space takes on visual meaning, reproducing or commenting in its own way on the narrative levels. Most notably is the use of different typeface fonts: The Navidson Record by Zampanò is in Times New Roman whereas Johnny Truant’s notes are in Courier. This change may seem innocent and irrelevant, yet inevitably it tells us something of the character of Zampanò and Truant. The materiality of these typefaces is significant and triggers meaning in us as readers; I believe that Zampanò’s soft, curved Times New Roman reproduce a sense of quiet elegance and authority, both because it is very often the typeface of academic works and thus reproduce that sense of knowledge and respect, but also because there is a calmness to the serif typefaces which slowly leads us on to the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph.

Zampanò and his writing thus exude calmness and continuity. With epigraphs for every chapter and obsessive referencing and footnotes, Zampanò reassures us of his competence, knowledge and authority. By contrast, Truant’s Courier typeface is jarring and confusing – in an age of computers, Truant’s writing seems an oddly archaic throwback to the typewriter. Along with his ranting style, bad grammar and spelling and constant use of expletives, Truant appears extremely intrusive, further enhanced by his writing sometimes spatially overtaking Zampanò’s prose – Truant’s prose is located as footnotes but as Truant becomes more verbose, his words take up more and more space on the page until it completely blocks out Zampanò and fills up the entire page. This happens first on pages 12 and 13, where Truant feels compelled to tell us about the lack of hot water for his morning shower and continues to provide more details about his day. Seemingly completely irrelevant for the story about the house and Zampanò’s narrative, it is difficult not to feel frustrated with the ugly smear of the Courier typeface across the page, blocking our access to what we at this point believe is the main story.

So much more is the shock when in Chapter IX, Zampanò suddenly introduces not simply struck-through text but also red text, footnotes placed in boxes rather than the bottom of the page and these boxes appear on both recto and verso of the pageleaf, mirrored on the verso side as if one can see through the page. Upside-down, italicized text appears on the right side of recto pages, while the verso pages has a regular typeface footnote along its left side. Footnote 148 is located along the inside margin; left on a recto page, almost obscured (121). Footnotes 166, 167 and 168 spread over two pages, turning first sideways and then upside-down. A black box appears along with a white box and peculiar uses of indents or whitespace. Suddenly, all of Zampanò’s hard-earned authority is questioned and starts falling apart, just as the typographical unity falls apart. Chapter X continues this use of spatialized typography with little text per page, ordered according to what is happening in the narrative of the film fragment “Exploration #4.”

Significantly, this explosion of typographic space comes as part of the description and discussion of “Exploration #4,” which is concerned with the shifting space of the Navidson house and the labyrinthine nature of this unstable space. Chapter IX contains a discussion of the nature and etymology of labyrinths and certainly the shifting between epigraph, footnote, Truant’s comments and the main text becomes extremely labyrinthine in this chapter, to the point where it is all but impossible to navigate the book. One needs to physically turn the book to read the upside-down text and the sideways text, and find a mirror to see the reversed text. Also, it becomes necessary for the reader to decide whether s/he wants to read the main narrative or the footnotes first; everything becomes so intermingled that one cannot easily locate a direction for reading, and the spatial disorder inevitably afflicts the reading which becomes confusing and multi-directional, again much like a labyrinth. The fragmented typography thus informs the narrative just as the narrative informs the typography, yet we cannot decide where the labyrinth originated first – the poetics of content and form haunt each other.

The book itself suggests that a labyrinth “is a required effort to keep from slipping or falling; in other words stopping. We cannot relax within those walls, we have to struggle pat them” (Danielewski 2000, 114), yet this seems to suggest that the walls we are struggling against are in fact the ‘walls’ of text swirling on the page. We – as readers – have to work to keep from slipping or falling in our reading; slip into the footnotes or fall out of the frame of reference. Of course, the book makes sure that this is impossible by destroying the calm typographic space as well as the order of reading. The footnotes become all jumbled and no longer simply lead us to look down the page or to pages further ahead. We have to flip back, for instance, to find note K, which is referenced on page 114 but located on page 109. By breaking up our direction of reading, the typographic space begins to take on uncanny features as the book becomes a strange thing, suddenly alive in our hands instead of the inert object it usually is. Of course, in this way the book simply, yet again, mirrors the house which similarly does not remain inert and stable. Zampanò’s authority recedes as we no longer fully trust the book we hold before us. The specter of typography suddenly peaks forth and becomes visible, thus alienating our reading. Even the footnotes, usually markers of stability and authority in any text, become unstable and lose their anchoring effect through their displacement on the page.

The significant point here is that the textual instability occurs at the introduction of the film fragment and the visual breakdown of the page visualizes the spatial breakdown which Holloway and his team experience. This visual representation of the literary content is of course in itself unusual; although there are a number of precedents, most books do not visually resemble their narratives. Instead, this is one place where Danielewski’s book turns uncanny as an object, as a thing. House of Leaves is no longer a literary experience where the materiality of the pages, covers, etc recede until we no longer notice them because they are ‘transparent’. The pages glare back at us in all their visual glory and disturbing ‘aliveness’ because the book must now move for us to make sense of it (to read it we would normally say, yet that seems too easy for House of Leaves). As Ong has pointed out, visual surface is

charged with imposed meaning and because print controlled not only what words were put down to form a text but also the exact situation of the words on the page and their spatial relationship to one another, the space itself on a printed sheet – ‘white space’ as it is called – took on high significance (Ong 1995, 128)

which House of Leaves is certainly an example of, but only because such experiments are not typical. In fact, most books attempt at making their pages transparent in order for the reader to become immersed in the narrative. Although Bolter and Grusin only discuss visual media in their Remediation: Understanding New Media, it seems evident to me that the history of printing and the history of the novel have created a form of immediacy for its readers: we accept the trivial effort of turning over a page and regard verbal representation as close to visual representation, in order for the immersion to work. In other words, for the reader a book is a transparent medium in most cases. What House of Leaves achieves is precisely to hypermediate its language and its material construction. The spatial construction of the typographic page generates an interest in the medium and materiality of the book and suddenly the book emerges as a visual medium. No longer do we simply ‘see through’ the pages, words and sentences but see the page in its entirety – with whitespace, typeface and color.

In this way, House of Leaves is a product of a visual media-age since the book’s visual layout attempts to remediate cinema. House of Leaves is as much a visual object as a literary. The visual impact is immense, especially because we are not used to it, yet it adapts much from cinematic storytelling in the way that the words become almost animated and move around on the ‘frame’ of the page. The spatial constriction or expansion of the words influences our reading. Sometimes we read faster because there are only a few words on each page and we leaf through the pages much faster than normal. At other times, the page frame is so dense that our reading slows to a crawl, as we check footnotes, twist the book, decide which order to read the sections in, skip back or forth to find the proper references and so forth. Constantly, we are made aware of the material nature of the book as a piece of technology as we come across different typefaces and different colors, or even iconic images – all this without going into the photos, comic book pages and prints which appear in the appendices.

All of these spacings turn the book into a monster and a monstrous object, simultaneously inert as any book but also uncannily alive in our hands as we turn it and flip it around. The book transforms itself into a visual object instead of a verbal object readily containable in a conventional book; House of Leaves thus oscillates between being a work of verbal and visual representation and so transgresses our easy conception of the book as a stable (verbal) unit. Let us remember that the etymology of monster is derived from the Latin monstrare, which means to show or display (Huet 1993, 6), and in this sense House of Leaves is monstrous. And as Huet goes on to show, monster is also derived from monere, which means to warn, especially associated with prophetic visions of impending disaster (Huet 1993, 6). Certainly also in this way, House of Leaves is monstrous, as it constantly filled with danger and uncertainty. The monstrosity of the book goes even further in its transgressions, as the narrative frames which we establish in order to have at least some sense of control over the book, constantly collapse.

The narrative frames collapse for different reasons, some for diegetic reasons others for non-diegetic ones. The two most significant diegetic ones are revealed early on, before we ever arrive at that narrative frame. In the introduction, Johnny Truant relates to us how he found Zampanò’s manuscript when Johnny moved into Zampanò’s apartment after Zampanò died. Johnny reads the manuscript and annotates it, which is what we get after the introduction. However, before this Johnny reveals two things – the manuscript is about a film which does not exist and Zampanò was blind (Danielewski 2000, xix, xxi). These two revelations effectively render the entire book void, since it is all fabrication, even on a diegetic level. One must even wonder why the publishers would even release a book which is so evidently fake. It seems that we must take this framing as an ironic and playful engagement with the Gothic tradition of found manuscripts, but also a certain satire of the academic world – Zampanò’s blindness did not, after all, prevent him from writing an academic treatise on a fictitious film; one might argue that this is a satire of academia in general on how film critics (and presumably literary critics) do not properly ‘see’ the work in question, being too preoccupied with theories and academic argument. Such a reading would anchor this framing with reference to Danielewski himself, as a satirist of academia, a field he himself has occupied.

Yet these frames also explode outwards. Consider how the word ‘house’ in any language is always colored blue in Pantheon’s Two-Color and Full Color versions. At first, we might assume that this coloring is done by Zampanò but the coloring is also present in Truant’s commentary, even when it is not in English. We know that Truant only speaks English and would have had problems coloring the non-English words for house, so perhaps we must locate the action of coloring the words with the Editors, since they at times correct Truant’s mistranslations or provide translations Truant never made. However, ‘house’ is colored blue even in the copyright section, the review blurbs and even on the front and back cover of the book (Patheon editions). So, again we are forced to anchor this decision with the publishers and Danielewski. It is unusual to have the need for so much recourse to the author as the anchoring frame, since authors are generally absent from their own works or at least only playfully present. In the case of House of Leaves, however, we are constantly confronted with the need to consider Danielewski as part of his work, thus establishing an implied author. This implied author continually haunts our reading of the book, since we must consistently turn to this construct in order to explain certain features of the book. However, the implied author wavers between being a fictional construction made by the reader and the factual author we know exists. This flickering becomes simply another device of instability for House of Leaves as we are never fully aware of where to locate authority and stability.

A further example is that of Appendix III: Contrary Evidence, which is a collection of images referred to in Zampanò’s and Truant’s frames. This appendix is added by the Editors, yet why would the Editors feel the need to present contrary evidence? And why are we never told the identity of these editors? Again, uncertainty proliferates and once more we are forced to locate the final decision with Danielewski or accept that there is no final authority which can anchor the meaning of the book. As such, we as readers are drawn into the oscillating narrative frames and confronted with a series of shifting and transforming relationships between these frames and this in itself leads to a proliferation of meanings. More than simply this tendency towards indeterminacy, however, the book also breaches the usually established boundaries between diegetic levels, in the case of the unknown entity which begins to come after Truant.

Truant, of course, has never been near the Navidson house (if that house even exists, since the film does not) and so has only been confronted with the so-called monster of the house via Zampanò’s writings. However, he does encounter a monster one night in the tattoo parlor where he is building needles:

Worse, I’m no longer alone. Impossible. Not impossible. This time it’s human. Maybe not. Extremely long fingers. A sucking sound too. Sucking on teeth, teeth already torn from the gums. […] And then behind me, the door closes. The rest is in pieces. A scream, a howl, a roar. All’s warping, or splintering. That makes no sense. […] Everything falls apart. (Danielewski 2000, 70-71)

Even in this compressed quote, we see how everything is confused for Truant and while the encounter clearly terrifies him, it is difficult to determine whether or not it is actually caused by the presence of something monstrous. Truant himself claims that he was no longer under the influence of alcohol or marijuana, yet it seems to me that we are here confronted with a case of Todorov’s fantastic – we may chose to believe Truant’s encounter as supernatural (thereby making it marvelous) or to read it as the confused after-effects of drugs and alcohol (in which case the encounter would be uncanny). Much of Danielewski’s book wavers between these two poles, allowing for plenty of hesitation for the reader but what is interesting for me is how Truant describes the encounter, which is terrifying but not exactly bodily or visible. Instead, his description is much more literary:

Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp. Cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad perhaps even irreparable way. Known. Some. Call. Is. Air. Am? Incoherent – yes. Without meaning – I’m afraid not. (Danielewski 2000, 71)

This hardly sounds like a typical description of an encounter with a monster and certainly not coming from Truant. The emphasis on words and the power of words and syllables is, however, interesting considering the nature of the book itself. One could argue that what Truant encounters and fears so much that he has constant nightmares about it (Danielewski 2000, xi) is simply the book – in this case, Zampanò’s manuscript with its fragmented and monstrous layout. Truant has simply succumbed to the Haven-Slocum’s Theory of post-exposure to the house. In this case, however, the house is not the Navidson house or any other physical house – it is the house referenced in the title; the book itself as a house. This argument is not unusual for as Mark Wigley has argued, a house is a system of representation just as a system of representation can be considered a structure akin to a house. So, let us change our emphasis to that of the haunted house of House of Leaves.