PX. Publicity As Relinquishment: Writing Digitexts

I composed this text on my desktop with a word processor.

I am old enough to remember well what it was like to compose lengthy papers on typewriters and legal pads, scrawling text in a cramping hand smudged with graphite or ink, erasing or crossing out words nearly as fast as I could write them, introducing supplemental points and qualifications from the margins in a swarm of snaking arrows, flipping through scribbled pages and annotations, slathering liquid paper over type-written gaffes, back-spacing, resuming again.

Like many pathologically perfectionist writers the transition into digital textual production was an ecstatic one for me, a release from the constraining meat of pulp into a realm of spirits. The enterprise of writing became for me incomparably more experimentalist, a matter of tinkering with ideas and polishing endlessly away at suggestive phrases. Writing became at once wonderfully more playful and satisfyingly more purposeful. Moreover, the results eventuating from the process of digital writing typically felt incomparably closer to my felt intentions, where typescript often emerged instead as a compromise formation reached at the point of exhaustion in a wrestling match registering less the already difficult translation of ideas into effects than the mechanical difficulties inhering in a process in which marks are simply always easier to make than to unmake.

For me, then, digital writing seemed doubly to amplify the writerly agency it succeeded: The digitization of textual production seemed first to ameliorate the labor of writing, facilitating editing and revision –- providing for the comparably effortless deletion and insertion of text, the cutting and pasting of text from one disparate location to another, and the like. And all the while digitization seemed, second, to amplify the extent to which we control the terms in which writing appears –- the disposition of margins, typefaces, the organization of information in charts and tables, the introduction of illustrations, and the like.

But, of course, the scene of digital writing is one for which the empowerment of the terms of textual production it facilitates likewise seems to be complemented by compensatory relinquishments of control over the terms of textual reception.

Because the members of my dissertation committee are busy people who are geographically dispersed, it is usually easier for everybody concerned if the digital document I have composed on my desktop is then sent off as an e-mail attachment to my readers for comments and revisions. It has often been the case that the very first time I see visceral ink-on-paper instantiations of the parts of the dissertation I have written so far will be as copies appearing in my Departmental mailbox, printed up wherever the digital versions first found their way to and then marked up with comments on the spot.

Finding the physical text in my hands is always unsettling, and almost always begins with my misrecognition of the document itself as something someone else has written. Usually I first mistake the text as a paper handed in late by a student in whatever class I am teaching at the moment, and so I am already annoyed by the thing. Then comes perplexity: The words on the page are in any case simply altogether alien at first, impossible to connect to the text that has long fixated my attention on the screen.

The typeface, the formatting, the margins will all differ uncannily from the “virtual” versions that have so long preoccupied my notice. Italicized words will sometimes have been made plain. Section headings tumble from grace and migrate incomprehensibly into the paragraphs they were meant to herald. Even the number of pages will differ from reader to reader, depending on whatever utilities they employ to read their online mail.

One of my readers reformats my documents into single-spaced texts in a smaller typeface before printing them, in an admirably conscientious effort to save paper. These versions are especially appalling to find in my mailbox. Since I fully understand that there is a very real sense in which I could write interminably about the topics that preoccupy this dissertation, and that in a sense a whole career of writing will likely digress and ramify from this scene of dissertating, I secretly think of the dissertation instead as an effort to cover certain argumentative ground in a certain number of targeted pages. All the elation of accomplishment I psychically squirrel away as my word processor piles up its virtual pages in an ongoing attainment after that target evaporates when I find these reformatted concretizations and re-imaginings of my work in my box, looking as dense as the Rosetta Stone and filling up so few pages after all.

Like the readers of my digitized dissertation who receive it as attachments to e-mail, readers of these sections on my blog will likewise see rather different forms of the text according to whichever browsers they use to read online pages and the options they have selected to shape the ways in which their browsers present these pages. I have seen my blog on other machines, for example, for which the wider spacing and hideous gigantism of the fonts their users inexplicably prefer cause my words to dilate endlessly down the screen, making them seem to me long-winded, belabored, and awkward in ways that other more considered choices would surely have avoided altogether. (Yes, I blame the fonts.)

Of course, the really modest sorts of ease and vulnerability introduced by the digitization of textual production I have discussed so far are rather mild when compared to the more deranging interventions into the stability of the authorial text introduced by digital hypertext or by the textual tagging practices enabled by social software.

Go to Next Section of Pancryptics
Go to Pancryptics Table of Contents