With digital media, by contrast, translatability across media is guaranteed by the binary code to which all these texts are ultimately reduced, a process Lev Manovich analyzes in his discussion of transcoding (2001, 45–48). Rather than depending on the transcendental signifier, electronic texts tremble at the edge of what Cayley calls the “abyss” of binary code, a form of symbolic language difficult for humans to understand in its raw form; rather than pointing up toward the purity of the Word, digital devices plunge down into a froth of code that becomes progressively less intelligible to humans as it moves closer to the point where it is instantiated in the materiality of the machine as on-off voltages. To mark this difference between the transcendental assumptions undergirding translation and the machine processes of code, Cayley suggests that “transliteration” would be a better choice to describe the re-encoding of print or manuscript documents into electronic texts.
I have suggested that fully exploring the implications of media specificity will require new conceptualizations of materiality (Hayles 2002, 19–34). Rather than think about the materiality of texts as a fixed set of physical properties characteristic of an object, we might consider it as emerging from the ways a text mobilizes the physical characteristics of the technology in which it is instantiated to create meaning. Materiality in this view is a different concept than physicality. Materiality implies a characterization and selection of physical properties that could be listed as comprising an object. How the poem-event goes in search of meaning determines which aspects of the technology are foregrounded, so materiality emerges as a dance between the medium’s physical characteristics and the work’s signifying strategies. Contingent, provisional, and debatable, materiality itself thus comes to be seen as more an event than a preexisting object, a nexus at which culture, language, technology, and meaning interpenetrate.
I have suggested that fully exploring the implications of media specificity will require new conceptualizations of materiality (Hayles 2002, 19–34). Rather than think about the materiality of texts as a fixed set of physical properties characteristic of an object, we might consider it as emerging from the ways a text mobilizes the physical characteristics of the technology in which it is instantiated to create meaning. Materiality in this view is a different concept than physicality. Materiality implies a characterization and selection of physical properties that could be listed as comprising an object. How the poem-event goes in search of meaning determines which aspects of the technology are foregrounded, so materiality emerges as a dance between the medium’s physical characteristics and the work’s signifying strategies. Contingent, provisional, and debatable, materiality itself thus comes to be seen as more an event than a preexisting object, a nexus at which culture, language, technology, and meaning interpenetrate.
