In her introduction to textual mediation in the digital age, Writing Machines, Kathryn Hayle foregrounds the materiality of the new forms of text presentation and the effects of these on the reader. Her case for a media specific analysis is well made, I think, given the increased visuality of the hybrid technotexts that she explores, as well as the material complexities of cybertexts. However, she failed to convince me that subjectivity itself is being transformed in new ways by the writing machines. Admittedly, I found the chapter on Lexia to Perplexia difficult to understand, perhaps because I have no experience with novels in these forms, and so may have misunderstood her claims; still, her descriptions of her experience with the work seem to be only material metaphors (a combination of the visual and the kinetic) for the multiple mediations that have always been a part of reading.

The commonplace “You never read the same book twice” is indicative of the many “paths” one can take through any complex, print centric text. So when Hayle makes the claim that technotext actually “structures” users as well as environments, I wonder does she mean the technotext is teaching the reader how to pursue its paths and interpret them through interaction? If so, I would argue this happens in any challenging print-text as the reader comes to understand the author’s methods and style (I’m thinking Henry James’s later period, for example). Furthermore, physical interactions with the text are at least as old as the blank pages left in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy for reader response. If, however, Hayle’s claim is for a more elemental re-structuring of subjectivity, I think the evidence inadequate.

Similarly, if, as Hayle claims, the creole language concocted of English and programming code in Lexia to Perplexia, “forms the medium through which the origin of subjectivity can be redescribed as coestensive with technology,” one would have to accept an analogous situation—that the language Tolkein invents for his hobbits creates reader subjectivities coestensive with the shire. And perhaps this is actually the case; literature undoubtedly influences us in the time we spend in its imagined worlds. Technocreole, then, is just another authorial invention to intensify the experience of an imagined world in which technology is in control. My concern is again with a deeper implication that Hayle seems to be gesturing toward in her language: that the new interactions with technotext will create a heretofore-unknown kind of subjectivity because the language and metaphors are drawn from, and through, technology. In her descriptions, I do not see new processes at work that would support such a claim.

It is interesting that Joan Lyons, the Press Director at the Visual Studies Workshop, found the books coming from the workshop more interesting visually than verbally. As Hayle reports, “she speculated this was so because many of the artists tended to locate metaphoric intensity and play in images rather than words…the prose was often rather flat because it was seen as an explanation or amplification of the images.” Rather than subjectivities structured by technotexts, I see technotexts made (inevitably) in the image of their creators—symbolic visual representations of their already learned processes of mediation—a kind of hermeneutic remediation.

The epiphanic moment promised by many of these books or book-like objects, as with much conceptual art, is thrilling but brief. If they, and the various technotexts Hayle reviews, lack a text with the complexity to engage the reader’s subjective experiences beyond their immediate interaction with its materiality, ultimately it seems the technotexts might offer a reader fewer paths to follow than does one distinct voice relayed in the only-apparently-fixed medium of print.

-Ann