“Inscribing consequential fictions, writing machines reach through the inscriptions they write and that write them to re-define what it means to write, to read, and to be human.”
— Hayles, Writing Machines, 131
Which means, of course, that as these things are changed and redefined, methods of analysis (and pedagogy) must also shift accordingly.
“The unreliable narrator, a literary invention foregrounding the role of consciousness in constructing reality, has here given way to the remediate narrator, a literary invention foregrounding a proliferation of inscription technologies that evacuate consciousness as the source of production and recover in its place a mediated subjectivity that cannot be conceived as an independent entity. Consciousness alone is no longer the relevant frame but rather consciousness fused with technologies of inscription.” (116-117, emphasis mine)
This was one of my favorite moments in Writing Machines. Hayles is talking about House of Leaves and its narrative structure, however, this is the moment where Hayles’ writing strategy for Writing Machines also becomes clear. Writing Machines is constructed with at least two different narrators driving the text forward. Hayles alternates between a distanced, conventionally academic, writing voice and a style of narration that is much more personal and focuses on telling the story of “Kaye” and how she came to academia and then electronic literature. As a queer feminist, I immediately appreciated Hayles choice to do this from the start of the book. (There’s a long tradition emphasizing the need for self-reflective positioning in gender and queer studies.) As someone interested in participatory methods and ethnography, I also appreciated the self-reflexive positioning— its something I’d love to see media-focused scholars doing more to help us better consider why we find certain objects and texts more or less worthy of our attention. However, at this point in Writing Machines you realize that this technique is also deeply necessary to Hayles’ larger project. In Writing Machines, she also seems to be trying to produce this kind of mediated subjectivity that she sees happening in a text like House of Leaves and emphasizing that, as scholars, we also have a mediated subjectivity in our own work. A subjectivity that is shaped by our life experiences and interactions, as well as our methods, our communication medium, and our production processes.
