“Work as Assemblage, a cluster of related texts that quote, comment upon, amplify, and otherwise intermediate one another.”

— Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer (105)

“Going along with the idea of Work as Assemblage are changed constructions of subjectivity. The notion of the literary work as an ideal immaterial construction has been deeply influenced by a unitary view of the subject, particularly in the decades when editors sought to arrive at the work by determining an authors ‘final intentions.’ The work as it was formulated using this principle in turn reinforced a certain view of the author as a literacy figure… the unitary work and the unified subject mutually reinforced and determined each other. As the rest of critical theory deconstructed the unified subject and exposed the problematic ideological bases on which it rested, editorial criticism underwent similar revisionist movements, particularly in Jerome McGann’s arguments for the ‘social text.’ Perhaps now it is time to think about what kinds of textuality a dispersed, fragmented, and heterogeneous view of the subject might imply.”

— Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer (106)

I think I know what song I’m singing in answer to this question. I am, in some things, rather predictable. 

I also think that this isn’t necessarily new though. Aspects of it are, but this is also about what’s made visible/material/traceable due to digital culture and the way we now live out our lives, at least in part, in a digital archive. Folk culture, however, certainly carries aspects of this and always has. But this also gets back to Hayles’ discussion of whether the Age of Computing is a metaphor (that we use on a cultural level to reorient ourselves), an actual shift, both, or if that matters at all. So, it may not matter how much of this is new/old, as much as its something we’re ready to think about more and notice in this moment. (And then, of course, we need to think about what that signifies.)