Hayles – Writing Machines

This book blew my mind! I found this more accessible than Hayles's _How We Became Posthuman_, although I sensed traces of _Posthuman_ throughout this text.

The thing I loved about this book is the way it connects with so many thoughts I already had running through my head. At first, I was actually worried that all my thoughts had already been said by Hayles, but I felt a bit better when I thought about how I'm applying these ideas to the composition classroom (which is different than how she is applying them) and then how XML plays into all of this (which is definitely something she does not discuss).

Hayles offers more of a focus on how these "writing machines" exist in terms of literature, and I think it would really have been interesting to put some of these ideas to the panel that was discussing the Lindemann/Tate debate. The end of _Writing Machines_ sort of seems to say a lot of important stuff, so I think I'm going to start there. Here is a big long quote, but I think it really gets at what she is saying in the whole book:

"Through its material metaphors, _House of Leaves_ suggests that the appropriate model for subjectivity is a communication circuit rather than discrete individualism, for narration remediation rather than representation, and for reading and writing inscription technology fused with consciousness rather than a mind conveying its thoughts directly to the reader. Focusing on materiality allows us to see the dynamic interactivity through which a literary work mobilizes its physical embodiment in conjunction with its verbal signifiers to construct meanings in ways that implicitly construct the user/reader as well. It is no accident that electronic texts such as _Lexia to Perplexia_, artists' books like _A Humument_, and print novels like _House of Leaves_ envision subjects who are formed through and with the inscription technologies these works employ. The writing machines that physically create fictional subjects through inscriptions also connect us as readers to the interfaces, print and electronic, that transform us by reconfiguring our interactions with their materialities. 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" (130-1).

So much of the book shows her, through MSA (media-specific analysis), working out these ideas that she articulates so well here at the end. She discusses the materiality of literature (both electronic and print). These inscription technologies inscribe the reader as much as they inscribe the meanings that the reader creates when interacting with the text.