"Through Light and the Alphabet": An Interview with Joanna Drucker An Interview with Johanna Drucker by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum University of Virginia mgk3k@virginia.edu © 1997 Matthew G. Kirschenbaum All rights reserved. "According to the Hebrew myth," notes the poet Charles Bernstein, "light was the first act of creation." That is probably the most famous hierarchization of sight among the human senses: the Bible creates the conditions for using eyes before it creates eyes. Eyes, at least in our culture, are the most prized of the human sense organs; assumed to be responsible for processing the most information about the world, eyesight is the sense most associated with survival. Presumably, the evidence is that most people would give up limbs or tongue, ears or nose--though such choices are usually hypothetical--before they would cede sight. The problem with these formulations is that sight is imagined to be split off from the other senses, and from language... ("Words" 124) It is precisely this schism that Johanna Drucker's collective work addresses itself to, in the process constituting one of the most striking oeuvres in late twentieth century aesthetics. Drucker, who holds a Ph.D. from Berkeley, is currently Associate Professor of Art History at Yale University. For twenty-five years she has been writing, printing, and binding artists' books, many of them under the imprint of her own Druckwerk press, using both letterpress and offset production techniques. (The earliest of these is Dark, the Bat-Elf, from 1972, in an edition of 13 copies.) Her works place particular emphasis on typography, but their range is far greater than sheer formal experimentation; as Drucker herself writes in a recent article: The particular form of typographic poetics which formed the center of my work from the late 1970s was dedicated to exploring the non-linear potential of print form and to the power of visual material form to proliferate meaning within a semantic field through visual structure. But it was also bound up with issues of female identity, prose traditions, and the relations between fiction as a literary form and fiction as a cultural form--tabloids, pulp novels, and genre writing.... Though all of this work from the last two decades can now, in my own critical writing, be framed in terms which locate it within traditions and contemporary frameworks of Visual poetry and aesthetic innovation, it was originally conceived without that information and with a far more intuitive and unregulated sensibility. ("Experimental" 56) In addition to her book art, Drucker has also published several highly regarded critical studies, including The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923 (focusing on Dada, Russian and Italian Futurism, and Cubism); Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition (a collection of essays); The Alphabetic Labyrinth (a scholary history of the alphabet); and most recently, The Century of Artists' Books (a major study which has the potential for opening an entire field to critical inquiry). All of this work, critical and creative, has accumulated in a corpus which is, as Nick Piombino has put it, nothing less than "a conceptual framework for the relationship between the visual arts and the written arts" (55). Nowhere, I believe, is such a conceptual framework currently more needed than in the post-alphabetic writing spaces of electronic media--an area to which Drucker has, in fact, lately turned her attention. In this interview, which was conducted between Charlottesville and New Haven via electronic mail in March of 1997, I have attempted to frame my questions so as to provide as complete an overview as possible of Drucker's career, with particular emphasis on her recent interest in matters of the virtual. The text of the interview is accompanied by forty digital images of Drucker's work,* as well as a brief catalogue essay entitled "The Corona Palimpsest: Present Tensions of the Book." Johanna Drucker may be reached at johanna.drucker@yale.edu. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum University of Virginia mgk3k@virginia.edu ---------------------------------------------------- 1. MGK: I'd like to start with a very broad-based question, one apropos of this interview appearing in a special issue on "hypertext" in a journal that publishes only electronically. Your cumulative work as a writer, as a printer and a book-maker, and as a historian of visible language in all its forms suggests an intimacy with the printed word unlike that of any other contemporary artist or thinker I can name--and I say that not least because the nature of that intimacy has been so self-consciously scrutinized and explored by you throughout your career. Yet, your response to electronic media is clearly very different from, say, that of Sven Birkerts, a self-confessed bibliophile who regards the proliferation of new information technologies as a "Faustian pact" and who concludes his book The Gutenberg Elegies with the admonition to "Refuse it." So I'd like to ask you to talk about when and how you first began to see developments in electronic media as important to your other longstanding scholarly and creative interests. I also understand that you have a book in press called www.VisCult. Have you been spending much time on-line lately, and what are your thoughts on the phenomenon of the Web as a visual-verbal environment? JD: My sense of the Web and my reaction to it is fairly clear, so I can give you a straightforward answer to that question. The reason I don't have the same extreme response of "refusal" that someone like Birkerts has--or the same wild enthusiastic "embrace" that many others have--is that I see new technology in terms of continuities and disruptions. One thing which interests me is the way books and readers are being transformed by exposure to hypermedia. It has become, very quickly, a commonplace for my students to object to the claims of hypermedia by pointing out (unsolicited) that they can read a book, a newspaper, or a journal in a "hypertext" fashion. This was of course always true, but it's the sensitivity to that possibility which hypertext has given them. It's also interesting to consider ways in which various tropes of "bookness" will and won't (do and don't) find their counterparts in the electronic environment. Certain fundamental spatial and physical properties of the books which are essential to our reading/understanding are the finitude of the object--which orients us--and the punctum division of the page--exploited more in artists' books and commercial media than in the standard literary form. (Asked for an example of this physical orientation and its influence on reading, I offer the difference between the meaning ascribed to a sentence in a mystery/narrative when one is aware that there is 90 percent of the book still to come and that same sentence when the narrative has advanced to the point where there is a highly diminished volume of pages still to come.) In the "Corona Palimpsest" essay I wrote to accompany an exhibition of Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese's piece of that name, the issue of the mutual interaction of the two domains--literal books and electronic media--is stated in terms of a "current tension of the book" which "reflects the present tense of electronic media coming into being." Neither escapes transformation in the process. Nor should it. In my own experience, the Web is both useful and frustrating. A great source for information, research, and communication, it is very disorienting for me. I am attached to the spatial modes which print media offer as orientation. I despise the "scrolling screen" and the attempt to locate myself in a document by the position of the sidebar marker. As for surfing the web, I feel keenly aware that my dislike of the experience is directly linked to an "ethos" of time. The purely diversionary, time-consuming, open-endedness makes me crazy--and this, I know, is because I am attached to an equation in which time = labor = production. I can't let go of this enough to "enjoy" surfing, simply being "in" the experience of wandering through site after site. The potential of hypermedia to offer a newly shaped experience--one with spatial navigational coordinates--is terrific, and exciting, and satisfying to contemplate. But I want a bigger monitor and a better sense of the virtual physicality of that space in order to enjoy it. Ultimately I don't believe in techno-determinism. My conviction is that technology appears when there is already a predisposition to be receptive to it. The desire for more communicative modes, commercial outlets, interconnected nodes of individual existence, and the escapist but also eclectic and available aspects of the electronic environment--these all seem in part to have been "prepared for" in advance of the general receptivity with which the Net has been received. There is an inevitability to the way in which this will affect us and offer specific tools and functions--but we all know it won't solve social problems, won't liberate us from our bodies, and won't magically lift us out of linear time or patterns of thought. We still experience the world in a moment to moment sequence of events, and still read that way as well, for the most part. The "forms" which will emerge won't, I don't think, replace print media for a long time--we're too attached to the intimacy and convenience of portable books and magazines--but the electronic forms will and already are allowing the popular imagination to reinvent its relation to the received traditions of reading, writing, and imagining. Don't you think? One postscript: I would want to note that there are a few other people whose profiles as poets/writers parallel mine in their interest in visual poetry and its theoretical and historical dimensions--Steve McCaffery, as you know, is the most obvious one and he and I have a lot in common in that way. Others would include Susan Howe, the Australian Pete Spence, younger Canadian writers like Christian Bok and Darren Werschler-Henry, the late bpNichol, and the list could expand. My point isn't to try and give an exhaustive outline of all of these people--but to situate myself among a group of writers who have common interests so that my "uniqueness" such as it is, is qualified a bit by my own growing sense of a community of poets with shared concerns. The list of scholars is of course extensive also--as you know, so I won't even begin that. 2. MGK: We'll circle back around to electronic media, but I want to talk at some length about your writing and book art. You've said, "The original inspiration for exploring the potential of language as a material form came from the experience of 'holding language in my hands'--lines of letterpress type shaped in a composing stick whose weight and presence were as much physical as linguistic--and from looking at language in the world" ("Experimental" 55). And indeed, much of your earliest letterpress work, such as From A to Z (1977)--which was the outcome of an attempt to "use each and every piece of type in the forty-odd draws and use them once and only once and make a text which made sense" ("Chronology")--directly confronted the material constraints of the medium. You've also said that for a long time, you simply thought of yourself as "a writer whose interest in typograpy, printing, and experimentation made my work impossible for anybody but myself to publish" (Century ix). But in 1980 you entered Berkeley's graduate program in Visual Studies and began reading critical theory. So who was important to you, and how did reading someone like Derrida, say, impact the earlier phenomenological premises of your printing and writing? JD: Entering the graduate program at Berkeley didn't alter my basic conviction that my way of working with letterpress (and later, offset and computer generated typography and images) made it impossible for someone else to publish--or at least print--my book projects (for technical reasons), but it did provide theoretical, critical, and historical material on which to further develop those projects. Against Fiction, for instance, took its title from the work of Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, a book I encountered by stumbling into his class in my first year at school. But Feyerabend didn't exert much influence on me--I got to philosophy through French theory, as you suggest. The result of this exposure was twofold: I was able to conceptualize my work through those newly acquired theoretical ideas and I was able to understand some of the conceptual premises which had been latent in my earlier work. Derrida's work provided insight into mark-making, the concept of the "trace," in its pedestrian, actualized sense as well as in the more arcane philosophical domain. Lines, letters, and signs had been a major component of the visual art work I had done in the 1970s, so that theories of signification resonated profoundly for me. But I had very little immediate use for Derrida in terms of my creative projects. He was clearly disinterested in the more mundane aspects of writing as material and of the history of its visual forms--which were central to my various projects. That disinterest, however, became a point against which certain of my texts were written (Through Light and the Alphabet and The Word Made Flesh in particular). I thought, perhaps naively, that I could mount a refutation-through-demonstration in such projects--at least a counter-position in which materiality was pried loose from the slipping change of signifiers. I didn't expect this work would really have much effect on critical theory--though I did once send a copy of Against Fiction to Fredric Jameson (he never replied). The critical mix to which I was exposed between 1980 and 1986 was mainly dished up to me by my mentor in the French Department, Bertand Augst, a largely unpublished but terrifically inspiring teacher. Through him I was introduced to the full spectrum of critical theory--Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roman Jakobson, Gerard Genette, and so on. I eschewed feminist theory for a long time--it wasn't until towards the end of my graduate career that I became interested in French and British feminism and the work of Julia Kristeva. I had tended to think of feminist theory as something akin to a theory disabilities act--a compensatory discourse designed to help the inadequate to deal with their limitations. Having initially believed that "writing could save me from being a woman" ("Writing with Respect to Gender," opening line), I had, not surprisingly, come to believe that theory could do the same. I think women in academia in the 1980s were intent on proving they could "do theory with the boys" as a way of asserting their intellectual credentials. Though I became well-steeped in the lineage of structuralist theory from Russian Formalism to French Deconstruction and Post-Structuralism, I didn't have a strong sense of cultural theory and Marxist critical theory until after grad school. Signification was for me a largely ahistorical issue, not exactly outside of culture, but never linked to it in specific ways at that point--ironic to me since now what I am most interested in considering is the way visual art and writing function as cultural practices. It's odd to me to consider my earlier work as "phenomenological," though I can see how that makes sense in terms of the belief in materiality and its capacity to "be" as well as "mean." In other ways I feel there was a strong systemic and structuralist bias to the pieces which emerged from the typecase--as if in some desperate attempt to wring "parole" free from the "langue" of normative discourse. There was certainly never much sense of essence or transcendence in my work, even if it was grounded in an encounter with material or the letterpress medium. Even now, for instance, as I am beginning work on a new printing project which is generated directly out of a lead font (unused, fresh from a foundry about twenty years ago, but still pristine), I don't see myself trying to get at its essential properties but rather, see the project as exploring the tension between that which can be generated from from its finite set and the language which strains at those limits. · · · · · · · · · · Follow-Up 3. MGK: On the Buffalo Poetics list a few months ago, Ron Silliman commented that in San Francisco in the seventies there was something of a split between people writing in ways that became identifiable as language poetry, and artists and writers working in mixed media forms--visible/concrete poetries, or else sound or performance-oriented work. I was wondering what your own recollections and impressions of this period are. You spent much of the seventies and part of the eighties in the Bay area; you also worked as a typesetter at the West Coast Print Center from 1975-77 where you came into contact with poets from a variety of traditions. From A to Z documents some of your ambivalence toward this scene; for example, you record the spoken or unspoken challenge to your activities at the Print Center with a background in the visual arts rather than poetry: "How can you even presume to without knowing the tradition." And your response: "Quick, tell me the differences among Olson, Williams & Pound." How did such confrontations with "the tradition" affect your own development as a writer in these settings? Likewise, you've described another early book, Fragile (1977), as "one of many struggles for recognition from the mainly male poetry community" ("Chronology"). Could you expand on that statement? JD: Well, the history of the San Francisco scene is deserving of a good old fashioned scathing roman a cléf--and I may yet write it! Certainly all of our memories of that era are different and highly subjective. When I first met Ron Silliman (through Barrett Watten) in 1975 or 1976, I was fairly uninformed about the traditions of modern poetry--and what I did know was French symbolism, Dada, and Surrealism, not the Anglo-American tradition. From my point of view, the Language poets (not even yet quite wearing that label, still trying it on, as it were) affirmed for me that what I was already doing with my writing was in fact part of something, could be, and that it was legitimate. I had been isolated as a writer, thinking of myself as someone doing highly figured, dense prose. That's still how I think of myself--whether the work is rendered typographically or not, though of course different issues arise in the typo-pieces (or "typopoesis" as my friend, designer Gino Lee, says). As far as I remember, there weren't any other poets doing visual or "concrete" work (I've never connected myself with that term since it seems historically specific to me and refers to Brazilian and German/Swiss poets in particular)--I wonder who he is thinking of. There was plenty of performance, video, and conceptual art going on, and a fine print and newly burgeoning artists' book scene. I always felt distinctly singled out for exclusion--especially from anthologies and magazines--on account of the visual dimension of my work. But in terms of readings, social life, and a sense of being part of the conversation, between 1975 and 1977 I felt very much involved. Then I left the Bay Area for two years to go to Europe. On the way, I stopped in New York for a book fair, met Charles Bernstein, Susan Bee, Abby Child, Bruce Andrews, Paul Zelevansky, Nick Piombino--and all in all found a far more enthusiastic reception among this group than I had ever found among my California peers. Their work was much closer in spirit to mine. Charles and Susan sometimes have suggested that it was just in the nature of the New York scene that there were already more crossovers among visual artists and poets and that my work didn't seem anomalous to them. By the time I went back to the Bay Area in 1979, the cliques and alliances had ossified, there were "poetry wars" raging, and I went to grad school instead of looking for a peer group among the poets. 4. MGK: On the first page of The Century of Artists' Books (1995) you state plainly, "In many ways it could be argued that the artist's book is the quintessential 20th-century artform" (1; emphasis in original). The volume that follows is essentially a substantiation of that assertion. Yet artists' books have not enjoyed a correspondingly broad public recognition. Marjorie Perloff, for example, in a recent essay entitled "Something is Happening, Mr. Jones," discusses the popularity of the National Gallery's Vermeer exhibition as example of the vitality of public interest in the arts. Now this is probably an unfair comparison, not least because of complex questions as to the assignation of cultural capital to an artist like Vermeer, but still, it seems reasonable to expect that the Dressing the Text exhibition of artists' books now touring the country will not draw the same magnitude of lines and crowds. So why is it that one still has to explain the concept of an "artist's book" to most people? Likewise, in The Visible Word (1994) you make a very specific argument about how the consolidation and ossification of critical narratives of the modernist avant garde served to discourage awareness of typographic expermentation in both the visual and the literary modernist traditions; can similar arguments account for most contemporary academic critics' limited awareness of artists' books? It occurs to me, for example, that the reception of Tom Phillips's A Humument, which is probably the best known artist's book, might make for an interesting case study. JD: The problems which artists' books face don't seem to be based so much in critical resistance (though there is a bit of that) as in the "demographics" of the form. What I mean is that artists' books are difficult to exhibit, haven't found their niche in either the artworld (can't show them in a case very successfully) or the literary world (often they are too pictorial). They are comparable to video as an emerging media, and video is finding its greatest success these days by integrating itself into sculpture and installation works. Some book sculptures--works which reference the book as an icon or cultural artifact--have found a similar point of receptivity, but they are almost all works which have ceased to function as books. The "bookness" of the book which artists' books attend to does raise a few critical issues. First, the familiar conventions of a book are often violated or ignored in a phenomenon I call the "no introduction" syndrome. With an object as conventional as a book, this is baffling to many first-time viewers. Second, books are time-based media. They unfold in sequence (fixed or not) over time, require a certain amount of attention, and can't be taken in in the "all at once glance" mode which we have come to believe is the correct way of viewing visual art. Electronic media suffer from the same problem--exhibiting a CD-ROM or hypertext work in a gallery simply induces frustration and resentment on the part of many viewers. So, there is a critical issue at the core here which has to do with the discrepancy between expectations brought to the experience of art and the actual encounter with an artist's book. Artists' books, like all books, both provide and require an intimate experience--which is hard to reconcile with public venues, mass audience, or display given their small scale, one-on-one format. I think this is an insurmountable problem, basically, but that it doesn't keep artists' books from finding an audience (small), a home (private and public collections) and critical recognition (growing). 5. MGK: You've written that "[t]he single, conservative constant of my work is that I always intend for language to have meaning. My interest is in extending the communicative potential of writing, not in eliminating or negating it. While my work tends to go against established conventions of appearance of type on a page this deviation is intended to call attention to the structure of those norms, as much as to subvert them." This seems absolutely essential to your concerns in a book such as Against Fiction (1983), which experiments with layout, fonts, and illustrations in order to dramatize the normally transparent homogeneity of the unmarked page. Likewise, in that book's first lines you seem to align conventional narrative with a "Gratifying hook INTO ATTENTION AND OBLIVION. AN OUTGROWN FORM, ADDICTIVE, SEDUCTIVE." Your own prose, semantically and syntactically difficult and complex, resists absorption, transparency, everything we associate with the sensation of "losing yourself in the book." This seems to align your work with the sort of "impermeable" writing delineated by Charles Bernstein in his "Artifiice of Absorption," as well as with some of the forms of "radical artifice" suggested by Marjorie Perloff in her book of that same name. But I wonder whether you ever find your self-described "conservative" investment in communication at odds with your affinities for more "radical" artifices. Also, as you know, novels were once widely condemned for corrupting their readers, especially when those readers were women who presumably couldn't understand the difference between fiction and reality. The tabloid form of the headlines you use--"ADDICTIVE, SEDUCTIVE"--seems to play on that; how does the gendered history of the "rise of the novel" affect your own attitudes toward writing fiction and narrative prose? JD: Ultimately, after all, my work is prose-bound, prose-driven, prose-fed, and prose in its form. My sources were 19th and 20th century literature, novels, fiction, prose accounts and their mass media counterparts in film, television, and the photo-roman. I love fiction, find it addictive, won't let myself read it during the day, and keep thinking that I will, ultimately, manage to write those long fiction books which I dreamed of in my youth. In fact, as a very young writer--throughout my teens--I did write long fictional narratives with star-crossed lovers, long-lost relatives, and obscure parentage. I don't read the contemporary versions of these things--the Jacqueline Susann stuff is just too badly written to engage my imagination--but I do go back to a Trollope or an Austen from time to time with great gratitude and read lots of contemporary genre fiction, particularly mysteries. But this is all beside the point--which is, that having grown up believing I would indeed write such works, I matured into the very same group of Language poets mentioned above, only to find that as much as they disdained prose, they were virulent prohibitionists when it came to fiction. My addiction notwithstanding, I had the realization that fictional narrative was totally unacceptable within the emerging literary formations with which I was then identifying. Now I'm not so sure--my belief in "high" literature is somewhat tempered--I think it's important, but not the only thing which is viable or useful or even legitimate. The conservatism of meaning to which I refer, however, has another aspect to it. There is a considerable amount of typographic work which is "experimental" in nature (mainly that means not aligned in straight rows!) which does not have an allegiance to linguistic meaning. It is, in that sense, about visual materiality as a means of creating effect or experience--the "phenomenal"--but can in no sense be "read." That sort of production always seemed gratuitous to me--since my engagement was with linguistic form, its limits and mutations, potential and transformation--not with leaving it behind. In that sense I would have to say that I do, absolutely, conform to the idea of "radical artifice" which Marjorie Perloff outlines. My conservatism is not so much in the form which communication takes, as in preserving communication as the fundamental function of linguistic texts. The paradox, as per my above statements, is that as a reader I am drawn to the "easy vehicle" of normative prose and as a writer I am continually tripped up in my attempt to write such prose by the thick, clotting effects of language as it condenses into compelling figurative prose. I love that density in other writers. A friend of mine, Marisa Januzzi, gave me a copy of Mina Loy's Insel about a year ago, and I was in absolute heaven feeling a close affinity with Loy's textual strategies. I do have a moral proscription against writing normative prose--I can't seem to let myself--though one critic/poet/friend once said she couldn't believe I would characterize my entire own ouevre as a mere effect of language disorder which blocked my basic desire to write pulp. Well, nor could I, but these moral imperatives are not outside the realm of what determines the form of my work. And I do keep trying to write those long prose novels -- both the normative and the "impermeable." 6. MGK: You've also said of Against Fiction that "The text recorded a five year struggle with the desire to write fiction and the sense of its impossibility in contemporary literary contexts." Could you expand on what you meant by that? Also, in a short piece entitled "Final Fiction" published in Temblor in 1986, you state: "On one level writing is always the thing in itself meeting the challenge of too many religious and radio revelations" (78). You seem to be suggesting that writing is a struggle against the homogenization of language, no? Let me also quote a paragraph from near the beginning of this piece, because it seems relevant and because it's good fun: On the sidewalk a colony of newborns swarmed through the layers of debris. Their birth was a demonstration. Radical virtues pass intact through the hand to hand combat of mating. A spontaneous generation of spiders arose from the raw cheese. Every favorite substance was honored for at least a moment by the tentative groping of the newborn breed. Burst free from their little egg cells they hot-footed their hairy way across the fresh surface in an ecstasy of exploration. Their joy at finding themselves able to make movements resulted in a fanatical tracing of a maze of finely stepped lines into the soft substance. Clever little devils. They hardly knew themselves what they wrote, except that it sure wasn't fiction. (75) JD: "Final Fiction" was written out of scraps left over from Against Fiction. Which is to say, that Against Fiction had arisen out of an accumulation of snippets and scraps written over a five year period in which I was trying to let myself write the fictional narratives which I was simultaneously editing out of existence. One little aborted novel after another. In shaping the text, I aligned the scraps according to their affinity with each other, thematically speaking (thus the subtitle, "Organized Affinities"--a play on Goethe, obviously, and structural rather than romantic). The finished manuscript was several hundred pages of unreadably dense, grey, prose. So I struggled with a format for it, came up with the progressive geometry of the Against Fiction pages and signatures, and proceeded to typeset and print it (about 800 hours worth of work, casually estimated). In the process, much of the prose was transformed--cooked down, reduced, to make it as dense as possible. There is still quite a bit of abstract, non-referential, meandering language in Against Fiction, but I was working towards the figurative density which shows up in that section of "Final Fiction" which you quoted. You can see, clearly, the evidence of critical theory in that work--the play set up between the marks made by the spiders and the assignation of meaning to them as "writing." My fascination with the alphabet, with the pleasure of mark-making, with the contrast between motivated and arbitrary signs -- all of those show up in that passage. At the same time, the other phrase you cite demonstrates the never very hidden interest I have in tabloid and mass culture. Marjorie Perloff, in a recent review of my work, said she felt that the conspicuous recycling of the language(s) in my prose seemed to indicate my desire to wrest linguistic significance back from its banalization in mass media. I think that's true--and I don't think that that's in contradiction to the fact that I love the junk food brain fix of soap operas, tabloids, and made for tv mini-series. Quite the contrary, it's the fact that these forms work, that I do find them seductive, which fascinates me--I don't have critical disdain for them. I'm their ideal viewer, totally identified and immersed, inhabiting those cliches. It's just that in my work the cliches come out inverted, in some recombinant prose in which the mutation is neither parodic nor pastiched, rather, a marbled effect of compression, condensation, and displacement. The challenge is to preserve the imaginative interior life--and with it some illusion or actuality of subjective agency--or at the very least, to provide a contemporary linguistic experience which is both of and distinct from that which the media matrix provides. 7. MGK: The Word Made Flesh (1989) is one of your best known letterpress works, and it demonstrates many of your most characteristic gestures: suggesting meaning through the spatial proximity and orientation of words and letter-forms as well as using visual cues like point sizes, colors, and fonts to encourage non-linear reading practices. Each page (except the very first) is dominated by a single broad, dense, almost corpulent black letter-form--progressing sequentially through the book, we realize they combine to spell the title phrase--around which other linguistic units gather and accumulate, these arrangements becoming more complex the deeper we move into the book. After the fifth opening, the visual field of the page becomes further complicated by the addition of a matrix of evenly spaced red letters which constitute their own distinct--though not disconnected--textual event. The volume as a whole is prefaced with the phrase a l'interieur de/u la langue/age, but in all of this I find a work concerned with the psychology of reading as much as with the psychology of the word. Do you have any interest in cognitive approaches to spatial form and pattern recognition, and their application to our biological--embodied--processing of visual information, such as textual forms? This sort of thing also seems very relevant to your interest in a thinker such as Wittgenstein and the relationship between visual or linguistic signs and "the real," if real here is understood in terms of the embodied mind's operations on language--Wittgenstein himself being influential to certain branches of cognitive science. JD: I'm afraid my answer to the question of cognitive science and approaches to spatial form and pattern recognition will disappoint you--I just don't know that material at all, though I am interested. So maybe you can send on a bit of a "starter" reading list for me. It tailors into my current concerns--which, in fact, emerged in part from the Wittgenstein's Gallery piece, as you may or may not know. That piece exists only as a set of drawings/works on paper (on slides too) and a text. I've exhibited it, but not published it, which is fine since it was rather preliminary in certain ways. But as far as I understand what you are getting at, here's the common point of departure: I was interested in Wittgenstein's Gallery in a "Visual Investigations" which might have parallels with his philosophical ones. According to what conventions of pictorial form do we process visual experience as knowledge and in so doing, show both the limits of the conventions to accomodate the experiential and the conceptual while also gaining insights into the nature of conventions themselves. Because pictorial conventions are so much more fluid, mutable, and less available to a systematic structural analysis than linguistic ones, this is a different kind of problem. So I made my problem set out of thinking through the mis-match between conventions in syntax/grammar/language and visual form. A concrete example, for instance, was to take the concept of spatial relations indicated by prepositions and think about ways in which these can be indicated in visual, diagrammatic terms. Which they can and can't--that is, the images which show "in" or "between" might also show all kinds of other things incidentally as part of the process--images don't delimit their domain of signification as neatly as words and we are all too familiar with ways in which words are already problematic in that realm. So, between that Wittgenstein's Gallery project and my current interest in AI and logic, visual analysis, machine vision, etc. I have become more curious about whether one could begin to articulate the conceptual parameters according to which a model of artificial vision could be structured. This is what I call my "beyond David Marr" project. I'm sure there's tons of recent work in this area, but David Marr's posthumously published keywork in this field hit certain conceptual impasses in trying to make the leap the ways perceived visual data can be analysed and the intellectual frameworks which are used to make cognitive sense of this data. But I have a feeling this is a long way from where you were wanting to go with the question about The Word Made Flesh. When I made that book, in 1988-89, I wasn't thinking at all about AI, though I did do the Wittgenstein's Gallery project the same spring. I was just seduced by those huge, beautiful wood letters which spell out the title, and wanted to make something with them, and of course, make a text in which materiality was the referent as well as the conspicuous formal property of the piece. It was my "no transcendence" work. The plane of reference is supposed to be collapsed with the plane of discourse. Though, of course, it can't be. 8. MGK: Simulant Portrait (1990) is the auto/bio/monography of Sim-one, the prototype of a phylum of artificial life known as the "Sims." It is a portrait of, in the words of Sim-one's biographer--who is one of several textualized presences embodied by the book--"an unlived life...versions of a life she thought she'd lived, written out by herself, almost." Or, "a life lived as information," as the book has it elsewhere, for unlike the Generics before them, Sims are possessed of a personal memory and identity. To what extent was your work in this book influenced by the "ironic political myth" of Donna Haraway's now-famous "Cyborg Manifesto"? Were there specific interventions in feminist/cyborg theory that you were attempting to make? You also play with notions of documentation and the construction of historical records, themes which have been in your work since Twenty-Six '76 Let Hers (1976) and From A to Z. In Simulant Portrait, you write: And the blank space of the past, from which she had been, of course, conspicuously absent, reverberated with the strange insertion of her consciousness into its strictures and orthodoxies. That was what we had not counted on--that of course the entire of history would change, reorganize, shift with the domino effect of copy in the file suffering the entry of new material on its early pages. Alignments altered radically. The paper clips and rubber bands fell from the files. Her literal body burst into view. The metaphors of weave, texture, warp and woof all strained to the limits and finally dispersed. But this passage, which seems to want to be read as a moment of embodied presence trumping différance, also speaks to the artifact of actual book itself, for despite all of the text's commitment to partiality and fragmentation in its representational strategies (both narratively and graphically), we are ultimately left with a cohesive material object in our hands, no? JD: The odd thing is that I didn't know anything about Donna Haraway when I came up with my Simulant project--in fact, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women has a publication date of 1991, a year after I had published Simulant Portrait--and when I heard about it and her work, I sent her a copy of my book. So, there is no influence at all of Haraway in this book; instead, I think there may be certain issues in feminist theory which were common points of reference. I remember my major feminist litany at that point was "how to become subjects of our own discourse, of our own desire?" The centrality of both language and sexuality in that question was brought on by my at that point raging rejection of Lacanian psychoanalysis in its formulation of the "feminine." Having bought into it wholesale in the late 1980s, I was interested when a number of women students began to look at me like I was from another planet as I explained the concept of "lack" to them--and the organization of sexual identity in relation to that silly "phallus" which is always and never exactly what it is. So, Simulant came out of feminist theory and art, not out of cyborg theory--which I didn't know much about. Like The History of the/my Wor(l)d, Simulant is very much about the place of the female subject in history and the capacity of women to find/make their own personal histories as well as to be part of History in the broader sense. As for blank spaces and text, fragmentation and archives, history and books--there is another odd background element here. I had been working at the time on my (still languishing) biography of Ilia Zdanevich, or Iliazd. That project had been extremely satisfying from the point of view of research process. I had met Hélène Zdanevich and in working with her on the biography we took as our point of departure a set of sheets which had served as the basis of a chronology. Comprised of a list of short statements such as "March 10-14--went to Venice," these sheets led us back into an elaborate archive of materials on Iliazd's books, personal life, research projects, and intellectual activity. A single line might lead to a whole journal, a packet of letters, a railway ticket, or any of almost infinitely varied items in the boxes Hélène had in Iliazd's studio. Given my propensity for fetishizing the documentary nature of archives, this was pure pleasure to me--unlike the made-up documents of the A to Z project--which, after all, I had invented because I was so envious of Alastair Johnston's archival work on his book on the Auerhahn Press. In working on Iliazd, I became interested in the tension between archival documents and synthetic, descriptive prose text. Simulant is a hybrid--part pseudo-document, part-syntho-prose, and stopped short of archival miscellany production. I was also inspired by the work of Dennis Wheatley--who made documentary mysteries in the 1930s--stories told entirely through a collection of papers which were printed to resemble (or actually be) the "documents in the case." Reading through the portfolio, one assembled the clues. Though bound within paper wrappers, his work has always served as an exemplary model of the hypertext archive in my mind. In principle, there is no fixed limit--one can continually expand the file by tracing out a character's life history, idiosyncracies, or any of a number of other narrative or non-narrative threads of connection from the basic story. But the fetish-y quality of this production seemed too cute to me for Simulant, too contrived, so I settled on this middle ground of discrete texts within a related mode of production. But the boundedness of the book--the finitude of the object--there's another issue. In a one-of-a-kind project I did in 1984-85, Mind Massage (which also has sci-fi themes), references within the main book text gave rise to a group of other book objects. So, a character's reference to a story would be linked to an actual book in the same box, a secondary text, which the reader could choose to read at any point. All the bits fit into a single box container, but weren't bound into a single book. The hypertext aspect is pretty obvious, though of course in 1984 that wasn't exactly a current term. To me a book is defined by its boundedness and finitude; against these limits the fragment gains its identity and definition, but I find the potential of linkage highly useful. · · · · · · · · · · Follow-Up 9. MGK: In The History of the/my Wor(l)d (1990), which counterbalances an almost overbearingly grand, sweeping historical narrative with a more intimate text, some of your longstanding concerns with the discrepancies between public and private experience, history and autobiography, and the relationship between writing and reality come together. The book communicates through three distinct planes of referentiality (text, images, and conspicuous diacritical markings), all of which are mutually expressive of and responsive to one another; and, as in many of your books, color coding, font sizes and proportions, and the spatial proximities (and disjunctions) of words, images, and icons all likewise carry information about the text's topology. Marjorie Perloff has also noted that this book represents your first foray into collage--its images were "found" at Harvard's Bow and Arrow Press where it was printed ("Herstory" 54). The subtlety and richness of your design work on every page here seems like a good opportunity to ask you to open a window onto some of your compositional practices. I'm not asking you to adjudicate among possible meanings or interpretations; rather, I'm interested in your remarks on some of the design decisions you self-consciously made in laying out and printing the book. Perhaps we could do this through close attention to the visual dynamics of one or two particular openings. JD: The visual structure of History is meant to parallel the verbal text, usually acting utterly independently of two large narratives in red and black. The premise on which I began was that I would simply arrange the images as they came to hand from boxes of found cuts at the Bow and Arrow Press where I was working (thanks to the largesse of Gino Lee and Jim Barondess). I would write the "history" which was suggested by the images. I didn't do this, in fact, but did much rearranging of visual components to create visual puns and resonances on the pages. Sometimes there are obscure jokes in the visuals--as in the very first opening where the bowling ball colliding with a pin is to suggest the "big bang" theory of the origin of the universe in an irreverent counterpoint to the already undermined-by-parody lines of Genesis which open the book. The second opening is a good example of the visual play in the book: I decided to use the image which looks like a Sunday school book illustration to anchor the captions in my own family history ("a brother or [and] two sisters"). To amplify the workshop feel, I put the hammer next to it, punning with "labor" in the caption and the depiction of carpentry. To forge a visual alliance, I put the eyedropper on the right page into diagonal alignment with the hammer, but the decision to use the dropper had been suggested by the drop-like shape suspended above the mysterious bit of machinery in the center of the page. These rhyme well with the "waters" of the large black text. The horseshoe crab was a natural match, reiterating both the shape of the "drop" globe and the idea of marine life and water. It sits right at the base of the triangle formed by the hammer and dropper--thus activating the whole opening across these diagonal connections. The diacritical marks fill out the page, defining the full space, mass, volume of the active area and also, in the case of the dropper and hammer, give them a stability through the use of a vertical axis. They're subtle, the diacritics, but they provide structure without adding too much content to the pages. Sometimes the connections among images are obvious--in the next opening all images are "batons"--the arrow, wand, or long pipe. In some cases it's the literal content which puns--as in the opening where the large red telescope is aimed at the tunnel in the earth into which two men are peering with surveying equipment. Often it's just a matter of echoing shapes--as in the opening beginning "a virus of civility..." where the open penknife echoes the fretwork of the cranes and the spindly diagrammatic image of the townscape. In every case, my intention was to let the images create their own relations, complement each other, and give each other an identity or emphasis through the contrast or interconnection. This is particularly true in the next to last opening where, for instance, there is a pair of women figures--one a classical nude and the other a burlesque looking figure with a rolling pin. The closeness in size and level of detail made them a perfect match. Likewise, the idea of progressing from the tiny tiny buffalo on the top of the right hand page (captioned as "Plankton") to the huge trout-like fish at the bottom simply took advantage of the scale of the found cuts to make a visual joke. The images are a separate level of discourse, however, and function through their links to each other and through inflections of the captions, rather than as illustrations in the conventional sense. There is no a priori sense of a signified or referential field to which they must adhere--they come into the book as self-sufficient elements, primary, not secondary, with respect to the whole. 10. MGK: Narratology (1994) is one of your most recent and most ambitious books. On one of its first pages, you "define" narratology as "[t]he stories according to which the possibilities of living a life gained access to the psychic theater staging the imaginary events as real." The book itself is a compendium of visual and linguistic riffs on different flavors of genre fiction (historical romance, sweet romance, science fiction, horror, adventure, glitz, etc.), all presented on pages of varying sizes and placement, so that "the revelation of the text elements ... occur through covering/uncovering portions of a page in turn" ("Dilemmas" 12). (All of this, from the title on down, strikes me as a send-up of orthodox structuralism.) You also note that the edition of 70 copies (each of which includes twenty-five drawings water-colored by hand) required 1000 hours of work, distributed over three years (exclusive of the actual writing). In commenting on the book, you've written, And then I realized that the narratives according to which I believed my life would be lived had come from genre fiction. Genre fiction--books with attractive covers, embossed, foil stamped, and bearing vivid images. Available in supermarkets, airline terminals, train stations, malls. Except that I had never been allowed to read any. Allowed by whom? By myself of course.... I felt a strong taboo against reading them. I mean they were bad, bad literature. ("Dilemmas" 16) All of this also seems very relevant to your earlier comments on your own prose style and your attempt to resist and/or reveal the homogenization and commodification of language in the media's sphere: > ... I love the junk food brain fix of soap operas, > tabloids, and made for tv mini-series. Quite the > contrary, it's the fact that these forms work, that > I do find them seductive, which fascinates me--I > don't have critical disdain for them. I'm their > ideal viewer, totally identified and immersed, > inhabiting those cliches. It's just that in my work > the cliches come out inverted, in some recombinant > prose in which the mutation is neither parodic nor > pastiched, rather, a marbled effect of compression, > condensation, and displacement. The challenge is to > preserve the imaginative interior life--and with it > some illusion or actuality of subjective agency--or > at the very least, to provide a contemporary > linguistic experience which is both of and distinct > from the media matrix. But let me reduce my meanderings here to something you'll hopefully be able to take off from: in Narratology and other work, you seem to be inverting the fundamental tenants of metafiction--it's not that all the stories have been exhausted and so the only possibility we are left with is to write about the impossibility of reading and writing, but rather that the stories have exhausted our own capacity for expression so one must write through them in order to reclaim a language with which to communicate. Would you agree with that, and if so, why is it that the "high postmodernism" which metafiction exemplifies (and I'm thinking of writers like Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, Cortezar) is not compelling to you, at least in your creative undertakings? JD: It's true that I have less affinity for the self-conscious tropes of "high postmodernism" than I might--but that is for a combination of reasons. One's own self-perception is always a point of departure for encountering any work in the world, and though the arena I was operating in was miniscule (if it can be called an arena at all) when I produced From A to Z in 1977, I felt resentful of the attention paid in the mainstream to works whose contrivances seemed more obvious and less complex or dense than my own. This was adolescent hubris, obviously, combined with an absence of any sense of reality. At this point, I'm much more sympathetic and curious when it comes to someone like Cortezar. But the crucial point of difference is, as you clearly point out, that the metafictional self-consciousness of writing about writing which is fundamental to much of what constitutes the paradigm of postmodern fiction was not aligned with my approach. I had a different set of questions, I think, having inhabited the fictions of classic 18th and 19th century form, having lived in them and been formed by them. It was getting to this issue which motivated the continual return to the narrative, to the sense of the ways expectations about and responses to the actuality of unfolding events in my own experience could be processed according to those already in place patterns. This segues into the next question, obviously. The issue of form, however, is what is in focus here--and the ways in which certain rhetorical devices--what in Genette's terms would be called "discourse markers" or features of discursive form, became subject matter in postmodernism; my own formal interests were with the rhetoric of narrative, I think, though the discursive was certainly a topic of investigation in typographic format. The "how" of the construction was something I addressed more at the level of the book's arrangement of elements, structures, layout than inscribed in the text. You'll notice in From A to Z that a number of the parodic texts take the "this is being written as I write it" as a point of departure. The self-conscious attention to process as subject matter had become so banal in the late 1970s, especially among some of the writers I was close to, that it didn't have much imaginative appeal. It seemed like a major "so what?" at that point. I think I was never really interested in the kind of distancing which such work produces (or aims at), as I was in engagement. 11. MGK: I'd like to push you a bit on the relationship between "lived experience" and its representation in written forms of language. This is a concern that seems to span the range of your work, from the bicentennial Twenty-Six '76 Let Her's--your earliest typographically experimental book, which is your cryptic account of a four-day visit to Los Angeles--on up through Narratology. You've written on the theoretical underpinnings of lived experience in the context of this latter work: Sometime in the last couple of years, critical theory embraced the concept of "lived experience." This was intended as a guerilla action to upstage theory, to challenge the concepts of "the mediated," "constructed," and "semiotic" models of experience (and representation) which had become the evil dominatrices and terminators of academic writing. This assertion of the Lived was that it was real, direct, available--and more authentic than all this structuralist, poststructuralist, and deconstructive blah-blah. ("Dilemmas" 12) With regard to the writing of Narratology, you go on to say: "It didn't work. There was no real in all this; all the referents slipped away as fast in this rendering as in any other" ("Dilemmas" 14). In The Current Line (1996), you're even more succinct: "Experience never had a chance against language." On the other hand, in a book like Through Light and the Alphabet (1986), you begin with this: "All our conversations were in language and according to conventions others could be party to, but this one took off on its own trajectory to mind the business being left out of the accounts. The world was too amorphous for repose inside of sweet articulation." So are these differing accounts of the relationship between language and (lived) experience contradictions that you've deliberately sustained throughout your work, or do they reflect changing points of view? JD: There are two aspects to the notion of the "lived" as I currently understand it. One, which is the more prevalent, is the assertion of a base of experience as a base of authority. This is a political assertion which is extremely problematic since it assumes a fully conscious, self-constituting subject rather than a socially constituted position of subjectivity. The subject of the "lived" seems to exist outside of any psychoanalytic model, to take the experiential at face value, and to deny much of the work of fantasy, desire, drives--in fact, the entire apparatus of the unconscious. Nonetheless, as a place from which to challenge the authority of the elite culture which produced a theoretical discourse of subjectivity which, by its jargoned turgidity and textual opacity, excluded many people, it made sense. When I set myself the problem of "looking for the lived" I quickly realized that it couldn't be separated out from the fantasmatic. That for me at least, the sense of what constitutes experience is so bound up in the effects of the psyche upon its production that there was no independent base of "lived" experience. That is of course the premise of Narratology as cited in your question above. The tension between the positions of lived vs. constructed are nicely outlined in terms of historical debates in Great Britain in the introduction to Victor Burgin's new book, In Different Places--where he traces the emergence and dialogue of what he calls "culturalists" (advocates of the lived) and "structuralists" (those of the constructed). But the second notion of the lived is grounded in a more fundamental conviction I have about the relation between various aspects of perception and the strictures of systematic representation. This relation is most evidently conflicted in the contrast between visual experience and linguistic form. There are many ways in which we process visual data which have no linguistic correlate--from the perception of highly nuanced modulations of color to the process by which we recognize a familiar form, person, space, place though the tiniest of visual clues. A strict adherent to language as the primary mode of mental activity (sorting, typing, cataloguing, organizing etc. our perceptions into meaningful thought) would of course assert that what is happening is that a translation is being made. I know absolutely this isn't true, and that much of what I experience exists outside of language. I won't say outside of culture, because the whole way in which we hierarchize info to survive, the way we establish what is to be perceived, is so culturally coded that it would seem pointless to make such an assertion. But those cultural codes are not so highly articulated or evident in some domains as they are in others. I would never argue that the "visual" is unregulated, but I would say its regimes of ordering are distinct from those of language. This is the "world" which is "too amorphous for repose inside of sweet articulation." Obviously I am always battling this--even in myself--and thus the counter-remark in The Current Line about "[e]xperience never having had a chance against language" which comes down so strongly on the side of condemning the cultural hegemony for its eliminative, coercive, controlling strictures. 12. MGK: I'd like to ask you about maps, and whether you take any interest in them as visual/verbal forms. I bring this up partly out of self-indulgence--maps fascinate me, though I have only an amateur's knowledge of cartography. But it seems to me that maps can very effectively demonstrate the fundamentals of visible language: words and letters are deployed to quite literally occupy space. I also notice that the relationship between textuality and cartography seems to be a minor but persistent theme in some of your work. I think of Bookscape (1986-8), which you've described as a reflection of "the postmodern object oriented architecture of Dallas," or else Otherspace (1992), which contains images of Martian maps and is subtitlted "Martian Ty/opography." Likewise, a book like The Word Made Flesh seems to me very cartographically oriented, at least in so far as it experiments with our sense of scale and uses arrangements of letter forms to create typographic contours on the page. Are you aware of any historical points of convergence between various technologies associated with cartography, writing, and printing? JD: It is the process of mapping spatial and temporal arrangements onto the structure of the book/page--rather than a literal engagement with maps--which has shown up in my work. At this moment I have a student--Tim McCormick--who is doing his senior project on the theme of landscape as a model for typographic legibility in electronic documents. He has been synthesizing materials on topographic modelling, print versions of maps, landscapes, and cityscape imagery, theories of intertextuality, and the "disorientation" problem which currently plagues hypermedia as the basis for a final project which will be a "panoramic" projection of the research in typographic format. The concept of a "horizon" as an organizing line from which other elements can be read coherently provides a framework for what, eventually, will be a spatialized domain of language. He's interested in the practical application of this idea, rather than using it to generate artistic or poetic expression. I find this exciting since it involves the integration of a visual logic, with all its analogue to optical experience and historical conventions, into new media. It's clear that the mobility through planes of representation-- the various cuts through an axonometric sequence (or even "planes" receding through a perspectivally constructed field)--is potentially greater in the electronic environment than in printed documents with their opacity, single plane surface, and fixed relations of elements within that surface. But the conceptualization of spatial relations--including, of course, a temporal axis within modular units -- is a very ready extension of the visual conventions with which we are long familiar. The first work in which I attempted to use typographic format to represent a spatial/temporal field was actually Twenty-Six '76--the book about my trip to Los Angeles with Jim Petrillo and Betsy Davids in 1976. The sequence of pages in that work are each, in a sense, supposed to be schematic diagrams of moments in time as projected onto a picture plane, then sequenced into the book as pages (planographic slices along a temporal plane). That work is so abstract and obscure that it may not read that way-- and there was no self-conscious attempt to make the pages "read" through/against each other as a whole since I did structure them each uniquely (though themes, motifs, etc. repeat). I am doing an issue of A-Bacus this fall and would like to revisit this idea in a new work. The apocryphal tale I sometimes tell, and you can believe it or not if you like, is that when I was six my parents took me on a trip to Europe with my older brother and younger sister. For three and a half months we travelled in Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, and then back (crossing the Atlantic in both directions by boat). When I returned to Philadelphia, my recollection is that I said to myself, "Thank god, I finally have something to write about." And then I wrote a five and a half page piece for the school newspaper, The Chatterbox, about the trip in which the distribution of text on the page matched my memory of the way the time of the trip had been distributed through the various geographical locations. While this may or may not be true, it has become a point of reference for me in terms of understanding the "space" of the page, text, and book as a structural form--and of my own self-consciousness about it. In the 1980s when I was doing my graduate work, I found my institutional home in the College of Environmental Design. I had already done quite a bit of travelling by then--and had written the book on Italy, with its poem on the Netherlands (Italy, The Figures, 1980), as well as the Greek book (unpublished), so I was well disposed towards reading about "place" and landscape in theoretical terms. When I spent a year in Paris in 1984-85 I began a letterpress project which was to integrate two experiences--that of getting to know the city and that of expanding my limited French in the context of linguistic immersion. This was a topographic piece--but I never finished it--someplace in a print shop near La Bastille there's a galley of undistributed type shoved way back into the dark corners of a galley cabinet. When I moved to Dallas I was struck by the unfamiliarity of the landscape--not just its seventies boom architecture and soulless mall sensibility. I found myself continually disoriented--as if the coordinate points shifted in relation to each other as well as to the perceiver as one moved through. This idea of a continual realignment of elements was what provided part of the inspiration for the Bookscape--though that work is also about the relations between the presumed closure of a book form and the openness of textual play. As for technologies, of course there are many points of convergence--probably most explicit in the elaborate engravings of the 17th and 18th centuries. I think of the work of Athanasius Kircher, for instance, with its exquisite articulation of the late medieval cosmological hierarchies struggling to accomodate the structures of modern thought. His literal and encyclopedic sensibility is satisfyingly organized even at the moment at which the belief that one could, in actuality, mirror the structure of the "world" in a representational system is already starting to be transformed by empiricism. The work of his (barely) contemporary, Bishop John Wilkins, provides the complement--his Essay on the Real Character being the outline of all knowledge in a kind of modern Aristotelianism. The contrast between the diagrammatic Wilkins and the pictorially structured Kircher is useful since it seems to have a contemporary analogue in AI research--the question which continues to intrigue us all being, of course, what are the relations between formal structures of representation and thought? If by technologies you mean something more literal, then, again, I think engraving (and manuscript) are the technological modes which most closely approach the electronic in the flexibility they accord to interactions between visual and verbal modes. Since in an engraving each letter is "drawn" and in a photoshop document each "word" can be treated as an image--these are closer in their ontological condition of production than they were in letterpress printing--where, of course, words and images are different orders in every respect--technologically and conceptually. In my limited experience of virtual spaces I have experienced some of the same kind of disorientation I experienced with the Dallas landscape--the sense that as one turns one's head one doesn't simply get a different view through elements fixed in space, but that the coordinates mapping the space realign along the perspectival axis of vision. This added change creates a sense of vertigo for me--I want to be able to distinguish between the experience of looking around in a stable space and that of remaking or creating space along a virtual sightline. 13. MGK: You've already talked some about the exhibition entitled Wittgenstein's Gallery, a series of some one hundred and twenty-five watercolor and ink images which "takes up Wittgenstein's investigation of the idiosyncratic character of language and its independence from the world by applying the same principles of investigation to the convention of visual images and their lack of relation to the 'real.'" Some of these same images also appear as illustrations in your most recent fiction, Dark Decade (1995). Is there a formal or critical connection between these two works? Dark Decade, for example is, a very acute critique of the current mediascape and the detachment of the language and images of the media from anything remotely recognizable as "real." Also, I notice that in your drawing and painting you have a tendency to depict people, human figures (I'm thinking of Against Fiction, Just As (1983), Narratology, and others, as well as Dark Decade); this seems to correspond on some level to your interests in autobiography, biography, and novelistic character. Are there specific conventions and techniques of visual representation--portraiture, the photo ID, the talking head--in which you're attempting to intervene in the same way that your writing and book-making intervenes in various linguistic and bibliographic conventions? JD: I think there is a bit of confusion here because in fact the images in Wittgenstein's Gallery are very different from those in Dark Decade or the other books you mention. They are often figurative, but far more simple, structured to prove certain points: a drawing of a coffee mug in several different modes/styles as a way to demonstrate the difficulty of putting emotional codes into graphic language; some diagrammatic drawings of interlocking blocks with arrows as an interrogation of prepositional relations in visual terms and so forth. The Dark Decade images, and the images in Against Fiction, Simulant Portrait (the only one with photographs), and Narratology are all figurative because they quote various genres or media: newspapers, wire service photos, women's magazine images, and pulp fiction illustrations respectively. So those images are self-consciously parodying and imitating such modes. I had produced drawings and paintings throughout the 1970s--I graduated art school in 1972, had a show in 1973, and went on to make drawings, pastels, oil paintings, and even an etching book--all in an "organic minimalist" sensibility. The book was done in Amsterdam, sold to various museums there, and found its way into a few American collections also, though I can't remember which ones--it's called Experience of the Medium. I pretty much stopped doing that work by the late 1980s--I couldn't see where it was going to go in the world, had become involved with academic life, and keeping up my creative writing practice was more important to me than drawing. I taught drawing for quite a few years there as well--and I lived it. But basically I find making visual art boring on account of the repetitive and time-consuming aspect while writing seems capable of synthesizing more information for me, letting me process anything through it. So, you're right that the images in the works you mention DO attempt the same kind of intervention as the texts--an appropriation and transformation of cliches, tropes, modes of production. 14. MGK: Most of your printing has been in letterpress, but you've also occasionally worked in offset in such books as Just As (1983), Simulant Portrait, and Otherspace. Originally a technique of mass production, you've written that offset artist's books "offer an alternative to the mainstream of mass media's hegemonic control over texts and images...offset extends an industrial process into the territory of fine art printing, calling into question the terms of finite production, especially the limited edition so central to that tradition" ("Work"). You've also interestingly characterized offset printing as a nostalgic activity, at least in relation to electronic media, for the process is essentially one of reconstituting stored text and image data in material form: "When electronic media give up their nostalgic need for life in material, then the mechanical processes of offset printing will lose their industrial function and perform some new metaphysical practices of smooth running in an aesthetic dream" ("Work"). Given that a PC with sofware such as Photoshop and Quark costs significantly less than offset equipment, does on-line electronic publishing promise anything of the above-mentioned "smooth running aesthetic dream"? What can small presses, 'zines, and individual writers and artists involved in on-line publishing learn from the history of offset and other alternative printing practices, mimeo/xerox for example? JD: I'm not sure I think of offset as nostalgic--the idea that there is a nostalgia for "life in material" is not a characteristic of that printing mode as much as an aspect of the current increased awareness of materiality which seems to derive as a response to the idea of a relatively immaterial electronic environment. Offset has always suffered in the print and book world from a dimished perception of its actual material specificity. Because it is seen primarily as a mode of reproduction rather than production, and because of its character as a planographic rather than relief mode of printing, it has tended to disappear rather than be granted any aesthetic quality or virtue. This of course has implications for the economic valuation of its products and one of the points I was emphasizing in "Work" was the effacement of the labor involved in the offset process. This is also a problem in electronic documents which are in many cases extremely time consuming to produce and yet do not net any clear return on that labor. While the Net and other venues for distribution of electronic documents will solve certain of the logistical problems which faced small press printers and publishers in the past (getting the product out to an interested audience), these won't resolve the economic dilemmas. Certainly production costs in terms of paper, printing, binding, and so forth are reduced, but not the actual work investment. Since most small press publisher/printers didn't make much money off their work anyway, this isn't a huge change, but it sets up a situation in which there will never be any inventory to sell off if and when it accrues value. Desktop publishing combines the tasks of what used to be an entire design and production team into the work of a single person--who can now be the writer, designer, layout person, camera person, and so forth. The problem is that so few people have the training to perform these jobs adequately that there are all kinds of aberrant things which happen. Not understanding production in a traditional darkroom environment can make an individual's electronic camerawork into something which can't really be printed effectively. WYSIWYG is an enormous fiction unless one is going directly to electronic output--and for publishing in any volume this is still not cost effective. You couldn't produce a New York Times Sunday Magazine using laser color printers--or even a small edition of a children's book. Once you get over fifty to a hundred copies, the time and money involved don't really pay off. The newest innovations in the printing industry are offset presses hooked directly to computer terminals--a Heidelberg press which produces four color copies within several impressions (thus approximating the paper use efficiency of a xerox machine). But for high volume offset is an industry standard likely to remain for quite some time. Most people using desktop publishing have never been introduced to the concept of designing from the production backwards--thinking about the output first instead of last. This is a conceptual problem, not just a production problem, since it determines the choices about the ways in which the design of a document evolves. 15. MGK: In The Visible Word, you distinguish between the marked and unmarked page: The basic distinction between marked and unmarked typography occured simultaneously with the invention of printing. Gutenberg printed two distinctly different kinds of documents, which embodied the characteristic features of what evolved into the two distinct traditions. On the one hand he printed bibles, with their perfectly uniform grey pages, their uninterrupted blocks of text, without headings or subheadings or any distraction beyond the occasional initial letter. These bibles are the archetype of the unmarked text, the text in which the words on the page "appear to speak for themselves" without the visible intervention of author or printer. Such a text appears to possess the authority which transcends the mere material presence of words on a page, ink impressions on parchment. By contrast, the Indulgences which he printed displayed the embryonic features of marked typography. Different sizes of type were used to hierarchize information, to create an order in the text so that different parts of it appear to "speak" differently, to address a reader whose presence was inscribed at the outset by an author in complicity with the graphic tools of a printer who recognized and utilized the capacity of typographic representation to manipulate the semantic value of the text through visual means. (94-5) This passage provides a historical underpinning for not only your own work, but also for the poetics of Steve McCaffery (who, with bp Nichol, articulated likeminded ideas in Rational Geomancy), as well Bernstein, Howe, and any number of other contemporary poets or artists who ground their work in principles of visual materiality. And, this recent activity is itself an extension or transformation of various Modernist projects, which in turn find roots in Mallarmé, or Blake, or Dickinson, or the medieval Book of Kells (depending on what genealogy one wishes to adopt). Now hypertexts theorists have recently begun making very similar distinctions with regard to electronic media; in The Electronic Word, for example, Richard Lanham writes, "The textual surface has become permanently bi-stable. We are always looking first AT it and then THROUGH it..." (5). In Lanham and elsewhere, the emphasis is on how the malleability of the medium reinforces the visible artifice of digital texts and images. Many of these observers of the new media, however, seem all too unaware of the long tradition in experimental poetics which has rigorously and fruitfully engaged these same issues of representation and signification (or if such work is acknowledged, it most commonly takes the form of references to early twentieth century figures such as Marinetti or Kenneth Burke). So do you think these various traditions of visual materiality will find a legacy in electronic media, and if so, how does being digital alter their practice? JD: One chapter of www.VisCult is titled "The Ontology of the Digital Image" and addresses the distinction I perceive between the roles of codes of materiality in traditional media and the encoding process which gives illusory/temporary material form in the digital environment. There is a moment in production in any media which we could call the moment of "transmigration of content"--I describe it in terms of the act by which a typesetter takes up a phrase to be set, carries it in her head, and then remakes it in a sequence of lead letters in the compositor's stick. Information is a part of each incarnation or embodiment--the material history of the artifact contributing to the way it is read (inscription in marble vs. graffiti). Though the sequence of material embodiments (various editions of a single work, for instance) is subject to the same kind of mutability to which an electronic document is subject, there is always a trace in material of the decisions, history, and effects of that material embodiment. The moment of "transmigration" may work as a filter, but it is effectively mooted by the fact the the text continues to be incarnated in one material form after another. By contrast the electronic document has no stable material identity, exists ultimately as a disembodied code, and thus bears no "information" within its material form. It's the loss of this (often considered incidental) information which distinguishes the electronic from the material document. Making the means of visual innovation and experiment available to a greater number of people than could have ever learned letterpress or other traditional technologies does seem to have the potential to explode the visual inventions (and conventions) according to which text will be disposed. Ignorance of the history of prior innovations won't be a likely hindrance. As I think I already mentioned to you, when I began setting visual work at the West Coast Print Center in the mid-1970s, Alastair Johnston started babbling to me about Mallarmé and I just stared at him blankly. As far as I was concerned, I was just doing what the type itself seemed to make possible--the idea that there were precedents for such activity seemed a lot less important than that there was a future for it. 16. MGK: I'd like to talk a little bit about contemporary experimental graphic design, a field which, it seems to me, is absolutely essential to our understanding of what's going on in electronic media. I would argue that the leading concern of avant garde graphic design today is to formalize a representation of print's communicative exhaustion. As a result, an entire digital aesthetic--or "look"--is being synthesized. Wired is perhaps the best known and least interesting example of this--but what do you think of the work of, say, David Carson, whose post-alphabetic layouts and fonts are criticized for "not communicating," even as Carson himself has migrated from alternative underground magazines like Beach Culture andRay Gun to designing (and presumably communicating) for the likes of Swatch and Pepsi, among others? Likewise, in The Visible Word, you write: "The use of graphics as the means to make and perpetuate the image of the corporation, and through it, the virtuous projection of themes of progress, industry, and capitalist consumption, was essential to the public fantasmatic notion of modern life. In that culture, images and signs circulate without relation to their mode of production, and they sign the existence of a spectacle designed expressly for consumption, not productive necessity, but its surplus. Graphic design is not only the sign par excellence of that surplus, but is the very site in which it comes into being and is itself consumed as spectacle through the formal mechanics of display" (241-2). Is there any room for graphic design as an oppositional practice, and if so, who's doing that work today? JD: Contemporary graphic design's self-conscious display of "non-communicative" and "post-alphabetic" aesthetics has to be understood in large part in relation to the site of graphic design in the culture: it is, after all, the spectacular display kickwheel to the consumer-based economy of super-surplus in which first world designers work. So when I look at Wired or Carson, what I am struck by is the way in which motifs of old counter-culture style, rhetoric, or identity are directly co-opted to pique the interest (credit) of the boomers, generation's X, and Next. To interpret the stylistic extremes of non-communicative prose in substantive terms is to either reduce the gestures to an emblematic enactment of surface/graphism for its own sake, to a generational transgressive I-can-go-farther-than-anyone-at-Cranbrook careeristic bid for attention, or to a reflection on the print-culture's own surplus of production. Most mainstream print material might as well run "greeked" copy anyway for all that it communicates--that is, the style-fashion type publications (Wired, Interview, RayGun). In my moments of self-righteous puritanical judgment I see this as an inevitable dumbing down of a fundamentally anti-intellectual culture gone nuts on its own brain/eye candy self-indulgences and in my more tolerant moments I see it as the best kind of revenge against the old Beatrice Warde "crystal goblet" repressions against which I feel equal outrage. But in terms of "oppositional practices," it seems that graphic designers face the same obstacles as the rest of us except that they potentially have terrific tools for overcoming those obstacles: how to make any kind of strategic intervention in the seamless seeming face of the spectacle. Sheila de Bretteville is a model of promoting and practicing oppositional design: she uses (and encourages her students to use) their grapic design skills for community based activism. She and her students have done billboards about literacy (using rebus-like icons which "read" when looked at), proposed stamp designs to promote awareness of domestic violence, and given public voice in visible ways to marginal or disenfrancished groups who would not have an effective visual presence in the "spectacle" otherwise. Since such work builds not only consciousness but community action coalitions, it seems more "oppositional" to me than any intervention in the style codes of graphic design could be. While it's true that habits of reading are bound to conventions, and that as readers we evolve our capacity to read new typefaces, new formats, and new hypermedia, I think that there is still a distinction to be made between effective communication and its inverse. I don't really want to be confronted with an innovative, "post-alphabetic" design when I am looking through the Yellow Pages for a plumber and my living room ceiling is falling in. Do you? The sites in which such innovations gain their legitimacy and visibility are highly fetishized and circumscribed--to say print culture is exhausted as if it described the condition of all print circulating in the culture at this time is the same as saying that all economic value is now only symbolic-- just because some amount of economic value is generated from purely symbolic transactions. Clearly the style motifs indicate that there is the possibility of non-communicative design serving certain functions--but are they career functions, anti-information functions, innovative pushing the aesthetic/cultural envelope functions, or just novelty functions? That it is possible would seem to indicate (as in the similarly absurd extremes of contemporary art) that it is somehow significant. But how significant I don't think I have the perspective to say. 17. MGK: You've recently written on Joseph Nechvatal, a new media artist who uses computer viruses to electronically alter the contents of the digital images he works from in order to achieve a "limited but transformative mutation": "The body of the image is literally eroded in the process, but behind the screen, unseen, in the inner workings of its stored condition as a file. When the virus has run its course through the file the body of the image offers its wrecked corpus for our inspection. The resulting beauty is not meant as a denial of the reality of damage, but as an antidote to its terminal velocity through the culture at large" ("Pleasure"). Last summer, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities here at Virginia ran a seminar on the semiotics of digital images. Fernande Saint-Martin's writing on visual semiotics was our starting point. The goal was to work towards a formalized descriptive scheme for images which might be used as the basis for certain computational processes; it was observed that if a program like Photoshop, say, can use its filters to transform an image in some predictable way, computers ought to be capable of formalizing and acting upon other elements of the image's composition. Are you familiar with Saint-Martin's work and if so, does it seem relevant to such as project? More generally, what do you see as the most salient points about treating digital images as information structures? You've talked about this some already but I'm especially interested in hearing more about your work on David Marr (and perhaps you could also give readers a very brief account of his contributions to the study of visual information). JD: Is Saint-Martin the person who did the beautiful semiotics of maps book? I remember an exhaustive, extensive semiotic analysis of such visual material from the 1980s, but have to look it up to see if that's the same person. I find semiotics a useful tool for descriptive analysis, but like many such systems, it is difficult to use as a basis for certain kinds of conceptualization. For instance, if I think about (from my really rather superficial knowledge of it) the work of David Marr, what struck me was that he was proceeding with a very systematic, logical development of basic oppositional parameters for sorting fields of visual data (like a scanned image, screen, or other planographic image) according to fundamental features of those visual components: open/closed, bounded/blurred, patterned/solid. While such basics are useful for machine vision because they can be programmed as sets of conditions a sensor and data processor can assess, they will never never approach the conceptual terms on which our cognitive visual functions are based. For instance, take the idea of recognition. How do you know if someone, something, or some place is familiar? The entire concept of familiarity, of prior knowledge, of a social specificity of relation (let alone the emotional charge which might accompany it) can't be programmed by such parameters. You can have a machine tell if it "knows" a voice through a voice-print match, but visual-print matches are harder except on highly constrained data-bases (fingerprints). The integration of vision and cognition can't be reduced to semiotic analysis. And this, again, was part of what I was trying to begin to work with in Wittgenstein's Gallery. I think we have to really think backwards or outwards from cognitive structures as well as working from visual structures. Someplace at the end of one of the books I read on AI someone (Dreyfus? Minksy?) wrote that ultimately the problem facing AI designers is that of constructing one full intelligence with one full life's experience. 18. MGK: I've asked you to take a look at the Language Visualization and Multilayer Text Analysis project at Cornell's Theory Center. The stated objective of this project was to "develop a tool which allows a researcher to explore interactively the structures and typologies of discursive formation in large samples of textual data and develop new techniques for reading and interpreting text space." In other words, the researchers wanted to find ways to effectively visualize texts as data, as information. But what's most striking to me about the images they produced is that they are simply gorgeous to look at--the screenshots of the actual interface no less than the more self-consciously aestheticized compositions in the "palimpsest gallery." These images remind me of your own work, and also recent "visual poems" by Charles Bernstein (see, for example, Bernstein's "Cannot Cross"; "Illuminosities"; "Littoral"; and "Veil"). What are the implications of such a radiant convergence of information and aesthetics, two categories of experience which we habitually perceive as widely differentiated? JD: I was enthralled with the images in the Language Visualization site at Cornell and have been sending people to visit that site ever since you introduced me to it. The work has the graphic beauty of Edward Tufte's visual forms. Tufte (whose work you probably know) draws extensively on earlier models for his inspiration--looking at diagrams, schematic layouts, maps, and many varied sources which inform his understanding of the way information can be rendered legible through visual form. I think that, again, there are many other precedents here and that the intersections of aesthetics and information, because they were frequently presented through the single organizing hand/eye of a fine graphic artist, proliferate throughout history. Some of my favorites are the diagrams used to map the logic systems of Petrus Ramus, the images in the books by the 17th century polymath Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, and of course the history of map-making, of flow charts, of organizational schemas, time-lines, hierarchical diagrams, and so forth. I find these all infinitely suggestive as structures whose internal logics bear meaning in themselves as well as serving as a vehicle for the presentation of information. 19. MGK: Have you read any hypertext fiction or poetry and if so what is your opinion of it? And would you ever consider working in computerized hypertext? I ask because of your longstanding interest in alternatives to linear and sequential reading patterns. One of your most common techniques for achieving this, in books as diverse as Twenty-Six '76 Let Her's or The Word Made Flesh or The History of the/my Wor(l)d, is through the use of different fonts and point sizes in conjunction with visual layout cues which gesture toward an array of multiple reading paths all simultaneously displayed on the open page. Do you see this as similar to or different from the mechanism of the hypertext link? I wonder, for example, whether the subterranean coding of the hypertext link in fact muffles the sort of immediacy inherent in the multiple readings you so visibly juxtapose? JD: The only hypertext fiction I have read is by Michael Joyce though I have seen some other hypertext and hypermedia documents in exhibitions, seminars, or symposia. While I was in the library yesterday I ran across a "multiple-choice, interactive" novel by someone I had never heard of before--Robbins or Robinson, I think--about a murder in London. It was written fifteen or so years ago, so hardly innovative, but in fact, that was what was so surprising to me--here was this "ordinary" artifact, not even high profile or well-known, to show that the genre had had a more developed life than I had realized. Certainly I find the organizational possibilities of texts and subtexts, interlinked archives and documents, very intriguing and seductive in the hypertext format. But I am so attached to print documents and objects that I can't say whether I will ever manage to create a hypertext novel/work. Maybe soon and maybe never--I do love having those books to hold in my hand. Printing a book is always satisfying at the tactile and material level. As it progresses you sew the finished signatures together. You flip through the pages. You feel that heft and bulk or slipperiness and opacity. I tend to feel deprived of the product unless there is a hard-copy output. But I'm not opposed to the form in any ideological or dogmatic sense. We still have to deal with the resistance to reading on the screen before it makes sense to make elaborate works which rely on an electronic environment--and I'm not there yet, so how could I expect a reader to be? 20. MGK: Your most recent work, entitled The Current Line (1996) is actually bi-linear, running a large and domineering but unadorned Mac-generated font above a 10 point red letterpress sequence. Over the course of thirty pages the large letters produce the following sentence: "ALL IS WEALTH IN THE HOUSE OF THE BLESSED AND OUR ADVANTAGE IS WELL TAKEN ACCORDING TO THE LAW THAT CONSTANTLY PRESENTS ANOTHER WETTER DREAM ALWAYS ABOUT TO SLIP ABOVE THE SIMULACRAL HORIZON." And I'd also like to quote in full the last few pages of the letterpress text, for it strikes me as very poignant: Crawling underneath the table of nostalgic form we find ourselves desperate for verbal insight. Each day succeeds the rest, concealing the signs of waste from the sentence structure, passing eliminatory matter through the deregulated system. Without thinking, we lay awake at night, picking laughter from our teeth and shaking loose our bright-eyed optimism about infrastructure and religious convictions. Empty accounts come back to the conjugal bed to restore their spirits with the blush of affectionate cash. Our days were never really spent, but kept in deep reserve against the possibility of expression, the small chance that a word might slip in edgewise and in finding its place disturb the placid grammar by which our future had been so brutally rent from the now obsolete belief in language and referents. No darkness. No gloom. No privation. No room for any negativity in the bright successful glow of the afterimage on the screen as it slipped into mute, modest obscurity. The perfection of the simulacral mechanism carefully conceals any hint of doubt. This is visionary: total salvation. Complete release. An utter lapse of gravity so that the fall this time is upward, rising out of reach to the hot and newly animated stars. This seems more lyrical, or at least more declarative than some of your previous work. So is that your current line, and where are you taking it? JD: Of course those final lines are completely dark, utterly ironic. The deceit of media/spectacle language is "the current line"--and the capacity of us all to internalize it, buy into the fantasmatic concealment of referents. "The freedom to chose" and "the people must be served" are the two refrains which echoed through last night's half hour television dose--both fast food chains advertising. The "utter lapse of gravity" and "fall" upward seems awfully close to joining the space ship in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet to me--which is to say, mere reportage, hardly invention in any sense. If I could do achieve what I most wanted in my writing in the future it would be to be able to inscribe as accurately and vividly as possible the contemporary carnival of grosteque human folly. It does seem that the only possibility for human survival (forget redemption) is insight and that one route to insight is the scathing mirror of dark humor. Lyrical? Well, how about perverse lyricism? 21. MGK: Finally, I have to ask you about your name. Given that "Johanna" is the feminine form of "Johann" (as in Gutenberg), and given also that "Drucker" is, I'm told, the Dutch for "printer"--well, do you ever have to convince people it's not a pseudonym? JD: Very funny. The man who moved my press for me in New York was named Joe Gutenberg. I kid you not. Moving a press for Johanna Drucker. The only mileage I ever got out of my name was in Amsterdam in 1978. I had gone to a place called the Drukhuis on a canal in the center of the city. It was an old old house with presses in it which was run in some part through city and state subsidies so that people could print there by paying a per diem. The man in charge was a wild looking greybeard like the troll under the bridge in Billy Goat's Gruff (he turned out to be a fine, kind, gentle, and generous person), and he asked me three questions in perfect fairytale fashion. "Do you know how to print?" he said, wagging a proverbial finger in warning fashion lest I try and deceive him. When I answered yes he said, "Well, can you bring me something to prove it?" And when I again answered in the affirmative he went on to say, "Okay then, tell me your name so I'll remember who you are when you come back." "Johanna Drucker," I said, and he replied, "You don't have to show me anything at all, I believe you." So there it is. Department of English University of Virginia mgk3k@virginia.edu http://faraday.clas.virginia.edu/~mgk3k/ ---------------------------------------------------- Talk Back ---------------------------------------------------- COPYRIGHT (c) 1997 BY MATTHEW G. KIRSCHENBAUM, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS TEXT MAY BE USED AND SHARED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR-USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT LAW. ANY USE OF THIS TEXT ON OTHER TERMS, IN ANY MEDIUM, REQUIRES THE CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR AND THE PUBLISHER, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS. THIS ARTICLE AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. FOR ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE, THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS. ---------------------------------------------------- Notes * Links to the images of Drucker's work are generally, though not exclusively, anchored by the first reference to a particular book in the text of a question or a response. Occasionally images are linked to a phrase rather than a title proper. Where a book is referenced more than once in a single question or response, only the first reference to it is active as a link. Works Cited Works of Drucker's Cited The Century of Artists' Books. New York: Granary Books, 1995. "A Chronology of Books from 1970 to 1994." Exhibition Catalogue, Granary Books, New York City, June 1994. "Close Reading: A Billboard." Poetics Journal 2 (Sept. 1982): 82-4. "Critical Pleasure." catalogue essay, Joseph Nechvatal Retrospektive, Galerie Berndt, Koln. Available URL: http://www.dom.de/arts/artists/jnech/drucker.html Dark Decade. St. Paul, MN: Detour Press, 1995. "Experimental, Visual, and Concrete Poetry: A Note on Historical Context and Basic Concepts." Experimental--Visual--Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s. Eds. Jackson, K. David, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker. Avant-Garde Critical Studies 10 (1996): 39-61. "Final Fiction." Temblor 4 (1986): 75-82. "Narratology: Dilemmas of Genre Fiction, Lived Experience, and Book Structure." AbraCadaBra 10 (Spring 1996): 12-7. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. "Women & Language." Poetics Journal 4 (May 1984): 56-68. "The Work of Mechanical Art in the Age of Electronic Reproduction." Offset Exhibition Catalog, Granary Books, New York City, Dec. 2 - Jan. 25, 1994. Available URL: http://www.uwo.ca/visarts/vol1num1/eva2.html Note: Most of Drucker's creative work is published under her own imprint, first Chased Press and later Druckwerk. I have not provided citations for these books in this list as their full titles and dates are given where they are first referenced in the text. Steve Clay's Granary Books, 568 Broadway, Suite 403, New York, New York 10012, (212) 226-5462, distributes some of Drucker's books, especially more recent titles. For more information on artists' books in general, contact Brad Freeman, editor and publisher of the Journal of Artists' Books: 324 Yale Avenue, New Haven, CT 06515. Other Works Cited Bernstein, Charles. "Words and Pictures." Content's Dream: Essays 1975 - 1984. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1986: 114 - 161. Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Perloff, Marjorie. "Johanna Drucker's Herstory." Harvard Library Bulletin 3.2 (Summer 1992): 54-63. ---. "Something is Happening, Mr. Jones." electronic book review 2 (Spring 1996): n. pag. Online. Internet. Available: http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr2.perloff.html. Piombino, Nick. "The Visual-Verbal World of Johanna Drucker: Five New Books." M/E/A/N/I/N/G 18 (November 1995): 54-66. ---------------------------------------------------- Acknowledgements My deepest thanks go of course to Johanna Drucker, not only for patiently and carefully answering all of my questions here, but also for her extraordinary generosity in providing me with copies of rare, out of circulation, or just plain out of my reach books and other materials. And my thanks also to Stuart Moulthrop for his ready enthusiasm. I am very grateful to Will Rourk for his assistance with the digital images. I'd also like to thank Jerome McGann for first introducing me to Drucker's work, and John Unsworth for his continued interest and encouragement on all fronts; and finally, thanks to Bennett Simpson, Lisa Samuels, Kent Puckett, and David Caplan for their conversations about writing and such. [LINKS: Non-Graphical Users See Top of Page] Last Modified: Monday, 14-Jul-97 12:17:09 EDT