The articles by McGann and Michaels both attempt to posit a method against a hard-nosed deconstruction. McGann wants to focus on what he calls "textuality," the material and cultural conditions of a text (as demonstrated in editions, notebooks, book prices, marginalia, etc.). The problem with "theory" is that it focuses on semantic meaning to the exclusion of external conditions. These, too, he argues, are very much a part of textual intepretation.
Michaels rightly takes this notion to task. Citing de Man. Derrida, and S. Howe on "the mark," he shows that materiality, too, is unstable. Focus on materiality, and you exclude anything remotely related to authorial intent, to semantic meaning, and to the poetic work itself. Shifting interpratation to the material actually heightens the undecidability of the text. Skepticism reigns on this level, too.
Yet Michaels is not satisfied with simply stating this attack and siding with the deconstructive heroes. Instead, he aligns a poststructuralist view with a reader's subjective interpretation of a text. Because the text has no inherent, fixed meaning, the only possible meaning is to be posited by the reader (or viewer or gamer or whatever). And this, indeed, is what many interactive digital works try to emphasize: it's all up to you.
However, Michaels's attack is upon a straw man (or maybe Stanley Fish - basically the same thing). The hard-line deconstructionists such as Derrida and de Man would disagree with the idea that meaning lies with the reader. Meaning, they would say, lies within the text, but it's no longer single - it's undecidably multiple. But that's not all. It's impossible, they'd go on, to decide whether or not there is meaning at all. This is a feature of language, not the subjectivity of the reader (cf. Derrida on differance).
How this relates to digital poetry is something I'll demonstrate by looking at Joerg Piringer's "Spambot" sound poem, the second part of his Metaisms trilogy. "Spambot" is very much materially oriented - it fully acknowledges being on the web by its multiple sound clips and video link beneath its artist statement, which tells us that it "will deal with the language in propaganda, commercials in tv and radio and internet-spam" and that "spambot is the attempt to liberate poetry from the pages of books and perform it live through image and sound."
The sound clips themselves consist of what appears to be advertisements manipulated beyond recognition. However, because they've been manipulated beyond recognition, I must trust that they really did start out as advertisements. I have no way of knowing and must consequently put my faith in Joerg Piringer's artist statement. Thus, the focus on materiality present in "Spambot" actually does not break down any binary between the subjectivity of the reader and authorial intent. In fact, it reasserts authorial intent more strongly because I must rely on Piringer's artist statement to make any "sense" of the piece, much like illiterate churchgoers once had to rely on clerics to interpret the Latin scriptures to them.
While I agree that a focus on materiality does put to the forefront certain cultural questions that have previously been ignored (and that this focus is a good thing), we must not suppose that this focus in any way solves the problems deconstruction has posed. In translation studies, no one claims to have solved the problem of the untranslatability of literature. The way we proceed forward is by recognizing translations happen in spite of this theoretical issue and go from there. In other words, we simply recognize the problems inherent in interpretation, agree to bracket them, and then dig in. McGann and Michaels make the naive mistake of assuming they have solved something that is by nature unsolvable.
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