Surrogate
Jeffrey Drouin
Historical scholarship in literary studies is increasingly dependent upon digital objects that stand as substitutes for printed or manuscript material. Digital surrogates often mimic the functionalities of codices and other material formats, ostensibly to reproduce the experience of handling the originals while taking advantage of the vastly different cognitive and representational possibilities afforded by the new medium. There has been much theorizing since McLuhan (1964) on how new media contain the old: indeed we might say scholars involved in historicist criticism are increasingly making digital simulacra into effigies of print. Archives of digitized print materials do not pretend to replace the experience of the original but nonetheless promise, implicitly if not explicitly, a way of engaging with the attributes of those objects in order to facilitate scholarly judgments about them. Thus digitized editions embody the ecclesiastical origins of the surrogate—a term derived from the Latin for “[a] person appointed by authority to act in place of another; a deputy,” or one who is asked or elected (-rogate) over (super+) another—and its related concepts that impinge upon scholarly and institutional authority. When office, conceived as a symbol of power, is transferred to the realm of text, a digital edition that duplicates a print or manuscript document comes to both embody as well as symbolize the power inherent in the original it stands for. In that way, the digital surrogate is an effigy: the image of an original simultaneously worshipped and desecrated in the act of interpretation.
A digital edition is a surrogate in that it stands in for a print original (at least to the degree printed texts may be considered originals). We gain many practical benefits from using digital surrogates in literary scholarship, ranging from protection of the fragile original when a copy would suffice, to increasing access to rare materials, and rendering documents searchable and interoperable with other networked resources. Libraries have been major proponents of digital surrogates, which have long been touted by digital humanists, archivists, and special collections departments for their scholarly and preservational utility. Digital surrogates have also become levelers of class inequalities among researchers, allowing access for those who cannot afford to travel to the archives that house rare artifacts. As digital humanities has flourished over the past decade or so, the searchability and interoperability of digital texts through the TEI encoding guidelines and Dublin Core metadata standards have expanded the usefulness of digital surrogates for making large gestures about literary history, especially when corpus analysis can process “big data” sets, which are much larger than can be processed by scholars individually or in the aggregate. There is no denying the innovative possibilities in massive digital corpora.
However, when the move toward corpus-level analysis leads to inferences about texts in the aggregate, we necessarily ignore to a large degree the individual works that make up the corpus. A number of epistemological and practical questions follow: Each work says something from a particular point of view, so how can we be sure that our corpus-level inferences are accurate or meaningful? Is the singular text lost in the move toward searchable corpora? Is it possible to develop a methodology that synthesizes search-based queries and the uniqueness of the underlying texts? When we use digital methods upon digitized texts, what exactly is the object of study—the semantic unit, the text, the genre, the written language? And, if we attempt to compensate for the blind spots of large-scale analysis by selecting individual works from the digital corpus, how can we know whether we are adequately filling in the gaps?
While a digital edition offers built-in functionalities and research possibilities unavailable in a printed object, the interface also erases many physical traits of the original, such as size, weight, paper quality, and ink saturation—all of which are crucial in matters of historical and bibliographic analysis. Take the central example of this essay: the Modernist Journals Project (MJP) (http://modjourn.org) features an edition of BLAST, an important avant-garde magazine from one hundred years ago known for its radical experiments in typography and poetics.1 Even though the MJP offers high-fidelity scans of the original pages, the physical impact of the magazine is lost in translation. A brief description of the original format may help: the bibliographic information supplied on the landing page of the digital edition indicates that the 212 pages of the first issue (June 1914) are 30.5 cm long and 24.8 cm wide (more than 12 inches and 10 inches, respectively). A reader could use a ruler or tape measure as a visual aid in comprehending the size, since the surrogate will almost certainly appear smaller on a screen. Yet in no way does the comprehension of measurements equal the aesthetic apprehension of seeing—and holding and smelling—a codex that is roughly the area of a small poster, that is twice as wide when opened up, and whose thick paper renders it roughly 6.35 cm (2.5 inches) deep, weighing around 1 kg (2.25 lbs.), and supporting the heavily saturated block letters that often stand over 2.5 cm (1 inch) tall on the page as if they are autonomous objects.
The physical experience of reading BLAST necessarily contributes to the interpretation of its content, since such a solid, impactful object is diametrically opposed to the ephemerality normally expected of magazines: it is a Vorticist manifesto attempting to break art and literature aesthetically, morally, and physically—to “be an avenue for all those vivid and violent ideas that could reach the Public in no other way” by bringing “to the surface a laugh like a bomb” (Lewis, “Long Live” 7, “MANIFESTO” 31).
Indeed, the kinetic typography that often spans juxtaposed pages produces a visual effect whose immensity corroborates its revolutionary assertions. The accompanying image presents a digital imitation of two juxtaposed pages from BLAST that demonstrate the interplay of typography and ideology. The series of “Blasts” and “Blesses” comprising this section of the manifesto take aim at the passé while asserting an English art that is nationalist and industrial in temper. Throughout most of modern history, English artists and writers looked enviously upon their French colleagues as being more advanced. Here, however, the attacks upon French culture by the magazine’s “Primitive Mercenaries in the Modern World” (“MANIFESTO” 30) seek to create a new space for English art that far surpasses its rival. A key tactic in surpassing the French is to embrace the opposing energies of an explosion: “We fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the SAME cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours” (30). Hence Vorticism, taking its cue from the vortex or whirlpool (as well as adolescence), deliberately embodies opposing forces at their point of maximum concentration, which is simultaneously their point of cancellation. These self-contradictory position statements explain the typographical interplay of absence and presence on the magazine’s pages, where bullet lists occupy the left or right side of a page, while a vertical line divides text on one side of the page from a blank space on the other (taking a cue from commercial advertising), or where there seems to be a diagonal line separating absence and presence across two juxtaposed pages, as in the screenshot reproduced here. The reader can fully appreciate the amount of energy required to embody these principles only while situated before the text arrayed across an area of 1,513 square centimeters (240 square inches) plunked solidly upon a table.
Two pages of “Manifesto” from BLAST.
The reason the image reproduced in this essay is currently not part of the MJP, which I codirect, may deserve a personal anecdotal description. In my quest to view digital pages of BLAST juxtaposed as they are in the original, I discovered it was not possible to view both pages at once, a problem I sought to resolve by first submitting a PDF version of the magazine to FlipSnack2 so that I could observe it onscreen (or at least the first sixteen pages available without my paying for the service) and then embedding it on a teaching blog linked below.3 I also fiddled with the Two Page View option (with the selected option to Show Cover Page) in Adobe Acrobat, which works well on a computer but cannot be embedded on a website. A codex-simulating view option will be available on the MJP website in the coming year, but, more interesting, in the process of trying to view the original print format digitally, I have found myself jerry-rigging a digital simulacrum of it.
The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that a simulacrum is a “material image, made as a representation of some deity, person, or thing”; it possesses “merely the form or appearance of a certain thing, without possessing its substance or proper qualities”; it is “a mere image, a specious imitation or likeness, of something.” In other words, it fulfills the role of surrogate as a substitute deputed by authority yet lacks the true substance of that for which it stands. The association of a simulacrum with a deity—and inadequacy—seems apt in light of the digital BLAST as well as electronic editing and scholarship in general. A goal of the simulacrum is to return to some originary state, “to see the thing as in itself it really is” or was, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold. But in translating BLAST into the new medium, which cannot adequately duplicate the physical attributes inherent in its meaning, are we not in fact moving away from the original?
Every act of copying creates an effigy: a likeness, portrait, or image that lacks the character of the original yet stands in for our pursuit of it. Like the other terms in this conceptual cluster—surrogate and simulacrum—effigy bears the undertones of a symbol of something holy to be revered, as well as the substitute for something profane to be desecrated. It is telling that the various definitions of effigy draw upon ecclesiastical and judicial terminology. In that light, my hasty decision to feed BLAST to FlipSnack in effigy betrays an attempt to incarcerate and subject the original to tools under my command: “fig. … to inflict upon an image the semblance of the punishment which the original is considered to have deserved; formerly done by way of carrying out a judicial sentence on a criminal who had escaped.” In this case, we must ask what are the processes of historicity that motivate the raising of this effigy.
The digital surrogate clearly has its impetus in preserving what Walter Benjamin describes as the aura, the “presence of the original” that is “the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (220). For Benjamin, the aura belongs to a unique work of art, such as a painting or sculpture, whose authenticity thereby exudes “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (221). Digital surrogates like that of BLAST depend upon something like the aura for their attraction as objects of research, even though the nature of that aura, if it may be so called, is complicated by the fact that the original was a born-print magazine, not a unique manual creation. Here the judicial valence of the surrogate becomes relevant in establishing legitimacy. According to Benjamin, before modern machinery, manual reproduction was “usually branded as a forgery,” since “the original preserved all its own authority” (220). Likewise, a mechanically reproduced copy of an artwork lacks the authenticity of the original because its “substantive duration ceases to matter,” which jeopardizes its historical testimony (221). The stoic value of “substantive duration” appears to ascribe selfhood, to venerate the individuality of the artwork as it ages and continues to assert its voice over time and through changing circumstances—in other words, it appears that the digital surrogate risks losing precisely what we are attempting to recover through the study of original texts. Still there is something to be gained: for a magazine like BLAST, however innovative it was, its centripetal pull derives from its multiple birth in that fateful summer of 1914. Its aura has never been the same kind as that ascribed to unique masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa or Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning; as a text, the work makes up a complex and still-unfolding archive comprising all of its variants, including avant-texte, print copies, digital surrogates, and derivative data. The work transcends its various instantiations, which are now augmented through the possibilities of the digital medium.
Benjamin’s assertion that technical reproduction does not constitute a forgery offers an interesting twist: a mechanically or digitally reproduced artwork comes into being not through an individual’s mimicking the technique or vision of the original artist but through a technical process independent of and removed from the original, such as what takes place in a photography lab or on the cutting floor of the sound film studio. The photographic negative might constitute an original in some sense, but the possibilities it offers for postproduction manipulation are manifold, including very high levels of magnification in order to reveal elements of the subject invisible to the naked eye, or, in the case of cinema, to study motion through manipulation of projection speed and direction. The high-definition mimesis of digital scanning provides many more photographic possibilities. Print magazines are in this way similar to photo negatives, especially after they are translated and transcribed into a digital medium; they become metamorphosed into a different kind of art—no longer a printed text. Like a pagan animal deity, which is less than human insofar as it embodies a single characteristic, yet thereby far more powerful as a force of nature, the digital surrogate diminishes the aura of the printed original but still wields an enchantment all its own.
Lest this meditation be misconstrued as a kind of Proustian obsession with “The Sweet Cheat Gone,” it must be acknowledged that it is illusory to demand total knowledge of our Albertine. It is perhaps fitting that the hunt for the fugitive original now extends to mechanically reproduced print “originals” that, when read through their digital surrogates, do just the same. In what ways do they evade the reader—or, now, the computational investigator? Is the data output of the digital surrogate fundamentally separate from the object from which it derives? Our response will depend on the language we use to inquire after digital materiality, which remains central to the current information age, as well as other essays in this volume (see analog, cloud, digital, etc.; Sterne; Kirschenbaum, et al.). As for this essay, the digital surrogate-cum-effigy seems to approach the character of the fetish: “a means of enchantment … or superstitious dread”; “an inanimate object worshipped by preliterate peoples on account of its supposed inherent magical powers, or as being animated by a spirit”; “something irrationally reverenced.” Perhaps, taking another cue from Benjamin, we still read the digital surrogate as a hieroglyph—not just on the level of the linguistic or even bibliographic code, but in some other mode of apprehension for which we have not yet developed the pictorial language.
See in this volume: analog, archive, cloud, digital, memory, mirror, prototype
See in Williams: aesthetic, creative, fiction, image, literature, nature, representative, subjective
Notes
1http://modjourn.org/render.php?id=1158591480633184&view=mjp_object.
3BLAST, no. 1 (June 1914), http://www.flipsnack.com/7C66E8EC5A8/fvc8bf5j.html; BLAST no. 2 (July 1915, “War Number”), http://www.flipsnack.com/7C66E8EC5A8/fxcfol89.html.
References
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217–51. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew, et al. “Digital Materiality: Preserving Access to Computers as Complete Environments.” iPres 2009 (October 2009). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7d3465vg.
Lewis, Wyndham. “Long Live the Vortex!” BLAST 1(1) (June 1914): 7–8.
———. “MANIFESTO.” BLAST 1(1) (June 1914): 30–43.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.
Sterne, Jonathan. “What Do We Want? Materiality! When Do We Want It? Now!” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Kirsten Foote, and Pablo Boczkowski, 119–28. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.