Charles Bashe et al.: IBM's Early Computers (1986)

"In the early 1950s, even the smallest stored-program computer was more expensive than a typical installation of punched-card machines. . . . Thus the computer was as irrelevant to many punched-card users as to the small businesses whose accounting procedures were un-mechanized. It also left unchanged the practices of many firms whose accounting involved special types of documents and industries with information processing requirements (such as process control) that were not yet widely viewed as applications for digital computers. Nevertheless, before the computer could realize its potential, these small businesses, special industries, and unfamiliar environments would have to be considered in its planning." This is an exhaustively research and detailed account of IBM's computing machines prior to the System/360. It gives full technical description of the CPC, SSEC, 650, 700 series, and 1401 computers, as well of magnetic tape, disk storage, ferrite cores, transistors, and early programming. The project is vital and the writing rigorous and clear, and the only possible objection to this kind of book is that the sheer quantity of detail (700 pages worth) will leave it unread except by only a few specialists or make it function merely as a reference volume. While relentlessly technical - the book is rather obsessed with the number of vacuum tubes, cards-per-minute, bits of data - the authors also provide a history of the IBM organization during the period. Perhaps most striking about the book is how the technical details affect the organization and vice versa. If read closely (a hard task to stick to after about page 400), the book demonstrates the numerous contingent factors that shaped the direction and timing of IBM and the computing industry. For example, far prior to IBM's delayed recognition of commercial computing, the firm had been researching magnetic tape as a replacement for its punched-card systems. When the firm did enter fully into electronic computing, it was further ahead in storage systems than the computers themselves. The book also highlights how many research projects were carried on for years without clear results, largely because of organizational inertia and desperate attempts to recoup expenses. The authors have a particular interest in IBM's problems with dividing and defining research & development. Too often abbreviated and reduced to a simple function - R&D - the two elements were broken apart by IBM, which funded "pure science" such as the work Wallace Eckert did at the Columbia University Watson Laboratory and concrete development aimed to produce immediate and marketable products. Yet the computer seems to have been an exceptional technology that called into question all such distinctions, and IBM was forced to alter its organizational division of the two numerous times. The book also makes it clear how questions of academia and cultural prestige affected decisions about R&D at organizational/funding level. To attract the world's top scientists, an organization led by a famous scientist and a reputation for pure research was necessary, whereas forcing concrete engineering projects onto such groups tended to make the scientists flee quickly. Closely reading the overwhelming data contained in books such as this, I find myself regularly generating new ideas and concepts, producing more thought than I often do when reading theoretical works. For example, the authors describe how the conducting ability of early vacuum tubes tended to degrade, resulting in output voltages that were not clearly all or nothing, 1 or 0. Calling the computers that used these tubes digital, then, is potentially incorrect, or at least calls for greater attention to the fragile construction of the digital.

Emerson Pugh: Building IBM (1995)

"The failure of many at the time - and perhaps even more today - to grasp the overarching significance of the use of magnetic tapes on UNIVAC is partly the result of an unfortunate misnomer: all electronic information processing machines are called computers even though they are seldom used for computing. Although ENIAC was the first large-scale electronic computer, it lacked the memory and storage facilities necessary for information processing. In contrast, UNIVAC and other electronic stored-program computers equpped with magnetic tape storage were effective information processing machines. Because they were also superior to computers of the ENIAC design for computing, ENIAC had no progeny." The many histories of IBM, like much work in computing history, tend to be caught up in praising the "vision" of inventors and corporate executives rather than provide a critical analysis of the field of commercial computing, investigate technical questions involved in the building and functioning of the machines, and closely observe the changing structure of the business. Pugh's book, drawing from his experience working for IBM and from the company's archives (which he was granted access to without restrictions) is the one exception, and nicely balances these concerns. He traces the history of IBM back to Herman Hollerith's invention of the punched card tabulator. In 1911, Hollerith's business merged with two others to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR), and Thomas Watson Sr. was named president in 1915. CTR eventually changed its name to IBM and came to dominate the information processing industry. Pugh describes the company's success throughout the Great Depression and WW II (aided by leasing policies and the government's need for information processing equipment) as well as its belated entrance into the field of commercial computing. The final sections present IBM's "gamble" in leaping into the IBM 360 series of computers, which came to be the industry standard for decades. He interestingly points out that IBM failed to make its OS 360 operating system compatible with its smallest computers, and therefore was particularly weak in the low end of the computer market, which left it quite vulnerable during the personal computer revolution at the beginning of the 1980s. Focusing on a single business risks losing sight of the competitive field that business is situated within, but given IBM's clear dominance and leadership in the field, this is not a problem in the book, especially since Pugh takes the time to describe in detail the competition from companies such as Remington Rand, CDC, and Honeywell. For example, around 1930 IBM and Remington Rand each began to change the number of columns on the punched cards they produced, attempting to brand the cards and make each incompatible with the tabulating systems of the other company (recapitulated in the present by the incompatibility of Mac and Windows). An interesting fact is that Watson Sr. initially was determined not to allow IBM's machines to be called "computers," since he feared that term was associated with automation and job-loss. IBM's first computer the IBM 701 was called the Defense Calculator as a result. As the quote above illustrates, Pugh himself dislikes the term "computer" because it doesn't accurately identify the bulk information processing (and storing) that business computers are involved in.

Richard Wright: Savage Holiday (1954)

"He was trapped in freedom. How could he again make a foolproof prison of himself for all of his remaining days? What invisible walls could he now erect about his threatening feelings, desires? How could he suppress or throttle those slow and turgid stirrings of buried impulses now trying to come to resurrected life in the deep dark of him? How could he become his own absolute jailer and keep the peace within the warring precincts of his heart?" Erskine Fowler, a well-to-do white insurance executive, finds himself retired at the age of 43 due to corporate nepotism. Fowler's retirement forces him out of his secure routine and into an exploration of his unconscious desires and existential freedom (Wright at this point was living in Paris and friends with Sartre). One day after taking a shower, Fowler walks naked into his apartment's hallway to pick up his newspaper and gets locked out of his apartment. He plans to sneak back in by going to the floor balcony and climbing in through his bathroom window. But on the balcony he surprises his neighbor's neglected child, and the child falls from the ledge and dies. Fowler climbs back into his apartment and decides not to admit what happened (partially because he fears he will appear a pedophile). He decides to help the child's mother with arranging for the funeral and begins to pursue and judge the licentious woman. But his emotions vacillate between sexual desire and moral condemnation, and in a fit of anger he murders the woman. The narrative closely resembles that of Wright's "The Outsider" and "Native Son," where an unexpected event forces the protagonist towards existentially, morally, and psychologically unclear ground, and murder becomes a means to maintain or escape that position. What is unique about this book is that the protagonist is white - he doesn't flee the urban poverty of African Americans living on Chicago's South Side. Fowler is materially privileged to be on a permanent holiday from work. Yet Wright doesn't fully succeed in his portrayal of Fowler: his ventriloquism of Fowler's Christian moralism and corporate executive thinking feels like a parody, and Fowler ultimately remains far more distanced from the reader than Wright's other, far more murderous, protagonists. What really drags the book down and keeps it a minor work is the Freudian psychology that is heavy-handedly at the core of the narrative. Wright directly aims to show what happens when an individual discovers at a belated point in life that she has an unconscious (Fowler had repressed details about his prostitute mother abandoning him). The novel ends with a direct explanation of Fowler's actions (think of the psychological explanation tagged on to the end of Hitchcock's "Psycho), which informs the reader that Fowler had re-enacted a misogynist dream he had as a child in order to fully remember it. The novel also takes a long detour into explaining that the child who died panicked so much because the child was traumatized by seeing its mother have sex with numerous men, and therefore was exceptionally frightened by Fowler's naked body. Even if these two psychological explanations had been left implicit (which would have allowed a few more unnecessary critical essays on the book), they are too simple and pat. Their revelation comes across like the solution to a mystery novel, where we find out who killed whom how, though the unconscious is much less knowable than a crime scene. In the end, the novel feels less like a narrative informed by Freud's ideas than an imaginary case study presented to support Freud's claims.

Pierre Bourdieu: The Rules of Art (1992)

"The field is a network of objective relations (of domination or subordination, of complementarity or antagonism, etc.) between positions. . . . All positions depend, in their very existence, and in the determinations they impose on their occupants, on their actual and potential situation in the structure of the field - that is to say, in the structure and distribution of those kinds of capital (or of power) whose possession governs the obtaining of specific profits (such as literary prestige) put into play in the field. To different positions . . . correspond homologous position-takings, including literary or artistic works, obviously, but also political acts and discourses, manifestos or polemics, etc. - and this obliges us to challenge the alternative between an internal reading of the work and an explanation based on the social conditions of its production or consumption." Bourdieu openly engages in a sociology of art, examining not the essence or meaning of artworks but the incremental autonomizing of the field of art from other fields such as politics. Considering the field of art, Bourdieu hopes "to bypass the opposition between internal reading and external analysis." Because artists and their artworks are situated within the field of art, the myth of the "pure" creator or self-sufficient creation gives way to the history of the field and the positions and forms it offers up to the artist and artwork. And because the field in the late 19th-century was made into an autonomous realm, its structure is not strictly homologous to that of society, so the positions and actions of individuals within it cannot be directly deduced from their class or social position. As the field develops over time, different positions will be available and different position-takings will be enticing to individuals from the same social background. To understand the production and reception of art, we need to understand not just the singularity of the work and the artist but the historical singularity of the state of the field (which again, is necessarily diachronic). Bourdieu is aware that his theory might seem to represent art as the cynical "posing" of artists and audiences, who do whatever is necessary to succeed or appear cultured, so he emphasizes that the field produces not only positions but artists and audiences with dispositions adjusted to those positions, so that it appears that there is a "natural" congruence of positions and position-taking. One doesn't have to pose because one is already pre-disposed. Radical innovation (perhaps as a modernist disguise of the myth of the pure creator) doesn't find much support here: Bourdieu claims the field has lacunae that can be strategically developed by acute members of the avant-garde, but these lacunae resemble a preexisting set of possibles. He even claims that artistic "revolution" is now the routine of the field: after the early 20th-century avant-gardes, "revolution tends to impose itself as the model of access to existence in the field." I wouldn't deny that radical artwork has to bend to existing schemas of perception and classification to be fully integrated into the institutions and discourses of art, that is to say, to be able to gain access to the various forms of capital offered by the field, but Bourdieu seems to foreclose even the isolated generation of the truly new (perhaps I am merely repeating the criticism that the habitus is a necessarily conservative concept). Bourdieu is always persuasive when he explains his method of doing theoretical work through precise empirical investigation. He calls for "theories which are nourished less by purely theoretical confrontation with other theories than by confrontation with fresh empirical objects" (a point I completely agree with), and admits he prefers "authors who know how to infuse the most decisive theoretical questions into a meticulously conducted empirical study . . . going as far as to conceal their own contribution within a creative reinterpretation of theories which are immanent in their object." But the repetitiveness of the final third of this book calls into question whether this "new scientific spirit" is suitable for producing written works and were tough going.

McKenzie Wark: Gamer Theory (2007)

"Gamer theory is not about asserting the absolute uniqueness of games, nor about assimilating them to other forms (novel, cinema), but rather about marking the game's difference from these forms as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations. The form of the digital game is an allegory for the form of being. Games are our contemporaries, the form in which the present can be felt and, in being felt, thought through." Wark begins by claiming that all of everyday life and reality has now become "gamespace:" all which does not appear as fragmented detritus functions and is conceived of as a game. Therefore actual games cannot be opposed to the gamespace of reality; we cannot simply turn away from games because they have colonized and become the "ideal" of reality. Yet there remains a "gap" between games and gamespace that can be critically exploited. We can look at games to show how they reveal the failure of gamespace (i.e. reality) to live up to its gaming ideal: "You trifle with the game to discover in what way gamespace falls short of its self-proclaimed perfection. The digital game plays up everything that gamespace merely pretends to be: a fair fight, a level playing field, unfettered competition." Wark plays on the terms allegory and algorithm to coin the term "allegorithm." As one plays a game, one comes to intuit the algorithm at work in it. Everyday life also has come to appear to depend on an algorithm, but one that remains unfair or unknown. Playing games acts as an allegory for everyday life because games' accessible algorithms act as allegorithms for the unknown algorithms governing and structuring everyday life.
The style of the book is rather off-putting, and I'm not sure an entire book is necessary to argue these points. Debord and Baudrillard are looming influences, as Wark replaces the spectacle and the mass media with the game in order to make the same kinds of claims about the loss of an "im-mediate" reality. Unfortunately, unlike Debord, Wark's need to reduce all his claims to clever axioms that are over-generalized isn't supported by a continuous conceptual insightfulness, resulting merely in repetitiveness. There are some genuinely useful points here, especially Wark's distinction between topics, topography, and topology (i.e., lines, maps, and the digital, respectively), as well as the aforementioned concept of the allegorithm, but Wark seems guilty of making the rules (and therefore style) of his critical game a bit too easy to intuit, and therefore a limited allegory of everyday gamespace.

Don Delillo: Falling Man (2007)

"In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber's body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who's in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a cafe. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel." Delillo's 9/11 novel is his best, and has forced me to reconsider my previous reservations about his work. It begins with Keith Neudecker literally walking out of the falling towers and back into a relationship with his estranged wife, Lianne. After being treated for minor wounds, Keith realizes that the briefcase he took out of the tower was not his own; he contacts the original owner, another survivor, and their sense of shared trauma leads to a brief sexual affair between them. Keith's wife Lianne, who had thought he had died when she saw the television coverage (and especially the images of bodies falling from the towers), repeatedly runs across the "Falling Man" performance artist, who recreates the pose of the iconic photographic image of a man falling straight down from the towers. As probably must be the case given the subject, the novel's plot is that of trauma and muted/ambivalent recovery. Delillo's skills in creating an atmosphere and psychology of detached and confused, though oddly everyday, alienation fit quite well with the trauma genre. The fall of the towers seems to do much of the critical work that Delillo usually takes upon himself, so that instead of lambasting some part of American culture (his usual intellectual/ironic sentences and dialogue are mostly absent here) he produces an emotive and potent narrative of Keith's narrow escape and confused "fall" back into reality. Unlike a novel such as "White Noise," this novel's reputation I believe will rest much more on style (and affect) than ideas. For example, in the near-perfect description of Keith's flight from the towers, the narrative repeats variations of the phrase, "This was the world now," so that the shifter "this" points towards a new reality, itemizing its elements, without fully explaining or pinning it down, gesturing towards what remains largely incomprehensible. As is often the case with Delillo, the final third of the novel stumbles by leaping to three years after the event, and we find that Keith is still with Lianne, but fairly detached and a professional poker player, lost in the chance and anonymity of the game (the allegory of gambling doesn't quite work for me). The novel is divided into three sections, with each section ending with a brief chapter describing the thoughts and actions of one of the terrorists in preparation for the hijacking. This is perhaps Delillo's riskiest maneuver, and I'm still not sure whether I feel these sections should make the terrorist more strange or more familiar than he is represented (I need to read "Libra" to even begin to answer this question). The last of these sections describes the hijacker's actions as the plane hits one of the towers, but in mid-sentence the narrative shifts back to Keith and follows him over the final pages as he escapes from the building. This syntactical splice (clearly made possible by Delillo's cinematic imagination), which shifts Keith from being an object/target to being the subject, results in the single best sentence Delillo has written.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin (ed.): First Person (2004)

"[T]he dominant user function in literature, theater, and film is interpretive, but in games it is the configurative one. To generalize: in art we might have to configure in order to be able to interpret, whereas in games we have to interpret in order to be able to configure, and proceed from the beginning to the winning or some other situation. Consequently, gaming is seen here as configurative practice, and the gaming situation as a combination of ends, means, rules, equipment, and manipulative action." The essays collected here all question how new media should be interpreted and designed. Nearly two-thirds of the essays enter into the debate about whether video games and related interactive media should be considered narratives or games. In "Hamlet on the Holodeck," Janet Murray emphasized the narrative approach and coined the term "cyberdrama." To my annoyance, this "narrativist" approach resembles those literary scholars who wish to call everything in reality a narrative so that their literary-critical skills take on a universal applicability and wisdom. Opposing this position are "ludologists" like Espen Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen who argue that there is no reason to believe that new media can be understood in terms of old media, and especially as a form of narrative, and instead promote the study of the unique "gaming situation," or in other words, the study of games as games. The key text for the ludologists is Aarseth's book "Cybertext" and his theory of "ergodic" literature that requires "non-trivial effort" in order to be traversed. This collection doesn't resolve the debate, and because each author feels the need to address it, the essays get a bit repetitive by the mid-point of the book. Although the disagreement initially appears to be over genre - narrative or game? - it often changes into a disagreement over the importance of modernist/avant-garde innovations. Many of the "narrativists" draw from Aristotle and come across as rather traditional and conservative in their understanding of narrative, as if the 20th-century had never happened to literature. Yet even the ludologists can resist modernist concerns with radical form and modes of distancing the reader/user because emphasizing the gaming experience often leads to valuing immersion; so while the ludologists may resist using the framework of the narrativists, they may converge upon the same suggestions for a smoothly flowing entertainment. Most disappointing (and probably a direct result of this ambiguous position of modernism and the avant-garde) is that the collection does not set forward any interesting examples or theories of what a "critical" game might be. Gonzalo Frasca tries, but his "videogames of the oppressed" borders on group thereapy rather than the truly political engagements of the activists he draws from because he fails to take into account the narrowly constrained context of games and the difficulty of creating transformative relays between political events on-line and in reality. Of course many of the writers here simply have no interest in the idea of critical gaming and intend merely to build better and more entertaining games.

John Updike: Rabbit, Run (1960)

"[W]hat kept him walking was the idea that somewhere he'd find an opening. For what made him mad at Janice wasn't so much that she was in the right for once and he was wrong and stupid but the closed feeling of it, the feeling of being closed in. . . . What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it." Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom had been the star of his high school basketball team, but at 26 finds himself a salesman with a child and an alcoholic wife who watches too much television. At the beginning of the novel, Harry stumbles across some kids playing basketball in an alley and invites himself into their game, though he dwarfs them in size and skill. The ease with which he takes on all of the kids in the game reminds him of his glory as a high school player. When he gets home to find the drab reality of his wife drunk, he runs, though without direction, hoping to re-acquire his former state of grace. Updike's formidable, if rather uninventive, writing style is demonstrated in the long opening section presenting how Harry walks out and drives his car all night to another state, but returns back to the town he lives in by the morning. He meets his ex-coach there, who hooks him up with a prostitute whom he moves in with for three months. Yet when his wife gives birth to his child, Harry leaves his lover and returns to his wife, apparently making amends for his wrongs. But always seeking something more, he again attempts to flee, sending his wife into a bender that results in her drowning their newborn child. Harry is totally self-absorbed, and has to be admonished by both his wife and his lover that there are more important things than his feelings. Harry keeps getting chances to perhaps better his situation, but prefers to run rather than face reality. The sexual politics in the novel get rather ugly, as Harry demands his lover commit fellatio with the intention of degrading her (remember that the novel is from 1960 when this act could appear an unusual demand), and when he returns to his wife, he also takes advantage (that is, practically rapes) her shortly after she has given birth. Those scenes would be even more painful to read if Updike hadn't repeatedly made Harry do the most wrong and embarrassing things throughout the novel. In this contrast between Harry's self-image and his actual irresponsibility and cruelty, the book resembles much middle-class realist fiction from the 1950s and 1960s in which a middle class (perhaps lower-middle class here) protagonist believes he is somehow distinct from those around him, and tragically seeks to prove or discover that distinction. But rather than a sense of his cultural superiority (as is the case of the Wheelers in Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, from 1961), Harry is merely nostalgic for his adolescent sporting glory, a truly narrow achievement since Updike emphasizes that it didn't extend beyond the county. The most successful aspect of the novel is Updike's ability to show Harry's consciousness guiltily open up and begin to perceive what he is doing, only to close up as he runs, which is most evident in the brutal final scene at his child's funeral, in which Harry's guilt suddenly transforms into petty denial and humiliating flight. Appreciation of a novel such as this really comes down to one's concern with "style," which scholarly criticism rarely understands (its interest in technical elements such as point of view appears to cover style, but doesn't really capture it). Postwar realism has a rather limited set of settings, characters, and plot elements, just as suburban communities appear as serial variations of each other. Harry's quest for distinction, just like that of many other middle-class, suburban protagonists, can always be read self-reflexively as commenting on the position of the novelist, who attempts to clear a distinct position within the postwar field of literature through style rather than a more radical break in form or even content. But for academic critics to productively read such novels and stylistic strategies, they will have to align themselves much more closely with the MFA program's interest in the act of composition and a kind of close reading rarely seen since the pre-theory critics of the 1950s.

N. Katherine Hayles: Electronic Literature (2008)

“Literature, conceptualized not just as print books but as the entire complex system of literary production – including writers, editors, publishers, critics, designers, programmers, booksellers, readers, players, teachers, copyright laws and other legal formations, websites and other electronic dissemination mechanisms, and the technologies that enable and instantiate all of the above – is permeated at every level by computation. The bellelettristic tradition that has on occasion envisioned computers as the soulless other to the humanistic expressivity of literature could not be more mistaken. Contemporary literature, and even more so the literary that extends and enfolds it, is computational." Oriented as a general introduction to electronic literature and a survey of the small body of critics attentive to the field, Hayles' book is at its best in the opening chapter where she outlines the different types of electronic literature as well as concisely summarizes the major critical works. Due to the very different code at work and the intersection with various media, electronic literature is not a particularly unified genre, with the term sometimes referring only to texts viewed on a computer, at other times including all texts that are "computer born," such as those written on a computer but ultimately read in print. Hayles works her way through the early theorists of hypertext fiction, moves on to interactive fiction (which often is closer to gaming than literature), installation pieces involving complete immersion and the CAVE system, generative works partially or completely composed by the computer, and codework, which explores the code that supports the visual surface of electronic literature. Much of the middle section of this book repeats and condenses her earlier book, "My Mother Was a Computer." This is especially evident when Hayles again contrasts Friedrich Kittler's media determinism with Mark Hansen's privileging of human embodiment, and positions her theory of intermediation between the two. Yet this time around, she much more strongly attacks Hansen's work, in particular singling out his reliance on the philosopher Raymond Ruyer's ideas of an "absolute survey" and "transpatial domain" as lacking in empirical evidence and scientific support. This may seem like a concrete objection, but it also reflects a different approach to or distrust of theory, since Ruyer's (and hence Hansen's) ideas are truly theoretical by being by definition beyond empirical testing. Hayles' own theory of intermediation posits the co-evolution of human and computer, with neither strictly determining the other. Interactive programs as well as innovations in software make it clear how human use of computers changes the latter. To show how computers might "reengineer" humans in a substantial way (that is to say, to do more than simply alter human culture), Hayles turns to recent scientific work on "synaptogenesis," which claims the brain of individuals goes through a kind of neural natural selection, where the large potentiality of the infant brain is reduced as those pathways that are used become reinforced whereas those that aren't used decay and disappear. Therefore the environment, which includes technologies such as the computer, doesn't simply alter human behavior on the surface, but the actual biological make-up of the brain. Though it risks becoming a moralistic point, Hayles deploys this science to argue that young kids have what she terms "hyper attention," "a craving for continuously varying stimuli, a low threshold for boredom, the ability to process multiple information streams simultaneously, and a quick intuitive grasp of algorithmic procedures that underlie and generate surface complexity" instead of the deep attention associated with traditional literature not merely because of a superficial postmodern culture, but because their brains have evolved in tandem with new media and computers. Hayles reads electronic literature and print in the era of digital mediation and shows how they participate in and allow us to reflect on and alter these dynamics of intermediation that lead to “emergent complexity." That last phrase, "emergent complexity," shows up quite often in the book. Both "emergence" and "complexity" are useful concepts precisely in how they avoid the rational, enlightenment quest for complete knowledge and allow cognition to sidestep any need to fully know the exact details or state of a subject. But without finding ways to say more about the form or mode of emergence or the type of complexity, pointing to emergent complexity doesn't always reveal as much as it should, and tends to resemble the post-structuralist habit of emphasizing self-reflexiveness about the text's materiality and mode of production. Given that Hayles' book is aiming at a general and reflective theory of electronic literature, this is understandable here. It remains to be seen how those who follow her are able to construct more specific and socially-informed accounts of the genre.