Collecting, citing, and the practice of contemporary reading

H1a,2. We can take a passage like this and "reinterpret" as an explication of how citation operates, but we can from there use the passage as an interpretive landscape of the digital. That is, collecting is the collection of objects, as much as it is the collection of quotations, as much as it is the collection of infinite data points assumed by the digital, a kind of protocol in Alexander Galloway's sense, one where text, pure computer code (our "pure language"?) ceaselessly crosses over and back from a certain kind of materiality (and we should draw out how this digital materiality is both simliar too, carrying the characteristics of, and different from the materiality of the book). (In fact, can we conceive of the materiality of digital text in terms other than what the book itself, or the newspaper, gave rise to? In fact, is digital text required to be text? Are there modalities of meaning that are not textual? Is meaning textual? Is meaning mechanical? Too broad a question.).

Collection and citation are situations where the "object is detached from all its original functions." This is true of our analysis of digital text as it works citationally since in order to perceive text as a discrete unit, as a separate thing for analysis, we "read" it. In this way we pull digital text from its position in a larger flow of non-individualized cultural signification, which funtions both as a network of human input and electronically, and position it within an interpretive framework of use-value. Any given modality of perception is a theory of constraining text within a "peculiar category of completeness." Otherwise this text would maintain its "wholly irrational character" of "mere presence at hand."

What is the "presence at hand" of digital text? It is text outside the collection, outside of its reading, outside of historical system, outside of perception itself. For Benjamin I would say it is text that keeps its place in "pure language," beyond any system as we can possibly imagine it, where language and image reference an identical primitive ontology, a place that we might see in flashes only, "that place beyond the heavens which, for Plato, shelters the unchangeable archetypes of things." We might ask, insofar as contemporary culture and its global networks function according to digital affordances of connectivity and the immedaite transferability of meaning, affordances that might be seen as the current state of technological evolution as depicted in passages like "every single thing in this system becomes an encyclopedia of all knowledge of the epoch," how does the identity of the collector become a cipher for the human personality overall, each of us at each moment constructing "an alarm clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to 'assembly'"? Most likely we should speak of temporalities of technological evolution that take the same basic form as that from the early to mid to late nineteenth century but that happen instead over the course of decades or even single years, cateogories of the human and the technologiclly human being born and fading into obsolescence with such rapidity that the powers of any single person to percieve the contemporary grow quickly (and hence progressively further) into antiquity (though here antiquity is only a few years ago). If reading is a vital act, it is so only in terms of self-sacrifice.