Johanna Drucker counters hands-off poetics with practice.
Some questions remain to be posed: How can we read the materiality of binarism (electronic technology IS deeply materialist) - rather than reduce it to mere difference? How do the properties of analog systems persist within the digital domain, not in opposition, but as an aspect of communicative systems? (Here we might consider the work of Donald Knuth as written about by Douglas Hofstadter [1985], in an approach quite different from that of Kittler, an approach more deeply embedded within praxis, rather than invented at the distance of theory. My own dissatisfaction with Kittler always comes back to a suspicion that he doesn't really know the tools and practices he writes about, that in fact the problem with his work is precisely that he writes ABOUT technologies of production, not in an intimate, hands-on engagement with them - and I wonder what Cayley thinks about this.) How do we insist on the value of the dialogue between poetics and new technology by asking what the disambiguating demands of computational method require of our poetics - and what poetics may suggest as an affective force in return?