Elise Takehana 1 The Shape of Thought: Humanity in Digital, Literary Texts ABSTRACT: This article considers arguments on the book as a structuring paradigm for thought and how the rise of digital technologies shift the structure of thought away from that of the print codex. Rather than making evaluative judgments on this transition from print to digital, this essay considers what differences exist between the print and digital structure of thought and how that new structure puts forward another vision of the human subject. Developing a networked and ecologically aware state that alters the unified and singular view of the subject born from the codex as organizing paradigm. Following a brief review of the literature, this article presents short readings of the structure of two digital stories -- David Clark’s 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein and Kevin Gold’s Choice of Robots -- as a proxy to explore how restructuring models of thinking from print codex to digital platform affects the literary representation of subjectivity. KEYWORDS: subjectivity, book, digital, biography, novel, zoegraphy, anthropocentrism The codex form is far from a stable state, but is instead a part of the evolution of humans externalizing thought. However, we’ve reached a stage where digital technologies have challenged the book’s organizational paradigm. The total, unifying, encyclopedic book does not represent the linked, international, prosumer that reads and writes on the Internet. The ready connection and cohabitation of word, image, and sound on the computer bring out the limited effect of the written word alone. With writing in digital space, one can now rediscover how the medium of the book shaped thought, and so subjectivity. Because the digital reshapes how thought may be structured, another subjectivity must exist as catalyst and product. Here I will review some of the tensions in the shift from print to digital and leverage two literary texts to mine the implications their structure to that of thought in the digital age. While defending the digital future of written expression, Jean-Pierre Balpe accuses literature of being a culture that “preserves more than they produce.” 2 For Balpe, literature’s attachment to the book “petrifies itself in insane rituals of fixity” 3 and “has become a reductive matrix that we have to reform.” 4 Letting go of the book would allow literature to get passed linearity and fixity. But such a transition is not just a formal or generic adjustment - as though that alone was simple. Moving from page to screen, fixity to dynamism, book to new media, requires a shift in perspective on the structure of human thought. For Balpe, “The ‘old’ writer, concerned with ‘the’ text’s sanctification, because of the need for formal references, looks backward; the digital writer, as a scientist in search of progress, looks forward.” 5 Balpe equates this transition as one from conservation to risk. For my own sense of digital writing, this distinction is too harsh, too biased toward the potential of the digital and the irrelevance of print. However, Balpe does illustrate the individual’s transition towards digital reading quite well in his story “The Bedrooms,” which characterizes this shift in space, movement, and the subsequent reading, thinking, and lived implication through Evita’s experience and gradual admiration of her “smart paper.” Evita at first resists the smart paper and turns back to the print 1 Department of English Studies, Fitchburg State University, Fitchburg, MA – etakehan@fitchburgstate.edu 2 J. Balpe, “Toward a Diffracted Literature”, Leonardo, 37,5 (2004): 385-390 (387). Accessed December 30, 2014. DOI: 10.1162/0024094041956033. 3 Balpe, “Toward a Diffracted Literature,” 387. 4 Balpe, “Toward a Diffracted Literature,” 388. 5 Balpe, “Toward a Diffracted Literature,” 389.