Having seen Susan Howe deliver Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives as a lecture at Harvard University, I could not help but contemplate the effects of technology that are present in the composition and presentation of this project. Circling and dissecting the ideas of materiality, expression, knowledge, and experience, the content of Howe’s project directly addresses the issue of media translation in the introduction: “As they evolve, electronic technologies are radically transforming the way we read, write, and remember” (9). Spontaneous Particulars takes up the issue of what’s lost, recovered, degraded, and enhanced by moving from analog to digital collections, both in terms of our of-the-body experiences and our of-the-mind knowledge in relation to our interactions with archival objects. However, the ways that these issues are taken up in Spontaneous Particulars as a lecture and as a book seem distinctly different to me.

As a book, Spontaneous Particulars juxtaposes reprinted digital scans of archival selections with poetry, quotes from various thinkers, and Howe’s reflections on the processes of collecting, confronting, and interpreting archival materials. We encounter text and image side-by-side, each symbols of either aural or physical material (the text a symbol of speakable language and the image a symbol of a touchable object). The process of printing the text and images in facing pages has essentially flattened the tactile and sonic presences of the original materials on a single, symbolic plane.

In contrast, the “reading” experience of Spontaneous Particulars as a lecture is not so singular. An audience member listens to Howe—hears the sonic elements of her voice—while encountering projections of the digital images of archival materials. It’s possible to experience what would be the textual or language-based portion of the lecture as mere aural material—to encounter the sounds-in-themselves, if you will. The simultaneity of processing Howe’s reflection on names (sonic stimuli) and a visual projection of a prescription written by William Carlos Williams (visual stimuli) has a much different effect on the way one reads and remembers Spontaneous Particulars. It feels bodily, now.

In this way, Howe’s project reenacts the very issue that it addresses. While listening to Howe recite the lecture is a performance and not the initial thoughts that she captured through language, experiencing Spontaneous Particulars in person does remind me of the experience of touching an archived object. There’s a now-ness to hearing Howe speak that’s similar to the now-ness of touching WCW’s prescription pad. Howe’s voice and WCW’s handwritten notes are material objects that no longer exist in their original context, but remain present for us—the listener, reader, researcher—in a sensory way that interpreting text on a page does not. In the same manner that the archive effect may fool us into deeming an image or clip historical or “real,” I can see Howe’s voice as fooling us with its ephemeral yet salient presence in material validity. Thus, I view Howe’s intentions for Spontaneous Particulars the book to be “a collaged swan song to the old ways” as a celebration in the book’s relationship to the process through which it was created (rather than in the product itself). Like Farge, Howe’s fervor for digging within the physical archives seems to place value in the act of seeking, not the products that seeking creates.