Digital Deixis, Passing Poeticity

Abstract

Drawing on Lev Manovich’s work, poet and literary scholar Matti Kangaskoski has identified momentariness as a crucial characteristic of digital cultural interfaces. According to Kangaskoski, related readerly effects in the case of digital poetry include “glimpses of an overall structure” and “passing moments whose meaning is formed in relation to the ephemeral reader.” (2019, 47) This paper proposes that a cognitive take on the notion of deixis can be fruitful in addressing the complexities of such momentariness. Deixis is usually understood as expressions whose meaning is relative to the discourse situation, such as “here”, and is linked to a more general perspectival positioning in cognitive accounts of language use. Departing from Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (2008) and relating to the spatiotemporal dimension of Elleström’s media modalities (2010), the paper explores the critical potential of deictic positioning in Ian Hatcher’s Attentions (2022). It argues that the work’s commentary on the momentariness of human attention offers illuminating insights for current discussions around the digitalization of textual practices.