Transcript TEXT AND SIGN

TEXT AND SIGN
CAMELIA ELIAS
Dept of Culture and Identity, English Program
cyber/complexity theories
reasons for emergence
 the media and computer revolution after WWII –
especially the introduction of HyperText Mark-up
Language and the World Wide Web in the 80s and 90s
 Ted Nelson (1965): coins the term hypertext
 computer-presented documents representing ideas in a nonlinear, as opposed to an authorially organized, way
 the publication of cyberpunk (William Gibson’s
Neuromancer) and hypertext fiction in the 80s and 90s
(ex. These Waves of Girls)
 attempt to theorize the influence of hypertextuality on
literature and literary studies
Background
 Deconstruction/Derrida
Intertextuality: the condition of
interconnectedness among texts
De-centering: the transformability of texts
 Bakhtin:
Multivocality: all texts consist of a dialogue or
conversation between different voices
 Transition from modern industrial to
network culture – grid vs. network
Background
 Narratological structure  all texts consist of:
 a number of structural components
 their interrelation
 their relation to the narrative’s basic story line
 Physics, mathematics, meteorology, biology
 Chaos theory: hidden orders within chaotic systems
 Complexity theory: spontaneous self-organization of
complex systems at the edge of chaos
Theory 1: Text
No autonomous, or discrete work:
 ontological difference between analogical text
and digital text
 bite, node, lexia
 effacement of distinction between textual,
graphic, sound and other information
 hypertext: ‘site’ consisting of electronic links
connecting verbal and non-verbal information
 no central body of fixed meaning, but a site of
multilinear and multisequential paths of
signification → virtual meaning → dispersion
of meaning
Christopher Nash (2001)
 The word ‘hypertext’ … articulates as richly as any
utterance could … a constellation of ideas … By means
of HyperText Mark-up Language (the ubiquitous ‘html’, a
universal computer-language protocol) or some
augmented form of it, any utterance or graphic or audial
sign, once electronically registered in digitised form, may
be ‘hyperlinked’ with any other utterance or sign,
anywhere within whatever whole hyptertext ‘book’,
‘picture’ or digital video or ‘soundtext’ in which it’s
embedded, or … with any other place that can be
reached by electronic, digital communication, anywhere
on the planet. (The Unravelling of the Postmodern Mind)
Theory 2: Text/context
 “the open, or borderless text”: effacement
of difference between text and context
(blurring of distinction between
‘inside’/‘outside’)
 “the democratic text”: destruction of
hierarchical relation between text and
commentary, notes, illustrations, etc.
 “integration” or networking: between text
and context
George P. Landow (1992)
 Hypertext, which links one block of text to myriad
others, destroys [the] physical isolation of the text,
just as it also destroys the attitudes created by that
isolation.
 Because hypertext systems permit a reader both to
annotate an individual text and to link it to other,
perhaps contradictory texts, it destroys one of the
most basic characteristics of the printed text – its
separation and its univocality.
 Whenever one places a text within a network of other
texts, one forces it to exist as part of a complex
dialogue. Hypertext linking … changes the limits of
the individual text … Hypertext thereby blurs the
distinction between what is “inside” and what is
“outside” a text. (Hypertext: The Convergence of
Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology)
…continued
 Text – or, more properly, passages of text – that had
followed one another in an apparently inevitable
seamless linear progression now fracture, break apart,
assume more individual identities … the individual
hypertext lexia has looser, or less determining, bonds to
other lexias from the same work …
 [A] related effect of electronic linking: it disperses “the”
text into other texts. As an individual lexia loses its
physical and intellectual separation from others when
linked electronically to them, it finds itself dispersed into
them.
…continued
 Electronic linking radically changes the
experience of a text by changing its
spatial and temporal relationship to
other texts. Reading a hypertext version
of Dickens’s Great Expectations or
Eliot’s Wasteland, for example, one
follows links to predecessor texts,
variant readings, criticism, and so on.
Theory 3: Text/narrative structure
 non-linearity and non-sequentiality →
multi-directionality and multidimensionality
 no absolute beginning and no final end
 plot: not what is ‘probable’, but what is
‘possible’
hypertextual story space
 multidimensional
 theoretically infinite
 with an equally infinite set of possible network
linkages, either programmed, fixed or variable,
or random, or both
 destabilizing
 seducing: the allure of the blank space
 “replace the logic with character or metaphor, say,
scholarship with collage and verbal wit, and turn the
story loose in a space where whatever is possible is
necessary.” (Robert Coover, Hypertext: Beyond the
End of Books)
Theory 4: Text/reader
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the reader as author
the interactive reader
the reader as plotter
 “In a hypertext environment a lack of
linearity does not destroy narrative. In fact,
since readers always, but particularly in this
environment, fabricate their own structures,
sequences, and meanings, they have
surprisingly little trouble reading a story or
reading for a story” (Landow, 1992)
Method
 Denaturalization and demystification of the
culture of the printed book
 Decentering of book culture’s assumptions
about reading, writing, authorship, and
creativity
Mark C. Taylor:
The Moment of Complexity (2001)
 … the figure of … all-encompassing logic is the grid. The
assembly line extended beyond the factory floor to
create supposedly rational and suburban grids where
workers spend what they earn and relax and rest so they
can work efficiently another day.
 The straight lines and right angles of streets and
avenues as well as modern houses and buildings
channel desires in ways that allow controlled moments of
release necessary to keep the wheels of industry turning.
 From the beginning of modernity, the grid functions as
an instrument for rationalizing and thus controlling
nature.
 Modern Times 1936
discourse on man
Peter Cook /Colin Fournier 2003
Mies Van der Rohe, 1958;
man stands alone, and erect,
triumphant, and distant
man embodies multitudes;
others are welcome  the self is
a relational self  horizontal rel.
“The Friendly Alien”, Graz
…continued
 complexity …, then, emerges at the edge of
chaos.
 This is not a world where chance is eliminated
and control assured.
 To the contrary, aleatory associations and
unexpected juxtapositions create “difficult”
wholes that cannot be comprehended by the
neat-and-clean distinctions of a logic of
noncontradiction based on the exclusive
principle of either-or.
 [It] displays the synthetic or even dialectical logic
of both-and.
the complex text
 Overturns hegemonic structures by soliciting the
return of repressed otherness and difference in
a variety of guises.
 Undermines systems and structures that
inevitably totalize by excluding difference and
repressing otherness.
complex texts
 ‘complex’ text
A nontotalizing system or structure that
nontheless acts a whole’ (Taylor)
 nonlinear dynamic system of meaning
 complex form – e.g., recursive symmetries
between scale levels
 disorder is order and vice versa
 deterministic and unpredictable
 adaptability of text to context
The Other: The Cyborg
 'cybernetic organism’
 The cyborg signposts the fact that the
distinctions between machine/human no longer
hold
 The cyborg blurs boundaries between:
 Living / Non-living
 Organic / Inorganic
 Natural / Artificial
 Body / Machine
 Human / Non-human
the breakdown of three
dichotomies
 human/animal
 machine/organism
 physical/non-physical
 why?
 the demand of biology and the sciences
and technologies of communication and
information
the cyborg as organizing myth
Donna Harraway: The Cyborg Manifesto
 “There is nothing about being “female” that
naturally binds women.”
 “No objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in
themselves;
 any component can be interfaced with any other if
the proper standard, the proper code, can be
constructed for processing signals in a common
language.”
 “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and
reassembled, post-modern collective and
personal self. This is the self feminists must
code.”
cyborgs and networking
 “I prefer a network ideological image,
suggesting the profusion of spaces and
identities and the permeability of
boundaries in the personal body and in the
body politic. “Networking” is both a
feminist practice and a multinational
corporate strategy - weaving is for
oppositional cyborgs.”
regeneration not reproduction
 “I would suggest that cyborgs have more
to do with regeneration and are suspicious
of the reproductive matrix and of most
birthing.”
Cyborgs: Stelarc
 performance artist Stelarc
has used technology in a
variety of ways to amplify
and extend his physical
body
“The Third Hand”
 “It is no longer a matter of
perpetuating the human
species by reproduction
but of enhancing the
individual by redesigning.
Male female intercourse
is replaced by human
machine interface...We
are at the end of human
physiology.”
Stelarc - Extra Ear
 “altering the
architecture of the
body [allows it to be]
amplified and
accelerated, attaining
planetary escape
velocity. It becomes a
post-evolutionary
projectile.”
cyborg themes in popular media
The dehumanization of the human:
 Robocop
 The human is viewed as a product
 memory can be wiped in order to be re-programmed
 the body is owned by a corporation
 re-assertion of human identity
The humanization of the machine:
 Terminator 2
 the machine learns human values
Mark C. Taylor: “De-sign-ing”
 “the modern can be dedicated to the
present only by affirming every present as
always already passé” (170)
text and sign
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by interpreting the signs of the time,
we are able to expose what a given
culture represents:
 namely an on-going process of translating
what is manifest (superficial) into what is
latent (profound)
reflection vs. depth
 endless play vs. stability
 complex infinity vs. decipherment
 ambiguous vs. clear ground
timely (current)
 yes to fashion means affirming time’s eternity
fleeting (insignificant)
 no to fashion means escaping time’s eternity
new and old; new as old
 “since the new is old as soon as it appears
it is necessary to renew it constantly
through a process in which repetition
becomes a virtual compulsion” (Taylor,
188)
history  culture  sign
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sensuality to reason
ornamentation to purism
eros to thanatos
flesh to skeleton
sign to sign
 “the sign is always the sign of a sign, it never
represents the thing itself but is a simulacrum
that testifies to the imaginary status of the
original” (Taylor, 204)
sum up
 structuralism:
 identifies tensions
 deconstruction:
 deconstructs tensions/hierarchies
 marxism:
 unmasks power relations and points to class struggle
 feminism/Queer theory/psychoanalysis:
 figure out the position of the subject
 postcolonialism:
 empowers the subject
 cyborg theory:
 allows the subject to transgress
 ALL THESE 10 CRITICAL SCHOOLS REDEFINE
VALUES, RELIGION, TRADITIONS AND REJOICE IN
DIFFERENCE