TEXT AND SIGN

1. TEXT AND SIGN CAMELIA ELIAS Dept of Culture and Identity, English Program

2. cyber/complexity theories

3. 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 non-linear, 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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)

8. 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

9. 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)

10. …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.

11. …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.

12. Theory 3: Text/narrative structure • non-linearity and non-sequentiality → multi-directionality and multi-dimensionality • no absolute beginning and no final end • plot: not what is ‘probable’, but what is ‘possible’

13. 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: Beyondthe End of Books)

14. Theory 4: Text/reader • 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)

15. Method • Denaturalization and demystification of the culture of the printed book • Decentering of book culture’s assumptions about reading, writing, authorship, and creativity

16. 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

17. discourse on man Peter Cook /Colin Fournier 2003 man embodies multitudes; others are welcome  the self is a relational self  horizontal rel. “The Friendly Alien”, Graz Mies Van der Rohe, 1958; man stands alone, and erect, triumphant, and distant

18. …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.

19. 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.

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. the cyborg as organizing mythDonna 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.”

24. 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.”

25. 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.”

26. performance artist Stelarc has used technology in a variety of ways to amplify and extend his physical body “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.” Cyborgs: Stelarc “The Third Hand”

27. 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.”

28. 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

29. Mark C. Taylor: “De-sign-ing” • “the modern can be dedicated to the present only by affirming every present as always already passé” (170)

30. text and sign • 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)

31. 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

32. 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)

33. history  culture  sign • 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)

34. 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

35. Text  Text  Text  Text  Text  Text  Text  Text  Sign  Sign  Sign  Sign  Sign  Sign  Sign  Sign  T & S  T & S  T & S 