posted 10/9/00 2:28 PM     

Palimpsest and the Incunabula HyperMystic Writing Pad


"A palimpsest is a manuscript on which an earlier text has been effaced and the vellum or parchment reused for another. It was a common practice, particularly in medieval ecclesiastical circles, to rub out an earlier piece of writing by means of washing or scraping the manuscript, in order to prepare it for a new text. The motive for making palimpsests seems to have been largely economic--reusing parchment was cheaper than preparing new skin. Another motive may have been directed by the desire of Church officials to "convert" pagan Greek script by overlaying it with the word of God."

See: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0243.html


In a metaphorical analysis of how the psyche "records" material, how one experiences the world through traces of previous experiences, Freud used the example of The Mystic Writing Pad - that dime store toy and carnival novelty in which a carbon or wax topped piece of cardboard is overlaid with a piece of plastic. Once the plastic is lifted, the writing "magically" disappears. However, the carbon underlay retains the traces of the original.


Jaques Derrida, the French philosopher and Deconstructionist concluded that perception is a kind of writing machine like the Mystic Writing Pad. Commenting on Freud's metaphor, Derrida notes the fact that the marks on the pad are not visible due to the stylus leaving a deposit on the sheet of plastic and the marks only become visible because of the contact with the subsurface of the the wax or carbon. None of us, Derrida claims, apprehend the world directly, but only retrospectively; our sense of that which is beyond ourselves is the product of previous memories, previous writings. "Writing," says Derrida, "supplements perception before perception even appears to itself". (Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology)


How then does this relate to the Incunabula? Hypertext might be described as a hyper-Mystic Writing Pad; it is both infinitely receptive to new experience and capable of potentially infinite retention. "Its magic arises from its ability to reactivate any trace unaltered from when it was first recorded. More particularly, hypertext allows writing to become a physical force which, like that which enters the unconscious through perception, creates paths and webs which determine the structure of all subsequent experiences." Words have presence only in so much as they are illumined from behind or beneath.

See: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0243.html


Hakim Bey suggests the use of the Palimpsest as a tactic for ontological guerrilla warfare or "poetic terrorism" (i.e. creation-in-destruction and destruction-in-creation) against the burgeoning view of information as wealth, devoid of the corporeal and the manipulation of the images of information. Deconstructionism shows the multiple layers of meaning in language other than perceiving the author as the sole source of meaning of text, challenging the traditional premise that text has an unchanging or unified meaning. In Immediatist parlance, Bey intends its use as a magical assault on the manipulation and appropriation of images by the media machine and the "information state" fixating our attention on information and away from direct experience. " 'Knowledge is freedom' is true only when freedom is understood as a psycho-kinetic skill.
'Information' is a chaos; knowledge is the spontaneous ordering of that chaos; freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity."


The juxtaposition of the overlay is the key. Historically, the overlaid writing was not simply on top of the "rubbed out" original text, but also at right angles and in the margins. Bey theorizes that the juxtaposition of the theory-palimpsest is not random but full of synchronicites. "The connections between layers are not sequential in time but juxtapositional in space." Hakim Bey, "The Palimpsest" See: http://www.gyw.com/hakimbey/palimpsest.html
To be effective, it must remain unfixed, ever unfolding.


"It can be re-written -- re-inscribed -- with each new layer of accretion. And all the layers are transparent, translucent, except where clusters of inscription block the cabalistic light -- (sort of like a stack of animation gels). All the layers are "present" on the surface of the palimpsest -- but their development (including dialectical development) has become "invisible" and perhaps "meaningless". Ibid.


The Hypertext Palimpsest can be used in the formation of Jungian creative artifacts. By using the imaginal powers - throwing out the 'net' and seeing what is caught within it - seducing those into its spider-like web with conspiracy, sex, mystery and science - more than a living book - but a living and evolving art architecture - creating, evolving, manifesting the imaginal powers, deploying the imagination and focusing the attention on "liberatory energies".


"Hypertext provides for multiple authorship, a blurring of the author and reader functions, multiple reading paths, and extended works with diffuse boundaries. With the inclusion of sound, graphics, video, and other media as nodes, hypertext (here often referred to as hypermedia) expands the world available to a writer." "The Electronic Labrynth" See: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html


And its purpose?


"Each artwork would be a consciously-devised "seduction machine" or magical engine meant to awaken true desires, anger at the repression of those desires, belief in the non-impossibility of those desires. Some artworks would consist of settings for the realization of desire, others would evoke and articulate the object/subject of desire, others would shroud everything in mystery, still others would render themselves completely translucent. The artwork should shift attention away from itself as the privileged icon or fetish or desirable thing, and instead focus attention on liberatory energies." Hakim Bey, "The Palimpsest".


Through this creative hypermystic process, a story "unfolds" which subconsciously connects the subsurface levels of synaptic pathways "enfolding" the reader into its web.

So, as we peel back each plastic translucent overlay of the Incunabula, we find beneath the traces of the original ideas presented by authors such as Corbin, Bey and the mystics and find that, in doing so, the fractal traces remain firmly embedded - the memes - we find in the margins "synchronistic connections" to the Knights Templars, the Sufis, Javanese art and Tantric sex; at the fringes are the scientific theories of Herbert, Everette and Wheeler, Bohm and Sheldrake; and on the edges of the frames sits Schroedinger's cat no longer aware of life and death but of the "traces" of its once existence.


To those seeking "answers" within, there are none. It operates as a viral meme deconstructing the reality model of language and the concensus reality as we know it and replacing those models with reconstructed autonomous and imaginal mind maps.


"The best tactical defense against this co-optation will be the subtle complexity and aesthetic depth of our symbolism, which must contain fractal dimensions untranslatable into the flat image-language of the tube." Ibid.


Do the authors of the Incunabula really want to "leave" or do they simply want others to join them in the imaginal construct outside the media manipulated "information state"?


"The purpose however is not to destroy the space of creativity but to open it up -- not to depopulate it but to invite "everyone" inside. We don't want to leave; we want (finally) to arrive." Ibid.


See also:

Fox S. (1991), "The Production and Distribution of Knowledge Through Open and Distance Learning." In D. Hlynka (Ed.) Paradigms Regained: The uses of illumination, semiotic, and post-modern criticism as models of inquiry in educational technology; a book of readings. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.


Taylor, W. and Swartz, J. (1991), "Whose Knowledge." In D. Hlynka (Ed.)Paradigms Regained: The uses of illumination, semiotic, and post-modern criticism as models of inquiry in educational technology; a book of readings. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.


Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist, 1995 Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, robin


http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/

http://www.connect.net/ron/derrida.html

http://www.gherkin.com/palimpsest

http://www.gyw.com/hakimbey/

http://www.programhouse.com/pal/

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/

http://joseph.matheny.com/