| LOUIS ARMAND FROM MEMEX TO HYPERTEXT: JOYCEAN TOPOLOGIES & THE CYBERNETICS OF FINNEGANS WAKE Neither inside nor outside, it spaces itself without letting itself be framed but it does not stand outside the frame. It works the frame, makes it work, lets it work, gives it work to do [�]. The trait is attracted and retrac(t)ed there by itself, attracts and dispenses with itself there [il s�y attire et s�y passe, de lui-m�me]. It is situated. It situates between the visible edging and the phantom in the centre, from which we fascinate. [�] Between the outside and the inside, between the external and internal edge-line, the framer and the framed, the figure and the ground, form and content, signifier and signified, and so on for any two-faced opposition. The trait thus divides in this place where it takes place. The emblem of this topos seems undiscoverable. (Jacques Derrida) PROTOTYPE The theoretical prototype of modern hypertext was first described in an article by Vannevar Bush in 1945, in the Atlantic Monthly. Bush envisaged a type of electronically linked information retrieval machine designed to help scientists and private individuals process, organise and access the increasing amounts of information that new research and communications technologies were making available. Bush described this machine, the memex, as: a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, �memex� will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged supplement to his memory. This supplemental memory was envisaged by Bush as performing a prosthetic function of �associative indexing� linked to a mechanical archive, of which it would form an integral part, �the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex.� As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in America in the mid-1940s, Bush was in a unique position to appreciate the significance of information systems for the future of western technological development. But it wasn�t until the 1960s, when Theodor H. Nelson and Douglas C. Englebart began to design computer systems that could implement some of these notions of linked texts, that the computing possibilities of what Nelson came to term �hypertext� were given formal expression. Consequently today hypertext as a term is taken to refer almost exclusively to computer-based networks of interlinked texts, supported by an array of �mark-up� languages and specialised scripts. This form of �hypertext,� however, only began to be generally available for personal computers in the late 1980s, whilst the ubiquitous World Wide Web did not take form in the popular imagination until the advent of browser software like Mosaic and Netscape in the early 1990s. As George P. Landow and Paul Delaney point out in their 1991 anthology, Hypermedia and Literary Studies, electronic library catalogues and search facilities, which have been in wide use since the late 1970s, provide a simplified model of hypertext systems. While these systems can be thought of as supporting a virtual rearrangement and retrieval of information about individual published volumes, they are generally limited to a small number of standardised search categories (author, title, subject) and did not, until fairly recently, tend to operate with textual units smaller than a book or, in some cases, individual articles. But according to Landow and Delaney, online catalogues do not actually qualify as hypertext systems �because they operate on textual classifications rather than on the actual underlying complete texts.� On the contrary, a �true hypertext must be able to define textual units, and link them in various ways, within an overall textbase or, to use another term now gaining currency, �docuverse.�� Generally speaking, hypertext emerged at a time when textual theories had already reconfigured the way we think about the book and about what it is that constitutes a text. Consequently, it was not so much a question of hypertext�s theoretical value but of its possible use which concerned academics like Landow and Delaney. To a greater or lesser extent hypertext presented a possible means of overcoming the material limitations of the existing reading culture�from the most mundane practice of turning pages and taking printed volumes from shelves, to the more complex requirements of cross referencing and the presentation of simultaneous or variorum texts. This utilitarian function of hypertext, an extension of older information retrieval systems, is still the most common use of the medium�and despite its supposedly radical break with the existing structure of the book it remains, in fact, closely related to such traditional �internal� meta-textual functions as citation, indexing, tables of contents, page-numbering, chapter divisions and subdivisions, footnotes and endnotes, appendices, glossaries, prefaces and postscripts, critical introductions and afterwords, as well as to such �external� functions as concordances, annotations, curricula vitae, reference guides, biographies, scholarly editions, monographs, reader�s guides, dictionaries, encyclopaedias and so on. By the same token, hypertext can also be seen as eroding precisely those boundaries which determine the relation of text to meta-text, along with such unitarian notions as completion, closure and linearity. For Landow and Delaney, computer hypertexts provided a model for a critical paradigm, along vaguely �deconstructive� lines, by which electronic writing could be thought of as dismantling textual hierarchies �by inserting every text into a web of textual relations.� In this sense hypertext defines textuality in terms of �integration� rather than �containment,� by �situating texts in a field of other text,� although this too can be seen as merely a restatement of textual relations described in the work of pre-structuralist thinkers like Blanchot and Bataille, and in the work of pioneer �textual theorists� like Sigmund Freud, J.G. Frazer and Ferdinand de Saussure. When it first began to encroach upon the field of textual studies, however, the real challenge of hypertext was that it rendered explicit the particular psychological processes of �synthesis� that have always been a part of the experience of language, but that have nonetheless been subordinated to the interests of formal discourse. Practically speaking, the advent of hypertext brought with it a number of problems that made it difficult to continue regarding post-Saussurean discourse as purely �speculative.� It seemed that heretofore �theoretical speculations� on the nature of signifying structure would have a �material� realisation in the shape of a functional �technology� that, rather than existing on the margins of the academy or passing in as a kind of literary fashion, was in fact about to entrench itself in the very fabric of popular and official culture globally. And in the process, this strange technology has come to further redefining the way in which we conceive the relationship between �information� and textuality. In the context of literary studies, the sudden, and seemingly unlimited capacity to manipulate texts brought with it conceptual problems which, by and large, arose from the purely practical function scholars had considered computers to serve in regards to their research needs (that is, as a reference tool). When it became evident that hypertext was something far more dynamic than simply an information retrieval system�that is, as a medium in its own right (the first verbal medium, after computing languages, to emerge from the computer revolution)�questions again arose as to what constitutes a unit of text, and what are the relevant (or possible) links between textual units? For Landow and Delaney, among traditional (pre-Saussurean) textual units the most recognised �are the word, the sentence and the book�: To think of them as commensurable units on a linear scale of magnitude might appear natural, but it is also misleading. A word is a conceptual unit, a sentence a syntactical one, a book a unit whose identity is largely determined by its status as a physical object. Or, following Aristotle, by its symbolic relation to an external, formal unity. However, the integrity of each of these �units� has already been severely tested by writers of the avant-garde, by anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and psychoanalysts, and by philosophers, linguists, and other theorists, and so it has become necessary to arrive at different ways of thinking about textual units as such. The American critic Stanley Fish, for example, considers that �formal units are always a function of the interpretive model one brings to bear; they are not �in� the text.� In the opinion of Fish, �formal units,� like �intentions,� function nominally: �an intention, like a formal unit, is made when perceptual or interpretive closure is hazarded; it is verified by an interpretive act, and [...] it is not verifiable in any other way.� Further, Fish argues that �meanings are not extracted but made and unmade not by encoding forms but by interpretive strategies that call forms into being.� For Fish, �intention,� like �formal units,� are a product of a decision, and this decision constructs a type of psychological interface between the reader(s) (the �interpretive community�) and the empirical phenomenon of the words on the page. This interface (�interpretive strategies�) describes a textual relation, and by extension we might consider the virtually unlimited capacity of this interface to evolve differing textual relations to define one of the basic qualities of hypertext. CYBERNETIC That a text is not an object was one of the arguments of Roman Ingarden�s 1931 phenomenologist study, The Literary Work of Art, and a similar conclusion is to be found in the twelfth chapter of Ren� Wellek�s and Austin Warren�s 1949 Theory of Literature. This chapter, written by Wellek and heavily indebted to Ingarden, disputes various accounts of the literary text as any sort of empirical or psychological entity, although it nevertheless suggests that the text may be situated or realised by empirical means. In Wellek�s conception, the text is neither an artefact like a piece of sculpture (that is, the physical pages or book), nor the real sounds uttered by someone performing it. Neither is it the psychological experience of someone hearing or reading it, the experience of the author in creating it, nor, finally, is it the totality of readers� experiences or even what all of them have in common (which would be merely a lowest common denominator). Wellek concludes that a text is only a matter of norms which serve as �a potential cause of experiences,� which Ingarden views as phenomenological in nature, whereby the term �experience� is substituted for the various ways in which a text can be konkretisiert or realised. Nevertheless, the first requirement for a theory of hypertext is that it take into account the medium itself as a kind of mechanical-textual apparatus. That is, not in its utilitarian sense, but in its signifying function. Borrowing a metaphor of a virtual medium or interface, we might view this apparatus as contiguous with the de-centred structures inscribed within or between languages and programmed by language. In other words, as an accumulation of processes of coding and transcoding, translation and integration between differing softwares and different operating systems. As Geoffrey Bennington argues, this medium recalls: the �memory� traces of an electronic archive, which can only with difficulty be thought according to the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, and more easily as differences of force or capacity. At the same time, this apparatus remains linked to textuality: �helping us to think writing in a more complicated relation with space and time [�] because of the possibilities of folding a text back on itself, of discontinuous jumps establishing quasi-instantaneous links.� In other words, this �medium� would articulate a textual apparatus which would also be technological. In Of Grammatology Derrida suggests that cybernetics, and in particular the cybernetic programme, in fact describes a field of writing. For Derrida: if the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts�including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory�which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, gramm? [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. This may in fact be one of the most succinct statements about the nature of such metaphors as �hypertext,� situated as it is on the breach of the mechanical and the human, techn? and physis, and so on�informing the cybernetic apparatus, from the most elementary processes of information to structural formulations of semantic systems, as contiguous with a condition of writing. At the same time, this condition itself is seen to undergo modifications, following the various developments of �the practical methods of information retrieval� which extend �the possibilities of the �message� vastly, to the point where it is no longer the �written� translation of a language, the transporting of a signified which could remain to be spoken in its integrity.� For Derrida this development describes a particular defile of the signifier as �phonetic writing,� that is, as the record of the absence of a speaking subject. Thus the �cybernetics� to which Derrida alludes can be thought of as a moment or series of moments in which the pro-gramm? is seen to mark a writing �prior� to the sign, that �medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical and economic adventure of the West,� which in its turn is �limited in space and time� to a particular historical placement. It is this tentative �priority� of the pro-gramm? which provides the deconstructive �element� of Derrida�s cybernetics, as non-linguistic inscription: Even before being determined as human (with all the distinctive characteristics that have always been attributed to man and the entire system of significations that they imply) or nonhuman, the gramm?�or the grapheme�would thus name the element. An element without simplicity. An element, whether it is understood as a medium or as the irreducible atom, of the arche-synthesis in general, of what one must forbid oneself to define within the system of oppositions of metaphysics, of what consequently one should not even call experience in general, that is to say, the origin of meaning in general. This �nonfortuitous conjunction of cybernetics and the �human sciences�� could be one way in which we might understand Derrida�s description of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as �1000th generation computer� or �hypermnesiac machine.� ARCHIVAL DESIRE When Samuel Beckett wrote of Work in Progress, �there form is content, content is form,� he was offering one of the first insights into this problem of Finnegans Wake as a hypertextual medium. Beckett goes on to support his comment by noting: His [Joyce�s] writing is not about something; it is that something itself [...] when the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep [...] when the sense is dancing, the words dance. While we should remain cautious of drawing a simple equation between Joyce�s writing and the �something� which is signified in Beckett�s statement, �it is that something itself,� the absence of an �about� suggests one way in which Finnegans Wake disrupts any simple (or quasi-mimetic) relationship between writing and (the) sense(s). This is most evident in the paronomasian function of the Wake�s language, where �sense� might be regarded, through the agency of both visual and verbal puns, as the fabric of the text (although this process obviously works retroactively as well, where �sense� is actually the �event� by which other texts are seen to �emerge� as in Joyce�s �soundsense� or �sensesound� [FW 121.15]). In this way Joyce poses a challenge to mimetic conceptions of language�a challenge that involves not only a disruption of the binary category sensible-intelligible, but also the empirical conception which would impose a causally linear relation of language to (the) sense(s). In the Wake, this process of �emergence� is described not only in terms of autopoiesis, but in terms of an overall apparatus: the open totality of Joyce�s work-in-progress, including each of its themes of alchemy, duplicity, copyright and historicity in general. Shem the Penman, the plagiarist-heretic figure of Finnegans Wake, stands at the �centre� of the Wake�s thematics of textual production (as the author-counterfeiter of A.L.P.�s �letter�) in a composite function with Shaun the Postman (Shem is Shaun�s Baudelairean �shemblable� [FW 489.27] or �doblinganger� [FW 490.17]). Towards the end of Book I Shem is depicted as producing: nichthemerically from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity of obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United States of Ourania or bedeed and bedood and bedang and bedung to him, with his double dye, brought to blood heat, gallic acid on iron ore, through the bowels of his misery, flashly, nastily, appropriately, this Esuan Menschavik and the first till last alchemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integumented slowly unfolded in all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history. [FW 185.29, 186.02] By writing with his excrement across the entire surface of his own body, Shem symbolically obscures the divisions between tropos and topos in a single act of autopoiesis. Or rather, this solipsistic reversion crosses between a topological space within language and a tropological space within the topos of this relation, whereby we might think of Finnegans Wake (whose metonym this excremental writing is) as emerging from a chiasmus of hypertextual corsi and recorsi. According to H�l�ne Cixous, Joyce adopted Giambattista Vico�s cyclical theory of history for the purpose of repeating �with a difference� the quasi-archetypal material of the universal cultural archive. As the above passage from the Wake suggests, the �invitation of history proceeds to the disguising of an original event,� and thus to so-called �distortion and degradation.� In this way, Cixous argues, �Joyce�s vision of history was bound to coincide sooner or later with parody�: a tragic event if repeated [out of its context] may become comical [...]. The next stage must be that of the imitation of the comical, the comedy burlesquing comedy, the parody parodied. In Finnegans Wake Cixous considers that �Joyce is parodying Joyce parodying Homer, Dante, God and mankind, and for this reason history, which was a nightmare for Stephen [in Ulysses], is nothing more than a dream for H.C.E.� Joyce�s persistent reference to Vico�s Principi di Scienza Nuova (1744), however, requires that we look more closely at the Viconian concept of history itself, which, as Cixous�s analysis suggests, has come to acquire the tenor of a (Marxian) dialectical trope. In Vico�s schema history indeed comes to mean an ideal history �whose periods consist not of contingent facts but of forms of the spirit,� as �a moment in the ideal history of the spirit, a form of consciousness.� Vico extends this idea in order to explain the relationship of history to poetry. From the time of Plato and Aristotle at least until the Renaissance, this relationship had broadly been defined in terms of those aspects of mimetic representation which belong to the possible and to the probable (verisimile), such that history was conceived typically as the imitation of the particular, and thus poetry as the imitation of the universal. Contrary to this, Vico presents an idea of history and poetry (poi?sis) as undifferentiable, at least in form, since for Vico �primitive history was poetry, its plot was narration of fact, and Homer was the first historian.� In this way: �Poetry gives an imaginative vision; science or philosophy intelligible truth; history the consciousness of certitude.� Vico also describes two principles relating to historical knowledge which are of particular significance to the structure and thematics of Finnegans Wake. In the section outlining the �Elements� of the new science, Vico writes: I 120 Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things. 121 This axiom explains those two common traits, on the one hand that rumour grows in its course (fama crescit eundo), on the other that rumour is deflated by presence [of the thing itself] (minuit praesentia famam). In the long course of rumour run from the beginning of the world, it has been the perennial source of all the exaggerated opinions which have hitherto been held concerning remote antiquities unknown to us [�]. II 122. It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant or unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand. Not only does Vico�s conception have significant implications for Joyce�s use of historical and factual material, and for his treatment of historical themes, but also for the way in which we might view the relationship between history and mythology in a text such as Finnegans Wake. For Vico, language and poetry are ostensibly the same, which also implies a particular discursive model of history. In Book II of the Scienza Nuova, Vico argues that poetic tropes structure all human discourse, and that empirical language in this sense is inextricably tied up with verisimilitude as the descriptive basis of human experience. One implication of this is that history as such can be regarded as what Benedetto Croce called a �universal system of etymologies,� or what Vico himself referred to as a �dictionary of mental words common to all nations,� a descriptive phrase that might equally well apply to Joyce�s linguistic experiment in Finnegans Wake. This movement in Vico�s thought can be seen as lending a certain modernity to his concept of poetic history, which not only denies the univocity of historical narrative (as a function of the possible) but also ties it to a literalised poi?sis as �writing� (Vico�s �dumb gestures�), and thus to an aspect of techn? and to technology as a �mechanics� of the imagination. In his 1953 essay �The Question Concerning Technology,� Heidegger makes this link explicit, stating that: The essence of modern technology starts man upon the way of that revealing through which the actual everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve. �To start upon a way� means �to send� in our ordinary language. We shall call the sending that gathers [versammelnde Schicken], that first starts man upon a way of revealing, destining [Geschnick]. It is from this destining that the essence of all history [Geschichte] is determined. History is neither simply the object of written chronicle nor merely the process of human activity. That activity first becomes history as something destined. And it is only the destining into objectifying representation that makes the historical accessible. Not only is Heidegger�s method here suggestive of the �etymological� condition nominated by Croce, but in both method and argument implies a type of archival aspect of the historical which, as Derrida outlines in Archive Fever, is tied to a certain destining of the call, or rather commandment�what Heidegger here refers to as a �sending,� but also �to start upon one�s way,� to motivate. Such an historical apparatus Joyce refers to in Finnegans Wake as a �vicociclometer� (614.27), in which the historical archive is presented as a recycling, a return, a rescripting�an interminable destination of that which arrives at the moment of starting out (�the destining into objectifying representation that makes the historical accessible�): We drames our dreams tell Bappy returns. And Sein Annews. We will not say it shall not be, this passing of order and order�s coming. [FW 277.17-21] This re-ordering of history approximates Freud�s innovation in describing the operations of dreams and the unconscious in terms of iterability in language. Just as in Vico, who described imagination as �dilated memory,� Freud proposed that memory itself is not only subject to but undifferentiable from the technical operations of writing. This is most explicitly systematised in the Traumdeutung, in which Freud anticipates the structuralist linguistics of Roman Jakobson by proposing that dream texts can be read as being structured along the axes of displacement and condensation (virtual synonyms for metaphor and metonymy)�a structure in which the force of linguistic equivocality serves as the key organisational impetus. Similarly, Finnegans Wake can be viewed as constructing a �night language of dreams,� in which, as Darren Tofts suggests, the �virtual-reality engine for Joyce�s �nightmaze� is the pun (411).� It is in his essay �Note on the Mystic Writing Pad,� however, that Freud first develops a topology of representation through the metaphor of the psyche as a textual apparatus or Wunderblock. Suggestive of the accretive form of a palimpsest, the metaphor of the Wunderblock implies �an unlimited receptive capacity and a retention of permanent traces,� in which the graphemic function is literalised as the base register of all subsequent reflexive discourse. As a form of universal record in which �history� and �language� define contiguous signifying relations, the Wunderblock would thus also describe a type of archival machine or �MIND FACTORY� (FW 282.R1): �a writing machine of marvellous complexity into which the whole of the psychical apparatus will be projected.� Elsewhere Freud proposes that: If we reflect that the means of representation in dreams are principally visual images [Bilden] and not [spoken] words, we shall see that it is even more appropriate to compare dreams with a system of writing than with a [verbal] language. In fact the interpretation of dreams is completely analogous to the decipherment of an ancient pictorial script such as Egyptian hieroglyphs. The relationship between memory and writing in Freud is analysed by Derrida in his essay �Feud and the Scene of Writing,� but it may be fair to say that many of the conclusions drawn there are already prefigured in an earlier work on Husserl, in which Derrida makes his first explicit reference to the work of James Joyce. In his introduction to the Origin of Geometry, Derrida draws upon Joyce as representing an alternative to the phenomenological models of history and language put forward by Husserl. For Derrida, Joyce is taken to exemplify (most notably in Finnegans Wake) the ways in which history can be shown to collapse into a synchronic, equivocal form of writing, in contradistinction to Husserl�s constant appeals to the imperative of univocity, or the ideal unity of the sign in the external object-relations of its signifier. In an echo of Vico, Derrida describes Joyce�s project as one that entails repeating and taking responsibility �for all equivocation itself, utilising a language that could equalise the greatest possible synchrony with the greatest potential for buried, accumulated, and interwoven intentions within each linguistic atom, each vocable, each word, each simple proposition, in all worldly cultures and their most ingenious forms.� For Joyce, equivocality is not merely an affect of language, but rather the very basis of language. It is by virtue of its equivocality that language is in fact able to sustain itself and to give rise to communications (translation or transference), both between signifiers and within�a generative polysemy which Derrida elsewhere designates by the terms diff�rance and iterability. This �process of production� (writing) reveals its �historicity� through a relationship with the ephemera of the universal cultural archive, which also recalls the Viconian notion of epochal recycling. According to Derrida, who identifies a similar process at work in Ulysses: this writing resolutely settles itself within the labyrinthine field of culture �bound� by its own equivocations, in order to travel through and explore the vastest possible historical distance that is now at all possible. Derrida considers Joyce�s project to have �proceeded from a certain anti-historicism� (in Husserlean terms) suggesting that his �equivocal� writing enacts a rupture in the unifying movement of either a linear or cyclical notion of history that purports itself to be a closed totality. Such a writing, ��bound� by its own equivocations� to the �labyrinthine field of culture,� and at the same time �anti-historical,� already suggests the �form and content� of a future hypertext. TEXTUAL OBJECTS Theodor H. Nelson, who was the first to coin the term in the 1960s, defined hypertext simply as �non-sequential writing.� A hypertext, in Nelson�s view, rather than obeying sequential or narrative logics, can be said to develop through a process of �accretion� in a way that mirrors the functioning of the psyche, as described by Freud in his essay Note on the Mystic Writing Pad. According to Freud, memory and the unconscious emerge from a kind of palimpsestic writing, a �synoptic� text which retains the differences between its various layers at the same time as reducing those differences to a spatio-temporal �immediacy.� In �The Topic of the Imaginary� Lacan elaborates upon Freud�s schema, in which the apparatus of memory is also compared to a photographic apparatus (�The Psychology of the Dream Processes�), and which elsewhere Lacan relates in terms of the linguistic theories of Jakobson and Saussure: That other scene which Freud designated, in relation to dreams, as that of the unconscious, the effects discovered at the level of the materially unstable elements which constitute the chain of language: effects determined by the double play of combination and substitution in the signifier, along the two axes of metaphor and metonymy which generate the signified. In �Freud and the Scene of Writing,� Derrida further develops Freud�s notion of the palimpsest which he renders in terms of trace, an idea which bears heavily upon his notion of diff�rance. For Derrida, it is the paradox of this self-identical, different-differing trace that gives language its signifying force�what, in common with cybernetics theorists, he terms iterability (the possibility of repetition, which is mechanical, and which allows language to therefore generate associative or differential significations from within its own structure). Geoffrey Bennington has described this mechanism as �the model of a �hypertext� program�: the �memory� traces of an electronic archive, which can only with difficulty be thought, according to the opposition between sensible and intelligible, and more easily as differences of force or capacity (although this is already important, helping us to think writing in a more complicated relation with space and time): but also because of the possibilities of folding a text back on itself, of discontinuous jumps establishing quasi-instantaneous links between sentences, words, or marks separated by hundreds of pages. Following from Derrida, this cybernetic textual apparatus or recursive network of self-referentiality and autopoiesis, can be seen as describing a form of generative textuality which would also operate as a kind of signifying matrix, whose permutative functions would thus give rise to innumerable other textual relations. Through like processes of textual evolution, these networks would also interact and influence one another to modify the structure of the �original� matrix itself, thus situating the �essence� of the text in direct relation to the technics of its various genetic and topological mechanisms. In this way also it is possible to speak of a certain technological aspect of language�the �book� as assemblage, as machine. And like Finnegans Wake, the non-sequentiality of this cybernetic �hypertext� also describes a matrix whose structuring co-ordinates are thus constantly in a state of generative flux. Where this idea of text differs from that of literary critics like Wellek is not so much in regards to the question of whether a text can function meaningfully as an object, but whether or not it can be fixed and determined in regards to a particular objectivity (which was the positivist argument that Wellek was opposing, and yet which he at times falls back upon in order to assert the normative function of the text). Moreover, Wellek was more preoccupied with traditional ontological questions�for instance, the mode of Being of the literary work of art�than with questions of language as such. On the other hand, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, writing since the late 1940s and early 1960s respectively, have revealed how the question of language has come to challenge such received notions of ontology and Being, and indeed to describe their very condition. Much of Blanchot�s and Derrida�s thinking on the subject can be traced back to the ideas of the Heidegger and to the nineteenth-century symbolist poet St�phane Mallarm�. Mallarm�s conception of poetic language, like Heideggerean Dichtung or poetising, was defined both by its non-instrumentality and by a quasi-transcendental structure. Similarly, for Blanchot: The poetic word is no longer somebody�s word. In it no one speaks, and what speaks is not anyone. It seems rather that the word alone declares itself. In his 1950 essay, �The Origin of the Work of Art,� Heidegger likewise considers poetic language as �not the reproduction of some particular being that happens to be present at hand at any given time�rather it is the representation of the general way in which such being comes-to-presence.� Likewise with Blanchot: The work of art reduces itself to being. That is its task: to be, to make present �those very words it is [...]. There lies all the mystery� [Mallarm�, letter to Viele-Griffin, 8 August 1891]. But at the same time it cannot be said that the work belongs to being, that it exists. On the contrary, what must be said is that it never exists in the manner of a thing or a being in general. Similarly hypertext can be thought in these general terms as not existing �in the manner of a being or a thing� but rather as a rendering �of the general way in which such being� has always seemed to �come-to-presence.� As a function of possibility, hypertext is always in the process of emerging, and while this may give the appearance of a realisation of latent or concealed structures, it is rather the case that hypertext marks itself as this �realisation� in a quasi-phenomenological way. Clearly at this point Wellek�s definition of text as arising from a set of norms that structure an experience of language becomes more problematic, and it is this question of normative experience that underlies what has come to be called �the novelistic fallacy.� In an early essay, Harry Levin described two misconceptions that have threatened to shape our overall impression of Finnegans Wake: The first of these is that, while not differing greatly in kind from the books we are accustomed to read, it happens to have been written in a queer language, and must therefore undergo the process of translation to which all foreign books�including Scandinavian�are regularly subjected [...]. A second, and related, fallacy is that Finnegans Wake is a novel. Herein is the real reason for putting critical emphasis on the �story� and brusquely attempting to extract a quintessential content from the morass of form in which it lies embedded. The persistence and authority of novelistic assumptions in Finnegans Wake criticism has been greater than Levin could have foreseen. It remains common practice for many Joyce scholars to attempt feats of translational and exegetical virtuosity in order to render the Wake in terms of those normative structures that came together in eighteenth-century subjectivist thought to define the novel. This combination of Aristotelian formalism and faith in individual or collective experience, psychological and otherwise, belies a deeper (what Nietzsche might call Apollonian) suspicion of language. The problem of situating the limits of normative experience also brings to light the question of ethicality and the relation of sets of normative predicates to something which might be determined as intentionality. The lack of any straightforward relation suggests that the experience of discourse in general is itself in some way prior, or pre-predicative, in regards to the assumption of ethical authoring. In this sense, the novelistic fallacy belies a totalising wish whose outward form is that of the commandment, and the allegorising of the command as what may teach us about its true nature and meaning. For many Joyce scholars, the most pressing task at hand is thus the �translation� of Finnegans Wake, in order to restore the text to Joyce�s clandestine intentio�to solve, in a sense, the exegetical riddle of the Wake�s language. Or, as Stephen Heath has put it: �to �reduce� its writing to the simple carrier of a message (a meaning) that it will be the critic�s task to �extract from its enigmatic envelope.� This logic has been the basis of much of the investigative energy directed towards the Wake notebooks. For this reason, Finnegans Wake scholarship invites a certain perversion. The sheer enormity of the challenge posed by the Wake�s language to eighteenth and nineteenth-century novelistic assumptions seems to attract many who wish to resolve this challenge in a way that might affirm the truth and/or limits of normative experience, as proposed by Wellek. On the other hand, Ludwig Wittgenstein, author of the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1922), posed the problem in directly ethical terms. For Wittgenstein, the underlying normativity of �speech acts� founders upon the logical aporia of Cartesianism: I can well understand what Heidegger means by Sein and Angst. Man has an impulse to run up against the boundaries of speech [...] which Kierkegaard himself already recognised and characterised very similarly (as running up against the paradoxical). This running up against the boundaries of speech is Ethics. This idea of ethics bears certain resemblances to Derrida�s and Lacan�s ideas of responsibility (at the boundaries of language: to respond to/for the Other), and it provides a link between the aporetic function of desire and the quasi-transcendental structure of what we might call the hermeneutic will (what Hans Robert Jauss describes in terms of an �horizon of expectations�). In this way the �limits of speech� are no longer assumed to act as a unified horizon against which the Cartesian ego continuously projects the signifiers of its will-to-self, as the ergo of a speech-actuated self-presencing, and which at the same time functions for the ego as a mirage in place of what �stands beyond� language and thus threatens the very possibility of presence. Consequently, Wellek�s conception of the text, as the structurality of normative experience, provides us with a simple model for the paradox of this ethics. Further, the desire to situate �responsibility� at the limits of language on a basis of normative experience can also be seen as paradoxical, not simply because responsibility can no longer be thought in terms of intentionality, but because it marks precisely the point at which formalism and subjectivity both break down. In other words, this ethics signifies a �crisis� in the form and content of the ego cogito�that is, at the moment when the ego confronts itself as something given, and thus assumed, which would need to be distinguished from the prior assumption of facticity or the a priori as such, let alone a grammatical or syntactic convention. According to the phenomenologist Wolfgang Iser, this paradox �is virtually hermeneutic�: The text provokes certain expectations which in turn we project onto the text in such a way that we reduce the polysemantic possibilities to a single interpretation [...] thus extracting an individual, configurative meaning. The polysemantic nature of the text and the illusion-making of the reader are opposing factors. If the illusion were complete, the polysemantic nature would vanish; if the polysemantic nature were all-powerful, the illusion would be totally destroyed. [...] The formation of illusions, therefore, can never be total, but it is this very incompleteness that in fact gives it its productive value. In Iser�s view, the relationship of the reader to the text (at the limits of language, as he sees it) is a dialectical one, similar to Lacan�s �mirror stage,� in which the influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty�s phenomenology of perception is most evident. Where Lacan accounts for the illusion of presence as a function of the individual subject�s �given� desire, Iser falls back upon the notion of readerly competence and the idea that the reader, standing outside the text, creates illusions around a textual latency. For Iser, it remains a question of an ethics of interpretation, and whilst Iser�s phenomenological approach is fraught with psychological and philosophical pitfalls, its value lies in the way it extends upon the role of interpretation in Lacan and the polysemic nature, not only of the text, but of the �incomplete� textual relation. THE SPECULAR For Lacan, this relationship is rendered more explicitly by linking the question of possibility with that of the nature of desire and signification�viz. the inverted Saussurean algorithm S/s, which defines the signifier�s primary (�desiring�) relation to an imaginary signified as one of continuous substitution or glissage. In his seminal essay �The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience� (1936), Lacan provides a model for considering the relation of desire and possibility in textual terms. In Lacan�s formulation, this stade du miroir marks the individual�s entry into the symbolic order, that is, into the order of meaningful signification. This occurs in two stages: firstly, when the individual recognises its specular image or imago as itself (an exterior representation which is nonetheless thought of as coterminous with the self)�and secondly, when the individual recognises its imago as an object belonging to it but irretrievably cut off from it (an exterior projection of a part of the self recognised as �other�). According to Lacan: The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation�and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of fantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality. Following a logic of �citation,� the signification of the �specular image� thus comes about in a twofold way: on the one hand, when the subject, in order to constitute itself, splits off a part of itself which then performs the supplementary task of the specular counterpart (metonymic), and on the other hand, when it is given to the subject, from/by the Other, in the form of desire (metaphoric). This twofold movement reveals a delusive construct in the structurality of the subject, in which the ego cannot determine whether anything of itself originates from within itself (the sublimated desire of the individual as will or cogito) or beyond itself, in the field of the Other (the desire of the individual as the desire of the Other [d�sir de l�Autre]). This double movement of identification and differentiation allows the so-called subject to think of itself both as object and subject, as the I that is spoken of, and the I that speaks. As a consequence the subject is conceived as being divided in a peculiar way�its desire for recuperation of �self� remaining asymptotic, so that it can �never become one with the assumption of its desire.� For Lacan, the subject (as conceived in psychoanalytic experience) no longer bears any relation to the Cartesian subject, except in the form of its desire to formulate itself through the assertion cogito ergo sum which, however, remains a mirage. The desiring subject, then, is always venturing, lured or compelled, towards the language of the other (illuminating a further possible meaning of the term �symbolic�). What preoccupies this I is the projective illusion of the other-place, the emplacement of the objet petit a, which it seeks to habilitate, to take possession of in a �primal way,� so that the topology of the subject�s desire seems to anticipate the subject�s own sporadic movements, rearranging the terrain as it goes. By constantly defamiliarising the terrain of the subject, this �mirroring� horizon dissimulates, makes uncanny, estranges the subject from itself at the same time it posits a relation, which is nevertheless imaginary, which �anaesthetises� it, makes it �fall in love� with itself. This narcissistic falling-in-love-with-itself of the subject is simultaneously a falling away from itself into what Heidegger describes in Being and Time (1926) as an �inauthentic� mode of Being�a �falling� which will not be exhausted in regards to an horizon of Being, since both notions are intertwined and require each other. In the analytic of Dasein, this �alienation of falling� describes a basic condition of phenomenalism as a series, or as the seriality of possibility in the forethrow of Being. For Heidegger, the �essence� of Dasein is non-substantial, and Dasein is not something which is at first objectively present and then has some possibilities as mere attributes. Rather: �Dasein is always its possibility,� as a Being in and of its own possibilities. At the same time, this movement is described as at once �tempting and tranquillising� so that Dasein is considered as becoming �entangled [verf�ngt] in itself� in a way that is symptomatic of its dependence upon the �mirroring effect� of discourse. Similarly for Lacan the individual subject, through its �dialectical� relation to and in signification, encounters everywhere and always its own image, but this �image,� although similar to the subject �to the point of hallucination,� is not the subject�s �own��it does not �belong� to the subject. The mirrored-mirroring signifier of the subject thus situates the subject as subjection to the rule of the signifier�what Heidegger calls �the word�s own rule�: which means making the passage from the concept-formation, over something we imagine we have control, into placing ourselves within the grant of language. Since this signifier is already the other of the subject, the subject in its otherness, then the subject�s subjection to the signifier is sustained, paradoxically, by the delusion of the cogito that already imagines the conscious to be in a position of mastery (what Lacan describes as the linking of the specular I to the social I, a movement which characterises the �whole of human knowledge� as �mediatised through the desire of the other�). Through the compulsive manufacture of �rational discourse� the cogito in fact guards its subjection to the signifier and prevents its own overcoming of the �subversive� contingencies that permeate language, beneath the �unthinkable of an absolute subject.� This delusion is described by Bataille as the �slumber of reason,� which is described by Derrida as �the slumber that engenders monsters and then puts them to sleep�: this slumber must be effectively traversed so that awakening will not be a ruse of dream. That is to say [...] a ruse of reason. The slumber of reason is not, perhaps, reason put to sleep, but slumber in the form of reason. The horizon of the subject, then, presents itself in the illusion of the attainable, as the possibility of closure, of a telos or terme against which reason can posit itself as its own-most end. This horizon, however, is the very dissimulation of such a positioning�it lures reason on in a tranquillised state, into the labyrinth of �unreason� (a-logos) at the �limits of language.� Such an horizon would be what H�l�ne Cixous, referring to Joyce�s �discrediting of the subject,� calls �a metonymic chain where the other place always has its other place.� An untraversable distance or the path of an impossible travail�what Derrida, paraphrasing Heidegger, terms the �interminable event� of substitution and re-citation. The significance of this for a consideration of Joycean hypertext may well rest upon the question of decision, if not decidability. At each point in the text, one is implicitly required to make certain decisions in order to proceed, a process which psycho-linguists term �encincturing.� That is, the unconscious circling or closing-off of signifying possibility that allows reading to proceed from point to point through a text without being suspended perpetually in a state of undecidability. Likewise Lacan refers to a point de capiton, an arbitrary fixing of meaning through the �reduction� of ambivalence. This operation of decision might also be considered as ethical, as the limit of a certain possibility which is also an opening, a way to, a form of incision which implies a recursive �moment� of alterity in the experience of language. However, this would not be to mistake an operation of �decision� for an action that would set the ethical determination of its procedures outside or above the text. That is, as though it were possible, through an act of will, to disengage the experience of the �limits of language� from the experience of language as such, and thus to regard textuality as a whole from a position of �ethical� detachment. In Finnegans Wake such a dis-engagement (ethical, hermeneutic) is precisely what is demonstrated, by virtue of its paradoxical necessity and impossibility, as the basic condition of an horizon of expectations. Not only does this relate to the interminable event of signifying substitution, but also to the premise of causally sufficient conditions in determining the relation of subsequent states in the chain of undecidability. Whether these relations define semantic or grammatical states, in the case of a text like Finnegans Wake, of whether they define possible world states in an extension of modal logic, the fact remains that the operation of decision cannot be delimited according to any normative experience which would not in turn already involve its being implicated in its own procedures, and so on seriatim, becoming �lost� in its own �puling sample jungle of woods� (FW 112.04). At each point in the Wake we are confronted with the question: �Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space?� (FW 558.33). This problem is compounded by the fact that, despite its being printed in the form of the book, Finnegans Wake subverts the idea of a determinate point of entry into the text. As Derrida writes in Of Grammatology: The opening of the question, the departure from the closure of self-evidence, the putting into doubt of a system [...] necessarily have the form of empiricism and errancy. At any rate they cannot be described, as to past norms, except in this form. No other trace is available, and as these errant questions are not absolute beginnings in every way [...] we must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace [...] has already taught us that it was impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely. Wherever we are: in a text where we already believe ourselves to be. While this hermeneutic dis-engagement is not unique to Finnegans Wake, Joyce�s text demonstrates more readily than others the failure of what Iser calls the reduction of the text�s �polysemantic possibilities� to �a single interpretation [...] thus extracting an individual, configurative meaning.� Moreover, the paronomasian or equivocal character of the Wake�s language makes reduction to a singular �schematic view� impossible, rather than improbable, at the same time as it renders some form of reduction necessary. As Derrida has elsewhere noted, there is always �the choice and the division between two ways [�] the way of logos and the non-way, the labyrinth, the palintrope in which logos is lost; the way of meaning and the way of non-meaning; of Being and of non-Being.� In its perpetual bifurcations, semantic loops, and topical reversions, Finnegans Wake suggests a type of disseminal, polysemic apparatus or hypertext, operating in this breach of reduction and proliferation. � Louis Armand, 2001 Department of English & American Studies Charles University, Prague |