| LOUIS ARMAND SOLICITATIONS: MCLUHAN, JOYCE & THE QUESTION OF TECHNOLOGY Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined. [FW 20.07-16] ESCAPE VELOCITIES �The Gutenberg Galaxy, a book which redirected the way many theorists viewed the role of technological mediation in communication processes, had its origin in Marshall McLuhan�s desire to write a book called The Road to Finnegans Wake.� For Donald Theall, McLuhan�s �reconnoitring� of The Road to Finnegans Wake established him as one of the first major disseminators of a technological approach to Joyce�s text. In the early 1970s McLuhan was already theorising the possibility of electronically mediated texts, relating computer technology to the inflationary dynamics of the cultural archive. According to McLuhan: It steps up the velocity of logical sequential calculations to the speed of light [...] and at the same time it dissolves hierarchy in favour of decentralisation. When applied to new forms of electronic-messaging such as teletext and video text, it quickly converts sequential alphanumeric texts into multi-level signs and aphorisms, encouraging ideographic summation, like hieroglyphs. Since McLuhan, the question of electronic mediation has drawn attention to the way in which contingencies in material structure (or �medium�) affect the ways in which reading takes place and in which meanings are formed. For critics and theorists like George Landow and Martin E. Rosenberg, the idea of electronic mediation and the electronic writing space provides a means of disarticulating notions of textuality from notions of the book, by viewing the electronic writing space as somehow paradigmatic of a deconstruction of the logocentrism recently attributed to the �culture of the book.� This technological transcendentalism is nevertheless a form of empiricism, which Derrida describes as �the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source [�]. We say dream because it must vanish at daybreak, as soon as language awakens.� At the same time, this heterological thought divides two conceptions of textuality, whereby certain articulating elements which may otherwise be designated as �material� are misunderstood as the materiality of the book. That is to say, for Hillis Miller, its binding and glue, its unique historical placement, and so on�in other words, the book�s bibliographical codes. Similarly Jay David Bolter, in his essay �Hypertext and the Electronic Writing Space,� speaks of hypertextuality in terms of what he calls �topographical writing.� For Bolter, the basic contingencies of electronic writing require different ways of thinking about writing practice, and therefore about the mechanics of compositional structure and the overall nature of the textual apparatus. In Bolter�s view: The computer�s memory and central processing unit are intricate hierarchies of electronic components. Layers of software in turn transform the machine�s physical space of electronic circuits into a space of symbolic information, and it is in this space that a new kind of writing can be located. What this kind of writing consists of, however, is that it �makes structure a permanent feature of the text,� as opposed to those forms of word processing which �imitate the layout of the typed page� and �flatten the text.� Bolter has likewise described �Ulysses and particularly Finnegans Wake [as] hypertexts that have been flattened out to fit on the printed page,� citing a comment by Hugh Kenner in 1962 to the effect that: �the text of Ulysses is not organised in memory and unfolded in time, but both organised and unfolded in what we may call technological space: on printed pages for which it was designed from the beginning.� While many of Bolter�s analogies are useful in demonstrating how computing technology has opened up other possibilities for writing practice, they tend to obscure the fact that texts have never functioned in the limited way in which he would like to suggest they have. As a measure of signifying possibility, electronic writing is itself extremely restricted and may be said to provide merely a clumsy approximation of poetical and rhetorical structures which have in one way or another characterised the technics of language from the earliest times. By the same token, electronic writing has tended to foreground the spatial element of textuality, even more so than in other narratological structures which are often conceived as unfolding temporally, if not to represent a certain temporality, and this spatial emphasis no doubt does much to account for the parallel foregrounding of the �materiality� of the text. As the extension of the visual metaphor of the page or the computer screen, the electronic conception of hypertext suggests little more than what Donald Theall has called a �surface of sense.� But this elevation of topography to the status of paradigm raises questions at a more fundamental level, about the material aspect of signification�what Derrida calls �the so-called graphic trait, even prior to the existence of the word.� As can be seen in regards to the genetic function of the Wake�s triads, H.C.E. and A.L.P. (�Here Comes Everybody,� �Anna Livia Plurabelle�), this process is contingent upon a certain polysemy, which despite appearing against a shifting surface of different signifying chains, seems to promise an ultimate coherence under the concept or tenor of a signified identity. Recalling a comment by Heidegger which relates the haphazard or Zufall to a masking of hermeneutic reversion, this apparent tendency within polysemy�that is, towards a moment of reduction or recuperation of signifying unity�achieves its more virulent formulation in the work of theorists such as Algirdas Greimas and Paul Ric?ur. According to Greimas, discourse can be rendered univocal through the reduction of polysemy, while Ric?ur has argued that �one dimension of one word�s meaning sanctions only one dimension of other words� meanings� (what he calls the �screening of polysemy�). However, at the same time, Greimas and Ric?ur both point to practical linguistic concerns which need to be taken into account, particularly in regards to a certain empirical dimension of discursive structures. Similarly, the question of polysemy, and of difference and similitude in broadly paradigmatic terms, is important for our understanding of the way in which hypertext might be understood as an activation of a signifying reserve (or rather �non-reserve,� as non-potential, non-latency) at the level of materiality. The relative lack of formally recognisable terms in Finnegans Wake (and the corresponding lack of a readily identifiable grammar and syntax organising these terms into a linguistic system) suggests that the marks we encounter on the page must firstly be taken as describing (through various graphic and phonic resemblances) elements of language which might then be assumed to supply this lack. However, before such a decision can be hazarded, the Wake invites a more fundamental kind of reading which would necessarily precede even the effort of establishing a grammatical system through which to affect any formal concretisation of the text�s potentialised �meanings.� Hence any reading of the Wake would begin by drawing certain inferences that would allow the reader to treat the Wake as being composed of language-fragments, of portmanteaux, of resemblances to words belonging to one language or another�even a language apparently perverted to the point of being hardly recognisable as such. Yet before we say that this state of affairs reflects an �irreducibility of the text,� we need to take into account the banality of a situation which requires the reader firstly to treat the marks on the page as �objects� simulating the appearance and arrangement of elements belonging to a language, whose outward aspect disguises an internal mechanics which might otherwise yet be determinable). In Finnegans Wake this movement is radicalised in the base materialism of language itself, whose paranoiac or pathological inferability exceeds the �itself� of what is designated, as though it were an entity or a thing, �language.� In the breach or d�bordement of the �field of language,� �language itself,� caught in the fore-throw of possibility: this designation gives onto an other language, other languages. In each (one) the promise of an other, of others�mise en abyme of the Babelian matrix, holograph or hologram. Thus each �fragment� of the Wake seems to preserve a genetic blueprint of the whole, which it not merely allegorises but in fact inscribes. This requires some consideration, particularly as this situation is aggravated by the way in which Joyce himself seems to �objectify� individual letters or groups of letters by treating them, as we have already seen, in the manner of sigla (or as anagrams, acronyms, algebraic notation and so on). This �objectification� has a radical effect upon the way in which textual elements are understood to signify, posing analogous questions not only in regards to the general typography of the text (marginalia, footnotes, hand-drawings, geometrical diagrams, the distribution of paperspace, individual graphemes and phonemes), but also in regards to the more recognisable elements of syntax and grammar, and to other forms of articulation. IDEOGRAMMATICS Of those �altereffects� which allows us to approach the language of Finnegans Wake, as being formed out of other �recognisable� languages, is the way in which textual elements are articulated in terms of a certain mark, or absence of a mark, of differentiation. This implies a particular significance in the way in which the internal articulation of a term like �riverrun� must bear upon its semantic content (�riverrun� rather than �river run�) as well as upon the other terms that frame its context (�the [...] riverrun past Eve and Adam�s�), and vice versa and so on throughout the Wake. This mode of articulation, however, does not take place linearly or diachronically, presupposing a latent sentence structure for instance, but synchronically and synoptically, so that the text appears to be structured like a palimpsest, according to a logic of what Joyce calls �gramma�s grammar� (FW 268.17). It may be said that reading the Wake would not be possible at all without this assumption of signifying articulation. However, as long as this assumption appears to point towards a perversion of �proper� signifying structures, such a notion of articulation must be dominated by the possibility of a purely arbitrary distribution of differential marks. In this way any reading of the Wake would always be haunted by the possibility of re-distributing these marks �at random,� so that there would seem to be nothing to stop us from considering the structural appearance of the text as merely nominal, or at least as describing a hesitation between a more radical fragmentation, or distortion on the one hand, and a reconstitution into a formal system on the other (as though, in fact, the printed book remained a work-in-process, a genetic parasynthesis whose actual form relates more or less arbitrarily to either the original conception or to the envisaged outcome, neither of which may be conclusively assumed on the basis of the work at hand). What is most often ignored, however, is that in order to begin reading Finnegans Wake in either of these ways one is required to perform violence against the text, effectively defacing it in order to constitute or reconstitute the text that it supposedly represents in a confused way, or at least that it poorly preserves. In either case, the question here may be one of an allegory of language(s), described by a certain �ideographic summation,� of what McLuhan identifies in terms of a �hieroglyphic� function, as the basic economy by means of which language communicates as techn?. That is, as a type of �graphology,� or what Derrida terms grammatology. Since the material function of a text only acquires meaning once it is placed in a textual relation (with itself or with other textual elements), then we might recognise here the basis of what Bataille in La part maudite terms an �economy without reserve,� whereby it would no longer be a matter of a signification �empty� of meaning, but rather of certain marks describing, not a signifying potential or latency, but signifying possibility. For Bataille, this possibility also implies a reflexive movement, as the possibility of signification itself. Denis Hollier interprets this in performative linguistic terms, as describing: lexical units wrested from the symbolic code, joined to extralinguistic practices, charged with a libidinal intensity referring not to a process of representation or communication, but to a productivity in which the word functions as a centre of energy, a productivity in which the word is not defined by what it means but by what it does, by the effects it induces. But whilst it is possible to conceive of electronic mediation as reducing the mystical properties of the book and bringing the materiality of language closer to a textual function, the problem remains of avoiding the assignation of metaphysical values to what is said to constitute the textual fabric itself. That is, if we are to consider this fabric as a screen or interface between the reading �subject� and an �other,� for instance, and according to which this other could be regarded as being �made manifest.� This tendency might be said to arise more or less out of certain similarities in appearance between a printed book and an electronic text (and between the computer screen and the mirror), whereby the same empirical notions of textuality reapply themselves in a superficial manner to the question of technology and the erosion or emptying-out of sense. GENETIC DRIFT The issue of hypertext, however, does not rest upon questions of the difference or similarity between printed books and electronic writing. Indeed, more than ever, the notion of an electronic writing threatens to plunge �textual theory� back into a utopianist or phenomenological understanding of the nature of signification�whereby an analogy might be drawn between the mimetic conception of the word�s relation to a transcendental idea, and the conception of an electronic text as somehow descending from cyberspace as the disembodied signifier of a deus ex machina, which would be nothing more than logocentrism under another guise. More important for a consideration of hypertext as such, is how the virtuality of the material body of the text bears upon a general signifying apparatus. In this way the illusion of a form of writing suspended in cyberspace, and no longer seeming to be bounded by the physical limits of the book, opens the possibility of envisaging a graphological network that would take the form of a literal morphogenesis, as it were, implicating a semantic linkage at every level of the textual relation�that is, the distribution of linguistic and non-linguistic difference across the entire field of signifying possibility. It would no longer be simply a question of considering the �materiality of language� as somehow describing an object or non-signifying condition. Nor would it be a question of extending the paradox of a material �non-materiality� to electronic texts as a condition of virtuality (there remains the problem of how this visual trick is determined by a certain play of encoding and decoding, and of programmatics). The question, rather, would be one of considering the metaphor of this paradox in terms of what Derrida has called the �trace,� or �arch?-writing,� or again �diff�rance.� Derrida himself describes diff�rance as a kind of �generative polysemy,� where this polysemy could be thought as marking a play of transverse substitution (or translation, between a non-reserve and a certain surplus). This transverse movement describes a rupture in the semantic horizon at the same time as it appears to reconstitute its signifier under the constellation of a transcendental signified, as the totalising form of an apparent abundance of meanings or polysemia. As Derrida argues: Totalisation can be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavour of either a subject or a finite richness which it can never master. There is too much, more than one can say. But nontotalisation can also be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of play. If totalisation no longer has any meaning, it is not because of the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field�that is, language and a finite language�excludes totalisation. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a centre which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. [�] One cannot determine the centre and exhaust totalisation because the sign which replaces the centre, which supplants it, takes the centre�s place in its absence�the sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement. The movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there is always more. It is this supplementarity, the surplus effect of signifying substitution, which affects hypertextuality as the counter-reduction of any architectonics that might otherwise situate the transverse play of the supplement as an extension of the mimetic faculty. With regards to Finnegans Wake, this is a threat posed by those approaches that seek to render the Wake�s paronomasia merely as a challenge addressed to narratology and translatability. This also recalls Henri Michaux�s �transcoded� schizophrenic assemblage which, by upsetting any perceivable relationship with nature, suggests an irreducible �ruination� of an organic system and the impossibility of a �restorative� genetic master-code. This, too, describes a state of affairs most apparent within the field of textual genetics, with its necessary structural �contradictions� between a genetic linearity or genetic descent and the types of morphogenetic pathways described by a transversal. For Ric?ur and Greimas, however, the polysemantic valencies of transversality might simply be viewed as a form of hermeneutic riddle, or of an anamorphosis, whereby what is signified under the term diff�rance would be rendered rather as an algorithm for a process of encryption. Hence the transverse organisation of Joyce�s writing would take the form of a problem whose number of possible solutions would thus be rendered finite, and which could be re-instated within a structural �whole.� In this way Joyce�s �endless play of substitution� might also be posited as a finite probability, and so affirm the metaphysical dimension of hypertext as a totalising movement. These problems, however, can themselves be situated as so many topics of transversality. Indeed they can be said to be generative of transversality itself, and for this reason it is not simply a question of determining where such problems �come to rest.� STRATIFIED OBJECTS Insofar as hypertext marks a �genetic stratification� or quasi-stratification, it can be seen as providing a way of thinking the failure of this relationship between the materiality of the text, as a function of encoding (for example, the graphemic structure of a �word� as �acrostic,� H.C.E. or A.L.P.), and an architectonics focused upon the idea of potentiality as the �probability of outcomes� issuing from a prior idea and inscribed mimetically. According to Deleuze and Guattari: as soon as it is recognised that a code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it, the problem receives a new formulation. There is no genetics without genetic drift. Anticipating Deleuze and Guattari�s notion of �genetic drift,� Derrida, in his 1969 essay �Diff�rance,� offers a means of approaching the problem of �materiality� in hypertext (as one of a generative polysemia) through what he terms �empirical wandering.� For Derrida, �empirical wandering� describes �the unity of chance and necessity in calculation without end,� suggesting a transverse network whose limits of possibility engage the entire field of signifying �combination.� Such a network would realise the means by which the limits and boundaries between semiological systems are transposed and transformed, and this in turn would again imply a generative polysemy as the basic organisation of any hypertextual �stratification.� As we have seen, the idea of viral emplacement further suggests that any �succession� of coded/coding articulations becomes complicated by various �integrations� or �emplacements,� where series of genetic material become involved in other processes of transcoding and translation, grafting, simultaneous transmission, and so on�so that a morphogenetic pathway is never seen to operate along any determinate trajectory or axis. And although such a morphogenetics might seem to re-describe a movement of polysemy, it would not be in the sense of an abundance of genetic codes which, despite their apparent hybridisation, require a distinct and ultimately traceable genealogy. On the contrary, the genetic metaphor that we have elaborated would suggest what Derrida has called a �disseminating polysemy,� polysemy arising from �irreducible diff�rance,� rather than from a plenitude of signs. In Dissemination, Derrida warns that: polysemy always puts out its multiplicities and variations within the horizon, at least, of some integral reading which contains no absolute rift [...] the horizon of the final parousia of a meaning at least deciphered, revealed, made present in the rich collection of its determinations. What is important is that even in its rendering as a generative polysemy, the term �polysemy� would nevertheless continue to retain the sense of ultimate derivation or reducibility that similarly characterises what may be alternately termed hermeneutics or genealogy. This is precisely because polysemy will have always involved an aporia of destination, which will itself have been implied already in, or as, the �horizon of the final parousia of a meaning,� the re-totalising limit of any polysemy. And however belated such a final re-totalisation might be, and however far off its realisation remains, it secures by right the multiplicities� re-assemblage into a unitary totality of meaning, and thus also secures the totality of the text. Hence polysemy, as such, always implies a certain architectonics, which preserves between the sign�s abundance of referents or interior significations a structural thread that gives this labyrinthine form its organising principle. In so distinguishing, then, between polysemy as such and a broader �generative polysemy,� it is not simply a matter of denying the difficulty of this aporia by adding to it a further term, but rather to indicate that the aporetic function itself is at least double (orientating a movement whose end or horizon it is, at the same time as it stands beyond that horizon as the very possibility of an end�as an assumption of itself�and as the locus of a transgression), and that this doubling is more or less �symptomatic� of an inherent diff�rance in the totalising structure of the sign, and hence of polysemy. This aporia, which Derrida terms �originary diff�rance,� does not cut-off polysemy from an �horizon of meaning,� as though such an horizon gave polysemy its chance, as it were, in the first place. Rather this horizon is seen as the generative possibility or forethrow of polysemy�as continuing to �make a sign.� In this way, too, the topos of hypertextual transversality could be said to describe the place of a deferral or constant substitutory projection of this aporetic function. TERMINAL In The Truth of Painting, Derrida raises the question of �the apparent polysemy of techn?.� According to the traditional opposition physis/techn? (which �contrasts divine or natural writing and the human and laborious, finite and artificial inscription�), this polysemia would arise out of a prolific manufacture or representations which, while seeming to conceal the �natural� beneath the artificial, mechanical re-production of signs, would nevertheless defer to it for its meaning, or truth (�the simple kernel which supposedly lies hidden beneath the multiplicity�). In his Pola notebook (1903), Joyce similarly posed the question of mim?sis in terms of a problem of translation in Aristotle�s dictum on art and imitation: e tekhne mimeitai ten physin�This phrase is falsely rendered as �Art is an imitation of Nature.� Aristotle does not here define art, he says only �Art imitates nature� and meant the artistic process is like the natural process. For Joyce, techn? is thus a question of process or poi?sis linked to physis in terms of the matter or material nature of language itself. In Ulysses this is most clearly elaborated in chapter 7, �Aeolus,� in which Joyce has encoded examples of almost every rhetorical figure outlined in Quintilian�s Institutio Oratoria. As Don Gifford claims in Ulysses Annotated, rhetoric was �the form of linguistic manipulation Joyce considered closest to the heart of the working process.� Generative polysemy, as delimiting this physis/techn? opposition, might thus be said to constitute a form of mechanical apparatus which appropriates and mimics aspects of nature, and whose phylogenetic processes of transcription and translation would likewise define a type of �strange attraction� whose vertical axis (physis/techn?) would be merely nominal or contingent upon a rhetorical tropology. It would be a matter, then, of asserting the aporetic double-limit of polysemy (�the apparent polysemy of techn?�), which would not only upset the opposition physis/techn?, but prompt the critical re-alignment that gives rise to Heidegger�s statement that �techn? belongs to poi?sis,� and to the assertion that physis, too, is: �the arising of something out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poi?sis.� At he same time, the aporetic doubling of polysemy�as generative possibility�indicates a rupturing of mim?sis �orientated� by an �originary diff�rance,� such that the field of signification could not be thought as closed or situated as an �other of the other,� or specular substitute of a �transcendental signified� (an idea that would �initiate� it as a system) whose �meaning� it would be compelled to supplant or mimic. And insofar as this aporia repeats itself, it is in �recognition� of a repetition of/at the �origin� which hence continues to �initiate� itself anew as its own-most possibility. Generative in the sense that it �repeats� this initial repetition, polysemy thus lends its structure to our understanding of techn? (which would not then fall into opposition with poi?sis, but would be �described� in poi?sis as what gives generative polysemy its chance, as a �calculation without end�). Like McLuhan�s concepts of �ideographic summation� and �hieroglyphics,� the production of techn? would imply so many fragments of a whole to which it merely alludes through its own prolific manufacture, ultimately con-fusing this allusion with the illusion of a communicated message framed by so many sound-bytes or image-bytes (metaphor collapsing into metonymy), as what Joyce calls �juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed� (FW 118.11-30). Moreover, the speeding up of the �velocity of logical calculations� described by McLuhan, runs the risk merely of obscuring the referential structure of its �multi-level signs� by a mere trick of light (what Paul Virilio calls the �interval of light� or �zero sign�). Derrida poses this problem from the opposite direction: �How could you calculate the speed with which a mark, a marked piece of information, is placed in contact with another in the same word or from one end of the book to another?� Clearly a conception of transversality requires more than thinking of hypertext as a series of multi-level signs, even if these levels are shown to be structurally or otherwise substitutable. As Derrida has pointed out, in Of Grammatology, the logic of the hieroglyph, despite, or precisely because of its economy of summarisation, assumes to a certain extent the logic of the symbol, which implies �an immediate relationship with the logos in general.� Moreover, �the hieroglyphic graph? is already allegorical,� presupposing an identity, and thus an ideality, whose formal articulation it is considered to mimic, or mime. At the same time, the hieroglyph as non-phonetic writing �breaks the noun apart. It describes relations, not appellations.� Between this graphic �economy of summarisation� which �breaks apart the noun,� and the relationship of polysemy to techn?, there remains the question of how the �materiality� of the text might also be considered under the constellation of ideas which circulate around the question of writing, and the mnemotechnic function of so-called graphic signs. As Derrida suggests, this question points persistently towards the notion of the written trace, and to the relation of techn? to a �generative polysemy� (recalling Heidegger�s remarks about technology as a �mode of revealing�), and re-emphasising what has already been said about genetics and �thinking memory,� or Ged�chtnis, as �the memory productive of signs.� This also suggests that we might approach Jacques Aubert�s notion of a �genealogy of the noun� (as deducing grammatical or syntactical systems from the graphic and phonic resemblances the text poses to them) as a form of ruse�which arises out of the duplicity of the textual allegory that on the one hand signals an identity at the same time as �breaking apart� the noun that supposedly refers back to it: the allegory of the text itself as aporia of all genealogy. This allegory, the play of a generative polysemy, continues to �make a sign� only as the signifying re-production of what Derrida posits as a diff�rance of/at the origin. And this would perhaps frame for us the basic problematic of a logos �always already� invested by techn?, as what remains �essential� to technology as something �belonging� to poi?sis, and what would situate language itself as technological. Hypertext, more than merely a model of textual invention, would denote the various transversals also marked out by this technology and its investment of the entire field of signification. Not merely a strategy, it denotes an embeddedness within the locus of technological proliferation (the rupture of technology at the point at which techn? invests the meaning of logos). And insofar as we would say that Finnegans Wake �solicits� hypertext, we would also say that it performs an activation, not of a structural latency somehow concealed from logocentric structure, but of the prior possibility of signification as such, and across all levels of the signifying relation. As a �network of topics,� hypertext itself can be said to describe a transversal between what we might call topological emplacement and topographical charting, between the topical mask of narrativity and a narrative of topos. But at the same time this network of topics would describe a radical tropology, a fundamental reversion in the technics of emplacement. In this sense we could also view hypertext as a generalising of diff�rance (as spatialising-temporality), since it is can never be a matter simply of replacing one topology with another, or of inverting a topographical order, but of marking a transversal always on the breach of this �system.� But finally, if we are to speak of a solicitation of hypertext, it would be in the sense of its �activating� a certain non-reserve �at the origin� of a system of signification, an �originary diff�rance� at the point at which the rupture of technology invades the universal problematic. � Louis Armand, 2001 |