FRAGMENTS FROM
Assembled Textualities, Posthuman Selves: Remediated Print in the Digital Age
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth…imagine that Marcel did not eat the madeleine, but the madeleine ate him – and came back for more.
In the novel, what Eric calls “conceptual flows”; thought flows, speech flows, are just as contaminable, just as ‘wired’, as electronic flows since the conceptual shark can catch your thoughts any time (68)… One cannot control the fertile interstices, the in-between spaces, that give rise to an interminable becoming and signifying. These (un-)spaces are generative spaces, liquid flows that recall Derrida’s recurrent metaphor of liquid forces in “Force and Signification”: forces of interminable or “infinite implication” – excessive, for never wholly controllable, energy or virtuality(i). This is precisely why these flows, or volumes, as Derrida might say, breed monsters: the monstrosity of the shark is an embodiment of the profound depth and endless movement into which this energy taps,(ii) as well as of the surplus of signifying possibilities haunting the conceptual flows that destroyed and resurrected paper-made Eric Sanderson – overkill and breeding ground, destruction and generation, in one and the same force field.
[In The Raw Shark Texts the anxiety of communication and the excessive coding] point to a felt loss of authorial intention, the inevitable gap between sender and message, message and reader, sender and reader: the shark personifies that gap, a container where stolen words and ideas take on meanings and directions beyond the reach of their author – disseminated so radically that they can never be recollected (first Eric Sanderson and his thoughts and memories are, after all, gone beyond retrieval). While we know this is a necessary dissemination, a condition for signs to function outside of their ‘first’ appearance, it is also a lethal intervention – authors must be killed for signs to emerge. It is as such a lethal apparatus that the shark resembles the appropriative, scrambling machines that have appeared on the internet since the 1990’s.
The Raw Shark Texts repeats the antagonism of the shark as a scrambling machine, in its own, endless, appropriating and re-setting of texts. This antagonism betrays an uneasy relationship to the digital and the ways in which digitized textuality has automatized and normalized assemblage. The novel interrupts that practice by foregrounding the fate of an author – first Eric Sanderson – desperately protecting his copyrights (for lack of a better word) by means of old-medium-style firewalls.
The Raw Shark Texts does not simply offer a resurrection of old-time paper-based conventions and convictions. This resurrection is, by contrast, ambivalent: though there is a nostalgic gesture towards print-based novelistic and poetic ‘currents’ that have been formative in the prehistory of cyberspace and electronic literature, and even towards impossible authorial intentions, The Raw Shark Texts…also re-animates and redesigns the novel as a prosthetic text through quasi-electronic techniques.
The Raw Shark Texts re-materializes emergent, electronic textualities by means of an ‘ancient’ paper-based technique: the flipbook. Consider… how the shark never appears in identical form to readers of The Raw Shark Texts. It rather shapes itself with ever new thoughts and words, thus mirroring Eric’s recurrent self-transformations: the predator never appears as more than a shifting shape of scrambled, animated word-patterns. This animation also works on a meta-level: on pp. 335-373, it is the reader who engenders the shark’s approach by animating the display-text in flipbook-style.
By incorporating the flipbook technique, The Raw Shark Texts mimics the instability that Katherine Hayles precisely attributes to electronic textuality: one never ‘flips’ these pages quite the same, so that they emerge differently with each manual reading. They may be durably inscribed, yet the dynamic of manually mediated reading/viewing renders the inscription unpredictable for possibly always different in a next reading (slower, faster, complete, incomplete as one skips a page, etc.). This is, I believe, not just a remediation of the instability of electronic textuality: the flipbook technique is all too evidently present for that.(iii) Rather, by emphasizing its materiality through animation techniques dating back to the nineteenth century, and before, The Raw Shark Texts shows how, in an age of electronic dominance, paper-based writing problematizes binary distinctions between ‘old’ and ‘new’, ‘durable’ and ‘flexible’ modes of inscription and display.
The Raw Shark Texts mimics an electronic textuality that, as has been observed by Landow, Bolter, Tabbi, and others, has no stable basis or fixed physical boundary: hypertexts have a dispersed ‘background’, are attached to numberless other texts and thus have no proper beginning or end.(iv) They extend indefinitely through a web of (accidental) attachments, and are always in motion, unfinished.(v) It is precisely this indecidability, and, in relation to it, the networked status of electronic texts that has caused some anxiety among advocates of the printed book in recent years. Among the apocalyptics, Sven Birkerts has linked the instability and allegedly flashy aspect of electronic texts to a fateful distractedness in contemporary Western culture.(vi) Indeed, he foresees a possible dissolution of the printed book in an all-consuming electronic network that will effectuate the disappearance of the individual self as we have known it in the modern age: “we will conduct our public and private lives within networks so dense . . . that it will make almost no sense to speak of the differentiated self”.(vii) Such dystopian views are of interest here in so far as they voice a correspondence between printed book and private self; electronic text and networked, decentred self. Novels like The Raw Shark Texts as well as Woman’s World tap into that correspondence as they present a protagonist/enactor without a fixed private self in printed texts that start to behave in the manner or procedure of electronic textualities.(viii)
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i Jacques Derrida, “Force et signification” in L’écriture et la différance (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), 9-50, 42; Jacques Derrida, “Force et signification” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London : Routledge, 1978), 3-30, 25.
ii A great number of shark species occur at great depth.
iii For more on the history of (commercial) flipbooks see Gérald Dupeyrot, “Flip Story” in BàT (1981), 32-35. See also the extensive website on flipbook history at
http://www.flipbook.info/, last visited January 2009.
iv This is in no way binarily opposed to the paper-based textuality – since Barthes and Kristeva ‘text’ has functioned in literary theory as a field that likewise has no proper beginning and ending. As we all know, it is this definition of ‘text’ as plural, an open universe, that has informed mainstream configurations of hypertextuality. The Raw Shark Texts thus re-animates postrstructuralist conceptions of textuality as processed through hypertextuality. See for Barthes: Roland Barthes, “De l’oeuvre au texte” in Le bruissement de la langue“ (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 69-77 : Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text”, ed. Josue V. Harari in Textual Strategies. Perspectives in Poststructural Criticism (Cornell UP 1979), 73-81.
v For more on electronic textuality and hypertextuality see: Jay David Bolter, Writing Space. The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991); George Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); George Landow,Hypertext 3.0. New Media and Critical Theory in an Era of Globalization (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Joseph Tabbi, “The Processual Page: Materiality and Concsiousness in Print and Hypertext”.
vi Sven Birkerts, “The Poet in an Age of Distraction“, in Ploughshares. The Literary Jorunal at Emerson College 1 (1984) at:
http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleID=1698, last visited January 2009.
vii Quoted in Eyal Amiran, John Unsworth, and Carole Chaski, “Networked Academic Publishing and the Rhetoric of its Reception” in Centennial Review 1 (1992) at
http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/centennial.review.36.1.html, last visited January 2009.
viii Eric thus cannot well be separated from the shark: both feed on the memories of an other.
