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The copyright laws that surround ownership of texts continue to be a legaldilemma for those involved in the production of material intertextual works,but they cannot really affect the virtual texts created by reader/viewers. Readers' minds will vary in their abilities to interact with texts, and intheir abilities to remember texts. These factors will necessarily affect thedegree of intertextual blurring that will take place as readers create virtualtexts. Virtual intertextual readings created during any process of reading may differ vastly from the material texts Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari postulate that, '[a] book is anassemblage ... [l]iterature is an assemblage ... A rhizome [rhizomic text] hasno beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things' (4, 25).Deleuze and Guattari want metaphors for writing that allow written works to bedescribed as maps, not tracings: Intertextualities cannot be traced. They cannot even be mapped for long, asthey are always in states of process, flux and motion. Video or computergraphics might represent/metaphorise these (inter)textual processes far moreeffectively than the comparatively limited medium of black words on paper.Undoubtedly multi-media electronic journal articles will greatly facilitatediscussions about intertextuality, especially explorations of readerlyintertextual productions that result from reading/viewing intertextually andinter-imagically across textual media. Accompanying every debate about intertextuality, however, even thoseproduced in multi-media formats, there will always be a vast repository ofother intertextualities over which assemblers of material (inter)texts have nocontrol: the unknown myriad virtual-intertextual-collages stored within everyreader. Every reader's various notions of identity (and the ways in which thoseentities are evolving alongside the 'new technology (inter)textual revolution')will inevitably affect the assemblage of her/his intertextual realities.
Roland Barthes proposes that texts are re-written on readers during the readingprocess. He writes, a text is ... a multi-dimensional space in which a variety ofwriting, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue ofquotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture ... The reader is thespace on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed withoutany of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in itsdestination. Yet this cannot any longer be personal: the reader iswithout history, biography, psychology; ... [s/he] is simply that someone whoholds together in a single field all the traces by which the writtentext is constituted (156-57 [emphasis added]).
Language could not be understood if readers did not inter-relate phrases readwith other phrases read, and those intertextualities with the myriad (inter)texts that are apprehended throughout readers' lives. It would be almostimpossible for any reader, however, except those with flawless memories (themythical 'ideal reader' who exists only in theoretical texts), to hold togetherevery single thing that constitutes a material text, 'all the traces.'
from which they derive. A text's unitycannot be guaranteed when it arrives at its destination. A reader is a vastrepository of virtual intertextual readings with which any material text, andany of its traces, may intertext at any time after its inscription upon thespace of any reader, thus mutating even at the moment of being read, andcontinuing to do so thereafter.[t]he map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable,reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed,adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or socialformation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art,constructed as a political action or as a meditation ... A map has multipleentryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes 'back to the same.'The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves analleged 'competence' (12-13).
Maps are well-suited to describing the intertextualities between written textand written text; image and image; and image and written text; and therelationships of all those artificially-produced material signifiers with thematerial world that is not 'artificially' produced; as all these (inter)textsare perceived, in varying ways, by different reader-viewers.
Diane Caney, 1998 References
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