:::right:::
The copyright laws that surround ownership of texts continue to be a legal
dilemma 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 in
their abilities to remember texts. These factors will necessarily affect the
degree of intertextual blurring that will take place as
readers create virtual
texts. 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 an
assemblage ... [l]iterature is an assemblage ... A rhizome [rhizomic text] has
no 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 be
described as maps, not tracings: Intertextualities cannot be traced. They cannot even be mapped for long, as
they are always in states of process, flux and motion. Video or computer
graphics might represent/metaphorise these (inter)textual processes far more
effectively than the comparatively limited medium of black words on paper.
Undoubtedly multi-media electronic journal articles will greatly facilitate
discussions about intertextuality, especially explorations of readerly
intertextual productions that result from reading/viewing intertextually and
inter-imagically across textual media.
Accompanying every debate about intertextuality, however, even those
produced in multi-media formats, there will always be a vast repository of
other intertextualities over which assemblers of material (inter)texts have no
control: the unknown myriad virtual-intertextual-collages stored within every
reader. Every reader's various notions of identity (and the ways in which those
entities 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 reading
process. He writes,
a text is ... a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writing, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture ... The reader is the
space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without
any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination. Yet this cannot any longer be personal: the reader is
without history, biography, psychology; ... [s/he] is simply that someone who
holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written
text is constituted (156-57 [emphasis added]).
Language could not be understood if readers did not inter-relate phrases read
with other phrases read, and those intertextualities with the myriad (inter)texts that are apprehended throughout readers' lives. It would be almost
impossible for any reader, however, except those with flawless memories (the
mythical 'ideal reader' who exists only in theoretical texts), to hold together
every single thing that constitutes a material text, 'all the traces.'
from which they derive. A text's unity
cannot be guaranteed when it arrives at its destination. A reader is a vast
repository of virtual intertextual readings with which any material text, and
any of its traces, may intertext at any time after its inscription upon the
space of any reader, thus mutating even at the moment of being read, and
continuing 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 social
formation. 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 multiple
entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes 'back to the same.'
The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an
alleged 'competence' (12-13).
Maps are well-suited to describing the intertextualities between written text
and written text; image and image; and image and written text; and the
relationships of all those artificially-produced material signifiers with the
material world that is not 'artificially' produced; as all these (inter)texts
are perceived, in varying ways, by different reader-viewers.
Diane Caney, 1998
References
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