text-fields of identity
Foreword Because my autobiography feeds into both this essay and
the hyperfictions discussed, I have written an autobiographical note. From 1992-1996
I researched and wrote a doctoral thesis on the notion of 'reading intertextually'.
With over 200 colour illustrations in printed format, the thesis attempted to
speak in the language of images as much as words. This work was a precursor
to the hypertexts I now create in electronic format, incorporating both image
and text. My doctoral research was preceded by the birth of my daughter, and
my son was born half way through the project. Both the philosophy of reading
I developed while writing my thesis and my creative writing were greatly affected
by the arrival of my children. During this time I also worked closely with a
writer who was having nightmares because of abuse experienced in childhood.
The perceived or real threat of disinheritance by family and friends can lead
to an aphasia which overflows into writing practice. In order to circumvent
this fear, I began to use a fictional child to explore how abuse can affect
identity. Having an interest in theory which flirts with poetry, poetico-philosophy
or fictocriticism, I prefer to write upon a revolving stage which moves continually
from restriction to the comparative freedom of a creative style of writing,
Julia Kristeva's 'carnivalesque':
This essay explores the relationship
between language,
identity and technology. Language is considered as an intertextuality
which transmutes as it voyages across the parallel virtualities of technology
and reader-inhabited space. The notion of intertextuality involves the movement
of various texts from spaces outside the body, to that 'virtual' library inside
everyone's mind, and back again, in a ceaseless nomadic wandering which cannot
be traced. I argue that identity is also an intertextuality, a conglomerate
of splintered enmeshments ... bits assembled by individuals,
but affected by a wide variety of influences both inside & outside the sensations
of self. ‘Inside/outside intertextuality’ visits various theories
of intertextuality and two hypertexts, Imaginative Reading V (http://www.overthere.com.au/writing/imaginative.html) and travels
towards (http://www.overthere.com.au/travels/), collaborations by Diane
Caney and Robin Petterd.
These two written epigraphs play with the idea that the mind
is at once material while appearing not to be. Grey matter, complex psycho-biological
processes, information drawn from behind glass screens, cultural conditioning,
red corpuscles, the bohemian shiftings of hormones, and innumerable other factors
can affect reader-inhabited space(s). Likewise, texts can be described as tangible
objects of reality, and yet they might also be considered as semi-ethereal constructions
moving through many different media in the course of their translations from:
person to person, machine to machine, place to place, and language to language.
I describe 'text' as anything and everything that exists across time, space and
imagination. In pieces text-fields Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality in her essays,
‘The Bounded Text’ and ‘Word, dialogue, and novel’, both
of which were first published in 1969 (Roudiez 3-4). In his glossary of terms,
Léon Roudiez comments of the term intertextuality,
[c]arnivalesque discourse ... is the only dimension where 'theatre
might be the reading of a book, its writing in operation'. In other words, such
a scene is the only place where discourse attains its 'potential infinity' ...
where prohibitions (representation, 'monologism') and their transgression (dream,
body, 'dialogism') coexist.1
<P>
It is in wanting to know that one is often deceived.
I prophesy: then I seek to translate into words
what is being written in fevers, in heartbeats,
in luminous songs. I wonder what it is called.
Hélène Cixous
<A Name="language">Language</A>
Language is a process whereby a multitude of signifiers and their attendant
array of possible signifieds are assembled into the 'virtual' spaces inhabited
by readers.
<A Name="identity">Identity</A>
The notions of 'splintering' and 'enmeshment' are mobilised in this essay
because for survivors of abuse there is a continual shifting from a survival
strategy of 'splitting' one's self from the body in order to avoid pain/knowledge,
and a desire to draw one's selves together.2
<A Name="technology">Technology</A>
Technology continues to provide new media with which to write. This essay
was authored initially as a web site in order to reverse the assumption that
the act of writing usually precedes authoring in html. The web site (http://www.overthere.com.au/digital/) has now been modified
to act as a sibling to this essay, making use of computer-generated virtual
space, moving images and hotlinks in ways that are not possible in a printed
format. For examples of 'technology', this essay concentrates on computer technology,
particularly the Internet, although the explosion of information technology
as a means for textual dispersion is also considered. Intertextuality is only
possible to the degree to which we experience it today, because we have access
to so many different sounds, texts and images.
One need not be a Chamber -- to be Haunted --
One need not be a House --
The Brain has Corridors -- surpassing
Material Place --
Emily Dickinson
... who will provide us with ointment
and bandages for our wounds
and remove the foreign ideas
the glass beads of fantasy the bent
hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds ...
Janet Frame
As with any signifier, though, the list of possible descriptions for the signifier
'text' is open-ended. In this essay I use the term in a dualistic fashion. 'Text'
denotes any entity which can act as a signifier (i.e. anything, even that
which we can only imagine) and 'text' also signifies particular pieces
of multi-media, literature, art or theory. Reading intertextually on the Net often
foregrounds the notion of 'reading inter-imagically' (reading across images).
Because all reading activities take place inside a body which is situated in a
physical environment, however, 'reading intertextually' is not limited to the
enmeshment of formal 'texts', but also thoughts, conversations, architecture,
emotions, bodily activity, sounds and innumerable other signifiers.
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 destination 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 [emphasis added].3
Language could not be understood if readers did not
inter-relate the myriad (inter)texts apprehended throughout their lives. It would
be almost impossible, though, for any reader, except those with flawless memories
(the mythical ‘ideal reader’ who exists only in theoretical texts),
to hold together everything constituting an external text, ‘all the traces’.
And even then, readers might not be aware of countless contexts which might be
described as the 'traces by which ... [a] text is constituted'. Donna Haraway
proposes that
[w]riting is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late
twentieth century ... [but] [c]yborg politics is ... the struggle against perfect
communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly ...
[insisting] on noise and ... pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions
of animal and machine.4
The inscriptions on both silicon chips and pages, sing ... scratch and screech
when they encounter readers' intertextual mine-fields.
<P>
(write by violent fragments,
by splinters.)
Hélène Cixous
[t]he concept ... has been generally misunderstood. It has nothing
to do with matters of influence by one writer upon another, or with the sources
of a literary work ... It is defined in [Kristeva’s] La Révolution
du langage poétique [1974] as the transposition of one or more systems
of signs into another ... ‘Any signifying practice is a field (in the sense
of space traversed by lines of force) in which various signifying systems undergo
such a transposition’.5
The shifting nature of the Internet, with its mixture of image, text
and disappearance makes the Web a space both ‘traversed by lines of force’
and an intertextual zone which metaphorises the notion of Kristeva’s ‘signifying
systems undergo[ing] ... transposition[s]’.
Any reader assembling the endless textual territories of the Web is both seeing
and becoming the embodiment of the (inter)textual field(s), the myriad fields,
the plains bursting with embryos, teeming with invitations to read, to
run, to adventure, to play in the vast force-field of intertextual
possibilities. Identity is also an intertextual entity, always shifting and
adopting different stances. The Net now seems to mirror that process. Web sites,
when revisited, have often been altered by their web-managers and can also change
depending upon the computer hard- and soft-ware used by readers to view those
texts. The text is no longer a certain fixity. It was not ever that,
but cultural myths described the interplay between texts and readers as that
of tutor and pupil – one of power-play which could not revert to interplay
... and there was never room for regression to the unknown and/or the unknowable.
In one sense, the Web acts not as an archive of information and/or art, but
as a mind, continually shifting in its reinterpretations, rerepresentations
and playful reinventions of texts.
As intertexts are woven into new external texts by author/artists, or into new
'internal' (or reader-modified) texts by reader/viewers, those intertexts produce
kaleidoscopic effects, as new perceptions and meanings appear. In ‘The
Bounded Text’, for instance, Kristeva writes,
[t]he text is ... a productivity, and this means: first, that its
relationship to the language in which it is situated is redistributive (destructive-constructive)
... and second, that it is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the
space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect
and neutralize one another [emphasis added].6
By using words like ‘space’ and ‘neutralize’, Kristeva's
writing about the terms textuality and intertextuality metaphorises the world
of texts as ‘territory’, rather than free space or unstable, unowned
entity. 'Neutralize’ can be read as inferring that intertexts neither belong
to their original contexts nor to the contexts into which they have been placed.
To follow this argument, any (inter)texts that can be recognised as ‘alien’
in a novel/film/electronic work are in a sort of limbo within the new text,
in a state of no-context.7 Or, Kristeva’s use of the term ‘neutralize’
might mean that any intertexts in a work, no longer belong to their texts-of-origin,
but are now ‘citizens’ of the new work.
I would prefer, however, to think of intertexts and any new text as being
in a state of flux in which meanings and/or perceptions are moving from intertextual-collage
(which indicates enmeshment of new text and its intertexts) via the new text
to a reader-modified intertextual-collage, and so on, as many times as the reverberation
makes sense to any reader. Any reader-modified intertextual-collage is an enmeshment
of texts and intertexts in which meanings and perceptions are vibrating. New
texts, intertexts in their various contexts (including any new contexts), and
intertextual-collages are alternately and/or sporadically foregrounded, moved
to background positions, and/or erased in a reading activity that is incapable
of being traced in all its intricacies of motion, intersections, and erasures.
When surfing the Web, reading experiences are not often concentrated around
one main text (or new text). They might involve both searches for a range of
keywords and/or random explorations during which the Web becomes one enormous
disjointed intertextuality. The term 'intertextuality' usurps the position conventionally
given to the word 'text' with 'intertextuality' being the norm and any single
text being an unusually prominent single entity within a vast intertextual zone.
overload
On the Internet, the freedom to form intertexts when both
authoring and reading can cause overload with the enormous intertextual palette
available to authors and readers today – a palette which will only expand
as the Internet continues to grow and as new technologies continue to increase
the potential for information dispersal. Intertextual variations of any text
might be created at a later date, by intersecting that text with any of various
theories, images, poetico-philosophy or creative texts. In a sense, every text
is always already an intertextual variation that has not yet been made.
The process of reading intertextually can also be stopped altogether, though,
by deliberate reader-initiated strategy (in as much as that is possible, given
our propensity to bring the 'intertextuality' of our 'identity' to any textual
interaction). While the resonances that operate between new texts and intertexts
are capable of transforming all those (inter)texts, readers can theoretically
suspend knowledge of any intertexts in order to view a work without their reading/viewings
of that work being influenced by information about its intertexts. In such instances,
intertexts temporarily enjoy the status of imaginary, no-context, or solely
new-context, and the dynamic interaction between the text under consideration
and its intertexts ceases for a time.
It is integral to theories of intertextuality that during acts of deliberate
reading, readers can choose not to intertext with certain texts, whether remembered
texts or new texts drawn into the reader from outside her/his body. Jean Lescure,
for instance, argues that ‘[k]nowing must ... be accompanied by an equal
capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult
transcendence of knowledge’.8 It is desirable then, for the strategy of
reading intertextually to be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget intertextuality.
This means that a textual boundary is deliberately enforced during the activity
of reading, that the usually porous boundaries which operate during any reading
process become impermeable for a time. By combining both deliberate suspension
of knowledge and reader-initiated (inter)textual filtering readings can facilitate
escape from 'the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and
our tools to ourselves ... [and usher in] not a common language, but ... a powerful
infidel heteroglossia'.9
Diane Caney, 1999
© all rights reserved
Bibliography
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon,
1969.
Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’. Twentieth Century Literary
Theory. Ed. K. M. Newton. London: MacMillan, 1988. 154-57.
Bass, Ellen & Laura Davis. The Courage to Heal. Harper & Row,
New York, 1988.
Caney, Diane & Robin Petterd. Imaginative Reading V. http://www.otheredge.com.au/prj/imaginative/
Cixous, Hélène & Mireille Calle-Gruber. Hélène
Cixous, rootprints: Memory and life writing. Routledge: London, 1997.
Cixous, Hélène. Stigmata: Escaping Texts. Routledge: London,
1998.
Cixous, Hélène. 'First Names of No One'. The Hélène
Cixous Reader. Ed. Susan Sellers. Routledge: London, 1997.
Cixous, Hélène. 'FirstDays of the Year'. The Hélène
Cixous Reader. Ed. Susan Sellers. Routledge: London, 1997.
Frame, Janet. An Angel At My Table. London: Paladin, 1987.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature.
New York: Routledge, 1991.
Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins U P, 1987.
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and
Art. Ed. Léon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, &
Léon S. Roudiez. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.
Kristeva, Julia. 'Word, Dialogue and Novel'. The Kristeva Reader. Ed.
Toril Moi. Trans. Seán Hand & Léon S. Roudiez. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1984.
Lacan, Jacques. 'The Mirror Stage'. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader.
Ed. Antony Easthope & Kate McGowan. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993.
Petterd, Robin & Diane Caney. travels towards. http://www.overthere.com.au/travels/.
Roudiez, Léon, S. ‘Introduction’, in Julia Kristeva. Desire
in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
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Simpson, J.A., & E.S.C. Weiner, eds. The Oxford English Dictionary.
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References
1
Julia Kristeva, 'Word, Dialogue and Novel', The Kristeva Reader, Toril
Moi (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984, p. 49.
2
'Splitting ... describes the feeling the survivor has when she separates her
consciousness from her body, or "leaves" her body'.
Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal, Harper & Row, New
York, 1988, p. 42.
3 Roland Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’, Twentieth Century Literary Theory, K. M. Newton (ed.), London: MacMillan, 1988, pp. 156-57.
4 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 176.
5 Léon, S. Roudiez, ‘Introduction’, in Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984, p. 15.
6 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984, p. 36.
7 By new text (or primary text) I mean to infer any text that is being considered as the focus for intertextual exploration. The category of new text is always arbitrary and shifting, depending upon which text has been chosen as the primary text (either by a reader, or by a textual analyst). With chronology of production being inconsequential to readers an older text can feasibly be the focus (or the new text) for an intertextual reading with intertexts that chronologically post-date the (older) text’s production.
8 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon, 1969, pp. xxviii - xxix.
9 Donna Haraway, p. 181.