radical artifice Beyond Radical Artifice
 
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...the electronic pulse of active charges flowing across a continually shifting differential.
-Drucker, "Critical Pleasure"
 
    Visual allure, animation and other forms of multiplex engagement alter the variables in literature's complexity in the current creative moment.  Examining various aspects of "cybertext" as outlined by Espen Aarseth in his critical study Cybertext:  Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, then applying them as a lens on Johanna Drucker's The History of the/my Wor(l)d, our presentation wishes to suggest further areas of investigation with regards to aesthetics and purposes for machine modulated text as cultural and poetic activity.  Particularly under inspection in this research are transformations enabled by the digitization of documents already diverging from-the-norm, which allow and/or require each reader to discover from a fresh perspective their meaning.
    Drucker's work (here and elsewhere) obviously questions and diverges from any standardized notion of popular textuality; as Pamela suggested in her paper, the reader of her work has to find a way to combine disparate parts of the text.  In Cybertext, Aarseth defines such textual presentations, where the user effectuates a semiotic sequence, where "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text," as ergodic literature (1).  Readers and writers share the responsibility of being conduits and mediators between world, image, thought, and language in a (sometimes) mysterious intertextual environment.
    Cybertext, in Aarseth's design, is not confined to electronic texts.  Focusing predominantly on the mechanical organization of the text, Aarseth instead regards the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the text.  The major defining point is that "a cybertext must contain some kind of information feedback loop."  This holds true for any textual situation where "'text' is something more than just marks upon a surface" (19).  This perspective on all forms of textuality expands the scope of literary studies.  Michael Joyce, a serious hypertext author and pedagogue, makes the claim that hypertext no longer presents for users (and authors) a situation which is "either/or" but rather "and/and/and".  Yet, as Aarseth observes, Joyce outlines just two broad lenses through which to examine and classify hypertext and hypermedia:  as either "constructive" or "explorative."  Joyce's critical vocabulary regarding hypertexts is too broad.  Aarseth's textology is not only descriptive; its particulars create a solid platform upon which to illustrate and introduce aesthetic points.  He attempts to achieve a terminology that "has distinctive power as well as unproblematic connotations" (59).
    Cybertext, writes Aaresth, "is the wide-range (or perspective) of possible textualities seen as a typology of machines, as various kinds of literary communication systems where the functional differences among the mechanical parts play a defining role in determining the aesthetic process" (22).  In his typology, terms such as scriptons, textons, and traversal function are introduced in order to determine different variables in any text.  Specific variables outlined by Aarseth are:  Dynamics; Determinability; Transiency; Perspective; Access; Linking; and User Functions.  By analyzing such intricacies within any text may we begin to develop a "cross-genral" vocabulary, an apparatus by which to discuss textuality in a "(post) textual" world?  Putting these arbitrary dynamics into the mix, alternate attentions will arise.  In any event, "Until these practices are identified and examined," writes Aarseth, "a significant part of the question of interpretation must go unanswered" (20).
        The jacket cover of Johanna Drucker's The History of the/my Wor(l)d proclaims the book "provides a striking alternative to the familiar telling of historical events," and combines "the intersection of official history and individual memory".  As we describe, and as you see, The History of the/my Wor(l)d--originally produced by hand on a letter-press--presents varied fonts, font sizing, a mixture of symbols/icons (such as stars, triangles, telephones, airplanes), images ("pods, ciphers, and other mysterious devices"), and alphanumeric text.  Stand-alone lines are juxtaposed with blocks of text offer the reader various ways to perceive it.  This piece, to adopt another of Aarseth's concepts, is multicursal:  the reader faces a series of critical choices, as they do in all ergodic literature.  These particular symbols and found images are pictographic referencing via elements of electronic and print culture.  History begins its literal or non-literal path with its gist up front, even if it is dwarfed or obscured by visual effects (especially the oversize article ("the"), and personal pronoun ("my")).  Directly stated, next to the image of a diagram used when mapping circuits, the book contains "Fragments of a tesimonial to history, some lived and realized moments open to claims of memory".
    Drucker's process exhibits archetypical multiplex possibilties, such as how "layering" functions to create the style of feedback mechanism introduced by Aarseth.  Reading her work, every formal projection is important yet the importance of language is obvious.  In Drucker's history is "the word adored" (3).  While each aspect is equally vital to her poetics, in this piece we see word as word, its truth is taught and transmittable, flexible, creative, and sometimes direct; it is a mythos of law, word, muse made authority.  Sometimes word becomes icon, as iconbecomes word.  Hopefully some of you were all able to piece out this exquisite line across the first three pages of her story:  "Soft, fat, slow time takes its first breath following the initial explosion, making light into a face swaddled in warmth and letters.  Our earth took us to heart and mind in the intellectual embrace of a cool companionship" (2-4).
    Reading History as a book, as cybertext (in Aarsethian terms), its dynamics are static.  It is a determinate and intransient text.  Its perspective is impersonal.  Since all aspects of the text are available to readers at all times it is a random access text with no mechanical links. Its user functions are explorative and interpretive.  While Drucker states in her 1997 interview with Matthew Kirschenbaum that "electronic forms will and already are allowing the popular imagination to reinvent its relation to the received traditions of reading, writing and imagining," she nonetheless declares, "I am so attached to print documents and objects that I can't say whether I will ever manage to create a hypertext novel/work."  If yet another textual dimension is concievable, however, the Granary Books edition of The History begins to make an example of how the mechanical parts may be suddenly blurred by technological possibility.
    In an endnote, Drucker states that the Granary version is already an electronic adaptation, "Quarked on a Mac based on original layout."  Taking the further step of transforming just one--or perhaps two--of the previously determined variables in an electronic version of this book could completely expand the capabilities of the document.  For instance, let's consider a mode of hyper-feedback where an outwardly linked reconstruction or version of the text is ventured.  A transformation, a translation of this cybertext into a linked cybertext (potentially with textonic functions where users could not only make links but permanently add their own text and links), furthers the radical artifice and potency (poet instensity) that emerges from the layering of verbal and visual information.
    On a large-scale, sophisticated network (i.e. greater than the Internet), Drucker could not only express her vision in this matter but "program" The History of the/my Wor(l)d by plugging into a much larger body of textual materials.  Language and image become common denominators allowing pluralistic and subjective interpretation, engaged self-directed exploration through (not-yet-available) vast archives of history and other forms of cultural interpretation.  As Kirschenbaum points out, "...the use of different fonts and point sizes in conjunction with visual layout cues which gesture toward an array of multiple reading paths all simultaneously displayed on the open page."  Drucker uses these to help her in achieving alternatives to linear and sequential reading patterns.
    A hardwired non-linear History could lead to databanks of self- or global histories.  The application of this poetics opens direct, random, and numerous other anthological possibilities for texts.  In the pages you are seeing alone, direct links could be made through language, image, via intuitive and non-intuitive linking, either (or both) on the part of the producer(s), users, or other forms of agents.  At least the following disciplines or areas are cognitively accessed in these pages:  global history (could include series of definitions, dictionaries, encyclopedias), spiritual/religious history, architecture, philosophy, athletics, world cultures, anthropology, biology, mathematics, women's issues, history of technology, geology, geography, "popular" culture, environment, industrial society, sociology, human and material transportation.  Opposites and relatives to each of these would exist in an openly matrixed version.  Diacritical marks could be random or non-randomly generated links.  Every icon and image could be uniquely designed and programmed; every index could be textonic.  This user-guided endeavor may or may not be a virtually created model or space.  Both benefits and drawbacks would arise by creating instructionless projections like Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel which tend to either frustrate users or completely captivate them, absorbing--however temporarily--their attention and interest.  Some users will want to be led, others will want to find their own way through history.  Of course, this type of design--where literature is literal investigation, and curiosity guides the user's way--entails great organization and precision on the part of the producers.  Visual hypertextuality, as Michael Joyce writes, creates an "interaction between viewers of its material and those who created or gathered that material" (20).  The purpose behind my ideas as here described is to have a series of textual events.  Information as drawing, graphic designs, and as binary data, can be located more quickly than it can in books.  A user can either follow closely along with a literalist approach, or flip quickly through.  Utilizing visual and digital cues is a way of programming our minds.
 
The body of the fine arts has suffered an infusion of new processes and data
manipulations so that it now lives the same cyborg hybrid life as every other entity.
-Drucker, "Critical Pleasure"
 
 A poem or book can not be more than what they are, and at the same time aspire to be farther-reaching than history has previously allowed.  Readers guide themselves to cognitive and creatives space of their own choosing, using interactive principles and practices.  What do these technologies tell us about the principles and evolution of human communication?  In an essay on the art of Joseph Nechvatal, Drucker celebrates Nechvatal's "network of visual pleasure whose critical insight resonates with a satisfying complexity, providing a surface whose body indexes the corpus of the social, proposing mutation as a process of reinvention and renewal."  It is not an issue of books versus computer networks but rather the limits to the extent to which we involve ourselves with language, image, linking, thinking, organization and patience.
 

                                            --Chris Funkhouser


 
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Works Cited
 

Aarseth, Espen.  Cybertext:  Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.  Baltimore:   Johns Hopkins
    U. Press, 1997.

Drucker, Johanna.  The History of the/my Wor(l)d.  New York:  Granary Books,  1992.

 - - - .  "Critical Pleasure."  Online.   http://www.dom.de/arts/artists/jnech/drucker.html
    15 April 98

Joyce, Michael.  Of Two Minds.  Ann Arbor:  U. of Michigan Press, 1995.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew.  "Through Light and the Alphabet":  An Interview  with Johanna
    Drucker.  Postmodern Culture.  Online.   http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/
    issue.597/  kirschenbaum.597 7 April 98

Perloff, Marjorie.  Radical Artifice:  Writing Poetry in the Age of Media.
 
 
 
 

<note>
"Scriptons" is a term used to describe strings of text as they appear to a reader.  "Textons" is used to describe strings as they exist in the text.  "Traversal function" is the mechanism by which scriptons are revealed or generated from textons and presented to the user of the text  (62-65).