Cobussen and deconstruction

[1] What 'is' deconstruction?

The use of the quotation marks should make clear that the question cannot in fact be posed like this. cf. Deconstruction: Between Method and Singularity.) A first option for a description of deconstruction is offered by the dictionary. In the French dictionary, Littré, the meaning of deconstruction progresses along two lines. (1) Grammatical. Deconstruction means change, the disruption of the construction or the composition of the words in a sentence with the purpose of producing other, new meanings with the same words (i.e., not to deny them!). (2) Mechanical. Deconstruction indicates disassembling, taking apart, dismantling, disintegrating (Derrida often uses the word 'demontage.

The first description in particular shows that destructive and constructive aspects are at work simultaneously. Deconstruction not only encloses and unlocks, it also gives access to new spaces. Deconstruction means a dismantling in order to create something new. The grammatical meaning puts more emphasis on the affirmative nature of deconstruction than the mechanical meaning of the word.

Metabolean change in the course of writing

As davis S. Miall put it, alternative models of what it means to read a literary text are abundant in the theoretical literature. The little empirical work that has taken place, however, suggests that a central characteristic of reading a poem or a novel is a transformation process, in which what the reader knows or feels undergoes a change in the course of reading.

This contrasts with other types of reading, from newspaper articles to instruction manuals, which generally appear to be cumulative, consisting of a process of conceptual model building. The latter process can clearly be simulated more easily by computer: the typical hypertext system, which provides annotations and links to related documents, enables a reader to elaborate a view of a target domain in this way. Thus a literary text can be surrounded by various supporting contexts that will enhance a reader's knowledge and understanding of it, but this is not the same process as the encounter with the primary text !

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Individual man

It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.

Gregory Bateson

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Real change

 

Experience presupposes change as well as permanence.

Without disruption of unexpected, there would be merely the passage of events. And a mere passage does not constitute a real change. Passage is pure continuity without interruption (a phenomenon of which humans, with the possible exception of a few mystics, have precious little experience). Change arises with a departure from continuity. 

Change does not, however, involve the total obliteration of continuity — there must be a "persisting non-passing content" against which an emergent event is experienced as a change.

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Anticipation of change

"Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw be”

Samuel Johnson

(English Poet, Critic and Writer. 1709-1784)

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So fast the e-literature is changing

As Grigar points out, "one of the most difficult aspects of e-lit is the ability to talk about it fast enough, so fast is the landscape changing".

Since its inception, e-lit has been struggling to free itself from its generic limitations and now seems to be on the verge of doing so. At long last. Although interesting, its early manifestations were hardly groundbreaking. Collaborative narratives are as old as literature itself. Generative poetry simply adds a technological twist to Tzara's hat trick, the surrealists' automatic writing or Burroughs' cut-ups. Interactive fiction has its roots in Cervantes and Sterne. Hypertexts seldom improve on gamebooks like the famous Choose Your Own Adventure series, let alone BS Johnson's infamous novel-in-a-box.

Besides, if you really want to add sound and pictures to words, why not make a film?

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So fast is the e-literature changing

As Grigar points out, one of the most difficult aspects of e-lit is the ability to talk about it fast enough, so fast is the landscape changing.

Since its inception, e-lit has been struggling to free itself from its generic limitations and now seems to be on the verge of doing so. At long last. Although interesting, its early manifestations were hardly groundbreaking. Collaborative narratives are as old as literature itself. Generative poetry simply adds a technological twist to Tzara's hat trick, the surrealists' automatic writing or Burroughs' cut-ups. Interactive fiction has its roots in Cervantes and Sterne. Hypertexts seldom improve on gamebooks like the famous Choose Your Own Adventure series, let alone BS Johnson's infamous novel-in-a-box. Besides, if you really want to add sound and pictures to words, why not make a film?

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-PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Metabole and tragedy

The word metabole is employed by Aristotle in his definition of peripety (Poet. 1452a 22-23), which Anton F. Harald Bierl, Dionysos und die griechische Tragödie.1991) regards as somehow connected with Dionysus.

He is tempted by the thought that Aristotle borrowed it from the poets, or at least that it belonged to a dramaturgical vocabulary that had already sprung up by the time of HF (143 n. 88, 225). This word, Bierl thinks, signals metatragically the critical moment when the action is about to take a sudden turn (it does just that at the conclusion of the third stasimon, 815ff.). The mad Heracles is characterized in Dionysiac imagery (esp. 889-98, just before he kills his children). According to Bierl, Heracles unites the two sides of Dionysus: he reflects the positive, cultic side of the god in the first half of the play, where he is the embodiment of Bacchic hope in the eyes of his loved ones, and the negative, mythical side in the second half, where he becomes their murderer.
In sum, an evocation of the Dionysus in his theatrical dimension might
(a) serve as a dramaturgical signal, a device to prepare the audience for a subsequent turn of events. It might
(b) induce the audience to experience vicariously the optimism of the dramatis personae (e.g. of the chorus in Sophocles' plays) by calling forth the "positive" cultic context. It might
(c) call attention to the operation of tragedy, especially the sudden reversal, which Aristotle called peripety; theatrical metalanguage (e.g. metabole [HF 735], eleos and phrike [Phoen. 1284-87], phroimion [HF 753]) can suggest the tragic principle of sudden reversal. Finally, it might (d) cause the audience to reflect on the theatrical illusion (Hel., cf. Cho., IT) or on the value of the theater for the polis (Bacch. does this by dramatizing, through the monitory example of Pentheus, the breakdown of theatrical communication).

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Rules of movement

To aid in the seamlessness of editing a sequence of action together several basic rules of movement, frame entry, and frame exiting, were developed by classical Hollywood cinema.

Where a moving body exits a frame, and the next shot is to show them again, then the following conditions are to be followed:

where a figure has left the frame in shot A, they can be shown already present in shot B.
where a figure remains in shot A, they must enter frame during shot B.

These rules only apply to those shot sequences where a character, or other moving object, is to be shown moving across the sequence produced by the edit, where there is to be a change of shot but no movement across the frame, movement is regularly co-opted to motivate the edit.
Such rules of movement can be seen in Written on the Wind, though it helps if you use the movie controller. Where this is not followed a jump cut results, and while uncommon prior to the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, it, like crossing the line, does not appear to significantly compromise intelligibility.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

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Process of change

The meaning of a simple object, or a particular word, is always in the process of change.

Moreover, the significance of a past change can only be appreciated from the future and, of course, that 'future' is itself implicated in a similar process of transformation were it ever to be capable of becoming 'present'. The future is hence not just a future that will become present, but the future that makes all 'presence' possible and also impossible.There can be no presence-to-self, or self-contained identity, because the 'nature' of our temporal existence is for this type of experience to elude us. According to Derrida, our predominant mode of being is what he will eventually term the messianic...

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Thetis changes her form too

To conquer the nereid Thetis was not an easy task for Peleus, since she, as Proteus, could change her form, becoming in the arms of anyone who strived to hold her, a bird or a tree.

So far Peleus clung on her, but when she showed herself in the guise of a tigress, he lost his courage, and loosed his hold.

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Liquid modernity

Zygmunt Bauman's thesis, set out in his book of Liquid Modernity (2000), is that we have moved from a solid to a fluid phase of modernity, in which nothing keeps its shape, and social forms are constantly changing at great speed, radically transforming the experience of being human.

Bauman notes that while the workplace was traditionally a very important source of personal identity, changes in the economy have rendered it far less reliable. He suggests that the enduring identities once associated with work have given way to looser and more provisional identities, and conceptions of community, that are subject to constant change and renegotiation. Indeed, Bauman points to a more profound transformation of how we understand what it means to be human in the absence of transcendent ideologies (traditional or otherwise) such as have characterised modernity until recently.

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Unexpected catastrophe

A "catastrophe" is an abrupt change in a variable(s) during the evolution of a system that can be modeled by structural equations and topological folds.

Catastrophes are governed by control parameters whose changes of values leads either to smooth transition at low values or abrupt changes at higher, critical values. Catastrophes indicate points of bifurcation in dynamical systems.

For example, the way a dog can change abruptly from a playful mood to an aggressive stance can be modeled by a simple "catastrophe." In organizations, the presence of sudden change can similarly be modeled using Catastrophe Theory. In recent years, Catastrophe Theory is understood as a part of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory in general.

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Advent of writing

Historians draw a distinction between prehistory and history, with history defined by the advent of writing. The cave paintings and petroglyphs of prehistoric peoples can be considered precursors of writing, but are not considered writing because they did not represent language directly.

Writing systems always develop and change based on the needs of the people who use them. Sometimes the shape, orientation and meaning of individual signs also changes over time. By tracing the development of a script it is possible to learn about the needs of the people who used the script as well as how it changed over time.

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Sweeping change

J. Hillis Miller does point out that Derrida's Glas and the personal computer appeared at more or less the same time.

Both work self-consciously and deliberately to make obsolete the traditional codex linear book and to replace it with the new multilinear multimedia hypertext that is rapidly becoming the characteristic mode of expression both in culture and in the study of cultural forms. The `triumph of theory' in literary studies and their transformation by the digital revolution are aspects of the same sweeping change" (Literary Theory). This sweeping change has many components, to be sure, but one theme appears in both writings on hypertext (and the memex) and in contemporary critical theory -- the limitations of print culture, the culture of the book.

Bush and Barthes, Nelson and Derrida, like all theorists of these perhaps unexpectedly intertwined subjects, begin with the desire to enable us to escape the confinements of print. This common project requires that one first recognize the enormous power of the book, for only after we have made ourselves conscious of the ways it has formed and informed our lives can we seek to pry ourselves free from some of its limitations.

George P. Landow

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