Graphic expression

Recognising the specificity of writing, glossematics did not merely give itself the means of describing the graphic element.

It showed bow to reach the literary element, to what in literature passes through an irreducibly graphic text, tying the play of form to a determined substance of expression. If there is something in literature which does not allow itself to be reduced to the voice, to epos or to poetry, one cannot recapture it except by rigorously isolating the bond that links the play of form to the substance of graphic expression. (It will by the same token be seen that “pure literature,” thus respected in its irreducibilty, also risks limiting the play, restricting it. The desire to restrict play is, moreover, irresistible.)

This interest in literature is effectively manifested in the Copenhagen School. It thus removes the Rousseauist and Saussurian caution with regard to literary arts. It radicalises the efforts of the Russian formalists, specifically of the O.PO.IAZ, who, in their attention to the being-literary of literature, perhaps favoured the phonological instance and the literary models that it dominates.

Notably poetry. That which, within the history of literature and in the structure of a literary text in general, escapes that framework, merits a type of description whose norms and conditions of possibility glossematics has perhaps better isolated. It has perhaps thus better prepared itself to study the purely graphic stratum within the structure of the literary text within the history of the becoming-literary of literality, notably in its “modernity.”

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What is remediation in hypertextuality?

Bolter argues that digital hypertext is the remediation of the printed book.

Published between the first and second editions of Writing Space, Remediation: Understanding New Media (coauthored by Richard Grusin, MIT Press, 1999) focuses on the relationship between visual digital expressions (such as computer games and the World Wide Web) and earlier media forms (such as film and television). Bolter argues that digital forms both borrow from and seeks to surpass earlier forms, and he gives this process the name “remediation.”

With Blair MacIntyre, Maribeth Gandy, and Petra Schweitzer, bolter is also reexamining Benjamin's concept of aura. He wants to see how aura (or the decay of aura) manifests itself in new media forms, such as augmented and mixed reality. His current paper is entitled: “New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura.”

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Jay David Bolter and new genres and forms

Roy Christopher: The web has provided an environment for the high-speed spread and exchange of information. Do you think it has evolved in the best possible manner? What could we be doing better on and with the internet’s power?

Jay David Bolter: The World Wide Web is an extraordinary achievement. It isn’t just about the exchange of information, narrowly conceived as bytes of data. It has already spawned a whole set of new media genres and forms: news and information sites, personal home pages, corporate sites for marketing and sales, entertainment sites, gambling and pornography sites, and the sometimes tedious, sometimes amazing webcams. The Web is now suffused with the influence of global capitalism, and for that reason alone it has become an object of critique for many in media studies. The Web has also disappointed the relatively small, but dedicated community of writers who were creating standalone or small networked hypertexts in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many of their systems were more sophisticated than the Web in the sense that they offered better linking protocols and more possibilities for author/reader interaction. Nevertheless, the Web succeeded in capturing the imagination of our culture where these earlier systems did not. We could certainly propose a more powerful global hypertext system, but the genius of the Web lay in its (originally) simple link structure and its distributed architecture. Everyone could understand how the Web worked - how you traveled from page to page - and anyone with access to a server could create her own Web pages. As soon as inline graphics were added in 1993, the Web had everything it needed to become a cultural and economic phenomenon.
The Web is changing, developing richer forms of interaction. But as everyone who uses the Web is aware, the most important trend is toward increasing use of multimedia forms. Tim Berners-Lee originally conceived of the Web principally as a textual medium. The development of the Mosaic browser in 1993 gave us the Web as a new space for graphic design—the combination of text and static graphics. Now we see animation, digitized video, and sound playing a greater role. This trend will surely continue, even if we don’t see the ultimate ‘convergence’ of television and the computer that some have predicted.

Enframing is the point

As Derrida points out, the frame is also part of the picture (despite Kant's best efforts to the contrary).

At the gigantic, uncanny scale of the internet, electronic communication initiates countless points and movements, sliding over the representational scenery without being reduced to the sequence of its particularity. Still, electronic communication still has to sweep along all the bad old functions of metaphysical thinking for local uses. The pervasive proximity of electronic communication races beyond any phenomenology of things or texts. It is not even a matter of forms and contents - that fine old Platonic division - since internet-as-Enframing remains indifferent to what it transmits or represents, operating only according to what it could transmit or represent, which is everything and nothing. The most potent device of Enframing is literally the frame: the gesture of bracketing which makes something seen at the expense of everything else (G.Bennington).

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Formation of form as a linguistic movement

Nothing stands outside the system of differences.

Only the formation of form.

But it is on the other hand the being-imprinted of the imprint. It is well-known that Saussure distinguishes between the “sound-image” and the objective sound. He thus gives himself the right to “reduce,” in the phenomenological sense, the sciences of acoustics and physiology at the moment that he institutes the science of language. The sound-image is the structure of the appearing of the sound [l'apparaître du son] which is anything but the sound appearing [le son apparaissant]. It is the sound-image that be calls signifier, reserving the name signified not for the thing, to be sure (it is reduced by the act and the very ideality of language), but for the “concept,” undoubtedly an unhappy notion here; let us say for the ideality of the sense.

“I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifé] and signifier [signifiant].”

The sound-image is what is heard; not the sound heard but the being-beard of the sound. Being-heard is structurally phenomenal and belongs to an order radically dissimilar to that of the real sound in the world. One can only divide this subtle but absolutely decisive heterogeneity by a phenomenological reduction. The latter is therefore indispensable to all analyses of being-heard, whether they be inspired by linguistic, psychoanalytic, or other preoccupations.

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Crown for changing

Proteus, obeying a practice among the Egyptian rulers, wore upon his head now the forepart of a lion, now that of a bull, now a serpent, now trees or fire, as symbols of his sovereignty.

And for this reason, some believed that the Greeks, unable to grasp what they had in front of their eyes, thought that Proteus was changing his form when he just changed his crown...

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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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Changing form

The most remarkable feature of Proteus is his ability to change form. But whereas some whose form has been changed remain in their new state, Proteus can continuously assume new forms, looking as a young man, a lion, a boar, a serpent, a bull, a stone, a tree, water, flame, or whatever he pleases.

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Nutritious centre

How does the metaphor work?

Imagine a nut. A nut has a shell that, once removed, yields a nutritious centre. This is what Paul de Man means by the following statement: “when form is considered to be the external trappings of literary meaning or content, it seems superficial and expendable.” The formalists, on the other hand, taught that it is the shell, rather than its content, that is important in literature. So when Paul de Man observes that the trend in literary criticism has moved from form to reference, what interests him is the underlying metaphor that governs how we have up until now always—without thinking about it too much—imagined meaning to come about. That is, before we interpret a text we have already accepted an interpretation—based upon a metaphor—of what interpretation is. It is this unwitting interpretation of interpretation that interests de Man.

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Language and finite form

In "Truth and Meaning," Donald Davidson argued that any learnable language must be statable in a finite form, even if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of expressions—as we may assume that natural human languages are, at least in principle.

If it could not be stated in a finite way then it could not be learned through a finite, empirical method such as the way humans learn their languages. It follows that it must be possible to give a theoretical semantics for any natural language which could give the meanings of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a finite system of axioms. "Giving the meaning of a sentence", he further argued, was equivalent to stating its truth conditions, so originating the modern work on truth-conditional semantics.

In sum, he proposed that it must be possible to distinguish a finite number of distinct grammatical features of a language, and for each of them explain its workings in such a way as to generate trivial (obviously correct) statements of the truth conditions of all the (infinitely many) sentences making use of that feature.

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Definition of a text

We can broaden the definition of text, or at least include within the realm of hypertext, other textual forms like sound, photographs, and art.

It is not only words that can become hypertext links, but any image. And a link can transport a reader to a sound, another piece of text, or an image, all themselves pieces of text. Perhaps what I like best about this definition of a text is the fact that like a piece of fabric a hypertext web can be added on to. And the additions do not have to be placed by the original weaver, the original writer...

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Approaches to the notion of form

Currently, there are three approaches to the notion of form.

The first is the Platonic, classical definition: collection of perceptible elements which can incorporate the Socratic and Benjaminian ideas of representation and its false implications resulting from mediation, reproduction, interpretation, and translation.

The second is the Aristotelian definition: intelligible elements of nature, kind.

The third is the modernist approach of internal form in association with and contrasting with external form, and especially the formalist principle of a work's form determining its value as art. Used in combination, these notions are interplayed in media theory to combine formal artistic analysis of composition, consideration of aesthetic value, and relations between mediums or forms of art, on a common term.

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