Co-presence between texts

Intertextuality. According to Genette's rather restricted definition intertextuality is "a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts."

This includes, as Eskelinen put it, the practices of quotation, allusion and plagiarism. In principle, it is just a matter of recognition. But in these days just because you read it doesn’t mean it is there and vice versa. The invisible, hidden, and inaccessible parts of the text will deny the reader the comfort of knowing for certain what exactly is there in the text. To make matters more complicated it’s not only the dialectic between visible and invisible parts of the text that counts, but also the relations between what’s visible now and what, if anything, will be visible later. Also the threshold between what’s inside and what’s outside the text is getting blurrier, as it’s so easy to supplement and replace the original text from the outside (as certain famous software agents have already shown).

In some ways, all this may lead to the decreasing importance of intertextuality in dynamically ergodic works, or at least to more drastic ways of foregrounding intertextuality. In any case we’d be better prepared to understand the widely varying degrees of co-presence at work.

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Not present time

Our present experience of time has to do with something that is not present, or one could say, is present in the form of non-presence – like a ghost or a spectre.

Derrida speaks of “the experience of the non-present”. Phrased in the shakespearian terms used in Spectres of Marx, time is always out of joint. There is no presence that is not involved with the future and the past, the air is always full of ghosts. This of course holds for every point in time. Time is always already out of joint, not present to itself. The concept of “Messianicity” tries to formulate this out-of-joint structure.

In his text Marx & Sons, Derrida tries to clarify why this Messianicity is “without” Messianism, and he names two conditions that this conception should exclude. It should exclude (firstly) the memory of a determinate historical revelation, whether Jewish or Jewish-Christian, and (secondly) it should exclude a determinate Messiah-figure.

Thus, the messianic for Derrida names a universal structure of experience, a structure, he says at one point, that functions as a quasi-transcendental ground for all particular Messianisms. Let me read to you a passage from Marx & Sons:

“The figures of Messianism would have to be (…) deconstructed as ‘religious’, ideological, or fetischistic formations, whereas Messianicity without Messianism remains, for its part, undeconstructible, like justice. It remains undeconstructible because the movement of any deconstruction presupposes it.

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Definitive discourse?

Since all elements in a hypertext system are subject to connection, it becomes harder to separate one discourse from another.

In printed works notes and bibiliography give writings outside the current text a presence on the page, but that presence is metaphoric. Hypertext abolishes this metaphor: the other writings actually become present when the reader activates a link. Hypertext thus offers to revise our notions of definitive discourse. It seems to move us in the direction of Roland Barthes' "writerly" text, defined as "that social space that leaves no language safe or untouched, that allows no enunciative subject to hold the position of judge, teacher, analyst, confessor, or decoder".

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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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