Read a text

In the most simple and general terms, deconstruction in the Derridean sense means to read a text according to a certain way or strategy, a precise and careful strategy, but also one that shakes the ground under one's feet.

It is a praxis in which Derrida specifically aims to transform philosophical, linguistic, theological, or aesthetic texts. Deconstruction shows us the possibility of continually ascribing different or additional meanings to texts; it acknowledges the fundamental ambiguity of signs and texts and the impossibility of controlling them. Deconstruction implies transplantation, the ability to remove a sign or text from its present context to another context. In this way, deconstruction highlights the heterogeneity of a sign or a text. It wants to show the impossibility of a (sign-)system to close, to arrive at a definite meaning. Of course, attempts to demarcate meanings take place all the time, but the demarcations are based on conventions and are always tentative ('for the time being').

Transplantation. But transplantation also always means transformation. Deconstruction establishes a transgression, a shifting of meaning that in turn is never definitive. There is no expectation of a final moment of truth. Rather, there is an ongoing process of the shifting of rules that govern the relationships among (the elements of) systems. A short example. We write, and in this writing there is a potential for rewriting. Transformation implies that 'change' is a change in way of meaning - a becoming. See Cobussen.

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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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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Grammatisation by Bernard Stiegler

Now a few years into this 21st century, which will be the century of nanotechnologies and which will see unheard of relations between technics, science and desire, the crucial question of what links and distinguishes power, knowledge and the will, i.e., the question of what can, at times, set these infinitives into oppositions, composing them at the same time, by posing them together, this question which, more profoundly and par excellence is the problem of thought and its ass’s skin – as though it diagrammed the mechanism of that stupidity Deleuze called “transcendental” --, this question is a problem for us, so much so as to appear to have become unthinkable, the test and ordeal of powerlessness itself.

The great transformation of these terms, in as much as they are constituted only through the relation they form, begins with the advent of machines as a stage in the process of grammatisation. I call “grammatisation” the process whereby the flux and flow networking our existences become discreet elements: writing is thus, as the breaking into discreetelements of the flux of speech (let us invent the word “discretisation” for this possibility), a stage in grammatisation. Now, the process of grammatisation, with the dawn of the industrial revolution, suddenly surpasses the sphere of language – one wants to say that the same thinghappened to the sphere of logos – and invades the sphere of the body: first and foremost, the gestures of workers, which are discredited, devalued in view of their automatic reproduction –while at the same time the machines and apparat uses of reproducibilities of the visible and the audible appear on the scene.

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Bovarism

Hypertextual continually returns to the theme of changing, transformation and role of narrative, perhaps in an attempt to draw the reader into questioning the future of narrative, specifically as it relates to new media.

Hypertextual wants to define narrative as giving a context in which we can explore -- and subsequently come closer to understanding through further illumination - web behaviors and the numerical condition. We believe that narrative is a method through which we can isolate scriptor's traits, project them beyond ourselves, and contextualize them in a medium which can be used to understand reading behaviors and cultural society.Narrative under this description seems to accord very well with projectionist theories of religion, specifically Feuerbach. Ludwig Feuerbach, in his work, “The Essence of Christianity”, explains religion as man’s projecting his own humanity beyond himself into a transcendent reality in order to understand his own characteristically human experience.

Hypertextual works like this projection. An ideality. The text is projected in a transcendent ideality. And the author is identified with his own words."Madame Bovary, c'est moi !" used to say Gustave Flaubert !

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Sites for transformation

Texts are sites for transformation.

That texts do not only signify inherently, but also in relation to other systems of meaning, to other texts and cultural norms, and that their aesthetic is inseparable from determinants exterior to linguistic properties, are the underlying notions of the metabolean Hypertext concerning Literature and Transformation.Transformation means not only change, metamorphosis, and transfiguration, but also creation and that, as we read and compare texts, we add another dimension: the relationship between the text and ourselves, in other words, the transformation of the text by the individual reader.

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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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Enter Hypertextual

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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Changing hypertextuality

With Hypertextual’s way of reading, we could undermine the user's predictable points of identification by changing the number and the content of scripting, regulate the reader's possibilities to read in time, decide to what he may return or whether he may do so at all, circulate characters between numerous positions, or process the traces of configurative uses of a cybertext as toxic waste in the "fictive" world it is supposed to contain…

From this viewpoint it is sometimes hard to understand the constant attraction to static hypertexts.

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Electronic media to disseminate new forms of identity

What happens is not simply an increased "efficiency" of interchange, enabling new avenues of investment, increased productivity at work and new domains of leisure and consumption, but a broad and extensive change in the culture, in the way identities are structured.

If I may be allowed a historical analogy: to Mark Poster, the technically advanced societies are at a point in their history similar to that of the emergence of an urban, merchant culture in the midst of feudal society of the middle ages. (...) A new identity was constructed, gradually and in a most circuitous path to be sure, among the merchants in which a coherent, stable sense of individuality was grounded in independent, cognitive abilities. In this way the cultural basis for the modern world was begun, one that eventually would rely upon print media to encourage and disseminate these urban forms of identity.

At the moment, electronic media are supporting an equally profound transformation of cultural identity.

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Being is transformist

Heidegger's ontology is a true ontology of transformation, an ontology of permanent mutation. Being is transformist. Today, what is "fantastic" is that one can see the machinery of Being, its process having been fully uncovered. But there are two ways of transforming one's being. It can be done in a "flexible" manner, one that acquiescently responds to the exigencies of "ontological capitalism." Or it can be done in a "plastic" fashion, one that is creative and explosive. Being offers these two modalities of mutation, or rather they are found in the extant (l'étant). Everything mutates and changes. There is no position outside of the extant that can protect us from the mortifying effects of flexibility. But the extant can give us something to resist with, but only if we realize what it can do. Against all expectation, "salvation" will not come from Being, but from the rehabilitation of the extant.