Becoming Involved: Dialogism and Materiality in the development of E-Rhetorics

by Gavin Stewart

"Small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught - nay, but the draught of a draught!" Herman Melville

Introduction

Let me begin with two bold claims for my discipline. Firstly, that the authoring of computerised creative writing, is an important, consciousness-expanding activity, and secondly, that many aspects of the authoring of these new works can be taught.

In arguing for the importance of authorship (or more accurately for author-participant-ship, as I will explain in due course ) I recognize that I appear to be making a ‘Romantic’ claim for authorship that runs counter to the anti-authorial trend of a lot of recent literary criticism. I will, therefore, begin my defence of my bold claims by first setting out a general literary/cultural theory that addresses the roles of both the author-participant and the reader-participant in the understanding of a text. Having done this I will then turn to the specific conditions of computer-mediated textuality. I will use this theory to explore some specific examples of creative writing that hint at the potential of computer-mediated textuality. In doing so, I will demonstrate how this new medium offers opportunities for the engagement of human consciousness.

Theoretical Discussion: Neologisms and Theory

It is apt that this theoretical discussion should begin with a rhetorical apology, for the neologism, E-Rhetorics, in my title. Why not use good old ‘Rhetoric’?

As someone who has spent some time now reading and writing about computer-mediated textuality I am well aware that accounts of these phenomena abound in neologisms which can make creative activity in this area appear (initially at least) a rather abstract and unattractive undertaking for those unfamiliar with the field. Examples of these neologism include technotext (Hayles 2002); e-poetry (Glazier 2002); cybertext (Aarseth 1997 and Ryan 1999); interactive fiction (Sloane 2000) new media writing (Campbell 2002); interactive narratives (Douglas 2000); flash poetry (Howard 2002); writing space (Bolter 2001); digital narrative (Murray 1997) and hypertext and hypertext fiction (Joyce 1995, Landow 1997, Snyder 1996). I am acutely aware that these terms might not be familiar to my esteemed addressee. However, far from condemning this outbreak of ‘neologitis’, I will cautiously welcome these new terms, for they require their author-participants to make detailed defences of this new vocabulary, and to set forth their underlying assumptions about key critical issues, such as materiality, textuality and authorship. This new language also allows one to articulate subtle nuances of concepts and to see the artistic possibility of these phenomena with fresh senses. From these expository writings it is also possible to ascertain the important reflexive relationship between the ‘new media’ phenomenon identified by these authors for discussion and the theories by which they are defined and illuminated. For as Martin Heidegger noted, in his introduction to Time and Being:

"Every inquiry is a seeking. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought. Inquiry is a cognizant seeking for an entity both with regard to the fact that it is and with regard to its Being as it is."(Heidegger 1962: 5)

This essay, as ‘yet another’ seeking after a theoretical account of computer-mediated textuality, seems, therefore, to be charged from onset with a duty of coining its own neologisms, in order to demonstrate is own assumptions. I argue (as any keen rhetor would) that the term E-Rhetorics will justify itself by the end of this piece.

In this essay I intend to follow in Wayne Booth’s footsteps, by arguing that when dealing with the poetics of creative works we should regard “technique as rhetoric” (Booth 1983:39). To this end I will look at works that have artistic rather than purely polemic or pedagogical aims because I believe they better able to demonstrate the rhetoric of this medium. As a result the kinds of rhetoric I will describe will not be the strict linear rhetoric of beginning, middle and end, that is so often associated with Aristotle. It will also contain some pre-Socratic, oral elements such as loops and repetitions, allusion and association (see Ong 1982 and Welch 1999). It will also include elements of the rhetoric of literature identified by Booth and others. However it will also figure some new configurations- featuring sound, image and programming - that will emerge out the need to convey arguments in a networked, multi-sequential, multi-mediated world.

I will also argue here for the rhetorical usefulness of a number of the other terms mentioned above (while critiquing and re-accentuating them), recognising that they form an important dialogue between different understandings of computer-mediated textuality. I will do this in order to highlight the value of this dialogue in the development of the rhetorical techne of the new media writing (so important for understanding the role of myself and many, many others, as participant-authors of these texts) and also for highlighting an important extra-literary aspect of this dialogue; that it is rooted in power-based critical disputes between concrete actors with real world interests.

Theoretical Focus

It is important to recognize from the outset that any implementation of existing theories (literary or cultural) to computer-based textuality needs to be understood as an appropriation, with all its attendant hazards. These hazards can take many forms but perhaps the most hazardous is assuming that contemporary ‘literary thought’ and ‘computer-mediated textuality’ present coherent, unitary concepts that can easily be marshalled under one banner. To give just one example of the dangers of ‘literary theory’, hypertext theorist George P. Landow has discussed the theories of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bakhtin (among others) in his discussion of computer-mediated textuality, however, at an early key point in his discussion, Landow conflates these influential twentieth-century thinkers together into a construct he calls ‘literary theory’ (Landow 1997:2). Despite his insightful application of the ideas to computer-mediated textuality, Landow’s construct is unfortunately an awkward tool for the task in hand because it fails to fully address the pertinent differences between these thinkers, in particular, their differing treatments of issues of authorship, rhetoric and understanding. ‘Literary theory’ leaves him with a number of paradoxes (discussed below) he is only partially able to address.

This essay will seek to steer a path through the rapids of ‘literary theory’ by developing a model that is clearly rooted in one tradition, namely, the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin and his close circle of contemporaries (e.g. V.N.Voloshinov) that has come to be known as Dialogism. It will, of course, seek to highlight the important differences between ‘dialogic’ thought and the work of Barthes and Derrida (among others) as it advances its arguments. However, in treating the thought of Bakhtin at el., in a new and largely unanticipated cultural area this essay will also recognise that ‘dialogic’ thought has and continues to be critiqued by contemporary thinkers that have dialogized Bakhtin. Whenever possible it will seek to address the criticisms made of Bakhtin’s terms. In doing so, it will, I believe, stay within the bounds of the dialogic traditions, and that it is fair to describe its epistemology as being essentially ‘dialogical’. One of the key legacies of dialogic thought is the seminal notion that all entities (including dialogism itself) are never complete, fixed or closed off. Dialogism itself, in fact, is in a constant state of ‘becoming’. As Caryl Emerson, notes:

For Bakhtin “the whole” is not a finished entity; it is always a relationship. An aesthetic object – or for that matter, any aspect of life – acquires wholeness only when an individual assumes a concrete attitude toward it. Thus, the whole can never be finalized and set aside; when a whole is realized, it is by definition already open to change” (Editor’s Preface to Bakhtin 1984: xxxix)

In this way, this essay will also seek to be in dialogue with dialogism as well as with the future artwork of the new media.

Why Dialogism?

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was something of a polymath, whose range of intellectual interest was large. He has been characterised as a philosopher, cultural critic, historian of the novel and literary theorist, however, he certainly did not write about the computer-based media. In fact, Bakhtin largely based his work on direct speech and books, and by his silence on the media and technology, appears to have largely taken their material properties for granted. As Michael Gardiner notes:

"Bakhtin, although living in a period of accelerated technological and industrial development ….never attempts to assess the nature or importance of other form of media (film, photography, radio) and their possible impact on the prevailing structures of human communication and consciousness.” (Gardiner 1992: 171)

At first sight, this makes dialogism an unpromising selection as the theoretical cornerstone of this argument. However, it is also important to note that a number of the terms developed by Bakhtin were methodologically grounded in his wider philosophical interest in language and subjectivity. These key terms (such addressivity, responsive understanding and re-accentuation) address a number of the issues raised by computer-mediated textuality. In particular, they allow us to gain an insight into the thorny issue of authorial control that have been the subject of much discussion in this area.

What is Dialogism?

Holquist notes that:

“Dialogism argues that all meaning is relative in the sense that it comes about only as a result of the relation between two bodies occupying simultaneous but different space, where bodies may be thought of as ranging from the immediacy of our physical bodies, to political bodies and to bodies of ideas in general (ideologies).” (Holquist 1990:20)

This account of meaning allows the literary theorist to make a break with the traditional rhetorical diagram that posits meaning as the transfer of information from a sender (a speaker or novelist) to the receiver (a listener or reader). For instead, “meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding" (Voloshinov 1973:102). From this term ‘responsive understanding’ it is possible to see the value of another concept developed by Bakhtin and Voloshinov, namely ‘the utterance’. For the utterance, as Voloshinov notes, always “makes response to something and is calculated to be responded to in turn. It is but one link in a continuous chain of speech performances."(Voloshinov 1973:72). Meaning, for Bakhtin et al., is in a constant state of becoming and it is not closed-off or set in stone for all time. Meaning is found in dialogic utterances set in a social situation.

Addressivity and Speech Genre

In his late essay, ‘The Problem of Speech Genre’ Bakhtin refines the notion of an utterance by developing the concept of addressivity. Bakhtin notes that addressivity is “the quality of turning to someone” (Bakhtin 1986:99). It is this act of turning (and of being turned to) that creates the dialogic utterance, as it is also the act of defining an addressee, another who will be a participant in the creation of the meaning of the utterance. As Bakhtin continues:

“This addressee can be an immediate participant-interlocutor in an everyday dialogue, a differentiated collective of specialists in some particular area of cultural communication, a more or less differentiated public, ethnic group, contemporaries, like-minded people, opponents and enemies, a subordinate, a superior, someone who is lower, higher, familiar, foreign, and so forth. And it can be an indefinite, unconcretized other” (Bakhtin 1986:99)

It is clear from this long list of participants that Bakhtin wishes to make the point that he rejects the concept of a transcendental, ideal listener or reader. For Bakhtin, there is no such thing as universal language or universal understanding, for language is always to be found in a particular, pluralizing, changing, social context. He further argues that language is always stratified (Bakhtin 1981:288) and subject to social forces that produce this stratification (Bakhtin 1981: 290). Bakhtin develops the concept of the speech genre to describe the effects of this social stratification of language. Bakhtin gives the following as an example of the role of a speech genre.

“When we select words in the process of constructing an utterance, we by no means always take them from the system of language in their neutral, dictionary form. We usually take them from other utterances, and mainly from utterances that are kindred to ours in genre, that is, in theme, composition, or style. Consequently, we choose words according to their generic specifications. A speech genre is not a form of language, but a typical form of utterance.”(Bakhtin 1986:87)

It is important to note that speech-genre are constantly being formed, they are waxing and waning, fusing together with other speech genre and being abandoned as the social situation changes. In a classical example of Bakhtinian thought, they are always in a state of becoming. For Bakhtin, the concept of speech genre was able to cover the full range of language activities from spoken street slang, to the written stylistics of this essay. Even as he recognises that literary and philosophical works possess key differences to dialogue, he notes that they ‘are by nature the same kind of units of speech communication’ (Bakhtin 1986:75). Bakhtin even defines the novel as “a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (Bakhtin 1981:262).

Addressivity, therefore, is a highly-charged contingent social activity. It involves the critical judgments of which words and which speech genre to use in which situations (Bakhtin 1986:77). As such it involves the current understanding of both participant-speaker, as well as participant-listener. It is a dynamic, diachronic activity. Holquist sees this participation as being fundamental to our understanding dialogic consciousness. He notes that:

“to understand existence as "addressed to me" does not mean I am a passive receptacle into which events fall, as letters drop into mailboxes. Addressivity means rather that I am an event, the event of constantly responding to utterances from the different worlds I pass through. Addressivity implies consciousness” (Holquist 1990:48)

Following Bakhtin we can also recognise the importance of addressivity to students of creative writing as they strive to become author-participants of computer-mediated texts. For it is the continuing conscious engagement of the dialogic consciousness of a particularised participant-readers, through addressivity, that is the goal of any dialogic participant-authors.

The question therefore arises - How does a budding participant-author persuade a potential participant-reader that she is being addressed? How does the participant-author continue to engage the participant-reader over an extended period of time? This must surely be a question of rhetoric. Given that we wish to recognize that any dialogic understanding is particular (as well as a pluralistic) event, this study will involve arguing for the recognition of a number of E-rhetorics.

Context, Re-accentuation and the History of the Word

For Bakhtin, language is always situated in a social reality. This meant that he was acutely aware of the role of context. He notes:

"we cannot, when studying the various forms of transmitting another's speech, treat any of these forms in isolation from the means for its contextualized (dialogizing) framework." (Bakhtin 1981:340)

At the end of ‘Discourse in the Novel’, Bakhtin tackles the issue of the context in the act of understanding. He describes this dialogic interaction as a process of re-accentuation (Bakhtin 1981: 420). The danger to any theory of understanding that recognizes the dialogizing role of context is, that it makes it hard for it to then argue for any kind of stability of meaning (for example – in the stable addressivity of a novelist addressing her future reader). For if the text can be re-accentuated, to such an extent that it amounts to a radical recontextualisation, then, the participant-reader’s understanding can have little basis in original authorial contribution. This kind of theoretical model seems head towards toward the indeterminate text (discussed under ‘Hypertextual Ideals’ below) proclaimed by Roland Barthes (Barthes 1988).

David Shepherd tackles this problem by breaking down the binary opposition of determinancy and indeterminancy by pointing out that any process of re-accentuation has a history. He states:

"a text continues to bear the marks of its past historical engagements which, as well as being open to recontextualisation, must also place some limit on the nature and degree of that recontextualisation. If the activity of reading is based on dialogic relations between reader and text, and text and context, then there are relations which have a past as well as a present. A simple opposition of determinancy and indeterminancy is ultimately inadequate as a means of theorizing this immensely complex position."(Shepherd 1989: 98).

History, we are often told, is written by victors. Victory, in this sense, I argue is also largely a rhetorical process as well. The author-participants’ contributions fight in a Valhalla-like state of eternal battle with the word of the other. The degree to which stability of the meaning is maintained over an extended period of time is also achieved by various acts of rhetoric as well; as the very rhetoric by which earlier critics and authors try to convey their own arguments will go some way to stabilising the dominant meaning of a text. In fact, it will go a long way to stabilizing the text as a text as well, helping it to resist its own disintegration into an inter-textual aggregation of other’s words. Therefore, the text will continue to be and to mean certain things, because a cast of concrete, historical, social-embedded actors (author-participant, critics, readers, publishers, editors, etc.) utilising the rhetorical potential of semantics, materiality and their social setting, have successfully argued it so, up to the present time. This is why, as critics, we still talk paradoxically about ‘our reading of Barthes’ Death of the Author’ - despite its subject-matter! This does not, however, mean that any reading of a text is entirely author-determinate either. To stabilize meaning does not mean to fix it for all time. Even words set in stone do not have their meaning ‘set in stone’. Any reading encounter with the text is still dialogic, involving the reader’s responsive understanding as well as the re-accentuation of its utterances by changes in context. The recent history of literary criticism has shown that a powerful participant-reading of a text, for example, the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ reading of Jane Eyre (Gilbert and Gubar 1979), can alter the history of a text.

This ‘history of the word’ will have particular relevance when critiquing the theory of the hypertextuality of computer-mediated texts, for it allows for the development of the theoretical concept of an open text (see Eco 1989) without arguing either for a wholly author-determinate or wholly author-indeterminate one. In doing so, it will account for one of the chief features of computer-mediated texts, namely that they are open but not infinite. It will also remove the need to resort to the enumerable ‘deaths’ (of the author, of the Author-God, of the reader, of the subject etc.) which have characterised critical discourse over the last few decades.

However, before turning from a general discussion of the dialogic text to a discussion of individual modes of computer-mediated textuality, our general dialogic theory needs to account for a sotto voce difference framed within the very term ‘computer-mediated textuality’.

The Materiality of Texts

One of the most striking features of the Bakhtin circle’s discourse on language was their continuing use of the concept of ‘speech’ to describe all forms of language activity. Most of the key terms developed by Bakhtin and Voloshinov reflect this philosophical predilection (e.g. dialogism, speech genre, utterance, heteroglossia etc.). In doing so, the Bakhtin circle sought to emphasize that language use is an embodied, performative activity, involving socially-situated individual speakers (what Bakhtin called ‘speech subjects’) (Bakhtin 1986: 71). Bakhtin and Voloshinov did this, in part, in reaction to the writings of the Russian Formalists and the Structuralist (under the influence of Saussure) who saw language as a formal system. In fact, in many respects Bakhtin and Voloshinov can be characterised as Anti-Structuralist as they vigorously rejected the notion that language or any other sign system was as an abstract, normative system (Voloshinov 1973:94). They critiqued Saussure’s work, arguing that it did not take account of the temporal or the social nature of understanding. As Voloshinov explains:

“Signs can arise only on interindividual territory…It is essential that the two individuals be organised socially, that they compose a group (a social unit); only then can the medium of signs take shape between them"(Voloshinov 1973:12)

However, it is also the case that both Bakhtin and Voloshinov saw speech and writing as very closely-related activities. In these kinds of arguments there is a danger of a logocentrism (the term coined by Jacques Derrida to highlight the privileging of speech over writing in philosophical discussion about language) (Derrida 1976). In recognizing the danger of conflating inscription and speaking, this essay will argue that there are sufficient similarities between the socially-positioned dialogic utterance and computer-mediated textuality to support an appropriation of Bakhtinian dialogism in this discussion, but there are also significant differences that need to be addressed at this stage. For as Katherine Hayles recently noted:

“We can no longer afford to ignore the material basis of literary production. …[F]or without it we have little hope of forging a robust and nuanced account of how literature is changing under the impact of information technologies” (Hayles 2002: 19)

Hayles is not, however, advancing an objectivist version of the notion of materiality warned about by Stanley Fish in his essay on affective stylistics (Fish 1980:82). Instead, she characterises materiality as an event brought about by the interaction of humans and texts. She notes:

“An emergent property, materiality depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artefact as well as on the user's interactions with the work and the interpretative strategies she develops - strategies that include physical manipulation as well as conceptual frameworks. In the broadest sense, materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create meaning (Hayles 2002: 32)

Jerome J. McGann notes that “a text is not a "material thing" but a material event or set of events” (McGann 1991: 21). These material events give rise to what McGann calls the ‘Textual Condition’. In a rather ‘dialogic’ passage, he then notes that “the textual condition is a scene of contest and interaction, a scene where specific textual decisions are made (or unmade) in a context that involves many people” (McGann 1991:21). This essay will argue that these particular dialogic relationships are highly important for our understanding of computer-mediated textuality, though they do not preclude any of the other dialogic interactions noted above.

The Techne and the Technology

The textual condition of any individual computer-mediated text is dependent upon a wide range of highly variable factors (author-participants, reader-participants, technology, social milieu, editors, theorists etc.). They are, therefore quite naturally, a very diverse and diversifying object of study. However, there are also a number of factors that currently characterise these texts as an interesting sub-set of wider textuality.

Firstly, the mode of production and of dissemination of these texts differs from the norms of the publishing industry. This is due to a number of features including: - the increased use of PCs in the 1990s; increased access to the Internet via dial-up and broadband connections; the rise of web-hosting and the increased availability of training (in basic programming, web-site design etc.) and the sheer obscurity of computer-mediated texts as an art form. This has had a number of effects on the culture of programmers, writers and artists working with computer-mediated textuality; in particular, it has facilitated a challenge to the tradition of demarcation of semiosis that characterises the book industry. In the traditional model of this industry, the ‘author’ has long been solely responsible for producing a long, alphabetic string of characters (which is privileged as ‘The Text’). The cover, the typography, the illustrations, the marketing and distribution of these texts were all the responsibility of others. As a result of this mode of production, a ‘Fordist’ culture has grown up which encourages the separation of these text-producing functions. In particular it has caused the separation of the production of the visual, material and semantic aspects of the text (there are some very notable exceptions to this situation of course, for example, in the original publications of poet-artist William Blake). This in turn has encouraged a literary culture in which most writers are not trained, encouraged or empowered to take control of the material or visual aspects of their texts. It has also created a culture in which the written word has been elevated over the image. In contrast, author-participants of computer-mediated texts working with tools such as Macromedia Flash are encouraged to be responsible for both the visual and semantic aspects of their texts. Most author-participants consider them together as they produce their work, and they are coming to see both as integral elements for the creation meaning in their texts. This renewed interest in the non-semantic aspects of textuality have also encouraged a number of fruitful collaborations between artists trained in differing traditions (programmer with visual artist, novelist with web-site designer etc.) who are working in close collaboration to produce works that explore the widest possible notions of textuality.

Secondly following Wise, another key feature of computer-mediated texts is that they are digitised, and this digitisation makes them highly ‘amenable to manipulation by a computer’ (Wise 2000: 2). As I discuss later, it is possible to structure these texts in ways that would be very complex or expensive to achieve with a printed book or film (e.g. real-time variable temporal structuring). The ability to program these manipulations of the computer-mediated text further means that they are capable of being structured by local circumstances, such as by the actions of the reader-participant in the course of reading the text. This is important because it facilitates the artistic culture noted above, and it also facilitates the use of the rhetoric of these new structures. As Landow notes, it seems to be a rule of computer-mediated textuality that author-participants:

"will employ any feature or capacity that can be varied and controlled to convey meaning…[and] controlled variation inevitably become semiosis" (Landow 2000:160)

Thirdly, computer technology has facilitated a number of cultural activities, for example, word-processing, sampling, linking, ‘photoshopping’, and ‘cut’n’past-ing’ (to list just a few types of manipulation), which encourage the rapid radical re-contextualisation of text. These computer-mediated texts are, therefore, being produced for the very medium that encourages a culture which challenges their very existence as texts, and their author-participant’s status as participants. The rhetorician Kathleen E. Welch declares that the World Wide Web is a domain in which “textual instability will reign” (Welch 1999:151).

The opportunities, but also the challenges faced at this time by the author-participant of a computer-mediated text are therefore considerably greater than those taken on by a traditional print-mediated author-participant.

As a result of the above, the author-participants of computer-mediated texts are investigating and enacting a much wider range of rhetorical strategies than would be normally considered by other author-participants. The examples of computer-mediated textuality I discuss below are both characterised by these novel, dynamic, reader-involving rhetoric.

The Techne and the Culture

It is important to keep in mind at this stage of my argument that these new texts are being read (like any other text) as part of a wider social dialogue between conflicting cultures. These ‘dialogic’ aspects of the materiality of computer-mediated texts, for example, can be seen in dialogic interactions between different readers, individual texts, programming software, the programming protocols that support the software and the ‘network’, as well as the wider value-systems which context them all these elements. To give just one example of this, Macromedia Flash, a program used by one of the authors discussed below, has been shaped by many technological and social influences, which in themselves have helped to shape these individual Flash works. The addition of new functionality can inspire a programmer to do different things. For example, Flash Programmer Keith Peters wrote recently:

"Then came Flash MX and the new drawing API. The ability to create an empty movie clip on the fly. moveTo, LineTo, beginFIll, beginGradientFill! When I saw these commands, I was in heaven!" (Peters 2002: 2)

However, any description of software development should also include the wider ‘capitalist’ notion of property, represented in this case by Macromedia’s continuing desire to make a profit from their intellectual property in a changing market. In their brief history of Flash, Watrall and Herber point out that it was only with Flash 2 in the late 1990s that “the transformation of flash from a straight linear-vector animation program to an interactive media-design program” began (Watrall and Herber 2002). This change was driven by the enormous rise in demand for web-based technologies, and this stimulated the deployment of the functionality such as links now being used in flash texts. In turn, the successes of these changes were also a factor responsible for Flash being widely-deployed across the Internet.

Of course, by being widely-deployed across the Internet, flash programming and programmers have also played a role in re-contextualising individual Flash pieces as well, because familiarity with Flash interfaces and games have re-accentuated some readers’ understandings and expectations of computer-mediated textuality. Context, in this example, is a highly recursive and time-dependent event.
In a wider example of the cultural construction of computer-mediated textuality, Herrington, flags up the importance of the US legal professions’ construction of the concept of ‘intellectual property’ for defining the use of the Internet, noting that their traditional ‘Romantic’ notions of the author as sole proprietor of a text is re-defining the medium (Herrington 2001). This Romantic tradition stands in stark contrast to the ‘cybercultural’ values described by many commentators of Internet culture (e.g. Lanham (1993), Landow (1997) Gaggi (1997). These writers argue for a more communal concept of textuality. For example, Silvio Gaggi notes that computerised hypertext for example:

"like conversation - encourages a value system that emphasizes the solving of problems and the growth of learning by and for the good of the community as a whole, rather than one that insists that individuals always be recognized and rewarded for their exact part that they have played in that communal endeavour" ( Gaggi 1997: 106)

The Chronotopic Nature of Computer-mediated textuality-1: Place

Another important example of the textual condition noted by McGann is textual location. He states that it makes a difference “if the poem we read is printed in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, or the New Republic (McGann 1988: 80). Following the arguments made by Hayles above, it clearly makes a difference if a poem is produced, presented and read in a book or on a computer, but equally importantly it also makes a difference whether it is produced, presented and read using a stand-alone hypertext program or an animation program on the World Wide Web. This means that computer-mediated texts are not subject to a single ‘overriding’ mediating condition. For, despite sharing some of the material conditions described above in common they are also being stratified by a number of quite different social and material forces into different genres. These differences and their resulting stratification explain why this essay argues for the plural term E-rhetorics. These different conditions give rise to different genre which will be explored later in this essay.

The Chronotopic Nature of Computer-mediated textuality-2: Time

It also makes a difference as to when we read a ‘work’ on the Internet. The re-accentuating effects of regular use of the Internet and Internet-based technologies mean that to some readers some relatively recent works from the mid-1990s now appears to be ‘old-fashioned’. As the poet Peter Howard notes:

Anyone who uses computers as part of their art has to allow for or accept that what is ground-breaking today may be buried tomorrow. (Howard 2002)

This prospect is widely recognized by many artists as one of the greatest challenges facing the author-participant of a computer-mediated text. They have developed a number of rhetorical strategies to deal with the vicissitudes of technological redundancy. For example, both ‘precedence’ (being recognised as the first to do something) and ‘metatextuality’ (explicitly working with/from theory to demonstrate a point about textuality) are being widely used within texts as rhetorical tools by author-participants, to overcome the problems arising out of the rapid changes in reader-participant’s experience of computer-mediated textuality.

Interestingly, Bakhtin developed the concept of the ‘chronotope’ to describe this contextualising effect of space and time (Bakhtin 1981:84—258) on textual meaning. In ‘Response to a Question from Novy Mir’ Bakhtin claims that:

“The author is a captive of his epoch, of his own present. Subsequent times liberate him from this captivity, and literary scholarship is called upon to assist in this liberation” (Bakhtin 1986:5)

It is one of the striking features of computer-mediated textuality that it has been highly theorized almost since its inception. Scholars have also been keen to archive older, ground-breaking pieces as exemplars of this textuality in order to provide a scholarly context to new works. However, as we have witnessed recently in the Iraq, liberation is not always a universally desired state of affairs. The liberation of the text by scholars developing arguments based on their theoretical understanding of the text might possibly involve the realising of meanings in the text that result in the loss of the author-participants’ contribution. Critics, including myself, should be understood to be yet another rhetorical challenge to be faced by the budding author-participant.

Theoretical Thresholds

Clearly, there is not one ‘textual condition’ that describes the materiality of computer-mediated textuality. There are myriads of dialogic events occurring, and one of the challenges to any critic of computer-mediated textuality is to find a meaningful way of describing this rich diversity. Theory ( as I mentioned above), in this theatre is often therefore quite legitimately used as a focussing tool that highlights up some noted aspect of textuality while leaving others in the dark. However, having noted this it is also important to keep in mind that this ‘focussing’ and ‘highlighting’ is also part of the dialogic events being described. For as Voloshinov notes:

Every ideological sign is not only a reflection, a shadow, of reality, but it also itself a material segment of that very reality." (Voloshinov 1973:11)

This relationship between theory and text becomes particularly interesting when theoretical works are made available on the Internet. In these cases, author-participants and theorists are describing and then providing links to creative works from their theoretical writing, fulfilling what Genette has describe as a threshold function ( Genette 1997). Genette argues that the textual route by which one comes to a text matters, whether it be, via a recommendation from your academic tutor, via a glowing recommendation in a book such as Bolter’s Writing Space, or via a poorly- framed google search contexts that text’s reception.

Para/texts

In his book Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation Genette catalogues a number of ways in which book-mediated texts are encased in paratexts, for example, by the critical comments on their back covers or by a publishers insert. He notes that:

“A literary work consists entirely or essentially, of a text, defined (very minimally) as a more or less long sequence of verbal statements that are more or less endowed with significance. But this text is rarely presented in an unadorned style, un-reinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author's name, a title, a preface, illustrations - these are all paratextual” (Genette 1997:1)

There are a number of new and relatively unfamiliar ‘para/textual’ elements at work in computer-mediated texts. In some cases, these elements are relatively easy to identify as paratexual for they are relatively separate from the text. For example, in addition to defining the linking ‘threshold’ described above, the Uniform Resource Locator of a website (used to make the link) is also a key paratexual element, because it provides the participant-reader with an indication of the nature and status of the website’s authorship. Differing values of textual worth will be inevitably be attributed (by differing participant-readers) to a site that contains the domain ucl.ac.uk compared with one with a domain containing luton.ac.uk, for example.

However, one of the more interesting features of recent examples of computer-mediated textuality has been the blurring of textual and paratextual elements within computer-mediated texts, which came about with the breaking down of the notion of the ‘primary’ alphabetic text and the ‘secondary’ graphical illustration of that text. For example, the images embedded in the animated header at the top of a screen that proclaims the author-participants authorship contribute as much to our understanding of this text as the alphabetic text displayed with it.

Any study of computer-mediated textuality, therefore, involves the looking at the author-participant’s use of links, code, images, animation, movie clips, sound as well as the alphabetic text. This will be the critical method followed in this essay.

Writing Space or The ‘Speech Genre’ of Computer-Mediated Textuality?

In wishing emphasize the stratifying effects of materiality in our discussions of computer-mediated textuality it is tempting to appropriate Bakhtin’s term and to talk about the ‘speech genre’ of computer-mediated textuality. However, this would involve characterising multimedia works (including ones involving only images) as speech. This kind of attribution would obscure the very materiality that the term is trying to draw attention to. Therefore, we need a term that recognizes a much wider notion of social semiosis. However, our new critical term needs to retain within it the notion that it is describing a temporal activity, involving human participants so as not to fall into the trap of suggesting a totalising or abstract ‘structuralist’ notion of meaning. Bolter has suggested the term ‘writing space’ to describe these kinds of material phenomena described above. He notes that:

"Each writing space is a material and visual field, whose properties are determined by a writing technology and the uses to which that technology is put by a culture of readers and writers. A writing space is generated by the interaction of material properties and cultural choices and practices. Moreoever, each space depends for its meaning on previous spaces or on contemporary spaces against which it competes. Each fosters a particular understanding both of the act of writing and of the product, and this expresses itself in writing styles, genres, and literary theories. The writing space is also a space for reading….communities of readers help to define the properties of the writing space by the demands they place on the text and the technology" (Bolter 2001:12)

Although Bolter ably describes much of what I have set out above I think that the use of the word ‘space’ here suggests a rather too abstracted notion of the phenomena. It also seems to suggest that we are dealing with something that is discrete. For our new term needs to recognize the fact that any categorisation is highly dialogized, contingent and fluid, and that when seen over time that we are dealing with a phenomena that “presents the picture of a ceaseless flow of becoming” (Voloshinov 1973:66). I propose, therefore, to characterise the computer-mediated texts below by a new term ‘dialogic genre’ that recognizes the importance of both Bakhtinian dialogism and materiality.

Work Considered

This essay will look in detail at two examples of computer-mediated textuality. These pieces - Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (Jackson 1995), and The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam by Martyn Bedford and Andy Campbell (Bedford and Campbell 2000) have been selected because they demonstrate the importance of rhetoric, theory and materiality in the emergence and development of new dialogic genres of computer-mediated textuality. Following Voloshinov and Bakhtin, however, I do not want to argue for the fixed separation of these pieces in to a hard and fast system of classification. In arguing that these pieces are different I am conceding that they can also be argued to be quite similar. A dialogic understanding of computer-mediated textuality recognizes that these dialogic genre might well flow together in years together, or fly apart or all be extinguished all together as a social irrelevance. It also has to recognize that this paper and many others will have some role to play in these processes.

Patchwork Girl was produced using Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace hypertext software, and is sold as a CD-ROM. The Virtual Disapperance of Miriam was produced using Macromedia Flash for a literary festival, and is also available via the Internet (Note: - although Macromedia flash is not part of the World Wide Web specifications, it can be viewed using a Flashplayer – a download-able ‘plug-in program for web browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6). These works, therefore, represent a diverse variety of textual events. These examples have also been selected because they have been discussed by a number of authors (e.g. - Landow (1997), Bolter (2001), Campbell (2002)) who use these works as exemplars of their theoretical interests. They, therefore, provide an additional opportunity to critique these critical accounts and note how theory functions as thresholds to these pieces.

Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl

Along with Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (Joyce 1987) and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (Moulthrop 1991), Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson has been heralded by a number of critics as an important example of computer-mediated textuality. George P. Landow describes it as a “parable of writing and identity” (Landow 1997: 198).

Shelley’s intriguing, meta-textual work deals with many acts of construction: the fabrication of both subject and object. It also deals with the act of representing and with the identity (in particular the identity of the feminine subject). It is a text, therefore, that deals with a number of issues of contemporary interest.

The opening lexia of this work presents a black and white image of a naked female with stitching marks all over her body (Jackson 1995: [her]).

This key image is important because it introduces the reader to the theme of ‘stitching’ and of ‘being stitched’, a metaphorical element that runs throughout the whole text. For example, as one of the [graveyard] lexia notes:

You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. If you want to see the whole, you will have to sew me together yourself. (Jackson 1995: [graveyard])

I believe that this small piece of text very eloquently demonstrates the dialogic theory of understanding I outlined at great length above. The reader-participant is being addressed by the utterance of the author-participant as the text both demonstrates and comments on the fact that in order to have an understanding of the Jackson’s text, the reader-participant will have to perform a critical act of judgment and skill (‘stitching’ a reading together in a series of acts of ‘responsive understanding’).

However, what exactly is being stitched together?

It is one of the hallmarks of the subtly of Jackson’s rhetoric that the reader-participant is able to participate in a number of readings of this lexia. My understanding of this text was not formed by one reading. In fact it is still becoming as I write. For example, the first-person ‘I’ of this lexia might be the female Frankenstein monster character in the text, and/or the constructed feminine subject and/or the text (speaking meta-textually about its own condition). The richness of this rhetoric lies in the fact that the ambiguity of the subject allows the reader-participants understanding to develop through associative leaps between these concepts, as well as by linear progressions of the later lexia in this section.

In discussing this piece it is worth noting that it shares many kinds of rhetoric with non-computer-mediated texts. Ambiguity, as just one example, has been used to great effect by a number of poets; as discussed by William Empson among others (see Empson 1977). However, the peculiar nature of computer-mediated textuality gives rise to some new examples of rhetoric, not often encountered in book-mediated texts.

Shelley’s text is meta-textual in that it draws attention to the fact that it ‘stitches’ together a number of literary texts, in particular Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum which feature ‘stitched-together’ protagonists. It also explicitly quilts a number philosophical works (see Jackson 1995:[sources] for the particular references) which the text describes as a sources for ‘patched words’(Jackson 1995:[this writing]). In a key sequence, that begins with the lexia [scrap bag], Jackson makes-up her text solely by cutting and pasting sections from her source texts. Jackson draws attention to this stitching by picking out the different sources of her text in different typography (in bold, underlined, italics etc.). She then provides a key for using these typographies in the bibliography she provides at the end of the lexia. When the reader-participant selects the ‘next’, default lexia, she then demonstrates the dangers of radical de-contextualisation for computer-mediated textuality. Another [scrap bag] lexia is displayed, but this one hides its seams. The words of this text have become lost to their philosophers. It is worth noting that these sections of ‘stitched’ text have been described as collage. However, Bakhtin warns us against this kind of description because as he notes in his essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’ "the speech of another, once enclosed in a text, is - no matter how accurately transmitted - always subject to certain semantic changes" (Bakhtin 1981:340). Something new has been formed by this act.

This sequence of texts also demonstrates two other key aspects of this piece’s rhetoric; namely, the use of graphical elements to create meaning, and the use of the reader-participant’s actions to create meaning. In these lexia Shelley uses the dash key to create a graphical ‘stitching-effect’ at the bottom of each lexia (“— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —” (Jackson 1995:[scrap bag])). This is a visual technique that this work shares with, for example, Apollinaire’s calligrammes (see Bolter 2001:153) or the concrete poetry tradition described by Rothenberg and Joris (see Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 302). However, this line of dashes is more than just a graphical illustration of a concept, because it also provides an opportunity for the reader-participants to take action, for on this lexia there are two links. The default link, selected by pressing the return key or the body of the text, brings up the next ‘seamed’ lexia. This is a routine action taken by the reader-participant of this text that is equivalent to the relatively passive act of turning the page of a book .

However, in contrast by finding and selecting the other ‘stitching’ link the reader-participant is being more active in this process. In clicking this link the reader is then presented with the ‘seamless’ lexia discussed above. This link, with its visual and verbal associations, draws the attention of the reader-participant to their part in the act of responsive understanding that is occurring here. My reading of Jackson’s text is that it is arguing for, demonstrating and also critically involving its reader-participant in its themes, namely that texts, objects and subjects all become ‘whole’ because we, the participants, make them so. This is act of involvement (and of demonstrating involvement) is key to understanding the consciousness-expanding aspects of computer-mediated texts.

So far, in my discussion of Patchwork Girl I have noted a number of rhetorical aspects of this text that it shares in common with many non-computer-mediated texts. I have done this for two reasons. Firstly, to drawn attention to the fact that the newly-formed dialogic genre of ‘Eastgate-systems/CD-ROM hypertext fiction’ has drawn many influences from the cultural practices of contemporary literature. But secondly, to also suggest that the processes of social stratification, that are producing this genre, started to have effect relatively recently. In some respects this genre of textuality is still quite bookish and this probably a good thing, because it gives the reader-participant a cultural point of reference for approaching these works. However, it is also of great interest for my argument to try and identify the social stratifying effects that have separated this genre away from books. Following my outline of dialogic genre above, this stratification has occurred in part due to the materiality that defines the textual condition of these texts. In this case, through the threshold-ing role of theoretical writing and the technological material deployed to mediate these texts.

Theory as Focus – Hypertext

George P. Landow in praising Patchwork Girl notes that it “generates both its themes and techniques from the kind of collage writing intrinsic to hypertext” (Landow 1997: 198). Clearly, in order to understand Landow’s assessment of this piece it is necessary first to understand the theoretical importance that he attaches to the term ‘hypertext’.

In a recent essay Landow describes hypertext as “text composed as lexias ( blocks of words, moving or static images, or sounds) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains or trails in an open-ended web” ( Landow 2000: 154). Hypertext was a term coined originally by the computer scientist Ted Nelson in the 1960s to give an account of the special features of his lifework, Project Xanadu (Nelson 1993). It is a term whose intellectual roots reach back to Vannevar Bush’s ideas for a mechanical system in the 1940s (Bush 2001). Arguably the most familiar system that has been characterised as a ‘hypertext’ is the World Wide Web.

Landow points out that as a result of the inclusion of these links between the lexia, the small sub-sections of the text can be read in a number of different orders. On the title page of Patchwork Girl, for example, we, the readers, are presented with six different links – ‘a graveyard’; ‘a journal’; ‘a quilt’; ‘a story’; ‘broken accents’ and ‘sources’ – to six different lexia each of which will provide a different starting point for our reading (Jackson 1995:[title page]) . Landow characterises this type of reading as being “multisequential” or “multilinear” (Landow 2000: 154). Landow has argued that the multisequentiality of hypertext is of great importance because it ‘permits readers to choose their own paths through a set of possibilities’ and by doing this it ‘dissolves the fundamental fixity’ that is the cornerstone of the traditional rhetorical triangle (Landow 1994:33). Landow turns instead to more recent theoretical approaches described in the works of Roland Barthes (as well as Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida and others). Reviewing his main argument Adrian Page notes that:

"The fundamental claim that he [Landow] makes is that Barthes' statement that the 'death of the author' would make the birth of the author possible, is vividly illustrated by the example of hypertext." (Page 1998:86)

The Barthesian ideal of textuality is an open, plural text characterised by multiple paths in which the reader is liberated from the control of the ‘Author-God’. In his book Hypertext 2.0 Landow sets out a range of exciting possibilities that this notion of hypertext presents for reconfiguring the text, the author, writing, narrative and literary education. It is significant for this argument, therefore, that Barthes evokes a notion of a text that has becomes a:

“galaxy of signfiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable…; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language” (Barthes in Landow 1997:3)

However in following Barthes, hypertext theory should logically, therefore, focus solely on the reader to create meaning in the text. Reconfiguring the author and writing should simply mean eliminating these figures from our discussions altogether and in doing so also eliminating any concept of rhetoric or techne. For as Barthes notes (in his famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’):

“there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto, the author. “(Barthes 1995: 129)

It is significant for this argument that a number of contemporary theorists have convincingly argued against the kind of textuality described in ‘Death of the Author’. Séan Burke points out that Barthes is actually inventing a construct, the Author-God, and that the “the author in ‘The Death of the Author' only seems ready for death precisely because he never existed in the first place” (Burke 1992:27). By following Barthes too closely in this respect, ‘The Death of the Author’ presents hypertext theory with a number of apparent paradoxes. In particular, hypertext theory provides a description of a text characterised by readerly freedom, and yet a number of critics have described these texts as being like labyrinths or mazes in which the reader is far from free (see Gaggi 1997:122, Aarseth 1997:91). As ‘hypertext fiction’ author J. Yellowlees Douglas comments:

“hypertext is an odd creature, one that simultaneously promises more autonomy to its readers while offering authors a degree of control unthinkable with more conventional materials - seemingly as two-faced as any politician's promises. (Douglas 2000:125)

‘Barthesian’ theories can not really account for the participation demonstrated by the author-participant. This is one of the chief reason I have used the awkward neologism ‘computer-mediated texts’ to describe the texts under discussion here, as I believe it is not helpful to over-define these text with the ‘hypertext’ banner. However, it is important to note that there are hypertextual elements within Jackson’s text, and that their skilful deployment highlights some of the many elegant possible solutions to the challenges note earlier to the author-participant’s rhetoric. In this respect, the notion of hypertextuality does help us to understand why the author of a computer-mediated text needs to exercise a particular kind control, in particular to define paths through sections of their texts.

The Hypertext Ideal

In his review of Hypertext 2.0, Page describes what he calls the hypertext ideal, that is, the Borgesian notion of a “reading experience in which all boundaries evaporate and infinite connections open up” (Page 1998:88). In this idealised state, the text is thought of as “an absolutely unstructured form which can be processed in innumberable ways” (Page 1998:88). Page does not argue that such an ideal can be or should be fully realised, far from it, he notes instead that this “would appear to dissolve all meaning rather than validating the reader's experience” (Page 1998:88). However, in dealing with the dangers presented by this hypertextual ideal, author-participants are charged with structuring their work in a way in which this ideal is explored and gestured to without being fully realised. In Patchwork Girl, for example, although it is possible to follow at least six different paths from the [title] lexia but it does not mean that the text has no limits or that it is unstructured. The Storyspace program does not present the lexia like a pack of cards that can be shuffled into any order. Instead it presents a carefully-crafted map which depicts radial nexus leading to a number of long-looping paths.

In my reading, the text was multi-sequential but not sequence-free. In fact, the author seemed to be deploying a series of rhetorical strategies that defeat the ‘hypertext ideal’ so that I, the reader-participant, could come to a series of understandings.

E-Rhetorics: The Words on the Screen?

One of the ways that Shelley Jackson has dealt with the challenge of the hypertext ideal is in the careful use of language. For example, each of the six links described above led to a lexia that began with a sentence in the first-person. This simple rhetoric strategy orientates the reader-participant by establishing an ‘I’, a narratorial speaking-subject, which provides a point of orientation for the particular path it then describes. These six paths were not strictly linear; there were chances to follow digressions, to ignore links and to change paths on occasions, but there were also large sections which were quite linear with lexia one following another in a specified order. Therefore, although Patchwork Girl is multi-linear it is not a garden of endlessly forking paths (described by Borges in his famous short story (see Borges 2000:44). However, once I realised that the text did contained a number of forks (some of which were hidden) also I felt a duty (as a conscientious reader-participant) to find all these links in the text. These forking-path lexia seemed to serve be remind me, the reader-participant, that reading this text was a joint responsibility. In this they perform a similar rhetorical function to the Ancient Greek orator who addresses his audience directly to ask them what they think. I was being involved and consulted in my reading.

At the semantic level, each of the lexia within a path defines an utterance. These utterances are written in a paratactic style without connective words between them that would enforce a more strict causality between elements. The relationships between the paths were also carefully handled. These are related by theme, metaphor, association and allusion, rather than by linear narrative or by hypotactic hierarchy. Time and place are also very carefully localised in Patchwork Girl. There is a specified temporal progression within the paths, but this ‘locating’ function is not carried over outside of a particular path. In other words, the lexia relate to one another but not by temporal or syntactic ordering. For example, some elements stand outside narrative time. In this respect the philosophical elements of Patchwork Girl brought to mind the ‘cetology’ chapters of Moby Dick (Melville 1985: 227). In Melville’s classic these chapters do not ‘fit’ into the immediate narratological frame provided by the hunt for the whale. However, they do inform our reading. Similarly in Patchwork Girl, the philosophical texts provide insight into the text and actions of other sections of Patchwork Girl. In my first reading of this text I read these sections in a linear narrative fashion, in my second reading of this text I read these sections in as ‘footnotes’. The beauty of the rhetoric of this computer-mediated text is its lexias can be read many times to produce many different meanings.

The End justifies the Means

It is important to note that Patchwork Girl does not have a lexia that can be identified as the ‘ending’ lexia. This is important for its rhetorical structure because it means that, for example, it can not have an obvious dénouement or a final authorial statement. It is also important because the Storyspace system lacks the white page and back cover of a post-modernist novel like Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch that give a material signal to the reader that she has read to the end of the text (see Cortazar 1966). So instead, this text must suggest to the reader-participant that they might have read enough to say they have come to a responsive understanding of the work. It does this by piling up allusions and by looping back to the title page. This title page, therefore, also serves as a resting point, a point of reflection, and a point of decision. It asks the reader-participant a rhetorical question – Have you read the text?

However, it is important to note that the links on the title page emphasizes that this particular ‘understanding’ is not closed, unique or definitive. Even after reading all the links, the reader-participant can always read more, simply by setting out on one of the paths again. The text stays open, mainly because as J. Yellowlees Douglas notes our point of ending is “simply one "ending" among many possible.” (Douglas 2000:122)

E-Rhetoric – Materiality?

While introducing the concept of materiality Katherine Hayles notes that “the physical form of the literary artefact always affect what the words (and other semiotic components) mean” (Hayles 2002: 25). It is worthwhile, therefore to move beyond a purely ‘New Criticism’ approach to textuality, which only considers the words on the screen for criticism, and to look also at some of the other material aspects of Patchwork Girl as well.

This text is sold by Eastgate Systems as a CD-ROM that comes in a small plastic box with the author’s name on the side, much like an audio CD. Once installed on my PC it ran as a stand-alone program, launched from the start menu link labelled ‘Patchwork Girl’. On opening, the program presented three windows, a program window, a map window and a text window. The program window is titled ‘Patchwork Girl’ and is constantly kept open during a reading. The packaging and program, therefore, effectively proclaims the authorship of this text, and the fact that it is a text!

It is also worth noting that as a stand-alone program, Patchwork Girl’s lexia only makes links to other lexia provided on the CD. The text is not available for viewing over the World Wide Web, for example, and it is not linked to from other sites. This textual condition is somewhat different, therefore, from the textual condition of a web page of a large, multi-page website. By being presented in this material form Patchwork Girl resists some of the challenges of radical recontextualisation mentioned above. Its materiality creates meaning, by re-enforcing a traditional notion of the integrity of the text, of its intellectual property and authorship. All of this serves to re-enforce the rhetoric of the author-participant, by giving it identity and authority.

Multimedia

On re-reading Patchwork Girl again in 2003, I noticed a number of other non-semantic aspects of this text now worthy of comment (which did not strike me at all when I first came across this text a few years ago). It is entirely black and white. It is predominantly made up of alphabetic characters and these characters are rendered in a uniform font and type face. This text does not contain any sound, video or animation elements and the alphabetic text of a particular lexia will continue to be displayed in full on the screen until the reader-participant clicks a link.

Many of these ‘new’ features of this text are a direct result of the functionality of the version of Storyspace that Jackson used to write her work. Earlier versions of Storyspace simply did not support the kinds variations in graphical display now used on the World Wide Web. However, these ‘features’ are also the result of the change of my reading context. For Jackson’s text is also being additionally stratified by my recently-acquired expectations of textuality.

This is important firstly because, as I quoted earlier "authors will employ any feature or capacity that can be varied and controlled to convey meaning” (Landow 2000:160). But it is also important because, reader-participants exposed to ‘new’ kinds of rhetoric are aware of an ‘absence’ in texts that do not deploy these effects.

The second work discussed in this essay looks at the effect of some of these multimedia elements and expectations on contemporary computer-mediated textuality.

The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam: An Interactive Story in Four Parts

From the very first click of The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam, the reader-participant is aware that they are experiencing a very different dialogic genre from ‘‘Eastgate-systems/CD-ROM hypertext fiction’ described above. The text begins with a series of film-like titles and credits that appear and then fade. The program then automatically loads the first screen. This ‘please-select’ screen presents a richly-layered, coloured animation that continues to loop until a link is selected. The lowest layer of this animation is an enigmatic dark-green murk in which it is hard to pick out much more than idea of lines and texture. Overlaying this is a ‘searchlight’ animation and two rotating wire-frame images of a human head. There is also a loop of electronic music. The alphabetic text is in two different sizes of fonts and is positioned over a ‘jiggling’ animated box. The text announces four links – ‘1. Missing you already’, ‘2. House of Sam’, ‘3. Playing the Male Lead’ and ‘4. Miriam’.

Clearly the alphabetic text is only forming a small part of the overall semiosis of this screen. It is the combination of sound, alphabetic text and image that collectively establishes a sense of incipient mystery, and of a dilatory sense of action which are features of this text.

The graphical nature of this presentation also draws attention to the graphical nature of alphabetic text in this piece. In my discussion above I noted that the ‘Eastgate-systems/CD-ROM hypertext fiction’ was quite bookish. In contrast this ‘Macromedia Flash/Internet/animation’ genre has been deeply influenced by visual art, television, film and animation. In this screen, the alphabetic text has been re-mediated (to use the term coined by Bolter and Grusin (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 45)) and it is being re-represented in quite a different way in this screen. It has ceased to be a permanent mark on a paper (or a screen) instead it is just one animated, graphical element amongst many.

Spatial and Temporal Structuring

The graphical design focus of this work means that it is very carefully spatially structured. This is not actually a new textual feature, for as Mc Gann reminds us: “to read Blake's illuminated poems, or read any newspaper, is to be reminded of the crucial importance which spatial relations play in the structure of texts.”(McGann 1991:113). In the cases, noted by McGann, the spatial relations structured in the text provide the text with meanings. For example, the arrangement of and the size of text in a newspaper reflects, among other things, the editorial evaluations of newsworthy-ness of the particular stories presented. The ‘top story’ of the day is often, literally, headlined at the top of the first page of the newspaper.

In The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam the spatial structure of the text is often used to great comic effect. For example, in the section that describes the effect of being passed in the corridor by the removal men, the alphabetic text is arranged in lines one character long, to reflect the narrator’s feelings as he tries to squeeze himself against the wall. The narrator then describes the removal men, as coming “like racing cars off a start grid” and the text is moves upwards in the shape of a grid of racing cars.

The graphics in this piece are used for more than just illustration, however. For the spatial structuring of this piece also suggests certain readings for key sections of the text. For example, at the beginning of the section ‘missing you already’ the alphabetic parts of the text are presented ‘laying’ on one side of a graphical image of a bed. The text actually runs out of the field of view so that it is only partially visible (though the bed can be moved by the mouse actions of the reader-participant) and suggests that we will not get the ‘full story’ from our narrator without some effort. This particular spatial arrangement emphasizes two of the major themes of this piece. Firstly, the absence of Miriam represented by the empty half of the bed and secondly, that this is a story that is being hauled into view by the participatory actions of its reader-participant’s responsive understanding. In this respect, the rhetoric of this movable bed functions in much the same way as clicking on the ‘stitching’ in Patchwork Girl in that its rhetoric both illustrates and demonstrates these points.

Significantly, animation programs like Macromedia Flash also allow for the temporal structuring of a text, as well. For example, in Daniel Rees’s recent flash work Natural Wonder (Rees 2003), the arrival of the cartoon space craft in the textual field is a delightful comic surprise, that would be very hard to replicate in a traditional print format. In another example, Peter Howard makes use of time to create an ironic effect in his flash work The Rainbow Factory ( Howard 2000).

This short piece begins with a title that displays the ‘traditional’, storybook image of the rainbow (bright, primary colours etc.). This image is then replaced with the image of a set of black factory gates (and a sound effect of heavy-metallic gates opening) in a sort of temporal juxtaposition. The text then displayed reads “Making Rainbow’s is a Business” but then after about one second an extra piece of text is then inserted into the above to make it read “Making Rainbow’s is a Dirty Business”. This piece of temporal structuring creates an effect like a qualifying aside. It dramatizes the meaning of its text.

In ‘The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam’ animated temporal structuring is used to great effect. In the ‘missing you already’ section, for example, the narrator’s character is filled out by a rapidly scrolling list of his attributes. The list scrolled at such a speed on my machine that it was not possible to read it all (even after a few attempts). I found myself grabbing at his personal details as they flowed by. To read this section of the text required the rapid eye movements of an experienced computer video game player. This experience is significant for my reading of this text because in this section the reader-participant briefly experiences the state that the author-participant is describing. We are engaged by the conditions that have formed the narrator’s mindset.

Hypertext?

In discussing the dialogic genre of Patchwork Girl, I argued that its rhetorical structure was devised in part in response to the expectations raised by the ‘hypertext ideal’. The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam, by contrast is not particularly hypertextual, in that it does not use its links to create a series of multi-sequential paths for the reader-participant to follow. Instead, it bluntly deals with the fact that it has potentially different paths, by recognizing that a certain key points you may or may not know something that is important at this point in the story. For example, in the piece of alphabetic text that begins ‘Miriam knows nothing…’ we read that:

“Miriam knows nothing of the suicide attempts. (Nor do you, if you skipped the CLICK-for narrator-info option)” (Bedford and Campbell 2000)

As I noted earlier, the links at the beginning of this text are numbered and are designed to be read in the numbered order, so that they lead to the ending, with ‘Miriam’ sequence. The rhetoric of author-participants of The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam, however, has instead to contend with the expectations placed on this text by what I will describe as the ‘interactive ideal’.

The Interactive Ideal

The sub-title of The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam describes this piece as an ‘interactive short story’. In doing so, it points to one of the most ubiquitous terms used in current discussions about computers, namely interactivity. It also points to the opportunities and rhetorical challenges that this notion of interactivity presents to author-participants of computer-mediated texts. In doing so it raises questions about what exactly interactivity means in this case.

Despite its common currency, interactivity has proved to be a surprisingly difficult concept to define. J. Yellowlees Douglas quotes MIT’s Andy Lippman, who broadly defines interactivity as:

"mutual and simultaneous activity on the part of two participants, usually working toward some goal, but not necessarily” (Douglas 2000:42)

The concept of ‘simultaneous activity’ in Lippman’s definition, therefore, suggests that interactivity is about presence (that the two participants are in some way aware of each other, and that things will happen between them), that they are participants in a Bakhtinian-style dialogue where by both parties are demonstrating their presence to the other party through an on-going act of mutual responsive understanding. It also suggests that there is continuing activity and that this activity will vary, and will continue to vary in real-time, in a non-mechanistic way as a result of the continuing actions or inactions of the participants involved.

Interaction: An Example

In the case of human-computer interaction, the participants in this activity have been variously defined as the user (the reader-participant) and/or, the computer, the computer-program, or the computer program’s programmer-participants working through the computer/programme combination. In the case of The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam I would argue that we are dealing with the latter example which is typical of a number of programs currently deployed through the World Wide Web. For example, when you buy a product from an on-line retailer such as amazion.com (see Amazon 2003), the computer processes the details you have filled in on the on-line form provided. However, as well as organising the immediate despatch of your purchase, it also analyses your purchases against a historic database of yours, and everyone else’s, previous purchases. Using a program (such as the Alexa software - see Johnson 2001:121) the computer will respond to your purchase by providing you with an updated, personalised ‘Your Favourites’ list of products you might like to buy. It is worth noting here that the program does not ask you what you like (it is not search program); instead it tries to calculate what you might like based on the purchasing habits of its client base. In this kind of interactivity the computer will carry out many actions at once, which are not localised to a particular routine; these actions are structured, but they not mechanistic; they are responsive, reasonably immediate, complex and the outcome is largely unpredictable by either the programmer or the user. It is these kinds of features that define the current interactive ideal.

Activity: Buttons and Loops

There a number of features of The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam that gesture toward interactivity. For example, in the ‘Miriam’ sequence the reader-participant is presented with a small section of alphabetic text that reads “I press the intercom”. The word ‘intercom’ is picked out as a link. On selecting this link an audio file is played which let us hear the narrator talking to Miriam through the intercom. However, the rhetoric of this piece carefully scripts the kinds of interaction that occur between the reader-participant and the computer program here. In doing so, it does not allow the reader-participant to ask a question that the programmer-participant has not predicted. For example, in this piece the audio file did not vary, regardless of which links I had (or had not selected) when reading the text. In The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam, this scripting normally takes the form of a button, or a single specified action, for example, the bed in the ‘missing you already’ section has instructions that state “Click and Drag to move the Bed”. Apart from links this was the only action I could detect on this screen. Compared to the e-commerce example above, The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam is not particularly interactive in that this program is rather mechanistic; the activity produced is largely localised and the outcome of selecting a particular link is largely predictable. However, despite these observations this text gave me a real sense of interactivity and of its on-going presence. Like exploration of the ‘hypertext ideal’ discussed in Patchwork Girl above, The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam gives the reader-participant a sense of the ‘interactive ideal’ without enacting it.

Lev Manovitch has noted that the loop is an important form in computer-mediated textuality (Manovitch 2001: xxxiii) and this comment is borne out by the design of The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam. A number of features of the text use loops to create this sense of on-going activity. For example, the soundtrack of the ‘Miriam’ section continues because it is a loop. Similarly the animation layer that is visible behind the alphabetic text is made up of a series of looped, layered elements – the green ‘interference’ lines, the rotating wire frame heads and the searchlight effects- all of which suggest on-going activity. One of the many technical successes of this piece is the synchronisation of the visual and audio loops, so that for example, a white noise sound effect is heard at the same time as the green ‘inference’ loop is seen on the screen. The author-participants of this piece have also temporally structured these audio loops using the interactivity provided by the links. In the ‘House of Sam’ section the soundtrack loops becomes progressively more disturbing as sound elements are added with each progressive mouse click. The overall effect is extremely unnerving by the end of this section.

E-Rhetorics – Materiality

As I mentioned earlier The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam was created using Macromedia Flash and is available over the Internet from the Ilkley Literature Festival website. The functionality of the flash programming environment encourages the spatial and temporal structuring discussed earlier. It also allows for the precise control for the looping elements that are so important for the effectiveness of this piece. However, the materiality of the Flash programming environment also gives this piece similar properties to Storyspace CD discussed earlier. For example, the title of the piece is constantly displayed in the browser title bar, which argues for this text’s integrity. It is also quite hard to copy textual quotes from this piece (as I have found out while drafting this essay). For although it is available through the World Wide Web, this text it is not directly part of the web itself and many of the browser functions (such as ‘cut’ and ‘paste’) do not work with this file format. In this way the materiality of this textual condition also helps resist the kinds of radical recontextualisation discussed earlier.

The Moral Aspects of Dialogic Genre

Returning to Bakhtin, it is interesting to note his reasons for focusing on discourse in the novel in developing his philosophy of language. Bakhtin certainly was not motivated by a desire to create a formal description of its poetics or its history. As I mentioned earlier he was opposed to formalist and structuralist notions of language and literature. Instead he was drawn to the language of the novel for wider cultural and ethical reasons. He believed that he could identify a certain quality in a number of key literary works, a quality he called novel-ness, essential to the development of a desirable form of human consciousness.

This novel-ness, he argued, was brought about by the artistic structuring of ‘heteroglossia’. Michael Holquist defines heteroglossia as “a way of conceiving the world as made up of a roiling mass of languages.”(Holquist 1990:69). In this case, it is a way of conceiving of the language in a particular literary work as a ‘roiling mass’ of different socially-charged speech genre. For, as Bakhtin notes the:

“The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the intentions of others from the heteroglot language in his works, he does not violate those socio-ideological cultural languages - rather, he welcomes them into his work. The prose writer makes use of words that are already populated with the social intentions of others and compels them to serve his own new intentions, to serve a second master. Therefore the intentions of the prose writer are refracted, and refracted at different angles, depending on the degree to which the refracted, heteroglot languages he deals with are socio-ideologically alien, already embodied and already objectivized"(Bakhtin 1981:299).

The main effect of ‘heteroglossia’ in the novel is to ‘dialogise’ the meaning of any utterance. As a result, the words and authority of the characters and the narrator are challenged; no one is allowed to have a last word on any subject. Bakhtin argued that this important because it breaks down absolutist dogma and destroys the illusion that any text presents transcendental truth or timeless values (qualities that Bakhtin criticises in heroic and tragic texts). He notes that in the novel there are “fewer and fewer neutral, hard elements ("rock bottom truths") remain that are not drawn into dialogue” (Bakhtin 1981:300). To dialogize Bakhtin’s argument, the reading and writing of ‘heteroglossic’ novels is important because they give us an awareness of our own dialogic condition.

The study of E-rhetorics is exciting to me for very similar reasons, in that some of aspects of the texts I have described in this essay facilitate a high degree of involvement from their reader-participants. They also excite me because they require their participants (both authors and readers) to consider a very wide notion of meaning. This is not a claim for uniqueness, or exclusiveness of computer-mediated texts, in that I recognize that it is always possible (as nothing is ever closed-off in the dialogic world-view) to produce similar effects with other forms of mediation. However, I do argue that the current culture and technology of computer-mediated textuality lends itself to this kind of involved textuality. As such it represents a considerable opportunity to explore a new kind of rhetoric that does more than just telling, or novelistic ‘showing’. For in the continuous act of showing in the novel the reader-participant’s responsive understanding becomes routine and taken for granted, mainly because the author-participant continually addresses her as a bystander.

The first bold claim I made at the beginning of this essay was that creative writing using computers is an important, consciousness-expanding activity. In these works, both the author-participant and the reader-participant can become aware and active of their dialogic role in the text. They are involved and they are empowered by this responsive understanding, to know their dialogic presence in the text, but also more importantly to know their own dialogic presence in their world.

The E-Rhetor: The Pedagogy of Computer-Mediated Textuality

The second bold claim I made at the beginning of this essay was that many of the rhetorical aspects of this kind of writing can be taught. This is a claim steeped in the traditions of rhetoric; a tradition founded on the arguments of skilled rhetors who taught using their rhetorical skills, and in doing so justified their right to be called teachers.
My idea of teaching in this instance is rooted in the praxis of creative writing, which is quite similar in some ways to the methodology of the ancient rhetors. The rhetorical education in Ancient Greece involved five basic elements- aptitude; knowledge of different kinds of discourse; practice; a teacher who provides instruction in the principles of discourse, and a teacher who models a mastery of discourse (Welch 1999: 79). This approach placed emphasis upon the production of discourse, though it also embraced the analysis of discourse as well. It seems clear to me that the same basic elements can be applied to the teaching of computer-mediated textuality as well.
This essay sets out to provide an introduction to two of these elements – namely some of knowledge of the different kinds of computer-mediated textuality and an instruction in the principles of their discourses. In doing so I hope it has intrigued my reader-participant and encouraged them to look at the example works I mention here. However, the budding author-participant of a computer-mediated text needs more. The teaching of computer-mediated textuality will involve providing enthusiasm, skills, analysis, advice, historical context, respect, companionship and challenge. It will involve using theory to challenge preconceived notions of textuality. It will involve, more specifically, bringing the literary, the programming and the graphic arts into a close artist dialogue. It will involve (that word again) providing a location (both on and off-line) at which different sorts of artists can meet and engage in meaningful collaborations. But ultimately it will involve becoming the participant of a computer-mediated text.

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