"I see language.... A third vision ... appears: that of infinitely spread-out languages, of parentheses never to be closed: a utopian vision in that it supposes a mobile, plural reader, who nimbly inserts and removes the quotation marks: who begins to write with me." (Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 161)

Unfolding Comments

Let me rebegin by what I take John Slatin to be saying in Chapter 3 of his forthcoming book This Will Change Everything (Ablex). I will be selective in my opening summary of this chapter, which I read to be an expository-transitional chapter on various recent, problematic approaches to textual analysis in electronic environments. Chapter 3 functions as a transition to Chapter 4 , which is apparently on hypertext and how it is changing and will continue to change scholarship as well as 'writing.' I take it--I'm guessing at the possible linkages--that in Chapter 4, John offers alternative, hypertextual methods of dealing with the conceptual and ethico-political differences between text (as both 'readerly'/'writerly') and information (as efficient transmission of data-messages through a communications channel).

I interpret the chapter as such because John gives an historical background of how Humanists are transferring print to information (i.e., engaging in text entry), or transforming atoms of ink and paper to pixels of 0/1, so that they might store and display scholarly texts for the purpose of an efficient analysis and interpretation of texts. John makes clear how immense and tedious this task can be, and equally makes clear how open-ended and daunting the question of How to set up (i.e., markup) the texts in this new environment can also be.

The potential for retrieving bits of information in printed books has been limited to tables of contents and indices. When along came computers, consequently, along came concordances, which were and still are printed and placed in reference rooms in real libraries. With the devolution and evolution of computers (especially into PCs), it has been inevitable that the counting and indexing--and even marginalia as well as other textual information--would be collected and catalogued in hard disks and servers. More importantly, however, it was inevitable that some Humanists would want to make this information available to colleagues locally and globally and for the primary purpose of collaborative work, say, on critical editions. With the opening up of the Internet and specifically the World Wide Web, the means of delivering the information, analyzing it for patterns, and then interpreting the patterns became a reality ... a virtuality.

Still more important--however, as John repeatedly stresses from the beginning with his discussion of Roland Barthes's S/Z--is the tension that is brought to (and felt with) the rendering of "text-as-print and text-as-information" (5). John states that this tension is not just a matter of the problem of transferring print to information. As I take it, he does not work with the predisposition that print is automatically or even potentially a topos for what Barthes calls a "writerly" text, though electronic discourse can be a topos for the 'writerly.' I must admit at this point, however, that I am not sure enough about my reading of John's intent, for there is the interesting possibility that John is also suggesting that the 'writerly' might potentially have as its topos the 'in-between-ness' of the printed text and the information (electronic) text. At this point, I am going to have to 'fess up and say that John's Chapter 3--remember that I have not seen any of the rest of the book--is an in-between-text for me, as I suggested in my first paragraph. Consequently, I find it more difficult to process Chapter 3 as a 'readerly' text, but easier to process as a 'writerly' text. (The difference is very much suited to my intellectual temperament.) Please John, therefore, take this explanation as a justification, or rationalization, for my 'casuistically stretching,' perhaps, what you might be intending in the overall manuscript. I see myself as beginning "to write with" you.

Two 'Writings'

Let me explain my two 'writings' (double articulations) of John's chapter by backtracking and rehearsing a bit: If at one time (and still, in some circles) 'orality' is favored over 'literacy,' today (in other circles) 'literacy' is favored over 'orality.' It's been a simple, yet traumatic, switching of privileged and supplementary positions. In similar fashion some of the early harbingers of electronic discourse (e.g., Walter Ong) wished to call the third environment "secondary orality," which is a highly problematic way of coming to understand this third thing whose topos is not air or paper but electricity. Recently, Greg Ulmer has called this third "electracy."

Now let's recall that I said that John does not take print as a topos for the "writerly": John works and plays, given the context of his discussion, with the predisposition of privileging "electracy" (information, electronic discourse) over "literacy." Why? Because any and every attempt to bring the 'conditions' (genres, conventions, etc.) of literacy into "electracy" for the sake of "scholarship" has lead to failures and frustrations. John writes:

Barthes can't quite manage to bring the 'writerly'--which is ourselves writing, ourselves no longer mere consumers but instead active producers of the text--clearly into view. For the writerly is on the other side of the electronic frontier, in the domain of information. S/Z takes place on print's home ground, which is to say no more than the obvious, that S/Z is a book about a book, that it is deployed, enabled, and constrained by the conditions of print. (5)

John is absolutely right to call to our attention that Barthes has rendered the 'writerly'-as-text-as-print, which is the wrong place for it and, consequently, produces a "Sarrasine" in the appendix that "is loud now, noisy" (5).

Third (uncanny) 'Writings'

But John seems to be saying something else here as well and it has to do with his statement, "S/Z takes place on print's home ground," which I read productively (i.e., re/'writerly') to mean that Barthes has placed the unhomely (the uncanny, the unfamiliar) in the homely (the canny, familiar); hence, the production of "noise." In a contrary fashion, I hear through out John's chapter, that scholars interested in, say, using Text-Analysis Computing Tools (TACT), render the 'readerly'-as-text-as-information." For Barthes actually "to bring the 'writerly' ... into view," would be actually to bring the monster into view, which wants to remain virtual. I say, "the monster ... wants"! I should provisionally say, "Barthes needs to keep the monster virtual. (To this issue of who wants what, we will eventually and irrepressibly return.)

Not at Home with TACT

It's one of those co-incidences, but today (30 Dec. 96), I received from the MLA a list of new titles, one of which is an advertisement for Using TACT with Electronic Texts: A Guide to Text-Analysis Computing Tools (Ian Lancashire, et al.). In the description, we are told that TACT can "discover full and partial anagrams." When I read this claim, I thought of poor Ferdinand de Saussure, who as a philologist studied Latin hymns and poetry, the Rig Veda, the Niebelungen and found in them, way beyond what anyone might expect, anagrams after anagrams. Saussure found anagram-dedications to God, found them to gods and even cryptograms (signs) uttered by the gods in pagan poetry and prose. As Lecercle points out, Saussure kept his distance, maintained his 'objectivity,' in his search for proof or substantiation for what he but glimpsed. Finding no proof, allegedly, Saussure never made public, but kept private, what could only be a monster, or what Lecercle and so many other commentators saw as a condition that would invite the philologist to drift into madness! So again, we have another who is wrestling with the differences (différance) between the 'readerly' (proof) and the 'writerly' (drifting).

I've discovered a wonderful Invention-Discovery (Difference) Machine on the Web. It's I, Rearrangement Servant, or Internet Anagram Server. Anyone using this difference machine will quickly come to the conclusion that language is thoroughly anagrammatic. If it were not for grammars, we would easily drift into psychotic episodes. Or if it were not for the presence of anagrammaticisms, we, and you and I would drift into thinking that we were 'subjects,' that is, that we say what we mean and mean what we say. And everything else is not what 'we say.'

Inventio: For fun, I typed my name into the difference machine and I could not believe what was generated, and yet the pull towards believing it all was remarkably powerful. John, I typed your name and Saussure's. When you read the onslaught of returns, be sure to keep, as Lecercle says, your distance!

(Is it not remarkable How incipient Paranoia--meaning, too many meanings, co-incidences--becomes Theory? And yet, simultaneously, threatens another sense of Theory?)

And so, I was wondering, John--as I think you must now be wondering--What will scholars in using Using TACT come up against when, and if, the anagrams start piling up? And in an unhomely ill-manner? Will TACT (shareware) and Using TACT (the book with CD) have prepared scholars for the on-coming, on-slaught of monsters that the 'readerly' harbors? Will they have prepared scholars for the uncanniness of language and of literacy and electracy and especially of their in-between-ness, which is not topos or eutopos but an atopos ("a drifting habitation") as ever new conditions for possibilities (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 49)?

Inventio +++: How do we move ... reasonably ... from anagrams (as anagrammaticisms) to the 'writerly'? Or is there even a difference? When Thomas Edison set out to invent the light bulb, he knew precisely what he wanted to achieve, namely, an efficient, long-lasting source of beneficial light in the form of an electric bulb. (Perhaps, he wanted such a bulb so that people could be better 'readers' during the night.) His was an act of invention (intention), with the syntax of Problem-->Solution(s). Though this act of invention is subject to the 'writerly,' it is primarily a 'readerly' act. Which, as now we must know, harbors monsters! Invention is part of the myth and promise of light as emancipation, Enlightenment, behind which lurks monsters. The New Prometheus.

Now the question is, How do we move ... reasonably ...

• from 'de-monstrably intended, canny, and beneficial species of anagrams'
• to 'monstrous, unintended, uncanny ones-cum-a-radical-multiplicity-of-singularities (anagrammaticisms)'?

There is a difference between invention and discoveries (i.e., unexpected, accidental discoveries). Every invention of words, or a string of words, harbors a strangeness. If there is a reasonable movement from anagrams (intended or accidental) to the 'writerly' (intended or accidental), it is a proleptic (perverse) one, with the syntax of Apparent Solutions in search of Problems; or with wild, savage words in search of a grammar. So as to stabilize meaning or significance for easy consumption. After all, Has it not been the purpose, disciplinary intention, of scholars with their acts of scholarship to make the uncanny, canny?

And so, If perhaps all production is in the incipient form of paraphraxes, slips of the tongue and pen, accidents (!), which scholars would turn into the 'readerly,' then, I would have to conclude that scholarly attempts to locate and cast light (bulbs) on classical anagrams but especially on paraphraxes, to make them into a 'readerly' text or a less strange 'writerly' text to be easily consumed, will fail. (Wow, that is a monster of a sentence, right?)

There is presently no way to deal with the uncanny in a TACTful way! Why? Because of a Restricted Economy. Let me explain further.

Evaluation and Economies

At the very beginning of S/Z, Barthes discusses "Evaluation" (re-valuing, which I take to be a Nietzschean revaluation) and makes a distinction between "representation" (indifference-->science, ideology) and "practice" (infinite differences-->production). He divides "practice" into what is possible to write and what is not possible to write. The former--what is possible--is the 'writerly,' which makes the reader a producer of the text and not a consumer.

I would 'rewrite' Barthes discussion of Evaluation now in terms of Economies. Georges Bataille in his The Accursed Share makes a distinction between two economies: A Restricted Economy and a General Economy. The former, Restricted, is predicated on the negative, on lack, on scarcity. It is an economy (valuing, measuring) by way of an Hegelian "determinate negation." The latter, General, is predicated on excess. It is an economy by way of an Hegelian "absolute negation," or a denegation of the negative.

While a Restricted Economy (the 'readerly') attempts to invent, to produce knowledge for consumption, by the act of exclusion, suppression, a General Economy (the 'writerly') attempts to produce, radically recover, nonknowledge by reincluding what, heretofore, in the canny name of 'knowledge,' has been excluded. (Un/namely, wild, savage anagrammaticisms.) A General Economy-'Writerly,' therefore, attempts to return--without representation, for 'it' cannot be represented--the uncanny, anagrammaticisms, the excluded third (Serres, Vitanza).

Unfortunately, then, scholarship and scholarly criticism and, more importantly, scholarly 'writing' is at present far too ... Restricted. To deal with the un-evenness of the LOGOS. It needs to employ electricity strictly for what it considers 'useful' purposes. And so, let us now move on and return to Barthes's and John's ...

La Zambinella; or, Not at Home with an In-Between-Ness

Earlier, I wrote: "There is the interesting possibility that John is also suggesting that the 'writerly' might potentially have as its topos the 'in-between-ness' of the printed text and the information (electronic) text." In 'writing' this statement, I was not at all discounting John's view that the 'writerly' has as its topos--or I would rather say, its atopos--"the other side of the electronic frontier, in the domain of information" (5).

Let's examine what John says Barthes's says about Zambinella so that I might further advance the above double articulation:

For John, "La Zambinella is ... a liminal figure, on the boundary between male and female, heterosexuality and homosexuality, 'legitimate' and 'perverse' desire" (5).

La Zambinella--we might begin to infer (gathering up what I have said thus far)--signifies a mixture of

• the canny and uncanny, of
• the familiar and strange, of
• the 'readerly' and the 'writerly,' of
• the Restricted and General Economies;

Or La Zambinella might suggest

an

• In-Between-Ness.

However, John, as well as Barthes, makes it fairly evident that La Zambinella

is ... the readerly: s/he is the "deficiency," the "deficient message" that Barthes calls "literature"--the deficiency that the reader "consumes" under the impression that it is the "most precious nourishment" (Barthes, p. 145); and ... the reader too is castrated, neutered, nullified by the "contagion" (p. 210 and passim) of the "castrating effect of the narration" (p. 211). (5)

John's point, by analogy, is a continuation of his earlier statement that "S/Z takes place on print's home ground." The extra-vagant (exuberant) amount of information that is packed into 'La Zambinella' is the very paradoxical sign of the "deficiency" of text-as-print. As John says, "information stands traditional economics on its head" (5). Bringing into being a monster. The paradox is that the more information that we get the less we are capable of knowing. And the more we know, the less 'powerful' we become. And so, let us be 'pensive.'

In-Between-Ness: But Is John, then, suggesting that S/Z should take place on information's home ground? My sense is, as I have suggested, Yes. And yet, No! For John ever returns to the (not-to-be-excluded) excluded middle. Lest there be a misunderstanding: I am not suggesting that John is opting for an Aristotelian "intermediate" ground between "excess and defect" (Nicomachean Ethics Bk. 2, Ch. 6; or1106b). Nor am I suggesting a synthesis of opposites. Nor am I suggesting that John would call for the total return of the excluded middle that would only lead to the muddle. (This is a tactic that I myself have used, but have never called on it as a strategy in itself.) Nor am I suggesting that Barthes is saying something quite different from John, that Barthes is in some way defective. On the contrary--perversely--things can explode and then implode, but can gather, nonetheless, from time to time, at the VIRGULE, but not as antitheses as in either/or, but as a "disjunctive synthesis" as in both-and (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, AntiOedipus, 5, 75-106).

John's wisdom lies in his seeing (paratheorizing) the liminal figure of La Zambinella as a Cyborg (Haraway); and his choosing hypertext as the means of situating the figure at the sign of the VIRGULE, "standing at the interface between print and information" (6). Which--Yes, yes, y e s--is still today "bounded wholly by print" (6). Caught up in the war of desire and technology (Stone).

And Barthes's wisdom?

Xcursion: I am going to very quickly point out What Barthes is, in part, up to in the paraproject S/Z. I am going to take this brief side trip as a means of better preparing myself to say and my readers to understand what I take John's wisdom to be.

Barthes speaks in terms of three ways of entering the text (rhetorical route, castration route, and the economic route), "no one of which is privileged" (215). What each has in common is that "it is fatal ... to remove the dividing line, the paradigmatic slash mark which permits meaning to function" (215). It is fatal to cross (!) the line. (In other words, it's fatal to move from a Restricted Economy to a General Economy.)

However, the slash ('/') has been removed. Barthes writes: "By abolishing the paradigmatic barriers, this metonymy abolishes the power of legal substitution on which meaning is based: it is then no longer possible regularly to contrast opposites, sexes, possessions..." (216). And yet, the last (rebeginning) starred text-lexia is "the pensive text," information being kept in "reserve," being "supplementary," being the "signifier of the inexpressible, not of the unexpressed" (216). There is a balance, though a very perverse one.

To be sure (!?), we as 'readers' know that La Zambinella is a castrato. And this knowledge castrates us as readers. But to be sure, Do we as 'writers' have this knowledge of Zambinella?

• Yes, if we think such knowledge castrates us and that is not good.
• No, if we figure that Sarassine is not about Zambinella.

It's about "a contract" (90) that cannot be idyllically (131-32) honored by either the text or the author or the 'reader.' (A Restricted Economy cannot be honored.)

Nes and Yo: What S/Z is about "is a transgression of ownership" (45). The literary text is always already mutilated and is at its very best VIRTUAL. There is, of course, no author, authorizing force, no canonized reading. No phallus. After all, as Barthes says: "The writer is always on the blind spot of systems, adrift; he is the joker in the pack" (Pleasure, 35). But I am going to say heretically, in an unauthorized statement, that there is no 'reader' either, who some would see as being favored in proto-hypertext or hypertext, democratically, in the absence of the author (cf. Landow). At best, the reader is a 'skeuomorph,' just as all things associated with the phallus are 'skeuomorphs.' (A skeuomorph is an after-image, a trace, of what was; it's a simulation, a third dis/order.) When talking about authors, readers, and writers, Barthes places them in third positions, or the in-between. Each is a "Fool," caught in the double articulation (S/Z 145) and being squeezed out of legitimacy, yet returning as something different. (They all appear to be Restricted, but are General.)

In-Between-Us, again: But what if Sarassine is about Zambinella, the castrated? What would be he/r positionality? and How would s/he function? Barthes says: "As for the castrato himself, we would be wrong to place him of necessity among the castrated: he is the blind and mobile flaw in this system [the joker in the deck]; he moves back and forth between active and passive" (36). Zambinella moves intermittently between active and passive; s/he functions as an incipient middle voice (zero element). S/he, to be sure (!?), is the "countercommunication" (145). Which Barthes holds as a sign of the VIRGULE or a THIRD. Through out all of his works.

In his image-repertoire, Barthes continues to search for "a third term, which is not a synthesis" (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 69; cf. Barthes Pleasure, 55). And even more heretically, he turns against (contra to, but along side) his own text S/Z. He projects,

Readerly, writerly, and beyond

In S/Z, an opposition was proposed: readerly/writerly. A readerly text is one I cannot rewrite (can I write today like Balzac?); a writerly text is one I read with difficulty, unless I completely transform my reading regime. I now conceive ... that there may be a third textual entity: alongside the readerly and the writerly, there would be something like the receivable. The receivable would be the unreaderly text which catches hold, the red-hot text, a product continuously outside of any likelihood and whose function--visibly assumed by its scriptor--would be to contest the mercantile constraint of what is written; this text, guided, armed by a notion of the unpublishable, would require the following response: I can neither read nor write what you produce, but I receive it, like a fire, a drug, an enigmatic disorganization. (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 118)

(In dis/order to escape from archi-writing, what we might give each other, in attending to each other; what scholars, in escaping, might give to 'readers' ['writers']; ... is "a fire, a drug, an enigmatic disorganization," or pathic expressions of intensities.)

From Between-to-Beyond-Us: I would venture to say, now, that "Sarrasine" and S/Z or any 'text' just wants to be electricity, but not in the form of AC or DC, but something in between, something, I would say, borrowing a word from Deleuze and Guattari, that would be "chaosmos" (Thousand Plateaus, 313) or "chaosmosis" (Chaosmosis). But as John has pointed out in Chapter 3, none of the texts or archives that scholars have attempted to turn into electricity (e.g., Representative Poetry, Electronic Beowulf, or perhaps even the Rossetti Archives) has been able to realize its desire, though, also as John suggests, these texts can seek their pleasures by way of hypertext, if only practiced hyper-textually! (The Rossetti Archives comes the closest.) We need not just countercommunications but, more so now, ....counterexamples. We need the pleasure of hypertext. Instead of the MLA "Statement," we need a Society of the Friends of the Hypertext. Which would be concerned with ...

Linking as the issue. As Lyotard says, it is necessary to link, but not how to link (Differend 29). A feeling for an illigitimate coupling and tripling. Lyotard, like Barthes before him, projects:

The feeling that the impossible is possible. That the necessary is contingent. That linkage must be made, but that there won't be anything upon which to link. The "and" with nothing to grab onto. Hence, not just the contingency of the how of linking, but the vertigo of the last phrase. Absurd, of course. But the lightning flash takes place--it flashes and bursts out in the nothingness of the night, of clouds, or of the clear blue sky. (75)

Perhaps the paragenre of everything is Ovid's Metamorphoses. Which is, as Lyotard would posit, a "pagus, a border zone where genres of discourse enter into conflict over the mode of linking" (Differend 151). Which has much to do with rethinking time and space:

Temporally, in John's discussion the past meets the future to form the future perfect. (I am not sure that there is a pun here on "perfect" because I am not sure that John is being eutopian in his thinking about hypertext. I can say, however, that I would wager on the pun. And yet, perversely hold on to an atopia.)

Spatially, in John's discussion the architectonics of the text move from

• a textual, at times, origamic, Baroque paper castle (Barthes, "manhandling" literature) to
• a Medieval stone castle with dungeons ("MLA holds the fort," while the electronic scriveners "preserve the originals," "identify the enemy," and "fix" [mummify?] the text) to

... Now I Am Back to Guessing! with a throw of the dice. Stochastically ...

• an electronic-Baroque anarchitextual, nomadic plane of immanence. Again, a chaosmis.

I take it that John--much like Georges Bataille--would not have us erect archiTEXTual monuments. Or especially archiTECHual ones. But something much closer--much like Barthes--to Fourier's phalanstery (Sade Fourier Loyola 112-13; cf. "Society of the Friends of the Text" in Pleasure, 14-15). When and Where everything becomes possible.

Which is an atopos, as Katherine Hayles posits it, way beyond any, except vestigial, talk about

• homeostasis (Shannon, stable state) or
• autopoiesis (Varela, reflexivity, self-organization)

way beyond to

• VIRTUALITY (Varela, Mazlish, Haraway, Stone et al., the body as prosthesis, emergence, immersion).

When and Where the human text is replaced by the posthuman.

______________________________

Notes

The anagram machine brings to mind Derrida's "Signature, Event, Context" in Margins and Ulmer's "Signing (The Proper Name)" in Text Book, 256-73. Ulmer writes: "Remember finally that the goal of the project is to take whatever material your names provide and turn it into a model for a theory (general description) of how to write" (262).

In reading John's chapter, I recalled the thought that liminal characterizations of text (La Zambinella) are reappearing in much of our recent literature. The most interesting for me is Lyotard's characterization of Marx and his texts as a "monster ... the hermaphrodite ... in which femininity and masculinity are undiscernibly exchanged, thereby thwarting the reassurance of sexual difference" (Libidinal Economy, 97). Lyotard has Marx, in his writing of Capital, caught in a libidinal flow, a General Economy, without end.

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Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. NY: Hill and Wang, 1973.

_____. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. NY: Hill and Wang, 1975.

_____. Sade Fourier Loyola. NY: Hill and Wang, 1976.

_____. S/Z. NY: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. 1. NY: Zone Books, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. AntiOedipus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.

_____. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. "Signature, Event, Context" in Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 307-30.

Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

Hayles, N. Katherine. "Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics." Configurations 2.3 (1994): 441-67.

Landow, George P. Hypertext. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy through the Looking Glass. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1985.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Differend. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.

_____. Libidinal Economy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Mazlish, Bruce. The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.

Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.

Scholes, Robert, Nancy R. Comley, and Gregory L. Ulmer. Text Book. Second Edition. NY: St. Martin's P, 1995.

Varela, Francisco. Principles of Biological Autonomy. NY: North Holland P, 1979.

Vitanza, Victor J. "Threes." In Composition in Context. Ed. W. Ross Winterowd and Vincent Gillespie. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 196-218.