István Berszán

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

iberszan@yahoo.com

 

 

Ages and Rhythms of Literary Practices

 

 

Abstract: What does the digital age offer for literature and what does it take away from it? On the one hand, we are told that the historical-cultural progress surpassing the Gutenberg project inevitably entails the fall of literature; on the other hand, we are told that media technology offers new possibilities for literary writing and reading we never imagined before. In this paper, I will investigate how these allegations about the impossibility or the possibilities of literature are connected to certain practices of orientation. If we regard cybertext according to Aarseth’s suggestion, as a version of the book-labyrinth or as its computational extension, I envisage in the second part of my paper a comparison between the so-called ergodic practices of reading and writing and the forester extension of the space of literary practices.

Keywords: Literary practices; Ergodic and extra-ergodic spaces of reading and writing; Time as gestural rhythm; Experimental exercises; Ritual reading and writing.

 

 

What does the digital age offer for literature and what does it take away from it? Today we can read two different kinds of messages about this issue: on one hand we are told that the historical-cultural progress surpassing the Gutenberg-project inevitably entails the fall of literature as well, on the other hand we are told that media-technology offers possibilities for literary writing and reading we never imagined before. Hereinafter I will investigate how these announcements about the impossibility or about the possibilities of literature are connected to certain practices of orientation and I will try to find out how far the literary writing and reading belong to a “digital age”.

 

1. An age or a fad?

 

When we call a period of history by labels like ’the age of revolutions’, ’atomic age’ or ’digital age’, it is clear that we consider a chosen direction of occurrences. I will not measure in which extent is this choice contingent or felicitous; I will follow rather the way the knight of historical ages orientates himself in times.

 

The current threat to the written word comes from its inability to meet the needs and desires of the current population. Our image-based culture has gravitated toward the emotional and non-linear. The appeal of this shift is part of what has drawn people away from the printed word. (Ross 2008, 20)

 

Writing this, Terrence Ross is acting upon a necessary change to which he himself would like to have a contribution. This is why—taking the model of the not so recent avant-garde tradition—he elaborates a Manifesto which clearly shows for everybody what is the vital stream of culture that makes history and is worth alone to be followed. This occurrence—as obvious as gravitation—is validated by every event and every reason, so there is no question about how we have to orientate ourselves regarding culture. Of course, such words can stir up concern or gloating upon the statistical decrease concerning popularity of reading. And the author of Manifesto (like many others) undoubtedly makes persistent experiences for years to produce appropriate digital texts for the 21^st century. With the same laptop by which I am writing these ancient linear words, we can link the proposed site (www.murderedtheweb.com) where murder is not only text, but letter, drawing, animation and voice in the same time, so if we click the revolver, it goes off in a visible and audible way. Then one may start his/her lesson using “the mother tongue of the present generation” that is “the digital language of our time”.

Terrence Ross publishes his Manifesto in a journal that is accessible online, nevertheless the author relies this time on the force of “printed word” from which the digital age “has drawn people away”. Of course, he returns to the historical form of the text for the sake of scientists who are entrenched deeply in traditional academic grounds—that is, having influence on the education and the current canonization of texts—in order to convince this group of cultural leaders, always fallen behind, to receive the message of the digital age.

 

Simply keeping the printed word alive is not enough, or rather it risks becoming academic in the most limited and least appealing sense of the word, “academic” meaning abstracted from the real world. (…) Simply insisting on the pre-eminence of the printed word will not change the present dynamic. With all due respect to the printed word, I feel it is time to leave it, or at least leave it as it is currently used. (Ross 2008, 20.)

 

Then follows an instruction to artists: to get beyond Joyce’s naivety (who imagined the stream of consciousness as a linear process), they should be aware much more of the present days’ signs instead of obsolete artistic traditions.

 

More than ever before we live enmeshed and entangled with the lives and cultures of everyone else in the world. It is time for art to mirror this by creating cross-reference works that echo outward and inward the way our lives do today. (Ross 2008, 22.)

 

Being American, it doesn’t matter for him that he gets close to a vulgar version of György Lukács’s theory about how a given work may objectively mirror the social totality of a given place and time in the process of change. When, in the Eastern Part of Europe the tasks of art were appointed by the directives of the Communist Party, activists were referring, like Terrence Ross, to historical necessity. Even getting beyond the items that could be investigated in this campaign by the ideology critique, we have to deal here with an ethical issue as well. Terrence Ross as a knight of the digital text wants to support a marriage: a union between Prose and Cinema. In his opinion their descendants would be more viable hybrids than the parents apart, especially the printed literature. I wonder whether such a genetic program could be justified or not under the aegis of diversity, if the cross breeding proposal definitely renounces one of the uncrossed parts. Because the aim of the project is more than the union of Prose with Cinema in order to obtain digital texts, there is also a call for leaving the printed word “as it is currently used”. Thus, historical explaining is, in fact the propagation of a certain practical decision among writers and readers who do not practice exclusively (or do not practice at all) the rituals of “digital texts”. It seems that the speaker does not believe enough in the victory which could be obtained by the multimedia practices themselves, including those of his own along the development of digital age—he considers necessary their support by other means as well.

Is it ethically correct when we try to validate our practical decisions by other ways than our steadfastness in their intensive practicing? I do not answer whether it is legitimate or not, because jurisdiction, politics, education and any institute sustaining stability in a society have this basic function: to validate certain practical decisions even if the executor does not follow them at the moment. Since we are very familiar with this, also out of any institution, we need institutions which control such behaviour (at least in principle) by its regulated use. Problems arise when a non-ethical (power based) decision tries to appropriate spaces of practice like faith or art, i.e. when faith or art are not governed by faith-full or artistic decisions.

The compulsion of power based directives provokes us in a definitely different way than the faith-full or artistic practice: whether it generates fear, that is a false obedience which is nothing else than fear, and makes the terrified or threatened part obey a directive without practicing obedience; or it generates resistance—similar arrangements that he/she wants to resist to. One cannot answer decisions of the power, but by fear or resistance. If somebody answers them by faith or art, he/she act upon totally different impulses: the “answer” is that he/she keep practicing his/her faith or art without being dislocated by obeying or resisting power. The ethical difference between power and faith or art is that the latter ones try to validate practical decisions by their intensive practicing. One who is following a faith or an artistic practice, he/she obeys them indeed, but it never means the same gestures—it is not the same fear, it is not the same resistance or pleasure, but a resonance to something happening, to impulses of gestures that act upon the rhythm of the followed occurrence as well.

By contrast, the superiority or historical-evolutionary selection of digital writing and reading can be validated only inside the space of a power-practice. Historical compulsions are exercised by certain arrangements which try to declare their practical orientation as the course of history. I would like to underline that this is not only a political or moral problem, but an ethical (practical) loss which diminish our space of practice. On one hand, the propagation of an artistic orientation by non-artistic ways can obscure the diversity of artistic practices. On the other hand trying to fill any other space of artistic practice with one’s own way of practical orientation—which is an ethical (practical) impossibility—is equal with being closed up in the “simultaneity” of a single time that is the rhythm of its own practice. In other words, presuming that we can grasp, at the same time, all possible ways of creation and reception declared “traditional”, the proclaimed “new historical age” is reduced in fact to the events of one single propagated arena.

Researchers of electronic literature are usually not satisfied with a typological or functional distinction between traditional (printed) and electronic literature, they are enmeshed in a (self)legitimating, many times pugnacious emancipative argumentation. Since the aesthetic rise of photography and film we know the claim of a new art created by recent technologies to get released from or become totally independent of those traditional arts that give an impulse at the beginning of its development. It means many times a frenetic search for effects that are unrealisable by the other art, and the challenge usually provokes challenge from the other side as well: not only does the film(-director) try to show off the effects of an audible, coloured and 3D movie, which a novel never can reach, but vice versa, the novel(ist) answers him from the monopolistic position of a writing practice that can never be put on the screen. After the renewing fight of avant-garde endeavours one can find out that the good novel and the good film are not against each other, but rather side by side and sometimes in a very close connection to each other. There are again and again important works in which the film turns towards literature and the literature towards film: a very good novelist, for instance, writes a shooting script together with a very good film director, as in the case of László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tar[1].

From the beginning art needed multiple skills and masteries, diverse materials and special means, but a practice that became art did not cease to work, if another art appeared. Architecture or theatre never made doubtful poetry or music, or vice versa, just as the electronic synthesizer did not change Antonio Stradivarius’ violins into mere historical reliquaries. The most interesting attempts of the avant-garde rebellion against artistic traditions, such as the filmic endeavours breaking with novel, became soon inspiring fellow works instead of being rivals or enemies. But, of course, artistic practice can never escape orientation. It is not necessary to get beyond an art or artistic tradition, not even a steady sequence of an author’s life to be trained—as an author or a receiver—in many kinds of practices or rather, to be expected to practise many kinds of skills and masteries.

As Kant also put it, the ethical imperative can never refer to this or that directive, but to the practical orientation itself. In fact, there is a double command. In its stringent modality, “Orientate yourself!” claims that orientation is unavoidable or orientation alone is unavoidable. In its permissive modality, it tells that it is not recommended trying to avoid it. It is possible, but by doing this we will orientate ourselves in a way we do not want to take or in a way which someone else desires. In other words, there is a very important difference between the case when I want what someone else wants and the case when it happens that I do what someone else wants because I don’t want to orientate myself.

To say that after the quantum field theory printed literature became obsolete and this is the reason why electronic literature has arisen is an attempt to canonize digital texts alone as contemporaneous literature.

 

After Einstein, space and time are not the separate containers they are on a printed page. Einstein and quantum field theory teach that mass-energy-space-time are so little separate, so closely interlocked, so interchangeable, they could be better referred to as one hyphenated word, one reconfigurable acronym. In electronic literature, where a bitstream may express as text or sound or image, or all three in some topologic arrangement, we are taught to grasp, to replay, a single potential expressible in multiple fundamental manners. Trade-offs and interconversions of spatial and temporal expression are the everyday practice of an electronic writer. (Strickland 2009, 219.)

 

According to these arguments contemporaneous literature must be an illustration of quantum field theory, moreover in that digital sense alone as the author claims. I wonder whether literature has to realize mass-energy-space-time occurrences in a technological way—even digital texts are a quite superficial and analogical model of such a project, rather than its experimental realization—or it invites for practical endeavours with an artistic intensity to range over the latitudes of all accessible (not only virtual) mass-energy-space-times.

Electronic literature considered by Stephanie Strickland as the only up-to-date imperative of writing and reading that exceeds the whole literary tradition in a technologico-historical way, is in fact a reduction of the much larger field of literary practices to the “only” space of digitally generated virtual worlds. I consider totally unfounded her supposition that digital technique passed in an evolutionary way any “former” (in fact any other) practices. What is indeed a technical development in a succession of the information transmitter media should not be confused with a kind of “ethical evolution” or a historical hierarchy of practices. Ethical orientation is not defined or decided merely by the stream of technological evolution—by every gesture of our behaviour we have to orientate ourselves on a field of practical latitudes, much larger than virtual systems.

Does diversity mean exclusively the layers of “complex hierarchical systems”? Should we orientate ourselves according to “bottom-up and top-down causation” alone? The non-artistic propagation of electronic literature considers theoretical and technological-experimental research as the only way of orientation, in a paragraph in which it speaks about the multitudinous character of artistic occurrences. Indeed, these events are of so many kinds that it is not enough to know our way about a complex hierarchical system; we have to get experience in spaces of practice that are not deductible from each other, this is why our orientation in and between such spaces will dislodge us from the system constructing activity.

Electronic literature concentrating upon the materiality of language couldn’t be equal to being aware of—previously not reflected (enough)—basic processes of any literary practice as Stephanie Strickland declares; it is rather a literary attempt to range over the spaces of practices offered by digital media. When she claims that electronic poetry demands new reading skills, she refers to “tracking visual units and anticipating their next appearance, zooming and entering textual objects as one would a 3-D object, mousing over or clicking to link or activate a program, decoding by reading software, attaining a gestalt or snapshot-like perception, listening to the audio soundscape, and navigating spatial patterns and animations” (Strickland Born Digital, 4), comparing them to decoding linear rows and paging the book. Nevertheless, beyond the fact that the interpretational techniques are at least as many as the algorithms and individual styles of digital navigation, we have to point out that ranging over the spaces of practice by literary writing and reading requires—as well (but not equally) as in the case of following the media transmission events of the material word—to be trained in certain skills, gestures and rituals of paying attention. A narration that follows the rhythm of mute animal or human gestures demands as sophisticated (but not the same) mastery, it expects you to learn as special (but not the same) practical resonances as the enterprise of building virtual worlds by programming, digital navigation and mediated communication techniques. When the practitioners or theoreticians of electronic literature distinguish their art or the object of their research from the “traditional” (printed) literature along the requested practical skills they, in fact, are not talking about an evolution or a deeper discovery of previous literary writing and reading practices as they claim to do, but about a sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful experiment of the recent literature to tune itself to the rhythm of digitally functioning media.

 

Reading is being redefined in cultures that use programmed and networked media: a surfing, sampling, multitasking kind of reading is often elicited online, while in some online and video games, a problem-solving, focused, remembering attention is required. Deep, focused attention is what print readers are trained to have, but attention itself is being reshaped, becoming a mix of deep and hyper, or focused and mobilized. E-lit, like Deena Larsen’s “Carving in Possibilities,” requires, shapes, and comments on just this type of new attention. (Strickland: Born Digital, 3)

 

What is the difference (because there must be a difference) between the surfing-sampling-multitasking way of reading and the dispersion of attention characteristic to the boredom? Is it sure that attention is working as the interconnected functions of a machine? If we are watching a film, it is important that the order, speed and the (colour) resolution of successive pictures, the duration, tempo, timber and frequency of voice sequences, noises and music to be synchronized with each other. But all these functions do not resonate in the player device, but they are set one by one in such a way as to produce a certain effect for perception. But if we are paying attention on someone of the enumerated items, on the relation between two of them or the common effect of a few, needn’t we practice every time a certain way of paying attention, more or less difficult depending on our being in practice about it?

When a skilful driver is driving a car, is he paying attention in a surfing-sampling-multitasking way, in the sense we can use concerning the functions of the car—as parallel motions, having their independent principles of work, but synchronized for a desired objective—or a practice of paying attention in which multiple gestures are tuned on the same rhythm that can be distinguished by this practical resonance? Until one becomes a skilful driver, he or she is confused because he or she attempts to realize a synchronization of separate ways of paying attention. Even at a few tasks of driving he or she get closed to (or beyond) a critical threshold where his or her intention become impossible. This is the reason why it is much harder to accommodate an intensive talking with the driving practice, even if partners are talking about driving itself, because these two practices cannot resonate with each other, they can only be synchronized. Not driving alone, but most of practices (from walking by two feet to instrumental music, from cooking to speaking a foreign language) require a turn from synchronized functional gestures to a ritual (practical) rhythm.

Reading printed literature is not an exception. For deciphering any collation of letters, the articulation of a succession of syllables into syntagms, sentences, ideal, structural or formal unites, all these need separate attention at the beginning. To read a poem and pay attention to everything in it needs much exercise. I don’t mean only solving the problems of the first reader or getting metrical, logical, rhetorical and esthetical experiences, because even a high qualified scholar or a famous poet reads a poem over and over again, until he or she will be in practice about it and can read the poem entirely. Being practised is more than the drill of each gesture separately; it requires that by practicing any of them one should resonate with the same rhythm. I wonder whether we can talk in this case about multiple practices or not. Yes, we can, according to those functions we distinguish analytically, as far as we are trained in the analytical survey of a process. But if we resonate with the rhythm of the rolled gestures, we do not only perceive them as a practice, but we make them practically an occurrence having its own time.

Of course it is quite frequent that our attention is dropped out of a well-known practice as well. In such moments we make mistakes, our legs or tongue stumble, we get rattled or we hesitate and there is no other way to recover the flow of our attention than to resonate again with the rhythm we lost because changing its gestures with foreign ones. If someone is boring and therefore his attention is dispersive, his gestures are never tuned to the same rhythm. Such an estate is awkward. We try or at least would like to escape it, because it is much better if there is a rhythm of what we are doing. Taking into consideration that even in the time of sleeping we have a well-balanced breathing, maybe it is not exaggerated to say that the rhythm of practice is a vital necessity.

If so, it must be as such even during electronic writing and reading. It is doubtful that electronic literary practices are dispersion and boredom alone. Presupposing the contrary means that all the motions we have considered from the point of view of functions, media or other, theoretically distinguishable components as being the realm of surfing-sampling-multitasking attention, are practically tuned to a worked out rhythm as well as the more traditional practices, such as walking on two feet or writing/reading linear hexameters. If our attention drops out by mistake from the rhythm of an electronic literary practice into a foreign gesture, this event will disturb the ritual of game in the same way as in the case of any other practice. And again, we can return to the interrupted or ceased practice only by regaining the lost rhythm. Thus, by the difference—so many times underlined—between print readers or writers and their electronic counterparts, one does not distinguish an old type of paying attention from a new one, but one ritual of paying attention from another one. It’s true that a “deep, focused attention is what print readers are trained to have”, but this is bound to the intensive rhythm of reading and cannot be deduced from a single, analytically irreducible function of attention as Stephanie Strickland’s typology suggests.

It is useless to propose other typologies saying that the rhythm of electronic writing and reading is never closed as in the case of unendingly repeated hexameters. Because even the metric form of a hexameter is constituted of unexpected syllables and words in every verse, as well as there are no equal steps, not even in a walk with a very smooth rhythm. It could be, that electronic reading and writing are not tuned to metrically measurable rhythms, but as we have seen, the rhythm practically is not the measure of actions, but the resonance of gestures. If someone can find out which ones of the syllables are long and which ones are short, only by numbering consonants, he or she did not resonate to the rhythm of hexameters, with other words he or she cannot hear this rhythm.

As a conclusion of the arguments set forth above I would not claim that there is no difference between a rhythm of electronic poetry and that of reading Dostoevsky. I argue that such a difference is not a typological or evolutionary distinction between the times “after Einstein” called digital age and the former writing and reading exercises, but simply a gap of different rhythms. It is not decided by historical compulsions whether I am in practice about one or the other, or perhaps now about one, now about the other; it depends on my practical orientation whether I will get mastery in gestures belonging to the one or to the other rhythm. Otherwise how could contemporaneous scholars argue—using laptops maybe of the same trade mark, but this time formulating linear sentences—whether the difference between the printed and electronic literature is a historical distance or rather a practical one between artistic practices. Stephanie Strickland’s thesis according to which “E-lit is based on an aesthetic that arises from networked programming practice” (Strickland Born Digital, 5), from this point of view does not mean that the historical development of practice have created a new aesthetics or a new art in place of the old ones, but rather, that every practice can get an artistic intensity: electronic literature became the art of networked programming practice as ballet became the art of walking on two feet.

Taking advantage of all possible surfaces of writing while shoving off more and more from the printed paper is not again an eclipse of literature, but a part of it or the apparition of other arts that are yet, to a certain extent, dependent on literature. No such new art makes printed literature obsolete, secondary or needless, because practically art is not made by its materials, by the technological algorithms that are used or by medial functions, but by the rhythm of those gestures that sometimes resonate intensively even with the occurrences of the previously enumerated items. If during the time of writing and reading we cannot make a difference between gestures that resonate and those to which they are tuned, it is because of the very happening of this resonance and it does not empower us to draw the theoretical conclusion (yet this is a possible way of thinking) that any occurrence depends on functions and rules of one complex space of practice: on the rules of physical mass-energy-space-time, on neurobiological processes, on technical-medial algorithm or—to be ethically correct—on rituals of paying attention that turn into themselves needing no other occurrences around. During our attempts to orientate ourselves in time(s) nothing happens without having other occurrences around. This is what makes practical orientation unavoidable.

 

*

 

The fanciers of digital literature usually are not satisfied to present the new multimedia writing and reading as recent phenomena that displace the practices related to the obsolete printed literature; they try to prove that the whole literary tradition belongs to the text engineering techniques, though without the present technology of generating virtual worlds it could not become an object of (self)reflection.

 

The success of quantum mechanics at the atomic level has made molecular engineering possible. Physicists, rather than seeking to explain, begin to focus more on creating novel phenomena, studying systems that never before existed. Notice that this makes physics very similar, now, to applied or social science, a science of the “artificial,” as Herbert Simon names it, a science for things you don’t just come across, like lightning or motion or magnets or stars, a science of things you desire and thereby discover. You do not just come across superconductivity—it is a “genuine novelt[y] in the universe.” A reversal of sorts, or at any rate an equalization, between theory and application has taken place. In print poems, how does one gain a sense that reality is being engineered in every aspect of life, that understanding itself is being engineered, and that a corresponding responsibility accrues? Print poems tend to both be and to proclaim, to both depict and to explicate a fait accompli. Though print text itself has been revolutionized by computation—written, typeset, and printed digitally—the book continues to be received by many as if it were a nineteenth-century product. By contrast, electronic literature is perforce aware of the shifting platforms, protocols, and hardware that underlie it; of corresponding responsibilities for public preservation and access; of the artificiality of its constructs; and of the analogy of its products to applications. It too creates and probes novelties never seen by generating texts, some unending, which could not occur without the use of computational algorithms. It applies mathematical, statistical, topological, and evolutionary schemes to produce text and process images; it even “bends” circuits, that is, it engineers hardware, to produce new sounds. (Strickland 2009, 219-220)

 

Stephanie Strickland speaks about our accruing responsibility. According to what kind of ethics? The cause of responsibility is based here on claiming that “reality is being engineered in every aspect of life” including understanding. By the progress of quantum mechanics that made possible molecular engineering, even physics turns from a science of things waiting to be discovered into a science of artificial. It is irresponsible not to be aware of this omnipotent construction because in this way we pay no attention to how reality takes form. I wonder whether reality is engineered in every aspect of life indeed or it becomes like this, because we are interested exclusively in artificial reality. Shouldn’t we—out of responsibility towards reality and towards the form of our life—take care also of those things and occurrences of the environment and of our life which are not artificial? The engineers of molecular novelties do not deny stars or the importance of sunlight for the life on earth. Wouldn’t they consider irresponsible an ethics which regards everything as being artificial in order to validate an engineering orientation even in ethical questions? I wonder whether this ethics finds reality as being artificially engineered in every aspect of life or out of an engineering ambition it creates it as such. I consider it very dangerous to apply in research the ethics suggested by Stephanie Strickland: “you desire and thereby discover.” If we discover in everything only what we would like to discover, it turns triumphant engineering into projection of our desire over the world. Coming back to ethics from psychoanalysis: If we are following exclusively engineering, i. e. the technical-material construction in every event of life, we are responsible for diminishing our space of practice.

 

E-literature is built as much as it is written; one could speak of text engineering as a new kind of writing. As with engineering and big building projects, many kinds of expertise are involved in its production; in some cases, a number of readers are required as well as a number of writers.

 

One might think of the great oral epics of Greece, India, and other ancient cultures as also being pieces of text engineering. In each case, a number of generators, reciters, and receivers were involved in the production of the text; in fact, their practice of generating, reciting, and receiving helped to form them as members of one culture. Today, as with online games and activities in Second Life, the people co-creating a work or a reading may never have met one another, and they may be acting from highly dispersed geographical and time locations. Perhaps utopian practices of worldwide collaboration are being foreshadowed in such literary projects. (Strickland, Born Digital, 6)

 

Saying, for instance, about the ancient Greeks and Indians that in fact they took part in a text engineering by practicing their rituals, fulfils indeed the principle of you desire and thereby discover, but the consequence of this orientation will not be a “genuine novelty in the universe”, because we obey a well known theoretical desire to wrap everything in a single formula of the world. “After Einstein” it is not surprising at all (it was not before him either). The old reductionism in its ethical version declares its favourite practice of working in all the other ones, but this is fulfilled in an artificial world alone created by desire and the cost of this fulfilment is the loss of any contact with the other spaces of practice. “Digital age” is such an artificial reality in which it is impossible for any ritual, except engineering or technological construction, to be considered the only real. In other words, they who orientate themselves according to this ethics have given up (or they declare that they have given up) all the other ways of getting in touch with occurrences for the sake of digitally functioning stories.

If theory and application are undistinguishable, it is not related to the artificial creation of genuine novelties in the universe, but rather to the fact that theory is always one of the practices. And even when it wants to orientate itself in many practices in the same time, it happens, in fact, by identification with one of them. An orientation in multiple practices at the same time is possible theoretically alone, which means that practically it is impossible. “A reversal of sorts, or at any rate an equalization, between theory and application”, Stephanie Strickland talks about, is not a historical turn, but rather a consequence of an ethical turn trying to grasp all practices by a single one: the engineering application. Following only a model occurrence where we could follow other occurrences indeed, we artificially transform any practice into its model, what can be a successful technological achievement, but ethically it is an ordinary loss: we lose irresponsibly those spaces of practice we are ousted from because of our exclusivist orientation. According to this engineering ethics we have to leave the “previous” literature considered, in a characteristic way, not as multiple practices, but as a printing technology and we have to practise the material engineering of texts alone. Nevertheless, ethics in not an equalization of theory and application by engineering, but it is always a certain practice of orientation. Practice research proposes to investigate such practices without trying to apply artificially/theoretically one for the other or the same for all of the others. It does accept that we can pass from one practice of orientation to the other only by an ethical (practical) decision. Such a decision cannot be a power imperative concerning others but the resonance of our gestures with the rhythm of the followed occurrence.

I agree that the members of ancient communities became partakers of the same culture by their practices. But those rituals that connected them practically cannot be reduced to the common denominator of text engineering or be related as functional components of a digital system as Stephanie Strickland has imagined. Those societies can be distinguished from the fancies of electronic literature by their ethical orientation, which made possible for the people to meet each other in the spaces of many common rituals. They were not closed in the “age” of one synthetic occurrence, but they entered common durations by resonating with multiple practical rhythms. This is why I cannot agree with Stephanie Strickland’s hope concerning the utopian worldwide collaboration around the MUD projects, because such union of participants—mediated in multiple ways and, for this reason, artificial—substitutes the practical connections between people at least as much as it facilitate them. Such collaboration could be effective, but it cannot compensate for the encounters in multiple spaces of practice. This is why I think that ethically it is not reasonable to compare MUD-s with the “literary” rituals of the ancient Greece or India.

 

2. Ergodic and extra-ergodic rhythms of literary practices

 

Fortunately, beyond the manifestoes and the quickie arguments of cyber-enthusiasts who posits the only up-to-day project of digital art as a historical-evolutionary necessity, the new forms of literature have more established theories as well, such as Espen J. Aarseth’s conception of ergodic literature. It is characteristic of this approach that it does not consider the relation between printed and electronic literature as a succession comparable with that of the old-fashioned floppy and the “future” BlueRay in media history:

 

As we shall see, the codex format is one of the most flexible and powerful information tools yet invented, with a capacity for change that is probably not exhausted yet, and I (for one) do not expect it to go out of style any time soon. (Aarseth 1997, 9.)

 

Or:

 

Whether concepts such as “computer literature” or “electronic textuality” deserve to be defended theoretically is by no means obvious, and they will not be given axiomatic status in this book. The idea that “the computer” is in itself capable of producing social and historical change is a strangely ahistorical and anthropomorphic misconception, yet it is as popular within literary-cultural studies as it is in the science fiction texts they sometimes study. Often, in fact, science fiction portraits the technology with an irony that the critical studies lack (see, e.g., William Gibson’s short story, “Burning Chrome,” in Gibson 1986). (Aarseth 1997, 14 –15.)

 

If, according to Aarseth’s suggestion, we regard cybertext as a version of the book-labyrinth or the computational extension of this version, I propose here a comparison between the so called ergodic practices of reading and writing and the forester extension of the space of literary practices. I hope I can avoid in this way to fall under the suspicion that I struggle to reinforce text interpretation as the only form of literary practice against electronic writing and reading.

Aarseth distinguishes ergodic literature following such extranoematical tasks of the reader, „that the various concepts of ‘reading’ do not account for.” (Aarseth 1997, 1). Unmasking the never reflected metaphorical use of labyrinth in the literary theory and criticism, he continues:

 

The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through topological structures of the textual machinery. (Aarseth 1997, 4.)

 

This is how we have to understand the previous definition according to which “cybertext is a machine for the production of variety of expression”. (Aarseth 1997, 3.) In what follows, I will compare Aarseth’s conception with literary practices in which the reader has not merely a choice between possible forms of the text, but he/she orientates himself/herself in spaces of different rhythms by practical (gestural) decisions. I have discovered that practices of paying attention that need no text can help in a very effective way such reading and writing; moreover, they could be the very reading or writing practices as well. In the Land-Rover Book camps[2] consecrated to these experiments, all these exercises were not implemented in order to provoke Aarseth, but in order to learn how can we orientate ourselves by gestural reading in the ethical spaces of printed literature as well.

 

Silent Night Tour

The campers sitting around the campfire turned towards the dark forest with fear, and started to speak about ferocious bears and wolves, then, accompanied by a nervous laughter, also about mean extraterrestrials. I was listening to them for a while, then I turned towards them as a practice leader: “I am going to tell you a secret: those terrifying enemies that you are now afraid of are not in the forest but in your minds affected by certain cultural influences. Now we are going to see what there is in the forest at night.”

From the moment of leaving the fire, we did not talk at all until the moment we arrived back to the camp. We tried to remain in connection through the rhythm of looking for the next step and through paying attention to the events of the forest at night and to the events of the expedition. Whenever necessary, we helped one another get through the obstacles.

The tour lasted for about three hours on a steep mountain slope covered by forest, up to the rock where we had in front of our eyes a great night panorama of the upper reaches of Someşul Cald. We did not use torches, there was no path in the forest, and the leader of the practice had not wandered over the field beforehand – he oriented himself according to what his eyes contemplating the region had recorded that afternoon. Of course, it was not the first time that he had set out for a night tour in the mountains.

 

Write/ Read a Perceptual Poem!

The participants are divided into groups of three: in each there will be a poet, a reader and a literateur. The reader is lying on his/her back on the grass, and reaches his/her bare arms backwards. The poet is collecting material for his poem around the camp (pine cones, barks, branches, fallen leaves, pieces of turf, stones, mud, water etc.), so that with their help he/she should produce interesting impulses on the skin surface of the reader’s forearms for about one or two minutes. The literateur observes the common ritual of the poet and the reader.

Of course the quality of the impulses depends on the improvised poetic “choreography” at least to the same extent as on the collected material.

The reader has to read the authorial urges as a perceptual flow, similar to a lyrical or musical duration; he/she should not strive to identify the materials used by the author.

The literateur pays attention to the fact in what way the motions of the poet and his/her materials turn into a perceptual flow on the face of the reader.

Everybody should try out all the three roles.

 

The Land-rover book

Every tenant of the camp will be given a one-page-long sequence for reading covered with transparent, waterproof folia. Then everybody will go for a stroll in a chosen area nearby the camp, such as a part of a valley or a foot of a mountain, a pasture, forest, clearing, lake shore etc. The pilgrims will stop several times and read the page over and over again, as if they were wandering in a land; and they will wander in the area as if he/she was reading a story.

Paying attention to the read sequence, everybody will make a “book-page” using materials he/she finds on the way. The longer side of the page has to be as long as the forearm of the carpenter, and the shorter one as his/her two hand’s span. Participants can use bark, resin, blades of grass or string to fasten the sheet on the prepared “book-page”.

In a former camp, somebody wove a grid of thin hazel branches with leafs and fruits. Here and there nuts could be seen arching over the written rows of the fastened sheet. Another carpenter made the spine of his book-page of a flat cow bone on which he fastened a four-sided frame of dry stalk. Somebody tied up cons creating rows, then arranged them in layers and fastened them on braces. A girl with long hair bound her sheet on a piece of plank with blades of grass and bark and put the arabesque of a cut-off curl between the paper and the transparent folia.

When all the pilgrims arrive back to the camp, they will lay down their book-pages one on the other, and at once, there will be an amazing book there. The order of its pages should be easy to change. For this reason we made a cover (or rather a ladder) of split laths and a steel chain and we simply laid the book-pages on it without binding them together.

The leader of the workshop will put this book under an old tree/ on a big, moss-grown stone/ on a stump in the forest. All participants will go on a pilgrimage there to read it from its beginning to its end detecting impulsive motions of attention in every sequence.

When everybody finishes the pilgrimage to the “reading-lands”, they will sit down in a circle in the “library”. One of them takes the book and changes the order of the pages: at the top he/she puts the land-page which is nearest to his/her own space for moving and thus it is easier for him/her to wander on it. At the bottom will be the page which is very far from the reader’s “land”, and thus it is very hard for him/her to follow those impulsions. The re-edited book will go around from hand to hand and everybody will try to get acquainted with the “rhythmic environment” of the editor. This time it is enough to turn over the pages and remember the “reading-lands” by reading several fragments. Readers have to pay attention to the editor’s orientation between the nearest and the farthest away practices in his/her space of moving.

Then the next pilgrim arranges the order of pages and the book will go from hand to hand again and again, until participants ramble over the rhythmic terrain of each one’s “countryside”.

 

According to the experiences of practice research the spaces of reading and writing are much larger and more multiple than the ergodic spaces of linear/ non-linear or unicursal/ multicursal labyrinths. The extranoematic behaviour cannot be reduced to the “eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages” (Aarseth 1997, 2.) in the case of non ergodic literature either. We have to deal rather with the fact that literary writing and reading get us beyond even the cyber space of information transmission or information feedback loop by such sophisticated (and therefore artistic) gestures of attention, which are not happening merely or necessarily in a physical space, but in the spaces of practical rhythms. If the qualified literary theoreticians focus—as Aarseth claims—on what was being read, Aarseth himself on what was reading from, then practice research follows events that occur when we read. In the case of the latter, it is not enough to observe, this is why experimental research is indispensable.

Let us find out how this literary duration-exercises modify the basic conception of ergodic (cybertext)/ non ergodic (narration) typology. I shall quote Aarseth’s description of the difference in its full length:

 

A reader, however strongly engaged in the unfolding of narrative, is powerless. Like a spectator at soccer game, he may speculate, conjecture, extrapolate, even shout abuse, but he is not a player. Like a passenger on a train, he can study and interpret the shifting landscape, he may rest his eyes wherever he pleases, even release the emergency break and step off, but he is not free to move the tracks in a different direction. He cannot have the player’s pleasure of influence: “Let’s see what happens when I do this.” The reader’s pleasure is the pleasure of the voyeur. Safe, but impotent.

The cybertext reader, on the other hand, is not safe, and therefore, it can be argued, she is not a reader. The cybertext puts its would-be reader at risk: the risk of rejection. The effort and energy demanded by the cybertext of its reader raise the stakes of interpretation to those of intervention. Trying to know a cybertext is an investment of personal improvisation that can result in either intimacy or failure. The tensions at work in a cybertext, while not incompatible with those of narrative desire, are also something more: a struggle not merely for interpretative insight but also for narrative control: “I want this text to tell my story; the story that could not be without me.” In some cases this is literally true. In other cases, perhaps most, the sense of individual outcome is illusory, but nevertheless the aspect of coercion and manipulation is real.

The study of cybertexts reveals the misprision of the spacio-dynamic methaphors of narrative theory, because ergodic literature incarnates these models in a way linear text narratives do not. This may be hard to understand for the traditional literary critic who cannot perceive the difference between metaphorical structure and logical structure, but it is essential. The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through topological structures of the textual machinery. This is not a difference between games and literature but rather between games and narratives. To claim that there is no difference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both categories. (Aarseth 1997, 4-5.)

 

The difference is clear. But to what extent is it relevant, if the practical decision of the reader made by his/her gestures is not merely a choice regarding certain variants of expression, but an ethical orientation in and between rhythms as spaces of practice? Maybe the task is not to clarify the spacio-dynamic metaphors of literary theory, but rather to change them into practical gestures. What about if the practice of linear reading is spacio-dynamic indeed, not only in a metaphoric nor in an ergodic sense? Gestural reading or writing can be practiced during the reading of a (non ergodic) narrative sequence as well as in a forest without any text. And the training in one of these practices—as confirmed by the participants of Land-Rover Book camps—helps a lot in practicing the other one, back and forth. Not because of common references or common meanings, not even because of common exercises, but merely because both make us trained in how to learn of an unfamiliar way of paying attention and how to change multiple ways of paying attention to each other. The possibilities offered by a mountain partly covered by forest are at least as much multiple, but in totally different ways, as the virtual offer of digital technologies or the ergodic offer of the cybertext.

If the reader knows that his/her road is prepared in advance, it doesn’t mean that he/she is safe in every respect. Following a path does not relieve somebody of orientation. On the contrary, he/she have to find that way by every step and to maintain himself/herself on it. Moreover, the labyrinth is temporal as well. One, who follows a road, never can know what will happen to him/her during the journey.

 

The Risk of Reading

The participants form pairs of authors, and everybody withdraws with their peer to prepare a speechless short story which will happen to the other authors as readers individually. They choose the scenes, collect the necessary accessories, and in the meantime they recall and tell each other gestures and motions in order to build up the time of reading from them. The stake is to make out how they can conduct their readers to a particular move without talking to them. The readers will assume the risk of reading: they will unconditionally obey every urge.

The reliance can be facilitated if the reader is blindfolded, and in this way he/she will be entirely dependent on the guiding impulses of the authors: for example, when they run with him/her on a rough hayfield, with sudden changes of directions; when they lay and roll him/her down on a slope of a meadow; if they lay him/her into a bed of mint and thyme, and cover his/her face with similar scented herbs as if forming a bedspread.

It may happen that in another story the reader who is blindfolded will climb up onto an old, bearded fir tree, and then back, in a way that one author guides his/her hands to suitable handholds, and protects his/her head from knocking up against branches, while the other one guides his/her legs towards reliable stands.

Such piece of reading may also be created, which starts by the reader’s putting on a swimsuit – following the example of the authors –, then an exciting water parade follows (blindfolded) in the stream: building a dike, researching the eroded riverbank, climbing a waterfall, floating, slow diving, then turning up on the surface. If there is a way, the authors can transport their devoted readers by a water cart to the end of the story: laying them on their back, they pull them, by holding their hands, to the safe port.

And who knows how many other stories “will be told” by the storytellers famous for their ingenuity?

The risk is easy of attainment. At a beginner level, it is a struggle with strong anxiety, at an intermediate level it is the security of determination. At an advanced level it is the richness of duration: the practice of the skill of following uncontrolled impulses, leaving behind our usual rhythms. While we let the time of the story flow, we will grow richer by practices that we can try out. The reading of risk teaches us to rely on the other person, as if he/she were us too, and to accept the fact that relying on ourselves is terribly risky. (See Berszán 2007, 24.)

 

Cyber-culture, even in its ergodic version underestimates following. If somebody follows a road is it really means that he/she(!) is impotent? Is it true that he/she cannot intervene? It doesn’t depend on him/her what happens during the journey? We cannot answer to these questions as Aarseth does, except we limit the space of action to the performative change. Such effectiveness can be less than all the other ones in comparison with which it is performative because it excludes any unperformative effectiveness, such as following, persistence, waiting, hospitality, getting back, keeping silence, calm and so on. If I don’t intervene in a performative way, I can orientate myself in many different ways of getting in touch with occurrences and none of them is less important than changing or modifying. The attentive gestures of following cannot be reduced to voyeurism alone, nor to observation, because they can manage to turn towards or looking after somebody or something as well, by them one can get practiced in a rhythm in which he/she was unversed before. The non ergodic or linear reading does not constrain me by withdrawing possibilities—it invites or attracts me to follow a stream of occurrences. I can try to transcribe the words, rows or chapters of a narrative at any moment, but there are narratives with such intensive rhythm that it is much better to follow them, rather than to transform their paths. It is not excluded that a journey I am invited to by a linear narrative is much more consistent as duration than a game of ergodic adventures. Not only building virtual labyrinths can be adventures, but any undertaking as well, by which I enter a wilderness that I cannot change or modify (I don’t want to either), but I must orientate myself in it (see the silent night tour or intensive rhythms of reading).

The practice of gambling is not the only practice of orientation, why should we follow him alone in the way (hodos) of reading-work (ergon)? The sense of the term ‘ergodic’ composed of the two Greek words can be opened towards other ways than those of unicursal or multicursal labyrinths. Isn’t it a kind of impotence in reading if we are not able to get out of one or two coercive rhythms, irrespective of the invitation received from a certain writing practice? The difference between ergodic and non-ergodic literature is not a difference between game and narrative, but rather between multiple games. Even ranging in a multicursal labyrinth is more than choosing a direction at spacio-bifurcations, because there are different rhythms as well, i.e. a labyrinth of times where we orientate ourselves by practical gestures.

 

Cybertexts share a principle of calculated production, but beyond that there is no obvious unity of aesthetics, thematic, literary history, or even material technology. Cybertext is a perspective I use to describe and explore the communicational strategies of dynamic texts. (Aarseth 1997, 5.)

 

That’s right: we distinguish the cybertexts of so many kind by a practice—calculated production—that is considered as generating certain type of texts and, in the same time, as the research of a communication strategy. Not surprisingly, the researcher of cybertexts is reading in the same way as the reader distinguished and followed by him. Their practice explains why cybertext is a machine generating variable expression and why the narrative appears as a special form of it. According to practice research, literary writing and reading cannot be traced back to one practice such as interpretation, rhetoric performance or calculated production understood as the gambler’s orientation. Writing and reading mean as many practices as many rhythms we follow during writing and reading. They are not closed in the space of linguistic texts or in the space of deconstructionist rhetoric, nor in the technological medium of printed or calculated text. This is why the theoretical attempts we dealt with earlier are problematic as well when they distinguish the electronic literature by placing the non-electronic literary tradition into one of such reservation.

I sustain Aarseth’s struggle to extend investigation on writing and reading to extranoematic gestures. Practice research makes more steps in this direction by deciding over and over again to not limit the new space gained for literary theory and criticism to the motions of several chosen practices, such as that of a calculating labyrinth maker, a gambler navigator (on internet), an interpreter, a historiographer or a politologist. Of course, this project depends as well on practical orientation: if we are interested in it, we have to give up a common attempt of any literary theory searching for a characteristic or distinguishing occurrence of literature in general—representation, communication, technological, cultural, social or historical construction etc.—in order to start a search for every motion that occur in the time(s) of reading and writing. This is why it is doubtful, in my view, to examine literature inside the digital age. At most, we can investigate digital age in literature, as far as cyber-occurrences become times of writing and reading. I do not mean that literature is a larger or higher category than the digital age; the turn I am speaking about here is rather a practical decision by which one, who is reading and writing, orientates himself/ herself by gestures and rhythms of paying attention rituals. We can call this proposal an ethical approach if we understand ethics as practical orientation in time(s).

I cannot end without paying attention to a sober minded warning of Aarseth:

 

Especially, I wish to challenge the recurrent practice of applying the theories of literary criticism to a new empirical field, seemingly without any reassessment of the terms and concepts involved. This lack of self-reflection places the research in direct danger of turning the vocabulary of literary theory into a set of unfocused metaphors, rendered useless by a translation that is not perceived as such by its very translators. (Aarseth 1997, 14.)

 

It is true that the theorist of ergodic literature refers to empirical fields related to the wide spread digital technology but why would it not be valid concerning practices of the Land-Rover Book as well? When speaking about gestural writing or reading in the forest do we not pass into the camp of irresponsible “translators”? I must recognize that until I am just talking about these ways of the reader’s or writer’s work, I am not above suspicion. This is why we need to be trained in such reading and writing practices that I presented above. An ethical approach to literature does not want to extend theory to new empirical fields, but to remove research from the discursive space of getting in touch with and making connections between occurrences into many alternative spaces by the hodos–ergon of gestural reading and writing. Instead of multiple variants of the text or the synthetic model of a material cybertext-machine and its operator, I am interested rather in the constituting or using their practices and in other practices that are not connected to them in a synthetic way, but have heterogeneous rhythms. They may not be connected only by functional, mediated or theoretical relations, but by practical passages as well that make possible alone to get from the time of one to the time of the other.

 

 

References

AARSETH, Espen J.: Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press 1997.

BERSZÁN István: Terepkönyv. Az írás és olvasás rítusai – irodalmi tartamgyakorlatok.[Land-Rover Book. Rituals of writing and reading.] Koinónia, Kolozsvár 2007.

ROSS, Terrence: Digital Text for the 21st Century: A Manifesto in Support the Marriage of Prose with Cinema. The International Journal of the Humanities, volume 6, number 1, 2008, 19–24. http://www.Humanities-Journal.com, ISSN 1447-9508

STRICKLAND Stephanie: Born Digital. 2009.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=182942

STRICKLAND Stephanie: Poetry and the Digital World. English Language Notes 47.1 218 Spring / Summer 2009. 217–221.

 

 

Notes