Excerpts and Entanglements
Johanna Drucker
For the Document Academy meeting in Berkeley, SIMS, August 13, 2003
What is a document? To answer this question, I’ll move through discussion
of examples that engage critical, theoretical, and practical concerns.
Otto Ege, early 20th- century philanthropist,* famously, infamously, scattered the leaves of medieval manuscripts that these authentic treasures might provide pleasure and instruction to a broad and geographically distributed public. The virtual aggregation of such dispersed rarities beckons on the current horizon as our new grail. Holy indeed the possibility of having one's page and sharing it too, with all the world, their grubby hands kept at the safe distance mediated through pixels, display resolutions, and the elaborate delivery system of the World Wide Web. But what is the document? Each leaf and page? The whole intact? Some original condition? The newly remade partial aggregate? Each, of course, and none.
*(Dean of the Cleveland Institute of Art, Lecturer on the History of the Book at the School of Library Science, Western Reserve University, 1888-1951).
What is a document? Unanswerable as posed, the question supposes a definition suitable for use in an instrumental, management mode. Subject to critical inquiry, the question dissolves. Gets more interesting.
We can enumerate an elaborate typology of kinds of documents -- objects stretching the bibliographer's dream into a nightmare confrontation with items that stink, soak, and expand the protocols physical, material decorum the way Isidore Isou's 1960 "book" Chaos (Le Grand Désordre) does when "shaken free" from its concealing envelope into a scatter of cigarette butts, detritus, ephemeral debris, and other trash meant to insult the reader's expectations. Literature? Letters? Try litter-a-ture and sign/sing a different tune.
Stretching the definition of a document along a material axis offers its own challenges to the structures of belief, the conceptual axes that shoot through any point introduce another set of warps in our understanding.
Try this: No document is self-identical.
That tenet of belief, repeated innumerable times in these last few years conversation with Jerome McGann at UVa, suggests exponential possibilities.
But how can we understand the non-self-identicality that comprises the field of inquiry we take to be a document?
We'll see, ultimately, that any notion of a "document" has to get replaced by an idea of reading as interpretation. But I hope to lead you there by a diverting route. From fragments and excerpts to objects and artifacts to quantum poetics, patacritics, and radical constructivist approaches to cognition.
All documents are fragments. Let's begin with that premise. Excerpts. All works are partial -- almost in inverse proportion to their appearance of completeness. Bibliographical studies taught us this. The great goal of recovery -- of authorial intention or of the genealogy of a text through the traced history of its material manifestations -- these are mere surface features, distractions, the one ill-conceived and the other excruciatingly executed. As McGann, and his contemporary, Donald McKenzie, demonstrated dramatically, texts are social productions, not the work of individuals. Authors, we know from our French lessons in deconstruction, are themselves socially and historically created artifacts, the projected identity that arises from texts, rather than the author-itative source and origin of them.
Ok, you nod, all knowing in your well-learned agreement. Sure, All language is found language. All texts are social documents. Authorship is are a fiction. Identity is a mere feint behind which are the machinations and workings of a historically and culturally situated subjectivity. Ho hum. Yawn. Been there, known that. So why fragments? As a paradigm? Thee attempt to take a part from a document raises immediate questions about the “whole” we assume.
We like to think we know a fragment when we see it. The torn edges, ragged signs, announce the violent separation of the piece from its source. The excerpt, by contrast, sits with sound-bite perfection on the page, neatly, surgically extracted from its site of origin. The excerpt suggests a reductive modularity, capacity of discourse to be broken into consumable bits. David Moser, cited by Ruth Laxon, says "Quantum particles are the dreams stuff is made of." Do I need to know more? Or even the full source? The citation. I have only the secondary source, Laxson, to cite -- and the words of Moser appear in their brevity with a pretense of epigrammatic completion. All we need to know, to read that phrase, is bound up within it. Or so the excerpt says.
But how many texts are impervious to excerption? Trying to cut a crucial, telling phrase from the work of Paul Virilio's Vision Machine I found the task impossible. Deciding to test this (remembered from last year's teaching experience) perception, I opened Virilio at random, as per divination (rather than strictly scholarly) techniques. Lo and behold (you must admit, such language IS appropriate under the circumstances), the section that came to hand was uncannily appropriate to our topic. So, here is a sample of this un-sample-able prose:
Already at the beginning of the century, particularly in the United States, scraps of news film lying about the cutting room floor were no longer systematically swept up, "lost scenes" to be automatically incorporated into any old bit of junk that could be salvaged by the garbage collection, or, at best, the cosmetics industry. These began to be seeing as "viewing matter", recyclable within the film industry itself. (p.50) (Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1994)
Something is missing. But the curious fact is that the more one goes on and extends the quote, the more the "missing" appears to extend.
Once that happened, background reality re-surfaced, with blazing fires, storms, catalcysms, assassination attempts, crowd scenes… but above all, a mountain of material of military origin. These authentic documents, often judged at the time to be of no immediate interest, suddenly cropped up in the middle of feature films. Such subliminal sequences
–I'll break off. Rather than helping close the elliptical loopholes in the text, the added bits just increase the sense of absent information in the ever-more porous framework of allusion and reference.
The tissue-networked-fibrous-(oh, okay, say it, rhizomatic) nature of his prose doesn't permit excerption. That revelation led me to consider the distinction between excerpt and fragment, and hence, to the beginnings of thoughts for this paper.
Embedded and entangled, that, I thought, is the real condition of the fragment. And the excerpt. Let’s just think about this. Fragments announce their dependence on their source. The language of Marjorie Levinson's study of The Romantic Fragment Poem (Chapel Hill and London: UNC Press, 1986) is peppered with vocabulary conspicuously aware of this condition. She describes the fragment variously as "damaged," "incomplete," and "unresolved." The very condition of "irresolution" is a defining characteristic. Hers are Romantic fragments. and their particularity resides in their discursive claims to intentional fragmentary-ness (as well as the larger cultural context of celebration of incidental and accidental fragments). As Annie Janowitz has shown in her complementary study, England's Ruins, an ideological agenda was well served by this form, since the fragment, like its physical counterpart in the landscape, the ruin, provided an image against which presumptions of empire as whole and inevitable would be legitimated. The decay that engulfs the crumbling edifice suggests that the culture which is eroded is a part of nature and that Britain as an entity is an ancient as the geological formations to which such ruins appear to be about to return. (Anne Janowitz, England's Ruins, London and New York, Basil Blackwell, 1990).
Surely the fragment has a self-conscious character in the Romantic period, serving to provoke the melancholy strains of loss and nostalgia so utterly essential to the age. Fragments became the very image of the "damaged condition of Romantic poets" who followed Frederick Schlegel's edict that though the "works of the ancients have become fragments, the works of moderns are fragments at their inception." Schlegel wasn't speaking allegorically, but literally, about the production of poems deliberately embodying what another authority cited by Levinson–one Edward Bostetter-less than charmingly described as "extrinsically induced deformation of structural intention." or, to put it another way, works that weren't finished even from the start. The implications of such an approach are more than decorative. We're not just talking about bits of statuary strewn about the garden to create a sense of an antique past whose decay is the foil to the fresh hopes of new youth or the impetus of empire. Though such descriptions are apt for the scene, they don't pull back the curtain on the rhetorical aim of the romantic fragment. Which, in fact, struts on stage with the intention of disrupting claims of completeness,not just incidentally, by making works whose openings are left off (Wordsworth, began his poem "Nutting" on a "hemistitch" (a "half-line" an "open link") thus presumably leaving his meter hanging, its connecting wires sprouting like so many conspicuous chin bristles on the otherwise aesthetically well-formed work., that it might "provoke …an interpolative reception." (p.61)
Of course, fragmentation is its own well-formed-ness and the art of creating bits of poesy that suggest they belong to a once whole work requires its own virtuosity. Just as the condensed language of a personals ad is meant to conjure, through the compressed iconography of its SWF, dancer's body, seeks mature companion for romantic interludes, walks in the rain, and candlelight dinners, an entire lived life indexed through this tiny inventory of handles. Yes, the Romantic fragment is an artful piece of text, deliberately showing what we now know to be the case of all work(s) that they are to be read, as Levinson puts it "against an ideal integrity and extensiveness" through acts in which the readers "mentally complete" the piece by generating missing parts.
As you do, here, following the zig-zag path of illogic in the stepping stone progress of this talk, characterized as it is by what (citing Levinson again this time citing Pierre Machery) can be termed an "determinate insufficiency" in which "incompleteness shapes the work." (p.197, Levinson). But my work, this task, my demonstration essays to exhibit not what Shelley referred to as "a lost and anticipated perfection" -- that missing whole that gave the fragment birth -- but rather, the persistent irritant of (Macherey again) "incompleteness in itself" as the "true reason for its composition."
Why?
Well, because I'm intent on showing that that modern moment, quaintly antiquated as it may seem to be, marks the point of rupture with any objectivity for textual production or for our ”getting hold” of the text or document as an object. Subjectivity, Rossetti's famous "inner standing point" for experience, again reiterated regularly in our Virginia context by McGann, shifts the textual horizon from one whose coordinates are mapped against the constant sky to one which redraws endlessly from the point of view of the beholder. Linking our current work to the ruins in Romanticism, extending that fetishization of the fragment, we can find real use for this form and its ideas. The associational links between anything and anything are kept under constraint in many reading tasks. Not surprising.
After all, many of the ways we have of reading and thus constituting a text are bared in approaches and attitudes towards scripture. Whether we know this or not. Secular society, tending to believe in rational autonomy, forgets in us our inheritance of scholasticism as it morphed into scholarship. Sure we've changed. But what remains? Evelyn Tribble, writing of Robert Melanchton, a 1598 cleric advocating Protestant reform, notes that he declared a new mode of reading:
"Now away with so many frigid, petty glosses, these harmonizings and disharmonies and other hindrances to the intelligence, and when we shall have redirected our minds to the source, we shall become suffused with the blessed nectar of divine wisdom." (p.11) (E.Tribble, Margins and Marginality, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1993)
Melanchton's argument was with Church doctrine, and the habit of creating extensive glosses in the surrounds of biblical text so that any individual reading was meant to be filtered through this consensual discussion of the learned, as Thomas More would argue, since the lay person might well get God's word wrong. The "central argument of reform-minded humanists," Tribble says, was to "clear away the frigid petty glosses' of scholasticism, return to the source, and there experience the unmediated truth of scripture. The pure text reads itself–or rather, produces a moment of epiphany which erases the historical moment of reading."
How unlike our current impulse, so pre-Socratic and Heraclitian, in which we imagine that we never dip twice in the same textual stream that indeed the stream itself is reconfigured when we look away -- as Jerry is fond of saying, citing the inimitably unreadable George Spencer Brown's obscure opus The Laws of Form, "A equals A if and only if A does not equal A". We are all circumstance and situated-ness, subjective projection and inter-subjective mediation and exchange, seeing our texts engaged as instruments for communicative intercourse even as they offer their own "content" of genetically coded material.
And yet, the notion that "the pure text reads itself" is persistent in the garden variety of positivist approaches, to the poetic, the historical, and the logistical document. How much do we want the fabric of meaning to disintegrate searching in a desperate moment for a plumber's number in the Yellow Pages? How caught up in means when ends seem instrumentally urgent? Charles Bernstein, playing with these (all too often disappointed) expectations towards poetry, wrote in the poem "Thank You for Saying Thank You" in Let's Just Say:
Each line,
word, & syllable
have been chose
to convey only the
intended meaning
& nothing more.
Now I have a list here, of examples that shall follow:
Bibles
Burnt Boethius
Meres
Laxson
Voynich
So, let's see what these offer to our already radically dispersed image of the document:
Bibles: Tribble makes a wonderful demonstration, in Margins and Marginality of the ways the physical appearance of the page participates in these assumptions about the authority of the text document. I'll reduce her subtle argument dreadfully, but she begins with the page of the Glossa Ordinaria, a "standard commentary on the Scriptures produced in the twelfth century." We see here the textual apparaturs at work the mode Anthony Grafton characterises in The Footnote as an "instruction for reading" -- an exhortation towards a particular intepretation of the text. She constrasts these with later editions, in particular the Great Bible produced in English under license from Henry the VIII in 1539, has perversely done away with the gloss while leaving an indicator of the places in the text at which it might relevantly be inserted. These hanging hands, printer's marks, stand at the ready, like dead hypertext links, suspended and impotent. They mark an absent argument, suppressed through a combination of economic, logistical, and doctrinal reasons. "At those places where a hand appears…. the reader is enjoined to make 'no private interpretation thereof..'" The greatest fear of the English Church being that individuals might produce "private readings" in defiance -- not of spiritual authority -- but of the control asserted by the state over church matters for which they held authority. Tribble's excellent discussion details the correspondence of typographical appearance and attitudes towards authority -- contrasting the polyglot complexity of the Glossa Ordinaria with the vertical hierarchy embodied in the Great Bible. Precluding access not only to the actual gloss but to its possibility, the Great Bible shows dramatically the extent to which the page has become the site of contested authority. The document is clearly fragmentary, and yet, can't be reconstituted through any of the acts of reading offered by the text left present.
Margins were once a space of dialogue, affirming or subverting the passages in the text. Paraphrasing Tribble, again, they offered manifest evidence of different glossing traditions -- that of the exegete ("informed reader"), the insider ("privy to the secret meanings of the author"), the glozer ("obfuscating and distorting”), or other, rarer types -- such as the anagrammatic reader decoding the possible structure of a text in esoteric ways. (Tribble, p. 75) But each of these modes of reading persists, however unmarked they become as the conventions of print gradually absorb the glossed text (so easily rendered with pen in hand, or added to in palimpsestic adumbration). But unmarked, they appear to disappear. The smooth page of the Gutenberg bible, printed in harmonious grey, even and even to this day a masterwork of printer's craft almost inconceivable under the technical circumstances, is the absolutely perfect image of the authoritative page, the scripture that seems to speak itself.
At a radical other extreme, texts whose material condition is fraught with damage, use, wear, tears, tatters, the weight of their history showing as frayed edge or even worse -- water damaged or burnt. Kevin Kiernan's study of the "Burnt Boethius," tells a story of a text so complicatedly transmitted through two very different artifacts. The first are charred fragments of a 10th century mss., in the British Library (Cotton MS Otho A.vi) the "only surviving copy of the Old English prose and verse translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy by Alfred the Great (871-99)" severely damaged by fire in 1731, of which little remains legible. And the second a transcription by Francis Junius, done in the 17th century, with interleaved and linked fragments of prose and poetry which match neither in length or details of their content. The figural opposite of the Great Bible, whose central text is present and all its commentaries missing, this text is absent in its original centrality but rendered by the tangential bits that describe that aporia through their many approaches to it.
What is the document? And the text? Never the same as each other. We read and the work is called forth, provoked. Junius's transcription may well have attempted to get at the actual content of the work, but as in the child's game of whisper down the lane each mediating act, we know, introduces its own encoded specificity. This need not fall into the realm of error, but the encoding matters, making of the text a new work. That's just the physical reality of transmission. Each embodiment is an interpretation. The creation of a "document" however, much as it depends upon the materiality of that textual substrate, is a more complicated matter yet.
Gary Meres' in Dead Man's Trail, an artists's obsessional bookwork produced by Nexus Press in 2003, shows the principle of excerpted entanglement in one extreme -- the collaged pages bespeak their original sources by the memory invoked in their typography, but also, by the deliberate effort to communicate the processes of extraction and recombinatoric art. Words, here, are shown to be all found, and the document created never out of whole cloth, even at that level of material production, but always as the product of circulating currency, language in the stream of human communicative exchange, captured and cut-up for re-use. The condition of all documents, to connect back into their source code and material history, only in Meres' case, as, more elegantly, in that of Ruth Laxson, the traces that betray that process beg for the Frankensteinian condition of text production to be seen as a metaphor of subjectivity. Language speaks us, the old deconstructionist theorists used to say, If Meres makes his gothic tale a pastiche fictional document, crafted from the hideous necrophilic remains of a vast corpus of pulp prose, an artifact of creepy dark-night adolescent angst and psycho-pathological textual cannibalism meant to create a frisson of grade B horror, then Laxson's borrowings are of another order altogether. Serious poetics struggle with the place of subject in history and historical subjectivity. Yes, language speaks us, she says, but we are human after all and the role of aesthetics is in the registration of that process in which critical decision making can be marked. Her document, crafted out of bits and pieces, connects more directly to those lyrical poetics from which we started, ages ago, with Shelley and Coleridge and Wordsworth, marking their human condition as one of continual irresolution, of their poetics as a constant coming into being of a work.
But all these textual bits, with their artifactual richness, would still present only part of the argument in which the concept of the document is given its fuller exposition. Why?
Here is fragment of an analytic work. The work under scrutiny? None other than that great mystery of unsolved manuscripts, The Voynich Mss. Still a puzzler, baffling scholars of all ilks and ages, the original work is in an encrypted code, indecipherable, if possibly legible through a complicated process that may or may not yield the secrets of what is, by all accounts, a strange alchemical treatise. The mss. is too complicated in its history for dicussion here, and any Google search will lead you to the current state of obsessive scholarship, but I cite and show only one outstanding example interpretation. To use as turning point. To shift our discussion towards its final aspect. For here you see an image of a few words in the Voynich manuscript analyzed by the scholar William Newbold. Newbold became insanely obsessed. And his scribblings here are his record of study of what he thought was micrographia, the code within the code of the illegible signs of an unreadable text. Breaking these glyphs down he saw the signs within, and rendered them discrete in order to recode them yet again. Newbold's approach, at the micro level of analysis, was a projected vision of hermeneutic possibility. The chimera of meaning, ever more elusive as Newbold proliferated his vocabulary of signs, became the endlessly conjured partner of his relentless pursuits. Meaning could not be mined, here, like ore, any more than it can in any first year literary studies class in which the document disappears and thes tudents struggle to pour content out of the bucket of the page. But the embedded condition of meaning is here made strakly evident. The signs are rendered with a violent thrust of the nib into fibers and the eyes follow each hairline turn into an ever more detailed engagement.
An apt place to turn my discussion towards its end. The current consideration of "the document" at the intersection of new processes of interpretation. For these include the most pressing and real of logistical problems. Real problems. Those of electronic documents and digital surrogates, aggregates, virtual and simulacral. For if Newbold's capabilities for multiplying possibilities of meaning were in some sense limited by the optical tools available, then in the pixelated condition of digital storage, the lower limit would be minute indeed. The issue of scale is important, and all the more as the very processes of migrating traditional materials into electronic formats is always fraught with decisions about the constituent elements, the granularity of description. Text/document tensions were evident from the outset – as per Howard Besser’s early discussions of the painful effects of ASCII entry on a work. Is it necessary to indicate pages within an electronic document? Or refer to it as a whole? If the format is PDF then are lexical units of any significance? If it is in ASCII then where are the margins? If the white space is rendered in fascimile then how accurate need a transcription be in making the arrangement of line breaks correspond to an author's original? Forget intention. I'm just talking description. But description IS interpretation. No “object” exists outside of cognitive construction. The simplest of problems raises a host of practical considerations and a wild bunch of theoretical questions, demonically batting the air around us as we try to resolve apparently simple issues like: What is the right unit for the "lexia" of the game space? If we are, as we are, importing texts into e-space, then should they be chunked into elements that correspond to a paper-print-based original? to their electronic condition? And at what level of granularity? Paragraphs, words, sentences, characters? Every answer has its own objections.
We encounter these problems and many others, in our current project Ivanhoe. An electronic environment for critical studies, Ivanhoe is conceived in full recognition of all the theoretical dimensions I've alluded to thus far. But also, its dilemmas are only likely to resolved by following yet further along other pathways.
Which are? Quantum theory. Patacritics. And cognitive theory of a radical variety. These three together shift the ground. An object in a quantum frame is created through an intervention, doesn't exist a priori. Patacritical modes of interpretation, grounded in Alfred Jarry's Pataphysics, the science of exceptions and imaginary solutions, alerts us to the particular rather than the general nature of all phenomena. And radical cognitive theory makes clear the dynamic relation between stimuli and the capacity to process information according to evolving models, or frames, of understanding–circumstances of co-dependent arising. Such an approach is systems-based, not empirical or positivist, and doesn't allow that documents pre-exist the capability of a beholder to conjure them or to be provoked into a relationship of meaning production in the proffered field of potentialities.
Ivanhoe. our field of inquiry for this research. These few slides -- map schematically some of these concerns.
What is a document?
How do we read?
How could embedded/entangled intepretations be enabled?
What are the elements of the interface design?
What are the possibilities of screen space?
Patacritical demon -- a discourse intervened within a dynamicfield of potentialities.
You'll ask, what was the argument of this paper? I'll say, it was the demonstration of a associational method,a para-pata-critical approach to the topic, which scatters and relates through links of thought and readings, the question that was supposed to be at the center: What is a document?
That illusion of an area created at the intersection of overlapping frames -- the historical and social references, the projections of the reader, provocations of the text, constrained conditions, and potential responses, within a poetical field. Embedded, not like a nugget in earth, capable of extraction, but as a knot in a skein, of and in the tangle that makes it. Excerpts ARE entanglements, the followed threads are material and cognitive, procedural and dynamic.
An artifact offers an illusion of stable ground on which to focus a projection that gives rise to an interpretation. A document is a set of contingently configured possibilities, a text is an encoded set of instructions for reading, an artifact is a material object that provokes and calls forth an interpretation. Interpretation intervenes in that quantum field.
Ivanhoe we are asking questions of presentation and interpretation through interface design: Would we write differently if we wrote through the page, on top of, and behind it? If the lines of associational thought were spatialized as axes to display those interconnecting links? And if the document were formulated from within that field, rather than presuming to stand outside it? The condition of indeterminacy from which the act of perception intervenes gives rise to a document as constrained condition within a textual field, an artifactual one for sure, but also, a theoretical one, critically constituted and cognitively produced.
I don't see a simple, positive material fact when I look at a document, I see fields of shifting relations momentarily stabilized in an artifact that exists in a continuum of temporal and spatial and quantum dimensions, only constituted through the framing acts of intervention.