| Techne: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology by Louis Armand Prague: Karolinum/Charles University Press, 2003. ISBN: 80-246-0391-8. 226pp. available from shakespeare & sons, abebooks or directly form Karolinum Press, AUC: distribuce@ff.cuni.cz |
| "Techne is the first major attempt to think the relationship of poetics to technology & hypertextuality in the work of James Joyce. At once a history and critical theory of ‘Joycean hypertext,’ this volume represents one of the most significant recent contributions to the discussion of Joyce’s ‘techno-poetics’ and to the philosophy of discursive materiality." extract: TECHNE: JAMES JOYCE, HYPERTEXT & TECHNOLOGY PREFACE: INSTIGATIONS So This Is Dyoublong? Hush! Caution! Echoland! [FW 13.04-5] While this study is concerned with the question of technology in its relationin its relation to the work of James Joyce and theories of hypertext, it is also, and more specifically, addressed to a concept of technology arising from the language of Finnegans Wake. Drawing upon developments in communication theory and information technology, this study attempts to map a parallel development in Joyce's uses of language in the Wake, arguing that Joyce's writing provides a model for re-thinking the relationship between technology and "all forms of cultural production." The purpose of this is not, however, to suggest that Joyce was necessarily in some way cognisant of a future possibility of hypertext, nor is it simply concerned with a retrospective glance at Joyce from the position of current computing technologies. Rather, it is to examine how Joyce's work is aware of its own position against and within contemporary developments in the sciences and electronic media, and that Joyce incorporated material from these developments into his texts. Consequently, this study is concerned with the ways in which Joyce's text can be said to solicit hypertext: from constituting a non-sequential writing, to deploying itself as a type of textual apparatus or machine, to motivating a type of hypertextual genetics. The question here centres on the notion of solicitation-the extent to which Joyce's text can be said to both call for and motivate a hypertextuality irreducible to a stable field, or placement, whereby a text could be defined in relation to a structural episteme. At the same time solicitation is shown in Joyce's text not to be merely an affect or even a strategy of writing, but rather as something inherent to language itself. Amongst textual theorists who have engaged with the notion of solicitation, the one whose conception of language is closest to Joyce's own is Jacques Derrida, for whom "Joyce's ghost is always coming on board, even in the most academic pieces of writing." Derrida's work on and with Joyce has been extensive, beginning in 1962 with his introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry, although most of his work has taken the form of a "haunting" where Joyce appears to stand behind Derrida as a writerly éminance grise. Joyce's "ghost" may be said to animate a certain deconstruction from both within Derrida's writing and on the margins of that writing, as what we might call the figure of solicitation (both paradigm and deus ex machina of the Derridean corpus itself). In his 1963 essay 'Force and Signification,' Derrida relates solicitation to an implicit lability: Structure is perceived through the incidence of menace, at the moment when imminent danger concentrates our vision on the keystone of an institution, the stone which encapsulates both the possibility and the fragility of its existence. Structure then can be methodically threatened in order to be comprehended more clearly and to reveal not only its supports but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but lability. This operation is called (from the Latin) soliciting. In other words, shaking in a way related to the whole (from sollus, in archaic Latin "the whole," and from citare, "to put in motion"). Situating this concept of solicitation within the context of twentieth-century philosophical discourses on technology, it is possible to elaborate a number of implications for hypertext which touch upon our fundamental understanding of language. One of the more significant texts in this regard is Martin Heidegger's essay, 'The Question Concerning Technology,' which in many ways provided the initial theoretical impetus for this book. Heidegger's notion of enframing is seminal to the understanding of how hypertext can be thought as operating across the assumed boundaries of the semantic field, as well as all other fields of signifying convention. Among the issues that arise here is how the solicitation of hypertext would mark, as Samuel Weber puts it, a way "in which the 'technics' of Heidegger's quest(ion) entails the destabilisation of such fields," and how this solicitation as a general bringing-forth might be regarded simultaneously as a function of poiesis and of technics, both "originary" and mechanical production, reproduction or repetition. In other words, how this solicitation would describe what Joyce terms a "paradox lust," operating somewhere between the concepts of techne and logos. Similarly, in light of the various recent developments in the application of computing science within the field of Joycean scholarship, the question arises as to what it might imply if we were to approach hypertext as a particular technology, as technological-what the word "technology" might signify in the context of Joyce's writing practice-keeping in mind Heidegger's assertion that "techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic." As this study comprises a more or less transverse exploration of Joycean hypertext, the discussion itself, or rather the various notations assembled here as prefatory to some future discussion, will unfold topically. In this process, certain theoretical approaches will be examined in greater or lesser detail, but the actual study will be shaped along lines consonant with the demands of Joyce's writing and in accordance with the structural tropology implicit to a basic conceptualisation of hypertext itself. Broadly speaking, however, this study is orientated around three key objectives. Firstly, to trace the historical development of communications technologies in the context of Joyce's writing-taking into consideration the broad philosophical and sociological impact of technology at the time in which Joyce was composing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Secondly, to trace some of the effects of communications technologies upon scholarship generally, and upon Joycean scholarship in particular. And thirdly, to investigate the ways in which technology per se is involved in a "communication" with Joyce's language in Finnegans Wake. Hence the purpose of this study can be elaborated as follows: 1. To outline the historical necessity of considering Joyce's writing in terms of technological development in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe-thereby placing Joyce within the context of such writers as Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Marinetti and so on. The question here, however, is not simply one of historical contextualisation, but of mapping the development of a particular contemporary poetics which can be shown to be bound up with the evolution of communications technologies and with the impact this evolution has had upon language in general. 2. To investigate ways in which technology has effected aspects of Joyce scholarship. The question here is twofold. Firstly, how such "technologies" as hypertext have provided a means of presenting annotated works, archives, and genetic texts. And secondly, how these means have provided insights into the structural logic of Joyce's language itself, particularly with regards to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. 3. To attempt a critique of Heidegger's formulation linking technology to poiesis. The point of departure here being the question of the structure and unity of the Wakean "figures" H.C.E. and A.L.P. These are seen to function alternately as "acrostic grids," "desiring machines," "strange attractors," and so on, which mark out points of intersection or communication between otherwise non-communicating textual elements. This question involves further issues of identity, myth and the technological-mechanical basis of signification, in terms of what we might also call "genetic strands." This "genetics," however, may be seen to disappoint a general hermeneutics, investing the logic of the "genetic master key" with a type of viral flaw. For this reason it is a question of situating the hypertextual condition of Joyce's writing as something belonging to, and solicited by, a Joycean poetics, and not as a set of normative procedures imposed from outside. As Heidegger suggests, "not praxis but poiesis may enable us to confront the essential unfolding of technology." © 2003, Louis Armand Louis Armand is Director of Intercultural Studies at Charles University, Prague, and the Prague James Joyce Centre. He is the Editor of Hypermedia Joyce Studies (founded 1994) and the PLR (Prague Literary Review). View links to other online publications on James Joyce and Hypertext theory by Louis Armand. |
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