Machines and language... Language and machines...
The relation between them, as addressed beautifully by Foucault, is what I will explore here. But what
do I mean by “here”? That is the main question. Is this a paper? Is this text? Is this space? Is this time? Is this is an image? Is this television?
Is this language? Or, is this a machine? I can not answer that now,
hoping that hopping back and forth through this project will give some
sort of answer to that interrogation. So, I will call this simply a project.
In this project I will be developing the sketch for a theory of hypertext. I will not start from scratch. I will use as my point of departure the arguments about the question of narrative in the social sciences addressed by Clough and Seidman. Special interest will be placed on the Modernity/Postmodernity debate, in order to understand the configuration of Modern narrative. I will also employ other referents like poststructuralism and deconstructionism, and two writings from Julio Cortazar (which I will approach neither as an aestetician nor as a literary critic, but as a technichian of writing).
In order to be understood (is difficult to abandon completely to that ideal) I will be working on the same technology which I am theorizing about. How can I write about hypertext using traditional technologies of writing? In social science’s writing experiments the authors put themselves into their narratives bluring the dichotomy inside/outside of the text. As said by Clough (Clough p. 23): “[t]hese writers do not place their writings outside the network of transmission.” In the same way, I will be trying to make clear that this project is not about a technology which is somewhere outside, but about this technology, the one in which this project has been constructed. . After all, “There is no outside-the text.” (Derrida cited on Merquior p. 220)
One of the principal goals of the project is to address the relationship between culture (using the cultural practice of reading/writing) and technology by stating that they have become so interwoven that is no longer possible to approach one without approaching the other. Therefore, contemporary Cultural Studies -either as a topic, a methodology, or a discipline- should take seriously into account "the question concerning technology."
About the Question of Narrative
Je dois m'adresser à vous en anglais