Dene Grigar begins by detailing the challenges that current archival practices pose for preserving electronic literature. Examples from various library collections and experiences with preparing works for archives in her own lab help to foreground the problems needed to be solved.
If we are to follow Paul de Man’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Task of the Translator” , the translating process, far from being an attempt at totalization, further fragments the already fragmented pieces of a greater vessel, "die reine Sprache", or pure language, which remains inaccessible, and stands for a source of fragmentation itself. The work exists only through the multiple versions it comprises. As claimed by Walter Benjamin in « The Task of the Translator », a work always demands a translation which is both an alteration and a guarantee of its perpetuation : "(…) it can be demonstrated that no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife -- which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living -- the original undergoes a change."
Quite similarly, the hyperlinking process on which electronic hypertext relies defies totalization as it keeps fraying a textual fabric that is bursting at the seams and begging for an endless recomposition which points to the seriality inherent in the concept of translation. Each reading is akin to a versioning of a text that remains ungraspable as a whole.The cognitive overhead any attempt at holding all the threads in one hand would most certainly cause confusion for the translator/reader.
The inaccessibility of the work as a whole etches out a ghostly body of text, a blurry halo that haunts the margins of each lexia notwithstanding the underlying layers of code. I would like to contend that the translating process may be construed as a form of archiving as it involves a necessary selection which is also a destruction of “the original” text paradoxically meant to ensure its survival as the translated fragments migrate into a new spectral body of text spliced with updated strings of code enabling its performance, or becoming-text. Reading/translating afternoon, a story is akin to being caught within an infinite feedback loop which exacerbates the iterability of any textual form in its very performance. Each attempt at translation can be interpreted as a terminating condition which interrupts the potentially infinite loop on which afternoon’s performance is based and thereby offers transient islands of stability in a sea of proliferating and monstrously hybridized possibilities, each time begging anew for a redrawing of the limits of the wor(l)d.
An imagining of an electronic compendium of the archives of an ancient civilization.
The aim of ‘PO.EX '70-80: A Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Literature’ (http://po-ex.net/) is to represent the intermedia and performative textuality of a large corpus of experimental works and practices in an electronic database, including some early instances of digital literature. This paper shows how the performativity of digital archiving and recoding is explored through the remediation, emulation and recreation of works in the PO.EX archive. Preservation, classification and networked distribution are also discussed as editorial and representational problems within the current database aesthetics in knowledge production. (Project reference: PTDC/CLE-LLI/098270/2008).
Every writing addresses someone; this someone is often said to be the author's Ideal Reader. But "ideal" connotes a conceptualized, even perpetrated entity that is an entirely different creature from the real person one addresses when speaking. Now it may be useful to make this distinction in order to discuss, in the abstract, the *process* of writing, but the *practice* is wholly different: in writing anything, you address a real person, and, by addressing, conjure that person into your presence — the "materiality" of this being is, well, immaterial. When a real reader (in contrast to an ideal one) takes up an author's writing, she encounters not a voice speaking to *her*, or not to her directly: she comes in on a conversation already in progress, between the author and the person he is addressing in the writing. Given a sense of the occasion she has just joined, she will wisely keep still at first and pay attention, not just to the author's voice, but also to the silence of the other person listening to him at that moment. Thus she comes to know them both. The Authors who speak in _We Descend_ emerge from a span of many generations; what they have most in common is that their Writings have captured the imagination of one Curator after another, each of whom came to feel urgently that "the archives" must be preserved for, and thereby transmitted to, the generations to come. In addition, each Curator has imprinted the archives with the forethought and care he or she took in provisioning them for this further journey — hence the Apparati built into the structure of the Writings' presentation, which then become part of the story. The present Curator feels strongly that this story is best told in hypertext form, which enables its many voices to resonate with one another in many ways. The Reader herself will judge the strength or fault of this approach, of course, but, throughout, it has been this Curator's earnest intention, in every contrivance, to prepare her way into this ongoing colloquy of persons, which now includes her. As work proceeds upon the remaining fragments in the archives, the sequence, structure, and interface of their presentation are all certain to change, and even when that work is finished, it is likely that some disagreement will remain as to what belongs where or came from whom. Be that as it may, it is hoped that this provisional offering will find favor not only with new readers, but with the patient friends and colleagues whose unfailing encouragement has been necessary as breathing to me. Thank you, my patrons. Bill Bly Bethlehem PA US New Year's Eve 2014 (Foreword, We Descend Volume Two)
