figures of manipulation

Like most authors of digital works of the narrative genre, Gregory Chatonsky is opposed to the idea that plots should be written according to the novelistic traditions. His hyperfiction entitled The Subnetwork is no exception. For the clash of heterogeneous media in this work to produce a ‘community of metaphors’, as opposed to a dialectical reasoning or a conventional narrative, every single media must be indifferently compatible with each other. Occasional relationships are thus established between different worlds, different parts of individual and collective history, which highlights a more fundamental relation of co-membership, where heterogeneous elements are always likely to assemble according to the ‘brotherhood of a new metaphor’ (Rancière, 2003, Le destin des images. Paris: La Fabrique, p. 67). The range of metaphorical brotherhood yet widens in The Subnetwork, through the introduction of animated texts and the possibility that readers are given to ‘manipulate’ (interact with) the work. Using a semio-pragmatic methodology developed at University Paris 8, I will first examine in detail the construction of meaning in these combinations between texts and movement or manipulation and their relationship with the contexts in a reading process. Digital literature often experiments with unexpected combinations based on a (de-)coherence between text, movement, and manipulation gestures, called animation figures and manipulation figures: I would situate a part of the poetic potential of digital literature in these ‘spaces of indeterminacy’.

On the basis of electronic literary works, we can identify specific rhetorical figures in interactive writing: the figures of manipulation. It is a category on its own, along with figures of diction, construction, meaning and thought. For example, the figure of appearance/disappearance (responding to an action of the reader) is as a key figure among the figures of manipulation. What is emphasized in such figures is the coupling action/behavior, which could be considered as a basic unit in interactive writing. This coupling can be conceived independently from the medias (text, image, video) it relies on. Thus, it seems relevant to have an a-media approach when defining an art of rhetoric in interactive writing.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

For some time, critics tried to circumscribe the “novelty” of digital literature in rather generalist terms, either taking into account its relation to literary avant-gardes or focalizing on its technical features; these theoretical approaches were often blind to contents. Now that digital literature seems more and more aesthetically convincing, the time has come to define its stylistic features with more precision. In order to circumscribe the poetics of interaction, some authors tested the validity of the classical figures of style. It is, however, probably dangerous to use classical rhetorical terms intended to characterize textual phenomena, whereas the signs of digital text almost constantly refer to different semiotic systems (including the visual one). In the following pages of this article, I will sometimes continue to borrow from conventional taxonomies to describe the stylistic devices of digital literature, and I will try in other cases to invent a new terminology in order to avoid foolhardy analogies.

Whenever the program of a work, created by an artist, is run by a computer, the digital device necessarily plays a role in its updating process: because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, the digital device may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project, or even make it unreadable on screen. Thus, readers do not know what they should consider as part of the artist’s intentionality, and what they should ascribe to the unexpected changes made by the reading device of their personal computer. Critics who are in keeping with a hermeneutic approach may ascribe certain processes, actually caused by the machine, to the artist’s creativity. What is more, authors lose control over the evolution of their work and the many updates it undergoes. Thus, the “digital” artist is given four options when dealing with the lability of the electronic device, which will be described in this article by close readings of The Dreamlife of letters by Brian Kim Stefans, Revenances by Gregory Chatonsky and La Série des U by Philippe Bootz.