Textual Closure (Formal)
Formal closure is a property the printed text exhibited, at different pre-modern moments, by the text as a complete and unified whole, bound in the format of the printed book. The contemporary spread of the computer's digital text has opened texts to change and modification, which has profound consequences for the textual work as an aesthetic entity. Comparisons with the digital text are instructive, as the digital text brings to light technological qualities which compose the printed book but have been rendered invisible by over 500 years of circulation.
Contents
530: Roman Legal Administration
Cornelia Vismann
Work: Legal codex - Distinguish from scroll
Representative figure: Roman Emperor Justinian I
Emergent whole: writ and force of law
Figure: Father, murderer 'mother literature'
Medium and function: the codex. Compilation, indexical (digital); as compared with the radically serial (analog) scroll
Literacy: functional protocol as social norm
Closure (Opening?): Implicit truth of codex-codified protocol
Agency structure: Legal administrators hold agency through law; subjects are compelled to conform
1800: German Bildungsroman
Friedrich Kittler
Work: Bildungsroman novel - distinguish from law, which is literal?
Representative figure: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Emergent whole: unity of fiction novel
Figure: erotic, primal mother - and indulgent child
Medium and function: the bildungsroman novel, the scientific treatise. The serial aesthetic, or scientific whole. As compared with 'random' aspects of compilation codex.
Literacy: Alphebetization
Closure / Opening: Unity of subjective experience realized in imagination
Dynamic: Authors hold agency through 'works'; yet subjects are enabled to 'hallucinate' these in imagination in any way, and to derive pleasure from this experience
2000: Computational Sociality
N. Katherine Hayles
Work: Clustering dynamic texts
Representative figure: Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia
Emergent whole: Materiality of digital text - a heterogenous clustering unity?
Figure: Universal motherboard "of us all"
Opening (Closure?): Computation as fluid, but with infinite memory
References
Barthes, Roland, [1971]. “From Work to Text,” from Hale, Dorothy (ed) The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000. Wiley-Blackwell. Print.
Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. 1997. Print.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2005) "My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts." The University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Print.
Hesse, Carla (1996), "Books in Time," pp. 21-36. From Nunberg, Geoffrey (ed) The Future of the Book. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1996. Print.
Kittler, Friedrich. (1990) Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Stanford University Press: Stanford. Print.
Miah, Andy, (2003). “(e)Text: Error… 404 Not Found! Or The Disappearance of History,” Culture Machine, Vol. 5. Text available at: http://www.culturemachine.net.
Thompson, John B (1981). “Editor’s Introduction,” pp. 1-26. From Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Print.
Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford University Press: Stanford. 2008. Print.