Re: [-empyre-] re: Liquid Narrative Topos

["James Barrett" <jim.barrett@humlab.umu.se>]

I agree with much of what has been said so far, this makes for a quiet
discussion I suppose. Someone should be more controversial.

According to Aarseth?s definition, yes;

??cybertext demands collaborative process to exists in a truly way?

The problem I have with the Aarseth text is the line about ?non-trivial
effort? in the cybertext uptake. Reading a book requires more than trivial
effort. So does going to a theatre production, especially if it takes up
the discourse of performance such as those attempted by the ?Living
Theatre? (http://www.livingtheatre.org/) or La Fura dels Baus
(pre-Barcelona Olympics http://www.lafura.com/entrada/index2.htm) type
productions. But this is a part of the complex genealogy of cybertexts. 
To participate in the text is the difference, the need for a particular
form of agency on the part of the interpretant. These do not necessarily
have to be new media related it is just that with digital media there is
really is no copy and no original, just copious reproductions of
simulacra.  How it is entered into by the user/reader/listener/viewer is
never the same each time. Streams of recounting swirl around us everyday
in digital worlds.
So yes, Once again I agree:

??true cybertextual narratives are different because they demand an
immersion on a pre-appeared time by the reader. He needs to construct the
time that will be told, that is, he needs to construct the narrative
himself before he reconfigure this narrative. But this difference between
cybernarratives and non-cybernarratives isn't ontological.?

Fair enough, but then we come to the problem of process and becoming:

 ??collaborative process fundamental to discuss liquid narratives?

>From what I understand about the term narrative and the theory work around
it, there seems to be a fixed or static state to it. In the term ?Liquid
Narrative? I detect an attempt to enlarge the ability of narrative to
account for becoming or the movement and change of a performative new
media text. The basic framework of what could be one of many narratives is
created by an authorial entity and then those who engage with the
narrative materials (game, text, identity or image) have the ability to
create stories. But how many stories could there be? As many as copyright
allows? Even more I say.

I draw on Brian Massumi?s ?Parables of the Virtual?:
?Take movement. When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with
itself. It coincides with its own transition, its own variation. The range
of variations it can be implicated in is not present in any given
movement, much less in any position it passes through. In motion a body is
in an immediation, to borrow a phrase from Gilles Deleuze, is real but
abstract.? (Massumi 2002: 3).

New media narratives are bodies in motion. In relation to this is an
example I saw given by Henry Jenkins when he charted one image from the
?Bert is Evil? http://www.bertisevil.tv/ project all the way to its exact
reproduction in a newspaper image (analepsis?) upon a Pro-Al-Qaeda
demonstrator?s placard in Pakistan.
http://carlagirl.net/blog/uploaded_images/bert-725867.jpg (bottom right
corner). Jenkins spoke of ?Bert is Evil? (appropriation, detourment,
remix) and then proposed it as an example of charting the flow of a
cultural particle (someone suggested it was a meme but Jenkins said he had
doubts about the agency of a meme) through a series of media
manifestations on a global cross cultural scale.  This is how we do

??not take notes anymore; we make clips?

?Liquid narrative? is a paradox. Formalism meets non-form. Structure meets
flow. It does contain some seed of the infectious nature of stories and
language. I was thinking this morning if Elvis Presley (my 6 year old son
listens to him) could be described as a story teller (admittedly with a
very limited range of themes). The image of Elvis and all that went along
with it (cars, clothes, and attitude) is an early example of global viral
marketing recounted from Tasmania to Lapland by millions. The 2002
remixing of Elvis (Elvis vs. XJL) sends him round for another spin in the
21st century.

/jim
> <<As I have been recently reminded by re-reading Gerard Genette,
> ?Narrative
> does not ?represent? a (real or fictive) story, it recounts it ? that is,
> it signifies it by means of language ? except for the already verbal
> elements of the story (dialogues, monologues).?>>
> It is interesting how Benjamin and Genette seem to be close here. For
> Benjamin the narrator extracts what he tells from what was
> experienced: his own experience and the experience of others. And he
> incorporates the narrated material onto the experience of his own
> listeners.
>
> Interesting: it is the narrator that incorporates (that gives meaning,
> or meanings to?) the narrated material, not the contrary.
>
> This seems to indicate how there's a movement of intermingling voices
> (1) -- the voice of the person which lived the experience being told,
> the voice of the person that recounts this experience, and even other
> voices that speak through the words used, to evoke Barthes, Foucault
> and others that described language as a polyfonic process, where
> speech speeks whoever is in the position of enunciation. It is as if
> narrative would from a number of polyphonic processes, what makes
> clear how language is always ocurring between indefinitely figures of
> identity. (As opposed to the novel, where there is an effort to assure
> an authoritative voice).
>
> Devices such as the web and mobile phones transform intertextuality
> into something else -- by allowing us to recount (remix) sound and
> images, and also by allowing us to easily put sounds and images in
> circulation; so we are talking about a flow of text, image, sound and
> code, rather than a flow of text. We do not take notes anymore; we
> make clips.
>
> <<One of the features of this subjectivity is the immersion into a
> spatial recounting as part of their entry into or engagement with the
> narrative.>>
>
> a good example:
> http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/GeneralArts/proxy_en/www.zkm.de/futurecinema/fujihata_werk_e.html
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>


-- 
Doctoral Student, Umeå University
Department of Modern Languages/HUMlab
+46 (0)90 786 6584
HUMlab.Umeå University.SE-901 87.Umeå.Sweden
Blog: http://www.soulsphincter.blogspot.com
HUMlab: http://www.humlab.umu.se/