Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perpsectives on Ergodic Literature

The "textual machine" is interesting to me in several ways, but before getting into those, I'd like to offer a little background to the way the idea of said machine is set up. Aarseth argues on page 20 that "a text can never be reduced to a stand-alone sequence of words. There will always be context, convention, contamination; sociohistorical mediation in one form or another." If asked to place this concept theoretically, for what else do readers do if not categorize and divide, I would see materialist leanings, a hisorical bent, and probably group Aarseth among poststructuralism (generally). His emphasis on context and convention as well as mediation might support my reading, but he also mentions "contamination." In order to understand the concept of contamination, there first must be something pure, some whole and stabile form that is recognizable as such. This form can then be contaminated by what is not that form. If I again try to locate Aarseth theoretically, I am now not so sure about the materialist leanings or the poststructural view, though the historical bent could still be arguably true depending on what one did with that history (and what would constitute history at all). He goes on to argue that distinguishing between a text and its readings is necessary, though impossible. While I understand that the distinction is an ideal, a fiction, I am not sure that it is necessary. Poststructuralism continues to function, after all, while expanding the notion and limit of text and collapsing the binaries of text and reading. So I am left thinking Aarseth is a closet structuralist, one who would rather not deal with what could be but only what seems to be the way things are.

Aarseth writes (a little further down on page 20), "the meaning of text used in this study is closer to philological (or observable) work than to the poststructural (or metaphysical) galaxy of signifiers." I am once again troubled. Now I don't want to argue for theoretical purity, but there are some important distintions that he is blurring here (offhandedly) and also some implications. First, philological and observable are aligned with "work," while poststructuralism and metaphysical are aligned with some random "galaxy." Why the former is seen as doing work and the latter is not is troublesome. Work is a powerful metaphor, and not one empl;oyed without choosing sides. Why signifiers are constituted in the metaphor of "galaxy" is both unclear and not a fair comparison, as if observation occurred in a vacuum. Second, poststructuralism is aligned with metaphysics. I'm not sure what Aarseth is (or rather, isn't) reading, but a major project of poststructuralism is to deconstruct metaphysics, and since he cites Foucault and Derrida... Then he goes on to say that he uses "text" to refer to a whole range of phenomena (though this assuredly is not a galaxy of signifiers), a rather poststructural move, although he leaves out other important elements of text.

As for the idea itself, the textual machine, I think it is valuable in that it identifies the medium, something I've been pushing at in our readings. That said, I'm not too sure what its other uses are. I need to give this more thought, but my first impressions are