In response to the massive shifts in science and technology that accompany the industrial revolution, Romantic writers begin a process of reconceptualizing subjectivity and the social space it entails. Thus, Wordsworth defines the Lake District and the Leech Gatherer as mutually constitutive--an idea of space and selfhood set against industrialization. Blake's radical project of revisioning space, time, and being attempts to reconfigure Cartesian subjectivity altogether, a project made possible by his "infernal" use of technology. The shift from the page to the screen involves a new technology, as well as new modes of discourse and subjectivity. We aim to explore the strange correspondence between our own effort to design academic practices for the screen and the Romantic project of re-visioning the printed text. The continued predominance of print metaphors (as in "homepage") in the discourse of the Web indicates that these practices, and the modes of subject formation they might entail, have not yet been invented. As scholars of Romanticism, with a range of Romantic texts that seek to redefine textuality and the production of subjectivity at our disposal, we can be an extraordinary resource in inventing the new practices of the screen. Using the Web to display Romantic texts and using Romantic texts to shape our Web practices, we have set up a series of experiments or performances. Each performance works with a particular type of transformation immanent within a particular Romantic text. For us, the strange correspondence between contemporary work on the Web and Romantic work on print texts comes to life in transformation. A variety of forces come together in a nexus of textual figures. These forces are never static; they combine and recombine such that their changing relations transform the figures on the page. Transformation is not an example of "organic growth" so common in Romantic self-representation; rather, it combines divergent forces into un-natural couplings. We have liberated the monstrous, that which remains undemonstrable or too often unseen in print text. We use the Web as a field on which to reveal these transformations. By introducing motion and time into the text, we re-think textual stability. The projects we display here move at different speeds and glide across the screen in nomadic fashion. Furthermore, by combining forces which are normally kept separate, we re-think subjectivity. The changes we depict are not based on analogy between objects. Analogical thought is based on imitation. Imitation respects the boundaries between molar wholes while setting up comparisons between bodies considered separately, as entities unto themselves. It conceives of the body as a structural whole with determinate parts in stable interaction with one another. The model is the organism: a body is made up of parts (organs) with identifiable characteristics, supposedly intrinsic qualities, which predispose the whole they compose to certain habitual patters of action. (Brian Massumi A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 96) Transformation does not respect boundary lines and habitual patterns. Instead, fragments detach from the organism known as textual figure. These fragments call out to each other across a distance. Many of the transformations that we perform in this Web site involve deformation of textual figures and reformation of fragments to provide a new way of seeing the forces at work in the text. Becoming opens the organs to new dimensions, opens "the doors of perception," as Blake espouses. Instead of the same forces acting on a body for the same functions, new forces are applied so that the body functions differently or a new body is formed and so that no organs remain caught within the redundancy of identity. Analogy works by transcendence and abstraction while transformation, becoming-other, works by immanence. Becoming begins with the concrete particulars of the text and liberates and performs their local, immanent forces.

edagogy

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