<HTML><TITLE>The Four Zoas as Fetishized Screen Memory</TITLE><BODY BGCOLOR="#008000" TEXT="#ffffff" VLINK="#00ffff" LINK="#FFFF00" ALINK="#FF8080"> <TABLE WIDTH=100%><TR><TD WIDTH=15%></TD><TD ALIGN=left WIDTH=70%> <H2><FONT SIZE=5 COLOR="#000000"><CENTER>Transformation: <br><i>The Four Zoas as </i> <IMG SRC="fetish.gif" ALT="Fetishized" ALIGN=absbottom> Screen Memory</CENTER><BR> <BASEFONT SIZE=5><CENTER>Using Blake's Poetry as a Model for Hypertext Design</CENTER> <P><BASEFONT SIZE=3> </CENTER></FONT></H2> If argumentative logic and the linear outline define the print paradigm, associative logic and the "link" are the hypertext equivalents. "HyperText provides the means for establishing an indefinite number of 'centers'," <A HREF="http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html">Jerome McGann</A> observes. "One is encouraged not so much to find as to make order--and then to make it again and again, as established orderings expose their limits." In attempting to design academic discourse for the Web, one is essentially seeking a decentered organization in which the link will perform the function served by the outline in the print medium--the configuration of information in an intelligible format. The challenge for our profession in this regard is one of theorization and design: How do we tailor a set of academic practices that are inextricably linked to the book to the space of the screen? <P> In considering this question, it is important to remember, as <A HREF="http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~gulmer/">Gregory Ulmer</A> suggests, that "the scholarly practices of our discipline evolved as part of an apparatus consisting of a language technology (alphabet and print), institutionalization (school), and subject formation (selfhood)." In this light, we can understand that "the shift in our language technology from the page to the screen is part of the emergence of a new apparatus that includes not only a new technology but also new institutional practices and new personal behaviors (subjectivation)." <P></P> In <i>The Four Zoas</i>, Blake seems already well on his way to exploding the paradigm of the page. The poem exists as a single, heavily revised, complexly visual manuscript never bound by Blake in any final order. Many of the pages contain sketches in the margins, or are written on the proof sheets for the illustrations Blake did for Young's <I>Night Thoughts</I>. While this material excess has made life difficult for its editors, the poem provides us, should we choose to embrace its difficulties, with an extraordinary re-visioning of the very idea of the book. As Donald Ault argues in <I>Narrative Unbound</I>, "In its naked preservation of the traces of its struggle to be (re)composed, <i>The Four Zoas</i> pushes to the foreground the productive labor of writing: it is a text that insists on its own radical heterogeneity, on its own struggle to be different from itself, indeed, ultimately on its process of eradicating a potentially unitary textual 'self' from which 'it' could 'differ'" (xiii). <P> In this example of transformation, we will suggest a provisional theory of hypertext design based on William Blake's <I>The Four Zoas</I> and offer some scenes from a longer experimental hypertext adducing this theory. Recognizing that Blake's text manifests a material and narrative excess that undermine any attempts at imposing the linear structures of rational reference on the poem, we find instead associative structures and sets of uncanny correspondences produced by a process best understood as a kind of <A HREF="http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~bruegg/fetish/fetish.html">fetish logic</A>. <p> What is at stake in reading the text of <i>The Four Zoas</i> is the very construction of subjectivity in language, with all the metaphysical and ideological consequences that attend it. Eternity, for critics like Erdman and Bloom, is what Luvah's signs are for Urizen, a fetish object used in mapping a system of unproblematic interpretation into a rupture that would otherwise expose a lack. This fetish object is called into "being" in order to interpret, but it is also always a screen that contains the traces of prior and future projections operating phantasmically to avowal and disavowal one another This process occurs <I>en abyme</I> in <I>The Four Zoas</I>, telescoping the magic of the fetish into every level of interpretation in the poem, implicating every character, as well as the reader, in its traces. In the process, the poem itself becomes such a trace revealing on a meta-level these fetishes to be nothing more than ironic simulacra of each other: the process of rational reference itself is shown to be structured by a fetish logic. The secret of the poem is not hidden by the screen, but rather <I>is</I> the screen.<P> The pun on screen here is hardly accidental. In this hypertext design, we have attempted to use the associative power of the link to create discursive spaces that operate in ways similar to the textual <A HREF="theory1.nassr.html">spaces</A> of <i>The Four Zoas</i>. In so doing, we have tried to position myself at the boundary between the libidinal and rational economies we take part in as a graduate student to create a criticism that both reveals and revels in our fetishes and the fetishes of others. The basic principle of the "Blakean" hypertext design is to disrupt and alter processes of linear reading in an effort to create an awareness of how our discourse, our very subjectivity, is structured by denials and repressions--and the ideological consequences of these disavowals. This is appropriate not only because Blake seems to have anticipated multimedia, but because of our own libidinal investments in the text, our academic fetish. <P> Taussig argues that as academicians, our identities are "implicated and imperilled in the object of study, in its power to change reality, no less" (253). That this fact is so often elided, Taussig says, is an indication of "massive cultural repression" at work. We have to remember that our own desires and identities are bound up with our objects of study, that our efforts to place these objects into an interpretive system are ideologically structured. In the project, we have tried to foreground this relationship by attempting to "react" with the poem, by unleashing what Adorno calls the "mimetic shudder" (qtd. in Taussig 253-4), proliferating associations in which "I" consume the poem and it consumes "me." We have fetishized the poem, as we all do with our objects of study, but we have tried to display my fetish openly, critically.<P> In <i>The Four Zoas</i>, we have seen how characters can create the spaces (both literally and figuratively) through which they journey . The narrative switches between these spaces in ways that corrupt their coherency--creating ruptures by giving <A HREF="theory5.nassr.html">voice</A> to synchronous and mutually exclusive narrative fields. We have attempted to construct an analog of this process for the Web by providing parallel, but conflicting discursive <A HREF="blakefetish.nassr.html">avenues of flight</A> for the reader, using links to interpolate the discourses so that the reader must move through them non-linearly. One of these avenues is a <A HREF="left8.nassr.html">fragmentary personal narrative</A> of a journey on Interstate 95 through a landscape of billboards advertising South of the Border (e.g., "You never sausage a place"). These billboards, which extend for hundreds of miles in both directions from the South Carolina / North Carolina line, feature a "Mexican" mascot named Pedro, who in a fake vernacular advertises fireworks and peach wine. By linking these narrative fragments to passages in <I>The Four Zoas</I> that describe <A HREF="blake1.nassr.html">Urizen's journey</A> through the empty world of Luvah, I attempt to associate this weird tourist trap space, this mecca of bad advertising, to the kind of "erroneous" spaces characters in <i>The Four Zoas</i> fall into and perpetuate. I am trying to suggest that Luvah's signs function like "billboards" for Urizen, that in reading these signs and interpreting them, he is drawn into a fetishistic economy, not unlike the economy touted on <A HREF="right1.nassr.html">Pedro</A>'s signs.<P> I have "written" this narrative on pages of the poem taken from the proof sheets for the illustrations Blake did for Young's <I>Night Thoughts</I>. Upon these illustrations, Blake superimposed blank rectangular spaces that literally function as <A HREF="left7.nassr.html">screens</A>, both in the sense that they cover important parts of the illustration and because text (whether Young's, Blake's or mine) can be projected on them. These pages seem to be literal realizations of the metaphor of the fetishistic screen memory, and indeed they function as screen memories in Blake's poem, haunted by the ghosts of erasures, additional drawings, and Young's text, as well as the illustrations they cover. I have tried to capture this idea of the screen as a place of flow, litter, and libidinal accretion in my project. <P> The other discursive centers of the project consist of a series of quotations taken from theoretical discourse on the fetish, a series of quotations from <i>The Four Zoas</i>, fragments of an essay I wrote on the narrative function of Luvah in the poem (some of the arguments of which are reproduced above), and a series of quotations from "outdated" criticism by Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. The <A HREF="right10.nassr.html">fragments from my essay</A> are written in the style of advertisements for my particular take on the poem, and each is placed underneath a picture of a South of the Border <A HREF="right6.nassr.html">billboard</A> advertising the process of fetishization to which I have subjected the poem. Each billboard is also a hypertext link that jumps to a quotation by <A HREF="outdat15.nassr.html">Frye</A> or <A HREF="outdate1.nassr.html">Bloom</A> chosen for being blatantly ideologically suspect. I did this both because the fetishes of <A HREF="theory6.nassr.html">the New Critics</A> are rather obvious and easily revealed, and to suggest that my essay, dependent as it is on the same structures of rational reference practiced in Frye and Bloom's work, is similarly suspect. The quotations from Bloom and Frye are superimposed over erotic sketches from the poem to suggest that their discourse is structured by repressed libidinal investments in Blake's text. <P> I hope that moving between these discursive centers functions to create an associative montage that, like a lane change in the tenth hour of driving, is both revelatory and anxiety producing. Hypertext links, like the fetish object, become locations where different discourses and ideologies are set in motion. Mine is an attempt then to organize the hybrid medium of the Web, not as a synthesis, but as "shuttling" (a metaphor implying a woven text) between multiple discursive positions and modes of subjectivation. To design for the Web, we need to open our discourse (the form our work is in now) to the excess reference not explicitly acknowledged by whatever argument we happen to be making. Thus, in my project I have tried to construct an associative link between the production of <A href="right11.nassr.html">traditional academic discourse</A>, the narrative processes of <A HREF="blake8.nassr.html">Blake's poetry</A>, and the <A HREF="left13.nassr.html">stereotypes</A> deployed by the fetishistic practices of advertising to suggest that they are similar in some important ways (the stereotype, like the fetish, is a short cut directly embodying an entire constellation of discourse). But in giving up the structures of argumentation, I have given myself over to a different mode of signification. The argumentative method would allow me to "prove" that these ideas reside in the text, but using the structure of the fetish forces me to open this assemblage of texts without stabilizing one particular meaning. The model of <i>The Four Zoas</i> shows us that in designing for the screen, we should take advantage of the associative logic of the link to unbind our discourse, to produce a subjectivity that recognizes itself as an emanation, a specter of the ideological forces acting on it, a self-reflexive identity constructed in the discursive interstices of the Web.<P> <CENTER><a href="workscited.html">Works Cited</a></CENTER><P> <TABLE ALIGN=center WIDTH=100%> <TR><TD ALIGN=left WIDTH=20%></TD> <TD ALIGN=left WIDTH=20%><H3><A HREF="nassrpedagogy.html"><IMG SRC="p.gif" WIDTH=78 HEIGHT=64 BORDER=0 align=middle alt="P">edagogy</A></H3></TD> <TD WIDTH=20%></TD> <TD ALIGN=left WIDTH=20%><H3><A HREF="nassrtrans.html"><IMG SRC="t.gif" WIDTH=68 HEIGHT=64 BORDER=0 align=middle alt="T">ransformation</A></H3></TD> <TD ALIGN=left WIDTH=20%></TD> </TR> </TABLE> <p></TD><TD WIDTH=15%></TD></TR></TABLE> <HR><br> <CODE><I>Designed and Performed by <br><A HREF="mailto:bruegg@ucet.ufl.edu">F. William Ruegg</A> & <A HREF="mailto:rbroglio@ucet.ufl.edu">Ronald S. Broglio</A><br>English Department, University of Florida.</I><BR></CODE> </BODY></HTML>