Cuts and Holes

Notes in Summary of Terence Harpold's Article

Hypermedia and Literary Studies - "Threnody: Psychoanalytic Digressions on the Subject of Hypertexts"

Turn toward = away = around

The different names for the turn describe not only a trajectory but also the contour of a place you will never get to

Divisive effects enacted on the speaking subject

Erasure of subjectivity

Knotted vs. linked

"Lost in hyperspace" - lose place as participant - how will the path be maintained?

Narrative excesses : footnotes, marginal scrible [ paratextual] = equalized in hyperspace

Detours are what hypertexts are about

Holes in the web

Subject - speaking, writing, reading

A speaking being, marked by the symbolic

Lacan - signifying chain marked with a cut that divides signifier from signifier; subject from what she talks about, subject from herself.

Initiaion into language / being masked by language

The Subject assumes meaning [position in the symbolic; fabric of language] by the signifier which takes her place

Inter-dit = gaps = that which cannot be said - another place you cannot get to :
[synchronic; off frame within the frame] + lost story [ diachronic]

The gap ridden structure of the hypertext makes explicit the underlying gaps in the fabric of language, in which the subject is constituted.

Obssession - unsaid - the basis for the detour Reader/ analyst - read detours to see what is there unsaid

"Lost" = lost the unifying force of framing / positioning of self

Turn - return (obssession)

Freud: obssessional thoughts are characterized by severence of the connection between parallel, opposing and related ideas. The place it cannot get to - mortality.

Erasure

Suture - Jaques Alain Miller - closing the gap in language; an illusory bridge (Beckett) = A knot.

***