Reusement: Jerome Fletcher
At E-poetry, May 2007 in Paris, I presented a digital text piece entitled "Reusement,"which was based on a Java applet. This was the latest in a number of manifestations of this program which I developed in collaboration with programmer, Toby Holland. Previous versions of this work have been largely image-based whereas this was almost exclusively text-based and what has emerged from it are a number of research questions which are outlined sketchily below.
Reusement consists of a number of jpeg’s (35 in all) which are arranged in a pre-ordained sequence. Each layer can be accessed in turn by holding down the mouse and moving a square shaped cursor of variable size over the screen. Wherever the cursor moves it reveals areas of the layer ‘below’ the one visible – the effect is not unlike a coin removing the top layer of a scratch card. The user can ‘remove’ as much or as little of each layer as they wish before moving on to the next. What is revealed at each turn is a fragment of text, sometimes in English, sometimes in French. These fragments are taken from the first chapter of Michel Leiris’s autobiographical work Biffures (Scratches). The whole digital text is bilingual although there is an asymmetry between the French and the English texts.
The paper I want to present would engage with some of the problematics of reading such a digital work. These revolve around three related clusters of ideas:
- Composition and decomposition
- Reading/Writing/Performativity
- Decadence, the fragment and decay
1. Accessing this text engenders a tension between a process of composition and one of decomposition. The work is constructed in such a way that the composition of a new fragment of text often entails the decomposition of a previous one (although it is not obvious whether the process is one of erasure or overwriting). I want to examine this in relation to decomposition, the second process in Derrida’s ‘metaphorology’ and to Cixous’s notion of unerasing or unearthing.
2. When accessing …Reusement , it is not clear whether the user is engaged in a process of writing or reading. Does the user compose the text as they move the cursor over the screen or do they simply reveal a pre-existing text? Or are they enacting a pre-existing score? Or is this process more fruitfully thought of as performance rather than reading/writing? I want to relate this piece to my idea of what constitutes performance writing.
3. I would also like to open up the debate a little by looking at Calinescu’s ideas on decadence and its relationship to Modernism around the notion of the well-wrought fragment. …Reusement is a fragmentary text, exacerbated to the point of decay. The link between decadence and decay returns us to the notion of decomposition at the head of this list.
It may well be that there will not be enough time/space to develop all three elements. So this proposal can be reduced in scope if necessary.