Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

elation between cyberspatial redaction and the labours of authorship:
we can stop to consider the extraordinary usefulness of an instrument which can provide us with
not only different readings of a text, but also with the possibility of being able to grasp the
progressive coming into being of a text, considering all the aspects
it contains or implies, an instrument which which can equip the reconstructed text, as far as
possible, with its various layers, each one worthy of being read. This is by no means a simple
operation, given the often insurmountable difficulty of identifying the precise moments and
chronology of corrective interventions on the part of an author, but one which can certainly be
realised at the level of the macrostructure, and this itself can facilitate the successive work of
sectional restoration. 15
Having shuffled off its apocalyptic airs, hypertext might facilitate editions which combine genetic
criticism, manuscript variants, source studies, histories of the textus receptus etc., and in a
technology which permits unprecedented scope and readability.
One need not pause long to recognise the altogether greater benefits of constructive
collaboration with an authorial document rather than pseudo-creative linking. Hypertext enables
the representation of links. Broadly speaking, these links will be made in the diachronic and
synchronic spheres. In the former case, the value of those links will depend on the coherence of
the field in which links are made; in the latter, value will derive mainly from the competence and
intelligence of the linker(s). Nothing is much changed in conceptual terms by the passage from
print to digital culture: the difference resides in the literalisation that hypertext provides of these
operations. As Georges Poulet reminds us, a book is not just an object among others: it gains its
essential life only when read.16 No text is 'a space that resists all intrusion'17 and the only closed
text is one that has never been opened. Once read, a book has a life beyond its physical or
authorial confines, and that life is always interactive, even when the reader lives with the memory
of the book, constructs him or herself as the dialogic counterpart of its author. At this stage,
hypertext vividly illustrates the complex network of processes by which an active reader reads a
work: it provides an external correlative for patterns of thought established in a culture of print.
Proponents and visionaries of the new discourse would do well to emphasise these continuities:
the genius of hypertext resides in its unprecedented facility for making exterior mechanisms of
consciousness which have been developed over the millennia since the invention of writing. Here
one would want to add to the interiorisation thesis a related thesis of exteriorisation.
The radical argument for digitalised writing depends not upon hypertext as external technology
but upon its capacity to restructure human consciousness with an revolutionary effect comparable
to the interionisation of writing. Yet, even if accredited, the interiorisation thesis proscribes that
such restructuring takes place over many centuries of psychic adaptation to the new technology.
When one considers how radical Augustine found St Ambrose's habit of silent reading, it is clear
that writing was long considered the servant of vox, just as it was more common to write down
than to write in an intransitive fashion: only with the advent of print culture did it become
customary to proceed from the silent signifier to the concept signified and without the mediation of
the voice. 18 In projecting an interiorised digitalisation, the radical hypertextualist argument
comes too early. If writing was only slowly and jaggedly interiorised as a constructive component
of the human psyche, then one may not speak of the interiorisation of hypertextual technology
from this matinal point in its history. Thus the digital argument again appeals to possible and
projected futures, to a culture where digitalisation has been thoroughly interiorised as a
component of the human psyche. The stronger argument—acknowledging also the ease and
celerity with which culture has embraced digitalisation—would see the new technology as an
exteriorisation of cognitive processes developed in a culture of writing. The capacity of the literate
mind to establish links and intertexts is itself the foundation upon which a technology of linking
has been established. As Hillis Miller points out, Georges Poulet's Les Metamorphoses du Cercle
is a proto-hypertextual operation, and one of great distinction since Poulet's unique cartography
depends not only upon sublime connections but also an elegant selectivity.''19 The book maps
both the image of the circle and the mind which maps that image's recurrences. Equally, the
impressive work of reconfiguration undertaken by Roland Barthes's S/Z may well prefigure
hypertextual deconstructions, but the worth of this exposéof 'natural' narrative depends upon the
critical brilliance of a Roland Barthes. To this extent, the most (and 'most' is here a great deal)
that can be said about digital technologies is that they exteriorise those synthetic and analytical