Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture

namely, that the technology of letters could be exploited for an array of artistic ends. As well as literacy, the printed word could generate literariness.

Literariness, a term coined by formalist critics, refers to those qualities of language use that make “a verbal message a work of art” (Jakobson, 1966, 350). Given that literature uses the same material, for artistic purposes, that we use everyday for communication and in other pragmatic, non-artistic contexts, it clearly mobilizes specialized devices that in one way or another deviate from “normal” language use (such qualities, of course, are omnipresent in so-called common use, and for this reason the very notion of a norm from which the literary is a departure is a questionable one). As perverse, often complex manipulations of language use that we take for granted, literary devices, or codes, made us look at language in new ways, seeing it as something strange and performative, rather than familiar and instrumental. Such qualities were much easier to identify on the spatial layout of the printed page, which facilitated more complex literary composition through the ability to see possible signifying relationships between individual words.

The specialized devices of Elizabethan poetry alone were prodigious in number, as Rosemond Tuve demonstrated in her monumental Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947). Many of these, such as the rhetorical, or extended argument, made considerable demands upon the attention of listeners, and as a consequence required close, detailed scrutiny as written artifacts (a tradition of close reading that survived well into the second half of the twentieth century in the teaching of English literature). It is important to remember that the idea that writing is polysemic and capable of generating multiple and varying meanings was implicit in Socrates’ reflections on the techne of inscription, which conceived of writing in terms of dead authors, openness of interpretation, and the agency of the reader. Writing, for Socrates, was “a defenceless living thing, a son abandoned by his father” (Derrida, 1981, 145). In the absence of a father to come to its defence, writing is orphaned, le misérable at the mercy of whoever chances upon it. The realization, then, “that texts are unmasterable, and will return new answers as long as there are new questions, new questioners, or new contexts in which to ask questions,” (Attridge & Ferrer, 1984, 8) was made well before hypertext came on 167