Looping lexia, nested notions and viral versions of theory. He says, she says, all within what I am trying to say. I cannot say where their thinking ends and mine begins. An original contribution to knowledge or a re-combination of knowledges to form different patterns. I propose a patterning of vertical connectivity, laminated surfaces, many ideas at once, pattern as rhythm, heard in the head. I've long harboured the title for my imagined magnum opus—a one woman show called Every Book I’ve Ever Read, All At Once.

It is important to note that John Cayley’s aurature is not about sound in general—using sonic material instead of language—but is very much focused on the aurality of the word, and its live generation. Of course, the ability to synthesise speech from text has been around and accessible to any Mac computer user for decades via SimpleText. My first live sound performance, Watch Me Type (2002)◊ involved live improvised writing experiments, using the SimpleText voices to speak them. I wanted a mediation between me and my text, neutralising my embodied subjectivity in order to concentrate on the aural. I ceased that mode of performance rather quickly because I knew that the sounds of the SimpleText voices were too heavy with association. Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997) had already rendered the “computer voice” a too-well known trope. What I really wanted was a synthesised version of my own voice. While there have been several projects exploring personalised voice synthesis, there has been hesitancy due to ethical issues of deep-fakes.* Finally, in 2021, a relatively easy way of synthesising your own voice appeared. Easy but not free. To use this feature requires the Pro Descript subscription so I currently pay $50 per month to maintain the synthesised voice version of myself, while I wait for a time to use it. Perhaps now is the time.

◊ See ficto-critical module (ii): Listening to My Listening

* Just recently the synthesised voice of the deceased travel writer and chef Anthony Bourdain was used to complete voice-overs on a documentary about his life. It was met with outrage from certain people.

Radiohead. (1997). OK Computer [Album]. Parlophone and Capitol Records.

With Gregory Ulmer we see the way in which the ficto-critical is drawn to the mediated. He combines the subjective, the social, the theoretical, the fragmentary, the intertextual, the associative and the ambiguous. His emphasis on Roland Barthes’ punctum, the sting that occurs when experiencing cultural works, could be seen as the rupture that Stephen Muecke suggests occurs in the negotiation of concept and percept in ficto-criticism (2002).

While Ulmer began the notion of the mystory in printed form, his eyes were squared, focusing on the televisual and a new way to theorise that might align the expectations of high and low cultural thinking. His aim is “to translate existing theory into the vulgate of television, and to devise a new video essay capable of doing the cognitive work of future theory” (Ulmer, 2015, p. 65). The term mystory is not simply a form but an attitude. In a mystery/story, we don’t yet know the answer, and for Ulmer, this is how theory should be expressed, highlighting a sense of discovery rather than reasserting the already known.

Muecke, S. (2002). The fall: Fictocritical writing. Parallax, 8(4), 108–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/1353464022000028000

The whole rationale of theory is to contextualise your own thoughts while ripping thought out of its context…Rather than disguising this fact ficto-criticism revels in it treating theory as “a found object meant to be toyed with” as Jean Randolph puts it (1991, p. 15). This is not to succumb to relativism, but to create the possibility of new interpretations that may differ from the predominant male European canon. By transparently admitting the rupture of context, we are given the opportunity to question the context of context.

A keen reader may notice that the Benjamin reference above says “Find source text”. I did have intentions of doing so (have done so infact), but I think that leaving this reference in draft form, makes the point rather poignantly.

Randolph, J. (1991). Psychoanalysis and synchronized swimming. YYZ Books.

Child psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1986) proposed that thought and speech exist in an overlapping zone, but that there are two separate syntaxes in operation. There is a syntax of the spoken word, and a “grammar of thought” (p. 222)

Inner speech is almost entirely predicative because the situation, the subject of thought, is always known to the thinker. Written speech, on the contrary must explain the situation fully in order to be intelligible. The change from maximally compact inner speech to maximally detailed written speech requires what might be called deliberate semantics — deliberate structuring of the web of meaning. (p. 182). ◊

Of course, as Ted Nelson proposes, many ideas can be interrelated in a way that defies linearity, so is there always an inevitable tension between the sequentiality required in sentence structure and the structangularity of thought?

◊ See ficto-critical modules (i) Listening to My Listening & (iv) Listening Lingua

Vygotsky, L. S., (1986). Thought and language (newly revised ed., A. Kozulin, Ed.; E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Trans.). MIT Press.

Remember site maps? No one seems to bother with them these days, except perhaps the Scalar platform◊ built by The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, which offers several different visualising tools to see the lay of the land. I’m aware there is a tension, perhaps even a contradiction, which arises with my thought figure of tomography◊ ◊ that attempts to undo the desire for a bird’s eye topographical understanding of theory, and the visual representations of some e-literature works that rely on a site map. Ted Nelson envisaged a multidimensional system of connective points, what he called “Th3: a thinker toy in three dimensions” that he believed would only be understood by “multidimensional concept freaks”. It comprised three-dimensional projections of writing drafts viewable “on the faces of a cube” (Nelson, 1974, DM p. 55). While I am nowhere near enough of a “multidimensional freak” to fully understand Nelson’s notion, I do consider a tomographic “map” not as a horizontal understanding but as a vertical excavation exposing the layers below the surface.

◊ See Scalar website

◊ ◊ Adapted from the medical sciences, tomography describes processes of taking multiple scans from within a body, then reconstructing the form through compiling them. I suggest that writing about sound and listening may benefit from a tomographic approach in which specific aspects from within the experience can be compiled to consider the whole.

Nelson, T. H. (1974). Computer lib/Dream machines. Self-published.

Rosalind Krauss (1986) declared that paraliterary texts interrogate the textuality of the text. Jay Bolter concurs:

Deconstruction and the other post-structuralist techniques, such as those of Barthes and the reader-response critics, aimed to refashion techniques associated with the printed book from within the technology. On the other hand, electronic writing remediates print itself—that is, it seeks to refashion print genres and forms from the perspective of a new technology. (2001, p. 182)

For Katherine Hayles the key to this recursive re-examination of print is through interrogating the technologies that manifests the textuality of the text. The levels of interrogation multiply. As Alva Noë (2016) proposed, art is a strange tool, the premise of which is to question sensory procedures and conceptual organisations. Like the Hindu myth of the turtles that support the world, art comprises questions, questions all the way down. This irresolvability, the endless self-searching, is what causes those who are afraid of the destabilising power of questions to criticise art as self-indulgent. But it is only through asking questions that anything is learnt. This is the reason children at a certain age adopt the litany “but why, but why, but why?”—all the way down.

Bolter, D., J. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd edition). Routledge.

Krauss, R. (1986). Poststructuralism and the paraliterary. In The originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths (pp. 291–296). MIT Press.

Noë, A. (2016). Strange tools: Art and human nature. Hill and Wang.

For Espen Aarseth the writing machine is the text that occurs between writer and reader, which in case of cybertexts involves a feedback loop: “cybertext shifts the focus from the traditional threesome of author/sender, text/message, and reader/receiver to the cybernetic intercourse between the various part(icipant)s in the textual machine” (1997, p. 22). However, for him this is much more about a function than materiality, claiming medium is not definitive. Katherine Hayles agrees with the notion of the textual machine but argues that medium cannot be left out of this, in this way the ephemerality of temporal screen text may still take on a materiality, through its machine manifestation and the metaphors that this brings into circulation.

Aarseth, E. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Johns Hopkins University Press.

The 1980s and ’90s were all about hype. It wasn’t just in hypertext but the whole area of “new” media. Jacked up on cyberpunk and snorting the white lines off the information super highway, new media’s enthusiastic hubris was its own worst enemy. Many experiences of both hypertext and new media were dissatisfying. We could glimpse the potential of the future but the technology couldn’t yet deliver it, as we whistled along to the beeps and bleeps of our 56k dial-up modem and waited five minutes for an image to load. Like George Landow, Jay Bolter and Michael Joyce, I do feel like the link is fundamental for its associative and connective power, but by the time we have caught up with ourselves, the poetic potentials of the hyperlink have been overwhelmed by its function as information source and shopping tool.

There is an argument that there is no art form called “sound art” because to categorise an art by its medium does not allow for greater conceptual considerations. Caleb Kelly suggests that in the same way that focusing on the medium of oil painting doesn’t allow for more fine-grained understandings of historical movements or genres (e.g., Impressionism, Cubism), to focus on sound as a medium is so broad as to be meaningless. He prefers to think of “sound in art” (2011, p. 18). However, Hayles’s medium specific analysis allows us to consider what material metaphors sound in art (and text) manifests. My concept of sonaurality considers both material and effect, sound and listening, in a way that allows for sonic art to be held a constant, while we consider the effect of the material metaphor of sonaurality on whatever specific conceptual or genrefied exploration is at hand.

Kelly, C. (Ed.). (2011). Sound. Whitechapel/The MIT Press.

The increasingly digital nature of our lives has revealed our need to think of the immaterial as material. Sometimes I wonder if the word materiality is in the process of separating itself from the term matter that connotes the substance that makes physical objects. I like the way that John Cayley grapples with this in terms of language:

One of the things that I learned about language is that its “materiality” is singular, or, rather, that the way in which language comes to be is singular—embodied by and fashioned to exist as humanly perceptible material phenomena. For, whatever language is, it cannot be identified—essentially or substantively—with anything that is materially perceptible to us. Obviously, I’m bracketing certain conceptions of materiality—placing materiality into the phenomenological epoché. (Cayley, 2018, pp. 1–2)

Maybe we can understand the materiality of matter by thinking about the phrase “what matters”, that uses the word in an entirely conceptual, non-physical sense. Or perhaps, just as dark matter makes up the invisible majority of the universe, we should refer to the material immaterial that we are so desperate to be able to contain and analyse as dark materiality.

Cayley, J. (2018). Grammalepsy: Essays on digital language art. Bloomsbury Academic.

James J. Gibson (1979/2015) proposed the idea of ecological psychology, in which we are not simply minds, or even minds in a body, but minds in a body in an environment. Our perception is shaped by the way our bodies exist and move through space. We cannot perceive without relating to our environment, by turning, moving, reacting to the opportunities, the “affordances” that the substances of the world offers us. In this way cognition, is also directly shaped by our bodily engagements in space.

George Lakoff and Michael Johnson (1980; 1999) offer the argument that in fact many of our conceptual frameworks are built on metaphors that stem from our embodied engagement with the world. For example, affection is associated with warmth, understanding with grasping. The notion of more becomes associated with verticality by the physical understandings of filling vessels and watching volumes go up. These associations arise from our experiences as infants, when our subjectivity and sensorimotor capacities are conflated. These conflations are reinforced forming neural connections that become primary metaphors. Primary metaphors are combined to create complex concepts.

We have a system of primary metaphors simply because we have the bodies and brains we have and because we live in the world we live in, where intimacy does tend to correlate significantly with proximity, affection with warmth, and achieving purposes with reaching destinations. (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, p. 59)

Given these notions, even the most immaterial or virtual of interactions is understood through the body which is, as Hayles says, a MINDBODY.

Gibson, J. J. (2015). The ecological approach to visual perception (Classic ed.). Psychology Press. (Original work published in 1979).

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by (E-book). The University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Basic Books.

Sonic noise is something that most people have to learn to appreciate. This acceptance of noise is not innately in many of us, with it generally causing irritation, fear or frustration. Or perhaps our ability to parse it doesn't survive the enculturation of education in which we were taught to silence our noisiness. The non-signification of noise is terrifying, its own meaninglessness a potent meaning itself—of disruption and dissent, if we are to believe Jacques Attali (2003). Like certain bitter foods, I only began to appreciate noise as I matured, and began to feel its transgressive and liberating power. Even still, extended noise is too much for me. I prefer a hybrid approach. After years of composing and performing live on laptop, I began to introduce elements that made unpredictable noise, to force myself to engage with an unruly improvising partner. For both myself and the listener, I am working with seduction and repulsion—we are seduced by what we know and understand, repulsed by what we don’t and in the transitions, we become aware of listening—we listen to our listening.

Attali, J. (2003). Noise: The Political economy of music. University of Minnesota Press.

From here I would direct you, if you haven’t yet gone there yet, to the ambisonic essay "In_Listening_In"◊, which uses the responsive spatial dynamics of the 360 virtual environment to explore ideas of sonaurality, the complex subject-object relations that arise from listening to sound, and the ways in which we might approach a writing about this experience from the inside, from a tomographic approach◊◊. This is my experiment in using mediated forms to present an “audiographic” argument (Smith, 2019), pushing these ideas further into the next stage of media potentials offered by the increasingly accessible 360VR format.

◊ See ficto-critical module (ii) In_Listening_In

◊ ◊ Adapted from the medical sciences, tomography describes processes of taking multiple scans from within a body, then reconstructing the form through compiling these. I suggest that writing about sound and listening may benefit from a tomographic approach in which specific aspects from within the experience can be compiled to consider the whole.

Smith, J. (2019). ESC: Sonic adventures in the Anthropocene. University of Michigan Press/Fulcrum. https://www.fulcrum.org/

It is through mediation that the the temporal can be introduced into reading (or theorising as I propose). Mediation allows thought to be presented with an explicit rhythmic flow. We don’t tend to think of thinking as having a rhythm, but as Anna Gibbs proposes, drawing on Henri Meschonnic, by moving towards the poetic, which carries with it the rhythms of orality (which, I might add, is also aurality), there is the possibility of a transfer of subjectivity:

Subjectivity produces rhythm, but rhythm in turn acts on subjectivity. Produced out of the tension between sound and sense, rhythm opens an aspect of writing anterior to meaning but to which we respond corporeally before we have understood what is being ‘said’. (Gibbs, 2015, p. 233)

This sense of rhythm can be implied through silent reading but may be more successfully and efficiently communicated using actual sound and audiovisuality.

Of course, standard print reading involves the temporal. It takes time, but this is generally at the reader’s discretion—the reader controls their speed and the time when they decide to read. With all the talk of the reader’s agency, time-based e-literature works dictate the time and speed of reading in a way that challenges a reader. I know that I always have a sense of restlessness reading digital literature, as if it is taking more time than print reading, when in fact what it is doing is removing my control of time. While print reading is time consuming, somehow we are less aware of our time being taken. But perhaps more particularly, it is the replacement of space with time that aligns e-literature with the temporal arts of performance, video and sound.

Gibbs, A. (2015). Writing as method: Attunement, resonance, and rhythm. In B. T. Knudsen & C. Stage (Eds.), Affective methodologies: Developing cultural research strategies for the study of affect. Palgrave Macmillan UK.

The individual is never simply one role—a one function subjectivity—rather, an individual is a subjectivity of shifting perspectives in relation to context. The shifting roles in e-literature enact these interchanges of subjectivity.

Poetry pokes holes for the reader to fall into. Digital generative poetry can heighten this sematic peril. Here there is a clear concordance between e-literature and ficto-criticism. Stephen Muecke uses the metaphor of falling and collapsing in one of his seminal essays, “The Fall: Fictocritical Writing” (2002). For him it is about negotiating a chasm between percept and concept. Gerrit Haas describes the work of negotiating gaps when reading fragmentary ficto-criticism: “Our readerly work is, after all, not fundamentally different between a flowing and a fragmentary text—only the latter makes our workings perceptible while in progress” (2017, p. 27). In sound too, there is a rift, a crack to be leapt over—or into—that separates the pattern recognition of semantic sounds (those that offer meaning) and the sensual curiosity of the abstract and textural.

Haas, G. (2017). Ficto/critical strategies: Subverting textual practices of meaning, other, and self-formation. transcript Verlag.

Muecke, S. (2002). The fall: Fictocritical writing. Parallax, 8(4), 108–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/1353464022000028000

Philippe Bootz's meta-reader—the reader who reads her own reading—correlates with the complex formulation of self-reflexive reading that Gerrit Haas (2017) suggests exists in ficto-criticism. He proposes that the mechanics of the enactment of ficto-criticality revolves around “meaning, the other and self-formation” (the subtitle of his thesis). He suggests that the ficto element is concerned with our “textual formations of meaning” (p. 39). This is not so much about the untruth or fantasy of fiction, but the creative strategies of text formation: the playing out, playing up, experimentation with and examination of the text as a manufacturer of meanings. The critical component is the “discursive formation of self, other and the world” (p. 39) through which theory operates as the “ethical” questioning of how we position ourselves in relation to the world. In this way Haas proposes that the ficto-critical asks of the reader to interrogate the “self” (themselves) in relation to the text, then perform this “self-text” in relation to the “other/world” (p. 41). In more concrete terms Haas proposes

that ficto/critical reading and writing practices aim at creating an experience that simultaneously comprises an awareness and understanding of one’s own performative relation to the text and of the practical significance and function that this performative relation has within the wider discursive formations of meaning, self, and other, or world. (p. 4)

It could be argued that by combining ficto-criticism with electronic literature a meta-self-reflexive-reader will inevitably manifest.

Haas, G. (2017). Ficto/critical strategies: Subverting textual practices of meaning, other, and self-formation. transcript Verlag.

Why must we decide? The problem I find with academic writing is that you must argue, which entails backing a horse. I am attracted to hypertext because I am interested in many aspects and undecided on all. By allowing the ideas to rub up against each other I can exist in a state of potential, in unresolved complexity, rather than certain closure. Or perhaps I am just afraid of commitment.

Ficto-criticism is a form in which the writer transparently reflects on their own subjectivity. Amanda Nettelbeck describes this as a “powerful subjectivity” in which the “‘distance’ of the theorist/critic collides with the ‘interiority’ of the author” (1998, p. 12). As Jay Bolter suggests, e-literature activates not only the writer’s subjectivity but also the reader’s. While it may seem that ficto-criticism’s subjective focus is weighted towards the writer, Gerrit Haas’s explains how there is equally a focus on the reader. He suggests that the effects of the ficto-critical strategies of complex subjectivity, intertextuality, fragmentation, ambiguity and meta-textuality actually ask of the reader that they interrogate their “self” in relation to the text, then perform this “self-text” in relation to the “other/world” (2017, p. 41). While this is far from a passive position, the mediated mechanisms of e-literature make this relation between writer and reader more explicitly active, and as Bolter says, perhaps even adversarial, in the sense of each having equal power in controlling the textual mechanism and the impact this has on interpretation.

Haas, G. (2017). Ficto/critical strategies: Subverting textual practices of meaning, other, and self-formation. transcript Verlag.

Nettelbeck, A. (1998). Notes towards an introduction. In H. Kerr & A. Nettelbeck (Eds.), The space between (pp. 1–17). University of Western Australia Press.

I went to a psychologist when I was in my mid-30s because I had a kind of low-grade yet persistent sense of anxiety, perhaps spurred on by realising I was getting older and fearing I was not making the most of my life. She described the three things that actually make us happy. One is unexpected good luck or opportunity—the kind of happiness that comes with surprise and gratefulness. Two is when we are learning something. Three, unfortunately, I don’t remember. From that point on I’ve always noticed how learning something new brings with it a thrill of possibility. I suggest that the ergodic reading experience that Aarseth describes is one that encourages this sense of discovery and its attendant small moments of happiness.

I think of footnotes (not the boring citational kind) as all the associated thoughts that I’d love to keep in the paragraph, maybe in parentheses, as kind of dialogic asides, but I know most people will find them distracting. I, however, love people who think parenthetically, skipping from the point to a comment, to conjecture, to anecdote, to question all in the same breath. This is why reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) was so exciting. Perhaps not incidentally, it was the first book that I read in e-book form, easily facilitating the zooming (rather than flipping) back and forth, although I never lost the feeling of wanting to physically sense how far through the 900+ pages I was.

Of course the opposite of an associative footnote is a disjunctive one. My mother has an endearing habit (which I think I might have inherited) of launching into an unrelated topic mid-conversation, segueing with the line “Nothing to do with anything…”

Wallace, D.F. (1996). Infinite jest (E-book). Hachette Digital.

Jay Bolter highlights the spatial aspect of hypertext, while Philippe Bootz (2011) and John Cayley (2018) emphasise the temporal. Ted Nelson (1974, p. DM74) proposed a three dimensional hypertextual model, although this still preferences the visual and spatial. Bootz and Cayley are more concerned with generative and aleatoric poetry rather than the simple forms of hypertext, although the notion of electronic literature as manifesting differently to text through both space and time is not inconceivable. This then might in fact be writing in the fourth dimension.

Bootz, P. (2011). Regarding digital literature. Caietele Echinox, 20, 79–97.

Cayley, J. (2018). Grammalepsy: Essays on digital language art. Bloomsbury Academic.

Nelson, T. H. (1974). Computer lib/Dream machines. Self-published.

Ficto-criticism too is proposed as “performed writing”. Anna Gibbs says ficto-critical writing “uses fictional and poetic strategies to stage theoretical questions” (2003, p. 309). Amanda Nettelbeck (1998) cites Roland Barthes’ description of “text as a performance of ‘thinking through’ rather than as the residue of thought” (p. 5) to propose that ficto-criticism is not a genre but a “way of speaking, a mode of performance” (p. 6). What e-literature brings to the performance metaphor is the potential to control temporality, which aligns the reading experience with time-based modes such as drama, video and sound. John Cayley (2018) also alludes to generative poetry as bearing the temporal and rhythmic aspects of a score.

Perhaps the most interesting instantiation of e-literature as performance are the “traversals” that Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop (2015) have instigated through their Pathfinders project, in which the writers (and some readers) navigate through an early e-literature work, while being videoed, both reading the text and offering commentary. This is a novel approach to documenting works that are no longer accessible due to technological obsolescence, also offering insights into navigational and structural flows.

Cayley, J. (2018). Grammalepsy: Essays on digital language art. Bloomsbury Academic.

Gibbs, A. (2003). Writing and the flesh of others. Australian Feminist Studies, 18(42), 309–319. https://doi.org/10.1080/0816464032000171403

Moulthrop, S., & Grigar, D. (Eds.). (2015). Pathfinders: Documenting the experience of early digital literature. Nouspace Publications. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/pathfinders/

Nettelbeck, A. (1998). Notes towards an introduction. In H. Kerr & A. Nettelbeck (Eds.), The space between (pp. 1–17). University of Western Australia Press.

In initial commentary about hypertext some proposed that it was the very instantiation of post-structuralism. Jay Bolter was certainly behind this notion, but by the time he publishes the second edition of Writing Spaces in 2001, he professes to reigning in his enthusiasm to propose the position above. The connection with post-structuralism is particularly interesting when viewing ficto-criticism alongside e-literature. Ficto-criticism, predominantly discussed as a print form, manifests many of the same post-structuralist elements as e-literature—intertextuality, reflexivity and complex subject relations. The ability of e-literature to expand on these elements through mediated materiality seems an obvious step, an evolution, as James O’Sullivan (2019, p. 32) would have it.

O’Sullivan, J. (2019). Towards a digital poetics: Electronic literature and literary games. Springer International Publishing AG.