Comparative Literature and Internet Studies
Anke Finger
Introduction
The discipline of comparative literature is undergoing challenges: not
only is literature across the world to be studied, that is, cultural traditions
and productions in comparison with each other instead of a nation-based
approach, but the added task presents itself in the search for a
comparative history of the arts, within which literature is one.Flusser's and Bec's philosophizing in a dialog, that is, "(inter)mediality,"
is a field of study now widely accepted in media, literary, and cultural
studies (see, e.g., Golumbia; Manovich; Schmidt and Valk; Tinckom;
Wolf), and it is a constituent part of comparative cultural studies (see
Totosy de Zepetnek, Digital Humanities). An example of the definition of
intermediality is as follows:
Intermediality refers to the interconnectedness of modern media of
communication. As means of expression and exchange, the different
media depend on and refer to each other, both explicitly and implicitly;
they interact as elements of particular communicative strategies; and they
are constituents of a wider cultural environment. Three conceptions of
intermediality may be identified in communication research, deriving
from three notions of what is a medium (-> Media). First, intermediality
is the combination and adaptation of separate material vehicles of
representation and reproduction, sometimes called multimedia. Second,
the term denotes communication through several sensory modalities at
once, for instance, music and moving images. Third, intermediality
concerns the interrelations between media as institutions in society, as
addressed in technological and economic terms such as convergence and
conglomeration. As a term and an explicit theoretical concept,
intermediality has perhaps been most widely used in reference to multiple
modalities of experience (-> Modality and Multimodality), as examined
in aesthetic and other humanistic traditions of communication research
(-> Aesthetics) (Jensen 2385). What kind of fiction would Vampyroteuthis Infernalis be had it been
conceived in the electronic realm? Following Katherine N. Hayles,
Vampyroteuthis Infernalisin the digital realm could be delivered in a
number of genres and formats: it could be written in Storyspace
, a hypertext authoring program
that favors linked structures; it could use the multimodality of the world
wide web with "a wide variety of navigation schemes and interface
metaphors" including "sound, spoken text, animated text, graphics, and
other functionalities in a networked linking structure" written as
interactive fiction with "game elements" (7-8), engaging the user/reader
by requiring her/his input and, in turn, requiring from the critic or scholar

an entirely new take on reader-response criticism.Intersubjective dialogue and "multilogic interaction" takes place on
two levels:
1) within the book where Vampyrotheutis infernalis is positioned as an
othering of humans and 2) without the book between two collaborators
who move beyond their individual arts, the textual and the visual, but not
to describe the images via language or to undermine the text by covering
it or expressing it with an image; rather, the two artistic modes
complement each other to such a degree that that which is to be presented
can only find creation through both arts together. Thisconstitutes either a
process of birthing or the aesthetic expression of a Hegelian synthesis:
Bec has created a plethora of images of types of octopus that also turn up
in different media: the images shown at flusserstudies.net are digital and
in 2007, in a retrospective of Bec's work in Prague, show fictitious
genealogies of cephalopods and their various imagined biological data on
the kind of hanging maps formerly in use in chemistry, physics, and
biology classes (see Bec). They are worked in relief, with elements
hanging down and sticking out, hinting at unfinished three-
dimensionality. In this sense, the fictitious world of the animal--
brought about by conjoining two artistic expressions and different media
to confront the fictitiousness of humans' spatiality and virtuality, or as
Bec puts it, their parallel zoologies--is complemented by the
unfinalizability of the artists' dialogue with each other, with their
creature, and with their audiences (on the philosophy of the animal, see
Calarco). Another example emerges from conceptual art and precedes Dick
Higgins's 1969 concept of intermedia based on La Monte Young's 1963
edited volume An Anthology (the volume is without page numbers). Young, as a Cage and Stockhausen influenced minimalist composer
interested in conceptualism, assembled in this art book (published several
years before the official onset of the conceptual art movement) pieces
that, like Henry Flynt's influential essay on concept art that was
published in it, simultaneously called attention to conceptualism while
including elements of dialogism and unfinalizability. Indeed, according to
David Farneth, the anthology ranges "among the most influential
collections of music and performance art of the 1960s ... represent[ing]
an unprecedented breaking down of barriers between artistic media"
(Farneth qtd. Talking about
Compositions 1960, of which numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9 are contained in
the anthology, he stresses that both categories of theater and music apply:
"I divide my works into music pieces, and musical-theatrical pieces. During the last decades, in the art scene, two tendencies are to be
observed: on the one hand a still growing tendency towards an
annulment, a dissolution of the boundaries between different art forms, as
brought about by performativity, hybridization, multimedia; on the other
hand, we have observed an anesthetization and theatricalization of other
cultural fields, including politics, economy, the media, sports, everyday
life, that tends to abolish the boundary between art and non-art. Both
tendencies are a challenge to the arts disciplines. For those have preferred
a kind of monadic existence for a long time. Art history, theatre studies,
musicology, film studies, comparative literature or national literature
studies, each arts discipline has understood itself as defined and clearly
delimited from the others by its very specific objects, as well as by a
methodology and theoretical approaches that referred expressly to them
alone. The new situation that has emerged over approximately the last
fifty years, radically questions this self-understanding. It disorientates the
arts disciplines in terms of their special objects, i.e. in terms of just that
momentum that seemed to guarantee the self-definition and delineation of
the other arts disciplines in each case and, as a result, in terms of their
methodologies and theoretical approaches. ("Conception,"
eurodocsem.net).Many art
disciplines hence "speak" the language of literary criticism, leaving
literary critics wondering whether to embark on the search for a fresh
taxonomy and new theoretical frameworks for dialogue and discourse. Guillen's second question, of course, is an existential one, and points to
aesthetics as a possible answer, namely that a great deal of scholarship in
aesthetics concentrates on internet studies and on analyzing parallels or
convergences in the arts. As the study of aesthetics appears to be making
a comeback in the humanities, this facilitates the study of literature with
the other arts and thus produces work in the contextual study of literature. This does not mean a revival of "universalism"; however I consider it
essential that comparative literature and comparative cultural studies need
to (re)integrate the study of aesthetics and thesis with a specific focus on
internet studies, and this in a global context.The following pages
repeat the title in a different and much larger font and in black and blue,
and eventually one comes to a complete list of the contents of the
collection: "an anthology of chance operations concept art meaningless
work natural disasters indeterminacy anti-art plans of action
improvisation stories diagrams poetry essays dance constructions
compositions mathematics music." Listed thereafter are Young's colleagues, friends, and collaborators,
and stringent copyright restrictions. The volume opens with a
performance instruction piece by George Brecht, "Motor Vehicle
Sundown (Event)" dedicated to John Cage, in which "any number of
motor vehicles are arranged outdoors" and form and enact a complex
canon with respective lights, radios, horns, opening and closing
hoods/windows/doors, triggered by instruction cards and engines running.that I call 'multilogic interactions'" (205; on visual culture
studies, see, e.g., Mirzoeff). The ubiquity of the term and its approximate
equivalents--dialogicity, polyphony, intersubjectivity, connectivity--
signify a shift in Western aesthetic, philosophical, sociopolitical, and
ethical stances that helped bring about new fields, including
postcolonialism. As Jeffrey T. Nealon points out, "dialogic intersubjectivity, understood
in terms of an impassioned play of voices, has displaced the dominant
modernist and existentialist metaphor of the monadic subject and its
plaintive demand for social recognition and submission from the other"
(33).Furthermore, the dialogic work is reflected in the fluid and
unfinalizable reception within its audience or readership (see also
Mitchell on Blake and "the infinity of globalization"). The dialogue
within the work, in whatever way it constitutes itself, may find its
resonance among the spectators. At the same time, each member of the
audience or readership may piece together the fragments, impressions,
and sensory experience derived from the artwork individually, thereby
dialoguing with the artwork through channels all on her/his own while
not cutting herself/ himself off entirely from a communal conversation or
interpretation. Bakhtinian dialogism as defined by Michael Holquist gains in
importance at this point of the discussion since the center (of the artist, of
the self, of the artwork, of the community) loses prominence: "in
dialogism consciousness is otherness.Next are Earle Brown's "Music Essays,"
instructions for a piece for multiple pianos with multiple possible ways of
executing it. Joseph Byrd then contributes "Music Poetry" which includes
a short reflection on Nam June Paik, time, and Gertrude Stein, a "Ballet
for Woodwinds," and instructions for a poem "Homage to Jackson Mac
Low" (who helped edit the volume). Inserted is a loose sheet of music. Next are Terry Jennings with "Music" for piano and string quartet
(instructed), Dennis Johnson with the copy of a letter and an envelope
glued into the book itself containing a letter covered with blue script
(questions, sayings, haphazard thoughts), and more "music" in the form
of two words arranged exactly like the title of the anthology on the
covers: "ding dong." Ronald Gregor
Smith, 1937) and is echoed in Bakhtin's early essay entitled "Art and
Answerability." According to Eduardo Kac, in the visual arts, dialogism
it refers to "interrelationship and connectivity": "The dialogic principle
changes our conception of art; it offers a new way of thinking that
requires the use of bidirectional or multidirectional media and the
creation of situations that can actually promote inter subjective
experiences that engage two or more individuals in real dialogic
exchanges . Curiously, the anthology has failed
to attract in-depth studies, and this short discussion, too, will hardly give
the contents and the book's significance its due (see Kotz, "Post-Cagean"
60). It is to be stressed, nonetheless, that internet translation and
conceptualism intersect dynamically in this slim volume and that the
design by Fluxus artist George Maciunas mirrors the simultaneous
diversity and unity of the artists and their "products" therein.Concluding the volume are Richard Maxfield's "a simultaneity for
people," instructions for a conceptualist, Dada-infused simultaneous
poem, and his essays, Paik's reminiscences of an encounter with
Stockhausen and thoughts on unfixed form, Terry Riley's "Music"
including instructions for Young to crawl inside a grand piano, roll
around in it, and kick it, Diter Rot's "white page with holes" (literally a
loose white page with holes of varying sizes), Emmet Williams's
"poetry" including his "Cellar Song for Five Voices," Christian Wolff's
"Duet I (Piano four Hands, I is at right, II left)," and last Young's famous
Composition 1960.One dialogue--and I
am merely suggesting that it is an example of "multilogic interaction"--is
played out in a fable authored by philosopher Vilem Flusser and artist and
self-described zoo systematician Louis Bec. Vampyrotheutis Infernalis
("vampire squid from hell"), a (theoretical) fable published by Flusser
and Bec in 1987, juxtaposes humans and a type of octopus in order to
answer some fundamental questions about dialogic inter subjectivity in
light of humans' anthropocentric positionality.While the Renaissance did point to convergences
between disciplines, not until the eighteenth century--with the beginning
of the study of aesthetics representing the numerous debates during the
Enlightenment and after on the comparability of the arts and their
significance for human experience and expression--did theoretical
discussions emerge from examining interart creations.(98)...