In terms of the medium of the web and hypertext, these texts are arranged around dispersed links which establish ambiguous relations between each of the texts. As such, the general length of a particular text is usually kept to a minimum, while also carrying within itself as a semi-autonomous unit a certain heterogeneity. In terms of the issue of narrative itself, these texts are an attempt to enframe and then perform a series of treatments to the idea of narrative as well as the relatively unexplored space between narrative, citation, and theory, all of which oscillate around the limits of narrative as a body of prose (and often spilling over into theory, poetry, citation, non-sense, information, etc.). The general influence for this project came from a fascination with The Magnetic Fields, the first Surrealist automatic text, written by Breton and Soupault in 1919 - the ways in which the many scenes, objects, gestures, and relationships fluidly interact to both give an ambiguous yet efficacious sense of meaning or narrative, but also the way in which the writing does this through a very cinematic/montage effect of light and shadow. Forms of appropriation, textual collage, citation, Surrealist juxtaposition, cut-up/fold-in formed the main compositional thread of each text.
The hypertextual links between texts and pointing to texts, as well as the intertextual references (intended or not) and intratextual juxtapositions, all form various textual and technocultural mappings or "anatomies" whose primary functioning follows what Walter Benjamin has noted concerning his unfinished Arcades Project: "Method of this work: Literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show," and what Kathy Acker has stated about appropriation: "What a writer does, in 19th century terms, is that he takes a certain amount of experience and he 'represents' that material. What I'm doing is simply taking text to be the same as world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text."
TECHNICAL NOTE: These texts were composed almost entirely by sampling textual material from the web (on websites, homepages, electronic texts & journals, advertising, etc.), and then arranging them using cut-and-paste extensions in a word processing program.
Eugene Thacker (maldoror@eden.rutgers.edu)
