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This is the beginning of a Signature or Fetish Page, a nondiscursive "hypertext" page, which I promised in ==W4== to put out on the Web site for the book.
What follows is from Chapter 5, pp. 116-17. Read it carefully to refresh your memory and when you get down to the bottom of the page just click on the image 'forward' and you will be sent to the beginning of the page, where there will be some basic explanations of what is going on in the sequencing of 'scenes.' For the first three frames you will have to click on the links to get to the next 'scene' and the next. But thereafter, you will just have to sit back and watch the whole thing just automatically unfold from one 'scene' to the next and onwards. If you find that you don't have time enough to read one frame, simply backspace for additional time. However, the point is that you don't need extra time, for your unconscious will have read it. In a BLINK of an eye! To automatically move the frames, I have used what are called basic "push commands," which I did not mention in the book, but you can see what they are when you pull down the source code. (Look between the close of the Title and the Head.) Also, I have used the basic multimedia technology of gif-animation, which I discussed in passing in Chpater 10, pp. 198-99. Alright, here's what is in print on pp. 116-17: |
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Rethinking and reinventing signatures: As an example of an appositionally structured webpage with subpages linked off of it (a "hypertext"), we can--as people already have--begin to rethink and reinvent Signatures (the question of identity). Jacques Derrida and Gregory Ulmer have done just this kind of writing and designing: Derrida in writing for print and Ulmer in writing for electronic discourse. Both writers go by multiple names: Derrida refers to himself, for example, as "Reb Derrisa"; and Ulmer refers to himself often as "glue." In a textbook entitled Text Book, Ulmer has written:
According to the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, there are at least three ways in which an author signs a work. The first dimension or register of signing is the signature "proper"--the proper name placed on the title page identifying the source of the writing. The second register refers to what is commonly called "style"--"the inimitable idiom of an artist's work"--such that even without the availability of the proper name an experienced reader might recognize the author of a work.... [The] third register of the signature is the most complex, involving the heraldic placement of the name in the depths of the text. At this level the writer's name is seen as the seed out of which the text has grown, by a process of metaphorical and intertextual development. Retracing this process, an interpreter can find the author's name, hidden in the depths--or, to use Derrida's word, the 'abyss'--of the text." (256; emphasis mine)
In an attempt to illustrate how this third signature works (plays), I am presently building a website based on my name (Victor Vitanza) and developed "by a process of metaphorical and intertextual development." It is surprising what I have been able to discover in many mixed terms of my name. For example, I can tell you now that my last name is composed of two syllables (Vita anzi[a]), which are two separate Italian words. If I turn to an authoritative book, such as an Italian Dictionary, I discover the following lexigraphical meanings:
- Vita signifies Life;
- anzi signifies contrary to, against, etc.
Therefore,
- Life + against = (or signifies) Death?!
This is a rather disconcerting discovery, no? However, my first name,
- Victor, signifies Conqueror.
So when put all together, my full name can signify
Not bad, huh? This is only a beginning step in reinventing other connections between my name and other words and other texts. Which I promise to illustrate on the webpage for this book. It must be done in an electronic medium, for any number of reasons, which I am sure that you by now can figure out.
Rethinking and reinventing signatures into a fetish page: The website will not be an attempt at what we have been calling a home page; it, instead, will be a fetish page. Again, developed by Ulmer. (A fetish is generally understood as a substitute item for some other object that we want.) If we question identity, we question our sense of place and home, which we can begin to see as unhomely or as a substitute item for what we really don't have in the first place. And What might that be? becomes the driving question. We are not at home! Because there is something we don't have. Hence, the building of not-at-home pages, or fetish pages, so as to continue to invent who we are and to record our findings, ever so provisionally. And to record our findings is to list them all as an attempt at ever-inventing what we want that we do not have. (I will not only attempt to illustrate such a page but will give you from the website numerous links to fetish pages so that you can learn from them.)
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