Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for archetexts
data to nourish our souls
Stephen Bayley ends a recent article on DDR design with the following comment:
“The greatest legacy of the Cold War? [...] [I]t’s the internet, a system designed to secure free movement of the US command structure’s data in the event of a Soviet missile attack.” (italics mine).
That is the nature of the internet: to allow for the accumulation and free movement of data in order to facilitate another end altogether. In an article for Harper’s Magazine, August 1995 entitled “What are we doing on-line?”, when the internet was commercially in its infancy, Sven Birkerts critically noted that
“[t]he supreme capability that this particular chip-driven silicon technology has is to transfer binary units of information. And therefore, as it takes over the world, it privileges those units of information. When everyone is wired and humming, most of what will be going through those wires is that sort of information. If it were soul-data, that might be a different thing, but soul-data doesn’t travel through the wires.”
This view, however, is one that tends to see soul intrinsic to content, when it is not. Soul belongs to human beings. Once upon a time in western thought, we adhered to the belief that the word was imbued with being. What was forgotten was that the Word became flesh, and that the Word is a person, and not a book. Data is information, and, where once the printing press freed up the movement of that information for people to make up their own minds about God, now the internet is doing it. What is different is the medium in which this information is carried.
The book as a self-contained unit puts borders around the information it carries. To make use of that information, one must invest much time in mining a book for what profit it can produce. The physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual bond that is created between the reader and the book leads to misjudgement that somehow this book carries soul-data, when in fact it has merely facilitated the nourishment of the soul.
The internet on the other hand, places no such borders on its information, and where such borders might be found to exist, seeks to tear them down through integration and mash-ups so that disparate strands of data can come together in increasingly complex formulations of data that reveal seams of knowledge as yet untapped.
Konica Minolta have been working on a project to unravel the mysteries of the statue of Venus de Milo. They write,
“Recreating the Venus de Milo on our computers allowed us to make a very detailed examination of all aspects of the sculpture. We were able to see things invisible to the naked eye, and to visualize possible shapes and poses of the original statue. We were making a fresh discovery: a previously unknown beauty.” (italics mine)
While books will remain a medium of their own, and continue to hold to themselves the mystique they have so generously earned, perhaps it is time for us to throw our many many books, the making of which there is no ending, into the particle generator that is post-modernity and send them spinning round until they smash into each other. When they do, let us then be there to collect the information freed from these collisions and allow our understanding of this ever deepening mystery of creation to be drawn on into new spheres of data for the nourishment of our souls.
Towards defining an archetext, part II
The Old English word “arche” is derived from Old French, and means ark (as in Noah’s ark) in modern usage. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes the following examples
c1205 LAY. 26 Noe & Sem, Japhet & Cham and heore four wiues
e mid heom weren on archen.c1230 Ancr. R. 334 Eihte i
an noe was in to
e arche cumen. a1300 Cursor M. 1843 On
The OED also cites this same usage for the Jewish ark of the covenant which held the law of God, Israel’s most sacred text. An archetext then is, additional to its previous meanings, a form of textual ark which holds a crucial legacy in terms of knowledge for those that come after a devastation, as well as being a receptacle for sacred texts that hold a community together.
At the same time, an archetext can be considered as a form of arche-writing suggested by Jacques Derrida in his seminal work, Of Grammatology. This arche-writing can be understood as writing which
“refers to a more generalised notion of writing that insists that the breach that the written introduces between what is intended to be conveyed and what is actually conveyed, is typical of an originary breach that afflicts everything one might wish to keep sacrosanct, including the notion of self-presence.”¹
More plainly put, one might consider that “originary breach” as “original sin” in which everything that Adam and Eve might have wished to keep sacrosanct – Eden and a self-present God – underwent a spacial differing – exit from Eden – and a temporal deferral – having to commune with God through sacrifice.
Because of this differing and deferral, Derrida considers meaning never to be present in a text, not even present to the author themselves. It is always deferred into the future and subject to that future’s whims.
“[B]ut when that so-called future is itself ‘present’ [...] its meaning is equally not realised, but subject to yet another future that can also never be present.”
This brings us into the realm and nature of the prophetic. Those who would have the Bible fixed in meaning for perpetuity must fail to remember that concerning the salvation of Jesus Christ, “the prophets [...] searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing,” (1 Peter 1:10-11). Here we have the meaning of prophecy not available in full to the prophets themselves. Nevertheless, the messiah they prophesied, in falling under the whims of a post-exilic Israel, was re-prophesied as coming as a mighty slayer of Israel’s enemies. Yet when Jesus Christ came, he was recognised as the messiah by a small group of disciples who in turn radically reinterpreted the prophets to create a new future of a coming kingdom. This process of reinterpreting and re-prophesying into a future has continued throughout Christianity’s history and continues today, as the Biblical text allows itself as ark (arche), archetype, archeological specimen, architectural construction and corpus of writing that accounts for its “presence” through the arche-writing breach, to be so practiced upon.
The Bible then is a form of ideal archetext in the same way as the Internet might be considered as a form of idea arch-e-text, always allowing its treasure stores to cross over the flood of human history into a future present to be sent again on its path over the flood.
Notes:
1. Quotes come from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Towards defining an “archetext”
Archetext is a neologism that mashes the prefix for the word “archetype” together with “text”. Yet it also phonetically suggests a mashing of “text” with the prefixes for the words “architect” and “archaeologist”: archetext is also architext and archaetext. An archetext is thus a text in which archetypal, canonical (architectural in the sense that canonical texts construct a literature) and ancient sacral texts are mashed together.
Moreover, the word “archetext”, when spoken sounds almost indistinguishable from architects. Thus, an archetext, is both a text and a group of chief authors building a text. In having an archetypal foundation, a canonical architecture and an ancient history as its structure, an archetext, both as text and group of texts, opens itself to contain fresh prophetic visions not originally envisioned in the building texts.
Richard Wasserfall’s Apocalypse of Jude is a prototype of what an archetext might be. It mashes pagan ritual and myth together with Christian salvation and apocalypse, T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland with Dante’s Purgatory, Biblical scriptures Jude and Revelation with the novel genre. The characters are plotted to the stringencies of the building texts. The reader is left in a world that is a secularised, small town environment in 1998 that is simultaneously a pagan underworld, a Catholic purgatory, a modernist poem, the Church and the outworking of the biblical Apocalypse. The characters must play the roles of those partaking in a vegetation ritual and the apocalypse. As they follow these texts, they derive their own interpretations that leave them exposed to a prophetic future that they, nor the reader, can fully comprehend, but that nevertheless demands the inquiry, “What is being told here?”
