Rebooting Electronic Literature, Volume 4

Traversal of Eric Steinhart’s "Fragments of the Dionysian Body"

These videos are of Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart’s Fragments of the Dionysian Body, held on Friday, October 18, 2019 and hosted by the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver. For the event the work was accessed on a Mac G4 Flat-Screen computer (2002-2004) via CD-ROM.
 

Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Introduction

This first video clip from the event features the pre-show video in which a variety of voices define "electronic literature" as audience members take their seats. Hardware and works of electronic literature housed at the Electronic Literature Lab in Vancouver, Washington are shown on camera, and what the Electronic Literature Lab means by  "Traversal" is defined: an author or performer reading a text on the original hardware, offering an experience that faithfully presents to an audience the historical and cultural context of a piece as well as the piece itself. 


Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Part 1

Dene Grigar, Director of the Electronic Literature Lab and organizer of the Traversal, introduces Anna Nacher, associate professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland who will perform the Traversal. Nacher then introduces the physical media of Fragments of the Dionysian Body: a folio with a CD-ROM held inside it and an accompanying information booklet. She lays out the mission of Fragments, which to her is an attempt to use “hypertext as a tool of philosophical inquiry” and “method of teaching philosophy.” We learn that Fragments is based around The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writing, with its heavy use of aphorism, lends itself well to hypertext. Navigating to the opening screen, Nacher identifies two “modes of reading:” either from an introduction or a list of topics, each option accompanied by a large eye so the screen stares back at the reader. Steinhart recommends the list of topics for readers more familiar with Nietzsche’s work, but Nacher clicks on the “Introduction” eye to showcase Fragments as a teaching tool. The next screen, in another nod to Nietzsche’s style, is full of symbols including a volcano, a tree, and a bird. Nacher moves from there to a menu that shows one possible ordering of the keywords of Fragments: a “top-down hierarchical” table-of-contents system. The other ordering is formed by hypertext linking that “cuts through" between the keywords. Nacher decides to progress step-by-step, telling the audience she may “get lost” in the work because that is the nature of both hypertext and Nietzsche: even though Nietzche’s thought is based on logical rigor, his philosophy is not meant to be clear and systematic, but leans more on the reader’s capacity to understand it poetically and “get lost” within it. She clicks on “Epistemology,” which brings her to another top-down list of topics, selects the “Introduction” link, enters that lexia, and from there selects a bolded text link that carries her to “Perspectivism.” 

Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Part 2

Nacher’s reading takes her to a lexia describing perspectivism, the idea that “relations are logically prior to things” and the world is ultimately constructed of processes of relation rather than present and material things. At the bottom of the screen is a box of corresponding numbered sections in The Gay Science that also treat that topic, a placement that leads Nacher to conclude that the best way to read Fragments is by shifting between screen and physical text, reading in “a continuum between the book and the hypertext version” an “augmented reality” experience of Nietzsche. Nacher demonstrates this method by reading a section about perspectivism aloud from her print copy of The Gay Science. She also notes an “error” in the translation of Fragments from the original to Hypercard 2.2: link words are rendered on top of the plain text, making it more difficult to read what is on the screen. She is not bothered by this “trouble,” however, because the idea of “the error” is important to Nietzsche and so the translation error is just one more way in which form and content are “fused” in Fragments. This “bridging” of content and form is at the core of Nietzsche’s idea of “the gay science,” and of Fragments: perspectivism, the idea that relations are prior to the things that are related, “is inscribed in hypertext itself.”    

Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Part 3

A bolded link in the "perspectivism" lexia leads Nacher to “The Game of Life” by John Conway, which comes in a package with Fragments of the Dionysian Body and opens in another window. “The Game of Life” involves a number of “cells” which are filled in or empty––as the player moves time forward in the game, filled-in cells with filled-in neighbors persist and shift position, while those that have no neighbors perish. The “chain of modifications” imposed on the cells by the user and by chance "mirror biological life itself.” Conway’s game illustrates perspectivism because the forms made by the cells, and by biological life, seem to be things but are actually patterns—the instantiated outcomes of a user’s set of modifications through time rather than stable entities onscreen, testaments to ongoing processes. After playing the game a bit, Nacher returns to the top-down table of contents, and navigates to the introduction lexia to “Ontology,” clicking the in-text link to “will to power,” which brings her to another top-down menu. She explains how Nietzsche’s notion of the “will to power” was “misinterpreted” in tragic ways as a force of domination, and is actually more of a “will to exist” that underpins the world. She clicks a link bringing her to an especially poetic quote from Nietzsche describing the will to power, and then returns to the “will to power” menu, clicking from there to Nietzsche’s description of mechanistic science by “moving a bit upwards in Steinhart’s system.” Understanding the “will to power” not as a machine but as a “music box,” Nietzsche proposes a “gay science” that will involve an aesthetic understanding of the will to power as well as a mechanical one. Nacher concludes her Traversal by stating that “hypertext is actually the gay science itself,” because form (aesthetics) and content (mechanics) come together. Citing Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” Nacher proposes that hypertext reflects the will to power and human thought because it shows things not as things but as evolving, relational, and unified processes.

Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Q&A, Part 1

The question and answer session following the reading features Nacher and Grigar sitting onstage and begins with Nacher describing her relationship to Nietzsche and how rich the experience of re-reading The Gay Science through Fragments of the Dionysian Body was for her. The first audience question comes from Nicholas Schiller, who asks about whether parallels can be drawn between hypertext and the typewriter, which Nietzsche was forced to use while writing The Gay Science due to his declining eyesight. Nacher proposes that the aphoristic form of The Gay Science with its songs and poetic language might have been a result of Nietzsche's "struggle with the fundamentally linear writing technology" of the typewriter. Nacher goes on to describe the "poetic sensibility" of Nietzsche's "spatial" and "not systemic" thought before deciding "not to ramble about that for hours" even though she could. Grigar and Nacher then discuss Roland Barthes, whose critical writing also has more of a "poetic sensibility" particularly in works like S/Z and Pleasure of the Text as well as a concern with embodiment that is carried on by feminist materialist thought. Nacher links this notion of "embodiment" with the "ergodic" and performative aspects of hypertext, in which the reader moves through text fragments in a metaphorically embodied way. Grigar connects "embodiment" and "fragmentation" to a notion of "suturing... that was in the air in this period" in works like In Small and Large Pieces  (documented in Rebooting Vol. 2) and Patchwork Girl, as well as to hypertext's inherently "aphoristic" nature. The next question comes from an audience member asking about how to approach works of philosophy. Grigar and Nacher reply that taking your time, focusing on smaller pieces, and physically moving around while reading are helpful.

Anna Nacher’s Traversal of Eric Steinhart's  Fragments of the Dionysian Body, Q&A, Part 2

Grigar and Nacher define ontology ("the study of being") and epistemology (the study of "how do we know things?") as the concepts relate to Steinhart's work and the lives of members of the audience. As the discussion turns towards death, Nacher links Conway's "The Game of Life," featured in Fragments of the Dionysian Body to conceptions of death not as a binary but a sort of "process," in which everything in the world takes part. Grigar and Nacher share their love for the humanities and poetry as a way of allowing humans to "survive as a species and society." Another audience member asks Nacher about her views on hypertext's relative decline in comparison to other electronic forms of fragmented writing. Nacher shares that many of her students respond negatively to works of hypertext, preferring a book with a beginning and an end, and proposes the reason for this is cultural conditioning around what a "book" is and what "reading" entails. Quoting Nigel Thrift, Nacher identifies fragmented and hypertext forms of reading encountered by digital natives as "epistemic wallpaper"––structures that are so ubiquitous they go unnoticed. The session concludes with Grigar thanking the ELL team for putting together the event and Nacher acknowledging the trees in the forest, which helped inspire her reading. 

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