Internet as Text

You may have noticed an addition to my sig, following some research I've been doing on Jacques Derrida.

It means "this is not a signature" - using Magritte's famous line from his painting of a pipe to summarise one of Derrida's claims in his essay Signsponge.

Derrida also uses signatures to weigh in on Reader Response Criticism (the idea that the author is dead and the reader is fundamental to a text), writing that "When I sign, I am already dead" (Glas pg.19).

With Derrida's concepts in mind, can we treat the internet as a text in the same way that we treat books, dreams or the city?

Does the signing of a document relate to death? Or does the refusal to sign a document embody some sort of immortality, of the text or the (non)signer?

I don't understand what you are talking about.

A question like 'Does the signing of a document relate to death?' leads to all sorts of metaphorical discussion that could be insightful, but in more of an artistic sense than an intellectual sense.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sailor jack

With Derrida's concepts in mind, can we treat the internet as a text in the same way that we treat books, dreams or the city?

Does the signing of a document relate to death? Or does the refusal to sign a document embody some sort of immortality, of the text or the (non)signer?

---

Well, you may have noticed that not many of us are versed in Derrida... I would definitely like to try and engage with the discussion, but if you're going to be steering it (which, you'd have to, wouldn't you) you might have to do some more fleshing-out than this.

"Books, dreams or the city" -- I can't figure out what that is a list of, and why we'd treat the internet like we do all those things.

I think I get the gist of the "signing equals death" point, but I need a little help relating it back to the internet in any significant way.

I've intentionally kept it vague, I meant with the little explanation i gave.

The signature is the symbol or an authority. But with the text being the authority of itself, Derrida claims that the only way for an author to leave his signature on his text is to not sign it.

Can we "read" the internet like we read other texts? Books are the most common texts, but Freud read dreams and people like de Certeau and Simmel read the city as text. The text is a verb, a living document constantly doing things (a piece that is subject to intertextuality we could say), whereas a work is a static, concrete piece of writing that is only really relevant to one time (that of its publication).

Is the internet a work or a text? Can we sign it? Can we sign it off or sign for it?

The internet is no more a text than is a library or collection of libraries.

...Which you could see as a great big text, couldn't you? If a city, then a library.

I don't think a signature marks the end of discussion(death of the piece), or the end of what the author has to say about that particular subject. Maybe, for that time being, he has nothing left to say on the topic, but I would never equate a signature with death, be it the work's death or the author/artist's.