For Pierre Lévy, the virtual as potential represents not only the mode of being of the literary text but the ontological status of all forms of textuality. “Since its Mesopotamian origin,” writes Lévy, “the text has been a virtual object, abstract, independent of any particular substrate” (Becoming Virtual, 47). Paradoxically, this virtual object originates in an actualization of thought. The act of writing taps into, and enriches in return, a reservoir of ideas, memories, metaphors, and linguistic material that contains potentially an infinite number of texts. These resources are textualized through selection, association, and linearization. But if the text is the product of an actualization, it reverts to a virtual mode of existence as soon as the writing is over. From the point of view of the reader, as reader-response theorists have shown, the text is like a musical score waiting to be performed. (p: 45)
The virtuality of texts and musical scores stems from the complexity of the mediation between what is there, physically, and what is made out of it. Color and form are inherent to pictures and objects, but sound is not inherent to musical scores, nor are thoughts, ideas, and mental representations inherent to the graphic or phonic marks of texts. They must therefore be constructed through an activity far more transformative than interpreting sensory data. In the case of texts, the process of actualization involves not only the process of “filling in the blanks” described by Iser but also simulating in imagination the depicted scenes, characters, and events, and spatializing the text by following the threads of various thematic webs, often against the directionality of the linear sequence. (p: 45)
As a generator of potential worlds, interpretations, uses, and experiences, the text is thus always already a virtual object. But the marriage of postmodernism and electronic technology, by producing the freely navigable networks of hypertext, has elevated this built-in virtuality to a higher power. “Thought is actualized in a text and a text in the act of reading (interpretation). Ascending the slope of actualization, the transition to hypertext is a form of virtualization” (Lévy, Becoming Virtual, 56). This virtualization of the text matters cognitively only because it involves a virtualization of the act of reading. “Hypertextualization is the opposite of reading in the sense that it produces, from an initial text, a textual reserve and instrument of composition with which the navigator can project a multitude of other texts” (54). In hypertext, a double one-to-many relation creates an additional level of mediation between the text as produced by the author—engineered might be a better term—and the text as experienced by the reader. (p: 46)
When Lévy speaks of the virtualization of the text, the type of hypertext he has in mind is not so much a “work” constructed by a single mind as the implementation of Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex: a gigantic and collectively authored database made up of the interconnection and cross-reference of (ideally) all existing texts. (p: 46)
In Lévy’s words, the screen becomes a new “typereader [machine à lire], the place where a reserve of possible information is selectively realized, here and now, for a particular reader. Every act of reading on a computer is a form of publishing, a unique montage” (54). As the user of the electronic reading machine retrieves, cuts, pastes, links, and saves, she regards text as a resource that can be scooped up by the screenful. (p: 47)
If text is a mass substance rather than a discrete object, there is no need to read it in its totality. The reader produced by the electronic reading machine will therefore be more inclined to graze at the surface of texts than to immerse himself in a textual world or to probe the mind of an author. Speaking on behalf of this reader Lévy writes, “I am no longer interested in what an unknown author thought, but ask that the text make me think, here and now. The virtuality of the text nourishes my actual intelligence.” (63) (p: 47)
The virtuality of texts and musical scores stems from the complexity of the mediation between what is there, physically, and what is made out of it. Color and form are inherent to pictures and objects, but sound is not inherent to musical scores, nor are thoughts, ideas, and mental representations inherent to the graphic or phonic marks of texts. They must therefore be constructed through an activity far more transformative than interpreting sensory data. In the case of texts, the process of actualization involves not only the process of “filling in the blanks” described by Iser but also simulating in imagination the depicted scenes, characters, and events, and spatializing the text by following the threads of various thematic webs, often against the directionality of the linear sequence. (p: 45)
As a generator of potential worlds, interpretations, uses, and experiences, the text is thus always already a virtual object. But the marriage of postmodernism and electronic technology, by producing the freely navigable networks of hypertext, has elevated this built-in virtuality to a higher power. “Thought is actualized in a text and a text in the act of reading (interpretation). Ascending the slope of actualization, the transition to hypertext is a form of virtualization” (Lévy, Becoming Virtual, 56). This virtualization of the text matters cognitively only because it involves a virtualization of the act of reading. “Hypertextualization is the opposite of reading in the sense that it produces, from an initial text, a textual reserve and instrument of composition with which the navigator can project a multitude of other texts” (54). In hypertext, a double one-to-many relation creates an additional level of mediation between the text as produced by the author—engineered might be a better term—and the text as experienced by the reader. (p: 46)
When Lévy speaks of the virtualization of the text, the type of hypertext he has in mind is not so much a “work” constructed by a single mind as the implementation of Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex: a gigantic and collectively authored database made up of the interconnection and cross-reference of (ideally) all existing texts. (p: 46)
In Lévy’s words, the screen becomes a new “typereader [machine à lire], the place where a reserve of possible information is selectively realized, here and now, for a particular reader. Every act of reading on a computer is a form of publishing, a unique montage” (54). As the user of the electronic reading machine retrieves, cuts, pastes, links, and saves, she regards text as a resource that can be scooped up by the screenful. (p: 47)
If text is a mass substance rather than a discrete object, there is no need to read it in its totality. The reader produced by the electronic reading machine will therefore be more inclined to graze at the surface of texts than to immerse himself in a textual world or to probe the mind of an author. Speaking on behalf of this reader Lévy writes, “I am no longer interested in what an unknown author thought, but ask that the text make me think, here and now. The virtuality of the text nourishes my actual intelligence.” (63) (p: 47)
