6 INTERTEXTUALITY TODAY THE CULTURE INDUSTRY This study was first published ten years ago, and with this second edition it seems appropriate to attempt to register how inter- textuality and its study have developed in that period. The last ten years, after all, have seen an unprecedented acceleration in the kinds of Information Technology and web-based communications with which this study concluded its account of intertextual theory. When Chapter 5 was being written, in 1999, the Millennium Bug was still considered a threat and it was not anachronistic to speak of contemporary media in terms of ‘film, television and video’. The chapter was written before the age of the iPhone, Twitter, Wikipedia, and, incredible as it now seems, before the rise to dominance of Google, Facebook and YouTube. The cultural environment of today is so much more conclusively a new media environment, that a reassessment of the role of intertextuality is clearly required The past ten years have also seen an exponential increase in the features of Postmodern culture touched upon in the previous chapter. The first decade of the twenty-first century will204. INTERTEXTUALITY TODAY undoubtedly be remembered for the War on Terror, the rise of militant Islam, global anxiety over climate change, and latterly the stunning collapse of the world banking system. However, it will also be remembered as a decade dominated by the phenom- enon of Reality TV, a relentless celebrity industry, and more generally a move in almost all cultural forms to practices of cul- tural regurgitation. It does not seem strange, to most people on the verge of the second decade of the millennium, that most films they watch are remakes, that a good proportion of the music they listen to consists of cover versions or remastered tracks or is dependent upon sampling, and that the television shows they watch, the digital games they play, and even the fashions they wear ate frequently, even predominantly, allusively based on previous decades and previous styles. The phrase made popular by Theodore Adorno, the Culture Industry, has never seemed more appropriate, so that the kinds of nostalgia for a previous Modernism, complete with avant-garde artistic forms resistant to mainstream culture, that we saw in Jameson’s work in the previous chapter, can appear prophetic of the common intellectual response to the contemporary scene John Barth’s and Charles Jencks’s celebration of Postmodern culture, discussed in opposition to Jameson, may appear less available today. However, it is in exactly this contemporary scene of adaptation, appropriation, sampling, restyling and reformating that theories of intertextuality need to be rearticulated and, to employ a cur- rently popular figure associated with vampyre books, comics, games, films, television series and life-style choices, revamped. ADAPTATION STUDIES Raceetasnlenicdecglis Markers of the emergence of this (see Burke and Leitch, 2008a). Much of this new discipline is geared towards examining aspects of the culture we have justINTERTEXTUALITY TODAY 205 mentioned. As Linda Hutcheon puts it: ‘Videogames, theme park rides, websites, graphic novels, song covers, operas, musicals, cussed movies and novels’ (Hutcheon, 2006: xiv). However, as Hutcheon recognizes, there are anxieties within adaptation studies that are somewhat peculiar to its historical formation. (2006: 4). As she puts ic: * (ibid: xi). However, she also comments: ) (ibid.: 3). The ‘us’ here seems to be academics and critics, since she goes on to examine the mass appeal of adaptation. The anxiety or uneasiness leads us to the central role of intertextual theory within adaptation studies and returns us to familiar issues. As tation and appropriation, is inevitably interested in how art creates art, or how literature is Adaptation studies has its origins precisely in the study of film’s intertextual relationship to litera- ture. In fact it can be argued that the discipline of film studies itself partly emerged from the examination of this relationship. As Thomas Leitch makes clear, however, this fact has led film studies, as it developed into a recognizable discipline, to leave the question of the filmic adaptation of literature to those working in departments of literature and cultural studies. In Leitch’s account, this genealogy explains why debates over whether certain film adaptations are faithful to their literary sources has dogged the discussion about adaptation for so long (see Leitch, 2007: 1-21). This question of fidelity and an articulation of its inadequacy is a cornerstone of the recently emergent discipline of adaptation stu- dies and allows immediately for an understanding of the role played by theories of intertextuality. As Imedla Whelehan states: For many people the comparison of a novel and its film version results in an almost unconscious prioritizing of the fictional origin206 INTERTEXTUALITY TODAY over the resulting film, and so the main purpose of comparison becomes the measurement of the success of the film in its capacity to realize what are held to be the core meanings and values of the originary text. (Whelehan, 1999: 3) Clearly what such a comparison also misses, through its posit- ing of literary text as origin of meaning, is the intertextual nature of all texts. As Christine Geraghty states, this ‘fidelity model’ concerning ‘source texts’ and originary meaning is something that has frequently been attacked within adaptation studies; Rachel Carroll boldly states: ‘every adaptation is an instance of textual infidelity’ (Carroll, 2009: 1). However, the ‘fidelity model’, according to Geraghty, also ‘persists as a default mode’ stubbornly leading critics back to an assessment of how faithful a film is to its literary source (see Geraghty, 2007: 94). This is not simply because of the origins of adaptation studies in literary studies, exemplified by Leitch. It also alerts us to a commonly held sus- picion of poststructuralist accounts of intertextuality in the field’s major theorists. Geraghty herself argues that while the main poststructuralist account of intetextuality (Kristeva, Barthes) lib- erates critics from the errors of the ‘fidelity model’, it also ‘runs the risk of ... throwing out the notion of an adaptation altogether’ in an all-pervasive intertextuality in which everything becomes definable as an adaptation (sbid.). Thomas Leitch also sees the future of adaptation studies in terms of a negotiation between what he calls the ‘two dead-ends’ of the ‘fidelity model’ and ‘Bakhtinian intertextuality ... with each text, avowed adaptation or not, afloat upon a sea of countless earlier texts from which it could not help borrowing’ (Leitch, 2008a: 63). Intertextuality, it would seem, is an obvious core theoretical framework and yet, in its poststructuralist forms, a major threat to the establishment of a viable discipline of adaptation studies. It is not surprising, then, that the more circumscribed and formalist intertextual theories of Gerard Genette have seemed a more useful resource to adopt or revise by those working in the area (see Sanders, 2006: 107; Leitch, 2007: 94-95). Leitch’s work is a good example of the urge within adaptation studies to create lists ofINTERTEXTUALITY TODAY 207 categories and formal distinctions; however, he also recognizes that the future for the discipline, if ic is to move beyond its pre- vious obsession with filmic versions of classic literary texts, is in an examination of the cultural practices of adaptation which mean that some inter-texts are selected again and again for representation whilst others are not (see Leitch, 2007: 302-3). It seems inevitable that adaptation studies will frequently con- centrate on those contemporary art works which bring adaptation itself into question. The popularity of films such as Charlie Kaufman's and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), or Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge (2002), ot texts like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) and Ian McEwan's Ato- nement (2001), which appear to examine processes of adaptation and thus liberate their film adaptations to do likewise, are current favourites for analysis and debate. The impact of the new digital technology on the contemporary classroom, now often equipped with DVD players, laser projectors and internet access, also encourages an intertextual approach to the classics of the curri- culum which not only parallels but can also begin to analyze the cultural obsession with adapting sections of the canon. Shake- speare, Jane Austen, the Brontés, Dickens, are no longer simply the objects of study in the contemporary academic classroom, their cultural value and changing ideological significance can now also mote easily and rewardingly be studied through analysis of their frequent transmedia adaptations. In such a pedagogical approach questions of intertextuality are of clear and pressing importance. Since a large part of this field of study involves transposition from one media to another, another crucial aspect of study opens up in which the formative nature of different media becomes a crucial aspect of study and debate (see Hutcheon, 2006: 33-77). There is no doubt that the emergence of adaptation as a major field of critical and theoretical debate is partly a consequence of a technological age in which the majority of people in the West, at least, live within a multi-media environment. In such an environ- ment, of videos, DVDs, iPods, internet access, gaming consoles, digital High Definition television sets, smartphones and Kindles, the narratives and the art works we engage with are presented to208 INTERTEXTUALITY TODAY us ina plethora of media. In this context, much of what passes for adaptation studies can still seem rather anachronistically focused on the printed book, the celluloid film and expensive mini-series sponsored by national television networks. It is clear, however, that the technological ability to adapt or transpose texts from one form of representation to another is an increasingly significant object for our critical and cultural consideration. Likewise, as Hutcheon suggests, audiences are learning to adapt themselves to such a new adaptive environment. References to Darwin and the theory of evolutionary adaptation are not uncommon in the literature (see Sanders, 2006: 154-55; Hutcheon, 2006: 31-32; 176-77). Referring to the phe- nomenally successful triad of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1954-55), Phillip Pulman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Hutcheon reflects on how they ‘are now being made visible and audible on stage, in the movie theater, on the video and computer screens, and in multiple gaming formats, and their readers are proving to be just as demanding’ or, in other words, just as confident and comfortable in media other than prose fiction (Hutcheon, 2006: 29). In such an environment, a new outlook regarding the social and cultural role of art opens up and the intertextual nature of all texts is foregrounded. In order for theories of intertextuality to help us analyze such a cultural moment, however, we need to return to the manner in which the new media reformulate our understanding of intertextuality and the processes of meaning- making that we associate with that term. A good example comes in Michael Ryan Moore’s analysis of Konami’s video game Six Days in Fallujah (2009), a game based on military events in Iraq in 2004 (see Moore, 2010: 190). Commenting on the public outrage produced by the game, Moore reflects on the fact that such a censorious reaction is not accorded to film adaptations of the Iraq war, of which there have been a number, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008). Moore’s point is that the ele- ment of choice and of contingency within a video game changes the social rules about acceptability. As he states: Because contingency is crucial to game play, critics cannot satisfy themselves by policing the work of a single director or producer; inINTERTEXTUALITY TODAY 209 other words, the contingency of video games allows each individual player to become a potentially problematic adaptor. (ibid.) Part of the new field of adaptation studies will have to examine this intertextual or transpositional change of meaning as stories, whether fictional or factual, move from one medium to another, and readers and viewers become increasingly interactive participants in the creation not only of the meaning of the text but also at times its presentation. Theories of intertextuality also have to reassess the kind of cautious, sceptical response to the new media expressed at the end of the last chapter of this book. THE DE-CENTRED TEXT Since 1993, the year in which it was invented, the World Wide Web or W3 has revolutionized the lives of millions of people around the world. It has also revolutionized the ways in which it is possible to think about meaning, about textuality, and about what we do when we read and write. The rate of change has accelerated, so that in the ten years since Chapter 5 of this book was written a significant shift has occurred between academic forms of theory and those involved in the design and production of new electronic and digital forms of media, Lev Manovich makes striking claims about this shift in his introduction to MIT's The New Media Reader (2003). Manovich argues that today's greatest art works are the digital media themselves, which have taken up and massively extended the ideas about textuality and meaning articulated by eatlier twentieth-century avant-garde artists. Manovich describes W3 itself as a great work of art “because it is more complex, unpredictable and dynamic than any novel that could have been written by a single human writer, even James Joyce’ (Manovich, 2003: 15). He goes on to argue: Which means that those computer scientists who invented these technologies — J.C.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, Seymour Papert, Tim Berners-Lee and others — are the210 INTERTEXTUALITY TODAY important artists of our time, maybe the only artists who are truly important and who will be remembered from this historical period. (ibid.) It is certainly true that from today’s viewpoint poststructuralist theories of intertextuality appear to have influenced and perhaps have already been assimilated in a computer-dominated world in which, increasingly, every item we would call a text is connected with every other text. This accelerating connectivity appeats to inspire a proliferation of media devices upon which and through which contemporary readers and viewers make those connections. As Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromola pur it: Many people today, indeed the vast majority in our urban society, choose to surround themselves with complex media forms. They enjoy the multiplicity and prefer not to concentrate on any one medium or representation for very long. Even if they are watching a single media form (say MTV on television), that form itself is fragmented and multiple. (Bolter and Gromola, 2003: 66) The MTV viewer in question is likely, today, also to be reading and writing their Facebook page, communicating with others on a mobile phone or an iPhone, and occasionally checking out facts and making further connections by accessing sites such as You- Tube ot Wikipedia on the same laptop computer on which they are communicating with their friends. The interconnectivity and multiplicity of media involved in modern life may seem over- whelming to some who have been trained to focus their attention on one medium at a time, but the fact is that such a multi-media environment does seem to physically embody and materialize the kinds of avant-garde theories concerning intertextuality we have studied in this book. As Marcel O'Gorman puts it: ‘somewhere in the early 1990s, the major tenets of deconstruction (death of the Author, intertextuality, etc.) were displaced into technology, that is, hypertext ... philosophy was transformed, liquidated even, into the materiality of new media’ (O’Gorman, 2005: xv).INTERTEXTUALITY TODAY 211 The modern media consumer, then, appears to live in a hyper- textual environment in which the theories of intertextuality we have looked at in this book are made visible through a series of technological media. As O'Gorman goes on to state, the new media also seem to offer the prospect of a global archive, theoretically figured by earlier artists such as Jorge Luis Borges (whose ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is the first text in ‘The New Media Reader) and his poststructuralist heirs, such as Foucault and Derrida. Christine L. Borgman asks the question: ‘If a global information infrastructure can link together electronic resources, whether public or private, large and small, located around the world, will it serve as a “global digital library"?’ (Borgman, 2000: 33) Recent public battles over the Google Books Library Project, which have included legal cases concerning issues of privacy and surveillance, demonstate that this feature of the new digital media is not simply an academic one. The Open Book Alliance's call for open access is balanced by the demands of the commercial world, and it is certain that che new global libraries will provide a new platform for the opposing forces of knowledge and ‘the marker’ to play out their on-going conflict. What seems clear is that the new media environment is moving us ftom a print to a digital culture in which the inter textual nature of texts is experienced at a more material level. As George P. Landow puts it: Scholarly articles situate themselves within a field of relations, most of which the print medium keeps out of sight and relatively difficult to follow, because in print technology the referenced (or linked) material lie spatially distanced from the references to them. Electronic hyper- text, in contrast, makes individual references easy to follow and the entire field of interconnections obvious and easy to navigate. (Landow, 2006: 3-4) The caution over such claims articulated over ten years ago in the previous chapter of this book, now seems, because of the degrees of connectivity between hypertexts, and the speed at which internet connections can be made, somewhat anachronistic. As Landow states, describing what can be called the de-centred text of hypertextual sites:212 INTERTEXTUALITY TODAY As readers move through a web or network of texts, they continually shift the center — and hence the focus or organizing principle — of their investigation and experience. Hypertext, in other words, provides an infinitely recenterable system whose provisional point of focus depends on the reader, who becomes a truly active reader. (Landow, 2006: 56) This decentred textual experience does now appear to contain within it the kind of resistance to notions of transparent meaning which poststructuralist theorists associated with a commercialized approach to texts. The reader of such linked textual pathways is, Landow argues, the modern equivalent of Barthes’s textual ana- lyst, tracing the never ending play of signifiance as it detonates in different directions anyone who uses hypertext makes his or her own interests the de facto organizing principle (or center) for the investigation at the moment. One experiences hypertext as an infinitely decenterable and recenterable syste, in fact because hypertext transforms any document that has more than one link into a transient center, a partial site map that one can employ to orient oneself and to decide where to go next. (Landow, 2006: 56-57) Lev Manovich compares the reader of this hypertextual, decentred text to Robinson Crusoe walking across the desert finding random objects in his way and, ptesumably, making a world out of them (Manovich, 2001: 78). An intertextual, linked, non-linear reading is what hypertexts such as those found on the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Elec- tronic Scholarship) digital resources site offer their readers (McGann, 2005: 116). As Jerome J. McGann, founder of NINES, and the Rossetti Archive which proceeded it, states: ‘Hypertext provides the means for establishing an indefinite number of “centers” and for expanding their number as well as altering their relationships. One is encouraged not so much to find as to make order — and then to make it again and again.’ (McGann, 2001: 71). One might be tempted, however, to suggest that hypertexts such as the Rossetti Archive or the Blake ArchiveINTERTEXTUALITY TODAY 213 ultimately encourage something which is not so much reading as browsing. Readers, we might object, follow the pointer as it hovers and clicks over the icons for hypertextual and internet links. Is intertextual as hypertextual reading ultimately not a kind of ‘surfing’ rather than reading? The serious answer to that rather rhetorical question would be that the nature of reading is obviously being affected, in ways we are hardly aware of as yet, by the radical change from print to digital technology. As Manovich states, if we see two layers involved in new media, the cultural layer of meaning and the computer layer of mathematical code and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and its correlatives, then we ate mistaken if we believe that the latter does not significantly influence the former. He states: ‘a code is rarely simply a neutral transport mechanism: usually it affects the messages transmitted with its help’ (Manovich, 2001: 64); therefore, ‘we may expect the com- puter layer {to} affect the cultural layer ... its organization, its emerging genres, its contents’ (Manovich, 2001: 46). Laments over the collapse of literacy levels are as inaccurate and naive as they ever were; however, it does seem likely that a new reading and writing environment, based on new, post-print technology, will have a significant effect upon those practices. It will also have a formative influence on all the textual, artistic and historical material it digitally archives and represents. As McGann often stresses, the ‘entirety of our received cultural archive’ is being digitally recoded (see McGann, 2001: 15 and 2005). This means not only that academics in the Humanities need to learn the basic skills to be able to play their crucial role in that process, but also, as Manovich suggests, that the culeural archive and ‘the cultural categories and concepts’ which they have produced will undergo a process of what he calls ‘transcoding’ and also ‘reformatting’ (Manovich, 2001: 47; 89). Where does the theory and the concept of intertextuality fic in to such a process? REMEDIATION The answer to the question just posed clearly involves the future of the concept of intertextuality. Whatever that future is to be it214. INTERTEXTUALITY TODAY is bound to involve a process of naming and renaming. As Trillini and Quassdorf have remarked, the history of intertextuality has been partly one of Graeco-Latinate neologisms and a general ten- dency towards taxonomical lists. In a process which is in itself intertextual, we have seen the concept renamed and renamed again during the course of this book. In the context of new media studies and digital culture the pressure to generate terms which reflect the significant change in the object of study will inevitably mean that the focus alters from text to media, from textuality to mediality and mediation. One of the key terms which helped theorists and writers push beyond the monologic idea of the closed and finished book (intertextuality) will no doubt have to be transposed, transcoded and reformatted into other terms as the culture of the book gives way to or at least shares considerable space with the electronic, digital culture of the Human-Computer Interface (HCI) and W3. One example of such a process comes in Jay David Bolter's and Richard Grusin's much-cited and deployed concept of remediation. Essentially remediation takes us from Manovich’s transcoding and reformat- ting figures and lifts us into the realm of media analysis, in par- ticular a much needed analysis of how new and old media interact. Remediation, in the context of this book, appears like a transposition of the concept of intertextuality onto the level of media design and analysis. The process of remediation, according to Bolter and Grusin, has much to do with the long-established tendency of media to pre- sent itself as a new stage in the quest for transparency, that is the perfectly ‘natural’ and thus invisible medium. This was the way, they argue, that Renaissance perspective painting promoted itself over earlier forms of painting, how photography promoted itself over painting, how film promoted itself over the theatre, and how digital technology now presents itself as different from a range of analogue technologies and media. The argument so far reads like an intertextual account of the history of media since the Renaissance. Bolter and Grusin argue: In digital media today, as in modern art in the first half of the century, the medium must pretend to be utterly new in order to promote itsINTERTEXTUALITY TODAY 215 claim of immediacy. It must constitute itself as a medium that (finally) provides the unmediated experience that all previous media sought, but failed to achieve. This is why innovation on the World Wide Web must be represented by its promoters as a revolution. (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 270) As they go on to remind us, however, the myth of transparency is a myth, and a thoroughly intertextual process of bricolage, of appropriating, mixing and transposing styles and functions dom- inates the relationship between older and newer media. In order to make themselves look ‘new’, television news channels borrow the designs and formats of internet news sites, thereby helping viewers to recognize and to generate a sense of authenticity. These terrestrial news channels, in turn, borrow and adapt previously incorporated elements from print newspapers. As Bolter and Grusin say: ‘When artists or technicians create the apparatus for a new medium, they do so with reference to previous media, bor- rowing and adapting materials and techniques whenever possible’ (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 68). This process of remediation seems to have reached a peak with the rise to dominance of computer technology. As Bolter and Gromola write: the computer has now emerged as perhaps the most vigorous and eclectic remediator of all the various media that we still use. Various digital forms, and particularly the World Wide Web, borrow from, reconfigure, and remix all of the principal media of the twentieth century (film, radio, audio recording, and television), as well as two great earlier media: photography and print itself. All of these were new media themselves at one time and defined themselves distinction to earlier media. (Bolter and Gromola, 2003: 90-91) The point, as has been said, is a quintessentially intertextual one. Bolter’s coinage, remediation, is more appropriate to his work, however, since, apart from its citing of media, it indicates the constant activity involved in the process of adaptation, remo- delling, reformatting and transcoding. Bolter and Grusin state, again in ways which remind us distinctly of the theories of216 INTERTEXTUALITY TODAY intertextuality we have been studying: “The true novelty would be a new medium that did not refer its meaning to other media at all. For our culture, such mediation without remediation seems to be impossible’ (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 271). There is another reason why the term remediation suits theor- ists of media better than a term like intertextuality, however. Whilst poststructuralist theories of textuality incorporate all sig- nifying codes and discourses, from literature to the fashion system and beyond, the intensity of the visual dimension of the new media appeats to have encouraged a move away from linguistic and textual terminology. O'Gorman talks about ‘the pictorial turn’ (O'Gorman, 2005: 25). Manovich, in his The Language of New Media, writes of ‘a general trend in modern society toward presenting more and more information in the form of time-based audiovisual moving image sequences, rather than as text’ (Mano- vich, 2001: 78). Kelli Fuery argues that ‘it is through the image that we as new media subjects come to understand and interpret digital culture’ (Fuery, 2009: 130). McGann analyzes the manner in which digital media make it possible to critically edit ‘certain works that could not be adequately handled in a paper medium: the works of Rossetti, of course, but also those of Burns, of Blake, of Dickinson’ (McGann, 2001: 171). The last point is crucial, reminding us that this is not a simple movement forward, but is also a process in which we can now retrieve some things — the visual aspects of artists such as Blake or Rossetti — that print culture often requited us to dismiss or at least omit. A temediated Blake, as The Blake Archive so strikingly demonstrates, is not only a genuinely mixed-media experience, it is also a testament to his art’s contemporary relevance. To be able to see the distinctly different copies of a work like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell arrayed on a screen one after the other is an experience which allows for an intensely intertextual and intratextual reading of that work. Digital media will not replace earlier art forms, but will remediate them in complex ways which may ultimately bring us back to a new media version of the theories of adaptation with which we began this chapter. Perpetually remodelled and renamed, intertexcuality continues to lay its core role in the pro- duction and reception of meaning.