[Porousness] in 7CV [Part 2 of ?] Intertextuality
7CV is not only diffuse or permeable or porous in the sense that its boundaries [membrane] are non-static, but also in that they allow for intertextual diffusion. 7CV is permeated throughout by other texts via appropriation, allusion, citation, and photocopy. Here, intertextuality surpasses or evades its usual purposes. As with the overabundance of formats and editions, hyperbolic intertextuality destabilizes assumptions about the static nature of the book. Lin says:
My interest with HEATH and 7CV was to treat the book as a distinct medial platform through which a lot of ancillary information passes, much like a broadcast medium like TV or a narrow-cast medium like Twitter or Tumblr.
(Interview with Angela Genusa for Rhizome, Oct. 2012)
Like a TV broadcast or a social media feed, 7CV aggregates a wide variety of information from many sources and authors. This creates a reading experience which is hypertextual and discursive in a way that feels similar to channel surfing or browsing the web.
In one illustrative instance, a passage of dense critical prose analyzing the architecture of Walmart is interrupted with the non-sequitur, â#pilsner is my favourite kind of #beerâ (128), set apart not only by its diction and subject matter but also by capitalization scheme and typeface as if it were copy-and-pasted from another source. The hashtags, of course, allude to Twitter, and indeed by causing the readerâs attention to flit momentarily to something completely unrelated, this passage mimics the experience of reading an article on a phone or computer and receiving a notification from Twitter in the corner of the screen. Throughout the book images (mostly photographs and scanned images of book backs and packaging) appear beside text to which they bear no (or indecipherable) relevance, interrupting attention much like popups or other advertisements. To read Linâs ambient review of Wylie Dufresneâs modernist restaurant WD-50 on page 88 and then happen upon the scanned image of a toothpick package from that restaurant on page 101 feels like stumbling on Google Ads for a product youâve been recently Googling.
Allusions and citations permeate the book like hyperlinks on the internet. Citations like â1935 âThe present situation in quantum mechanicsâ in Naturwissenschaften, 23, pp. 823-828â (103) and allusions like âThe book is James Beardâs Theory and Practice of Good Cooking. The only other book I kept in that apartment at the time was a copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashberyâ (112) refer the reader directly to other texts outside of the book. Or consider the literal hyperlinks in the PDF 7CV Critical Reader, of which there are more than 100. 7CV even makes use of internal linksâthe note â(continued on page 222)â (123) physically sends the reader to another location in the book, like a hyperlink which sends the reader to another area of the same website. Of course, such hypertextual connections are present in any text with endnotes, citations, or allusions, and that is precisely the point. 7CV exaggerates and proliferates hypertextual connections in order to emphasize how hypertext always informs reading experiences, even in non-digital formats. A book, as much as a website, is a networked object.