This document discusses theories of textual materiality and cybertext. It addresses how texts can be considered embodied entities through the interplay between their physical/material aspects and signifying strategies. Materiality is presented as a dynamic quality emerging from the relationship between a text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of readers. The document also discusses how cybertexts can be considered systems involving the text, a medium, and a human operator, with blurred boundaries between these elements. Game-like and narrative qualities of cybertexts are addressed, as well as how the reader takes a player-like role in interacting with such texts.

1. Technotexte et Cybertexte

2.  « Material metaphors, a term that foregrounds
the traffic between words and physical
artifacts », « Les métaphores matérielles, un
terme qui met en relief les relations entre les
mots et les objets physiques »

3.  The contemporary pressure toward
dematerialization, understood as an epistemic
shift toward pattern/randomness and away
from presence/absence, affects human and
textual bodies on two level at once, as a change
in the body (the material substrate) and as a
change in the message (the codes of
representation).

4.  The crucial move is to reconceptualize materiality as
the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its
signifying strategies. This definition opens the possibility
of considering texts as embodied entities while still
maintaining a central focus on interpretation. In this
view of materiality, it is not merely an inert collection
of physical properties but a dynamic quality that
emerges from the interplay between the text as a
physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the
interpretive activities of readers and writers.
Materiality thus cannot be specified in advance; rather,
it occupies a borderland –or better, performs as
connective tissue– joining the physical and mental, the
artifact and the user.

5.  Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,
literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-
specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which
recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature
of the medium in which they are instantiated matters. (….)
Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a
text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a
move that entwines instantiation and signification at the
outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering
texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central
focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent
property, so that it cannot be specified in advance, as if it
were a pre-given entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate
and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text's
"meaning" will also take into account its physical specificity
as well.

6.  MSA aims to electrify the neocortex of literary
criticism into recognizing that strands
traditionally emphasizing materiality (such as
criticism on the illuminated manuscript, on
such writers as William Blake for whom
embodiment is everything, on the rich tradition
of artists' books) are not exceptions but
paradigmatic of the ways in which literary
effects emerge from and are entwined with the
materiality of texts.

7.  When a literary work interrogates the
inscription technology that produces it, it
mobilizes reflexive loops between its
imaginative word and the material apparatus
embodying that creation as a physical presence.
 Hayles, Katherine N..Writing Machines. Op. Cit.,
p. 25.

8.  In this view of materiality, it is not merely an
inert collection of physical properties but a
dynamic quality that emerges from the
interplay between the text as a physical artifact,
its conceptual content, and the interpretive
activities of readers and writers. Materiality
thus cannot be specified in advance; rather, it
occupies a borderland —or better, performs as
connective tissue— joining the physical and
mental, the artifact and the user.

9.  As the cyber prefix indicates, the text is seen as a
machine –not metaphorically but as a mechanical
device for the production and consumption of verbal
signs. Just as a film is useless without a projector and a
screen, so a text must consist of a material medium as
well as a collection of words. The machine, of course, is
not complete without a third party, the (human)
operator, and it is within this triad that the text takes
place. The boundaries between these three elements are
not clear but fluid and transgressive, and each part can
be defined only in terms of the other two.
 Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature,
Baltimore et Londres: John Hopkins University Press,
1997, p. 21.

10.  -celle qui résulte d’une activité interne ,
noématique
 -celle qui résulte d’une activité externe,
extranoématique

11.  “The ergodic work of art is one that in a
material sense includes the rules for its own
use, a work that has certain requirements built
in that automatically distinguishes between
successful and unsuccessful users. »

14.  “The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler;
the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it
is possible to explore, get lost, and discover
secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically,
but through the topological structures of the
textual machinery. This is not a difference
between games and literature but rather
between games and narratives. To claim that
there is no difference between games and
narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both
categories. And yet, as this study tries to show,
the difference is not clear-cut, and there is
significant overlap between the two. » (p. 4-5.)

16.  « Sous l’angle de la forme, on peut définir le jeu
comme une action libre, sentie comme fictive et
située en dehors de la vie courante, capable
néanmoins d’absorber totalement le joueur ;
une action dénuée de tout intérêt matériel et de
toute utilité ; qui s’accomplit en un temps et
dans un espace expressément circonscrits, se
déroule avec ordre selon des règles données.
(…) C’est une lutte pour quelque chose ou une
représentation de quelque chose. »

17.  Agôn- la compétition
 Alea- le hasard
 Mimicry- le simulacre ou le «faire semblant»,
 Illinx-la recherche d'un certain vertige

18.  « Or il y a deux façons de modifier ce rapport.
Ou bien on s'évade du monde en créant un
univers artificiel d'égalité pure au départ grâce
à la compétition libre ou à l'effet du hasard, ce
qui renvoie aux deux premières catégories. Ou
bien c'est le sujet lui-même qui se transforme
dans son rapport avec le monde, soit en se
créant un autre personnage, soit en provoquant
un certain trouble intérieur, ce qui renvoie aux
deux dernières catégories. »

21.  « Un des premiers effets des pratiques hypertextuelles
actuelles est la prédominance de la dimension ludique.
On ne lit pas sérieusement les hypertextes fictionnels.
On joue à les lire. Si déjà, aux dires des philosophes du
langage, la fiction est un jeu de faire semblant, le
lecteur simulant par voie de conventions implicites une
référence, celle qui a cours avec les hypertextes
exacerbe cette disposition, l’imposant comme régie
unique. On porte peu attention à la lettre du texte, au
grain de sa signification, on s’amuse et épuise son
attention au niveau de la forme, du dispositif offert,
l’enchainement des fragments, les possibilités visuelles
et sonores, la dimension technique du médium. »