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"Anne F. Wysocki" wrote:
Kathy wants to shoot the docent so she can move as she wants
Anne,
Not shoot to kill. Shoot her with a camera, maybe, freeze framing and setting her aside for a moment, until I'm willing to melt her back into motion. If I do violence to her intentions, it's only because I've sensed something threatening about her intentions toward me. After all, she shot me first. Escaping her is an act of psychic self-defense.
I suppose I don't envision the writer/reader roles as being as clearly distinct or distinguishable from one another as you seem to suggest, or maybe I don't *want* them to be, which probably explains my rebellion against the apparently authoritarian desire of those conservative writerly/readerly frames to draw everything--even nominally extradiegetic nodes--neatly within their confines.
<<and that learning to read and write -- to become literate -- was also all about learning to sit still, behave, and fit your words (hence thoughts) back into the shape that words were supposed to have on the page.>>
Composing as composure? I dunno. The angsts and pleasures of creation and interpretation (even, apparently, their little deaths) consist as much of motion as they do of stillness. My shooting the docent makes her still so I can move, her directing the film/frames makes me still--or at least limits my motions so that they can be nothing but iterations of hers, echoing in her hallways--and so it goes. We compose ourselves, our texts, each other's texts, and each other, by turns immersing ourselves in and challenging one another's composures/ compositions.
The oxymoronic quality of "hypercomposure" is nice--a lovely term in search of a satisfying definition Your idea of a "generous" composition is something like what I mean, though, Anne. A text that invites and somehow generates improvisational readings and responses would be the kind of hypercomposition I have in mind. Seems to me there is always something more pernicious about unconscious ideologies than reflexive ones (though I doubt we can ever make them entirely apparent), so that frames only annoy me into outright rebellion when they take their privilege to determine my reading for granted, cavalierly making it difficult for me to make even the smallest independent motion, such as bookmarking one of those (no longer) extradiegetic nodes. A framed hypertext that intentionally generated a resistance that would itself become part of the text wouldn't make me quite as unwilling to behave (literately and actively--as a reader, a writer, a thinker), for it would somehow declare that my reading behavior makes a difference, that it's as privileged as the text itself, and that the *interchange* among writer/reader/text (the hypercomposition)--an arena that becomes spatially actual if somewhat ephemeral here, at last--is, well, the shootin' match that matters.
Kathy at C.O.D.