oh, for god's sake

[labellementeuse]

In the transition from the written to the virtual [electronic] subject, deconstruction played a significant theoretical role, for in reinterpreting writing (emphasising its instabilities, lack of originary foundations, intertextualities, and indeterminacies), in effect it made the written subject move much closer to the virtual subject than had traditionally been the case.
- N. Katherine Hayles, The Condition of Virtuality 202. emphasis mine!

OK. This passage comes in the middle of a paper in which she asserts (in conjunction with a number of other critics) that oral culture produces a subject (i.e. a person/ality) which is fluid, changing, situational; written culture produces a subject which is fixed, self-identical, decontextualised; and virtual culture, by which she means cultures using computer technology as their means of production of the subject, produces said subject as... well, she hasn't got any snappy key words, but she uses phrases like "formed through dynamic interfaces", "body boundaries extended... through proprioceptive coherence" and "a cyborg." OK, cyborg is snappy. Let me be clear here: she's not talking about literary theorists, but everybody. You, me, your fifteen year old cousin.

How many people, really, have read deconstruction theory? I haven't really, and I am an English Lit major. Now, I am a terrible person, for sure, and I blame a degree structure which has let me get away with never doing any literary theory. But! Your fifteen year old cousin is not a bad kid for never having read any. If she'd only gone as far as "theoretical role", I would have been fine. But she's actually saying that Derrida has changed your fifteen year old cousin. Right? "[T]he written subject [is] much closer to the virtual subject." Wait, what? Hang on, didn't she just say that deconstruction identified the ways in which the written subject is not stable? not decontextualised? not self-identical? So doesn't that mean that actually, deconstruction has made it more clear that the subject hasn't changed much at all?

Here's an example for clarity: Hayles makes much of the fact that computer-based writing is quite different from paper-based writing. Because of cut and paste and copy and being able to go back and add extra bits, you can make structural changes to writing; you can write from the beginning or from the end; etc. You probably have actually felt this difference in your writing when you moved from high school, where the bulk of your writing would have been done on paper, to university, where the bulk of your writing would have been done on a computer. I wrote drafts in high school; I never wrote drafts at university. But hang on one second: didn't Hayles notice that words like "cut" and "paste" describe actual physical actions? You can cut and paste paper. It's not as convenient as it is on a computer, but you can do it. Tamora Pierce describes physically cutting and pasting her adult Alanna novel into the four young adult Alanna books that were actually published. These structural changes can be made. Drafting is our way of acknowledging that paper isn't the best tool to make the changes that we want to make. But what has actually changed about our subjectivity there? It can be expressed more easily on a computer. But would Mary Shelley not have needed to do the same things? Wouldn't she have redrafted Frankenstein, shuffled chapters and scenes around, killed her darlings? And she was writing a long time ago, y'all. How about the people who wrote the Qur'an, who tried to internally index it? People who write dictionaries, which aren't meant to be read from cover to cover? People who write encyclopedias who use print tools to create hyperlinks?

tl;dr: I think people are overstating the big change in the writing subject. I can juuuuust about buy that maybe there is, or will be, a change in the reading subject. But most of ALL: guise, literary theory is good in lots of ways, but it doesn't create a dramatic change in the nature of what it means to be a person and to express yourself in forty years. Literary fiction? For sure. Art? Definitely. The way I write a paper? I don't think so.