We might say that a transversal, or "transverse unity," manifests itself as a particular kind of punctuation or puncturing. It weaves a fabric or hypertext which is actually an accumulation of punctures (divisions, splits, ruptures, discontinuities) simulating the "numerous stabs and foliated gashes" or "paper wounds" (FW 124.02) which comprise Finnegans Wake . This punctuated fabric in a sense produces itself and its variant "texts" within, and as, a grouping of what Marc Auge calls "non-places" and what Helene Cixous refers to as "a metonymic chain where the other place always has its other place" ('Joyce: the (r)use of writing' 23) -- it marks a twilight zone of traces between what has previously been thought as the "inside" and "outside" of language. According to Derrida, this twilight zone would be designated by the "is," placed under erasure, in the equation: "The Outside is the Inside" ( Of Grammatology 30ff.).
In the case of hypertext, the (non-)place of punctuation and invention -- what we call a "link" -- describes a kind of mechanical copula between aspects of the same signifier which resonate "in two absolutely different places at once, even if they are only separated by a veil" (Derrida, Dissemination 221). This non-place of the veil, the "allness eversides" (FW 568.26) of the "is" placed under erasure (between the "inside" and the "outside"), allows a transverse to take place without, as it were, taking place.
We might further envisage this hypertextual transverse in terms of what Victor Vasarely called Surface Kinetics, whereby two-dimensional surfaces are set into an apparently three-dimensional pulsation. This pulsation is brought about textually by a type of sham transparency, a kind of palimpsestic illusion -- the way we seem to be able to peer through the punctuated fabric of a text at other texts, or to be able to separate a confluence of texts into discrete textual events. What constitutes a hypertext is not simply the potential for fluid movement between significatory planes (by means of mechanical copulas), but that the planes themselves are always kept in a fluidic pulsation. Indeed, we might say that hypertext is that pulsation itself.
Envisaging something similar, Georges Bataille has suggested that we should consider language as structured like a labyrinth, not simply as being involved in its own "dazecrazemazed" (389.27) convolution of signifiers, but in a more profound way. For Bataille what is essential is the way language distributes or disseminates its signifying force by means, precisely, of copulas :
... each phrase connects one thing to another by means of copulas ; and it would be all visibly connected if one could discover in a single glance the line, in all its entirety, left by Ariadne's thread, leading thought through its own labyrinth. ['L'Anus Solaire' 81]
Which of course would not be possible, as such, and that is the point -- the transversal marked out by means of the copula cannot be reduced to a narrative thread , to a determination of presence, or of the "visible," as something revealed. In fact, it is the verb to be that can be said to make the very concept of presence possible in the first place. Or as Joyce writes: "if we look at it verbally there is no true noun in active nature where every bally being ... is becoming in its owntown eyeballs" (FW 523.10-12).
The copulative function of the verb to be is caught up in a system which retrospectively imposes a semantic value upon it, so that the verbal form which will have opened the possibility of meaning at its "origin," and which could have been described as non-substantive, becomes substantive in turn, and "Being" becomes the horizon of meaning. As Derrida has pointed out, "[a]lthough it has always been disturbed and tormented from within ... the fusion of the grammatical and lexical functions of to be has, no doubt, an essential relationship with the history of metaphysics and with all of its co-ordinates in the west" ('Le Supplement de copule' 243). Hence it is never the case that a transverse marks the active transgression of meaning, since such a meaning could only arise on the basis of what is "essential" to a transverse. As Geoffrey Bennington has noted, referring to Derrida's treatment of the Joycean "hypertext" machine ('Derridabase' 314): "this machine is already in place, it is the 'already' itself" (315). Therefore, to suggest that the hypertextual transverse is nothing more than a relativistic network of copulas would be somewhat misleading, since a transverse could not be what it is without there being a prior occurrence, and recurrence, of a "split" at the beginning of Being; between the non-substantive and substantive aspect of the copula of the verb to be.
This split at the beginning of Being opens the possibility of a tra(ns)versed text -- such as Finnegans Wake -- as an apparatus of "breakdowns". The notion of a traversed text does not arise, however, as a spoiling of some prior unity, whether this unity is represented by a transcendental signified or for the rule of the signifier. Insofar as it comprises an apparatus of "breakdowns" it does so on the basis that such breakdowns do not signal the collapse of a pristine order, but a mechanical, as it were, repetition or re-partition of a "breakdown" at the origin. If we begin to think of all texts as being produced as a function of the hypertextual transverse, rather than existing in some isolated relation to meaning, then we can also begin to comprehend the way in which any concept of priority or of a beginning is already itself a product of a transverse:
... some incision, some violent arbitrary cut ... it is of course a beginning that is forever fictional, and the scission, far from being an inaugural act, is dictated by the absence ... of any de-cisive beginning, any pure event that would not divide and repeat itself and already refer back to some other "beginning". [Dissemination 300]
In Finnegans Wake this sense of beginning with an incision is one of the possible significations evoked by the following passage:
There's a split in their infinitive from to have to have been to will be. As they warred in their big innings ease now we never shall know. [271.21-24]
The words "big innings" would refer literally to the score of a particular side in a game of cricket, with the related ideas of enumeration, accumulation, development, the narrative of the game indirectly recorded in the score, the sense of time and history, etc. Yet "big innings" can also be seen as signifying quite differently. We might consider, for instance, the word "split" as possibly referring to a split which seems to have been introduced into a word ("beginnings") which is not present in this passage from Joyce's text in order to create two different words that are ("big" and "innings"). Conversely, the "split" might refer to an irreducible remainder if we were to attempt to force "big" and "innings" to signify "beginnings," or, allegorically, if we were to attempt to reduce an otherwise arbitrary numerical system of keeping score (chronological history, for example) to some originary intention or meaning (suspended in the abyss of the "zero"). Such an origin is depicted as precisely what "we never shall know," because we will only ever encounter there the past-tense of a split (a signifier of "nothing" which is nontheless not without value and without which "origin" and "history," among others, would be unthinkable), substituting itself to infinity. In this way, the beginning itself is never a beginning as such, since it always already constitutes a division of sorts (hence "as they warred [both "were" and "war"] IN thier big innings"). Or, according to the distinctions Jean-Michel Rabate has made, the Wake "begets only beginnings but invalidates all origins" ('Lapsus ex machina' 79). The beginning without origin is always a beginning-already and a beginning-not-yet: a non-place which is also a containment and an uncontained flow.
This is perhaps nowhere more in evidence than in the opening line of Finnegans Wake , which "begins" with the words "riverrun past Eve and Adam's ...". The reference to Adam and Eve, and the biblical account of the "fall" in Genesis , with its attendant concepts of divine unity and so forth, follows from an apparent elision of syntax which is suggestive of another kind of fall of its own. At the "beginning" of Joyce's text there appears a "split" which, despite all efforts, cannot be recuperated within a system, whether linear or dialectical, according to which it would be substituted for by a concept of presence -- even if that concept were to be "present" only in the form of a signifier, the English definite article and ultimate term of the very text which that "split" would have opened in the first place: "the" (628.16).
The elision of the ultimate line of Finnegans Wake , precisely at that place toward which the definite article will have directed its signifying force, suggests that it is not simply a matter or regarding Joyce's text as a "book of Doublends Jined" (20.16), since the articulating joint itself also exceeds the text, daring it to fold back upon itself, in a sense to close itself in a gesture of affirming definite articulation, and causing it to spend itself in the attempt (interruption and excess of the flow of "riverrun"). This split or dis-arti ulation would mark what, according to Derrida, "can never be mediated, mastered, sublated, or dialectized through any Erinnerung or Aufhebung " ( Dissemination 221). The Wake , with the possible signification of its "first term," "riverrun," as "Erinne ung" (remembrance as internalisation), and its apparent haunting by the "ultimate term," "the," enacts at its "beginning" what is illustrated graphically in "big innings" as the (non-)place or partition of/at the origin.
THE GHOST OF A CHANCE
To render this apparent haunting in terms of what Jacques Aubert calls "the actualization of a noun" -- the word "riverrun" -- "as it emerges from an echo" ('riverrun' 72), without first distinguishing this "echo" from a signifier of a prior plenitude or past presence (of meaning, even of a grammatical system), is to more than simply lose sight of the "originary" nature of this partition -- especially in regards to Joyce's writing practice in Finnegans Wake and the suggestion that the inspiration, intentionality, or originality of the text belongs to what he calls a "lethemuse" (272.F3) as concealing forgetfulness. Joyce's allusion to the mythical river Lethe provides, via the figure of "gossipaceous" Anna Livia (the "eternal geomater" whose science of "aletheometry" is always already involved in originary dissimulation), a way in which we can think Erinnerung (Platonic aletheia) as the internalisation and repetition of a kind of "primal repression," recalling also the epigraph to Freud's Traumdeutung: Flectere si nequeo supero, Acheronta movebo .
The question of genealogy thus runs up against the challange posed by psychoanalytic theory (even, or especially, at those points where psychoanalysis is seen to fail) to classical notions of inference and derivation.In so far as we can speak, then, of any "true genealogy of the noun " ('riverrun' 72), as Aubert suggests that we can, it would have to be a genealogy "described," not by the inference of signifying chains, but by the (re-)occurrence of a rupture or dissimulating event , a "split" which before hand would spoil every possible tense, "from to have to have been to will be," to which traditional genealogy would lay claim as the basis of its science.
One of the difficulties, Aubert suggests, in dealing with the word "riverrun," is the way that it can function simultaneously as both a noun and a verb. According to Aubert this is but one of the means by which the Wake "constantly calls representation into question," that is by inventing significatory "categories" in a way that "runs counter to the mechanisms of language and of myth while also obtaining from them a prodigiously high output." However, while Joyce's writing calls into question existing systems of representation -- "linguistic, mechanical, cybernetic and so on" --, Aubert insists that "we still must define as rigorously as possible the interconnections between the various systems it uses ... and the modes of articulation of one with another" (77), even if, as he seems to suggest, such a project of defining could not, in the final analysis, articulate itself independently of Joyce's inventions. This desire for preservation and genealogy, while at the same time recognising the necessary impossibility of both, marks another way in which we can view the hypertextual transverse in terms of what Jean-Michel Rabate calls (dis-)articulation. In other words, there can be no genealogy at work upon the Wake which is not already compelled by the Wake to disengage itself from its systematic grounds, which nevertheless continue to haunt it, involving it in a type of "solipsism" which can be said to be characteristic, to a greater or lesser extent, of all reading practices and even, according to Heidegger's notion of "idle talk," of Dasein's Being-in-the-world. Which is to say, again, "if you look at it verbally there is no true noun in active nature where every bally being ... is becoming in its owntown eyeballs" (523.10-12).
This solipsism, however, would reflect something of the Freudian notion of the unheimlich. The process by which genealogy attempts to engage and define "the modes of articulation" between systems of representation which have been stripped of their specific characteristics enters into the realm of the uncanny, wherein "rigorous" definition gives way to anxious identification with the familiar or the similar and the tendency to project its own desire upon the unfamiliar and dissimilar. A comment of Heidegger's sheds some light upon this this matter:
What looks like disunity and an unsure, 'haphazard' [Zufall] way of 'trying things out,' is an elemental restlessness, the goal of which is to understand 'life' philosophically and to secure for this understanding a hermeneutical foundation. [ Being and Time 398]
The genealogical or hermeneutical will, in its attempt to recuperate chance as a means toward a foundation, reveals a deep-rooted anxiety (Angst) at its "origin." In this way the anxiety which Freud associates with the (un)heimlich also seems to arise in Aubert's encounter with the word "riverrun" and its apparent haunting by the definite article "the" and by the (Hegelian) notion of Erinnerung, suggesting that we ought to view Aubert's genealogical paradox in terms of a kind of double-articulation of a "memory"; wherein Erinnerung (remembrance as internalisation) is continually made to run up against Gedachtnis (thinking memory), revealing the dependency of genealogy and its various "infrastructures" upon a mechanical hypomnesis.