Joyce starts his essay with the poem "The Poet Stands in the Ruins." from A Book in the Ruins written by famous Polish-American poet Czeslav Milosz.

Laying out what seems to be the main agenda of his cryptic piece, Joyce comments on Milosz's poem as follows: "The poet stands in the ruins, it is the modernist moment. [The "standing" refers to something static. Static, according to Joyce, is modernist] But, no, this is not what we see. The poet makes his way into the ruins, and in so moving the movement in itself reads barrier as gate. What he reads he writes [The "making a way into the ruins" is movement, is the postmodern that, according to Joyce, turns reader into writer and writer into reader] (273). As Joyce's emphasis on movement indicates, Joyce attempts to imagine the transformation of print into digital culture "topologically," that is, in a kind of 3-dimensional way that is interested in becoming ("how we got there", not being [static identity].

Unfortunately, I cannot comment much on Joyce's piece, because, like the Joyce himself, I am not "wise enough to be able to say what [he] means exactly" (279) and what he is trying to say. However, his piece did trigger some thoughts/questions** which I would briefly like to list here.

**(Probably, that's the goal of Joyce's piece is in the first place, to turn me, the confused, frustrated reader into a writer who continues Joyce's quest of making meaning) :

"Each thing nonetheless remains itself even in the displacement, the chiasmus, of its form. What’s changed is not the thing but its placement. Print stays itself, electronic text replaces itself. Electronic text is apt to evolve before it forms, as apt to dissolve before it finishes." Web design or MOOs are very good examples of this statement. Before a Web designer completes the page, the first planned version may be already dissolved, and the new version is not finished, BUT still it is a WEB PAGE. (so, even if it is unfinished, it does have an "essence" (the text that is on the page). So the question perhaps is if there is a fundamental difference between versions of a WebPages and between different editions of a book (for example Wordsworth's lifelong changes to his poetry). How does the interaction between reader--writer--text change if it is very fast and easy to change texts?)

If you visit Michael Joyce's website, you will find an interesting remark:

"some things remain changeless. You have our word on it. This is still, like everything, under continual construction. There are still no cool backgrounds here, no wallpaper, no forms, no frames, no tables, no client-pulls, no blinks, and their will never be any. There are still only a few heavy duty screens full of color, graphics (for instance my Home’s page".

An interesting thought: the only thing that remains stable/changeless in the virtual world is that everything is always changing. Is this a new insight or an old truism?????

Joyce says that "the future won’t stay still but instead keeps on replacing itself. The page becomes the screen, the screen replaces the page. We could call this placement "history".

Electronic text present themselves in the medium of their dissolution: they are read where they are written, they are written as they are read. What "this could be," the poet tells us, "you don’t know yet."

This quote seems to be related with the ambiguous title of Joyce's article. "(Re) placing the author" means two things: (1) the author is substituted by somebody (perhaps the reader?); yet at the same time (2) the author is not taken out of the game. Instead he is being placed back (re-placed) at a different point in the web of relations between author--reader-text. What does Joyce say about this new place? Since he is thinking topologically (in 3D), we can't expect him to give us the coordinates of the author's new place. That much I understand. But where do we find the author then?

Joyce points out for us that he reads the poem of Milosz as a mediation on electronic text.

"The one who reads the book in the ruins replaces the one who reads the space of the ruin in the book we read. In its unraveling the erupted world retreats by routes along which it had previously traveled. Thus …. the paleontologist's fossil gives way to the poet's imagined….scene (276)." Read this passage a couple of times and try to unravel its meaning! I think it may mean this: the one who reads "the books in the ruins" (us, the readers) replaces the one who reads the space of the ruins (Joyce and Miloz), or, as Joyce puts it: "In the course of what is seen the writer is replaced by the reader…This is the claim of constructive hypertext, and by extension any system of elecronic text….. Thus, the fossil word (the old print text) … on the computer screen ….. again takes its place within the universe of the visible and the sensual" (276). So, electronic text re-animates the word, makes it sensual, vivid, alive. But electronic text is more than that. It "is a belief structure and the reader is apt to believe that even the most awkward technology of literacy embodies the associational schema of the text which it presents" (276). So, there is a connection between the form and medium of a text and its meaning. "[The reader] sees herself there in [the electronic text's] form….and feels that the form trails (drags along) behind her as she goes. Scene is seen: this is the shift from the book" (276-77). So, the book metaphor used to be our belief structure; now this structure is replaced by a new one. It is replaced by the electronic text, which is also a belief structure (rather than an ideology-free unstructured space), and which is saturated with belief structures (not neutral). But then again, Joyce is not sure if this is really so, because it is not really clear if "Scene is seen" (285). Confused?????? Us, too--so lets as Dickie and Bill……;-)

Another important aspect is the concept of contour (a term related to topology) and its relationship to new circumstances of mind. A contour is "one expression of the perceptible form of a constantly changing text, made by any of its readers or writers at a given point in its reading or writing." Elements of the contour include:

the current state of the text at hand;

the perceived intentions and interactions of previous writers and readers which led to the text at hand, and those interactions with the text that the current reader or writer sees as leading from it (p. 280).

It seems important that contours are discovered sensually, read in the visual form of the verbal, graphical, or moving text (280). They include both content and design (280). What contours do is express relationships among text, author and reader (283).

At the end of his essay, Michael Joyce discusses forms beyond the book: "Hypertext structures created in storyspace could become rooms in a MOO, their links doors or corridors between them, each room a text to be read as well as written, and a place where at any time a reader could encounter another and a text change (seen is scene) before one’s eye. Joyce sees virtual worlds as "a structure of words, everything we will see from now on is made of words: scene is seen, text is useless, thus its use." ???? Again, at this point we would like to replace ourselves (the authors) by you (the readers) and hand over the discussion to you.

Does the image of the bombed library indicate that Joyce subscribes to the replacement model (the electronic text wiping out and replacing the printed text)?

What do we make of the statement that "print stays but electronic text is spaces" (285)?? Could it be Joyce sets up a false dichotomy between permanence (print, which undoubtedly is more permanent than electronic text) and spaces? What is the opposite of permanence? Is it evanescence??, permanent change?? Or what? And what's the opposite of space???????? And what does Joyce mean by space? Does he mean unlimited freedom? (If we'd answer this question with 'yes' we would imply that Joyce thinks the electronic space is "free/without structure, etc." Is that the case???