




































Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 2.1 (2012) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.5399/uo/hsda.2.1.3016 
 

 

 

 

  91 

"Liquid/Cloudy/Foggy: For a Critique of Fluid Textuality"  

Massimo Riva, Brown University 

Abstract: The title of this paper is inspired by the book edited by Domenico 

Fiormonte entitled Canoni liquidi (Liquid Canons). Of course, the adjective 

“liquid” refers to Zygmunt Bauman’s term at which my critique is also 

indirectly aimed. The title of Fiormonte’s book seems to suggest equivalence 

between textual “mobility” and “liquidity.” Yet the “liquefying” of (literary) 

canons and the emergence of new intrinsically kinetic or fluid forms of 

mobile textuality requires a critical assessment that does not prematurely 

celebrate the funeral of the text as we know it but pays close attention to what 

seems to be waiting for us beyond the text, as suggested in Francesco 

Fiorentino’s recent edited volume. This means paying attention to what in my 

recent book, Il futuro della letteratura (The Future of Literature), I call digital 

incunabula: objects/textual tools, devices programmed in a twofold, 

reciprocal sense, whose linguistic properties and rules interact and interfere 

with the algorithmic procedures of artificial languages. In this programmed 

and programmable interaction and intermediation one can perceive the 

horizon of incomprehensibility of posthuman language, providing a new 

aporetic dimension to Gadamer’s assertion that “the being that can be 

understood is language.“ This assertion is by now the most significant issue in 

the horizon of literary (digital) arts.  

Il titolo di questo saggio si ispira (e reagisce) a quello del libro curato da 

Domenico Fiormonte Canoni liquidi. Naturalmente, l’aggettivo rimanda al 

termine reso corrente da Zygmunt Bauman che rimane sullo sfondo della mia 

critica. Il titolo del libro di Fiormonte  sembra suggerire una equivalenza tra 

testo “mobile” e “liquido.” Ma la liquefazione (e liquidazione) dei canoni 

(letterari) e l’emergere di nuove forme di testualità intrinsecamente cinetica o 

fluida richiedono una valutazione critica che non celebri prematuramente il 

funerale del testo, come lo conosciamo, ma presti attenzione a quello che 

sembra attenderci “al di là del testo” (per parafrasare il titolo del libro curato 

da F. Fiorentino con cui dialogo nel mio intervento). Nel mio e-book sul 

futuro della letteratura dedicato all’opera d’arte letteraria nell’epoca della sua 

(ri)producibilità digitale, ho affrontato la questione dal punto di vista di quelli 

che definisco “incunaboli digitali”: oggetti/strumenti testuali, dispositivi 

programmati in un duplice, reciproco senso, in cui le proprietà e le regole del 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Massimo Riva 

2.1 Fall 2012  92 

linguaggio (letterario) inter-agiscono e inter-feriscono con le procedure 

algoritmiche dei linguaggi “artificiali.” In questa inter-azione o inter-

mediazione programmata e programmatica si delinea l’orizzonte di in-

comprensibilità del linguaggio post-umano, dando una nuova dimensione 

aporetica all’asserto di G. Gadamer (citato da F. Fiorentino) che “il linguaggio 

è l’essere che può essere compreso.” Questo asserto è ormai la domanda che si 

staglia all’orizzonte delle arti letterarie (digitali).  

My essay discusses three books, including mine, and all that follows should be 

considered as a series of remarks suggested, or provoked, by my reading of the two books 

edited by the organizers of the conference “Il Testo è mobile,” held in Rome on January 10, 

2012. 

 The very title of this paper is inspired by the book edited by D. Fiormonte and entitled 

Canoni liquidi (Liquid Canons). Of course, the adjective “liquid” refers to the term coined 

by Zygmunt Bauman at which my critique is also indirectly aimed. The title of this 

symposium seems to suggest equivalence between textual “mobility” and “liquidity.” Yet, 

the “liquefying” of (literary) canons and the emerging of new forms of mobile textuality 

require a critical assessment that does not prematurely celebrate the funeral of text as we 

know it but pays close attention to what in my book about the future of literature in the age 

of its digital (re)production I have defined digital incunabula (Riva, Il futuro della 

letteratura) 

The loss of centrality of Text is not a taboo any more, in the humanities. Rather, it is now 

seen as an opportunity for a theoretical and methodological turn, which would bring the 

humanities closer to current developments in the social sciences or even the life sciences. I 

am thinking of the “neural” or “neurological” turn in cultural studies, for example. Yet, 

whether we embrace this opportunity or not by and large depends on a fundamental 

ambivalence that we humanists deep down feel in an age in which models and forms (as 

well as canons) inherited from the past are not only “liquefied” but also, apparently, 

“liquidated” on the digital platform.
 

 As humanist and literary scholars, we are committed to 

the preservation of our past, the repository of our literary heritage, as much as we are to the 

construction of our future, the re-generation of that heritage within the new mode of cultural 

production. Yet, we do not often see clearly enough how the two things actually go together 

- indeed too often we see them as goals opposing each other.  The only way out of this 

ambivalence is to realize that our own contribution to the development of the digital mode 

of cultural production entirely depends on our ability to boldly convert and re-invent 

within it models and forms inherited from our cultural (literary) past.  

Disenfranchising Text from the history of print culture is something that the literary 

(digital) avant-garde has been doing for at least the past twenty years, continuing  the 

mission that historic avant-gardes (in the early 20
th

-century and the 1960s) had already 

undertaken. When, in Il futuro della letteratura, I speak about the future of literature, 

therefore I mean both the entirety of “works” tagged or codified as such in our cultural 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Massimo Riva 

2.1 Fall 2012  93 

archives and the symbolic form of cultural production which is undergoing today a radical 

transformation: now more than ever, the survival of the first (the repository, our literary 

memory) and that of the second (the cultural form, our literary imagination) depend on each 

other. As our literary heritage turns into a cloud of (textual) data, the cloud itself changes 

shape. Today practically all of “literature” - artifacts made of language - is digital, including 

the literature that gets printed.  In my book, I speak about those artifacts that are born 

digital, that is, literary artifacts intentionally produced with programmable devices. Of 

course, the literary text is always already a programmed linguistic, stylistic and rhetorical 

device: it is programmed by the author – and sometimes re-programmed by the reader - to 

do something, tell a story, recite a poem, etc., according to more or less strict linguistic, that 

is grammatical, syntactical, semantic rules or constraints.   

From this point of view, the (literary) text can be considered the software of the literary 

machine. From another point of view, however, one can consider the text itself as the 

machine, the programmable device. Yet another perspective considers the hardware and 

software inextricably intertwined, as in a printed book, or an e-book. Now, in the age of 

digital incunabula, as it moves from print to electronic formats, the literary text undergoes 

(or is augmented by) another programming layer. Literary codes do not transfer untouched 

from a medium to the other. To speak of different “supports” for the same text is therefore 

utterly inadequate. Under the hood of the literary machine, different forms of language 

(human, mechanic, or machinic, “natural” and “artificial”) interact and often interfere with 

each other. But here is the important thing: when we speak of programming or re-

programming text (or the literary work of art as a textual device), we mean both the re-

programming of linguistic codes or rules according to the procedural protocols (algorithms) 

of computing devices and the programming or reprogramming of digital devices in order to 

process and perform literary procedures: the “textual instruments” of which, for example, 

speak John Cayley or Noah Wardrip-Fruin (two of the artists I consider in my book) are 

complex, multilayered devices in which programming and literary codes expressively inter-

act with each other (Riva 179-180). 

The result of this inter-action, or, to quote Kate Hayles, “inter-mediation” between 

literary and computing codes is to produce hybrid symbolic-artificial objects (artifacts): 

indeed, in my book I also claim that the Hybrid, in this sense, emerges as the most 

compelling ontological genre (or category) of digital literature, the ontological mode of a 

multi-layered, programmable device (Hayles, Electronic Literature 51; Riva 105). The most 

interesting and, from my point of view, successful works of digital literature about which I 

write, are those which highlight this hybrid ontology of programmed literary objects, 

without sacrificing the pleasure that we traditionally associate with the literary experience. 

This pleasure is only partially due to the surprise and wonder effect produced by the 

mobility acquired by the text. Rather, as Espen Aarseth argued in  Cybertext. Perspectives on 

Ergodic Literature, a book published fifteen years ago, it also depends on the active, ergodic 

role of the “reader” or “user” or co-producer (cyber-text releases a high degree of ergonomic 

energy).  But what does this all mean, exactly? Granted, human culture is not text-centric 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Massimo Riva 

2.1 Fall 2012  94 

anymore, perhaps we are indeed moving beyond the text, to quote the title of the book 

edited by Francesco Fiorentino. Fifteen years ago, Mario Ricciardi edited a similar book 

entitled Oltre il testo: gli ipertesti (Beyond Text, HyperText) which seemed to provide an 

easy answer to the question about the future, or the “beyond,” of textuality. Those were the 

years in which the meta-model of the net (or the web) was beginning to impose itself: the 

beyond of textuality seemed to be its empowered version, Hyper-Text in both its social and 

cognitive meaning. Yet, fifteen years later, we are not so sure that our ever more powerful or 

hyper-linguistic devices are indeed only that (the computer as an alphabetic machine, as 

Umberto Eco used to say).
1

 Beyond the declining fortune of literary hypertexts a more 

radical questioning seems to emerge, in Fiorentino’s introduction to his book, where he 

writes: “With the digital revolution the age has come to an end in which we could think, 

with G. Gadamer, that ‘the being that can be understood is language’ ” (Fiorentino 16). 

In short, this is really the “beyond” that we have to envision. The mobility of text is only 

an epiphenomenon of this more profound transformation. Consciousness-language-writing: 

this hermeneutic circle (which also included the Freudian un-conscious) is now inserted in 

a more complex circuit, in the age of programmable media. This is the issue facing the 

humanities as they come to consider (to say “understand” would be excessive) the alpha-

numeric, and algorithmic properties of our hybrid cultural devices. Indeed, Understanding 

as the mode of humanistic thinking (according to the tradition that dates back to W. Dilthey) 

is now a questionable tenet, albeit one perhaps the humanities should preserve.  The digital 

mode of production is based on a different ontology in which (I quote again Fiorentino) 

textuality is no longer able “to capture all the knowledge that an epoch or a society has of 

itself” (Fiorentino 23). This is indeed the paradox we are confronted with: at a time when 

written communication seems to literally explode and (paraphrasing an old Latin proverb) 

scripta volant everywhere, writing in its strict linguistic sense loses its privileged 

epistemological status within our culture. This is not simply due to the fact that our cultural 

processes “are nowadays embedded within a plurality of media” (Fiorentino 23). (Wasn’t 

this always so? Only the hegemony of text in print culture has obscured the intrinsic 

multimediality of human culture, across the ages).  And it is not only due to the fact that, 

since the 1960s, with Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc., the “mobility” 

of writing has been unleashed, liberated from its metaphysical constraints. Perhaps more 

than anything else, it is the demise of the Book as a cultural meta-model in the post-

Gutenberg era that un-bound the text, both in a physical and a symbolic sense. The Book as 

metaphor of the World has been replaced by the Net. Fiorentino speaks of  “infinite nets” in 

his introduction to his book (9-59). Even the (modern) Encyclopedia from this point of view 

was a meta-book. Thinking in terms of Networks (rather than Corpora or Canons, for 

example) has become a commonplace even for humanists, as texts lose their corporeal 

features and become assimilated to dis-continuous, disembodied processes.  

So the question we have to ask ourselves really is: what awaits us, not beyond Text, but 

beyond Hyper-Text? In my book, I suggest that the best electronic or digital literature invites 

us to consider precisely this question. HyperText, of course, emerged in the 1960s as an 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Massimo Riva 

2.1 Fall 2012  95 

exquisitely literary construct: later, Ted Nelson explicitely spoke of the literary inspiration 

of his idea of hyper-text as expressed in the title to his book, Literary Machines. Yet, 

Hypertext as a genre (or a model) of digital literature flourished later and withered. Already 

years ago, Bob Coover spoke (somewhat nostalgically) of hypertext as the golden age of 

electronic literature, already over at the turn of the last century. Yet, all forms of digital 

literature have this in common with the hypertexts of yesteryear: they consciously, 

intentionally, reflectively adopt the computer or other programmable devices as their “post-

textual” instruments. Not just to disrupt the “linear” logic of traditional narrative or re-

calculate the constraints of poetic forms. But to re-think our own primary connection with 

Language as the only understandable mode of human being. Beyond Language, beyond 

Understanding. 

The artists of which I write in my book present us with an interesting critical paradox: 

they work in a niche, undoubtedly (when all the culture is somewhat, at least 

technologically, converted into avant-garde, avant-garde is reduced to a niche). Yet, in their 

work they move beyond the contamination or hybridization of the meta-model of the Book 

with the meta-model of the Net (Riva 299-304). In other words, they move beyond the meta-

model of Hyper-Text, the cognitive translation of the intrinsic hyper-mobility of Language, 

in order to venture into the uncharted territory of the hybrid, natural-artificial processing of 

language, which, supposedly, across our previous evolutionary stages, has made us human 

(all too human). In doing so, however, these artisans of the techno avant-garde maintain an 

organic link with the old repository of literary imagination: they experiment with the 

literary codes inherited from the past, especially the procedural algorithms of the historic 

avant-gardes, putting them to the test of the new instruments or devices – and in doing so, 

they claim a somewhat hybrid but progressive identity as writers.  

And here we come to the heart of my argument and my conclusions. In a book of a few 

years ago, Arturo Mazzarella spoke of the “great net of writing,” in praise of (literary) 

Writing. It is true, he wrote, that within our cultural mode of production writing 

increasingly “hybridates” itself with video art, digital cinema, computer games, virtual 

communities, social networks etcetera. Yet Writing, according to Mazzarella, maintains a 

fundamental power: “the capacity of going back to its origins: to the material pregnancy of the 

word, combined with the virtuality naturally imprinted in writing, whose indeterminacy 

assures its absolute plasticity” (Mazzarella 118). I have italicized in this quotation the terms that 

I find both suggestive and highly problematic. The history of writing, as we know, hardly 

justifies a meta-physics of the Origin: indeed, the latest forays into the origins of writing suggest 

a closer relationship between language and calculus than the traditional division of the two 

cultures was able to accept (Grigorenko).  

As for the material pregnancy of the word, it is always embedded in, and dependant on, the 

specific tools and media in which the word finds concretization: there is nothing exclusively 

natural in it; it is an exquisitely technological device. And finally: of which indeterminacy does 

Mazzarella exactly speak (write) here? A linguistic or a semantic one? Is the plasticity to which 

he alludes the capacity of Writing to break and renew its own rules and procedures? If so, is this 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Massimo Riva 

2.1 Fall 2012  96 

plasticity a natural or a hybrid quality: isn’t the process of writing always embedded in a 

technological inter-mediation? And doesn’t the degree of plasticity precisely depend on this 

intermediation? Moreover, we may ask whether this praise of the intrinsic plasticity, 

indeterminacy and fluidity of Writing is sustainable from both a conceptual and a realistic point 

of view; or whether it should be simply considered an effect of the digital mode of production, a 

retrospective projection of properties that belong to the latter. I would argue the latter.  

Perhaps, in our contemporary context, it does make more sense to speak of  “liquid” or 

“fluid” writing than “solid” literature. Yet, one must ask, is the price to be paid for the loss of an 

understandable notion of “literature”? Fiorentino celebrates our newly acquired freedom to 

venture “diasporically” (thanks to the hyper-mobility of texts, once all canons are liquified) 

beyond our traditional institutional and territorial boundaries. It is limiting indeed to speak 

“only” of “literature” instead of  “infinite nets,” understood as a new meta-cognitive model. 

If we accept this position, criticism will then become “a set of variously intertwined 

epistemological practices which trace knowledge paths in the Cultural Hyper-text” 

(Fiorentino 59). 

My final question then is about the specific medium of this set of practices, distributed, 

pervasive, or interstitial within the cultural rhyzome. According to Fiorentino, they consist 

in a “multitude of texts which are connective machines of diverse enunciations” 

(Fiorentino, 58) – Fiorentino also uses the term “script” and “score” (as in cinematic and 

musical writing). These definitions are certainly consistent, in principle, with the definition 

of “textual instruments,” mentioned above.  The question is: what kind of Writing are we 

talking about? Are we sure that Mazzarella, Fiorentino, Cayley, etc. mean the same thing 

when they talk about writing? Isn’t our concept of writing, so “plastic,” so “liquid,” so 

“fluid” a little too cloudy or foggy, or fuzzy, if we do not specifically reflect (on) it from the 

point of view of the hybrid textual-algorithmic devices and the objects they produce, within 

the digital eco-system? 

In short, we have to consistently ask ourselves how writing is specifically mediated 

today, through our multiple programmable devices. What kind of interface is/processes 

literary writing, today, as a cultural software? (Manovich) In order to answer this question 

we must begin by questioning the deceptively commonsense notion of an immaterial, 

entirely fluid textuality. Perhaps, one effective way to examine this ideological fluidity - the 

ideology of a free, unbound, anarchic circulation of textual currency – is to devise ways to 

interrupt the ever spinning, spiraling cycle of the hyper-textual machine.
2

 How can literary 

(expressive) software interfere with the automatism of our self-programming cultural 

machine? How can it allow us to critically reflect, from both an emotional and cognitive 

standpoint (as is the prerogative of great works of literary art) on the way in which language 

transforms itself in its interaction with programmed devices? In the best possible cases, such 

a reflective approach (perhaps as an antidote to the widespread ludic enthusiasm for faster 

and faster computer gaming) can help us pose again, within our new cultural mode of being, 

the hermeneutical question: how can language (the being that can be understood) be 

understood, today? There is no work of digital literary art that expresses this dilemma better 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Massimo Riva 

2.1 Fall 2012  97 

than Noah Fruin’s Screen,
3

 on which I conclude my book and this essay: in this full 

immersion experience, realized for the Brown virtual reality environment, we are invited to 

read/listen to three stories, written in flickering characters on the walls of the Cave, like the 

pages of a tridimensional book or a virtual version of the origins of Writing, the latest 

version of the House of language. These stories are memories and as we try to read/evoke 

them, the characters start to peel off the walls. We can try to salvage them, pushing them 

back onto the walls by hitting them with a laser pointer, but this playful exercise becomes 

ever more frantic as the crumbling accelerates. Until we give up and the words start to swirl 

faster and faster around us until they pile up or better condense together in an 

undecipherable white cloud in which we are immersed. As the voice speaking to us from 

the depth of the Cave invites us to start “playing” again, to try and re-compose a meaning 

from the scattered, fragmentary words, the pieces of stories, of memories, of language slowly 

resurfacing on the walls, we have time to reflect that perhaps this painstaking task is (still) 

the paradoxical goal of the literary work in the age of programmable devices. 

                                                        

1

 The definition can be found in a dialogue-interview with Roger Chartier at: 

http://www.carmencovito.com/archivio/saggi_regazzoni.html (Web, August 16, 2012). 

2

 I refer to the international festival of digital arts “Interrupt,” held at Brown University in 

2008. (http://www.brown.edu/Project/Interrupt_2008/) (June 25, 2012): “Why “Interrupt”? 

In computing, a hardware interrupt request or IRQ is used to prioritize the execution of 

certain processes over others. It is a command sent to the processor to get its attention, 

signaling the need to initiate a new operation.  In the context of contemporary art, the act of 

interruption is a performance that redirects threads of process and lines of thought into 

fields of new expression. Interrupts trigger the moment when a process of creation yields a 

public manifestation. The cycle of ongoing work is paused by a challenge, calling for the 

attention of a provisional community: just as we read ICQ as “I seek you,” we can read IRQ 

as “I argue.” In this sense, interrupts articulate critical thresholds at which formal 

expressions are offered up to (or forced into) new circuits of communication, countering 

that which came before and making a case for new artistic and political futures. 

3

 A short video of the installation is available at: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOwF5KD5BV4 (June 28, 2012). 

Works Cited 

Aarseth, Erspen J. Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Md: The Johns 

Hopkins University Press, 1997. Print. 

Çoover, Robert. “Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age.” Digital Arts and 

Culture, Atlanta, Georgia, 1999. Keynote Address. Web. 1 September 2012. 

http://nickm.com/vox/golden_age.html 

Dilthey, Wilhelm. Selected Works. Volume I: Introduction to the Human Sciences, 

Princeton: Princeton, U.P., 1991  Print. 

http://www.carmencovito.com/archivio/saggi_regazzoni.html
http://www.brown.edu/Project/Interrupt_2008/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOwF5KD5BV4


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Massimo Riva 

2.1 Fall 2012  98 

Fiorentino, Francesco, ed. Al di là del testo. La critica letteraria e lo studio della cultura. 

Macerata: Quodlibet, 2011. Print. 

Fiormonte, Domenico, ed. Canoni liquidi. Variazione culturale e stabilità testuale dalla 

Bibbia a Internet. Napoli: Scripta Web, 2011. Print. 

Grigorenko, Elena L, Elisa Mambrino, and David D. Preiss. Writing: A Mosaic of New 

Perspectives. Hoboken: Taylor &amp; Francis, 2012. Internet resource.  

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision.” New Literary History, 

Volume 38, Number 1, Winter 2007: 99-125. Print.  

---, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, Notre Dame: University of Notre 

Dame Press, 2008. Print. 

Manovich, Lev. “Cultural Software.” Lev Manovich new media, digital humanities, cultural 

analytics, software studies. Web. June 25, 2012. http://manovich.net/2011/07/14/new-

article-cultural-software-lev-manoich-7142011/ 

Mazzarella, Arturo. La grande rete della scrittura. La letteratura dopo la rivoluzione digitale. 

Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008. Print. 

Nelson, Theodor H. Literary Machines 93.1. Sausalito CA: Mindful Press , 1992. Print. 

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Riva, Massimo. Il futuro della letteratura. L’opera d’arte letteraria nell’epoca della sua 

(ri)producibilità digitale. Napoli: Scripta Web, 2011. Print. 

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Expressive Processing. Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and 

Software Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011. Print. 

---, Screen (2002-05) with Sascha Becker, Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, Shawn Greenlee, and 

Andrew McClain, http://www.hyperfiction.org/screen/. Web. September 10, 2012. 

 

http://www.hyperfiction.org/screen/

