the text which is not one

I found that Sadie Plant's Zeros and Ones does not merely pay lip service the richness of non-linear narrative and the connectivity of the internet, but rather enacts these concepts in the form of the text itself. Replete with allusions to & quotations of other texts (including its own chapters), Plant's book seems to have a hypertextual quality reminiscent of Net texts. First, the length of the individual sections ruptures extended, linear argument; instead, concepts are woven together across several texts: Lovelace's letters, Irigaray, Wittig, Gibson, etc. Also, the large, bold quotations, which are somewhat freestanding, create network among themselves, further challenging linearity.

It would be interesting, given that Plant's text is out of print, to digitalize it, adding both internal and external links, searchability, multiple viewing options. In printed text, weaving is the background (paper) & links must be forged in the mind of the reader; it would be fruitful to make these connections, these touches, manifest. To rework the text into an explicitly multiplicitous network would engender different modes of reading, with the result that no two readings would be likely to trace the same path through all of the links. The primary locus of organization would be the reader's interest in lieu of the convention to read print from beginning to end.

Furthermore, to highlight conceptual webs surrounding terms such as "woman," and "the feminine" would highlight that these are not transparent, purely denotative signifiers, but a network of (sometimes contradictory) significations--a process, a weaving that enables the imbrication of multiple valences: historical, biological, subject-positional, cyborgian, philosophical. These registers are mobilized not to affirm the unity of a category, but to suggest that "this sex which is not one" is multiplicitous, anti-essential, & nonidentitiarian in ways that a hypertextual reading experience would foreground.