The term culture turns out to be multifaceted:
culture vs. nature, material vs. mentality are topics which are highly
disputed. The basis of my investigation was an understanding of culture
as program. This means that culture is not defined by its artifacts but
as an underlying program of semiotic coding
which is the basis for our construction of reality and possible
worlds.
Lotman's thesis that there exists a parallel between consciousness,
text and culture points to the capacity of texts to represent our perception
of space. Signs of space in texts are products of a complex process of
linearization which have to transform
three-dimensional space into linear and therefore one-dimensional language.The
term sign spaces refers to the possibility of
texts to create their own spaces in a metaphorical
sense. Iser's hypothesis that so called "reality" and the constructionof
virtual spaces in literature do not have to be interpreted as oppositionbut
as mediated by imagination was leading my
analysis. The example of the literary construction of spaces demonstrates
that the experimentation with patterns of our perception leads to an esthetic
transformation of space which becomes fragmented and mosaic.
The reciprocal influence of the different arts broadens the possibilities
of
narrative space in completely new ways.We
have to give up models which try to describe the text as one world in favor
of an open
multifaceted view of textuality. The text as a labyrinth of a network
in which all nodes are serially connected forms an unlimited space.
The text can be described as the number of its possible
links. It communicates by branching out. The text theories of Barthes,Kristeva,
Derrida and Eco come to be the program for the description of the new hypermedia.
The new hyperculture cannot be conceived solely
within traditional categories, because it stands for a cultural state of
permanent dynamics. It is a continuous revision and interpretation of categories,
and therefore of possible cultures, which let its influence grow as a political,
economic, and cultural space of tomorrow. The suspension of borders, spatial
proximity which is simulated by the worldwide networked information, cyberspaceas
space in space open up reflections on fictionality of space in general.
Hyperspace represents and comments on this imaginary spatialization without
making the new boundaries visible. For the present a universal hyperculture
is just a result of discourse and therefore a product of imagination.
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