Introduction: Shakespeare, Spectro-Textuality, Spectro-Mediality 1

Notes Introduction: Shakespeare, Spectro-Textuality, Spectro-Mediality 1 . “Inhabiting,” as distinct from “residing,” suggests haunting; it is an uncanny form of “residing.” See also, for instance, Derrida’s musings about the verb “to inhabit” in Monolingualism (58). For reflections on this, see especially chapter 4 in this book. 2 . Questions of survival are of course central to Derrida’s work. Derrida’s “classical” formulation of the relationship between the living-on of a text and (un)translat- ability is in Parages (147–48). See also “Des Tours” on “the necessary and impos- sible task of translation” (171) and its relation with the surviving dimension of the work (182), a reading of Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.” In one of his posthumously published seminars, he stresses that survival—or, as he prefers to call it, “survivance”—is “neither life nor death pure and simple,” and that it is “not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death” (Beast II 130). “Survivance” is a trace structure of iterability, a “living dead machine” (131). To Derrida, what is commonly called “human life” may be seen as one of the outputs of this structure that exceeds the “human.” For a cogent “posthumanist” understanding of Derrida’s work, and the notion of the trace in particular, see Wolfe. 3 . There are of course significant exceptions, and this book is indebted to these studies. Examples are Wilson; Lehmann, Shakespeare Remains ; Joughin, “Shakespeare’s Genius” and “Philosophical Shakespeares”; and Fernie, “Introduction.” Richard Burt’s work is often informed by Derrida’s writings. See especially Film and Media and his recent “Hauntographology.” See also Nicholas Royle’s work, which often makes Derrida and Shakespeare interact in interesting ways, especially How To Read and In Memory (1–37). 4 . For Derrida, “to set it right” is in the play a “movement of correction , repara- tion, restitution, vengeance” (20), and this is arguably inseparable from a teleo- logically driven trajectory of reappropriation of meaning. Yet these economies of calculation cannot suppress an “an-economic ex-position to others” (21). For 164 ● Notes Derrida, “dis-adjustment” is also “the very possibility of the other” (20). While mostly adopting a Derridean framework to read contemporary media adaptations of Shakespeare, this book also hopes to practice an “ex-position to others” and other readings. 5 . The Shakespeare-on-film boom of the 1990s is not the subject of this book, but I am aware that I am running the risk of reproducing an Anglo-centric narrative here. According to Mark Thornton Burnett, if one attends to “alterna- tive systems of production and distribution, a more nuanced picture emerges” (“Applying” 114). For a questioning of Anglo-centric narratives in the area of Shakespeare-on-film studies, see also Huang (1–18). 6 . Burt adds that “Shakespeare has always been ‘Shakespeares,’ mediatized and subject to dislocation, decontextualization and fragmentation” (3). The theoret- ical implications of Spectral Shakespeares undoubtedly point in this direction. 7. Richard Burt points out that “Shakespeare’s popularization on DVD has involved the transformation of film itself” as well as “a shift in reception from historical to posthistorical time”: “the horizon of reception . is composed of multiple viewing possibilities that reframe the initial theatrical viewing . in media that are often old and new (DVDs textualize film, for example by divid- ing scenes up into chapters)” (Burt and Boose, “Editors’ Cut” 1, 4). 8 . For a short but thoughtful account of the position of “Shakespeare” in our current mediascape, see Cimitile and Rowe, “Shakespeare Mediascapes.” For an excellent special issue on digital Shakespeare, containing articles ranging from discussions of online scholarly editions to issues of performance, peda- gogy, and the use of multimedia tools for research, see Galey and Siemens. See also Rowe, New Media . On dslan’s HyperMacbeth , see Lessard; on Fritsch’s Hamlet X , see Wiens. Among the number of articles addressing the Shakespeare on YouTube phenomenon, see Desmet; Shohet, “YouTube”; and O’Neill. For Twitter Shakespeare, see chapter 7 . 9 . For instance, when one listens to a podcast of the Shakespeare’s Restless World series, one also watches a reel-to-reel tape recorder playing “live” what one is listening to, which is also an example of the mutual reframing of old and new media Bolter and Grusin call “remediation” (55). In the “Soundscapes” sec- tion of myShakespeare , a multimedia web project created for the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival that intends to measure “Shakespeare’s digital heartbeat” (n.pag.), and which includes commissioned work and amateur performances, sound files are often graphically represented. Interestingly, the website includes a tool for data visualization called Banquo, with data from Twitter, Flickr, and eBay. It explains that Banquo is “a ghost, a character created by Shakespeare who appears in Macbeth ,” and that this name is used “to draw parallels between the way social media leaves a lasting impression of our comments, ideas, thoughts and activity that remain in cyberspace long after they initially existed” ( sic ) (n.pag.). 10 . In the course of an extremely lucid analysis, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young points out that “it is highly questionable whether a computer is a medium, given the ways in which it violates, annuls, or supersedes notions of communication, Notes ● 165 remediation, and intermediality that are presupposed by most conventional definitions of medium” (186). He refers to work by media theorists Friedrich A. Kittler and Arjen Mulder as emblematic of opposing trends in media theory as regards the “nature” of computers—respectively, computers as essentially hardware configurations versus computers as essentially software configurations—to show that the “the end result” is the same: “to move beyond media ” (195). To Winthrop-Young, these debates on computers as hardware or software take places against the background of the finitude of human “wetware,” “the embattled area that the computer must yet master in order to render humans obsolete” (192). 11. One of the many interesting points that Greg Semenza makes in his “Introduction” to this special issue is that “only the death of the medium will validate the medium as an unequivocally worthy subject of academic study” (19). In this sense, Shakespeare on film may aspire to become canonical in Shakespeare studies precisely as a result of the proliferation of Shakespeares in new media, a proliferation that may mark the disappearance of Shakespeare on film. Some of the chapters of Spectral Shakespeares are more concerned with how early twenty-first-century Shakespeare on film is already after itself , and not only in a chronological sense. 12 . For Lanier, “one of the many achievements of the nineties was to bring Shakespeare in line with late twentieth-century visual culture and in the process loosen the equivalence between Shakespeare and text” (106). Other “reca- librations” of Shakespeare that occurred in the 1990s (and that still shape the contours of our current Shakespearean mediascape) include “the practice of resituating Shakespearean narrative in a new setting or time period” (107), and the engagement with “the concerns and screen styles of youth culture, still the most lucrative market segment for film producers” (108). 13 . In the same special issue Thomas Cartelli offers a polemical and nuanced assess- ment of the status of cinematic Shakespeare in the new millennium (“Slant Shakespeare”). 14 . For Bolter and Grusin, the “two seemingly contradictory logics [of immediacy and hypermediacy] not only coexist in digital media today but are mutu- ally dependent” (6), so that the simulation of immediacy is only ever the re-emergence of hypermediacy. See also Mitchell: “Every medium constructs a corresponding zone of immediacy, of the unmediated and transparent, which stands in contrast with the medium itself” ( What Do Pictures Want? 214). 15 . On the mediatization of liveness, see Auslander. 16 . Te c h n o p h o b i a o f t e n c o m b i n e s w i t h i c o n o p h o b i a . T h o m a s C a r t e l l i a n d Katherine Rowe underline the extent to which iconophobia shapes responses to filmic adaptations of Shakespeare (32–34). For Shakespearean spin-offs as “the realm of bastard, deformed, or wayward children of the Bard,” see Lanier, “Virtues of Illegitimacy” 132–37. 17 . On the paradoxical emergence of “medium-specific rubrics” in Shakespeare studies “precisely at the moment when Shakespeareans are grappling with the phenomenon of media convergence in our daily lives” (36), a phenomenon that 166 ● Notes is thus not unrelated to the policing of disciplinary and institutional boundar- ies, see Rowe, “Medium-Specificity.” 18 . For the proliferation of terms that describe the afterlife of a text, see, for instance, Sanders 3. For the “will to taxonomize ” as itself a significant phenomenon, especially in relation to “how the field [of adaptation studies] has tried to mark out its own territory,” see Cartmell and Whelehan (2). Adaptation is of course a “cultural process” (Cartelli and Rowe 25–26). But it is perhaps important to retain the “biological” meaning of adaptation, and also see adaptations as “living organisms.” Almereyda sees his adaptation of Hamlet (2000) as follows: “While sharing essential vital organs, cell tissues and a patchy epidermal layer with Shakespeare’s Hamlet , [my] adaptation is a separate creature, a mutation” (Almereyda xvi, qtd. in Harrison 15). This “biological” meaning also emerges in some critical discussions of adaptations (see Sanders 24; Lehmann, “Film Adaptation” 74–75; and of course Stam 1–3), and is fully exploited in Spike Jonze’s highly self-reflexive film Adaptation (2002), a film obsessed with ghosts of various kind.

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