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VII:36. While the instances of interactivity offered by existing texts are currently
extremely limited, it is important to remember that this need not always be the case, and remark
that the type of interactivity offered is different from that offered by, in particular, the (pure) literary art
of codexspace and of text-based performance. The interactivity offered by pure orality was both
what I will call catastrophic/judgmental (limited to the dismissal of the work, its rejection or
forcible suppression e.g. stopping a speaker, putting down a book) and
also cooperative/critical/co-creative. Bard and audience were able to develop a relationship
not one in which skill (even mastery) was necessarily in doubt, nor a sense of the
priority of the impetus to produce verbal art, but one, nonetheless, which allowed the
work to be significantly, meaningfully changed and, in exceptional circumstances, co-created. These
possibilities, which are not typically or materially available to pure literary or text-based
performance, are not only accessible but, arguably, extended and radicalized in a cybertextuality where
literary objects themselves both perform to their readers and are worked with by these readers as
co-authors and co-programmers.
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