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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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