AdAptAtion As ConneCtion
45
Chun, “stems from how they are imaged and what they are imagined to
do.” 50 Networks, I would continue this line of thought, are cultural patterns
imbued with an ideological function, oscillating, as Alexander Galloway
notes, between “the chain of triumph” and “the web of ruin.” 51
On a basic level, adaptations are processes in which multilayered connections are established between different modes of representation, authors,
audiences, media, and/or corporations. Such connections can be explicit
or implicit, they can be total or partial, and they form complex networks
of creation, reference, adaptation, and co-adaptation. Such networks of
adaptation are inherently open, meaning they are only potentially there as
soon as connections are traced and agreed upon by an individual or by an
“interpretive community” that then also becomes an agent in the network.
This “interpretive community” accounts for both the existence of individual
interpretations of a cultural product as well as for the “stability of interpretation (at least among certain groups at certain times).” Connections are thus
not purely subjective but always prestructured by interpretive “strategies
[that] exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape
of what is read.” 52 The film No Country for Old Men, directed by the Coen
brothers, for example, makes an explicit reference to Cormac McCarthy’s
novel by its use of the same title and thereby connects the two media and
their respective cultural discourses. Yet, not only does the film have to be
highly selective in forming these connections. The film-novel connection
is only one possible connection out of a dense network of inherent links to
other films, genres, cultural, aesthetic, or production contexts, not to mention the extensive realm of what Genette calls “paratexts” (titles, prefaces,
epigraphs etc.) and “metatexts,” the discourse about the text by fans and
critics that surrounds the text proper. 53 These connections form an implicit
intertextual and intermedial web, yet they have the potentiality to turn
into adaptations as soon as they are enacted, performed, and recognized
as adaptations by a particular community.
Having established that adaptations can be regarded as networks of
circulating signification, what follows from such a proposition? What is
50 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. “Networks NOW: Belated Too Early.” In Network Theory and American
Studies, special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies, ed. by Ulfried Reichardt, Heike
Schäfer, and Regina Schober, 60.1 (2015), 37.
51 Alexander Galloway, “Networks.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. by W.J.T. Mitchell
and Mark B.N. Hansen (The Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010), 281.
52 Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the ‘Variorium’,” Critical Inquiry 2.3 (Spring 1976), 483.
53 Gerard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree [1982], transl. by Channa
Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 3; 8.
45
Chun, “stems from how they are imaged and what they are imagined to
do.” 50 Networks, I would continue this line of thought, are cultural patterns
imbued with an ideological function, oscillating, as Alexander Galloway
notes, between “the chain of triumph” and “the web of ruin.” 51
On a basic level, adaptations are processes in which multilayered connections are established between different modes of representation, authors,
audiences, media, and/or corporations. Such connections can be explicit
or implicit, they can be total or partial, and they form complex networks
of creation, reference, adaptation, and co-adaptation. Such networks of
adaptation are inherently open, meaning they are only potentially there as
soon as connections are traced and agreed upon by an individual or by an
“interpretive community” that then also becomes an agent in the network.
This “interpretive community” accounts for both the existence of individual
interpretations of a cultural product as well as for the “stability of interpretation (at least among certain groups at certain times).” Connections are thus
not purely subjective but always prestructured by interpretive “strategies
[that] exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape
of what is read.” 52 The film No Country for Old Men, directed by the Coen
brothers, for example, makes an explicit reference to Cormac McCarthy’s
novel by its use of the same title and thereby connects the two media and
their respective cultural discourses. Yet, not only does the film have to be
highly selective in forming these connections. The film-novel connection
is only one possible connection out of a dense network of inherent links to
other films, genres, cultural, aesthetic, or production contexts, not to mention the extensive realm of what Genette calls “paratexts” (titles, prefaces,
epigraphs etc.) and “metatexts,” the discourse about the text by fans and
critics that surrounds the text proper. 53 These connections form an implicit
intertextual and intermedial web, yet they have the potentiality to turn
into adaptations as soon as they are enacted, performed, and recognized
as adaptations by a particular community.
Having established that adaptations can be regarded as networks of
circulating signification, what follows from such a proposition? What is
50 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. “Networks NOW: Belated Too Early.” In Network Theory and American
Studies, special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies, ed. by Ulfried Reichardt, Heike
Schäfer, and Regina Schober, 60.1 (2015), 37.
51 Alexander Galloway, “Networks.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. by W.J.T. Mitchell
and Mark B.N. Hansen (The Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010), 281.
52 Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the ‘Variorium’,” Critical Inquiry 2.3 (Spring 1976), 483.
53 Gerard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree [1982], transl. by Channa
Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 3; 8.