文字、影像、媒介淡水河畔的玻璃詩

Word, Image, Medium The Glass Poetry of an Independent Bookstore

淡水河畔的獨立書店「有河book」創立十年來，已舉辦近二百場「玻璃詩」活動。書店主人邀請文字創作者在店內面河的玻璃窗上寫詩，並以攝影及文字側記方式記錄過程，製成網頁。而每隔幾年，書店又另將玻璃詩集結成冊出版。玻璃詩在出版資本化時代護衛文學的空間，幾乎讓所有事物皆成為文學的載體：不僅印刷、玻璃、書寫、攝影、網路是媒介，身體、風景、動物亦然。其基進之處，不在人與山水景色的相融相輔，而是各式媒介對文字接力傳介所產生的主體性外翻效果：媒介的物理屬性交相作用之下，不是烘托出一個有機整體，而是暴露每一種媒介各自的界限。本文將參照當代媒介理論幾個重點，借玻璃詩思考關於文學生產的幾項命題，包括「作者」及「原創性」概念的重新整理、書寫與書寫主體內在性的扣連或斷裂問題、文學的媒介性等等。簡言之，本文企圖思索傳介概念在媒體研究之外更宏觀的理論可能性，尤其是對文學人可能的啟迪。本文主張將「傳介」理解為關係本身，而非僅是關係當中的中介。以玻璃詩為例，各媒介透過物理層次特殊性所傳介的，除了是文字信息，更是各種文學關係。然此關係性亦包括了「非關係」：詩人的身體與文字、環境之間的交疊並置，在科技媒介效應之下，並非彼此再現、指涉，而是相互鄰近、穿透，甚至消失在彼此之間。媒介特殊性曝顯媒介界限，卻也直指溝通的真義。

“Youhe book” is an independent bookstore located in Tamsui, Taiwan. Since its opening in November 2006, the bookstore has invited nearly two hundred writers to stop by and handwrite verse on the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of its riverside premises. With a few exceptions, the words written on the glass are something the invited guest has already published. The owners of the store record the process through the camera lens and descriptive notes about the guest and the work selected, and create webpages for what has come to be known as Glass Poetry. The verse on glass further materializes in print publication. Glass Poetry, thus, involves multiple relays of word: previously published work in print, the author’s handwriting, photography, digitized rendition of the writing process, and materialization in print again. Glass Poetry is at the same time a dynamic intersection of images: what the camera typically captures is the superimposition on transparent glass of Chinese characters visualized, the body of the poet writing, the surrounding landscape, and scores of stray cats the bookstore has been looking after over the years. This article offers an account of Glass Poetry as a manifold and ongoing event of mediation: mediation not only between word and image, but also of various relations contributing to or generated by literary production. The article draws on some important current lines of inquiry in media theory, in particular the argument that media technologies come to shatter interiority by taking in sense and non-sense altogether. The “non-sense” aspect of Glass Poetry consists, among other things, in the presence of landscape and animals in the photographic images: while their integration into the cultural agenda of Glass Poetry may seem random and superficial, these non-sensical elements, or what the article would like to call non-relations, are constitutive of the ethos of communicability that initiatives like Glass Poetry help to articulate.