Digital Literature: Ephemeral in Truth?

A brief overview of the current methods used to preserve digital works has us realize that they strive to make material states durable. This article introduces the lability phenomenon, which is the technical and semiotic dependence of the result displayed during the reading on the technological context of execution of the program, which prevents us from defining a precise state to preserve. Lability is considered as a fundamental, indispensable and unpredictable feature of “private reading” productions, which are designed to be read on the reader’s equipment. Besides, some works induce a disjuncture between reception and digital reading, introducing meta-readings that sometimes implement some of the work’s contexts, including its lability. The Spinozist ontology then provides us with the necessary heuristics to design preservation in terms of “the possibility to update a power to act,” rather than making a materiality durable.