Schwebe’s keynote talk

RETROACTIVE EMERGENCE AS INTERNAL TEXT RECONFIGURATION
On the possibility of nonlinear meaning modulation in completed works
Transcript of a keynote address by Johannes Schwebe (Lucerne), held at the Colloquium for Protopoetics, Berlin 2022

The observation that some fictional texts show themselves changed in retrospect, without their wording having been modified, poses a challenge for any conventional text theory. The phenomena at issue here categorically evade revision, correction, or expansion. They also cannot be explained as mere effects of reception aesthetics. The best-known example is the disappeared novel "Flash" by Jonas Herrera, which Tamis Chavignol and Anke Woerner will discuss in a panel on Sunday morning.

We speak of retroactive emergence when new structures of meaning appear within an already published text, which were not identifiable at the time of the original reading. These structural cores—often in the form of individual words, formulations, or abruptly coherent micro-units—appear to have been embedded into the text retroactively, although no intervention has taken place.

The thesis is: In highly condensed texts, there exist latent configurations that are activated only under specific cognitive, discursive, or technical conditions. This activation does not take place along the axis of time. A reader from 2025 sees something that a reader from 2017 could objectively not have seen, even if he had read the exact same text under the exact same conditions.

Re-reading changes expectations. Retroactive emergence changes the object itself in its internal articulation. The text remains the same, but its internal condensation reorganizes itself along a new axis that did not exist previously.

The explanation possibly lies in the dynamic structure of the text objects themselves:
    • Their internal organization is not entirely static.
    • Under certain conditions, e.g., discursive shifts, technological resonance, or interpretative accumulation etc., inactive modules can become active.
    • This activation also works backwards.

An obvious comparison would be the so-called Mandela effect, a popular-psychological collective phenomenon where large groups of people consistently share false memories, for instance regarding certain cultural details or historical facts. Frequently, this is interpreted as an indication of the merging of parallel realities or alternative timelines.

For the phenomenon discussed here, the following applies: Even if one takes this explanatory approach seriously and assumes that two versions of reality have superimposed themselves, the observed effect would not merely be collateral damage of the collision. The text would have, independent of whichever timeline, generated exactly that configuration which it intends to generate. The shift would always be a manifestation of its inner architecture.

Retroactive emergence does not follow a break with reality, but rather a different logic of coherence: What appears later was always already laid out.

If one takes this hypothesis seriously, profound consequences arise for central concepts such as authorship, text fixation, edition, interpretation. The text would then not be an object with a constant core of meaning, but an energetic field that reformats itself along discursive impulses, even after its publication.

A selection of observable indications:
    • individual words that suddenly generate a coherence that previously did not exist
    • passages that have not changed, but in retrospect seem to contain new information
    • contexts of meaning that are not explainable by personal maturation, context shift, or frameworks of interpretation

What does this mean for the readers, and which questions pose themselves for research?
First: What role do collective discursive shifts play for such reverse changes?
Second: Are there threshold values from which texts enter into retroactive self-modulation?
Third: Obviously, operative phenosemanticists like 404?, Jonas Herrera, Sam T., Thomas Glavinic, Nora Novell etc. are capable of deliberately constructing texts in such a way that they recode themselves on a later time level and, in some cases, cross over into reality. If humans possess the ability to produce fiction that becomes reality, where do ethical boundaries begin? Is this ability perhaps even dangerous? Or is that a philosophical question, because every human manipulates and shapes the world through his personal actions, especially persons in positions of power?

Retroactive emergence has little to nothing to do with interpretation. It is an attack on the notion that texts are completed. Whoever treats texts as stable artifacts underestimates their internal dynamics.