The Intermedia

As suggested above, affinities with theatre, performance, and the visual arts, including sculpture, imply that liberature could be described as a kind of discourse in which the author intentionally blends the linguistic and non-linguistic codes, and uses different materials as the space of inscription. This resort to mixed verbal, visual, and spatial resources inspired Wojciech Kalaga to describe liberature as “a hybrid transgenre” (2010a: 8; see also 2010b: 76–77). The Polish semiotician focuses on the ontological hybridity of works in which the physical shape of the text, or to use the Ingardenian term – its material foundation – is combined with the work's intentionality thereby creating a hybrid carrier of multiple senses. As he explains, the “materiality of text does not do away with its function as the intentional object, but it calls for concretising it along with its entire extraverbal, semiotic load,” hence “a hybrid text is one that integrates senses emerging out of a collaboration of the semantics of language and the structure of the matter” (2010b: 76, 78, translation mine). Consequently, non-linguistic aspects of materialised language contribute to the architecture of the book, which is no longer seen as a transparent container for words, but a legitimate constituent of the literary text. As we have seen, Fajfer envisaged the organic, unified fusion of the semantic and material dimensions of literary texts in generic terms, although such ontic hybrids have also been described as the intermedia, or as multimodal literature.

This invites a comparison of liberature with Dick Higgins’ concept of the intermedia. This seems necessary given that some works mentioned as proto-liberatic in “A Brief History of Liberature” combine texts with drawings, or photographs (Bazarnik and Fajfer 2005a: 17–21), and hence fulfill Higgins’ criteria for defining them in this way. In the mid 1960s, the American scholar-painter revived Coleridge's coinage in order to describe pieces that are conceptually and materially situated between different types of art. In his view, such works “fall between media”; they should therefore be understood as new art forms emerging when different media are conceptually fused in one piece (Higgins 2001: 49). The con-fusion is vividly demonstrated in a chart added to the revised version of his essay, in which different arts, media, and even genres are represented by overlapping circles.