YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?
HYPERTEXT AND THE LAWS OF MEDIA
by
STUART MOULTHROP
<eifa307@utxvm.bitnet>
University of Texas at Austin
_Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.3 (May, 1991)
Copyright (c) 1991 by Stuart Moulthrop, all rights reserved.
This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may
not be republished in any medium without express written
consent from the author and advance notification of the
editors.
[1] The original Xanadu (Coleridge's) came billed as "a
Vision in a Dream," designated doubly unreal and thus easily
aligned with our era of "operational simulation" where,
strawberry fields, nothing is "real" in the first place
since no place is really "first" (Baudrillard, _Simulations_
10). But all great dreams invite revisions, and these days
we find ourselves perpetually on the re-make. So here is
the new Xanadu(TM), the universal hypertext system proposed
by Theodor Holm Nelson--a vision which, unlike its legendary
precursor, cannot be integrated into the dream park of the
hyperreal. Hyperreality, we are told, is a site of collapse
or implosion where referential or "grounded" utterance
becomes indistinguishable from the self-referential and the
imaginary. We construct our representational systems not in
serial relation to indisputably "real" phenomena, but rather
in recursive and multiple parallel, "mapping on to different
co-ordinate systems" (Pynchon 159). Maps derive not from
territories but from other map-making enterprises: all the
world's a simulation.
[2] This reality implosion brings serious ideological
consequences, for some would say it invalidates the
informing "master narratives" of modernity, leaving us with
a proliferation of incompatible discourses and methods
(Lyotard 26). Such unchecked variation, it has been
objected, deprives social critique of a clear agenda
(Eagleton 63). Hyperreality privileges no discourse as
absolute or definitive; critique becomes just another form
of paralogy, a countermove in the language game that is
techno-social construction of reality. The game is all-
encompassing, and therein lies a problem. As Linda Hutcheon
observes, "the ideology of postmodernism is paradoxical, for
it depends upon and draws its power from that which it
contests. It is not truly radical; nor is it truly
oppositional" (120).
[3] This problem of complicity grows especially acute where
media and technologies are concerned. Hyperreality is as
much a matter of writing practice as it is of textual
theory: as Michael Heim points out, "[i]n magnetic code
there are no originals" (162). Electronic information may
be rapidly duplicated, transmitted, and assembled into new
knowledge structures. From word processing to interactive
multimedia, postmodern communication systems accentuate what
Ihab Hassan calls "immanence" or "the intertextuality of all
life. A patina of thought, of signifiers, of 'connections,'
now lies on everything the mind touches in its gnostic
(noo)sphere. . . ." (172). Faced with this infinitely
convoluted system of discourse, we risk falling into
technological abjection, a sense of being hopelessly
abandoned to simulation, lost in "the technico-luminous
cinematic space of total spatio-dynamic theatre"
(Baudrillard, _Simulations_ 139). If all the world's a
simulation, then we are but simulacral subjects cycling
through our various iterations, incapable of any "radical"
or "oppositional" action that would transform the techno-
social matrix.
[4] Of course, this pessimistic or defeatist attitude is
hardly universal. We are far more likely to hear technology
described as an instrumentality of change or a tool for
liberation. Bolter (1991), Drexler (1987), McCorduck
(1985), and Zuboff (1988) all contend that postmodern modes
of communication (electronic writing, computer networks,
text-linking systems) can destabilize social hierarchies and
promote broader definitions of authority in the
informational workplace. Heim points out that under the
influence of these technologies "psychic life will be
redefined" (164). But if Hutcheon is correct in her
observation that postmodernism is non-oppositional, then how
will such a reconstruction of order and authority take
place? How and by whom is psychic life--and more important,
political life--going to be redefined?
[5] These questions must ultimately be addressed not in
theory but in practice--which is where the significance of
Nelson's second Xanadu lies. With Xanadu, Nelson
invalidates technological abjection, advancing an
unabashedly millenarian vision of technological renaissance
in which the system shall set us free. In its extensive
ambitions Xanadu transcends the hyperreal. It is not an
opium vision but something stranger still, a business plan
for the development of what Barthes called "the %social%
space of writing" (81), a practical attempt to reconfigure
literate culture. Xanadu is the most ambitious project ever
proposed for hypertext or "non-sequential writing" (_Dream
Machines_ 29; _Literary Machines_ 5/2). Hypertext
systems exploit the interactive potential of computers to
reconstruct text not as a fixed series of symbols, but as a
variable-access database in which any discursive unit may
possess multiple vectors of association (see Conklin; Joyce;
Slatin). A hypertext is a complex network of textual
elements. It consists of units or "nodes," which may be
analogous to pages, paragraphs, sections, or volumes. Nodes
are connected by "links," which act like dynamic footnotes
that automatically retrieve the material to which they
refer. Because it is no longer book-bounded, hypertextual
discourse may be modified at will as reader/writers forge
new links within and among documents. Potentially this
collectivity of linked text, which Nelson calls the
"docuverse," can expand without limit.
[6] As Nelson foresees it, Xanadu would embody this textual
universe. The system would provide a central repository and
distribution network for all writing: it would be the
publishing house, communications medium, and great
hypertextual Library of Babel. Yet for all its radical
ambitions, Nelson's design preserves familiar proprieties.
Local Xanadu outlets would be "Silverstands"(TM), retail
access and consulting centers modeled after fast-food
franchises and thus integrated with the present economy of
information exchange. Xanadu would protect intellectual
property through copyright. Users would pay per byte
accessed and would receive royalties when others obtained
proprietary material they had published in the system. The
problems and complexities of this scheme are vast, and at
the moment, the fulfilled Xanadu remains a "2020 Vision," a
probe into the relatively near future. But it is a future
with compelling and important implications for the
postmodern present.
[7] The future, as Disney and Spielberg have taught us, is
a place we must come "back" to. The American tomorrow will
be a heyday of nostalgia, an intensive pursuit of "lost" or
"forgotten" values. Xanadu is no exception: Ted Nelson sees
the history of writing in the 21st century as an epic of
recovery. His "grand hope" lies in "a return to literacy, a
cure for television stupor, a new Renaissance of ideas and
generalist understanding, a grand posterity that does not
lose the details which are the final substance of
everything" ("How Hypertext (Un)does the Canon" 4). To a skeptical observer, this vision of Xanadu might suggest
another domain of the postmodern theme park. Gentle
readers, welcome to Literacyland!
[8] But this vision could constitute more than just a
sideshow attraction. Nelson foresees a renovation of
culture, a unification of discourse, a reader-and-writer's
paradise where all writing opens itself to/in the commerce
of ideas. This is the world in which all "work" becomes
"text," not substance but reference, not containment but
connection (see Bush; Barthes; Zuboff). The magnitude of
the change implied here is enormous. But what about the
politics of that change? What community of interpretation--
and beyond that, what social order--does this intertextual
world presume? With the conviction of a true Enlightenment
man, Nelson envisions "a new populitism that can make the
deeper understandings of the few at last available to the
many" ("How Hypertext (Un)does the Canon" 6).[9] What is "populitism"?--another of Nelson's neologisms
(e.g., "hypermedia," "cybercrud," "teledildonics"), in this
case a portmanteau word combining "populism" with "elite."
The word suggests the society-of-text envisioned by
theorists like Shoshana Zuboff and Jay David Bolter, a
writing space in which traces of authority persist only as
local and contingent effects, the social equivalent of the
deconstructed author-function. A "populite" culture might
mark the first step toward realization of Jean-Francois
Lyotard's "game of perfect information" where all have equal
access to the world of data, and where "[g]iven equal
competence (no longer in the acquisition of knowledge, but
in its production), what extra performativity depends on in
the final analysis is 'imagination,' which allows one either
to make a new move or change the rules of the game" (52).
This is the utopia of information-in-process, the ultimate
wetware dream of the clerisy: discourse converted with 100
percent efficiency into capital, the mechanism of that
magical process being nomology or rule-making--admittedly a
rather specialized form of "imagination."
[10] At least two troubles lurk in this paradise. First,
the prospect that social/textual order will devolve not unto
the many but only to a very few; and more important, that
those few will fail to recognize the terms of their splendid
isolation. Consider the case of the reluctant computer dick
Clifford Stoll, whose memoir, _The Cuckoo's Egg_, nicely
illustrates these problems. Stoll excoriates "cyberpunks,"
virtual vandals who abuse the openness of scientific
computing environments. Their unsportsmanlike conduct
spoils the information game, necessitating cumbersome
restrictions on the free flow of data. But Stoll's
definition of informational "freedom" appears murky at best.
He repeatedly refers to the mainframe whose system he
monitors as "his" computer, likening cybernetic intrusions
to burglaries. Electronic information, as Stoll sees it,
lies in strict analogy with material and private property.
[11] Private in what sense? Stoll professes to believe that
scientists must have easy access to research results, but
only within their own communities. He is quick to condemn
incursions by "unauthorized" outsiders. There is some sense
in this argument: Stoll repeatedly points out that the
intruder in the Stanford mainframe might have interfered
with a lifesaving medical imaging system. But along with
this concern comes an ideological danger. Who decides what
information "belongs" to whom? Stoll's "popular elite" is
restricted to academic scientists, a version of "the people"
as %nomenklatura%, those whose need to know is defined by
their professional affiliation. More disturbingly, Stoll
seems unaware of the way this brotherhood is situated within
larger political hierarchies. Describing a meeting with
Pentagon brass, he reflects: "How far I'd come. A year
ago, I would have viewed these officers as war-mongering
puppets of the Wall Street capitalists. This, after all,
was what I'd learned in college. Now things didn't seem so
black and white. They seemed like smart people handling a
serious problem" (278).
[12] Here is elite populism at its scariest. Though he
protests (too much) his political correctness, Stoll's sense
of specialist community shifts to accommodate the demands of
the moment. When in Fort Meade he does as the natives do,
recognizing agents of Air Force Intelligence, the National
Security Agency, even the CIA and FBI as brothers-in-craft.
After all, they are "smart" (technologically adept) and
"serious" (professional). Their immediate goal seems
legitimate and laudable. They are just "handling" a
problem, tracking down the intruder who has violated the
electronic privacy of Stoll's community (and, not
coincidentally, their own). They are the good policemen,
the ones Who Are Your Friends, not really "Them" after all
but just a braid-shouldered version of "Us."
[13] Stoll is not troubled that these boon companions live
at the heart of the military-industrial complex. He
disregards the fact that they seem aware of domestic
communications intercepts--in phone conversations, Stoll's
CIA contact refers to the FBI as "the F entity," evidently
to thwart a monitoring program (144). Stoll does task his
agency associates for sowing disinformation and managing
dirty wars, but this critique never gets much past the stage
of rhetorical questions. In fact Stoll seems increasingly
comfortable in the intelligence community. If the data
spooks turn out to be less interested in freedom of
scientific speech than in quashing a security leak, Stoll
has no real objection. His own ideals and interests are
conveniently served in the process.
[14] What leads to such regrettable blindness, and how might
it have been prevented? These may be especially pertinent
questions as we consider entrusting our literate culture to
an automated information system. The spooks are not so
easily conjured away. It is no longer sufficient to object
that scientists and humanists form distinct communities, and
that Stoll's seduction could not happen in our own elect
company. The old "Two Cultures" paradigm has shifted out
from under us, largely through catholic adoption of
technologies like data networks and hypertext. Networks are
networks, and we can assume that most if not all of them
will eventually engender closed elites. Fascism, as Deleuze
and Guattari instruct, is a matter of all-too-human desire
(26). What can shield humanist networks, or even the
"generalist" networks Nelson foresees, from the strategy of
divide and co-opt? What might insulate Xanadu from those
ancestral voices prophesying war?
[15] The answer, as forecasters like McCorduck and Drexler
point out, lies in the hypertext concept itself--the
operating principle of an open and dynamic literature, a
consensual canon with a minimum of hierarchical impedances
and a fundamental instability in those hierarchies it
maintains. Visionary and problematic as it may seem,
Nelson's vision of "populitism" has much to recommend it--
not the least of which is its invitation to consider more
carefully the likely social impact of advanced communication
systems. In fact hypertext may well portend social change,
a fundamental reshaping of text production and reception.
The telos of the electronic society-of-text is anarchy in
its true sense: local autonomy based on consensus, limited
by a relentless disintegration of global authority. Since
information is now virtually an equivalent of capital, and
since textuality is our most powerful way of shaping
information, it follows that Xanadu might indeed change the
world. But to repeat the crucial question, how will this
change come about? What actual social processes can
translate the pragmatics of Nelson's business plan into the
radicalism of a hypertext manifesto?
[16] The complete answers lie with future history. In one
respect, Ted Nelson's insistence that Xanadu become an
economically viable enterprise is exemplary: we will
discover the full implications of this technology only as we
build, manage, and work in hypertextual communities,
starting within the existing constraints of information
capitalism. But while we wait on history, we can devote a
little time to augury. As a theorist of an incipient
medium, one is reduced to playing medium, eking out
predictions with the odd message from the Other Side. Which
brings us to the last work of Marshall McLuhan, a
particularly important ancestral voice from whom to hear.
At his death, McLuhan left behind notes for an enigmatic
final project: the fourfold "Laws of Media" which form the
framework for a semiotics of technology. The Laws proceed
from four basic questions that can be asked about any
invention:
* What does it enhance or intensify?
* What does it render obsolete or displace?
* What does it retrieve that was previously
obsolete?
* What does it produce or become when taken to its
limit?
[17] As McLuhan demonstrates, these questions are
particularly instructive when applied to pivotal or
transforming technologies like printing or broadcasting.
They are intended to discover the ways in which information
systems affect the social text, rearranging sense ratios and
rewriting theories of cultural value. They reveal the
nature of the basic statement, the "uttering or 'outering'"
that underlies mechanical extensions of human faculties. If
we put Xanadu and hypertext to this series of questions, we
may discover more about both the potential and the limits of
hypertext as an agency of change.
1. WHAT DOES HYPERTEXT ENHANCE OR INTENSIFY?
[18] According to McLuhan's standard analysis,
communications media adjust the balance or "ratio" of the
senses by privileging one channel of perception over others.
Print promotes sight over hearing, giving us an objectified,
perspectival, symbolized world: "an eye for an ear"
(_Understanding Media_ 81). But this approach needs
modification for our purposes. Hypertext differs from
earlier media in that it is not a new thing at all but a
return or recursion (of which more later) to an earlier form
of symbolic discourse, i.e., print. The effect of hypertext
thus falls not simply upon the sense channels but farther
along the cognitive chain. As Vannevar Bush pointed out in
the very first speculation on informational linking
technologies, these mechanisms enhance the fundamental
capacity of %pattern recognition% ("As We May Think," qtd. in _Literary Machines_ 1/50).
[19] Hypertext is all about connection, linkage, and
affiliation. Formally speaking, its universe is the one
Thomas Pynchon had in mind when he defined "paranoia" as
"the realization that %everything is connected%, everything
in the Creation--not yet blindingly one, but at least
connected...." (820). In hypertext systems, this ethos of
connection is realized in technics: users do not passively
rehearse or receive discourse, they explore and construct
links (Joyce 12). At the kernel of the hypertext concept
lie ideas of affiliation, correspondence, and resonance. In
this, as Nelson has argued from the start, hypertext is
nothing more than an extension of what literature has always
been (at least since "Tradition and the Individual
Talent")--a temporally extended network of relations which
successive generations of readers and writers perpetually
make and unmake.
[20] This redefinition of textuality gives rise to a number
of questions. What does it mean to enhance our sensitivity
to patterns in this shifting matrix, to become sensitized to
what Pynchon calls "other orders behind the visible?" Does
this mean that hypertext will turn us into "paranoids,"
anxious interpreters convinced that all structures are
mysteriously organized "against" us? What does interpretive
"resistance" mean in a hypertextual context? Can such a
reading strategy be possible after poststructuralism, with
the author-function reduced (like Pynchon himself) to quasi-
anonymous nonpresence, a voiceless occasion for
deconstructive "writing" (McHoul and Wills 9)?
[21] Perverse though it may seem, hypertext does accentuate
the agonistic element of reading. Early experience with
hypertext narrative suggests that its readers may actually
be more concerned with prior authority and design than
readers of conventional writing. The apparent "quickliming
of the author" does not dispel the aura of intention in
hypertext (Douglas 100). The constantly repeated ritual of
interaction, with its reminder of discursive alternatives,
reveals the text as a made thing, not monologic perhaps but
hardly indeterminate. The text gestures toward openness--
%what options can you imagine?%--but then it forecloses:
some options are available but not others, and someone
clearly has done the defining. The author persists, undead
presence in the literary machine, the inevitable Hand that
turns the time. Hypertextual writing--at least when
considered as read-only or "exploratory" text (see Joyce)--
may thus emphasize antithetical modes of reading, leading us
to regard the deconstructed system-maker much in the way
that Leo Bersani recently described the author of
_Gravity's Rainbow_: as "the enemy text" (108).
[22] So perhaps we need a Psychiatrist General's Warning:
Reading This Hypertext Can Make You Paranoid--indeed it
must, since the root sense of paranoia, a parallel or
parallax gnosis, happens to be a handy way to conceive of
the meta-sense of pattern recognition that hypertext serves
to enhance. But would such a distortion of our cognitive
ratios necessarily constitute pathology? In dealing with
vast and nebulous information networks--to say nothing of
those corporate-sponsored "virtual realities" that may lie
in our future--a certain "creative paranoia" may be a
definite asset. In fact the paragnosticism implicit in
hypertext may be the best way to keep the information game
clean. Surrounded by filaments and tendrils of a network,
the sojourner in Xanadu or other hypertext systems will
always be reminded of her situation in a fabric of power
arrangements. Her ability to build and pursue links should
encourage her to subject those arrangements to inquiry.
Which brings us to the second of McLuhan's key questions:
2. WHAT DOES HYPERTEXT DISPLACE OR RENDER OBSOLETE?
[23] Though it may be tempting to respond, %the book%, that
answer makes no sense. The book is already "dead" (or
superseded) if by "alive" you mean that the institution in
question is essential to our continued commerce in ideas.
Irving Louis Horowitz argues that reports of the book's
demise are exaggerated; even in an age of television and
computers, we produce more books each year than ever before
(20). Indeed, our information ecology seems likely to
retain a mix of print and electronic media for at least the
next century. Yet as Alvin Kernan recently pointed out, the
outlook for books in the long run is anything but happy
(135-43). As the economic and ecological implications of
dwindling forests come home, the cost of paper will rise
precipitously. At the same time, acidic decay of existing
books will enormously increase maintenance costs to
libraries. Given these factors, some shift to electronic
storage seems inevitable (though Kernan, an analogue man to
the last, argues for microfilm).
[24] Yet this change in the medium of print does not worry
cultural conservatives like Kernan, Neil Postman, or E.D.
Hirsch nearly so much as the prospect that the decline of
the book may terminate the cultural dominance of print. The
chief technological culprit in Kernan's "death of
literature" is not the smart machine but the idiot box.
"Such common culture as we still have," Kernan laments,
"comes largely from television" (147).
[25] But the idiot box--or to be precise, the boxed idiot--
is precisely the intellectual problem that hypertext seems
excellently suited to address. In answer to McLuhan's
second question--what does hypertext render obsolete?--the
best answer is not %literacy% but rather %post-literacy%.
As Nelson foresees, the development of hypertext systems
implies a revival of typographic culture (albeit it in a
dynamic, truly paperless environment). That forecast may
seem recklessly naive or emptily prophetic, but it is quite
likely valid. Hypertext means the end of the death of
literature.
[26] Here the voice of the skeptic must be heard: %a revival
of literacy?--read my lips: not in a million years%. Even
the most devoted defender of print is likely to resist the
notion of a Gutenberg renaissance. In the West, genuine
literacy--cultural, multicultural, or simply functional--can
be found only among a well-defined managerial and
professional class. At present that class is fairly large,
but in the U.S. and U.K., world leaders in laissez-faire
education, it is contracting noticeably. So it must seem
foolish to imagine, as Ted Nelson does, a mass consumer
market for typographic information, a growth industry based
on the electronic equivalent of the local library.
[27] Indeed, should Xanadu become a text-only system (which
is not intended), its prospects would be poor in the long
run. There are however other horizons for interactive
textuality--not just hypertext but another Nelsonian
coinage, "hypermedia." Print is not the only means of
communication deliverable in a polysequential format
articulated by software links. In trying to imagine the
future of hypertext culture, we must also consider
interactive multimedia "texts" that incorporate voice,
music, animated graphics, and video along with alphabetic
script (Lanham 287). Hypertext is about connection--
promiscuous, pervasive, and polymorphously perverse
connection. It is a writing practice ideally suited to the
irregular, the transgressive, and the carnivalesque
(Harpold 8). Culturally speaking, the %promiscuity% of
hypertext (in the root sense of "a tendency to seek
relations") knows no bounds of form, format, or cultural
level. There is no reason to assume that hypertext or
hypermedia should not support popular as well as elite
culture, or indeed that it might not promote a "populite"
miscegenation of discourses.
[28] But what can this mean--talking books in homeboy jive?
Street rap accompanied by Eliotic scholia? Nintendo with
delusions of cinema? Or worse, could we be thinking of yet
more industrial light and magic, the disneyverse of
eyephones and datagloves where YOU (insert userName) are IN
THE FANTASY? Perhaps, as one critic of the computer
industry recently put it, interactive multimedia must
inevitably decay to its lowest common denominator, "hyper-
MTV" (Levy, "Multimedia" 52). According to this analysis,
the linear and objectifying tendencies of any print content
in a multimedium text would be overwhelmed by the
subjective, irrational, and emotive influence of audio/
video. This being the case, hypertext could hardly claim to
represent "a cure for television stupor."
[29] But Nelson's aspiration should not be so easily
dismissed as a vision in a dream. Hypertext does indeed
have the power to recover print literacy--though not in
quite the way that Nelson supposes; which brings us to the
third of McLuhan's queries:
3. WHAT DOES HYPERTEXT RETRIEVE THAT WAS PREVIOUSLY
OBSOLETE?
[30] Xanadu and similar projects could invite large numbers
of people to become reacquainted with the cultural power of
typographic literacy. To assert this, of course, is to
break with McLuhan's understanding of media history. It is
hard to dispute the argument of _Understanding Media_ and
_The Gutenberg Galaxy_ that the culture of the printing
press has entered into dialectic contention with a different
ethos based on the "cool" immediacy of broadcasting. But
though that diagnosis remains tremendously important,
McLuhan's cultural prognosis for the West holds less value.
McLuhan saw clearly the transforming impact of "electric"
technologies, but perhaps because he did not live much
beyond the onset of the microprocessor boom, he failed to
recognize the next step--the %recursion% to a new stage of
typographic literacy through the syncretic medium of
hypertext.
[31] It is crucial to distinguish recursion from return or
simple repetition, because this difference answers the
objection that print literacy will be lost or suppressed in
multimedia texts. Recursion is self-reference with the
possibility of progressive self-modification (Hofstadter
127). Considered for its recursive possibilities, "writing"
means something radically different in linked interactive
compositions than it does in a codex book or even a
conventional electronic document. Literacy in hypertext
encompasses two domains: the ordinary grammatical,
rhetorical, and tropological space that we now know as
"literature," and also a second province, stricter in its
formalisms but much greater in its power to shape
interactive discourse. This second domain has been called
"writing space" (Bolter 4); a case might be made (with
apologies to those who insist that virtual reality is
strictly a post-print phenomenon) that it also represents
the true meaning of %cyberspace%.
[32] Walter Benjamin observed with some regret that by the
1930's, any literate European could become an author, at
least to the extent of publishing a letter or an article in
the newspapers (232). With no regrets at all, Ted Nelson
envisions a similar extension of amateur literary production
in Xanadu, where all readers of the system can potentially
become writers, or at least editors and commentators. The
First Amendment guarantee of free speech, Nelson points out,
is a %personal% liberty: anyone may publish, and in Xanadu
everyone can. So Nelson bases his prediction of revived
literacy on the promise of a broadly popular publishing
franchise.
[33] This vision is limited in one crucial regard. Nelson
treats print essentially as the %content% of his system,
which is taking a rather narrow view. In describing Xanadu
as a more or less transparent medium for the transmission of
text, Nelson overlooks the fact that alphabetic or
alphanumeric representation also defines the %form% of
Xanadu, and indeed of any hypertext system. This neglect is
consistent with the generally broad focus of Nelson's
vision, which has led him to dismiss details of user-
interface design as "front-end functions" to be worked out
by the user.
[34] Design details, whether anterior or posterior to the
system, cannot be passed over so easily. In fact the
structure and specifications of the hypertext environment
are themselves parts of the docuverse, arguably the most
important parts. Beneath any hypertext document or system
there exists a lower layer that we might call the
%hypotext%. On this level, in the working implementations
of its "protocols," Xanadu is a creature of print. The
command structures that govern linkage, display, editing,
accounting, and all the other functions of the system exist
as digital impulses that may be translated into typographic
text. They were written out, first in pseudo-English
strings, then in a high-level programming language, finally
as binary code. Therefore Xanadu at its most intimate level
is governed by all those features of the typographic medium
so familiar from McLuhan's analysis: singular sequentiality,
objectivity, instrumentality, "left-brained" visual bias,
and so on. The wonder of hypertext and hypermedia lies in
their capacity to escape these limitations by using the
microprocessor to turn linear, monologic typography
recursively back upon itself--to create linear control
structures that enable an escape from linear control.
[35] In recognizing the recursive trick behind hypertextual
writing, we come to a broader understanding of electronic
literacy. Literacy under hypertext must extend not only to
the "content" of a composition but to its hypotextual "form"
as well--e.g., the way nodes are divided to accommodate data
structures and display strategies, or the types of linkage
available and the ways they are apparent to the reader.
Practically speaking, this means that users of a hypertext
system can be expected to understand print not only as the
medium of traditional literary discourse, but also as a
meta-tool, the key to power at the level of the system
itself.
[36] Ong and McLuhan have argued that television and radio
introduce "secondary orality," a recursion to non-print
forms of language and an "audile space" of cognition
(_Orality and Literacy_ 135; _Laws of Media_ 57). By
analogy, hypertext and hypermedia seem likely to instigate a
%secondary literacy% --"secondary" in that this approach to
reading and writing includes a self-consciousness about the
technological mediation of those acts, a sensitivity to the
way texts-below-the-text constitute another order behind the
visible. This secondary literacy involves both rhetoric and
technics: to read at the hypotextual level is to confront
(paragnostically) the design of the system; to write at this
level is to reprogram, revising the work of the first maker.
Thus this secondary literacy opens for its readers a
"cyberspace" in the truest sense of the word, meaning a
place of command and control where the written word has the
power to remake appearances. This space has always been
accessible to the programming elite, to system operators
like Clifford Stoll and shady operators like his hacker
adversary. But Nelson's 2020 Vision puts a Silverstand in
every commercial strip right next to McDonald's and
Videoland. If Xanadu succeeds in re-awakening primary
literacy as a mass phenomenon, there is reason to believe
that it will inculcate secondary literacy as well.
[37] But like any grand hope, this technopiate dream of a
new literacy ultimately has to face its man from Porlock.
Secondary literacy might well prove culturally disastrous.
The idea of a general cyberspace franchise, in which all
control structures are truly contingent and "consensual,"
does summon up visions of informatic chaos. "Chaos,"
however, is a concept we have recently begun to understand
as something other than simply an absence of "order:" it is
instead a condition of possibility in which new arrangements
spontaneously assemble themselves (Prigogine and Stengers
14).
[38] Taking this neo-chaotic view, we might inquire into the
possible positive effects of secondary literacy in a
postmodern political context. In outlining a first move
beyond our recent "depthless," ahistorical quiescence,
Fredric Jameson calls for an "aesthetic of cognitive
mapping," a "pedagogical political culture" in which we
would begin to teach ourselves where we stand in the
networks of transnational power (92). At this moment, as
the West reconsiders its New World Order in the aftermath of
a war for oil reserves, we seem in especially urgent need of
such education. But such a cultural pedagogy clearly needs
something more than the evening war news, especially when
reporters are confined to informational wading pools. We
require not only a sensitivity to the complex textuality of
power but an ability to intercept and manipulate that text--
an advanced creative paranoia. This must ultimately be a
human skill, independent of technological "utterance;" but
the secondary literacy fostered by hypertext could help us
at least to begin the enormous task of drawing our own
cognitive maps. Here, however, we verge on the main
question of hypertextual politics, which brings up the last
item in the McLuhan catechism:
4. WHAT DOES HYPERTEXT BECOME WHEN TAKEN TO ITS LIMIT?
[39] Orthodox McLuhanite doctrine holds that "every form,
pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its
characteristics" (_Laws of Media_ viii). Media evolution,
in McLuhan's view, proceeds through sharply punctuated
equilibriums. "Hot" media like print tend to increase their
routinization and determinism until they reach a limit (say,
the prose of the late 19th century). Beyond that point the
overheated medium turns paradoxical, passing almost
instantly from hot to super-"cool," bombarding readers with
such a plethora of codings that conventional interpretation
collapses. Structure and hierarchy, the distinguishing
features of a "hot" medium, reduce to indeterminacy. The
plurality of codes overwhelms hermeneutic certainty, the
"figure" of a univocal text reverses into polysemous
"ground," and we reach the ultima thule of Gutenberg
culture, _Finnegans Wake_.
[40] But though McLuhan had much to say about the reversal
of overheated media, he left the complementary possibility
unexplored. What happens to already "cool" or participatory
media when they reach their limits? True to the fourth law,
their characteristics reverse, but here the effect is
reactionary, not radical. Radio, for instance, begins in
interactive orality (two-way transceiving) but decays into
the hegemony of commercial broadcasting, where "talk radio"
lingers as a reminder of how open the airwaves are not.
Television too starts by shattering the rigid hierarchies of
the Gutenberg nation-state, promising to bring anyplace into
our living rooms; but its version of Global Village turns
out to be homogenous and hegemonic, a planetary empire of
signs.
[41] Hypertext and hypermedia are also interactively "cool,"
so following this analysis we might conclude that they will
undergo a similar implosion, becoming every bit as
institutionalized and conservative as broadcast networks.
Indeed, it doesn't take McLuhanite media theory to arrive at
that forecast. According to the economic logic of late
capitalism, wouldn't the Xanadu Operating Company ultimately
sell out to Sony, Matsushita, Phillips, or some other
wielder of multinational leverage?
[42] Such a self-negating "reversal" may not be the only
possible outcome, however. What if the corporate shogunate
refuse to venture their capital? What if business leaders
realize that truly interactive information networks do not
make wise investments? This conclusion might be supported
by memory of the controversy that Sears and IBM stirred up
when they tried to curtail user autonomy on their Prodigy
videotex system (see Levy, "In the Realm of the Censor").
This scenario of corporate rejection is not just speculative
fabulation, but the basis for a proposed modification to
McLuhan's fourth law. Media taken to their limits tend to
reverse, but not all media reverse in the same way. The
case of a complex, syncretic, and fundamentally interactive
medium like hypertext may involve a "reversal" that does not
bring us back to the same-as-it-ever-was--not a reversal in
fact but a recursion (%deja vu%) to a new cultural space.
[43] We have entered into a period of change in reading and
writing that Richard Lanham calls a "digital revolution"
(268). As this revolution proceeds (if it is allowed to do
so), its consequences will be enormous. The idea of
hypertext as a figment of the capitalist imagination, an
information %franchise% in both Nelson's and Lyotard's
senses, could well break down. Though Xanadu may in fact
open its Silverstands some day soon, hypertext might not
long remain a commercial proposition. The type of literacy
and the kind of social structure this medium supports stand
fundamentally against absolute property and hierarchy. As
we have hinted, hypertext and hypermedia peel back to reveal
not just an aesthetics of cognitive mapping but nothing less
than the simulacral map-as-territory itself: the real
beginnings of cyberspace in the sense of a %domain of
control%.
[44] "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every
nation... A graphic representation of data abstracted from
the banks of every computer in the human system" (Gibson
51). William Gibson's concept of a cybernetic workspace,
laid out in his dystopian novel _Neuromancer_, represents
the ultimate shared vision in the global dream of
information commerce. For all its advancement beyond the
age of nation-state capitalism, Gibson's world remains
intensely competitive and hierarchical (for nation-state
substitute the revived %zaibatsu%). _Neuromancer_ is
_Nineteen Eighty-Four_ updated for 1984, the future somewhat
gloomily surveyed from Reagan America.
[45] There is accordingly no trace of social "consensus" in
Gibson's "consensual" infosphere. In his version of
cyberspace, the shape of vision is imposed from without.
"They" control the horizontal, "They" control the vertical.
Of course there must be some elements of chaos, else Gibson
would be out of business as a paperback writer; so he
invents the "cyberspace cowboy," a hacker hero who plays the
information game by what he thinks of as his own rules. But
though cowboys may attempt to destabilize the system, their
incursions amount at best to harassment and privateering.
These forms of enterprise are deemed "illegal," though they
are really just business by another name, inventiveness and
competitive advantage being the only effective principles of
operation.
[46] Gibson's dark dream is one thing--in effect it is a
realization of McLuhan's prophecy of reversal, an empowering
technology turned into a mechanism of co-option and
enslavement. But perhaps Ted Nelson's 2020 Vision of
hypertextual literacy is something else. If not a utopian
alternative, Nelson's project may at least provide a
heterotopia, an otherplace not zoned in the usual ways for
property and performativity. Cyberspace as Gibson and
others define it is a Cartesian territory where scientists
of control define boundaries and power lines. The Xanadu
model lets us conceive instead a decentered space of
literacy and empowerment where each subject acts as
%kybernos%, steering her way across the intertextual sea.
[47] Nelson's visions of the future differ crucially from
Gibson's. In Xanadu we find not consensual illusion but
genuine, negotiated consensus. The pathways and connections
among texts would be created on demand. According to
Nelson's plans to date, only the most fundamental "back end"
conventions would be strictly determined: users would be
free to customize "front end" systems to access information
more or less as they like. Xanadu thus possesses virtually
no "canons" in the sense of a shelf of classics or a book of
laws; the canons of Xanadu might come closer to the musical
meaning of the word--congeries of connections and
relationships that are recognizably orderly yet
inexhaustibly various. The shifting networks of consensus
and textual demand (or desire) in Xanadu would be
constructed by users and for users. Their very multiplicity
and promiscuity, one might argue, would militate powerfully
against any slide from populitism back to hierarchy.
[48] Nelson's visionary optimism seems vindicated, then.
Xanadu as currently conceived--even in its status as
Nelson's scheme to get rich very slowly--opens the door to a
true social revolution with implications beyond the world of
literature or mass entertainment. Xanadu would remove
economic and social gatekeeping functions from the current
owners of the means of text production (editors, publishers,
managers of conglomerates). It would transfer control of
cultural work to a broadly conceived population of culture
workers: writers, artists, critics, "independent scholars,"
autodidacts, "generalists," fans, punks, cranks, hacks,
hackers, and other non- or quasi-professionals. "Tomorrow's
hypertext systems have immense political ramifications, and
there are many struggles to come," Nelson warns (_Literary
Machines_ 3/19). This is an understatement of cosmic
proportions.
[49] But it would be a mistake to celebrate cybernetic May
Day without performing a few reality checks. Along with all
those visionary forecasts of "post-hierarchical" information
exchange (Zuboff 399), some hard facts need to be
acknowledged. The era of the garage-born computer messiah
has passed. Directly or indirectly, most development of
hardware and software depends on heavily capitalized
multinational companies that do a thriving business with the
defense establishment. This affiliation clearly influences
the development of new media--consider a recent paper on
"The Rhetoric of Hypertext" which uses the requirements of a
military training system to propose general standards of
coherence and instrumental effectiveness for this medium
(Carlson 1990). Technological development does not happen
in cyberspace, but in the more familiar universe of
postindustrial capital. Thus to the clearheaded, any
suggestion that computer technology might be anything but an
instrument of this system must seem quixotic or plain
foolish.
[50] Before stepping off into cyberspace, we do well to
remove the futurist headgear and listen to some voices in
the street. No one wants to read anymore: "books suck, TV
rules." Computers are either imperial business machines or
head toys for the yuppies. Anyone still interested in
"mass" culture needs to check out the yawning gap between
the rich and the debtpayers, not to mention the incipient
splintering of Euro-America into warring ethnicities and
"multicultural" tribes. And while we're at it, we might
also do some thinking about the Gulf conflict, war-game-as-
video-game with realistic third-world blood, a campaign in
defense of economic imbalance and the West's right to
determine political order in the Middle East. Perhaps we
have used the word "revolution" far too loosely. Given the
present state of political and cultural affairs, any vision
of a "populite" future, or as John Perry Barlow has it, an
"electronic frontier" (Bromberg 1991), needs hard scrutiny.
[51] Do we really want a revolution? Are academic and
corporate intellectuals truly prepared to dispense with the
current means of text production and the advantages they
afford in the present information economy? More to the
point, %are we capable% of overturning these institutions,
assuming we have the will to do so? Looking back from the
seventies, Jean Baudrillard criticized the students of Paris
'68 for assuming control of the national broadcast center
only to reinstate one-to-many programming and the
obscurantist focus of the "media event." The pre-
revolutionary identity of television swiftly reasserted
itself in the midst of radical action. The seizure was in
fact just a sham revolution, Baudrillard concludes: "Only
total revolution, theoretical and practical, can restore the
symbolic in the demise of the sign and of value. Even signs
must burn" (_Political Economy of the Sign_ 163). Xanadu
as Nelson imagines it does promise to immolate certain
cultural icons: the entrepreneurial publishing house, the
codex book, the idea of text as unified, self-contained
utterance. Taken to its limits, hypertext could
reverse/recourse into a general medium of control, a means
of ensuring popular franchise in the new order of virtual
space. Public-access Xanadu might be the last hope for
consensual democracy in an age of global simulation.
[52] Or it might not: we do well to remember that Ted
Nelson's vision comes cleverly packaged with assurances that
copyright and intellectual property shall not perish from
the earth. Some signs would seem to be flame-retardant.
The vision of Xanadu as cyberspatial New Jerusalem is
conceivable and perhaps eligible, but by no stretch of the
imagination is it inevitable. To live in the postmodern
condition is to get along without the consolation of
providential fictions or theories of historical necessity.
This renunciation includes the "Laws of Media," whose force
in the final analysis is theoretical and heuristic, not
normative. As Linda Hutcheon observes, postmodernism
undermines any attempt at binary distinction. To invoke the
possibility of a "post-hierarchical" information order, one
must assert the fact that all orders are contingent, the
product of discursive formations and social contracts. But
this postulate generates a fatally recursive paradox: if all
order is consensual, then the social consensus may well
express itself against revolution and in support of the old
order. The term "post-hierarchical" may some day turn out
to carry the same nasty irony as the words "postmodern" or
"postwar" in the aftermath of Desert Storm: welcome back to
the future, same as it ever was.
[53] In the end it is impossible to put down Nelson's
prophecies of cultural renovation in Xanadu; but it is
equally hard to predict their easy fulfillment. Xanadu and
the hypertext concept in general challenge humanists and
information scientists to reconsider fundamental assumptions
about the social space of writing. They may in fact open
the way to a new textual order with a new politics of
knowledge and expression. However, changes of this
magnitude cannot come without major upheavals.
Responsibility for the evolution of hypertext systems as
genuine alternatives to the present information economy
rests as much with software developers, social scientists,
and literary theorists as it does with legislators and
capitalists. If anything unites these diverse elites, it
might be their allegiance to existing institutions of
intellectual authority: the printed word, the book, the
library, the university, the publishing house. It may be,
as Linda Hutcheon asserts, that though we are incapable of
direct opposition to our native conditions, we can still
criticize and undermine them through such postmodern
strategies as deconstruction, parody, and pastiche (120-21).
Secondary literacy might indeed find expression in a
perverse or promiscuous turn about or within the primary
body of literate culture. But it seems equally possible
that our engagement with interactive media will follow the
path of reaction, not revolution. The cultural mood at
century's end seems anything but radical. Witness the
President's attacks on cultural diversity (or as he sees it,
"political correctness") in higher education. Or consider
Camille Paglia's recent "defense" of polyvalent, post-print
ways of knowing, capped off by a bizarre reversal in which
she decrees that children of the Tube must be force-fed "the
logocentric and Apollonian side of our culture" (Postman and
Paglia 55). Given these signs and symptoms, the prospects
for populite renaissance and secondary literacy do not seem
especially rosy. "It is time for the enlightened repression
of the children," Paglia declares. Yet in the face of all
this we can still find visionary souls who say they want a
textual, social, cultural, intellectual revolution. In the
words of Lennon:
Well, you know...
We all want to change your head.
The question remains: which heads do the changing, and which
get the change?
------------------------------------------------------------
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URL: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.591/moulthro.591
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