Pushing Back: Living and Writing in Broken Space
THIS ESSAY WAS PUBLISHED IN MODERN FICTION STUDIES 43(3):
FALL, 1997
The word is the serpent eating its tail; it is the sign that disappears
in the act of signing -- the signing is not complete until the word has
disappeared into its puff of meaning. At the instant of apotheosis it ceases to
be itself; when it has brokered the transaction, it vanishes, reappearing only
when the eye has moved on. This is the paradox of paradoxes: The word is most
signifier when it least signifies.
-- Sven Birkerts [1]
Writing should demand we see. Seeing should demand we change.
-- Fred Pfeil [2]
1:
Ideas of the opposite
Critics
are a blessing. As William Blake almost said, they may confer kingly titles.
Failing that, critics can at least point out the high stakes involved in
questioning important aspects of a culture. "Opposition is true
friendship," the poet wrote, though these days that line reads less like
Blake than some wistful, downsized Strangelove mourning the receding glaciers
of the Cold War. There is a lesson in this. Without adversaries we are lost,
unable to find even a contingent standpoint of difference in the
all-assimilating postmodern funhouse. If opposition is friendship, critique is
aid and comfort. It restores the agenda.
Though
this logic of opposition could apply to virtually any recent intervention --
multiculturalism, or "language" poetry, or postmodern theory itself
-- we focus here on an information-age practice called "cybertext"
(Aarseth, 19). This is writing (or more accurately, textual production in
various media) that depends on a feedback mechanism operated and partly
controlled by the receiver to evoke a particular state of a variable or
combinatorial text. While this formula may cover everything from libraries,
encyclopedias, and aleatory poems to role-playing games, I Ching, and the Ouija
board, much cybertextual interest these days concerns text production on the
Internet and its World Wide Web, a subtype of electronic writing called
hypertext or hypermedia.
Once upon
a time, globally networked, computer-mediated communication seemed a genuinely
radical notion. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, advocates like Stewart
Brand, Howard Rheingold -- and above all, Ted Nelson -- foresaw electronic
publishing as the cardinal technology of a de-centered, populist information
culture. When this vision reached research labs at companies like SRI, Xerox,
and IBM, not to mention a certain garage in
In light
of recent events, Bolter's quondam description of "network culture"
seems acutely innocent, much like the utopian, "tribal" rhetoric of
the sixties on the morning after
Bolter
names our times "the late age of print" (2), but the Internet has
thrust belatedness upon other media as well. As cybertext alters the conditions
of writing and publishing it also unsettles two holy pillars of spectacular
society, broadcasting and advertising. By inviting people to create
"liaisons" at will instead of switching on a standard program,
cybertext threatens to break up the broad, demographically homogeneous
audiences on which traditional marketing depends. How can the logic of mass
communication be preserved? One answer, according to the senior pundits of Wiredmagazine,
lies in a new approach to the technology:
Sure, we'll
always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don't we? But the
center of interactive media -- increasingly, the center of gravity of all media
-- is moving to a post-HTML environment, a world way past a Web dominated by
the page, beyond streamed audio and video, and fast into a land of push-pull,
active objects, virtual space, and ambient broadcasting. You might not want to
believe us, but... you can kiss your Web browser goodbye. (Kelly and Wolf,
12-13)
Though
some have long suspected that HTML stands not for "Hypertext Markup
Language" but rather "Hypertext More or Less," the Wired
revisionists would dispense with even this distant approach to "special
literacies." They would substitute the sharply different and noticeably
familiar model of "push" communication. According to the
"push-pull" metaphor, users of the Internet currently
"pull" information into view through cybertextual interactions. This
may soon change. With software now emerging, such as various
"webcasting" systems, Netscape's "kiosk mode," and
Microsoft's ActiveX programming, content arrives in an unbroken, often
uninterruptible stream once the user completes an initial link. Since these
schemes aim to make the Web safe for advertising, it is reasonable to assume
that users will not be encouraged to make other connections, but rather to keep
the channel open and await instructions. Don't touch that keyboard:
[The]
almost neurotic urge to zap has falsely led people to think that what viewers
want is more zapping, more control, more steering. What they want instead are
more ways to zap. More ways of interrupting flow, more varieties of story and
no-story, text and game, of things done together with other people and things
done alone. More states that flit between steering the media and being steered
by it. More ability to tweak the dial, between twirling and being twirled, so
that finally you can dance with the media. (Kelly and Wolf, 19)
Although
mention of "more ways of interrupting flow" confers some ambiguity
(or inconsistency), the drift of these pronouncements seems fairly clear. If
certain people have their way, tomorrow's hypertext links will be as numerous
and important as today's "postcards and telegrams" -- that is, they
will dwindle into obscurity. While we may never lose our Web pages, and though
we may be given a thousand new ways to "zap," it seems more accurate
to say that we will forever have television, albeit in new boxes. To which end
we might remember what TV's Control Voice always says about trying to adjust
your television set. Broadcasting, it would seem, is the re-run from which we
cannot awaken, which brings us to a familiar truth: techno-cultural space
curves such that no line of flight, however ambitious, ever really departs from
initial conditions. Given time, any cultural revolution loops back toward
reaction.
2:
Brokered transactions
This is an
essay about reaction -- in the large sense, reaction against changes in mass
communication and mass markets, but more particularly, reaction against certain
approaches to "story and no-story," or narrative. On first
presentation these topics may seem dubiously related if at all. Barring a few
exceptions (most notably the Miller brothers' brilliantly successful Myst),
cybertextual work has little large-scale appeal or market potential. Many of
the most influential and interesting examples of electronic narrative are
available non-commercially on the Internet (see Shumate). So what do
cybertextual stories have to do with the social and economic fate of
cyberspace? More perhaps than may be apparent; but to explain the articulation
it is necessary to take up some parochial controversies. As we have noted,
there is much to learn from critics. Consider for instance this assessment from
Jurgen Fauth:
One of the
most prevalent problems plaguing current hyperfiction is what I call the
"poles-in-your-face" effect: Many of the hyperstories found online
are lacking in content and quality writing because the novelty of hypertext
makes all other aesthetic concerns secondary. This seems to be an intrinsic
problem with newly discovered forms... (par. 1)
According
to Fauth, hypertext fiction writers suffer from a morbid obsession with
technique. He compares hypertext links to all those toppling trees, baseball
bats, monstrous limbs, telescopes, and other elongated objects of which the
makers of stereoscopic movies were so fond. Links are "poles in your
face" that ostensibly betray a disordered relationship between storytelling
and technical effect. Following through on this analogy, Fauth like the swamis
at Wired sees little future in cybertext. His Johnsonian logic runs thus:
"3-D" did not last. Hyperfiction will not last. Nothing new lasts.
Works like Joyce's afternoonare by implication the literary
equivalent of Creature from the Black Lagoon or It Came from
Outer Space -- curios, sports, and instances of bad taste, interesting
only as they mark the limits of invention.
It seems
wise not to touch with any sort of pole the subtext of anxiety so evident in
this curious analogy; neither would it be productive to dwell on the quality of
Fauth's critical judgement, which relies heavily on blanket assertion in a
notable absence of close reading.[3] For present purposes it does not matter whether
Fauth accurately describes the state of affairs in cybertext. Counting texts
both on and off the Internet, a few hundred electronic fictions are currently
available. For the sake of argument, assume that "many" if not all
these productions are nearly identical and that all are so overburdened with
technique that they deliver little in the way of "content and quality
writing." Even under such a general indictment, questions remain.
We might
begin with the critic's criterion. What could be meant in this context by
narrative "content?" The term seems more reminiscent of Microsoft
than the Mississippi Review. What do readers (as opposed to
marketers) expect narratives to contain? Further, what aspects of a work
differentiate inferior stuff from "quality writing?" In other words,
to recur both to friendly opposition and poles-in-your-face, what useful ground
of difference has Fauth staked out between his great tradition and the
"miniature" tradition of cybertext? It is hard to answer these
question based on Fauth's text, but this may be excused. After all, Fauth seems
more interested in tactical (if not practical) criticism than in general
theory, and his scope is the article, not the opus. His dissatisfaction with
cybertext provides an opening to inquiry.
If we take
up a more ambitious study, Sven Birkerts' Gutenberg Elegies, the
terms of ideological division become much clearer. Though some have noted that
Birkerts also stints in his engagement with electronic texts (see
Kirschenbaum), he at least offers some reason for finding them unreadable.
Birkerts in fact lays out quite a sophisticated theory of narrative
"content," as in the first epigraph above. Sensibly enough, this
theory does not explain what a narrative should contain but rather how. Content
is an intangible commodity carried by the text and delivered in a
"transaction" that is "brokered" by the word through its
"apotheosis." The word, says Birkerts, "is the sign that
disappears in the act of signing" (78). Though the comparison may not be
entirely fair, this position recalls one of Donald Barthelme's characters, the
numinous Miss R. of "The Indian Uprising:"
"Young
people," Miss R. said," run to more unpleasant combinations as they
sense the nature of our society. Some people," Miss R. said, "run to
conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point
out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned
fool." (16)
To be
sure, the word to which Birkerts holds seems less a dense nugget of meaning
than a moveable token in a glass bead game. This is not a "self-consuming
artifact" in Fish's sense of socially emergent discourse; rather, the
signifying activity is self-directed, self-contained, and above all
self-limiting. Words in this view (that is, printed words) signify exhaustively
and absolutely. They are arranged just so, and, in the case of "quality"
writing, to best effect. In this regard their status as artifact or techne has
only minimal, transitory importance. Given Richard Lanham's distinction between
"looking AT" and "looking THROUGH" (5) -- between uses of
language that do or do not invite attention to themselves and their conditions
of production -- Birkerts seems squarely on the side of transparency.
Like
Fauth, Birkerts disapproves of those who would alter the business of writing by
tinkering with word processors and other machines. The word obtrudes itself
only so that it may vanish.
Writing on
the computer promotes process over product and favors the whole over the
execution of the part. As the writer grows accustomed to moving words,
sentences, and paragraphs around -- to opening his lines to insertions -- his
sense of linkage and necessity is affected. Less thought may be given to the
ideal of inevitable expression. The expectation is no longer that there should
be a single best way to say something; the writer accepts variability and is
more inclined to view the work as a version. The Flaubertian tyranny of le
mot juste is eclipsed, and with it, gradually, the idea of the author as a
sovereign maker. (158)
Here
indeed is a pole in the face, or more precisely a frontier marker announcing NO
TRUE LITERATURE PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT. Yet even though we may have
reached the border of good writing (that is, of print), its productions can
still tell us something about our situation. Consider once more Barthelme's
story. At the outset the formidable Miss R. appears to be some kind of
psychotherapist, but by the end she is revealed as a terrorist, head of a
revolutionary court that will decide the feckless narrator's fate:
"Skin,"
Miss R. said softly in the white, yellow room. "This is the Clemency
Committee. And would you remove your belt and shoelaces." (19)
This fable
comes from 1968 -- another time and a very different politics[4] -- but even so, it resonates with the present. In
Barthelme's satiric view, a strict regime in language goes fist-in-glove with
other deficiencies of tolerance: scratch an essentialist, find a Maoist. This
gives a somewhat different spin to the "tryanny of le mot juste."
When Barthelme wrote, the world seemed to be settling, as no doubt it usually
is, into increasingly polarized and intransigent attitudes. Then the cry was
"cultural revolution," now it is "cultural war," and though
the parallel is hardly as neat as this play of words suggests, there is some
ground for comparison. Sentences as harsh as Birkerts' and Fauth's leave little
room for appeal, assuming one can find a Clemency Committee. Those who choose
not to work in print are denied the "sovereign" status of literary
artists. The "quality" writers have closed ranks around a well-worn
ideology, essentially the one that Fred Pfeil described twenty years ago:
Language,
like paint or musical pitches, is seen to be a self-enclosed, fanatically
guarded medium. Its ability to perceive or to express perception of the world
is secondary or immaterial; the desired end of the act of writing is a closed,
autonomous, self-referential body of well-shaped, beautiful language. (21)
The
Gutenberg elegists would no doubt object to Pfeil's claim that "perception
of the world is secondary or immaterial." As they see it, the transparency
of literary language allows a higher truth of human experience, refined and
sanctified by the artist, to shine through. Since the nature of this higher
truth (or at least its origins) is open to question, the accuracy of any such
"perception" may also be dubious -- a point to which we will return.
In any event the elegists would doubtless affirm a stable, closed, and
autonomous literary language which, as Miss R. says, only a "damned
fool" would renounce. For some damned fools, the only response to this
attitude may be a hardening of opposition. Partisans of cybertext might find
sympathy with John Perry Barlow's response to recent telecommunications
policies:
Governments
of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from
Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the
past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty
where we gather. (par. 1)
These
sentiments are enormously suggestive, speaking as they do to the question of
cultural "sovereignty." Could one simply secede from print culture?
Is Mutual Assured Irrelevance a valid strategic doctrine for the present
cultural war? Under present conditions these ideas are not as impractical as
they may seem. Birkerts himself observes that conventional publishers these
days are reluctant to consider books lacking mass appeal (28). Indeed, writers
more interested in readership than royalties might fare better at the moment by
publishing or self-publishing on the Internet than by going through traditional
channels. Those concerned with professional validation could submit to an
established literary or academic Web site, or more radically, could consider
setting up reviewing agencies, indices, or "seals of approval" to
evaluate self-published work (Rscheisen). Various electronic payment schemes
might even hold the prospect of (small) financial reward. This reasoning
applies both to traditional writers as well as to those whose cybertextual work
could not be reproduced in print. For the latter, of course, there are few
alternatives to the Internet.[5]
But though
Barlow's declaration of independence is rousingly immoderate, it seems on
closer examination rather damned-foolish. Since cyberspace relies on
"Industrial" ways and means, it can never really be independent. We
might remind ourselves where electricity comes from. "Leave us alone"
has a very nice ring, but neither cyberspace nor its textual productions are
likely to be left alone by western governments, major cultural organs, or the
large concentrations of capital these entities serve. The friendly opposition
includes not just Fauth and Birkerts but also advocates of "push"
technologies, mass marketing, and Web-as-TV. Those interested in defending
alternative textual practices had better be prepared to situate those practices
discursively (if not dialectically) in the non-virtual world. To return to the
more parochial subject of this essay: if interactive writing matters, we must
understand how, to whom, and why.
3:
You can't take it to bed with you
Birkerts
has many interesting things to say about the "metaphysics" of print:
the relationship of writer to language, of reader to an imaginary world, and of
medium and material to the process of signification. Yet when it comes to the
corresponding features of cybertext, he resorts mainly to negation. Printed
texts are fixed and autonomous; electronic texts are not. Traditional writers
at their best are deliberate and careful; those who work with computers, he
fears, may be merely prolix. Print demands perfect expression; a hypertext
consists of "versions," or to borrow from Borges, "an indeterminate
heap of contradictory drafts" (24). It is regrettable that Birkerts
chooses not to consider cybertextual work more closely in its own right,
especially since some of his claims might not hold up to testing. He asserts,
for instance, that because they lack a single, determined ending, hypertexts
say nothing of value about the consequences of human action. Yet many such
texts are deeply concerned with causal logic and if read with reasonable
engagement can convey very clear messages about choices and outcomes (see
Birkerts
makes no reference to critics who have given more time to interactive texts. To
be fair, some of this work is only now appearing, though a significant body of
commentary on electronic writing has been available for the last five years.[6] In some ways, close attention to interactive texts
confirms the suspicions of the elegiac school. Virtually all systematic
accounts of such works notice their discontinuousness, convolution, and strong
cognitive demands. In an aleatory poem, a "lexicon novel," or a film
with multiple endings, the reader or interpreter faces an absence of familiar
formal limits. With hypertext and hypermedia this problem is compounded by the
convention of link-following or "navigation," which ties the
discourse of the text to repeated selection or probing by the reader. Hypertext
links present a particularly important concern for theorists. Some consider
them barriers or "occlusions" (Glazier), others see them as gaps and
fissures (
In many
hypertexts it is hard indeed to develop a sense of direction. Yet it does not
follow, as the elegists fear, that writing with machines represents a wrecking
of form and an assault on "sovereign" authority. Reacting with
understandable dread to Robert Coover's musings on an "End of Books,"
Birkerts turns by association to Barthes' "Death of the Author," and
levels his suspicions against technologists (152-55). But by his own admission
Birkerts has spent little time reading electronic texts. Contrast the critic
J.Y. Douglas, who has worked with interactive narratives, particularly
hypertexts, extensively and intensively. She reaches a markedly different
conclusion. Interactive construction, says
Consider
this general premise: Cybertextual works are structures for breakdown in
semantic space. This sentence contains all the difference between the
elegiac position and a practical engagement with the late age of print, but
since it is far from self-evident, some unpacking is in order.
The term
"semantic space" comes in this instance from cognitive psychology and
interface design (Dillon et al.), though it has obvious cognates in literary
theory. Semantic space is an indefinite domain of possible expression to which
the current text bears some active and particular relationship. Bolter calls it
"a structure of possible structures" (144). As Douglas points out,
there is nothing especially radical about situating writing in a virtual space:
"It can be argued that since the advent of the modern novel readers have
been challenged with the task of reading something that approximates the
virtual, three-dimensional space of hypertext narratives" (1994, 176).
Indeed an approach to text as a contingent arrangement of discursive
possibilities might be traced throughout narratology from the Russian Formalist
pairing of sjuzet and fabula up through structuralism, affective stylistics,
and deconstruction. By the same token, non-literary rhetoric and information
science have also become accustomed to thinking of texts as selections from a
signifying field (Johnson-Eilola, 211-12). The fetishism of print and le
mot juste among the elegists seems curiously at odds with this emphasis,
though no doubt that is the point.
Semantic
space is particularly useful in thinking about hypertext, with its formalized
structures of discontinuity and connection. Applying the metaphor of textual
"navigation," the hypertext link may be thought of as a course or
channel through the space. Suppose for instance that you were reading this
article on the World Wide Web instead of in print, and that the word
"space" at the end of the previous sentence was configured as the cue
or "yield" of a hypertext link. The click of a button would trigger a
transition, replacing your view of this paragraph with, say, the cheery
iconography of Heaven's Gate. But though the pivotal word literally vanishes in
this instance (apotheosis or no), the effect of this transaction is far from
self-effacing. Fauth's complaint about gimmickry seems borne out to some
extent. The link is obtrusive and peremptory, if not a pole in your face then
something equally cinematic, a quick dissolve or flash cut. Indeed, the
venerable hypertext program HyperCard contained built-in visual effects to
signal transitions. As nearly all commentators on hypertext observe, links
dislocate even as they connect. Landow (1987) once argued for an orthopaedic rhetoric
of arrivals and departures, but as Harpold and others have noticed, even the
most rationally designed transition can produce something of a surprise. This
is particularly true in the case of the Web, where links point to documents
maintained on remote systems. Web sites follow their own erratic courses
through semantic space, changing at the whim of their creators. The link that
took me to the suicide cult last week may lead today to trailers for the
inevitable mini-series. Here we begin to find the limits of the navigation
metaphor. By contrast, the "push-pull" model may offer a more
satisfactory framework. Borrowing yet again from physics (albeit the physics of
Star Trek), hypertext links may be thought of as warping or
wrapping semantic space around the reader's perspective (Moulthrop and Kaplan).
Literally speaking, they pull distant information close. This seems closer to
what goes on in the Internet, yet distant from navigation in the real world.
In actual
seaborne travel, voyagers can see where they are going as they go. They pass
through a tangible, substantial, and resistant medium, as their stomachs
sometimes attest. Progress in Web space, on the other hand, is an experience
that combines the matter transporter of science fiction with the slot machines
of
There are
of course moments when ground overwhelms figure and the Web's limited
implementation of hypertext acknowledges its surrounding space, albeit
unintentionally. These are the familiar failures that occur when a server is
too busy to respond, an address has changed, material fails to transfer quickly
enough, or something else goes wrong. When these things happen, the frustrated
navigator runs up against an incomplete page, an error message, or at worst a
frozen screen. These untoward outcomes signify very little about the semantic
space of the text, but they at least remind us we are dealing with a complex,
contingent system whose behavior we cannot entirely predict. In the good old
Gutenberg days, all we had to worry about were sloppy typing, printing errors,
and the occasional misbound sheet. In cyberspace the possibilities for error
are enormously greater, as many irritated critics note. Yet these apparent
failures are more than mere annoyances. As John Milton might have said had he
written from
Which
brings us to the second stage of the initial proposition: cybertexts are
structures for breakdown. That last term must be granted a certain range of
meaning. It does refer literally to moments when things go wrong in information
systems, but it also indicates a more abstract and significant articulation
between human and machine, or in our case, the text and its reader/performer.
In fact the operation of breakdown may be the most important cultural aspect of
cybertext.
The word
"breakdown" comes from Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, who borrow
it from Heidegger in Understanding Computers and Cognition, a book that draws
on phenomenology and the biological theory of autopoesis for a new approach to
artificial intelligence and software design. Breakdown proves useful in this
context because it allows Winograd and Flores to raise the intellectual stakes
for programmers and engineers. Like many technologists, Winograd and Flores
prefer process to product. They set aside cognitive science's dominant
preference for reductive solutions, preferring to think about technologies in
the phenomenological sense of articulation and unfolding. In this respect some
bugs are indeed supremely important features:
...we want
to break with the rationalistic tradition, proposing a different language for
situations in which 'problems' arise. Following Heidegger, we prefer to talk
about 'breakdowns.' By this we mean the interrupted moment of our habitual,
standard, comfortable 'being-in-the-world.' Breakdowns serve an extremely
important cognitive function, revealing to us the nature of our practices and
equipment, making them 'present-to-hand' to us, perhaps for the first time. In
this sense they function in a positive rather than a negative way. (77-78)
In the
domain of cybertext, failed links and malfunctioning programs do represent
cognitively significant breakdowns; but if we follow Harpold, Douglas, and
other critics who insist on the deeply problematic nature of links, then we
must expand this notion to cover apparently successful operations as well. If
links and other interactive transactions are inherently confusing, traversing
an invisible, nonspecific space, then these elements must also convey something
of a phenomenological crisis or surprise even when they work as intended.
Cybertextual work cannot deliver the infinite variation which its multivariate
structure disingenuously promises. Indeed, no verbal structure can truly map
semantic space (Dillon et al.). The reader matches wits with an articulated
system or text, not another mind, and as Winograd and
In this
respect we can say that cybertexts are not plagued by breakdown, rather they
are conceived in breakdown. Winograd and Flores point out that
"[n]ew design can be created and implemented only in the space that
emerges in the recurrent structure of breakdown. A design constitutes an
interpretation of breakdown and a commited attempt to anticipate future
breakdowns" (78). It bears noting that by "anticipate" Winograd
and Flores do not mean prevent. Breakdown is an essential component of
good design. Well-made software works both with and against its conceptual
limits.
Drawing on
these ideas, we can think of cybertexts as structures forĘbreakdown, ways of
thinking critically and creatively about all the plausible, deceptive
constructions we find in cyberspace. Though this logic would apply to any
transaction among people, machines, and texts, the application may be clearest
for hypertext links. In traversing a semantic space, the link by implication
spans or contains that space, if not in its infinite totality then with a kind
of cognitive blank check for which there can never be sufficient discursive funds.
Links like words may be "brokers" of meaning, but they are not honest
brokers. As a divingboard into darkness, the link from "space" to the
saucer cult invites us to consider an enormous range of possible destinations
-- from Hubble photography to differential topology to Gene Roddenberry's
"final frontier." Yet only one possibility is realized, and likely as
not it will not be what the reader anticipated.[7] Having followed the link, we might wonder where else
we might have gone, or where other links in the same document might take us.
The particular circuit just closed implies an unseen matrix of latent
connections. These other possibilities are not present or realized (indeed they
may be imaginary) but we cannot exclude them from the transaction. The present
circuit implies an unseen machine. We perceive any given connection as figure
against an undefined ground of semantic space, and in this perception we
recognize that the present text is both more than we can easily perceive, but
also likely far less than its complexity implies. This recognition is
breakdown, or what passes for it in hypertext.
If this
account does not justify cybertexts to their critics, it may at least measure
the conceptual gulf between them and traditional texts. That gulf is
considerable. Even when they occur in print, cybertexts cannot be well-formed
or well-behaved books, and when they manifest themselves as hypertexts they
pose even greater problems. Perhaps the most persistent complaint about
machine-mediated texts stems from their need for bulky hardware. Books and
magazines are exquisitely portable, convenient to our most intimate spaces.
Likewise, television and radio have escaped from the parlor and colonized every
room of the house. Meanwhile the newer media remain ponderously stranded on the
desktop. "You can't take it to bed with you," the elegists still say,
even in the age of laptops and digital assistants. Though the ultimate answer to
this problem lies with the engineers, the concept of breakdown as a general
property of cybertext suggests a more immediate response. Indeed you shouldn't
take such things to bed with you -- if you go to bed chiefly for sleeping.
Cybertext is not a tranquilizing agent. It is not about slumber, trance,
transport, or other forms of hypnagogia. It is an irritant, often indeed an
irritating enterprise, a practice full of pranks and tricks that no doubt will
never last; but paradoxically these admissions do not annul its value; in fact
just the opposite.
4:
Better a pole in the face
"You
gotta get a gimmick," Sondheim's philosophical stripper counsels, "if
you want to get ahead." Though postmodernism has drummed in a deep
distrust of all progress narratives, we might still find use for this sentiment
even after substituting paralogy for progress. Does the gimmickry of cybertext
represent a productive move in the language game of information culture? If it
doesn't get us "ahead," does it get us anywhere at all? Fred Pfeil
faults the school of "quality writing" for allowing "perception
of the world" to become "secondary or immaterial" to its cult of
fine language. With or without investment-quality writing, cybertext should
also be held to this standard. Do its technical maneuvers reflect any
engagement with the hard, old world of "flesh and steel?" What social
effects, if any, might flow from narratives based on phenomenological
breakdown? In his treatise on postmodernism, Frederic Jameson places two major
items on the agenda of art and ideas: a "pedagogical political
culture" and an "aesthetics of cognitive mapping" (54). It will
take a movement much more ambitious and sophisticated than the present interest
in cybertext to fulfill Jameson's assignment. All the same, some limited claims
can be made.
The
twentieth century may be marked in the final analysis less by Kuhnian
"paradigm shifts" than by what Nelson with his usual keen wisdom
calls "paradigm shiftlessness" (1995). That is, industrial society
has been struggling for a century and more with rationalistic, theoretical,
revolutionary models for everything from political economy to popular
entertainment, but we have yet to escape the enduring nightmare of grand
solutions, or what we might call general systems hubris. If paradigms shift,
new and similarly delusive paradigms replace them; or as now seems apparent,
the new are simply blatant reassertions of the old. Winograd and Flores see
this problem most acutely in artificial intelligence and this is a primary
reason why they go to Heidegger and Maturana, thinkers who insist on the
irreducible complexity of phenomena, for a new approach. If all computer
science can do is invent new reductionist gimmicks, then it is locked into a
self-enclosed language game where "getting ahead" is defined only
parochially or personally, not in terms of larger social effect.
Breakdown
represents a jump outside this game, a recognition that it is not product but
process, not the gimmick but the getting of the gimmick -- and thus its
readiness-to-hand as cognitive "equipment" -- from which value must
ultimately derive. To flit across the Internet from idea to idea is convenient
and perhaps important in a small way. All things considered, it is nice to have
the World Wide Web. More significant, however, are uses of this technology that
emphasize the contingency of its structures and claims, that emphasize the
experience of "detour," as in Miller's "TRIP," or invite us
to think about signs in social context, as in Steadman's "Placing."
Narrative as technological breakdown might offer an alternative to a
hypnagogic, fetishizing view of language as self-consuming signifier. In this
regard it could represent a first step toward the Jamesonian project and thus a
possible exit, in the art world at least, from the long meander of
postmodernism. It might suggest a way of thinking about information technology
that is not tied to mass markets, economies of scarcity, and general solutions.
At very least cybertext provides a smart answer to the Control Voice of push
media and WebTV, and this might be a toehold for more meaningful resistance.
What if the audience pushes back?
However,
before we push back this flight to Mr. Barlow's brave new electroworld, some
stipulations are in order. To begin with, it is impossible to theorize an end
of theory or to define in abstract terms a set of anti-reductionist practices.
To describe cybertext as a general method for the critique of general methods
is absurd; or as Pynchon says of all metaphor, it is "a thrust at truth
and a lie" (129). Any general statement made here will find its limits in
the particular. The things we have called cybertexts are too multifarious to be
grouped so easily under a single heading. There are major differences in
design, approach, and community of reception between the Millers' Myst,
Joyce's afternoon, Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars,
and synchronous interactive spaces such as LinguaMOO, though all these fit
within Aarseth's general definition of cybertext and all arguably represent
designs for breakdown.
To
complicate matters further, cybertext is very much work in progress, keyed to
the pace and rhythms of the information industries. Especially since the
takeoff of the World Wide Web, change in the techne of interactive writing has
been relentless. At dizzyingly short intervals, engineers at Netscape
Communications release radical new design tools whereupon their counterparts at
Microsoft raise the ante, redefining the nature of the game. It might thus seem
pointless to consider cybertext as a coherent development or a unified
aesthetic field. What is the point of trying to think seriously about something
that changes faster than the speed of print? Or more critically, why resist the
centripetal movement of media change that is currently sucking the Web toward
the singularity of broadcasting?
This
question adds a very important complication to the argument. Anxiety about
technological displacement is hardly limited to champions of the book.
Birkerts' polemic against information culture might reasonably be described as
reactive, if not reactionary; but the same could also be said about a defense
of hypertext against insurgent neo-television. No party wants its textual
totem, be it book or hypertext, to land among postcards and telegrams on the
cultural scrapheap. Birkerts takes up his crusade against the electronic word
because he fears for the future:
As a writer
I naturally feel uneasy. These large-scale changes bode ill for authorship, at least
of the kind I would pursue. There are, we know this, fewer and fewer readers
for serious works. Publishers are increasingly reluctant to underwrite the
publication of a book that will sell only a few thousand copies. But very few
works of any artistic importance sell more than that. And those few thousand
readers -- a great many of them, it turns out, are middle-aged or older. The
younger generation have not caught the habit. (28)
These
remarks lend interesting perspective to Birkerts' conception of the word as
"broker" of a "transaction" and Fauth's approach to
narrative as commodity "content." Indeed, "serious" words
invested with aesthetic "quality" are the coin of the publishing
realm, the stuff on which one builds a literary (which these days means an
academic) career. There may be a legitimate dispute about aesthetics here but
there is clearly also a turf war, or as we learned to say in the Reagan years,
a lively exploitation of the free market in ideas. On either side of the
technology barricades, writers and critics who take their work seriously feel
imperiled, as if they are caught up in a dualistic, zero-sum game where one can
only gain at the other's expense. There are claims to be defended and converts
to win. Readers must be introduced to the "habit" of page turning or
link-following while still impressionable -- as if the goods in question were
not words but cigarettes. As we confessed at the outset, this is not so much
Blakean contrariety as the paralytic logic of the Cold War; and in that respect
this essay is as badly tainted as anything on the other side.
Is there
an alternative to this mutual hostility? Bolter's notion of "special
literacies" might provide some hope, suggesting that network culture could
assist and not displace the culture of the book, for instance by helping
serious writers build communities of readers. One of the few successful
ventures so far launched on the Internet is Amazon Books, a business that
offers among other things help in finding obscure and out-of-print titles.
Believers in progressive, pluralist uses of technology see no reason why books
cannot co-exist with postmodern information systems including various forms of
cybertext. Unfortunately, the most committed of the elegists will not accept
such compromises. Birkerts rejects information technologies because he
considers them insidious, seductive, and totally incompatible with a literary
life -- one lived ideally in a world largely free of machines. As he sees it,
any benefit that might flow from electronic media is far outweighed by their
ill effects. The hardness of this line makes it difficult to share Bolter's
optimism about the cultural outlook. There is also the lesson of the 1980s,
which saw both the one-sided results of the Cold War and the rapid reorganization
of western economies around a shrinking number of major industrial interests.
Pluralism, it would seem, is largely a creature of theory.
Instead of
harmonious mosaics it is probably more realistic to think about lacunae and
margins. Birkerts clearly knows this: after worrying about the diminishing
population of readers, he cannily observes that he has enough to see him
through the rest of his "time below" (29). Technophobia and cultural
conservatism are strong niche markets. Indeed, after a certain amount of
shaking-out and downsizing, one can imagine certain areas of the book trade
thriving in the next few decades, especially as erosion of the middle class
progresses and higher education belongs more exclusively to children of
exceptional privilege. As they say in the marketing world, these are good
demographics. There may be fewer readers in the future, but their pockets will
be deep.
It is
harder to read cybertext's Tarot. Its marginal position in the coming empire of
signs seems much more tenuous, since it cannot be advertised as the precious
relic of a lost regime. The episteme of print may be at a disadvantage when set
against film, television, and other technologies of the spectacle; but print
(as the elegists define it anyway) shares the ideology of sovereign authorship
and stable products, and this common interest is not trivial. By contrast
technologies like hypertext are difficult, discontinuous, and inherently
unsettling, less committed to sovereignty than discursive unfolding. Compared
to the tradition of print on the one hand and the regime of broadcasting on the
other, cybertext is something new in the earth. As such it will always be
followed by the fatal sentence: "Nothing new lasts."
Dr.
Johnson's cynical jibe holds true, however, only if we insist on validating
product over process, maintaining an ideology of "content" in which
meaning is commodity and, to pervert McLuhan, the medium is the package. This
is not the only way to think about language and technologies. To think otherwise,
we may need to stop mourning the late age of print and recognize that
imaginative work, and even literature, may continue in other contexts. As Pfeil
said two decades ago, "writing should demand we see." Part of what we
see must be the medium itself, and in the case of electronic text, its dubious,
contingent claims to represent a semantic space, broken (happily) out of the
seamlessness of cyberspace. Beyond this, Pfeil would no doubt insist that we
see something larger, namely the articulation between discursive practices like
cybertext and late-capitalist enterprises like software development,
publishing, and broadcasting -- that we recognize our alleged obsolescence and
evident marginality, or as Pynchon calls it, our preterition. In this regard shifting
the aesthetic ground from validation of "quality" to exploration of
difference, from the (mere) novelty of product to the production of novelty,
could begin a larger process. This enterprise might mean creating markets
defined less by demographics (in the root sense of scripted populations) than
by populations of scriptors, readers and writers of "special"
literacies. It might also mean re-examining certain assumptions about property,
scarcity, and the distribution of profit, at least in the domain of information.
That would indeed mean change; but as the man says, change is what writing
demands.
Aarseth,
Espen. "Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature."
Barlow,
John Perry. "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace."
Self-published manifesto, 8 February 1996. 16 pars. Online. WWW. 8 April, 1997.
Go there
Birkerts,
Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of
Bolter, Writing
Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing.
Borges,
Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings.
Coover,
Robert. "The End of Books." New York Times Book Review
21 June 1992: 1, 11, 24-25.
De Landa,
Manuel. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.
Dillon,
A., C. McKnight, and J. Richardson. "Space -- The Final Chapter or Why
Physical Representations are not Semantic Intentions." Hypertext: A
Psychological Perspective. Ed. C. McKnight, A. Dillon, and C.
Richardson.
Douglas,
J.Y. "Where the Senses Become a Stage and
Fauth,
Jurgen. "Poles in Your Face: The Promises and Pitfalls of
Hyperfiction."
Go there
Glazier,
Loss. "Jumping to Occlusions..." [forthcoming in Postmodern
Culture]
Guyer,
Carolyn. "Written on the Web." Feed September, 1995.
Online. WWW. 14 April 1997.
Go there
Harpold,
Terence. "Threnody: Psychoanalytic Digressions on the Subject of
Hypertexts." Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Ed. G.P.
Landow.
Harpold,
Terence. "Conclusions." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. G.P.
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Jameson,
Frederic. Postmodernism Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Johnson,
George. "Old View of Internet: Nerds. New View: Nuts." New York Times
30 March, 1997, National ed.: E1+.
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Johndan. Nostalgic Angels: Reconfiguring Hypertext Writing.
Joyce,
Michael. Afternoon, a Story.
Joyce,
Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics.
Kelly,
Kevin and Gary Wolf. "We Interrupt This Magazine for a Special Bulletin --
PUSH!" Wired 5.03 (March, 1997). 12-23.
Kirschenbaum,
M. G. "The Cult of Print." Postmodern Culture 6.1
(1995): 12 pars. Online. WWW. 8 April 1997.
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Kolb,
David. Socrates in the Labyrinth.
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George P. "The Rhetoric of Hypertext." Hypertext '87
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George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology.
Lanham,
Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts.
Liu, Alan.
The Voice of the Shuttle. Web site inaugurated 1994. Online. WWW.
14 April 1997.
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McGann,
Jerome. "The Rationale of Hypertext." Essay published 6 May 1995.
Online. WWW. 14 April 1997.
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Miller,
Matthew. "TRIP." Hypertext fiction. Postmodern Culture
7.1 (1996). Online. WWW. 11 April 1997.
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Moulthrop,
Stuart. "Traveling in the Breakdown Lane: A Principle of Resistance for
Hypertext." Mosaic 28(4) [1995]: 55-77.
Moulthrop,
Stuart and Nancy Kaplan. "Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Ontological
Design for Virtual Spaces." Proceedings of the ACM Hypertext
Conference.
Nelson,
Theodor H. Literary Machines.
Nelson,
Theodor H. "Where the Trail Leads." A Symposium in Honor of Vannevar
Bush on the 50th Anniversary of "As We May Think." Massachusetts
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Barbara. "Women Writers and the Restive Text: Feminism, Experimental
Writing and Hypertext." Postmodern Culture 6(2) [1996]. 29
pars. Online. WWW. 14 April 1997.
Go there
Pfeil, Fred.
Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture.
Pynchon,
Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49.
Rheingold,
Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.
Röscheisen,
M., C. Mogensen, and T. Winograd. "Beyond Browsing: Shared Comments,
SOAPs, Trails, and On-Line Communities." 1995 World Wide Web Conference.
Online. WWW. 12 April 1997.
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Rosenberg,
Jim. "Navigating Nowhere/Hypertext Infrawhere." SIGLINK Newsletter 3
(December, 1994). Online. WWW. 13 April 1997.
Rosenberg,
Jim. "The Structure of Hypertext Activity." Hypertext '96
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Shumate,
Michael. "Hyperizons." Annotated index of hypertext fictions. Online.
WWW. 16 April 1997.
Go there
Steadman,
Carl. "Placing." Hypertext fiction. On-line. WWW. 12 April 1997.
Go there
Tolva,
John. "Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital
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1. Birkerts,
78.
2. Pfeil,
28.
3. Though
Fauth complains specifically about "hyperstories" on the Internet, he
offers no detailed consideration of any such. Only Michael Joyce's afternoon
receives extensive discussion. Even assuming Fauth's opinions about this work
are well founded (though they in fact say very little about its
"content"), they are arguably irrelevant. Afternoon was
written before the inception of the World Wide Web, is not available on-line,
and differs in notable respects from projects like "Girl, Birth, Water,
Death," "TRIP," "Placing," and numerous other Web
fictions. Fauth does mention a few Internet texts, including "Stories from
Downtown Anywhere" and "Hypertext Hotel," but rules them out
because they are collaborations, where presumably "quality" is less
important. For a much more careful (though hardly less critical) survey of Web
fiction, see Guyer.
4. As
Birkerts notes in the introduction to Gutenberg Elegies (p.4),
attitudes toward current information technologies do not map onto the old
liberal/conservative axis. Newt Gingrich and Timothy Leary have both been
advocates of the Internet. By the same token, for all his dislike of late
capitalism, Birkerts stands in the same ideological corner as William Bennett
and E.D. Hirsch. I am interested less in old ideological positions than in
those now emerging which may be defined more by atttitudes toward information
and interpretive authority than by traditional political concerns.
5. Outside
the computer game industry there were until recently two major publishers of
electronic writing in the
6.
Following the foundational studies by Bolter (1991) and Landow (1992),
important commentary has come from Coover (1992), Lanham (1993), Joyce (1994),
Ulmer (1994), Liu (1994), and McGann (1995). Essays by Douglas (1993, 1994),
Harpold (1990, 1994), Rosenberg (1995, 1996), Page (1996) and Tolva (1996) have
contributed insights into cybertextual phenomenology and reader response.
Recent book-length studies from Aarseth (1995) and Johnson-Eilola (1997) help
place electronic forms in social and historical context. Kolb's hypertext
(1995) represents the first extensive use of the medium for critical discourse.
This list is hardly exhaustive.
7. All Web
browsers differentiate visited from unvisited destinations by changing the
highlighting color of cue material. Most also display the destination code for
links (usually a Uniform Resource Locator) in small type somewhere on the
screen. This information is at best a cryptic guide to what lies on the other
end of the link.
URL: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/pushMe.html