This essay appeared in Mosaic
28/4 (1995), pp. 55-77
On-line
talent wars will occur: [there will be] a need to keep the lines clean and
open.... Above all, perhaps, the author's freedom to take a story anywhere at
any time and in as many directions as he or she wishes... becomes the
obligation to do so: in the end it can be paralyzing... One will feel the need,
even while using these vast networks and principles of randomness and expansive
story lines, to struggle against them, just as one now struggles against the
linear constraints of the printed book.
--Robert Coover, cited in
Landow (112)
In the mid-eighties, more
than two decades after Theodor Holm Nelson first broached the subject of
"hypertext" or "non-sequential writing" (0/2), computer
scientists finally set to work implementing this concept on a broad scale. One
of the outcomes of this activity is the World Wide Web, an international system
for publishing linked electronic discourse which realizes many aspects of
Nelson's great project (Dougherty and Koman 9-13). With tens of thousands of
documents and millions of links in place, and more added daily, the World Wide
Web may be the most complex written artifact ever produced. As a practical
enterprise, not merely a theoretical invention, hypertext has undoubtedly
arrived.
As Robert Coover's
speculations suggest, this arrival may have as much relevance for fiction,
history, and other forms of narrative culture as it does for informatics
--though culture workers may well share Coover's deep skepticism. Responses so
far have been mixed. After Coover declared "The End of Books" in the New
York Times Book Review in 1992, hypertext has turned up with surprising
frequency in literary discussion. Michiko Kakutani worries that this technology
spells the end of responsible writing ("Fiction?" B8), while
Nicholson Baker decries "hypertextual bouleversement" as a scare
tactic for terrorizing writers and publishers ("Infohighwaymen").
Other commentators have been less agonized. Thomas Pynchon refers casually to
"the do-it-yourself hypertextualist" in one of his rare prefaces
("Introduction" xv). Richard Lanham and Jay David Bolter both argue
that hypertext merely carries on the ancient project of literacy. For them, the
transition from books to electronic webs carries the force of historical
necessity. Commenting on Bolter's Writing Space, Brian Eno calls Bolter
"the new Gutenberg" (12). But electronic culture also has its radical
wing --for instance, the "media philosophers" Mark Taylor and Esa
Saarinen, for whom hypertext and networked telecommunications represent a new
intellectual order. "If you read books," they challenge,
"justify it" (Imagologies, "Superficiality" 11).
We are asked to understand
the future in terms of putative revolutions, ostensibly sweeping changes in the
way we make and receive texts. We must now justify what we have done for
centuries. But how justifiable is this demand? Where there are utopians there
will also be dissidents. One character in Bruce Sterling's recent novel Heavy
Weather nicely puts the case against the end of books, surveying the
intellectual landscape of a post-apocalyptic 2030:
There were
derelicts who could fit all their material possessions in a paper bag, but
they'd have a cheap laptop and some big chunk of [the electronic Library of
Congress], and they'd crouch under a culvert with it, and peck around on it and
fly around in it and hypertext it, and then they'd come up with some pathetic,
shattered, crank, loony, paranoid theory as to what the hell had happened to
them and their planet. . . . It almost beat drugs for turning smart people into
human wreckage. (74)
Whether or not one can
justify reading books, or writing hypertexts, the dubiousness of
The desire
for a resistance to hypertext is a complicated matter. In other work, Nancy
Kaplan and I have examined this effect both as students of the text and
teachers of literature. We have noted how the threat of multiplicity in
electronic writing tends to turn scholars back to their books, while it
confronts students, often more willing to experiment, with a discursive hall of
mirrors ("'They Became'" 233-37). One can choose to resist hypertext
the way some conservative critics do, by cleaving to the book and ruling out
any engagement with electronic technology. For instance, Alvin Kernan proposes
mass microfilming, instead of electronic encoding, to save books from acidic
decay, presumably because microfilm preserves the integrity of the book as
object (135-36). Words on microfilm stay firmly on the page; they are not
permutable as in electronic storage. Kernan's strategy seems misguided, since
microfilm is hardly more durable than paper over the long run. Sensible people
will see through this error readily enough. Some will of course opt for
half-measures like "electronic books" (Yankelovich 134), or
"Expanded Books," as the Voyager Company calls its products (Smith
8). But such "expansions" put us on a slippery slope of innovation.
Voyager's electronic libraries include facilities for intertextual reference
and annotation. Such devices blur and collapse the boundaries between works, as
hypertextual tools tend to do. It is a very small step from the electronic book
to true hypertext.
As Kaplan and I have
observed in working with students, electronic writing complicates the work of
literary criticism. A critical project set up within a hypertextual network
becomes an intimate and integral part of the work it tries to anatomize. In its
root sense, "criticism" implies a separation of one discourse from
another; but in hypertext this primary agenda runs into difficulties. If one
chooses to work in hypertext, one has no clear defense against the potential
vastness of the network and its principle of multiplicity, if not of
"randomness." Resisting hypertext is by no means a simple matter.
This does not mean that Coover's prescription is impossible and that we can
find no balance between the demands of the network and those of the line. It
does suggest that any such accommodation must be deeply ambiguous, so much so
that it must turn back upon itself.
But before we can take
these insights further, we must first specify what we are resisting. Consider
O.B. Hardison's breezy dismissal of hypertext in his last work, Disappearing
through the Skylight. Hardison speculates about a hypertextual edition of
Shakespeare's Tempest, presumably an electronic compendium of source
texts, commentaries, scholarly apparatus, and recorded performances. Reflecting
on this hypothetical object, Hardison wonders: "What does hypertext do for
-- or to --The Tempest? Unfortunately, the answer is not as simple as it
might seem to be in the abstract. The clear implication of hypertext is that The
Tempest is not a literary work to be enjoyed but a heap of facts to be
memorized or a puzzle to be solved or a mystery to be explained... When we
'read' in this way, the play tends to disappear into the hypertext like water
in a sponge" (263-64). This seems a devastating critique, until one
realizes that it is aimed at the wrong target. Hardison proposes a modest and
uninteresting application of hypertext as typical of all work in the medium --
but this is a serious mistake. His theoretical Tempest project represents only
incunabular hypertext, a hybrid production that is neither electronic text nor
book (nor indeed play) but an uneasy mixture of all these things. In this view
Shakespeare's play figures as butterfly in the electronic web, a beautiful
captive whose vital juices are sucked out by academic predators. Not all
hypertexts, however, put canonical art in such distress.
Throughout Hardison's
discussion of electronic technology, his approach seems distinctly pessimistic.
Hardison believes that twentieth-century culture enacts a
"disappearance" in which nature (whatever that was) is steadily
displaced by artefacts. We no longer know things directly, we know only what
our machines tell us about them; which is to say, all we really know is our
instrumentalities (1). At the end of this process, Hardison predicts, our
technologies themselves will disappear in a final act of desertion. He cites a
NASA researcher who claims that with "the rapidity of technological
evolution, it is reasonable to expect that machines and their descendants only
a few thousand years from now might be invisible" (341). That is, advanced
information devices will operate in spheres or bandwidths beyond even our
technologically extended senses. They will no longer share our ontological
level. According to this view, carbon-based life is about to reach the end of
its evolutionary program, or the boundaries of its biosphere (for which see
again
It seems logical enough,
given this Darwinian fatalism, to regard a development like hypertext as an
eruption of noise within a precariously balanced humanist system. But
Hardison's narrative of disappearance is by no means the only one applicable. A
sharply different view may be found in the work of Manuel De Landa, a
technological historian who approaches his subject not like Hardison, as an
alienated humanist, but as a researcher well versed in the military-scientific
complex. This shift in perspective confers a crucial difference in
understanding. Being an insider, De Landa knows that the course of
technological development does not always run true. Seeking to consolidate its
own hegemony, militarized science creates powerful devices, from the conoidal
bullet to distributed computing networks. But such technologies quite often
develop in unintended ways, leading not to the consolidation of power but to
its unforeseen dissemination through ad hoc structures (guerrilla armies, or
the Internet). Given these possibilities for unforeseen change, De Landa does
not foresee a technological overcoming. Quite the reverse: in his view,
interactive computing techniques (including hypertext, which he cites
specifically) open "the machinic phylum" to human understanding. This
is the direct antithesis of Hardison's "disappearance." By using
machines to complicate our representation of nature, we make the world around
us more richly and deeply present. Interactive graphics enable us to discover
the mathematics of chaos, enabling a new understanding of physical structure.
By the same token, interactive texts might inspire an exfoliation of language
and symbolic imagination. Coover's "vast networks" might not be
entirely sinister after all. De Landa sets an important limit on techno-skepticism.
"The task confronting us," he concludes, "is to continue the
positive tasks begun by hackers and visionary scientists as embodied in their
paradigm of human-machine interaction: the personal computer" (228).
Seen from this perspective,
hypertext constitutes a much more positive development. But if we follow De
Landa's upbeat reasoning, we must define the field of hypertext differently
than Hardison does. We must understand hypertext as an encounter with the
"machinic phylum." This means separating hypertext incunabula, which
do indeed seem to be questionable interventions into book culture, from what we
might call native hypertext: productions conceived and developed entirely in
the electronic idiom (see my "Informating Texts" 171). Native hypertexts
are creative and critical expressions of De Landa's "paradigm of
human-machine interaction." They use the interactive attributes of the
computer not to routinize understanding, but to augment our potential for
inference and expression. Hardison's nightmare of evolutionary bypass stems
from a common misprision of computing machines --the old cybernetic dream of
electronic brains, or the robot as a replacement for human workers. To a large
extent, these dreams are still cherished by proponents of expert systems and
the "strong" thesis in artificial intelligence (Penrose 17). But
"strong" AI lies in disgrace these days, overtaken by concerns with
self-organizing rather than linguistically determined systems, and by a
commitment to augmentation rather than autonomous mechanism. The recent
interest in hypertext, both in the sciences and the humanities, proceeds from
this epistemic shift. H. Van Dyke Parunak, a specialist on the mathematical
properties of hypertext, has noted that works in this form "offer semantic
richness of data storage comparable to that used in expert systems. In fact, a
hyperdocument can be viewed as an expert system whose inference engine is not a
computer but a human being" (388). Or to paraphrase, a hypertext is a sort
of quasi-AI in which the "I" is you. To some extent this principle is
implicit even in Hardison's incunabular hypertext; but it finds fullest
expression only in texts that exist independent of book culture -- in writings
that come after "the end of books."
As Coover's
epigraph suggests, these native hypertexts are largely (though not always)
works of fiction -- and as we will see, this definition should perhaps be
understood in two senses: every interactive fiction depends upon a fiction of
interaction. In English, the idea of interactive writing goes back at least as
far as Sterne, whose Shandean alter-ego claims that "writing, when
properly managed... is but a different name for conversation" (108). The
application of computers to this eccentric storytelling began with the earliest
interactive operating systems. Will Crowther and Don Woods of the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory programmed the first text-exploration game,
the illustrious Adventure, in 1976. Adventure in turn launched a genre (Hardison
265). Its offspring, called "text adventures," became a mainstay of
the early computer game market, with several titles, such as Robert Pinsky and
Michael Campbell's Mindwheel and Douglas Maretsky's A Mind Forever
Voyaging, earning literary notice and praise (see Pinsky).
When the current hypertext
boom began in the mid-eighties, a number of writers attempted to take
interactive fiction beyond the deductive, problem-solving milieu of the text
adventures. Michael Joyce's afternoon: a story (Eastgate Systems, 1990)
introduced a major technical enhancement. Joyce rejected the pragmatic commands
found in adventure games ("Go North"; "Take gold";
"Hit troll with ax") in favor of "words that yield:" cues to
further development imbedded in the language of the story itself. In an
encounter with afternoon, the reader may find the sentence: "I want
to say I may have seen my son die this morning." If the reader selects the
word "son," she follows one narrative direction; if she chooses
"die," "I want," or some other set of words, she will go
another way entirely. Eastgate Systems, publishers of afternoon and
Storyspace, the authoring system used to create it, have developed a growing
list of hypertext fictions and have just launched the first hypertextual
literary review.
Most works of the so-called
Eastgate School resemble text adventures by being chiefly verbal; but as
word-based hypertext software has given way to more complex
"multimedia" tools, interactive fiction has begun to incorporate
sounds and images as well. Monica Moran's Ambulance (Electronic
Hollywood, 1993) brings the aesthetic of "adult comics" to electronic
form. John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse (Eastgate Systems,
1993) presents the reader with electronic sketchbooks, digital photo-montages,
and audio tapes. Greg Roach's Madness of Roland (Hyperbole, 1991)
combines verbal text and interactive video. None of these fictions make the
literary experience "disappear" in Hardison's terms. They do not
operate upon any prior, printed work. Though discernible stories do emerge in
texts like afternoon, The Ambulance, and Uncle Buddy's Phantom
Funhouse -- and though, as we will see, these stories manifest a curious
similarity -- the narrative content of the text does not depend upon some authoritative
pre-text. Literature does not vanish into the sponge-like electronic network,
but rather precipitates on each encounter.
Recognizing the importance
of native hypertext might invalidate the harsh resistance of Kernan, Hardison,
and other mourners of the book. But dispensing with one misguided form of
resistance does not mean we might not find a better one. Coover's injunction to
"struggle" seems all the more urgent when applied to native
hypertext. In a form of writing that has effectively abandoned singular
sequence, Coover's worst fears of "randomness and expansive story
lines" would seem to be realized. Native hypertext appears particularly
vulnerable to elliptical and anarchic impulses. The problem for writers and
readers alike is both to resist and engage its dangerous energies. Coover
suggests this accommodation will not be reached without "on-line talent
wars"; and indeed the first salvos have already landed. In a recent issue
of the Village Voice, Erik Davis attacks the "precious literary
experiments loved by Robert Coover."
I am not
convinced hypertext... is a particularly strong example of how "electronic
textuality" challenges tradidiological concepts such as readers, authors,
freedom (of print/publishing) etc.
Significantly, there is very little *free* [hypertext] fiction out there on the
net (George [Landow] making available his students' work seems to be the only
exception): the texts we discuss on tnc are written, sold and reviewed (and
even canonized) in a very traditional way.
Furthermore, their writers are *authors*, with all significant motor-parts
intact... Hypertext fictions are novels, both narratologically and
sociologically. To find "the new writing" we must look elsewhere; I
would suggest towards UseNet, IRC, and the MUDs. (Aarseth)
According to their rhetoric
at least, people like Davis and Aarseth are true progressives, not lackeys of
reaction. They have little in common with O.B. Hardison beyond a relatively low
opinion of hypertext. Aarseth and Davis discount the current generation of
electronic writing not because it destroys the traditional experience of
literature, but because it seems all too good at maintaining it. This is a form
of "struggle against" hypertext which Robert Coover did not foresee.
Aarseth's counterexamples,
"UseNet, IRC, and the MUDs," represent alternative possibilities for
electronic writing. They share the post-Gutenberg situation of hypertext,
though they differ in structure and concept. Unlike the native hypertext
discussed above, all three of Aarseth's writing environments operate over the
Internet, that vast, self-organizing assemblage of communications systems which
might prefigure Mr. Gore's "information superhighway." UseNet
supports thousands of "news groups" on which Internet users exchange
technical information, cultural opinions, art work, confessions, civic notices,
political debate, and even erotica (Krol 238). "IRC" stands for
"Internet Relay Chat," a computerized analogue of citizen's band
radio in which users exchange typed messages in something close to real time.
For our purposes, the most important of Aarseth's alternatives is the third,
"the MUDs." The acronym MUD stands among other things for
"Multiple User Dimension." Hundreds of such constructs exist around
the Internet, including variants called MOO (MUD-Object-Oriented), MUSE
(Multiple-User Simulated Environment) and MUSH (where the "H" is for
"Hallucination"). Roughly speaking, these creations grow out of the
old Adventure game: they are virtual spaces constructed within computer memory,
having the same metaphoric spatiality as hypertexts. MUD users move through the
space by issuing commands. They may also manipulate objects and (most
importantly) conduct transactions with other users (Rheingold 145-75).
Aarseth's comparison of
MUDs to the current generation of hypertext fictions seems quite cogent. In
many ways, MUDs deliver the same kind of textual experience that hypertexts do.
Any engagement with a MUD involves some level of interactive writing, as the
user describes actions and receives passages of prose from the program in
reply. In addition, the MOOs, MUSEs, and MUSHs allow users to create new
spaces, objects, and even simulated persons called "NPCs" or
"non-player characters," a term from role-playing games, which are an
important source for the MUD subculture. This creative franchise represents a
significant difference from the sort of hypertext that we have thus far
considered. Works like afternoon or The Madness of Roland do not
allow their readers to change the content or structure of the network -- though
it is true that some hypertexts, such as Bolter's electronic version of Writing
Space and McDaid's Funhouse, allow readers to write within the
presentation space. Deena Larsen's Marble Springs (Eastgate Systems,
1994) invites readers to fill deliberate gaps in its story matrix, promising to
include some of these additions in subsequent editions. Even within hypertext,
the lines are blurring; but on the whole, literary hypertext keeps the roles of
author and reader distinct.
In an important early
contribution to hypertext theory, Michael Joyce proposed two different modes of
interactive writing: "exploratory" and "constructive"
hypertext. Generally speaking, exploratory texts allow readers to navigate
through fixed bodies of material, while constructive texts represent
"structures for what does not yet exist," open-ended and contingent
forms ("Siren Shapes" 10-12). In exploratory hypertext, the
distinction between primary author and subsequent reader-explorers remains
clear. In constructive hypertext, anyone is free to change the nature of the
text. There can be many authors, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that no
author retains that status absolutely. This account distorts Joyce's actual
argument somewhat. In fact his terms are more continuous than exclusive -- even
most commercial hypertexts retain some traces of constructive form. On the
other hand, most ventures in open, collaborative electronic writing betray some
lingering elements of authorial control; and this realization has considerable
bearing on the claims made for MUDs.
The writing environments
Aarseth finds most valuable, UseNet newsgroups, Internet Relay Chat lines, and
Multiple-User Dimensions, closely resemble Joyce's constructive ideal. In fact,
since both news groups and MUDs allow the linking of elements as
"threads" or "rooms," they might qualify as constructive
hypertexts. Aarseth might also have mentioned other instances of hypertextual
writing distributed across the Internet, such as the World Wide Web and Wide
Area Information Server, which permit users to create documents whose links
span the entire global network (Krol 281-82). When Nelson first described
hypertext in the 1960s, he clearly had such constructive schemes in mind, not
the limited, exploratory writings that have recently had the limelight. If we
remember this, then Aarseth's point seems well taken. The "new writing"
cannot have authors in the old-fashioned sense. If hypertext and other forms
electronic expression hold out any difference, it would seem to lie with
constructive ventures, not such traditional offerings as electronic novels and
monographs. The native country of hypertext must be a stranger place than
anything we have yet imagined.
If we take constructive
hypertext as our ideal, however, how can we construct a principle of
resistance? In a writing environment without authors, there would seem to be no
check, at least in theory, on what Michel Foucault called the
"perilous" spread of discourse. It was to control such an explosion
in language that Foucault's "author-function" was called into being
(216). If Aarseth is correct in his claim that "the new writing" must
be radically non-authoritative and collaborative, then perhaps any struggle
against the centrifugal force of hypertext must fail. This would be consistent
with the effect Kaplan and I have noticed in our experiments with hypertextual
criticism. Perhaps we should simply learn to stop worrying and love the death
of the author. Or if we do not wish to surrender so easily, maybe we should
redouble our scrutiny of so-called radical electronic writing systems. After
all, environments like UseNet, IRC, and the MUDs do have discernible elements
of structure. Many UseNet groups, for instance, are managed by moderators who
screen incoming material. There are clear conventions for turn-taking,
greeting, and departure on Internet Relay Chat. We can even expect some level
of coordination, if not deterministic control, in Multi-User Dimensions.
As it happens, Aarseth's
claim that MUDs and other Internet spaces represent author-free zones cannot to
be taken at face value -- and to be fair, Aarseth offered this opinion not in
formal writing but in the spontaneous give-and-take of an electronic debate.
The MUDs present many signs of the old authorial Adam. In a recent visit to
PMC-MOO, a multi-user space set up by the on-line journal Postmodern
Culture, one of my colleagues discovered how greatly the demise of
authorship has been exaggerated. Within ten minutes of logging on (in a female
persona), my informant had encountered sexism, bullying, and even terrorism.
First she was accosted by another user who insisted on addressing her as
"lady." Reminded that some women find this term objectionable, the
user in question replied that "there are only three kinds of females:
ladies, babes, and bitches." As this exchange devolved further, the
garrulous user abruptly pulled rank, claiming to have "wizard
privileges" and then storming off into cyberspace. My informant was
initially puzzled by his last remark but soon discovered its meaning. Shortly
after the encounter with the digital ladies man, she came across another user
claiming to be a "terrorist." This person tossed her a
"bomb," which was actually a subprogram that moved her character to
an obscure room in the virtual space. She could not leave this room without
invoking another subprogram which required special privileges on the system.
These privileges are conferred only on "wizards," users who have
access to the coding facilities that underlie the MUD.
There would seem to be no
fundamental difference between a MUD wizard and the author of an exploratory
hypertext. Both exert control over others' movements through a virtual or
symbolic space. Both exploit a power gradient within the textual construct.
Both represent a response to Coover's dilemma, the necessity to limit the
elliptical spread of networked discourse even as one struggles against the
monology of traditional writing. This is not to say that authors and wizards
are alike in all respects. There may of course be several wizards in a MUD,
just as there can be many authors in a distributed, constructive hypertext.
This multiplication of authorship can have important consequences, especially
when wizards find their interests in conflict. One wizard of my acquaintance
discovered that another programmer had begun to add rooms to "his"
MUD, changing the nature of social interactions there. In response he created a
self-replicating electronic object named kudzu, which quickly filled all the
new rooms -- and unfortunately the old ones as well. The MUD in question became
extinct.
Stories such as these shed
a revealing light on our engagement with hypertexts, virtual spaces, and other
species of electronic writing. They suggest, pace Aarseth, that the goal
of our literary evolution is not to abolish the author or to amputate her
"motor parts." In these new textual environments we may from time to
time imagine that the author is "dead" --long live the
author-function, distributed and deconstructed but still very much with us. Our
new schemes for writing still invest power in managers of linguistic structure
-- albeit a mutable, transient, and contingent sort of power, given to a class
of users who do not map neatly onto any old-fashioned auteur. Any
principle of resistance for hypertext must acknowledge this transformation,
which Michael Joyce has recently named "the re-placement of the
author." This formulation offers an alternative both to Hardison's attack
on hypertext incunabula as the enemy of literature and to Aarseth's dismissal
of exploratory hypertext as a form of bourgeois reaction. Hypertext may come
after "the end of books" (whatever that means), but it is not quite
the revolution that some fear and others crave. Joyce insists that we place the
author once again within the text, and that we simultaneously re-place him in a
context of difference:
Electronic
text can never be completed; at best its closure maps point on point until time
is real and the text stays itself, becoming print. But when a point suddenly
fails to map onto itself the author is replaced. Replacement of the author
turns performer to author. The world intended by the author is a place of
encounter where we continually create the future as a dissipative structure:
the chance of oriented insertion becomes the moment of structural instability,
the interstitial link wherein we enact the replacement of one writing by
another. ("Re-Placing the Author")
In discussing the failure
of a textual point to map onto itself Joyce draws deeply on topology,
dissipative systems, and other critiques of spatial reasoning. It requires much
more scope than we have here to do these concepts justice. In fact the
re-placement of the author is probably best addressed in artistic practice, not
theory. For our present critical purposes, it suffices to note that the moment
of replacement involves "structural instability," or to use an idiom
from computer science, breakdown. The author is placed into a context of
incompleteness, stress, and dis-closure. In this context or "place of
encounter," the author still operates intentionally, creating a little
world, a text or hypertext. But since that world is a performance space,
allowing multiple authors as well as readers to occupy the stage, we must
understand the author-function within a particular situation -- if not under
erasure, then at least in difficulties (see Douglas, "Where the
Senses"). It is in this context that we must understand the struggle for
and the struggle against the line, which between themselves constitute the
dynamic of resistance in hypertext.
But again, practice seems
more revealing here than theory. Before we can approach these concepts in the
abstract, it is necessary to consider some particulars. Having re-placed the
author within electronic writing, it follows that we should glance at least
tangentially at what some authors do in that complicated space. This requires a
digression.
In trying
to create a "new foundation" for the art of software design, the
cognitive scientists Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores begin with the
Heideggerian concept of "thrownness" or contingent being-in-the-moment.
The metaphor they use to introduce this concept involves a traffic emergency:
they invite the reader to imagine driving along a turnpike in heavy rain and
crowded traffic at
We might reasonably suspect
that hypertext, as an increasingly popular form of writing on the Internet, is
implicated in this Age of Fast Information. Winograd and
These are
the end times and we're playing in the streets! But do you know what happens
when you play with your back to the traffic? Hint: think quick! BLAM! Are you
just going to stand there and get run over? BLAM! is born at the point of
impact. You provide the meat, we provide the speed freaks, the motor mavens,
the gypsy cab drivers, the habitual drunks, the little old lady from
This is perhaps a good
place to stop digressing and return to hypertext and its resistances. There is
certainly plenty to resist in the above manifesto. These may be "end
times," but some of us learned a long time ago about playing in the
street. Many readers, no doubt, will not be pleased with Eric Swenson's desire
to run them down, treat them as "meat," or fling explosives, like
those bomb-throwing terrorists of the MUDs. Swenson's hyperventilating claims
arouse a strong impulse toward criticism in the root sense -- an attempt to cut
this discourse off from other, less Sadean approaches to electronic writing.
However, such inclinations carry the odor of bad faith. Swenson has one thing
dead right: hypertextual writing is indeed "born at the point of
impact." Consider this crucial moment in Monica Moran's Ambulance:
At this
point we might reflect on an insight from McDaid's Funhouse, words of
wisdom delivered by one of Uncle Buddy's bandmates: "We have to explore
the inner realms Êof the mind and know how to shoot a good car chase"
("The Writer's Brain," card 115). Car chases tend to involve
collisions; and in such scenes, the collisons often multiply. Moran's
"instant of demolition" is repeated over and over through much of the
current generation of hypertext fiction. We have already noticed the arresting
proposition from Michael Joyce's afternoon, "I want to say I may
have seen my son die this morning." What the narrator means, it develops,
is that he has witnessed the aftermath of an encounter much like the one above.
Driving to work, he passes the wreck of a gray Buick that looks exactly like
his ex-wife's car. There are emergency vehicles on the scene and two covered bodies.
Much of the tension that animates afternoon, through initial readings at least,
flows from this fearsome discovery. Similarly, in Uncle Buddy's Phantom
Funhouse, one of the documents most deeply concealed within the
labyrinthine text is a newspaper clipping about a member of Uncle Buddy's
college band who dies when his car skids into a tree. Given its positioning in
the text and the way it completes certain patterns in the mosaic of Buddy's
life, this event might be crucial to the meaning of the story -- though such
judgments are hard to make in a text without an overt narrative. Nonetheless,
if the car crash in the Funhouse does not hold the key to that
particular story, it does seem indicative of an emergent pattern in hypertext
writing as a whole. This brief survey might also include a fourth text, J.
Yellowlees Douglas's "I Have Said Nothing," which answers the
question, "What happens when a Chevy Nova with a 280 engine hits you going
-- It
fractures your collarbone, your scapula, your pelvis, your sacral, lumbar,
thoracic and cervical vertebrae.
-- It splinters your ribcage, compresses your liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach,
intestines, lungs and heart.
-- It fractures your skull and bruises your brain.
-- It causes massive hemorrhaging, throws the heart into cardiac arrest, and
throws the central nervous system into profound shock. ("Anatomized")
Since Douglas, McDaid, and
Joyce are all inmates of the "
If hypertext really
"kills" the text, then those who care about literature might
justifiably condemn it. And yet the implications of such a position are
problematic. Refusing to look at the crash site does not undo the accident.
Declining to drive, while a fine civic gesture, cannot really insulate us from
the horrors of the superhighways, electronic or otherwise. After celebrating
the death of the traditional text, Landow offers a justification:
"destroying now-conventional notions of textual separation may destroy
certain attitudes associated with text, but it will not necessarily destroy
text. It will, however, reconfigure it and our expectations of it" (53).
Whether we like it or not, we must come to terms with this reconfiguration, or
in Joyce's terms, the "re-placement of the author." But first we must
revise our expectations. Surely no attempt at reconciliation can be wholly
successful here. This is why Coover predicts struggle and on-line
"wars." There will always be an impulse to reject the violence of the
crash, to restore the broken dignity of writing, or to haul the sullied body of
the author out of the collaborative MUD. We could dwell on this restorative
impulse in its own right, but that is not a very good way to reach a principle
of constructive resistance. To move beyond "profound shock" and
simple denial, we need to understand that there is something paradoxical about
the crash scene. At least on the metaphorical plane, some so-called accidents
are not so accidental. By the same token some crashes, though evidently
destructive, may actually create new order.
To unravel
these apparent contradictions, we need once again to invoke the concept of
breakdown. Like "thrownness," this idea comes out of Winograd and
Unfortunately, not all
designers understand or honor this commitment, which is why Winograd and Flores
offer their critique. Drawing not just on phenomenology, but also on the
biophysics of Humberto Maturana and the speech-act theory of John Searle, they
argue for a deeply contextual view of the world in which structures of meaning
spread in an indefinite web of associations --a model, we might note, that
recurs in the poststructuralist concept of le texte, in De Landa's
"machinic phylum," in Nelson's or Landow's descriptions of hypertext,
in Joyce's notion of "a structure for what does not yet exist," and
in the World Wide Web itself. The complexity of this network defies simple
calculation; or to use the idiom of cognitive science, "decision
space" has no precise boundaries. Therefore attempts to link cognition to
the tools of technology must always encounter (or engender) breakdown. Winograd
and Flores cite many instances of this effect, the most striking involving
Joseph Weizenbaum's program ELIZA, which mimics the discourse of a
psychotherapist. ELIZA does not contain a formal representation of therapeutic
knowledge; in essence the program consists of a very clever set of language
tricks. Given input of a certain form, ELIZA commonly responds with a simple
modification of that input. So when ELIZA encounters a construction of the
form, I am [verb phrase], it may respond with the construction, How long have
you been [verb phrase]? Herein lies a fatal weakness. One of ELIZA's
interlocutors made the claim, "I am swallowing poison" (121). ELIZA's
response ("How long have you been swallowing poison?") may represent
a fine piece of satire, but the program is supposed to be a therapist, not a
satirist. This instance nicely defines the phenomenology of breakdown.
By drawing on breakdown as
a criterion for technological design, we may be able to frame a principle of
resistance for hypertext. There does seem to be a strong thematic coincidence
among the superhighway metaphor, Winograd and
This last insight might be
our principle of resistance. Hypertext fictions are rife with collision,
impact, and the scattering of "motor parts" all over the imaginary
roadway. Perhaps these images are so pervasive precisely because hypertext
fiction enacts and incorporates the principle of breakdown. Much like
Weizenbaum's ELIZA, Joyce's afternoon or Moran's Ambulance or my
own
The term
"deconstruction" is not used idly here. There is a self-revising
double logic inherent in the fiction of interaction that underlies interactive
fiction. Its principles may be asserted only under the mark of their own
erasure. The author is present but re-placed. The promised but frustrated
multiplicity of exploratory hypertext opens inevitably into the seductive
possibilities of the Internet and constructive hypertext. Displeased by the
backslidings of the
This fragility -- both the
effect and the cause of breakdown -- will always be an enduring feature of the
landscape. "Hypertextual story space is now multidimensional and
theoretically infinite," Scott Bukatman quotes Coover, finding the remark
provocative. "The phrase 'theoretically infinite' raises another question:
the lack of closure may be a theoretical strength but a practical weakness.
Landow concedes that 'complete hypertextuality requires gigantic information
networks' linked more tightly than existing networks. A 'complete' hypertext,
like the perfect simulation promised by virtual reality, remains a kind of
electronic grail" (Bukatman 13). Like the argument for the "pleasure
of the web," this is an important objection. One could adduce Gravity's
Rainbow as evidence of what happened to grail quests in the sixties, but
that would be another story. Suffice it to say that we no longer expect to
arrive at the Holy Center, though we may well come in the fullness of time to
the Dark Tower or some other scene of success-through-failure. Anyone who
understands the ways of native hypertext knows that the point is not to
struggle against hypertext. Rather the act of reading in hypertext is
constituted as struggle: a chapter of chances, a chain of detours, a
series of revealing failures in commitment out of which come the pleasures of
the text. We must understand hypertext as an information highway in which every
lane is reserved for breakdowns, a demolition epic in which the vehicles always
and constantly blow apart. Some of us may not be interested in a
"complete" hypertext -- indeed certainly not in a
"complete" evocation of virtual reality or any other technological
"enframing." As Michael Heim pointed out some time ago, we must worry
about the tendency toward monolithic drift (or "digital convergence")
tending toward "an all-enframing technology... which points to the
reduction of the metaphorical powers of language to a single aspect of
information management" (72). Give us this day our daily breakdown, rather
than such sinister forms of success.
In this
essay, I owe much to two of my colleagues. In the summer of 1993, Terence
Harpold suggested to me that J.G. Ballard's Crash might have some
bearing on the narrative aesthetics of hypertext. J. Yellowlees Douglas's,
"I Have Said Nothing," which I first read that spring, strongly
confirmed that insight.
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URL: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/breakdown.html