This essay appeared in Strate, Jacobson, and Gibson's collection, Communication
and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, Hampton
Press (1996).
The only responsible
intellectual is one who is wired.
-- Taylor
and Saarinen
Millennium season has
arrived. Every month now the rhetoric of technology salesmen, never much known
for subtlety, re-sets the record for hyperbole. The airwaves are filled with
trailers for the future. AT&T promises surfside faxes, power breakfasts in
your skivvies, your medical history on a credit card. Maybe you do not desire
this stuff just yet, but don't worry... you will. Meanwhile on
MCI's side of the highway, Anna Pacquin lisps that everything is information
-- digitized, lightspeed quick, annihilating distinctions of time and space. In
the new regime there will be no more "there!" Or as we
might also say, there goes the neighborhood. So begins "our violent
descent into the electronic cage of virtual reality," says Arthur Kroker
with trademark hysteria. Down we go into the "floating world of liquid
media where the body is daily downloaded into the floating world of the net,
where data is the real, and where high technology can fulfill its destiny of an
out-of-body experience" (1994, 36). There goes the body, too, drowned in
recombinant buzz. Shuffled off into "bodiless exultation" (Gibson
1984) we hang out in cyberspace awaiting further prophecies. Where do you
want to go today? asks Microsoft, but it is less a question of going than
of knowing -- knowing where we are. We have come to that liminal zone called
"The New Edge" (Rucker at al., 1992). The gulf between the Now and
the New yawns impatiently.
This is an ambiguous,
ambivalent state. Here is Vivian Sobchack commenting on the cyberhip magazine Mondo
2000: "In my sober and responsible moments I bemoan our culture's loss
of gravity and fear the very real social dangers of disembodied ditziness, but
holding this Christmas present to myself, all I want is a head shot"
(1992, 583). It is particularly easy to feel this way if one is of a certain
age. Cyberculture may be the last holiday orgy of the yuppies, replete with
silicon sugar plums for all. There is something seductively regressive about
the New Edge, with its smart drugs, mind machines, data networks, body-piercing
narcissism, and dreams of virtual sex without secretions. Personal computing
these days seems little more than an exclusive toy shop, especially considering
the present craze for CD-ROM and "multimedia." More often than not
this buzzword refers to pre-recorded sequences of sound and video, a techne
that seems distinctly familiar. As Greg Ulmer says, "[e]verything now, in
its own way, wants to be television" (1990, 11). Except for television, of
course, which wants to be something new, improved, and "interactive,"
but whose vision of the future turns out to be Oliver Stone's Wild Palms,
or Beavis and Butthead in Cyberspace.
In large part the New Edge
may be just another trompe l'oeil shadow; though it may not be entirely without
significance even so. In the era of simulation, as Baudrillard pointed out, the
production of illusions becomes a crucial enterprise. Consider the thesis of
"digital convergence," the last "vision rollout" put on by
John Sculley before he left Apple Computer for wilder company. Taken at its
glossiest, this concept means the wholesale integration of personal data
services: much the same thing that is intoned over that stolen Peter Gabriel
riff in all those AT&T spots. If the industrialists get their way, then
nearly all our information will be mediated by a very small number of boxes and
perhaps a single skein of cable.
Consequences of this change
could be great. No more personal computers, no more television sets, no more
fax machines, just a single appliance strung into "the dataline," as
Pat Cadigan calls it (1990). Nor would consumer electronics be the sole area of
impact. Imagine a world without bookstores, where one has only to connect to a
publisher's electronic catalog to download, in whole or part, anything that one
can plausibly afford. The implications for retailing are astonishing, as Barry
Diller and others in the media marketing business have recognized (Carlin
1993). Sculley's convergence seems likely to be realized any day now; it has
considerable momentum both economically and politically. His vision maps
closely onto Vice President Gore's National Information Infrastructure
initiative, in which a "partnership" of communications companies,
information providers, computer makers, and government will build the fabled
digital superhighway. Since this strategy seems equally acceptable to the
resurgent right (or at least the Speaker of the House), it seems sure to go
forward.
Discussion of NII usually
centers on its implications for business. Under "time-based
competition" where product development cycles can be measured in weeks,
some means of fast, copious, and efficient data exchange becomes essential
(Peters 1992, Zuboff 1988). Complex, densely interrelated tasks must be
adequately documented and represented for managers. Large engineering
enterprises like the aerospace industry require flexible software tools for
complex and dynamically changing work groups (Malcolm et al. 1991). But the
implications of this development go well beyond industrial competition.
Autobahns and interstate highways support commerce (and military mobilization)
but they also change profoundly the way we organize ourselves as a culture.
Just ask anyone who grew up in the suburbs and later returned to the urban
core. As Fred Pfeil points out, the coming of the concrete highways contributed
crucially to the atomized, post-Oedipal condition of the "PMC,"
Pfeil's shorthand for both Professional-Managerial Class and Postmodern Culture
(1990, 32). The new fiber-optic data routes might bring similarly sweeping
changes to cultural life. But what will these effects be? Can they be
understood in terms not saturated by SF visions or pitchman hyperbole?
When Arthur Kroker writes
about bodies "downloaded into the floating world of the net," he is
of course fantasizing. Whether or not the "destiny" of "high
technology" lies in "an out-of-body experience," even our highest
technologies of the moment come nowhere close to that objective. The body, like
the material world in general, turns out to be more complex and sophisticated
the more closely we examine it. Digital convergence is one thing, digital
conversion quite another. Uploading or downloading people into information
networks is the stuff of Star Trek's 24th century (i.e., of television)
not of the present era. What we transfer into the network, now or in the
foreseeable future, is not our literal mind/body but some representation: some
text. As Donna Haraway says: "Writing is pre-eminently the technology of
cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century" (1991, 176).
Questions about cyberculture thus lead away from "edges" (new or
otherwise) and back toward surfaces -- or to scenes of writing.
At the moment our cyborg
texts remain heavily invested in pre-electronic technologies. We are living in
what Jay David Bolter calls "the late age of print," a moment in
history when the old, industrial paradigm of alphabetic literacy collides with
the younger agenda of electronic communication (1991, 2). Outlines of a new
order have begun to emerge, yet the old regime remains stubbornly present.
Though promoters of multimedia may try to turn everything into television, for
a while the main front of development in electronic media remains verbal and
textual; and there is good reason to think that the word will not wither away
any time soon (Moulthrop 1993). "Cyberspace" as we know it in the
nineties is largely a system of texts and intertexts. Consider the current most
popular lane on the information highway, the distributed writing system called
the World Wide Web. This vast congeries of information is really nothing like
an electronic book or even a virtual library. The flow of information on the Web
is much more dynamic and much less invested in stable objects than such
metaphors suggest. Yet its component elements are still referred to (and to
some extent designed) as "pages." Authors representing themselves on
the Web organize their work around the comforting notion of a "home
page" (December and Randall 1994).
If we recognize today's
electronic environments as what Bolter calls "writing spaces"(1991,
10-12) then we may begin to understand the emerging cultural front of
cyberspace. Is the library the home we never left? Or is it the object of our
frustrated re-turning, the home to which we cannot come again? The cyberpunks
and New Edgers dream about cyberspace in the comfort of pre-digital media. They
operate in the book and magazine markets, old foundations of of the print age.
They are often, strange as it may seem, staunch defenders of high literacy and
even the canon (e.g., Stephenson 1993). Too often their projections assume that
crucial aspects of print culture -- analysis, reductive formalism, Aristotelian
agon, and discrete authorship -- will be carried wholesale across the new
frontier.
They are probably dead
wrong about this. In the environment of electronic communications, write the
"media philosophers" Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen, "all philosophy
must be interactive. Monologue becomes dialogue or, more precisely,
polylogue" (1993, "Ending the Academy," 1). Cyberspace may be a
textual domain, but it is not the Gutenberg Galaxy same as it ever was.
Textuality in the new writing space is not constrained by the rigid ordering
principles native to pre-electronic media. This means that we must
fundamentally re-think our position as subjects of electronic textuality. We
must come to grips with yet a third kind of "convergence," a phenomenon
George Landow calls "the convergence of contemporary critical theory and
technology" (1992, 4). This intersection may have more significance, in
the short run at least, than either the vision of integrated data services or
the dream of human/machine fusion.
The subject of Landow's
interest, like Bolter's, is a relatively modest item on the high-technology
agenda, a form of electronic writing called hypertext. (For background on this
concept, see Bolter 1991, Halasz 1987, Landow 1992, Nelson 1990, Slatin 1990.)
The name was coined in the mid-1960s by the computing visionary Theodor Nelson
to describe "non-sequential writing," a scheme for using interactive
computing systems to deliver documents in variable form, as opposed to the
strict sequence imposed by bookbinding (1990, 3/19). Hypertexts cannot be
translated into print. They retain a dynamic or "interactive"
component which no non-electronic reduction can adequately represent. In
hypertext, a body of writing is formally divided into arbitrary units or
"lexias" as Landow calls them, borrowing from Roland Barthes. The
reader's path from one lexia to another is determined partly by active
engagement: the reader selects a word in the present lexia, chooses an option
from a menu, issues a command, or otherwise indicates some wish for further
development. The program responds with another piece of writing which may or
may not match the reader's desires, but which articulates in some way to the
previous passage. In the most ambitious, "constructive" versions of
this writing system (Joyce 1994), the reader may not only follow pre-defined
pathways, but may alter the connections and add new lexias to the system,
creating complex textual hybrids.
Hypertext is a
characteristic product of the late age of print, which is to say, it is deeply
ambiguous. While still dependent on alphabetic literacy, algorithmic
programming, linearity, hierarchy, and other trappings of Gutenberg culture,
hypertext implicitly challenges the episteme from which it sprang. Though any
hypertextual document remains a limited and definable object, this object is
much more like Roland Barthes's notion of "text" -- a dynamic network
of ideas, indefinite in its boundaries and mutable over time -- than like a
teleologically closed literary "work" (Landow 1992, 23). The precise
nature and boundaries of a hypertext are hard to define. The experience of
reading for any two people who traverse its verbal space may be radically
different: "polylogue," not monologue. Where multiple writers are
involved, authorial voice and intention come in for serious questioning. In the
World Wide Web, for instance, a single document may contain scores of
references to other texts stored at various far-flung points around the
Internet. A single reading may involve writings (and writers) from
These aspects of
hypertextual writing lead Landow to his particular vision of "convergence."
As he sees it, the current interest in hypertext represents the happy union of
two cultural forces that have worked for twenty years in adjacent ivory towers.
On one side of this new synthesis are information scientists, men like Douglas
Engelbart and Andries Van Dam who created the first practical hypertext
systems. On the other flank stand poststructuralist theorists like Barthes,
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva, whose critiques of print
culture, or logocentrism, appear to parallel the hypertextual enterprise. As
Landow sees it, the technology of the printed book
engenders
certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a physically
isolated text that hypertext makes untenable. The evidence of hypertext, in
other words, historicizes many of our most commonplace assumptions, thereby
forcing them to descend from the ethereality of abstraction and appear as
corollaries to a particular technology rooted in specific times and places.
(1992, 33)
Landow does not claim that
hypertext represents an "applied grammatology," to borrow Ulmer's
phrase, only that there is a compelling and useful analogy between
poststructuralist theories of the text and the development of electronic
writing. "What is perhaps most interesting about hypertext," Landow
explains, "is not that it may fulfill certain claims of structuralist and
poststructuralist criticism but that it provides a rich means of testing
them" (1992, 11). What Landow means by "testing" here, or what
anyone else might mean by it, remains very much at issue. Hypertext enables its
users to invent new forms for arranging and passing on information. These forms
do not map onto the claims of poststructuralist critics in any simple, literal
way. But if Landow is right, hypertext should allow us to articulate
poststructuralist concepts within the emergent practices of digital culture.
"Articulation" here might mean a process of connection in which one
creates contingent unities among moving differences (for the roots of this
concept, see Grossberg 1992). This enterprise seems entirely in line with
Haraway's cyborg politics. If such a process is possible, then hypertext might
lend some substance to all that loose talk about digital highways, electronic
frontiers, and a "floating world of liquid media." But this remains
to be seen.
At the moment we face a
more primary and practical cultural problem: the disturbing presence of the
past. Contrary to the testimony of the sixties, print is not dead, nor is it
merely sleeping. The cultural complex of print (a metonymy taking in publishing
houses, academic institutions, reviewers, advertisers, and these days,
multimedia conglomerates) is actually undead, which is to say that it lingers
on, monstrously transformed, haunting us in the dead of night. According to
Taylor and Saarinen, who have laid the strongest claim yet to Marshall
McLuhan's mad media prophecies, technologies like hypertext portend a cultural
paradigm shift. This would be a change from monologue to polylogue, from edifice
to improvization, from Bildung to bricolage. "Expert language," they
say, "is a prison for knowledge and understanding. A prison for
intellectually significant relationships. It is time to move beyond the
institutional practices of triviledge, toward networks and surfaces, toward the
play of superficiality, toward interstanding" (1993, "Communicative
Practices," 8). Neologism is an essential part of the game here.
"Triviledge" indicates the privilege of institutional learning, or
the trivilality of knowledge; "interstanding" names the way of
knowing appropriate to hypertext, the exploration of what Joyce calls
"interstices" and "contours," or what Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari call "lines of flight" (1987, 3). "When depth
gives way to surface," Taylor and Saarinen write, "under-standing
becomes inter-standing. To comprehend is no longer to grasp what lies beneath
but to glimpse what lies between" (1993, "Interstanding," 1). In
moving from the page to the interstice, from understanding to interstanding, we
ostensibly reverse figure and ground, transforming the condition of textuality.
But how much is genuinely
new here? As Pete Townshend might have said: Meet the new Logos; same as the
old Logos. The problem is that scholars, critics, developers, and designers
cling desperately to the same old ways of doing what we do.
"Triviledge" represents our ultimate home on the page. Those optical
networks and etched surfaces that might redeem us seem strangely hard to
engage. Take
If an
electronic text can be published in printed form, is it really electronic? The
alternative would be to give up print and publish an electronic text. But the
technology necessary for accessing electronic texts is still rather limited.
Furthermore, most of the people we want to reach remain committed to print.
There is no sense preaching to the converted. Our dilemma is that we are living
at the moment of transition from print to electronic culture. It is too late
for printed books and too early for electronic texts. Along this boundary we
must write our work. (1993, "Telewriting," 5)
Much of this argument makes
sense -- though the sense that it makes deeply undermines the primary claim.
There is indeed no point in "preaching to the converted." If we
understand hypertext we know that there is no point in preaching at all, just
as there is no sense in worrying about the limpness of the next man's
transcendental signifier, or your own. If technologies like hypertext really do
open possibilities for cultural renewal, then as
Or maybe you won't. As any
scientist knows, most experiments fail. Even after we have given up on print,
the majority of "really electronic" text will be hopelessly contaminated
with the old ways of knowing. What we must carry forward is a strong sense of
foundational irony. The past is always present; we are Gutenberg creatures no
matter how hard we play at revolution; there is no such thing as
"non-sequential writing." We make our way by recursion, by folding a
new order back upon and into its predecessor. The relations among media, as
McLuhan discovered and as Neil Postman has clarified, belong to a complex,
mutually modifying ecology (Postman 1992, 18). Drastic, monumental changes are
rare in most ecologies -- and disastrous when they do occur. In the place of
such upheavals, in our day-to-day survival, we find articulations, contingent
complications of the old order which may, in their non-totalizing, fractal context,
create some space for "interstanding." Or so we may hope.
So is there really a new
world coming? If books are still being written about cyberspace (including this
book), then it must be too soon to tell. There is only one thing about which we
can be reasonably sure: we must stop writing our work along the boundaries. We
must step off the edge and onto the shifting surfaces. This writing is finished
-- or unfinished.
Baudrillard,
J (1983).
Simulations. Trans. P. Foss, P. Patton, and P. Beitchmann.
Bolter, J.
(1991).
Writing space: the computer, hypertext, and the
history of writing.
Cadigan, P.
(1990).
Synners.
Carlin, P.
(1993).
The jackpot in television's future. New York
Times Magazine, February 28, 1993, 36-41.
December, J.
and N. Randall (1994).
The World Wide Web unleashed.
Deleuze, G.
and F. Guattari (1987).
A thousand plateaus: capitalism and
schizophrenia.
Trans. B. Massumi.
Gibson, W.
(1984).
Neuromancer.
Grossberg,
L. (1992).
We gotta get out of this place: popular
conservatism and postmodern culture.
Halasz, F.
(1987).
Reflections on NoteCards: seven issues for the
next generation of hypermedia systems. Communications of the ACM, 31
(7), 836-852.
Haraway, D.
(1991).
Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of
nature.
Joyce, M.
(1994).
Of two minds: hypertext pedagogy and poetics.
Kroker, A.
(1994).
Spasm: virtual reality, android music, electric
flesh.
Landow, G. (1992).
Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary literary
theory and technology.
Malcolm, K.,
S. Poltrock, and D. Schuler (1991).
Industrial strength hypermedia: requirements
for a large engineering enterprise. In P.D. Stotts and R.K. Furuta (Eds.), Hypertext
'91 Proceedings (pp. 13-24).
McLuhan,
H.M., and Q. Fiore (1967).
The medium is the massage.
Moulthrop,
S. (1993)
You say you want a revolution? Hypertext and
the laws of media. In E. Amiran and J. Unsworth (Eds.), Essays in postmodern
culture (pp. 69-97).
Nelson, T.
(1990).
Literary machines.
Peters, T.
(1992).
Liberation management: necessary
disorganization for the nanosecond nineties.
Pfeil, F.
(1990).
Another tale to tell: politics and narrative in
postmodern culture.
Postman, N.
(1992).
Technopoly.
Rucker, R.,
R.U. Sirius, and Queen Mu (1992).
Mondo 2000: a user's guide to the new edge.
Sobchack, V.
(1992).
Reading Mondo 2000. South Atlantic
Quarterly 92(4), 581-97.
Slatin, J.
(1990).
Reading hypertext: order and coherence in a new
medium. College English 52, 870-883.
Stephenson,
N. (1993).
Smiley's people. New Republic, September
13, 1993, 52.
Ulmer, G.
(1990).
Teletheory: grammatology in the age of video.
Zuboff, S.
(1988).
In the age of the smart machine: the future of work and power. New York: Basic Books.
URL: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/edge.html