Hypertext & Litcrit

If intelligibility is the primary problem within hypermedia, part of the intelligibility problem comes from the novelty of hypermedia, but an important part also comes from the understandings hypermedia producers bring to the field. This problem stems in part from analytical deficits: a bias toward text, and within that a computer-based theory of information and a tradition of literary criticism which is too narrow, too much based on traditional forms, to understand the breadth and novelty of hypermedia.

Hypertext literary theory developed as postmodern literary criticism joined software environments like "Owl" and "Story Space" in which hypertext manipulation is possible. There was considerable convenience to this marriage. Hypertext linking enables multiple texts to be joined. Postmodern theories are concerned with the ways multiple texts come together to form larger communications, and how they presume or live out larger unstated cultural forms.

"For example, like much recent work by poststructuralists, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, hypertext reconceives conventional, long-held assumptions about authors and readers and the texts they write and read. Electronic linking, which provides one of the defining features of hypertext, also embodies Julia Kristeva's notions of intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin's emphasis upon multivocality, Michel Foucault's conception of networks of power, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's ideas of rhizomatic, "nomad thought." The very idea of hypertextuality seems to have taken form at approximately the same time that poststructuralism developedÉboth grow out of dissatisfaction with the related phenomena of the printed book, and hierarchical thought."12

This is also, fundamentally a text, and here I mean a word-oriented tradition. Leaving aside such visual examples as Barthes' Camera Lucida, the deconstructions of Max Kosloff, Susan Sontag and Christian Metz, the majority of litcrit has focused on text, both as the object of study and as a mode for studying other things: in which subject matters are "texts," as in Stanley Fish's "Is There a Text in this Class? 13

Particularly among computer based hypertext authors, there is generally little reference to any mode other than text, and there seems to be a presumption that the methods of text can be applied to images. The hypertext authoring environment Story Space, for example, does not allow for even minimal visual manipulation of text or layout outside of the link-node mapping. "Essentially, one must do for visual information what one already does far more easily for verbal information &endash; store it in a central repository (database) so that one can share it among many readers by means of a network"É14 More easily, indeed. Image taxonomy is turning out to be a very difficult proposition. Sometimes, the best method is to flash images in rapid succession and rely on visual recognition rather than an ordered taxonomy.

Given the text bias of hypertext litcrit, there is an often displayed elision or confusion that concerns text and information. It is between two meanings of the term text:

1. the text as the physical setting of words and lines
2. the text as the intelligible thing being written, the meaning or more properly content behind the empirical text setting. 15

Both exist and are linked together because the physical setting only exists as text insofar as it is read and interpreted, but that intelligible text is only available through the reading of the physical text. Some authors call this the distinction between the physical text, and the "work" as the thing we find in the reading. "Work" has its problems since it indicates a closed entity, yet many postmodern theorists break down the edges between texts. Often, the same word &endash; text &endash; is used without differentiation and this leads to confusion.

In the introduction to The Digital Word, Paul Delaney and George Landow describe "the dispersal of the text" through the computer's ability to disperse and recombine texts. This paragraph makes sense when the text being dispersed is what we have called the work, while the recombining and manipulation is of texts as physical settings or as "documents," the files or internet web "pages" which form the fundamental units of computer communications. Landow and Delaney are certainly aware of the distinction between text and work, but it is easy for a reader to miss. Many others write as if manipulating text documents were the same thing as manipulating the work, unless, of course, we presume that there is some larger "work" of which all texts are parts, and this is what the notion of social "intertextuality" suggests.

The reasoning problem is that the texts stand in front of the work. We have to be able to find the work through the texts before we can manipulate it. Manipulating the texts is not the same thing as manipulating the work, and manipulating the texts before the work has been set forth often obscures it. Thus, we return to the central problem of hypertext, making it intelligible.

To return to Stanley Fish, "Is There a Text in this Class," revolves around that question in its two meanings, i.e., "Is there a textbook used?" and "Does this class have an agenda or cant?" Similarly, Fish considers experiments, intended and otherwise in which lists of names, words or other markings on blackboards are interpreted in radically different ways by different classes, e.g., as poems or lists of saints. The different interpretations Fish reports are conditioned by the different classes as "interpretive communities" based on subjects (religion, English). Fish's work stresses the multivocality of language, that it can be interpreted in many different ways. But is language infinitely interpretable? If so, why are hypermedia so often disorienting or unintelligible?

In Fish's cases, students already possess senses of "work" which they apply to the empirical texts that they see. These are classroom blackboards seen in classes, which are well understood settings in which there are particular expectations. These expectations follow rules regarding occasion, in this case, classes. As signs in public places, they might have different meanings, though there too, we have interpretive rules which artists like Jenny Holzer exploit. Imagine yourself seeing a street sign flashing a list of names or words. What are the questions you would ask yourself as to what this meant? How would you reevaluate after each new word? Thus, how would you be searching for the interpretive rules?

Similarly, Hypertext litcrit is often concerned with revolutionizing traditional forms: novels or poems and is operating against a known print culture:

Technologies like that of book printing and the institutions coupled to it, such as literature and the university, thus constituted a historically very powerful formation, which in the Europe of the age of Goethe became the condition of possibility for literary criticism: To authoritarian and hierarchical forms, hypertext adds another liberating one: If linear and hierarchical structures dominate current writing, the computer now adds a third, the network , as a visible and operative structure.16

1. A text is what you read, the words and phrases that you see before your eyes and the meanings they produce in your head.
2. A text is a message, imbued with the values and intentions of a specific writer/genre/culture.
3. A text is a fixed sequence of constituents (beginning, middle, end) that cannot change.

Many theorists write of traditional literary structures not in terms of intelligibility, i.e., how stories make sense, but in terms of power. Thus, traditional book writing stresses hierarchy, author, linearity of the text and the book publishing industry. Against this backdrop, computer hypertext can liberate by destroying the individual work, the single author, by empowering the reader to reorganize and tell his own story, and by allowing for collaboration on a project. So it is argued. comment

What does hypertext fiction look like? It looks very much like meta-fiction. When a genre becomes well enough known, it becomes possible to write meta-works. The Rock'n Roll live album presents the old hit in a new way, often as variations on the original. Hypertext fiction is about the problem of its own reading. 18 comment

Hypertext functions by the displacement or inflection of normal reading; readers already possess a sense of how the root novel should work, so they look for it, just as listeners bring their knowledge of the recorded songs to rock concerts.

What happens when a problematic story structure is presented in hypertext?

In fiction the story determines and hides behind the plot, which produces the action, whereas in cybertext, the plot itself is hidden, and so the discursive causality is reversed: action determines (or searches in vain for) the plot, which if found does not produce anything interesting, only (barely) closure. 21 comment

Here, the distinction between the text and the work shows itself. Hypertext theory writes of hypertext fiction as a rearrangement of the text to alter the work (given that we already have a good idea of how we think the work is structured, an idea that comes from a four hundred year history of traditional novels). We are students in Stanley Fish's class.

But what if we do not already know or think we know the song, or even what a rock and roll song is, i.e., if we do not have a conception of the genre being inflected? How, then, can we get to the work if we don't have the empirical text in its totality and order? In hypertext novels, it is not the intelligible work that is being manipulated, but the physical text on the page through which we read it. Do we imagine that the manipulation of the text in one way will result in a parallel manipulation of the work?

Our experience with hypermedia seems to indicate that without a pre-defined conception of the work, e.g., the plot line of a story, we may have little hope of making sense out of hyper-recombinance. This is a particular problem when we attempt to use hypertext to build a new form.

Hypertext & Litcrit
Summary:
Litcrit and Computer Information

The interest here is not in a general criticism or debunking of postmodern literary theory. Hypertext litcrit is criticized to argue that it is best applied to established genres like fiction, and not necessarily applicable to emerging genres or to hypermedia as a whole. Unfortunately, the preponderance of hypermedia theory has been developed according to this model. Like the computer-based information model, it is partial. Both models presume the intelligibility that needs to be constructed. In order to explicate the limitations posed by the way both of these approaches are based solely on text will require a fuller discussion of the history of image use.

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