Nostalgic Angels,Chapter 5

Bridge

We find ourselves standing at a problematic point in these cultural texts: The concretizing activities of The In Memoriam Web appear as an attempt to reveal the Truth about the text as a social artifact, placing all commentary in subordination to the master-texts of Tennyson (or Dickens, or whomever) -- a still useful method of reading, but also commonly conservative if not outright repressive. Such texts and activities are useful in training textual scholars to the workings and expectations of the profession -- the geometry of a discipline -- but do not seem to go very far in Landow's asserted postmodern project. But the fragmented, flattened geography of Forking Paths (where even titles lose their honorific capitalization) absorbs identity in a disconcertingly disempowering manner. Time disappears in both cases, although in different manners. In extremely geometric spaces, time is totalized, frozen, mapped out. There is a sense of history, but it is closer to a reverent archaeology of the lives of past masters. In the predominantly geographic spaces, time ceases to represent anything at all -- if there is movement, it is a nomadic motion made perpetual by the flattening of culture: there are no outcroppings of relatively stable identity with which we normally identify individuals; there are no plateaus on which to re-territorialize, the subject seeming to continually forget where it has come from in the instant it arrives at its destination (which is an identical nowhere to the previous one). Hypertext is certainly not the cause of the dispersal, only a particularly vivid example, one force and symptom implicated in that displacement among many articulated by postmodern theorists. The totality of postmodern space is ungraspable, Jameson argues, requiring a new way of mapping ourselves -- not the geographical, narrative itineraries of the traveler and not the geometric, cartographic measures of the traditional mapmaker, but an interplay between the two. For Jameson (1991), contemporary social life requires a "cognitive mapping" of political/physical space, a process of interplay between Althusserian Real, Imaginary, and Lacanian Symbolic (pp. 52-54). Landow's intertexts fail in this project due to their geometrical goal, an attempt to make transparent both time and space in the guise of a network of texts -- a form of nostalgia that seems unable to recover a critical perspective on current social and historical spaces. Karl Crary, on the other hand, finds nothing to resist because the fragmented text becomes removed from the Real and Imaginary -- Crary attempts to resist the postmodern text that absorbs him in a pure place of the Symbolic. For Crary, geometry is absent due to any distinguishing features in the text -- there is no map or grid to organize and structure the text. The In Memoriam Web and Forking Paths move toward two opposing dangers of cognitive mapping as a resistance activity. Jameson warns that

the strength of the visual map from city to globe is so compelling that it ends up re-spatializing an operation we were supposed to think of in a different manner altogether. A new sense of global social structure was supposed to take on figuration and to displace the purely perceptual substitute of the geographical figure; cognitive mapping, which was supposed to have a kind of oxymoronic value and to transcend the limits of mapping altogether, is, as a concept, drawn back by the force of gravity of the black hole of the map itself (one of the most powerful of all human instruments) and therein cancels outs its own impossible originality. A secondary premise must, however, also be argued -- namely, that the incapacity to map spatially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience. It follows that an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in this sense is an integral part of any socialist political project. (p. 416)

In order to begin working on the project Jameson describes as building "a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system" (p. 54), we need to re-structure postmodern, articulations of hypertext so that in addition to dispersing the subject it also offers a method for learning how to situate that relatively dispersed self into an active, social matrix at the conjunction between geography and geometry.