Nostalgic Angels,Chapter 5
Hypertext and the Post-political Writer/Reader
Trans-politics is the beginning of the disappearance of politics in the dwindling of the last commodity: duration. Democracy, consultation, the basis of politics, requires time. Duration is the proper of man; he is inscribed within it. For me, trans-politics is the beginning of the end. . . . [T]here's work to be done . . . in order to re-establish politics, at a time when technology no longer portions out matter and geographical space (as was the case in ancient democratic society), but when technology portions out time -- and I would say: the depletion of time.
Paul Virilio,
Pure War, p. 28
As the plane of the text flattens -- as distinctions between "my text" and "your text," "published text" and "teacher's text" and "student text," begin to disappear, as each node comes to exist at the same level of importance -- hypertext potentially engenders post-political activity. The links between author/text, sign/signified that were re-enforced by the physical and social structure of book-discourse seem to come radically unglued. Furthermore, because hypertext is commonly conceived as merely a natural, evolutionary step from the deconstructive work of Barthes and Derrida, the link marker signifies, among other things, that this is the way it's always been -- or should have been; that we were only fooling ourselves before when we said we knew who the author was. Such a claim may be true, but it is far from re-assuring. The physical boundaries of text, before the computer, seemed easy to distinguish: A book is bound and bounded. But as activity/identity/agency are translated to the computer, reality comes to seem much more tenuous, even in day-to-day activities. One is reminded here of workers in a newly computerized wood-pulp plant interviewed by Shoshana Zuboff (1988). As one anonymous plant operator expressed the anxiety,
When I go out and touch something, I know what will happen. There is a fear of not being on the floor watching things. It is like turning your back in a dark alley. You don't know what is behind you; you don't know what might be happening. It all becomes remote from you, and it makes you feel vulnerable. It was like being a new operator all over again. Today I push buttons instead of opening valves on the digester. If I push the wrong button, will I screw up? Will anything happen? (pp. 63-64)
Like the operator's uneasiness about the invisible relationship between electronic-control-system and the machinery of the plant, the activity of wandering among the links, of navigating the hypertext, becomes the search for the "real" self under the signifier (the transcendental signified) (Harpold, 1990, p. 174); from a textual perspective, our loss of direction in the in reading/writing seems to represent a loss of direction or center in our lives.
But while for critics of hypertext fiction such as David Dobrin (1994) this activity appears wholly negative and oppressive (and admittedly, at times it has probably appeared that this is my point as well), we can perhaps express something more constructive. If the "flattened plane" is a transitional state or a heuristic rather than a totalizing world-view, hypertext can become an empowering forum. Dobrin falls into the argument that the technology is simultaneously effective and ineffectual, dangerous and innocuous without any middle ground that might afford a sense of purpose for the users of the technology (Landow, 1992c). Dobrin claims not only that Karl Crary's teachers have failed him, but that hypertext is an irrelevant medium; the medium is only a tool with which we control students.
What is missing in postmodern hypertext space is an overt sense of the place of postmodernism as a method of constructive and social resistance, something Moulthrop and Kaplan begin to allude to near the end of their analysis of Crary's work. By the old standards of classical interpretation, Crary's resistance is futile because he cannot dominate the text; Crary cannot construct an isolated, individual position from which to write. As Bolter said, a hypertext deconstructs itself -- so not only can the text not be resisted, but each subsequent writer's text is itself deconstructed.
Resistance could be directed toward a different goal, however, such as the distinction between ludic and resistance postmodernism (Ebert, 1991) discussed earlier. From the standpoint of the ludic/resistance distinction, the "negative" flattening of the text in hypertext is only a partial affair, a resistance that is never complete because it is consistently connected to the imaginary and real relations of society. Discourses are always multiple. Hypertext is important in the ways that it both realizes and problematizes things that we've been thinking about for a long time -- not merely as effects of deterministic, autonomous technology, but as also influenced by late/disorganized/postmodern capitalism, social structures, and, not least, the values and powers that are tangled into the culture of the book. The book, in our society, tends toward authorizing and conserving power and the commodification and consumption of ideas in capitalist culture. Moulthrop and Kaplan's (1994) own final analysis of the "failure" takes this tact:
In reading and writing hypertexts, our resistance may come to focus not on prior texts or creative precursors, but rather on the literary institutions we have inherited from the history of print -- institutions that make reading into a test of strength, authorship into a hierarchic mystery, and texts into closed books. (pp. 236-237)
So what Moulthrop, Kaplan, and Crary have accomplished is an important but only initial step away from print culture -- a step that is, because of its isolation, more of a symptom than a program for action. Moulthrop and Kaplan's analysis begins with the traditional view of literary scholarship (a rhetorical move that serves to highlight the contradictions inherent in this type of reading). For such a discourse, the primary forces involve isolated reader and text; the forces of other discourse are here, but are not mapped. Dobrin's skepticism is healthy, however: Moulthrop and Kaplan's more important ideas about book culture apparently come after Crary's experiences, only being hinted at in the last few paragraphs of their essay. Hypertext is not necessarily (or perhaps even commonly) an empowering area for student work. In order to construct hypertext as a socially empowering technology, we have to expand our vision to the social, mapping the world and living the map, not merely for the types of hypertexts articulated by the forces discussed in this chapter, but for all hypertext.