Segmentation / Alternative
paths
Silvio
Gaggi, From Text to Hypertext
Metonymy
and Metaphor in the Fiction of Forking Paths:
Silvio
Gaggi, From Text to Hypertext - Ch.4: "Hyperrealities and Hypertexts"
Postmodern hyperspace is so ubiquitous that it cannot be escaped; one
is always in it, disoriented by its organization and by the "logic of
the simulacrum." One cannot find a place from which one might be able
to evaluate or analyze, from which one might engage in an "old-fashioned
ideological critique" that would make political judgment and effective
action possible (99. Quoted from Jameson)
Simulacra -- divorced from all connection with the referent -- dominate
our landscape and replace representations, which might have been judged
on the basis of how accurately they reflect political and social truth.
The profusion of simulacra and the absence of reference produce a sense
of groundlessness. The subject cannot orient itself inside this space.
Clear coordinates are lost or ambiguous, so that the position of the subject
is always unclear, and dominant axes, which might clarify the direction
of the subject's movement, do not exist. The subject moves from point
to point along various channels, from node to- node through various links.
There may be plenty of choices available, but the subject acts without
knowing where it is and without sufficient basis for determining where
it should or might want to go.(100)
Because there is no possibility of ever reading the entire hyper text
(it is far too vast), a pragmatic consequence is that the temporal as
well as the textual beginning and end of the reading experience is determined
solely by the reader. In the most utopian scenario, all texts will be
linked hypertextually, so that readers will be able to travel through
world literature in diverse ways according to complex and labyrinthine
paths chosen only by themselves.(102)
In the near future, hypertextual systems‹especially those that integrate
multiple works --[will] become our dominant textual vehicle, both the
way we read and what we understand literature to be will be altered. Books,
stories, poems, essays, or articles may no longer be conceived of as primary
units, more or less complete and self-sufficient statements of one kind
or another. Instead there will simply be a textual network that one enters,
through which one moves, and from which one exits, after pursuing whatever
purposes one has or learning whatever one is trying to learn. As the system
grows and as individuals become more habituated to working with hypertext,
the sense of centrality of certain primary texts within the network will
be weakened. The distinction between text and context will dissolve and
intertextuality will cease to be regarded as such because there will be,
in fact, only one text, one intertext, one hypertext.
The empowerment of the reader is a potential of hypertextuality. In hypertext,
as Landow and others describe it, readers can append their own comments
and responses, add new nodes or lexias, to any parts of the text that
they are interested in, and they can create new links among the various
lexias. Thus, the distinction between reader and writer is attenuated,
perhaps even dissolved entirely. The text is no longer a one-way communication
system in which information and ideas proceed only from author to reader,
but a communication system in which all participants can contribute to
and affect the content and direction of the conversation. (103)
However, in spite of the reader's seeming control and empowerment, the
structure of movement in and about a hypertextual system suggests a decentering
analogous to the kind of decentering that can occur in other kinds of
visual and verbal texts. There is no center of the text, no vanishing
point, no primary axis, no clear unitary authorial voice that, like a
vanishing point,implies a clear subject to which the text speaks. Heim
writes: The new publishing resembles more the modern megapolis, which
is often described as a concrete jungle, a maze of activities and hidden
byways, with no apparent center or guiding steeple. This is the architectural
equivalent of the absence of the philosophical and religious absolute.
(105)
Hypertext -- like a conversation -- encourages a value system that emphasizes
the solving of problems and the growth of learning by and for the good
of the community as a whole.(107)
There is a polyphony of voices, and the authority of each of them is
continually qualified by their mutually commenting on one another.
Electronic networks create a horizonless conceptual space that speaks
almost to itself. Texts that are closed, coherent, and focused, whether
visual or verbal, tend to elicit mirroring subjects that recognize --
or misrecognize -- themselves as separate, unified, and centered. Autonomous
texts reflect and are reflected by subjects that conceive of themselves
as autonomous. Conversely, the conceptual dispersal of textuality that
occurs in hypertext may be reflected by a decentered subject that engages
that decentered textuality. The lack of a clearly delineated autonomous
text in hypertextual systems may he reflected by a subject that is less
autonomous.(111)
Word processing, more fluid than writing on paper, embodies a sense of
thought as an "ideational flow" (Heim, 152), as a continual process that
is not necessarily centered around static and transcendental ideas.
Hypertext involves a paradoxical relationship to the subject. In the
most obvious respect, it suggests the potential for empowerment; but that
potential for empowerment coexists with a psychological decentering that
results from engagement with electronic networks. Individuals can access
a horizonless textual space, forge their own paths and links within it,
and contribute to it just as they might contribute to a nonvirtual conversation.
But in that space there are no clear axes or established directions, no
vanishing points to help the subject position his or her self. (114)
Bonnie Mitchell: "Living in the electrons of cyberspace, we have
no gender, we have no race, we are neither old nor young, intelligent
nor naive, we have only an e-mail address to identify us. Our writing
style and smileys reveal our virtual personalities. We are not alone.
Yet we sit in physical isolation. Our machines satisfy our quest for social
acknowledgment. We speak with our fingers and the machine replies....
Nonphysical intimacy. Security and privacy. Suppressed expression. Electrically
altered ego. We have no need for faces. Don't show me yours. We have no
need for bodies. They deteriorate anyway. We have no need for voice. We
speak through thought. We have no need for any of these things. We have
fingers, words, and images. We have an Internet connection. We have our
virtual selves."
Jay David Bolter sees contemporary culture as organized as a network
rather than a hierarchy; traditional institutions no longer have the authority
they once had, and individuals form voluntary, nonhierarchical affiliations
instead. (115)
For a text to he excluded from hypertext is likely to be even more crippling
than its being excluded from the "canon" as presently constituted. The
ease and speed of navigating among texts embedded in hypertextual networks
has as its flip side a tendency to ignore texts that are not included,
as if they did not exist at all.(117)
Brooks Concept of Plot
Vs. Hypertext
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