Misunderstanding of narrative

Fear of incoherent hypertext arises from a combination of three factors: superstition, sloth, and a fundamental misunderstanding of narrative.

The roles of superstition and sloth are simple. Those who dislike computers (especially those who aren't very familiar with them) fear that their mysterious force will somehow damage the sort of writing they enjoy. Those who don't take the trouble to read much hypertext, similarly, often delude themselves by imagining that their failure is a virtue, that hypertext isn't worth reading because it cannot be worth reading. The sheer improbability of myriad successful artistic forms throughout the eons should make us doubt such ab initio arguments about human expression.

The misunderstanding of narrative, the naive belief that narrative is linear, is both pervasive and wrong-headed. Let us consider, for a moment, that most seemingly-linear of forms, historical narrative in the tradition of Thucydides, Gibbon, McCauley, Henry Adams, Bury, and Shelby Foote. Moreover, let us focus exclusively on the historian's traditional audience of colleagues, advanced students, and serious adult readers; we will ignore any aspirations to address mass markets, children, distant cultures, the MTV generation, or any of the other peripheral strengths at which hypertext writing is believed to excel.

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What is future

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

Peter Drucker

Serial absence

It is possible that the new technologies have actualized, accelerated and ramified the whole scriptual economy and all its relations of force, its programmings, regulations, calculations.

What is at stake with the internet, for example, is what has always been at stake, the complexities of "writing" of "social relations." And as with all systems of writing before it, this one is unable to enforce a regime of meanings; yet it has achieved the capacity to circulate texts faster and farther than ever. The acceleration and expansion of the system does not, however, "unify" it; instead, inversely, it makes possible a greater distanciation, what Sartre called the "serial absence" of each point to all the others, or what in Derrida becomes the radical and volatile indeterminacy of context.

To think the internet as a "post card," for exmp, means to acknowledge that transmission is the only law of production, that culture itself is sent through circuits, and that all this may demand a shift in our textual ontology, toward a conception of the textual system as an illimitable matrix crossing at various speeds thru all cultural, political, and social dimensions. (G. Bennington)

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Statement about undecidability

Paul de man concentrates on crucial passages which have a metalinguistic function or metacritical implications, particularly those where figural language has a dependency on classical philosophical oppositions (essence/accident, synchronic/diachronic, appearance/reality) which are so central to Western discourse.

Many of his essays attempt to undercut figural totalization -- the notion that one can control or dominate a discourse or phenomenon through metaphor. In de Man's discussion of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, for instance, he claims that genetic conceptions of history appearing in the text are undercut by the rhetorical strategies Nietzsche employs: "the deconstruction does not occur between statements, as in a logical refutation or a dialectic, but happens instead between, on the one hand, metalinguistic statements about the rhetorical nature of language and, on the other hand, a rhetorical praxis that puts these statements into question."

For de Man, an "Allegory of Reading" emerges when texts are subjected to such scrutiny and reveal this tension; a reading wherein the text reveals its own assumptions about language, and in so doing dictates a statement about undecidability, the difficulties inherent in totalization, their own readability, or the "limitations of textual authority.

Truth conditions and communication

A theory of truth is not enough to interpret a language.

After all, if truth-conditions are all that matters, then how can anomalous sentences such as ‘“Schnee ist weiss” is true if and only if snow is white and grass is green’ be verified as false? Davidson argues that because the language is compositional, it is also holistic: sentences are based on the meanings of words, but the meaning of a word depends on the totality of sentences in which it appears. This holistic constraint, along with the requirement that the theory of truth is law-like, suffices to minimize indeterminacy just enough for successful communication to occur.

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Radical interpretation

What radical interpretation highlights is what is necessary and sufficient for communication to occur.

These conditions are: that in order to recognize a speaker as a speaker, their beliefs must be mostly coherent and correct; indeterminacy of meaning doesn’t undermine communication, but it must be constrained just enough.

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Day to day living

Undeniably, many hyperfictions are awkward and frustrating to the reader.

Yet this new form, still in its infancy, promises to bring exciting new ways of appreciating narratives and dazzling visuals to the interested and ready-to-be-active reader. These are fictions for a postmodern world, where indeterminacy, multiplicity, and disconnectivity resonate with the reader's experiences of day to day living. These are texts that deal intelligently with life in a modern computerized world as well as with the possibilities and limitations of writing and reading in the digital medium.

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