Hypertext and its teeth

Like Barthes, Derrida conceives of text as constituted by discrete reading units.

Derrida's conception of text relates to his "methodology of decomposition" that might transgress the limits of philosophy. "The organ of this new philosopheme," as Gregory Ulmer points out, "is the mouth, the mouth that bites, chews, tastes. . . . The first step of decomposition is the bite".

Derrida, who describes text in terms of something close to Barthes's lexias, explains in Glas that "the object of the present work, its style too, is the 'morceau,' " which Ulmer translates as "bit, piece, morsel, fragment; musical composition; snack, mouthful." This morceau , adds Derrida, "is always detached, as its name indicates and so you do not forget it, with the teeth," and these teeth, Ulmer explains, refer to "quotation marks, brackets, parentheses: when language is cited (put between quotation marks), the effect is that of releasing the grasp or hold of a controlling context".

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Where is the lexia in the hypertext ?

The author's current work in progress carries the concept of simultaneity still further in the idea of a nested simultaneity.

In some cases this work carries the simultaneity inside the sentence. Hypertext is carried into the fine structure of language. Where is "the lexia" now? Is there really a concept of lexia when we are inside the sentence?

A hypertext may be thought of as a kind of virtual diagram, with software for navigating the diagram. If the diagram is small enough it may be presented in a single graphical space, without the aid of software. The author's Diagram Poems are examples of such works. These present an explicitly relational syntax notation, still used in Intergrams and Diffractions through. The structural atoms in the Diagram Poems are small clusters of words; the relational (i.e. hypertext-on-paper) structure is the sentence structure. What shall we say is "the lexia" here? In the Diagram Poems, the diagram notation carries syntax itself. Executed on a larger scale, this concept leads to the use of hypertext to carry the very infrastructure of language. Such works would have hypertext infrawhere: a structural underneath so fine and so pervasive, a lexia so completely fragmented, that the concept of lexia ceases to have any meaning: a completely dematerialized lexia, as in [Mou92b] after all.

In [Mou92b] Stuart Moulthrop asks: "Why does the hypertext research community publish its work in print?" At the risk of seeming glib, the answer is obvious: because hypertext is not our native tongue. Many will surely balk at the idea that this needn't be so, that there can exist a natural language in which hypertext carries the very structure of syntax itself: hypertext not as a medium of organizing thoughts, but as a medium of thought. Perhaps in the end this will turn out to be unachievable, but as a focus for poetic experimentation it provides this author with a sustaining vision.

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With the movement to the Web, the nature of electronic literature changed as well.

Whereas early works tended to be blocks of text (traditionally called lexia) with limited graphics, animation, colors and sound, later works make much fuller use of the multi-modal capabilities of the Web; while the hypertext link is considered the distinguishing feature of the earlier works, later works use a wide variety of navigation schemes and interface metaphors that tend to de-emphasize the link as such. In my keynote speech at the 2002 Electronic Literature Symposium at UCLA, these distinctions led me to call the early works "first-generation" and the later ones "second-generation," with the break coming around 1995. To avoid the implication that first-generation works are somehow superseded by later aesthetics, it may be more appropriate to call the early works "classical," analogous to the periodization of early films. Shelley Jackson's important and impressive Patchwork Girl can stand as an appropriate culminating work for the classical period. The later period might be called contemporary or postmodern (at least until it too appears to reach some kind of culmination and a new phase appears).

By N. Katherine Hayles

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Labels: Aarseth, ergodic, game, Genette, intertextuality

Science of thought

Logic might have been defined as the science of the pure Idea.

Pure, that is, because the Idea is in the abstract medium of Thought. But logic might have been also defined as the science of thought, and of its laws and characteristic forms. But thought, as thought, constitutes only the general medium, or qualifying circumstance, which renders Ideas and Lexias distinctively logical. If we identify the Idea with thought, thought must not be taken in the sense of a method or form, but in the sense of the self-developing totality of its laws and peculiar terms. Hypertext and lexias.These laws are the work of thought itself, and not a fact which it finds and must submit to.

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See the journal French Metablog with today different posts