Hypertext as reification of post-structuralist theory

Code and literature have come together before — for the first time and most famously in hypertext.

Whereas literary programming embeds bits of writing in code, in an attempt to further the communicative potential of that code, hypertext embeds bits of code in writing so as to make that writing more navigable. Simply put, hypertext is writing that contains links to other pieces of writing. There is really nothing more, in principle, to it than that. Hypertext is one of those curious technologies that was widely theorized about in advance of being created and used. The theory of hypertext, as devised and disseminated at this institution (Brown University) and others like it, positioned hypertext as the reification of post-structuralist theory.
Many grand claims have been made for it, and many lines drawn in the sand. The tendency to idealize it into some sort of potential textual utopia is what leads to the (tongue-in-cheek) name of this website. Post-structuralist literary theory has a series of tropes which align around the idea of the demotion of the author as fountain-head of meaning ("Death of the Author"), the radical plurality of texts (multi-vocal, eclectic), and the decentered nature of some avant-garde literature. Hypertext, it was thought, would be the literal embodiment of these ideas. It would usher in a new era of 'wreaders' (from writer/reader) who would take up these shiny hypertextual scalpels and remake texts in their own image.

Instead of passively submitting to a linear (and therefore, the argument ran, hegemonic and authoritarian) stream of text, the audience was supposed to jump in and choose the textual strands that they favored, reading in an order chosen by themselves, entering and exiting the text at any moment...

Jeremy Ashkenas

Postmodern

The word "postmodern" itself was minted by the French academic Jean-Francois Lyotard in the early 1980s in an effort to assess the changes in the culture, values, and education of the Francophone peoples in the wake of the social upheavals of the Vietnam era.

But it was the "ontology" of Husserl and Heidegger, to which Derrida reacted during this early period,and which he sought to de-Teutonize in order to accomodate the new forms of cultural and social-psychological critique that had emerged with figures like figures like Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan and to re-invigorate the deeply embedded tradition of structural linguistics, invented by Ferdinand de Saussure, in France as central to philosophy.

Most of what we know as "deconstruction" had this largely linguistic, neo-Marxist, anti-phenomenological, a-theological origin. As a footnote it is highly ironic that what in the past decade has become known to theologians as "postmodernism" tends (with the exception perhaps of Žižek) tends to be highly idealistic, phenomenological, anti-linguistic, anti-psychological, and a-political.

Posted by Carl Raschke

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Electronic media and theory

Until recently, discussion of electronic media among literary scholars has been framed in terms of poststructuralist theory (as in the writings of George Landow, Jay David Bolter, Stuart Moulthrop).

Hypertext, the medium that has received the most attention, has been considered to exemplify the unmargining and intertextuality claimed by Barthes, Kristeva, or Derrida, and to facilitate the reader's emancipation as an author. This early phase of theorizing now seems to be waning as a new generation of theorists rethink the nature of electronic textuality.

Earlier debates about the problems of literary hypertext seems now to be irrelevant. The founding arguments of authors such as George Landow, J. David Bolter, and Michael Joyce have been sometimes superseded. But how textual medium works really ?

We must approach computer literacy as literacy, and not as something completely different, be that text, theatre, cinema, comics or continental philosophy. And this purpose has to think electronic textuality in termes of Rhetorics of hypertext. While it is true that earlier attempts to situate hypertext in relation to poststructuralist text theorists such as Barthes or Derrida may seem misplaced, even naïve, I will suggest that the questions these accounts raised about the status of hypertext have not been superseded so much as abandoned.

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Affirmation cannot be simply opposed to negation

According to Deleuze, the Nietzschean "affirmation" cannot be opposed to "negation”.

Instead, it should be read as a multiplicity of becoming that exists in the play of its difference. Here, Nietzsche, as the philosopher of multiplicity, influences not only Deleuze, but Derrida and Foucault as well. Yet, along with a philosophy of multiplicity, poststructuralists, as neo-Nietzscheans, inherit the standard accusations that are leveled against Nietzsche:

that they are unable to account for agency, responsibility, rationality, human nature, community, and ethical and political values.

In Critical Resistance, these accusations are met head on. Not only can poststructuralism account for these notions, but, it can, also redeploy them as a radical means of critical resistance,
which, with a Nietzschean edge, is resistance that is self critical— resistance that resists itself.


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Criticism and ideology

In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism. In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on the basis of their adherence to such ideology.

In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy. It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions.

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Recognising contextual nature of link

The issue is not one of predetermining what links mean but of recognising the contingent and contextual nature of link use, as readers and writers.

This is common in poststructural approaches to discourse, which no longer place much store in hierarchies determined by formal categories, and is particularly the case in hypertext where it seems reasonably clear that readers find connection by virtue of the link.

It is important that we recognise that hypertextual narration is composed of syntagmatic series, and that this series is determined on the basis of some measure of narrative 'integrity' - whether episodic wholeness, readerly comprehension, temporal or thematic unity, or some other criteria (Rosenberg 1996). This is important because it suggests that the definition and decision of what constitutes a sequence lies as much outside of each constituent part as it does within the content or the connecting of its parts. Hence, if it lies outside, then any ambition to develop or define a typology or classificatory system must always be surrendered in the face of this outside.

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Metafiction

Metafiction is a type of fiction which self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction.

It is the term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. It usually involves irony and is self-reflective. It can be compared to presentational theatre in a sense; presentational theatre does not let the audience forget they are viewing a play, and metafiction does not let the readers forget they are reading a work of fiction.

Metafiction is primarily associated with Modernist and Postmodernist literature but can be found at least as far back as Cervantes' Don Quixote and even Chaucer's 14th Century Canterbury Tales.

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No single order

There are two main ways of dealing with hypertext.

The first is a scientific approach which points out the technical and practical aspects of this new medium. The second is a poststructuralist approach which defines the term from the point of view of a literary scholar by emphasising its theoretical functions and potential. Both ways are necessary to understand the structure of hypertext even though the theoretical ideas are of prime importance, since they also form the basis of the approach suggested by Jakob Nielsen, a distinguished engineer for strategic technology. He juxtaposes hypertext and traditional text and provides the following explanation:

All traditional text, whether in printed form or in computer files, is sequential, meaning that there is a single linear sequence defining the order in which the text is to be read. (...) Hypertext is nonsequential; there is no single order that determines the sequence in which the text is to be read.

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