Temporal dynamics in Hypertext

As Eskelinen points out, temporal dynamics may be either dependent on the reader's use of time, or independent of it. Using the categories defined in narratology as our starting point, Eskelinen outlines a list of simple functions that allow a very complex temporal manipulation of narrative digital texts. He also describes a set of authoring tools, Discourse Timer, which is specifically designed to employ these functions :

FROM SPATIALITY TO TEMPORALITY

"So far digital texts have been usually discussed in terms of hypertext, which is usually described as a spatial form of writing. Especially the literary-aesthetic discussion of hypertextuality has focussed on spatial practices.

Furthermore, much effort has been invested in studying the ways text links are employed in literary hypertexts. We take another approach, and emphasise the temporal organization and structuring of texts. So, text links are temporarily pushed to the margin, as we concentrate here on the ways the links and other aspects of digital texts may be pre-programmed.

That is, in addition to following Ted Nelson's lead and conceiving links as choices offered for the reader, we treat links as parts of the authored structure ".

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Time and space as objectivation of the will

According to Schopenhauer, the will transcends time and space, which together constitute the principle of sufficient reason of being. Time and space are conditions for manifestations of the will, but the will itself is unconditioned by time or space. The plurality of things in time and space is an objectification of the will.

Schopenhauer explains that the will cannot properly be defined as a necessary cause of its manifestations in the phenomenal world, because it is not governed by the principle of sufficient reason. The relationship between freedom and necessity is also the relationship between the will and its manifestations in time and space.

Schopenhauer also explains that the will cannot properly be defined as an aim or desire to do something, because the will does not have an aim or purpose in its willing. The principle of sufficient reason of acting, which declares that actions must logically follow from some motive, governs only manifestations of the will and not the will itself.

Schopenhauer argues that the will manifests itself in the world of individual things and in the world of individual ideas or concepts. Each individual act of will may require a motive, but the principle of sufficient reason of acting applies only to these acts of will, and not to the will itself. The will is independent of time, space, plurality, causality, reason, or motive.
Schopenhauer also argues that the will cannot properly be described as conscious, because to be conscious is to be conscious of something, and thus consciousness implies a relation between a subject and an object. The will is neither a perceiving subject nor a perceived object.

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Downplaying space in favour of time

Bergson is presented by Foucault as being chiefly responsible for a pervasive tendency of contemporary philosophers to downplay space in favour of time.
In 1978, during an interview with Watanabe, he refers to 'a kind of latent Bergsonism which dominated French philosophy' (Foucault 1994-1:576), cautiously qualifying his initial statement with a rather ambiguous remark : 'I say Bergsonism, I'm not saying this was the actual Bergson, far from it. There was a certain privilege of all temporal analyses over space, which was held as something dead and inert.'

In fact, it turns out that what Foucault wishes to oppose is rather something like an existentialist or vulgarly marxist over-valorization of historicity and historical consciousness at the expense of the 'reactionary' categories of spatiality. The reference to 'a Bergsonian valorization of time' does not only function as a philosophical cliché. It may in fact best be explained from an auto-biographical perspective. It is with the academic primacy of Bergsonian time (or Bergsonian primacy of time) that Foucault himself had to struggle in the fifties and sixties, as he tried to foster a new form of investigation invested in the constructions of space - sites, boundaries, thresholds, where power inscribes its marks.

Ironically, however, similarly sweeping accounts of the influence of Bergson on twentieth century French thought lead other commentators to radically divergent claims : Martin Jay, for example, traces back the 'denigration of vision' in French philosophy to the Bergsonian critique of spatialization as a specific mechanism of intellectual and social control, a critique which is supposed to bear its effects everywhere, from Luckàcs (whose concept of reification owes much to 'spatialization') and the Marxist tradition, up to Foucault himself (Jay 1993:191-208, 430).

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Bergson's concept of time

In Creative Evolution Bergson argued that the creative urge, not the Darwinian concept of natural selection, is at the heart of evolution. Man's intellect has developed in the course of evolution as an instrument of survival. It comes to think inevitably in geometrical or 'spatializing' terms that are inadequate to lay hold of the ultimate living process. But intuition goes to the heart of reality, and enables us to find philosophic truth.


Bergson's thinking and concept of time has influenced greatly Arnold Hauser, Claude Simon, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Santayana, and such authors as Péguy, Valéry, and John Dos Passos. Whitehead expanded Bergson's notions of duration and evolution from their applications to organic life into the phycial realm. It is said that for Marcel Proust, whose cousin Bergson married in 1891, the philosopher gave the idea for the great novel of reminiscence, À la recherche de temps perdu (1913-27). Sartre also paid tribute to Bergson, and Martin Heidegger, whose ontology is echoed in existentialist writing, used some of Bergson's concepts, such as "no-being". However, Bergson's influence on existentialism is not straight forward and in his own time the philosopher was considered an empiricist.

On the other hand, Bergson's argumentation frustrated such philosophers as the empiricist Bertrand Russell, who criticized his thoughts in 1914 and later returned to them in History of Western Philosophy. Philosophers have pointed out that Bergson did not satisfactorily show how intuition could work apart from intellect. Albert Einstein found serious mistakes from Bergson's DURÉE ET SIMULTANÉITÉ À PROPOS DE LA THÉORIE D'EINSTEIN (1921), dealing with Einstein's theory of relativity. Bergson had opposed in 1911 Einstein's ideas, but then his view had changed and he introduced the concept of non-linear time. Bergson is generally regarded as having lost his public debate with Einstein, but some of the leading physicists have devoted articles to his work.

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Delivered over mobiles

The next move is to go from imaging three dimensions interactively on the screen to immersion in actual three-dimensional spaces.

As computers have moved out of the desktop and into the environment, other varieties of electronic literature have emerged. Whereas in the 1990's email novels were popular, the last decade has seen the rise of forms dependent on mobile technologies, from short fiction delivered serially over cell phones to location-specific narratives keyed to GPS technologies, often called locative narratives. In Janet Cardiff's The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1996), for example, the user heard a CD played on a Walkman keyed to locations in London's inner city, tracing a route that takes about forty-five minutes to complete; Her Long Black Hair was specific to New York City's Central Park and included photographs as well as audio narratives. Blast Theory's Uncle Roy All Around You combined a game-like search for Uncle Roy, delivered over PDAs, with participants searching for a postcard hidden at a specific location. Meanwhile, online observers could track participants and try to help or confuse them, thus mixing virtual reality with actual movements through urban spaces.

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Logical structure

As David Kolb puts it, the key to using hypertext to show logical structure is to be willing to mix presentation of structure within a single writing space, and hypertext links to other writing spaces.

Let single writing spaces present passages of argument, diagrammed or analyzed however is convenient. Let hypertext links take the reader to the arguments that support the parts of the argument presented on the page. Don't try to show all the structure either on the page or in the hypertext links. The single writing space would show fine structure where individual propositions relate to one another over a relatively small span that does not tax the reader's short-term memory. The hypertext links would show how larger blocks of argument relate to one another. Such a mixed presentation would take advantage of the power of prose paragraphs to present fine structure, and also of hypertext's ability to lay out typed relations between blocks of prose.

By not using hypertext to model every move, we would assist perception rather than burdening it. (from Socrates In the Labyrinth).

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Woven threads

If we look at the original meaning of network, we find that it refers to a fabric of twisted or woven threads that have spaces in them, as would a net.

Those threads and open spaces are an apt metaphor for hypertext where all spaces are connected, linked, and no space is any more important than another.

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