Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. - book reviews

The emergence of new writing technologies, particularly hypertext, has prompted a great deal of prophesying about such changes in literacy, narrative, and culture that a new form of text might encourage and/or reflect. The two works under review here, Jay David Bolter's Writing Space and George P. Landow's Hypertext, fall firmly into such a prophecy category in that both authors clearly express excitement about what this new form of text can offer. While Bolter focuses upon how the nature of literacy will change with this new form of text, Landow takes as his topic the ways in which hypertext serves as the literal embodiment of, or "testing ground" for, much of literary and critical theory. Despite their different loci, Landow and Bolter investigate similar questions: how will a new form of text change the reader-author-text relationship that defines the interpretive act, and, further, how will this new textual relationship affect the cultural forms texts both embody and help inscribe? The answers these two books provide are not only insightful, but also have the potential to destabilize many of our assumptions about the function of text and narrative in a postmodern age.

Hypertext has been defined as a fairly radical change in writing technologies because of two notable changes in text. First, hypertext is written in "chunks" (i.e., nodes, lexias) of text which appear individually or side by side (as in a Windows format) on the screen. Within these textual nodes, the writer can highlight (by boldface, underlining, outlining, etc.) certain words, phrases, or sentences that indicate a link to another node of text. For example, in the paragraph above, I could highlight the term "hypertext" or "Bolter." If a reader chose to click a mouse on either of the highlighted words, she would see another screen appear that might, for instance, include this paragraph describing the physical properties of hypertext or receive a brief biography on Jay David Bolter. Within each of these nodes, I could create further links and/or present the option for the reader to return to the previous screen (i.e., my first paragraph). This ability to link text in multiple ways - creating many possible "paths" for reading - is the second radical innovation of hypertext. Links can be made through "buttons" (i.e., highlighted words) or through direct questions to the reader where his answer will enact a certain textual link.

In the past, hypertext has been employed primarily in informational technology. Its ability to make connections across texts makes it ideal for the cross-referencing users want most library catalogues, concordances, encyclopedias, and so on to execute. In recent years, the use of hypertext has expanded into a multitude of contexts: fiction, poetry, computer-aided instruction (CAI), computer games, even some newspapers. It is the growing use and availability of hypertextual forms in almost every literate context that prompts the predictions about the future of textuality made by Bolter and Landow.

Writing Space and Hypertext seem almost designed to be read in tandem. Although both authors see hypertext as almost a direct response to the relationships among reader, author, and text created by the printed book, Bolter provides a much more detailed discussion of this point. He situates his consideration of hypertext within an historical study of literate forms, providing a much needed context for hypertext's relationship to print. The first five chapters of Writing Space provide a well-documented, insightful history of how the technology of writing - whether it be pictorial writing on a cave wall or phonetic writing in print - has the inevitable effect of organizing the reader's and author's relationships to text and the acts they can perform on and with it. Writing, Bolter argues convincingly, has always been a technology, a "method for arranging verbal thoughts in a visual space" (Bolter 35). That visual space, in turn, creates the conceptual space in which readers and authors work.

The writing space of the printed book, Bolter contends, has come to control almost exclusively the conceptual space through which we think and act in a literate culture. The conceptual space offered by print depicts writing as "stable, monumental, and controlled exclusively by the author" (11), encourages a linear-hierarchical form of writing through its ability to define and order relationships between its constituent parts (113), and fosters the idea that writing is limited to finite units of expression closed off from other texts (85). A book, in effect, organizes textual space such that it becomes a center, creating an inside and outside that attempts to silence its relationships with other texts and creates a contained reading path within its clear beginnings and endings.

It is at this point that Landow's text seems to intersect so naturally with Bolter's. For Landow, the conceptual space created by print is precisely what most critical theorists are trying to deconstruct when they encourage us to "abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity" (2). Hypertext, he claims, embodies a radically new form of text in which such ideas are always already deconstructed. Through its ability to infinitely link units of text, hypertext highlights intra- and intertextuality, is always multivocal, and constantly decenters itself, destroying the line between center and margin. Authorial control or intention is similarly destabilized since the "voice" of a text is also decentered; the author is more accurately a "decentered network of codes" where the only voice of the text is that of Richard Rorty's conversation or Mikhail Bakhtin's heteroglossia (Landow 73, 11). By creating a form of text that seemingly responds directly to the new forms of reading critical theorists encourage, hypertext becomes the literal embodiment of theory for Landow and "the natural place for the irreverent reading they suggest" for Bolter (153).

Although Bolter and Landow disagree on the relative degree of power the reader is given over the text (Bolter acknowledges that the author still determines the extent of this power), they agree that the most radical change initiated by hypertext is the reader's relationship to text. Since a reader must choose the links to be read, the reading path becomes determined primarily by the reader rather than by the author; in sum, the form of text "invites the reader to participate in its own construction" (Bolter 156). The reader-author functions are further blurred because hypertext potentially allows the reader, depending on whether the author writes in this function, to write her own links between nodes and append her own commentary or text to the one she is reading. These actions not only force readers to be more active; they also create the reader as the primary locus of coherence for the text. As Landow puts it, "anyone who uses hypertext makes his or her own interests the de facto organizing principle (or center) for the investigation at the moment.... [C]entrality, like beauty and relevance, resides in the mind of the beholder" (12, 70). As a result, Bolter points out, the nodes or units of text function not as fragments of a prior whole but instead as "a space of shifting possibilities" (144). The only meaning available is the one the reader creates as he chooses to follow certain links rather than others.

Both authors convincingly prove that hypertext calls for a radically different reading process wherein the reader must play a more active role than heretofore required by most forms of text, especially print. Yet, the way in which they perceive the effects of such a reading process on meaning making and culture is somewhat problematic. For example, Bolter argues that changes in textuality will also alter the dynamics of textual power. Because hypertext embodies its own contradictions, he asserts that it never makes univocal statements that invite deconstruction (164). The text itself becomes more obviously a semiotic system in which signs only refer to other signs. There is no longer an impulse toward a transcendental signified in electronic writing: "they [the writer and reader] know that the topical elements they create are arbitrary sequences of bits made meaningful only by their interconnecting links.... [I]n the computer meaning is always deferral" (204). Yet Bolter also admits that the reader ultimately controls this play of signs since "much of the process of interpretation still plays out in the inaccessible regions of the mind" (200).

Giving readers so much control over this process of deferral necessarily leads to questions about how they will react to such textual possibilities. For semiotics and the interpretative process to change in such a way that deconstruction becomes moot, we have to assume that readers and writers are no longer predisposed to a logocentric search for closure and hierarchy. Further, without a concomitant change in readers, their ability to function in the way Landow espouses - as the "center" for meaning in a text - could lead to interpretative acts just as linear and hierarchical as those of print. Even though Landow presumes a similar nonlogocentric reader, he actually points to such a situation as a distinct possibility briefly in his text. In his discussion of the relationship between narrative and morality (i.e., Hayden White), Landow implies that readers will still read for closure:

As long as one grants that plot is a phenomenon created by the reader-author with materials the lexias offers, rather than a phenomenon belonging solely to the text, then one can accept that reading [Michael Joyce's] Afternoon and other hypertext fictions produces an experience very similar to that provided by reading the unified plot described by narratologists from Aristotle to White and Ricoeur. (116)

In fact, he goes on to point out, that readers have "surprisingly little trouble reading a story or reading for story" (118; my emphasis). Such a reader, it seems, would undermine the more radical semiotics and interpretation that Bolter proposes as well as the decentered and multiple text Landow envisions unless we assume that readers are already predisposed to read differently.

Bolter suggests precisely that in his final chapter, "Writing Culture." He implies that the loss of such a transcendental signified in hypertext mirrors the move to a nonhierarchical society constitutive of modern culture. He describes contemporary society as one in which all hierarchies, except monetary ones, have broken down, creating a situation wherein the form our lives is given is increasingly individually determined. Such a culture "both reflects and is reflected by our new technology of writing," in which the network increasingly replaces the hierarchy and where, by implication, readers search for individual rather than authoritative meanings (233). Bolter further points to an already existent change in cultural conditions by using authors such as Borges and James Joyce to illustrate how well modern fiction would take to a hypertextual form (132-37).

Even if cultural conditions are not predisposed to such reading, however, Bolter suggests that the textual form itself can change readers. Throughout most of Writing Space, Bolter foregrounds text as a causal factor in such a cultural shift rather than a reflection of it. This presumption of causality is most apparent in chapter 12, "Writing the Mind," if for no other reason than that it appears before the chapter on culture. Working from Walter Ong and Jack Goody and Ian Watt's presumptions that writing reveals the writer to herself in a certain form, Bolter suggests that the new form of writing has the potential to change thought and consciousness. He foreshadows this idea in the chapter on "Artificial Intelligence" when he comments on the dynamic relationship that has historically existed between texts and humans: "We come to see ourselves in the texts we have created and to ascribe to our minds the qualities of those texts" (185). If we accept that print technology helped create a construction of self as a unified, thinking being, Bolter argues, we must also accept that our concept of self and thought will change with a change in the writing space. Hypertext, then, not only reflects cultural change; it also serves "both to clarify and to accelerate" it (233).

Landow similarly suggests that culture will change as a result of the new textuality. He presumes, like Derrida in Disseminations, that "'one cannot tamper' with the form of the book 'without disturbing everything else' in Western thought" (29). He further foregrounds text as a causal factor in cultural change when he criticizes Marxists, particularly Jameson, for excluding technology as a source of cultural change, even though technology serves as form-giving labor (164-68). Landow, however, is a little more cautious than Bolter about whether changes in textuality will necessarily lead to cultural changes. Instead, he depicts hypertext as the ideal form and model for a potentially different politics and a more democratic and antihierarchical culture, suggesting that the collaborative, cooperative practice natural to electronic networks could embody and support a similar political system. As he puts it, "hypertext is the technological embodiment of such a reaction [to totalitarian centrism] and such a politics" as that found in Michael Ryan's "critical Marxism" and Rorty's edifying philosophy (182). Although Landow does not make text the only factor in such a cultural shift, his almost complete reliance on contemporary theory implies that society (or at least philosophy) has already begun to move in such directions. In fact, he begins his text by declaring that the way in which hypertext programs and critical theory converge is indicative of a "paradigm shift" (2). On the other hand, he also acknowledges that if ideological notions of intellectual property do not change, much of the collaborative and democratic potential of hypertext will not be realized (198-99).

In sum, both Landow and Bolter posit a rather ambiguous relationship between culture and text. Text is alternately seen as (1) a causal factor in changing consciousness and culture and (2) an embodiment of a change that has already occurred. Yet, the role textuality can play in changing culture is at the crux of whether the prophecy of a radically new textuality and criticism will be realized. Unless we assume that culture has already changed to reflect the fragmentation and individuation embodied in hypertext, the cultural and ideological position of readers and authors will ultimately determine the form and meaning such texts will be given.

In many ways these points are not so much criticisms as further evidence of how Writing Space and Hypertext make us rethink our assumptions. Bolter and Landow's discussions of how hypertext changes the reader-author-text dynamic not only defamiliarize much of what seems natural in print technology, but also point to how inextricable textual relationships are from conceptual and cultural ones. By insightfully chronicling the possibilities this form of text allows, they raise important questions about the culture-text relationship that will be difficult to answer. Will this new form of text inculcate a new consciousness that is amenable to a new politics, or will current ideological structures reincorporate its radicalness in such a way that the ideologies reflected by print are not challenged? If Landow and Bolter are right that hypertext will destroy the need for our current forms of textual criticism by realizing these theories' attempts at subversion in textual form, will this create the prophesied utopia wherein textual power is disseminated, or will hypertext constitute a new form of textual power that will require its own subversive critical approaches? While Bolter's historical analysis offers many insights into how these questions have resolved themselves in the past, the form this new writing technology will take remains to be seen. For now, how persuasive readers will find Bolter and Landow's arguments depends a great deal on how they imagine the contemporary cultural scene, the power of ideology to incorporate what might threaten it, and the causal relationship between text, humans, and culture. No matter which perspective a reader begins with, however, the books will undoubtedly raise questions about text, print, culture, and interpretation impossible to conceive without the insights Bolter and Landow offer.

Donna LeCourt Colorado State University

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