ABSTRACT [top]

This paper aims to situate the practice of creating hypertext and hypertext authoring systems within a larger socio-political framework. Although hypertext design and use have always been political and about human bodies, hypertext theorists have generally failed to explore the political dimensions of this lineage. This paper concludes with a discussion of recent work which bears upon non-technological issues such as collaborative writing, genre status of hypertext (fiction or non-fiction), and reproduction of proprietary materials.

KEYWORDS:
hypertext, rhetoric, cyborgs, technology and society, literary theory, postmodernism, authorship, copyright

I. Introduction[top]

At first glance, it can be difficult to understand what hypertext, a technology, has to do with social and political issues of gender and identity. After all, given adequate resources and training, anyone can create and use a hypertext authoring system. And while problems of differential access to resources and training are pressing, they are often viewed as better belonging to the social realms of education and resource allocation than to those of hardware and software; they do not impinge on the design of hypertext systems except peripherally -- or so the argument goes.

We have long known that technology alone cannot solve the myriad social problems that real bodies confront, and that technology in fact can sometimes make those problems worse. [For classic critiques of technology's impact on society, see 25, 26, 29] When particular technologies impinge on the boundaries between people and machines, potential negative outcomes take on a special urgency. With hypertext, as with any technology that transforms the relation of persons to machines, individual bodies can be possible sites either for domination or for transformation and resistance. Who has access to which hypertext systems, what can be said and distributed on those systems, how information will be distributed, at what cost and to whom, and how these systems and their users reciprocally constitute each other -- all these questions must be addressed in order for any theory of hypertext to move from an esoteric concern peripheral even to literature departments, to become a motivation, articulation, and catalyst for real change on the levels of systems and interface design, pedagogy, and participation in communities both real and virtual. People concerned with language and representation, people concerned with the construction of personal identity, and people concerned with the design of hypertext systems, all have stakes in molding the outcome of this particular interpenetration of bodies and machines.

Much recent literary commentary about hypertext avoids these issues. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold: to return social and political questions about hypertext technology to the technical arena, and to question the political aims and efficacy of some recent literary-theoretical approaches to hypertext. More specifically, if hypertext represents the convergence of technology and literary theory [23], hypertext theorists must take the political implications of both the technology and the theory into account.

II. Why Is Literary Theory Important for Hypertext?[top]

Although this is not the place for an extended digression on postmodernism and post-structuralist literary criticism, the rapid assimilation of a variety of facets of this cultural and intellectual movement into the rhetoric of hypertext and hypertext theory warrants at least some brief attention. Because hypertext invites readers to immerse themselves in a mass of shifting textual and graphical objects whose relations to each other may be far from obvious, hypertext actualizes the abstract emphasis on links, networks, webs, paths, and interweavings characteristic of much poststructuralist (or, more generally, postmodern) literary theory.[23 -- But for examples, see 1, 2, 9] Thus hypertext arguably provides a material instantiation of what had been previously only ephemeral analysis, an artifact rather than an academic theory divorced from the material and social conditions of textual production.

Though postmodernism in general has received its share of criticism, many objections have been intellectual or aesthetic rather than explicitly addressing the social and institutional structures that postmodernism itself supports [3] More interesting criticism quarrels with postmodernism's perceived lack of a coherently articulated politics, its abandonment of explicit political engagement in favor of a cynical " blankness," and " a knowingness that dissolves feeling and commitment into irony" [13]. With special reference to hypertext, John Palattella has argued that a wholesale appropriation of postmodern literary theory into hypertext theory implicitly supports a version of postmodernism which substitutes the idea of a " protean, priestly genius" for categories of authorship and artistic autonomy, rather than critiquing those categories themselves [33]. Strikingly, this appropriation threatens to undo at least one positive contribution of these theorists: because Michel Foucault's critique of authorship comes to seem not only commonplace, but positively archaic, it is easy to forget that Foucault's preoccupation was not with texts per se (rather than authors) but with the structures that produce authority (hence power) through the production of texts and authors in a system of power relations known as expertise.[12] Since there is no reason to believe that structures of authority regarding hypertextual productions will be any different from those of print, it might be worthwhile to think more about power and less about texts. By de-emphasizing the social, historical, and economic aspects of textual production, any uncritical adoption of a postmodern framework elides the very social relations among individual actors that brought the texts into existence in the first place.

If this is the sort of theory that hypertext enacts, or better, must enact, presumably in virtue of its essential hypertextuality, then one wonders whose interests are served in this convergence. Fredric Jameson has argued for the necessary relation between expressions of psychic and textual fragmentation and a concomitant socio-economic fracturing characteristic of late capitalism: "[I]t is not the unity of the world that demands to be posited on the basis of the unity of the transcendental subject; rather, the unity or incoherence and fragmentation of the subject � that is, the inaccessability of a workable subject position or the absence of one � is itself a correlative of the unity or lack of unity of the outside world" [19, p. 137].

On a related note, some feminist anthropologists have found it more than a bit strange that postmodern theorists began to question the basis of certain truths at precisely the moment when they lost the absolute privilege to define them. [17, 27, 31] Thus the postmodern turn may be an expression not of some absolutely true state of things, but of the decentering and fragmentation currently experienced by dominant groups and classes, experiences that are at least partly the result of women's struggle for equality in the home and the workplace in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The preceding comments are certainly too brief and impressionistic. I have brought them into the argument simply in order to sound a cautionary note: in formulating a politics of hypertext, it is urgent to consider how (or even whether) the literary-critical productions of a postmodern avant garde can inform a theory of hypertext and gender that adequately addresses the material reality of women's (and other) bodies while still acknowledging the power of textual, linguistic, and visual representations in people's lives.

III. Hypertext Has Always Been Political and About Bodies[top]

Even early hypertext system developers knew there was more to hypertext than questions of efficient system design. One aim of these designers was to effect a symbiosis of person and machine or, more specifically of people's minds and machines. For example, in 1945, Vannevar Bush predicted that his proposed proto-hypertext Memex machine would " elevate the " human spirit" so that the use of his technology would allow the user not only to operate more efficiently, but to " grow in the wisdom of race experience."[4] Douglas Engelbart's 1963 paper, " A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect," proposed a systems approach to human intelligence that would allow people to develop their so-called " native" abilities with the aid of " augmentation devices and techniques," via a symbiosis of person and machine.[11] Finally, while Theodor Holm Nelson's 1981 Literary Machines did not depart significantly from Engelbart in its celebration of hypertext's potential as a system for more accurately utilizing and extending human cognition, Nelson was also sensitive to the system's possible political ramifications. Foreseeing struggle and political conflict, especially over design and access issues on the hypertext frontier, Nelson concluded that " rolled into such designs and prospects is the whole future of humanity, and the future of the future -- meaning the kinds of future that become forbidden, or impossible."[30]

These early visionaries expected changing modes of information storage to change the way people think. Along similar lines, Jay Bolter has claimed that hypertext, as a particular case of computer-aided writing generally, is one metaphor for human cognition [5, pp. 104-06, 207-22]. Whether human cognition is essentially computational is not the point here. Rather, I want to emphasize how this metaphorical relationship conflates questions of hypertext design with questions of the body and bodily integrity, with problematic consequences. Bolter's metaphorical connection between human cognition and hypertext implies that if hypertext is considered a species of AI (that is, as a computational model of human cognition) then it has become a model for nature -- that is, a model for material processes that occur in the body without technological intervention. This modeling of nature has a disturbing genealogy. As Evelyn Fox Keller has argued in her analysis of the history of science, the desire to rewrite the biological body as a text reflects an exclusionary research program which feminizes nature in order to preserve science as a set of legitimate disciplines, the activities of which are thereby closed to individual women.[22] Bolter's view of hypertext reinforces a similarly problematic distinction between nature and culture as separate from the structures and individuals who define both. If one desire of science is to rewrite physical, bodily processes as text, then hypertext -- as a product of science -- provides a new conception of science, hence of nature, hence of bodies, that is itself in need of examination.[I am indebted to Stuart Moulthrop for this observation.]

Although, as Paul Edwards points out, the twentieth-century origins of biological reductionism and functionalist behaviorism can certainly be traced at least to post-war American cybernetics [10], such a history lesson is not my objective here. Rather, I'd like to emphasize the general point that questions of effective hypertext design also implicitly involve questions of what it means to be human and embodied, questions that are both political and technical, and have been so from the beginning of hypertext development.

IV. Cyborgs Among Us[top]

Certainly the traditional boundaries between humans and machines have undergone a near-dissolution in recent years. Most of us already know people with pacemakers, reconstructed joints, or artificial or transplanted organs. By means of their bodily incorporation of machine (and especially computer) technology, these people dissolve the distinction between organisms and machines. Their status as " cyborgs" -- part human, part machine -- exposes the leakiness of the distinction between technology and nature. By questioning the traditional method of defining what is human (which usually entails comparisons with creature that fall into an equally badly-defined category of what is not), they question our received notions of what it means to be human. Through them, we begin to recognize the limited utility of the distinction between nature and culture. As Donna Haraway puts it, " Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert" [15, p. 152].

Thinking about cyborgs provides a way to talk about bodies without losing sight of the material (or technological) conditions that ground their lived experience. As we learn that bodies are susceptible to technological augmentation and enhancement, we find that the so-called natural body isn't quite so natural, unconstructed, or innocent after all. But talking about cyborgs means talking as much about technology as about bodies, and talking even more about how received conceptions of both bodies and technology uphold the very structures and processes that gave rise to such distinctions in the first place. As technological reconstructions of the body become commonplace, it is necessary to confront technology's political dimension, as a power to shape individuals -- to shape the body politic.

Just as cyborgs integrate a variety of technological prostheses in order to constitute their own subjectivities, hypertext writing allows both reader and writer to weave their own meanings from a set of disparate textual elements. Hypertext, as a literal embodiment not only of postmodern fragmentation but also its possible resolution, repeats the cyborg paradigm on a textual, narrative level. Of course, a hypertext resists closure; as others have argued, a hypertexts resists endings, final validations or refutations of the reader's point of view. [16, 20] But perhaps we should not take our satisfactions for granted: perhaps the need for, and satisfaction of, closure is merely a special case of the desire to objectify and classify in the first place, a denial of subjectivity to others with equal, if occluded, claims to it. In that case, hypertext shares not only the cyborg insistence on patchwork subjectivity, a narrative " art of making do," but also the cyborg resistance to final determination or characterization, a resistance with consequences that are not only intellectual and theoretical, but also political -- as a technology with consequences for material bodies as they ground actual lives.

Hypertext thus exemplifies the permeability of the boundary between organisms and machines, as it is embodied in the cyborg paradigm. But without an exploration of its implications, this observation of the uncanny resemblances between hypertext and cyborgs is merely academic; that is, in order for a hypertextually-motivated collapse of categories such as nature and culture to have real consequences, a politics of hypertext must be articulated. Early hypertext pioneers had some inkling of the political ramifications of such a close coupling of bodies and machines. Yet, despite hypertext theory's embrace of avant garde literary productions and its sympathies with postmodern literary criticism, it has yet to come to grips with the political questions hypertext poses for the relation of people to machines.

V. Female Writing?[top]

Some hypertext writers have already begun to explore hypertext's politically enabling potential. Hi-Pitched Voices, a collaborative hypertext writing project for women, is one place where hypertext writing conjoins with an explicitly political, feminist agenda. Carolyn Guyer, author of the hypertext novel Quibbling [14], and one of the founders of Hi-Pitched Voices, writes that the collaboration's " interest in disjuncture and convoluted detail is for us an aesthetic composing rich fields of complexity" [quoted in 20, ,p. 89]. The project certainly has a politics; but what about its aesthetics? Certainly the art of hypertext expression relates to an ideology, at least in Guyer's view: "We know that being denied personal authority inclines us to prefer [�] decentered contexts, and we have learned, especially from our mothers, that the woven practice of women's intuitive attention and reasoned care is a fuller, more balanced process than simple rational linearity." [Ibid.]

Though promising, this perspective requires unpacking. In this view, hypertext is an alternative to " simple rational linearity,' which itself opposes ostensibly female (or perhaps, feminine) characteristics of intuition, attentiveness, and care, all of which are transmitted from one woman to another via the universal experience of having a (certain kind of) mother. The opportunities for non-linear expression which hypertext affords coalesce, in this view, to form a writing that is " female" in a very particular way: hypertext writing embraces an ethic of care that is essentially intuitive, complicated, detailed, but also " fuller" and " balanced." It is important to note that not all hypertexts written by women exemplify this aesthetic. In fact, some notable hypertexts by women, such as Kathryn Cramer's In Small & Large Pieces[6] and Jane Yellowlees Douglas's I Have Said Nothing [8], feature violence, rupture, and breakage as organizing imagery.

Any claim that hypertext is a privileged preserve of female or even feminist writing is suspicious for other reasons as well. Who is to say how and why hypertext might in some essential way fulfill a dream of an equal or even superior voice and representation for a group whose voices, interests, and hopes are themselves diverse and difficult to define? Those who make this claim commit themselves to a patronizing ideology of dominance masquerading as support and concern; for it is the privilege of the powerful to appropriate domains of discourse on behalf of others. Moreover, discovering alternatives to " rational linearity" is not the same as resisting and transforming the structures whose power and authority give rise to the need for alternatives in the first place. The Brown University Women Writers Project, for example, uses hypertext to increase the visibility of previously unknown or little-recognized writing by women, in order to provide a fuller representation of women writers before the Victorian period. [34] Certainly hypertext should function as a protective enclave for women's writing, but its protective capacity should neither ghettoize the writing nor politically paralyze the writers; we must explicitly recognize that any claims to the subversive potential of hypertext must intend to subvert not particular groups or sexes, but any, groups or individuals exercising power and authority over others.

Appropriating a domain of discourse for oneself, however, is another matter entirely. As I've argued elsewhere, the cyberpunk science fiction that blossomed in the 1980s expressed the cynicism, decentering, and fragmentation of a social and cultural landscape at the same time that it provided -- via the image of the cyborg -- an alternative to it [35]. Although there is in cyberpunk an element of what Paul Virilio terms " technological donjuanism," the disappearance of the material body along a technical vector [36, p. 92] (such as virtual reality) that allows the dissolution of physiological identities in favor of disembodied consciousness, the cyborg's resistance to categorization along a variety of binary axes (human or not human, male or female, alive or dead, sane or insane, self or other) suggests that it is possible to think and write about sex and gender without (re)producing bodies as objects. Rather, the cyborg paradigm results in the production of no discernible objects at all, or at least none we could recognize according to currently dominant (if contested) categories and modes of thought.

VI. A Wishlist for a Political Praxis of Hypertext[top]

The first, and by far the most important, criterion that must be met in order to create a better theory of hypertext is that the theory must be founded on a reality of participation rather than on disembodied theorizing. In reading and writing hypertext, this participation should lead to an opportunity for all participants to express themselves without need for pretense. That is, it should help everyone who uses it to speak for themselves, and thereby constitute their own subject position. In what follows, I will turn to some examples of recent hypertext work that, in one way or another, contributes to this aim. Although my general point is not new, previous work has not fully addressed concrete examples of current and possible political uses of hypertext, especially in the publishing arena and on the World Wide Web [20, 30]

Second, the theory should attack prevalent myths of genre by dismantling distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, fact and un-reality, truth and illusion as received categories themselves susceptible to criticism and redefinition. Although this criterion flies in the face of traditional norms and expectations for scholarship, it actually extends work begun decades ago, when scholars in one field after another began to question distinctions between fact and value [32]. This questioning has changed not only the subjects and categories of inquiry, but also the way people approach and interpret all kinds of documents, fiction and non-fiction alike; textual and discourse analysis, contextual sensitivity, and a deep commitment to historicism now inform even disciplines such as history and the history of science, both traditional strongholds of the objectivist program.

Language and interpretation are focal points in this shift. Where the idea and ideal of " objectivity" once comprised a traditional raison d'�tre, now practitioners are rethinking the aims and practices of historical methodology in order to better account for actors with unique and contextually-embedded paradigms for " reading the world" [Arthur Danto, quoted in Novick [32], p. 526]. Because hypertext makes concrete the theories that motivate this new historical work, theories of hypertext can extend the current critique of traditional objectivism by providing a sphere of action, a laboratory in which historians and others can apply the theories with which they experiment. For example, historian of technology Paul Edwards recently used hypertext as a vehicle for discussing methodological issues in the history of science and technology; though Edwards does not engage with current models of rhetoric and argumentation in recent hypertext work (such as David Kolb's Socrates in the Labyrinth) [37], and is therefore perhaps unjustly critical of the potential application of hypertext to non-fiction and especially history, this first step is promising [10].

Edwards' reticence is instructive, and points toward my next desideratum; if hypertext cannot satisfy the demands of readers and writers who prefer linear narrative, either hypertext designers must invent a system capable of reproducing this style or hypertext theorists must convince these readers and writers that non-linearity is useful for argument. Socrates in the Labyrinth, David Kolb's exploration of the possibilities of hypertext for non-linear philosophical expression, points the way toward a poetics of hypertext " non-fiction" that includes non-linear forms of expression as rhetorically useful in creating meaning in contexts that demand more fidelity to traditional print criteria for argumentative validity. By eschewing long, scrolling screens and by implementing a sophisticated structure of links and nested nodes that leads the reader through arguments and digressions without appearing intrusive, Socrates subverts the comforting local coherence of the print document without sacrificing meaning.

A politics of hypertext should also support and explore the sorts of communal authorship that hypertext makes possible, in order to help overturn the dominant mythologies of the solitary (presumably male) genius as the sole origin of work of literary and artistic merit. ("Death of the author" sloganeering does not count, except ironically; celebrating the death of the author still underwrites an ideology in which the author still occupies a position of centrality.) In Forward Anywhere, for example, Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall have used hypertext and electronic mail to develop a hybrid correspondence that is part fiction, part autobiography, and part poetry that could not exist without electronic forms of writing and communication, forms which themselves have given rise to a new form of communal authorship, the outlines of which have yet to be articulated. [38] Other work, such as the Center for Ethics in Science and Engineering , a web site under construction at MIT under the direction of Caroline Whitbeck and David Gordon Wilson, takes collaborative authoring in a different direction; by bringing different sources and voices together, this project allows the reader to juxtapose a variety of ethics codes, interviews, and demographic data in order to draw conclusions about ethical issues in the sciences.

Finally, theorists would support hypertext's recombinant potential by encouraging hypertext writers to use all sorts of materials, including those currently under copyright, or otherwise unavailable (except to those who can afford the often extravagant sums needed to purchase ostensibly un-reproducible material). This calls for a certain civil disobedience -- call it creative appropriation -- but it must be remembered that although some can afford to buy out those from whom they draw inspiration, many more artists, scholars, and publishers cannot. That is why several lines from T. S. Eliot's " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" appear on Microsoft's Encarta, (1994) but no lines of Eliot's The Wasteland appear in Christiane Paul's scholarly study, Unreal City [39], where they would be central to the work. By supporting the recombinant potential of hypertext, theorists and practitioners can take an active stand against the Realpolitik of the publishing industry, in which the official sanctity of the author-function, traditionally protected by copyright laws, can be bought with the appropriate sums of money.[40, 30].

As this partial list demonstrates, much work remains to be done both in the theory and practice of hypertext, and especially in creating a theory of hypertext with consequences for its implementation. If the list evokes even more desiderata, so much the better; the hypertext show isn't over by any means; if hypertext teaches us anything, it must be the impossibility, after all, of having the last word. Lurking within the spiraling networks of hypertext readers and writers are subversive convergences as yet unwritten, convergences that will current notions of what hypertext is really (or essentially) about. Subversive enough, perhaps, to jettison this category of " essence" altogether, in favor of a pluralism that leaves room for a radical poetics of hypertext that is also political -- that is, based on participation rather than triumphalist rhetoric or abstract theorizing. As George Landow suggests in his introductory essay for Hyper/Text/Theory, nascent convergences of hypertext with various feminist perspectives on technology, writing, and the body have yet to appear in either feminist scholarship or hypertext theory. The convergences, he notes, are mentioned " either only in passing or not at all" [24, p.44]. Is this evidence of some subtle silencing? Or does it testify to the nature of these convergences as an open field for inquiry, scholarship, reading and writing? This moment is pivotal for women, writing, and hypertext; all three could go anywhere from here.