Showing posts with label text. Show all posts
Showing posts with label text. Show all posts

17 Mar 2014

The Joy of Hypertext

Hypertext Book Sculpture by Stephen Doyle


Why is it that people enjoy surfing between channels on TV and endlessly playing with the remote? The answer is because they are not concerned with what's on - but only with what's on next

Similarly, when reading online the pleasure is no longer in the content as such, but in the euphoric process of following and creating links. For whilst one rarely bothers looking at footnotes or checking references when reading a conventional work that exists in a traditional format, when reading a text online these things often matter more than the main body of writing; they certainly matter more than authorial intent. Indeed, the best ideas are frequently born not through loyalty, but through thinking of another when reading the one you love. Or, as Roland Barthes once said, the pleasure of the text is infidelity.

But what is text? Text is something outside of language even though it consists of language; something which exteriorizes the world's jargons "without taking refuge in an ultimate jargon" [1]. In fact, text liquidates the very idea of a primal metalanguage behind which booms the voice of God. For text has no soul or mystique and often undermines even its own canonical structures, such as lexicon and syntax. We engage with text like a fly buzzing around the room - suddenly zipping here, there, and everywhere in a kind of promiscuous frenzy.     

Radically democratic, text breaks down traditional boundaries and thereby enables greater intellectual contact and cooperation. As genre distinctions become meaningless, we are left only with text as a signifying practice; one that can be demonstrated and displayed on-screen as a movement of discourse that cuts across and links up an infinite number of works and is experienced as a shared activity of production.

For Barthes, text thus takes thinking to the limits of its own rationality. It doesn’t mark a dumbing-down, as some critics suggest, so much as the becoming paradoxical of language and the deferral of meaning. Text is played – like a pinball machine, or a musical instrument – beyond filiation or the search for origins. For the text is an orphan. And the text grows not by vital expansion or organic development, like a living thing, but rather as a network of temporary alliances and artificial constructions which extend as a result of a combinatory systematic

In other words, the text-as-network is an acentred, anarchic, and non-coordinating system that dissolves and refuses any division between a field of reality and its digital or virtual recreation.  

Perhaps not surprisingly, this Barthesian notion of text-as-network has been as influential outside of literary studies as it has within it. No more so than within the world of information technology and computer studies. The term hypertext, coined by Ted Nelson in 1963 to refer to a non-sequential way of organizing information, may not be Barthes's, but many commentators see hypertext as the digital embodiment of the latter's theory. For it too allows the individual to exercise choice and to find his or her pleasure by being playful with units of information (including images and sounds and not just the written word), chasing from link to link not in search of some final meaning or ultimate Truth, but simply for the sheer fun of it.

Of course, it might be asked - and raised as a concern - if this doesn’t result in a certain solipsism; for if each body is unique and has its own idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, how can we ever communicate with others? Isn't the joy of hypertext a masturbatory and profoundly anti-social pleasure?

The answer, of course, is that even the most creative and self-contained individuals do not form their own private languages expressive only of unique individual experiences. Communication with others remains (even in a virtual realm) a shared act, shaped by history. For as Wittgenstein once pointed out, even when describing our most personal and private of feelings our language is tied to social phenomena at every point.

And so hypertextual joy does not spell the end of society. In fact, perhaps it marks the birth of a new type of society, based upon a non-essential solidarity; a society in which members have very little in common but consent to "remain silent and polite when confronted  by pleasures or rejections which they do not share"

Barthes names this immanent utopia the Society of the Friends of the Text, but perhaps we might also think of it as a democracy of virtual touch


Notes: 

1: Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 30.
2: Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, (Papermac, 1995), p. 117.