Thomas Swiss

Drake University
ts9911r@acad.drake.edu

 

Eastgate Systems, Inc.

 

Given that musical references are common in the critical literature about hypertext, I begin with Jacques Attali, ¹ whose criticism poses a challenge not only for music and musicians but for other artists as well, including writers working in hypertextual mediums. Considering sound as a cultural phenomenon, Attali argues that relations of power are located on the shifting boundary between “music” and “noise.” Music is a code that defines the ordering of positions of power and difference that are located in the aural landscape of sound; noise, on the other hand, because it falls outside of a dominant musical code, transgresses this ordering of difference. For Attali, then, music is tamed noise.

 
By many accounts, hypertextual witing aspires to the condition of noise, not music. It means to jam the normal literary frequencies, create a disruption, some useful static. Said in a rawer, more openly political way, it “overthrows” “all kinds of hierarchies of status and power”; it is “radical,” “revolutionary”–or so the best-known arguments go.² But how radical is hypertextual writing in our current Age of the Web? How committed is any of it, to borrow Attali’s terms, to producing an appreciation of noise (as opposed to music) that transgresses the dominant order of difference?

 
Why “review” Eastgate? Because we only know Eastgate through its representations of its aesthetic and intellectual enterprise–the way it has conjured itself discursively. The way it has conjured itself as a text. In this brief review, I want to offer in impressionistic fashion (and with the support of a few hypertext links) some observations about Eastgate, a pioneering publishing company which has managed to create a kind of “local” scene for hypertext writers. Of course, as is often the case now with the wide-spread use of e-mail, news groups, and Web pages, locality here is less a place than a space: a network that brings people and their ideas together. In particular, I want to pose some questions about the evolving discourse surrounding literary hypertext, including certain conflicts and contradictions at work in the field of hypertextual production and promotion. At Eastgate, this discourse finally positions the company and its authors as both advocates of noise (meant to overthrow the literary mainstream) and music (meant to enter the mainstream.)

 
Based in Watertown, Massachusetts, Eastgate specializes in “serious hypertext.” That last phrase, used in the company catalog, Web site, ads, and other promotional materials, appears to mean something like “academic” hypertext as opposed to, I suppose, much of the hypertext one finds these days on the Web: “The Dickens Web” as opposed to “Mike’s Cool Links.” I don’t know how big the market is yet for hypertextual criticism, fiction, and poetry–my own order for Eastgate’s fiction was a first for my university library. Judging from the number and increasing frequency of hypertexts that Eastgate publishes, however, the news must be fairly good. If it is, I suppose Eastgate is in an enviable position: it practically owns the franchise. Its stable of writers includes such influential authors and critics as George Landow, Michael Joyce, Carolyn Guyer, and Stuart Moulthrop.

 
In the area of hypertext and–is it too early to use the phrase?–“hypertextual studies,” Eastgate resembles certain other “niche” publishers of avant-garde work. Like City Lights Books in the 1950s, which provided the Beat writers an early home, or Roof Press, which still provides a publishing outlet for “language poetry,” Eastgate appears to offer hypertext writers close attention, good company, and (for a small organization) sophisticated marketing. Using the tag line “serious hypertext,” for example, is a clever marketing move as it marks out a “high” literary space for everything Eastgate publishes. Thus Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and Clark Humphrey’s “The Perfect Couple” (described in the Eastgate catalog as “A New Age couple discovers the secret of perfect love”) get to travel together under the same umbrella, although they reflect–to say the least–different literary values and practices. But claiming for your authors’ work a certain (if undefined) seriousness seems mostly a pre-emptive strike on Eastgate’s part, an attempt to disarm those critics who refuse to take anything composed in hypertext seriously.

 
The relationship between software and digital writing is indeed a complicated one. At the textual level, it obviously affects both writer and reader. That is, it alters the composition and influences the “readability” (and symbolic meanings) of a text. At Eastgate, where the discourses of (computer) science routinely meet those of literature and literary theory, this relationship can be difficult to express. Which metaphors will suffice? In the following passage we hear a certain–and sudden–awkwardness as Michael Joyce offers the “reading instructions” for his new (and very interesting) hyperfiction from Eastgate, Twilight: a symphony —

 

When you begin a reading, you will see an open text window that looks like this one. If you want to shape this reading in something of a dance involving our common intentions and momentary whims, you can click and go on (here or anywhere) and the text will take you, or you it, where either you or it are going…

 

(Enough poetry, you say, bring on the praying mantises! So be it…)

Behind each open text window is an arrangement of titled boxes with arrows among them which represent their links. Each box (or space) contains text and/or graphic images. Many of the spaces also contain more text boxes. That is, each space can both contain text and images and hold more spaces like itself.³

 

In this particular case, the passage into and through various lexicons, however discordant (“praying mantises”?) or conflicting, can be part of the reader’s pleasure in the text. What begins here sounding like an overly-ripe lyric poem concludes by sounding like an instruction manual–the sort of movement you might find in the work of John Ashbery and others.

 
But some representations, including graphic ones, of the ways in which software and serious writing interact can be confusing or contradictory at Eastgate. Is hypertext more like literature or science? music or noise? commerce or art?

 
Take the cover art on the catalog, which appears to reproduce a nineteenth century drawing. In the drawing, two bearded men in suits are gazing at or into telescopes while two boys in the corner converse at a desk.

 

Cover of Eastgate catalog, Spring 1996

 

I’m not sure how we’re supposed to read this illustration. Are the men programmers and the children writers? That hardly seems right. Why are there no women involved in this mysterious enterprise? Eastgate publishes a fair number of hypertexts by women. Minimally, we see that the image foregrounds the “science” of hypertext as opposed to its literary elements. What about the full name of the company? Eastgate Systems. “Systems”? Or the text of the brochure which includes a “welcome” from Mark Bernstein, “Chief Scientist,” who begins his message with the resonant phrase: “Dear Friends in Hypertext.”

 
Now where are we? In The Church of Hypertext? Well, sort of. There is a lot of hyperbole surrounding hypertext, a kind of utopian (and sometimes evangelical) rhetoric that springs up, as Martin Spinelli points out in a recent essay on radio and the internet, among devotees of emerging mediums. ⁴ Thus we find George Landow, for example, talking about “hypertext visionaries” in the Eastgate brochure. Landow’s comment is a blurb for a software program called Storyspace which is sold by Eastgate and which happens to be the software of choice for many Eastgate authors.

 
Nothing wrong with that, except that the relationship between Storyspace, “a hypertext authoring system for the personal computer,” and the hypertextual writing that Eastgate publishes may be misleading. That is, hawking the software, as Eastgate prominently does in all of its materials–even in the jackets of the hypertextual “books” they publish–may suggest too strong of a connection between the software and the quality of the work itself. The better the software the better the writing? Eastgate appears to promote this linkage in the brochure:

 

Storyspace is used to write serious hypertext nonfiction--such as David Kolb's Socrates in the Labyrinth and Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric by Diane Greco. Storyspace is also used to write creative and experimental hypertext fiction and poetry, like award-winning author Edward Falco's Sea Island, and Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story.

 

Eastgate’s claim, while a common one in the world of advertising, means very little; it’s like Knopf developing a line of pens and paper and then crowing: it’s the same kind of writing apparatus Toni Morrison used to write Beloved! Maybe so, but so what? Of course, I am exaggerating here. Yet what animates this claim is something that currently remains under-studied and under-conceptualized: the relationship between the production of literary hypertext and the market. Some questions we might ask include: What are the ways in which we might consider the political economy of hypertext? How does the market impact the technology of hypertextual production and the practices of hypertext authors themselves? How do we conduct an institutional analysis of a company such as Eastgate? Like many “indie” labels in the music business, Eastgate often professes an oppositional discourse and yet needs, in some measure, to be understood not as “noise” but as “music” in order to survive economically.

 
At any rate, no matter the claims made for it, I find both the Storyspace authoring program and the Storyspace Reader software rather cumbersome myself, though the design has improved somewhat over the nearly ten years they have been on the market. On the positive side, the quality of display is very good, as are the shapes and locations of the windows, even if one often wishes that the boxes could be enlarged by the reader. But I find the information structure tricky to learn, and the navigation tools in the Storyspace Reader–in the age of the easy-to-use Netscape Web browser–could use both re-locating and a new set of icons for clarity’s sake.

Storyspace browser
Netscape browser
My comments raise familiar concerns about the difficulty for “independent” companies like Eastgate to compete, especially in the area of technology development, with mega-companies like Netscape. Of course Netscape itself was only a few years ago employing a version of counter-hegemonic discourse as it competed with the first widely used graphic browser for the internet, Mosaic. What difference would it make if Eastgate’s hypertexts were written not in the programming language of Storyspace, but in HTML and then bundled with the Netscape browser? How would this change Eastgate’s notions of independence and its representation of hypertextual fiction and poetry? Would the work be any more or less “serious,” “experimental,” “noisy,” or “musical”?

 
Storyspace has been written about–both described and theorized–most prominently by Landow, but also by its multiple creators, including Michael Joyce in his rich collection of essays, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Joyce’s book is the best single-author collection of work in the field of hypertextual studies at this time. He calls the essays “theoretical narratives”; they cover a lot of ground (a number of issues are provocatively raised) in what might be described as an original and elegant style–unusual in such a book. While the title of the volume is meant to refer to the “two minds” of hypertext pedagogy and poetics, it seems to also signal something of the competing positions or mind-sets that a number of hypertext writers and theorists are caught between. By way of an example, let me note that while Joyce can be an astute commentator on the aesthetic implications of hypertext, he also writes (in a chapter on pedagogy):

 

Indeed, hypertext tools offer the promise of adapting themselves to fundamental cognitive skills that experts routinely, subtly, and self-consciously apply in accomplishing intellectual tasks. Moreover, hypertext tools promise to unlock these skills for novice learners and empower and enfranchise their learning. ⁵

 

This analysis springs from cognitive psychology as adapted by some of the “writing process” advocates of the late 1970s. Ignoring the social (and political) processes that decide who learns what and how, Joyce essentializes learning by reducing it to “skills.” There’s no consideration here or elsewhere of such issues as how a student’s home environment and community shape learning and what counts as “knowledge.” There’s no consideration of gender barriers as they relate to technology, and as they are inevitably played out in the classroom, etc. In this passage and others, Joyce constructs learning as a static set of skills that can be “unlocked” by the lucky novice with the right “tools.”

 
In their critical writing Eastgate authors are sometimes constructivists; at other times they are cognitivists. Even in those essays framed in poststructuralist terms, there can be a heavy reliance on the classic “encoding/decoding” model of communication and culture. Thus while hypertext is sometimes lauded for its “revolutionary” power, here it is promoted as another (new and improved) route into the mainstream.

 
As Majorie Perloff notes in her work on language poetry, ⁶ the early critiques of most avant-garde movements–and the literary hypertext community is that–draw heavily on that movement’s own statements of intent as represented in various essays, interviews, and manifestos. The Eastgate stable, while certainly not the only community of hypertext authors out there doing interesting work, has been particularly visible and vocal. Thus what thoughtful commentary there has been on hypertext, with the exception of Sven Birkerts’ ongoing (and retro-romanticized) critique, ⁷ has generally relied on what Perloff calls the “exposition-advocacy model.” Landow’s two ground-breaking books from Johns Hopkins, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and his edited volume Hyper/Text/Theory, are good examples of this model at work–Eastgate authors are routinely cited; their work is praised, explained, and theorized for a readership presumed to be just developing an interest in hypertext. Unsurprisingly since its authors are well-represented in these books, Eastgate distributes both of them.

 
In part, I am suggesting that the sponsorship structure of Eastgate has contributed to what, in my view, is a surprising consensus among hypertext theorists. Last winter, for example, I attended a conference which brought a number of Eastgate authors together in keynote panels. There were no fireworks, not even any real disagreements. Instead the writers articulated a loose set of common goals, procedures, and habits. Much of the talk about hypertext, as usual, was about its relationship to post-structuralist thought: in this case, the foregrounding of textuality; the “interactiveness” between reader and text; praise for collage and fragmentation, for multiplicity and collaboration. What one did not hear repeated, happily, were some of the early claims made for hypertext: that it would somehow strengthen democracy, that the linear straightjacket of ink on paper would be liberated by hypertext, which was itself more natural or more representative of how humans (or intellectuals) think ⁸. Still, though the conference was more interesting than most, the presenters seemed, at least in this context, mostly of one mind.

 
More emphasis on the differences between the writers might have proven more exciting–more “noise” and less “music.” But I suppose it is necessary to remember that we are fairly early into the story of hypertext and hypertextual studies; it is likely to be awhile before these writers get past the initial phase of advocacy and instruction and begin a rigorous (and public) self-critique.

 
Given the time-delay mechanisms of literary politics, issues that Eastgate authors have been bravely raising explicitly for some years (in essays and talks) or implicitly (through their fictions and poems) are beginning to be augmented and seriously debated in other forums, and by a widening group. The least interesting of these discussions, as I have said, are debates painted in broad strokes (“classic print vs.the pixel”), and usually come with apocalyptic warnings on both sides. More compelling are those discussions about literary hypertext which foreground the possiblilities of either disjunctures or continuities through generations of language innovations and across cultural forms. A few of the best examine both. It is not only literary theorists who are increasingly publishing essays and books about hypertext, but also reading specialists, psychologists, and information and computer scientists.⁹

 
Still, what has been largely ignored is the discourse surrounding literary hypertext and its relation to the market as well as to pedagogy–in ways that include the social realities of education. In the context of both increasingly available “commercial” literary hypertexts and (especially) the growing number of “free” internet-available hypertextual essays, poems, and fictions, the terrain is shrinking upon which a hypertext company like Eastgate may still articulate a “revolutionary” stance. The concepts of “serious” and “experimental” hypertexts, in flux like the concepts of “noise” and “music,” are in need of continued critique.

 

Notes

 

1. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985). For a discussion of Attali in relation to pop music, see Thomas Swiss, John Sloop, and Andrew Herman, Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming 1997).

 

2. George P. Landow, Hypertext (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992). See the back cover of the book.

 

3. Michael Joyce, Twilight: A Symphony. (Watertown MA: Eastgate Systems, 1996).

 

4. Martin Spinelli, “Radio Lessons for the Internet,” Postmodern Culture 6.2 (January, 1996).

 

5. Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor, 1995) 40.

 

6. Majorie Perloff, Radical Artifice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). Also see Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996).

 

7. See the hypertext roundtable, “Dialog,” in the inaugural issue of the Web-based magazine FEED. The URL for the site is http://www.feedmag.com/95.05dialog1.html.

 

8. Joyce, Minds 57.

 

9. Jean-Francois Rouet, Jarmo J. Levonen, Andrew Dillon, and Rand J. Spiro, Hypertext and Cognition (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996).