Editor’s Introduction

Decorating the Corpse: Hypertext After the Web

Not long ago I learned that in 1997-98, two new literary prizes will be given for work in hypertext, one in the U.S. and one in Europe. When I reported this to a certain writer well versed in “new media,” I received an interesting answer. The givers of the prizes are very kind, the writer said, “but they are pinning medals on a corpse.” My correspondent thought that creative hypertext had a fine future behind it but little in the way of prospects. It was an idea whose time had been.Writers say these things. Sometimes, as in the case just mentioned, we speak from despair, fearing that the audience for serious work may be collapsing to a singularity. At other times the lament that X is lost may serve as prelude to hubris, for instance when the mourner believes that a bright and promising meta-X (of his own invention) is coming with the dawn. Writing is dead!–and not a moment too soon–long live my kind of writing! Because they can be disingenuous in this way, literary mass obituaries should never be taken at face value. The reader is warned.

Yet if one has time and inclination to worry about such things, there are reasons to be concerned about hypertext. Until recently the United States had two major publishers of substantial work in new media: Eastgate Systems and the Voyager Company. After struggling to create a market for CD-ROMs with admirable production values and strong literary sensibilities, Voyager has left the field. Eastgate carries on, and other ventures, perhaps by university presses and non-U.S. firms, may compensate in some measure for Voyager’s absence. Still, the implications are troubling.

No doubt the change at Voyager came for various reasons, many having little to do with the Internet, but Voyager’s withdrawal does seem to coincide neatly with the recent surge of interest in the World Wide Web. One has to wonder whether Voyager’s often exquisite products were eclipsed by offerings on the Web–from on-line ‘zines like Salon, Feed, and Suck to the more dubious prospects of “push” media and VRML. If this is the case, then we may be seeing a shift, as far as hypertext is concerned, from a commercial model of literary production:

“EXPANDED BOOK” = CD-ROM =
MARKETABLE COMMODITY

to a public-service or indeed an amateur model:

HYPERTEXT = WEB SITE =
WORK OF PURE DEVOTION

Postmodern Culture has an evident stake in these developments. Since our recent move to Johns Hopkins University Press and the Muse Project, back issues of the journal, formerly available to anyone with Web access, have been open only to institutional and individual Muse subscribers. (Each current issue continues in free circulation until the next issue appears.) As we explained when the change was announced, this seemed a reasonable way to cover operating costs and keep the journal alive. We knew, though, that we were swimming against the tide. As a number of our authors and readers pointed out, free availability has been a key feature of this publication. Imposing charges seems to some a betrayal. On the Web, as they would have it, information wants to be free.In response to these concerns, the Press and the editors have decided to make text-only versions of our back issues available to all. This is only a preliminary announcement; details of the new arrangement will appear in our next issue (September, 1997). It bears mentioning, though, that we are not abandoning the subscription model of on-line publishing. Subscriptions to Postmodern Culture will still be offered both individually and through Project Muse, and versions available to subscribers and non-subscribers will differ in important ways.

The free archive will most likely contain full text of conventional articles minus hypertext links, search support, and other valuable features. Because they depend on more sophisticated forms of encoding, hypertext and hypermedia compositions like the contents of this special issue will almost certainly be excluded from the text-only archive. Where hypertext is concerned, some of us still prefer to go against the flow.

It would be easy to mistake this perverseness for greed, common as that motive has become. The insistence on hypertext as a cash nexus (to say it bluntly) may seem in line with the rampaging commercialization of the Internet. Ever since the discovery of Web browsing as the fin de siècle“killer app,” the corporate world has been lusting after computer networks with priapistic urgency, and though pundits regularly predict a nasty end to this affair, the ardor shows no sign of cooling yet. Information wants to be free? On the dot-commons these days the buzz is rather different: info-makers want to see fees. This is a long way from pure devotion.

Yet as any old cyberspace hand will tell you, it is hard to use the words hypertext and profit in the same sentence without arousing deep suspicion. In the most popular Internet business models, major revenues come not from subscriptions but from sale of advertising space. Advertising–as business has known it so far, anyway–depends on reliable, sustained audience attention, the sort of thing TV, movies, radio, and print provide quite handily. Hypertext systems foster rather different behavior. They emphasize transition and active selection of content, raising the primitive impulse of channel-surfing to something that might be called art. They challenge viewers to become interpreters, working out connections between fragments instead of relaxing into the paratactic flow. In short, hypertext does not go well with mass marketing.

Mass marketing, however, remains our primary economic doctrine; so something needs to be done about hypertext (for starters) to make the Internet safe for oligopoly. This is where “push” programming and “Web channels” come in (who needs hypertext links?), where Microsoft’s absorption of WebTV starts to look like something other than amoebic reflex, and where Larry Ellison’s recent bid to turn Apple Computer into a manufacturer of dumb terminals makes a certain deeply sinister sense.

In his interview with Johanna Drucker in this issue, Matthew Kirschenbaum adverts to Sven Birkerts’ attack on the “Faustian bargain” of emerging technologies. (See this and also Drucker’s response.) This argument also plays its part in the defense of the old order. Dire moralist that he is, Birkerts asks us to choose the stony but honest road to salvation. A more jaded reader, or one better informed about the current state of media, might draw a different conclusion: better the devil you know. How much more comfortable to live in a world where books are books, television is television, and so is the World Wide Web. Why learn to surf when it’s it’s so delicious to drown? As for hypertext, leave that to the hobbyists.

Hypertext is a strange kind of hobby, though. Pursued for purposes of art or inquiry, hypertext is a vexation, a disorderly practice. As the projects collected in this issue demonstrate, this sort of writing calls us back to fundamental questions about language, meaning, structure, and authority that have long been part of the postmodern agenda; but we come to these questions in practice as well as theory, and in the marketplace and classroom as well as the library. To be sure, Messrs. Gates, Murdoch, Ellison and company will not lose much sleep over the contents of this issue, but that does not mean these texts are insignificant or futile, mere posthumous campaign ribbons for the celebrated corpse.

Whatever its fortunes in the marketplace, hypertext is far from dead–and there may be hope, in the fulness of years, even for the marketplace, since late-stage capitalism doubtless does not mark the end of history. History is dynamic and therefore debatable–literary history in particular. The reader will have learned by now not to trust an author with a long face and a sad story about his favorite form. A hasty bill of mortality is often a transparent fraud. Consider the evidence.

In This Issue

This special issue on and of hypertext contains four explicitly hypertextual works and three scholarly articles in which electronic media figure as subject, mode of expression, or both.

Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue” is a network of stories or a music in words composed of twelve parts in eight bars–all asking to be read at a certain blue depth.

Two of the hypertexts are poems: Diana Slattery’s “Alphaweb” and John Cayley’s “Book Unbound.” Slattery’s work is a text-and-graphic exploration of the angelic, the demonic, and the electronic rendered onto the Web. Cayley’s work is a singular and significant representative of electronic writing outside the Web (it was created with HyperCard), and of generative, interactive “cybertext.”

In the critical register there is “Through Light and the Alphabet,” Matthew Kirschenbaum’s interview with the writer, artist, and historian Johanna Drucker, the text supplemented with links to and reproductions of Drucker’s work. Loss Pequeño Glazier’s “Jumping to Occlusions” is a hypertextual essay considering the status, potential, and problems of interactive poetry. Craig Saper’s “Intimate Bureaucracies and Infrastructuralism” considers anti-institutional practices such as mail art and artists’ assemblings in relation to, among other things, the culture of the Internet.

In addition this issue also includes “The Heimlich Home of Cyberspace,” a multi-authored, collaborative hypertext produced by undergraduates at Drake University. As a communal discourse, as a project from the classroom–and most important, as the work of writers about as young as the Internet itself–this text has a particular significance.

Acknowledgements

This issue could not have been produced without much wise and generous assistance. I am especially grateful to (and for) our Managing Editor, Sarah Parson Wells, who handled with capability and confidence the enormous technical work behind this issue. Thanks also to Mark Bernstein and Eastgate Systems for their kind cooperation in publishing “Twelve Blue.” My co-editors, Lisa Brawley, Eyal Amiran, and John Unsworth, along with Ellen Sauer at Johns Hopkins University Press, gave encouragement and counsel. Jane Yellowlees Douglas and Greg Ulmer graciously served beyond the call of their editorial board duties. Above all I wish to thank those who acted as consulting readers and advisers: Espen Aarseth, David Balcom, Carolyn Guyer, Jon Ippolito, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Michael Joyce, Nancy Kaplan, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Catherine Marshall, Barbara Page, and Jim Rosenberg.

Acknowledgements

Meaning appears only at the intersection

"Home pages" and electronic "'zines," much like assemblings, depend on making links to other sites on the Internet. Each page, even corporate pages, link to and assemble other groups' or individuals' work. The pages link according to the logic of amateur discoverers. "Here's what I found," they say. 

He had been a coward. No one liked him. It was a life. Each morning he woke up surprised and a little disappointed that he'd made it to another goddamn day in this empty stinking valley. 

The “forms” which will emerge won’t, I don’t think, replace print media for a long time–we’re too attached to the intimacy and convenience of portable books and magazines–but the electronic forms will and already are allowing the popular imagination to reinvent its relation to the received traditions of reading, writing, and imagining. Don’t you think?

In my own experience, the Web is both useful and frustrating. A great source for information, research, and communication, it is very disorienting for me. I am attached to the spatial modes which print media offer as orientation. I despise the “scrolling screen” and the attempt to locate myself in a document by the position of the sidebar marker.

…the point is not that everything is linked through these sequences. The constitution of any such whole could only be a misrepresentation of stability, the futile pursuit of yet another encyclopedia. The insistences of the internal orders of texts do not add stability to the text, rather they add a perplexing layer of instability; it is the “failure” of the links, whether they connect or not, that gives them their activity and it is through this activity that electronic writing departs irreversibly from the world of print.