Grammatology Hypermedia

Greg Ulmer

University of Florida at Gainesville

 

This article is about an experiment I conducted for publication in a volume collecting the papers read at the Sixteenth Annual Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature: “Literacy Online: the Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers,” October 26-28, 1989 (organized by Myron Tuman). My talk at the conference placed the current developments in Artificial Intelligence and hypermedia programs in the context of the concept of the “apparatus,” used in cinema studies to mount a critique of cinema as an institution, as a social “machine” that is as much ideological as it is technological. The same drive of realism that led in cinema to the “invisible style” of Hollywood narrative films, and to the occultation of the production process in favor of a consumption of the product as if it were “natural,” is at work again in computing. Articles published in computer magazines declare that “the ultimate goal of computer technology is to make the computer disappear, that the technology should be so transparent, so invisible to the user, that for practical purposes the computer does not exist. In its perfect form, the computer and its application stand outside data content so that the user may be completely absorbed in the subject matter–it allows a person to interact with the computer just as if the computer were itself human” (Macuser, March, 1989). It was clear that the efforts of critique to expose the oppressive effects of “the suture” in cinema (the effect binding the spectator to the illusion of a complete reality) had made no impression on the computer industry, whose professionals (including many academics) are in the process of designing “seamless” information environments for hypermedia applications. The “twin peaks” of American ideology–realism and individualism–are built into the computing machine (the computer as institution).

 

The very concept of the “apparatus” indicates that ideology is a necessary, irreducible component of any “machine.” Left critique and cognitive science agree on this point, as may be seen in Jeremy Campbell’s summary of the current state of research in artificial intelligence: A curious feature of a mind that uses Baker Street [Holmes] reasoning to create elaborate scenarios out of incomplete data is that its most deplorable biases often arise in a natural way out of the very same processes that produce the workmanlike, all-purpose, commonsense intelligence that is the Holy Grail of computer scientists who try to model human rationality. A completely open mind would be unintelligent. It could be argued that stereotypes are not ignorance structures at all, but knowledge structures. From this point of view, stereotypes cannot be understood chiefly in terms of attitudes and motives, or emotions like fear and jealousy. They are devices for predicting other people’s behavior. One result of the revival of the connectionist models in the new class of artificial intelligence machines is to downgrade the importance of logic and upgrade the role of knowledge, and of memory, which is the vehicle of knowledge (Campbell, The Improbable Machine. New York, 1989: 35, 151, 158).

 

Critique and cognitive science hold different attitudes to the inherence of stereotypes in knowledge, of course. Critique is right to condemn the acceptance of or reconciliation with the given assumptions implicit in cognitive science, but its own response to the problem, relying on the enlightenment model of absolute separation between episteme and doxa, knowledge and opinion, is too limited. This split is replicated in the institutionalization of critique in academic print publication resulting in a specialized commentary separated from practice. Postmodern Culture could play a role in exploring alternatives to the current state of the apparatus. Grammatology provides one possible theoretical frame for this research, being free of the absolute commitment to the book apparatus (ideology of the humanist subject and writing practices, as well as print technology) that constrains research conducted within the frame of critique. The challenge of grammatology, against all technological determinism, is to accept responsibility for inventing the practices for institutionalizing electronic technologies. We may accept the values of critique (critical analysis motivated by the grand metanarrative of emancipation) without reifying one particular model of “critical thinking.” But what are the alternatives? The experiment I contributed to the volume differed from the paper delivered at the conference, being not so much an explanation of the problem–the inability of critique to expose the disappearing apparatus–as an attempt to write with the stereotypes of Western thought, using them and showing them at work at the same time. The essay is entitled “Grammatology (In The Stacks) of Hypermedia: A Simulation.”

 

My research has been concerned with exploring various modes of “immanent critique,” a reasoning capable of operating within the machines of television and computing, in which the old categories (produced in the book apparatus) separating fiction and truth are breaking down. Rhetoric has always been concerned with sorting out the true from the false, and it will continue to function in these terms in the electronic apparatus, as it did in oral and alphabetic cultures. The terms of this sorting will be transformed, however, to treat an electronic culture that will be as different from the culture of the book as the latter is different from an oral culture. It is important to remember, at the same time, that all three dimensions of discourse exist together interactively. I am particularly interested in the figure of the mise en abyme, as elaborated in Jacques Derrida’s theories, in this context. The mise an abyme is a reflexive structuration, by means of which a text shows what it is telling, does what it says, displays its own making, reflects its own action. My hypothesis is that a discourse of immanent critique may be constructed for an electronic rhetoric (for use in video, computer, and interactive practice) by combining the mise en abyme with the two compositional modes that have dominated audio-visual texts–montage and mise en scene. The result would be a deconstructive writing, deconstruction as an inventio (rather than as a style of book criticism).

 

“Grammatology (In The Stacks) of Hypermedia” is an experiment in immanent critique, attempting to use the mise en abyme figure to organize an “analysis” of the current thinking about hypermedia. The strategy was to imitate in alphabetic style the experience of hypermedia practice–“navigating” through a database, producing a trail of linked items of information. I adopted the “stack” format of hypercard, confining myself largely to citations from a diverse bibliography of materials relevant to hypermedia. These materials were extended to include not only texts about hypermedia from academic as well as journalistic sources, but also texts representing the domains used as metaphors for hypermedia design in these sources. Two basic semantic domains, then, provided most of the materials for the database: the index cards, organized in “stacks,” to be linked up in both logical and associative ways, and the figure of travel used to characterize the retrieval of the informations thus stored. The critical point I wanted to make had to do with a further metaphor that emerged from juxtaposing the other two–an analogy between the mastery of a database and the colonization of a foreign land. The idea was to expose the ideological quality of the research drive, the will to power in knowledge, by calling attention to the implications of designing hypermedia programs in terms of the “frontiers” of knowledge, knowledge as a “territory” to be established. The goal is not to suppress this metaphorical element in design and research, but to include it more explicitly, to unpack it within the research and teaching activities. In this way stereotypes may become self-conscious, used and mentioned at once in the learning process.

 

The design of the experiment was influenced not only by the principle of the mise en abyme (imitating in my form the form of the object of study), but also by several other compositional strategies available in current critical theory. One of these is Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, for which hypermedia seems to be the ideal technological format. Indeed, one might hope, following her superb alphabetic (re) construction of Benjamin’s project in The dialectics of seeing (MIT, 1989) that Susan Buck-Morss would direct a hypermedia version of the Arcades. A point of departure (but only that) for this version might be the “Cicero” project, in which students of Classical civilization and Latin explore Rome (a representation on videodisc, composed using microphotography of a giant museum model of the city at its height in 315 A.D.) assisted by a “friendly tour guide” (Cicero). It is worth recalling, in this context, that Cicero was an advocate of artificial memory as part of rhetoric, and that Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theater (designed during the Venetian Renaissance) was “intended to be used for memorising every notion to be found in Cicero’s works” (Frances Yates, The Art of Memory. Chicago, 1966: 166). In fact, the design of hypermedia software in general, and not just the Cicero project, has much in common with the hypomnemic theaters of the Renaissance Hermetic-Caballist tradition. The unfinished Arcades project exists in the form of a “massive collection of notes on nineteenth-century industrial culture as it took form in Paris–and formed that city in turn. These notes consist of citations from a vast array of historical sources, which Benjamin filed with the barest minimum of commentary, and only the most general indications of how the fragments were eventually to have been arranged” (Buck-Morss, ix). In the hypermedia Arcades, an interactive Benjamin would guide students through a Paris whose history could flash up in the present moment with the touch of a key. Meanwhile, I was interested in the resonance of the card file metaphor for hypermedia and Benjamin’s views on the obsolescence of the academic book:

 

And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index. (Benjamin, Reflections, New York, 1978: 78.)

 

The other strategy that is relevant to the experiment is the postmodernist fondness for allegory. Thus any item of fact reported in the database could also function as a sign, signifying or figuring another meaning. The specifics of this meaning are to be inferred in the reading, leaving the construction of the critical argument to the reader. These strategies constitute an outline for a potent pedagogy in which research functions as the inventio for an expressive text (thus producing a hybrid drawing upon both scholarship and art). This possibility suggests another role for electronic publications–to explore productive exchanges between the electronic and alphabetic apparatuses, emphasizing the usefulness of computer hardware and software as figurative models for written exercises. It is perfectly possible to compose an essayistic equivalent of a hypermedia program, and to think electronically with paper and pencil.

 

My version of a hypermedia essay consists of some 29 cards simulating one trail blazed through a domain of information about hypermedia–concerned, that is, with a sub-domain holding data on the semantic fields of the terminology of program design for hypermedia environments. The entries are drawn from the categories listed below in random order (the entries evoke these categories). In hypermedia, the cards could be accessed in any order, but in the alphabetic simulation, which is an enunciation or utterance within the system, the sequence does develop according to an associative logic (it is precisely an experiment with the capacity of association for creating learning effects). In hypermedia, the scholar does not provide a specific line of argument, an enunciation, but constructs the whole paradigm of possibilities, the set of statements, leaving the act of utterance, specific selections and combinations, to the reader/user. Or rather, the scholar’s “argument” exists at the level of the ideology/theory directing the system of the paradigm, determining the boundaries of inclusion/exclusion.

 

–hypermedia design
–methods and logic of composition
–the computer conference at the University of Alabama
–computers in general
–critique of cinema (apparatus theory)
–grammatology
–Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
–colonial exploration of America (Columbus, the overland trails).
–stereotypes
–“Place” in rhetoric, memory
–Situationism
–mis en abyme.

 

The fundamental idea organizing the grammatological approach to hypermedia (theorizing the institutionalization of computer technology into education in terms of the history of writing) emerges out of a comparison of three textbooks, introducing students to the operations of the three memory systems dominating schooling within three different apparatuses: the Ad Herenium, main source of the classical art of memory, in the pre-print era when oratory was the predominant practice (cf. Camillo’s Memory Theater); the St. Martin’s Handbook, representing (as typical among a host of competitors) the codification of school writing; and a textbook yet to come, doing for electronic composition what the other two examples do for their respective apparatuses. It is certainly too soon for a “codification” of electronic rhetoric, considering that the technology is still evolving at an unnerving pace. The position of Postmodern Culture in this situation should not be conservative or cautious (that slot in the intellectual ecology being already crowded with representatives). Rather, it should serve as a free zone for conceptualization, formulating an open, continually evolving simulacrum of that electronic handbook. Some of the elements of that handbook (but a new word is needed for this program) might be glimpsed in the citations collected and linked in my hypermedia essay. In the remaining sections I will reproduce, in somewhat abbreviated form, one of the series included in the original article (but with the addition of a few selections not used previously). In this recreation I will omit the sources, noting only the name of the author. My principal concern is with the transformation of the rhetorical concept of “place” that is underway in the electronic environment. A review of the history of rhetoric reveals that “place” is perhaps the least stable notion in this history, the one most sensitive to changes in the apparatus.

 

“What seems necessary to me is the development of a completely new discipline that embraces the whole augmentation system. What are the practical strategies that will allow our society to pursue high-performance augmentation? My strategy is to begin with small groups, which give greater ‘cultural mobility.’ Small groups are preferable to individuals because exploring augmented collaboration is at the center of opportunity. These small groups would be the scouting parties sent ahead to map the pathways for the organizational groups to follow. You also need outposts for these teams” (Douglas Engelbart).

 

“Between 1840 and the California gold rush, fewer than 20,000 men, women, and children followed those roads westward–the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Bozeman Trail. Yet the story of the overland trails was told a thousand times for every one telling of the peopling of the Midwest. Why? Excitement was there, of course: Indian attacks and desert hardship and even cannibalism. But I suspected that the greatest appeal of the trails lay in the role they played as avenues for progress of the enterprising. The roads that the pioneers followed symbolized the spirit of enterprise that sustained the American dream” (Ray Allen Billington).

 

Originally, theoria meant seeing the sights, seeing for yourself, and getting a worldview. The first theorists were “tourists”–the wise men who traveled to inspect the obvious world. Theoria did not mean the kind of vision that is restricted to the sense of sight, but implied a complex but organic mode of active observation–a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing. The world theorists who traveled around 600 B.C. were spectators who responded to the expressive energies of places, stopping to contemplate what the guides called “the things worth seeing.” Local guides–the men who knew the stories of a place–helped visiting theorists to “see” (Eugene Victor Walter).

 

“Information would be accessible through association as well as through indexing. The user could join any two items, including the user’s own materials and notes. Chains of these associations would form a ‘trail,’ with many possible side trails. Trails could be named and shared with other information explorers. ‘There is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.’ We need fundamentally new organizing principles for knowledge, and we need new navigation and manipulation tools for the learner. Instead of regarding an intelligent system as a human replacement, we can consider the system as a helpful assistant or partner” (Stephen A. Weyer).

 

“The two recognized, contemporary authorities on Columbus are his son Ferdinand and the traveling monk Bertolome de las Casas. Both cite the reasons why Columbus believed he could discover the Indies as threefold: ‘natural reasons, the authority of writers, and the testimony of sailors.’ As to the ancient authorities, Columbus’ son cites Aristotle, Seneca, Strabo, Pliny, and Capilonius. None of these ancient writers gave a route plan– it had to come from another source. The source for that plan had to be St. Brendan, the Navigator. Brendan lived in the 6th century, A.D. The Irish clergy were a devout group and practiced a form of wandering in the wilderness. Not having a desert nearby, they did their wandering at sea. In the Navigatio Sancti Brendani the style and manner of navigational reports are as excerpts relating the interesting events, taken from a diary or logbook. The subsequent versions of the Navigatio were penned by monks in monasteries. These contain religious matter of a mythical nature which has obviously been added to the original” (Paul H. Chapman).

 

“For the Aboriginal nomad, the land is a king of palimpsest. On its worn and rugged countenance he is able to write down the great stories of Creation, his creation, in such a way as to insure their renewal. Walking from one sacred spot to another, performing rituals that have changed little over the millennia, are in themselves important aspects of a metaphysical dialogue. Since Aboriginal society is pre-literate, this dialogue relies on intellectual and imaginative contact with sacred constructs within the landscape that have been invested with miwi or power, according to tradition or the Law. The language is one of symbolic expression, of mythic reportage. We begin to see at this point the seeds of conflict between two opposing cultures existing in the same landscape. On the one hand we have an Aboriginal culture that regards the landscape as an existential partner to which it is lovingly enjoined; on the other, we find a European culture dissatisfied with the landscape’s perceived vacuity and spiritual aridity, thus wanting to change it in accordance with facile economic imperatives so that it reflects a materialistic world- view” (James Cowan).

 

“Can the hypermedia author realize the enormous potential of the medium to change our relation to language and texts simply by linking one passage or image to others? One begins any discussion of the new rhetoric needed for hypermedia with the recognition that authors of hypertext and hypermedia materials confront three related problems: First, what must they do to orient readers and help them read efficiently and with pleasure? Second, how can they inform those reading a document where the links in that document lead? Third, how can they assist readers who have just entered a new document to feel at home there? Drawing upon the analogy of travel, we can say that the first problem concerns navigation information necessary for making one’s way through the materials. The second concerns exit or departure information, and the third arrival or entrance information” (George Landow).

 

“Removed from the tangible environment of their culture, travelers came to rely on this most portable and most personal of cultural orders as a means of symbolic linkage with their homes. More than any other emblem of identity, language seemed capable of domesticating the strangeness of America. It could do so both by the spreading of Old World names over New World place, people, and objects, and by the less literal act of domestication which the telling of an American tale involved. This ability to ‘plot’ New World experience in advance was, in fact, the single most important attribute of European language. Francis Bacon, primary theorist of a new epistemology and staunch opponent of medieval scholasticism, extrapolated Columbus himself into a symbol of bold modernity. His voyager was decidedly not the man of terminal doubt and despair whom we encounter in the Jamaica letter of 1503. He was instead a figure of hopeful departures, a man whose discovery of a ‘new world’ suggested the possibility that the ‘remoter and more hidden parts of nature’ also might be explored with success. The function of Bacon’s Novum Organum was to provide for the scientific investigator the kind of encouragement which the arguments of Columbus prior to 1492 had provided for a Europe too closely bound to traditional assumptions” (Wayne Franklin).

 

“Perhaps the most fragile component of the future lies in the immediate vicinity of the terminal screen. We must recognize the fundamental incapacity of capitalism ever to rationalize the circuit between body and computer keyboard, and realize that this circuit is the site of a latent but potentially volatile disequilibrium. The disciplinary apparatus of digital culture poses as a self-sufficient, self-enclosed structure without avenues of escape, with no outside. Its myths of necessity, ubiquity, efficiency, of instantaneity require dismantling: in part by disrupting the separation of cellularity, by refusing productivist injunctions by inducing slow speeds and inhabiting silences” (Jonathan Crary).

 

One more suggestion of a function of electronic publishing: To experiment with other metaphors for the research process in the electronic apparatus, as alternatives to the metaphor of colonial imperialism.