Somnio, ergo sum


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Somnio, ergo sum

Donald Challenger

Dreaming in future tense

To suggest that Descartes somehow dreamed "of" or dreamed "in" hypertext is perhaps unnerving on the face of it. But it is not a move to dispense with the constraints of chronology or to deny the historical specificity of Descartes's experience, which Susan R. Bordo has established as crucial to any reading of Descartes. (16) Rather, it is an attempt to read the concept of "hypertext" in a more resourceful and extended way, to see how it might reach back as well as forward across history -- in a sense, to read the signifier hypertext itself more hypertextually. As Richard A. Lanham has noted, "in practice, the computer often turns out to be a rhetorical device as well as a logical one." (17)

If we think of hypertext exclusively as a "tool" or "medium" through which the possibilities and parameters of textuality are extended electronically, we logically dismiss the notion of a seventeenth-century hypertext as an anomaly, a contradiction in terms. If, however, we understand hypertextuality primarily as an ensemble of writing/reading practices always embedded in the complex experience of textuality itself -- practices that anticipate and foreground but are not wholly defined by the eponymous electronic apparatus -- we may discern any number of reading/writing experiences as hypertextual.

A variety of scholars routinely stake this claim on behalf of printed literary works that are safely enough entrenched in the realm of the postmodern or the "experimental" to deflect charges of anomalous geneology. Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, Cortazar's Hopscotch, the stories of Borges, Coover's "The Babysitter" are a familiar litany in hypertext; in criticism and theory, the epigrammatic texts of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Marshall McLuhan meet a similar, if never quite defined, standard, as do the feminist interrogations of patriarchal discourse by Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous. More adventurously, Lanham finds the obituary for the codex book and the attack on regimented, "transparent" typography not in the postmodern project, but in the Italian Futurism of 80 years ago -- if not in "the struggle between icon and alphabet" manifested in medieval illuminated manuscripts. And Umberto Eco, reading of the "abnihilation of the ethym" in Finnegan's Wake, argues that Joyce predicts the fission process through a kind of semic serendipity:

If most if not all of these works predate hypertext, we should also keep in mind that hypertext predates itself. The term was coined by Theodor H. Nelson in the 1960s, two decades after Vannevar Bush had envisioned the intertextual structure of hypertext as the Memex information-retrieval machine in a now-famous 1945 Atlantic article, but a decade before the commercial appearance of the home computer and more than two decades before the introduction of Apple's HyperCard and the World Wide Web. Even in the register of technology, then, we must ask: Do we date the inception of hypertext by the idea, the name, the metaphor, or the apparatus? (19)

"Actually it is quite clear and evident to all who will consider attentively the nature of time that a substance, to be conserved at every moment that it endures, needs the same power and the same action which would be necessary to produce it and create it anew if it did not yet exist. Thus the light of nature makes us see clearly that conservation and creation differ only in regard to our manner of thinking and not in reality."

Rene Descartes, Third Meditation