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--Sum

Bolter notes that "topographic writing" -- networked texts or hypertexts that circumvent canonical order and hierarchy to share authority with the reader -- can be realized in print as well as on the screen: "Whenever we divide our text into unitary structures and whenever we conceive of this textual structure spatially as well as verbally, we are writing topographically." Here such writing seems to be a matter of choice regardless of the medium, a kind of postmodern enlightenment. Yet he observes nearby that "all texts are ultimately networks of verbal elements" and that "association is always present in any text.... A writer cannot help but write associatively" (emphasis added).

Why, then, is all writing not topographic? "Previous technologies of writing," from the scroll to the printed book, "could not easily accommodate such alternatives" and so inevitably took hierarchical forms -- sequenced paragraphs, pages, chapters -- that sought "to impose order on verbal ideas that are always prone to subvert that order." Now the writer/text figuration has become one of historical constraint and tension, pitting the instincts of the writer against the constraints of the technology; it remains for the computer, "the first medium that can record and present these networks to writers and readers," to free the writer from the burden of the past.

Yet, Bolter claims -- again in the same section -- "The goal of conventional writing is to create a perfect hierarchy, but it is not always easy to maintain the discipline of such a structure." But hasn't he located the "discipline" of "convention" in the technology itself, against which the writer struggles toward associative "verbal ideas"? Or is "conventional" writing by definition that which resists the liberation of the computer and its own nature?

We seem to be caught in a series of contradictions: We can write topographically or hypertextually in any medium, but we must do so by design, skill and choice. On the other hand, all writing is at base networked and associative; we can't help it. However, pre-electronic writing technologies "impose order" on that associative richness, rendering it nearly invisible. That deadening "order" is now being subverted and overthrown by the computer; yet in its more benign form as "perfect hierarchy," that order is merely an elusive ideal.

An appealing but problematic metaphor shapes this passage in Writing Space from the beginning: that of Saint Teresa, who wrote, "I only wish I could write with both hands, so as not to forget one thing while I am saying another." Bolter reads Teresa's lament as a mere desire to keep up with the flood of her own thoughts, but it speaks equally to duality of intention and the problems such parallel processing can create: of forgetting and elision. One of the risks we incur in "writing with both hands" about hypertext -- or of wanting to -- is that it leads us, even against our wishes, to maintain mutually exclusive rhetorics of subjectivity and technology.