Justin, note: This website is not meant to be complete. Linear as it may be, it represents my reading, my construction of Of Two Minds, and as such it leaves silences of its own, both in what I will not say and in what is not explicitly said. If this is hypertext, or some version of it, then there should be more than my voice on this page--even if that voice is itself changing and coming from different places and different times and different directions. I am not sure that linking, both the act of making a link and the construction of what is at its end, is enough. If there is reader control, or if reader and author blur, then it seems it must be more than just deciding which links to follow--even if that does change the order of the text or what links are available. It seems that to enact such changes there must be voices other than the author's--in this case other than mine--in the text itself, and not just linked from it. So I invite others, as they respond, to insert their own voices within this text and not just linked from it, to modify coding and form and color as part of that expression and writing, and to make links as well. To that end I have left this page somewhat open, the coding basic, to allow room for others.

Michael Joyce's Of Two Minds

Intro

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Joyce, intro: One of Joyce's first assertions is that the computer began to change him--it was more than an epistemological tool, it was a social experience that engaged his own subjectivities. He describes this change as creating less stable subjectivities, ones not so easily encompassed by the clear line between typical binaries. In short, he leaves behind the logic of either/or and works within a more postmodern framework. Though this shift is often presented as a move to both/and reasoning, Joyce refers to it as "and/and/and," perhaps an attempt to leave behind even the two-part structure of "both/and." Along this same line of thought, it is one of Joyce's contentions that pedagogy and poetics, primarily conceived as teaching and writing, have come almost simultaneously to the ends of thier respective developments. This conception is a modified version of Landow's thought in that it takes as its object the disenfranchisement of text with hypertext, but Joyce's claim is somewhat more appealing and acceptable in that it is tempered by the union of the terms. That is, pedagogy and poetics do not simply end, but they are rather conjoined/modified in a relationship where pedagogy and/as poetics is in the process of re(d)fining each. And so with these assumptions the text begins.

Joyce, part 1: The main work of this section is to lay out a brief history of hypertext and to locate Joyce's own workings in that history. Though he initially asserts, following Bolter, that hypertext is a primarily visual form, he attempts to distinguish between hypertext and hypermedia, the former being where language is printed to the screen but is conceived as content, not form, and the latter being where sound, animation, video, etc, is added to the first conception. Though this distinciton is a useful analytic tool, Joyce later decides to let hypertext subsume both forms, advocating a typical postmodern move wherein most everything is "text" to be read. Working with what he describes as the typical description of hypertext (being related in someway to human cognition), Joyce then traces a line of technology and theory beginning with Bush's memex and ending with Joyce's own work with Bolter. Joyce ends this section by calling for a "constructive hypertext" and offerng a brief narrative on what it is that he really wants to do: "I wanted, quite simply, to write a novel that would change in successive readings and to make those changing versions according to the connnections that I had for some time naturally discovered in the process of writing and that I wanted my readers to share" (31).

Joyce, part 2: Perhaps one of the most important contributions of this section is a guideline for judging hypertexts, though it is mainly applicable to classroom sorts of activities. Joyce offers the "transformation of knowledge" as a way to judge both exploratory and constructive hypertexts where "transformation" is measured by the ways in which learners look at materials in new ways, though the means of measuring such transformations is not discussed. Another useful means of answering this same question is offered by Nancy Kaplan (see pages 68-9). "I have come to" the conclusion that Joyce is not polyvocal but that Vitanza is. This conclusion is reached by silence. There is a network you--you readers--have no access to unless I provide it, and even then it is a construction of that silence. I have come to talk to you about silence--"one that in its certainty any of us might legitimately mistake for utterance" (92). Bakhtin wrote that silence is an utterance. Kennedy, writing of animal rhetoric, comments on the field mouse, heart beating mile-a-minute, waiting for the fox to pass. Silence is an utterance, yet it is one we are meant not to hear, or rather, to hear all too well. Joyce writes that his mantra has an actual substance and palpable extension, yet we cannot (not) access it. That silence is obvious, but I cannot "click" on palpable and know it. It is the author's secret, yet only a link away. As he asks of Moulthrop, "do you ever find yourself wanting to press the words on a page of a book"? His answer is "no." Of course, what other answer could there be. The danger in silence is that of Alice's rabbit hole, or more recently that of the Matrix (using the same metaphor), you have to see how deep the whole goes, and once you do, you can't go back. The idea of network is intriguing here: the change has come, it has been here for a while now, and this is its expression. The network, as a metaphor and somewhat as an actual series of hyper-relations, is that way of understanding that we have--the behind the silence. At least that is the extension of the mind-machine link so often employed in discussions of computers in general and hypertexts in particular. Nevertheless the idea of network seems to be an improvement from cognitive psychologists' flowcharts and boxes, though it gets us, perhaps, no closer to really understanding the mind, if that is evn the goal. If I am plugged-in to the network--someone has used the term "jacking-in"--then what is at issue, as Joyce comments, is how one uses oneself and on what. Man is method, and this itself is an interesting way to understand life in as a networked system.

Joyce, part 3: If texts were truly interactive, if hypertexts were, what would they be? Joyce's questions in this regard, especially as they pertain to the already available means of interaction, are interesting, though I think they ultimately rely on false parallels. Why do we not write in the blanks of pages, in the spaces after chapters? Why do we not compose our own new novels in response to ones we love? Why are there only three messages posted in response to Allan Heaps' review (none in the last three years)? Why doesn't Don add his voice right here, as explicitly encouraged in Justin's opening note, rather than linking to a separate page? While the answers Joyce offers, that of presupposed relationships and selfish desires, may in fact be true, they don't take into account the fact that such markings or writings never achieve the level of the text itself. They may be marginally interactual, but they are not the text. John Gardener's Grendel interacts with the legend of Beowulf, and Michael Criton's Eaters of the Dead interacts with those, which all interact with the movie "The Thirteenth Warrior." There is interaction because it is public/published and because it enters into an hierarchical system of publication and marketing. I can write in the margins of a book all I want, but it's not the same. Hypertext, however, seems to offer that medium wherein I could read and write a text, and save the changes in the same program. Now that might be interaction, but what does it do to all the reader/author/text/context relationships Joyce discusses? And what does it make (hyper)text become? Would there no longer be text as we know it? And then what?