Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing

Johndan Johnson-Eilola's book weaves together a number of concerns, some of which have been integrated into the five years or so of discussions that followed it, and some of which still deserve to be. In his opening chapter, Johnson-Eilola raises a number of issues that set the tone for the chapters that follow. First among them is something that has crept into our discussions on a regular basis, and that's the limitations that we impose upon our discussions if we "stick to the text." Both literacy and technology are social, and that attitude infuses this book at every step along the way. Johnson-Eilola labels hypertext an "ambivalent" technology (23), and while that ambivalence is the "potential openness" (28) that represents hypertext's critical possibility, it is also open to appropriation by more conservative interests. Actualizing these possibilities for Johnson-Eilola is a matter of mapping, discovering, and interrogating the borders, the borders among "kinds" of hypertext, among the theories (postmodernism, post-Fordism, romanticism, cultural studies) that have been used (and will continue to be used) to inform hypertextual practice, and among our own approaches to (inevitably social) technologies. One border that Johnson-Eilola seeks to blur here is the distinction between functional and critical computer literacies (20), a formulation that has been taken up by any number of technologists in our field. Johnson-Eilola's treatment of this distinction is, to my mind, excellent. It is one thing to champion "critical thinking" or "critical literacies"--who in their right mind believes in uncritical thinking? But Johnson-Eilola justifies critical computer literacy on a number of fronts. Functionality in our literacies blinds us to the contingent (i.e., negotiable) borders that surround databases, help menus, and other "genres" of hypertext that reach more people in a day than texts like Afternoon will in a year. Functionality keeps us from seeing technology as an arena for social change. Viewing our computers and software as tools mystifies the degree to which we can negotiate them (and the social constellations that they represent). Towards the end of the first chapter, Johnson-Eilola maps out his book for us as the articulation of a brief taxonomy (hypertext as functional text, as online research space, and as a space for reading and writing), preceded by a detour into cultural studies and followed by a conclusion that will complicate the scheme laid out in the body of the book. The opening chapter closes with the modest proposal that "the potential openness of the text...might possibly be exploited as an explicitly political and social activity by writers, writing teachers, and writing theorists" (28).

The second chapter of the book lays out the theoretical approaches that Johnson-Eilola promises to employ throughout the remainder of the book. Hypertext theory, according to Johnson-Eilola, "seems stuck within a stage of postmodernism," and he looks to cultural studies to provide the "self-critique and rehabilitation" that it lacks (29). The chapter opens by drawing a strong connection between the proto-hypertextual work of Vannevar Bush/Ted Nelson and Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. While labeling Bush (a governmental researcher who was advocating efficiency in information storage) an "anti-authoritarian" is an eyebrow-raiser for me, the shared concern among the three with access to information is a fair one. And the problem that each runs into, implied by Johnson-Eilola, is that access is given as an all-or-nothing formulation. Johnson-Eilola's approach is self-consciously "reformist" in the sense that it advocates a more practical, gradual response than perhaps Lyotard or Nelson. In doing so, he turns first to the "border pedagogy" of Henry Giroux and the "contact zones" theorized by Mary Louise Pratt. Both theories contribute to our ability to map out positions of power, and to see the contingencies of those maps. But without a more explicit theory of change, such maps can reinforce the territories they are meant to disturb. With change in mind, Johnson-Eilola turns to the work of Stuart Hall. Hall's articulation theory, rather than focusing on borders that separate, instead works with articulations, the connections among ideologies, subjects, institutions, et al. "Articulation theory is well suited to critiques of technology such as hypertext," writes Johnson-Eilola, "because of the ways in which this perspective tracks multiple, contradictory influences throughout the processes of production, mediation, consumption, and redefinition" (47). The second chapter ends with perhaps the most concise statement of Johnson-Eilola's thesis: "Hypertext can be rearticulated as neither a completely conservative replication and automation nor a postmodern dispersal of order and agency, but instead as a conscious struggle to appropriate, reinvent, and criticize structures of meaning and power" (48).

Chapter 3 speaks of the "functional" articulation of hypertext, and offers a vision of help menus, reference materials, et al., that is substantially different from the hypertext scholarship we've read thus far. An emphasis on functionality (and the range of values that it includes: efficiency, progress, transparency, speed, automation, control) articulates hypertext as a "new, improved book machine" (56). For my money, the most compelling moment in this chapter comes on page 71, where Johnson-Eilola suggests that hypertext enters the workplace as a "conservative process, a way of making progress in the drive toward increased technical efficiency." His discussion of how the social context for hypertext can transfer (and condition) expectations of efficiency, speed, etc,. to the users of such texts is also quite excellent. He relents in his position somewhat at the end of the chapter, but that doesn't detract from what is potentially one of the most interesting blind spots in hypertext theory, the tendency to decontextualize a technology that supposedly attends to contexts in ways never before possible.

Chapter 4 closes with an expression of hope that may have already slipped into nostalgia, the need to "increase the sense that the WWW is more of a community than a conduit or marketplace" (134). While such a sense may no longer be realistic, this chapter does a nice job of detailing the process by which online research hypertexts (or databases) function to translate knowledge and language into discrete objects. The paradox that Johnson-Eilola describes on page 117, the process by which information is spatialized, naturalized, and commodified has always struck me as interesting as well. In some ways, one of the main threads of this chapter takes us back to the emphasis on borders and maps. What we describe (and hear described) as information storage is ultimately information mapping (articulation). Regardless of how objective or disinterested the map (and its makers) claims to be, maps privilege certain elements at the expense of others. If it's not on the map, then we assume that there's a good (non-contingent) reason for its exclusion. Why aren't there any women or writers of color in the canon? For a long time, the standard answer was that such writers hadn't produced work worthy of inclusion. The canon (one example of a map) was held to be reflective rather than normative and exclusive. Given the uses to which we put maps, we place a certain faith in them, a belief in both their accuracy and objectivity. As a result, "they may encourage a functional literacy of electronic space--how to get around, but not necessarily how to critique, integrate, and present information" (129).

In chapter 5, Johnson-Eilola offers a more specific analysis of the sort of hypertext with which we've concerned ourselves in this course, and the notion of "space as construct" that he identifies as an alternative to the commodity space in Chapter 4. In this chapter, he takes on some of the targets we've identified in prior weeks: "Dismantling the technology of the print book does not necessarily remove the social forces that articulated the classic book text" (137), he writes, both justifying his own project and pointing up the weaknesses of some of the theorists who have preceded him. This chapter lays out "two key ways of thinking about postmodern space: geometrical and geographical" (139), the former alluding to the commodity maps of chapter 4 and the current-traditional model of composition pedagogy. Geography is offered as an analogue both of process pedagogy and of the territory that is mapped. While we might expect him to establish geography as superior in this chapter, Johnson-Eilola does a fair job of examining the difficulties of each. Geometries don't offer much resistance to the institutional authority that Landow claims to subvert, but geographies ultimately disperse meaning to nothingness. If geometries freeze and "map out" time, geographies reduce it to a flattened, endless wandering (169). Missing from both, according to Johnson-Eilola, is "an overt sense of the place of postmodernism as a method of constructive and social resistance" (172), and it is with this suggestive promise that he turns to his final chapter.

The final chapter opens by explaining that "we must add strength to the sense of hypertext use as social and political activity" (180), and Johnson-Eilola takes on each of the articulations from the body of the book in an attempt to do just that. To the In Memoriam Web and Forking Paths, he contrasts a hybrid, collaborative chat/StorySpace session at the 1992 Computers and Writing Conference. It provides "a combination of geography and geometry apart from universal truths but still in the social, which becomes the realm of contingent truths" (201). The commodified online research space is opposed to Landow's Context 34, where "the act of citation here is one of association or recognition rather than possession or appropriation--seeing rather than taking" (221). Finally, Johnson-Eilola suggests a rearticulation of the functional hypertext, one where we would be "coupling the intertextual, intersubjective tendencies of online text with the increased managerial interest in collaborative work" (235). The chapter (and the book) closes with two "primary impulses" necessary for critical computer literacy as he's defined it here: first, the politicization of the "production and consumption of cultural meanings"; and second, the socialization of hypertext in all its forms so as to interrogate (and overcome) the boundaries that naturalize these articulations, "boundaries that serve to rationalize hegemonic relationships" (241).

Collin Gifford Brooke