| Landow seems unwilling or incapable of distinquishing--for
more than a page or two at a time--between his ideal hypertext
and the examples of hypertext to which he refers. For example,
on several occasions, he identifies the WWW (something I thing
is up for dispute) as hypertextual. Yet many of the characteristics
of his ideal hypertext do not apply to the web or at least not
to all of it. |
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| "[H]ypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice"(36).
Is this true of all text we recognize as hypertextual or simply
of Landow's ideal hypertext? Is it true of the web? |
| Is the typical web page "infinitely recenterable"
(36)? He says that, "one of the fundamental characteristic of
hypertext is that it is composed of bodies of links texts that
have no primary axis of organization." Does that mean that a
text for which this is not true is therefore, given his designation
of "fundamental," not a hypertext? |
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| I'm much enamored of the metaphor of the rhizome and alternatives
it presents to the metaphor of the tree for thinking about structure.
I'm particularly struck by the potential of that metaphor for
the re-imagining of cognition and the construction of knowledge
and what Deleuze and Guattari say about "antigenealogy" and
"antimemory" (42). Landow acknowledges in this instance (42)
that the rhizome represents the ideal in hypertext, but elsewhere
he is less careful. |
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| "All hypertext systems permit the individual reader to choose
his or her own center of investigation and experience. What
this principle means is that the reader is not locked into any
particular organization or hierarchy" (38). All? |
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| He also fails to distinguish between any
electronic text and hypertext. Is any electronically rendered
version of a text (a word processed report for instance) automatically
hypertextual (by his definition)? Many of the claims he makes
apply to any electronic text but not necessarily to some texts
we commonly consider hypertexts. "[H]ypertext destroys the notion
of a fixed unitary text" (65). Why? How? |
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His list of the traits of hypertext--
- nonlinear/antilinear/multilinear
- decentered
- fluid
- dispersed
- polyphonic
- multivocal
- nonhierarchical
- collaborative
- virtual
- incomplete
- fragmentary
- atomized
--all apply equally to other electronic--and paper--text;
and I would argue that they do not all apply to hypertext,
at least not to all the permutations to which Landow alludes.
Nonlinear/antilinear/multilinear; why does he use these interchangeably?
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I am interested in hypertextuality, moreso than I
am in hypertext. And Landow does touch on issues of
the hypertextuality of paper texts etc., but when writing
about hypertext, he too often treats it as a monolithic concept,
as if all hypertext is equally hypertextual and that all hypertext
embody all the characteristics he claims (see incomplete list
to the left) equally.
I would be much more comfortable with a discussion of the
varying degrees of hypertextuality and some notion of where
he would draw the borders around this "borderless text."
After all his pains-taking efforts at definition in the first
chapter, I'm still left wondering what he means by the word
"hypertext" when he uses it later in the book.
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My primary response to this re-reading of Landow (at least
the first four chapters) has been impatience. I can deal pretty
well with a writer espousing a position with which I disagree,
but I'm frustrated when one takes up a position with which
I fundamentally agree but does so in such a way as to expose
it to ridicule. I have long been an advocate of the potentials
of hypertext, long interested in challenging the "naturalized"
technologies of paper, the book, the traditional publishing
cycle, etc., but Landow's absolute and unqualified claims
that these potentials have been realized and that those challenges
have been resolved by hypertext concern me and open hypertext
to dismissal and unwarranted skepticism in the field.
I can't make the claims Don
has made about Landow's use of Barthes, Derrida, et al. because
my own reading of these theorists has been sketchy, a long
time ago, or nonexistent, but I am concerned with what I see
as "bizarrely celebratory" (103) sloppiness elsewhere.
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