Hypertext, reveal yourself!

This week's readings of Hypertext and Critical Theory and Rhizome prove to be difficult to grasp.  Between understanding the metaphors used by Guattari and Deleuze and deciphering the meanings behind the terms that all three of theorists presented,  disentangling the theories and terms presented proved to be more challenging. I couldn't fully understand what defines a hypertext. So, I charge into this post trying to fully understand what we have read. What is hypertext and how is it a rhizome supposed to help us understand it?

Landow indicates that hypertext is a vast assemblage by making reference to Derrida. How is it an assemblage? What is it an assemblage of? "Hypertext...has the capacity to emphasize intertextuality in a way that page bound text in books cannot" (Landow 35). This also suggests that it surpasses the limits of intertextuality. But it also suggests that there is a similarity between the two. What is that similarity? "Hypertext which is a fundamentally intertextual system." This informs us that hypertext functions through intertextuality. Intertextuality according to The Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms, is "the condition of interconnectedness among texts, or the concept that any text is an amalgam of others, either because it exhibits sign of influence or because its language inevitably contains common points of reference with other texts through such things as allusion, quotation, genre, style" (249). In layman's terms, hypertexts serve to make connection among points that influence each other through genre, style, content or context etc. But if this interconnectedness surpasses that of a printed text, where can this hypertextuality go? How broad is the scope of the hypertext?

Unlike the printed text, "hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice." It is open to multiplicity and a perpetual extension of focus. In hypertext, "...the voice is always that distilled from the combined, experience of the momentary focus, the lexias one presently reads, and the continual forming narrative of one's reading path" (Landow 36). This multiplicity in hypertext is represented by the metaphor of the Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome. "A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains," similarly, the hypertext is always linking itself to other parts of the chain (Deleuze and Guattari 7). While the printed text has a subject, in  a hypertext, there is not a set subject that a reader has to hold true to because the focus of the book is always changing. A hypertext functions like a rhizome,, which is constantly multiplying itself. "A multiplicty has neither a subject nor object, only determinations, magnitude and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature" (Deleuze and Guattari 8). Therefore, the hypertext doesn't have a true subject nor object, only facets that cannot change without recentering the entire nature of the text.

Because of all these different dimensions or facets that puppets the hypertext, "One experiences hypertext as an infinitely decenterable and recenterable system" ( Landow37). The text itself is always changing, the content being completely dependent upon the reader. Landow informs us that, "hypertext transforms any document that has more than one link into a transient centre, a directory document that one can employ to orient oneself and to decide where to go next." I think it is safe then to assume that a hypertext serves as a directory for a reader by making connections among different genres, quotations, style, context, content and allusions. I remain unsure however, about whether or not a reader can retrace a path that has been trod before. If the system is always decentering and recentering can we ever get back to the same centre or point of focus?

-Kelli

Works Cited: 

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1987. 3-25, excerpted.

Landow, George P. “Hypertext and Critical Theory.” In Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1997. 33-48.

 Ray, Ross Murfin and Supryia. The Bedford Glossary of Critical an Literary Terms . 3rd. Boston: Palgrave Macmilan , 2009.