Hypertext Transforms and Shifts

After reading both Landow,Deleuze and Guattari's articles I learned some very interesting things about how, "hypertext transforms any document that has more than one link in to a... directory document that can employ to orient oneself and to decide where to go next," (37). This had me confused and I struggled to understand what he meant at first. But once I realized that he was stating how it’s up to the reader’s interpretation of that document and they decide how to use that information, it shows how Landow really focuses on how hypertext is a piece of a book. A text, book or literature that interlaces together, he says how "Intertextuality shifts attention from the triad constituted by author/ work/ tradition to another constituted by text/ discourse/ culture," (35). I took this to mean that the attention is no longer on the author's work, but that the reader has their attention on the text and the significance behind the text. 

According to Landow, "Hypertext is a fundamentally intertextual system, has the capacity to emphasize intextuality in a way that page bound text in books cannot," (35). This really helped me to better understand how accessible it is to use links when reading a text instead of having hard cover books that can easily be destroyed, it is better to not just protect the text by having electronic e-readers or tablets, but it preserves the text as well. But, unlike Landow who believes that hypertext is advancing with this generations coming of new technology, Deleuze and Guattari's believe that, "a book is an assemblage of this kind and s such is unattributible," (4). This had me very interested because we know that books are made of paper which is created out of trees, but unlike books who have transformed with technology, trees remain the same. For example, when Deleuze and Guattari's state how, "The tree is already the image of the world," I think this relates to what they are saying about how, "The world has become chaos but the book remains the image of the world," similar to how the tree is the image of the world, because the book is the tree (7).

  

Landow says how "both rhizomes and hypertext is closer to anarchy that to hierarchy," and how it can connect any point to any other point. This relates to what Landow says about plateaus interlacing or intertwining with rhizomes, "any, multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by... stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome,” it is the cause of a rhizome being mapped and not traced (39-41). However, Deleuze and Guattari's state how, "The rhizomes itself assumes very diverse forms..." (7).  They believe that rhizomes, "establish connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles," (7).