My earliest experiences with “hypertext” mostly involved unformatting hyperlinked words in a word processor. Copying paragraphs from my browser into Word, I’d yet to conceive of the true value, flexibility, and reflexivity of the blue and underlined words I labored to change back to plain black “words.” They were more or less an aesthetic nuisance, to me — accidental Word Art. I was probably in 3rd grade, relatively new to writing technologies and totally clueless to the significance of the kind of non-linear reading hypertext encourages let alone the concept of intertextuality .
In the past few years, i’ve encountered several instances of hypertext that expanded the notion of hypertext and its intertextual significance, including Talan Memmott’s hyper textual novel “Lexia to Perplexia,” which did me the favor of breaking down tedious reader/observer barriers in favor of a more interactive, flexible, and extra-referential presentation. As Landow writes in Hypertext and Critical Theory, such a medium “permits the individual reader to choose his or her own center of investigation and experience.”
Perhaps the most moderately challenging yet truly important passage to my understanding of hypertext arrives on page 34, in regard to the print medium’s viability as hypertext. From Derrida, Landow gathers that hypertext can be implicit, particularly in non electronic forms. In many ways, per my formative word-processing and hyperlink stripping experiments, bare text in a word processor seems to to occupy the same space, connected to the external world in infinite ways according to the significations and references in words and concepts alike.
While the “meta” prefix doesn’t strike me as particularly challenging on the surface, I had a difficult time applying it here but certainly see what I believe to be the “second-order discourse” described in Mitchell’s “Metapictures.” Hypertext may not be “self-referential” to the point of referencing the process by which it is created (in physical print formats, specifically) but besides being “anti-theatrical” “decentered” I’m interested in identifying a more concrete relationship between metapictorial and hyper textual forms.
It's funny that you included your first experience with hypertext involving the unformatting of hyperlink because that was also my first experience, except I can't trace it as far back as third grade. Just as Landow claimed, this medium allows the reader to lead his investigation/experience; and as you pointed out, it's an activity that relies on interaction rather than just observing. Additionally, you're right in stating that hypertext isn't exactly "self-referential." What I think might help you better identify or understand these complex relationships, like that of metapictorial and hyper-textual forms, is to try comparing them to rhizomes. You talked a lot about Landow and some of Mitchell so I think it's a good idea to also throw Deleuze and Guattari into the mix. Something I'd like for you to keep in mind is that the rhizome is "a map and not a tracing," thus highlighting a similar "decentering" feature you had touched upon in your post.
ReplyDeleteHyperlinks are definitely a clear example of hypertext that we have all probably experienced pretty early on in life since we live in the Digital Age. Good job making that connection! As for the link between metapictures and hypertextuality, I think there is a connection there that cannot be ignored. For one thing, Landow's text about hypertext is metatextual in its own right because it is written about hypertext, but it has hypertext of its own in all the works it references and all the other articles it inspired. In a way, Landow's essay is self reflexive since it addresses its own hypertext while discussing hypertext. Also, Mitchell's concept of the metapicture requires us to observe pictures textually and pay attention to their hypertext in order to truly understand them and what it is that makes them metapictures. His comparison of several metapictures to one another (Duck-Rabbit, Las Meninas, Les Trashion des Images, etc.) shows that every metapicture has its own hypertext. In studying something as in depth as Mitchell studies metapictures, hypertext must be taken into consideration.
ReplyDelete-Kayla Goldstein