Hypertext & Metapictures

      When thinking about and exploring hypertextuality and metapictures, it's interesting to examine the role of the reader. A reader engaging with a hypertext has utmost control of their experience with that text and each reader can emerge from the other side of experiencing this text with a completely different understanding. Landow describes this as the property of a hypertext having an infinite amount of central points, "Hypertext, in other words, provides an infinitely recenterable system whose provisional point of focus depends upon the reader, who becomes a truly active reader in yet another sense" (36). The quality of hypertext having many central points is depicted quite well by Deleuze and Guattari as comparing hypertexts to the root system known as a rhizome.




 A rhizome is an interconnected root system where all of the roots link to one another and tie back to one another in some way. This is a network where any point connects to any other point much like, of course, a hypertext. And in reading Mitchell's "Metapictures" I observed many connections between hypertextuality and the theorists we've studied so far. For instance, the idea of a movable center that is dependent on the reader's mind felt very Lockean to me. Understanding words, images, and hypertexts from an individual worldly perspective ties into Locke's belief that every person has a different understanding of the same words, ideas, and concepts.

Similarly, a particular description of metapictures by Mitchell also felt like it was directly describing hypertextuality, "The result is a curious hybrid that looks like nothing else but itself" (53). Bear with me here as I make endless connnections in a stream of consciousness fashion, but this brings me to something we discussed in class. Specifically, a drawing Matt came up with and fleshed out on the white board. I think as rhetoricians what we have to understand when exploring hypertextuality is that no thought or creation is completely original (gasps). His drawing was a scale where on the left you have highly original or groundbreaking works, in the middle you have "remix" type works, and on the left you have pretty blatant copies such as all of the folk music Bob Dylan stole and passed off as his.

Acknowledging that in the twenty-first century it's nearly impossible to create something completely original is a bit jarring and unsettling at first. However, after this you realize that just because no individual thought is original doesn't mean that a new mixing and culmination of multiple thoughts/ideas/samples isn't original. Here's where you again get that "curious hybrid that looks like nothing else but itself" (53). Hypertext is the nesting of ideas and images together and in creating that nest you're creating something new that has never been combined before. Just like in exploring a hypertext every individual will have a unique experience.

This scale of originality is comparable to Mitchell's metapicture scale where the duck-rabbit is the least self-reflective and Las Meninas is the most self-reflective. Additionally, Mitchell's claim that no gaze is stable is very reflective of Landow's claim that no center is stable. We clearly see hypertext and metapictures go hand in hand. For Mitchell, images aren't just texts, they are way larger than that. We may use text to try and understand images as much as we can though and to bridge the gap between discourse and representation. And when we reach an impasse, rather than giving up and placing blame on the imperfection of words, we should use as Mitchell quotes Foucalt, "their incompatibility as a starting point instead of an obstacle to be avoided" (64).

One issue I had with Mitchell's work was one point where he says that if Foucalt hadn't written about Las Meninas as being a metapicture that it wouldn't be a metapicture at all. This seemed to conflict with his earlier argument that all pictures could be seen as metapictures to some degree. The power is in the viewer when viewing a picture as being a metapicture or not. I've personally seen Las Meninas at the Prado in Spain and obviously it was way before I knew the term metapicture but I still understood the work to be highly self-reflexive at that time. I think Mitchell's point though was that historically Las Meninas wouldn't have been understood as being meta until Foucalt picked up on it.

On a similar sidenote, I wanted to answer the question about the link between Landow and Miller. I highly agree with the fact that hypertextuality ties in with genre as social action. Exploring a hypertext and even a metapicture is action in and of itself because it takes conscious effort to move through a work like this and break it down. This breaking down occurs on an individual and societal level. Hypertext itself is interesting as its own genre because its hard to categorize based off content instead of form. Hypertextuality in and of itself implies that there are many contexts, ideas, social, historical, and psychological perspectives being represented in a multifaceted and perhaps multimedia text.