C Y B E R T E X T

 

HORIZONTAL/VERTICAL = HYPERTEXT/CYBERTEXT

by Anne-Marie Boisvert


One should keep in mind that a "literary" work on the Net (as any other Internet "event") is generated along two axes: one vertical, the other horizontal.

The horizontal axis is the occasion for links and references from word to word, from word to image and from image to word, from paragraph to paragraph, subject to subject, and text to text. Such is the Web, a fabric of interwoven texts, images, objects - the product, also, of authors' and readers' actions, of all the clickings, searches and wanderings, the backtrackings and bifurcations. This is the Web, of which we have all seen the exponential growth during the nineties, sites and users increasing to the point where the Web is now a medium for work, research and entertainment, as well as a means of economic exchange and, as such, the stakes in a power struggle. The increasing "user-friendliness" of personal computers, designed and sold as household appliances, is not an entirely innocent phenomenon in this context. In other words, it is not a coincidence that the commercial success of PCs and of the Web rests on intentionally superficial effects of attraction, users' control becoming ever more illusory as emphasis is placed on look and design, and as an object-based language gradually replaces procedural language, Microsoft abandoning DOS in favour of Windows 95-98-2000 - that is, of an operational mode heavily "inspired" by the Mac.

The vertical axis, on the other hand, is probably ignored most of the time: it is what underlies the Web; it is the machine and its machinations.

 

HYPERTEXT/CYBERTEXT

Several theoreticians (see texts by Jean Clément, Landow, and others, listed in the bibliography, as well as our own feature, published in the Ciac's December 1999 issue of the Magazine électronique) have emphasized the fact that the Web, as an interlaced hypertext, allows for the literary production of "Text" as defined by post-structuralists (such, mainly, as Julia Kristeva and, following her, Roland Barthes). For what hypertextuality promises and allows for is precisely the transformation of the notion of text, traditionally conceived as a linear unfolding, with beginning, middle and end, in the image of its supporting media - the unrolled papyrus, or the book one leafs through - on which it was presented to the reader and, more profoundly still, marked by the very necessity of the material possibilities and limits of this support. On the whole, one notes that text as a concept has always depended - necessarily and practically, whether its author or reader was conscious of it or not - on its supporting media, which text itself may play upon, revel in, or endure.

An example of the force of this medium and of the writer/reader model is the veritable sense of guilt it engenders in the reader, accused of "cheating" if he happens to sometimes skip a passage deemed too long, too obscure or simply bland, or of outright sin, if he succumbs to the temptation of "looking ahead" by immediately reading the end (whether to reassure himself of the characters' fates or, more egotistically, to check whether readi!ng the book is worth his while). Traditional text therefore takes on the aspect of an imperative "superego": the idea of suspense, when one thinks about it, is founded on this taboo against "looking ahead," lifting the veil, wanting to know everything right away, too fast - and, above all, the culpable pleasure associated with doing so. Hence its success in detective fiction, which Umberto Eco describes (in the short appendix to his hit novel The Name of the Rose) as a "philosophical novel par excellence;" one could add "psychoanalytic novel par excellence," as the reader identifies himself not only with the detective but also with the culprit, the traditional reading process becoming a kind of Oedipal drama.

Hypertext, finally freed from the confines of the printed book, affords the reader another textual model, that of the loom (tissage). Certainly, this model was - and is - always present in all! texts one may read: that is, all texts may at least be read as "proto-hypertext," and therefore as "Text" in the post-structuralist sense described by Julia Kristeva and, as already mentioned, by Roland Barthes (for instance, in an excellent summary of this concept of writing/reading in his article for the Encyclopedia Universalis). According to these theoreticians, to go from (traditional) text to (proto-hyper-) Text one need only disregard the taboo, override the page model, go beyond the page, parceled out, black on white, to see not only the unfolding, but the very structure, itself a weaving of interlaced strands; to go beyond the author's words as well, to ask one's self at each step what the latter may or may not have meant, to shamelessly accept the pleasure of intertextuality, the pleasure of words that, taken for themselves, weave their own links - their proto-hyperlinks.

Paper-based media had therefore already allowed text to become hypertext, or at least proto-hypertext, if one must be precise, since it is certain that the invention of the computer and, especially, that of the Internet and of the Web have greatly facilitated, improved and accelerated these possibilities, to the point of actualizing the post-structuralist, "Barthean," and post-modern dream of Text as such, of the Web. But the concept of hypertext does not entirely take into account the particularity of the relationships between the digital medium and the text produced therein, visible on the screen, which I will call "cybertext."

All in all, "Cybertext" - that text which appears on the computer screen as a product of both natural and artificial languages - is Text (hypertext) conceived as a "cyborg," the creature of science-fiction, part natural, part artificial, in that it is actualized through digital processes and not simply theorized - or dreamt of - by writers and post-structuralist theoreticians.

 

VISIBLE/INVISIBLE = "TRANSPARENCY & DECEPTION"

Why is cybertext generally ignored in favour of hypertext? The answer variously lies in practicality, in elegance and readability, in the ease of manipulation and access for the user - but the reasons are also economic and political, and concern power, information control, and market share (see Marcel O'Gorman's "Transparence & Déception" in CTheory on this topic).

The question is therefore: to show or not to show one's code. For artists working on the Web, it is an important ethical and artistic question (see Mark Napier's commentaries in the interview published by Rhizome...). Should they answer the question at the outset, and choose their "palette" of tools accordingly? Should they work with HTML or Javascript, for instance, rather than use Flash and Shockwave - that is, should they allow the user to access the code by "viewing source"? Or should artists stick unquestionably to their initial vision, to their conception of the work to be, and choose their means of expression - that is, their programming language - according to that?

It becomes obvious that literary texts on the Web always imply another text; yet the code itself, made visible through View Source, at least for some readers, and which author and reader may take as the text's double, a second work to be deciphered, is also doubled by another text, another code, and so on, until one reaches the literal/un-readable machine code, with its bits of 1s and 0s, and the final materiality of the chip. Is something in the text therefore always hidden? "The Real is that which is impossible," as Lacan put it, - impossible to decipher?

 

AN ICONIZATION OF LANGUAGE? NO: RATHER A SYMBOLIZATION OF THE IMAGE, OF WEB OBJECTS

The coming of writing - and of writings (écritures) - is surely the founding moment of great civilizations, allowing for the visualization and manipulation of symbols (that is, their objectification), as well as of their preservation and transmission. Printing, followed by mass media (where image, sound, and movement, inscribed and reproduced, have already become signs), as in the Web now, constitute an extension of this instrumental logic, facilitating and democratizing the means of production/manipulation/dissemination of signs. Each, no doubt, has its particularity. It is therefore a question here of examining how multimedia and particularly the Web are characterized, and how they characterize the works (to use a classic expression), which they serve to produce/manipulate/disseminate.

First of all, digital language/media, which has the advantage over analog languages precisely in being a language (in its simplest form, that of boolean algebra, of binary logic), now allows one to translate language, sound, image, and so on, in a common "idiom," greatly facilitating their manipulation, integration, and dissemination, and blurring further still the divisions of work between users and producers.

Thus, rather than speak of the "iconization of language" (where we would seem to remain, even to regress, in analog thinking), it would be truer to speak of the symbolization of the image (of sound, etc.), for the Web, more than any other existing medium, authorizes the integration of all signs in a homological (cf. R. Barthes) structure (that would ultimately represent the Web as a whole, as in the Mallarmean Book), a structure of tabulation, of the network, of intertext, of the "intersign." Thus also for space, for the Web introduces a temporal dimension into this very space (circulation of signs and, within the signs, of the reader/writer...).

 

PROGRAMMING/COMPILATION/EXECUTION

The electronic literary work is therefore unique in that it depends on computer languages for its existence, to be created, transmitted and read. Languages are layered within it, each level bringing its own translation of the work to the construction of the whole. Thus, as opposed to formal logic, whose aim is to reduce ordinary language (or any other domain) by formalizing it, substituting itself for and replacing it, computer languages represent and double, at each level, the work made visible on the screen, each language level hiding the previous one, without erasing it, however: in other words, the visible is the result of an invisible foliation of metalanguages, each translatable by the other.

In theory, these various translations all serve the final, screen-rendered product and should remain hidden, buried, forgotten, to the extent that the passage from one to the other, of the one in the other, was well implemented - that all "bugs" have been squashed. Modernism in literature and in art, however, has defined itself above all as a realization of and a reflection upon the medium used - whether it be language, words, writing, or painting tools. Electronic literature must also effect a critical reflection on its own implementation that takes its medium into a account.

 

OF THE SYMBOLIC, THE IMAGINARY, AND THE REAL

One can indeed observe this typically modernist critical reflection by the work on itself, on its own means of production, in many electronic literary works, and it occurs at three levels.

First, at the symbolic level, the suppressed signs of the layered code come back in the text - and generate bugs, contaminations, monstrous or ironic juxtapositions, where the reader witnesses the appearance and disappearance of the different language levels, manipulated and fragmented. Examples of such works are those of Mark Napier, JODI, mindfuck/netochka, commented in our Web Works section.

Second, at the level of imagination, electronic literary works rather choose to explore the computer medium for screen and page effects, for palimpsest and mirror effects, for the play of surface and depth. Thus the work of Vannina Maestri, in Poezie 2000, also commented in this magazine.

Finally, some authors are inclined to bring the machine, of sorts, into play in their works - a play that, depending on the work, can perhaps approach or even realize the dream of a machine-man, the result of a concatenation of hardware and wetware. We are here at the third level, that in which electronic literary works depend for their existence o!n this ultimate place or moment at the heart of the machine, where the electronic circuits awaken to language, where the real meets the symbolic. One can mention here the work of Jean-Pierre Balpe on computer-generated literature, and the work of Mouchette, Wattlechick, also commented in this magazine.

 

THE MACHINE/AUTHOR/READER = TOWARDS A NEW WRITING?

Thus, bringing and tying together the three levels of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, electronic literature becomes cybertext - and, as such, reveals the "nature" of the cyborg com-puter that, in the world of machines created by man, gives it a unique place, one that is made in its own image, speaking it and speaking of it, lending it a mirror and drawing it towards the troubled and silent depths of the screen, its electromagnetic circuits capable, under certain conditions - like the human brain -, of generating works.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Anne-Marie Boisvert


Anne-Marie Boisvert completed a Bachelor's degree and pursued graduate studies in French literature (with a concentration in textual theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis) at Université de Montréal. She holds a Master's degree and has pursued doctoral studies in the analytic philosophy of language and exact sciences at Université de Montréal. She worked as a research and teaching assistant in Université de Montréal's philosophy department and has taught philosophy at Collège de Maisonneuve. As a writer, Boisvert has contributed to the Centre international d'art contemporain de Montréal's (CIAC) Electronic Magazine since November 1999, while also maintaining the organization's Web site. Her essay on electronic literature and hypertext, published in issue 9 of the Electronic Magazine (December 1999), has since been republished in the French revue Ressources.

 



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