From: River . <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Apr 25, 2005 11:45 PM
Subject: [Reader-list] Hypertextual Poetry: A Study of MSN Poetry Communities
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sometimes, I procrastinate. Like certain things I do, even procrastination takes on gargantuan dimensions. So, after two (three?) months of silence, I am making a reappearance on the reader list. I have a litany of excuses, but will refrain from unleashing them on you.
I am back to cogitating on things like poetry and hypertext and this post will incorporate three months worth of research. Don't tell me later that you were not warned.
Since many people (some politely, some not so politely) posed this question to me, "What (the $^<#) do you mean by hypertext and what connection, if any, does it have to poetry?" my February post was supposed to deal with the meaning and application of the term in contemporary interdisciplinary areas. Therefore, in the first part of this post, I will look at the history and definition of hypertext. In the second segment, (my March portion) I will analyse a section of Stuart Moulthrop's essay, "You say you want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of the Media". I apologise in advance for the rather heavy theoretical stuff, but some things need to be done. On the positive side, these "things" need not be repeated. In the final bit, my post for this month, I will see if hypertextual formulations can be used to radically subvert generic constraints of 'traditional' poetry. For this purpose, I will briefly look at the architecture of MSN poetry sites and try to see — (i) if the structure of a medium can be seen as concomitant to the content of an aesthetic work, (ii) the empowering possibilities of "incompleteness" and (iii) whether this new, demystified poetic space can be a freeing one where linkages and affiliations can be privileged and glorified.
Theodore Nelson, who first coined the term, "Hypertext" in 1965, said in his 1981 manifesto, "Literary Machines", that "forty years from now (if the human species survives) there will be hundreds of thousands of file servers, and there will be hundreds and millions of simultaneous users." He had used the word, hypertext, to mean electronic textual connectivity. Hypertext, or "non-sequential writing", as Nelson puts it, as a system, refers to the connective, interactive potential of computers to reinvent texts, not as fixed symbols, but as a "variable access database in which any discursive unit may possess multiple vectors of association." The collective, linked text was called "docuverse" by Nelson and it held within itself the potential of limitless expansion. Nelson's new world, Xanadu, was the new textual universe, an optimistic look at writing as an epic of recovery. He talks of a "grand hope", "a return to literacy, a cure for television stupor, a new renaissance of ideas…a grand posterity." In this world, all work becomes "text", not a closed, contained substance, but a referential, open-ended connection.
Apparently, Nelson was inspired by a 1945 essay by an American engineer, Vannevar Bush. In this essay, entitled, "As We May Think", Bush envisaged a future in which mechanically linked bodies of texts (which he called "memex") would allow users to access information in a non-traditional, non-linear, almost recurrent fashion. As George Landow, one of the pioneering names in hypertextual literary theory, puts it, Bush's concept of connected textuality worked "to replace the essentially linear, fixed methods that had produced the triumphs of capitalism and industrialism with what are essentially poetic machines—machines that work according to analogy and association, machines that capture the anarchic brilliance of the human imagination."
Because hypertext, by definition, is a shifting, shimmering, interwoven network of links, webs, paths, the reader is no longer trapped within the authority of the page, but becomes a "virtual voyager" through icons, film clips, animated archives. For example, Landow, in his Hypercard Programme on Tennyson's "In Memoriam", says that such a non-linear poem can best be read, not sequentially, but through linkages and webbing. Each word, then, becomes a "hotspot", which, when clicked, opens up newer levels of information and annotation. The marginal, the tangential, the contingent, all become significant in this new system of knowledge. The fixity of the printed page can be transcended to reveal different modes of learning. As Landow states, hypertext "promises to have an effect on cultural and intellectual disciplines as important as those produced by earlier shifts in the technology of cultural memory that followed the invention of writing and printing."
This takes me to the March section of this post. Here I will look at certain portions of Stuart Moulthrop's essay, "You say you want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of the Media". He begins by giving an overview of Nelson's "Vision in a Dream, Xanadu". He explains with some care Nelson's use of the word, "populitism". Populitism, for Nelson, refers to the democratic space where "the deeper understandings of the few (can) at last (be made) available to the many." Moulthrop says that a "populite culture might mark the first step toward realisation of Lyotard's "game of perfect information" where all have equal access to the world of data. Moulthrop wants to know if Nelson's Xanadu and his vision of "populitism" can actually change the existing shape of written texts into radical hypertextuality.
For this purpose, he takes up four questions posed by Marshall McLuhan for a framework of a semiotics of technology. These four questions can be posed for any invention and they are: 1. What does it enhance or intensify?, 2. What does it render obsolete or displace?, 3. What does it retrieve that was previously obsolete?, 4. What does it produce or become when taken to its limit?
Moulthrop tries to answer these four questions by substituting "it" with "hypertext". So that the questions become: 1. What does hypertext enhance or intensify?, 2. What does hypertext render obsolete or displace?, 3. What does hypertext retrieve that was previously obsolete?, 4. What does hypertext produce or become when taken to its limit?
1. What does hypertext enhance or intensify?
Moulthrop is of the opinion that, if hypertext is about connection, linkage, affiliation, then it simply is an extension of what literature has always been.
2. What does hypertext render obsolete or displace?
He wonders if he could answer, "the book", but decides that the answer should be "the idiot box". It is the intellectual problem that hypertext seems excellently suited to address. So hypertext renders obsolete, not "literacy", but "post-literacy". It foresees a "revival of typographic culture (…in a truly dynamic, truly paperless environment)." Moulthrop knows that this may seem "naïve or emptily prophetic", but also knows that "it is quite likely, valid." Since "hypertext means the end of the death of literature." He also makes it clear that the hypertext culture must consider the incorporation of images and sounds and other interactive multimedia texts along with alphabetic script.
3. What does hypertext retrieve that was previously obsolete?
Here Moulthrop makes a rather startling comment about a second domain in hypertextual literacy, what Jay David Bolter calls, "writing space" as opposed to the ordinary, grammatical space of "literature". This "writing space" can be exploited by any literate person to become an author. All readers can become potential writers. Anyone can publish in hypertextual space and to write is to create a "secondary literacy".
4. What does hypertext produce or become when taken to its limit?
There is the fear that hypertext, when taken to its limit, might realise McLuhan's prophecy of reversal, "an empowering technology (may be) turned into a mechanism of co-option and enslavement." As Moulthrop says, perhaps Xanadu too would "sell out to Sony, Matsushita, Phillips or some other wielder of multinational leverage." However, he is optimistic, as long as there is a possibility of an "other place", a heterotopia, which would not work according to understood paradigms of property.
This discussion of Moulthrop's essay will be put to interpretational uses in the third part of my post, my April post. For all intents and purposes, this is where I start exploring the poetry sites run by Microsoft Network, more commonly known as MSN. Poetry is just one category among many other categories of discussion fora, which include subjects as diverse as sports, movies, health, automobiles or alternative sexual lifestyles. The groups are designed in a way whereby the "What's New" page shows links on the left, new pictures posted on the right, sponsored links and advertisements on the top, new messages below the welcome message and a list of new members (which can be viewed only by people who are already members) just below that. The slightest click by the reader/user will allow her entry; allow her to play in a polymorphic space that could take her to tangents of various kinds. It could take her to a decentred, dynamic space with very few and indeed, unstable hierarchical impediments.
[Links to the "what's new" page of a few sites:
http://groups.msn.com/themustardbastard/_whatsnew.msnw
http://groups.msn.com/Blackwidowswindowofpoetry/_whatsnew.msnw
http://groups.msn.com/ThePoetsPlace/_whatsnew.msnw ]
The architecture of these sites is such that one has to travel through complicated alleys of links to navigate the various boards and pages. More often than not, there are categories within categories like Haiku, erotic poetry, dark/horror poetry, comic poetry etc. this categorization would only mean more links to be traversed, more clickable pressure points to be negotiated.
Open groups, where membership is unrestricted, can be joined by anybody with the help of any hotmail e-mail account. One hotmail account gives you 3MB of storage space and the use of one screen name. You can use your real name, of course, but such instances are rare. As I said in my first post, my aim is not to investigate the use of disguises and constructed identities in computer-mediated communication. Enough work has already been done in this area. Suffice to say here that anonymous poetry, or poetry written under interesting screen names or "nicks", as they are called, can drastically change certain existing definitions of poetry as a lyric/subjective medium. The self-naming of the poet-persona can be read as an attempt to unsettle ordinarily held assumptions that the poetically created artefact is stitched to the body and the imagination of the individual who created the poetic text. The very fact that once you use up the 3MB of storage space allotted to you, you will have to rejoin with a new hotmail account and a new nickname (since the old one will show up as being already in use) proves that in this poetic space, the name of the creator, the aura of the original writer, is almost lost.
Even though this may seem unnecessarily anarchic to most people, there is much to be said about the instability and the decentredness of the authorial voice. This is a fundamental reconfiguring of text production and I would argue, also of reception. The reader will have to keep track of the polyvalence of the voices, read through the shifting mass of identities, textual materials and stylistic interweavings.
The movement of the poem from the written version to the typed, on-screen, what I call, the fonted version, is a tortuous one and requires basic computing skills. For instance, a direct copy-paste from MS Word to the posting pop-up would render the poem unintelligible since annoying HTML tags would taint the meaning of the poem. It would be interesting to frame this slippery space between technology and poetry according to Robert Pepperell's Post-human Manifesto (1995) where he says: (i) Human bodies have no boundaries and (ii) Post-humans regard their own being as embodied in an extended technological world. Though the manifesto is problematic in various ways, these are formulations that we need to take into consideration when we try to locate the literal embodiment of our poetic selves on the computer screen. I may look at this issue more closely in later posts.
In the MSN Poetry sites, we see a hypertextual privileging of recurrence, a permeable boundary between selves and machines, a confrontation with simultaneity (in so far as a poem can be read by any number of simultaneous users immediately after it is posted). The archives co-exist seamlessly with the present. Any poem in the archives can be brought back into the "What's New" page, can be "pushed to the top", "bumped" to the present. Because hypertext resists closure, we see that the poems exist in a state of chaotic incompleteness. There are no final endings; a poem can be infinitely reworked, reedited, can exist in a perpetual workshop space. So the reader is no longer an outsider to the text, but a richly interactive, almost busily so, entity. Sometimes, a poem almost takes on a "patchwork"-like quality, and I do not mean this in the pejorative sense. Readers put in various inputs, delete lines, add new words, change punctuation and line breaks, sometimes rewrite entire stanzas, sometimes, the whole poem.
This recombinant potential of hypertext, the usage of "writing space" for "secondary literacy", where all readers are potential writers (or at least commentators, critics and editors) is something that we have to keep in mind. It also erases commonly held suppositions that the gift of poetry is granted by higher powers to only a selected few. Hypertextually speaking, all accessors of data are poets in the making. It is interesting that poetry is also freed substantially from the tyranny of the written word and annotations can be visual or aural links, animated graphics, movie clips, poetry readings/recordings. All these can become part of the poetic text, in fact can become the poetic text, making its meaning roll into formerly unimaginable areas.
If we look at Moulthrop's discussion of McLuhan's final question, we see that there is a fear of being co-opted, appropriated within the existing power structures of capital. We cannot afford to forget that these groups are run by managers and assistant managers. The creator/manager of a group can design/change the front page, add or delete pages/boards, delete single comments or whole discussion threads, invite or ban members and also assign assistant managers to help in the general running and maintenance of the site. Even though the powers exercised by many managers are minimal, there are sites where the rules cited by MSN are followed strictly. Moreover, advertisers and sponsors are difficult to erase even though spammers and porn-bots are kept out by frequent banning. Moreover, Microsoft, after all, is a great wielder of power. So will the vehement pluralism, the heterotopia of this space be compromised and lead to reversal and enslavement? I will look at the problems raised by these questions/observations in my May post.
Nitoo Das
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