Article in a print journal

Postmodernist poets' continued use of the self-consciously "material" print media of high modernism, in tactical response to life in a postmodern, technologically mass-mediated society (even while they embrace new electronic media as well), is a literally "literary" form of resistance to both the dematerializing, utilitarian ends of technology--what artist Simon Penny terms the "engineering world view" 8 --and the pure theoretic mode that, in its estrangement from or resistance to art practice, reverts to apocalyptic (or, less often, utopian) prophecy.

Paranoids produce not just delusions but delusional systems, structures of compound association that attempt to embrace "everything in the Creation." Here we have a clear parallel with constructive hypertext—infinitely extensible, repeatable, and emergent, with an inexhaustible latency of other orders. If the exploratory text is a conspiracy, then the constructive text is a kind of lunacy, a riotous proliferation of discourse (something like Pynchon's novels themselves, only moreso).

This negative disposition of hypertext travel language is a subsidiary effect of its function as metaphor. The resemblance of the activity of threading through a complex document to that of forecasting a ship's route, or guiding its rudder, is based on a process of approximation common to both processes. (It's a critical cliché, but perhaps not unproductive to point out here that the root meaning of "metaphor" is grounded in shift, displacement, movement, etc.: "metaphor," from Latin, metaphora, Greek, metapherein, to transfer, to carry [pherein] something from one place to another.) "Navigation" implies movement and a changing proximity to a destination. The movement should be, as I mentioned before, intentional, and the proximity should, ideally, increase, but navigation as a strategy undertaken to bring you closer to a goal happens only during the journey, not once you get to where you were going. Each moment of the journey-as-navigation is conditioned by the deferral that shapes its entire trajectory. Movement qualifies as navigation, not because it's undertaken with a goal in mind, or because it brings you closer to your destination (though it is always measured against an end that progresses logically—teleologically—from the point of departure), but because you're not there yet.

To read the link as purely a directional or associative structure is, I would argue, to miss—to disavow—the divisions between the threads in a hypertext. "Missing" the divisions is how the intentionality of hypertext navigation is realized: the directedness of the movement across the link constitutes a kind of defense against the spiraling turn that the link obscures (Harpold, 1991, 181, n6). What you see is the link as link, but what you miss is the link as gap.

The problem with getting inside the act of reading for writers and theorists alike is its ubiquity—there's no escaping it, and, like any environment with which we are overly familiar, we no longer see it. So take it all away: all the familiar trappings, the pages and their numbers, the binding, the heft of a book, its cover, the chapters, table of contents, the dwindling supply of pages that lets you know you're nearing the end. And we're left with something more basic than soliciting and wheedling, blanks, gaps, or spots of indeterminacy. We're left with what constitutes the act of reading, and what we read for, why we stop reading, and ultimately, why we bother to read at all. The concrete act of reading itself does not necessarily seem tied to why we read in any larger sense, which is probably one of the reasons no theorist in the schools of either reception-theory or reader-response has actively pursued any inquiry into why, for example, we read fiction. Reading the printed word is one of the things we do: reading for pleasure (as opposed to reading in the pursuit of, say, specific knowledge for end-defined reasons) is something that we cannot explain in terms of Iser's schematized aspects or Sartre's directed creation because we are never thrown back on such primary resources when we read. When we read print narratives, we arrive already equipped with a full repertoire of reactions and strategies, including turning to the last chapter to find out who really knocked off Roger Ackroyd or skimming over all those huge chunks of exposition in Bleak House. We never come face to face with the ground zero of reading—just why the hell we do it. But we do reach that ground zero in reading narratives like afternoon and WOE. Here the question becomes one of your resources, if only when you acknowledge it.

"Experimental multimedia's 'labyrinths and... interlacings of matter' invite a decoding of hidden histories of the hieroglyph (the paradoxical cryptograph of the hieroglyph), and a critique of the emerging international language of 'user friendly.' If the objects of this avant-garde are not all immediately what we expected, it is because they document something important about the artist and his/her uncertain relation to the new medium."

"This is the noosphere of police work--where the intellect not only flows between members of a highly collaborative, elite crime unit, but between the living and the dead. It is not a supernatural force at play here, but the immortal technology of advanced police work. . . . _Homicide_ is law enforcement in the age of fuzzy logic."