Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
Landow. Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins Press, 1992. xii + 242 pp. $48.50 hardcover, 15.95
paperback.
The subtitle of this book describes a meeting, or attempted meeting, between critical theory and
the new interactive, manipulable, interpolable, computer text. The thesis is that both partners in
the meeting "argue that we must abandon conceptual systems based upon ideas of center, margin,
hierarchy and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks."
(2.) I believe that it might be more accurate to describe hypertext in Landow's book not so much
as one of the partners but as the venue or locale of a somewhat different meeting, between
traditional literary scholarship and poststructuralist critique, with implications that are both
fascinating and disturbing.
Landow's book is a good introduction to the kinds of hypertext that can be used in literature
classes. The description of his own hypertext version of Tennyson's In Memoriam is especially
valuable. In his discussion of the Victorian sermonist Henry Melvill he shows that hypertext can
be valuable for traditional scholarship as well. He quotes Vannevar Bush, Walter Ong and Alvin
Kernan to good effect, and has intelligent things to say about the canon, recognizing that it was
never as graven in stone as either its enemies or its defenders believedin other words, the canon
is really a nonissue. He writes interestingly on how the process of writing itself is altered by
hypertext, on the new ease of collaboration, on intellectual property and on the new dangers of
exclusiveness once a hypertext "canon" is established.
But the core of the book is the meeting between Landow, the hypertextualized literary scholar,
and the deconstructionist and poststructuralist theorists to whom he goes for advice and
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confirmation. The meeting itself is like the encounter in The Silence of the Lambs between the
Jody Foster character, a courageous and decent FBI trainee, and Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant
insane cannibal/psychiatrist whose help she seeks in solving a mystery. The movie itself may in
fact be an allegory of the experience of the humanities student entering university literary
studies: to uncover the mystery of the text we go to school with its new custodians, the "cannibal
lecteurs" who like to deface literature, or bite the faces off its dead authors.
This may sound extreme; but it is no more so than the lecteur's selfdescriptions. Landow quotes
Gregory Ulmer quoting Derrida, perhaps the greatest Lecter of them all, on the subject of the
"lexia" or "mourceau," the decontextualized citation, the "bit, piece, morsel, fragment; musical
composition; snack, mouthful" (and we might add "bite" or even, now, "byte") that is the meat of
the critic. This "mourceau" [sic; from "mourir"?], says Derrida, "is always detached, as its name
indicates and so you do not forget it, with the teeth." (9.) "Mors" is "jaw." As Ulmer says, "The
organ of this new philosopheme is the mouth, the mouth that bites, chews, tastes. . . The first step
of decomposition is the bite." (8.)
What are these teeth that bite? Landow quotes Ulmer's explanation, that they are the "quotation
marks, brackets, parentheses" (and we might add, the virgules or "slashes") so dear to the
theorists and so rife among the titles of MLA papers.
What is it that is bitten into pieces, into bits or bytesor, in the practice of the media,
"soundbites"on this island of the Doctors Morceau? It is, as Foucault says, the individuality of
the writer (74), or as Said says, the human subject (75): in other words, the author's personal
expression or face. When we sup with the devil we had better use a long spoon; and when we go
to school with poststructuralists, they had better be muzzled. Landow, like most of his academic
contemporaries, has been insufficiently briefed about the more problematic habits of his mentors;
and like the Jody Foster character he is partly responsible for enlarging them in the world where
they can have more old friends for dinner. Could she not solve the mystery without being helped
by Lecterand without allowing him to escape? Speaking as a poet, and as a translator of the
great poet Miklos Radnoti who was murdered by the Nazis, I must confess to being an interested
party, and declare my political solidarity with all victims of the lecteurs. Radnoti describes the
poet's mission, at a time when the likes of Paul de Man were challenging all notions of truth, in
his poem "O Ancient Prisons":
O peace of ancient prisons, beautiful
outdated sufferings, the poet's death,
images noble and heroical,
which find their audience in measured breath
how far away you are. Who dares to act
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slides into empty void. Fog drizzles down.
Reality is like an urn that's cracked
and cannot hold its shape; and very soon
its rotten shards will shatter like a storm.
What is his fate who, while he breathes, will so
speak of what is in measure and in form,
and only thus he teaches how to know?
He would teach more. But all things fall apart.
He sits and gazes, helpless at his heart.
(Foamy Sky: the Major Poems of Miklos Radnoti, trans. Zsuzsanna Ozsvath and Frederick Turner,
Princeton University Press, 1992)
This poem could well stand for the poet's predicament today, when Foucault undermines the
poet's authority, Said the poet's subjectivity, Jameson the poet's political integrity, Derrida the
poet's very existence, and Rorty the notion of truth for which the poet speaks. The only thing a
poet can do in his or her defense is reveal the distortions of language practiced by the enemies of
poetry. Let us therefore return to Landow's thesisstatement, quoted at the beginning of this
review, and look more closely at the terminology he has borrowed from his poststructuralist
mentors. Let us pay especial attention to the terms he uses throughout the book for what is
retrograde and oppressive: "linear," "hierarchical," and "central." A close examination will show
how profoundly incoherent these terms are as they are used by literary theorists, and thus how
profoundly subject to question the whole critique that is based upon them, including large areas
of feminist and multicultural studies.
Let us begin with "linear." As far as I can see, the word is used both by Landow and most
contemporary theorists in three totally different and often contradictory senses, without any
awareness of the difference or contradiction. The first sense is "like a geometrical line" with the
connotations of "spatial" as opposed to temporal and processual, and "orthogonal" as opposed to
curved or differently angled. Of course a geometrical line is completely reversible: it is the same
from B to A as it is from A to B (whereas a temporal sequence, say March 1992 to September
1992, is by definition irreversible). Pure logic or inference, which is often called linear when it is
free from selfreflexion, is similarly reversible; there should be nothing in the conclusion that is
not in the premisses. Some hypertext theorists, like Nancy Kaplan, are fond of contrasting
graphics (as a politically positive medium) with text; of course in this sense, the spatial as against
the linguistic/auditory, graphics are much more "linear" than text.
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The second sense is "like a causal sequence in time," with the connotations of "deterministic" as
opposed to free, and "without branches or alternatives" as opposed to branched and choiced. The
inductive conclusions of science, and the progress of technology, are often thought of by
humanists, inaccurately, as being linear in this sense. Induction is actually a process of branching
hypothesisconstruction coupled with experimental testing of the branches, and technology, far
from taking a single track, always branches into more and more diverse forms in order to enlarge
the marketplace. But even without the contradictions inherent in this use of the term "linear," our
humanists must somehow grapple with, or repress, the profound contradictions between the first
sense of the word and the second: between the timeless reversibility of the first and the temporal
irreversibility of the second; between the perfect economy of the first and the entropic running
down of the second; and between the endlessness and beginninglessness of the first and the ends
and beginnings of the second. We might also add that those humanists who say with Jameson
that "everything is 'in the last analysis' political" (32.) are subscribing to a view of history where
everything that happens is nothing more than the direct result of power, a view which is
profoundly linear in just this sense.
The third sense of "linear," as theorists so carelessly use it, is "like a story," with connotations of
"making sense," "intentional," "controlled," "closed" and "irrevocable" as opposed to aleatory,
random, uncontrolled, open and revocable. What makes stories and narratives what they are is
precisely the feedback relationship between later and earlier eventsearly events partly cause
later events, but are partly caused by them in the sense that they are brought about by persons
seeking to achieve the later event; and early events make sense in the light of later ones. This
characteristic of storiestheir reflexiveness and feedbackis rather precisely definable in terms
of Chaos science as "nonlinear." Stories only make sense as stories, moreover, if they contain, at
least in implication, a widelybranching set of alternative futures at every moment, whose
selection or rejection makes the protagonist's actions interesting and significant. Thus we may
define "storylike" as "free," and thus "linear" in this sense could also mean "free," much to the
confusion of the theorist. Stories have climaxes and epiphanies and irreversible peripeteias
(which Chaos scientists would call bifurcations or catastrophes) in which the old levels of
organization are broken through and transcended; thus we could call them revolutionary by
nature, and if that is what our theorists mean by "linear," then maybe we should hang on to the
linear for dear life. Stories, by their closure, their ending, and thus their removal of themselves
from the future, make room for the Other in ways that no "openended" form can, and thus they
are essentially more empowering to a reader, and more politically liberating. I need not describe
in detail the contradictions between the third sense of "linear" and the first two; they should be
obvious by now.
The second set of confusions sown in the minds of our literary investigators by their cannibal
mentors concerns the use of the term "hierarchy," especially when contrasted with "network." It
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becomes clear that the word as it is used simply means "what is bad," because any other meaning
it might possess turns out to be an objective property of the world, the fundamental condition of
any form of organization. The more hierarchicallyorganized an organism, the more it is able to
support feedbacks within its own structure, and thus the more autonomousselfrulingit is, and
the more free. It is the hierarchical organization of the organs, limbs, and nervous system of an
animal that give it mobility and autonomy; if we were to dismember it, it would not become more
free (though indeed it would be liberated from the confining shape of its body), but less.
In human institutions the most highly organized form of government is modern democracy,
which has a richly complex and multileveled hierarchy of control and responsibility (unlike
feudalism or despotism, which usually have only about four levels or less, or totalitarianism
which has really only two!) The usual cliche which contrasts hierarchy with democracy, a cliche
that Landow unthinkingly repeats (174), is thus totally in error. Tyranny hates hierarchy. Why
else should the first act of any totalitarian government, right or left, be to dismantle the existing
hierarchy? The difference between democracy and more primitive hierarchical systems is that
democracy has achieved sufficient hierarchical complexity to include subsystems, such as the
vote and a constitutional legal system, that are designed to legitimate the assignation of
individuals to positions within the hierarchy, and to render it flexible, transient and porous.
Thus to invite us to "abandon conceptual systems based upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy
and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks" is
tantamount to an invitation to abandon mammalian and vertebrate forms of life and replace them
with polyps and slime molds, or to abandon life itself and replace it with inorganic matter, or to
abandon matter and replace it with energy. Landow admits as much: "the lexia. . . associates
with whatever text links to it, thereby dissolving notions of the intellectual separation of one text
from others in the way that some chemicals destroy the cell membrane of an organism:
destroying the cell membrane destroys the cell; it kills." (53) In other words, poststructuralist
theory is a sort of intellectual AIDS on the biological level, or hydrogen bomb (which turns
hierarchicallyorganized matter into a simple web of energy) on the level of physics.
Networks are all very well, but they are in themselves only the most primitive and inflexible form
of hierarchy, one with only two levels. When they are allowed to evolve they will, as chaos
theory shows, develop highly organizedand often highly flexible and responsivestructures of
their own. The infant human brain is something like a network of neurons; but it immediately
begins to organize itself into the Hebbcell circuits which carry thought and memory. The cells
of a fetal animal or plant, at first an unhierarchical mass, differentiate themselves into an organic
division of labor. Even the interacting nodeandweb ensemble of photons in the first moment of
the Big Bang clustered and condensed into more hierarchical forms. In computer science, the
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whole point of an artificial neural network is to develop a hierarchy of weights and preferences
when asked to identify a given object.
One of Landow's main pointsand he is not of course alone in thisis that traditional book text is
somehow more hierarchical (and linear, of course) than the new hypertext medium. In fact, one
could argue exactly the opposite: that hypertext, because it offers more levels of reference than
traditional text, is much more hierarchical in both its invitation to the writer and in its actual
organization. It sets up an immediate hierarchy, with those elements of the hypertext which make
most references and are most frequently referred to at the top, those containing some references
to and from other texts in the middle, and those that are singlereference dead ends at the bottom;
the more references a lexia gets or makes, the more valuable it is, and the higher in the hierarchy.
Of course poetry and belleslettres have always found ways, through allusion, rhyme and meter,
coherency of image, allegory, echoes and foreshadowings, to deepen, hierarchize, and enrich the
text; but they have always been subject to the discipline of a print format that in its physical form
reduces every word to equality with every other, and must be made to organize itself through its
sonic and semantic content, rather than its visual form. Anyone not prejudiced by
poststructuralist shibboleths would instantly recognize Landow's fascinating reproductions of
hypertext screens as being far more hierarchical visually than ordinary text. Politically, fixed
book text led to egalitarian, legalistic and levelling forms of government; technologically it led to
the uniformity and dehierarchizing of the assemblyline. Hypertext, then, is promising and
exciting for exactly the opposite reasons from those that are usually offered; and this huge
mistake, fostered by the blunders of poststructuralism, will dog hypertext until we throw it off.
And here we encounter the third illusion that Landow allows himself to be persuaded by: the
notion that somehow we can escape the distinction between center and margin into a
"decentered" world. The claim is, of course, that the bad old hierarchical linear world of text
distinguished center from margin and privileged the former over the latter, whereas the liberating
revolution of hypertext breaks down the distinction and the privilege, or at least allows any
element of a system to assume the role of center according to the needs of the moment.
The problem is that the capacity of attention is impossible without the distinction between center
and margin, and that is it is hard to imagine what value a text or a hypertext might have if not in
some way to direct attention. The reason why one would buy a book or a piece of hypertext is to
have one's attention directed to something that it would not have been directed to otherwise, so
that a new object of importance would occupy the center of one's attention, consigning other
objects to the margin. A library could not be used in a truly noncentered "democratic" fashion,
for the reader would make no inegalitarian distinctions in importance between the books, the
catalogs, the shelves, the readingtables, the floor and the ceiling; and the same thing goes for a
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hypertext document. Attention is the whole work of consciousness. Living organisms evolved
from the directionlessness of the amoeba, through the twodimensional radial symmetry of the
starfishes and the axial directedness of the vertebrates, to the highly focussed attention of human
beings, who in attending to something must necessarily, as Michael Polanyi points out, attend
from everything else.
The claim that a centerless and marginless document empowers the reader leads logically to the
proposition that a book of blank pages, or an empty computer chassis, would do so even better,
and no book or computer at all better yet. Although we might thank a person who offered us the
world thus unmediated for the Zenlike wisdom of his or her minimalism, we might object to
paying the twenty dollars for the blank book or the fifty for the empty disk. Nor is the case
helped much by the claim that a hypertext document is temporarily centered at any given
moment. So is the visual field when the eyes, without an object of attention, wander about the
room.
In his defense of his position, Landow quotes Richard Rorty's warning against the search for
overarching or underlying truths, which Rorty stigmatizes as an attempt "to close off
conversation by proposals for universal commensuration through the hypostatization of some
privileged set of descriptions." (182.) But how does this plausiblesounding idea differ logically
from the assertion that the leaves and twigs would grow better if they were hacked free of the
single trunk that connects them? Rorty's procrustean alternatives are summed up in the assertion
that it is our job "to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth." Again, the
logic of this statement feels sound until we ask the innocent question, why we should not do both.
It is only if objective truth is closed and simple that it could possibly threaten open conversation;
and even so, some might prefer an honest silence to a lying discourse. But perhaps objective
truth is in fact more wildly open than any artificiallymaintained conversation could ever beand
this is the challenge that science currently poses to the humanities.
To do Landow justice, there are signs that he himself suspects the motivations of the
poststructuralists to be not be entirely trustworthy. He suggests (53), for instance, that because
hypertext is a literal test of many of the principles so abstractly proposed by the theorists, that
they might find it embarrassing and even threatening to their power. But Landow does not follow
up on such insights, because, I believe, he feels that his mission of promulgating the literary use
of hypertext is best served by an alliance with the fashionable and dominant ideology. However,
I believe that a better case for literary hypertext could be made, which might go something like
this.
The deep intellectual goal of all cybernetic research is the emulation and improvement of the
operations of the human brain. In other words, the new computer technology, including
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hypertext, is an early study and approximation of artificial intelligence. Now it so happens that
the traditional arts, including pictorial art, music, and especially writing, are already very
sophisticated forms of artificial intelligenceprograms designed to be booted into and run on
human brains, "meat computers" as some have cruelly called them. Under the influence of a
work of literature, a reader experiences within him or herself the thoughts, feelings, and even
some of the intellectual and imaginative capacities of a (perhaps dead) writer. A great writer is
able to do what amounts to a "core dump" into a text, so that the reader can see the banks of the
nineteenthcentury Seine or the shores of archaic Ithaca through the eyes of a past protagonist.
(Perhaps it is precisely this commandeering of the reader's mental hardware that poststructuralists
find so threatening, so challenging to their own little moral worldsand thus they try to bite off
their authors' faces.)
But if this analysis is correct, there is a very exciting role for hypertext, both as a critical tool and
as a field of creative art: that is, as the convergence of traditional and contemporary artificial
intelligence research. Both cybernetic intelligence theorywhich has bogged downand
contemporary literary theorywhich as we have seen is mired in poststructuralist assumptions
could use the new ideas that might result.
Frederick Turner
University of Texas at
Dallas