GRAMMATOLOGY HYPERMEDIA
by
GREG ULMER
University of Florida at Gainesville
Copyright (c) 1991 by Greg Ulmer, all rights reserved
_Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.2 (January, 1991)
1. This article is about an experiment I conducted for
publication in a volume collecting the papers read at the
Sixteenth Annual Alabama Symposium on English and American
Literature: "Literacy Online: the Promise (and Peril) of
Reading and Writing with Computers," October 26-28, 1989
(organized by Myron Tuman). My talk at the conference
placed the current developments in Artificial Intelligence
and hypermedia programs in the context of the concept of the
"apparatus," used in cinema studies to mount a critique of
cinema as an institution, as a social "machine" that is as
much ideological as it is technological. The same drive of
realism that led in cinema to the "invisible style" of
Hollywood narrative films, and to the occultation of the
production process in favor of a consumption of the product
as if it were "natural," is at work again in computing.
Articles published in computer magazines declare that "the
ultimate goal of computer technology is to make the computer
disappear, that the technology should be so transparent, so
invisible to the user, that for practical purposes the
computer does not exist. In its perfect form, the computer
and its application stand outside data content so that the
user may be completely absorbed in the subject matter--it
allows a person to interact with the computer just as if the
computer were itself human" (_Macuser_, March, 1989). It
was clear that the efforts of critique to expose the
oppressive effects of "the suture" in cinema (the effect
binding the spectator to the illusion of a complete reality)
had made no impression on the computer industry, whose
professionals (including many academics) are in the process
of designing "seamless" information environments for
hypermedia applications. The "twin peaks" of American
ideology--realism and individualism--are built into the
computing machine (the computer as institution).
2. The very concept of the "apparatus" indicates that
ideology is a necessary, irreducible component of any
"machine." Left critique and cognitive science agree on
this point, as may be seen in Jeremy Campbell's summary of
the current state of research in artificial intelligence: A
curious feature of a mind that uses Baker Street [Holmes]
reasoning to create elaborate scenarios out of incomplete
data is that its most deplorable biases often arise in a
natural way out of the very same processes that produce the
workmanlike, all-purpose, commonsense intelligence that is
the Holy Grail of computer scientists who try to model human
rationality. A completely open mind would be unintelligent.
It could be argued that stereotypes are not ignorance
structures at all, but knowledge structures. From this
point of view, stereotypes cannot be understood chiefly in
terms of attitudes and motives, or emotions like fear and
jealousy. They are devices for predicting other people's
behavior. One result of the revival of the connectionist
models in the new class of artificial intelligence machines
is to downgrade the importance of logic and upgrade the role
of knowledge, and of memory, which is the vehicle of
knowledge (Campbell, _The Improbable Machine_. New York,
1989: 35, 151, 158).
3. Critique and cognitive science hold different
attitudes to the inherence of stereotypes in knowledge, of
course. Critique is right to condemn the acceptance of or
reconciliation with the given assumptions implicit in
cognitive science, but its own response to the problem,
relying on the enlightenment model of absolute separation
between episteme and doxa, knowledge and opinion, is too
limited. This split is replicated in the
institutionalization of critique in academic print
publication resulting in a specialized commentary separated
from practice. _Postmodern Culture_ could play a role in
exploring alternatives to the current state of the
apparatus.
Grammatology provides one possible theoretical frame
for this research, being free of the absolute commitment to
the book apparatus (ideology of the humanist subject and
writing practices, as well as print technology) that
constrains research conducted within the frame of critique.
The challenge of grammatology, against all technological
determinism, is to accept responsibility for inventing the
practices for institutionalizing electronic technologies.
We may accept the values of critique (critical analysis
motivated by the grand metanarrative of emancipation)
without reifying one particular model of "critical
thinking." But what are the alternatives? The experiment I
contributed to the volume differed from the paper delivered
at the conference, being not so much an explanation of the
problem--the inability of critique to expose the
disappearing apparatus--as an attempt to write with the
stereotypes of Western thought, using them and showing them
at work at the same time. The essay is entitled
"Grammatology (In The Stacks) of Hypermedia: A Simulation."
4. My research has been concerned with exploring various
modes of "immanent critique," a reasoning capable of
operating within the machines of television and computing,
in which the old categories (produced in the book apparatus)
separating fiction and truth are breaking down. Rhetoric
has always been concerned with sorting out the true from the
false, and it will continue to function in these terms in
the electronic apparatus, as it did in oral and alphabetic
cultures. The terms of this sorting will be transformed,
however, to treat an electronic culture that will be as
different from the culture of the book as the latter is
different from an oral culture. It is important to
remember, at the same time, that all three dimensions of
discourse exist together interactively.
I am particularly interested in the figure of the mise
en abyme, as elaborated in Jacques Derrida's theories, in
this context. The mise an abyme is a reflexive
structuration, by means of which a text shows what it is
telling, does what it says, displays its own making,
reflects its own action. My hypothesis is that a discourse
of immanent critique may be constructed for an electronic
rhetoric (for use in video, computer, and interactive
practice) by combining the mise en abyme with the two
compositional modes that have dominated audio-visual
texts--montage and mise en scene. The result would be a
deconstructive writing, deconstruction as an %inventio%
(rather than as a style of book criticism).
5. "Grammatology (In The Stacks) of Hypermedia" is an
experiment in immanent critique, attempting to use the mise
en abyme figure to organize an "analysis" of the current
thinking about hypermedia. The strategy was to imitate in
alphabetic style the experience of hypermedia
practice--"navigating" through a database, producing a trail
of linked items of information. I adopted the "stack"
format of hypercard, confining myself largely to citations
from a diverse bibliography of materials relevant to
hypermedia. These materials were extended to include not
only texts about hypermedia from academic as well as
journalistic sources, but also texts representing the
domains used as metaphors for hypermedia design in these
sources. Two basic semantic domains, then, provided most of
the materials for the database: the index cards, organized
in "stacks," to be linked up in both logical and associative
ways, and the figure of travel used to characterize the
retrieval of the informations thus stored.
The critical point I wanted to make had to do with a
further metaphor that emerged from juxtaposing the other
two--an analogy between the mastery of a database and the
colonization of a foreign land. The idea was to expose the
ideological quality of the research drive, the will to power
in knowledge, by calling attention to the implications of
designing hypermedia programs in terms of the "frontiers" of
knowledge, knowledge as a "territory" to be established.
The goal is not to suppress this metaphorical element in
design and research, but to include it more explicitly, to
unpack it within the research and teaching activities. In
this way stereotypes may become self-conscious, used and
mentioned at once in the learning process.
6. The design of the experiment was influenced not only
by the principle of the mise en abyme (imitating in my form
the form of the object of study), but also by several other
compositional strategies available in current critical
theory. One of these is Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project,
for which hypermedia seems to be the ideal technological
format. Indeed, one might hope, following her superb
alphabetic (re) construction of Benjamin's project in The
dialectics of seeing (MIT, 1989) that Susan Buck-Morss would
direct a hypermedia version of the Arcades. A point of
departure (but only that) for this version might be the
"Cicero" project, in which students of Classical
civilization and Latin explore Rome (a representation on
videodisc, composed using microphotography of a giant museum
model of the city at its height in 315 A.D.) assisted by a
"friendly tour guide" (Cicero). It is worth recalling, in
this context, that Cicero was an advocate of artificial
memory as part of rhetoric, and that Giulio Camillo's Memory
Theater (designed during the Venetian Renaissance) was
"intended to be used for memorising every notion to be found
in Cicero's works" (Frances Yates, _The Art of Memory_.
Chicago, 1966: 166). In fact, the design of hypermedia
software in general, and not just the Cicero project, has
much in common with the hypomnemic theaters of the
Renaissance Hermetic-Caballist tradition.
The unfinished Arcades project exists in the form of a
"massive collection of notes on nineteenth-century
industrial culture as it took form in Paris--and formed that
city in turn. These notes consist of citations from a vast
array of historical sources, which Benjamin filed with the
barest minimum of commentary, and only the most general
indications of how the fragments were eventually to have
been arranged" (Buck-Morss, ix). In the hypermedia Arcades,
an interactive Benjamin would guide students through a Paris
whose history could flash up in the present moment with the
touch of a key.
Meanwhile, I was interested in the resonance of the
card file metaphor for hypermedia and Benjamin's views on
the obsolescence of the academic book:
And today the book is already, as the present mode of
scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated
mediation between two different filing systems. For
everything that matters is to be found in the card box
of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar
studying it assimilates it into his own card index.
(Benjamin, _Reflections_, New York, 1978: 78.)
7. The other strategy that is relevant to the experiment
is the postmodernist fondness for allegory. Thus any item
of fact reported in the database could also function as a
sign, signifying or figuring another meaning. The specifics
of this meaning are to be inferred in the reading, leaving
the construction of the critical argument to the reader.
These strategies constitute an outline for a potent pedagogy
in which research functions as the inventio for an
expressive text (thus producing a hybrid drawing upon both
scholarship and art). This possibility suggests another
role for electronic publications--to explore productive
exchanges between the electronic and alphabetic apparatuses,
emphasizing the usefulness of computer hardware and software
as figurative models for written exercises. It is perfectly
possible to compose an essayistic equivalent of a hypermedia
program, and to think electronically with paper and pencil.
8. My version of a hypermedia essay consists of some 29
cards simulating one trail blazed through a domain of
information about hypermedia--concerned, that is, with a
sub-domain holding data on the semantic fields of the
terminology of program design for hypermedia environments.
The entries are drawn from the categories listed below in
random order (the entries evoke these categories). In
hypermedia, the cards could be accessed in any order, but in
the alphabetic simulation, which is an enunciation or
utterance within the system, the sequence does develop
according to an associative logic (it is precisely an
experiment with the capacity of association for creating
learning effects). In hypermedia, the scholar does not
provide a specific line of argument, an enunciation, but
constructs the whole paradigm of possibilities, the set of
statements, leaving the act of utterance, specific
selections and combinations, to the reader/user. Or rather,
the scholar's "argument" exists at the level of the
ideology/theory directing the system of the paradigm,
determining the boundaries of inclusion/exclusion.
--hypermedia design
--methods and logic of composition
--the computer conference at the University of Alabama
--computers in general
--critique of cinema (apparatus theory)
--grammatology
--Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
--colonial exploration of America (Columbus, the overland
trails).
--stereotypes
--"Place" in rhetoric, memory
--Situationism
--mis en abyme.
9. The fundamental idea organizing the grammatological
approach to hypermedia (theorizing the institutionalization
of computer technology into education in terms of the
history of writing) emerges out of a comparison of three
textbooks, introducing students to the operations of the
three memory systems dominating schooling within three
different apparatuses: the Ad Herenium, main source of the
classical art of memory, in the pre-print era when oratory
was the predominant practice (cf. Camillo's Memory Theater);
the St. Martin's Handbook, representing (as typical among a
host of competitors) the codification of school writing; and
a textbook yet to come, doing for electronic composition
what the other two examples do for their respective
apparatuses. It is certainly too soon for a "codification"
of electronic rhetoric, considering that the technology is
still evolving at an unnerving pace. The position of
_Postmodern Culture_ in this situation should not be
conservative or cautious (that slot in the intellectual
ecology being already crowded with representatives).
Rather, it should serve as a free zone for
conceptualization, formulating an open, continually evolving
simulacrum of that electronic handbook.
Some of the elements of that handbook (but a new word
is needed for this program) might be glimpsed in the
citations collected and linked in my hypermedia essay. In
the remaining sections I will reproduce, in somewhat
abbreviated form, one of the series included in the original
article (but with the addition of a few selections not used
previously). In this recreation I will omit the sources,
noting only the name of the author. My principal concern is
with the transformation of the rhetorical concept of "place"
that is underway in the electronic environment. A review of
the history of rhetoric reveals that "place" is perhaps the
least stable notion in this history, the one most sensitive
to changes in the apparatus.
10. "What seems necessary to me is the development of a
completely new discipline that embraces the whole
augmentation system. What are the practical strategies that
will allow our society to pursue high-performance
augmentation? My strategy is to begin with small groups,
which give greater 'cultural mobility.' Small groups are
preferable to individuals because exploring augmented
collaboration is at the center of opportunity. These small
groups would be the scouting parties sent ahead to map the
pathways for the organizational groups to follow. You also
need outposts for these teams" (Douglas Engelbart).
11. "Between 1840 and the California gold rush, fewer
than 20,000 men, women, and children followed those roads
westward--the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Bozeman
Trail. Yet the story of the overland trails was told a
thousand times for every one telling of the peopling of the
Midwest. Why? Excitement was there, of course: Indian
attacks and desert hardship and even cannibalism. But I
suspected that the greatest appeal of the trails lay in the
role they played as avenues for progress of the
enterprising. The roads that the pioneers followed
symbolized the spirit of enterprise that sustained the
American dream" (Ray Allen Billington).
12. Originally, theoria meant seeing the sights, seeing
for yourself, and getting a worldview. The first theorists
were "tourists"--the wise men who traveled to inspect the
obvious world. Theoria did not mean the kind of vision that
is restricted to the sense of sight, but implied a complex
but organic mode of active observation--a perceptual system
that included asking questions, listening to stories and
local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing. The
world theorists who traveled around 600 B.C. were spectators
who responded to the expressive energies of places, stopping
to contemplate what the guides called "the things worth
seeing." Local guides--the men who knew the stories of a
place--helped visiting theorists to "see" (Eugene Victor
Walter).
13. "Information would be accessible through association
as well as through indexing. The user could join any two
items, including the user's own materials and notes. Chains
of these associations would form a 'trail,' with many
possible side trails. Trails could be named and shared with
other information explorers. 'There is a new profession of
trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of
establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the
common record.' We need fundamentally new organizing
principles for knowledge, and we need new navigation and
manipulation tools for the learner. Instead of regarding an
intelligent system as a human replacement, we can consider
the system as a helpful assistant or partner" (Stephen A.
Weyer).
14. "The two recognized, contemporary authorities on
Columbus are his son Ferdinand and the traveling monk
Bertolome de las Casas. Both cite the reasons why Columbus
believed he could discover the Indies as threefold: 'natural
reasons, the authority of writers, and the testimony of
sailors.' As to the ancient authorities, Columbus' son
cites Aristotle, Seneca, Strabo, Pliny, and Capilonius.
None of these ancient writers gave a route plan-- it had to
come from another source. The source for that plan had to
be St. Brendan, the Navigator. Brendan lived in the 6th
century, A.D. The Irish clergy were a devout group and
practiced a form of wandering in the wilderness. Not having
a desert nearby, they did their wandering at sea. In the
Navigatio Sancti Brendani the style and manner of
navigational reports are as excerpts relating the
interesting events, taken from a diary or logbook. The
subsequent versions of the Navigatio were penned by monks in
monasteries. These contain religious matter of a mythical
nature which has obviously been added to the original" (Paul
H. Chapman).
15. "For the Aboriginal nomad, the land is a king of
palimpsest. On its worn and rugged countenance he is able
to write down the great stories of Creation, his creation,
in such a way as to insure their renewal. Walking from one
sacred spot to another, performing rituals that have changed
little over the millennia, are in themselves important
aspects of a metaphysical dialogue. Since Aboriginal
society is pre-literate, this dialogue relies on
intellectual and imaginative contact with sacred constructs
within the landscape that have been invested with miwi or
power, according to tradition or the Law. The language is
one of symbolic expression, of mythic reportage. We begin
to see at this point the seeds of conflict between two
opposing cultures existing in the same landscape. On the
one hand we have an Aboriginal culture that regards the
landscape as an existential partner to which it is lovingly
enjoined; on the other, we find a European culture
dissatisfied with the landscape's perceived vacuity and
spiritual aridity, thus wanting to change it in accordance
with facile economic imperatives so that it reflects a
materialistic world- view" (James Cowan).
16. "Can the hypermedia author realize the enormous
potential of the medium to change our relation to language
and texts simply by linking one passage or image to others?
One begins any discussion of the new rhetoric needed for
hypermedia with the recognition that authors of hypertext
and hypermedia materials confront three related problems:
First, what must they do to orient readers and help them
read efficiently and with pleasure? Second, how can they
inform those reading a document where the links in that
document lead? Third, how can they assist readers who have
just entered a new document to feel at home there? Drawing
upon the analogy of travel, we can say that the first
problem concerns navigation information necessary for making
one's way through the materials. The second concerns exit
or departure information, and the third arrival or entrance
information" (George Landow).
17. "Removed from the tangible environment of their
culture, travelers came to rely on this most portable and
most personal of cultural orders as a means of symbolic
linkage with their homes. More than any other emblem of
identity, language seemed capable of domesticating the
strangeness of America. It could do so both by the
spreading of Old World names over New World place, people,
and objects, and by the less literal act of domestication
which the telling of an American tale involved. This
ability to 'plot' New World experience in advance was, in
fact, the single most important attribute of European
language. Francis Bacon, primary theorist of a new
epistemology and staunch opponent of medieval scholasticism,
extrapolated Columbus himself into a symbol of bold
modernity. His voyager was decidedly not the man of
terminal doubt and despair whom we encounter in the Jamaica
letter of 1503. He was instead a figure of hopeful
departures, a man whose discovery of a 'new world' suggested
the possibility that the 'remoter and more hidden parts of
nature' also might be explored with success. The function
of Bacon's Novum Organum was to provide for the scientific
investigator the kind of encouragement which the arguments
of Columbus prior to 1492 had provided for a Europe too
closely bound to traditional assumptions" (Wayne Franklin).
18. "Perhaps the most fragile component of the future
lies in the immediate vicinity of the terminal screen. We
must recognize the fundamental incapacity of capitalism ever
to rationalize the circuit between body and computer
keyboard, and realize that this circuit is the site of a
latent but potentially volatile disequilibrium. The
disciplinary apparatus of digital culture poses as a
self-sufficient, self-enclosed structure without avenues of
escape, with no outside. Its myths of necessity, ubiquity,
efficiency, of instantaneity require dismantling: in part by
disrupting the separation of cellularity, by refusing
productivist injunctions by inducing slow speeds and
inhabiting silences" (Jonathan Crary).
19. One more suggestion of a function of electronic
publishing: To experiment with other metaphors for the
research process in the electronic apparatus, as
alternatives to the metaphor of colonial imperialism.