Hypertext and “the hyperreal”

Hyper/text/theory, 1994

In his novel The War Outside of Ireland, and more recently in his hypertext fiction afternoon, Michael Joyce remarks on a shift in the postindustrial wind. We seem, he suggests, to be undergoing a change of identity, weaving a fresh social fabric. "I have argued elsewhere that Japan is now everywhere. It is the long dream of a new culture." 1 Like Roland Barthes before him (Empire of Signs) and William Gibson after (Neuromancer), Joyce registers the rising appeal of a dream-state characterized by headlong technological advancement and the groundless play of signifiers. There are many reasons to think of this state as Greater Nippon -not just the recent economic prominence of Japan, but also the example it offers of a hyperadaptive, bricoleur society rebuilding itself from its own ruins. As Joyce says, however, "Japan" is now everywhere, not a state but a state of mind, so the name seems somewhat arbitrary. We could as easily invoke other dreams of cultural revolution: George Bush's Megalo-American "new world order"; Jean Baudrillard's nightmare of "total spatio-dynamic theatre" 2 ; Donna Haraway's vision of cyborg politics played out within "a polymorphous information system" that has become "a deadly game." 3 All of these long dreams have something in common: the conviction that the transition from a mode of production to a "mode of information" 4 has effects exceeding the traditional boundaries of economics and politics. The transforming effect of rapidly evolving communication and information technologies appears first in the marketplace, but like Joyce's imaginary Japan, the marketplace of semiotic exchange is now everywhere: in our homes, in our bedrooms, in our minds. Changes in technology portend more than, in Mark Poster's phrase, "the end of the proletariat as Marx knew it"; 5 they suggest possibilities for a reformulation of the subject, a truly radical revision of identity and social relations. 6 The effects will touch us (so we dream) in our languages, our narratives, our domestic objects, our fashion systems, our games and entertainments. The changes will be felt throughout our culture.

Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 1992

How will literature survive the development of other media of communication? Already we no longer believe, as it was believed from Aristotle to La Harpe, that art is an imitation of nature, and where the classics sought above all a fine resemblance, we seek on the contrary a radical originality and an absolute creation. The day when the Book ceases to be the principal vehicle of knowledge, will not literature have changed its meaning once again? Perhaps we are quite simply living through the last days of the book. (Gerard Genette) 1 . . . plan to throw one away; you will anyhow. (Frederick P. Brooks, Jr)2 PREHISTORY Is it possible that books are the preliminary, now inadequate design for organizing, containing and presenting our textuality, and that the new, improved design, superior to the old membrane or paper book, is the phenomenon we call 'hypertext'?3 In fact, hypertext is not new. 4 Studies in orality tell us that human language, in as primitive a form as we are justified in imagining it, was much less linear than literacy has forced the written language to become. This lack of a consistent linearity is the result of a rhetorical complexity in which blocks of discourse are linked to other blocks, and these to others, just as the automated teller machines at our banks offer us several operations to

2007

With regard to (digital) hypertext as a medially determined literary 'genre', or 'hypertext proper', which forms the focus of this study, let us continue with an investigation of the actual technological concept of hypertext, which, after all, forms the macrostructural foundation of the literary concept. The most widely acknowledged definitions have been suggested by Ted Nelson, whose first public use of the word 'hypertext' dates back to his 1965 lectures at Vassar College, Jakob Nielsen (1990), Paul Delany and George P. Landow (1991) and Jay David Bolter (2001). Essentially, the abstract idea of 'hypertext' is based on the rhizome metaphor (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), characterized by a ramifying, horizontally organized root structure, which is, unlike arborescent structures, decentralized, i.e. there is no core, or 'trunk', and no visible hierarchy. Similarly, Nelson's ubiquitously quoted definition of hypertext classifies it as non-sequential writing-text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways. (1984: 0/2) 6 Evidently, Nelson's explanation combines issues of production, reception, mediality and textuality. It emphasizes hypertext's compositional nonlinearity, which allows a

Journal of History Culture and Art Research, 2020

The article deals with the concept of hyperrealism in the projection on a fictional work of the 20th-21st centuries. The study is focused on the features and techniques of hyperrealism, inherent in different types of art, which have been reflected in literature, in particular French literature. The period of powerful development of digital technologies made scientists wonder about the essence of reality, and taking into account the fact that the latter can create their own reality, their attitude towards it acquires different, modified features: what I see may be or may not be reality. Thus, the dominant philosophy of this period is the attempt to manipulate reality in various forms of art, both verbal and fine art. Hyperrealism in painting, sculpture, and cinema uses similar techniques. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to find out the techniques and means of hyperrealism in the French literature of the 20th-21st centuries. Works of French writers whose creativity is consonant with the techniques of creating/reproducing excessive reality in a literary text were selected as the illustrative base of the research. The methods of component and linguostylistic analysis, as well as elements of communicative-pragmatic and descriptive analyzes were applied to achieve the desired objective. Thus, in the article the narrative technique of detailing the image is positioned as the dominant technique of hyperrealism in French prose works, functioning at the compositional, linguistic, and syntactic levels of the literary text. It is found out that this technique is accompanied by a detailed description of the photograph as a reflection of the development of photorealism precisely in this period and by a realistic description of the city acquiring forms of working with the map. Detailing that runs through the whole content and structure of a fictional work of art is aimed at the reader, in particular at gaining his/her confidence in the events and/or actions depicted. Herewith, the text has a minimum of evaluative characteristics that could simulate the reader's opinion regarding events and/or actions, since all the detailing is directed to the free judgment of the reader. Therefore, the detail is the key element by which you can "grab" the reality, because changing the detail gives rise to a new spiral of reality. The content of the article can serve for further studies of modifications of the concept of reality, its dependence on the worldview of a man, and its multidimensionality on the material of works of fiction or other arts from the perspective of psycho or sociolinguistics.

2014

authored by dr. in philology Elena Ungureanu, Dincolo de text: hypertextul , published in Chisinau: ARC, 280 p. The book addresses a topical issue, examined by a s pecialist in humanities: the relation between the concept of TEXT and informatio n echnology. This research proves to be bold and somewhat risky, as long as the scien ce of printed text has not yet said its last word. Taking as landmark two famous fundamenta l definitions by Barthes “Text is a tissue, a woven fabric” (“Text veut dire Tissu”) an d “Every text is an intertext” (“Tout est un intertext”), the author adapts them to the n ew format of online writing and reading, paraphrasing them as “hypertext is online fabric” and “Every online text is an online intertext, therefore a hypertext “. “Text as tissue, text as a parasite (text feeds fro m other texts), text as a labyrinth, text as a cobweb (the network and the World Wide We b ar associated to the cobweb), the text as jouissance /the “pleasure of thinking” (J. Krist...

CM - casopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem, 2014

This article analyzes one of the roots of contemporary online participatory writing practices within the literary field, focusing on an object that had its theoretical heyday twenty years ago: hypertextual fiction. Invented in the sixties by social informatics visionary Ted Nelson, the word "hypertext" gained academic attention in the humanities in the early nineties with the works (among others) of George P. Landow, Paul Delany, David Bolter and Stuart Moulthrop. In 1992, in his review of Michal Joyce's Afternoon (still credited as one of the first pieces of hypertext fiction) Robert Coover (1992) wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "much of the novel's alleged power is embedded in the line […] [T]hrough print's long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line's power […] but true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text". Since then, hypertext started to be defined as an artefact empowering the reader to subvert the linear text and the author's authority, and thus, within a post-structural and postmodern theoretical framework, deconstructing and subverting the very roots of power tout court. By addressing hypertext theory (a mixture of history of textual forms, of reading practices, and of technologies of memory, semiotics, poststructuralist and feminist theory, etc.) and tracing the influences of postmodern literature and the literary avant-gardes on hypertext fiction, the article will thus investigate both the construction of hypertext as a participatory "cultural object"-in Wendy Griswold's (1994) terms-and the legacy of that theoretical debate and those artistic practices in contemporary reflections on online collaborative literary writing.

Diogenes, 2002

The Free Art & Technology Lab art collective, who had been championing a free and participative culture through their support of open source software, announced their closure and ‘total defeat’ in 2015 in the face of a loss of a stake in the future of the Internet. In the face of the simulacrum’s logic, Baudrillard took a similar approach through his ‘fatal’ strategy. Is there possibility for the digital technology, the Internet, and the realm of representation to still serve as avenues towards political subversion within what Baudrillard terms ‘the hyperreal’? Has the political sphere, the social, the logic of fact and the order of reason, truly disappeared, or is Baudrillard’s own theory simulational in its creation of a ‘media theology’? Does democracy still have something to offer or does its functionality lay precisely in its failures? Have we truly lost all alternatives, are we stuck in a simulacrum, or does Baudrillard underestimate the subject’s own powers of mediation and agency? Did F.A.T. Lab’s hacktivist tactics wield the media’s own logic against itself, or reinforce the simulational logic of the system they were attempting to topple? F.A.T. Lab and Baudrillard’s strategies of total defeat are the only effective strategies in combating the simulacrum and the Internet as a structure of power. It is in the total defeat that we acknowledge the failure of democracy and capitalism, rather than petitioning to its moral framework which serves to shroud its functional dysfunctionality. As we face of an increasingly absurd sociopolitical reality, perhaps we must also take a stance of ‘total defeat’ and, as per Slavoj Žižek and Jean Baudrillard, find new ‘Master-Signifiers’.