Primitive Hypertext as Creative Resistance
Today I’m talking about hypertext and can influence the practice of everyday living. As is the nature of hypertext I found myself researching it in medias res. The task I have given myself is looking at to recontextualise the quotidian through the lens of hypertext and observe the consequent changes to rituals, habits and gestures. I wanted to see how centring hypertext would change my practice of everyday living.
I still find it hard to speak of hypertext clearly. The blue text that we see on Wikipedia is only a small part of it. MIT defines hypertext as a compositional tool and a conceptual approach to communication. As a compositional tool, hypertext mark up languages — as in HTML — allows the author of a hypertext to link documents, to reference, amplify, and expand upon ideas over the World Wide Web. The purpose of hypertext from MIT’s perspective is that it may take any number of forms and its makeup is necessitated by the needs of the audience. I want us to take from this definition that a hypertext doesn’t have to take you to another article or document. It does not have to be digital. Nor does it need to be text. Hypertext I argue can be an image, an object, a person, a book. As long as it meets the needs of an audience to aid in their understanding of a concept.
It may soon be quaint to demarcate digital from reality, but for the purpose of improving my practice of everyday living it is important. Outside of the digital where I believe hypertext has potential for everyday living. Octavia Butler used the term primitive hypertext to describe her work process. Butler, in an interview with Samuel Delaney in 1998, spoke of having 4 or 5 books open around the house. She’d read each of them intermittently to have the ideas bounce between each other — likening this to clicking around different tabs and articles. The divergent concepts and narratives enable the synthesis of novel ideas.
I can speak for the effectiveness of this process from my own experience. Last year I wrote about Walter Benjamin’s On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. An entertaining question within this text is addressed to the reader: “Who does the lamp communicate with?”. What I wrote focussed on relational connections between ourselves and our possessions. I used an extract from Virginia Woolf to help me explicate inchoate thoughts. She said in A Room of One’s Own: “We sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our experience. It is these objects that transforms houses into homes.”
As I was GRAPPLING WITH this passage, -Á LA BUTLER – I came across a paper by KATHERINE Hayles titled: Print is flat, Code is Deep. Together, let’s go further into intertextuality, as Id like to read Hayle’s introduction, which uses Roland Barthes to touch upon the meanings of text and hypertext over time.
Barthes’s description of ‘‘text,’’ with its dispersion, multiple authorship, and rhizomatic structure, uncannily anticipates electronic hypertext. ‘‘The metaphor of the Text is that of the network,’’ Barthes writes (1986: 61). Yet at the same time he can also assert that ‘‘the text must not be understood as a computable object,’’ ‘‘computable’’ here meaning to be limited, finite, bound, able to be reckoned (ibid.: 57). Written twenty years before the advent of the microcomputer, his essay stands in the ironic position of anticipating what it cannot anticipate.
What struck me was the idea of hypertext before the advent of the microcomputer. Hayles continues stating that the man widely credited with the idea of hypertext — Vannevar Bush — imagined a hypertextual system in 1945. His system was mechanical rather than electronic. Hayles paper continues about a topic unrelated to this talk, but the premise – which enticed me into researching hypertext - is that restricting hypertextual thought to digital media is limiting. So my own attempt at rhizomatic reading – reading these texts intermittently in a non-linear manner – I came to think of how the objects upon our walls and on our mantelpieces are hypertextual links to events and people in our life. Everything is coloured blue, ready to be clicked upon, expanded with the right command.
Hypertext-pilled, I BEGAN TO consider myself as a walking wikipedia, yet to be crystallised on a digital platform. In reading further about hypertext I found my thoughts echoed parts of Michel De Certeau’s 1980-something book The Practice of Everyday Living. In this book De Certeau writeds about the economic and social forces implemented by the governments and institutions surrounding us. Through these mechanisms our means of living are constrained and self-expression stifled. De Certeau calls the combinatorial mechanism of social and economic forces the grid of discpline. The grids purpose is to provide order, and to maintain the status quo. De Certeau continues, writing that it is within everyday life that we are able to exercise resistance against the strategies implemented by the technocratic structures, “deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of tactics articulated in everyday life.” He suggests that every small choice we make can be a moment of resistance. What we cook and eat, the way we spend our money and the way we spend our time. Even with every walk we are writing and rewriting our own text everyday; our bodies moving “in space constitut(ing) a codified calligraphy.”
With this idea of resistance before us I’d like to reintroduce hypertext. Recall MIT’s definition as a compositional tool and a conceptual approach to communication. I’d like to add that it is a method of creative resistance. I don’t suggest reading 4 or 5 books, or watching 4 or 5 movies intermittently. I’m suggesting accepting circumstance and turning it to opportunity. Then taking it further to become resistance. Resisting linearity. Resisting finishing things. Resisting things making sense and being computable. Resisting the partition of work and leisure, being swept by the allure of blue hyperlinks online and irl. (De Certeau’s example is writing love letters on company time.) “As unrecognised producers of movement, poets of our own affairs…in the jungles of functionalist rationality we are wandering lines” amongst the grid of discipline. Giving an abundance of thought to the banal and quotidian we can push the pen further.
