Hypertext and Temporality

Mitchell writes of metapictures: "the “fort-da” or “peek-a-boo” effect of these images is sometimes associated with forms of “savage thought,” rites of passage, and “liminal” or threshold experiences in which time and space, figure and ground, subject and object play an endless game of “see-saw”" (Mitchell, 46). I see the same case of savage time and liminal experience occurring in the context of hypertext, and I think it happens in much the same way.

Landow describes the "quasi-magical entrances to a networked reality" (37) which Western culture thought of long before the advent of hypertext. Considering that magical time and savage time are the same idea, I see how Mitchell's statement can be applied to hypertext and its shifting, non-linear nature. Landow describes the concept as a structure of space and time in which "any particular person, event, or phenomenon could act as a magical window" and that lexias "become Borgesian Alephs, points in space that contain all other points, because from the vantage point each provides one can see everything else" and "the hypertext document becomes a traveling Aleph" (37). If in hypertext one can access any point from any other point, it is similar to metapicture in that a metapicture is a liminal, in-between existence which serves to lead into another existence when the observer experiences and interprets it as one thing or another.

The plateaus of hypertext create a liminal space and time, one without determined beginning or end. Deleuze and Guattari's statement that the rhizome "is antigenealogy" or "antimemory" (40) also provides insight. The rhizome is "always a middle" (40), so it can have no genealogy  or memory because it has no past and no future. This is an example of magical spacetime, in which all spaces and times are one. I'm still not sure I grasp "being-for space" and "being-in space", but  in this context I might interpret "being-for space", which is inside the person's experience, as experienced linear time, and "being-in space" as the actuality of the magical spacetime, which is the network in crush, or the Aleph.