First of all, I want to say that the idea of a purely unstable network is self-defeating. The "rhizome" as it is explained in the George Landow is essentially an unachievable ideal (Landow, 42). But is it an applicable idea at all? It has the appearance of a being a "logical" extreme, representing "neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills" (Landow quoting Deleuze and Guattari, 40). And yet even this picture, this analogy collapses under itself. If there is no beginning or end, then how can it overspill? You essentially reach an infinity from which any point can be arbitrarily termed a "center" because any direction is infinitely far from any end. Literally, the center does not exist and cannot be scientifically or mathematically determined.
I do not mean to propose, though, that this concept has no worth or application, as it most certainly does, but I think it is essential to view this as only an illustration of a concept. I do not wish to propose either that this is the concept itself, because it simply cannot exist. I consider it an analogy and I think that is where it should be left.
That said, this has some truly fascinating implications for text, hypertext and the human mind. This kind of hypertext theory illustrates a wonderful application of the idea that a text is interpretable by any given individual without the necessary risk of them being "wrong." Because each person brings their own presuppositions to the table, each person creates their own "center of their movement through an information space" (Landow, 41). This is important also because it differentiates something I think many people miss: the center is still within the context of the network. That is, a unifying force must exist at least on some level. It would be foolish to propose that the author has absolute control over the text, or even that a text has full control over itself, however a text can define its bounds.
If you think about a text (for the purpose of this example, let's say a hypertext) as a circle and a reader of the text as a line, the reader can begin from any point along the edge of the circle and continue through until they achieve a "center." Now, while this center may not exist at what we might call the center of the circle, it does exist at the center of the experience. That is, we can think of the line itself as an actor. The act and path of reading a text change where the center might be. Since each person follows a different line, the center might be anywhere within the circle. However, the center will never be outside the circle because the experience of reading does not (at the specific moment of reading. Rumination, citation, allusion, etc. all complicate the idea in a way the analogy does not and cannot address) exist outside the circle of the text.
This I found to be very true of Daniel's "Public Secrets." Everyone in the class came to the text differently and followed vastly different paths through it. However, there were unifying principles that all of us could catch on to. Because the project is not simply "the internet," we were able to define a unified reading experience and identify our reading paths with others'. This is because we all, at one point or another, must needs have crossed paths within the confines of the "circle" in order to form our opinion and conception of the text's "center."
This idea could definitely be fleshed out a little more, but I thought I would throw it out there.
1 comment:
I really like the "circle of text idea." I like the idea that all centers about which a hypertext can refer, although infinite, are limited by the text itself. It makes me wonder about the possibility of a circle-less form of text.
You reference "the internet" as a hypertext that would have readers define drastically different centers but it seems to me that the internet would only become a larger circle and surely we would cross paths at some point. I think a group of people browsing the internet for the first time would center it on information exchange.
So how could you eliminate the center so that the reader can truly find their own? If you consider a human life as a hypertext and that life's path from birth to death as the path across the circle then I still think paths would cross. Even across cultures there are similarities in the paths people take (namely in relation to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs) but I can't think of any circle of text that would be any bigger.
I think to eliminate the limiting factor of the circle is impossible. I can't see a way out of the circle of text that would create the possibility for completely unique interpretations.
This makes me think if there is anything at all that couldn't be considered a hypertext. Even a basic novel seems to be a hypertext with a very small circle. A book like the bible could be more explicitly called a hypertext with all its writers thinking about one character. I already claimed a human life was a hypertext so what couldn't be?
Maybe an amalgamation of all different hypertexts of different media would come together to form one hyper-hypertext without limited centers.
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