Cybernetic Esthetics, Hypertext and the Future of Literature

The development of cybernetic theory and technology marks a paradigm shift: the basis of the economy is transformed from material goods to information; space and communication are reconceptualized in terms of electronic virtuality; and text and intertextuality are extended into hypertextuality. Cybernetics includes not only information technologies but the complex of effects - epistemological, ethical, social, political - that accompanies these technological developments. As is true for all paradigm shifts, the effects of cybernetics have inspired fear and loathing in those committed to an earlier paradigm characterized by visual/material presence, linearity and monologism (exemplified textually in the single-authored monograph that claims an original thesis and uses the expositional, unidirectional logic of deduction and induction). Conversely, those who abandoned the old paradigm years ago, and who form the advance guard of the new movement, exhibit an optimism that verges on rapture. In this essay I wish to analyze the ways that the hypertextual medium transforms the process of literary reading. Because the responses to hypertext have tended to be polarized, either Luddite aversion or rapturous acceptance, too often they have been evaluative without being adequately analytical. Furthermore, the arguments from these polarized positions frequently suffer from temporal displacement: on the one hand, a nostalgic wish to return to the past, while on the other, a utopic yearning for the future. It is from the vantage point of the present - a transitional period between the paradigms of print text and digitized virtual text - that I will assess the esthetics of the evolving genre of hypertextual fiction and discuss its future as it vies with various forms of virtual reality. My own response to cybernetic esthetics is neither aversion nor unquestioning acceptance, but a combination of the two responses - a both/and position (rather than either/or) which I would like to call a wary openness. As I see it, within the next few decades, cybernetic reading will gradually displace the linear, close(d), solitary reading constructed by print text, and it would indeed seem that the process is already underway. The ideal reader for hypertext has been/is being constructed through sustained exposure to the intertextualities and virtualities of mass media and information technologies. This is a reader whose experience includes exposure to cinematic fast cuts (MTV short-attention span), ever more extraordinary visual images and effects, information as sound bites, Nintendo and Sega game systems, computer video games and interactive fantasy-adventure games in a computer network. This is also a reader who has become immersed in informatics in diverse forms such as banking, education, law enforcement, medicine, telecommunications and mass media. Ironically, this situation poses special problems for hypertext as an art form. In a cybernetics culture, I want to argue, hypertext will survive as an art form only by offering the pleasures of virtual immediacy, spontaneity, intricate movement, a rich web of texts in various media (graphic, audio and film) and interactivity for the reader in the form of creative agency to reconstruct the text, either acting alone or as part of a performance with other readers. Hypertext will not realize its potential unless it provides for the reader both the pleasure of immersion in an imagined world (the achievement of realist fiction) and the pleasure of instrumental action in that world (the goal of virtual-reality technology). Currently in its nascent phase, hypertextual fiction is far from realizing this potential, but one can discern the possibility of such a realization in the trajectory of its esthetic evolution. I will focus on the hyperfiction of Michael Joyce, Carolyn Guyer and Stuart Moulthrop, all of whom weave helpful meta-narratives about hypertext into their narratives in an attempt to instruct readers of the new genre. …