Primitive Hypertext as Creative Resistance
Is it quaint to demarcate digital from reality?
MIT defines hypertext as both a compositional tool and conceptual approach to communication. Such a definition surprised me with the absence of digital. I thought that maybe it is superfluous to mention digital technologies in regards to hypertext, but I found in further research that it was no oversight by MIT.
Hypertext can take many different forms - dictionaries, encyclopaedias, conversations - as long as its purpose is to aid the communication of complex ideas. Recently I read about Octavia Butler’s non-digital hypertext. In an interview with Samuel Delaney in 1998, Butler spoke about her unique hypertext and coined the term primitive hypertext to describe her work process. This process cited having 4 or 5 books open around the house. Butler stated that she would read her selection of books intermittently. Breaking up the linearity of each text led to divergent ideas bouncing between each other. This creates the chance circumstance needed for novel ideas to be synthesised.
I can speak for the effectiveness of Butler’s process as a compositional tool from my own experience. Last year I wrote about Walter Benjamin’s On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. In Benjamin’s text a question is addressed to the reader: “Who does the lamp communicate with?”. The question asks us to consider our relational connections with inanimate objects and imagine a language outside of anthropocentric comprehension. My response was centred around the following extract from Virginia Woolf’s 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.”
Without much progress I moved onto other things. One of those things was a paper by Katherine Hayles titled: Print is flat, Code is Deep. What struck me in her writing was that hypertext existed before the advent of the microcomputer. Hayles states in the introduction that the man widely credited with the idea of hypertext - Vannevar Bush - imagined a hypertextual system in 1945. Hayles paper continues about a topic unrelated to this talk; but there were two ideas which I found important: firstly that restricting hypertextual thought to digital media is limiting. Secondly, that hypertext is not a computable object. Hypertext is infinite, limitless, without bounds.
With primitive hypertext as a compositional tool my writing was improved; à la Butler, reading texts by Benjamin, Woolf and Hayles intermittently helped the generation of interesting ideas. I came to write on how the objects upon our walls and on our mantelpieces are not computable in isolation. The objects in our homes speak a language through their relations and their comprehension is contingent on context and memory. They are hypertextual links to events and people in our life. I am a walking Wikipedia; every object is coloured blue, ready to be clicked upon and expanded with the right command.
Once again I moved on to another text. I began reading Michel De Certeau’s 1980 book The Practice of Everyday Living. After witnessing how hypertext as compositional tool improved my writing I was prompted to ask: how can hypertext be a compositional tool for constructing a better practice of everyday living? In this book de Certeau writes broadly about how our bodies navigate networks and spaces. More specifically he is concerned with how the economic and social forces implemented by governments and other institutions affect our ability to navigate such spaces. De Certeau calls the combination of these forces the grid of discipline. These economic and social forces enable institutions to maintain the status quo and perpetuate the functionalist reality we exist within.* Self expression is stifled in the necessity to make ends meet and interests are given less value than they deserve in a capitalist structure.
With primitive hypertext in this context I’m looking to reconfigure my own practice of everyday living; to make it unbound and infinite. Similar to Butler’s application of primitive hypertext, my application of hypertext in everyday living allows movement between the complex network of ideas available to us. How effective is this as a method to challenge institutional structures and disrupt patterns of discipline? Thinking with Hypertext allows me to move beyond the constraints of traditional hierarchical structures and enables engagement with ideas in a more fluid, non-linear way. Embracing the principles of hypertext in daily life allows me to cultivate a more dynamic and creative approach to living that is not computable by institutions. The cultivation of such opportunities allows me to move away from habit and gain a stronger sense of authorship for a meaningful practice of everyday living.
* - The functionalist reality requires any action or unique expression to be qualified with a sensible or pragmatic reason leading to progress.