The End of the Word As We Know It?
a paper presented at the Brisbane Writers' Festival, Friday, October 15, 1999.
Co-respondents: Dean Kiley (Participating Chair) + Komninos Zervos

I've been mulling over the title of this session for weeks, the end of the word as we know it. I have the habit of walking and ruminating and in those wandering thoughts I've realised that out of a four day festival dedicated to writing, that only one session deals with hypertext. It's rather a leap of faith to stand in front of you in this context and pronounce the end of narrative texts, or the end of the word as we know it. Given this, I think I'll take it one day at a time and adopt a wait and see attitude.

So, I have to admit that I have my doubts about the proposition that hypertext will result in the end of narrative texts. I'm sure the book publishing or film industries won't have a bar of it!

However, I do have a great deal of faith in processes of change and about the questions those processes raise. And I think that's what this debate might be about. It's about change, and at some point we just have to accept that certain modes of thinking about ourselves and our world have fractured, that these discontinuities have opened into a heterologically measured world rather than brought about its cataclysmic end. While still grappling with dialectics and dualisms, with their universalising and totalising tendencies, our formations of the world are not wholly constrained by them. Cyberfeminist, Sadie Plant says it like this:

if anything does emerge from the complexity of current shifts, it is the realisation that cultures cannot be shaped or determined by any single hand or determining factor. Even conceptions of change have changed. Revolution has been revolutionised. There is no centre of operations, no organizing core; there are no defining causes, overriding reasons, fundamental bases, no starting points or prime movers; no easy explanations, straightforward narratives, simple accounts, or balanced books. Any attempt to deal with some particular development immediately opens onto them all.

For me this kind of comment means that the authority of the narrative text cannot be sustained. And that's what I think hypertext does: it doesn't undo, delete or trash narrative texts but rather, it undoes, deletes and trashes the authority of these texts. It permits other modes of writing and the web makes it accessible. I think if you're going to enter into a fight, then it's best to know who or what you're fighting against. And in the case of hypertext, it's not narrative per se, but rather the authority and celebration of particular narratives and their authors over and above all others for reasons such as taste, commodification, style or because that's the way it's always been.

Hypertext of course does embrace narrative. It's structure is inherently nonlinear rather than linear. It is an open work rather than a closed one. So what happens with hypertext is that it confounds linear narrative within its own form rather than brings about the demise of those narratives. To think otherwise is to buy into all those `end-ist' discourses like the end of history or the end of the subject or the end of language. And I've always thought it telling how history, language and the subject faced their end at the same time that those of us who were excluded from history, language and subject were gaining access to those sites.

For some of us, it's not an end at all, but rather revolution or perhaps even evolution. Not a storm the citadel type of revolution, but the sort of change that Sadie Plant was talking about. The sort of change that implies our ideas of change have changed and that our expectations of change have also changed. But I'm kind of stuck here because I don't really know how our ideas of change have changed. I simply expect that they have and I assume that something like hypertext might somehow address that. What I do know is that often these changes are addressed in terms of loss. At the very mention of change we seem to be thrown into nostalgic melancholia. Suddenly things aren't what they used to be and we're longing for the good old days when things were more simple, blokes were blokes and books were books and those blokes wrote those books. What is it that we think we have lost?

I don't know about you but I revel in the prospect of change and risk. I love the idea that certain forms of authority are questioned. I take a certain amount of pleasure in the idea that new forms of writing are emerging on and through the web. I love that alternatives to mainstream or commercial culture are really only a phone call away. And that's the power of hypertext. It's simply there and it's existence seems to worry some people, especially those with vested interests. I doubt very much that the web has made any real impact on book sales or tv ratings or film attendance but it's very presence seems to have ruffled some feathers and brought about the claims that the book is facing extinction.

No one wants the book to disappear do they? We love books, as objects, as narrative and story, and as symbols of knowledge and literacy. Books and the literary canon are part of our culture and it's likely to take a lot more than hypertext to change them and their purveyors. Given this, and the claims that hypertext is displacing rather than diversifying and decentering, I wonder if hypertext does a bit more than just provide an alternative to the book or linear narrative. These days internet based works fall under categories such as new media or screen culture. They are established as different, perhaps even as minor literatures. A minor literature, as philosphers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari define it, is constructed by a minority using a major language. The minor literature deterritiorialises the major language, connects the individual to a political immediacy and the collective assemblage of enunciation.

So perhaps cybertexts do constitute a minor literature, like screen writing but not like it, like the book but not like it, like performance but not. As a culture, we are yet to develop what Gregory Ulmer describes as 'electracy'. He says that electracy is to the electronic text what literacy is to the printed text. Because most online work is predominantly text-based, the mainsteam seems to label it as `electronic book' rather than make comparisons with other writing forms as hybrid or as a form in its own right, as a minor literature which speaks back. The nomenclature of publishing is applied to the virtual world: web pages, electronic books and so on. I have to wonder about how appropriate that is.

In a practice sense, as computers and software become more powerful, bandwidth becomes more abundant and writers become more technologically literate, the content is taking on a more multimedia and complex form, it is taking advantage of and exploring the possibilities proffered by the web. I doubt this necessarily sounds the death knell for narrative. What it does, as I have said before, is displace the primacy of the word as text and posited a more complex audio-visual-literary language. We still know these words and they certainly haven't ended, but online, we are developing greater media savvy or electracy, and we are imposing minor literatures, which is resulting in the text or word becoming part of the mix. The hypertext is probably not one identifiable thing but moves through and as a series of tendencies, a proclivity towards a structured structurelessness, like the internet itself. We can never really find anything, we keep browsing and searching inconclusively.

Describing narrative and hypertext in their conference brief, trAce online writing community says:

The web is home to a huge variety of narrative forms: fictions using a traditional narrative structure within the framework of hypertext; works operating across literary genres - ficto-criticisms which consider the medium directly; poetic writings that seek to dishevel the structure of language; pidgin languages and texts; the blurring of image/word/sound so that the very design itself becomes the writing; and the liberation from the alphabet.

Given this, then perhaps it really is silly to argue that this era is an endist era where everything worth doing has already been done. Obviously, there's a lot more in the making and a lot to look forward to.

While working on our recently launched hypertext fiction, cipher, Josephine Wilson and I were one day in internet relay chat musing about how we might like the work to develop if we had better skills, more powerful computers and more funding. That's how we collaborate - via IRC and email because josephine is in Perth, and I am in Brisbane. Our works are produced exclusively online. So those exchanges form the basis of our creative work.

In producing cipher, we sought to contextualise the work as `screen writing', not just writing for the screen but on it. It is work concerned with the frame. Jacques Derrida speaks of the frame as the ambiguous `parergon' which does not seperate an outside from an inside but unsettles the distinction between the two, and we do this, I think, through interactivity. This shifts the writing off the page and into the realm of visual culture, necessarily engaging with a mediascape of advertising, image, visual art, film and video, and requiring the active participation of the reader or users. Increasingly, we find it necessary to explore the implications of a concept like `screen writing' or `minor literature' of which hypertext as a kind of genre is just one manifestation, perhaps the most flexible and least regulated (in a normative way) than others such as television and film.

The perennial Marshall McLuhan argues that each new medium contains all those that preceeded it. Given this, cybertext presumably does contain linear narrative. It not only contains television, the book, the telephone, radio, graphics and many other media but renegotiates and reorganises them as electronic texts in the fragmented field of cyberspace, as an adjunct of screen culture. People are turning their computers, networks or websites into radio and television stations, publishing houses, performances, cinemas, exhibition spaces, cave paintings, telephones and fax machines, communities, libraries, codex, public meetings, archives and magazines. Each new medium seems to create its own space and dynamics of use, production, access and distribution. In doing that, it doesn't necessarily dislodge something else. Cause and effect is too simple and too easy.

But what might happen is that artists, writers, individuals and communities have access to a medium which lets them produce and distribute their own messages or minor literatures outside agenda setting and imposing corporate, elite or populist interests and structures. I think this is important because in Australia, media, publishing and production houses have been increasingly centralised, monopolised and rationalised in particular metropolitan centres. So if you're living and working anywhere else, you have to do some fast talking and hard selling in those extremely competitive markets to have your ideas heard or get a job in those fields.

In the best of possible circumstances, the tyranny of space and place is dispersed via the web. It is transversal and pluralistic. Small-scale, comparatively inexpensive productions are possible. I suppose these are early days yet and there's still a degree of wonder in my interaction with digital media. I like to think that the powers that be won't figure out how to regulate the web, that corporate interests won't be able to monopolise content, that each of us will be able to develop content, that others will be looking for it and watching or reading it, that the possibilities are endless. Of course this means nothing if you don't have access to a computer or infrastructure.

The lesson of works as diverse as The Blair Witch Project or Jeffed.com or John Safran Media Tycoon or the Electronic Writing Research Ensemble is that a great many people, both writers and readers, are more interested in story, content or concept, in talking back and in doing it yourself, rather than production values, hype and special effects. Perhaps this is indicative of a nascent cultural ethos: the dream of minor literature which aspires not to assume a major function in language but to create a becoming-minor. Minor literature in action and the end is, if not impossible, then unlikely. Appropriative and generative. Decomposing and recomposing. Flowing. Connective. Desiring. Open-ended.