Review: Hypertext 3.0

Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization #

By George P. Landow The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society, third edition)

Landow, George P. 2006. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. 3rd ed. Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-8256-7 (hardcover), 0-8018-8257-5 (paperback), ISBN-13 978-0-8018-8256-2.

Few books in digital media studies have been revised as publicly as this one. Landow publishes Hypertext in 1992, Hypertext 2.0 in 1997, and this third version in 2006, each time keeping the core argument and swapping out the technological referents; Intermedia gives way to the Web, the Web gives way to blogs and wikis, and hyperbole gives way, at least partly, to the chastened mood of the post-dotcom years. In this review, I will argue that Hypertext 3.0 earns its standing as the standard statement of the theory-technology convergence thesis while running on analogies that assert more than they argue; I will show this by assessing 1) what the third edition adds, 2) the analogy problem at the book's core, and 3) the pedagogical value of its datedness. The core argument itself never changes. Hypertext and late twentieth-century critical theory converge: what Barthes describes as the writerly text, what Derrida describes as textual openness and citational grafting, what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the rhizome, electronic linking makes literal. Landow is careful, and was careful from the first edition, to insist that theory neither caused hypertext nor coincided with it exactly; the relationship carries a double valence, illumination running in both directions. His students, he reports in the preface, found Derrida easier after writing hypertexts, and found hypertext easier to think about with Derrida in hand.

What the third edition adds #

The 3.0 revisions are the most interesting part of the book to assess, because they show Landow responding to the two events that most damaged first-wave hypertext theory: the dotcom crash and the general deflation of high theory's academic standing. He opens the preface with Vincent Mosco's The Digital Sublime and its account of cyberspace as a cultural myth in the long tradition of utopian claims made for electricity, telegraphy, and radio. This opening is a smart move. Landow uses Mosco to inoculate the book against the celebratory tone of its predecessors, then pushes back on Mosco for treating every claim about cyberspace as false simply because it functioned as myth, when some of the claims about networked work and education turned out true. The new material on Weblogs treats blogging as the first widely available read-write hypertext, the closest the actual Web has come to the visions of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. And two whole new convergences appear, interactive cinema and postcoloniality, the latter giving the book its subtitle.

The strongest sustained writing remains the chapter on reconfiguring narrative. Landow's close readings of Michael Joyce's afternoon and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl are patient, concrete, and still the best short introductions to those works. He takes Aristotle seriously as the thing hypertext fiction must answer, asks directly whether hypertext fiction is even possible, and lets the question stay harder than his earlier editions did. The politics chapter is also better than its reputation. Rather than cheerleading, it stages a real argument between empowerment claims and the skeptics, drawing on Geert Lovink's disillusioned account of the Net's enclosure by firewalls and capital, William Mitchell's post-9/11 observation that in a networked world there is no difference between addresses and targets, and a detailed treatment of Chinese Internet censorship that reads presciently two decades on. Landow ends the chapter refusing to decide between anarchy and Big Brother, noting the Internet was showing the potential to be both at once. That refusal was the right call in 2004, and it looks even more right now.

The analogy problem #

The book's central weakness was visible in 1992, and three editions have not repaired it. The convergence argument runs on analogy, and the analogies carry more weight than they can bear. Chapter 2 opens by observing that Derrida continually uses the terms link, web, network, and interwoven, terms that "cry out for hypertextuality." That observation concerns vocabulary, not concepts. Derrida's point about citational grafting, that any mark can break with every given context and engender infinite new ones, concerns the structure of signification as such, in print, speech, or smoke signals. Reading it as a description of morphological analyzers and dictionary lookups in extant hypertext systems, as Landow explicitly does, converts a transcendental argument into a product feature. The same move recurs with Barthes's lexia, which becomes the hypertext node, and with the rhizome, which becomes the link structure. Sometimes the translation genuinely illuminates, as when the intertextuality discussion uses the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses to show what explicit linking adds to allusion. But Landow rarely pauses on what gets lost in translation, and the theorists' resistance to exactly this kind of literalization goes mostly unexamined. He notes in passing that Derrida could not think his way outside the mentality of print. The possibility that Derrida was not trying to describe a future technology, and that the description fits only because Landow selected the passages that fit, never receives serious entertainment.

The postcolonial material added for this edition shares the same structure and delivers less payoff. Hypertext becomes a "paradigm for postcoloniality," multivocality and decentering map onto the margins writing back, and the analogy floats free of any sustained engagement with postcolonial theory's own debates. Coming to this chapter after reading actual postcolonial criticism, I find the treatment an extension of the book's method to a domain that deserved a book of its own, included because globalization had become unavoidable rather than because the argument demanded it.

A period document, and the value of that #

The other thing to say honestly is that the book is dated, and dated in an instructive way. Landow timestamps himself mid-sentence in the final chapter, writing that the rain has stopped in Providence at 6:07 p.m. on July 19, 2004, and that he has enough hope to believe the liberatory potential of hypermedia will enable good things to happen. He adds, "I could be wrong." The canon he built the argument on, Storyspace fiction distributed on disk, was already a museum piece by 2006. The developments he flagged as most promising, blogs and wikis as read-write hypertext, were about to be swallowed by platforms that stripped out precisely the features he valued (visible link structures, reader annotation, distributed authorship). Animated Flash text, treated here as an emerging form worth a lengthy taxonomy, is now unplayable without an emulator. None of this obsolescence is Landow's fault, and the layered-edition format makes it oddly honest, since the book wears its revision history openly instead of pretending to timelessness.

For a doctoral course in critical theory, that datedness is the pedagogical point. Hypertext 3.0 is the fullest record of a moment when literary theorists believed a technology had vindicated them, and it models both the productivity and the risk of reading theory through technology. The productivity is real. The risk, that analogy substitutes for argument and the technology's actual political economy goes untheorized, is also real, and the book demonstrates both at length.

Verdict #

Hypertext 3.0 earns its place as the standard statement of the theory-technology convergence thesis, and the narrative and politics chapters still repay close reading. But it should be read the way we read Benjamin on film or McLuhan on print, as a primary source about its own moment rather than a reliable guide to ours. The analogical method that makes the book exciting is also what a critical reader has to push against on nearly every page, and the 2006 additions, especially the postcolonial chapter, stretch the method past its limits. Read it alongside a history of what actually happened to the read-write Web, and it becomes an excellent seminar text. Read alone, it teaches a persuasive story that the last twenty years have complicated at almost every point; read critically, it reveals the digital sublime writ large.