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Hypertext and Hyperculture

Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, does not see hypertext as a phenomenon limited to digital text. The world itself is a hypertext. Hypertextuality is the ‘real structure of things’.¹ ‘Everything is’, as Nelson’s famous phrase has it, ‘deeply intertwingled’.² Everything is tied up, networked with everything else. There are no isolated beings: ‘In an important sense there are’, Nelson holds, ‘no subjects at all’.³ Neither the body nor thinking follows a linear pattern: ‘Unfortunately, for thousands of years the idea of sequence has been too much with us … The structure of ideas is never sequential; and indeed, our thought processes are not very sequential either.’⁴ The structure of thought is an ‘interwoven system of ideas (what I like to call a structangle)’.⁵ A tangle is something jumbled up or tied into a knot. Despite its complexity, the net-like structure of reality is not chaotic. This is what the ‘struct’ in structangle expresses: it is a structured tangle. Linear and hierarchical structures or closed, unchanging identities are the result of compulsion: ‘Hierarchical and sequential structures … are usually forced and artificial.’⁶ Hypertext promises a liberation from compulsion. What Nelson imagines is a hypertextual universe, a network without centre, in which everything is wedded together: ‘The real dream is for “everything” to be in the hypertext.’⁷

Nelson calls his hypertextual system ‘Xanadu’, the name of the legendary place in Asia where the powerful ruler Kubla Khan created a magnificent pleasure palace in the middle of a glorious garden. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes this mythological place in his unfinished poem Kubla Khan. Nelson must have been fascinated by Coleridge’s vision. In CompLib/ Dream Machines, he explicitly refers to Coleridge’s fragment of a dream.⁸ Nelson’s hypertext, his ‘Xanadu’, thus has something dreamlike about it.

Nelson also drew sketches of his Xanadu palace. In front of the entrance to the monumental castle-like building, an oversized X stretches up to the sky. The golden X in front of every Xanadu branch bears a certain resemblance to McDonald’s golden arches. The users who enter it are tellingly called ‘travellers’, and they are hungry: ‘The Golden X’s welcome the mindhungry traveller.’⁹ The hungry travellers are greeted with a ‘hyperwelcome’ in the hypermarket of knowledge and information.

The ‘intertwingularity’ and the ‘structangle’ are also characteristic of culture today. Culture has increasingly lost the kind of structure familiar to us from conventional texts or books. There are no stories, no theology, no teleology to give it the appearance of a meaningful, homogeneous unity. The borders or enclosures that convey a semblance of cultural authenticity or genuineness are dissolving. Culture is bursting at the seams, so to speak. It is exploding all ties and joints. It is becoming unbound, un-restricted, un-ravelled: a hyperculture.¹⁰ The hyperspace of culture is organized not by borders but by links and network connections.

The process of globalization, accelerated by the new technologies, de-distances cultural space. The resulting closeness creates a richness, a corpus of cultural lifeworld practices and forms of expression. The process of globalization accumulates and condenses. Heterogeneous cultural contents are pushed together side by side. Cultural spaces overlap and penetrate each other. This unbounding also applies to time. Not only different sites but also different time frames are de-distanced so that the different is placed side by side. The feeling of hyper-, rather than the feeling of trans-, inter- or multi-, is the most precise expression of today’s culture. Cultures implode; that is, they are de-distanced into a hyperculture.

In a certain sense, hyperculture means more culture. By being de-naturalized, by being liberated from ‘blood’ and ‘soil’, that is, from biological or terrestrial codes, culture becomes genuinely cultural, even hypercultural. De-naturalization intensifies culturalization. If the factual existence of a culture is tied to a site, then hyperculturalization represents an abolition of the facticity of culture.

Will hyperculture come to be seen as a fleeting semblance, a dream vision, like Coleridge’s ‘Xanadu’? Kubla Khan’s pleasure-dome is erected on an earth that is ‘with ceaseless turmoil seething’. And the sacred river ‘Alph’, flowing through the paradisiacal garden, sinks ‘in tumult to a lifeless ocean’:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

In the roaring of the waters, Kubla Khan can hear the voices of his ancestors. They prophesy war:

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!¹¹

A war of cultures? A hyperculture without centre, without a God, without sites will continue to trigger resistance. There are many for whom it means the trauma of loss. Re-theologization, re-mythologization and re-nationalization are common reactions to the hyperculturalization of the world. Thus, hypercultural de-siting will have to confront a fundamentalism of sites. Will those ‘ancestral voices’ prophesying disaster be proved right? Or are they just the voices of a few revenants who will soon drift away again?

Notes

1 1. Theodor Holm Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Redmond: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1987, p. 30.

2 2. Ibid., p. 31.

3 3. Ibid.

4 4. Theodor Holm Nelson, Literary Machines, Edition 87.1, p. 1/16.

5 5. Ibid., p. 1/14.

6 6. Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, p. 31.

7 7. Ibid., p. 32.

8 8. Ibid., p. 142.

9 9. Ibid., p. 145.

10 10. Hyperculture, or hyperculturality, is a concept belonging to the theory and philosophy of culture. It differs from the concept of ‘hyperculture’ one finds in media theory and literary theory, which contrasts with book culture. See M. Klepper, R. Mayer and E.-P. Schneck (eds), Hyperkultur: Zur Fiktion des Computerzeitalters, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995, which contains exclusively contributions from the fields of media theory and literary theory that discuss hypertext, hyperfiction, science fiction, cyberpunk, cyberspace or virtual reality. Despite the title, then, it actually has very little to do with culture in the proper sense of the word, and indeed the volume does not contain any theoretical reflections on culture. ‘Hyperculture’ is merely used as an undefined collective term for computer-related phenomena.

11 11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, in Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon, 1912, Vol. 1, p. 295.