Reading Response Four

Both of these readings get at the idea that we are complex beings who need more complex modes of communication otherwise we are just lying to ourselves or at least not getting to the full nature of things as they actually are. The reality is we are complicated and so is everything else. To simplify only blinds us to what more there is out the to understand.

“The boundaries between genres and disciplines keep people dumb and inflexible and make them careerist of the imagination. You can’t let other people decide what is important to write or think about. Other people are wrong. This is a good rule of thumb. (But also keep in mind that you are someone else’s “other people.”)

“Language must be teased into displaying its entire madcap lavish beauty. If you let it be serviceable then it will only serve you, never master you, and you will only write what you already know, which is not much.”

- Shelly Jackson

The Jackson reading seemed to make more of an argument for why common modes don’t work, where they fail and how Hypertext as a solution can help us gain stronger and pos sibyl more honest understandings of ourselves and the context in which we live. I liked her take on things but found her argument limited in her tactic of comparing the way things are and how much better they will be with the use of hypertext as a better way of understanding. The chapter over all left me wanting to know, how hypertext works. Theoretically though, the argument is strong the ideas sound right, but I’d like to see evidence that is actually is. In some ways it seems like gaining and understanding of hypertext through comparison shallows the focus a bit to one way of understanding it. It leaves me wonder how you would defend hypertext as an entity in and of itself. I think that Jackson would argue that nothing is in and of itself, but for some reason I still feel that that us an argument that needs to be stated.

Much like the autoethnography piece, Jackson employ her own tactics in the text itself by focusing on relationships, in this case the disjuncture between established modes of communication and perception and the possibilities that hypertext proposes. In this sense I was won over by the idea of hypertext in the way that I was engaged with the reading more so than with a basic academic text, I found it entertaining yet enlightening and felt as if I were have a conversation more so than reading a text.

Where Jackson left questions Hillis seemed to fill them in. His discussion on middle voice and middle ground speak to this notion that there are spaces and points of connection that are hard to define; yet we still find ways to get at them.

Middle Voice: reveals a subjectivity that that seemingly emanates from a time or space situated between the author and the characters he or she crafts. There is a lack of acknowledgement of either author or character causing the reader to identify with what is being said more.

Free indirect discourse allows an author to attempt to give voice to what is at the threshold of imagination as oppose to what dare not be said. In this sense it may speak more of the ineffable and constitute a nascent effort on the part of the author to symbolize or actualize that, which is still virtual, incipient, not fully thought.

Middle Ground: lies between an embodied user this side of the screen and any other individual she or he may connect with through its use.

As a virtual spatial strategy, telepresence relies on and promotes a flexible theory of subjectivity also evident in the novel’s middle voice; telepresence is neither fully here nor fully there, yet both at once.

The concepts mention above are actually existing examples of the kinds of ideas that Jackson talks about in her article. Hillis really gets at the heart of it fore me in a more substantial way though. In a sense I’d love to grasp the notion of hypertext more fully but the reality is I have been trained to learn in this particular way and breaking from that feels like I’m missing something.

When Jackson talks about the boundaries of our bodies and alludes to the notion that we exceed our physical barrier in a sense. She actually says, “Hypertext is the banished body – It’s not opinions I’m interested in, but relationships, juxtapositions, apparitions and interpolations.”

So okay that’s nice, but what exactly does that mean? Hillis presents the avatar as an actual thing that we have created that exemplifies this notion that Jackson speaks of. With an avatar and multiple avatars we can exercise our multiple selves (our complexities) in a virtual space.

Telepresence, as mentioned earlier is also a subject in Jackson piece. She says, “In the no-place of hypertext, there’s finally room to move around, like an orifice I can fit my whole body into, instead of just my finger or my pen.” Telepresence happens in virtual space, a space of partial imagination and partial reality yet infinite and no placed anywhere physically.

Overall I get the strange sense the hypertext debates kind of happen in a vacuum where these arguments come form nowhere or no place. They do mean something, as Jackson stated and that is why I am in favor of implementing more hypertext discourse into our modes of learning BUT the way that they mean something are in there manifestations in the real world. The imaginary realm is great and a lot can be learned form it, but we do exist in a physical world where things like force and impact totally exist.