I have taken excerpts from the Web presentations and hypertext essays that apply the following theorists to digital technologies. When possible, I have cited abstracts or introductory materials. I will also respond to some of the concepts and arguments presented here in my own hypermedia presentation. I encourage you to browse these sites for the complete text.
(includes link to A Declaration of Independence Cyberspace)
Roland Barthes and the Writerly Text
"Hypertext blurs the boundaries between reader and writer and therefore instantiates another quality of Barthes's ideal text."
Susan Romano. University of Texas at Austin
"Since Baudrillard conceived his ideas about simulation and the simulacrum long before the advent of Internet technology or cyberspace/cyborg culture, it is remarkable the degree to which his theories regarding the state of Western culture apply to cyberspace. "The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control-- and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against an ideal." This passage from Simulacra and Simulation could serve as a definition for computer generated virtual reality." Yousuf Dhamee
Jean Baudrillard and Digitality
"Jean Baudrillard, who presents himself as a follower of Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan, is someone who seems both fascinated and appalled by what he sees as the all-pervading effects of such digital encoding, though his examples suggest that he is often confused about which media actually employ it. The strengths and weaknesses of Baudrillard's approach appear in his remarks on the digitization of knowledge and information. Baudrillard correctly perceives that movement from the tactile to the digital is the primary fact about the contemporary world, but then he misconceives -- or rather only partially perceives -- the implications of his point." (excerpt from )
Erica J. Seidel Brown University '97. English 112, 1996
"This site represents, as if such a motive were possible, the efforts of several students in a graduate course in the English Department at the University of Texas at Arlington. The course is entitled English 5352: Major Figures in Rhetoric: Jean Baudrillard and the Problem of Simulation, and it is being taught by Victor Vitanza. For more information about the course itself, we recommend a trip to the Collab-1 website, as this course is one of two being taught collaboratively (the syllabus is available at that site). The other course is at UT-Dallas. We also recommend a visit to the Rhetoric, Composition, and Critical Theory site at UTA, for more specific context to the course itself. The fact that this is a student project carries with it a few specific parameters."
A website dedicated to Baudrillard resources on the Web. Maintained by UTA graduate humanities students.
"In 'The Precession of Simulacra' Jean Baudrillard attempts to disentangle the phenomenon that the Post-Structuralist movement simultaneously identified, decried and helped popularize: the disappearance of the real. In examining the cultural climate of the West following 1970 Baudrillard finds a world where representation through a surplus of images has obscured all former notions of truth. The annihilation of the real has become a manifestation of Marx's nightmare of the commodity fetish. He portrays the United States, in particular, as a grim militaristic state controlled by the media's manipulation of images. Baudrillard finds himself disempowered by the endlessly proliferating images which confound the real. His position becomes that of the male hysteric , due in part to the fact that intellect and reason cannot make sense of the post-modern "world of hallucinations" where image, reality, and surface representation blur into each other. Baudrillard in a sense writes himself out of his own text. In a world without truth the theorist/the semiotician/the intellectual (indeed the university itself) becomes irrelevant, if not totally impotent." Yousuf Dhamee
The Simulation of Surveillance
"A fascinating exploration of the relation between surveillance (Foucault) and simulation (Baudrillard). Well researched and well written, it goes beyond other books on surveillance to relate high-tech surveillance systems to concepts in postmodern theories." Mark Poster, University of California, Irvine Cambridge University Press, U.K. server or U.S. server
Chapter 8-11, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.
Nancy Kaplan's discussion of Jay Bolter's Writing Space.
The following discussion of Deleuze+Guattari, WWW, rhizomes, etc. took place on the Deleuze-Guattari discussion list (part of the Spoon Collective). The first post is dated Wed, 31 May 1995 09:22:52 (EDT); the last post occurred on Sat, 24 Jun 1995 03:17:41 -0700 (PDT).
WWW Resources for Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
WWW Resources for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari [This page derives from one created by Chris Allert, who in turn incorporated materials from A. Liu's Voice of the Shuttle Philosophy Page].
Web site maintained by Brown University.
Other Convergences: Intertextuality, Multivocality, and De-centeredness
Like Barthes, Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida continually uses the terms link (liasons) , web (toile) , network (réseau), and interwoven (s'y tissent), which cry out for hypertextuality; but in contrast to Barthes, who emphasizes the writerly text and its nonlinearity, Derrida emphasizes textual openness, intertextuality, and the irrelevance of distinctions between inside and outside a particular text.
Daniel Chandler's Biases of the Ear and Eye
"In the early 1960s several influential books and papers were published on the theme of oral versus literate cultures. These included The Savage Mind by the French structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, a paper on 'The Consequences of Literacy' by the English anthopologist Jack Goody and his colleague the literary historian Ian Watt, The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan, and Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock. These works and many others since brought to prominence the theme of what came to be called 'orality and literacy' in cultural debates. It is a stimulating but controversial topic with considerable implications for anyone concerned with literacy. It sheds light, for instance, on some of the influences framing the widespread and dominant paranoid myth of the so-called decline of literacy (see Graff 1987)."
E-literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print
"I have twisted the language to contrive the title of this essay because I want to interrogate the future of literacy both its electronic formations (if indeed these differ from its pre-electronic ones) and its social origins and effects. Hence: I am using the unpronounceable locution e-literacies in two different ways:
- first, to mean those reading and writing processes specific to electronic texts (by texts, I mean a whole range of digitally encoded materials -- words, sounds, pictures, video clips, simulations, etc.);
- second, to signify elite-racies as in those socio-economic elites whose interests might be served by electronic literacies of one sort or another, or who might come to be elites by virtue of their ability to shape electronic literacies.
There are a number of ways to read this essay, none of which will exactly replicate the text of the talk I gave. Take chances with your choices."
Cyberspace and Critical Theory
An entry in Landow's hypertext essay on Cyberspace and Critical Theory
An excerpt from: The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts by Richard A. Lanham. The University of Chicago Press.
Nancy Kaplan's discussion of Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts.
Nancy Kaplan's discussion of Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
Nancy Kaplan's discussion of Myron Tuman's Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age.
Prof. Tuman Responds to Prof. Kaplan
Alan Aycock's review of Tuman's Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers
"This article is about an experiment I conducted for publication in a volume collecting the papers read at the Sixteenth Annual Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature: "Literacy Online: the Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers," October 26-28, 1989 (organized by Myron Tuman). My talk at the conference placed the current developments in Artificial Intelligence and hypermedia programs in the context of the concept of the "apparatus," used in cinema studies to mount a critique of cinema as an institution, as a social "machine" that is as much ideological as it is technological. The same drive of realism that led in cinema to the "invisible style" of Hollywood narrative films, and to the occultation of the production process in favor of a consumption of the product as if it were "natural," is at work again in computing. Articles published in computer magazines declare that "the ultimate goal of computer technology is to make the computer disappear, that the technology should be so transparent, so invisible to the user, that for practical purposes the computer does not exist. In its perfect form, the computer and its application stand outside data content so that the user may be completely absorbed in the subject matter--it allows a person to interact with the computer just as if the computer were itself human" (_Macuser_, March, 1989). It was clear that the efforts of critique to expose the oppressive effects of "the suture" in cinema (the effect binding the spectator to the illusion of a complete reality) had made no impression on the computer industry, whose professionals (including many academics) are in the process of designing "seamless" information environments for hypermedia applications. The "twin peaks" of American ideology--realism and individualism--are built into the computing machine (the computer as institution)."