Review by Don Riggs

Joyce, Michael. Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture. University of Michigan Press: 2000.

Michael Joyce’s Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture is a collection of essays either published or delivered as addresses between 1994 and 1999 on the cognitive implications of electronic text of various sorts, from hypertext to MOO’s. (A “MOO” is defined by Joyce as a MUD [Multi-User Dimension or Multi-User Dungeon] Object Oriented [37], a chat forum, often with an educational purpose in addition to a recreational one.) As such, the work is in part theoretical, in part exploratory, in part experimental, in part manifesto, and in part playful. In true Postmodern fashion, the text is recursive, self-referential, disjunctive, at times digressive, and at times opaque. Insofar as it is possible for a print text to partake of characteristics of electronic text, Joyce tries to make his text do so. The interested reader will find it useful not only to read with pen in hand, annotating her own text, but also with computer at hand, ready to make forays into the Net as if clicking on links in the text.

Although James Joyce does not appear in Michael’s Bibliography, the earlier writer’s densely punning use of language occurs throughout. “James Joyce could not be here with us today,” Joyce writes, later referring to “my cousin Stephen Daedalus” (32). The Prelude (the book is structured quasi-musically with a “Prelude” before Chapter 1, an “Intermezzo” between Chapters 6 and 7, and a “Coda” after Chapter 11), “Screendoor: A Meditation on the Outsider,” places Michael Joyce as a young man, growing up in an Irish-American neighborhood, and evokes the sense of place in a way reminiscent of James Joyce’s “Araby,” though without the anguish and anger. Instead, Joyce implies that now, in the slightly post-dawn period of the electronic age, the outsiderness that characterized the great Irish writers of English literature characterizes us all. Wir sind alles Dubliners.

Again, although Marshall McLuhan is not in Joyce’s Bibliography, his shadow looms large. Like McLuhan, Joyce is speculating about the implications of electronic information technology for consciousness, also uses (James) Joycean language to push beyond the linear modes of thought that characterize scholarly writing, also like McLuhan, (Michael) Joyce uses poetry, interpreted in a flagrantly unscholarly way to make a point of his own. I am thinking here of McLuhan’s suggestion that Shakespeare’s “But soft -- what light in yonder window breaks?” adumbrates a passerby’s perception of a television being watched inside a house; Joyce much more thoroughly interprets Milosz’s “A Book in the Ruins” to suggest the unity of reading and writing when someone engages interactively with an electronic text, as in a MOO, where the reader literally changes the text through her participation. Although this ahistorical reading will be problematic, if not abhorrent, to many critics, Joyce acknowledges this: “In reading this poem of Milosz as a meditation on electronic text, I do not wish to appropriate the horror of this scission [of the bombed library in 1941 Warsaw], to trivialize what the space of the Warsaw library opens into or what, in slicing through, it replaces” (14). However, Joyce’s appropriation and reconfiguration of the Milosz text gives him a platform from which his meditation can be launched, and this very transformation of the original into a meditation far from the intent and historical context of the original is an example of the kind of reshaping of the text that is possible in an electronic and interactive medium.

Joyce’s method exemplifies his message, and the frustration of the scholarly reader face to face with Joyce’s text parallels the frustration of the “post-Gutenberg isolated reader” (in McLuhan’s formulation) face to face with a nonlinear electronic text that is constantly in flux due to various “readers’/writers’” influencing of the text through their participation. This is a hard brick to swallow for readers such as myself, who was trained in literary scholarship and criticism grounded in an essentialist view of the Literary Work of Art; the notion that there is an urtext, or a “definitive edition” of a work, with an ascertainable set of “correct” readings contained within definite parameters, has been challenged by Jauss’s reader-response focus and the Derridean “deriding line” that destabilizes the text (and yes, Derrida does appear in the Bibliography). Derrida’s perception of intertextuality, which calls into question the primacy of the author as the creator of the literary text, and which (re)places the author as one stage along the endless evolution of what can only be thought of as a metatextual evolution, can now be seen to have anticipated the mode of existence of the interactive electronic text. That is, while Derrida’s work suggests that the individual literary work of art is not a free-standing and solid self-contained entity, Joyce takes that point of view and shows it to be a literal description of the electronic text.

A vital distinction between McLuhan and Joyce is that, while McLuhan was a fairly conservative critic and scholar viewing the electronic media encroaching on the print medium and pointing us to the implications of the difference, Joyce himself has participated in the creation and development of hypertext. He co-developed the “Storyspace” hypertext software for Eastgate Systems, and that Judith Kerman, for example, used to transform her poems in Mothering from print text to hypertext. The Storyspace software allows the reader to become the writer of the text insofar as she can create her own sequential coherence, apart from the linear sequential model determined by a fixed printed text. That is to say that Michael Joyce is sending us a report from the front in a very different sense than McLuhan did -- as a participant rather than as a war correspondent.

To return to the (re)placing of the author as a participant in the evolution of a work rather than as that work’s initial creator and terminus ante quem non, one of the most significant images used by Joyce in describing this concept is that of contour. Joyce asserts that topology, or “rubber sheet geometry” (22), is a far more apt model for describing the electronic text than is Euclidean plane (or even solid) geometry. He explains that contour is composed of: 1)”the current state of the text at hand,” 2) the “intentions and interactions of previous writers and readers” that evolved into that text at hand, and 3) “those interactions...that the current reader or writer sees as leading from it” (22). The electronic text, then, is a fluid, evolving construct, as opposed to a stable, unchanging essence: Heracleitus rather than Parmenides.

Regardless of whether the Poststructuralists have pronounced the final word on the nature of the printed text, this flexible model seems to describe most adequately the nature of the electronic text, as described by Joyce. One of Joyce’s co-creators of Storyspace, Jay David Bolter, has addressed the same issue of the flexible electronic interactive text in his essay “The Late Age of Print” (contained in a volume of Bolter’s listed in Joyce’s Bibliography), in what may seem a more clearly articulated overview. However, Joyce’s essays are not intended (as far as I can determine) to reproduce Bolter’s historical clarity, but rather to engage the reader in the process of grappling with the emergence of this network textual culture. In reading these essays, I found myself constantly hurled centrifugally outward, accessing the web references in the text, and at one point I simply went through the Bibliography at the computer, accessing various of the websites as if clicking on parts of the text itself. It is striking to notice Joyce’s “resistance to the web” as a “hypertextier-than-thou reaction to the failure of the web to take the form I imagine it should have taken” (51); there is a certain humility to his (re)placement along the course of this trajectory as yet another participant, and as not having the final word. Similarly, he cites his own previous phraseologies at times, admitting that he no longer has any idea what he once meant by them.

His essay on Vannevar Bush as the “father of hypertext” reads like William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” in that Joyce critiques a number of aspects of that earlier stage of electronic text theory, of circa-1945 predictions about the future of hypertext that have failed to materialize. His recurrent meditations on Bush as his “virtual father,” on his actual, biological father, and on his two sons (and he quotes from one son’s email from Prague, misspellings and departures from grammar and all), as well as his constant references to “space,” “place,” and “a recurrent insistence upon grounding our experience of the emergence of a network culture in the body” (4) all point to a tension between the reality of our current interface with cyberspace through the flat window of a computer screen and the desire/nostalgia for connection with an organic and physical whole. In criticizing “the gadgeteer’s chirpy American optimism” associated with Bush -- and, one might surmise, the Golden Age vision of Gernsback, Campbell, Heinlein and Asimov -- Joyce refers to his sister’s archeological work on precolumbian Mayan culture, to the “human remains that wash across history before us, and away from which we have bravely, if foolishly, surfed off in thinking to construct a network outside history” (221).

In his chapter “The Lingering Errantness of Place, or, Library as Library,” Joyce addresses the particular challenges, fears and frustrations besetting the librarian in the age of the flexible electronic, as opposed to fixed printed, text. He refers to his particular experience in teaching as “professor of English and the library” (67) as producing exasperation among the guardians of texts in a fixed form. Possibly to the exasperation of the reader seeking answers, he primarily raises questions and poses paradoxes.

The reader of Othermindedness may well at times be frustrated by Joyce’s cleverness of language and self-referentiality; he cites Thoreau as a fellow sufferer from “the ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you”(70). Interestingly, it seems that some of his multiply authored electronic texts (e.g., <http://www.feedmag.com/95.05dialog1.html>) feature a more direct verbal expression, as if the ability to “interrupt without interrupting” via links from particular words frees him to be less (James) Joycean. However, without having accessed this site, I would not have understood his “I have not Svenned myself, I’m not doing a half-Birkets from the high board” (55), where he alludes to Sven Birkets, one of his fellows in that e-dialog.

Despite such privately clever opacities, the annoying sententious reiterations of phrases like “scene is seen,” and the occasionally Baroque self-referential cleverness, this collection presents the reader interested in the current (or, really, recently past) state of electronic network textuality with a valuable opportunity to immerse herself in the process. -- Don Riggs

This review article was published in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. William Senior [Fiona Kelleghan, reviews editor], Vol. 11, Issue 4 (Summer, 2001), pp.468-471.