Do You Really Want a Revolution? CyberTheory Meets Real-Life Pedagogical Practice in FrankenMOO and the Conventional Literature Classroom

College Literature, Summer 2006 by Sonstroem, Eric

the work can be seen . . . the text is a process of demonstration. . . .The work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse... .The Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production."(Barthes 1977, 156-57)

In some ways, this fit between electronic textuality and critical theory that was written before the advent of electronic text can seem downright uncanny. Writing about Barthes, N. Katherine Hayles observes: "Written twenty years before the advent of the microcomputer, his essay stands in the ironic position of anticipating what it cannot anticipate"(2000, 2). We could say the same of Wolfgang Iser, who finds literary texts full of gaps and blanks, "an arena in which reader and author participate in a game of the imagination."(1980, 51). Iser actually appears to configure the (printed) text as a kind of "virtual reality," before this metaphor was concretized by computer science:

The literary text activates our own facilities, enabling us to recreate the world it presents. The product of this creative activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality. This virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is the coming together of text and imagination. (Iser 1980, 54)

We could say the same of Deleuze and Guattari, whose concept of narrative as a rhizomic network is often used as a metonym for an electronic text: "a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end"(1987, 21-22). We could say the same of Louise Rosenblatt, with her notion of active readers12, or of Stanley Fish when he argues that "interpreters do not decode poems: they make them"(1980, 327). This uncanny convergence of critical text theory and electronic text is noted by many hypertext theorists, and acknowledged in the subtitle to George Landow's Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1997).

Curiously, and somewhat paradoxically, this enthusiastic endorsement of conventional text-based theory to describe immersive electronic environments is also a move away from acknowledging that electronic textual experience is at all similar to print textual experience. The more we use print text-based theory to describe electronic text, the less that theory seems to have ever described print text in the first place. The more astonished we become that Barthes can be used to theorize MOOing, the more we forget that he was actually theorizing reading. Sometimes we appear to forget it altogether, as when Landow enthuses "Using hypertext, critical theorists will have, or now already have, a laboratory in which to test their ideas"(1997, 2), apparently forgetting that there already was such a laboratory, and it was called text.

The lure of theorizing electronic textual experience as utterly revolutionary is attractive partly because it can appeal to our best Utopian impulses. Epsen Aarseth acknowledges that there might be cases of "significant overlap" (1997, 5) between print literature and cybertext, but still refers to cybertexts as "theoretical vacuums"(18), "virgin territory"(18), and "foreign ground"(19)."I wish to challenge the recurrent practice of applying the theories of literary criticism to a new empirical field," he writes, "seemingly without any reassessment of the terms and concepts involved"(14). As a revolutionary medium, electronic text will, at last, liberate the reader from the tyranny of the author; according to Jay David Bolter in the early days of electronic text theory,