Untitled - witz cultural

'r20HYPERTEXT 3.0 spheres" therefore becomes very difficult, and in a fully networked environmentsuch text hierarchies tend to collapse.Hypertext linking situates the present text at the center ofthe textual universe,thus creating a new kind of hierarchy, in which the power of the centerdominates that of the infinite periphery. But because in hypertext that centeris always a transient, decenterable virtual center-one created, in otherwords, only by one's act of reading that particular text-itother aspects of the network in the way a printed text does.never tyrannizesBarthes, well aware of the political constraints of a text that makes areader read in a particular way, himself manipulates the political relations oftext in interesting ways. The entire procedure or construction of S/2, forexample, serves as a commentary on the political relationships among portionsof the standard scholarlytext, the problem ofhierarchy. Barthes plaliilycreates his own version of complex footnote systems. Like Derrida in Glas,hecreates a work or metatext that the reader accustomed to reading books findseither abrasively different or, on rare occasion, a wittily powerful commentaryon the way books work-that is, on the way they force readers to see relationshipsbetween sections and thereby endow certain assemblages of words withpower and value because they appear in certain formats rather than others.Barthes, in other words, comments on the footnote, and a7l of S/Z wrnsout to be a criticism of the power relatrons between portions of text. In a footnoteor endnote, we recall, that portion of the text conventionally known asthe main text has a value for both reader and writer that surpasses any of itssupplementary portions, which include notes, prefaces, dedications, and soon, most of which take the form of apparatuses designed to aid informationretrieval. These devices, almost all of which derive directly from print technology,can function only when one has fixed, repeatable, physically isolatedtexts. They have great advantages and permit certain kinds ofreading: oneneed not, for example, memorize the location of a particular passage if onehas system features such as chaptertitles, tables ofcontents, andindices. Sothe reference device has enornous value as a means of reader orientation,navigation, and information retrieval.It comes at certain costs, costs that, like most paid by the reader of text,have become so much a part of our experiences of reading that we do notnotice them at all. Barthes makes us notice them. Barthes, like most latetwentieth-centurycritical theorists, is at his best seeing the invisible, breathingon it in hopes that the condensate will illuminate the shadows of whatothers have long missed and taken to be not there. What, then, does the footnoteimply, and how does Barthes manipulate or avoid it? Combinedwith the