Untitled - witz cultural

122HYPERTEXT 3.0 texts by oneself. Several things have happened, things that violate our expectations.First, attaching my commentary to a passage from foyce makes itexist in a far different, far less powerful, relation to Joyce, the so-called originaltext, than it would in the world of physically isolated texts. Second, as soonas one attaches more than one text block or lexia to a single anchor (or block,or link marker), one destroys all possibility of the bipartite hierarchy of footnoteand main text. In hypertext, the main text is that which one is presentlyreading. So one has a double revaluation: with the dissolution of this hierarchy,any attached text gains an importance it might not have had before.In Bakhtin's terms, the scholarly article, which quotes or cites statementsby others-"some for refutation and others for confirmation and supplementation-isone instance of a dialogic interrelationship among directlysignifying discourses within the limits of a single context . . . This is not aclash of two ultimate semantic authorities, but rather an objectified (plotted)clash of two represented positions, subordinated wholly to the higher, ultimate authority of the author. The monologic context, under these circumstances,is neither broken nor weakened" (Problerus,188). Trying to evade theconstraints, the logic, of print scholarship, Bakhtin himself takes an approachto quoting other authors more characteristic of hypertext or postbook technologythan that of the book. According to his editor and translator, Emerson,when Bakhtin quotes other critics, "he does so at length, and lets each voicesound fully. He understands that the frame is always in the power of theframer, and that there is an outrageous privilege in the power to cite others.Thus Bakhtin's footnotes rarely sewe to narrow down debate by discreditingtotally, or (on the other hand) by conferring exclusive authority. Theymight identify, expand, illustrate, but they do not pull rank on the body of thetext-and thus more in the nature of a marginal gloss than an authoritativefootnote" (>oorvii).Derrida also comments on the status relations that cut and divide texts,but unlike Barthes, he concerns himself with oppositions between prefaceand main text and main text and other texts. Recognizing that varying levelsof status accrue to different portions of a text, Derrida examines the way eachtakes on associations with power or importance. In discussing Hegel's introductionto the Logic,Denidapoints out, for example, that the preface must bedistinguished from the introduction. They do not have the same function, oreven the same dignity, in Hegel's eyes (Dissernination,lT). Derrida's new textuality,or true textuality (which I have continually likened to hypertextuality),represents "an entirely other typology where the outlines of the preface andthe'main'text are blurred" (39).