Untitled - witz cultural

135RECONFIGURINGTHE AUTHORa search through a French thesaurus, or a reader-determined tracking ofddbordement created after I had completed my document would automancallybecome available.My brief description of how I would go about producing this text were Iwriting it in something like a complete hypertext environment might troublesome readers because it suggests that I have sacrificed a certain amount ofauthorial control, ceding some of it to the reader. The act of writing has alsochanged to some extent. Electronic hypertext and contemporary discussionsof critical theory particularly those of the poststructuralists, display manypoints of convergence, but one point on which they differ is tone. Whereasmost writings on theory with the notable exception of Derrida, are models ofscholarly solemnity, records of disillusionment and brave sacrifice of humanisticpositions, writers on hypertext are downright celebratory. Whereasterms like deoth, vanish,loss, and expressions of depletion and impoverishmentcolor critical theory, the vocabulary of freedom, energy, and empowermentmarks writings on hypertextuality. One reason for these different tonesmay lie in the different intellectual traditions, national and disciplinary fromwhich they spring. A more important reason, I propose, is that critical theorists,as I have tried to show, continually confront the limitation-indeed,what they somewhat prematurely take to be the exhaustion-of the cultureof print. They write from an awareness of limitation and shortcoming, andfrom a moody nostalgia, often before the fact, at the losses their disillusionmenthas brought and will bring. Writers on hypertext, in contrast, glory inpossibility, excited by the future of textuality, knowledge, and writing. Anotherway of putting this opposing tone and mood is that most writers on criticaltheory however brilliantly they may theorize a much-desired new textuality,nonetheless write from within daily experience of the old and only of theold. Many writers on hypertext, on the other hand, have already had someexperience of hypertext systems, and they therefore write from a differentexperiential vantage point. Most poststructuralists write from within the twilight of a wished-for coming day; most writers of hlpertext write about manyof the same things from within the dawn.Virtual PresenceMany features of hypermedia derive from its creating the virtualpresence of all the authors who contribute to its materials.Computer scientists draw on optics for an analogy whenthey speak of "virtual machines" created by an operating system that providesindividual users sharing a system with the sense of working on their own individualmachines. In the first chapter, when discussing electronic textuality,