Untitled - witz cultural

334HYPERTEXT 3.0 ination. Since marginalization results from one group's placement of itself ata center, one must nert ask which group places itself at the center of powerand understanding, and the answer must be one that feels itself threatenedby the importance of technology. Ryan asks, "What is the operation of exclusionin a philosophy that permits one group, or value, or idea to be kept outso that another can be safeguarded internally and turned into a norml"(Marxism and. Deconstrucfion, 31. One such operation that I have frequentlyencountered after talks on educafional hypertext takes the form of a statementsomething like "I am a Luddite" or "What you say is very interesting,but I can t use (or teach with) computers, because I'm a LudditeJ' (Can youimagine the followingl "I can't use lead pencils-ballpoint pens-typewriters-printedbooks-photocopies-librarycatalogues because I'm a Ludditel')All the self-proclaimed Luddites in academe turn out to oppose only thenewest machines, not machines in general and certainly not machines thatobviate human drudgery. Such proclamations of Ludditism come permeatedby irony, since literary scholars as a group entirely depend on the technologiesof writing and printing. The first of these technologies, writing, beganas the hieratic possession of the politically powerfirl, and the second providesone of the first instances of production-line interchangeable parts used inheavily capitalized production. Scholars and theorists today can hardly beLuddites, though they can be suspicious of the latest form of informationtechnology, one whose advent threatens, or which they believe threatens,their power and position. In fact, the self-presentation of knowledge workersas machine-breakers defending their chance to survive in conditions of souldestroyinglabor in bare, subsistence conditions tells us a lot about the resistance.Such mystification simultaneously romanticizes the humanists' resistancewhile presenting their arxieties in a grotesquely inappropriate way.In other words, the self-presentation of the modern literary scholar or criticaltheorist as Luddite romanticizes, in other words, an unwillingness to perceiveactual conditions ofhis or her own production.Perhaps my favorite anecdote and possibly one that makes a parricularlysignificant contribution to our understanding ofresistance is this: after a lectureon hypertext and critical theory at one institution, a young Europeantrainedfaculty member who identified his specialty as critical theory candidlyadmitted, "I've never felt old-fashioned before." As the latest of the newfound,new-fangled developments, hypertert, like other forms of New Media, ingeneral has the (apparent) power to make those who position themselves asthe advocates of the new appear to themselves and others as old-fashioned.