Untitled - witz cultural

Hypertext and Critical TheoryTextual OpennessLike Barthes, Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin, facques Derridacontinually uses the terms link (liasons), web (toile), network(riseau), and interwoven (s'y tissent), which cry out for hypertexfuality;but in contrast to Barthes, who emphasizes the writerly text and itsnonlineariry Derrida emphasizes textual openness, intertexhrality, and theirrelevance of distinctions between inside and outside a particular tert. Theseemphases appear with particular clarity when he claims that "like any text, thetext of 'Plato'couldnt not be involved, or at least in a virtual, dynamic, lateralmanner, with all the worlds that composed the system of the Greek language"(Dissemination, L29). Derrida in fact here describes extant hypertext systemsin which the active reader in the process ofexploring a tert, probing it, cancall into play dictionaries with morphological analyzers that connect individualwords to cognates, derivations, and opposites. Here again something thatDerrida and other critical theorists describe as part of a seemingly extravagantclaim about language tLlms out precisely to describe the new economyof reading and writing with electronic virtual, rather than physical, forms.Derrida properly recognizes (in advance, one might say) that a new, freer,richer form oftext, one truer to our potential experience, perhaps to ouractual ifunrecognized experience, depends on discrete reading units. As heexplains, in what Gregory Ulmer terms "the fundamental generalization ofhis writing" (Applied Grammatology,58), there also exists "the possibility ofdisengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of everymark, spoken and written, and which constitutes every mark in writingbefore and outside of every horizon of semiolinguistic communication . . .Every sign, linguistic or nonJinguistic, spoken or written . . . can be cited, put