Untitled - witz cultural

59HYPERTEXT ANOCRITICAL THEORYanswer or fi.rlfillment. Thus, their explanation of a plateau accurately describesthe way both individual lexias and clusters of them participate in aweb. 'A plateau," they explain, "is always in the middle, not at the beginningor the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word'plateau' to designate something very special: a continuous, selivibratingregion of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culminationpoint or external end" (2t-221, such as orgasm, victory in war, orother point of culmination. Deleuze and Guattari, who criticize the "Westernmind" for relating "expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends,instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of theirintrinsic value," take the printed book to exemplify such characteristic climactic thought, explaining that "a book composed of chapters has culminationand termination points" (22).Like Derrida and like the inventors of hypertext, they propose a newerform of the book that might provide a truer, more efficient information technology,asking: "What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus thatcommunicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brainl We call a'plateau' any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficialunderground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome" (22). Sucha description, I should add, perfectly matches the way clusters or subwebsorganize themselves in large networked hypertext environments, such as theWorld Wide Web. In fact, reducing Deleuze and Guattari's grand prescriptionto relatively puny literal embodiment, one could take the sections concerningGaskell and Trollope inThe VicTorian Web, or the individual diary entries inPhil Gyford's Weblog version of Samuel Pepys's Diaies, as embodiments ofplateaus. Indeed, one of the principles of reading and writing hypermediaasin exploring a library of printed books-lies in the fact that one can beginanylvhere and make connections, or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, "eachplateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau."Such a characteristic organization (or lack of it) derives from the rhizome's fundamental opposition to hierarchy, a structural form whose em'bodiment Deleuze and Guattari find in the arborescent: "unlike trees or theirroots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are notnecessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very differentregimes of signs, and even nonsign states" (21). As Meyer explains inPlateaus, a Storyspace web that has since been published as part of Witing atthe Edge,we generally rely on "arborescent struchrres," such as binary thought,genealogies, and hierarchies, to divide the "seemingly endless stream ofinformation about the world into more easilv assimilable bits. And. for this