Untitled - witz cultural

5lHYPERTEXT ANDCRITICAL THEORYing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact withthe rea1" (12). Maps and hypertexts both, in other words, relate directly to performance,to interaction.Like some statements by Derrida, some of Deleuze and Guattari's morecryptic discussions of the rhizome often become clearer when consideredfrom the vantage point of hypertext. For example, when they state that therhizome is a "a short-term memory or antimemory," something apparentlyin complete contrast with any information technology or technology of culturalmemory they nonetheless capture the provisional, temporary changingquality in which readers make individual lexias the temporary center of theirmovement through an information space.Perhaps one of the most difficult portions of A Thousand Plateaus involvesthe notion of nomadic thought, something, again, much easier to conveyand experience in a fluid electronic environment than from within theworld of print. According to Michael foyce, the first important writer ofhypertext fiction and one of the creators of Storyspace, Deleuze and Guattarireject "the word and world fully mapped as logos," proposing instead that "wewrite ourselves in the gap of nomos, the nomadic" (Of Two Minds,207). Theyoffer or propose, he explains, "being-for space againstbeing-in space. We arein the water, inscribing and inscribed by the flow in our sailing. We write ourselvesin oscillation between the smooth space ofbeing for-time (what happensto us as we go as well as what happens to the space in which we do so) and thestriated space of in-time (what happens outside the space and us)" (207).Those who find the ruptures and seams as important to hypertext asthe link that bridges such gaps find that the rhizome has yet another crucialaspect of hypertextuality. Moulthrop, for example, who "describes hypertextsas composed of nodes and links, local coherences and linearities brokenacross the gap or synapse of transition," takes this approach: "In describingthe rhizome as a model of discourse, Deleuze and Guattari invoke the 'principleof asignifying rupture' (9), a fundamental tendency toward unpredictabilityand discontinuity. Perhaps then hypefiext and hypermedia representthe expression of the rhizome in the social space of writing" ("Rhizomeand Resistance," 304).We must take care not to push the similarity too far and assume that theirdescriptions of rhizome, plateau, and nomadic thought map one to one ontohypertext, since many of their descriptions of the rhizome and rhizomaticthought appear impossible to fulfill in any information technology that useswords, images, or limits of any sort. Thus when Deleuze and Guattari writethat a rhizome "has neitherbeginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu)