Untitled - witz cultural

55HYPERTEXT ANDCRITICAL THEORYconfining situation, he perceives a network as something that confines andlimits: "Locked within the totality of a corpus, within a complex system ofrelationships, the novel is, in its very letter, allusion, repetition, and resumptionof an object which now begins to resemble an inexhaustible world" (2681.Frederic fameson, who attacks Louis Althus ser in The Political Uncon'scious for creatrng impressions of "facile totalization" and of "a seamless webof phenomena" (271, himself more explicitly and more frequently makesthese models the site of error. For exampTe, when he criticizes the "antispeculative bias" of the liberal tradition in Marxism and Fonn, he notes "itsemphasis on the individual fact or item at the expense of the network of relationshipsin which that item may be imbedded" as liberalism's means ofkeeping people from "drawing otherwise unavoidable conclusions at thepolitical level" (x). The network model here represents a firll, adequate contextualization,one suppressed by an other-than-Marxist form of thought, butit is still only necessary in describing pre-Marxian society. fameson repeatsthis paradigm in his chapter on Herbert Marcuse when he explains that "genuinedesire risks being dissolved and lost in the vast network of pseudosatisfactionswhich make up the market system" (100-101). Once again, networkprovides a paradigm apparently necessary for describing the complexities ofa fallen society. It does so again when in the Sarlre chapter he discussesMarx's notion of fetishism, which, according to fameson, presents "commoditiesand the 'objective' network of relationships which they entertainwith each other" as the illusory appearance masking the "reality of social life,"which "lies in the labor process itself" (296).Cause or Convergence, Influenceor ConfluencelWhat relation obtains between electronic computing, hypertextin particular, and literary theory ofthe past three or fourdecadesl j. Hillis Miller proposes that "the relation . . . ismultiple, non-linear, non-causal, non-dialectical, and heavilyoverdetermined. It does not fit most traditional paradigms for defining 'relationship"'("Literary The oryi' ll\. Miller himself provides a fine example of theconvergence ofcritical theory and technology. Before he discovered computerhypertext, he wote about text and (interpretative) text processing in ways thatsound very familiar to anyone who has read or worked with hypertext. Here,for example, is the way Fiction and Repetition describes the way he reads anovel by Hardy in terms of what I would term a Bakhtinian hypertextuolity:"Each passage is a node, a point ofintersecfion or focus, on which convergelines leading from many other passages in the novel and ultimately including