Untitled - witz cultural

67HYPERTEXT ANDCRITICAL THEORYLyotard, Mcluhan, and others similarly argue against the future importanceof print-based information technology, often from the vantage point of thosewho assume analogue media employing sound and motion as well as visualinformation will radically reconfigure our expectations of human nature andhuman culture.Among major critics and critical theorists, Derrida stands out as the onewho most realizes the importance of free-form information technology basedon digital, ratherthan analogue, systems. As he points out, "the developmentof practical methods of information retrieval extends the possibilities of the'message'vastly,to the point where it is no longer the 'written translation ofa language, the transporting of a signified which could remain spoken in itsintegrity" (10). Derrida, more than any other major theorist, understands thatelectronic computing and other changes in media have eroded the power ofthe linear model and the book as related culturally dominant paradigms. "Theend of linear writingi' Derrida declares, "is indeed the end of the book," evenif, he continues, "it is within the form of a book that the new writings-literaryor theoretical-allow themselves to be, for better or worse, encased" (O/Grammatology,86). Therefore, as Ulmer points out, "grammatalogical writingexemplifies the struggle to break with the investiture of the book" (13)'According to Derrida, "the form of the 'book' is now going through aperiod of general upheaval, and while that form appears less natural, and itshistory less transparent, than ever. . . the book form alone can no longersettle . . . the case of those writing processes which,inpractically questioningthat form, must also dismantle it." The problem, too, Derrida recognizes,is that "one cannot tamper" with the form of the book "without disturbingeverything else" (Dissemination,3) in Westem thought. Always a tamperer,Derrida does not find that much of a reason for not tampering with the book,and his questioning begins in the chain of terms that appear as the more-orlesstitle at the beginning pages of Dissemination: "Hots Liwes: Outwork,Hors D'oeuwe, Extratext, Foreplay, Bookend, Facing, and Prefacing." He doesso willingly because, as he announcedin Of Grammatology, "All appearancesto the contrary, this death ofthe book undoubtedly announces (and in a certainsense always has announced) nothing but a death of speech (of a so-calledfull speech) and a new mutation in the history of writing, in history as writing.Announces it at a distance of a few centuries. It is on that scale that wemust reckon it here" (8).In conversation with me, Ulmer mentioned that since Derrida's gramequals link, grammatology is the art and science of linking-theart and