Aporia

From the Greek (“at a loss”), this term was used by Socrates in the Meno (Plato, 73) to describe the awareness of one's lack of knowledge that is a necessary precursor to philosophy. Aarseth adapts the word to mean “an absence of possibility” (Aarseth, 3), the closing off of potential paths that occurs as one moves through a hypertext; the knowledge one lacks is of the parts of the hypertext that one does not see. If the hypertext is one that does not provide the reader with an overview of its parts, this sense of absence may continue even after the entire text has been encountered.

Bricolage

“In this mode of composition, as Turkle describes it (Life on the Screen, 50-73), the writer does not adopt a ‘top-down’ method, starting with a given idea and breaking it down into constituents, but proceeds ‘bottom-up’ by fitting together objets trouvés, into an artifact whose shape and meaning(s) emerge through the linking process. The result is a patchwork, a collage of disparate elements, what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called a ‘machinic assemblage’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 332-35). As Silvio Gaggi has shown, this broken-up structure, as well as the dynamic reconfiguration of the text with every new reading, proposes a metaphor for the postmodern conception of the subject as a site of multiple, conflicting, and unstable identities.” (Ryan, 7)

Concordance

An index listing all the occurrences of a particular word in a text or group of texts, originally the Bible. Links to online concordances of various sorts can be found in the bibliography.

Default

A path through a hypertext that does not involve selecting links, but rather proceeds along a preordained route selected by the author, for example by pressing the enter or right arrow keys. Multiple non-overlapping default paths may exist in a hypertext, as trails that appear and dead-end according to the author’s design.

Ergodic

This term, adapted by Aarseth from one in use in physics, “derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning ‘work’ and ‘path.’” (Aarseth, 1). He uses it to describe hypertext literature as requiring “nontrivial effort” for the reader to move through the text, specifically referring to the mental effort and attention required to select a link (and thereby a path) out of the multiple available possibilities.

Guard field

A conditional link, for which certain conditions need to be fulfilled (such as visiting the page a certain number of times, or coming to the page via a particular path) before it will be activated.

Hypertext

A textual network, in which selecting a linked word, phrase, or image moves one to a different place in the network. The distinction between the network as a body of linked texts and the particular sequences in which those texts may be encountered means that hypertext literary works consist of three levels:

1. The text as written or “engineered” by the author
2. The text as presented, displayed, to the reader
3. The text as constructed (mentally) by the reader

(Ryan, 46)

Interactivity

At its most basic level, a system in which a user’s input influences output. See also Forms of Interactivity.

Labyrinth

A maze. Often used to designate hypertext works that must be navigated “in the dark,” in which one cannot see where a particular path will lead.

Lexia

A unit of hypertext literature: a card in Hypercard, a screen in Storyspace, a page on the World Wide Web. The Textual Tesseract operates somewhat differently, as lexia are not separated, but rather coexist on a single page, meaning that several possible types of lexia operate at once: the word, the poem, the author, and the year are all ways in which the work could be divided into lexia. The word is considered the dominant lexia in the project for the purpose of the writings on this site, though by analogy to other works of hypertext literature it mightmore properly be the poem.

Rhizome

A term developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to designate an organic, non-hierarchial mode of organization. From A Thousand Plateaus: “Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. . . . It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion” (21).

Smooth and striated space

“Cybernauts and hypertext readers spend most of their time clicking on the nonplaces of the links, never dwelling for long on a textual segment, because each of these segments is less a destination than a point of departure for other, equally elusive destinations. Theorists of electronic culture make a virtue of this sense of never getting anywhere by regarding hypertext as a textual implementation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘smooth space.’ For Deleuze and Guattari, smooth space exists in contrast, though in constant interrelation, to an organized, hierarchical, and largely static space that they call striated. ‘In striated space, lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another. In the smooth, it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the trajectory’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 478). Smooth space is nomadic (like the sea or the desert, it offers no home, only an experience of its immensity), sprawling, continually expanding (you can always add a link to hypertext), amorphous (you can add links wherever you want), heterogeneous, without clear boundaries, tactile rather than visual (through clicking, the reader grabs segments), and constituted by an ‘accumulation of proximities’ (488). These proximities are links that negate physical distance, since all it takes to make two points adjacent in a network is to draw a line between them.” (Ryan, 261)

Tesseract

In mathematics, a four-dimensional hypercube. My use of the term, however, derives from an entirely different source: Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time (1962), in which it is a means to travel nearly instantaneously over long distances through space. In this formulation, the first dimension is a line, the second a square, the third a cube, the fourth time, and the fifth: “Well, the fifth dimension’s a Tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.” (78). Like the tesseract, hypertext operates in non-Euclidean space.

Tmesis

A term developed by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text. “[T]mesis is the reader’s unconstrained skipping and skimming of passages, a fragmentation of the linear text expression that is totally beyond the author’s control.” (Aarseth, 78)

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