Thursday, November 13, 2003

who writes this rubbish?
'I have recently been made aware of work done by Gregory Ulmer at the University of Florida on hypertext in which he (and some of his students) are using the idea of the fetish as a conceptual metaphor for dealing with the effects of hypertext. The idea of the link as an object invested with a cathected libidinal energy perhaps describes one way in which to consider what I have called "the potential energy of the potential link"; another way might be to consider the way in which the link reproduces, in the grammar of the text, the effects of substitution, displacement, and condensation usually associated by literary critics with metaphor (as has been noted by Stuart Moulthrop, among others). The hypertextual link may prove to be another form of copula, another "is"- and the potentialities that can be linked upon that statement would require another book, to be linked to the one that, through the alogical logic of hypertext, does not necessarily end here.'