Othermindedness: the Emergence of Network Culture

Michael Joyce
University of Michigan Press,
Ann Arbor MI USA
http://www.press.umich.edu 2001,
paperback, 252 pages
ISBN 0-472-00843-2

Reviewed by Michael R. Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University,
University Center MI 48710 USA

mosher@svsu.edu

The painter and Dartmouth College art professor Hannes Beckmann (1909-1977) lamented that in Germany-- a nation that revered the Expressionist painter Max Beckmann--his famous name made him feel as if he were named Jimmy Picasso. Michael Joyce probably suffers from incessant inquiries, ‘Like James Joyce’?. Michael Joyce is the author of the hypertexts afternoon, a story. Twilight, a Symphony, and the preceding book of essays on pedagogy and poetics Of Two Minds. This contemporary author, critic, academic and hypertextualist happily lists traits he shares with James, as well as pondering his fellow Irish bard’s stylistic impact on the field of hypertext.

Joyce also likes to name things, giving his essays proud titles, here discussed out of order. ‘One Story: Present Tense Spaces of the Heart’ compares the software product he co-designed called Storyspace from Eastgate Systems to the Aztec or Mexica codex form. ‘Nonce Upon Some Time: Rereading Hypertext Fiction’ realizes that ‘hypertext is the conflation of the visual kinetic of rereading.’ It sometimes veers into sophistry with its assertion of the read as not-read the piece twists and turns, contradicting itself until the next section begins with the command ‘Start again.’ Still, it takes chances, attempting a new kind of essay to critique a new kind of writing.

‘(Re)Placing the Author’ looks at Milosz’s poem ‘A Book in the Ruins’, imagery of bombed libraries and other literary moments. He turns to a library shelf full of Eco, Deleuze and Guattari, Kwinter’s essay on the sculptor Boccioni, Hericlitus and Derrida. Joyce laments that electric text is ultimately as vaporous as the smoke from the concentration camp ovens. Elsewhere he compares ideas and intangibles to fog and a bumblebee. In a speech Joyce delivered to a futurists’ conference of librarians ‘The Lingering Errantness of Place’, he praises the library as an arena to wander and to err, and ponders its collectible objects and fugitive poems, sites of attention and organization.

Joyce scorns most multimedia as an extension of television and the and marketplace yet picks up clues to the state of literature from global pop technology and its interfaces. ‘On Boundfulness: the Space of Hypertext Bodies’ praises Robin and Rand Miller’s ‘Cosmic Osmo’, a hyptertext project constructed in Apple’s HyperCard (preceding their more famous ‘Myst’) as a model for evoking space and locality, prefiguring works that might use GIS positioning systems. ‘Forms of the Future’ sees Berlin as the ‘constant blizzard of the next’, as wrapped in meaning as was its Reichstag in the hands of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. ‘Paris Again or Prague: Who Will Save Lit from Com’? enjoys President Havel’s Prague as the republic of words, something beyond the U.S.A.’s commercial democracy and even the technocracy prevalent elsewhere in Europe. His argument situates Irish writer Deidre Grimes’ online journal of pregnancy and birth in the accelerated five years of World Wide Web history and hegemony at the time of his writing

Several essays are peppered with insights from participation in the species of online game called a MOO (a text-created Multi-User Dungeon that is Object-Oriented),specifically the Hotel MOO built by participants at Brown University. ‘MOO or Mistakenness’ contemplates the indeterminacy of textual virtual realities, this one in which novelist Robert Coover was an opinionated participant. ‘New Stories for New Readers’ opens with his participation in a MOO class, hi s students in chairs or at various desks in Poughkipsee, New York, U.S.A. while Herr Professor sat among conference participants in Germany. Joyce is in fine form as he critiques the prevalent forms of cyberspace, scorning designers’ omnipresent assumptions that the screen must be television-like, a box with control buttons.

‘Beyond Next before You Once Again: Reposessing and Renewing Electronic Culture’ and ‘Songs of My Selves’ Persistence, Momentariness, Recurrence and the MOO’ are both ultimately about mortality. Alluding to the poems of Walt Whitman and Charles Olson, and theoretical writings of Helene Cixous and Donna Harraway, these essays are centered in memories of dying colleagues. Joyce notes that Anne Johnstone remained as an online presence after her death at age forty-four, then turns to hypertext poems by Mary Kay Arnold and Mirelle Rosello and a hypertext novel by Shelly Jackson in some of his best writing on these forms.

‘A Meditation on the Outsider’ is unafraid of the autobiographical, in Proustian recollection linking boyhood and mystery (the big secret: sex!), concluding that boyhood was like computer use, lonely at heart. The book’s final chapter ‘My Father, the Father of Hypertext and the Steno’ begins with Vannevar Bush’s visionary magazine essay ‘As We May Think’ in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, an essay which foresaw networked desktop machines accessing textual and pictorial information from diverse sources, and also inspired the great hypertext theorist Ted Nelson. Joyce approaches 1940s technology from the experience of an anonymous female stenographer (an aside: in the early 1970s this reviewer’s mother wondered why I would take highschool typing class, assuming I would always have such a faithful secretary in my professional life). Around the character of the steno, Joyce infuses biography of his father and family with that mythic quality that he likes to give to favorite subjects. ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Search Engine Entity’ muses on mortality, one’s online effect on the world and the petty contents of pocket or desk drawer

Though in some passages Othermindedness reads like ‘mere’ literary criticism (this reviewer betrays a bias to privelege the artist), Michael Joyce’s writing stands among the best and deepest on any of the cyber-arts. A chapter on contemporary hypertext rushes through a somewhat clichéd and biased--where are the Californians’--raft of hypertext authors’ names in the last couple of pages as if bestowing acknowledgements at an awards ceremony that’s running late. There’s a repetition of phrases in different essays that I’m not always sure is intentional and should have been caught by the book’s Editor. This is problematic and noticeable, because Michael Joyce’s prose is so often richly memorable, as is his exuberant enthusiasm for this literary medium unique to our age.