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cinema and links
force
This essay first appeared as "Cinematic paradigms for hypertext." in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13.2 July (1999): 217-226.
In cinema Lev Kuleshov demonstrated through a series of experiments that edits are able to compel associations or connections between previously unrelated material (Mitry, 1997: 100). The work of the edit appears to force this association, and while the meaning of the edit is external to the content of the shot its effect is to produce a hermeneutic logic that accounts for this relation as if it were internal. The same effect is present in hypertext, where we can, and do, freely connect between previously unrelated and disparate material, and by virtue of this connection the content is understood, in some manner, as now being related. This is not the 'hit list' we generate from a request to a Web search engine, nor is it the way in which we might more or less arbitrarily link to 'external' nodes, but is simply the capacity to link to nodes and in the link generate, force, a hermeneutically viable connection between otherwise discrete discursive spaces. This connection is not merely 'technical', nor rhetorical, but expresses a transformation between, and of, the nodes joined.
As Austin (1962) demonstrated, all utterances are performative and while they may vary in perlocutionary and illocutionary effect all discourse has performative force. The transformation of nodes and shots that is performed by their linking or editing is an expression of this force, and is not, at least in the first instance, the expression of a meaning, but is the transformation necessarily elicited by the force that all language, all utterance, is immersed within (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; 75-9). The effect of this is what Deleuze and Guattari have described as an 'incorporeal transformation' where '[t]he order-words or assemblages of enunciation in a given society (in short, the illocutionary) designate this instantaneous relation between statements and the incorporeal transformations of noncorporeal attributes they express' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 81). This transformation 'applies to bodies but is itself incorporeal, internal to enunciation' (82) and furthermore is 'recognizable by its instantaneousness, its immediacy, by the simultaneity of the statement expressing the transformation and the effect the transformation produces' (81). In other words this is the realm of the order word, illocutionary force, and of indirect discourse, and this is the domain of the edit and link.
In cinema any two shots can be edited together, and in this editing a meaning generated or expressed - this is obviously a return to the 'proofs' of Kuleshov discussed above. Yet, any one of these shots can also be inserted into a different sequence, to in turn generate a different meaning. The content of the shot, its literal 'body', remains unchanged, however its attributes are instantaneously transformed in the performance of the edit. In hypertext two or more nodes can be variously linked and the series they participate in, including the repetition of nodes, when the links are performed also effect instantaneous transformations of the nodes' attributes. As Walker has suggested:
The re-interpretation of the same node when it is re-read seems a perfect example of Nietzschean repetition. Not only does the node seem the same on the surface, it is the same more deeply than a traditional codex repetition can be. And yet it is different, changed (Walker, 1999:116).
What is crucial here is that this transformation is effected in and by the performance of the edit or the link, and not by the nodes (bodies) themselves, and that this transformation occurs with the performance of the link, it is coterminous with its expression.
The illocutionary force of such utterances has two aspects, it is what allows the apparently disparate or unrelated (two shots, two or more nodes) to be able to be joined, and it is what provides, even compels, the connection that we make between the nodes - this must relate to this. This force is prior to the sorts of connections, if you like the rhetorical tropes, that we are able to make, and in its expression edits, and links, become in fact 'risky' promises.
Promises, along with orders, are perhaps the canonical example of the performative. They are contextual, carry social, ideological, political, ethical, normative, and persuasive force, and are always conterminously determined or evaluated in and by their doing. What a performative utterance means is unable to be separated from its saying and doing, and their risk is not of being true or false, what Austin characterises as the constative, (after all what is an untrue link?) but of being felicitous or infelicitous. Indeed much of the work on hypertext linking, navigation, and readerly sense can be regarded as exploring what constitutes the good link (Bernstein, 1998a, 1998b, Landow, 1994). In other words, the leap and its recovery into a destination that a link or edit performs, represents an opportunity for misunderstanding, a loss of coherence, even simply a broken link, but this possible infelicity will always carry a residue of force that bets against this risk.
These incorporeal transformations are immanent to language but what is peculiar about cinema and hypertext is that as discursive systems they appear to want to give expression to, to make visible, this force. An edit or a link is, if you like, a manifestation of the expression of this immanent force, even a writing with this force, and while we might find it helpful to think about links as promises, and possibly even consider edits as promises, what is perhaps more productive is to attempt to identify how hypertext, as an already cinematic practice, renders this force visible. In cinema the dissolve has generally been surrendered to representation, however these are moments that give face to the edit, and dissolves are moments of particular intensity in film, points at which the performance of the edit is no longer surrendered to an impossible moment but given a duration that regularly exceeds the practicalities of narration. While the dissolve is a temporal device, its occupation of time by extending the usually occluded instant of the edit across the space and time of the image places the emphasis not so much on the promise, as on the act of promising. However, even more significantly dissolves are the invention of a rendering visible in film of its incorporeal transformations, as its performative force is made corporeal in the visibility that its folding upon itself produces. In other words, during the dissolve the edit no longer is content or limited to an incorporeal transformation, but actually performs itself upon a surface, and in this renders its affects visible. It is less about meaning than about rendering the incorporeal or virtual visible.
Within most hypertext systems the distance between nodes is not a quality recognised (any node is as temporally available as any other), and in our dream of instant bandwidth every link ought to be as available as any other. This is of course much like continuity editing, but if hypertext writing and reading happens 'in' the link then it is not in the nodes that hypertext resides but in the connections and pathways made between nodes. To think about, describe, or even approach the question of what allows this requires us to shift our attention from nodes to links, away from a theoretical misreading that misjudges the content of a node as being that which allows parts to be joined. It is in this shift that cinema not only helps us by providing theoretical tools, but it is because hypertext is about the connecting of separations that we all find ourselves making our hypertext's cinematic.
The cinema rapidly defined for itself a method that expresses the effect of its force upon its own material form. This expression in time of the transformative work of the edit is, of course, probably unsurprising in a temporal medium, but the question of whether hypertext can or should pursue a similar trajectory is merely to begin to recognise those aspects of a hypertextual practice and theory that have been overlooked in its literary prejudices.
For hypertext as a writing practice the issue is not to mimic the cinema, but to develop a methodology that gives expression to the force that it is the expression of. This is a riskful writing, a writing that seeks, endorses, and returns to the expression of the force that the link embodies, performs, and promises. This risk is not to be found in subject matter, or content, but in a yay saying to the danger of the link that endorses the break and recombination that links allow. This is how hypertext is cinematic before it is literary, and suggests that a future writing, the writing that hypertext is yet to be the expression of, will be a writing with the link. This is not the saturated linking that much experimental hypertext performs, nor is it the imitation of cinematic effects upon our computer screens. It would be, if it were possible, a 'zero degree' of the link, and while such a writing remains impossible it is the task of the hypertextual promise to move towards such a practice. In such a writing the link will have learnt to think itself, and we in turn will wonder at the obviousness of such a writing.
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