Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext is probably one of the most interesting texts in media theory in the recent years. What makes this text so exciting is that it opposes itself to a lot of the 20th century literary theory: structuralism, poststructuralism and semiotics. Aarseth’s very specific and original viewpoint is most likely related to his background in video game studies and electronic literature, both domains, which put a lot of emphasis on the technical medium. To him, the shortcoming of structuralism is that it treats any text as a sequence of signs, irrespective of the reader’s position or the material that is read from. Poststructuralism on the other side overemphasises the position of the reader, the process of reading and interpretation, thus turning the reader into an author. While questions of meaning are at the center of both theories, the actual mechanics of reading are neglected, as a text according to those schools of thought is linear per se and the path of reading is predefined. Particularly poststructuralism actually critisizes the linearity which it thinks is at the core of the medium book.
Aarseth points the attention to the element that has been mainly ignored by these schools of thought, the materiality of the text itself. His focus is not on “what was being read” but “what was being read from”. He points out that it is not only the act of reading and writing that produces a text but also the performance of the material itself. All texts perform and in digital media the text can even perform partially or wholly without either the reader or the author. Accordingly Aarseth describes text as a “mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal signs”. In that sense the book is not linear at all. Aarseth highlights the fact that reading paths through a book are actually less linear and predfined as they are in a hypertext. A hypertext has much stricter rules regarding the accessibility of certain parts of text at a given moment.
So what is a Cybertext then? There has been some controversy about its exact meaning and particularly about the term ergodic literature. (see the respective discussion on Grand Text Auto) The way I understand the term Cybertext it is meant as a specific perspective on text. The label does not apply to digital media only as, by the sounds of it, one might think. Nor does it try to deepen the trenches along the lines of old and new, digital and analog, linear and non-linear, interactive and non-interactive or whatever terminology might be used to describe the changed modalities of text. It is an effort to give consideration to a wider dimension of textuality and to open up the discussion by adding a new perspective regarding the performance of the text. This performance includes the possibility of a physical rearrangement of the text elements, the scriptons. This construction of a very specific sequence of signs goes much further than the idea of just different readings, which structural and poststructual literary theory concentrate on. But Aarseth also points out that there are “trivial” and “non-trivial efforts” in the construction of such a sequence. The turning of the pages of a book for example would be seen as a trivial effort. This doesn’t rule paper or other analogue media out as carriers of Cybertext. Aarseth explicitly refers to printed works such as the I-Ching or Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poémes as falling into this category.
One could argue that it is the interaction with the text that Aarseth is interested in. But interaction does not discriminate between trivial and non-trivial action, which is why Aarseth doesn’t give it much further consideration. He defines his own list of qualities defining the workings of the text as a material:
- Dynamics: describing the possible changes in the amount and content of text elements
- Determinabilty: describing the flexibility in the relationship of the text elements to each other
- Transiency: describing the ability of a text to change without the user’s intervention
- Perspective: does the text force the user take on a specific perspective (play a specific role) such as a character in a role playing game?
- Access: how much of the text is accessible at any given time?
- Linking: if specific text-elements are linked to each other how are these links defined?
- User-functions: What are the activities that the user has to undertake to support the performance?
Those categories show that the user to some extent participates in the arrangement of the text, and thus reading is more than just the extraction of meaning out of a predefined semiotic sequence. However, according to Aarseth, there is no way the user can claim authorship which is one of the main propositions of poststructuralist theory. Ergodic literature, at least in my understanding of the term, describes a form of literature where the user moves through a text by acting on it and through a form of non-trivial effort, always restricted to the amount of freedom and the set of rules predefined by the author (p. 89). So, contrary to poststructuralism, Aarseth claims, that these predefined parameters of reading are an essential part of authorship rather than a way of handing authorship to the reader.
A few quotes from Cybertext:
Cybertext, as now should be clear, is the wide range (or perspective) of possible textualities seen as a typology of machines, as various kinds of literary communication systems where the functional differences among the mechanical parts play a defining role in determining the aesthetic process. Each type of text can be positioned in this multidimensional field according to its functional capabilities…As a theoretical perspective, cybertext shifts the focus from the traditional threesome of author/sender, text/message, and reader/receiver to the cybernetic intercourse between the various part(icipant)s in the textual machine. (p. 22)
For semiotics, as for linguistics, texts are chains of signs and, therefore, linear by definition (Hjelmslev 19661, 30). As Tomás Maldonado (1993, 58-66) argues in his excellent essay on virtual reality, semiotics (with particular reference to the work of A. J. Greimas) has not managed to meet the challenge from “a whole typology of iconic construction, very different form those studied by semiotics until now.” The new constructions consist of “interactive dynamic” elements, a fact that renders traditional semiotic models and terminology, which were developed for objects that ar mostly static, useless in their present, unmodified form. (p. 26)
The fundamental question, however is whether a system capable of producing emergent behavior based on an initial state and a set of generative rules should be considered a semiotic system at all. Since it can exist without any semiotic output, as a closed process running inside a computer, the semiotic aspect is clearly arbitratry and secondary to the process itself. To the researcher, the semiotic aspect is indispensable as a front end, a practical means to observe and gain knowledge of the evolutionary process going on inside, but this does not imply that the process is basically a semiotic one or that the studied object should be classified as a sign, only that the activity of observation by necessity has to involve a semiotic system of some sort. (p. 31)
