The World Without Cybertext
Stuart Moulthrop

To establish the value of any cultural practice it is useful to imagine a universe in which that practice has never come to be. In what way would our common life be changed had we never known graffiti, lyric poetry, fashion design, or tennis? How much of our conceptual apparatus would be lost along with adultery, soap opera, and canvas shoes? Though arguably no such erasure would ever amount to simple, integer subtraction, some deletions might leave bigger holes than others in the fabric of the real. By studying the size and shape of these imaginary voids, we may perceive connections, influences, and network effects not otherwise apparent.

This talk begins by trying to imagine a world in which symbolic expression and self-modifying systems do not and never did intersect. This task seems nearly impossible in one domain, which we might call the instrumental or exoteric dimension of culture: how could postindustrial society not produce some analog of the Internet? But in another, esoteric domain, the realm of literature, performance, and other forms of cultural experiment, the extraction may seem far more plausible. Some might argue, in fact, that esoteric cybertext could and perhaps even will actually cease to be.

In the traditional, late-modernist analysis, esoteric practices complicate and thus (ostensibly) make accessible our assumptions about dominant or "transparent" forms. As Mott the Hoople might have said, if you've got TV, you very much need T. Rex--or so it was possible to think when we still believed in rock and roll. Here at the far end of postmodernity, however, it has become increasingly clear that the esoteric/exoteric distinction may be as precarious as its near-homonymity suggests. It may no longer be very useful to find in art an ironic complement to primary or structures, an archipelago of opacities sprinkled over the unseeable surface of immersive media, a set of temporary autonomous zones where we may briefly enjoy the pedagogical pause that refreshes. The extension of the cybertextual ethos into areas like peer-to-peer file sharing and headless networks may well have put an end to such comfortable and bourgeois imaginings. We may well face a choice between a world in which cybertext cannot have ever existed, and one in which no medium is beyond its reach.