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April, 1994 _EJournal_ Volume 4 Number 1 ISSN 1054-1055
There are 646 lines in this issue.
An Electronic Journal concerned with the
implications of electronic networks and texts.
3256 Subscribers in 37 Countries
University at Albany, State University of New York
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CONTENTS: [This is line 19]
Eliza Meets the Postmodern [ Begins at line 49 ]
by Norman N. Holland
Department of English
University of Florida
NNH@NERVM.bitnet
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Eliza Meets the Postmodern [l. 49]
Norman N. Holland
Already we have a cliche: computers have launched writing into a
new Gutenberg Age. But already we have a misunderstanding, as is
so typical of literary theory. Theorists have proclaimed that
hypertext and multimedia prove various postmodern notions of the
literary work. This, I think, is not so, but I think the theorists
do raise a larger question. What *do* the new computer genres
imply about the postmodern and literary theory?
_Postmodern_ calls for an extensional definition, a point-to. In
postmodern literature, I think of the self-reflexive writings of
Borges, Barth, and Julian Barnes, to mention only Bs. When I read
_Letters_ or _Flaubert's Parrot_, my mind flickers constantly
between being absorbed in the story and wondering whether I am
reading literature or some new hybrid of forms celebrating its own
hybridity. In the visual arts, I read the Pop Art of Andy Warhol
or Roy Lichtenstein as asking me to think about the nature of art,
much as, in a very different way, the "white paintings" of Robert
Ryman do. I reflect, in a double sense. So with conceptual
sculpture. Is a set of instructions for making a chair somehow
artistic in a sense that the chair is not? I admire postmodern
architecture with its quotation and off-centering and out-sizing of
traditional forms. Perhaps the most accessible example is Philip
Johnson's AT&T building: straight international style, but with a
giant Chippendale curlicue on top. Or Michael Graves' teakettle
with its deliberate flouting of Bauhaus functionality. In film one
could mention Jean-Luc Godard, who has always worked with the
nature of movies. Even a popular film like Arnold Schwarzenegger's
_Last Action Hero_, plays with the relation between clearly
imaginary filmic reality, "reality" as represented in realistic
film, and the differently real worlds of onscreen and offscreen
audiences. I find it all vibrant, shimmering, disconcerting,
disorienting-- just fine. [l. 84]
I like less the usual theories about the postmodern. Most people
have adopted Frederic Jameson's criteria.^1 [_New Left Review_,
1984] As I read him, Jameson proposes two qualities to define the
postmodern. One is the quotation of other material in a spirit of
"iteration" and parody. The other is de-centering: focusing on
what is marginal, on the edges; preferring what is associational
and random to the logical and hierarchical. I think that's all
true, exemplified in the various works I've mentioned. But I also
think we can cut deeper.
We can find a straightforward starting point in that postmodernism
is a reaction against modernism. What characterized modernism? I
would say, it was a definition of the work of art as a thing in
itself, not referring to a reality outside itself (as, say,
nineteenth-century fiction and painting did). Think of the great
modernist texts: _Ulysses_, _The Waste Land_, _A la recherche du
temps perdu_, _The Pisan Cantos_. Think of modern painting from
early non-objective art to Abstract Expressionism, the massive
sculptures of Lipschitz or Chillida, the Bauhaus or international
style in architecture, or a painting like _Guernica_. These
modernist works are solidly *there*, whole and integral and
complete. They seem almost defiantly to assert themselves against
the societies or the previous arts to which the artist was
reacting.
Postmodernism reacts in turn against that modernist solidity. The
postmodern artist turns questioner. What have we here? Is this
sculpture? Is this a painting? A novel? Why am I doing art? How
do I make it new? How do *you* complete this skewed work?
I would sum it up this way. < In postmodern art, artists use as a
major part of their material > *our* < ideas about what they are
working with >. Postmodern art addresses the very activity that we
carry on when we perceive art. It works with our knowledge,
beliefs, expectations, wishes. It works with the hypotheses we are
constantly trying out on the world, including works of art. This is
a concept of the postmodern that places the postmodern historically
and, to some extent, explains the phenomenon. [l.123]
Often, the artist evokes our ideas by quotation, as Jameson
suggests. Often we feel disoriented or surprised, because the
artist has used those quotations in a jokey, parodying way. Often
the artist upsets our beliefs or explanations by making things
off-center, marginalizing what would ordinarily be central, or
violating familiar ideas of logic or order. In other words,
Jameson's criteria are sound, but seem arbitrary, even superficial.
This view provides an underlying rationale for them.
What then are hypertext and multimedia? Modern or postmodern? Just
for the record, hypertext means an electronic text such that, when
you are reading, say, _Great Expectations_ on your computer screen,
you can "click" on a word in the text and bring up a short essay on
religion or the penal system in Victorian England or display the
Marcus Stone illustrations or portraits of Dickens or critical
essays.^2 [Landow/ Intermedia] In hypertext, the medium is mostly
text. Multimedia means that, when you are listening to Beethoven's
Ninth, you can call up the score or related pieces by Beethoven or
rock and roll versions or a description of life in Vienna in
1820.^3 [Robert Winter/ Voyager CD/ 1989] With multimedia, you get
text plus sound plus photographic-quality images. Fundamentally,
though, hypertext and multimedia are the same, and people combine
them in the portmanteau word, *hypermedia*.
Hypermedia have become remarkably rich. _Perseus_ combines
classical texts with dictionaries, glosses, maps, and architectural
diagrams, spanning much of ancient Greek literature. _A la
rencontre de Philippe_ allows the student to enter into (quite
literally!) the search for an apartment in Paris-- newspaper
advertisements, answering machines, telephoning, an angry plumber,
and all. With _Interactive Shakespeare_, the student can "read"
_Hamlet_ as folio, quarto, gloss, or the cinema versions of
Laurence Olivier and Franco Zeffirelli. [l. 157]
Labeling hypermedia as postmodern rests on two claims.^4 [Landow/
_Hypertext_, etc.] One, hypertext equals webs of text rather than
linear text. There is no center, no particular starting point.
That perhaps exaggerates a bit, since we did, after all, start with
the linear structure called _Great Expectations_. But, it is
argued, because hypermedia do not require us to follow a centering,
hierarchical, logical-outline structure, they are postmodern.
Second, in some forms of hypertext, one reader can annotate the
text so the next reader can get what the first reader said. This
electronic co-authorship, it is said, also de-centers, because it
cancels the centrality of the original author. Here, too, though,
this is not as exotic as it seems. It is rather like finding a book
in the library all marked up by a previous user.
In general, hypermedia simply do electronically what a reader or
researcher might do "by hand" in a library. That is, one could
interrupt one's listening to Beethoven's Ninth in a music library
to consult a score, a biography, or criticism. In a way,
hypermedia are simply a variorum or a Norton Critical Edition done
electronically. They are by no means as radical a departure from
familiar forms as claimed.
In fact, the hypermedia author can be even more dictatorial than
the print author. The hypermedia author can control not only the
visible text, but the very jumps the reader makes within that text
or to other texts. The author can make unavailable to the reader
connections or interpretations or intertextualities other than
those the author chooses.
For all these reasons the claim that hypermedia somehow validate
popular notions of the postmodern seems exaggerated. The mere fact
that you *can* make a text toward which people *can* make
associative rather than logical, hierarchical connections doesn't
mean that the text in some intrinsic sense *is* that way. It may
very well be just the opposite.
The confusion arises because of the error, endemic in the world of
literary theory, of attributing to texts what is really action by
the reader. Texts, finally, are inert objects. They are
inanimate, powerless, and passive. They don't *do* things. Readers
act, texts don't.
One would think this obvious enough, but I hear endlessly in the
drone of modern literary theory that texts deconstruct their
apparent meanings or impose other texts or marginalize people or
de-center themselves. Claims that texts determine our perceptions
of them fly in the face of modern perceptual psychology and
cognitive science, which include the very large field of the
psychology of reading. I once asked our reference librarian to
check the computer index of the psychological literature (PSYCLIT)
to see how many articles in psychological journals used _reading_
in their titles or as keyword. 5000 in eight years! This is not a
field where one can simply say the text de-centers or deconstructs
or determines its meaning. 5000 articles say that matters are not
that simple. [l.213]
Those who experiment with actual readers and actual texts do come
to a fairly unanimous conclusion. Most cognitive scientists hold a
*constructive* view of perceiving, knowing, remembering, and
reading. That is, you *construe*. You act. You do something.
More specifically, you do something in two stages. One, you bring
hypotheses to bear on what you are reading (or perceiving, knowing,
remembering). You bring pre-existing ideas to bear, and two, you
get feedback from what you are addressing. Then, are you pleased,
bored, annoyed, anxious? How you feel about that feedback
determines how you continue the constructive process.^5 [see Taylor
and Taylor, 1983]
If one views reading as the psychologists do, then a lot of
contemporary literary theory sounds nonsensical. Almost any
sentence in which the text is the subject of an active verb begins
to seem silly. Even sentences which separate properties of a text
(like structure or meaning) from some human's perception of those
properties sound fishy. Most turn out to be quite confused.
"Foundationalist" would be an appropriate and fashionable epithet.
Where does this notion of the active text come from? I think it
mostly comes from a misreading of Saussure. Postmodern theorists
have adopted his model of language: a totality of signs in which a
sound-of-word or signifier produces a meaning or signified.^6
[Culler, 1976] But this is to take poor old Saussure to a place he
never intended to go. As he tells us early in his lectures, he was
trying to produce an account of language free of psychology,
sociology, anthropology -- a purely linguistic account. Today's
theorists, however, translate him back into a psychological
statement about how readers read.
As a result, most of today's theorists substitute supposed
activities or properties of the text for what are really activities
by the reader. This newest idea, that hypermedia are postmodern,
also mixes up text and reader this way. The theorist focuses on
the de-centered look and feel of what is on the screen and ignores
the activity of author and reader that does the de-centering. It
is, after all, the reader who has to click on a word or choose from
a menu or stop to listen to the music. All the author does is
automate choices that readers have always had. If we chose to read
_Great Expectations_ without interruption or listen to Beethoven's
Ninth from beginning to end, we would not get the look and feel of
hypermedia.
Even the active, annotating reader is only functioning like another
author. The annotator provides a text for subsequent readers just
as any other author does. It is a text that subsequent readers can
read, skim, or ignore-- like any other. [l. 262]
In short, hypermedia simply use a computer to assist in tasks that
have always been open to readers. There is no radical change here
in the nature of literary texts, nor even much change in readers'
activities. What differences there are are differences in degree,
not kind. One could, after all, sit down in a college library to
read _Great Expectations_ and laboriously surround oneself with
treatises on Victorian prisons, religion, or lawyers. The computer
just makes that easier.
Are there electronic texts, though, that are definitively
postmodern? I think there are, although they are far less
razzle-dazzle than the hypermedia. Consider the familiar ELIZA
program. Joseph Weizenbaum invented it back in 1963, naming it for
the heroine of Shaw's _Pygmalion_.^7 [ACM, 1966] Like Henry
Higgins, Weizenbaum had taught the computer to talk-- sort of. As
the "reader" types text onto the screen, the program scans it for
key words. Then it turns around and displays various texts in
response to those key words as if it were answering the "reader."
Although, in principle, ELIZA could be sensitive to thousands of
such words, it was designed to imitate a Rogerian ("uh-huh") kind
of psychotherapist. That way, demands on its seeming ability to
answer would be small. The responses can simply be canned
sentences. "Yes." "Tell me more." Or the program can respond by
substituting a word for the key word. The machine hears "mother,"
perhaps, and asks about "family." At its most sophisticated level,
the program can reverse or incorporate a typed-in sentence so as to
make a reply apparently based on an understanding of what has been
said by the "reader." This is a sample of its dialogue (the
computer is in capitals): [l. 293]
I need some help, that much seems certain.
WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP?
Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY.
My mother takes care of me.
WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU?
My father.
YOUR FATHER.
You are like my father in some ways.^8
[Boden, _AI_, 1977]
As in that last response from the "reader," people relate to ELIZA
as though it were another human being, because it *says* things.
That is why I call it (her?) postmodern. These programs-- texts,
really --create the illusion that they are animate beings. The
writer writes them, then takes hands off and leaves them to run on
their own, just as writers usually do. But the ELIZA programs,
once their writers let go, then create the illusion of acting more
or less of their own free will.
Although very simple, these programs have fooled a lot of people.
In fact, PARRY, designed to imitate a paranoiac, fooled most of
the psychiatrists who read its dialogues. Since 1991, the Boston
Computer Museum has been holding a competition for these humanoid
programs. The contest stages a "Turing test," the classic
behaviorist criterion for artificial intelligence. In a
conversation, can you tell the difference between responses typed
in by a person and responses generated by a machine? In 1991 and
1992 more than half the judges mistook one program for a human
being. Yet the program had been developed by one man in Queens
and now sells for a couple of hundred dollars. (Interestingly, in
1993 journalists substituted for lay judges, and nobody was
fooled.)
The original ELIZA program was also very simple. It ran in BASIC.
Even a novice like me could modify it. [l. 339]
Yet we readily take these relatively uncomplicated programs for
human. We trust them, so long as they behave fairly reasonably.
There are many anecdotes. One of the earliest concerns
Weizenbaum's secretary, who asked him to step outside because she
was beginning to discuss personal matters with the seeming
therapist. Conversely, there is a negative Eliza-effect. People
get quite frustrated and angry when the program fails to behave
naturally. This tells me (as a psychoanalytic critic) that we are
dealing with a failure of basic trust. We trust the program
because it "feeds" us satisfying answers. If it doesn't, we get
angry. We are experiencing the boundary merger (associated with
early oral experiences) that we allow in all literary "suspension
of disbelief."
As that analogy suggests, readers begin to treat ELIZA programs as
a kind of literature, particularly as they become more complicated
than the original, very simple ELIZA. Consider the
_CONVERSATIONS/ CHARACTER MAKER_ program developed by Janet Murray
in her creative writing class at MIT.^9 The program offers the
prospective writer a template on which to create a character.
That is, the student chooses keywords to which the ELIZA-type
program is to respond. Then the student specifies answers which
the program can make (plus priorities for different answers,
default answers, and so on). The student writer can thus create a
character: an evasive politician who dodges your questions; a
Jewish mother who keeps trying to feed you; a lover who is dumping
you.
The reader of such a program creates a conversation that is like a
little short story. The writer, having completed authorship, may
only have created what amounts to some stock phrases and some
computer code. The final "work of art" is the conversation that
results from what the reader puts into the program. This final
text will be variable, different for every reader and different
for every "reading" by the same reader. This work of art has no
clear boundaries between reader, writer, and text. It is, it
seems to me, completely de-centered. It is finally and
definitively postmodern in that it works wholly with what its
"reader" brings to bear. [l. 379]
Murray is edging her program toward greater sophistication. She
hopes to be able to vary answers according to semantic context, so
that the program will "know" whether _B-I-L-L_ refers to a dun, a
bird, or the President. She hopes to be able to supply the
program with "knowledge," in the form of scripts, so that it will
know what to expect in a restaurant, say, or a department store.
Then, by using story grammars (such as those of Propp or Lakoff),
she can allow the "reader" to move progressively through pieces of
a standard plot like: meet, be tested, overcome obstacle, achieve
goal, receive reward. The plot, again, can depend partly on the
"writer," partly on the "reader," and it will vary for each
reading.
Murray's program is relatively simple. Yet, from the point of
view of literary theory, it seems to me to go beyond much so-
called "Interactive Fiction." One of I.F.'s most talented
practitioners, Robert Coover, described a number of such programs
in the _New York Times Book Review_ (Aug. 29, 1993). Most are like
hypermedia. You choose. You may choose to "click" on this word
or that. As a result, you may get this or that text. You may
choose this ending or that. You may be offered forking paths, and
then you can choose different ways through an otherwise fixed text
from a repertoire of routes. Given permutations and combinations,
that repertoire can become very large.
Basically, though, most interactive fictions are not as fully
interactive as the ELIZA programs. We expect a fixed sequence in
a literary text, and I.F. does change that. But most I.F. texts
allow the reader no more input than the privilege of selection.
Today's I.F. is midway, perhaps, between ELIZA and hypermedia,
between modern and postmodern.
My criterion is, Does the text *do* things, as if it had a will of
its own, when it responds to the reader? If so, then definitely
postmodern. Or does it simply offer a reader choices? If so,
modern. One would have to judge interactive fictions one by one,
but clearly ELIZA and CONVERSATIONS allow readers more input than
merely choosing among passive alternatives. In fact they open up
startling possibilities. [l. 419]
Suppose one were to combine these programs that "talk back" with
virtual reality. That is, you put on a helmet and "see" a space
in which you "move" right and left, up and down, in and out,
through different rooms and passages. Suppose that in that space
there were computer-simulated people. Suppose you could talk to
them in an ELIZA way, and they would talk back, responding
variously to your various words.
What I am describing is "interactive drama" or the OZ project
(under Joseph Bates at Carnegie-Mellon). The technology is very
difficult, even more so than for hypermedia and interactive
fiction, but some of it will almost certainly be feasible within
the next few years. The Boston Computer Museum has a continuing
demonstration of virtual reality (VR), and in October 1993 the
Guggenheim Museum Soho exhibited VR works by a variety of video
and visual artists. You may remember Boopsie doing virtual
shopping in _Doonesbury_ --the goods are virtual but the bills are
real. (An image for late capitalism?)
In one of Project OZ's scenarios, you enter a bus station. You
manage to buy a ticket from a recalcitrant clerk. (ELIZA-type
dialogue here.) A man nearly blind from recent surgery is told by
the surly clerk to fill out forms. (More dialogue. Do you help
him or not?) As he (and you?) work on the forms, a young tough
comes in with a knife and harasses the blind man. (Further
dialogue. Do you intervene?) If you call the clerk's attention
to this, she gives you a gun. (Do you shoot?)
This is a play, and the authors have written lines. But what
lines you hear depend on what you say and do. You are being asked
to make choices, open-ended moral choices, like those of life, not
the multiple-choice options of interactive fiction or hypermedia.
Moreover, your choices have consequences that could frighten you
or reassure you or make you proud. You are acting in a play, like
a character in Pirandello, but the words and actions of this play
change in response to your words and actions. You are being asked
to discover yourself, just as you always are in literature.^10
[Bates, "VR ....," _Presence_, 1992] [l. 458]
The programs and machines to accomplish interactive drama will be
very large and complex. They will happen, I would say, by 1997,
but they have not happened yet. In the meantime, to test out the
ideas behind interactive drama, Bates and his colleagues have
hired human actors to impersonate the machines (which are, of
course, impersonating humans).^11 [Kelso, Weyhrauch, Bates;
"Dramatic Presence," _Presence_, 1993] Surely this is the
ultimate postmodern, de-centered irony.
Whatever the technological problems, though, we can now see that
the ELIZA genre, even the most rudimentary one back in 1963, had
already changed the nature of literature. Why? Because the text
*says* things. Like other literature, the program is created by
an author, and then the author stands back. *Un*like all other
literature, however, this writing then creates the illusion that
it is another human being with a will of its own, independent of
the author whose hands are now off.
The postmodern, properly understood, represents a real shift in
world-view from the modern. Postmodern artists use as their
medium our beliefs, expectations, and desires toward the work of
art. Literature on the computer sometimes adds to such a
postmodernism and sometimes doesn't. Today's hypermedia, for
example, and interactive fiction don't really change anything.
They are dazzling, to be sure, but they are just texts in the
traditional sense. They don't *do* things-- they offer finite
choices. By contrast, the ELIZA programs allow the reader an
infinity of possible responses. Then the ELIZAs speak and act,
seemingly on their own. As a result they differ profoundly from
any literature we have hitherto known. Truly, we are seeing
something new under the sun, something that may even be beyond our
notions of the postmodern.
NOTES [l. 493]
^1 "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,"
_New Left Review_ 146 (1984): 53-92.
^2 _The Dickens Web_, Developer: George P. Landow, Environment:
Intermedia 3.5 (Providence RI: Institute for Research in
Information and Scholarship, 1990).
^3 CD Companion to Beethoven Symphony No. 9: A HyperCard/CD
Audio Program_, Developer: Robert Winter, Environment:
HyperCard (Santa Monica CA: Voyager, 1989). Other
multimedia webs deal with Chinese literature, _In
Memoriam_, and the moon.
^4 See, for example, George P. Landow, _Hypertext: The
Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology_
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), or Edward M. Jennings,
"The Text is Dead; Long Live the Techst" (Review of Landow,
_Hypertext_), _Postmodern Culture_ 2.3 (1992), available on
Internet: PMC-LIST through LISTSERV@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu.
^5 Of the many textbooks in the field, I usually recommend
Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor, _The Psychology of
Reading_ (New York: Academic, 1983).
^6 Jonathan D. Culler, _Ferdinand de Saussure_, Modern
Masters Series (London: Fontana, 1976).
^7 "ELIZA--a Computer Program for the Study of Natural
Language Communication Between Man and Machine,"
_Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery_
9 (1966): 36-45.
^8 Margaret A. Boden, _Artificial Intelligence and Natural
Man_ (New York: Basic, 1977), 107.
^9 Developers: Janet H. Murray, Jeffrey Morrow, and Stuart
A. Malone. Cambridge MA: Laboratory for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities, MIT, under development. Environment:
Macintosh.
^10 Joseph Bates, "Virtual Reality, Art, and Entertainment,"
_Presence: The Journal of Teleoperators and Virtual
Environments_ 1.1 (1992): 133-38.
^11 Margaret Thomas Kelso, Peter Weyhrauch, and Joseph Bates,
"Dramatic Presence," _Presence: The Journal of Teleoperators
and Virtual Environments_ 2.1 (1993): 1-15.
Norman N. Holland
Department of English
University of Florida
Gainesville FL 32611-2036 U.S.A.
NNH@NERVM.NERDC.UFL.edu
NNH@NERVM.bitnet
*******************************************************************************
* This essay in Volume 4 Number 1 of _EJournal_ (April, 1994) is (c) copyright*
*1994 by _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give it away. Any and *
*all financial interest is hereby assigned to Norman N. Holland. This notice *
*must accompany all copies of this text. *
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Consulting Editors - April, 1994
ahrens@alpha.hanover.bitnet John Ahrens Hanover
ap01@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool
dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca Doug Brent Calgary
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donaldson@loyvax Randall Donaldson Loyola College
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nrcgsh@ritvax Norm Coombs RIT
pmsgsl@ritvax Patrick M. Scanlon RIT
r0731@csuohio Nelson Pole Cleveland State
richardj@bond.edu.au Joanna Richardson Bond
ryle@urvax Martin Ryle Richmond
twbatson@gallua Trent Batson Gallaudet
userlcbk@umichum Bill Condon Michigan
wcooper@vm.ucs.ualberta.ca Wes Cooper Alberta
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Managing Editor: Chris Funkhouser, English, University at Albany
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University at Albany Computing and Network Services: Ben Chi, Director
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University at Albany State University of New York Albany, NY 12222 USA
