Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature

1. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature By Espen J. Aarseth Presentation: Lone Albrecht

2. Definitions • Cybertext – information feedback loops – mechanical organisation of text • Ergodic – during the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of ’reading’ do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic.

3. The concept of Cybertext • Hales from Norbert Wiener’s book (and discipline) called Cybernetics, subtitled Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) • Refers to any system that contains an information feedback loop • Not limited to computer-driven (or ’electronic’) textuality

4. Focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange • Also focuses on the consumer, or user, of the text • Ergodic derives from the Greek: ergon and hodos, meaning ’work’ and ’path’. • In Ergodic nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. • Non-ergodic – the effort is trivial.

5. Typical reactions to the idea of Ergodic lit.: hypertexts, adventure games etc. • All literature is to some extent indeterminate and non-linear – different for every reading • The reader has to make choices to make sense of a text • Not really nonlinear : reader can read only one sequence at a time!

6. Hypertext, adventure games and so forth are not texts the way the average lit. work is a text. • They produce verbal structures, for aesthetic effect. • The paraverbal dimension – that is hard to see.

7. A cybertext is a machine for the production of variety of expression • You are faced with a forking text • In a cybertext – contrary to a normal text – you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard. • Each decision will make some parts of the text more, and others less, accessible, and you may never know the exact results of your choices!

8. For a moment let’s try to apply this idea to your site/the site of your choice – what is it you are faced with here? • You might compare an image brochure with e.g. one of the company sites I have left on the net for you. • Some say: It is difficult to see the variable expression of the nonlinear text which is often mistaken for the semantic ambiguity of the linear text

9. The narrative cybertext • The ’nonlinear’ reader’s pleasure is that of exploring a labyrinth, a game or an imaginary world in which he can get lost, discover secret paths, play around, follow the rules etc. • The ’linear’ reader’s pleasure is that of the voyeur: safe but impotent

10. What is the nature of trying to know a cybertext? • Investment of personal improvisation. • Possible results: intimacy or failure • A struggle not merely for interpretative insight but also for narrative control • The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler • The cybertext is a game-world or world-game • It is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts – through the textual machinery • A difference not between games and literature – but rather between games and narratives

11. Cybertext is a perspective Aarseth uses to describe and explore the communicational strategies of dynamic texts. • Even if cybertexts are not narrative texts but other forms of literature governed by a different set of rules, they retain to a lesser or greater extent som aspects of narrative – just as in other nonnarrative literary genres.

12. The labyrinth • A metaphor: • As a sign of complex artistry, inextricability – important metaphor and motif in classical and medieval lit., philosophy, rhetoric, visual signs • Paradox: • Visual art from prehistoric times always unicursal • Literary maze usually multicursal • The multicursal motif did not appear in art until the Renaissance

13. Doob shows the two paradigms coexisted peacefully as the same concept at least since Virgil (70-19 B.C.) • Seemingly contradictory models subsumed under in a single category, signifying a complex design, artistic order and chaos, inextricability or impenetrability, and difficult progress from confusion to perception • Apparently no need to distinguish between the two

14. In the Renaissance: idea of the labyrinth reduced to the multicursal paradigm we recognize today • Figurative likeness of the narrative text as unicursal coexisted with multicursal aspects such as repetition, interlaced narrative threads, etc. • Now labyrinthine and linear incompatible • Therefore labyrinth as a model of narrative text has become inapt for most narratives

15. Aarseth suggests the reinstatement of the old dual meaning of labyrinth so that both unicursal and multicursal texts might be examined within the same theoretical framework – which would encompass hypertext

16. Cybertext in Antiquity • I Ching(1122-770 B.C.) written by several authors. By manipulating three coins or forty-nine yarrow stalks according to a randomizing principle, the texts of two hexagrams ar combined, producing one out of 4,096 possible texts • Actually used in binary mathematics

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