_______ _______ __ / _____/ /__ __/ / / / /__ / / ____ __ __ __ ___ __ __ ____ / / / ___/ __ / / / __ \ / / / / / //__/ / //_ \ / __ \ / / / /____ / /_/ / / /_/ / / /_/ / / / / / / / / /_/ / / / \_____/ \____/ \____/ \____/ /_/ /_/ /_/ \__/_/ /_/ 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 EJOURNAL@ALBANY.bitnet 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 Information about _EJournal_ - [ Begins at line 560 ] About Subscriptions and Back Issues About Supplements to Previous Texts About _EJournal_ People [ Begins at line 605 ] Board of Advisors Consulting Editors ******************************************************************************* * This electronic publication and its contents are (c) copyright 1994 by * * _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give away the journal and its * * contents, but no one may "own" it. Any and all financial interest is hereby* * assigned to the acknowledged authors of individual texts. This notification* * must accompany all distribution of _EJournal_. * ******************************************************************************* >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< 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. 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