HYPERTEXT FICTION
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internal and external
internal and external perception
non-linear context
genre mutable
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Perhaps the most misleading element for our studies of alchemy is the alchemists’ use of chemicals. Earlier, I argued that alchemy was concerned more with a spiritual process than with a chemical transformation. While accurate, this is a simplification, because the distinction between inner and outer states was not always so absolute. Schwartz-Salant writes,
The alchemists combined material, practical experience with actual chemicals and substances to help them elucidate and clarify their abstract thinking and vice versa. (29)
Often the distinction between material and abstract is not made clear. Schwartz-Salant discusses whether this was the result of "the confusion of a mind not yet capable of discursive thinking and causality" (3) and goes on to problematise that distinction. In favour of their intellectual clarity, we have "the acute awareness of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’... among certain practictioners of magic in the Renaissance" (3) and the interest alchemy held for "great scientists such as Newton, Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon". (3) On the other hand, many alchemical texts appear to confuse the two thoroughly. He suggests that alchemy "may have been employing a different rather than a lesser form of thought" (3).
Be that as it may, this form of thought had to retreat for scientific objectivity and the individual ego to develop: alchemy’s demise is "indissociably linked with the control and limitation of the imagination at the instigation of the Reformation and, of course, with the development of science." (3) After several centuries of scientific and technological development, however, our linear rationality is starting to fray, and the distinction is once more becoming blurred. Hassan writes of how postmodernism "vacates the traditional self", producing "a fake flatness, without inside/outside" (505). Rather than collapsing the inside/outside distinction, however, postmodernism complicates the relationships between what we once regarded as discrete units.
This entangled view of the internal/external reality of the self is perceived in many branches: popular understanding delights in citing how even the "hard science" of physics has Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the wave/particle light experiment. How these tidbits of science differ materially from deconstruction is not so interesting to me as the widespread delight in the apparent similarity: we appeal to the ‘conscious’ mind of science, to confirm the ‘unconscious’ intuition of the humanities. (Here lingers the assumption that science deals only in hard, empirical facts, whereas the humanities are rather vague and yet intuitive - a mimicry of the masculine/feminine principles.) Do the new discoveries result in this inner/outer indifferentiability, or do we fix on the ideas that we are collectively ready for? In other words, who is responsible, the observer or the observed, and is this still a question we can legitimately ask? If we regard our fascination in the light of the collective unconscious, we are able to explore and pull apart this question without resolving it into an observer/observed dichotomy.
Jameson notes, somewhat bemusedly, how quickly disparate branches of study have herded around postmodernism:
Why we needed the word postmodernism so long without knowing it, why a truly motley crew of strange bedfollows ran to embrace it the moment it appeared, are mysteries that will remain unclarified until we have been able to grasp the philisophical and social function of the concept, something impossible, in its turn, until we are somehow able to grasp the deeper identity between the two. (xiii)
The ‘deeper identity’ which Jameson does not seem to grasp is, quite simply, the zeitgeist: not merely the mood of the age, in the way a mood passes over an individual without substantially changing her, but the spirit of the age, a deep shift in our thinking. We begin again to perceive both the fragmentation and the interdependence of things, and hunt for examples and models to clarify these new thoughts. The "motley crew of strange bedfellows" has in common the same motivating impulse. The similarities we note between contemporary theories of history, literature, and physics, do not prove the empirical truth of inner/outer indistinction, but a common motiviation to perceive our reality as such.
French anthropologist Bruno Latour argues that the "Great Divide" of the Englightenment, "when Descartes’s mechanistic thought invaded natural philosophy", was a "sleight of hand... to deny the ever-present reality of hybrids" (quoted by Davis, 11). The increasing interconnectedness of society, he claims, make it impossible to sustain this illusion: "We begin to see that everything is connected, and this recognition invokes premodern ways of thinking" (Davis, 11). What I find significant here is that the possibility for seeing the interconnectedness was ever there, but denied; now, with new information and technology, we are "forced" to admit the hybrid, interdependent nature of things. The technology facilitates the new way of thinking, the new thought facilitates the technology, and neither can be claimed as the sole cause. Nevertheless, to enable this shift in the zeitgeist, we look to the material world for confirmation, much as the alchemists used chemicals to express their own process of transformation. Hypertext fiction has the potential to serve this purpose for postmodernism.
internal and external perception non-linear context genre mutable
Postmodernism
Jung's Alchemy
Western World & The Individual
Hypertext Fiction
Process of Transformation