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| The alchemists, through their practical work with chemicals, were often able to sublimate some of the horror of the nigredo through projecting it onto the chemicals, and treating it as symbolic. (Jung, 1998, 286) Similarly, hypertext allows us to sublimate certain aspects of postmodernism into more comprehensible form: it is much easier to cope with a text that is indeterminate, fragmentary, mutable, context-variable, and so forth, than to declare that the world itself is all of these. This, however, is what postmodernism insists: the disruption of knowledge and meaning that it instigates and hails are not restricted to any one discipline, but attack the dominant world-view from every angle. Regarding this chaos as part of a necessary nigredo experience as the Western world enters a collective process of transformation shows us the method in postmodernism’s madness: this disruption is crucial if we are to readapt. Relinquishing control is vital, when our intellectual systems may be inappropriate models that limit more than elucidate our understanding. To discover new knowledge one must also be willing to abandon old paradigms. An example of web-discourse will illustrate this. The reevaluation of the feminine principle that I discussed earlier has, it seems, found its way into web-metaphors. Traditional literary metaphors have been intensely phallocentric: the pen as penis; the ‘masculine thrust’ of writing; the seminal text, and so forth, all privilege both the male organ and the masculine principle of control, order, reason, and linearity. (Again, the ‘masculine principle’ does not refer to men, but to the animus, and those qualities traditonally associated with men.) Drawing from completely different imagery, Sean Murphy writes, Interactive narrative has had an ignominious infancy. It has been unable to fully sever the umbilical cord which attaches it to its spiritual mother, the World Wide Web. … Janet Murray regards this book [Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars] as an "excellent model for the kinds of aesthetic pleasure that the new media will be particularly suited in bringing us: the pleasure of immersion.... the rapturous pleasures of the labyrinth, the delight in purposefully getting lost in a space that folds back upon itself." The analogy of the labyrinth has also been used to express complex patterns of the human consciousness - the parallels between interactive narrative's approach to storytelling and the fundamental structureless form of the human mind draw a little closer still. Some labyrinths have a way in and a way out, a defining path often with dangers along the way. The pleasure in this labyrinth comes from reaching the exit. Others, more closely resembling the human mind, are multi-threaded, the pleasure here not in solving but in dwelling and luxuriating in a prologed state of enticement and disorientation. (my emphasis) Reminiscent of Kristeva’s jouissance and Iragaray’s "ecriture feminine", the web-as-female-body metaphor does not see ‘disorder, irrationality, and chaos’ as the opposites of order, reason, and linearity. Rather, it reconceives what opposites it might provide. This illustrates how positive the "slime from the depths" might just be. |
 
‘Cleanse our minds of this
horrible darkness!’ exlaims an alchemist... |