7 Theoriesof postmodernism-those, for example, of Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Fran*oisLyotard, or Fredric Jameson-that replay a "break" or "divide"tend, overtly or covertly, to become entangled in the problem of the "McLuhanesque":that is, they are built around the notion of a revolution in therise of media, an event that must dramatically and irrevocably have changedthe essential fabric of daily life in the developed West. Out of habit, we identify the "modernist"poetic text as "materialized," and the "postmodernist"poetic text as "dematerialized," ephemeral, a "simulacrum."The extent, however, to which "materiality" (taken as sensous,extraverbal reality, something more than the functional-instrumental, "transparent"use-value of a word) is integral to much postmodernist poetry, poetics,and art practice might be seen as reason to interrogate this habit of thought. 5As Bolter suggests, "True electronic writing is not limited to verbal text: the writeable elements may be words, images, sounds,or even actions that the computer is directed to perform." 6
It might alsobe seen as evidence that commoditizing the videation of the Web invitessubversive uses of that videation-just as, say, the video art of BillViola is dependent on (and talks back to) the same technology that extendsthe commodity value of a blockbuster (and then Blockbuster) film. This growthof visual writing may be seen as a response to the technological accelerationthat permits more and more complex forms of information-from simple text,to static images, to animated and then to user-interactive text-image clustersor constellations, what might be called "lex/icons"-to coexistin one "medium" or information-delivery system. At the same time,poets and visual artists working from a tradition of typographic experimentationthat reaches back to futurism and Dada, and includes twentieth-centuryvisual and Concrete poetry, are using networked, heterogenetic writingspaces to create and distribute a new electronic visual poetry. 4Īs if in response to this (as though, in the acceleratingvistas of electronic writing, there were time enough for anything like"response"), Web-based or distributed electronic writing hasevolved from its first alphabetic-(hyper)textual forms toward diverse incorporationsof, and hybridizations with, the static or kinetic image. Bolter'srecent thinking in particular emphasizes the continuing marginalizationof (hyper)text as the "videating" media of television and filmadapt and encroach on previously textual environments of the Web. These thinkers have seen from thestart that electronic hypertextuality, or the computerized proliferationof symbolic writing, was only a step on the way to general electronic hypermediationdominated by iconic visual, rather than symbolic textual, forms. 2Meanwhile, with the public recantation of hypertext'svirtues becoming a kind of expiation ritual, 3the initially minimized warnings of new-media theorists such asLandow, Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, and others arebeing echoed with increasing frequency.
Landow) of poststructuralist literary theory, a global Storyspace-hasin a mere six years been appropriated, consolidated, and "videated"as a forum for commerce and advertising. Born in 1993, the democratizing, decentralizing WorldWide Web-at first, the "almost embarrassingly literal embodiment"(George P. 1Recent trends in digital media theory signal the absorption of initial,utopian claims made for electronic hypertextuality and for the transformationof both quotidian and literary discourse via the radical enfranchisementof active readers. Sacks has observed, mourns not only the deceased but also the ceremonyor medium of grief itself. "O sole mio." The contemporary elegy, PeterM.
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