Hyperspace

Constructive hypertexts require a capability to act: to create, to change, and to recover particular encounters within the developing body of knowledge. These encounters… are versions of what they are becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist… A constructive hypertext should be a tool for inventing, discovering, viewing, and testing multiple, alternative, organizational structures…

-- Michael Joyce, "Siren Shapes"

There is no simple way to say this.

-- Joyce, afternoon

For many interactive authors, especially hypertext's early writers, the simplest way to justify their existence was through a pastiche of other writers. This lexia, from Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, can be the culmination of a long sequence (depending on the reader's choices) of directly quoted theorists. Moulthrop exits his plot entirely, quoting as metacommentary rather than epigram. "Cyborg Politics" is nothing more than a passage from Donna Harraway's influential "Cyborg Manifesto" that describes the postindustrial phase of society. The reader then has several choices to link to other theoreticians, from Vincent Mosco to Kroker and Cook to Gregory Ulmer and finally to Joyce. This type of pastiche is ubiquitous in earlier hypertext writing.