This essay is self-referential: It works around a debate about whether hypertext is linked to processes of homogenization and oppression. Parts of the essay deal with a polemic by Sanford Kwinter that was published in the architectural theory journal Assemblage. Kwinter talks in terms of society as a whole but relies on something very close to the standard ideal of a university. Other parts of this essay deal with hypertext and with the influence of linking on the university.
Universities are said to be places of critical discussion and evaluation that train new cognitive explorers, make better maps, and also create new territories for exploration. We are all familiar with the internal walls that limit that creativity. These walls may be implicit in the very idea of a university. Could hypertext linking help resist and subvert those walls and undo what is too often the university's one-way meta-position?
The text experiments with different modes of criticism. One part discusses Kwinter's opinions in a traditional quotation and comment method. Another part plays with hypertext links to place Kwinter's opinions into a larger space of options. The different parts (and the introductory materials) are indicated by different background colors, maintained in the new edition of the essay.
This hypertext contains 97 screens of text connected by 272 links. Some screens are very brief; others require scrolling.
Web browsers visually emphasize the links, but the content of a screen is probably best read before following the links, as that content and where the links take you may not be always related in straightforward ways. Not all the links are binary movements from summary to details, or question to answer, or claim to comment.
There are enough cross-links that if you go on from a screen you are likely to find yourself back at it eventually. So it is not necessary to keep backtracking to follow all the links from one screen. Still, you may want to read that way now and then; if you do, or if you want to back out of an area that seems repetitious, use your browser's "Back" button or history list.
As you read the screens, your Web browser will change the color of the links leading to screens you have already seen. However, since the screens are linked in non-hierarchical ways, you will need to follow some "already used" links, both to read old screens in new contexts, and to find new links.
Be aware that part of the text contains several sets of almost identical screens with the same titles. There especially, it is the pattern of linking and the contrasts among the screens that are important.
The whole text contains about twelve thousand words, but there may be more than you have so far found.
(This essay was composed in Storyspace, which provides maps of the link patterns, and then exported to HTML, which does not. The HTML was then refined using BBEdit.)
