In the architectural journal Assemblage 29 in the year 1996, Sanford Kwinter spoke about the oncoming digital age as a time of manipulative thrills and cheap intensities that would dumb people into subservience and turn every aspect of their lives into something from which corporations could draw profit even down to the attention of their minds and their enjoyment of play. In this world of submission and uniformity, he wanted to protest. This protest would use many tactics. The one I want to discuss is the creation of resistant enclaves. Get away from this seductive flow of intense but short-lived experiences and stop being bulldozed and leveled out into a compliant, productive servant or resource. This mirrored the enclave strategy that the Americans tried in the Vietnam War; they tried to create secure villages that could block out the pervasive power and propaganda of the other side. Kwinter's case for resistant enclaves also echoes the advice Max Weber gave us for how to live in a world facing the inevitable spread of instrumental rationality and bureaucratic routine. He urged us to find and rejoice in those corners of our world where more substantive humane values still prevailed. Those circles or clubs or monasteries may be doomed but are not yet gone.
An enclave strategy did not work in Vietnam, and Kwinter feared that it would fail in the coming digital USA. His fear was justified; we could not hold back the tide of seductive, cheap digital thrills in the late ‘90s, and now, 30 years later, our situation is worse. We approach what Weber thought would be the final result of the process whereby old substantive values were replaced by a cool means-end rationality in a disenchanted world of stifling rational routine occasionally disturbed by breakouts of older values led by charismatic figures who eventually are absorbed back into the routine.
I am with Kwinter in what he opposes, but there is another family of tactics. Not to retreat but to take up the weapons of the new age, the flow of the seductive connections, and use them against the way the age is using them. The seductive flow of intensities linked up in new ways could challenge the smooth seductions. It could leap over the walls and out of the boxes that the productivist homogenization of human life is trying to create and pack us into. The very thing that is being used to seduce us could be turned against its seductive power and made to open horizons
I spoke in my 1996 essay mainly of hypertext links, not of the full panoply of hypermedia. But the hypertext link is one way of materializing something that the productivist homogenization of life wants to hide. Every piece of meaning we have exists in a field of possibility that goes beyond what it knows and which it cannot totally control. Every text, every image, every movement, every game is in a field of possibilities that could change the game, alter the rules, and confront itself in different self-conscious ways.
Any piece of text has an indefinite number of edges to its page, leading in different directions. It's that sense of possibility and openness that we're trying to recreate by using the hypertext link in ways of blending things together that break the chain of the seductive movement.
Now, 29 years later, my suggested tactic has not worked, either. Perhaps because it has not been tried? The kinds of hyperlinking I was urging have not happened much. I still feel that the kind of openness I was suggesting is always there, if only we can link ourselves into it. It's still to be had through unexpected links and gestures. But it turned out that the kind of hypertext that I was hoping to have people write, of which this HAR was a beginning, a hypertext using small lexias and literary tropes to make real-life non-fiction discussion, did not appear. It was too hard to read and to write.
Yet I remain convinced that one way out of the mindless heap of digital, now AI-enhanced, fluff is to produce enticing digital artifacts that are challenging to read but promise much for that effort. In today's digital world, with crossovers, meme creation, rapid circulation, and things going viral and then disappearing, there are possibilities for the kind of movement that I was hoping for. In a world of quick memes on TikTok or YouTube shorts, one can imagine mashups and mixes that make complex points in new ways.
The philosopher in me rejoices in the re-growth of blogging on Substack and other platforms. These encourage long essays that could be linked and confronted in unexpectedly revealing patterns to create new dimensions of individual and communal self-awareness. So my plea to do hyper-textual linking that leaps over disciplinary and institutional walls and out of enforced boxes is still seriously needed, even more than before.
