BAKER: We went further when we got back to the office. We thought of THE PROGRAMME as an "alternative ontology," a world to which we can go, leaving behind the "real" ontology we live in between the boundaries of being born and dying.
ABLE: Of course, we know that our "alternative ontology" has no life except as it is bracketed within the "real" ontology.
CHARLIE: It would be a feat to make the alternative just like the real one.
BAKER: A hypertext like THE PROGRAMME, as an alternative ontology, can evolve, because it is not closed. What we are here calling the "real ontology" (the term has theoretical problems, but we skip them for now) similarly evolves. For one organism, like us, however, it is finite. Death ends it.
ABLE: Just as death ends THE PROGRAMME. In that sense our ontologies interweave.
CHARLIE: We should really imagine that we could make the hypertext of THE PROGRAMME--the alternative ontology--correspond completely with the life we really live. At least the part of the real life that revolves around the development of our thoughts.
BAKER: Our proposition thus seems to be that we can create identical ontologies with our hypertext and our lived life.
ABLE: This goes too far, obviously.
CHARLIE: But think of it! Suppose our evolving thought was, in fact, the text of THE PROGRAMME. Text precedes concept. We have no thought until we have text. THE PROGRAMME would evolve as the hot bead of our thoughts, welding the ontologies together seamlessly. At our death, the text of THE PROGRAMME could be reliably considered the map of our mind.
BAKER: More accurately, the text would BE our mind. It would be a map of itself.
ABLE: Not a map at all, therefore, if we accept the shaky foundations of this talk in the first place.
CHARLIE: Even more remarkable, then.
ABLE: When we think of a hypertext as an ontology of its own, a "zone"--as McHale would say--it is still contingent on the so-called real ontology of our physical birth and death. A semi-world, we might say. We should resist giving parity to something that is so dependent on the other to which it is being compared.
BAKER: For purposes of postmodern investigation, the interesting question probably is this: does hypertext afford us an unprecedented means of displaying the organic development of how we think and what we think? Because its form and operation are closer to the way a person develops ideas than books and lectures, is it able to show knowledge coming into existence better than anything before it?
CHARLIE: Yes!
ABLE: Caution! We have to consider the social function of thoughts. It would not be enough to create by life's end a self-referential "map" of one's intellectual life. We live by the day. We have a responsibility to think about acting both for ourself and for the society. We have to be able to argue to closure and act on our conclusion. If all is hanging in hypertext until our end of days, what social utility will our thought have? In other words, how does a reader get from a beginning to an end of our hypertext and come away from it with a recommended action?
CHARLIE: Wait a minute. Hypertext does not just roll on like an ever-flowing stream. In the aggregate, it may be a "plane of consistency," completely deterritorialized. Along the way, it is a give and take of striation. It localizes in a lexia. It becomes concrete and has friction and is allowed to declare an end. The difference between hypertext and print culture is that in hypertext you can never declare that an end is final; there is always a jump to be made to a beginning.
BAKER: Yes, and that is why it gives the appearance of a radical unwillingness to conclude anything. But the maker of an argument in a book never stops thinking either.
CHARLIE: It is just that the form of his material imposes an illusion of finality. Hypertext finally releases him from that unfortunate by-product of book culture. Now his form of expression can be congruent with the ongoing nature of it.
ABLE: That cannot be the final word on this.
BAKER: That is quite literally true.
CHARLIE: Precisely the point!
ABLE: A final word, at least, for now. If our hypertext is a map of our complete development of thought--or if it IS our thought and not just a map--it poses a social problem. How does ANOTHER mind stop itself from developing long enough to follow our map or our total thought? How would WE stop our map long enough to witness another's?
BAKER: In practical social terms, we could not.
ABLE: Would not, anyway.
BAKER: So, hypertext might make the development of all thought transparent. Yet it would not advance the socialization of thought one to another. Our thought-map and another's thought-map would be unread.
CHARLIE: Be succinct! Be symbolic! Make art! That is the only power anyway. So spoke Zarathustra!