Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 30 Nov. - 6 Dec. 2000 Issue No.510

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Surplus ministrations

By Youssef Rakha

Ain Shams University's second literary criticism conference had a (beady) eye on the future. The event was held in Dar Al-Moshah, which, besides being far-out, exuded an aura of five-star politeness and cosmopolitanism, however shoddy its aspect might appear to be on one's next visit to a five-star hotel. Except for a palpable administrative incompetence, the conference could have been anywhere: the small, orderly clusters of people waiting to be admitted into seminar rooms, the speakers straining to present their papers in audible English, the irritatingly spurious serenity of contemporary academia setting the tone.

While sailing conference seas, the presence of PR lifeboats would have been reassuring. Alas, there were none in sight. A conveniently placed display of (exclusively Arabic) books, manned by remarkably unhelpful attendants, added little to the scene. And the ubiquity of literary scholars from all over the world could only exacerbate a newcomer's unease. By the time one braced oneself for the fourfold session on hypertext, the episode of some official entourage paralysing airport-bound traffic on the way to Heliopolis had fallen out of memory. Neither the room nor the topic under discussion betrayed any sign of nationality.

There is something futile about listening to four middle-aged men juggle terminology, arrange and rearrange their thoughts, then say very little in the end. Hermeneutic expositions seem particularly pointless because they eschew life and concentrate on texts, as if the latter were more worthy. Babis Dermitzakis from Greece, Andrec Kappanyos from Hungary, Ahmed Abdel-Fattah from Egypt and Mark Poster from the US all made relevant observations about hypertext as a contemporary life phenomenon hitherto absent from human history -- as a reading and writing technique, as the most advanced text medium (surpassing print), and as a cognitive and (multi-)cultural experience. Yet only Poster attempted to prod the historical and social implications of hypertext in the context of nationality, inter-nationality and the Internet.

The historic Za'faran Palace, part of the Ain Shams University campus photo: Randa Shaath

In the long-winded, circular arguments of lit-crit, though, the Internet and even the future of humanity waver at the edge of boredom. Until the audience's queries facilitated a more direct and personal explanation of some points, the formality of the discourse was such that many crucial assumptions were merely glossed over. And this inevitably takes away from the force of the point being made. A provocative comparison between digital text and verbal folklore ("in that the possibilities of human transformation are far greater in those two cases than in the case of print") was neither debated nor illuminated further. And despite the four professors' emphasis on the Internet as an agent of change, how and by what criteria Internet use makes for "a different humanity from the current one" remained unclear. Concepts like post-national identity and multiple subjectivity may be operative within the realm of Internet Relay Chat, but lit-crit evidently does not explain why, how or when they begin to influence political reality.

Perhaps the session merely counts for an acknowledgement of the Internet's importance by the literary establishment. All over the world, it seems, scholars of the text are wiring into the cyber dream. That they should care to tell us so is important in itself. What they seem to ignore is that political reality has a cruel penchant for hemming in as soon as one steps out of Dar Al-Moshah, and that, before one is back on the road, images of universal digital literacy and post-national intellectual mobility will have blurred, then vanished.

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