The pun on screen here is hardly accidental. In this hypertext design, we have attempted to
use the associative power of the link to create discursive spaces that operate in ways similar to
the textual spaces of The Four Zoas. In so doing, we have tried to position ourselves at the boundary
between the libidinal and rational economies we take part in as a graduate students--to create a
criticism that both reveals and revels in our fetishes and the fetishes of others. The basic
principle of the "Blakean" hypertext design is to disrupt and alter processes of linear reading in
an effort to create an awareness of how our discourse, our very subjectivity, is structured by
denials and repressions--and the ideological consequences of these disavowals. This is
appropriate not only because Blake seems to have anticipated multimedia, but because of our
own libidinal investments in the text, our academic fetish.
Taussig argues that as academicians, our identities are "implicated and imperilled in the
object of study, in its power to change reality, no less" (253). That this fact is so often elided,
Taussig says, is an indication of "massive cultural repression" at work. We have to remember
that our own desires and identities are bound up with our objects of study, that our efforts to
place these objects into an interpretive system are ideologically structured. In the project, we
have tried to foreground this relationship by attempting to "react" with the poem, by
unleashing what Adorno calls the "mimetic shudder" (qtd. in Taussig 253-4), proliferating
associations in which "I" consume the poem and it consumes "me." We have fetishized the poem, as
we all do with our objects of study, but we have tried to display our fetish openly, critically.