Descartes Any course on the intellectual history of the European Enlightenment is likely to include a discussion of Cartesian subjectivity, i.e. Descartes's idea that humans are rational, autonomous individuals. Working in a hypertextual classroom can give students a unique historical perspective on this concept. Specifically, the hypertextual environment situates students outside of Cartesian subjectivity. Hypertext demonstrates to students that they live in a world where Descartes's claim to have discovered the true essence of human subjectivity is now suspect. This makes it much easier for an instructor to talk about the Cartesian subject historically, i.e. as a concept which has a history, and whose history may now be approaching its end.

Jay David Bolter suggests that "philosophers who deny the individual ego special powers as the author of its thoughts are questioning the foundations of Cartesian philosophy. They are also exploring positions appropriate to the electronic writing space. . .Such a philosophy may be nothing less than the end of the ego, the end of the Cartesian self as the defining quality of humanity" (221). One would not necessarily want to try to explain to an undergraduate class how electronic writing and hypertext challenge the Cartesian subject-position's claim of universal validity. But on the other hand, students can begin to grasp this point even if the instructor does not explicitly emphasize it. Indeed, I suspect that students develop an understanding of post-Cartesian subjectivity every time they click on a hypertextual link. This is, after all, one of the most interesting functions of hypertext. George Landow argues that "as readers move through a web or network of texts, they continually shift the center--and hence the focus or organizing principle--of their investigation and experience. Hypertext, in other words, provides an infinitely re-centerable system whose provisional point of focus depends upon the reader" (11). The experience of hypertextual reading challenges the dominance of the Cartesian subject in a radical way.

Anyone who has spent much time on the Web would probably agree that it becomes increasingly difficult for Web surfers to think of themselves as rational, autonomous Cartesian subjects. Web users readily recognize the terminals they use as nodes on a network; these surfers also accept with surprising ease the seemingly radical claim that they themselves might constitute part of this network. The mouse which moves the cursor, the hand which moves the mouse, and the brain which moves the hand all seem to be part of the same postmodern creature, a cybernetic organism or "cyborg." Many Web surfers routinely encounter cyborgs in the pages of novels by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and other authors of "cyberpunk" science fiction. As Donna Haraway points out, however, the cyborg is "a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (191). Web users are cyborgs, in the sense that they are part of an immensely complex bio-electronic network. Students who make extensive use of the Web may therefore find it difficult to think of themselves as centered, stable Cartesian subjects. They are more likely to become "lost in cyberspace"; i.e., they are likely to experience their own subjectivity as de-centered, multiple, cybernetic and, dare I say it? postmodern. This experience encourages students to think about the Cartesian subject position not as something that is "true" in an absolute sense but as something which has a history.