The distinction between writing and theory is only a convention of academic institutions, a matter of furniture arrangement, course descriptions, and chapter headings. Like any writer I write conscious of the writing at hand, and theory, which is only another name for this consciousness of what is at hand, has no greater or lesser place than it does in any other kind of writing.

In some sense there is never theory, only writing. Even so, to the extent that hypertext blurs these artificial, institutional boundaries it enables a writing which is from moment to moment more and less consciously theoretical, whimsical, practical, lyrical, whathaveyou, i.e., one in which they oscillate as what N. Katherine Hayles calls "flickering signifiers."