Ultimately, the emphasis on a power struggle or battle for control between reader and author or reader and text participates in the tradition of agonistic rhetoric, which is central to mainstream Western thinking. In other words, arguments for the radical, liberatory potential of hypertext appear to be founded on the ideology that they purport to deconstruct--i.e., the ideology of Enlightenment humanism, whose ideal citizen is a rational, self-interested, autonomous man who occupies a stable subject position, the kind of person who walks an individual path to learning. Far from subverting this ideology, the rhetoric of liberatory hypertext, by focusing on personal empowerment at the expense of collective action or collaboration, actually reinforces liberal humanism.