a Farce in two voices

nOIsEs ofF

Links are the pointy inkblots of the moment - regarding them, each blogger seems to find his or her daily obsession:

Links are barbaric. They are dangerous. They have an excess that cannot be controlled by the conventions of scholarship, breeding and selfhood. Links turn scholarly essays and conversations inside out and upside down, making connections ("footnotes") the centre rather than an afterthought. Jill

[Aside, off-stage]:

Barbaric! That's the nicest thing anybody's called me all day. Leuschke.

A while back, I was idly listing link analogies:

What links are like...

...cuts, trims, ruptures, wounds, connectons, legations, ligatures, vectors, movements, pointers, couplers, motions of thought, comments, traces, fingerprints, pauses, caesurae, joints, implicatures, openings, motors, drives, minefields, heat seeking missles, political statements, lobbyists of memes, motility of minds, porosity of textual boundaries, extrapolations.

What links do...

...move, align, connect, allude, pull in, comment on, underscore, redound, palpate, waste time, do dreamwork, open, propel, correct, surprise, explode, foment, cut, trim, refer, digress, associate, trope, season, expand, corral, illustrate, deepen, ironize, develop, point.

Some of these seem "linked" to chance, others to violence. Violence to some imago of integrity - of text, thought, pathos, sustained utterance of reflection (think 3 Stooges meet Tomas Luis de Victoria). For Jill, experiencing links as disruptions seems to stem from a bygone model of authority...

...a print-centric point of view where value is given to the individual, to authority, to the singular romantic genius.

The ''barbarism'' seems related to the aleatory mode of the link, which can wreak havoc upon the intentional structures we create. Jill links to Miles, who says:

To follow a link is to surrender, in that moment of choice, control to a system whose logic of operation and connection remain unknown. A link is, then, in such a system, little more than a roll of the dice.

(Is the ''logic of operation'' unknown, or is what is unknown simply what awaits one at the other end of the link? What if the system in question carries the aleatory within its "intent" (thanks MMO)?)

If links spark anxiety in Jill and Miles, and a hypothesis of caring in Weinberger, in Ward they spawn a familiar, inward (hmmm...) interpretive complexity:

Links can be taken to be polyvalent signifiers, but then, so are words.

For Golub::Bakhtin they pose, coiled within the potent influences of other words:

"The word encounters an alien word not only in the object itself: every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that anticipates it..."

=====

What do I see in the darkness visible of links? How to ''put'' the reflection of my own obsession with the impossible plainness of an improper rendering?

1. Links involve actions, which entail effects outside the control of the linker, the reader, or the linkee. This ceaseless, febrile, farce-like motility seems the fabric of the Web - the dicey dance of the surf, if you will.

2. You have a link here, it points over there. There, though, can be considered a vehicle for what is here. Or vice versa. Tenor and vehicle, as Ward (on Richards) reminds us, together produce metaphor. But this birth comes only in their coupling, which generates a third, which we like to call the "proper" meaning.

3. The movement of language is always a turning, a thrusting towards some adequation of meaning that is always somewhere else.

If I do not try to speak directly, it is because I know that the false promise of directness will only lead to misunderstanding.

4. Linking is a slippery turning toward this propriety which is all we ever want, and all we never have.

thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

05.31.02

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