Linking as metaphor

It had been a long time since I read The Rule of Metaphor by Paul Ricoeur. As I picked up my copy last night, I noticed that it was still interspersed with at least twenty bookmarks; it is, in my opinion, one of the most important critical works of the twentieth century. Going through the last group of lectures in I.A. Richards’ The Philosophy of Rhetoric, I noticed that the ideas were oddly familiar. No wonder; Richards’ ideas were part of the foundation of Ricoeur’s work.

When I wrote about denotative and connotative properties of links, I was falling back on the terms most popular in tech-writing theory. Richards doesn’t use those words, but instead, tenor and vehicle. Richards’ Philosophy of Rhetoric is more about understanding how metaphor works (to prevent misunderstanding) than any sort of tropological (style and figures) study. The distinctions Richards makes about metaphor were a bit confusing at first, but last night I began to see the power of it, driving me to pick up Ricoeur again.

Using George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” in class last semester, it seemed easy to nod in agreement with the idea that the most powerful metaphors are visual; if you can’t picture it, it’s not a good metaphor. Richards attacks the simplistic view of metaphors as “mental pictures” instead suggesting that words are metaphorical when they operate simultaneously at two levels, i.e., “literal” (denotative) and “figurative” (connotative). However, those words do not adequately describe what’s going on either. Think of the word “strong.” You could picture a guy with big arms crushing something, I suppose, but what of “strong light”? You don’t picture sunbeams with muscles on them, whereas used in the form “strong man” you do. When you say someone is “brainy” do you picture a brain? When you say someone is “geeky” do you picture a circus freak that bites the heads off chickens?

Richards’ points about metaphors are multiple: they cannot be removed from context to be evaluated in isolation; they are not always visual; their meaning is constructed by applying selective parts of the other contexts to which they might also be applied. Thus, when we say something is geeky, we are usually applying the marginalized status of the geek, without taking wholesale the entire literal context the word implies. I would suggest, as Weinberger does in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, that link behavior is similar. Weinberger says that collections of links often have only one thing in common: whoever collected them found something of interest on that particular site. What that something is, is certainly a matter for conjecture — not as “expression” but as part of a larger meaning constituted by the site which chose to link them. Taken in isolation, they are not meaningless, but rather are filled with so many different meanings as to make them an unreliable and imperfect indicator of personal expression. But these qualities do make them effective metaphors.

To channel Weinberger again, being “unreliable and imperfect” is part of what the web is all about. It can be embraced as a strength, rather than a weakness. The more I think about it, linking behavior was one of the first things that obsessed me when I first started reading weblogs. I picked the people I wanted to link to carefully; I did my best to avoid any of the “popular” circles. Sort of like going back to high school, it seemed to me. I tried to choose diverse weblogs with little in common with each other, to avoid reading stale repeats of the most popular buzz. I got sucked in by individual writers, not communities.

So what study might be made of my choices? Of the sites I find interesting enough to point to? The bottom line is that outside of the context of my own particular cave, very little. Linking choices are based in complex interactions, shifted by context. What puzzles me about link blogs with no commentary is why, given the absence of a context would I chose to click the link? Many blogs provide snips of the target document, which is quite helpful in determining why I would be interested, in lieu of commentary. Making a choice to follow a writer is an investment, and I find those with no commentary or quotes a total waste of time; hardly a revelation or new form of expression. I might as well read a dictionary arbitrarily. I suspect that there is much to be said for approaching links through Richards' labeling of the effective parts of metaphor.

Rather than denotative or connotative, rather than original idea and borrowed idea, rather than idea and image, Richards labels the parts of metaphor as tenor and vehicle. Ricoeur applauds this choice, because it makes it impossible to confuse the two parts with anything else, or give priority to one over the other. In a certain sense, you might call the target of a link its tenor, filled with overtones and information. The inducement to click it is the vehicle, be it quote, commentary, or context. The two parts work together. Sometimes they work through resemblance, sometimes through dissimilarity. However, what constitutes their effectiveness is that both parts must be present in order for it to qualify as a metaphor.

What is constantly true of links (or metaphors) is that they are externally referent, not internally referent, as building blocks for discourse— except in the case of incredibly skilled writers who build their own metaphorical universes through years of practice at their craft. Gesturing at other sources to clarify a position, make a point, or fuel an expression is a time honored tradition within a text, as are tactics of self-mythologizing word-play in writers like William Blake, who use the entire force of their oeuvre to pack each word with multiple meanings. I suppose that some bloggers are self-referential in this way, pointing to previous posts to clarify the compact concepts they use; but this is the exception, again, rather than the rule. Metaphors only work when within a context, a connection can be made with subtle possibilities of meaning. Otherwise, they might as well be a bag of words. Pick a handful— they’re cheap.