Waiting for the fruit to fall from the tree

Waiting for the fruit to fall from the tree.

Occasionally, I find the footnotes and bibliography of a scholarly paper more interesting than the paper itself. It’s rare, but it happens. When I surf into a link blog, I always get the feeling I’ve entered into something by turning to the back pages. Only a few of them interest me much; wood s lot is certainly one of those. There is a coherence to his method that is the exception rather than the rule.

Returning to an earlier theme, I wanted to respond a little more completely to Alex Golub’s Filtering as Personhood and Tom Matrullo’s Two or three views of links.

Tom summed up my position fairly well, though I must state up front that it’s an evolving position which seems to shift with everything I read. That’s why off and on, I write about it. Bourdieu was fresh in my head, and I was thinking about how little, effectively, these taxonomies of social predilection really say about people. As an artist moving into higher education with feet dragging (I align myself closely with Joseph Duemer’s observation “this is the only way we have been able to figure out to earn our dinner & indulge our passions”) I like an occasional drink of red wine and listen bit of accordion music (norteño, not polka), effectively thwarting Bourdieu’s neat diagram. Of course, this makes it entirely possible to say that evaluating linking choices outside the normal habitus is a means to chart the “expressive” nature of linking.

However, Tom really hit a nerve regarding the real question at stake: logos vs. techne. Linking is a techne: a method of accomplishing either authority (in the case of scholarly discourse) or metaphorical connection in the case of web discourse. I say metaphorical, because linking behaviors operate on many levels simultaneously. A link can be a direct access to information for justification or a gesture of approval, or an indirect, ironic glancing blow at an object of ridicule, or oftentimes both. Links are stand-ins, symbols that revel in their multiplicity and playfulness. Reading authorial intent into these behaviors is complex; it pushes homo symbolicus to the extreme.

Links are connotative and only rarely denotative. When denotative, they usually express primarily habitus. So, in this sense I can agree with Alex that the connotative power of link behaviors might be worth consideration, however, lacking any real commentary or feedback (which is usually the case with link-driven blogs) determining authorial intent (as expression) is a potential mine field of misinterpretation. The only certainty regarding the connection of a personality construct regarding these connotative link behaviors, is that the personality has chosen to be silent. Silence is a difficult field to glean personality from.

What assumptions can we make regarding the personalities of authors who write dictionaries? Not many. A new mode of expression? I doubt it; we’ve been hunting and gathering for a long time, and while an anthropologist may be interested in reconstructing portraits of a people by what they choose to hunt and gather, it hardly seems necessary when so many people are willing to speak, and tell their stories in first-person narratives.

As Tom says, this is really not an either/or ground. Just a choice of what, within a given subject field, is the most interesting. Method has a powerful attraction. Coleridge takes an interesting stance in his essays “On Method.” He starts with the question of what makes a person seem to be “of superior mind,” when we meet them in passing:

Not the weight or the novelty of his remarks; not any unusual interest of facts communicated by him; for we may suppose both and the one and the other precluded by the shortness of intercourse, and the triviality of the subjects. The difference will be impressed and felt, though the conversation should be confined to the state of the weather, or of the pavement. Still less will it arise from any peculiarity of his words or phrases. . . . However irregular and desultory his talk, there is method in the fragments.

This appears to support Alex’s contention (in 1818, just a few years before the web) that the method of linking is revelatory; for what are words, but links to ideas? Coleridge continues further on to say:

Method, accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers. To enumerate and analyze these relations, with the conditions under which they alone are discoverable, is to teach the science of method.

Or, perhaps by quantifying and analyzing the relationships one might discover this supposedly new “method” of revealing personality through linking behaviors on the web. I tend to wonder: why would this be interesting outside the realm of sociology? People often write actual words that reveal themselves, rather than pointing at other people's words forcing you to guess. This is what interests me. I am far more interested in the content, formed and shaped by consciousness from these relations, rather than the relations involved outside the pointer, who gestures at something outside to complete a self-image. Pointers of this type are ultimately an impediment to clues of selfhood, rather than the revelation of it. "Just look me up under my particular notion of 'hip'," the link seems to say. Sorry, I've got better things to do than read the dictionary. If I want to research something, I'll use a search engine. Unless of course you have the comprehensiveness and the focus of wood s lot. My perspective is closer to that of a philosophic poet, or poetic philosopher, as Coleridge describes:

The purpose of the writer is not so much to establish a particular truth, as to remove the obstacles, the continuance of which is preclusive to all truth, the whole scheme assumes a different aspect, and justifies itself to all dimensions.

. . .

— not to assist in the storing of the passive mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if the human soul were a mere repository or banqueting-room, but to place it in such relations of circumstances as should gradually excite the germinal power that craves no knowledge but what it can take up into itself, what it can appropriate and reproduce in fruits of its own.

I’m far more interested in the fruits than the tree. Pulp has a sweeter taste than bark.

There's a lot more I'd like to say about Weinberger's book; I'm not really avoiding the question, I'm just easily distracted. But, regarding the "self-sacrificing artifacts" that links constitute, I would argue that most language behaves that way. Each word is a gesture that flouts, or aligns itself with the social meanings which preceeded it. Language has been reaching out to "the other" long before the web was formed to carry it. Language is constantly reaching beyond itself. Links can be taken to be polyvalent signifiers, but then, so are words.