At / Through
Processing Lanham’s Electronic Word a little further brings me back to links. Raymon pointed me at a student’s hypertext reading of the book (thanks!) that expressed some discomfort at the repetition of some concepts, such as the “At / Through” reading of texts, suggesting that Lanham “put his HTML where his mouth is.” Reading a good book on discourse analysis or linguistics is like that too. Sometimes, the concepts are so important that transposition into a linear textual exposition requires this sort of emphasis to convey the weight behind the words.
Lanham proposes that electronic communication is the ultimate convergence of text, image, and music. While the paradigmatic (in a linguistic sense) set of meanings available for expression in these earlier technologies is the same, the syntagmatic rules which govern their behavior are not. The grammar is different (my conjecture, not Lanham’s). Projecting my intuition onto Lanham, you could say that the paradigmatic level (the Through level) is confronted with new syntax of expression on the At level.
Lanham uses Eric Havelock’s work to suggest that this is natural with any new technology: with the development of alphabetic technologies, letters were at first decorative rather than transparent carriers of meaning. Letters lost their surface character after a time, becoming a transparent meaning carrier enabling us to look through them; however, this is an illusory phenomenon which ignores the value laden nature of discourse. In times of interface between the two levels (image / text), simultaneous functioning on both levels (At / Through) historically has occurred. Illuminated manuscripts are a strong case in point. Perhaps the arguments regarding the syntactic functioning of links in hypertext are evidence of a similar mode of interface.
Adrian Miles site shows the same sort of convergence that Lanham was talking about. What is most striking to me is that, unlike the statement I quoted regarding the lawlessness of links, Miles actually argues for the development of a syntax for using hypertext for scholarly documents. Entering the same document from Miles’ akademic werds page, I discovered that the article was much deeper and broader than I originally thought. I misread it. Why? Because the “rules” were unknown to me, and I hadn’t clicked any of the links. There was no clear marker (just a visual map on the side that I missed) as to where or how the essay was structured. Nothing differentiated the use of links as “works cited” and links as a narrative structure. That’s the problem with hypertext: grammar must be inferred, and links haven't been around long enough to develop any sort of syntax allowing a reader to follow link structures transparently, that is, to read through the text without the disruption of confronting the presence of a link. For now, links are indeed ruptures; but it may not always be that way.
Thinking about this in broader terms, applying the convergence that Lanham proposes, it seems as if we must confront the presence of syntactic rules in all forms of communication. Syntax, in a linguistic sense, is well formed and only partly understood. In a musical sense, syntax is present in terms of codified scales and genre expectations developed after years of tradition. Pictorially, syntax is mysterious and only relatively recently has developed some expected parameters for communication beyond genre (extra-linguistic universal signage). Perhaps this collision of pictorial communication (the At level) and linguistic communication accounts for the difficulty involved.
Links of the meaning-nn type (non-natural intentional communication) require syntax in order to be interpreted. The primary recourse is to linguistic syntax, but this isn’t the only possibility. A deeper development of visual syntax is perhaps the key to preserving the synergistic At / Through oscillation without losing the capacity to transmit meaning. This seems much like the secondary orality that Father Ong proposes, and Lanham’s throwing musical communication into the mix complicates syntactic conjecture even further.
The easiest road of exploration seems to be the visual / verbal confrontation. Photographs or images in general force a confrontation with the At level; linguistic components imply the presence of a Through level. Although links need not be pictures, the way we deal with them often seems to be analogous to the difficult syntax presented by a photograph. Surface is always the quality that is dealt with first in a photograph, before we can move through into the conceptual communication beyond it. There’s a lot to think about!
* It occurs to me hours later that the reason why musical and linguistic syntax have coercively reached a higher level of development is that they are essentially temporally dependant interactions, whereas pictorial communication is substantially atemporal.
