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06/07/2005 Archived Entry: ""

The Unbearable Lightness of Linking

Another draft entry (and I emphasize draft) for The Digital Dictionary of Pivotal Terms.
The Unbearable Lightness of Linking
The link signifies the basic element of web writing. Its heyday is still framed in early ‘90s hypertext studies, where the non-linear paths triumphed in much of the published fiction and theory saw the link as a savior to rigid narrative structure. In this view, the link re-organized how stories could be told. On the Web, however, the link generates something other than narrative; its function is to enable the network.
Networks are broken paths of meaning. The Web, David Weinberger writes, is broken on purpose. Thus, to think of links and writing together is to consider writing as purposefully broken. For some, that is an unbearable thought. Purpose is central to writing instruction, at least to specific visions of writing instruction heralded in composition studies. With purpose, we make rhetoric heavy. We become heavy handed. “We apply the term ‘rhetorician,’” Aristotle notes, to describe a speaker’s command of the art and a speaker’s moral purpose” (7). That mix of morality and purpose makes rhetoric very heavy, and that heaviness often enforces exactness, for morality is a noble purpose to uphold (to be moral in speech or deed, you must be exact).
In writing instruction, the noble and moral goal is to match topoi with a given audience, or to explain a disciplinary position to the public sphere. One links positions in heavy gestures. “We stand for X.” “X means Y.”
In this way, we see connectivity (i.e. linking) is reflected in Burke’s repetition of the idea of “bureaucracy.” The network as bureaucracy surely exists – the various social relationships formed in government, entertainment, education, etc. are bureaucratic. But the network as the Web offers the potential of a different model outside of/or alternative to bureaucracy: that model is the incongruity Burke triumphs.
Burke writes of perspective by incongruity. Perspective by incongruity links “unlinked words by rational criteria instead of tonal criteria” (309) But the network itself does not depend (or have to depend) on rationality. Instead, following the early media work of William Burroughs, it often relies on conflict and irrationality. Irrational linking. Linking without purpose. Linking without morality. Imagine the digital network, then, as a site of irrational incongruity. The logic behind such a rhetorical apparatus might be: link it/unlink it. This gesture reflects Burroughs’ Nova Technique: “The basic nova technique is very simple: Always as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts” Searching out conflict seems something alien to the morality of purpose. And wouldn’t a conflicted rhetoric of the link be just as heavy-handed?
The conflict, as McLuhan taught, is the network response to rhetorical production. When opposing positions collide, we have the collide-oscope. The collie-oscope is not really heavy, but light, for it happens, and is not forced. This lightness of linking is an attribute, then, of invention. To link/unlike is a digital way of saying “invention.”