Two or three views of links

Writing recently about David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Alex Golub suggested that one effect of the Web is greater openness to the uncertain clamor, the competing claims and charms of multiple voices:

What it really happening is not changes to what it means to 'know' but what it means to 'convince'. A single authority is being replaced by a multiplicity of voices (insert Bakhtin here) (and it's odd, by the by, that David never does). Again, I get the feeling that in taking philosophy too seriously he starts giving in. When philosophy's authoritative stranglehold on knowing is relased, the result is not a different kind of knowing, it's a different kind of convincing. What emerges when you crack philosophy open? Rhetoric.

The web opens the can of worms known as rhetoric. This is a very key point, and as with much else in the field of rhetoric, it can mean many things. Here I take Alex to mean the Web supports a dialogical space in which arguments are won or lost by the (cleverly wielded) power of the signifier, rather than by the presumed authority of the underwriting guarantor (expert, Wisdom, God, etc).

It is somewhat puzzling, then, to find in a later discussion of filtering and linking, that Golub seems to reduce links to the level of decodeable signs, perhaps unwitting ones, that reliably tell about the person doing the linking. If links merely provide clues about some unified auteur ''behind'' the blog (blogeur...), then the very thing that makes the Web what it is - the link - turns out to be precisely not the place where the uncertainty of rhetorical language comes into play. Instead, it seems to be a modality in which we can gain more certain knowledge, at least about those doing the linking. Pointing, Golub suggests, is more about the pointer than about the thing pointed to (pointee): Links R Us. For someone as rhetorically aware as Golub, this seems a curiously transparent and monological view of links.

Are links, like cats in the night, all the same? In the ''meatspace'' genre of the scholarly essay, for example, scholars long have used footnotes to point to documents relevant to their research. As their name suggests, the notes sit at the base of whatever learned edifice the scholar is building. They have to do with the intertextuality of the scholar's work and the works it is using, critiquing, consuming in order to produce itself. Sure, they reveal something about the scholar, (e.g., she reads Gramsci in translation), but is this the only - or the most important - sort of thing to acquire from them?

Commenting on Golub, Jeff Ward agrees that links reveal the blogger, but argues that they are limited to revealing the ''habitus'' - Bourdieu's term roughly suggesting a sort of recognizeable, coherent, ready-to-wear cultural force field - rather than the blogger's unique personality. In a compact paragraph that would take a good deal to unpack, he notes:

[pointing, linking as habitus is] a strategy of indirection, hiding personality beneath the waves of cultural doxa. It substitutes pointing to capital for possessing it.

Ward states his clear disagreement with Golub: Links are not where the action - or the capital - is. He associates linking with the persuasive, ''shout-and-point'' rhetoric of advertising - a debased currency of pre-digested, commodified ''social predilections'' that appear less rich to him than the goings on inside the conversational cloud of a grappling group of diverse consciousnesses. If Golub values link-heavy blogs because they're exoteric, Ward likes them less because he's interested in the esoteric.

Ward seems to say the expository mode that reveals the blogger - via the I/we/you mode of conversation, whether in the form of the essay or some other genre, or in blogging - offers rich intersubjective soil for exploration and contemplation: fluid confluences of selves, or writers, or subjectivities, intent upon topics that shift and branch and blend under the gaze of one, then another, all directed toward some thing in their midst that they seek to better see, hear, and say.

For Ward, this is where the revelatory power of conversation comes into its own. Golub, on the other hand, values the third-person observational mode:

Hopelessly focused on one paticular culture at the expense of others, written from the point of 'I/we' rather than the more distanced 'they' (observing others is a problematic but still fruitful thing to do, after all!), uninformed by the realms of knowledge that lie far away from the cerebral, [phenomenology] needs more and different kinds of perspectives to add to its vision if it is going to break free of the remnant ties to philosophy that bind it.

Golub is other-oriented, but fully alive to the possibility that in observing the other, he may be extended, surprised, transformed. Ward is interested in the transformations within himself, mutations of conversation.

This is a fascinating divergence, because in back of it are questions having to do with the relation of logos and techne, content and form - is the Web really new, or just another kind of vessel for bearing meaning, thought, conversation, observation?

I hope it's not too oversimplifyingly chiasmic to suggest that where Golub sees a new genre taking shape, Ward sees a new shape for the eternal questions and conversations.

While both have read Weinberger's book with care and insight, neither seems prepared to go with one of its chief premises, namely that links are the constitutive, other-directed building blocks of the web - that in linking, we - Weinberger's ever-present ''we'' - are creating self-sacrificing artifacts that point beyond themselves. This he construes as a mode of caring, which is also a mode of being, which is also a mode of promising, which can only be accomplished when an other is both addressed and acted upon.

I want to come back to this - because it seems that each of these views of links is enormously stimulating and worthwhile. Not really either/or ground here; there's more to links than are dreamt of by our binary oppositions. Per ora, basta.

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