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Somnio, ergo sum Donald Challenger Linking as entailment     What might ideally constitute a more complete yet open-ended rhetoric of linking? It should first and most simply lend itself to the syllogistic and narrative implications of ergo, invoking the logic of the linear if ... then without succumbing to the demands of a strict causality. It should permit writers and readers to construe connections among and within texts in several registers: as a global structure; among "discrete" texts; among complementary texts; within texts as as an infrastructure of organizational and navigational principles; and within texts as local connections or transitions negotiated in the interplay of technological constraint and the writing subject. It should make these connections available to both writer and reader as categories, while also acknowledging their provisional status. It should leave links in all these registers open to ideological questioning, not only in the overtly commercial spaces of the World Wide Web, but also in the interstices of documents where seemingly mechanical or "neutral" linking veils the consequences of particular choices. It should balance the needs of reader orientation and a "default" determinacy against the play of multicursal possibility and discovery. The rhetorical relationship between the nodes in question might be one of necessary sequence, of association, of chronological succession, of amplification, of tension or contradiction; it might be metaphorical in all the dimensions of that term. An ideal rhetoric of linking would always signify and operate within the dialectical relationship between part and whole, figure and ground. This rhetoric would itself be clarified by naming -- by collecting and ordering its various functions under some rubric that is etymologically rich and diffuse without wandering into vagueness or inaccessibility; it should offer an ensemble of meanings that are reasonably lucid and ordered without being inert or obsolete. The term entailment might serve as such a rubric for a rhetoric of linking. In its narrow legal sense, an entail is the ordering of the succession of an estate so that no possessor can bequeath it outside the prescribed line of descent. According to the OED, this meaning has inhered since the fourteenth century, gradually expanding to refer to any predetermined sequence and hence to the most common contemporary (and philosophical) usage, to necessitate or "bring on by way of necessary conclusion." Thus entailment, in the dominant modern strain of its history, signifies narrative order and sequence, an accounting or documenting distinctly unicursal but not strictly causal, as well as the right of ownership -- meanings all lingering in the related verb to tally. Yet a second ensemble of meanings, emerging simultaneously in the fourteenth century and more closely allied to the term's Latin root, taliare, plays richly against this determinacy. Among the earliest uses of entail as a verb are to engrave or carve; to represent in such an engraving; and by extension to tailor, embroider, design, or, figuratively, to render artistically. As a noun, entail in this strain signified the pattern of a garment or figure, and by extension "guise" or "semblance." Its self-reflexive dimensions are perhaps more dramatic in the equivalent Italian intaglio -- a design carved below the surface of its material so as to reveal the layers and striations of the medium itself; or, alternatively, a method of printing with a similarly carved plate that leaves raised lettering or figuration in ink. Entailment in this way subverts its own legal and philosophical implications of linear structure by simultaneously invoking the play of surface and depth, of detail within the gestalt, of texture within structure. Entailment is at once the imposition of a sequential order, a design that reveals its own depths, and a decentered weaving of figures and representations.

"We must find ways to bring history into the computer world.... It is a truism but nonetheless true that we are about to witness a great transfer of knowledge from one medium to another.... In [the place of the old medium] would be the qualities of the computer age ... the sense that recorded knowledge can be collected, transmitted, reorganized, and molded to one's immediate needs and the feeling of being immediately "in touch with" our culture's past. The technologist might find the past more accessible in this form, and the humanist might find new uses and interpretations for familiar texts and historical events." Jay David Bolter, Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age

It should first and most simply lend itself to the syllogistic and narrative implications of ergo, invoking the logic of the linear if ... then without succumbing to the demands of a strict causality.

It should permit writers and readers to construe connections among and within texts in several registers: as a global structure; among "discrete" texts; among complementary texts; within texts as as an infrastructure of organizational and navigational principles; and within texts as local connections or transitions negotiated in the interplay of technological constraint and the writing subject. It should make these connections available to both writer and reader as categories, while also acknowledging their provisional status.

It should leave links in all these registers open to ideological questioning, not only in the overtly commercial spaces of the World Wide Web, but also in the interstices of documents where seemingly mechanical or "neutral" linking veils the consequences of particular choices.

It should balance the needs of reader orientation and a "default" determinacy against the play of multicursal possibility and discovery. The rhetorical relationship between the nodes in question might be one of necessary sequence, of association, of chronological succession, of amplification, of tension or contradiction; it might be metaphorical in all the dimensions of that term.

This rhetoric of linking would itself be clarified by naming -- by collecting and ordering its various dynamics under some rubric that is etymologically rich and diffuse without wandering into vagueness or inaccessibility; it should offer an ensemble of meanings that are reasonably lucid and ordered without being inert or obsolete. Such a rubric should, in addition, always signify and operate within the dialectical relationship between part and whole, figure and ground.

The term entailment might serve as such a rubric for a rhetoric of linking.

In its narrow legal sense, an entail is the ordering of the succession of an estate so that no possessor can bequeath it outside the prescribed line of descent. According to the OED, this meaning has inhered since the fourteenth century, gradually expanding to refer to any predetermined sequence and hence to the most common contemporary (and philosophical) usage, to necessitate or "bring on by way of necessary conclusion." Thus entailment, in the dominant modern strain of its history, signifies narrative order and sequence, an accounting or documenting distinctly unicursal but not strictly causal, as well as the right of ownership -- meanings all lingering in the related verb to tally.

Yet a second ensemble of meanings, emerging simultaneously in the fourteenth century and more closely allied to the term's Latin root, taliare, plays richly against this determinacy. Among the earliest uses of entail as a verb are to engrave or carve; to represent in such an engraving; and by extension to tailor, embroider, design, or, figuratively, to render artistically, to create a "guise" or "semblance." As a noun, entail in this strain signified the pattern of a garment or figure, and by extension "guise" or "semblance." Its self-reflexive dimensions are perhaps more dramatic in the closely related Italian intaglio -- a design carved below the surface of its material so as to reveal the layers and striations, or alternatively, a method of printing with a similarly carved plate that leaves raised lettering or figuration in ink.

Entailment in this way subverts its own legal and philosophical implications of linear structure by simultaneously invoking the play of surface and depth, of detail within the gestalt, of texture within structure. Entailment is at once the imposition of a sequential order, a design that reveals its own depths, and a decentered weaving of figures and representations.

SIDE QUOTE:"We must find ways to bring history into the computer world.... It is a truism but nonetheless true that we are about to witness a great transfer of knowledge from one medium to another.... In [the place of the old medium] would be the qualities of the computer age ... the sense that recorded knowledge can be collected, transmitted, reorganized, and molded to one's immediate needs and the feeling of being immediately "in touch with" our culture's past. The technologist might find the past more accessible in this form, and the humanist might find new uses and interpretations for familiar texts and historical events."

Jay David Bolter, Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age