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Somnio

--Ergo

Sum

• The foundational architecture of any webtext, considered as an abstraction or global structure.

• The system of connections among texts that we customarily think of as "discrete" -- for instance, hypothetical links from Somnio, ergo sum to those nodes of a professional web designers' guide titled "How to build links" and also to a site devoted to scholarly essays on the print fiction of William H. Gass.

• The system of connections among texts that we customarily think of as complementary, cumulative, or closely interrelated -- for instance, the chapters of a novel, the essays by various authors in a thematized issue of an online periodical such as Kairos, and the juxtaposition of film images in montage to generate resonant meanings.

• The broader system of connections within works that we typically regard as individual texts -- a system that we might think of as a spatial structure, a map, or a field of Cartesian coordinates (36) through which the writer provisionally organizes and the reader navigates text.

• The local connections, logical and rhetorical, among nodes or lexias within a work that are generated individually in the act of composition itself but also are informed by the practical limits of the computer screen. These technological impositions are in turn reabsorbed into the composition process as stylistic conventions ("keep individual nodes or chunks of text short," "use keywords to keep users oriented," and so forth). Such local connections are roughly analogous to transitions in traditional print-based composition.

Obviously this list of distinctions is not comprehensive, and each blurs to varying degrees under scrutiny and at the margins. In hypertext we think of texts as "discrete" at our peril, and to a large extent such distinctions and categories are themselves imposed and naturalized by the taxonomies of print. In the second instance above, I represented this webtext on Cartesianism and hypothetical sites dedicated to Web design and the work of Gass as safely separate entities, but in fact we can connect them -- recontextualize them -- in a single gesture: Gass is the author of fictional works that a) anticipate in print the play of typography and graphic elements we see fully realized in Web design (Willie Master's Lonesome Wife); b) enact the possibilities of fragmented, multicursal narrative ("In the Heart of the Heart of the Country"); and c) subvert the dualism of mind/body representation with specific reference to Descartes himself (Cartesian Sonatas). In this manner, we can imagine any number of textual strategies and readerly interventions that would subvert or erase the conventional distinctions between works in the act of constituting a textual ensemble around an unforeseen trope, theme, or even a single word.

Similarly, while the connections (and potential links) among related texts in the third grouping above are more centripetal than in the second, they, too, tend to fray under closer inspection. Some are chronological or syllogistic texts that "need" to be read in a certain sequence -- and while hypertext, like postmodern theory, contests the privileging of single-path readings, we should also acknowledge their value within certain texts and contexts. (37)

We have, then, a number of categories through which we can identify specific types of links, but the very creation of those categories tends to atomize the central concept of linking itself. Linking is both centrifugal and centripetal; it spins texts "away" from the center of the writer/reader's attention at different speeds, thereby constantly repositioning that center and pulling new texts -- or new perspectives on the same text -- into its field. A fuller understanding of its implications and practical demands requires that we articulate a framework for the link that allows for this tension of claiming and disclaiming -- a nomenclature of linkage that will bend but not break.