Intertextuality

Intertextuality, as defined by Michael Riffaterre, "depends on a system of limitations in our freedom of choice, of exclusions, since it is by renouncing incompatible associations within the text that we come to identify in the intertext their compatible counterparts."

He further states that this intertextuality is the complete opposite of hypertextuality because the former builds a "structured network" of limits that will keep the reader on track (towards the "correct" interpretation), the latter is a "loose web of free association."

This comparison forces me to question Riffaterre's understanding of hypertext. The quote comes from a 1994 article, when hypertext was somewhat different from today's (1997) version, but certainly not an amorphous, unstructured mass of material arbitrarily selected. Two distinct types of information linking in hypertext refute Riffaterre's argument. First, embedded links are placed in a text by the author. They are very rarely random. A second form, "searches", are dependent on the programming of the search engine (program). Currently, different search engines give different "hits" to the same inquiry, which indicates that someone has decided how the search will be limited because computers can not make such decisions without instructions.
Riffaterre ultimately sees the intertext from the Aristotilean perspective of certifiable truth. He even goes so far as to imagine that the "Institutions of Interpretation" have not changed since Aristotle.

Perhaps some in academia can maintain that illusion, but those who have grown up as "other" would argue the point. At any rate, he embraces an artificial standard when he states,
Intertextuality is made manifest either by syllepsis or by a gap, or by an ungrammaticality. . . Each of these is immediately perceptible to readers, who need no more, to respond to the text, than the senses nature gave them.

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Freedom and tragedy

We can see tragedy as a specific disruption in the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

The disruption takes place at the site of art’s "militarization," the point at which the medium and the mechanics of expression divide, not in indifference, but in strife. This conflict marks the emergence of a language that demonstrates its aesthetic and political authority only by undermining its very status as language.

In fact, Schelling's subsequent discussion of Greek tragedy has been viewed as the most important contribution of the Philosophical Letters, often to the point that the passage is read as a complete doctrine in its own right, in isolation from the rest of the work.
With the Greeks, explains Schelling, the hero is punished for succumbing to the power of fate. This fate is an inherently superior power, a power against which the hero fights, but in the face of which he could never hope to be successful .
For Schelling, it is this defeat and this defeat alone that constitutes the recognition of freedom. Only when the hero is lost before the fact, only when he enters into a conflict in which he is, as it were, always-already defeated, does he demonstrate that he is free.

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Trading security for freedom

Zygmunt Bauman gives short shrift to the charge of pessimism: we have enough court poets and enough triumphalism in liberal capitalism, he comments drily, so why should he point out its virtues?

In fact he is much more optimistic in person than in his published work. His current thinking can be summed up in one of his favourite phrases:

Do we take "responsibility for our responsibility"?

Do we acknowledge and accept our responsibilities, be they personal, political or global?

Indeed, much of his writing on globalisation focuses on his claim that it is primarily a moral issue. Bauman points out that Freud's thesis that human beings had traded freedom for security has been inverted; now we have traded security for freedom and with that freedom has come unprecedented responsibilities for the conduct of our own emotional lives and for our political participation.

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Free of prejudice

Zarathustra has spent ten years alone, meditating in a mountain cave until one day, his heart full of wisdom and love, he decided to leave the cave to teach the rest of humanity about the overman. According to Nietzsche, the overman is someone who is free of prejudice, who is no longer constrained by the morality of human society and who creates their own values and purpose. Zarathustra arrived in a town and announced to the people in the marketplace that the overman must be the meaning of the earth, that mankind is just a bridge between animals and the overman and so must be overcome.

The majority of the townspeople do not understand Zarathustra and are not interested in the overman and, at the end of his first day with the people, Zarathustra is saddened by his inability to move the herd of people towards his ideas. Zarathustra decides that he will not seek to try and convert the multitudes but will instead spread his wisdom by speaking only to those individuals who are interested in separating themselves from the herd.

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No shipping with ebooks

EBooks are books that are available in digital format. eBooks are ordered online, and delivered electronically to your computer.

You save money with no shipping, no taxes, and the lowest prices. EBooks have many features that traditional paper books do not - you have the freedom to control the look and feel of your eBook through fonts and colors, add annotations in your eBook with Microsoft Reader, add your own bookmarks with Adobe Reader, carry your eBooks anywhere with your on your PDA ... the list goes on and on.eBooks offer a new dimension to the written word, allowing books to be distributed and enjoyed so much more easily.

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Continents of knowledge

At the heart of the problem of hypertext lie the essential design issues of "filtering" and "navigation."

In its raw state, any system that "links continents of knowledge" would overload its user with choices. An undergraduate encountering Heart of Darkness might want to know something about the geography of the Congo, the history of Conrad's travels in Africa, and the iconography of light and dark in western literature -- but she probably would not want to visit these discursive places before exploring the world of Conrad's narrative.
Hypertext demands a mechanism that affords users flexible, filtered access to information, something that has been described as "broadcatch" (Brand 42-45). Once filtered for relevance, information has to be put before the reader in a way that preserves both the coherence of a present line of thinking and the freedom to explore alternative pathways.

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Double-edged bond

When it comes to the bonds of prisons and chains there is at times little difference between prisoner and guard, or between slave and master, since Ananke's bond appears to tie them both. This is why Hephaestus, while chaining Prometheus 1, complained before Cratos (Power):

Hephaestus: Oh handicraft that I hate so much!Cratos: Why hate it? Since in truth your craft is in no way to blame for these present troubles.
Hephaestus: Nevertheless, I wish it had fallen to another's lot!Cratos: Every job is troublesome except to be the commander of gods; no one is free except Zeus.
Hephaestus: I know it by this task; I cannot deny it.

[Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 45ff.]

Consequently, those who love freedom above all consistently avoid the tasks that threaten to put yet a chain round their neck, knowing that such tasks would teach them, regardless of their role—either master or slave—that they are not free.


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Necessity's kingdom

Some have suggested that Ananke's kingdom is primarily that of the physical world, since in it no real freedom can be perceived. What is necessary, specially the bare necessities of life, is under her dominion; and in that sphere, no one can choose to act according to his own view, but instead must follow Necessity's dictates.

This is why some have regarded the body as 'the prison of the soul', seeing that it is fettered to its own functions and needs, which inevitably lead to want and later to death.

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Foreknowledge

Boethius, one of the most important intermediaries between ancient philosophy and the Latin Middle Ages, puts forward an argument, based on God's foreknowledge of future events, which threatens to show that even mental acts of willing are determined and so unfree.

He proposes the argument in two formulations:

If God sees all things and can in no way be mistaken, then there necessarily happens what he by providence will have foreseen will be.

If things are capable of turning out differently from how they have been foreseen, then there will no longer be firm foreknowledge of the future, but rather uncertain opinion.

Since it is accepted that God is omniscient, and that this implies that he knows what every future event—including mental events such as volitions—will be, and each seem to rule out any sort of freedom of the will requisite for attributing moral responsibility: a consequence the disastrous implications of which Boethius the character vividly describes.

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