Textuality with Roland Barthes

In S/Z , Roland Barthes describes an ideal textuality that precisely matches that which has come to be called computer hypertext -- text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web , and path: "In this ideal text," says Barthes,

the networks [réseaux ] are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable . . . ; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language" (emphasis in original; 5-6 ).

Terms whose meaning depends on the whole message

The term "shifter" was introduced into linguistics by linguist Otto Jespersen to refer to those elements in language whose general meaning cannot be defined without reference to the message.


For Jakobson, a shifter is a term whose meaning cannot be determined without referring to the message that is being communicated between a sender and a receiver

Personal pronouns are shifters: the word "I" designates both the speaker or sender who says "I" and the "I" contained in the message that is sent.

For example the pronouns "I" and "you", as well as words like "here" and "now", and the tenses, can only be understood by reference to the context in which they are uttered.

Roman Jakobson developed the concept in an article published in 1957.

Before this article, "the peculiarity of the personal pronoun and other shifters was often believed to consist in the lack of a single, constant, general meaning."

Jakobson argues that shifters do have a single general meaning; for example the personal pronoun "I" always means "the person uttering I".
This makes the shifter a "symbol."

Jakobson concludes that shifters combine both symbolic and indexical functions and "belong therefore to the class of indexical symbols."

In this way, Jakobson questions the possibility of a context-free grammar, since the enunciation is encoded in the statement itself.

Also, since grammar is implicated in parole, the langue / parole distinction is put into question.

Following Jakobson, Lacan uses the term "shifter" (in English) to show the problematic and undecidable nature of the "I" (Je).


However, while Jakobson defines the shifter as an indexical symbol, Lacan defines it as an indexical signifier.


This problematises the distinction between enunciation and statement.

On the one hand, as a signifier it is clearly part of the statement.
On the other hand, as an index it is clearly part of the enunciation.

This division of the "I" is not merely illustrative of the splitting of the subject; it is that split.
"Indeed, the I of the enunciation is not the same as the I of the statement, that is to say, the shifter which, in the statement, designates him."

See article


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Semantic web technology

Aggregator sites, such as Dogpile, which check several engines at the same time, could weaken Google's dominance.

They can be very helpful because search engines index their results in different ways. Semantic search engines, which focus on the meaning of your search rather than just the keyword, could be the next big thing in search, according to Ben Camm-Jones, news editor of Web User magazine. If there's going to be anything, it will be semantic web technology that overtakes Google - if it's a really compelling proposition, and if, somehow, we can shake people out of this belief that Google is the only way to find information on the web.

Microsoft have invested in this area by buying the semantic site, Powerset.

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Theory of meaning and circularity

Intention-based semantic theories are still popular and are actively pursued.

But they have not entirely succeeded in reducing meaning and psychology to actions and utterances. If meaning is defined as acting so as to induce belief and action in another, theories of meaning must be grounded in non-semantic terms to avoid circularity. And there is some doubt whether this can be done. Individuals act according to beliefs, and the communication of these beliefs eventually and necessarily calls on public beliefs and language.

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Underlying structure

Chomsky argued that our astonishing creativity with words, and the phenomenal ease with which children learn a language, meant that language users employed and intuitively recognized an underlying structure.

Not a structure, moreover, resting on phonemes or individual words as Ramon Jakobson would have it, but a sort of fundamental, proto-syntax. Any well-formed sentence, for example, contains a noun-phrase (NP) and verb-phrase (VB). From this we could create all possible sentences: The old tutor well described the difficulties. Or: The difficulties were well described by the old tutor. By transformation rules the deep structure can be converted to surface sentences with the correct syntax.

But what of: The old tutor elaborated the difficulties? The meaning is practically the same: we might chose either. But is this a different transformation or a different deep structure? And how do we make the choice or substitution? Critics say that Chomsky's grammar is simply formalizing what is still a mystery.

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What is a signification

A signification is indefinitely determinable (and the ‘indefinitely’ is obviously essential) without thereby being determined. It can always be marked out, provisionally assigned as an identitary element to an identitary relation with another identitary element […] and as such be ‘a something’ as the starting point for an open series of successive determinations. These determinations, however, in principle never exhaust it.

The ‘being of signification’, Castoriadis goes on, has been inadequately de-
scribed by «the distinctions between proper and figurative meaning, central
signification and semantic aura, denotation and connotation»
In fact there is no denotation opposed to connotations, there are only connotations or as
Castoriadis argues, «every expression is essentially tropic»
All language is essentially the ‘abuse of language’. Any formal rule of language, any structural
setting of language, is only applicable insofar as it allows for creation of significations in the sense of letting the creative organization of the magma prevail. Being in language means to accept that there is no final and in this sense determinate response to the issue of identity, that is, to ‘accepting to be in signification’s possibility of taking their bearings in and through what they say in order to move within it […] to use the code of designations in order to make other significations appear».

Sequential movement through time

It has been pointed out that the mode of language is fundamentally one of sequential movement through time.

It follows from this that each word will have a linear or 'horizontal' relationship with the words that precede and succeed it, and a good deal of its capacity to 'mean' various things derives from this pattern of positioning. In the sentence 'the boy kicked the girl', the meaning 'unrolls' as each word follows its predecessor and is not complete until the final word comes into place. This constitutes language's syntagmatic aspect, and it could also be thought of as its 'diachronic' aspect because of its commitment to the passage of time.

But each word will also have relationships with other words in the language that do not occur at this point in time, but are capable of doing so. The word, that is, has 'formulaic' assocations with those other words from among which it has, so to speak, been chosen. And these other words, 'part of the inner storehouse that makes up the language of each speaker' (p. 123) - they might be synonyms, antonyms, words of similar sound or of the same grammatical function - help, by not being chosen, to define the meaning of the word which has. (Hawkes, pp. 26-7.)

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Context and connections

An important implication, as Metz notes, is that if it is the development or articulation of autonomous segments that are fundamental to narration in cinema, then the meaning that accrues to these segments is highly contextual and not inherent within the connections themselves.

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Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

Choice of words

Any element of a film is already linguistically meaningful.

They are more like statements (the cliche that "a picture is worth a thousand words" comes to mind), and the paradigmatic process - choosing which from the paradigmatic series to place in the syntagmatic chain - is considerably diluted in film as the paradigmatic field is made virtually trivial, and the syntagmatic ordering is similarly weakened. In other words, in a sentence the choice of words is constrained to some extent by what choices are available within a vocabulary, and then by the grammar which constrains what can appear where.
When composing a film image there is no substantive paradigmatic series that the sequence most be chosen from within, and then once a shot is composed, its location within a syntagmatic series (a sequence) is similarly much more open than that offered by a linguistic grammar.

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Link types

Generally speaking, poetic and literary discourses are understood to foreground the formal properties of language at the expense of clarity of meaning.

This is, from a literary point of view, a peculiar way of characterising what is celebrated as an art, but broadly speaking literary texts are less concerned with transparency (of meaning, sense, even in some cases, of presentation) than with other effects.

However, this division between the 'noisy' and the 'clear' is generally not strongly recognised in poststructural theory (indeed if anything we could characterise poststructuralism as the recognition of how all information systems are in fact noisy!), and it is probably not useful in any attempt to generate typologies of link types.

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Hypertext and cinema

Semiotician Christian Metz developed a syntagmatic schema of the varieties of cinematic sequence.

He described the extent to which these offer a methodology to reconsider our notions of link rhetoric and link typology. With Metz' description, we can see that much of the appropriation of cinema within hypertext is founded on a common misconception of there being an a priori formal cinematic grammar. Cinema relies upon the contextual and pragmatic basis of connection for the production of meaning, and has clear applicability to a posteriori attempts to determine rhetorical structure in hypertext.

The assumption of an isomorphic relation between hypertext and cinema is fundamental to this thesis.

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Super-compossibility of meaning

In 'Two words for Joyce', Derrida suggests that Joyce's text is already more powerful in its hypertextual capacities (he doesn't use the term, but that's what it's about) than any super-computer.

I guess he means that there's what he elsewhere calls a 'super-compossibility of meaning'. In that sense, a (real) hypertext is a sort of image of textuality rather than a realisation of it.
What might be more interesting in relation to Derrida's work would be other features of electronic communication: its instantaneity, for example, but also the question of publicity, encryption, viruses and so on. Something about e-mail, for example, makes me write more freely and incautiously than I would in other circumstances (something very noticeable in discussion groups like the Derrida list -- it came as a shock to me to learn that everything posted to the list is printed out and archived at UC Irvine): obviously this is double edged. And maybe you could tell me some things in this context about what it means to publish an electronic journal (presumably more than that it isn't printed on paper).

There's a double logic here we might want to explore, whereby the (in principle democratic) increase in 'communicability' made possible by electronic communication leads to a commensurate increase in 'contaminability' of all sorts, so that advances in communication seem not to lead in any straightforward way to transparency or clarity, still less to equality, but quite possibly to the opposite.

Perhaps something about information technology made it possible for Derrida to formulate things about communication and contamination that turn out to have been around since Plato, and that in a sense philosophy exists to control. These are topics it would be interesting to explore (from G.Bennington).

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I talk as I write

Writing is not secondary to speech.

The "a" which Derrida puts into the term can only be read: it sound just the same as the "e" would in this word in French. He claims that it is merely a comforting illusion to think that speech and writing are separate, and that writing is a fallen version of speech. He will proceed to argue that speech as the prototype and more perfect version of writing tries to deny the radical insight of deSaussure.

So différance is not: it has neither existence or essence.

It comes from both "defer," to put off, which is what happens to meaning in language in a relational system where signs themselves do not have essential meanings, and from "differ," to be unlike, not identical. The "ance" gerund form of the word puts it somewhere between passive and active, like "resonance" or "dissonance".

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Human cognition

Despite their important differences, Connectionist and Modularity models of human cognition suggest that while cognition is dispersed and, in important ways, disconnected, it is not fragmentary in the Postmodern sense of the word.

The latest research suggests that the drive towards meaning making and subject formation exists concomitantly as an hardwired psychological imperative with a drive towards distributed association and subject fragmentation. Man is a meaning making machine; and the experience of meaning making is bound inextricably to the experience of a coherent subject, the beholder of the meaning.

The mechanisms of meaning storage, retrieval, and production are, however, fragmented and distributed.

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Self positing consciousness

For Husserl consciousness is absolutely self-positing (so much so that the annihilation of the world leaves it untouched) and as such is absolutely constitutive of the meaning of transcendent reality.

For Heidegger human being in its facticity does not posit itself over against the world and then constitute it presuppositionlessly from some supreme vantage point. Rather, we find ourselves already thrown-open (posited into possibilities), which possibilities in turn constitute the meaningfulness or being-dimension of the things we meet in the world.

As already thrown-open (geworfen), we are already opened up (vereignet) by possibility, and we attain authentic selfhood, not self-position, by personally reappropriating our openness.

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Timing or mapping ?

Where is "time" today in hypertextuality?

Trying to map an entire hypertext in a single view is usually unproductive: the result, for any large hypertext, tends to be a muddle in which hundreds of items are entangled in thousands of links. Automatic layout algorithms can help make good hypertext maps a little bit neater, but no satisfactory approach has been proposed for creating good hypertext maps in the first place. For a map to be informative, it must draw on knowledge of the meaning and intent of the hypertext. Representing the surface structure is not enough.We must introduce the meaning of "time" in our algorithms !

So, see the metabolean hypertext - on hypertextual.net...

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Guarantee of meaning

No meaning is given to us as a gift, any more than there is any guarantor or guarantee of meaning; it signifies that there is no other meaning than the one we create in and through history.And this amounts to saying that democracy, like philosophy, necessarily sets aside the sacred. In still other terms, democracy requires that human beings accept in their actual behavior what until now they almost never have truly wanted to accept (and what, in our utmost depths, we practically never accept), namely, that we are mortal.It is only starting from this unsurpassable--and almost impossible--conviction of the mortality of each one of us and of all that we do, that people can live as autonomous beings, see in others autonomous beings, and render possible an autonomous society.

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Bottom-up or top-down hypertextual approach

The fundamental problem that semantic web needs to solve is explaining the meaning of things to computers.

There are several approaches to this, all of which in principle can work.

There are companies and technologies that are doing it bottom up - by embedding semantical annotations (meta-data) right into the data. The opposite camp is exploring the top-down approach, which relies on analyzing existing information.

The ultimate top-down solution would be a fully blown natural language processor, which is able to understand text like people do.

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Meaningful statements

The logical grounds of interpretation have gone entirely—especially when we deal with the literary text, which is “above the norm” in rhetorical meaning.

Both logic and grammar are questionable when we read a literary text. Grammar assumes a simple logical one-to-one relationship between language unit (word, sentence, etc.) and meaning. Rhetoric contests that assumption. Logic postulates the possibility of universal truth (a concept that independently of its objects remains unchangeable, eternal and unaffected by rhetoric). We know from de Saussure that such a concept has no place in a system like the language system, which provides meaning only through the values that the differences between signifiers allow.

In other words, when we make meaningful statements we do so by acting on the combined resources of difference and rhetorical substitution. This gives us considerable freedom but at a cost—we can no longer hope to control or to limit the structures of linguistic meaning and the multiple possibilities of confusion that always threaten.

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Sign and referent

Semiology establishes some basic tenets: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, the system of differences that gives the sign its value, and the conventional codes that operate as prompts for signification, sometimes making it seem rather culture bound.

What is it that frees language from cultural specificity? The arbitrariness of the sign and its repeatability: ah, bold and italics, must be important.

Remember this: a sign does not simply refer to its referent (on the model of re-presentation). A sign is coded according to its system and that’s how it comes to have its particular meanings.

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