Risking intelligibility

In the context of this essay grammar is understood to be that system of rules, what semiotics describes as langue, that one necessarily ascribes to in a language community.

Without this grammar we are condemned to a series of idiolects. To not use grammar (whether a formal grammar or a colloquial grammar) is to risk intelligibility and comprehension in quite fundamental ways, and it is this that makes a grammar a formal system. Hypertext (and classical cinema) may have commonly accepted styles but these are not grammars in the sense of langue. They do not constitute the possibility of utterance in advance, as is the case in our usual experience of language.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links

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How knowledge is produced

The general assumptions of post-structuralism derive from critique of structuralist premises.

Specifically, post-structuralism holds that the study of underlying structures is itself culturally conditioned and therefore subject to myriad biases and misinterpretations. To understand an object (e.g. one of the many meanings of a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself, and the systems of knowledge which were coordinated to produce the object.

In this way, post-structuralism positions itself as a study of how knowledge is produced.

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Organisation and structure

We can talk about the organisation of Hypertext as opposed to its structure.

Actually, Humberto M. Maturana and Francisco Varela have tried to define the difference between organisation and structure. The organisation of a system consists in the necessary relations which define the system. The structure of a system consists in the actual relations between the components which integrate the systems as such.Therefore the organisation of a system like the Internet can remain invariant while it maintains its identity without disintegration.

To Varela, structures can vary provided they satify the organizational constraints of the system.

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