links

I’m thinking a lot about the inherent meaningfulness of links. Dingo’s theorization of the network model (which draws “linkages between national and international texts and policies” (502)) and Queen’s assertion that “The link acts as the mode of circulation by which…already mediated texts are further transformed as they enter different rhetorical fields” (484), while they are dealing with different kinds of links (Dingo’s comparative/theoretical and Queen’s digital), nevertheless seem to be very much to one another’s point: the very placement of texts in various forms of connection with one another – the creation of links – and their movement through time and digital, literary, or political space is a [transformative/productive/meaningful] activity. It’s like stepping away from the actual stuff of meaning (its content, I guess, if that can be imagined for a second,) and looking instead at its structure or context (“…cultural climate, witnessing, and location, for example” (Dingo 502),) in order to…what? Better understand the content?

That’s not really it. My premise is flawed, because the point is that content and context can’t be separated, and should, in fact, be interrogated simultaneously. Is this true? Where a text comes from, where it goes, what it looks like, and what’s next to it matters just as much (100% as much? 82% as much? 51% as much?) as what it’s saying. But again, it’s not a question of determining how much that surrounding stuff matters so much as it is about recognizing that what a text is saying is always inevitably mediated by where, how, and to whom it is saying it. I think.

Queen shows how the literal “movement” of a text in cyberspace can result in misunderstanding and misappropriation (which, I suppose, is one kind of meaning-making). The internet itself – as a mode that deals in links – bears investigation: “How does Internet technology not simply reflect, but also create representations that a/effect particular relations of power among feminist activists across borders?” (Queen 485). The internet is active: the ways in which texts circulate and overlap and link is itself a creative process.

For Dingo, it’s all somehow bound up in the notion of the transnational: “understanding the interarticulations between U.S. welfare and World Bank gender-mainstreaming policies requires studying transnational rhetorics as a multitude of dynamics” (502). This may be too simplistic an essentialization, but it seems that if Queen is telling us to pay attention to (and beware of) the ways in which the texts we find online have already been and continue to be mediated by the internet, then maybe Dingo is advocating that rhetorically active citizens be conscientious linkers, intentionally looking for interarticulations even between seemingly disparate texts: “As my interrogation of World Bank and U.S. welfare policy shows, transnational situations that may seem radically different and disconnected are actually bound by transnational networks of power, neoliberal logics, and similar rhetorical practices that function to define and contain women’s agency in the global market place” (Dingo 502). These interarticulations will presumably be endless in an age of globalization.

It’s not like English majors aren’t used to putting texts in conversation with one another (which is a kind of linking, I think). But Queen and Dingo seem to be using a much bigger scale, at minimum, and perhaps a different paradigm altogether. How does network theory and linking complicate our pre-existing inclination to put texts in conversation with one another?

Parenthetically, the temptation for me is to think of internet links as kind of organic—disembodied, certainly, and somehow “naturally” (do I mean accidentally?) occurring in this odd, vast, impersonal digital space…