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\begin{document}

\title{``Text'' and ``Network'', Reconsidered}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{29/6/2007}

\maketitle

The close affiliation of networks and texts does not begin with
telegraphy or the Internet, but lies in the very notion of text, since
the Latin word ``textus'' literally means ``the web''. And just like
perceptions of the web tend be paranoid, as we know from Hollywood, 
``text'' has triggered exuberant imagination. In Jorge Luis Borges'
short story ``The Garden of the Forking Path'', written in 1941 and
playing in the First World War, a Chinese German spy randomly, as it
seems, murders a British sinologist named Stephen Albert, but with the
hidden intention of transmitting the location of a British artillery
park, a city called Albert, to the German secret service which would
read British newspapers and recognize the name of the murderer. The
murder, in other words, solely serves the inscription of the letters, as
if it were a dark pun on Saussure's theory of the arbitrariness of the
linguistic sign. 

which can be read as reflections of texts as networks of
writing and meanings; this is also how they have been interpreted by
many literary theorists including Foucault. But ultimately, the
connection is not new since the Latin word "textus" literally means "the
web". 


The problem with much literary and cultural theory is that it uses
a very vague and all-encompassing notion of text, ever since
structuralist semiology, starting with Roland Barthes, began to read all
kinds of cultural phenomena - including cars, beefsteaks and striptease
dances - as texts. It is however not helpful when the notion of "text"
becomes as elusive as that of, for example, "media". The Internet, and
computer technology, has helped to gain clearer notion of what a text is
- namely a finite amount of alphabetic, respectively discrete symbols,
nothing more and nothing less, not necessarily bound to a certain
materiality like paper or a book. Everyone who has understood the
concept of a text file has also understood this. It also means that the
notion of text per se is not bound to meaningful writing - something
literary theory has struggled to grasp. (Although a text like Man Ray's
poem that only consists of stricken-over words nicely illustrates it.) 
Even structuralism didn't have a clear understanding of "form" or
"structure", respectively "syntax" and "semantics" because it also
classified semantic figures of speech, such as metaphor, under "form"
and "structure". Since computers and Shannon's information theory, we
know that syntax is computable while semantics is not unless one models it
as syntax. Nelson Goodman, an analytic philosopher, was the first to
realize this when he used the notion of analog and digital information
in his book "The Languages of Art", and formally defined writing as
disjunct and discrete. From there one could follow that if writing is
data, a text simply is a file. Since a striptease or a beefsteak is not
a file made up of disjunct and discrete information elements, neither of
them is a text. 

Borges preempted this insight in his story "The Library of Babel"
although it didn't refer to structuralist linguistics, but to the ars
combinatoria of Lull and Leibniz. Through its data shape, text becomes a
system of differences, just like one would apply a "diff" operation in
Unix between two files. It means that a text is less a web in itself
than in relation to other texts that exist; again, a concept that is
trivial for anyone who has used a computer file system, a database or
the World Wide Web.  In "The Garden of the Forking Path", this idea is
applied to narrative and the idea of a parallel universe in a novel of
endlessly forking, fractal-like narratives. This story has been a major
influence first on poststructuralism - with Foucault taking its
fictitious account of a recursion in the 1001 Nights for face value -
and later hypertext theory and "hyperfiction" - and was adopted as a
hypertext in the early 1990s by Stuart Moulthrop. But what is overlooked
in such adaptations is that Borges renders the concept ironically, since
he writes Anglo-American style short stories. Although that what they
describe is non-linear, decentered, open etc., they are perfectly
linear, centered and closed in themselves. Of course text, whether or
not it contains cross-references respectively "links" (which have been
given way too much critical attention in the 1990s), is always both
linear and finite and exists, as Kristeva wrote in 1967, in a web - or
network - of relations, just as any file does. 

If texts are finite amounts of linear data that nevertheless exist in
relation to other such finite amounts of linear data, what does this say
about networks? Borges' fiction is insightful because it embodies the
duality of network logic and, in their closure, network topology. It is
the paradox of networks that their topologies are not networks, in other
words: that any network, whether network in mathematic graph theory or a
communication network, can always be mapped and reduced to a linear
structure. In yet other words, they might look different on the level of
object language, but boil down to the same logic on the level of grammar
and metalanguage, just like a city remains a city whether or not its
ground plan is a square grid or a rhizome.

Just as Borges reflects and 1960s poststructuralist text theory - with
the single exception of Jacques Derrida - and 1990s hypertext theory
didn't, this makes networks much less disruptive and remarkable than
they seem to be. But there seems a more important lesson to be learned
from text theory, with its initial conceptual trouble of understanding
text syntactically, its later excesses to apply text to anything and its
newly found pragmatism in an age where people no longer have
difficulties to picture texts as data. The problematic issue is how
a terminological model gets mapped onto other phenomena, and out of hand
in this process. What might be described as the linguistic fallacy of
structural semiology has its equivalent in cybernetic fallacies of media
studies. The earliest modern theory of networks can be found in Ludwig
von Bertalanffy's general systems theory of the late 1940s, as part of
von Bertalanffy's attempt to bridge hard sciences, social sciences and
humanities, technology and art through a common set of descriptive
notions such as system, network, metabolism, openness and closure.

While cybernetics was closely related to general systems theory, it
differed in its more exclusive focus on human-machine interaction. With
this paradigm, and inspired by behaviorism, it factually extended and
superimposed concepts of engineering such as feedback to organisms and
culture. It is, last not least, out of this discomfort that arts and
humanities adopted on the notion of media rather than cybernetics, since
McLuhan had anthropologically conceived of technology as human
extensions rather than as a models of human behavior and culture. But
with the assumption that the medium is the message, i.e. the technology
bears its own agenda, media theory could be seen as even less critical
than cybernetics which at least conceived of mutuality in its model of
the feedback loop. If media theory since the 1990s could be
sloppily called "postmodern", then because it nominally did away with
the cybernetic a priori, embracing supposedly open models of
communication and interaction. But not only can this openness be
questions if one looks, with inspiration from Borges, at network
structures. The problem is that, just like 1960s poststructuralist text
theory, it conflates phenomena that a critical theory should
differentiate: telecommunication networks from social networking, and -
by implication - machine feedback from human interaction. No question
that these areas do overlap and that the Internet escalates this
development. But a critical media theory that tries to dissect rather
than feed the hype should not let its own terminology buy into it. The
identification of "networks" as a mathematical and telecommunication
engineering model with cultural, anthropological networking follows the
same miserably failed 1940s-1960s cybernetic ideology that claims the
identity of computation and cognition, of syntax and semantics, of
storage and memory, of feedback and communication, of information and
knowledge, and so on. 

Given that these equations have been made productive for the imagination
of Science Fiction novels, David Cronenberg movies, net.art and
codeworks for example, why are they problematic for critical theory? The
problem is indeed that of the two scientific culture that, despite all
claims to the contrary, remain to separate ways of thinking.  What a
humanities scholar and cultural critic might consider an inspiring
metaphor when he or she reasons about, let's say, the "signal-noise
ratio" of a mailing list, is not metaphorical at all in cybernetics and
information science, and neither for a software developer using a
Markov/Shannon model to write a spam filter, with all problematic
implications this has. In other words, the role of media studies and
humanities should be to take apart - i.e. analyze and criticize - those
mappings rather than indulge in them, no matter whether they're more
questionably called "artificial life" or go under such cozier terms as
In both cases, the cybernetic mapping is not the social territory,
although - of course - it is blatantly political.  So I think that we
need a new network theory indeed: one that (deconstructively) beat those
mappings on its own terms, by not gullibly observing and comparing
different phenomena marketed as "networks", but by actually looking at
the conceptual networks in between those "networks", the politics of the
mappings.

for a critical pragmatics: 
network is not good or bad per se, just as an image or a text is not
good or bad - tendency of academic disciplines to glorify their subject.

neuronal network
organized complexity = network in systems theory

rhizome = vitalist


Borges: inscription is linear, word: ALBERT, heroic cutting through the
maze (J. Barth)

term "communication network" obscures the difference between
technical network design and social structures

Relation between technical networks and social networks: not mapping,
not metaphorical, but networks in themselves

\end{document}
