Cones (draft essay extract)
This is a pre print extract from an essay I’ve just about finished, for a design journal:
This can be visualised, quite separately from the interface of any particular hypertext system, through the following illustrations. Figure One is a simple sketch showing the common experience of writing an essay (or designing ). The horizontal axis represents time, and the end can be thought of as a deadline — perhaps when the work needs to be finished or simply when a required number of pages or words have been achieved. It can also be thought of as an illustration of what it might mean for the work to be completed, when something has been sufficiently explicated so that what falls outside of the cone is not perceived, or otherwise made minor courtesy of our normative ‘good enough’ argument which has been realised through the materialisation of thought as writing. This suggests that what is outside of the cone becomes not relevant or otherwise accounted for and so the end is sufficient in relation to its beginning — whether this be a concluding paragraph or a realised design. In this illustration research and the practice of writing is an activity of collecting material and then filtering and concentrating it down, distilling it if you like, towards and into an argument. The point at the tip of the cone (labelled “essay”) is this end point and it is represented in this way because in the normative model of the good essay all that falls before this point ought to teleologically lead us to it. In other words to the left of the end of the essay we can imagine the contents of this research and writing cone to include those references and other material that are deemed relevant to this conclusion, and all of the arguments and clauses contained within its paragraphs that are to help move us, inevitably, towards this conclusion. Like any good narrative it will all make sense in light of this ending, and anything that falls outside of this, that is outside of the cone, needs to be excluded since it disrupts, interferes with and otherwise problematises the inevitable trajectory of the argument and the writing of the essay.
If we then treat the horizontal axis as time and the tip of the cone as representing a deadline then this situation is exacerbated as the closer you get to the deadline the more disruptive anything new becomes and so the more likely it is to be ignored or at best acknowledged via a footnote. This form is highly teleological, and encourages an emphasis on finding material that ‘matches’ and in disregarding that which disrupts or otherwise problematises this end. This is clearly the case in much essay writing, whether undergraduate or professional, which historically and institutionally has valued clarity, certainty and concise causality of argument over thinking per se.
Figure Two, on the other hand, is how I represent writing hypertext hypertextually, and in this case also how a material digital practice in the domain of writing (as thinking) can be illustrated. Clearly this illustration is schematic and simplifies matters (but in this case isn’t that it’s value?) by its reversal of Figure One. Here we begin from an idea or a problem which we take to be a complex knot that is to be investigated. This model is promiscuous and the sorts of objects that are produced are not teleological in the manner of a ‘good’ essay. They may have no conclusion, many, or one that while offering itself as a good enough place to finish will also contain links back into the writing so that other passages and ideas can be found or explored. In this model the intent is to include what might ordinarily be regarded as ‘outside’ so that those ideas or things that would disrupt and problematise an argument can be included. This is achieved through the use of the link as a performative and connective event so that when writing in this manner the link is no longer instrumental (in the sense in which they are most commonly treated as navigational or interface elements) but generative, associative, metaphorical and inclusive. In this model, which is of course as normative in its own way as the ‘good’ essay, it is possible to include that which disrupts what you are doing, that may have arrived at the eleventh hour, but which is valuable and indeed may even suggest new directions. In other words links are part of the very materiality of such a writing and become a part of a particular mode of thinking within the activity of writing where these links produce an architecture of argument that lies between the affordances of writing–as–thinking and a thinking–through–writing.
This is not intended to be an idealist argument, nor to suggest that such writing systems erase the problem of what can and cannot (or should and should not) be included, or of relevance. Arguments still need to be conducted, claims explored and justified, and all of the usual procedures of academic and intellectual conduct apply , however, it does indicates how the digital is able to produce and construct a particular practice that complements and is a mode of material thought, and to situate material thinking within quite specific terms to help sketch what in fact a materiality of thought as a realised practice might be.
While each of the figures suggest something single or unitary as the point of each cone, within Figure Two this point is not singular but can be more productively conceived of as having a crystalline structure.