The Rhetoric of Digital Structure

This paper will examine the rhetoric of textual markup by relating it to mapping. I begin with the observation that markup is a kind of poesis, which is itself a species of mapping: to paraphrase Theseus at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is the embodiment of form, the giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. I will discuss so-called “mapping art,” a digital art form that uses data sources, or streams, or pools, or bases, and filters them to create works of art that are, in some way, connected to the source, if only functionally.
I will focus on pieces that claim informational status
and discuss the way rhetoric inevitably inflects the
transformation/mapping of data into information. These pieces, I will claim, shed a new light on the rhetorical nature of textual markup.
This by itself is nothing new: we’ve long understood
that all marking is interpretation. But I will extend this observation to discuss the relation of mapping and
marking to information and reading. I will examine
linguist Geoffrey Nunberg’s discussion of the term
“information,” comparing it with Shakespeare’s notion of poeis as (ex)formation, and consider the proposition that reading is information, and there can be no information without a map.
The argument turns at this point to consider the possibility that markup is not mapping so much as it is tracing: not the translation of data from one domain to another but a kind of delineation, a marking on the body of the text itself. Thus “informing the corpus” is replaced with “inscribing the corpse,” and instead of Shakespeare’s
depiction of imaginative creation, we have Kafka’s
fascist nightmare In the Penal Colony.
Between these two poles must be a middle way of
reading, and I will conclude by briefly considering
how the Lacanian notion of the Phallus can help us
understand the desire for markup, with a gesture
towards Harold Bloom’s anxieties of Influence and maps of misreading.