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The F ield of Relations: User Culture and Intratextual Participation

Abstract

In this paper, I attempt to develop a theoretical framework for the intratextual: forms in which collective participation under a presiding structure produces meaningful relations on both a “micro” and a “macro” level, between the smallest units encompassed by the form and between the form itself and its constituent units. I address several applications, some contemporary and others from the past, and propose that participation in such forms redefines an individual’s sense of subjectivity and personal agency. The analysis focuses on a broad range of intratextual media, including social networking technologies, terrorism, and educational formats. The analysis is in no way comprehensive—I only hope it serves as an inclusive framework from which to further develop and critique intratextual forms. K ey Words/Phrases: positive technology, intratextuality, social networking technologies, Twitter, terrorism.

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Academic writing is littered with citations for a specific reason, and it is not because a

good idea requires precedent to be a good idea. Those within academia commonly profess the

value in "supporting one's ideas," but the support afforded by citation is often misinterpreted to

mean 'justification'. 'Cooperation' is a more constructive interpretation. Citation is not support in

the sense that Roman Catholic doctrine supports a Catholic's pro-life stance; it is support in the

sense that the earth, a farmer, a grocer, a cook and a hungry person support one another—it

suggests a harmony achieved by discrete actors and processes. This is the essence of the

intratextual, forms through which a cohesive whole develops through the action of its constituent

parts. In the intratextual, the whole gains meaning from its parts and grants meaning to them—it

is important to note, however, that common form does not imply common action, simply a

common environment for action. The intratextual form is true collective expression,

characterized by both unity and diversity, and persistently generating both through its continued

use. The culture of citation in academia is one fostered by intratextuality and stands as one of its

many diverse examples, and the values and dynamics enacted through citation reveal technical

nuances and cultural factors of the intratextual form.

Citation as common practice in academia stems from that community's sensitivity to how

knowledge circulates and develops—through community, and more specifically, through the

relations communal existence enables. "[T]he strong emotions which inform [. . .] academic

work cannot be isolated from the relationships of students to each other, to their teachers, and to

their communities" (Grumet 51). Education is about context, in practice and utility—one

experiences and processes aspects of one's environment in order to glean an understanding that

permits one to better inhabit that environment. Although it is commonly circulated in object

form, in books and the like, knowledge is not an object; it cannot be located, deposited and

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activated. Knowledge lies in the space between subjects—it is fleeting and always developing

due to the persistence of relations which engage the student (or human being). The structures of

academia indicate a subscription to the belief that "culture moves and grows [. . .] as one

generation reads the work of another and answers it with new work that represents their lived

understandings" (Grumet 67). Every human experience is distinct and carries with it a unique

database of knowledge. Education happens when this knowledge is shared because sharing this

knowledge also modifies the knowledge of the recipient. Citation represents a formal

acknowledgement of the essence of learning in its integration of the process of learning into the

product.

Citation is a surrender of complete authorship; it operates on the principles that just

because one has an idea it does not mean it's theirs, and that ideas must co-exist in order to

develop. The latter principle grants the human subject a peculiar place in the scheme of things—

the idea-network of academia (its overarching intratextual form) provides an open, conducive

forum for expression and development, but at the expense of the subject's sense of total

independence. In this facet, the intratextual form resembles Spinoza's concept of "universal

substance," which claims that in "Nature there exists nothing contingent, but all things have been

determined by the necessity of the divine nature to exist and operate in a certain way" (Spinoza

99). Every bit of a subject's expression, due to its constant interaction with other bits of

expression, loses its personal meaning and is integrated into the 'total meaning' of culture.

However, contrary to conventional expectation, this does not muffle expression but amplifies it,

by formally relating a bit of expression to a vast network of other bits of expression—it is a

remarkably efficient mode through which to circulate and develop knowledge. Academia's

historical claim to be the horse to the carriage of culture stems from its adoption of an

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intratextual approach. But academia, institutionally at least, might have to surrender or share its

hallowed position. Popular culture, especially since the onset of the new millennium, is more and

more adoptive of intratextual media, and as such, has become more meaningful and more

completely engaging. I will attempt to outline some of its key features and implications, as well

as explore the cultural mechanics of some of its more prevalent manifestations.

TOWARD A THEORY OF THE INTRATEXTUAL

Some twentieth century theoretical approaches touch on the intratextual, but none fully

accommodate its unique dual emphasis on formal concerns and social concerns. Both features

have been given careful attention, but usually separately—this mutual exclusivity pigeonholes

formalism as a purely aesthetic approach, with no social utility, and intertextuality as privileging

the social function of art while neglecting its artfulness. The theorists who comprise New

Criticism stand partially responsible for the crystallization of privileged 'anti-social form' and

those working in the field of Semiotics for the dismissal of intrinsic formal design as a viable

location of textual meaning. Formulation of meaning in an intratextual form is dependent on the

interconnectedness of structure and relations. New Criticism's formalism nearly realizes the

structural aspect of the intratextual, and the Semioticians' notion of 'intertextuality' nearly

realizes the relational aspect of the intratextual, but neither encompasses both. My theoretical

framework for the intratextual selectively borrows from, critiques and re-synthesizes the ideas of

each school into an adequate set of guidelines for intratextual analysis. Singular structure and an

open, broad field of relations would incur a sense of cognitive dissonance in many critics and

aesthetes, but the intratextual succeeds in intertwining the two—any substantive analysis of its

diverse incarnations requires careful attention be paid to both.

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Structure // New Criticism

New Criticism accommodates the intratextual in its assertion that unified and harmonious

form (Brooks 1355) possesses intrinsic meaning and shapes the impression of the text's

consumer. Cleanth Brooks breaks down form to reveal how it functions this way, explaining that

form

is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of

unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing

connotations, attitudes and meanings [. . . ]. [T]he principle is not one which

involves the arrangement of the various elements into homogenous groupings,

pairing like with like. It unites the like with the unlike. It does not unite them,

however, by the simple process of allowing one connotation to cancel out another

nor does it reduce the contradictory attitudes to harmony by a process of

subtraction. The unity is not a unity of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and

simplification appropriate to an algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a

negative; it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony. (Brooks 1355)

This position anticipates notions of structure in interactive art by positing that form issues

carefully crafted patterns in a text which guide rather than fix textual meaning. These patterns

allow for divergent interpretations of the text which are never right nor wrong but merely

represent, much like one's experience of any environment (city, building, forest, tree, etc.), a

certain individual's interpretative and creative activity within a space possessing unique

topography and formal character.

Despite prizing some degree of interaction, New Criticism's notion of form does exclude a

social function: William K.Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, in a two part polemic entitled,

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respectively, "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy," take aim at externally

oriented critical approaches, pronouncing that "though cultures have changed and will change,

[media] remain and explain; and there is no legitimate reason why criticism, losing sight of its

durable and peculiar objects, [media] themselves, should become a dependent of social history or

of anthropology" (Wimsatt 1403). Nevertheless, especially within the general parameters of

Brooks' assessment of structure, it would not represent a lapse in theoretical logic to introduce a

social function to a self-contained, meaningful form. The key to keeping form intact and

permitting it a social function is not that one pays attention to external social relationships

signaled by the text, but that one pays attention to the social relationships a text could potentially

generate within its unique form. To employ an example relevant to my readership (and to

illustrate that applicability does extend beyond 'new media'), one could locate these formally-

mediated relationships in any traditional seminar. Structure is there. And, unlike its ugly twin, the

lecture, a seminar permits collective participation. Diversity and focus thrive in equal measure

because a focus, or topic, shapes open dialogue. Structure is what distinguishes a seminar from

common conversation—it creates a common expression space which doubles as a common

meaning space. Nothing infringes upon that space without integrating into it; one cannot interject

in a seminar without participating in it. Interactive forms are consuming because they mirror

sublime natural forms. Just consider our world—the only way to be external to it is to stop being.

Relations // Semiotics

Semiotics, and its ideas of intertextuality, recognize a somewhat interactive process of

interpretation (as opposed to an inert product for interpretation), and accordingly, touch on that

aspect of the intratextual, but its theoretical canon is inadequate for evaluation of the particular

kind of knowledge and information generated by the intratextual process. The notion of

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intertextuality implies a process by structuring the act of 'text', both in production and

consumption. Julia Kristeva provides a valuable scientific representation of the process of

meaning-making: she proposes that the "three dimensions or coordinates of dialogue are

[addressor], addressee and exterior texts. The word's status is thus defined horizontally (the word

in the text belongs to both [addressor] and addressee) as well as vertically (the word in the text is

oriented towards an anterior or synchronic literary corpus)" (Kristeva 36-37). As Kristeva's

graphical model implies, for the Semioticians, meaning is not static, and certainly not intrinsic a

la New Criticism—textual meaning is modified as textual production continues, and, if human

history to the present is any indication, textual production will invariably continue. In this sense,

intertextuality captures the temporal dynamism of intratextuality: as long as production and

consumption of creative material persists, meaning is in motion—“the Text is experienced only in

an activity of production"(Barthes 1471).

As one might assume, this persistent shifting of meaning redefines the role of consumer—

their passivity is diminished, not by their own decision to consume in a particular way but by

their very participation in the reading/viewing/listening/etc. process. In Kristeva's terms, by

sharing the "word" in question with the addressor, the "addressee's" experience of the text

functions similarly to that of the addressor—neither is true, neither is false, and neither is

immune from peripheral scrutiny. But both contribute to textual meaning.

As with intratextuality, intertextuality debunks the illusion of truth in subjective

impressions—the textual environment (containing all units of meaning-making) paradoxically

negates personal meaning in order to incorporate it as something different. Roland Barthes

describes the process as such: "[t]he Text [. . .] practices the infinite deferment of the signified,

[it] is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived of as 'the

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first stage of meaning', its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred

action" (Barthes 1472). Consequently, in both fields, no division exists between producer and

consumer, and, furthermore, there is no such thing as the independent producer; there is only

producer and environment, a distinction that blurs immediately following the act of production.

The physical quality of Kristeva's graph illuminates this—the horizontal axis is the 'producer

axis' (with distinctions between addressor and "addressee" drawn only to accent continuity

between two actors traditionally seen as distinct) and the vertical axis is the 'environment axis'.

The point at which the axes intersect represents textual meaning; this point is the foundation of

any X-Y graph's communicatory potential—its linear extensions in either direction serve only to

provide details and context. The melding of discrete (but not independent) producers and

environment is essential to the tenets of intratextuality—the Semioticians nearly extend

‘intertextuality’ far enough.

Critique-Revision

Where intertextuality falls short is its scope, which due to its breadth, tends to dismiss

formal unity—structure—as a tool for creating and understanding. As Barthes indicates in his

aforementioned discussion on the "field" of text, the scope of intertextuality is "dilatory":

interactions within a text are not generally evaluated in relation to a discrete form which

structures them but instead to broad, external forms like other works, language, and cultural

history. This approach seems all-encompassing but it obscures the critical evaluation of similar

relationships within a single text, or so as not to confuse Barthes' vocabulary, a single work.

Because 'text' holds certain connotations that tend to limit its applicability to expansive

relationships of forms external to one another, a vocabulary distinct from that of intertextuality is

necessary to discuss some particularities of intratextuality; an effort to apply the terminology of

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intertextuality to intratextuality would be warranted, but the specific focus of intratextuality

might be muddled by associations with historical discussions of intertextuality, which tend to

veer away from a formal focus. The vocabulary must contain terms to describe not only a

discrete aesthetic form, but the discrete (not independent) parts which grant meaning to and

derive meaning from that form. For this analysis, I adopt the terminology outlined by Ian Bogost

in his book, Unit Operations; Bogost explains that "[u]nit operations are modes of meaning-

making that privilege discrete, disconnected actions over deterministic, progressive systems"

(Bogost 3) and that 'unit' is the appropriate term to describe the variable actors "because it does

not bear the burden of association with a specific field" (7). Apart from providing this simple,

multidimensional vocabulary, Bogost's analysis compensates for some of New Criticism and

Semiotics' deficiencies in developing an adequate theoretical heritage for the intratextual by

reconciling formal unity—the structural component of the intratextual—and pluralistic meaning-

making—the dynamic component of the intratextual. The 'units' Bogost describes act in relation

to one another in a shared meaning space under a common operation. But this is all very vague.

It begs the question: what qualifies 'unit' and 'operation' as such?

According to Bogost:

- A 'unit' is a material element, a thing. It can be constitutive or contingent, like a

building block that makes up a system, or it can be autonomous, like a system itself.

Often, systems become units in other systems. (Bogost 5)

- An operation is a basic process that takes one or more inputs and performs a

transformation on it. An operation is the means by which something executes some

purposeful action. (Bogost 7)

It is supposed to be vague.

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'Unit' is an extraordinarily broad term—it could describe a letter, a syllable, a word, a

sentence, a chapter, a novel, a series of novels, every novel ever written, Barthes' universal 'text',

or something altogether unrelated to the written word. I choose 'unit' as my base term not to

plunge my analysis into this amorphous mass of potential applications, but simply to incorporate

vocabulary that is sufficiently neutral to refer to things of all shapes and sizes and traverse easily

across one medium of intratextual expression to another.

Bogost's definition of an 'operation' is mostly applicable to the dynamics of intratextual

forms, excepting his inclusion of "one or more inputs"—an intratextual form must take more

than one input to be qualified as such. The part of his ‘operation’ definition most crucial to my

analysis is the transformative aspect—overarching form is the operative component of the

intratextual in its shaping of constituent units (inputs) and assignment of "purposeful action"

beyond the activity of one constituent unit itself. In the intratextual, form becomes environment

because the units it contains are acting within it and on it—within it in the sense that those units'

action is granted a larger-than-itself meaning by overarching form, and on it in the sense that the

units' action contributes to that meaning. It is the aesthetic manifestation of Spinoza's 'universal

substance'—altering everything within and alterable only from within. No external substance

dictates the meaning of an intratextual form; its development is purely internal. This is why the

intratextual is so dynamic—it consciously adopts as an aesthetic principle Marshall McLuhan's

assertion that "[a]ny understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a

knowledge of the way media work as environments" (26). It is participatory. It is “cool media” 

(McLuhan 22) at its coolest.

APPLICATION

I choose 'information' and 'politics' as two fields worthy of intratextual consideration not

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because the intratextual is limited to their boundaries, but because their respective characteristics

serve both to accent 'structure' and 'relations' apart from one another and mesh the two.

Information, in its purest sense, is the structure of culture. It is knowledge, it is communication,

it represents the cumulative product of interactions among people, it constitutes each individual's

palate for participation. It can be conceived of in terms of 'object'. Politics in its purest sense

describes relations in culture—one individual's participation rubbing against another's. It is

action on culture, it is active communication, it works within existing information structures, it

presents constant change. It can be conceived of in terms of 'subject'.

The intratextual unifies 'object' and 'subject'. As a result, information and politics bleed

into one another. To consider 'information' and 'politics', 'object' and 'subject' in a traditional

manner, as distinct fields, then intratextually, as elements common to a 'universal substance', is to

map a significant historical and cultural progression from fragmentation and specialization to a

more holistic mentality.

Information

Perhaps the most culturally ubiquitous and immediately recognizable occurrence of the

intratextual form is the numerous information interfaces that have emerged in the past decade—

most notably in the realm of internet-based 'social networking' technologies. These technologies

occupy their current stature in culture because they offer not only new forums for the exchange

of information, but also new ways for the user to process and present information. These

technologies enable a great deal of freedom and interactivity in the relationships people have

both to the information they consume and the people with whom they are exchanging it. The real

historical significance of these technologies will lie in the latter—programs like Wikipedia and

Twitter debunk the traditional claim that digital technology inhibits authentic human interaction.

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The widespread popularity of web-based social networking indicates that people desire to be

conscious that the information they consume is from people (even if they are represented via

avatar) instead of objects. Technology is not generally seen as social because it implies the

presence of a non-human intermediary—the internet turns this preconception on its head. It

provides all the extra-human utility of a machine while still maintaining the ever-changing,

decentralized character of informal conversation. It revives the oral tradition's treatment of

information while offering opportunities for archival unheard of fifty years ago. As was the case

in the oral tradition and is once again, the insistence on accreditation in the evaluation of

information is falling to the wayside. A project like Wikipedia challenges a culture to consider

whether decentralized, community-generated information is any less 'truthful' than information

distributed by traditionally recognized arbiters of truth like Encyclopedia Brittanica; that value

judgment inevitably leads to the consideration of whether information can be objectively true. Is

our archived knowledge, our cultural memory, perhaps as fallible as human memory? After all,

although one could not necessarily tell from just looking at a print encyclopedia (because its

material substance does not signal a human creator), those cultural archives were produced and

organized by human minds.

Wikipedia and Twitter are different. From a simple glance at the interface, one is

connected to the people who produced the information because the information (especially in the

case of Twitter) is presented not as an object but as a personal statement, juxtaposed with other

personal statements containing more information. This is what qualifies such programs as

intratextual—the presiding form is an open, interactive one which enables and is defined by the

creative production of its users. The visual interface of Twitter is the most direct expression of

intratextuality of which I can think: it foregrounds the overarching form (by way of the

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structured feed and text input box), the participant (evident by username in the feed), the

participant's production within the form (the post, or 'tweet' adjacent to the username), and the

relations between one participant and other participants (highlighted in the juxtaposition of

'tweets' in the feed). These programs make the exchange of information a dialogue rather than a

lecture, which, due to the fact ears and mouths predate books and newspapers, is probably a

more authentic mode of communication, and certainly a more social one. In the cases of

Wikipedia, Twitter and similar social networking technologies, the object of interpretation shifts

from mere text to a joint presentation of person and text. This inspires a more democratic notion

of “mass audience” because the audience members (or more appropriately, the users) perform the

roles of both consumer and producer (Boal 342).

The word 'media' describes a channel between two parties through which information can

be transmitted. It follows that two kinds of media can exist: media through which one party

transmits information to the other, without feedback, and media through which both parties

transmit information to the other, in dialogue. The former is 'distribution media', the latter is

'communication media' (Enzensberger 265). The book or the newspaper is a 'distribution media'

which communicates information to readers but blocks the return of information, which might

contain critique, correction or something entirely different. Defenders of newspapers might retort

that the 'letters to the editor' section renders newspapers communicative, but the editorial process

of choosing which reader-generated information appears in that section, the time elapsed

between reading and response, and the re-presentation of that response outside the context of the

information to which it was responding all reveal that illusory communication to be pure

distribution. A 'distribution media' cannot become a 'communication media' by simply

transmitting new content and framing it as something apart from the context in which it

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appears—the writer of a letter to the editor, at the time his or her information is actually

published, is nothing more than another newspaper writer posing (or presented) as a reader. To

overcome this charlatan populism, a revolution in form must take place. Newspaper web

components have accomplished this revolution by mimicking the interface of social networking

technologies. The only real communication (and the only example of intratextuality) that takes

place under the umbrella of a newspaper organization occurs in the oft-neglected comments

section beneath an article published online.

One article in particular, published in the online component of a local newspaper, The

Walla Walla Union Bulletin, in February 2008, illustrates the cumulative value in presenting

information via 'communication media' rather than 'distribution media'. The article, entitled

“Walla Walla man stabbed to death,” covers a case in which a local man, Johnny Angel Leal,

stabbed and killed his brother, Pedro J. Ramirez, and was subsequently convicted of

manslaughter. The article exhibits a limited amount of colloquial knowledge, in its specification

of street names and reference to an earlier drug raid executed at the dead man's home, but the

information it presents is not nearly as comprehensive as that found in the comments section

directly below. The comments, posted predominantly by Walla Walla locals, enlighten

circumstances the reporter could never have exposed on her own, and reveal the unique value of

collective, decentralized media production/consumption. The reader learns that Ramirez was an

unsavory, often violent personality who kept company with drug traffickers and gang members.

Some even express relief that his menace is absent from the community. Others mourn his loss,

recalling good times and a unique personality they will dearly miss. The story takes on a totally

different form in its online incarnation—one which the reader (and potential producer) of the

information must regard as something different than just a newspaper article. The dialogue that

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occurs in the comment section (unit to unit, between user and user, between user and text)

constitutes collective journalism—the story gains a greater depth and complexity, undergoes a

stringent process of fact-checking, and generally mirrors the way information circulates between

people. One is left questioning whether a journalistic standard really trumps the unique brand of

truth revealed in the intratextual 'feed'.

In A Theory of Media Hans Magnus Enzensberger illuminates the social and political

value of such models for groups of people:

Communication networks which are constructed for [the purpose of 'collective,

organized effort'] over and above their primary function, provide politically

interesting organizational models. In the socialist movements the dialectic of

discipline and spontaneity, centralism and decentralization, authoritarian

leadership and anti-authoritarian disintegration [. . .] long ago reached deadlock.

Networklike communications models built on the principle of reversibility of

circuits might give indications of how to overcome this situation: a mass

newspaper, written and distributed by its readers. (267)

Twitter, Wikipedia and the comment interface are the closest we have come yet to this

progressive ideal of media; what is so encouraging is that these technologies do not exist on the

fringe—they are utilized by millions of people in many walks of life and even have become a

crucial tool of the establishment. The White House has a Twitter account. And you can 'tweet'

back at it without having to gain any kind of security clearance.

Politics

As evidenced by the ubiquitous 'feed', the relevance of the intratextual cannot be reduced to

aesthetics. Its social quality—realized in the participation it enables in the production of greater-

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than-oneself meaning—extends its applicability into the political sphere. Its application is not

without substantive contemporary justification; especially since the onset of the twenty-first

century, the nature of individual agency in a political environment has shifted drastically.

Modification of the political environment is no longer solely the function of governments and

organizations—in fact, recent history has proven the acts of unaffiliated individuals (that is, not

affiliated in the traditional sense to a nation-state or ‘legitimate’ political organization) can be

much more resonant than those of organizationally-structured groups of affiliated individuals. As

of late, political actors have come to the realization that the form of the political environment is

manipulable at the level of relatively small unit-unit interactions—the channels for action on and

within that intratextual environment are open to anyone. Furthermore, the tools and systems with

the greatest utility favor small-scale participation.

One of the key functional qualities of the intratextual form—one that is particularly

pertinent to its political manifestations—is that it possesses an overarching structure, but that

structure does not define its meaning nor does it maintain its existence. That is the function of the

units within that structure; in this case, individuals, their beliefs, their actions and any contingent

factors; remember, the intratextual is characterized by the inseparability of the whole from its

parts, and vice versa, in determining meaning. The modification of our notion of war further

solidifies this 'new' brand of individual agency—we have moved from an age of narrative wars,

with clear beginnings, endings, climaxes and contextual plot points, to a general environment of

violent conflict. The successful execution of a narrative war is dependent on the engagement of

two or more discernible, well-organized and large scale opponents (generally nations). When a

smaller unit, whether an individual or a loosely organized guerrilla sect, becomes the opponent,

narrative war is impossible to carry through to completion; this is because the power of an act of

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political violence by a smaller unit cannot be effectively countered with the old machinery. First,

"in these cases there is no concentration of forces or central organization, a feature that makes

them difficult targets" (Habermas 29) and second, armies can only defeat armies, not ideas or

individuals. Even if the individual is defeated, his or her political orientation is most likely

shared by a loose network of individuals necessarily adoptive of the same modus operandi. At

this point in time, terrorism is ubiquitous and effective in modifying the political environment:

"We are now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause [. . .] can account for the

energy which feeds terror"(Baudrillard). The resonance of the terrorist act lies in the perpetuation

and dramatization of unit-unit conflict within a unified form—our globalized society.

Context is essential in grasping the effectiveness of a terror act—this context constitutes

the form which it encompasses it and, accordingly, qualifies the global environment of terror as

intratextual. No terror act is especially dramatic in quantitative terms. The status of the 9/11

attacks as an epoch-defining event extends far beyond the death toll and the rubble—its ultimate

meaning is a symbolic one nurtured by relevant emotions, media coverage, policies, past events,

potential events, and so on. The death and the rubble would seem far less momentous if

considered outside the context of the Patriot Act, The War on Terror, al Qaeda videotapes,

shoeless security procedures, Richard Reid, Guantanamo Bay, "Freedom isn't Free" bumper

stickers, and other related units. The effectiveness of the terror act lies in its interrelatedness to

other units, whether classified as 'terrorist' or 'counter-terrorist', within a unifying form. Jean

Baudrillard articulates the paradoxically disorganized nature of this interrelatedness, explaining

with them [terrorists] [. . .] there is no work contract, but a pact and an obligation of

sacrifice [. . .]. Contrary to the contract, the pact does not link individuals—even

their 'suicide' is not individual heroism, it is a collective, sacrificial act, sealed by

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demanding ideals [. . .]. And it is the conjunction of these two mechanisms, born of

an operational structure and of a symbolic pact, which makes possible such an

excessive action. (Baudrillard)

No organizational structure can be assigned to the 'terrorist impulse'—as such, it does not relate

individuals traditionally, as through a contract (or an army, government, etc.) but instead through

abstract ideals, which cannot be squashed by organized military action. Resultantly, 'The War on

Terror' is not really a war—there is no discernible opponent and it could never end, just as 9/11

was not sufficiently singular and clear-cut (as Pearl Harbor was) to constitute a true beginning.

Instead, it indicates the effort of a nation grounded in antiquated notions of conflict resolution

attempting to render an amorphous ideological environment more tangible, and it suggests a

timeline that will persist indefinitely. Perpetual conflict is not a war, it is an environmental

feature: "all terrorism presents itself as a response to a situation that continues to escalate"

(Derrida 107).

Another essentially intratextual aspect of the terror form is the status to which it relegates

the terrorist/producer of meaning. I mentioned previously the blurring of producer and

environment following the act of production within an intratextual form—the terror producer is

negated as the content of his act is integrated into the form in which it is committed. The terror

environment only generates meaning from effects—cause and intention are inconsequential,

meaningful only to the producer and not to the form. For example, "the attacks of 9/11,

immaculately planned and executed though they were, lacked intentionality because Al-Qaeda

could neither control nor even predict their global repercussions" (Devji 3), thus the act loses

intentionality because it can no longer control its own outcome (6). Form swallows intent

because it is specific to an individual—it cannot function collectively and accordingly has no

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relevance to the essentially collective nature of its presiding form. Repercussions, on the other

hand, despite stemming from intent and resultant action, do have a collective function: their

impact extends beyond the individual (unlike intent) and can be incorporated into the form and

modify the whole environment, including participation therein.

The significance of this stretches beyond the common incidence of terrorists taking only

ambiguous or indirect responsibility for terror acts—even if responsibility were taken and

intention expressed, both would be inconsequential because the extraordinary shockwave of

meaning following the act dramatically outweighs any meaning which preceded it. It is for this

reason that Jurgen Habermas asserts, in the terror environment, "one never really knows who

one's enemy is. Osama bin Laden, the person, more likely serves the function of a stand-in" (29);

and, similarly, it is not for literary purposes that Derrida insists on using the name 'bin Laden'

"always as a synecdoche" (111). This deferment of the producer correlates to Wimsatt and

Beardsley's discussion of "The Intentional Fallacy": relations themselves within a form

sufficiently communicate meaning—the impetus for that meaning, especially in the polyvocal

intratextual form, would only serve to undermine the unity of complex structure by reducing

meaning to numerous, divergent psychologies each purporting absolute truth. Any semblance of

truth can only be gleaned from an appreciation of the total form: the personalities of producers

are relevant only in the arena of symbol exchange. It is also due to this condition that it is

impossible to impose any kind of organizational structure on terrorists smaller than that of the

global terror environment, which encompasses all persons, symbols and activity of the like:

"[b]ecause it operates in a landscape of relations and intentions, the jihad must eschew a politics

that would organize people only around common beliefs or practices" (Devji 19).

Because the terror form only integrates a unit of participant-generated meaning and never

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highlights it as 'the meaning', it is, like all true collective expression, an 'open work' and a 'work

in movement'. And just as in a similarly structured musical composition (i.e., indeterminate

works by John Cage) or literary composition (i.e., poems of Stephane Mallarme), it is "a work [. .

.] divorced from its ultimate definition. Every performance explains the composition, but does

not exhaust it" (Eco 171). This inexhaustibility speaks to the endurance and dynamism of

intratextual forms, as well as the foolishness of 'The War on Terror', which is doomed only to

function as a metonym for its environment and carry on perpetually as a result. Units within the

text cannot defeat the text—they can only reflect and modify it.

SYNTHESIS

I hope the reader found little clear distinction between the fields and examples of the

intratextual which I discuss. Education, language, politics, information, and any applications you

might imagine, cannot after all exist as totally distinct fields within any definition of 'universal

substance'—the word 'universal' is just too clear-cut. The most momentous implication of the

intratextual is the awareness it inspires of the continuity between all things and concepts. A focus

on relations instead of distinct objects permits the intratextual participant to regard one's world as

one regards the intratextual form: connected, open to modification and communicative of a total

meaning.

One singing voice produces expressive meaning, a few voices produce harmony—a

different expressive meaning, and every voice singing together produces something which may

be harmonious and may be disharmonious but is still meaningful, and perhaps more 'true'.

Something greater than its constituent parts is born of this harmony/disharmony: the

relations fostered between people, their activities, other people, and their activities produce what

human beings refer to as 'life', 'experience', and in a more refined sense, 'culture'. How we are is

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largely defined by the kind of participation in which we partake; how we participate is largely

derived from the kinds of participation our culture permits—which is usually what is common

and what has been collectively decided upon as useful. As intratextual forms become more

common, and their mode of use continues to enable the particular kind of collective participation

it does, people will participate in their environment accordingly. Media conditions us by

directing our senses and actions in specific ways. Communications theorist Harold Innis analyzes

the way the communications media used in different cultures shapes the trajectory and scope of

those cultures by making certain kinds of participation and development intuitive and realistic.

Speaking on one historically prominent media's cultural influence, he explains,

Writing enormously enhanced a capacity for abstract thinking which had been

evident in the growth of language in the oral tradition. Names in themselves were

abstractions. Man's activities and powers were roughly extended in proportion to

the increased use and perfection of the written word. Priests and scribes

interpreted a slowly changing tradition and provided a justification for established

authority. An extended social structure strengthened the position of an individual

leader [. . .]. Power was increased by concentration in a few hands [and]

specialization of function was enforced. (Innis 10)

Writing enforced this authoritative paradigm because the kind of participation it initiated

required a specialized skill. Writing, by enabling new relations to one’s environment—mass

communication, record keeping, etc.—moved culture forward, but since use of the media was

limited to a few, culture moved forward per their direction. It is from this historically re-affirmed

situation that the author was born, and the separation between writer/directors of culture and

those who, lacking the skill, simply followed their lead, created the passive audience. When a

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dominant form of communication limits meaning-making relations to a few, only a few will

define the environment, but all will live on its terms.

The intratextual form does not fundamentally require a skill (although some of its

manifestations might). It only requires active participation based on responsiveness to other units

sharing one's environment, and a consciousness that it is those relations which comprise and

define that environment. Intratextual forms expose the kind of environment that would result

from widening and opening the field of relations to permit total participation. This is the unique

character of Twitter and terrorism: they reveal that free, individual communication produces a

richer meaning when located in the context of the free, individual communication of others. Old

media fixes meaning to the producer and thus inhibits relations as a viable meaning-making tool,

while new media (the intratextual, the interactive) so firmly privileges relations in meaning-

making that the producer cannot be considered independently. This renders communication less

clear, but louder, which will likely continue to initiate a push toward greater disorder and

decreased subjugation in culture. By opening communications media to total participation, what

Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” is dissolved: “instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be 

based in another practice—politics” (Benjamin 1172). And is not politics at its most basic level 

relations—friction between people and ideas? Intratextuality is a completely democratic

aesthetics because it excludes nothing in meaning-making—it makes anything less than total

meaning impossible, which challenges firmly rooted notions of aesthetic and political authority.

It is difficult to normalize an opinion when all possible retorts exist alongside it. It is difficult to

persuade the masses into empire when its opponents dramatize its flaws through its destruction.

Simple participation can be powerful.

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