The "Contour" of a Contour

Dave Ciccoricco’s “The Contour of a Contour,” new in ebr, is a serious meta-theoretical contribution to the literature on hypertext. While it is difficult to get a sense of Ciccoricco’s own relationship to this body of work—is he critic, historian, apologist, or (to borrow a term from Friedrich Kittler) literary scientist?—the essay is impressive in its (re)tracing of the tangled genealogy of the contour, the signature trope of 1990s hypertext theory. Near the end Ciccoricco writes, “[a]bove all, the Contour aspires (as does this essay) to be nothing more than a site of gathering.” In this sense the piece really is invaulable, for Ciccoricco has exhaustively teased the word’s synchronic and diachronic lexical accumulations out of very close readings of critical work by Michael Joyce, Mark Bernstein, Stuart Moulthrop, Terry Harpold, and others.

Contour, along with a host of other terms from this period (Moulthrop’s “informand” for example), reminds me a bit of the metaphors sprinkled across our computer desktops—I mean “desktops.” After all, hypertexts no more have “contours” than operating systems have “recycling bins.” Ciccoricco rightly draws attention to Mark Bernstein’s writing in “Patterns of Hypertext” and elsewhere which takes to task those critics and commentators who elide (read: don’t really understand) the minute computational particulars of the systems and software they profess to be deconstructing. And Ciccoricco, for his own part, administers a quick drubbing to those who have been critical of Eastgate’s role in the field but have yet to implement any alternative systems themselves. Even Bernstein, however, does not discuss what a link is actually doing computationally, and instead gives us a colorful semantic palette with which to name patterns, including cycle, counterpoint, tangle, sieve, and montage.

Question: why not discuss these phenomena as the data and control structures computational events they actually are, utilizing the existing language of computer science, instead of adopting a wallpaper language which more than anything else resembles literary modernism?

Rote answer: because the language of computer science is as socially and historically specific as the language of literary modernism. “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

Is it just that simple? (Note: Mark Bernstein reads this blog and rarely agrees with what I have to say. Look for him in the Comments section.)