By Way of Introduction

In the following essay, I will attempt, among other things, to approach the ways in which writing on the Internet represents a marked change from writing as stable, anchored to context and authorial intent. Whether written specifically for use on the Internet or written for print and later placed online, Web-based text has built into it or grafted onto it, certain “meta,” or peripheral, information designed to take into account the users who might search for it or eventually stumble across it. This meta information, including hyperlinks, keywords, images, headlines, titles, and meta descriptions, works on the periphery of the text itself to make its parts accessible to an audience by making them visible and relevant to search engines and Web editors.

Readers within this system are thus empowered to search among and choose between texts and Web artifacts, ultimately writing their “own” narratives based on those choices. This essay will draw parallels between web-based writing and contemporary theory, particularly Jacques Derrida’s Signature Event Context, in order to show how web content demonstrates that essay’s suggestions regarding the ultimate un-anchor-ability of language. It will also seek to contest the standards of print-based writing in order to demonstrate, structurally, the ways in which web-based writing can defy the kind of authority-reinforcing structure by which previous iterations of language were defined. This text, therefore, as should become evident, will contain meta-information designed to facilitate searching within, outside, and around it, which will hopefully open it to interaction with potential readers and within new potential contexts.

One of my main goals in this essay will be to examine the way language constitutes itself on the web by removing any illusion of anchoring in author, intent, stable context, or truth value. I will also attempt to show the way that search is itself a kind of utterance, performative in structure, which changes what it seeks to find in the mere desire to find something. The goal here is not to discourage searching but to suggest that searching using community-generated content, rather than top-down, editorialized content, may help a reader to overcome the limits of categories and space that affect non-digital language, ultimately allowing users to access information that they may not even know to ask for. Searching based on intuition, then jumping off the structures that facilitate searching, moving even temporarily without the aid of meaning-imparting institutions, is a way to find information users never knew they were looking for.

Making It All Happen

Search engines, in their freedom to count any information as “relevant” regardless of truth value or authorial intent, echo Derrida’s discussion of communication in Signature Event Context, in terms of “freeing the performative from the authority of the truth value, from the true/false opposition, at least in its classical form, and [substituting] for it at times the value of force” (Derrida 13). This concept of the performative in the context of Internet search is especially relevant because of its identity in force, rather than its meaning in an author’s intent or its truthfulness. Derrida defines the performative as an utterance which “produces or transforms a situation” and serves as “a ‘communication,’ which is not limited strictly to the transference of a semantic content that is already constituted and dominated by an orientation toward truth” (14). Here, the term “search query” is a “performative,” for any series of terms entered into a search engine with the intent of creating a list of results and possible choices is an utterance that “produces or transforms a situation.” Additionally, that a search query entered into the blank box on Google’s home page could be any combination of words adhering to grammar or not, with regard for “truth” or not, makes it performative in its existence as a “communication” not “limited strictly to the transference of semantic content.”

To return to the idea that a search query is performative with the built-in ability to transform a situation, we must acknowledge that this Internet version of the performative utterance comes in the form of a question. A search term or phrase, whether fragment, “mashed potatoes” or “mashed potato recipes” or full interrogative “how do I make mashed potatoes?” always asks a question. This question, when used to activate the search algorithms of a search engine, then pulls up page after page of results, effectively materializing that information for the user. Thus, the retrieval of a web-based artifact through some imperative or some interrogative, that is, some performative statement or action, as described by Derrida, “produces or transforms a situation, it effects” (Derrida 13). These artifacts, therefore, must be written to be read; they thus become rewritten into a new context: the context of the question to which they serve as answer.

The search query thus constitutes a performative utterance in its calling up of information. It describes the thing which it intuits is out there but for which no location is known, while it also calls that thing into being by entering a search query that is answered by the text’s materialization. The text is then transformed as the result of being called forth in search because it becomes a new answer and thus a new text each time it appears in response to a different string of search terms.