Context/Crosstext

   Context is by itself not a self-evident notion, and yet it is always invoked as the explanation for the operational sense of language use. Although not a clear-cut idea, context is simply what we appeal to as the field in which our actions and events find their place. In this way, context is unavoidable, whether we think of it as the continuation or extension of the historical and cultural narratives we find ourselves implicated in, or as the social and physical field of action our being-in-the-world must react to and from which it also receives an action and a reaction. We are in a dynamic field of exchange of forces and information.

   It is an oversimplification to divide the medium from the message or vice versa, for everything is a message as much as everything is a medium. Our bodies are as much the physical relays of energy and information as any other physical body unfolding in time and space. The energy/information wave can traverse all bodies in different levels of complexity and articulation. The language we use travel in both the visual and the radio ends of the electromagnetic spectrum, and in its various configurations carry the multidimensional articulation of what we simply call human meaning. As a purely anthropic codification of information, meaning seems the most obvious, intimate, and transparent aspect of human experience.

   Yet, our infinite access to this meaning is always confounded by exactly the same abundance: there seems to be too much meaning, too much data, than what our senses can process. And context is the term we simply refer to whenever we want to place a restraint on this almost unbearable abundance, which, from another viewpoint, appears to be perhaps nothing but the deceptive facade of the scarcity of true or final meaning in the objective, non-anthropic universe. The price of abundance, therefore, is interpretation. As Derrida dryly observes, there is not yet a science of context. Usually, it is not lack of context which is the problem, but that there is too much of it, that it comes in too thick. What we often need, and do employ, is a filter. What is often abused, of course, without acknowledgment, is the simplification of everything under its name. But ultimately, we can say with some confidence, is that context is often propinquity, as whatever togetherly coincides in a given place and time, bound by this criss-crossing of paths, like strangers meeting again and again on the road. (And Hermes is the god of roads and travellers.) Context is, hence, "crosstext."

   There is a sort of vagabondage—if we let this word play its double form—in the fate of language: it is always bound to travel like time, at once centripetal and centrifugal like on a watch where it is both moving to impress and to express. It is what goes and yet returns, what we refer to but what is always irreferable. There is context in the samples given, the context we must create to bind the passage of complexity within the terms of human meaning, but they are the limits of our senses, in the same way coherence is nothing but the limit in which words find themselves coincidentally bound by the visual space of the page and the codex. This happy place for a semantic and pragmatic rendezvous is where propinquity happens: it is the train station of language.

   Won’t media, in the end, be the operational and material definition of all that is text and context?