Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication

Writing and reading are always negotiations between process and structure. (I call it "structure" rather than "product" because products seem like things that come off assembly lines while structures are spaces in which we can move, sometimes remaking them.) For me, at least, this text highlights the productive tension between the two: weaving in and out of nodes, flashing back to the map from time to time to position myself against the broader, often unseen structures of the work.

Only some of the nodes—probably half—are on the map screen, which maps hiearchical linear connections but not multiple ones. This is more or less intentional. The outlying regions are only mapped in the temporal experience of reading them.

These ideas are something Louise Wetherbee Phelps (1988) identified some time ago as the unfolding, spatial dynamic of dancer in the act of dancing.