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and multiple “authors.” Here it’s precisely the rule-governed variability of the experience that confers cultural authority, precisely the uncertainty of the journey that is its strongest feature. To confine oral performers to a verbatim text is to render their activity textual, and in the process to sabotage the interactive dynamic between those performers and their audiences. Expressive strength in this arena (Arena of Oral Tradition) stems from emergent, right-now composition and reception, rather than from reducing a system of communication to an object that belongs to another agora. Intertextuality isn’t possible in the OT marketplace because there are no texts. Each version is an original in the time, place, and circumstance that it occurs, and the performance recurs rather than repeats (Recur Not Repeat). You can’t hold Proteus captive without destroying his natural identity. In the oAgora, reality remains in play. Now picture yourself surfing the web, navigating through the Pathways Project for instance. If we instantly remove all your options—imitating the master plan to freeze and textualize Wikipedia in order to “increase its worth” (Freezing Wikipedia)—you’ve just as quickly exited the eAgora in favor of a textual venue. Now what you’re exploring becomes your not-so-brave old world—tidy, protected, closed-off, and static, not to mention tAgora-cozy. Instead of cocreating experience, you’re confined to interpreting an invariable play script, a single route, a pathwayless environment (Impossibility of tPathways). Many interpretations are possible, to be sure, but they all rest on one single, solitary object. Then, if we reverse the procedure and instantly restore those removed links, everything changes (Arena of the Web), and changes radically. Now you’re directly responsible for participating in communication that can’t be prescripted. Now you must make your own way through a network of nodes in an order and at a depth only you can choose. Now you’ll have to deal with sites and domains that actually prosper by being unfixed, by being forever under construction. Now it’s up to you to construe knowledge, art, and ideas not by trekking along a one-dimensional road map but by navigating through a multidimensional, interactive grid of potentials. In the eAgora, reality remains in play. L Recur Not Repeat Repetition is a tAgora phenomenon What do we mean by “repeating?” We mean to do something again, and to redo that something as exactly as possible. The smaller the variation (if any), the better ; if there’s too much change, the second instance can’t qualify as a repetition of the first. With repetition we strive toward a linear sequence of identical acts, all in a row and each taking its meaning from the foregoing instance(s). Think of n, n+1, n+2, n+3, and so forth. 208 . Reality Remains in Play In looking at how repetition works in its home marketplace of communication , the tAgora, let’s consider a few instances, ranging from simple to more complex. After that, we’ll examine its opposite—recurrence, an oAgora and eAgora phenomenon, providing some illustrations of its dynamic function. 1. Repeating for emphasis. Perhaps the simplest case and use of repetition is the attempt to emphasize a point we’re trying to make, to underline its importance rhetorically. We all remember too many overcrafted political speeches, for example, in which candidates tried to move their audiences by citing and re-citing a particular point or issue, trying to drum their favored position into our heads with a particular catchphrase or soundbite . Many of us have written memos or essays or personal letters whose mission was to persuade their reader(s) by repeating a policy or idea or belief, again often using the same catchphrase so that the cumulative force of linear repetition is maximized. This is classic repetition, where each iteration takes its meaning from the preceding iteration(s). And because this practice depends on leading an audience or reader through a planned sequence of fixed things—rather than navigating and activating optiondriven networks—it is also a classic tAgora strategy. 2. Repetitive practice makes perfect performance. Classical music performances are in one sense always misleading. We go to the concert hall to hear a Beethoven symphony, for example, and are thrilled by the virtuoso, tightly integrated playing of the strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion . But what we experience then and there is only the performance, the very tip of the iceberg. What’s lost to us as an audience...

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