Reading's Refrain: From Bibliography to Topology

How might knowledge of the refrain--of reading's redundancy--help us imagine what it would mean to read topologically instead of bibliographically? This essay seeks to identify some of the features that underlie computational approaches to reading and how those approaches might change our relationship to textuality. In privileging a sense of dimensionality, topologies invite us to think not only about the visuality of reading, but also language's agential nature, as a form of action rather than expression. In privileging a sense of restraint, a refraining from, topologies move us away from individualistic models of the palpable and the transformational, toward the likely, the proximate, and the scalar--from a field of reading's revolutions to one of resolution.