This cool tag cloud is from Wordle. Clicking on it takes you to the Wordle site. The image here is generated out of the text of a paper I wrote on Ranciere. Also, here's some advice: always save your post even if you think you already did. I just wrote a long post on tag clouds and lost it. I'm pretty bummed but hope I can retrieve the ideas. Of course, the one that got away was brilliant, original, and insightful. This one can only pale in comparison to the one that was lost. Tag clouds are symptoms of the decline of symbolic efficiency. The meaning of words is not at stake in tag clouds. Meaning is replaced by frequency, proximity, and duration. Which words are repeated the most and in what combinations? The combination of these elements determine intensity--if something is only present once, it doesn't count, isn't counted. Words matter, words and themes. Not sentences and not stories or narratives. People always get the story wrong, anyway. Tag clouds exemplify this loss of a space of meaning, of a language constituted out of sentences that are uttered in contexts according to rules that can be discerned and contested. What's lost? The ability to distinguish between contestatory and hegemonic speech. Irony. Tonality. Normativity (how can there be an ethics of the address if the words are not part of an address, if they are extracted from their position within speech acts to become artifacts and toys?). Critique. The terms...