Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1992 16:34:05 CST
From:         mcmorg@VAX1.BEMIDJI.MSUS.EDU
Subject:      A sophistic rhetoric of hypertext?

I'd like to run a couple things past everyone concerning
a rhetorical framework for hypertext, just to
see if a) I've lost a mental link somewhere, b) if this
approach might be at all interesting, c) if it fits in
with anyone else's thinking.


(Apologies for the rather arch tone of what follows:
I'm grabbing this from  a draft of an article
I'm working on).


I would posit an inventional rhetoric of hypertext, one
based on sophistic precepts of a social-epistemic,
social-constructionist rhetoric.  The conception of
knowledge and of writing that is embodied in such a
rhetoric is, of course, social, pluralistic, public,
provisional, and contingent.  This would be a
hypertext of orientations (Burke); one that promotes
writer and reader interactions and decisions; one that
doesnUt reduce plurality to singularity but that
engages the reader and other authors in at least
dialogue and at best dialectical negotiation; one that
would attempt to simulate not structures of the mind
so much as proposed structures of shared knowledge;
one that places at the center of attention the social
construction of the concepts and of their multiple
organizations and interconnections that make up a
discourse community or discipline.

Inventional:
The conception of hypertext as IUm posing here would be
one in which a number of forms of invention can take
placeQall in the direction of sustaining multiplicity:

invention in the sense of discovering the available
means of persuasion in topics (Aristotle)

invention in the sense that multiple versions and multiple
rationales could be constructed and maintained
(Gorgias, Isocrates)

invention in the sense that topics can be organized
around stasis; a stasis point would be a number of
possible branches from a single
topic, each of them arguable (Cicero)

invention in the sense of structuring multiple
organizations,
multiple orientations, and multiple perspectives, all
of them reasonable and so arguable (Young, Becker, and
Pike)

inventional in the sense that the writers
would engage in dialectic on their way to creating
such texts, and thatQperhapsQthe hypertext itself
would engage a reader in a dialectic (Plato, Burke)


This hypertext, then, would constantly explicate by
invention rather than subsuming invention to
explication; the hypertext would attempt to open and
sustain ambiguity by multiplicity.  There would be no
push to RfinishS such a hypertext.

Sophistic:
This rhetoric for a writing classroom would be sophistic,
kairotic: localized, contingent, temporal, timely.  The
construction of a hypertext as multiple paths through
a body of knowledge represented by a network of linked
topics seems an appropriate conceptual, visual, and
operational representation of sophistic rhetoric.


There's more, but that's enough for now.

Am I lost in the nodes or on to something?  I need my
discourse community to get re-oriented!  I've been in
the woods too long!

Michael Morgan
Bemidji State University
Northern Minnesota
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU