Information Problems Particular to the Field of Composition, Rhetoric, Literacy


For the 1996 Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference in Tucson, Catherine Hobbs, Dianne Juby and Jana Moring collaborated to present a panel entitled The Architectonics of Information. Later that year, this group revised and updated those presentations for the Mid-America Symposium on Emerging Computer Technologies in Norman, Oklahoma. Below are the full-text versions of the MASECT papers: 

























The Architectonics of Information:

Ancient Topical Thought and Postmodern Cognition



Catherine L. Hobbs

University of Oklahoma, Department of English

chobbs@ou.edu




Abstract
This paper examines the usefulness of thought patterns from ancient rhetoric as they have been appropriated in various times and places in past and present. It suggests that such heuristic patterns may be useful as a portable human-computer interface to assist in negotiating information overload in today's interlinked electronic environment.

In a society based on information, the chief scarce commodity would presumably be information not goods. But we are drowning in information, not suffering a dearth of it. Dealing with this superabundant flow is sometimes compared to drinking from a firehose. In such a society, the scarcest commodity turns out to be not information but the human attention needed to cope with it.

We have in the West a venerable tradition of studying how human attention is created and allocated: the "art of persuasion" which the Greeks called rhetoric. A better definition of rhetoric, in fact, might be "the economics of human attention-structures," for whenever we "persuade" someone, we do so by getting that person to "look at things from our point of view," share our attention-structure. (Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word ).

In the early eighteenth century, the Neopolitan professor and philosopher Giambattista Vico was already feeling the pressure of the "firehose of information" described in late twentieth-century electronic culture by Lanham. Vico, an early modern still in the youth of the literate revolution, clung in reaction to the ancient arts of speech and memory championed by Aristotle and Cicero. He bragged that he had written his masterwork The New Science (1725, 1744) as if there were no books in the world. Architectonic arts are structuring arts: the architectonic art Vico claimed enabled this feat was the ancient art called "topics." Vico's topical art enabled him to make connections between disparate fields and elements to produce singular insights resulting in a structural-historical view of human civilization.

Perhaps what we need today to enable us to drift, surf, or dive through our postmodern ocean of information are similarly flexible systems of inquiry that allow us to internalize and manipulate information to produce meaning. If such heuristic systems could allow us to float in the information stream without becoming disoriented, if they could help us produce knowledge from information as if there were no tsunami-force wave hitting us full in the face--this would indeed be refreshing and relevant.

One might ask what sort of nostalgic humanities fantasy I attempt to foist on the less credulous fields encompassing mathematics, cognitive studies, and computer sciences. But such systems, heuristic guides, sets of "rules of thumb" may be as pertinent as they are intriguing and seductive to consider. Such a set of internalized "arts" would be the best imaginable human-computer interface. They are organized by concepts, by "terms," and serve as aids to focusing an inquiry, helping both eliminate and elucidate possible moves. They are thus, in the rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke's language, "terministic screens," sets of terms that focus our attention, both screening out and structuring in what they can and will.

How these portable interfaces will work we can only imagine from past uses of topical systems in the fields of rhetoric--the arts of literacy, both writing and speaking, bordering communication, linguistics and literature.

Rhetoric and Topical Thought

I have been working on the history of this sort of "topical thought" for almost a decade. But only quite recently has the context appeared to make this work seem less anachronistic-- that is, the advent of searchable online information in the wealth of forms and sites we know today, especially hyperlinked WWW text and media. This is a self-justifying stance, of course, but the metaphors in English and my specialty of rhetoric and composition studies finally all make sense today: revolutions discussed in images of the bush form taking precedence over the tree; the rhizome over the bush--the rhizome being that networked structure of crabgrass, or if you prefer, the root-branching strawberry plant. Cyberspace is now truly the sixties’ "strawberry fields forever."

These networking metaphors now seem, however ahistorically, to have been merely gathering in anticipation of the linking of internet and online data bases. In such a network of free-floating information, a postmodern art is needed to serve as a useable human-computer interface for information retrieval as well as information manipulation and knowledge construction.

As a former journalist and communication specialist, I have always been interested in the lateral thought processes and everyday logic described by the field of rhetoric, the classical arts of speaking and writing that were the center of education for more than 2,000 years. Unlike more linear thought, such as deductive academic philosophical argument, rhetoric was used flexibly and pragmatically in the public, civic sphere. In fact, there was an ancient battle between the philosophers and the rhetoricians over the two thought styles. Philosophers were concerned with universals and the certain, while rhetoricians were concerned with the everyday, the situated, the contingent. To give importance to such an ancient battle of the humanities may seem, again, oddly anachronistic. However, it is just these sorts of seemingly off-beat, out-of-time connections that we may need to encourage in the present age, connections that may prove enormously productive, if surprising and unsettling.

Deferring the question "productive for what?" the issues presently at hand are:

These are some of the questions I have been asking as I teach writing and online research in my advanced composition classes here at OU. I aim to help my students be more flexible and diligent inquirers, to be more independent, able to take on ill-defined problems rather than the pre-digested problems offered them in much of their college work. I want to help them turn information into insights and useful knowledge. Can teaching them some postmodern form of the topical arts really help?

History of Topical Thought

These challenges take me back to the Neopolitan professor of rhetoric I studied in the history of rhetoric class I took in 1985 with Prof. Janice Lauer at Purdue University. Vico, professor of Latin eloquence at the University of Naples in the early eighteenth century, reinterpreted the classical arts as appropriated by Renaissance humanism. His thought was based in the art of classical invention, especially two arts, those of topics and status. He describes flexible ways of using networks of information, writing about solitary and social inquiry as well as the speaker's performance of public persuasion. Vico's networks were in his memory and in the books he surrounded himself with, but his emphasis on creating new knowledge through making connections seems pertinent to the present issues.

What is a topical system? The Greek term topos and the Latin locus, are often translated as "places" or "lines of argument." They refer to considerations that might possibly arise in disputation, and they existed to serve as flexible touchstones for helping advocates in classical courtrooms. Aristotle and other classical writers also discuss topoi of the legislative forum and public ceremonies organized primarily around the topics of praise and blame. As we shall see, Vico later expands the Aristotelian system of court, forum, and public ritual to encompass more and more situations of human thought, including scientific inquiry.

Vico also is worthy of examination at this conference for his alternative conception of mind, alternative to the earlier "black box" computer model. As semiotician Marcel Danesi (1995) has written, Vico’s model is based on the mind’s ability to capture and manipulate imagery. This capability can be linked to the Web revolution based on capturing and manipulating images, making the Web environment more conducive to Vico's model of how the human mind works. For Vico, the ability to capture and manipulate imagery is the fundamental process that allows the external world to be internalized and the body and mind to be brought together. This ability can explain why we have anything "in mind" on which to reflect, with which to think at all (Verene, 1981). The image is in this sense a "middle term," an important technical term in Vico. The "middle term" originally referred to the middle term in a syllogism, the key statement linking the first and final propositions, but Vico uses it at times metaphorically as encompassing all linking.

The key imagistic move in Vico’s model of mind is the human ability to produce metaphor. A metaphor is also a middle term, a point of intersection between two terms that produces new knowledge. When two images are brought together to produce a metaphor, a new node has been formed in a network of information. When we say the moon sailed across the sky, we have brought the images of a sailing ship and the moon's motion together in such a way as to make it difficult ever to see in the same way the moon change positions in the night sky. We note with pleasure the whiteness of the moon, the specter of a sail on a summer lake.

Vico says through such processes, which operate alike in both aesthetic and scientific realms, we produce our worlds--although, like Marx, (or Marx like Vico), we don’t make them just as we would like. We are constrained by our materials and our positioning within our technical/cultural networks. The existence of such networks was the insight Vico came to from his topical pattern of thought--multiple, historically produced cultural networks, in motion. Structures in the process of producing themselves, perpetually in transformation or in catastrophe: this was the historical model Vico's own art of topics produced.

Vico’s own contemporary cultural network was adjusting to the production of new instruments and methods--the telescope, the book, the Cartesian critical method. Vico liked his predecessor Bacon better than Descartes. Bacon was one of his four guiding lights--along with Plato, Tacitus, and the international natural law theorist Grotius. He liked Bacon’s view of the total network of knowledge, but he didn’t like Bacon's view of topics as useless for anything but memory retrieval. He also recemented Bacon's separation of classical arts of invention into scientific invention and invention of speech and arguments (Advancement of Learning XIII, 1). As one who in young manhood flirted with Cartesianism, Vico knew and interacted with the Cartesians of Naples, who were primarily interested in natural phenomena, not in ancient texts or topical inventional strategies for discovery. Vico himself wrote on the circulation of the blood. But he wasn't happy that the Cartesian paradigm or exemplar for knowledge and what it meant to know was shifting from the humanities to physics and mathematics, from moral philosophy to natural philosophy. We can never know the natural world because we didn’t make it, he argued (1710). He believed the paradigm for knowing should be the humanities: the study of human history, in particular, law, politics, and rhetoric. What humans have made, they can know with most certainty.

For Vico, a teacher of rhetoric, the premiere art of rhetoric was topics--an art he tried to refashion as relevant to the eighteenth-century world of sciences. In doing so, he made the sort of claims about topical thought we make here--that they are flexible and can be adapted for a variety of problems and times. Vico believed topics were valuable for surveying what other people have discovered about a matter as well as making humans more acute and quick in thinking on their feet in public persuasive situations. Vico thought they could even be adapted for scientific observation as well as the traditional invention of arguments. Applied thoroughly, this questioning became critical as well as creative, he claimed. They also could be used to validate, test or challenge knowledge. But their use to make connections that created new knowledge was their most important contribution.

Throughout Vico’s literary corpus, which ended in his masterwork on human history, The New Science, his own topical thought functions to collect and recollect, make fertile and surprising connections, overcome divisions, and construct classifications having semipermeable membranes, or heuristic categories.

Vico had obtained his chair in rhetoric in 1699 by a disputation on Quintilian's De Statibus Caussarum, an etymology and explication of the term status. Status is a theory of judicial controversy that assists the rhetor in determining the point at issue or "center of gravity" of a case. This theory became a rich field of thought for Vico, incorporated in his topical scientific method. The Vico scholar Guiliani argues that the classical theory of status made it possible to "go beyond an emotive and irrational rhetoric" because of its "objective, impartial, and neutral value" (38). With the structure of status, rhetoric becomes the "art of distinguishing" the nature of the problem. Understood as the center of argumentation, the judicial controversy can be seen in all its complexity as a site offering up a plurality of questions.

Vico's Topics in Process

Topical thinking to Vico was more and more closely identified with the construction of knowledge through language; from his earliest work it was set into opposition with the critical Cartesian philosophy of his day. In his 1708-9 Study Methods, Vico protests the neglect of topical inventional arts for Cartesian critical thinking. Two years later in Ancient Wisdom, he repeats his criticisms, advising a processual use of topics to generate questions to probe a matter, listing examples of his topical questions. Vico poses a number of questions which function not solely in law, but as a general heuristic for inquiry: 

	And first, he must examine the question "Does the thing exist?" 

	so as to avoid talking about nothing. Second, the question "What is it?" 

	so as to avoid arguing about names.  Third, "How big is it?" either in size, 

	weight, or number.  Fourth, "What is its quality?" under which he considers 

	color, taste, softness, hardness, and other tactile matters.  Fifth, "When was 

	it born, how long has it lasted, and into what [elements] does it break down?"  

	On this pattern, he must take it through the remaining categories comparatively 

	and set it beside everything that is somehow germane to it.  The causes from which 

	it arose and the effects it produces or what it does must be compared with other 

	things like it, or different, with contraries, with things greater, smaller, and 

	equal to it. (p. 100)

These questions, based on transformations of Aristotelian dialectical and rhetorical loci as used in Cicero, cannot be criticized for being the narrow checklist for arguments into which topics are accused of degenerating in some rhetorics. The first two questions are obviously from the determination of status, including the issues of fact or definition. Vico's third question reflects Aristotle's common requisite of degree or size, Cicero's comparison category. In the fourth, the question of quality, Vico's stress on the senses ("color, taste, softness, hardness, and other tactile matters") shows the influence of Aristotelian thinking as well as contemporary empirical science with its Cartesian and Baconian sensory emphasis.

Perhaps the most interesting question because of its manifestations in Vico's later work is that which highlights the temporal nature of Vico's thinking, the fifth: "When was it born, how long has it lasted, and into what does it break down?" This pattern of birth and decay shows up in The New Science's theory of corso and ricorso, in which the era of "progress" regularly degenerates, swept providentially into barbarism. The fifth question also allies itself with the status issue of quality.

Vico's key insight was that humans have not simply changed by degrees over time, but have passed through qualitatively different transformations, evidenced by changes in their use of language and parallel institutions. The topos of quality also concerns historical narrative because it was the primary strategy for determining the narrative portion of a legal argument. Therefore, topics of argument may help a thinker tell a story from a mass of facts or make an argument. Another set of topics from a speaker's arsenal assisted with memory, important in an oral culture, and adding up to a complex system of arts for managing the unwieldy lifeworld William James described as a "blooming, buzzing confusion."

Contemporary Linkages

So how does a discussion of these arcane ancient arts connect to online searching in the near-21st century? There are some interesting parallels with Vico's anti-modern approach to information management and our current interwoven information revolution. For example, a colleague who studies memory, Linda Calendrillo, Eastern Illinois University, has said that the more information we accumulate, the more we will need memory topics just to navigate through our own accumulated external memory files to retrieve and produce our own knowledge. I think she is right. We may need new topics for both memory and rhetoric. Any new topical art must first, like Vico's, be an art that is both creative and critical, with a both-and view of the world and binary oppositions in general--and, as in classical topical arts, such opposites will remain key. The concept of "opposites" and contradictories was itself a key rational topos, along with other concepts such as causes, actions and consequences, means and end, processes, definitions, classification, authority, and other logical lines of thought and argument (logos). In addition, sets of topoi traditionally set out to grapple with character presentation (ethos) of the message producer. They also attempted to identify lines of thought concerning attitudes and emotions of the interlocutors in or audience of the discourse (pathos).

Navigating through the transforming cyberspace of WWW or an online database may call for a related art of stasis, the art of standpoint that is used to ensure a project begins well. Sometimes, my students who can keep their own questions uppermost in their Web searching, who have a center of gravity to their activities, end up with the best insights and information. Stasis as an art also reminds me of Bender and Wellbery’s (1990) definition of rhetoric as "the art of positionality in discourse." Not only does one need to know where one is and where one is going at any particular moment, but one needs to know where the sources he or she uses are located--in what discipline, what methodological orientation, what political orientation. Who speaks? From what place? What is at stake here? We all need to know, and yet these complex questions are even more baffling in emerging electronic media. One "real-world" example of the complexity of positionality emerged in my women's studies class on method and theory, where we discussed the nature of expertise. I brought in an AIDS skeptic, who made his presentation on what he terms the Center for Disease Control's "AIDS terror campaign" (Wright, 1996). Then and for the rest of spring semester, we asked ourselves how he and his information was positioned. Were we more in danger of dying of AIDS or of living a life whose choices were based on irrational fears? Was Wright an expert or a crank? Was he a gay-basher, a libertarian, an anarchist? What was the quality of his information? When the statistics he had presented came out later in an article in the Wall Street Journal, the class's view of the information shifted. When lesbians used the same facts to point to the AIDS campaign as trying to frighten women away from lesbianism, the positionality shifted once more for perhaps one or two students in my class. Who speaks, from where, and why? In times of crucial decision-making, on AIDS, in this election year, we need such abilities to parse information, intention, and location, and we could do worse than the topos of positionality.

Positionality: Who produced this knowledge? How do they present it? What is at stake? What is their orientation to the academy, to industry, to the public? This art begins on the Web with the domain--.gov, .org, .edu, .com. But as in all positions, these domain names are contradictory: the non-aligned League of Women Voters is not located under ".org," but under ".com," in the space of the politically conservative Daily Oklahoman newspaper. This seeming exception, however, is the rule--the gaps and contradictions in positions--even Rush Limbaugh's (see Juby, this volume), make judgments of position more than simplistic identity-politics or stereotyping.

Such topical arts from classical rhetoric already have been flexibly transferred from linguistics to technical writing and general writing instruction in the sixties. In the fifties, Kenneth Pike's structural linguistics developed a set of topics as part of what was called tagmemics theory. This topical system has been used extensively by linguist/missionaries encountering isolated, oral cultures to orient themselves enough to write down the language and translate the Bible. In the sixties, Alton Becker and Richard Young collaborated with Pike to develop a "tagmemic rhetoric." They produced a technical writing text from their work at Michigan, Rhetoric, Discovery and Change (1970), which adapted the tagmemics strategy as a general heuristic aiming to lead students to creativity and insight. James Kinneavy's Theory of Discourse (1971) used the stasis art to analyze, critique, and retheorize the teaching of writing in English Departments. Recently Allan Megill, a historian at the University of Virginia, has used stasis as a heuristic to analyze historical discourse, aiming toward a study of "historics" (1995). These diverse examples show not only the flexibility of topical thought, but how they can provide perspective on location in various ways. They may help in translation, in inquiry, indexing, analyzing, critiquing.

Training in metaphor and topical thought may be the queen of the topical arts of thought, helping people make many types of surprising connections. In creativity theory, Rothenberg (1979) has described the process of creativity in science and in the arts as involving metaphor as well as maintaining or manipulating the tensions between oppositions. This is a more subtle way of positioning oppositions, and much more promising than that of the monlithically oppositional Sunday morning news shows. Romantic ideology has it that creative thought cannot be taught. The very complexity of most creative acts makes many today argue that writing, an exemplary case of the performance of thought, cannot be taught. So what function can topics serve? What exactly might they do?

Pertinent questions, among others, remain: