Rhetorical Velocity and Hypertext

On their own, rhetorical velocity and hypertext are complex concepts with many different avenues of application. When put together, their meanings and applications become even more tangled, but also more useful in understanding them. Each of them require the attention of active and engaged readers, writers, rhetors, and creators. On several different occasions, Landow argues for the need of an active and attentive reader when it comes to hypertext, because hypertext “provides an infinitely recenterable system whose provisional point of focus depends upon the reader, who becomes a truly active reader in yet another sense” (Landow, 36). As Landow pointed out, even Derrida claimed that “the active reader in the process of exploring a text, probing it, can call into play dictionaries with morphological analyzers that connect individual words to cognates, derivations, and opposites” (Landow, 33).

I have an admittedly limited knowledge of morphology, but in my understanding, when it comes to language and linguistics, to analyze something morphologically would be to study how a word is shaped or built. If an active reader is required to morphologically analyze a text, specifically hypertext, that means that he or she must pay attention to the smallest units of the text to interpret and understand its meaning. Interpretation, as we have discussed before and as I. A. Richards claimed, depends entirely on the person and his or her experiences. On this point, Landow pointed out that “all hypertext systems permit the individual reader to choose his or her own center of investigation and experience” (Landow, 38). This means that there is no required organization or path for the reader to follow, and no set interpretation of hypertext. This is where rhetorical velocity comes in.

In the same way hypertext requires an active reader, rhetorical velocity requires an active deliverer or rhetor. Ridolfo and Rife defined rhetorical velocity as “a strategic concept of delivery in which a rhetor theorizes the possibilities for the recomposition of a text based on how s/he anticipates how the text might later be used” (Ridolfo & Rife, 229). If there is no set path for the reader of a hypertext to follow, this means that there is an infinite number of possibilities for future use that the rhetor or deliverer of the text must anticipate. This reminds me of Lawrence Lessig’s assertions in Good Copy Bad Copy, when he said that he published work with the expectation that others would use it as a reference in their own work (e.g. in scholarly articles). He anticipated that before publishing—and even while writing—his work.

Landow argues that books and scholarly articles are explicitly hypertextual. This makes sense, if you think about the fact that scholarly articles reference many other works by many other authors to support their arguments. The order in which the other works are referenced does not necessarily indicate their importance or value—that is, there is no set hierarchy or organization. Rather, they all simply provide different information. Sampling, as discussed in Good Copy Bad Copy, works in much the same way. An artist can take bits of someone else’s work and incorporate it into their own, without any form of structure that indicates value. The samples are just other pieces of art that help to make one bigger piece. In this way, scholarly articles, arguably, employ a type of sampling, and sampling can be seen as a type of hypertext.

With all of this in mind, it is clear that hypertext is requires not only an active reader, but also an active deliverer. That is, the author, rhetor, or deliverer of hypertext must employ the strategy of rhetorical velocity, as Lessig did, because there are so many different focal points, experiences, and interpretations available in hypertext. 

-Jessica Gonzalez