Untitled - witz cultural

09RECONFIGURINGTHE TEXTmaking up for their inevitable shortcomings. From the point of view of oneconsidering either the relation of hypertext to markup languages or thehypertextualization of them, the problem becomes one of finding some wayto encode or signal multiple structures or multiple classifications of structure.Ifa scholarly annotation and main text can exchange roles, status, andnature, then one needs a device that permits a SGML- or XMl-marked lexiato present a different appearance, ifso required, on being entered or openedfrom different locations.Returning to our examples from "Hudson's Statue," we realize that readersstarting from Carlyle's tert will experience linked materials on Chartismand the People's League as annotations to it, but readers starting with primary or secondary materials concerning these political movements willexperience "Hudson's Statue" as an annotation to them. When discussingwriting for electronic space in chapter 5, I suggest ways in which both softwaredesigners and individual authors have to assist readers. For the momentI shall point out only that one such means of orienting and hence empoweringreaders takes the form of clearly indicating the permeable borders of theprovisional text to which any lexia belongs. Using such orientation rhetoricmight require that materials by Carlyle have a different appearance fromthose of conceivably related materials, such as lexias about the English Revolutionof the 1640s and Victorian political movements. In such a case, oneneeds a way of configuring the text according to the means from which it isaccessed. This textual polyrnorphism in turn suggests that in such environmentstext is alive, changing, kinetic, open-ended in a new way.Argu mentation, Organization,and RhetoricElectronic linking, which gives the reader a far more activerole than is possible with books, has certain major effects.Considered from the vantage point of a literature intertwinedwith book technology, these effects appear harmfirl and dangerous,as indeed they must be to a cultural hegemony based, as ours is, on adifferent technology of cultural memory. In particular, the numerating linearrhetoric of "first, second, third" so well suited to print will continue to appearwithin individual blocks of text but cannot be used to struchrre arguments ina medium that encourages readers to choose different paths rather than followa linear one. The shift away from linearization might seem a majorchange, and it is, but we should remind ourselves that it is not an abandonmentof the natural."The structuring of books," Tom McArthur reminds us, "is anything but'natural'-indeed,it is thoroughly unnatural and took all of 4,000 years to