As David Kolb pointed out to the audiences who sat rapt during his Traversal of
Socrates in the Labyrinth, his work asks the question, “Does a philosophical argument need to be in a linear order?” “No,” he answers––but this seemingly benign line of thought suggests larger, more challenging questions relating to hegemony and the dominance of practices that limit modes of discourse, methodologies, perspectives, and ultimately thought. In this sense, the Minotaur is not the philosophical problem to solve by following threads of an argument through a maze of potential intellectual possibilities, but rather the representation of the singular idea that one must seek to slay––that is, if one’s heroism is up to it. Because the might of the Minotaur overwhelms the weak and foolish, only a Theseus (with the help of an Ariadne) can prevail.
Perhaps after experiencing even just the handful of lexias from the work read to us yesterday one could argue that Kolb was that warrior and hypertext, that muse. Kolb did arrive at the center of the maze––the truth where the monster resides––with the dual discovery that 1) “philosophy is more than argument,’ and 2) “hypertext opens up the possibility of new ways to do philosophy.” And while he is one hero whose labor went unsung by his colleagues in philosophy, Kolb was not ignored by media theorists. Reviews of his work by Nick Carbone, Susana Pajeres Tosca, and others lauded Kolb’s achievement as “well-crafted” and “exciting.”
But I am getting ahead of myself: "What
is 'Socrates in the Labyrinth?,'” you may ask.
It is one of a handful of hypertext essays published by Eastgate Systems, Inc. and the only one that focused on the topic of philosophy. It consists of five files: the titular one + four more: Habermas Pyramid, Earth Orbit, Cleavings, and Aristotle’s Argument. Kolb also produced a 6th file called Caged Text (named after the great experimental thinker, John Cage). This one, currently unpublished, was structured around random pages from randomly chosen books from his personal library and linked together by a mix of randomly selected and intentional paths to demonstrate that humans make meaning even under such circumstances.
Kolb, a classicist trained in both Greek and Latin who had taught philosophy at both the University of Chicago and Bates College, started "Socrates in the Labyrinth" in 1992 after reading Robert Coover’s article, “The End of Books,” for the
New York Times while Kolb was visiting Eugene, OR (where he now resides). Having been introduced to Mark Bernstein, the owner of Eastgate Systems, Inc. by another hypertext essayist, George Landow, Kolb purchased a copy of Storyspace and set out to use hypertext for exploring new methods for making philosophical arguments. Ultimately, Kolb rethinks Landow’s view of deconstruction and hypertext presented in Landow’s book,
Hypertext (1992), which arguably––along with Jay David Bolter’s
Writing Space (1991)––figured as among the most important works about hypertext theory of this period. Kolb argues instead that hypertext doesn’t necessarily take away a “primary axis of organization” (12) or “de-center[s]” a text (13). “It can,” Kolb says, “but it doesn’t have to.” Those of us who know ancient Greek grammar automatically recognize the suggestion of the Greek preposition
mev de (>on the one hand / on the other) that lends itself well to a broader notion of argumentation structuring Kolb’s findings.
Kolb's texts follow the multi-linear structure those of us familiar with The Storyspace School [1] come to expect of a hypertext built on this platform. Kolb’s hypertext presents us with a 195 nodes in the opening interface that open to other boxes nested within them. In total, "Socrates in the Labyrinth" is made of up 26,000 words, 307 nodes of text with 741 links.
The four hypertexts that accompany it are built on specific structures identifiable by their names. As Nick Carbone points out in his 1996 review of the work in
Kairos:
