Abstract

• Indexes are hylomorphic; they turn accidence into substance. • Indexes are authored, not merely produced. • The syntactic, alphabetic, and columnar form of indexes are rhetorically powerful. • Indexes are political because they destabilize hegemonic reading practices. This article, in the area of digital rhetoric, argues that the apparatus of the index is an authored text that bears all of the qualities of creative work. Its primary and distinguishing quality, moreover, is a hylomorphic one that bridges the temporal and material divide by taking the accidence in a text and naming it in substance. This dual nature is especially apparent in indexes that are produced by software, such as MS Word, that require the tagging of a main text to create what is called an “embedded index”; indexes of this sort exist both inside a main text and outside of it, in the tags and in the index list. Because the index both transforms (accidence to idea) and translates (from the main text to index list), the index has rhetorical force, interpreting a text for its readers. It does so as much by its content as by its formal qualities: syntactic, alphabetic, and columnar. Its persuasiveness in tandem with its intervention in the reading process, moreover, has social and political implications since the index can serve as both a means of rebellion and control for those who use and make them.