Web Projects

Please post a link to your web project (and the text of your short description of same) as comment below before midnight, Dec 12.

12/04 – Control Systems, Control Societies

Readings: Protocol; Foucault Beyond Foucault

10/30 – A Rhetoric of the Multitude

Text: A Grammar of the Multitude

Presentation: Derek on Multitude

Housekeeping:

• 
• Keyword entries & web projects
• The next three weeks
  

A Multitude of Multitudes (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hardt & Negri): Virno doesn’t have any telos up his sleeve, no ready-made program for the multitude-certainly not coming out “the other side.” It’s been tried before, didn’t turn out so well. Why should a “postmodern revolution” be any different? Anyone who cares for the multitude should first figure out what it is about and what could be expected from it, not derive its mode of being from some revolutionary essence. The ultimate goal of Virno’s inventive inventory is “rescuing political action from its current paralysis.” Empire is trying that too, but a straw fight won’t do — The Multitude Strikes Back… Virno may be onto something when he suggests that Post-Fordism is the communism of capital.” It doesn’t say that there is no more fights in sight, that post-Fordism brought us “communism.” Fights should be expected, but not a war that would allegedly destroy the enemy. A combat rather, meant to strengthen some forces present in capital, and join them with other forces in order to form a new communist ensemble. This is what Virno has been attempting to provide: the description of a combat, a cartography of virtualities made possible by post-Fordism, elements in contemporary life that could eventually be mobilized. The problem is not to destroy capital or Empire — destroy, they say — but bolster one’s own power. What is a body capable of? (16-17)

Konoi Topoi: The transformation with which we must come to terms can be summarized in this way: in today’s world, the “special places” of discourse and of argumentation are perishing and dissolving, while immediate visibility is being gained by the “common places,” or by generic logical-linguistic forms which establish the pattern for all forms of discourse. This means that in order to get a sense of orientation in the world and to protect ourselves from its dangers, we can not rely on those forms of thought, of reasoning, or of discourse which have their niche in one particular context or another. The clan of sports fans, the religious community, the branch of a political party, the workplace: all of these “places” obviously continue to exist, but none of them is sufficiently characterized or characterizing as to be able to offer us a wind rose, or a standard of orientation, a trustworthy compass, a unity of specific customs, of specific ways of saying/ thinking things. Everywhere, and in every situation, we speak/ think in the same way, on the basis of logical-linguistic constructs which are as fundamental as they are broadly general. An ethical-rhetorical topography is disappearing. The “common places” (these inadequate principles of the “life of the mind”) are moving to the forefront: the connection between more and less, the opposition of opposites, the relationship of reciprocity, etc. These “common places,” and these alone, are what exist in terms of offering us a standard of orientation, and thus, some sort of refuge from the direction in which the world is going. (36-37)

The General Intellect and Linguistic-Virtuositic Labor: The speaker alone — unlike the pianist, the dancer or the actor— can do without a script or a score. The speaker’s virtuosity is twofold: not only does it not produce an end product which is distinguishable from performance, but it does not even leave behind an end product which could be actualized by means of performance. In fact, the act of parole makes use only of the potentiality of language, or better yet, of the generic faculty of language: not of a pre-established text in detail. The virtuosity of the speaker is the prototype and apex of all other forms of virtuosity, precisely because it includes within itself the potential/act relationship, whereas ordinary or derivative virtuosity, instead, presupposes a determined act (as in Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, let us say), which can be relived over and over again. But I will return to this point later. It is enough to say, for now, that contemporary production becomes “virtuosic” (and thus political) precisely because it includes within itself linguistic experience as such. If this is so, the matrix of post-Fordism can be found in the industrial sectors in which there is “production of communication by means of communication”; hence, in the culture industry. (56)

Publicness Without a Public Sphere: When the fundamental abilities of the human being (thought, language, self-reflection, the capacity for learning) come to the forefront, the situation can take on a disquieting and oppressive appearance; or it can even give way to a non-public public sphere, to a non-governmental public sphere, far from the myths and rituals of sovereignty. My thesis, in extremely concise form, is this: if the publicness of the intellect does not yield to the realm of a public sphere, of a political space in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces terrifying effects. A publicness without a public sphere: here is the negative side — the evil, if you wish — of the experience of the multitude. (40)

Non-Servile Virtuosity: How is non-servile virtuosity possible? How do we move, hypothetically, from a servile virtuosity to a “republican” virtuosity (understanding “republic of the multitude” to mean a sphere of common affairs which is no longer state-run)? How do we conceive, in principle, of political action based on the general intellect? We must tread this terrain carefully. All we can do is to point to the logical form of something that is still lacking a solid empirical experience. I am proposing two key-terms: civil disobedience and exit. (69)

The Communism of Capital: The metamorphosis of social systems in the West, during the 1980’s and 1990’s, can be synthesized in a more pertinent manner with the expression: communism of capital. This means that the capitalistic initiative orchestrates for its own benefit precisely those material and cultural conditions which would guarantee a calm version of realism for the potential communist. Think of the objectives which constitute the fulcrum of such a prospect: the abolition of that intolerable scandal, the persistence of wage labor; the extinction of the State as an industry of coercion and as a “monopoly of political decision-making”; the valorization of all that which renders the life of an individual unique. Yet, in the course of the last twenty years, an insidious and terrible interpretation of these same objectives has been put forth. First of all, the irreversible shrinking of socially necessary labor time has taken place, with an increase in labor time for those on the “inside” and the alienation of those on the “outside.” Even when squeezed by temporary workers, the entity of employed workers presents itself as “overpopulation” or as the “industrial reserve army.” Secondly, the radical crisis, or actually the desegregation, of the national States expresses itself as the miniature reproduction, like a Chinese box, of the form-of-State. Thirdly. after the fall of a “universal equivalent” capable of operating effectively, we witness a fetishistic cult of differences — except that these differences, claiming a substantial surreptitious foundation. give rise to all sorts of domineering and discriminating hierarchies.

Mid-Semester Feedback

According to Queens’ University, “Informal written feedback can help inform your teaching and to help you critically think about how the course is progressing.” So help me get informed and critically thinking about the progression of our course by dropping some anonymous feedback as a comment to this post (it becomes anonymous when you don’t log-in with your usual name/e-mail). Please respond to the following queries:

• What has been, in your estimation, working well about the course thus far?
• What can we do, that we haven’t been doing, that would improve the value of the course?
• Is there a burning question or theme in our subject matter that you think has not been adequately addressed in the course at this point?
• Which of our texts have you found most valuable and which one have you found to be least valuable?
• How you would describe our course in five words or less?

11/06 – There is Nothing Inside the Text

Readings: Electronic Literature and Avatars of Story

Presentation: Wendy on Radiant Textuality

10/30 – Everything is Image

Reading: The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle

Discussed: Allan Stoekl’s Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainabilty; Cognitive capitalism; The “credit crunch”; Derrida’s Spectres of Marx; Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man; Marx’s “Fragment on Machines“; Kojeve and the “End of History,” James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency; Nietzsche’s “last man“;  Tendency of the rate of profit to fall

TRPF: The progressive tendency of the general rate of profit to fall is, therefore, just an expression peculiar to the capitalist mode of production of the progressive development of the social productivity of labour. This does not mean to say that the rate of profit may not fall temporarily for other reasons. But proceeding from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, it is thereby proved logical necessity that in its development the general average rate of surplus-value must express itself in a falling general rate of profit. Since the mass of the employed living labour is continually on the decline as compared to the mass of materialised labour set in motion by it, i.e., to the productively consumed means of production, it follows that the portion of living labour, unpaid and congealed in surplus-value, must also be continually on the decrease compared to the amount of value represented by the invested total capital. Since the ratio of the mass of surplus-value to the value of the invested total capital forms the rate of profit, this rate must constantly fall. (Marx, Capital, III/13)

The End of History: What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. (Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man)

After the End of History: For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth. (Derrida, Spectres of Marx)

After the Orgy: The dirty secret of the American economy in the 1990’s was that is was no longer about anything except the creation of suburban sprawl and the furnishing, accessorizing and the financing of it. It resembled the efficiency of cancer. Nothing else really mattered except building suburban houses, trading away the mortgages, selling the multiple cars needed by the inhabitants, upgrading the roads into commercial strip highways with all the necessary shopping infrastructure, and moving vast supplies of merchandise made in China for next to nothing to fill up those houses. (James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency)

The Return of History: History will not, as some critics of the “end of history” thesis claimed, return  merely as localized struggles and revolts that put the superpowers on the spot. Instead, History now is the fight for that resource that will allow History as we have come to think of it – the flourishing of civilization and the establishment of the definitive dignity of Man – to continue and triumph. No one yet wants to think about how History should continue in the absence of an adequate supply of fossil fuels. it is too horrible to think about. Human die-off is quite natural, but it also constitutes an incontrovertible historical event. With the finitude of cheap energy, alas, the end of history is itself finite. (Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak, xi)

Capitalism is the Ultimate Deterritorializing Machine: “…it seems there is no longer a need for a State, for a distinct juridical and political domination, in order to ensure appropriation, which has become directly economic. The economy constitutes a worldwide axiomatic, a “universal cosmopolitan energy which overflows every restriction and bond,” a mobile and veritable substance “such as the total value of annual production.” Today we can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates through foreign exhange and across borders, eluding control by the States, forming a multinational ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto supranational power untouched by governmental decisions. But whatever dimensions or qualities this may have assumed today, capitalism has from the beginning mobilized a force of deterritorialization infinitely suprassing the deterritorialization proper to the State. (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 453)

Capitalism is Axiomatic: Codes have a momentary self-sufficiency about them, whether they subsist in the form of decorations (bodily tattoos, for example) or in the form of custom and myth, and even though they are prone to transformation into other codes in the immense slippage of history. Axioms, on the other hand, are operational; they do not offer anything for commentary or exegesis, but rather are merely a set of rules to be put into effect. And this is the sense in which capitalism repairs itself and surmounts its contradictions by adding new axioms: you are supposed to believe in a pure market system, that is to say, a rather simple axiomatic positing undisturbed exchanges. But when there is a crisis in free trade or the gold standard, you add the more complex axioms of Keynesianism: those do not modify the axiomatic of capitalism but merely complicate the operations that make it up. There can be no return here to any simple axiomatic or purer form of capitalism; only the addition of ever more rules and qualifications (rules against rules, for example, a dismantling of Keynesianism that has to use the latter’s structures and institutions in order to fulfill itself). (Fredric Jameson on Deleuze and Guattari, “Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze,” A Deleuzian Century 18)

Machinic Assemblage: In the history of philosophy the problem of the machine is generally considered a secondary component of a more general question, that of the techne, the techniques. Here I would like to propose a reversal of the view in which the problem of technique is a part of a much more extensive machine issue. This ‘machine’ is open to the outside and its machinic environment and maintains all kinds of relationships to social components and individual subjectivities. It is hence a matter of expanding the concept of the technological machine into one of the machinic assemblage… (Guattari, “Mega Machine”)

Machinic Enslavement: For example, one is subjected to TV insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the very particular situation of a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a subject of enunciation (”you, dear television viewers, who make TV what it is…”); the technical machine is the medium between two subjects. But one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television viewers are no longer consumers or users, not even subjects who supposedly “make” it, but intrinsic component pieces, “input” and “output,” feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as to produce or use it. In machinic enslavement, there is nothing but transformations and exchanges of information, some of which are mechanical, others human.” (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 458)

The Commodity as Spectacle: The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things” — attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality. [...] Whereas during the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation “political economy considers the proletarian only as a worker,” who only needs to be allotted the indispensable minimum for maintaining his labor power, and never considers him “in his leisure and humanity,” this ruling-class perspective is revised as soon as commodity abundance reaches a level that requires an additional collaboration from him. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity” simply because political economy now can and must dominate those spheres as political economy. The “perfected denial of man” has thus taken charge of all human existence. (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 36; 43)

Cognitive Capitalism: The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper. Machinery appears, then, as the most adequate form of fixed capital, and fixed capital, in so far as capital’s relations with itself are concerned, appears as the most adequate form of capital as such. (Marx, “Fragment on Machines”)

The Cinematic Mode of Production: …cinema is…the emerging paradigm for the total reorganization of society and (therefore) of the subject. From a systematic point of view, cinema arises out of a need for the intensification of the extraction of value from human bodies beyond normal physical limits and beyond normal working hours – it is an innovation that will combat the generalized falling rate of profit. [...] l What I call “the attention theory of value” finds in the notion of “labor,” elaborated in Marx’s labor theory of value, the prototype of the newest source of value production under capitalism today: value-producing human attention. The cinematic organization of attention yields a situation in which attention, in all forms imaginable and yet to be imagined (from assembly-line work to spectatorship to internet-working and beyond), is that necessary cybernetic relation to the socius – the totality of the social – for the production of value for late capital. At once the means and archetype for the transfer of attentional biopower (its conversion into value and surplus value) to capital, what is meant today by “the image” is a cryptic synonym for these relations of production. The history of cinema, its development from an industrial to an electronic form, is the open book in which may be read the history of the image as the emergent technology of he leveraged interface of biopower and the social mechanism. (13; 4-5)

The Man with a YouTube Movie: Vertov’s brilliant articulation of the relationship between the formation of the image and the formation of what will, despite his best efforts, remain the commodity foretells not the end of prehistory and the historical victory of communism but the emergence of new laws of exchange. The image in circulation will indeed carry the logic of exchange-value, but for capital. (52)

Technologic: The meshing of the microprocesses of the biological organism outlined by Pavlov with the macroprocesses of the socio-industrial organism outlined by Taylor in the cinema of Eisenstein is predicated upon the logic of isolated organs, rationalized functions, repetition, selection, and conditioning. The extension of this logic to the body through the eye shows that a cybernetic integration of social mechanisms is occurring; radically different mechanisms are being shot through with systemic compatability. In computer talk: Industry, the nervous system, and representation are all beginning to speak a compatabile language, a compatible machine  – or systems – language. (137)

The Prison of Attention: Along with life and labor, the very consciousness of our bodies has been and is being expropriated. For this we have become not just spectators, but specters. The only way out, short of a complete expropriation of the expropriators, a radical redistribution of wealth and a complete overhaul of the human network (whatever that would look like), is to drop out completely, that is, for all practical purposes, to cease to exist, to cease to speak, write or be written as the discourse of the spectacle. Otherwise, you (or at least chunks of you) are working for the man. Sorry, Jim, but that’s how it is. (295)

Resistance?: Immortal Technique’s “The Poverty of Philosophy” is another technology for the bundling of attention, but its method of operation, its rational and its rationalizations are markedly different than the internet models. This bundling is not undertaken (exclusively, anyway) to be parsed and resold. It…calls upon the various modes of attending we have developed historically and assembles them to create its aesthetic/intellectual/communitarian experience…and it bundles the attention required both to produce the piece for the artist (the reservoir of past forms and learning, Marxism, decolonization, anti-racist struggle, rap) and for the audience (the collective modes of relating both to the piece and to one another). [...] Binary code may transmit the mp3 files that disseminate “The Poverty of Philosophy” and thousands if not millions of similar encodings, but running the program requires wetware and organizes zones that are beyond the reach of the project and projection of capital. Or so we must assume. And, perhaps, is is there in the shadows, that the poverty of philosophy may be seen to express Our new power. This time, here, now, it is capital that will have to catch up or fizzle out. Either way, there will be blood. (311-312)

Abstracts

Please post your abstracts (as a comment) to this post. As mentioned in class, the details are as follows:

FIRST ABSTRACT:

• Suggested length: 400-600 words
• Deadline: before midnight, October 29
• Abstract style: more like a conference abstract (description of your topic and your line of inquiry) than like an article abstract (with a fully-formed thesis and conclusion)
• Contents: as specific a description as possible of your project as well as your intended “use” of the project – will you present it a conference? will you send it out for publication? (include names of possible conferences/journals)
• Follow-up: revised abstract with annotated bibliography (8-12 entries) due in two weeks

SECOND ABSTRACT/ANNOTATED BIBS:

• Suggested length: same for abstracts (400-600 words); your 8-10 source annotations should be between a half and a full double-spaced page
• Contents: try to be a bit more specific with the abstracts this time around; the annotations should summarize the item under review and also detail how it useful to your project
• Deadline: please post your revised abstract and annotated bib before midnight, Nov 19

10/23 – No Time like the Telepresent

Reading: Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television

Reading: Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews

The Flows of Television: The general trend, towards an increasing variability and miscellaneity of public communications, is evidently part of a whole social experience. It has profound connections with the growth and development of greater physical and social mobility, in conditions both of cultural expansion and consumer rather than community cultural organizsation. Yet until the coming of broadcasting the normal expectation was still of a discrete event or of a succession of discrete events. People took a book or a pamphlet or a newspaper, went out to a play or a concert or a meeting or a match, with a single predominant expectation and attitude. The social relationships set up in these various cultural events were specific and in some degree temporary. (Williams, Television 88)

In the Time of Television: When television forms no longer follow a single representational logic, a plateau of totalization has been reached: television images can adhere to every body in motion, a value marked there in reserve, waiting for the chance to reenter the machinery, whether played out as need or as work. Television images do not represent things so much as they take up time, and to work through that time is the most pervasive way that subjects suffer through, participate in, and perhaps even glimpse, the global unification of contemporary capitalism. (Dienst 64)

In the Time of Television: The least acceptable thing on television, on the radio, or in the newspapers today is for intellectuals to take their time or to waste other people’s time there. Perhaps this is what must be changed in actuality: its rhythm. Media professionals aren’t supposed to waste any time. Neither theirs or ours. Which they are nonetheless often sure to do. They know the cost, if not the value, of time. (”Artifactualities” 6-7)

Tactics: All of this theorizing of television – its discourses, its appartus, its interests – settles sooner or later on the place of the viewer, the recipient, the site in front of the screen. Time and again, each theoretical snapshot tries to take into account what Sartre would call the “facticity” of television, the impression that it stands over against us, soliciting and repulsing our efforts to engage it constructively. Our best tactic may be stubbornness: staring down the images onscreen, looking at television as if it were not already there, and thereby producing our own fields of visibilty. (Dienst, 33)

Control Society: …if telecommunications in general is pursuing a logic of ever greater diversification and differentiation, there can be no panoptic focal point. How can this matrix be understood in terms of power? Deleuze has suggested that the panoptic disciplinary systems have been thrown into crisis, given way to “societies of control” populated by amorphous capitalist enterprises. There is a corresponding shift in figures: as rigid discipline spreads out and becomes flexible control, the “enclosed” subject becomes an “indebted” subject. Here, then, we can recognize the prototypical television viewer: in exchange with the screen a revolving debt is incurred, one payment is dispensed while the other is held back, so that an obligation and an interest are set against the future. [...] The televisual bargain will last, moment by moment, image by image, as long as we feel we owe something to television, whether it is the solemn duty to find sense in what we see or the sweet burden to pursue our pleasures there. Whereas automatic time demands that we keep watching, still time demands that we keep switching; driven by these two pressures, the image onscreen extends its claim over other images, near and distant, already past and yet to come. But if we insist on the possiblity of seeing the future anew, delivered from the contraints of the unbearable present time, our eyes ought to be trained not on television but on the active and critical powers of thought. (Dienst 169)

Moment of Zen

Right of Inspection/Cognitive Liberty: There is much to say, whether about the right to penetrate a “public” or “private” space, the right to “introduce” the eye and all these optical prostheses (movie camera, still cameras, etc.) into the “home” of the other, or whether about the right to know who owns, who is able to appropriate, who is able to select, who is able to show images, directly political or not. I had used this expression, “right of inspection,” in reference to photography, to a mute photographic work, the narrative matrices of which I had multiplied, but it goes far beyond the question of art – or of photography as art. It concerns everything that, in public space today, is regulated by the production and circulation of images, real or virtual, and thus of gazes, eyes, optical prostheses, etc. (”Right of Inspection” 34)

Technical limits, technical training: …not only is all regulation in the form of state law, all cultural protection decided by a nation-state dangerous in itself, but it is outdated from a technical standpoint. [...] What is possible and, in my opinion, desirable are not legislative decisions concerning the production and distribution of whatever it is, but open programs of education and training in the use of this technology, these technical means. [...] Most people who drive a car, who use a telephone, e-mail, or a fax machine, and a fortiori people who watch television, don’t know how it works. They use these things in a position or relative incompetence. I would be tempted to see in this relative incompetence and its incommensurable increase as compared with the incompetence of the past, along with the decline of state sovereignty, one of the keys to most of hte unprecedented phenomena that people are trying to assimilate to old monsters in order to conjure them away (the “return of the religions,” “nationalist” archaisms). (”Artifactuality, Homohegemony” 54; “Acts of Memory: Topopolitics and Teletechnology” 57)

The Evolution of the Technical Synthesis Implies the Evolution of the Spectatorial Synthesis: The Technological synthesis is not a replica, not a double of life, any more than writing is a replication fo speech, but there is a complex of writing in which the two terms always move together, being in a tranductive relation. [...] …just as certain kinds of writing actually liberate certain kinds of reflexivity (for example, certain kinds of linear, alphabetic writing, without which law, science, and in particular history would be inconceivable), so certain kinds of image-objects are doubtless destined to liberate reflexivity in the domains of the visible and of movement, just as alphabetic writing reveals the discrete characters of language. Techniques of digitization of animated images are going to become very widespread in global society through multimedia and digital television. The relation of the analog image is going to b massively discretized, thrown into crisis, it is going to open up a critical access to the image. There is a chance, if it can be seized, to develop a culture of reception. Which might lead to another way of formulating the question of the cultural exception. The real problem here is to rethink or think otherwise what Hollywood has up to this point done in the domain of the culture industry, to which cinema and television belong. For what it has done, it has done in accordance with reifying schema, and by opposing production to consumption, that is to say: by putting analysis on one side (production) and synthese on the other (consumption). Technology is giving us the chance to modify this relation, in a direction that would bring it closer to the relation of the literate person to literature: it is not possible to synthesize a book without having analyzed literally onself. It is not possible to read without knowing how to write.  And soon it will be possible to see an image analytically: “television” and “text” are not simply opposed. (”The Discrete Image” 162-163)

Moment of Zen

10/16 – Programming the Digital Age

Reading: Multiliteracies for a Digital Age

Presentation: Conor on Kress’ Literacy in the New Media Age (wiki log-in key = “conor”)

Discussed:

The Problem: …computer literacy is a vexing and ongoing problem even for teachers who have good support systems. Many in the profession are understandably skeptical about getting involved in computer literacy initiatives. One explanation for this skepticism is that those who work with technology can quite easily find themselves in a number of precarious situations. Some are fortunate to have access to impressive computer facilities but find themselves operating in a culture that vastly underestimates what must be learned to take advantage of technology and to understand its social and pedagogical implications. Others function rather productively in relative isolation, organizing an active community of dedicated graduate students and part-time instructors, while bending over backwards to entice faculty colleagues to invest their time and energy in a new direction. Still others – the great majority of teachers, I argue – are encouraged, even mandated, to integrate technology into the curriculum, yet no incentives are given for such an ambitious assignment, one that places an extra workload burden on teachers, adding considerably to their overall job activities. (2)

Multiliteracies: …teachers should emphasize different kinds of computer literacies and help students become skilled at moving among them in strategic ways. The three literacy categories that organize my discussion – functional, critical, and rhetorical – are meant to be suggestive rather than restrictive, and more complimentary than in competition with each other. [...] Students who are not adequately exposed to all three literacy categories will find it difficult to participate fully and meaningfully in technological activities. (24)

Technology as Artifact: It is indeed a shameful act that certain technologies have been designed in order to repress subaltern groups. Harley Shaiken reports on a machine shop that installed an override switch on an automatic turret punch press so that the company could send the symbolic message to workers that management was in control. [...] Langdon Winner mentions a number of examples in which the designs of of technologies have served purposes of domination: the design of college campuses to diffuse student demonstrations; the design of industrial plants to deter union activities; the design of overpasses to segregate people of color who ride city buses. [...] Still, at least two other explanations (not excuses) for abusive designs are possible. First, a design can be socially inattentive. [...] Second, a design can have unexpected consequences. (89-90)

Functional Literacy: …why do so many students today still operate the computer like a glorified typewriter? In part because teachers often implicitly or explicitly dismiss student experiments with genres and formats, and in part because certain documentation styles remain quite traditional (the MLA style, for example…puts angled brackets around Website addresses as opposed to permitting actual hyperlink designations). In addition, however, teachers have not paid enough attention to the so-called advanced features of software programs (e.g., style sheets, master pages…), which are typically explained in the associated help features. [...] These five parameter – eduational goals, social conventions, specialized discourses, management activities, and technological impasses – provide a framework within which teachers of writing and communication can conceive a productive approach to functional literacy that encompasses computers. On the whole, they serve as an alternative to the prescriptive lists of software skills churned out in academic settings by technologists and administrators who fail to problematize modern literacy practices that seem to be given and natural but are in fact subject to social forces. (48; 72)

Critical Literacy: …students that are critically literate can work against the grain of conventional preoccupations and narratives, implicating design cultures, use contexts, institutional forces, and popular representations within the shape and direction of computer-based artifacts and activities (95).

Rhetorical Literacy: …students who are rhetorically literate can effect change in technological systems. Students should not be just effective users of computers, nor should they be just informed questioners. Although these two roles are essential, neither one encourages a sufficient level of participation. In order to function most effectively as agents of change, students must also become reflective producers of technology, a role that involves a combination of functional and critical abilities. (182)

10/9 – Don’t Believe the Hype: The Digital Divide and the Third Way

Reading: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology

Discussed: African American Jeremiad; Houston A. Baker, Jr.; Amiri Baraka; Black Arts Movement; Black Voices; BlackPlanet; City of Bits; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Keith Gilyard; Harlem Renaissance; Langston Hughes; Ishmael Reed; The “third way” in African American rhetoric, Feenberg, and Neoliberalism; George Schuyler; Langdon Winner

Ishmael Reed (1974): And why all this antagonism toward individuality? Insects have individuality, even ants. You can’t predict the behavior of one shark by observing that of another shark, and each wolf has a different tone, yet these people will go about saying we are all the same, then shout down Shockley and Henson when they suggest that we are subhuman or want to fight when somebody says they can’t tell them apart. The Afro-American’s great asset may be his “unpredictability”…There’s always been a final solution suggested against Afro-Americans and they’ve always had the means to carry it out. We’re still here. (Shrovetide in Old New Orleans 140).

Amiri Baraka (1980): …in the Fall of 1979, I put forward the idea that there is a revolutionary tradition in Afro-American literature. I also implied, and to a certain extent discussed, the obvious capitulationist tradition in that literature – obvious, because the dialectic would automatically suggest that if there were a revolutionary tradition, then its opposite would also be present. I think it should be added that probably the majority of Afro-American writers fall somewhere between those two poles, as “middle forces” that are swayed, guided, directed, or influenced, given their peculiar individual experiences, by one of these stances or the other. But the genuinely major Afro-American writers have been part of the revolutionary tradition, and there is a preponderance of patriots as opposed to copouts among Black writers. [...] Recently the bourgeoisie has been pushing Ishmael Reed very hard…in essay after essay Reed stumps for individualism, and asserts ubiquitously that the leadership of Black folks is the Black middle class, rather than the working class, but it gets even further out than that. [...] …in the recent climate of celebration of capitulation and upholding of the compradors, the real garbage in the brains of these traitors comes out. And this is what their aesthetic is built on. (”Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle” 5; 11-12)

Houston A. Baker, Jr. (1984): …Afro-American culture is a complex, reflexive enterprise which finds its proper figuration in blues conceived as a matrix. A matrix is a womb, a network, a fossil-bearing rock, a rocky trace of a gemstone’s removal, a principal metal in an alloy, a mat or plate for reproducing print or phonograph records, The matrix is a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit. Afro-American blues constitute such a vibrant network. The are what Jacques Derrida might describe as the “always already” of Afro-American culture. They are the multiplex, enabling script in which Afro-American discourse is inscribed. [...] A further characterization of blues suggests they are involved in the code’s Hegelian “force.” In the Phenomenology, Hegel speaks of a flux in which there is “only difference as a universal difference, or as a difference into which the many antitheses have been resolved. This difference, as a universal difference, is consequently the simple element in the play of force itself and what is true in it. It is the law of Force.” Force is thus defined as a relational matrix where difference is the law. (Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature 3-4; 6)

Houston A. Baker, Jr. (1987): The “changing same” is Amiri Baraka’s designation for the interplay between tradition and individual talent in Afro-American music. Invoked in reference to the Harlem Renaissance and Afro-American modernism, the phrase captures strategies that I designate as the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery. (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance 15)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1983): Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey. The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as similanlike, the Signifying Monkey – he who dwells at the margins of discourse, evern punning, ever troping, every embodying the ambiguities of language – is or trope for repetition and revision, indeed it is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, a figure of a figure. (”The Blackness of Blackness” 686)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1988): Naming the black tradition’s own theory of itself is to echo and rename other theories of literary criticism. Our task is not to reinvent our traditions as if they bore no relation to that tradition created and borne, in the main, by white men. Our writes used that impressive tradition to define themselves, both with and against their concept of received order. We must do the same, with or against the Western critical canon. To name our tradition is to rename each of its antecedents, no matter how pale they might seem. To rename is to revise, and to revise is to Signify. (The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism xxiii)

Technology and (In)Equality: Not only are Black people forced to catch up to technological tools and systems and educational systems to which they have been denied access, but they are required to do so in a nation (or system) in which the struggle they endure to gain any such access to any new technology, any acquisition of any new literacies, is rewarded by a change in the dominant technological systems and the literacies used to facilitate access to them, and thus the same struggle over and over again. The only difference is that the consequences are peoples’ life chances, their material realities, whether they get to eat, have homes, and live fulfilling lives. (xxi)

The Argument: The overall argument I make is this: rather than answer either/or questions about whether technological advancement and dependence leads us to to utopia or dystopia, whether technologies overdetermine or have minimal effects on a society’s development, or whether people (especially those who have been systematically excluded from both the society and its technologies) should embrace or avoid those technologies, African American history as reflected throught its rhetorical production shows a group of people who consistently refused to settle for the limiting parameters set by either/or binaries. Instead African Americans have always sought “third way” answers to systematically racist exclusions, demanding full access to and participation in American society and its technologies on their own terms, and working to transform both the society and its technologies, to ensure that not only Black people but all Americans can participate as full partners. (2)

Beyond “the word”: African American rhetoric has always been multimedia, has always been about the body and voice and image, even when they only set the stage for language. Even within a definition of African American rhetoric as only being about the word, careful considerations of how current technologies can extend its study will provide a much richer body of work for rhetorical criticism and analysis. (25)

The Digital Divide: The Digital Divide is not the equivalent of national “why Johnny can’t read” campaigns that brand Black people illiterate in the service of continued American racism, but rather, was deployed by Black technology innovators in the Clinton administration (namely Irving and William Kennard, the FCC chairman who preceded Michael Powell), community organizations, academics like Abdul Alkalimat, and activists in order to call attention to systemic inequalities – the same inequalities that the AfroGeeks acknowledge in their rant. Moreover, their embrace of technologies is unequivocal; lumping those with any critical consciousness about the ills they could caus or exacerbate as Luddites and technophobes who are part of the problem by announcing that the transition must be from phobia to philia. More worrisome than either of these issues, however, is the fact that they see their erasure as the result of the struggle for equitable access rather than part of the larger problem of the Divide, reflecting the same crabs-in-the-barrel mentality, the same scorn for Black people who have been systematically denied the educations and digital literacies they enjoy that were the worst excesses of the turn of the 20th-century uplift ideology. (36)

Malcom X and Martin Luther King: …I want to suggest how a change in the analytic tools we bring to bear on the study of African American rhetoric can allow us to do what we have always done, but better. Such a change can take us to texts and performances that have not received the same attention as Malcolm and King have. It can lead to new insights on how activists managed to “jack” access through whatever means possible, insights that can lead to strategies for doing the same with new technologies, helping rhetors can acquire far more control over messages than we have had at other times in our history. (55)

A Different “Third Way,” A Different Centrism: The brotherhood King posits as necessary to our survival is different because it depends on a mutual responsibility that demands the correction of past injustices, with American racism the chief among them. This is what cable news channels fail to grasp when they play their favorite clips from the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and what neoconservatives either fail to understand or ignore when they sample his words for a song he wouldn’t sing. The difference between King’s global vision and corporate or governmental globalisms, between a global neighborhood and a global brotherhood, is the same as the difference between actively including those who have been denied technological access and casually placing a few computers in a few libraries and arguing that it is the responsibility of those who have been denied to find their own way. (63)

Black Digital Ethos: Black digital ethos is the combination of all these abilities Martin Luther King and Malcolm X demonstrated, rooted in African American traditions, committed to a larger project of transformation to make some real difference in the lives of Black people, however they define that difference. It is rhetorical excellence based on both a mastery of skills and a broader critical awareness. It is an understanding of the workings of individual technologies  and the larger networks of power in which they operate. It is a vision for the role of technology in its most general sense in the lives of Black people and in a common humanity. It is an ability to stage the event,  manage the interview, give the speech, create the weblog, bring the television cameras, get on the radio, preach at the church, or whatever else is necessary, in whatever forum, with whatever tools, to carry one’s message to the people regardless of the differences of power that might exist, regardless of the knowledges, needs and assumptions audiences bring with them. A Black digital ethos is the set of attitudes, knowledges, expectations, and commitments we need to bring to our dealings with individual technological tools and to that larger, macrolevel awarness we need. Malcom and Martin and all the networks of their collaborators, parishioners, opponents begin  to show us the way. (67)

African American Rhetoric of Design: As contrasted with notions of specific visual or design aesthetic, by African American rhetoric of design I mean a set of principles for design taken from the work of people who used their work to aid some sense of collective struggle, a kind of heuristic that can be applied to design processes regardless of their different aesthetic choices one might make. This rhetoric fo design is bidirectional, working on both sides of transformation, and would challenge designers to build freedom and pathways to it into technologies and spaces. (107)

The Intellectual Mixtape: …I ask students to compile a soundtrack to the ideas we’ve covered during a particular course or course cycle. This assignment serves not only as a review exercise, but forces students to engage the ideas again and connect them to music, artists, and traditions they enjoy. This assignment also allows me (sometimes) to directly engage issues of intellectual property and ethics with digital technologies and writing processes. There is potential I have not yet tapped in an assignment like this, as it could allow one to move from basic issues like what copyright law allows as fair use to how groups have organized in resistance to the domination of major media companies in the forming and enforcement fo those laws, eroding almost all sense of public good or fair use. Such examinations could then, in a technologically focused course, link various copyleft and open source movements (and their own ironic racialized exclusions) to the patterns of textual borrowing and building that marks forms like the African American sermon to such an extent that preachers often jokingly relate their citation system. (142)

Access: Acess requires an individual or group of people having the material of any particular technology, along with the knowledge ad experience and genuine inclusion in the networks in which decisions are made about their design and implementation that enable them to use – or refuse – them in ways that make sense in their lives. Combining these four levels or access (material, functional, experiential, critical) in some way than can represent transformation in similarly a multi-faceted task. People must think and act simultaneously along the axes of critique, use, and design. The Jeremiah cannot work alone to point out the failings of a society; people must also be prepared to imagine, design, and build new systems, new documentation, new tools, new networks that assume and naturalize the epistemologies of those who (in this case, African Americans) have been left out. Their histories and assumptions must be naturalized, centered, in those new spaces. And finally, along with both critique and design, those who press for change must be able to count on users to participate in those new, tecnologized spaces, as problematic as they might seem. (135)