10/02 – The Rebirth of the Cool

Reading: The Rhetoric of Cool

Presentation: Cindy Mooty-Hoffmann on Writing New Media

Discussed: Actor-Network Theory; Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; Roland Barthes; “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century”; The Conquest of Cool; Electronic Revolution; Expressivism; The Laws of Cool; Marshall McLuhan; The Morbidity of Current-Traditional Rhetoric; Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon; Three Degrees of David Bowie; Uptaught

A New Genealogy of Composition Studies: My re-presentation of a history (and not necessarily, the history) of composition studies i meant as a sub/version, for who would think to associate composition studies and cool? And when I make that connection, how am I undermining an assumed history of composition studies? By arguing for a sub/version, I want to make composition studies uncomfortable about its history because we have agreed to quickly about what that history entails. But I don’t yearn for uncomfortability merely for the sake of upsetting. By undermining an accepted history (and thus the consequences of this history), I want to disrupt composition’s commonplace assumptions regarding cultural studies, technology, and writing, how they fit into a given curriculum, and how they mesh with one another. Out of this discomfort, I hope that composition studies will come to understand and work with new positions. What I pose is one alternative, one re-presentation, one sub/version meant to draw us out of a dominant re-presentation in circulation today. Out of this alternative, I would hope others will follow as well. (18)

Digital Culture as Model for Literacy: …this book will define a rhetorical practic conducive and generalizable to digital culture. The rhetorical moves I identify as belonging to the rhetoric of cool are possible only because of digital culture: they challenge and disrupt print-oriented conventions and structural logic. Even if those texts and writers writers I draw upon to learn these practices don’t actually work with technology, the rhetorical value I find and present as part of the rhetoric of cool is the result of post-World War II American culture, a culture largely shaped by an emerging electronic apparatus based on television, film, the transistor, radio, and, of course, the computer. The figures I draw upon could not have produced the rhetorical work they did within any other kind of apparatus; their work is technologically fashioned by implicit and explicit forces. (21)

Chora, Appropriation, and Juxtaposition: When the spirit of appropriation is reduced to another corporate slogan or commercial strategy, its rhetorical value is as minimal a Elbow asking student to utilize collage for coherent meaning or Web texts always emphasizing their hierarchical order. In these kinds of scenarios, appropriation serves only to reinstitutionalize the already accepted form of discourse. Appropriation is not applied in order to make a new rhetorical turn; it is used to keep the same rhetoric already in place. My interests are in thinking about appropriation differently. [...] Literate society in 1963, represented in composition studies…strucures our current understanding of literacy as framed by Aristotlean methods of logic and persuasion (how an oral delivery persuades an audience or compliments its expectations), and not as a “new physics, as McLuhan poetically describes new media. The new physics, like hip-hop’s droppin’ science, represents a nonliterate, or beyond literate, method of producing knowledge outside the parameters of argumentation in which exploration, as Ong and McLuhan claim, involves a “sounding out” of sorts in the quest to combine information in unlikely manners. Sampling signifes one kind of digital writing that puts these ideas into a composition practice. (60; 90)

Nonlinearity and the Rhetoric of Cool Contra the Conquest of Cool: Currently we find the most widely applied semantic moves in Web sites that track user usage or purchasing habits. Amazon.com and Aol.com are two of the most dominant enterprises employing semantic information structures toward information creation and distribution; these sites generate connections among user purchases based on word choice, titles of products, or associative gestures (this book you are buying sounds like this CD, so you might want it too). The writing may or may not be correct (I don’t want the CD), but such a point is immaterial. Within nonlinear threads, meaning is established. One item connects to another item in suprising or expected ways; regardless of which, there is meaning in these connections. That meaning’s specificity, of course, depends on all kinds of contexts and situations. Yet in these types of examples, we find that there exists a new media logic that allows for associative nonlinear reasoning and writing. Rather than ask how we can avoid the traps such writing poses for our consumer habits, we should ask how can we use such media for a composition-oriented cool writing. (125)

Imagery: …when questions of “fact” are disputable – such as a government clinging to the validity of segregation – and when conclusions don’t always flow from given premises (“all men are created equal” but what to make of segregation? If all “men” are equal, why is Dexter Gordon sill in the projects?), how do writer compensate? To read or to write the Blue Note record cover is not to encounter a fact or a reliable conclusion or a logical response to tense social conditions. The Blue Note rhetoric is not a replication of traditional syllogistic argumentation. Its mix of iconic display and juxtaposition propose a more complex construction of ideas. Is Mo’ Greens Please actually a plea for African-American empowerment as I initially suggested? Or does it comment on how stereotypical African-American habits (like eating soul food) are picked up uncritically by African-American culture itself? Or can both arguments be read off of the cover? Or is the argument something else entirely? (150)

The Rhetoric of Cool and the Future of Composition: Is writing the teaching of thesis-driven representation, is it a rhetoric devoted largely to the concepts of audience and purpose, or is it only logical reasoning? Does a writer really need purpose or a sense or audience each time she sits down to write? Should she be inventing the university or media culture? Or – and possibly in addition to these items – does writing also include those items I note as central to the rhetoric of cool? These are questions for the future work of composition studies. [...] Our task today is to reimagine the status quo, to reconceptualize writing so that it includes, among other things, the notion of cool. [...] we can more fully realize electronic writing in our work, our teaching, our research, and elsewhere. To do all of this, we can become cool in ways we haven’t yet begun to imagine. To do any of this, we must imagine ourselves and our work entirely. (157)

9/25 – The Informatic Habitus

Reading: Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work

Discussed: Articulation Theory; Cloud Computing; The Communism of Capital; Computers & Composition (field); Computers & Composition (journal);  Formal and Real Subsumption; Habitus; Information Architecture; The New Spirit of Capitalism: Sarah Palin, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge; $upercapitalism; Symbolic-Analytic Work; “There Will Come Soft Rains”

Information as Habitus: …how we live has changed: We have come to work with information as a primary environment and resource. Whereas the industrial age focuses on the production of information, in his epoch, information workers do not merely use information, they inhabit it. (3)

Bridging the Critical/Practical Divide: Articulation theory forefront resistant, political stances that many (although not all) symbolic-analytic workers would vehemently protest. yet that contradiction is also the reason to force them together: Articulation theory provides a method for politicizing symbolic-analytic work, whereas symbolic-analytic work provides vocational training for what too easily can devolve into liberal posturing. Datacloud, in one limited sense, is a job ad for information age cultural workers. (19)

Interface as Surface: As we move toward more graphical interfaces, the location of working and learning information begins to shift; learning is buried in the interface (in online help and tutorials), but increasingly the interface – the surface – provides users with suggestions and hints about how to work. In other words, learning and work increasingly take place at the surface of the computer. The interface captures multiple, overlapping spaces that support an increasingly complex array of tasks: word processing, e-mail, graphics design, page layout, presentation of design, video, and more (e.g., the analysis and manipulation of symbols). (45)

Deskilling in the Information Age: Paradoxically, increases ease of use also worries me; it is now much more likely that people will create Web pages without a broader learning context – without understanding anything about interactivity, screen layout, and information design. [...] In a sense, the ease of use tends to move the task of constructing Web pages away from a symbolic-analytic skill and toward a routine production or in-person service skill. (49)

The Spime of Symbolic-Analytic Work: In interfaces that relate to information work, we begin to see a split: Programs that support information consumption tend to prioritize the line and time, whereas those that support information production tend to prioritize space (and often colonize time by turning it into space). Some programs support both information production and consumption, with a small class (which I will return to later) supporting production and consumption as both temporal and spatial activities – in other words, disarticulation and rearticulation. These activities suggest new directions for support for symbolic-analytic work. (102)

Deconstructive Architecture: Whereas traditional architecture (and information architecture) would deem contingency and chaos as negative aspects, deconstructive architecture recognizes the productive and creative potential in those characteristics. Just as important, deconstructive architecture frequently involves social commentary in ways commensurate with the social project of articulation theory. So we might consider the work of deconstructive architecture as something akin to Stuart Hall’s understanding of the place of postmodernism in relation to articulation theory – not a rejection, but a recuperation and reclaiming of terrain and power. The fragmenting impulses contained (and exploded) by these gestures do not obliterate opportunities for meaning; they make new meanings possible. (126)

David Toews Lecture – 12:30 PM, 9/23

9/18 – The Machine of the New Soul

Reading: Technics & Time

Presentations: Crystal Starkey on Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual

Discussed: Blanchot; Dasein; Merlin Donald; Electracy; Everything Bad is Good for You; The First Sophistic; Genesis, Heidegger; Kant; The Man Without Qualities; Meno; No Future; Rotary Phones; Brian Rotman; Rousseau; Gilbert Simondon; The Superfold; Techne; White Noise; Norbert Wiener

Tekhne and Episteme: At the beginning of its history philosophy separates tekhne from episteme, a distinction that had not yet been made in Homeric times. The separation is determined by a political context, one in which the philosopher accuses the Sophist of instrumentalizing the logos as rhetoric and logography, that is, as both an instrument of power and a renunication of knowledge (Chatelet 1965, 60-61). It is in the inheritance of this conflict – in which the philosophical episteme is pitched against the sophistic tekhne, whereby all technical knowledge is devalued – that the essence of technical entities in general is concieved. (1)

A Radical Mechanology: The relation of functional overdetermination is  a relation of objective implication – coming from the object itself – through the solidarity of the constitutive elements of the object. This is not a logical implication: it is not imposed in the immanence of the experience. The evolution of technical objects thus does not stem from the nontechnical environment of “other systems.” There is obviously a common dynamic to all systems: “there is a convergence of economic constraints (matter, labor, energy) and properly technical demands.” But the technical system, and above all the technical object in its proper dynamic within the technical system “prevails in evolution” (Simondon 1958, 26). The analyses by Gille and Leroi-Gourhan of technical evolution must be radicalized. The technical system, the universal tendency that it carries, are no longer the partners of the “other systems”; the technical object lays down the law that is its own, it affirms an auto-nomy with regard to which, in the industrial age, the other layers of society must regulate themselves, with an actual possibility of negotiation. (73)

Which “Nature”?: …genetic manipulations undoubtedly constitute the most striking technological development, giving rise to the most disarming discourses: worse than the possibility of sheer destruction of humanity, they make imaginable the possible fabrication of a “new humanity,” or of a pseudo-humanity, and without even having to dive into science-fiction nightmares, one can see that even their simple current applications destroy the oldest ideas that humanity has of itself – and this, at the very moment when psychoanalysis and anthropology are exhuming the constitutive dimension of these ideas, as much for the psyche as for the social body [le faire-corps social], begining with the ideas concerning kinship relations. [...] This is the age when vast, horrific traffic in human organs is conducted with impunity on homeless children of third-world megalopolises, kidnapped and emptied of their livers, kidneys, hearts, their very entrails. This is all taking place at a moment when a new Orphism is moved to indignation by medical experimentation on animals (however problematic), at a moment when a vast DNA research program aims at technoscientific “productions” capable of making profits upon receiving copyright, at a moment when genetic manipulations are directly affecting the organzation of the human individual body, its specific memory and therefore its genetic prospects, its most “natural” “substratum,” in a word, its nature. (87)

Machinic Evolution: The emergence of this being – producer, constructor, if not conceiver – begins then in a process of neurolgical evolution. However, on the one hand, it is no longer strictly a matter of zoological phenomenon: the most archaic technical evolution is already no longer “genetically programmed”; on the other hand, beyond the Neanthropian, this process continues as pure technological evolution, the organization of the cortex being generally stabilized. [...] One must first ask what mirage of the cortex is experiences [seprouve], a pathbreaking, in the hardness of flint; what plasticity of gray matter corresponds to the flake of mineral matter; what proto-stage of the mirror is thus installed. One must then ask what the closure of the coritical evolution of the human implies from the vantage of a general history of life, the closure of cortical evolution of the human, and therefore the pursuit of the evolution of the living by other means than life – which is what the history of technics consists in, from the first flaked pebbles to today, a history that is also the history of humanity – a statement that will lead us to the unusual concept of “epiphylogenesis.” (134-135)

Externalized Memory and Techno-logic: Differentiation is only possible inasmuch as the memory of the group, when human, is “external.” But from the moment it is external, group memory is no longer species specific, for from that moment it is technological, the technical and the logical (or linked to “language”) being only two aspects of the same property. (155)

Instrumental Maieutics: Exteriorization means that genetic memory and its transformation do not coincide with the memory of the stereotype and its transformation. It seems obvious that the memory of the stereotype is influenced by the transformations of genetic memory. it is no less the case that another memory is set up. The question then becomes: where is the memory of the stereotype kept, if not in the material trace of the stereotype in which the preexisting tool itself consists, repeated, duplicated by its “maker” and guiding the latter much more than being guided by him or her? In this sense, the archaic cortex and equipment are codetermined in a structural coupling of a particular sort. The issue is to know the kind of repetition at work in the duplication of stereotypes down through generations of archaic humans, how it is distinguished from genetic duplication, in way differences play and are inscribed in the duplication, and where they come from. (158)

The De-Fault Origin: Discovery, insight, invention, imagination are all, according to the narrative of the myth, characteristic of a de-fault. Animals are already marked by a de-fault (in relation to being as it is and as it endures through change, and in relation to the gods): they perish. one must understand “de-fault” here in relation to what is, that is, a flaw in being. And yet, whereas animals are positively endowed with qualities, it is tekhne that forms the lot of humans, and tekhne is prosthetic; that is, in any case a positive gift of the gods: a predestination. The gift made to humanity is not positive: it is there to compensate. Humanity is without qualities, without predestination: it must invent, realize, produce qualities, and nothing indicates that, once produced, these qualities will bring about humanity, that they will become its qualities; for they may rather become those of technics. (193-94)

No Future: The Dasein that comes to be in anticipation – in differance – is not given its being through the clock; rather, it loses itself in the clock. Its temporality is its future. The generation of today’s “time,” our Geschlecht, says flatly: no future. What is affirmed here at the same time as it is refused? Does this slogan mean that there is no differance or no longer any differance in the extrapolation of the present as Gegenwart – that in “real time,” which is nothing but this extrapolation, there can be no future?

Andrew Hoskins Lecture – 4PM, 9/16

All seminar participants who are available are strongly encouraged to attend the DeRoy lecture by Andrew Hoskins taking place this Tuesday at 4 PM in the 10th floor Conference Room of 5057 Woodward. More information on Hoskin’s talk, entitled “The Mediatization of Memory,” can be found here.

09/11: Das Komputer, or, The Dialigital

Reading: The Digital Dialectic

Discussed: The Bottled City of Kandor; Georges Canguilhem; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Dialectic, Pre- and Post-Hegel; Julian Huxley; Internet Pornography Statistics; Japanese Vending Machines; Johnny Mnemonic and the failures of Futurology;  The Large Hadron Collider and the end of the universe; “The Machine Stops”; Memetics; Neo-Luddism; The ubiquity of Neuromancer references in 90’s critical writing about the Internet; The Office; Planned Obsolescence; Karl Popper; Sandplay Therapy; Scandinavian Death Metal; The “Science Wars”; Second Life; Smartridges; Technoscience; Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education; WALL-E

The Dialigital: Frankfurt school theorist Theodor W. Adorno saw within the dialectic a way to weld together identity and the contradiction of thought, unfolding “the difference between the particular and the universal.” Capable of indicating two possible states of conditions – “0″ or “1″ or “off” or “on” – the binary mode of cybernetic calculation might appear to resemble this duality, which is, in essence, the dualism of thesis and antithesis. Resemblance is not identity here, however, and conflating the digital with the dialectic is a mistake. On the digital frontier, the endless alteration of off/on, a system of closed and open switches, never generates a true synthesis; it merely impels the regeneration of the system. Yet this inability to come to synthesis may be turned to our advantage. it may prevent us from falling prey to a newly devised teleology for the digital age: the techno-utopia that cyberlibertarians promise once the markets are unfettered and the world is fully virtualized. The digitial dialectic’s universals, to return to Adorno’s formulation, are far less bombastic, averse in the end to such rosy metanarratives. (Lunenfeld, xviii)

Virtual Realism: Both network idealism and naive realism belong to the cyberspace dialectic. They are two sides of the same coin, binary brothers. One launches forth with unreserved optimism; the other lashes back with a longing to ground us outside technology. Some enthusiastically embrace the commercial development of the Internet, while others vehemently oppose it. [...] What is the path of virtual realism? Virtual realism parts with realism pure and simple. Realism often means lowered expectations. “Being realistic” often implies reducing or compromising ideals. Historically, in fact, realism often follows periods of high idealism. the pendulum swings back because it had swung so high in the first place. No movement of history begins, however, without an initial affirmation, without a first postulate affirming that it has cleared the mist and found reality. Yet at the core of realism is an affirmation of what is real, reliable, functional. Today we must be realistic about virtual reality, untiringly suspicious of the airy idealism and commercialisms surrounding it, and we must keep an eye on the weeds of fiction and fantasy that threaten to stifle that blossom. (Heim, 38; 41-42)

The Digital Aesthetic/Ethic: Construction of the digital environment, what we may call the digital aesthetic, mirrors back to us all the same nagging questions about how to act in the physical, natural world of which we are a part. This construction gives us a chance to test out particiular theories and, given the gift of human imperfection, a chance to learn form out mistakes. [...] The challenge of hte digital dialectic is to imaginatively work out the consequences of a particular course of action while constantly considering the responsibilities of that imaginative work. What goals do we use to choose a certain dialectical path: freedom, justice, truth, subjectivity, equality, compassion, responsibility, and care? Neither useless nor solved, the questions accompanying those goals still need to be debated and constantly revamped. (Gigliotti, 62-62)

Virtual Subjectivity: …academics can make, I believe, vitally important contributions to the development of these technologies. Perhaps the most crucial are interventions that provide historical contexts showing how and why the technologies developed as they did. Although certain paths of development may be overdetermined, they are never inevitable. Other paths and other interpretations are always possible. The points I want to underscore is that it is a historical construction to believe that computer media are disembodying technologies, not an obvious truth. In fact, this belief require systematic erasure of many significant aspects of our interactions with computers. [...] Techologies do not develop on their own. People develop them, and people are sensitive to cultural beleifs about what the technologies can and shoudl mean. (Hayles, 92-93)

The Medium is the Memory: If a medium is a conveyor of memory rather than of messages, this offers us some insight into how to design for new media. This starts at the level where out memory technologies tend to define the very way we metaphorize our lives. Three generations ago, I would likely have categorized every evocative scent as inextricably linked to Proust’s madeleine. In my youth, I saw the road to work on an average morning as one long tracking shot in a nouvelle vague film. Today I find it difficult to think of my life as anything but an interactive network. The connection has become more important than the here and now of the situation. (Brody, 143)

Course Description

Writing Machines is designed to introduce students to the increased focus within English Studies on the rhetorics, politics, and aesthetics of new media and information technologies. Topics covered will include the relationship between episteme and tekhne in the Western philosophical tradition, the impact of technology on contemporary critical and cultural theory, and, most generally, the kind of work on and with new media and its associated vectors that takes place within English Studies. Although this is a Rhetoric/Composition course, we will spend equal time engaging work within philosophy, film and television studies, economics, and literary studies. Our tentative list of texts (available here) includes works by Adam Banks, Jonathan Bellar, Richard Dienst, Deleuze, Derrida, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Alexander Galloway, N. Katherine Hayles, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Bernard Stiegler, Stuart Selber, and Paulo Virno. Whenever possible, these authors will join us via tele- or videoconference for short periods during class meetings to personally field students’ questions and comments about their work. In addition to a research paper, course deliverables include weekly responses, brief presentations on works related to our readings, and the design of a professional web presence for use during the job search process (no previous web design experience required)