Clinamen

[Warning: As you can probably tell from the title, this is a blog post that is meant to kick start writing. This means that it involves rambling. Be advised.]

Okay, so I can't quite get things rolling on this summer writing thing. I find myself wanting to read a lot (and not even doing that), and I (of course) find myself inspired to write at strange moments. I'm hoping that the blog will trigger some things for me.

In a moment of frustration yesterday - as I looked at a list of rhet/comp. citations on intellectual property, rhetorical agency, and community - I went back to Ulmer's Internet Invention. I've been thinking about using this book for my Computers and Writing class in the Fall, and I'm working my way through it. I've also been wanting to start in on some of Ulmer's work anyway, and this seemed like one way to do it.

So, this got me thinking that I should start my own "wide image" or "mystory" as a way of triggering my writing process for the dissertation. Ulmer's concept of Mystory is a response to Hayden White's assertion that history would be written differently had it been developed in the 20th Century. Ulmer attempts to develop a method of "electracy" (as opposed to literacy), and I find his model really intriguing. It allows students (and instructors) to discover the ways in which knowledge is structured in the different spheres of their life: career, family, entertainment, community. Following Kuhn and others, Ulmer encourages us to look at the stories/artifacts/people that shape each of these spheres. What tropes drive our research? How do disciplines create knowledge? Ulmer has us looking for our "image of wide scope" or "themata": "the clusters of presuppositions and 'gut' assumptions which each scientist has about the universe" (Briggs qtd. in Ulmer 20).

So, one great example that Ulmer provides (via John Briggs) is Einstein's fascination with a compass that his father showed him:

"It was an experience to which Einstein often referred. His friend Moszkowski reported him in 1922 to have said, 'Young as I was, the remembrance of this occurrence never left me...The scene is most suggestive. There is the mysterious invariance or constancy of the compass needle, ever returning to the same direction, despite the fact that the needle seems free from any action-by contact of the kind that is usually unconsciously invoked to explain the behavior of material things; despite the vagaries of motion one may arbitrarily impose on the case of the compass from the outside; and regardless of personal will or external Zwang or chaos. If Einstein remembered it so well and referred to it so often it may be because the episode is an allegory of the formation of the playground of his basic imagination" (Holton qtd. in Ulmer (19-20).

So the compass is a sort of guiding trope for Einstein. It is a defining moment/event for him (and this makes me thing a bit of Badiou's Being and Event - which is sitting in my room waiting to be read). So, Ulmer has us on a search for our own compass (double meaning intended).

Now, first off, I have my reservations with this approach, and those reservations extend to me using this exercise to trigger writing and to using it with students. My main reservation stems from Ulmer's arguments regarding the "wide image" and identity. In the introduction, Ulmer explains that Internet Invention offers us a way to map connections between all the different types of knowledge/information in our lives. It's not necessarily important whether these connections are "invented" or "discovered": "That some pattern will emerge through the process is guaranteed due to the very nature of language and design: there will be repetitions."

At this point I'm totally on board. However, he goes on: "A further guarantee is based on the fact that people's lives have some continuity and coherence, some style, shape."

There are any number of critiques that could be offered here - the first one that comes to mind is Alexander Garcia Duttmann's At Odds With AIDS, a book that looks for an approach to identity that does not settle on such "continuity and coherence." Duttmann uses Heidegerrian terminology to argue (I'm working on 3 year old notes here - so I could be off a bit here) that an approach like Ulmer's (of "continuity and coherence") can mean that we

"remain powerless and reactive because of the belatedness of the question that asks for a restitution of the connectedness of life?” (25)

All of this is to say that I'm not 100% on board with what Michelle Ballif might call Ulmer's "identity disclosing pedagogy." However, I'm also not ready to toss it aside.

But, back to the initial question: What is my "image of wide scope" and how can it help me start writing my dissertation.

Well, one place to start would be with the question of rhetorical agency. As I look for something that "defines" my discipline and my interests, I think agency is one really apt answer. Many argue that questions of agency are "the" questions of contemporary rhetorical studies: Where do we locate rhetorical agency after the insights of postmodernism/poststructuralism? If the rhetorical text is no longer considered to emanate from a person who has complete and utter control over how an idea is communicated, then how do we rethink agency? If the medium acts on the message, then how do we account for the intended effects of that message? If the audience shapes the message, then how much does the author/orator really shape the message?

These questions approach agency from a number of different angles, but they get at what we might call "the" question of contemporary rhetorical study. If this is the beginning of my "image of wide scope," I guess I could ask the question: Why am I interested in Rhetoric, rhetorical theory, rhetorical agency? Why have I found myself in this "wide image"/discipline? What are the tropes/stories that lead me here?

Well, this is where I get uncomfortable with Ulmer's method. I could trace my interest in agency to my life as a cubicle drone at MCI. That is, I was smack in the middle of post-capitalism, with little or no agency and little or no way of having any "real" impact on the world. Thus, I went back to school to study that thing that haunted me most...and I guess I could keep shaping such narratives. And I think I will benefit from this process because I will recognize it as almost entirely invented. However, if we see it as discovered and not invented, we end up thinking that we're following some path called fate...a path that leads from Journalism major, to telecommunications, to engineer, to grad school, to teacher...

However, maybe this isn't really a concern at all. I don't deny that such narratives (or even master narratives) do important work for us, and it seems that this is what Ulmer wants us to search for: the narratives that do work in our various spheres of knowledge. I guess I'll just have to stick with this for a bit to see if my concerns regarding his theories of identity/subjectivity are an issue for me.

In the meantime, I'm gong to work through my own "wide image" in the coming weeks in hopes that it helps me sift through all the different kinds of information I'm confronting as I start my dissertation.