In between dissertation writing and job material stuff, I've been thinking about a paper I'll be giving at 4C's this Spring. Yes, it's a long way off, but I think this paper is a kernel of the "next project." I've still got plenty of work to do on "Hospitable Texts," but it's also fun to think about what I'd like to do next. The question I'm interested in has to do with rhetoric and quickness. If arguments are arriving (solicited and unsolicited) at our doorstep, are we to make attempts to slow things down or is this a naive pursuit? Put another way, if "soundbyte culture" defines our current cultural moment, do we continue to fight the fight of putting things "back into context" or, again, is this a naive pursuit? How do we deal with speed and quickness? Do we slow things down, provide context, map the controversy? This, it seems to me is what we normally teach. And it very well might work in certain situations. But what about the other situations where slowing things down is virtually (in all senses of this word) impossible. What then?

Before going any further, I want to provide a description the panel I'll be participating in at CCCC 2009. Fellow panelists include: Jeff Rice, Michael McGinnis, David M. Grant, and Derek Mueller.

Choragraphies of Composition: Revisiting Five Key Moments in the 60 Year History of CCCC

Over its 60 year history, each CCCC conference does important disciplinary work as new modes of thought are introduced. However, alongside each of these events we can, in retrospect, find waves -- moments that sit at the margins of our disciplinary discussions. Acknowledging that lapse does not showcase a deficiency, but rather offers a challenge for further inquiry and invention. In other words, when we revisit a CCCC year, we can discover other writing moments rippling beyond the theme of the annual convention, moments making other kinds of waves relevant to writing and writing instruction. Among such moments are those either forgotten or glossed over in our current image of that date. This panel celebrates the 60th anniversary of CCCC by revisiting five key CCCC moments: 1949, 1995, 1987, 1969, and 1994. Supplementing each important conference date, these waves allow us to think broadly about the work we do. In this session, panelists employ temporal moments not initially identified in each year's CCCC in order to expand and extend each conference date for further thought regarding writing, pedagogy, research, and disciplinarity.

And my paper abstract:

1995: Quickness and Composition

1995: Ward Cunningham names his new software “wiki," the Hawaiian word for “quick"; Netscape issues an initial public offering, later described by Wired’s Kevin Kelly as a “brilliant flash [that] revealed what had been invisible only a moment before: the World Wide Web"; Bill Clinton signs the National Highway Designation Act marking the end of the federal 55 mph speed limit. Amidst this culture of speed, CCCC met in Washington, D.C. under the banner of “Literacies, Technologies, Responsibilities.” How "responsible" has rhetoric and composition been when dealing with the speed of digital writing? By returning to 1995’s “brilliant flash,” I revisit some infrastructural shifts of the mid-1990s with an eye toward rethinking quickness and composition.

Speed. Quickness.

The word on star athletes is that things move more slowly for them. Not being a start athlete, I do not know that this is like, and I can only imagine what it might be like to “slow down” a 98mph fastball or a corner blitz. But this discussion of a slower reality does point us toward questions I am qualified to address—questions of speed and rhetoric. How has the discipline of rhetoric accounted for the speed, the quickness with which texts and arguments are moving? How have rhetoricians dealt with those things that happen instantaneously, without rhetor and audience even having a moment to figure out what happened.

My first instinct is to turn to Ulmer here, because he's interested in how we "learn to be an image." This process can happen consciously, but it often happens unconsciously. That is, it often happens too quickly for the naked eye and/or naked body to even notice. We can examine this processes only after the fact (as Thomas Rickert notes in Acts of Enjoyment, we are always doing this belatedly...he references Freud's Nachträglichkeit to describe this belatedness). But there are others who we might turn to. In The Economics of Attention, Richard Lanham turns to style as a way to manage "information overload." We could say that Lanham's answer to the problem of quickness is style and the attention economy.

But Lanham's attention economy raises other questions. If it's "information overload" that we're dealing with (I am skeptical that we were ever not overloaded with information), then is the problem the quickness of an arriving argument (a question of velocity) or is the problem the amount of arriving arguments (a question of "mass"). Are these two questions even separable?

As you can see, I'm at the level of research here...research as in invention...research as in "What is it that I want to say?" Things are not all that clear now. But if you made me state some research questions right now, they would be:

How should we deal with quickness - with the circulation of texts, bodies, images at staggering speeds? Should rhetorical approaches be focused on trying play "catch up" (recontextualizing, slowing things down, mapping out all the positions of the disagreement) or should we be doing something else? What would that something else look like? Is there an emerging rhetoric that's already addressing this question of quickness?[*] Where can we find that emerging rhetoric and what are its rules?

[*] This is the assumption of my current project...that Wikipedia represents an emerging digital rhetoric that we as a discipline can and should learn from. I like this approach because it reminds me (and the academy in general) that we don't always have to "create" solutions...we can seek out pre-existing ones. It might be that this is my method: Find a problem, assume that a solution has already been developed, find that solution, examine it, bring it back to my discipline.