Clinamen

The SXSW panel I participated in last week (along with John Jones, Jillian Sayre, Will Burdette, and Trish Roberts-Miller) seemed to go over really well. To our surprise, we presented to a full room at the Austin Convention Center.

In each presentation, a panelist took one of the canons of rhetoric (invention, style, arrangement, memory, delivery) and explained how they were playing out in online spaces like Twitter (though, some of us spoke of the Web more generally). My fellow panelists were predictably brilliant, and the crowd seemed to really dig the conversation. John followed the Twitter conversation that was happening during our panel, and this allowed us to get a good sense of how the audience was reacting.

I will be joining Will Burdette, John Jones, Jillian Sayre, and Trish Roberts-Miller on a panel at SXSW interactive called "Is Aristotle on Twitter?" It should be really fun to present some of these ideas to folks outside of the academy. Here's the description:

Bill Ayers' New York Times Op-Ed explains why he felt the need to steer clear of Election 2008's attempts to suck him in. He was being called a "domestic terrorist" and he was described as someone Obama was "palling around" with. But he saw no viable way to enter the discussion:

With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.

Faced with a rhetorical infrastructure of speed, Ayers "sat it out." He saw no path to "rational discussion." I would not argue with Ayers on this one. I don't think there was a useful way for him to join the conversation. However, it raises some interesting questions: What are the ethical implications of sitting things out? If rational discussion is not an option, then how do we proceed? Do we attempt to slow down "sound-bite" culture, or do we develop new rhetorics?

I have no real answers to these questions, but they interest me. I'm hoping to address some of this in my 4C's presentation, but I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts. What other rhetorical options were available to Ayers?

Thanks to Matt for the link.

My latest geekly obsession is speed and rhetoric. I've been following the advice of a certain yellow dog and reading some Virilio. I've cleaned the library out of Virilio, in fact. But more on that at another time.

For now, I'd like to point you to current discussions about the link between the 55-miles-per-hour speed limit (or lack thereof) and the current financial mess. Yeah, really. Here's Michael Lewitt, editor of The HCM Market Letter and a money manager, wondering why neither presidential candidate has suggestion lowering the speed limit:

I'm teaching a course entitled "Anthologics" this semester. This is a word that I kind of made up. I say "kind of" for a couple of reason. For one, no one makes up a word...it's all a matter of citation. But also, as I was writing my course description I stumbled into a post by Derek that mentions this word (Derek? You out there? Did I steal your word?) Anyway, students are creating their own anthologies based on a topic of their choice. They're compiling sources, designing a book jacket using InDesign, and writing a book proposal (crafted for a particular publisher).

Derek has started a "CCCarnival" for Karen Kopelson's recent article in College Composition and Communication, and I'm using it as an excuse to stop the process of moving/unpacking. Put in the terms of Kopelson's discussion, I'm taking a break from "practice" to do some "theory." In responding to this piece, I'd like to focus on two things: the discussion of "new converts" to Rhet/Comp and the discussion of how Rhet/Comp "borrows" most (if not all) of its theory.

I put together this audio presentation using Audacity software for the Rhetoric Society of America conference. The panel presentation was called "Rhetoric and the Amateur," and each participant tried out a technology that they knew nothing about.

The "Why?" Question is the question I always get when I talk about distance running. If you listen to the presentation (which is, predictably, quite amateurish), you'll get some possible answers to this question.

In July, I pointed to the door to Parlin Hall as the central front in the war between Rhetoric and Literature. Here's what that door looked like until a few days ago:

Here is what that door looks like as of today:

The Department of Rhetoric and Writing talked to the Dean's Office and the Physical Plant people to get this changed. Apparently, I was not the only one to notice this door - many people brought it to the attention of the department.

My post in July used this door as an opportunity to riff on the history of our little disciplinary rift, and this new version changes things...but only a little. They changed "composition" to "writing" (we dropped "composition" from the title a couple of years ago), but it still looks a bit like these are three items in a series (English, Rhetoric, and Writing). Also, I ran into Linda Ferreira-Buckley, our Department Chair, right outside the door today and I pointed out that writing was still banished to the bottom of the door. She had a different take: "No, Jim. It's the foundation."

This was a nice reminder: maybe I should stop being so damn cynical.

School starts today. I didn't do nearly as much writing as I would have liked to over the summer, but I did a fair amount of reading. Among the books I read were Thomas Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject and Jeff Rice's The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media. I initially decided to read these two books because they were new contributions to Rhetoric and Composition, but it turns out that they had some interesting overlaps.

Rickert's project is an intriguing one. He begins the book with a dilemma that would make just about any rhetoric and writing teacher take a step back. Toward the end of the 1990s, Rickert started to notice something strange about his composition students:

"My students were becoming adept at picking apart ads and identifying their most pernicious features: the inducement to buy unnecessary, expensive items; the achievement of identity and modes of being through products; the reification of unjust class, race, and gender roles; and so forth. I faced little resistance from them, James Berlin and Company to the contrary. Or perhaps I should say their resistance appeared indirectly, in odd, hard to recognize, even symptomatic forms. Their adeptness led them to write competent, even excellent papers, but that was the extent of it. If there was any real change, it was in growing cynicism: 'Yeah, I know I don't need these seventy-five-dollar designer blue jeans, but...' [spending ensues]. Where was the connection between what they were learning and their actual lives?" (1-2)

Rickert's framing of the problem is clear and elegant, and it made me immediately question my own teaching practices. How might we make sense of the "fault line between knowledge and action" (2)? Rickert turns to Slavoj Zizek and theories of enjoyment, fantasy, and jouissance to understand the limits of a cultural studies approach to teaching rhetoric and writing. He takes us through detailed engagements with the "big shots" of the field (Jim Berlin especially) and moves toward a theory of the "act" - something that would move beyond mere "critique":

"The Act is interested in rupturing the day, in transforming the entire discursive field that determines what is proper and valued. The Act refuses accommodation in favor of radical transformation despite the risk of total loss. Ultimately, this is what most pedagogies refuse to do: they do not teach 'risk' ('Godless' 561). Even the most radical pedagogies, which would wage war on capital itself, betray the servitude that underwrites their success: 'ifyou do this, then this will happen; if you plan ahead, you will save time; if you are critical of power, you will be empowered'" (194).

Rickert's question is a powerful one: How do we move beyond a cultural studies approach that does little upset things? He admits that his answer - a pedagogy of the Act - is not specific one, but he is not looking to institute a program. Instead, he is looking for rhetoric and composition to rethink the very assumptions of pedagogy.

What I have provided here is a very brief sketch of Rickert's argument, but it feeds nicely into Rice's book. Rice may very well perform something close to what Rickert calls for.

Rice's The Rhetoric of Cool continues Gregory Ulmer's project of inventing electracy, a project that Ulmer has worked through in numerous texts including Applied Grammatology, Tele-Theory, Internet Invention, and Electronic Monuments. A student of Ulmer's (the book begins with a Foreword by Ulmer), Rice works very much in his mentor's mode by excavating the ground beneath the term "cool." Thus, Rice is not necessarily trying to make composition "cool," but is instead searching the term for it's various, disparate meanings. This search allows him a way into a conversation about new media and composition studies.

Rice returns to 1963 and the birth of composition studies to recover some of the paths not taken by our discipline. Thus, he asks why when theorists like Albert Kitzhaber were "inventing" modern composition studies certain artists and musicians were left out of the conversation. Why not consider artists such as Warhol or authors such as Burroughs when developing theories of composition? Rice argues that these figures have been left out of the conversation as composition has put together a grand narrative of the discipline. That grand narrative is mostly concerned with civic literacy and democracy, and (on some level) it depends upon the exclusion of certain theories.

Rice asks the discipline to abandon this grand narrative and to consider what has been left out. Further, he asks the sub-discipline of computers and writing to reconsider its goals. Instead of nuts-and-bolts considerations of technology, Rice wants inventions (and reinventions) of whole new ways of thinking (whole new "electracies.") Instead of asking how we can use a tool like Photoshop in a writing classroom, Rice encourages us to think about teaching students to write with images. This would be beyond writing about images - it would be an expansion of the definition of Writing to include various media. Film making is writing. Podcasting is writing. Hyperlinking is writing.

Here might be where Rice's project answers Rickert's. Rice calls for rhetoric and composition to move beyond the literate enterprise toward an electrate one. This will require (and here is where he most echoes Ulmer) invention, but not invention in the way Aristotle uses the term and certainly not invention in the way that "inventors" use the term (i.e. creating something from scratch.) Instead, Rice wants in in(ter)vention that produces new ways of reading and writing. This would mean teaching students how to appropriate texts, how to see various shades of meaning, and how to make remake meaning.

It seems that Rice, like Rickert, is frustrated with any pedagogy that stops at mere critique and stops at the boundaries of literate practice. Maybe these two books are an indication of some future strands of rhetoric and composition scholarship - strands that will ask how we can think about the next phase of our research and pedagogy.

As I walked into Parlin Hall today to work in the CWRL, I came upon a new door:

The text on that door is new. And check out the right-hand side:

"English, Rhetoric
and Composition"

One might argue that it's the same door, but it seems pretty clear that the (performative) rhetoric at work on this door has transformed things. A couple of things worth noting here: The "Division of Rhetoric and Composition" is now the "Department of Rhetoric and Writing." So, the stenciler (or, perhaps more accurately, the person who gave the order to stencil) got that last word wrong. Further, the door reads as if these are three words in a series rather than two entities. FURTHER, isn't it interesting that Composition is all by its lonesome on the bottom line? That bottom line from which compositionists can cry "I'm being marginalized!" And that top line from which "English" can say to "Composition": "Get some graduate students and adjuncts to teach that crap, will ya?"

My point is not that Compositionists are whiners or that "English" is filled with elitists. This may or may not be true. What's more important to me is this: How productive is this debate (if it's even a debate...maybe it's just bickering)? Aren't we past it? I have this sense that a younger generation of scholars is emerging that is not so invested in this fight - that this group of scholars wants to figure out how these different entities - English, Communications, Speech, Rhetoric, Writing, Composition - fit together. Then again, maybe these disciplinary fights are how disciplines determine their boundaries

One wonders how Maxine Hairston would react to this new door.