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.

As a follow up to Rosa's PSU Conference shout out, I thought I'd offer an observation about the conference.

Beginning with Anne Wysocki's plenary talk, traveling through the plenaries by Jimmie Killingsworth and James Porter, and then trickling out into the concurrent sessions was the idea that rhetoricians of technology are turning their attention back to the body. Thus the title of this post: Where's the beef?

I thought I'd take a stab at summarizing Anne Wysocki's talk as an example of this kind of work. As a group of us are reading through Zizek's The Parallax View with Josh, we are noting that the body is reinserting itself in his work as well (in fact, Josh notes that we might even set The Parallax View alongside Butler's Bodies That Matter in that it is an answer to critics who are looking for more materiality...)

Wysocki's talk was concerned with the use of certain aesthetic theories to discuss the bodily experience of certain digital art installations. One such installation is "Saturday" by Sabrina Raff, an installation that allows users to place a glove to their forehead and eavesdrop on cell phone conversations via bone transducers. That is, the sound comes to the participant without the use of their ears...the sound travels through bones when you put the glove to your forehead. This is art that is in no way separated from from the body. In fact, it is impossible without a body.

Mark Hansen and other critics make use of aesthetic theories rooted in Kant to discuss the embodied experience of the those who encounter these installations. These Kantian-based theories stem from the idea that the aesthetic experience allows, say, a viewer of an artwork to see that they the "fit" in the world. Wysocki's question is this: If we no longer think that there is a world "out there" that already makes sense (she assumes that most of us don't think this), then can we really apply traditional aesthetics to such installations? Considering the lack of a given world that fits together and makes sense, how do we bridge the gap between individual aesthetic experience and collective experience. Or, as Anne says, how do we move from epistemology to ethics when discussing digital, embodied experiences. How do we move from “this is a great experience and I understand it in this way” to “this is the same experience that others have, thus I share something with them?" For Wysocki, Hansen and others don't account for this move.

And lest you think that such digital art installations have little to do with the public at large, Wysocki points us to the Nintendo Wii. How are digitally embodied experience being designed and critiqued? How are games for the Wii being designed and critiqued? Ann calls for a different way of designing digital experiences (video games) and a different way of critiquing them (reflection about what certain digital experiences mean, how they/if they point to ethical questions problems). Her concern is that if there is no world "out there" anymore that holds everything together, then we might end up w/ isolated aesthetic experience...with no move to ethics.

Wysocki, Killingsworth, Porter and others are all looking for ways to reintroduce the body into our conversations. That body isn't separate from technologies or, in the case of Killingsworth or Marilyn Cooper, separate from ecologies, contexts, or other bodies. Where's the beef? It's mixed up with a bunch of other stuff...and these folks seem to be looking for a way to make sense of that mix of stuff without forgetting that a body is in there somewhere.

Mark Rothko's “White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)" sold for $72.8 million at Sotheby's.

I've been to the Rothko chapel in Houston, but I really don't know much about Rothko. This story (and its mention of an inflated market for modern art) reminded me of Lanham's discussion of the Attention Economy, and I was wondering if anyone has studied how an inflated market for modern art influences (or is influenced by) or emerges out of a larger economic moment. Or, is the market for art fairly autonomous when considering larger economic trends?

Just a thought...

I'm at Computers and Writing in Detroit right now. I'm killing time before I head over to the Detroit Beer Company for drinks and appetizers (brought to us by the fine folks at Bedford St. Martins. The Wayne State dorms are really nice (and secure, you have to swipe a card to get in...I'm reminded of how we used to prop doors open with pizza boxes at my undergrad dorm to sneak people in.) More C&W blogging to come...

This is the name of my dissertation - Hospitable Texts. The basic argument is that web texts are hospitable, and the focus of the study will be Wikipedia. For me, Wikipedia is the quintessential hospitable text in that it "gives place" (Derrida's words) to both readers and writers. Or, better, completely blurs the categories of "reader" and "writer." My argument is that hospitable texts allow rhetoricians to refigure the key terms of the discipline: rhetorical agency, community, and intellectual property.

I take my prospectus exam a week from Friday, so I've been working through these ideas a lot over the past few weeks. I've also been trying to figure out how exactly to approach my C&W 2007 conference paper. The title is "Wikipedia: Modeling a Middle Way for Rhetoric" is one I'd like to change, but I guess that's just the nature of conference papers. My plan was to offer Wikipedia as a text that intervenes in the debate about "productive" and "hermeneutic" rhetorics. Folks such as Rosa Eberly argue for rhetoric as a productive art while Steve Mailloux focuses on the hermeneutic and interpretive (interpretative?) aspects of rhetoric. In his most recent book, Mailloux tries to answer these "rhetoric as production" critics by claiming that his rhetorical hermeneutics does offer strategies for productive rhetorical interventions. Mailloux claims that his hermeneutics is not just a mode of reading - it is a mode of production as well. I'm not sure Mailloux's answer really offers the productive art folks a satisfactory answer, and I've been trying to figure out why.

My paper will argue that texts like Wikipedia render the production/consumption binary problematic at best (possibly even obsolete). At first, I couldn't quite figure out where to go with this argument. I mean, what's new about saying that people on the Web are "prosumers." But then I revisited - an intervention that calls for the recognition of the "non-hermeneutic" aspects of rhetoric. While Eberly and Mailloux debate the hermeneutics vs. "productive art," Diane asks whether Mailloux's hermeneutics exhausts the possibilities for rhetoric. Diane's argument is that there are portions of the rhetorical situation that escape interpretation, and she wants to call these portions rhetorical as well. The very relation between two parties of the linguistic situation is rhetorical, before they say or do anything. This relation is the "saying" (performative) that happens before there is any "said" (constative).

This is the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry for Rhetoric. Recently, I removed the word oral from that sentence. Another user (Tito4000) changed it back and requested that I raise the issue on the discussion page.

I have posted something to the discussion page (I haven't heard anything back yet). It will be interesting to see how this "discussion" shakes out. As I note in my comment on the discussion page, there is little doubt that Rhetoric has focused on spoken language at many times in history. However, when defining the "concept" of Rhetoric, it seems to me to be more useful to define rhetoric broadly. Then, we can move to a description of the different "rhetorics" that have popped up over the past couple of thousand years.

We'll see how this goes...

So, I'm really trying to jump on the RSS train. I've added some feeds to this site, and I've made my RSS reader my browser home page. I'm basically forcing this technology on myself to try it out. Now, this really isn't my first swim through RSS. For many years, I used Yahoo's "My Yahoo" page as my home page. "My Yahoo" allows you to add RSS feeds along with other types of content, and it bundles that content with links to my email and my fantasy baseball team. It's a one stop shop.

Here's what the "My Yahoo" page looks like, and here's what my current RSS page looks like. Both provide content from all over, though the yahoo presentation is probably a little bit nicer to look at. However, there's something that both of these pages do that interests me: They rip content from other contexts and place them on my desktop.

In essence, RSS seems to be based on the assumption that the text is what matters. Thus, if there's a New York Times story about Abu Graib or a CFP from tech geek story from Slashdot, RSS readers can' t provide that text in context. An RSS reader doesn't give you the story in it's visual context, it doesn't show you the story next to other stories. It might even take away the important experience of browsing a web page and scanning through headlines. We might say that RSS merely puts off this experience. Once you click on one of your RSS links, you're taken to the web page, right? But aren't you most times taken to a persistent link for that web page? Haven't you skipped straight to one story, sneaking in through a side door and skipping the front page?

All of these factor lead me to think that RSS either skips the kairotic event of reading a web page or creates a brand new kairotic event.

[definition of Kairos - "Fullness of time; the propitious moment for the performance of an action or the coming into being of a new state." (OED)]

When we read a website, infinite factors are at play (some of which, incidentally, have absolutely nothing to do with the site or its design). All of those factors are a part of kairos - a part of the singular experience of reading a website at any given moment. What does RSS do to that experience? What does RSS do to web content? Does it assume that content is content, regardless of how we come to it? Can RSS itself assume anything, or does our use of it mean that we are making assumptions about content? Is RSS really taking off as a technology, or is it something still confined to techies and geeks?

I've proposed the following paper for next year's NCA conference in San Antonio. This proposal is part of a panel on "Trope Hijacking":

Hijacking Scapegoats: Kenneth Burke, Technology, and the ‘Doctrine of Use’

Kenneth Burke is a well-known trope hijacker. He makes use of mathematical terms by calling his pentad a “calculus” and co-opts scientific terms such as “biologism.” The “technological psychosis” is one trope that occupies Burke throughout his career, figuring prominently in much of his later work. In his “Towards Hellhaven” essays, Burke presents a particularly dystopic view of technological society. In this presentation, I argue that Burke uses technology as a scapegoat (in his sense of the term) to exercise demons. Burke’s problem is not so much with technology but with “doctrine of use” that he traces back to utilitarianism. His interest in the ambivalence and slippage of language and his embrace of Bohemianism show us that Burke sees the value of a life not bound up with ideas of utility or efficiency. Yet, Burke’s analysis is always conducted with an eye toward how the study of language can be of great use. For Burke, language is of great utility – a technology for understanding human motive. Using Burke's scapegoatism to interrogate his views of technology, this paper hijacks the hijacker. However, my goal will not be to “debunk” (another of his favorite tropes) Burke’s views of technology. Rather, I hope to show that a discourse of utility, though difficult to escape, stops us from productively theorizing technology.

Blogs are often talked about in terms of the free exchange of ideas. Those championing blogs say that they have democratized the media and given everyone a voice. How wide are the communities "created" by blogs? In the book We've Got Blog, Rebecca Blood offers this explanation of how communities pop up in the blogosphere:

The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thought and opinions. A community of 100 or 20 or 3 people may spring up around the public record of his thoughts. Being met with friendly voices, he may gain more confidence in his view of the world…” (13)

As Blood notes, blogs depend on "friendly voices," but how often does a blogger meet with unfriendly voices? In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill talks about the value of dissent in his discussion of the free press:

"But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race...If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error" (53).

Do Blogs allow for the "collision with error"? Do they allow dissenting opinions to work against one another toward truth or compromise?

As you look through some sample blogs, think about these questions:

1) Who's the audience for this blog? How do you know?

2) Who is/are the author(s)?

3) What is the focus of the blog?

4) How does the blog make visual arguments?

Some examples of political blogs:

little green footballs
BlogCritics
Talking Points Memo
Wonkette
Daily Kos
InstaPundit
The Drudge Report
NewsBusters.org
Baghdad Burning
NeoLibertian.net

Works Cited

Mill, John Stuart, et al. Mill : Texts, Commentaries. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Rodzvilla, John, and Perseus Publishing. We've Got Blog : How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub., 2002.