July Homage

Good riddance to a soggy, steamy July--at once blazes quick and also unbearably sluggish. I've capped off the month with the following:

• Turned in grades today for the eight-week online term. Two courses: research-motivated writing and introduction to humanities. The writing course might be one of the best I've ever taught. Can't gloat quite the same over the humanities course (a contagion of confusion over one project option, even though it's a project that has soared in terms past).
• Wrapped up course overhauls for the three courses I keep buffed for old U. This probably doesn't mean much to you. To me, it means I won't have to scramble around when core outcomes statements are revised in the whenever ahead, and I get to relax for the remainder of my contracts, bask in the royalties, and so on.
• Read through to the final page of Mieville's The Scar. I'd been taking it slow--twenty pages here and there--for most of the summer, but tore through the last 280 pages over the weekend. A wildly violent turn of events caps the novel. I won't spoil it here, but I will say that while I enjoyed reading this one (especially the bits about the scabmettlers' battles early on and the mysteries of the avanc and city's mysterious course), it felt just shy of being an equal to Perdido Street Station.
• Recaulked the tub. Mowed the back lawn. This morning, walked Yoki (1.6 miles; 00:26:06.12). Chauffeured D. and Ph. to their various classes and work-appointments today. Before the day's done: Ph.'s soccer match in the mosquitoed marsh-fields by the airport (L, 1-0).

I can't think of anything else I need to say about July.

Indexical Thinking

As I continue to plod ahead with preparations for qualifying exams, I'm becoming more and more cognizant of indexes and also more dependent on the them. I've used indexes more casually in the past, almost always involving them as an after-thought to front-to-back reading--as something merely referential, a auxiliary text ranking well below everything else, a match with its rear-most position. A mere aid to memory rather than a multiple and complex terminal for differentiated reading encounters.

It's difficult to know just how much my own tagging habits have overhauled my expectations when reading. Between Flickr, del.icio.us, cite-u-like, blog entries and CCC Online, I'm ever more frequently engaging with tagging systems, applying tags or using them as bumper cushions on various meanderings around the internets. Thing is, I'm finding that because of this I want more from the indexes of books. More and more often, perhaps because some kind of indexical desire is piqued by the plenty of tagging systems for reading online, the indexes of books disappoint me. Just today, in the back of Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work, I was scanning the index. Came to "Turkle, Sherry, 212." And flipped. Only an endnote in Selfe and Selfe's "The Intellectual Work of Computers and Composition Studies"; "Turkle," named in a list. That was that.

Early this summer I was trying to get up to speed with exam prep, tinkering around, trying to get organized. And one of the bigger of the hitches was uncertainty with my ever-evolving note-keeping system. Throughout coursework, I used a few different systems, some of which are posted here in the reading notes category. Other methods I've tried involve lists of phrases with page numbers and letters to locate page positioning and other combinations of handwritten or typed notes. But for exams I wanted something more indexically entangled, more integrated with tagging and cross-referencing, all managed by assigning keywords that I could pool, sort, and free-associate. It took me a couple of weeks to get it set up and running smoothly, and now I'm reasonably satisfied with the results--results I'll share early this fall provided I can continue to make reasonably steady progress with reading and annotating. If not for a flurry of new tagging habits, I probably would've been content with old-fashioned note-keeping, although I'm skeptical about my own ability to find my way through them once they pile up.

I doubt this will raise many eyebrows, but I don't find it the least bit preposterous to suggest that book indexes should be resituated. Move them to the front of the book, I say. Add indexical information for each chapter (especially for edited collections). After all, for me at least, indexes are the new table of contents. I'll grant that this is probably more of a personal revolution and not something bigger (or it is, whatever). But consider the possibilities in a variant of cite-u-like that would offer a book's indexed terms (by chapter, also) and would allow you to select from them while also pulling from the tags of others and adding your own. Sort of like what you can do with the del.icio.us site for CCC Online when fold a link into your own collection. You get the prefab, auto-indexed stuff plus your own. Today's what if: the index of R&C as Intellectual Work available online in such a way that it cooperates with other web 2.0 apps. A more fanciful wish: an uber-linked, comprehensive (books, journals, net), dynamic, disciplinary concordance system.

Vitanza, "Seeing in Third Sophistic Ways"

Vitanza, Victor. "Seeing in Third Sophistic Ways." Olson 164-176.

Vitanza introduces a third "seeing" to the seeing/not seeing dyad.  With it, he sets up a correlation between theory and seeing (etymologically, drawing on Gk. thea and also Williams' Keywords). From here, he accounts for the shortcomings of dialectics resulting from the faintness of the negatives (no longer can we test "the pagus of thought" and return from the "wild, savage border zone where the excluded thirds and their ways of seeing dwell" (166) to effect a more inclusive polis). Vitanza offers three Sophistic ways of seeing:

1. misrepresentative antidotes: counter to representative anecdotes (168)

2. dissoi-paralogoi: counter to dialectics--"against dialectic (of any kind), against didactic, and against dissoi-logoi by moving from one and two to an explosion of threes or 'some more' (excesses, dissoi-polylogoi)" (168).

3. theatricks: counter to pragmatics (168)

Third Sophistic seeing will keep theorEYEzation alive, will continue to mine the pagus.  Without it, theory stalls, potentiality is reduced, stifled, and we have a restricted economy (Modernism's scarcities?). Whatever beings (Agamben) "prefer not to be in the present reactionary community, prefer not to be complicit in employing the principle that excludes, prefer not to be in the coming community" (173).

Another point: Third Sophistic seeing is not the same as Victor Turner's "liminal space" (169).

"'Whatever beings' are not particular (i.e., species) or general (genus); instead, they are a set(less) of radical singularities (in the paralogic of the excluded Middle Ages, a.k.a. the manere [27])." (171).

"Whatever beings intuit that the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded-middle (all the principles of negation informing re/invention) are the very principles that exclude, that disallow the thing with all its properties, that disallow radical singularities, themselves as such, in community" (173).

"Berger discusses 'seeing' as a matter of ideology and mystification" (165).

"I used to believe that it was possible after leaving the polis of systematic seeing to spend some paraproductive time in the pagus of thought--that wild, savage border zone where the excluded thirds and their ways of seeing dwell--and then when done to return, with insights, to the polis so as to make it more inclusive.  I still believe that such excursions are valuable, but they soon will be impossible" (166).

"What will de/form the coming community is without any notion of antithesis but only remainders. Whatevers!" (167).

"According to Agamben, in The Coming Community, the coming beings are 'whatever beings'" (170).

seeing, theory, theoreyezing, singularity, spectacle, thirds, binary, whatever, community, indifference, identity

Related sources:

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.

Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Trimbur, "Delivering the Message"

Trimbur, John. "Delivering the Message: Typography and the Materiality of Writing." Olson 188-202.

Trimbur opens with a lucid, concise account of the distinction between process and post-process movements.  "Process," he writes, becomes a given with the ubiquity of its foci: cognition, voice, conversation.  Post-process, rather than accepting as transparent the material orthodoxies operating implicitly alongside the design-lessness of the "Alphabetic Literacy Narrative," fronts materiality and so resurrects production and circulation key considerations in the activity of writing. 

In "The Materiality of Writing" section, Trimbur gives a thumbnail history of the "great Alphabetic Literacy Narrative" that elevates certain literacies at the expense of "'syllabic and logographic writing systems" while "banish[ing] pictographs and images to the status of illiteracy" (Faigley qtd. in Trimbur 190). It is not enough to regard writing as the making of meaning if we fail to take into account the material means of production and circulation. Trimbur, citing Kress, notes that we should prefer notions of literacy as built rather than acquired (191).

Trimbur recommends the study of typography as a means of attending again to the visual design of texts through layout, spacing patterns and typefaces.  In the middle section of the essay, he gives a brief overview of design studies and also emphasizes that 1. graphic designers and typographers have already begun to study design theory and history in ways that would be of interest to writing studies; and 2. we have yet to fully recognize the relevance of "design" to writing studies (194).

In the final section, "Typography in Theory and Practice," Trimbur keys on three ideas: 1. Narrativity of Letterforms (letterforms are meaningful, significant); 2. The Page as a Unit of Discourse (the page as a unit accounts for design patterns; elements in combination produce conglomerations of meaning); and 3. Division of Labor (designers and producers are now the same person; digital apparatuses have fused what once were more likely to be separate roles).

Claim: "My claim is that studying and teaching typography as the culturally salient means of producing writing can help locate composers in the labor process and thereby contribute to the larger post-process work of rematerializing literacy" (192).

"And yet, the moment writing theorists are starting to call 'post-process' must be seen not just as a repudiation of the process movement but also as an attempt to read into composition precisely the material conditions of the composer and the material pressures and limits of the composing process" (188).

"I argued a few years ago that essayist literacy--from the scientific prose of the Royal Society to the essay of the coffeehouse and also--emerged in the early modern period as a rhetoric of deproduction: a programmatic effort to reduce the figurative character of writing, minimize the need for interpretation, and thereby make the text more transparent ("Essayist")" (189).

"Accordingly, it should be no surprise that David Olson would want to make the essay into the culmination of alphabetic literacy precisely because it appears to transcend the visuality of writing by organizing the speech-sound abstractions of the alphabet into highly integrated grammatical and logical structures, forming self-sufficient, autonomous texts capable of speaking for themselves. The texts of essayist literacy, by Olson's account, appear to transmit meanings transparently, without reference to their mode and medium of production" (190).

"The problem is that, by and large, typography has been ghettoized in technical communication, where many compositionists think of it as a vocational skill" (192).

"Typography, on the other hand, calls attention to how the look of the page communicates meaning by treating text as a visual element that can be combined with images and other nonverbal forms to produce a unit of discourse" (197).

Related sources:

Benjamin, Walter. "The Author as Producer." 1934. Reflections: Essays, Aphorism, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken, 1978. 220-238.

Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Trumbur, John. "Essayist Literacy and the Rhetoric of Deproduction." Rhetoric Review 9 (1990): 72-86.

Gibson, "Theory of Affordances"

Gibson, James J. "The Theory of Affordances." Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing. R.E. Shaw and J. Bransford, eds. Hillsdale, N.J.: Elrbaum, 1977.

Gibson's seminal essay introduces the term, affordances, and articulates the nuances in its application to ecological psychology. An affordance, according to Gibson, is "a specific combination of the properties of its substance and its surfaces taken with reference to an animal" (67). Affordances are species-specific; they are functionally generic, in this sense, applying differently according to the physiological tendencies of an animal.

Affordances are those perceived aspects of the environment that suggest suitability to habituated action (action likely to be carried out in kind by others of the species). Objects, substances, and events all afford activities (^events afford exigence). Niche, for Gibson, is a set of affordances (how one lives rather than where, rather than habitat). And while niches are not, strictly speaking, places, they involve occupation and suitability (even sustainability?). They also take root in a middle space between the subjective and objective, according to Gibson (69). An affordance is not wholly dependent on the observer's perspective nor on the absolute physical properties of an object. Niche, however, guides us toward an understanding of affordances as real--constitutive of the phenomenal environment (70).

Gibson further develops the concept of affordances using a series of question-guided subsections:

What do substances afford? (71): ripeness and pleasure
What do surfaces and their layouts afford? (72): obstacles and locomotion
The Affording of Concealment (73): from ecological optics, concealment involves positioning relative to layout
What do detached objects afford? (74): manipulation and tool-use
What do other animals and other people afford? (75): interaction, animation and othering
Summary: Positive and Negative Affordances (76): "There has been endless debate among philosophers and psychologists as to whether values were physical or phenomenal, in the world of matter or only in the world of mind. For affordances as distinguished from values the debate does not apply. They are neither in the one world or the other inasmuch as they theory of two worlds is rejected. There is only one environment, although it contains many observers with limitless opportunities for them to live in it" (77).

In the section titled, "The Origin of the Theory of Affordances," Gibson situates affordances in work by Gestalt psychologists. He invokes valence, a concept he attributes to Lewin which applies to the behavioral object rather than the geographical object. The phenomenological object is entangled with the intensities of the user. But Gibson wants to qualify affordances as something more persistent than vectors and valences (78).

In the final section of the essay, Gibson distinguishes between perceiving and misperceiving affordances. The need for perception means that affordances can also be misperceived. : "No wonder, then, that quicksand is sometimes mistaken for sand, that a pitfall can be mistaken for solid ground, that poison ivy is sometimes mistaken for ivy, and that acid can be taken for water" (81).

"Now just as surfaces are stand-on-able and sit-on-able so also are they bump-into-able or get-underneath-able, or climb-on-able, or fall-off-able" (68).

^Is Gibson's a modernist project dependent on restrictive (or regular) patterns of human behavior?  What, if not an affordance, is the experimental edge of the thing-in-use? Are affordances incompatible with singularity? Given the ties to perception (and ecological optics), this is an interesting pairing with VV's "Seeing in Third Sophistic Ways."

Key phrases: Koffka's "demand character" (77), Kurt Lewin's "invitation-character" (78), valence (78), vectors (78),

Related sources:

Koffka, K. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1935.

Olson, "The Death of Composition as an Intellectual Discipline"

Olson, Gary. "The Death of Composition as an Intellectual Discipline." Olson 23-31.

Olson begins with a glaring critique of the perceived split between high-theory elites who avoid "the problems of the classroom" and those who would see composition as centrally concerned with "self-reflection about the teaching of writing or about one's own (or one's students') writing practices" (23). Olson was invited to address RNF and offer a justification for theory.

"In that speech, I argued that if postmodern discourse has taught us anything, it is that 'rhetoric' is at the center of all knowledge making, even in the sciences. As a field devoted to how discourse works, composition, then, is perfectly situated to participate in the exciting cross-disciplinary investigations of the interrelations between epistemology and discourse. That is, I argued that while we all desire to learn more about the teaching of writing or about our own writing processes, these are not the only intellectual concerns we should have as a discipline" (24). Olson notes anti-intellectual associations with studying the teaching of writing, citing Phelps.

"Since that speech, I had thought that as a discipline, we had come to terms with our intellectual diversity" (24). Olson says he was mistaken, however, given currents against theory (and also against feminism) (25). He offers the example of Wendy Bishop's piece in CCC (51.1, 1999), "what will undoubtedly become known as 'the new theory wars'" (25). Olson gives a reading of Bishop, telling that she makes claims that nobody cares about good writing any longer (^read next to Fulkerson).

"No one seems to care about good writing and teaching, she claims; the teacher-writer is dismissed or used for target practice" (25).
Bishop criticizes Pratt; Olson takes issue with her characterization of Pratt's sentence as having "no clothes, no heart" (27). In this second section, "A Place to Stand?," Olson unravels Bishops stance, raising questions about why, in the name of "good teaching" it is acceptable to protect students from dense theoretical vocabulary when, ultimately, disciplinarity depends on specialization that includes shared terms (prewriting, freewriting, audience invoked) (28).

In the third section, "A Sense of History," Olson refutes the attacks on "rapid professionalism" or "careerism" (28), noting that "most 'scholars' make enormous sacrifices to produce their work, gladly devoting huge spans of time to their projects--not simply to further their careers but because they love the subject and are devoted to the discipline itself" (28). The fissure Bishop introduces, Olson writes, isn't so different from its precedents: the disagreements between cognitivists and expressivists in the 1970s.

"For twenty years, composition scholarship has developed as an interdisciplinary, 'intellectual' enterprise--and we are much the richer because of it" (30). Olson closes with an emphasis on respect for differences.

Related sources:

Bishop, Wendy. "Places to Stand: The Reflective Writer-Teacher-Writer in Composition." CCC 51.1 (1999): 9-31.

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. Composition as a Human Science: Contributions to the Self-Understanding of a Discipline. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Selfe and Selfe, "Intellectual Work of Computers and Composition"

Selfe, Cynthia J. and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. "The Intellectual Work of Computers and Composition Studies." Olson 203-220.

According to Selfe and Selfe, four characteristics characterize intellectual work in computers and composition: grounding in language studies and social theory; a belief in social justice (204); commitment to school settings as sites where social change is produced (204); and "an understanding of technology and technological systems" as enacting change and resisting hegemony (204). Selfe and Selfe go on to describe computers and composition as infused with a pragmatic orientation; this piece has a tendency to frame computers and composition's intellectual work as a critical project or, that is, as a project anchored in critique (analysis, examination, etc.).

Though they admit it to be partial, the central portion of the essay focuses on three elements in computers and composition: educational issues (205), social/cultural issues (207), and representation and identity (210). Each section reads like a densely packed bibliographic essay with paragraph-long listings of books and articles that resonate with each focal area.

To conclude, they point out the cultural mythologies of technologies as monsters (211) and turn their emphasis to human beings; the final push is for humanities computing or technology studies cognizant of human agency in the proliferation of technologies. They end citing Giddens on the sociality of technology and the often "unanticipated consequences" and also with a reaffirmation of "continuing to pay attention to technology" (212).

"Technology is not fully constituted by machines. It is, instead, a set of articulated social formations--ideological, economic, political, cultural. And given this fact, the study of technologies must, at its heart, involve the study of the humans who design, make, and use these machines" (212).

^What's odd about this piece is that it is just nine pages of heavily referential prose (a dense bibliographic essay) followed by eight pages of citations--appr. 170 in all and many of which are never used in the piece. Does everything listed fit with the label of "intellectual work" (rel. to the distinctions in the early section of the book--Neel, Swearingen, Olson)?

Related sources:

Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.

Wysocki, Anne Frances, and Johndan Johnson-Eilola. "Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?" Hawisher and Selfe, Passions 349-68.

Swearingen, "R&C as a Coherent Intellectual Discipline"

Swearingen, C. Jan. "Rhetoric and Composition as a Coherent Intellectual Discipline." Olson 12-22. [A]

The creation of graduate programs in rhetoric and composition between 1975-1985 marked a sea change for the field; following this initial point, Swearingen notes several of the earliest conditions that enabled the firming up of the discipline: PRE/TEXT, RSQ, Young, Becker and Pike's work, an MLA division, JAC, Rhetoric Review, and so on: "It is impossible to estimate how crucial these developments have been to the redefinition of graduate programs and to reforms of rhetoric and composition courses in the undergraduate curriculum" (13). Overall, this piece lays out the theoretical terrain of English studies and the ties of rhetoric and composition to critical theory and sociolinguistics influences.

The remainder of Swearingen's article is divided into four sections:

A Developing Discipline (13): Situates rhetoric and composition in English studies; notes anti-theoretical moments or turns away from theory (comparison to lurching of a loon trying to get off the ground); new growth in doctoral programs and edited collections "attempt[ing] to define the conceptual, philosophical, and aesthetic bases for new composition theories" (14). "Various intellectual streams merged" in the scholarship (14).
"The shorter recent history of the hegemony of critical theory marks a point of attempted, or wished-for, conjunction, with both rhetoric and literature claiming a closer, earlier tie to high theory. The more theory is agreed upon, however tacitly, as the lingua fracta of citizenship, the more composition feels defined out; many compositionists once again feel themselves strangers in the land they have helped create--or in some cases emigrants by choice" (16).

Paradoxes of Postmodernism (16): Accounts for the peak of postmodernism in the late 1980s and the resurgence of "ludic reconstructionism" pursued by "feminists, compositionists, and proponents of ethnic diversity in language practices" (17). Suggests theory as a stressor for many compositionists (18).
"Many current studies of identity politics (and curricula based upon them) can be traced at some point to the knowledge-identity topos in postmodern rhetorical and composition theory" (17).

The Prospects of Foundationless Critique (18): New rhetorics are solidified in the field, along with Russian linguistics influences. Citizen-based models also take hold (Freire, Marx). The result of so many theories is a problem of incompatibility. Swearingen explains the nuances of each theory's inward instabilities and dissensus (on citizenship...good citizens vs. social change; on Bakhtin's "inner speech" and agency).

The Return to the (Socio)Linguistic Turn: (20): Lays out the paradox of language standards and variants of English, noting that "[t]he practical difficulties that have emerged out of anti-foundationalist social critique models affect the implementation of tolerance- and diversity-based language pedagogies" (21).
"It is not too early to observe an institutional consequence of strained relationships between rhetorical theory and composition practice" (21). [e.g., Brodkey and the curriculum fiasco at Texas]

The final point emphasizes a history that should lead to something better than the labor crisis we continue to face because of theoretically inclined faculty (tipping to rhetoric and critical theory) tend to distance themselves from writing programs.

What sound?

Neel, "Reclaiming Our Theoretical Heritage"

Neel, Jasper. "Reclaiming Our Theoretical Heritage: A Big Fish Tale." Olson 3-11.

Neel complicates the theory and practice polarities; he argues, quite convincingly, that theory is not expendable. Advanced through analogies to whaling, the argument begins with an account of the Makah tribe's resumption of whaling practices in the Pacific Northwest in an effort to restore cultural heritage. Their whaling praxis was compromised and so they sought to restore it. Neel tests the limits of this decision, noting that countertheories were well in place "by the time such a practice could be demonstrated theoretically as socially desirable" (5).

From here, Neel works through multiple possible readings of the story of Jonah and the whale--the least probable of which is a literal reading. In other words, the perpetually re-cast, re-framed, re-interpreted allegory suggests the shifting enactments of theory.

Ultimately, this is an argument for "Reclaiming Theory." Neel contends that "Composition becomes mature, however, able to sustain itself, when it constantly scrutinizes its theoretical underpinnings" (9). He goes on, "It would be naive to retreat from theory, and it would be exceedingly selfish, because the only faculty who truly have the option of doing so already have tenure and have already passed through the process of finding a voice with which to speak" (10).

"Theory forces one to interrogate one's own position. Ignorance of theory usually permits one to remain unaware that one holds a position, one of many possible positions, a position that can change. Ignorance of theory blinds one to the knowledge that changing one's position changes what one sees and how one sees it" (11).

"And does it matter if the Native Americans re-create the whale hunt using modern technology? Radar and sonar to find the whales? Motorized boats to catch them? Harpoon canons that are much more accurate and have far greater range and power than harpoons thrown by hand?" (3).

"For the practitioner, Stanley Fish's old T-shirt with the question, Sure it works in practice but will it work in theory? is an ironic description, not an in-joke" (3).

Foster, "What Are We Talking About...Composition"

Foster, David. "What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Composition?" JAC 8 (1988): 30-40.

Foster sets up a tension between scientistic and humanistic approaches to composition by giving a reading of three seminal texts: Beach and Bridwell's New Directions in Composition (1984), Hillocks's Research on Written Composition (1986), and North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition (1987). He is foremost concerned with composition's status as a discipline, and he builds toward a provocative conclusion (what will we refuse to know?) by working through each of these books and suggesting the implications of an approach to composition that depends too narrowly on empirical research, on models of mind and process that do little to account for context, and on the limits of replication as a reliability indicator in scientific research (34). Empirical exclusivity is problematic, Foster contends, because it renders codependent theoretical development and empirical evidence (34). Humanistic approached to composition, on the contrary, "flouris[h] through dialectic, in which one mode of thinking draws life [energy!] in response to all other modes of thought, none ever permanently 'disproved' or abandoned" (35).

In an affirmation of humanistic models, Foster mentions Bitzer's triad, recent research on audience, and Fish and Blech's work on "interpretive communities" (36). Furthermore, Foster notes the trap of dualistic thinking [killer dichotomies?]: "The scientific and humanistic ways of knowing can carry equal power for the knower, provided he or she understands the different processes of knowledge upon which each depends. We know some things as humanists, some things as scientists, and we can accommodate each way of knowing into our total field of awareness--so that we can prevent ourselves from being trapped into dualistic either-or thinking" (37).

Foster's final criticism of Hillocks centers on Hillocks' conclusion that there is relatively little research on audience. Foster contends that Hillocks consideration of other research is heavily qualified by a narrow set of brackets, brackets neglecting to include a number of audience studies on the basis of methodology. This is the final argument before Foster's compelling conclusion: "To refuse this invitation to an intellectual pluralism, to settle in its place for a single perspective, is to invite the punishment we all hated in grade school: having to write the same sentence one hundred times. In this case, it would be 'I will not know. I will not know. I will not know...' (38).

"Each study also conveys a sense of the dynamic, changing nature of 'composition,' a feeling that it is enlarging its boundaries faster than its mapmakers can chart" (31).

"The assumption informing both books [Beach and Bridwell; Hillocks] is this: composition is an empirically verifiable field of knowledge which, under the right conditions, can grow through hypothesis and experiment toward a truer picture of what teachers must know to nurture literacy" (32).

"Applied to composition, this powerful idea [natural laws] requires us to believe that beneath the activities collectively called 'writing' are inherent laws which, when discovered, will permit us to understand, predict, and even control such activities" (33).

"But can scientific knowledge be a real foundation for teaching discourse?" (34).

"Indeed, we must turn to North's thorough, deliberate anatomizing of all the major modes of inquiry in composition to get anything like a satisfying picture of the competing ideologies in current composition study" (35).

Related sources:

Beach, Richard, and Lillian S. Bridwell, eds. New Directions in Composition Research: Perspectives in Writing Research. New York: Guilford, 1984.

Connors, Robert J. "Composition Studies and Science." College English 45 (1983): 1-20.

Cooper, Marilyn. "The Ecology of Writing." College English 48 (1986): 364-75.

Hillocks, George, Jr. Research on Written Composition: New Directions for Teaching. Urbana: NCRE-ERIC, 1986.

North, Stephen. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair, NY: Boynton, 1987.

VR@RL Underway

The VR@RL Conference kicks off today and runs through the end of the week. Here's what I put together: "Digital Underlife and Writing Instruction."

Meal Ideas

Figures that the last week of July would be my week for groceries. I'm heading to the store in a few minutes, until then, preparing mentally for the mealy week ahead. Here's what I've got so far:

Day One (Monday): Ph. has a soccer match at 7:15. In the mosquito hatchery that doubles as Wetlands Soccer Park. IOW, we'll be the dinner. Home by 9. Actual dinner: microwave popcorn with popsicles for dessert (only if it's a win).
Day Two: Our third wedding anniversary. Celebrating a superfine three years. D. and I eat at a respectable restaurant, while Ph. sits at home, playing PS2 and eating graham crackers (relax, they're honey graham crackers).
Day Three and Four: Where have the appetites gone? Y. (who reminds me more and more of a junkyard Snoopy) is still sick. Poor lil' guy. But damn! Nobody's hungry.
Day Five: Creamed corn casserole. Too hot to bake, so I put the microwave to work. And work. it. does. Which is more than we can say for the washing machine or dishwasher. Hey Maytag, are we unlucky or should these rusty &^% appliance go to the scrap-heap?
Day Six: Nearing expirations on the many milks in the refrigerator. Dinner idea: dairy consumption contest. Vanilla soy milk, 2%, skim. Oh, and why not: yogurt, sour cream, half-n-half and cottage cheese.
Day Seven: It's the end of my week, which saddens me just a little bit. For a mood-lift, we splurge on double-toasted everything bagels and cokes (Coke floats if I pick up some ice cream).

For breakfasts: Cinnamon Life, wheat germ and PB toast.

I'm gone to the store.

Turkle, "Identity Crisis"

Turkle, Sherry. "Identity Crisis." Vitanza 57-76.

Turkle begins by suggesting that metaphors for pshychoanalysis predominate in every era.  Fluidity and stability contend, increasingly, in the high tides of postmodernism.  Turkle examines the implications of MUDs and other online domains for identity play: "Online switches among personae seem quite natural. Indeed, for [Emily Martin], they are a kind of practice. Martin would call them practicums" (58). Citing Gergen, Tukle invokes his phrase, a "pastiche of personalities" to describe identificatory play and experimentation (^liken to tourism in Nakamura).  Generally, she gets at the tension between unity and inner pluralism or inner multiplicity--differences that are primarily metaphoric (and these metaphors are amplified by material technologies and language).

"I am not limited in the number of links I can create" (61).

"At one extreme, the unitary self maintains its oneness by repressing all that does not fit.  Thus censored, the illegitimate parts of the self are not accessible" (63). Turkle's insight here is fairly balanced, and her perspective magnifies the limitations of both perspectives, while still acknowledging that, good or bad, online technologies make play possible.

"We are encouraged to think of ourselves as fluid, emergent, decentralized, multiplicitous, flexible, and ever in process" (67). Or, on the other hand, as...mannequins?

"Emergent or not, when reduced to our most basic elements, we are made up, mind and body, of information" (69). ^Provocative claim. Turkle goes on to explain why it's complicated, controversial.

"As we stand on the boundary between the real and the virtual, our experience recalls what the anthropologist Victor Turner terms a liminal moment, a moment of passage when new cultural symbols and meanings can emerge. Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity" (71).

"pastiche of personalities" - Gergen (59), "languages of the self" - Gergen (60), "continuum of dissociation" - Hacking (63), inner diversity (64), "liminal moment" - Turner (71)

Related sources:

Gergen, Kenneth. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1990.

Rheinghold, "Smart Mobs"

Rheinghold, Howard. "Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many." Vitanza 89-120.

"Smart mobs are an unpredictable but at least partially describable emergent property that I see surfacing as more people use mobile telephones, more chips communicate with each other, more computers know where they are located, more technology becomes wearable, more people start using these new media to invent new forms of sex, commerce, entertainment, communion, and, as always, conflict" (115).

An virtual enthusiast, Rheingold covers a range of issues related to wireless, handheld and portable devices (wearable computing) while considering the potentials of digitally enabled collectivity. His examples are primarily political and popular press (news items). He recounts the power struggle of Philippine President Joseph Estrada and the impact of "smart mobs" in toppling the regime. Because cellular phones are so inexpensive, the citizen (peer-to-peer) journalism they enable is potentially a major force in social and political change. Rheinghold the technical infrastructure as "a social instrument" (93).

"Examples later in this chapter demonstrate that smart mobs engaging in either violent or nonviolent netwar represent only a few of the many possible varieties of smart mob.[...] Networks include nodes and links, use many possible paths to distribute information from any link to any other, and are self-regulated through flat governance hierarchies and distributed power" (96). Rheingold goes on to clarify--is this a given yet?--that networks and networking technologies are neither inherently good nor inherently bad (97).

Rheingold's discussion of "personal awareness devices" is very interesting--related to "reputation systems" (98) and GPS. Basically, the locative devices enable real-time social positioning notifications. ^I still find it fascinating that such devices might be used to observe patterns at an academic conference, such as the CCCC.

"What if smart mobs could empower entire populations to engage in peer-to-peer journalism?" (101).

"'Mobile ad hoc social network' is a longer, more technical term than 'smart mob.' Both terms describe the new social form made possible by the combination of computation, communication, reputation, and location awareness. The mobile aspect is already self-evident to urbanites who see the early effects of mobile phones and SMS" (103).

"The research is as much behavioral as it is computational, beginning with simple experiments matching properties of mobile computing with the needs of social networks" (104).

"Trust means a distributed reputation system" (106).

"The coordinated movements of schools and flocks is a dynamically shifting aggregation of individual decisions" (110).

"Oscillation is one of the standard and simplest emergent phenomena" (111). ^ Connect this with Lanham in Economics of Attention?

Terms: Goffman's "interaction order" (105), "epidemics of cooperation" (108), "synchronization of brain processes" (111),

Related sources:

Ball, Philip. Critical Mass. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959.

Granovetter, Mark. "Threshold Models of Collective Behavior, " American Journal of Sociology. 83.6 (1978): 1420-1443.

Huberman, Bernardo. "The Social Mind." Origins of the Human Brain. Jean-Pierre Changeuz and Jean Chavaillon, eds. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995: 250.

Examinutiae

I count 110 days until I'm taking qualifying exams. Over the past 24 days, I have read and annotated 19 units--books and articles combined. I'm not making any distinction between books and articles for now, even though I know that I need an hour for an article and ~6 for a book. My notes for each are roughly equivalent coming out at around 1-2 pp. The first 19 units fit in while teaching two online courses together enrolling ~50 students (my fall will not be so engorged...with teaching, but, of course, the fall will be babyful, so the formulas are all amiss). Because I'll lose my mind if I work constantly, I took fifteen minutes to monkey around with my lists as a bar graph. When I paste the sets into a spreadsheet, Excel tells me there are 169 items in my three lists combined.

I think of it like a fundraising chart:

Holy smokes. Bleak friggin' outlook for being exam-ready by November. Unless! I glanced through the remaining 150 items (remember, 110 days or 2,640 hours, however you want to break it down) and I have read 56 of them. I know 56 out of the 150 remaining. I simply need to dash out a few reliable notes. Remainder: 94 units in 110 days. If one-third are articles and two-thirds are books, then I'm amping up for 403 hours of grindstone. Tack on another 50 hours for annotating the familiar 56 units and it comes to 459 hours. Just over five hours per day, not counting weekends. Or, more my style, eleven hours one day followed by a day on the couch reading fiction and watching television...and again and again. Well, and I have some expendables built in, so I could drop ten units without offending anyone or read super-selectively, etc. But given that I haven't had what I would characterize as a remarkable working month (even take it to six weeks), I guess that it still seems possible to be exam-proof in the fall.

Nakamura, "Race In/For Cyberspace"

Nakamura, Lisa. "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet." Vitanza 141-154.

Nakamura's critical account focuses centrally on identity tourism and racial passing.  She reads these issues through a series of events or happenings: 1. the "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" cartoon; 2. the matter of character (distinct from person--this is not clarified by Nakamura, but it comes up in Frith and Barthes on "voice"); 3. the exoticization of space and theatricality of trying on characters; 4. nationalistic framings of cyberspace as subject to a "space race" (149); and 5. a failed petition in LambdaMOO on hate-crime (150).  The petition failed because detractors contended that race was a willed disclosure; nobody was forced to disclose race. The absence of race then, as is central to Nakamura's set of concerns, becomes a default position.  LambaMOO, in fact, doesn't even have an option for designating one's race, and when racially suggestive names appeared in the MOO, they were perceived, according to her research, as divisive or contrarian. 

^Consider the timing of this article relative to graphical web browsers.  How does the visual web complicate this?  And how, too, read alongside matters of person and character in voice (increasingly a disembodied voice) add a layer to the problem of "writing" oneself into the MOO?  Is the person/character problem for voice the same as the identity tourism problem for text-based online forums?

"Role-playing sites on the Internet such as LambdaMOO offer their participants programming features such as the ability to physically 'set' one's gender, race, and physical appearance, through which they can, indeed are required to, project a version of the self which is inherently theatrical" (143).

"The borders and frontiers of cyberspace which had previously seemed so amorphous take on a keen sharpness when the enunciation of racial otherness is put into play as performance" (144).

"Identity tourism in cyberspaces like LambdaMOO functions as a fascinating example of the promise of high technology to enhance travel opportunities by redefining what constitutes travel--logging on to a phantasmatic space where one can appropriate exotic identities means that one need never cross a physical border or even leave one's armchair to go on vacation" (148).

"Performing alternative versions of self and race jams the ideology-machine, and facilitates a desirable opening up of what Judith Butler calls 'the difficult future terrain of community'" (153).

Relates sources:

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1993.

Beaguiled

Despite warnings, we ventured into the park, careful to avoid anything that might be mistaken for a "no dogs-with-blue-collars" area.

Oneonta and Back

After twenty minutes on the road, I realized that the return trip from Oneonta to Syracuse late this afternoon was the longest stretch I've driven alone in over two years. Yeah. Can you believe it? One hundred and fifteen miles, half of which are like a labyrinthine winder through the curvaceous NY countryside (I still love that scene from Peewee's Big Adventure). Other half? The I-90 thru-way.

Ph. and I drove to Baseball Village this morning to watch a game. My twelve-year-old cousin and his team from the Kansas City area played in the quarterfinals against some team from San Diego. It was a terrific game, other than the final score favoring the kids from California, 7-5. After lunch with my aunt and uncle, I drove back to Syracuse (for D. and me the last birthing class was tonight; it included an entry-worthy tour of the hospital). Ph. stayed back in Oneonta to check out the Soccer Hall of Fame and hang out with family.

But on the drive, I was suddenly very bored. I had the iPod jacked into the Element's auxiliary input and shuffling through my so-so music collection. Bored. And I also got out the camera and humored myself with a bit of photodriving. Except for the extremely curvy stretches, it's relatively safe. Okay, well, safer than talking on a cell phone.

Here's one at the fields this morning:

And from the Hall of Fame:

Commenting with Audio

Over the last two days I've been reading and commenting in response to student work from two summer courses I'm teaching online.

I'm using a budget-friendly Labtec mic and the following settings in Audacity:

Out Comes

As much as anything else, I wanted to gather together the full (re-released!) collection of interchange on "computer literacy" section of the WPA Outcomes Statement on technology. Why? Just so I'd have it, evidence of the watershed moment.

Suggested Section: Computer Literacy
Outcomes, Technology, and a Blog
Computer Literacy Plank on Outcomes Statement
Party like it's 1996
Why I haughtta...
planks of technology
More on Technology, Outcomes, Walking Planks, Being an Outsider"
WPA Technology Outcomes Statement
Walking the "Techplank"

While I'm at it, I've been thinking about outcomes statements for a few days now, too, not only because of the WPA OS on technology, but also because I've been deciphering quite a few acronym-rich emails with references to CO, CA and CAR associated with my summer gig.

Just moseying along, minding my business, when I bump into an OS, I want to ask, What comes out? (Is it possible to do so without seeming rude?) Put another way: What do we gain and lose by shifting outcomes from a noun to a question? What comes out? Or what, with adherence to the listed dictums, would come out?

That probably wouldn't work becomes outcomes are answers, affirmations of the implications of a particular set of activities (often associated with formal schooling). Because the answers or outcomes precede the activity, they run the risk of overdetermining the activity, reducing it to its forecast. They are, for the most part, inertial rather than accelerative, a happy cocktail of teleology, ideology and institution-ology. They depend upon clear, concise language, language that must not theorize, must not introduce perplexity (no matter how vital these things might be throughout the activity!). Outcomes, necessary though they are, might be the antithesis of inquiry. Inquiry moves ahead without full certainty or reassurance of already knowing. Inquiry knows not what will come out: wondering, wandering, guessing.

In fairness, we can all recognize the need for removing these three nuisances: theory, perplexity and inquiry. Outcomes statements must be the surest answers; the activity would be a failure if it didn't come out as predicted, if it didn't come out, that is, an exact match with the lowest replicable components (LRC).

Last thing: this brings up an audience problem. I mention this because audience seems to be a crossed-wires issue here. In "Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline," citing Farrell, Lauer writes, "In social fields, advocates have two kinds of audience: 1) the epistemic court of experts and 2) larger affected populations for whom social knowledge exercises a rhetorical function, attempting to gain their acceptance of its conclusions and to induce their action" (24). Eventually there's a third audience (even if Lauer includes it with the second audience): "those writing instructors and pedagogical advocates who are neither in touch with existing scholarship nor contributing to it" (24). What do I mean about an audience problem? The three audiences, again:

1. Epistemic court (experts who keep up with the reading and write actively on the issues they profess)
2. General public
2a. Those who self-identify with the field but who neither keep up with the scholarship nor write actively on the issues they profess

Outcomes statements can't appease all three audiences at once, and it's altogether likely that those in the first group will find them to be egregiously reductive, simplistic and lacking in vitality (fair enough; Lauer wasn't writing about OSes, exactly). They must name only what is already known to be possible as an LRC (and often such sure things are a few years old) rather than naming what is possible or recently emerging.

Barton, "Interpreting the Discourses of Technology"

Barton, Ellen L. "Interpreting the Discourses of Technology." Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology. Cynthia Selfe and Susan Hiligoss, eds. Research and Scholarship in Composition Ser. New York: MLA, 1994. 56-75.

Barton is chiefly concerned with two discourses of technology: the first, enthusiastic, euphoric, celebratory, and triumphalist, tends to correspond to teaching (look what we can do!); the other, an antidominant discourse of technology, corresponds to a "skeptical interpretation" most often theorized and politicized. 

Dominant: "the substance is based on an unquestioned assumption that progress in technology brings a variety of benefits to individuals and society" (57).  Assumptions that go along with this are that technology is here to stay and that the benefits are for everyone.  This stance or discourse also contends that the educational system must prepare technology users (58).
Antidominant:  "exists as a minority voice, critiquing the assumption that technology always brings progress and pointing out some of its less desirable consequences" (60). Baron attributes this stance--reading it through Rorty and Pratt--to the "cultural Left." 

"Critics of the cultural Left, in contrast [to cultural literacy orientations], present an antidominant discourse, arguing that the integration of technology most often functions to maintain existing lines of power and authority" (65).  This connects with the problem of literacy as either a.) an indoctrination to status quo (which does little to destabilize power structures) or b.) a critical project motivated by making explicit inequities perpetuated (often unwittingly) by the dominant discourse of technology.

"Slatin's article ["Reading Hypertext"] reflects a common theme in the dominant discourse of technology, that of the creation of new and potentially significant products, products that may, in this case, assist theorists in understanding the associative process of reading and help teachers in developing mature student readers and writers" (67).

"In sum, even this brief review of the literature shows a clear association between pedagogical research describing the use of computers in the teaching of writing and the dominant discourse, which assumes the advantages of technology in education" (69). Here, Barton leads up to the conclusion that much of the scholarship in Computers and Writing enfolds the antidominant discourse into the dominant discourse, blending (perhaps infelicitously) the two forces with the edge going to enthusiasts--or those who, at the very least, grant that techonology literacy is good.

"As I argued earlier, much of the research in computers and writing that adopts the antidominant discourse actually merges into the dominant discourse in its explicit or implicit focus on pedagogical goals. But research in computers and writing more closely reflects the key ideas of the antidominant discourse when it exposes the unequal distribution of resources across groups using technology in literacy education" (74). This is a succinct statement of the both-and bind facing C&W researchers in 1994.  What followed?  Is technology still reducible to dominant and antidominant discourses? Is this more than a killer dichotomy (the antidominant skepticism putting the brakes on productive uses of technology, for better or worse)? 

Related sources

Lanham, Richard. "The Extraordinary Convergence: Democracy, Technology, Theory, and the University Curriculum." Gless and Smith 27-50.

Slatin, John M. "Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium." College English 52 (1990): 870-83.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979.

Costanzo, "Reading, Writing and Thinking in an Age of Electronic Literacy"

Costanzo, William. "Reading, Writing and Thinking in an Age of Electronic Literacy." Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology. Cynthia Selfe and Susan Hiligoss, eds. Research and Scholarship in Composition Ser. New York: MLA, 1994. 11-21.

In this overview, Costanzo provides a snapshot of C&W concerns and vocabulary in 1994.  He acknowledges the changes in the "tools of literacy" and the related shifts in the "nature of texts."  Centrally, the computer screen is the focal site of this change.  Costanzo refers to Haas' notion of the challenge in electronic prose related to "getting a sense of the text" (12) and reports that the distinctions for how hand and eye work with electronic texts has bearing on literacy.  Shifts from linear reading to hypertext also apply here. 

According to Costanzo, theories of reading have tipped in favor of Frank Smith's Understanding Reading and comprehension rather than Jean Chall's Learning to Read and decoding (12). Basically, computers introduce new factors affecting how we read; he mentions Selfe's concept of "layered literacy" here and also acknowledges a more complex visuality and related design considerations bearing on reading and writing activities.  Before wrapping up with three chapter summaries, Costanzo works through the areas related to response and collaboration--the network dimensions of computing (though he doesn't call it this): interactive fiction (16), enactive models for writing processes (17), and communal contexts/intertextuality (keeping with Vygotsky and Bakhtin) (17). He also introduces, briefly, Ong's secondary orality and matters of representation related to desktop publishing (democratization of tools) and access (19).

Electronic versus Printed Texts
Reading and Writing Electronic Texts
The Look of the Text
A Sense of Response
Historical Perspectives
Questions of Representation

"Whereas textbooks may describe the processes and teachers may give demonstrations, computers serve as enactive models" (17).

Related sources:

Haas, Christina. "Composing in Technological Contexts: A Study of Note-Making." Written Communication 7 (1990): 512-547.

Haas, Christina. "Does the Medium Make a Difference?: Two Studies of Writing with Pen and Paper and with Computers." Human-Computer Interaction 4 (1989): 149-169.

Smith, Frank. Understanding Reading. New York: Holt, 1971.

Smith, "Hypertextual Thinking"

Smith, Catherine F. "Hypertextual Thinking." Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology. Cynthia Selfe and Susan Hiligoss, eds. Research and Scholarship in Composition Ser. New York: MLA, 1994. 264-281.

Smith seeks to develop an understanding of hypertext as having a figural relationship to cognitive form and structure.  She draws on Susanne Langer (Living Form) and Walter Kintsch (Cognitive Architecture) to suggest models of thinking as they overlap with "human capabilities for designing a conscious intellectual quest" (280). The intellectual experience of hypertext--hypertextual thinking--Smith contends, might move us toward "reidentifications of literate thinking, especially those that realign literacy's relation to textuality" (280).

Smith opens with a riff on Bolter's correlation of mind as a network of signs.  She questions this.  Is it?  Something seems to be lacking in the metaphor.  Smith's focus in the chapter is what she calls "the pragmatics of making meaning," and the discussion proceeds through distinctions between thick and thin cognition.  "I am asking whether hypertext systems might be designed and used to support the 'thicker' kinds of knowing" (265).

Hypertext is an "intellectual experience" in addition to a "textual experience related to reading and writing" (266). This approach puts pressure on what it means to read and write hypertext as meaning-making activities or, in Langer's terms, acts.

In her discussion of cognitive architecture, drawing on Kintsch, Smith considers structures of expectation and the problem of getting lost in a "spaghetti" of hyperspace (275).  Other factors include relevance (a teleological turn here) and quest.  ^It's not clear in places whether the quest is ordered according to a network topography or something more grid-like (274b).

Implications for teaching focuses on heuristics (280): "In Langer's view of acts of thinking, objects are saturated by their relations, grounded in a context; most important, they are motivated by a particular situation" (279).

Sections:
The Issue: Making Meaning
Hypertext: The Original Paradigm and Its Limitations
An Alternative View: Hypertext as Living Form and as Cognitive Architecture
Living Form
Cognitive Architecture
Implications for Teaching and Learning
Hypertextual Thinking and Orality

"Nodes and links are the defining capabilities of hypertext" (267).

"'Living form' is Langer's characterization for continuous vital process or organic connectivity, both within a single form of existence and across forms of existence" (270). Smith explains how Langer's philosophy of mind--keyed by 1.) dynamic architecture, 2.) origination and effect in a situation, and 3.) formative principles of individuation and involvement--inform "a different notion of hypertext" (271).

"Through ambience, an act gathers relationships with other acts.  The possibilities are so varied as to blue distinctions between kinds of existence, e.g. between organic and inorganic existence" (271).

"This constructed output--the initial text base--is an associative network, with propositions as nodes and associations as links" (273). [Return]

"My primary aim here, however, is not to specify the technical implementation but to bring into view a fresh concept of hypertext. As Mark Frisse notes, 'How people conceptualize hypertext will affect how they design indexes and information retrieval methods for those systems'" (276).

Terms: mental representation (272), structures of expectation (273), activation vector (274), hypertextual thinking (280)

Related sources:

Kintsch, Walter, and Teun A. van Dijk. "Toward a Model of Text Comprehension and Production." Psychological Review 85 (1978): 363-94.

Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner's, 1953.

Langer, Susanne K. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1967.

Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"

*Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181.

Hawaray's famous essay winds, triple-helix-like, around three politically-inflected considerations: feminism, socialism and materialism. Or, perhaps more precisely, she spins together a critical, (anti)definitional account of cyborg writing: the problem of agency, that is, in late twentieth century's emerging conditions of posthumanism and globalization as such forces "change what counts as women's experience" (149).

The essay is organized into the following sections:

I. An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit (149) (primarily definitional; a lot of giveth and taketh away or additive and subtractive defining of "cyborg")
II. Fractured Identities (155) (shift away from identity in favor of "affinity" and "affinities")
III. The Informatics of Dominion (161) (gets at the new conditions related to communications technologies and biotechnologies--a "writing technology" (164))
IV. The 'Homework Economy' Outside 'The Home' (166) (deals with labor and scene)
V. Women in the Integrated Circuit (170)
VI. Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity (173)

Haraway introduces three boundary breakdowns: 1.) the separation between human and animal; 2.) the distinction between organism and machine; and 3.) the distinction between physical and non-physical things. Furthermore, beyond boundary breakdowns, Haraway accounts for miniaturization and ubiquity (even invisibility) as factors complicating the "new scientific revolution" (153).

"The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence" (151).

"The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other" (164). This begins to blend with ecological psychology and related considerations of systems as arenas where materiality and mythology wash into each other.

"These sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or cybernetic [feedback-controlled] communication system" (169).

"'Networking ' is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy--weaving is for oppositional cyborgs" (170). Haraway gives us so much buildup--characterizations, descriptions, explanations of new and emerging dynamics. She might also be said to domesticate the figure of the cyborg; by establishing it complexly, Haraway becomes a kind of thin referent for all subsequent cyborg references.

"Intensifications of hardship experienced world-wide in connection with the social relations of science and technology are severe" (173). How might this be a more vigorous approach to questions of access? Is access synonymous with hardship? And why wouldn't we, then, always keep language fresh for its relevance to the technology access question?

"Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication" (176). The sites for this struggle and activity are elaborated in section IV, and a statement like this one moves the cyborg figure, its logic, nearer to composition and rhetoric. Maybe?

"Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?" (178). Another ecological psychology question.

"Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations" (181).

Related sources:

Winner, Langdon. The Whale and The Reactor: A Search For Limits In An Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986.

Grossman, Rachael. "Women's Place in the Integrated Circuit." Radical America 14.1 (1980): 29-49.

New London Group, "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies"

*New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies." Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Future. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds. New York: Routledge, 2000. 9-37.

"Designing social futures" comes not only as this first chapter's subtitle but also as the second phrase in the subtitle of the NLG's larger book: Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. The New London Group is concerned with the proliferation of information, its circulation in multiple channels, including mass media, and, as well, the ability of education to prepare students for life in the face of unprecedented waves of information. Specifically, they focus on three scenes or phases of life: working lives, public lives (citizenship), and personal lives (or lifeworlds). In accounting for each of these scenes or phases, they hint at notions of network understanding, particularly intermixed with digital encounters (Ulmer's electracy, noted in one margin).

To put it another way, one of the questions motivating the NLG's work might be: How have new and emerging information technologies reconstituted the literacies most viable for work, citizenship and personal life? How must schooling respond?

"Local diversity and global connectedness mean not only that there can be no standard; they also mean that the most important skill students need to learn is to negotiate regional, ethnic, or class-based dialects; variations in register that occur according to social context; hybrid cross-cultural discourses; the code switching often to be found within a text among different languages, dialects, or registers; different visual and iconic meanings; and variations in the gestural relationships among people, language, and material objects" (14). Consider this alongside Canagarajah's notion corrective, code meshing. This also bears on the emphasis on futures and the static quality of standards.

The second major consideration of the essay (beyond that changing contours of literacy in work, citizen-publics and personal lives) is schooling: What schools do and what we can do in schools.

"The role of pedagogy is to develop an epistemology of pluralism that provides access without people having to erase or leave behind different subjectivities. This has to be the basis of a new norm" (18). The new norm relies heavily on notions of pedagogy as "design." This, they break into three sub-sets: available design, design and the redesigned. This reminds me of the tension Urban sets up between accelerative and inertial forces in culture (Metaculture). Available Designs are precursors and antecedent forces; Design is agency, in effect, and the redesigned accounts for what comes of the dialectical relationship.

"Our view of mind, society, and learning is based on the assumption that the human mind is embodied, situated and social" (30). This stance folds together four teaching activities: situated practice (33), overt instruction (33), critical framing (34), and transforming practice (situated, reflective) (35).

Related sources:

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. 1916. New York: The Free Press, 1967.

Halliday, M.A.K., Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning, Baltimore: University Park Press, 1978; London: Edward Arnold, 1978.

Macrorie, Uptaught

*Macrorie, Ken. Uptaught. 1970. Innovators in Education Ser. Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook, 1996.

Macrorie's Uptaught is a humorous, hard-edged critique of tendencies in formal education toward prescriptive, overdetermined, and algorithmic writing events. True to his expressivist orientations, Macrorie emphasizes freedom (an almost Elbovian "Life is long; school is short" strain), freewriting, voice and their antitheses: oppression, constraint and stale discourses of schooling. I'm most interested in Macrorie's treatment of a computer system, Percival, as a trope for all that's wrong with education. The villainous computer system is used to score essays based on textual features, and this scenario functions rather like a set of bookends holding together the middle of his critique. Algorithmic text analysis is emblematic of all that's wrong with the institutionalization of writing in college. He boldly criticizes such projects (and associated thinking), but this also comes off as a critique of technology.

"They figured the theme graded by a teacher would carry a large number of these characteristics: a variety of sentence structures, frequent long sentences (with dependent clauses and other clearly realized relationships), a title (many papers did not carry titles), frequent paragraphing, few apostrophes, few spelling errors, many connective words, many commas and parentheses marks. The computer could read the papers for these mechanical traits" (4). Here, Macrorie lists the traits the computer system could identify, and he's right: it could. But he doesn't inquire into the possible benefits or uses or computationally assisted reading because it is the enemy. The mechanistic association, to be fair, is convenient to his larger set of proclamations about the dire state of college-level writing instruction.

"It was not nice to look at Johnny's carefully prepared dead body of a theme, cleaned of all the dirt of the street and the lines of experience around the eyes, inflated with abstract, pedantic words, depersonalized with pseudo-objective phrases that rendered it like every other corpse submitted to the teacher" (7). This connects with a couple of issues: Phelps in "Domain of Composition" on natural attitude, the idea of circulation in composition as "submitting" a paper (or corpse!), and the general displeasure in it all--for everyone involved.

Notably, Uptaught is part of an "innovators" series. And this brings up questions about what's involved with being an innovator. What does it mean, in other words, to be an innovator in composition and rhetoric, and who are our innovators now? On what grounds?

"This dehydrated manner of producing writing that is never read is the contribution of the English teacher to the total university. I know. For seventeen years I talked and responded like Percival. Then something happened in my class that showed me I had been an automaton sending out subtle messages I was unaware of. The students read them well: they were to become automatons too" (8). This, another illustration of Macrorie's complaint with automaton teaching and learning.

Related sources:

Page, E. B. & Paulus, D. H. (1968). The analysis of essays by computer. Washington, D. C: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, Bureau of Research.

Inman, Computers and Writing: The Cyborg Era

Inman, James A. Computers and Writing: The Cyborg Era. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004.

Inman's monograph is structurally rugged in the sense that he is explicit about the function and form of each section.  The book begins with a definition of computers and writing that stacks up according to real and virtual conferences (a listing of C&W conferences, locations, and dates), professional organizations and initiatives (ACW, Netoric Project, MOOs, OWLs, and listservs), and publishing ventures and products (Computers and Writing (1983), Kairos) (3).

Late in chapter one, Inman introduces something like an abbreviated bibliographic essay in an effort to account for the historical boundaries of the "cyborg era," a period he identifies as running roughly from 1979-2000, a period throughout which computers and writing scholarship resonated with the cyborg writing Haraway describes, where political agency weighs heavily, taking into consideration individuals, technologies and contexts.  Cyborg era, then, gets treated as a god-term; Inman contends that it exceeds the era designations common in the titles of a long list of works about writing technologies, the internet, and the surge in information economies.

The general structure of the book follows a series of cyborg designations: cyborg era, cyborg history (1960-1979; other technologies, resistance, women, and minorities), cyborg narratives (1979-2000; influence, textual transition, and pedagogical evolution), cyborg literacy (workplace, school, internets, and integration), cyborg pedagogy (shifting materialism, discomfort, design structures, minority empowerment), and cyborg responsibility.  Cyborg responsibility is Inman's culminating argument.  With it he introduces the following edicts: 1. Remember individuals in any technology and/or technology-adoption decision; 2. Actively seek and promote diversity; 3. Articulate and model resistance; and 4. Participate in the design of technologies. Toward implementation, Inman invokes Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations.

The ending sections of each chapter introduce the computers and writing roster, a who's who of the computers and writing "community" with photos and page-length answers to a set of Inman's question about how did you become active, what project influenced you, what's the most important aspect of the "community," what worries you about the C&W community, what's the best lesson, and why do you choose to be active in it. In an effort to define computers and writing, Inman also introduces a definitional montage--an oddly designed spread of voices from people who identify with the field. 

^emphasis on individuals (user-centered rather than technology-centered decisions) (278)
^degree of theorization in adopting Haraway's version of the cyborg (276)

"We have to realize, however, that terms like field, discipline, subfield, subdiscipline, and community are not interchangeable, as they each bring forward distinct values and implications.  Terming computers and writing a field, for instance, suggests that it has an established unique body of scholarship and that a number of scholars are engaged in its work, developing new scholarship themselves that advances knowledge in the field" (2). ^Consider this alongside Lauer's notion of a dappled discipline and especially her division of audience into expert-keepers of the epistemic court, the general public, and those who identify with the field but to don't keep up with the scholarship either as readers or writers.

Related sources:

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181.

Hawisher, Gail E. and Cynthia L. Selfe, Paul LeBlanc and Charles Moran. Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History. New Directions in Computers and Composition Ser. Norwoord, N.J.: Ablex, 1996.

Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: Chicago Press, 1999.

Lauer, "Composition Studies: Dappled Discpline"

Lauer, Janice. "Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline." Rhetoric Review 3.1 (1984): 20-28.

Lauer deals with the disciplinary of composition studies in this piece. She is particularly concerned with qualities of the discipline that should inform the planning of graduate programs in composition studies. Briefly she acknowledges pioneers of the field who, in the 1960s, balanced teaching responsibilities with the problems of how best to pursue training (of themselves and others). This led to deeper investigations of the nature of writing and, as well, how best to teach it. Lauer notes that not only did these early scholars in composition studies seek answers to early theoretical questions about teaching, they also too risks in venturing into other disciplinary areas to inform their questions. Lauer goes on to explain that the interdisciplinary theoretical influences were complemented by an early commitment to multimodality in methods (ranging from linguistic and hermeneutical work to empirical studies and so on). Compositionists recognized early on the value in a wide range of methods to get at answers to the persistent questions that concerned them.

To account for the stages of the field's development, Lauer relied on Habermas's levels for consensus: everyday communication, warrant-testing, warrant-establishing, self-reflection on the nature, function, and purpose of knowledge itself (^apply this to C&W). Notably, two audiences also enter into consideration: 1.) the epistemic court of experts and 2.) the general population. She adds a third audience: teachers of writing who are not informed about scholarship and who do not contribute to it. Lauer contends that one problem with the emergence of the field is that arguments are made to the wrong audiences (textbooks contribute to this problem) (24).

Lauer calls multimodality a "mixed blessing" (25). It tends to be unkind for newcomers, requiring them to become acquainted with a wide range of methods and theoretical orientations. Modes also recruit interested specialists which leads, in turn, to "narrower and narrower circles" (25). [Close to Fulkerson's concern.] Multimodality does, however, "cultivate a fruitful reciprocity among modes. On the other hand, it becomes very difficult to keep fresh with work in other fields. Returning the questions of disciplinarity and training to graduate programs, Lauer notes Winterowd's contention that "English studies as a whole are responsible for literacy." (27).

"At its deepest level, a discipline has a special set of phenomena to study, a characteristic mode or modes of inquiry, its own history of development, its theoretical ancestors and assumptions, its evolving body of knowledge, and its own epistemic courts by which knowledge gains that status" (20). ^Consider matching these criteria up with Phelps in "Domain of Composition."

"From the start, then, this field has been marked by its multimodality and use of starting points from a variety of disciplines, all marshaled to investigate a unique set of pressing problems" (22).

"Composition studies suffers from this problem which is exacerbated by some of its journals which, for historical reasons, have build readerships too diverse to warrant argumentative exchange at the cutting edge of the field" (24). ^This applies to listservs, too, no?

"The field sustains itself through a lifeline connected to the composition classroom where many of its problems for research are generated and to which its theory returns for implementation and testing" (28).

Terms: "epistemic court" (22), "presuppositions of consensus" (23), tone of composition studies (27), bibliographic starting points (20)

Related sources:

Habermas, "Theories of Truth," trans. Richard Grabau.

Kinneavy, James. A Theory of Discourse. New York: Norton, 1980.

Young, Becker, and Pike. Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

Explitiville, USA

You've been warned: there are assloads of cusses inexcusable levels of profanity in this NPR interview with SU geography professor, Mark Monmonier, on his new book about downright offensive, pejorative or otherwise lascivious place-names (via).

Selfe and Selfe, "The Politics of the Interface"

Selfe, Cindy, and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. " The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones." CCC 45.4 (1994): 480-503.

Selfe and Selfe set out to establish the political dimensions of the computer interface and to recommend practical action steps for teachers of English. The adopt two prevailing metaphors: "mapping" from Denis Wood's The Power of Maps (1992) and "contact zones" from Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zones" (1991). After opening with a brief anecdote representative of racism at the Mexican border, Selfe and Selfe correlate computers and interfaces specifically to a kind of borderland infused with "the effects of domination and colonialism" (2). To understand interfaces as "complex political landscapes" (2), we must first recognize them as educational spaces (ideologically imbued; as consequential in what they reveal as what they conceal or fail to display) and then we must read them critically as maps of 1.) capitalism and class privilege (desktop, white pointer hand, default icons); 2.) discursive privilege (Standard English in spellchecker and OSes, devaluation of linguistic diversity, ASCII limitations); 3.) rationalism and lagocentric privilege (hierarchical; formal, propositional logic). The critique doesn't seem to account for trends toward customizable web browsers (this, evidence of the times in which it was written). It also seems oriented toward single-user interface encounters that are not networked beyond a hardware/infrastructural connotation of the term. In answer to the third point of criticism, they recommend the figure of the bricoleur as one who makes do and re-shuffles materials following intuition more than hierarchical schemes.

As for practical action steps, Selfe and Selfe contend that we must begin with recognizing these borders (the design orientations and political infused-ness of the interface) and also that we "need to teach students and ourselves useful strategies of crossing--and demystifying--these borders" (10). Specifically, they recommend 1.) becoming critics as well as users (never mere users); 2.) contributing to technology design (especially for faculty who are experts in computers and composition); and 3.) involving interfaces as texts (subject to critique and revision) in the composition classroom. To a degree, this becomes a critical reading project, but it's not clear that students in 1994 would have had the means to create interfaces themselves (in other words, there's little here about designing interfaces as a composition project, although designing culturally just icons is mentioned (13)).

I. Computers as Learning Environments: History and Motivation
II. Mapping the Interface of Computers as Educational Space
III. Interfaces as Maps of Capitalism and Class Privilege
IV. Interfaces as Maps of Discursive Privilege
V. Interfaces as Maps of Rationalism and Lagocentric Privilege
VI. What to Do?
VII. Becoming Technology Critics as Well as Technology Users
VIII. Contributing to Technology Design
IX. Re-Conceiving the Map of the Interface
X. Toward Critical Readings of Interfaces

"Indeed, from the work of computers and composition specialists, it is clear that computers, like other complex technologies, are articulated in many ways with a range of existing cultural forces and with a variety of projects in our education system, projects that run the gamut from liberatory to oppressive" (2).

"If we hope to get English composition teachers to recognize how our use of computers achieves both great good and great evil--often at the same time, as Joseph Weizenbaum points out--we have to educate them to be technology critics as well as technology users" (3).

"In effect, interfaces are cultural maps of computer systems, and as Denis Wood points out, such maps are never ideologically innocent or inert" (4).

"The interface does not, for example, represent the world in terms of a kitchen counter top, a mechanics workbench, or a fast-food restaurant--each of which would constitute the virtual world in different terms according to the valued and orientations of, respectively, women in the home, skilled laborers, or the rapidly increasing numbers of employees in the fast-food industry" (5).

Related sources:

de Certau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992.

Feenberg, Andrew. Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Ohmann, Richard. "Literacy, Technology, Monopoly Capitalism." College English 47 (1985): 675-689.

Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987.

Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. New York, NY: Guilford, 1992.

Phelps, "The Domain of Composition"

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. "The Domain of Composition." Rhetoric Review 4 (1986): 182-95.

Phelps frames the field of composition studies by identifying its domain, a term she uses both as "a scene of action" and also "a space one controls." Tracing through each of these senses of "domain," Phelps accounts for the field in 1986 by moving through three sections: I. Core; II. Margins; and, III. Vision. A disciplinary domain, according to Phelps, has these elements: "a group of inquirers, a characteristic attitude toward phenomena, the objects of inquiry themselves, the means of inquiry, its purposes, and scenic factors" (2). Because written discourse is central to our work, compositionists themselves become entangled with their research; teaching, after all, depends upon symbolic action not only as an object of study, but as a kind of activity. Phelps acknowledges the uses of "performance" to describe what happens when reading writing texts; she explains the tension between naturalistic views of language view it as best left to its own developmental trajectories and, on the other hand, school-directed approaches to literacy education that adopt "skill" as a way to account for the "indeterminate and fluctuating" competencies that range between experts and non-experts. She also points out that "some of the linguistic, cognitive, and social knowledge needed to coordinate [reading and writing] activities must be studied consciously before it can become tacit in use" (7). In discussing the margins or borders of composition studies with other disciplines, Phelps calls for "syntopical research" (15). The core of composition studies as she accounts for it here is oriented "to symbolic interaction and from development" (14).

"My object is to push outward from the expanding conceptual core of the domain, defined in terms of symbolic action, to its margins, where composition encounters other disciplines and recognizes its own limits" (2).

"[Shoptalk] offers a vocabulary of distinctions among such concepts as technique, skill, strategy, tactics, craft, art, know-how, and knowledge" (8).

"Recent research has submitted this idea [production w/o consideration of reading or consumption] of writing to a critique and moves toward integrating the writer's composing act into a more comprehensive notion of written discourse as a complex social process by which discoursers co-construct meaning" (3).

"That is to say, written discourse as symbolic action can only be understood ecologically, in terms of its rich interactions among acts, meanings, and reality, rather than by a reduction of its texture to ideal elements and rules" (4).

"event psychology" (17), "natural attitude" (6), "personal development" (9), "keyed" (Goffman) (13), "literacy as a power to act in the world" (10), "a network of primary discourse acts" (13)

Related sources:

Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, UCalifornia Press, 1968.

Vygotsky, Thought and Language. Alex Kozulin, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986.

Chicago Has Ben

Just as long as it's clear that when we call for hack-a-Ben, we send Ben Wallace to the foul stripe, not Ben Gordon. The upstart Bulls will look pretty good for next season with the addition of Wallace, and as a Detroit devotee, I admit to being disappointed that the difference came down to a few million chips. I mean, when offering 49-50 million, what's another one or two? Woe, Detroit basketball. Of course, I enjoyed seeing the Bulls rise as over-achieving underdogs this season, and, if it had to happen, I'd rather see Wallace with Chicago than with, say, the Pacers, the Nets, the Knicks or the Heat.

I suppose this introduces new pressure to the Bulls. They exceeded expectations late last season, even mightily testing the eventual NBA Champion Heat in the first round of the playoffs. But now they must finish among the top three in the Eastern Conference to keep everybody happy, including some of the hungry young players coming off the bench. Their depth and balance at multiple positions might be unmatched, which means they should be really good. Right?

Back in Motown, I say Pryzbilla. Or give Darko another chance. He was picked to ahead of some decent players after all. Gotta end before tears well up.

Added: Trouble for Benny the Bull.
Added: Good on the Pistons for filling in with Nazr Mohammed.
Added: You're reading Earth Wide Moth entry #600. Guess I should make a wish or something. I wish I had an idea for entry #601.
Added: Ph. is talking about it over here. Nothing to worry about, he says.

Barthes, "The Death of the Author"

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-148.

Barthes advances several important (now "given") theoretical maneuvers in defining writing as "performative," in destabilizing the role of intentionality in reading, and in involving the reader as an equal (if unknowable) participant in the text's performance. Skeptics will counter that Barthes comes on too strong, that he means that the author gives up all control to the reader. But this is simply a theoretical project meant to relax and thereby introduce a degree of play in the taken-by-some-to-be-exactable relationship between authorship and the (meaningful) life of a text in its multiple, unpredictable performances. I take Barthes to be urging us to regard the reader as a legitimate participant in textuality and meaning, thereby opening a space for interpretation to contend with meaning rendered absolute or rigidified by the nod of the author (as an increasingly celebrated figure).

"Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hiterto said, the author" (148). This changes the presumed controls, introducing the aliveness of a text and its terms as involving trajectories that we cannot always easily anticipate or constrain, though this doesn't necessarily mean that as writers, we shouldn't try, within reason, to do so or to make what we do readable.

"Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile" (147). If the project of classical literary criticism was to stake out a superior (that is, intention-matching) reading, Barthes instead argues for something more democratic, participatory and reader-centered. This also matches with Barthes antithesis; he "refus[es] to assign a 'secret,' ultimate meaning, to the text" (147).

"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture" (146). A variation of intertextuality and a theory of writing as a tissue-like aggregation of various, contending fibers.

"For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs' and not 'me'" (143).

"Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing" (142). ^Consider this alongside Ong's notion of distance and also Barthes' mention of "distancing" (145).

"Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it" (145).

Banks, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology

Banks, Adam J. Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006.

"The questions remain, hauntingly: Is it possible to make this nation a just one for Black people? Is it worth the struggle? Can technologies really be used to serve liberatory ends, or is that hope just another pipe dream calling us upon our awakening to resist! resist! resist! the shiny boxes we're all sold and the promise they once held?" (xi). This books questions immix technology (primarily defined here in the instrumental sense, as an apparatus or material component with central issues of justice and access for African Americans. It keeps fresh issues of the bi-directional look running throughout African American struggle, the Racial Ravine (43) and the Digital Divide (as an aspect of the Ravine), the possibility of uplift and empowerment through technologies (Black Planet as site for collectivity, African American design principles for technologies and spaces of use, and the rhetorical techne of Martin King and Malcolm X as technologies in themselves).

Banks gives us seven chapters:

I. Introduction: Looking for Unity in the Midst of Madness: Access as the ONE in African American Rhetoric and Technology Studies

"The overall argument I make is this: rather than answer either/or questions about whether technological advancement and dependence leads to utopia or dystopia, whether technologies overdetermine or have minimal effects on a society's development, or whether people (especially those who have been systematically excluded from both the society and its technologies) should embrace or avoid those technologies, African American history as reflected through its rhetorical production shows a group of people who consistently refused to settle for the limiting parameters set by either/or binaries" [rel: bricoleur] (2). Also: move beyond individual exemplars (2), refusal of "postmodern hype" (3), "post-everything navel-gazers" (4), "unities are not absolute" (5). Here, Banks pushes away from certain theoretical orientations while later preferring a set of three axes: practice, theory and pedagogy. ^"theory"?

"There are many reasons for centralizing access in this way, but it comes down to this: more than mere artifacts, technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories on its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advances its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political, and economic relations" (10). ^Connect this to writing and agency, as with Baron's account of writing as a technology with dependencies on instruments and treatments of those instruments that might be improvised or tactical rather than orthodox.

II. Oakland, the Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment
This chapter reads technology issues alongside the ebonics debate. Banks surveys articles on access in computers and writing from Selfe (15), Moran (15), Porter (16). Grabill (20), Romano (20), and Blair (20).

"All technologies come packaged with a set of politics: if those technologies are not inherently political, the conditions in which they are created and in which they circulate into a society are political and influence their uses in that society (Winner, 1996), and those politics can profoundly change the spaces in which messages are created, receive, and used" (23).

III. Martin, Malcolm, and a Black Digital Ethos
IV. Taking Black Technology Use Seriously: African American Discursive Traditions in the Digital Underground
V. Rewriting Racist Code: The Black Jeremiad as Countertechnology in Critical Race Theory
VI. Through This Hell into Freedom: Black Architects, Slave Quilters and an African American Rhetoric of Design
VII. A Digital Jeremiad in Search of Higher Ground: Transforming Technologies, Transforming a Nation

Related sources

Heidegger, M. (1986). The question concerning technology and other essays. New York: Harper.

Mitchell, W. J. (1995). City of Bits. Campbridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Winner, L. (1986). The Whale and the Reactor. Chicago: U. of Chicago.

Bursts of Memory

Thinking back on Fourths of July. I remember where I was on Fourths better than any other day of the year (for years afterward, that is). Fourths are distinctly eventful. The older I get, the less I like the celebrations though. Anti-patriotic? Nah. Celebratorily ambivalent when it comes to fireworks on the Fourth. Bombs bursting in air, cinders raining down, the dulled out masses of cricked necks turned skyward, a hypnotic oohing and aahing to exploding light. It's not the holiday; it's the cliched fireworks shows. I just can't get into them (beyond wow, that was something). But I probably sound like a crank.  I keep going to them, anxiously watching for the bigger blast than last year and the extension of the show just when you thought it was over.  Past Fourths: I've starred them all on this quikmap:

Flashes, memories of 4th of July and place:

Late 1970's: My grandparents' drive-way on Drummond Island. Safe-works, all sparklers and snakes. Grand finale: something tank-shaped that spun and popped. The flowing goo of writhing carbon snakes: wow, that was something. I was into the sparklers, too. Two at a time to keep it dangerous.

1984: Independence, Mo. My brother and I were staying in the duplex where my aunt and uncle lived. Only they were gone to Denver, so our grandmother was watching us. The entire complex of apartments was crawling with kids, the grounds ascramble with bottle rocket battles. Only we weren't allowed out past dark. Too risky. Grandma was a worrier. I think I remember that we tried her nerved by staying out past the first edge of evening. And then paid dearly for it. Still, my aunt and uncle brought back giant jawbreakers from their short trip to Colorado.

A year later? Or two. This time with another aunt. We left Lansing, Mich. and traveled through the night toward Kansas City. I was eleven or twelve. I watched out the car window (a Chevette, I think) for all of the fireworks shows between Lansing and Indianapolis. And then I fell asleep. I was supposed to stay awake, help her stay awake (changing radio stations, chattering on about how scenic south-central Illinois was). When I woke up on the Fifth, we were just leaving St. Louis. The I-70 corridor was a fireworks paradise with bright yellow tents parked at every exit for 270 miles.

1996: Saginaw Bay, Mich. I'd just taken my first job after undergrad, moved from KC to Saginaw, and was handling claims for damaged property following a wall of tornados from Frankenmuth to Bay City. A small cooler of beer, a cookout. Good friends who I don't keep in touch with any longer.

Dias et al., "Distributed Cognition at Work"

Dias, Patrick, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Pare. "Distributed Cognition at Work." Cushman, Kintgen, Kroll, and Rose 199-208.

Dias et al. (reprinted here from Worlds Apart) briefly introduce the concept of distributed cognition, which recognizes "that 'people appear to think in conjunction or partnership with others and with the help of culturally provided tools and implements'" (199). The authors lead with a comparison of Hutchins' research on the complexly coordinated efforts involved in navigating a ship; Dias et al. compare ship navigation to the work of managing economic policy done by the Bank of Canada (BOC). A brief few pages of theorization (drawing on Lave, Hutchings and Engestrom) sets up a protracted analysis of the activities at the BOC. Unlike the ship, however, which is eased by routines, the cognitive load for workers at the BOC requires "extended pieces of reasoning" (201d). Their research focuses on genre, which seem to align with Miller's "social action" model: "It is through complex webs of discursive interactions and, in particular, genres that the cognition of the BOC is accomplished distributively" (202).

"Hutchings points out that the maps used in navigation look more like coordinate charts in geometry rather than like amps in an atlas; this is true as well of the mathematical models and graphs guiding the progress of the BOC" (200). This gets at the role of images, of maps, and the distinction between geometries and geographies (like Moretti).

^See "thought styles": "the recurrence of certain lexical phrases (which represent categories of experience) and argumentative warrants" (203c). The idea of recurrent and shared categories of experience rings of folksonomy somewhat. Folksonomy, in this arrangement, becomes a feature of the organization and its genre-based activities, which include introducing "alternative scenarios" (203c) and "decision making" (204b).

"It is a commonplace at the BOC that what is expected in writing (and in oral presentations based on written analysis) is more than elevator economics: that is, this went up and this went down. There must always be interpretation, analysis, comparison with forecasts, and possibly suggestions for revision to these forecasts" (206d).
"All in all, then, the BOC thinks and distributes its cognition through sets of genres, each with its expected form" (207c).
"Of particular interest to our work is the role of verbal discourse in the distribution of cognition--especially in the form of sets of interweaving genres that are not just the media and shaping agents for the interpretation but also the sites for both social sharing and communal creation as well as the sites for identifying and negotiating internal contradictions" (208d).

Related sources

Cole and Engestrom. 1993. "A Socio-cultural approach to distributed cognition. In G. Solomon (Ed.), Distributed Cognitions (1-46). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Hutchings, Edward. 1993. "Learning to Navigate." In S. Chaiklin and J. Lave (Eds.), Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context (pp. 35-63). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, S. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. 2nd Ed. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Baron, "From Pencils to Pixels"

Barron, Dennis. "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies." Cushman, Kintgen, Kroll, and Rose 70-84.

Baron's article, first printed in Selfe and Hawisher's Passions, Pedagogies, includes several figures representative of the points he makes related to a genealogy of writing instruments, from Sumerian reeds to pencils to computers.  "From Pencils to Pixels" is, in one sense, a historical piece concerned with identifying the impact of new and emerging technologies on writing activity.  That is, the pencil, even though it wasn't initially designed for writing (instead, it was designed to mark lines for measurement) became the most ubiquitous writing instrument ever.  Baron takes a moderate stance after he announces at the outset that we must be cautious about hyperbolic predictions for the future of computers (an indicator of 1999, perhaps). 

Summary statement: "My contention in this essay is a modest one: the computer is simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies. In many ways its development parallels that of the pencil---hence my title--though the computer seems more complex and is undoubtedly more expensive" (72).

Like Ong, Baron makes the case for writing as a technology, too, but rather than considering the ways that writing (or the possibility of writing) restructures thought, he is foremost concerned with comparing the rise of the computer with the development of the pencil. 

"New communication technologies, if they catch on, go through a number of strikingly similar stages. After their invention, their speed depends on accessibility, function, and authentication" (71).  Baron dwells on these three features, framing the computers mostly in functional terms or, that is, as an instrument or apparatus rather than as material and epistemological force implicated in a complex network or ecology.  This is, of course, necessary given his comparison with the pencil, which he treats likewise. 

Judging by the amount of space he devotes to it, Baron is concerned most of all with authentication, ranging from issues of validity (forgery, for instance) to related strands of privacy (78), corruption (81), security (81), fraud (80), and integrity (81).  This also connects with concerns about error (82) and tranclusivity (81) or the problem of multiple versions of a document, problems tracking changes, methods for verifying dates of production, and so on.

"But technology has a trailing edge as well as a down side, and studying how computers are put to use raises serious issues in the politics of work and mechanisms of social control" (83).

Related sources:

Bolter, Jay. Source unnamed. (74b)

Marvin, Carolyn. 1988. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford UP.

Petroski, Henry. 1990. The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. New York: Knopf.