Sometimes when I am out and about on campus, e.g., on the way to a meeting, I walk past this sculpture, "Crouching Figure," and feel a beat of empathic identification in the thought that Crouching Figure is on the way to a meeting, too.
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Sometimes when I am out and about on campus, e.g., on the way to a meeting, I walk past this sculpture, "Crouching Figure," and feel a beat of empathic identification in the thought that Crouching Figure is on the way to a meeting, too.
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I changed offices this week, moved from the smaller, windowless interior office that is standard issue for junior faculty in my department to the larger, windowed outer office pictured here. This is one among the incentives for taking on responsibilities as Director of the First-Year Writing Program--a role I formally stepped into earlier this month. The larger office is warranted because it is spacious enough for meetings with small groups of 3-4 people, or that's the main rationale for the up-sized office, I'm told.
There's quite a bit of new work that comes with being WPA, and I have been daily trying both to tick items off a long task-list I'm keeping in Astrid for now and to keep short-term priorities in clear view. In the mix: (anti)textbook decisions, curricular fine- and coarse-tuning, drilling down on outcomes that read to too many--me included--as over-general goals, getting publishers to say anything-more? about their pricing and margins, scrounging for budget, setting up online spaces (e.g., Wordpress and Mediawiki installs), scheduling for fall, prepping a summer materials PDF for new GA cohort, and on and on. I'm not sure how the size of this FYWP compares, but I'd guess it is larger than most with 140+ sections per year, more than 3000 students per year, and an instructional staff of more than 50.
Along with all of the challenges, the transition into this role is generative in that it is pushing me to re-think my research agenda, reconsider my teaching philosophy, formalize an administrative philosophy and plan (almost certainly rooted in chreods and chreodologies), and reflect on what worked well in my graduate education. I have every indication so far that EMU is a hospitable place for tending to the strength and solidity of the first-year experience and Gen. Ed. There are many smart, supportive people involved, which always helps.
I have half-kidded on Twitter that in addition to Writing Program Administrator, WPA means Writing Program Atavist and Writing Program Adhocrat: atavist for throwback tendencies (returning to my own TA training, unearthing relic teaching influences, leafing through the 1936 Sears catalogs as Jim Corder did, and finding it fixed, stale: "We mustn't try to live forever with only the knowledge we now have."), adhocrat for the gut-trusting making up of this thing as we go, leaning hard on practical wisdom and the proceed-as-way-opens Quaker maxim LWP has always been fond of. I've ordered a few other books about contemporary WPA thinking, but right now this is where I'm at.
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Yahoo! Tournament Pick'em
Group: Netanoia (ID# 71855)
"Regret your picks all you want."
Password: ewm
Firm up your selections any time between the selection show on Sunday evening, March 17, and five minutes before the round of 64 tips off on Thursday, March 21.
]]>And like I said, I'm only halfway through. Slow jumps read slowly. As much as by anything else, I'm struck by--affected by--Stewart's reconfiguring of pronouns.
I write not as a trusted guide carefully laying out the links between theoretical categories and the real world, but as a point of impact, curiosity, and encounter. I call myself "she" to mark the difference between this writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence. "She" is not so much a subject position or an agent in hot pursuit of something definitive as a point of contact; instead, she gazes, imagines, senses, takes on, performs, and asserts not a flat and finished truth but some possibilities (and threats) that have come into view in the effort to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer. (5)
To write not as a trusted guide seems at first to go against professionalism and rhetorical ethics, but instead of turning into fanciful indulgence, because it finds gravity in description, it shifts ethos to ethos-oikos, a kind of redistributed or network-strewn, banal registry. A contagious style, Stewart's.
He noticed frost on the Honda Element outside and put off a morning jog, wrote a blog entry, ground beans for pressed coffee. "March was always warmer than this."]]>
The quotation, the animated GIF (from the highly entertaining Latournimata GIF Tumblr, of course)--these didn't make it into my #nhuk presentation. Neither did the Stengersian gesture GIF below (would have been an odd fit, anyway) or any discussion of felicity and infelicity conditions extending from Austin's pragmatics much like Latour does here to modes of existence, only in this case to ontographs and the disciplinary encounters they describe (by mapping). Cut. But what's left will do: tiny gestures, crowned ontologies, an extrusion of ontographic methods with which to do alien discipliniography.
The visual rhetorics course I'm teaching this semester is by now well enough plotted to pass along a link, finally. I haven't taught the class before, which only means that its materials this time are spun provisionally from many influences--an independent study and qualifying exam at SU, Michael Salvo's syllabus, Dànielle DeVoss's syllabus, and good conversations with CGB just after the new year. Its large arc follows from photography to document design to infographics and data visualization. I remain cautiously optimistic that these three sub-arcs will fit together okay within the fourteen meetings we have. No surprise, but I'm supplementing heavily with PDFs and assigning as required texts only Barthes' Camera Lucida, Handa's edited collection, and Cairo's The Functional Art. One project involves writing (and designing) Ch. 10 for the Cairo book--a "missing" chapter focused on visual rhetoric. There's an ignite presentation set up to articulate in short-form one's emerging visual-rhetorical priorities and interests in relation to one of the people interviewed at the end of The Functional Art. And then there is a loose-fitting, build-your-own-collection portfolio whose creation and assembly is spread as evenly as possible throughout.
I'm still trying to figure out the role of in-class workshop blocks devoted to self-paced attempts with Photoshop and Illustrator. And I can't quite decide how formally and explicitly to dwell on technical matters and rationale related to different image file types. Against these uncertainties (or yet-unmade decisions), I count as one advantage that I have had all but three of the fourteen students in class before, and it's a terrific bunch who will assert their preferences whenever I'm slow to decide.
]]>Basically, Harman delivers a simplified introduction to speculative realism2007, contrasts object-oriented philosophy with new criticism (Brooks), new historicism (Greenblatt), and deconstruction (Derrida), and finally sketches what he calls "object-oriented criticism." Harman succinctly recounts the key question for speculative realism--"does a real world exist independently of human access, or not?" (184)--while suggesting that speculative realists might hold up H.P. Lovecraft as a model intellectual for his patent weirdness. Speculative realists, in other words, have an inclination to the bizarre that continually bears upon and interferes with presumptions about what is real. They would have us check both the prominence of humans and human cognitive processing when accounting for the real (correlationism) and wonder about what is real without deferring to atomism or long-established scientific paradigms, like physics, chemistry, or biology. At least in part, this is consistent with a cautious and heavily qualified decoupling of Kant's efforts to privilege human-world interactions. And this is object-oriented philosophy, more or less (admittedly less than is available elsewhere).
Harman's abbreviated run-down of speculative realism is both helpful and adequate as a primer; he introduces key terms from his work, such as allure (187) and overmining (199). The article succeeds in differentiating object-oriented criticism from its well-worn predecessors, and rather than attempt to summarize those sections, which constitute most of the piece, for now--and for Friday's reading group--I will mention just two moments/questions that stand out.
The first concerns allure, partly covered here:
The broken hammer [whose sudden transformation could not have been anticipated] alludes to the inscrutable reality of hammer-being lying behind the accessible theoretical, practical, or perceptual qualities of the hammer. The reason for calling this relation one of "allusion" is that it can only hint at the reality of the hammer without ever making it directly present to the mind. I call this structure allure, and quite aside from the question of broken hammers, I contend that this is the key phenomenon of all the arts, literature included. Allure alludes to entities as they are, quite apart from any relations with or effects upon other entities in the world.
I'm not sure whether I grasp Harman's allure, but I think it names what happens when an object is seduced into accepting as ontologically fixed some other object. The hammer's transformation upsets the trance of so many proximate objects. But I would like to know more about how if this is "the key phenomenon of all the arts," whether the arts umbrella covers rhetoric, or whether suasive arts fit elsewhere. Allure, as it is framed here, seems to me strain a bit if it must operate for rhetoric, particularly techne or poiesis, but also for what seems to be a consequential relationship between the two or three phases--hammerunbroken's, hammerbroken's, and hammerwhatever's.
The other is the concluding section in which Harman explains what an object-oriented literary criticism would bring about, what it would look like. According to Harman, object-oriented philosophy "hopes to offer...not a method, but a countermethod" (200). Counter to what? New criticism, new historicism, and deconstruction, but also counter to canonicity, axiology, the reduction of texts into social forces. Here's Harman: "Rather than emphasize the social conditions that gave rise to any given work, we ought to do the contrary, and look at how works reverse or shape what might have been expected in their time and place, or at how some withstand the earthquakes of the centuries much better than others" (201). It sounds a lot like rhetorical analysis to me--an interest in how texts-as-objects prove impactful, shaping expectations, enrolling hosts, enduring. Harman also suggests a value in "attempting various modifications of these [literary] texts and seeing what happens" (202). Reading this, I'm curious how object-oriented criticism is different from the sorts of remakes and genre transformations we commonly see in our first-year composition classes. That is, how different is it, really?
As for the second of the two readings for tomorrow, this one by Latour, I will be quick because it is late and I am tired. Latour's "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" is a screed against critique's distaste for and objections to facts. Critique has sought to undermine facts, but this descriptive tool with its "debunking impetus" has proven futile. Latour does not wish to steamroll facts, nor to get away from them. He asks, "Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Haraway would put it?" (232).
My argument is that a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, encouraging us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to be considered as friends by the wrong sort of allies because of a little mistake in the definition of its main target. The question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the con- trary, renewing empiricism. (231)
Next, Latour draws together "things" with "assemblies." Things, extending from Heidegger, are gatherings. But Latour suggest we look not at the simple "pots, mugs, and jugs" (234) philosophers are fond of contemplating, but instead look at more complex things, noting their capacities to assemble and disband (234-235). There's too much I'm skipping over here, but he brings up Whitehead, who even though he "is not an author known for keeping the reader wide awake" (245), was one of the few who "tried to get closer to [matters of fact] or, more exactly, to see through them the reality that requested a new respectful realist attitude" (244). A "new respectful realist attitude" may or may not fit well with the speculative realist characteristics noted by Harman, yet for Latour, this attitude is akin to compositionism (note: in this CI essay from 2004, BL seeks to reframe "critic" "with a whole new set of positive metaphors" (247), but with "An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto," he has presumably abandoned reframing for re-naming).
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Posting a blogday commemorative at a quarter of ten on the last day of winter break and after a particularly slow blogyear feels like the felicitations equivalent of realizing on the way home from work that it's your kid's ninth birthday and stopping by Circle K to pick up--surprise!--as gifts a small cherry slush and a Slim Jim. Nevertheless. Earth Wide Moth is nine, and that still matters around here. "Here" meaning the blog. May the blogpace quicken--or at the very least stay its measured speed--over the months to come.
Walked the main loop in our subdivision, 300-degrees of the circle, anyway, before turning west for just more than a mile and outlining the next subdivision west of here where I ran into ghastly-happy Snowtorso. Sidewalks are clear enough, but the inter-subdivision trail network isn't maintained in the winter, so although its surface has been traveled by dozens since last week's snowfall, the surface is all icecrags and snowruts. Unpredictable. Sometimes slippery.
I listened to last week's "Mapping" episode of This American Life. I think it was a re-run from several years ago with a snippet about Denis Wood's new-ish book, Everything Sings, dubbed in. Could be wrong. The segment reminded me of what I find so interesting about Wood's work, and it convinced me that I made the right decision to devote a week to Wood and Monmonier on my winter Visual Rhetoric syllabus, which remains a work-in-progress pending a few finishing touches.
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Something about tracing a sternum against a second-story window lit by a graywhite winter's day, the illuminated anatomical model from a book found in the garage while making space for one of the cars to fit between the stuff piled there for a garage sale scheduled sometime when the weather is warm again.
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The WIDE-EMU 2012 countdown widget ticked to single digits earlier today, which means I'm past due--delinquent!--with the Phase II teaser for a session called "Clocking Composition: Exploring Chronography with Timeline JS." My co-presenters, Joe and Jana, have written smartly about what we have planned, and when we met a couple of weeks ago, we decided the Phase II piece may as well be a timelinear representation of the conference program, which is what we've created, since I would be working on the ordinary program, anyway.
I'm more or less pleased with the result. I suppose I've tempered my enthusiasm because I'm still learning quite a bit about Timeline JS, figuring out whether it's better to tune style in-line or adjust it in the CSS files. Earlier today, for example, I asked a colleague to check out the time-lined version of the program and much of the text on the landing page was clipped, unreadable. I adjusted, and the new version should scale more elegantly to smaller screens, but, well, these are the nuances that take more time to get to know. I plan to continue experimenting with Timeline JS this fall in part because we''ll be using it for a project in ENGL505 soon.
Before next Saturday's conference, I need to duplicate enough copies of the Timeline JS sandbox files (basically create about 10-12 .html pages and create the openly editable Google spreadsheets that will feed into each of them) and figure out the best way to make these accessible during the session. I doubt we'll dig too deeply into how to set this up on a server or why to consider abandoning Google spreadsheets for JSON, but I suppose we can drift in these or other directions as suits all who attend next week.
]]>To prepare for today's conversation, I've been dusting back over a couple of recent blog entries here and here and here (as well as the comments, which begin to explore some lingering questions I have about OOO), and I also took a look again at Bogost's entry from 2009, "What is Object-Oriented Ontology? A Definition for Ordinary Folk." The point about OOO needing a "simple, short, comprehensible explanation" leaves me wondering to what extent the elevator pitch has been satisfactorily laid down and also whether a short-form version can adequately answer to its skeptics (e.g., those who, upon reading a bit about OOO lead with,"Yeah, but what about X?"). I suppose what I'm thinking around is whether OOO can really be boiled down to a 100-word account and whether, especially considering what looks to me like a surge of interest in units/objects/things/nonhumans, there could be a coherent statement that many of the main participants would stand behind. Yet another way, just how raging are OOO's debates, now? And how much are new/cautious/fringe enquirers capable of exploring those debates?
Looking again at Chs. 4-5, I felt this time like writing, as counterpart to carpentry, isn't given much of a chance. Writing is a foil--a thin backdrop against which a preferable set of practices are cast. The generating question follows: "[W]hy do you write instead of doing something else, like filmmaking or macrame or sumi-e or welding or papercraft or gardening?" In this context (and in this contrastive framing), writing is something of an attention or activity hog. It gets overplayed in the liberal arts; it gets over-valued in exceedingly strict economies for tenure and promotion. According to the chapter, these are cause for concern because 1) "academics aren't even good writers" (89), and 2) writing, "because it is only one form of being" (90) is too monolithic a way of relating to the world. I generally agree with Bogost's argument that scholarly activity should be (carefully!) opened up to include other kinds of making, but I'm less convinced that the widespread privileging of writing is the culprit here. It's fine to say that academics aren't good writers (though I'm reminded that we should never talk about writing as poor or problematic without looking at a specific text/unit in hand), but why would they be any better at "filmmaking or macrame or sumi-e or welding or papercraft or gardening" or coding APIs?
So while I'm interested in the call for an expansion of what can be considered scholarly activity, it remains unclear to me why writing should be at odds or brushed aside with that expansion. Instead of "Why do you write instead of doing something else?", I would rather consider "How is your writing and making and doing entangled?", whether gardening, drinking beer, or even welding (the second slide here suggests that writing and welding are compatible, though paper-based dossiers are already heavy enough; also weld-writing does not correspond to slideshow-encoding). It's a relatively minor tweak of an otherwise compelling set of arguments about scholarship-in-computational-action, and yet with just a bit more nuance, rather than concluding that "When we spend all of our time reading and writing words--or plotting to do so--we miss opportunities to visit the great outdoors" (90), perhaps we don't have to scrap composition to get beyond the limited and limiting definitions of writing still in circulation. And this may be one of the reasons an object-oriented rhetoric remains a promising complement to OOO.
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Another week in the desert would have been nice. Three days wasn't enough even though I spent it well: keeping the time and announcing substitution intervals for 15-minute basketball games, noshing on Veggie Navajo tacos from Tuuvi Cafe, catching up with some of my oldest friends (also best-kept, considering I see them almost every year), and generally just soaking in Native Vision. I played basketball for the first time in eighteen months, first in Thursday's "All-Star Game" and again the next day when Tuba City HS cafeteria lines were so long following the group photo at the football field that rather than wait and wait and wait in the crowd, I took to the gym next door, rebounded for shooters until they invited me to play 2-on-2. Telling time during the camp was its own puzzle: Tuba City doesn't heed daylight savings, while Moenkopi (across the street) does. Suffice it to say that following the paper itinerary or arranging casual meet-ups (e.g., Let's meet at 8) proved confounding. I still don't know what time it was. Lost. And I wasn't alone in this time warp, which was comforting but also added to the confusion. I went for a short run on Saturday morning. Aimed for just three miles round trip, but I turned back after I found myself attempting the third or fourth shoulderless curve along a canyon edge. Nah, not going out making a decision between the grill of an F-150 and a dive down a steep cliff. Such a slow jog, too. New shoes. Hills. Mile-high oxygen. Stopping to remember the views. But I picked up the pace when, on the return trip, Aggressive Alpha of the three scruffy dogs fenced in only by two strands of barbed wire slipped his loose yard and appeared genuinely interested in chewing whichever is the slower of my two legs (or claiming one of my fancy shoes as a new toy). Yeah, I ran faster then, ran into the road a bit, too. Dodged ("Don't make me kick at you!"). And back in the hotel lobby, another time warp: mistimed breakfast, a bus driver asking me and only me if we were going to be ready at 8TubaCity when it was only 8Moenkopi. I might've felt reassured by a nearby wall clock, but there were who cares two of them side-by-side reporting different hours, a bi-temporal crevasse in spacetime.
Back in Phoenix, or Scottsdale, later Saturday watched the Heat top Boston in the ECF, again with friends who, before we witnessed a shouting match at the bar and went our separate ways for the next day's early a.m. flights, reminded me that I have to go back again next year. For being, as always, energized and humbled by the event, I can't wait to go back again next year. And the year after that.
Another week--another hour--in the desert would have been nice.
]]>Digital rhetorics1 provide a vast suite of generating principles. These principles are difficult to collect into a simple model, much less to name, substantiate, and prioritize. Fortunately, difficulties like these are much of what motivates digital rhetorics scholarship (some of which was reviewed by others in previous entries), and they are also what I find both exciting and challenging about the field. Digital rhetorics often draw on reasonably well-traveled rhetorical theories (Aristotle's appeals, Burke's dramatisms, stases, etc.), but they also subject traditional concepts to renewal and reinvention. Collin Brooke's Lingua Fracta comes to mind as a terrific example of this renewal for the ways it reconceives rhetoric's five canons in light of new media, but also because it explicitly recognizes ongoing change as inevitable. Thus, it stands to reason that we must refrain from settling too comfortably into static definitions lest we appear monolithic in how we think about digital rhetorics, how we enact them. Where rhetorical principles--new, established, cultural, applied--converge with hypertext, blogging, SMS, sonic mixing, still image and video editing, and more (a comprehensive list remains forever out of reach), distinctive practices emerge, and with them come abundant opportunities and responsibilities for teaching and learning, for rhetorical education concerned with composing across screens. Underscoring circulation, participation, contingency, and immediacy, digital rhetorics shift, intensify, or subside with particular tools, materials, and media. So digital rhetorics, as I think of them, tend to follow a crosshatched pattern, a meshwork similar to the boat wakes Burke noticed in the WWII gallery photograph (see Spread 7): one set of threads responsive to rhetorics, the other responsive to new media, and among them multiple junctures due for exploration.
Yet, considering all that digital rhetorics make possible, the quick sketch above remains an incomplete response to the carnival call: "What does digital rhetoric mean to me?" Perhaps another approach can enter a bit more definitional richness into play. For this, I turn to Googlism.com. Googlism is a playful site (also rather like a para-site) that has been around for almost a decade. Basically, with search terms entered, it draws upon Google's indexes to retrieve a list of equative phrases (e.g., [search term] is [...]) related to one of four designated conditions: who, what, when, or where. A Googlism for the what of "digital rhetoric" yields this:
The core list (21 of the items here) comes from "digital rhetoric is" strings appearing in various places on the web. But I've also embellished the list with a couple of add-ons of my own. Without cross-referencing Googlism.com, can you guess which ones they are? Which of the statements do you find most useful? Least useful? What "digital rhetoric is" statement would you add? Which one would you place at the top of this list? Why?
[1] I think it is fitting to assign the 's', thus making digital rhetorics plural.
]]>I haven't been to Marquette since 1992, and I've never visited Big Bay. Thanks to Google Street View and some of my dad's handiwork running an elevations report, I'm starting to have some sense of Co. Road 550, its slopes and grades, shoulders and hazards. When there was discussion among the team earlier in the month about who gets the steepest hills, who gets the two-mile stretch, who gets the start gun fanfare of Leg One, and who gets the champagne and confetti glory at the finish line, I laid low, kept to myself. Waited. This tactic worked brilliantly. Everyone else on the team claimed these in turn: two-miler, hills, finish, start. This left me with the peaceful (if banal) UP spring jog that is Leg Two.
My rigorous preparation for the relay has been equal parts of watching Power 90X infomercials, clicking through segment after segment of (is it uphill or isn't it?) Co. Road 550 on Google Street View, and trying to determine, based on the elevation report my dad sent, which miles will be mine. You can see below how I've tried to highlight my five miles, but is also happens--wishfulness error?--to be more down-sloping than I could have hoped for.
That email from my aunt (no, not the one insisting that I wear a size L t-shirt, rather than the 2XL I asked for; yesterday's email) included a hopeful weather forecast: high 80F, cool start near 50F, light winds from the south. Between the wind and the down slopes, here's hoping I don't have to do much running other than lightly lifting each foot in slow alternation until it's finished.
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