digital digs

terminal composition

Recently Jeff mentioned the need to move on from the term "composition." I've had some long term misgivings about rhetoric and composition, at least as those terms applied to the work that I do. Getting tenured means caring less about being on the periphery of a discipline, at least for me. Over time, reading more of the long history of work in rhetoric, I began to see myself more as a rhetorician.

However it is only recently that I've begun to think more interesting thoughts about the idea of composition. No doubt composition is a tired term 'round these parts. It has suffered from its prominent position in the FYC acronym. We've largely lost the association with composition in other media--music and the visual arts.

Composition as a term...

The word "term," of course, like "terminal" comes from the Latin terminus meaning "boundary," which makes more obvious sense when the word is used in a phrase like "term limits." Composition, then, occurs at the site of "terms." That is composition is more like an admixture than a synthesis. Discrete elements are linked. If you synthesize blue and yellow, you get a green canvas. If you compose with blue and yellow, you get...well you could get any number of blue and yellow "terms."

Jeff mentions the "network," and I can go with that. Networks that unfold rhizomatically, though often apprehended arboreally. Networks composed from terms that are media, information, thoughts, affects, virtual thoughts. Different material networks emerging/composing.

So composition as studying the terminal site/cite of the network's emergence.

That said, maybe composition cannot be recovered, maybe it is too degraded. Or, on the other hand, perhaps it is not yet degraded enough. Perhaps it still remains too hot, too heavily marked by institutional striations.

Technorati Tags: academics, writing, composition

computers and writing

Here's what I'm thinking of doing for the Computers and Writing conference. It relates to a number of things I've written here recently (and not so recently). In particular, it has to do with how we might conceive of the future of professional writing... always an issue for me.

Screencasting and the write brain: the newly mediated writing professional

In a Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink foresees the rise of “right brain” thinking in the professional world, a position emblematized by his slogan, “The MFA is the new MBA.” Though Pink’s claims should certainly be approached critically, I see some credence in his position. For professional writing, this right-brain approach suggests the importance of balancing the traditional technical writing emphasis on analytic and rational communication with an emphasis on empathic, holistic, and experimental writing techniques.

This shift is especially significant for the role of new media in professional writing. For the most part, new media instruction has focused on two subjects: developing basic new media skills (e.g., learning HTML and desktop publishing) and discussing the rhetorical implications of new media (e.g. hypertext’s nonlinearity, visual rhetoric, etc.). While these continue to be relevant, this emerging professional world will also look for writers who can compose across media, not only for the purposes of instruction or sales but also to communicate a more holistic and empathic understanding to their audience. On his O’Reilly weblog, Jon Udell has termed this new genre “screencasting.”

Of course metaphors, buzzwords, and claims of paradigmatic shifts only go so far. While many may see a new development here, Pink’s left-brain/right-brain metaphor resonates with our all too familiar tendency to emphasize writing either as a communication skill or as a conceptual/critical thinking practice. Furthermore, while Pink’s predictions may be accurate, this does not mean we should simply embrace the economy he describes. We need look no further than hiring practices in our own discipline for reasons to be skeptical of the future of professional labor.

My presentation will investigate these issues and discuss strategies for responding to these shifts in professional writing practices while maintaining a critical, rhetorical relation with corporate culture.

Technorati Tags: academics, writing, computers

virtual reality in real life, 2006

This little conference I've put together will be coming to life soon at vrrl06.earthwidemoth.com (thanks Derek). I've got my presentation put together. You can see it here. I've got a few tweaks to do visually, but the text is all there.

The piece is titled "Rip/Mix/Burn: Virtual-Actual Spaces and New Media Composition." It is constituted from several elements in my now nearly-completed book manuscript (I really just have to print it out and put it in the mail).

Technical Writing and Writing Fiction Syllabi

First day of class and things are already backed up a little.  As such I'm putting up some syllabi here for my classes.

Here's the Technical Writing syllabus.

Here's the syllabus for Writing Fiction

anonymity: a face in the crowd

A discussion recently on Jeff's blog that I didn't get around to in time to really comment regarding the issue of anonymous academic blogs. There's the whole practice of being anonymous in order to spread academic gossip without paying a price. I don't have much use for that, but then I was never really interested in academic murder mysteries either, so maybe it's just not a genre for me.

But this conversation raised more interesting issues. Three, in particular, for me.

1. Given the potentially broad public nature of blogging, anonymity protects one from strangers and outsiders who wouldn't appreciate the context in which a conversation is being had. In this way anonymity works in much the same way as the limited access most people have to academic journals. I.e., someone can Google me and find me here, but that same person is not likely to track down an article in a journal or essay collection.

2. Anonymity makes clear the way that normal academic discourse operates on a foundation of authorial identities. That is, for good or bad, comments are likely judged by the identity of the source (e.g. a comment offered by a professor at a small college like myself versus one offered by a senior faculty member with a national reputation at a major university). I'm not griping about that. I'm just pointing out the nature of how we respond to writing. Obviously we don't read our students' work the same way we read our colleagues' texts. Interestingly one can build up the reputation of a consistent pseudonym.

3. Related to point 2, what would occur if texts were published anonymously? Obvioulsy it would alter the academic marketplace that exchanges intellectual property for tenure and promotion. I like Deleuze and Guattari's comment on authorship at the outset of A Thousand Plateaus:

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. ... Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render impreceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I.

Clearly the ideological impulse of the State is to assign properties to subjects (obviously the term "properties" has multiple meanings here). "You" write something, then "you" are accountable for it. You benefit from its commodification in whatever marketplace, and you receive the consequences arising from any accusations--libel, plagiarism, idiocy, and so on.

academic bill of rights

Why not chime in on this issue? Not that I imagine I have all that much to add. Of course that has never stopped me before...

1. It's curious how the right seeks to turn the whole postmodern thing around. As in "if there's no Truth, and all discourse is ideological, then academics must be promulgating a political (liberal) position in the classroom." It's a dramatic misunderstanding of postmodern critique in that it equates ideology with politics. The fact that one might view American history as ideological, to use and example outside my discipline, does not necessarily mean that one must choose among conservative or liberal or "balanced" views to teach. When we talk about ideology, we're talking about a structure of ideas that encompasses the various "positions" politicians perform. Properly understood and employed, I would think "postmodern" critique (or any rigorous analysis for that matter) would quickly dispense with the clownish conversation, left or right, that passes for politics in this country.

2. The complaint that academics are always critical of our country, that we are always pointing out historical misdeeds and lingering racisim and inequity, rather than celebrating our great accomplishments as a beacon of freedom in the world. Yeah sure, just go ask our neighbors how much they see us as a "beacon of freedom." There's probably an accurate recognition here. I often tell my students that as a history major as an undergrad, I noticed the shift from high school history, which was America as great leaders, wars, and accomplishments, and college history, which was America as stolen land and stolen labor.

The fact is, it's hard to overlook that America was built by slaves on land that was taken from Native Americans. It's also hard to overlook the statistical evidence, provided by our government's census, about the continuing economic divide in our nation. And yet, for the most part, public schools, mainstream media, and the government all do a fairly good job of looking the other way.

Higher education serves a cultural function as an outsider voice. Academics do have a different education and perspective from the average citizen. I mean there's a reason why colleges don't just pull people off the street to teach courses (well, except for composition).   

rhetoric and the liberal arts

It's been a while since I've posted here. I was away visiting my in-laws in T or C, NM over holiday. And then I spent several days catching up. I'm still not caught up, but I'm writing here anyway.

So, in the past, I've dealt here with questions that come up here and there, you know, around, in departments, in hallways, at conferences, raised by colleagues and such. For example, "do you really need a PhD to teach writing?" or "Do students really need to learn about new media?" and similar variations on this theme.

Here is another quasi-hypothetical question: is rhetoric (and writing) part of the liberal arts (in English)?

There are a couple of answers.

1. Since rhetoric is part of the original trivium of liberal arts, it would seem obvious that the question is yes. However, perhaps you could say that rhetoric is a liberal art but NOT part of "English" (and yes this disciplinary identity question just drags on and on, perhaps waiting for people to die, I don't know).

2. On the other hand, at least some professional/technical writing programs are really focused on preparing students for a very specific sector of jobs. We don't have a program like that, but they do exist. I taught a summer course in a technical writing program that is part of an engineering school (rather than arts and sciences). Perhaps faculty in such a program would not think of their subject matter as a liberal art. I'm not sure. Honestly it's hard to imagine writing as anything other than a liberal art. Indeed  it stikes me as the prototypical liberal art.

Nevertheless, this tension between professionalization and liberal arts does exist. It is, in a sense, an extension of the tension in first-year composition between seeing such courses as skills-driven or as developing critical thinking.