digital digs

on having nothing to write

As just about any rhetorician knows, there's no stranger misnomer than "basic writing," though "advanced writing" is equally strange. Toward what exactly is writing advancing? Perhaps by basic we could mean the minimal physical skills to perform the act of forming letters with a pen on paper or typing. I defy anyone who claims they fully understand how humans acquire the cognitive ability to compose sentences for speech or text. At its worst, basic writing is a forced march through the punitive pedagogy of correctness. Often basic writing is the rehearsal of formulaic heuristics that can be stacked together to produce little mechanistic essays. This is what my kids learn in grade school: things like T-charts and "repeat to complete."

Why do you like to write in school?
I like to write in school because...

These heuristics "work," meaning that if you teach them to students, then, as a group, the students will produce predictable results in response to carefully constructed prompts offered in controlled testing situations.

But here's a question. In what way does writing short, boring, predictable, mechanistic paragraphs constitute a "basic skill" that is a foundation for writing something that someone would actually want to read and/or that might accomplish a real world task beyond passing a standardized test?

The answer is that I don't know. I am skeptical that there is any relation. But I don't know because I don't know what the foundational/basic skills of writing might be. I'm not sure that such things exist. I know that one can try to idiot-proof composition by creating conditions where the likelihood of going off the rails is reduced. But does that lead to writing? Does constructing a detailed assignment and working closely with students to the point where 80% of the class produces essentially the same essay mean that we are moving toward learning how to write?

The greatest, and most common, complaint/problem I hear from students is that they have "nothing to write." This occurs when one gives them a detailed assignment (and they say they aren't interested in the topic) or when one allows students to pick their own topic. Sometimes students think they have something to write, but they really don't. (This happens to all of us, too, btw.)

Yes, it is a problem of invention, I suppose. But it is also a problem of motivation and literacy. The most interesting things to write about are often the most difficult, so we must be motivated to write about them. To invent ideas, topics, arguments, etc., we must be able to recognize them when we see them. That's an issue of literacy, of rhetorical fluency. It also requires having the willingness to experiment and fail.

There's really nothing "basic" about invention. It's not like you can master invention and then move on to more "advanced" issues. But without invention you don't have writing at all. You can't bracket invention by providing students with a topic or an outline. There's invention in each compositional event/moment, in each word choice, or however you want to slice up writing.

So when my students say, "I have nothing to write," I think, now you are experiencing the life of a writer. Only writers have nothing to write. Others simply don't write. Having nothing to write, in a pseudo-zen sense, is the beginning of writing. And it isn't like you have nothing, then you have an idea, and then you write until the text is done. Having nothing to write and then something to write is like alternating current. Between each paragraph, each sentence, each word there is nothing. (You can see it, right? the negative space?) It's nothing that John Cage hasn't/has taught us.

Maybe we never have something to write. Maybe the something that is writing has us. Who knows?

Maybe having nothing to write is what is basic to writing. It's not a deficiency. It's not a problem to solve. It's not the grist for the mill of resentment and bad conscience. And if we are going to advance writing, perhaps we should advance toward nothing.

The apprehensive economics of rhetoric

I just finished reading Agamben's essay "What is an apparatus?" (AMZ). It raises some interesting connections for rhetoric that I had certainly not thought of before, at least not in this way. The essay begins as an exploration of Foucault's use of the term apparatus, or more precisely, dispositif in French. Agamben notes this word translates as apparatus in English. In the original Italian of his essay it is dispositivo. These words have a visible etymological relation to a Latin word familiar to rhetoricans: dispositio, which (for non-rhetoricians) is the word Classical Roman rhetors used for what we now term "arrangement" in the writing process.

Back to that in a moment, but let me take a brief foray into the weirdness of translation. Google translates dispositif as "device" but also translates appareil as device. Elsewhere appareil is translated as apparatus, and is the word in French that gets translated in A Thousand Plateaus as apparatus, as in "apparatus of capture," which is a phrase that comes up in Agamben's essay, though he doesn't make the connection to Deleuze and Guattari.

But that's not all. Dispositio is the Latin translation of the Greek oikonomia, as in economics. Agamben enters this conversation from several angles, starting with Focuault, circling back through Hyppolite (one of Foucault's mentors) to Hegel and back through Heidegger. He also notes the Church's use of oikonomia in the 6th century to explain the operation of the Trinity. As Agamben explains the Church's reasoning, "Just as a good father can entrust his son the execution of certain functions and duties without in doing so losing his power and unity, so God entrusts to Christ the 'economy,' the administration and government of human history." However, as Agamben continues, "as often happens, the fracture that the theologians sought to avoid by removing it from the plane of God's being, reappeared in the form of a caesura that separated Him in being and action, ontology and practice. Action (economy, but also politics) has no foundation in being: this is the schizophrenia that the theological doctrine of oikonomia left as its legacy to Western culture."

Without summarizing all of Agamben, he comes to this observation: "we than have two great classes: living beings (or substances) and apparatuses. And between these two, as a third class, subjects. I call a subject that which results from the relation, and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses." At the same time, Agamben also notes that the apparatus is necessary to becoming human as it allows for the separation of being and action (as we see in theology). As he points out, language is the perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses, and provides us with consciousness as we know it, the ability to experience Being and the Open (in Heideggerean terms), and all the struggles of subjectification that have exponentially proliferated through the expansion of technology in the contemporary age.h?

We recognize that writing is an apparatus (or constellation of apparatuses if you prefer) and that writing pedagogies tend to gravitate toward teaching students to occupy particular subjective positions in relation to the writing apparatus. For Agamben, this seems especially wrong-headed, who argues that "if a certain process of subjectification corresponds to every apparatus, then it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it 'in the right way.'" That is to say that students (who as students are obviously already captured subjects of an institutional apparatus) are in turn captured as "composition students" then they have already been subjectified by the writing apparatus. In this scheme, pedagogy becomes an economics of apprehension in which we seek to manage/apprehend the subjectification of students in relation to writing, and this is the case whether we are talking about current-traditional "correctness," expressiveness, critical awareness, or political empowerment/liberation.

Dispositio operates iteratively with/as inventio in the composition of thought as thoughts emerge to be apprehended in the conscious, as language or symbolic action/behavior, within that apparatus of capture. It is no more at matter of escaping the apparatus (b/c we only exist as conscious beings through our relation to the apparatus) than it is the appropriate use/management of the apparatus (which is ultimately only the management of the subject). The management of the apparatus, the economics of apprehension, as Agamben notes, was once the province of the divine (of Christ in Christian theology). Then perhaps it was secured by the State. Now, who knows? Perhaps one imagines there is still some unifying force in transnational capitalism or some such, perhaps the "will to technology." Or maybe we are adrift in a schizophrenia of desubjectification, attached to a proliferation of apparatuses. This would seem to be Agamben's take.

Well this post has certainly gone on long enough. I'm going to have to think about these things some more.

purpose and audience awareness for English Studies

Sure. Purpose and audience are the old standbys in first-year composition. What are you trying to accomplish in this essay? Who are you writing to? What will they think about what you are saying? What do you want to say to your audience? How do you expect them to react?

Familiar, to say the least, which is not to say that the answers are easy to come by or that the answers translate directly into actually composing a text. But those are different matters (sort of) from what I'm thinking about here.

What happens when we try to think of our undergraduate curriculum in terms of purpose and audience?

Yes, I am aware that there remains a very strong notion of English (and other humanities) as a course of study that is not professionalizing, not preparing one for a particular career, but rather as providing a liberal arts education. But that doesn't mean the curriculum is without an overarching purpose, does it? Of course not. Traditionally, the goal was knowledge/appreciation of canonical literature, organized by region and historical period. Except... that wasn't the real purpose, was it? I mean, it was/is an intermediate goal with the idea that the knowledge/appreciation of the canon led to something else (insight into human nature, cultural literacy, eloquence, something). In contemporary versions, the source material has changed and the end goals might be more phrased in more political, less universalizing terms, but otherwise the mechanisms remain the same.

However, the relationships between material, curriculum, and goals have always remained quite vague, and I don't really buy the explanation. And let me be clear, that I am not singling out literary studies here, even if it does continue to dominate the undergrad major. In other areas I think we face the same challenges in articulating the relationship between the specific activities and materials of the curriculum and the putative purposes of liberal arts education.

While we say that we oppose "professionalization," I think one could easily argue that professionalization is exactly what we are doing. When we teach students to do humanistic research, to interpret literature, to conduct rhetorical analysis, to employ "theory," to write essays, etc., we are teaching them the practices of our profession. It's fairly obvious, right? We are professionals. The knowledge we are certified to teach is that of our profession. What else are we supposed to teach?

As I've discussed before, according to an MLA report, 3.8% of English majors 91-99 are post-secondary English teachers. (And let's be clear that certainly a significant majority of those are people teaching first-year composition.) So maybe one or two students in the average English class is bound for a career in our profession. The largest portion are high school teachers. The next largest group are really writers of various kinds. But I digress. We aren't preparing them for careers, but if we were, we obviously wouldn't be preparing them for jobs like ours, right?

There is a way out of this, though, and thinking about audience/purpose isn't a bad start, even if it isn't easy and doesn't lead directly to an answer. Grads of English programs seek out professions where they can communicate, educate, and persuade. They rely upon their cultural literacy, their ability to analyze media, and their skill as composers. We ought to ask who our undergrads are, not just our majors, but students across the campus. We ought to recognize how our majors are seeking to use their education and respond to that. We all know that, nationally, English needs to communicate its value to undergrads more effectively than it has. How do we communicate with those students? What is it that we expect students will do with the curriculum that we provide them?

I'm not saying we need to abandon the things we teach or the expertise we have. Not at all. I'm confident we have something valuable to share with students. I just think we need to be more rhetorical in the curriculum and pedagogies that we build upon our disciplinary knowledge.

learning to write

One of the truisms of composition pedagogy asks the teacher to think about his/her own experiences learning to write and his/her own development of a writing practice. It is an approach that is fraught with all kinds of problems, though that depends on what one makes of the insights.

My development as a writer was essentially outside the classroom. My FYC course was thoroughly nondescript, in part because I remember almost nothing from it, except that I got a C+. Most of the writing I did while an undergrad took place off the campus: technical/professional writing for my job in the pc industry, creative writing, and writing music.  I had a couple creative writing classes that were useful, but otherwise there was no discussion of writing in my undergrad majors (English and history).

If I were to look at my early writing experiences, I would identify three contradictory practice.

1. For academic writing assignments that were uninteresting (i.e. most of them, not that there were many) my strategy was to take the path of least resistance. My English lit classes were all New Critical. I think there was one course where I needed to do library research.  No process; no rough drafts; no revisions; barely any proofreading. And in return I would get a few checks in the margins with a comment like "Very Good" and then a letter grade. Looking back, I'm sure I was in a series of co-dependent literacy relationships where no one was paying much attention.
2. For interesting classroom assignments and the creative writing I was doing, I would essentially follow my own instincts and interests. I would experiment. And I wouldn't care too much about the reception of the piece or the grade I received. Plenty of rethinking and playing around, but not for any extrinsic purpose. Only for my own pursuits. I'm not suggesting, btw, that this is a practice to imitate. But that's what I did.
3. And then all the technical and professional writing I did, where I was writing to meet another person's standards and the point was effective communication undertaken in an efficient manner. Here the idea was to avoid revision if possible, to work quickly, to operate within recognizable genres, and to steer away from unnecessary complications. In other words, in many respects this writing was opposite to the expectations of academic writing.

In thinking about my academic career, many of these trends have carried forward. In my research (and in my blogging) my writing follows my interests and answers the intellectual demands I encounter through writing. Much of my writing is instinctual in the sense that I have a strong hunch that certain disparate ideas belong together or that some insight is lurking, and I write until I discover it. It's not an efficient process. I seek out the difficulties and contradictions and pursue them. It's not a process of internal discovery. I envision writing as an exploration of a symbolic field/network.  I just keep going until I get somewhere. Of course there's a lot of revision that follows on that.

I often get the sense that this is the kind of writing practice we seek to teach students in FYC: writing as an open-ended process of inquiry that eventually comes to take shape as a rhetorical, communicative text.

But I don't do all my writing that way. I don't write grant proposals or strategic plans or program policy memos that way. In those cases I'm back in the realm of technical and professional writing. Now let's be clear. There is plenty of technical writing that presents significant intellectual and rhetorical challenges. And if you think it's easy to write an effective sales letter, then please write one selling English as a major. And anyone who would like to write a magic strategic plan that will get me all the resources I need can feel free to email me.

These are all demanding, rhetorical tasks. But I don't think the writing practices associated with humanistic inquiry are of much value there. And I expect we know that. Isn't that what we mean when we say that writing "skills" are not particularly transferable?

Of course I have a fondness for writing as inquiry and experimentation. I've been reasonably successful at it. I often enjoy it. I think most folks in English Studies have similar experiences. But I also think that the further one gets from English, the humanities, and higher education, the less common that experience becomes. So it is unsurprising that we want to pass along our particular writing experience, views, and habits to our students. And it is unsurprising that when we think of "writing," we think of (and value) the particular kinds of writing we tend to do. But I don't know that it makes particular sense to make FYC a course in humanistic writing. I don't have a problem with a course in humanistic writing; I just don't know that it needs to be a mandatory part of everyone's education. And if it is/should be, then it certainly shouldn't be billed as a course in "how to write" or even "how to write 'academically.'"

But all of that is the danger of looking to our own writing experiences as a basis for FYC.

close reading, open composition

We had an interesting works-in-progress presentation yesterday that focused  on composition. One of the takeaways for me was the overall mapping-out of the disconnects observed among the compositional practices of digital media networks, the schooling experiences of incoming FYC students, the mainstream, scholarly discourses of FYC as our graduate students encounter them, and the disciplinary values of literary studies-centered English.

I don't think that anyone would be so very surprised by these disconnections. However, as I see it, close reading is at the heart of these disconnections. Close reading, if you don't know, comes out the 30s and 40s with New Criticism as a kind of scientific method for literary analysis. It manages to survive the postmodern shift into theory and cultural studies, so that today we continue to advocate "close reading" without perhaps meaning the specific practice the New Critics called for. Btw, I think this is largely the case whether one is in a literature or composition classroom. Needless to say, while literary interpretation suggests a wide degree of openness in the meanings a reader might uncover in a text, close reading serves as a significant limitation on practices of reading and interpretation, and the compositions that might result.

Arguably, close reading is a practice predicated on a scarcity of texts. It's time consuming. Indeed, close reading might be said to follow upon a self-imposed, selective scarcity: the literary canon. Now, of course, we have an explosion of media. Furthermore, the discipline has departed from the selectivity of the canon. In short, there are more texts than ever to study. Yet we continue to cling to close reading because, I think, we have confused method with objective. This is, we have come to point where we might say that the objective of English Studies is to conduct close readings of texts. There appears to be a sense that intellectual work, at least in the humanities, can only function through close readings, that critical thinking requires close readings, and that other cultural-textual practices are anti-intellectual. Now, let me say that there's nothing "intrinsically" wrong with close reading. It is just simply a limited methodology that literally and explicitly closes reading and, indirectly, the composition practices that we insist must follow upon it.

Franco Moretti's distant reading methods are certainly one response to this condition. Moretti plays on the switch between close and distant. Here I'm switching close and open. I've played with this term before. One might draw connections with "open" in Heideggerean terms or in relation to the Black Mountain School or even in terms of "open source."

How would English classrooms operate if they didn't function as lectures/discussions of close readings of texts? What would English students write if they weren't writing interpretive essays based on close readings? What happens when we separate "critical thinking" from "close reading"?

In part, and certainly at the start, the answer would be non-deterministic. That is, one would not want to switch one overdetermined genre and practice for another. I think this is key. The heavy hand of judgment runs through our discipline where we imagine that we know how others should write (and what they should read and even how they should read it). I think this is a serious error in thinking. Typically, English faculty know very little about appropriate writing practices outside the narrow genre that results from close reading. To our credit, I don't think most English faculty believe they should be teaching students to write for these foreign discursive contexts, but in some strange paradoxical way, we still seem to believe that we know how students should write.

In this situation, I think the methodological answer is to examine extant writing practices and approach the development of new compositional practices in an open, experimental way. Communication takes place around the clock without close reading. People fall in love; fortunes are built; innovations are developed; discoveries are made; knowledge is composed and disseminated: all without the benefit of close reading.

Open composition, in the absence of close reading, is the situation of the text in an open field of networks and contexts. It's not about ignoring the specific intentions of the text; to the contrary ignoring intentionality is the hallmark of close reading. And certainly contemporary scholarship has plenty of examples of self-interested, careerist or politically-motivated readings of texts. In fact, open composition might have a stronger ethic of listening to the text and an awareness of the situated and distributed process of reading.

durable mutations in digital scholarship

In his TED talk, Scott McCloud goes in search of "durable mutations" in the world of comics as they move toward the web.One of the things he notes in his talk, and this is developed in his book Understanding Comics, is the relationship between time and space in the graphical representations of comics. On a certain level, we can think of film in the same way as a series of frames going by really fast (though that isn't technically the case for digital film, even if digital video can be represented as frames like in iMovie). The difference with comics, as McCloud notes is that we are asked to fill in temporal gaps between frames in a way that is more consciously active than the gap filling we do with film or video. We also control the spatial-temporal flow in a way we don't with film (rewind and fast-forward notwithstanding).

I am also interested in durable mutations... in digital scholarship. What lasting shifts will we see in the movement to non-print media? And I think there are some relevant connections to McCloud's observations about comics. He asks us to think of the computer screen not as a page (which is a dominant metaphor, as in web page) but rather as a window. (As an aside, this connects in useful ways to some of the things Lev Manovich talks about in his analysis of the development of the screen in The Language of New Media.)

Maybe the most useful way to do this is to think about the "durable mutations" of print scholarship. These were also designed to address space-time problems. Scholars adopt writing technologies as a way of communicating over space and time, both with their contemporaries and for posterity. In a sense, writing begins as a means to address the limits of speech but then develops its own cognitive affordances. Similarly digital scholarship emerges to address the limits of writing, and in some ways recaptures some of the advantages of real-time communication. The limits of writing, as we probably know, are

• it's relatively slow (in terms of distribution and arguably in terms of consumption)
• it's relatively expensive (particularly for scholarly publication)
• it lacks sensory appeal
• it lacks interactivity

As such, we might imagine the screen as a window into a digital scholarly ecology where authorship is downplayed and the intersections are highlighted (in comparison to print), where knowledge is offered to us in a variety of media, but most importantly where we are able to recapture the intellectual conversation that we never really had but have always pursued.

And this is where I come back to McCloud, who envisions web comics as comics only more so, who sees emerging technologies as enabling comic artists to pursue their aesthetic goals more fully beyond the limitations of print. If we recognize that fundamentally scholarship is about communicating and building knowledge with our colleagues, that it is about the conversation, then we can recognize the durable mutations that print technologies offered in the past, and we can recognize the limits of print and the ways in which digital media networks might allow us to pursue our ongoing intellectual goals beyond the limitations of print.

real time online education and writing pedagogy

I'm wondering if there is anyone out there doing real-time, online FYC courses. The nearest I've come to this is using Second Life, and yes that is real time, but it wasn't a sustained part of the course. Primarily I couldn't make a real time course work because the online courses were asynchronous, so I had no way of requiring students to appear at a given time.

As bandwidth continues to improve, real time online education seems an increasing possibility from SL to Adobe Connect and beyond. Certainly one of the often-stated appeals of online courses is their asychronous character. At the same time, online courses suffer from high drop-out rates and I think seem a little, well, distant to many students. So while we could probably keep some fully asynchronous courses, it seems likely to me that there will be some move toward offering courses with real-time components.

There are a couple ways to do this that I can think of off the top of my head.

1. There's the mentor/tutor model, which is probably the most common. This is basically an asynchronous course that makes real-time support available. This makes sense if one is delivering a large number of commonly-designed courses. While I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with having online tutors available, this is clearly not the same as having a real-time classroom community with a professor and fellow students.
2. There are real-time virtual office hours, which I have often done in the past. But that's not also not the same as a real-time online classroom.
3. The "avatar" model, which would be a course in a virtual world like SL.
4. The video/chatroom model. Here I think the video component is essential.

The avatar and video approaches both incorporate a strong visual element and sense of place. I think these are essential. I don't really think that a text-based chatroom or even audio-only exchange will be effective enough in engaging students in a real-time distance setting.

The question to consider is what we might do as writing faculty in such an environment. First, there are the things that we wouldn't do, or better put, the things that are better accomplished asynchronously.

• lectures whether written, audio with slides, or video
• course readings (obviously)
• threaded discussions
• most of the writing students would do, whether individual assignments or collaborative wikis or multimedia compositions

However students might benefit from real-time discussion of course readings or lectures. They might also get useful results from real-time workshopping. It's hard to tell. Fundamentally I think the value would lie in the relationships and community that can be built through real-time exchange. In truth, there's very little that is done synchronously that can't be done asynchronously, but it is also likely that the former will benefit some students' learning styles in a way the latter does not.

In any case, I'd be interested to know who is out there doing this.