digital digs

genius and the impossibility of teaching writing

It's a familiar argument, I think. "You can't teach writing. Good writing is a matter of natural talent or genius." The answer is, "Well, that depends on what you mean by 'writing.'" In elementary school, kids learn "to write" by forming their letters. No one would doubt that's a learned skill that can be taught. On the other hand, if you mean that one cannot be taught to write like (insert a list of your favorite authors here), then I'm sure that's true. No one can be taught to write like me either. And in a strange (and maybe unfortunate) way, that can be the default of composition pedagogy, right? That is, as instructors our default mode would be to teach students to write like we do. From a different perspective, that seems almost inescapable. After all, are we supposed to teach them to write like someone else?

This is another version of the error/problem of thinking through paradigms that I discussed in my last post. However, here I want to think about this issue in terms of the notion of "genius," particularly as Agamben takes up the term in Profanations. Agamben writes that "Comprehending the conception of man implicit in Genius means understanding that man is not only an ego and an individual consciousness, but rather that birth to death he is accompanied by an impersonal, preindividual element." In this respect, genius is connected not only to some "spirtual," higher plane (i.e. some external source of inspiration), but also to all the unconscious processes of life: "If we didn't abandon ourselves to Genius, if we were only ego and consciousness, we would not even be able to urinate."

This intimacy with a zone of nonconsciousness is an everyday mystical practice, in which the ego, in a sort of special, joyous esoterism, looks on with a smile at its own undoing, and, whether it's a matter of digesting food or illuminating the mind, testifies incredulously to is own incessant dissolution and disappearance. Genius is our life insofar as it does not belong to us.

So we might be able to say that that part of our lives which is "genius" is not directly "teachable," at least this would be the case if we constrain pedagogy to acts of communication between two or more conscious subjects. Certainly, genius, so defined, responds to pedagogy, but does it do so in a predictable way that would satisfy the "outcomes" we hope for from curriculum?

Agamben addresses specifically the issue of writing. 

Suppose the ego wants to write -- not to write this or that work, but simply to write, period. This desire means: I (Ego) feel that somewhere Genius exists, that there is in me an impersonal power that presses toward writing.  But this Genius, who has never taken up a pen (much less a computer) -- has no inclination to product a work. One writes in order to become impersonal, to become genial, and yet, in writing, we individuate ourselves as authors of this or that work; we move away from Genius, who can never have the form of an ego, much less that of an author. Every attempt by Ego, by the personal element, to appropriate Genius, to force him to sign in one's own name, is necessarily destined to fail.

So this should be a familiar refrain within the song of theory. Writing comes from elsewhere. It is a way to become-other. And at the same time, there is the will to immanence, to make the self present in the text, through the signature, etc. From here, though, Agamben goes in a couple interesting directions, and then I will return to this issue of teaching.

Agamben writes that "An author's style -- like the grace displayed by any creature -- depends less on his genius than on the part of him that is deprived of genius, his character. That is why when we love someone we actually love neither his genius nor his character (and even less his ego) but his special manner of evading both of these poles, his rapid back-and-forth between genius and character." And then the most interesting turn at the very end of the essay:

But for each person there comes a time when he must be separated from his Genius... only now do we begin to live a purely human and earthly life, the life that did not keep its promises and, for that reason can now give us infinitely more... only now does the very long unlearning of the self begin.

I can only imagine here that the notion of the genius has shifted somewhat from that which is connected to the unconscious processes that keep us functioning (e.g. urination). Here at the end we have returned to a more traditional understanding of what genius is. Here we come to see that writing cannot solely be the impersonality, genial condition of genius. After all, genius cannot take up a pen. What is at stake here at the end, is the particular/singular "back-and-forth" that reconnects us to Agamben's notion of "whatever." I love you, whatever you are, in your singularity. 

As we see in this final passage, one does not only separate from genius but also unlearns the self. Writing, for Agamben, is the evasion of both of these poles. As long as we cling to genius, we must simultaneously cling to ego. Through writing we might move away from this dialectic.

Ok, so try teaching that????

Maybe not. That said, in composition we have long eschewed the notion of individual genius (as unteachable) and pursued a more instrumental, heuristic process that produces predictable works. It is fundamentally a pedagogy that says "Through pedagogy, through a careful manipulation of the conditions of writing, I can regularize your writing practice so that you all (the students in the class) will produce predictable texts that will approach acceptability."

In the end, it comes back to the first question. If by "writing" we mean the production of business reports, letters, and memos that are not replete with "grammatical errors" and are generally intelligible (i.e. what most college students will be asked to produce as professionals). This would appear to be a teachable skill. And this would also appear to have nothing to do with what Agamben means by "writing," and even less to do with genius. Fair enough, though I would suggest that even though would might never mention Agamben, even when writing memos, one is becoming impersonal, one struggles with the issue of the signature, and that the difficulty of writing (anything) always resides in the back-and-forth between genius and character.

Of course that kind of writing has nothing to do with what we teach in composition, either. The funny thing is that I don't know what we mean by "writing" in composition. The traditional definition of composition was that we were teaching general writing skills and simultaneously "academic" writing skills. Then we said there really isn't such a thing as "general" skills. Then we said there really isn't such a thing as general "academic" skills either. 

But I might suggest a return to "general" writing. To writing that is not part of a specific economy but rather writing as part of the "general economy" in Bataille's sense. Or perhaps in the context of this post in the sense of the genial. 

Can this be taught? Now perhaps the question turns to what one means by "teaching." If one means the creation of conditions under which one encounters this experience of writing, then yes. If one means creating opportunities for reflection and discussion of these concerns, then yes. 

In the end, the problem isn't that writing cannot be taught, that genius cannot be taught. Nor is it that writing is such an instrumental, basic activity that writing instruction can only be remedial at the college level. The problem is that the whole business of writing instruction is far more complex than that. Which does not mean that students need to read Agamben or Bataille! But it might mean that writing pedagogy must emerge from an understanding of writing that is more complex than what is represented in a composition textbook.

composition program #fail and assemblage theory

Perhaps these days it seems like I am throwing assemblage theory into every post. Maybe I am. But I've been thinking about it more and (probably as a result) seeing it more in the things I am encountering. So here a couple things I encountered in the last couple days.

• Wired magazine's article: "Accept Defeat: the Neuroscience of Screwing Up" courtesy @docmara
• A NY Times book review of Brain Arthur's The Nature of Technology courtesy @hrheingold
• I was also watching Agamben's EGS lecture on "What is a Paradigm?" (transcript)

The video is from 2002 and reminds me of his later essay "What is an Apparatus?" which I blogged about a couple months ago.

In any case, each of these pieces addresses the subject of science studies from a different angle, with Kuhn being a common touchstone of sorts (not that they all agree with Kuhn, of course). Agamben's piece is more abstractly about the concept of the paradigm (particularly the role of the paradigm in Foucault). The others are more directly conversations about trying to understand how science works.

Typically I am moving tangentially from these concerns toward my own and here taking up the issues of failure and paradigm-cum-assemblage.

I have discussed failure many times on this blog, particularly in terms of pedagogy. I emphasize risk-taking and experimentation in my classes. I try to encourage students to value failure as an integral part of a creative and intellectual life. Failure is deeply stigmatized in American education to the point where students are conditioned to avoid the risk-taking that is integral, in my view, to learning. 

Jonah Leher's Wired article discusses the problems laboratory science has dealing with failure and introduces some interesting neuroscience that explains, via fMRI, how our brains tend to edit out observations that we make that do not fit with our expectations. As Leher writes:

What turned out to be so important, of course, was the unexpected result, the experimental error that felt like a failure. The answer had been there all along — it was just obscured by the imperfect theory, rendered invisible by our small-minded brain. It’s not until we talk to a colleague or translate our idea into an analogy that we glimpse the meaning in our mistake. Bob Dylan, in other words, was right: There’s no success quite like failure.

Arthur's book looks to develop a theory of technological development or evolution. I haven't read it, just this Times review, so I can't comment on the book itself right now. However, the review resonated with me in its exploration of how in the mainstream we assume that science drives technology and that there is a rational, logical, incremental evolution of science (with occasional great discoveries of course). Leher points out that, to the contrary, laboratories regularly produce unexpected results and that they have curious ways of dealing with those failures where it would seem that the very last thing one would do would be to abandon one's theory.

If that sounds like a knock on science, it shouldn't. In fact, I'm more interested here in discussing how we do this very same thing in composition, not only on a pedagogic level but on a programmatic level as well.

While we can experiment in composition, it is not the same thing as a science experiment, obviously. There are far too many variables out of our control. Composition is all about failure. It is founded on the premise that students fail to write well. I have often argued that the institutional definition of a student is "one who cannot write," and inasmuch as that is the case, a curriculum designed to produce student writers is tautologically impossible. It would be like creating dogs that were cats. However that's really an argument about cultural-institutional attitudes toward students as writers.

I have to admit that composition scholarship is rife with heroic pedagogy narratives about great successes, but in my view such narratives are reactions to the general perception that composition fails. And we have many explanations for this failure (beyond the simple fact that we are strongly predisposed to view students are poor writers). We can blame technology or media (e.g. texting). We can blame socio-economic conditions or the public education system or any number of external conditions. 

And who can say that such conditions do not cause the failure of our experiment/program? Under laboratory conditions, scientists can spend months trying to eliminate such potential external reasons for failure. For composition, that would be like spitting in the ocean. It's imposible to eliminate external factors without eliminating the students. 

Still, that does not mean that the theories, the paradigms, that shape/cloud our perception of composition are not an integral part of our failure. Now, it would be wrong to say that composition does not develop new pedagogic theories and practices. At the same time, the bulk of actual pedagogic activity is disconnected from composition theory because the instructors are not participants in the discipline. Furthermore, as much as we have seen the development of disciplinary practices over the last 40+ years, much of rhetorical instruction is fundamentally the same as it was during the classical Greek and Roman eras. Now there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it does indicate a powerful paradigm at work.

As I was thinking about this from the angle of neuroscience, I was reminded of the Zen Buddhist concept of shoshin or "beginner's mind." Leher's article remarks on the value of interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving where the people involved do share all the same preconceptions. And I wonder if it is possible for me to bring a beginner's mind to the concerns of writing pedagogy. Not sure. When I think of such things, I am reminded of approaches like Diane Davis' in her CCC article, "Finitude's Clamor."

Having ditched "the rhetoric of assertion:" a first-year writing course might adopt a rhetoric of exposition and reclaim the sense of "essay" that it implies, making writing a way of testing out possibilities, trying out questions together: writing as a way of putting oneSelf into question by initiating conversation. The idea (the point) would not be to encourage a point- or thesis-free essay but to admit and to affirm the thesis as a mark of exposure: It indicates not power or knowledge or mastery but naked vulnerability. To state one's thesis is to risk oneself, to open toward others; it is to initiate an approach, an encounter, a becoming. Thus, the goal of writing would not be to defend one's thesis and then cleanly and clearly to wrap up. Rather, the stated goal of the essay in such a course would be to hold the door open on this thesis (and so, on one's writing-being), to keep it exposed to various encounters, interruptions, contradictions--to resist the urge to turn away from the "outside" in order to finish off the conversation. Assigned essays in this course would ask not for the closing off that feigns mastery but for the opening up that perpetuates the inquiry, that keeps the conversation going.

Perhaps a writing program might operate in a similar way.  To turn back to Agamben's lecture, he says 

the intelligibility of the paradigm is never presupposed, on the contrary, the specificity of the paradigm resides precisely in the suspension of its immediate factual reference and in the exhibition of its intelligibility as such in order to give life to a new problematic context. Perhaps to treat the hypothesis truly as a hypothesis and not as a principle may simply mean to treat them as paradigms. The paradigm is a hypothesis treated and exposed as such. It is a hypothesis or presupposition whose intelligibility is no more presupposed but exposed, so that it allows us to reach an unpresupposed principle. 

The common thread here is exposure (and our apparently built-in, neuroscientific predisposition to turn away from exposure to otherness--to the unexpected, to that which does not fit our presuppositions). I do find connections, at least for myself, between the beginner's mind that allows itself to be exposed and the practices of assemblage theory. It's hard to imagine a methodology of exposure. I don't think of assemblage theory as being that. That said, a realist social ontology, as DeLanda might put it, offers us a different way of thinking through paradigms that does expose them.

Davis writes about the "rhetoric of assertion," and I see that as a paradigm. I often think about the writing process. How does that paradigm intersect the particular spaces of a composition program: in classes, conferences, assignments, instructor comments, textbooks, and even in a student's writing practices? Rather than blinding ourselves to #fail outcomes, how might we expose that paradigm "in order to give life to a new problematic context"?

Making new work in digital English studies

I'm bringing together a couple things I've been reading. First here's a couple dog bites man stories:

• in Inside Higher Ed a report regarding the sharp decline of tenure-line jobs in English, 
• an article in the NY Times on new education programs to draw students into digital jobs,
• an interview in Edutopia with Alvin Toffler on radically reforming the education system.

And then I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's interesting novel Makers about a downtrodden, near future America, the potential of DIY networked technologies, and, ultimately, the suffocating weight of corporate inertia. In short, as we should already know, change is inevitable (and these days comes upon us faster and faster) but it is rarely what we think it will, let alone should, be.

We can wring our professional hands over the job market. There's reason to be concerned. Mark Bauerlein counts a mere 55 tenure-track jobs in traditional Brit Lit fields. And we can concern ourselves with the plight of graduate students in those fields. We can concern ourselves with the long term viability of continuing scholarship and teaching in those areas. No jobs; no grad students in those fields; eventually no one doing research or teaching in those areas, or so Bauerlein's argument goes, roughly. Of course there are already few students taking the courses, which is the underlying problem.

So we can jump to the kind of reporting we see in the Times about trying to excite more students about computer science and bringing it into the mainstream curriculum. This might remind one of Samuel Papert and Mindstorms 30 years ago: computational thinking is critical thinking. Then perhaps one could enter into some discussion of how English Studies ought to try to find its way toward computer science and digital media. Or perhaps we might follow Toffler and go with the more general recommendation that we "shut down the public education system."

In my view, it doesn't matter if one shares Bauerlein's love and valuation of the traditional English curriculum, agrees with Toffler's radical propositions, or believes in bending English to meet a new economy. 

In the end, English lives or dies on its ability to convince students that we have something valuable to teach them. If you don't think this is the case then spin me a scenario of a thriving English department sans majors. 

Makers is not a great literary achievement by disciplinary standards, but I found it a compelling novel of ideas. It's not a celebration of technology; it's not an "engineers to the rescue" sci-fi novel. The novel maps the complex relations among technology, labor, markets, the legal system, journalism, local and national cultures while mostly being a story about people. But it echoed with me in a weird way with the very core of the earliest notions of the liberal arts, as the skills a "free man" required.  

The liberal arts have changed in many ways since then, and we now have vexing notions of agency. And yet there remains something compelling about the promise of an education that will give you the skills to create agency. Yes I realize the theoretical issues there, but I'm thinking about how I would speak to a prospective student or parent here. Sure, maybe other colleges at a university would like to promise students the security of job preparation. But in 2010 (almost) we know that's snake oil. The liberal arts take up the risk/reward proposition in a different way. When job market risks start to rise, maybe the answer is to look for a different value out of your education. 

Doctorow's novel focuses on two geeks with the computing and engineering skills to build cool things immersed in a networked culture that allows them to collaborate in radical new ways, creating "new work" as it is termed in the novel. Maybe the liberal arts will never be that technical, but it is certainly that geeky. And in the novel, the two geeks are joined by an ex-journalist-turned-blogger who turns the world on to their inventions through her writing. But I'm not hunting for role models in the novel. Instead I am interested in the spirit of the DIY culture and the innovative communities that build up around it. Much of the novel revolves around the duo's invention of an interactive amusement-ride-cum-museum. And that's my model, such as it is. 

In my vision, the liberal arts ought to be a place where students can manipulate cultural objects and build new, interesting objects from them. It ought to be a site of creativity and innovative community. The liberal arts major ought to graduate with a portfolio of creative projects, a broader and more nuanced cultural literacy, and the communication skills to help others see the value/get excited about their work. Digital media rhet/comp plays a role in each of those areas. But perhaps it's most basic and essential role is in helping students develop the networked media skills to collaborate, create, and share. I'm not talking computer science or engineering here, but simply the digital literacy version of what writing papers once was (or purported to be).

Of course, as mentioned above, these things rarely work out as we imagine them. Who would have thought that reading English literature would become a cornerstone in the managerial literacy of 20th century industrial culture? And yet it did. And who would have thought that all that would be disappearing as quickly as it is? Strange times.

"New work" is based on our capacity to do "it" ourselves, with the tools that are available to us as students and faculty: to create exciting things, build communities around them, and share their value with the world. The liberal arts must be about what we are doing now, not some deferred value in a distant future. It's not the promise that today's learning will create future value/earnings after graduation. It's the promise that we will create value today with the hope that today's creation will lead to better future creations. 

20,000 Years of Virtual Composition: Computers and Writing 2010

Looking forward to the Computers and Writing conference in May. Here's my abstract.

As media networks alter social relationships, they also rework the relations within scholarly communities. The single-authored monograph or journal article, whether text-only or multimedia, makes less sense with each year. These practices make less sense in terms of economics and the overproduction of scholarly publication. They also fail to recognize that we are perpetuating a narrow conception of composition and communication built on print technologies and nineteenth-century conceptions of rhetoric.

I will discuss the “virtual” as a philosophical and technological concept that offers insight into potential future directions for scholarly composition. Virtuality is neither outside reality nor a separable segment of materiality. Instead, virtuality is the interpenetration of materiality and symbolic action. When we view the history of symbolic action as virtual composition, we develop different theories than those informing legacy scholarly production. This does not mean seeing the world through a computer metaphor. To the contrary, the computer is one technocultural application of a virtual philosophy.

Rather than trying to imagine a particular digital media genre for rhet/comp scholarship, my presentation is more interested in reimagining compositional practices as an extension of theories of networked communities and distributed cognition. That is, future digital genres will emerge from setting aside our legacy practices of imagined solitary authorship. In doing so, I will draw on philosophical interventions into community, such as those of Agamben, Nancy, and DeLanda. I will also draw on new media theorists such as Manovich, Kirschenbaum, and Hayles, and scholars within rhet/comp such as Ulmer, Rice, and Hawk.

actualized virtualities in Latour: the case of the tweckled lecturer

A couple posts ago I was exploring the concept of the virtual in Latour. I've been thinking more about these two particular passages from Reassembling the Social. In the first, Latour writes "To maximize the fabulous power of their etymology, objects have now become things again: the disputed topic of a virtual assembly." In the second, in a footnote he largely equates ANT's concatenations of mediators with Deleuze's "actualized virtualities." Second point first: so what is an actualized virtuality?

I haven't seen Brian Massumi cited very often in the conversations I've been following around the web, but I find his take on the Deleuzian virtual worthwhile. In Parables for the Virtual he writes:

Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiences and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are infolded and sadness is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life). The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt--albeit reduced and contained. (30)

The actual occurs at the point of intersection of the possible, the potential, and the virtual: three modes of thought. The actual is the effect of their momentous meeting, mixing, and re-separation. The meeting and mixing is sensation. Sensation stretches on a continuum from the absolute immanence of virtual center to the far end of potential, where it just extends into possibility. No actuality can be fully imaged, since it emerges from, projects into, and recedes into inactuality. Bodies and objects, their forms and contents, do not account for all of it. They do not catch the momentum. To look only at bodies and objects is to miss the movement. (136)

The concepts of nature and culture need serious reworking, in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of the nonhuman in and through its active connection to the human and vice versa. Let matter be matter, brains be brains, jellyfish be jellyfish, and culture be nature, in irreducible alterity and infinite connection. (39)

[side note: I realize that last quote doesn't directly address the "virtual," but it directly pertains to my work in relation to the field of rhetoric and composition. 30 years ago, rhet/comp had a strong interested in cognitive science, but that work was largely pushed aside by a focus on discourse and ideology along postmodern, cultural studies lines, Foucault in particular. No doubt there were legitimate critiques of the use of cognitive science in rhet/comp and the turn toward discourse has been productive in shifting us away from thinking of writing as a purely internal, individual activity. However my work has been about these connections with the nonhuman (and starting with networked media because that's the nonhuman elephant in the room).]

But back to the virtual and the actual... the virtual is the space/plane from which actualized objects arise. The actual is one aspect of an object, apprehended at a particular moment. Part of this is the semantic problem of the object itself which reintroduces concerns of essentialism as well as language/text problems. What defines an object? Where does one object end and another begin? Objects all the way down?  What about the vacuum in space between subatomic particles? Is that also an object/objects?  These are the kinds of questions the virtual seeks to address without resorting to the essentialism that pervades our conventional cultural thinking about the world. So as I understand it, for Deleuze, the virtual is always there/not there. It can be felt but not grasped. What we grasp is actualized but is only ever part of an object, which also always retains virtual potentials. 

If we take Latour's invitation and think of concatenations of mediators as actualized virtualities, then I think we would also have to see those Latourian actors as having virtual dimensions. What is the implication of that for ANT? Alternately, if one attempts to extricate the virtual (for whatever reason) from ANT, what is left? Is it the virtual that differentiates ANT from the conventional sociological theories from which Latour is dissociating himself?

I'll leave those questions hanging. I certainly don't have a definitive answer. But I can investigate some of these issues within my own areas of concern.

Generally speaking, as a rhetorician one can look at communication in a two ways: what does happen and what should happen. The former could be a philosophical form of investigation, a philosophy of communication. Mostly these days I'd say it's more of a social-scientific investigation. That said, primarily rhet/comp is focused on the "should." After all, that's what we are on about in undergraduate composition courses: teaching students to write as they "should," instead of the bad, bad, bad, bad ways they actually write (or don't write). Now typically this "should" is tempered. We don't have to say that a student's existing writing practice is "bad," only that it is not "effective" or "appropriate" for various academic, professional, and/or civic discourse communities into which they "should" (again) want to enter or into which they must write as future professionals, etc. 

So how might we investigate this "should"? We might leap to the background of a generalized ideology or "academic discourse," but that is precisely what Latour warns us against. Instead we might begin with an event: the students and instructor in a classroom, the student reading the composition textbook, the instructor commenting on a paper, etc. Then we might trace the mediators/the actualized virtualities as they converge.

Of course I have painted "should" negatively there, I fear, and it need not be. In my own work, I find it productive to ask questions such as "how should humanities scholars make use of networked media?" or "how should English restructure first-year composition or other aspects of its curriculum to teach emerging technologies?" Here the "should" can mean many things. It could be an ethical argument. It could be a pragmatic or politically-motivated argument. It could be a philosophical or intellectual argument, i.e. one that is based upon research/scholarship. Or all of the above. As we consider possible actions, a theory of the virtual not only informs strategies or tactics, it also reshapes ethics as it provides a different accounting of relations.

But I have promised a "case of the tweckled lecturer," and this post is already getting long! So tweckling is the practice of criticizing or heckling a lecturer or presenter via Twitter while the presentation is taking place. I want to take some license with this definition and expand it to include the (potential) distraction of a presenter by tweets (regardless of the tweets content). There have been recent articles in the Chronicle about these matters.

Again the question of what should we do arises?

The immediate reaction has been to suggest that we should "shut off" such devices and/or discourage such behaviors. That tweeting during a presentation is distracting for everyone (including the multi-tasker with the thumbs). And that asking a presenter to interact with tweets during a presentation is unfair, potentially disastrous, and, at the very least, disrupts the flow of hir presentation.

The equal and opposite reaction is to suggest that shutting off these devices is impractical/impossible and that they engender many potential positive contributions, provided we develop a few techniques.

As I noted a couple posts ago, wireless access and mobile tech have altered the material contexts in which lectures/presentations (whether in a classroom or at a conference) take place. Our conventional way of thinking might identify these mobile media networks as add-ons. That is, the room is already "complete" with its speaker, hir paper, the audience, chairs, lectern, etc. Perhaps the add-on is unwanted, to be ignored or driven out. Or perhaps the add-on is invited in, but only as a supplement to the already complete scene, purpose, and activity of the presentation.

However, ANT already suggests that the traditional scene is more than it appears, that we must consider networks of mediators acting on that location. Those mediators have virtual dimensions, but they have been actualized as they are by the semi-stable relations among them that have resulted in thousands of English Studies conference papers over decades being delivered in much the same way in hotels around the world. The development of mobile media networks is analogous to turning up the stove under a pot of water. There is a shift in intensification. The whole network begins to roil. All of the mediators shift. None can behave precisely as they did before. 

Who is to say what will happen. Perhaps the whole situation will diffuse and return to a state largely similar to what we've conventionally had. But if not, then the entire premise of standing up and reading sentences printed on letter-sized paper sheets for 15-20 minutes will not persist. In short, the question of how should (or shouldn't) we accomodate mobile media networks to the conventions of the conference presentation or faculty lecture is probably misguided. Instead the question should be how will we carry out our academic work in these shifting techno-material contexts?

I don't think it is so hard to imagine a future where conference sessions are conversations based on previously distributed material rather than formal presentations. After all, as is the English Studies tradition, if you are just going to read a text to me, why not put it up on a conference website instead. Then I can skim it and those of a dozen other concurrent panels and decide which conversation I wish to attend. Meanwhile, perhaps I can follow along with other conversations online. I can also attend a conference at a distance (perhaps paying a limited registration fee to gain access to conference materials). I might comment on a presentation or participate in a session discussion via a live feed.

We might expect "everything" to change under such conditions. Certainly there would be new roles, new behaviors for "presenters" and "audience." Perhaps we arrange the chairs in a different way. Maybe the sessions are of different lengths. Maybe we arrange those mobile partitions in hotel conference rooms in new ways. Maybe the whole conference is longer or shorter. Bigger or smaller.

In my mind, the virtual is a way of thinking through these mutations.

some first-year composition reflections

I've just finished my first semester at the University at Buffalo, which included teaching first-year composition. It's not a class often taught by tenured faculty at UB, but since I'm going to be taking on the job of running the Composition Program next year, I thought it would be useful to have taught the primary sequence of writing courses most UB students take. (I'll be teaching the second course, 201, in the spring.)

Personally, I think composition is one of the more difficult courses to teach. I won't go into all the reasons this is so. But if you've taught the course, I imagine you will agree with me.

I can't say it was a great class. No heroic pedagogy narratives here today I'm afraid. It has its moments. Students certainly had opportunities to learn and develop as writers. I intentionally tried to push the envelope on the course somewhat, and I certainly succeeded in doing that!

Here's something I think I know about FYC in general. If you give students a fairly narrowly-defined assignments, lay out specific steps for them to take, give good workshop directions that feed back into that narrow definition of an assignment, and then give very specific draft feedback, then you are probably going to end up with some decent products. 

So, for example, we read Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Rhetoric, which is a tough text, and a little dry for FYC. But the students got some sense of what rhetoric is out of it. I didn't do this, but we could have taken Booth's chapter on media, where he discusses media rhetrickery, and evaluated his argument by analyzing a recent media event. Following the formula above, I'm sure my students would have produced fine essays. We did something similar, which was more open than that, and they did well on that assignment, so I'm confident with less variables they would have produced even better final products.

The problem is that I'm not exactly sure what the point of doing that is.

I mean I know why I would do it as an instructor. As an instructor, I know where all the bodies are buried on the way to a disastrous composition. I can create an assignment that steers us around all the real rhetorical challenges of writing. Generally speaking, if you give students a blank slate then they will find they don't have anything to say and they have no one to say it to. But that's not a fair assignment, because as writers we are never given a blank slate; we are always writing into a rhetorical situation. And, in fact, the students don't really have a blank slate either. They are writing into the situation of the classroom.

Of course, as writers, we have to figure out the rhetorical context into which we are writing. I suppose one could say that we start as readers. E.g., recently I started reading some blogs about object-oriented ontology. Then I wrote a post. More generally as a scholar I started reading in my field. Afterward I started writing, and eventually I got published. This is part of the act. To read, but to read as a writer.

I think the main argument for a narrowly-defined assignment is the assumption that composition is a collection of moves. First you teach the students the moves, then they put them together. I do this with nine-year olds in soccer practice. I teach them how to dribble and pass. Turn your foot like so, strike the ball here, position your body like this, etc. But I don't think the analogy really carries to writing. Yes, one can analyze a text and identify various rhetorical moves. And if I were teaching students a specific technical genre of writing, then there would be clear conventions to learn.

In this comp class, we talked a fair amount about motivation. We also talked about creativity. To write well take creativity, which means taking risks. It also means thinking beyond conventions. We took risks and often we were not very successful. But we have to be OK with that. But the other part is motivation. While we have to be willing to accept failed experiments, we also have to be motivated to keep trying until we succeed. So we accept failure, but we are not satisfied with it.

The difficulty is that students have been educated to take the path of least resistance. I don't blame them for that. I'm not someone who is going to claim that "students today" are lazy or anti-intellectual or "the dumbest generation." The narrowly-defined assignment is, in a sense, the path of least resistance. It is the most reliable and shortest path to a decent product. As an instructor, I can ask students to take risks and I can be lenient in my evaluations so that they are not unduly punished for failing at the risky ventures I encourage them to take. The difficult problem is motivating students to not accept failure but to continue to strive for success when what they really want is to just be finished.

Writing is not about finishing. It's always about more writing. How do you teach that?

Of course the professional writer in me laughs at that idealistic statement. Of course writing is about getting done. It's about getting paid in fact. And it is, if you are writing in a particular context. And if FYC was about teaching students to write a job letter or a brochure for a new product or service or a guide to campus activities for incoming students, then sure, it would be about getting done. And it wouldn't be a matter of experimentation, at least not very much.

But that's not what FYC is about. Is it? 

Deleuze, Latour, and the virtual

Continuing on this thread from the last few posts, I have become interested in investigating the relationship between Deleuze and Latour, especially as it pertains to a concept of the virtual. So, courtesy of Google Books, here are some places in Latour's work where "virtual" and "Deleuze" arise. This is not meant as definitive, merely exploratory. And I limited myself to the two works of Latour's with which I am most familiar (and which I have lying around the house): We Have Never Been Modern and Reassembling the Social.

The word "virtual" doesn't appear in the former text, but has a role in the latter, where it appears five times (excluding the index or in titles of cited books). One of these, a footnote on pg 208 is a reference to the technological concept of VR and doesn't really add anything here.

1. At the end of his chapter on the "Fourth Source of Uncertainty," Latour discusses the challenge of ensuring that the diversity of "agencies manifested by matters of concern.... is not permanently closed by one hegemonic version of one kind of matter of fact claiming to be what is present in experience" (188). So Latour makes a 4-item "to-do list" and the word virtual appears in the fourth item. Essentially the list is about tracing the material production of "scientific facts:" in the lab (first), extending outward into society (second), through specific experiments and controversies (third), and "the growing intensity of controversies over 'natural things'" (fourth). Here he writes: "While before you had to go back and forth between reality and fiction as if it was the only road worth taking, it is now possible to distinguish the procedures allowing for realities--now in the plural--and those leading to stability and unity. To maximize the fabulous power of their etymology, objects have now become things again: the disputed topic of a virtual assembly" (119).
2. The other three uses of virtual come closely upon one another on pp 163, 164, and 166, and build upon a particular point Latour wants to make and is put well here: "it does not require much effort to see that a virtual and always present entity is exactly the opposite of what is needed for the collective to be assembled: if it's already there, the practical means to compose it are no longer traceable; if it's total, the practical means to totalized it are no longer visible; if it's virtual, the practical means to realize, visualize and collect it have disappeared from view... To put it even more bluntly: either there is society or there is sociology" (163).

Rather than address these different uses of the term "virtual," I want to head into Latour's references to Deleuze. In Reassembling the Social, Deleuze comes up twice in footnotes and once in the text. One of the footnotes (pp 94-95) is just a passing comment on the "science wars" and not worth noting here.

1. The first footnote is on pg 59 in the chapter on the "Second Source of Uncertainty" (which is related to action or agency) in a section titled "How to make someone do something." Here Latour is arguing for the importance of mediators as a way of suggesting that one cannot simply expect that "causes" determine "effects." All sorts of interesting things can happen in between, at least for Latour. So these are two ways of looking at things: one where causes are deterministic and one where mediators affect outcomes. He writes, "The first solution draws maps of the world which are composed of a few agencies, followed by trails of consequences that are never much more than effects, expressions, or reflections of something else. The second solution, the one preferred by ANT, pictures a world made of concatenations of mediators where each point can be said to fully act." The footnote comes at the end of the sentence and says, "In Deleuze's parlance, the first has 'realized potentials,' the second 'actualized virtualities.'"
2. Deleuze appears in the "main" text (sort of) in a side bar on "a terminological precision about network" on pg 129. Of course Latour is famous for saying about ANT that there are only three things wrong with it, "actor" "network" and "theory," and here he is parsing the term "network." He mention two common uses of network: technical networks and the sociology of organization. And then writes, "But the other tradition, to which we have always referred, is that of Diderot in his La reve de d'Alembert (1769), which includes twenty-seven instances of the word reseaux. This is where you can find a very special brand of active and distributed matieralism of which Deleuze, through Bergson, is the most recent representative."

There are three references to Deleuze in We Have Never Been Modern and I'm going to speed things up a little here.

1. "What is the source of the very modern impression that we are living a new time that breaks with the past? Of a liaison, a repetition that in itself has nothing temporal about it (Deleuze, 1968)?" (72)
2. "moderns have simply invented longer networks by enlisting a certain type of  nonhumans. The network-lengthening process has been interrupted in earlier periods, because it would have threatened the maintenance of territories (Deleuze and Guattari, [1972] 1983). But by multiplying the hybrids, half object and half subject, that we call machines and facts, collectives have changed their topography" (117).
3. "Every totalization, even if it is critical, helps totalitarianism. We need not add total domination to real domination. Let us not add power to force. We need not grant total imperialism to real imperialism. We need not add absolute deterritorialization to capitalism, which is also quite real enough (Deleuze and Guattari [197] 1983). Similarly, we do not need to credit scientific truth and technological efficacity with transcendence, also total, and rationality, also absolute" (125).

I don't want to make too much of this little exercise. But I will say this. In these spaces Latour has plenty of opportunity to dissociate himself from Deleuze. He could have been critical or not even mentioned Deleuze I suppose. But you don't see that. Instead, I see someone who is building on Deleuze or at least does not find it necessary to make a clean intellectual break from Deleuze as he does from mainstream sociology. Now some might want to criticize Latour's use of Deleuze (though the idea of a "Deleuzian purist" strikes me as about as weird a concept as could exist); others might want to emphasize Latour's differences from Deleuze. But I don't see Latour taking real liberties with Deleuze or making substantive breaks from him. It's more like they touch upon one another in productively resonant ways, that Latour has made something productive from his encounter with Deleuze... which is what I would hope to do.

As my last post discussed, one of these points that is raised has to do with the virtual. I would have to agree with Harman's point in The Prince of Networks that Latour does not often employ the term "virtual." Above we get two very different uses of the term virtual. The second case is more critical and refers to the virtual as an ideal realm, which I think is very different from the way Deleuze employs the virtual. The first is more interesting "objects have now become things again: the disputed topic of a virtual assembly," as is the first footnote reference that appears to link "concatenations of mediators" with "actualized virtualities." 

Here's an example. Take this sentence. Objects have now become things again: the disputed topic of a virtual assembly. When I encounter this, it is as patterns of ink on paper. Here it is patterns of light on a screen. Then there are light wave-particles that carry those patterns to my eyes. Stand back far enough (or in my case, remove eyeglasses) and nothing happens. Close enough and the light hits my eyes, goes through a series of mediations where I maybe recognize (but do not consciously think), these are letters that make words that make a sentence. I don't consciously process letters or even words necessarily but a thought enters my head that is "caused" by reading the sentence, but not in a deterministic way, certainly not for Latour.

So part of this is boilerplate textual theory. My 10-year daughter is very bright (he said objectively) but she would get something very different from that sentence, as would my students or neighbors, etc. etc. The disciplinary-academic meaning of the sentence, which attempts (cybernetically) to limit its effects, is maintained through various institutional actors operating in a network, including in some modest way this blog post. So all of those things are obviously not physically present as I sit in my living room reading that sentence, and yet they linger somewhere in my brain or I encounter them in a google search or something on my laptop as I write this (e.g. where does Latour mention Deleuze? ah thanks Google book search). 

As I see it, Latour's main argument in Reassembling the Social is that we can't just leap from ink to Inc. That we shouldn't jump from ink forming letters on a page to a transnational capitalist ideology controlling our interpretation of texts. We need to follow the trails, like ants (Latour's joke).

Latour addresses this question of object relations through the concept of mediators. And as far as I can see, he doesn't have a major issue with thinking about mediators as "actualized virtualities." FWIW, we see a similar discussion coming from a different angle in the work of Agamben and Nancy where one is working through concepts of immanence and community. To put the questions together, if objects are immanent to themselves, how do they relate (i.e. form communities)? Put differently, what is one's theory of mediation? As I have discussed, the virtual offers a different concept of immanence, as a theory of mediation. 

Well, I have to head to a meeting and then I must do some grading, so I am afraid I will need to leave off here, but I will get back to the matter later.

flat ontology and the virtual-actual circuit

I've been thinking some more about Scot's question regarding the relation of Deleuze to object-oriented philosophy. Now I certainly do not want to come off as an expert, let alone confuse anyone into thinking that I number among these speculative realists. However I am interested in their work. I am coming to their work through Deleuze. When they make connections with Latour or De Landa, I am seeing those as connections to Deleuze as well. I also think that when one looks at Deleuze it is difficult to say his argument is ______.. In some sense the proliferation of concepts makes this impossible. Perhaps he was trying to avoid getting the "rhizome" or whatever pinned to his chest the way Derrida got pinned to deconstruction. One last caveat, my reading of Deleuze is surely influenced by Massumi, not only as translator of ATP but also because I read his User's Guide quite early on in my encounter with Deleuze.

As I see it, it is over the issue of actual and virtual that object-oriented philosophers seem to have considerable problems. (There may be other issues, but this is the one I'm dealing with here.)

In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy DeLanda writes, "In a flat ontology of individuals, like the one I have tried to develop here, there is no room for reified totalities. In particular, there is no room for entities like 'society' or 'culture' in general. Institutional organizations, urban centres or nation states are, in this ontology, not abstract totalities but concrete social individuals, with the same ontological status as individual human beings but operating at larger spatio-temporal scales." In this sense, this would seem to connect well with Deleuze, though DeLanda does note in some places Deleuze uses a different language. I'm not sure whether to characterize this as departure, critique, or clarification of Deleuze, and I'm not sure what's a stake in those differences either.

With the virtual and actual we get something a little different. For Deleuze, the virtual is the plane of consistency or immanence while the actual is the plane of organization. Here's a little chunk from A Thousand Plateaus:

The plane of consistency is the body without organs. Pure relations of speed and slowness between particles imply movements of deterritorialization, just as pure affects imply an enterprise of desubjectification. Moreover, the plane of consistency does not preexist the movements of deterritorialization that unravel it, the lines of flight that draw it and cause it to rise to the surface, the becomings that compose it. The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely, the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of organization, causing particles to spin off the strata, scrambling forms by dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assemblages or microassemblages. But once again, so much caution is needed to prevent the plane of consistency from becoming a pure plane of abolition or death, to prevent the involution from turning into a regression to the undifferentiated. Is it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages? (270)

It is perhaps these relations that object-oriented philosophy objects to, and which might contradict the idea of a "flat ontology." In OOP, as I see it, there is a greater emphasis on the objects themselves and less importance placed on relations. The virtual is a mapping of relations, the immanent space populated by objects. DeLanda explores Deleuze's motivations for articulating the virtual as an effort to avoid essentialism and typological thinking. These questions still seem to be at stake in OOP if they want to eschew the virtual. That is, how does one want to define the "object"? Is it objects all the way down?

Deleuze was perhaps more interested in the process/construction of objects than OOP seems to be. This was something noted over at Struggles with Philosophy as well. In any case, given the rhetoricians interest in "composition" (and "process" for that matter), I have found the virtual-actual circuit to be an integral part of this whole business (which is why it was a central element of my book).

a thousand plateaus? meet wordle

  Made from a PDF I found here.

object-oriented ontology for rhetoricians

So I am thinking today about the intersections of folks like Agamben, Nancy, Deleuze, Latour, De Landa...

What, you're still here?

Clearly Deleuze gets some play among rhetoricians, at least as a figure one encounters in grad school these days. But you won't find many citations for Deleuze in CCC; let's put it that way. Latour and actor-network theory has gotten some recent attention (i.e. this decade) in the new media and tech writing sectors of our field. You might have encountered Agamben or Nancy in Vitanza or Ulmer and those doing related "theory" work. And De Landa? Well, go ahead and google de landa rhetoric composition and see what you find (beside this post, I mean).

As one steps closer to these thinkers, there are differences that are really important (to some), depending on how one wants to slice it. For instance, Agamben and Nancy take interest in community, in opposition to a concept of immanence. Immanence is integral to Deleuzian philosophy (though maybe immanence means something different here than it does for Agamben or Nancy). Arguably, Latour and De Landa both extend upon Deleuze, though for some Latour is constructivist (focusing on how humans construct reality) while Deleuze and De Landa would be realists (in pursuing a reality independent of humans). Depending on where you sit, of course, these are all shooting offenses. Plus there's plenty of reason to object to any of these thumbnail descriptions/accusations.

I see it this way (and I'll turn the lens more on rhet/comp interests). Let's say that one wants to be done (if it is possible) with the self-present, authorial subject who writes to make hirself immanent to hirself (i.e., the traditional, humanist writer). Maybe one doesn't care for the politics, maybe one is interested in being experimental, or maybe one thinks the humanist concept is inadequate. Whatever. One requires a theory of composition that articulates cognition and subjectivity as external rather than internal, effectively quashing the distinction, at least from the humanist perspective.

So I have titularly promised to discuss object-oriented ontology (OOO). Ian Bogost offers a good entry point into what OOO might be, though one could also look at Levi Bryant. Object-oriented and ontology certainly resonate with philosophy and psychoanalysis. They also intersect with computer programming, though I am not going there today. The basic premise of OOO is that all objects (including subjects as objects) or actors (to go Latourian if you please) share a common material plane (that would be Deleuzian, a la "plane of consistency," at least for my money). For those who would further distance themselves from Deleuze at al, there is an increased insistence on the objects rather than aggregates/assemblages or becomings.

For rhet/comp, let's say that I wanted to take up the issue of "mutt genres" in FYC, as Elizabeth Wardle terms them, and the underlying issue of transfer. As we know, learning to write a humanist-interpretive essay (or however you want to characterize FYC) does not equal learning to write a chemistry lab report, or anything else. That's the issue/myth of transfer. But that doesn't mean that writing activities, actors, events, objects, and networks linked to FYC do not exchange forces, do not transfer something to subsequent writing tasks.

Just as we might rethink writing activities within a writing course in terms of these object relations, we might also rethink the operation of writing pedagogy/curriculum as a class of objects. What do they do? What differences do they make?

In the end, I'm not sure I can go as far as some of these OOO folks, Graham Harman, for example. I am still stuck (productively stuck, maybe) on how to describe the very task I'm involved in here. This text is an object in itself, composed of other objects (certainly), but also exhibiting characteristics not present in its constituent objects (letters, words, computer programming, monitor light source, etc.). Then there are also the event(s) of composing and reading. How do those objects and object relations connect with the other objects I am discussing here? Our knowledge of the world (which is a class of objects itself) exists only through our exerting of force through object relations onto/through the world. I am still left going back to Deleuze and Guattari working through concepts and immanence in What is Philosophy?

But that's where I am. You are likely (certainly) somewhere else (cause I'd smell you if you were here). In any case, there are some worthy ideas here to explore.