digital digs

CCCC presentation on computational composition

Putting together my presentation for next week. I half-jokingly suggested on twitter an audience exchange where I'd promise to go to your panel if you came to mine. It's a half-joke because I'm in the second-to-last session on Saturday, so I'm a little worried about who will be left around at that point. I take solace in the fact that I can put my presentation up here and increase my audience by at least 10-fold I imagine.

My presentation is about "computational composition" and mobile phone networks. The main way that I've been making use of this in my classes is with Twitter, so I'll talk some about that. Honestly I've never been fond of the "look what I did in my class" genre though that gesture seems to be necessary in the CCCC proposal. Really I'm more interested in talking about how the tropes of computation, mobile tech, and networking reshape the increasingly dated conversation about multimedia/multimodal comp. As I suggested in my last post about NCTE's 21st century writing (and could equally be said for the WPA Council's technology plank in it's FYC outcomes or what gets mentioned in MLA's recent report on the undergrad major), I think something significant happens when you put composition through that turn.

[side note: I've had some exchanges about the usefulness of the word "composition" and the desire for another term or maybe a proliferation of terms with no fixed identity. I would hope to estrange composition but perhaps that's not likely.]

Anyway, I've got three angles on this turn. There is the material aspect of the computational perspective that asks us to consider the hardware and software at work in compositional processes. Obviously all digital compositions proceed through computation. These computations are largely automated: steadying your camera, cropping photos, audio effects, compression algorithms. It's the intelligence of the network at work there. But we can extend farther than that to think about searching, findability, and usability as all shaped by computational factors. Certainly mobile technologies play into this equation.

Second is the notion of a participation literacy, which Trebor Scholz talks about. Kevin Lim and I were discussing this the other day at the SLN conference. This is quite different from the visual/multimedia literacy that we often mention. Mobile technology is an integral part of the lived experience of networked participation. My students used their phones on a voluntary basis with twitter, so I will bring in some discussion of how this worked in my class. But really I'm wondering what it might mean to see composition as a participatory activity in which students are at least partly/optionally engaged through mobile tech.

Third is a retun to computation but more as a metaphor, as the lens through which we increasingly see ourselves and our culture. Obviously there are negative/critical things to mention here. One can see this in Hayles and others (though certainly that is not all Hayles is doing). However rather than simply decrying the idea of computation, one can also see the potential for deterritorialization here... the way that "computational" estranges composition.

Anyway more on this later, but that's a rough sketch.

NCTE's 21st century writing: the age of composition in the regime of computation

NCTE offers a recent report by Kathleen Blake Yancey on Writing in the 21st Century. Overall this is an interesting report and I am hopeful that it will spark some useful conversation in writing programs, English departments, and perhaps across campuses. Yancey ends with an identification of the challenges we face:

• developing new models of composing,
• designing a new curriculum supporting those models, and
• creating new pedagogies enacting that curriculum.

I couldn't agree more with that assessment, and I would like to extend upon some of the observations flowing through this report..

The report begins with a reference to Garrison Keillor and the injunction to "grow up in a society that values knowledge and hard work and public spirit over owning stuff and looking cool." In many ways I sympathize with this injunction, particularly with the rejection of the consumerist-materialist obsession in the U.S. But at the same time, this underlying value drives this report in an ambivalent way.

The text is largely a history of writing and schooling in America. There are a few running themes in this history: writing has been characterized as hard or difficult; writing has been tied to social progressivism; and research in writing has been de-emphasized in part because we have valued reading over writing. While in part the report seeks to unmask these historical assumptions, it also continues to carry them out. The challenge of moving to new models of composing will require hard work. There is a continuing desire to help students become "citizen composers" and thus participate in a socially progressive vision of what cultural discourses might be. And certainly there is a call for new research and an insistence that we take writing seriously where we have not.

There is nothing wrong with those claims or goals but certainly they represent more of a continuation of the same than a breaking from our past. And perhaps that is the rhetorically effective approach, and I don't disagree with them. But at the same time, I wonder about other possibilities, other perspectives, and what might be missing here.

the desires of the teaching of writing

So I just returned from a curious panel on "multimodal literacies" featuring Ethna D. Lay, Ann Jurecic, and Jay David Bolter. And as was germane to the presentations, and with all due humility about (indeed specific statistical awareness of) the size of this blog's readership, I am certain more will learn of what was said there through reading this post than actually witnessed the presentation (which is not to say that it wasn't a typical session audience: it was).

Bolter made an interesting observation about the split between contemporary literature and social media, with the former remaining firmly in the realm of print despite the brief flirtation with hypertext in the early 90s. As we all know, literary studies has largely followed the same path. So here's the question: what happens if/when the rest of the world leaves the "writers" and their professorial readers behind? Whither composition in the wake of this? Does composition remain faithful to the essay or not? Yes, it is a question that has been asked before. But Bolter put it in a rather curious way. He asked,

What does the teaching of writing want to do?

So this got my thinking about the polymorphously perverse organism that goes by the name of "the teaching of writing" and what desires/wants it might cook up. How do the flows of desire that activate this set of assemblages hook into discourses on literacies, educational institutions, departments, faculty, teachers, etc? How are "we" empowered by our linkage into this circuit?

Then I recalled Victor Vitanza asking whether or not CCCC could have as its theme "Should writing be taught?" (and suggesting this is a question rhet/comp cannot entertain). Of course at the time that was written, I think he meantnthat rhet/comp could not ask a question for which one answer would put the discipline out of business. Now that is not so much the case. Today (or someday soon) the answer could be, "No, we shouldn't teach 'writing;' we should teach 'new media.'" 

I tend to look at this differently. Of course, we are well aware of the moralizing that accompanies literacy, going back to Plato.... All those "shoulds." I think in some way that is what Bolter was getting at in asking this question: that what the teaching of writing would want to do would reflect some moral obligation to literacy or students or discipline or something.  In a related way Ann Jurecic talked about the difficulty as a scholar in developing multimodal literacies when departments and the discipline tell us we "should" be doing more traditional writing. And Ethna Lay, focusing on FYC, considered how one should respond to new media compositions that elude the conventions and expectations of academic prose.

If for a moment we were dispassionate about it, we could see something quite interesting. That is, if we don't care about the fate of English as a discipline or the fate of literary practice or even the fate of cultural literacy, we could look at the rise of networked culture (and the response of the hyper-literate world of MLA and elsewhere) with some fascination. Is it possible to imagine a history composed in the 22nd century that remarks on how this hyper-literate community steered the world away from the emergence of a network culture? Uh, not really. So where exactly do we think we are going?

the rhetoric of software studies

I've started reading Lev Manovich's in-progress book Software Takes Command (PDF available from this site). The book begins with the articulation of an emerging field Manovich terms "software studies." This term emerges in The Language of New Media where Manovich writes

To understand the logic of new media we need to turn to computer science. It is there that we may expect to find the new terms, categories and operations that characterize media that became programmable. From media studies, we move to something which can be called software studies; from media theory — to software theory. The principle of transcoding is one way to start thinking about software theory. (48)

Transcoding was one of the five main principles of new media discussed in that book and was Manovich's approach to mapping the intersection between new media technologies and culture. Interestingly, it also proves to be the concept that moves Manovich beyond "new media studies" into "software studies," which he seems to see as a broader project that looks into the processes by which new media is produced. As he notes in his new book:

At the moment of this writing (Spring 2008), software studies is a new paradigm for intellectual inquiry that is now just beginning to emerge. The MIT Press is publishing the very first book that has this term in its title later this year (Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller.) At the same time, a number of already published works by the leading media theorists of our times - Katherine Hayles, Friedrich A. Kittler, Lawrence Lessig, Manual Castells, Alex Galloway, and others - can be retroactively identified as belonging to "software studies." Therefore, I strongly believe that this paradigm has already existed for a number of years but it has not been explicitly named so far. (In other words, the state of "software studies" is similar to where "new media" was in the early 1990s.) 

Manovich recruits a wide range of traditional disciplines into the work of software studies, including the humanities. Who knows if the term will catch on, but it is certainly clear that the explosion of participatory media and mobile networks has dramatically redefined what new media might mean in comparison to what we were discussing at the beginning of the decade. This is clearly a challenge for any discipline, as technological change outpaces the disciplinary-institutional apparatus.

As with any interdisciplinary project, we each have to bring the strengths of our perspectives and methods to bear on the subject. In the case of rhetoric, we continue to struggle with the inclusion of "multimodal" composition, drawing on language from Gunther Kress that hails from the first new media ago. In the trenches of first-year composition classroom, faculty offices, and hallways, we can certainly still hear the debate of whether such instruction is necessary or appropriate; the point is probably moot in that most instructors nationally don't have the technical skills to teach such material, and even if they did they may not have access to the technology to make such things possible. Still we continue to engage in these conversations about students building web pages or making videos.

And certainly the rhetorical skills and knowledge behind multimodal composition remain germane, just as the long history of print rhetoric remains germane. At the same time though, in some ways we are fighting the last war. We are now in the midst of a very different new media environment from the one that spurred the conversations we largely continue to have. This is Manovich's argument, or at least part of it. Manovich takes up the concept of remix as the familar, integral component of software studies, and looks to deepen that idea (more on that later as I get further into the book).

To offer just one final snippet along these lines, Manovich notes

In the new communication model that has been emerging after 2000, information is becoming more atomized. You can access individual atoms of information without having to read/view the larger packages in which it is enclosed (a TV program, a music CD, a book, a web site, etc.) Additionally, information is gradually becoming presentation and device independent – it can be received using a variety of software and hardware technologies and stripped from its original format. Thus, while web sites continue to flourish, it is no longer necessary to visit each site individually to access their content. (205-206)

What does this remix culture mean for the way we think about composition? What does it mean for how we understand invention and the use of existing information in compositional processes? What implications exist for design or organization when we realize that our audience might encounter our work in an atomized way, through any number of devices? Software studies suggests the examination of such concersn.

networked media's curious writing lesson in embodiment

Yesterday I was watching my seven year-old play basketball. In that game, there were some kids who were already exhibiting some sense of naturalness with dribbling the ball. No prodigies mind you, but a sense of being able to walk/run and dribble without undue conscious focus on the ball. Other kids really labor with dribbling, much like you or I would be trying to balance several full cups of hot coffee at once. Most, honestly, can't even manage that. They can't remember that the ball needs to bounce and just start running around with the ball in their hands.

Dribbling is a lesson in proprioception, an unconscious understanding of the body in time and space. Proprioception allows you to bring the fork to your mouth without having to watch it all the way. If you've ever had children, you know that this is a learned behavior! Proprioception can extend to a ball or a bat in a sport. It can extend to your automobile. Witness the difference between driving your car and what happens when you rent a big u-Haul.

It is, admittedly, more of a leap to extend proprioception to writing. Let's move slowly. If you are a touch typist, that is propriceptive, much like the fork to the mouth. Handwriting also. But what about rhetorically? We have the idea of writing/rhetoric occuring through space/time. Obviously it does. We discuss topoi and kairos. So what would it mean to suggest that writing is proprioceptive like driving a car or dribbling a basketball? The intersection of body and technology in the unconscious navigation of space-time. Clearly space-time of a text (multimodal or otherwise) is abstract, but does that matter? Neuroscience demonstrates that we use the same parts of our mind to navigate a virtual space (e.g. a video game) as we do to navigate a physical space. That's not surprising. What would be surprising iis if we had a separate part of our brain for navigating virtual spaces! Clearly there's no time for such a thing to evolve, even if there was a need. The same thing is true for writing. 5,000 years of writing, in evolutionary terms, isn't much different from a decade of virtual reality. Certainly, writing involves the use of visual processing and the use of the body to write, turn pages, click on links, etc.

So here's the thing about expert writers (or so I would hypothesize). Expert writers, like expert drivers or basketball players, use different parts of their mind to write than non-expert writers. Inexpert writers, like many of our students, are hyper-conscious of their writing, laboring over each sentence--an effect that is made worse by the constant reminders about the importance of "correctness." So on one level, the goal of writing instruction is to help students develop a level of "naturalness" in writing. Nature is in scare quotes here as there isn't anything necessarily natural about writing (or driving or bouncing a ball for that matter). At another level, we seek to de-naturalize writing through reflection, cultural critique, heuristics, and the like. Because, in the end, the analogy to dribbling breaks down, and we must see writing as a far more varied and complex set of practices.

Curiously, media networks help us learn these lessons. I say curiously because we typically think of the online world as drawing us away from the physical. But this is really just an extension of a false opposition between the virtual and the real (for another day). Media networks de-naturalize writing by presenting us with varied conditions for writing. In some respects I think it is easier for us to recognize our embodied responses to non-written media--tapping our feet to music, crying at a movie, etc. Of course we are similarly moved by texts, but there's a clear affective difference in processing the heavily symbolic quality of letters and words.

Juxtaposing these conditions can help us develop some awareness of the proprioceptive navigation of different media. In the end, becoming a better writer isn't so much about being a better conscious composer of sentences or paragraphs. It's about learning to feel your way through a rhetorical space. It's about developing good instincts and learning to trust them. The expert baller not only dribbles the ball unconsciously s/he can see the flow of the game unfold before hir, twists and turns hir body without thinking. The expert musician feels the music. Writing is also about getting into the flow, while also recognizing that the flow is not natural but a complex combination of cognition, body, technology, culture, rhetorical situation, and so on.

social media and public pedagogy

Right before Thanksgiving I had two new projects come to me that I'll be working on through mid-February. The first is a chapter I've been asked to write on social media and public pedagogy for an essay collection focusing on the latter term. I've also been invited to speak at the SUNY Learning Network's online learning conference. My audience there will primarily be multimedia instructional designers. Here, I'll also be discussing social media and pedagogy. To a certain extent, I see these projects as rhetorical reflections. In the first case, the essay will be addressing an audience of faculty and grad students with an investment in public pedagogy, broadly conceived, but likely with little knowledge of social media. In my presentation, on the other hand, I am envisioning an audience with technical knowledge, particularly with desiging courses in a CMS, but with less knowledge of the issues surrounding teaching in a public, networked space.

Public pedagogy, particularly as the term is used by people like Henry Giroux, describes a broad range of practices. In "Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals," he writes

Culture, in this instance, is the ground of both contestation and accommodation, and it is increasingly characterized by the rise of mega-corporations and new technologies that are transforming the traditional spheres of the economy, industry, society, and everyday life. Culture now plays a central role in producing narratives, metaphors, and images that exercise a powerful pedagogical force over how people think of themselves and their relationship to others. (62)

So, yes... I'd say that's fairly broad. Social media is also a "fairly broad" term, which means that I'm starting at a high level of generalization. Can we say that Facebook and/or Myspace teach people how to "think of themselves and their relationship to others"? Of course. And we can say the same thing generally about Second Life or YouTube or Wikipedia and so on. Can one argue that there is a dominant, consistent ideological force that is exercised through any and all social media? Yes. One can make that argument, and certainly people do make that argument. Trebor Schulz makes an argument along those lines in First Monday, but with an important caveat I think. He argues that "Web 2.0" communicates a particular market-capitalist ideology, but that it is possible to recoup these technologies for other purposes. Certainly folks like Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, Henry Jenkins, and others have explored other purposes.

I come at this from a different angle. I don't think it is so useful to attempt a totalizing account of social media. Such accounts are neither accurate nor helpful in my view.  I certainly agree that the Web is broadly deployed for the purposes of market capitalism, just as virtually every other sector of our culture is likewise deployed. I don't believe technology can save us from history. However I do think that culture is mutated through changing material contexts: culture shapes and is shaped by its technological contexts. The public pedagogy of Facebook, for example, is not the same as the public pedagogy of the daily newspaper or broadcast television. But to investigate this, in my view, one might work, Latour-like, through an examination of specific networks.

a pro-tools theory of composition

On Salon, Simon Reynolds reviews Kanye West's and Axl Rose's new albums. The review takes an interesting detour into the increasing role of digital tools in corporate music production, specifically Pro-Tools and Auto-Tune. Reynolds summarizes his negative review of Guns 'n Roses this way: "Rose wanted to create something of grandeur and beauty the way the classic rock gods did, but like the cosmetic surgery addict who doesn't know when to stop having operations, he ended up with something botched and grotesque: a face that can't transmit a recognizable emotion."

Pro Tools works by creating a simulated perfection. Perfection might be a particular way of conceiving the simulacrum: it is a copy of an object that doesn't exist. Auto-tune works in a similar way by "correcting" off-pitch notes. As Reynolds notes, in this practice we can encounter the monstrosity in perfection, and the result can be a production that doesn't quite work (as the case with Guns 'n Roses, at least according to Reynolds) or, more typically, a production that sounds like all the others (as we see with Top 40 songs).

So let's work by generalization toward a theory of composition. Pro Tools and Auto-Tune, at least as they are typically used (and that's a key point to which I will return), assume that beauty-cum-perfection is generalizable: what is beautiful here will be beautiful everywhere else in the song. They also assume that beauty can be/is digitized. That is, what is beautiful in this part of the song is captured in the digital articulation/recording and can be copied/pasted elsewhere.

I believe this is a faulty theory of composition, even though it does function crudely speaking and can even succeed in producing marketable music. Essentially it ignores the value of kairos, the embodied, situated-ness of rhetoric: what is beautiful here/now may not be so elsewhere. Indeed what makes sense here/now may not make sense elsewhere. Furthermore reiteration leads to mutation: in some mathematical/digital sense the sound is the "same." But I'm not listening to a song with my calculator. I'm listening with my ears. Without that sense of real embodiment, one is left with a cold, ineffectual aesthetic or as my favorite line from this review states: "There's a gross tumescence to the sound of "Chinese Democracy" redolent of the 4-hour erections induced by Viagra: engorged but devoid of desire, a meaningless show of strength."

Or think of it this way. The problem with plagiarism isn't just that it is intellectually lazy or unethical. Generally speaking the plagiarized text doesn't make sense. That's how we notice it as readers of student papers. You can't just cut and paste material, even it if it is beautiful somewhere else. But it's not only plagarism. The problem extends more generally to rhetorical-compositional methods. This of course is what we mean when we say that we cannot speak of the writing process. How many compositions, extended to meet a page requirement might be described as engorged but devoid of desire, a meaningless show of strength?

This is also why on the one hand we can speak of the importance of regular reading to being a good writer but also recognize that we don't really learn to write by creating conscious rhetorical "models." If you want to think about the texts you read as models, that's fine. If you want to imitate a text as a kind of heuristic exercise that's fine too. Ultimately though, writing is about the internalization. As we all know with music, it isn't about perfection. It's about affect and expression (in the Deleuzian sense).

For Reynolds this appears to be the case with Kanye West's album, where he sees the use of Auto-Tune, in conjunction with other digital effects, as integrated into an experimental heuristic rather than as replication of the same (though obviously he doesn't put it in those words!). This is always the danger with the kind deterriotiralizations made possible through digital technologies. One pole leads toward mutation and becoming; the other pole toward fascism and replication. The former reminds me of Wiliam Gibson's remark that the street finds its own uses for things. Composition becomes a series of inventive, non-determining tactics for unfolding texts. Bring in these machines but seek out their mutative potential.

the long tail of research citations

Picked this up from the WPA listserv: a recent article from the Boston Globe cites research that indicates that contemporary scholarly work cites a fewer range of sources than work in the past.

James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work. Overall, Evans says, published research has expanded, due to a proliferation of journals, authors, and conferences. But the paper, which appeared in July in the journal Science, concludes that the Internet's influence is to tighten consensus, posing the risk that good ideas may be ignored and lost - the opposite of the Internet's promise.

"Winners are inadvertently picked," says Evans. "It drives out diversity."

I haven't read the Science article (subscription required--talking about ignoring the "internet's promise"!). And the Boston Globe article indicates that there are others with research that counters Evans' claims. So in short, no one knows. However I think there are other forces at play here, one of which is mentioned above.

There has been an explosion of publication, fueled largely by increased pressures to publish at institutions of all varieties. So if there is 3X, 5X, 10X the amount of research being published annually in my field. It quickly becomes difficult to read even narrowly in my specialty, let alone browse through related fields. The network allows this information to be published but then serves to create the long tail effect as we make choices as readers.

That means that essentially 80% of the article reading events in a field will be of the top 20% of the available articles. So let's say that over a certain period of time 100 articles are published. Let's hypothesize that there are 1000 scholars in the field and that they will read 25 of these articles during this period. That's 25000 article readings. 20000 of those readings will be of 20 articles. The remaining 80 articles will be read a total of 5000 times, with a long tail were the last 30 or 40 articles are read only a handful of times.

Now let's say you have 1000 articles instead of 100 but still only 25000 readings. Now you have 20000 readings of 200 articles in the "head" but you have to look closer because 20% of those articles are getting 80% of the readings within the head. So 40 articles are getting 16000 readings, while the remaining 160 are getting 4000 readings.

So in short, it would appear that the long tail effect, if it works strictly by mathematical formula, could work to have this narrowing effect. But it isn't really the long tail that is at work here so much as the brutal forces of an attention economy. The long tail business model assumes that through the network you can reach a larger market. That is the number of available readers should expand with the networking of yoru product.

So let's change the example.

Let's say that in the print world only 1000 interested scholars would have access to your research and the limits of the print economy mean that only 100 articles can be published. That's the first example I gave above. Now let's say that in the online world we can publish 1000 articles (again as above) but this time the increased access of the Internet means there are 50,000 possible readers. (You may scoff at this, but we know more people than this are teaching FYC at this moment--are they not all potential readers of rhet/comp scholarship?.) Suddenly we can say 900 articles see the light of day that would never have been published (or possibly even attempted) under the old print economy and tens of thousands of new readers have access to them.

Now it's quite likely that 99% of those 50,000 readers will never write an article that cites your work. Surprisingly, that's the way it tends to work with most writing. Many people read Time magazine; few people cite it in their research. Still I wouldn't mind being asked to write an article for Time, would you? That's not to say that citations can't be one useful measure of the value of academic work. But it might mean that if more and more academics are being asked to publish more and more, it might make sense for us to think about valuing writing to broader audiences.

In the interim, if you feel like breaking this long tail curve, feel free to be the first to cite this blog post.

not ready for spime-time pedagogy

I'm teaching Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things right now and thus thinking of his neologism, the spime. Spimes are Sterling's vision for the next generation of technology and draw their name from their unique ability to be precisely tracked in space and time. As Sterling suggests in his book (and here in a 2004 Wired article), we are already beginning to see spimes: objects that are linked to vast databases of information about them. He gives the example of how Amazon treats books. And I was thinking the other day of how I was in the supermarket trying to find an environmentally sound cleaning product. I was staring skeptically at Clorox's new line of green cleaning supplies. So I pulled out my iPhone and did an internet search. I was able to determine that these products were relatively good. So the product is there before me and the information is out there. The spime begins with linking those two. In addition, the spime also tracks its own singular history. That is, this particular bottle and its contents: where did they originate, where have they traveled, and how will they be disposed. Sterling suggests this kind of information will be significant in the necessary green revolution everyone speaks of.

But Sterling makes another interesting observation that appears tangential, but I believe is significant. In the Wired article he notes:

In July, Mexico's attorney general became a smart object. Rafael Macedo de la Concha had an RFID chip implanted in his arm that can track and authenticate him, a bold bid to fight government corruption. Of course, it's his brain that makes him smart. It's the chip that makes him an object: cataloged, searchable, and locatable in space and time.

This reminded me of Baudrillard's arguments about the power of being an object, a somewhat counter-intuitive argument when we generally think of agency as attributable to subjects not objects. If we are indeed moving into a cultural period where we will begin to see intelligence, information, and power as emerging from objects or networks of objects, then I believe this has significance for how we understand our discipline (and I realize that in the scope of this revolution, this is a small corner, but it's my corner).

vitalism and virtuality

Melvyn Bragg's latest BBC podcast addresses the issue of vitalism. As you might now, vitalism is the central issue of Byron Hawk's excellent Counter-History of Composition. There are some important connections between the concept of vitalism and theories of composition. As Byron fundamentally argues, "the problem urround vitalism in rhetoric and composition is that the discipline has selected one definition, equating it with romantic genius and individual expression, excluded vitalism from the discourse of the field based on this definition, and thus covered over the possibility of seeing what vitalism has become" (122).

So in Bragg's roundtable conversation, vitalism is situated in conflict with mechanistic/materialistic theories, which emerge as natural philosophy develops into science (with Descartes, Newton, and so on). The conflict really comes to life (excuse the pun) around the question of electricity (Bragg begins his talk with a reference to Frankenstein). Vitalism goes back to Aristotle and then becomes embricated in Roman Catholic doctrine until the appearance of scientific method. Vitalism does not simply disappear however (Byron goes into some great detail about this).

In thinking about this binary, one can perhaps see the reaction of hard-line Marxists to Deleuze and Guattari. D/G build upon this vitalist tradition through Nietzsche, Bergson, and many others. Marxism, on the other hand, is a mechanistic-materialist critical method, at least in the hands of many red theory folks. So the "ludic" quality of D/G is an extension of these vitalist principles. It is a similar theoretical perspective that informs the cultural studies-inflected post-process movement in composition, which, as Byron argues above, establishes vitalism as expressivism.

Importantly though, one can potentially view the process movement in a related way. If we see process as a mechanistic/materialist theory, as a means to make (the study of) written composition scientific and to demystify writing practices, then certainly that would fit into the discourse of the Bragg podcast. Vitalism still remains "expressivist" and attached to the molar conception of the individual. In this regard it remains attached a more religious or at least traditionally humanist notion of vitalism as spirt/soul.

My thinking about virtuality has run along resonant lines with Byron's study of vitalism and perhaps indicates the rich, iterative quality of Deleuze's work. Virtuality articulates a minor philosophical approach to materiality, an alternate conception of composition fueled by non-deterministic mechanisms (assemblages if you prefer). Either way, in this philosophical work, there is a particular development of vitalism that moves away from religious notions of spirit or divinity (as one of Bragg's contributors notes, one could see "intelligent design" as one contemporary instantiation of vitalism, though obviously quite different from Deleuze!). Instead it is a vitalism that, ironically, comes up through technological development: computers and information theory play important parts in the articulation of the theories of complexity that in some ways redraw this distinction between the mechanistic and the vital. Certainly such distinctions are not possible in D/G.

Anyway, the Bragg podcast is certainly worth a listen. Needless to say (but said anyway), Byron's book is worth reading. Here is an opportunity to think expansively about the possibilities of composition, to recognize that thought necessarily exists beyond the social just as writing exists beyond philosophy but that such a recognition does not require a return to the humanist individual but rather a step toward greater complexity.