First Day, Fall 2012

Somehow it is already the first day of classes for 2012. I am not sure where my summer went.
I am excited to teach a new grad class this semester, New Media Production. The course differs from the other grad courses I teach, where the focus is on traversing and networking a complex set of readings and ideas. This course emphasizes production--learning how to use tools to do new things. If I am nervous about anything, it is that the class has over 20 students in it, with different comfort levels regarding technology.

The course also seeks to historicize the term new media, defining in light of the convergence of postmodern theory and network technology. We're opening with two staple essays for me--Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" and Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology." The Heidegger sets up our early work with Ulmer; I frame Ulmer's concept of electracy as an attempt to wrestle with Heidegger's provocation of technology/logos. (I flush out this strain of thought more in the syllabus' course description, "The Becoming of Electracy"). I've taught Ulmer's Internet Invention with undergraduates before, but I am really excited to teach the MyStory genre with graduate students.

I am also teaching an undergraduate Expository Writing course. Leahy and I completed a manuscript for Computers and Composition that outlines our rationale for teaching web writing. The abstract to that article reads as follows:

Collaborative digital tools, online communities, and the evolution of literacy create opportunities in which writing for an English class and writing for the "real" world no longer have to be two separate activities. We believe seizing such opportunities requires rethinking the desire to teach writing—a move toward what has been termed postpedagogy. We align the interactive and collaborative affordances of web writing with a postpedagogical model of learning focused on inventive practices grounded in kairotic interactions.

I'm going to give the students the article to read in preparation for our next class--the first half of the article is fairly theoretical, focusing on why institutions insist that writing (narrowly defined as academic essays) is "teachable." To rephrase Heidegger: "the correct instrumental definition of writing still does not show us writing's essence [...]" ("QCT" 313). The second half of the essay argues for organizing a class dedicated to the idea that writing cannot be taught, but can be learned. Learning writing requires attending to writing outside of the instrumental-institutional expectations. The dynamic, participatory web affords us opportunities to discover writing in the wild.
Working on the syllabus for both courses reminded me that I have a blog, and that it has been very lonely. Sorry blog.

New Media Production

This fall I will be piloting a New Media Production class for our PhD program. This aims to be different from my usual "read a colossal amount of theory" approach to graduate courses; the emphasis will be on that final word, production, and providing graduate students to experiment with and learn html and css coding, podcasting and video editing, and probably photography and photo manipulation. Here's the write-up for our catalogue I submitted this morning:

Course Description

Beyond familiarity with the ethical and epistemological implications of new media, 21st century humanists require intimate working knowledge of new media communicative tools and techniques. These tools and techniques include: html, css, javascript, rss, blogging, podcasting, vblogging, wikis, and Flash. This course provides students with a rhetorically-oriented introduction to using these tools. Additionally, course readings and discussions will address how the "newness" of these tools refigure the ways we conceptualize the relationships between writers, audiences, and media.

While this course is a production lab, I do not expect any students to enter the classroom with any level of technology skill above being able to save an MS Word document. We will learn coding languages from the ground up.

Course Texts (Subject to Change)

• Ulmer, Gregory. Internet Invention
• Holmevik, Jan Rune. Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy
• Rice, Jeff. Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network
• Kalman, Maria. The Pursuit of Happiness

Additionally, we will read a number of contemporary articles. Furthermore, I have a recommended list of HTML and CSS tutorial guides, most notably Karl Stolley’s How to Design and Write Web Pages Today.

Course Requirements (Subject to Change)

1. MyStory Project: Following Ulmer’s Internet Invention and its call for Egents ready to participate in the EmerAgency, we will construct websites that unpack our participation in four different socio-discursive networks (career, school, entertainment, and community)
2. SF Zero Project: Building from Holmevik’s theory of play, we will evaluate the potential of real world MMO hybrids such as SF Zero for post-critical, post-pedagogy. If there is sufficient interest, we will begin development on USF Zero
3. Derive Project: Using both Rice’s Digital Detriot and Kalman’s Pursuit of Happiness as relays, we will invent new forms for research and representation that seek to better integrate our logical, ethical, and pathetic/affective relations to spaces
4. Portfolio Project: We will all construct Professional Web Presences show casing the print and digital works produced as members of USF’s Graduate Program. These portfolios should help students think about how they will market themselves on the job market (or, if MA students, how they will package themselves for PhD programs)

Walking Notes: Latour on Heidegger

I was thinking today about Latour's move to Heidegger in "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam". He notes that it might strike many as odd, a hyper-realist turning to one among the most speculative of phenomenologists. But Heidegger's fourfold moves us away from matters of fact because it moves us away from a conception of the Real (of) Being in terms of abstraction.

Yesterday, in my new media class, I introduced Ulmer's anti-definition assignments via a discussion of tables. Aristotle, if chasing down the "reality" of the table, would seek to cut away anything peculiar to a particular table. These he would call accidental qualities. His aim would be to arrive at the elements common to every table (the essentials). Western philosophy spent the better part of 2000 years following Aristotle's lead.

But the 20th century saw a turn away from Aristotle's quest for the Ideal table. Slowly, an appreciation grew for the peculiarities of particular tables. A cut in the wood from the time your brother ran his tricycle into a table leg, for instance. Tables become permeated with memories. So, the question I pose to my students was this: "don't tell me what you think when I say table, spend sometime telling me how you feel when you hear that word. What is the first memory that pops in your head? This is what Ulmer might call the affective table." To which one student responded: "yes, but why are we talking about tables at all? Why does this matter?" Aristotle would be proud? This question I leave open to them.

Back to Latour: his interest in the fourfold lies in its opposition to chasing down the one Ideal, abstracted table, divorced from time and space. The fourfold represents for Latour a method for reconceptualizing our relation to the world (see Rivers here for an extremely smart explication of how "world" in Latourian discourse deconstructs the West's foundational nature/culture binary, 196-197). Method is actually too strong a word--what we are talking about here isn't even a heuristic--rather I would identify it with Ulmer's term heuretic. It is a way of opening a way of thinking about the world. As Hawk emphasizes, it is not a predetermined system but rather a kairotic sensibility to the possibilities a context makes possible (see Hawk 206). Its elusiveness, which Bay and Rickert explicate so wonderfully, is its very charm (which, to a positivist, will stink of magic, deception, and pastry-baking).

Zakaria and Political Reality

I missed a post yesterday, so two posts today. First, a brief comment on Zakarias' article "How Conservatism Has Lost Touch with Reality. A friend has a rather scathing response to Zakarias over at his blog, arguing that Zakarias is practicing a kind of revisionist history, devoid of spirituality, and is hiding behind as ideological fantasy. I don't agree.

First, I think Zakarias' history shows something I've pointed to a number of times on this blog. Tax rates on the wealthy have never been lower than they are today. The current economic crisis is in large part connected to globalization of labor such that trickle-down profits, taxed less than any other point in industrial American history, are no longer fed into strictly an American system; as Casey notes--this makes labor a global rather than local issue, and makes any attempt to address inequality even harder. But that does not mean we should just throw are hands up and do nothing. Yes, the global median income is $9000, and the average American earns significantly more than that. Throwing contextualization issues aside (factors such as cost of living etc), this tells us that, even as we argue for increased taxation on the domestic scene, we keep remain open to global factors. We live in the meantime. One of my favorite aspects of sophistic rhetoric is that it is the art of the mean(ness) of time (and existence), addressing how we dwell with each other everyday, haunted by Idealism's search for absolute foundations, plagued by the problems that call us to be.

Second, spirituality is a complex matter. I think there is a rising "leftist" spirituality--the ecological turn I'll call it. It is a fundamental recognition that every entity on the planet comes into existence through infinite relations with other entities, nothing is born whole, autonomous, or ex nihilio. Of course, this dove tails with my work with Levinas. Such as metaphysical understanding of our Being does, I believe, generate ethical principles, even if the academic left has been slow to articulate them. But I don't think many of us are "postmodern" in the "classic" sense anymore. There's new problems and agendas. One of which, following Latour, is to move beyond critical thinking and critique (debunking, etc) and toward collecting problems (as Dr. Rivers puts it). As Gregory Ulmer puts it: "problems B us"; by articulating the problem, we kairotically emerge inhabiting the problem that infects/affects us. Any attempt to articulate a problem is always an act of self-fashioning. We are the people our problems make us. This, I believe is a thoroughly spiritual orientation, even if it suspends the issue of transcendence. One can be spiritual without a beyond. In fact, I would argue that assuring the presence of a beyond (whether it is God, Truth, Love, etc) reduces the infinity of the beyond to a known object. But that's a Levinasian argument, and a whole post itself.

Third, I think Zakarias is trying to collect such a problem, and the actants that form it. As I indicated in #1 above, I think Zakarias "collects a reality," Zakaria is referring to the increasingly cumulating statistics documenting 1) the rise of unemployment alongside increasing trickle-down economic and 2) the increasingly economic divide between classes. I don't think there is a "Utopian" vision underlying this problem--there is no suggestion that the solution to this problem lies in any kind of communist re-organization of capital. In fact, I think Zakarias' article implicitly calls for a moderate response to the problem he articulates: a better balancing of centralist infrastructure and free market investment and innovation similar to that operating during America's economic boom in the 1950's and 1960's.

Here, Hear Ulmer (Or, U Might Learn Electracy, Really)

Today professor Ulmer visited University of South Florida to give a talk on electracy and have a discussion with our graduate students. I had the pleasure of introducing Professor Ulmer. Here's my introduction (I have some notes from the talk that I will post tomorrow).

Here Hear Ulmer, or U Might Learn Electracy, Really!

I consider it an honor and a pleasure to introduce Professor Gregory L. Ulmer.

Professor Ulmer visits us from the University of Florida, where he’s a professor of English and Media Studies and participates in a number of critical, aesthetic, and institutional projects concerning electracy, a term he coined to target the transformation of agency and the public sphere by television, hypertext, new media, and digital communicative technologies.

The explication of electracy and generation of inventive methods for electrate netizens are the central concerns of his two most recent projects— his 2005 Electronic Monuments and 2003 Internet Invention. He offers an anecdote early in Internet Invention I find particularly relevant to our own kairotic moment (as scholars and teachers in the humanities living during the political, economic, and social challenges in Wisconisn, Michigan, Ohio, and likely coming to a Florida near you).

In the opening to Internet Invention, Ulmer relates telling his pragmatic father (proud possessor of a degree in Civil Engineering) of his decision to change his major from Economics and Political Science to English. The decision was not well received. For his father, “real work added value to the world by taking something and making it useful to society,” something to which the poet had no claim. This personal scene provides a sense of the purpose that unites all of Professor Ulmer’s work—the line between art and instrumentalism, between exploring our values and creating objects we value. This search continues to inspire scholars and teachers in rhetoric and composition; Ulmer’s post-pedagogy and electracy influence recent projects by Thomas Rickert, Sarah Arroyo, Byron Hawk, Jeff Rice, Bradley Dilger and others. [Learning and discovery only begin when we stop teaching, when we allow students to write and stop telling them what’s right.]

Ulmer’s electrate methods explore the relation between the personal and the public: exemplified by the two genres central to his electrate EmerAgency: the MYstory and the MEmorial. His methods are reflective of feminist research methods elaborated by Sullivan and Porter; they work in hopes of a new discipline of H/human(ities) that, instead of aiming at the work of self-fashioning, invites a playful self-exploration (what I might call, channeling Levinas—self-de/Facing).

Aristotle's theory of argument (the topoi) is built around the idea that we inhabit common "places" of argument. And, of course, one thing that 20th century theory, philosophy, rhetoric, sociology highlights is that, peeling back the layers of our psycho-social onion, we are arguments “all the way down” (or, as professor Ulmer puts this, that “Problems B Us”). Ulmer's work in Internet Invention stresses this--the four components of the Mystory [career, home, entertainment, school] interrogate four different personal-cultural domains (to stick with the geographical discourse). Ulmer's mapping of the subject points to the places common to our childhood, our school, our entertainment, our neighborhoods. The question his work poses is: where else might I have gone? Where else might I go? Where else might I will-have-been?

The value of such a “geographic” approach is that it allows introspection without the immediacy of critique. There is no default command to criticize in Ulmer, and those with more traditional expectations of cultural studies often object to the work on these grounds. Here I would agree with Thomas Rickert, who emphasizes that the questions brought to Ulmer's work by those in Cultural Studies "demonstrates the extent to which Ulmer has achieved a real advance" (Acts 116).

His methods can be disorienting at times, involving complex networks of anagrams, acronyms, puns and neologisms. But disequilibrium is the goal—only by transgressing commonplace expecations (rhetoric’s insistence upon the Aristotelian topoi) that we can move to inhabiting new (dis)positions (vital possibilities of the Timaean chora). Get off the beaten path. Rhetoric makes spaces, for welcome, confrontation, creation, relation. Ulmer argues in Applied Grammatology, how Derridean deconstruction aims “to submit ‘reality’ to the extremes of human imagination” (27). Such a re-imagination “might have” Ulmer qualifies, “the power to guide transformation of the lived, social world” (Of Grammatology 27).

Ulmer Riff: Recipe

My class is progressing with our mystories. In an effort to help them grasp Ulmer's approach to relay and imitation, I crafted what I call the recipe assignment. Its inspired by a visit from poet Robert Pinsky this past Spring; in response to a question on how a young poet can improve her skills, Pinksy advised: "learn to read like a good cook eats." Its not just about savoring the flavor, but about tasting the technique. Beyond understanding what something is, its about tracing how something becomes.

Ulmer uses a number of examples in his chapters, what he calls relays. Along the lines of classical and neo-classical imitation, these relays provide models for approaching the larger assignments. I've asked my students to break into groups. Each group is required to take one of Ulmer's extended quotations and re-mix it into a recipe, distinguishing ingredients, equipment, time, and step-by-step directions.

Judging by the temperature of the room, it seems to be going well.

Ulmer Exercise: Term Extensions

Today in class we are working on two exercises from Ulmer's Internet Invention; the first of which is his Term Extensions exercise.

Using the history of the term "culture" as a model, select a different craft (other than agriculture) and develop its figurative possibilities as a new extension of the meaning of the term culture

[...]

If human development of learning can be like agriculture, what else might it be like? Or, if human development in general may be tended in the manner of a crop or herd, what about your particular specialized area of work? What sort of craft makes a good metaphor for developing knowledge in your career field? (35)

For my term, I picked "assembly." Here I admit I didn't pick a "good" term, but rather an unfortunate one. This keeps with the logic of my career site since I am examining the Scantron machine as my disciplinary invention. The assembly line, in connection with Fordist industrialization, appears as a trope for contemporary education in a number of places, particularly Aronowitz's book The Knowledge Factory. It is also the underlying trope driving Asimov's short story "Profession."

To help with this assignment, I used the Oxford English Dictionary.

Without getting too much into specifics, there's essentially two historic meanings for assembly. The first, whose origins date back to around 1333-1436 and is still in use today, speaks to bringing some things together. It can refer to assembling an army, a governmental body, or a flock of birds singing in a tree ("The byrdes..syttynge in assemble vpon an hye tre").

The second meaning refers more to the industrial process and emphasizes putting something together. Unlike with the first meaning, the parts here constitute little if taken separately. It is only in the right combination, guided by the proper process, that the parts gain utility or significance. This meaning begins to develop around 1914. From a 1914 Engineering Magazine article: "The boards travel..down the line, growing in completeness as they move, each ‘team’ working simultaneously on opposite sides of the board, adding some step to the assembly."

As with Ulmer's definition of culture, we have two different intonations here. If we consider education in terms of the first, then we think of students as individual entities whole before they arrive in the classroom (be it to fight, deliberate, or sing). If we follow the second, then students are incomplete entities before they arrive on our doorstep. Students lack. Teachers provide.

There are, of course, distinct overlaps to the definitions of culture Ulmer highlights--Arnold's and Taylor's. Recall that Arnold's specifies a particular and higher culture as the aim of education/enculturation. Arnold's students lack. Taylor, however, sees culture as something central to all humanity everywhere, he isn't interested in articulating a particularly proper culture as much as he is in identifying those things that all cultures do (even if they do them differently).

My objections to Scantron were routed in its homogenization of education, its dedication (and glorification) of efficiency and singularity. It makes sure students are getting what they lack. 

An Insignificant MyStory (Part 3)

In between posts with Casey today, I did manage to get some work done. Particularly, I'm working on prepping for my summer course. I will be teaching a 6 week upper-division expository writing course. Usually, I teach expository writing as digital citizenship (essentially a course in feminist research, digital ethics and social construction). This semester I am trying something new--Gregory Ulmer's Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. As the title intimates, Ulmer's pedagogy is not caught up in traditional interests with the thesis and the paragraph. Rather, it is a creative attempt to translate these kind of structural units into digital practice (they are respectively replaces by the assemblage and the image). It is very hard for me to summarize Ulmer's project with an justice to its philosophical ambitions and pedagogic invigorations in a sentence or two. So instead, a display. Although I am a bit suspicious of this work (across Levinasian lines, Ulmer is drawing on Heidegger and Derrida, and while Levinas and Heidegger-Derrida share an interest in interrupting hegemonic epistemologies, they also differ on the role of the other and the obligations of the self), I admire it.

The book's assignments all aim at designing what Ulmer dedicates a wide image, a kind of psycho-social cognitive map that helps a student recognize multiple (and likely hidden) elements of their identity. There's four primary lens through which students image-ine their identity (referred to as the Popcycle of the Mystory). These categories have resonance to literary modes articulated by Frederick Jameson. They are:

• Literal = School "This history represetns the memory of the collectivity"
• Allegory = Entertainment "The discourse learned is that of cultural mythology encountered in popular genres" [Ulmer notes in several places that this could be religion for some people. It is meant to target the locus of cultural identification--what teaches you who you are supposed to be?]
• Moral = Family "The individual is considered in terms of his/her family upbringing, with the language being the one learned in the home (English, Spanish, Creole) and the discursive regime being the habits and customs specific to that family"
• Anagogy = Career [Disciplinary knowledge] "The collective meaning of history is determined in mystory ... by the world view embodied wihtin the specialized knowledge that one acquires as an expert in some given career field... This knowledge is the means by which one earns one's livelihood (work), but the knowledge of an avocation may be used instead. (81-82)

In preparation for teaching the mystory, I have been creating one. Its quite fun--and exhilarating. My initial experiences emphasize that Ulmer has discovered an exteremly effective methodology for encouraging creativity.

Today I spent time on the third assingment:

Make a website documenting the details of a movie of TV narrative some part of which you still remember from your childhood years. (127)

Ulmer notes that books can be used in place of cinema and television. He also explains:

the first purpose of the documentation is to record the part of the story that you remember. Once you have inventoried the remains of the work in your memory, view it again and record what you notice in this fresh viewing. The memory is the site of a sting, in Barthes's sense [...] When reviewing the work, note especially the problem or conflict organizing the drama, and the way it is resolved. Memory tends to form around problems, whether the problems are large or small. All narratives are structured by conflict (the protagonist confronts a problem).

In preparing for my summer course, I work on my Mystory for an hour at a time. I also tend to break up my work into categories a bit as I go (I think this kind of genre/structure might be beneficial to undergrads). Here's what I produced in my first hour focus on Assignment 3. (Sorry, I lost the links in the cut and paste, Google Site's HTML function is hopelessly bloated).

What I remember

For my story, I choose an old cross-over series of Marvel comics: the mutant massacre. This story line crossed over several interrelated titles: X-Men, X-Factor and The New Mutants. I rarely read comics these days, although I'll pick through a few issues or a graphic novel every year. But I read quite a few comics during my youth--and whenever I think about all those comics, sitting in the bottom of my guest bedroom closet, this is the series that comes to mind.

In the story, many mutants have taken to living in the tunnels under New York City. Rejected by society-at-large, on account of their difference, they chose to withdraw themselves. While I forget the particularities of their motives, a group of mercenary mutants is contracted out to massacre the mutants living under the city.

The X-men work alongside other mutant heroes (X-Factor, The New Mutants) to stop the genocide. I remember particularly that Wolverine kills his nemesis Sabertooth in a very anti-climactic way. Unfortunately, there's very few other specific details I remember.

Why I Am Selecting It

For as long as I can remember, I have been haunted by genocide. It motivates my scholarship. It is what directed me to academic study. How could a group of people murder another group of people? How could they desire the extermination of an entire people? Such questions are amplified by the Nazi Holocaust. For here, it is not a simple matter of greed (at least, I don't think it is). It is not competition for resources or longstanding political conflict (such as what I understand of Riwanda). This is not to diminish the horror of other atrocities, which I realize it might. Rather, this is to amplify the cold, technical precision of Nazi death camps--more factories than camps. Places that manufacture death.

As an eleven year old, I was drawn to this story line. This was not Spider-Man beating an enemy set on world domination or on acquiring wealth. Those are simple human motives, motives, I speculate, that any eleven-year-old could understand. But hate at this intensity, hate as a motive, that is something that didn't show up in Spider-Man, Scooby-Doo, the Incredible Hulk or any of the other stories that I recall from my youth. Yet one of the pivotal moments of the 20th century was nothing but pure hate.

As I write this, I can think of other places where pure hate shows up in 20th century aesthetics. Tolkien's Sauron, for instance. Wikipedia offers up an interesting tidbit from Tolkien:

Tolkien noted that "it had been his virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall ...) that he loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction." Thus "it was the apparent will and power of Melkor to effect his designs quickly and masterfully that had first attracted Sauron to him."

Order and coordination. Industrialized death. Efficiency. For as long as I can remember being alive, I have been suspicious of these terms. IBM and the Holocaust does nothing to sway me otherwise. Here, quite literally, accountability and efficiency are the servant of industrialized murder, all in the name of world order.

I will never forget the line by Wiesel in Night, reflecting on eating soup after watching the dreadfully prolonged hanging of an adolescent. "That night, the soup tasted of corpses." The taste lingers.

Further Research / Loose Notes

Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the storyline. I am going to hold off on reading it until after I have re-read the stories (mainly to avoid spoilers).

Unanticipated: Intentional vs. Functionalist perspectives on the Holocaust (found in Wikipedia while searching for Order as a theme of Mein Kampf). There is a separate page dedicated to the debate. The intentionalist argument, I would guess, is more well-known: that Hitler's intentions for killing the Jews traced back to his earlier writings/thoughts. Put simply, he always envisioned the genocide. This is referred to as the straight line to Auschwitz. The functionalist argument, which I had never heard before today, seems a bit more probable to me (it is also a more rhetorically-ecologically complex argument, which I find appealing). This argument is based off of evidence that Hitler originally envisioned a deportation of all Jews to Madagascar. Once the war on the Eastern front disrupted transportation, the "storage" of Jews began to pose a serious problem. Detainment facilities were short-term (ewww...) solutions. For functionalists, the idea for genocide developed after a few, localized massacres at these camps.

The final solution wasn't an initial plan, but rather an unfortunate, unanticipated, accident. This is referred to as the "twisted path" or the "crooked path" to genocide. This is also, unfortunately, an electrate model of creativity. Ulmer's work approaches composing in terms of linkage (assemblage, maintaining disorder) rather than linear Order (synthesis). But, in the word's of Shakespeare's Prince, "all are punish'd." Thinking tastes like corpses.