Digital Humanities

A friend emailed me Feisal G. Mohamed's response to Fish's recent discussion of digital humanities. Here's my response.

I think there's two basic genealogies to digital humanities/technology studies. Reductive? Sure. But helpful.

The first traces back to Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology." Heidegger argues that modern technologies can be traced all the way back to a Greek emphasis in "techne," doing, production. This has marked Western history, creating an overwhelming insistence upon using/consuming things. Often these scholars misread Heidegger's skepticism of techne-ology to be an absolute dismissal, a return to naturalism. I don't read Heidegger quite this way. His point is that we cannot get outside of "techne" and consumption, but can learn to dwell within it at least semi-consciously. Doing so allows us to open ourselves to other ways of Being in the world.

The second traces back to McLuhan. Que the optimism for a global village, connectivity, ethics, etc. We are how we consume. Blah, blah, blah. We all know this camp, because most of us in rhetoric and composition were reared in its wake.

Clearly, Mohamed's skepticism is rooted in a hardcore Heideggerian misread that believes the answer to our problems lies in a kind of Thoreau-ian naturalism far away from machines and their evil influence. The expectation that we "fully disarticulate" notions of innovation and progress is the give away--as if innovation and progress were really just ideological fantasies; note too that the author rigorously divides ethics and spirituality from materiality and digitality--as if the two were streams that could never be crossed. Boo. Of course, a lot of the writing I do is built upon the premise that new technologies make possible new ways of considering ethics and metaphysics, which I would argue melds, to some extent, the Heideggerian and McLuhan threads together. On the one hand, our dwelling within Being is always, already mediated by the technologies through which we experience and interact with beings; but, on the other hand, digital technologies have exponentially expanded our encounters with other beings and other ways of considering how to be (ethics).

Lessig Quotes Huxley

Lawrence Lessig quotes Huxley (1927) in his OpenVideoAlliance webside chat:

"In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity."

In brief, if you want a populace that speaks, then you need to provide them with the tools, permissions, and incentives to speak. Copyright is responsible for creating a read-only culture rather than a read-write culture.

The pre-supposition here is that being creative (in-the-world) establishes a positive relation with others (sharing, expressive, empathic) and makes us more satisfied and fulfilled than mere consumption.

Particularly as an educator in the humanities, I feel I have a responsibility to promote a read-write culture by "all available means." Beyond the technological, this also means promoting theory that speaks to our "being-in-the-world" and intersubjective existence as a metaphysical defense for fair-use.

My RSA presentation this year focused on Latour's reading of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. Latour's reading shares an extremely interesting overlap with Lessig's vision for 21st century political practice. Lessig cites two principles: first, we need an increase in the ability to see the dependencies between political agents and corporate/private profits. Second, we need the courage to act upon such visions. Seeing and courage, philosophy and sophistry, are for Latour the oppositions Plato lays out in the Gorgias (philosophy has insight, but not the courage to face the crowd. Sophistry might lack insight, but courageously faces and works with the multitude). What we need, then, is a commitment to the integration of what Latour identifies as the philosophic and the sophistic.

A few other interesting Lessig pieces I dug up in my travels today:

• First, an appearance on the Colbert Report (copyright as a "totally failed war").
• Second, 2007 TED talk in which he's pretty clearly rejecting the moderate position laid down in Free Culture (around 2 minutes in he describes copyright culture as silencing the expressive ability of the millions in favor of aggrandizing the wealth of the few).
• Third, a very brief article on Lessig's recent battles with Youtube and Time Warner on fair use.

Toward Kair-erotically Thinking Techno-Determinism

I spent the morning today doing some reading/writing on my Computers and Writing presentation, which will deal explicitly with how social media played a role in diagnosing and dealing with my daughter's cancer. One article that I read today was John Potts' "Who's Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory." I like this article for its compact summary of Marshall McLuhan, and for its guilt-free recognition that technologies can have intrinsic properties and structuring effects on consciousness. Summarizing the woks of Havelock, McLuhan, Goddy, Watt, Ong, Eisenstein, Kittler, and Meyrowitz, Potts identifies one constant proposition: "as media technologies change, profound cultural effects ensue. These effects operate on both the level of the individual psyche and the social formation as a whole. The effects may be observed in the long historical span of inventions from literacy to interactive multimedia."

Human thinking of thought comes to resemble the media we use to capture, express and exchange that thinking on thought. At one point in time, humans created television; I might call this thinking "being-chronoslogically." But let's recognize that, at this moment, it is equally true that television creates humans, which would be thinking "becoming-kairoserotically. Chronological and Kairotic. History and Phenomenology. Logos and Eros. Kairos, phenomenology, and eros are the web (presented colloquially as transience, interactivity, plurality respectively in my dissertation). This is precisely why rhetoric, and more particularly Levinas, are central to my understanding of what the web could help us be-come.

Whether the relation between technology and subjectivity/sociality is a good thing is another discussion altogether. My reading today consisted of a number of cultural studies / neo-marxist / critical / materialist objections to the "social" media dominating today's communicative and cultural landscape. In short: the Web 2.0 honeymoon is over. Its a bit depressing, but requires our attention. I won't give it that attention right here, right now (but I will try to in the coming days). I will argue in a few weeks at C&W, these important analyses of the Internet's relation to capitalism and hegemonic power fail to account for the affective dimensions of the social web. Nor do they take into account the possibility that such affective and ethical relations could come to challenge their ontological-materialist-technological grounds. These critical theorists read "the medium is the message" quite literally--they track who owns and economically benefits from the medium at hand. I have Levinasian objections to this, but I will save those too for another post.

For this post, I'll follow Potts' suggestion that a little technodeterminism might not be such a bad thing if we want to reveal "the most profound and long-term cultural effects of those media." I say so provided we attempt to balance the "inherent properties of technologies" against economic, political, and social [and I wish I could here explicate this as Levinasian] considerations of media. We have to be responsible for the whole bag. Of course, I will recognize that the precise "inherent" properties of any medium are indeterminate--and we are talking in a speculative hermeneutic riddled with desire. This complexity does not make it a futile, irrelevant or dangerous task. Well, perhaps a dangerous one. But given that things so often become within the realm of possibility we imagine for them, it makes it all the more important a task. An essential task. Heidegger critiqued of Marx: "before a change in the world comes a conception of change in the world." Let's use technological determinacy as a vehicle for initiating-continuing-popularizing the construction of such a change.

Returning to my initial quote from Potts, perspective and scopes are the keys here ("the long historical span of inventions"). Materialist critiques focus on interpreting a now with a (linear) eye to the future. As one such theorist, David Golumbia offers in response to posthuman notions of transcendental change: "the more things change, the more they stay the same." His pessimism is routed in a narrow view of recent history (say 200 years) that documents how corporate and capitalist interests continually usurp individual choice into hegemonic, centralized institutions of power. From such a perspective, individuals are currently contributing (via free content) to their own subjugation, and the forms of power subjugating them are becoming increasingly invisible. Such a history becomes linear in the sense that there is little chance to break free (except, perhaps, for unplugging all our computers and reading all the Right [and by that, of course, I mean Left] books--sorry, couldn't help one cynical jab).

Against this pessimism, media theory would project a future from meager traces of the now and an interpretation of then. Its optimism is grounded in a long-look at human history documenting how media technology transforms social, political, and economic life. Most of those transformations are, in the long run, for the better for everyone involved. These transformations, however, did not take five, ten, or even twenty years. They took centuries. I would like to argue that this is thinking history (chronos) kairotically--to think of history as producing a present that generates the past, rather than thinking how the past caused the present. Either case, I would argue, is within view of infinite spectral futures that incessantly haunt us (that is, whether we are functions of the past or its originators, we are always, already haunted from the future, from the judge beyond the horizon of the time that unfolds).

And I would conclude by stressing that the future is as indeterminate as the absolute inherent properties of technologies. We will have to fight for any future we wish to come to be. The kairos for a potential chronos always begins now, in the stories we tell ourselves we are to Be-come.

A Not-So-Radical Approach to Teaching Final Papers

In my last post, I mentioned that I was trying something a bit different with my current expository writing class. I should say upfront that State and programatic expectations for the course don't give me too much wiggle room. The syllabus I inherited was quite traditional EDNA, and my approaching to teaching expository writing as blogging (attempting to emphasize social [ethical] practice alongside knowledge [epistemological] production) seemed experimental enough. The past times I have taught the course, the final paper has been a traditional 8 to 10 page argumentative research paper. I felt I needed to have something traditional to turn over in case my course was selected for SACS accreditation review.

For whatever reason, I feel less concerned over this matter this semester. Not that what I am proposing here is "radical" by any means. But its a new approach to teaching research and scholarship that I am trying out, and I figured I would share. The influences on this approach are, I think, people like Geof Sirc (his essay from Writing New Media), Pat Sullivan (her discussion of feminist research methods in Writing Spaces, and Gregory Ulmer (pretty much everything he's ever written). And, of course, there's a good bit of Levinas and his intersubjective ethics (over, might I call it, institutional epistemology) operating in this one too. I also used ed. Sherry Turkle's recent collection Evocative Objects as model essays for approaching the project (particularly Jenkins' essay for the way that it folds together reminiscences on childhood comic books with an exploration of our relation to death). I've also discussed Foucault's genealogical approach to history as a particular inventive method for approaching the project.

For the final project this year, I am asking students to construct 8 to 10 page essays that fold five different requirements into their writing.

• Research: The paper must present attention to something(s). Think: I looked at A (and B and C) in X.
• Personal: The paper must disclose/explore a personal investment in/relation to the research. Think: I looked at A and B and C in relation to X.
• Argument: The paper must include some kind of argumentative proposition directed toward a particular person or idea. Think: X says A and B but C or D is better in relation to X.
• Theory: the paper must move outside of the particular object or idea at hand to offer a more philosophical exploration of what it means to be a human being.
• Kairos: The paper must offer some rational for why it is particularly important for us (and "I" from bullet two and an audience identified through this very articulation) to read the paper now, at this time, at this crucial, reflective, boring, tense, vital, transitory, resistant, opportune time).

As I said, I don't think I am recreating the wheel here. It is the theory bullet that I think is the most compelling--and the most difficult to "teach." But, in working with several students in drafts, I've seen the proverbial light-go-on--a moment where an investigation into X produces a deeper understanding of Y or when investigating X requires us to consider how we are already invested in Y or... well, I hope you (and my students) get the point. This kind of approach speaks to the writing I have been doing lately--writing on Levinas's potential benefit to Rhetoric and Composition in a political-curricular era evermore concerned with standardization, [mass] assessment, and accountability. Rather than connecting writing with the will-to-master, I'm looking to connect it with an obligation-to-alterity. I've been downplaying the Argument section as much as I can, but still feel compelled (both by State expectations and personal orientations) to teach some kind of thesis. Perhaps this too shall pass.

PS. Theory bullet. Irony alert?

First Sentences

My two writing classes today were focused on writing first sentences. I compiled a few resources to provide lens' for examining all the first sentences they had written the previous week. From an article over at A Tate Publishing Blog, I pulled three criteria:

• excite a reader's curiosity, particularly about a character or relationship
• introduce a setting
• lend resonance to a story

These criteria are the goals for an effective first paragraph, but I think any of them additionally apply to a first sentence. With my class, I broke setting down into three more distinct notions: time, place, and mood [which I discussed in a Heideggerian sense as our "being-in-the-world"]. The post then gives two questions to ask of a first sentence:

• Does it convey an interesting personality or an action that we want to know more about?
• Can you make it more intriguing by introducing something unusual, something shocking perhaps, something will surprise the reader?

Given my favorable disposition to Peter Brooks' psychoanalytic treatment of hermeneutics, I chose to boil that second question down to "suspense": does the first sentence pose a question we want answered?

From a creative writing handbook, I pulled two more criteria for evaluating good sentences:

• Flashes a picture in your mind, using concrete details
• Puts you right in the middle of something happening

Finally, I read the short article Killing the Babies and Captivating First Sentences" over at footnoteMaven with the class. I liked this article not only for its title, but also for its pragmatic advice. When revising, fM focuses on identifying the most compelling sentence in a piece, and then finds a way to "rock" that piece up to the very beginning of a document.

For non-academic writing instructors out there, this makes for an excellent exercise. Come to class with a document that contains every first sentence your students have written for a particular project. Have the students select their three favorites from the list; additionally, have them mark off the three sentences that need the most work. After tallying results, have students apply fM's theory to whichever piece of writing received the most critical votes--can they, looking through the entire paper, find a compelling sentence that could be crafted into a more engaging opening? And, then, can they use this principle on their own writing?

A brief survey of the results showed the answers to such questions as positive. And, of course, I hope the critical attention such an activity fosters is applied to every sentence they write.

A Brief Definition of Rhetoric

Today was Jim Corder day in my Digital Citizenship/Expository Writing classes. I use the Corder piece to provide a substantial definition for rhetoric--since I study one of the few things in a University that people rarely recognize. If you study biomedical chemistry, people likely have no idea what you do, but they know what you do. Rhetoric, however, is often a mystery.

Anywho, here's my brief definition(s):

• How humans create/digest/circulate meanings
• How to get others to listen to your meaning
• persuasion, conflict, argument, change, identity, cohesion

Notice the shift from plural to singular.

Course Evaluations

Today is the last day of class at USF, so I passed around a course evaluation of my own design. This semester my class has focused on "digital citizenship": students maintained a blog all semester long dedicated to a topic/hobby of their choice. They then wrote a 8-10 page research paper responding to one argument from Andrew Keen's polemic Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture. All in all, I'd say it was a good course--I'll let you know what they think once I get all the info.

Here's the questions I asked them to respond to:

Exit Questions for Expository Writing: Digital Citizenship

1. Did you find They Say, I Say a useful text? Did you think I did enough to present the text in class? I plan on using this text again, so please let me know what more I could do with it.
2. I am definitely replacing the Lanham Style book. It didn't accomplish what I thought it could, and I apologize for making you purchase it. That said—should I replace it with a book on writing (specifically, a book that gives organizational strategies) or another book on “digital culture” that argues against Keen/series of articles responding to Keen (such as the Shirky, Weinberger, etc.). I am leading toward the first book.
3. Did I manage to present three ideas this semester that helped you with your writing? What were those ideas?
4. Was there a particular lecture/presentation on writing that you found useful? Remind me about it.
5. What would you have liked me to address that I didn’t? What did you expect from the course on the first day that we didn’t do? What else would you have liked me to do? What do writing classes need to do?
6. This semester I asked you to read almost all of Andrew Keen’s book in order to find an argument to engage. Would you have preferred to read a series of articles?
7. Now that you are not a part of my course, and thus I cannot implement any draconian procedures, what is one “evil” thing I could force upon next semester’s students to improve writing instruction?
8. How many hour a week did you spend on this class? Generally, did this class take more time than your other classes? Less?
9. If a friend asked “is Santos’ course hard?” how would you respond? If they queried “should I take it?”
10. Instead of using Google, should I have used Facebook? Would that have been too weird?

A quick note on question 9: my drop rate at USF is extraordinarily high. It is not an attendance problem--it is a retention problem. This semester I taught 2 25 person sections--both classes now have enrollments below 12. Students explained to me that my course isn't hard (in the sense of grading) but is hard (in the sense that it requires a lot of thought). It doesn't require a lot of thought because of the difficulty of material I assign; rather, it calls upon them to invent, every week, their own assignments. They are required to post 1000 words a week on their topic, but outside of a few occasions, I did not give them any guidelines for what their posts needed to do each week. At least, that's what a few students candidly told me a few weeks ago--so I'm hoping question 9 will help me to understand what I need to do to increase retention. But I will not spoon feed.

Student Strikes Gold

I had my students do an assignment in which they had to characterize blogs. One student offered these nuggets:

Fourth, the blog that is the most idiotic tends to win. This is just like high school. The weird blog is the ugly girl, who when stripped of her ponytail and glasses, is beautiful. The weird blog tends to have the most readers and the most responses, so the more stupid you think your idea is the more you are swimming in gold.

Fifth, and by far the biggest tip, nice blogs always finish last. Nobody wants to read why your life is awesome. We do not care about your big green powered house (unless it was built out of rubber bands), your pink Barbie convertible (unless it flipped and left you with a harry potter esque scar), or your 2.5 perfect kids (unless one really is only .5 and he is the most normal of the three). It is wired into our DNA to love a good train wreck, and then to drive by it at 7 miles an hour staring on the high way because we were trying to ‘safely pass it’.

Sweet.

On Thinking and Clarity

The following material is a response to Richard Lanham's Style: An Anti-Textbook. I shared it with my expository students today. It relies on a ridiculous simplification. My use of the terms "rhetoric" and "composition" are completely idiosyncratic and reductionary.

I’ll write as preface that these remarks probably won’t be clear. And the reason they won’t be clear is that I’m thinking. Or, perhaps I should say, I am still thinking, and thinking doesn’t tend to sit still. What I’m reacting to is Lanham’s question “Does clear writing really make for clear thinking?” And, while my thoughts are conflicted, they go something like this:

Clear thinking isn’t necessarily representative of quality thinking. Thinking is messy and conflicted. In fact, when it comes to teaching, we often must choose to teach either thinking or clarity. As a teacher, when I think of clarity and Freshman Composition I think of assignments such as “what did you do on your summer vacation?” Because the question is insipid, students can focus on the expression, the clarity, without any thinking getting in the way. If you want to teach clarity [prose], then you can’t teach thinking.

Thinking back (uh oh) to an earlier lecture, I discussed the principle canons of rhetoric germane to an Expository Writing class: invention, arrangement, and style. Rhetoric (as a pedagogic discipline) primarily concerns itself with invention—generating ideas. Composition primarily concerns itself with style—communicating those ideas. Arrangement gets caught between the two: for rhetoric, awareness of generic (and in genre) forms can help stimulate invention; for composition awareness of structure can facilitate communication.

So, thinking of this class, I hope you see that the emphasis is on Composition. All our work engaging a network is to help you generate ideas. And allowing you to choose your own area of interest is to “limit” your thinking (is this true? I don’t know). Let me explain: last semester I taught this same course on the history of education. Students needed to compare and contrast Plato’s allegory of the cave with Cicero’s analogy of the healthy civic body as regards the purpose of higher education. This was a course on approaching complex, messy ideas. And relating them. And, as expected, the writing was messy.

Now I’m toning down the reading list. In fact, I am essentially allowing you to generate your own weekly reading lists (is Lanham right? Do you read?). But I don’t think I am necessarily teaching clarity. I haven’t used that word yet. And, as a deconstructionist, I abhor simplicity (simplicity and certainty always mask complexity and doubt). This aversion to simplicity goes along with my aversion to teaching writing in favor of the possibility of exposing W-R-I-T-I-N-G. But I wrote about that here.

See. I knew this wouldn’t end clearly.

Fish on Donoghue on the State of the Humanities

Stanley Fish has a review of Frank Donoghue's recent book The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. Reading his review, I couldn't help but think of my recent post on the links between my teaching and Bill Readings' University in Ruins. Fish sums up Donoghue's position:

The opposition between this view and the view held by the heirs of Matthew Arnold’s conviction that poetry will save us could not be more stark. But Donoghue counsels us not to think that the two visions are locked in a struggle whose outcome is uncertain. One vision, rooted in an “ethic of productivity” and efficiency, has, he tells us, already won the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it

Fish quotes Donoghue's conclusion: "that all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary." And Fish applauds Donoghue's utter pessimism: there is no future for the humanities, no return to glory, no Renaissance. They will all be subsumed under the wave of productivity.

I agree with Donoghue and Fish regarding the humanities future--especially in these economic times. As a rhetorician and a writing instructor, I am not sure how to feel about such a prognosis. While I believe that Universities have a larger obligation to craft citizens rather than scholars, I also feel that literature, philosophy, history, art, and all the other courses on the endangered species list help develop critical and imaginative thinking. These courses cannot be reduced to mere delivery (of static content). They train the brain to produce. But, as Fish points out, that's not the way these disciplines have conceptualized or marketed themselves in centuries past. Whether they can refashion themselves in the public's mind as something more than extravagance or intellectual decadence remains to be seen. But, while perhaps as not as absolutist as Fish and Donoghue, I remain skeptical.

Again: I am torn. I am torn because I feel that the Humanities have put themselves in this position. Referring again to Bill Readings' University in Ruins, this the lingering malaise of the Modern Enlightenment's divorcing academia from the public sphere (Kant's mantra to "think, but obey" and his distinction between public and private faculties). Our faculties need to become public once again. The University, as a place X, crumbled. Readings concludes: "In attempting to sketch how one might dwell in the ruins of the University without belief but with a commitment to Thought" (175). And rhetoric, when taught well, does this better than most of the disciplines surrounding it. Sophistic rhetoric is the art of eschewing belief, of dwelling in ruins, or appreciating agonism and celebrating insecurity--all while encouraging critical, thoughtful engagement. Welcome to the parlor. We might not be able to craft Matthew Arnolds, but I'll settle for Kevin Kellys--people who are active participants in actual (i.e., not-necessarily-academic) social networks. And that's the real crux--for Kant, for the humanities, for students: in the 21st century, the era of the network, you can't go it alone; you have to produce something for someone.

Productivity is not necessarily a dirty term. The digital citizenship course I am working with this semester aims to produce humanitarians--people who are critical participants in a community. People who are ready, able, and willing to work with other humans. My job, as a "new" professor, is to help increase the productivity of that work. I do not aim to rebuild a University, rather I hope to build people (such work is risky, ideological, difficult, controversial--but anything worth teaching should involve all four of these things). This is what the humanities need to sell in a very concrete fashion: we build good [productive] people. (Of course, I work at a research university... and they don't give out tenure for producing people...)

Thinking about First Posts and Abouts

Today my students will be setting up there blogs. I wanted to think about first posts and/or about pages. These are important to establish the tone, feel, and personality of a blog. Here's some source material:

• mxrk
• raw thought
• dooce

Whether through the first post, or through the "about," or through what you choose to label your links section, some of your important first decisions regarding your blog will be developing your writerly persona. Just as important as telling readers what you'll be writing about is telling them who will be writing. And this telling need not be explicit (though in the case of Dooce it certainly is, although I would argue that her explicity tells much about her--it is strategically over-explicit--an indication that her writing will share personal details).

Productive Mess Hits the Airwaves

Here's some shameless self-promotion: the new issue of Kairos includes my article with Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber "Productive Mess: First-Year Composition Takes the University's Agonism Online." The article has two main arguments: first, it discusses how to better integrate CMSs into FYC. Briefly: increasing interaction and productivity requires careful, well-planned structure (arguing for heuristics)--going digital doesn't necessarily mean more engaged students. And the article provides one particular structure that we found effective.

Second--the article questions the purpose of FYC, and, in greater scope, of University education. I believe I will be writing/publishing on this more in the future. Essentially, I think the growth of digital technology will increasingly move us away from the Enlightenment University (as a center of knowledge production) and more toward the university as a center of civil discourse and engagement. Those who know me know my appreciation for Bill Readings' University in Ruins; I want to spend some more time with that book. I believe Readings' themes permeate the entire article, even if there is limited discussion of his work.

Jack McCoy, Ciceronian Rhetoric, and the art of Pathetic Conclusions

Tomorrow I'm planning a quick, introductory lecture on Ciceronian argument. As such, I'll be referring to the six-part structure extracted from the Catiline Orations and discussed at length in De Inventione. In brief:

• Exordium [prepares the hearer... this can be creative, it depends on kairos; thinking of They Say, I Say, this is where you make the case for "who cares?" or "why care?"]
• Narration ["the facts of the case," here is an objective overview, or a statement of a problem]
• Partition [here is where the speaker lays out exactly what they will be arguing; defining the scope of there work. What they hope to accomplish]
• Confirmation [the presentation of evidence]
• Refutation [respond to possible objections]
• Peroration [sums up the argument, usually incites pathos of some kind]

In putting this lecture together, I hoped to find an example of one of Jack McCoy's closing arguments from Law and Order, by far my favorite television show. Nathaniel River, Ryan Weber and I have talked about doing an article comparing Law and Order and CSI in light of Sophist (non-Aristoletian) rhetoric vs. Platonic philosophy. In CSI, cases are always solved "beyond a shadow of a doubt." The show is full of cliches testifying that "the evidence doesn't lie" or "there is always a clue." There's even a few episodes in which Grissom staunchly denies that "human observation" (i.e., eyewitnesses) shouldn't be considered as evidence at all. In the end, a CSI episode wraps up nice and neat (even if there is at times some question as to whether the crime was justified). As a rhetorician, I prefer the "mess" of Law and Order: at the end of every episode, regardless of the legal decision, there is always residual moral ambiguity. In Law and Order, stasis is never as absolute as it is in CSI. In CSI, a dead body always signifies a crime to be solved. In Law and Order, a dead body signifies a social problem. Whether there was even a crime is often a matter of the morality of the jury (and viewer).

Anywho, in searching for a video clip, I came across a PDF article "The Art of Closing" on the impact of Law and Order on juridical practice. While I had heard of the CSI effect (the idea that the show has made jury's expect rigorous scientific evidence for every conviction), I had not heard of a Law and Order effect. Essentially the author, attorney David A. Gradwhol, argues that the performative and emotive dimensions of McCoy's closings are having a noticeable impact on jury expectations. I think his conclusions make sound advice for any rhetorician:

• While attorneys might not be able to reduce their closings to the five-minute (or less) Law and Order versions, they should push for focused brevity: "a focused closing has the power to etch the merits of the client's position onto the jurors' minds."
• Avoid jargon: "lawyers should not confuse the jury with obscure legal terms... The lawyers' verbal arsenal should include analogies and key words that elicit strong mental and emotional images for the jury."
• While actual closings might not be able to offer moral soliliquies, they can strive "to keep the moral high ground... as they may present issues of moral concern about honoring contracts or providing an injured person with the compensation he or she deserves"

When teaching "academic writing," I have always struggled to find a helpful way to present conclusions. But I think these two final points offer a possibility of conceptualizing the conclusion as an emphasis on "why care?" Sure, the conclusion needs to remind us of the logos for the argument, but it should wrap this logos in pathos. The conclusion elicits cooperation by arousing passion. Truth can never be divorced from desire--and a strong conclusion needs to remind the audience why they should care to endorse a particular truth.

Jim Corder as an Ethic for Blogging

Today I presented Jim Corder's "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love" to my expository writing class. I believe Corder's propositions for "writing with love" serve as particularly apt principles for approaching digital writing. Corder pushes for five core values:

• The writer is exposed "...the arguer is alone, with no assurance at all that the other or any audience will be kindly disposed")
• All writing is provisional ("we can learn to dispense with what we imagined was absolute truth and to pursue the reality of things only partially knowable")
• Writers are not authorities ("an authoritative position, anyway, is a prison both to us and to any audience")
• All writing by nature closes, we must work to attempt to keep it open ("Each utterance may deplete inventive possibilities if a speaker fails into arrogance, ignorance, or dogma. But each utterance, if the speaker having spoken, opens again, may also nurture and replenish the speaker's invective world and enable him or her to reach out around the other")
• Writing should be both personal and thoughtful--not detached, objective, or positively referential ("we must rescue time by putting it into our discourses and holding it there, learning to speak and write not argumentative displays and presentations, but arguments full of the anecdotal, personal, and cultural reflections that will make us plain to all others, thoughtful histories and narratives that reveal us as we're reaching for the others.")

As I was reading Corder today, I couldn't help but notice how much he shares with Levinas, especially in terms of fragmenting the stability of the subject-writer, of indebting the composition of the subject-writer to the author. Of thinking of writing other(than)wise.

I also find it interesting that, writing in 1987, Corder sees technology as speeding up time (he cites electronic mail as an example). I argue the opposite: that forums and especially wikis create a new lived experience of time. This new time somewhat (not completely) outs writing from time--frees us for contemplation and reflection.

Expository Writing as Digital Citizenship

Its a new semester, and I am teaching two sections of upper-division expository writing. I am excited to return to a previous approach: blogging as composition. Last time I tried this with freshman we and we were quite pleased with the results. Here's what this semester's course description looks like:

This course is an attempt to reimagine writing instruction, moving away from 20th century models based on print scholarship and toward 21st century models of digital citizenship. My premise: the purpose of the contemporary university has to be more attentive to maximizing new communicative tools, including blogs, wikis, aggregators, bookmarks, and networking technologies.

Traditional writing classes, especially those “academic” in nature, instruct students to write for imagined audiences. Unfortunately, in practice, this is rarely the case—students end up writing for “a general conversation of mankind.” For many complicated reasons, cutting edge writing instruction has denounced writing for this universal / incorporeal audience. Yet, few alternatives present themselves to instructors: who can students write to? Can authentic audiences be a part of writing instruction?

This class is my experimental answer to this question. I am refiguring the way we teach writing. This semester you will be writing to an audience of your choosing—but you will have to demonstrate to me an authentic relationship with this audience. You will be entering into a discourse community, participating in its social conventions, and reporting back to the class on its values, purposes, and intrigues.

To explain: this will be a course on blogging. This is not to say that this will be a course that uses blogs. I am proposing something a bit more extensive than that. I am proposing that blogging will not simply augment the material of the course, it will compose the material of the course. Playfully, composing blogs will be the expository exercise.

Simultaneously, we will be reading, discussing, and (of course) writing about the viability of blogging as an approach to expository writing. We will discuss the goals and purposes of the traditional expository class in relation to your experiences in this class. We will use a contemporary academic argument handbook, They Say, I Say, assessing whether the values of academic prose translate into blogging. In their work, Graff and Birkenstein argue that “rote instruction [has] indeed encouraged passivity and drained writing of its creativity and dynamic relation to the social world” (xv). This class, then, can be understood as an attempt to revitalize and reprioritize writing. I am looking to teach a form of writing that is creative, dynamic, an integrally tied to your social world.

This work will culminate in a discussion on the broader conceptualization of blogging within our social sphere. You will use your experiences as a blogger to respond to the contemporary debate concerning the rigor and value of blogs.

This course will be run as a creative writing workshop. I imagine all of you will be writing on different topics (and entering into different communities, crafting different voices, different styles of blogs). Our class sessions, then, will be dedicated to providing peers with meaningful and helpful feedback (critical in its least pejorative sense). You should be prepared to share your work, ideas, and thoughts in a respectful manner.

The course, then, is an extension of my previous semester: on the purpose of higher education. I am further attempting to move beyond the Ruins of the Enlightenment institution, the knowledge factory, and toward something more social, democratic (?), and connected.