digital digs

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.

a pedagogy of planned emergence

Below Steven Johnson talks about emergence at TED in a presentation made in 2003 but made available on the TED site this month. His discussion touches on a number of things that were quite new in 2003--Technorati, the long tail--but are now familiar stuff. What's particularly interesting to me, however, is his approach toward emergence that looks at what might be termed a kind of human-scale feedback loop in emergent information systems.

What do I mean by that? Well Johnson starts by talking about city neighborhoods and asks, rhetorically, who plans a neighborhood? Traditionally the answer is that no one does, that neighborhoods emerge organically, and that attempts to simulate neighborhoods through planning often end up quite comic, as disneyfied versions of themselves. The organization of the web is likewise an organic process. For the most part, Google search ranks and the long tail linking/popularity pattern are not planned. Johnson ends his talk discussing Dave Sifry's efforts to shift the system somewhat and since then we have seen any number of attempts to game these search algorithms for monetary or political purposes.

the future of digital humanities

Mark Marino at Writer Response Theory reports on a recent presentation by N. Katherine Hayles and Lynne Withey on this subject. Withey is at the University of CA press, and one of the things I can glean from this post is the ongoing challenge of establishing a working business model for digital publishing. As we know there are ongoing problems here including:

• maintaining the model of authorial expertise and copyright
• establishing a digital genre that would be analog to a book so that you aren't continually reinventing the publication process
• getting readers/users to pay for access.

I'm confident that some future digital publishing will follow this remediation of the monograph, but really it does seem to miss the point by a wide mark. When I think of many of the exemplary models of single-author digital scholarship, I see one of two things. Either they are pretty much just print texts online, or they are very experimental pieces that operate more like art than scholarship. Both of these things are fine, but neither are good arguments, in my view, for digital scholarship.

Marino reports Hayles identifies the following shifts in the move toward the digital:

• "Decenters the individual human researcher (solitary work of genius)
• Pushes toward collaboration (humanities scholars working with designers and other programmers)
• Shifts expertise
• Puts data-collection over meaning making"

As Marino observes, there would appear to be a notable shift toward social scientific and scientific modes of research here. Hayles uses the example of moving from Latourian ANT methods toward a Moretti-like distant reading analysis. I see where she's coming from. I agree that computer networks allow us to deal with more data through a new set of analytic methods. Computer networks also facilitate collaboration, which includes the expertise shift. All of this runs antithetically to Withey's concerns.

privacy, pedagogy, and 5000 days

Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired, among other things) speaks here at the EG conference on the next 5,000 days of the Internet

One of the interesting remarks he makes here is about privacy. Kelly sees that over the next decade or so we will increasingly come to view the Internet as a single (albeit distributed/networked) device that we accessible through a variety of means. In order to make best use of that device, we will need to share a great deal of information with it. If you can imagine a world of ubiquitous computing where nearly everything is tagged, you are also looking at a world where the granular elements of your personal information are tagged and shared with the web.

Admittedly it seems a little creepy, right? And yet we need to recognize that our notions of privacy are cultural and historical. If you lived in a small rural town or area in the 18th century (or earlier), as nearly everyone did, your "world" was pretty small, and it's likely that everyone in your world knew your business. There's a kind of evolutionary thing here, I think, where we are social animals and our success comes from knowing things about our community. On the other hand, I think about my life today. I live in a home where my kids have private bedrooms. I have a separate room for my office. I have friendly but fairly distant relations with all my neighbors. They don't know my business. I have a private office at work.

I go online in search of communities. I write this blog to connect.

My point is that I believe the experience of privacy that might typify middle-class American life is an anomaly in general human experience. Sure this is the first period in human history where you could look into your webcam and make confessions to a billion people. Yes we are increasingly sharing our preferences, even our unconscious ones with the computing cloud. Picture tying together your buying habits (via online accounts and swipes of your shopper cards) with television viewing and search habits and data mined from your social networking sites. You'll share this "private" information for the same reason we watch commercials on television: putting up with the commercials means getting free/cheaper entertainment. In this case you get free online services. And I put "private" in scare quotes here b/c I think the notion of what is private is relative.

But there's more to it than that. Sharing information online will allow us to connect in more powerful and granular ways than we have in the past. This is the point that Kelly makes. In the past we shared pages, linking page to page, in the future we will link on a more semantic level, word to word, meme to meme. Of course there are privacy issues here! Who will be able to do what with your information? And I'd be more concerned about governments or corporations than shady individuals. These are issues that we'll have to deal with, and not resolve once and for all, but continually revisit. Nevertheless this would appear to the direction of the next 5,000 days.

So that brings me to pedagogy, specifically public, online pedagogy. I appreciate the concern faculty have with the idea of students learning and communciating in public spaces. There are legitimate concerns. I also know that faculty are very good at raising problems about practices that they don't want to do themselves. I do think that those who worry about what students write in an online class probably haven't spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos or reading Facebook. If Kelly is right, then we are headed toward a time when we will all have extensive networked identities. The parts of those identities that we actively compose will be our best, subjective opportunity to engage in that process.

faciality and the interface

Gardner Campbell writes on Michael Wesch's recent post on "context collapse." Wesch describes this collapse as

an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a blackhole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible contexts – in upon itself.

Essentially Wesch is speaking to the paralyzing effect of the webcam. It's an issue that has come up in several conversations on Seesmic: the many ways in which the material constraints of the media network shape compositions. Gardner also speaks about this in rhetorical terms--the development of voice in the writer and the challenges of audience. That is, the challenge of speaking to an absent, indeterminate audience is not new.

One could follow this down the Derridean path toward presence/absence cum pattern/randomness a la Katherine Hayles. But Friday is Deleuze and Guattari day here at Digital Digs, at least this Friday is. Besides, Wesch's passage made me think immediately of D/G's discussion of the face as white wall/black hole in ATP, and this interesting little passage:

if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face--freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing into those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivities. (171)

One of the things you have to love about D/G prose is the capacity to take the things we presume make us human and turn them monstrous. One of the things you have to understand about facialization here is that it is a process of decoding the surface of the head and overcoding it in terms of signification (the white wall site of inscription) and subjectification (the black hole of consciousness). And it is not just the head, the body can also be facialized in this process. Indeed even objects can be reterritorialized this way, as D/G remark "you might say that a house, utensil, or object, an article of clothing, etc.  is watching me, not because it resembles a face, but because it is taken up in the while wall/black hole process, because it connects to the abstract machine of facialization" (175). And where could this be more true than with the monitor and its web cam? As Wesch notes, the camera is a "gateway to a blackhole." The screen is the desublimation of facialization.

Rhetoric includes the author's strategic manipulation of the face. This is bi-directional though as discourse captures the face/voice as well. But this is about more than that. The camera reveals the inhuman and uncanny face, introducing us to "unconscious optics" as Benjamin noted. Of course we normalize the experience fairly quickly. I'm no longer bothered to sit before my webcam and then send off a post to Seesmic or YouTube or where ever.

Perhaps it is possible though to elude the organization of the face by recognizing that the image on the screen is a product of a networked process that cannot be reduced to "you."

hunting and gathering in the digital age

I'm in the midst of reading Peter Morville's Ambient Findability. His discussion of the connections between the contemporary challenges of human information interaction (HII) and our paleolithic cognitive wetware, as articulated in evolutionary psychology and elsewhere, interests me and connects with some of the thoughts I've written here about paleorhetoric, as well as in The Two Virtuals.

Basically I understand Morville's point here to be this: our brains evolved to process information in the context of pre-historic hunting and gathering. Symbolic behavior came along later, piggybacking on this cognitive context.  This is sometimes called "information foraging" (Wikipedia).

This is a behavior that we are all familiar with, every time we make our way to the Google search box or find ourselves browsing. Perhaps we are looking for something specific that we've seen before (but forgot to bookmark). Maybe we're looking for some specific piece of information (e.g., how to cook wheat berries). Or maybe we are engaged in a less specific search: much like our foraging ancestors, we're just looking for something good to eat. How do we make our decisions? Are we regularly making rational choices along a decision tree that leads us ultimately to the best possible result?

Of course not. We're human. Post-human maybe in the sense that we don't (and never have) reflected historical notions of human-ness. But we are still human, still bodies. As Morville notes, "Since being happy broadens our thought processes and facilitates creative thinking, attractive products that make us happy can improve our ability to use them. In effect they work better because we work better. Small gifts (and flattery) can have similar positive effects. But why are we so susceptible to these superficial elements? How can such smart beings be so shallow?"

Those a good questions. My perspective comes from a different angle. I see this history of information interaction (going back to Aristotle) as operating on slowly developing ontologies and epistemologies, not to mention ethics! One result, as we all know, is that knowledge has been (is) viewed as fundamentally rational and organizable by rational means. The other result is that humans are capable of rational thought, that some portion of us (e.g. our souls) is purely rational, and that we should act rationally (that's where the ethical injunction appears).

As Morville notes, we are beginning to see ourselves in different, cognitive terms. In addition, I would add, we might begin to see information in different terms as well. It would not necessarily be to our benefit if we were strictly rational beings (if such beings are even possible, if rationality actually exists). Our feelings give us insights, as do our intuitions. We ought not to pretend we understand our wetware so very well.

So the question then becomes how to build information systems that better recognize our humanity. We see this (and fail to see this) in language all the time in its affective, supplemental force, beyond the "message." And the humanities as a constellation of disciplines is focused on such questions. It is in this arena that we have something to offer in understanding media, communications, and information.

agency and apprehension

One of my continuing favorite intellectual moves is to consider the history of concepts through etymology. Perhaps this seems pedantic, but to me it is a reminder of the materiality of language. The nexus of apprehend, apprehension, and apprehensive send me off in this regard. As we know apprehend references both physically and mentally grasping something (the physical came first, btw). It has a particular legal suggestion (e.g. "criminals were apprehended today"). As we move toward apprehension and apprehensive we get an increasing sense of a third definition that has to do with anticipation, particularly anticipating with fear or dread (though that meaning also appears for apprehend). There's a suggestion of a kind of reaching out perhaps, but certainly a cautious reaching.

I've often thought of the word apprehension in the relationship between distributed cognitive processes, our experience of consciousness, and the subjectivities we inhabit. This was something that came up in a conversation I had with Gardner Campbell the other day. So all this is an attempt to get some better language around what I was trying to communicate about agency.

There's a networked flow of cognitive processes. Some of it is technological in the conventional sense: flows of binary data along fiber optics, CPUs, magnetic storage, wireless access, and so on. There's the larger cultural-material network, physical spaces embedded with information, ideology, and so on. There are other people and groups of people. And there are our own bodies, which interface with these networks, sending information coursing through us.

Out of this continual state, a thought emerges into consciousness. We generally apprehend that thought in language, though sometimes words fail us. However thoughts also strike us affectively, with force. This is also apprehension, to varying degrees, as we grasp the aporia, the ineffability, of thought.

Consciousness can be abstractly separated from the network of distributed cognition, but it is better understood as part of the cognitive network. Every actor in the network performs its mediations. If we find information, force, and will as different aspects of the same process, the these mediations are also mechanisms that shape force.

In short, agency lies everywhere, with every actor. Of course that's what makes it agency, right? If we couldn't pass along our agency to others in the network then it wouldn't amount to much. Practice zazen meditation and you'll quickly realize your thoughts are not you. Still there is an eye/I that is watching thoughts.

So I suppose you could imagine consciousness strictly as a theater, but that wouldn't make much sense to me. It makes more sense to me that consciousness performs cognitive functions, pertaining to symbolic behavior I would imagine. As such, it has its role in the network of agency. So does our subjectivity, which apprehends our thoughts, pinning them against a cultural-ideological grid, and communicates apprehension to the conscious about the things we think. Again, this is only a partial apprehension.

In the end, the process of apprehension, with its partiality and affective excesses, both communicates the force of agency and opens the possibility for new agencies, new dimensions of force, at every node along the network.

Perhaps post-humanist descriptions of agency cause apprehension (or stronger negative emotions) for you. I have always figured that no one's description of agency or free will can alter whatever my consciousness is. It might alter my understanding of my consciousness, but no philosophical argument can take away agency if it exists or give it to me if it does not. So all we're really after is a good description of agency that, if possible, improves our ability to act individually and collectively.

PraxisWiki and you... yes, you!

We are looking to relaunch Kairos' PraxisWiki. Here's the idea. If you are teaching a graduate course addressing computers and writing, or if you are a grad student in such a course, then PraxisWiki is for you. The idea is to open accounts for faculty and graduate students in our field to compose the wiki as part of curriculum.

This is a solution for getting around the problem that wiki collaboration doesn't really work as a model of scholarly work right now, making it hard to attract users to do this work as scholarship.

Of course we view participation in the PraxisWiki as valuable, intellectual work. Not only could it be a useful contribution of knowledge for the tens of thousands of writing instructors who increasingly must incorporate technology into their teaching, it is also a contribution to the important intellectual work of opening our understanding of what counts as scholarship. Right now I could see the wiki including things like

• reviews of articles/books
• reviews of technology and applications
• key terms/concepts
• syllabi, assignments, rubrics, and other pedagogy material
• history of computers and writing

But what do I know? It's your wiki (or could be), you figure out what belongs there! Leave a comment or drop me an e-mail if you're curious.

why do we write to each other?

I was thinking about this question when I came across this post from Kathleen Fitzpatrick about her next planned scholarly project on the challenges of academic publication. Her project sounds important and interesting. It's clearly a major question facing all academics. It's also, in my view, integral to composition, since, in the end, "academic discourse" is some distilled version of the writing we do as scholars.

My question is maybe less serious and certainly less thought out. But I'm thinking about the hundreds of articles and dozens of books written each year. I wish I could recall where I saw this statistic, but less than 10% of articles in the humanities are ever cited. It begs the question of who reads them and why.

I know why we write them--for jobs, tenure, promotion, etc.--but what is the point? To maybe write that one article or book that will get you noticed and lift you into the community of read (and cited) academic authors?

30 short years ago, maybe even 20 or 15 years ago, the article made some sense. In 1993, what was the best way I had of discovering the thoughts and works of my colleagues? I could go to conferences, but you can only absorb a little bit in a few days. I had to read articles, books, and such. It was really the best means available.

Now that is so far from the truth, and it has happened overnight in academic terms. I can work as easily with a dozen colleagues at a dozen institutions as I can with colleagues on my campus. We could actually do something, not just collaborate on an article (again), but go beyond that and put our research into action, connect with our forgotten audience of mainstream culture, and so on.

I am all for making digital, electronic, networked scholarship count. But I see this as a half-measure. We need to recognize that scholarship existed as a way to share knowledge at a distance when the best you could hope for was someone to respond in six months or a year or longer. It was the best way we had to work together.

If we can realize the potential for networked collaboration we can thoughtfully address real problems quickly enough for our response to matter, and we can build things that people will actually use. I'm not suggesting abandoning scholarship. Of course not. I suggesting expanding it into new realms of possibility.

microblog compositions

Following up on my earlier post on microblogging, I saw a thread on the TechRhet listserv regarding this subject: essentially how might one use Twitter in the writing classroom?

The general consensus in the thread was that there was a potential to teach concision in the 140 character limitation of the tweet. There was also extensive comparison to the haiku. Well, a tweet may sound like its a haiku on the classic subject matter of nature or spring, but that's about as far as it goes.

Writing a short message is not the same as writing a concise message or a haiku (btw, I would not characterize haikus as concise; there's a different aesthetic @ work there).

Fortunately our students don't need to be taught how to write short messages. They probably write more than their instructors. Obviously the 140 character limit reflects the important connection between microblogging and SMS. And as we know the point of texting is not to be concise! In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. In microblogging we say anything and everything b/c it's quick, easy, and free.

A couple other observations...