digital digs

mathematics and evil

I'm finishing up an essay for a new collection on rhetoric and the digital humanities that looks at the usefulness of a speculative digital rhetoric for dh, specifically big data applications. One of the points of commonality between speculative realism and digital humanities has been their interest in advanced mathematics. This has been pointed out before (see, for example, Michael Witmore's piece on the Ancestral Text in the Open Access edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities). Clearly Meillassoux's work connects with set theory but one could also think of Bryant's interest in cybernetics, DeLanda's use of simulation, or Bogost's work with programming. The use of mathematics and computing has also been a common point of the critiques lodged against both fields such as Alex Galloway's piece in Critical Inquiry or Tara McPherson's in the Debates book. In both cases, and many similar critiques, speculative realism and digital humanities are guilty by association. The warrants in these arguments are that we know that object-oriented programming is a tool for capitalist domination and that advanced mathematics has been built to devalue the human race and exploit our suffering for the profit of the few. So all we have to do is demonstrate that speculative realism or digital humanities rely upon such evils to prove their own evil as well. 

Of course there is another possibility that suggests that mathematics is a powerful way of investigating the world and that our philosophies ought to account for it. In that case, part of the argument that mathematics is a powerful tool is that people who are in power use it; there's no point in denying that. What makes less sense is the argument that suggests that because a tool is powerful we shouldn't use it to understand the world. 

If we think about these matters historically, as these critiques often insist that we should, the arguments become even odder. If we were to look at critical methods that have long operated in the humanities such as psychoanalysis or Marxism, it wouldn't be difficult to recognize the role that nineteenth and early-twentieth century math and science played in the formations of those theories. Similarly, it isn't difficult to identify the importance of industrial technologies to the development of modern scholarly practices. It wouldn't be that difficult to establish that the math and science underpinning Marxism, for example, were also used to hegemonic and destructive ends. And yet, somehow, century-old math, science, and technology are acceptable in the humanities in a way that contemporary math, science, and technology are not.

I understand the argument that suggests the digital humanities are "under-theorized." I would think of the situation somewhat differently. New computational methods can always identify new relationships and patterns within data and interpreting those relationships and patterns is a second step that is perhaps necessarily going to be a little behind the first step. I don't know that our legacy critical theories are of much use in this regard. On the other hand, I think those who are willing to engage more openly with contemporary math, science, and technology, including speculative realists but many others as well, might be able to develop, in conjuction with digital humanists, ways of theorizing the ontological and epistemological status of computational analysis. For my own part in thinking about a digital speculative rhetoric, I think the role lies in understanding the rhetorical function of nonhumans.

Regardless, I don't really see the benefit in passing these blanket judgments on departments across the campus from the humanities building. It seems to me that this is where the real antipathy toward speculative realism and digital humanities begins. Mathematics isn't evil, though it can be used for evil purposes. Shakespeare was put to use in English departments to perpetuate an essentialist, anglocentric, patriarchal ideology but that doesn't make Shakespeare a servant of industrial capitalism that should be abandoned. What is really at stake here, I believe, is a matter of disciplinary authority wherein these methods are not beholden to extant theories. It is understandable that humanists would not want to become epiphenomena of math or neuroscience or simulations. The response has been to attempt to turn the tables by asserting all math and science is primarily historical and cultural. Speculative realism and digital humanities do something different by rejecting this divide in a Latourian move. I don't really see how this is evil. It's more like different, though its not suprising when different is mistaken for evil.

 

(digital) humanities and darkness

I am crawling out from under the #mlasick illness I and so many others picked up in Boston. If you followed the Twitter stream during the conference, it is likely you encountered the conversation surrounding the session "The Dark Side of the Humanities." I wasn't able to attend the session, but the participants have uploaded their comments here. In The Chronicle William Pannapacker summarized the critique offered by the roundtable participants (Richard Grusin, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Patrick Jagoda, and Rita Raley)  this way:

That DH is insufficiently diverse. That it falsely presents itself as a fast-track to academic jobs (when most of the positions are funded on soft money). That it suffers from “techno-utopianism” and “claims to be the solution for every problem.”  That DH is “a blind and vapid embrace of the digital”; it insists upon coding and gamification to the exclusion of more humanistic practices.  That it detaches itself from the rest of the humanities (regarding itself as not just “the next big thing,” but “the only thing”).  That it allows everyone else in the humanities to sink as long as the DH’ers stay afloat. That DH is complicit with the neoliberal transformation of higher education; it “capitulates to bureaucratic and technocratic logic”; and its strongest support comes from administrators who see DH’ers as successful fundraisers and allies in the “creative destruction” of humanities education. And—most damning—that DH’ers are affiliated with a specter that is haunting the humanities—the specter of MOOCs.

In short, DH is an opportunistic, instrumentalist, mechanized response to the economic crisis—it represents “the dark side of capitalism”—and, as such, it is the enemy of good, organic humanists everywhere: cue the “Imperial March” from Star Wars.

Reading through the presentations onilne, this summary strikes me as defensive (Pannapacker clearly sees himself as a digital humanist) but accurate. In an online addendum to her presentation, Raley responds to the negative reaction the roundtable generated: "The upset seems in part to derive from a misunderstanding about our critical object: though our roundtable referred in passing to actually existing projects, collectives, and games that we take to be affirmative and inspiring, the 'digital humanities' under analysis was a discursive construction and, I should add, clearly noted as such throughout. That audience members should have professed not to recognize themselves in our presentations is thus to my mind all to the good, even if it somewhat misses the mark." OK. Maybe. But I think it strikes me as unrealistically naive to imagine that such attacks on the "discursive construction" of DH are not also unavoidably an attack upon the people who do the work. After all, the argument is that the digital humanities needs to act differently and does this not necessitate that DHers act differently?

Part of this is a well-covered methodological shift where digital humanities work tends to rely less upon traditional critical theory. This perceived "rise" of DH is thus seen as a threat, and I think this is the source of the greatest hostility: the idea that DHers might not view critical theory as a master discourse for their work. After all, it doesn't really make much sense to conflate DH, which in the end is a fairly narrow and specialized form of research, with the larger digital cultural revolution. It may not even make sense to conflate the emergence of digital technologies with the rise of neoliberal, global capitalism. However those are the links that are being made here. DH=digital culture=neoliberalism. Of course that's not an attack on DHers. No, of course not, because DHers can still accept critical theory as their personal savior; they can still be saved from the dark side. That's not an attack on critical theorists though; that's just an analysis of a discursive construction.

In this talk Wendy Chun makes an interesting observation: "The humanities are sinking—if they are—not because of their earlier embrace of theory or multiculturalism, but because they have capitulated to a bureaucratic technocratic logic."  This observation comes out of this talk about DH "saving" the humanities and appears to imply that DH saves the humanities by moving away from theory and multiculturalism. I actually see this a little bit differently. I agree that the humanities aren't sinking because of theory or multiculturalism. I actually don't believe either have had much impact on the humanities outside of the relatively narrow sphere of graduate studies and scholarship. It would be difficult to find an English undergraduate major where theory plays a visible role and multiculturalism in most cases has meant the addition of a "nonwestern" class requirement.  When the humanities, English in particular, thrived in the US (up through the 1960s), I would think it was precisely because the curriculum was aligned with the bureaucratic, technocratic logic of the day. Would we not aruge that the Eurocentric, patriarchal, canonical curriculum of literary studies supported our mid-century Anglo-American nationalist ideology? Certainly it was not offered as a critical resistance. As far as that goes, that curriculum continues to chug along, probably 80-90% unchanged on a national level (same courses, same books, same assignments). It's just less appealing now to students who have more choices, especially women who now have far more freedom in their choice of major than 40 years ago.  In a similar vein, I was struck by Richard Grusin's observation of "a class system within DH that generates an almost unbridgeable divide between those on the tenure-track, those in what have come to be called “Alt-Ac” positions, and those in even more precarious and temporary positions." I agree with him that there's a complex problem there. These DH projects require a different kind of infrastructure, including employees in new kinds of positions. And there is a connection to be made with the emphasis on what we might euphemistically term "flexibility" in labor practices. However, in my view, this dh class system is dwarfed by the pyramid scheme that characterizes English Studies. All this "critiquing" stands firmly on the backs of TA and adjunct labor. We all know that. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. 

On a more positive note, Grusin wants to put an end to the division between production and critique, and Chun wants to forge better relations with science and engineering. Raley similarly wants to break down divisions between theory and practice. However, it seems odd to me to point to the DH community as the obstacle to such goals. To the contrary, I would think it is the traditional humanities that have the deepest antipathy for science and engineering. Certainly it is the traditional humanities that have the most invested in maintaining the separation between production/practice and critique/theory with the latter being the master term. All one has to do is look at the treatment of writing instruction in English to see how the humanities have denigrated production/practice over the decades. If DH rejects the role of critical theory as its master discourse (or, heaven forbid, turns to other theories), then it is only because of the way in which the traditional humanities have long established these hierarchies. 

So, yes, let's put production and theory on a level playing ground in our curriculum and our research. Let's reshape our faculty and our discipline so that an interest in making is equally valued with an interest in critiquing. Let's embrace the DIY culture, as Raley suggests, that doesn't recognize elitist hierarchies that forbid makers from building their own theoretical views. But we should recognize that this isn't about reforming DH, it's about reforming the humanities. 

 

academic cynicism, social media, and the fate of the humanities

There's some conceit in the humanities, or at least in English, that one must love the object one studies. It almost feels like an elementary school playground: "if you love social media then why don't you marry it?" I don't believe I've ever been a technology apologist. I actually don't make much personal use of social media. I guess I don't get enough enjoyment out of Facebook or Twitter to spend much "free time" there. I do however find productivity in these tools: i am introduced to people; I encounter new ideas; I get involved in new projects; and I find colleagues to work with on projects of my own devising. Still I understand the skepticism, even cynicism, regarding social media and its proponents (e.g. Clay Shirky). No one finds the conversation regarding MOOCs less surprising than I do, and I have certainly raised my concerns about them. However, it strikes me that we are only at the very start of a networked society. The problems we identify are challenges to address not reasons to turn away.

But that's not the humanities' way. I agree with Levi Bryant's recent post on the matter of cynicism. We have every reason to be skeptical of social media. There is no doubt that ideolgical and capitalistic motives lie behind the arguments for social media. Hell, in most cases, such motives are front and center. Should we be skeptical of Instagram or Facebook or Coursera? I think so. But should we be skeptical about the premise of networked sociality in itself? Or should we be looking to adapt/invent practices for this environment? Levi writes that as a result of cynicism "We thus strangely find ourselves in the same camp as the climate change denialists, the creationists who use their skepticism as a tool to dismiss evolutionary theory, and those that would treat economic theories as mere theories in the pejorative sense and continue to hold to their neoliberal economics despite the existence of any evidence supporting its claims.  We critique everything and yet leave everything intact." It's a bold argument perhaps, as it equates what we imagine as the height of intellectual behavior (critique) as functionally equivalent to some of the more blantant examples of what we would term anti-intellectualism. However, I think the same thing could be said for our treatment of social media.

So here's another piece of information to critique. The McKinsey Global Institute produced a report earlier this year on "the social economy." Yes this institute is a think tank for a global consulting firm. I won't go into too great detail about this report as I don't think the findings are too surprising. One interesting statistic indicated that knowledge workers spend 28 hours a week writing emails, searching for information, and collaborating internally. While these may be online activities, they are typically not done via social media, and the report argues that these activities might be done more efficiently if social-media functionality was enabled. So that's their argument. Another argument/analysis that they offer identifies different industries in terms of the value a social media approach might have and the ease of realizing that value. Education comes out looking ripe for such activities, which I don't find so surprising either.

This leads me back to a position I've been arguing for some time (in fact, you can find it in my chapter for the Design Discourse collection) that we should be looking to integrate social media into our pedagogy. Here are four examples.

1. Next semester we will have around 2500 students and 80 instructors teaching composition courses at UB. No they aren't all following a common syllabus, but nevertheless they are encountering common tasks. About 3/4 will be in a second-semester course where they will be writing research papers. Could our students and instructors be more productive if they collaborated in this way? Could they get feedback faster? Could they get answers to questions that are stalling them out? Could they get support and encouragement when they hit writer's block or need to stay on schedule? Could they find an audience for their work and peers who have similar research interests? 

2. On a smaller, but more diverse scale, we'll have around 60-70 other graduate and undergraduate courses in English with 40 or so different faculty and instructors. What kinds of conversations and collaborations could arise among them? Would we discover consistent and persistent challenges running through the curriculum that we might collectively address? Would we develop a sense of purpose and communicate that to our students?

3. And what about among the faculty, say all the humanities faculty at UB? Let's just say we did the following. Each semester, you would post in your profile a description of your current research project, courses you were teaching, and particular service project you were undertaking(if any). These could be driven by keywords and include lists of books and articles being used (in both research and teaching). Out of this, you could find colleagues across the humanities that might be potential collaborators. Administrators could see trends that might shape policy and budget decisions. One could generate a kind of ground-up vision of what we are doing. The sad thing is that we already do this in a far more pedantic way for our annual reports. However that information is retrospective (i.e what we've done rather than what we plan to do) and is not socialized. 

4. As far as that goes, why not do this with MLA? You could start just with the convention. In a rudimentary way, you could start by just having participants add some keywords to their proposals (key terms, major authors, etc.). Then you could link these people together and create some recommendations. Not just among those who were accepted, but everyone who applied. I wouldn't mind a list from MLA of other scholars "who appear to be studying related issues" that I might then seek out on Twitter or Fb. Eventually though we'd need to build a platform to facilitate disciplinary collaboration.

Anyway, I think you get the point. The common workplace concern is that social media is a distraction. It is the common classroom concern as well. This is the perhaps counter-intuitive argument that social media could make us more productive workers and learners if the applications were properly designed and we adapted to use them in this fashion. The argument I made in that Design Discourse article (freely available here, pdf) is that one shouldn't make rules up front about how to use the technology. That is, rather than building the paths and forcing people to stay on them, one could wait to see where people move and build paths to facilitate that movement. 

In the long term (say a decade out) this shift might not only be in the degree of productivity but also in the nature of productivity (which is more interesting to me). That is, our notion of the kind of work we should be doing will change as the means by which we do our work shifts. By facilitating large-scale collaboration among students, across the curriculum, institutionally among researchers, and through professional organizations, the relatively solitary labor of the typical humanist (a consequence of 20th century technology) will change. Maybe that change will not be for the better. It depends on what "better" means. If by better one means keeping things as they are, doing the same work as we've done in the past, and asking the same questions in the same ways, then this will obviously not be better. For those of us that are congenitally skeptical, as Bryant suggests, then there can never be a better, which results in a de facto argument for the status quo. For me, better for the humanities means increasing our capacity for producing knowledge and practices that have meaning and value beyond our specialized communities and that can speak (at least) to the shape of education and (hopefully) to the concerns of public, democratic discourse on a range of issues. But that's just rhetorician speak I suppose. 

composition's big gamble

As you may know, rhet/comp's big conference is in Vegas this year. Generally speaking, the conference theme is tied to the location in some way. (Last year's St. Louis conference had "gateways" as a theme.) This year's theme is "the public work of composition" and gestures half-heartedly to the Hoover Dam. Of course it begs the question, why not a theme about risk-taking or gambling? Too obvious? Or just too tawdry. On the WPA-list there has been some recent complaining about holding the conference in Vegas, which in and of itself is not unusual since complaining about the conference site is an annual practice. However these complaints are of a slightly different tenor as they have a moral tone. Whether it's the gambling, the smoke-filled rooms, or the whole tourist-trappiness of it, the complaints focus on a sadness to the whole enterprise. I've never been to Vegas, so I don't have an opinion. I also have no interest in going there, for the conference or any other reason. 

However, Vegas (and my colleague's complaints) are only an occassion for writing this post. What really struck me is how very similar Vegas and composition might be. This might seem a counter-intuitive claim in the way that composition instruction is associated either with grammarian schoolmarms or earnest untenured radicals. The transformation to gambler might seem as unlikely as that of the librarian turned pole dancer in an 80s hair band music video. But really a certain desparation might be shared between the gambler and the composition instructor. There are many other similarities:

• both are really phenomena of post-War America
• both operate on the backs of a large, exploited labor force
• both attract employees who have dreams of something greater
• both serve similar types of customers/students: those who play the system; cheaters; those who sit and pull mechanically at the arm and hope it will payoff.
• both places inspire a willful amnesia. 

Most importantly though, both Vegas and composition are profit centers for large corporations. And from that view, the way online gambling has transformed that industry offers some shady insight into the future of online composition. I don't want to push the metaphor too far, but I don't think I need to in order to see composition as being cheap, tawdry, and sad in the way the Vegas can be, but also glitzy, high-tech, and performative. Vegas and composition classrooms: two great middle-American sites of naked rhetoricity in an agora of the surface fueled by the magic of appearance. Neither the grammarian nor the untenured radical wishes to see composition this way. No one who has made a career of rhetoric and composition would, including me. And yet I think we need to recognize that rhetoric plays this role. Rhetoric is a gamble; it is often a calculated risk, a matter of style and bluffing. Like gambling, rhetoric might offer a lens into the circulation of signs, psychology, and social behaviors.

But the real gamble for composition ultimately comes in shifting from a horizontal mass curriculum to a more vertical and varied one. The mass curriculum reflects that legacy industrial notion of mass production and a homogenized, monocultural literacy of an era long gone (if it ever existed). It also supports the paradigms and interests of a similarly industrialized university system; writing as a homogeneous, unspecialized activity that requires little qualification to teach, unlike virtually every other course on the campus. It can be taught cheaply with adjunct labor; it can fuel graduate programs with TAships. I understand why many constituents at the university would have an interest in preserving composition, but I do not understand why those in rhetoric would share that interest. Perhaps it is the fantasy that rhetoric might (and should) become some master university discourse that is necessary for righting all our social wrongs. This is the lottery ticket the untenured radical buys every semester (and I say untenured because so few tenured faculty ever teach FYC). Perhaps it is the opposite belief, the grammarians' belief, that writing really is low stakes. Or perhaps it is a continuing fear that universites will never allow writing to be anything else, a fear born of decades in the basement. However, these days it is the entire humanities that is in the basement. The finishing school of cultural appreciation that drove the humanities in the last century is no longer of interest. Instead, what is of interest are the so-called "soft skills" that rhetoric develops: creativity, collaboration, and of course communication. It is the facility with digital media, which rhetoric has more broadly embraced than any other humanistic discipline. And finally it is an ability to write in a diverse, global workplace and culture, which rhetoricians have studied for decades. 

Of course such matters cannot be covered in a single, homogenous course. I am not suggesting that universities should abandon their expectation that students develop as communicators; nor am I suggesting that rhetoricians shouldn't lead universities in meeting that expectation. I am only suggesting that we replace the mechanism that we use to try to get there. That's hardly a new suggestion. However, it strikes me, as so many of my colleagues head off to Vegas, that a greater gamble is required here. If, as it appears, higher education is in a state of transistion, if the humanities are under fire, then now is the time for us to insist, organizationally, that composition as a mass educational tool is not viable, that it needs to be replaced by a different model of instruction. One that is perhaps not so susceptible to the mass delivery of online courses. One that does not fall prey so easily to exploitative labor practices.

As I have often said on this blog, my decision, now nearly 20 years go, to specialize in what we now call digital rhetoric was a gamble. It was a bet, at the dawn of the WWW, that digital technology would be a transformational force, perhaps the most significant one of my generation. Now that seems like a no brainer, but not everyone made that bet then. Not everyone in the humanities sees that today. But really, is it even still a gamble today to wager that higher education will be transformed, both in form and content, by digital media networks? Or that future academics will not only require the proficiency to work in such contexts but the expertise to lead in shaping such transformations? This is where composition's gamble must go, toward a diversified and vertical curriculum that looks toward the digital and global future. And Vegas, well as the cliché goes, no one needs to speak of what happens there.

What a first-year writing MOOC would teach

The other day in our Teaching Practicum we were discussing Kathy Yancey's 2004 CCCC address, republished in CCC, "Made Not Only in Words." In it Yancey observes

it seems to me that in all our efforts to improve the teaching of composition- to reduce class size, for instance, to conference with students, to respond vociferously to each student paper, and to understand that in our students' eyes we are the respondent who matters-we seek to approximate the one-to-one tutorial model. Quite apart from the fact that such an effort is doomed-about a hundred years ago, Edwin Hopkins asked if we could teach composition under the current conditions, which conditions then are the same conditions we work in today, and immediately answered, "NO"-I have to wonder why we want to work this way, wonder why this is the neo-Platonic mode to which we continuously aspire.

The general, negative reaction to the idea of MOOCs for writing instruction is based on this premise: that writing instruction must occur through some approximation of the tutorial model. (And of course fears about what a MOOC would do to the economics of composition instruction, but that's a different matter.) This post isn't an argument for or against MOOC-based writing instruction, but rather a consideration of how the MOOC challenges this value.

As such I want to begin with two points. First, as I have argued here before, it is an error to approach online instruction of any kind with the question "how to can I import my traditional classroom activities into an online environment?" Asking this question generally ends up with the worst of both worlds: only those things that can be done in both contexts. Second, following on that, the appropriate question is not to ask how (or if) MOOCs can teach us what physical classrooms teach us, but rather, more neutrally, what kinds of learning happens via a MOOC? If the traditional classroom was/is modelled on the industrial model and prepared students for work on an assembly line, then it is fair to wonder if the MOOC is/will be modelled on a postindustrial model and prepare students for work in a distributed network.

What kinds of literacies, rhetorics, and cognitive processes (the art formerly known as critical thinking) will be appropriate in the emerging model? Perhaps the answer, somewhat tautologically, is those that are taught via networks (i.e. some future version of the MOOC). Industrial-print literacies are clearly linear in nature. And even though we assert the recursive nature of writing processes, they still smack of the assembly line in a way that is very different from the experience of thousands of particpants composing media in a collective, real time fashion (which is what massive, open online composing would be... a different MOOC). Change the process of composing and change what is meant by communicating. Change what is meant by communicating and change what is meant by learning. Change learning and change pedagogy and evaluation. Or in thise case, try to make that system go backward by changing pedagogy and evaluation first. 

The most obvious model for a composition MOOC would be freemium. At the free level there is a textbook. lectures, online discussion, and perhaps some kind of automated activity. There would be crowdsourced evaluation of writing and maybe some collective writing project along the lines of a wiki. In other words much like you have now. Then one could purchase tutorial sessions where one would get professional feedback on one's writing. Finally one could submit a portfolio and pay for some evaluation. Undoubtedly cheating would be possible, but in my view cheating is always possible. Since I call this the "obvious" model, I'm not offering it up with much endorsement. It is a model that still tries to reassert the tutorial approach to writing instruction. Another technocratic model might imagine some kind of artificial intelligence that would serve as tutor (and evalutor). These models still presume that we want to create individual writers in a traditional humanistic sense. However my argument would be that those writers never existed (at least no in the way we described them) and so we clearly never taught students to become them.

Instead, in sci-fi speak, in a MOOCC (the two Cs are "composition course"), students are the wetware nodes in a writing network, participating in a larger, emergent, rhetorical-decision-making structure. On a "massive" enough scale, those decision become statistical. Indeed even in the traditional writing seminar (and certainly on the level of program assesssment) the statiscial nature of student writing choices become apparent. The same rhetorical variables are recognized by the students, a predictable set of student responses can be identified, common errors (rhetorical and grammatical if you like) are visible, writing behaviors are largely consistent across the population. This is not unlike the way the Kindle identifies commonly highlighted passages. In other words, when one starts to think about 2000 or more individuals composing essays in response to a curriculum, one inevitably starts to see trends: common quotations, common theses, common organizational structures, etc. Arguably, the purpose of FYC is to normalize student writing in a particular way, to produce predictable outcomes with certain generic features. One could almost see this happening in real time with the right technical affordances as a kind of cybernetic feedback loop. This would be the post-industrial equivalent of assembly line composing.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that as desirable, as something I would want my kids to experience. However, I do think that there is likely some future MOOCC in store for us, and it will require us to recognize a few things:

1. That symbolic behavior involves nonhumans (e.g. technologies) in a networked environment that is increasingly digital in character.
2. That rhetoric and composing, which have always been collective activities, will be more palpably collective due to the speed of networks and the accessiblity of data. This intensification is reaching a point where some becoming is emerging (i.e. we're not just hot water anymore, we are coming to a boil).
3. That the tutorial model of writing instruction is not necessarily the best model (let alone the only one).

As I always tell my practicum students, teaching writing implicitly assumes an ontology. It begins with some assumption about how thinking and composing arise. It assumes something about the agency of students, about the choices that are available to them and the practices that they are free to adopt. Millions of people can collaborate to compose Wikipedia or the archive of YouTube or the Web for that matter. Generally all composition classes do is say that that stuff shouldn't be trusted. To be honest, what FYC (and academic writing in general) really must say is that the web isn't possible, because it violates many of its assumptions about how writing takes place. 

We ask scholars to produce scholarly writing because that writing is supposedly evidence of their capacity to think and to know their subject. We ask students to write academically for the same reason. But what if thinking and knowing didn't work that way? What if thinking and knowing were more distributed activities and what we were measuring with composing was not some inhered characteristic of individuals but rather their capacity to participate in certain networks? Networks that shift over time. In that case, rhetoric and composition would be about learning to participate, to relate, to particular networks in ways that are productive of thinking and knowing in certain paradigmatic ways. That's what a MOOCC would have to teach,, I think.

Latour's moderns and correlationism's gift

I've been trying to think through the relationship between Latour's critique of modernity and the now-familiar issue of correlationism. While I am certainly not trained as a philosopher, I can count, so it's clear that Kant's arguments, which Meillassoux identifies as the inauguration of correlationist thinking, develop in the 1780s, while Latour focuses on Hobbes and Boyle (more than a century earlier) as a start point for the modern division of nature from culture. Latour clearly states that it is Kant who fully realizes the division that Hobbes and Boyle begin (in We Have Never Been Modern), so at least from Latour's perspective there is merit for seeing correlationism as a product of modernity. In Latour's view, Kant's Copernican revolution is one step in an increasingly attenuated line between the poles of nature/object and society/subject. In the modern world, there are always quasi-objects that serve the role of linking these two poles. For moderns these objects are mute intermediaries where for Latour they are mediators with an active role. This is a crucial difference.

I often hear from readers of speculative realism I encounter that philosophers in this school want to solve the problem of correlationism. Some do, perhaps, but as I see it, establishing correlationism as a problem to be solved might be misleading at best. That is, it is misleading if one imagines that the goal here is to establish a means by which modern subjects of the type Latour describes can encounter the natural world without mediation, without the drifting/withdrawal that makes our knowledge of the world always knowledge for us. That's not what's happening here. However, if solving the correlationist problem means offering a better explanation for the ontological/epistemelogical problem Kant identifies, then yes I think that makes sense. 

At the same time, I think it is important to recognize that the disconnection between subject and object in correlationism (and the general withdrawal among all objects in OOO) is the foundation of life. Without this disconnection, things would happen instantaneously via pure translation of cause. I'd have to think it through but perhaps one would even want to argue that there could be no events or time. Relations would be always already decided; they would be pure and total. Instead, because there are gaps, there is thinking. Because relations are not complete and translation is not overdeterminingly causational, there is agency. These are not solvable conditions, except through total destruction. I am not even sure why such a thing would be desirable. It seems that part of what one can learn from Latour is that our efforts to imagine the natural world in these terms have contributed to our destructive ecological condition. Who would want to extend such "solutions" further?

The "problem" of correlationism might, in Latourian terms, be understood as the problem of hybridity. If one extends this in a way Latour hasn't to not only object-subject but object-object (a kind of OOO move), then one begins to investigate how objects mediate one another through relation, developing capacities for thought and agency. Whether object or relation is primary can be a debate for another day. I am willing to say that an object need not be in relation in order to exist, as long as all objects are already made up of objects in relation. (In other words, there can be objects that have no relations but no objects can exist without relations also existing because every object has to be made up of other objects that are relating to form that object... make sense? he asked breathlessly) In any case, my particular interests are in objects that happen to be in relation to one another anyway (rhetorical relations). This problem of relation is not be solved (in the pursuit of substituting pure connection for relation). Instead, in the Deleuzian sense, it is the problem that forms the assemblage from which thought and action develop.

 

 

Figure/Ground interview with me

You can find the interview here, and if you aren't familiar with the site, you should check it out. Many good interviews with folks in media studies, rhetoric, speculative realism, OOO and much more. 

composing objects and other C & W keynotes

Thanks to Dan Anderson (@iamdan) for recording this. I've also included Dave Parry's video. When Anne Wysocki's becomes available, I'll add it.

 

digital humanities and digital literacy #dhdebates

In her latest HASTAC post, Cathy Davidson considers "How Digital Humanists Can Lead Us to National Digital LIteracy," and she frames digital literacy in terms of one's ability to answer the following question (as she says, "an entrance exam question for 21st-century literacy):

QUESTION:   If SOPA/PIPA had been passed into U.S. law in 2002, would Wikipedia exist today?  If either law had passed in 2012,  would Wikipedia exist in 2022?  Why or why not?  Discuss.

There's no doubt that IP, copyright, and other legal issues are central to the way digital networks function. In a way I find it a curious question though, because we wouldn't establish the analogous question as an entrance exam for print literacy (e.g. if the Constitution hadn't established copyright laws, would Huckleberry Finn have been written?). Certainly there is a feedback loop among cultural conceptions of authorship, property, the marketplace, technology, and the law. And what we see with digital networks is clearly a shift in technology that has fed into a shift in how authorship works, while the remaining concepts are seemingly in flux.

So, yes, this is one important question and one would bring one's digital literacy to bear in answering it.

It is also, not incidentally, a question that interests many digital humanists (and I really want to make an effort to use that term narrowly: that is, scholars who employ/build digital tools to study traditional objects of humanistic inquiry). There is no doubt that digital humanists are proponents of open source (as both a practice and an ethic) and have been strong opponents of SOPA/PIPA. To be a digital humanist, I would imagine, requires a fairly high digital literacy, just as traditional humanists required a fairly high print literacy. However, at this point I need to interject that beyond a fairly low level, literacies become highly specialized. E.g., being a literate humanist does not mean that you can read extensive legal contracts, complex technical documentation, or a physics journal. Just as I would argue that all faculty are responsible for teaching writing, for teaching the specialized discursive practices of their field, we are all responsible for helping our students become literate. That is, part of teaching a student about physics or mathematics is teaching them how to read like a physcist or mathematician. 

From this perspective I think it is unfair to put the expectation on the digital humanities (at least as I am using the term here) to lead the way in terms of digital literacy, just as I think it would be a misplaced expectation to believe that literary scholars, historians, and other traditional humanists led the way in terms of print literacy. I was an English and History double-major as an undergrad, and now I am a rhetorician (of sorts). Certainly as an English major I learned strategies for reading poetry, novels, and plays. As a history major, I read some important historical documents and a good number of scholarly texts by historians. However I can't say that we ever spent much time talking about the practice of reading or deciphering arguments in either major. I did learn some literary interpretive strategies (mostly close reading techniques, scansion, things like that) in English, but those strategies don't really apply to non-literary texts. 

If there is a humanistic discipline that studies literacy in some broad sense it is obviously rhetoric. Yes, literary studies does as well, but only in the narrow frame of literature. And that's not meant as a criticism. We all study what we study. Every field has its limits. Outside of the humanities in education, communication studies, psychology, cognitive science, there are other modes of investigation into literacy. There's linguistics, but I don't know of a linguist that would say s/he studies "literacy," and there is media studies, and perhaps there are folks in that field that study media literacy, but they may or may not think of themselves as humanists. In any case, those humanists who study literacy and/or digital literacy in particular, including me, wouldn't really think of themselves as digital humanists. And even though digital humanists are clearly digitally literate and are deeply concerned about questions such as the SOPA/PIPA one, I don't think that's where their work lies. Similarly a literary scholar or historian or philosopher may be concerned about K12 literacy or the quality of undergraduate writing, but that's not their area of scholarly investigation. 

Certainly, Davidson (and HASTAC) offer up a different, more capacious, definition of digital humanities. By Davidson's terms, I am a digital humanist, as are all the people mentioned above, plus many people who are not academics. It is because of the visibility of HASTAC and other organizations, which have drawn us all together under this DH nomenclature, that I find myself in the position I am in. I am uncertain of the value of being lumped together. I think there's some interesting scholarship being done by the people I would more narrowly term digital humanists, but I don't think its work that really addresses itself to Davidson's concerns. I also think there's interesting scholarship being done in my field (computers and writing/digital rhetoric), in education, in media studies, and so on, that does directly examine the question of a public/democratic digital literacy and the attendent pedagogical challenges. I am not sure how much overlap there is between the two, though I do believe we are fellow travellers and share many values, practices, and pragmatic concerns. 

 

social media: signs of life

Not that there's been much life on this blog of late. It's the summer and things tend to slow down around here, mostly because I spend less time online in the summer. During the school year I spend many more hours working and devote some of that to work here. In the summer, I try to target my work hours to the things I absolutely need to do and spend more time with the kids, etc. But I am prompted today to write about social media life in part out of the recent birth of google + (about which 100s of blog posts have already been written). 

Perhaps you've seen this recent car commerical (below if you haven't) that takes the familiar poke at Facebook and social networking. The 20-something daughter complains about her parents being anti-social because they don't have many online "friends." Meanwhile they are out having a good time in the "real world." At one point, the young woman looks up from her laptop and announces, "This is living."

Allow me to misread her intent for a moment. She's right. Facebook is living. It is alive. And we, gentle Fb users, are organs in the organism. I do not wish to overblow this in some sci-fi, Matrix-like dystopian way. This is what we fail to see when we think of rhetoric as human symbolic action. We risk failing to recognize that language, writing, media, words, and so on are not human, that they are not simple, uncomplicated servants of our will. I do not wish to attribute some human-like intelligence to social networks. Nor do I mean to speak of the people behind the curtain at Fb or G+ and whatever plans for wealth and global domination they might have. I simply mean to suggest that a social network is an assemblage unto itself with its own life. 

Now let me return to the intended and familiar message of the commercial. Does it not go without saying that sitting in front of a computer is a fairly degraded form of social relation? Personally, though I've been on Fb and Twitter for years, I've never gotten into the confessional aspect or the diary diarrhea. My urge to be snarky is not that strong. I have good friends among my academic colleagues; we get together at conferences. I have friends among my colleagues at UB and my kids' friends' parents and such. But I have not great need for small talk beyond what I already encounter in the non-networked world. So I fear I've never really "gotten" social networking. It seems to scratch an itch that I do not have. Apparently I am in the minority in this regard. Instead, my social media itch, quite obviously, is satisfied on this blog, where I am not obligated by the demands of fully academic prose and yet can write something extended and hopefully thoughtful.

Though it is obviously early days for Google+, its design does seem to encourage more engaged and extended conversation than Fb or Twitter. Both the blogosphere and Google+ are also living, but they are different forms of life than Fb. In the blogosphere the extent of community exchange is fairly limited. There was/is the blogroll and the link in a post. Blogs are comparatively insular. As Anil Dash notes, once one opens the comments one risks assholes rushing in, especially on popular sites. On this site, the commenting is modest enough that I can easily moderate. But the real problem is there is no communal response to trolls. That is, it's not enough for one blog to block someone, others must as well. As DeLanda notes in Philosophy and Simulation, this is how larger communities develop. Cheaters are not only punished by those they cheat but are judged by the overall community. This is what we seem to lack in social networks: an agreement on standards of behavior and then an agreement to stand together to enforce them.

On Facebook, your option is to select your friends and/or hide their comments. My wife spends much more time on Fb than I and she has plenty of old high school friends with some fairly unsavory views, so she hides their comments (rather than defriending which draws attention). Perhaps we should blame our education in civics which leads people to believe that they have a freedom to say whatever they want without consequence. (You would think real world experience would have taught them this isn't so.) 

In earliest formations of real world communities, people relied upon one another for survival. The trades they made had a material impact on that survival. Cheating therefore had real implications. We manage to exist in real world communities with some continued sense of this. As has been obvious since the email flame wars of the 90s, the difference is that in real life, if you said what you just wrote in an email, you'd risk having the crap beaten out of you. In the social media world, nothing much seems at stake. The doggerel of Fb is what you get when the risk is removed from communication. 

And people worry that social media communication is risky!! It's not risky enough. 

For the future of Google+, or at least my interest in it, something has to be at risk there. Otherwise, while it may be living, it's not much of life for me.