birthday wrap-up
A small note:
By far, my favorite of the several birthday greetings I received was from Jeff Rice, via Facebook:
Birthday? Birthday?
Get back to your reading!
Eerily accurate, given that despite my best efforts to stay a week ahead of the game in 7007, I’ve fallen behind so that now I’m right on schedule. Well, maybe one day ahead, but it will take a Herculean effort to crunch Foucault into five days and get back into a clearer space.
Later, I’ll write something on Rice’s Rhetoric of Cool maybe something in response to Nietzsche (whose name I can now spell without looking it up) and Maffesoli. Also, I’m thinking of starting a film blog. More on that later, too, perhaps.
rice on "the post-hype society"
An interesting post (and comments following) on Rice’s blog about technological hype and what we do about it. I’ve contributed some comments there, so no need to comment further here, but if you haven’t read it, check it out.
blog blog
So, I recently missed Foolscap’s first blogday, bad blogger that I am. A lifetime of therapy and counseling, I’m sure, awaits.
So, why do we mark blogdays anyway? Or blog birthdays, if you prefer, but my own preference is for “blogday”. We don’t mark the days we first learned to read (ReadDay?) or write (WriteDay?), perhaps because we tend to think of those events as more procedural and evolutionary: I know I couldn’t tell you what day I first knew how to read. (Although an aunt did get me a trophy for being the best reader in my kindergarten class for my birthday one year.) I point to these two “events” rather than one’s first word or first steps because they seem more integral to the way I use my blog–almost said the way blogs are used, but of course not all blogs are used the same way–in fact, we might even recall my own recent deliberations for how to use my blog.
I’ve not been writing here as much as I would like, esp. given the things I’ve been reading of late. I still owe the much promised responses to Rice, Derrida, Lakoff/Turner, and now I can add the Gorgias and the Sophist and Debra Hawhee’s book as well. In part, one reason I’ve avoided doing the page-by-page note posts is because I’m sort of more interested in thinking through these texts as applications, or maybe as rhetorical lessons, than simply as a collection of notes and bon mots. Of course, when I come to use these texts eventually, Ill need that citation mode, but I’m much more interested at present in seeing how I might link together Lakoff/Turner, Derrida, and Kant . . . or Rice and Derrida and Hawhee (which is sort of where my brain is at right now).
So, in other news, I’m coordinating a panel submission for RSA that will involve myself, Jessica Rivait, Kim Lacey, and Jared Grogan–no blogger he. When things are assembled, I’ll put up the preamble to the panel for general assessment–and on that note, anyone have any advice about good texts on celebrity, ethos, and media(tion). This isn’t the Lennon project again, (though it could work) but a new approach (for me at least) to questions of pop rhetoric.
My goal for the ucoming semester: One post a week if time allows; the 1020 course has a pretty rigorous online component so I want to be sure I keep on the ball with that.
Anyone know if I can set my MacBook’s delete key to work like the PC’s delete key with using the “Function” button?
big mac
So, this post is being written on my shiny new MacBook Pro. (Thanks a zillion, mom!) I’ve been having a lot of fun figuring out the nooks and crannies of the Mac OS, and having bouts of frustration with the keyboard–it works, but you have to apply more prssure to the keys than I would otherwise have thought, in addition to just getting the hang of using the narrower notebook keyboard. It’s been a learning experience, and in the best way: driven by curiosity, not mandated by function. Of course, in order to know how to do certain things–use certain functions–I have to explore, but the point remains.
Having recently read Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, I’ve been sort of theorizing this experience. One point that SJ makes is that one function of complex media is just this search/explore pattern, process that, Johnson argues, equips cultural consumers with a set of skills based on conjecture, hypothesis, and deductive reasoning. SJ locates this in games, but it might be extended to at least one part of the technology learning process. The Mac came without bulky manuals and guides and whosits and howtos (rather disconcerting at first for this longtime PC user), and that provokes an interesting thought. (Well, interesting to me at least.) Apple seems to have moved away from the PC-model of learning–the don’t send you the weighty tomes that I’m sure Dell, HP, Compaq would. Instead, the interface in the Mac OS seems to encourage the sort of exploration I’ve been enjoying the last thirtysix hours or so (not consecutively).
As an invention strategy, then, we might ask how to make exploratory texts. Here, of course, I don’t mean the familiar exploratory essay, but rather a text that allows for a reader and a writer to try things, play with them, follow options and connections. This is not a new goal, of course, since many of the new media rhetorics we’re familiar with seem to have just this ideal as their guiding goal. But it may make for an interesting assignment: ask students to design their own OSs–not to a computer, necessarily, but to a space, perhaps, or a text of their own choosing. That is, if the OS is the basis for how we interact with with the computer, we might ask students to apply that notion to another moment of interaction: How do you interact, say, with Wayne State’s campus? What information is necessary to make one’s way from Parking Structure #2 to State Hall: what options are you presented with, what paths are open to you, and what happens should you follow one path rather than another? I’m not sure this a great assignment or anything; in this bare bones description, it sounds like the lamest Choose Your Own Adventure book ever published: “If you decide to give a dollar to the Lyndon LaRouche volunteers, go to page 72.” But there is something of an interest here–I think I’m edging to what I’ve seen described as the Deleuzian notions of “drift,” but since I’m behind on my Deleuze, I can’t sy for sure.
Something else I’ve been thinking about, invention wise. I’ve not written much about the “dictionaries” project of late, because it was sort of stagnant for a while. But recently, two ideas for possible ways to make this syllabus work:
As I’m envisioning it right now at least, the semester would revolve round two projects. The first would be based on neologisms; the “necessary words” assignment. In a nutshell, the goal of this project, as the name indicates, would be to create a list of necessary words to describe cultural phenomena. Students would be asked to first, coin the word, and then to explain its meaning and to suggest why it’s a necessary word–what is the exigence, then, for proposing the new word. The research would be based upon finding scenes in writing (or elsewhere) that are described by this word. So, for example, one that I’ve come up with is indiegestion, whose roots lie in “indie” (as in music) and “indigestion”. Indiegestion describes the moment an indie band reaches a certain point of oversaturation, and even those writers and critics who championed them initially grow weary of them. So, to show this through research, I’d locate the early reviews of a band’s work, and then find the follow-up scene where (ideally) the same writer describes a frustration or disappointment with the same band. This wouldn’t be the strategy for every neologism, of course: the methods of example would depend on the word in question. So, why do I like this assignment–what theory is behind it? Well, using Rice’s Rhetoric as a starting point, I could point to features of commutation & appropriation as at least two new media rhetorics at work here. The tutor text for this project would be McFedrie’s Word Spy: The Word Lover’s Guide to Modern Culture, which is a somewhat satiric (but nonetheless valuable) guide to media-derived neologisms, compiled both through observation and invention. In addition to Rice’s work, I could point to other new media theorists (or, like Derrida, who have influenced new media studies) whose work abounds in neologisms and wordplay–as Rice uses Burroghs, for example. Another point such a project might make, at least peripherally, is that the new media (or at least, the media that are still new to us) need new words to describe new experiences: just three years ago, the noun/verb “YouTube/youtube” would have been gibberish–actually, “Google/google” makes even more sense there on the same grounds. Another, more concrete point about invention is that since students are inventing their own words, they also need to invent the appropriate criteria for its demonstration. . .thus, they’re being called upon, as in the mystory/discourse assignments, to invent as they invent–both the text in question and the rules or creating that text.
The second project is based on the text that Rice recommended, Unspun. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s similar to Raymond Williams’ Keywords, except instead of terms central to critical theory, the terms investigated here are all tech related (there is some overlap–Williams might make good addenda to this text). My idea here for this project is somewhat more vague . . . at present, it’s just called the “demonstration” project. I’ve been thinking about ways to ask students to demonstrate how some of these words circulate in different ways through the web or through discourse. For example, one of the essays in Unspun is “Ideology.” My idea for what a student interested in ideology might do is to create a series of wikis or blogs or sites that mimic/echo different ideological perspectives found on the web or elsewhere. So, for example, you might have a student set up both a religious fundmentalist blog, using the blog genre to compile fundie sites online and offer comment on them; in turn, the student would also have to create a blog/wiki for a counter-sitem, working the same way but taking the opposite stance. Okay, so that example is not the greatest. But one of the other essays is “authorship,” which might yield itself to a richer project. I envision a student creating a series of sites that consider different dimenions of a single author: biographical information & influence on his or her work; the ethos created by an author through the work he or she produces/d; and the Web imprint of an author: how an author is presented/hailed/critiqued in online discourse. This is just one question about authorship that the Web might lead us to, of course: there remains the question of who students (and instructors) become once we engage with the phenomenon of online authorship as well–but how to suggest a project for that question escapes me thus far. More reading/thinking are in line. Anyway, the point I want to achieve with this project is not to have students just write about online authorship or ideology–to use them as topoi–but to demonstrate these scenes of contention, to perform them. Again, the debt to Rice’s work is obvious, but as a side note, I’m pleased with these ideas at least to the extent that I think/hope they show I’ve started to embrace the Vitanzan/Ricean dictum: Theory Is Practice: to have my pedagogy be informed by theory, and to to have my theory be enabled by pedagogy. To think, as Rice might say, rhetorically.
metamoment
I’ve decided that–while I still like the blog being primarily a space for textual reflection and theoretical workouts–I should on occasion devote more time to writing about personal things. Of course, that phrasing suggests theory etc. is not personal and that it’s just something I do, not part of who I am. Which is silly: I’m a theorist. Or, at least, aspire to be so.
So, faithful reader(s), why the decision? Well, the blog I read most attentively is Yellow Dog, and although Jeff’s theory/pedagogy/discipline/profession posts are always great, I often enjoy the little slivers of personal info that find their way to the blog. Again–the t/p/d/p2 stuff is, I’m sure, “personal” to Jeff as well. But I like those moments, and they’ve been echoed in certain ways by Collin’s recent Barthesian ”Summer of Personal Reflection” theme on his blog (until recent undisclosed events have made it difficult for C to blog), and the floating webmemes like “7/8 random things” that encourage bloggers toward similar “personal” scenes of invention.
So I’m introducing the new, semiregular feature called the “metamoment” which is devoted just to those scenes where the object is solely or primarily myself–again, with the caveat of the personal/professional divide being one of those dichotomies that Derrida warns against (and Ulmer and others have tried to deconstruct or work against through mystorical invention). This decision also finds its roots in last week’s chat with Jessica–one topic was whether, in the process of professionalization, one feels some sense of “authentic self” slipping way. For me, no–I’ve always been into theory and abstraction, and the professionalizaton merely gives me an appropriate database to draw from in expanding those interests. But one way to destablize that risk of losing authentic selfhood–ill-defined, true, and troubled as well by questions of essential/discursive subjectivity–might be to offer–against the usual concerns of theory, rhetoric, pedagogy that dominate the blog–insights into myself. And, to show I’ve been reading Jeff’s book (why I still kiss ass when he’s at a new university, I don’t know, haha.) to juxtapose (personal and theory) and commutate (blog becoming site of personality rather than theory).
I’m nearly done with both Jeff’s book and Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, which by chance I’ve found myself reading along one another. There are echoes btw the two, and when time comes to write about that, I’ll try to address the two together . Also, I have yet to do the full Derrida post (where in god’s name to start?) and the post of Lackoff/Turner (easier to start, but not much to say). Also like to do one in response to the aforementioned music post from Jeff’s blog. I guess that prompts something else: “Metamoment” will be category for those such posts, whereas category “meta” will remain the category for blogging about blogging. So I guess that makes this a metametamoment?
Lastly, a cry for help. Very generously, my mater has decided to purchase a laptop for my upcoming birthday. I’ve pretty much decided on a PC (sorry, my Mac-lovin’ pals) ‘cos I’m a glutton for punishment, if you believe the recurring Mac vs. PC ad campaign. But most new PCs I’ve checked out have the new Windows Vista OS, and I dunno much about it–I’ve heard the folks at Microsoft are still having a lot of problems with proggies not running on it and such, so I’m hesitant to choose a Vista-based PC if that’s the case. So, here’s my cry: if you know aught about Vista, pro or con, drop a line or two; or, if you want to plead your case on Steve Jobs’ behalf and convince me to come over to Mac, take that up. Why not? I’ve already abandoned lit studies for rhetoric, right? I’ll just do whatever you kooky folks tell me to do.
Tentative Sources for "Dictionaries" Project
Now, some tentative sources for . . . calm yourselves . . . the “dictionaries” project.
- Hayakawa, S. I. and Alan R. Hayakawa. 1940. Language in Thought and Action. Fifth edition. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1990.
- McFedries, Paul. Word Spy: The Word Lover’s Guide to Modern Culture. New York: Broadway Books, 2004.
- West, Paul. The Secret Lives of Words. New York: Harcourt, 2000.
- Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.
This post is more for archival purposes: If I don’t get a chance to read these in the next few month or so (well, “read” in a very loose sense–skim is more accurate), this way I’ll have a record of the texts I want to check out again.
If anything sticks out as being obsolete or roundly discredited, please let me know.
Responsibilities of Rhetoric
First, a blurb from FoolsCap 1.0:
Heidegger mentions Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the first practical study of being-together (god I hate H’s neologisms). If we can think of networks and network theory as also a study of being-together, how can we use that link to Aristotle to construct/perform a rhetoric that is inherently and essentially of, in, and, for the network?
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to piece together some sort of proposal for the RSA conference next year now that submissions info is finally up. I was trying to think through things I’ve read that might make good starting points for a presentation, good scenes of inquiry that might fit the theme for the conference, “The Responsibilities of Rhetoric,” and had thus far been stymied. Then I remembered this tiny phrase of Heidegger’s about Aristotle’s Rhetoric and I now think I may have the germ of an idea.
So, the question above is sort of phrased in response to Rice’s HASTAC presentation from a few months back, but I think this (almost passing) reference to Aristotle remains a good starting point. Setting aside questions of the network for a moment, here are some corollary questions that might make sense to ask for a possible RSA submission:
- If we accept Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, does that mean that rhetoric is inherently imbued with ethical/civic obligations?
- If so, what are they?
- Pedagogically, if we then agree that rhetoric is/should be an ethical practice, how do we teach ethical rhetoric without becoming moralists? There is a fine distinction here . . . .
- And, in particular, how we teach ethical rhetoric (assuming we commit ourselves to do so) in digital writing spaces? Do/would rhetoric’s ethical obligations shift as we move from one set of literacy practices–print–into another–the digital?
- What is the distinction–if there is one–between claiming that rhetoric has “responsibilities” or that it has “civic-ethical obligations?”
- Much of Plato’s work, esp. in those passages where rhetorike is condemned/maligned as techne, don’t suggest much responsibility of rhetoric at all (in fact, it is the irresponsibility of rhetoric that Plato seems most perturbed by). But just a generation later, Aristotle (if we accept Heidegger’s reading) can imply that rhetoric does confer ethical/civic responsibilities/obligations on those who use it. How do we account for that shift?
As always, advice or reading suggestions, feedback of any kind, appreciated.
Derridone
As the oh-so-clever post title implies, I have at long last finished the Grammatology. In coming weeks, I’ll troll through my annotations and offer some specific comments, questions, and ideas in response to choice bits, but for now just some initial afterglow smatterings:
- As the first major theory text I’ve read under my own direction–i.e., not for a seminar–I think I’ve done okay handling Derrida. That is, without claiming any sort of expertise or mastery of nuance, I feel confident that I was able to follow Derrida through most of his text, only losing the gist on a few occasions. Not that I could, you know, immediately write some well-assembled article in response to Grammatology, but I could probably hash out the salient details to someone interested.
- Speaking of the hashing out . . . Although, as stated, I think I have an adequate handle on the text, at times I sorely wished that I were reading it in seminar, if only to make sure that, yes, I was understanding it okay. Not just that sort of hermeneutic validation, but also to play my own response ideas off someone, to see if they make sense in terms of someone else’s understanding of the Grammatology.
- Of course, the blogosphere is sort of like the biggest dang seminar ever. So shut up, Mike.
- At one point, I figured it out: it took me about six minutes per page reading through the text. Of course, this also accounts for underlining and annotating too, but let’s do the math: six minutes per page at 316 pages comes out to . . . 31.6 hours or 1.316 days.
- That’s ideal time, of course: in reality, since I started this back in June, it’s more like 50+ odd days. Ah well.
Another thing I’ve been meaning to post on and haven’t yet made time to do so . . . again, not a full post yet but some vague sketchings before full post is written.
I’ve volunteered to teach a proposed standard 1020 syllabus in the fall for JP and EB; I like what JP has described about the syllabus so far and it gives me a break from the Text Book syllabus which faithful readers will know I’m growing weary of. (Still like the book, but I need to go through it and find some new things to do with it. . .I’ll probably keep the “Discourse” assigment, but I’m rethinking the other two. More on that later as well.) The goal of my teaching the proposed syllabus is to be able to offer some feedback to JP/EB and to this fall’s 6010 students, so it looks like a happy circumstance for all involved.
In the meantime, though, I’ve got this idea floating about my little mind for a possible 1020 course in the future . . . but I need to do some more research and some more thinking before putting it together (not that research doesn’t involve thought. . .). The bare bones of the idea is as follows:
- I’ve been reading a collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays in the downtime between bits of Derrida. One of the pieces compiled herein is 2001 review DFW wrote of a new usage dictionary of American English (available online here), and at one point in his review DFW introduces a quite lengthy and (to my eyes) theoretically sound critique of dictionaries being instruments of ideological power, as they dictate (literally) the official, approved uses of language.
- Which, you know, I thought was a great point. DFW goes on to outline two differing schools of thought about usage is approved/authorized, how language is fundamentally political and how authorized language is thus a complex epistemic patchwork intimately connected to questions of ideology and personal politics.
- In turn, more thought. Devoted readers will knowI’ve been toying with questions of rhetoric, metaphor, writing, and epistemology of late, and this DFW piece seemed to stitch all those pieces together (less so metaphor, true). In particular, the thought that I had was this–a question really: How does the issue of approved/authorized/legitimized language change when we move to writing online?
- I’m not the first to ask this question, I know, nor do I claim to be able to supply anything resembling an eloquent answer. But one thing that I’ve always found fascinating about the Web is how quickly Web and Internet memes become self-reflexive and self-critical: the recent explosion of I Can Has Cheezburger (even popping up in Time a couple weeks back) is an interesting example. And to a large extent, these memes and meanings are user-regulated, that is, linguistic authority becomes established through a consensual communal epistemic process rather thanbeing decreed accurate or correct by an authorized editor/editorial staff. (Is this what folksonomy is about? I need to do more reading. . .)
- And too, the Web allows for the investigation of dictionaries of non-mainstream, “other” discourses. While Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and The Free Dictionary are more or less still committed to the traditional goals of dictionary/encyclopedic practices (although again through community oversight rather than editorial control in the case of the wikis). the Web also has sites like the The Urban Dictionary, which–even though it may be more a humor site than an authoritative one–we might argue is an attempt to legitimate or authroize “other” discourses–here, obviously, the “urban” discourse.
- So then, the goals of the (thus-far hypothetical) 1020 curse would be to look at the way language use is regulated between print and digital writing spaces. In addition to those questions, we might look at the way our understanding of lexia are shaped by the names given them: do we think of an “Urban Dictionary” the same way we do a “Collegiate Dictionary?”
- The course is sounding pretty stuffed already, but another concern would be to look at how words are linked to one another–the sort of Derridean move, right? Every signifier is a signified and vice-versa. And then, building from there, to ask how dictionaries either reinforce or undermine the system of language by looking at how they connect words and meanings to one another.
- As it stands now, the writing project would be one that builds through the whole semester as students assemble their own dictionaries of personal usage. The goal would be start with a few terms and maybe examine how students already understand the same word/image in multiple discourses (the mystorical move there) and then to keep adding terms and building links through the semester until students had assembled their dictionaries. The assignments would be done in the wiki, and ideally I’d like to maybe have one part of the project just be focused on having students establish links between their entries and other students’ entries. The final assignment then, might be to write a forward (DFW makes much use of a very close reading of the forward/preface/introduction of the dictionary in his essay) that explains the student’s own guidelines for inclusion and theories about language use and authorization.
Whew. That was far more than I meant to write at present. I find this idea exciting but I’m sort of stumped about how to develop it further. Proposed readings, so far: the DFW essay, possibly the foreward DFW makes use of (if it’s still in print/current), and maybe the forewards from other dictionaries as well. The project proposed above is heavily indebted to Rice’s “cool” projects and pedaglossary assignment from 6010 (which, in turn, seem inspired by Raymond Williams’ Keywords).
So, please, faithful readers, any advice, feedback, or resources you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Let me know if you think this could work, or if I’m completely off my chump. If you have a good article, essay, or book in mind that might fit neatly into this project, please please please let me know. I’m really excited about this idea, but I think there’s one chunk missing that I can’t identify yet. . . .