The Refrigerator

What does one do with the last two tablespoons or so of Crab Mornay from Friday night that didn’t fit into the puff pastry shells and remain in the refrigerator? A rhetorical question: in the spirit of the local Fat City restaurant that offers a phenomenal lobster club sandwich, I toasted two slices of whole wheat, melted some butter, diced some mushrooms and onions, grated some more Swiss, and made myself a Crab Mornay grilled cheese sandwich. And washed it down with the last of the fantastic grassy razor-sharp fruit-bomb Mulderbosch Sauvignon Blanc and Deutsche Grammophon’s recordings of the String Sextets of Johannes Brahms. Would that all leftovers were this good.

While the Brahms features another Aronowitz — Cecil — on viola, I’m taking a short break from Stanley Aronowitz tonight to check out a recent Computers and Composition article: namely, Jim Porter’s “Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter’s Tale”, from 2003’s issue 20. (Those who follow the journal in question will note that I’ve been silent on the topic of Jeffrey Grabill’s recent article. There’s a reason for this: more on the topic sometime soon.) The questions at the heart of Porter’s article are some of the same ones I’ve been asking:

“How much do these computer-based writing technologies really matter in terms of their effects on writing? Is the computer changing writing in truly substantive, even revolutionary ways? Or is it simply one more writing tool, like the pencil, that aids the writing process but doesn’t revolutionize it?” (384)

It made me happy to see Porter resisting instrumentalist techno-determinism, as I’ve been trying to do myself, and as I think too few people in the academy — and in society in general — attempt to do: according to Porter, “The first problem that we need to address is technological instrumentalism, a binary view that separates technology from humans, that sees them as separate entities” (385). To get beyond this instrumentalism, we have to “Understand technology not as a static set of devices, but as a system evolving over time, including human and non-human agents in a developmental dance. The revolution lies in use, which guides technological innovation” (385). Now, on this point about “use“, I’ll disagree a bit with Porter, and I think he even contradicts himself a bit, since earlier he contends that “the computer per se is not the revolutionary technology”, but “the networked computer and the social/rhetorical contexts it creates” are what’s “revolutionary” (384). In other words, it’s not so much use as it is the contexts for that use, particularly since a focus on use takes us back towards bad old instrumentalism.

But when we look at context, according to Porter, “writing is not only the words on the page, but it also concerns mechanisms for production (for example, the writing process, understood cognitively, socially, and technologically); mechanisms for distribution or delivery (for example, media); invention, exploration, research, methodology, and inquiry procedures; and questions of audience, persuasiveness, and impact”, to the point where “writing technologies play a huge role — especially in terms of production (process) and distribution (delivery)” (386). As you might imagine, by the time I read this passage, I was crouched atop the refrigerator, waving one fist in the air, yelling, “Yes! Yes! Yes! GO!” and scaring the hell out of the cats. While the Brahms and the wine may have had something to do with my behavior, Porter’s ideas in this passage seem to do a wonderful job of getting us away from the conventional economic (both Marxian and neoclassical) understandings of technology as an instrument easily separable from its contexts and effects.

Instead, we are intimately bound to technology, and not only on the individually instrumental level — my car, my computer, my refrigerator — but on the bodily and community and societal levels. What Porter calls the “posthumanist approach” to technology points towards “a theory that focuses on writing as not simply the activity of an individual writing or the isolated writing classroom. . . but that looks closely at the socialized writing dynamic and the conglomerate rhetorical dynamic of readers, writers, and users and their impact on society” (388). I’m happy to think I perceive the germs of such a perspective showing in the recent New York Times article on weblogs and its focus on the social aspects of technology: maybe more people are starting to move beyond the instrumental perspective?