Writing

CW05: Materializing Resistance

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Economics, Writing

Apologies for taking so long to put up my last panel notes — kind of got a whole bunch of different things going on right now. I was also kind of anxious because, to be honest, it was one of the best panels I saw; Jim Ridolfo and David Sheridan and Tony Michel fit their presentations together really well thematically speaking; but I also liked it because I saw so much in it that intersected with my research interests and offered me some new and startling insights. All three focused, in one way or another, with the intersection of multimodal discourses with the discourse of the civic, as their panel’s subtitle (“Digital Rhetoric as a Civic Technology”) might demonstrate, but all three were very careful to acknowledge a sophisticated awareness of the many problems associated with the privileging of civic discourse, which made me happy — one so rarely sees, in our field, an acknowledgement that the public sphere was initially theorized as a bourgeois space.

Jim’s presentation, “Rhetorical Veloooocity!!!: The Economics of the Press Advisory and Tactics of Activist Delivery,” dealt with his work at Michigan State with the Worker Rights Consortium, composing activist press advisories with the knowledge and intent that the language of those advisories may be appropriated by the press. Basically, using the example of the sequence of rhetorical production and circulation of these releases, Jim demonstrated the deep connections between rhetorical delivery, re-seen economic theories — of production, distribution, consumption, appropriation, and re-production — and activist strategies for economic change. In fact, Jim argued, the rhetorical canon of delivery can be theorized through the lens of economy, including — in particular — the rhetorical situations in which the mass delivery, redistribution and re-appropriation of writings are the rhetorical objective. In the context of distribution defined as a tactic of delivery planned for economic circulation, Jim’s term “rhetorical velocity” refers to an accelerated delivery tactic (or cycle?) fostering the appropration of texts. He offered the example of a “News Advisory” sent to local papers concerning a protest event that used the words “students will dance vigorously”: two newspapers that actually sent reporters did not use those words, but the paper that did not send a reporter — only a photographer — described the event as “vigorous dancing,” and offered no reporter’s name on the news piece that ran following the event. Jim then showed a timeline demonstrating how quickly that cycle of appropriation operated: press release on Tuesday, event on Thursday, the appropriated-language news piece on Friday. In his conclusions, Jim compared the activist economy, the economy of the reporter, and the economy of media, all on immediate, near, and long-term scales, and noted that these three economies overlap in the ways different parties construct the economic value of a distributed text. Brilliant stuff, and this too-brief description doesn’t do it justice.

David Sheridan’s presentation on “Materializing Ethics and Multimodal Civic Rhetoric” described how different forms of production and semiotic affordances can open up shifting civic opportunities, working from the perspectives of the different but intersecting axes of understanding rhetoric as a material practice and rhetoric as an ethical practice. (And I know that sentence is a huge, mangled tangle of David’s language; I’m hoping he’ll set me straight.) In other words: how do material considerations intersect with rhetorical ethics?

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John Lovas

preterite Writing

John Lovas passed away yesterday. I was one of those people who visited his weblog regularly and was concerned that the recent quiet there was uncharacteristic of John. John was outgoing and outspoken, a sociable and generous colleague, scholar, mentor, and friend. Like many, I’m sure, I’m startled by death’s swift pace: one colleague had been working to edit a collection of writing in John’s honor for his retirement, and I’m saddened to know that John won’t see it. John’s weblog posts, his mentoring and activism, his presence at conferences and in our disciplinary literature, his comments here and elsewhere: I’ll sorely miss them all.

But if you go back through John’s archives, as I did this afternoon, you realize that the things John had to say — the insights he so often offered — still stand, in conversations that we’re still having.

I’ll stop with that, because my eyes are misting up.

CW05: Copyright Anxiety

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics, Openness, Politics, Writing

Dánielle Nicole DeVoss, Nancy Allen, and Stephanie Vie gave a presentation titled “Copy-Right Anxiety: File Distribution and Intellectual Property,” and I’m not sure what the hyphenation means — maybe foregrounding the question of whether it’s ethical or right to copy? I didn’t hear them explain it, but that certainly didn’t detract from the quality of their presentations. Dánielle’s focused on using examples of video pastiche to theorize some implications of new media convergence, while Nancy’s had a deeply pedagogical focus on the implications of open source practices for the classroom, and Stephanie’s examined the intersection of students’ attitudes about peer-to-peer file-sharing and their attitudes about plagiarism; the three, taken together, sparked a lively discussion and composed a sort of collective matrix of insight about the nature of intellectual property online.

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CW 2005: Drupal Workshop

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

This isn’t a review of the excellent all-day session on using Drupal as a writing course community content management system, but just a way to say thanks to Charlie Lowe, Jim Kalmbach, Bradley Bleck, and Tim Lindgren (as well as some helpful long-distance commentary from Samantha Blackmon and Clancy Ratliff) for a great workshop. Kieran Lal assisted as well with some tutoring and a short and impressive presentation on CivicSpace, the reincarnation (?) of the DeanSpace distributed open source content management system designed specifically for the needs of a grassroots political campaign. I learned lots and lots and lots today — my brain hurts — and I’m looking forward to trying out some of Drupal’s way-beyond-just-blogging capabilities with my students in the fall.

My presentation’s tomorrow morning. (And, uh, I could still really use some help with a title.)

Entitlement

preterite Asides, Writing

Well, today’s been a really, really long day, but I got here in one piece, and of course I already miss Tink and Zeugma. Thanks to some excellent feedback from my co-presenter, I’ve managed to trim substantial fat from my presentation for Panel B.5, “Self Representation and Agency in a Web of Commercialization,” although I’m hoping our audience might not notice the spots where I’ve, er, pretended to insert a transition. Or inserted a pretend transition. Or something like that.

What I really need to work on is coming up with a title that isn’t awful. “Paris and Me” is kind of a textual nod to Harriet Malinowitz’s super-smart JAC piece “David and Me,” with said textual nod’s glaring problem being that my piece isn’t about me at all. (Although there are some interesting things about the commodification of identity in Malinowitz’s piece.) So then I thought maybe something like “Branding Payton Manning,” but realized the lame attempt at rhyme was, more than anything else, kinda dorky, and besides, a title like that conjures up rather unsavory mental images.

I’d be grateful for title help from anybody who’s read the two parts of my original draft. This is the first presentation I’ve ever written that has a shoe fetish, so I’m thinking as far as themes for the title go, well, it’s gotta be the shoes. Ideas?

Paris and Me, Part 2

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Economics, Education, Writing

Digital reproducibility profoundly alters the relationships between production, consumption, the individual, and the economy. As Zuboff and Maxmin note, “the individuation of consumption [. . .] means that people no longer want to bend to the antiquated rule of business” but rather “want to be the subjects of a new commerce in which they are recognized as the origins of a new form of economic value [. . .] realized in individual space” (11). A careful reading of Raymond Williams, I think, gives considerable historical nuance to Foucault’s concerns with the nature of power (particularly in the economic sense), and while I’m certainly not enough of a new-economy fool as to dismiss Foucault’s work, I do think that context is important — and Foucault was writing in the context of an economy of mass production and consumption, when it was impossible to imagine any other situation. As a discipline, composition is in similar straits today: our big names, our super-scholars, are baby boomers. They grew up with three superpowers, three car manufacturers, and three TV networks. When Zuboff and Maxmin contend that “Rather than being diluted, the value of information can increase as it is distributed, allowing more people to do more with more, as it enables collaboration and coordination across space and time” via digital technologies (293), it’s genuinely startling to such scholars, turning the conventional economic wisdom, with its assumptions about scarcity and value, on its head.

Former Harvard president Derek Bok has observed, among others, that many academics seem to want to construct higher education as a space somehow outside of or immune to economic interests. This is rather foolish when we understand the economy as involving “making, holding, using, sharing, exchanging, and accumulating valued objects and services” (Gudeman 1), but perhaps not so foolish when we understand the widespread commonsensical notion that economics=money. Indeed, economist Colin Williams suggests in “A Critical Evaluation of the Commodification Thesis” that “The view that predominates is that the overwhelming trajectory of economic development is towards a commodified economy. Although the extent, pace and unevenness of this process is open to debate [. . .], the process of commodification itself is not” (527). Williams’s contention about the unquestionable trajectory towards commodification sounds very much like the transcendent and agentless power Gibson-Graham suggest contemporary views ascribe to the economy, as when they point out in “The Diverse Economy: Constructing a Language Politics” that there has been a “shift from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society” and that this shift has relied upon “a hegemonic move through which representations of economy have slipped from their locations in discourse and landed ‘on the ground,’ in the ‘real,’ not just separate from, but outside of society” (1).

Bloggers and writing teachers know, not just in theory but in practice, that value is contextual and anything but monolithic.

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Razor Wire Writing

preterite Politics, Writing

Elvera, you’ve taken the lead, and you and Cathy and Danielle and Mary and Kristol and everyone else who’s commented have helped to make this a place where people can fight back against T-Netix. My brother is in the Maryland prison system at Jessup, and your comments and cooperation and collaborative research are doing so much more for him, and likewise for your families and loved ones, than any of us could have done alone. I’m glad we can all help one another out, and I’m hoping that your faces are some of the faces I see when we’re in the visiting room. With these comments, we’ve got a huge resource of information that we can use to help other people in similar situations, and the more we speak up, the more power we’ll have.

As a graduate student who studies rhetoric, I’ll observe that the curious thing is that every one of us — everyone who comments here, whether on the despicable behavior of T-Netix or on other topics — is talking to multiple audiences. We know tattoos and we know discourse communities. Hermeneutics and lock-in. The beef and the critique. A Thousand Plateaus; three forty on the bench.

So let’s talk mutual interpellation, specially you folks who might want not to venture outside teaching writing. You want literacy? You want a discourse community? We got your discourse community right here, in the populations of the prisons. So talk to me about Discipline and Punish as rhetorical reality rather than literary metaphor.

Talk to me about security-glass literacies.

Comic Strips

preterite Friday Fun, Writing

I’m finding out that it’s really hard to draw passengers in a car. Working on it, but probably no comics-style Friday Non-Dissertational tonight, despite my efforts. Maybe tomorrow.

Back to the books of Will Eisner and Scott McCloud for guidance. And practice — with the pen, with perspective, with pacing — dammit, practice. (Yes, this is Friday, and so my day to be dissertation-free, to have fun: and what do I do? I find something else to agonize over. Still, I like drawing them panels, even if they’re just practice, even if they never find a place in the narrative arc.)

You’ve figured out, at least, that page 1 was a zoom-in (as evidenced by the black circle in the second panel) from overhead — and so that the action of the next page will take place inside that Mustang.

Personal Branding

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Economics, Metadissertating, Writing

I’ve had this idea I’ve been working at from different angles for a few weeks; an idea that feels like the germ of the idea that’s at the heart of my dissertation’s final chapter. In Chapter 1, I argue that the discipline of composition has a really difficult time talking explicitly about economic issues, and that teaching writing with computers is one of the big places in composition that makes economic inequality really, really visible. So I go through chapters on class and economics, and come back to the economics of computers and composition at the end, where I talk about how open source perspectives can help to de-fang the effects of economic commodification in the writing classroom. But I haven’t been able to connect those issues all that well to class, until lately, especially with some prodding from a colleague over dinner tonight.

At Wealth Bondage, CEO Candidia Cruikshanks rages that The Happy Tutor is trying to steal her “brand equity” — said equity, of course, embodied in all that attitude and oh my those boots. Naomi Klein recently argued elsewhere (can’t find the link now — help me out?) that personal identity is itself an act of branding. And I’ve argued that class is the point of articulation between economics and identity. What I’ve neglected to investigate, in my considerations of the (economic?) use value of personal writing, are the ways in which identity/self/persona in and of itself, as enacted in writing, takes on both commodified and non-commodified (market and non-market; monetized and non-monetized) economic value. At Wealth Bondage — perhaps as nowhere else — we see personae qua personae ventured, offered, exchanged, and rejected in market, feudal, slave, and gift transactions. So — rhetoricians, compositionists, bloggers — what are the values of the personal selves you compose and enact on your weblogs? Some of those values are easily commodified: technorati, blogshares, comments; promotion, hiring, tenure. So, too, for students: my professor tells me this weblog entry is worth a C minus. But what about those other types of economic transactions; the non-commodified ones?

And how might those non-commodified values shift when we move from considering the various blog personae of teachers to considering the various blog personae of students?

Personal, Political, Economic

preterite Economics, Openness, Politics, Writing

Geoffrey Nunberg just did a fine piece on NPR about the discourse of the “personal” versus the “private” and the accompanying rhetorical concerns of ownership. His piece stands as good evidence why copyfighters — of whom, yes, I’ll finally admit to being one — need to be thinking about the work of both Peter Elbow and J. K. Gibson-Graham, about how the act of engagement with ongoing discussions about intellectual property constitutes the seam or suture joining personal, political, and economic concerns.

Sorry I’m late.