rhetoric, writing, and technology

Some CHC Blogs

I've been meaning to post a couple of links to blog discussions about CHC.

• Schizzes and Flows
• CompSpot (plus a follow up)

I'll try to keep up with what I come across and post it here. If any body comes across something, let me know.

I've also been thinking about whether I should respond to these kinds of discussions or not. Part of me hates to insert the author into them. In the end, you can't legislate lines of flight.

Posted by: bhawk at 13:24 | link | comments
vitalism, reviews

Arlington School

Robert Leston just started a social networking site through Ning for The Arlington School. We've thrown around the school idea for a while (first ironically mentioned by Hans Kellner). If everybody signs up this could really help me with a social networking/mapping article I've been thinking aobut.

Posted by: bhawk at 16:36 | link | comments (3)
whatever, announcements, texas

Interview Podcast

At CCCC, Thomas and I did short interviews with Victor for a Podcast "station" they are starting at Clemson called Knowing, Doing, and Making Digital for the RCID program. Here's the static link for introductory blog post. Or, go straight to Clemson's iTunesU site. You can click on visitor/guest login and look for the KDM Digital icon. You'll need to have iTunes on your computer to download the files. The initial questions are posted. The second questions should be coming in a few days. Each file is about 10 minutes. If you subscribe to the series, the rest of the sessions will upload automatically into your iTunes accounts once they are published.

Posted by: bhawk at 16:36 | link | comments (1)
interview, vitalism

Interview

While at Cs I did a re/interview with VV on my book _A Counter-History of Composition_ that will be posted as a podcast on his site at Clemson. But to prep for it, I got Scot Barnett and Adam Koehler to give me some sample questions to respond to. Since the podcast interview turned out quite differently, I thought I'd throw out the initial Q&As here. Thanks to Scot and Adam for great Qs.

1. Expressivism
2. Pedagogy
3. Research
4. Indeterminacy
5. Institutionality
6. Future Work

Posted by: bhawk at 00:41 | link | comments (3)
interview, vitalism

Q6 - Future Work

6. And my last question (and a little unfair of a question): if you had to re-write the book using more of the complexity you carve out so nicely at the end of the book, what would it look like? In other words, what would you write about next and how would the methods you create shape that work?

Well, this is the big issue. I think the book lays the ground and justification for this line of thinking pretty well, but it doesn't go nearly far enough into the details of the possible relationships between complexity theory and rhetorical theory. This is where the second book would need to go. One possibility would be to flesh out the initial connections I make between Heuristics and Schemata, Dissoi-Logoi and Polarities, Rhetorical Situation and Complex Adaptive Systems, Kairos and Emergence, Logos and Network, Ethos and Screen, Pathos and Affect, and Process and Evolution. Each could become its own chapter with much more detail about the complexity theory and accompanying applications to texts, technologies, and situations. This is a pretty tall order as well though. Each of those chapters could be its own book if pushed to its limits. But certainly more could be said than what little room I had to give these connections in the book.

Another option would be too focus more on mapping complex situations and the rhetorical and ethics effects of those representations. This would be a different kind of book but it would have to focus on developing theoretical connections and accompanying applications as well. Along with the professional writing work I've been reading a lot of Latour, whose model of sociology matches up nicely to Deleuze and complexity theory. There are a number of possible connections there. But really my book is a call for others to extend a develop the category of complex vitalism and it could go in so many directions and apply to so many kinds of contexts that it is hard to imagine what it all might look like. And this is really what is exciting to me about the whole project. I really don't see it as my project but the project of a whole network of people. And the conditions of possibility created by these networks carry the potential for so many lines of flight.

Posted by: bhawk at 00:33 | link | comments
interview, vitalism

Q5 - Institutionality

5. How would an institution assess such an emergent and complex sense of writing? What large-scale administrative revisions need to be made in order to encourage the kind of pedagogical environments you describe at the end of your book?

Assessment is not an area I focus on. The book of course is interested in the other end of the spectrum—invention. This issue, I suppose, would be whether you want to assess the inventional process or the outcomes of invention. One could still have a traditional text as one of the outcomes of a complex classroom situation and assess that in fairly traditional ways. Or, teachers could develop ulterior criteria to assess the maps of the situations made along the way. One could develop criteria in line with Ulmer's heuretic and assess how well students followed some of his rhetorical principles, but such a move would run somewhat counter to the inventional spirit of Ulmer's work. In a professional writing situation, one could assess knowledge maps across the positive or negative effects it creates in the rhetorical situation. But this of course would require rethinking sets of criteria and new institutional practices for observing such effects.

Perhaps most interestingly, the biggest institutional critique that would logically follow from my book is the labor practices associated with composition in the university. More than being aimed at students' needing to change their practices, the book asks teachers to change their approaches to thinking about teaching writing. For teachers to be more attentive to the rhetorical situations they create and engage they would: 1) need more time to focus on teaching—teaching 4/4 would be too large of a constraint to get into the complexity of each individual classroom situation; and 2) more teachers would need explicit degrees in rhetoric and composition. Some background in literature or even an MFA wouldn't be enough. Having PhD students that you have trained to specifically think about these issues would be better, but even a couple of introductory classes for TAs wouldn't go far enough either. But despite these major constraints, I think we can move forward toward thinking in this direction and begin to reap small rewards.

Posted by: bhawk at 00:32 | link | comments
interview, vitalism

Q4 - Indeterminacy

4. If composition studies has been informed largely by an instrumental characterization of rhetoric, and your attention to Heidegger helps us see a less instrumental and more complex understanding of rhetoric, particularly techne, how would you say composition studies could account for (and productively draw from) the inherent indeterminacy of the rhetorical act? In other words, does the sort of complexity you illustrate regarding the uses of techne help us re-examine the productivity of indeterminacy? And would it be vital for composition studies to work with such a (new) understanding of indeterminacy? If so, how would it be possible for students to use that indeterminacy in order to look at the limits of representation.

Well, as I've been trying to indicate, I'm interested in thinking down the middle of determinacy and indeterminacy. It is not that rhetoric is completely indeterminate. There are choices we can make and things we can determine. As Fordist rationality shows, we can determine the outcome of some processes to a fairly high degree. But this doesn't mean such processes are the most valuable or the best solutions to all situations. Hitler chose to use propaganda as the most expedient means of persuasion as control. And he did so because he knew it would work. And largely it did. Similarly, pure indeterminacy is not always going to be the answer against determinacy. I could go into class and say, well there is no way I can determine what you guys will write anyway, so just write whatever. But this ignores the entire middle ground that is so complex and occupies so much of rhetorical and pedagogical thought and practice. We know we can do things to positively influence writers, texts, and situations. The question becomes, what things? And that's the interesting part for me.

The issue of representation is an interesting one as well. I've been working a lot in the area of professional and technical writing and I'm most interested in the work of Clay Spinuzzi, Linda Driskill, Greg Wilson, and Carl Herndl. Wilson and Herndl, for example, are looking at the ways knowledge maps mediate rhetorical complexity. What becomes critical to any complex situation is how the participants collaboratively create visual representations of the rhetorical, cultural, technical, and material contexts they are engaging. The maps are never truly representative in some objectivist sense, but they are also not completely disconnected from reality. They are partial views of real people, texts, forces, and technologies that ultimately contribute to what emerges from those ecologies. Again, following a middle path, I'm not interested in representation's complete or complete lack of objectivity. I'm interested in what the representative body can do. I'm interested in the real material effects of the representations that we make.

Posted by: bhawk at 00:31 | link | comments
interview, vitalism

Q3 - Research

3. How do you see methodologies of complexity enriching how the field approaches and conducts research, whether historical, theoretical, pedagogical, etc.? Given complexity theory's close conceptual affinities with posthumanism and network cultures, do you see methodologies of complexity playing out primarily in the realms of new media and other forms of electronic communication, or is there room/space enough for more "traditional" modes of writing (e.g., print-based literacies)?

The issue of research is an interesting one. Clearly I'm using method in a different way than just the traditional approach to research methods. The argument in the book is that historical research should proceed less from predetermined grand narratives and categories and move more toward developing methods particular to the problems and contexts under investigation. In this light, history would look more like "anticipatory strings of dots" as Foucault says. It will attempt to map the quirky twists and turns of what happens with a little less desire to make it fit a predetermined schema. As the book's title suggests, a counter-strategy to come up with ulterior narratives and categories is probably the first move. But even under a new general rubric, mapping personal, institutional, and conceptual connections and reconnections won't even nicely fit the new schema either. Therefore, the next attempt to map the complexity of any historical moment or act will have to look *different* and ultimately *look* differently.

The same thing goes for my approach to theory. I tell my students all the time that once they learn the basic rhetorical strategy of theory/application, they need to immediately begin to problematize it. Applying theory in a vacuum is too deductive and will ultimately predetermine the nature of what you will find when you look through that lens. Instead, a theory or a concept or even a term is but one element in the larger assemblage that they are building through their research. The theory chosen obviously is an important factor that can reveal and conceal possibilities, but it won't be the determining factor if the ecology is mapped out in larger detail. Ultimately multiple theories should link together with the larger ecology to become contributors to emergence.

And just as I have no real interest in pitting expressivism against theory or against professional writing—each one can potentially engage complexity or ignore it—I see no need to reduce future writing to technology. I read Heidegger from the work of Graham Harman who argues that most of Heidegger's work essentially comes down to the claim that constellations reveal and conceal. So when Heidegger looks at technology, language, objects, or art, he is showing how they all contribute to revealing and concealing. It is not something that is the province of technology only. Not to mention the fact that print technology is a technology as well. A print text can potentially contribute to emergence as much as a digital text. The important thing about technology being a predominant factor in our current moment, as Heidegger notes, is that as part of the contemporary constellation technology makes us see differently. We now see print from a different light than we did before, for example. It can no longer occupy an unquestioned hegemonic position.

Posted by: bhawk at 00:30 | link | comments
interview, vitalism

Q2 - Pedagogy

2. In terms of complexity, part of what you suggest later in the book is that unpredictability and emergence, despite their apparent resistance to pedagogy and methodology (narrowly construed), have a lot to offer writing teachers and theorists. Thinking of real classroom environments, in what ways can writing instructors begin the process of embracing complexity? In other words, in your understanding, how might one go about designing/encouraging environments in which emergent behavior is not only possible but examined and reflected upon as well? Moreover, to what extent does such an approach need, even demand, institutional recognition or, if you prefer, approval?

Well, I give lots of examples in the book. Kameen's attempt to develop ecologies in his classrooms and Ulmer's attempt to build a heuristic that enacts lines of flight are the primary extended examples. But in the last section of the book I also mention Janet Atwill, Cynthia Haynes, and Jim Henry, all of whom provide hints for what might be possible.

Henry, for example, is working in the context of professional writing, which is typically seen as fairly remote from expressivist pedagogies. But nevertheless he works to build a pedagogy that explicitly connects students to the rhetorical ecologies in which they write. Henry asks his students to map the institutional ecologies surrounding their work; uncover the policies, texts, practices, and affects that govern their writing and work; link these discourses to other institutional sites, practices, texts, theories, and concepts; and ultimately to use what they learn from mapping these ecologies to intervene in and reform their workplace discursive formations. The goal is not to undo the institutions, but to remake and rearticulate the discourses, subjectivities, and lines of flight that emerge from them.

I argue in the book that the important message is not to copy any of the examples I analyze in the book but to design your own occasions, build your own constellations, and invent your own heuristics specifically for those contexts. If we take the general principle of Deleuze's expressionism seriously, that the entire ecology produces emergence, then the choices we make as teachers about what to link up to those ecologies matters. What this means for pedagogies of invention is that any heuristic exists in many potential sets of relations with particular writing assignments, theoretical or conceptual ideas, selected readings, individual student histories, and institutional constraints. All of these and more need to be taken into account when developing heuristics, implementing digital tools, designing assignments, choosing readings, and grouping students collaboratively. The spaces between all of these molar elements are ripe with molecular complexity and it is these moments that are truly generative.

I think this is precisely what Henry was up to. He tried to develop a pedagogical approach specific to his class, in his university, in the metro DC area, with a specific kind of student. His practices emerged out of that context and were directly tied to it. This didn't mean that he sat back and just let learning happen in some random fashion. Far from it. He worked hard to build the ecology of his classroom and to develop heuristic strategies for getting his students to connect that ecology to their workplace ecologies in ways that change both the students and the institutions that they inhabit. In short, we don't control emergence but we aren't powerless in its face either. We don't have to make emergence possible. Emergence is happening all the time all around us. But what I hope we can do is begin to recognize that and attempt to take advantage of those kairotic moments through the pedagogical choices we make. We'll never be able to account fully for the complexity of the contexts we inhabit and partially create, but I do think we can be more attentive to their rhetorical and productive potential.

I don't think the kinds of approaches I have in mind need any recognition or approval at all from the institution. The recognition actually should work the other way. We as teachers should recognize not only the institutions we work in as key parts of the ecologies we inhabit and build pedagogies from, but also other institutions that our students and our selves create assemblages with everyday, from the capitalist institutions of mass media to the cultural institutions of marriage. I'm mostly interested in how teachers think about these spaces and their impact on pedagogical moments. Perhaps the institutions would be concerned if they recognized how these pedagogical practices might be changing the institutions, but these more molecular, small-scale, emergent changes are likely to go unnoticed at the larger, molar levels.

Posted by: bhawk at 00:29 | link | comments
interview, vitalism

Q1 - Expressivism

1. Part of the argument you make in the first half of the book concerns vitalism and the ways composition studies failed to fully account for vitalism in all of its historical and conceptual complexity. In Berlin and Winterrowd, for example, you note how vitalism becomes, in a sense, coterminous with expressivism and therefore used to bolster modern composition studies' attempt to ground itself on what it is not. To what extent, then, would the affirmative (re)turn to vitalism you call for mean a similar (re)turn back toward expressivism? In the current climate of rhet/comp, is it possible or even desirable to issue such a return given the hard knocks expressivism took in the past 25 years or so?

As the argument in the book attempts to show, I'm explicitly *not* returning to an older form of vitalism nor a traditional model of expressivism. Neither, in my mind, would be advisable, not simply because of the hard knocks they took, but because they don't really fit our current situation. The point of the book, in part, is to carve out a new space for talking about rhetorics and methodologies that makes more sense within our historical, technological, and conceptual moment.

In the book I work to make a clear distinction between expressivism as a subjectivist epistemology and pedagogy as Berlin and others lay out and expressionism as a posthumanist epistemology and pedagogy that I pull from Deleuze. For Deleuze, it is the entire assemblage, constellation, or ecology that expresses not simply an individual. This is fundamentally different from the older models of expressivism that draw the circumference around the individual and naïve vitalisms that posit some manner of mystical force that we can't draw a circumference around. Instead, material and cultural conditions, assemblages, ecologies produce emergence, which is neither a simple form of cause and effect nor a pure form of chance. It operates in between these extremes.

I think it is pretty clear that we are in a different historical moment from the late sixties, for example, where expressivist pedagogies rose up as a form of political resistance to traditional and institutional discourses. And perhaps it is even more obvious that technology has changed in ways that shift our relationships to these institutions and their discourses; for example, P2P technology resists capital in a completely different way than happenings did. But the other important shift that I try to chart in the book is conceptual. Following what I perceive to be part of Deleuze's project, I'm interested in how scientific principles are changing at a pace that perhaps only technology can surpass. I read Deleuze as trying to build a philosophy that is commensurate with contemporary thought. In the past, science often came in after philosophy and tried to disprove or corroborate its principles. But today the tables have turned. The sciences are at the forefront of thought to the point that it makes no sense to continue to base our philosophical concepts on models of reality that are 200 to 2500 years old. Kant and Plato are important moments in intellectual history, but that doesn't mean we have to think of our historical and conceptual moment in terms of theirs. In part, all I am trying to do is bring this point to composition theory by proposing complex vitalism as a way to think about what we do today in terms of today.

Posted by: bhawk at 00:27 | link | comments (2)
interview