Digital Digs (Alex Reid)

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. 

I appreciated Ian Bogost's post from a few weeks ago on the state of digital humanities navel-gazing. As he concludes, "currently, what one does in the humanities is talk about the humanities. This is particularly true of the digital humanities, some of whose proponents are actually using computers to do new kinds of humanistic scholarly work in breaks between debates about the potential to use computers for new kinds of humanistic scholarly work." Perhaps there are historical reasons why, at this particular moment, the humanities are so self-reflective. No perhaps about it, actually. We are somewhat lost at sea and the "digital" is part of the reason. This does not mean, however, that reflection is productive, and certainly not all reflection is productive. At some point, as Ian suggests, it's a matter of getting back to work. A point that Mark Sample also makes.

Maybe, from this point of view, rhetoric and composition has a built-in self-reflexivity in its research into writing and the teaching of writing: we research what we do and what our students do. (Of course, it's a big field so that's not all rhet/comp scholars do.) Getting back to work for me means continuing to investigate the ways in which digital technologies and networks shape rhetorical practices. I am particularly interested in the problem of rethinking rhetorical education to address shifting literacy practices. This, to me, is not narcissistic, though it does involve looking at the rhetorical practices of humanisits since it is fairly clear that what we will teach students is a function of what we do ourselves.

To this end, I am interested in Stanely Fish's most recent DH post in the NY Times and Ted Underwood's response. Fish concludes (complains?) that digital humanities "will have little place for the likes of me and for the kind of criticism I practice: a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author, a criticism that generalizes from a text as small as half a line, a criticism that insists on the distinction between the true and the false, between what is relevant and what is noise, between what is serious and what is mere play." Maybe so. Though there are probably a dozen other interpretive methods that also have little place for this method. But his more salient criticism (and you can read the article to see how he makes it) regards the ways in which he suggests digital humanities scholars develop their arguments and provide evidence for them. He puts it this way:

The direction of my inferences is critical: first the interpretive hypothesis and then the formal pattern, which attains the status of noticeability only because an interpretation already in place is picking it out.

The direction is the reverse in the digital humanities: first you run the numbers, and then you see if they prompt an interpretive hypothesis. The method, if it can be called that, is dictated by the capability of the tool.

I would suggest that Fish's method is also "dictated by the capability of the tool." The primary tool in this case is Fish himself (please excuse the pejorative connotations of that sentence). The point is that Fish's method is also constrained by the capacities available to the relations between a human reader and a text. In either case, I wouldn't say "dictated" as I wouldn't attribute a deterministic relationship here. That's another misunderstanding. Fish appears to suggest here that his "hypothesis" arrives ex nihilo. I doubt that's actually the case. My first guess is that Fish, like most literary critics, would build an interpretation while reading a text, and that while certainly one might have some tenative hypothesis before cracking the book open, it would be based on readings of other books. I mean this is why literary scholars focus on a particular period, right? Because it is part of the disciplinary paradigm that books written in a particular time and place impact one another with special significance.

So I believe what we have here is a significant misunderstanding of invention. Underwood makes a similar observation. He writes

The basic mistake that Fish is making is this: he pretends that humanists have no discovery process at all. For Fish, the interpretive act is always fully contained in an encounter with a single piece of evidence. How your “interpretive proposition” got framed in the first place is a matter of no consequence: some readers are just fortunate to have propositions that turn out to be correct. Fish is not alone in this idealized model of interpretation; it’s widespread among humanists.

The underlying misunderstanding is painfully ironic. Fish is resisting the assistance of digital techniques — not because they would impose scientism on the humanities — but because they would force us to acknowledge that our ideas do after all come from somewhere.

Hmmmm.... if this is actually the case it would explain why humanists struggle with teaching writing. It would also be ironic in the sense that so much of literary criticism focuses on exploring the historical and cultural contexts that inform the production of literary work while denying that similar contexts inform their own compositions. However I will go a little farther with Underwood's argument and suggest that it is precisely a scientistic conception of invention/discovery that leads to this belief in the eureka moment. 

Let's recall that at the heart of the typical scientist objection to Latour is his contention that scientific knowledge is constructed. In the conventional way of thinking, scientists want to claim that scientific knowledge is discovered in nature rather than "made up" in the lab. In this view, construction equals fiction. On the flipside, literary scholars in Fish's tradition want to claim that literary knowledge is discovered in the literary texts rather than being constructed in a lab (or a DH computerized process). In rhetoric, not surprisingly, we have made an extensive study of the history of invention. We can see how rhetoric gets slowly stripped of its canonical elements until it arrives in the Modern era as little more that Style. The processes of invention get supplanted by scientific methods of discovery on the one hand and the eventual emergence of a Romantic conception of inspiration on the other. 

It's for reasons like this that I can appreciate Cheryl Ball's response to the recent Profession issue on digital scholarship. That is, I think it's fair to suggest that rhetoricians have some understanding of how invention, evidence, and argument operate, and, from this rhetorician's perspective, this whole discussion seems a little simplistic. 

So let's rehearse some of the basic concepts here. Composing is a networked phenomenon because thinking is always already relational. I mean you are composing/thinking in words right? You didn't invent that language, right? So, that's obvious. Thoughts are constructed. Arguments are constructed. Evidence is constructed. Scholarship is constructed. That is, these things are composed of other things. That doesn't mean they can be explained solely by those other things. Nor does it mean that we fully understand (let alone control) the processes of construction. However, I think we can recognize in this current (if somewhat navel-gazing) conversation, that a shift in the available compositional networks has created some discomfort. It causes us to recognize the constructed, networked characteristics of our legacy practices, characteristics that we had come to ignore (or forget) because they had been normalized.

In turn we are faced with choices that we never really recognized as choices before. We took invention to be natural. We read a book, and an interpretation came to us.  Of course we had training and such to help us, but regardless of our methodological/theoretical preferences, in literary studies it ultimately came down to reading a text and developing an interpretation. Regardless of methodological differences literary interpretations were generically the same in general length, uses of evidence, structure of argument, etc. etc. The same was true in rhetoric and, I imagine, the rest of the humanities.

But that's no longer the case. Now we have real choices to make that make real differences in the knowledge that we produce and the communities in which we participate. They make real differences in what we understand literacy to be and as such what we will teach to future generations of students (which is ultimately what concerns me). And here I would stretch far beyond the arguments related to "distant reading" which are the focus of Fish's piece (and another error he makes, conflating this one practice with the entirety of DH).  

In the end, I think it is entirely accurate to say that digital humanities from distant reading to middle-state publishing (like this blog) does little to improve our ability to conduct pre-digital scholarly practices or answer the questions of a pre-digital humanistic disciplinary paradigm. Digital technologies did not arrive to resolve the questions of the print humanities anymore than late industrial technologies arrived to resolve the questions of a pre-industrial humanities. As I often argue here, we are faced with ethical questions regarding how to proceed. What do we take from the 20th century into this one? Set aside, for a moment, the navel-gazing debates over methodological minutiae and consider what larger questions the humanities seek to answer in this century.

I certainly do not want to make a claim that I know what the humanities should be. I have a hard enough time finding my own scholarly way. However, I will make the argument that what the humanities was in the last century was largely conditioned (though not determined!) by the capacities of an industrial culture and that now those capacities are different and as such the humanities will change. Maybe the humanities will diminish or even disappear, but not necessarily. However they will change if for no other reason than the technological infrastructures on which they once relied have changed.

It's up to all of us, individually and collectively, to figure out how to get back to work. 

There was extensive discussion at MLA this year (and, following that, quite a thread of posts on the WPA list, and I imagine elsewhere) on the subject of doctoral programs. Inside Higher Ed reports on the MLA business here and here. These are not new debates. However I think they are increasingly propelled by job market prospects and the uncertain future of the humanities. They are also connected to discussions regarding #alt-ac (alternative academic) careers and digital dissertations. That is to say these discussions include the fact that at least some doctoral students are seeking nontraditional careers off the tenure track and others wish to produce nontraditional dissertations. 

For me, the central issue is this statistic from an NSF report that indicates humanities students spend a median of 9 years of registered time to degree, which is "time in graduate school less reported periods of nonenrollment." This has increased slowly but steadily from 1978, when it was 7.5 years. I believe that's a 20% increase over the last 30 years or so. I'm not sure what the cause of this increase has been. Perhaps there are economic pressures that cause students to take longer (however here we are talking about registered time). Maybe it is the "reading problem," that my colleague Derek Mueller discussed in his dissertation: the proliferation of scholarship means one is required to read more before writing.

I don't know. 

Typically, though, I believe doctoral students enter their "ABD" phase after three years. That would mean the median time spent writing a dissertation is six years. To put this in perspective, a 300-page, 90,000 word dissertation, written over 5 years, would require writing about 50 words per day. Obviously it's not possible to write that slowly. I would suggest that, if one is in fact writing, then it is difficult to write less than 2500 words per week, which would suggest you could write this sucker in 36 weeks. That is why I tell graduate students that it isn't writing the dissertation that takes a long time; it's the not-writing the dissertation that is so time-consuming.

So this is what I am confused by. The average graduate student will have spent 3 years (one as a master's student and two as a doctoral student) taking coursework. S/he will then spend another year devoted solely to reading something like 75 books (or the equivalent in articles) in preparation for exams. This, of course, mentions nothing of the time spent getting a BA in English. However, despite having taken over 30 English courses in college and spent a year reading books in narrow preparation for an exam, the now ABD doctoral candidate spends an additional 3 years or more doing research to prepare for writing a dissertation, which then takes another 2-3 years to actually write???

I want to be clear. This is not meant in any way as a criticism of the doctoral students. This is a systemic, disciplinary problem. What it says to me is that everything that a student does enroute to becoming ABD leaves her totally unprepared to write the dissertation. One effectively starts from scratch. I don't actually believe that is the case. Instead, I think the problem is more likely a rhetorical-compositional one. First, I'm not sure that the writing and research done in graduate courses connects clearly enough with the rhetorical challenges of researching and writing dissertation chapters. As such, graduate students find themselves reinventing their writing practices once they hit the ABD level. Second, I think that we need to have a frank discussion as a discipline about the rhetorical purpose of a dissertation in relation to the larger purpose of a doctoral degree.

Let's look at this problem backwards and say that we wanted to move the median to 5 years (at MLA the objective was to cut time to degree in half). So we still have three years of coursework and exam prep. As such, we can start by defining the dissertation as "the text you can reasonably produce in 2 years." What does this mean? Well (and perhaps this is a little ideal) I imagine the following:

• a student enters a program with a general idea of what she wants to study (e.g. 19th cent. Amer. Lit or Digital Rhetoric)
• she takes a dozen classes in two years that are in that area, in adjacent areas, and introduce her to the primary methods and theories of her field
• she writes a dozen seminar papers and hopefully 2 or 3 of them will have the potential to be developed into dissertation chapters
• she then spends a year reading more narrowly in her field, which hopefully provides her with 80% of the research she needs to write her dissertation

Ok, now we're ready to write the dissertation in 24 months. In the first six months, she revises those 2-3 seminar papers into dissertation chapters and gets feedback on them. Then she sits down and figures out whatever chapters have to go around them. Let's say we are going to write an additional five chapters, each about 30 pages. Well, you've been writing 3 seminar papers every semester, right, so we'll write a chapter a month. We're now 11 total months into the dissertation and we have 7-8 chapters and 200+ pages. We've got a year to revise these and write the introduction and conclusion. 

As far as brute force work goes, that's quite manageable. The tough part is the rhetorical challenge of conceiving of a book-length project. It can't just be a bunch of seminar papers juxtaposed to one another. It ain't an essay collection. Conceiving of a book-length project isn't actually hard, unless you've never done it before. The cognitive problem that ABD students face isn't so different from the one FYC students face when they are told they need to write their first 10-page research paper (gasp!) or the one seniors face in writing their capstone essay in an English class or the ones MA students face writing their first seminar paper or their thesis. 

As graduate faculty, we might mitigate this obstacle by helping PHD students to understand the rhetorical challenges of the book/dissertation (and they are different things) as we are going along in coursework. I would imagine there are any number of ways to do this. My inventive strategy has always been to stick things together and see what problems/questions they generate. That's how I wrote my dissertation in six months. I took a couple seminar papers that I liked, stuck them together and then wrote my dissertation in the space they created. In some respects, the less well the papers go together the better the result. So I had a paper that was a Deleuzian analysis of critical pedagogy, another that was on Ulmerian/Derridean invention strategies, and a third that addressed death and simulation using Baudrillard and Blanchot. I tossed in some technology questions along the way, and *poof.* I'm not saying it was the greatest dissertation of all time, but it got the job done. 

And that's another point. The diss isn't an end so much as it is a beginning. To me it's more about creating velocity into a future career than it is about working some subject (and somebody) to scholarly death. But regardless of how one wants to define it or go about it, it just doesn't make sense to me that it should take six years.

I suppose it is fair to say that I passed through MLA this year. I was only in Seattle for one day (Saturday) when panels were going on and attended four that day, including my own. It's the first time I've presented at MLA in over a decade. It's not really a conference that I've ever considered to be in my discipline. And if you want to understand why, you can go to this search page for the program and look at the drop-down menu of subjects. There are only two subjects that are not some kind of "literature:" linguistics and "the profession." Rhetoric is a subheading of "General Literature," but my panel was in Electronic Technology, also in "General Literature." Obviously, I can't really operate in a world that views everything as some kind of literature. But that's fine. As I said, it's not my conference or professional organization. 

What I want to remark on is precisely this tendency to view the world and its objects as various kinds of literature, which is perhaps a little like that "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. That said, I don't want to make sweeping generalizations but only talk about how I saw this phenomenon in the panels I attended. Specifically, I noticed a familiar though curious-to-an-outsider tendency to value close reading and demonize clarity. The latter is one of the places where I think rhetoricians and literary scholars really differ. Certainly rhetoricians understand in principle and investigate in particular the cultural contexts that define and perpetuate certain values regarding clarity. We've read all the same theory as literary scholars. At the same time, as teachers of writing and as writers ourselves, we realize that it is not easy to be clear.

In short, I'm hoping this post makes its point clearly. I'll even proofread it (once) before I press publish!

Obviously some texts are difficult to understand even when the author is struggling for clarity. And certainly in some artistic/literary contexts, difficulty is an objective in itself. Regardless though, some things need to be clear so that others can be difficult. Finnegans Wake is of course a difficult text, but the words are clearly printed on the page, right? I mean if everything was difficult and unclear (e.g. signage in a conference center), I probably wouldn't be able to make my way to your panel presentation to hear about how awful clarity is. So English sets itself up in opposition to clarity as part of its kind of loyal opposition role that it plays throughout the 20th century in relation to a nationalist, industrial, technocratic culture (while at the same time demanding clarity from students and from colleagues in the writing they produce). The value on close reading is interconnected with valuing difficulty. Through close reading, difficult texts are made more understandable. Or if you dislike the idea of degrees of clarity then I could say close reading makes texts understandable in a different way that is more amenable to the values of literary studies.

Honestly these are traditional and recognizable values in the discipline. So I was curious to see how they were embedded in the literary studies version of digital humanities. Personally I find the opposition to clarity in computer interfaces somewhat bizarre. I've certainly been in conference presentations where the WiFi doesn't work or someone's web page won't load or the file they have won't open on the computer that's availabe to them, etc. etc.  I've never really seen anyone celebrate these interface failures. Does anyone think such things are desirable? That's not to say that a digital literary/artistic work that investigates interfaces isn't worthwhile, and I'm certainly not suggesting that we shouldn't study or critique interfaces. But sometimes I wonder if people make the arguments they do only because they are confident that no one is going to take them seriously.

Meanwhile, the close reading issue is trickier. The arguments I saw ranged from suggesting that using digital media in the classroom (in this case making a video game based on a novel) made the students read more closely to a more global argument that it was necessary for English to demonstrate that close reading was a valuable practice in relation to digital media. I asked the panelists if they felt that close reading was so central to literary studies that they couldn't imagine the discipline without it and if they were concerned that close reading might play itself out. Of course we realize that there are various "distant reading" projects going on, but it is hard to imagine distant reading replacing close reading. (And I should note that close reading is also a central feature of rhetoric.) There was thoughtful response to this, including the observation that other academics beyond English identify English with close reading and recognize that practice as the thing we do, as what we bring to the table, methodologically speaking.

While that may be true, I think it is also a problem. In part because I see close reading as a fairly specific mode of analysis and that there are many other forms of investigation that examine objects closely. Indeed actor-network theory could be practiced that way and I wouldn't call it close reading, because what close reading does (whether in a New Critical or in a more contemporary theoretical frame) is leap from a specific feature of a text to some global theoretical predisposition. So the Marxist critic reads the text closely in search of class issues and not surprisingly find them, etc., etc. 

In my view, close reading seems particularly ill-suited to practices related to digital media, in part because it might have the tendency to treat digital media as if it were print. I'm also not sure that it does a good job of identifying productive units of analysis. Perhaps we can say that it is misleading to look at a text on a page and treat those words as units independent of the technological production and networks that bring them into being, as the traditional close reading would insist we do (the text itself with its "intrinsic" meaning).  However, I think it is somehow more problematic to look at a video game or an interactive digital work and treat it as if it were a text, as if it were literature.

So while I certainly wouldn't want to characterize all of literary studies digital humanities as doing this, let alone the wider frame of DH, I do think this paradigmatic disciplinary perspective that leads literary scholars to view objects as literary could be a problem in the long-term challenge of engaging with the digital. I don't know how they will work around it. That's their issue. No doubt, rhetoricians have their own similar problems, which I'm sure to be addressing when 4C's comes around, if not sooner.

Here is the text of my brief roundtable talk at MLA.

When we look at digital humanists and those who study technology in writing studies, we discover a field of methodological silos with long histories situated in a context of broader disciplinary antagonism. Still for decades we have gotten along fine, hardly paying any attention to one another, until two things happened. The first was the technological revolution of the last 15 years, which has dramatically expanded the work we might do and made the study of digital media a more central subject for the humanities. The second was the invention and popularization of this term the "digital humanities," which unlike humanities computing, has come to mean something larger. Not only are there now more people than ever with an interest in what humanities computing has become, but there are a far wider range of scholars, not only in writing studies but also in new media studies, game studies, and the cultural study of technology who never considered themselves in humanities computing but now find themselves drawn into this umbrella term, the digital humanities. We¹ve reached a point where Stanley Fish writes in the NY Times that the digital humanities includes "the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure ....in short, everything."

I don't think anyone intended that. But if it hadn¹t been the "digital humanities," it would have been something else, some other term, that would have thrown us all together in the context of this expanding digital-technological revolution. While that work is ongoing I believe we face another larger common task in rethinking the relationship of the humanities toward digital culture and literacy. A dozen years ago I chaired a panel at MLA called "Is technology killing English Studies?" Though obviously much has changed, we are still largely there, still uncertain of the relation between English and digital media, perhaps more uncertain than ever of the profession's future. Fortunately we don¹t require common answers or even common questions about the role of the digital for the humanities. What we will require, I believe, is a realization that we will no longer be able to operate as if the capacities of digital technologies did not exist then one could have operated in the 20th century as if the typewriter or industrial printing did not exist.  What those capacities will be remains undetermined. While waiting for a connecting flight in Detroit, I ran into Alan Kay's famous line, "the best way to predict the future is to invent it." I wonder how many people wandering that airport would realize that Kay's line, delivered in Palo Alto in 1971, was a death knell for Detroit not a celebration of the great modern industrial project. And despite our pseudo-Luddite protestations, that's what English and MLA are as well, great modern industrial projects. Of course we haven't had our Detroit moment, our higher ed bubble continues to stretch. Perhaps it won't burst.

On the other hand maybe we can toward invention anyway In my view, the significant division between literary studies and rhetoric lies between hermeneutics and heuristics, between interpretation and invention. It¹s fair to say that literary studies has focused on interpretation to the same degree as writing studies has focused on invention. The digital humanities, while having a disciplinary loyalty to interpretation, is also very committed to invention as the "less yack more hack" refrain suggests. However I believe we need a wider scope of invention. In my view Kay's techno-optimistic line remains a modernist faith. As such I would offer instead Bruno Latour's "Compositionist Manifesto." As Latour has long argued, the principles of modernity are flawed. While his work has been taken up in our field, particularly by those in science studies, I don't believe we have adequately considered our disciplines' own fatal modernity. In addressing this concern, Latour invokes Benjamin's backward-looking angel but notes that contrary to Benjamin’s interpretation,

the Modern who, like the angel, is flying backward is actually not seeing the destruction; He is generating it in his flight since it occurs behind His back!... What the Moderns called “their future” has never been contemplated face to face, since it has always been the future of someone fleeing their past looking backward, not forward. This is why... their future was always so unrealistic, so utopian, so full of hype.

Latour's interest in this piece is with the far more pressing issue of our ecological future than with our discipline or higher education. However I believe this applies to us as well, particularly as we seek a role in the defining conversations of our time. Perhaps it is just the rhetorician in me, but I read Latour's call as a call for a new ethos, a rethinking of relation, not only among humans but among all objects, what he refers to elsewhere as an "object-oriented democracy." So how do we do that? As a rhetorician I think it means asking how do we turn our backs to the modern faith in a public sphere of deliberative democratic rhetoric founded on "critical thinking" and argument, the linchpins of rhetorical education starting in first-year composition. That kind of disentanglement is not easy, but if one manages that and then turns toward our prospects, what does one see? What can we compose at that point? The entirety of rhetorical relations must be rethought with an eye for the objects that have always been there. It doesn't mean that we stop making arguments, but that we approach their composition differently. This is both an abstract philosophical project and an applied challenge. It means asking how we create technologies that allow us to see and compose arguments differently, with a cautionary eye toward a nonmodern, object-oriented democracy. And while this would impact composition, I think it begins with humanities scholarship. And that is a project in which we might all participate.

I'm working on a piece on memory, which I'll be discussing in a talk at UT Austin in February, and it departs from this line in A Thousand Plateaus that I mentioned in my last post: “one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts.” It's not that I am in search of some slavish allegiance to Deleuze or looking to reframe things in Deleuzian terms. Instead, I think I still find this text a productive site of departure to go on to things that may or may not fit into a strictly Deleuzian philosophy (if there is such a thing). 

The notion of short and long-term memory are familiar to us, and as far as I can tell, these concepts continue to work in a recognizable way in cognitive science. Indeed there does seem to be evidence that there are two separate memory mechanisms. In scientific terms, short-term memory is generally on the order of a few seconds, involving seven elements (+/- 2), hence the length of phone numbers, zip codes, etc. So this made me wonder what D+G were on about here. By our conventional understanding of what we mean by short-term memory and writing, writing would clearly rely on long-term memory as well. The simple recollection of vocabulary, to say nothing of recalling a plan for a text or what one wrote earlier, would demand long-term recall. So my sense is that writing means something different here, or more precisely, something narrower. This narrow view then connects interestingly with thinking about composition as an act of withdrawal and casts a different light on conventional, disciplinary thinking about the role of culture/discourse communities in writing. 

As D+G discuss, it is long-term memory that connects us with ideology, capturing and territortializing thought within social assemblages. No doubt, these forces and objects enter into relation with one another in the short term of writing. However short-term or working/active memory as it is also termed places limits on what can be involved in each compositional event, in the emergence of each text-object. How much can you hold in your active memory? That's what you are composing with. Can other forces impact composition? I would think yes, on an affective level, if you're cold, tired, hungry, angry, feeling inspired, etc. And there are certainly other elements of a compositional event, like technologies. These can also mediate, as Latour would suggest, social forces. However, when one is thinking about something like the ideological force of a discourse community, perhaps we might argue that only impacts us before or after the compositional event. 

I suppose from a Deleuzian perspective one might take up writing's short term tactically in an effort to avoid capture. I can see that as a potentially useful heuristic. In fact that's what automatic writing is about in some sense. However, clearly writing anything meaningful of any length would require long-term memory. I hardly want to make memory a villain! 

However, I do think this is worthwhile from an object-oriented perspective as it offers a handle on the experience of how texts appear to withdraw from us even as we write them. We can say the words or phrases that come into our working memories are already alien objects made from a language that is other than us. That moment when thoughts become words is when those thoughts are no longer simply "ours." I'm not exactly sure when that happens. Sometimes it seems like my fingers are taking dictation from thoughts in my head. Other times the words seem to appear simultaneously or, weirdly, even creep ahead ever so slightly. Then, of course, we stop and read back over what we have done. Sometimes we race through pages, sometimes just a paragraph or even a sentence. Then we ask "Now what had I planned to do next?" or "What have I gotten myself into?" What has this thing that I have composed obligated me to? These are all long-term memory moments. 

To be clear, I don't wish to set up too facile a distinction between long-term and short-term memory in the act of writing. I would imagine there is a more seamless and ongoing switching between the two. However, at the same time, there are two different mechanisms at work here, two different objects if you prefer. And thinking about composition in these terms helps to explain why the texts we compose operate as they do.

My kids and I have been playing Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim this break. If you aren't familiar, it's a fantasy role-playing style game. In this post, it's an object and opportunity for discussing the operation of reading from an object-oriented perspective.

To provide some brief context, I approach speculative realism and object-oriented ontology by departing from Deleuze and moving through DeLanda and Latour. I would describe reading as a particular kind of encounter between objects that involves code. Deleuze and Guattari describe code as a feature of assemblages that appear in certain strata. DeLanda takes it up slight differently and adds code as a third axis to social assemblages. Though I won't go into great detail with the technical aspects of this theory here, one can build out the operation of code from collective assemblages of enunciation to map the emergence of code from other object relations. DeLanda follows a similar path in Philosophy and Simulation.

Code is a characteristic that certain objects may have. It results from a particular kind of assemblage production. Other objects (e.g. humans) have the capacity to encode in their relations. This might mean literally marking a code or more abstractly naming objects. Clearly our encoding/naming of objects never fully captures them, but it can have an impact upon them, as when you name an animal your "food." In English Studies we use terms like "text" and "reading" quite liberally. This makes sense inasmuch as we encode the world we see and interact with that code. However, here I want to be more literal and think specifically about interactions between objects that are marked with codes and objects with the capacity to decipher those codes. So this could be a human reading a book, a Google search spider crawling this page, or a supermarket checkout counter scanning a bar code. Or in this particular case, me interacting with the text in this video game. The discussion over on Levi's blog (and elsewhere) as been about an SR literary criticism, but I don't want to use literary examples, partly because literary studies is not my field, but also because I would contend that one should begin with a general theory of reading as a kind of relation among objects from which methods for the interpretation of literary texts would develop. And I do think one would require or at least be able to develop specialized methods, just as one develops specialized engineering applications from more general scientific principles. 

So, to reiterate, code is a characteristic an object might have that has tha capacity, when encountering an object with an interlocking characteristic, of being read by that second object. The code, in this case words in English, are objects unto themselves. (it's objects all the way down, out, up, wherever.) As objects they too withdraw, but we can (and obviously do) encounter them, and they impart their forces upon us, in this case, primarily through our eyes. In the mundane event I am describing, as I shift my view around a room in Skyrim and focus upon a door, the words "(A) Open Skyrim" appear. I know this means that if I press the "A" button on my Xbox controller, the door will open and I will leave this inn/castle/crypt/wherever I happen to be and reappear (after loading) in the "open" world of Skyrim. We don't need to refer to some new theory to recognize that if you haven't played the game then the reference to "Open Skyrim" is basically nonsensical. Furthermore, to look at a screen capture or a YouTube video where we see the words appear from the game might tell us something but it's not the same as seeing the words while playing the game itself. In the game these are what Deleuze and Guattari might term order words. They make something happen. This is also a capacity of code. It doesn't always work. The capacity depends upon other relations. If I say "you're gulity," it's not the same as when the jury says it to you in a courtroom at the conclusion of a trial. In a related fashion, we are not free to interpret words to mean whatever we want. Yes they withdraw from us, so we cannot know them in some totality, but that does not mean that they do not delimit in some fashion what they communicate. If we don't have the capacity to decode the words (i.e. if they are in a language we do not know), then they are meaningless, but if we can read "Open Skyrim" then we cannot interpret this as synonymous with "ham sandwich." 

So far I don't believe I've said anything radical. Reading/interpretation is about the capacities of interacting objects/assemblages. A given text is a necessary but not sufficient element to produce a given interpretation of that text. Meaning isn't intrinsic. Again, this is just another way of framing the basic post-New Critical interpretive move. What happens next, however, in most contemporary methods, is that one turns one's focus on the cultural contexts that intersect the text in the production of this or that reading. Do these relational readings impact the text-object? Of course. Depending, the text-object enters the literary canon, it gets burnt, it goes out of print, it becomes a bestseller, etc. These are all phenomena worthy of investigation.

In Harman's terms though, I think one might suggest that focusing on the coded capacities of a text-object, particular in relation to various cultural contexts, is a form of overmining. I think it's reasonable to view any disciplinary reading practice as a form of overmining. Any discourse community employs territorializing, cybernetic mechanisms to secure the meaning of its texts. Both rhetoric and literary studies do this for cultural texts. Even while individual articles might celebrate the indeterminacy of texts, the overall operation of English Studies is to create a system. That's what it means to be an academic discipline, but perhaps something else can happen.

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that reading relies upon long-term memory (as opposed to writing which is short-term... more on that some other day); for D/G long-term memory connects the text with the social order we typically investigate. However, reading also imparts direct affects that are only ever partially captured within autopoietic and ideological mechanisms. These affects are singular and though we might describe the mechanisms that produce them, the resulting affects are indeterminable. So one might take a Latourian approach and follow the trails of actors from the site of any singular textual encounter. Though not framed in this way, one might think of many scholarly articles in this fashion, as tracing the scholar-reader's particular interpretive actor-network. One always has to make choices about the paths one follows and when to stop. Such decisions, in my view, are always framed by the knowledge one hopes to construct through this practice.

Unlike the experience of the conventional text, but like many video games, Skyrim is extensively non-linear. There is a linear main quest narrative to follow, but there are many other quests that might be taken in any order, or one could simply wander about. The world map is filled with nodes--various opportunities for adventure--which certain operate as singularities, drawing one in. The game is "open" in this respect as well. Filled with text objects, ripe with the capacity for being read, and replete with potential, context-sensitive meaning. But let's be clear here. The game player is not the only reader in this system. There is a network of readers handling code back and forth between the disc, the console, the controller, and the screen. That's an area for exploration that I just want to acknowledge but not address here. However, the game's AI is intended to be responsive to the player's actions. To what extent do we want to extend thought or agency to the traditional, printed text-object? And while we may conventionally experience the linear text as narrative, disciplinary interpretation doesn't function that way. Instead it links nodes together. Furthermore, as the digital humanities indicate, there are other (machine) readers of literary texts that can perform a wide variety of manipulations resulting in graphics and other interactions. It's Hamlet on the holodeck all over again. 

Everyone gets the same Skyrim in as much as each game sold in the store is as identical to the next in the same way as each copy of a novel is the same. And there is a high degree of similarity among gaming experiences, but also significant variety, depending on the player and the various mediators between the player and the disc. Can we not say the same thing of the novel? Singular reading experiences with the "same" text?

I wouldn't want to delimit in any way how one might proceed to study interpretive practices, either in the abstract or in relation to a specific text. There are many ways to move forward from this point. My particular scholarly interest, not with "literary" texts or games (despite the example here), is to follow the somewhat Latourian suggestion I made above, to investigate the various mediating nodes as a way of uncovering and testing various hypotheses regarding the quasi-causal, minimally-rhetorical, multiplicities that operate between reader-object and text-object, multiplicities that are analogous to those that operate with, but do not determine, the crystalline shapes salt forms or the spheres of soap bubbles. 

Colin Allen has a piece in the NY Times on robots and morality. I am not familiar with Allen's work, though I now plan to check it out. As such, this is not a direct commentary on his work. It is instead some independent thoughts on the problems that he addresses here (and apparently in his scholarship). The problem is familiar to us in its sci fi articulation from Frankenstein's creature to the Terminator and the Matrix. There's HAL and the computer in Wargames, etc. etc. However this is not just a sci fi problem. As Allen notes:

In military circles, the phrase “man on the loop” has come to replace “man in the loop,” indicating the diminishing role of human overseers in controlling drones and ground-based robots that operate hundreds or thousands of miles from base. These machines need to adjust to local conditions faster than can be signaled and processed by human tele-operators. And while no one is yet recommending that decisions to use lethal force should be handed over to software, the Department of Defense is sufficiently committed to the use of autonomous systems that it has sponsored engineers and philosophers to outline prospects (.pdf report, 108 pages) for ethical governance of battlefield machines.

And there are plenty of less lethal everyday robots, including, as soon as 2013, robot-steered cars. As Allen continues, "Even modest amounts of engineered autonomy make it necessary to outline some modest goals for the design of artificial moral agents." As this suggests, and I've discussed here before, the question of morality (though I prefer ethics) is tied to questions of agency and cognition. Can you think? Do you have the capacity to make decisions about actions?

Allen concedes that "Perhaps ethical theory is to moral agents as physics is to outfielders — theoretical knowledge that isn’t necessary to play a good game. Such theoretical knowledge may still be useful after the fact to analyze and adjust future performance." I would judge this an effective rhetorical move in the NY Times and perhaps also for an audience of engineers or scientists. Maybe it is even important as a philosopher to hold this possibility open. However, I don't think it is an entirely fair analogy. Or at least it isn't yet. That is, I don't think we have an ethical theory that operates as physics does, describing the principles that govern ethical relations as physics governs physical/energetic relations. One might complain that since ethics involves agency it has to include a level of indeterminacy, but so does quantum physics. An ethical theory of this variety would be similar to physics and perhaps be of little use in helping "moral agents" make ethical decisions. However, if you were building a robot outfielder, you would certainly need an understanding of physics, an understanding that is built into engineering practices already. Similarly, if you were building a moral agent, then you would require an ethical theory. 

In addition, there is another layer of practice that rests atop these general theories. The outfielder is not only an object of physics, but also biology, psychology, etc. Sports medicine, athletic training, sport psychology and so on shape the outfielder, as does the statistics of sabremetrics. Of course we are familiar with this traditional relationship between pure and applied sciences. Allen is exploring the possibility of an applied philosophy. In rhetoric, we have long been comfortable with shifting between the pure and the applied. I think of my own work as rethinking rhetoric on that basic, ontological level with an eye toward how it might shift an applied rhetorical practice, so, not surprisingly, I am sympathetic to a project like this.

I also imagine that speculative realism would be a productive approach to this problem. Without knowing Allen's work, I would suspect that a deeply held correlationsim could be a significant obstacle (not necessarily held by him but perhaps by the engineers with whom he works). That is, I think it would be a problem to begin with the premise that humans are the sole moral agents or that we should serve as a model of morality for other objects. I don't think a Kantian categorical imperative would be a useful approach, even though most people conceive of morality in this way (universally black/white). As Allen points out in the article, Asimov's three robot laws are an example of how such an approach goes awry. Of course, if ethics are not universal then they are contingent. They are for something. 

The robot car needs to know that it must choose to strike the dog rather than the child, the tree rather than the dog, the wild animal rather than the domesticated one, to avoid hitting any creature assuming minimal risk to the passengers. For humans these are barely ethical decisions. We don't have time to think in such situations. If we see the dog and the child, we don't swerve toward the child but we don't think about it. What about the robot? Does it calculate a response? Presumably any robot car built in the next decade would. In the end, is this just a brute force quantitative calculation? A robot drives a car the same way that it plays chess? Honestly I think these kinds of split-second decisions, the kind we would hardly call ethical decisions for ourselves, are the hardest to model.

Far easier are the typical ethical dilemmas, the "I found a wallet with $500" decisions. But then again, these aren't ethical dilemmas for the robot, unless the robot can benefit from having $500. One cannot act in a selfless manner without a sense of self. One can only simulate ethical behavior. However, from an object-oriented perspective one might argue that all objects might have a sense of self and an autopoietic function. Autopoiesis is the foundation of ethical relations. Autopoiesis begins with sustaining self-organization but extends to recognize that such sustenance depends upon relations with others. DeLanda does a good job of investigating the game theory mechanics that model such behaviors. 

I will take this one step further and suggest that robots cannot have ethical relations with us unless we have ethical relations with them. And we can start with our non-robotic objects. What ethical obligation do you have with your car? Not with using your car in relation to the environment, but with your car itself? The car is a classic example of an allopoeitic machine, put into the service of an autopoietic machine (you). I suppose car maintenance could be an example. How about driving your car with style? Driving it the way it was meant to be driven?

If this was my project, I would begin by trying to understand what ethical relations already exist among non-human objects and use that fundamental ethical mechanic in the same way that engineers use physics to build the kinds of ethical relations we desire into new technologies.

Stanley Fish has a recent NY Times piece addressing this subject. It is one of those annual examine the MLA convention articles, and Fish discovers that DH is the latest trending topic at the convention. Essentially, he compares DH to the trend of postmodernism and speaks fondly of the long-standing traditions of literary studies. To start though, it is probably worth mentioning the caveat that one should be skeptical of any claims made of a discipline that are the product of reviewing conference paper titles and abstracts, but at least there isn't a Wordle image.

Fish notes, "if you like the way literary studies were done in 1950 or even 1930, there will be a department or a journal that allows you to proceed as if nothing had happened in the last 50 or 75 years."  I'm not sure if this is supposed to be good news or a criticism. It's an observation that people will be presenting without any apparent reference to, or methodological reliance upon, postmodernism or even New Criticism. More on this in a moment.

He notes that the quirky and contentious presentations of the postmodern era have seemed to pass, "after an exciting period of turmoil and instability, the alien invader was domesticated and absorbed into the mainstream, forming part of a new orthodoxy that would subsequently be made to tremble by a new insurgency." I suppose this is true, though as William Gibson remarked, the future is unevenly distributed. In the disciplinary hinterlands, there are no doubt still "theory wars" ongoing. I would guess, however, that in phd programs, postmodern theory is well-integrated into the research profiles of all but the most senior faculty and a mundane facet of graduate student life. That is, no one doubts that this is what should be studied. Did postmodernity bring significant upheavals? I would suggest that one look for that answer in the undergraduate curriculum. There is likely some theory woven into courses whose titles and descriptions have not changed in 50 years. And there are a few new courses representing literature beyond the arch-traditional canon, which nevertheless remains 80% of the course offerings at most institutions. Though maybe that is not the place to look. If one looks at graduate curriculum or works cited in dissertations, monographs, or journal articles, then yes, "theory" has had a lasting impact. 

However, this post is about Fish's "new insurgency," the digital humanities. However, there is really no comparison. Where postmodernity was a direct attack on the existing traditions of literary studies, the digital humanities isn't even specifically about literature. It certainly isn't an attack on existing methods. It is more like an alternative set of methods. It doesn't demand literary scholars change their objects of study. Instead, DH carries on studying the conventional literary traditions. It's most strident claim is it's insistence that it be treated as equal in scholarly value, so that DH dissertations can be done and DH publications can earn someone a job and tenure. And I believe progress has been made in these directions. Fish's major complaint about these sessions? He imagines that if one attends, "a new language is confidently and prophetically spoken by those in the know, while those who are not are made to feel ignorant, passed by, left behind, old." I suppose to a degree this is always the case with disciplinary talks: a degree of expertise is expected of the audience. However, this is also a rhetorical failure. This would certainly not be my rhetorical objective. But this is hardly a quality of DH panels alone. I'm sure I would feel similarly alienated in the old-fashioned panels that appeal most to Fish.

And that's where I want to come back to. A review of the MLA convention would not be complete without a discussion of the panels that address the health and future of the profession. Fish puts these in the context of a number of panels that examine literature and religion: "The very fact that so many papers explore the intersection of literature and religion may be evidence that literary studies are attached to a value that will sustain them even in these hard times." He wonders

if there is to be hope, there must be a path it can travel; and if there is to be redemption, there must be a redeemer. Who or what shall it be? Again, according to the program, it can only be one thing — the digital humanities, which does make an appearance in some of the panels that pose the question of the profession’s health and survival. The digital humanities is the name of the new dispensation and its prophets tell us that if we put our faith in it, we shall be saved. But what exactly is it? And how will its miracles be wrought?

There's no doubt that there is a degree of this rhetoric out there. 4humanities makes such connections, though more modestly than this. I don't believe postmodernity ever offered such claims; that was about overturning the discipline, not "saving" it. 

What one can see suggested in Fish's perspective is not that literary studies has an interest in religion. It is a kind of religion itself. Literary studies requires faith. Like all religious discourse, it has a special meaning for the faithful, and for nonbelievers it is little more than a curiosity. With the MLA convention as its central ritual, the faithful can attend and what the repetition of disciplinary performances. As Fish notes, panels remain unchanged from 50 or more years ago. I would not make this same comparision. I would prefer a different kind of ritual performance like sports or theater. Literary studies is like a baseball; it's professional histories roughly co-extensive. Both had their rough patches in the 90s. You go to a baseball game and you basically know what's going to happen. But you go to see the performance, to experience something through the performance. Sure the score at the end matters, but you could learn the score from the internet. You watch the game because of the aesthetic experience and because you can find value and meaning in that peformance/experience (as all the baseball philosophers would tell us). 

I'm not sure if this comparision is comfortable for literary scholars. It suggests the discipline is about performance rather than the discovery/production and communication of knowledge. Perhaps we would be like Deleuze and Guattari and prefer the factory over the theater. Perhaps we can blur the distinction between performance and discovery/production (of course we can). Personally, I would not be comfortable with viewing my scholarly work as solely an "act." I view my own scholarship as producing knowledge that can be of value (and use) to others, sometimes a small group of scholars, sometimes (hopefully) a broader range of people (e.g. students in writing classes). 

Unlike Fish, my suggestion would not be to go to MLA in search of something in which to put one's faith. I would not look for a ritualized performance that restores my belief. Instead, I would go in search of important research questions and methods to investigate those questions. 

Levi Bryant has a new post on speculative realist literary criticism that has fueled a fair amount of discussion. Apparently Tim Morton and Graham Harman have upcoming essays on the topic, and Eileen Joy has a recent post as well (which spurred Levi's). I've added on the "rhetorical analysis" bit as I think the rhetorical analysis of texts shares a great deal with literary criticism, often drawing upon common theoretical methods. 

The first question one has to ask is "What can be accomplished through literary criticism?" It's a version of the so what? question, I suppose. The same thing is true for rhetorical analysis (please assume I'm speaking about both unless I make a clear distinction). Put different, "What are you trying to find out through textual analysis?" This question might be answered generally or for specific texts. Would you say 'I'm going to analyze 'The Red Wheelbarrow' to discover its meaning"? Probably not, because we no longer accept that premise that the meaning of literary texts can be finalized. However we probably would say that we are going to discover (or compose) a meaning. That is, whatever interpretation results from an analysis of the poem could be attributed to that text. This becomes a disciplinary, rhetorical matter. One has to convince one's audience that an interpretation can be attributed to the text. However, we're still not very far. We now have to ask what the meaning means, or more precisely, what it's value might be. This, again, is a disciplinary-rhetorical matter, perhaps a matter of disciplinary paradigms: how does the meaning discovered/composed connect with established paradigmatic scholarly questions?

An SR lit crit would have to begin with an interest in the ontology of literary texts. As the comment thread on Levi's posts suggests, one can reasonably assert that such an interest exists within literary criticism. A new historical analysis of the cultural contexts that inform a text's production and/or reception values the materiality of the text, a view that could be reoriented toward viewing the text as "object." That said, an object-oriented approach would unmoor the text from its history somewhat, suggesting that the textual-object always withdraws from these historical relations. While we cannot know the text-object in full, we can identify some of its characteristics and encounter some of its capacities through our relation with it. Our encounters with text-objects will always be shaped by our anthropocentrism. However, perhaps, in recognizing this, we can set aside the commonplace belief that texts "contain" truths about us as humans. Texts can know no more about us than we can know of them. We are alien to one another. 

If we focus on the idea of composing rather than discovering knowledge through textual encounters then the text-object becomes a kind of tool. If I use a hammer to drive in a nail, do I think I've discovered some truth about the hammer? So let's say I can use a text to achieve some disciplinary objective. Here I am much like the scientist in the lab, right? I construct an interpretation. Now if I turn too directly toward the text I will find that it slips away. The interpretation that I compose is limited. But that's OK. The scientist doesn't make great discoveries every day in the lab either. It's almost always small steps. Of course the scientist's argument and the literary critic's argument are quite different from one another. Generally speaking I would say textual analysis is aimed out convincing an audience to think/feel differently about a text or perhaps to think/feel differently about a different subject through examining that subject's treatment in the text. For example, maybe we think differently about gender by examining the treatment of the subject in a novel.

In either case, we are now standing farther back from the site of interpretation and examing a larger assemblage at work. The disciplinary assemblage territorializes the literary text. It really can't do anything other than that. Similarly it territorializes its students, faculty, and so on. That's not to say that we are ever fully captured by the discipline! Neither is it to say that the discipline cannot be deterritorialized or mutated. 

My point is just that, for me, an SR approach would begin with recognizing these assemblages at work, while also recognizing that these relations cannot determine the encounter between the text and the critic. Instead they are singularly part of the enounter in a way that explain why such readings are indeterminate while also creating a degree of predictability. E.g., no sane person conversant in English will say "The Red Wheelbarrow" is about the migratory patterns of birds. However, the more disciplined one becomes in literary methods, the more different possibilities open up for interpretation beyond the literal. Many of the rhetorical features of a disciplinary interpretation remain the same, even though the actual interpretations differ.

For me, the particular SR approach I'm interested in is one that examines the relations among reader, text, and interpretation (or object, object, and object). 

I'll be in an MLA roundtable with Cathy Prendergast, Spencer Schaffner, Annette Vee, and Matt Gold discussing the intersections between these two fields. It's a topic that's come up many times on this blog, so now I find myself in a position where I want to say something new about the topic. On ProfHacker and DH Q&A one can see some of the underlying issues. For one thing DH and writing studies (which I supposed one would say is rhet/comp plus technical/professional communication) are both loose connections of interdisciplinary practices themselves. However at the core there is continuing ill will between literary studies and rhetoric. It is difficult to imagine a future where DH lit studies folks and digital rhetoricians identify with each other moreso than they do with their non-digital brethren (though certainly there are occasions and issues where they share common interests). But I don't know that it's enough to reach a point where the emphasis  and identification comes on that digital rather than whatever follows.

In any case I don't really think of myself as a digital humanist or even necessarily as a humanist. And, in a way, that's easy to say. I think it's typical for academics to see themselves as outsiders. After all, this is work that attracts people who like to work independently and we create scholarly value by differentiating ourselves from others. But that said, I think rhetoricians in particular are outsiders in the majority of institutions. How many English departments would imagine rhetoricians as being central to their disciplinary identity as they would any fill-in-the-blank literary period scholar? Not many. And rhetoricians appear in a variety of departments in education, social sciences, and so on. Certainly it has been argued that rhetoric is excised in order to create the Modern Anglo-American humanities with its core focus on literary studies. 

But this is all territory I've covered here before. 

I am attracted to Jeff Rice's recent comments on DH's focus on interpretation and "critical thinking."

If the digital is also a question of display (making apparent through connectivity, access, visuality, aggregation, and so on), then the need to be critical or to be a so called critical thinker can yield to the need to show.  Digital Humanities could relent on its drive to interpret or decode a supposed image for some reality (a Humanities passion exemplified maybe best in literary studies) and begin to understand how to gesture, demonstrate, juxtapose, show among actors and media.

I would put this a little differently, but I believe along the same lines. What does it mean to move from interpretation to composition? Which is not to say that one no longer interprets when composing (or that one can interpret without composing); it is instead a shift in emphasis where the scholarly objective is no longer "to interpret"  but rather to make. The DH refrain for more hack and less yack might reflect such a sentiment (though perhaps that characterizes the yacking as "mere rhetoric"). So that woudn't quite work for me. Given that I spend much of my time as a WPA, I am often thinking about these concerns in terms of undergraduate education. I would like to see a reform of general education where student compositions where not focused on interpretive claims (e.g. read a couple essays write an argumentative paper in respose) and "critical thinking" (whatever that is). Again, not to abandon interpretation, but not to see it as the goal either. I would think that DH (to the extent that one can even speak of DH as a single entity) should align itself with such a move. For my money DH is less about the technology than it is about the creeping realization that the modern humanities is played out. The objects are still there to study, the fundamental mysteries of human experience remain, errr, mysterious, but the methodologies... well, again, I've been over that territory. And, to be clear, this is as true for writing studies as any other disciplinary area. But there is a thread in the digital ends of these disciplines that is perhaps willing to move into a new perspective where interpretation becomes a nonlocal phenomenon and only stands as an intermediary step toward a new emphasis, perhaps on invetion, composition or activity rather than hermeneutics. 

I'm sure there are many answers to this question, but here's mine.

Any rhetorical practice is a composition. Something is composed: a message, a sentence, a thought, sounds, gestures, data, etc. To establish a theory of composition is to establish an ontology, a theory of being and becoming. Perhaps in my field, that ontology is often implied and unexamined, a humanist-Enlightenment philosophy, or if not, then it takes some postmodern form via cultural studies, Foucault, and so on. So the short answer is that one pursues a speculative rhetoric because the extant ontologies of rhetoric are found wanting. Or one might even say that they devalue ontology, insisting that questions of composition, agency, community and such are discursive, epistemological questions, questions of ideology and representation.

However, I obviously see this differently. Not only would I say that a theory of written composition or communication or symbolic behavior rests upon a general ontological theory of composition. I also view questions of rhetoric as intertwined with questions of cognition, agency, and affect. 

• How do we record, retrieve, and process information?
• How do we account for the activities produced by rhetorical relations?
• How do we describe our ability to be affected and affect others via rhetorical practices?

The way I've phrased those questions leaves open the larger question of how far to extend rhetorical relations, which is another arena a speculative rhetoric enables (i.e. how does one draw the boundary between rhetorical and non-rhetorical relations and practices?).

I came to speculative rhetoric via Deleuze, DeLanda, Massumi, and Latour, particularly theories of assemblage and actor-networks. I came to this point organically from what I believe is an obvious realization for anyone who has ever played music (or perhaps composed in any non-textual medium): composition cannot come simply from "inside." Somehow, culturally, we have allowed ourselves to overlook the role of writing technologies and communities when we think of written composition, but anyone who has ever cursed out their multi-track recording deck or guitar that won't stay in tune or spent an afternoon trying to figure out why you keep getting feedback or stapling foam to a wall understands that composition isn't inside. So I started there, 20 years ago, and without even giving it much thought, I brought that perspective to graduate school. So I didn't really experience cognitive dissonance in thinking about networked composition or distributed cognition. 

Of course the things you are hooked into will shape what you compose.

It gets more complicated from there as one tries to develop a theory for how that works, but for the rhetorician the theory is only part of the issue. In some ways the more interesting question is how does the theory open new possibilities for composing? And for the academic rhetorician, the question might be how can I take this scholarly work into the context of my obligations and commitments to teach? And best of all, for the rhetorician who has struggled with the hylomorphic relation between conventional theory and practice, a speculative rhetoric can never be prescriptive. It is simultaneously more and less than a methodology. It gives us a new way to think about the knowledge we produce, one that is both less certain in epistemological terms but also more connected to the world. 

I think we are on firm ground when speaking of incorporeal transformation and any kind of language or symbolic behavior. When the newspapers speak events into being or when a defendant is declared guilty or really any symbolic act where one accepts identification is an incorporeal transformation. However, these acts cannot occur in language alone, they require a larger assemblage: the defendant's guilt is only meaningful in a legal sense with a courtroom and a penal system. Elsewhere perhaps a different transformation might occur, or maybe no transformation occurs.

How about transformations in the relations between humans and animals? Is a pet or domesticated animal that responds to commands experiencing an incorporeal transformation? How much (or what kind) of cognition or agency is needed? How about between humans and other objects? If a geologic formation is identified as a natural resource is that an incorporeal transformation? (e.g. there's gold in them there hills!). I would suggest that these are all incorporeal transformations. And I should note that they are reciprocal: the animal becomes the pet; the human becomes the pet owner. The hills become a gold mine; the humans become miners.

So what happens when we take humans out of the equation? If one animal identifies another as a prey or predator, is that an incorporeal transformation? When a bird's song identifies a territory and another bird recognizes the song? When animals identify a mate? To what extent would we say that those things we typically term "instinctual" are the result of collective assemblages of enunciation rather than strictly machinic assemblages (the interminglings of bodies)? Or do we want to question this distinction? In some respects, I would want to keep these distinctions provisional, and yet I think there is a useful difference to maintain between the exchange of forces we see in the realm of physics and the exchange of forces in these examples above.

The really hazy area is conceiving of incorporeal transformations in relations among objects where it is very difficult to imagine any kind of cognition, any kind of relations that are not machinic. The easiest potential examples are among computers in a network. When one computer addresses another, certain functions/capacities are enabled. Maybe that's an incorporeal transformation. When my phone finds a network? hmmm... Obviously that's a machinic operation, but incorporeal transformation require machinic components. But can the lamp enact an incorporeal transformation on the nightstand? Or is its capacity for collective assemblages of enunciation only realized in its exposure to other objects (like people)?

I think it would reasonable to argue that operations like atoms bonding to form molecules or objects falling under the effect of gravity are not incorporeal transformations. But then one wonders about the strange realm of indeterminacy that lies at the subatomic level. Incorporeal transformation is not about will or agency. They are instead about the capacity to effect and be affected by certain kinds of forces that are not strictly machinic. Should such forces be deemed rhetorical? Or are rhetorical forces only one kind of incorporeal transformation? One thing we might say about incorporeal transformations is that they are not determinate in the way machinic relations can be. That is, I can declare there is gold in those hills, but that does not have a determinate impact on the hills. Many other things have to happen along the way.

Clearly this is the case with our standard, language-based concepts of incorporeal transformation. They don't always work the way we'd expect. As in Austin's example of an illocutionary act, I can ask "Do you have the salt?" at the dinner table with the expectation of someone passing the salt, but it may not happen. Not only may someone refuse the command; someone could simply not recognize the command. It's a different kind of force from the one that reaches over and grabs the salt shaker. Of course that force can also fail (maybe the salt shaker slips from our hands). 

In any case, I am still thinking about how far one extends incorporeal transformation beyond language and thus where rhetoric might go.

Incorporeal transformation is an intergral part of assemblage theory, specifically Deleuze and Guattari's collective assemblages of enunciation. In A Thousand Plateaus "Postulates of Linguistics," incorporeal transformation is an important concept. As the title of the plateau would suggest, the focus here is clearly on language and signs. Probably the typical example of incorporeal transformation is when a defendant is proclaimed guilty at a trial. So the first impluse is to think about incorporeal transformation in terms of Searle or Austin in terms of illocutionary acts. In ATP, Deleuze and Guattari take up the illocutionary. Here's an extended quote:

The theory of the performative sphere, and the broader sphere of the illocutionary, has had three important and immediate consequences: (1) It has made it impossible to conceive of language as a code, since a code is the condition of possibility for all explanation. It has also made it impossible to conceive of speech as the communication of information: to order, question, promise, or affirm is not to inform someone about a command, doubt, engagement, or assertion but to effectuate these specific, immanent, and necessarily implicit acts. (2) It has made it impossible to define semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics as scientific zones of language independent of pragmatics. Pragmatics ceases to be a "trash heap," pragmatic determinations cease to be subject to the alternative: fall outside language, or answer to explicit conditions that syntacticize and semanticize pragmatic determinations. Instead, pragmatics becomes the presupposition behind all of the other dimensions and insinuates itself into everything. (3) It makes it impossible to maintain the distinction between language and speech because speech can no longer be defined simply as the extrinsic and individual use of a primary signification, or the variable application of a preexisting syntax. Quite the opposite, the meaning and syntax of language can no longer be defined independently of the speech acts they presuppose. (77-8)

And then a few lines later, "And the illocutionary is in turn explained by collective assemblages of enunciation." In short, language does something other than code. Is language a code? Can it be translated (into digital signals for example)? Apparently so. However, we cannot equate language with code, nor rhetoric with either language or code. The collective assemblage of enunciation address the force of order-words and incorporeal transformations. This is not simply a matter of context, as in recognizing that saying "I do" in a marriage ceremony is different from saying it elsewhere. It's the recognition that language, as a kind of collective assemblage of enunciation, has an immanent capacity for incorporeal transformations that can be realized in particular relations.

Let's set aside language and think instead about "expression:" bird songs, human music, territorial pissings, gestures, facial expressions, cries, howls, etc. Collective assemblages of enunciation are illocutionary; they do rather than communicate. Unlike language, they are not capable of translation, though certainly language is capable of translating them. As assemblages they have capacities. As such, depending on the relations with other assemblages that develop, those capacities may or may not emerge and incorporeal transformations may or may not transpire. The important point is that collective assemblages of enunciation are not simply code/representation nor are they only natural or only social. They are Latourian quasi-objects. As humans we are exposed to any number of incorporeal transformations. Think of how we are affected by body gestures, both conscious and unconscious, or tone of voice. Think of the illocutionary force of images or advertisements. We can explain these as "natural" reactions, though they are also certainly intertwined with social forces. 

From this perspective, an object-oriented rhetoric begins with the illocutionary expressions of collective assemblages of enunciation. The capacity to be affected by incorporeal transformations is the foundation of rhetorical relations: relations that are not solely the intermingling of bodies, the machinic exchange of forces. In earlier posts, I've thought about rhetorical relations as those productive of thought/agency. I want to stick with that, as I think ultimately, the task of object-oriented rhetoric will be to expand thought, agency, and rhetoric to fill this space of incorporeal transformations, though right now they probably do not. Maybe this will be a matter of a reciprocal relationship, the capacity for agency and to affect others reciprocally includes the capacity to be affected and have agency overwritten. 

China Mievile's sci-fi novel, Embassytown, takes up language as a central theme. [Spolier alert.] The novel follows humans living on an alien planet where the native Hosts have two voices and thus speak a language no single human can attempt. However, their language is more mysterious than that. The Hosts do not view their language as symbolic; instead it is inextricably connected with a mind and with the world. As such, a machine speaking or two random humans speaking in chorus make no sense to the Hosts, who do not even recognize the sounds as language. Instead, it requires two carefully bred humans who are closely connected on a mental level (like twins, but only moreso) so that the Hosts recognize them as a single speaking entity. These humans serve as ambassadors, undertaking all communication with the Hosts. Furthermore, the Hosts find it impossible to lie as for them, language ties their minds directly to the world. They cannot speak what has not been perceived.

I don't want to summarize the entire plot. However in the Host's language one can see how a language might function if the world, words, and thoughts were so closely interwoven that the speakers could not separate them. Inasmuch, the novel considers what the implications might be for a language that was purely logocentric and nearly telepathic. Words without a recognizable presence behind them are meaningless. (There is no writing.) Only that which has been seen, that which is perceived as real, can be spoken or thought. Of course the human ambassadors can lie in this language: a fact that the Hosts find fascinating, and they struggle to lie as well. This all-too-human abiilty to separate language from word and thought, also introduces a literal pharmakon into the Hosts' language, as one Ambassador's speech has a narcotic effect upon the aliens. Eventually the aliens, with the help of the protagonist, create a new symbolic language that frees them from this addiction. 

It is the capacity to lie that brings Plato to condemn both rhetoric and poetry. Mieville's novel asks us to consider how invaluable this poetic-rhetorical capacity is. (He focuses particularly on metaphor.) One might imagine that the disconnection between symbolic behavior, thinking, and objects marks the impossibility of true knowledge of the world, but one might just as easily remark that this disconnection or slippage creates the possibility of knowing. The near-telepathic perception of presence among the Hosts obviates the necessity of extending toward the other that requires us to produce knowledge. Indeed, the Hosts are not able to imagine regular humans as sentient beings. Hosts do not produce knowledge, which is self-evident for them.

In any case, I don't want to over-philosophize the novel, even though it is openly philosophical. The most interesting moments are not the philosophical musings but the way the theory of language plays itself out through the characters and plot: the way some humans come to view the Hosts' language as Edenic, the politics and social structure that build up around the Ambassador class, the revolutionary struggles of Hosts seeking to break free from their language and their addiction.  However, in reading it, I couldn't help but think how the novel explored how an object-oriented ontology provides a basis for understanding how a minimal rhetoricity creates the context for thought and agency. Only with the separation of symbolic behavior from objects and mind does one come to see oneself as a separable thinking being and recognize others as such. Only in this way does one move from the "embassytown" where language is a neutral transmitter of reality, devoid of any possibility to think otherwise, to an assembly-ville where agency to think otherwise arises.

With A Thousand Plateaus,Deleuze and Guattari announce "There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)” (23). Of course, in rhetorical instruction, we are familiar with a different tripartite division: the “rhetorical triangle.” A Google search (or the typical college writing handbook) will reveal that the triangle refers to Aristotle’s three modes of appeal: logos, pathos, and ethos. However, Aristotle never wrote of rhetoric in terms of triangles. Instead, the rhetorical triangle is first drawn by James Kinneavy in 1969, though he certainly acknowledges Aristotle, among others, for his conception. In “The Basic Aims of Discourse,” Kinneavy’s triangle is “composed of an encoder (writer or speaker), a decoder (reader or listener), a signal (the linguistic product), and a reality (that part of the universe to which the linguistic product refers” (301). Kinneavy’s terminology suggests the cybernetic, scientific basis of his approach: “an attempt to formulate the nature of information, as such, must operate in a discourse vacuum which momentarily abstracts from the fact that information can be used in propaganda or be a component of a literary discourse” (297). Later textbook versions of the rhetorical triangle would replace them with author (encoder), audience (decoder), and subject (reality). Sometimes subject is replaced with “purpose.” Furthermore, these terms are them overlaid with Aristotle’s appeals creating encoder/author/ethos, decoder/audience/pathos, reality/subject (or purpose)/logos.  This remapping is only partly reflective of Kinneavy’s triangle. Kinneavy notes that certain rhetorical practices do emphasize certain elements of the triangle, so, for example, practices that focus on the decoder are primarily persuasive. These persuasive practices include advertising, which might principally appeal to pathos, but also political speeches and legal oratory, which one at least hopes are not solely emotional appeals. Nevertheless, this overlapping does reinforce a central modern theme; reality is a realm of fact and logic, separable from human, subjective questions of ethics and affect.

Latour observes a related triangle when he writes “'if you are not talking about things-in-themselves or about humans-among-themselves, then you must be talking just about discourse, representation, language, texts, rhetorics.' This is the third misunderstanding” (We Have Never Been Modern, 5). That is, Latour’s moderns divide the world into three parts: the natural, scientific world of nonhuman objects; the social world of humans; and the epistemological world of signs. The rhetorical triangle captures this, with the signal mediating between reality and the human encoders and decoders. As Latour continues, “the only way to escape from the parallel traps of naturalization and sociologization consists in granting language its autonomy” (64). However that is not sufficient in itself if language then remains a fully separate realm. Though the rhetorical triangle points to humans and nonhumans, it is only ever about signs: the author as a function of the text, the audience as addressed by the text, and the world as represented in the text.  Assemblages, however, are “quasi-objects” (to use Latour’s term), which “are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the 'hard' parts of nature, but they are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of a full-fledged society” (55). They are part-natural, part-social, and part-discursive, belying these distinctions that form the modern world (and the book). Latour’s quasi-objects, like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, require a different conception of assemblage and arrangement. The arrangement of the text cannot simply be a matter of heading and sub-headings, of sentences and paragraphs. Instead, the text’s assembly includes both human and nonhuman, as when the instruction manual mediates between a person and his mobile phone. No one imagines such mediations are transparent. We have all read enough instruction manuals to know they are anything but transparent! On the other hand, the manual is not in a distinct and distant realm unapproachable by either phone or human either.  This is the principle shift for rhetoric suggested by the rhizomatic arrangement of the assemblage, an ontological shift out of the purely symbolic realm of discourse and into the hybridized, ontological space of the quasi-object.

In this TEDxNYED talk, Dan Meyer discusses the particular challenges of math education. Essentially he observes that students are taught to view math as the application of a formula. Indeed they become so inured to that expectation that they view with some suspicion the encounter of math without a formula. As I view it, students come to desire to serve as the meaty end of a calculator. It's an interesting video. I encourage you to watch it. I think it has much to say about the general challenges of teaching.

I would describe this situation in Latourian terms. We tend to view teaching, but especially the content of teaching, as "matters of fact." As matters of fact they are rational objects that can be measured by scientific means, such as multiple choice tests. In other words, there is a "science of learning." It is not only students that come to desire operating as the meaty end of a mechanical process. Teachers also desire formulaic methods. Deny that if you wish, but the internet is replete with lesson plans. The extreme end of that desire is scripted teaching, or what I call "do you want fries with that? pedagogy." I doubt that many teachers wish to be reading scripts all day. But the underlying premise is commonplace: formulae exist for successful teaching.

As Latour observes, the modernist split between nature and society never really happens, but we firmly believe in it. Scientists object when Latour remarks on the processes they employ to construct knowledge, believing that such remarks are meant to suggest that their results are fictions rather than facts. That's not the point at all, of course. Science is supposed to be separate from the political but we know that never is the case from cloning and climate change to DoD research and academic entrepreneurialism. Obviously the same thing is true with teaching: the political and marketplace debates over teaching are endless. And yet we still believe that the content of schooling is factual and the processes of teaching are scientific. Ultimately what gets lost in that modernist view are the roles of students and teachers in the composition of knowledge. Learning is making. Learning is composing. And not just in the sense of composing writing but in the broader sense that we might also say knowledge is composed in a scientist's laboratory. 

The obvious difference between the scientist and the 5th grader is that the scientist is an expert. We think of the knowledge she composes as being an original contribution: she learns something that no one else knew before. On the other hand, 5th graders are supposed to learn canned knowledge that we all supposedly know (though that game show about being smarter than a 5th grader belies that supposition). But that's not how either of these processes work. For one thing, science is often about repeating experiments: verifying knowledge composed elsewhere. In addition, scientific discoveries rely upon a great deal of technical problem-solving. In a very different way, as a rhetorician, I also expect to compose new knowledge but spend most of my time solving technical problems from the interstices among the different philosophical concepts I'm using to rhetorical problems of arrangement and style. In other words, experts spend much of their time solving everyday real world problems in their work so that they can create conditions for composing new knowledge. 

I would suggest that 5th graders, students of all ages, do the same thing. They have to construct new knowledge for themselves and in doing so they face everyday obstacles to those constructions. They do not encounter the world as a pile of pre-digested matters of fact ready to be consumed by baby-bird students. No one lives in that world, so perhaps we ought to not build pedagogies built on the belief that we do. To be fair, I don't believe anyone would state their beliefs in that way. And yet, we also seem to resist the notion that students must make knowledge for themselves. In part because it is difficult to understand the role of the teacher in the process. Even if we have long understood the "banking" model as bankrupt, we still hold on to the teacher as authority. Of course the teachers are authorities in the sense that they do know more about the subject at hand than the students. I know more about writing and rhetoric than my students. But so what? They still have to make that knowledge for themselves. Every scientist, every researcher, scholar, and academic, knows that there is someone out there in his community that knows something more or other about the work he's doing than he does. No one can read all the possibly relevant research. Nevertheless, we all must compose knowledge from what we have. And in doing so, we can create value. This is what students must do as well. 

The ecocritical theory reading group, of which I've been a very wayward member, is discussing Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter this week. Bennett's work and mine share similar foundations in Delanda, Latour, Deleuze and the minor philosophical tradition that Deleuze mapped, which is not to say that we are in total agreement but rather that I am a sympathetic audience for her work. At the close she writes, "I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to nonhuman bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp." I find this a reasonable claim. I don't know that I would pursue a method of anthrophomorphization, although I would certainly agree with the recognition of our limits to comprehend. However I'm not certain that this view leads toward the environmental politics that Bennett seeks.

Instead, when I look at Latour, Delanda, Deleuze, Guattari, etc., I see some compelling ontological investigations into how objects emerge and relate. We can see how ethics operate, that fundamentally ethics are a recognition of interdependency. As I would put it, there is no thought or agency without relation. I would certainly argue that there are minimal ethical relations among objects, just as there are minimal rhetorical ones, and that the two are perhaps co-extensive.

When we start to speak of environmental politics, however, I think there is an entirely reasonable focus on humans. Namely, environmentalists are interested in maintaining a world that is habitable for humans. Not just humans, mind you. But certainly humans. The earth has gone through some inhospitable moments in its geologic history, and the universe is filled with lifeless worlds, so I don't think there's any ethical requirement on the part of the earth or the universe to perserve "life as we know it." As such, there is no foundational, no absolute injunction to maintain life.

We have to invent that for ourselves.

I suppose one could think of that as a kind of human exceptionalism. We decide we are worth saving. And obviously we think we are pretty special. Humans are unique (apologies to ET) in their symbolic behaviors, in our particular cognitive capacities and uses of technology, etc., etc. However not unique in a way that our development cannot be understood as part of the development of the rest of the world. No doubt, for a long time we had a belief (and most humans still believe) that human exceptionalism was not part of the life world but granted by an external divine force. That belief changes one's relations with the rest of the world and has certainly led societies to believe they had little ethical obligation to nonhuman objects (or even nonbeliever humans). There's no doubt that certain strains of human expectionalism have been fairly deadly. Our current Western committment to a secular modernity brings its own human exceptionalism, with its separation of nature and culture, that has resulted in some severe enivornmental damage. That modernist belief was also a belief that we were outside the system.

In other words, human exceptionalism often seems to me that we are excepted from ethical obligations rather than establishing that we are the "only" ethical beings. Or maybe that's the same thing. If we are the only ethical beings then perhaps that implies that we cannot have ethical obligations to others. 

Perhaps it is a matter of rephrasing the problem, which is how I would read Bennett's project. If we see "humans" as part of a larger assemblage then we see how ethical obligations extend beyond the conventionally human. Clearly this is how environmentalism commonly operates, or at least one could read it that way. On this general level and in the long term, I don't think Bennett's intervention alters the fundamental politicial goal of environmentalism of keeping the earth habitable for humans. In this respect I think it has be a kind of human exceptionalism: we want to survive. However I do think it changes how we understand and respond to the challenge of doing so because it asks us to rethink what human is and what objects are. In this regard, I think it likely challenges many of the existing tenets of human exceptionalism. 

Stepping adjacent to environmental issues in particular, I think this move has real implications for the humanities and the arts. That is, just think for a moment about your own experience in the humanities (and humanistic interpretation/appreciation of the arts). To what extent is it a celebration of a deadly human exceptionalism? Sure we can say, as Bennett sometimes does, that we can't escape our anthropomorphism. I suppose teenagers can't escape their solipsism either. And I'm not a naive realist to believe we can know the universe as it "truly" is (that's perhaps the greatest form of human exceptionalism, btw). What would a non-humanocentric humanities look like? What would it mean to read literature or examine rhetoric or study philsophy or history or whatever without this exceptionalist view of humans? These are the kinds of changes that Bennett suggests for environmentalism, so perhaps they are not as modest as I suggested at the outset.

Perhaps this has occurred to others, but I was thinking this morning of the word object and the many other words it shares -ject with: project, deject, eject, reject, inject, interject ... perhaps you can think of others. Like "object," most of these words serve as both noun and verb (sometimes as adj.). In most of the etymologies, -ject comes from the Latin jacĕre meaning to throw. In the case of object, the inherited meaning is to throw something before the mind or senses. I suppose the etymology, in this case, could be viewed as unfortunate for OOO, which clearly presents objects as mind-independent, and certainly the evolved and contemporary understanding of object is mind-independent, though even being "objective" still requires a mind. However I don't exactly see it that way, particularly given my interested in an object-oriented or speculative rhetoric. While such a position begins with the premise that objects withdraw from one another, it is also a position that investigates how relations occur despite this premise. That is, while objects may withdraw from one another, what we know of each other and the world has to do with what is thrown before us, what we can encounter, which is mind-independent. 

With that in mind (sorry), my interest turns toward the vector that is implicit in the throw. Or perhaps I should say trajectory. To traject means to cross or also a point of crossing. Although we might say that a trajectory is a particular kind of -jection, so maybe we need a word with a different etymology, like vector. Either way, there is an energetic component to object, as is clear from the verb form. To object is to get in the way, to dissent. We could say that objects in OOO do this to us. They rise in our sensorium and resist. They object to our cognitive apprehension of them. In any case, the object is hardly static. We can't imagine that it just sits there. This understanding might contribute to how one would reconcile the differences between object-oriented positions and more process-oriented positions that arise from Deleuze (or in a very different way, in writing processes, which are of more specific interest to my field). An important point in recognizing objects have a vector or trajectory is that this does not mean that they have a destiny or destination. Instead, it is simply to state that objects have forces and these forces encounter one another. As I have suggested before, a minimal rhetoric might be understand as the study of forces, not, obviously, in the physics sense but rather as the study of forces that result in thought or agency. 

Now to think about an eject-oriented ontology. I don't mean this in the sense of ejection but rather in the way that the ubiquitous e appears before e-book, e-learning, e-mail, etc. In other words, I'm thinking about the ontological force relations pertaining to objects participating in digital networks. While we can speak of a general ontological philosophy, we can also recognize that certain objects have capacities (energies/forces) activated by their participation in particular networks, ecologies, etc. Obviously humans, for example, require certain conditions in order to remain human. As DeLanda remarks in A New Philosophy of Society, communication networks operate as a significant deterritorializing and decoding force for social assemblages. The e-object or e-ject participates in digital networks in a manner that alters its energetic profile: there is an intersection of forces. 

My research investigates such matters. Certainly there are objects that we would describe as digital but there are many more objects that are modified by the digital, e.g. digital pedagogy, digital scholarship, and so on. So the monograph was composed out of a particular assemblage to become its own withdrawing object as a printed book has its energetic profile altered by its encounter with the digital, which turns it into a PDF and distributes it online. The PDF is different from the book. Indeed each copy of the book is singular. And yet each book as an object, as that which is thrown before other objects, is altered by its encounter with the digital. That is, the existence of the PDF changes the book as encountered, speculated upon, object. This, in turn, alters the scholarship producing assemblages that compose future monographs. 

In my previous post I mentioned heading off to a presentation on digital pedagogy. The outcome of the presentation reminded me of a common feature of these discussions, one that had slipped my mind as it had been some time since I'd had an extended conversation about online teaching with folks just entering into the practice.

As you might tell from the last post, the focus of my remarks addressed the recognition that contemporary digital networks promote a degree of real-time sociality that is untapped in conventional online teaching. Furthermore, I noted that the primary errors in online pedagogy are  

1. adapting existing FTF courses for online, with the result of a course that is the least common denominator of FTF and online teaching, and
2. imagining that the problems of the FTF class, namely managing the potential sociality of the space, is the problem of the online class (where, err, it isn't).

The conversation that followed focused primarily on managing the online behaviors of students. Interestingly, the concerns were not even particularly with behaviors in classrooms but with online behaviors in general. Most of the points that were raised were anecdotal ("I heard about this one student who...") or searches for exceptions ("but what if a student..."). Sigh.

However, my reaction was to observe how the conversation quickly shifted from teaching online to questions of online behavior. Why is that? Clearly the physical classroom is designed to regulate behaviors of both students and teachers. That's why the seats are situated as they are. No doubt there are conventions regulating in-class behavior as well. However, as faculty, we don't spend a tremendous amount of time worrying about student real-world behaviors outside the classroom. So why should we worry about student online behaviors outside our online courses? By the way, student online behaviors are part of their real world behaviors, so whatever distress one might have about such behaviors would apply as much to FTF classes as to online classes, right?

In other words, I'm a little mystified as to why the conversation goes in this direction. Perhaps it is because the audience is on such uncertain ground in discussing online teaching that it retreats to commonplaces about the online world. Maybe the appeal of the CMS is its sterility. In fact, there's probably little doubt about it. That's what appeals to faculty and universities about Blackbored: the sterility of the CMS means little can happen.

The real concern though is the deeper pedagogical problem this reveals. Clearly the traditional lecture classroom operates on a pre-industrial, medieval model where the best way to get information is to listen to the expert tell you. All of our school behaviors condition us to accept this state of affairs as natural. In the digital world, where we have an overload of information, the problem is restricting the flow of information, identifying what is the best media. However, that doesn't mean that we need a lecture; it means we need a guide. The classroom with its no-laptop policy and Blackbored are designed to create artificial conditions of information scarcity where the performance of the medieval lecture can be re-enacted.

Of course, once we record the lecture, we don't need it performed again. In fact, why don't we hire Morgan Freeman or some other actor-sage and create documentaries like those on Discovery or the HIstory Channel? Why not have big budget videos with historical reenactments and special effects of black holes or atoms or dinosaurs or whatever? Why not have that instead of lectures? If the classroom is all about delivering information and then testing people to see if they received the information, then we really don't need professors. We need videos, some texts, a testing center, and maybe customer support/tutors. For some perverse reason, this seems to be the future that faculty wish to pursue (except somehow they fantasize they get to keep their jobs, maybe through union protectionist clauses). The perverse reason is that they would rather go under with the lecture hall than risk entering a non-sterile online space.

• What happens when the student's non-academic social media mix with the activities of the classroom and you read tweets/updates about their lives?
• What happens when students say things online in your class (or otherwise visible to you) that are offensive or that cause problems for other people?
• What happens, what happens, what happens

One answer is that we don't know, because we don't know what the future of online learning will be. The other answer is what happens when these things happen in real life? When the student confesses in the office hour? When they come to class with bloodshot eyes and reeking of pot? When they get into a fight in the hall? 

Here's the deal: The dangers of the online world are no different than the dangers of the real world. Do you know why? Because the online world is part of the real world! 

The future role of faculty will be negotiating online and physical spaces. I think most of our students will continue to come to college... if for no other reason than they don't want to sit around the house all day. Classes will continue to have real time elements, both FTF and online. Our job will be to serve as leaders and mentors in learning communities. If you are studying to be a nurse or a teacher or a professional writer or if you are studying literature, philosophy, physics, or psychology, there is a body of knowledge that you need to learn and there are practices and methods you need to adopt. As a student you can't just decide you want to be an "X" and then make up your own course of study. Getting a degree means entering a community and learning its knowledge, practices, and methods. In that regard, the role of the faculty remains the same.

It's just that the specific activities that we undertake to fulfill that role will change.

And if we want to talk about the ethics of online behavior along the way, that's fine. You could tell the prospective teacher (or really almost any aspiring professional) not to upload risque photos or post status updates about getting wasted. I suppose you could tell them not to identify their sexual orientation, religion, or politics either. Any of those things might offend someone. But ethics is a two-way street. And ultimately we will have to learn that we don't get to decide in advance what our ethics shall be.