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This semester I am teaching our Practicum for Teaching course: a graduate course in which we mentor our new TAs and discuss research in rhetoric and composition. Our primary text is the Norton Book of Composition Studies, and we've started with a number of interesting pieces from Bazerman, Bartholomae, Harris, and Elbow. Of course one always tends to read texts through the particular theoretical lens that one is working in or through, and I have been thinking about "assemblage, network, object" theory. Nevertheless, I was surprised at the connections I saw, and perhaps the potential to think the existing disciplinary foundation for thinking about rhetoric in these theoretical terms.

With Charles Bazerman and his longstanding interesting in the rhetoric of science, it is hardly surprising that there is a connection with Latourian approaches. Like Latour, Bazerman is interested in the construction, the composition, of scientific knowledge (though admittedly, he is primarily focused on how this construction occurs through rhetorical practices as opposed to the broader network of actor-objects at work). In this excerpt, the first chapter from Shaping Written Knowledge (1988), Bazerman focuses on genre and contends that "we must be careful not to consider this genre as a unitary social fact. Formal definitions, expected features, institutional force, impact, and understandings of the genre vary through time, place, and situation." Though certainly he is writing here at a time when Derrida and Foucault are taking over English Studies, and, as a rhetorician, he is content with this renewed focus on language, particularly non-literary language, we can see in Bazerman the move toward thinking about technology and other objects in rhetorical-compositional processes.

If we want to think about an object-oriented rhetoric, then we can't think of genre as a formal or essential category of texts but rather an articulation of a text in a social situation. I.e., a proposal isn't a proposal simply because it reflects some formal elements.

Joseph Harris' "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing" explores the links between genre and community. When we speak about "academic discourse communities," especially in first-year writing, we tend to reference an abstract, textual community: writers who may never meet and only connect through citation. It's a community that comes very close to what we typically think of as a genre. Harris notes this. The same thing might be said of a students' "home discourse." Harris writes

There has been much debate in recent years over whether we need, above all, to respect our students' "right to their own language," or to teach them the ways and forms of "academic discourse." Both sides of this argument, in the end, rest their cases on the same suspect generalization: that we and our students belong to different and fairly distinct communities of discourse, that we have "our "academic" discourse and they have "their own" "common" (?!) ones. The choice is between opposing fictions... We do not write simply as individuals, but we do not write simply as members of a community either.

Harris ultimately seeks to recoup the concept of community from the abstractions of ideology, hegemony, and the like. This too strikes me as a project similar to Latour's reassembling of the social. The leap to abstract genres of academic discourse or vague academic communities is much like the leap to the bland background of the social. Does the generic genre of academic discourse exist? Only in the sense that it is constructed and maintained in the context of the composition classroom. But then, of course, it isn't "generic;" it is locatable within a network.

Of course this connects with Bartholomae's "Inventing the University," where we encounter a curious kind of invention. Students don't really get to invent the university; they have to invent a way to enter into the university. This is the problem that Harris is discussing and critiquing above. In Bartholomae's essay it is interesting to see how the force of institutional writing can serve to stultify writing for those who come to view the task in terms of formal genres.

Strangely, for those of us who find value in academic writing and its community of writers and readers, genre becomes a more fluid emergent understanding of the relations and mediations among objects (even if we don't always speak in those terms). Perhaps this is part of the problem that Ian was writing about recently. Even though "expressivist" rhetoric, in the sense that is generally applied to the work of Elbow and others, has certainly declined in popularity, perhaps a return to a philosophy of expression might be useful. After all, expressivism and process are put through the textbook grinder and come out as crude caricatures; then the terms get appropriated by other scholars who would replace them.

The primary problem with expressivist rhetoric, particularly as it devolved, was its focus on the individual as the sole source of expression. What we might do is extend the notion of expression to map the relations among objects. There are many objects and forces expressing themselves in a compositional assemblage. With expressivism we get past the non-local, generalized, spectral notions of university and discourse to examine the specific objects at work, expressing themselves.

 

 

I'd thought I'd throw out some characteristics of my son's generation rather than wait for ten years or so to see how they represent themselves in a Pew and American Life study. He's almost eleven years old. His is the generation that was born into Web 2.0 and other advanced digital technology. I know this isn't true for all kids his age (and it may be more true for boys--I don't know), but it's fun to imagine:

1. Many of them would rather take videos than still pictures.
2. They either have themselves, or have a friend close in age, who has put up a video on YouTube.
3. They either have themselves, or have a friend close in age, who has been in a YouTube video.
4. They have their own computer, or at least one that is shared with siblings and not the adults in the family.
5. They share websites and videos they find on the Internet.
6. They have email accounts and send and receive email on occassion.
7. They have played an MMORPG designed for kids along with other kids in their school. My son and friends at school, boys and girls alike, play Wizard 101.
8. They have mobile phones and have sent and/or received text messages.
9. Some are used to watching television and/or movies without commerical interruptions, and they will prefer the use of a DVD, Blueray, DVR, Tivo, or Netflix on demand to avoid commercials.
10. They have more than one game system, at least a DS and a console unit.
11. Cable television is not their sole, primary form of digital entertainment. Video games and the Internet have a strong, competing role for their attrention.
12. Mp3 players are the primary music listening device that they own.
13. Radio is something they listen to in the car when there are no CDs, the DS is not with them, and they forgot the mp3 player. It's the electronic media of last resort.
14. Superheroes are something one sees in movies or cartoon series, not in comics (my son is the exception; he reads Marvel comics).
15. Fantasy and science fiction--in video and in print--are often their primary genre of choice.
16. The boys read video game reviews on the Internet and in magazines and discuss them with the enthusiasm adult males read sports and talk about sports.
17. Thanks to Rock Band and Guitar Hero, the music their parents--and even younger grandparents--grew up with can be "cool" to like and to listen to.

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing:

Position Description. Reporting to the Chair of the Department of Writing and Linguistics, the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing position requires teaching, service, and research responsibilities and a terminal degree. The successful candidate will teach 3 courses per semester with primary assignment in multi-genre and single-genre Creative Writing courses. The position is a 9-month, tenure-track appointment, and the salary is competitive and commensurate with qualifications and experience.
 
Required Qualifications:
•                      M.F.A. or Ph.D. with creative dissertation by August 1, 2011
•                      Publication in nationally recognized journals or presses
•                      Experience teaching multiple creative writing genres
•                      Experience teaching with technology
•                      Evidence of excellence in teaching
 
Preferred Qualifications:
•                      Poetry as primary genre
•                      Publications in multiple creative writing genres
•                      Book publication with nationally recognized press
•                      At least one year of full-time experience teaching creative writing
•                      Experience developing and teaching online courses and programs
•                      Evidence of interest in active involvement with students, such as advising majors, advising creative writing club, and judging student competitions
 
 
Postmark deadline for receipt of applications is October 15, 2010. The position starting date is August 1, 2011. A complete application consists of a letter addressing the qualifications cited above; a curriculum vitae; and three letters of professional reference. Additional documentation may be requested. Georgia Southern University seeks to recruit individuals who are committed to working in diverse academic and professional communities. Applications and nominations should be sent to:
          Professor Eric Nelson, Search Chair, Search 59262
                             Department of Writing and Linguistics
                             Georgia Southern University
                             P. O. Box 8026
                             Statesboro GA 30460-8026
          Electronic mail: enelson@georgiasouthern.edu
          Telephone: 912-478-0739
 

More information about the institution is available through http://www.georgiasouthern.edu or http://class.georgiasouthern.edu/writling/. Georgia Southern University seeks individuals who are committed to excellence in teaching, scholarship, and professional service within the University and beyond. Finalists will be required to submit to a background investigation. Georgia is an Open Records state. Georgia Southern University is an AA/EO institution. Individuals who need reasonable accommodations under the ADA to participate in the search process should contact the Associate Provost.

All,   As the 2011 conference chair, I am pleased to share with you the call for proposals for the 14th annual conference of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing. Like previous ATTW conferences, the 2011 conference will be held on the Wednesday immediately preceding the start of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Atlanta, GA. That date is Wednesday, April 6th.   The theme for the 2011 conference is Networks of Technical Communication. The CFP is available at http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jswarts/ATTW_2011.html . I hope you find the theme as compelling as I do and that you will consider submitting a proposal by October 8, 2010.    If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at jswarts [at] ncsu [dot] edu.   Sincerely,   Jason Swarts 

There's a story up at studentpirgs.org about rising textbook costs and some news laws designed to fight it. Their calculations show that "textbook wholesale prices have risen more than four times the rate of inflation over the last two decades" and that new laws will force publishers to reveal their textbook prices to faculty. The article also points to open-source textbooks and the very popular textbook rental companies springing up all over the place. The commercial textbook publishers better get on that subscription-based electronic book bandwagon soon if they want to keep their high rises on the Avenue of the Americas.

The BBC has a story about a computer programming class at the National Museum for Computing in Bletchley where students are using PDP-8 computers, machines built by DEC during the 1960's.

Here's a silly idea. I propose we collect donations and scour Goodwill stores for some old IBM 5150 first generation PC's for a computer lab with Wordstar and retro gaming. I bet we could find someone that would love to host it at St. Cloud University.

That would actually be an interesting project, though, wouldn't it? To try composing in Wordstar in a comp classroom? The main problems would be (a) there would be no way for students to print out their papers (could we even purchase the necessary paper assuming we could find a working printer to attach?), (b) a computer classroom without people using Facebook would be very weird, and (c) students would get confused over how to hook their USB flash drives up to save their papers ;-)

The open access series Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing seeks chapter proposals for its third volume. We are interested in a wide range of topics relevant for first-year composition, but especially in accessible discussions of rhetoric. Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

• rhetorical appeals, especially ethos
• rhetorical fallacies
• inductive and deductive arguments
• strategies for addressing different audiences

We are not interested in "general introductions to rhetoric" kinds of chapters.

The deadline for proposals is September 1st. To submit a proposal, please visit http://writingspaces.org/authors/submit-proposal. If you have questions, please contact the series editos Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky at http://writingspaces.org/contact

Writing Spaces is published in partnership with Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse.

 
From Vooks to ebooks, from the iPad to the Google settlement, and from print-on-demand to new styles of writing, this article attempts to analyse the effects of the digital revolution on the publishing industry, and to make some educated guesses about how things may develop in the next few years.

"An alternative to the Big Publishing model is already with us, and despite the odd viral phenomenon it consists in the main of very large numbers of small-scale products reaching small audiences, rather than small numbers of very high-profile products reaching huge audiences. This alternative model is enabled by digital technology, and it replaces high production values and market-minded editorial controls with the principle that people's desire to publish themselves and to look at each other's efforts is itself a profit motor."

To read the whole article, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewdigitalpublishing.php or http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=406 .

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

I've been reading about Fred Brooks' new book The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist. Of course, I've had Brooks' earlier book, The Mythican Man-Month, on my reading list for many years now. I assume you know the basic premise there about how adding extra engineers to a project doesn't necessarily result in a speedier development cycle. Wired has an interview up with Brooks about his book. There aren't a lot of insights there, but it's interesting to see that Brooks now sees the benefit of encapsulation and how much faster hardware has accelerated compared to software.

Anyway, has anyone read the new book? I'd love to hear your opinion.

 

Picking up on some conversations after being away on vacation (and from the internet) for a week. Levi Bryant continues his discussion of rhetoric and object-oriented philosophy. The concept of missing masses comes in from Latour via Scot Burnett's discussion of object-oriented rhetoric.

Levi writes:

In the sciences, a missing mass is a variable that plays a crucial role in a particular phenomenon but which has been overlooked or missed in the course of investigation. For example, scientists were led to posit the existence of dark matter to explain the strange accelerated motion of stars at the edges of galaxies. If visible matter accounted for all matter in the universe, it would be impossible for stars to move at this rate. Consequently, there must be some other sort of matter that accounts for this accelerated motion. Remarkably, simulations of the evolution of the universe that include dark matter in their algorithms produce spiral shape galaxies such as their own, lending credence to the hypothetical existence of dark matter. The claim that the field of rhetoric contains missing masses would be the claim that rhetoric has overlooked crucial actors in rhetorical situations and that if it is really serious about explaining how persuasion works, it must, in addition to a focus on the domain of signification, take into account the role played by these masses. These missing masses are precisely the things that Barnett mentions: technologies, the body, space and place and temporalities, and natural entities. While these agencies are entangled (thank you Karen Barad) in significations, meanings, and purposes, they contribute forms of difference that are a-signifying and that can only be understood in a-signifying terms. Here the issue is to understand what contribution a-signifying agencies make to signifying agencies. Again, the aim is to think in terms of entanglements rather than ultimate grounds.

And I want to borrow this extended passage to take up a number of points.

1. "Missing masses" comes from earlier Latour. It is, essentially, the argument that sociologists need to consider nonhuman actors, which is exactly as it is taken up here, but in terms of rhetoric rather than sociology. But I was thinking about this in relation to more recent Latour in Reassembling the Social, particularly in the section titled "Plasma: the missing masses." Here Latour writes,

I call this background plasma, namely that which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified. How big is it? Take a map of London and imagine that the social world visited so far occupies no more room than the subway. The plasma would be the rest of London, all its buildings, inhabitants, climates, plants, cats, palaces, horse guards. Yes, Garfinkel is right, ‘it’s astronomically massive in size and range’.

So I would replace "missing masses" with "plasma." Harman explores Latour's use of plasma in Prince of Networks. To quote briefly: "To summarize: mediating objects are always needed between any two objects, but a mediator would be needed to touch the mediator as well, andon to infinity. Hence, the world must also be filled with a non-objective gas or plasma in which direct contact is possible. That plasma is found on the interior of objects themselves." It should be obvious that an object-oriented philosophy would require not-objects as well.  I would look at plasma as the place where Latour comes closest to a Deleuzian virtual, as a medium of exposure through which objects mutate/become.

2. If we are to think about rhetoric's missing masses then, we need to do more than consider the metrological networks of actor-objects (though clearly these are crucial as well). We must consider the non-objective (and what I would term affective) exposures among objects. As such, it is not just the network of bodies, technologies, space-time, etc., but the virtual-plasmatic in which all objects are suspended. I actually think that rhetoric has done a decent job of looking at technologies (in computers and composition), workplaces (in technical writing), classrooms, schools, bureaucracies, and so on. (At least in research, though such knowledge may not impact the teaching of composition.) This isn't to say that we might not benefit from an ANT/object-oriented informed approach (and we can see some of that work already being done, as Scot notes).

But if we are to consider the plasmatic, missing masses of rhetoric, then we must engage in a different, though related undertaking where we must investigate what I am still willing to call the virtual.

3. In a slightly different vein, Scot comments on Levi's post:

Language (with its handmaidens motive, purpose, agency, intentionality, etc.) have long been at the fore of rhetorical thinking and teaching (a point you acknowledge here as well). And if my recent experience is any indication, drawing folks’ attentions to some of the emerging work in OOO and how it might enliven what we do in rhetorical studies works remarkably well to dredge up these (literally) ancient prejudices. For rhetoricians committed to such emphases, and who are often skeptical of transdisciplinary work, I worry that synthesis alone just won’t cut it–that a case will need to be made that what we’re calling OOR can also emerge out of the historical workings of rhetoric itself. This, in my view, is the much harder project. But it’s one that may, if effectively presented and argued, give OOR more currency and staying power within the field.

That is, to put this in context, that in order for rhetoricians to take up an object-oriented rhetoric, they would need to see it within rhetoric itself, rather than coming from some other field. Sigh, if only rhetoricians were so resistant to Marx or Foucault or Friere, etc., etc. Still I get Scot's point. It makes me think of a different kind of "missing masses:" the masses of composition instructors. It also makes me think about Deleuze's thoughts about missing people.

An object-oriented rhetoric of plasma will need to address a missing people, a plasmatic-virtual people yet to be, "not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified." If the field is the network then the rhetorical plasma, the missing masses, are everywhere else.

The Wall Street Journal of August 20,2010 carries a story about start up Inkling's introduction of "four full-length interactive college textbooks . . . designed specifically for Apple's iPad."  The texts, from McGraw-Hill (no releated info was found on their site about this), are best sellers in economics, psychology, marketing and biology. An introductory offer has chapters selling, beginning Monday, August 23, for $2.99 and the books for $69.99. Prices will go up to $3.99 a chapter and to $79.99 for whole books after the introductory period lapses.

What makes this a leap is the books will no longer be just static digitial versions of text-books, but they will allow for 3-D views, manipulation of images, page swiping with the trouch screen and more. Deals have also been struck with education publishers Cengage and John Wiley & Sons. Maybe you do need that iPad after all?

I thought some of you might find these apps interesting. They are for special needs children, particularly (it seems) autistic children. These apps facilitate visual communication and help parents to help children visualize their everyday routine activities, goal/reward systems, and social situations.

Years ago in a diversity seminar, a staff member who was leading the seminar said that when things (anything: buildings, cars, computers, etc.) are designed for accessibility, everyone benefits. Literally: wheelchair ramps are used by moms with strollers (hello!), power-assist doors are used by people who are carrying a lot of boxes or bags, and so forth. I'm sure my children, students, etc. could put these programs to good use.

The Wired Campus newsletter from the Chronicle of Higher Education asks, seeming yet again, "Should Colleges do More to Teach Students about Plagiarism?" My answers is, maybe the this is the wrong question. Most of the plagiarism we encounter is improperly cited work, which may or may not be an attempt to deceive. With regard to the article itself, more likely to be informative, or at least of interest, is the ensuing discussion the article prompts.

For More: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Should-Colleges-Do-More-to/26250/?sid=wc&u...

I want to try to think of as many possible "Top IP Developments of 2010" as possible while 2010 is still going on, so that I'll have a lot of topics to assign for the CCCC IP Annual. (Most people want to be assigned a topic.)

There's Viacom v. YouTube...anything else you can think of right now?

Issues of assessment having been coming at me from a couple directions recently, and I've appreciated Jeff Rice's taking up of Latour's matters of concern in relation to assessment. Rice has promised a discussion of his concept of "networked assessment," which I look forward to.

In my experience, assessment runs from hell-bound good intentions to institutional pragmatism to bureaucratic cynicism. A la Latour, Rice notes that proponents of assessment would seem to view assessment procedures as revealing facts, namely, in the case of composition, does the curriculum make students better writers. The litany of absurd propositions that must be taken on to ask and answer this question is extensive. Why should comp make students "better writers" in the first place? Does Bio101 make students better biologists? Does History 101 make students better historians? But I digress. The result of the absurdity of assessment is that, as a WPA, one could be in a postion of thinking "I don't for one second believe that this 'assessment' tells me anything useful, but I will conduct it for pragmatic reasons because the university demands it of me." Certainly that situation opens the door for cynicism.

I would like to avoid that in my job now as director of composition. I think the answer begins with setting aside value-laden purposes behind assessment (e.g., that we do it in order to do our job better). In ANT fashion, the activity of assessment is descriptive, to allow the actor-objects to speak for themselves and follow the network of associations rather than leaping from the student paper to "the corporatizing university" or "ethnocentric academic discourse" or whatever.

So let's take the fairly typical example of portfolio assessment, where one gathers a random sampling of student writing from composition courses to assess. And let's say, like the WPA Council that one of our assessable goals has to do with the writing process. Not only do we want students to know what the writing process is, and not only do we want them to use the process approach (especially revising) when writing their papers, but we want them to produce "better" papers as a result (thus proving they have become better writers).

Honestly none of that makes any sense to me whatsoever. I can collect a bunch of texts. I can hire some readers, norm them, and set them to the task of quantifying those texts. But the notion that this tells me something about the student-author, or more distantly, that author's experience in the course, the course the student took, or (at the periphery) the program itself just strikes me as bizarre. If the people who wear Nike shoes are overweight, does that mean there's something wrong in the shoe factory?

An ANT-like assessment makes more sense where one traces the associations between curriculum, instructors, class meetings, students, composing practices, and texts. It would be labor intensive and in the end one wouldn't get a number that passed judgment on the program. What one would encounter are the matters of concern that shape how knowledge about our programs is constructed. One might see the stories of instructors and the decisions they make in balancing their many sections or TA's balancing teaching and coursework; one would listen to the overcrowded classrooms and the office space; the university CMS would have a word. One would have to abandon the notion that there is some perfectable curriculum or even university. One gives up, in Latourian fashion, these modernist utopian impulses.

In short, one might have to abandon the value-laden ambitions of assessment. Of course this doesn't mean that we give up trying to be better. It just means that being better is a complex ethical practice that we must continually compose rather than reveal.

 

 

"It was too hot. She was struck by an unusual heaving. A sense of irritation gathered round the doors and windows. Margaret reached the small side-entrance. The porter's answer to the bell. The keen sharp pressure of the knife. She went across and up. Click of machinery."

Continuing the abridged version of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South - abridged on the principle of leaving out all the important bits. In this section Margaret, supposedly on the lookout for a water-bed, conceives a sudden and all-consuming passion for clogs.

http://edwardpicot.com/and/

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

From Larval Subjects I picked up on Latour's composition manifesto. The manifesto makes arguments that should be familiar to any reader of Latour, but it's clear focus on composition should be of especial interest to rhetoricians (though, of course, he fails to make the connection between composition and writing even while managing to connect to music, painting, dance, etc.). Basically, Latour differentiates between composition and critique, which I actually see as a re-enactment of Ulmer's discussion of hermeneutics and heurertics: critique/hermeneutics are about revealing a hidden world; composition/heuretics are about building a world from the rubble of critique.  As Latour writes, "While critiques still believe that there is too much belief and too many things standing in between reality, compositionists believe that there are enough ruins and that everything has to be reassembled piece by piece."

In fact,one might go back even further with Ulmer to his late 80s essay "The Object of Post-Criticism" to see one starting point for what Latour is discussing (though clearly Latour has been making this argument at least since We have never been modern as well). It's not really origins or ownership that I'm interested in here, but I do think that it's interesting that Ulmer comes to a post-critical composition through his reading of Derrida, who has been so antithetical to these discussions otherwise. In that 80s essay, Ulmer connects Derrida's pharmakon with his own development of the saprophyte (mushroom). In The Two Virtuals, I read the saprophytic process as analogous to ripping (as in rip, mix, burn) as a part of (de)composition.

In object-oriented discourse there is simultaneously a great interest in rhetoric, as we can see in both Bogost and Harman's work, and some hesitancy in focus on the textual, which I think comes out of creating some distance from the correlationist emphasis of texts underlined by the mainstream Derridean catch phrase, "il n'y a pas de hors-texte." As I noted above, we can see it in Latour's list of compositional practices, where he notes composition "has a clear root in art, painting, music, theater, dance" (as if we haven't spoken of the composition of texts for centuries, with the OED citing the original use of composition in reference to words in 1388). Levi Bryant notes the same thing regarding Latour that "Composition here does not refer to write, but rather to composing or building out of heterogeneous actors."

Of course I take issue with this, not with Levi's reading of Latour, which is correct, but with this separation of these to definitions. I would argue that writing is composing is "building out of heterogeneous actors," because of course written composition is NOT ONLY building from words. And it is not only words plus punctuation symbols, margins, kerning, leading, and all the other elements of typography. It is NOT ONLY all those things PLUS all the material, technological apparatuses of written composition (now turned to "multimedia" digital composition).

A text is a composed object just like any other object. Texts may be especially important objects from a human perspective (and a humanists perspective). They are the objects that I tend to study. And we have special methods and technologies for studying them just as other objects are studied with microscopes,etc. Knowledge about texts is composed just as knowledge in the sciences is composed (as Latour has so famously demonstrated). We even have "labs" in written composition where knowledge about rhetoric/composition is sometimes composed.

This is really an argument that I have been trying to articulate since reading Ulmer in grad school, though certainly the recent work of DeLanda and Latour, along with my encounter of object-oriented discourses, has really crystallized it. In particular I have long been interested in this movement away from critique, which in composition studies is connected with the post-process movement. Even though I consider myself to be "post-process," that term has always been an umbrella for a heterogenous range of scholarly practices that share in common a departure from the "process approach" to teaching writing, which is really the bedrock of rhet/comp (and is likely still the mainstream way in which writing is actually taught in the US). As those in the discipline know, the primary post-process approach is one that is characterized by a Foucauldian, cultural/ethnic/gender/feminist studies approach to discourse, ideology, representation, and power in which the pedagogical experience is one of unveiling (just as Latour notes all critique promises). While I believe (and I think most object-oriented folks would agree) that such critical approaches made contributions to the humanities, it's time to move on. Not because the problems such critiques reveal have been solved, but because a post-critical composition offers a more productive method for building a better life.

When we get to these questions of what rhetoric and object-oriented theory can offer one another, this is where I see the connection. Object-orientation offers rhetoric a theory of post-critical composition, an object/actor/assemblage/network theory of process that dramatically expands traditional writing process theories and moves us beyond the limits of critique. In turn, a post-critical rhet/comp offers object-oriented theorists methodologies for dealing with textual/media objects and composition that doesn't fall prey to the correlationist tendencies OOP seeks to redress.

Great news for open access publishing. Kairos has received a $50,000 grant from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities for their project, Building a Better Back-End: Editor, Author, & Reader Tools for Scholarly Multimedia. The grant will provide funding to hire an open source programmer to develop the Open Journal System (OJS) to manage the type of multimedia scholarship publishing that Kairos does.

 

Please excuse any cross-posting.

On the heels of the successful publication of the first volume, and with the second volume entering the production stage soon, the editors of Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing are happy to announce the call for proposals for volume 3. The deadline has now been extended until September 1.

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing is an open textbook series for composition seeking proposals for essays for our 3rd volume. Each Writing Spaces book contains peer-reviewed collections of essays all composed by teachers for students, with each chapter freely available for download from our website under a Creative Commons license.

For more information about the call for proposals, including submission format, contact information of the editors, and other instructions, please visit http://writingspaces.org/authors/cfps

Also, please help us spread the word of this call among any friends and colleagues who are not reading Kairosnews, but might be interested in submitting a chapter proposal.

My daughter got this card game for her birthday. With In a pickle you get a deck of cards, each card with a noun (thing/object) on it. Four cards are laid out on the table and each player gets five cards. You then have to play a card so that the card on the table either goes into the one you've played or the one you've played goes into the one on the table (e.g. the letter goes in the drawer, the drawer goes in the elephant.... err if you shove it hard enough). The rules are only a little more elaborate than that but the real point is to have a kind of brain-stretching, creative fun.

In any case, I started noticing what an oddly bi-directional preposition "in" can be. Now one immediate objection would be that such a claim could be possible. The letter is in the drawer. The drawer can't be in the letter... unless of course it is a letter concerning the drawer. Now perhaps you think that's just a facile example I set up. Maybe. And I'm sure one can find counter-examples, but in the play of the game I was struck by how easily nouns could be transposed. Is the DNA is the cat or is the cat in the DNA? Is the table in the universe or is the universe in the table?

I am willing to submit that this is a problem of language that in a Wittgensteinian way gets resolved by cultural rules outside grammatical or logical rules (as in the case of the game where players get to vote on whether a move is acceptable or not). That is, objects may really either be inside other objects or not, and outside of an Escher print objects shouldn't be inside one another in a bi-directional way. So we might easily say that the drawer is not really in the letter, but on the other hand, the drawer's exposure to the letter might have a dramatic effect (e.g., maybe the letter instructs that the drawer be destroyed or painted red).

But I also started thinking about the withdrawal of objects, where in some sense objects could never be inside of one another because they are vacuum-sealed as Harman puts it. And yet, the objects are in a vacuum then, right?  Again, perhaps a problem of language, which is not to say that such issues are solely language games but only to point out how difficult it is to speak about such matters. I think it is pointed that Harman turns to metaphor and humor in Guerilla Metaphysics since it is precisely these unexpected turns in language that both make it productive and at the same time resistant or slippery in relation to a project like OOP.