a move without || following a hyperrhetoric trace

V

As should be indicative from the play at work so far, I will follow a rhetoric more akin to Vitanza’s Sub/Versive Sophistic Rhetoric (a.k.a. the Antibody Rhetoric), and work to counter the infection of the philosophical tradition on Rhetoric (and the septinium in general).* Additionally, this is a move from the “old” rhetoric—Aristotle’s influenza with a focus on persuasion—and even a move from the “new” rhetoric—Kenneth Burke’s influence with a focus on identification—and instead a drifting in Jean François Lyotard’s paralogism, with a focus on instabilities, marginalia (marginals), de/stabilization and dis/placements, among other (sub/verting or perverting) connections.

We must, then, as Jacques Derrida tells us in “Inventing the Other,”** work to “unsettle the givens,” to subvert the anticipated conventions*** of this work:

It is certainly expected of a discourse on invention that it should fulfill its own promise or honor its contract: it will deal with invention.  But it is also hoped (the letter of the contract implies this) that it will put forth something brand new—in terms of words or things, in its utterance or its enunciation—on the subject of invention [….] To however limited an extent, in order not to disappoint its audience, it ought to invent.  We expect that it state the unexpected. (315)

But we must also keep in mind that we are not only pursuing a discourse on invention but also that we are (or should be) working in terms of invention—that is, the occurrence of invention—with the singular (unique) structure of an event that

seems to produce itself by speaking of itself, by the fact of speaking of itself, once it has begun to invent on the subject of invention, paving the way for it, inaugurating or signing its uniqueness, bringing it about, as it were, at the same moment as it also names and describes the generality of its genre and the genealogy of its topos: de inventione, sustaining our memory of the tradition of a genre and its practitioners. (317)

Therefore, this subversive, counter-inventional rhetoric must “write the paradigm“**** or, to follow Gregory Ulmer’s approach in Heuretics: The Logic of Invention,***** this inventional rhetoric must “use the method that I am inventing while I am inventing it, hence to practice hyperrhetoric” (17).

Immediately below you will find * notes, but you are also encouraged to scroll and read Comments, specifically my first comment as it indicates some of the issues this blog-post shift is trying to open.  Then feel free to return (eternally return) to the Sophie Dissertation.

NOTES:

* This will help to move us from rhetoric based on intersubjectivity (Aristotle’s speakers/writers communicating to listeners/readers) to an approach based “on intertextuality, with the ‘desire’ of language itself more so doing the speaking/writing” (“Critical Sub/Versions” 53).

** It is important we note that this text (“Inventing the Other”) begins with a question, “What am I going to be able to invent this time?” which he repeats again several pages in.  This repetition, perhaps marking a fold, enfolds another beginning in this text, which is where Derrida begins with a question of the son, borrowing from Cicero’s Partitiones oratoriae, where the son asks the father (Cicero) to tell him of invention (among the other great arts of the doctrine of speaking), but to do so in Latin and not Greek.  Derrida is not a fool; this is as much of a vital component to the rest of this text as anything else in the text.  At the outset, he couches us in the frame of the question of the son (whose “burning desire,” Derrida tells us, “anticipated the father’s wish” of the son being “as learned as possible” [313]) and in the language of Latin, which has issues in its translation of Greek—specifically important is the translation of aletheia into veritas.  What we have then is a play, a subversion even, of the unfolding of this text.

*** In “Inventing the Other,” Derrida tells us, “An invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract; it inserts a disorder into the peaceful ordering of things, it disregards the proprieties.  Apparently without the patience of a preface—it is itself a new preface—, this is how it unsettles the givens” (312)

**** This is the title Victor Vitanza uses in his review of Ulmer’s Heuretics, and it has significance both in terms of the Ulmer’s work and in terms of the previous quotes in the text from Derrida’s “Inventing the Other.”  The contract of a discourse on invention is that one must invent something new, and to do that requires that the “newness” be created as it is being created—thus, to write on a new method, new approach, new genre, etc., nearly mandates the use of that method, approach, genre, etc.  This also echoes the implications in this work, at least in reference to this dissertational other, this Sophie creation, as it is more akin to “writing the paradigm” than the print-literacy based creation.  While Ulmer may have found a way to write the paradigm in literacy, as seen by his example mystory of “Derrida at Little Bighorn” (Teletheory 249-280), it is a bit difficult for us as the literacy version places us within a performative contradiction, which violates much of literate logic: while I am discussing, and will further explore, among others, the limitations of literate logoi, I am participating in literate logoi—doing the very thing that I am trying to resist; thus, the need, to work in a different paradigm, a digital paradigm.

***** Ulmer’s use of “the” vs. “a” in this work’s title (Heuretics: The Logic of Invention) implies a definitive restriction to the work itself and/or his intent, but I feel this is more accidental than purposeful—as the text itself, along with many other works by Ulmer, indicate that the restriction implied here (a definitive singularity) is not at all in keeping with his philosophies.  This apparent accident can have numerous possibilities. Irony being one.

Revisiting Lanham’s Analyzing Prose

I was recently rereading sections from Richard Lanham’s Analyzing Prose as I am prepping for a course I’m teaching this fall titled Writing for Digital Environments, and I had forgot how much I enjoyed the book and particularly the epilogue, “What’s next for text?”, which he added in the 2nd edition of the book.  Granted it has some of the thinking from his Economics of Attention book, but he does a very nice job of setting up many threads or issues that persist in multimedia scholarship and/or its relation to text (as in the legacy of the printed word).  He tells us, in no particular order, that electronic texts allow the author to speak from the margins (236), that we readers of texts and/or consumers of information “crave the rich signal” (237), and that the fixity of print will always remain a choice, but we should acknowledge (more explicitly than we have) that fixity is, in fact, a choice and not the de facto position of text (236).

He also writes, “We always have wanted to mix word and image, abstract and behavioral space [. . . . and we] have always wanted to put words in motion, dramatize their relationships to one another” (237).  This desire, it seems, comes from our existence as beings in a multimodal and multimediated world.  Words alone, while of value, cannot do what multiple media together can do.  It is the same with human-to-human (face-to-face) interaction, where the combination of words, voice, gestures, setting, context, situation, and so on are all at play.  To reduce ourselves to a single mode of expression is, in a certain way, a reduction of self, a reduction of capacity, a reduction of human possibility.

One of my other favorite lines, which reminds me of Ulmer’s work, is when Lanham writes, “digital prose works in, around, over, and through images” (237).  Prose, aside from its existence as an image as well, works in image reasoning and/or Ulmer’s “image reasoneon” (which he builds/borrows from Walter Benjamin).  There is not only something visual about prose (or text in general) , but there is an image logic that can be found moving amid the at/through oscillation Lanham speaks of.  Ulmer picks this up with Derrida working at the level of the gram, but also with this notion of “image reasoneon” where we might think of the importance of neon words in advertisement and, more generally, our larger consumerist culture.

There is much more in this chapter, and this work, especially his working with/through his notion of “alphabetic counterculture,” but I do enjoy this work and will be

recent find

As you may have gathered, there has been a fairly noticable absence in my post history.  This is the combination of working on dissertation(s) and navigating the job market process.  Nonetheless,  I had to share a recent article that I came across in working on my dissertation as I am really impressed with the clarity of explanation it provides.  The article, by John Johnston, “Ideology, Representation, Schizophrenia: Toward a Theory of the Postmodern Subject,” is published in the collection After the Future: Postmodern Times and Places, edited by Gary Shapiro (published by SUNY in 1990).  It is one of the most approachable articles I have read on exploring the distinctions between the postmodern subject and the poststructuralist subject, and provides a fairly solid introduction to a variety of theorists takes on these two diffferent subjects (from Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari to theorists like Terry Eagleton).

Hyperwords – a choragraphical operation

Too often searching the web or browsing the internet–a gamed based in words, words as the connectors ( i.e., keywords)–we work under the illusion that we can link, look, or “go” anywhere.  We generally don’t question, don’t critically investigate this illusory freedom (Sean Williams has done work in this area).  Instead, we move through the www as if we were in control of the navigation, of the connection, the links we make.  While there are certain freedoms we exercise in online environments, and those freedoms are noticeably greater than in the literate apparatus (the linearity of text), we still do not make moves as “freely” as we would believe.  In truth, hyperlinks are done by web authors–they/we determine what you can (and cannot) link to from any given page they/we have created.  Search engines work based on algorithms determined by programmers.  Web connectivity, as we traditionally approach it, only occurs on pre-set lines, even if very fluid lines; connections established by authors, not users.

We might look at a site like StumbleUpon as starting to change this relationship, but it doesn’t push the bar far enough.  Enter Frode Hegland’s Hyperwords.  This add-on to your (firefox) browser, “makes every single word or phrase on a [web] page into a hyperlink—not just those chosen by a website’s authors” (from The Economist, click here for full article).  It makes browsing choragraphical, perhaps even paralogical, and it subverts the dominant hierachy of the web browser’s relationship to web author.  Check out the video below to see some of the potentialities involved with Hyperwords.

Mike Wesch’s digital scholarship…oh, and he speaks to the Library of Congress

Digital Ethnographer (and anthropologist) Mike Wesch spoke to the Library of Congress about YouTube, providing an anthropological introduction to the global phenomenon. On his YouTube channel, Wesch (and his digital enthnography students) have posted a video of this presentation (which can be seen below). Aside from the dynamic content, and beyond the quality of scholarship involved in this presentation, the Wesch et al.’s video creation really showcases a different way of thinking/making with/about scholarship in our current culture. While I am sure the presentation was good, I have to believe that the video posted on YouTube works better, as it becomes a more integrated way of working through the material. In this one creation, there is oral discourse (and we can see parts of Wesch’s oration—the gestures, the facial expressions, and so on [hearkening us to Ong’s discussions of secondary orality), textual discourse (with text on screen, among other literate-based influences), visual/image discourses (with still shots, but also with issues of juxtaposition or examples of collage in various moments), and numerous other discourses. We could classify some as video-based practices (though not sure if that is “discourse”), where the use of jump cuts and other editing techniques help communicate the message(s) involved. Or we might see comic-based techniques emerging, with sections that work relationally—multiple things that together communicate something greater than they can individually: where text, image, video, oration, etc. work together intricately, relationally, not mimetically.

This creation, in terms of our focus here, is by far as interesting, if not more interesting, than Wesch’s discussion of YouTube, which itself is fascinating. The video mode opens things for the message that traditional print-based text cannot do. It creates a possibility for communication that text, even multimodal text (e.g., image/graphic and alphabetic writing) could not do. This, I think, is the kind of scholarship that Virginia Kuhn’s dissertation tried to open up, but because her constraints were within the genre of doctoral dissertation, she had to adhere (or remain noticeably close) to the expectations of that kind of creation: a print-dominate culture, adhering strictly to literate practices; thus, her TK3 dissertation was noticeably print-literacy based. More than just incorporating multimedia (like Kuhn’s approach, which itself challenged many limitations and significantly pushed boundaries for digital/multimedia scholarship in positive directions) Wesch’s video opens us to something else. It is scholarship that works orally, but also scholarship that works literately, and scholarship that works electrally. The medium, and the creation, do as much for the message as does Wesch’s scholarship (and the situation…as this would be received in completely different terms if he wasn’t speaking at/to the Library of Congress).

Nonetheless, I am once again amazed, informed, and inspired by Wesch’s work, and despite its lengthy viewing time (55 minutes), especially for YouTubers, it is an excellent piece of digital/multimedia scholarship.

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http://www.clemson.edu/~hodgson

technical difficulties

One of the major arguments against doing a digital dissertation, or generally dissertations in other media formats, is the issue of access. What do we do when the technology moves on and this current “new” media becomes old, outdated media? becomes perhaps even inaccessible media? Right now I am battling a bit of this issue as I try to locate a TK3 reader so I can view Virginia Kuhn’s digital dissertation (one of the first to ever be done). But as TK3 was a forerunner to Sophie, and as the progress has moved specifically to Sophie, I cannot seem to find a current, active download for this program. Sophie, yes. TK3, no.

The issue is not about my particular frustrations, though they are also involved, but rather the legitimacy of the argument of access. But I think the situation is one that perpetuates itself. These fears drive part of the resistance to other media dissertations. But the lack of widespread access to certain media platforms, the lack of a mandatory TK3 download as an option on every University Library’s homepage, is partly because these things are not generally considered acceptable. As long as print remains, books will be available. But because these other media creations aren’t prolific, maintaining access to the software isn’t prolific, which only sustains/supports this argument of access. It is quite a cycle, and in the meantime I have to figure a “work around” to find/locate/install a TK3 reader.

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http://www.clemson.edu/~hodgson

potential unfolding

This past week (May 26-30), I had the luxury of attending the Sophie workshop at the University of Southern California (USC) put on by the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF:Book) and the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) at USC. The workshop was designed to familiarize us with the various operative capabilities of the Sophie program, and as I interacted with the medium and conversed with others in the workshop, I started to see a potential bridge between the “adherence to text” (nearly at all cost) that we see in traditional scholarship and a future of predominantly multimedia scholarship, and I can’t stress enough the importance of this potential.

With any change, paradigmatic, social, cultural, there is a person, entity, or thing that resides, even if only marginally, in a multitude of worlds, and Sophie may be that for the future of scholarship, and its institute: the 21^st century University. One of the areas of resistance normally attributed to multimedia creations and their lack of “scholarship” comes from various tenure-review faculty not knowing how to judge the material, which can be as much of there not being clearly defined guides to addressing this kind of scholarship as it is a matter of the work not looking or feeling like scholarship, like scholarship they are familiar with. But with Sophie, the author/creator could, though by no means is required to, mimic the style, format, or flow of a “traditional” print-based text [image1 below] From this, he or she could then add illustrative movie clips or sounds or even add explanatory pop-ups that function somewhere between footnotes and hyperlinks. [image2 below].

This, of course, is one take of Sophie, one use, and while it can be used to do much more radical things, things that push envelopes in a lot of directions [image not shown because “image” not static], without having to sacrifice the level of scholarship involved, I think for now this view of Sophie as bridge between a space of print-scholarship and a space of Moulthrop’s intervention is a great moment for beginning our potential engagement with it—especially as I intend to create a multimedia/multidimensional variation of my dissertation in Sophie, and so I will start with this base of adding complexity and media to a familiar form as a place to launch my own explorations, so as not to be dismissed, disregarded, or devalued by “traditionalists” simply because this “media” version doesn’t look or feel like scholarship.

Sophie View (ebook variety)

Sophie with video insert

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http://www.clemson.edu/~hodgson

The resistance…

Marshall McLuhan, in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, tells us that electric technology will meet with much resistance in American culture because it threatens (to alter) literate thought, which has been instituted (uniformly) in education, government, society, industry, and so on. Additionally, as Walter Ong has told us, in his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, literate thought is total, is unquestioned, and this is the world we encounter within the walls of the academy. Despite the multimedia push occurring across the University, noticeable in the growing multimedia nature of Freshman composition and its related texts (visual readers, companion websites & CDs, etc.) as well as the common practice of cannibalizing lecturer positions so departments and colleges can afford various education technologies (necessities in our current climate), the academy is still overwhelmingly a literacy club (and maybe it should be, to a certain extent, as it was the institution given rise by literacy–i.e., Plato’s Academy). We talk of multimedia, theorize about the effects (and affects) of multimedia, and engage the various emerging new media technologies daily, but yet we don’t necessarily value the multimedia in terms of “acceptable” scholarship: dissertations are still predominantly text-only creations, even with a pdf option, which tends to be a mere digital copies of the would-be print version; or, in terms of tenure-track mobility, multimedia creations may be “appreciated,” may be conversation fodder, even may be considered impressive work, but are significantly less valued compared to the printed article–with the online (printed) article residing somewhere between the two–and all this despite the often immense effort, insight, research, and ability needed to create multimedia scholarship.

This is an issue making its way into various current conversations, creating some buzz about scholarship in the 21st century, and it is the root/rhizomic issue at the base of this blog, which I hope to explore in a variety of posts as I work to complete my own dissertation (regarding this and other related issues).

Work Cited
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1964. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: Technologizing of the Word. New Accents Series. NY: Methuen, 1982.

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http://www.clemson.edu/~hodgson