Digital WRTC

This Silver Works photo brings to mind W.E.B. Du Bois’s important concept of “double consciousness,” though it may not be an exact pictorial representation. Symbolically, it might be worth it to ponder the “whiteness” of the clouds in this particular image.

In his 2009 JAC article, “‘Nah, We Straight”: An Argument Against Code Switching,” Vershawn Ashanti Young makes the case for what he terms “code meshing.” Using both Spanglish and AAE (African American English) in his definition, Young writes that code meshing is “blending dos idiomas or copping enough standard English to really make yo’ AAE be Da Bomb” (p. 50). In other words, code meshing is the “blending and concurrent use of American English dialects in formal, discursive products, such as political speeches, student papers, and media interviews” (p. 51). Code switching, represented in such works as Wheeler and Swords’s Code Switching: Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms (2006), advocates the separation of the way African American students communicate at home and the way they communicate at school or at work. Young likens this approach to language instruction to segregation and Jim Crow legislation, mentioning Justice Billings Brown’s “phony logic” in the 1954 Brown v. The Board of Education decision regarding the “separate but equal” notion (p. 53). He then quotes Gerald Graff to bring his point home: “Linguistic integration is better than segregation” (p. 53). In contrast to the Wheeler and Swords volume, Young offers Catherine Prendergast’s Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. The Board of Education (2003) as a sort of pedagogical antidote. This book “uncovers the segregationist practices that still inform the instruction of black students” and points out that literacy teachers who adhere to code switching are “accomplices, often unwittingly, in the continuation of racial inequality” (p. 53). Throughout the article, Young deploys W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness,” suggesting that code switching is an unfortunate continuation of a “racial schizophrenia” that comes about due to (1) looking always at oneself through the eyes of Caucasians and having to (2) reconcile psychologically one’s state of what might be called Schrödinger’s citizenship (being a citizen and a non-citizen at the same time) (p. 52). Young also peppers his essay with anecdotes of confrontational encounters with white and African American teachers who advocate code switching to what he very much sees as the detriment of students. (Interestingly, bell hooks starts Chapter Eight of Black Looks (1992) with an anecdote blending personal experience with theoretical insight.) The “nah, we straight” in the title of his article comes from President Barak Obama’s reply to a waitress concerning change at Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington, D.C. While acknowledging that Obama is an excellent role model, he faults the 44th President’s use of code switching, arguing that his “hyper-performed standard language mastery,” “professorial” style of vocal delivery, and “polysyllabic” word choice may very well “(over) compensate for the stigma of [his] race” (p. 65).

In Chapter Six of her book Women, Race, & Class (1981), “Education and Liberation: Black Women’s Perspective,” Angela Davis discusses the drive and passion of enslaved Africans in America for education. (Please note: page numbers here correspond to the ebook PDF.) As the subtitle of her chapter implies, she focuses on Black women, although she brings up Black male perspectives (W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass) as well as the admirable and impressive efforts of of white women. One of the most interesting facts Davis mentions in her chapter is that a Black woman, Lucy Terry Prince, was the first woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. One of the most interesting observations Davis makes is that the racist view that Black people have no interest in learning (or ability to learn) is very much belied by the enthusiasm and great thirst for knowledge exhibited by African Americans both during slavery and after emancipation. White women like Myrtilla Miner and Black women like Susie King Taylor fought for education for themselves and others at great personal risk. Despite the name of her chapter, Davis’s key message seems to be strength through togetherness. She writes that “[t]he history of women’s struggle for education in the United States reached a true peak when Black and white women together led the post-Civil War battle against illiteracy in the South. Their unity and solidarity preserved and confirmed one of our history’s most fruitful promises” (p. 65/166). In Chapter Thirteen of her book, “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective,” Davis makes the case for the socialization of housework and for increasing job opportunities (particularly interesting and meaningful work) for women. Why hasn’t the socialization of housework happened yet? She writes that “[s]ocialized housework implies large government subsidies in order to guarantee accessibility to the working-class families whose need for such services is most obvious. Since little in the way of profits would result, industrialized housework—like all unprofitable enterprises—is anathema to the capitalist economy” (p. 128/166). So where does the title of her chapter come from? Davis argues that “the rapid expansion of the female labor force means that more and more women are finding it increasingly difficult to excel as housewives according to the traditional standards. In other words, the industrialization of housework, along with the socialization of housework, is becoming an objective social need” (p. 128/166). For this reason, “[h]ousework as individual women’s private responsibility and as female labor performed under primitive technical conditions, may finally be approaching historical obsolescence” (p. 129/166). She points out that prior to the Industrial Revolution, women’s domestic roles were quite varied and far more creative than housework after the capitalist factory system. Black women since the time of slavery have had to perform labor that white women traditionally have not had to perform. Davis writes that Black women “toiled alongside their men in the cotton and tobacco fields, and when industry moved into the South, they could be seen in tobacco factories, sugar refineries and even in lumber mills and on crews pounding steel for the railroads. In labor, slave women were the equals of their men” (p. 132/166). Davis makes the case for socialism in this chapter, particularly as this system relates to women and work. She writes that “t]he only significant steps toward ending domestic slavery have in fact been taken in the existing socialist countries” (p. 139/166). Women of working-class backgrounds, therefore, have every reason in the world, for Davis, to support socialism and to push for a political change in that direction. Capitalism’s desire for an expanding work force combined with the growing understanding that women who have children cannot care for those children and work in non-domestic environments at the same time suggest a paradox (or is it something ironic?): “Moreover, under capitalism, campaigns for jobs on an equal basis with men, combined with movements for institutions such as subsidized public child care, contain an explosive revolutionary potential” (p. 136/166).

Chapter Eight of bell hooks‘s book, Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), deals with portrayals of Black female sexuality in music, music videos, fashion magazines, and cinema. She discusses Sarah Bartmann (the first name is sometimes spelled Sara and the surname is sometimes spelled Baartman)—best known by the racist moniker “the Hottentot Venus”—who was relentlessly objectified in life and death. She also discusses Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Iman, Naomi Campbell, and Rae Dawn Chong. Her chief concern is the manipulation and commodification of Black women’s bodies for the erotic pleasure and excitement of Black and white male consumers of media. She suggests that women celebrities of color who have long struggled with abusive male presence in their lives have a very difficult time centering their lives around feminist, anti-racist self-empowerment. For example, she writes that “[l]eaving Ike, after many years . . . because his violence is uncontrollable, [Tina] Turner takes with her the “image” he created” (p. 126). “Despite her experience of abuse,” hooks continues, “rooted in sexist and racist objectification, Turner appropriated the “wild woman” image, using it for career advancement” (p. 126). Moreover, after viewing a PBS special on Aretha Franklin (part of the American Masters series, I am guessing) and commenting on an ill-advised sartorial choice, hooks tells us that “it undermined the insistence in the film that she had overcome sexual victimization and remained a powerful singer; the latter seemed more likely than the former” (p. 128). She urges the creation of “oppositional space,” implying both a freedom (or freeing) from and an active resistance to patriarchy (p. 132). She writes that “[w]hen black women relate to our bodies, our sexuality, in ways that place erotic recognition, desire, pleasure, and fulfillment at the center of our efforts to create radical black female subjectivity, we can make new and different representations of ourselves as sexual subjects” (p. 131).

This photo, which looks like might belong in a Harlan Ellison story, reflects Heidegger’s less-than-optimistic view of what Bernard Stiegler calls “technics.”

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), best known for Being and Time (1927), published his essay technology in 1954. According to a piece in The New Atlantis online by Mark Blitz, Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” is “a revised version of part two of a four-part lecture series he delivered in Bremen in 1949 (his first public speaking appearance since the end of the war)” (Blitz, 2014, para. 14). By the way, Heidegger’s 1949 Bremen lectures, as well as his 1957 Freiberg lectures, have been published together in a book from Indiana University Press (translator: Andrew J. Mitchell) called Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (2012). 1954 was an interesting year in science and technology: It was the year Alan Turing died; the first mass vaccination of children against polio; the first of the anti-psychotic phenothiazine drugs; first successful kidney transplant; the Soviet Union commissioned the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant; the US Navy commissioned the first atomic-powered submarine; Texas Instruments (famous for its calculators) sold the first commercial transistor radio that November; the first synthetic diamond was produced; and the book series The History of Technology released the first of its many volumes. In his essay, Heidegger explores the essence of technology. The essence of a tree, he tells us, is not another tree one encounters in the woods. He writes that this essence “pervades every tree” (p. 1). To figure out technology is almost like asking a fish to figure out water. The fish cannot, if you will, step back from it. Heidegger writes that “[e]verywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (p. 1). For Heidegger, there are two major ways of pondering technology: (1) technology “as a means to an end” and technology as “a human activity” (p. 1). The first way is instrumental, the second is anthropological. Neither of these paths is acceptable to Heidegger. The essence of technology has to do with “revealing,” a word Heidegger sees as close to “truth” (p. 4). Revealing, to use his interesting terminology, has to do with bringing forth something concealed into “unconcealment” (p. 4). Technology is the way of understanding the nature of the times we are living in. It reveals the world to us. “Only when we allow our attention to rest on this fundamental characteristic does that which is new in modern technology show itself to us” (p. 5). Heidegger does not dislike all technology, but he is concerned about technology that “challenges” nature by unrelentingly exploiting it (p. 5). The affects humans as well, of course: “In whatever way the destining of revealing may hold sway, the unconcealment in which everything that is shows itself at any given time harbors the danger that man may misconstrue the unconcealed and misinterpret it” (p. 9). If those with great power look at nature as just a “standing-reserve” to be used, what if they begin to look at people in the same way (p. 10)?

In Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (2011), Adam J. Banks, a professor in Stanford’s Department of Education, discusses DJs (specifically those whose focus is Hip Hop music) as “digital griots,” a contemporary continuation of the oral historians, storytellers, and poets in West Africa called griots. Banks’s take on technology is enthusiastic, suggesting an almost natural evolution from ancient African griot figures to the highly skilled, creative, innovative African American DJs of today. The digital and the personal and the communal appear to flow into one another, with remixing as a key part of this seemingly techno-organic continuation. For Banks, DJs are also an example of what Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) calls “organic intellectuals,” meaning an “intellectual who is nurtured and sustained by local communities rather than professionalized in universities or think tanks or foundations” (p. 3). Banks adds that he “extend[s]” this “concept of the organic intellectual beyond the individual figure into collective organic intellectual work” by linking multimodal writing to the “everyday practices” and life experiences of African Americans (p. 3). Banks’s chief audience are those who work in the field of rhetoric and composition. But because so much writing today is digital and multimedia in nature, we must go outside the spheres of Gramscian traditional intellectuals. DJs, according to Banks, “are responsible for the conceptual framework that forms a response to the challenges of digital, multimedia writing” (p. 3). As with the record scratch of the stylus, DJs as digital griots interrupt older notions of what counts as writing.

In the General Introduction to his book Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (English translation, 1998), French philosopher Bernard Stiegler (who passed away in 2020), comments that Heidegger was of (at least) two minds when it comes to technics (technology). Stiegler writes that “the difficulty of an interpretation of the meaning of modern technics for Heidegger is on a par with the difficulty of his entire thought” (p. 7). In thinking about four of Heidegger’s essays in particular, Stiegler states that technology “appears simultaneously as the ultimate obstacle to and as the ultimate possibility of thought” (p. 7). “The Question Concerning Technology,” which Stiegler renders as “The Question of Technics” falls under the obstacle category. Stiegler writes that the “major argument [of the instrumental section this essay] is that the traditional view of thinking technics under the category of “means” deprives one of any access to the essence of technics” (p. 8). As we recall from the above post on Heidegger, the German philosopher also focused on technology and human activity. For Stiegler, “[i]n the case of the “anthropological” conception of technics, in contrast, the efficient cause and the final cause are confused” (p. 9). The advanced technology of today “inflects violence upon” nature, and the metaphor of growing something technological as if one were feeding and watering a plant in order to see it continue its growth, is not feasible any longer. The relentlessly calculative mind that worried Husserl has completely arrived, and nature is the victim of this mind’s use of technological might (p. 10). In the mid-1960s, Herbert Marcuse, of Frankfurt School fame, brought into this vision of technology the human being (Heidegger’s Dasein) as socially repressed under a wholly rationalized (in Weber’s sense of the term) capitalist system (p. 10). For this reason, we “need to develop a new science that would be in dialogue with nature . . . free from technics as a force of domination” (p. 11). Stiegler agrees with Marcuse that this interpretation is indeed Heideggerian, but that it is in error. He discussed Habermas’s communicative project as an alternative.

This photo, for me, seems to capture the theme of this issue of Media Fields Journal: surveillance.

In Scott Sundvall’s “The Rhetoric of Desiring-Surveillance: Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Subjectivity, and Media(ted) Vision in the Age of Electracy,” the point is made that the trope of worrying about (or even being paranoid about) being watched all the time makes less and less sense in the digital age. He writes that he “slightly depart from recent scholarship in surveillance studies and argue that we first and foremost desire to see others and to be seen by others. I refer to this emergent frame of mind as desiring-surveillance”(Sundvall, 2016, p. 2). We have gone from orality to literacy to what Gregory Ulmer calls electracy. We live in the age of images and videos. Sundvall states that due to the many advanced technological changes in society, surveillance has become more lateral or horizontal. Rather than being concentrated in the hands of powerful corporations or governmental agencies, surveillance has become, if you will, democratized. The people themselves are able to record at a moment’s notice. If someone sees something funny or alarming, she can take out her cellphone and then post the video on social media. Moreover, every store, business, workplace, etc. has security cameras on the outside and on the inside. Sundvall also discusses Velázquez’s famous 1656 painting, Las Meninas—focusing on Foucault’s ekphrastic analysis and Bentham’s panoptic gaze. He relates this painting and the discussion around it to the birth of modern subjectivity. A subjectivity that holds on to a possibly outmoded attitude toward privacy is one that is not keeping up with the times. In our electrate age, the self has become a brand.

Mark Andrejevic’s “Surveillance, Desire, and the Obliteration of the Subject” tackles the subject of “how to approach the systemic horror of a totalizing monitoring apparatus” represented by surveillance. This article takes a more pessimistic view of surveillance than Sundvall’s. The argument that Andrejevic outlines in his Freudian/Lacanian piece is that, in thinking through surveillance, we should perhaps retire any notion of surveillance stuck “in sociocultural terms” and go “beyond the standard sociological approach that considers the role of surveillance in the disciplining and rendering productive of subjects” (Andrejevic, 2016, pp. 5-6). Desire, in this article, is reinterpreted as drive. Drive is “the form that desire takes when, in Lacanian terms, it misses its object and turns back upon itself,” potentially leading to the ultimate form of masochism: self-obliteration. The “predictive power” of total surveillance is bent on erasure. It is a power that that seeks to obliterate action, history, and subjectivity” (p. 6). For Andrejevic, “[t]he interactive and mutual character of social networks tends to dismantle the distinction between seeing and being seen, which facilitates both self-display and tracking (by “friends,” companies, and the state)” (p. 3). The desire to watch and the desire to be watched, as well as the desire to know and to be known represent two forces, or drives, that may wind up eating each other up, although Andrejevic doesn’t quite put it that way.

Sundvall’s point about the Paparazzi might be interesting to bring up here: “the paparazzi (as an electrate surveillance modality) might be resisted by celebrities, but the paparazzi also afford celebrity in the first place. First and foremost, vertical, top-down surveillance techniques are afforded by and even predicated on an ever-expanding, horizontal, brand-to-brand desiring-surveillance.” Unlike Andrejevic, Sundvall takes a more Deleuzian approach. “Drives” feel deterministic, but for Deleuze and Guattari “desire can never be deceived” and as “they note in Anti-Oedipus, the masses were never conned into fascism; they desired it” (Sundvall, 2016, pp. 11-12).

Simone Browne, in her article, ‘“Your Personal Information is Being Requested”: Ancestry Testing, Stunt Coding, and Synthetic DNA,” is concerned that genetic data used for surveillance purposes might not be such a good thing. Questions of consent and of regulation also come up for her and are in need of careful consideration. She makes the point that “[a]ncestry testing and police databases situated in disproportionately policed and disproportionately represented communities present us with spaces for questioning the expanded uses, or “surveillance creep,” of databasing DNA” (Browne, 2016, p. 4). Discussing a well-known personal genomics/ biotechnology company located on the West Coast, Browe writes that “23andMe provides its paying users the choice to share their genetic personal data and any intellectual property derived from such data to non-profit and commercial organizations” (p.3). This important data “is used for research purposes, including the formation of “disease communities” “to understand, through genetics, why people respond differently to disease treatment options and drugs.”’ [Here Browne is quoting from research made available on 23andMe’s Website.] The profit motive rears its head, and as we know from certain industries (usually Bid This and Big That), the peoples’ best interests are not exactly kept in mind: “Such personal genetic file-sharing is part of an increasingly interconnected system of knowledge about the human body collected in databases and used to track habits and movements, to profile, and to accumulate information for commercial applications” (p. 3).

This is an AI generated image (via WordPress) using the key terms “social,” “infrastructure,” “bodies,” “time,” and “invent,” roughly corresponding to Alford’s chapter headings.

In Chapter Three of Entitled Opinions: Doxa after Digitality (2024), the chapter dealing with doxa and bodies, Caddie Alford discusses Hannah Arendt’s take on opinions as constituting a sort of “sixth sense.” In “Reality and the Thinking Ego,” an essay from her book The Life of the Mind (1978, Harcourt edition, the two volumes combined), Arendt writes that “[w]hat sense Thomas Aquinas we call common sense, the sensus communis, is a kind of sixth sense needed to keep my five senses together and guarantee that it is the same object that I see, touch, taste, smell, and hear . . . This same sense, a mysterious “sixth sense” . . . fits the sensations of my strictly private five senses . . . into a common world shared by others” (Arendt, 1978, p. 50). For Arendt, this “sixth sense’s corresponding worldly property is realness, and the difficulty with the property is that it cannot be perceived like other sensory properties. The sense of realness is not a sensation strictly speaking . . . . [rather, it] relates to the context in which single objects appear as well as to the context in which we ourselves as appearances exist among other appearing creatures” (pp. 50-51). Alford writes that for Arendt, “opinions first start to accomplish things by intercepting bodily reasoning” (Alford, 2024, p. 17). The difficulty here, for Alford, is what this sixth sense means in a digital world where this sensus communis becomes “technosocial” and “biotechnic,” and how conspiracies and clickbait multiply as a direct result (p. 17). As we all know, such phenomena proliferate on the Web. Interestingly, Arendt makes the point that “thinking can nether prove nor destroy the feeling of realness arising out of the sixth sense . . .” (Arendt, 1978, p. 52). Commonsense is certainly complicated (and very possibly corrupted) when it comes to online spaces due to algorithms. Alford writes that “the encounters between platforms and repetitive online investigations are crafting a “sixth sense” configured by digitality and converging because of opinions” (Alford, 2024, p. 78). Drawing from the work of Erin Manning and Gilles Deleuze, Alford makes a distinction between commonsense, on the one hand, and common sense on the other. The space is important here because, according to Alford’s reading of Deleuze, “[s]ense is not bounded, predictable, and cannot be enforced by commonsense. Hyper hyperlinking, stimulating impressions, impulsive movement, a touched heart—sense translated [“Pizzagate” gunman Edgar] Welch’s investigation into a singular and generative pushing, pulling, shaping of moving bodies” (p. 77). According to her reading of Manning, a “rule-based commonsense wants bodies to stop what they are doing because what they are producing poses a threat to any naturalized order” (p. 84). In thinking of how commonsense relates to content moderation, I was reminded of Derek Mueller’s (2017) interesting term “curatorial ethic” and his proposal of an “information officer” when it comes to RCWS data (see p. 160 0f Network Sense: Methods of Visualizing a Discipline).

This discussion around “sense,” though largely negative, reminded me also of Derek Mueller’s (2017) idea of “network sense,” as well as Collin Gifford Brooke’s (2009) mentioning of Christina Haas’s notion of a writer’s sense of the text (see p. 32 of Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media). Mueller brings up Haas’s “text sense” as well as Sondra Perl’s “felt sense” in Chapter Six of his book. All three concepts of sense here are centered on what Mueller terms “epistemological wherewithal,” albeit in different ways.

Earlier in this post, we read briefly about Arendt on objects, appearances, and “sixth sense.” In her chapter on doxa and infrastructure, Alford states that the “common critique that epistemic rhetoric confuses epistemology and ontology has been misdirected all along” (p. 60). Drawing from Scott Sundvall‘s 2018 Philosophy and Rhetoric article, “Without a World: The Rhetorical Potential and “Dark Politics” of Object-Oriented Thought,” she writes that “Sundvall takes the muddiness between doxa and episteme in an interesting direction by claiming that the distaste that object-oriented ontology [“A new specter of materialist thought,” to quote Sundvall on p. 217] and rhetoric thinkers have for epistemology actually points to doxa as the ontological origin for epistemic meaning” (p. 60). Sundvall also makes the point that “[m]eaning-formation (significance) ontologically provides and is guaranteed by doxa, that slippery and multidirectional rhetorical bridge by which we ground ourselves in our otherwise groundless capacity for anxiety, angst, care and concern” (p. 238). Moreover, “here [in thinking about Lloyd Bitzer on the point of rhetoric as a discipline] we find the intersection of rhetoric and philosophy: value and reality cannot be ontologically divorced, no matter what the sophisticated allure” (p. 238).

This photo by Kosta Karampelas appears to be of a wall of Post-It Notes, each one (perhaps) representing opinions as doxa, endoxa, adoxa, or ur-doxa.

In Entitled Opinions: Doxa after Digitality (2024), Caddie Alford, an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, writes of opinions as doxa, specifically doxa, endoxa, adoxa, and ur-doxa. She writes as a rhetorical theorist and is particularly focused on how opinions operate in the realm of social media: “Opinions are the tickets for participating online” (p. 12). Doxa, Alford explains, is an ancient Greek term “generally translated as opinion or seemingness, but the word harbored other meanings such as fame, conjecture, reputation, and expectation” (pp. 9-10). Although the plural of doxa is doxai, Alford uses doxa as both a singular and a plural term. This use of the term is part of Alford’s “repurposing” of an old word for a new age. She writes that she wants “to make it abundantly clear that I am chasing novel trajectories for contemporary opinions. Repurposing doxa’s constellation changes the message of opinions—indeed, the message of social media” (p. 11).

Endoxa, a term Alford borrows from Aristotle’s Topics, is defined as “credible and received opinions that can serve as premises for exploring a problem . . .” (p. 8). “As opinions that just immediately seem “right,” Alford writes, “these opinions had to have been in circulation, and being in circulation in Aristotle’s context required a specific kind of social status” (p. 8). For Alford’s purposes, she views endoxa as “the shared truths that create assemblies of communities” (p. 16). Adoxa does not mean zero opinion, as one might suppose, but rather opinions that don’t have very much strength or substance to them. Insofar as opinions are “integral to public relationality,” adoxa represent lack of status (p. 16). Just as doxa can mean expectation, adoxa can represent the unexpected and socially disreputable, as Alford pointed out in a recent interview for VCU’s news site. At one point in the Introduction, Alford distances doxa from opinions in the word adoxa, writing that “what runs counter to opinions—adoxa—are things that detract from relating socially” (p. 16). Similarly, in Chapter One she writes that adoxa “might be accepted . . . as things we all host, albeit unwillingly, reluctantly, and guardedly” (p. 30). Interestingly, she writes that Aristotle referred to “endoxa as “the things” many people believe in” and that he “positions endoxa like fruit: present, definite-pronoun-ed “things” ripe for the taking” (p. 27). Referencing the work of Ekaterina V. Hastings, Alford writes that here endoxa seem more “objects of belief” instead of statements expressing beliefs” (p. 27). Ur-doxa, a term coined by Edmund Husserl, is defined as “the beliefs and concepts that appear to anchor other opinions” (p. 18). In Chapter Four of her book, which deals with doxa and time, Alford writes that the famous German philosopher came up with this term “to ascertain opinions that seem originary in nature, like timeless bases in nature” (p. 117).

In a brief autobiographical section of her Introduction, Alford shares with her readers that her interest in doxa began with opinions surrounding what a family is considered to be and not be. She writes that she “went through the foster care system” and has been “without a traditional family structure since I was seventeen” (p. 13). She writes that she “notice[s] doxa about families in ways others don’t. The fact that I stood outside some of the most taken-for-granted opinions about “family” drew me to doxa in the first place” (p. 13). Here I am reminded of Gregory Ulmer’s mystory punctum, or “sting of memory,” used to “locate items significant to” the writer (Teletheory, p. 245).

This photo by Franco Monsalvo seems to capture symbolically the spirit of the mystory genre: the autobiographical figure at the center, the video feel of the picture, and the text which seems to have oral origins in news broadcasts.

According to Zachary P. Dixon’s article in Kairos, “Our [Electrate] Stories: Explicating Ulmer’s Mystory Genre,” literacy is based on the pre-digital world of print, whereas electracy (an Ulmerian “puncept”), corresponds better to the age of video and the Internet. In Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (2015), Douglas Eyman writes that “Ulmer focuses here [i.e., in Teletheory (2004)] on the image (and video in particular), but his overall body of work has expanded to include the full range of digital media” (p. 46). Dixon writes that, electracy is “recognizable by its dissolution of traditional notions of the linearity, an increased value on the image over narrative structure, and the affective power of multimodality” (Dixon, 2014, para. 1). Literacy, at least as it is traditionally understood, lends itself to a linear and narrative form of presentation that, for many, is out of step in a world where “the possibilities enabled by digital multimodality” keep growing in new and exciting ways (Dixon, 2014, para. 1). For Dixon, the mystory (the concept was first outlined in Teletheory) is “a personal narrative that defies the conventions of literacy . . . in favor of disconnected image driven scenography” (Dixon, 2014, para. 2). Here readers are drawn to the form of the mystory, which they notice is not like the typical autobiographical account one would read in a book or magazine. In a mystory, “images are selected and arranged in deeply personal and expressive ways” and “new meanings are constructed via the assemblage of the author” (Dixon, 2014, para.2). Dixon himself, however, is not wholly convinced by Ulmer’s electracy project, particularly when it comes to education. “If Ulmer’s aspirations truly are to create a pedagogical exercise that challenges the paradigm of literacy as the primary mode of expressing, communicating, and relating to knowledge, I’m doubtful that the mystory lives up to the billing” (para. 3). Dixon’s main concern is the “mind-body split” represented by literacy. Ulmer’s electracy does not, if you will, provide the Cartesian pineal gland solution Dixon might be looking for. On a strictly personal level, however, Dixon reports that he did find rewarding the exercise of coming up with his own mystory (see para. 4). He adds that his experience in putting together a mystory jibe with “previous experiences in creative nonfiction, where the cathartic benefits of personal exposure and exploration is a familiar feeling” (para. 13).

A good example of a mystory (other than Ulmer’s own “Derrida at the Little Big Horn”) might be Elena Maria Rogalle’s “MyStory and the Catastrophe.” Here we are shown how the mystory “is meant to highlight the inherent possibilities for the creation and dissemination of knowledge embodied in digital information and communication technology,” allowing for a great deal of creative expression on the part of authors who embrace electracy (Dixon, 2014, para. 2). Rogalle writes that mystory “is a hybrid genre” that helps us to investigate “our “popcycle,” which include discourses in Career, Family, Entertainment, Community results in insights and discovery through the punctum” (Rogalle, 2020, para. 1). “Punctum” is a word that comes from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (first published in France in 1980 as La Chambre Claire). In his book What Photography Is (2011), James Elkins writes that “[t]he punctum—little point of pressure or pain, hidden in every photograph, waiting to prick the viewer—is still one of photography’s indispensable concepts” (Elkins, 2011, p. ix). “Catastrophe,” in the sense of Walter Benjamin’s use of the term, has to do with “the forward movement of time, not the backward look” (Ulmer, 2004, p. 138). Ulmer’s reading of Benjamin here is informed by Michael W. Jennings’s Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (1987). Ulmer writes that “[i]n mystory I ask, after Benjamin, what image, what tableau, what scene, and also what story from history stings me into an awareness of the temporality of catastrophe” (p. 138). The mystory is composed in such a way as to evoke the effect of montage in a movie. “[F]ragments from widely dispersed places and times” are placed side by side in an inventive effort to bring “into the composer’s awareness hidden features of the present as well as of the past” (p. 138). Rogalle’s mystory draws especially from Ulmer’s Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (2002). Her catastrophe begins intriguingly in this way, “[t]he Florida Monarch Butterfly population has decreased 80 percent since 2005 (Marchese and van Hoose) and I have a role in this disaster” (Rogalle, 2020, para. 3). Ulmer’s catastrophe (as public story), by the way, is Custer’s Last Stand—a massacre; his more personal catastrophe is his father’s gall bladder cancer.

For Gregory Ulmer, television is the institutionalization of video. “Most of the attacks on video as a medium and television as an institution may be seen as examples of the assumptions of alphabetic cognition used as the basis for the condemnation of primal thinking” (p. 90). A representative example of this take that Ulmer discusses at some length is Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978). The spirit of Mander’s Four Arguments is alive and well in the digital age. Contemporary works that may remind one of his polemic: Jaron Lanier’s similarly titled Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018), Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010) and Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024).

I am commenting on the revised second edition of Ulmer’s Teletheory (2004), the second book in a philosophical trilogy that began with Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (1984) and concluded with Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994). The first edition of Teletheory came out in 1989 and was subtitled Grammatology in the Age of Video. The subtitle has been dropped from the second edition. The cover of both editions features a sketch by Jacques Derrida for the Parc de la Villette project. The sketch is of a “folie,” or folly in English, “for a sculpture based on the metaphor informing the passage of Plato’s Timaeus that he finds most resistant to interpretation—the chora as crible, sieve or sift” (p. 278, italics in the original). This quote appears the last chapter of Ulmer book, “Derrida at the Little Bighorn,” which serves as an example of what Ulmer calls a “mystory.” Mystory is Ulmer’s neologism, or “puncept,” meaning “the contribution of personal anecdotes to problem-solving in a field of specialized knowledge” (p. 62). Mystory is “a term designating the nexus of history, politics, language, thought, and technology in the last decade of this millennium” (p. 105). One of the objectives of one’s mystory is to have epiphanies or eureka moments (here think of Freud, Kekulé, Einstein) in the classroom; it “brings this process into academic discourse so that it may be artificially developed, democratized, extended to normal schooling for everyday use” (p. 63). In his own mystory, Ulmer uses three different stories from/related to his life as his invention (the first canon of classical rhetoric). I’ll discuss this more in my next weblog post. Ulmer is well known for his term electracy, which does not really make an appearance in Teletheory until the reader gets to the book’s afterward (written for the revised second edition), “After Teletheory.” I shall also explore electracy more in my next post.

What is particularly significant for mystory “is the insight into the circulation through the oral and literate registers of the sense that occurs in the social and psychological development of inventions, epitomized by Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis . . .” (p. 64). Ulmer dubs this “new style of thought” oralysis and states that it is “writable in video” (p. 64). This puncept refers to “the way in which oral forms, derived from everyday life, are, with the recording powers of video, applied to the analytical tasks associated with literate forms” (p. 11). This brings us to the interview as an interesting example of oralysis. Ulmer makes the point that “the interview is one of the predominant forms of our time, both in daily life, the popular media, and specialized research” (p. 117). Here is an example of this I myself discovered. In the entry titled “Postmodern Interviewing” in The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (2005), we learn that “[i]n oralysis, the traditional product of interviewing, talk, is coupled with the visual, providing a product consonant with a society dominated by the medium of television” (p. 710). Here “the topic of inquiry becomes dramatized by the focus on existential moments in peoples’ lives, possibly producing richer and more meaningful data” (pp. 709-710). Similarly, in a chapter called “Showing One’s Sadness in a Visual Context: Providing a Sense of Community and Support for Depressed Women through Video Interviews,” in Women and Depression (2010, edited by Iffat Hussain), Irmeli Laitinen and Elizabeth Ettorre write that “[t]he video work used in this project incorporates narrative interviews and is embedded in what Ulmer (1989) calls oralysis” (p. 2).

This photo, for me, represents the growing presence the digital plays in our lives. The phone, as an isolated object, is not emphasized. What we notice is the aesthetics of mobile app user interface design.

Brooke, in Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media (2009), uses his own terms for the five canons of classical rhetoric. Perspective is how Brooke denominates style. As always, Brooke’s focus is on interfaces and not “static texts” (p. 114). He quotes from Keith Moxey’s 1995 New Literary History article, “Perspective, Panofsky, and the Philosophy of History,” writing that perspective could describe “either one point of view among many, or the point which organizes and arranges all the others” (p. 114). As Douglas Eyman reminds us in his book, Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (2015), “For Aristotle, style was primarily a question of matching the appropriate forms of language to the discourse at hand, but he also had several suggestions for developing effective style (including an emphasis on correctness, use of appropriate metaphor, and an avoidance of excessively ornamental prose)” (p. 70). Eyman also writes—and this part helps to explain further Pixabay’s photo that heads this weblog post— “[s]tyle takes on new importance for digital rhetoric, particularly in terms of visual style: for a digital rhetoric, style is equivalent to “design”; thus, digital rhetoric must be concerned with understanding all the available elements of document design, including color, font choice, and layout, as well as multimedia design possibilities such as motion, interactivity, and appropriate use of media” (p. 70). Here “all the available elements of document design” reads a lot like Aristotle’s “all the available means of persuasion.” Brooke remarks that the field of rhetoric and composition studies, or what Derek Mueller calls RCWS, “has undergone a “turn” to the visual over the past five years or so,” adding that accompanying a fairly good amount of intellectual work on “the visual,” we have “several composition readers on the market that take the visual as their focus . . .” (p. 115). Here I am reminded of Mueller’s chapter on “turn-spotting” in Network Sense (2017).

Eyman, I should note, discusses Brooke in his book, commenting that “Collin Brooke (2009) undertakes a complete reconfiguration of the classical canons of rhetoric in [his book]. While others have focused on a specific canon (such as memory or delivery) and their application or rearticulation in the face of digital texts, thus far only Brooke has provided a comprehensive consideration of all of the canons, describing their complex inter-relationships as an ecology of practice . . .” (p. 62).

Speaking of memory and delivery, Brooke renames these canons “persistence” and “performance” respectively. While memory still holds importance in, say, public speaking, some compositionists (Edward P. J. Corbett, for example) hold that any requirement to memorize material has been obviated by written communication (see pp. 143-144). Here we have what Brooke calls ecologies of code and of culture (p. 147); that is, memory as storage and memory as history (p. 147). Regarding the latter, memory-as-history can take the form of books or of monuments—with monuments acting as perhaps a kind of visual rhetoric. In thinking of delivery as performance, I was reminded of the curious (and often comical) phenomenon of “influencers in the wild” videos on YouTube. Here you have voyeuristic videos of videos being made, complete with commentary about how silly these people look dancing (for example) in the middle of crowded boardwalks and in other very public places/spaces. Their delivery does indeed look ridiculous . . . when viewed from the quizzical spectator’s perspective. When one views the finished, polished product of the dancers themselves, however, those same silly people look pretty daring and cool.

This photo, for me, symbolically represents the central idea of Brooke’s Lingua Fracta: a modern reconceptualization of something classical/ancient.

Collin Gifford Brooke’s project in Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media (2009) is to reexamine the five canons of classical rhetoric in light of new media (the digital, the interactive), placing the reader’s focus on interface rather than isolated textual objects. These canons are invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. As someone with a background in speech communication, I appreciated it when Brooke tells us in Chapter Two that “[t]he canons map loosely across the writing process or more accurately the speaking process. It is not difficult to imagine the canons being taught to ancient rhetors as the stages one must undertake to produce an oration” (p. 30). My students often get a “wow” look on their faces when I share with them that they are taking a course that has been taught for over 2,000 years. Brooke puts it succinctly: “One must come up with ideas [invention], put them in a particular order [arrangement], figure out how to express them [style], memorize the text that results [memory], and finally deliver it [delivery]” (p.30). Of these, Brooke writes that “[i]f there is one canon that would seem to be the least useful for a rhetoric grounded in the printed page, it would be memory” (p. 31). He, of course, mentions the urtext for this view, Plato’s Phaedrus. He also brings up Christina Haas’s Writing Technology (1996), a text briefly discussed by both Shipka and Mueller. Haas observed that when we write by hand, we remember more than if we type out the same text on a word processor. When writing on a computer, one is able to cut and paste, meaning that one does not have to think out everything as carefully beforehand. Memory is also affected by the need to print out earlier versions of our work, as well as what part of our work the screen “lets” us see at one time. For Brooke, “she demonstrates that writing calls on us to practice that canon in different ways” (p. 32). Moreover, “in Plato’s estimation . . . the delivery of a written text is more accurately perceived as a text devoid of the various qualities of oral delivery . . .” (p. 33). One way memory and delivery have been technologized, if you will, can be seen in the phenomenon of the politician’s teleprompter. Not only does this machine help politicians remember what to say, but it gives them directions for delivering their speeches: “applause line, pause here,” “repeat this line,” “smile/laugh here,” “raise voice in anger,” etc.

Brooke also reimagines the canons using the metaphor of ecology. If this sounds to you like media ecology (a term coined by Marshall McLuhan and further developed by Neil Postman), that is because Brooke draws his inspiration from this very interesting, interdisciplinary field. For Brooke, “[e]cologies are vast, hybrid systems of intertwined elements, systems where small changes can have unforeseen consequences that ripple far beyond their immediate implication” (p. 28). The title of the book is a “puncept,” Gregory Ulmer’s neologism for “a play on words that provokes us to think through a set of terms in more detail” (p. xiv). Like Derek Mueller, Brooke is not enamored of close reading (here represented by the New Criticism movement in literary studies). Incidentally, Brooke was Mueller’s doctoral advisor at Syracuse University. Brooke’s Lingua Fracta (2009) was published the same year Mueller completed his dissertation—the title of which is “Clouds, Graphs, and Maps: Distant Reading and Disciplinary Imagination.” (This information is available via a Google Scholar search.) Brooke’s view of interface reminded me a little of Jody Shipka’s thoughts on process versus product in Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011). “A turn toward the interface as our unit of analysis,” Brooke writes, “would be an acknowledgement that it is not necessary that these processes culminate in products (which can then be decoupled from the contexts of their production), but rather that what we think of as products (books, articles, essays) are but special, stabilized instances of an ongoing process conducted at the level of interface” (p. 25). Brooke begins by discussing an essay published in the online journal Kairos called “Hypertext is Dead?”. This piece is an example of a text that resists two ways of approaching texts in literary studies: (1) the kind of close reading mentioned above which Brooke simply refers to later as “criticism”; and (2) an approach inspired by Continental philosophy (as opposed to analytic philosophy), that one might think of as Theory with a capital “T.” The first approach focuses on the text without regard for the author’s biography or historical time period. The second seems to look at everything but the text itself: author’s biography, historical time period, ethics, epistemology, socioeconomic concerns, questions surrounding identity, and so forth (see pp. 7-11).

I’ll be discussing hypertext more in my next weblog post, but I’d like to conclude by pointing out something in Brooke’s book regarding Maxine Hairston. In a brief section of Lingua Fracta having to do with whether or not rhetoric and composition will, at some point in the future, “achieve some sort of institutional autonomy or separation from English studies more broadly (e.g., in the case of free-standing writing programs) . . .,” he mentions Hairston’s article “The Winds of Change” as her well-known, controversial 1985 CCCC Chair’s address (p. 8). This is an error. “The Winds of Change,” published in CCC in 1982, is about Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions applied to the teaching of writing. Brooke was thinking of “Breaking Our Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections.”

The weblog’s author. Process and media.

The above photo was inspired by Shipka’s Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011), particularly her argument that “if we are committed to expanding the technologies and representational systems that composition and rhetoric, as a discipline, work with, theorize, and explore, our frameworks must support us in making the shift from studying writing to studying composing practices more generally” (p. 37).

Chapter Five of Derek Mueller’s book begins with a block quote from David Harvey’s Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical Geography (2001). The quote, from page 221 of Harvey’s book, concerns our position in the society in which we live and the world in general. Here we have thematic echoes of the micro and the macro, close and distant, thick and thin. We are not sure what to make of our positionality (we may not know much about it) because we lack an official map spelling it all out. Harvey makes the point that we have maps in our minds (or “perhaps even whole cartographic systems”), but that these cannot be represented in the same way cartographers map various terrains. This is doubtless due to our asymmetric agency as human beings. How much of our identities do we really choose as individuals located (emplaced) in historical time and space? For Mueller, “even though tacit, cognitive maps may be highly idiosyncratic and uneven, most of us make do with mental models and locative senses informed by immediate sensory verification, signage, mobile devices, memory, imagination, direct inquiry, nuanced noticings, as all of these give bearing to course” (p. 127). Mueller uses Harvey’s comment on maps as a way of segueing to the importance of maps for distant reading, and also to discourage his readers from what Mueller terms the “localist impulse” by metaphorically flying us above Michel de Certeau’s Manhattan sidewalks. He looks at maps of the locations doctoral consortia members, of where one finds conferences held by the CCCC, RSA, and Computers & Writing, as well as the institutional affiliations tied to academics’ career paths. Mueller even uses himself as an example of how one can “consider a set of maps developed to trace out genealogies of influence through doctoral committees” (p. 156). This last map may remind readers of The Writing Studies Tree. There is a similar map, by the way, in philosophy called The Philosophy Family Tree.

In Chapter Six (the conclusion) of Mueller’s book, he reminds us that his project began with the following exigence (a Lloyd Bitzer term): Rhetoric and composition has generated “[m]ore disciplinary material . . .than any one person reading by conventional strategies alone could reasonably, meaningfully engage” (p. 106). As Mueller himself acknowledges, his is an observation that has been voiced for years. In 1945, in an article published in The Atlantic, Vannevar Bush comments on what he calls “a growing mountain of research” (p. 106). Mueller quotes Bush, writing that “there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down as today’s specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less remember, as they appear” (p. 106). This “mountain” has led to a great deal of specialization in the field of English studies, though now even specialized areas of study are producing scholarly works at a rate that makes it difficult for even the most dedicated professor to keep up with. The more niche, though, the more likely one can stay (pretty much) on top of important articles, conference talks, single-author books, listserv discussions, edited volumes, etc. Distant reading and thin description help with getting a handle on this great quantity (for those determined to be generalists of some sort), but there is at least one place in Mueller’s book where he may be skeptical: The titles of conference presentations. This brief note of doubt about his telos seems to come out of nowhere and took me by surprise. Mueller writes that the “trend of arriving at conclusions about the field judging by conference paper titles alone certainly raises some unavoidable questions about the gains and limitations of distant and thin methods. More importantly, the title-skim operation points to the dearth of well-established data available for grounding claims about the field” (160). I wonder, though, if such a dearth is really the issue here. The titles are what they are, and usually give one a good idea of what the papers are about. Critics of the humanities and social sciences (particularly as these academic disciplines have evolved since the 1990’s) are, after all, often politically motivated. The opinions they form based on these titles may say more about their ideological leanings than anything else.

Mueller expands on his definition of network sense from earlier in his book, drawing from Christina Haas’s (1996) text sense and Sondra Perl’s (2004) felt sense. “Tendering network sense,” he writes, “requires a facility for recognizing and tracing relationships, for engaging in focused reading and exploratory reading, and for noticing connections among programs and people, publications and conferences, difficult questions and myriad stakeholders” (p. 161).

Mueller ends his book on a hopeful note, symbolized by the Clock of the Long Now (pictured below):

Photo is from Wikipedia

Mueller suggests “that we take a hint from The Long Now Foundation’s interest in collective inheritance and in the shared responsibility that it produces for us—now in the first decades of the 21st century and for those who will be doing RCWS’s work in 50, 100, or 300 years” (p. 173).