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).
Digital WRTC 