Author Blogs

Cathy Davidson has a great post on the hidden (and not-so hidden) costs of digital media. It has me thinking in a couple directions, as interesting writing tends to do.

1. I'm thinking about our composition program and my goal of infusing digital composition into the curriculum. It's a goal that will require professional development for our instructors, 95% of whom are PhD students. Our instructors' status as students is significant because I view my relation to them not simply as a manager overseeing the delivery of our composition courses but also as a teacher preparing them for a career in English Studies. In this light, as important as I believe it is to incorporate digital media into composition, I believe it is equally important for our graduate students to be able to demonstrate a facility for teaching with technology. Undoubtedly the learning curve can be steep and sometimes it just feels like it just gets steeper with the continual churn. It's necessary to be strategic about where one invests one's time. Even if I stay within the realm of professional development, there are other things we could be doing than developing this particular kind of pedagogy. 

2. LIke Cathy I think about my own time, such as the time devoted to this blog. Is it leisure? Is it work? Is it this more nebulous playbor? I don't believe these issues are new for academia, even if we have new ways of seeing them now. 30 years ago a Victorianist sits down in her home to read Dickens again. Is that work or play? She goes to a conference excited to hear a presentation from an old colleague: work or play? She picks up the latest journal to read an article on a subject she's researching: work or play? Maybe that last one is obviously work? Maybe not. She goes to the movies to see the latest adaption of some 19th-century novel. She watches some crime drama show on TV and thinks about its relation to Sherlock Holmes and how she might incorporate it into a class she's teaching. Etc. etc. We know these boundaries have always been blurred for academics. We don't punch a clock. We love our work (most of the time). We pursued a difficult and uncertain path through academia not so that we could do nothing, but so we could pursue the work that exited us with an unending focus that only our long-suffering spouses can attest to.

For me, digital media is like that. The lines are blurry. I bought an iPad the other day. While I clearly bought it as a consumer item, a toy of sorts, I already use it for work purposes, and clearly it intersects with my research interests. It's not unlike the Victorianist rereading Dickens or going to a movie adaption.

3. Now this may seem as counter-intuitive as it gets, but despite the continual attacks on higher education and academics, I continue to see our model of labor as increasingly common in the world. We are prototypical creative professionals whose lives and work are deeply blended, who continue to do our work far beyond the boundaries of any definition of the job. If you think that isn't so, ask an academic what she's doing during the summer when she is not contractually working. If you had a job that was 10 months a year, would you still be doing the job the other two months?

I get it that there's this groundswell of folks who don't value the work done by academics. But that's a different issue from saying that academics as a group don't work. With the networking of scholarly activity today and our extensive access to information and research, the opportunities for academic work are really endless. The question, in my mind, is where to put our focus. It's the question I started with here in the more narrow context of professional development.

The Rutgers writing program has offered up several interesting videos about their curriculum including a 35-minute documentary following five students in FYC and this 5-minute discussion of the course featuring Kurt Spellmeyer. Jeff Rice has commented on these videos (twice). And like Jeff, my interest/critique is not about Rutgers' program, but rather what it says more broadly about disciplinary approaches to composition.

Jeff makes a good observation in noting the emphasis on analysis and close reading as the focal points of the composition program. If one adds in Richard Miller's discussion of the "spirit of the new humanities" which guides the common readings for Rutgers FYC, I think one does end up with a rather quizzical (but no less common) approach to composition that combines a Bartholomae-stye focus on reading, a Berlin-style focus on ideology/social action, and a lingering Elbow-style expressivism where, as Rice puts it, "All the answers are unto me." 

In the video, Spellmeyer does a good job of laying out the pedagogical process of the Rutgers course that begins with the analysis of single text, but the first formal writing assignment includes two texts, then three texts for second assignment. The course materials articulate a clear common vision that is focused on the development of an original thesis, the situating of assigned texts in conversation with one another, and organization (on both the essay and paragraph level). 

I will say that I would aspire to have as clear a vision of the UB program as Spellmeyer and Miller have for Rutgers (though I know that our TAs would be very resistant to a common syllabus, and I'm not sure that's the best approach).

Like Jeff, my response to what I view as a mainstream model of composition is that it appears to give short shrift to invention. I suppose I keep coming back to Ulmer when I think of this division of the humanities into hermeneutics and heuristics. In this model it appears that hermeneutics will suffice for invention. That is, if you can't think of enough things to write then you haven't "analyzed" enough. Analysis would appear to be the sole mode of invention, typified almost exclusively by the close reading of passages. In the documentary, the students often cite a difficulty with reaching the required five-page length. That's not uncommon, of course, but I am wondering if the best solution is to apply further analysis.

On a larger scale, I am perplexed if the spirit of the new humanities is to be transmitted through close reading. In the end, is close reading all the the humanities can come up with?

Instead, I would be curious about a different kind of exposition: a putting outside or out of place; an exposure. What is the relation between a com-position and an ex-position. Perhaps exposition precedes composition. That is, exposure produces opportunities for the emergence of new relations. Unfortunately the hermeneutic-analytic mode, in my view, always seeks to territorialize such inventional processes before they can even get started. It immediately asks us if we can authorize our claims, provide evidence from the text, organize an argument around the thesis, etc. It is a purely rational mode. It brings writing back inside the territory of the classroom before it can be exposed.

In my experience writing is always intuitive. By intuitive I do not mean simply internal or imaginative but something more like a network sense. I have come to have confidence in my nascent belief that "there's a there there" in my writing, if you get my drift, even if I can't articulate it. Writing then becomes a way of my trying to figure out what it is that I am responding to intuitively. 

Over time FYC has evolved to provide mechanistic short cuts to that process, but in doing so it tends to dead end quickly because it dramatically foreshortens the inventive elements of writing. 

In my take, the new humanities begins with exposing oneself to the inventional potential of the network.

 

A recent NY Times article causing reaction on the WPA-list takes up the subject of the public bashing of professors. It's really a fairly dated complaint. At least I can't recall a time in my professional life when professors weren't being bashed, even though this piece wants to suggest this is some kind of recent turn of events. The common response on the WPA list is to react with a list of the hard work one is doing.

I have several reactions to this, but that response is not one of them (even if I do think I work hard).

1. Most highly-educated professions are disliked as professions--lawyers, bankers, doctors, politicians, teachers--so why not professors? Can you name a profession that requires graduate education that isn't disliked? Maybe there are some, but only because their cultural profile is not very high. Americans as a whole distrust education and educated people (remember less than 10% of Americans have graduate degrees). That's life. 

2. Related to point one, the average American doesn't understand (or value) the work we do, especially in the humanities. Certainly we could do more to reach out to the public. However in doing so we compete with a pro-corporate mass media. I have little doubt that if humanists' political views were more in line with those of the mainstream media, we'd be represented in a far better light. 

It's a little odd these days to try to argue that professors are only working a couple of hours per week comprised of the time they are teaching classes or holding office hours. How many people cybercommute these days? Watch those house hunting shows and everyone is talking about needing a home office. I assume that's because they are working at home. The nature of labor across many professions is tending more toward the shape of academia than away from it.

3. The article suggests professors make a lot of money (really?) and throws around 6-figure numbers. According the bureau of labor statistics, the national median for post-secondary English teachers is $58K. Yes, some other professors earn more (e.g. median for engineering is $86K, but that has something to do with the non-academic market for engineers), but I haven't noted a dramatic overall increase in the salaries of English professors in the last decade. That is, looking at the BLS stats and those on Monster.com, I doubt an incoming asst prof at SUNY Cortland, where I started in 2001, is making more than I did (after you factor inflation, etc.). The uproar is over the increasing cost of higher education, but until someone shows me some evidence to the contrary, it doesn't seem to me that the increase is a reflection of increased costs for faculty. In fact, given the shift toward adjunct faculty, I would find it hard to believe that faculty costs overall can have gone up in real dollars. Certainly not in the humanities.

4. If one wants to be unhappy with the cost of higher education, join the club. I've got two kids too who will want to go to college in the next decade. But I think part of the unhappiness is the sense that one is required to go to college to get a decent job. Let me point out that this fact is not the responsibility of higher education. Universities don't write job ads for corporations. I still say that people happily pay for a nice car the same amount they might pay for in-state public university tuition. But they want the car and they don't want the education. They just want the job that requires the education (actually they don't want the job either; they want the stuff they can buy with the pay from the job).

5. The other thing people seem to dislike is tenure. And I think they place themselves in that position and say "if I had tenure then I'd sit around and do nothing all day." Well, maybe that's why you don't have tenure. To get to tenure, a person has to exhaust a tremendous amount of labor. Seven years of graduate school (on average), working as a TA or adjunct, borrowing a lot of money all for the chance to just compete for a tenure-track job. Most people wouldn't take that risk (probably because they are sane or something). Then one has to negotiate the job market and tenure process. Really you can only get to tenure if you have a tremendous amount of intrinsic motivation for doing the work required. Now others might not value that work (see above), but doing it for the extrinsic reward of tenure protection isn't going to be sufficient. 

Now that's not to say that there aren't lazy professors. I'm guessing there are lazy people where you work too. That's not to say that some years one is more productive than others. Anyone is sales has this same experience. We are all familiar with this trend among professional athletes. The point though is that overall professors have plenty of motivations for continuing to work after tenure, including material rewards like better pay and perks but also reputation and improved working conditions. In turn universities benefit from the reputations of their faculty. 

In the end, tenure is one of the benefits of being an academic. Any pro-business, free-market advocate should appreciate that. If University A offered you $75K and tenure and University B offered you $80K and a 3-yr contract, which would you take? Yes, there are plenty of job-seeking phds out there, but if you want proven faculty with national reputations, there's a competitive market for such folks. How much more would a university have to offer you to compensate for not offering you tenure? Then, thinking of this from the university perspective, which approach is more cost-effective?

Maybe as a university you do tenure a few duds. Every large corporation has employees that somehow manage to hide under the radar. And yes it probably is harder to get rid of those folks. But compare that to the cost of not offering tenure. Sure, hypothetically every university in the world could decided simultaneously to stop offering tenure. Hypothetically every business that employees people in any profession might simultaneously decide to start paying those folks half what they currently pay them.

Or not.

The fact of the matter is that when you factor in the years of education and the precarious nature of the job market and tenure process, that academia is not a good profession to enter for making money.

I mean, isn't that obvious. Just to hit the point home. The median salary for writers is $53K and for nurses its $63K. And I don't want to denigrate nurses in any way. My mother is a nurse. But no one thinks nurses make "a lot" of money, do they? Well, English professors make less, only a little more than "writers."

One of the newly instituted objectives of our first-year composition program is to have students write in "multiple genres" over the course of the semester. The basic goal here is really to have students encounter different kinds of writing tasks than the default, humanistic-academic essay. Essay writing is fine, but the idea is to have some variety. Why? Again, basically, so that students can realize that different writing situations call for different rhetorical and compositional approaches. 

Raising the concept of genre, however, has generated many questions from our instructors about what a genre might be (and perhaps, how I and/or the WPA are deploying the term). Most of our instructors are invested in literary studies, where I think the notion of genre operates a little differently from its operation in rhetoric. As I mentioned in my last post, we were reading Bazerman in our Practicum class, and I think that's a useful place to start for rhet/comp. 

And ultimately Bazerman will resonate well with where I am going to come from, which is an approach more informed by Latour and DeLanda. Here I want to focus on DeLanda in a way that partly presages what I have to say about DeLanda's critique of essences when I take up chapter 2 of New Philosophy of Society as part of the reading group Levi has established. 

As Levi notes, there is an interesting reflexive quality to a social realist ontology that it different from an ontology of natural objects. That is, calling a tree a tree doesn't impact what the tree is. Calling a plant a weed, doesn't change the plant (though it may change the way people react to the plant). On the other hand, the way we name things in a social milieu can be cybernetic. For example, students who become labelled as smart or troubled or whatever can tend to take on those roles. Clearly institutions play integral roles in maintaining those identities. For DeLanda I think this is why we have not only the axes of material/expression and territorialization/deterritorialization, which he borrows from Deleuze and Guattari, but a third axis of coding/decoding that deals specifically with the role that symbolic behavior has among social assemblages.

This brings us to the question of genre. DeLanda writes

Much as biological species are not general categories of which animal and plant organisms are members, but larger-scale individual entities of which organisms are component parts, so larger social assemblages should be given the ontological status of individual entities: individual networks and coalitions; individual organizations and governments; individual cities and nation-states. This ontological manceuvre allows us to assert that all these individual entities have an objective existence independently of our minds (or of our conceptions of them) without any commitment to essences or reified generalities.

I don't want to go too far into this in general terms, as I will be writing more soon, but I think this applies to how I understand genres to operate. Genres themselves are larger-scale individual entities of which individual texts are component parts. As such, it would be erroneous to think of a genre as defining essential characteristics that typify the texts they categorize, just as it would be erroneous to think that species do the same for individual organisms.  

Of course this is a fundamental challenge for a writing class. Typically genres are taught by identifying its textual/rhetorical features. This is how we tend to teach the "academic essay." Students really like models or, barring that, a rubric, which tells them the characteristics of an "A." And this is how we get the cybernetic quality of genres as an assemblage that include material, expressive, territorializing and coding forces. That is, genres might delimit the particular material quality of a text (e.g. a blog post must be online). It might delimit the expressive potential (e.g. the genre of the love letter vs. the business letter). A genre establishes territory (the blog post is on a blog; the composition essay is in a class; the academic essay is in the journal, etc.). And it regulates coding (what counts as evidence, what rhetorical and stylistic moves are acceptable, how the text is organized, etc.).

Genres are not just abstractions; they are also entities with their own particular history. They are born and die, and they change over time. They emerge from the constellation of objects that are their component parts, but they are more than the sum of those parts just as those parts are not a simple function of the larger whole. They also are exposed to other objects and assemblages in processes of composition, so a particular text of a particular genre emerges through an extensive set of relations. To quote DeLanda one more time: "unlike taxonomic essentialism in which genus, species and individual are separate ontological categories, the ontology of assemblages is flat since it contains nothing but differently scaled individual singularities (or hacceities)." Both the text and the genre are hacceities (of different scales). 

So what's the upshot of this? Well, one cannot say "write an essay," and mean write a text following procedure A resulting in qualities 1,2, and 3, and then say "write a proposal" following procedure B resulting in qualities x,y, and z. Instead, when one says write an essay or proposal or whatever, one is exposing a compositional task to a particular assemblage that will have material, expressive, territorializing, and coding effects upon it. From a pedagogical perspective then, the task is not so much to say "here are the rules/characteristics," but rather to provide the rhetorical-analytical tools for investigating the operation of these assemblages (which DOES NOT, btw, mean that one has to introduce this kind of theoretical language).

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.

 

 

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.

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.

 

 

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.

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.

Here's yet another article suggesting reasons for not attending college. In this case, it's essentially a series of financial calculations demonstrating better ways of spending your money. And maybe it makes sense in those terms. It's followed by a slew of comments on all sides of the issue but with many people telling their stories of how what they learned in college didn't prepare them for the "real world."

My advice on the matter? If you don't want to go to college to learn, then please don't come. If you're coming to college because you think the piece of paper you're "purchasing" is going to improve your standard of living, don't enroll. Maybe you will make more money. Maybe you won't. But don't treat college like it's your investment portfolio. You won't be happy with the results.

Culturally we need to make a decision. Is college a mechanism for social equality or is it a form of meritocracy?

K-12 seeks to be a social equalizer, right? We aim for 100% graduation, though we don't get it. As a result, a HS diploma has little/no market value. There's no absolute reason why corporations couldn't just starting hiring entry level workers right out of high school, like they did in the fictional old days when folks worked their way up from the mail room. Of course, socially we don't need 18 year olds entering the job market. More importantly, I think that most employers would be dissatisfied with the work their young employees would do. College grads may not think they're learning anything in college, but I see time and again how young people mature in college to become more responsible, confident, articulate, serious, etc. Maybe some corporation will want to pay them while their going through that process. Maybe it will happen if they live at home and work at the mall. Maybe.

Or maybe not.

Over the last 40 years college has lurched toward becoming a social equalizer with open admissions, expanding community colleges, and so on. However we also think about college as a meritocracy (though it is far from a perfect one) where the best students go to elite colleges. If higher ed was a meritocracy (however flawed) then it would make sense that only the best students would succeed, that they would be uncommon, prized individuals, and that they might demand higher salaries. Of course we have this fantasy in America where even though we recognize that some people are prettier and some are better athletes (and thus deserving of more money), that we all are equally smart, equally capable of equal academic success. This is incompatible with the notion of college as meritocratic in any significant way (which is maybe a good thing), but it certainly means as a result that one can't expect to be rewarded in a substantial way for getting a degree. Then when college costs skyrocket we get the situation we are in.

But our real problem is not whether college should be an equalizer or meritocratic. The real problem is that we mistake college as an individual good (for personal gain) rather than a social good (where educating some benefits us all).

If we send people to college to become teachers, engineers, scientists, researchers, scholars, lawyers, doctors, civic leaders, and such, we hope that people are not following these career paths in search of profit. We hope they are in search of knowledge, justice, and a better society for all of us. We hope that some of the best and brightest people in the world will follow such paths. My math genius 11 year old daughter wants to be an astrophysicist. What a terrible monetary investment. Maybe she should be an accountant or I should give her whatever money I have saved for her college education and tell her to user her mathematical-analytical skills to become a day trader on the stock market.

Or maybe I should send her to college and if she does end up becoming a physicist, maybe she will contribute some valuable knowledge about the universe to our society.

But if your kid isn't interested in learning, isn't interested in entering a profession with some ethical obligation to better our society, then please feel free to use whatever college savings you have to open a frozen yogurt franchise or a car wash or whatever it is you think you're capable of doing. And I really, honestly wish you all the best of luck with that. I hope you reach your SUV, hot tub, Disney vacation, home theater suburban fantasy.

Meanwhile, I hope my kids and others like them go to college, become scientists, and help to develop some clean renewable energy source that will allow you to heat your hot tub with something other than your own flatulence.

We have long-rejected the banking model of education in favor of a student-centered, constructivist pedagogy. Fundamentally, this rejection rests on the recognition that simply presenting students with a body of information does not constitute an education. Instead, for an education to be transformative, for students to really learn and internalize knowledge, they need to be engaged, actively constructing their educational experiences. That said, formal schooling remains cybernetic: however student-centered the activities may appear or feel, ultimately a class is being steered toward a predetermined set of outcomes.

So when I was watching Inception the other day, I was thinking about this. In the film, where people share subconscious dream spaces, one person, the "architect," creates a space and another fills it with his secrets. With the particular task of inception, the goal is to place an idea within the dreamer's head, so that s/he recognizes the idea as his/her own, and that idea begins to grow.

Perhaps this is education as well, eh? I am certain one could have an extended argument about the ideological and/or indoctrinating/socializing function of education. There is the knowledge that we know that we learned from somewhere at some time, e.g. facts about American history. But that's just the banking knowledge, right? The constructivist knowledge comes out of a kind of pedagogy of inception in which students come to recognize certain thoughts and ideas as their own, e.g., the opinions or value judgments they make about America's history and the way they situation themselves within that history. Of course it's fairly easy to politicize history education, even literary history education. It is also perhaps not so hard to view an aesthetic education as one of inception. That is, an education in which students' aesthetic sensibilities shift to appreciate different literature, art, music, etc. or cultural practices different from their own.

I see the same things in my own teaching, from first-year composition courses, through undergrad digital composition courses, to graduate courses. The purpose is never simply to offer students "information" about how to write an essay or analyze or compose a digital text or teach composition. On the other hand, it is not necessarily effective to situate a course as an argument in which one attempts to persuade students to hold a different viewpoint, to convince students on a rational level to embrace an active writing practice or view digital media in a new way or adopt different teaching practices. Certainly the experience of the class may be filled with such discussions, but that's not what sticks, is it? That is, I would doubt that many of my composition students would recall specific arguments or discussions from the class. What sticks are the ideas that are implanted on a deeper level, that are embedded in the activities of the course, that students experience as arising from within but are part of the pedagogical design.

Perhaps that strikes one as unethical. Certainly if one thinks of the process strictly as it occurs in the film, then there are undoubtedly ethical issues. But on some level, students come to school looking to be transformed, and it is really not possible for them to understand fully the transformation they are signing up for. If they did, then they wouldn't need the education. To be educated does not mean to be the same person you were four years ago, except with some extra information in one's head. After all, the great job and value of an education is to encounter an idea that takes over one's life, transforming it in some significant way. You don't really get to decide what idea it will be, and you certainly don't get to choose how you will be transformed.

The challenge is in how people get stuck, determined to hold onto wherever they are. It happens to undergrads and grad students. It certainly happens to faculty. As such a pedagogy of inception is not necessarily about instilling a particular idea or trying to predetermine the shape that idea will take in a person's mind, but rather about creating conditions of openness where inception might occur.

As reported in the NY Times, there seems to be a "slight" error in the standardized testing measures in which it first appeared that 86% of students were at "grade level" in math, when in fact only 61% were. In the article, Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the state’s Education Department, is quoted as saying “Now that we are facing the hard truth that not all of the gains were as advertised, we have to take a look at what we can do differently. These results will finally provide real unimpeachable evidence about to be used for accountability.”

But I especially like this paragraph:

New York City officials said that if the passing rates since 2006 were adjusted to match the new scoring standards, the city had shown substantial progress over all. But that explanation is likely to offer little consolation to teachers and parents who must now face the reality that just more than half of city students in the third through eighth grades are proficient in math, not four out of every five, as they were led to believe last year.

To which I believe the only suitable response is to say, "But these go to 11."

Of course the entire system of assessment here is comically arbitrary. First you establish some fantastical notion of what qualifies as math or ELA knowledge that says first you must learn X and then Y and that you must learn them by a certain point in time. Second, you make up some test that purports to evaluate whether or not students have learned this knowledge in the way you have insisted that they should. Third you drink the assessment kool-aid so that you can believe the results of some test can tell you the Truth about what students actually know.

Testing does not and cannot improve education. It cannot even give you a real sense of the classroom. I love Tisch's unrepentant delusion where, even when faced with the gross imprecision of testing, she continues to have faith in future assessments. Why would any sane person believe that future results would be any less impeachable than last year's?

The fundamental problem is that we do not trust teachers' professional ethics. This begins with imposing standardized curriculum (where we don't trust them to create their own) and extends through the reward system attached to high-stakes testing. But this is completely wrong-headed. Certainly, younger, less-experienced teachers need to be mentored and guided, but at some point we either have to trust these people to educate our kids or stop sending them into the classroom.

Of course there are problems with the way that we structure these jobs. If teachers are professionals (which of course they must be), they need to be involved in discussions and research regarding teaching methods as well as the subject matter they teach. They need to be part of a community which affords the professional courtesy of making one's own decisions but also ultimately holds one ethically accountable to research, best practices, and so on. And those things do exist, but they need to be a more integral part of every teachers' work. Then there is also the pay issue. As I've discussed in past posts about motivation and creative jobs, the first thing you need is fair pay. Once you have fair pay then you don't need to incentivize work with more pay. In fact, more money can dis-incentivize. This is perhaps what happens when we tie test results to more money.

Really though I think there are deeper questions about why we mistrust educational institutions. And perhaps even more perplexing to me why we trust testing and government instead.

By now, John Seely Brown's notion of "passion-based learning" is familiar, particularly among the DIY education crowd. Will Richardson has a recent post on this, as does Alan Levine. Gardner Campbell wrote recently about Brown's talk at the NMC conference (video). It is a little curious how educational movements toward intrinsic motivation, curiosity, creativity, and such run along the same path as instructional technology, but that's a post for another time. I've been invested in these concepts/values for a while, but at the same time, I find them opening whole new sets of questions.

I often find myself thinking about a line in Lester Faigley's Fragments of Rationality, one of the first rhet/comp books I read as a grad student, where he observes that many of the disagreements among rhet/comp pedagogies boiled down to the different subject positions we wanted students to occupy. That is, to a large extent, a pedagogy is a function of three interrelated things:

1. your theory of how subjectivity is produced;
2. your understanding of student subjectivity coming in the door; and
3. your goal for the students' subjective end state.

Perhaps it seems unethical to see pedagogy as a manipulation of subjectivity, but what would be the point of education if it didn't change people? Only in the most unreflective notion of free will would one imagine that education is the depositing of knowledge in the brain where it can be referenced without effecting any other change. The notion of a DIY, passion-based learning, in a related fashion, valorizes students' existing desires, but as Will and Alan ask, can we really count on student desires to carry them through the long, often difficult, path of education? 

I suppose the answer is both yes and no. Likely the students who succeed in our existing system connect their desires and subjectivity with institutionalized learning. I was never much of a grade-hound, and I can't say, on a personal level, that I understand how one would find grades particularly motivating. However it does seem that some people are able to connect grades with some internal motivation. Other successful learners are more like me and find other reasons to push through the difficulties and obstacles to learn new things. But is certainly true that many, many students do not find such things. They respond to external motivations/obligations for attending school, but that never carries one very far. And we've all experienced that to some degree. We've all been required to take some course or workshop or something where we didn't want to be.

To return to Faigley then, we are still describing a subjective state that we wish students to occupy. We should not mistake it for a "natural" state, even though we often talk about students losing their sense of creativity and curiosity at an early age. Neither should we imagine creativity/curiosity is a single thing that one either has or doesn't have along a single line of intensity. If instead we think of creativity/curiosity as emergent affective states, then the pedagogic task isn't about id-ing natural creativity but rather about generating passion around the intellectual hurdles that we want students to traverse.

We should also keep in mind that there is nothing particularly more moral or ethical about this creative professional subjective state that we wish to inculcate than the "organization man" of Fordist America. Just as literary studies took 19th century bourgeois aesthetic experiences and tried to naturalize them as the aesthetic, literary sensibilities of civilization that all students should feel (e.g. everyone should love Shakespeare), today we are suggesting that everyone should have a particular subjective-desiring position that is "natural" and is, not surprisingly, commensurate with the new economy.

In his talk, Brown mentions the now-familiar, shrinking half-life of education: the skills we teach seem to be quickly outmoded. Perhaps, but that's the great value of the humanities then. The less directly practical an education is, the longer it is useful. The reason we can still productively discuss Socrates is that many of the thoughts and questions raised there are still relevant. Perhaps what students need is the ability to analyze on a meta-level their own educational path. Of course I'm not sure how many will desire to learn that. It would mean becoming passionate about learning itself.

Is that the subjective state I want students to occupy? Maybe. However, I try to insulate my pedagogy from such drives by trying to devise non-deterministic pedagogies that teach without outcomes. (not that such a thing could ever be institutionally acceptable.)

At UB there are large plans underway to rethink how we deliver general education, and while I don't want to write here about my institution's specific plans (which to be honest aren't that specific yet), my own role as director of composition certainly has me thinking about these issues in new ways.

But first, some general observations about general education.

1. The general perception is that students dislike gen ed courses and take them begrudgingly. In part, this seems to be because the courses appear uninteresting to them and/or not relevant to what they see as the purpose of going to college (i.e. getting a job). The other part is the way some of the courses are delivered in giant lecture halls, which understandably turn people off.
2. Many students, at least at UB, at my previous institution, and I imagine elsewhere, are now taking gen ed courses at community colleges and then transferring the credit in. They do this mostly to save money, and it's hard for a university to compete if the students are also saving on housing costs. 
3. From the university perspective the concern is that the courses are not really equivalent. As an undergrad advisor, I really saw students struggle with foreign language. In terms of composition, I think there are also issues. I should note when I say that that my wife taught at a community college for several years. She and many of her colleagues are great teachers. But their curriculum was not really equivalent to ours. It couldn't be because they are dealing with a very different student population. Simply put, we ask more of our students. 

Of course the larger question is whether or not any of this matters. That is, does it make a difference to the average junior/senior with a writing assignment in her major if she took fyc at a community college or placed out or took it at her university? I don't know the answer to that. Does it make a difference if you take Western Civ at a community college where perhaps less material is covered or at least the final is maybe easier? That is, if you took two UB grads from 2005 and asked them questions about Western Civ, would you be able to tell which one transferred in the credit?

The more nebulous and hence not measurable claim about general education is that it makes one a better person/citizen. Ok, maybe, who knows. 

I am willing to say this about general education. If a gen ed program was able to give students a solid understanding of world history, literature, philosophy, art, basic science, mathematics, writing/communication, and a language other than English, I would think that would be worthwhile. However, I don't think it is successful in doing those things. In order to be successful at doing those things, one would have to ask students to read a great deal, spend long hours discussing it, and then write. If one is interested in such an education, it can be had, mostly at private liberal arts colleges and maybe some elite public institutions. But honestly, students who are interested in this kind of education probably acquire a significant portion of it before entering college anyway. In any case, such an education is expensive and the average student has already demonstrated that cost is a primary factor (and who can blame them for that).

So here is my reset solution (not that it is all that original). As much as possible, give general education away for free. Universities will never be able to undersell community colleges; the savings on room and board alone are insurmountable. So take all the content and put it online for free. By my count UB requires 13 gen ed courses, including our two-semester writing sequence. So we're talking roughly about one year of coursework. There are certain things that I think can't be done online for free, specifically a lab experience, studio art (which would be optional at UB) and the mentoring of writing instruction. For the more content-driven curriculum, one might require students to pass some test, but I think there's a more interesting option.

One might create a 6-9 credit one-semester learning community where students are asked to produce a portfolio that demonstrates their general education competency. I pick this size as it would allow students to continue taking courses in theirs major as well. This might include lab reports, an art project, a humanistic research essay, and some other piece of media. I would say students need to have 12 credits before they take it (i.e not in their first semester) and need to complete it to get junior status. This gives them time to review the free online materials, which they will be expected to know. It also gives them time to take some introductory courses for their major. One of the tasks of those introductory courses would be to impress upon students the importance of a liberal arts education for success in their coursework and profession. The completed portfolios would be reviewed by both the faculty teaching in the community and faculty in the student's major.

I would then add an advanced writing in the disciplines course (300-level), which might be taught by writing faculty or by faculty in the disciplines, and a major-specific capstone course which might bring gen ed experiences back in at the end. I realize this might be tough: think about the kind of capstone English course that would revisit math or science. It could be done, for sure, but it wouldn't be typical.

In any case, I'm thinking something like this would solve several problems:

1. It might connect general education more with a student's major, particularly if faculty in introductory major courses do the work of making some connections.
2. It resolves the problems of giant gen ed lecture courses. Students may not retain as much information this way, but it is a question of cost/benefit, especially when students aren't taking the courses on your campus anyway.
3. It might combat the trend of losing students to community colleges by giving students the opportunity to get right into the courses in their majors.

The question left open then is what does one do with the 10 or so courses that have been removed from the curriculum. Perhaps it does become possible for students to get a degree in three years or maybe a masters in 4-5 years since it now seems many more students are pursuing masters degrees. Or maybe it becomes easier for students to study abroad or double-major.

Of course the fundamental problem is when students come to college in search of a degree rather than an education, and their parents (or whomever is paying) is in search of ROI measured in terms of getting a job at the end. The thing is, as all the edupunkers point out, you don't need the degree; you need the education. Or at least that's how it should be.

The thing is... if you look at entry-level, BA/BS required jobs most of them don't really require much in specific education: marketing associate, research associate, recruiting associate, sales consultant, etc. All they are really looking for, I think, is someone who has demonstrated enough intelligence, maturity and focus to make it to the end of a college degree. Oh, and maybe good communication skills. The degree is really just a filter mechanism to make it more likely that a new hire would be able to handle the training that will follow being hired.

So this is the real problem with higher education right now. It is an increasingly cynical operation where no one is there for the right reason. Students want job preparation, but for the most part there really isn't anything specific they need, except to become more mature and responsible. Those who do need specific skills or experiences, like nurses or engineers, could probably get that training in a more direct route. But no one wants a 20 year-old nurse or engineer or high school teacher, and I think for good reasons.

The underlying problem then is thinking about education in a very different way than we have for a long time. Another post perhaps.

Starting to catch up on some reading now, and I was very interested in Levi Bryant's and  Ian Bogost's discussion and of object-oriented theories, desire, and politics. Of course, in a way it is quite familiar in that I spent many years, in grad school in particular, engaged with ardent Marxists over any number of points. Eventually my experience with such "conversations" was that these folks weren't actually interested in a dialogue in which we might both learn and grow; instead they seemed motivated either to win me over to their point of view or failing that to castigate or shame me (and to be honest, as I recall, the matter moved quite quickly to the latter strategy). So from that perspective, I appreciate Levi and Ian's willingness to engage where my response would probably tend more toward a blow off. 

So the upshot for me is that I'm not too interested in the question of how these theories can serve existing political fantasies, but I was curious about the attempts here to explain object-oriented theory in terms of fascination (though I would use desire) rather than (ethical/political) imperative, especially as these move toward Buddhist thought. 

Even in Marx it is possible to differentiate between an analytic/descriptive philosophy that seeks to understand how society operates and the revolutionary praxis that describes how society should operate. Obviously the two are interrelated to the point where one might say the failure of latter has cast doubt on the former. No doubt there is a long history connecting philosophies with descriptions of ideal states going back to Plato. On the other hand, Deleuzian philosophy, for example, is marked by the absence of such a "win state" and has be criticized on this point. However, while it may lack a political program, Deleuze's work is not without insight into living and ethics. This lack of teleology is one common point with at least certain strands of Buddhism. While not conflating Buddhism, Deleuze, and object-oriented philosophy, the three might share in common a kind of non-deterministic compositional process and molecular ethics, where actions are not judged by their ability to assure specific outcomes. 

Now that isn't to say that people-actor-objects are not interested in outcomes. Of course they are, but that interest, which Bogost discusses as a replacement for imperative, is an emergent property of assemblages or networks. Here we get molarized ethics and desires of the kind that can form and drive enterprises like object-oriented philosophy. As I see it, the point of an object-oriented approach is to understand processes of molarization as they emerge non-deterministically from molecular ones.

I think there are useful connections here with Buddhism. Buddhism, or more to the point, Buddhists, certainly can have molar ethical obligations and political goals. But I think the point of "letting go" is recognizing that molarization, and its attendent desires, are the root (and route) of suffering. Perhaps one might be Deleuzian playful here and suggest that while molar desires have roots, molecular desires are rhizomatic and rootless. Molecular ethics hinge on the recognition of interdependence among objects within assemblages. Similarly, Buddhist ethics hinge on the principle of dependent co-arising, as such they result from an understanding of what is (dependent co-arising) rather than what should be. 

Now I think these things are likely troubling for object-oriented philosophy and its desire to focus on objects over processes (I wonder if it can "let go" of that focus). Nevertheless, OOP, with its exohumanist approach (to coin a term over anti- or post- humanism), shares this practice of an ethic that emerges from what is rather than what should be.

There has been a recent flare up of this conversation recently, following an RSA panel on the subject. Jim Brown offers an account of the panel here as well as an earlier post on the matter. Ian Bogost has two posts in response as well. Not for nothing, but here's a post I wrote a couple months back on rhetoric and OOP.

If you take a look at Jim's posts there is some fairly strong, skeptical/critical reaction in the comments to the idea of OOP (something that Ian responds to). It's not something that really surprises me. In a way it is understandable that rhetoric would have a very strong connection with correlationist theories, as OOP would term them. After all, rhetoric has largely (if not solely) defined itself in terms of human communication; the study of rhetoric is fundamentally about affecting/persuading human subjects, the formation of human communications, ethical relations among humans, etc. Our concerns have focused on subjective experience.

In a way, in my view, that doesn't necessarily have to be a problem for OOP. As an academic, one cannot study everything. I don't think there's anything philosophically wrong with a discipline that has a focus on human behaviors and experiences. However... it's tricky. I am often reminded in academic encounters of the overwhelming primacy that many humanists wish to give to the cultural, the representational, and the subjective. It's one thing to focus on human activities (as opposed to the activities of birds or the ocean or paper cups), but one still must interrogate one's underlying theory of the relations of objects and subjects.

Ian poses the following questions:

what is the rhetoric of objects? Do things like traffic lights and kohlrabis persuade one another in their interactions? What would it mean to understand extra-human object relations as rhetorical? When Bruno Latour suggests that trees also might use us "to achieve their dark designs," does such a use count as rhetoric?

I think these are useful questions though I would want to expand rhetoric beyond the concerns of persuasion. I'm still down in South Carolina at this gaming institute, so I don't have my books, but in Chaosmosis, Guattari remarks that agency and ethics operating at molecular levels in the recognition of interdependence. I would think of these relations as open to rhetorical study as well. It's fairly easy to begin with communications among animals: mating, pack dominance, child-rearing, establishing territory, etc. Then the communications between predator and prey. Or even the communications between the homing pigeon and the earth's magnetic fields. We can think of the ways the plants respond the changing weather conditions. One might even think of molecular bonding. That said, I don't think it is necessarily unreasonable to draw a line somewhere and say there are some object relations that are not rhetorical.

For instance, it might be useful to think of rhetoric as studying assemblages that include overcoded operations, and here I am thinking of the way DeLanda takes upon Deleuze and Guattari on this matter. Briefly put, D/G describe two dimensions to assemblages material/expressive and territorializing/deterritorializing. DeLanda adds a third, coding/decoding, that essentially serves to reinforce (de)territorialization. I think it is entirely reasonable to argue that not every assemblage includes that third element. Assemblages involving conscious humans certainly do (maybe there are some exceptions), but there are also assemblages without humans to consider here as well. Certainly one could think of relations among information machines in this category.

Of course it's not that simple from either direction. Perhaps one would want to argue that DNA or physical laws constitute coded operations. D/G don't see it this way. As they write in ATP:

This property of overcoding or superlinearity explains why, in language, not only is expression independent of content, but form of expression is independent of substance: translation is possible because the same form can pass from one substance to another, which is not the case for the genetic code, for example, between RNA and DNA chains.

This brief quote only points to the issue, but it at least suggests their willingness to separate different kinds of codes. Coming from the more traditional, humanist or subject-oriented rhetorical position one might want to insist that rhetorical relations require agency. That is, I can only be persuaded if I have agency to respond in different ways. Maybe, but the question of agency is vexed all over the place. In some senses I think it is more viable in object-oriented theory than it is in the Foucauldian, neo-Marxist inflected cultural studies that dominates the theory end of the rhet/comp field. In fact, one of the more interesting things for me about object-oriented rhetoric would be its potential to offer a better understanding of agency.

Still if object-oriented rhetoric focused on the study of assemblages with overcoded elements/strata, it would remain necessary to have a broader theory of objects that accounted for the other elements participating in the assemblage. This is what object-oriented theories would bring to rhetoric. In turn, to date, I think object-oriented theory could benefit from a more expansive understanding of the rhetorical. That is, just as code is exposed to the other elements of an assemblage, so those other elements are exposed to the coded strata. I think that rhetoric has something to offer to object-oriented theory in terms of these questions. 

My personal approach to all these questions is ultimately heuristic. That is, I am interested in how synthesizing these concepts opens new spaces for me to explore, invent, and act.

Perhaps these seem like an odd collection of terms, but bear with me.

First off, let me say that I think my discipline (rhetoric and composition) has strong commitments to a number of somewhat contradictory impulses:

1. that everyone can "write" (and perhaps should write);
2. that there is really no such thing as natural talent or creativity;
3. that writing is a social rather than individual activity.

And my thought is that of course these things are all true, but they are also completely wrong. The discipline's commitment to democracy means understanding writing as a socio-political activity that everyone can engage in equally, at least on some abstract-potential level. However, I cannot get away from the fact that there are people who have an exceptional talent and interest for writing (some of whom also teach writing). The same rhetoricians who will refuse to see writing as a natural talent are quick to say they have no natural aptitude for math. Hmmmm. Undoubtedly, the mission of rhet/comp is well-intentioned, particularly if one has faith in the notion that literacy equals empowerment. At the same time, to be committed to writing having certain characteristics because writing instruction must serve a particular political end would ultimately be destructive.

All of that is a little preamble to my consideration of why I think many of my colleagues in rhet/comp would be troubled by the notion of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation that I discussed in my last post. In the mainstream discourses of my discipline, I fear that intrinsic motivation would sound too much like a kind of naive humanism, where many in my field would rather insist upon the role of social, cultural, and ideological forces. In short, all forces are extrinsic. Don't ask me how we get from there to empowering students through literacy, because honestly that little trick of agency has always escaped me.

From my view, this intrinsic/extrinsic talk must also be reconciled with assemblage theory and relations of exteriority, which is where my work and this blog often operates. That may also seem like a difficult rhetorical trick, but actually I think it's fairly simple.

When one discusses relations of exteriority, in my view, one must begin with the dissolution of inside and outside as absolute, essential characteristics. (Admittedly then, relations of exteriority is a somewhat misleading term, but that matter will have to wait for another day.) That doesn't meant that inside and outside cannot exist as emergent and very real characteristics of objects. E.g. my house has an inside and an outside. They exist and not just in my mind as concepts. In a related way, subjectivity/consciousness emerges through relations of exteriority, through a network of distributed cognition and symbolic action, through embodied processes, and through exposure to assemblages of objects. Subjectivity is semi-stable inasmuch as those relations and assemblages are semi-stable. Even though subjectivity emerges through relations of exteriority, it has an inside and an outside as surely as my house does. The point of assemblage theory & relations of exteriority is "simply" to argue that subjectivity (or any other object) is not defined that which emerges as an inside.

However, given all that, as subjects we experience our lives as a collection of intrinsically and extrinsically motivated activities. And I'm not going to try to account for them all. Instead I want to jump right to the one that is at issue here: writing. We are regularly given obviously extrinsic conditions where we are called upon to write. Student writing assignments are an obvious example. But we are also often obligated to write various kinds of things on the job. The point that Dan Pink is trying to make (see previous post) is that when we are asked to do creative, intellectual work that extrinsic motivations (e.g. carrots and sticks) not only don't work, they can be detrimental. Grades, extra credit, bonuses, etc: none of these things are particularly good motivators in getting people to do good creative work (and I would describe writing as creative work). Now certainly those things we experience as "intrinsic" forms of motivation emerge through assemblages, through relations of exteriority. That doesn't make them less intrinsic. Everything ultimately comes from some other place.

Take for example this post. Why am I writing it? (Why are you reading it?) There is no obvious extrinsic motivation. I don't get paid. It's not related to my job. Maybe I think it will make me famous or at least improve my reputation, but even if I did, there would certainly be no clear reward for writing this post right now. As such, I might say I am intrinsically motivated. What that means to me is that these actions are motivated (though not determined!) by assemblages/relations of exteriority that I subjectively experience as coming from inside. (As to why you're reading this, I have no idea; it probably has something to do with your relationship with your mother.) But this is where we might encounter the "autonomy of objects" (btw, Levi Bryant has some interesting posts on this subject: here is one). If all objects have autonomy to some degree, with the plane of immanence being a degree zero of pure autonomy, there's no special free will for humans. To be autonomous here means that objects have emergent characteristics and behaviors that are reducible to their relations with other objects.

When we are looking at the kind of positive psychology that informs Pink's work, we are not developing some general ontology. The point, quite simply, is that when humans act out of experience of autonomy, mastery, and purpose (to give a shorthand for the qualities of intrinsic motivation Pink explores), they are more successful at creative tasks. If you are a corporate manager or a WPA then you might think about creating work conditions that are conducive to these experiences. Similarly, as a teacher, one might facilitate these conditions to give students opportunities to draw upon intrinsic motivations for their writing.

So I will end with where I started. It's true that in some basic definition of writing, nearly every human has the cognitive ability to write. That said, everyone does not have the equal potential for writing and not everyone will find pleasure in it (anymore than the typical English professor finds pleasure in mathematics). While writing certainly is a social activity, we need to be more careful with that term "social," as Latour has pointed out. We need to recognize how inadequate conventional "social" explanations are for our own motivations as writers. Despite my understanding of things like audience, genre, and discourse, I know quite well that my best writing does not come from meeting those external demands. It is a sadly impoverished view of writing that does not recognize the necessity of intrinsic motivation. And I fear that in our desire to make writing logical and learnable, to make it something that is equal for all people, we ignore those aspects.

I picked up Pink's latest book yesterday. Essentially, the book takes up theories of intrinsic motivation and positive psychology and applies them to business management theory. Pink also has a TED talk that outlines the basic experimental evidence that underlies the argument he makes in the book (evidence that the book further expands upon, though always in a layperson's discourse). I've discussed this talk here before and the subject of motivation, pedagogy, and writing many times. But here I want to think through these issues more in terms of writing program administration.

Pink suggests that the dominant theory of motivation (that in academia we might think of as desire) has flaws that have become significant given the new types of labor we ask employees (and I would say students) to do. As he puts it, in simplistic terms, there's Motivation 1.0, which are our animalistic drives for food, safety, and procreation. Motivation 2.0 extends upon those more immediate drives with extrinsic motivators, which are basically carrots and sticks. As he explains, carrot/stick motivators work fine for simple, algorithmic tasks, where we ask students/employees to perform rote procedures. The important thing the research shows, however, is that when one asks people to perform heuristic tasks, tasks that require inventive and creative thinking, that the carrot/stick act can actually serve as a disincentive to performance.

Obviously the composition course is a place that calls for heuristic acts, though this is something that we have struggled over in various ways. Over the last century as a culture we have tried to turn education into an algorithmic procedure that can be incentivized with carrots and sticks from grades and detention to high-stakes testing for district funding. We have tried to turn composition into an algorithmic procedure as well, even if that wasn't what people originally intended in talking about the "writing process." Furthermore, the course is incorporated into a larger motivation 2.0 structure of grades and credits. But let me fold this back to a familiar composition scene, where the student asks "How can I revise this to get an 'A'?" And the koan-like answer is that your best chance of getting an A is to stop writing for the purpose of getting a good grade. The carrot of the A is actually limiting your performance. Of course it isn't that easy. Ironically, the whole system is designed to dissuade learning and creativity, and over time these motivational structures do lasting damage to students, as Ken Robinson has famously articulated. It isn't intentional, of course; it's just that the system is designed on a poor theory of mind.

According to the research that Pink cites, in order for people to be most successful at these complex heuristic tasks, they need to be intrinsically motivated, and he describes three key foundations to that motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In some ways, academia ought to be an ideal model for the kind of workforce and workplace Pink is describing. We have a very high degree of autonomy in the way we work. We generally work hard in the pursuit of mastery over our subject, while always knowing that there is more to know or discover. And we also tend to make strong connections between the narrow focus of our research and grander cultural and intellectual purposes. However, there are obviously general problems with the management of higher education and I think that infamously academics can be horrible managers of other academics (though that isn't true in every instance). In part, the problem is that sometimes academics end up in administrative positions for the wrong reasons, and they don't bring the creativity and passion they have for their research or teaching to their administrative roles. There is a long standing tradition of antagonism, generally, between faculty and administration, which I would hypothesize stems from the tradition of "motivation 2.0" with its carrots and sticks and its focus on controlled, routinized tasks. As Pink points out, these strategies are poisonous to the heuristic challenges of both research and teaching.

However, it's not all that simple. In UB's composition program, we have a long tradition of giving instructors a high degree of autonomy in constructing syllabi and assignments. While there have certainly been successes as a result, the practice has not been without problems. There are always limits and contexts for autonomy. As the director of composition, I can only loosen the restrictions that I put in place. For example, I can't alter the length of the semester or change the fact that students need to be graded at the end of the semester. A composition course isn't a course in auto repair or calculus. As Pink puts it, the autonomy here is over task, technique, time, and team. What you are going to do, how you are going to do it, when you are going to do it, and who you are going to do it with. Task is certainly related to purpose (purpose is a big picture task, I suppose). And technique might be one of the objects of mastery.

So here's how I see it. We start with the WPA Outcomes Statement. It's sweeping and fairly general, Many of the terms are open to interpretation and debate. And in my view, many of the outcomes themselves could be interrogated and others added. As Pink points out, extrinsically motivated people play within boundaries (in an effort to get carrots); intrinsically motivated people play with boundaries. So even if you view the statement as boundaries, we want to play with them. Similarly, our program has certain constraints and policies (which are themselves open to periodic review and change). We can and should play with those boundaries as long as we keep a larger sense of common purpose that hinges on professional ethics (and if you can't play in that broad space, that's fine, you just need to find a different profession). There are ultimately limits, but I think there's a wide degree of autonomy within that, particularly if you have a personal sense of professional purpose that is at all connected to the discipline.

Within those contexts, instructors ought to be able to define their own tasks (e.g. this semester I am going to focus on developing methods for teaching revision or digital composition or whatever); they can develop their own techniques or pedagogies; they can set their own time to work (beyond the constraints of course scheduling); and they might think about team as well (finding colleagues in the program to share ideas with and collaborate; this is not done enough!).

One of the things I think is underdeveloped, both generally and at UB, is the focus on the mastery of teaching. Since almost all of our composition instructors are graduate students, I look at the program as part of their education/professional development. Here Pink turns to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his concept of "flow." Fundamentally, the flow state is one where a person is engaged in a task that is ideally suited to just push his/her ability. It is not so difficult as to produce anxiety nor so easy as to be boring. It is in these flow states where our ability to grow is maximized. Of course we are not always in a flow state, but as a WPA, one challenge might be to maximize the opportunities for teaching to put instructors in these opportunities. Pink also points out that mastery is difficult (of course), and that it requires an ability to grind it out sometimes. The flow state can help us get over those difficult moments. Also, we need to recognize that mastery is developed not inherited and that it is ultimately unreachable: we can always improve. It is the journey that is intrinsically rewarding and motivating: not the extrinsic carrots one might encounter along the way.

Finally there's purpose. I don't think rhet/comp or academics in general have much trouble connecting their work to grand purposes like saving democracy or illuminating the Truth. In fact, I tend more to be skeptical of such claims. At the same time, I recognize the importance of having a larger sense of purpose (though maybe not quite that large). As Pink points out, one of the strategies here is to give employees the opportunity to connect their work to a personal sense of purpose. In a composition program, I think this works through giving instructors the opportunity to develop the content and assignments for their courses. If an instructor has a passion of the environment, then s/he can focus on that or maybe the passion is education or media or cultural difference. 

At the same time, it is important for instructors to recognize their own managerial role. Just as the program needs to create opportunities for instructor autonomy, mastery, and purpose, each course needs to do this for its students for the students are also engaged in heuristic work that requires intrinsic motivation. And furthermore, one might imagine that as writers we bear a somewhat similar relationship to our audiences where, rhetorically, we want to engage our readers, bring them into a state of flow, and interact with their own motivations. Certainly, to some degree, Pink's book did that for me. Hopefully it is a virtuous rather than vicious circle.

In the her Chronicle article (subscription required), "Hot Type: No Reviews of Digital Scholarship = No Respect," Jennifer Howard reports on the struggles in getting digital scholarship properly reviewed. Not only is it difficult to establish appropriate standards for review, there are not many people capable of doing the reviewing. And I fully understand the nature of the problem here: the review is an important form of currency in academia.

But once again this can all be filed under missing the point.

Digital scholarship will never make sense within the context of a print scholarship intellectual marketplace. Here's the fundamental difference. In the existing print world, a text "counts" because two or three reviewers read it and said it's good enough to print. It doesn't matter if no one else ever reads it. Yes, we can get into bibliometrics, but such mechanisms cannot explain the forces at work behind a citation. It's as if getting cited as an example of stupidity is better than not getting cited at all. Similarly there can be a variety of unaccounted-for mechanics behind book reviews. On the flip side, of course it is fairly easy to measure a variety of user activities in relation to online scholarship (links, visits, time spent, click throughs, etc); there's also numerous ways for users to give feedback. So even though one might have trouble getting the kinds of reviews Howard is discussing, one would think that with digital scholarship one could get a far more accurate measurement of how people actually use the work.

So we could have a kind of pitched battle over these terms, where the evidence for the value of digital scholarship would suggest that we have reason to doubt the value of any/all print scholarship since we don't have any metrics for understanding how/if users actually do anything with it.

But I still think that's missing the point.

The point as I see it begins with getting beneath the process of scholarly publication and review, which is obviously a print process. Fundamentally to publish simply means to make something public. But obviously it means something more specific in this context. I think we have to ask why we publish articles and monographs (beyond the imperatives of tenure and promotion). What is this publication meant to accomplish? To suggest the most altruistic motives, the purpose of scholarly publication would be to contribute meaningfully to an ongoing conversation of scholarly and intellectual merit. While the article or monograph represent engagements of labor and thought of a certain scope/depth that I think are still important in the humanities, we need to recognize that the process of publication and review is not necessary to our deeper purpose. Therefore, I think we go down the wrong road when we try to accomodate digital scholarship to the process of publication and review. 

We need to rethink the entire way we do intellectual work, which extends right down to what we ask our undergraduates to do in the classroom. I don't think this means abandoning the fundamental questions that drive our intellectual inquiry. Nor does it mean giving up the theoretical approaches that we use. But it does mean taking apart many of the unexamined, naturalized aspects of our disciplinary paradigms. Sure, one could ask, "But what is wrong with the scholarly essay? It still works just as well now as 20 years ago." But one could equally ask, what is wrong with public oratory? Why begin writing essays at all?

Digital scholarship clearly allows for a kind of large-scale, collaborative, iterative, scholarly activity that goes far beyond the essay with its citations, thesis statement, and facile structures that tie into a neat, conclusive bow somewhere around 6-7000 words down the road. In the context of digital scholarship, the essay and the monograph are about as useful as oral presentation. Of course we still do such presentations, and I imagine we will still write essayistic prose. But to seek to match digital scholarship to the metrics of print scholarship is simply another sad example of why one might lose hope for the long-term viability of academics. It's just sad, sloppy thinking.

DeanDad's review of Kamenetz's DIY U raises a number of good issues that brings me back to this topic again today, as does this NY Times op ed, which essentially argues for more summer teaching to compress the 4-year degree into 3 years. As the old saying goes, time=money, and so, we get this sense that college is perhaps a waste of both.

DeanDad's review echoes more general concerns I have raised about the DIY movement and the presumption that a significant percentage of potential college students could essentially educate themselves. For instance, not only do I imagine that very, VERY few college students could figure out how to improve their writing without close, ongoing support from a teacher, most would not even elect to do that kind of work, and I'm not sure how one would encourage DIY students to do difficult work of any kind. In short, any student with the discipline and motivation to make DIY education work is also the kind of student who could get their money's worth from a college environment.

This actually brings me to the waste of time/money issue. I appreciate this on a personal level. I bang my head against my kid's K-12 education on a weekly basis. Their schooling has only one gear: slow. Actually, that's not true. There's a second gear: reverse. As far as my kids are concerned, the curriculum could move 5-10 times faster than it does, no sweat. Of course, there are plenty of kids who struggle with the workload as it is right now. 

The real issue here is that the educational system (in the US anyway) is not meant to teach individual students. It's a democratizing process that is designed to try to bring everyone to some minimal standard. Anyone who thinks that completing the curriculum to get some degree (any degree I don't care how advanced) means that s/he has become "educated" obviously was not paying attention in class. The educational system certainly is at odds with our notion of college degrees as an investment in individual human capital and with our fantasy about our own specialness that results in kids getting handed medals and awards for participation.

It wouldn't be too difficult to imagine a different kind of educational system that is more meritocratic than democratic. In fact there are plenty of models of such around the world. Our educational system, in its own localized ways, tends to focus on the lower third of any student population. Not the lower-third nationally mind you, but the lower-third in each school district: getting them to pass state tests, stay in school, etc.

The DIY approach is clearly more sink or swim. Maybe some of those lower performing students would find a passion and succeed but I think many more would choose the do-not option that is implicit in DIY. Meanwhile the best-performing students would likely be able to take off. In short, you'd have a different educational system. It would be less democratic but it would be better for some. Maybe it would be better for "us" nationally in cultural or economic terms. I guess that would depend on what one meant by "better."

[Now I should point out, as an aside, that DIY on a global scale is more complicated; what I'm talking about here is restricted to an American context.]

Perhaps it is instructive to think of these things in energetic terms. In a complex, dynamic system like our society, democratic equality or equilibrium is costly to try to maintain. If socio-economic equality is not your goal then expenditures to maintain it would seem highly inefficient. Unfortunately, equality is at odds with excellence unless one includes equality as a marker of excellence (which I think it an entirely viable argument). Once upon a time, higher education was a mechanism for maximizing excellence, but for at least 40 years it has increasingly been a mechanism for equality. That is, we have come to see college educating a large percentage of citizens as a measure of equality.

The problem is that the equality higher ed is expected to provide is not a social equality but a kind of quixotic individual equality, where everyone has above-average incomes. That is, in our fantasy of specialness we want everyone to receive a higher ed degree as a mark of excellence. Well... duh. As long as we aim to get 40% of Americans 4-yr degrees (up from the low 30s% it is right now), we are going to be in a system of inefficiency. I think a university system that was more in line with a DIY philosophy could do a good job with 10-15% of the population and maybe serve them better than it does now. But then it wouldn't be an engine of equality.