Fabulous Fun with Fisting

Will somebody remind me to update this soon so that this doesn’t sit here for the next couple months as my first post? Thanks.

So anyway, I’m in a class and we’re reading Zizek and thus, there is talk of fisting (Plague of Fantasies, if you must know). See Exhibit A:

“What precise form did sexual activity assume in Eden? In this practice of homosexual fist-fucking, the man (usually associated with active penetration) must open himself up passively; he is penetrated in the regiion in which ‘closure’, resistance to penetration, is the natural reaction (one knows that the difciculty of fist-fucking is more psycbnhological than physical: the difficulty lies in relaxing the anal muscles enough to allow the partner’s fist to penetrate–the position of the fisted one in fist-fucking is perhaps the most intense experience of passive opening available to human experience); on top of this opening oneself up to the other, whose organ literally enters my body and explores it from within ; the other crucial feature is that this organ, precisely, is not the phallus (as in ‘normal’ anal intercourse) but the fist (hand), the organ par excellence not of spontaneous pleasure but of instrumental activity, of work and exploration” (16).

Now, there are many interesting places we could go here. Obviously, we could discuss Leroi-Gourhan (gesture, the hand, how important freeing the hand is to the development of speech) and how that might make “fist-fucking” so much more meaningful, or heck, we could even talk about Hannah Arendt–but I like her too much to drag her right into the middle of A Hand in the Bush.

And so, because I’m taking a break from writing a freaking dissertation chapter that I shouldn’t HAVE to write until next fall (that’s due Wednesday), and because I nearly just got killed on John R., I’m going to go ahead and tell my favorite fisting tale and tie it into Zizek somehow–I promise.

So, it was late at night in the middle of October. I was camping out with some SCAdians, because I wanted to score some website design money. I was already making one website for a jewelry seller, and was macking up on several other clothing and garb makers in hopes of getting some more moolah before the weekend was over. The moon was full, the fire was raging because guys kept on throwing Everclear on it, and the person whose website I was making decided to tell us her favorite story.

Several years before, at that same camp, at the same event, a couple had gotten busy in their tent. Unlike Zizek, they were heterosexual (mostly) and decided to get down and busy with the fisting. Other people were around in their consecutive tents, and just like that night, many were still awake around the fire.

And then it happened–she orgasmed, and she broke his wrist.

Now this is the point at which that I think that the story must be false, fake, an urban legend. Why? Well, females have been known to orgasm while giving birth, and I never heard of a baby getting squished to death as a result. I can only imagine that something strong enough to break a man’s wrist (unless he was really a nancy boy) would have somehow managed to also break a baby–just saying.

Regardless, the story goes that the couple got stuck that way, with him in too much pain to withdraw, and her too freaked out to “let go.” (Needless to say my friends tell really classy stories late at night.)

 Now, if homosexual “fist-fucking” is Edenic–a perfect letting go–what does it say about our culture as a whole that heterosexual “fist-fucking” is seen as something that is its exact opposite? Is this possibly because of this same Eden-tale, that the woman ruined perfect fist-fucking for us all (by daring to have an orgasm?) How much do our sexual urban myths really say about us?

In any case, if I have time post-diss-chapter-writing, I promise to come back and write about that new media bit at the end–really.

An Ode To Galloway

In Protocol, Alexander R. Galloway describes a system of power online (based around Foucault’s biopower) that is based in a more or less solid understanding of the technology itself. That is, unlike a lot of technological theorists, Galloway has a pretty good idea of how computers and the internet work and starts from there–and thus I say Hallelujah.Why does that excite me? Well, to be honest, I’m a bit miffed when I read people theorizing the Internet or computers that really don’t know how they work. Especially when said people are then used in pedagogy to suggest why we should use certain technologies in our classrooms (no, I’m not going to name names here!). I don’t think you need to know how to build a computer to teach with them (though it doesn’t hurt when they crash and burn in the middle of your course, of course) but I think a certain working knowledge should be required to make statements of “This is how it is.” Thus, Galloway’s abillity to tie together “this is how it is” with “this is why that is” is a breath of fresh air. No more general statements about how this seems to be the case, tons of statements of “this is how the internet is actually ran, and it does make a difference.”  Furthermore, a study of the protocols of how the internet is held together (formed, designed, redesigned, and controlled) admits that there is a system of control on networks. Too many theories suggest that there is no such thing, that hooking a bunch of computers together will magically form a network where everybody has the same power. That’s simply not true. Galloway says that resistance to control has to change from discipline to biopower to protocol. Hence, hackers are different from the people who have previously resisted power. He cites some hackers that claim that they don’t really work in groups, that they are nomadic, that most of the truly famous ones have worked alone. They tend to be anti-corporate, and so on. Maybe it’s only in the past couple of years, but I’m not so sure that hacking is still exactly what Galloway and even others describe. There was a time when there was some valor to hacking into somebody else’s system, these days it’s hard to say if there’s an valor to it at all. Why? Well, for one thing, the proliferation of online “tools” for hacking have made it pretty simple to launch broad scale campaigns without truly having to have the ability to write these tools oneself. And that’s not to say that it isn’t still considered cool or funny to be anti-corporate, but these tools are also often turned on private individuals as well. While there might be a certain amount of valor (and yes, lulz) in attacking Walmart’s website or the church of scientology, is there any valor in other attacks? Is there anything redeemable (except technological prowess) in attacking an epileptic website? Yes, the latest medium scale hacking attack was reported by Wired. Over Easter weekend, an epileptic support message board was attacked by a group using tactics similar to Anonymous. They posted javascripted messages that would flash and cause seizures in members of the group that viewed them. Clearly, this isn’t cool (yeah that’s a pretty big understatement). While it would definitely represent a breakdown of protocol and control, Anonymous themselves are saying the attack wasn’t them (and they do a pretty good job of claiming things they’ve done, despite all the blame it on Ebaum’s stuff). They’re blaming it on the Scientologists, and meanwhile, the message board itself is trying to stop discussion of it and move on. In any case, it was very refreshing to find a theorist who not only believes that control exists online, but that it is very rigid and created in such a way that decisions were made about the way things were going to be (rather than them just somehow magically coming into being). I believe that one of the ways technology studies is bound to develop in the future is going to be more theory like this–based in reality, contextualized, and real.

Jeffrey Nealon might just be my hero

After all, what academic uses the word snarky in an academic publication? (I may get to quote such words in my diss, but in a published academic text, as regards other academics?) Yeah, this dude is totally and completely my hero.

*Anyway.*

Quotes + responses (because I’m feeling rushed and lazy, I may finally get a cell phone that doesn’t short out when people call me today, yay!):

“…the mode of disciplinary power is much more ‘intense” precisely because of its ubiquity–which isn’t necessarily to say that that discipline hurts more or that each individual feels its oppressive presence much more sharply. Quite the opposite: Power’s increasing inetnsity suggests a kind of abstraction from the wounded boyd, from the stultifying and oppressive presence of physical compulsion. One might say that as power becomes more virtual, it also becomes more intense….” (35).

Biopower vs. discipline is a very interesting topic for me, one that should send me scurrying back to Foucault, because it gives me some theory with which to think about internet power structures with. For example, it might be easy to assume that the folks behind the Chanology project would primarily be employing biopower to achieve their goals (silence cyberfeminists, drown the church of scientology) I’m not so sure. After all, they asked a few feminists to appear naked from the waist up with signs saying how sorry they were on the main page of their site “or else”–that sounds an awful lot like discipline to me. However, the way they wield power (despite their panopticonic pretense of being “everywhere”) seems to be a lot more biopower-optical. (Yes, now I’m officially making up words.)

“And so the dominant modes of power shift, extend, and abstract their targets and tactics: from force oming to bear on the subject primarily through a series of discontinuous (but linked) institutional training exercises, (birth, school, work, death) to force coming to bear primarily on that subject more ubiquituously through her very lifestyle; from policing the act to policing the norm; from discipline to biopower” (49).

So, Anonymous functions somewhere between these two realms. They are lifestyle police, attacking those that use the Internet for serious purposes, attacking lifestyle choices like feminism, and enforcing a “norm” online. However, their attacks themselves sometimes speak more of discipline. A biopower style attack might include hacking and DDoS. But by following this up with public humiliation and in person surveillance and harassment? That doesn’t seem very much like wielding biopower to me.

This might be one way to break down the affects of such groups–if we can recognize that their enforcement of “status quo” power structures is stretched between two different systems of power, then perhaps that split can be used to break those systems apart.

On the other hand, Nealon later points out (on page 6 that “societies of control extend and intensify the tactics of discipline and biopower”… in other words, it is not at all unusual for these two to work in accordance with one another. However, he still believes that discipline has been stretched to its limit.

Despite this, I wonder if this combination of using discipline in addition to biopower (in the way that Anonymous and other similar groups of hackers function) adds something back to discipline that was previously absent. Any thoughts?

We will always be human (also, Stiegler says “qua” a lot)

When I wrote last I got into a little Stiegler by accident, because I was reading it at the time…. hrm, maybe I should have written more then. Regardless, before getting into some specific responses I have some general thoughts about Technics and Time.

A student came into the Writing Center last week ranting and raving (consequently at a couple of my students) about how her teacher, a good friend of mine, was “obsessed” with technology and thought that robots were going to take over the world. I doubt that, a lot, in fact I’m pretty sure the teacher/friend was probably trying to teach her students about the idea of exteriorilization–that stuff that Stiegler and Leroi-Gourhan are pretty obsessive about. We store bits of ourselves and our memories outside ourselves in the exterior milieu–we publish, we make stuff. It lives longer than us. Furthermore, it is *more* than each of us.

Even if we, as a species, begin to exteriorilize (darn I can’t spell that word) and remember less, I don’t think that–as the student was ranting away about–that we become less human. It might be a philosophical sticky point, but we define what it is to be human. In fact, unlike all other animals, our ability to define what is human for ourself is one thing that sets us apart.

Our development of tools since the stop of “formal evolution” of our bodies, then, is the one thing that I think may make us human. Huh (qua? hah, sorry, I was getting sick of that word)? At the point we began to make tools, we enabled the eventual equality of sexes/races/etc. Have we gotten there? Well, no. But if we can externalize all of the things that we would have to rely upon certain parts of our naturally faulty anatomy for, if we can create prosthesises, we can eventually hope for some sort of human equality as well.

Furthermore, as long as we exist, we continue to create for ourselves what it means to be human. Therefore, we will probably never say to ourselves, “Hey there selves, we’re no longer human. We should probably call ourselves ‘homo somethingerotherelse’ now.” Nope, that one is never going to happen. Instead, unlike all the other animals, we are given the choice to give ourselves a name (and do) and are likely to hold onto it.

Therefore, unlike the student that thought her teacher was crazy because “robots are never going to take over the world” I’d like to take a slightly sleep deprived and family-encrazed moment to suggest that instead humans will continue to take over the world.)

And now for some quotes:

____________

“New technical systems are born with the appearance of the limits of the preceding systems, owing to which progress is essentially discontinuous” (33).
I once heard, though I cannot remember where, an argument against this point that stated that when new technological systems are discovered there is often a renaissance eventually (ala steampunk) of older technology, a romanticizing of it, if you will, that proves that people always had the same degree of technological sensibility and knowledge that they do today. I believe the example given was that old machine (see here)  that seems to many to be an ancient computer. In response to this counterargument I believe one could back up Stiegler here by suggesting that it is only within the new technological system that we can recognize the significance of some objects of the old.

“Technical discovery cannot be typified by the mere development and implementation of a scientific discovery. Such an ‘implementation,’ when it occurs, is itself autonomously inventive, following a logic that is not the logic of science” (34).
Every time I read the words “discovery” or “invention” I can’t help but be dragged back into the old discovery vs. invention in the classroom arguments that were repeated ad nauseum the first term I was a student here.
So I ask my audience, which is more important for students to learn–invention or discovery? Which would Stiegler claim is more important?

Sometimes it seemed as though composition is afraid of discovery…. at least, in the discussions I’ve participated in it seems that way. Do we want invention? Or are we ready to settle in and wait for discovery? Hrm….

Blackboard Security Cameras?

Blackboard selling security camera systems kinda freaks me out. Maybe it’s just because I *already* work at one school where I can’t go anywhere but a bathroom stall to pick my wedgie in private.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2804/blackboard-gets-into-video-surveillance

I can’t read “Leroi-Gourhan” without hearing “LEROY JENKINS!” in my head.

Don’t know what I’m talking about in my title? Go here: Leroy Jenkins. And for that, I suspect I am going to academic hell.

Quotes taken from Gesture and Speech:

“One essential point that we can establish, however, is that as soon as there are prehistoric tools, there is a possibility of a prehistoric language, for tools and language are neurologically linked and cannot be dissociated within the social structure of humankind….in the case of the earliest anthropoids, to separate the level of language from that of toolmaking: Throughout history up to the present time, technical progress has gone hand in hand with progress in the development of technical language symbols. It is possible, in the abstract, to conceive of a purely gestural technical education; in practice, even completely silent instruction will actuate a reflective symbolism in both teacher and pupil ” (114).

In any conversation I’ve participated in about “What is technology” (mainly in graduate seminars) people always start with computers and work their way back to pencils, hammers, and so on. I can only think of one conversation (in a course of Anne Wysocki’s) where that connection was made and, even then, probably only after prompting from her. Language as a technology (or techne, if you prefer) shouldn’t be that uncommon of an idea to us, however. After all, I think we do see some languages as a sort of technology, especially those like American Sign Language that aren’t as “natural” to most people as speech because we aren’t as exposed to them. A lot of Western domination is built on this idea as well, that our language is “natural” while others are not (and either this text or the next actually outright states something about Western things being more natural, technical, and precise than Eastern, though I can’t find the citation right now). Clearly, I don’t agree with that idea–languages, like tools, are context specific. Despite the fact that languages grew from the same need, cultural and geographical differences will naturally lead to differences in systems of speaking and writing. None is naturally more correct than any other.

The other idea I feel that is drawn from this passage is this: if tools and language grow together, where does our language go next? Some people would undoubtedly think that computer “languages” would be one natural outgrowth, but I don’t think they are the direct answer to this question. Perhaps some sort of techno-logic will find its way into our rhetoric and speech (such as for or while loops becoming a sort of syllogism) but I don’t think we’re going to start talking in code more than we already do in text messages and IMs. After all, technological advancement will make those acronyms eventually defunct. Nobody wants to type in acronyms when you could do so in full words. (And just think, today’s teenager who texts in class will be the next generations grandma who is “uncool” for still using “lol” and “u” all the time, the English teachers will have their revenge after all!)

“The development of the urbanized organism (a civilized organism in the etymological sense) leads ineveitably to all the negative features of present-day society. Indeed the artificial organism cannot function effectively without accentuated social segregation, its particular form of the cellular specialization common to all animate beings: the landlord, the peasant, the prisoner, are social categories whose effectiveness is directly proportional to the distance society sets between their functions. In agricultural societies, social justice and human triumph over nature are two sides of the same coin” (178).

To be honest, I don’t have much to say in response to this, other than the fact that I flagged it and found it interesting. Is it possible to imagine an un-segregated city? Some science fiction authors seem to believe that technology can provide us with one, don’t they? They seem to be the only ones, however, that believe true social equality would be possible, even if machines were to take over all of the menial labor of society. After all, if capitalism were to continue beyond that point (and whose to say it would?) people would still be free to gamble or spend away their earnings, even if they didn’t work a low-paying job.

“Thus the reason why art is so closely connected with religion is that graphic expression restores to language the dimension of the inexpressible–the possibility of multiplying the dimensions of a fact in instantly accessible visual symbols. the basic link between art and religion is emotional, yet not in a vague sense, It has to do with mastering a mode of expression that restores humans to their true place in a cosmos whose center they occupy without trying to pierce it by an intellectual process which letters have strung out in a needle-sharp, but also needle-thin, line” (200).

And so may the best new media art–just minus the religion. In the place of God comes the worship of techne.

“To the speaker, tien-ch’i-teng means “flashlight” and nothing else. But to the attentive reader, the juxtaposition of the three characters for “lightning,” “steam,” and “lamp” opens a whole world of symbols that form a halo round the banal image of the flashlight: lightning issuing forth from a rain cloud, for the first; team rising over a pan of rice, for the second; and fire and a receptacle, or fire and the action of rising, for the third. Parasitic images, no doubt, and likely to cause the reader’s thoughts to stray in a manner irrelevant to the real object of notation, worthless images, indeed, in the context of a modern object–yet even an example as commonplace as this gives us an inkling of a mode of thought based on diffuse multidimensional configurations rather than on a system that has gradually imprisoned language within linear phoneticism” (205).

Of course, juxtaposition of images, text, and even ideas within text is somewhat of a hot topic right now, isn’t it? Ulmer suggests such juxtapositions in MyStories and the assignments that follow it in his texts for many of the reasons that Leroi-Gourhan notes here. After all, juxtapositions of this type open up our language into multidimentionsalisms that aren’t normally available to us.

“Writing thus tends toward the constriction of images, toward a stricter linearization of symbols. For classical as well as modern thinking, the alphabet is more than just a means of committing to memory the progressive acquisitions of the human mind; it is a tool whereby a mental symbol can be noted in both word and gesture by a single process” (212).

Again, our language and writing system changes the way we think and record our thoughts. New technology (such as, but not particularly, new media) may give us a way to break out of that cycle. “Audiovisual language tends to concentrate image making entirely in the minds of a minority of specialists who purvey a completely figurative substance to the individual. Image makers–painters, poets, or technical narrators–have always, as far back as in the Paleolithic, been a social exceptions, but their work always remained incomplete because it called for the participation of the iamge users, whatever their cultural levels” (214).  Leroi-Gourhan goes on to note that photography is causing a change in this, a separation of sorts, but it’s difficult to say how he would feel about a nice hacked version of Photoshop being available to so many teenagers who make images online.

I have more pages marked, of course, but I think I’m off to read some Steigler. This needed to be noted before my Steigler-reading got into more of it though.

oh the unholy freaking frustration

Honest to god, if there were ever a reason I didn’t want my blog searchable by name… this is it.

I’m going to RSA, along with a caboodle of friends, and supposedly my husband. I haven’t made reservations yet, but we were planning on staying through Wednesday or so to sight-see.

Well, no more I guess.

Now, I realize I must preface this by saying that when I was born, my whole family up and started dying. They haven’t stopped yet. On my mom’s side of the family I have 3 direct relatives that remain alive and two of them are dying. So. (Well four now… considering the new baby… but…)

My cousin just had her first kid. She lives pretty far away and will be visiting for Memorial Day. She’ll be at my mom’s house, my mom is making dinner, and if I don’t go my name will be DEATH until the end of time. How do I know this? Well, when I was eight years old I didn’t act completely utterly thrilled when she asked me to be flower girl in her wedding. It was Christmas Day, and she asked in the middle of me opening my gifts. Now, remember when you were eight, what would have mattered more to you? Getting invited to be in somebody’s wedding or the My Little Pony Perfume Palace? Yeah, I thought so. It gets better though, she launched into how many rehearsals there would be and so on–yes, there was more than one–and at least once in this conversation (although my mom doesn’t remember this part) I know me having to quit taking ballet lessons to be in the wedding came up.

Yeah right. You’re telling me that I have to stop playing with this cool new toy AND give up my dream of being a ballerina to be in your wedding? Hahaha. Yeah. She didn’t have my attention so much anymore, but I thought I was going to be forced into it anyway.

She called my mom back a few days later to tell her that since I hadn’t thanked her more than a few times and didn’t seem excited enough that she was asking that she was going to pick somebody else that wasn’t going to “ruin her wedding.”

Whatever. That really didn’t bother me as a kid, still doesn’t to this day, but it bothered my mom a lot. I was really well behaved and it was uncalled for, I guess. But you have to understand how she is–if you aren’t overjoyed and simply ecstatic about whatever it is she’s offering you, you’re in the shithouse for a very very long time.

So back to RSA.

My dog is currently living with my mom because my in laws and husband don’t like him. No, I’m not kidding, and this was another decision that was more or less forced on me on Christmas Eve that I have been very unhappy about ever since. The dogs (mine and my mom’s) HAVE to stay with me if there’s going to be a BABY in the house on Memorial Day, but his presence back here will piss off the in-laws if they have to be here to watch him if we’re still out of town.

So I guess we have to come back early, maybe Sunday, missing a day and a half of the conference. It’s the only way to keep just about everybody happy except the in-laws.

Well… and me.

And of course, he already got the time off work, so I don’t know if going early, seeing stuff, then doing two days of the conference is an option, but I guess it’s that (together) or me just go alone for two days. I remember how much it sucked to do an abridged C&W because I had to teach….

So yeah, I’m frustrated and angry and sick of my life not being allowed to be “normal.” Somehow I doubt that all that many other people have to bend over backwards every day to keep everybody else around them happy and things running smoothly. And don’t even get me STARTED on the “we’re not moving after you graduate” lectures (from everybody else involved–all parents, spouse, and relatives) because really? That’s the ONLY thing that would make this livable someday. Me and him, far away from everybody else, at a really nice school, with my bloody dog. *grump*

Pardon the drama, but I’ve got nobody to rant to here that would remotely understand why you’d want to go to a WHOLE conference. “But those are boring!” *sigh*

So what?

A response from a student upon reading Peter Elbow:

“Secondly, upon reading this article, I found myself becoming angry. I don’t think this has anything to do with Elbow himself or his methods, but more to do with the insignificance of the matter. After losing a high school classmate this week, I realized just how trivial this entire topic really was. It really baffles me that people can take such a great concern for how they teach writing when there are so many more important things they could be spending their time on. Who really  cares how you teach writing or how I teach writing? Does it really matter? Obviously this is an emotionally charged opinion but I think it’s more important what we use our writing for than how we learn it in the first place.”

Of course, in a way, she’s right. There’s nothing life or death about my job–period. I’m not a cop or a doctor or a firefighter or even a psychologist, I just teach people how to write. I think up better ways to make sure that people know how to write by the time they leave college, and hell, I run a Writing Center to ensure that people have support in learning how to do it. That’s my job. And in the end of things, I’d bet that 99% of people out there would agree with her–it really doesn’t matter.

Maybe my original response was knee jerk anger: “How dare you take this out on me.” She found out her friend died when she was in class with me (essentially). Her friend told me. I told her that they could all go. Was I supposed to hug her? Let her know I cared? Yeah, I care. I also realize that drawing attention to the situation may not have been what she wanted and in the presence of other students I chose the safe path.

This is actually the second student I’ve had informed of a death in my class this term. The other time, letting them leave and deal with it around friends and family was the right choice. Did I mess this up?

But no, she’s essentially saying that’s what I’m doing wrong–it shouldn’t be about me, or my Center, or my class. Well.. okay.

So let’s make it about somebody else, several of them in fact. My job in the Writing Center is primarily scheduling, training, and support. I make sure that everything’s going smoothly for everyone. I live tied to the e-mail that feeds the online Writing Center. And I watch, and I read (and crack jokes to break the tension). It’s not in any way a glorious position.

If this were a TV movie I’d go into work tomorrow and make this great Ron Clark-esque speech that would change everybody’s lives forever. But instead, I’m the person that’s going to answer the voicemail and deal with the Monday morning crazy.

I was told over and over my first year here to avoid the heroic narrative. That’s okay, I don’t have a heroic narrative.

Since I started work at the Writing Center we’ve seen nearly 1000 students. I’d say I’ve probably sat through, in the room with, 500 of them (that’s students, not appointments). Now, of those 1000, I can name 4 that are probably truly miracle stories.

One’s pretty open about her involvement in AA. She came to us first as a mess, but she’s slowly learned to shape her truly creative prose into something that other people can read and understand. Her creativity is now working for her and she smiles a lot when she gets help. The difference? Amazing.

Another student was only passingly functionally literate… and now writes A essays.

I’ve also gotten to sit and watch as natural bonds were formed amongst the new GTAs as they started to teach for the first time. I’ve seen natural leaders emerge from them, at least one who will eventually (probably) be the new Writing Center co-director next year.

And a few of my old students from five years ago are now in grad school themselves, with their own students.

If anything, seeing those small changes in people occur over a 2-3 year period is the joy in this job. There are no one term magical instances, no whole classes full of failing students who become geniuses, nothing like that.

I don’t ever get to see what most students use their writing for.  This girl is asking for service learning that does something now, not just service that might pay off later.

And oh, I understand. I think. It’s not life or death now. But for those few students that come in and really learn, I’d argue, it might be later.

Now they have words, you see, that other people can understand. And that means something, I think.

But I don’t want to say she’s wrong, because she isn’t. Petty infighting amongst lit vs. comp, expressionists vs. critical pedagogy folks–yeah, I’ve sat in lecture and wondered if it really mattered. I don’t even tell my students about that crap (although we do read some basic pedagogy articles as part of training to work in the Center). After all, those are all just labels we give to the things we think are important or do naturally anyway, aren’t they?

But the thing is, unless people learn to write, they’ll never use their writing. I think, perhaps, the very first day of the term next year will be discussing this. Maybe I’ll try and find some published miracle stories from other WC’s for readings. After all, our book is pretty morose (lots of dealing with challenges chapters).

Maybe a reading response wasn’t the right place to say it, but really maybe the student here had something important to say, and regardless of what she thinks of my response to it (asking her what she wanted to USE her writing for) she has, unintentionally perhaps, probably used it for something good.

I <3 Manuel Castells

I’d actually forgotten how pleasant it is to read Manuel Castells. Really, what’s wrong with me? Why have I been putting that off? (Oh yes, 400 page volumes are kinda heavy to lug around, but really, I’ve got no excuse.)

Castells recognizes the power of groups in the information age over states and nation-states in The Power of Identity. He feels the tension between institutions of state and society and more than adequately describes how groups like feminists, Al Queda, and even the Militia have come into being. These groups either stand in favor of or against globalization and the changes taking place in society because of new informational tools and networking strategies. In some cases, these groups are trying desperately to hold onto an older, more conservative patriarchal order while others support rapid globalization and equalitarianism. Furthermore, as Castells analyzed these groups he represented them more or less fairly–laying blame no where particular and suggesting that they are, instead, reactive to forces mostly outside their control. He states, “social movements must be understood in their own terms: namely, they are what they say they are” (73). I think this sort of analysis and presentation leads Castells to be much more even handed (less preachy, if you will) than other writers that I’ve read recently online about many of these same topics.

Loss of power is, at times, much more frightening to individuals than never having had it to begin with, and Castells suggests that new identities must be created for this new world and its power structures.

I have a lot of pages marked to be written about, and the only way I could tie this all together would be to write something very long, so instead I’m going to just put in some lines and respond accordingly.

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“The Internet was one of the major reasons the militia movement expanded faster than any hate group in history. The militia’s lack of an organized center was more than made up for by the instant communication and rumor potential of this new medium. Any militia member in remote Montana who had a computer and a modem could be part of an entire worldwide network that shared his or her thoughts, aspirations, organizing strategies, and fears–a global family” (Stearn, qtd. in Castells 87).

Castells argues that a lack of an organized center (a globalizing constant rather than a centeredness, if you will) is a place of power in the Network Society. This is certainly true online where power is made mostly in numbers (Kelly’s “Hive Mind” principle in action). How this power is translated from other groups (such as Anonymous, AWS, etc.) into real life action is trickier. Anonymous is making that jump, claiming to only be “testing the water” of real world action against Scientology, but what is next?

However, other dispersed, non-centralized groups aren’t fairing as well in these same online waters. Why is this? Why do some groups survive decentralization and others flounder? I would even go as far as to state that some of the groups Castells analyzes aren’t doing as well now as they were back in 1997 or 2000 because their lack of any united front or message is causing internal discord and opening them to further attack from the outside.

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“…a third major theme runs through the movement: a backlash against feminists (not against women as long as they remain in their traditional role)” [though some groups believe that no Western woman is any longer in her traditional role and all deserve to be rebuked] “gays, and minorities (as beneficiaries of govenment protection). There is one clearly predominant characteristic in the Patriot movement: in a large majority, they are white, heterosexual males…. Traditional national and family values (that is, patriarchalism) are affirmed against what are considered to be excessive privileges accorded by society to gender, cultural, and ethnic minorities…” (97).

Liberal movements online are very anti-conspiracy theory. Anyone suggesting a connection between racism and sexism (except Black women, of course) or homophobia is usually called out in their circles as being crazy and looking for trouble “where there is none.” And yet, hate does seem to write on networks in a single voice. Comments against women, gay men, and people of color read remarkably similiarly, seem to come from the same place, written by the same people. Castells recognizes the connections between this hate, whether or not the people on the receiving end of it are willing to.

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“The implications of this networking organization are huge. How can states fight networks?” (138).

Indeed, at least one argument that I’ve made before, and indeed may again (albeit in different language) is that they can’t. Only networks (or groups) can even begin to take on other networks.

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It is worth noting that as I sit here, thinking about racism and sexism and networks and terrorism, two blonde female undergrads that work in the Writing Center this term are sitting within earshot having a lovely conversation about how fat and ugly I’ve gotten since the beginning of the term. Irony–don’t you love it?

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“However, new, powerful information technologies might indeed be put to the service of surveillance, control, and repression by state apparatusess…. but so might they be used for citizens to enhance their control over the state, by rightfully accessing information in public data banks, by interactin gwith their political representatives on-line, by watching live political session, and eventually commenting live on them” (341).

Clearly, the last part of this quote has happened already–the youtube live debate was considered a “big deal.” Again, however, the groups who stand to earn the most from participating in reverse data gathering against the state and for their own purpose are, at times, the least likely to do so. I was once on a message board (about race, I believe) when someone suggested that the Patriot Act could be used to shut down white supremacist organizations. The idea was immediately shut down not because white supremacist organizations help keep extreme conservatives in power but because “We don’t want to be like them. Two wrongs don’t make a right.” By dismissing the power of moves available to them, anti-racist allies remain weak and unavailable to the very people they try to help.

I need to go teach, and as such, will stop here from now, though I do have a little more to say (I think).

Posthumanism Debunked by Cool

In Avatar Bodies, Ann Weinstone lays out a theory of human interaction for posthumanism that focuses on the connections between people instead of the connections between human + computer (as Haraway, Hayles, et al are more concerned with). She then goes on to develop a number of thought exercises aimed at bringing together an ethics of self-other interaction that critiques humanism and positivism in some of the same ways that posthumanism critiques self-technology interactions.

She does this through ample application of the Tantra, and what seems at first like an extended metaphor seems to grow to be something else entirely. The connections she draws between Deleuze, Guitarri, and Tantra suggest that this isn’t just a metaphor, this isn’t just a researcher interested in Tantra that writes about it because it’s a part of her life, instead, I’m lead to believe that there is some reality to Tantra’s influence on critical theory. That’s pretty cool in itself, it’s always good to get a chuckle out of pulling out my Deleuze Critical Theory Trading Card and imagining him engaged in a Tantric embrace with Guitarri–hot stuff.

Regardless of that, reading through this text was an experience. She constructs any number of short chapters, never withholding the payoff of getting another one done more than a page or two until the chapter entitled “A Tantra for Posthumanism.” This has to be a rhetorical move; after hearing so much about the good of holding off release for longer pleasure, after so many chapters that ended quickly, this single one that lays down some of her main ideas being so much longer made her point rather clearly.

 Unlike some of Weinstone’s critics, I don’t think that the personal letters, stories, and so on that she includes take away from the “seriousness of her project.” Rather, if this book were all theory all the time that would take away from her project itself. Other reviews I looked up seemed confused about the use of italics (not recognizing that some were quotes, and were used in place of quotation marks) and disliked the short chapters.

However, I think that Weinstone’s book is a good textual (print) example of what Jeff Rice asks for in The Rhetoric of Cool. The short chapters can, in many cases, be read in many different orders. I first came to that conclusion when I noticed the chapters weren’t numbered. Although the chapters do develop over the course of the book into a cohesive whole, a different cohesive whole can be made by reading them in a slightly different order, by skipping around, etc. but none of these cohesive wholes is explicitely against Weinstone’s project.

As I said to begin with, I think this book is more than an extended metaphor, in fact, I’d argue that the book juxtaposes Tantra, critical theory, and posthuman ethics in such a way that she discovers links in the same way that Rice suggests by “cool writing.” Weinstone’s entire book functions by juxtaposing these ideas and communtating meanings of rhetoric and bodies to come up with something entirely new and different that is completely appropriate to the topic of posthumanism. Using this form of “new media” “cool” writing to discuss what is essentially usually a topic of technology to turn it into something more about people and their connections just works even if it isn’t ordinary academic prose.

In Rhetoric of Cool, Rice uses 1963 as a jumping off point to talk about things that happened (or didn’t happen) in composition/rhetoric as a field and how going back to that moment and seeing the paths not taken might, indeed, be useful to develop a new new media theory. 1963 marks the point when the “4th C was dropped,” when racial tensions ran high, when we started on our current path as a discipline. Pairing composition and 1963 and seeing what happens, of course, very similar to pairing posthumanism and Tantra.

Rice uses the rhetorical method of chora–taking one word with multiple meanings (perhaps only cultural ones)–and using all of them to form a new idea. He does this with cool, of course, and traces out several different ways the term has developed over time. He mostly dismisses the most popular one in favor of more culturally situated meanings that can be used for composition’s purposes.

In addition to Weinstone’s book being a potentially good example of what Rice is talking about, I think that there are some interesting things here that can be said about plagiarism and “remixing.” I know that in another article about Hip-hop Pedagogy, Jeff has mentioned having students write as though they were remixing others’ ideas. Although only mentioned directly once, there are echoes of that earlier article here. I think that the idea of re-mixing and juxtaposing sources to “see what happens” is a pretty cool one, and one I might be willing to pick up for a midterm paper in my course this summer. I think having one not writing center related assignment in my class would “jazz” things up a bit, so I’m willing to give this a try. I think it would help my students with the critical analysis and reflection I ask for in their final paper as well.

Anyway, I’m off to deal with craziness related to one very rude student who refuses to check their junk mail folder for an e-mail I sent — have a good day.