Ka-Knowledge, Deixis and Bird

Hey, sorry I missed everyone on Monday.

As I read Jeff Rice’s article and Collin Brooke’s discussion of deixis, I kept circling back to Charlie Parker (I could say to “jazz” or even “Bebop,” but to keep this example under some control, I’ll stick with Parker). I thought of the fusion of quotations that became the "assemblages" of Bird’s solos, especially when Rice was making a case for hip-hop’s “sounding out” as rhapsodizing, which Ong “places at the center of Homeric poetry and the Greek rhetorical tradition” (Rice). While I see that "hip-hop as an assemblage" affords us a means of discussing "different ways of knowing through digital writing," it seems like the fusion (or rhapsodizing) in hip-hop lyrics is often less interesting than the fusion of sounds sampled. I’m guilty of generalizing here, but it seems like a wider variety of cultures are assembled at the turn-table than at the mic. That said, I’ve already seen textbooks and readers that present Tupac lyrics alongside other “gritty, urban social commentaries” like Marge Piercy’s “Rape Poem”. Now, of course, it’s not Tupac’s or Jeff Rice’s fault that the full aurality of hip-hop gets canonized as--or flattened into--mere lyrics, and it doesn’t mean that hip-hop can’t help us imagine or illustrate Havelock’s (1986) aural/oral writer building “his own semi-connected discourse out of disconnected bits and pieces contained in oral discourse” (as quoted in Rice). I just think that Parker’s “recompositional” decisions in the moment of improvisation--improvising against the inherited charts and time signatures of old standards, “reimprovising” in set pieces performed nightly with “variations in the stitching [that] led to variations in rhetorical output”-- may provide a useful analog to Rice’s example of the Homeric poet. I guess I just have an easier time thinking of the “aural practice of rhapsodizing” when I think of the sampled beats, hooks, grooves, etc. without the accompanying visual rhetoric of lyrics on a lyrics sheet or in a “social commentary” section of a Bedford collection of “Minority Voices.”

Parker’s improvisations (like the solos of those he influenced) also offer an opportunity to discuss deictic systems. In one sense, Parker became a resource as a pioneering "expert": he absorbed not only the history of jazz but the history of western music and was willing to quote Bartok, Stravinsky, etc. in his playing, in a way that purportedly schooled younger musicians. In another sense he was an "intelligent agent" (the younger musicians took what they wanted or could hear from Parker’s solos, from the way he mixed and matched and seemed to create the new from classical and pop cultural sources, something that also gave expression to his ethos and pathos). For all of its solos, jazz is deeply reliant on collaboration and communication, a reliance that allowed James Baldwin a device for making his narrator finally listen to his brother Sonny "sounding out" and entering a conversation in the epiphanic close of “Sonny’s Blues”. Again, I’m only offering Charlie Parker as a metaphor for discussing deictic systems, “sounding out,” or as an alternative to expert mastery of a subject; I’m not arguing, as it seems Rice is with hip-hop, that a sustained analysis of Parker’s abilities will provide insight into digital networks or ka-knowledge.

I'm also considering Parker's impact on a “small network” of jazz buffs who had tired—at least in Harlem and a few progressive clubs on the west coast—of the influence of swing. Parker’s agency in the evolution of “bebop” is tricky to explore for the same reason it's ideal for discussing small networks: many of his innovations came during the recording strike in the early 1940s, so there was a delay between limited audiences learning to hear jazz a new way in a few clubs on either coast and the mass audiences who purchased a later “now” on recordings that tried to capture—-a few years after the fact-—the spontaneity of the “now” of small club improvisations that had already spawned legions of imitators. As early as 1939 Parker’s devotees “learned” to listen for the origo of a song like “Cherokee” even as they heard it in the “now” context of Parker re-assembling “Cherokee” into his signature tune “KoKo”. Parker’s innovation, or his “recompositional” decisions, led him to play past the original time signatures, improvise new melody lines against older songs’ chord changes, and later snag copyrights for these new songs that became, with each performance, less recognizable. That is, “Cherokee” is certainly harder to hear in “KoKo” than The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” is in Diddy’s tribute to his pal Biggie. By the time much of the country-between-the-coasts got to hear the “revolution” that was “KoKo,” the “now” of that 1944 recording had multiple layers of context: how the old standard once sounded—or at least how its underlying structure was preserved—a collage of what Parker added in the moments of, say, specific club dates in 1941, 42, 43, etc., and what Parker’s “comments” on his own solos were on the day of the studio recording (does this make bebop an example of both the deictic and palimpsestic?).

Ultimately, Rice wants to find ka-knowledge “in the mix,” or as he describes it:
“The result of this stitching (described aptly in McLuhanist terms of bodily extension) is a new type of knowledge where the personal and the multiple events/ideas/moments engaged by the personal (i.e., voice) come together. Not quite autobiography, not quite technological reflection, not quite cultural critique, not quite argument, it is somehow a bit of all the above and something else. . . .this combination of actions through rhapsodizing is indicative of the ka-knowledge of digital writing I am uncovering. In digital culture, the process of interweaving composition and identity, of becoming an extension of one's own writing, of assembling various genres of discourse, has come to be known not as the stitch, but the mix.”

Somewhat relatedly, jazz critics often struggle to find a rhetoric that doesn’t just add to a hagiography of the individual autonomous icon nor discredit the icon's "pioneering work" in favor of LaTour-be-damned “social forces” that contributed to post-World-War-II revolutions in jazz. Take the following quote by Stanley Crouch, writing about Parker in a 1989 article. After referring to Parker as “the self-made creator of a vital and breathtakingly structured jazz vernacular,” Crouch observes,

“[Parker’s] prodigious facility was used not only for exhibition or revenge, moreover, but primarily for the expression of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic inventions, at velocities that extended the intimidating relationship of thought and action that forms the mastery of improvisation in jazz.” (“Bird Land” 255)
Crouch goes on to make points about the way we begin to learn and intuit an emotional understanding of the performer (sounding out, in his own way) as he makes sampled lines and conjured riffs from the past his own—in the moment, in the “now” that doesn’t get to come back in just the same context at future gigs, recording dates, or when Parker’s solos were “digitally lifted” from their “original context” (Crouch’s terms) so that modern performers could “swing” with him on the poorly received soundtrack to Clint Eastwood’s biopic Bird (1988).

In a transcript of an interview Parker gave in the last year of his life (he died at 34), Paul Desmond and John Fitch seemed to be pressuring him into defining a way of knowing and communicating that music provided (Parker’s elliptical answers, with his false starts and halting phrasing sounds like Sonny when he is pressed to describe his anger with words instead of music in Baldwin’s long middle dialogue). Thirty-five years before the Beasties start droppin’ science in favor of ka-knowledge, Parker tries putting something similar (to me) in his own words:

“There’s definitely—there’s stories and stories and stories and stories that can be told in the musical idiom, you know? You wouldn’t say idiom, either, it’s—it’s so hard to describe music other than the basic way to describe it: music is basically melody, harmony, and rhythm. But I mean, people can do much more with music than that—it can be very descriptive in all kinds of ways, you know? [It can include] All walks of life.”

Back to deixis, I realize I’ve left out the context for this quote: interviewers were pushing him to promote “book study” of jazz to kids who think you’re either born with knowledge and “mastery” or not. All of which leads me back to Rice’s concluding explanations of Ka-Knowledge, in which he asserts:

“To enact a theory and pedagogy of the aural (i.e., sounding out), we also are inventing new forms of knowledge acquisition, forms traditional studies of literacy cannot accommodate. Ka-knowledge as digital knowledge is a mixing, a usage of a variety of ideas, events, moments, and texts for the mix and the subsequent identity of “being mixed,” not for the demonstration of expertise (a fixed, topos-bound concept)”

It seems that most jazz critics and casual fans of Parker often cite his solos--or sample them--for the “demonstration of expertise” (“hey, listen to how Bird mastered the e-flat alto sax like no one else!”), while some, like Gary Woideck, are more interested in the way Parker’s solos, his sense of what was possible musically or aurally, led him to defy traditional musical composition, the limits of structure. I guess in the context of our recent readings, I’m interested in how those like Parker retrained listeners to appreciate, decode, reconsider a high speed “variety of ideas, events, moments, and texts for the mix” (Rice). Again, I would favor including aural knowledge that doesn’t include lyrics—or an easily separated “text” for inclusion in textbooks—to illustrate many of the same points Rice seems to be getting at in his argument for ka-knowledge.

Or, whew, that could just be the cough syrup talking.

map.

For Mark

From The Village Voice, with love: "Hot Hot Heat"

Post on Rebekah Nathan from 8010

Here it is, kids.

And here is a link to amazon's page for My Freshman Year which, like all amazon page's I link to, has the "Search Inside!" (or, alternately, the "Look Inside!" feature).

Krause and Brooke

I assume that Krause's "Blogging Gone Bad" was the Brooke response that we were supposed to read (I wasn't entirely sure from the syllabus). Anyway, I was struck by Krause's remarks. He places some of the blame for his class's failed blog experiment himself, but he also points out some key issues that I found myself agreeing with, such as:

"While blogging, students quickly learn that posted content can be read by those other than the teacher and their classmates. Blogging opens up assignments beyond the teacher-student relationship, allowing the world to grade students and provide encouragement or feedback on their writings."

I wonder if Krause's utopian vision here is common. As I wrote in a comment to Faith about her blogging anxiety, there's very little to feel anxious about, since so few people will read your blog. In fact, many bloggers receive hits from friends and family. I ran a blog for two years and was disappointed that my blog didn't receive more hits. This notion that the class Web log will connect students to people around the globe is something of a pipe dream.

Later, Krause writes,

"Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I thought the blogs turned out poorly. Some students posted repeatedly, while other students barely posted at all. The amount of text per posting varied considerably. While there were times in which some students wrote longer messages, more often than not, the posts were short, merely links to other documents, or text that was "cut and pasted" from another source. There was very little writing that could be described as reflective, dynamic, collaborative, or interactive."

At times this term, I've felt that the 8040 blog could fit the description above, and I'm definitely part of the problem! I've blogged. I consistently blogged for two years. I am no technophobe, yet I find myself posting less often to the blog than I have for other forums, such as E-mail listserv or Blackboard. Part of me wonders if the blog is really more special than Blackboard discussion, which offers similar basic tools: posting and commenting. If the blog isn't really reaching out to the masses, is it really better than other simpler forms of technology?

Krause would disagree with some of my comments. He sees blogs as more polished, more formal than E-mail; thus, they can inhibit discussion, since posters might feel intimidated to post to the "author." I'm not sure I agree. Members of the class feel comfortable enough to talk to one another. I think Krause is referring here to true dynamic discourse (i.e. people from "out there" jumping in on the discussion), and as I've written above, I'm not sure how many people outside the class really find their way to the blog, become interested in what's written, and respond.

The Brooke page was okay, but did anyone else have problems putting everything together? The page begins with an overview of deixis, which sounded interesting, but by the time I finished all the readings, I didn't really sure how digital writing should embrace/acknowledge deixis. Also, as Brooke admits, his page is quite stable and doesn't seem like a very good example of a "web log as a deicitic system" (which is the name of the blog). I did like the part where Brooke writes, "In a matter of three degrees (each connection between two people is a degree), the graduate students at Syracuse, for instance, are connected to the faculty and graduate students at Purdue University, the University of Texas, Penn State University, and so on." This reminded me of a mental game that I play, and that I'm sure others play, where you try to link any given two figures (Liberace and George W. Bush, for example) in as few steps as possible. :-)

Rice

At the end of Rice’s article he quotes Berlin, “Only through language do we know and act upon the conditions of our experience” (277). So, what I understand of the article is that there are those who are actively participating in understanding through rap. This makes sense.

Whenever I need to understand a concept I have to talk about it with someone more knowledgeable than myself, which means just about anybody. But that is for understanding things that are really complex from my view. I’m not sure I think that I believe that auditory information will be what leads us in the future. Rice quotes the rapper B.I.G. as seeming to state that his success came from a place other than educational mastery. If I’m not mistaken so did Kenneth Burke’s. He was not happy with educational systems, and never really finished a degree in the traditional manner. I think I remember Dr. Comas telling us that he had several sporadic attempts, but didn’t finish. Anyway, my point is that our successes in general probably do not come from the educational system. It is through finding our own voices more likely. We read, attend classes, etc., in order to attempt to broaden our views and to conform with certain educational criteria so that we can more easily succeed in this world.

Power, juice, etc., come from inside and are sparked by things from the outside. I think.

Blogs

My interest in blogging has only, so far, been related to what is required in certain classes. Although, I think a couple of things in this weeks readings have sparked a different kind of interest.

A quote at the author uses by Kathleen Blake Yancey got my attention: “The word Now when I wrote this text is one time; as I read the Now in San Antonio was a second time; and now, when this talk is published in CCC and who [knew?] how many people do (or do not!) read this Chair’s Address, it will be many, many other times (318)” (1). So, whether or not we add words, take away ideas and sculpt them to meet our needs, or simply read the ideas to interested parties, the premise changes. Now will never be the same for readers who are not reading the words simultaneously. The “situation” of now will be different for each of those readers—their mood, their circumstance, the reason for the reading of the words, etc. It is as if time itself is an element that thrives within the written word. I find that interesting, and perhaps, will explore that at some later date.

While reading “Software, socially” I began thinking of another aspect of the effects of blogging. Blogging as an electronic transference of information, like all electronic transfers, I suppose, is instantaneous. It is also limitless as far as the information it can contain. This brings me to wonder if we can be overly informed. Information, knowledge, for me has to be taken in, and thought over for a time, so that I might integrate it more thoroughly with prior knowledge. This makes attempting grad school at warp speed fun. Ugh. But I wonder if all this knowledge pouring forth changing, mutating, gaining, losing, etc., is losing something. The translation of that information must be quick and adept. Is it actually possible to keep up?

Centripetal/Centrifugal reminded me, of course, of Latour. It also made me think of my idea about concentric circles, and how that is now not quite right. Perhaps a better analogy is chemistry. Each new reader being a new ingredient that can change ideas and thoughts radically or barely. I realize this was about software, but. . . The author states, “This fluidity returns us to Yancey’s evocation of deixis—in the context of research, a given source may function centripetally or centrifugally for us depending on the time and place within the research process where we use it.”

Hmmm.

More On Rice

I've really appreciated reading the posts about Rice's uses of hiphop to redefine literacy, and they've helped me to think about what his article is and isn't doing. In my reading of it, he's making comparisons between traditional conceptions of rhetoric and a rhetoric embodied by hiphop, and doing so to show that traditional rhetoric needs to change in order to respond to changes in culture fomented by new technology.

The article may make it seem like he's trying to claim academic cred for the Notorious BIG and the Wu-Tang Clan, and/or to give street cred to his academic piece (which has been a hot rhetorical move, maybe, ever since Barthes mythologized pop culture); what I took from it is that hiphop doesn't claim any academic membership, but embodies aspects of culture that academically spawned rhetoric can't, since its focus has been drawn from the image and the print media, and not from the aural realm that McLuhan and Ong defined as the rhetorical territory created by new technology. In his view, traditional rhetoric hasn't ventured into that territory; hiphop, more than any other form of music, has.

I believe that his article outlines at least three ways in which hiphop rhetoricizes aural media. First, hiphop's use of sampling foregrounds the text as assemblage. Second, its reliance on mixing different sounds together, more than other forms of music, foregrounds those sounds as representing different contexts--instead of a guitar and drums, we might get a guitar loop from an Aerosmith song and a bass/snare track from another hiphop song, so each song becomes a mixing of cultures that embodies the simultaneity of aural culture delineated by McLuhan. Finally, the stance assumed by the Notorious BIG, the Wu-Tang Clan, and the Beasties, establishes the primacy of the individual voice--not as a mood, the way Lunsford defines it, but, literally, as the sound of a voice. Using that voice, the rapper doesn't belong to the traditional rhetorical establishment, but to the rhetorical alterity of hiphop, with its own science, its own ka-knowledge, and its own cred, based on the power of the individual voice to carry the rhetoric. As Aaron wonderfully pointed out, other forms of music do all of the above (the boast claimed by Rice as an aspect of ka-knowledge comes, I think, from the blues). However, hiphop combines them with greater frequency.

The article's juxtapositions can lead to the idea that Rice is trying to install hiphop in the academy, and/or that rappers are trying to claim a particular rhetorical territory; I got this funny vision of Ad Rock rushing to his fellow Beasties with a copy of McLuhan's article, saying, "We need to rhetoricize the auditory domain!," and Mike D gleefully shouting, "Fellows, let's drop some science to drive McLuhan's thesis home!" What I think Rice is trying to say is that hiphop is rhetoricizing aural technology in a way that traditional rhetoric is not, and that examining the particulars of that rhetoric will help us to shape a pedagogy more informed by that rhetoric.

Deixis

My reaction to the Brooke article was similar to Aaron's in that I questioned the explanation of deixis itself, although my "objection" to it, if it can be called an objection, was on narrower grounds: I felt that the temporal--and to a lesser degree the spatial--was being foregrounded, when in fact one could pay just as much attention to the agency and power relations created and maintained through deixis.

In linguistics, following Buhler, we speak of deixis as a process whereby utterances rely on context to give them meaning--it's the way in which the reference of certain elements in an utterance is determined in relation to not just a particular time or place, but also to a specific speaker and addressee. The origo is the context from which the reference is made—it is the viewpoint expressed by one interlocutor that must be understood by another interlocutor in order for the latter to interpret the utterance. In most deictic systems, the origo identifies with the current speaker (for example, the “I” in a first-person statement).

What interests me in terms of the Brooke piece is how the discussion of deixis with regard to networks constituted by centrifugal and centripetal movement and flux (in what I thought was similar to Latour's argument that the social is constantly being reassembled) is what role power might play--or, alternately, might be resisted--in such systems. The discussion of deixis immediately reminded me of a part of what eventually became one of the writing samples for my application to the MA program here: I used the concept of deixis to discuss how it can inform the transition from modernism to postmodernism. The relationship between the Occident and the Orient before World War II, for example, can arguably be situated in terms of deixis, where the origo, then, is analogous to the centre, to the Occident. As Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and others have mapped for us, the Occident spoke to the Orient, it lectured it, narrated it, implicated it in its subjugation. Place deixis is implicit in this analogy as well. Place deixis marks the spatial location relative to the location of the speaker: “over there” implies a distance away from the speaker. Before World War II, the Orient was “over there” from the Occident.

Following the war, however, these deictic relationships came into crisis. The origo was no longer located solely in the Occident. Previously oppressed voices were now heard and emerged from multiple points in space simultaneously, breaking down the deictic binary. Similarly, “over there” was no longer a one-to-one opposition either: place was complicated as the Orient broke down into separate independent nations and cultures in the post-colonial period, while simultaneously globalization disturbed their lines of demarcation. East and West had been replaced by a multititude of locations. The dichotomies of us and them, of black and white, of masculine and feminine were no longer tenable. Both the end of empire and the move toward globalization problematized the relations of the East and West as they existed up through the modern period. The centre indeed could no longer hold. (The emerging voices that arose out this deictic crisis brought forth a second problem: power relations had been disturbed and there was now a crisis of authority or, as I call it, the crisis of interpellation--but this is for another time).

Those other readings...

So it appears that Rice is getting the lion's share of posts, which leaves Brooke and Krause (and my map) outside in the cold. There's not alot for me to say in that area, either, since I too find Rice's issues more easily assayable.

Here's what my minimal thinking (after a long weekend of thesis-ing) has come up with. Brooke says that Yancey claims we should focus on the deitic way that tech can help us as compists/rhetists.

He defines blogs as deitic systems, claiming that "... even when the moment has passed, the terms are capable of referencing that moment" in order to show us that blogs have this ability to conceptualize "now" in different ways.

I'm thinking that in the same way, though, they're automatically "then". While there seems to be some claim that these times are indeed timeless, and always in the present, it appears to me to be, unless you're the AUTHOR, always in the past. While I always buy "social" for social's sake, this doesn't appear to be social to me, at least in the ways that he says it is. I'm not sure I'm being clear...Brooke talks about how Yancey's writing occurs in three different "nows" in the article--and he connects them to himself as the reader/imaginer in his current "now". But come on, HER "now" is THEN, no matter how we try and social it up.

I dont' think there's anything inherently wrong about seeing it as "then", since "then" isn't so bad--plenty of "thens" can influence us "now", but it doesn't, to my mind, make them "nows".

Again, I'm all for "Aaron you've missed the point" sort of responses here. I've been writing for pretty much 48 hours, and I'm pretty brain fried, but in the mean time, I've also read Rice and Brooke, and they seem to be, particularly from the scattering of posts, "blowing things out of proportion"...

Like the other folks, I'm all for treating things outside the comp classroom as academic, but some of the bits this week seem really forced....

On Rice

Right before Jeff Rice visited the campus, Matt Gordon gave me a copy of “The Making of Ka-Knowledge” and said something like, “Here. You’re into this theory stuff—you understand it better than I do. Read this and tell me if it makes any sense.” The first part of what he said was an assertion that was equal parts compliment and insult in a way that only Dr. Gordon can deliver. The second part proved to be a challenge.

I read “The Making of Ka-Knowledge” then—something like three months ago now, so I’ve had that long to marinate on it and I have to say that I feel conflicted, at best, about it. Dr. Rice starts off by valorizing a non-traditional form of rhetoric and he makes a move to incorporate what's outside of the academy into the classroom (like Faith, I see this as a good thing). He then theoretically describes--in a wedding of McLuhan/Ong and Lyotard--how listening is bound up with engaging “the process of knowing as opposed to just the known… redefined through technological innovation” (267), which he exemplifies using the lyrics to various hip-hop/rap songs. Dr. Rice and I should be fellow travelers, then, but I found myself taking exception to a lot of what he had to say. (We probably are fellow travelers, but for the sake of this post I’m going to commit a trahison des clercs or, alternately, just play devil’s advocate).

Like David, I found myself resisting the beginning of the piece and then warming up to it in the second half (my resistance was aided by the fact that when I went to my copy of the 1964 edition of The Gutenberg Galaxy, the passages that Dr. Rice quotes weren't on the pages he cites, and that the quote he gives for McLuhan later on page 268 that doesn't reference a title but only a year--1967--has no corresponding entry for that year in the References section). I think David is right on when he says that

Rice's early discussion of Biggie and Wu-Tang feels awfully forced, and neither of these examples really show off what Rice ultimately finds most rewarding about aural writing in a digital world. Rather, the references feel like a desperate stab at street cred. The first pages of the Rice article feel a bit arbitrary at best, obvious at worst.

David goes on to make some great points, and I'll just add some of my own observations here.

First, for me there’s a problem of definition. Dr. Rice asserts that “droppin’ science” is hip-hop’s renaming of McLuhan’s “new physics." As Dr. Rice puts it (268):

Droppin’ science means to rhyme (usually in a unique way) in order to rhetorically engage with the aural dimensions of discourse. Rhyming, like McLuhan’s new physics, is meant to evoke new types of discursive relationships, to generate new kinds of knowing processes. Droppin’ science’s nonliterate status (as McLuhan might say) might be attributed to the ways it disrupts the conventions of print culture (linearity, syllogistic reasoning) in favor of rhyming. Droppin’ science is meant to lead to a new “wisdom” often rhetorically shaped as a physics or general science practice.

This isn't exactly the "droppin' science" that I know. At the risk of sounding like I'm trying to assert my own authenticity or street cred, rap and hip-hop are two genres that I listened to growing up. I have every album that Dr. Rice cites and I'm familiar with the lyrics he quotes, and my personal feeling is that he's overstating what "droppin' science" means. It can mean a few different things, actually, depending on who's doing the talking and when (in other words, deixis--but that's another post), but it basically means something very much like "to school" (another hip-hop phrase), that is, to demonstrate either skill or wisdom for the sake (or at the expense) of someone else. You can "school" someone by upstaging them in a battle or, alternately, you can "school" or "drop science" in the sense of disseminating knowledge to those listening to you. The expression goes all the way back to documented usage among members of the Five Percenter branch of the Nation of Islam in describing the uses of science (Rakim, whom Dr. Rice citess in his definition of "droppin' science," was actually one-half of the duo Erik B. and Rakim, and they were/are both Five Percenters). And the OED entry actually explains the term's use well: to "drop science" (you don't need the hip "-in' ending) is "to impart knowledge or wisdom, frequently about social issues" (from the OED's entry for draft additions for 2005, entry "b"). The OED offers this citation: "Recorded in 1989 on the television programme CBS This Morning in J. E. Lighter's Hist. Dict. Amer. Slang (1994) I. 660/2: 'Droppin' science is when she's really explainin' what's goin' on." In other words, "telling it like it is" or, one might posit, cutting through the b.s.

So it's ironic, in a way, that Dr. Rice's article "directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge" (to quote bell hooks, speaking about what I'd say is a related matter in "Postmodern Blackness"). Or as Faith puts it, "if Biggie's argument is a rejection of traditional schooling, how would he feel about his lyrics being co-opted for an article in an academic journal?" It seems like Dr. Rice took the Urban Dictionary's entry and ran with it (seriously, he seems to quote it almost verbatim), adding to the entry's description of it meaning "to rhyme, say or do something original or unique, especially when rapping or in music," the puzzling assertion that it also means "to generate new kinds of knowing processes." Really?

The point is that Dr. Rice should've dropped the "droppin' science" bit, and especially the Beasties' use of both that phrase and even more so "ka-knowledge," which means nothing, period, but especially not what Dr. Rice develops for it (for a thorough discussion of the Beasties' use of the terms, see Dan LeRoy's treatment of Paul's Boutique in the 33 1/3 series--search for "sound of science" on amazon's page and read LeRoy's discussion, starting on page 85). The whole enterprise is a red herring that got the best of him. Furthermore, I think Dr. Rice would have done himself a great service if he would have actually dug deeper into the history of hip-hip and rap. For example, bringing in Public Enemy's "Caught! Can I Get a Witness?" from their seminal It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (1988), which is about PE going on trial for "stealing beats" (the title of the song itself is an homage to Marvin Gaye's "Can I Get a Witness?"). Chuck D starts the track thusly:

Caught, now in court cause I stole a beat
This is a sampling sport
But I'm giving it a new name
What you hear is mine
P.E., you know the time

Soon afterwards, Flavor Flav (I know--cringe) interjects into Chuck's flow to tell the court that "Man, y'all can't copyright no beats, man!" At the time, sampling was becoming a matter for copyright infringement cases. PE was encouraging the free exchange of ideas and bricolage composition that Dr. Rice sees in emerging digital forms, but they also are pointing out something that Dr. Rice seems to miss altogether in his analysis: if he had went further back still, he could have brought in Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Kaz (and Grandmaster Flash), Kool Herc and other DJs' use of sampling and mixing that would speak directly to his use of McLuhan/Ong and Lyotard much more than any of the latter, hipper albeit less relevant artists he cites do. For example, in Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap and Hip Hop Culture, William Eric Perkins points out that

The DJ ruled during hip hop's early days, and it was the DJ who established the foundations for the lyricist (the MC). The DJ's style was determined by the beats he was able to exploit from the continuous riffs, solos, traps, and thousands of other snippets of sound in the audio treasure chests at his disposal. It was sound that molded the first wave of hip hop (page 6).

Like Mark says about his own post, I might seem "grumpy"--or even captious--here. It probably seems absurd to critique Dr. Rice's gloss of "droppin' science," but I think it speaks to what Faith means when she says that "the juxtaposition of rap lyrics and academic discourse sometimes had a comic effect." I agree, but I'd qualify that by saying it's a matter of execution, not of any essential incommensurability of the two--and I see that comic effect beginning with Dr. Rice's gloss of what needn't have been a violent yoking together of heterogeneous ideas. The definition of "droppin' science" also happens to be where I'd locate the move Dr. Rice makes from the theoretical discussion of McLuhan/Ong and Lyotard to hip-hop itself, the move David and Aaron (and I) found problematic. I think the reason why it's problematic is because--like David and Faith have both pointed out--the academic-speak does a disservice to what is actually an interesting argument, once the layers of unnecessary obfuscation are removed.

A Bitter Response

I agree with Faith that the intellectualizing of hip-hop makes for unintentionally funny reading. In particular, Rice's early discussion of Biggie and Wu-Tang feels awfully forced, and neither of these examples really show off what Rice ultimately finds most rewarding about aural writing in a digital world. Rather, the references feel like a desperate stab at street cred. The first pages of the Rice article feel a bit arbitrary at best, obvious at worst. For instance, I'm still not entirely sure how Rice moves from McLuhan to hip-hop. Oh, I generally see how he moves from one to another, but I don't specifically see how he does so, except that he sees a special connection to hip-hop, and that's all that matters. I also didn't really follow how Elbow's comments about "Juice" led Rice to awkwardly transition into, "In hip-hop, 'Juicy' is a song by the late Notorious B.I.G." While we're talking about Biggie, Rice's discussion of Biggie states the obvious, with the obvious simply translated into academic-ese: "Graff's 'literacy myth' might be understood, in this context, as the myth of knowledge mastery. 'My success,' B.IG. seems to say, 'came from somewhere else than education mastery.' There is an additional dimension to B.I.G.'s rejection, however. Within the rejection of conventional literacy [. . .] and its 'in your face' style is the simultaneous preference for another kind of literacy, an aural literacy of sounding out" (270).

Simple translation into regular-speak: Biggie, like most hip-hop artists--heck, like most rock artists--proves that people can have smarts that don't have their roots in the classroom.

Duh.

I don't mean to sound bitter. I just have lots of problems with academic writing that dresses up what it has to say. I remember reading this psychoanalytic reading of Faulkner where the author spent twenty pages invoking Lacan just to say that women in Faulkner's fiction have agency. Hell, I knew that before I even read the article!

The good news is that Rice's article is much better in the second half, when he spends less time establishing street cred and spends more time drawing analogies between the pastiche, bricolage style of hip-hop and the direction he sees digital writing headed. Rice is right. Hip-hop folds in a lot: spits, samples, loops, rhythms. All of these hit the listener at once and are "read" (or downloaded, in LaTourian language) instantaneously. In fact, I thought of LaTour when reading the second half of the Rice article. Just as the social only becomes evident in a glimpse seen when mediated elements are assembled, the assemblage of hip-hop works similarly. Any given hip-hop song has the potential to produce its meaning on the fly, as it hits the listener's ear; the listener cannot possibly "process" all the elements, but that's not what's important; the overall assemblage produces its effect. Thus, I could kind of see where Rice was going with his desire for future writing.

Too bad most of the article still sounded unintentionally silly.

I Hope This Doesn't Come Off As Grumpy

I was excited to read this week’s readings, hoping that I could learn about how blogging will fundamentally change the way human beings think and interact with each other. At the very least, I was hoping to read that blogging as seriously disrupted some of our taken-for-granted cultural institutions. So far, I’m not really convinced that blogs are all that special. I concede that they have numerous uses for teachers, students, and non-academics alike, but I feel like we might need to temper our excitement about the potential of blogging.

I don’t mind Marshall McLuhan, at least not when he says that the medium is the message. I understand the importance of the kind of thing that Meg Hourihan has done in describing what she believes is unique about a blog and how that might influence the way we think and interact with one another. Still, I tend to agree with John Grohol on this one. I’m just not convinced that blogging does a whole lot that other online formats haven’t already done. Their ease-of-use and their conversational quality might make them a bit more accessible than other web-based forms of community, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s really tough to make any generalizations about blogs. Some blogs are giving readers daily access to the opinions of respected experts in particular fields, others obscure the idea of an “expert” to such a degree that false information can be propogated by just about anyone; some blogs foster community, others just serve as soap-boxes for bloated personalities that don’t have the faces for television.

In addition to my reservations about the difference between blogs and other online forms, its also important to take into account the number of people who don’t use blogs or for that matter don’t use computers (despite the moves that Year of the Blog makes in describing the growing appeal of blogs). While I’ll admit that weblogs are useful (they’ve certainly been a helpful, important part of this course), entertaining (here’s my favorite), and informative, I’m going to side with Grohol on this one: “Everything old is new again” and we need to understand that blogging has no “special quality to it that makes it, and the people who engage in it, somehow unique or special.”

Blogging Angst

I was interested in Krause's discussion of “audience.” More than once, I've considered starting a blog, but I always get too scared off by audience awareness. I'd like to use a blog as a working-through of ideas that might eventually end up as something more formal, but I worry too much about who will read what I write and what they will think about me. I feel that I would have to qualify everything with a “Just thinking out loud here, but ....” Krause writes that his students as well as his colleagues lacked motivation or a “personal reason” to write in the blog in the first place. Most of my motivation to write is when I'm getting angry about things or people or ideas, and a public space is not an appropriate place for that. (Perhaps this is why so many bloggers write about their dogs.) My network includes too many people that I have to worry about impressing (and not just scholars, Boyfriend's Parents are online too). Now that I re-read that last sentence, “deixis” seems precisely the problem: I get so wrapped up in thinking about all the different meanings my words will have for different people that I become completely blocked.

This is Why I'm Hot

I understand and appreciate the way Jeff Rice describes a pedagogy that focuses on ka-knowledge and explicates “a different method of forming ideas and presenting ideas” (p. 277). Still, something Rice wrote when he was describing “the mix” got me thinking of other ways that hip-hop is related to the social. Upon arguing that the point of the mix is to juxtapose styles and open up new discourses, Rice claims “what is often forgotten in discussions of hip-hop is the rhetorical gesture of showing off, a move essential for enacting the mix in the first place. This showing off is not a gesture to demonstrate expertise nor is it egotistical” (p. 274).

Rice might be talking about the art of sampling and borrowing from other genres of music, but there are clearly other elements of hip-hop that could indeed be considered egotistical. Hip-hop is typically a male-dominated space, and so masculinity is a distinct characteristic of this type of music. According to Trujillo (1991) occupational achievement is a key component of hegemonic masculinity. This can be seen in the efforts of many rappers to explain why they are the best in their chosen business. According to Billboard.com, the number one Rap Track in the country is called “This is Why I’m Hot” by Mims. The song’s title basically explains it all – lyrically, Mims provides a plethora of reasons for why he is hot and you are not. Personally, I was most convinced when he tells me “I’m hot ‘cause I’m fly.” Anyway, I’d give other examples of the tendency of rappers to get a bit braggadocios, but I think it’s something with which most people are familiar.

But let’s say that this self-promotional quality of hip-hop stems from the tradition of battle-rap. Surely, this is a good example of invention as a social act. Sure, each party is trying to one-up their competitor, but they are certainly feeding off of one another and directly referencing each other’s prior utterances. The result, in many cases, is likely much more interesting than the work of just one person rhyming by themselves. In short, reality is being constructed through the efforts of a collective.

Rice quotes from a variety of hip-hop artists, some of which are part of groups, and others who perform as individuals. Clearly, the social is an important component of the work produced by collectives such as the Beastie Boys and the Wu-Tang Clan. According to Invention as a Social Act, the social must also be a necessary component of the songs created by individual artists such as Notorious B.I.G. and Mos Def. I’d be really interested in comparing the creative process, as well as the actual products of artists that operate as a collective to those who at least claim to be individuals.

In summary, Rice’s project was not necessarily to talk about the role of invention and the social in hip-hop, but clearly there are ways in which the social is responsible for hip-hop. Among the best evidence of this might be hip-hop’s origins, which rest within particular communities, and not the actions of individual actors.

Trujillo, N. (1991). Hegemonic masculinity on the mound: Media representations of Nolan Ryan and American sports culture. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8(3), 290-309.

School Spirit

My latest crusade for composition studies is that it needs to look outside of the composition classroom more, so I appreciated the creativity of Jeff Rice's piece. What fascinates me about writing, and what I think makes it so worthwhile to study is that it's everywhere (unlike, say, Chaucer). Everybody writes (including Biggie).

I was wondering why Rice didn't mention Kanye West's The College Dropout. West, whose mother is an English professor, dropped out of Columbia College in Chicago, and much of the album is his argument for the uselessness of that education, and how it hasn't correlated to his success. See, for example, the lyrics to the School Spirit Skits 1 and 2. Kanye West is probably best known for his enormous ego ("the rhetorical gesture of showing off"), which prompts him to do things like say that “George Bush doesn't care about black people” and appear on the cover of Rolling Stone as Jesus. I imagine that Rice would see this as part of his “vision” of his success. Kanye West is also an especially relevant example because he rose to fame as a producer -- it was his "assemblages" that made him famous.

Still, I'll be honest – the juxtaposition of rap lyrics and academic discourse sometimes had a comic effect. “Academic Locates Pedagogical Structure of Literacy Myth in Old Dirty Bastard Lyrics” sounds like an Onion headline. And if Biggie's argument is a rejection of traditional schooling, how would he feel about his lyrics being co-opted for an article in an academic journal?

Relevant Reading...

There's an interesting article in a recent issue of Mass Communication and Society. It's called, "Is Advertising Creativity Primarily an Individual or a Social Process?" As the title implies, it is pretty relevant to this course. The authors use scientific understandings of creativity and social systems to argue that the social (although they never refer to it as such) is an undeniable factor in the creation of today's popular advertising. The article analyzes the stories about how famous campaigns such as Foster's Lager's "Australian for Beer," Budweiser's "Whassup," and Snicker's "Why Wait" were created. You can't get the article from EBSCO yet because they hold articles for a year before oh-so-generously granting us access to them, but I'll bring the hard copy to class this week in case anybody is interested.

Ka-Knowing Latour

Jeff Rice's article ties the writing of Ong and McLuhan, which hints at technology transforming rhetoric, to hiphop's unique innovations, and depicts hiphop as an aurally based way of communicating that springs from technology. The ties that he makes are primarily to the above writers, along with Berlin and a few others, almost all of whom seem to align his discussion with the social nature of rhetoric; the only surprise in his citations is maybe Peter Elbow. Elbow's discussion of the "juice" that spurs writing, which seems to stem from a Platonic view of invention, is equated with the "juice" of the Notorious BIG, and both depicted as difficult to pin down. This "juice" reminds me of Latour's "plasma," which also seems to bring the ineffable into discussions of the social.

All of the above remind me of our classes focused on ANT. Donna pointed out that Rice's article ties network discussion in to hiphop, and I'm wondering now, more than ever, if some hiphop might be considered ANT documentation of community life. Rice's citing of the Wu-Tang Clan has all of them saying their names, representing a multiplicity of actors, and how many hiphop songs could be said to offer actors that are nonhuman, like brand names and place names? This other-referentiality seems more common to hiphop than to other genres of music. Certainly, other songs refer to brand names and band member names, but the sense of each band member playing a part that constitutes the band as an entity is more common than in hiphop. Too, one mainstream hiphop group tends to lead us to another, as in any network, that's ultimately borderless; Outkast has the Goodie Mob and the Dungeon Family, and so on. Does the hiphop song function as a piece of ANT documentation?

Textbook dollar breakdown.

Here's the graphic I was talking about in class last time. It's from the National Association of College Stores (NACS), so it's industry-produced (that may or may not be a good thing). The first slice you see is for author income, but as it says, that includes what's used to cover expenses. I went to this presentation at the 2006 NACS conference and they broke it down further, the actual profit that authors make is closer to 5 cents per dollar.

Court

----------------




1. Author Income : 11.8 ¢
Author's royalty payment from which author pays research and writing expenses.

2. Publisher's Paper, Printing & Editorial Costs : 32.8 ¢
All manufacturing costs from editing to paper costs to disctribution, as well as storage, record keeping, billing, publisher's offices, employee's salaries and benefits.


3. Publisher's Income : 7.2 ¢
After-tax income from which the publisher pays for new product development, author advances, market research, and dividend to stockholders.


4. Publisher's General and Administrative : 10.2 ¢
Including federal, state and local taxes, excluding sales tax, paid by the publishers.


5. Publisher's Marketing Costs : 15.6 ¢
Marketing, advertising, promotion, publisher's field staff, professors' free copies.


6. Freight Expense : 1.0 ¢
The cost of getting books from the publisher's warehouse or bindery to the college store. Park of cost of goods sold paid to freight company.


7. College Store Personnel : 11.0 ¢
Store employee's salaries and benefits to handle ordering, receiving, pricing, shelving, cashiers, customer service, refund desk and sending extra textbooks back to the publisher.


8. College Store Operations : 6.3 ¢
Insurance, utilities, building and equipment rent and maintenance, accounting and data processing charges and other overhead paid by college stores.


9. College Store Income (pre-tax*) : 4.1 ¢
* Note: The amount of federal, state and/or local tax, and therefore the amount and use of any after-tax profit, is determined by the store's ownership, and usually depends on whether the college store is owned by an institution of higher education, a contract management company, a cooperative, a foundation, or by private individuals.


Please Note
The statistics in this illustration reflect the most current 2002-2003 financial data gathered by the National Association of College Stores and financial data provided by the Association of American Publishers. These numbers are averages and do not represent a particular publisher or store.

House Bill 213 passes...

Bad news.

And more bad news.

Holy Concatenations, Batman! I think I finally figured out how to post these:)

Three Versions of Rhetoric

It's interesting to read the three articles assigned for this class, and look broadly at their views of rhetoric. In each one, rhetoric is articulated as something different, and each holds different social implications.

Bitzer's article seems to delineate rhetoric the way Plato and Gaonkar did--as something suited for persuasion, and nothing else. He takes it for granted that rhetoric is used when persuasive language is needed, which is limited to a specific set of situations.

Vatz acknowledges this as a primary difference between them, and tries to render Bitzer's position untenable by showing its roots in the Platonist tradition. Clearly rhetoric can't be situational, and must be constitutive of meaning, because rhetors seem so clearly able to create emergencies and other situations where rhetoric is heightened.

Edbauer seems to work more from Vatz's tradition, but to modify it with the same kind of horticultural metaphor offered by ANT, and its heterogeneity. Rhetoric, like the ANT conceptions of the individual and the world, exists in the confluence of too many influences for it to have tidy borders and guidelines.

Exigence seems to be the pivot point that facilitates these different definitions, and it also implies divergent definitions of rhetor and audience. All of the above hearken back to earlier readings; Vatz and Edbauer seem to both be working from a position that might be shared by Berlin, LeFevre, and Crowley, of rhetoric as ubiquitous and constructed in socially constructed selves.

Contexts and Networks

Each of this week’s readings reminded me of my eighth grade journalism teacher who was fond of saying that quotes were never truly “out of context,” quotes were just being placed temporarily in a different context. “You could never,” she would repeat, “be outside of a context.” Bitzer might have said, yeah, but you have to admit there was a “natural context” (or an original one, situated somewhere, the principal’s office, perhaps, where an interview about dress code first occurred) and this natural context was comprised of “persons, events, objects and relations.” Vatz might have sided with my teacher and said, yeah, “but one never runs out of context. One never runs out of facts to describe a situation. . .the facts or events communicated to us are choices, by our sources of information. . .any rhetor is involved in this sifting and choosing” (so my jr. high principal, like Keith Richards last week, can’t really complain that his comments were taken out of context just because they reappeared in a different one) (Vatz 156). Edbauer would seem to expand beyond my teacher’s implications and say, yeah, and you’re not just putting the principal’s quotes into one new fixed context, either—you’re just a point of distribution; we’re always in myriad contexts, and we’re also within and between myriad contexts. The (1) original taped interview and (2) whatever you think you’ve made salient by quoting for your article (in the old Bitzler view) are just two nodes of the many already in existence.” This would have taken longer for my teacher to articulate, though, and I know now her contract was already set for termination, at least partly because she didn’t think we should get so hung up about the original context of quotes.


Another connection I’m still thinking through. . .

Edbauer includes Biesecker’s “problem with many takes on rhetorical situation[s],” which is essentially (or anti-essentially) imagining rhetoric for an audience of “already-formed, already-discrete individuals” already limits the possible “potencies” of what rhetoric can hope to do in a situation. As Becker clarifies, the problem with this configuration is that rhetoric may only be used to “influence an audience, to realign their allegiances, but not to form new identities” (Edbauer 2; Biesecker 111). This seemed to account for some of our lamentation over Crowley’s rhetoric. For instance, Crowley states that “fundamentalists” are “unwilling to meet” conditions in which they run the “risk” of having their “beliefs altered” by exchange in a rhetorical situation in which “everyone is accorded the respect due to participants,” whereas “a liberal’s identity” is “not necessarily threatened by a change in belief” (196). Edbauer might argue that both the liberal’s identity and the conservative / fundamentalist / apocalyptist’s identity cannot be situated or as fixed as Crowley renders them (supposedly) for the sake of finding potential stasis for a rhetorical situation between the two. It would seem that both sides are already “trans-situationally” linked in a shared ecology of buzzwords, platform stands, Darwin vs. Jesus Fish car decorations, etc. It would also seem that Crowley only succeeds in trying to fix the identities and the sites of rhetorical interaction in ways that “mask the fluidity of rhetoric” as it’s lived daily, beyond the confines of what is made salient by a few dominant news organizations and spin doctors (Edbauer, page 13ish on my print out).


Another related thought. . .

Vatz, arguing conversely with Bitzler, concludes that “rhetors choose or do not choose to make salient situations, facts, events, etc.. . .after salience is created, the situation must be translated into meaning” (160). This idea of who or what makes things salient (and is everyone who adds a distribution point, in Edbauer’s construct, a rhetor? Or even interested in Vatz and Bitzler’s conflicting notions of saliency?) also becomes interesting in the age of using your cell phone’s video function to create a TMZ.com event, and / or “ecology” of situations online. I think it’s easy for us to think of politicians (a president, his speech writers, his party’s platforms, his lobbyists, his pollsters, his machine, etc.) choosing events to turn into crises not because these events offer inherent exigence (Bitzler) but because the president et al. chose to make certain salient features into a crisis for perceived political gain (Vatz, Burke and motive, etc.). However, it’s maybe more interesting to think through Edbauer’s observations when it’s not the president but the guy who had his phone above his head in time to catch Michael Richards’ racist meltdown, Britney challenging our notions of public decorum, etc. etc.

Selling the recorded event to TMZ. Com could still be seen as a result of profit motive, but the “rhetor” here, if we’re limited to older models, is not even making commentary so much as downloading and forwarding an event—one point of distribution—that will then fan out wildly over the literal network of the internet and the figurative network of public discussion (Has he/she gone too far?), office chatter, blogs, YouTube copies of copies, parody sketches, Daily Show and late night jabs, appropriations into different political platforms, and a wildly diverse “rhetorical-event neighborhood” that seems akin to semioticians talking of “free-floating signifiers” (though, even then, many semioticians posit that there was an “original signified” from which the signifier, or recorded event, has come untethered, and this may bring us back to how structurally or poststructurally we like to think of / locate / fix an “original context”).

Genesis of Rhetorical Action

Vatz’s problems the Rhetorical Situation were ethical and philosophical in nature. They were not very practical – a more practical approach realizes that without some variation on the rhetorical situation, studying discourse becomes incredibly difficult. I can’t imagine writing an analysis of a particular speech without using the term “situation” at least incidentally. But as I wrote previously, I do tend to disagree with the way the situation is purported to bring all discourse into being. I believe other factors must be considered. So does Bill Benoit, who challenged The Rhetorical Situation, and most theory about genre, with his theory of the “Genesis of Rhetorical Action.”

“Rhetorical discourse is called into existence by situation,” wrote Bitzer (p. 9). He granted even more power to the situation when he wrote, “The situation controls the rhetorical response in the same sense that the question controls the answer and the problem controls the solution. Not the rhetor and not persuasive intent, but the situation is the source and ground of rhetorical activity-and, I should add, of rhetorical criticism. (p. 6). Benoit (2000) has adopted and adapted Burke’s pentad in order to demonstrate that there are indeed factors other than the rhetorical situation that bring discourse into being.

Basically, Benoit used Burkean ratios to argue that scene, or situation, was not the only thing that could inspire an act. The purpose-act ratio, the agent-act ratio, and the agency-act ratio could also be responsible for generating a body of discourse. A rhetorical critic should approach a text by considering the influence of each other pentadic term on the act. The critic may find that the rhetor’s purpose best explains the creation of a discourse, and accounts for the specific nature of that discourse. It is also possible that this use of the pentad will only confirm that the scene is indeed the term with the most explanatory power over a particular message. Still, the value is in systematically considering each ratio before falling back on the rhetorical situation as Bitzer would have.

Admittedly, Benoit’s system, because it relies on Burke’s pentad, is guilty of the tendency in communication studies to rely on “elemental conglomerations” for describing and explaining discursive processes. Jenny Edbauer cites Louise Weatherbee Phelps as a major opponent of this sort of approach. Still, I believe the theory of the Genesis of Rhetorical Action is useful for opening up a universe of alternative explanations not only for why a piece of discourse exists, but for what that piece of discourse does, and how it does it.

Benoit, W. (2000). Beyond genre Theory: The genesis of rhetorical action. Communication
Monographs, 67(2), 178-192.

Austin City Limits

One thing that I thought about last week with Latour and that has come back to mind again as I read Bitzer, Vatz, and Edbauer is what role--if any--the work of J. L. Austin could play in an understanding of how utterances themselves function, either in a network (as with Latour and, seemingly, Edbauer) or a rhetorical situation (Bitzer and Vatz). In How To Do Things With Words, Austin presents a speech act theory in which not all utterances are simply truth-evaluable--some actually perform the function described, an action of binding power. Obvious examples include legal sentencing, marriage ceremonies, the reading of wills, the christening of ships (and perhaps naming, in general). (Judith Butler appropriated Austin's work in describing how gender is produced as an effect of a regulatory discourse--one that requires ritualized repetition of behavior, including performative utterances).

I thought about this last week in terms of Latour because it occured to me that utterances are themselves included as actors in networks and that, following Austin, they very well should. My thoughts returned to Austin this week when Bitzer talks about rhetoric as "a mode for altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action" (3). This sounded very much like Austin to me. Bitzer then qualifies his formulation, of course, by going on to say that the rhetor "alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change" (4); and Bitzer grounds the power of rhetoric in a situation that calls it forth--the situation is "the very ground of rhetoric" (5). If anything, reality determines the meaning of an utterance for Bitzer, rather than the utterance performing and giving meaning--"rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation..." (5). But Bitzer also gives both rhetorical discourse and the rhetor their due places in what might be dubbed a kind of network. On page 8 he concludes his remarks on the constituents of the rhetorical situation by saying that, "These three constituents--exigence, audience, constraints--comprise everything relevant in a rhetorical situation. When the orator, invited by the situation, enters it and creates and presents discourse, then both he and his speech are additional constituents."

Vatz's argument does a 180 and goes the other way, of course: he argues against Bitzer's claims in such a way that he passes Austin and moves close to what Latour bemoans as social constructivism in the passages I discussed last week. Vatz asserts that "meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors" in a "translation" that conveys not a "situation's reality, but... the rhetor's arbitrary choice of characterization" (157). Meaning, thus, is not "intrinsic to situations" as Bitzer contends, but rather meaning is "a consequence of rhetorical creation" (158), "Thus rhetoric is a cause not an effect of meaning" (160).

My impulse is to say that while I found Bitzer's contentions intellectually unsatisfying at best, Vatz's critique bottoms out towards the end. His statement on page 160 that "one cannot maintain that reports of anything are indistinguishable from the thing itself" adequately summarizes what I object to--and an example he gives that "the killing of a president of this country at this time is not a real threat to the people in any measurable way" spells out on its face my objection (whatever you exaggerate you weaken). I think both formulations are simple-minded--rhetoric does not create reality, a slope that I feel Vatz slips towards, any more than reality calls forth rhetorical statements. Edbauer seems to split the difference, much in the same that I'd say Latour does in his own way. I'll expand on that in my next post.

Rhetorical Ecologies

I liked the way Jenny Edbauer traced the rhetorical ecology, or the “range of processes and encounters” (6) of “Keep Austin Weird.” I thought this might be a good assignment for students – trace the rhetorical ecology of something. Some ideas: Trace the way brands become commonplace names for things (I think there's a word for this), like Kleenex or Xerox. You could also trace how TV or movie catchphrases are circulated (e.g. “yadda, yadda, yadda” or “I'll be back”) In fact, lots of things from popular culture would work – re-makes of movies, covers of songs, how books influence authors. One example I thought of would be our own Mike Kardos' piece on the Missouri Review blog about how people have co-opted the title of Carver's “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Politics might be a fruitful angle as well. I'm thinking specifically of how the phrase “partial-birth abortion” was created by the pro-life movement and then circulated into commonplace usage.

Edbauer and de Certeau

Whereas Bitzer pushes for LaTourian rigidity in his definition of what constitutes a rhetorical situation, Edbauer pushes for LaTourian a complete reworking of the notion of rhetorical situation, arguing for a complete paradigm shift. Like LaTour, Edbauer goes against the grain, suggesting that the rhetorical situation doesn’t already exist: “[. . .] there can be no pure exigence [. . .] the exigence does not exist perse, but is instead an amalgamation of processes and encounters” (8). The language here echoes LaTour—exigence is not a given, and, thus, the rhetorical situation does not exist a priori (“the social does not reside in fixed sites” (9). We can only sense a rhetorical situation by examining the nodes within the network. These nodes include people, things, concepts, and feelings. Edbauer’s example of Austin Texas’ “weird” slogan is a terrific example.

I was also struck by Edbauer’s discussion of the city; actually she mostly cites Amin and Thrift. Edbauer, of course, uses the complicated notion of city as a metaphor for her revision of rhetoric. But it’s interesting to note that in his famous chapter “Walking the City” from his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau ponders the relationship between urban movement and writing. Certeau’s chapter here is more or less a direct response to Foucault’s “Panopticism” (itself modeled on Bentham’s notion of the panopticon). Whereas Foucault’s Panopticism examines power structures from the top down (power as tower-like, yet, strangely, decentralized and democratic (in the sense that all people tacitly agree to participate in surveillance of the public), de Certeau’s piece looks at the panopticon from the bottom up; he looks at how the subjects of the panopticon respond, and rebel, in their small ways. The idea of the city, de Certeau suggests, is an imposition of control. City planners create rigid grids that are designed to inscribe control (one must walk here, not there); clearly indicated street names act as markers to make sure that we do not get lost. However, people walk as they wish: they create shortcuts, they ignore the names of streets (or they make personal meaning out of a street name that has no connection to the meaning intended). In short, people resist the order imposed by the urban grid. De Certeau writes:

“Rather than remaining within the field of a discourse [de Certeau sees walking
discourse] [. . .] one can try another path: one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization” (96)

De Certeau’s language is pretty dense here (earlier in the piece, he refers to an “erotics of knowledge, which made me grimace in pain), but he’s essentially talking about the ways in which people carve out their own existences, despite the system that has been put into place. Later in the chapter, de Certeau compares walking explicitly to writing, which is interesting since it echoes Edbauer’s move from city to rhetoric. De Certeau writes, “The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (or tours) and detours that can be compared to “turns of phrase” or “stylistic figures.” Anyway, I’m sorry if most of this discussion has been dull or tangential, but anyone whose interest was piqued by Edbauer’s examination of the city might check out the de Certeau book/chapter.

Finally, the example of Cingular’s cooption of the anti-corporate “Keep Austin Weird” slogan reminded me of the earlier piece we read this term by James Gee: “The New Literacy Studies and the ‘Social Turn.’” In that piece, Gee questioned whether rhetoric is intrinsically progressive. His answer, of course, was “not always.” He devoted several rich and interesting paragraphs to examples of ways in which corporations use “the social turn” to increase their profit margins. Edbauer’s example of Cingular seems a prime example of a conservative group’s (in this case a corporation) absorption of radical discourse (Austin’s largely liberal, anti-“big business” slogan).

My On Again/ Off Again Relationship with The Rhetorical Situation

The Rhetorical Situation is a tricky thing. I’ve tried to remove it from my own understanding of rhetoric quite a few times, but I haven’t been successful. It seems to be rather indispensable. I genuinely agree with Vatz’s articulation of the academic and ethical problems with The Rhetorical Situation. Still, every time I conceptualize discourse in my mind, the rhetorical situation sneaks into my design.

Like Vatz, I believe that rhetors are capable of creating exigences. Exigences don’t exist until someone points a public’s attention in a particular direction. There exists no shortage of contemporary social and political examples of groups racing to define an issue so that they can demonstrate how their solution best solves the problem or responds to the situation. When Bush tried to reform social security, you could usually predict a person’s opinion on the issue based on whether they thought his program was designed to “privatize” or “personalize” social security. To define/describe/create an exigence or a situation is to prescribe a response.

Still, while meaning certainly lies in people and not situations, I believe rhetors craft messages that rely on situations for their meaning and value. No utterance can be interpreted without context. This is so natural that when we hear a comment for which we have little or no context, we usually create ourselves so that the comment makes more sense. Socio-political context cannot be overlooked when crafting a message. There are indeed limits or constraints to what a speaker can get away with. It might be important to recognize that those constraints are also rhetorically constructed, but that doesn’t make them any less important or influential in any set of circumstances.

While I would disagree with Bitzer’s idea that the Rhetorical Situation determines discourse, I would argue that rhetor’s necessarily look to situational factors when generating discourse. Aristotle defined rhetoric as the “search for the available means of persuasion” and even though artistic proofs might come from within the rhetor, she must still look to audience and context to discern which persuasive techniques are most likely to work. The entire field of rhetorical criticism was originally based on this idea. Traditional or neo-Aristotelian methods of criticism have certainly fallen out of favor, its hard to begin to understand what a speaker has done, or how she has done it without first accounting for situational elements.

If this blurb seemed to chase its own tail, then I think I have accurately reproduced the way the Rhetorical Situation dilemma spins around in my mind. I can try to summarize by saying that I take issue with the determinism expressed by Bitzer, but I still see the situation as crucial to the production and study of rhetoric. In actuality, I think my relationship with the rhetorical situation is way more complicated than that. But we'll work it out.

Edbauer

Edbauer

This article was great! I love articles that make me think and rethink any situation, and this one had me thinking about all manner of things, from Latour to the classroom. In speaking about Phelps’ critique she states, “That is, the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (3). She then goes on to explain, “The rhetorical situation is part of what we might call, borrowing from Phelps, an ongoing social flux. Situation bleeds into the concatenation of public interaction. Public interactions bleed into wider social processes. The elements of rhetorical situation may simply bleed (3). This, of course, made me think of Latour and his network, or ANT. However, I think she “invented” in my mind something a bit different from Latour.

She states, “Rather a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field. Moreover, this same rhetoric will go on to evolve in apparallel ways:” (6). While Latour’s notion of networking evolves from a star burst—lines shooting from a central blast—Edbauer makes me wonder if he hasn’t gotten his metaphor a little off. Think of it this way, rather than lines shooting straight out from a star, how about a large rock in a pond or lake. As the concentric circles move away from the point of impact the circles still maintain their original shape, but they grow in size and in ability to effect things beyond that first impact. The network is maintained, but rather than a straight shot there is a circle of growth and mutation as growth is maintained. The original survives as it mutates, creates, and perhaps corrects. She states, “The intensity, force and circulatory range of a rhetoric are always expanding through the mutations and new exposures attached to that given rhetoric, much like a virus” (5).

She also made me wonder about the universities composition program. She quotes Margaret Syverson, “Our theories of composition have been somewhat atomistic, focusing on individual writers, individual texts, isolated acts, processes, or artifacts” (5).
We see young writers as budding in composition, and then through other writing intensive courses as flowering. But I wonder what would happen if we broadened our horizons and theirs. First year students would take English 1000, but in the junior year, after having taken some of those writing intensive course, would take another course in composition. The point of this being that by adding lived experience, knowledge obtained through classes, we could encourage this more developed writer to take the skills further. Incorporation of lived experience and academic knowledge into what they have written about. Finding out what connections these students may find between History and Literature and the development of Literature. What types of thinking learned through college algebra have they learned that might spark better writing. Rather than simply teaching them basic academic writing, bring life experience in to create a course that asks them to synthesize this knowledge with a new, perhaps grander, writing experience.

That’s all.

Bitzer vs. Vatz

When I began reading the Bitzer article I began disagreeing with it. He makes good points about the influence of context, etc., but his idea that “situations” invoke or create the rhetoric just didn’t suit me. While I’ve since read the Vatz and the Edbauer, at the time I had my own arguments. I’ve met people who create crisis through rhetoric. These are not highly public people, but people that belong to my small circle of those I’m acquainted with. By phrasing something in a particular way, e.g., “The neighbor is intoxicated”, as opposed to, “So and So is having a drunken fit” the situation takes on a different tenor. Rather than the rhetoric fitting the situation, the situation is made to fit the perception of the person uttering the words. Bitzer states, “Thus the second characteristic of rhetorical situation is that it invites a fitting response, a response that fits the situation” (Bitzer 9). While this can be true, I don’t believe it to be true in all situations.

Vatz states, “The world is a scene of inexhaustible events which all compete to impinge on what Kenneth Burke calls our ‘sliver of reality’” (Vatz 156). So, in effect, he is agreeing in part with Latour. Everything strikes out in one way or another to have an impact on that which surrounds it. Vatz goes on to speak of meaning, “Therefore, meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors” (Vatz 157). So, the meanings from the “scene of inexhaustible events” merges with our “sliver of reality” to create a rhetor who creates meaning. He goes on to tell us, “In short, the rhetor is responsible for what he chooses to make salient” (158). This, to me, creates a more “salient” role of rhetoric within the academic, public, and private versions of the lives we live.

That’s all.

Message “parasitically invades” students

Bitzer's view of rhetorical situations also made me think about the way that advertisers convince you that you need something. They tell you that you need, say, the Ipod with the TV screen or the Thighmaster to be happy. Bitzer is like the guy who sees an ad for a Blackberry and is convinced that he can't live without it – he's certain there was a set of circumstances in his life that necessitated its purchase. Vatz is like the guy who realizes the power of advertising – that such needs are “created” and not “found.” They convince you that there was a rhetorical situation there already, when in fact they created it.

I use the concept of the rhetorical situation to respond to students who don't like my standards for grading. I teach personal writing, which many students perceive as “what I think” and “what I feel.” For example, a student told me last week that topic sentences are too constraining on her writing. I try to get them to see that personal writing is a rhetorical situation like any other where one must take into account audience and constraints, etc. Reflecting now on this practice, I realize it's more Bitzerian than Vatzian because I tell them that in the “real world,” you will always need to write for a certain audience under certain conditions. This always seems deeply unfair to them.

I too wondered why Jenny Edbauer called Vatz “infamous.”

Bitzer and LaTour as Buddies? Maybe?

Lloyd F. Bitzer published "The Rhetorical Situation" in 1968, but I swear I hear premonitions of LaTour. It is easy, I am guessing, from our post-post-modern positions (postmodern children that we are) to critique Bitzer from forty years' difference (Bitzer finds comfort in the "real," the objectively verifiable), but consider the excerpt from Bitzer's piece:

"Any exigence is an imperfection marked by urgency...An exigence which can not be modified is not rhetorical...thus, whatever comes about of necessity and cannot be changed...are exigences to be sure, but they are not rhetorical."

Am I the only one who hears echoes in LaTour? Simply replace "exigency" with the word "the social." Bitzer's discussion of what constitutes a rhetorical situation sounds a lot like LaTour's discussion of what constitutes the social. For Bitzer, a rhetorical situation exists when there is mediation ("an exigence which can be modified only by means other than discourse is not rhetorical; thus, an exigence is not rhetorical when its modification requires merely one's own action or the application of a tool, but neither requires nor invites the assistance of discourse"). For LaTour, the social only really exists when the players involved are true mediators. Is Bitzer arguing for anything radically different? Okay, in some ways yes? But Bitzer seems to be pushing for the same LaTourian rigidity in asking that a rhetorical situation be filled with full-fledged mediators.

I'll have more to say about Bitzer (and Vatz) later, but I was pumped after noticing the LaTourian turn forty years before such a turn actually turned.

Just some things....

So far, and before my computer dies....

Vatz could introduce a quote with ANYTHING but "As ______________ says/states/writes" and it wouldn't drive me up the wall.

We SHOULD use nouns as verbs. We should also use "concatenate" a lot, as that really IS what we're called upon to do in virtually every course, paper, or discussion. And finally, "the elements of rhetorical situation simply bleed" (9) is, I think, brilliant. And true.

While I taught "the rhetorical stance" this semester, and I think my students found it helpful, it's still in an elemental form. I also noted that most, if not all the kids in both of my sections hadn't even seen my (crude) version of the sort of triangle system referred to--I think I roughly sketched the "speaker"---"message"---"receiver"---"feedback" loop, when we were discussing Booth's article, but I wonder whether talking about ecologies would have been better?

I guess my thinking, in terms of getting the students to concatenate (anything) is that BOTH might be the way to go. Haven't finished Jenny's piece yet, so maybe she'll tell me. My query to you all then, is what parts of this do you actually use in the classroom/plan to use in the classroom....and for Mark in particular, what sort of schema are they teaching in Comm? While I remember public speaking, it was poorly taught (by the soccer coach at school...d'oh) and althought we got a badly sketched diagram, I wonder what's really going on....

Down to almost no battery at all, gotta get this to post.

Concatenate.

Ritualized Salience

Vatz's article succinctly presents Bitzer's, and lists his reasons for disagreeing with Bitzer. The wonderful Jenny Edbauer calls it "infamous," which is intriguing, and makes me wonder what its overall impact has been, if anyone happens to know and feels like sharing :). He seems to start from the position that we create meaning, and to call different aspects of Bitzer's article into question based on that given. The idea that we're socially constructed seems to underly his position, which ties his vision in with those of most of the authors we've read for this course, with the exceptions, possibly, of Gaonkar and Latour.

His arguments bring up a really basic question that ties in to rhetoric's pedagogical applications. Can the significance of absolutely every situation be thought of as rhetorically constructed, when some situations seem to be thought significant in virtually every discourse community? His discussion of assassination started me wondering what discourse community exists where the death of a leader would not be thought significant. Can we always say that historic events gain significance because of "ritualized salience"? If we think so, believing rhetoric to be the source of meaning, can we teach the approach?

Collaborative Text Editing (via SubEthaEdit)

Here's the program I was talking about during class that we'll be using at the "Reach and Teach the Digital Native" conference tomorrow--it sounds intriguing. From Brian S. Brookes, Associate Dean of the School of Journalism (here at MU):

"During the Digital Campus Institute @ Missouri we’ll be working together to explore ways to “Reach and Teach the Digital Native.” SubEthaEdit is a text editor that facilitates collaboration through Apple’s Bonjour technology. With SubEthaEdit many participants will be able to edit the same text document, live, in realtime. Every user is able to type anywhere in the text without locking parts of the text for other users, making SubEthaEdit just as easy to use as a traditional text editor."

A free 30-day trial version of SubEthaEdit can be downloaded from http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit

Latour Pt. 2 Cmap

Redefining networks

Court's post about the multiplex and uniplex conceptions of social networks got me thinking about the varied uses of "network" as a term. I'm wondering whether the different meanings (social network, computer network, actor network, etc.), all somewhat similar to begin with, are coming to overlap--maybe it's just that they're overlapping in my thinking. But Donna's observation about web 2.0's increased resemblance to a Latourian network got me thinking that at least those two are merging.

A Bridge to Next Week

There are several places in which Latour makes comments that support or hint at a couple key rhetorical concepts. The first is Lloyd Bitzer’s notion of the rhetorical situation, which is assigned reading for next week. A second, and related concept is that of rhetorical genre.

Latour writes, “When, for one reason or another, you happen to come to the stage, you become quickly aware that most of the ingredients composing the scene have not been brought there by you…” (p. 165-166). Basically, we are constantly prompted by and encouraged to respond to particular complexes of people, things, events etc. These situations are not of our own creation, but we must navigate them nonetheless. Bitzer (1968) went so far as to basically suggest that all human interaction was dependent on the details of the rhetorical situation. Our task in any rhetorical situation is to fashion our discourse in such a way that it fits the constraints of that situation and remedies the exigence or imperfection that moved us to respond in the first place. Of course Bitzer’s explanation is much more complicated than that, but I believe Bitzer and Latour are seeing our position as actors within a collective very similarly.

Genre theory, which is typically based in the rhetorical situation, also suggests that the scene has a major influence on our actions and behavior. Edwin Black (1965) wrote, “First, we must assume that there is a limited number of situations in which a rhetor can find himself…Second, we must assume that there is a limited number of ways a rhetor can and will respond rhetorically to any given situational type…Third, we must assume that the recurrence of a given situational type through history will provide the critic with information on the rhetorical responses available in that situation” (p.133). Basically, genre theory and practice, by helping us understand and predict social interaction, can be understood as a helpful aid to tracing associations.

To understand the “ingredients” in any situation seems to be part of the task for ANT. Latour writes, “Yes, we should follow the suggestion that interactions are overflowed by many ingredients already in place that come from other times, other spaces and other agents; yes, we should accepts the idea of moving away to some other sites in order to find the sources of those many ingredients” (p. 171). ANT obviously has different, and perhaps grander goals in mind, so maybe instead of arguing that genre theory fits some of ANT’s criteria, it would be more useful to argue that genre studies could be improved by using some ANT. But then again, I already have a final paper topic.

Social Determination of facts, inscriptions, and other points of clarification

By points of clarification, I mean, of course, for myself, but one always hopes that one's writing is both received well and that it is somehow productive for others. There have been a few spots where Latour references his earlier work (I discussed one such instance with We Have Never Been Modern last week); one such instance in Part II occurs on page 223, when in footnote No. 305 he states that, "I introduced the expression of inscription devices in Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1986), Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts."

The subtitle of that (seminal) work led me (and Latour, it seems) back to some choppy waters in Part I, in which Latour distinguishes ANT from social constructivism (starting on page 88, in a section entitled "Constructivism vs. social constructivism"). Latour outlines what it means to be "constructed" according to ANT, something very different than what it means in social constructivist modes of critique; and Latour hints that this is a distinction that he has maintained all along, going back to his work in Laboratory Life, which I myself have since turned to in order to try and parse it out. On page 91-2, Latour appears to be discussing the lumping of ANT with the so-called "strong programme" of what might be productively distinguished as social determinism (thought it's often referred to as "social constructivism") in science studies (though Latour explicitly uses social constructivism in the social sciences and humanities). Latour--if I'm understanding him--takes exception to this association:

On the one hand, it seemed easy enough to reclaim a sturdy meaning for this much maligned term construction: we simply had to use the new definition of social that was reviewed in the earlier chapters of this book.... 'constructivism' should not be confused with 'social constructivism'. When we say that a fact is constructed, we simply mean that we account for the solid objective reality by mobilizing various entities whose assemblage could fail; 'social constructivism' means, on the other hand, that we replace what this reality is made of with some other stuff, the social in which it is 'really' built. An account about the heterogenous genesis of a building is substituted by another one dealing with the homogeneous social matter which is built. To bring constructivism back to its feet, it's enough to see that once social means again association, the whole idea of a building made of social stuff vanishes. For any construction to take place, non-human entities have to play the major role and this is just what we wanted to say from the beginning with this rather innocuous word.

But obviously this rescue operation was not enough since the rest of the social sciences seemed to share a completely different notion of the same term. How could that be? Our mistake was that since we had never shared the idea that construction could mean a reduction to only one type of material, we produced antibodies against the accusation that we had reduced facts to 'mere construction' only very slowly. Since it was obvious to us that 'social construction' meant a renewed attention to the number of heterogeneous realities entering into the fabrication of some state of affairs, it took years for us to react in a balanced way to the absurd theories with which we appeared to be associated. Even though constructivism was for us a synonym for an increase in realism, we were feted by our colleagues in social critique as having shown at last that "even science is bunk'! It took me a long time to realize the danger of an expression that, in the hands our our 'best friends', apparently meant some type of revenge against the solidity of scientific facts and an expose of their claim to truth. They seemed to imply that we were doing for science what they were so proud of having done for religion, art, law, culture, and everything the rest of us believe in, namely reducing it to dust by showing it was made up....

No wonder that our excitement in showing the 'social construction of scientific fact' was met with such fury by the actors themselves!... The substitution of the social with other stuff seems to every actor a catastrophic loss to be adamently resisted--and rightly so! If, however, the word social is not used to replace one kind of stuff by another, but is used instead to deploy the associations that have rendered some state of affairs solid and durable, then another social theory might become audible at last.

How could there be, we wondered, such a divide in the basic duties of social science? This is why it slowly dawned on us that there was something deeply flawed not only in the standard philosophy of science, but also in the standard social theories used to account for other domains than science. This is what made ANT scholars at first look either too critical--they were accused of attacking 'even' matters of fact and of not 'believing' in 'Nature' or in 'outside reality'--or much too naive--they believed in the agencies of 'real things' that were 'out there'. In effect, what ANT was trying to modify was simply the use of the whole critical repertoire by abandoning simultaneously the use of Nature and the use of Society, which had been invented to reveal 'behind' social phenomena what was 'really taking place'. This, however, meant a complete reinterpretation of the experiment that we had conducted, at first unwittingly, when trying to account sociologically for the production of science.

Latour, then, distinguishes ANT from social constructivism in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as (it appears any way) the strong programme in science studies: in a footnote--No. 116--on page 93, Latour asserts that the critique made against ANT that it "attack[ed] 'even' matters of fact and of not 'believing' in 'Nature' or in 'outside reality'" was "offered during the 'Science Wars'." I have since realized that I've been hung up on this distinction between ANT and the strong programme for a while in reading the first part of Reassembling, but turning to Laboratory Life and putting it in context with some back story in the history of the philosophy of science, I think I might have a hold on it now. So I want to try to flesh out a bit how ANT in general and Latour's work in particular is distinct from social constructivism (or, alternatively, social constructionism--or sociological constructionism--or simple constructivism--or radical constructivism... an examination of any of these would be seemingly interesting).

First, some back story: in An Invitation to Social Construction, Kenneth J. Gergen points out that as early as 1929--when Karl Mannheim published his Ideology and Utopia--a competing notion that scientific knowledge is socially constructed had challenged the essentialism or naturalism of science, this idea that science is a neutral, value-free quest for Truth. Mannheim, for example, observed that theoretical committments on the part of scientists may be attributed to social rather than empirical motivations, that groups of scientists often emerge around theories and that disagreements over theories are therefore matters of group conflict, that what is taken for granted to be scientific fact is a byproduct of a social process. Mannheim's work was highly influential, and soon other social critiques of science followed: Ludwig Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science (1946), George Gurvitch's The Social Frameworks of Knowledge (1966), and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966) built up a tradition of socially critiquing science. Berger and Luckmann, for example, traced the scientist's interaction with the world to the social sphere, proposing that we are all socialized into "plausibility structures," conceptual understandings of the world and rational supports which help foster the belief that these structures are natural, that reality as we experience it should be taken for granted (from page 26):

I apprehend the reality of everyday life as an ordered reality. Its phenomena are prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them... The language used in everyday life continuously provides me with the necessary objectification and posits the order within which these make sense and within which everyday life has meaning for me... In this manner language marks the co-ordinates of my life in society and fills that life with meaningful objects.

To me, this sounds a whole lot like ANT, at least superficially (Berger and Luckmann, for example, include an account of how clocks have altered the way we experience time and order our lives accordingly), but this is part of the tradition that Latour seemingly is rejecting in Reassembling. Although he doesn't refer to him (or indeed, any of the names I have cited so far), Latour also appears to reject Thomas Kuhn's work along the same lines. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was at the center of the so-called "Science Wars", and indeed that work makes some interesting claims in terms of scrutinizing science as a social activity, and it interrogates (forgive me) the Enlightenment-inherited assumption that science is progressive, that with continued research and testing we will eventually arrive at the Truth (from 170: "Perhaps... scientific progress is not quite what we had taken it to be.... We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth").

For any one who wants a (vulgar) summary of what I think is relevant here, Kuhn asserted that scientists work from "...some accepted examples of actual scientific practice...[which] provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research"--these models are what Kuhn refers to as paradigms. Kuhn argued that science is a kind of puzzle-solving activity which is always subsumed in a belif system, the dominant paradigm ("normal science"). Removing the heretofore-present blinders of cumulative histories, disciplines could view thier histories in terms of these non-cumulative theoretical paradigms of "normal science," followed by accumlations of anomalies that are incommensurate with the dominant paradigm; once enough of these anomalies accumlate a critical mass is reached at which point a "scientific revolution" occurs, leading to new normal science. (It might be worth mentioning that Kuhn speculated that the social sciences--and certainly the humanities--are "pre-paradigmatic").

Kuhn argued for the social construction of scientific change and the consequent incommensurability of successive paradigms. Kuhn also emphasized the networks of interrelated commitments and practitioneers whose peer judgment provided consensus for establishing and elaborating theories. Again, Kuhn's work seems to echo rather than run against that of Latour's. But Kuhn doesn't have much to say about the actual social organization that is involved with a paradigm-shift; and his examples of paradigm-shifts are taken from classical science: the Copernican Revolution is the archetype example; and so Kuhn's examples cover centuries rather than the decade-to-decade or even year-to-year revolutions that occur in contemporary science. This acceleration or exhaustion might to similar developments that Latour outlines and this could thus be what distinguishes Latour's project from what has come before. Kuhn has lamented (much like Latour does above) the reception of his work, however; he included a postscript to the 1970 revision of Structure that made it clear that his work was received in a more radical light than he cared for (and maybe intended) and he has since expressed his regrets for this reception (see, for example, The Essential Tension, 1977).

Aside from the inclusion of networks, another possible bridge between Kuhn and Latour is Joseph Rouse's Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science. Rouse imagines a "radical Kuhn" who replaces "communities of practioners" with "communities of believers," thus foregrounding that competing theories are evaluated not by comparison to one another on their own merits, but rather with a "history is written by the winners" mentality (32). Rouse argues that science is to be understood as a field of practices rather than as what Latour himself (in Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society) refers to as "ready-made science," science already reified for textbook consumption. Latour (and Rouse) advocates "science in the making," the practice of scientific work itself, a process that is never predictable or controllable in advance (4). If nothing else, however, Gergen points out that these social determinist or contructivist arguments underscore the importance of interpretive communities in shaping heretofore naturalized scientific practices (35). But as Latour gestures, these arguments have often been taken to the extreme ("the absurd theories with which we appeared to be associated"), and so ANT and other modes of critique have increasingly sought to foreground the relational processes that emerge from actants (persons, objects, surroundings--Society and Nature). Rather than being constructed by social forces, science is the product of scientists, technologies, spaces, ideas, etc. acting as full participants in a complex relationships out of which mutual understanding is achieved.

Here we finally arrive back at the footnote (No. 305) that prompted me to write this out for myself (and any one else who might benefit): "the expression of inscription devices" that Latour casually mentions on page 223. In Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, these inscription devices are part of a larger process of conscriptioin that Latour discusses in terms of how a scientific fact is determined. Conscription (literally, "writing with"--an interesting gloss, but also think of conscription in terms of drafting soldiers) is the process of appropriating support for a preposed fact and silencing detractions from it. Any statement can be proposed as fact, but on its face it's not convincing--any number of objections can be raised. The problem of the scientist is to enlist support and silence dissent; and support is conscripted from four domains: allies, a social network of those who support one's interpretations, enlisted to do so through social practices within science; former texts, the established repetoire of "what is known" is drawn upon in a type of argument from authority; rhetorical devices [interesting for our purposes here], prestige forms that convey a "truth-telling capacity" such as the use of numbers, graphs, and arcane formulations that establish and reinforce the authority of the scientist by moving the reader further and further away from an understanding of what's being argued; and, finally, the inscription devices that Latour mentions in the footnote. Inscription devices are the machines and instruments used in science which produce non-linguistic representations to "write the world"--as long as science is accepted as truth, how these devices "measure the world as it is" stands in for the phenomenon itself.

"Scientific facts," then, emerge within actor networks that include both the social and natural world, both humans and technology and these facts are thus dependent on these networks. If one questions a scientific fact, one encounters a network of allies to defend it, a network of former texts that support it, as well as rhetorical and inscription devices that legitimate it as part of the assemblage. Each of these actants, then, is like a black box: if one tries to open it, to question its validity, one is directed to another black box and these black boxes exist in an interlocking assemblage of actants. Latour, it seems, wants to be careful here not to be associated with social constructivism because he does not question the reality of scientific facts, rather he wants to bring more reality to them("constructivism was for us a synonym for an increase in realism," 92)--to remove the mysticism from science and the claims that it is beyond scrutiny or interpretation or somehow above culture. If one substitutes "the social" for "science" (Latour was dealing with the social make-up of science) then one might see how, it seems, Latour wants to do away with Nature and Society, the categories "which had been invented to reveal 'behind' social phenomena what was 'really taking place'" (93). These categories collapse into each other when it's demonstrated that they actants from within each domain are interconnected in various assemblages.

This is how I've reconciled the history of social constructivism with ANT for myself, using Latour's words in Reassembling and elsewhere, but I may be way off. If so, I hope someone will help me out.