Insignificant Wranglings

Visual Rhetoric Crash Course

In preparation for the MEmorials, I wanted to give a quick crash course in Visual Rhetoric. Your design decisions will play a factor in the evaluation of this piece. The following is meant to provide you with a heuristic, a set of questions, to think about as you construct this (and any other) text (and I mean “text” as loosely as possible). 

The Basic C.R.A.P.

One of the first “viral” books on visual rhetoric and design was Robin William’s book The Non-Designer’s Design Book, now in its third edition. Williams explicated four primary design principles:

1. Contrast
2. Repetition
3. Alignment
4. Proximity

Let’s think about them one at a time. 

Contrast

Williams’ first principle stressed that usable design requires high levels of contrast. One of the lessons we carry from this is a distinction between contrast and conflict. Another is to be wary of sublte changes. If you want to change something, make it a super-big change. Don’t go one font-size larger, go five. Don’t go a single-shade lighter, etc. etc. 

Repetition

Repetition is probably the simplest of concepts in Williams’ quartet. Put simple, we want to repeat as many things as possible because it helps users find what they are looking for, navigate a site, and notice important changes. Take a look, for instance, at most websites: you’ll notice that headers, navigation, footers, and sidebars rarely change as you move to different pages in the site. But, the content changes. By keeping other elements “static,” it calls more attention to what is dynamic.

Of course, by maintaining repetition, you create the opportunity for a “wow” moment simply by breaking the established expectation. Use these opportunities sparingly. 

Here’s an example of what, via Garr Reynolds’s discussion of presentation storytelling in Presentation Zen Design, we might call narrative contrast: Max Fisher’s piece on War and Peace in Kiev from the Washington Post.

Alignment

Alignment is a critical concept. Obviously, alignment asks to think about the margins and spaces built into our design. But alignment doesn’t demand that we use only one margin. Rather, alignment asks us to set hierarchical preferences via varying margins (without going overboard).

If you care about my soul at all, then you will never, ever, ever, ever center-align anything. Ok, maybe you can center-align a title. Maybe. Nah. 

Proximity 

Proximity is, imo, the most difficult of the quartet to describe. Williams writes: “The idea of proximity doesn’t mean that everything is closer together; it means that elements that are intellectually related connected, that has some sort of communication relationship, should also be visually connected.” In web design, this can easily be built by paying attention to space, or what web designers often call padding, between elements. 

We’ll think about proximity, space, and layout more down below when we think about the Golden Rule. 

Color

Don’t be afraid of color. That said, recognize that the study of color has a few basic rules. Here’s a quick rundown:

Maria Claudia Cortes’ Color in Motion

Link to Cortes’ video. Different colors have different meanings and set different moods. There is no definitive set of meanings. But, if you wore pink to a wake, people would stare at you. As a rhetorical designer, it is your idea to imagine how different audiences will react to your choices. What are the expectations for what you are doing? Should you risk defying those expectations? 

Some Helpful Guides / Tools

• Tiger Color Introduction to Color Theory
• Colourlovers.com offers some great pre-fab color palettes, complete with hex values
• SlayerOffice Palette Generator will make a gradient palette based on two different colors.
• Pictaculous will generate a palette based on an image

Most of these applications will translate colors into hex codes (for instance, white is #ffffff, while red is #ff0000). Most design software will include some kind of entry field to dictate specific hex colors. 

Typography

Typography is an incredibly deep subject area. People can become serioulsy passionate about typographical choices. As with all of these principles, there isn’t any kind of definitively right or wrong answers. But there are some central concerns to consider as you design a print or web text.  

To Serif or not to Serif

Fonts come in two primary classes, serif fonts and sans-serif fonts. The difference: wings and feet. Let’s look at an image: 

As a rule of thumb, serif fonts are used for printed materials. Studies have shown that the wings and feet on serif writing (inherited from the legacy of cursive) improve reading speed. On the web, however, the addition of wings and feet can increase pixelation, and hence, strain on the eyes, and hence, cause ouchy headaches (especially on a pc). Technological improvements over the past few years have reduced this effect, but the rule continues to be: serif for print, sans-serif for the web.

You can use serif fonts for web headings, however. Just make sure that you repeat the serif-heading, sans-serif-main-content distinction. Also, be sure to look at your fonts-you want contrast without clash. (See Douglas B’s “How to Choose a Typeface” at SmashingMagazine and his blog post “Top 19 Fonts in 19 Top Combinations”).

If you take a look at contemporary websites, especially those invested in their design aesthetic, then you will see a predominant amount of sleek, clean, sans-serif fonts used for body text, often with a imbalanced sans-serif or weighted serif for headings. 

In terms of design, the Wall St. Journal offers us an “ugly” old-school website. It has way too many alignments, fonts, and colors crashing together. Compare this to an even mediocre “web3.0” design aesthetic like Vivino or 1st Web Designer (or 90% of the Squarespace templates we are working with). Even with commercial sites looking to provide a mass of information, the increasing trend is toward minimalist design that eschews “mystery meat” (complicated) forms of navigation. K.I.S.S. 

Harry Roberts’s Typography Heuristic

Harry Roberts’ “Technical Web Typography: Guidelines and Techniques” provides an excellent heuristic for typography. Let’s consider his points in order.

Font-Face or Font-Family; in addition to Roberts, I would recommend Aaron Boodman’s “B Definitive Web Font Stacks” for building font-families.

Font-Size; in I Love Typography’s introductory guide to web typography, the author urges designers to choose a moderate base size. We’ll avoid microscopic text, and follow both his/her and Roberts’ suggestion and go with 16 pixels.

Line Length, or Measure; the general principle here is that you don’t want text to stretch across the entire screen. A bit more specific: you are aiming for approximately 45-75 characters per line.

Line Height, or Leading; according to Roberts, the easiest way to figure out your base line-height is to set it as 150% of your base font-size, which can be easily done as 1.5em (see my CSS). This comes out to 24 pixels. There are more sophisticated ways of setting this number (see below).

Magic Number; this number (base font-size x 1.5) is what Roberts refers to as our “magic number.” It gives us a baseline for setting other elements of the page–from margins and padding, to white spaces, etc. All we try is multiplying/dividing our magic number whenever we need to calculate a measurement.

From Magic Number to the Golden Rule

Typography: Ratios for Headings, Spacing, and Layout

Thinking about typography more broadly, you may have question about “how much padding should I have on a left margin?” or “how wide should I make my navigation box?” One solution to these questions lies in attending to the ancient Golden Mean–the magical ration of 1.6.

Tim Brown’s “More Meaningful Typography” and Vitaly Friedman’s “Applying Divine Proportion to Web Designs” build theories off of the Golden Mean, the ancient Greek ration that surfaces in a variety of creative mediums, from music to art to architecture to page design. Brown points us toward a modular scale generator–simply put in your base text size, select your desired ratio, and the generator will supply a range of numbers. Friedman shows how the golden ratio can not only inform margins, padding, and text size–but also dictate page layout.

The point here is to develop an awareness that things like alignment and placement aren’t arbitrary. There should be a thought process behind these choices. As with many things, just because their isn’t a right answer doesn’t mean there isn’t bad choices. 

Here’s a link to this page’s modular scale.

Click here to see some of these typography considerations in action.

Taking Care of Images

There’s a few basic things to keep in mind with images for the web.

Image Quality

No one likes ugly pixelated images. If your images are ugly and pixelated then you are doing something wrong (probably trying to make a small image larger). A nice, basic rule: never increase the size of an image.

Note that one way of assuaging poor image quality can be through the use of filters. In some cases filters can improve image quality (here’s a quick guide on some of the more helpful photoshop filters). Here’s Darren Hoyt’s easy-to-follow tutorial for for fixing poor quality photos (like those you might get off your phone). 

Of course, editing images can lead to some critical ethical questions, such as the Contreras controversy. See this link as well on cropping. 

. And I never miss an opportunity to share this:

Related: Lena Dunham’s cover photo manipulation. And when virtual alteration becomes physical. 

Image Borders

Think of images as art on the wall. If you like something, you frame it. If you’re going to put an image up on your site, then you need to provide it a border. This can done pretty easily through CSS. Here’s the code:

#content img {

border: 5px solid #999;

padding: 5px; }

NOTE: See the image here to see the border code in action. 

The border property above first creates a five pixel wide border around the image. The padding property inserts 5 pixels of whitespace between the image and the border. Of course, you can also create elaborate borders around images in Photoshop and export them as part of the image file

Squarespace’s “edit image” interface provides a number of helpful image editing tools, including some quick and easy border options. 

Note, too, that a lot of minimalistic web3.0 design aesthetic ignores borders.

Image File Types

Part of paying attention to image quality requires you know something about image file types. Essentially, there’s only two file types you need to use on a page. If your image is just going to sit there like a photograph, then you likely want to use a .jpeg. If your image requires transparencies, dynamic movement, or quality resizing, then you likely want to use a .png (aka portable network graphic) You should not use raw photoshop files (.psd) on the web as many browsers do not know how to render them.

Images and Accessibility 

Whenever possible, you should ensure that images have alternate text–text that appears in case an image cannot show up, or text that is read via screen readers for the visually-impaired. 

In Squarespace, you set the alt-text by writing captions. You can then turn the captions off in the image menu. I will demonstrate this in class. 

Nemo, Heidegger, Levinas, and Onto-Theology

In his translator’s introduction, Cohen highlights Heidegger’s critique of “onto-theology.” Simplifying a bit, we can understand onto-theology as the desire for a foundation, for a metanarrative, for a transcendental grund. Of course, such a foundation can be strictly theological, as God, or secular, as Reason (Kant), Progress (Hegel), Capital (Marx), or Sexual Desire (Freud). Regardless, what we desire is to stabilize reality as a representation, a playing out, of a higher authority. Cohen notes that, building in part from Nietzsche’s gay science, Heidegger offers us an optimism. He writes: 

A new age and a new humanity are called for, an age of honesty, courage, and innocence. Henceforth, existence will be affirmed joyously, gaily, in its coming to be and passing away in its expenditure without reserve, its bountifulness. Henceforth our obligations will be our own, authentic, in the self-conscious creation of value or the quiet harkening to being. (3)

Levinas’s response, as Cohen foreshadows, will be to challenge the fundamental optimism that underwrites Heidegger’s philosophy. I will leave the details of this challenge to your reading and our discussion next week. But understand that Cohen is setting up the fall with those sentences–virtually every clause will be taken to task. 

In the process, one might claim that Levinas is trying to undo Nietzsche’s fundamental achievement–laying waste to the concept of original sin and the slave morality (the Apollonian spirit, Platonism, etc.) that chained the Dionysian enjoyment of the world. To which I would respond tentatively, yes. Yes he is questioning my enjoyment of the world. Again, the philosophic reasons why will wait until class.

But one might begin to work out why by considering Levinas’s experience of the Holocaust. He was a soldier in the French army, forced to surrender earlier in the war. He spent the majority of the war in a German military prison. It is likely that being in the military saved him from the death camps. It was during his imprisonment that he drafted what would be his first major publication, Existence and Existents (1947) and a series of lectures later published as Time and the Other.  He discusses both of these works with Nemo. 

What Levinas doesn’t discuss too much in that work is his concept of “justice,” a concept that he works out in later essays and mostly in later interviews–what happens when we acknowledge that face-to-face relation with the other person (a relation that may trigger an experience with the Other, in the same way that, for Barthes, a photograph may sting us) is always, already surrounded, interrupted, monitored, influenced, etc. by a third party? What do we make of the third party? The readings I send out later this week will touch upon this subject. 

Teaching, Learning, and the Ethics of Postpedagogy

Heidegger, postpedagogy, and teaching. Ulmer “Problems ‘B’ Us.” Under the best circumstances, I think, teaching is not a matter of direct transmission, nor even an exposure to a particular set of problems. Rather, teaching is an opening to the question of what it is to be “problemed,” to question/think in Heidegger’s language, to be exposed and dispossessed by the Other / obligated to others in Levinas’s.

While preparing for class this week, three troubling stories passed through my Facebook feed. 

1. “What is Fourth Wave Feminism and What Does 4chan Have to Do With It?” via Daily Dot
2. “After Being Denied A Snow Day, University Of Illinois Students Respond With Racism And Sexism” via BuzzFeed
3. “ALCU Alleges Comically Unconstitutional Religious Harassment in rural Louisiana School” from the Daily Caller.  A PDF of the ALCU legal complaint is available here. 

But, seriously, this is why I consider ethics the first priority of rhetoric. These people are out there, and their desire for lulz, their desire to destroy, should not be dismissed or ignored. Hate is real. And I hope that rhetoric can prepare us to deal with it. I think a reading we didn’t do this week, Jim Corder’s “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” helps us to understand just how rhetoric can accomplish such preparation (here’s an old blog post dealing with how I present Corder in my writing classes). 

Key issues to bring up concerning Levinas’s Ethics and Infinity:

• Levinas’s definition of phenomenology (30 vs. folks like Harmon who argue that Levinas’s methodology is a rejection of phenomenology).
• Levinas’s framing of Heidegger’s politics in relation to his philosophy (38)
• Levinas’s short summation of the distinction between the saying and the said (42, 88; note that this distinction is from Otherwise than Being)
• Levinas’s problematical thematizing of the feminine as a mode of being in constant withdrawal (67-68; it becomes easier to frame the feminine purely in metaphysical terms when you aren’t actually female)
• Levinas’s critique of totality (75)
• Levinas’s explication of “face” (85)
• Levinas’s articulations of justice (89-90, 99), responsibility (95), hostage (100), and substitution (101). I especially want to discuss how Levinas’s concept of justice anticipates the critiques of plurality offered by scholars such as Levi-Bryant and David Roden

And a few issues from our reading of Totality and Infinity:

• “We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics” (43).
• Levinas’s castigation of rhetoric (70-72)
• The Other and nakedness (74-76)
• “The presence of the Other is a calling into question my joyous possession of the world” (75-76).

Smiling at the Death Camps

Julia Kristeva, channeling Nietzsche’s comic spirit: 

the humorist goes right through uncanny strangeness and–starting from a self-confidence that is his own or is based on his belonging to an untouchable universe that is not at all threatened by the war between same and others, ghosts and doubles–seeing in it nothing more than smoke, imaginary structures, signs. To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts. (Strangers to Ourselves 191)

Levinas picks up an argument we have heard before–from Lyotard, Readings, and Heidegger, that philosophy “compels every other discourse to justify itself before philosophy” (“God and Philosophy” 55). Levinas couples this compulsion with Western/Greek/Philosophy’s opposition to transcendence, its prioritization of ontology/Being as the foundation of thought/logos. The desire for the return of the same as a kind of allergy to the Other who is not merely an other but Otherwise to Being. In short, Levinas imagines the possibility of thinking what is beyond thought (see what happened there? but impossibility does not signify the limits of the imagination), or of signifying what opposes the essence of signification. Levinas: “Our question is whether, beyond being, a meaning might not show itself whose priority, translated into ontological language, will be called prior to being” (“God and Philosophy” 57).

Note that Davis will argue that, given Levinas’s framing of this meaning in terms of passivity/receptivity, first philosophy is actually a primary rhetoricity. Amending Levinas’s proclamation of ethics as first philosophy, Davis charges rhetoric as first philosophy. Ernesto Grassi similarly offers a compelling argument in Rhetoric as Philosophy. 

Ok, but why?

For a roundabout answer, let me start as saying: the prioritization of ethics is a response to the problem of atheism. But let me also immediately say that, by Levinas’s understanding of God, many folks who consider themselves “religious” would show us as atheists. How?

Because for Levinas to inhabit God, to be religious, is to awaken from what Heidegger might call the tyranny of the technological, the confining of Being. Levinas:

It is not proof of God’s existence that matter to us here, but rather the breakup of consciousness, which is not a repression into the unconscious but a sobering or a waking up that shakes the “dogmatic slumber” that sleeps at the bottom of all consciousness resting upon the object. (63)

Why the swipe at psychoanalysis? Because it is an attempt to know the other. Levinas resists this desire to know the Other, to thematize the other, to treat the Other as an object of knowledge (Ethics and Infinity 57). Vitanza will remind us that we are fearful of the other, that knowing the Other is the first step to “no-ing” them:

The negative– or negative dialectic–is a kind of pharmakon, and in overdoses, it is extremely dangerous. (E.g., a little girl is a little man without a penis! Or an aryan is not a Jew! And hence, they do not or should not–because in error–exist). The warning on the label–beware of overdoses–is not enough; for we, as KB says, are rotten with perfection. We would No. By saying No, we would purchase our identity. Know ourselves. By purifying the world, we would exclude that which, in our different opinions, threatens our identity. (Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric 12-13). 

The first brick in the path to Auschwitz is laid by Isocrates, mortared by Heidegger. Any notion of “authentic” being is a step toward killing something/one. Hyperbolic? Perhaps. Perhaps. 

Let’s clear up Levinas’s notion of atheism: exactly what are we waking up to? “The Infinite affects thought by simultaneously devastating it and calling it” (66). That is, God is not a knowledge. We cannot know God. Any claim to know God trespasses against God’s holiness. God, for Levinas, marks the absolute transcendence beyond the bounds of Being, beyond the bounds of what a being can know (see the distinction between “books” and “determinate beliefs” on 23 of Ethics and Infinity). 

What is it that we Desire? What is the “desire for what is beyond satisfaction? (“God and Philosophy” 67)? It is the desire for the foundation, for the home, for atheism, for a solitary self left to question the boundaries and horizons of its own Being (you didn’t think Heidegger was getting off scot-free, did you?). Levinas would–perhaps like the Heidegger of “The Question Concerning Technology”–interrupt this desire with the exasperating question posed by the other. He would have us face this question. We Face the question of the Other (l’Autre) in the face of the other-person (l’autrui). And the obligation to the Other which I repay via the prioritization of the other-person is vexed from the start by the presence of third party which institutes the demand for justice and the comparison of incomparables (see especially Ethics and Infinity 89-90). Violence is unavoidable, but silence is inexcusable: “…one must not be silent” (“Questions and Answers” 99). 

Yes. This is confusing as hell. Let’s not even mention the hard stuff like “responsibility” or “substitution.”

But, like almost every theoretical system, there is a simple anecdote that animates its concerns. For Levinas, this is the immediate demand we feel when we look at another person.  From the interview “The Awakening of the I”:

Q: What would you respond to someone who said that he did not admire holiness, did not feel this call of the other, or more simply that the other left him indifferent?

E.L.: I do not believe that is truly possible. It is a matter here of our first experience, the very one that constitutes us, and which is as if the ground of our existence. However indifferent one might claim to be, it is not possible to pass a face by without greeting it, or without saying to oneself, “What will he ask of me?” Not only our personal life, but also all of civilization is founded upon this. (184)

Davis, via Ronell, via Derrida, picks this up. We can choose to ignore the call of the Other (l’Autre) faced in the other’s (autrui’s) face. We can burry our head into a book or a screen. We can deflect the question of the other via some phatic non.sense about the weather. We can choose to ignore alterity. But we cannot deny alterity’s primacy. We cannot but feel alterity. This resonates with much of contemporary rhetoric’s concern with affectivity as a “mode” of signification that precedes being / logos. 

But, then, at the end of all this, why? Because “only a vulnerable I can love his neighbor” (“Questions and Answers” 91). It was Blanchot who reminded us that Levinas took up the challenge of thinking how philosophy might think after the horror of the Holocaust. Levinas admits that the Holocaust is his ghost, it pervades all his thought. And his philosophy, as perverse as it might sound, is an attempt to find a smile in its strangeness. 

“My critique of the totality has come in fact after a political experience that we have not yet forgotten” (Ethics and Infinity 78-79)

Tuesday

First, I want to talk about the assignment sheets a bit. Here’s some comments worth discussing:

I think your methods section does a nice job grounding a specific approach to the assignment–the idea of focusing on a public blindness. But what I would consider, as you think about the ME in MEmorial, is what specific event/person/idea allows you to see this blindness? Why/what do you see – have you experienced – that affords you a different perspective? What keeps others from seeing?

Remember that the critical question I asked people to address was what puts the ME in MEmorial. Why capitalize the ME? Ulmer is interested in juxtaposition–how does your specific experience of a person, idea, event, history, trauma, tragedy, victory, etc. juxtapose against the objective, generic, or traditional conception/representation of that person, idea, event, history, trauma, tragedy, victory, etc. What I hope you get a sense of at this point is that this requires two different kinds of research.

I get, given the fire and brimstone I spewed at the end of last class, why the MEmorial might appear as a critical project that seeks to highlight the flaws in humanity. And, honestly, I think that is what Ulmer is aiming for. But let me suggest that it doesn’t have to be that kind of project. I am not expecting “critique.” The project isn’t necessarily about pointing out how stupid or ignorant people (or “society”) is for believing / valuing / championing / supporting something. Rather, the project can also call our attention to another way of seeing something–a way of seeing that you ground in a unique personal perspective itself generated via unique personal experiences. 

A note about format. As a technical/professional writer, style, format, and proof-reading are important. Whenever possible, use single-spacing. Use block paragraph format (rather than indented paragraphs). Use bold for headings (or use heading formats). Something like this: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/590/04/

Second, I want to talk about PechaKucha today. Here’s an example one on Roland Barthes’s concept of the punctum. 

Here is a guide for creating a PechaKucha. It is worth a look. 

Peyton Manning, the Playoffs, and the Ontic/Ontological Question

I wanted to follow up on one of Lauren’s questions from the end of last class–what is the difference between ontic and ontological? Heidegger addresses this early in the essay–it is the distinction between “correct” and “truth.” In some ways, by exposing how the correct is not necessarily the true (how we can give a correct answer without ever approaching the essence of a thing), Heidegger is echoing the the “emancipatory” narratives of the French/critical tradition critiqued by Lyotard. 

However, a question becomes whether Heidegger is proposing to give us THE “true” essence of a thing. In short–does Heidegger believe we can reach truth? Honestly, I am not sure. Neither, I believe, are other scholars. Rickert will approach an answer to this question later in the semester (Rickert’s Ambient Rhetorics imagines a Heideggerian rhetoric). 

For an example of the ontic/ontological binary, I would offer the questions surrounding Peyton Manning this week. A number of people have pointed out that, despite being one of the greatest regular season quaterbacks of all-time, with truly impressive statistics, Peyton is a mediocre 10-11 in the postseason. As a Patriots fan, that record makes me very happy. Riding the happy mood (at least until Sunday, when I think Manning will smoke a decimated Patriots defense… but I get ahead of myself). 

So, every sports commentator is in a rhetorical situation that begs the question: is Peyton Manning “truly” (ontologically) a mediocre quarterback? Because, it is absolutely “correct” (ontically) that 10-11 is mediocre.

I will return to this question and this example Tuesday night. Food for thought. 

Heidegger and the Question Concerning Technology

Some questions I would like to raise:

• What is the essence of technology?
• Why is the destining of revealing (of the essence of technology) the greatest danger humanity faces?
• Is there an optimism to Heidegger?
• How does Heidegger’s solution to the question concerning technology (poesis) compare to Lyotard’s solution for the emerging metanarrative of performativity (parology)?
• What is the irony of giving a reading quiz like set of questions concerning Heidegger’s essay?

Cagle’s question: “If the difference between older and modern technologies is of degree, rather than kind, where do we tip from valuable, useful, non-threatening relationships w/ nature, objects, and technologies to “the essence of technology” as the greatest danger humanity faces?”

Worsham and the Question Concerning Invention

Here’s a few questions to wrangle with:

• How does Worsham connect Heidegger to notions of invention in R/C?
• What does Worsham consider the markings of a Heideggerian model of writing?
• What does Worsham mean by “agonistic” writing? What doesn’t she mean?

One point to raise–does the “magical” notion of writing-as-art “end up serving the ends of technology by making the writer’s self a natural resource to be mined for its unique crystal of truth and vision” (201)? In other words, via Heidegger, does it end up with a kind of causality that cares only about the silversmith. Obviously, those of you who are familiar with my investments can imagine how I respond to this question. 

As a follow up to the Kairos piece dealing with Ulmer, electracy, and the mystory, Ellie Browning and I have been working on a piece that focuses on choric invention. We draw our theory of chorography from a number of people we will be reading later in this class, including Ulmer, Thomas Rickert, Jeff Rice, Sarah J. Arroyo, and others. 

From these theorists, we generalize four guidelines for choric invention. Generally, these guidelines extend from one of Ulmer’s two critical influences–Derrida’s reinterpretation of the chora, and/or Roland Barthes’s theory of the punctum (in opposition to the studium):

• The first principle explores how environs operate as active agents in an unpredictable inventive process, rather than serve as mere backdrop for human acting and thinking.
• The second suggests that choric invention involves a juxtaposition of personal experience alongside objective, “public,” representation; it is this part of choric invention that is drawn from Barthes and his distinction between the studium and the punctum or, in the case of Brooke (2007), between Barthes hermeneutic and proairetic interpretive codes.
• The third principle, similar to the second, notes how choric invention highlights the ways in which particular environments/rhetorical situations can overlap and cause us to simultaneously inhabit multiple–and perhaps contradictory–subject positions.
• Finally, the fourth principle, shared by all of these theorists, insists that choric invention follows no articulable system. Byron Hawk understands choric invention as an approach to invention that resists systemization–or, in Ulmers terms, the distinction between a heretical heuretic and an orthodox heuristic. Choric invention is an invention of a means of inventing, not a following of a guaranteed means that promises to lead to the definitive answer. And while it cannot be reduced to a clear articulable system, this does not mean that we cannot generalize contours that mark an approach. Our goal here is to offer a coherent and concise explication of choric invention, highlighting its resonances with Kalman’s ambient, ambulatory, and serendipitous process, before sharing a pedagogic practice inspired by both Ulmer and Kalman’s work.

We compare a choric form of invention to the work of multimedia artist and author Maira Kalman. Here’s an example of Kalman’s work. Here’s an image particularly important to the article:

And here’s an example of Kalman talking about her process:

Here’s another example:

Here’s how, in the article, we discuss these videos:

What she shares with Ulmer and the theorists that extend his work is an opposition to thinking happiness or ethics in terms of a foundational idea or metanarrative. Rather, both her philosophy of life and her approach to composition begin with an openness to the moment and its peculiarities. What marks all of Kalman’s works is her attention to idiosyncratic details, at times expressing a profound sadness, and at others a giddy delight to the unexpected, odd moments of life.

In her talk “Art and the Power of Not Knowing,” Kalman reveals that there is a deliberate process driving her interest in the seemingly mundane. She emphasizes the importance of learning to traverse places alone, without agenda, with “an empty brain.” Kalman repeatedly links her creative process to specific locales and idiosyncratic experiences, urging would be artists “to be aware of the moment” and that “whatever you tackle can be tackled from a personal point of view and can have serendipity.” We believe this emphasis on subjective experience, the power of place, and the significance of serendipity mark her compositional approach as choric.

In Kalman’s (July 2012) interview, titled “Thinking and Feeling,” with THNKR, the web series produced by @radical.media, she reiterates the importance of “allowing her brain to empty.” The key practice for this emptying is walking. She explains:

Walking enables your senses to really pick up lots of things. You can feel your body going through space. I’m sure there is some kind of explanation for it in physics and biochemistry or something like that. But walking clears your brain and fills your soul and makes you quite happy.

Rickert (2012) identifies the “something like that” as neuroscience, connecting choric invention to much of the recent research on ambiance and brain activity. Of course, walking here isn’t simply walking–it is walking with a purposeful purposelessness, akin to the surrealist practice of the derivé (Debord 1958).  Key to this strategic walking is the ability to attune oneself to the serendipitous:

A lot of what my work is waiting for the unexpected and to be surprised, to be walking down the street and to not know what I’m going to see and go “Oh! Ah ha! Of course, that’s what I was going to see today!”

For Kalman, the “Ah ha!” moment is when something “makes your heart go “ah, that’s really fantastic!” The “Ah ha!” moment is a critical component of Gregory Ulmer’s pedagogy–a moment of unexpected (self) discovery. What for Ulmer and others who theorize choric invention is akin to a potentially painful sting, Barthes’s punctum, is for Kalman a moment of affective delight, and a core component of her inventive process.

Tuesday: Ulmer and Electracy

Today’s plan:

1. Address Ulmer’s Electronic Monuments

2. Ulmer’s interest in Haiku

To begin approaching Ulmer, I want to return to some of the binaries I laid out while we were discussing Ong. This will give us a sense of what Ulmer is after. 

Note: pairs marked with an * are taken from Lester Faigley’s Fragments of Rationality (Faigley, in turn takes them from Ihab Hassan’s “The Culture of Postmodernism.” The pair marked ** stems from Ulmer’s introduction to Electronic Monuments; while image connects to sight and the eye, Ulmer deploys it in the sense of the infinite–since a single image always conveys more information than words could ever totalize, realize, capture, contain.
 

“A nation, like an individual, can come to know itself better by learning how to remember and tell its dreams” (22). 

“The challenge to democracy is to educate an electrate citizenry” (47). 

Here’s a few questions in relation to Electronic Monuments:

1. What’s up with “EmerAgency”? xii-xiii, xv, xxxi, 9-10, 13 [new monument] 
2. What is a MEmorial? xiv [see also xiii, 16] , xxix, xxxiii-iv, 6-7, 14, 16 [trauma of individuation], 28, 42-43 [and/as abject], 48 [components of MEmorial], 65 [MEmorial and testimony, sample assignment], 66 [MEmorial and avant garde poetics], 77 [MEmorial and stock/ing photos–inspiration for tonight’s homework], 
3. What’s the difference between testifying and witnessing? xxvii, 7 [perspectivist window]
4. What is CATTt? [and don’t just say a heuristic…] xxxii
5. What is/constitutes a “subject” in electracy? xvii, xxi, xxx, 10 [nation], 18 [group subject], 19 [popcycle]
6. What is ATH (até)? xv [return of the repressed], xxiv, 21, 

Why the need for “electric” monuments? What kind of “consultancy” (analysis, critique) does the EmerAgency hope to accomplish? Ulmer writes:

Public discussion remained fixed on the events, rarely reflecting on the frame of the events, never raising the structural questions that might help us grasp the cause and function of private and public death. (35)

So, question: what does Ulmer mean here by “structure”? [Our rituals of morning contribute to the formation of a community] (34)

Discussion of chora: pages 39-40:

As reactivated in contemporary theory, chora names a secularized, personal sacred: it maps a relationship between an individual and those places that reveal the categories (classifying system, metaphysics) of a society.(40)

Discussion of traffic fatalities and the abject, 42-43:

The premise of the MEmorial is that traffic fatalities are not an anomaly in an otherwise rational order, as normal consultants would have it. 

The de$ign preimse, following Bataille, is that traffic fatalities are fundamentally “abject,” meaning that hey are a sacrifice on behalf of some “value” that is more important to the society than the annual loss of motorists. This value is not an ideal that may be named in a concept (justice, virtue, freedom), but remains inarticulate within the bodies and behaviors of individuals in the private sphere, untransformed, nontranscendent, untransposed, unredeemed, (what Bataille called “formless”). Call it an “abject.” What memorials are to ideals, MEmorials are to abjects. It is the case that every ideal is shadowed by an abject? the place to look for formless values is not in social narratives but in the habitus of behaviors. The traffic accident is a short circuit bringing into direct contact an abstract machine and the fluxes of matter, productive of group subjectivity. Bataille proposes the me as monster or remainder that refuses to be distracted by the glorious body of the ideal. (43)

Here, I want to argue, is a critical passage for coming to grips with Ulmer’s desires for the MEmorial. We will parse this passage out near the conclusion of class. 

Second, I want to spend part of class working with images. Source material, Ulmer’s Internet Invention and its discussion of Basho and haiku reasoning. 

Thursday: Inventing the MEmorial

In class today I will ask you to break into groups of 2. Working together, I will ask you to create a one page assignment sheet for the MEmorial project. This should involve the typical genre conventions of the assignment sheet. I will give you 20 minutes to do this. Please remember that whatever the process, and whatever else you want to do/make/perform/write/whatever, the final component of this process is a PechaKucha presentation. 

In part two of class… TOP SECRET

In the third and final part of class, we’ll return to the questions I posted on Tuesday (above) to talk about key concepts and passages. If we have time, I want to look at some of the Haiku’s (although these might have to wait until Tuesday). 

For homework, I’ll ask you to revise your Project One: Assignment sheet based on our class discussion and submit a finalized version, as a Word .docx, via Canvas. Also, I will ask you to collect material for your MEmorial (10 articles, 20 pictures). This material should form the “objective representation” or “studium” or “traditional” or “memorial” component of your MEmorial project. 

Heuristic: Parts of an Assignment Sheet

Purpose / Rationale: What is the purpose of this assignment? Why ask students to do this? Rationale is very similar to purpose, they might be combined. What is the inspiration for this project? Who are the important theorists? What are the key terms? (i.e., This project asks you to compose a MEmorial. Theorist Gregory Ulmer explicates the MEmorial as… He capitalizes the ME to stress…)

Medium / Materials: What do you need to do this project? What will the project be/ (i.e, in this project you will compose a MEmorial using the presentation application PechaKucha). 

Methods: How might a student begin the project? What are the steps / key points of the process? 

Tuesday

 Hi all. Welcome to New Media. This post will help us walk through what I hope to accomplish in class today. 

First, we will review the syllabus. HEY SANTOS: Remember to take attendance. 

Second, we will set up accounts with SquareSpace. You can register for a 14 day free trial. For homework, you will need to activate the account ($10 per month, $8 per month if you pay for a year in advance). I want you to think of a name for your space, select a template, and craft an “about” page. 

Third, we will talk about Twitter. We will set up Twitter accounts on Thursday. 

Fourth, I will say a few things about the reading homework, Walter Ong’s essay “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought.”

Thursday

Today’s class will focus on Walter Ong’s essay, “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought.”

First, we’ll share some of the PowerPoints from the last class in an effort to start a conversation. 

Second, I’ll talk about about how Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy corresponds to Ong’s project. 

Third, we’ll set up Twitter accounts for class communication. 

For homework, you are reading Gregory Ulmer’s Electronic Monuments, the preface, introduction, and first 33 pages. Remember that you are reading Ulmer as if it were a very long assignment sheet–your job is to tease out from this material a project to complete.

That said, realize that this will be difficult reading. Three pieces of advice when reading theory:

• First, set aside ample time. Think about how much time you would normally need to read about 60 pages of material. Now triple it. 
• Second, just keep reading. Don’t stop and wonder about getting every detail–especially with an author like Ulmer who loves to invent new terms and likes to reference a wide variety of material. Rather, just try to plow through and get a sense of for what he is aiming. 
• Third, write–don’t highlight. Highlighting is useless. Instead, use a pen to underline key lines or mark the margin. Then write a sentence at the top of every page that has an underline. This will go much farther than highlighting for helping you digest and recall what you have read.

Additionally, I use Evernote for all my reading notes–every time I read something, I start an Evernote file for it with key quotes and thoughts. Evernote is amazing because it is both 1) free, 2) multi-platform (computer / smartphone / tablet), 3) a bookmarking platform (meaning you can “save” webpages and “tag” them), and 4) social (so if you are working on a group project, you can create an Evernote notebook for everyone to share). All nerds should try it. 

Kant and/as Enlightenment

Hello world. You have stumbled upon some lecture notes for my graduate seminar in Contemporary Rhetorics at the University of South Florida. In preparation for our first class session, students read Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question ‘What is Enlightenment?'” and chapters 4 and 5 of Bill Readings’s University in Ruins. 

Preamble: syllabus. Why are you here? (poststructuralism, postmodernism, signification, context, history, hystery)

First:

Second, highlights from “An Answer…”

• Radical individuality
  • Freedom / autonomy at the core of Kant’s ethics and his politics
  • In America, via Emerson, the notion of “self-reliance”
    • Kant is skeptical of immaturity, places immaturity in distinction to progress (below)
    • Emerson, to an extent, praises immaturity (the young boy who offers opinions free of social restrictions). Civil disobedience. Working out of a Petrarchian/humanistic tradition that distrusts the human animal (Hobbes, Machiavelli, etc). 
  • Kant’s primary obligation is to Reason/Truth (secular, yet transcendental–a Platonic affair). Hence, deontological ethics. Using Reason to identify the right way to live. Working out of the optimism of Locke’s tabula rasa (all wo/men created equal). Hence, “think, but obey”
• University at the Intersection of Public and Private
  • “Think, but Obey”
  • In front of the literate “public” sphere, Burke’s Parlor, the subject is called to “think,” to critique.
  • Private Obligation: as a citizen/subject of the state, the subject is compelled to obey. 
    • Frederick’s place in late 18th century politics; Frederick’s desire for cosmopolitanism, his cultural rivalry with conservative and orthodox France. Hence, the livestock metaphors have significance for a ruler looking to modernize beyond an agrarian image
    • Interest in Scottish Enlightenment
    • Revolution in America; growing tensions in France
  • Public Freedom: as a scholar/participant in the great conversation of mankind, as a resident of Burke’s parlor. 
    • Think of Readings’s depiction of Humboldt; inspiration to Jefferson. 
    • Insists upon “public” freedom because of the belief in progress; our advancement toward the right way to live
• A Subtle Critique of Plato
  • Kant is not looking to create philosopher kings, but rather aims to make each (wo)men a philosopher. He knows full well that many do not have the inclination, determination, or aptitude to earn the title. However, he believes that knowledge can promote emancipation from our cave of ignorance
  • Cue Nietzsche: you see a will to knowledge? I see a will to power:
    • Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to determine and press into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or political (moral) thought or art, some great data of valuations—that is, former positings of values, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called ‘truths.’ It is for these investigators to make everything that has happened and has been esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even ‘time,’ and to overcome the entire past—an enormous and wonderful task in whose service every subtle pride, every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, ‘thus it shall be!’ They first determine the Whither andFor What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power. (“We Scholars” Beyond Good and Evil) 
    • Cue Foucault
• Progress Narratives
  • Hence the “slow” maturity
  • Hegel’s sense of history as a dynamic unfolding of Geist through the triadic process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. From slavery, to rational, self-realization. Or, taken up by Marx, the gradual advancement of the proletariat’s unveiling of bourgeoisie control over the means of production. Etc. 
  • Cue the Lyotard. 

So, let’s boil the Enlightenment down to a four principles:

1. Autonomy / Individuality
2. Abstract Thought over Material World (Purity over Messy)
3. Universality
4. Progress

Third, some highlights from Readings:

• From outside our assigned readings:
  • “The University becomes modern when it takes on the responsibility for working out the relation between the subject and the state, when it offers to incarnate an idea that will both theorize and inculcate this relationship” (53). 
  • Excellence as the postmodern di.versity (which leaves Bloom’s University in ruins):
    • “The need for excellence is what we all agree on. And we all agree upon it because it is not an ideology, in the sense that it has no external referent or internal content” (23). Like conservatives bending postmodern suspicions toward absolute truth to subvert policies targeting global warming, encouraging “excellence” can be seen as deploying poststructuralist ambiguity to defer/discredit/dismiss “political” (i.e., in Enlightenment terms, “critical,” education). 
    • This is what allows the University president, in chapter 4, to behave akin to DeLeuze’s schizophrenic–“from judge to synthesizer, to executive and fund raiser, without publicly expressing any opinions or passing any judgments whatsoever” (55). And, hey, Readings was writing this stuff in 1996!
    • […] French thought becomes concerned with the idea of humanity, while the Germans focus on the notion of ethnicity” (60). and “the University is pressed into the service of the state once the notion of universal reason is replaced by the idea of national culture as the animating principle of the University.” In America, this shift happens sometime around the 1920’s with the introduction of America’s literary manhood. Bildung.

What I want to take out of Readings’s history of the transformation/tension between German visions for the University. The question: “Why are you here?”

Specifically, I want to use ancient Greece as a heuristic for thinking about the purposes of higher education. 

• Plato, the University in terms of philosopher kings (an intellectual oligarchy)
• Isocrates, the University in terms of paideia, developing our cultural character (ethos, epideictic rhetoric); an institution of social conservation
• Socrates/Gorgias, the University as the seat of questioning (paging Dr. Kant); the University as a center of disruption, agitation; an instigator of social change

And, a fourth possibility, born out of modernity itself–the University as an institution dedicated to knowledge for knowledge’s sake (?)

Getting ready for Lyotard. Some questions to keep in mind as you prepare for next week’s class:

• Is performativity a bad word for Lyotard? for you?
• What is paralogy? Can it be taught? In fyc? Should we teach it, to approach paralogy denotatively and/or prescriptively?
• In what kind of University were you educated? Go look at its mission statement/presidential letter. Is it “excellent”? Is “excellence” rhetorical? (Bonus: what does it mean to be rhetorical?)
• I would argue that the most important section of this book is its brief and implicit echo of Nietzsche. Find it. 
• Why, if dissensus cannot be institutionalized (p. 167), does Readings think it can operate as the foundation of the new University?

Things to share:

• Kant, from Lectures on Ethics, 1963 (Example of deontological ethics in action, the obligation to restrict my own consumption
• Nietzsche, “We Scholars” from Beyond Good and Evil
• Humboldt, “University Reform in Germany” 

This summer I find myself teaching another section of Expository Writing, an upper-division writing course and graduation requirement. For the past few years I have taught the course in a fairly eccentric way, one that matches up with my proclivities for postpedagogy. Students choose a topic in which they have a personal investment and read and write about that topic for the entirety of the course.

This semester, spurred a bit by boredom and a bit by fresh research interests, I decided to add in a wrinkle. In addition to their topics, students would write in-class on some assign readings. These readings all deal with the history of the essay, and on whether it is a viable form for digital writing. We read a short piece (perhaps a list of which will follow) and craft responses. We started with Christy Walpole’s “The Essayification of Everything.” That essay led me to Montaigne’s “On the Education of Children,” and my students first in-class writing prompt: to craft a post that uses Montaigne as a relay for thinking through the idea of “On Writing.”

I appreciated Walpole’s characterization of Montaigne (who she contrasts with Bacon) because of her emphasis on how his trepidatious style can be used as an ethic for life–an ethic that shares much with my interest in Levinas and his ethical prioritization of the other. So I approached his essay on education with enthusiasm.

While the name “Montaigne” resonated on the back of my memory, I couldn’t remember reading anything of his. I was happily surprised to find my favorite quote from Cicero near the start of his essay:

The authority of those who teach, is very often an impediment to
those who desire to learn.

Postpedagogy in a nutshell. I also appreciated Montaigne’s analogy between learning and eating–that the brain of the student resembles her stomach. Both must be given time to digest. Both should avoid regurgitation.