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Rhetorics and Technologies
New Directions in Writing and Communication
Stuart A. Selber, Stuart A. Selber
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Rhetorics and Technologies
New Directions in Writing and Communication
Stuart A. Selber, Stuart A. Selber
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About This Book
Electric discussions of the interplay between technological innovation and communication
Recognizing an increasingly technological context for rhetorical activity, the thirteen contributors to this volume illuminate the challenges and opportunities inherent in successfully navigating intersections between rhetoric and technology in existing and emergent literacy practices. Edited by Stuart A. Selber, Rhetorics and Technologies positions technology as an inevitable aspect of the rhetorical situation and as a potent force in writing and communication activities.
Taking a broad approach, this volume is not limited to discussion of particular technological systems (such as new media or wikis) or rhetorical contexts (such as invention or ethics). The essays instead offer a comprehensive treatment of the rhetoric-technology nexus. The book's first section considers the ways in which the social and material realities of using technology to support writing and communication activities have altered the borders and boundaries of rhetorical studies. The second section explores the discourse practices employed by users, designers, and scholars of technology when communicating in technological contexts. In the final section, projects and endeavors that illuminate the ways in which discourse activities can evolve to reflect emerging sociopolitical realties, technologies, and educational issues are examined. The resulting text bridges past and future by offering new understandings of traditional canons of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—as they present themselves in technological contexts without discarding the rich history of the field before the advent of these technological innovations. Rhetorics and Technologies includes a foreword by Carolyn R. Miller and essays by John M. Carroll, Marilyn M. Cooper, Paul Heilker, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Debra Journet, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Jason King, James E. Porter, Stuart A. Selber, Geoffrey Sirc, Susan Wells, and Anne Frances Wysocki.
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1
Redrawing Borders and Boundaries
Being Linked to the Matrix
Biology, Technology, and Writing
Edward Hoagland writes:
I'd lie on my back on a patch of moss watching a swaying poplar's branches interlace with another's, and the tremulous leaves vibrate, and the clouds forgather to parade zoologically overhead, and felt linked to the whole matrix, as you either do or you don't through the rest of your life. And childhood—nine or ten, I think—is when this best happens. It's when you develop a capacity for quiet, a confidence in your solitude, your rapport with a Nature both animate and not much so: what winged things possibly feel, the blessing of water, the rhythm of weather, and what might bite you and what will not. (49–50)
Perhaps it was because my father is a fisheries biologist and we spent a lot of time on lakes when I was a child that I know this feeling of being linked to the whole matrix and that it is deeply sedimented into my thinking about all aspects of life. In 1986 I published an article about the ecology of writing in which I struggled to articulate my sense that writing is social action, not simply an activity that takes place in a social context. I hoped to encourage a view of writing and writers as fully engaged in social practices: I wanted to emphasize how writers and writings shape their social environments and are shaped by them in a manner analogous to the way organisms interact with their environments. It was also around 1986 that some of the classic expositions of complex systems theory were coming out: the first English edition of Benoît Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982), Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers's Order Out of Chaos (1984), Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores's Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986), and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's The Tree of Knowledge (1987). Although I did not read these works until much later, I was aware of chaos theory (through the popular account Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick, published in 1987), and after the publication of my article I increasingly thought that the systems of writing are not just analogous to ecological systems but are driven by the same principles. In meetings at the Los Alamos lab, the Santa Fe Institute, MIT, and the University of Illinois, researchers in the diverse fields of economics, physics, biology, cybernetics, mathematics, and meteorology were coming to similar conclusions. The challenges of investigating chaotic phenomena blurred the boundaries between disciplines and between the realms they studied. I, too, believed that once social phenomena such as writing were viewed as complex systems, the distinction between nature and culture would come into question, just as the related dualities of mind and body, subjectivity and objectivity, had. When I read about autopoetic systems, I felt as though someone was explaining something I implicitly knew, or, as Merleau-Ponty says about reading Husserl or Heidegger, as though I was “recognizing what [I] had been waiting for” (viii). When I finally read Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind (which I had owned, unread, almost since it was published in 1972) and Maturana and Varela's The Tree of Knowledge, I found my nascent vision of writing as a web clarified and expanded in Bateson's idea of mind as “immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology” (461) and in Maturana and Varela's claim that “we humans, as humans, exist in the network of structural couplings that we continually weave through the permanent linguistic trophallaxis of our behavior” (234).
The study of complexity, originating around the early twentieth century,1 has grown exponentially in the past three decades. Proceeding under various titles—chaos, complexity, emergence, autopoesis, self-organization—this research has generated new understandings of, among other things, brains, fractals, thermodynamics, ontogeny, software, ecosystems, synchronicity, and communication and economic systems. It is also drawn on increasingly in theories of virtual humanism and network culture, as in the work of Mark Hansen, Katherine Hayles, and Mark Taylor. At the same time, cognate understandings of systems developed in the work of phenomenologists Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as well as in related theories of Bergson, Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Guattari, Bourdieu, Giddens, Latour, and Bakhtin, as well as Edwin Hutchins in distributed cognition and Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in situated learning, among others.2 My reading in all of these theories (see fig. 1.1) increasingly led me to the conclusion that writing is not a matter of autonomously intended action on the world, but more like monitoring, nudging, adapting, adjusting—in short, responding to the world.
Although few researchers have explicitly applied complexity theory to writing,3 several groups of researchers in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, working from some of the related theories just mentioned, have offered understandings of writing as a dynamic and interactive system. Members of the New London Group, many of whom have backgrounds in social theories of meaning and language, envision language systems as structured by the interactions of users; compositionists such as Charles Bazerman, David Russell, and Paul Prior draw on activity theory to conceive of writing as a means of making and transforming social worlds; and Victor Vitanza and his “third sophistic” followers derive a vision of writing as an embodied and open system from their readings of Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari. My approach to writing differs from theirs primarily in my emphasis on writing as arising from responses to others and to social and physical environments, responses that involve both body and mind and are only partly and sometimes intentional.
Fig. 1.1 Source theories
The New London Group and activity theorists both see writing as predominantly an intentional cognitive process. The New London Group acknowledges that “the human mind is embodied, situated, and social” (30) and that “immersion in a community of learners” is necessary for learning literate practices (31), but they argue that “conscious control and awareness of what one knows and does” and the ability to “critique what they are learning” are crucial to the activity of writing (32). Activity theory recognizes a large role for tacit consciousness in writing, but activity theorists, like the New London Group, focus on writing as a conscious cognitive process. Bazerman and Russell argue, “Things human exist in an evanescent world held up by focused consciousness and attention and activity” (1). The emphasis on consciousness in activity theory can be traced to the Marxian assertion of fundamental differences between humans and other animals. Vassily Davydov explains, “In the process of human anthropogenesis, a break occurred between organic needs and the means of satisfying them, that is, human beings lost their instincts” (49). In place of instincts, humans use social forms of activity to satisfy their needs, and consciousness supplies the “internal images” that link need and goal: it is “people's ideal images that make it possible to foresee the product” (40). But theories and studies of cognition in animals, beginning in the early twentieth century with Uexküll and continuing to the present (see Csányi, Griffin, and Hauser), as well as contemporary studies of human cognition, have undermined any notion that humans have lost their instincts or that the link between need and goal is determined by ideal internal images.
Vitanza, in contrast, seems to envision writers as merely channeling writing. His emphasis on the fluidity—the flow—of writing turns it into an autonomous Nietzschean life force that animates human agents who are largely or entirely unconscious of its desires. Writers are not understood to be making choices, but are driven to write. Vitanza says, “What writing…wants is a writer!…A body filled with tics that cannot but (not) write!” (4), a statement highly reminiscent of Barthes's idea of the death of the author—“the author is never more than the instance writing” (145). Although Vitanza's understanding of writing as engaging the body is a good corrective to the idea that writing is dominantly cognitive, he seems to acknowledge no role for intentional response.
In this essay I argue that writing is an embodied interaction with other beings and our environments. As a result, writing is as much a biological as a cultural practice: the practices that are writing emerge as people respond to others and to their world; they are not the product of minds somehow separated from bodies nor of innate technical or linguistic abilities. Furthermore, I argue that writing and technology are cognate practices. Arising as an epiphenomenon of engaged action in the world, tools and words play the same role in our lives. As concrete objects that can be manipulated and can store information, tools and words extend cognitive processes beyond the individual brain. Other beings can also be recruited in the same way, as dogs extend the abilities of shepherds to control sheep and editors extend the abilities of writers to consider other perspectives. As I use the term, writing often describes both linguistic and technological practices, practices that function to elaborate cognitive ecologies such as those that make sheep herding and publishing possible. Writing in this sense is what makes us human. The extent of our abilities to elaborate cognitive ecologies may set us apart from other animals, but no nonbiological source is needed to account for our abilities, an argument buttressed by evidence that other animals share many of the same abilities. Neither language nor technology is foreign to our nature; tools and words are us, not things we create and use.
To get a sense of what writing looks like from this perspective, consider these examples. First, the use of DEVONthink by professional writer Steven Johnson. DEVONthink is sophisticated indexing software that works on an archive of the writer's writings and notes and excerpts from the writer's reading; Johnson explains that it not only searches on specific words but also “learns associations between individual words, by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other.” He describes how in working on a book project involving the history of the London sewers, he ran a search on “sewage.” Among the results, he also received references to “waste,” a word that often occurs with “sewage,” including a quote about how calcium waste products were repurposed into bones in the evolution of vertebrates.
That might seem like an errant result, but it sent me off on a long and fruitful tangent into the way complex systems—whether cities or bodies—find productive uses for the waste they create. It's still early, but I may well get an entire chapter out of that little spark of an idea.
Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously the computer wasn't conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I'm not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.
Here is a second example. A group of students in a writing class make a documentary video reporting their research on the Paulding light, a well-known mystery in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Their research involves a trip to the site, where, using their cell phones and a GPS unit, they establish that the light comes from headlights on a highway in the distance, and they use a video camera to record their observations and commentary. Although their teacher might be tempted to exclaim at their cleverness in using all that technology, for them the cell phones, GPS unit, and video camera simply come to hand as part of the already-established consensual domain of these extensively mediated and technologized students, students for whom nearly continual communication with others, never being lost, and being immersed in images of their own and others' making has been a way of life. Through their actions, extended in their prosthetic technologies, they create the world as knowable, a world in which there are no obstacles to ascertaining precise positions and exchanging words and images and in which, as a consequence, there are no mysteries.
These examples illustrate three points I want to make about writing considered as a biological/cultural, linguistic/technological practice. First, notice that in the process of writing, words and tools do not normally arise as separate objects to be used but are experienced as part of our bodies and brains; they are, as Heidegger says, ready-to-hand, not present-at-hand. Steven Johnson experiences the genesis of the idea of how complex systems repurpose wastes as a collaboration between him and the indexing system, a productive interaction between carbon-and silicon-based intelligences; and in both examples, the technologies of DEVONthink, GPS unit, cell phones, and video camera are as much a part of the writers as their hands and eyes. Second, writing is not just autonomous social action but always an interaction with other beings and objects in our surroundings, an ongoing process of stimulus and response that we habitually misconceive as autonomous planned action. The “errant result” returned by DEVONthink stimulated Johnson to think in different ways about waste, and the teacher in the second example credits the students with bright ideas about using technology to achieve their goals that probably never entered their conscious minds. Third, writing is a complex system organized by dense interactions of writers and their worlds. DEVONthink, like all of the technologies of propagating and indexing writing, amplifies and makes visible these dense interactions out of which invention arises. And the students “use” “communication” technologies to investigate the Paulding light because through interactions with one another and their worlds they have become habituated to how these technologies abolish distance, and they thus experience (and expect) all people and places to be always accessible.
Words and Tools Arise from Interaction
Neither words nor tools exist prior to or separately from human action. They arise as an epiphenomenon of that action and are continually reconfigured or reinterpreted as they arise again in different situations. Perhaps the best-known enunciation of this understanding of language is Wittgenstein's in Philosophical Investigations. Disputing Augustine's contention that the meaning of a word is what it stands for, Wittgenstein argues that the meanings of words arise from their use in social interaction. He imagines a simple protolanguage used by a builder and his assistant: “A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ‘block,’ ‘pillar,’ ‘slab,’ ‘beam.’ A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call” (sec. 2).
Wittgenstein argues that this language is learned by training B to respond to the words in particular ways. He asks, “Don't you understand the call ‘Slab!’ if you act upon it in such-and-such a way?” (sec. 6). B has learned the use of the words and that is all he needs to know to understand and play this language game. Wittgenstein asks, “Now what do the words of this language signify?” and answers with another question, “What is supposed to shew what they signify, if not the kind of use they have?” (sec. 10). He concludes that “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (sec. 23).
Paleoanthropologist Alison Wray advances a similar theory of the origin of language in what she calls a protolanguage that consisted of holistic utterances that later developed into referential symbols. More along the lines of Wittgenstein, another anthropologist,...