Abstractions

October 23, 2007

Abstracts due below before midnight, Friday, October 26

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  • 1. Andrea Vought  |  October 24, 2007 at 12:43 pm

    Kinetic Pedagogy: A Refiguring of Sophistic Rhetorical Training in the Composition Classroom

    Hypothetically, I’m targeting this paper at the Pedagogy journal.

    In his 2005 address at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Douglas Hesse decried the lack of student agency in the writing classroom. In this paper I argue that this antipathy and lack of agency towards writing stems from the very foundation of the introductory composition class itself: the bulk of rhetorical theory taught in first-year composition courses is the rigid Aristotelian model of writer-audience-purpose and the Current-Traditional paradigm’s rule-driven, grammatical stronghold on the writing process.
    As a result, composition students are finding these largely mandatory introductory classes to be mechanical, boring, and having little relevance to their own lives and courses of study. Indeed, it is imperative that students’ agency be reinstituted into the writing classroom.
    I argue, by traversing the work of Kathleen Welch, Jeffrey Walker, Susan Jarratt, and Susan Miller, that helping students to take ownership of their writing is not a lost cause; however, a reevaluation of the foundation of pedagogical practice in the writing classroom is imperative before that change can take place.
    To accomplish this task, I advocate turning to the pragmatic civic rhetorics of the Sophists and marginalized female rhetors in ancient Greece. These practical theories have been all but lost in the composition classroom, having been underwritten by the rhetoric of Aristotle. A reinstatement of these more hegemonic practices, Isocrates’ paideia in particular, would result in a composition program that equips students with the skills necessary to be dynamic, flexible, able not only to traverse academic disciplines, including service learning and community service projects, but also to shape discourse in the sociopolitical-economical-technological realm.
    Finally, to answer Dr. Hesse’s call to diversify the classroom, I will also show how the rehistoricizing of the Sophists and Greek female rhetors, including Sappho, Aspasia, and Diotima, into the corpus of texts studied at the introductory level will likewise help minority and ESL students find their voices where they had previously been silenced.

  • 2. Jule Wallis  |  October 24, 2007 at 5:18 pm

    Jule Wallis- “Becoming,” Desire, and Physical Production
    Shows such as Star Trek, The Bionic Woman, and The Matrix explore the evolution of the human body into an entity/subject both carbon and technologically based. Yet, alongside these shows are programs (Nip and Tuck and Extreme Makeover, to name a few) exploring a similar theme- the ongoing production of the body, the making of physical (and thus psychic) perfection. While it may be a few years before we witness the realization of Cyborgs (although with the emergence of internal tracking devices, internal organ monitors, artificial organs, I wonder just how close the transformation may actually be) human bodies, and thus psyches/consciousness, have begun to morph into a “becoming”- whether that “becoming” is the ecstatic smearing of subjectivity/existence that Brian Rotman yearns for or not is questionable in my mind. Either way, this merging of the human with technology has created a realization that: “Undoubtedly, something irrevocable is happening to the self in the presence of the robotic-informatic web of media systems, external memory devices, and digital procedures threading through it” (1).
    Thus, understanding subjectivity/consciousness cannot be found within the internal, autonomous, subjective self but through the decentered outside-rather than inside, extraneously and techno-made identity/existence. This slippery slope of always becoming/mutating can complicate identity/consciousness: “But in relation to the effects and affects of technology, the self—either as too present subject or elusive object—becomes ever more difficult to locate and theorize” (1). The self is “assembled” via language, media, digital; technical, medical, scientific inquiry, and hypertext communication- so that the body is no longer figured or understood as a natural specimen, but “a made thing.” But what does/would this “made” body look like? Doyle and Rotman theorize the made body as a “becoming” subject; the self morphed into the realm of the digital, the alife. While less abstract, I would like to conceptualize Rotman’s “Becoming Beside Oneself” in correlation to the physical body where assemblages consisting of numerous discourses create or make a body much closer to that of a cyborg or rhizome than a digital entity.
    The self that is “emerging,” according to Rotman, no longer has a soul, is free from the “tragic crisis of the fallen,” and no longer has the archaic connection to the natural world. Agency, then, has moved from desire as lack to “desire as excess, becoming and production, that is, desire as a source” (2). Yet, as I mentioned before, the physical body still holds fast to the desire/mirage of perfection and subjectivity, even if that perfection comes at the cost of the integration of the unnatural into the “natural” body. And ultimately, the manipulated corporeal image of the perfected body (whether it be “real” or digital) is subsequently distributed and commercialized and ultimately fed back into the chain of psychic desire, consumption, and physical creation. Or as stated by Rotman, the body and psyche is “…also conceived as being put together within society and history from outside itself, as an extraneously made thing…” (1). Thus, “Perhaps the question has to be: what and how (and not ‘who’) is this self…” (1).
    How and what is this new self? How is/has it made? The physical body, as well as the psychic self, is made through multiple levels of images and discourse: “…pictorial polyphony…as if the image…has gone parallel, confronting us with an imagized image…” (9). It is a body re-defined, re-envisioned, and re-produced culturally via the desire of excess, the desire to produce and become. One is no longer prisoner to the natural physical form; the body is no longer biologically grounded. For, the physical form can be altered and re-made. For example, Extreme Makeover exploits desiring subjects, ultimately re-mapping the subject so that the self is transformed through the science/art of desire and production. The human body is the new art form; no longer a re-mastering of pieces of art, but rather, now a re-mastering of the body and self/consciousness. Thus, the image of the body is digitally re-mastered, producing corporeal/physical re-mastering of/on the body. We have entered into Rotman’s pragmatic dimension which is defined as “superimposing or layering one image on another” (9); we now exist in the world of Extreme Makeover and Nip and Tuck- a world of layered media, images, prosthetics, and non-organic and organic items within the body. And the power of this new-made-self is its “ability to be copied” and to mesh and “repeat it within any number of independently controllable, accessible…layers so that they can be superimposed and interact with each other” (9).
    From the psyche up, physical existence becomes multiple and fluid, no longer biological but engineered, producing an opening up of desire, production, and perfection. Scientific and technological advances have made it possible to re-shape the human form, transplant non-carbon apparatuses into the carbon body, and even transplant faces. Face Off is no longer a Sci-Fi thriller, but a reality, producing the self as “an extension already at work…the re-making of the surgical subject” (10) into a bio-technological image of perfection.

  • 3. Jule Wallis  |  October 24, 2007 at 5:29 pm

    I am hoping to submitt this for the popular culture conference that occurs in March and would like to work on it enough to see if I can submitt it to the Popular Culture Journal

    The Subtle and Insidious Hegemony of Rape in Television: A Natural Crime Against Women?

    Television drama has been extensively explored by critics and theorists for over thirty years. This paper will attempt to explore how television generates a narrative for constructing, mediating, and framing social and individual identities. More specifically, it will explore how the crime drama Law and Order: SVU has been coded, thus infusing a dominant ideological framework within the text. As a text, Law and Order: SVU is intriguing, for it attempts to create a liberal portrayal of gender and race. However, such “positive” portrayals of minorities within the show actually work to perpetuate and feed the general and dominant paradigms of a patriarchal society. In Law and Order: Special Victim’s Unit, the violated female body is sexualized through cinematic technique and rhetoric used to describe/explain the body and crime.
    I intend to look at articles dealing with the domination of women through violence as well as how rape is described, portrayed, and discussed within SVU. By utilizing Foucault’s idea that the body and sexuality are cultural constructs rather than natural phenomena, Judith Butler’s insistence that cultural norms regulate how we embody or perform our gender identities, as well as other who have contributed to the theory of television and violence against women (Fiske, Susan Miller, Susan Lorene Brinson, Sarah Projansky…), this article will show the ways in which televised violence against women produce “’a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 1990: 33). In addition, Foucault’s identification of the body as the principal target of power will reveal the ways in which televised violence against women performs social control over women’s bodies and minds.
    Television has become such a large part of modern experience that it has significantly molded and defined popular culture. Television generates meaning and is a highly controlled and ideological representation of the world; it is an ongoing process of meaning construction. Thus, television portrays and creates unspoken and explicit meanings and values within society by simultaneously revealing and molding the audience’s perceptions of reality. In addition, the function of television is a form of containment that assumes as its audience a group whose gender and familial roles are already constructed, roles which it is the ideological business of television to reinforce. Television, therefore, is an excellent source for exploring/understanding how our society creates and presents meaning: how women are “naturally” connected to acts of violence, dominance, and sexual victimization. Within the television show, Law and Order: Special Victim’s Unit, the violated female body is sexualized through cinematic technique and rhetoric used to describe/explain the body and crime. In addition, the show seems to define rape as a horrifying crime against women. Yet in reality, the show actively popularizes the rape myths of patriarchal culture. In addition, the show subtly and insidiously perpetuates the myths that: only bad girls get raped, women ask for it, women ‘cry rape’ only when they’ve been jilted or have something to cover up.

  • 4. Crystal Starkey  |  October 26, 2007 at 5:48 pm

    Through my research, I think I can draw parallels and make connections amongst Autism and other disabilities within the college composition classroom. While my focus is on Autism and, more specifically, Aspergers, one can easily derive similar principles researched here and apply them to other learning disabilities in higher education. Unfortunately, since its inception in the 19th century, research on the human body, is continually measured against the body capable of doing factory work in the 1800’s. Appearance and function are the two main categories of which we critique our bodies. The other, the different, the ‘incapable’ (again, defined according to factory production standards) body is repulsive because it does not appear or function ‘properly.’ This repulsion is what creates fear within teachers of Autistic students, as well as growing frustration, often resulting in opting to “let someone else deal with it.” Repulsion and frustration at the student’s failure to meet expectations often drives teachers to readily offer the excuse that they have no training in working with Autistic students and deem themselves as, thus, unqualified to have such students in their classes. But they are qualified and do have the knowledge and capability of helping these students be successful.
    In rethinking and theorizing learning disabilities such as Aspergers in the classroom, I do hope to avoid the accusation that I am patronizing the Autism community from a non-Autistic position. Though I am an educator, and I have conducted several hours of research on this topic, I do not pretend to know better than those afflicted with the disorder nor those close to people afflicted with the disorder. My goal here is to make the disorder more public, give it more light within higher education and related circles, so people with Aspergers have the opportunity to achieve a more educated, well-adjusted life. I am confident this research can help create this opportunity.
    I have organized the essay into four sections: 1) The Autistic Body; 2) Asperger’s: The Shared Body vs the Private Body; 3) Autistic Identities: Pre-Defined and Re-Defined; 4) Rhetoric of Autism in College Composition Courses. In discussing 1) The Autistic Body, I am hoping to better identify the disabled body and mind, through economic, historical, cultural and social processes, which directly affect the ways in which we think about the learning disabled’s body and mind, specifically those with Asperger’s. In the section, 2) Asperger’s: The Shared Body vs the Private Body, I examine Elaine Scarry’s point in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World when she states,

    “The notion that everyone is alike by having a body and that what differentiates one person from another is the soul or intellect or personality can mislead one into thinking that the body is ‘shared’ and the other part is ‘private’ when exactly the opposite is the case” (256).

    Indeed Asperger’s is a case study for Scarry’s point; students inflicted with Aspergers are primarily prevented from success in mainstream courses due to their outward behavior. To be trite, they wear their disorder on their sleeve. Scarry’s point can be furthered by the idea Dr. Ellen Williams discusses on self-disclosure. Self Disclosure is often recommended by an institution’s Disability’s Office, but the data has yet to reflect consistency in the advantage of this public sharing. Additionally, disabled students, because they are different, are expected to want to change and adhere to their societal, cultural norms, when being different may be working just fine for them; thus, self disclosure—the sharing of their private and public body— may or may not be the best answer for each Asperger student and should be a personal choice in higher education. 3) In the section Autistic Identities: Pre-Defined and Re-Defined my purpose is to show that we are all differently abled, and the ones who are typically referred to as “normal” or “non-disabled” are only temporarily abled. Yet, our identity politics are so misshapened we fail to understand Asperger’s as a modality, not a disability. This Asperger ‘disability’ is erased (in large part due to our rapid progression within technology), through various modes of communication. The problem in defining Autism as well as other learning disabilities lies within the research we use to define this condition. Research surrounding learning disabilities and the Asperger disorder relies on constructed categories created in an ableist culture. This is problematic. Finally, the portion devoted to 4) The Rhetoric of Autism in the Composition Class focuses on Autistic students in a composition environment that has been shaped with knowledge and skill sets, which reflect learning disabled, developmental and mainstream students’ needs. Designing a rhetorical space intentionally created to foster all students’ learning, while decreasing the disabled variables and deficits through effective teaching strategies and knowledge. Because contemporary society normalizes the body and the individual, my goal here is to help instructor’s de-normalize their perspective of students.
    Unfortunately, the construction of normalcy since the 19th century has meant a simultaneous deconstruction of disability, as there is probably no area of life in today’s society in which some idea of a norm hasn’t been incorporated and assumed, and yet disability is not included in the definition of diversity. Further, according to Lennard Davis in his book Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body, “…our construction of the normal world is based on a radical repression of disability and that given certain power structures, a society of people with disabilities can and does easily survive and render ‘normal’ people outsiders” (22). When we define the unreachable, unattainable, ‘divine’ body as the ideal body (or student), we simultaneously create and define the grotesques, the abnormal. An example of this occurs through what Davis calls ‘bourgeois hegemony,’ which creates a precedent for middle-class ideology; this middle class ideology created a mean, which ultimately justified the creation of a norm for both the ideal and the abnormal (27). It is within this space, between the ideal and the abnormal in terms of Asperger’s disorder that I hope to research and better understand how to incorporate Asperger students into mainstream higher education courses, successfully.

  • 5. mlmcginnis  |  October 26, 2007 at 7:42 pm

    In establishing the now in/famous cogito as the test for human subjectivity, Rene Descartes established central tenets about the mind and body that have only recently been adequately problematized: the notion of a transcendent, disembodied, transhistorical subject, mind, or soul; and the historically situated and temporally finite body as the agentless vessel of the mind. Recent scholarship on post- and transhumanism has offered implicit critiques of Cartesian dualism, from Brian Rotman’s insistence on a psyche “put together within society and history from outside itself” to Richard Doyle’s examinations of postvital forms of life and biotechnologies such as cryogenics and “uploading” that promise a radical redefinition of the body’s temporality (Wetwares). Perhaps the most stinging explicit critique came in British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 work The Concept of Mind, in which Ryle characterized Cartesian dualism as establishing a model of the subject as little more than a “ghost in the machine.”

    Nevertheless, much of trans- or posthuman theory has been dependent on at least a tacit acceptance of the body-as-machine metaphor. Such acceptance includes explicit technologization of the body, as in Eugene Thacker’s insistence that “biology is technology (in fact, a better technology than any we can build)”; or through the promise of a machinic or cyborgic evolution such as N. Katherine Hayles’s contention that “extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born”. Similar to these claims are ones like Doyle’s own that complicate conventional notions of life and, therefore, human subjectivity; Doyle argues that our “scientific concept of life itself” has seen a radical “shift from an understanding of organisms as localized agents to an articulation of living systems as distributed events”. These and other theorists of the post/transhuman seem to define the capabilities of the posthuman state through implicit endorsement of the body-as-machine metaphor, in particular, a machine very much modeled on modular, adaptable, and upgradeable digital technologies.

    Amidst these tensions of defining the human as machine, theorists have also had to confront the implications of the “ghost in the machine” metaphor when taking account of emergent forms of (postvital) life. Doyle’s work again proves useful in making sense of this question. As he notes, “our very criteria for identifying and studying living systems remain vague, operational definitions haunted by their character as simulacra”. Granted, this is not a new problem for theorists of the trans/human; it has been asked at least as early as 1957, when T. R. Miles argued that the Cartesian cogito “must remain forever unknown and unknowable, and its presence or absence cannot therefore be the criterion by which we distinguish men from machines”. While Miles ultimately proposes a solution to the problem, his answer has in no way been definitive and the question remains the object of critical inquiry.

    Thus, my goal in this project is to interrogate the continued validity and sustainability of the “ghost in the machine” metaphor in light of these conflicting and conflating scenes of inquiry. I hope to start with Ryle’s original use of the metaphor and trace its implications through the two strands of current inquiry described above: that of the body-machine and that of the machine-body. In so doing, I hope to be able to evaluate the influence this metaphor has explicitly or implicitly had on this boy of work, and to questions whether it holds the promise for sustained rhetorical productiveness. Does “the ghost in the machine” remain a useful way for theory to situate questions of the body and subjectivity, or do we need to move away from the boundaries established a priori in its categorical division of man from machine? Which is to ask: is it time to give up “the ghost?”

  • 6. mlmcginnis  |  October 26, 2007 at 7:47 pm

    Oh, as a final bit:

    As a target journal, Configurations, since half the stuff I’m reading for the project so far has been from there.

    Conference wise, this one</a?.

  • 7. Jack McIntyre  |  October 26, 2007 at 8:18 pm

    My argument will rely heavily on Derrida’s thinking on the gift (especially in The Gift of Death and Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money), which posits that if a gift is repaid in any way, it is not a gift. In this sense the gift is (almost?) impossible. Derrida is preoccupied in these works with “the impossible,” which is not necessarily impossible in a literal sense; he means the gift is paradoxical, unthinkable, and therefore analogous to religious faith. In The Gift of Death, for example, he draws a parallel between Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and the impossible gift.

    This has already been convincingly argued by, among others, John Caputo, Ken Jackson, and touched on by Brian Rotman, and while Derrida is usually connected to Judaism (mostly, I suspect, because he was Jewish), his work on the gift is also relevant to Christianity, which is paradoxical in its most fundamental tenets. For example, there is the problem later resolved by the trinity: God has a son who is God, yet there is only one God. Also Christ is simultaneously fully divine and fully human. And the paradox that most closely resembles Derrida’s gift: are Christians faithful in order to be rewarded (get into heaven) or is their faith “pure” (not to benefit themselves)?

    These paradoxes of Christianity were resolved around the fourth century, when theology formalized various doctrines at least partly to protect the religion from critics. This was done through recourse to late Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, in some ways similar to and derived from Socratic thought, as Foucault points out in Hermeneutics of the Subject; Practically speaking, this stabilized Christianity.

    This move is parallel to the corruption of the pre-Socratic Greeks Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy. The tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses is unstable; his concept of the Will, meant to imply a lack of free will in the individual but simultaneously implying a complex sort of determinism, is equally unstable. Socrates resolved this instability and eventually led humanity to an obsession with knowledge, which Nietzsche laments.

    Having established the connection between Derrida’s gift, early Christianity, and Nietzsche’s pre-Socratic Greeks, I will apply Nietzsche’s argument about the “corruption” of the pre-Socratic Greeks by the Socratic search for knowledge to Christianity, which was similarly, gradually “corrupted”, in a process that culminated in the fourth century. In historical terms, the instability of Derrida’s gift (post-structuralism in general?) is a return to an ancient sort of thought/belief. Both Christianity and Nietzsche’s pre-Socratic Greeks were “corrupted” by the Socratic lust for knowledge, and only relatively recently has philosophy begun to critique this privileging of knowledge.

    I will then consider the conflict bwtween stable knowledge and pre-Socratic/early Christian/Derridean instability to Rotman’s work; the former equates to serial processing and the single subject, while the latter to parallel processing and a multiple subject(s). While I agree with his claim that God is intimately connected to language, I believe he oversimplifies God, and therefore doesn’t recognize that religion has struggled with many of the same issues of the subject and body that concern him, and that these problems have also been addressed, though not conclusively, by philosophy. Ultimately, I will show that an understanding of Rotman’s predicted, emerging, multiple subject will resolve problems that are, perhaps, much older than he realized. In this way, technology might actually facilitate access to God, in that these religious problems are inseparable from the philosophical and scientific issues that concern Rotman.

    Partial bibliography:
    Caputo. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida
    Debray. God: An Itinerary
    I haven’t read it yet but Rotman recommended. Looks promising.
    Derrida. The Gift of Death
    Derrida. Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money
    Hawhee. Bodily Arts
    I believe Hawhee’s work will compliment Nietzsche’s pre-Socratic Greeks
    Foucault. The Hermeneutics of the Subject
    Foucault. Technologies of the Self
    Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling
    Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy
    Nietzsche. Genealogy of Morals
    Rotman. Various works, especially Ghost Effects
    Smith. Jacques Derrida: Live Theory

    What I’m missing in terms of sources is a good book(s) on early Christianity, something that discusses it in a way that will be useful for my paper. Foucault is very thorough on the Greeks/Romans but not so much on the Christians. Any advice/help along these lines will be GREATLY appreciated.

    Also, I don’t know where I could submit something like this. I’ve looked at journals a bit and have no idea. Again, please help! Just point me in the right direction.

    Finally, I don’t have a title. I’m not good with titles, and usually decide on one the day before the paper is due. Yet again, suggestions would be appreciated, though I’m sure I will eventually come up with something.

  • 8. Kim Lacey  |  October 26, 2007 at 8:24 pm

    Viva Whenever: Suspended and Expanded Bodies in Time

    One of the frequently asked questions noted on the Cryogenics Institute’s webpage asks, “What is cryonic suspension?” Described as an “unchanging patient suspended in time,” one might say that we – bloggers, online social network users, PDA owners, or even casual computer users – are already suspended. Since these spaces are outside of our own bodies, we are diversifying our personal portfolios by relocating our memories and experiences. In his article, “Going Parallel,” Brian Rotman explains this diversification as “a shifting plurality of disbursed, distributed and fragmented personae” (60). When we post or save information to these other places, we are expanding the self into multiple storage locations. However, these multiple storage locations remain dormant, or suspended, and function only when the user calls upon it to retrieve certain information. Consequently, while we continue to progress forward, our external storage locations do not experience any time passage, thus, we are able to constantly and accurately access our suspended selves. Throughout this paper I will explore the aforementioned extended selves and their intersections with popular theories of time by examining Bergson’s duration with Deleuzian notions of the actual and virtual. I will also ask: In what ways are we already “unchanging patients”? When we utilize these external spaces, are we somehow immortalizing ourselves?

    To examine the issues of the body from another perspective, I will turn to modern medicine as an additional site of time control. Specifically, I will compare the usage of external storage spaces with modern medical advances by looking at sexual performance enhancers, such as Viagra and Levitra. I will argue that for their users, these supplements are creating the possibility to manipulate time. Similar to the constant accessibility of the external storage locations, when called upon, these sexual enhancement drugs can ready the body for activity when the user swallows a pill. While sexual activity is a very time-oriented act, these medicines promote a timelessness of the action altogether by allowing users to decide when they want to be ‘active’. Rather than relying solely on the body and its potential functioning, the individual instead calls upon an external source to assist with the body’s abilities. Modern supplements appear to be leaning toward a type of time which one experiences in a virtual space (i.e. “playing” MMOGs such as Second Life) in the sense that online, a user, or more precisely one’s avatar, is not limited by normal bodily functions. Instead, one can control the response in ‘real’ life by taking a pill to enhance performance. Usage, then, is no longer the issue—sexual performance, much like one’s online presence, is instead renewable and indefatigable, at least as long as the pills – or an Internet connection – are available. Therefore, by simply taking one of these supplements, an individual can create time, expand time, or even dismiss time altogether. It should be noted that throughout my paper, the terms create, expand, and dismiss will be explored at length in relation to the grand topic of suspension. Also, I will also be questioning the moment of medical suspension: is one suspended before taking the pill (i.e. waiting, downtime), or during its effects (i.e. the created time)?

    Journals: Isis, Configurations, boundary 2, Critical Inquiry, Social Text

  • 9. Clay Walker  |  October 26, 2007 at 9:58 pm

    Affective Literacy: How Affects Impact Subjectivity and Literacy Practices

    Over the last thirty years, ethnographies of literacy have situated the development of human subjectivity within the context of literacy practices embedded in communities, cultures, societies (Willis 1977; Heath 1983). While these scholars have indeed considered affective as well as cognitive relationships and experiences, there has been no explicit research on human affective systems and literacy practices. By understanding how affects relate with cognition and culture in the development of human subjectivity, this paper argues we may begin to work toward studying the impact of the human affective system in the development of literacy practices as well as their continued influence as the individual. Such research, however, would entail a multi-year ethnographic study, and is therefore beyond the capacity of the present argument.

    Affects and emotions are central to early 21st century American society and culture, constantly represented in the media and in our memories, conversations, daily lives: 9/11, The war on terror, the war on Iraq, the war on Afghanistan, North Korea, sanctions on Iran, Darfur; foreclosures, declining industry, layoffs, early retirements, looming government shut-down/bankruptcy; “To Catch a Predator”; wildfires in California, Hurricane Katrina, bridge collapse in Minnesota, tunnel collapse in Boston; unaffordable health care, antibiotic resistant staph infections, HIV/AIDS, lead based paint recalls, e. coli burgers, e. coli potpies, e. coli spinach; Columbine, Columbine-style attacks, Cleveland, Pittsburgh stockpile, Amish schoolhouse murders, Virginia Tech. This list sketches out broad historical events and phenomena that have had national and international interest and intense media attention. But emotions and affects are just as present in our everyday lives: in her recent book, Ordinary Affects (2007), the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart shows us through an auto-ethnographic work of cultural poetics how affects, emotions, and feelings impact our everyday lives; how they “can pull the subject into places it didn’t exactly ‘intend’ to go” (40). But as Silvan Tomkins has persuasively argued, while affects are the primary human motivational system, they do not work alone but rather combine with drives, cognitive systems and other psychological processes in complex relationships with other affects, and objects exterior to the self.

    Julie Lindquist echos this emphasis on the impact of affects in “Class Affects, Classroom Affectations” (2002) where she argues that the working-class experience is an emotional one, and moreover, the student must negotiate the emotional burdens of her working-class memory and her middle-class ambitions within the (traditionally) cognitive space of the classroom. Thus, Lindquist sees little room for these emotional burdens in the traditional classroom and calls for educators to open spaces for scenes of affective learning through what she calls a strategic performance of affect. However, Lindquist’s call for a performative pedagogy of affect stands against Lynn Worsham’s argument in “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion” (1998). Worsham criticizes pedagogies of nurturance, like Lindquist’s, that commodify the female teacher’s emotional labor within a “sex/affective system that sustains and justifies pedagogic violence of all kinds” (238), and argues that before affects can become politically (and thus pedagogically) operative, we must restructure our sex/affective system. However, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sees the problem facing affects as a theoretical one in Touching Feeling (2003), and makes the case for a practice of reparative reading through which we can learn “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150-1).

    Sedgwick’s criticism of theory is one shared with Brian Massumi, who argues in Parables for the Virtual (2002) that while cultural studies “realizes that expression is always collective … it takes the collectivity as already constituted, as a determinate set of actually existing persons” and in doing so, “It misses the relational comingness of the community and the qualitative contagion of collective life-movement. It misses the impersonal or overpersonal excesses of ongoing transformation” (253). At stake in Massumi’s argument in failing to understand affects as change, becoming, virtual, autonomous is “a key to rethinking postmodern power” in late capitalistic society (42). And as Jeff Nealon has argued, “Periodizing the 80s” (2007), the post-postmodern society is one of incredible change from a Foucaultian disciplinarian society to a Deleuzian society of control that swaps individualization and physical barriers of the carceral system for the virtual dividuation in the society of control. To further understand how culture impacts subjectivity (mind/body, cognition/affect) I turn to William Connolly’s Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002) and Merlin Donald’s A Mind So Rare (2001) and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s The Way We Think (2002).

  • 10. Jennifer Niester  |  October 26, 2007 at 11:56 pm

    Technologies of Self-Help: Re-programming the Brain that is enslaved by Information

    In his final years, Michel Foucault turned his attention towards the technologies of the self, “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (18). His research interests were prescient in 1980s, as Western society had yet to reach its zenith of self-obsession that is observable today through the plethora (to draw from Nealon) of memoirs, studies on the body/affect, discussions surrounding privacy issues, student-centered classrooms, and self-help books. The last item of that list, self-help books, is the topic I will explore in my paper. My interest lies in a very specific vein of the self-help catalogue, those that deal with cybernetics. Cybernetics and self-help were famously connected by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz in 1960, who found that cosmetic surgery did not alleviate the internal programming that told his patients they were not attractive and worked to change individuals self images through hypnosis. In the nearly five decades that have passed since the publication of Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics, the processes of communication and control have reached new levels, perhaps rendering Norbert Weiner’s famous quote hopelessly out of date: “The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence.”

    Today’s current top-selling self-help approach, Getting Things Done by David Allen, claims such a hope can exist. Allen’s uses the metaphor of the brain as a computer to demonstrate the shackles of our thoughts resides in a cluttering in our short-term memory, which he relates to the sluggish function of a computer due to overloading the random access memory (RAM). If we remove the open loops of unfinished projects and unnecessary information, our true potential can be unleashed and we will gain control of our time, the god which Allen seems to be worshipping.

    Allen’s most interesting claim, though, may be: “It has been a popular concept in the self-help world that focusing on your values will simplify your life. I contend the opposite: the overwhelming amount of things that people have to do comes from their values […] the more you focus on them, the more things you’re likely to feel responsible for taking on.” (228). Using Gilles Guattari’s theory of societies of control, I will examine why Allen’s ideas resonate with such a large population and has garnered new products such as a subscription website, public seminars, corporate training sessions, wallets, plastic folders, and an add-on for Microsoft Outlook. In order to demonstrate the shift from discipline societies to societies of control, I will rely heavily on Foucault’s technologies of the self and work to prove that de-centralized information is a conditioning factor constantly working on the selves in a way that is comparable to the conditioning that happened within the institutions of discipline societies.
    Unlike Richard Doyle, who examines the potential vitality that lies in information, Allen doesn’t focus on preserving life through technology and “uploading.” Instead Allen’s work revolves around the burden of what is being downloaded into our brains. To critique the validity of Allen’s use of the brain as a computer metaphor, I will draw on the work of Gregory Bateson (as well as examining the rich sources and ideas present in Dr. Pruchnic’s two posted articles). After exploring the functions of the brain through cybernetics, I will move into how the way the brain is defined relates to the conception of a “self,” a critical component of any self-help text.

    When it comes to finding a venue for my inquiry, I am having a bit of a struggle. Because it revolves around the genre of self-help, I am thinking that popular culture or cultural studies would be the general area. For a potential conference, the closest fit I could find was The Composition and Rhetoric Area of the PCA/ACA (Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association), which is seeking “papers/projects addressing the intersection of Popular Culture with Composition studies
    and/or Rhetoric” http://www.pcaaca.org/. As far as journals, I tentatively have selected the following possibilities: Postmodern Culture, The Journal of American Culture, Technology and Culture, Configurations, Isis. If anyone has any suggestions for a clearer fit for my project, please let me know.

  • 11. eric herhuth  |  October 27, 2007 at 1:07 am

    Preface: As may be clearly evident, this project will at some point split into two papers. Where/How that split will be made is pending research. Any suggestions regarding research and argument are welcome.

    A potential submission to the journal Postmodern Culture

    The Face as ‘I’ Space: Deleuze/Guattari’s Facialization in Shakespeare and Identity Politics

    In A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write on the face and the process of faciality. The face or faces construct a necessary milieu for signifiance and subjectification; this is described as the “white wall/black hole” system. Signifiance needs a white wall to inscribe “its signs and redundancies,” and subjectification requires a black hole “in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies” (ATP 167). Interestingly enough, in their chapter on faciality, Deleuze/Guattari cite the novel genre as well as the person of Christ as significant in the facialization of the modern age (in addition to film, psychology, schizophrenia). This paper will explore these two exemplars of faciality in terms of signs, consciousness, multiplicity, identity, etc. Serving as an early site of application and complication of the theory put forward will be the Shakespeare play of Cymbeline: a dramatization set in “Year Zero” (the year of Christ’s birth and Deleuze/Guattari’s title for their chapter on faciality) whose heroine, Imogen, demonstrates a bizarre yet familiar tendency to facialize. Here I will assay whether or not the play Cymbeline performs a narrative of the originary milieu for signifiance and subjectification. Subsequently, I will explore Imogen as a proto-novelistic character making use of the dialogic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, which harkens to Delueze/Guattari’s rhizome figuration and the multiplicity behind the face. To narrow the scope of analyzing the development of the face as a system for signifiance and subjectification, I will specifically look at how the subject becomes signified, i.e. the development of the ‘I.’ The supreme objective of this paper is to illustrate facialization in an aesthetic medium that reflects the facialization developed in the social. For Deleuze/Guattari, the face is a politics constructed by assemblages of power that enable our notions of signifiance and subjectification to persist: “there is no signifiance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects” (ATP 180). Thus, the work of facialization as evidenced in an aesthetic medium like drama, also informs the politics of public and social realms. In the terms of a politics of recognition and identity, the formation of an authentic subject who is an ‘I’ is the beginning for claims of individual autonomy/sovereignty, viz. individual rights. Ultimately, this paper considers the stakes of facialization, the signified subject, within a multicultural, globalized society.

    For Jack: I always use the writings of St. Augustine–very Platonic; On Christian Doctrine is my favorite–http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/doctrine.html–this is a site at Calvin College with a large amount of early Christian stuff. I don’t know about secondary sources but this might help you find something.

  • 12. Michael Cipielewski  |  October 27, 2007 at 2:24 am

    On issues of proposed journals/conferences: I have little point of reference concerning journals and conferences: I am inclined to say two things: 1. I would rather have the work exemplary of Richard Doyle’s lot, who I feel is more critically engaging “by any means necessary”, rather than holding to convention. 2. Since this work is a sort of theory/anthropological split (at least, in my mind it is, so I doubt it will manifest otherwise) I would say that the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference may be my possible audience. As for #1: any thoughts on journals?

    Re:public : Telepresence and Rendering the Avatar
    Heather Horst, in “Coming of Age in Networked Public Culture” describes one subject, Ann, as “[designing] a shared and intimate living space within spaces of networked public culture” in context of Ann’s use of blog sites Myspace and Facebook. Horst’s observations concerning blog interface point to self-making, an affirmation of the corporeal self; Ann’s interactions with other users were from her own perspective in that, Ann’s digital self is not a fragment of her analog self: Ann is “Ann”, and her homepages served (to what ever variable degree) as a rendering of her corporeality and analog self. Further, Ann’s interface with networked users consists primarily of dorm mates – people Ann knows in real life (IRL).
    I am not going to simply reduce Ann’s interface with blog sites “to its role as a tool or prosthesis extending or replacing the body, nor to its role as a medium conveying/creating information and meanings.” (Rotman 425) Truly, Rotman’s perspective on technological instrumentality is well taken. However, like Ann Weinstone, “I am concerned with events that suspend the terms of self and other and with the … consequences that flow from these events-in-common.” The act of rendering oneself (like Ann in Horst’s ethnography and other examples of network users) exhibits a fundamentality; the corporeal axiom described by Rotman may find instrumentality reductive enough to confuse the issue, but concerning technology within bounds of virtual social network: to speak of the medium is to speak of the user.
    Instead, I have chosen to look at two forms of virtual (re)embodiment: First, blogs such as Myspace, Facebook, Livejournal, and the like. Second, the Multi-User Domain (MUD) Second Life. The evolution of the blog exhibits movement from a interfaced self-referential virtual embodiment to a social one. Or simply, the blog started as a textual artifact of the self embodied on a webpage (such as Livejournal), and has evolved social tool with a blog at its center (such as Myspace). The private is the new public comes into play here in terms of self-display, pre and post evolution. Second Life differs from the above example of the blog in that it is not a blog at all. Rather, it is distinctly a social networking tool focused on the recontextualization and reterritorialization of the self and the body, in some cases to a level of multiplicity that recalls parallel selves (Rotman): multiple accounts and the multiple “I”s. These examples of virtual rendering and display, in turn, propose two differing results of interface: the blog proposes simulacrum, and Second Life proposes autopoiesis.
    Tied up in these propositions of virtual embodiment are the breakings of social contracts between users. The viral methodologies of Phishers and “Internet Predators,” the alterity in breaking virtual social contract with users by “pretending,” to whatever degree or purpose, shows how the virtual contracts have “real” implications (i.e. breaking these contracts can manifest law suits, identity theft, rape, murder, and so on). Nevertheless, the current (virtual) social and political climate exemplify the blog contract.
    Blogs and MUDs are inherently social tools. For me, it seems best to use both a “theoretical” approach (Hayles, Rotman, Weinstone, Turkle, and so on) as well as an ethnographic approach ( Such as the “Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures’” project at USC and U of C) to better understand the social, pedagogical, and (supposed) transcendental nature of virtual environments and the new public sphere, as well as elements inherent in identity availability in autopoietic interfaces.

  • 13. Clay Walker  |  October 27, 2007 at 2:45 am

    Forgot: Journal target would be CCC if Ethnography and Literacy can really make its way into the paper; College English if the scope remains rooted in the pedagogical argument; may aim is the former.

  • 14. Katrina Newsom  |  October 27, 2007 at 2:49 am

    The Nietzschean Negotiation and the Black Figure

    In this paper, I will examine the image of black body as a representational figure through Nietzsche’s negotiation of the Apolline and Dionysiac arts. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche blurs the line of the seemingly two opposing Greeks art forms; the Apolline (the image-maker or sculptor) and the Dionysiac (the imageless art of music) (14). Through this negotiation, he dispels the Greek philosophy of the body as something understood only through appearance. Within the “image-less art of music” the Nietzschean figure can be understood within a context (in)outside the physicality of the human body. Thus, the amalgamation of the image and the image-less arts creates a space for the essence of the human to be understood. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ways in which (if at all) the Nietzschean merger of these two art forms allows the image of the black figure to maneuver within and/or beyond its stagnate representational form. Within this context, I will address the works of Fredrick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston and Amiri Baraka to show the possibilities and limitations of the Nietzchean negotiation of image and music in an attempt to shatter the plastered image of the black figure.

  • 15. Jared  |  October 27, 2007 at 2:53 am

    Jared

    Pillars of the Apparatus: The Sustainability Motive, Disaster Capitialism, and Bataille’s Beams

    The word sustainability is everywhere, staked in the heart of multi-faceted resistance movements, tracked as the latest buzzword for marketing strategies, and encoded into critical changes possibly en route to a new epoch for humankind. William Greider in One World, Ready of Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism sums up the spectrum of meaning in sustainability well when he notes that sustainability “carries revolutionary implications, but sounds so wholesome that almost everybody can endorse it. […] Meanwhile, the global system plunges forward along its usual path, building toward some sort of epic showdown with nature” (448-9). Sustainability’s nebulous meanings are currently being conscripted by many social projects and political purposes, new and old. The affect of sustainability also works on a sliding scale that filters through to people in many different ways, ranging from all shades of optimism, critically sound or naïve, to shades of strong pessimism, as well as wading deeper into anxieties, fears and even despair over concerns that we may be literally over-producing and over-consuming our planet’s diversity and natural resources.
    Sustainability is in a sense becoming a complex dispotif (apparatus). As explained by Foucault in his 1977 interview, “The Confession of the Flesh,” the term apparatus referred to: “a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid…The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements (199).” For Foucault the apparatus is “precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogenous elements” and it forms as a strategic imperative response to an “urgent need” (201).
    This paper will explore two key pillars of sustainability as an apparatus: a broadly interpreted sustainability motive, and what is currently called “disaster capitalism,” as well as the ghostly connections between both. The first pillar holds up hopes and unifies people within a sustainability motive that rests on the desire for self-preservation, as one the central motives and instinct of humankind, which, according to Spinoza, we typically feel in an emotion of desire or pleasure. Intensifying calls for sustainability are changing this relationship between desire and self-preservation, bringing a sense of unity, coherence and meaningfulness back to fragmented groups, modes of production, and human activities such as labour, politics, and art. Running beside such unifying forces are almost equally divisive influences tied to pervasive discourse fuelled by apocalyticism that gains its charge while being intensely agonistic and contestatory, which causes political conflict, and takes extreme forms. Both the unifying and divisive aspects of the sustainability motive are distinctly tied to a tragic sensibility explored since pre-modern times and recycled skilfully by Nietzsche, Arendt, Burke, Bataille, Markell, Maffesoli, and many others. Sustainability encourages and advances the return of the tragic sensibility while revising its vital force through new aesthetic celebrations of destruction, renewed pessimism (often fuelled by a sense of sheer panic), a renewed intergenerational ethos, and a profound re-orientation toward the future.
    A second pillar of the same apparatus, one typically seen as being in major conflict with the sustainability motive, is global capitalism’s increasing proclivity to rely on crises to make vital profits, or what is currently often referred to as the expansion of “disaster capitalism” (Klein 6). Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, rests on her belief that “an economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. […] Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market’s invisible hand” (513). She also states: “the only prospect that threatens the booming disaster economy on which so much wealth depends — from weapons to oil to engineering to surveillance to patented drugs — is the possibility of achieving some measure of climatic stability and geopolitical peace” (515). Klein provides rich description of the people and the political scheming that has helped give roots to this shocking global economic logic, and she allows us a brief view of how capitalism is conditioning itself to profit off speculation of increased ecological crises; but Klein provides no real analysis of how individual or political agency might intervene, except her standard call to allow plural, practical communities to work their magic in resistance.
    What Klein and other fail to acknowledge is how disaster capitalism and the sustainability motive are key pillars of the same apparatus. We must see that disaster capitalism as a type of post-postmodern evolution of Bataille’s notion of expenditure, universal meanness, and the traditions of restricted economic theory. Bataille’s theory of general economy in The Accursed Share challenges us to question whether our apparatus of sustainability will have any chance of success if we only allow our sustainability to gear us toward decelerating the market, averting disaster, or forms of reduction of economic growth to fundamentally more manageable and ecological cycles of production and conservation. What Bataille stresses is that we cannot ignore how human action has always had irrepressible “interest in considerable losses, in catastrophes that while conforming to well-defined needs, provoke tumultuous depressions, crises of dread, and, in the final analysis, a certain orgiastic state” (117). The Accursed Share demonstrates Bataille’s “general economy” as fundamentally different from the “restricted” economic perspectives we are used to, and his economic vision makes productive room for great loss and an ethic of sustainability.
    This paper will refract Bataille’s “general economy” between the two pillars of sustainability, paying particular attention to Bataille’s notion of expenditure, excess energy, and potlatch. The overall aim is to trace productive connections that outline sites for individual and collective agency in rarely charted relationships between the real risks of free expenditure in a (truly) free market, and a rational cycle of production and conservation amenable to sustainability.

    Lots of open ideas here… I will try to draw out more attention to the body
    through attention to natural drives to “orgiastic excess” (in Bataille’s terms)… and how this embodiment can become reflected in a less reductive economic system… and in how this fits into a sustainability motive…
    Also, it’s an hour before midnight and I haven’t thought of journal something like this might fly in… no clue.

  • 16. Sharon  |  October 27, 2007 at 4:15 am

    Metaphors of Immortality in Technological Discourse

    Being, in ancient and contemporary thought, has been imagined as both material and immaterial, temporal and eternal. In humanist philosophical discourse beginning with Plato, the soul has been the basis of a conceptual understanding of the immaterial and immortal nature of being. Recent and pending discoveries in science and technology about the mind and body have contributed to a new way of thinking about what it means to be a human being. In this paper I will examine the metaphors of immortality that shape the discourse of religious and technological discourse on the body as I explore what it means to be a person in the postmodern world. Augustine saw the intellect as the seat of the soul, and before him, Plato explained the development of human knowledge in terms of a pre-existing, indestructible soul that was part of the divine creation. In Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky develops a way to think about intelligence and the work of the mind that is not tied to the idea of the soul or an essence. Proponents of scientism believe that science will eventually be able to provide a complete picture of being that will outstrip a need for philosophical or religious thought. Owen Flanagan writes that to date, humanistic philosophy has given us a false perception of human being in its propositions that we possess nonphysical minds, free wills, and souls that constitute our essence” (7). His research in consciousness shows strong opposition to the idea that consciousness is tied to the existence of an eternal soul in favor of the production of consciousness from neuronal processes. In “What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery” Francis Crick explains how his growing knowledge about the physical workings of the human body diminished his faith in God. He explains that beliefs are only viable for as long as they fit within the framework of current states of knowledge. “A belief, writes Crick, at the time it was formulated, may not only have appealed to the imagination but also fit well with all that was then known. It can nevertheless be made to appear ridiculous because of facts uncovered later by science. What could be more foolish than to base one’s entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?” (11). In a similar vein, Marvin Minsky contends that the idea of the soul is a vestige that we should be ready to dispose of in favor of better, scientific theories. Minsky readily conceptualizes the body as nothing more than a “meat-machine.” In opposition to these ideas, David Hume has proclaimed: What cruelty, what iniquity, what injustice in nature, to confine all our concern, as well as all our knowledge, to the present life, if there be another scene still waiting us, of infinitely greater consequence? Although theorists who conceptualize the body in purely scientific terms find it plausible and fascinating to reduce the understanding of being to “meat,” I find it interesting that they still hold out hope for an immortal existence. Possibilities for an embodied immortality are being pursued through cryogenics and through the uploading of consciousness to computer systems. If the body is indeed meat, what life producing element can be extracted from it for uploading? My overall question will be how the idea of the soul, whether real or mythical, contributes to our understanding of a moral reality and whether its eradication from discourse will be helpful or harmful to humanity.

  • 17. Katrina Newsom  |  October 30, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    Journal targets will be:
    Callaloo
    American Literary History
    Discourse
    The Journal of Nietzsche Studies

  • 18. Clay Walker  |  November 10, 2007 at 3:31 am

    In celebration of Mike McG’s workshop on Wikis, I have prepared my annotated bibliography and second abstract on my very own wiki. Thanks to MMcG for the tutelage…

    The 13PiratesWiki: 13pirates.pbwiki.com
    Abstract #2: 13pirates.pbwiki.com/Abstract2
    Annotated Bibliography: 13pirates.pbwiki.com/AnnotatedBibliography1

  • 19. Kim Lacey  |  November 14, 2007 at 7:35 pm

    Annotated Bibliography
    (Extended Abstract to follow)

    Barglow, Raymond. The Crisis in the Self in the Age of Information: Computers,
    Dolphins, and Dreams. “Technological Objects and Divided Subjects.” New York: Routeledge, 1994.

    Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. “Of the Survival of Images. Memory and Mind.”
    Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Book, 1991.

    According to Henri Bergson’s essay, “Of the Survival of Images,” time is a constantly formed and reformed triplicity: past, present, and future. Essentially, these three ‘parts’ of time are not individual entities, as they are simultaneously becoming one another via one another. Because of this interdependence, one might falsely recognize time as a linear entity, a repeating formation of future becoming present, present becoming past. However, since these three are all represented within each passing moment, distinguishing between the three becomes nearly impossible. In attempting to define the notion of past by stating “whether the past has ceased to exist or whether it has simply ceased to be useful,” Bergson is ultimately questioning the present: if it is immediately becoming past as it is formed, wherein does the present lie (149)? In my paper I will be arguing that external storage devices and sexual enhancement drugs independently create and suspend time within an already existing timeframe. Therefore, this ‘independent time’ complicates Bergson’s theory of past, present, and future.

    —. Mind Energy: Lectures and Essays. Trans. H. Wildon Carr. Westport,
    CN: Greenwood Press, 1920.

    Burfoot , Annette. “Human Remains: Identity Politics in the Face of
    Biotechnology.” Cultural Critique, No. 53, Posthumanism. (Winter, 2003), pp. 47-71.

    Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New
    York: Zone Books, 1991.

    —. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta.
    Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1989.

    In the essay “Peaks of Present,” Deleuze analyzes Bergson’s theories of time. While Bergson’s theory argues that the present is a simultaneous conjunction of past and future, Deleuze instead insists that the past, present, and future are distinguishable from one another (100). When the moment passes, the present no longer exists, as it becomes either past or future. Therefore, the present is discernable because it “precisely stops being present when it is replaced by something else” (100). Also in this text, Deleuze defines “actual image” and “virtual image” in relation to the cinema. These Deleuzean time theories will be helpful when examining how time can be (re)started by an individual, since both external storage devices and sexual enhancement drugs allow for the personalization of created time.

    —. Foucault. Trans. and Ed. Sean Hand. “Foldings, or the Inside of Thought
    (Subjectivity).” Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1988.

    Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning,
    and the New International. New York: Routledge, 2006.

    Throughout this text, Derrida looks at the continuing effects of Marxism long after Marx’s death, noting the importance of something’s impact once it no longer exists. Derrida calls this recurrence “hauntology”: “repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time” (10). The specter indicates a repeating present, not an ending or a death. I can utilize this text to support my claims that external storage devices are stable platforms for individuals to create the possibility to access one’s past at any moment in the future. Thus, even though one’s past self no longer exists, what is stored on the external device is still repeatable by opening or downloading the stored information.

    Donald, Merlin. A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York:
    W.W. Norton, 2001.

    —. Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and
    Cognition. “Third Transition: External Symbolic and Theoretical Culture.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991.

    —. “Human Cognitive Evolution: What We Were, What We Are Becoming.” Social
    Research, Vol. 60, No. 1., Spring, 1993.

    Doyle, Richard. Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living. Minneapolis: U of Minesota
    Press, 2003.

    Since part of my argument revolves around suspended time and uploaded memory, and Doyle’s Wetwares discusses this issue at length, it is crucial that I turn to this source for theoretical grounding. He argues that for individuals, uploading, as “an anticipatory technology of the self,” represents a possible, although not guarantee, future (131). Our uploaded selves are then “not based in the present or the past but the future, the continually itinerant specter of a ‘change in state’” (130). I will juxtapose Doyle’s characterization of the future as a ‘change of state’ with my argument that we are already suspended for possible future use.

    Flusser, Vilém. “On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise)” Leonardo, Vol. 23, No. 4.
    (1990), pp. 397-399.

    Flusser argues for a distinction between cultural memory and genetic memory, noting that the former is, “is shorter than genetic memory, and even less trustworthy” because the individual re-remembers an event over time (397). This re-remembering causes the original memory to become misconstrued, and only by reifying memory (i.e. through libraries, or for purposes of my argument, through external storage devices) can we accurately save something to memory. He also claims that since “electronic memory exaggerates some of our memory functions,” humans will re-appropriate the energy we used on remembering into creativity, therefore transforming humans from workers into information processors (398, 399).

    Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. “Technologies of the Self.” Ed. Paul
    Rabinow. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: The New Press, 1994.

    Hansen, Mark B.N. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. New York:
    Routledge, 2006.

    Kochhar-Lindgaren, Gray. TechnoLogics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension
    of Animation. “Temps: Time, Work, and the Delay.”New York: SUNY Press, 2005.

    Claiming that “the ‘now’ and its others must be thought of differently than as the presence of the present,” Kochlar-Lindgaren confronts the linear movement of time (175). He examines a postmodern dismissal of waiting, delay, and desire arguing that, “the desire of technologies […] is to obliterate the delay” (185). Thus, the ‘desires of technologies’ is a desire that “should be satisfied before I am aware that I am desiring” (185). I will utilize this chapter in two ways: firstly, I will examine how technology promotes a non-linear movement of time by claiming that our suspended selves can be present in multiple places and have recurring presents. Secondly, how sexual enhancement drugs erase the desire to become sexually “active”—the pills create the space for sexual arousal, something that cannot happen (as easily) without the drug; therefore, the user no longer wishes to be “active” as one can be whenever one chooses.

    Levy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. Trans. Robert Bononno.
    New York: Plenum Press, 1998.

    Massumi, Brian. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, and Sensation.
    Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.

    McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

    Porter, Kevin J. “Terror and Emancipation: The Disciplinarity and Mythology of
    Computers.” Cultural Critique, No. 44. (Winter, 2000), pp. 43-83.

    Stelarc. “Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary
    Strategies.” Leonardo, Vol. 24, No. 5. (1991), pp. 591-595.

    Stelarc states that, “evolution ends when technology invades the body,” illustrating this claim by insisting that immortality must be achieved if humans are to “survive” (591). Arguing for the need to begin thinking about our future selves, Stelarc suggests that we replace parts of the body as they fail, rather than temporarily repairing the body with modern medicine. Through his proposed method, the body becomes obsolete, as we will be consisted of interchangeable and upgrade-able parts. Stelarc’s essay offers opposition to my view of modern medicine, and is forcing me to rethink my approach to the sexual enhancement drug portion of my research. However, Stelarc’s insistence upon immortality aligns with my original approach concerning external storage devices as a source of immortal memory.

    Thacker, Eugene. “Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the
    Posthuman.” Cultural Critique, No. 53, Posthumanism. (Winter, 2003), pp. 72-97.

    Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. “Cyberspace, or the Unbearable Closure
    of Being.” London: Verso, 1997.

    In this chapter, Zizek discusses Internet sexual partners and the division of mind and body reaction to these encounters. Even though a screen separates the partners, both have the possibility to experience real, individual pleasure. By using technological interfaces to foster sexual activity, intimacy becomes complicated. Zizek notes that cybersex is not isolated and masturbatory, but rather something that adds to sexual arousal: “people use pornography (or other technical sex devices) not only when they lack ‘flesh-and-blood’ partners but also to ‘spice up’ their ‘real’ sex life” (138). Zizek’s distinction between real and virtual partners will help my discussion of sexual enhancement drugs and the creation of physical, sexual possibility.

  • 20. Jack McIntyre  |  November 15, 2007 at 9:19 pm

    Part one of my paper will develop a certain understanding of Christianity based on the work of Kierkegaard, Derrida, Dostoyevsky, and Tertullian. Certain works of each figure emphasize the instability of Christianity, its aporias, contradictions, and paradoxes, as an essential element of faith, truth, and the inevitable result of access to God.

    Especially, I will rely on Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling in The Gift of Death. Derrida and Kierkegaard both emphasize that Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac requires a kind of madness. It is a gesture towards the absolute Other, and therefore must exclude entirely the economy of “normal” life. In the same way, the gift as developed in Derrida’s Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money is “the impossible”, unthinkable, and profoundly “religious”; any attempt to give the true gift is an attempt to access the absolute Other – God. In this sense the essence of Christianity if doubt and confusion. One has no chance of accessing God except at those moments when one is completely destabilized. Christianity is structured to encourage such instability.

    I will then use the work of Tertullian, a 2nd-3rd century theologian. I am interested in him because he was the first to use the word trinity, and while he did not formulate the doctrine of the trinity ubiquitous today he did lay the foundation for its eventual development (I will explain shortly why the trinity is important for this paper). Tertullian also emphasized and embraced the paradox and implausibility of Christianity, saying that they constituted the foundation of his faith. Clearly such an attitude is consistent with Derrida’s work, and I will explore the significance of this. Tertullian is by no means unique in his attitudes towards the aporias of Christianity; many theologians writing from the Greek tradition shared his attitudes. To an extent I will use Tertullian as a window into the complexity of early Christianity, briefly examining the history of the early Church in a broader context, in terms of philosophy, politics, theology, etc, to show that conflict and instability was ubiquitous and highly beneficial throughout the first 600 years of Christianity, before the aporias of the Trinity and the status of Christ’s body were resolved, and before the non-Trinitarian churches of North Africa were destroyed by the Muslims. Finally, because Tertullian is universally acknowledged as an important figure in the early church (he is not canonized but only because he left the Church later in life to join another Christian sect that was more morally restrictive), I believe that demonstrating that his early work is consistent with the view of Christianity I’m presenting grants it a certain credibility.

    I will also use Ivan’s “poem” The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan imagines that Christ visits Seville, Spain in the 16th century during the inquisition. The inquisitor locks Jesus up and explains that Christianity is far too difficult for most people, demands too much of them, and explains that since the 8th century the Church has been working against Christ/God. The Christianity he describes, that the Church is fighting against, is obviously consistent with the works of Derrida I mentioned. This story also says very clearly what Christianity is not: a stabilized Church that dictates what people must believe. Any entity that seeks to make Christianity “easier” has missed the point. In terms of the structure of my paper, this poem will be employed in much the way Derrida relies on Baudelaire in Given Time; it will serve a certain structural purpose, as well as contributing to the content of the paper.

    Part two of my paper will deploy the interpretation of Christianity I have defined and relate it to Rotman’s work on parallel processing and its implications for the subject. Rotman believes that the eventual emergence of the subject as multiplicity is inevitable, but at this time such a subject is unthinkable, partly because our brains have not had time to adapt physiologically to this emerging world. What interests me is that the problem of imagining and eventually becoming the subject as multiplicity is the same problem that the Church stabilized, but did not solve, with its doctrine of the Trinity. In this sense technology may finally allow a more meaningful resolution to this problem, a “resolution” that would actually be the realization that there never was a problem; God is a multiplicity in the same way that man is, or will eventually be. Therefore what the new subject demands is not so much that one re-imagine or reinvent God but that one understand a very old conception of God that has been problematic for 2000 years. Resolving the aporia of the trinity is not merely an intellectual exercise; it demands a fundamental change in the self and the self’s conception of God, and it will result in a radically transformed humanity. The implications of this transformation are unthinkable, but perhaps it will be a Brave New World. Certainly the connection with Christianity implies as much; perhaps this is what Christ meant when he talked about returning.

    Relating Nealon’s work to all of this may provide further cause for optimism; the existing, capitalist system will not be able to assimilate the new subject in the way that it has historically. In this sense Christianity is not so much resistance, since if we believe Rotman this change is inevitable, but it is cause for hope. In a vaguely Marxist sense, maybe the new subject finally understanding an old God is the hoped for revolution.

    Bibliography

    Barnes – Tertullian
    This book, like Bray’s and Sider’s, is about Tertullian. All three look promising, but I have not had a chance to review them in detail to see which I will rely on most heavily. So far my understanding of Tertullain comes primarily from encyclopedias.

    Bray – Holiness and the Will of God

    Debray – God: An Itinerary
    This was recommended by Rotman when he was here, and I’m in the process of reading it now. Debray examines how environment and technology contribute to conceptions of God. Rotman obviously drew heavily on this work, especially in terms of his understanding of the relationship between God and language. Again, it is hard to say exactly how this book will fit into my project because I’m still reading it.

    Catholic Encyclopedia

    Derrida – Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money
    Derrida here examines the gift, and establishes it as a kind of religious gesture towards the absolute Other (God). I’ve written about it in the abstract so I won’t say more here. I also want to loosely follow the structure of this text in my paper, substituting Dostoyesky (see below) for the Baudelaire story Derrida uses.

    Derrida – The Gift of Death
    I am most interested in the reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (see below) that Derrida undertakes here. It also further develops the work of Given Time. I am also interested in possibly using Derrida’s read of Patocka, who saw Christianity as a sort of technology of responsibility and a more sophisticated development of the Platonic mystery, though I’m not quite sure if/how I’ll use this yet.

    Dostoyevsky – The Brothers Karamazov
    As I said in the abstract, I will use a short section, Ivan’s poem The Grand Inquisitor, to explicate the understanding of Christianity I am interested in deploying in this paper. I also intend to model the paper after Derrida’s work that references literature (see Given Time above).

    Foucault – The Hermeneutics of the Subject
    I don’t expect to rely on this work too much, but it may be useful for its descriptions of early Christianity and its development in relation to the Hellenic/Roman tradition. However, because Foucault is much more interested in the latter than the former, I think Hermeneutics will be of limited use.

    Kierkegaard – Fear and Trembling
    See Gift of Death

    Nealon – Periodizing the 80s
    I may argue that the form of Christianity that I describe will be useful in resisting capitalism as Nealon describes it. Because Christianity gestures towards “the impossible”, and because it is fundamentally removed from economy (as Derrida explicitly points out in Given Time), it cannot be assimilated. That Christianity as popularly conceived has colluded with capitalism is evidence that it is badly in need of reinterpretation and deployment.

    The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity
    Of course, being an encyclopedia this covers a lot of territory. For this paper I am using the first two chapters, on Christianity through 700 C.E. These chapters highlight the debates taking place in the Christian community at the time, the emerging Church as institution and its relationship with Constantine and Rome, and prominent theologians of the time. It’s been a useful starting place.

    Rotman – the essays we read in class
    There are two aspects of Rotman’s work that interest me, and they are described in more detail in abstract. Very briefly, his idea that parallel processing in computers, along with other technologies, will lead to parallel processing in humans and “midwife” the birth of the new subject as multiplicity. This is intimately connected with conceptions of God, and I will relate it to the Trinity in Christianity.

    Sider – Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire

  • 21. mlmcginnis  |  November 16, 2007 at 7:54 pm

    Find all to your heart’s content here!

  • 22. Clay Walker  |  November 16, 2007 at 8:21 pm

    Update! Since I thought that the abstract/bibliography were due last week, I posted an earlier draft then my current abstract, which is here

    13pirates.pbwiki.com/Abstract3

  • 23. Kim Lacey  |  November 16, 2007 at 8:29 pm

    Viva Whenever: Suspended and Expanded Bodies in Time
    Extended Abstract

    I am dividing my paper into four parts: i) time extension and creation ii) created and transferable memory iii) time and memory via eternal storage devices iv) removal of desire and the machinic use of the body through sexual enhancement drugs. In this abstract, I will detail these four sections by illustrating my preliminary hypotheses and how I hope to employ the major theories mentioned in my abstract (posted above).

    Part I: Time extension and creation
    Rather than begin my essay with examples, I feel that it is better to unpack the theories first and animate them through two different models later. Therefore in this first section, I will thoroughly examine Deleuze’s in Cinema 2 argument about time passage and the creation of three distinct moments in time: past, present, and future. I will juxtapose Deleuze with Bergson’s argument in Matter and Memory. The latter suggests that time is not made of distinguishable past, present, and future moments, but that the three are always part of each other (present is becoming past as it simultaneously becomes future). I will lead into my essay with this part because the rest of my paper will focus on memory and time creation; thus, establishing how we already theorize linear time is crucial to understanding new possibilities for suspended time which are offered by both digital and medical advances.

    Part II: Created and Transferable Memory
    In this section, I will begin by turning towards Merlin Donald’s notion of “external memory devices” and the evolution of our dependence upon hardware for memory and extensions of the self. Donald insists that external memory fosters exactness, so that continuing experiences never hinder pure recollection. The memories are stable (or in my argument, suspended) and able to be recalled without any change resulting from time passage. Because we store so much of ourselves in external spaces (blogs, iPods, flash drives, etc.), we have the opportunity to share these external memory devices with others, thus creating the possibility for transferable memory. Two people can have the same memories simply by uploading to an external memory device and sharing it with someone else.

    Part III: Time and Memory via External Memory Devices
    Since I argue in the previous section that two people can share the same memories, in this section I will look towards sharing memory with future – and even unknown users – via external memory devices. For example, if I’m waking around campus and find a flash drive on the ground, pick it up, and plug it into my home computer, I can experience part of this person (e.g. some stored memories). However, there is a distinct difference between finding hardware and finding someone’s diary, a photograph, or an old book on a library shelf. We use external memory devices unlike the way one uses a diary. We utilize these devices for their stability, as opposed to diaries that are looked back upon as part ‘that was lost.’ External memory devices are unchanging, and lie dormant until called upon at some point in the future. Since these devices are extensions of ourselves, I will argue that we are already (and constantly) in a state of suspension. These devices are only effectual when called upon, and are otherwise useless. In this section, I will question what happens to time if we are already, and always, suspended? Are we living in a constant present, or is suspension a construct of the past? I will probably use Derrida’s Specters of Marx in this section, along with Flusser, Burfoot, and some more Donald.

    Part IV: Removal of Desire and the Machinic Use of the Body through Sexual Enhancement Drugs
    If external memory devices are extensions of the body in a specific time-oriented way, sexual enhancement drugs, too, extend the body in similar means. Because external memory is equated with stable recollection, one can access the same things repeatedly at any point in time. Therefore, drugs such as Viagra can be used to create a uniformed potential for sex. Simply by taking a pill, the user does not have to rely upon the body and the possibility that an erection will not occur. Rather, one can use these sexual enhancement drugs to ensure that the body functions in the way one desires. Further, if one no longer has to wonder if the body will react to arousal, then possibility is no longer an issue. Users know where they can go to ‘access an erection,’ so suspension, here, refers to user’s unfaltering reaction to the pills. There is no lack since there is no desire for something one cannot achieve. (In my paper, I will make the distinction between the desire for sex v. the desire for an erection.) Somewhere in this section I also want to discuss “replacement,” but I’m still trying to figure that out. Also in this part I will be relying upon Zizek and Stelarc most heavily.

  • 24. Kim Lacey  |  November 16, 2007 at 8:31 pm

    First paragraph typo: annotated bib is posted above, not abstract. Oops.

  • 25. Crystal Starkey  |  November 16, 2007 at 9:09 pm

    Crystal Starkey
    Dr. Pruchnic
    ENG 7007
    16 November 2007
    Revisionary Consciousness: Disabilities in Education
    “While mental illness is by definition not related to the intactness of the body, nevertheless, it shows up as a disruption in the visual field. We ’see’ that someone is insane by her physical behavior, communication, and so on. Yet the fear is that the mind is fragmenting, breaking up, falling apart, losing itself– all terms we associate with becoming mad. With the considerable information we have about the biological roots of mental illness, we begin to see the disease again as a breaking up of ‘normal’ body chemistry: amino acid production gone awry, depleted levels of certain polyeptide chains or hormones” (Davis 142).

    Introduction:
    Through my research here, I think I can draw parallels and make connections amongst Autism and other disabilities within the college classroom. While my focus is on Autism and, more specifically, Aspergers– which is a disorder ascribed to people with no general delay in cognition or language, whose IQ ranges from normal to gifted, and has an overly developed imagination (Williams)– one can easily derive similar principles researched here and apply them to other learning disabilities in higher education. Unfortunately, since its inception in the 19th century, research on the human body is continually measured against the body capable of doing factory work in the 1800’s. Appearance and function are the two main categories of which we critique our bodies. The other body, the different, the ‘incapable’ (again, defined according to the 1800’s factory production standards) body is repulsive because it does not appear or function ‘properly.’ This repulsion creates alarm within teachers of Autistic students, as well as increasing frustration, often resulting in opting to “let someone else deal with it.” Repulsion and frustration at the Asperger student’s failure to meet expectations often drives teachers to readily offer the pretext, they have no training in working with Autistic students and deem themselves as, thus, unqualified to have such students in their classes. It is my hope in this project to examine the reasons sourcing that repulsion, driving that frustration, as well as to offer ways in which higher education professionals can help Asperger students in their classes because these professionals are qualified and do have the knowledge and capability of helping these students be successful.
    In rethinking and theorizing learning disabilities such as Aspergers in the classroom, I do hope to avoid the accusation that I am patronizing the Autism community from a non-Autistic position. Though I am an educator, and I have conducted several hours of research on this topic, I do not pretend to know better than those afflicted with the disorder nor those close to people afflicted with the disorder. My goal here is to make the disorder more public, give it more light within higher education and related circles, so people with Aspergers have the opportunity to achieve a more thoroughly educated, well-adjusted life. Statistics show 48 people in 10,000 currently have Aspergers, and all of these people deserve a fair chance at higher education. I hope this research can help create this opportunity.
    I have organized the essay into four sections: 1) The Autistic Body; 2) Aspergers: The Shared Body vs the Private Body; 3) High Functioning Autistic Identities: Pre-Defined and Re-Defined; 4) Rhetoric of Aspergers in College Composition Courses. Within these sections, I hope to better define the Asperger body from the Asperger mind, while examining the Autistic identity as a student in the college classroom. Since books about disability are little read and academic presentations and conferences on learning disabilities poorly attended (Davis xi), there is little rhetoric about High Functioning Autism in higher education and even less on Aspergers in the college composition classroom. As a college composition instructor, I’d like to see Autistic students in an environment that has been created with knowledge and skill sets which reflect learning disabled, developmental and mainstream students’ needs. An ideal classroom is one which ultimately allows all students to learn together– decreasing the disabled variable, the deficits, through effective teaching strategies and knowledge.
    The Autistic Body:
    To define the Autistic Body, it is crucial to identify the disabled body and mind, through economic, historical, cultural and social processes, all of which directly affect the ways in which we think about the learning disabled’s body and mind, and for this project specifically those with Asperger’s. Culturally, our concept of disability lies within our senses in that our sense of touch, sight, hear, and smell have been conditioned by our cultural experience to see, feel, hear and smell what those experiences have taught us is normal, beautiful and rigid. In this way we interpret the disabled body as abnormal, ugly and incorrect, rather than the way the observed disabled body truly exists. Within our realm of human affect, we perceive the disabled body as a disruption to our senses. Of course, the disabled body does not perceive itself in this way. It is this, what I call ’sense-disruption’– stemming from our culturally biased assumptions on ability and outward behaviors– which creates body binaries within our consciousness such as the normal/abnormal, abled/disabled, and good/bad body. This is exemplified when Lennard Davis, in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body, writes “…our construction of the normal world is based on a radical repression of disability and that given certain power structures, a society of people with disabilities can and does easily survive and render ‘normal’ people outsiders” (22). And because our culture considers the disabled body abnormal and bad, the disabled body is thus de-eroticized. When we define the unreachable, unattainable, ‘divine’ body as the ideal body (or student), we simultaneously create and define the grotesques, the abnormal. An example of this occurs through what Davis calls ‘bourgeois hegemony,’ which creates a precedent for middle-class ideology; this middle class ideology created a mean, which ultimately justified the creation of a norm for both the ideal and the abnormal (27). Economically, then, the body is either disabled or it is not: if a body can earn money, it is not disabled, but if it cannot earn money it is disabled. Following this bourgeois hegemony, lower class families often have children born with more disabilities and acquire disabilities at a higher rate than middle class and upper class families (161). This economic mean serves as another source for sense-disruption when we come in contact with the disabled body incapable of being financially productive and continuing into social means as well. Sense-disruption re-occurs socially, where the Asperger body exists as a repressed fragmented body: fragmented In It’s awkward, external encasement, repressed In Its brilliant mind, capable of genius mental capacity. People afflicted with this disorder possess no social skills or non-verbal communication knowledge. Because we identify the body and mind through these processes we see this awkward, external fragmentation as disabled.
    We understand the body as something not occurring naturally but rather, as Brian Rotman writes, on his website regarding gesture, ”… a bio-cultural assemblage, constructed within discursive practices, interlocking social, cultural and historical matrices and the facilitations/impositions of an evolutionary past.” (NEED IN-TEXT CITATION HERE). Indeed the language our culture uses to define the ‘other’ body such as “birth defect” and “deformity” clearly communicates our society resides in an ideological state rather than a factual, scientific one. Because of this ideological state, the body, then, is an object formed through our expositions, experiences actions and perceived reactions. For Davis, the body represents society’s obsession with an assumed ideological state, yet the very principle of difference in/of the body lies within the principle of meaning, and meaning is gained by differing from each other. “The concept of disability is a crucial part of the very way we conceive of and live in our bodies” (Davis 157). In this way, then the ‘normal’ body exists in relativity with the ‘disabled’ body. Davis’ area of expertise on the deaf and disabled bodies—terms which he believes are used to create rigid categories of existence: either one is disabled or one is not—furthers this idea of categorizing regarding disability in its presentation to ‘normal’ people. These categories are function and appearance– the functional modality is defined as the inability to do something considered a standard movement (walk, talk, hear, see, manipulate, etc), while the appearance modality puts the disabled person in our field of vision, as being visualized as disabled. Disabled is seen as the person, rather than disability being a part of the person (11).
    Asperger’s: The Shared Body vs the Private Body:
    In examining a point from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World In whichh she states, “the notion that everyone is alike by having a body and that what differentiates one person from another is the soul or intellect or personality can mislead one into thinking that the body is ‘shared’ and the other part is ‘private’ when exactly the opposite is the case” (256), it is clear Asperger’s is indeed a case study for Scarry’s point. Students inflicted with Aspergers are primarily prevented from success in mainstream courses as well as in daily social settings due to their outward behavior; to be trite, they wear their disorder on their sleeve. Still, although the body is the external entity, viewed and shared by sight and touch, this sharing is not exclusive just to the physical body. Scarry includes the inner person, the ’soul’ and ‘intellect’ in this public sharedness. The body then is converted into belief– a conscious bodiment of experiences, emotions and actions. “Behind the surface of the face in the mirror is blood and bone and tissue but also friends, cities, grandmothers, novels, gods, numbers, and jokes; and it is likely to be the second group (the socialization of the sentience) rather than the first (the privacy of sentience) that she at that moment ’senses’ as the washcloth in the mirror moves back and forth over the illuminated surface of the skin” (256). Though it would seem it is the external awkwardness which is the shared portion of the Asperger person’s body, it is the physical experiences within our psyche that creates the physical body’s shared presence. A specific debate over the shared versus the private body for Asperger students in higher education is furthered by the choice often presented to Asperger students regarding self-disclosure.
    Autistic Identities: Pre-Defined and Re-Defined:
    All bodies are differently abled, and the ones who are typically referred to as “normal” or “non-disabled” are only temporarily abled. In that we all have our gifts, specialties, etc we are all differently abled as well as disabled, and in this way we realize those gifts are temporary in our physical life. Thus, the term differently abled should be readily applied to all peoples, yet currently is used only to disable disabled peoples. While the term has its drawbacks, it is a term often preferred by many disabled persons because ‘differently abled’ implies the way in which they are differently abled is a quality about their personhood. Being referred to as ‘disabled” implies that is the makeup of their entire person: disabled (Davis xiii). When we begin to conceive of disability as a description of the person rather than an absolute category, only then will we be able to examine the identity of a person with Autism.
    Yet, our identity politics are so misshapened we fail to understand Asperger’s as a modality, not a disability. This Asperger modality can be channeled (in large part due to our rapid progression within technology), through various modes of communication in the classroom, which I discuss in the next section. But the problem in defining Autism as well as other learning disabilities lies within the research we use to define this condition. The Asperger diagnosis was not added to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders until 1994, and while the diagnosis enabled those afflicted with it some sense of acknowledgment, this recent research surrounding the Asperger disorder, continues to rely on constructed categories created in an ableist culture. A culture where the “normal” and the “disabled” can’t survive without the other. “The normal body, invented in the nineteenth century as a departure form the ideal body, has shifted over to a new concept: the normal ideal. This normal ideal body is the one we see on the screen. It is the commodified body of the eroticized male or female star. This body is not actually the norm, but it is the fantasized, hypostatized body of commodified desire” (154). Thus, the ideal body leads to the normal body which turns into the normal ideal. It is in this creation of the normal ideal which simultaneously creates the abnormal and grotesque. Thus, the normal and the disabled body are directly connected and must co-exist.
    The Rhetoric of Autism in the Composition Class:
    This section focuses on the ways in which we can successfully mainstream Asperger students in a college classroom (specifically the composition classroom) environment that has been shaped with knowledge and skill sets– reflecting learning disabled, developmental and mainstream students’ needs. For composition classrooms, writing prose is deemed the means by which students must be able to communicate. While some peoples with Aspergers find writing is the best mode of communication, for others it is the worst. This is problematic. It is my hope that this section will aid teachers in designing a rhetorical space intentionally created to foster all students’ learning, while decreasing the disabled variables and deficits through effective teaching strategies and knowledge. Because contemporary society normalizes the body and the individual, my goal here is to help instructor’s de-normalize their perspective of students because it is clear that in order to successfully integrate Asperger students in the mainstream college classroom, higher education professionals must reshape their cultural expectations and ideologies.
    Asperger students often struggle with problem solving and organizational skills; they also experience difficulty with generalization of learned behaviors/knowledge as well as differentiating relevant and irrelevant information; additionally, they often have restrictive, narrowly defined interests (Williams). For these reasons, and others, precision, certainty, regularity and order are crucial to the Asperger student’s success in the college classroom. In addition to incorporating precision, certainty and regularity in their classroom teaching, education professionals can significantly increase an Asperger student’s chance for success in higher education through understanding certain common problematic issues an Asperger student will probably experience such as: basic communication; misunderstanding protocol; classroom interaction; stigmatization by other students; lack of social support system; faculty misinterpretations (Williams). But these hindrances are just that: hindrances– and should not be considered valid reasons for rejection into an institution or class. Asperger students can be successful at the college level. This is proven through the several colleges and universities that have adopted special programs for students with Asperger’s syndrome like: University of Arizona; Bowling Green State University; University of Indianapolis (BUILD Program); Marshall University, Huntington, WV; University of Southern California; Southern Illinois-Carbondale (ASPIRE Program); Western Kentucky University (Kelly Autism Program) and more. These programs realized Asperger students’ potential and channeled it via successful integration into mainstream college classes.
    According to Davis, “…disabilities appear or are highlighted in environments that produce disability. If our society were one in which difference could be more easily handled, impairments might not be seen as so ‘devastating’ as they are today” (165). Because our society does not handle being different easily, teachers expect a ‘norm’ in their classrooms and design their curriculum around that norm. When students with disabilities are part of the equation, professionals are often stretched too far beyond their comfort zones in the classroom in addition to being asked to adjust their ideas of what is possible and what defines success. For some, this is too much. One aspect educational professionals must address personally is whether or not they are able to progress beyond the learning disabled’s body as “a zone of repulsion,” which evokes fear and loathing from others (144). If we are able to see beyond the lens of disability and understand that Asperger students is more a difference in presentation than a sense-disruption, then we could recognize these students have the ability to hear, talk and see like non-disabled bodies. Davis argues disabled bodies are “disqualified from representing universality,” and this may not be able to be changed within higher education and/or elsewhere unless Asperger students are mainstreamed not only in college classrooms but in society wholistically (150).
    Professors who have high functioning Autism students in their courses can implement a number of teaching strategies to help the Asperger student be successful in the mainstream classroom. For our purposes here, I have listed only the following ten.
    Conclusion:
    Unfortunately, the construction of normalcy since the 19th century has meant a simultaneous deconstruction of disability, as there is probably no area of life in today’s society in which some idea of a norm hasn’t been incorporated and assumed, and yet disability is not included in the definition of diversity.

  • 26. Crystal Starkey  |  November 16, 2007 at 9:28 pm

    Annotated Bibliography

    Alcoff, Linda Martin and Eduardo Mendieta, Eds. Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
    This collection of essays examines the ways our identities are connected to our daily existence: authors like Ernest Laclau, Renato Rosaldo, Ross Poole, E.J. Hobsbawm, Georg Lukacs, and W.E.B. Du Bois analyze, dissect and discusses the ways our societal identities determine the experiences we have and vice versa. Because the Asperger identity is so often publicly defined by their external selves and yet is privately so often determined by those external influences in conjunction with their inner personalities, this book fits well with person-analysis project in terms of the social aspect of Asperger students’ lives.

    Brice-Heath, Shirley. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

    Davis, Lennard Ed. The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge, 2006.

    Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body. New York: Verso, 1995.
    Davis discusses the ways our ableist society has constructed a ‘normal’ body around an 1800’s factory worker body, while simultaneously constructing an abnormal body. Davis’ book dissects the multiple layers in which a
    disabled body affects the temporarily body and the ways these interactions occur both physically and mentally for all people.

    Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York, The New Press, 1995.
    Delpit’s point that nearly 40% of our students are minority students, yet most of the teachers are white is directly connected in that research shows community college and other open enrollment higher education institutions are going to see an influx of Asperger students, yet the teachers teaching these students are not learning disabled trained.

    Gabel, Susan L. Ed. Disability Studies in Education: Readings in Theory and Method. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2005.

    Hawhee, Debra. Bodily Arts Rhetoric And Athletics in Ancient Greece. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2004.
    In her text Hawhee analyzes the ways in which rhetoric, rhetoricians and athletics are interconnected in ancient Greece, though these themes are evident today as well. My project will utilize Hawhee through her terms, kairos, cronos, metis and the ways Asperger students are at a crucial disadvantage without these both in higher education and in society.

    Jung, Julie. Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.
    Jung dissects multi genre texts and the ways disconnections offer learning opportunities not typically used in college courses. Jung shows ways in which teachers can de-normalize learning, writing and literacy and the multiple benefits students take away from this technique. I plan to use Jung’s theory to show teachers the multiple options available to harnessing Asperger’s students’ social challenges interfering with their academic success and channeling it through the disconnections Jung examines.

    Learning Disability Quarterly: Journal of the Council for Learning Disabilities. Fall 2005. V28; No4.

    McCabe, Robert H. Yes We Can! A Community College Guide For Developing America’s Underprepared. Arizona: League for Innovation, 2003.

    Palmer, Ann. Realizing the College Dream with Autism or Asperger Syndrome: A Parent’s Guide to Student Success. Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006.
    Palmer, a parent of an Asperger student, discusses the considerations, preparations parents must make to ensure college success for their Asperger child. I am applying this parent’s-perspective source and applying it throughout my project as an inside perspective to Aspergers.

    Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia and Brenda Jo Brueggemann. Eds. Disability and the Teaching of Writing: A Critical Source Book. New York: Bedford-St. Martins, 2008.

    Perry, Beth. She’s A Top Model– and Autistic. People. 22 October 2007:75
    Kuzmich is an Autistic top model and serves as an example of Asperger inflicted people making their life public.

    Purcell-Gates, Victoria. Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy. Massachusetts: Harvard university Press, 1997.
    Purcell-Gates’ research on Appalachian families and their relationship to poverty and low literacy reveals connections to Asperger students in that Appalachian students are subject to a cycle beginning with little literature in their home growing up through shallow goals for their livelihood while Asperger students are often relegated to similar fates, not because (like the Appalachian students) they’re not capable but rather because it’s easier to let them continue the cycle, sing their poverty, lack of experience and/or cognitive impairment as a reason for their low level of success rather than looking to ourselves as a member of the faculty and/or member of our society who allowed this injustice to occur.

    Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press,1985.
    The focus of this Scarry text examines the effects of torture and pain on the body, but for my project I will use the her material on the shared body versus the private body and the way in which her theory on these very different aspects of our bodies is connected to the Asperger student in higher education.

    Selzer, Jack and Sharon Crowley. Eds. Rhetorical Bodies. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
    Examining the rhetoric of the body through authors like Wendy Sharer, Peter Moretensen, Lester Faigley, John Schilb, Christina Haas, Celeste Condit has helped me apply contemporary theories on the rhetoric of the body to today’s disabled bodies.

    Shapiro, Nancy S. and Jodi H. Levine. Creating Learning Communities: A Practical Guide to Winning Support, Organizing for Change, and Implementing Programs. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999.
    Shapiro and Levine have broken down every step to creating learning communities in colleges across the nation. Studies show Asperger students are much more successful in academic courses if the topic interests them. Not that this is a unique trait amongst all college students, but for Asperger students having an interest in the topic could be the one aspect of education to foster success.

    Shaughnessy, Mian P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York, Oxford University Press, 1977.
    Saughnessy examines the many ways and reasons why students are unable or can’t master the skills required for basic writing success. Amongst these non-learning disabled students who are not able to master these skills are Asperger students who have the mental capacity and ability to easily master these techniques but are unable due to other cognitive impairments as well as resistant teachers unwilling to change their teaching routines to accomodate disabled students such as Asperger students.

  • 27. Jule Wallis  |  November 16, 2007 at 9:40 pm

    What’s So Special About the Victims and Detectives of Law and Order: Special Victims Order?
    Television drama has been extensively explored by critics and theorists for over thirty years. This paper will attempt to explore how television generates a narrative for constructing, mediating, and framing social and individual identities. More specifically, it will explore how the crime drama Law and Order: SVU creates a liberal and feminist portrayal of gender and race. I intend to argue that Law and Order: SVU utilizes aspects of performativity in order to re-articulate and re-define the ways in which violence as well as rape is described, portrayed, and discussed within SVU. By utilizing Foucault’s idea that the body and sexuality are cultural constructs rather than natural phenomena, Judith Butler’s insistence that cultural norms regulate how we embody or perform our gender identities, Grusin’s concept of premediation, as well as other who have contributed to the theory of television and violence against women (Fiske, Susan Miller, Susan Lorene Brinson, Sarah Projansky…), this article will show the ways in which televised violence against women can either produce “’a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 1990: 33) or can work to unsettle traditionally held concepts of femaleness, violence, and rape.
    Television has become such a large part of modern experience that it has significantly molded and defined popular culture. Television generates meaning and is a highly controlled and ideological representation of the world; it is an ongoing process of meaning construction. Thus, television portrays and creates unspoken and explicit meanings and values within society by simultaneously revealing and molding the audience’s perceptions of reality. Television, therefore, is an excellent source for exploring/understanding how our society creates and presents meaning. Specifically, Grusin’s definition of premediation: “premediation, on the other hand, insists that the future itself is also already mediated, and that with the right technologies the future can be remediated before it happens. This remediation is not only formal but reformative” is highly intriguing and seems applicable to a reading of the popular show Law and Order: SVU.
    It would not be a stretch to assert that SVU functions as a premediated rhetorical tool against rape. Intervening into the discourse of rape, the show can and has been read as a form of rape prevention. A majority of rape victims portrayed within the show are women and children. Often, women question their role in the violation “I should have never gone back to his place”, “Why did I get so drunk”, “I can’t remember, does that still mean I was rape” and so on. So, on a very basic level, the victim’s questions can be read as a warning; if you do this, this, and this, you will be raped. In the article “It Could Happen to You” the author argues that rape prevention rhetoric actually produces the rhetoric of unavoidable risk. This rhetoric of risk creates programs that focus upon prevention. In other words, similar to Grusin’s concept of premediation, anti-rape programs, pamphlets, and even theoretical discourse produces and relies upon preventative measures in which they attempt to ensure the future does not hold the promise of rape for women. Yet, if women are raped, it is often rhetorically explained away as the result of offending, non-preventative actions of the woman. Similar to rape prevention rhetoric, SVU could be read as perpetuating the myth that women are naturally rapeable subjects, and that women must follow precise and constricting rules if they hopes premediate a future of violation.
    It seems valid to read SVU as just another form of rape prevention rhetoric, in which females are seen as a rapeable space. Yet, a seemingly susceptible and unsettling reading might refigure the role of premediation and victimhood within SVU. In other words, how can Grusin’s theory of premediation be read against the grain of rape in which it is defined as the “natural” experience of heterosexual women? How does SVU attempt to premediate and refigure personal and social concepts of the who, how, and when of rape? In many ways, SVU endeavors to fracture and question how femaleness, victimhood, and rape becomes regulated, normalized, and materialized. By performing rape and gender that runs against the grain of established ideas, SVU invokes Butler’s insistence that “Identifications [and gender] are never fully and finally made; they are incessantly reconstituted and, as such, are subject to the volatile logic of iterability” (105) and yet “It is this constitutive failure of the performative, this slippage between discursive command and its appropriated effect, which provides the linguistic occasion and index for a consequential disobedience” (122). Resistance, in other words, is possible only through the recognition of performativity (regulated norms) as performativity.
    A counter argument to my reading of SVU may be that the problem with shows such as SVU is their enmeshment within the normalizing matrices of power. Characters who are raped within the show are still predominantly women and often blamed by others for the rape. While I cannot contest this argument, what I find interesting is the ways in which the show questions the validity of such claims. Yes, one performs the gendered role, because as of yet, there is no other role to perform; to exist in any meaningful way, one must and does exists in the relation to regulatory norms. Yet, these norms can and are contested in SVU. What seems ingenious, then, is the way in which SVU works within the regulating structure in order to create a space for resistance. Thus, like Butler, SVU refuses to view rape or sex as irreducible and inevitable. Sexual difference and violence can only occur within a space that insists upon and produces that difference.
    As materially produced beings, we are simultaneously subject to and implicated in the social structures that surround us; yet we are never fully determined by them or free from them. This, it seems, appears to be the power of SVU. The show largely focuses upon the connection between women and rape because, unfortunately in our current culture, women are in greater danger of being rape. Yet, this is not to say that SVU reinscribes rape as a “natural” and as a biologically inherent female experience. Instead, SVU insists upon investigating why it is that women are raped. SVU attempts to understand rape victims as embodied subjects, and in doing so, the show is able to take the crime and violence committed seriously without endowing the victim with an identity of enduring helplessness. Thus, the premediation that occurs in the show SVU does not rearticulate rape myths. Instead, it attempts to open up a previously silenced and shame infused discourse and re-articulate and re-imagine the violence of rape in society.

  • 28. Jen  |  November 17, 2007 at 12:34 am

    Technologies of Self(-Help): Cybernetics, Life Hacking, and the Belabored Brain

    In his final years, Michel Foucault turned his attention towards the technologies of the self, “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (18). His research interests were prescient in 1980s, as Western society had yet to reach its zenith of self-obsession that is observable today through the plethora of memoirs, studies on the body/affect, discussions surrounding privacy issues, student-centered classrooms, and self-help books. The last item of that list, self-help books, is the topic I will explore in my paper. My interest lies in a very specific vein of the self-help catalogue, those that deal with cybernetics. Cybernetics and self-help were famously connected by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz in 1960, who found that cosmetic surgery did not alleviate the internal programming that told his patients they were not attractive and worked to change individuals self images through hypnosis. In the nearly five decades that have passed since the publication of Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics, the processes of communication and control have reached new levels, perhaps rendering Norbert Weiner’s famous quote hopelessly out of date: “The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence.” Weiner perhaps did not imagine that life hackers would design email inbox avatars to remind them of all the daily tasks they didn’t want to burden their brain with or that we could get in a car and get to an address without having to think about directions. Many of our thoughts are getting outsourced to open up our creative potential.

    Today’s current top-selling self-help approach, Getting Things Done by David Allen, is promoting a way to get rest from thinking, at least unnecessary thinking. Allen uses the metaphor of the brain as a computer to demonstrate the shackles of our thoughts resides in a cluttering in our short-term memory, which he relates to the sluggish function of a computer due to overloading the random access memory (RAM). If we remove the open loops of unfinished projects and unnecessary information, our true potential can be unleashed and we will gain control of our time, the god which Allen seems to be worshipping. The goal of developing the self has seemed to changed greatly since Foucault wrote: “Since we have to take care throughout life, the objective is no longer to get prepared for adult life, or for another life, but to get prepared for a certain complete achievement of life. This achievement is complete at the moment just prior to death. This notion of a happy proximity to death— of old age as completion—is an inversion of the traditional Greek values on youth” (31). Instead of working toward a complete achieve of life, individuals are working towards managing the everyday.
    The movement from working on the soul or working on the self in order to be a good citizen in the Greek sense (not in today’s consumer sense) has shifted to what Micki McGee defines as the creation of a belabored self, who “presents itself as overworked both as the subject and as the object of its own efforts at self-improvement” (16). Though McGee does not acknowledge the movement from discipline societies to societies of control, she does acknowledge the disintegration of standard jobs and families to facilitate the need to constant labor on the self to keep employable and marriageable. Hannah Arendt defines labor as a never finished product and something that must constantly be performed only to be performed again, such as making the bed.

    To build off of McGee’s claim of the belabored self, I will argue that with the renewed interest in cybernetics that the brain is becoming belabored. Labor is being done to open up the ability to work. Work as opposed to labor produces an enduring product. This labor happens on several different levels. It is being done through the new phenomenon of brain exercises, such as soduku puzzles; through emptying the short-term memory the way one would take out the garbage, through implementing cybernetic techniques to change self-image systems, and through what is being called “outsourcing.” Outsourcing the brain involves techniques such as “hiring” computerized devices to remember items, such as birthdays and PIN numbers for you, using GPS systems to remove the need to learn direction, and taking advantage of musical recommendations from online vendors based on previous song selections. This laboring, much like the labor done by servants in Ancient Greece, gives the brain freedom to do real civic work. In today’s capitalist information society, the work of a citizen is creative production.

    In conjunction with labor being done on the brain, I would like to explore how the way individuals view the “self” fits with how they view the brain. For this section, I will draw on Gregory Bateson and N. Katherine Hayles and my selected self-help texts. In his essay, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory on Alcoholism,” Bateson addresses the problems of seeing a self as transcending the systems in which the self is situated. Hayles worries that cybernetics discourse has dissolved the sense of a self too much in the movement towards posthumanism, though she does not ask for a return of the liberal humanist subject. This would be the place where affect theory can shed some light in self formation. In addition, the cybernetic system theory with affect theory’s reliance on interactivity can address the problem McGee sees with the autonomous self.

    Note: I’m still not ready to state an argumentative claim about the negative/positive affects of the self-help genre.

    Annotated Bibliography

    Allen, David. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. New York:
    Penguin Group, 2001.
    In this self-help book, motivational coach and management consultant, David Allen, offers a new approach to unleashing an individual’s potential. Allen argues that stress-free productivity is possible through information organization and strategies for task completion. The goal is to clear the mind from information overload by sorting, prioritizing, and assigning plans of actions for the tasks that constantly build up in today’s information society. By not bogging down the brain with mundane details and unfinished projects, the brain’s true creative potential can be unleashed. In addition, individuals will feel less confused, anxious, overwhelmed, and have a higher self-esteem by being able to fulfill goals and promises to themselves.
    How I Will Be Using This Text:
    This text reflects a new approach to cybernetics and self help as it doesn’t focus on targeting the subconscious like Maxwell Maltz’s text and other texts do, but instead focuses on the short-term memory to unleash creative potential in the subconscious. It is also tied to the new movement called life hacking, which has arisen in response to the information overload that asserts control over the selves. I will argue these methods are a set of survival skills for the information age, as they deal with the dissolution of boundary between public and private life and facilitate the emergence of the skills desirable in the current market: creativity and information management.

    Bargh, John and Tanya Cartrand. “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.”
    Bateson, Gregory. “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory on Alcoholism” Steps to an
    Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler Publications Co., 1972. 309-337.
    In this essay, Bateson examines the way alcoholics anonymous is structured and based on religious views in relation to systems theory. Before entering the first step of AA, sobriety is viewed problematically in relation to a Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, which Bateson describes as the conscious will and the remainder of the personality. What is not acknowledged when focusing on a conscious will is that the mind works as a whole through a system of parts. By examining alcoholism through cybernetics, Bateson argues there are important differences that exist between the cybernetic thinking system and more popularly held conceptions of a “self.” In addition, he explains how, in relation to cybernetics, the steps and ideologies related to alcoholics anonymous work.
    How I Will Be Using This Text
    There are several ideas that I really hope to utilize from this text. Most basically, it offers historical background on how systems theory and self-help complement each other. Also, it is a nice contrast to McGee’s book on self-help and the critique of the autonomous self, as Bateson really focuses on relations, whether it is with alcohol, others, or God. Bateson also critiques the Cartesian dualism, which I think is an essential critique to make within the self-help genre. I am hoping to build on this idea in relation to how we work on the brain (giving the example of all the brain exercise programs that have hit the market) and “outsource” the brain today. The question I have in mind is if we are erroneously trying to separate the idea of a “self” from the brain.

    Brooks, David. “The Outsourced Brain.” New York Times. 26 October 2007. 16
    November 2007. .
    Caplan, Jeremy. “Hacking Toward Happiness.” Time (2007) 169.27: 73.
    In this article, Caplan investigates a new self-help movement entitled life hacking, a term coined by Danny O’Brien at a 2004 technology conference. O’Brien describes the approach of implementing life hacks as “Seven Habits of Super Effective Geeks.” The movement has spawned popular blogging sites offering tips, such as 43folders.com, podcasts, and books.
    How I Will Be Using This Text
    I find this movement to be very interesting, as it sounds very much like how Jeffrey Nealon described disciplines as targeting capacities. We are now targeting our own capacities to produce through little tips like standing during meetings to keep things moving. It sounds like factory life in many descriptions: give yourself five minutes to surf the Internet, only check your email once an hour, etc. What is also interesting that is mentioned in this article, and that I confirmed through visited these sites, is that it is a lot about simplification. Many life hackers use index cards instead of high-tech computer tools.

    Deuleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on Societies of Control.” Libcom.org. 4 September 2006. 16
    November 2007. .

    Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
    Literature, and Informatics.
    Hayles defines three distinct eras within cybernetics, each centering around a different concept: the first being homeostasis, the second reflexivity, and the last virtuality. These parallel three other developments within the text: how information became separated from materiality or disembodied, the emergence of the cyborg, and the construction of the posthuman/the dismantling of the liberal humanist subject. Hayles develops this history through both scientific and literary texts to create the argument that information is always embodied and cannot be conceived separately from materiality.
    How I Will Be Using This Text
    I will be using this text not only to get background on cybernetics, but to explore the conception of a self through cybernetics. Her claim that the liberal humanist subject was dismantled through cybernetic discourse seems at odds with the concept of self-help. I’ll use this argument as a lens to read the two core self-help texts and the new life hacking movement that is taking place online.

    Maltz, Maxwell and Dan S. Kennedy. The New Psychocybernetics. New York: Penguin
    Putnam Inc., 2001.
    This self-help book is an updated and expanded version of Maxwell Maltz’s Psychocybernetics. The central claim is that through understanding, modifying, and managing self-image, individuals can gain new confidence. Positive thinking is not enough, as if the ideas you are trying to affirm are inconsistent with the system of ideas that make up your personality, those positive thoughts will be rejected. Maltz’s approach targets the subconscious mind, which he claims is not really a mind but a servo-mechanism of the brain and nervous system that performs goal-striving as directed by the mind (consciousness). The goal is to feed new information and data to the servo-mechanism, which Maltz names more specifically the Creative Mechanism, to make it a Success Mechanism instead of a Failure Mechanism
    How I Will Be Using This Text
    After reading this in conjunction with Massumi and Bargh and Cartrand, it appears the Maltz’s is utilizing a system of affects to produce new potentials and perceptions. There does seem to be unexamined issues underlying this text, such as where do our goals come from and why do we feel that we need to work on certain areas. Also, I hope to examine the relationship between the conscious and subconscious in terms of “self” ideology. I do think that this text is a bit too focused on an autonomous system, which I will relate to Bateson and McGee.

    Maturana, Humberto R., “Biology of Cognition,” 1970. Reprinted in Maturana,
    Humberto R. and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization
    of the Living. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980, 2-62.
    http://www.enolagaia.com/M70-80BoC.html

    McGee, Micki. Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. New York:
    Oxford University Press, 2005.
    In this book, McGee argues that the growth of the self-help genre is related to the instability of the job market and marriages. Individuals enter a vicious cycle where they are not improving themselves, but belaboring themselves to remain employable and marriageable. Under this larger context, McGee explores the notion of a calling, the gender differences within the self-help genre, the negative impact of pursuing self improvement autonomously, and the benefit of envisioning a more collective approach to self-improvement.
    How I Will Be Using This Text
    This text will be helpful in giving me background history on the genre of self-help. However, the most important point I will be taking up is the idea of the belabored help in response to the dissolution of institutions. Though, McGee doesn’t use the terminology societies of control, there is definitely a need to make that connection. Also, I hope to build on her idea of the belabored self (she is using labor in reference to the distinction made by Hannah Arendt between work and labor) and argue that it is the brain that is becoming belabored and consequently also outsourced.

    Nealon, Jeffrey. Foucault beyond Foucault. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University
    Press,?.

    Nealon, Jeffrey. “Periodizing the 80’s.”

    Pangaro, Paul. Cybernetics – A Definition. 2007. 16 November 2007.
    .
    This what Paul Pangaro supplied as a definition of cybernetics for an entry in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Computers. The definition explains the differences between artificial intelligence and cybernetics, the former one utilizes computer technology to create intelligent machines and is tied to a realist view; and the latter is based on a constructivist view and uses “models of organizations, feedback, goals, and conversation to understand the capacity and limits of any system.” Pangaro also goes into the history of cybernetics, explaining how Norbert Weiner named it as a new discipline and how it came to be known as applied epistemology as it studied subjectivity. This entry chronicles the rise of artificial intelligence, the waning interest in cybernetics, and the resurge the field of cybernetics is experiencing today in light of artificial intelligence’s inability to create intelligent machines.
    How I Will Be Using This Text
    I will be using this text as background material to help me build a genealogy of cybernetics.

    Technologies of the Self, a Seminar with Michel Foucault. Eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck
    Gutman, and Patrick Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
    This book builds off of a seminar delivered by Michel Foucault entitled, “Technologies of the Self,” which examines how an individual turns him or herself into a subject through “their own means or with the help of others, acted on their own bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being in order to transform themselves and attain a certain state of perfection or happiness, or to become a sage or immortal, and so on.” His presentations covered approaches to self-formation from the classical age through Christianity. Luther Martin, William Paden, and Kenneth Rothwell build on this exploration of self-formation techniques within religious practices. Huck Gutman builds on the religious practice of confession to examine the emergence of a Romantic sense of self, while Patrick Hutton concludes by arguing that Foucault offers a counterpoint to Freud’s psychoanalytical examination of the psyche.
    How I Will Be Using This Text
    I plan to use this text to illustrate a movement from targeting the body, to targeting the soul, to targeting life itself through technologies of the self. While Foucault concludes by relating technologies of the self to a preparation for death and a complete achievement of life, I will be arguing that self-help is indeed a labor in the Arendtian sense (using McGee as a supporting text) and that technologies of the self are being used to achieve everyday happiness and security.

    Weiner, Norbert. Cybernetics. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1961.

    Websites:
    http://www.lifehacker.com

    http://www.43folders.com

  • 29. Andrea J. Vought  |  November 17, 2007 at 3:09 am

    Annotated Bibliography

    Carter, Michael. “Stasis and Kairos: Principles of Social Construction in Classical Rhetoric.”
    Rhetoric Review 7.1 (1988), pp. 97-112.
    Especially if I want to tie in Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the rhizome into my project, a reinscription of kairos will be imperative. In that vein, Carter’s article should serve me well, especially in his argument regarding the inherent fluidity of establishing stasis. Carter’s article will help me to make the case for stasis in a cybernetic neo-sophistic composition classroom. Carter positions himself against theoreticians who think of stasis as rigid and little more than the foundation for dialogical reasoning. In actuality, stasis too can be dynamic: “Though stasis has connotations of standing still, the result of the confrontation of two opposing movements or forces, it also bears a strong sense of the potential energy of creation and action” (99).

    Connors, Robert J. “Greek Rhetoric and the Transition from Orality.” Philosophy &
    Rhetoric 19 (1986): pp. 38-65.

    Crowley, Sharon. “A Plea for the Revival of Sophistry.” Rhetoric Review 7.2 (1989), pp. 318-
    334.
    Like most of the other authors on my list here, in this essay Crowley glosses a history of rhetoric that includes the Sophists and stresses the connections between Sophistic rhetoric and civic awareness today, specifically, she advocates using sophistic strategies to improve the quality of human life. Her discussion in this essay is quite general and not as detailed as my paper would require but in conjunction with her textbook co-written by Debra Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, it should serve as good background information for the first section of my paper, in which I will rehistoricize Sophistic rhetoric. However, she makes the point of using sophistic rhetoric to improve human life; I think this is a key idea, and I’d like to elaborate on it in light of Donna J. Haraway’s essays in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women to further improve not just human life, but nonhuman life as well.

    Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
    Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1987.
    In the chapter entitled “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?”, Deleuze and Guattari argue that there are three strata that bind: the organism, signifiance, and subjectification. The structured and limiting nature of these strata are Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the rhizome, too, is full of Sophistic vestiges, especially when thinking about kairotic time and the importance of . As I began to discuss in my most recent response, I’d like ideally to explore the possibilities of the D/G rhizome as a contemporary manifestation of kairos and the rhizome’s ability to more fully inscribe the ideas of both Rotman and Doyle into the composition classroom. Further, D/G’s interest in “mapping” would be appropriated in this new pedagogy too, as an alternative to structured inverse-pyramid writing.

    Doyle. Richard. Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living. Minneapolis: University of
    Minnesota Press. 2003.

    DuBois, Page. Sappho is Burning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1995.

    Fantham, Elaine. “Imitation and Evolution: The Discussion of Rhetorical Imitation in Cicero
    De Oratore 2. 87-97 and Some Related Problems of Ciceronian Theory.” Classical
    Philology 6.6 (1978).
    Guthrie, W. K. C. The Sophists. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1971.

    Hagaman, John. “Modern Use of the Progymnasmata in Teaching Rhetorical Invention.”
    Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986), pp. 22-29.
    My original plans for this project included a detailed discussion of the progymnasmata and the ways in which they could be reincorporated into the contemporary composition curriculum if a shift is made in the direction of new digital media and the concept of memory as laid out by Rotman. Hagaman eschews what Marrou and others deem the “danger” of appropriating the progymnasmata, that they would be nothing more than yet another prescriptivist addition to the C-T curriculum. However, Hagaman disagrees with such a reading and stresses the adaptability of the progymnasmata through an interesting reading of Cicero’s De Oratore (which I also plan to incorporate along with Quintilian in my background section). Hagaman’s essay will serve as more of a springboard than anything else, as it is short and not terribly detailed. However, he notes that Ciceronian finds invention to be a key part of the rhetorical process and it is invention that is targeted in the progymnasmata. If these exercises are digitized, invention and the other the canons are similarly opened to the possibility of change.

    Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:
    Routledge. 1991.

    Hawhee, Debra. Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece. Austin: U of Texas
    Press. 2005.

    –“Bodily Pedagogies: Rhetoric, Athletics, and the Sophists’ Three Rs.” College English
    56.1 (1994), pp. 46-65.
    Instead of placing herself in a discourse already explored ad nauseam, in “Bodily Pedagogies,” Hawhee instead explores classical rhetoric in relation with athletic training, much in the same way she does in Bodily Arts. Hawhee describes the gymnasium as the locus of rhetorical training in the time of the Sophists, and I’d like to explore the parallels of the gymnasium in the time of Isocrates and Gorgias with social networking websites of our own time like Facebook (one can state on her profile her political leanings, the candidate she favors, “hot issues” she supports, etc.), Flickr, blogging sites, and YouTube. Now that the presidential debates have been hosted through MySpace, the Internet has become more than just a chat room or shopping mall. The mayor of the city for which I work sporadically updates a blog posted to the City’s website, too, so this is happening on the local as well as national and international levels. As I discuss below in regards to producing digital arête, the digital space is becoming increasingly political, and I think Hawhee’s essay (and Bodily Arts, too) will be an interesting parallel to connect the political nature of the gymnasium with that of social networking sites.

    Heath, Malcolm. “The Substructure of Stasis-Theory from Hermagoras to Hermogenes.” The
    Classical Quarterly 44.1 (1994), pp. 114-129.

    Henry, Madeleine M. Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition.
    New York: Oxford University Press. 1995.

    Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern
    Illinois University Press. 1998.

    Lindblom, Kenneth J. “Toward a Neosophistic Writing Pedagogy.” Rhetoric Review 15.1
    (1996), pp. 93-108
    As the title suggests, Lindblom seeks to reincorporate Sophistic ideas into the contemporary composition classroom in order to foster students’ civic and social understanding: not a novel concept, surely, but—and to build upon Crowley’s article discussed above (indeed, he cites Crowley’s essay as an “organizing essay” toward a neosophistic pedagogy)—Lindblom includes more concrete examples on how to enact a neosophistic education, the foundation of which is a reworking of “knowledge production” to include understanding of cultural laws (nomoi) and the multiplicity of truth through writing “snapshots.” Rather than trying to capture the entire world or some transcendent truth in their writing, Lindblom’s students situate their writing.
    I am interested in Lindblom’s use of the term “snapshot” and hope to expand the possibilities of this “snapshot” to include other media and ourselves, too. What Lindblom (and many others here, too) fail to articulate is ability of this knowledge, writing and other media to shape us too.
    With Rotman’s and Doyle’s pieces (and D/G’s too, ideally, with respect to the dismantling of the subject/object dichotomy), I hope to critique this argument and explore the symbiotic relationship between “us” and “everything else.”

    Poulakos, John. “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 16
    (1983): 35–48.

    Poulakos, Takis. Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates’ Rhetorical Education. Columbia: U of
    South Carolina P. 1997.
    Poulakos does a commendable job of outlining Isocrates’ paideia or rhetorical pedagogy. His last chapter is focused on Isocrates’ educational program itself, while the earlier chapters discuss Isocrates’ most important works and their implications for social agency and the relationship between logos and ethos. The last chapter will be especially helpful for my project because I plan to read Poulakos’ discussion of what he calls “Isocrates’ strategy of appropriation” (99), that is—how he was able to use other disciplines for rhetorical ends—in terms of the wealth of digital media and their potential for political or social ends in the composition classroom, especially YouTube and MySpace (the online presidential debates especially seem pertinent here). To elaborate further, Poulakos’ discussion of Isocrates’ focus on reaching virtue or arête through rhetorical training (and as we see later with vir bonus dicendi peritus in Quintilian). Similarly, one’s online avatar—that is, a whole new conception of “private life” which isn’t so private—reflects and implicates the reception of one’s “public” life. I adamantly dislike the distinction between the two for obvious reasons, but Poulakos’ presentation nonetheless should prove fruitful in a construction of “digital arête” and teaching composition students to reach such an arête.

    Rotman, Brian. “Corporeal or Gesturo-Haptic Writing.” Configurations 10.3 (2002), pp. 423-
    438.

    Sprague, Rosamond Kent, Ed. The Older Sophists. Translation of Die Fragmente der
    Vorsokratiker, Ed. by Diels-Kranz, Vaduz: Weidmann. Columbia: University of
    South Carolina Press, 1972.

    Sullivan, Dale L. “Attitudes Toward Imitation: Classical Culture and the Modern Temper.”
    Rhetoric Review 8.1 (1989), pp. 5-21.
    –Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992):
    317–332.

    Walker, Jeffrey. “What Difference a Definition Makes, or, Walter Dean Howells and the
    Sophists’ Shoes.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36 (2006), pp. 143-153.
    Walker ultimately argues in this piece for a rehistoricizing of the Sophists to allow for an embodied rhetoric, imitation in its best form: not a cheap mimic, but an entirely new creation, one perhaps based in something else, but ultimately an aggregation of the rhetor’s training, ability, and necessity presented at a specific moment (kairos): an interesting combination of Deleuzian shifting plateaus and creative production. In this piece, Walker really makes the case for the importance of understanding how a work is produced, not just what it is and what it means. Thus, rhetoric in the sophistic sense can be appropriated for ALL disciplines, so this makes it especially easy to analyze the rhetoric of digital media, especially those used by students. Practically, though, my use for this essay would likely be in the first section, in which I could use Walker’s dissection of Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric to tie into a need to rehistoricize the Sophists (which, in turn, will inform how we interact with each other—humans and nonhumans, students and teachers—alike).

  • 30. Michael Cipielewski  |  November 17, 2007 at 3:23 am

    RE:public : Rendering the Multi User Domain Avatar in Corporeal and Virtual Environments

    In discussion with Brian Rotman, the subject of Second Life, the three-dimensional Multi User Domain (MUD), came up. He politely stated that it was a pointless interface, that Second Life is pointless because it reconfigures real life (RL) socially and economically without a discernable addition (The “game” mimics real life in almost every imaginable way: the world contains its own system of money and commerce, as well as virtual renderings of gesture, video and speech interfaces, dance clubs, art galleries, a virtual sex interface, et al). I see what Rotman was getting at: Second Life simply regurgitates life, hence the unimaginative title, Second Life. But the brush with which Rotman paints virtual life (and I would extend that sentiment beyond Rotman specifically, since it is fairly common) may be too broad. Second Life does something; the possibility for seemingly endless configurations of virtual communities and their subsequent impact in RL are far from nothingness. Further, the rendering of the virtual avatar, the versions of our imagined self or alternate selves are more easily realized in digital space than corporeal space. RE:public serves as a both a re-sponse to queries articulated by Rotman and intoned by the masses; Does the MUD (re)do anything? as well as questioning axiomatics of autopoiesis and the subject in general; Who or what renders the avatar? Is the avatar a sociological or autonomous function? Is it a function at all?

    Sherry Turkle engages the first question specifically, and all questions in turn. Her case study of MUD users shows that the rendering of the avatar occurs in a dually personal and social setting. That is, the user brings his/her own experience to the MUD table, and the configuring occurs within the confines of social rules. Turkle shows that not only are these avatars far from autonomous, but they may have a “life” completely separate from that of the user, but simultaneous to it — Rotman’s “parallel process.”

    Second Life is a shift away from a user-based MUD, where the user processes the virtual experience from textual interpretation, to a visual-based MUD, where the MUD itself serves less as mediation, per se, but an alternative reality. This alternative reality is not an immersive reality (Bolter Grusin) in that, it does not seek to replace reality, but serve as alter-reality. In this way, maybe the title Second Life is not so unimaginative. Rotman’s discussion of Gesturo-Haptic Writing fits with the discussion of text and image, for Turkle’s work relies solely on text-based MUD experience, and as Rotman discusses, this is not to say the text is obsolete, but rather the text experience differs from the visual experience. The approach to MUD experience from that of the virtual avatar body rather than the “disembodied consciousness” of the MUD text (an alter-avatar consciousness) that tells the user what a room looks like rather than actually showing the room, for instance, affords a rethinking of Turkle’s MUD concepts.

    These alter-avatar consciousnesses are shown by Turkle to have a one-way existence: there is life on the screen that– almost always– cannot be taken off-screen. Turkle cites instances of virtual courtship, where two users meet in virtual space and find that their respective alter-avatars wished to meet, and have already met via virtual space, not their corporeal bodies and embodied consciousnesses (affectionately referred to as “meatware”), which neither the desire to meet, nor a level of “knowing” one another. Turkle’s examples of rendering avatars as alter breaks down when avatars are not alter, but prosthesis of the body, as in dating sites such as Match.com, for example. But in fact, the alter avatar can “come off screen” as it were. The work of Jane Mcgonigal shows that Alternate Reality Games (ARG) contains users who use a hybrid of technological avatars and corporeal bodies producing a “life-effect” (Doyle), where the avatar actualizes, abandoning the technology that “contains” it, and seizes control of the wetware that served (in part) in its creation.

    Virtual courtship has potential for greater discourse, both in context of prosthesis of the self and the alter-avatar. Dana Boyd’s discussion of how meatware relationships are affected and effected via the multi user interface, and Turkle’s discussion of how alter-avatars can render relationships across technological interface and space and gender barriers, showing the “reworking” of what it means to “court”. Rending affect, or “affective bandwidth” (Picard) via the MUD interface is at the heart of virtual courtship and all virtual relationships.

    The work is split into four parts discussing the MUD and the re-visioning of the concept of public, rendering the avatar and concepts of the self, the visual virtual experience, and rendering affect on and off screen.

    It is possible that I may be re-adding some of the sources I’ve left off here, particularly Massumi, but other works dealing with the affective in virtual environments. (Beyond our friend Grusin, of course) I mean to say, this is a Biblio-in-progress!

    Bibliography

    Digital Youth Research:

    From Digital Youth Research “About” section:

    There is a growing recognition that kids’ passion for digital media has been ignited more by peer group sociability and play than academic learning. This project works to address this gap with a targeted set of ethnographic investigations into three emergent modes of informal learning that young people are practicing using new media technologies: communication, learning, and play.

    As a whole, the Digital Youth Research project is an ongoing anthropological study of human – technology interface and humans interfacing via technology in pedagogy, display, and communication. The three pieces below I will utilize specifically in my work, where they serve are “real life” examples of discursive concepts. For example: The Matteo piece I will use in discussing the difference between gaming MUDs (in tandem with Mcgonigal) and social MUDs (in tandem with Turkle). The Boyd piece I will use in to discuss rendering affect via MUDs. The Horst piece appeared in my original abstract, and will continue to serve as a point of reference in context of making the self/selves as a prosthesis, or autopoietic fragmentation.

    Bittanti, Matteo. “The ‘Angry Gamer’: Is it Real or Memorex?”
    http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/node/92
    Boyd, Dana. “Relationship Performance in Networked Publics.”
    http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/node/70
    Horst, Heather. “Coming of Age in Networked Public Culture: Stories from the Field.”
    http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/node/85

    Turkle, Sherry “Life on the Screen” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

    Turkle utilizes both social theory and sociology to grapple with what digital networks do. She uses data collected from her own experiences and others’ experiences on Multi User Domains to examine how wetware possibly (de)values virtual and corporeal experience. This text offers interesting vectors on the scope of Second Life in that it offers a hybridized and strictly MUD version of Rotman’s concept of the parahuman. Turkle explores “parallel self/selves,” “standing beside oneself,” and other sociological problems in autopoietic virtuality. I will turn to Turkle’s experience on the MUD circa 1995, a purely text-based MUD, in comparison to Second Life, a MUD that no longer relies on the capacity of the user to visualize objects embodied in virtual space via text, but presents objects as objects per se, in that they occupy virtual space in the Second Life world. Turkle also touches heavily on rendering digitally-interfaced affect (which ties into concepts of wetware, and the “gap” between the real and the virtual) which will comprise a major portion of my work in RE:public

    Doyle, Richard “Wetwares” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

    Wetwares will play a major role in “unpacking” Turkle’s ethnographies in Life on the Screen, as well as the field studies of the Digital Youth Research group. The amount of material I will discuss from Doyle is so numerous that a formally structured synopsis of how I will engage Doyle will be… laborious, at very least (I might as well write the entire seminar paper here!) that being said, here are some of Doyle’s concepts I will utilize to engage Turkle, et al:

    - Blockage, the rigid distinction between outside and inside
    - Istealthed life as a (un)scientific object
    - Localization, some particular organism “in” or “on” the computer is “alive”
    - Life effect, the actuality of virtuality
    - Actualization of alife depending on the ability to be “befallen” by human wetware
    - Capacitation of virtual technologies to deliver corporeal practices across a network
    - Alife games as “no-person games”
    - Redistribution of vitality

    Rotman, Brian “Becoming Beside Oneself”
    Rotman, Brian “Corporeal or Gesturo-Haptic Writing”
    Rotman, Brian “Going Parallel”

    Becoming Beside Oneself

    Engaging Rotman’s concepts of “machinic processes of construction, impersonal fabrication, and formal/material assemblages, not reducible to familial conflicts, imaginary self-identifications or the perennially tragic crises of an always fallen person” in context of virtual autopoiesis. The Multiplex n-self, the “trans-self carried over, momentarily de-territorealized or ported alongside itself” presents an interesting concept in context of MUDs considering the avatar and the (im)possibility of “porting” the avatar into RL (see Going Parallel.) Schwartz’s multiplicities: simulacrum multiplicity, aboriginal multiplicity, play into the avatar/”self” parallelism as schizophrenic unity, and in some cases, incongruity.

    Corporeal or Gesturo-Haptic Writing

    Here I will engage Rotman’s presupposition of technological materiality in context of Turkle and Digital Youth Research to see if the appliqué of preinstrumentality, prediscursivity, and presemiotics in MUDs shows a corporeal axiom or something else. I will also engage Rotman’s concept of “unity of the techno-body in lieu of the withering “obsolete” body”, and corporeal writing in the setting of MUD evolution from textual-based interface to visual-based interface.

    Going Parallel

    Rotman’s concepts of Parallelism serve as a jumping point from Turkle, who shows many examples of parallel autopoiesis in MUDs (in this respect, Rotman and Turkle are cut from the same cloth.) Turkle’s discussion of the (in)ability to port virtual avatars into RL makes for an interesting approach to Rotman’s rendering of the parallel process (and the Multiplex n-self from Becoming Beside Oneself) in a circular self/other subject/object relation with technology.

    Weinstone, Ann Avatar Bodies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
    2004).

    Weinstone largely engages Deleuze and Guattari (1000 Plateaus, “the wasp and the orchid,” and so on) in a lamination of Tantra and Posthumanism. The book is written as a meditation, a mantra of the Tantric unity within Posthuman alterity, the “I” in the other.

    Weinstone’s approach to alterity is unique, but it folds into the discourse of some of the other writers I will be engaging in that, the technological other versus the non-technological other are separate for Weinstone, where they are one in the same for others. Weinstone points out that most posthuman discourse circles around human-nonhuman relations, that is, human + technology, and seeks to focus, like me, on the relationship between humans via technological interface. That being said, Weinstone also calls to a unified relationship of human to human, that we cannot be completely alter to each other. These concepts will prove useful in discussing technological and affective feedback loops.

    Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard Remediation
    Grusin, Richard Affective Life of Media
    Haraway, Donna A Manifesto for Cyborgs
    Hayles, N. Katherine How We Became Posthuman
    Hayles, N. Katherine Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments
    Maffesoli, Michel The Return of the Tragic in Postmodern Societies
    Mcgonigal, Jane SuperGaming: Ubiquitous Play and Performance for Massively
    Scaled Community
    Carolli, Linda Virtual Encounters: Community or Collaboration on the Internet?
    Turkle, Sherry Looking Toward Cyberspace: Beyond Grounded Sociology

  • 31. eric herhuth  |  November 17, 2007 at 3:49 am

    A potential submission to the journal Postmodern Culture

    The Face as ‘I’ Space: The Politics of Recognition and Deleuze/Guattari’s Facialization

    This paper will have two parts: the first will develop a question and the second will propose an answer. First, from selections of the writings of Hannah Arendt, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Patchen Markell, and Charles Taylor, the politics of recognition will be shown as rife with dilemmas and opposing arguments. Rather than a comprehensive comparison of these respective arguments, the objective here is to illuminate the contested concepts at the level of language/rhetoric, i.e. to diagnose common obstacles in talking about a politics of recognition through a brief comparison of terminology. This analysis will show how the subjective, hegemonic nature of language itself presents a problem and forces the question of what to do with the ‘I,’ the subject with agency through language/speaking. It is always a subject that recognizes and recognition has many articulations. To be essayed here is a basic articulation of recognition as withness, presence and relevance, an idea contingent upon time and space. The final question then, is how the material subject translates into the linguistic subject or rather, how the linguistic translates the material, and one possible epistemological answer is in the work of the face.
    In A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write on the face and the process of faciality. The face or faces construct a necessary milieu for signifiance and subjectification; this is described as the “white wall/black hole” system. Signifiance needs a white wall to inscribe “its signs and redundancies,” and subjectification requires a black hole “in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies” (ATP 167). Serving as an early site of application and complication of the theory put forward will be the Shakespeare play of Cymbeline: a dramatization set in “Year Zero” (the year of Christ’s birth and Deleuze/Guattari’s title for their chapter on faciality) whose heroine, Imogen, demonstrates a bizarre yet familiar tendency to defacialize. Subsequently, I will explore Imogen as a proto-novelistic character, a character that seeks authentic life—breaking out and away, a character whose face serves as a screen for signifiance, and a character that demonstrates withness, presence and relevance.
    For Deleuze/Guattari, the face is a politics constructed by assemblages of power that enable our notions of signifiance and subjectification to persist: “there is no signifiance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects” (ATP 180). Such a dynamic examined through the character Imogen hopefully will illuminate how the process of facialization constructs subjectivity. In the terms of a politics of recognition and identity, the formation of an authentic subject who is an ‘I’ is the beginning for claims of individual autonomy/sovereignty, viz. individual rights. Ultimately, this paper considers the stakes of facialization within a multicultural society.

    Bibliography

    Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

    This work by Arendt examines the given conditions of humanity and its changes, including new technologies, the rise of the social sphere, and the diminishing public sphere. Categorized by Labor, Work, and Action, the human condition is a predicament of plurality and unpredictability. The contrast between the polis of the ancient Greek state and modern societies provides insight into the construction of identity and human communications. Arendt’s definitions of identity and communication as derived from the early Greeks serves as an important point of reference in my essay in that it grapples with the paradox of human difference and equality (sameness), a contradiction that troubles us today.

    Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987

    Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. New York: Verso, 2003.

    Levinas, Emmanuel. Humanism of the Other. Trans. Nidra Poller. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

    This shorter and later work of Levinas advances his concept of the face (visage) as the prompt for human ethics. This particular work attempts to reestablish humanism based on the recognition of the humanity of the other. In the text, Levinas responds to Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others. The argument will serve as a force of comparison with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of faciality.

    Markell, Patchen. Bound by Recognition. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003.

    In Bound by Recognition, Markell responds and criticizes Taylor’s “Politics of Recognition,” and suggests a politics of acknowledgment as an alternative to recognition. Acknowledgment, in Arendtian fashion, asks that one be aware of and considerate of the interdependences and interrelations between groups and individuals that contribute to the unpredictability of human action. Markell’s work, like Arendt’s, is helpful in illustrating the problems inherent in the concept of recognition and addresses the issue at the level of language. At times, Markell’s acknowledgment even smacks of Deleuze and Guattari’s exhortation to dismantle the face.

    Nealon, Jeffrey T. “The Ethics of Dialogue: Bakhtin and Levinas.” College English 59.2 (1997): 129-148.

    —“’Junk’ and the Other: Burroughs and Levinas on Drugs.” Postmodern Culture 6.1 (September 1995).

    Nealon compares Burroughs’ writings on ‘Junk’ addiction to Levinas’ philosophy of ethics. Junk shares with Levinas’ il y a the absence of the other, thus the addict and the Levinasian subject are forced outside, to become exterior. Nealon concludes that Levinas’ ethics leave out the subject’s encounters with nonhuman systems and that Levinas’ ethics fail in that the human is the exclusive category of ethical response; thus, making possible the misrecognition of humanity not embodied by face or voice. This criticism of Levinas resonates with the obstacles faced by the writers examined in my work on the politics of recognition.

    Rotman, Brian. “The Alphabetic Body.” parallax 8.1 (2002): 92-104.

    —“Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing.” Configurations. 10.3 (2002): 423-438.

    —“Going Parallel.” SubStance 29.1 (2000): 56-79.

    Rushton, Richard. “What Can a Face Do?: On Deleuze and Faces.” Cultural Critique 51 (2002): 219-237.

    In this essay, Rushton moves from the traditional understanding of a face as a Platonic representation, a representation that signifies a subject as well, to a Deleuzian conception of the face. No longer is the face a mere representation of an interior affect, idea, mood, emotion, etc. But rather, the face is the embodiment of that expressive state and from this understanding, Rushton does not ask what a face represents but instead asks “what can a face do?” In Deleuzian reversal of Platonic thought, the face serves as the virtual preceding the actual; the face makes available possibilities, potentialities and prompts action. Thus, every encounter with a face—the face of an other—makes a finite possibility in a world of infinite possibilities. Rushton describes the two poles in Deleuze’s conception of faces: the reflective face in which the parts of the face are subservient to the whole, and the intensive face in which the whole of the face is subservient to its parts.

    Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky and Adam Frank. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

    Shakespeare, William. “Cymbeline.” William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. 2nd ed. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

    The play Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare’s tragicomedies and explicitly dramatizes an understanding of identity, specifically in terms of a subject possessing an interior and exterior. The play is set during the year of Christ’s Nativity and includes an intrusion by the god Jupiter as a deus ex machina that ushers resolution into the play. Of particular interest for my essay is the character Imogen who pursues an authentic life with her husband Posthumous. When she finds a beheaded body that she believes is her husband, Imogen smears the blood of the corpse on her face. This striking action reveals her desire to identify with her husband and make manifest her horror and grief. The question I will ask is how this use of the face fits into Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality.

    Simonds, Peggy Muñoz. Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: An Iconographic Reconstruction. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.

    A thorough reading of the play, Simonds’ text serves as a fine reference for early modern iconography, both classical and Christian. The book argues against the longstanding criticism of the play’s incongruity by demonstrating the integration of the copious images and symbols from nature and mythology that characterize the “Neoplatonic-Pythagorean cosmology of Shakespeare’s era.” For my purposes, the text provides a gloss on traditional interpretations of the play, particularly the scene in which Imogen smears blood on her face.

    Stivale, Charles J. “Deleuze/Parnet in “Dialogues”: The Folds of Post-Identity.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 36.1 (Spring, 2003): 25-37.

    Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

    Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Getting Under the Skin, or, How Faces Have Become Obsolete.” Configurations 10 (2002): 221-259.

    In this essay Wegenstein illustrates how thinking about the body as fragmented has been “overcome,” namely, by the figuration of “organs instead of bodies (OiB).” Following Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a body without organs, Wegenstein describes OiB as a “flattened body” that serves as a screen, a medium, in which exterior and interior elide. Numerous examples in science, art and advertising demonstrate the move toward OiB; examples include the Visible Human Project, the Human Genome Project, and the Anatomy Art of Gunther Von Hagens. Many of these examples depict facializations of the interior human body, thus altering the notion of what is behind the face or under the skin. Wegenstein concludes that there has been a popular turn to facialized skin and that the face no longer serves as the primary site of signifiance.

  • 32. Sharon  |  November 17, 2007 at 7:41 am

    When you get motion sickness from scrolling through the text, you know you’ve been up too long.

    What follows is a revised abstract and an annotated bibiliography. Target journal: Rhetoric Review

    Rhetoric and the Cybernetic Body

    In this paper I will explore the connections that contemporary scholars are making between cybernetics and the practice of rhetoric. First defined by Norbert Wiener in 1947, cybernetics is a study of systems of control that concerns many areas of human experience such as psychology, learning, cognition, adaption, and social control, as well as to language. According to Gordon Pask, cybernetics brings us to an understanding of subjectivity as an entity that emerges through the use of language. Pask argues that conversation is the basis of all that we know. It also brings us new ways to conceptualize rhetoric. Instead of thinking of rhetoric solely as persuasion, through cybernetics theory researchers are able to come to a new understanding of communication in which people make connections between systems of language, consciousness, and agreement in their interactions (Pask). Cybernetics may also provide a way to take into account the way in which bodily systems affect our perception of the world. Specifically, my project will show how Plato’s thoughts about the soul influenced his beliefs about the written and spoken word and compare that system of belief to the way in which a contemporary understanding of the body and biological systems affects our understanding of how language works.

    Works Cited

    Ackoff, Russell. On Purposeful Systems. Chicago: Aldine, 1972.
    In this book Ackoff opposes the idea that causal relationships are linear. He explains the synchronous working of interrelated systems of perception, consciousness, and memory contribute to our understanding of the world and explain how we form mental representations. Ackoff argues that we have taken for granted these processes that are involved in purposeful behavior. His ideas can help to create a new understanding of rhetoric and communication as purposeful flows, deepening Aristotle’s conceptualization of rhetoric as persuasion.

    Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy,
    In this collection, Agamben ties the problem of the existence of language to the concept of potentialities. A potentiality is a possibility that exists. For Agamben, the fact that there is language attests to the fact that we live in a world of potentialities. In this work, Agamben traces the ways in which being has been associated with expression, and the differences that arise when being is identified with the soul as opposed to being identified with the body. If subjectivity emerges through language, then it holds that our subjectivity is tied to the idea of potentiality.

    Brennan, Theresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004.
    In this book, Brennan writes about the ways the body speaks and produces meaning. Brennan ties the production of meaning to the life drive. She writes that “words are pushed by the life drive, that is, the senses and the informational channels of the flesh that [ . . .] are intelligent, aware, and struggling to either subdue or communicate with a slower, thicker person who calls itself I” (140). For Brennan, feelings are sensations that are attached to words. She takes the idea of meaning beyond words into the fleshy matter of the body.

    Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change.
    Burke writes about how challenging commonly held perceptions of “truth” can open up new understandings of human experience in the world. Burke shows us that language is always rhetorical because it is laden with judgments and content that existed prior to the content we intend to give it in the present. For Burke, our subjectivity is constituted in language and can be reconstituted through decontextualizing already existing systems of meaning. It is by questioning how we use language and symbols that we can understand who we are.

    Craig, Robert T. “Communication Theory as a Field.” Communication Theory, 9, 1999.

    Dourish, Paul. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2004.
    In this book Dourish draws on the work of Merleau-Ponty to argue that the body plays a critical role in any theory of perception. He uses the key word “being-in-the-world” that is derived from phenomenology to explain that we come to find the world meaningful through out interaction with it.

    Doyle, Richard. Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living.
    There is a connection between Doyle’s Wetwares and Burke’s Permanence and Change in that each text discusses how metaphor shapes the way we see the world and demonstrates how we can arrive at new understandings of the world by placing metaphorical constructions in unusual contexts. Doyle uses the concept of “rhetorical softwares” to explain the ways in which metaphors belonging to particular epistemes lead researchers to new understandings of the body and human being. He illustrates the ways in which information theory has made it possible to theorize the possibility of the immortality of the biological body.

    Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 1992.
    The ideas in chapter 2 of this book appeal to me because it is here that Faigley writes about the changing nature of composition studies. Drawing on ideas from Gerald Graff, Faigley asserts that “we no longer need to find a unified theory of for composition studies” but we are instead challenged to understand how the many things that we know can provide contexts for one another and produce new ways of thinking about the world (48). In a subsequent chapter he writes about the dynamism that is involved in producing language, arguing that such paradigms for writing as “writing with a purpose” and “the writing process” do not engage the complexity that is involved in the production of written texts.

    Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
    In this book Hacking shows how science tried to write the soul out of social life. The question under investigation is what happens when memory serves as a substitute for the soul.

    Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Information, Cybernetics, and the Literary Imagination. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

    Hayles explains how the body becomes virtual and, drawing on the assertions of cybernetics, questions the coherence of human consciousness. She asks, what kind of humans are we, now that the body can be conceptualized in terms of information systems? She shows us that our tendency to see the body as virtual is an effect of the rhetoric of technical discourses. She argues that embodiment is a necessary condition of being human.

    Gordon Pask. Conversation, Cognition and Learning. New York: Elsevier, 1975.

    Massumi, Brian. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, and Sensation.
    Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.

    Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945. The Phenomenology of Perception. English translation, 1962. London: Routledge.

    Minksy, Marvin. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

    Plato. Phaedrus.
    Plato illustrates how rhetoric is tied to the soul. In order to produce effective speech, one must have knowledge of the soul.

    Plato. The Republic.
    Plato argues that the written word is the image of the soul and ties ideas about rhetoric and the soul to justice.

    Pruchnic, Jeff. “Rhetoric, Cybernetics, and the Work of the Body in Burke’s Body of Work.”
    Pruchnic relates Burke’s works to cybernetics and the body, a theme evident in the title. He writes in depth about many Burkean ideas and shows how Burke’s work can open up new pathways of understanding for rhetorical theory.

  • 33. Katrina Newsom  |  November 17, 2007 at 5:13 pm

    “I Promise I can Speak for the Black Race: Black Representation in ‘rent-a-negro.com’”

    The purpose of this paper is to explore the constructions and performances of black representation within Cyberspace. Much of the criticism that addresses race and Cyberspace is couched within the dichotomy of what Bosah Ebo terms ” Cyberghetto or Cybertopia” (which is also the title of his book). These two terms describe the theories that are surrounding cyberspace. On the one hand, some critics believe that the internet is a cybertopia because it creates a space in which race, class, and gender no longer determines the interactions between various groups of people. On the other hand, some critics dispel the notion of the internet as a cybertopia and view it more along the lines of cyberghetto, in which many groups are still marginalized because the internet, largely, reflects and caters to the dominant white male culture. Some of these critics dismantle the notion of cybertopia by asserting that economic disparities prevent many marginalized groups from participating in cyberspace. Thus, I find that much of the discourse on the idea of cyberspace as a cybertopia or rather the “great equalizer” is disrupted by numerous criticisms that argue against the placated idea of non-racialized identities in cyberspace. Such scholars as Alecia Wolf and Guillermo Gomez-Pena echo Lisa Nakamura’s assertion that “Certainly, the Net is as racist as the societies that it stems from” (Talking Race and Cyperspace: An interview with Lisa Nakamura, 60).
    It is within this context that I turn my attention to Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s article “‘How Do I Rent a Negro?’: Racialized Subjectivity and Digital Performance Art”. In this article, Catanese addresses the conceptual artistic website rent-a-negro.com, which was launch in 2003 by damali ayo, by exploring the performative nature of the website as it works to disrupt and destabilize the dominant culture within cyberspace. Acting within a paradigm of a very specific black identity, one that is “anachronistic” in context, further proves the argument against non-racialized identities in cyberspace. Catanese attempts to understand this antiquated performance of “the negro” through the website’s “rental request form” in order to “discuss performances of race that the site generates from both ayo and potential customers, and investigate the ways in which compromised corporeality challenges our understanding of racial identity” (“How to Rent a Negro,” 700).
    Catanese, unlike other critics such as Colin A. Beckles who purports to analyze the black presence in cyberspace through its ability to convey news, archive history, and perform other forms of resistance, does not examine the black presence within the website rent-a-negro.com under the guise of placing a specific frame of reference to prove its active resistance to the dominant culture. On the contrary, it is through the satirical performativity of the website that induces its own form of creative resistance that becomes the focus of Catanese’s discussion. Yet, I argue that although Catanese does explore the performative nature of the website to show the satirical form of resistance through the ‘rental request form’ that works as a medium, which allows all users to question their participation in racialized cyberspace, a critical analysis of this website is ignored. Even though, Catanese touches on some aspects of black representation, which is the foundational premise of the website, much of ayo’s advertisement for representing blackness remains outside the scope of Catanese’s work.
    It is at this moment that I will extend Catanese’s argument to look at ayo’s intervention into the tropes of black representations. The concept of “renting a Negro” is a deliberate attempt to call into question the need for black representation. Ayo voices her concerns about the need for black representation in an interview with Bill O’Reilly about the book How to Rent a Negro (the offshoot of her website), in which she addresses O’Reilly’s question about the negative stigma that Colin Powell and Secretary Condoleezza Rice receive from the black community. She raises the question, “Why do we look at them and say, ‘How are you representing the black community?’ We don’t look at Dick Cheney and say, ‘How is he representing the white community’?” (Interview with Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, 2005). These concerns about the persistent pull to have a black person speak for the race as a whole, is performed in her website as she claims to answer questions about blackness, allow physical examinations (such as hair touching, skin comparing etc), and stand in as a guest that will ensure great dinner conversations (www.rent-a-negro.com). Through this offer of performance, I explore the ways in which this website complicates the historical tropes of black representation that exist within both the white and black American culture. I further explore the Dionysian presence in the website as a stage that allows “creative and constructive system of complex intertextuality” to negotiate and critique the cyberspace that it is working within (Black Dionysus, 15). This paper attempts to answer several crucial questions: Can the internet, although racialized, provide a stage in cyberspace by which such websites as rent-a-negro.com can work outside the obvious forms of resistance that work to archive history and convey news? In what ways can such websites work within the system to negotiation their space as a form of resistance? Does the Black Dionysus of the African American theater inform such moves? Finally, how does ayo’s offer to represent blackness disrupt the discourse of black ontology and black performativity?

    Annotated Bibliography

    Alkalimat, Abdul. The African American Experience in Cyberspace. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
    The subtitle of this text is A Resource Guide to the Best Web Sites on Black Culture and History. I found the title itself to be quite misleading and I was disappointed to find that this book only offered a categorical listing of black websites in the internet. This book is similar to travel guides that provide brief descriptions of places for travelers. Because this book only offers a listing to black internet websites, I am unable to use it in my essay.

    Baraka, Imamu Amiri. Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965. New York: Random House, 1969.
    In this short essay, Amiri Baraka indicts the technology of his time as diluted by the Western hegemonic culture that works to maintain the white man’s privileged position. He calls for the black man to create a post-Western thought through technology. By the end of this essay, Baraka speaks to the possibility of technology as a way to create a space
    for humanistic thinking. He deems technology to be a place “without form” and thus, a place for creation. This essay does offer a critique of technology that I find useful for myproject.

    Baker Jr., Houston A. Blues: Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. Chicago: UP of Chicago, 1984.

    —. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: UP of Chicago, 1987.

    Beckles, Colin A. “Black Liberation and the Internet: A Strategic Analysis.” Journal of Black Studies. 31.3 Special Issue: Africa: New Realities and Hopes. (Jan., 2001):
    311-324.
    In this article, Beckles investigates the role of Black Information Gateways (BIGS) owned
    by black elites to see the extend to which they participate in the struggle against or resistance to the dominant culture. After exploring three BIGS, he finds that to some degree or another, these information gateways successfully create spaces for resistance. This article appears very limited in its analysis. The analysis can be placed into branches: resistance and nonresistance. Ironically, all of the websites that were mentioned in this article were resistant to the dominate culture. I am interested in Beckles’ need to limit this analysis to such a narrow investigation.

    Catanese, Brandi Wilkins. “ ‘How Do I Rent a Negro’: Racialized Subjectivity and Digital Performance Art.” Theatre Journal 57 (2005): 699-714.
    Catanese critiques a website that claims to “rent-a-negro” as a way to explore the racialization of cyberspace. According to Catanese, this satirical website http://www.rent-a-negro.com functions as a way to criticize the ‘cybertypes’ created by the dominant culture within the internet sphere. Her critique extends to examining the performative role of the black body in cyberspace. This article is crucial to my project. Through it, I will explore the construction of the black representative in cyberspace. Needless to say, I am extremely excited about finding this article.

    damilyi ayo, interview by Bill O’Reilly, The O’Reilly Factor, Fox New, June 22, 2005.

    Ebeling, Mary F.E. “The New Dawn: Black Agency in Cyberspace.” Radical History Review 87 (Fall, 2003): 96-108.

    Ebo, Bosah, ed. Cyberghetto or Cybertopia?: Race, Class, and Gender on the Internet. Westport: Praeger, 1998.
    This book is a collection of essays that continues the debate over the utopian conceptualization of the internet. Some of these essays are concerned with the ability to access the internet. This line of argument is concerned with the economic status and various other components that would limit certain groups of people from accessing the internet. Other essays in this text expound upon the idea of the utopian possibilities inherent in cyberspace. While there are many interesting arguments in this text, it will function primarily as a tertiary source for my project.

    Everett, Anna. “The Revolution will be Digitized: Afrocentricity and the Digital Public Sphere.” Social Text 71 20.2 (2002): 125-146.

    Fanon, Franz. Black Skin White Mask. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967.

    Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995.

    Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

    Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: SAGE, 1997.

    Hansen, Mark. B.N. “Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address.” SubStance #104 33.2 (2004): 107-133.

    Kevorkian, Martin. “Computers with Color Monitors: Disembodied Black Screen Images 1988-1996.” American Quarterly 51.2 (1999) 283-310.

    Lichty, Patrick. “The Cybernetics of Performance and New Media Art.” Leonardo 33.5 (2000): 351-54.

    Lovink, Geert. “Talking Race and Cyberspace: An Interview with Lisa Nakamura.” Frontiers 26.1 (2005): 60-65.
    This interview hosted by Lovink takes place via E-Mail. The interview further explores Nakamura’s view of the utopian myth of the internet. She continues her critique of the internet as a site that proves to be “as racist as the society it stems from” (60). This interview differs little from the book, but I do see new lines of thoughts and arguments extending from this article. There are several quotable lines in this text that I am considering for my essay.

    Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2002.
    In this book, Lisa Nakamura explores the racial tropes within cyberspace. She defines these tropes as ‘cybertypes’ whose roots are found within stereotypes which are perpetuated by printed technology. Nakamura extends her observations to argue against the concept of the internet as the “Great Equalizer”. Through internet websites, racialized avatars and cyberpunk films, Nakamura shows the extent to which the cyberutopia is challenged over and over again. This book is an excellent secondary source for my project. Through this text, I hope to develop the stage by which I can explore the constructed role of black representation in cyberspace.

    Nealon, Jeffrey T. “Refraining, Becoming-Black: Repetition and Difference in Amiri Baraka’s Blues People” Symploke 6.1 83-95.

    Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. “Racialized Fantasies on the Internet.” Signs 24.4

    Institutions, Regulations, and Social Control (1999): 7089-96.
    Wetmore Jr., Kevin J. Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2003.
    Wetmore explores the African American dramaturgy as it contextualize and recontextualize the Greek Tragedy into its performance of black resistance. Also, the text appears to offer a historicized account of the African experience both through slavery and colonization. Wetmore furthers his analysis to investigate the indictments made against the Europeanization of Greek Tragedy. He examines the claims that Greek Tragedy in fact has its roots in Egyptian schools of thought. The usefulness of this book depends on Wetmore’s ability to provide an adequate definition of Black Dionysus.

    West, Cornel. “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual.” Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York: Routledge, 1993.

    http://www.rent-a-negro.com/ Accessed Nov. 13, 2007.

  • 34. Hilary  |  November 23, 2007 at 3:44 am

    >Though I am an educator, and I have conducted several hours of >research on this topic, I do not pretend to know better than those >afflicted with the disorder nor those close to people afflicted with >the disorder.

    Afflicted?

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