The Penn State sex abuse scandal has rocked the core of our campus. Students, Faculty, and Staff are reeling as they struggle to find ways to talk about an issue of this magnitude and complexity amidst the swirl of information and misinformation. This situation is unprecedented, which makes it all the more important for us to remember that the higher-level administrators are not the only leaders at this institution and that leadership comes from a variety of people on this campus. While it is difficult to know how to guide conversations about a still-unfolding crisis, there is nevertheless more to do than to speculate about motives or to call for firings.

The Center for Democratic Deliberation believes that deliberation about such an emotionally fraught issue is most fruitful when it begins in established communities, particularly when those communities care about inquiry. At the end of the term, such communities of inquiry have been built in Penn State’s classrooms, student groups, residence halls, fraternities and sororities, as well as many social and interest-based organizations.

We are grateful for resources such as CAPS to help individuals work through personal turmoil. At the same time, we believe in the importance of 1) thinking about these issues collectively in groups, and 2) learning how to deliberate about community and social issues in real time. It might not seem like it now, but the discussions we have today and in the coming weeks and months will shape our campus and community—both in how we live together and how we are perceived. Penn State is a lot of things, but it is foremost an institution of higher learning, and there is learning to do in this midst of this crisis. In the week leading up to Thanksgiving, the Center for Democratic Deliberation urges instructors to devote class time—or to continue to devote class time—to structured conversations about issues important to the Penn State community. Finally, we urge students to remember that this is their conversation as much as anyone’s.

To these ends, we invite instructors and students to use the questions and resources on this page to help generate productive dialogue.

The following was sent to faculty and graduate students in the English Department and Communication Arts and Sciences Department:

The Center for Democratic Deliberation believes that deliberation about emotionally fraught issues is most fruitful when it begins in established communities, particularly when those communities care about inquiry. At the end of the term, such communities of inquiry have been built in Penn State’s classrooms. The CDD is urging a teach-in for intro GWS courses (English 15 and 30; CAS 100) for classes held on Wednesday and Thursday, November 16 and 17. We invite instructors of other courses to participate as well. During this time, we hope that you will devote at least part of your class to discussing issues raised by the recent scandal.

In Information Please, Mark Poster asks how information works differently when it is mediated through digital machines, arguing that much cultural theory has ignored the importance of specific media in understanding subjectivity, relations among people, and culture (4). He begins with the basic contention “that information increasingly appears in complex couplings of humans and machines” (9). One important aspect of this coupling for Poster is a “new hermeneutic, one that underscores the agency of the media,” meaning that we can no longer posit a simple subject/object dichotomy that sees subjects as fundamentally different and separate from objects (10).

Through his discussions of various schools of thought, including postcolonialism, Hardt and Negri’s theory of empire, theories of identity, postmodernism, and media theory, Poster argues that these theories, while informative and helpful, often fail to take into account the specifics of media, especially digital media, in their theorization. He argues that digital public spheres “constructs the subject through the specificity of its medium in a way different from oral or written or broadcast models of self constitution” (41). Digital media constructs users as producers, “who are present only through their textual, aural, and visual uploads” (41, 195-196).

He argues that digital technologies are “not prosthesis, not a mechanic addition to an already complete human being, but an intimate mixing of humans and machine that constitutes an interface outside the subject-object binary” (48). The self becomes embedded in various digital databases, which disrupts our understanding of identity as consciousness (92); information about oneself is exteriorized (100), and so “Digital networks thus extend the domain of insecurity to objects that had previously been relatively safe” (101). Identity thus can no longer be understood as consciousness: “Identity is thus a double operation of material trace and consciousness bound together in a configuration that solidifies the figure of identity” (112).

Poster also argues that perhaps we need to reconfigure ethics for digital media, because we are uprooted from local communities, come into contact with a wider array of human behavior, and disrupts the public/private distinction so that we encounter things that we’d prefer to think of as “evil” but would rather not encounter and just let be (149). Additionally, the ease of just removing yourself from a digital encounter raises ethical questions, and Poster posits that perhaps “virtual ethics entail a different, perhaps more demanding, type of obligation. The moral imperative might be ‘act so that you will continue to maintain the identities you have constructed in relation with others’” (153).

He argues that “The screen is thus a liminal object, an interface between the human and the machine that invites penetration of each by the other” (175).

I particularly enjoyed Poster’s discussion of how images travel and move in planetary ways online, how “identity theft” is a recent development, and other developments he discusses.

Poster, Mark. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.



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But as I discussed this concept with a professor today, I was told this word still carries too much baggage, especially after Vietnam, Communism, Nazism, etc. Is loyalty too dirty of a word now? I’m attached to it, I think because it’s an Aristotelian virtue that I have affective connections with, more so than the term’s cousin commitment. That is, there seems to be a philosophical tradition tied to loyalty. Is there a denotative difference between loyalty and commitment? Certainly, there’s the connotative one, the one that makes loyalty a dirty word in the minds of many.

The OED defines loyalty as Faithful adherence to one’s promise, oath, word of honour, etc. and as being etymologically linked to the Latin legalem, or law. It defines commitment variously, sometimes with obligation, and defines commit (in one of its various definitions) as To pledge oneself; to make a personal commitment to a course of action, a contract, etc. So both appear to have a pledging aspect, but loyalty seems to stress faith. Is “faith” so sullied in our contemporary eyes that loyalty too is charged? Can’t faith be revisable?

Certainly, faith in some way limits us to what is counted as evidence (that our cause is harmful or not). While I like Royce’s theory of loyalty, I’m also cognizant that he does not really address epistemological problems about what counts as evidence. While loyalty is certainly affective, his discussion of revising loyalty and causes seems strongly rational—as if one can see evidence that your cause is harmful and revise your loyalty rationally based on that evidence.

I bring these up because I’ve been thinking about loyalty/commitment to an academic discipline. What does it mean to be loyal to a field? Is loyalty or commitment a good word to describe someone’s commitment (for lack of a better word) to their field? If one is loyal to a cause, does it make sense to understand academic pursuits or an academic discipline as a cause?

My intuition is that he can’t define it. I’m also a bit pissy about the term, as I see it as an obfuscating term that is deployed in order to not address the real issues at hand. “Politically correct” (“PC”) is an interesting term, in that it’s been co-opted by conservatives and the mass media from marginalized groups. Jeffrey Escoffier, in American Homo describes how the term was used ironically, to mark their feelings or attitudes that didn’t conform with moralism or attitudes from their group, the Left or the women’s movement. However, conservatives and the mass media¹ have picked up the term to imply that political moralism is an attack on free speech. But what this term often does is obfuscate debate about representation and pluralism (196-197).

It’s ultimately a code-word meant to “close down debate” (197), and what I find most ironic about its continual deployment is that it comes from those who see themselves as “radical” or anti-establishment in some way. It’s a way to proclaim that “I don’t conform to your moralism,” without actually addressing the moral or ethical issues being rejected. However, there isn’t anything “rebellious” in any fruitful way about deploying this term; using the term is only parroting a conservative media force that refuses to hold honest, open debates about representation and pluralism. Rather than discuss sexuality and age, my interlocutor chose to dismiss the whole conversation as “PC.”

Every time I ask someone who says something is “politically correct” in order to reject it what they mean by the term, they are unable or unwilling to define it. I suppose this is true of most buzzwords picked up from the conservative mass media forces in this country (like the “socialist” label put on Obama during the election). “Politically Correct” is a nasty phrase that closes down debate by charging others with already having closed down debate.

I appreciate my friend’s honesty last night. When I asked questions about his discomfort, he readily admitted he was uncomfortable with a dog collar on a 60-year-old man because of the man’s age, and his discomfort with age, sexuality, and nonconformity. At least then we have something to talk about. When the other gentleman (a loose use of the term) charges “That’s PC!”, discussion is turned away from the issue at hand, and when he refuses to discuss the term, discussion is foreclosed completely. Such asshattery!

¹ A great bumper sticker I read recently: “The media is only as liberal as the conservative corporations that own them.” Fantastic!

A textbook based on a community perspective valuing audience and ethics would begin much differently [than textbooks that start with "Writing is an important means of expressing yourself"]. Maybe like this: “You have a duty and an obligation to write, not because you have ‘the truth’ and must share it with others, but because we need to discover truths and we need all the help we can get, yours included. You write because you have an obligation to do so. (Porter 123, emphasis in original)

Porter, James E. Audience and Rhetoric: An Archaeological Composition of the Discourse Community. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Are there no shared ends that matter to us any longer than the desire to be affluent while avoiding the risk of cancer? It may be that the answer is no. The prevailing consensus seems to be that people love a life of high consumption, tremble at the thought that it might end, and are displeased about having to clean up the messes that modern technologies sometimes bring. To argue a moral position convincingly these days requires that one speak to (and not depart from) people’s love of material well-being, their fascination with efficiency, or their fear of death. (51-52)

Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.

I found the parts of the essay on authenticating most interesting, as this seems to be one of the biggest anxieties around the Internet currently: what is true? what is safe? what is legitimate? what is a “real” human being online? Baron notes that as students research online, that “verifying the reliability and authenticity of that information becomes increasingly important” (31). (Anne-Marie has a great blog post on these issues.)

Last term I read David Gunkel and Debra Hawhee’s “Virtual Alterity and the Reformatting of Ethics,” which takes up issues of “real,” “truth,” and “authenticity” in the virtual world, arguing that virtual systems call into question traditional notions of ethics because on the Internet, you can’t tell what is true or even what is human. I don’t want to go re-read the article at the moment, but Baron’s assertions that authenticity has always been an issue with new technologies seems to question Gunkel and Hawhee’s claims that the Internet is somehow that much different than other technologies. I do think it is different, but perhaps it is a different in kind(?) and that authenticity and truth has always been a concern when it comes to new technologies.

One other interesting moment in this book chapter that I want to address. Baron mentions the Unabomber’s attacks on computer scientists, but his relative ease toward humanists. Baron “[feels] left out” and asks “if humanists aren’t harmful, then what’s the point of being one?” (17). He discusses humanists’ relationships to technologies for a bit, but this strain isn’t picked up again. I didn’t get the sense from his essay that humanists are “harmful” (at least when it comes to technologies)… Just something I’m thinking about…

Baron, Dennis. “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies.” Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 1999. 15-33.

Gunkel, David, and Debra Hahwee. “Virtual Alterity and the Reformatting of Ethics.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 18.3-4 (2003): 173-93.

I booked my hotel, clear across town, when I thought I was going to drive to Louisville. I thought driving across town would be no big deal. But then, I realized I would be very tired, and a nine-hour drive would be very hard, and then I thought about how much work I could get done riding a Greyhound, so I took the Greyhound to Louisville. The Greyhound wasn’t a mistake, but not switching hotels was. It’s an hour-long bus ride, if not more, from my hotel to downtown, and then a 15-minute bus ride to the U of Louisville campus. Thus, I didn’t see as much of the conference as I had hoped. Next time, I definitely get a hotel closer to the conference, even if it’s a bit more expensive.

During my panel, someone asked a great question about what our three talks could teach us about what we do in order to counter the effects of online rumours, media’s framing of events in order to blame certain folks, and online uncivil discourse. A few people in the room chimed in, and the traditional idea that we want our students to be able to read texts and not be duped was an answer. But I like the answer proposed by our chair, that we should be thinking about how we and our students can produce texts that do evoke emotion; as Sharon Crowley has made so apparent in Toward a Civil Discourse, liberal rational arguments are not effective.

And I’ve begun wondering about how I focus so much on rational argumentation in my writing classroom. Certainly, I do value some emotional appeals in the paper, and try to help students work with those effectively, but many times, I fall back on the rational. It’s that dratted hermeneutics of suspicion training that keeps me in the rational mode. Also, I think the focus on the printed page is particularly limiting in that it pulls us toward the logical….

I’ve been struggling between my training in criticism and my desire to move toward design (a la Gunther Kress, Jeff Rice). I think the course I teach next term will help me with this quite a bit (more about that at a later date).

I was struck by Anne Wysocki’s presentation during a plenary session on Friday. Among other things, she made a call for returning to a focus on labor and craft, returning to Hegel’s idea that in making things, we fashion ourselves and recognize ourselves. I took some notes, but even after a day, I’m having a hard time recalling what my notes meant, or how the ideas worked together in Anne’s talk. But her talk resonated with some of the arguments I made about texts and figures, and understanding some of the visceral/bodied reactions to the figural aspects of texts. Anne asks us (drawing on JW Mitchell, I believe?) to question the visual/textual and body/mind dichotomies.

Though we haven’t yet read Appiah’s discussion in Chapter 5 (where Appiah will take up this topic more), I would argue that no, these are not identities we want in the longer run, and in fact these identities are a factor in the developing typification of other bodies/identities. I sense, from some conversations both inside and outside of class, that whether these identities (gay, black, lesbian, Latino, etc.) that arise out of oppression are viable in the longer run is of central concern to at least some in the class. Identity politics has done some much needed work in affirming the identities of marginalized folks, but how much longer is this type of politics going to work? A gay identity depends on the existence of sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia. A black identity depends on the social construction of race and cultural racism. It seems to me that as long as these identities exist, the oppression that underpins them will continue to exist.

Additionally, as I stated, I think the typification of bodies that creates these identities is extending and broadening to the typification of affinity groups. Science, especially psychology, which had its hand in the creation of sexualities and races, is now at work in creating such things as “liberal bodies” and “conservative bodies.” A recent psychological survey found that conservatives are more likely to be startled or scared than liberals. Our political affiliations are becoming, I fear, biological imperatives (like the outmoded idea that race is biological, or the still somewhat en vogue idea that sexual identity is 100% biological). In fact, the organization of these new typified bodies seems to model itself on other marginalized groups: conservatives can now argue that they are oppressed, marginalized, and excluded solely on the basis of being a conservative. Ultimately, I see this as harming our ability to discuss ideas, beliefs, and values.

What is your conception of what types of identities there “should” be in the future?