J-E takes an ecological prospect, arguing that hypertext, like all computer technologies, “are ambivalent technologies, objects or concepts that can be used in various ways depending in part on the social conditions in which they are constructed and reconstructed in use” (23). He urges against viewing technologies as solely tools, as the tool perspective can lead users, teachers, and scholars “to forget the always-present technological forces” and to assume that tools simply help achieve predetermined goals (19). Another important aspect of J-E’s argument is that, following Terry Eagleton, if cultures admits its inadequacies (such as the inadequacies of print by allowing computer technologies to take hold), it might “tighten rather than loosen its grip” (23, qting. Eagleton).

Chapter 3 of Nostalgic Angels takes as its focus those “functional” hypertexts that many ignore when they make utopian claims about hypertext. Functional documents and technologies (like technical documents, how-to texts) are hard to analyze and critique for their politics because through their functionality, they obscure their context and politics (52). J-E shows how functional hypertexts often emulate print texts, focusing on efficiency (53, 63); valuing clarity to avoid “misinterpretations or misreadings”—a transmission model of communication (61, 66); and offering more choices than print but still and more powerfully restricting freedom (63). He concludes, “Hypertext, ten, integrates most successfully into the workplace not as a transformative (let alone disruptive) technology, but as a conservative process, a way of making progress in the drive toward increased technical efficiency,” noting as well that hypertexts fit well into post-Fordist logics, allowing for less time for reflection (79).

Chapter 4 explores how texts, intertextual relations, and information become spaces. According to J-E, “spatial articulations can take one of (at least) two forms—the commodity and the construction” (95). In this chapter, J-E discusses functional hypertexts, like databases, for how they are articulated as commodities and construct readers as consumers (103). While “text as information has long seemed spatial, [. . .:] hyperspace appears to expand and transform that space” (106), becoming a market where information “can be entered, browsed, and purchased” (107). J-E spends much of the chapter promoting a critical literacy, as opposed to a simple functional literacy, of hyperspaces, so that users can critique the ways in which information is presented, organized, mapped, and navigated (129). Central to his concerns are how information has become more commodified, in part because we articulate it as a space (like land, that can be bought and sold), and in part because of post-Fordist capitalist logics that privatize space (thus, less public support for hypertextual spaces and more privatization) (130-134).

Chapter 5 explores the articulation of hypertextual space as a construction, particularly the postmodern conception that hypertexts are liberating, fragmented, subversive, deconstruction, and so forth. He is concerned that “hypertext potentially engenders post-political activity” by naturalizing hypertext as inevitable and the way things should have been (or always have been) (171). He shows how hypertexts, though they might engender deconstruction, do not naturally create deconstruction, and often undercut deconstruction’s goals (160). Nor do they naturally decenter the author or put readers and authors on the same plane.

The last chapter turns to nostalgia, the desire in this case to want an image of the past, wherein “Hypertext here is, among other things, a code word for the innocence we sometimes assume marked human existence prior to print, an impossible Eden of pure knowledge and perfect communication unmarked by the ‘complications’ of technology” (176). While most of his book has been critical of hypertext and articulations of hypertext, J-E turns to rearticulating hypertext “for increasing access to information for both our students and ourselves, for rethinking boundaries between discourses” (186).

I wish I had read this book a few years ago—when Lisa Ede first suggested it to me my first term at Oregon State. I was very interested in hypertext at the time—in fact, in many ways, my vague interest in that time led to a more focused interest in blogs for my master’s thesis. This book could have been helpful in understanding articulations of the Internet as liberatory. But I’m glad I’ve read this now.

View all my reviews >>

The biblical conception of a book was clearly far more open-ended than any notion current in our own culture, with it assumptions of known authorship and legal copyright. The very different is the technology of bookmaking is emblematic. For us, a book is a printed object boxed in between two covers, with title and author emblazoned on the front cover an the year of publication indicated on the copyright page. The biblical term that comes closest to “book” is sefer. Etymologically, it means “something recounted,” but its primary sense is “scroll,” and it can refer to anything written on a scroll — a letter, a relatively brief unit within a longer composition, or a book more or less in our sense. A scroll is not a text shut in between covers, and additional swathes of scroll can be stitched onto it, which seems to have been a very common biblical practice. A book in the biblical sphere was assumed to be a product of anonymous tradition. The only ones in the biblical practice. A book in the biblical sphere was assumed to be a product of anonymous tradition. The only ones in the biblical corpus that stipulate the names of their authors, in superscriptions at the beginning, are the prophetic books, but even in this case, later prophecies by different prophet-poets could be tacked onto the earlier scrolls, and the earlier scrolls perhaps might even be edited to fit better into a continous book with the later accretions. (xl)

I really like sefer as a metaphor for something to replace the cohesive, fully-concluded one-author text (book or essay). In a way, it’s like a multi-authored collage essay or hypertext, something that can be added to later or re-formed, the authorship not as important as the content, the voices inside. If one were to view a blog as a single text, a blog seems to work in this way as well. More later, perhaps?

Alter, Robert. “To the Reader.” Genesis. Transl. Robert Alter. New York: Norton, 1996. ix-xlvii.

As I lay in bed this morning, wondering what the hell I would send y’all about my thesis, the first somewhat concrete idea that came to mind was conflict. At this point, to be honest, I have very little idea of where I want my thesis to go. I’ve seemed to jump ship from idea to idea every other week this last year. However, there are a few themes that keep recurring when I freewrite about thesis ideas or when I walk around, playing ideas off each other in my brain.

Structures: I find myself struggling against structures in all facets of life: class, race, gender, sexualities, government, school systems, and now classrooms. Geoffrey Sirc writes about the classroom as a museum: A place where students have to arrive, be told what is good (and thus, since it’s in a museum, what is also lifeless), and be told to recreate with the same lifelessness. Part of me wants to rebel against the idea of a composition classroom as a training ground for training academic writing: why can’t the composition classroom be justification in and of itself? Why the force-to-train? Why is education a gauntlet for the worker-to-be rather than the person-as-is? Simultaneously, in today’s society, it is necessary to teach certain things in order to prepare students for the next stage. It would be irresponsible not to.

Ambiguity: One of my favorite passages from this year is:

These either/or ways of seeing exclude life and real revision by pushing us to safe position, to what is known. They are safe positions that exclude each other and don’t allow for any ambiguity, uncertainty. Only when I suspend myself between either and or can I move away from conventional boundaries and begin to see shapes and shadows and contours—ambiguity, uncertainty, and discontinuity, moments when the seams of life just don’t want to hold…. My life is full of uncertainty; negotiating that uncertainty day to day gives me authority. (Sommers 317)

The classroom seems to me to be a place where ambiguity is necessary. Where structures are questioned, where ideas are at play against each other, where values are in constant critique. A big problem I’ve had with education is the way it passes on culture instead of critiqing culture. The classroom is a tool of the king. Foucault places the teacher’s origins in the scribe of the Church or King, and in the lawyer. The teacher is supposed to appear “objective“ but instead reinforces the dominant ideologies. I want to struggle against being that teacher and instead be the teacher, who, like Socrates, questioned dominant values.

Social Change: In her book The Peaceable Classroom, Mary Rose O’Reilley asks whether the language arts classroom can’t be a place to help make a more peaceful world. I share her sentiment that the language arts classroom should be used to create social change. I want a better, more peaceful, more fair, less cruel world. It seems that the language arts classroom, based on the fact that we are teaching writing (in a way, a way of thinking), that it is the best classroom venue (as opposed to other fields) for the freedom to critique society and ask students to engage in the world. However, Structure sets in: Teach the academic essay. Teach the resume. Teach form. Tagmemics. The desire to use language to create is destroyed in our youth as early as elementary when they are taught that form (grammar) is more important than play, force, and engagement in the world.

Conflict: I do have a concern about the peace movement, and even with feminism as it is often applied (so more with application than with theory). It is the will to erase conflict. The peace movement and watered-down feminism often fall prey to the dominant American ideology of “conflict is bad“ – we are told “you are either with us or against us,“ so don’t be oppositional. Our youth are pathologized if they disagree too much: “Oppositional Defiant Disorder.“ People who criticize the race situation in this country are accused of “playing the race card“ or of being “uppity“ and asked “Why can’t we all just get along?“ Women are told not to “complain“ about their situation. Too many people would rather mask over conflict that is there and deny it. (And then when there is conflict, it is treated in the most asinine manner possible, thank you Rush Limbaugh and his ilk). I see conflict as one of the central metaphors of the composition and language arts classroom. I see teachers falling prey to the will-to-erase-conflict problem when they try to deny the power differential between them and their students. I see the ideal classroom as a place where it is not safe to hold any opinion for long, where it is safe to express any opinion, but where students are open to the conflict in themselves and among others to allow their opinions to be challenged and changed. Perhaps this is too violent, too masculine, and too agonistic of a vision?

How do all these ideas play with each and trim down into something manageable for a thesis? At this point, I am not certain. They’re all very big and amorphous in my mind right now, and I’m so fickle, I feel like I could be somewhere else completely in a few weeks.

Possible ways to approach this:

1. I am drawn to hypertextuality and the possibility to be upfront with conflict that is within us (it can be, in a way “texts that listen,“ as I’ve said before). I’ve ordered Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do by B.J. Fogg (recommended to me by Kevin Brooks) through Orbis. So, I could focus on hypertexts as a way to discuss the above issues, and choose one or two hypertexts that exhibit the possibilities of this. This actually sounds fun to me…

2. I could see how this could be a bit more theoretical with a heady discussion of structure and ambiguity, but I have no idea what this would look like. This is something that I want to write, but I am also beginning to think that this is also something that should wait a while – something that would be a bit more manageable for a longer work, when I have more experience and grounding in theory and in Composition reading.

3. A discussion of blogs in this vein, though, honestly, I have done a bit with blogs so far, and will continue for a paper or two at conferences. It would be very savvy of my time and energy to write about blogs on my thesis, but to be honest, I’m burning out on that. There is still a lot of energy around it, but I guess there is large part of me that wants my thesis to be something different from other work I’ve done. Perhaps it’s some naïve vision of a thesis as a grand work that stands out from everything else. I should just start viewing it as a long paper.

4. I’ve been tempted approach this as an analysis of Socrates’ dialogic rhetoric and approaching these ideas from a “This is what I see good about Socrates that we can learn as teachers and writers.“ This too sounds fun, but now as I think about it, I want more to focus on the modern classroom.

Okay, I feel done with writing this. I feel my own energy going around hypertexts with these ideas, and I look forward to talking to you!

From H. G. Wells’ lecture on Brain Organization of the Modern World, October and November 1937.

“This Encyclopedia organization need not be concentrated now in one place; it might have the form of a network. It would centralize mentally but perhaps not physically. Quite possibly it might to a large extent be duplicated. It is its files and its conference rooms which would the the core of its being, the essential Encyclopedia. It would constitute the material beginning of a real World Brain.”

“….In a few score years there will be thousands of workers at this business of ordering and digesting information where you now have one.”

This seems like a foreshadowing of hypertextuality to me.

http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/2.2/features/reflections/jon1.htm

Earlier on my blog Kevin Brooks commented and suggested that I focus on a particular work or author, such as B.J. Fogg. I received similar recommendations from the MAWG. Dr. HBH made a great suggestion that since this such a huge topic that I should pick something to focus on (on text or discourse realm) and engage the topic around that. I agree that this is a great idea.

Texts/discourse realms that came up during the discussion:
Particular activist movements (I am considering queer activism)
The language arts classroom and how discussion/argument is conducted
Women’s Studies classrooms
Hypertexts
Politics
Sitcoms and the use of conflict within them, as well as how they’re solved so tightly

Right now, I am leaning towards studying hypertexts, and a few people caught onto the energy behind my “proposal” (or whatever it is) when I wrote thtat hypertexts are “texts that listen.” I think hypertexts are fascinating, so I think I’m leaning towards focusing on them.

Lisa Ede forwarded me the article “Hypertext Theory and Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography” by Aparna Zambare, which is full of resources to look at. I noticed that quite a few of them focus on narrative instead of argument, but that’s okay and will be something to consider anyway (perhaps). Plus, I’m also very interested in narratology.

Right now, I’m unsure of a “next step,” but perhaps it’s reading up on theory, background, and reading some hyptertexts. Well, perhaps “next” is getting caught up in my homework for this quarter, but I feel like I have somewhere I’m going, which is a great feeling.

A few other notes from our MAWG meeting:
Someone noted that Foucault writes that by avoiding talking about binaries we are reinforcing those binaries in History of Sexuality, Part 1.
Read Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson (I’ve read part of it before for undergraduate rhetorical analysis, but it’s been a while).

Polemics and Irenics in Argument – it’s a start?

In her essay “The Womanization of Rhetoric,“ Sally Miller Gearhart writes that she believes “that any intent to persuade is an act of violence“ because the persuader has an intention of changing someone (53), and proposes that instead we should “forsake all this and think of ourselves not as bearers of great messages but as vessels out of whose variety messages will emerge“ (60). I think this is an interesting position, and the reason I bring it up isn’t because I completely agree with her. In fact, I strong believe that everything is an argument, as is often argued, which makes Gearhart’s position problematic (isn’t everything violent if these two ideas merge?). (However, if the dominant metaphor, “Argument is war,“ is a subtext to our lives [Lakoff and Johnson, right?], then perhaps this idea of everything being violent is something to pursue?) I am interested in this because I feel it gets at a very important question about arguments, and that is how aggressive or violent should they be? Perhaps another way to look at this might be how much is the arguer collaborating with the audience and those with different opinions, and how much is the arguer working against the audience and those who disagree.

In Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness, Walter J. Ong writes:

Contest is a part of human life everywhere that human life is found. In war and in games, in work and in play, physically, intellectually, and morally, human beings match themselves with or against one another. Struggle appears inseparable from human life, and contest is a particular focus or mode of interpersonal struggle, an opposition that can be hostile but need not be, for certain kinds of contest may serve to sublimate and dissolve hostilities and to build friendship and cooperation. (15)

Johan Huizinga adds, “All knowledge…is polemical by nature“ (qtd. in Ong 45). At this time, I am inclined to agree, that all of our knowledge is created out of struggle and conflict. However, to what degree can this struggle be too aggressive or violent? I know this feels vague at this time, and I’m looking for some sort of guidance (both from myself by writing this out, and from you).

Another valid concern is how we might become too irenic. Ong believes that we have become “unabashed irenicists“ (24). Here I am inclined to agree. Americans tend to fear conflict, viewing it as something that must cause separation. While we often value differences (or is this merely lip service), we don’t really value differences in ideas. This is true from the introspective (how many people struggle to dispel conflicts within themselves?) to the large scale (you’re either with us or against us – a minimization of choices, of differences). In groups, we try to dispel conflict through means such as voting, consensus, and compromise, all of which I believe just serve to mask conflict (voting hides the needs/wants of the minority who has lost; consensus is more a contest of who can last the longest; compromise masks the fact that neither party actually got what they wanted).

Which brings me to polyphony (multivocality) and collage in texts, including hypertexts and multigenre essays. I like these texts because they don’t mask conflict – in fact, it is usually right there, in multiple voices and from multiple pints of view. In fact, an author can be upfront about his/her/hir own conflict within the self; the author doesn’t have to take a singular view on an issue, but can rather express all the voices in his/her/hir head. Additionally, I like these texts because of their potential to be, in my own made up phrase, “texts that listen.“ By creating this term, I am drawing on my belief that we often do not listen to texts or to people, but rather wait impatiently to “counter-argue.“ If a text has multiple viewpoints, perhaps it can quell this urge to “read“ with an eye for what you can attack in a counterargument.

Some ideas that I would like to intersect as I research and write include gender, aggression, verbal and psychological violence, polyphony, polemics, irenicism, collage/montage/bricolage (sp?), hypertext, texts that “listen,“ and the metaphor “argument is war“ (Lakoff and Johnson). Questions I have at this time include:
1. Does this make sense at this time?
2. I know this is a huge topic – does anyone have suggestions for ways to focus?
3. What suggestions do people have for sources? I am considering Barthes and Bakhtin, but would love more ideas.

Works Cited

Gearhart, Sally Miller. “The Womanization of Rhetoric.“ Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.

In this article, Brooks argues for a genre-based pedagogy for teaching hypertexts. There are a few points from his essay that I think my be pertinent to my 511 paper: