Tag: identity

Why I Don’t Buy the Arguments to Vote for Kavanaugh

On By BrettIn identity, Media, Politics, Pop culture, Psychology, rhetoric, societyLeave a comment

This afternoon, the Senate–after weeks of rancor and the bathetic hem-hawing of folks like Flake–will vote in Kavanaugh as the Ninth Justice of the current Supreme Court. I should technically say that they “likely” or “all-but-certainly” will, but precision devalues the sheer force pushing confirmation. So, unless God himself smites the Capitol Monty-Python style, hello Chief Justice Kavanaugh.

I haven’t written here in a while, though I have been meaning to, and perhaps those now-unfinished posts may make their way up here. But like many, the Kavanaugh confirmation, long-since troublesome, has consumed my thinking the past two weeks after Ford’s accusations and subsequent testimony. Considered a referendum on the #MeToo movement, the debate over Kavanaugh certainly represents a crucible-rupturing focus on gender politics in an already fraught era. It has also brought up issues of judicial impartiality and temperment, the institutional credibility of the court, and the stability of centrist and liberal provisions eked out over the past decades.

All of these are important conversations, as are the testimonies of Ford and Kavanaugh, the political background of Kavanaugh, the procedural issues of the confirmation, the veracity of his two other accusers, and many more issues. However, I mainly want to focus on the arguments of those in favor of the Kavanaugh vote, as I see them.

I want to take these at face value, though I suspect like so much in this era, they lack the sincerity of their delivery. I do this knowing that it makes no difference. Having called public servants, donated to causes, talked with friends, and gone to protests–done all in my current power, in other words–I feel that it may at-best be an intellectual exercise. Nevertheless, as a teacher and student of rhetoric, I think it’s important to look at the arguments that govern major political and policy decisions and define our country for our lifetimes and beyond.

As such, I see three main arguments, summarized and addressed below. And, yes, I am biased. I do not want Kavanaugh, but being biased does not preclude academic fairness. And frankly, I don’t think these arguments deserve that fairness, but many Americans (cough, Republicans) support him, so here we go.

Gif of woman shrugging tiredly with the phrase "Here we go" below

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CCR 633: Transformers 2016, Rise of the Algorithms

On By BrettIn digital humanities, identity, rhetoric, Rhetoric of Technology, social media research2 Comments

Walking to my car today, I was thinking of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, particularly his idea of the “thing-in-itself.” Trying to reconcile the rationalism of Leibniz and Descartes with the empiricism of David Hume, Kant cut a line between the phenomena of our experience and noumena of the thing-in-itself, of what reality is outside of our experience.

For Kant, we cannot gain empirical knowledge without our own cognitive filters. We can never actually experience reality in-itself, so we cannot actually “know” the world, except through self-evident a priori analytic judgements.

I’ve never left that dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, between our experience and what “is” outside our a priori glasses. And as time went on, the layers of separation added up. Our senses. Our cognitive biases. Mediators, like my own glasses. Language. Culture and normative hubris. Geography. People around me. Prior readings and the general assemblage that constitutes “me,” or the signifiers and self I identify as. All filters. All filter bubbles.

 

As Daniel Estrada writes, “in a very deep sense, you are your bubble. The process of constructing a social identity is identical to the process of deciding how to act, which is identical again to the process of filtering and interpreting your world.” While I would argue that identity is more than “the process of deciding how to act,” a point that I reckon Estrada would likely recognize, I think it definitely plays a central role. Sartre put it best: “We are our choices.” Our choices have echoes, and sometimes those echoes etch our being–or how others view our being, which Sartre also argues.

But what I like about Estrada, is that the key is not the act itself, but the “deciding,” the cognitive pathways and heuristics–conscious or unconscious, affective or analytic, cultural and idiosyncratic–that form our actions. And at some level this deciding reflects our worldview, or prejudices, and the information we use to understand and then act in the world.

And here, things get interesting–at least for me. As Estrada goes on, “Thus, any constraints imposed on your filter are also constraints on your possibilities for action, constraints on the freedom of your decisions and the construction of your world. If you are your bubble, then any attempt to control or manipulate your bubble is likewise an attempt to control you.” While for Kant, the self is largely insular, cognitive, sensory, and self-contained. Expressing such a view of self,  Emerson, a foundation to our own American sense of self (and “self-relience”) describes it bluntly: “the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.”

But, as thinkers continue to argue, from a Buddhist metaphysics of emptiness and many Native American epistomologies (and axiologies), to Diane Davis in Inessential Solidarity and Thomas Rickert in Ambient Rhetoric, the self is more osmotic or relational. It is permeable and messy, bundled and blurry, oozy and diffuse, yet localized by language and materiality.

And here come the algorithms. These too, if you want to go this way, are part of us, and so is the digital pathways they “co-author” from our metadata (to draw from Jessica Reyman).  To use Kant’s term, this digital world informs–or possibly is–our phenomenological experience and the self that this experience informs.  And as both Reyman and Estrada point to, we don’t really own, or fully understand, these algorithms. As Eusong Kim has argued about trending, “We don’t know why something trends. The algorithm is a locked secret, a “black box” (to the point where MIT professors have built algorithms attempting to predict trending tags). The Fineprint: Trending is visibility granted by a closed, private corporation and their proprietary algorithms.”

And, to make matters worse, as Brock and Shepherd argue, these algorithms are persuasive, constituting “procedural enthymemes,” drawing from Aristotle’s enthymeme, a syllogistic argument finished by the audience. It requires audience participation, as Bogost argues in Persuasive Gaming and Richard Colby argues in his work in composition, saying it creates a “rhetorical situation.” But the procedure still influences, as these scholars point out, both in games and other digital and non-digital systems. There is this odd hybrid between human and nonhuman, what Tom Friedman in his view of digital games (extended by Alexander Galloway) calls “cyborg consciousness,” in which the player learns to think with the algorithm.  But here, the player may not be aware how the algorithm is influencing their thinking.

And I think this leads me to three key points, which I end on. First, I would argue that these filters and filter bubbles are rarely a one-shot argument; they exhibit ontological rhetoric–or at least heftily influence what we see as “reality” or how we work through “reality.” To use Burk’s terms, they inform our identification and terministic screens. Second, it’s not just algorithms, but people, mainstream media, interactions, upbringing, etc.,–our filter bubble online and offline–that we co-create with other actants, with varying level of control and agency. Believing we were somehow less permeable before social media feels wrong to me; though we didn’t have the same procedural influences.

And finally, I really don’t think we can improve without heavily challenging this propensity to think phenomenological experience is the noumenal world–and that this phenomonlogical experience is based on individual, non-relational agency. Or at the very least, we need to challenge the idea that one must impose one’s phenomena on others.

In particular, I think this cuts two ways. On the one hand, this involves people trying to force people into certain ways of being, regardless of their own agency–what Lévinas termed “totalizing.” And here we have the destructive role of identity politics, which Trump’s rhetoric and neoconservative policy (I think) have capitalized on: enacting an ideology and identity so much that you feel need to threaten the identity of others at a material, ontological level.

It also cuts the other way. Here, I move back to Kant and his “Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy,” in which he argues that once you abandon certain modes of verifying knowledge and regulating discussion (rules of discourse and epistemology), such a discussion becomes pointless. It’s like playing a game. If I play by the rules and you do not, we can’t play. And as Bakhtin argues, dialogue cuts both ways. If we are in different realities, phenomenologically speaking,  we can’t do anything.

As Burke argues in “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” when a religious rhetoric gets corrupted, it is one of the most damaging, as people lack a certain self-reflexivity.  They believe on faith or on belief. And even more dangerously they may think that belief is universal–and needs enforcing. And, maybe somewhat paradoxically or provocatively, algorithms have the most blind faith of any rhetorical actant: their programming.

[Featured image: Robot! by Crystal, via Creative Commons]

CCR 633: Multimodality, Part 2

On By BrettIn composition, fanfiction, Rhetoric of TechnologyLeave a comment

Chapter three begins with the “prosumer,” an idea that Alexander and Rhodes borrow from Daniel Anderson. The “prosumer,” they describe, is “a convergence of the consumer and the professional in terms of new media tools” (106). Many new media tools allow consumers, formerly just receivers, to produce products, thereby acting as professionals. This, in turn, allows a more critical focus on production, as it is no longer black-boxed behind the usual channels, but in the hands of the consumer.

This similar idea–that of consumer as professional or producer–also connects with the Situationalist notion of “détournement,” a form of “pillaging or appropriation,” as Frances Stracey describes (qtd. in Alexander and Rhodes 112).  The Situationalists argued that capitalism had the constant need to project a “spectacle” of needs that inspire consumers to thirst after products, so people should critically produce to counter this.

Alexander and Rhodes connect these ideas to current DIY movements, but emphasize the “critical” dimension of this production. In other words, it’s not simply enough to be critical, in a humanities sense, or to produce; one must use production in a critical way, engaging in multimodal production through new media tools. They provide the example of images that grew in “excess” from their work that argue their work or ethos as “queer rhetoric” scholars in different ways.

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ENG 730: The Game and Immersive Narrative

On By BrettIn game studiesLeave a comment

Watching The Game, I kept thinking of Kafka. In many of his stories, Kafka presents this looming network that always recedes as the protagonist gets closer to solving it. I think A Messenger from the Emperor puts it best:

“he is still forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he overcome them; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to fight his way down the steps; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to cross the courtyard and, after the courtyard, the second enclosing outer palace, and again stairways and courtyards, and again a palace, and so on through thousands of years. . .

In The Game, Nicholas, much like many of Kafka’s characters, must navigate the ever-withdrawing, seemingly omnipotent CRS. Things escalate as he goes forward, almost to an absurd degree. And at the end, instead of closure of catharsis, we get this bizarre party. As John notes, no one seems to recognize the emotional turmoil that Nicholas endured, revisiting the suicide of his father, shooting and thinking he killed his brother, and attempting suicide himself, only to stumble into a room of friends and strangers who only moments ago–he thought–were trying to kill him.

I guess my frustration stemmed from the notion of immersion and boarders that Murray discusses. As Murray writes, “Part of the early work in any medium is the exploration of border between the representational world and the actual world” (103). When immersed, much like the Holodeck example from the beginning of the book, one is caught up in a procedural, participatory medium, as Murray describes. But as she also notes, this participation is “a visit,” and we must often “actively create belief” (110). There is a border, in other words, between the illusion and the larger world in which that illusion sits.  This larger world may have its own hyperreal characteristics, but it is nonetheless distinct–or seems to be.

But the blurring of that border is what seems to make The Game and The Grasshopper examples so haunting. As John notes, Nicholas ends up no longer really playing in a way, as he thinks that he is actively fighting a real entity. For example, toward the end, the ontology of the gun is ambiguous: in the actual world, it’s a prop; in the representational world, it’s a gun. But for Nicholas, the representational world has become the actual world. The game, and all of its trappings, has become his new reality, including the gun. And, as many others have noted, the “voluntary” element of Nicholas’ participation feels murky, making this “game” all the more problematic.

Connecting it back to Kafka, I think the reason why The Trial is so haunting is that the legal system has left its boundaries. To draw from Huizinga, the court has flooded outside its magic circle and has become an existential way of life. K is guilty without his consent, and forced to solve the maze of “state sanctioned violence” as Murray calls it (131), as himself, not a player version of himself.

In a similar note, The Game shows this haunting Grasshopper-like dystopia where the representational aspect of play has permeated and supplanted actual life. But, the game ends, and this is the strangest part. As Murray points out, digital mediums have a more ambiguous ending, often created by their interactive aspect. They often end through exhaustion and not a linear progression. The same could be said for the movie.

The doctor/actor jokes at the end, for example, that if Nicholas didn’t jump, he’d have to throw him.  This raises the question on how prescriptive the game was. Jordan points out that the game maybe was not that interactive, and indeed, it’s hard to see how the game wasn’t pulling all the strings, giving CRS an almost deterministic quality that feels godlike, all driving toward this “ending.” Were there alternative endings? What if, for example, Nicholas didn’t drink the tea? What if he didn’t get the gun from his house? What other rhizomes could he follow, and would those rhizomes still lead to that party in that way?

Much like K’s demise in The Trial, the ending in The Game feels inevitable, and I wonder–since they lied to him before, including about him not being picked to enter the game in the first place–whether the game is really over. Once you turn life into a game, it doesn’t feel easy to get out, and maybe Nick’s blithe acceptance at the end is a sort of absurdist, nihilistic acceptance of the Grasshopper’s wisdom. Worst birthday gift ever.

CCR 633: Handwriting and Withdrawal

On By BrettIn composition, disability rhetoric, disability studies, Rhetoric of TechnologyLeave a comment

One of the tensions in the reading, particular in Thorton, was the role that handwriting has between self, discipline, and social role. Early on, Thorton writes, “Faithful imitation of penmanship models-what teachers would call good handwriting-thereby signals  conformity and ordinariness, while breaking all the penmanship rules, even to the point of illegibility, is a mark of individuality” (x). This immediately connects with some of the disciplining that Trithemius discusses in relation to scribe work. In both, a certain rigor and repetition, a discipline of the body and the “hand” takes place.

I think, then of writing’s broader potential to discipline, like what McCruer discusses in composition’s ability to “compose bodies” in “De-Composition” (2008) or even in formal rubrics, genre conventions, curricula, the Harvard rhetoric requirement, and pre-set forms, like the five paragraph theme. This capacity that rhetoric and writing has to conform and prescribe has along history, as Thorton points out.

But, in slightly different sense, writing also created or highlighted larger social identity, and in this way it also polices or defines. For example, as Thorton points out, business, itself a core catalyst to writing instruction (p. 6), prescribed more clerk-like ways of writing, rejecting the flourishes of more gentlemanly backgrounds. Writing was also gendered, with many “feminine” scripts designed to take longer and exhibit “fair” qualities. As Thorton writes, “mercantile advice books urged men of commerce to shun penmanship refinements appropriate for gentlemen in favor of a straightforward ‘Clerk-like Manner of Writing.’ And where men might be urged to cultivate a ‘good’ or ‘fine’ hand, Women were urged to cultivate ‘fair’ one” (37).

And through this quality, handwriting, seemed to exhibit a sort of self-expressive quality, growing from social identities. As Thorton writes,  “As each human being performs a socially differentiated part, so is each given a different ‘script.’ Conversely, by reading that script for its social information one could learn all there was to know about the writer. Here at last was a sincere medium of selfhood” (37). Hand writing analysis and associations with different scripts connected the self (albeit a socialized self) to the script, presenting a certain window of expression.

But once again, the movement to “automatic handwriting” and related systems of standardization, like the Palmer method, disciplines expression, but through a certain systematized erasure. By making writing more standardized and less idiosyncratic–whether justified through “science” or a sort of “lore”–one is essentially erasing the body, or trying to. This erasure or withdrawing is particularly bad for embodied backgrounds that do not fit the standard, like lefties, people with disabilities, or those with less training and resources. It is a sort of gate-keeping, but one that erects its gates by assuming writing a certain way is a type of present-for-hand skill and not a complicated, socialized, embodied action.

With this, I often think of a quote by Nirma Erevelles about special education that has been following–or rather haunting–since last semester: “Haunting these policy discourses is the existence of an absent presence. There are no bodies recognized here. Just test statistics. Research-based outcomes. . . In the stolid precision of statistical measurement and evidence-based research, the introduction of bodies to the discussion is a dangerous and messy act. Bodies have history. Bodies transform in context. Bodies are mobile. Bodies are unpredictable.” (Disability and Difference). In other words, as the body withdraws from systematization, quantification, and abstraction–as it often does–what bodies and what people get left behind?

And though handwriting is still “a thing” as they say, something that we discuss and learn and use, I am curious about the same disciplining, social-signifying, and withdrawal (in a Heideggarian sense) that takes place in today’s context through digital print or new media.

ENG 730: Player Experience, Identification, and Identity

On By BrettIn game studies, rhetoricLeave a comment

I feel that Roger Caillois, in some ways, offers a helpful rejoinder to some questions (or critiques) to Huizinga from last class through his focus on “games.” While Huizinga seemed more concerned with a broader concept of play, Caillois seemed to take a more more grounded approach. As Caillois says early on, “[Huizinga’s] work is not a study of games, but an inquiry into the creative quality of the play principle in the domain of culture” (4).

In particular, I thought Caillois taxonomy of games proved helpful, particularly as it further acknowledged the hybrid mixes that could take place within the terms. As he lays them out: “I am proposing a division into four main rubrics, depending upon whether, in the games under consideration, the role of competition, chance, simulation, or vertigo is dominant. I call these agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx, respectively” (12). To this “rubric” he adds a further axis between the more open play of paidia (a tem Huizinga also takes up in tension with agôn) and the more structured ludus.

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CCR 711: Bodies, Subjectivities, and Being

On By BrettIn disability rhetoric, disability studiesLeave a comment

As Nirmala Erevelles writes in her article, “it is the ‘ideology of disability’ which has been used to justify the sexual division of labor that constructed gender as a political and economic concept, the production of class/caste differences. . . the production of racial categories. . . and the upholding of compulsory heterosexuality” (104).

In other words, at different historical times and spaces, different bodies have been disabled. During colonialism, slavery disabled African bodies, for example And more broadly, disability connects to the surplus of labor inherent to the system, as such subjects lack the ability to “produce” or labor in the capitalist economy. This excludes them from the role of producer and consumer, erased into surplus and further marked as disabled.

This sort of historical materialist grounding helped guide more post-structuralist and post-human theories in Erevelles’ account, I thought, the section on cyborgs being particularly clear. Initially, the promises of hybrid and human, technological and flesh, and the different assemblage-based bodies afforded in this paradigm seems ideal for people with disability. But such a paradigm still has divisions among social classes, with many of these bodies out of reach for most. Moreover, the production and technology needed for these cyborg bodies often arises from capitalist labor and the hierarchies that follow with that, a material reality often missed by theorists.

Thus. as Erevelles writes, “By locating their emancipatory practices within the space of the social imaginary, as opposed to the actual materiality of of economic conditions, poststructuralists continue to uphold a utopic vision of emancipation” (98-99).

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CCR 611: Discussing Remedial Writing

On By BrettIn compositionLeave a comment

I’m not sure what to take away from the readings. Perhaps that’s the byproduct of my own frazzled ontology as of late, but I also think part of the difficulty arises from the complex, fraught nature of the debate.

Kynard, I think, presents the most dynamic critique. By redrawing the history, she presents a completely new insight, approach, perspective, tear in the curtain. As she says:

“When I stopped looking for black folk in basic writing scholarship and in the history of open admissions and instead placed basic writing scholarship and open admissions into the already existing history of African American education and literacy, lo and behold, I got a whole different kind of story” (189).

And indeed, that story was different. Protest, tension, ransacked offices, Jim Crow and bodily danger at the heart of literacy. The voice of student. The bodies of student. The structures–both physical and conceptual–making walls and red lines. The pilling up of de jure and de facto discrimination. The hard-fought challenges. And Kynard goes on to vocalize an approach:

“The issue here then is not to insert black teachers into the basic writing paradigm, but to deliberately see black compositionists’ practices, research, politics, and discourses inside of the much longer standing protest tradition of black teaching” (189).

In other words, this “whole different kind of story” needs to keep going, not just in the way composition constructs or tells history, but in how it in enacts it. In how it makes history. How it orients itself.

In other words, composition has a lot to think about.

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CCR 711: Bodies and Webbed Worlds

On By BrettIn disability rhetoric, disability studies, embodied rhetoric, identityLeave a comment

Reading Kristen Lindgren’s “Bodies in Trouble,” I kept coming back to Heidegger’s distinction between “present-at-hand” and “ready-for-hand.” In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that people tend to encounter objects as ready-for-hand, meaning that we encounter them based on what they do or how we use them. He uses the example of the hammer. We encounter and look at hammers as a tool to “hammer,” not as an abstract object in itself.

Moreover, he argues, this object-defining function is grounded in a “world” of interrelations and definitions that help constitute “being-in-the-world.” For example, one couldn’t hammer without nails and boards, and one couldn’t build a house without the concept of “house,” and one may not need to make a house without nature’s capacity to storm. A world of relation webs out from this hammer, contextualizing its being.

But when ready-to-hand, the world of these interrelations and the hammer as an object recedes into the background and one sets to work.

This all changes once the hammer breaks. Suddenly it can no longer “hammer,” and it becomes an alien object in our hands, forcing us to reflect on what it “is.” This approaches Heidegger’s present-at-hand, when we look at an object in a more abstract, property-oriented way, like a scientist or theorist. In particular, Heidegger wants to critique the Cartesian tradition of looking at objects in abstract ways, outside of their more fundamental being as objects in the world, closely involved with our being.

But I’ve always been stuck on the breaking of the hammer.

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Metis

On By BrettIn disability rhetoricLeave a comment

I.

Dolmage’s recognition of the hidden body in rhetoric (and philosophy) proves a powerful starting point of critique, particularly considering his point that many ancient texts were quite obsessed with the body. For example, Socrates and Plato actively attacked the lustful qualities of the body. Continuing this, Augustine marked the potent marriage between the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus with Judeo-Christian dogma, giving a particularly powerful foundation to embodiment in the Western tradition.

Here, I think Nietzsche is particularly helpful, as he is incessantly asking one to return to the body. He also critiques the potential disembodied “view from nowhere” (as Nagel calls it) that this distance from body and experience may create. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for example, Nietzsche critiques objectivism’s quest for “immaculate perception,” mocking science’s goal of passively lying before objects “as a mirror with a hundred facets.”

In pursuit of this immaculate perception and its rhetorical extension of immaculate communication, any unusual, distracting, or problematic body would be unwanted. So starting from the opposite end, as Dolmage does, in grounding rhetoric in the body, one must look at rhetoric in a more embodied, complex enterprise.

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