Photo Credit: “Persuasion” by reihayashi

Way back when – in October – I opined about how rhetoric might fit with the emerging field of software studies.

Now, I probably should have been a bit more precise with that title.  As I noted in that post, rhetoric is certainly present in software studies.  Even though Manovich gave us a “reduced” rhetoric in The Language of New Media, rhetoric has continually irrupted in the conversation about software and its cultural implications.

But beyond that, rhetorical theory has even found its way into software studies, and here’s where I should have been more precise.  Because what I actually had in mind was a role for the rhetorician in software studies.  Rhetoric itself is present in the conversation, and we have Ian Bogost to thank for that.

In Persuasive Games, Bogost develops the idea of “procedural rhetorics” in his examinations of videogames.  Bogost is interested in how game designers are “authoring arguments through processes” (29).  For instance, he examines the various procedural rhetorics of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.  In particular, he analyzes of of San Andreas’ more innovative features—the requirement that the player-character must eat to maintain stamina and strength: “Eating moderately maintains energy, but eating high-fat-content foods increases CJ’s weight, and fat gangsters can’t run or fight very effectively” (113).  Bogost admits that the game’s features with regard to nutrition are “rudimentary” but he also insists that these features make an important argument:

The fact that the player must feed his character to continue playing does draw attention to the limited material conditions the game provides for satisfying that need, subtly exposing the fact that problems of obesity and malnutrition in poor communities can partly be attributed to the relative ease and affordability of fast food. (114)

Thus, through its design (through its computational processes) San Andreas expresses various arguments about problems with inner city life.  Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric offers us a starting point for understanding these arguments.  But Bogost also points out that while classical rhetoric focused on “persuasion,” contemporary rhetoric is interested in a broader notion of “communication” that encapsulates both persuasion and expression (29).  For this reason, he sees procedural rhetoric as being applicable to a broad range of practices: “I intend the reader to see procedural rhetoric as a domain much broader than that of videogames, ecompassing any medium—computational or not—that accomplishes its inscription via processes” (46).  Procedural rhetorics are at work in a variety of environments, electronic and otherwise, and Bogost gives us a method for understanding how procedures create spaces and how those spaces make arguments.

As an analytic concept, procedural rhetoric gives us a way to understand software as part of a complex rhetorical situation.  Developers and designers of video games work toward various rhetorical ends, and gamers (the audience for the text) make use of that software and are (or are not) persuaded in various ways.

If Bogost provides this bridge between rhetoric and software, what might the rhetorician bring to the conversation?  Bogost rightfully notes that most work in “digital rhetoric” does not account for what is different about digital texts.  That is, rhetoricians have merely brought the methods of rhetorical analysis to texts that happen to be in digital environments without really thinking through what is different about those environments: “digital rhetoric tends to focus on the presentation of traditional materials – especially text and images – without accounting for the computational underpinnings of that presentation” (28).  As Bogost notes, the main difference between digital environments and off-line spaces is computation and procedure.  Our various digital agoras are the result of procedural rules, rules that materialize through software.  That software shapes rhetorical exchange in important ways.

This is where I see the rhetorician’s role emerging.  Software studies scholars continue to guard against an interface bias – that is, they are worried that we have focused too much on interface at the expense of examining the infrastructure.  For that reason, Bogost focuses on how software designers are rhetors and how gamers are audiences.  What digital rhetoricians can now do is bring the two approaches – the study of both interface and infrastructure – together.  How do the rhetorical texts (software) created by programmers shape the rhetorical actions (writing, gaming, or the “traversing” of cybertext in Aarseth’s words) of by digital rhetors?

Digital rhetoric, as I see it, is primed to do this kind of work.  We have done a great deal of work with texts online, and we’ve dealt with how texts circulate through networks.  The next step is to get into the nuts and bolts of how the production and circulation of text happens, and how those process shape persuasion and communication.  We know that digital spaces are important locations of persuasion, but we haven’t quite figured out what methods we need to determine how software clears a space for (or, perhaps, hinders) certain kinds of persuasion.  This, as I see it, is the role of the rhetorician in software studies.

Photo Credit: “Cool Runner” by Nirmal Thacker

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of rhetoric, writing studies, and rhetorical theory in the emerging field/subfield of software studies. Software studies was launched by Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media, fleshed out by Katherine Hayles in My Mother Was a Computer, and then extended by scholars like Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Matthew Fuller, Matt Kirschenbaum, and various others.  Kirschenbaum provides my favorite description of this emerging subfield:

“What is software studies then?  Software studies is what media theory becomes after the bubble bursts.  Software studies is whiteboards and white papers, business plans and IPOs and penny-stocks. Software studies is Powerpoint vaporware and proofs of concept binaries locked in time-stamped limbo on a server where all the user accounts but root have been disabled and the domain name is eighteen months expired.  Software studies is, or can be, the work of fashioning documentary methods for recognizing and recovering digital histories, and the cultivation of the critical discipline to parse those histories against the material matrix of the present.  Software studies is understanding digital objects are sometimes lost, yes, but mostly, and more often, just forgotten.  Software studies is about adding more memory.” (153)

While Kirschenbaum’s version has definite “book history” feel to it, I think it helps us think of a broad range of methods that fit under the software studies umbrella.  Software studies allows scholars across a broad range of disciplines to examine the far-reaching ramifications of code.  Kirschenbaum’s focus is on mechanisms and Wardrip-Fruin’s is on computational processes.  As I see it, software studies can be a big tent.

But Collin Brooke notes in Lingua Fracta that Manovich significantly reduces the role of rhetoric in new media studies, making it difficult to see how rhetoricians might fit with the emerging field of software studies.  It’s worth briefly revisiting Manovich’s treatment of rhetoric in The Language of New Media. In a discussion of hyperlinking and the Web’s non-hierarchical arrangement of texts, Manovich argues that “the printed word was linked to the art of rhetoric” (77).  Traditionally, Manovich argues, texts have “encoded human knowledge and memory, instructed, inspired, convinced, and seduced their readers to adopt new ideas, new ways of interpreting the world, new ideologies” (76-7).  Manovich suggests that this approach becomes obsolete with rise of new media and hypertext.  After citing Roman Jakobsen’s reduction of rhetoric to “metaphor and metonymy,” Manovich argues that hyperlinking has reduced rhetoric even further by “privileg[ing] the single figure of metonymy at the expense of all others” (77).  While he eventually suggests that a “new digital rhetoric may have less to do with arranging information in a particular order and more to do simply with selecting what is included and what is not included” (footnote, page 77), Manovich still bases this discussion on a particularly narrow definition of rhetoric.

Collin suggests that Manovich’s definition of the rhetorical canon of arrangement (and of rhetoric, more generally) is based on a straw man.  On the Web, the argument goes, writers/orators no longer painstakingly arrange things in order to persuade in a particular way; therefore, rhetoric is dead.  But Collin argues that “the links that allegedly demonstrate the irrelevance of rhetoric are rhetorical practices of arrangement, attempts to communicate affinities, connections, and relationships” (91).  As Collin sees it (and I’d agree), arrangement is not an “all or nothing” thing.  Arrangement may be further complicated in new media environments, but it still happens.  Rhetoric changes in new media environments, but it’s still there.

We can hardly blame Manovich for this reduced rhetoric.  Manovich inherits (from Jakobsen and others) a reduced rhetoric, or what Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen would call a “restricted rhetoric.”  As Borch-Jacobsen argues, rhetoric’s history is defined by a constant oscillation between “primary rhetoric” and “secondary rhetoric”:

The history of rhetoric is not  the continuous and closed story of its progressive restriction, but the discontinuous and indefinite one of permanent tension between two uses of the term: one of extreme generality (and therefore also extreme vagueness), which makes it an art of persuasion (this is its oratorical, pragmatic, or ‘impressive’ pole, corresponding roughly to what G.A. Kennedy calls ‘primary rhetoric’); the other of more restricted scope, which makes it an art of speaking well (this is its literary, poetic, ornamental, or ‘expressive’ pole, corresponding roughly to what Kennedy calls ’secondary rhetoric’ and V. Florescu letteraturizzazione). Between these two poles there is constant oscillation punctuated by ‘deaths’ and ‘renaissances’ of rhetoric. (128)

Manovich’s rhetoric is still about persuasion, but it is mostly a secondary rhetoric of ornamentation.  However, if we accept Borch-Jacobsen’s more complex historical narrative of rhetoric’s constant oscillation, how might we rethink the role of rhetoric in new media studies and, more specifically, software studies? What would a primary rhetoric offer software studies?  What does the art of persuasion offer those of us interested in “fashioning documentary methods for recognizing and recovering digital histories”?

I’d like to offer a brief, provisional answer to this question.  If rhetoric is bigger than tropes and figures and if it is about how the art of persuasion morphs and changes, then a study of digital histories might trace out the origins and iterations of rhetorical strategies.  These rhetorical strategies are shaped by software.  Design choices enable and constrain certain rhetorical practices, and a study of these emerging practices would attempt to understand how persuasion and communication can happen in emerging environments.

Let me provide a brief example.  The Wikipedia controversy of Essjay is well known, and it is one I dealt with in detail in a recent College Composition and Communication article.  That article does not address Wikipedia’s software (Media Wiki) directly, but a consideration of Wikipedia’s code allows us one more way to examine this “scandal.”  To recap: Ryan Jordan claimed to be a tenured professor of theology.  He used this identity to guide discussion on Wikipedia and to work his way up the Wikipedia food chain.  It was eventually discovered (with the help of wiki-critic Daniel Brandt) that Jordan was not a professor, and this opened up a public discussion about how identity operates on Wikipedia.

In the CCC article, I argue that the Essjay controversy demonstrates how ethos operates in Wikipedia and how this community deals with textual origins.  Wikipedia’s rules attempt to outlaw any claims to an ethos of real life (RL) expertise.  That is, no one can claim to be the origin of an utterance.  Writers are not supposed to dictate discussion by pointing to their RL credentials, and they are not allowed to include “original research” in a Wikipedia article.  Instead, Wikipedia’s rules require that a contributor build an ethos of citation.  Instead of pointing to his or her credentials, a Wikipedian should be pointing to verifiable sources.

This argument is geared toward an audience of rhetoric and composition scholars who are concerned with issues of writing, argument, and intellectual property on the Web.  But a discussion of Essjay’s ethos would shift in a software studies conversation.  We would have to account for how Wikipedia’s code allows for (indeed, encourages) the building of virtual identities and actively discourages any claim to RL identities.  We would have to track the development of Media Wiki software and a number of design decisions: the creation and maintenance of user accounts, access control settings, security settings, and permissions.

For instance, Media Wiki’s rules with regard to user identities and “anonymity” are quirky (these rules expose what Galloway and Thacker might call an exploit…but that is another blog post).  Creating a username on Media Wiki masks that user’s IP address.  Thus, I can edit without a user account and have my IP address attached to each edit, or I can create a username that is linked to each edit.  Only users with CheckUser access can link usernames with IP addresses.  Thanks to Virgil Griffith’s Wikiscanner tool, we can link IP addresses with physical locations.  But this still doesn’t provide a clean way of linking edits with particular writers.

Media Wiki’s dealings with user accounts are confusing and counterintuitive.  What does it mean to edit Wikipedia anonymously?  What can anonymity even mean when an “anonymous” user is more easily tracked than a user who creates an avatar.  When Ryan Jordan created the identity of “Essjay,” he was able to create an entire identity. That identity was not necessarily tied to a real world location or a real world person.  And he was able to do this because of a particular design decision on the part of those who designed Media Wiki.  Contrary to what most will say, this policy with regard to RL identity is not in place for all wikis.  In fact, the original wiki, Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb, insisted on “RealNames” because “people who use online nicknames care less about what they write.”  This is an arguable claim, but for the time being it’s important to note that Media Wiki’s design is but one way of dealing with user identities.  This design decision has shaped the rhetorical situation in which each Wikipedian finds herself.

Using episodes such as the Essjay controversy as starting point, we can track the history of Wikipedia’s code.  This history will help us better understand code influences rhetorical action and how the ethics and rhetorics embedded in code bubble to the surface as software is put to use.  Essjay made particular choices about how to persuade other Wikipedians, and many of those choices involved a strategic deployment of ethos.  But that strategic deployment was not only about Essjay’s (or Ryan Jordan’s) “choice.”  It was much more about the code that allowed for and encouraged such a rhetorical strategy.

And I’d like to go one step further here.  Even this brief discussion of Essjay’s ethos and how it opens the door for a rhetorical approach to software studies only scratches the surface.  Beyond a study of rhetorical strategies and how they’re shaped, a rhetorical approach to software studies would also have to be a discussion of how persuasion happens, regardless of or beyond any conscious choice on the part of the digital rhetor.  Yes, we should consider Essjay’s attempt to game the system and persuade.  But what about all of the persuasion that happens over and beyond such strategic attempts?

In electronic spaces that invite various digital writer/rhetors regardless of credentials, Web denizens are put into contact with various others regardless of any choice to do so.  I do not know who is editing “alongside” me when I contribute to Wikipedia, and this opens up a long list of rhetorical questions: How does persuasion or communication happen amongst a group of writers who may not share the same agenda?  How does one track the motives of a writer without knowing his or her identity?  What kind of community is a text like Wikipedia?

There are more questions to pursue here, but my hope is to open up a discussion about how rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and writing studies might contribute to the emerging field of software studies.  I see a number of openings, and I will be looking to pursue many of them in future blog posts.

Photo Credit: “the infrastructure” by haribote

Recently, I mentioned to some folks on twitter that I was putting together a graduate seminar for next semester, and those same folks seemed interested in a bit of crowdsourced syllabus design.

So, I’m posting a draft of a brief course description along with a list of possible readings.  If you’re interested, please drop me a comment and let me know what you think.  I’m open to suggestions.

New Media Interfaces and Infrastructures

Recent New Media scholarship is pushing beyond the study of texts online and attempting to study the systems, infrastructures, codes, and platforms that produce those texts.  By examining and tinkering with the interfaces and infrastructures of new media, scholars across various disciplines and subdisciplines are looking to develop new rhetorics for new media and new research methods.  In this course, we will examine and enter this conversation about new media’s interfaces and infrastructures.  The class will share reading notes and the results of their research in a wiki-based “Interfaces and Infrastructures” research database.  Students will also write a conference paper, geared toward a particular conference.

Final projects for this course could take many forms.  A few examples (this list is not exhaustive): a traditional seminar paper, a grant proposal, a dissertation prospectus draft, the design of a new media interface or infrastructure.  Students will work with the professor to develop a project that can aid in the student’s career trajectory.

Possible Readings

Foundations
Lanham, The Electronic Word (selections)
Manovich, The Language of New Media
Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
Ulmer, Heuretics (not sure if this fits…but would love to include it)
Ronell, Part I of the UberReader, “The Call of Technology”
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation
Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer

Rhetoric and Composition
Welch, Electric Rhetoric
Rice, The Rhetoric of Cool
Brooke, Lingua Fracta
Reid, The Two Virtuals

Platform Studies/Software Studies
Bogost and Montfort, Racing the Beam
Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms
Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing
Harpold, Ex-Foliations

Other possibilities: Banks’ Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Matthew Fuller’s Media Ecologies, Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code, Thierry Bardini’s Bootstrapping, Alexander Galloway’s The Exploit, Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media, McLuhan (and many more…)

Note: I am considering pairing each text with a primary source.  For instance, Harpold discusses Ted Nelson and  Vannevar Bush, and I could pair their writings with Harpold’s.

Photo Credit: Mez Love

When I picked up Daniel Barrett’s book on Media Wiki, I didn’t expect to be engrossed.  That’s not a knock against Barrett or O’Reilly books (which are always pretty useful).  I just assumed that I’d be reading your run of the mill software manual.  I wanted to know a little bit more about the guts of Media Wiki.  And while I wouldn’t say it’s a “page turner,” I’ve been fascinated to find out how easy it is to learn and use Media Wiki.

From an administrator’s perspective, Media Wiki is fairly straightforward.  Installing and maintaining the software is pretty much a snap.  But beyond this, Media Wiki offers end users a really easy way to manipulate a lot of data.  With a tool called Dynamic Page List (DPL), Media Wiki users can query the database of the wiki.  With a wiki like Wikipedia, this is an amazing tool to have.  Imagine that you wanted to pull a report on all Wikipedia articles about your favorite baseball team or comic book and that you wanted to manipulate, sort, and display that data in multiple ways.  DPL allows you to do that.  For me, this was a revelation.  I knew that Wikipedia was “open” and that its data was there for all to see, but I didn’t realize that one could query the database that easily.  After learning a few easy commands, anyone can run a lot of really useful reports and queries of the Wikipedia database.

As I learn more about Media Wiki extensions like DPL, I am realizing how important it is for people to understand that these tools exist.  ProfHacker recently ran a couple of posts about working with APIs, and many others in new media scholarship (Bill Wolff comes to mind) argue that new media scholars have to learn APIs and teach students how to use them.  But those calls can always seem so daunting.  They seem daunting to me, and I even understand some of this stuff.  How could I possibly convince folks in various English departments that they should be teaching students how to manipulate the Wikipedia database or build Google maps using the Google API?

But the task of both learning these tools and teaching them to others (students or instructors) is not nearly as daunting we sometimes think.  After reading about DPL, I started to think of some really interesting ways to teach the tool.  Teaching this kind of skill moves well beyond teaching students how to create tables and pages that query the Wikipedia database.  Instead, this kind of teaching shows students that Wikipedia is a database, something I’m not sure most students really understand.  The content they see on a Wikipedia article is nothing more than a database query, sorted for them by various tools, software, and developers that have decided the order and placement of bits of information.  It’s not really a page at all.

When new media scholars argue that the interface is the new “thing” we should be studying, it’s easy to dismiss this work as a bunch of computer geeks interested in programming.  And you certainly need some basic understanding of programming to learn something like DPL.  But the language and logic of programming is slowly influencing all of our writing tools and genres (our novels, our blogs), and its time for everyone (not just the geeks) to get a chance understand that logic and put it into practice.

All of this is to say that Barrett’s book has really made me think differently about teaching with new media.  The next time someone asks me if I let my students use Wikipedia, I think I’ve got a new answer.  I don’t want students to read Wikipedia or cite it.  If they do, fine.  But it’s a boring way to use one of the most interesting databases in the world (and, frankly, the debate about whether to cite it or not is boring as well). But instead of teaching students how to read Wikipedia, we should be teaching them how to write with it.  And I’m not talking about the articles.  I’m talking about data structures.  We should be teaching students how to manipulate all of the data that Wikipedia presents in a way that remakes it, reshapes it, and provides them and others with a new way of looking at the database.  That data manipulation is writing, and I hope the folks in the humanities start to see that soon.

Photo Credit: Phillie Casablanca

I began rethinking my book project this week along two different lines.

The first line has to do with investigating the history and development of MediaWiki. I spent part of this week reading about the history of MediaWiki, the wiki platform of Wikipedia.  Platform is an interesting way to characterize MediaWiki because in actuality Wikipedia and MediaWiki are mutually constitutive (each is the “platform” of the other).  MediaWiki was developed specifically for Wikipedia, but it has now become a platform in and of itself.  MediaWiki will always be identified with Wikipedia (the default skin is Wikipedia’s skin) but the platform itself is now supporting any number of wiki projects.  It’s interesting to think about how MediaWiki has been defined due to its relationship with Wikipedia (and vice versa).  How could this platform have been different had it not been developed for an encyclopedia project?  How could Wikipedia have been different had a different collection of developers worked on MediaWiki?

I began reading about the people and code behind MediaWiki in an attempt to fill in what I saw as a gap in my dissertation, Hospitable Texts.  That project examined the hospitable code of Wikipedia, and it did deal a bit with how the computer code (1’s and 0’s) of Wikipedia influenced its ethical code of hospitality.  But I am now seeing that a fuller exploration of MediaWiki and of the history of Wikipedia’s platform is necessary if I want a full exploration of Wikipedia’s ethical code.  The people (Lee Daniel Crocker, Magnus Manske, and others) will be an interesting part of this story.  Most people donated time and money to the development of MediaWiki in order to get Wikipedia to the “next level.”  Without these people donating time to the development of the platform of MediaWiki (which went through a number of iterations), there would be no Wikipedia (at least not in it current form).

Another new line of thought: The present state of Wikipedia.

My project focused on the controversies of Wikipedia (the Essjay controversy, the Seigenthaler contorversy, various BLP controversies), and I’ve realized that all of these flare ups happened during a really interesting time in the trajectory of Wikipedia.  I was writing about some of these events while they were happening.  In fact, I started blogging because I was getting daily emails from friends and colleagues who knew I was writing about Wikipedia.  I couldn’t keep up with all of the stories, and a blog gave me a way to jot down some thoughts as the Wikipedia controversy of the day came down the pipeline.  Wikipedia was growing at an astronomical rate, and that meant any number of celebrations/critiques of the text and its community in the press.

But recent discussions of Wikipedia are suggesting that its growth is slowing.  A recent piece in The Guardian paints this picture:

During Wikipedia’s first burst of activity between 2004 and 2007, the number of active users on the site rocketed from just a few thousand to more than 300,000…However, statistics released by the site’s analytics team suggest Wikipedia’s explosive growth is all but finished. The quickening pace that helped the site reach the 2m article milestone just 17 months after breaking the 1m barrier suddenly evaporated: adding the next million has taken nearly two years. While the encyclopedia is still growing overall, the number of articles being added has reduced from an average of 2,200 a day in July 2007 to around 1,300 today.

This is to be expected.  Wikipedia is no longer a “new thing,” and one would expect that the system would begin to seek out a kind of equilibrium.  But what articles like this suggested to me was that this period from 2004-2007 was a) the exact period I was writing about  and b) an extremely important period in the development of Wikipedia, MediaWiki, and the Web in general.  During this tumultuous period, a number of rules were being negotiated and renegotiated.  An ethical and rhetorical code was emerging and developing.  Things were changing on the fly.  This means that reflecting on this period becomes extremely important.  Now, with some historical distance, it becomes more important (and easier) to figure out exactly how everything shook out during that three year “boom.”

These two new ways of thinking about my project – in terms of a more detailed consideration of “code” and in terms of the historical moment that my project will deal with – have really helped me to see the project’s bigger picture.  As I was in the middle of writing about all of these various controversies, it was difficult to see how I might justify writing about Wikipedia.  It was something that was happening, and it seemed to be drawing a lot of fire.  This seemed like a good enough reason to focus on this virtual-textual community.  But it never felt like a full or rich justification for the project.  Now, in 2009, it’s easier to see that this time period was when the code of Wikipedia (the computer code and the ethical code) was being developed, written, rewritten, and negotiated.  It’s going to be interesting to revisit and revise this project with these ideas (the justifications) in mind.

Photo Credit: Steve Rhodes

I am still reading Infinite Jest, and I am still enjoying it.  At certain moments in the text, “enjoyment” may not be exactly the right word.  A number of bloggers and commenters over at Infinite Summer have commented on the parallels between the novel and Alcoholics Anonymous.  Wallace spends a great deal of time (a great deal of time) describing AA meetings and members, and one of the central themes of the Boston AA groups that he describes is: “For God’s sake, keep coming back.”  This phrase (along with “trust Wallace”) is offered to the reader of IJ who gets frustrated or hits a lull or thinks about quitting.

I haven’t really considered quitting, but I have certainly met some lulls while reading the book.  Four straight pages of Don Gately’s thoughts about “the program” (AA) with no paragraph breaks? It can be rough.  But those slower patches are followed by storylines that I love and that I want more of.  I can’t wait to find out more about Orin’s run-ins with the wheelchair people (Canadian Separatists) or about Hal’s eventual inability to interact with the outside world (I have an idea about how this happens…but I’m waiting for confirmation).

I’ve also been thinking some more about one of my previous posts regarding IJ as a new media object.  I recently finished Collin Brooke’s Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media, a book that gave me yet another way of thinking of Wallace’s novel as a new media object.  Brooke’s book is an attempt to rethink both rhetoric (specifically, the canons of rhetoric) and new media.  The book deserves its own post, and I hope to get to that soon.  But with regard to IJ, Brooke’s text offers an interesting way of thinking about how English studies can/should shift it’s unit of study from “object” to “interface.”

Brooke argues that literary criticism “depends on the shared experience of a text, something that the standardization of print publication allows us to take for granted” (11).  However, new media changes things as “the absence of shared experience can become part of the infranstructure of the text” (11).  This is particularly easy to see if we consider hypertext fiction.  Readers of Patchwork Girl each experience a different text.  As Terry Harpold argues, those different experiences are due to different paths taken through the narrative and also (just as importantly) different versions and/or interfaces.  Every reading has always been a singular experience.  Even those people reading the same edition of a book experience that text differently.  This is not a brand new problem, but electronic text make this problem much more apparent.

IJ is a perfect example for this discussion because it is a print text that, I think, should be seen as a new media object.  Discussing Infinite Jest with another reader (let alone attempting a critique of the book) in terms of narrative is not impossible, but it is difficult. There is such a large amount of narrative information provided, that readers are bound to experience the narrative differently.  However, the interface of the text is something that can be discussed.  This is the shared experience of IJ.  Criticism of the novel’s interface would not only discuss Wallace’s famous footnotes, but it would also discuss the book’s dealings with time, its different genres of writing (letters, manuscripts, filmographies), or even something as simple as the need to have multiple bookmarks.  If the shared experience isn’t necessarily the narrative, this can open up a lot of interesting questions for criticism.  To my mind, this is an exciting thought.

Anyway, I hope to finish IJ in the next week or two.  I have some concerns about letting my Infinite Summer bleed too much into my very Finite Fall.

Photo Credit: Maia C

I have been slowly easing my way into Detroit.  I work in this beautiful building (The Maccabees, pictured above), and J and I have enjoyed exploring the city.  In addition to this new home city, I’m working on a new home in cyberspace.  You are seeing my new digs here at  www.clinamen.us.  Clinamen.net and Clinamen.org (not to mention .com) were taken.  So, .us it is.  And that’s kind of fitting anyway, given that the clinamen is all about, in Nancy’s words, “an inclination or inclining from one toward another.”  There is no “us” without the swerve of the clinamen.  But we also have to remember that this “us” (this .us) is never final or closed off either.  Clinamen is the relation or the possibility of a relation.  It would perhaps be best to think of clinamen as the “.” that comes before “us”….perhaps.  I will soon update my old post “explaining” (if that is possible) the title of this website.

I’ve got some blog posts brewing right now, but I wanted to get something on the new site as a kind of introduction.  I’m hoping to slowly migrate my online activities from my University of Texas site over this way.

Photo Credit: Steppinlotus

[This post was initially written on January 10, 2008 when this blog was housed on Computer Writing and Research Lab servers.  While I have not migrated all content from that previous site to this one, I did want to provide a version of this post as it explains the name of this site.]

As you may have noticed, I’ve renamed my blog. [Edit: The blog's previous name was "Confessions of a Graduate Student."] I wanted a name that said a bit more about my interests and that was…well…a little bit more interesting. Below, I offer what others have said about the term “clinamen” (pronounced almost like “cinnamon.”) As you will see, it has to do with the impossibility that an atom (or any entity) is completely isolated. For me, this is what rhetoric is about. Everything and everyone is connected or “inclined” to one another. There is no “being by oneself.” Such a thing is impossible. It’s rhetoric’s job to negotiate the ways we “swerve” into one another.

And so, it all begins with Lucretius in the first century BC. Lucretius essentially invented the concept. Here’s a quote from his Of The Nature of Things:

“The atoms, as their own weight bears them down plumb through the void, at scarce determined times, in scarce determined places, from their course decline a little- call it, so to speak, mere changed trend. For were it not their wont thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one, like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void; and then collisions ne’er could be nor blows among the primal elements; and thus nature would never have created aught.”

However, the real reason for using this name for the blog is this quote from Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community:

“Still,one cannot make a world with simple atoms. There has to be a clinamen. There has to be an inclination or an inclining from one toward the other, of one by the other, or from one to the other. Community is at least the clinamen of the ‘individual.’ Yet, there is no theory, ethics, politics, or metaphysics of the individual that is capable of envisaging this clinamen, this declination or decline of the individual within community. Neither ‘Personalism’ nor Sartre ever managed to do anything more than coat the most classical individual-subject with a moral or sociological paste: they never inclined it, outside itself, over that edge that opens up its being-in-common” (3-4).

This is the definition of clinamen according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

Clinamen

An inclination, bias.

1704 SWIFT T. Tub ix. 106 The round and the square would, by certain clinamina, unite. 1823 DE QUINCEY Let. Young Man, Wks. XIII. 85 An insensible clinamen (to borrow a Lucretian word) prepares the way for it. 1827 HARE Guesses (1859) 226 No old word; which, with a slight clinamen given to its meaning, will answer the purpose.

According to Gilles Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition:

“Ancient atomism not only multiplied Parmenidean being, it also conceived of Ideas as multiplicities of atoms, atoms being the objective elements of thought. Thereafter it is indeed essential that atoms be related to other atoms at the heart of structures which are actualised in sensible composites. In this regard, the clinamen is by no means a change of direction in the movement of an atom, much less an indetermination testifying to the existence of a physical freedom. It is the original determination of the direction of movement, the syntheses of movement and its direction which relates one atom to another…If it is true that atoms, the elements of thought, move ‘as rapidly as thought itself’, as Epicurus says in his letter to Herodotus, then the clinamen is the reciprocal determination which is produced ‘in a time smaller than the minimum continuous time thinkable’. It is not surprising that Epicurus makes user here of the vocabulary of exhaustion: there is something analogous in the clinamen to a relation between the differentials of atoms in movement. There is a declination here which also forms the language of thought; there is something here in thought which testifies to a limit of thought, but on the basis of which it thinks: faster than thought, ‘in time smaller…’. Nevertheless, the Epicurean atom still retains too much independence, a shape and an actuality. Reciprocal determination here still has too much of the aspect of a spatio-temporal relation. The question whether modern atomism, by contrast, fulfills all the conditions of a structure mst be posed in relation to the differential equations which determine the laws of nature, in relation to the types of ‘multiple and non-localisable connections’ established between particles, and in relation to the character of the ‘potentiality’ expressly attributed to these particles” (184).