894 Reading Notes: Latour

Latour’s key idea and a few key terms

To use the idea of the “social” to explain social phenomenon is like pretending there is a material in which we are all floating, as if the adjective is a descriptor akin to silk or plastic.  Instead, Latour argues, to generate reliable explanations of how the social world works, one has to build a network of connections, spinning filaments that connect humans and objects within landscapes of activity, local point to local point, until a meaningful assemblage emerges.  The essence of ANT is captured on page 108: “I can now state the aim of this sociology of associations more precisely: there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations” (emphasis in original).

•  Actant—Basically “different ways to make actors do things” (p. 55, emphasis in original) without clearly defining the specific agents.
• Collective—A term which Latour proposes to “designate the project of assembling new entities not yet gathered together and which, for this reason, clearly appear as being not made of social stuff,” or, in other words, the ANT alternative to “society” (p. 75).
• Intermediary—This is “what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs” (p. 39).
• Mediator—In contrast to intermediary, these “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry… their input is never a good predictor of their output” (p. 39).
• Oligoptica—Something like a router, in that it is a hub or node from which multiple connections emerge.  It is describe as “star-shaped” (p. 182).  A couple of examples are a newspaper editor’s cubicle or a military command center.
• Translation—Basically, the channel of mediation, “a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting” (p. 108).

Drawing connections between things in the world (picture taken in Taipei, Taiwan)

Latour and literature

In my reading of Latour I was fascinated by the several times that he draws attention to literature in his text.  For example, in his discussion of actant, Latour uses literature as an example to explain the variety of actants that might occur, arguing, in fact, that literature is freer about what can be considered an actant than sociology normally is.  He gives as an example a fable in which a magic wand or even “a thought in the fairy’s mind” are as capable of acting as a knight with a sword (p. 54).  Later, in the discussion of the idea that objects can also have agency he brings up the “resource of fiction” for building connections between objects and humans (p. 82).

I was reminded of this point this week when I was reading an essay in The Best American Essays 2009, in which PatriciaHampl describes visiting an art museum to stimulate her writing.  She goes home and writes long descriptive passages, trying to better capture her memories.  But then something unexpected happens.  “To my growing astonishment, these long descriptive passages, sometimes running two, three pages or longer, had a way of sheering off into narrative after all.  The teacup I was describing had been given to me by my mother. And once I thought of the fact that she had bought these cups, made in Czechslovokia, as a bride just before the Second World War, I was writing about that war, about my mother and her later disappointments, which somehow were, and were not, part of this fragile cup” (p. 50).  The connection that Hampl makes between description and narrative reminded me of the ways that Latour describes the connections between objects and humans.  In fact, as Hampl goes on the parallels grow even more striking:  

“Description, written from the personal voice of my own perception, proved even to be the link with the world’s story, with history itself.  Here was my mother’s teacup, made in Czechoslovakia before the war, and here, therefore, was not only my mother’s heartbreak, but Europe’s. The detail was surely divine, offering up miracle after miracle of connections out of the faithful consideration of the fragments before me.” (p. 50)

Hampl’s use of this object, the teacup, not only creates a network of connections that resonate in her own individual life but ultimately opens to her the ways that she is connected to larger, broader networks, to larger populations and world events.

Mug memories: 

night street in Taipei and a favorite shop...

shopping at 10 pm coming back home... 

pencil box in Dad's shop (until I rescued it)... 

Taiwanese tea, Vietnamese and Malaysian coffee drunk in the USA... 

Reading Latour

Latour has been the most pleasurable author to read yet.  I found Spinuzzi accessible, but Latour has an accessible style as well, and rare for academic books, little glints of humor here and there. I especially enjoyed “On the Difficulty of Being an ANT: An Interlude in the Form of a Dialog,” the simulated interview with a graduate student, in which Latour proves that if you try to “apply” actor-network theory to frame an analysis, you are missing the point. 

Because we recently read about hypertext theory, I realized that reading an academic book—particularly Latour—isn’t that different from hypertext.  In other words, an academic reader will move between the main text and the footnotes or endnotes, and quite possibly the references or even the index. Here, by using footnotes, Latour makes it easier to keep track of the main text.  Of course, this is by no means unique, but for Latour, it is a way that he demonstrates connections to an unusually wide range of sources and it is also a place for odd bits of information.  For example, I liked footnote 179’s comparison of French and American scholarship: “In France, you can be at once naively rationalist and a great admirer of deconstruction. Once transported across the Atlantic, this innocent passion became a dangerous binary weapon” (p. 126).  I might also mention footnote 171, similar for tongue-in-cheek style and in message: “After years of teaching in England and America, I have been forced to recognize that semiotics does not survive sea travels” (p. 122).[1] 

Another thing that was interesting about reading Latour was considering whether there is a French style of writing.  (I also bring into play here my vague memory of Hélène Cixous’ essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” and an even vaguer memory of Derrida’s writing.)  At any rate, I noticed when I read Foucault that reading longer sections results in greater comprehension.  Latour is much more accessible, but I feel that he also argues cumulatively, driving an argument forward in small successive sweeps, and then circling back to remind the reader of an earlier point.  I feel like Anglo-American scholarship is more systematic, pushing the argument forward in evenly-paced steps. 

One thing that really works for me in Latour is his metaphor of travel.  He uses this to frame his warnings of what is to come and the distance the reader will have to move to get there. 

Walking slowly (ODU, July 2015)

Likewise, he uses metaphors of transportation to describe theories, comparing faster forms of transportation with ordinary social theories that quickly move to the explanation of the social. In contrast, he uses the idea of walking to describe the application of ANT as a theory, like an ant following a path of crumbs, moving slowly and painstakingly along the ground.  

References

Hampl, P. (1981). The dark art of description.  In M. Oliver & R. Atwan (Eds.), The best American essays 2009 (pp. 43-52). Boston: Mariner Books.

Latour, B. (2008). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

894 Case Study Rubric

I had a great deal of trouble with this assignment.  I had been under the impression that the rubric that I created needed to be tailored specifically to the theory.  So I created a checklist-style rubric that addressed genre theory since I had selected Adrienne's case study to read, and she used genre theory.  When I got ready to read and assess Adrienne's case study, however, I saw that she had already done the rubric, and one glance convinced me that I had conceptualized my rubric wrong.  In fact, I only glanced at her rubric for two reasons. I didn't want to steal her ideas, and I also saw that she was evaluating my case study!  At any rate, I went back and rewrote my rubric entirely before reading and analyzing her case study. 

At any rate, here is the basic version:

Explication of theory	Thorough coverage will include
Theoretical framework	Includes reference to key theorists and may also make reference to figures who influenced these theorists or the connections that this theory makes to earlier approaches.
Core concepts and model	Explains key concepts and discusses what this model focuses.
Comparison with other approaches	Alludes to other theories used for similar purposes. May mention specific studies that apply the theory, particularly pioneering studies that defined the theory.
Application of Theory	Thorough coverage will include
Description of OoS	Gave detailed description of the object of study as a foundation for the analysis.
Demonstration of the model	Applied key concepts to describe object of study. In addition, noted insights that could be gained about the object of study from application of this model.
Mapping the object of study	Applied network model through and with key terms from the theory to capture the workings of the object of study with a network.
Adequacy of framework	Evaluated how which parts of the theory worked and which parts did not.  Drew conclusions about value of theory for other applications.  Noted the places not covered by this theory.
Assessment of theory	Evaluated the theory in terms of its general usefulness to the field and/or to understanding this and similar objects of study.

Here is the version that I filled in:

Explication of theory	Thorough coverage will include	Assessment in terms of this trait
Theoretical framework	Includes reference to key theorists and may also make reference to figures who influenced these theorists or the connections that this theory makes to earlier approaches.	Adrienne identifies the genre theorist she is using within the framework of genre studies.  She does imply that other models of genre theory work.
Core concepts and model	Explains key concepts and discusses what this model focuses.	She gives Miller’s definition of genre and describes the core concept that emerges from this, the idea of emphasizing the action behind the employment of a genre.
Comparison with other approaches	Alludes to other theories used for similar purposes. May mention specific studies that apply the theory, particularly pioneering studies that defined the theory.	Admits that other theories also offer insights for this object of study.
Application of Theory	Thorough coverage will include	Assessment in terms of this trait
Description of OoS	Gave detailed description of the object of study as a foundation for the analysis.	In her text, Adrienne identifies her object of study, but her chart is particularly helpful in situating the Facebook profile picture within an individual’s social networks.
Demonstration of the model	Applied key concepts to describe object of study. In addition, noted insights that could be gained about the object of study from application of this model.	She demonstrates how choosing a Facebook profile picture is a social action. Using genre theory, Adrienne identifies several genres that have different forms and offer subtle variations of the primary social action, self-presentation.
Mapping the object of study	Applied network model through and with key terms from the theory to capture the workings of the object of study with a network.	The network in this case is an abstraction of the social network represented within Facebook.  Miller's genre theory doesn’t explicitly use a network framework or metaphor, but the seeing genres within a network, as Adrienne does here, is compatible with the theory.
Adequacy of framework	Evaluated how which parts of the theory worked and which parts did not.  Drew conclusions about value of theory for other applications.  Noted the places not covered by this theory.	Application of the framework does generate insights.  Miller’s theory helps highlight the social action behind the choice of profile picture.  It does not, however, as Adrienne says, “apply judgment to… the picture itself.”
Assessment of theory	Evaluated the theory in terms of its general usefulness to the field and/or to understanding this and similar objects of study.	Because the theory allows the elaboration of genres of profile picture and suggests the social actions that generates each, Adrienne has demonstrated that the theory can be productive.  In other words, she implies that the theory could be valuable in similar cases.

I did not provide scores but conceptualized it in terms of a holistic-type of assessment.  I typically design my teaching rubrics more or less like this, except I would assign a certain score to each row, say four points.  

At any rate, I felt that Adrienne's case study stacked up well against what I understood of the assignment and rather well in terms of the rubric as well. However,  the checklist for the assignment suggested that we should be more broadly situating the theory and the analysis within the field and, in a sense, over time.  By the latter, I mean in terms of situating the theory historically (looking back) and assessing the usability of the theory within the field and for other objects of study (that is, looking forward.)  Within this broader understanding, Adrienne could add a little more in terms of how genre theory may compare with competing theories and in terms of the overall usefulness of the theory (what I've called the assessment of the theory).  In every other category, however, she amply fulfills what I have called a "thorough coverage."

894 Case study responses

I enjoyed reading Megan’s and Star’s applications of genre theory to OoS’s that were quite novel to me. They were using genre theory, a theory that I am pretty familiar with, but applying it to, in Megan’s case, World of Warcraft genre sets and in Star’s, to an art museum.  I have only used genre theory to look at documents, so I enjoyed seeing the ways that they described genres that were more emphatically multimodal and worked within very different activity systems.  I’m a big fan of genre theory, so I always enjoy reading applications of the theory, but it was fascinating to see how it works in these less familiar contexts.  In both cases, it was interesting to see how users employed the genres in very different ways than the textual forms that I usually work with.  I usually look at genres that do some type of knowledge work, and of course these do, but these are more experiential, too.  Incidentally, both of Megan and Star were much stronger at including descriptive details of their OoS than I was.  I spent more time laying out the theory that I was using and defining terms, so I gave short shrift to the details of my OoS.  Since I was over the word count, I don’t know exactly how to do well on both, but I would like to better balance the two in the future.  

864 Reading Notes: Johnson-Eilola & Joyce

Summary of Johnson-Eilola  

Nostalgic Angels, Johnson-Eilola’s (1997) book about hypertext, seems to written primarily in response to early enthusiasts of hypertext within the humanities who believed that the technology automatically offered a liberating alternative to the dominating hegemony of print discourse.  Johnson-Eilola shares the dissatisfaction with print culture but argues that hypertext, while offering potential for pedagogy that is both collaborative and polyvocal nevertheless needs to be treated critically.  For one thing, he argues, hypertext can simply solidify existing power structures.   As Johnson-Eilola says, “hypertext can be (and often is) articulated as a powerfully conservative technology, a way to introduce wider groups of people more quickly and effectively into traditional structures of power” (p. 22). 

An important theme for Johnson-Eilola is the ways that hypertext has changed the relationship between readers and writers.  While he disagrees that the writer has been entirely replaced by the agency of a reader with choices, he points out that “compared to hypertext, print does not seem as capable of collapsing the reader and writer in the visible, surface-level manner enacted by hypertext writers and readers” (p. 143).  Although literary theorists such as Barthes and others argued that reader collaborates with the writer to make meaning in a way that is “primarily mental and unseen, hypertext appears to make the intertextual, text visible and active for the writer and reader… with the reader an explicit rather than merely psychic collaborator with writer” (p. 144).  This does seem to be a point worth making.

To summarize, I want to give one quote that I think captures the starting point of Johnson-Eilola’s argument in the book.  “Despite claims of radical novelty for the technology [i.e.hypertext] in a wide range of disciplines, the various articulations illustrate the ways we (necessarily) map the technology back against our conventional ways of acting and knowing” (p. 175).  That being said, he does believe that hypertext offers value as a pedagogical tool.  “At the same time, we must also remember that we are changed, that new potentials do exist, and that our use of hypertext in writing classes and elsewhere can be used to help students think about their writing and reading as social and political activities” (p. 176).  Bringing new writing practices into composition classes and engaging them critically, as Johnson-Eilola argues, can offer students long-term benefits since “the ways in which a writer is taught to operate within a virtual writing and research environment hold a great deal of influence over the ways in which that writer lives and thinks” (p. 233).

Something I am not sure I agree with

It appeared to be case that for Johnson-Eilola and some of the sources that he cites, to “think in a pluralistic, nonlinear fashion” (144) is a virtue.  Presumably the idea is that linear thinking is laid out by an author and therefore is a masculinist, dominating force on the reader.  But in practical terms what keeps this from becoming simply mental sloppiness, a sort of anything-goes way of thinking that doesn’t serve students well in the real world?!  Interestingly, Johnson-Eilola goes on to cite Landow & Delany (1990) as arguing that critical thinking is well-served by developing non-linear habits of thought that teach students to make connections between disparate things, and that “hypertext also helps a novice reader to learn the habit of non-sequential reading characteristic of more advanced study. Scholarly and scientific writing require readers to leave the main text and venture out to consider footnotes, evidence of statistics and other authorities, and the like; they must then integrate their evidence into a complex intellectual structure” (quoted on p. 144).  I am rather skeptical of this pious hope.  In my experience as a graduate student and as a teacher of novice readers the more important skill is to follow and grasp an author’s complete, linear argument before launching out in other directions.  Following other threads too soon tends to lead to mental confusion.  Advanced study requires more post-sequential reading than non-sequential reading, I would argue.  The goal is to get the argument and then make the connections—or at the very least, don’t lose the thread of the main argument along the way.  I do—at times—make forays away from the main text, but there is always a risk in doing so, and it requires me to stick a mental placeholder in the main argument.  The ability to keep the main argument in working memory, however, comes from a lifetime of reading print.  (Some indication that extensively hyperlinked texts are, indeed, working against critical thinking skills comes from research on how teenagers read websites.) 

I do not want to be seen as insisting on the maintenance of print culture against all odds.  What I do want to do is maintain some things that I see as good in print culture; The techno-topians have plenty to say, and I think to raise a contrary voice can be healthy.

Reading Johnson-Eilola and Joyce

                Both of these authors made me quite impatient.  I think a significant stumbling block was the style.  Postmodern literary theory is not the scholarship that I was acculturated into in my master’s degree.  I find it facile but rather hard to follow.  Sometimes I suspect that the main goal is to sound clever and the attempt comes across as pretentious to me.  To be fair, I recognize that every discipline and subdiscipline has its own way of talking, so I try—not always successfully—not to be too hostile.  Here is an example from my notes.  I wrote, “Hypertext turns us in to angels without maps?  We keep returning to our conventional practices because ‘we allow our nostalgia to channel new possibilities into old pathways’?  Which of course represents ‘existing channels of power’… (13). For pity’s sake, we’re only talking about hypertext, not religion.”

Here is an even more frustrating example from Joyce (2000).  He calls searches gritty “in the sense that the particularity of an evolving planet and its creatures are gritty” (p. 74).  This was my response in my notes:

What?? Dirty like gravel? Diverse and minutely-differentiated? Um. Explain again what this has to do with searches.  Going on: “Yet if they herald a loss it is, I think, the cleansing and morphogenetic loss that engenders a newness” (74).  Why are they a loss? Has this been explained earlier? The searches are approximate rather than specific? Well, I don’t know about Joyce, but I did library searches before the days of databases and the Internet, and those searches also had a groping clumsiness about them, too.  In what ways are newer methods of search “cleansing”?  Sorry.  This guy is not communicating.  I don’t admire cleverness if it doesn’t make any sense.

To be absolutely fair, I did find some memorable and comprehensible quotes from Joyce, but I am not sure I understood exactly what he was getting at much of the time.

                With readings that were a little more challenging for me, an interesting and occasionally helpful aspect was the digital annotations that were attached from a previous reader.  For example, Johnson-Eilola’s described hypertext as lacking constraining pathways for readers. “Postmodern articulations of this hypertext space, theorists commonly argue, encourage us to think of reading beyond the train tracks. There are no longer, it seems, fixed train tracks at all—only the process of readers continually retracking the landscape, becoming writers. Writing and reading become less clearly distinct, polarized activities” (p. 137). The quote was annotated with more or less what I had been thinking.  I also found the summary annotation at the ends of the chapters somewhat helpful. 

Because of my difficulty with understanding him, I will not summarize Joyce’s articles, but I can give a few takeaways.  The first was useful in seeing how things looked in 1996 when theorists were just beginning to tackle what hypertext meant for readers, writers and society. It also gives a bit of history of the early steps towards hypertext and hypermedia.  One thing that did catch my attention was that the article explicitly employed the network metaphor:

“Hypertext structures are often represented as nodes and links: the nodes "contain" text, graphical information, sounds, and so on, connected by the links, which, however, may themselves also contain information Or at least be labeled. Depending on the interface metaphor—the way the program visually depicts its information—the distinction between nodes and links is not always represented in hypertext programs, and the contents of the nodes themselves can often function as links” (Joyce, 1996, p. 19).

The excerpts from Joyce’s (2000) book were arguably poetic but very challenging to read. The article on the library inspired a picture with one of the early weird metaphors. 

I had the idea of putting more of Joyce’s metaphors into pictures, but there were too many and too weird.  Basically, Joyce covers four points.  The first is “collectible object or the nature of the library”, or in other words, what is it and what can it be that the library collects?  The second is “gritty searches or bibliographic instruction,” which is basically how searches are changing.  The third point was completely impenetrable to me, but he titled it “adolescent stacks or the library as publisher.”  Not quite sure what he was getting at, but it seemed to have to do with performance and serendipity. Here is the conclusion to the section in a very unhelpful quote:  “Presence of mind in an electronic age requires persistence. I would like to suggest that the role we might dare to take up as we become publishers of our own pageants is the persistent one of the sacred reader or the adult self. Whether Prospero or Eve, the sacred reader persists in what she reads of the play of self and space, encompassing childhood and adolescence in transcendent performance” (p. 77).  The only stable signifier here is “electronic age”, and possibly “reader.”  I welcome clarification on this section!  At any rate, the final point in this article was “embodied spaces or library as library.”  I can best capture this one with a quote that I think is quite insightful. “Yet another way I wore upon the patience of my library colleagues was with a repeated mantra: the physical collection must lead us into the electronic collection and the electronic collection must lead us into the physical” (p. 78).

The other chapter from Joyce’s book had great imagery and inspired another picture,

but the main thing that I can say about it is that it interrogates electronic culture from multiple perspectives.  Actually, I think it has to do with how our identities are written through and how we interface with and within electronic culture.

Favorite quotes from this week

Valuable insight for pedagogy: “The activity of a community of writers can work to outweigh the weight of conventional, conservative notions of meaning. At the same time, the lived process of this activity helps to prevent the postmodernist from degenerating into nihilism” (Johnson-Eilola, 1997, p. 173)

I am hoping that this is true: “What I often say (l said it in the last chapter) in response to others who claim that the so-called MTV generation has no attention span is that in an age like ours that privileges polyvocality, multiplicity, and constellated knowledge a sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attendings” (Joyce, 2000, p. 74)

I think this is increasingly, if differently, true: “We inhabit new forms in the presence and community of others. In a world of shifting centers, meanings are not so much published as placed, continually embodied in human community” (Joyce, 2000, p. 75)

Interesting insight on the appeal of the new and the next: “In our technologies, our cultures, our entertainments and, increasingly, the way we constitute our communities and families we live in an anticipatory state of constant nextness. There is, of course, a branch of philosophy that concerns those who see themselves as inhabiting the time before the future. That branch, eschatology, is perhaps the archetype of othermindedness and its itch of desire for constant, immediate, and successive links to something beyond.” (Joyce, 2000, p. 81-82)

Profound: “The memory of the world, materialized in the body, for which both the book and the screen stand as repeated instances of embodiment, is itself the world” (Joyce, 2000, p. 101).

Latour?

Being read with some pleasure.  I will put all my thoughts in one blog next week.

References

Johnson-Eilola, J. (1997). Nostalgic angels: Rearticulating hypertext writing. Norwood, N.J: Ablex Pub. Corp.

Joyce, M. (1996). Of two minds: Hypertext pedagogy and poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Joyce, M. (2000). Othermindedness: The emergence of network culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

894 Response: My Writing Across Levels of Scope

I chose to theorize my writing at the macroscopic level in terms of my role as a writer and implying my purpose for writing, for example, as an instructor in a university writing for students as audience, as an employee and faculty member at my institution writing to communicate for various purposes with various audiences, and as a PhD student writing within my PhD courses.  At the mesoscopic level, I have listed various genres that I write to match my roles as listed in the mesoscopic level.  In the microscopic level, I mention how I specifically engage technologies in my writing practices.  Incidentally, I mention that I almost always use Microsoft Word to draft and then cut and paste into digital environments.  Ironically, I just realized that I am drafting this text directly into my blog space.  So microscopic practices are always pushed by the considerations of the moment--in this case my decision to add prose to a diagram that I am going to paste right here:

894 Mind Map

I am embedding my mind map here. This is my first time tweaking code, so I'm pretty excited that you can actually see SOMETHING here.  Let me know if it isn't working.

April 17 update

For social network analysis, I made connections to “network society,” because computing has made possible the data crunching that SNA depends on, to “relations” because SNA is looking at relations, particularly human-human interactions. I added another node as well, “data analysis,” which I have also connected to “network society.” It is true that it is primarily methodology but is so essential to SNA that it is almost like another concept.

April 3 update

I added a node for Castells and a small web of nodes capturing some of the main features I see in Castells. This is more interpretive than for some other scholars because Castells doesn’t establish a theoretical framework with a set terminology.  However, I decided to look at technological innovation and diffusion as a node and time and space, combined for convenience, as a node, which when bundled with human actors and non-human actants from previous theories, generate a synergy leading to Castells’ network society, another node.  I recognize that I am being redundant in listing “network society” in two places, except in the main node I am using at as a label for a theory and in the second as a concept, or perhaps better, an assemblage.  This node, in turn, connects to nodes for work and identity.  Connected to the work node are also nodes for the micro and macro changes in work, namely, how the network society has changed first, the nature of work, capturing the types of positions emerging and the changing workplace, i.e. the flexibility, stability and managerial climate of the workplace, and second, the structure of the labor force in terms of the economic structure of a country.  To be fai r, I should probably indicate international and global interdependence here, too, but I already have a fairly complex diagram.  I also connected concepts from Castells back to CHAT, thinking in terms of workplace and organizational studies that would probably illuminate Castells, to ecology due to the big picture nature of Castells’ system, and to laminated chronotopes because of the space and time relations that Castells include.  I also included institutions, a node previously associated with CHAT, because sociologists such as Castells inevitably implicate institutions to one degree or another.

March 27 update

I added a node for neurobiology connected to a node for "neural network," to which I attached nodes for "cognition," "emotion," "memory," "motor skills," and "sensory perception." These I connected to "mind."  The idea behind this addition was to see the entire neural capabilities of human beings, i.e. the brain and nervous system as part of "mind," through which human beings interact with the world in any of the other ways implied by other theories.  Bateson's theory, therefore, is in a sense compatible.

March 14 update

Even though I was inspired by Megan's mind map to make mine better, I haven't yet been able to come up with a better strategy.  I'll keep thinking about it. In the meantime, I added Bateson with connections to "ecologies," "actor," "non-human actant," and "mind."  I have the connections to the other nodes pass beneath "mind."  I really should have them link through it, but that was an afterthought.

March 4 update

I had the impression that I had added Latour with the last update, but I later realized that wasn't the case.  At any rate,  I added a node for Latour along with connections to ecology, actor, non-human actants and relations.  Actors and actants are obvious choices, but I think that Latour's approach, by focusing on tracing connections, makes relationships more explicit than some theories, though relationships are implicit in all network approaches.  I also added "plasma" as a new node and "black box".

February 26 update

I  added hypertext as a node and connected it to concept and rhetor/actor.  Concept was associated with Foucault, but I'm repurposing it here because hyperlinked terms are usually key concepts operating within a text, and this is somewhat similar to concepts that organize discourse in a Foucauldian sense.  I also connected hypertext to Vatz because of Vatz's claim that the rhetor generates the exigence for discourse.  In hypertext, the assumption is that the rhetor (the user/reader) makes meaning by the links that are made.  This is analogous, in that meaning is being generated by the operations of selection and connection.

February 21 update

I added CHAT as a node and connected from CHAT to actors (=people, in terms of CHAT), and actants (i.e. objects).  I also added "laminated chronotope" as a new node connected to CHAT, but also to genre, speech act, and event, since I see these as connected to the concept.  I also added "ecology(ies)" because this appears two places in the CHAT list.  The mind map doesn't allow me to handle this in the way that I'd like.  If I could do so, I would color-code connections to group nodes and connections into subsets, or I would draw boundaries around varies nodes.  Ecology, to my mind, would be better treated in this way than as a separate node.

Earlier updates

Because I didn't initially realize that I needed to put my mind map in the blog and trace my additions as I went along, it is a little hard for me to reconstruct exactly what I did when.  However, I know I did the following at different points:

• I added Foucault to the mind map and put the discursive formations as a block of nodes connected to Foucault. 
• I added Spinuzzi and genre theorists to the mind map and made appropriate connections to these as well as back to aspects of the rhetorical situation.

894 Reading Notes: CHAT

Summary of core article

The core article in this interactive Kairos article on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) describes how the five canons of classical rhetoric omit many things that have always been interesting about rhetoric but have become especially prominent with today’s greater awareness of context and ecology and with the proliferation of digital and multimodal approaches to communication.  The first step towards building a new model is to highlight the idea of delivery, particularly the ways that different media have diversified forms of delivery.  Next, the authors survey the ways that delivery has changed, and bringing in theorizing about digital and electronic media introduce the concept of mediation and remediation.  From here, they expand the traditional canons by adding in mediation, distribution and reception.  However, they argue that the expanded version still fails to account for “complex institutional networks” (p. 12). The CHAT model captures rhetorical activity but also adds a larger social framework. 

The authors define CHAT as “the emergent synthesis that has brought together Vygotskyan psychology, Voloshinovian and Bakhtinian semiotics, Latour’s actor-network theory, and situated, phenomenological work in sociology and anthropology” (17).  This comprehensive theory aims to provide a complete toolbox for mapping literate activity.

A challenging term: Laminated chronotope

The core article (i.e. Prior et al, 2007) identifies laminated chronotope— as “embodied activity-in-the-world, representational worlds, and chronotopes embedded in material and semiotic artifacts” (19).  Unfortunately, I found this description pretty opaque.  So I did a quick web search. The Wikipedia article on “Chronotopes” points to “particular genres, or relatively stable ways of speaking, which themselves represent particular worldviews or ideologies.”  This turned out to be a pretty good definition when compared with Prior & Shipka (2003), who point to how literate acts tie together embodied acts in the here in now with representations involving intertextual traces of the past. In other words, all chronotopes as embodied-representational “concrete time-place-events deeply furrowed with, and constructed through, representations and with representations always deeply rooted in chains of concrete historical events” (Prior & Shipka, 2003, n.p.).  Now I understand where the descriptor “laminated” is coming from.  However, as a temporary placeholder in my mind, I prefer the idea of a knot, where a bunch of things are tied together and assembled into a text in a given genre at one point in time.  It makes sense for a complex concept like laminated chronotope to have a compound descriptor, but it is a double-edged sword—you trade simplicity for uniqueness, I guess.

(Personal photo of "Untitled," by Ruth Asawa, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art)

The question of mediation

“You may have noticed that mediation is not on this list. What happened to it? In fact, we did not drop it. From a cultural-historical perspective and adopting James Wertsch’s (1991) terms, we take mediated activity and mediated agency as fundamental units of analysis. In those terms, everything in the three maps (literate activity, functional systems, and chronotopes) is about mediation” (22)

I have problems with this sweeping “everything is about mediation” move.  I find the concept of mediation to be quite productive.  While Prior is not saying that everything is mediating, by not theorizing more precisely what is mediating, the concept of mediation ceases to be particularly productive.  For me that is a shame.  When discussing the concept of mediation, on pp. 6-7, Prior makes a case for its importance.  Now I am not sure how it can be built into the model because Prior is right about the fact that mediation is not one thing, but the interaction of multiple things.  For example, genre is mediating (Spinuzzi, 2003, p. 115), and genre can be seen as activity or practices (“social action,” as Miller, 1984 would have it) that is laminated, produced and distributed, institutionally-situated, serving specific communities, and so on. A medium, such as television, for example, could be seen as mediating—though arguably its mediation works through its diverse genres.  As a comprehensive theory to replace the classical canons that are legitimately argued as insufficient, CHAT offers a compelling alternative.  I am, however, disappointed that the concept of mediation is not more specifically situated within the theory.  In a sense Prior is correct in that the whole system works together to generate symbolic action that serves a mediating role in every society.  At the same time, I would argue that the moment of mediation, the interface that most precisely functions as providing mediation is not distributed everywhere in the model.

Selected articles

Kairos and Community Building

Sheridan-Rabideau’s focus in this article is to explore the literate activities of a particular organization, Artists Now, in their efforts to put a billboard in their community. The political, economic and material obstacles for Artists Now illustrate ecological aspects to rhetoric that are not described in traditional models but can be explored product through a CHAT approach.

Remediating Science: A Case Study of Socialization

Lunsford’s article looks at how scholarly communication in the sciences is changing, particularly in the growth of databases as archival collections of raw scientific data.  As Lunsford says, “Because these repositories are typically web-based… they represent information in rich ways; they can be peer-reviewed; they can be available openly or by subscription; and, importantly, they can be accessed by the same audiences that are also accessing the electronic versions of scientific articles.”  However, the development of such databases suggest shift in the way that science is communicated and stored. Lunsford suggests that this remediation of print journals may “represent a clear shift in scientific memory practices” for scientists. Lunsford explores ways that such remediation in scientific communication may be changing the positioning of other elements in the complex CHAT network, such as audience, rhetor and other members of the network.

CHAT connections

This semester I am also taking an independent study that I’ve chosen to call Discourse Theory.  Originally I wanted to take Discourse Analysis, but that never worked out, and my independent study version of the course also fell through.  As I reflected on what I really wanted to learn about discourse, however, I decided that I really wanted to learn how “discourse” has been used as a theoretical concept in critical and social theory as well as linguistics.  Some of the authors that I wanted to read were Foucault and Latour and I also wanted to explore CHAT.  I put Foucault and Latour on my reading list, but noted that I was reading these authors in Theories of Network. I put CHAT on my list, but mistakenly placed it under Spinizzi, probably because I was a little confused about the differences between Activity Theory and CHAT.   For my independent study, I am reading Bakhtin, some sociologists like Giddens and Bourdieu, and linguistics discourse theorists.  But I am pleased with how I can use the two courses together to get a much fuller overview of many of the theorists that I’m interested in.  That’s why I was particularly interested in the reference list provided in this issue of Kairos.  Not only does it have some of the readings that I already have on my list, but it is giving me a few more.  In addition, it is reinforcing connections that I am already making.  In some ways, graduate school is like collecting baseball cards—I keep looking for important players to add to my collection.

Here is a list of some scholars from the reference list that have been on my scholarly reading wish list for a while and also showed up in the CHAT references.

• Bakhtin (already own one of his books)
• Bazerman (already own one of his books)
• Casanave, Christine Pearson 
• Eco, Umberto (already own Kant & The Platypus)
• Engestrom, Yrjo 
• Goffman, Erving 
• Graff, Harvey (already own book)
• Kress, Gunther 
• Latour  (of course, we plan to read very soon).
• Ong, Walter. (already own book)
• Prior, Paul. (1998). Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy

References

Lunsford, K.J. (2007). Remediating science: A case study of socialization. Kairos, 11(3). Retrieved from http://technorhetoric.net/11.3/binder.html?topoi/prior-et-al/index.html

Prior, P., & Shipka, J. (2003). Chronotopic lamination: Tracing the contours of literate activity.  In C. Bazerman & D.d Russell (Eds.),Writing selves, writing societies: Research from activity perspectives (pp.180-238). Fort Collins: The WAC Clearinghouse and Mind, Culture, and Activity. Retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/prior/

Prior, P., Solberg, J., Berry, P., Bellwoar, H., Chewning, B., Lunsford, K.J., . . . Walker, J.R. (2007). Re-situating and re-mediating the canons: A Cultural-Historical remapping of rhetorical activity. Kairos, 11(3). Retrieved from http://technorhetoric.net/11.3/binder.html?topoi/prior-et-al/index.html

Sheridan-Rabideau, M.P. (2007). Kairos and community building: Implications for literacy researchers. Kairos, 11(3). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/11.3/topoi/prior-et-al/about/abstract_mpsr.html

Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 

894 Case Study #1: Foucault

Looking for a way to bring together the discourses of disciplinarity and the concept of genre, I chose as my object of analysis interviews of notable academics that are distributed within the discipline.  Typically this would be an interview in an academic journal, but it could also be an online journal or forum or archived within a university department, as Florida State University has done with its “Visiting SpeakersSeries.”  I chose to begin examining this object of study through a Foucauldian analysis, mostly because Foucault’s concept of discourse seemed like a productive way to look at the discourses of disciplinarity.   As a matter of fact, I discovered that Foucault was not the best choice for an analysis that placed significant weight on the concept of genre.

A Foucauldian analysis would probably not define the interview genre explicitly, but would more likely situate the interview genre within the larger academic discourse, which would be the more salient object in a Foucauldian analysis.  Let’s look at one example, “‘That Light-BulbFeeling’: An Interview with Clay Spinuzzi.” This interview, in a typical move, has a blurb at the beginning introducing Spinuzzi as “an accomplished scholar and teacher in rhetoric and technical communication” (McNely, 2013, p. 1).  In other words, this interview, as is typical, is predicated on the fact that there is a scholarly discourse, that scholarship takes place within discrete fields, and that certain individuals advance the field or discipline, and as intellectual leaders, are worth listening to.  The interview genre reveals the existence of academic celebrity, and through what these prominent scholars say in the interview, the discourse and the discursive formations that structure it may emerge.  The genre in itself, however, is hard to theorize as very important in a Foucauldian analysis, something that becomes clearer as we examine what might be regarded as the nodes and links in the Foucauldian model.    
In the first section of The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault discusses four types of discursive formations.  The first type builds the discourse around “objects of which it [the discourse] can speak” (p. 46).  The second is the formation of “enunciative modalities” that have to do with the positioning of the speaker as legitimated by his or her position within institutions or settings that are valued by a society, permitting and shaping the types of discourse that emerge.  The third type of discursive formation involves concepts around which discourse may organize itself. Here Foucault gives some examples from economics and from botany, and it appears that the concept is something like ideas that might catalyze paradigm shifts in Thomas Kuhn’s model.  Foucault suggests that “one tries to determine according to what schematas (of series, simultaneous groupings, linear or reciprocal modification) the statements may be linked to one another in a type of discourse” (p. 60).  The final type of discursive formation is what Foucault calls “the formation of strategies” (p. 64).  This refers to something like the logical linkage of discourse elements, or, as Foucault puts it, “as systematically different ways of treating objects of discourse…, of arranging forms of enunciation…, of manipulating concepts” (p. 69-70).  Thus, in a Foucauldian analysis, the first three discursive formations—objects, subject roles and positions, and concepts—tend to serve as nodes, I would argue, while strategies—the fourth discursive formation—might be better seen as the linkages or connections between the nodes—or perhaps an algorithm for directing the flow of information.   In other words, the discursive functions provide the skeleton of discourse as network. 

What then are the discursive formations of the interview genre?  Or do multiple types of discursive formation apply?  The interview involves a conversation with two interlocutors, a venue for publication, an imagined audience consisting of disciplinary practitioners and potential disciplinary practitioners, and the generic expectations offered by the genre frame.  The concept of object does not seem immediately helpful since a diverse array of objects can be discussed.  Academic discourse encompasses many fields and disciplines, each of which has its own set of salient objects and concepts.  In fact, in describing the first discursive formation, Foucault is not referring to objects per se, but to the rules governing the emergence of a set of objects viewed and managed in a certain way by discourse.  While academic discourse of all types examines and discusses its objects of study in conventionalized ways, the interview genre does not seem the best place to seek these rules.  This brings us to a question of scope that we must address before moving forward. 

Foucault’s model, as already noted, is built around the concept of discourse.  Understanding exactly what he means is hard to nail down, partially because at times he uses the term in more or less the conventional way but at other times, as the broader, more theoretical concept that he is generally noted for.  A reasonably good definition of this is “a loose structure of interconnected assumptions that makes knowledge possible” (Bertens, 2005, p. 154).   Above this already fairly big picture position, Foucault poses another, even broader level, episteme, which is described as “the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyzes them at the level of discursive regularities” (1972, p. 191). Mills (2004) offers an explanation that is perhaps a little more transparent: “An episteme includes the range of methodologies which a culture draws on as self-evident in order to be able to think about certain subjects” (p. 51). Clearer, this is macro level that subsumes discourse.  On the other hand, Foucault’s view of discourse is larger than one discipline; instead, it may connect multiple institutions and disciplines.  (See, for example, Foucault, 1972, p. 179).  Nevertheless, it was the prospect of using a Foucauldian analysis to examine the ways that disciplines and subdisciplines enact and construct disciplinary values that drew me to try out the theory.  After all, many of Foucault’s examples in The Archeology of Knowledge involve disciplinary discourse at a given point in time.  But when I began the analysis, I realized that the interview genre exists—or could exist—in more than one discipline.  In other words, the discourse governing the genre must be the assumptions that undergird American academia, that confer status on certain scholars, and that make it meaningful and interesting to publish simulated conversations with them.  The discourse governing the content of a given interview or subset of interviews, on the other hand, should be the values and reasoning that undergird a specific discipline or research program.  American academia arguably has a discourse that extends itself into all disciplines and fields represented by institutions of higher education, but individual interviews are more likely to yield the objects valued by the discipline.  Research reports might be more fruitful for an analysis of academic discourse per se, and indeed, Swales (1990, 2004) does reveal characteristics of academic discourse through genre analysis that might be reinterpreted as discursive formations.  Going back to the interview genre, Foucault’s third discursive formation, examination of concepts that construct discourse, poses similar challenges when moving beyond disciplinary boundaries. 
Examining the concept of enunciative modality in relation to the interview genre is more meaningful. The subject of an interview is typically chosen for his or her notable contributions to theory or methodology within a discipline.  As the subject, the interviewee is given a great deal of status, but oddly, not a great deal of agency.  Because an interviewee has been chosen for well-developed and widely-promoted theories, he or she is, in fact, constructed and positioned to a degree by his or her own theory.  The interviewee explains and builds on the theory but is unlikely to develop new theory or make substantive changes during the discussion; in fact, the theorist has become constrained by the boundaries of his or her own theory.  In terms of producing a description of academic discourse, then, the interview genre reveals the way that academics are anchored by the discourse of their fields, even their own contributions to it.

As may have emerged from the previous discussion, within a Foucauldian analysis, genre cannot quite serve as a node.  In rhetorical genre theory, genres might be seen as conveyors of action, or as links, and in activity theory, as mediating nodes.  Foucault’s approach tends to sideline them.   It might be possible, in fact, to argue that research genres encapsulate a strategy, Foucault’s fourth discursive formation, in the way that they stabilize and display conventionalized academic discourse.  Initially, I believe that interviews represented a less crucial part of the network of academia, but a recent discussion with Louise Phelps challenged that notion.  In a project that she is currently working on, she discovered that a scholar’s networking activities, for example, hosting conferences and mentoring other scholars have an important effect on scholarly presence.  Scholars with a presence in a field are more likely to be interviewed, and being interviewed will surely make a scholar more noticeable.  In this sense, the interview genre does play a role in terms of positioning a scholar within the larger academic discourse.  Indeed, becoming more recognizable in more contexts can perhaps play a small role in helping Spinuzzi (or Steven Pinker or Stanley Fish) to become public intellectuals and speak for academia.  In this sense their own theories become the theories that represent academia. 

Most interviews include a question about a scholar’s influences.  For example, McNely details a number of scholars who have influenced Spinuzzi such as David Russell, “his mentor and dissertation director” (p. 2).   Thus, interviews are genres that serve to connect scholars explicitly to their ancestors in their discipline.  If I am seeing discourse as network, is the interview genre, therefore, a collection of nodes, a sub-network of the larger academic discourse? 

When considering how nodes are situated and the relationships between nodes in the Foucauldian model, it seems like human subjects need to be primary nodes.  The interview genre certainly highlights the centrality of scholars as subjects, in an immediate relationship with another scholar, i.e. the interviewer, and building a connection to objects and concepts.  But here a problem emerges in the Foucauldian model.  He emphasizes the situatedness of discursive formation, emphasizing how discourse constrains what is noticed or can be said.  This makes discourse appear quite static.  At the same time, he is interested in discontinuities, and wants “to show that a change in the order of discourse does not presuppose ‘new ideas’, a little invention and creativity, a different mentality, but transformations in a practice, perhaps also in neighboring practices, and in their common articulation” (p. 209).  Where do this shifts come from given that subjects are seen as so limited in terms of agency?  If subjects had no agency, discourse would never evolve and none of the historical shifts that Foucault explored in his genealogies would have occurred.   

Perhaps it has to do with information flow.  If we can assume that statements (in Foucault’s sense of the word) flow through discourse as network, making use of nodes and paths (think discursive formations), and moving between subjects in network (for example, interview interviewer and interviewee, then there two things are likely.  First, repeating statements—knowledge as perceived, concepts as highlighted, strategies as employed—reinforces existing networks, like burning connections in a neural network in the brain, making certain types of discourse stronger through use.  The second possibility, again using the analogy of the neural network, is the emergence of slight shifts that subtly readjust the network, reshaping the discourse.  How exactly this would lead to seismic shifts, like paradigm shifts, is perhaps something that needs to be explained by another theory.

Foucault’s ideas about discourse do seem productive for discussing disciplinary discourse as well as larger discourses.  Using Foucault to look at the academic interview genre brought me contradictions of scope.  It seems that the genre is generated by the discourse of academia whereas the subjects (interview and interviewee) are more plausibly situated within the discourse of discipline.  Nevertheless, considering the linkages related to subject, stimulated by Foucault’s principle of enunciative modality, does offer some insights into how academics are situated in relation to each other within academic discourse.   

References

Bertens, H. (2005). Literary theory: The basics. London: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1972, 1989). The Archeology of knowledge. London: Routledge.

McNely, B. (2013). “That lightbulb feeling”: An Interview with Clay Spinuzzi .Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society 3(1). Retrieved from
http://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-3/that-light-bulb-feeling-an-interview-with-clay-spinuzzi/

Mills, S. (2004). Discourse (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.