Being and Unions

Whew! Spent a couple days in Madison, protesting Walker's proposal to strip collective bargaining from public employees and presenting at the NCTEAR conference. By the time my presentation was scheduled on Sunday, thundersnow and sleet had started, sending participants scurrying to their phones and computers to rearrange flights or just outright leave. Nonetheless, I still got some helpful feedback, even some in the form of perplexed looks on why I separate "being" from "identity."

My paper laid out a small critique of Jim Gee's definition of literacy as "ways of being in the world," a definition followed by Colin Lankshear, Michelle Knobel and others. While these folks start with "ways of being," that phrase is quickly shifted to "identity" and take the difference to be something ontological vs. something presenced through representation. Now, I admit that even a representation might have its own ontological status, but that status is certainly different from the ontic of the human that uses that identity for various purposes, some of which humans are not entirely aware. By focusing on identity, research is tilted toward epistemology and discovering how we know and differentiate between identities. This is certainly fruitful research and any theory of being, in my mind, has to grapple with this at some point. However, as folks like Graham Harman and Levi Bryant point out, it has its limits: everything is so radically politicized and subjected to endless hermeneutics that it is often more intractable than it opens up any new horizons.

My main claim is that for literacy, composition studies, and rhetoric, an ontological as opposed to an epistemological approach may be in order. This isn't entirely new. In fact, as Victor Vitanza has argued, this extends the project of a Third Sophistic, notably the work of "nonpositive affirmation" that might shift the history of “negative essentializing” especially with respect “to physis and nomos” (Vitanza 12). If physis is the world (nature, material reality) and nomos is the word (law, custom), how do we move from one to the other in such a way that we retain some measure of correspondence or fidelity? If nomos is decoupled from physis and the relations are only arbitrary, how do we manage our effects on and from our spatial and material environments? For Vitanza, this is one of the fundamental discussions that runs throughout and constitutes the history of rhetoric and, I would add, the history of Western thought's attempt to theorize the connection between "the word and the world."

As I claim, identity is not sufficient to account for such a connection. Instead, we might look to being (or Being) as a basis. This won't disregard epistemological work by any means, but would extend the conversation in different ways. As Vitanza has pointed out, and as more recent work has detailed, Gorgias is one of the key rhetorical theorists to look to in formulating such a project. For Gorgias, in a precoursory refutation to Descartes, thought and being are certainly not the same, since not everything that is thought comes into being. Rather than posit a kind of nihilism, however, Gorgias' other extant writings detail the ways in which logos (word, language, discourse) operates not as content, but as variable maneuvers within social situations. Thus, according to Scott Cosigny, he "anticipates Wittgenstein's characterization of language as a family of games; that his construal of inquiry as rhetorical debate within socially sanctioned agons anticipates an array of contemporary hermeneutic theorists such as Gadamer, Rorty, and Fish" (210).

Interpreted this way, Cosigny does not account for the social sanctions themselves. Nor does he go as far as Vitanza in following the implications of the split in logos that Gorgias recognizes (the split between physis and nomos, which always produces a paradox and a "dispersion/ scattering of the antitheses that leads to 'something new, irrational'" Vitanza 243). For Vitanza, Gorgias' On Non-Being can be read more as pastiche than parody since a parody always implies an original whereas "One of he primary conventions of pastiche is that there is no origin, original, that is, no No" (261). Through the double-bind of kairos-logos, something else is produced from the available materials. Such new things, however, are not entirely present, but always part of the "will to power as falsehood." Through the mixing of kairos and logos, a being becomes something new, though still unified as a subject -- still affirmative in its Being as a being. Here, Vitanza follows Deleuze's follow-up to Nietzsche that "the living world is the will to power, will to falsehood, which is actualised in many different [forces]. To actualise the will to falsehood under any power, to actualise the will to power under any quality whatever, is always to evaluate, to lie, to interpret, to measure]" (279). Logos can only distort, evaluate, and lie. Kairos, however, is ambient in the environment and inserts its own operations within any situation of logos, dispersing them, opening the way onto the lie.

Within such kairotic moments, thought, we have a lot going on. In a follow up post, I will draft how I see current ontological debates informing this process with a special eye to differences (if any) between Process-Relational Theorists (PRT) and Object-Oriented Ontologists (OOO). But for this kairotic moment, I am tired and need to attend a meeting...

Pandora is Gaia: Nature as the Oldest Hypertext

My apologies for being absent for far too long. I hope starting the blog up again can not only get me talking with several folks, but also help with several projects I have going. I need it and hope you will contribute!

I find it interesting that Byron Hawk's work A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity has not been taken up by more mainstream environmental thinkers in English and the humanities. As far as I can research, ISLE hasn't published a review and I am fairly certain a search of works cited in their pages since its publication will produce little to no results. The same could be said of Gregory Ulmer's work in chorography, one of Hawk's influences. Ulmer radically revises notions of place and environment as real forces of invention, a point Hawk takes up in his book on vitalism. Add to this, Thomas Rickert's essays on kairos ("Inventing in the Wild") and khora (in Philosophy and Rhetoric), and we have some well-argued and carefully thought out ways to rethink place, environment, and nature.

Before I detail this a bit more, I have to note that I have fallen prey to the same ideological blinders that may be hindering folks in ecocomposition, ecocriticism, and environmental communication (let's call these and their allies the "eco-humanities"). As Hawk notes, Dobrin and Weisser failed to push the concept of ecology to its limit, keeping to representational notions of discourse and thereby dividing the discursive from the environment, a point I came to in my own chapter in Goggin. But I had to talk with Hawk before getting to this understanding. There is still a premium in the eco-humanities on representation, cultural studies, etc. that serves to maintain the nature-culture binary. My contention is that this has limited scholarship in the eco-humanities because Ulmer, especially, but also Hawk and Rickert have been taken up so readily by folks dealing in technology, hypermedia, video games, and computer interfaces. In other words, many eco-humanities scholars see them as "technological culture" and, perhaps because of their ideological love of "nature" (read as "those things relatively untouched by human culture"), they skip over the important insights offered from their colleagues thinking about (and with) computer technologies.

I won't detail Hawk's vitalism here, having made notes on it in an earlier post, nor will I recount my argument in Goggin's book. Suffice to say that, as Raul Sanchez argues, we have a crisis of representation and one of the foremost areas this crisis affects is thinking about the environment. I think Zizek is right to point out that an environmental discourse founded on representation has all the makings of a new opiate of the masses. But what Ulmer, Hawk, and similar scholars point out is a fairly simple argument that if everything (including nature) is a text we read/ write in non-linear, non-book ways, and that the sum total of the read/ write situation - if what is written/ read is a product of an emplacement, a total environment, if you will, - then this is perfectly applicable to our own scholarly work in the eco-humanities. In short, the world around us, our total environment from cities to prairies, to corn fields, oceans, rivers, and highways are a hypertext with which we interface but must invent ways to navigate trough, following its connections, links, and databases.

I admit that this is awfully close to James Cameron's imaginary world of Pandora, a world that functions as a vast database for memory, culture, and information. But aren't these imagined worlds important because they reveal truths about our own? We certainly don't have the same species or biological morphology that allows us to download memories of our elders, transfer consciousness from one body to another, or meld our neurological pathways with that of companion species. But we can and do interface with our environments, be they technological or not. And the "non-technological" is as linked together, if not more linked together, than any network yet devised by humans. Isn't the astrology-astronomy continuum indicative of how we use the natural world as calculator and computational tool linked to interfaces with planting, hunting, and ceremonial activity? Don't we use landscape as repository for memory, as Simon Schama has argued at length? What, then, is the difference between digital and natural hypertext?

My question, then, is what happens when we view the environment through the lenses articulated by Ulmer, Hawk and others? If we see the environment - built as well as "natural" - don't we get around the questions of ideology posed by William Cronon, the problems of cultural politics pointed out by Bruce Braun, and the (im)possibility of sustainabile development posed by Timothy Luke? We certainly don't "solve" these problems or questions, but wouldn't we understand them in a new way? Wouldn't we be able to reconfigure our interfaces with nature?

To me, this sounds at least worth exploring. Plus, it resonates with the work of Latour, Haraway, Hayles, and some of our foremost thinkers of how we understand and move through our worlds.

yeah... that's about it

Funny how CEB leaks this on the day we met with department heads to propose our New Media/ Integrated Digital Media major. My head (English) didn't show. I think he had an excuse, but then, I'm not completely sure. At least the Dean loves our program!

Master's Thesis

I get a kick out of the persistence of this thing. It's a decade old, but folks keep checking it out from the library. Maybe Laura is showing it to students. Or Sibylle. It's not like it is all *that* great, is it? Well, for whatever reason, I am thankful!

Introduction (Draft)

I'm soliciting feedback on a draft for my intro. In footnotes, I mention that 1) all names of people are pseudonyms and 2) Goodman’s use of past tense here indicates how even a careful researcher and a document published by Sinte Gleska University can relegate native cultures to the past rather than admit their “survivance” in the present. For the sake of simplicity, I retain his past tense but work against it in my own characterizations of Lakota culture.

Let me know what you think!

epigraph:
“though the principles of symbolism are not reducible to sheerly physical terms… the meanings cannot be conceived by empirical organisms except by the aid of a sheerly physical dimension”
--- Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man”

We slept most of the day before Jim Jacobs came back to talk with us. The night before, we walked the trail up Mato Paha, or Bear Butte, an ancient, granite laccolith rising 1200 feet from the high plains like a lone advance scout of the Black Hills, some six miles distant. Rising as it does so distant from the other Black Hills, Mato Paha is extremely exposed, almost isolated from its sisters. It is truly a unique mountain and it serves as a spiritual site not only for Lakota, but also for many other plains cultures. We were at Mato Paha during June, one of the holiest months of the Lakota calendar. Jim was there as a member of the Lakota nation to participate in ceremonies marking the end of a three-month procession of spiritual renewal and rededication. According to Ronald Goodman (1992) “the Lakota lived between stories and symbols written in the sky and mirrored on the earth” (9) and traditional Lakota still gather at sites around in the Black Hills between the spring equinox and summer solstice, “synchronizing their movements to the motions of the sun along the elliptic” (2). In other words, traditional Lakota culture, like many other cultures around the globe, teaches that the heavens and the earth mirror one another. In this view, the Black Hills, as a geographic area, mirrors that part of the sky dominated by the sun during spring. Places such as Mato Paha have stellar analogues in Lakota constellations so that to map the heavens is to map a mirror image of the earth and vice versa. As a matter of religious practice, traditional Lakota may mirror the path of the sun as it journeys through these constellations by embarking on a ceremonial procession through the Black Hills. Mato Paha, according to both Goodman and Jim Jacobs, was usually the culmination of a three-month series of ceremonies designed to balance earthly and spiritual matters.

This practice bears a certain resonance with Burke’s quote that opens this introduction. The sheerly physical dimensions of land and sky, the physical correlation between geography and astronomy are necessary preconditions for the symbolic tapestry of traditional Lakota culture. Likewise, as a ceremony some may partake in for the benefit of the whole culture, the physical movements through these dimensions is necessary for the Lakota, as “empirical organisms,” to conceive meaning in areas of life beyond the ceremony itself. For traditional Lakota, as it is true for many peoples, the physical land is important not for what it represents and not because it stands as a symbol for something else. Rather, it is the opposite: the land is important because without it there can be no symbolic. Without the physical movement across the land concurrent with the movement of the sun across the sky, traditional Lakota would fail in the very real and important re-creation of a symbolic order. The journey across the Black Hills no more represents the sun’s journey as any reading of a text represents the process used to write it. Both movements are necessary and, to some degree, mirror one another, but they cannot be said to be representative in any true sense of the word. Rather, each depends upon the other: place and symbol, hills and stars, reading and writing, stitched together in time and space. This re-creation should not be understood as a return to an original or a static form of mimesis. Rather, because of the double movement involved, this is a dynamic re-creation that affirms change and remains at least partially open to what cannot be captured or contained within any iteration of the order itself.

This helps me understand some of why the Lakota have yet to accept any monetary settlement to the breaking of the Fort Laramie treaties by the United States, a settlement now worth over $570 million. Their denial of the money officially rests on their belief that one cannot sell sacred land and we should respect that position. But when viewed from the position that to accept that money would be to enter their land into the symbolic order of economics, thus eradicating the very foundation of their culture, we might better understand this decision despite the rampant poverty, violence, despair, unemployment, and other social problems, that the money might help alleviate on each of the Lakota reservations and in Lakota communities across the upper Midwest. Rather than the inverse double movements of land and sky, accepting a monetary representation of the land replaces the entire equation with a foreign order.

This raises a whole set of important questions for rhetoric and composition studies as well as other areas of inquiry that focus on the relationships between place and the symbolic – areas such as geography, environmental sociology, and ecocriticism. Much of this, I argue, has been distracted by an endless play of signifiers, focusing too much on language and symbols and not enough on the physical structures upon which those symbols depend. While I do not claim to have discovered a “ground” upon which we might rest our postmodern feet, I do claim to make some further progress in understanding how our discourses literally matter in the world. If we can only know the world through discourse and discourse is just an endless play of arbitrary signifiers, then we are fundamentally cut off from creation. But such an extreme version of postmodernism has come under scrutiny in the past decade and more and more scholarship is turning to the material world and the ways it is involved in making meaning every bit as much as social material. This leads me to inquire into material places: are they also involved in the production of meaning and, if so, how? And what might that mean for research into writing or for the teaching of writing?

Graduate Texts

Here's what I'm thinking of teaching for my first graduate seminar, "Rhetoric, Writing, & Teaching." It is designed for newbies to rhetoric, especially teachers who need continuing education credits or who are in our Teaching Secondary English master's program. However, TAs, creative writers, and literary students will no doubt also find something of interest.

Go, Gopher State!

I love Minnesota politics. And not just because my grandpa was part of it, but b/c of its contributions on the national stage, too. Gene McCarthy's anti-war stance (and Humphrey's tepidness on that very issue as Johnson's VP), Mondale choosing Ferraro, Governor Ventura... and this:It'll be days before we know the end result, but Franken has done an amazing job and this is testament to the ways in which, as a population, Minnesota is open to some creativity.