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Perhaps these seem like an odd collection of terms, but bear with me.

First off, let me say that I think my discipline (rhetoric and composition) has strong commitments to a number of somewhat contradictory impulses:

1. that everyone can "write" (and perhaps should write);
2. that there is really no such thing as natural talent or creativity;
3. that writing is a social rather than individual activity.

And my thought is that of course these things are all true, but they are also completely wrong. The discipline's commitment to democracy means understanding writing as a socio-political activity that everyone can engage in equally, at least on some abstract-potential level. However, I cannot get away from the fact that there are people who have an exceptional talent and interest for writing (some of whom also teach writing). The same rhetoricians who will refuse to see writing as a natural talent are quick to say they have no natural aptitude for math. Hmmmm. Undoubtedly, the mission of rhet/comp is well-intentioned, particularly if one has faith in the notion that literacy equals empowerment. At the same time, to be committed to writing having certain characteristics because writing instruction must serve a particular political end would ultimately be destructive.

All of that is a little preamble to my consideration of why I think many of my colleagues in rhet/comp would be troubled by the notion of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation that I discussed in my last post. In the mainstream discourses of my discipline, I fear that intrinsic motivation would sound too much like a kind of naive humanism, where many in my field would rather insist upon the role of social, cultural, and ideological forces. In short, all forces are extrinsic. Don't ask me how we get from there to empowering students through literacy, because honestly that little trick of agency has always escaped me.

From my view, this intrinsic/extrinsic talk must also be reconciled with assemblage theory and relations of exteriority, which is where my work and this blog often operates. That may also seem like a difficult rhetorical trick, but actually I think it's fairly simple.

When one discusses relations of exteriority, in my view, one must begin with the dissolution of inside and outside as absolute, essential characteristics. (Admittedly then, relations of exteriority is a somewhat misleading term, but that matter will have to wait for another day.) That doesn't meant that inside and outside cannot exist as emergent and very real characteristics of objects. E.g. my house has an inside and an outside. They exist and not just in my mind as concepts. In a related way, subjectivity/consciousness emerges through relations of exteriority, through a network of distributed cognition and symbolic action, through embodied processes, and through exposure to assemblages of objects. Subjectivity is semi-stable inasmuch as those relations and assemblages are semi-stable. Even though subjectivity emerges through relations of exteriority, it has an inside and an outside as surely as my house does. The point of assemblage theory & relations of exteriority is "simply" to argue that subjectivity (or any other object) is not defined that which emerges as an inside.

However, given all that, as subjects we experience our lives as a collection of intrinsically and extrinsically motivated activities. And I'm not going to try to account for them all. Instead I want to jump right to the one that is at issue here: writing. We are regularly given obviously extrinsic conditions where we are called upon to write. Student writing assignments are an obvious example. But we are also often obligated to write various kinds of things on the job. The point that Dan Pink is trying to make (see previous post) is that when we are asked to do creative, intellectual work that extrinsic motivations (e.g. carrots and sticks) not only don't work, they can be detrimental. Grades, extra credit, bonuses, etc: none of these things are particularly good motivators in getting people to do good creative work (and I would describe writing as creative work). Now certainly those things we experience as "intrinsic" forms of motivation emerge through assemblages, through relations of exteriority. That doesn't make them less intrinsic. Everything ultimately comes from some other place.

Take for example this post. Why am I writing it? (Why are you reading it?) There is no obvious extrinsic motivation. I don't get paid. It's not related to my job. Maybe I think it will make me famous or at least improve my reputation, but even if I did, there would certainly be no clear reward for writing this post right now. As such, I might say I am intrinsically motivated. What that means to me is that these actions are motivated (though not determined!) by assemblages/relations of exteriority that I subjectively experience as coming from inside. (As to why you're reading this, I have no idea; it probably has something to do with your relationship with your mother.) But this is where we might encounter the "autonomy of objects" (btw, Levi Bryant has some interesting posts on this subject: here is one). If all objects have autonomy to some degree, with the plane of immanence being a degree zero of pure autonomy, there's no special free will for humans. To be autonomous here means that objects have emergent characteristics and behaviors that are reducible to their relations with other objects.

When we are looking at the kind of positive psychology that informs Pink's work, we are not developing some general ontology. The point, quite simply, is that when humans act out of experience of autonomy, mastery, and purpose (to give a shorthand for the qualities of intrinsic motivation Pink explores), they are more successful at creative tasks. If you are a corporate manager or a WPA then you might think about creating work conditions that are conducive to these experiences. Similarly, as a teacher, one might facilitate these conditions to give students opportunities to draw upon intrinsic motivations for their writing.

So I will end with where I started. It's true that in some basic definition of writing, nearly every human has the cognitive ability to write. That said, everyone does not have the equal potential for writing and not everyone will find pleasure in it (anymore than the typical English professor finds pleasure in mathematics). While writing certainly is a social activity, we need to be more careful with that term "social," as Latour has pointed out. We need to recognize how inadequate conventional "social" explanations are for our own motivations as writers. Despite my understanding of things like audience, genre, and discourse, I know quite well that my best writing does not come from meeting those external demands. It is a sadly impoverished view of writing that does not recognize the necessity of intrinsic motivation. And I fear that in our desire to make writing logical and learnable, to make it something that is equal for all people, we ignore those aspects.

I picked up Pink's latest book yesterday. Essentially, the book takes up theories of intrinsic motivation and positive psychology and applies them to business management theory. Pink also has a TED talk that outlines the basic experimental evidence that underlies the argument he makes in the book (evidence that the book further expands upon, though always in a layperson's discourse). I've discussed this talk here before and the subject of motivation, pedagogy, and writing many times. But here I want to think through these issues more in terms of writing program administration.

Pink suggests that the dominant theory of motivation (that in academia we might think of as desire) has flaws that have become significant given the new types of labor we ask employees (and I would say students) to do. As he puts it, in simplistic terms, there's Motivation 1.0, which are our animalistic drives for food, safety, and procreation. Motivation 2.0 extends upon those more immediate drives with extrinsic motivators, which are basically carrots and sticks. As he explains, carrot/stick motivators work fine for simple, algorithmic tasks, where we ask students/employees to perform rote procedures. The important thing the research shows, however, is that when one asks people to perform heuristic tasks, tasks that require inventive and creative thinking, that the carrot/stick act can actually serve as a disincentive to performance.

Obviously the composition course is a place that calls for heuristic acts, though this is something that we have struggled over in various ways. Over the last century as a culture we have tried to turn education into an algorithmic procedure that can be incentivized with carrots and sticks from grades and detention to high-stakes testing for district funding. We have tried to turn composition into an algorithmic procedure as well, even if that wasn't what people originally intended in talking about the "writing process." Furthermore, the course is incorporated into a larger motivation 2.0 structure of grades and credits. But let me fold this back to a familiar composition scene, where the student asks "How can I revise this to get an 'A'?" And the koan-like answer is that your best chance of getting an A is to stop writing for the purpose of getting a good grade. The carrot of the A is actually limiting your performance. Of course it isn't that easy. Ironically, the whole system is designed to dissuade learning and creativity, and over time these motivational structures do lasting damage to students, as Ken Robinson has famously articulated. It isn't intentional, of course; it's just that the system is designed on a poor theory of mind.

According to the research that Pink cites, in order for people to be most successful at these complex heuristic tasks, they need to be intrinsically motivated, and he describes three key foundations to that motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In some ways, academia ought to be an ideal model for the kind of workforce and workplace Pink is describing. We have a very high degree of autonomy in the way we work. We generally work hard in the pursuit of mastery over our subject, while always knowing that there is more to know or discover. And we also tend to make strong connections between the narrow focus of our research and grander cultural and intellectual purposes. However, there are obviously general problems with the management of higher education and I think that infamously academics can be horrible managers of other academics (though that isn't true in every instance). In part, the problem is that sometimes academics end up in administrative positions for the wrong reasons, and they don't bring the creativity and passion they have for their research or teaching to their administrative roles. There is a long standing tradition of antagonism, generally, between faculty and administration, which I would hypothesize stems from the tradition of "motivation 2.0" with its carrots and sticks and its focus on controlled, routinized tasks. As Pink points out, these strategies are poisonous to the heuristic challenges of both research and teaching.

However, it's not all that simple. In UB's composition program, we have a long tradition of giving instructors a high degree of autonomy in constructing syllabi and assignments. While there have certainly been successes as a result, the practice has not been without problems. There are always limits and contexts for autonomy. As the director of composition, I can only loosen the restrictions that I put in place. For example, I can't alter the length of the semester or change the fact that students need to be graded at the end of the semester. A composition course isn't a course in auto repair or calculus. As Pink puts it, the autonomy here is over task, technique, time, and team. What you are going to do, how you are going to do it, when you are going to do it, and who you are going to do it with. Task is certainly related to purpose (purpose is a big picture task, I suppose). And technique might be one of the objects of mastery.

So here's how I see it. We start with the WPA Outcomes Statement. It's sweeping and fairly general, Many of the terms are open to interpretation and debate. And in my view, many of the outcomes themselves could be interrogated and others added. As Pink points out, extrinsically motivated people play within boundaries (in an effort to get carrots); intrinsically motivated people play with boundaries. So even if you view the statement as boundaries, we want to play with them. Similarly, our program has certain constraints and policies (which are themselves open to periodic review and change). We can and should play with those boundaries as long as we keep a larger sense of common purpose that hinges on professional ethics (and if you can't play in that broad space, that's fine, you just need to find a different profession). There are ultimately limits, but I think there's a wide degree of autonomy within that, particularly if you have a personal sense of professional purpose that is at all connected to the discipline.

Within those contexts, instructors ought to be able to define their own tasks (e.g. this semester I am going to focus on developing methods for teaching revision or digital composition or whatever); they can develop their own techniques or pedagogies; they can set their own time to work (beyond the constraints of course scheduling); and they might think about team as well (finding colleagues in the program to share ideas with and collaborate; this is not done enough!).

One of the things I think is underdeveloped, both generally and at UB, is the focus on the mastery of teaching. Since almost all of our composition instructors are graduate students, I look at the program as part of their education/professional development. Here Pink turns to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his concept of "flow." Fundamentally, the flow state is one where a person is engaged in a task that is ideally suited to just push his/her ability. It is not so difficult as to produce anxiety nor so easy as to be boring. It is in these flow states where our ability to grow is maximized. Of course we are not always in a flow state, but as a WPA, one challenge might be to maximize the opportunities for teaching to put instructors in these opportunities. Pink also points out that mastery is difficult (of course), and that it requires an ability to grind it out sometimes. The flow state can help us get over those difficult moments. Also, we need to recognize that mastery is developed not inherited and that it is ultimately unreachable: we can always improve. It is the journey that is intrinsically rewarding and motivating: not the extrinsic carrots one might encounter along the way.

Finally there's purpose. I don't think rhet/comp or academics in general have much trouble connecting their work to grand purposes like saving democracy or illuminating the Truth. In fact, I tend more to be skeptical of such claims. At the same time, I recognize the importance of having a larger sense of purpose (though maybe not quite that large). As Pink points out, one of the strategies here is to give employees the opportunity to connect their work to a personal sense of purpose. In a composition program, I think this works through giving instructors the opportunity to develop the content and assignments for their courses. If an instructor has a passion of the environment, then s/he can focus on that or maybe the passion is education or media or cultural difference. 

At the same time, it is important for instructors to recognize their own managerial role. Just as the program needs to create opportunities for instructor autonomy, mastery, and purpose, each course needs to do this for its students for the students are also engaged in heuristic work that requires intrinsic motivation. And furthermore, one might imagine that as writers we bear a somewhat similar relationship to our audiences where, rhetorically, we want to engage our readers, bring them into a state of flow, and interact with their own motivations. Certainly, to some degree, Pink's book did that for me. Hopefully it is a virtuous rather than vicious circle.

The oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has been bothering me so much that I've now uploaded a web page about it at http://edwardpicot.com/bpoil .

- Edward Picot
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

Join us for a special Citation Project Workshop at the 2010 Georgia Conference on Information Literacy

Post Conference Workshop
Georgia Conference on Information Literacy
Post Conference Workshop
Coastal Georgia Center
October 2, 2010
1:00 - 4:00 PM
This workshop is free for all registered conference attendees.
Please RSVP to:
Marie Williams, Assistant Program Development Specialist

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In the her Chronicle article (subscription required), "Hot Type: No Reviews of Digital Scholarship = No Respect," Jennifer Howard reports on the struggles in getting digital scholarship properly reviewed. Not only is it difficult to establish appropriate standards for review, there are not many people capable of doing the reviewing. And I fully understand the nature of the problem here: the review is an important form of currency in academia.

But once again this can all be filed under missing the point.

Digital scholarship will never make sense within the context of a print scholarship intellectual marketplace. Here's the fundamental difference. In the existing print world, a text "counts" because two or three reviewers read it and said it's good enough to print. It doesn't matter if no one else ever reads it. Yes, we can get into bibliometrics, but such mechanisms cannot explain the forces at work behind a citation. It's as if getting cited as an example of stupidity is better than not getting cited at all. Similarly there can be a variety of unaccounted-for mechanics behind book reviews. On the flip side, of course it is fairly easy to measure a variety of user activities in relation to online scholarship (links, visits, time spent, click throughs, etc); there's also numerous ways for users to give feedback. So even though one might have trouble getting the kinds of reviews Howard is discussing, one would think that with digital scholarship one could get a far more accurate measurement of how people actually use the work.

So we could have a kind of pitched battle over these terms, where the evidence for the value of digital scholarship would suggest that we have reason to doubt the value of any/all print scholarship since we don't have any metrics for understanding how/if users actually do anything with it.

But I still think that's missing the point.

The point as I see it begins with getting beneath the process of scholarly publication and review, which is obviously a print process. Fundamentally to publish simply means to make something public. But obviously it means something more specific in this context. I think we have to ask why we publish articles and monographs (beyond the imperatives of tenure and promotion). What is this publication meant to accomplish? To suggest the most altruistic motives, the purpose of scholarly publication would be to contribute meaningfully to an ongoing conversation of scholarly and intellectual merit. While the article or monograph represent engagements of labor and thought of a certain scope/depth that I think are still important in the humanities, we need to recognize that the process of publication and review is not necessary to our deeper purpose. Therefore, I think we go down the wrong road when we try to accomodate digital scholarship to the process of publication and review. 

We need to rethink the entire way we do intellectual work, which extends right down to what we ask our undergraduates to do in the classroom. I don't think this means abandoning the fundamental questions that drive our intellectual inquiry. Nor does it mean giving up the theoretical approaches that we use. But it does mean taking apart many of the unexamined, naturalized aspects of our disciplinary paradigms. Sure, one could ask, "But what is wrong with the scholarly essay? It still works just as well now as 20 years ago." But one could equally ask, what is wrong with public oratory? Why begin writing essays at all?

Digital scholarship clearly allows for a kind of large-scale, collaborative, iterative, scholarly activity that goes far beyond the essay with its citations, thesis statement, and facile structures that tie into a neat, conclusive bow somewhere around 6-7000 words down the road. In the context of digital scholarship, the essay and the monograph are about as useful as oral presentation. Of course we still do such presentations, and I imagine we will still write essayistic prose. But to seek to match digital scholarship to the metrics of print scholarship is simply another sad example of why one might lose hope for the long-term viability of academics. It's just sad, sloppy thinking.

David J. Tietge's Rational Rhetoric: The Role of Science in Popular Discourse (Parlor Press) has been named the winner of JAC's Gary A. Olson Award for most outstanding book in rhetorical and cultural theory. -- 26 May 2010.

DeanDad's review of Kamenetz's DIY U raises a number of good issues that brings me back to this topic again today, as does this NY Times op ed, which essentially argues for more summer teaching to compress the 4-year degree into 3 years. As the old saying goes, time=money, and so, we get this sense that college is perhaps a waste of both.

DeanDad's review echoes more general concerns I have raised about the DIY movement and the presumption that a significant percentage of potential college students could essentially educate themselves. For instance, not only do I imagine that very, VERY few college students could figure out how to improve their writing without close, ongoing support from a teacher, most would not even elect to do that kind of work, and I'm not sure how one would encourage DIY students to do difficult work of any kind. In short, any student with the discipline and motivation to make DIY education work is also the kind of student who could get their money's worth from a college environment.

This actually brings me to the waste of time/money issue. I appreciate this on a personal level. I bang my head against my kid's K-12 education on a weekly basis. Their schooling has only one gear: slow. Actually, that's not true. There's a second gear: reverse. As far as my kids are concerned, the curriculum could move 5-10 times faster than it does, no sweat. Of course, there are plenty of kids who struggle with the workload as it is right now. 

The real issue here is that the educational system (in the US anyway) is not meant to teach individual students. It's a democratizing process that is designed to try to bring everyone to some minimal standard. Anyone who thinks that completing the curriculum to get some degree (any degree I don't care how advanced) means that s/he has become "educated" obviously was not paying attention in class. The educational system certainly is at odds with our notion of college degrees as an investment in individual human capital and with our fantasy about our own specialness that results in kids getting handed medals and awards for participation.

It wouldn't be too difficult to imagine a different kind of educational system that is more meritocratic than democratic. In fact there are plenty of models of such around the world. Our educational system, in its own localized ways, tends to focus on the lower third of any student population. Not the lower-third nationally mind you, but the lower-third in each school district: getting them to pass state tests, stay in school, etc.

The DIY approach is clearly more sink or swim. Maybe some of those lower performing students would find a passion and succeed but I think many more would choose the do-not option that is implicit in DIY. Meanwhile the best-performing students would likely be able to take off. In short, you'd have a different educational system. It would be less democratic but it would be better for some. Maybe it would be better for "us" nationally in cultural or economic terms. I guess that would depend on what one meant by "better."

[Now I should point out, as an aside, that DIY on a global scale is more complicated; what I'm talking about here is restricted to an American context.]

Perhaps it is instructive to think of these things in energetic terms. In a complex, dynamic system like our society, democratic equality or equilibrium is costly to try to maintain. If socio-economic equality is not your goal then expenditures to maintain it would seem highly inefficient. Unfortunately, equality is at odds with excellence unless one includes equality as a marker of excellence (which I think it an entirely viable argument). Once upon a time, higher education was a mechanism for maximizing excellence, but for at least 40 years it has increasingly been a mechanism for equality. That is, we have come to see college educating a large percentage of citizens as a measure of equality.

The problem is that the equality higher ed is expected to provide is not a social equality but a kind of quixotic individual equality, where everyone has above-average incomes. That is, in our fantasy of specialness we want everyone to receive a higher ed degree as a mark of excellence. Well... duh. As long as we aim to get 40% of Americans 4-yr degrees (up from the low 30s% it is right now), we are going to be in a system of inefficiency. I think a university system that was more in line with a DIY philosophy could do a good job with 10-15% of the population and maybe serve them better than it does now. But then it wouldn't be an engine of equality. 

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is pleased to announce the 2010 winners of the Best Webtext, John Lovas Memorial Weblog, and TA/Adjunct Awards. Awards were presented at the 2010 Computers and Writing Conference at Purdue University.

Best Webtext Award

Susan H. Delagrange, for "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement," which appeared in Kairos 13.2

John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award

A tie between Viz (Digital Writing and Research Lab, University of Texas at Austin) and ProfHacker (Chronicle of Higher Education)

TA/Adjunct Awards

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Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is pleased to announce the release of Issue 14.3, a special issue on Rhetoric, Technology, and the Military with guest editors Mike Edwards and Alexis Hart.

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Some notes and thoughts on the recently completed Computers and Writing conference...

1. As I tweeted during the conference, the subject of gaming is a growing interest in the field. From rhetorical approaches to games studies to a pedagogical interest in serious gaming, there were many, many panels and presentations in this area. Perhaps we'll see a keynote speaker along these lines next year.
2. Computers and Writing also continues to shift and become more specialized. That's my sense anyway. That is, increasingly I think the conference audience at C&W is different from that at CCCC, even in a Technology session. A keynote speaker who imagines a typical rhet/comp audience will miss her mark at this conference. It's not just games. It's social media, video, and other forms of digital composition. It's building our own applications. There's plenty of intellectual diversity within C&W, but I would say it is now as differentiated from the mainstream as technical writing or the ATTW conference.
3. There were some good conversations about the role of digital scholarship in the field: the challenges of reviewing such material and the relation between our digital practices and the broader conversations in the humanities.

So I want to gather together these issues through a concept of "targeting," which struck me as an undercurrent in the presentations I saw. Targeting is obviously a process of selection. It's a regular feature of most video games, and I want to keep that analogy in my here as I stray from it. Targeting/selecting may appear as a fundamental display of agency, but we know it is more complicated than that. The selector and the selectee are both exposed to one another in a broader assemblage.  In many gaming situations both sides are hunter and hunted. But even in the cases where the hunted is seeking to avoid the hunter, there are some characteristics of the hunted that emerge in this moment of exposure that call the hunter's attention. Regardless, the point here is to investigate the assemblage of exposure where the event of selection emerges.

I saw this issue iterate in the following ways:

• in our discussion of Dan Anderson's I am a map/I'm a green tree, an excellent video exploring object relations. The conversation circles around "is it a poem?" "is it scholarly" "but poems can be scholarly." How do we target the discourse of our digital work? How does it target us?
• in Scott Reed's presentation on a game-based composition portfolio. He mentions Ulmer and references Heidegger's geschlecht.  We are stamped and targeted, which in turn shapes our own targeting. For Ulmer, invention lies in the investigation of and experimentation with these targeting apparatuses. 
• in Joshua Hilst, Sarah Arroyo, and Geoff Carter's panel on virtual immersion(s) where we see the role of networks, YouTube, and game mechanics on selections of video remixing and bibliography.
• when Collin Brooke, Doug Eyman, and Aimee Knight ask if we can spell new media without "me," and examine gamer networks, social media objects, and citational systems where it seems to me that we are looking at a series of bi-directional targeting systems. We search and are simultaneously searched for.
• later Dan's deliverator presentation "Watch the Bubble" asks questions targeting in on computers and writing... its history of tinkering and experimentation and says "we are the lab discipline of the core humanities."

So we come to the point where we look at our relations with the humanities, with English studies, with rhetoric and composition, with the digital humanities. How do we target them? How do they target us? Are we, as I suggested in my presentation, drawing on Alan Liu, monstrous exo-disciplinarity? In his User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Massumi describes a series of tactics that begins with cherishing "derelict spaces." That's what Dan's bubbles are, or at least were, the skunkworks of composition computer labs where few wish to venture. However, if you are successful in your tactics eventually the state will seek to molarize you, to create a box for you in the system. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand perhaps it is a case of being careful what one wishes for.

What does it mean for C&W to be targeted by the humanities or the digital humanities or rhetoric/composition? How do we or ought we target them in return? Or perhaps we should target new, less institutional assemblages. I would turn toward the heuretic, but then you likely knew that. That means breaking free of the hermeneutic questions of target that revealing meaning and instead turn toward production. Do not ask why I make these selections but rather what these selections produce. Rather than seeking selections that are meant to reify some illusory internal identity, why not experiment with the targeting assemblages themselves... maybe even turn them off. What happens then?

"Luke, you switched off your targeting computer! What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I'm all right."

danah boyd makes this argument in a recent post, suggesting

Your gut reaction might be to tell me that Facebook is not a utility. You’re wrong. People’s language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago. Facebook may not be at the scale of the Internet (or the Internet at the scale of electricity), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not angling to be a utility or quickly becoming one. Don’t forget: we spent how many years being told that the Internet wasn’t a utility, wasn’t a necessity… now we’re spending what kind of money trying to get universal broadband out there without pissing off the monopolistic beasts because we like to pretend that choice and utility can sit easily together. And because we’re afraid to regulate. All of this comes out of the reaction to Fb's continuing push to make user information public. I understand boyd's point, but I suppose I wonder what it is exactly that "we" want Fb to be. I've been on Fb for a number of years, but not as long as I've been blogging here. I guess I've always thought of the web as a public space. On facebook I do post things of a more quotidian and personal nature than I tend to on Twitter. And here I don't really post personal things at all. But none of it is really personal. My Fb "friends" include something like 25% people I have never met but are in my field, 50% professional colleagues who I've met at conferences, 20% people I haven't seen in 15 years, and 5% other. Basically I wouldn't share anything on Facebook that I wouldn't share with students in a class. Indeed, I have students who have friended me. So in my Fb account there really isn't anything that isn't otherwise accessible on the web; it just offers one more way for people to find me.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that everyone needs to be like me! I can understand that some people want to use Fb to communicate in a semi-private way with a narrow group of friends.

That said, the privacy issue is really just a slice of the problem. What is more annoying here is the way that Fb wants to monetize users' immaterial labor by selling information to commercial interests. If Fb wants to use my status updates about jogging to sell me exercise gear or my age and education to target me demographically then that starts to get on my nerves. As long as it's just on my Fb page, like ads in gmail, I can live with it. But if it starts to get pervasive, following me around the web, then my inclination would be to shut up.

Personally I am skeptical of the utility metaphor. Maybe people are dependent on Fb, but that dependency reads more like an addiction or habit. If Fb is as indispensable as boyd suggests, then why can't they get users to pay for the service? People are willing to pay for electricity, cable, internet service, etc. If users aren't willing to pay for Fb then how important can it really be?

Underlying this all is the problematic concept of "private communication." To begin with, privacy is a legal fiction. Among bees, as I remember reading in Kittler, one bee can communicate via its dance the location of a flower to another bee, but that second bee is not able to pass the message along. Only that first bee can communicate the message. That's essentially private communication. It can only be shared by its author.

But human communication doesn't work that way. Anything that you communicate can be recommunicated. In fact, anything that you can know about yourself, even if you keep it in your head and never speak of it, can be known by others and recommunicated. Communication is not private, but it is not public either. Public is just the other side of the legal fictional coin here. Now when I say legal fiction I don't mean to suggest that it is unimportant but only that we shouldn't mistake the social mechanisms we create to try to manage communication with the actual mechanisms of communication.

As I often discuss here, if thought and communication fundamentally occur through exposure to others, then any methods to limit exposure, from encryption to contracts, operate only by limiting the value and potential of thought. When Zuckerberg argues that our values regarding privacy are changing, he's probably right. After all, they are always changing. That doesn't mean we want radical transparency today though. Exposure is critical to our cultural development, but at the same time over-exposure can be crippling. In some sense, this is what Fb is already facing as it deals with the exorbitant costs of maintaining all this user data.

danah boyd makes this argument in a recent post, suggesting

Your gut reaction might be to tell me that Facebook is not a utility. You’re wrong. People’s language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago. Facebook may not be at the scale of the Internet (or the Internet at the scale of electricity), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not angling to be a utility or quickly becoming one. Don’t forget: we spent how many years being told that the Internet wasn’t a utility, wasn’t a necessity… now we’re spending what kind of money trying to get universal broadband out there without pissing off the monopolistic beasts because we like to pretend that choice and utility can sit easily together. And because we’re afraid to regulate. All of this comes out of the reaction to Fb's continuing push to make user information public. I understand boyd's point, but I suppose I wonder what it is exactly that "we" want Fb to be. I've been on Fb for a number of years, but not as long as I've been blogging here. I guess I've always thought of the web as a public space. On facebook I do post things of a more quotidian and personal nature than I tend to on Twitter. And here I don't really post personal things at all. But none of it is really personal. My Fb "friends" include something like 25% people I have never met but are in my field, 50% professional colleagues who I've met at conferences, 20% people I haven't seen in 15 years, and 5% other. Basically I wouldn't share anything on Facebook that I wouldn't share with students in a class. Indeed, I have students who have friended me. So in my Fb account there really isn't anything that isn't otherwise accessible on the web; it just offers one more way for people to find me.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that everyone needs to be like me! I can understand that some people want to use Fb to communicate in a semi-private way with a narrow group of friends.

That said, the privacy issue is really just a slice of the problem. What is more annoying here is the way that Fb wants to monetize users' immaterial labor by selling information to commercial interests. If Fb wants to use my status updates about jogging to sell me exercise gear or my age and education to target me demographically then that starts to get on my nerves. As long as it's just on my Fb page, like ads in gmail, I can live with it. But if it starts to get pervasive, following me around the web, then my inclination would be to shut up.

Personally I am skeptical of the utility metaphor. Maybe people are dependent on Fb, but that dependency reads more like an addiction or habit. If Fb is as indispensable as boyd suggests, then why can't they get users to pay for the service? People are willing to pay for electricity, cable, internet service, etc. If users aren't willing to pay for Fb then how important can it really be?

Underlying this all is the problematic concept of "private communication." To begin with, privacy is a legal fiction. Among bees, as I remember reading in Kittler, one bee can communicate via its dance the location of a flower to another bee, but that second bee is not able to pass the message along. Only that first bee can communicate the message. That's essentially private communication. It can only be shared by its author.

But human communication doesn't work that way. Anything that you communicate can be recommunicated. In fact, anything that you can know about yourself, even if you keep it in your head and never speak of it, can be known by others and recommunicated. Communication is not private, but it is not public either. Public is just the other side of the legal fictional coin here. Now when I say legal fiction I don't mean to suggest that it is unimportant but only that we shouldn't mistake the social mechanisms we create to try to manage communication with the actual mechanisms of communication.

As I often discuss here, if thought and communication fundamentally occur through exposure to others, then any methods to limit exposure, from encryption to contracts, operate only by limiting the value and potential of thought. When Zuckerberg argues that our values regarding privacy are changing, he's probably right. After all, they are always changing. That doesn't mean we want radical transparency today though. Exposure is critical to our cultural development, but at the same time over-exposure can be crippling. In some sense, this is what Fb is already facing as it deals with the exorbitant costs of maintaining all this user data.

There's been much talk around the web regarding Anya Kamenetz's book DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, which obviously connects with a conversation about the changing nature of higher education which is a long time topic here. Clearly I am interested in the potential of digital media to change education. I have often written about changes I see happening or think will happen. I write even more about the possibilities I see and interesting, productive ways to intervene in this situation. At the same time, I remain skeptical of the potential of a non-institutional educational system working as a substitute for higher education for the majority of students.

Put bluntly, if you were to take the average student I have taught and tell them "Here's the web; go get an education," the results would not be good. Is it hypothetically possible to create a society where such a system could operate in lieu of institutionalized education? I would say yes. Many, many things are hypothetically possible. Could this kind of approach work now for a small percentage of people? Probably, especially if they already have an extensive college education. (And it's only partly ironic that most of the people who argue for DIY education have impressive formal educations, without which they probably wouldn't be in a position to make the arguments they do.) But I digress.

The point I really want to make here is that all education is DIY. Maybe we've forgotten that, and maybe that's part of the problem we face. A student enters my composition class. I can't make her learn. The best I can do is create a context where she has a greater opportunity to learn about writing than if she wasn't in the course. The work I do with students in the classroom or in office hours and the communications I have with them online or through the assignments they do and the comments I give them are just a tiny portion of the learning process. 

Really you have to do it yourself. And ultimately college is about putting people in a situation where they can become more independent learners. But we see how hard that is. Doctoral students go through years of graduate coursework to learn about their subject and become independent researchers, but it is common for doctoral students to struggle in the transition from the supervised work of a course to the more independent work of writing a dissertation. A good number never write that dissertation. And even among those who do write the dissertation, many struggle to continue researching, writing, and developing as a professional once they leave their doctoral institutions and start academic jobs.

Honestly there are all kinds of pitfalls in DIY education. The obvious one is making everything too easy on yourself. Who's going to set and uphold the standard? But equally perilous is being too hard or demanding of yourself. This is what happens to some grad students who are unwilling to believe they are ready to write their dissertations. I joke from time to time that the problem with higher ed is its mini-me pedagogy, where professors are always trying to turn students into versions of themselves. But maybe that's exactly what we need in a strange way. If students need to be become self-directed, intrinsically-motivated learners, then that's what professors should be able to model and reproduce because that's what we are.

I suppose my point is that higher education is DIY education or at least should be. It is a community of experts and learners (expert learners really) following a path of education that has been worked out collectively but that still leaves much space for independent thought. It's been a little obscured, in my view, with this heavy apparatus of general education and a kind of infantilizing of students through all these support systems we provide, but honestly it does seem like students are less prepared. I don't mean that they know less necessarily but rather that they seem to feel like they need more structure. Maybe also the turn toward professionalization has over-structured the four-year degree.

Ultimately though I look at the ethos of a DIY education as being at the heart of what the liberal arts are about.

On Larval Subjects, Levi discusses three mereologies in a description of the relations between objects in subtractive OOO. To summarize (though you should read it yourself), when talking about a couple, there are three objects (the two individuals and the couple). As Levi lays out the basic theory:

Insofar as all objects are necessarily aggregates of other objects, it follows that objects cannot exist without their parts. However, while subtractive variants of OOO concede that objects cannot exist without their parts and that, indeed, one way of destroying an object is through the destruction of its parts, nonetheless objects are independent of the parts that compose them. In other words, objects cannot be reduced to their parts. The parts of an object are themselves objects that have their own autonomy and life. The larger object composed out of these parts is another object that has its own autonomy and life.

I understand this, but I also want to push on it somewhat and then comeback from the edge. As we think about parts and aggregates, at the limit we encounter two kinds of strange, conceptual singularities. I say they are "conceptual" because no human can or at least has experienced the universe or quantum foam directly. Quantum foam is theoretical physics. In theory (and based on my obviously non-expert understanding of such matters), a philosophy of objects doesn't really work on the quantum level unless it has a kind of Deleuzian virtuality. 

In a different way, the universe, while a more familiar concept, is equally problematic. Following the OOO line of thinking where an object is independent of its parts, the universe is something in excess of what makes up the universe. But where would that excess come from if not from the aggregate relations of the objects? Perhaps the universe is one of many. Energy and matter get sucked into black holes; maybe these are passages beyond the universe. Maybe. However, what this points to is the problem of thinking about totalities or wholes. Now this is certainly addressed in OOO where we understand "the withdrawal of objects." 

Objects in the mirror of subjectivity are other than they appear.

What quantum foam and the universe might present are virtuality and absolute exteriority. If quantum foam is real, then all objects emerge continually from an immanent, undecided sub-atomic turbulence that exists both inside and outside our conventional notions of time and space. This is the virtual as I understand it.

On the other hand, a totalizing object, like the universe, demands the recursivity that exteriority offers. That is, in a more local example that Levi uses, I am a citizen of the US, and as such I am part of the object. But at the same time, being a citizen is part of me. The US is part of me. Inasmuch as the US as a nation is an object, aggregated from other objects but also in excess of the expressed characteristics of those objects, and I am similar aggregate, we are both exposed, exteriorized, to one another. I am part of the US; the US is part of me; and the relation (the coupling of the US and me) is a third. 

There were three in the family, and that's the perfect number.

Of course, in a Deleuzian spirit, we might mount an anoedipal response to such a calculation: rather than the three points that define a plane, there are always n - 1 dimensions to relations.

It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n - 1). (ATP)

The "it" in this blockquote is the rhizome. If the universe is One, it is composed of directions in motion from which it grows and overspills. I am a part of the universe; the universe is part of me; the universe and I have a relation, which is three, but n -1 dimensions laid out on a plane of consistency, the virtual, the turbulent sub-atomic non-spacetimes of quantum foam. Given these recursive, exteriorized relations, it is not possible to say where the universe or I begin/s or end/s anymore than it is possible to count the dimensions of a fractal.

As I understand it, the issue for OOO is to say that object relations do not need to travel "all the way" down to the sub-atomic and back up. I agree. Furthermore, the realm of quantum foam might suggest a degree of randomness and mutation in the universe which, at least, is not locally observable in our light cone. As always, Newtonian physics remains good enough for predicting my experience of the world. This is what I meant earlier when I said I want to come back from the edge of reality. I see concerns like the virtual and totality as being taken up by OOO in a way that is not unlike the philosophy's address of correlationist concerns with ideology and representation. That is, to address these things as matters of degree. Yes, my coffee mug arises from the virtual, from quantum foam, I suppose. And yes, the fact that it is a "coffee mug" indicates it has some semiotic dimensions, and even ideological ones. But let's not forget that it is also a mug, with characteristics that are quite obviously different from sub-atomic particles, and that exceed capture within semiotic and ideological apparatuses.

Still "the mug" that I grasp (physically and mentally) is the one that is subtracted from the n. Perhaps this is what is meant by the "subtractive variants of OOO."

The third in a series of 10-minute videos about the adventures and frustrations of an ordinary (but rather hirsute) General Practitioner. In time for the General Election, Dr Hairy inexplicably takes it upon himself to share his philosophical and political views with the nation - with hilarious results!

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I'm catching up on my blog reading and Michael Feldstein had an interesting post a few days back, asking the question of whether there is a bubble in the higher education market. He points to a number of statistics indicating the declining rate of return for a college student investing in his or her education. As he concludes, "unlike your home, your education is a fundamentally illiquid asset. You can’t sell off your diploma, even at a loss, to pay back your bank loans. These students will be screwed six ways from Sunday, which is even more ways than they’re getting screwed now." In other words, students could end up essentially upside down in a college education that will never be worth the cost. Feldstein's alternative is to explore the idea of a DIY education.

So here are some thoughts I had on that.

1. Unlike the housing bubble, where house values were raised by speculation, college really does cost that much. I mean no one is making a living flipping BAs. Maybe college shouldn't cost that much, maybe it should be funded differently to reduce the cost to students, but that seems different from a bubble, or at least it's a different kind of bubble. That said, I agree that this whole business is encouraged by the availability of these loans, so that is something shared with housing.

2. Maybe a purely economic ROI calculation shouldn't be the rationale for going to college. If you're going to college solely to make money designing, producing, marketing, and/or servicing widgets, then maybe socially we should expect WidgetCo to train you. They're the ones making money off your labor anyhow. Of course that's a radical shift in our culture, but so is a DIY education.

3. So let's say half of our current college students decided to stop going to college... I wonder what that would do to the unemployment rate? It would also shift the burden for health insurance, which they are currently getting from their parents. When these couple million new job seekers enter the market, what will happen to pay rates? All I'm suggesting here is that there could be other externalities that would arise from moving so many people out of higher education.

So if you look at UB's costs, it's about $8000/yr for tuition, fees, and books.Yes, there are other expenses for college like food, clothing, transportation, shelter: but I'm guessing you were going to need those things anyway. That's $32K for a four-year degree. Even if it went up every year (as it seems to these days), it would still be under $40K. Just as a point of comparison, the average cost of a new car in 2010 is $28K. Why are we happy to pay that much for a new car, which will be worth less than $5K as a trade-in in five years, and upset by the cost of college? Typically 16 million new cars are sold each year in the US. In 2008 that number crashed to 13.2M, resulting in a multi-billion dollar bailout of the auto industry as we all remember.

This conversation is far from over, but I'm already so tired of it. Yes, great, let's find a way to make college more affordable without reducing its quality. And yes, let's explore the DIY route, which can work for some people. I can think of at least 10-20 students I've had over the last 15 years that could probably succeed doing that. 

But don't tell me that a college education is less valuable than your gas-guzzling SUV. And if you have to come to college to get the job you want, then complain to the corporations. Colleges don't require you to get a degree in order to get some entry-level corporate job. The probably isn't that college isn't worth the money. The problem is that people are forced to pay for a college education that they don't actually want.

Some time ago (about three years past), I posted here about academic co-working spaces. And I won't claim to have made the kind of sustained study of the topic that Clay Spinuzzi has. However, sitting in my office today, the issue returned to my mind.Here's my office, fairly typical, at least in my experience. All that's missing from the image is the obligatory bookshelf that is just off to the right of this image.

Here's the good thing about this space... I'm betting the furniture is bullet-proof. I'm sure it won't burn. But otherwise, it's fairly useless, except as a surface. Right now, I'm sitting in the chair (which I must say is new and very comfortable) with the laptop on my lap, because the desk is really too high to be a good surface for typing (though it's ok if one is just surfing the web). I've got a phone (which I never use--voice mail goes straight to email). And a printer (which is nice, though a video camera or some new software would have been more useful to me). The file cabinet is empty... I think. I've never actually opened it. You can't quite see it, but there's another table behind the chair. I usually drop my coat and laptop bag on it.

So the space isn't really very good for writing or research. I do that at home, as I imagine most academics these days do. It's marginally acceptable for meeting students, though I prefer to meet with students in small groups and the space doesn't really accommodate that. I could probably dump all the furniture and set up a card table and chairs and have a more functional space than I currently do.

But my point is not to complain. I know that plenty of my colleagues have worse working spaces. In fact, the point I want to make is somewhat driven by that fact. I occupy this space less than 8 hours a week because, aside from being a place to be available for office hours or otherwise to meet with students outside class, I can't imagine any reason to be there. Of course meeting with students is an important part of the job; I'm just not sure I need a space that's dedicated 24/7 to me for that purpose.

I think it's possible to argue that the faculty office reflects an outdated model of labor, one that corporate America has shifted away from, at least in some instances. Humanities scholarship is still a solitary venture. And unfortunately I think our teaching and curriculum remain equally atomized. And in part I think that the office model reinforces that. 

I wonder what kinds of academic communities would evolve if our academic workspaces were more communal?

Of course we are all familiar with the story since Plato of the divide between philosophy and rhetoric. But I have to say that composition is a discipline that loves to ask philosophical questions of itself. Why does composition exist? What is its purpose? What makes for good writing/teaching/etc? To say nothing of the many ethical and political philosophical questions we ask of ourselves from adjunct hiring practices to preparing students to be good citizens.

That said, composition has never thought of its pedagogical task as philosophical in the conventional sense of making/teaching constative truth statements about writing (though our turns through cognitive and social science represent our scholarly forays into the constative). Instead, we have operated more in the area of performance and pragmatics. Unfortunately we have run afoul of the problem of the relation between the particular and the general. As we have seen in discussions not to be rehashed here, we have come to doubt the general value of the particular writing performances we have our students practice. The traditional notion of teaching students an understanding of particular writing skills that are then generalizable to future writing situations doesn't seem to hold. 

So while there's no doubt that, in composition, students can learn particular writing skills, discuss and write about important topics that interest them, and generally have a positive learning experience, the question of how this connects with future writing practices remains. Last night in my grad class, I was making the following observation. In the typical composition class, 10-20% (2-4 students) will walk in the door as demonstrably better writers than the others. At the end of the semester, they will leave the same way. I don't believe that composition classes can transform the long-term writing ability of students in any substantive or predictable way. And honestly, I think that's an unfair demand. What other course has to answer demands like that? After all, we are talking about a practice here and how our students practice writing once they leave composition cannot be our responsibility. 

Still, that observation evoked a strong reaction in the class. I know that in composition we like to tell stories of pedagogic transformation and link our teaching to narratives of citizenship and political empowerment.  But if we can set aside this predilection, can we be satisfied with the more modest goal of having students write some things and learn some things about writing that may or may not help them down the road. Do we really think that other gen ed courses offer more?

I don't.

As such, I was thinking about composition as philosophy... not in the Platonic, constative sense but in the monstrous Deleuzian sense. Deleuze and Guattari write (in What is Philosophy?) that "it does no credit to philosophy for it to present itself as a new Athens by falling back on Universals of communication that would provide rules for an imaginary mastery of the markets and the media (intersubjective idealism). Every creation is singular, and the concept as a specifically philosophical creation is always a singularity. The first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained." A few pages later, they write

The post-Kantians concentrated on a universal encyclopedia of the concept that attributed concept creation to a pure subjectivity rather than taking on the more modest task of a pedagogy of the concept, which would have to analyze the conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments. If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commercial professional training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third-an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism.

So here is where I see composition, as a pedagogy of the concept. I'm not going to claim that what I have in mind is what they had in mind. However, I do believe composition must stand between the will for universal communication on the one hand and the concept as a PR/marketing tool on the other. When Dan Pink talks about the arriving "conceptual age" in A Whole New Mind, I fear he means the latter. I prefer, like Deleuze and Guattari, to view the concept as singular... not as a particular linked to a generality, but as a singularity.

Of course composition is decidedly not that. It is mostly a desire for constative, encyclopedic knowledge, represented by the ubiquitous handbook. When it is not, it tends to slide quickly to the other pole, where writing instruction becomes professional training. This is not to say that composition is a philosophy course, a place where the discipline or content of philosophy is taught. This is not a post about what one says or does in the classroom as a composition instructor. Sure, D/G say that "composition is the sole definition of art," but by this they mean strictly aesthetic composition, compositions of sensation. Our compositions are certainly about invention and communication but not in the aesthetic sense, rather in the singular, conceptual sense. 

Composition is not about learning particular concepts so much as inventing singular concepts that fuel thought and writing. Those concepts ultimately fold back on those basic philosophical questions I raised earlier. Not so that we can answer them finally or so that we can demonstrate value in training writers as future professionals and/or citizens. To close this off in a dense fog of theory speak, composition operates in this way because it can only be the impossible arrival of the event of writing; impossible in the sense that, in its singularity, it cannot result from thought-out possibilities but only virtual potentialities. 

  

Call for Papers:

Rhetoric/Composition/Play: How Electronic Games Mediate Composition Theory and Practice (and Vice Versa) [Extended Deadline]

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In the last few days, I have noticed what might be called an "explosion" of activity on the forums for my writing class.

With 23 students, these where the statistics:
Thursday: 56 new posts.
Friday: 246 new posts.
Saturday: 100+ new posts.

What leads to a dozen discussion threads being so active? I'm not sure but I am going to explain what I do.

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