A place for Tumblr denizens of all sorts to discover and engage with rhetorical theory and practice related to digital composing, access, and identity. Run by Sara (she/her/hers), sometime grad student and first year writing instructor and longtime Tumblr-dweller.
So what is “rhetorical theory and practice related to digital composing, access, and identity”?
There are literally thousands of definitions of rhetoric depending on who you’re asking and why you need to know. Many introductory writing or speech classes centered on persuasion define rhetoric as “persuasion through the use of appeals” or “identifying all available means of persuasion”. A mentor of mine, a passionate advocate for social justice, favors the Roman senator Quintilian’s definition: A rhetor, someone who successfully uses rhetoric, is “a good man speaking well.”
For the purposes of this blog, I want to define rhetoric along the same lines as Robert Davis and Mark Shadle: As a practice that “creates new knowledge by posing questions differently and uncovering connections that have gone unseen.” Creative rhetors “[recast] traditional forms and commonplaces in new contexts and questions.” When we ask thoughtful questions about the assumptions we make and the things we take for granted, we can find new ways to understand ourselves, our world, and the people around us.
In this sense, we can think of rhetorical theories as a set of tools or guidelines for creating new questions and new ways of exploring things we encounter every day. Theories of digital rhetoric investigate the differences between digital texts and non-digital texts, how texts are composed in digital spaces, and how the ever-changing relationship between technology and communication shapes our world.
As a ‘digital native’ and a scholar of rhetoric and composition, or writing, I think it’s important to bring these theories to people who care about online community so that we can consider how we shape, and are shaped by, the online spaces we call home. This blog will offer a space for all of us to learn, talk, and listen about the rhetorical implications of Tumblr’s favorite subjects, from social justice, fashion, and fandom to copyright, AI, and Big Tech.
Proxy data—inferences (or assumptions) companies make about you based on data they do have about you, to fill in gaps.
Caretaker speech/cuteness in the service of power concealment—the use of simplified, cutesy language, as if speaking to children, to encourage feelings of false intimacy with tech products and conceal internal processes
Calculated publics—audiences produced by algorithms bringing them together based on assumptions about interests/demographics
Bot—code designed and used to automate tasks.
Questions:
What do companies like Apple gain from creating the pop up, opt in to be tracked model? How will these norms change in response to a more privacy-aware culture?
How can we make algorithmic processes (or at least their consequences) more visible to ourselves and to students, so that they become part of our media analyses?
Will the flood of AI, together with traditional bots, finally make the Internet more machine than human? How can we reckon with an era where not even our eyes can be trusted?
“Digitalized writing assessments are not necessarily better than their lower-tech predecessors, nor should we fall into the trap of false nostalgia that assumes older ways of assessing writing are somehow purer and thus superior to newer methods (59).”
“The rhetorical nature of reading and writing is the hill on which teachers of writing should make our stand against the pervasive notion that machines can do the work of assessing student writing and that they can do it better since they are objective and reliable (67).”
What are we defining as reliable? What are these mythical few reliable methods of mechanized assessment like?
Webber
“…by encouraging us to work publicly from the terms of reform, reframing dis- counts the power of realist style to narrow and constrain the participation of the publics served by reform. And by disciplining public critique, reframing discourages us from tapping into the public inquiry and participation that could authorize our professionalism as publicly representative (134).”
“When we create opportunities for parents, teachers, and administrators to assess the assessments, our critiques of machine scoring may not only issue expert denunciations but also foster public participation in reform (135).”
“A turn toward sponsoring students’ public inquiry would recognize that we in composition need a basis for our professionalism that is broader than the redirection of neoliberal reform or the reassertion of our expertise (139).”
If we aren’t basing our profession on our expertise, what in the world should we base it on?
Haswell
“I want to argue the obvious point that for writing teachers commercial machine scoring is largely a black box and the less obvious point that for writing teachers, even for those who participate in it, even for those who help construct and administer it, holistic scoring is also largely a black box (68).”
“…we need to avoid treating evaluation of writing in general as a black box, need to keep exploring every evaluative procedure until it becomes as much of a white box as we can make it (75).”
“We need to fight our own internal forces that work against good evaluation. Above all, we have to resist the notion of diagnostic response as rote drudgery, recognize it for what it is, a skill indeed—a difficult, complex, and rewarding skill requiring elastic intelligence and long experience. Good diagnosis of student writing should not be construed as easy, for the simple reason that it is never easy (77).”
It’s not obvious to me! What is holistic scoring in this context? Scoring by a group?
Potential Rabbit Holes (Methodological Insights) From William I. Wolff
Texts, terms, and methodologies Wolff mentioned I want to explore when I have time.
Example Autoethnography
Tweets from the April 4, 2012 concert at the Izod Center were chosen following Daniel Cavicchi's (1998) ethnographic approach where he began his study of fans at a concert he attended with his wife (pp. 22–37).
Social Media Scholarship
Liza Potts and Dave Jones (2011) have shown how writers using social media must navigate complex, often disruptive writing spaces in order to successfully access and move information. Like most Web 2.0 writing environments, Twitter requires "users to learn new vocabularies, recognize the characteristics of new writing spaces that contain multiple symbiotic genres, reconceive of the relationships among multiple applications, and be able to transfer knowledge of functionality from one application to the next" (Wolff, Fitzpatrick, & Youssef, 2009).
Porter (1986) broke down intertextuality into two instances: iterability (repeating fragments of text) and presupposition (presumptions a text makes about its context and readers) (p. 35). Bazerman (2003) broke intertextuality down even further into five instances, with the most relevant for our purposes being "using certain implicitly recognizable kinds of language, phrasing, and genres, [which] evokes particular social worlds where such language and language forms are used, usually to identify that text as part of those worlds" (p. 87).
Methodological Considerations
To complete axial coding, I adopted Kathy Charmaz's (2006) approach of using gerunds when coding. Charmaz (2006) argued that "adopting gerunds fosters theoretical sensitivity because these words nudge us out of static topics and into enacted processes. Gerunds prompt thinking about actions—large and small" (p. 136). Whereas the categories that emerged from open coding were "static topics," most that emerged from axial coding are composed as gerunds. Those that could not be formed into gerunds still suggest, as Charmaz (2006) advocated, "emphasis on actions and processes" (p. 136).
Michele Zappavigna (2011) took pains to describe the problematic nature of the term "community" when applied to non-hashtag keyword corpuses. It is also difficult for me to describe what I have collected as a community or even virtual community. Similarly, it is problematic to consider the collected tweets as an "information ecology," as Brian McNely (2010) was able to adapt Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O'Day's (1999) concept to describe tweets for a convention, because in my corpus there is no hashtag grounding the tweets in a specific virtual classification space (Wolff, 2015).
We Historicize: “Locate [our] activities within a history of [our] own life and/or fandom."
We Integrate: “[Incorporate] the language or actions of the…fan discourse community [into social media content].”
We Get Intertextual: We create things that “overtly or unconsciously [have their] full meaning in the understanding of a larger context.”
We Perpetuate: We engage in “the practice of being a fan,” maintaining an awareness of things that are happening in fandom spaces and at fandom events. We weave it all together into a continuing narrative of why we’re fans and what it means to be a fan, recognizing moments of magic, transformation, and celebration.
* (Wolff argues that not all fans and fan activity are the same, so perhaps I’m perverting his intent here, but I think there are enough commonalities for it to be worth considering how it relates to AG fandom.)
“Fans exist at the intersection of popular culture, interpretation, and textual production, where they ‘create social structures, ecologies, rituals, and traditions of their own’ and are ‘constantly making their own cultural environment from the cultural resources that are available to them’.”
"Fandom celebrates not exceptional texts but rather exceptional readings (though its interpretive practice makes it impossible to maintain a clear or precise distinction between the two).”
—Henry Jenkins
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, 2006
Accessibility, Universal Design, and Inter-Community Advocacy
I enjoyed the readings on accessibility and design, but I didn’t expect to learn much I didn’t already know—in retrospect, a deeply arrogant thought. I want to start by recording NC State University’s Principles For Universal Design (that is, design in which accessibility is an important part of the process, not an afterthought or a grudging addition:
“Equitable Use: The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
Flexibility in Use: The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.
Simple and Intuitive Use: Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user's experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
Perceptible Information: The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user's sensory abilities.
Tolerance for Error: The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.
Low Physical Effort: The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue.
Size and Space for Approach and Use: Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of user's body size, posture, or mobility (qtd. Dolmadge 13).”
To these, Jay Dolmadge adds an emphasis on assuming ability, demonstrating respect, and negotiating with the disabled people who will use your spaces to respond to their needs (14). These are all things I found self-evident, though appreciated. And yet, I initially dismissed our readings on caption design out of hand. Sure, it’s a neat thought experiment, but why would anyone want captions that did anything but convey information and get out of the way, allowing them to focus on the show (what a mentor of mine used to call writing for looking ‘through’, not looking ‘at’)? Certainly that’s what I want out of my captions, which I use frequently due to auditory processing issues.
Sean Zedneck’s “Designing Captions: Disruptive Experiments With Typography, Color, Icons, and Effects” was revelatory. Two moments in particular really stood out to me. The first, when Zedneck introduces the concept of meta captioning, or captioning media such as TVs, videos, etc within TV shows and movies:
“Meta captioning is disruptive. It highlights the mode of communication (as well as the primary stakeholders: deaf and hard of hearing viewers) over the meanings that are communicated through this mode. Meta captioning disrupts the very idea that captioning is always or simply about specific linguistic meanings [emphasis added].”
This concept immediately and powerfully resonated with me, as I remembered being sixteen years old, holding a Target catalog, and finding myself brought almost to tears by the image of a little girl using a gray walker with red handles, the same one I had had at her age, and smiling at the camera in her fairy costume and leaning her weight on her walker in a way I recognized. For the first time ever, someone like me was on a piece of junk mail. I was part of the ordinary landscape of media that surrounded me.
Reading Zedneck’s piece, I thought that metacaptioning must be like that—the sense that you and your lived experiences are mundane, a part of the fabric of society, not only recognized but widely recognized enough to show up in something we normally barely notice, that isn’t meant for widespread publicity. Moreover, the concept was a stark reminder that the background noise of a movie or TV show—something I wouldn’t normally think of as significant—is still a part of the experience of that piece of media that everyone deserves access to.
I was also struck when Zedneck, musing about how to caption the countdown of a bomb, says
“A beep is not a number. If equal access for all is the professed (but misunderstood) goal of captioning, then we have failed to provide access to the timer's beeping when we turn beeps into numbers. Indeed, by providing full access to the time remaining on the clock (instead of only partial and incomplete glimpses of the phone screen), we could actually be decreasing the amount of tension that viewers are expected to experience. How much time is remaining? I can't see the timer on his phone! Did it just say 01:37? A timer in the lower right removes doubt as it compromises the scene's dramatic tension. Perhaps an EKG wave or a countdown timer is not necessary or sufficiently helpful in these examples.”
It had never occurred to me before that the goal of captioning is (or should be) not simply to preserve the sense of what is happening or being said in a scene, but to preserve the tension and narrative resonance of the scene. Stories are and have always been so important to me, but I had never thought deeply before about what it would mean to tell stories in ways that offer full access to different groups of people (as Zedneck wisely reminds us, it’s not as simple as ‘access for all’. We would have to tell this story in a different way for someone with low vision). This set of readings has encouraged me to think more creatively about access to my work in the classroom and to the media I create when I’m just ‘playing around’, as well as serving as a reminder of the importance of not speaking over other disabled people’s experiences.
Copy(right) and Copy(wrong): Defending Fair Use, Protecting Ourselves and Our Students
As Janice Walker notes in Copy-rights and Copy-wrong, it’s so easy to save information and media files nowadays that we forget that what’s easily obtained wasn’t always meant to be publicly available. There are those, like Lawrence Lessig, who would argue that “information wants to be free”, and that we shouldn’t set up a legal system to criminalize things we know people will do anyway and that, ultimately, aren’t harming anyone. But, as much as I might be tempted to agree (so long as we make a distinction between huge conglomerates arbitrarily extending copyright every fifty years and individual artists, creators, and small businesses trying to make a living), I’m more immediately concerned with how I can teach students to protect themselves when using media for class or otherwise. The most common tool given to help prevent students from running afoul of copyright is these four principles for determining fair use:
What is the purpose of the use? Educational, nonprofit, and personal use are more likely to be considered fair than is commercial use.
What is the nature of the work being used? In most cases, imaginative and unpublished materials can be used only if you have the permission of the copyright holder.
How much of the copyrighted work is being used? If a writer uses a small portion of a text for academic purposes, this use is more likely to be considered fair than if he or she uses a whole work for commercial purposes.
What effect would the use have on the market for the original? The use of a work is usually considered unfair if it would hurt sales of the original.
(Maimon et al qtd. Westbrook 167)
Of course, these four principles are only a heuristic, and people can and do face copyright strikes for use that follows all four of these principles when they use material in a way the copyright holder doesn’t like. For that reason, Steve Westbrook argues, we shouldn’t take our concern with copyright to extremes.
By asking for permission to use copyrighted material even when we are reasonably confident it falls under fair use, we forfeit an opportunity to “deny ultimate power to holders of derivative rights, to recover a sense of agency and authority for the writer who relies on appropriative practices, and to counter abuses of copyright law (Westbrook 166).”
Janice Walker offers a few additional, more specific considerations for using copyrighted material in online spaces that can help students build multimedia projects with confidence (Walker 214):
1. Follow guidelines already established for published (i.e., print) sources, if possible. In other words, if you’re using textual materials (i.e. book excerpts or articles) where this would make sense.
2. Point to (i.e., link to) images, audio, and video files rather than downloading them, if possible. While I admire the intent behind this recommendation, to preserve as much context and ‘paper trail’ as possible, I do wonder if it could create accessibility concerns for disabled visitors/viewers/readers/participants, especially those using screenreaders.
3. Always cite sources carefully, giving as much information as possible to allow the user to relocate the source.
4. If in doubt, ask. In doing so, be sure to explain exactly what and how much you intend to use and what you intend to use it for.
She also argues that, as composition teachers, we have a particular obligation to use media mindfully and to educate other teachers and scholars about copyright. In the spirit of taking up that challenge, I reproduce here an account of the rules laid out in order for something to be considered fair classroom use under the TEACH act (Reyman qtd. Walker 209-210):
Use is limited to works that are performed (such as reading a play or showing a video) or displayed (such as a digital version of a map or a painting) during class activities. The TEACH Act does not apply to materials for students’ independent use and retention, such as textbooks or articles from journals.
The materials to be used cannot include those primarily marketed for the purposes of distance education (i.e., an electronic textbook or a multimedia tutorial).
Use of materials must occur “under the actual supervision of an instructor”.
Materials must be used “as an integral part of a class session.”
Use must occur as a “regular part of the systematic mediated instructional activities.”
Students must be informed that the materials they access are protected by copyright.
Further, it remains incumbent on faculty and/or administrators to ensure that the following restrictions are adhered to:
limiting access to material to only those students enrolled in the class;
ensuring that digital versions are created from analog works only if a digital version of the work is not already available;
employing technological measures to “reasonably prevent” retention of the work “for longer than the class session”;
developing copyright policies on the educational use of materials; and
providing informational resources for faculty, students, and staff that “accurately describe, and promote compliance with, the laws of the United States relating to copyright.”
Reading these guidelines in full motivates me to talk to my department head and seek out more detailed explanations from the federal government, because per these guidelines I’m pretty sure uploading a chapter of a copyrighted text for students to read for homework, which I and every teacher I know do all the time, wouldn’t be fair use because it’s not “under the actual supervision of an instructor”.
Quasi-object— an object of examination that has a temporary sense of stability, boundedness, but only because it’s interacting with things that speed up or slow down its natural dynamic movement into something we can perceive (Hawk “Introduction” 6).
Resounding— a process of circulation, transduction, and resonance that evokes the “re-sounding” of rhetoric, in which sound leaves the domain of the oral and enters the digital—a process that can only move forward (“Introduction” 15).
Byron Hawk breaks with tradition; rather than opening his book with a definition of rhetoric, he chooses to define the rhetorical as “an ongoing series of actions that continually modulates and modifies—a series of suasive vibrations that speed up, slow down, rearticulate, and invigorate ecologies of composition and their futurities… at stake in every circulation of energy, every material encounter, and every unfolding future (“Introduction” 15).” Frankly, I struggle to understand where this framing of rhetoric departs from convention—it seems to me that the entire point of the rhetorical ecologies model that’s become dominant in RhetComp is to imagine a continually evolving, moderating and moderated rhetoric.
Hawk offers quasi-objects as a solution to the field’s warring desires to expand our objects of study to encompass the myriad composing forms of the digital age and to maintain an object of study that is focused enough to allow us some kind of disciplinary integrity. If we were to turn our attention to the composing of quasi-objects, he argues, our object of study would then be “any process of being put together, from the smallest circumference to the broadest scale (“Chapter 1” 21).” I have no qualms with this idea, as such, but it again seems to me like a nifty label for a way we were already thinking.
Things start to get interesting when Hawk turns his new framework on the analysis of sound. When understood as a quasi-object, he argues, sound is fundamentally ontological—concerned with the nature of being (“Chapter 1” 35). I find myself wondering if thinking in terms of quasi-objects means that most objects of study are fundamentally ontological, since the processes that they are composing and being composed by are ongoing and to some extent subjective. For sound, at any rate, it solves the debate around whether sound is an energy that travels/circulates or an event that is experienced in a particular place. Hawk tells us
“As an entangled material process, the transduction of sound waves into electrical brain signals forms the basis of knowledge and folds back to contextualize and coproduce further transductions (“Chapter 1” 35).”
As best as I can understand, this means “Perceiving the circulating energy and translating it into meaning in the brain is itself an event, so the energy and the event of sound coproduce one another.” This makes sense to me; sound can be both deeply rooted in a given moment or memory and a kind of “wallpaper for the mind” that follows us through life, and arguably the former occurs when something happens to give background music/sounds a special meaning, which can then fade back into the background as a circulating energy.
In this sense, Hawk argues, ambient rhetoric models and networked rhetoric models can coexist, because networks are always being produced, transformed by, and transforming ambient rhetorics. Actor-networks, he argues, aren’t strong or permanent links between things, but traces of encounters between and among quasi-objects (and quasi-subjects, or are the two the same thing?) in the act of composing. The idea that networks were composed out of ambient rhetorics seemed intuitive to me, but the idea that networks contributed to the establishment and maintenance of ambient rhetorics felt more novel. I really struggled with Hawk’s work; perhaps because it calls attention to the “background noise” of assumptions I took for granted, much like I do the music I have almost constantly playing in my downtime.
Clothing, Claiming, and Negotiating: The Imagery of “Non-Normative” Bodies
Key (or New) Terms
Body schema— non-visual sensing of the body, including haptics, proprioception, or spatial awareness of the body and interoception, or awareness of the body’s internal state (Featherstone qtd. Manivannan 66)
Cartesian perspectivalism—the eye creates a two dimensional, artificial image of a 3D scene that is decontextualized, held up in a vacuum, and assumed to be a real, authentic reflection of reality (Hum 110-111).
Scopic regimes—culturally specific ways of interpreting what we see that seek to organize reality into one essential socio-historical construct (Hum 108).
Polymorphic literacy—a constantly evolving, multifaceted literacy made up of verbal, graphic, and mental (visual-kinesthetic space, reality in the absence of reality) (Fleckenstein 623).
I knew that my choice to host this blog on Tumblr, my first social media platform and online “home”, would eventually resonate with the contents of this course. I just didn’t expect it to come so soon! As I read Michelle Grue and Vyshali Manivannan’s pieces on role that clothing plays in navigating academia as a person of color or a visibly disabled person, I thought of my “main” blog. Just a tab away from where I’m composing this post waits a collection of historical and cultural fashions and aesthetics cultivated over the course of years, interspersed with quotations from literature, scholarship, and the work of historical interpreters, reflecting my own evolving relationship with history, fashion, academia, disability, and authenticity over the years. I find myself wondering what I would uncover if I examined that collection for markers of class and “authenticity”. How have I negotiated with what Sue Hum calls the “dynamic of universality”—have I looked for or considered the historical, social, and economic tides that brought content to my dash, or have I allowed what I saw to be reduced to a flattened, commodified “reality” of other cultures focused on what we in the West would like to believe we all, as humans, share?
Manivannan’s “But You Look So Well” brought this home for me in a very real way. Since I am visibly disabled, “dressing sick” or “dressing well” aren’t a concern for me in the same way as for her. I carry obvious, universally (Western) symbols of “sickness” with me everywhere. But I do find myself having to dress in ways that reinforce a sense of belonging in academia. At my undergraduate institution, I was once stopped on my way to class (in sweatpants and a t-shirt) and kindly asked if I needed help getting back to a program for special education high school students that sometimes ran on campus. In a dress and a blazer (especially the blazer, which seems to impress undergraduates) I am much more reliably clocked as an academic. As Manivannan notes, these more formal or ostensibly intellectual ways of dressing reflect a sense of neoliberal independence and “ownership” of pain that people with intellectual disabilities, especially, are stereotyped as not possessing. This speaks to Sue Hum’s assertion that Western society calls for an ostensibly objectivist way of seeing—what looks, to our sensibilities, as “authentic Chinese culture” is authentic, and what looks, to us, like an unintelligent person must be so.
Moreover, I’m aware that these standards are in some ways highly specific to me as a white woman. As Grue notes, the standard, “serious” styles that work well for white women seeking to be taken seriously can get Black women stereotyped as angry or unnecessarily severe. Grue’s piece offers a powerful reminder that clothing, like other imagery, is never neutral. I was especially struck by Grue’s reflection that Dr. Tamora “needs to perform a certain way to protect her body and her intellect, so she can do the work she wants to do.” I’ve often regarded signifiers or stereotypes of intellectualism (books, overtly academic vocabulary) similarly, as armor I can wield against societal stereotypes and prejudices surrounding the “useless”, naïve disabled person—a category I fought not to be included in growing up.
Now, I strive to conceptualize my disability as a key part of what Fleckenstein might call a home place—a kind of mental map that integrates all aspects of my disability and identity in a way I can return to, draw language from, to build solidarity with others rather than defining myself in opposition to others. Perhaps especially in online spaces, I think it pays to be aware of how our imagery (mental, visual, verbal, or sartorial) positions us in relation to others (the Other); online, as elsewhere, our presentation is deeply rooted in identity and experience, even when it isn’t intended to align directly with our everyday selves.
One of the most striking aspects of my arrival at Florida State University was a kind of speech I heard Michael Neal, the Rhetoric and Composition director, give to varied groups of graduate “English majors”—creative writers, literary scholars, and rhetoricians—several times during my first month there. It always began along these lines: “Hi, I’m Michael Neal, the RhetComp director. I know those of you in other specialties might not think RhetComp is very important, or even have heard of us, but…” Although my brief encounters with composition pedagogy had alluded to some controversy, I had never imagined an academic introducing himself to other academics with such a disclaimer. As I’ve settled into graduate school and begun to explore Rhetoric and Composition in more depth, I’ve come to understand Michael’s introduction not as a form of self-disparagement but as a reaction to narratives of place and purpose that have been with our discipline since its inception.
In The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925, John Brererton reports that just a few years after their inception in the 1870s, composition courses were already being criticized for “not making a difference in studentwriting, for being expensive in terms of a teacher's time and energy, and for distracting faculty efforts from more important things.” I couldn’t help but laugh when I read those words. I heard in them the echo of Blake Smith’s January 2023 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which he indignantly asserts that students who visit college writing centers, traditionally run by composition scholars, “ought to demonstrate a guaranteed minimum level of writing ability, leaving instructors in other courses free to focus on teaching their discipline-specific content without having to explain, yet again, the purpose of topic sentences.” More than a century on, composition is surrounded by the same narratives. The teaching of writing, we are told, is busywork—a simple skill to be acquired, not one that serious scholars should concern themselves with. And yet somehow we have spent nearly 150 years failing to pass along this skill and prepare students for “real work”.
In many ways, we’ve internalized this criticism and come to direct it at our own efforts in teaching, composing, and rhetorical analysis. Kathleen Blake Yancey argues that the traditional “neo-Platonian” model of composition instruction through individual relationships with the student “is doomed”, and has been for 100 years. Similarly, Alexander Reid posits that the “traditional humanistic paradigms” at the foundation of rhetoric are no longer suitable for the post-industrial age. In both cases, they offer digital rhetorics as the solution. For Yancey, digital rhetorics manifest as a multimodal composition curriculum which supplants writing for the instructor with writing for the “real world” in a variety of digital genres. For Reid, the exploration of digital rhetorics allows for a speculative rhetoric that privileges our relationships with nonhumans over purely human perspectives. In so doing, he argues, it can address concerns of the digital age that humanism isn’t equipped to deal with and restore the relevance of the English department. Both speak to RhetComp’s urge to discard our humanistic roots in favor of computational, algorithmic methods that we hope will win us recognition as a “real” discipline. Otherwise, we worry about being seen as anti-science or, in Yancey’s words, “as irrelevant as faculty professing in Latin.”
On the other hand, there are figures like Douglas Eyman, who sees digital rhetorics as an analytical method firmly rooted in public, dynamic, interactive conceptions of classical humanist rhetorics. A digital rhetoric framed in terms of computation and scientific/mathematical analysis, he argues, would reduce rhetoricians to technicians applying technique to a representation of discourse that doesn’t come close to the complexity of the real world. As Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes argue, much thought is required to bring multimodal, digital composition into the world of rhetoric without forcing it into the mold of traditional textual analysis. In the process, I would add, we turn ourselves into mere tool-users, applying universal principles of writing to some object.
While I disagree with Eyman—I think there can be a place for computational analytics in rhetoric—I’m also reluctant to cosign Reid’s dismissal of our roots. It seems to me that these tensions are driven by a constant quest for visibility, to justify our presence alongside what is relevant, impactful, and highly visible elsewhere. I find myself wondering if it’s possible to make peace with our relative invisibility—to say “We’re RhetComp, and you probably haven’t heard of us because we’re so deeply embedded in everything you do that it’s hard to see us. Let us show you how to recognize the context, considerations, and possibilities driving the way you communicate, so that you can decide how a text ‘works’ and what it needs to do next.” In other words, we could claim our mundanity and humanistic origins proudly, positioning ourselves as a conduit by which people can both come to understand individual artifacts and composing processes and learn apply that knowledge to the wider world. I’m sure someone else has proposed it before me, but I’m curious how the individual perspectives embedded in multimodal compositions have been considered by theorists so far.
The speculative rhetorical model posits that we can only know the world in ways bounded and contextualized by our own experience of being. For this reason, a speculative rhetoric approach tries to pay careful attention to the perspectives, roles, and experiences of nonhumans, since communication inevitably takes place among a vast array of nonhuman actants. Speculative rhetorician Andrew Reid asserts that “A speculative rhetoric begins with recognizing that language is nonhuman.” At first, I couldn’t begin to imagine what this must mean. Sure, animals communicate, but surely language—expressive, symbolic communication with defined rules—must be an exclusively human phenomenon.
I read Reid’s short list of scholars cited (Alexander Galloway, Richard Grusin, Bruno Latour, Alan Lui, and Quentin Meillasoux) aloud to GPT-4 and asked it to tell me what they were known for, in hopes that knowing the background Reid was drawing from would help me contextualize such a bizarre statement.
It confirmed that Bruno Latour is best known for actor-network theory, as I had thought. Meillasoux it introduced as a speculative realist philosopher. Lui it defined as a scholar of “language as a digital-cultural phenomenon, influenced by both human creativity and digital technology.” Grusin, it said, was known for proposing that new technologies “remediate” and refashion older ones. Galloway, it said, “explores how digital protocols, the rules and standards governing digital networks, shape interactions and communications.” A quick look at Google Scholar and the scholars’ university webpages confirmed that its characterizations were fairly accurate.
Altogether, I could only conclude that these scholars affirm language as a constructed, constantly evolving phenomenon, although I still couldn’t see how the ability to influence human actions would equate to an equal ownership of language. It may be old-fashioned, but at present I’m still prepared to embrace Kenneth Burke’s definition of man as “the symbol-using animal.” As far as I know, there’s no evidence that animals can grasp the abstract symbolism inherent in language as well as we can.
However, I do think Gunther Kress’s “Multimodality” afforded me with another avenue for making sense of Reid’s perspective, at least. Kress asserts that “all texts are multimodal”, where ‘text’ seems to be doing a great deal of heavy lifting to encompass practically anything into which meaning can be encoded and decoded. For him, the multimodality of verbal speech arises from its inclusion of “pitch variation; pace; stress; phonological units (produced by a complex of organs); lexis; sequencing (as syntax); etc.” In other words, any element which can have a role in imparting meaning is part of the mode (or means) of linguistic communication. Since some animals can intentionally adapt these facets of communication to a rhetorical context (i.e. cats having a less babyish meow around one another than humans), I can see the argument that many animals possess a kind of language in that way.
But since Kress’s many example pictures and diagrams stress the representational quality of human languages (in which he apparently includes visuals, which he says can develop a kind of grammar) even when it’s completely divorced from written or spoken words, I’m still inclined to say that animals have communicative skills but not language. I’m curious whether anyone knows of any animals capable of abstraction.
Similarly, I wonder at what point we could consider the product of generative AI to be language (or perhaps I should say a form of communication, period). There’s no conscious intent behind it, it’s an actant and not an actor, but it arguably works entirely in abstractions (it doesn’t have meaningful, individual experience of what anything is!) and it certainly considers its modal elements, as many generative AI models will show by displaying alternate response options.
