Design Research as Possibility

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Oct 102011

The con­se­quences of this are legion. It means that pro­to­co­log­i­cal analy­sis must focus not on the sci­ences of mean­ing (representation/interpretation/reading), but rather on the sci­ences of pos­si­bil­ity (physics or logic)… (52)

This is from Alex Gal­loway’s Pro­to­col, which I’ve been reread­ing dur­ing the last few days. Galloway’s book is closely related to the project I’m cur­rently work­ing on. The pri­mary dif­fer­ence is that I’m focus­ing on the rela­tion­ship of pro­to­col and stan­dard­iza­tion to writ­ing and rhetoric whereas his argu­ment focused on pro­to­col and stan­dard­iza­tion through the lens of crit­i­cal social theory.

This pas­sage is sig­nif­i­cant in the way that it turns the inter­pre­tive method on its head. For Gal­loway, pro­to­co­log­i­cal (stan­dards) analy­sis explores pos­si­bil­ity rather than under­ly­ing mean­ing. This type of analy­sis explores pos­si­ble worlds that may not yet exist as a type of research, but are enabled through media, or in my favored ter­mi­nol­ogy: infrastructure.

Gal­loway calls this type of research hacking.

Before read­ing this, I’d formed an uncom­fort­able alliance with design study research, some­thing I’m not trained in, but found use­ful because of the its focus on pro­duc­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties rather than inter­pret­ing exist­ing texts. As I’ve worked on my own research, I’ve found it odd that rhetor­i­cal stud­ies hadn’t fre­quently taken the turn to pos­si­bil­i­ties and text pro­duc­tion more enthu­si­as­ti­cally. Rhetoric had his­tor­i­cally at one point been focused on cre­at­ing heuris­tics for pro­duc­ing new texts, not inter­pret­ing old ones. While a few rhetori­cians pur­sue that idea (Kaufer and Butler’s Rhetoric and the Arts of Design for exam­ple) and oth­ers have sug­gested that rhetor­i­cal analy­sis is pri­mar­ily a heuris­tic for pro­duc­tion rather than inter­pre­ta­tion (like in Dilip Gaonkar’s infa­mous attack on the rhetoric of sci­ence), research in rhetor­i­cal stud­ies in the mod­ern uni­ver­sity has largely remained a crit­i­cal act of inter­pre­ta­tion. I’m not sure why that is, per­haps there is more polit­i­cal power in the human­i­ties for being an inter­pre­tive dis­ci­pline rather than pro­duc­tive one. Any­way, I had taken to read­ing design schol­ar­ship because it embraces pro­duc­tion as research rather instead of the inter­pre­tive crit­i­cal approach.

Galloway’s work is moti­vat­ing because he takes the pro­duc­tive per­spec­tive from within media stud­ies, which is more closely aligned with rhetoric than design is, at least in North America.

Posted by NRJ at 6:59 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Bowker's "Time, Money, and Biodiversity."

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Jun 302011

Bowker, Geof­frey C. “Time, Money, and Bio­di­ver­sity.” In Global Assem­blages: Tech­nol­ogy, Pol­i­tics, and Ethics as Anthro­po­log­i­cal Prob­lems, edited by John D. Kelly, Beat­rice Jau­regui, Sean T. Mitchell, and Jeremy Wal­ton, 107–123. Malden, MA: Black­well, 2005.

Geoff Bowker is a fas­ci­nat­ing per­son to read. In his writ­ing, he con­sis­tently tran­si­tions from his­tor­i­cal analy­sis to crit­i­cal the­ory, which makes him both a plea­sure to read and frus­trat­ing as hell. At some points, his books are com­pletely lucid, and then they’ll throw in an aside, foot­note, or sin­gle sen­tence that seems com­pletely inde­ci­pher­able. It’s awe­some, because he draws read­ers in and then makes them think really hard.

This chap­ter from the Global Assem­blages col­lec­tion (I believe it also informs much of his book Mem­ory Prac­tices in the Sci­ences, too) is largely about bio­di­ver­sity and eco­log­i­cal pol­icy, but the parts that are most intrigu­ing are his dis­cus­sions about modal­i­ties for deal­ing with bio­di­ver­sity: essen­tially, the the­ory behind the research.  By modal­ity, I’m assum­ing he is talk­ing about sig­nif­i­cant crit­i­cal points for under­stand­ing bio­di­ver­sity and related infra­struc­tures. Because he’s inter­ested in com­plex infor­ma­tional ecosys­tems that are clas­si­fied and stan­dard­ized by biol­o­gists, ecol­o­gists, etc, etc, this paper dove­tails well with his other writ­ing on infor­ma­tion infrastructure.

He describes two modal­i­ties that are typ­i­cally used for talk­ing about bio­di­ver­sity. The first he calls implo­sion, which I’ll focus on here. (In case you’re curi­ous, the sec­ond is clas­si­fi­ca­tion and tax­on­omy, which means mak­ing huge lists and hier­ar­chies to cat­a­log all types of flora and fauna). Implo­sion describes a way of assign­ing value to ecosys­tems and ecosys­tem com­po­nents. Implo­sion involves cre­at­ing some­thing akin to a cur­rency for talk­ing about bio­di­ver­sity. If you’re famil­iar with the car­bon trad­ing con­cept, it seems that the same form of dis­course is used to assign value for bio­di­ver­sity. Bowker explains implo­sion by using money as a metaphor. In Bowker’s descrip­tion, sci­en­tists come up with a cur­rency that will enable exchange among dif­fer­ent parts of ecosys­tems. Implo­sion works by pro­ject­ing a cer­tain type of value across dif­fer­ent things and sug­gest­ing that those things are actu­ally sim­i­lar (or at least focus­ing on one sim­i­lar aspect). For instance, sug­gest­ing that tiger is worth more than that flea, for exam­ple, because the num­ber of species of fleas far out­num­ber that of felines.  If a flea species goes away, it’s not as impor­tant as if pan­thera tigris dis­ap­pears. After all, we have dozens of sim­i­lar flea species and not nearly as many tigers.  Ecosys­tems are reduced to exchange. (This exam­ple was hypo­thet­i­cal — don’t quote me on it).

Clearly, there are some issues with this. For one, how would one talk about the fact that a cer­tain flea species might have a sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship with the tiger and that allow­ing habi­tats of that flea species to be altered would sig­nif­i­cantly alter the tiger species. What if a less valu­able ecosys­tem part actu­ally enables things that would seem more valu­able. Sec­ond, how can a value exchange rate deal with the con­cept of time? Species emerge and die off fre­quently. Can a value exchange rate han­dle talk­ing about bio­di­ver­sity in terms of time, evo­lu­tion, or species adap­tion? Last, and maybe most sig­nif­i­cantly, to assign value to ecosys­tem parts simul­ta­ne­ously cre­ates a self/other rela­tion­ship with nature. Are humans left out of dis­cus­sions of value? Do we have a value as well? Does that include all types of humans? If so, do we label our­selves as the most valu­able part of ecosys­tems? Why?

The most inter­est­ing part of this chap­ter for me was when he dis­cussed how peo­ple con­sid­ered indige­nous will often be swept up into the dis­course as the other side of a self/other binary. That is, in the lan­guage of value and bio­di­ver­sity, some peo­ple are less “human” and more “nature” than oth­ers. Fas­ci­nat­ing and scary at the same time.

Bowker does an awe­some job of show­ing the real world impli­ca­tions of implo­sion for bio­di­ver­sity dis­course, but this is also an inter­est­ing way to think about a huge num­ber of other infor­ma­tion infra­struc­tures. For exam­ple, the con­cept of implo­sion could work well for think­ing about tech­ni­cal stan­dard­iza­tion of con­tem­po­rary tech­nolo­gies. Tech­ni­cal stan­dards work to flat­ten real world dif­fer­ences into one value exchange rate. Even tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments like those of the W3C and ISO, despite their usu­ally utopian claims for a bet­ter tomor­row, embed pri­or­i­ties and val­ues that do work to dis­em­power some groups, objects, and ecolo­gies. (Patrick Feng wrote a good overview of stan­dards — check it out). Bowker’s chap­ter is a great read.

Posted by NRJ at 11:09 am Tagged with: , , , , ,

Metacriticism: A Bibliography of Criticism of Rhetorical Criticism

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May 272011

What does it mean to be a rhetor­i­cal critic? One way to find out is to read about what crit­ics say about rhetor­i­cal crit­i­cism. There has cer­tainly been a lot of

This list was started by Leah Cec­ca­relli at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton when I took an inde­pen­dent read­ing sem­i­nar with her. My orig­i­nal inten­tion was to use it to write my own meta­crit­i­cism, but it’s a dif­fi­cult genre to break into. In addi­tion to know­ing a lot about rhetor­i­cal crit­i­cism, you also need to be able to nav­i­gate the often polar­ized per­spec­tives of rhetor­i­cal crit­ics. I’ve added to the orig­i­nal list, and will con­tinue to edit it as I read more.

  • Baskerville, Bar­net. “Selected Writ­ings on the Crit­i­cism of Pub­lic Address.” West­ern Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 110–118.
  • Black, Edwin. “A Note on The­ory and Prac­tice in Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.”West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 44, no. 4 (1980): 331–336.
  • Black, Edwin. Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism: A Study in Method. New York: Macmil­lan, 1965.
  • Blair, Car­ole. “Reflec­tions on Crit­i­cism and Bod­ies: Para­bles from Pub­lic Places.” West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 65, no. 3 (2001): 271–294.
  • Blau, Joseph L. “Pub­lic Address as Intel­lec­tual Rev­e­la­tion.” West­ern Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 77–83.
  • Browne, Stephen Howard. “Response: Con­text in Crit­i­cal The­ory and Prac­tice.” West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 65, no. 3 (2001): 330–335.
  • Bryant, Don­ald C. “Of Style.” West­ern Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 103–110.
  • Camp­bell, John Angus. “Between the Frag­ment and the Icon: Prospect for a Rhetor­i­cal House of the Mid­dle Way.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 54, no. 3 (1990): 346–376.
  • Camp­bell, John Angus. “Spe­cial Issue on Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 54, no. 3 (1990): 249–251.
  • Camp­bell, Kar­lyn Kohrs. “Cul­tural Chal­lenges to Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 358–361.
  • Cec­ca­relli, Leah. “Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism and the Rhetoric of Sci­ence.” West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 65, no. 3 (2001): 314–329.
  • Clark, Robert D. “Lessons from the Lit­er­ary Crit­ics.” West­ern Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 83–89.
  • Con­dit, Celeste M. “Con­tem­po­rary Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism: Diverse Bod­ies Learn­ing New Lan­guages.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 368–372.
  • Con­dit, Celeste. “Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism and Audi­ences: The Extremes of McGee and Leff.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 54, no. 3 (1990): 330–345.
  • Cox, J. Robert. “On ‘Inter­pret­ing’ Pub­lic Dis­course in Post-Modernity.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 54, no. 3 (1990): 317–329.
  • deWin­ter, Jen­nifer. “A Bib­li­o­graphic Syn­the­sis of Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 388–407.
  • Dick­in­son, Greg. “Intro­duc­tion to Spe­cial Issue.” West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 74, no. 1 (2010): 1–3.
  • Dow, Bon­nie J. “Response: Crit­i­cism and Author­ity in the Artis­tic Mode.” West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 65, no. 3 (2001): 336–348.
  • Enos, Richard Leo. “Clas­si­cal Rhetoric and Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 361–365.
  • Enos, Richard Leo. “Intro­duc­tion: The Inclu­sive­ness of Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 357–358.
  • Far­rell, Thomas B. “Crit­i­cal Mod­els in the Analy­sis of Dis­course.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion44, no. 4 (1980): 300–314.
  • Fisher, Wal­ter R. “Genre: Con­cepts and Appli­ca­tions in Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 44, no. 4 (1980): 288–299.
  • Foss, Sonja K. “Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism as Synec­doche for Agency.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 375–379.
  • Gaonkar, Dilip P. “Object and Method in Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism: From Wichelns to Leff and McGee.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 54, no. 3 (1990): 290–316.
  • Gaonkar, Dilip P. “The Ora­tor­i­cal Text: The Enigma of Arrival.” In Texts in Con­text: Crit­i­cal Dia­logues on Sig­nif­i­cant episodes in Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Rhetoric, edited by Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauf­feld, 255–276. Davis, CA: Her­mago­ras Press, 1989.

    • Gron­beck, Bruce E. “Dra­matur­gi­cal The­ory and Crit­i­cism: The State of the Art (or Sci­ence?).” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 44, no. 4 (1980): 315–330.

  • Gross, Alan G., and William M. Keith. Rhetor­i­cal Hermeneu­tics: Inven­tion and Inter­pre­ta­tion in the Age of Sci­ence. Albany: State Uni­ver­sity of New York Press, 1997.
  • Hasian Jr., Marouf. “Silences and Artic­u­la­tions in Mod­ern Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 65, no. 3 (2001): 295–313.
  • Henry, David. “Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism: The State of the Art Revis­ited.” West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 65, no. 3 (2001): 229–231.
  • Hochmuth, Marie. “Burkean Crit­i­cism.” West­ern Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 89–95.
  • Jasin­ski, James. “The Sta­tus of The­ory and Method in Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 65, no. 3 (2001): 249–270.
  • Jensen, Richard J. “Ana­lyz­ing Social Move­ment Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 372–375.
  • King, Andrew. “The State of Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 365–368.
  • Leff, Michael C. “Inter­pre­ta­tion and the Art of the Rhetor­i­cal Critic.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 44, no. 4 (1980): 337–349.
  • Leff, Michael C. “Intro­duc­tion.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 44, no. 4 (1980): 264.
  • Leff, Michael. “Lin­coln at Cooper Union: Neo-Classical Crit­i­cism Revis­ited.” West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 65, no. 3 (2001): 232–248.
  • Leff, Michael. “Things Made by Words: Reflec­tions on Tex­tual Crit­i­cism.” Quar­terly Jour­nal of Speech 78, no. 2 (1992): 223–31.
  • Leff, Michael, and Andrew Sachs. “Words the Most Like Things: Iconic­ity and the Rhetor­i­cal Text.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 54, no. 3 (1990): 252–273.
  • Med­hurst, Mar­tin J. “Thirty Years Later: A Critic’s Tale.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 379–383.
  • McGee, Michael Calvin. “Text, Con­text, and the Frag­men­ta­tion of Con­tem­po­rary Cul­ture.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 54, no. 3 (1990): 274.
  • Mohrmann, G. P. “Elegy in a Crit­i­cal Grave-Yard.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 44, no. 4 (1980): 265–273.
  • Mor­ris, Charles E. “(Self-)Portrait of Prof. R. C.: A Ret­ro­spec­tive.” West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 74, no. 1 (2010): 4–42.
  • Nilsen, Thomas R. “Inter­pre­tive Func­tion Of the Critic.” West­ern Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 70–76.
  • Noth­s­tine, William L., Car­ole Blair, and Gary Copeland. Crit­i­cal Ques­tions: Inven­tion, Cre­ativ­ity, and the Crit­i­cism of Dis­course and Media. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
  • Por­rovec­chio, Mark J. “To Hope Till Hope Cre­ates: A Reply to ‘What Does Prag­matic Melior­ism Mean for Rhetoric?’” In West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, 74:61–67.
  • Red­ding, W. Charles. “Extrin­sic and Intrin­sic Crit­i­cism.” West­ern Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 96–103.
  • Riches, Suzanne Vol­mar, and Mal­colm O. Sil­lars. “The Sta­tus of Move­ment Crit­i­cism.” West­ern Jour­nal of Speech Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 44, no. 4 (1980): 275–287.
  • Stroud, Scott R. “What Does Prag­matic Melior­ism Mean for Rhetoric?” In West­ern Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, 74:43–60.
  • Wichelns, Her­bert A. “The Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism of Ora­tory.” In Stud­ies in Rhetoric and Pub­lic Speak­ing in Honor of James Albert Winans, 181–216. New York: Cen­tury Com­pany, 1925.
  • Wrage, Ernest J. “Crit­i­cism and Pub­lic Address.” West­ern Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 69–70.
  • Zaref­sky, David. “Knowl­edge Claims in Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 58, no. 4 (2008): 629–640.
  • Zaref­sky, David. “Reflec­tions on Rhetor­i­cal Crit­i­cism.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 383–387.
Posted by NRJ at 3:06 pm Tagged with: , , , ,

What is a rhetorical perspective?

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May 202011

Dur­ing my the­sis defense, a com­mit­tee mem­ber asked this ques­tion. I found myself stum­bling for an answer, not because I didn’t have one, but because I had too many. Dur­ing the defense, I answered by sug­gest­ing that a rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive was one indebted to the ever-changing inter­ests of pro­fes­sion­als who iden­tify as rhetori­cians. In my case, I’m most indebted to the dis­ci­pli­nary his­to­ries of rhetoric that emerge from the field of speech com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the United States.

I wasn’t happy with that answer, because it’s not pal­pa­ble enough. The idea is too abstract to be applic­a­ble dur­ing the hands-on work of a project. After my com­mit­tee member’s ques­tion, I real­ized that my own rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive had become back­grounded in order to focus on more elab­o­rate parts of research. Like the idea that Gadamer refers to as prej­u­dices, my rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive was some­thing I had stopped reflect­ing on.

Given that, I’ve been col­lect­ing var­i­ous def­i­n­i­tions from text­books, arti­cles, and con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings, look­ing for one that I can rec­og­nize in my own work. I’ll be adding more as I find them. Some of these are more sophis­ti­cated than oth­ers, but they’ve all appeared in pub­li­ca­tion. Enjoy, and please add to the list in the com­ment section.

  • The shift towards a tran­scen­dent def­i­n­i­tion of rhetor­i­cal crit­i­cism is likely to be accom­pa­nied and rein­forced by a shift towards an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary con­cep­tion of the “rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive.… Sim­i­larly, as more inter­dis­ci­pli­nary links are fash­ioned, the encom­pass­ing con­cept of effec­tive­ness may increas­ingly func­tion as one of the dom­i­nant def­i­n­i­tional fea­tures employed to char­ac­ter­ize the rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive. (Brock, Scott, & Chese­bro, 1989, pg. 514)
  • The bias of a rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive is its empha­sis on and its con­cern with the resources avail­able in lan­guage and in peo­ple to make ideas clear and cogent, to bring con­cepts to life, to make them salient for peo­ple. A rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive is inter­ested in what influ­ences or per­suades peo­ple. (Camp­bell & Hux­man, 2003, pg. 2)
  • A rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive, then, focuses on social truths, that is, on the kinds of truths that are cre­ated and tested by peo­ple in groups and that influ­ence social and polit­i­cal deci­sions.… From its begin­nings, this empha­sis on social truths has been the dis­tinc­tive qual­ity of a rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive. (Camp­bell & Hux­man, 2003, pg. 2)
  • … to take a rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive means to assume that rhetoric itself is not good or bad, but instead is a vehi­cle that can be used for either (or both) of these pur­poses. (Cis­neros, McCau­liff, & Beasly, 2009, pg. 233)
  • This is the sec­ond premise of a rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive: that dis­course, lan­guage, and per­sua­sive sym­bols are influ­en­tial tools within a soci­ety. In short, rhetoric mat­ters. (Cis­neros, McCau­liff, & Beasly, 2009, pg. 234)
  • A rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive … calls atten­tion to the ways in which lan­guage use crys­tal­lizes rela­tions between read­ers and writ­ers. Such a per­spec­tive also brings into focus the extent to which the ways authors posi­tion them­selves within a cer­tain social space is con­tin­gent upon a.) author­ity … b.) the pur­poses that bring writ­ers together within a par­tic­u­lar social forum, and c.) the topic of their dis­course or task at hand. (Greene & Ack­er­man, 1995, pg. 383)
  • In the pub­lic under­stand­ing of sci­ence, rhetoric has two dis­tinct roles. It is both a the­ory capa­ble of analysing pub­lic under­stand­ing and an activ­ity capa­ble of cre­at­ing it. From the per­spec­tive of its first role, Aristotle’s Rhetoric is pri­mar­ily a trea­tise on pub­lic under­stand­ing; from the per­spec­tive of its sec­ond, it is pri­mar­ily a hand­book for speak­ers seek­ing to co-create pub­lic under­stand­ing. (Gross, 1994, pg. 5)
  • A rhetor­i­cal model of the pub­lic sphere would regard each of these engage­ments as part of the ensem­ble of dis­course that con­sti­tutes civil soci­ety, exam­in­ing each encounter as part of a social dia­logue on appro­pri­at­ing his­toric­ity. A rhetor­i­cal model reveals rather than con­ceals the emer­gence of publics as a process. (Hauser, 1999, pg. 49)
  • A rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive … draws on the rich rhetor­i­cal her­itage of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion that orig­i­nated with the writ­ings of ancient Greeks and Romans. (Heath, 2000, pg. 69)
  • Whereas a pub­lic spheres approach may end itself to reify­ing rigid boundaries—between inside and out­side, us and them, dom­i­nant and resistant—a pub­lic modal­i­ties per­spec­tive aims not only to fore­ground the flu­id­ity of iden­ti­ties across time and space, but also rec­og­nize how spe­cific con­texts of time and space con­sti­tute our iden­ti­ties .… A the­o­ret­i­cal approach that rec­og­nizes publics as processes must value stud­ies that reveal failed attempts at pub­lic­ity, block­ades to democ­racy, and mar­gin­al­ized sto­ries of cri­tique. (Pez­zullo & Depoe, 2010, pg. 103)
  • A rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive includes a vari­ety of method­olog­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal approaches .… a rhetor­i­cal approach … often shares the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics … crit­ics focus on texts of writ­ten or spo­ken words. Nonethe­less, non­ver­bal forms of argu­ment are also being ana­lyzed by rhetorical/argumentation crit­ics .… rhetor­i­cal crit­ics are guided by the belief that our com­mu­nica­tive inter­ac­tions are epis­temic and inform most of what we come to know about the world. As a result, rhetoric/argument is impor­tant because it is both the how and what of socially-constructed real­ity. Rhetorical/argumentation analy­sis is thus also ide­o­log­i­cal analy­sis, since all under­stand­ings of the world serve par­tic­u­lar inter­ests. (Schi­appa, 2002, pg. 67)
  • A “rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive increases our under­stand­ing about how dis­cur­sive lin­guis­tic sym­bols and non-discursive aes­thetic sym­bols func­tion together to com­mu­ni­cate and per­suade …” (Sell­now & Sell­now, 2001, pg. 395)
Posted by NRJ at 6:55 am Tagged with: , ,

Notes: Virtual Alterity and the Reformatting of Ethics. Hawhee and Gunkel

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Jul 152008

I’m still per­plexed by the argu­ment of this essay–not exactly sure what to make of it.

Gunkel, D & Hawhee, D (2003) Vir­tual Alter­ity and the Refor­mat­ting of Ethics. Jour­nal of Mass Media Ethics. 18(3/4), 173–193.

They are argu­ing that tra­di­tional forms of ethics, “ethics that priv­i­lege rea­son, truth mean­ing, and a fixed con­cep­tion of ‘the human,’” are recon­fig­ured by newer tech­nolo­gies. The essay upends truth as an unin­tel­li­gi­ble con­cept when con­sid­ered from the posi­tion of the posthu­man. Here’s my sim­pli­fied sketch of the argument.

  1. Man has tra­di­tion­ally been described as the rea­son­ing ani­mal. This has set man apart from nature, specif­i­cally machines and ani­mals (obvi­ous dualism)
  2. Cit­ing Har­away, they say that com­put­ers blur the bound­ary of the human as the rea­son­ing ani­mal. In a way, machines, here as com­put­ers, are able to rea­son as well.
  3. Tra­di­tion­ally ethics is the domain of the rea­son­ing ani­mal. (omi­nous music)
  4. In the essay, the cyborg rep­re­sents the “ero­sion of the bound­aries that have char­ac­ter­ized the human.”
  5. Same prob­lem with ethics. Machines, humans, cyborgs, oh my.

This next part is where I start to get con­fused. They start riff­ing on emoti­cons (with some hilar­i­ous asides).

  1. Emoti­cons are used to “cor­rect meanings.”
  2. This would some­how assume that some­thing isn’t present dur­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion (Derrida’s beef).

OK. no clue how that sec­tion fit in. Per­haps it will become clearer later. For now:

  1. Com­put­ers, to some extent, oper­ate with an ethics of decep­tion. They present false images of vir­tual real­ity, and more impor­tantly for this essay, who could be com­mu­ni­cat­ing (com­puter, human, pup­pies, who knows?).
  2. Cit­ing Niet­zsche, and his take on metaphors, metonymies, and anthro­po­mor­phisms gen­er­at­ing intel­lige­bil­ity, they ask what is wrong with decep­tion. To them, this is the wrong ques­tion to ask in a com­puter ethics. Decep­tion is the way of being. Instead, we should be ask­ing if the com­mu­ni­ca­tion works (extremely broadly defined).
  3. This may be where the emoti­cons fit in. An emoti­con assumes a false read­ing. The addi­tion of the emoti­con seems to stand as a bearer of truth–a way of say­ing that “this is actu­ally how I meant this phrase to be under­stand.” But the emoti­con has no more guar­an­tee of this than the orig­i­nal sen­tence. Its an adden­dum, not a mark of truth. (Note to self: think irony)
  4. There is a riff near the end on alter­ity. This seems to mimic an essay writ­ten by Diane Davis on alter­ity (Address­ing Aler­ity, Phi­los­o­phy and Rhetoric, 2005). Assum­ing too much about the other super­im­poses one’s own value struc­ture on that other. There’s no guar­an­tee that value struc­ture exists any­where other than in one’s own subjectivity.
  5. And the money sen­tence, the finale of the essay “What­ever is to be val­ued must be artic­u­lated in excess of the meta­phys­i­cal eval­u­a­tions that have tra­di­tion­ally dis­tin­guished truth from decep­tion, self from other, and good from evil.”

After the ini­tial read­ing, I had orig­i­nally thought the eval­u­a­tion placed a tremen­dous onus on the indi­vid­ual. After hav­ing reread that last sen­tence, they seem to be ask­ing for a recon­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of that indi­vid­ual. It’s not a descrip­tion but a request. If decep­tion is the way of the com­puter (not in a way that falls within tra­di­tional dichotomies of good/evil) what does it mean to be eth­i­cal as a posthu­man? They don’t give an answer, just a question.

My orig­i­nal con­cern (about the onus on the indi­vid­ual) was my gut reac­tion a tra­di­tional metaph­ics of ethics. What they are ask­ing for is to let go of that. It seems sim­i­lar to Davis’s argu­ment, only Davis doesn’t address machines at all. Davis’s essay had sug­gested this was a prob­lem with all communication.

I had read this, because I’ve been think­ing about the recon­fig­u­ra­tion of sub­jec­tiv­ity through tech­no­log­i­cal interventions–specifically con­cerns about bio­log­i­cal data­bas­ing. This would raise ques­tions about what it means to inter­pret a bio­log­i­cal data­base. When the other, in the form of the bits of com­mu­ni­ca­tion housed in a data­base, can’t be eval­u­ated in terms of truth/falsehood, what would that mean for bioeth­i­cal mon­i­tor­ing. For exam­ple, med­ical records are attached to a per­sonal iden­ti­fier and dis­persed within a data­based struc­ture. How could would one inter­pret mean­ing that is syn­tag­mat­i­cally recon­fig­urable? How would that effect how one under­stood one’s per­son. How does the data­base speak back to recon­fig­ure iden­tity and body?

Ques­tions; no ideas yet.

Posted by NRJ at 3:58 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,