Journey of the UnwiredMascot

The Randomest of Random Poetry

2010-11-27T16:03:00.002-05:00

The diss is finished, submitted, accepted. Which means now, perhaps, there will be time for other writing.

Jon Tuttle asked me to read a poem or two for the Snow Island Review reading on Tuesday the 30th, and I didn't really think about it before saying "Yes." Not that I'm regretting it, but that with this and the Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival earlier this month, I have come to realize just how much I've failed at writing in the last two years.

I've decided to read either two short poems from the Disability Workshop, or two shorter, older, poems that I had polished long before the dense, academic prose took over my brain. In trying to locate these (some of them on this blog), I found some other, really strange, pieces I wrote last year, my first year in Lafayette, and my last year in Boston. So I thought I'd post those here, in an attempt at recovering what was lost. Note that these have not been revised, and at times falter in syntax.

Friday Last

too lofty a word to speak here--love--and yet i do, aware that the "v" goes on to long, that i'll have to lick my lips quite soon. the rain falls listlessly unlike that first time i thought about the concrete ledge of the stadium, when it poured so hard no one knew i was crying until i tried to speak. too close to the rain, to the sidelines, to his breath fogging in time with mine, i fall back to my place on the third tier of seats without hearing a reply. florida, i say to the floodlights that cast our shadows together into one, can be reached by car in twenty hours. the ledge is too far to climb at this hour anyway.

On moving back to the midwest
if this is a sign of retribution, of atonement, nearing me then i’ll look away or look into the sun to blind me. this cloth is scratchy on the shoulder that’s not sweating yet this shoe is digging hard into my heel. the robe around me is just enough—my god, it’s may, and there’s my breath—just enough of a coat and it’s black. this robe cost too much, too much to cut my hair and box my clothes and drive drive drive west, even though the ocean calls me. the strap has blistered me again, flesh welting in accusation, making my cheeks twitch, i’ll give it away now if i blink or smile or raise an eyebrow, this carefully twirled hair will pull the cornerstone out and i want it to. there’s the pole i fell upon, there’s the one that fell on me in the early morning scent of steam and sweet cookies. there’s the track we circled around then around again and never quite met in the middle, the rubber soles and the rubber ground bounding us away from each other.

Solo
The ones my fingers know they've always known
and at this stage, can no longer afford to hazard guesses
this touch was my only intuition once
Pairs of people wander around me in my pretty dress
they come, they always come, to spoil the child
with "babe" and "hon" and "sweetie"
a slippage in the slick sweat on metal
intentional falter, intentional trip over sidewalk cracks
his words are praiseful, bouncing against the raindrops .

The trees come at me--this can't be--but the light is moving and I know I can see North and South at once. The wind slaps like waves, chunks of wind patting my eyelashes down to shut out the marching forests. Blunt wind, sharp sun--they say you can bathe in it, but it's all spikes and rays--speeding the leaves up into my face. It gives us a chance to sing loudly into the roar about the conditions of possibility--meaning, really, hope. To think about definition as the definition of the shadow on the moon. To hum a melody about what we contain, how we curtain it away like a shower, like a dirty room, so that the open space won't swallow everything, so we don't lose our shapes and release the churning infinity within. The strain of forever nips at the bounds we set, the missing fences around sensation.
The setting sun lances with intention this time, opens the pain, pokes holes in the boundaries of my flesh and I bleed freely, without cause, this time. The hole it makes expands, jagged, and infinity seeps out, flooding away words, lines, fences, until all is All and All is one. The trees are marching to staunch the flow and even the simplest question--are you alright?--is a feat of creation, but not impossible.

A vision of the messianic

I see you in the finite,
Which is, of course, wrong.
I see you as a condition of my caught breath,
As a phantasm of a deeper structure.

I ask for simpler words
(Perhaps angry words?):
Something to keep a beat to when the beat slows down,
And to walk to in the new night.

I want to measure a chill in the air.
I see you as a condition of cradles and graves,
Without which I am hungry.
It fed off of the delta valley.

Every other line is empty
Of devotion and vocation to cloister.
Not me, not in context, not in the northeast,
A condition of angrier words.

Being a liberal in war

Oh how easy it is to die in war,
The fletch of the arrow, the hilt of the sword
To see your own blood and want to see more
To bow to the sky, to scream from the core

Oh how lucky to die before
The panic sets in, they even the score
They burn all the bodies, loot all the stores--
How lucky to die as they blast through the doors

Oh how simple it is to protest
To scrawl on a poster and scream with the rest
About blood, about oil, about the oppressed
To fast and to mourn that we’re overly blessed

Happy

We are one big family
While all the stupid people writhe in agony
With sauntering steps kept to pace
The brush and bend of pulse and pages.
The party blesses one another;
In cold address each does stumble,
Hiding in their fetal poses
As one would cradle rose bouquets,
Cherishing sores from thorn arrays.

The undesirable among us
Chip each edge of memory from us
With emotion sweet as sugared donuts.
We must choose to abuse the past like this
It does not come naturally
It does not leave quietly
It will not be happy till we loose our fits
And miss these bleak displays.

Habitus

2010-04-10T12:55:00.000-04:00

Settled in to the hard edge of a chair--it cuts and makes its shape known against my body, and this awareness of sitting skitters at the edge of thought--I'm listening to songs that are substituting for prayer. I'm fairly sure Fiske is misreading the social action of fandom, and I'm fairly sure Burke says it all better in a single phrase: Literature is equipment for living. And I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with what I'm supposed to be reading for--oh, I'm poaching, baby--but the lines of the chair and the shining tabs of fanfic lining the task bar and the sounds of hope and peace and love penetrate the film of pain just enough to shatter my discipline.

This dissertation is being written amid burning and stabbing and weakness and twitching, words in the spaces between pain, theses extracted painstakingly, chaff from wheat, diamond from rock, tumor from breast. And even when I laser focus, pull my mind and soul from the body long enough for clarity of thought, it's there, in the meat; back down in the physical my legs move without consent, my brain registers startling scents, my ears baulk against the pressure of some deep throb of sound: A passing car. It's solid, inside me, a force that my soul shrinks from until I'm nothing but a singularity. How can it not appear in the writing, this pain? It manifests itself in every sentence, tainting my masterpiece with that which I abhor; the thing I hate infiltrating my love, I cannot escape it; we are forever entwined. When I speak of hope, it's never about my own.

"Final" draft of disability poems

2010-03-25T23:00:00.004-04:00

When I took The Rhetoric of Access Class in the Summer of 2006, Dr Salvo kept asking me why I could theorize all sorts of things, but couldn't theorize my own disability. Or even seem to conceptualize it in any meaningful way. While I had come to terms with the necessity of the label "disabled" for university purposes, I didn't like to use it except as shorthand for my situation--which, as a Burkeian, I should have realized the implications of this naming, but, then again, I wasn't theorizing it. I struggled to define for myself whether the disability was part of me, or if there was some other core identity outside the illness. As though the illness were a deviation from my True Self.

"You don't let it define you," Lou said today, as I struggled to finish the prose poem. And this is and was and probably always will be the problem. It does define me, but not in totality; it is me, I am it. It colors my language, my bodily movements, my lived experience. It gives me, in Burke's words, an orientation or perspective that prescribes strategies for living. But people, particularly normals, don't want to think about this, because admitting the sickness is (in) you is to admit your proximity to death. We run far, far away from death, if only to return to it in the death drive. Being disabled means being mortal. And that makes people uncomfortable.

Well too damn bad, people. As Mrs Curie told me when I struggled with Weber's Clarinet Concerto, "Make beautiful mistakes"--or, in another orientation, make the mistakes beautiful. Here's me trying to make the mistake of my body beautiful. (Oh, and Jeff, if you're reading this? Thanks, and sorry about the Muppet comparison. And to AHS band members: Yes, I'm aware I was never "cricked." But there was that one time with Kamp's pants, and you know we came close then...)

Twelve Steps Away From Disabled

He wants me to walk like a penguin; I want him to speak to me like an adult. My feet turn ninety degrees without my permission and I waddle triumphantly across the office. No, he says, not looking at my mother. I meant, turn them the other way. My toes face each other and twitch hello.

In the middle of a step, time stops with a high whine, bright and still like a frozen sunbeam. My boot slides in the snow banks; the New Hampshire sludge has a contract out on me. The rest of the class keeps on walking. Thanks, teacher, for leaving me be--I‘ll catch up eventually.

If I don't run now, I might be able to walk later: this is energy conservation in its finest. The gym teacher is unimpressed by my planning skills. He thinks I mean later in the day. I mean later, when I'm middle-aged and sporting a wheelchair. I've got a lot of contingencies to consider. I'm already eight.

My fingers fly up and down the keys, faster than anyone, and my mother looks relieved. Somehow my body knows this, easier than walking, than using a knife and fork, and I wonder if this is what it's like to walk without thinking left, right, lift, push. The concentration of a step is harder than Mozart's clarinet concerto in A.

And hit. Three feet behind again, panting and red faced; my foot is nowhere near the white line--it’s betrayed me again. The bass drum pounds on, and they threaten to throw me in the creek. The doctor’s note stays in my back pocket. I’ll take the plunge instead.

Trudging uphill. The cold feel of frozen meat that is my thigh trips me, breaking the article already written in my head. I can't ask the question I want to (Do you agree with the Senate's decision?) with the noise of pain coating the scene. I go for the easy schmooze instead, and Mom recommends I rethink journalism school. We call the new round of college applications "Plan B."

The word is washing machine, but I'm going with "the thing that gets things clean," which earns me laughter and friends. I smooth over the gaps by speeding in circles around missing words, so it's okay, and no one notices until I try to order pizza and ask for balloons instead. Much giggling ensues. Instant friends for life.

I didn't mean to hit her, but she was sitting too close, and the arm decided it needed to inhabit some other space, so I'm telling myself it's not my fault. When the leg kicks me back from my desk and into the wall three days later, Jeff’s mentoring skills kick in, and he eases my blush with jokes about the spontaneous overflow of emotions. I tell him I hate the Romantics, anyway. I score points for intertextuality.

Jeff’s a mad Muppet-like man, bobbing in his seat, Mennonite compassion oozing from the books on his shelf. You’ve got more options, he tells me. You’d like grad school, because it’s clear Plan B is a bust, and I don’t want to travel too far into the alphabet. I refuse to ask What if I run out of words? What if I get lost? because Jeff has too much faith in me, and I’d hate to ruin his day.

They put me on the top floor, of course, high above the city that breathes for me most days. Fire drills aside, the minuscule elevator carries me faithfully down to the pavement I can pound, inhaling Boston, infusing it in my skin. The stairs stare me down, and I glare right back; I am not lost, for once, in the streets that wind dizzyingly in marshes and fens.

To the prim professor, I say, “The creation of audience identification is necessarily voluntary: But what if they don’t want to feel disabled with me?” The words haven’t gone anywhere, as long as the buildings twinkle at night, and standing in the doorway between here and there seems to suit me.

I'm sitting in the driveway, trying to remember which one is the brake pedal again, and how to get home. Twenty years of failing to be the right kind of penguin has been like the slide of twilight into night. Or like a frog being boiled slowly in water. “Becoming,” I say to the unfamiliar street signs, “is different from being,” tasting Heidegger on my lips. As long as I’m still driving, I haven’t yet arrived.

Sirloin Or why you shouldn't hug me

Please unloose my flesh
To let fly free that which
Aches against my borders.
Like frost on a window
Binds sticky and prickles,
So do your fingers scratch
Against the edge of my skin.

It begins in the spine,
Tracks down and settles
Matching gut for gut,
Meeting stab with stab,
Etching rutted lines
Through pulsing muscle,
Clean Ginsu marks,
But not to stretch,
Not to butterfly open:
It’s not your intent to butcher
Me with embracing arms.

And a bonus poem that I didn't have the balls to read at something called "Disability Awareness Month." "Raising Awareness" is an idea I often rant against, and this poem is to be read sarcastically: Imagine a whiny 13 year old girl's voice, and you've got it just about right. (Yes, this and Sirloin are reposts, but with revisions)

Raising Awareness
Are you there, passion?
Are you yet asleep?
Has hope awoken you on cue
at the end of the end,
where you can sip the most fuel
thrust forward at the tip of the fuse?
Or have you slipped beyond now
infusing the realm of dreams
where you are more easily grasped
where you are not denied a chance
to light the plot to enlighten the world
And make them all impassioned for the cause?

They’ve waited, passion,
those banner-makers and slogan-writers
They who walk for cures with posters held high
They’ve waited on you and upon you
waited for your arrival at the darkest night
triumphant in trumpet blares at blastissimo,
For you to burn the untouched souls
And inflame them with compassion.
But you snuck in quiet to the back room
and tied them up in our own pink ribbons
till they are furiously still at the keyboard
passionately aware, the standard of awareness raised.

Are you still here, passion,
Now that the worst has floated downriver?
It seems they can't remember
how this is supposed to end--
is it a tragedy or comedy?
A romantic gesture?
A single rose on the fifteenth of February?

Vines (A meditation on consubstantiation)

2010-03-01T01:03:00.003-05:00

In working with the "Writing the Disability" group, I've been contemplating what Burke has to say about disease. It's not positive, of course. In Burke world, disease is dis-ease, and is what we are always/already acting against; we are "rotten with perfection" or at least the motive to perfect, and that means constantly expunging the disease around us. But what happens when the diseased is a person, not an idea or situation? What does that do to Burke's motive of identification: He says we all want that communion with each other, but do we really? Do you want to share substance with the ill and dying? That would mean admitting that you, too, are ill and dying, and we Americans don't do that well.

So, thinking about Burke and disease and about his brief comments on consuming ("you are what you eat" being his example of how changes in substance can occur) and thinking about the latest episode of Supernatural, in which Famine perfects the desire to consume which leads to death (insert Lacan here), I came up with this. This Whatever.

Vines
To be consumed,
to share in substance
to stand on the same ground
to emerge from the same soil like spider plant offspring
Springing off away from each other
soaking in the same rain
under shadows, one withers
the other bears fruit amid glittering rays: This is brotherhood.
It falters against the wind
it leans against its brethren
it steals all the nitrogen
just to stay till spring
just till May, not greedy enough to hope for summer.
To be ensconced
to huddle together for warmth and shelter
to bear down to the root
to find the common branch
and kill it: This is brotherhood, too.
Free from earthy tethers
from the lines of fathers and mothers
from the what was consumed together
the fruit bearer bears itself away
takes no part in the disease
of yellowing leaves and barren pods.

And, now I've managed to depress myself. Lovely.

Functionalism (WIP)

2010-02-25T19:21:00.002-05:00

[That which washes the other in a holy palmer's kiss]
scratches and twists
[structures which twitch and make things tap].
they used to run up and down
keys blinding [they who listen and clap]
sliding up [the spaced line that gaps a chord]
with joy bursting from the tip.

Sirloin cut

2010-02-15T20:56:00.000-05:00

the glare of hope
begins in the spine
tracks down and settles
matching gut for gut

meeting stab with stab
tearing rutted lines
through pulsing muscle
butcher knife sharp

On Pain, or Amy thinks too hard lately

2010-02-10T20:58:00.002-05:00

Apparently, I've been thinking about things without knowing it, again. I remember the first time this happened; I was taking yet another exam at Johnathan Daniels School in Keene, NH, where experimental education programs were running rampant (my first grade classroom had no walls--literally). I was taking the exam, some kind of math test with word problems that I would later recognize as testing pre-algebra skills. The test, like most of these government-sponsored standardized exams, was multiple choice. I read the problem, and instantly knew the answer was B. It was quite clear that there would be three chickens left, although when later asked by the teacher, I couldn't tell her why or how I had come to such a conclusion. Or how I had come to any of my conclusions. Something was working subconsciously or even unconsciously in my brain, and I let it happen.

I let it happen a lot, actually. When Mom was studying aloud for nursing school, droning on about rhizomes and the Kreb's Cycle, I listened while playing Tetris. And then aced science tests without studying for them straight through Anatomy and Physiology. When I hit college, this ability became less important as an English major--reading aloud helped my brain memorize things, but understanding why was often more important than knowing that and I ended up studying like normal kids. It wasn't until I got into heavy literary theory that I realized my brain was still doing its thing, just on a different level. I read Foucault and Derrida and Cixous out loud, I read them silently, I read and read the same passages until I thought my eyes were going to bleed, and still didn't understand them. Then I'd go to bed, or get up to get more coffee, and the answer would be so clear, skipping me past several steps of logical inquiry right to the end. I think that annoyed Lou and Kari, because I got it, but couldn't tell them what I meant.

Lately I've been reading about Burke and ontology, Burke and subjectivity, Burke and epistemology--none of which really relate to my dissertation, but there are a few things I can pull. Somewhere in the fog of synthesizing all of this, namely Monday night, I saw how the pieces fit, and wondered at my earlier confusion. What the hell, Amylea? Why was it all a mess before? I set to rearranging my chapter into something more reflective of my major concerns and moved on to cleaning it up.
Then, in the middle of reading about Burke and various social theories (from Marx to Althusser to Foucault) by Robert Wess, I started thinking about pain. It seemed kind of random, except that I'm hurting--but that's not unusual. But I wasn't dwelling on my own pain, but on the language of pain, in a Burkeian sense. Is not, I wondered, pain the ur-motive? Isn't "pain" really what we are talking about when we discuss "dystopian" fiction--the stories of pain? Thus I began putting forth some propositions:

Pain is the name for a situation, or more accurately, an agon to a situation.

Pain is not an action, but motion, forced response to stimuli that moves us.

The discourse of pain shows us the dialectic of the body--what is inus and what is of us, what we have, and what we are. Pain itself is dialectical; it divides as much as it unites.

Pain is scenic: it is the grounds of (for some of us) our existence.

Pain is a habitus in the Bourdieuxian sense. Thus those who are pained have a different orientation, different bodily lived life, and thus must have different rhetorical motives.

Pain is thus a subject position.

Society at large provides us with narratives for overcoming pain, but inasmuch as "society" does not come from the grounds of pain, it cannot encompass for us (provide equipment for living) the situation.

Now, what these exactly mean, that's a project for another time.

The Rhetoric of Hope

2010-02-04T18:44:00.002-05:00

Hope, I posit, is not an emotion, but a critical perspective attained after evaluating current conditions. Hope is thus constructed by our orientation to our experiences and our critical interpretation of sensory input. As a construct, hope is rhetorical, constructed by language, the result of the application of a terministic screen.
This orientation of hope is entelechial, or at least teleological. We hope for something; a desire that is to be fulfilled at some future date. We hope for some end result of the unfolding of history. That desire--a utopian yearning to eliminate hardships and conflict--is grounded in our interpretations of the current state of affairs and what we see as possible or probable outcomes. In this, we can also hope against something, position ourselves opposite of the possibilities inherent in the present.
When we hope, we construct, through imagination and through the logic of cause and effect, the future. When we hope, we provide a vision made manifest through humanity's symbol-using abilities. The future, an absence made present through our use of symbols as abstracted referents, can be evaluated as something to be hoped for or hoped against, and this prescribes a course of action.
The hope of a text, thus, does not have to remain within the world of the text; a text can be hopeful in its projection of future action for or against onto the readers. The most hopeless dystopian novel (in which our hero dies without resolving anything, and the dystopian culture seems to extend infinitely beyond the end of the text) may in fact be hopeful in its relationship to the reader. In positing the future, in making it manifest (enacting the crime, as Burke would say), the text prescribes actions for its readers, actions which will (with hope) prevent the future it describes.
"Action" of course, for Burke, may be first appear as "attitude." In changing attitudes of readers, a text may, in fact, effect change by changing the scene; the instant readers change their orientations and approaches to their own scene, the scene itself has been altered, thus altering the grounds from which the first entelechial extrapolation the text provides. We might even say that the very writing of the text is itself a revolutionary action in that the act of writing changes the author, who is part of his or her own scene.
The rhetoric of hope is always that of change; even those who hope against change recognize the ambiguities of their situation that would enable the transformations they hope against. Hope is syllogistic in its argument: If, then, else. Hope is dialectic in that it positions the present against the future, thesis and antithesis, denying neither their importance, negating neither in favor of the other.
The dystopian motive, the way of seeing that prescribes action, is essentially hopeful. Because it is a motive, Burke would ask us to examine what it means when we say why people are doing it--to look at the language used in dystopic rhetoric and/or the rhetoric of hope. In Chapters 3 and 4 I take two of the most celebrated dystopian narratives as examples of how we talk about dystopia and the implications made when we would imagine disaster; how authors tend to form their narratives, repeated ideas that become tropes, how dystopian writers feature scene over all else, what we can learn about our understanding of endings and ends from the entelechial principle enacted in these texts.

Carry On Wayward Son

2009-11-29T23:31:00.002-05:00

Muscle memory is a bitch.

In general, the second I hear classic rock on the radio, my fingers change the station. It's not that I don't like classic rock, but that my only exposure to it happened for those four terrible, wonderful, terrifyingly full years of high school. So, yes, I get a little nostalgic when I hear "Back in Black" or "Cat Scratch Fever" or "We're An American Band." But nothing, and I mean Nothing makes me react the way I do to "America" from West Side Story or that little ditty by Kansas (see title).

Luckily, the local station doesn't have much use for old show tunes. But for the last three weeks, I've heard the damn song every Thursday morning as I drive to school.

It wouldn't be that bad, if Supernatural didn't also use it as a theme song. Or if the roommate didn't take a certain glee to my wide eyes and panicked breathing. But lately, it's like everywhere I turn, there's those strong downbeats, and my wrists flex without my permission on the steering wheel.

Hence, muscle memory's bitchiness.

This one time, at band camp

It's in the blood. It's the source of shivers (of slivers).
Pulse turned to pulp by the blender beat of drums.
This three minute death and rebirth burns at the crescendos.
Canvass burns at first, but for this we pray:
Love, split lips and numb fingers,
Clear, crisp skies and a hidden flask,
The seamless motion of the stars as our own.
It is born in full from the first,
No rising to life, but complete it bursts
Whole and unwrapped
For bloody mouths and splintered palms to embrace.

Chapter 2, or, Amy Re-re-revisits Burke

2009-11-29T17:21:00.002-05:00

Chapter 2 of the dissertation is currently titled "Burke's Dystopian Imagination." Last summer, I presented a paper at the Triennial KB conference on a panel with His Most Awesomest Jack Selzer, who, along with Ann George, wrote the Totally Rad Kenneth Burke in the 1930s. After Kate's Really Cool Burke video project presentation, Dr Selzer gave me a few notes on my presentation, the key one being that if I was going to do it right, I'd need a whole book--i.e. 10 pages of conference presentation didn't do justice to the thing (his word) I was noticing about Burke.

When I was "given the opportunity" (their words) to rethink my dissertation, I immediately thought of Selzer's advice. At this point, however, moving to a historical, archival dissertation (NOT MY STRENGTH) would have meant another 18 months at Purdue, without funding, so I changed it up and went with the plan I'm now following. Still, I was left with an entire chapter--upwards of 50 pages--to do something like what I imagined before: a review of Burke's general social philosophy throughout his corpus, hopefully linking the subtle changes, as George and Selzer do, to his changing localities, his "circles" of influence.

The result? I'm stuck on page seven, nowhere near even beginning to quote Counter-Statement. I'm stuck where I was when I wrote the Burke presentation the first time: outlining my assumptions about what counts as dystopian literature, what makes something a dystopian argument. Because I can't show how KB is dystopian until I do that, but I also can't explain what I mean by "dystopian" until I can use Burke's terms.

Ouroboros. The snake eating its own tail. Consummation has never looked so complex.

Random Writings

2009-11-13T19:46:00.002-05:00

exstasis

What air fills these lungs,
they that will sing and sing
and deny
the beauty of spaces and faces
in favor of seeking lightening-wrought hearts
steeled by flame to hope!
The upbeat of the canvass cuts through the veil
and enflames the waiting spirit within--what blue skies
and cobbled streets humming in harmony
drain us of, of trying to be!

Once our skin was breaking from containing the desire
but now we stretch our wings to hold room in unbidden embrace.

December 23

Some commands cannot be followed: Remember!
Scuffed terra cotta ground with sand, aside;
Cheeks flushed against the sun, aside;
aside from the sound of hushed steps
and the prick of hollow watching eyes,
these things band too loosely and are denied.

Even though breaths can be counted and heart beats tamed,
even though absolute stillness of the body attained,
and blood slows to stagnant deep in veins
and pain disperses in heat across white skin
Even though the door is opened, nothing comes in
Remember: some commands cannot be followed.

September
From the first of September, the center starts to break
and once the nucleus has shattered, the cell walls bow out
from the first cold crackle, the ceiling sags down
under the weight of salt water, the dirt path is unmade

inGrained

Patent faith soaked to the feet
the fear of god, of water
of drowning in the stares,
falling on the stairs of the baptistry,
where we as children played,
dry and content to be unwashed.

But when guilt pours down and paints our skin--
the faults of a thousand aching sins--
then must we speak,
into the mic, into the air,
over the sobbing piano chords
that accompany such confessionals.

The Arc of Truth

2009-08-07T12:53:00.003-04:00

Watching Stargate with the commentary tracks on has led me to consider the nature of plotting narrative over a long serial text. The idea of an "arc" is of particular interest--why such mathematical a term? Should stories really be "plottable"? What would a graph of a series actually look like? What about the financial, production-controlled aspects of a serial narrative?
Given the right information, could a television writer use the desires and narrative conventions of fandom to better control an audience? Do we really want fans writing our canon stories (yes, I'm still angry at Russell T Davies. But Martin Gero, this is for you, too).

Pendulum

This isn't the story he wants to tell
he makes her fall, cloying sweetness gone,
he makes her fly, volition lost in plumbing depths
that plumb three years later, carrying her closer to Xeno's mark

He shapes the world with steep arcs
smooth sines dipping below to break the zero line
he threw her down to this cupped pit to ride the curve
to cushion the rough universe plotted hastily against blue grid squares.

Drabble

2009-08-04T13:22:00.002-04:00

Or, Amy Tries to Cope with Torchwood: Children of Earth

He doesn’t try to fix it, for once. He stands there and lets time wash over him and space move around him. And still he is not still, but hurtling around the sun as the rest of us flip our daily coins: to be or not to be? And the odds are always the same, anyway, half and half, maybe a little less, if you’ve got a nickel with the thick raised head of what’s-his-name. He lets the coins drop without tossing his own or tripping over all the spare change rolling around. All the day you’ll have good luck.

RUSSELL!

Rewiring

2009-06-26T04:04:00.001-04:00

brain chemistry reboot

Are you there, passion?
Are you yet asleep?
Has hope awoken you on cue
at the end of the end,
where you can sip the most fuel
thrust forward at the tip of the fuse?
Or have you slipped beyond us now
infusing the realm of dreams
where you are more easily grasped
where you are not denied a chance
to light the plot, burn it forward?

We've waited, passion
Waited on you and upon you
waited for your arrival at the darkest night
triumphant in trumpet blares at blastissimo.
But you snuck in quiet to the back room
and tied us up with black and yellow and green,
a mighty pen against a mightier sword
till we are furiously still at the keyboard
passionately aware, the standard of awareness raised.

Are you still here, passion,
Now that the worst has floated downriver?
It seems we can't remember
how this is supposed to end--
is it a tragedy or comedy?
A romantic gesture?
A single rose on the fifteenth of February?

Precision Surgery Required

2009-05-15T03:22:00.001-04:00

My blog is so not boring, Lou.

Precision Surgery Required

It was supposed to be over bandaid quick
This was the simple plan without illusions
But minds left alone can change
Minds left to cracked alley wanderings
Might make another turn,
Delay the path to home just to see
Where the faded beat down grass leads

And hope left alone can wait for the appointed day
Burning low on the back burner, ready to ignite
Alcohol flames that flash ere one can say it lightens
The story said we’d burn together
Cautionary tales will convict us
before allegations are named

Left hope festered down to a gram
Always waiting in the darkness
For the dawn of sun to rise
To play a role in careless dreams
To turn bleak reminders of all those turns,
Of what you said while palming embers
What is it that hope hopes for?

Now all the things you said would never die
Had already withered by your last breath
How can we go home to this,
Tree lined streets blown to splinters
In the middle of a drunken night?
What can there be to praise in such dust?

What have we done, but torn and shredded
Forgotten and breezed away,
Only flitting in and out in dreams?
Rip the plaster away quick like a bee sting
And run; this was the plan
But I lingered and wandered too close to home
One void summer, the blank before the period.

The Rhetoric of Fan Studies: PCA/ACA 2009, Draft 1

2009-04-01T03:23:00.005-04:00

The Popular and the Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan studies (v2.2) Comments welcome!

Popular and Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan Studies
Presented at PCA/ACA National Conference 2009
April 9, 2009
New Orleans, LA

I hid in the closet of fandom for years. My Master's degree was survived mainly by secretive late night forays into fic and vid and art and dubs--consuming fanworks to relax after Derrida. But why did I have to be so secretive? Fandom has always had some social stigma, perhaps best exemplified by the Simpson's character Comic Book Guy: a fat slob living at home, sad and lonely, too immersed in his fantasy worlds to attempt the performance of Normal that the rest of us partake in. Today I want to talk about that stigma, how it appears in academic conversations, and ways that we might legitimate the study of fandom(s) without resorting to "the popular" as our justification. Specifically, I want to suggest there are significant tensions in the language of fan studies: First, there is an unacknowledged dissonance in our language about fandom that stems from the difference between popularity and fanaticism. Second, there is a tension created by the language of popularity that categorizes fandom as somehow both “mass” and “unique,” both mainstream and eccentric. What results from these tensions is first a sense that a fandom is a legitimate object of study only for what it can show us about mass media, consumption, identity formation and the like. But in this assumption, the fans themselves and the products of fandom are still somewhat trivial (if not downright silly) and will disappear once the object of that fanaticism is no longer in the public eye.

Fandom is nothing new--and I'm even talking pre-Trek here, long before a person like Comic Book Guy could even exist and subsist within a society. Fiction in confluence with a middle class and industrial-print culture seems to create fandom as it grows, with the Pamela fandom of the 1740s as our earliest archived example. I’ll talk about the importance of archiving as legitimation later, but for now let us just say that fan studies might be said to be as old as the first critics of The Novel in general, those who spoke of silly little girls too busy reading to do their proper (house)work. In her book Consuming Pleasures Jennifer Pool Hayward examines fandom through the lens of serial production--and we might say that fandom is necessarily drawn to serial texts, if we were to make such broad generalizations. In tracing Dickens fandom, Hayward examines the pleasures of consuming a serial text, giving value to such a study by invoking a Marxist critique: Fandom in the past is important because it can show us cultural modes of production, movements of ideologies, and creation and maintenance of hegemony, particularly of the gendered sort.

My concern today is not with the studies of fans in the past, for many of these give value to the fandom by pointing to, not surprisingly, the permanence, artistry, and worthiness of the original text. Popularity and “mass“ audiences often characterize these fan works, which are not noted for their own intrinsic value as fan texts, but for what they can show us about the spirit of the age in which they were created. Aside, perhaps, from Joseph Andrews and his parody Shamela, no one I've met or read in "early" fan studies refers to a fan-writer by name or an exemplary fan-work by its title. By merging “popular” with “fanaticism,” we can study fandom as an interesting, but temporary phenomenon that emerges from the texts they reference. I wish to suggest that, at least in the digital era, fandom is not as dependent on the text it adores, but has created itself to be a nearly independent system of knowledge creating and knowledge sharing that can sustain itself across multiple, transient media events.

I am limiting my discussion to the fandom of the late 1990s through today because, true to our assumptions about the fickle nature of popularity, earlier fan works have been lost to us. The transience of fan works and fandom in general is part of what makes it a difficult object to study. The lack of an archive or a canon that can serve as what Latour and Woolgar call “immutable mobiles,“ those documents that serve as a foundation of knowledge for a community and serve as constitutional documents that create the community from nothingness gives us no common base from which to speak, doubtlessly causes some of the disjuncture we feel in fan studies. Further, when popular culture became an object of study, it became so within a Marxist-Foucauldian framework of ideological control. In this case, what is popular is what is hegemonic, and what is hegemonic tends to be without value in academia, unless it is to analyze the ways in which a text is hegemonic (and therefore uncritical, manipulative, and bad). Horkheimer and Adorno (as well as countless pop psychologists and after school specials) tell us that popular media are dumbing us down, working to institutionalize us by entertainment, and, in general, is for uneducated fools whose attention flits to whatever shiny object the producers flash at us. While we here at the PCA attempt to argue against that, some of that language and its values tend to seep into our language anyway, and we begin to assume that fandom is synonymous with consumption and all that is new.

This language appears, however rationalized, in many fandom studies. Cornel Sandvoss provides the most complete critique of such language in his introduction to Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: “The Balance between structure and agency is…crucial to the academic analysis of fandom….In [many] approaches fandom is interpreted as a consequence of mass culture needing to compensate for a lack of intimacy, community and identity” (2). Further, Sandvoss questions the definition of fandom as identity formation, and instead provides his own, which I borrow, for the most part, here: “I define fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text” (8). As his examples, Sandvoss points to Joli Jenson for her examination of the language used in common parlance and in some academic writings. In “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization” Jenson reminds us of the psychological and medical explanations of fan-ish behavior--a pathology, an unfulfilled relationship, a Freudian error in the fan‘s upbringing (9). The scholarly accounts, however were few and far between when Jenson wrote in 1992, and the criticisms tend not to be from media scholars. Still, the language of pathology or deviance that Jenson cleverly pulls from multiple sources has remained in our language, even as fans came to describe themselves in the summer of 2007 as pirates (see post 4/15/08: The Symbolic and the Virtual Event, to be presented at NCA 2009).

Of course, Henry Jenkins remains our key scholar in fandom. In Textual Poachers and later in Convergence Culture, Jenkins emphasizes the unique aspect of certain fandoms, what Sandvoss calls an “assumed uniqueness” that characterizes most fan studies. Jenkins might be the first to treat online fan works as legitimate objects of study; he cites the URLs of specific works and larger communities with the same academic rigor that the rest of us give to Dickens and Shakespeare. Like many fan scholars, Jenkins emphasizes the subversivness of fandom without acknowledging the tension between fanaticism and subversion, between “mass” media and counter-culture.
Several volumes of fan studies have emerged in recent years, and like Jenkins, they remain enthusiastic about the potential scholarly work available to fandom scholars, but continue to use language that celebrates the ex-centricity of fandom, emphasizes the subversiveness of fan works, and mark fandom as Other. The introduction to Rhiannon Bury’s Cyberspaces of Their Own notes the connection of fandom to oral culture and domestic storytelling that skews fandom demographics toward the female gender. The book surveys and analyzes certain communities that the author notes are dominated by women and tries to explain the need for and the pleasure in such activities. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, the editors (including Sandvoss), dedicate the introductory chapter to “Why Study Fans?“ The editors try to summarize “three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades” to come up with their answers, which include the subversive nature of fandom, the economic power of fandom that has television producers salivating for our attention, fandom as a mirror for what Bourdieu calls “habitus,“ and, more currently, fandom as “a cultural practice tied to specific forms of social and economic organization” (8-9). Neither Bury nor the authors of Fandom are too concerned with the connection of fandom to “popularity;” instead, these studies mark fans as an object (and as such, necessarily Others the fans) to be studied for what we can learn about larger cultural movements or human nature in general.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with Othering fans this way; fans themselves embrace this designation in their t-shirts, in their icons, in their posts that include some kind of self-disclosure. Whether we Other fans as subversive agents against mass culture or dismiss them as blind, adoring audiences, fans and fandom will and have survived in one form or another. In fact, “survival” of fandom may be one way we can begin to think of fan works as more than temporary manifestations of a fad. The connection of fandom to “popular” culture hinders us here--how can something be both popular and permanent?

The unstated criticism is that fan works, as non-legitimated narratives, exist only within a localized community and then only briefly. In the days of zines and snail mail fic and vid exchanges, few copies were made, and even fewer were available to outside readers. Without the backing of a publisher or producer, fan works tend to first shine brightly then fade from our consciousness. Without an (published) anthology to catalogue them, fanworks do not have a canon for academic study. Imagine trying to teach a class on fandom that focuses on the fan-produced texts themselves--what to include? The "textbook" as Bernadette Longo reminds us in Spurious Coin, is a legitimating tool in academia--a guide for what to teach, why to teach it, and what is teachable. Likewise, anthologies symbolically inscribe a field and guide scholars towards what is acceptable, even good, text. Despite the growing number of fan-scholars, scholar-fans, and scholars of fandom, we have no central, legitimated field. So where might we look, if we were to teach such a class or (God forbid?) create such a field?

First, we would probably find key authors in fandom--most likely those that write across many fandoms or those who are the most read. Perhaps the most celebrated fic (and some would argue, fic writer) in slash fandom comes from Speranza. “Written by the Victors” is, as one fan put it “what fanfic should be.” The 330K file is a long fic, coming in at several thousand words. More importantly, Speranza gives us a new genre that represents the core desires of fandom: to make the fandom world more present, more real, more encompassing, and to change that world as we see fit. “Victors” or the “VictorsVerse” tells a fairly standard Stargate: Atlantis story, an imagined universe where the crew on Atlantis officially split from Earth and form their own culture--a culture that allows for explorations into otherwise improbable romantic plots that facilitate slash relationships. In Victors, however, Speranza does not provide the standard narrative, but tells the story through quotes from books on the history of the Atlantis expedition. Of course, these books are not any more real than Atlantis itself, but Speranza’s authoritative academic voice makes these excerpts believable. An incident that would have perhaps been a chapter of a long fanfic is thus described through a quote from “Tina Eber,” author of the book The Atlantis Chronicles, Volume 2, page 37:

While we will never know for sure what happened on the evening of 17 January 5 A.T, we can make several educated guesses. It is probable, despite William Summerville's analysis in "The SGC's Real Target?" (Journal Of Political Diplomacy, OUP: 2010), that John Sheppard was the object of the attack. It is likely that Armitage planned to ambush or otherwise surprise Sheppard; Armitage's military record, as well as her preference for knives, shows a distinct predilection for stealth. It is also likely that McKay stumbled upon or otherwise interrupted her approach; it is unlikely that he would have sustained the degree of injury Royce witnessed if Sheppard had been in the fight. Royce's description accords with McKay having made a brave, if clumsy, grab for the knife while Sheppard's back was literally or metaphorically turned; it is not unreasonable to speculate that his injuries were sustained almost immediately as Armitage tried to ward him off. (“Victors” Book 3).

“Victors” has spawned a “VictorsVerse” that features both standard fan works and styles similar to what Speranza has done. What is important about this particular fic is the response it has elicited from the community: it has been bookmarked on Delicious by a thousand people, recommended in multiple fandoms, and, in general, recognized as one of the best scifi fics ever.
The fact that so many fans recognize Speranza (by her several online nicknames) as a key writer for the community is another way, I think, fandom can be seen as more permanent than other aspects of popular culture. Victors has captured the attention of the fan community as a whole--not just SGA fans. And any fan entering the SGA fandom will be recommended (recc’d) this story. "Victors," and other similar iconic fics, show the start of a canon for Stargate fandom and fandom as a whole.

Of course, the problem with fandom, even one as wide as the Stargate fandoms, is that it is tied to an original text, and once that original text disappears from the public eye, we would expect--assuming a close tie between the popular and the fanatic--the fandom to die as well. And in some ways this is true; enthusiasm for a given text dials down as new texts enter the media stream and our consumer consciousnesses.

Sandvoss’s definition of “sustained interaction” with a text only applies while the fandom is in vogue. In his definition both in the introduction and later in his book, fandom is still highly transient; it is the fan that remains the same. When interest dies, the fandom dies. But in many cases, most notably, the Buffyverse, Due South, and Star Trek, the original text is several years (if not decades) dead, while the fandom surges on. The ease of file bootlegging and DVD boxed sets allows for new fans to join, and many fans follow each other from one fandom to the next, creating relationships that extend beyond a single fandom. And jumping into an older fandom is easy, as I found out last summer when I consumed the whole of Due South in about a week. For example, using recommendation lists, newcomers can easily locate the most proliferous members and the most celebrated fan texts of that fandom. Major authors begin to emerge after a few minutes of research: Cassandra Clare, SuEric, Speranza, and Aristide, top may lists if quality writers

And most of their works in fact can be found with relative ease, thanks to an almost fevered effort to catalogue, categorize, and archive the fics of a fandom. Websites like the LiveJournal-hosted “dsficfinders” allows users to request help finding such works--all an inquiring fan has to do is describe what they remember about a favorite fic, and the community responds with suggestions within 24 hours--usually within an hour or two. Fans can even describe elements they want to read in a story, and the community will recommend the best version they know.

In Harry Potter fandom, Fictionalley features an overwhelming archive of fan works. Larger, multiple fandom sites such as fan fiction.net and mediaminer.org host thousands upon thousands of fic and art and poetry and snippets of conversation that would have, in the days of mimeographs and mailing lists, long been rotting in a landfill.

When LiveJournal purged several dozen communities in the summer of 2007, fans were outraged for the loss of years of conversations, “inscribed” proof of their lives and communities. The fics could be replaced (and they were, since many fans stored their favorites on separate thumb drives or email accounts), but the textual evidence, the immutable mobiles that made the fandom more than just a momentary enthusiasm, was gone. Using archives (and now, carefully backed-up archives) allows a fandom to subsist long after the object of its attention has faded from the public eye.

The inscription of fandom into texts and archives suggests that associating fan studies with popular culture may be, for now, a mistake. As “pop culture studies” grows, it will, probably, throw off some of the assumptions of transience and frivolity, and maybe even “mass.” Fandom is not, and cannot be both a part of mass media--that is, a part of the “mainstream” and part of the ex-centric, and it is time we stop looking at fandom as such. I’ve only begun to list here some of the processes that are now helping fandom become more permanent, more legitimate, and hopefully others can add those I am not aware of. Comments, like in fandom, are always welcome.

____________________________

Bury, Rhiannon. Cyberspaces of Their Own. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005.
Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
“Introduction: Why Study Fans?” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. Eds Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Joli, Jensen. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London: Routledge, 1992.
Latour, Bruno. “Drawing Things Together.” Representation in Scientific Practice. Eds Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 19-68. Reprinted at www.bruno-latour.fr. 9 April 2009. 4 April 2009.
Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
Speranza. “Written By The Victors.” 2007. Accessed 9 April 2009. See also “VictorsVerse Art and Artifacts.” Accessed 9 April 2009.

Settling Accounts

2009-03-02T08:05:00.001-05:00

On accounting

I've been a member of the internet-addicted community for some years now; it was March of 1996 that I got my first modem-enabled computer dialing up to speeds of 14.4K (!). I was hooked. It was like a drug; the coding, the chatrooms, the web searches that required a gentle hand and a clever mind. But online communities, the heart of the internet's popularity explosion, around since the WELL's inception (and conception) in 1984, were not really a part of my world; most were hosted by Prodigy and AOL and required fees to join. A few interfaces such as IRC created "channels" or chatrooms in which individuals could converge and ramble on about their lives, but IRC, unlike today's communities, was more fluid: users had multiple "nicks" and could change nicks at will, and you were never really sure about who you were talking to--I mean, sure, you could find out their IP address, the name of the server hosting the channel, their ping time, etc, but as for the person behind the nick, well, you could be anyone, including creepy voyeurs and pedophiles.

I don't remember my first "account" creation that gave me a stable internet presence. It might have been my hotmail, but definitely by the time I got my Yahoo! email, I had registered on several sites--a lot of them for casual games, a few on early blog-like sites. Today I have so many accounts, I can't account for them all. There's my credit card company account, my Papa Johns account, my Amazon.com account, Shockwave, various fan sites, facebook, delicious, my blog, my various emails and IM accounts, WebCT, job search engines, my MLA and PCA memberships, some more casual games sites, Bluffton Alumni...etc etc etc. There are accounts for sites that don't really account anything (such as Icanhascheezburger.com), and accounts that are attached to my bank accounts security sensitive accounts (like mypurdue).

Derrida says that postmodernism is marked by an "archive fever," a need to constantly count and account for (accompter) people, places, and things by rendering them into text--that permanent, substitution-vehicle that stands in for us long after we're gone. What does it meant to have an "account," then, but to re-iterate and re-cite one's own self-hood, to nominate yourself as part of a count, to ask to belong to a certain set? To call oneself into being through text, through the legitimating power of an email address--after all, most accounts require you to prove your identity or confirm your account by responding to an email sent by the automated program. Yes, I am real. Yes, I exist.

These "accounts" name us, they classify us as members, and they give us a place within a larger schema. They, not surprisingly, mirror many of the usually hidden aspects of language and governance, making them transparent. Who are you? When were you born (i.e. are you a legal adult)? What do you look like (in the case of avatars)? How can others identify you? Substitution upon substitution that makes us "present" online, that presents us online, that re-presents us to the world. The text and image stand in for us, they reserve our place among the counted.

Presence and presentation are, of course different. One can still create multiple accounts with the same site. One could change one's avatar to be older, younger, a different gender, blonde, fat, thin, elfin, wizard, troll, or sheep. Clever people have created MySpace pages for everyone from Hitler to Heidegger, Aristotle to Zola, and yes isn’t it cool how digital “presence” shows us that all identity is a performance. But for those less overtly ironic identities, those accounts we take seriously, the ones that are supposed to equate presence and presentation for operations in the “real” world--what does it say of us, this endless profiling, selecting, electing and editing of our selves into text, into image? Into something that will remain long after ourselves (thanks to the Internet archive project)? Does blogger.com really need to know my gender? My state of residence? My likes, dislikes, favorite quotes and movies?

Part of me gets frustrated with the multiple username/passwords I have to remember every day. Part of me wants to create a universal ID that allows me to log-in efficiently to every site or community I am a member of. Then the dystopian imagination kicks in, and I think of the Mark of the Beast, of Big Brother tracking my purchases, my involvement, my movements across cyberspace. Paranoia is another condition of postmodernity, and it is also a condition of a dystopian imagination.

For now, I suppose I’ll do like everyone else, and use the same two or three web identities for everything, the same password with variations, for everything. So if you see an unwiredmascot or a pandoratrue somewhere, it’s most likely me. It’s just easier to keep account of accounts this way.

Prospectus, version 1.0

2009-02-07T14:02:00.002-05:00

Well, here it is. Attempt #1. This is the introductory statement/rationale, which will eventually become part of the introduction to the dissertation. The rest of the plan can be found on this blog back in October 2008, but I'll be revising that in coming days and weeks.
Suggestions welcome.

The title of the final book of the Christian Bible, John of Patmos' [GREEK FORM GOES HERE] has been translated as "Revelation", but the Greek "Apocalypse" has passed into our vernacular as a synonym for catastrophic endings and destruction. Apocalyptic literature is far older than even the New Testament's Book of Revelation; the apocalyptic books of Enoch, Daniel, Isaiah ......[Baruch?] reveal to their ancient Hebrew listeners the truth of their current situation, a transcendent truth beyond simple predictions of the fall of a civilization, the truth of the nature of history itself.
The lofty goal of apocalyptic literature, the goal of enlightening and revealing, has been subsumed in recent decades by a more (perhaps profitable) concrete purpose of positing possible, albeit dark, futures. The apocalyptic genre has moved from sacred literature to popular fiction, and not without accompanying aesthetic and rhetorical shifts. Whereas once the genre "QUOTE FROM COLLINS," the utopian and dystopian literature produced since the Enlightenment (itself a revelatory moment) lacks a godhead to direct history; instead, human agency and the science of causality together determine whether human civilization continues or falls. Since Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, a teleological sense of history has ruled the fictions--we know we are going somewhere, progressing to some fulfillment of human potential, either ultimately good or horrifically bad. The speculative fiction of the mid-twentieth century was decidedly leaning toward the latter.
These dystopian--or anti-utopian, as some say--fictions, while still firmly within the apocalyptic tradition, Something about fear/pity and tragedy as well. Like the great Greek tragedies, these narratives seem to hold a permanent place in our collective consciousnesses that we wouldn't expect from pulp "science fiction." Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Lord of the Flies are listed on most junior high and high school curricula and feature heavily in Advanced Placement English classes [CITE], and dystopian narratives comprise much of science fiction television and film today. A "dystopian impulse" QUOTE BOOKER. This impulse to explore the end, and, in exploring, reveal and predict it, Quote RABKIN. Human seem to have a need to foresee the end; perhaps as a survival instinct, perhaps as morbid curiosity.
Understandably, most studies of dystopian fiction focus on explicating the particular philosophies and social systems each text proposes; comparisons to Marx's vision, examination of power a la Foucault, reworking of "the human" from Heidegger to Haraway. Frederick Jameson's recent work Archeologies of the Future, much anticipated among utopian studies scholars, offers a predictably Marxist analysis of utopianism, often blurring real utopian projects, formal texts proposing utopian communities, and utopian fictions such as Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis into one, uniform idea. M. Keith Booker's two studies on dystopian fiction provide a good introduction the the genre, but also focuses mainly on the social systems proposed within the texts. Seeing dystopian fiction as literature seems to be a problem among most critics; Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction begins with a disclaimer--he will not be including "didactic fiction" such as Orwell's 1984 in his study because it is too obvious in structure.
Dystopian fiction has often been included in other genre studies, as part of science fiction, fantasy, or both.--something about todorov's genre study and rabkin's--why they don't give us enough, but their overall understand of genre is good. To study the genre of dystopian fiction as literature, we would want to understand how it works, its purpose, its structures, and its rhetorical impacts. Early dystopian fiction such as 1984 and Brave New World have clear directives and proposals for their audiences, but how those arguments are made palatable to a reading audience has not been examined in depth. What, we might ask, is the pleasure of a text mired in death, fear, and loss?
Return to ancient western rhet. Deliberative genre. Kenneth Burke is good for this because his scholarship focuses on social change through text, literature as "equipment for living" and the ameliorative qualities of symbolic action. Burke gives us a language for literature as rhetoric, for aesthetics as persuasion, for heroes as avenues for identification.

Two months? Really?

2009-01-27T07:00:00.004-05:00

According to Blogger, the last time I published a post was November 7th, 2008. Two months is a long time between posts, but I did accomplish some stuff in December. Like passing the prelim.

I was playing on Icanhascheezburger.com last week, and ran across their sister site, Once Upon A Win, which features all the cool stuff from when we (whoever "we" is; there seem to be some assumptions about audience being made) were kids. Now, I never really liked VH1's I love the 80s (or 90s, or whatever), but this site makes me actually remember stuff, which is interesting in and of itself. It also reminds me that I am getting old.

Aside from fears that I may cease to be, the site provides links to some of that cool stuff. One such link sent me to a few MadLibs-esque sites that allow you to play that wonderful word game all day, no pens required. While some of it turned out quite silly, my reproduction of Hamlet's soliloquy had some good moments, which I have edited together here.

Oh, and a note about engrishfunny.com: Some of those "errors" are really quite lovely, such as "from time to time, the usual moment seems terribly beautiful."

Soliloquy
When we have washed off this mortal thief,
when we have found that dread of something after restlessness,
then we will know those ills we have
and prattle on to others that we know not of.

Thus conscience does make writers of us all
And thus the flattened hue of resolution
Is plated over with the passive wrench of thought.
And we are ordered, missives all:
To carry out the first stage of
(a lawsuit, for example): filed charges against your lover.
To march or quilt in a line.
To put items in a crate.
To make application; to elate.
To open one's name to a sterling contest
of will, of hope, of daily rendered love.

Annotated Bib: Battlestar Galactica

2008-11-07T10:22:00.001-05:00

A temporary posting of my BSG annotated bibliography:

“33.” Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel. 14 Jan 2005.

The first episode of the series, “33” explores the first few days after the initial Cylon attack. The episode is notable for its attention to time; “33” refers to how long the crew has between each new Cylon attack.

Battlestar Galactica Podcasts. http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/. 14 July 2006.

In an attempt to give viewers even more of their favorite shows, the SciFi channel and other cable networks have begun producing Podcasts, which can be downloaded and played with the show simultaneously. Podcasts speak to the desire of viewers to extend the discourse of the plot by allowing the authors to name their intents and give background information about the construction of each episode—including providing oft-quoted spoilers and character analyses. The Podcast for the final episode attempts to explain the director and writer’s choice in narrative trajectory, citing a need for a refreshing storyline.

Booker, M. Keith. Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2006.

Booker’s latest explication of science fiction history and evolution explores the intersection of SF and American ideology, particularly post-modern ideologies. First, he posits “America as Utopia—Or Not,” naming our current period as “post-utopian” (4) because “The particular nature of American historical experience complicates the American utopian imagination” (11). Seeing SF film and literature as a cultural critique of Cold War and post-Cold War ideologies, Booker traces the “weak” utopianism in major works of the latter 20th century (25). Anti-utopianism, he argues, results in the fragmented narrative style and uncertain arguments usually associated with postmodernism, and the two are inherently related. As a post-apocalyptic dystopia, Battlestar Galactica: 2003 demonstrates both the hesitancy to establish social and moral norms and the non-linear narrative style that Booker attributes to the intersection of postmodernism and utopianism. Booker’s argument that narrative style is a symptom of social conditions, of audience needs, assumptions, and desires, is helpful in that he is able to link such disparate texts as Psycho and Cinderella by pointing to the overall ideologies created by the construction of each text. Battlestar Galactica: 2003 draws from several Hitchcockian techniques to create a dissonance in the subjective point of view, and Booker’s relation of Hitchcock’s techniques to anti-utopianism should prove useful.

---. Science Fiction Television. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2004.

Booker gives a history of the evolution of science fiction in television, beginning with the classic Twilight Zone and ending with a brief note about the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. Booker outlines the premises of the major and minor programs and describes the stylistics of each series. What is important about this text is its attention to intertextuality among series, particularly in relation to the earliest SF television. While the book as a whole lacks a central thesis, it does provide insight into the emergence of more “intelligent” SF, such as the X-Files and Babylon 5 as contextually contingent.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992.

As a book “about plot and plotting,” Reading for the Plot (xi) attempts to “talk of the dynamics of temporality and reading, of the motor forces that drive the text forward, of the desires that connect narrative ends and beginnings” (xii-xiv). Brooks, taking a Freudian model informed by plot and narratology, highlights the structures of plot in relation to the distinction between story and discourse (or fabula and sjužet) (24-25). Brooks’s claims of the inherent human need for narrative and the structures which facilitate playing out those desires (such as the detective story) provide a way to understand Battlestar Galactica’s narrative techniques and the final episode’s sudden shift of time. Because readers/viewers constantly desire a recital of the events around a trauma (here, the destruction of the human race), Battlestar Galactica (successfully) tells and retells the events around the apocalypse, discursively moving slowly through diegetical time in order to satisfy readers’ desire for disclosure.

Gordon, Ian. “Superman on the Set: The Market, Nostalgia and Television Audience.” Quality Popular Television. Eds Mark Jancovich and James Lyons. London: British Film Institute, 2003.148-162.

Gordon argues that the must-see Lois and Clark of the 1990s was the result of nostalgia for earlier television sweeping the US, that it “allowed its audience, or a segment of its diverse audience, to long for something lost and address that longing in a critical manner” (156). Other television programs engaged in nostalgia, including That 70’s Show, target audience desires for the past by revisiting it with a critical eye, but Lois and Clark maintained a timeless look. Battlestar Galactica, whose mini-series production was most certainly initiated by nostalgia for the 1970s version, makes a similar move to Lois and Clark in that the timeline of the series in relation to our own time is uncertain, and its relation to the original series is also questionable. Is this the same Galactica retold, or is the war Adama claims to have fought in his youth the one we were shown in the 1970s? What makes these shows successful, Gordon argues, is their appeal to our memories of not the shows themselves, but the context in which they were broadcast originally. What makes them count as “quality” is the subtle shift in storyline from action/adventure to drama, from a focus on saving the world to a focus on character development.

Hoppenstand, Gary. “Series(ous) SF Concerns.” Journal of Popular Culture. 38:4 (2005): 603-604.

Hoppenstand’s short editorial eloquently raises familiar concerns about the future embodiments of the SF genre, that it has become too formulaic and commercialized. He argues that “these three giants of science fiction [Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Star Wars] and fantasy are the primary cause of the apparent stagnation of speculative fiction” (604). His fears that “science fiction and fantasy, having successfully escaped their disreputable origins, have now apparently returned to the disreputable” (604) may be well founded, but Hoppenstand also ignores some of the more recent “risks” taken by such SF TV as Battlestar Galactica.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005.

Jameson’s newest collection of essays takes on the subject of Utopia—both as a political ideal and as a literary genre. “Part I: The Desire Called Utopia” explores utopian thought as a whole, stemming from human desires and socio-economic conditions, while “Part II: As Far as Thought Can Reach” examines several SF texts in which utopian impulses are central. For my purposes, “The Barriers of Time” and “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future” are the most significant essays, as they take into account what is narratable and how that narration formally emerges due to constraints in time and space in the world of text. In “Progress,” Jameson argues that what SF shows us is not the limitless nature of human imagination, but the limit of what is sayable—all SF is about the present. Battlestar Galactica has taken on issues such as stem-cell research, A.I., terrorism, and martial law—all of which point to a concern for the present. Additionally, the filming techniques BSG utilizes implies a documentary or journalistic feel, not a cinematic one, again drawing connections between the viewer’s universe and that of Galactica. The real-time feel of the series also shows us our struggles with forecasting the future, with giving dystopic warnings to ourselves retroactively; if BSG is a history of a civilization, it is one meant to warn us of our own pending apocalypse—but it can only show us what we already know and imagine.

Jones, Sara Gwenllian. “Web Wars: Resistance, Online Fandom and Studio Censorship.” Quality Popular Television. Eds Mark Jancovich and James Lyons. London: British Film Institute, 2003. 163-176.

Jones discusses the evolution of “fandom” from the “harmless bunch of obsessives” in Star Trek garb to a condition cultivated by networks in order to produce revenue from merchandizing (165). Part of what is notable about Battlestar Galactica is its popularity and large fan base, despite its heavy involvement in issues such as the meaning of humanity, sexuality, and technology. Jones’s history of fandom and its relationship to network decisions about content provides a frame for understanding the reemergence of BSG in the first place, and its continued popularity in the second. BSG relies on many of the same mechanisms of fan creation that Jones attributes to The X-Files, and her comments on the creation of subtext as a tool of fandom formation can probably be applied to BSG, despite the vast difference between the series stylistically.

“Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II.” Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel. 10 Mar 2005.

The last episode of the second season, “Lay Down Your Burdens” ran for 90 minutes, playing over five minutes into the next programming slot. The last five minutes represent a startling shift in narrative style and content, and the events caused outrage among the fans for its divergence from the BSG style.

Moore, Ron. “Blog.” http://blog.scifi.com/battlestar/

Ron Moore, head writer for Battlestar Galactica, in addition to giving commentary in Podcasts, updates fans on the show’s progress throughout the writing process. The most recent entry is from April, responding to questions viewers had about the season finale. What is important about this blog is not so much the ability to reveal authorial “intent” but its ability to reflect viewer concerns, audience-author interaction, and at least one explication of a given episode. The blog also reflects the authors’ struggle with the text—to turn a traditional SF program into good TV.

Suvin, Darko. “Narrative Logic, Ideology, and the Range of SF.” Science Fiction Studies. 26:9 (March 1982): 1-25.

As the title suggests, Suvin’s essay explores, in a set of three hypotheses and tests, the limit of SF imagination and representation. Specifically, Suvin is concerned with extension and intension in the text, the central characteristics of SF narration, and the reasons for the “dominant emasculation” of SF texts which undermine their own premises (by mere silliness, or by ending with “it was all a dream”). More interesting for my project is Suvin’s explanation and adoption of HG Wells’ hierarchy of SF—broken down into the emasculated “pessimum” SF, the middle-ground SF (“most”), “good” SF and Suvin’s own addition of an “Optimum SF.” Using early British SF novel-length texts, Suvin “tests” his hypotheses about why there is such a large range between “good” SF and the pulp SF many of us think of as the norm. This article provides one way to evaluate SF based on a set of criteria from literary criticism and narratology. The original two manifestations of Battlestar Galactica seem to fit into the “pessimum” range while the third one has the characteristics Suvin identifies for “optimum” SF—effective, engaging SF. While his model is not perfect, his explanations for what makes an SF text “good” are a helpful heuristic for determining the difference between Galactica’s forms.

Wolfe, Gary K. “The Remaking of Zero.” The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, and Joseph Olander. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 1-19.

Wolfe examines the narrative structure of post-apocalyptic fiction, arguing that those texts which begin at the end (of the world) offer readers a chance to imagine the possibility of “remaking zero” or starting civilization afresh (5-6). Wolfe’s model of the structure of post-apocalyptic fiction has five parts: The discovery of the event, the “journey through the wasteland”, creation of a new community, the “re-emergence of the wilderness as antagonist,” and a final battle between the survivors to decide the structure of the new world (8). While Wolfe’s structure cannot be directly applied to Battlestar Galactica, (the “wilderness” is space itself), his sketch does provide an outline for a more traditional structure than what BSG offers, and can be used for contrasting the two versions of narrating the end of everything.

Revising my work: Evelina essay

2008-11-05T14:12:00.002-05:00

This essay I am particularly proud of. Written for Emily Allen's course on the British Novel. Some typos, and more close reading needed. Might need to insert some Blair.

A Good Woman Learning to Speak Well: Speech and Argumentation in Evelina

Not long after her first excursions into London social circles, the title character of Evelina writes to her guardian Mr. Villars: “But, really, I think there ought to be a book, of the laws and customs à-la-mode, presented to all young people, upon their first introduction into pubic company” (Burney 83). As arguments, novels represent female characters with given traits in a positive or negative light, thus promoting or discouraging certain behaviors in readers—Evelina’s book exists, and she is one of many who are presenting to young readers the customs of polite society. In contextualizing the novels’ rise as both a cause and effect of the rise of a middle class, critics such as Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, and J. Paul Hunter argue that novels act as what Kenneth Burke calls "strategic answers, stylized answers" (The Philosophy of Literary Form 1). Novels offer both reader and writer a symbolic means to react in an uncertain situation. The female heroine of Evelina and other eighteenth-century novels negotiate for the reader this uncertain environment and eventually arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.
If we take these as our premises, then we must next ask what behavior is being promoted through the female heroines. McKeon, Hunter, and Armstrong have argued that the target behavior is either an appropriate sexuality or domestication by pointing to the characterization and plot development in these novels. The domesticated or tamed female has been described as modest or decorous in her actions, but apart from elocution, little has been written about women’s speech, particularly argumentative speech.
Patricia Howell Michaelson’s Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen takes up the issue of women’s speech as represented in Austen’s novels, and the resulting social action that representation incurred. Michaelson is concerned with sociolinguists’ interpretation of “gendered language” as a question of “bad,” submissive silence as opposed to a strategic ethos of silence (4-6). Silence, for Michaelson, is not necessarily a sign of submission—it may be a rhetorical choice. If rhetoric has been, since Quintilian, defined partly as “a good man speaking well,” how are we to understand the utterances, or lack thereof of good women? While Michaelson studies the dialogue and conversational aspects of Austen’s novels, however, I am interested in the ways the novels describe and thus prescribe (or argue for) an appropriate female rhetor through these conversations..
Written by Frances Burney in 1778, Evelina seems to be particularly concerned with speech, more so than earlier novels. Evelina, with its central female narrator learning how to navigate various discourse conventions, prescribes for its female audience a way of arguing that embodies politeness, wit, and, above all, ethos over pathos. The history of rhetoric has been a history of conflict over the relative importance of these elements. In the eighteenth century, Wilbur Howell argues, the influence of Ramus placed concerns of ethos and elocution over logic, which was completely removed from rhetoric. When Mrs. Selwyn says “But for this observation […] I protest I should have supposed that a peer of the realm and an able logician were synonymous terms” (361) she is referring not to a connection to philosophical logics, but to Aristotelian “logic,” which we now call rhetoric. Those who spoke of “rhetoric” were most often working with Cicero’s reading of the Greek rhetoricians (Howell 75). While “rhetoric” as we now use it would not have been involved with epistemological questions or dialectical constructions, Howell claims that these ideas were debated in the 18th century, just as a separate category. Cicero’s popularity might have saved rhetoric from descending completely into elocution; the 18th Ciceronians, according to Howell, interpreted Cicero’s rhetoric as
the chief art of discourse, [which] consisted of all the principles and precepts which regulated all speaking and all writing addressed to popular audiences on occasions when some doctrine had to be taught, some thesis proved, some great achievement or great man celebrated for public enlightenment, or some course of action proposed as the best response to the facts of the case and to the human interests and feelings concerned. (77)
This last concern of eighteenth century rhetoric is what we find to be the preoccupation of Evelina: How, the novel asks, should women respond to “the facts” of a case of conflicts of interest? To revise Quintillian, how do we know when a good woman is speaking well?
Evelina provides possible strategic and stylized answers to this question in two ways. First, there is the epistolary nature of the novel; Evelina is writing to her father, being careful to omit some details, and to “delicately” phrase others. In first asking Mr. Villars for permission to go to London, Evelina hedges her arguments with deferrals to Mr. Villars’s authority: “They are to make a very short stay in town. The captain will meet them in a day or two. Mrs. Mirvan and her sweet daughter both go;--what a happy party! Yet I am not very eager to accompany them: at least, I shall be very well contented to remain where I am, if you desire I should” (25). In her appeal, Evelina first convinces Mr. Villars of her safety (the captain will appear shortly, and the Mirvan women go often anyway) before submitting, however grudgingly.
Evelina censors for her father several scenes, first by not quoting herself directly, and secondly by simply omitting events. Upon discovering the stranger in their coach is none other than Madame Duval, her grandmother, Evelina writes “But I will not shock you with the manner of her acknowledging me, or the bitterness, the grossness—I cannot otherwise express myself—with which she spoke of those unhappy past transactions you have so pathetically related to me” (54). Evelina’s reluctance to repeat Madame Duval’s “gross” speech shows that she has already a strong education in what is appropriate speech for women.
Michaelson categorizes this type of polite, censorious speech as one of three techniques Austen teaches us: “[Pride and Prejudice] begins […] with an example of what not to do in conversation, with Mr. Bennet’s refusal to participate in the turn-taking cooperatives we expect” (203). Madame Duval may take part in the turn-taking, but other discourse conventions of late eighteenth century England elude her, and Evelina is careful to show Mr. Villars that she knows that her grandmother’s speech is not acceptable. Michaelson sees similar comments in Pride and Prejudice on what not to say: “Earlier, formal modes of conversation are ridiculed in the obsequious flattery of Mr. Collins, who not only constantly spouts fawning phrases, but actually plans them out ahead of time” (204). In Austen, the “polite converser actively smoothes interactions and feelings”—and does not speak with “impertinence” (204-205); her novels prescribe this action. Evelina’s letters, in their censoring, show readers what not to say.
Evelina’s original insistence on omitting or glossing over for Mr. Villars the inappropriate speeches does not mean that Evelina is necessarily arguing for complete silence on the part of a female rhetor; instead, we must see Evelina’s letters in terms of the structure of the novel itself. Each of the three volumes provides Evelina opportunities to practice and perfect her writing and speech, and each repetition of events shows her improving her responses. This type of structure is itself an argument; Burke calls it a “repetitive form”: “Repetitive form is the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises. It is restatement of the same thing in different ways” (125). Evelina restates common social interactions—dances, theater, walking in gardens, courtship—in each of its three volumes, with slight shifts in characters and context.
While Evelina’s rhetorical moves in her letters show us an increasing sophistication of discourse analysis and response, the speech she represents in those letters is perhaps more important in that this representation is more obvious in its prescription. The three-volume structure of Evelina provides, as stated above, a qualitative progression for readers to measure and analyze Evelina’s education (and thus her speech). Readers know that the early arguments Evelina makes are less appropriate or mature than those appearing later. The “young” Evelina is not to be emulated, but is to be used as a starting point for further development.
In the novel, “argument” is difficult to separate from daily speech; we could argue that all speech is an argument of sorts, even if it is just an argument for the character of the speaker. In Evelina, much of the speech represented directly is connected to conflict, as these comprise the interesting parts of Evelina’s life. “Arguments” are all around Evelina, whether in the form of serious conflict, or mere negotiation of opinions of where to spend the evening. The early arguments Evelina finds herself in are largely out of her control; she does not yet have the skills to navigate the discourse community of “the world” outside Mr. Villars’ home. For most of her arguments, then, Evelina is silenced; at her first dance, she finds herself unable to even speak to Lord Orville: “He begged to know if I was not well? You may easily imagine how much I was confused. I made no answer, but hung my head, like a fool, and looked on my fan” (32). Later, she is embarrassed by her silence: “It now struck me, that he was resolved to try whether or not I was capable of speaking on any subject. This put so great a constraint upon my thoughts, that I was unable to go further than a monosyllable, and no even so far, when I could possibly avoid it” (34). Her lack of knowledge about “the world” prevents her from making an appropriate response.
Current-traditional rhetoric and most sociolinguistic theories find silence to be the most submissive position to be in an argument. Vocalization, as Michaelson recounts, has traditionally been given precedence over even strategic silence, and “Moreover, this dominant metaphor has encouraged us to pity, ignore, or discount the many generations of women for whom silence represented a potentially useful strategy” (3). Silence is the position of the marginalized, and Evelina is continually silencing herself-- in the first half of the novel her silence is the submissive, powerless silence we usually associate with that metaphor, but in the second half we see a strategic silence emerge. The presence of silence is not surprising; in tracing the history of desire in the novel, Nancy Armstrong argues that “one cannot distinguish the production of the new female ideal either from the rise of the novel or fro the rise of the new middle classes in England” (8) and that ideal featured a woman who spoke to few, and certainly did not participate in public, policy forming arguments (Armstrong 18-20). In recent years, rhetoricians have focused less on conditions of silencing, however, and more on tactics for overcoming marginalization, even through silence. Still, it is important to remember that Evelina is not representing and prescribing the characteristics of all women’s speech. Evelina is herself a middle-class white woman whose story is an educational tool for other middle-class white women in England—what Kenneth Burke calls a “symbol” (Counter-Statement 152) which gives a “pattern of existence” (157), a template of behavior for readers to follow.
One such “representative anecdote” for speech and silence can be found in Evelina’s first conflict with Sir Clement Willoughby. Sir Clement is unrelenting in his pursuit of Evelina, who lies to him by saying she already has a dance partner. Evelina attempts to escape Sir Clement’s, but he continues his advances:
“You do me justice,” (cried he, interrupting me) “yes, I do indeed improve upon acquaintance; you will hereafter be quite charmed with me.”
“Hereafter, Sir, I hope I shall never--“
“O hush!—hush!—have you forgot the situation in which I found you?” (47).
Sir Clement interrupts Evelina even as she attempts to politely refuse. To escape the “raillery,” Evelina pretends that Lord Orville is her partner. Upon reaching the safety of Mrs. Mirvan, Evelina quits speaking all together: “I had not strength to make my mortifying explanation;--my spirits quite failed me, and I burst into tears” (49).This silencing, Sara Mills points out, has been the topic of most sociolinguistic studies of gender, it has become a trope of the gendered speech discussion to the point where analysis has been stalled at the male-voiced/female-silenced binary. Like Michaelson, Mills finds fault with the earlier sociolinguistic analysis that posited a normatively polite (evasive) and inoffensive female speech, “characterized as deviant in relation to a male norm which, by implication, was characterized as being direct, confident and straight-talking” (Mills 5). For Mills, this characterization is not necessarily the best binary to follow, since “many of these features, particularly those associated with women's over-politeness and deference, are in fact characteristic of feminine rather than female speech, that is, a stereotype of what women's speech is supposed to be” (5 emphasis added). It is precisely this prescription of behavior that Evelina invokes; however, the majority of Evelina’s polite silences appear early in the narrative, when Evelina’s “discourse competence” (Mills 4) is still unformed.
Silence is, above all, a phenomenon of power structures. Julia Allen and Lester Faigley analyze the various ways that those in the margins try to overcome that silence or work within it. For them, the written discourse of novels, poems, and even music can teach methods of subversion (143). Working with Burke’s idea of “perspective by incongruity,” Allen and Faigley argue that replacing direct argument with the metaphorical or euphemistic to be one way the marginalized can speak: “To say the unsayable, writers have often substituted one safer representation for another more definitive one” (164). Narrative, Allen and Faigley suggest, is one way to say the unsayable, to provide a different kind of “rationality” (167). Evelina is not completely silenced; she replaces her silence with talking about her silence in letters—letters which are compiled by “the editor” (Burney) and transmitted to readers.
Despite this early, silenced speech, the majority of Evelina represents Evelina’s own arguments as the correct approach for a middle-class woman. The second volume contrasts the way Evelina handles confrontational speech with that of her less-savvy cousins and grandmother. Her conflicts with Clement and her cousins provide ample opportunity for her to create and give arguments. Without the protection of Mrs. Mirvan, Evelina must speak for herself, and when she does, she begins to discover which techniques are more effective.
Such rhetorical examination was running strong in the eighteenth century; while the “current-traditional” theorists (Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately) formulated rhetoric as a scientific set of rules to follow, still others focused their attentions on elocution. Women rhetors, however, had the most to gain or lose from the stabilization of rhetorical theory and practice, and several novelists, Jane Donawerth argues, used their novels and other fiction as a place to revise, parody, or reject outright the tradition that Howell describes. Donawerth points to Maria Edgeworth’s “Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification,” in which “Edgeworth mockingly parodies and transforms the techniques of traditional rhetoric and thus resists not only the repression of women’s voices and powers in marriage, but also the dangerous potential for manipulation in rhetoric” (245). Edgeworth, like many composition theorists today, knows that the restraints and formulas of current-traditional rhetoric are dangerous not because they are ineffective, but because they are too effective; they allow no room for other voices, they posit a singular, empowered ethos, and they categorize their audiences absolutely (leaving women always as passive, ready to be told the “truth” by male orators). Edgeworth challenges that rhetoric, however, through satire: “In her treatment of wives’ defenses of themselves from husbands’ blame, she parodies the categories of voice taught in elocution, for her shrew has mastered the ‘petulant, the peevish, and the sullen tones’” (Donawerth 245). Even theories of elocution, which was rarely concerned with the content or evidence of an utterance, gendered the speaker, prescribing a particular pitch and thus a particular version of the feminine. Women rhetoricians were in constant dialogue with the newly established theories and while neither Evelina nor Burney does not exactly theorize argumentation, the text does, by giving a representation of appropriate female speech and its consequences, promote a certain version of rhetorical practice. In the second and third volumes, as Evelina perfects her argumentation skills, we learn with her what good argumentation looks like.
In Volumes II and III we are shown various forms of argument and speech Politeness and “decorum” are shown as important to good speech when Evelina comments on the Branghtons’ language. Unlike Evelina, her cousins have no faculty of “sentiment,” the ability to engage in “moral reflection [and] a rational opinion” (Todd 7). Sentimental women (and, to a lesser extent, men) were to have compassion and pity for all, which was then reflected in their speech (19). Sensibility is the outward expression of being affected by pathos, and thus becomes a property of ethos: If one is not swayed to sympathy, one’s character comes into question (Michaelson 186). Evelina is convinced of her cousins’ faults because of the way they speak. Mrs. Duval has none of the decorum that Evelina comes to have by the end of the novel. Evelina comments on the coarseness of her introduction: “The manner in which Madame Duval was pleased to introduce me to this family, extremely shocked me. ‘Here, my dears,’ said she, ‘here’s a relation you little thought of; but you must know my poor daughter Caroline had a child after she run away from me[….]” (70). Madame Duval speaks frankly about Evelina’s private legitimacy problem within seconds of the introduction, causing Evelina to be “shocked.”
The Branghton sisters are no better: Evelina’s letter portrays their conversation as idle “ceremony” (71). Their brother even comments on their gossip and chatter. When asked what the women will find to say to one another, he replies indignantly: “‘Say!’ cried young Branghton, ‘O, never you think of that, they’ll find enough to say, I’ll be sworn. You know the women are never tired of talking’” (188). In addition to being empty talkers, the Branghton sisters are, in Evelina’s opinion “abrupt” and in “want of affection, and good-nature” (172). Additionally, Evelina finds that their conversation “manifested equally their folly and their want of decency” (172). The lack of sentiment and sensibility displayed by Evelina’s relatives gives Evelina the opportunity to comment on such indecency, and to point out to the readers the differences between her own mistakes, which are “never willfully blameful” and which she is always embarrassed by, and the sisters’ brash conversation which they do not notice is uncouth.
Sensibility is also important to understanding theories of rhetoric in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; what we now call identification and pathos became the central terms when describing how to “move” an audience. Evelina’s own sensibility endears her to Orville, even when he is suspicious of her meetings with Mr. Macartney: “‘My dearest Miss Anville,’ he said, taking my hand, ‘I see, and I adore the purity of your mind, superior as it is to all little arts, and all apprehensions of suspicion’” (364). Evelina’s purity from the “arts” of speech and rhetoric is a better argument than any she could—and tries to—give him to explain Mr. Macartney’s presence.
Evelina’s pathetic moments with Madam Duval show sensibility, but this is not used when arguing. Instead, sensibility and sentiment appear as part of non-argumentative speech. When Sir Clement and the Captain “rob” Madame Duval, Evelina pleads with Sir Clement to have pity: “—pray leave me, pray go to the relief of Madame Duval,--I cannot bear that she should be treated with such indignity” (147). Despite her pity and appeal, Evelina is still silenced quickly by Sir Clement’s relentless appeals of his own, and he interrupts her argument to stop his “schemes” to hurt Madame Duval, and instead Clement asks her to “be less averse to trusting” him (148). Evelina is not yet able to turn the conversation in her favor or to cause change.
Evelina’s character as expressed in her arguments begins to provide the basis of her speech. Because of the commonly held beliefs about the “nature” of women, a good woman speaker, to be heard at all, must adhere to the rules of sensibility. Her sensible character is as much a part of her argument as the syllogisms she can provide for evidence. Michaelson finds this to be especially true in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth “privileges ethos as a means of persuasion, while Darcy insists on logos” (Michaelson 184). In her letter to Lord Orville explaining that she had nothing to do with the Branghton sisters untactfully asking for his carriage, Evelina begins by announcing her shame and “shock.” By arguing that “I cannot forbear writing a few lines, to clear myself from the imputation of an impertinence which I blush to be suspected of” (250), Evelina constructs for herself the appropriate ethos for the situation. Her shame points to her understanding of what is appropriate, and the blush she describes is a sign of her true modesty. Her language is formal, as she knows that it is improper for a woman to begin correspondence with a man so suddenly, and the letter is short. She signs the letter as “Your Lordship’s most humble servant” (250); not as a friend or acquaintance. Her signature places distance in their relationship, the very subject of contention that is the exigency for her letter. Even her signature must be constructed with attention to ethos.
Evelina’s chooses her words carefully in this section because of how much is at stake for her. Norman Page provides a framework for understanding the role of character in speech in the novel. Although Page, like many others, focuses on representations of dialect in the novel, he does make a claim for a connection between the representation of dialogue in general and the presentation of character. Because we cannot see the character as we would on stage, Page argues, we must gather character information from the way the character speaks. In some novels, a dialect tells us about the character’s class; for others, word choice and conversational techniques provide characterization (Page 110). A character’s character is in part determined by his or her rhetorical understanding.
In Volume III we are given yet another counter example to Evelina’s newly acquired rhetorical sense. Mrs. Selwyn is perhaps the best female rhetor in the novel, but the novel’s attitude toward her “artistic” talents implies that she is perhaps too good at arguing. Sir Clement, the subject of many of Mrs. Selwyn’s comments, argues that she “afforded some relief from […] formality, but the unbounded license of her tongue—“ but is cut off by Evelina’s defense of her temporary guardian (343). Mrs. Selwyn is never polite, but is witty in her short, sarcastic comments and rational in her longer arguments to Mr. Belmont. To convince Mr. Belmont that Evelina is his daughter, she first meets with him briefly alone. When her arguments are ineffective, Mrs. Selwyn, knowing her audience, brings Evelina with her. She reasons that if Mr. Belmont is firm in his conviction, then he at least should “have no objection to seeing this young lady?” (372). Unable to find a reason why he should fear a young woman, Mr. Belmont assents, and Mrs. Selwyn wins the argument.
While the silent, uneducated response is not advocated by the novel, neither is the “force” (369) of Mrs. Selwyn. Evelina’s own comments lead us to believe that we are not to follow in Mrs. Selwyn’s footsteps: although she defends against Sir Clement’s criticism, in her asides to her father, her opinion is quite clear: “And now, my dear Sir, I have a conversation to write, the most interesting to me, that I ever heard. The comments and questions with which Mrs. Selwyn interrupted her account, I shall not mention; for they are such as you may very easily suppose” (345). Evelina’s father knows Mrs. Selwyn well enough to imagine what the woman might have said, but more importantly, Evelina does not find the comments worthy of copying down. To Evelina, the humorous and critical remarks do not count as necessary to the story, nor do they make for even an interesting aside in a letter.
As a contrast to Mrs. Selwyn, we are shown Evelina’s most effective argument—one in which she does not have to say a word. It is argument by face and demeanor. When Evelina meets her birthfather for the first time, Mr. Belmont is not convinced by the logical arguments and wits of Mrs. Selwyn. Evelina in arguing for her legitimacy is most effective when silent; Mr. Belmont exclaims “Yes, yes” and acknowledges Evelina is the true daughter of Caroline Evelyn. Throughout his shocked speech, Evelina remains “Speechless, motionless,” and yet has managed to “set [his] brain on fire” (372). Her best argument is simply her presence.
Evelina’s ethos comes from her heritage. There is nothing she can do to either improve or ruin it; her face, not her reasoning enables her to live a middle-class fairytale. Still, argumentation in this novel is not left entirely to the parentage of the rhetor. There are definite “bad” rhetorics, in the form of the Branghtons and the bad ethos of Mrs. Selwyn. From this, we can extrapolate what the novel recommends. At the very least, speakers should not be silenced when silence is an ineffective response to inappropriate proposals (like that of Sir Clement). Speakers should also speak politely, but provide enough information so that mistakes are not later made. Finally, speakers should provide an ethos appropriate to the situation; Evelina’s character as her mother’s daughter is the only appeal that will sway Mr. Belmont, and Mrs. Selwyn’s character as harsh and railing prevents her from being seen as the witty, intelligent speaker she is. Evelina does not provide a complete picture of a good female rhetor, but it does provide anecdotal tips to those about to be introduced into “pubic company.”
Works Cited
Allen, Julia and Lester Faigley. "Discursive Strategies for Social Change: An Alternative Rhetoric of Argument." Rhetoric Review. 14 (1995):142-172.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement. 3nd Ed. Berkley: University of California Press, 1968.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkley: University of California Press, 1974.
Burney, Francis. Evelina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Howell, Wilbur Samuel. Eighteenth Century British Logic and Rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Michaelson, Patricia Howell. Speaking Volumes: Women, Reading, and Speech in the Age of Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Mills, Sara. “Discourse Competence: Or How to Theorize Strong Women Speakers.” Hypatia 7 (Spring 1992): 4-17.
Page, Norman. Speech in the English Novel. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988.
Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen, 1986.

Revising my work: BSG essay

2008-11-05T13:18:00.002-05:00

Written two years ago, with some parts I'd like to incorporate into my dissertation. Perhaps for publication?

Starting with the End: Battlestar Galactica and Apocalyptic Narration

Early Science Fiction (SF) television had few successes—The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek—and many (some memorable) failures—Space: 1999, Red Dwarf, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and Battlestar Galactica to name a few. These failures have, for the most part, fallen into obscurity. In 2003, however, the SciFi Channel produced a mini-series based on, but not identical to, the original Battlestar Galactica (BSG), spending the four hour special focusing on the first days of the apocalypse that frames the show. The miniseries was so popular that it led SciFi to create its own version of the 1970s series; unlike that series, BSG: 2003 received a Peabody award in 2006 for its “parallax considerations of politics, religion, sex, even what it means to be ‘human’” (http://www.peabody.uga.edu), and it has continued to show strong ratings.

BSG: 2003 raises two questions: How do you narrate the apocalypse in a pleasing way? And why would anyone want to “read” a dystopic future in the first place? Gary Wolfe, in his structural analysis of post-apocalyptic novels, admits that “Although in one sense the very notion of beginning a narrative with a climactic holocaust seems perverse, especially if the underlying tone of the novel is going to be optimistic, such a fantasy is very much in keeping with traditions of millenarian thought” (3). The relationship between “millenarian” thought—the dystopian, apocalyptic attitudes that appear during times of social uncertainty--and our own postmodern condition is such that a television show that “perversely” begins at the end is not only unsurprising, but well-accepted and hailed by critics. BSG:2003, as a product of our postmodern consumer culture, narrates the chaos and trauma of a future apocalypse while remaining a pleasurable text.

The possibility of narrating the future has been taken up by Fredric Jameson in his latest book Archaeologies of the Future. The name of the book points to the fundamental paradox of science fiction: any written artifact tells of events that have already passed or are currently passing for the author, and yet for the SF reader, these events belong to a time other than his or her own, a time that has yet to come. Scifi, as many theorists assert, is never “about” that future time, however. All “good” SF is in parable form, an insight into the reader’s present (Suvin 5). Narrating an imagined future that is really the present in disguise will always be a complex venture when done well, and, as Jameson acknowledges, that when attempting to outline the formal aspects of Utopia (literary and otherwise), one must “confront the way in which the secession of the Utopian imagination from everyday empirical Being takes the form of a temporal emergence and a historical transition” (85). Utopias are never present, either spatially or temporally, and therefore have a built in reliance on cause and effect relations: if we read a utopian fiction, then we will see our world as imperfect, else we will never reach the heaven on earth represented in the text. Jamison reminds us that the perfection of any written or imagined utopia, however, is limited by human imagination (288), and even the imagined perfect future is only the present reworked.

What BSG: 2003 excels at is making the imagined future not only an easily recognizable reworked present, but making that presence present, immediate, and highly realistic. However, the popularity of the revised series cannot be attributed only to this high level of realism made possible through sophisticated special effects; we must also consider the series as a narrative that takes into account viewer desires for a literal revelation (in Greek, “apocalypse”). What follows is an exploration of what allows this story of the end of history to be pleasurable. I argue that BSG: 2003 uses the relationship between the story of our future as its being told and the viewers’ present time and narrative order to both sate and inflame viewer desires for revelation of the story of apocalypse. Specifically, the series uses an untold “story” that is uncovered through a fragmented and veiling “discourse” that appeals to verisimilitude, and thus the viewers‘ sense of import.

The Postmodern Social Scene
M. Keith Booker responds to Jameson’s earlier work on postmodernity by examining a strand of postmodernity he calls the “post-utopian” or the fall of utopian imagination (Americas 4). For Booker, the post-utopian is most readily seen in SF, but he implies that the post-utopian condition has been overlooked because of the low-culture status of SF: “[…I]f Jameson is right about the status of postmodernism as a cultural dominant, then postmodern characteristics should be displayed in a wide range of cultural products, not just in The Recognitions or Naked Lunch” (Americas 3). As such, Booker takes as his examples popular SF texts from Ray Bradbury and the like. Jameon’s latest work does in fact address science fiction as part of the postmodern condition, citing everything from Ursula K LeGuin’s The Dispossessed to Star Trek, finding that even the wildest u/dystopias are nothing more than “chimeras” made up of pieces of our own time and ideologies (24).

The rhetoric of modern post-apocalyptic fictions depends on this tension between what is knowable (the present) and what can only be posited from our current conditions (the future). It also, however, plays on our fears of the collapse of the social order, creating a desire for fortunetelling so that we can brace for the trauma to come. By appealing to the audience's desire for knowledge and control of the future, BSG: 2003 and other exemplary SF texts invoke the "Utopian impulses," that occur when we are shown a world different from our own, as Jameson reading Ernst Bloch argues (xii). While there is a sense in Jameson‘s work that all imagined worlds lead to “utopian” desires, we should also note that many postmodern texts are aware of those impulses, and take them into account, creating the “dystopian” end of fictions of social criticism. Jameson’s focus on the utopianism is understandable--after all, many ideal communities have been set forth around a general desire for unity, peace, and equality. Few “real world” communities (although we might here name a few religious cults or militias) base themselves around a sense of an impending apocalypse. Hope is a far more pleasurable and sustaining organizing principle.

What Jameson fails to comment on is how these texts--not the communities themselves or the ideas they are based on--work with their readers to produce a pleasurable experience. It is easy to see that utopian (and dystopian) texts show us a reflection of our own world and ask us identify with the fictional extrapolation of our current conditions, but to do so effectively and with enough rhetorical force, the texts must be pleasurable enough to maintain the reader involvement needed to make the argument. BSG:2003 accomplishes this by making the future almost hyper-present, using the cinematic techniques that create reader interest and pleasure in the immediate here and now.

Starting at the End: Revising the Apocalyptic Structure
The real-time feel—the “documentary style” that the writers and directors of the series say makes BSG distinctive-- of the series also shows us our struggles with forecasting the future, with giving dystopic warnings to ourselves retroactively (“33 Commentary”). If BSG is a history of the future, it is one meant to warn us of our own pending apocalypse—but it can only show us what we already know and imagine. The discourse and rhetoric of apocalyptic stories is limited by our past and present.

Film theories and theories of narratology provide a way for us to understand the pleasure of a rhetorically successful apocalyptic text. BSG: 2003 avoids the pitfalls of its predecessors by forgoing a linear narrative in favor of a discourse which reveals as it conceals, never allowing the viewer to gain complete access to the complete story—the events of the apocalypse as they happened. Peter Brooks, echoing Russian Formalist theories, describes this as the difference between “story” and “discourse” or fabula and sjuzet (Brooks 12). Wolfe’s model of the structure of post-apocalyptic fiction has five parts. The original series was half space western, half space opera, with Star Wars as its implicit model, both stylistically and in narrative. The program was popular at first, but as the novelty of the special effects and space travel itself wore off, the show’s ratings dropped. It could not sustain its intrigue with “flat characters and [a] lack of imaginative plot” (Booker TV 89).

The new and improved version takes only the basic plot from the original, leaving the “western” feel behind in exchange for a documentary style and theme. While post-apocalyptic novels have a structure that can, in fact, be seen as a frontier story according to Wolfe, as a television seires, BSG deviates from the five part formula that Wolfe describes. In novels, there are commonly five large stages of action: (1) the experience or discovery of the cataclysm; (2) the journey through the wasteland created by the cataclysm; (3) settlement and establishment of a new community; (4) the re-emergence of the wilderness as antagonist; and (5) a final, decisive battle or struggle to determine which values shall prevail in the new world. (Wolfe 8)

Battlestar Galactica has most of these elements, but has rearranged the pieces and, as Wolfe allows, “The formula may be varied in many ways, with some elements expanded to fill nearly the whole narrative, others deleted, and new ones added” (8). While the miniseries can be seen as covering at least partially stages one through three, the series which begins with the episode titled “33” could be located at stage four.

The four hour miniseries briefly establishes the logic of the diegesis and the premises for the show: Humans have settled on twelve planets known as the “Colonies” and were living in peace and prosperity until their artificially intelligent machines, the Cylons, turned on them and began a civil war. The miniseries picks up forty years after “the Cylon wars” in the middle of a cease fire. We are introduced to the seven main characters (the newly instated President Laura Roslin; the Vice President and traitor Gaius Baltar; Baltar’s Cylon lover, “Number Six;” the captain of the Galactica, Adama; and his second in command Colonel Tigh; Adama’s son, Lee “Apollo” Adama; and pilots Sharon “Boomer” Valery and Kara “Starbuck” Thrace) and several of the minor characters on the capital planet Caprica before the Cylons attack, bringing a nuclear holocaust to all twelve planets simultaneously. The miniseries focuses on the crew of the dilapidated old Battlestar Galactica which manages to escape the attack because its outdated technology isn’t prone to Cylon viruses. The Galactica and a small fleet of the surviving military and civilian ships begin a long fight for the survival of the human race and the (relative) maintenance of civil order. When the miniseries ends, the “ragtag” fleet seems to have momentarily escaped the Cylons and are searching for a mythical 13th colony known as Earth.

When the series itself begins, the audience is dropped right into the middle of a new crisis (the Cylons have found them) without any explanation of what has happened in between. The first season focuses on the survival of the crew in the “wilderness” of space, with the Cylons on their heels—a continual chase scene. This chase is anchored by two main plot threads that eventually become linked: President Laura Roslin’s piecing together the lost history of the 12 colonies and her lost memory of the Cylon attack, and Gaius Baltar’s struggle with his betrayal of the Colonies. While these threads are the show’s main, controlling plot, as they were in the (slightly different) 1970s series, the events move slowly, giving viewers time to become invested in the seven “main” characters emotional developments and the slow revelation of what really happened the day the Cylons attacked.

The structure as I have described it here fits in with Wolfe’s fourth stage, but with an important change: the events of the previous three stages are returned to and retold again and again, as the characters come to terms with the trauma of the apocalypse. The focus is not on the events themselves, but, as creator Ron Moore says, on the “humanity” of the situation; we do not watch for the action, but for the characters’ re-actions.

In part, the series is successful because of its careful construction of plot. All of BSG’s episodes can be seen as following the model of narrative given by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot. Brooks, taking a Freudian model informed by narratology, argues that “Narratives both tell of desire—typically present some story of desire—and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signification. Desire is in this view like Freud’s notion of Eros, a force including sexual desire, but larger and more polymorphous” (37). Narrative is also dependent on beginnings and endings: “The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending” (94). The role of the end is so important that “All narrative may be in essence obituary in that […] the retrospective knowledge that it seeks, the knowledge that comes after, stands on the far side of the end” (94). Brooks’s narrative form, like that of apocalyptic fiction, begins with the end, and endings imbue meaning on the events that precede them.

To begin at the end, however, means that there must be a return at some point, to an earlier time, to a “primal scene” (Brooks 95). Like the detective story that begins with a murder then attempts to reconstruct prior events from deduction and clues, post-apocalyptic narratives begin with a scene of absolute destruction and attempt to re-cover human history and culture. Brooks, looking through a Freudian lens sees our drive toward narratives that retell primal scenes as a type of repetition compulsion, where “repetition works as a process of binding toward the creation of an energetic constant-state situation which will permit the emergence of mastery and the possibility of postponement” (101, emphasis in original). Each episode of BSG opens with a replay of the moment of apocalypse that must be bound: We are shown Gaius Baltar in his pristine home, ducking behind Number Six as a nuclear blast mows down the landscape outside. The shot is ambiguous—how did Gauis survive the blast? This shot of the nuclear blast followed by an exterior establishing shot of the planet Caprica covered with radioactive clouds. Even though the moment of apocalypse is given in the opening of each episode, but the reasons behind the apocalypse, how the humans of the Twelve Colonies are related to Earth, and the plans of the Cylons are left to be discovered through flashbacks and revelation.

The series also uses a structure of repetition and revelation in a strange, yet effective, montage that occurs at the very end of the opening credits sequence. A percussion-based soundtrack serves as the tension-building background to an otherwise silent montage of clips from the episode that is about to be seen. These images, have little meaning without their context, are not meant to provide clues to the episode, but to invoke the “end as beginning” structure within each episode: in Brooks’s words, “beginnings are the arousal of an intention in reading, stimulation into a tension” (103) which moves the plot forward and creates further desire for narrative. The montage for the final episode of the first season, for example, showed Adama being shot in the chest; viewers watched the show to find out how these events came to be and to contextualize the very brief images that serve as a beginning.

Documenting the End: “Real” time and “real” trauma
It is this discourse of revelation and re-vision (as we literally “see” the episode in montage before it is aired, and we re-see many of the events of the apocalypse each week) that prevents the new BSG from failing like its predecessors. The documentary style allows the program, as a whole, to invoke a sense of real-time and immediate presence. BSG’s attention to the relationship between real time and diegetic time creates an invitation to audience involvement and identification, which we see emerge from the first episode after the miniseries, “33.”
Cinematically, the passage of time is felt by long shots, large jump cuts, and a plot that revolves around time in general. Laura Roslin is dying—she has about six months to live at the beginning of the series, and her progression notes the passage of time. Additionally, many episodes in the first season begin with noting how many days have passed since the Cylon attack. In the third episode, for example, three of our weeks into the season, we are told that only twenty-four days have passed—roughly the same amount of time in our world.

In part, “33” and the episodes of BSG argue for the series’ verisimilitude by its stylistic treatment of suture. Suture, according to Kaja Silverman’s explication of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is a “slight-of-hand” which “involves attributing to a character within the fiction qualities which in fact belong to the machinery of enunciation: the ability to generate narrative, the omnipotence and coercive gaze, the castrating authority of the law” (232). By “suturing out” two of the three possible gazes Mulvey identifies—that of the camera and that of the audience—we are asked to identify with the third gaze, that of the (male) character. Fictional television and cinema work to make us forget the mediating technology of the camera and our own subjectivity as audience.

BSG:2003’s distinctive cinematic style, however, might be described as journalistic or documentary. This real-time feel comes from the denial of suture and a minimal use of montage. The camera’s presence is difficult to ignore: Creator Ron Moore states in his blog that he is attempting to create a cinema verité on television by using handheld digital cameras. This “verité” style leads to bobbing, constant motion; the camera is never still, especially during action sequences. In discussing the traditional cinematic techniques that create and maintain the primacy of the male gaze, Laura Mulvey argues the the camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. (26) Battlestar Galactica’s movements are hardly “compatible with the human eye” and the despite the show’s attention to character development and human emotion, the “perception of the subject” is difficult to define in the series. The camera is always present, and it is difficult for the audience to forget their own position as audience.

The effect of the documentary or verité style can be best seen in two scenes in “33.” As the tired and increasingly ragged-looking Adama attempts to give orders to his pilots, the camera moves from side to side, never allowing viewers to see Adama’s still face conducting a gaze. While it is obvious Adama is looking at some screen to get information, we are never given a reverse shot of what he is seeing—only his half-open eyes which the jerking camera movements do not exactly focus on. In a scene where Adama is making life and death decisions, it is natural for an audience to want to know what he is looking at, and to establish a commanding gaze through his character. Both of these are denied, and we cannot identify with his controlling gaze because the camera’s unsettled gaze gets in the way.

While it is “nothing new,” as Ron Moore says, the authors of BSG: 2003 use an explicit split between objective and subjective shots to establish identification and to complicate the plotline. While many of the shots are handheld camera long shots that imply an objective, journalistic gaze, scenes with the psychotic Gaius Baltar rapidly switch between objective shots (which show Baltar talking to a wall or hugging himself) and subjective shots which show us that he is “really” interacting his Cylon lover, Number Six. While this often adds humor to the series, it also tempts the viewers to identify with Baltar as the traditional male gaze.

Montage, the use of cuts which sutures out the camera and allows our look to move around the fictional space, is used limitedly in BSG: 2003; instead, the show is comprised of several long shots strung together. The long shot is broken up by the constant movement of the documentary camera, which pans dizzyingly between characters instead of using a traditional shot/reverse shot technique which sutures out the camera and allows us to see more of the space in the scene. Instead, despite the viewers’ desire for more of the story, BSG: 2003 limits our gaze and our knowledge.

As Sharon (“Boomer”) sits in her cockpit, for example, she faces out toward the hangar. “The Chief” approaches her from behind, and the two stare out the window together. The camera remains on the pair as they talk about the missing commander Helo; despite the panning, bobbing, and weaving of the verité style, there is little movement of the camera around the space of the cockpit or what the Chief and Sharon are staring at. The lack created by the camera is made evident in these long shots, and the longer the camera denies us the reverse shot, the more difficult it is for us to identify with any one gaze. The “reality” of the verité camera work pairs up with the long shot to create the real time documentary or journalistic effect that gives exigency to the topic of the episode.

“33’s” real time sensation is added to by the subject of the episode itself: “33” refers to the number of minutes between each Cylon attack; the episode catalogues the crew’s fatigue, personal struggles with the recent apocalypse, and the relationship between the initial attack and Gaius Baltar’s relationship with Six. The episode begins with an echoing of a clock ticking, and a close-up of Baltar’s sleeping face. We are asked initially to identify with Baltar’s gaze and his experience of time, but as the episode unfolds, the focalization is complicated by continual shifts among the seven “main” characters. The clock continues to tick throughout the episode during moments lacking dialogue. The white face of the gear-work clock is grainy, and is a stark contrast to the crisp shots of beeping digital clocks that act as transitions between scenes. In “33” the clocks hold together the separate storylines, but also give us a point of reference for each significant “space” in the series: the Command Information Center (CIC), Roslin’s ship Colonial One, the hangar, the cockpits, and Commander Adama’s quarters.

Foreshadowing as Temptation: Engaging the Audience
Recovery and discovery of the “story” behind the Cylon apocalypse forward the plot more than any other element, however. Fans often note how offhanded remarks from earlier episodes turn out to be major plot twists in later ones. A specialized viewer-knowledge is created in these moments where memory of past events in the series gives the viewer a sense of being an insider, real member of the Galactica universe. For example, in “33” Apollo draws our attention to it in a lighthearted banter scene about Starbuck being “on drugs” and the squadron being “100% stimulated.” Sharon downplays her lack of exhaustion, but Starbuck interjects a brief “joke” that later turns out to be true: “That’s because she’s a Cylon!” Boomer is, in fact, a Cylon, and this scene is replayed in her mind as she comes to realize that she is not human a few episodes later.
The last episode of the second season of the show is a ninety minute episode that “shocked” viewers and left the series on a seven month cliff hanger. As more of the Cylon’s plan and Baltar’s betrayal became evident, however, the series began to forward the plot of finding Earth; little revelation was left. Many fans refer to this jump as “hitting the Reset button,” but it does not seem likely that the show’s writers simply gave up.

No doubt the audience responded as they did because their genre knowledge was violated. The series had established its own logical progression, but with the “One Year Later” move, seemed to break those conventions. Brooks’s claims of the inherent human need for narrative and the structures which facilitate playing out those desires (such as the detective story) provide a way to understand Battlestar Galactica’s narrative techniques and the final episode’s sudden shift of time. If, as Brooks claims, “[…n]arrative stories depend on meanings delayed, partially filled in, stretched out” (21), a narrative story ends when those meanings have been filled in completely, when the meanings have been “unfolded” (21). Through the first two seasons, BSG: 2003 effectively delays meaning and “stretches” the plot by returning to the apocalypse to “bind” the energy of the chaos. Because readers/viewers constantly desire a recital of the events around a trauma (here, the destruction of the human race), Battlestar Galactica (successfully) tells and retells the events around the apocalypse, discursively moving slowly through diegetical time in order to satisfy readers’ desire for disclosure.

“Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II,” is the second of a two part season finale which revolves around the Presidential election. The episode resolves at least one question of the first two seasons. Laura Roslin reveals to Adama that Gaius is “working with the Cylons” or at least Number Six, a memory she recovered midseason during a near death experience, but had not yet related to anyone else. The betrayal is kept quiet, however; Baltar has somehow been elected President. What is notable about this is not the surprising election result, but that a science fiction television show could present two entire episodes centered on something as pragmatic as an election. The show, however, is not “about” the election; instead, it focuses as usual on the main characters’ emotions as they consider settling on a new planet.

The twist in the plot which shocked fans came at the end of the first hour, where the episode would normally stop. At this point, Baltar lays head down in frustration on his desk: settlement, apparently, is not going well already. The camera starts at one end of the room, then it moves toward Baltar, focusing inward and zooming eventually to the top of his head, actually in his hair. The extradiagetical music becomes percussion-heavy; and the camera remains instead still, for once, in Baltar’s hair. This position on his hair is held for a few seconds, then the screen goes dim. When it lights again, we are “still” focused on his hair, but he is being woken up for the morning, still at his desk. As the camera pulls back, we notice that the office has changed; this is not the next morning at all, but sometime in the future. We are unaware of how far in the future for nearly a full minute, when the digital text appears in the middle of the screen, covering Baltar, letting us know that one year has passed. The delay in positioning the audience in time compounds this uncharacteristic plot move, making it a disorienting moment on several fronts. Because this new time takes place outside of the usual hour-long episode format, the year seems doubly extended. Still, there is another eighteen minutes of show, including five minutes that overlapped into SciFi’s next time slot at 11:30 p.m.

In the summer of 2006, SciFi.com made the final five minutes available to download. While all of the episodes are available to download to iPods for a small fee, the “extra” five minutes and six seconds have been made available free of charge in easily accessible formats, as though these five minutes really were “outside” the normal narrative flow. This supplement to the show is both and ending and a beginning: it ends the former plot line (the Cylons have won the war) while beginning a new cycle of repetition and recovery—we do not really know why the Cylons have tracked down the remaining humans or what has happened in the one year of peace on the new planet. This jump was almost necessary, from a Brooksian point of view. The ends of narrative do eventually happen, despite the delays and twists offered by the “discourse:”

Our most sophisticated literature understands endings to be artificial,
arbitrary, minor rather than major chords, casual and textual rather than cosmic
and definitive. Yet they take place: if there is no spectacular dénouement, no
distribution of awards and punishments, no tie-up, through marriages and deaths,
of all the characters’ lives, there is a textual finis—we have no more pages to
read. (Brooks 314).

The series’ main narrative “ends” when Baltar is elected and the surviving humans settle on their new planet. Wolfe’s formula of post-apocalyptic literature says as much when it names a final ideological battle between good and evil that will decide the value system of the new world (12). Gaius, whose mind is controlled by the Cylons, wins the “battle” of the election and forces the humans to settle; staying in one place for a year is what allows the Cylons to locate the new planet. Once the narrative has ended and there are “no more pages to turn,” we would expect the series to end as well. Fan loyalty and market pressures, however, have forced the show to move on beyond its initial premise, and the final two seasons have moved on to searching for “the thirteenth colony“ (Earth) in earnest, and revealing the Final Five Cylons supposedly hiding in plain sight. To maintain the same structure of revelation and mastery of trauma, a new trauma and new unsaid events must be presented.

Conclusion: Concluding an Apocalypse
What is eye-catching about BSG, what is pleasurable and thus popular, are also what helps the show accomplish what all good apocalyptic/utopian/dystopian narratives do: invoke the reader’s present and present a causal argument. BSG is remarkable for its breaking of conventions, its trust in its audience’s ability to “keep up”(as Moore says in his commentary) and its narrative risks, but these remarkable moves are also sound rhetorical moves. Because the series is still in progress, it is difficult to say exactly what arguments about American society are being forwarded, but it is easy to recognize that something is in the process of being offered. Unfortunately for viewers and fans, the quick leap ahead in time in the show will be followed by eight months of time passing in the real world. The real world was given a chance to catch up with Galactica’s time and to contemplate exactly what is being said in all those gaps and spaces. Now we await the final episode, due out “sometime in 2009,” a promised conclusion to the post-apocalyptic scenario. The lengthy delay in producing this end may be that writers are struggling with how to conclude a post-apocalyptic narrative--thus far, this “final” episode is being filmed as a four-episode miniseries, probably to mirror the series’ beginnings. What we do post-post-apocalypse is a question rarely answered; the Book of Revelation gives us a new heaven and a new earth. It is unlikely BSG will do the same. Stay tuned.

Works Cited
“33.” Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel. 14 Jan 2005.
“33 Commentary.” Battlestar Galactica Season One. Writ. Ronald Moore, Christopher Eric James and Michael Taylor. Dir. Stephen McNutt. SciFi Channel. 14 Jan 2005. DVD. Universal Home Entertainment, 2005.
Battlestar Galactica Podcasts. http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/. 14 July 2006.
Booker, M. Keith. Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2006.
---. Science Fiction Television. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2004.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005.
“Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II.” Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel. 10 Mar 2005.
Moore, Ron. “Blog.” http://blog.scifi.com/battlestar/
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 14-26.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
Suvin, Darko. “Narrative Logic, Ideology, and the Range of SF.” Science Fiction Studies. 26:9 (March 1982): 1-25.
Wolfe, Gary K. “The Remaking of Zero.” The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, and Joseph Olander. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 1-19.

On this historic occasion...

2008-11-05T00:55:00.003-05:00

Like all good former journalists, scholars of rhetoric(s), and news junkies in general, I stayed up to listen to Obama's acceptance speech in Grant Park, Chi-town. And then I listened to the pundits do their last punditing of the season, which turned into some really poorly done "analysis" of the speech. Leave the rhetoric to the rhetoricians, please.

On this historic occasion, (yes, I voted), one can feel the historicness. Whatever that means. Perhaps it means we can feel the mark of a new trace beginning. A new set of cultural assumptions, shared values, and mass experience (experience of the masses, experienced en mass, massively) ready to launch new language, new critical distance to be attained, a different progress narrative to be made hegemonic.

Hope, says Obama, but I remain cynical, because some part of my indoctrinated brain holds echoes of fundamentalist teachings. In days to come, some will name Obama as the anti-Christ, will point to the signs and wonders that prove we're headed for the end of days. And while I have critically distanced myself in some ways from that particular reading of Revelation, old ideologies are strongly embedded in my thought processes, my language, my view of history. While I have turned those views around--made negative copies of them and embroiled them so deeply in theoretical language that only those who know me can see the original under the postmodern brush strokes--they still remain, even if they are only now a starting point for further meditation.

Thus, I provide On This Historic Occasion, some Stuff I Wrote last week, having no explicit connection to an Uncovering. Explicit.

First Place

Plated into place, this nomination of ours lays flush against the wood,
as though the name will fix in place for as long as aluminum brackets hold.
But we live in four dimensions (And now they tell us eleven!),
so the thinner lines that mark the dates will rub out first, from all these boxes,
from being packed in newspaper, unwrapped, propped again against a different white wall;
from all these state line crossings the edges will not hold.

...and God only knows what this is--maybe a piece of fanfic? Or my own apocalyptic writing?

The night was warm, well, warm for this far north, when he woke with a start. The scientists would say later that it would have been impossible for him to hear it, to see it, or to feel it in any way with the five senses, but he always went with his gut, not his eyes or facts anyway. The last of the fire was winding down, and he could think only of death, despite his previous state of dreaming of tall buildings, bright lights, and skin. He woke his fellow traveler with a panicked poke to the ribs--"What the fuck was that?"

(re)Unions

2008-10-22T13:08:00.005-04:00

A few nights ago, I got to talk to Kari on Facebook (sucky sucky sucky chat interface), pretty much for the first time since she departed my place in August. We caught up (sort of, thanks to the interface) and exchanged stories of woe about our current geographical locations. It's no secret I have wanted out of Lafayette pretty much since I moved here--and that my displeasure with my surroundings has affected both my mood and my physical state negatively. Not only am I further behind on paperwork than ever, but I owe Purdue mucho dinero. I am also 18 months away from being without funding, and this has me quite concerned on many fronts. Despite the need to be here, be present, be focused (be filling out paperwork), I've been more and more absent, and we can thank the Interwebs for that.

And on the Interwebs, Kari mentioned missing her high school reunion, for lack of communication. It seems strange to me that a class would hold a reunion in the summer before the 10th anniversary of graduation, but, hey, whatev. My own 10 year reunion will be held sometime this summer, I think, if Mr. Greg Humrichouser manages to get it together. And, I just might go. After all, I may have gained weight since high school, but in general, I've been successful. Ish. I'm not un-successful. Or at least I won't be, if I get the paperwork in.

Of course, all this talk of reunions got me thinking about the cultural purpose of reunions...which for me, begins with the word "reunion" itself. Deconstructionists like "re" words and "de" words because we can play with language--in this case, I think I'd be correctly channeling Derrida if I were to discuss the idea of re-uniting as requiring an idea of original unity, as privileging unity, togetherness, and community identification, which is strange in a late capitalist society.

Oops. Jameson snuck in there. Damn.

The idea of unity, is, of course, highly Platonic in nature. Aristotle (who I know is not Plato, but go with me on this) discussed the Unities of Tragedy--of time, of place, and of plot. To unite means to be one, and yet, the verb implies a process of many "ones" entering into One--many kinds and versions of Human entering into the ideal, complete Form of Humanity. As though we are not whole until we are united, and yet reunion implies that we can, in fact, be separated, be functional, be parts of other unions. Are you ever Not a member once you become one?

On Facebook, I found an old classmate from Ashland Christian School, who is apparently a well-adjusted individual. I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to hold an ACS reunion--are we still a "class"? A whole unit, working as one in order to...to what? As a functionalist, I look to define things by how they operate, what they do. (That which washes that which we wear). What defines a class as a unit, once that unit has been dispersed? And, as Badiou might ask, who instigates the "count" that calls us to reunite, the count that creates a reunion, that recreates a union? How can there be a State to instigate the count, when that which initiated the original union has since graduated, progressed, moved on, to other counted groups?

I have implied that Greg Hummrichouser is responsible for initiating the (re)count for our class, because we elected him long ago. But the "we" that elected him do not exist again until he calls us into being again--but he cannot call us into being as The State, because we, his constituents do not exist until he calls us.

Here is the problem: Either reunions must call their parts into existence from a sort of nothingness, or that once united, a class is never really disbanded. Sadly, I prefer the first. Because being a member of ACS was bad enough when we were physcially present at the geographical location associated with that organization. My baggage is heavy enough.

The Structure of Hope: Rhetoric and Dystopian Fiction

2008-09-23T13:29:00.002-04:00

After much discussion about my life and plans, Professor Goodhart and I have somewhat finalized my dissertation. Here it is:

I. Introduction: Why dystopian fiction? Cataloguing use in high schools,

current studies and what they're missing.

II. The "Topic" tradition--Dystopia, Utopia, and classical rhetoric. Deliberative rhetoric through Pamela.

III. Genre as social action: Dystopia as diff from Utopia--against Rabkin and Jameson, vis a vis pomo, connections to the history of the novel

IV. Burke’s Lexicon Rhetoricae and dystopian fiction (in all media)--fulfillment of desire, desire for the end, the “last man on earth” syndrome. BSG, the apocalyptic tradition, Terminator, Zombie Movies

V. "Postmodern" dystopias--LeGuin, Oryx and Crake, cyberpunk. What is ethical response?

Yes, is beautiful.

It’s a blurry, blurry world out there

2008-09-07T23:35:00.002-04:00

When I was a little girl, there was a part of me that wanted to wear glasses. I thought it would make me appear outwardly as smart as I felt inwardly. Then I went to the eye doctor to do a check up, and became instantly terrified of people going near or touching my eyes. I should have known: I never even liked sunglasses because they came too close. A tickle of the eyelashes. The sound of hair on glass buzzing in my head.

So when things started getting blurry last semester (when did 10 point font start looking so….small?), I avoided the doctor as much as possible. I avoided even thinking about it until the headaches began in earnest, and Kate began getting tired of my whining. The last straw came when I drove Kate to Indy, and had trouble reading the road signs on the way back. Fine. Whatever.

So here I am, now the proud owner and wearer of pearly pink, nearly rimless reading glasses. I hate them. They frame the world, despite the lack of rim, change my perception, make everything that is not text (I know, Derrida--Il n’y a de hors texte) soft at the edges. And Mango ate the case.

But it does make me feel smarter. Or maybe older. More professional. More Professorial. And that’s a good thing, because this is the first time in 23 years that I am not a “student” taking a class. The real world is blurry at the edges, but it’s creeping in, making itself sharper in my peripheral all the time. Every time I teach at Ivy Tech, I feel less and less studential. Less studerian. More like a real human being alive. A human being human--fantastic!

And as a human, despite not being allowed/able/prepared to take the prelim exam, I am beginning to prepare for the job search, which begins next fall. Part of me is now split--while I always planned on either going back to Bluffton or back to Boston, I thought I'd be teaching at a traditional four year university, preferably smaller than Purdue, and with a more Liberal Arts emphasis. I thought about publishing in the areas of Rhet/Comp, fandom, and the English novel. But this teaching non-traditional and adult learners thing is really cool. Frustrating, but cool. Without my own classes to prepare for, I'm a better teacher, in general (this bodes well), but I actually look forward to teaching my 9:00 class at Ivy Tech. My Master Plan, that which has motivated and directed me since I first realized I would have to leave Boston--that which caused me to start this damn blog in the first place--is getting fuzzy now, and I have no Plan B, assuming something more falls through (and I can't blame Sandy's dad for being ill. I just can't).

Of course, "Plan B" usually refers to a failure of some sort. But maybe Plan B isn't always a bad thing. I've come to not believe in the God Has A Plan For Me rhetoric because it's too narcissistic, too American, too Capitalistic in nature. If something "bad" happens, it's because it happened, not because God has some coded riddle for me to figure out--my life isn't a parable with a tidy moral at the end. The dystopian impulse, the progress narrative's mirror image, forces us to look to the end (it's entellechial) to give meaning, to give us reason for action, to guide our processes. But this is postmodernity, and we know better than to assume time is neatly causal, or that there are limited positive outcomes for each situation. Fate is made, time is Wibbly-Wobbly, and a person's life doesn't have to have a singular, coherent narrative--that's a job for biographers and obit writers. And for filling in slots on class reunion forms.

So I've decided to embrace the Zen attitude for the moment--an attitude toward history which is neither comic nor tragic, and would have driven Burke mad. To simply be in the moment without plotting or extrapolating, without judging or narrating toward an end (or beginning). To be without temporal relationships. This is, of course, impossible, and I have already failed by writing this blog entry in the first place, but like most religious undertakings, it is the attempt at the impossible that matters, not the execution of perfection (rotten with perfection).

So I'm going to be a good little adult and go to bed before midnight. Time stamp: 11:57.

Rabkin, The Fantastic, Chapters 4-6

2008-07-14T19:41:00.002-04:00

Rabkin's definition of Sci fi: "One definition that seems to encompass the diverse works we havem entioned is this: a work belongs in the genre of science fiction if its narrative world is at least somewhat different fromo ur own, and if that difference is apparent against the background of an organized body of knowledge" (119). This definition includes dystopian fiction of all types, then, not just technologic ones--"body of knowledge" here might include social knowledge, religious knowledge, or ecological knowledge (although that, too, borders on the scientific). Rabkin further notes that this definition is dependent upon a sense of "difference" and the audience's perspective. Rabkin even goes so far as to posit a prescription: "A good work of science fiction makes one and only one assumption about its narrative world that violates our knowledge about our own world and then extrapolates the whole narrative world from that difference" (121). For me, the key word here is "extrapolates"--this is what good dystopian fiction does: it extrapolates one element, and leaves the rest untouched, so as to allow for reader identification and recognition.

I have some trouble with Rabkin's "reversal"; at times there is a complete reversal, but many works that are fantastic (i.e. Doctor Who) are serial in nature, and it is hard to imagine continual reversals--after all, once we accept that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, it becomes a normal part of the narrative, a joke that the reader is "in on" and can appreciate the non-shock value when new characters seem surprised. This is not fantastic for anyone but the confused human who keeps running around the edges of the blue box; nor is there anything fantastic about the Stargate, after the first movie. What is reversed in Stargate the series? What is reversed in ;the 200+ episodes of Doctor Who? If I answer nothing, then I'd be saying they aren't fantastic. Unless...this is why there always must be a moment of exposition to new or minor characters, so that we can once more bereminded that htis is a reversal. Where, then, does the identification lie?

Rabkin later (144) distinguishes Utopias (or, "approval") and Dystopias ("disapproval") and divides each into subgenres based on their reliance on either "contemporary perspectives" or "Organized body of knowledge" (one leading, of course, to "fantasy" and one leading to "science fiction"). He further divides each of these into either "extrapolation" or "reversal"--and then gives examples of each. I heartily disagree with his placement of "We" under the "reversal-knowledge" box of dystopian fiction, for I feel there is far more extrapolation at work than reversal, and that that extrapolation is a critique of "contemporary perspectives." It is not so much that OneState is a world where imagination is bad (a reversal) than this ban on imagination is an extrapolation of Stalinist Russia (which is when/where this book was written). If Bellamy's Looking Backward is an extrapolation of Victorian social policies into an ambiguous (at best) utopia where the sick are criminals and criminals are sick, how is We's "illness of imagination" any different?

Rabkin's further chart of circles(147) upon overlapping circles (which place dystopias INSIDE utopias....which i heartily disagree with) only serves to point out that classifying genres by category is a difficult and, in the end, not very helpful cause. Of course, his chart helps me to see why I call some things "true" dystopias--and while there isn't a space for post-apocalyptic fiction, I can imagine another circle for that. It also helps to show the releationship between Sartreian (word?) satire and dystopian fiction--both are "disapprovals" (I'm digging this word)--or in Burke, "stylized, strategic responses"--but are different narratively and aesthetically. More importantly, they are different rhetorically, featuring a different audience, a different purpose (exigence), and very different constraints (publishing-wise).

"In addition to showing new relatinships among works that use the fantastic to similar degrees, inspection of each display alone may well be profitable. For example, works in areas 4 and 7 seem to assume that man will change under the operation of science, while works in areas 6 and 9 seem to assume that society will change under the operation of man. This contrast suggests two hypotheses: 1) science fiction writers feel man is ultimately subject to powers beyond his control, while 2) satirists feelt hat men are always responsible for their actions." (149). Hence the inherent struggle in dystopian fiction for agency over structural determinism. Of course, this is always a question when we begin to speak of change, as Burke notes in P&C. Is it the Scene that makes the Agent, or the Agent who makes the Scene? Dystopian writers tend to feel that man has a choice up to a point--and that point was passed long before the start of their stories.
Of course, Rabkin is the one who set up this chart, and so it is not a "natural" chart like the table of the elements--it shows us Rabkin's assumptions instead of some natural property of the genre. And he begins with the assumption that these three genres (science fiction, utopian fiction, and satire) *are* three seperate genres, and he separates them according to his own understanding of the fantastic. He is asking the "essence" question--is text A essentially science fiction? And if so, what is the essence of scifi? Instead, we should take a more rhetorical approach: in what cases under what conditions does text A count as a member of genre X?

Satire, it seems to me, is a rhetorical mode, not a genre--a way of stylizing an argument, a way of arguing, like "deliberative" or "forensic" and carries with it certain topoi (just as "deliberative" always--according to Aristotle--has some discussion of "the good", satire always carries with it some discussion of benefits and the good of society, but reverses the logical means of arguing.)
After reminding us that the Victorian attitude toward technology informs most texts, and all scifi texts, Rabkin fastforwards to the 20th Century's complex attitude toward science in general, and technology specificially. "In the twentieth century all utopian schemes have included technology, and it is only sicne the emergence of the psychic monolith of The Bomb taht utopias are required to include, as wells did wtih this ruleing elite of humanists, a safeguard against technology gone astray" (155). I'm not sure we can locate The Bomb as the shift from a utopian-in-general attitude to the "dystopian impulse" Booker finds, but it is a good marker, and we can say that by the time of The Bomb, the shift had definitely happened.

"If the fantastic is indeed a basic mode of human knowing, then we should be able to see related and parallel developments in non-narrative materials (190). A way of knowing that is non-scientific draws us into Lyotard's questions of post-modern epistemology. And I must again ask: What do we do with post modern dystopias like "The Dispossessed", which does not clearly reverse anything, but reverses reversals and leaves us disorented. And what to do with the non-programatic medium of American film? What do we do about The Matrix (the place)? The film does not give us an answer but to Wait for The One. Agency is deprived, and we become voyeurs into a horrific landscape, but nothing more. The reversals in The Matrix displace us without allowing us to emerge from the theatre and re-orient. It reverses not the narrative of the film, but the grounds of our own reality, and lets us flounder around this construct as the minor characters we are--but now we are horrifically aware of our own status. This is in opposition to the satirical mode of arguing, to the traditional utopian mode of argument, in that it not only assumes that the Scene determines the act, but that the Scene has been determined by some outside force far greater than ourselves. There *is* no argument beyond a simple revelation (Welcome to the desert of the Real), no equipment for living. It's Stylized, but not strategic.

Rabkin, The fantastic in literature

2008-07-05T16:52:00.001-04:00

Rabkin, Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976
Chapter 1
"Talking plants--and (Komodo) dragons for that matter-- are not inherently fantastic; they become so when seen from a certain perspective. The fantastic does more than extend experience; the fantastic contradicts perspectives" (4)

Star Trek time travel episodes to the 20th C does the opposite--the fantasy there is that we ever thought in such primitive ways as we now do. For a member of the Enterprise to enjoy 20th C scifi, then, they must "suspend their disbelief" in order to "be rewarded by a delightful fantasy. Those who aren't willing to follow the signs in the text will throw down the book in distaste. Unless one participates sympathetically in the ground rules of the narrative world, no occurrence in that world can make sense--or even non-sense." (4)

Rabkin distinguishes three non-normal occurrences in literature: The Un-expected, the dis-expected and the anti-expected. (8-10). The Unexpected is literally not expected, but is not in breaking with the rules of the novel or the reader's own world. The dis-expected are "those elements which the text had diverted one from thinking about but which, it later turns out, are in perfect keeping with the ground rules of the narrative. Jokes depend on the dis-expected" (9). And the anti-expected is most closely aligned with fantasy, and are the 180 degree reversal of the ground rules (i.e. in Gulliver's Travels, we are given a scientific, adventurer's opening monologue--enmeshing us in the Enlightenment world view--but then there are tiny little people!) But "because so many of our perspectives enter a narrative with us...fiction often conflates the anti-expected and the dis-expected" (12).

"We have then three classes of signal for the fantastic: signals of the characters....signals of the narrator...and signals of the implied author (such as the narrative structures of Borges and Moorcock" (24).

For Rabkin, Fantasy is a genre, but "the fantastic" is a literary function of the reversal of the ground rules for a given diegesis. Can I do the same with "Dystopian fiction" and the dystopian impulse Booker describes? If so, what is that function? It's a rhetorical function, not aesthetic or plot-dependent, that's for sure.
z
What is fantastic about dystopian fiction? The fantastic happens when the hero/ine has that moment of recognition, of "enlightenment" (apt word, amylea!), and becomes able to see that his/her own world is *wrong*--and begins to desire to change what seems to be a utopia. Dystopian fiction depends no shifting perspectives, past and future, cause and effect--a recognition of the present as evil, of--to quote myself--the bait *as* bait, and not a yummy and convenient worm.

Chapter 2

The Fantastic and Escape

[Burke speaks of "escapist" literature in P&C--but he wants to note how we label literature, what motives that reveals, what interpretations are embedded in that naming]

Rabkin reminds us that "escapist" literature usually refers to lit that society perceives as having little value, as aiding the reader in a "general evasion of responsibilities" (43). What is interesting about this naming, for me at least, is that it marks genre not as a matter of form, but of effect.

Rabkin, of course, believes this label has two misconceptions: "First, that 'seriousness' is better than 'escape'; second, that escape is an indiscriminate rejection of order" (44). I would add that "order" is necessarily the goal--for many dystopian fictions wish to avoid order at all costs (especially those of the totalitarian persuasion). In that case, escape and the evasion of responsibility (but not response-ability) that goes with it are the intended effect upon the reader--a symbolic act of evading order (by reading to escape) that hopefully bleeds over into similar disruptive acts (what Badiou calls an intervention?) in Real Life.

"Escape in literature is a fantastic reversal, and therefore not a surrender to chaos" (45). The "escape" is an escape from the schemas of our mind, our "ground rules" of the universe. Further, "in the literature of the fantastic, escape is the mans of exploration of an unknown land, a land which is the underside of the mind of man" (45). Therefore, even the worst case scenario can have order--it's simply our world in negatives. More importantly, as Rabkin implies, is that the reader can recognize these aspects, can become educated, can be comforted by knowing that his own world is equally structured (or rather, inversely structured)--a sense of Justice emerges.

Rabkin then traipses off into structuralist land by reviewing Propp's thesis that all fairy tales have the same deep structure--this I do not disagree with, although as a Burkeian I'd point out that they seem to have the same structure because of how we name the similarities, and I'm more interested in why we wish to be able to name these disparate examples as "the same." And why "the same" is a good thing, a comfort. Still, I can't help but see a similar structure in both "fairy tales" and "dystopian fiction" (both of which Rabkin would categorize under "the fantastic in literature"); in both, there is a moment of recognition that leads the hero to a journey, traveling across an unfamiliar landscape where some all knowing villain is waiting and watching. But unlike in fairy tales, the dystopian protagonist is not rescued, does not learn his/her lesson. It is as though Hansel and Gretel get eaten after all, as though no prince awakens Sleeping Beauty and she is suspended in the void of sleep forever.

Fairy tales represent "a controlled world" (56), and this world is "an escape from our own, but, as with Poe, an escape through a diametric, fantastic reversal, so that the narrative world actually explores the underside of our conscious world. This world of escape is a controlled world, controlled not by the archfiend within us, but by the conventions of the fantastic genre itself" (57). Here I'd pull out the Lex Rhet from Burke--the form itself is a fulfillment of desire, the form itself acts as a response to the chaos represented within that form. As such, the genre works best when we are familiar with it, when we know what to expect, what to desire, how to respond fittingly.

The rigid form of fairy tales works not because of some cosmic alignment (the golden ratio) but because it is easily recognizable. It's very existence is proof of order, and thus a comfort. As Rabkin writes, "By making a fantastic reversal of the rules of our world and offering an ordered world, fears of maturation can be met and symbolically tamed" (59). Likewise, by making a fantastic reversal of social order, ecologic order, technologic order, we should expect a symbolic taming of fears of The End. This, indeed is what Utopian fiction does. But dystopian fiction does not tame the fears, does not symbolically temper the chaos, but encourages it.

Dystopian fiction does not end happily ever after because a return to the present order is not the goal. Escape is not the goal, but a heightened presence, an awareness of the here and now and of responsibility. The moral of the story is not borne of the mores of a community (as with fairytales) but emerges from fears of those very hierarchies and assumptions. Dystopian fiction doesn't reverse the ground rules, it amplifies them so that we can see them more clearly. It make the fish aware of water, it makes the trout differentiate bait from food.

"In some fashion, escape literature always presents the reader with a world secretly yearned for. If that world is merely the too-good-to-be-hoped-for accumulation of the dis-expected, as in pornography, it may reveal much about the writer and/or reader, but will not serve to give either a new perspective on the mental constraints from which they seek escape. However, if the escape world is based on a fantastic reversal, then, as with the fairy tale, that escape need not be a descent into triviality but a message of psychological consolation" (73).

But I'm not sure triviality is the correct word here. For much "work" is accomplished in slash and fanfic in general, which one can read as "too good to be hoped for accumulation of the dis-expected" (in that the scenarios of fic are within the realm of reality, but highly unlikely and sometimes against the ground rules set up--"canon")--work for both the author and the reader. But perhaps Rabkin is correct that this work is not quite enough--could that be the driving desire behind fandom? That no amount of writing, reading, picture rendering, discussing, role playing, can ease the desire to make the dis-expected the norm? That we cannot overthrow the ground rules of our society by simply playing with a text, now matter how many pages or hours we spend? Rabkin wants fantasy texts to be "psychologically useful" (73)--but useful for what? In what context? For whom? What "order" must this reinforce? Slash is the reversal, the "queering" of order anyway--so I doubt it'd be psychologically useful in the way Rabkin imagines.

Toward Helhaven: Burke's Dystopian Imagination

2008-06-29T23:38:00.001-04:00

AmyLea Clemons. "Toward Helhaven: Burke's Dystopian Imagination." Presented at the Seventh Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society. Villanova University, Radnor, PA. June 29-July 2, 2008.

"On the other hand, though I have, for several months, been compulsively clipping news stories about pollution, in the long run any kind of complaining becomes a damned bore" (Burke, Hellhaven 56).

"Toward Helhaven (misspelled in your program--but that's my fault): Three Stages of a Vision" appeared in the early 1970s, declaring that "Some give a decent life on Earth ten years, some thirty, some at most a hundred" (62). Here we are in 2008, though--and while watching CNN might convince us that we are now living in Burke's technological and ecological wasteland, we have not yet had to leave the planet. Dystopian or anti-utopian fictions such as Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, LeGuin's The Dispossessed, and Atwood's Oryx and Crake begin with a satirical critique of the author's current conditions and extrapolate the situation into the future, weaving together narrative, satire, and argument to create powerful texts that, in the end, are not about some future hero or heroine, but about the reader in his or her present. In the 1930s and 40s the genre emerged and flourished; Hitler's march across Europe, the US's flailing then recovering economy, new forays into technology, and the horrors of the eventual world wide war led many writers to put pen to paper and imagine the worst case scenario. But Burke's comment that I began this presentation with holds true: in the long run, these warnings fall flat, they become too generic, predictable, and no longer rhetorically effective. A damned bore, which brings us no closer to preventing apocalypse than before.

In the same essay that Burke declares these complaints "boring," he offers his own dystopian vision of ecological collapse, overwhelming technology, and constant surveillance. This hellhaven satire, however, could be seen as yet another complaint--ineffectual, unenlightening, and even trite--if we do not consider Burke's understanding of rhetoric and social change. The rest of this presentation will highlight Burke's dystopian imaginings as they are threaded through CounterStatement and Permanence and Change, and point to how these works emphasize Burke's inherent hope in human Acts and Agency.

First, let me outline some of my assumptions about dystopian fiction. Dystopian fiction is persuasive in a very particular way: It attempts to move the reader to action by presenting an extrapolation of the current situation (Eric Rabkin Nowhere Else). Dystopian fiction--particularly that of the 1930s to 1950s--has a regular form and plot structure; while the particularities of these structures are up for debate, few deny that dystopian fictions are highly "generic" and easy to recognize for their formal elements, tropes, and appeals (Darko Suvin and Gary Wolfe have both posited logical structures for the genre). More particularly, I argue, dystopian fiction's structure has an awareness of its readers and the tendencies of reading humans to identify with, engage with, and emotionally invest in certain plot structures and hero archetypes. As such, dystopian fictions (both in literature and film) feature heavily on space and context (for readers to recognize similarities) and attempt to provide a hero that all can identify with. What is important for me is that even as I describe here these structures and assumptions, I find myself struggling to avoid Burkeian terminology because there are few who are able to describe the workings of dystopian fiction as Burke does. It is not just that Burke provides us with terms for analysis, however; but that the connection between Burke and dystopianist thought goes both ways: That is, I do not want to "use" Burke to analyze dystopian fiction, but to show how what M. Keith Booker calls a "dystopian impulse"--the impulse to warn and to extrapolate to a worse case scenario is already a part of Burke's system.

As early as CounterStatement, Burke shows a particular attention to what Wayne Booth calls "didactic" fiction--his opening statements on "pamphleteering" and its relationship to "pure" art and "proletariat" literature can easily be applied to utopian and the emerging genre of dystopian fiction. In discussing censorship (always a "dystopian" issue), Burke compares Plato's Republic to Aristotle's Poetics, declaring that the censorship in The Republic requires a "one-to-one ratio between art and society" (xii)--a direct correlation between what is imagined and what comes to be. Burke, unsurprisingly, links this Platonic fear of mimesis to the totalitarianism of the 20th century. Burke continues down this dystopian path as he describes how "liberal" art, acting as a lightening rod (as Aristotle suggests in the Poetics) can quell the fears of the day, becoming a release valve. The fear he describes is recognizably dystopian: "The sort of fear I had in mind, for example, concerned the attitude toward the ‘promises’ of applied science. More and more people, in recent years, are coming to realize that technology can be as ominous as it is promising. Such fear, if properly rationalized, is but the kind of discretion a society should have with regard to all new powers" (xiii). Burke’s dystopianism appears here, as he first applauds those rational enough to fear, then warns us to pay attention to the fears, all the while assuming reason will prevail against both mass panic and blind scientific pursuit. Once aware of the faults, the logical human will respond rationally and evade danger.

Later, Burke more clearly aligns himself with the arguments of dystopian fiction when he argues through Gide that "society might well be benefited from a disintegrating art, which converts each simplicity into a complexity, which ruins the possibility of ready hierarchies, which concerns itself with the problematical, the experimental, and thus by implication, works corrosively upon those expansionistic certainties preparing the way for our social cataclysms. An art may be of value purely through preventing a society from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself (105). Many dystopian fictions draw their dystopian "energies" (again, Booker's word) from the extent to which they become too much of something--too capitalist, too egalitarian, too controlled, too masculine, too religious...etc. More importantly, Burke's Lexicon Rhetoricae gives us a hermeneutic for analyzing the rhetoric of literature. Even here, we see Burke's concern for identification and reader participation--both of which are essential to the mechanics of dystopian literature. In describing the Symbol and the emotions or associations it may arouse in a reader, Burke notes that "Often, to 'charge' his work Symbolically, a writer strains to imagine some excessive horror, not because he is especially addicted to such imaginings, but because the prevalence of similar but less extreme symbols has impaired their effectiveness" (164) His following discussion of the proletariat novel utilizes the terms of the Lexicon to show the relationship between "aesthetic" devices and rhetorical ones, connecting again reading, action, and social change.

Permanence and Change

, of course, is concerned with humans as social beings, but what Burke again emphasizes, particularly in Part I, is the relationship between interpretation and action. It is not simply that societies change or, in a more Marxist screen, that conflicting classes eventually lead to a synthesis of two opposing groups. For Burke, there must be a critical moment when the situation is interpreted--when, to continue Burke's opening metaphor, the trout recognizes the bait as bait and swims the other direction. Unlike the simple yet noble trout, however, "We not only interpret the character of events (manifesting in our responses all the gradations of fear, apprehension, misgiving, expectation, assurance for which there are rough behavioristic counterparts in animals)--we may also interpret our interpretations" (6). A dystopian trout would write about the horrors of bait, and other trout would respond in kind--the more horrific that bait-story, the more likely other trout are to avoid shiny lures. Burke continues to expect the (albeit flawed) human mind to first recognize, then interpret, criticize, and finally Act. While there may be some jumping around between the interpretative and critical stages, the form remains basically stable, with "any educated action" being one that has been "abstracted" (pc 105)--that is, put into a schema of interpretation. What is worrisome to Burke is that trained incapacity will prevent us from completing these steps, and, by implication, prevent us from amelioration.

Further in Permanence and Change, Burke refers to the "technological psychosis" which we see echoed in the tradition of technological dystopias such as 1984, Vonnegut's Player Piano, the Terminator series, and Burke's own Helhaven. Like most of the technological dystopias, Burke's fears seem centered on the man/machine divide, and he asserts that "man is essentially human, however earnestly he may attempt to reshape his psychological patterns in obedience to the patterns of his machines" (PC 63). Later he asks "How many people today are rotting in either useless toil or in dismal worklessness because of certain technological successes?" (101).

In general, dystopian arguments may be seen as a particular case of what Burke refers to as a danger-response (150)--an interpretation of a stimulus (in this case, a situation) as dangerous which leads to action. However, unlike the heat of fire or the pain of disease, abstracted stimuli may not lead to an immediate or ameliorative response: "We do not persuade a man to avoid danger. We can only persuade him that a given situation is dangerous and that he is using the wrong means of avoiding it" (150). Dystopian scenarios name that danger, and are, as the chapter titled "permanence and change" suggest, secular prophecies, new orientations toward the present and toward history in toto. Burke further suggests that even new discoveries can quickly become dystopic landscapes: "Such is the case with those elaborate regimens of social diet which we build up by a slowly selective process until certain ills gain prominence and authority enough to grow self sustaining or creative. These ills become powers in themselves, leading us on to still further interests, all farther and farther afield from our original patterns of humane gratification" (182). Even here, Burke's instinct seems to be to warn, to extrapolate, and to predict an unwelcome social condition.

What does it mean that Burke has (apparently) this occupational psychosis? These connections are obvious to me, because I spend most of my time thinking about apocalypse. For some reason, I am preconditioned--and, it seems to me Burke is preconditioned--by the linguistic texture in which I find myself, embedded in a set of terms and relationships that allows me to ascribe meaning (and thus cause and effect) to a given situation, to a given interpretation of a situation. The dystopian motive--that is, that which moves us to prevent dystopic situations--includes assumptions about motive, rhetoric, and human progress in general. While I've only managed to highlight Burke's dystopian imagination in two of his books here, the impulse to analyze and persuade by extrapolating to a worse case scenario remains central in most of Burke's work. In his own words, this appears to be his "attitude towards history"--and it is, despite the warnings of failure and totalitarianism, essentially a comic one, oriented toward hope. I will end with Burke's own satiric prayer: Envoi: Nocturne With Noise:

Spring springs among us, on this sod,

Spring vs. Total Fall

And may there be some kind of God,

that He have mercy on us technologic all.

Works Cited Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. ---. Permanence and Change: AN Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. --- "Toward Helhaven: A Vision in Three Stages." On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows, 1967-1984. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 54-65. Works Referenced Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Rabkin, Eric. "Introduction". The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.

Evergreen

2008-06-20T02:45:00.001-04:00

if you had run
I would have run
and when you slowed to a walk
I would have cast nets and made camp
right there, wherever was far enough
you were waiting on me to say Yes
and if I had said yes
you would have started running
my silence disappoints you
but it does not mean I wish to stay
only that I've forgotten how to go
how to say Yes against the echo of No
how to jump from the tower and and not die

The End of the World: Prelim studying

2008-06-14T18:14:00.001-04:00

The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.

Introduction: Rabkin

"The modern popular literature of the end of the world continues humanity's permanent questioning of its place and its permanent quest for a reason to exist. We forever reimagine the pligrimage in and out of history, seeking the well at the world's end, to drink the knowledge the gods withheld from Adam" (vii). Rabkin connects the apocalyptic impulse in art to the existentialist quest--how, though, does the resulting art provide that knowledge, enact that quest, create that history for its readers? What do the books *do*, not what do they explore or explain. How do they work on their readers to either provide an answer or to provide an echoing feeling of nothingness?

"When the world ends, what really ends is not all of creation but--only--the world as we know it" (viii). And the "as we know it" includes, most importantly, all thsoe little acts of human creation--art, literature, the buildings of cities, the social hierarchies of communities. This is what we despair at in dystopian fictio: The loss of the humanities, the death of the liberal arts. For without these, we are absent from the universe; we might as well have not existed, if not for the trace of being left in our creations. Fahrenheit 451 is most explicit about this, in making each person a book and a book each person. And what of the dystopian books themselves? They fortell of their own destruction, they warn of the loss of their warnings. They stand between Us and their own destruction.

Ch 1: Gary K Wolfe. The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End

"As in most post-holocaust fiction, the 'end of the world' means the end of a way of life, a configuration of attitudes, perhaps a system of beliefs--but not the actual destruction of the planet or its population" (1). This, I think, is the difference between dystopian and post-apocalyptic fictions--in dystopian fiction, the world has ended as we know it, but humans flourish (perhaps too much!). In post-apocalyptic fiction, most of the world's population is gone, humanity itself has disappeared not just in the attitudes, values, and beliefs we now hold, but in body as well.

The BSG effect: "Although in one sense the very notion of beginning a narrtative wtih a climactic holocaust seems perverse, especially if the underlying tone of the novel is going to be optimisitc, such a fantsy is very much in keeping with tradition of millenarian thought" (3). What is missing here is a close reading of a text that can show *how* the texts create desire, how they persuade, create identifications with readers, what they argue, what answers they provide. What is the role of revelation? What is the mechanism of that optimism, that hope? (Note: Optimism--opt= eye, to see. Theory. To envision. To make present symbolically).

What is the pleasure of the text for the READER?

"On the simple level of narrative action, the prospect of a depopulated world in which humanity is reduced to a more elemental struggle with nature provides a convenient arena [TOPOI???] for the sort of heroic action that is constrained in the corporate, technological world that we know" (4). Wolfe goes on to describe other benefits this topoi provides the *writer*, but does not discuss the pleasure(s) for the reader. Yes, we all enjoy a good heroic story with clear cut good and evil, a simple story of pure survival, but I think the dystopian texts are more narratively complex than that, when we examine them through Brooks' idea of the arabesque nature of plots. It's not just the plot that matters, but the story--not the events that occur, but how they're told--that matters. It's the "stylized" part of Burke's "strategic answers, stylized answers" that gives us the equipment for living, that persuades us that this equipment is the right equipment. In other words, the flashback, the revelation, the backstory, is more important than the subsequent events. BSG is interesting not because we want to see them reach earth, but because we are given a future without a past, and a story that slowly reveals that past, piece by piece, episode by episode.

Ch 4 W. Warren Wagar "Round Trips to Doomsday."

"With the exception of a few modern men of science, writes Mircea Eliade, 'humanity has never believed in a difinitive end of the universe'....Ends that lead to fresh beginnings and further ends appear regularly in science fiction, reflecting some of the most characteristic anxieties and ideological paradigms of late industrial culture" (73). Jameson echoes this connection to late capitalism in his Archaeologies of the Future--certainly our socio-economic situation contributes to our attitudes toward history (it's our terministic screen)--but literary texts emerge from more than just an economic position.

This chapter would be helpful to explore BSG: All this has happened before and all this will happen again.

Ch 5 Brian Stableford "Man-made Catastrophes."

This chapter briefly addresses causality and links to Christian eschatology--I need to look at it further.

Ch. 6 W.W. Wagar "The Rebellion of Nature."

For comparing traditional literary natural apocalypses with Doctor Who's "Utopia"--what do both say about the nature of nature? Of history? Of our organizing of time? Of humanity's understanding of the infinite? Of Time?

Yes, that's me. So?

2008-06-10T23:22:00.001-04:00

Your Score: The Eccentric

You scored 35Artist, 45 Philosopher, 20 Scientist!

You live in a world of vast abstraction and color. You are hardly interested in the mechanics of real life; you are preoccupied with the substance of existence (the story and narrative, the symbolism), and the form and shape which life itself takes. You mix the mystical with the rational, like St. Thomas Aquinas, you find inroads between the sublime and the tangible ... you might have a propensity to let yourself go, though, in different ways. Everyday chores and responsibilities are not high on your list of passions; neither is any kind of "daily ritual" most likely. Your ideal work involves something that combines a medium for self expression (such as writing), with the inherent rationality and inquisitiveness of your philosophical side. You are very youthful in your demeanor. You are a true representative of modern culture and society; with its shifts toward new systems of spirituality which combine ancient mysticism with classic reason. You are not preoccupied with wealth most likely. Examples of Eccentrics: Timothy Leary, Stanley Kubrick, Socrates. Quotes from "Eccentrics": "I am a little unusual, a little different and very unique."

Link: The Tri-Variable Personality Test (qualified psychologist) ... Test written by divncom on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test
View My Profile(divncom)

desire

2008-05-29T02:47:00.003-04:00

the stark stillness she has sought refuses to resolve, to become fixed in reality

it has passed over her dreams like some restless spirit, or a thought about leaving the stove on

but no means no in any language, even with that beat she allows to pass before speaking

Prelim notes: Buber I

2008-05-27T16:14:00.001-04:00

Buber, Martin. "Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour." On the Bible. Ede. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.

Buber begins with an anecdote-like paragraph about those times we all face wherein we recognize a *moment*--that this moment will change everything, the (as Badiou might say) horizon of an event. At this moment there are two basic impulses: first, to "cherish the until-now-unsuspected certainty of thus being able to particpate on the ground of becoming" (to seize the day and make change); or to "banish all such impulses and resolve... not to let himself be fooled--not by the situation, which is just an embroilment, and not by himself, who is just a man come to grief; for everything is linked invincibly with everything else, and there is nowhere a break where he can take hold" (172). Again, I turn to Badiou--how does something new emerge? How do we break with the state of the situation, with the continual movement of "history" in order to form a future? Is human agency (here, "choice"--173) part of that break, or are humans just incidental? What is history?

"How shall we manage to escape from the dilemma whose discursive expression is the old philosophiucal quarrel between indeterministic and deterministic views of the world?" (173). Indeed, this old quarrel seems to be what dystopian fiction addresses--the genre as a whole seeks to provide a response to that quarrel (to "put in his oar" in Burke's words), and the early pieces, at least, fall on the side of choice, making that implication by their very publication, their readership, their circulation. Later, "postmodern" dystopian fictions are less certain of their own agency, their ability to incite choice by increasing awareness. Buber states this for me: "....philosophy does justice to the life experience in which the moment of benginning the action is illumined by the awareness of freedom, and the moment of having acted is overshadowed by the knowledge of necessity" (173).

Buber next asks several questions "Does a historica; hour ever experience its real limits otherwise than through undertaking to overstep those limits it is familiar with? Does the future establish itself ever anew or is it inescapably destined?" (173)--again, these are the questions that dystopian fiction addresses, and answers with many different answers. Then again, it's "equipment for living", not holy scripture, so that's not surprising. These two options--breaking with history (choice) or following a predetermined progression in faith are visible in the two kinds of apocalyptic writings in the Bible--those of "the prophets in the ages of the kings of Judah and Israel" and those of "the apocalyptic writings of Jewish and Jewish-Christian coinage in the age of late Helenism and its decline" (174). Human understanding of history and our role in it has changed dramatically, giving rise to these two options, this crisis of agency--the divide between the "prophetic" and the "apocalyptic" (174).

Jeremiah is his key OT example--Buber explains that twenty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, before the exile, God spoke to him to reveal the change that was to come. Jeremiah becomes the prophet, the "announcer" (Nabi/navi)(175). In Jeremiah, God is seen as a potter who "works on the historical shapes and desitines of human nations" (176) but humans still have freedom to either act in accordance with his will or to turn from the plan. Jeremiah, as the announcer, reads the situation before him, and plans his speeches accordingly--sometimes he tells them to turn from evil for they will be saved, at other times he proclaims a coming storm, an inevitable catastrophe (176). In either case, "no end is set to the real working power of the dialogue between divinity and mankind, within whichcomapssion can answer man's turning of his whole being back to God" (176). The time table is open, there is no sense of entellechy. "Dialogue" is key here--the conversation is ongoing, not one prophecy (fiction) mapped out already. Put simply, "The task of the genuine prophet was not to predict but to confront man with the alternatives of decision" (177).

Buber cites one important "mixed form" (hybrid genre) between the prophetic and the apocalyptic--that of the "anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile" who appears in Isaiah. "Among the prophets he was the man who had to announce world history and herald it as divinely predestined. In place of the dialogue between god andf people he brings the comfort of the One preparing redemption to those He wants to redeem; God speaks here not only having foreknown but also having foretold what now takes place in history--the revolutionary changes in the life of hte nations and the liberation fo Israel conummated in it" (178). In this new genre, there is "the unheard-of new character of the historical situation" (179).

We begin with the Fourth Book of Ezra, in which "the speaker pretends to be living as amember of the king's house in exile just after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans", yet the book was clearly written in the first century CE: "The actual historical-biographical situation of the speaker is deliberately replaced by an alien scene taken over as analogous to his own" (180). Here we get further contrasts between the fiction-writer (the writer of apocalypses) and the prophet--the prophet "addresses persons who should hear him" while the "apocalyptic writer has no audience turned toward him; he speaks into his notebook. he does not really speak, he only writes; he does not write down the speech, he just writes his thoughts--he writes a book" (180). In the apocalyptic writings, "there exists for him [the writer] no possibility of a change in the direction of historical destiny that could proceed from man, or be effected or coeffected by man. The prophetic principle of the turning is not simply denied in its individual form, but aturning on the part of the communithy is no longer even thought of" (182). Here I should connect communual turning, communal atoning to Girard's sacrificial atonement and the role of tragedy. Somehow.

Connections: "There is, of course, an optimistic modern apocalyptic, the chief example of which is Marx's view of the future. This has erroneously been ascribed a prophetic origin....Here in place of the power superior to the world that effects the transition, an immanent dialectic has appeared" (183). Yes, yes it has.

---

Further contrasts: "Prophecy originates in the hour of the highest strength and fruitfullness of the Eastern spirit, the apocalyptic out of the decadence of its cultures and religions" (183).

Event horizon

2008-05-26T22:29:00.003-04:00

WIP--Found poem

Something might have happened in the snow
it might have come unglued, unhinged,
or slowly rusted underneath the snow.

There might have been an opening I missed
a pockmark, a drip mingling with the snow
in the winter sun there's so much to be missed

Somewhere in the settling of the spring
came rushing water, fog and perfect mist
drowning leaves of grass in what had been a spring

Gentle rivers raze the fields unhinged
washing over seeds and rust and a thousand sins of spring
But here we watch the foundations come unhinged
Something must have happened in the snow

The new Prelim List, or, How Amy Dies by Grad School

2008-05-13T16:47:00.003-04:00

After going through my notes from my two meetings with Sandy Goodhart, I have successfully composed the following sort-of final prelim outline.

Topic areas, the major things the prelim will cover:

The rhetorical tradition of discourse on social change, including: dystopia as topoi, places from which to speak, a recurring position for a recurring concern. Aristotle's Rhetoric,
Plato's Republic and the tradition of rhetoric and utopia/dystopia. Burke's
dystopian/utopian musings, his assumptions about agency and symoblic action
leading to (or away from?) utopia

The literary tradition of apocalyptic or prophetic fiction: Judeo-Christian apocalyptic fiction and its rhetorical structures. Dystopia as tragedy for the postmodern era (including a critique of humanism and human agency)

Current transformations of that tradition and its relationship to PoMo's critique of causality, order, and master narratives: Dystopian film's adaptations of more the written fictions as problematic, particularly in conjunction with agency (The Matrix,
Blade Runner, Terminator series)

Yeah, no prob. Cough.

Reading List
Aristotle's On Rhetoric
Plato's The Republic
More's Utopia
Bacon's New Atlantis
Derrida's "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy"
Various essays by Eric Rabkin
Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
Buber: Paths in Utopia; and Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour
Linda Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism
Lyotard's The PostModern Condition
Jameison's Archaeologies of the Future
Burke: "On HellHaven", Permanence and Change, Phil of Lit Form, the Motives
trilogy
Blanchot's "Literature and the right to death"
Dostoyevski's Notes from Underground
Rousseau's Walden Two
Theatre of the Abusrd: Works from Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, Camus
M Keith Booker's Field Guide to Dystopian Fiction and The Dystopian Impulse in
Modern Literature
The popular dystopias of the 30s and 40s: Brave New World, We, 1984, Fahrenheit
451
The next generation of dystopian fiction (50s-70s): Lord of the Flies,
Clockwork Orange, Player Piano, He,She,It, The Dispossessed
The "postmodern" dystopias: Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep (and many other Dick novels), Gibson's first trilogy
(Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), Feed, maybe Discworld
The Films: Filmic versions of the traditional dystopias, Terminator series (and
tv show), Blade Runner, some of the really bad ones like "The Island", Minority
Report, I am Legend, Enemy of the State (oh, let's just list all the Will Smith
films, shall we?)....and any others?

Yep. I'm a dead woman.

C'est fini!

2008-05-02T05:17:00.002-04:00

Alors, c'est un fait qu'il faut que, quand je lire Foucault, je faites des faults. J'ai fini les essaies, j'ai pensee trop, j'ai enonce mes penses a la monde. Alors, c'est fini, mais pas fait bien. Ce me laisse froid, le termine, et je ne veux que dormir sans les penses. Mes yeux ferment, et je me fait absente.
La langue, c'est belle.

Course Encyclopaedia--Even MORE

2008-05-01T23:36:00.007-04:00

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2007.

The Multiple

The One

Situation

Count-as-one

Presentation

The Void

The Event

The Multiple

"In sum, the multiple is the regime of presentation; the one, in respect to presentation, is an operational result; being is what presents (itself)" (24). The multiple, as a presented element, is also counted. Thus, a mulitple is what gets counted in the count.

"There is another way of putting this: the multiple is the inertia which can be retroactively discerned starting from teh fact that the operation of the count-as-one must effectively operate in order for there to be Oneness" (25). To me, this makes the most sense mathematically. If we consider set theory as mathematicians do, sets are sets of numbers that are grouped according to a common rule (or two or three). These numbers in the set (what B calls "multiples") must fit into the rule to make the set "true"--to fit the definition. If we say "the set of all odd integers", we are giving not only a structure to the set, but anticipating what will be in the set. If we were mathematicians, we'd say that the set of all odd integers is represented by 2n +1--and the formula given allows for an infinity of multiples, and allows us to anticipate what is to come. The count is an effect of this formula, since the formula itself is what first determines what belongs to the "set of all odd integers". Of course, this formula itself can be counted, and the set of all odd integers has other subsets within it (including the elusive "set of all prime numbers"). In math, structure and the count are both easily represented formulaically, and we can predict easily what belongs once that formula can be found (except for the prime numbers one. Damn). Humans are not so easy to order with shorthand.

The One

"The one is not" (23). In "deciding" upon the problem of Western metaphysics ("what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one"), Badiou declares that the One--that is, the essence of Being, the unpresented Platonic Ideal, is not. Or, in English, that the unpresented Whole, is not available to us without first there being the parts (multiples) which are presented, which present "being" by there mere presence in our field of vision. Or hearing. Or some other method of witnessing.

"The fact that the one is an operation allows us to say that the domain of the operation is not one" (24). The one is a function of the count in that in counting what is present, we are presented with presentation--which is being itself.

Situation

"I term situation any presented multiplicity.....Every situation admits its own particular operator of the count-as-one. This is the mpost general definition of a structure it is what prescribes, for a presented multiple, teh regime of its count-as-one" (24).

"Yet there is no situation without the effect of the count, and therefore it is correct to state that presentation, as such, in regard to number, is multiple" (25).

Count-as-one (compter-pour-l'un)

See Situation, above. The presented multiples must be counted. The count-as-one also forms the structure of the situation, is a definitional operation. It includes or excludes.
Presentation/Unpresentable/Re-presentation

"Structure is what obliges us to consider....that presentation is a multiple...and what authorizes us, via anticipation to compse the terms of the presentation as units of a multiple" (25). The structure, the formula, is what enables us to see that the set of all integers (the One, being) is Not--that there is only the multiples that occur after the count, after the presentation of examples (multiples, elements) that belong to a given set.

"...for presence is the exact contrary of presentation" (27). Presence is the Being that Plato imagines--being qua being. Presentation, however, is one step removed; it's the expression (interesting word, considering B avoids talking about the symbolic) of that ultimate Being. Presence's definition contains within it the idea that it cannot be presented--the English term uses the past participle for a reason, to show some kind of transformation has taken place, some displacement occurs from the original (Present) to the new form (presentED). Further:

"If there connot be a presentation ofbeing because being occurs in every presentation--and this is why it does not present itself--then there is one solution left for us: that the ontological situation be the presentation of presentation" (27). The situation (the count of, the structure of) being must have presentation within it, but what is it presenting, if not being itself (since being can't be presented?) It is presenting the very idea of presentation--which, again, contains within it the idea of some original Presence somewhere. Or when.

The Void
"...every situation implies the nothing of its all. But the nothing is neither a place nor a term of the situation. For if nothing were a term that could only mean one thing; that it had been counted as one" (54). Every situation contains within it this void because "there is a being of nothing, as a form of the unpresentable" (in order to include, there must also be an exclusion. Every presentable, counted element of a situation also has an unpresented, unpresentable part that is the Being, the one, that is the operational result of the count-as-one) (54).

"The 'nothing' is what names the unperceivable gap, cancelled then renewed between presentation as structure and presentation as structured-presentation, between the one as result and the one as operation" (54). See my above comment.

"By itself, the nothing is no more than the name of unpresentation in presentation" (55). As we discussed in class, the void has only one element--it's name, which names all of the unpresentables as unpresentable.

"I term void of a situation this suture to being. Moreover, I state that every structural presentation unpresents 'its' void, in the mode of this non-one which is merely the subtractive face of the count" (55). The void is a result of a subtraction ( 0 only exists as x - x), the subtraction of the inconsistent multiple from the consistent--or is it the other way around?

"It is essential to remember that no term within a situation designtes the void" (56). It's not surprising, then, that the state is unable to name revolutions as such.

"The void is what bounds the inconceivable, and thereby forecloses itself from any other relation, including its self-identity" (Barker. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2002, P. 5).

Event

And names: "The event has the nameless as its name: it is with regard to everything that happens that one can only say what it is by referring to its unknown Soldier" (205). The event, at the edge of the void, cannot be recognized by the state, for fear of the unpresented mass of the void. The name of the event is important, then, for what it can tell us about the multiples involved.

And the state: "The event occurs for the state as the being of an enigma" (208). The state, again, cannot recognize the event for what it is because the situation does not count the unpresented.

The evental site is "an entirely abnormal multiple, that is, a mulitple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation" (175). None of the elements of the site are presented, are not part of the legitimated count--thus, this is the space of possibility.

Course Encyclopaedia--More!

2008-05-01T23:15:00.006-04:00

Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1991.

Field

Captial, types of

Habitus

Symbolic Power

Field

Definition "The purpose of Bourdieu's concept of field is to provide the frame for a 'relational analysis,' by which he means an account of the multi-dimensional space of positions and the position taking of agents" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 5).

As structuralist? "Here Bourdieu reveals the structuralist underpinnings of his theory. He posits that the field is not ontologicaly grounded, but rather constituted of ever-changing relations--it is not a static thing, but a dynamic process, in which fluid relationality is the source of structure. He also refers to a universal aspect of all fields, cultural and otherwise: each involves specific forms of capital, which the agents aim to accumulate and increase through their varying 'strategies'" (Hipsky 192).

Field, then, is somewhat similar to the field (champs) that Foucault describes--it is not simply there, but a construct of relationships. For Bourdieu, these relationships are economical (in that they relate to forms of exchange for strategic purposes).

Political fields: These specific fields are "the site in which, through the competition between the agents involved in it, political products, issues, programmes, analyses, commentaries, concepts and events are created--products between which ordinary citizens, reduced to the status of 'consumers', have to choose, thereby running a risk of misunderstanding that is all the greater the further they are from the field of production. (Bourdieu 172)

Bourdieu widens the political field to not only politicians, but discourse about politics (as long as that discourse comes from an authorized subject).

Capital, types of

Definition of: "Bourdieu's notion of capital, which is neither Marxian nor formal economic, entails the capacity to exercise control over one's own future and that of others" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 4).

Capital seems related to agency and power (pouvoir); how it differs from either of these is unclear to me.

Symbolic capital: "...functions to mask the economic domination of the dominant class and socially legitimate hierarchy by essentializing and naturalizing social position" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 5).

Why is symbolic capital special? "Symbolic capital might thus be said to have a dialectical relationship with the other forms of capital; as a concept it underscores the fact that none of the positive properties that circulate on the literary field ever permanently or objectively inhere in any of the individuals, groups, works, or literary forms that are held to partake of those properties" (Hipsky 192).

Symbolic capital is a mystifying (a la Marx) force--it allows us to misrecognize the other forms of capital as natural or necessary.

Habitus

Definition: "Bourdieu characterizes the habitus as a system of general generative schemes that are both durable (inscribed in the social construction of the self) and transposable (from one field to another), function on an unconscious plane, and take place within a structured space of possibilities (defined by the intersection of material conditions and fields of operation (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 4).

What it does: "Between the social structure and agents there is a high degree of correspondence, mediated and generated by the habitus. It is through the dispositions inculcated in the habitus as these unfold in the structural space of possibility that the relationship of individuals to a social structure is objectively coordinated....The possibility of historical change rests in the limited conjucture between a social structure and the actions of agents as mediated by the habitus" (LiPuma 16).

LiPuma posits the possibility of change as a side effect of habitus--habitus mediates between structural determinism and the free will of agents.

Symbolic Power

Symbolic power is created and maintained through structuring structures and structured structures.Symbols are imbued with associations, connotations, and thus power because of the symbolic system they arise from; these powers allow those in dominant positions to hold symbolic capital.

"Structuring Structures": Associated with the "neo-Kantian" tradition: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Durkheim, and in many ways Foucault, as "treats the different symbolic universes...as instruments for knowing and constructing the world of objects" (Bourdieu 164).

i.e. We use these structures to construct the mental and physical objects, to create world views.

"Structured Structures": Associated with the semiotics of Levi-Strauss and traditional structuralism. The always/already present structure is what creates meaning from symbols. (Bourdieu 166). Both Structuring and Structured structures only work by social consensus--insofar as subjects submit themselves to the symbolic power that emerges as a result of the system. Dominant classes use this symbolic power in the creation and maintenance of ideologies (a la Marx).

Course Encyclopaedia, continued

2008-04-30T14:50:00.012-04:00

Foucault, Parts 3 and 4 (The Statement and the Archive and Archaeological Description).

Terms for this section

Statement

Genre

Subject

Author(ity)

Constraints

Ruptures and change

Archaeology

Statement

In French: l'énoncé, the said. Past participle of enoncer. Other uses: "Wording", "Utterance", "lecture", "declaration", "exposition"

What an énoncé is not: "We have put to one side, not in a definitive way, but for a time and out of methodological rigour, the traditional unities of hte book and the oeuvre; that we have ceased to accept as a principle of unity the laws of constructing discourse...or the situation of the speaking subject...; that we no longer related discourse to the primary ground of experience, nor the a priori authority of knowledge" (79).
And/nor: "I do not think that the necessary and sufficient condition of a statement is the presence of a defined propositional structure, or that one can speak of a statement only when there is a proposition" (80).
And: Statements can sort of be seen as a "sentence" bu "the equivalence is far from being a total one; and it is relatively easy to cite statements that do not correspond to the linguistic structure of sentences" (82).
It is also not "an act of formulation--something like the speech act referred to by the English analysts" (82-83).

Relationship to Burke: "...whether, while analyzing 'objects' or 'concepts,' let alone 'strategies', I was in fact still speaking of statements" (79-80).

An attempt at definition: "Must we admit that any series of signs, figures, marks, or traces--whatever their organization of probablity may be--is enough to constitute a statement .....? In which case, we would have to admit there is a statement whenever a number of signs are juxtaposed--or even, perhaps--when there is a single sign. The threshold of the statement is the threshold of the existence of signs" (84). This is still problematic, because MF is trying to talk about statements without talking about the situation or linguistic system (system of differences) or something external to the enunciative moment--and yet, "signs" are only signs in that they are agreed-upon substitutions for the signified. As he says, "If there were no statements, the language (langue) would not exist" (since language systems are rules based on acceptable statements). So clearly he must try again:

The statement is a unique formation, "neither entirely linguistic, nor exclusively material"; instead, it is "caught up...in a logical, grammatical, locutory nexus. It is not so much one element among others, a division that can be located at a certain level of analysis....it is a function of existence that properly belongs to signs and on the basis of which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition, whether or not they 'make sense', according to what rule they foolow one another or are juxtaposed, of what they are the sign, and what sort of act is carried out by their formulation" (86-87).

Relationship to the referent: "A statement is not confronted...by a correlate--or by the absence of a correlate as a proposition has (or has not) a referent....It is linked rather to a 'referential' that is made up not of 'things', 'facts', 'realities', or 'beings', but of laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated, or described within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it" (91). In this description, there seems to be something logically prior to the statement that allows it to mean--things are named--this implies someone doing the naming in the past, some consensus on what counts or doesn't count as a "thing" that can be discussed, about which something can be said (énoncé).

And, at last, the clearest definition: "We will call statement that modality of existence proper to that group of signs: a modality that allows it to be something more than a series of traces, something more than a succession of marks on a substance, something more than a mere object made by a human being; a modality that allows it to be in relation wtih a domain of objects, to prescribe a definite position to any possible subject to be situated among other verbal performances, and to be endowed with a repeatable materiality" (107). My emphasis here--the statement positions us--it Situates us. Hence, "situation", the way things are positioned in relation to one another. These positions are hard to imagine, to theorize (to See) without imagining a corresponding space/time, and it is tempting to map these situations onto a geographical map or a timeline. To Place. But while some situations are dependent on physical space or "real time", some are not. My relationship to my father is a situation, a "placement" of subject positions created by our statements to and about each other, but these cannot be mapped onto a map of Ohio or Indiana. Likewise, statements made online cannot be mapped onto the space of the internet, despite our attempts to call them websites or William Gibson's dream of a navagatable matrix that corresponded exactly to ISP locations of servers. As a non-spatial person, I am most bothered by the attempts to describe all of these philosophical and theoretical concepts in terms of space, or diagrams or flow charts: I'm afraid this adds extra elements or makes relationships far more descrete and finite than they really are.

Enough ranting.

Genre [See also Genre in contemporary rhetorical theory]

MF seems to avoid the subject of "genre" as we think of it, probably because naming and thinking of things in terms of genres is itself a unique aspect of our discursive field. Still, there are times when his discussion of "discursive field" seems to border on what we call "genre"--something that is regular, with rules, but formed from the mass of statements. An appropriate response, if you will.

Use of Genre: When discussing the difference between statements and propositional structures, MF finds that two similar sentences, while propositionally the same, are quite different statements: "If one finds the formulation 'No one heard' in the first line of a novel, we know, until a new order merges, that it is an observation made either by the author, or the character (aloud or in the form of an interior monologue); if one finds the second forumulation, 'It is true that no one heard', one can only be in a group of statements constituting an interior monologue, a silent discussion with oneself, or a fragment of dialogue, a group of questions and answers" (81). Here, the placement of the statement in a novel matters: the statement would belong to quite a different discursive formation if it were found, say, in a newspaper, or between friends. Genres, for MF, seem to be here to help us analysts limit the possibilites when we encounter a new statement. We use the idea of "genre" to limit the possible discursive field the statement could belong to, but this does not mean that genre and discursive field are the same thing, for the discursive field of, say, nursing, has many genres involved. Some discursive fields are named for the genres that seem to dominate them (although, I assume, that any genre can participate in the formation of the discourse surrounding an object, subject, or idea). Genres, for Foucault, seem to be more for the analyst--something after the fact that we construct to help us better talk about the rules of formation with some regularity (instead of spinning off into a million clauses as Foucault finds himself doing). In Burkeian terms, we have the recurring situation of needing to discuss the rules that govern statements belonging to a particular discursive formation, and so we create a proverb, a strategy, a Name that can stand as short hand for all of those rules, contexts, authorities, etc that are part of the statement. Archaeology, then, is undoing this naming process, translating this shorthand back into its original grammar and signs.

A discursive formation is not a genre: A discursive formation does "not form a rhetorical or formal unity", but it is "made up of a limited number of statemetns for which a group of conditions of existence can be defined. Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; the problem is not therefore to ask oneself how and why it was able to emerge and become embodied at this point in time...." (117). Genre study, however, does try to trace the evolution of the genre--which, as Carolyn Miller notes, carries with it the assumption that the genre is now "fixed" ("ideal, timeless form"), that it is a Thing, not a process. Unlike genre, discursive formation does not address a rhetorical or formal unity--while Miller attempts to downplay the requirement of "formal" by moving genre into the realm of social action and speech act theory, there is still a rhetoricality to those things we call genre--a repeatablility, something that can be templated and parodied.

Relationship to Archaeology:

"Archaeology does not describe disciplines. At most, such disciplines may, in their manifest deployment, serve as starting-points for the description of positivities; but they do not fix its limits: they do not impose definitive divisions upon it; at the end of the analysis they do not re-emerge in the same state in which they enteredc it; one cannot establish a bi-univocal relation between established disciplines and discursive formations" (178-9). If by "discipline" he means "statements recognized belonging to the discipline, what I describe above as the dominant forms that help us identify a discourse formation, then clearly he is saying that genre--disciplined texts, texts of a discipline--analysis is different from what he calls archaeology.

Subject [See also Subjectivity from Parts II and III]

Relationship to statement: "A statement also differs from any series of linguistic elements by virtue of the fact that it possesses a particular relation with a subject" (92).

"We must not, in fact, reduce the subject of the statemetn to the first-person grammatical elements that are present within the sentence" (92). And thus, the author dies.

"Is not this subject exterior to the sentence quite simply the individual who spoke or wrote those words? As we know, there can be no signs without someone, or atelast something, to emit them. For a series of signs to exist, there must--in accordance with the system of causality--be an 'author' or a transmitting authority. But this author is not identical with the subject of the statement; and the relation of production that he has with the formulation is not superposable to the relation that unites the enunciateing subject and what he states" (92).

Foucault on Free Indirect Discourse (a literary theory term, style indirect libre): In a novel, we know there is an author whose "name" (George Eliot? Currier Bell?) appears somewhere on the cover. But there are many problems with simply attributing all sentences in the novel to the person who gets paid all the royalties: "(...we are still faced with teh problem of the dialogue, and the sentences purporting to express the thoughts of a character; we are still faced iwth the problem of texts published under a pseudonym: and we know all the difficulties that these duplications raise for practitioners of interperative anlaysis when they wish to relate these formations, en bloc, to the author of the text, what he [sic] wanted to say, to what he[sic] thought, in short, to that great, silent, hidden, uniform discourse on which they build that whole pyramid of different levels); but, even apart from those authorities of formulation that are not identical with the individual/author, the statemetns of the novel do not have the same subject which they provide when they describe things as they would be seen by an anonymous, invisible, neutral individual, who moves magically among the characters of the novel, or when they provide, as if by an immediate, internal decipherment, the verbal version of what is silently experienced by a character" (93). A long quote, yes, but important for those of us concerned with narrative voice in 18th and 19th C novels. The "Free Indirect Discourse" utilized best by Jane Austen is a rhetorical puzzle that many literary scholars try to PoMo their way out of by using the Death of the Author and Foucualt's comments on the author as function. But Foucault here is only pointing out what is bothering the critics in the first place: This other voice that interrupts the normal direct/indirect quote diad is not that of the author, and it is not enough to simply call it part of the author function and throw it away. I want to think through what this not-author, not-narrator voice does to the reader reading. How does it change the truth-value, the "realism" of the novel? How does it try to mold the inner reading voice of the reader to that of this non-author narrator?

The subject, the situation, and the statement: The ennunciative function is not "some additional relation that is superimposed on the others, one cannot say a sentence, one cannot transform it into a statement, unless a collateral space is brought into operation. A statement always has borders peopled by other statements. These borders are not what is usually meant by 'context'--real or verbal--that is, all the situational or linguistic elements taken together that motivate a formulation and determine its meaning" (97). The statement is something other than a sentence said in the right kind of "situation" (as Bitzer imagines there are rhetorical and non-rhetorical ones). What sets a statement apart is that it is unique, although connected to other statements--but these situations are not what "motivates" (as in exigency) a statement to arise. Nor is there any speaking subject bringing it into being, declaring it a statement and thus making it so--"it is not simply the manipulation by a speaking subject of a number of elements and linguistic rules" (99). Nope. Not Bitzer at all.

When analyzing statements we must "operate thereofre with out reference to a cogito." This analysis "does not pose the question of the speaking subject, who reveals or who conceals himself in what he says, who, in speaking, exercises his sovereign freedom, or who, without realizing it, subjects himself to constraints of which he is only dimly aware" (121). In a single sentence, Foucault does away with most of the assumptions that went into Bitzer's rhetorical situation, which required a speaking subject who evaluated the exigencies, tailored a speech to his audience (yes! His!), according to constraints such as genre, time, space, ethos, etc. To analyze the nature of, the thing behind (sub-stance?) a statement, then, we should not analyze it via Bitzer's hermeneutic.

Authority
"...the materiality of the statement is not defined the space occupied...but rather by its status as a thing or object.....we know, for example, that for literary historians the edition of a book published with the agreement of the author does not have the same status as posthumous editions, that the statements in it have a unique value..." (102). This unique value, however, comes not from the authority of the author, but the authority of the institutions of Literary History that bestow that unique value on special editions. The reason why, MF implies, we do value the version of Great Expectations that Dickens wrote first over the one his editor made him write, or the versions edited 100 years later by Dickens scholars (corrected texts, added illustrations, etc), is that the first edition, the edition with Dickens's hand on it, cannot be repeated once Dickens is dead. What is valued is the un-repeatablility.

Authorship: See Subjectivity above.
Constraints [See also Constraints in contemporary rhetorical theory]

Bitzer's constraints seem to imply a silencing--that if conditions were different, so much more would have been said. Bitzer's rhetorical situation can be seen as a filter: it sifts out from the mass of all utterances that which can be said for a given situation, and the mesh of the sieve is made up of situational constraints such as time, place, audience, etc. What emerges is what is left over once all of the unsaid things have fallen through.

Foucault's version of what is said (enonce) is just the opposite. Instead the Said being what is left after all else is silenced, a subtractive process, Foucault's system is one of Positivities. Foucault asserts that "the words, sentences, meanings affirmations, series of propositiosn do not back directly onto a primeval night of silence; but that the sudden appearance of a sentence, the flash of meaning...always emerge in the operational domain of an enunciative function; that between the language as one reads and hears it, and also as one speaks it....there is not a profusion of things half said, sentences left unfinished, thoughts half expressed, an endlessm onolgue of which only a few fragments emerge" (112). Instead, statements are generated by the positivities of a given discursive field (125).

Rupture and change

[See also Badiou's Event above

Relationship to "regularity": "An analysis that reinvests in the empirical element of history...the problematic of the origin: in every oeuvre, in every book, in the smallest text, teh problem is to rediscover the point of rupture, to establish, with the greatest possible precision, the division between the implicit density of the already-said, a perhaps involuntary fidelity to aquired opinon, the law of discursive fatalities, and the vivacity of creation, the leap into irreducible difference" (142). This, Foucault says, is what the history of ideas attempts to do: to find the "tipping point" (as Malcolm Gladwell class it) of an era, idea, movement, discourse. This poses two possiblities: resemblance and procession--either the new idea resembles an old one or it is simply the natural evolution of a series of ideas.
On rarity: the analysis of statements and discourse formations seeks to "establish a law of rarity" (118), to determine what might have been said in a given situation compared to the statements that did appear.
Events and rarity: "...archaology distinguishes several possible levels of events within the very density of discourse....[including]a fourth level, at which the substitution of one discursive formation for another takes place. These events, whic hare by far the most rare, are, for archaeology, the most important" (171). The rarity of a truly new discursive formation is what interests the archaeologists. Here, the event is a linguistic one: the changing out of one form for another in an abrupt and radical way.
Archaeology

In true Foucauldian fashion, we are given more about what archaeology is not than what it is. The chapter "Archaeology and the History of Ideas" contrasts the two methods extensively--but it is simple enough to state that Archaeology seems to do exactly the opposite of the history of ideas, it seems throw out many of "history"'s main thinking tools (like "object" and "subject"), and has a very different understanding of the "progression" of history--Archaeology is concerned with the gaps, not the continuity.

Other, more positive definitions:

"Archaeological description is concerned with those discursive practices to which teh facts of sucession must be referred if one is not to establish them in an unsystematic and naive way, that is in terms of merit" (144).

"Archaeological analysis individualizes and describes discursive formations. That is, it must compare them, oppose them to one another in the simultaneity in which they are presented, disctinguish them from those that do not belong to the same time scale...[etc. A lot}" (157).
"Archaeology tries to establish the system of transformations that constitute 'change'; it tries to develop this empty, abstract notion, with a view to according it the analysable status of transformation" (173).

2008-04-15T16:15:00.000-04:00

The Symbolic and the Virtual Event

When, in May of 2007, "fandom exploded" online, the "event" seemed fixed and obvious to the journalists who covered the happenings: the owners of the blogging platform LiveJournal deleted some of its members' journals without notice or consent, causing thousands, if not millions of pages of creative works, conversations, and games to be lost to the ether of the Internet. Although not a politcal or state driven event, although little was physically at stake in the subjects' right to being, the situation that has since been termed "Strikethrough07" (or Strikethru07, or simply Strikethrough) raises several questions not only about the nature of subjectivity in online communities, but of the nature of the event as described by Alain Badiou when the event in question takes place in the symbolic and virtual realm. Specifically, Strikethrough07, when analyzed as an event, shows the difficulty of presentation and represenatation online, of subjectivity as described by Badiou, and of naming in the event.

What seems necessary here is to extend or perhaps amend our understanding of the symbolic--of the rhetorical--in Badiou. Kenneth Burke's description of a "situation", which is clearly different from Badiou's "event", may nonetheless be helpful. For this paper, we will examine the traces left by Strikethrough, the representative documents surround the unpresentable event itself. We hope that through a thorough examination of Badiou's "event," Burke's "situation" and Foucault's "ennunciative event" we can describe how events like Strikethrough are possible in virtual and symbolic spaces, and the consequences for all three ideas of an erruption of the established structure.

2008-02-27T18:08:00.000-05:00

Dis-ease in Bleak House: An Overview

Much has been written on Dickens's use of illness and disease in Bleak House and in his other novels; however, these comments usually fall into one of three categories: Disease as plot device; disease as a reflection of Victorian social dis-ease; and disease as contributing to "the feminine" or female identity in Victorian England. Each of these three approaches, however, ultimately returns to and requires an understanding of Dickens as a "realist" writer--that is, a writer who created texts that accurately reflect the intrusion of the mundane and abject (such as filth in the streets).

**Note: Most critics agree that the unnamed disease that strikes Esther is smallpox, despite the prevalence of cholera at the time Dickens is writing.

Disease as plot device

Perhaps the simplest use of "disease" is as a rhetorical device to move either the plot or the reader. The scarring characteristic of smallpox is an ideal plot device because "the infection provides a crisis in the heroine's life that Dickens uses in Carlyle's fashion to transform Esther from a naive girl to a true Bildungsroman character" (Gurney 79). As a highly transmittable disease, smallpox is better able to move between characters and scenes to create thematic links and move the story forward (Gurney 89). Further, "the presence of disease in the text does more than provide a tension between sickness and health in the various characters--it posits the entire novel as a document searching for a cure" (Benton 70). As readers, we are implicated in this cure--once the tensions of the novel are resolved, we should administer those same antidotes to our own dis-eases.

Readers are further implicated in the story of disease by means of the sympathy (or lack thereof) the text arouses in readers. Maura Spiegel argues that Dickens is "everywhere attempting to expand our sympathy" but that he is also "careful in negotiating what he understands to be readers' points of tolerance and intolerance" of descriptions that require sympathetic responses (Spiegel 3). In particular, Bleak House educates its audience about propers emotional responses to illness, either one's own illness or that of others. Esther is our model character, who teaches not only how to be sympathetic, but how to manage and control our sympathy: "The proper or moderate balance must be struck, and Dickens appears to have been convinced that an effortful but not distorting self-management intensifies our sympathy" (3-4). This sympathy is key to Dickens's social reform rhetoric: only by having sympathy for the characters he depicts in terrible conditions will we be moved toward social change.

Disease as social dis-ease

As social criticism, Bleak House offers a vision of England that would have inspired not only sympathy, but fear in its contemporary readers (Gurney 82). Although there are many diseases present in the novel, smallpox is clearly Dickens's central device for arguing for social change. According to Schwarzbach, the prominent theory of disease transmission in Victorian England was the "pythogenic"--"the theory held that rotting organic matter produced specific poisonous agents; when a person cam in contact with them he contracted on fo the several fevers" (22). Unlike germ theories, then, pythogenic theories tie a disease to a location and a hygenic (and aesthetic) condition; represented as "miasmas" or fogs, these centers of disease had to be visited for the illness to be caught, such as at Tom-All-Alone's (22-23). From this pythogenic theory, Dickens could argue for better social conditions leading to fewer illnesses.

Smallpox was known to be one of the few "contagious" diseases that could be transmitted person-to-person--one of the few illnesses that could cut across social classes (Schwarzbach 26). Unlike the pythogenic diseases, smallpox as device could help Dickens argue for sympathy towards suffering in general (Fasick 137), which would hopefully lead to social reform. Graham Benton puts it most clearly:

I would argue that disease...fills...a dual role, that disease represents a containment of power in that it 'selects' and 'isolates' certain individuals upon whom it asserts its authority, and at the same tme dsease, because of the arbitrary nature of contamination, remains outside hte artifical construction of power relations. Disease is 'god-given': through a discourse of poetic justice, one can argue disease represents the ultimate juridical system. And yet, expectations are reversed in Bleak House--it is the innocent and the 'good' who are afflicted. Such an inversion operates to produce sympathetic readins, and forces the reader to look for causes for such an eteliologically derrived tragedy (72).

Disease as sign of the feminine

Robert Lougy identifies Dickens's preoccupation with disease (and the filth, contagion, and death that accompanies it) with Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject, "particularly its relationship to sexual difference and the feminine" (Lougy 476). Lougy notes that we cannot escape the abject in Bleak House, that "it rubs our noses in this quotidian muck" (477) anymore than we can escape death, for the novel is "structured...around an extended joke about death" (Jarndyce and Jarndyce) (479). Lougy, like Kristeva, places disease, death, filth, and sex in the liminal--the transitional space outside of the symbolic order. Lady Dedlock, as a liminal character marked early on by death, sex, disease, and an actual physical stain (after visiting the graveyard), represents a break with the (masculine) order, and must be dealt with accordingly (489). More importantly, however, the novel itself acts as a mediating, ordering device: it describes the indescribable, erases what must be erased, and teaches us how to deal with the abject--just as Esther does, by redirecting her narrative at the moment she encounters her mother in death (Lougy 493).

Disease is further linked to the feminine realm by Esther's scarring; disfigurement and disease literally marks the women as sexually and culturally different. Helena Michie, using Elaine Scarry's terminology, claims that pain can make or unmake "a self and a world" for the female character, and that for Dickens, "the process of making and unmaking is itself foregrounded in the illnesses of his heroines, and that pain necessarily both temporarily reproduces female physicality and makes any notion of the stable and fully representable female self impossible" (Michie 199). The female self in Dickens is always marked by some dis-ease which prevents that character from wholly constructing herself. "Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend become, then, not only gigantic experiments in realism, but texts in which female pain produces a discourse of and for the female self, of and for the female body" (200)--the literature is "equipment for living" in that it teaches its readers what appropriate female identity and discourse looks like.

Key Passages:

Bibliography

Benton, Graham. "'And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day': Pathology, Ontology and the Discourse of the Diseased Body. A Study of Illness and and Contagion in Bleak House." Dickens Quarterly. 11 (1994): 69-80.

Fasick, Laura. "Dickens and the Diseased Body in Bleak House." Dickens Studies Annual. (1996): 135-151.

Gurney, Michael S. "Disease as Device: The Role of Smallpox in Bleak House." Literature and Medicine 9 (1990): 72-92.

Lougy, Robert E. "Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's Bleak House." ELH 69 (2002): 473-500.

Michie, Helena. "'Who Is This In Pain?': Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.2: 199-212.

Schwarzbach, F.S. "The Fever of Bleak House." English Language Notes. 20.3/4: 21-27.

Spiegel, Maura. "Managing Pain: Suffering and Reader Sympathy in Bleak House." Dickens Quarterly 12.1: 3-10.

Amy's new Reading List

2008-02-21T13:25:00.003-05:00

My focus feild is dystopias.

dystopia as topoi
Jewish/christian apoc;
tragedy's critique humanism;
dystopia as replacing tragedy

Buber--I and Thou
Ari
Plato
Formalism: Brooks/Ross Chambers/S. Chapman/Todorov's book on the fantastic/Propp
Violence and sacred--sacrificial crisis
Levi-Strauss's rejection of structuralist reading of literature
Eric Rankin?
Derrida's on Apocalyptic Time
Bernard Knox--Oedipus at Thebes
Cedric Whitman: Sophoclean Humanism
Causality: two kinds of prophetic: Buber: the apocalyptic, the prophetic and the historical --from On the Bible/ ed H Bloom

Primary texts
Kafka
Beckett
Ianesco
More's Utopia; Bacon
1984--novel, movie 1 movie 2
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451
Rousseau
Dispossessed--LeGuin
Dostoyevski
Camus--The possessed
Notes from the Underground
We-Zamyatin
countermovement by Russians--1840s: What is to be done? "The Double"
Dostoyevski: counterdystopian--begins with a dystopia.
Jacob's Ladder--three realities: Vietnam; in bed wakes up in another life; Never left the dystopia
Robert Ludlam--Bourne Identity/ George Lucas--THX

Relationship to ancient rhet?
Relationship to tragedy?
Is a genre?

Comm Gloss: Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge

2008-01-29T15:00:00.003-05:00

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Parts I and II

Terms

History

Space of Emergence

Object(s)

Subject(ivity)

Discourse Formation

"History"

Foucault:
"The old questions of the traditional [historical] analysis (What link should be made between disparate evens? How can a causal succession be established between them? What continuity or overall significance do they possess? Is it possible to define a totality, or must one be content with reconstituting connexions?) are now being replaced by questions of another type:[...]What types of series should be established? What criteria of periodization should be adopted for each of them?What systems of relations [...]may be established between them? [....] (3-4). History, or the work of historians, is no longer the study of causality and influence centered around a "spirit" of the period, but is now the analysis of disparate events breaking up that linear narrative. In other words, now historians are asking, with Burke, "How do you size up a situation?"--with "How" here referring to the power struggles, authorities, language choices, styles, traditions, and other forms that affect how we historicize.

"[...]thus, historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge" (5). Terministic screens go here.

Back in the day, "history" was simple: "The series being known, it was simply a question of defining the position of each element in relation to the other elements in the series" (7). This sounds like Bitzer's version of history and "situation": that there are objective facts we can write down in a predictable and ordered series, and these elements act as filters, sifting out what cannot be said from the totality of all utterances. Foucault sees this as a "negative" version of discourse formation; instead of seeing "constraints" and limits in the context, Foucault sees the elements as formative.

Total history: "seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle--material or spiritual--of a society[...] what is called metaphorically teh 'face' of a period" (9). General history, its opposite, looks for "series of series" and a "total description" of the relations between historical elements (10).

Space and Space of Emergence

Foucault:

"So that the problem arises of knowing whether the unity of a discourse is based not so much on the permanence and uniqueness of an object as on the space in which various objects emerge and are continuously transformed" (32). "Space" is the important word here. What is "space"? How does that space itself get delineated?

"Object"

Foucault:
Major questions arise: "[...]how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity[....]? By what criteria is one to isolate the unities with which one is dealing; what is a science? What is an oeuvre? What is a theory? What is a text? (5). The "object" of study is not singular, does not have essence in and of itself, is not a unity, until it is embodied in discourse; nor does it exist prior to the discourse that constitutes it!

"Subject"

Foucault:
Traditional history created the conscious subject: "Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject--in the form of historical consciousness--will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what he may call his abode" (12). Several important things here: First, that the "subject" is a historical subject, that consciousness is a by product of a continuous history that accounts for cause and effect, events, purpose, and progress. Second, that the subject uses traditional senses of history (or needs it?) to order his/her consciousness and cope with (deal with, "size up") the present, to understand differentiation and division. Third, Foucault uses the word "abode"--a place, a home, a grounds from which the subject emerges. Without traditional, linear history, the subject cannot find the grounds from which s/he emerges (to use Burke's idea from the Grammar. In the "new" history, the subject is constituted by his/her position in a web of relations that don't exist prior to her/his participation in them--nor does the subject exist prior to the participation!

Excuse me while my head explodes.

"In this system [traditional history], time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness" (12). Here is where Foucault intersects with dystopian rhetoric: In the traditional dystopias, the key to revolution is recognition--"consciousness" of history, of the historicity of the characters' present moment. In the new history, however, and in PoMo dystopias, this recognition is not enough, because "history" is no longer a linear path with easy causality, marching forward in an ordered Marxist way toward Utopia. Hence the subtitle of LeGuin's The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. What is ambiguous is what counts as utopia, how we know we've reached it, and for whom is the situation (however we delineate "a" situation) is utopian. What is ambiguous is the totalization of a group of people in a not-yet-differentiated time: Where do we draw the lines? Thus, the rhetorical force loses ground: there is no "forward" motion toward utopia because we are no longer sure what "forward" means. In Oryx and Crake utopia only appears without narrative, without humans. If discursive formations arise from specific grounds, we must consider what grounds dystopian fiction, always already historical and historicizing, emerges from, and why this discourse can appear in multiple genres across different "eras," and still be recognized as the "same."

Discourse Formation
Foucault:

How to find a "discursive unity": "But perhaps one might discover a discursive unity if one sought it not in the coherence of concepts, but in their simultaneous or successive emergence, in the distance that separates them and even in their incompatibility. One would no longer seek an architecture of concepts sufficiently general and abstract to embrace all others and to introduce them into the same deductive structure; one would try to analyse the interplay of their appearances and dispersion" (34).

He uses the idea of "theme" as a way of identifying a discursive unity among discourses. I think this is what I mean when I refer to a "dystopian rhetoric" or a "dystopian philosophy"--a set of assumptions, values, beliefs, worldviews, etc, which lead to (somehow) a unity of style, and selects the forms of novel and film almost necessarily.

MF finds the "theme" just as problematic a way of defining a unity as "essence"--themes change over time, influence each other--it is still a somewhat arbitrary naming of this *thing*, this body of discourses, that depends more on a gut feeling of interconnectedness than any criterion we can examine here.

COM 632S, or "Everthing you thought you knew about the rhetorical situation, but really you never did"

2008-01-27T16:43:00.003-05:00

As you can tell from the long title, my COM class this semester is a bit more rigorous than the others I've taken. And that's a good thing, in some ways, because these are the things I NEED to be thinking about for the...you know. That which will not be named.

[Prelims]

As part of the class, Dr. Sam McCormick (any relation I wonder?), who kicks professorial ass, has asked us to do a "glossary" of terms, a handbook of authors and their relationships to each other, a list of cool quotes, etc. Now, I usually do something like that on here for the first few, crucial weeks of the semester for referencing later in the semester (when I've forgotten everything but my own name...and then some), but Sam is going to be grading these at regular intervals (i.e. TUESDAY of this week), which means I must actually continue my practice beyond week 4.

Damn.

On the plus side, if I put this "glossary" on this blog here, I can use that cute little search button at the top of the page when That Which Will Not Be Named rolls around, and I'm stuck on a rhetoric question.

So, without further ado [complaining], I present to you the first two weeks of Amy's Communication Studies Glossary of Terms Related to the Rhetorical Situation in Contemporary Theory. Enjoy.

Strategy

Situation

Genre

Structural determinism

"Rhetorical"

Exigence

"Audience"

Situational Con/re-straints

Strategy

Burke:
Poetry is a strategic answer (PL 1)
“Another name for strategies might be attitudes” (PLF 297)
Burke defines for us “Strategy” by looking at the Concise Oxford and New English dictionaries, as well as quoting Andre Cheron.

Situation

Burke:
“Situations do overlap [across time], if only because men now have the asmae neural and muscular structure” (2) Physicality matters to situations.
“Proverbs ‘size up’ or attitudinally name” situations (2). Size up—as though we can symbolically encompass and control a situation. But, one must “size things up properly” (298).
Situations can recur, be “typical” (3) and “Social structures give rise to ‘type’ situations, subtle subdivision of the relationships involved in competitive and cooperative acts” (294). These give rise to genres, according to Jamieson and C. Miller.

Bitzer:
“There are circumstances of this or that kind of structure which are recognized as ethical, dangerous or embarrassing” (Rhet Sit, Phil and Rhet, 1968, p. 1) An attempt at defining “situation”
The rhetorical situation consists of audience, context, and exigence.
The presence of rhetorical discourse does not “give existence to the situation; on the contrary, it is the situation which calls the discourse into existence” (rhet sit, p. 2). Definitely “Scenic” like Burke’s Scene-Act ratio.
“It seems clear that rhetoric is situational” (rhet sit p. 3)
“Let us regard rhetorical situation as a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations and an exigence which strongly invites utterance; this invited utterance participates naturally in the situation, is in many instances necessary to the completion of situational activity, and by means of its participation with situation obtains its meaning and its rhetorical character” (Rhet sit, p. 5). First: “Natural”—while the word choice bothers me, his implication is clear: the rhetorical situation is not an imagined construct—it is part of the nature(damn that word) of communication. He also wants to emphasize here that the rhetorical situation and its invited utterances are not outside the real world, but that the utterance itself is part of the situation, and can give rise to other situations which require further utterances.
“Rhetorical situations exhibit structures which are simple or complex, and more or less organized” (11). Bitzer goes on to describe what he means by “simple” and “organized”, but the point is clear—by “organized” he means a “settled form with predictable outcomes”
“Finally, rhetorical situations come into existence, then either mature or decay or mature and persist—conceivably some persist indefinitely” (12). What does an “immature” situation look like? How can we tell?

Vatz, Richard.:
“NO situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it” (226). Vatz goes on to say that Bitzer’s version of “situation” requires a “realist” philosophy of meaning, which has “unfortunate implications for rhetoric.” Vatz proposes another “perspective…from which to view the relationship between ‘situations’ and rhetoric.” Vatz links this to the “nature of meaning”—but I’m not sure what he means by that, except that meaning lies not in the object of study itself, but in the person looking at the object. I agree that Bitzer is entirely too Platonic in his understanding of the relationship between situation and meaning, in that case.
Situations are themselves rhetorical and communicative events, as “except for those situations which directly confront our own empirical reality, we learn of facts and events through sone’s communicating them to us. This involves a two part process. First, there is a choice of events to communicate” (228)
Second: “the translation of the chosen information into meaning. This is an act of creativity. It is an interpretive act. It is a rhetorical at of transcendence.” (228).

Genre

Burke:
“Each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary (or, in the case of purely derivative artists, the addition of a subsidiary meaning to a word already given by some originating artist)” (PLF 300). Burke’s parenthetical note seems to also apply to the idea of genres—often I think Burke ignores the idea of genres where he might find it helpful—here, “Scifi” is also a naming of a situation under which many individual texts fall, and they all share the same situation they are attempting to “size up” In as much as 1984 adds a “1984ism” to the informal dictionary, “dystopian fiction” as a naming does similar work—it de-term-ines both the text to follow and the situation itself.
In sociological criticism of art, “Art forms like ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’ or ‘satire’ would be treated as equipments for living, that size up situations in various ways an in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes” (304). Here, it’s not just a particular piece of literature that’s the equipment, but entire forms (genres). How is this different? Here, it is forms that size up situations, that give us attitudes (which makes sense, since genres are all about forming and setting attitudes and expectations in audience members).
Further, “Their [forms’] relation to typical situations would be stressed. Their comparative values would be considered, with the intention of formulating a ‘strategy of strategies,’ the ‘over-all’ strategy obtained by inspection of the lot” (PLF 304). Genres, then, are on another level of analysis, a more encompassing and more abstract (higher order?) of analysis. He even seems to be hinting at what Derrida calls the “Law of Genre” (Loi de genre)—that genre is law, division and separation and categorization, and that genre depends upon some higher order law of law, a logos of lex.

Bitzer:
“The difference between oratory and primitive utterance, however, in not a difference in function; the clear instances of rhetorical discourse and the fishermen’s utterances are similarly functional and similarly situational.” (Rhet sit, p. 5). See Burke on “contemporaneous” situations—PLF p. 301. Also note that Bitzer, like Burke, defines things functionally. The similarity between two utterances—one formal oratory, and one “primitive”—can lead to similar responses, repeated responses, and the creation of a genre.

Structural Determinism

Burke:
“He will not too eagerly ‘read into’ a scene an attitude that is irrelevant to it” (298). Burke seems to imply that situations contain within them a limited number of responses, but that there is still room to act: for earlier, he says, “One tries to change the rules of the game until they fit his own necessities” (298).

Bitzer:

“It is clear that situations are not always accompanied by discourse” (Rhet sit p. 2). But when the discourse is produced, it is necessarily “fitting.”
“The situation dictates the sorts of observations to be made; it dictates the significant physical and verbal responses; and, we must admit, it constrains the words which are uttered in the same sense that it constrains the physical acts of paddling the canoes and throwing the nets” (Rhet sit. p. 5). Note the word choice: Dictates. There is already a linguistic element embedded in the rhetorical situation, long before it ever invites a rhetorical response. If Burke says we respond in order to size a situation up, Bitzer seems to say that situations size themselves up for us.
“Although rhetorical situation invites response, it obviously does not invite just any response. Thus the second characteristic of rhetorical situation is that it invites a fitting response, a response that fits the situation” (10). But, as Vatz points out, if you read the situation from a different perspective, the situation may seem to prescribe many different “fitting” responses to different people. Only when the situation is “strong and clear” is the response obvious, and here “strong and clear” seems to mean “Traditional oratories in traditional genres.”

Miller, Arthur B.:
“Although an exigence essentially specifies limits, the rhetoric has creative latitude to interpret the significance of the exigence within those limits, and it is this latitude of the rhetor that is of primary interest here” (“Rhetorical Exigence” 111). This links back to Burke’s description of rhetorical utterances as “stylized” and “strategic” responses to a situation; Miller is, like me, emphasizing the “stylized” part—even if the situation’s exigency suggests and limits responses to those most fitting, the rhetor is capable of stylizing his/her utterance within certain limits so that not every response is exactly the same. In fact, part of the job of new members of a genre is to both a) fit into the genre, and b) differentiate themselves from other genre members by stylizing their texts in new ways that do not quite break the genre’s limits. Miller is less Scenic than Bitzer and Burke: in this formulation, the situation does determine utterances, but the situation itself must first be perceived by some agent.

Vatz, Richard.
On Bitzer’s claim that the situation of Kennedy’s assassination “controlled” the following rhetorical responses: “This does not mean, however, that the situation ‘controlled’ the response. It means that the communication of the even was of such consensual symbolism that expectations were easily predictable and stable.” (230). Vatz adds a social element with the use of the word “consensual”--I’m reminded of Symbolic Convergence Theory, which states that humans will converge around an event with similar attitudes, form similar responses, which become so formulated and conventional that they become “traditional” and thus expected. Vatz brings in “genre” and “recurring” as explanation for situations which seem to control their responses….which seems to correspond with Bitzer’s above explanation that “strong” and “clear” (to whom?) situations are easier to analyze. After all, it’s only “clear” when we are able to recognize, categorize, and theorize about it---which we can only do when it’s a recurrent event.

"Rhetorical"

Burke:
“Here I shall put down, as briefly as possible, as statement in behalf of what might be catalogued, with a fair degree of accuracy, as a sociological criticism of literature” (PLF 293) In what ways does KB really mean “rhetorical” here? Or have we rhetoricians coopted the materials of sociology in order to justify our practice and study? Is rhetoric now sociological? Is this a bid for legitimacy?

Bitzer:
Poetry is not rhetorical. However, the Declaration of Independence is. Presidential addresses are. Anything “spoken” is.
“Nor do I mean merely that rhetoric occurs in a setting which involves interaction of speaker, audience, subject, and communicative purpose. This is too general, since many types of utterances—philosophical, scientific, poetic, and rhetorical—occur in such settings” (3). Bitzer goes on to suggest other things the specifically “rhetorical” situation is NOT. His difficulty in defining the rhetorical could probably be alleviated if he were to recognize that most discourse, if not all, is rhetorical—it may not be public and formal-address-like, but still rhetorical. I’ll leave my frustrations with people who refuse to see that “aesthetic” is rhetoric at that.
“In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality…..by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (rhet sit p. 4).
Larson, Richard L. “Lloyd Bitzer’s ‘rhetorical situation’ and the Classification of Discourse” Phil and Rhet 3.3 165-168.
“Such distinctions between rhetorical and non0rhetorical discourse, however, quickly turn out to be slippery or, to state the point more positively the category of ‘rhetorical’ discourse embraces much more of what an ordinary person says and writes than Professor Bitzer’s article might at first suggest” (166) Expanding the rhetorical situation by expanding what counts as rhetorical: YAY! He also rescues poetry and scientific discourses from the abyss of “non”rhetorical discourse

Exigence

Bitzer:
“An exigence is rhetorical when it is capable of positive modification and when positive modification requires discourse or can be assisted by discourse” (Rhet Sit, p. 7) Positive? Hello progress narrative view of history!
Miller, Arthur B. “Rhetorical Exigence.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. (5) 1972 : 111-118. :
“Bitzer’s statements here and elsewhere suggest that an exigence is an identifiable something that acts to specify a speech to be given” (111). “Specify” here seems to indicate a determinism.
Vatz, Richard. :
“Bitzer seems to imply that the ‘positive modification’ needed for an exigence is clear. He seems to reflect what Richard Weaver called a ‘melioristic bias’ “ (227). Vatz argues here that Btizer’s view of exigence is based on a progress narrative—the view that there are “wrong” things that should be “fixed” to better society (perhaps toward a utopian state) and that rhetoric can change the situation for the “better” (ameliorate). Vatz criticizes Bitzer for his belief that the “situation is rhetorical only if something can be done.”—the bias towards agency and “action” in a traditional political/public policy sense is inherent in Bitzer’s definition of what is “rhetorical” in the first place—public speeches, presidential oratories, eulogies, constitutional documents. Is it not rhetorical if there is a negative modification reaction?
Vatz would like to reverse many of Bitzer’s formulations: “For example, I would not say ‘rhetoric is situational,’ but situations are rhetorical; not ‘exigence strongly invites utterance,’ but utterance strongly invites exigence; not ‘the situation controls to rhetorical response,’ but the rhetoric controls the situational response….” (229). I agree with most of these, particularly when utterance invites exigence—we’ve seen this in Bush’s War on Terror recently. It also, as Vatz notes, puts us back in the drivers seat, morally: when we “view rhetoric as a creation of reality or salience rather than a reflector of reality’ we end up assuming much more “responsibility for the salience’ we create.

Audience

Bitzer
“Properly speaking, a rhetorical audience consists of only those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (8). How limiting is this, really? Aren’t we all capable of being mediators of change, atl east here in the US? Perhaps there are some slave populations that aren’t capable—but even people with “disabilities’ are able to effect some kind of change, even if it isn’t the desired or intended kind. Bitzer again seems to be imagining only the traditional oratory situation, and that’s far too narrow for what we do today. Later in this paragraph, he details how scientific discourse is also not rhetorical because the scientist can “express or generate knowledge without engaging another mind” (8)—which we know Burke would disagree with as well as many others, and rightly so. What is at stake when we limit our audiences in theories?

Situational con/re-straints

Miller, Arthur B.:
“On the other hand, when a hearer’s constraints combine with his perceptions of actions, phenomena, or facts, the result is the hearer’s perceived exigence: the basis of his expectations as he listens to the speaker” (117). This short quote is doing a lot. First, Miller is emphasizing the subjective nature of exigence: it Is only as much as it is Perceived As. Second, he is adapting the idea of constraints: it is not just the constraints upon the speaker, because as the speaker speaks, the situation inevitably changes; the listener, as perceiver, has his/her own constraints to work within—his own desires to be symbolically expressed and fulfilled. What Miller especially adds is the idea of genre as constraint on both the listener and the speaker: Expectations, formed from experience with recurring and repeated situations and their responses re/constrain what the speaker can say and how the listener can hear it.

Sticks and Stones

2008-01-15T19:07:00.000-05:00

Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will fuck you up, too.

From Burke's PLF.
Social structures give rise to "type" situations, subtle subdivisions of the relationships involved in competitive and cooperative acts (293-4). But are these structures deterministic? (de-term-inistic). Do they determine our response?

In what ways are all situations rhetorical?

Not determinative, but presupposes the appropriate action(s). The situation itself provides modes of conduct and possible names for it. But the "situation" is made up of audiences, "places" (which are created by the people around them), "historical facts" (which are the perceptions of the people recording them). The situation is a container for action.

The Final Semester * **

2008-01-07T15:53:00.000-05:00

*Hopefully
**Oh God, please

Amy's schedule for her final semester of classes ever. Mom, you might want to scrapbook this.

Monday
At coffee shop till 3:30
4:30-5:20 Teaching in WTHR 214
Evening: Prepping for rest of week of teaching

Tuesday: The Day of Hell
1:30-2:45 Dickens in HEAV 102
3:00-3:45 home to eat and breathe
4:30-5:20 Teaching in HEAV 109
5:30-5:45 Grab something from Oasis to eat
6:00-9:00 Rhet theory in BRNG 1232

Wednesday
Office hours 3:30-4:30
4:30-5:30 Conferences in HEAV 223

Thursday
1:30-2:45 Dickens in HEAV 102
Home till 3:45
4:30-5:20 Teaching in HEAV 109

Friday
Conferencing with students in HEAV 223 or online

Back to Lit Crit

2008-01-04T12:57:00.000-05:00

Theory is theory is theory. Text is textual and contextual and contingent on the medium which texturizes it. Even mimetic representation is rhetorical in nature.

Damn, I've missed literary studies.

That's not to say that my time over in Beering with the Communications Department was bad. No. It was very helpful, indeed, for schematizing, compartmentalizing, disciplining (Burkeian pun intended), and revitalizing my interest in interdisciplinary work.

But I've missed this. The textuality of text, the echoing voice of another author in my head. Piecing together the argument from someone else's words, getting close, closer, closest to the text. Adaptation, mastery, pathos, consubstantiality. The pleasure of the text. The text of pleasure.

And, a little emo from Amylea

2007-12-31T02:27:00.000-05:00

Kate's playing the new RadioHead CD, and the songs are making me a bit lethargic, nostalgic, acerbic, and other -ics. And I've been thinking about how much I hate December and Christmas and family-ness for obvious reasons, and this emerged. Needs some work...too much in the confessional mode, and that's so 1980s. So, not for publication or anything, but I wanted to save it here.

five years ago
curled up on my mothers couch in a week long sigh of relief
time pouring out of me
unafraid and steady, sure wheels settled firmly in the driveway
I breathed in the world with out a mask, hope coating my skin
The creak of the floorboards as she padded back and forth
her cough punching through the cold air
the soapy noises from the kitchen
lulled me into satisfied sleep

ten days without my sisters as ten too many
their absence the only disturbance to my slumber
all night lights dancing blue across my too-firm bed
the bed I only visited, never really laid in
the sheets she dug out of the closet
the kitchen table I still thought of as his not ours
--the soft edges of nowhere cocooned me
and I needed not a home
stately mansions and even-sided shelves
roots and leaves mixed in a compost mash

what first snapped my shoulders into rigid lines?
where is the hope of the city at night?
of patterns broken, sunlight always fading,
music always playing in the musty subway air?
Do not ask me to prepare for this
as eternal weights and concreted place
a permanent address suspended in the middle of nowhere
I've washed the hope from beneath my nails
and refused to let peace enter this door
and I will not rest till rest is restored.

Amylea's Daemon

2007-12-05T17:19:00.000-05:00

"A Pirate's Life For Me": Narrative Theory and Online Fan Community

2007-11-29T10:39:00.001-05:00

[Note 12/20/07: The final version of this paper will not be published here for various reasons--mainly because it sucked and I don't feel I'm saying anything we don't already know, either as fans or as scholars, that isn't expressed by the outline here. If you'd like to read the full version, email me for an electronic copy.]

Intro--the day fandom exploded. The event known as "Strikethrough07" can show us how narrative theories might be adapted to examine communal, asynchronous narratives online.

Narrative theory as appropriate for studying fan culture and fan text production. Bormann's Symbolic Convergence as a place to start. Fisher (and his respondants), particularly talking about the communal nature of all narrative. Ricoeur on temporality and (re)iteration. In literature: Peter Brooks (Formalism/Structuralism)--justify use of literature by pointing to a lack of other ways to analyze written communication that is neither literature nor tech writing.

Fandom--definitions (including overview of LiveJournal as platform), narrative nature of, and counter-hegemonic practices of. Citing Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, and Camille Bacon-Smith's ethnographic studies of fandom.

: Strikethrough07 as told "objectively" by news organizations and technology news blogs.

The narratives of Strikethrough 07. Examples throughout.
1. Creating leaders, heroes and villans--this was the first task: "Whose fault is this?" was the first thing most fans asked and began researching.
2. Time passage/speed of mythos construction. A single narrative emerged as the dominant version more quickly due to hyperlinking and copy/paste abilities.
3. Genre of narratives of Strikethrough is quite clearly that of a detective story. Peter Brooks says this is the most engaging and most basic plot of all--an unveilling, a revelation. Fans constructed their narratives around this most familiar emplottment--because fanfiction is often written like this? Because it is the easiest to write? Because it poses the writer as Revealer?
4. Pirates as metaphor. Fans see fandom as a whole by unifying under the pirate metaphor. They also see themselves as counter cultural (and thus heroic). They also identify with one of the major fandoms at that time: Pirates of the Carribbean, drawing on the newly released movie for inspiration, working issues of capitalism, economic dominance and hegemony into their fanfictions (which are usually just about romance).
5. Errors and Rumors. As fans retell stories of their Strikethrough experience and attempt to hash out exactly what happened, accusations are made, unfounded rumors told, mistakes get made. The concessions to these errors are minimal, with most fans saying that the details actually *don't* matter--just the sentiment behind the actions. Which is strange, given the point above.

Contributions to narrative theory
1. Concession: The particularities of fandom must be considered: Already a strong community, already based in narrative.
2. Burke's symbolic action actually worked: By symbolically "flaming" the organization causing grievances (LiveJournal) fans managed to change policy in their favor.
3. Strikethrough as example of conflict resolution through narrative actually creating a communal identity from disparate sects (Harry Potter fans met with Sailor Moon fans, Smallville fans met with Pirates of the Carribean fans).
4. Strikethrough as catharsis.
5. Introduction of desire to catalogue and historicize events through posting narratives online.
6. Fans are used to open-ended narratives, to filling in the gaps, so it's no surprise many of the narratives simply stop around the first week of September. References still abound, but the fanaticism has faded. What can this tell us about other community narratives and their longevity?
7. The genre choice is interesting, as fans are continuously engaged in "revealing" the subtext of their favorite texts. This could be one of the differences between spoken narratives traded among face-to-face community members informally, and the more formal task of writing a narrative that others will voluntarily *find* then *read*--there must be some suspense built, the craftedness of the story is more important without other social cues.
8. Visual narrative-- narratives online are permanent (unless LiveJournal deletes them). Not only are these permanent, but online interaction involves a visual component that may have been traditionally filled with gestural language. Unlike f2f communication, however, narratives online are hierarchically arranged by time: threads of a conversation appear as replies *below* the original comment, and subsequent comments on the same "level" of reply are indented the same amount.

Conclusion: Proposals for further study
Strikethrough was just one example, focusing on fandom. But online communities exist outside of fandom, and create narratives as a way of creating identity (Cite Howard Rheingold and Nancy Baym). Anecdotes are the main genre of online communication, but how many of these are narratives that actually help build community? Is there any way to predict which narratives will hold in a community, and which will be just another post?
Structuralism can tell us a lot about the types that survive: Those with strong senses of heroes and villans, those that feature a quest for information (which makes sense, given the medium of the Internet is traditionally used for information-seeking). Further studies might look at how often comments on narratives are themselves narratives, how many times a given narrative is linked to by multiple users.
Continued work on three-d avatars has revealed software engineer's attempts to duplicate f2f communication--how are narratives currently created in 3-d avatar environments, and to what extent do these look like "real" narratives, and to what extent do they seem more like bulletin board posts?

COM632: White Paper

2007-11-28T23:36:00.000-05:00

Creating and Maintaining Online Communities Through Rhetorical Thinking

AmyLea Clemons

Submitted on 27 November 2007 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University,
Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog

Creating successful and vibrant online communities has been the subject of much debate: How much control should the founder have? Who should moderate and mediate for the community, if anyone? What design plans best encourage development of and participation in communities? How do we ensure the community will operate as planned? Although the ideal answer to any of these questions is “It depends,” this paper examines the best practices any community founder should follow and the processes he or she should consider at each step of community creation. The essay concludes with a discussion of Lloyd Bitzer’s “The Rhetorical Situation” as a quick and easy schema that online developers can use to simply the process.

Although the dotcom burst has leveled the enthusiasm for the internet somewhat, online communities—that is, a group of users who post to and create a central web space—still present as viable and vibrant spaces for growth. Creating successful and vibrant online communities, however, has been the subject of much debate: How much control should the founder have? Who should moderate and mediate for the community, if anyone? What design plans best encourage development of and participation in communities? How do we ensure the community will operate as planned? Although the ideal answer to any of these questions is “It depends,” this paper examines the best practices any community founder should follow and the processes he or she should consider at each step of community development.

Definitions and exclusions

“Online community” can mean several different things. Although we are now long beyond the debate over whether or not communities can exist online, what exactly these communities do or how they relate to their real world counterparts is still in discussion. Online communities differ from face-to-face communities in several ways, but also share significant overlap. Jenny Preece (2000) divides online communities into four components: People interacting “socially;” a “shared purpose;” policies; and computer systems (p. 7). These four components help identify an online group as a “community” and can serve as areas of analysis for developers.

Although all online communities may share these four components, the “shared purposes” can vary greatly. In a 2004 study of twenty seven bulletin boards (BBS) communities Ridings and Gefen found that use of online communities is not just limited to information-seeking, but that “virtual communities, like real ones, are joined not only because of utilitarian information exchange, but also because they serve the social need of having a friend and getting social support.” It is clear that some online communities are skewed toward information exchange or social support, and that the design, development and implementation of any online community will depend heavily upon the goals and activities the developer expects to occur.

This essay will be limited to discussing online communities that mainly foster social interaction instead of information gathering; of course, information distribution can be expected within these communities as well, as per Ridings and Gefen’s study, but the communities and processes described in this discussion will focus on groups that emphasize interaction over information, eliminating communities involved in e-commerce, journalistic blogging, and social bookmarking. In the following discussion, then, “online community” will refer to community blogging platforms, support networks, and social networking communities such as Facebook.

Further, it should be noted that, as with “real” or face-to-face communities, no community is prototypical. Preece (2000) reminds us that “Each community is unique, and there is no guaranteed recipe for a successful community” (p. 7). She also provides a helpful metaphor for developers to consider:

“Communities develop and continuously evolve. Only the software that supports them is designed. Thus, the role of a community developer is analogous to that of the mayor of a new town, who works with town planners to set up suitable housing, roads, public buildings, and parks, and with governors and lawyers to determine local policies” (p. 26).

It is with this metaphor in mind that best practices for online communities are proposed for each of the following areas: Planning, Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating.

Planning

When planning an online community, developers should be prepared to conduct research in at least two areas. First and foremost, the community should have a clear, central focus. Because online communities do not have a physical locale to ground them, they must be grounded in other ways, particularly in a common goal. Users report participating in online communities for several reasons, especially for discussing a shared interest. (Ridings & Gefen, 2004). Thus, developers should engage in initial studies to determine possible user interest and the specific direction of that interest. A community for sufferers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, for example, would not only be interested in sharing their experiences, but might be specifically interested in sharing coping tips, trading doctor names, and linking to unique treatment options. More importantly, developers should recognize whether the “interest” is strong enough to translate into “participation.” The purpose must be strong enough to incite action among regular users and lurkers alike.

A secondary research area is related to the first: audience analysis is essential to determining the direction of an online community. No online community is created in a vacuum; a profile of potential users can tell developers much about the probable direction of the community. While there are many approaches to audience analysis, Baym provides a simple and effective schema. Baym (1998) lists four categories for consideration: external contexts, temporal structure, system infrastructure, and participant characteristics. Of these, the external context of the participants and the participant characteristics should be the main focus for developers at the planning stage. In determining the context and characteristics of potential users, researchers should ask several questions: What demographic would this community serve? What do we know about their access to and familiarity with computer mediated communication? What constraints might there be on the users’ abilities to participate? What environmental conditions might actually encourage participation by our target audience? These questions are essential to address before the community is made “live,” so that designers can use the tools available to them to encourage participation in specific ways. For example, while Chronic Fatigue patients may be interested in such a community, the conditions of the illness itself will prevent many from participation; developers should note such constraints and determine if they will effect the initial building process.

As they prepare such research, developers should note that “participation” comes in many forms. “Lurkers,” or users who read the exchanges of other members of an online community without contributing to the community themselves, must be considered as part of the community, despite their invisibility. Ridings and Gefen assert that “arguably lurkers are members, albeit silent ones, in virtual communities” and that they

“should be of interest to companies and to researchers. Moreover, lurkers must actively navigate to the URL and occasionally even login to this type of a virtual community to obtain access to it. In doing so, even a lurker becomes an active, albeit silent, participant” (Ridings and Gefen, 2004).

Developers must keep lurkers in mind when planning a community: because research suggests a large percentage of “users” of online communities are actually lurking, a community should be built to accommodate lurkers without pressuring these users to give up their anonymity or to invest more time or emotion that they are willing to. When considering potential uses, developers must assume lurking will occur, and should design accordingly.

In summary, community developers must begin with a strong purpose and sense of audience before beginning design of software and web spaces. Once interest and audience have been established, developers can move on to the more difficult task of creating a style, a signature, a theme, and a “presence” for their community.

Designing

Online communities have sprung up across the web in such vast numbers that the introduction of a new community will not necessarily register to most users. Therefore a new community must not only be easy to use in order to encourage participants in the early stages of the community’s development, but it must also stand out visually and conceptually.

The best designs are “intuitive,” as Krug says in his 2005 book Don’t Make Me Think! “Intuitive” in this case, refers to ease of navigation; users must be able to sort through the layers of the site in order to find specific areas of interest. For this reason, the front or “home” page requires the most consideration. One option that many businesses and nonprofit online communities alike now use is a “splash” page, which provides easy entry to the subsequent pages for both regular and first time users. Splash pages include simplified instructions, large graphics for site navigation, and prominent login boxes. Splash pages limit the number of options a user may take to enter and move through the site, which thus limits the overwhelmed feeling many first time users get and prevents regular users from wading through unnecessary material. Splash pages must be visually interesting without looking “busy” however; Krug (2005) finds that many sites, in an attempt to catch the user’s eye, are instead distracting and confusing, causing readers to abandon their search.

From an introductory page, such as a splash page or a more traditional “home” page, each major activity developers expect to occur on the site must be accessible and easy to locate. For example, a community for single fathers might focus mainly on forum or bulletin board postings, and these forums should be accessible from the home page. Other activities on the same “level” as participating in the forums (such as uploading photos, linking to news articles, making important site-wide announcements) should also be accessible from this page, and each page on the same level should carry the same basic design. Maintaining a “theme”—a page template that keeps color, pattern, navigation and language uniform across several pages—not only makes the site easier to navigate, but creates a sense of location in “real” space; recurring design motifs help to stabilize an otherwise ephemeral “cyberspace,” and these motifs give the site a visual identity users can connect with on a sensory level.

Above all, design should aim for ease of use, because when a site is easy to navigate and post to, users will be more likely to participate. For the best interaction, posts to the online community should be made using the simplest software available—no user should have to learn special coding (unless they want to) in order to participate. Wiki softwares that allow users to simply add content without “uploading” are best, although any software (such as WordPress) that uses a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor that works like a word processing program should suffice.

Using software that allows users to post without learning extra codes should ease some of the posting anxiety that might prevent lurkers from participation. Another way to encourage lurkers to become more visible is to create levels of participation. Many sites now track the number of readers each post receives, which can serve to highlight the presence of lurkers, even if they choose not to “speak.” Yet another option is to require users to log in to read and comment on some posts; LiveJournal requires users to create an account to read material that posting members select as “private.” By requiring log in, developers can better track who logs in when, and how often.

The best designs are not only easy to use, but attempt to make the community feel “real” to users; this can be accomplished both visually and via the software’s functionality. Visually, the site’s various sub-pages should be unified by a common theme, as described above. By maintaining consitency among pages, developers create a sense of static, permanent space, as “real” communities tend to occur in a single physical place. Structurally, the software platform should support this sense of community by creating other visual cues for the users. Because computer mediated communication tends to filter out the social cues we are used to experiencing in a “real” community, an online community may be made to feel more “real” by adding back in cues that allow users to identify themselves in whole or in part, as with a picture of themselves, or simply adding their real names (Walther & Parks 2002).A prominent “Who’s Online” function in the navigation or side bars can show visitors and registered users alike the names of users currently occupying the site; this function emphasizes a shared space and shared time, and encourages users to connect to each other—they know they are not alone in the cyberspace of the community. Other functions that should be considered include

Large, easily visible “Comment” buttons on each user posting so that threaded conversations can begin in the space they are begun.

Time stamps on each comment that allow users to more easily imagine the person on the other end of the conversation.

“Tags” for each conversation. Tags are key words that users categorize their posts with. Lists of tags on the main page allow people to see what’s being discussed most frequently, and links them to users discussing similar topics.

These simple functions should be incorporated into the site design when available. The prominence of each feature depends upon the purpose and function developers want to foster in a given community, and these decisions should be made early in the design process.

One final feature that communities working with a younger demographic should consider is the use of avatars. Avatars are graphical representations of the user—small images attached to each user’s post and profile that can be changed easily depending on the user’s mood, the post topic, or the community’s focus. Older users may not feel comfortable with these images, or may not have the technical ability to create them as easily as younger generations do.

Once the design has been set, the community _site_ is ready to “go live”—to be made public to the internet in general. As the community begins building, developers should begin considering key questions of implementation and evaluation.

Implementing
How to manage and implement online communities continues to be a hotly debated subject. Some argue for a central moderating figure (usually connected to the supporting organization), while others find that moderation is best done “organically,” by users themselves. Nearly all, however, agree that some type of moderation is necessary, and moderation begins with setting initial guidelines and rules for all users to follow.

Guidelines or rules should be set early on, but should always be open for reconsideration. In particular, developers should consider the following issues before beginning:

Politeness to other users. “Flaming,” or harrassing or abusive comments between users on a given thread or topic, should be kept to a minimum. Politeness online also includes restrictions against profanity or overly graphic descriptions. The level of “adult” language allowed is contingent upon the goals and audience of the community.

Length of posts. Overly lengthly posts can clutter a site, and often makes other users feel croweded or silenced. Krug (2005) states that “We don’t read pages, we scan them,” and that “if the document is longer than a few paragraphs, we’re likely to print it out because it’s easier and faster to read on paper than on a screen” (p. 22). Most software platforms provide a “cut” or “more” function that trims posts to a more readable length for the front page, but a maximum post length should be set to keep the design looking even.

Off-topic posts. While the occasional non-related post can lighten the mood or break the monotony of a group, too many off-topic posts can detract from the original goals and purpose of the community. Limiting off topic posts can also limit spamming and advertising.

Once the rules have been tentatively set, developers should post them high in the hierarchy. To ensure users at least know about the rules, the guidelines should be presented as part of the registration process. Many sites now require users to agree to a “Terms of Use” contract before joining communities as registered users; these contracts list the rules and any other legal information, such as copyright laws. In general, rules are not only a good legal reference (for extreme cases of abuse), but gives users a shared responsibility that, again, builds a sense of “real” community.

Legislation of the rules should be carefully considered. Again, the use of a moderator is necessary for almost any site, but the type of moderator and the process of moderating varies. :Developers must first decide between a moderator chosen by the administrators and a moderator that arises “naturally” from the users themselves. Once a moderator (or moderators) is selected, the particular role this moderator would play must be outlined. Questions to consider include

What “punishments” are appropriate for rule breakers? Will moderators have the power to remove users or deny them access?

How will users be alerted of offenders and offenses? Some sites issue mass emails, others send separate notes to each offender for each offense.

How will rules be enforced? Some communities periodically post site-wide reminders, others assume users will conform without reminders.

One of the touted benefits of online communities is the tendency of such communities to be more friendly to those who are less socially adept or who are marginalized by the dominant society. These utopian notions are likely naïve, but the presence of rules and guidelines should not detract from the sense of “communitas”–an almost magical sense of communion that moves “toward universalism and openness” (“Rites”). Finding balance between regulation and chaos may emerge “organically” from the users themselves, but developers should be prepared to step in when necessary.

Evaluating
The key questions a developer should ask once a community has been active for several weeks are “Is it working?” and “What can we do better?” Evaluating an online community’s success can be difficult, as markers of success can sometimes be less thank obvious. Although success can be measured in many ways, the easiest aspect to measure is volume; although there is much more to a successful community than the number of users and posts alone, these can be good places to begin evaluation. In particular, developers should address:

Number of users, both registered and lurkers, if possible.

Number of hits.

Timeline of hits: When are people logging on? What are peak hours? Is there a particular time of month? Is the timeline related to any site changes or administration changes?

For those that find a community failing to meet expected volumes, new strategies of finding and motivating users should be implemented. To advertise the community, developers should locate sites focusing on similar issues in order to promote their own sites. For communities related to a profession or trade, developers might consider advertise in the journals or magazines that serve those trades. To ensure users can find the site easily, web managers should ensure that search engines such as Google can find the community.

Other enticements can increase participation. An empty community is rarely inviting; developers should make the space look occupied; founders can begin threads in forums or post questions to invite conversation. Some sites benefit from “guest bloggers” well known among the potential community members. Any post from a new community member should be promptly and encouragingly commented upon by founders and developers.

Ultimately, even well-populated communities may require evaulation and revision if users find the site design and software structure difficult to use. Periodic informal usability testing can help designers improve the functionality of the site with little cost to the developers; brief surveys every few months can keep designers and developers abreast of any emergent problems as the community changes and grows.

The Rhetorical Situation: A shorthand guide to community development

The above suggestions and points for consideration detail possibilities for online community development. However, many of these decisions are contingent and based in the specific situational context. When considering each of the above possibilities, developers should keep in mind what is commonly called the “rhetorical situation,” a “complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence” (p. 6). Bitzer offers three points to consider when attempting to define the rhetorical situation: Audience, exigency, and Constraints (p. 6). Others have added to the list, adding a “Context” category to further define historico-political elements; extrapolating the “Audience” seciton to include gender, race, and class issues; and adding to “Constraints” to discuss means of production. Taken as just Bitzer’s original schema, however, “the rhetorical situation” offers a framework for analyzing any situation in which texts are produced.

Online communities, as text-based constructions, are rhetorical situations as defined by Bitzer. Each of the previous sections–planning, design, implementation, and evaluatoin–can benefit from an analysis of the rhetorical situation at each stage. Because each community is different, each rhetorical stuation is different, and by detailing the situation, developers can better tailor the above suggestions to their own community. Additionally, a rhetorical analysis prevents developers from developing hard and fast rules that can stagnate a community. Thinking rhetorically can also highlight room for potential change and growth; in analyzing constraints, developers can find ways to remove barriers or exploit an absense of limitations. Thinking rhetorically also helps developers to determine the best way to moderate communities; remembering the users are also humans who interact textually can prevent clashes and promote good relations between moderators and users.

Many of the points for consideration above should be read through the rhetorical situation. The particular rhetoricity of online communities seems to call for extra attention to the community’s textual practices (both verbal and visual). While it make take a little more work for developers to learn rhetorical language and theories, adding a rhetorical perspective to the above will doubtlessly promote growth and vibrancy in the community.

References
Baym, N. (1998). The emergence of on-line community. In S. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety 2.0 (pp. 35-68). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Bitzer, Lloyd (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1 (1), 1-14.
Krug, Steve (2005). Don’t make me think! Berkeley, Calif: New Riders Press.
Preece, Jenny (2000). Online communities. Chichester, England: Wiley and Sons.
Ridings, C. & Gefen, D. (2004). Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online. JCMC 10(1), article 4.
Rites of Communitas (2004). The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals. (pp. 97-101) Ed. Frank A. Salamone. New York: Routledge.
Walther, J. B., & Parks, M. R. (2002). Cues filtered out, cues filtered in: Computer-mediated communication and relationships. In M. L. Knapp & J. A. Daly (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (3rd ed., pp. 529-563). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Strikethrough07: Paper Plan

2007-11-27T15:34:00.000-05:00

1. What are you trying to work out? What is the central problem?

How are narratives constructed communally online? How are stories constructed across several communities?

2. What is the significance of your study?

Narrative theory tends to focus on synchronic face to face communitcation. This study will use one example to suggest how similar processes appear in asynchronous mediated communication.
3. What is the scope of your study?

What are you including/excluding? Justify it!

This study focuses on one event in a large community online--"fandom" as a whole, which is rarely considered as a single community. This particular event unified fandoms and allowed fans to see themselves as a group. Why fandom? Because fans are fanatic--and there's a lot to sort through and look at. I am excluding the "other side"--the narrative of the "villains" for time's sake. And the spyware thing.

4. State your research question

What can Strikethrough07 show us about narrative building in online communities?

5. What are your data?

Posts from several communities created specifically to address the event, posts from individuals about the event, LiveJournal's press releases, transcripts of interviews provided by individual bloggers, and news stories/blogs about the event.
6. What body of theory/ies are you drawing on?
Narrative theory informed by Russian Formalists and Communication scholars

Some thoughts on icons as memes

2007-11-20T15:04:00.000-05:00

From an IM conversation with Lou...

Icons are a way of linking the idea of "meme" with "community" online. Icons, on Live Journal and for other online communities (and occasionally IM windows) were originally meant to be images of the user to attach to a community blog-to give a visual, social cue that users could link to the person posting. Over time, icons started skewing away from being representational of the users. Fans started started using screenshots of their favorite characters, they started framing and photoshopping them to fit with their (the community's) attitudes toward the fandom.

Some people excel at making them, so they get together to form a community for posting and sharing their icons. Other people steal or borrow, reference the users, and links are made between journals, between communities, between people.
What's interesting is when you see that icons are supposed to be representation of the user but instead are representations of the attitudes of the community. Icons have let us lose all possible touches iwth the physical body and individual and venture into communal space.

Icons are enthymematic--shorthand for situations and they generate narrative as well as mimetic desire.

Again, though, people wouldn't do this without communities in which to share them: check the old school fandoms of Kirk/Spock. People made the vids and fics for the conventions, for the 'zines, to mail to each other....not for their own enjoyment. And that's not even getting into RPG--a community built around people not being themselves.

Christmas 2003

2007-11-19T10:54:00.000-05:00

I'd nearly dreamed of heaven
when the flood began to rise
There's something there of a howling
in the deadening of the skies
It's the song that says just what I hear
That comes as a surprise
The sickened bells of Christmas
toll coldly as snow flies

Notes from Summer 07

2007-11-12T17:36:00.000-05:00

Despite what this blog seems to indicate, I DID nearly make it all the way through the Burke corpus this summer. My notes were taken by hand (insert gasps of surprise, shock, and/or awe here)! However, the notebook is getting more and more battered by Kit (and, I suspect, Bastet), and I've had it since Gerald's Contemp Rhet class, so it's probably time to do the right thing and just recycle it. First, of course, I'll save my notes here, and on that ephemeral "server" thing at Purdue. Just in case.

First, some random poetry....

No date, no title. No Idea.

It's my job to rip out the bricks and reveal the ones hidden in comfort behind. This is Virginia, untouched white walls, that I scream at to unloose. They stare when I reappear and I apologize for my absence. Which way, I ask, which way away from the dust? Which way across the too small ocean, where I died by saying, "I live!" too often in Latin?

The man with slightly toned thighs sitting in front of me has a wishbone shaped scar running up his arm, over the carpal arteries. Like someone tried to peel them out of him. He can no longer retract his vow, but he does not feel quite at home in resenting that.

(After reading Burke on "Perspective by Incongruity" and "Piety")
The gargoyles followed me from high school--that first imitation-marble statue that sat still on my vanity does not have a memorable face. It was not grotesque or strange enough, its eyes too small to be of any real transcendence. She gave it to me (In French now: Elle m'a donne) in praise of skills I did not want (Je ne les ai voules pas) to exploit, not in that oak-ridden town (La ville que m'a tuee), the stately marble and brick sinking slowly into the swamp. I left the gargoyle to watch over my mirror instead: only he could make it mean again, apart from the sea foam tiles swimming in my visions.

(After seeing Joyce Carole Oates read at Purdue)

It's the kitchen, he realizes sometime after dawn, the kitchen floor he's ended up on this time. It's a fact, he said, a quote, he said, that Betrayal is Damning. The spider plant is hardy--thank god, he thinks, palming the knife from the counter. It wasn't sharp enough anyway, so it lands in the dishwasher, rounded point up.

Why is it good to leave yourself sop much? TO go so far from your own brain, to be carved out from your own soul? Is it too deep in there, like an old mattress you've sunk your own silhouette in?

Random phrases in margins to be incorporated (embodied?) at another time
We must agree with a shiver that One did things for dead men.

The uncrowded filth of an ugly God
grounds us to the flowerless fields

The weave we use for fishing of men is perhaps too tight, too scratchy, too barbed.

The East holds in tension
the hand at the forehead
the groin,
right foot raised to toe.

One eye twitching
as he says
"Runs his eye along it"
not in variable foot
my foot squished into a
fat black shoe.

Transfigured by the broken clock
minutes as degrees of persuasion

So, it's another crit class and again
I'm staring down something Victorian,
and decidedly homosexual. Dorian Gray
is poking his sensual head at me,
cooing, "Remember!"

Usability

2007-11-12T16:13:00.000-05:00

Krug, Steve. Don't Make Me Think! Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing, 2000.

"But even then, if the document is longer than a few paragraphs, we're likely to print it out because it's easier and faster to read on paper than on a screen" (22). Ah, the return of the E-Book debate. Book 2.0. What do we do with this, when online communities are only textual (for now?) and text is "noisy"? Krug says "We don't read pages. We scan them," and this is true for the "information" based websites Krug is designing. But what about those websites that don't just disseminate, but create? Is this where the "drabble" and "flashfic" came from? Is it the amount of text as a whole, or the amount of text per section (as in posts to blogs)?

"Happy talk must die" (46) wherein "happy talk" are the introductory welcoming messages that we hate to write, and hate to read. But these are also conventions which he *likes*. Welcome tags are "basically just a way to be sociable" (46)--well, isn't that what we want, for social websites?

On Bookmarking: When we want to return to something on a Web site, instead of relying on a physical sense of where it is we have to remember where it is in teh conceptual hierarchy an retrace our steps. This is one reason why bookmarks--stored personal shortcuts--are so important and why the Back button accounts for somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all Web clicks.

We should change the Welcome! to a Start Here! tag.

The myth of the Average User:
"The belief that most Web users are like us is enough to produce gridlock in the average Web design meeting. But behind that belief lies another one, even more insidious: the belief that most Web users are like anything" (136).

The Eureka House

2007-11-11T21:50:00.000-05:00

Oi! We're live at The Eureka House. Go visit us, and be impressed.

Dr. Matei quote of the day

2007-10-29T18:21:00.000-04:00

Today, Dr. Matei compared online communities to sturgeons--because they're "cartiladginous." Like "trying to nail Jello to a wall."
This was only funny because Pam answered, "A fish? Online communities are like a fish?"
And that was only funny because earlier Dr. Matei said that "It's like a dog, sitting on a pile of hay. The goat can't get to it, and the dog won't eat it!"--in relation to "spare data sets that you'll never use." Sometimes his metaphors (meta-phor, substitution) are very Burkeian. After all, I talk about critical trouts....

COM632: Jenny Preece, Online Communities

2007-10-29T16:33:00.000-04:00

Preece, Jenny. Online Communities. West Sussex, England: John Wiley and Sons, 2000.

Preece's text is a merger of four perspectives (sociology, technology, virtual worlds, E-commerce) that examines what makes a good online community--how it ticks. The mixed perspective allows her to move easily across disciplinary lines and address the multiple problems online interaction brings us. At times, it can feel like a how-to book (techne), at other times, an intro to online community theory, and still at other times, a discussion space for the discipline (particularly in methodology). Still, it is not a schizophrenic read--in fact, it is an easy read, and I'm afraid I'll miss something subtle. So, the pulled out quotes below will hopefully highlight what I think is important--that which is not already on Dr. Matei's lecture notes.

In many ways, this feels somewhat like a self-help book to me--many good, but abstract ideas, with little concrete information. Yes, good design is essential. Yes, we must find user-oriented design. But what does that mean? And how can she fill a whole book with lists and bullet points of what seems to be fairly obvious? Or am I just so embedded in design culture, in internet culture, in online communities in general, that these only seem obvious to me? Who, exactly is her audience, and what level of expertise do they have?

"The collective purpose of a community, the goals and roles of the individuals in a community, and the policies generated to shape social interaction all influence social interaction in the community. Sociability is concerned with these issues" (Intro, p. 7)

"Each community is unique, and there is no guaranteed recipe for a successful community. However, developers can influence the way a community develops by carefully communicating its purpose and policies" (7)

Her definition of "online community" is interesting. Four parts: "People" interacting "socially"; a "shared purpose"; policies; and Computer systems. I think hers is the first to include the technology as part of the definition, rather than comparing online community to social scientific definitions of "real" community. This shows, a the outset, a different way of thinking. However, on p 11, she notes that there is still the problem of absent physical presence, and that good "sociable" design is what helps smooth it over.

See the list on p. 13 and the additional list on p. 14

A note against Utopianist thinking in online community theory discussions: "Yet physical communities do not always function well and to the advantage of all, or even the majority, of their members. So why assume that online communities will do any better? It's easy, but dangerous, to assume that all communities are good" (20).

Preece addresses the "threat" the nonphysical space of cyberspace poses to "real" relationships, to "social capital and society" (22). The "Carnegie Mellon study" seems to raise questions about antisocialism and the internet, about isolation. Preece simply says that we developers must be 'aware' (THERE'S THAT WORD AGAIN) of this potential, and should "raise awareness" (EURGH!) among participants of this tendency. Of course, awareness won't do any good, if you're sitting at home, on your computer 6 days a week, highly aware that you aren't doing any good in the "real" world, but quite happy about it.

Oooh, some PoMo!
"Most definitions treat community only as an entity; in fact, community is a process (Fernback, 1999). Communities develop and continuously evolve. Only the software that supports them is desgined. Thus, the role of a community developer is analogous to that of the mayor of a new town, who works with town planners to set up suitable housing, roads, public buildings, and parks, and with governors and lawyers to determine local policies" (26).

On Health Communities: Yep, I recognize the genre. And I HATE reading the fibro ones.

Chapter 5: Research Speaks to Practice: Interpersonal Communication

Oh, it's social science.
"Social Presence Theory"--"addresses how successfully media convey a sense of the participants being physically present, using face-to-face communication as the standard for assessment [yeah, cause that always works]. Social presence depends not only on the words people speak but also on verbal and non verbal cues, body language, and context" (150). See readings from Oct 15 for more. See also: Media Richness Theory.

She assumes that "social presence fundamentally affects how participants sense emotion, intimacy, and immediacy" (151). I'm most interested in immediacy--to be without medium, without barriers between the I and Thou. How platonic these assumptions are! How we fill in social cues online is interesting--they assume we don't, but I'm fairly sure we do. See her notes on "self-disclosure" and self-disclosure reciprocity (154). "Psychologically, the more people discover that they are similar to each other, thus, the more they tend to like each other, thus the more they will disclose about themselves" (154).

"Filtering out social cues impedes normal impression development." NORMAL????? (153).

Oh, gender! And gender bending! She's only scratching the surface of Queering potential online, but I guess that has to do with her audience and purpose. Damn.

Common Ground (156-164).
This section interests me most, as a Burkeian and as a fangirl. The phrase we're going with is "Common Ground Theory" (oh, come on! Get creative!) and it "determines how two people or a small group validate that they understand each other. There must be common referents ("my" or "that" or "now")--synchronicity. Different media allow different ways to ground (invite consubstantiality)

Co-presence (physical)

Visibility (physical and video)

Audibility (physical and audio)

Cotemporality (immediacy)

Simulatneity (messages can be sent and received instantaneously--experiencing the same thing at the same time--like watching MTV together while chatting).
Sequentiality (people take turns, establishing time)

Reviewability (go back and see what happened, dude! Or edit?)

Revisability (wikiality)

Grounding and Empathy
Empathy is most visible between people with similar experiences. "The more similar people are, the less they have to 'go outside themselves' to gather cues; hence the more readily the can respond naturally to their circumstances" (164). Oh? Naturally???????

"There is, however, no research on the relationship between common ground and empathy, though it seems likely that when socioemotional (HUH?) content is involved, establishing common ground is aided by empathy, or vice versa." 164. I go with the "vice versa".

To Bear Past The Light

2007-10-28T03:14:00.000-04:00

how many ways will we find to pretend

before we learn to fly

from the heels of our boots

from the pit of our navels

from the throbbing of our foreheads

He almost expected this; it's why he called it impossible so many times. The years have shown him that all events eventually mirror if he turns away long enough to squint. It's fire now that hunts him in the valleys, fire that burns the same each year, fire that burns away the drowning blood of houses. He runs on the cusp where grass meets slippery mud, and knows he should have expected this. It's why he's finding her now, on the beach where he left her; it's why he prefers to leave things in flames. Yet he is unprepared for the impossible meeting; he thought it would be whiter. He thought he had seen it in the mirror of a dark window, noon-sun bright and cheerful, awfully cheerful.

Do the Papelbon

2007-10-24T22:59:00.000-04:00

Sorry, my Ohioan friends. I can't resist: GO SOX!

Quote from Sorin Matei

2007-10-22T19:49:00.000-04:00

"SlashCom.com is not a meritocracy--it's not anarchistic--it's not like Wikipedia, which is a do-it-yourself-ocracy."

Snarry: Strikethrough07

2007-10-15T20:35:00.000-04:00

Click above link

Quote:
Dr. Matei: "What's hot now? What's the new thing?"
Class: "Ummm....We're grad students."

106 Project, courtesy Dr. Matei

2007-10-15T18:19:00.001-04:00

Have students make an Amazon.com list of "things every student needs"--connect to their Facebook accounts, give comments, feedback, initial "PR" pitches.

Text-based interaction/Social science stuff

2007-10-15T17:18:00.000-04:00

[Walther, J. B., & Parks, M. R. (2002). Cues filtered out, cues filtered in: Computer-mediated communication and relationships. In M. L. Knapp & J. A. Daly (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (3rd ed., pp. 529-563). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.]

In "Cues in, Cues out" the authors argue that "for good or ill, the Internet is a profoundly social medium" (530). To this I respond: No kidding. The word "internet" itself refers to a linking, a sharing of information. How could it be anything BUT social?

They also choose to focus their attention on "text-based interaction" (532). By "text" they seem to assume "words"--chat, MUD, MOO, etc. However, it seems odd to separate the "word" part of online interaction from the visual--even the text is arranged in a visual way, arranged to promote a chronological reading. "Threads" on BBs and some MUDs show not only chronological relations, but developmental ones; topics split, have subtopics and replies. Replies are the heart of BBs, blogs, fan platforms, etc--and these, while mainly textual, have a visual component that encourages a "community" feel, encourages a particular reading of the community (one way or another, depending on the type of community). To call the icons, music, and visual arrangment in general "extraneous" by omitting it from your study is the same as omitting adverbs and adjectives from a study of a piece of literature. You'll get the plot, the structure, the basic point, but the subtle meanings will most certainly be lost. It's not about delivering a message or completing a "task."

Nonverbal cues "filtered out"--researchers assume, the authors say, that the low bandwidth of "text only" communication leads to self absorption and lower social interaction abilities because the social cues used in f2f conversation are not 'present' (visual, embodied). This is, of course, the point of disability studies that focus on the internet, the glory of the online utopianist movement. The noncorporeal means cues are filtered out--but that's good! Those cues restrain us! Contain us! Put us in a chair! Gibson's Idoru plays with this, and comes to few, if any conclusions (although the third part of the trilogy might answer some of those...)Is the body really needed? Are our social cues worth anything?

[Kiesler, S., Siegel, J., & McGuire. (1984). Social psychological aspects of computer mediated communication. American Psyschologist, 39(10), 1123-1134.]

Key idea: Depersonalization. When you go online, you "leave something behind" (Matei). This can create counter productive behaviors--or it can create positive behaviors.
"Is computer-mediated communication simply disorderly, perhaps because there is no constraint on interruptions and distracting remarks?" (1129)
"...in computer communication there is less influence and control of a dominant person, moderator, or leader" (1130).

Baym, N. (1998). The emergence of on-line community. In S. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety 2.0 (pp. 35-68). Thousand Oaks: Sage.

"Writers who position themselves as participants as well as observers often emphasize emotion in their use of 'community'" (36).
"The dominant concern underlying most criticism of online community is that in an increasingly fragmented off-line world, on-line groups substitute for 'real'(i.e. geographically local) community, falling short in several interwoven regards" (36).
On B Anderson: "I argue here that an on-line community's 'style' is shaped by a range of preexisting structures, including external contexts, temporal structure, system infrastructure, group purposes, and participant characteristics" (38).

First Draft, Short Review

2007-10-15T17:14:00.000-04:00

Virtual Utopias and Online Interaction
Thomas More first coined the word “Utopia” for his didactic novel of the same name in 1515. The word’s translation means, literally, “No Place,” since More’s imagined edenic community did not actually exist. Today, our best chance at a perfect no-place seems to be in the non-space of cyberspace. In late 2007, it seems almost ridiculous to talk about whether online communities exist; the evidence of such communities on the internet is overwhelming. The question, however, was easily warranted in the early days of what would become “the internet.” Just twenty years ago, scholars were asking “Can communities exist online?” and “If so, how are they better (or worse) than ‘real’ communities?” What seems to unite these questions, and the driving force behind much of online-interaction research is a Utopianist rhetoric: A progress narrative that searches for the perfect community. This essay will examine both the early questions of the existence of community online, as well as the later, more explicit arguments for online community as Utopia.

Imagined Communities and Online Groups
Although the focus in past years has moved from one of ontology to one of axiology, even in the earliest conceptions of online communities, a definite Utopianist thread can be found fairly easily. I present these chronologically primarily to emphasize the conversation between writers and scholars, but also because technology’s tendency to grow exponentially means that the nature of “online” changes with each passing day—let alone month or year. I begin with descriptions of one of the first online communities—or at least the first to be written about extensively—the WELL. Many scholars begin here, possibly because of the WELL’s extensive archives and utopian reputation.

Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993), was the first to write extensively about his experiences at the WELL. Early in his introduction, Rheingold glorifies the internet as an egalitarian venture, he and continues to espouse that point of view throughout this first book: “The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost—intellectual leverage, social leverage, commercial leverage, and, most important, political leverage” (1993, p. xix). After an introduction that lays out Rheingold’s excitement for the potential of the internet, the remainder of the book blends theoretical considerations of what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities” with the a history of the WELL, and Rhengold’s own participation in it. For Rheingold, the WELL—and we might extrapolate to all online communities here—was “a full-scale subculture” (1993, p. xvi) and a “new kind of culture” where “Norms were established, challenged, changed, reestablished, rechallenged, in a kind of speeded up social evolution” (1993, p.xvi). Few argue with Rheingold that the WELL is, in fact, community; his evidence of interaction both online and in the Real World is extensive, from excerpts from discussions to narratives about his first experiences and later involvement. As an integral part of the WELL community, Rheingold offers a particular participant-observer perspective (“do-it-yourself anthropology,” he says in the introduction), but is also clearly biased.

The history of the WELL might be able to account for its Utopian echoes. As Rheingold, Seabrook, and Matei explain, the WELL was born as a project for the Whole Earth Catalog. Seabrook (1997)succinctly states “The basic idea was that by providing citizens with the technology to do more things for themselves…you could free people from their dependence on mass consumer products and corporate marketing” (p. 147). Utopian notions are built into the WELL, but whether or not the WELL is/was actually Utopia, however, is up for debate. John Seabrook, writing first for The New Yorker, then expanding to Deeper: My Two Year Odyssey in Cyberspace,” began his time at the WELL as a “lurker”—someone who watched the conversations in the postings, but did not participate. Not surprisingly, Seabrook begins his descriptions as an outsider, and thus has a very different viewpoint from the insider Rheingold; his outsider status makes him vulnerable to initiations and “flames” from the long-time users, and Seabrook includes these not-so-flattering comments in his text. Seabrook also does not hesitate to point out the disagreements and arguments that run rampant through the group: “Most of the time the WELL was peaceful and bucolic….But every now and then a thread would erupt into what was known on the WELL as a ‘thrash’” (152). In moving from “lurker” to “poster,” Seabrook experienced his own thrashings, emotional debates between angered community members, the text of which he reproduces and comments upon. However, Seabrook concludes that this insider/outsider divide, while not exactly Utopian, helps create a sense of community; internal disagreements and initiation rites are inherently part of any community, and they tend to help a community form its identity. It’s not surprising that Seabrook begins to echo Rheingold as his description of the WELL moves from insider to outsider status; he eventually states that “the WELL was the closest thing to a functional utopia of free speech of any place I encountered in my two years before the [computer] screen” (p. 185).

Some point out here that the WELL may be a special case; the community was active not just online, but it centered around a relatively small geographical area as well. Even Rheingold himself reminds us that “The WELL felt like an authentic community to me from the start because it was grounded in my every day physical world” (1993, p. xvi) For Rheingold, it was grounded in his physical world, but for others, online communities may be entirely ephemeral—users may never meet, may never even be in the same time zone. The lack of interaction outside the bulletin board, blog, or other online platform can easily lead to stresses that the early WELL easily resolved. In the revised edition of The Virtual Community, Rheingold addresses his critics in an additional chapter, titled “Rethinking Virtual Communities,” by helpfully outlining, and then answering a series of questions that emerged from his first book: “Is the use of the phrase virtual community a perversion of the notion of community? What do we mean by community, anyway? What should we know about the history of technological transformations of community?....Are virtual communities simulacra for authentic community, in an age where everything is commodified?....Most important, are hopes for a revitalization of the democratic public sphere dangerously naïve?” (p. 325). These questions continue to frame discussions of online community today, and Rheingold offers his own story of moving from naïve enthusiasm to knowledgeable critique as an example of how quickly the conversation about these issues can change. While this older Rheingold is far less naive, however, he is still equally enthusiastic, and he offers a thought experiment of ways to use internet-generated funds responsibly, “not…an unattainably ideal society expected to emerge magically from technology” (p. 391). The question of the quality of “community” in “virtual community,” he reminds us, is still up for debate among researchers.

By the late 1990s, however, scholars seem to agree that online communities are, in fact, communities; the term “community” itself undergoes some redefinition with the emergence of online groups, and online groups begin to see themselves as real, working communities. As the internet became more accessible to more people (with the evolution of the World Wide Web and America Online), scholars began to question not the existence of these groups, but their qualities, and their inherent potential to cause social change in the Real World. As Rheingold says “More than ever, we need to ask the right questions today about what kind of people, what kind of societies might emerge from social cyberspaces tomorrow” (p. 323). And for Rheingold and others, the potential for something approaching Utopia online seems vividly apparent.

Utopia, Communitas, and Agency

Rheingold first addresses the utopian tendencies of discussions of online communities in the introduction to the first edition of Virtual Communities. In the revised edition, however, Rheingold is far more explicit: He acknowledges that in his first book, he might have put a “rosier tint” on the WELL in order to emphasize the “realness” of it—to argue against the view that only “socially crippled adolescents would use the Internet to communicate with other people” (p. 324). He adds that “Perhaps prospects for online life were brighter then, seven years before the dotcom era” (p. 324). In Rheingold’s books and in the articles that follow below, a “bright” vision of the internet, what I am calling “Utopian,” is primarily egalitarian, “democratic,” and free from corporate intervention. The utopian online community mirrors, not surprisingly, the utopian commune experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.

Sorin Matei makes this connection explicit in his article “From Counter Culture to Cyberculture.” Matei gives a brief history of the WELL’s connection to the Whole Earth Catalog, analyzing WELL posts for their inherent counterculture assumptions and value, as well as for evidence of “community.” Matei concludes that the WELL, in imaging itself as a new type of commune experiment, superimposes a counterculture rhetoric over the already utopian language of technological progress.

New technologies have furthered the idea of cyberspace as utopia. Blogging and wiki functions have expanded the egalitarian language outside of just communities to other forms of online interaction; now, even encyclopedia writing is framed as a purely democratic and collaborative, if not utopian experience. What makes these shift from mere democratic language to utopian can be seen in Wikipedia’s own “neutral point of view” policy:

The policy requires that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being judged as "the truth", in order that the various significant published viewpoints are made accessible to the reader, not just the most popular one. It should also not be asserted that the most popular view, or some sort of intermediate view among the different views, is the correct one to the extent that other views are mentioned only pejoratively. Readers should be allowed to form their own opinions. (“Neutral Point of View”)

The above policy posits an imagined space where bias can, in fact, be removed enough to allow each individual to make up his or her own mind. Neither popularity nor expertise will guide the user toward one reading or another—Wikipedia imagines intellectual freedom without gatekeepers.

Blogging, like wiki, is seen as a bottom-up movement; networks of writers report the news in non-legitimated forms, without the oversight of editors or corprorations. Communities form around some blogs, and users work together to create new knowledges. The grassroots language used to describe the blogosphere echoes the WELL’s vision of a non-hierarchical information exchange . David Weinberger’s(2002) Small Pieces Loosely Joined is equally optimistic about the potential of the World Wide Web: “The Web is about groups—people who, in one way or another, can look into one another’s eyes. Groups are the heart of the Web” (p. 105). These groups then go on to produce shared knowledge

Of course, these utopian visions of a perfect democracy fail to account for several factors. Wikipedia depends upon a somewhat naïve notion of collaboration; the belief that “Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy” (McHenry, 2007). And it is quite clear that Wikipedia’s knowledge-building strategies depend upon not only experts and hierarchies, but traditional higher education forms as well—citations are required, an encyclopedic language is recommended, and even the collaborative “talk” pages require a rhetorical savvy that more closely mirrors academic review than a conversation on the street.

Conclusions: Community and Desire

What these theories fail to account for is how online communities transmit, manage, and contain desire, and the division that comes with it. As these new technologies continue to emerge, scholars have turned to the more complex questions about online communities: What is the draw? How do these communities hang together? How can we predict success or failure? How might a utopia actually emerge? The concept of “Communitas” has been proposed as a working hypothesis of community maintenance and progress. According to the The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals, “Communitas… is a relational quality of full, unmediated communication, even communion, between people of definite and determinate identity, which arises spontaneously in all kinds of groups, situations, and circumstances” (p. 97). Communitas is essentially utopian, it “strains toward universalism and openness; it is richly charged with feeling, mainly pleasurable” (p. 98). The very idea of “Communitas” depends on the assumption that all communities are continually striving toward perfection, toward a harmonious balance between individuality and community.

However, “Communitas” itself is dependent upon an understanding of rite, ritual and myth. An addition of Rene Girard’s concept of “scapegoating” as community maintenance to the already important sociological concept of “communitas” seems prudent at this stage of theory-building. The remainder of this essay will give an overview of Girard’s theory and how it might contribute to the already well-developed ideas presented above.

In Girard’s Things Hidden, which is the culmination and condensation of several of his earlier works, Girard theorizes that desire and difference are dual (and inseparable) causes of the disintegration of communities. To counter and manage mimetic desire—which leads to the destruction of structured societies—a ritual (with an accompanying myth) is required, specifically, a ritual of sacrifice and victimage: “The death of the victim transforms relations within the community. The change from discord to harmony is not attributed to its actual cause, the unifying mimesis of collective violence, but to the victim itself” (p. 48). According to Girard, community maintenance depends upon this scapegoating of a pre-selected victim—a victim who is the Other, who represents difference within the community; a myth and narrative arises naturally from repeated scapegoating. Thus, myth becomes “the transfigured account of real violence” (p. 109), and the initial murder moves to the symbolic—the scapegoat is murdered “symbolically” through language.

Seabrook’s reproduction of some of the arguments on the WELL show a definite scapegoating mechanism at work in that community—one member even goes so far as to sarcastically note that s/he is the “System Scapegoat” whose “shortcomings…are the source of all problems on the WELL” (Stewart Brand, qtd in Seabrook, 1997, p. 158). It is unlikely that other scapegoats and scapegoaters are aware of their role—this would, in fact, deconstruct the scapegoat process and make the community vulnerable again. Finding scapegoats and the myths and rituals that surround them in online communities might be one way to approach theories of community maintenance. It also points us away from the naïve utopian rhetoric that seems to dominate much of our discussions of online communities: finding scapegoat mechanisms reminds us that online communities are just as vulnerable to difference and desire as physical communities, and that it a disembodied, non-corporeal topoi is not likely to resolve the basic problems of human interaction.

Works Cited
Girard, R (1978). Things hidden since the foundation of the world. Trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Standord U Press.
Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: homesteading on the electronic frontier (Revised ed.). New York, NY: HarperPerennial.
Seabrook, J. (1997). Deeper. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Rites of Communitas (2004). The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals. Ed. Frank A. Salamone. New York: Routledge, 97-101.
McHenry, R. The faith-based encyclopedia. Retrieved 15 Oct 2007 from http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html.
Weinberger, D. (2002). Small pieces loosely joined. Perseus.

A rant against (some) Org Comm assumptions

2007-10-11T15:36:00.000-04:00

Org comm: Created to study communication--or lack thereof--in organizations (i.e. corporations). The goal is to create happier employees, “harmony” in the company, better relationships between managers and underlings. This of course, assumes that “work” should be harmonious, assumes we can make a job into an identity, and that we SHOULD invest so much of ourselves into our corporate lives. This is a palliative for the late capitalist condition of alienation of labor and reification of wage labor.
Org comm wants to create a participatory work environment, covering up the ‘real’ power relations at work, hiding the hierarchy. Consent is being manufactured, and we are helping! The very existence of Org comm reifies the current economic structure, instead of subversively deconstructing it; it is anti-Foucauldian at best.

Of course, I'm being broad here. But this is what I'm seeing in the literature, and it's scary. Marlene, our visiting "prof" from Brazil brought these to the fore for me; she's questioning the very basis of organizational communication, and that's good. Too bad there aren't more of her....