If my Popplett below doesn’t show up as a functioning Flash object, please click on these words or the image to visit the Popplett. This week I just added a node of key terms from the How Stuff Works readings related to Genre Theory. As I was reading Bazerman, Popham, and Miller, I kept coming back to the concept of the Router and the packets of information that travel along the network. I kept thinking of the genre as functioning as the router — sitting BETWEEN two nodes OR between two networks. Routers have this function of regulating and translating. Routers that sit between networks “speak” the protocols (rules) of the networks that connect to it, even if the protocols for a particular network are discrete. That made me think of the distinction Miller makes between the two types of rules — constitutive and regulative — each governing a discourse community or member of the rhetorical transaction. Routers would translate and mediate between those two sets of rules, making them parallel and “talk” to each other. Without the Router — you’ve got miscommunication, malfunction, a Tower of Babel.
I also started thinking then of routers as genres as boundary objects. Genres sitting at the edges, like Popham says, of two different networks or nodes. A router is clearly a boundary object; it is in the liminal space between, it is the knitter of the interstitial spaces. It is what allows discourse.
I think thought of genres as allowing discourse, as controlling and regulating it, discourse as not existing — or functioning — without them. Genres then, are sites of dynamism, not distinct entities that circumscribe into a unity. Genres are embodiments of discourse, housing the activity that creates it. A genre then functions not a container to “house” but as a sieve to flow through. I’ll have to try to draw that. Popplett is not the proper tool.
I spent some time, Spinuzzi-style, trying to make Popplet do what I, as the user, wanted it to do. I am going to try to make nested Popplets next week, in an attempt to show networks within networks and more complex systems than 2-D linear ones.
I commented on Jenny’s post that I thought the Atkins and Reilly article complements the article I read by VanKooten (see my post about it here), because both are talking about the assessments being tied to rhetorical theory (not just pedagogical principles). Of course we must assess what is taught, and we must have specific and practical and desirable learning outcomes, but these outcomes must also be tied to theoretical principles that are applied through the work that is assessed (I think theory is often lost in the race to make something “useful” and what is applied may be more technical knowledge or lower order thinking, rather than the higher-order synthesis and evaluation skills that would be addressed by paying attention to the theory behind the methods.
Atkins and Reilly’s assert that the “language of assessments of digital writing projects should be generalizable, generative, aspirational”, which is defined as encouraging students to use new tools and learn new skills. Moore notes that teachers should also “solicit student involvement in assessment creation, which Reilly and Atkins claim will localize and contextualize the assessment.” VanKooten also discussed co-creating the rubric with her students, which builds agency and investment in the project, but also requires them to think about the component parts (which would include applied theory) that must go into the assessment. I’m a firm believer in the “localize and contextualize” the assessment to the particular work in that particular class, which isn’t the same from semester to semester even if you are teaching the same class and giving generally the same assignment. I also liked Atkins and Reilly’s discussion about risk-taking and the aspirational component of assessment. We want to encourage our students to take risks — LEARNING involves risks. If you don’t feel uncomfortable, then you aren’t learning, you’re just doing.Adding a component to the rubric that encourages students to take risks by rewarding them tangibly with points. It also assures that students will have less of a tendency to fall back on “pat” responses to the assignment and should also discourage plagiarism.
Crow’s article brings up the “dark side” of the cloud, much as White’s afterword brings up the “dark side” of technology hyper-mediating our experience. Crow uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage to theorize that e-portfolios funcation as a convergence of once discrete surveillance systems, a “surveillant assemblage.” A classroom is one such discrete surveillance system, but when you create a portfolio of artifacts from multiple classrooms, you create such a convergence — performance across the boundaries of the individual performances for individual teachers who formerly surveyed their own students but now have access to products beyond the borders of their classrooms and students who were not “their own.” The performance revealed in the portfolio is something new in and of itself — it is more than the sum of the discrete performances in particular classes. Furthermore, the audience is extended, especially depending on who has access to the e-portfolio. And this, according to Crow, has implications for privacy that we should consider.
I have often thought about this “surveillant assemblage” (but without using that vocabulary term) when it comes to SafeAssign, the anti-plagiarism tracking tool in use at many high schools, colleges and universities (or another program of the same ilk, such as TurnItIn). Students don’t REALLY have a choice about putting their work into the database. Sure, they have the disclaimer in front of them that says they voluntarily agree to add their information to this network, but they cannot turn the assignment in to the teacher without agreeing to the terms. The vastness of the information contained in the SafeAssign database — including personal identifying information, reflections, etc. — is amazing to think about. It is in the hands of a multi-billion dollar corporation (BlackBoard, which is owned by an investment group. What do they do with the data? What *could* they do?
I am careful to have students put their personal narratives, profiles of partners, and their professional writing that includes their names, addresses, and resumes into BlackBoard but *not* SafeAssign for this very reason. Their papers are still on the VCCS BlackBoard server, and potentially viewable by others besides me, but that is not the same as being added to large, multi-school database. My institution requires me to use SafeAssign for certain assignments — either as a justification for paying for it or an attempt to monitor plagiarism (which sometimes subsumes the purpose of writing and making it about “catching” wrongdoing).
I think I would very much like to read other articles in this book. It is timely and fresh, with some new and exciting theorizes. And I got used to reading on screen, rather than printing, which I am trying to train myself to do. It’s a process.
Works Cited
Brown, Maury. “Toward a Rhetorically Sensitive Assessment Model for New Media Composition” – Crystal Van Kooten Annotated Bibliography Entry”. Blog Post. 3 Feb. 2014. Web. 7 Feb. 2014.
Crow, Angela. “Managing Datacloud Decisions and ‘Big Data’: Understanding Privacy Choices in Terms of Surveillant Assemblages.” Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation. Ed. Heidi A McKee and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2013. Web. 8 Feb. 2014.
Gardner, Traci. “Digital Rhetoric: Wordle of Top 50 most frequently used words from the DRC Blog Carnival focused on defining Digital Rhetoric.” 20 June 2012. Web. 7 Feb. 2014.
Hocutt, Daniel. “Annotated Bibliography Entry: Crow in DWAE.” Blog Entry. 3 Feb. 2014. Web. 7 Feb. 2014
Moore, Jenny Stephens. “Annotated Bibliography: Reilly and Atkins.” Blog Entry. 3 Feb. 2014. Web. 7 Feb. 2014.
Reilly, Colleen A., and Anthony T. Atkins. “Rewarding Risk: Designing Aspirational Assessment Processes for Digital Writing Projects.” Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation. Ed. Heidi A McKee and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. CC Digital Press, 2013. Web. 2 Feb. 2014.
VanKooten, Crystal. “Toward a Rhetorically Sensitive Assessment Model for New Media Composition.” Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation. Ed. Heidi A McKee and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2013. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.
White, Edward M. “Afterword: Not Just a Better Pencil (McKee and DeVoss, Eds.) – Afterword.” Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation. Ed. Heidi A McKee and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. CC Digital Press, 2013. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.
I’ll admit, when I first saw the last name Popham, I did this:
NO!!!!
James Popham, guru of assessment, was assigned reading when I was a K-12 educator, and used to usher in the era of accountability and a focus on “instruments” rather than students.
Then I read Susan Popham’s lucid, straightforward prose, and was instead feeling this:
Ironically, perhaps, this image comes from a web site devoted to cleansing the body. I do feel cleansed of Foucault after Popham.
Before I get to Popham and her coherence and cohesion, I’d like to focus some on Carolyn Miller’s piece. You should see my marginalia! As a former communications executive who developed and used many professional writing genres (and templates … a discussion of this term and its relationship to genre seems to be in order), the idea of a genre as having a social purpose resonated well. She believes that a genre is characterized by its usefulness in communicating from one group (or organization) to another by means of expected and accepted forms and formats. As Miller notes, a genre has a purpose, an exigence, a reason for its existence and its use in a particular situation; it is not merely a summation of particularities, or a form one can notice. This goes beyond what many (Frye, Black, Campbell and Jamieson) who postulate a kind of internal rhetorical unity that denotes a genre (C&J) or a kind of one-way “transaction” (Black) that communicates to an audience via a set of strategies, diction, or linguistic elements (153). This is the more “literary” definition of a genre, one which many are more used to. A literary genre can ostensibly exist without an actionable purpose, although I would argue that a writer calls upon a genre for one or more exigences: to express, to woo, to join a tradition, to imitate, to enjoy a challenge, to play with language, etc. I doubt that anyone is ever truly without an exigency, but this is different from what Miller means by “social action”, whereby the listener/reader is called upon to do something, and the genre exists as a way of bringing together not only a linguistic form, but a group of people who will interact (discourse) around it.
I was also piqued by this quote: “Thus, inaugurals, eulogies, courtroom speeches, and the like have conventional forms because they arise in situations with similar structures and elements and because rhetors respond in similar ways, having learned from precedent what is appropriate and what effects their actions are likely to have on other people” (152). This is part of Foucault’s historical a priori and also Vatz’s notion of what speech has come before as impacting the rhetor’s choices in responding to a situation. I submitted then when reading, and reiterated later in the essay, that analysis of discourse then becomes about deviance from the expected genres. This deviance (or aberration to use a network term … more later) may be interpreted as innovative (a sanctioned deviation from expected discourse, a lauded tweaking or hybridization of the genre) or as abject (beyond what is considered right or proper in terms of the use of the genre).
I was quite intrigued by her discussion of Walter Fisher’s theories, which I spent some time looking out outside of the article, as I felt it would enrich my understanding. Fisher’s narrative paradigm seems particularly fruitful for further discussion, as he replaces argument with stories as the defining element of rhetoric, positing that rhetors choose among stories and narrative archetypes that match their values and beliefs. Stories, not logic, underpin people’s decisions, and reasons presented in rhetoric are subjective and may be misunderstood by audiences who do not share these same beliefs/hold these same stories. In an age of “truthiness“, where peopel have their own sets of facts and it’s more important what you feel or believe, and in an age where you can filter your discourse to only hear or be exposed to stories that confirm your world view, Fisher’s theories seem to have even more application than they did in 1984.
I was also struck by the difference between Burke’s motive and Bitzer’s exigence that Miller outlined: “Burke’s emphasis is on human acction, whereas Bitzer’s appears to be on reaction” (155). This struck me as the same difference as teaching and learning, with Burkean thought focusing on what the teacher does and says, what is instructed or imparted or transmitted, while Bitzer’s notions are more focused on what is received or heard or learned. As Miller rightly notes, these are two different actions and interactions with a discourse or a genre, and they do not align always, even if both parties have the same general need or purpose. This idea was further reinforced later in the article when Miller brings up Sharon Downey’s discussion of two sets of rules: “constitutive rules that tell us how to fuse form and substance to make meaning and regulative rules that tell us how the fusion itself is to be interpreted within its context” (161). Thus, one set of ruels governs what is said and how, while another set of rules governs what is heard, interpreted and what it means. The potential for “disjunctive discourse” happens when these two sets of rules are not aligned. While this term is usually used linguistically to refer to syntactical issues that create semantic difficulties, I believe it can have a social meaning when two sets of operating rules — both valid — collide and the discourse breaks down in the absence of a mediator or translator that can bridge this divide (more network terms … more later). This whole notion applies to education because there, accountability has focused on the constitutive rules — what the teachers convey — but then measured the received messages without using teh regulative rules which govern what is interpreted. The problem lies with using the constitutive rules governing the rhetorical action as the basis for assessment vs the regulative rules that govern what is and can be heard or interpreted within context. The entire premise is incorrect, because rhetorical analysis (and what is teaching if not discourse) would state that what is said is not always what is heard, the action does not always create the intended reaction. Accountability focus on the students — why they didn’t hear or interpret or react in the intended way — would make sense.
I also wondered if Pearce and Conklin’s five levels of rule-governed relationships might make a useful model for theorizing larp: archetypes, episodes, speech acts, propositions (grammatical utterances — Foucault’s statements?), and stream of behavior that is interpreted … “based on the common physiology that human beings share and in the common physical properties of the world they live in” (Pearce & Conklin 78 qtd. in Miller 161). I would add the world they inhabit, as in the world of the game.
Works Cited
Colbert, Stephen. “The Word: Truthiness” The Colbert Report. Comedy Central. 7 October 2005. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.
Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70.2 (1984): 151–167. Print.
Munsch, Edvard. “The Scream”. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Scream.jpg. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.
Popham, S. L. “Forms as Boundary Genres in Medicine, Science, and Business.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 19.3 (2005): 279–303. CrossRef. Web. 1 Feb. 2014.
I realized that I am off on my Mind Map updates. I thought they were for the NEXT week’s work, not the previous one’s. I thought I had to do the new reading before updating. So last week’s more comprehensive updates were really both Foucaults. The Bazerman and Miller and Popham and the Digital Writing Assessment stuff are for AFTER this week’s class. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake.
So this week I spent time cleaning up my Popplett and attempting to reorganize it. I made two color schemes, corresponding to structuralism and deconstruction, aligning Biesecker and Foucault together, and Bitzer and Vatz together (and the genre folks will end up here, I suspect). Red for deconstruction (it bleeds …. it hurts us) and Blue for structure (it calms us … it gives false sense of unity). I actually deleted several Popples that were no longer needed and some extraneous connections. I also came upon the limitations of the interface. I wanted to create a “super-Popple” which contained other Popples, to show nested categories rather than simple linear connections. My exercise became one of dealing with the limitations rather than freely making connections. I believe that this iteration may prepare me to absorb the next round of theorists, but I suspect my basis for categorization will shift again as the map seeks to encompass more.
VanKooten, Crystal. “Toward a Rhetorically Sensitive Assessment Model for New Media Composition.” Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation. Eds. Heidi A McKee and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2013. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.
Situating herself inside three established assessment models — Paul Allison (2009), Eve Bearne (2009), and Michael Neal (2011)– Van Kooten creates a new model meant to assess new media composition. This adaptable model takes into account both process and product, functional and rhetorical literacies, and requires student self-assessment and reflection . Van Kooten details the theory and framework for the model, then demonstrates — using student voices — the implementation and assessment of it. The chapter functions as a true multi-modal text, replete with 7 short videos (with accompanying transcripts) to demonstrate the kinds of “multifaceted logic” and “layers of media” that are employed using a variety of rhetorical and technical features to accomplish a specific purpose for a particular audience.
Van Kooten narrates the difficulty in creating a new media assessment model and her journey toward the model she unveils here. She notes that the first attempts she made, along with her students who collaboratively created the rubric for their own work, were outgrowths of the print media rubrics, and that they quickly revealed their shortcomings, due to the affordances of various media that could be incorporated. For example, arguments are presented differently using sound and visuals, and what constitutes evidence and organization varies by media. Michael Neal (2011) proposed that the proliferation of multi-modal texts has created what he calls a “kairotic juncture” — an opportunity for a new model, which Van Kooten responds to, however cautiously, noting that “there is currently no agreed-upon language or vocabulary for discussing new media texts” nor any stability in new media genres. She hopes the model she proposes opens the conversation about new media assessment and the opportunity for further evolutions that remain grounded in “a solid theory of writing assessment itself.”
Van Kooten offers three criteria for assessment:
fulfillment of purpose and direction to audience;
the use of a multifaceted logic through consideration of layers of media; and
the use of rhetorical and technical features for effect.
Van Kooten’s model for assessment of New Media Composition includes both functional and rhetorical literacies.
She also offers two worksheets to help students set both functional and rhetorical goals for their work, involving them in the assessment process and requiring metacognition and reflection — ways of assessing both process and product.
It is my opinion that Van Kooten has created a plausible model, grounded in both (print) writing assessment theory and multi-modal composition theory, that will become an oft-cited text as this conversation continues. This article is a useful source for a go-to model that can be adapted for classroom use.
As mentioned, there are seven accompanying videos that demonstrate new media compositions and turn the chapter itself into a multi-modal piece. Here is a metacognitive piece where one of Van Kooten’s students overdubs his piece with his own narration of the process. This itself is a viable product, as we have director’s cuts with commentary on the special editions of movies and TV episodes, where the audience is privileged to have a window into the mind of the director or actor.
I enjoyed reading the Foreword, Preface and Afterword of the Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation book. I was forced to read on screen, which I am getting better at, although I prefer paper and being able to us an actual pencil to annotate. These were not too “heady” texts, so I didn’t feel stylus withdrawal. The compulsion to mark up and the feeling of loss wasn’t so strong as it is when I try to read something more difficult, that requires more processing and connections.
As a Community College English faculty member, I feel compelled to enter this conversation, perhaps in some of the gaps identified by McKee and DeVoss in their foreword. Interestingly, they did not identify the dearth of scholarship about writing at the community college, let alone digital writing and digital assessment, as one of these gaps. I checked, and not one of the chapters in this volume deals with community colleges as its object of study, nor is it written by or in collaboration with a community college faculty member. This is a HUGE gap, given that nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States are enrolled at two-year schools, and because of their open-access nature, they are one of the biggest users of Automated Essay Scoring (AES). In addition, they are less likely to have a coordinated writing program, although they are under the same pressures from accrediting bodies as the four-year schools to demonstrate student learning of course and program outcomes.
I was especially struck by the lack of regard for the implications when I read the footnote on the Foreword:“1. Interestingly, a form of credit is an option available for $190 in Coursera’s (Duke’s MOOC provider) “Signature Track.” Yet, as Steve Krause (2013) astutely noted, because Duke itself will not recognize that credit but offers it to other institutions, “it seems a little shady to me that places like Duke are perfectly happy to offer their MOOC courses for credit at other institutions but not at Duke.”
Where’s the “Duh” Hammer? Hello????? Duke, and other universities may well find themselves with students who earned their credit from a MOOC, despite their posturing that they do not accept it. Accepting (and OFFERING) credit for the Comp MOOC creates a slippery slope for Duke because of articulation agreements with colleges –such as community colleges — who may allow credit for the MOOC. Two-year schools are under increasing pressure to award credit for prior learning, in a rush by politicians to decrease the amount of time to a degree (a barrier, they note, to completion of a credential). Thus, the number of ways to be awarded credit for courses (CREDIT, mind you, not placement) increases. Examples include: CLEP, DANTES, IB, Cambridge, AP). So, if you earn an associate’s degree from a two-year school who awarded you credit for a MOOC, then you are eligible for guaranteed transfer to some pretty elite institutions, including Duke. As stipulated in the agreement:
Transfer students will be considered to have satisfied the UNC Minimum Course Requirements (MCR) in effect at the time of their graduation from high school if they have:
received the associate in arts, the associate in science, the associate in fine arts, the baccalaureate or any higher degree, or
completed the 44-hour general education core, or
completed at least six (6) semester hours in degree-credit in each of the following subjects: English, mathematics, the natural sciences, and social/behavioral sciences, and (for students who graduate from high school in 2003-04 and beyond) a second language.
These four-year institutions not only would not go back to see how the credits comprising the degree were derived at the associate-degree granting institution, but it also appears to be prohibited by the articulation agreement. While no community college currently awards credit for a MOOC, the door has been opened by a 2013 Florida law, which allows MOOC credit in certain cases and requires K-12 and colleges to create rules and procedures to accept credit for these courses. Between the pressure to award more credit for Prior Learning, to the inroads MOOCs have made with politicians who see them as a cost-savings measure (though not so much with students who want to use them for college credit on the cheap), more discussion about this topic is sure to follow, and community colleges cannot be left out of these conversations.
Three quotes from Edward White in the Afterword that I would like to address:
“This pencil [meaning the computer] has gotten out of hand and has entered our bloodstream.”
“But what is not discussed is what I consider the elephant in the room, which from my perspective is distinctly oppressive: assessment by computer and by various instructional platforms. While we talk pleasantly about the brave new world of writing that computers have ushered in, a darker side of technology has been making important inroads into the very center of writing itself.”
and
“Students will write to machines, a natural enough move for generations brought up challenging machines on computer games, rather than writing for their peers or their teachers. Students will write to machines just as surely as they now write their SAT or AP essays to the armies of dulled readers” (Afterword)
Again, leaving community colleges out of this equation is at the peril of compositionists. Virginia’s Community Colleges, for example, have partnered with McCann and Associates, a division of Vantage Learning, to use their IntelliMetrics to develop the Virginia Placement Tests, which all students entering the college must take in Mathematics and English Reading and Writing. The results of this test determine whether you require placement in Developmental Coursework, or are “ready for college-level work.” The writing test can be gamed by playing to structure. Repeat key terms, use a clear thesis and conclusion, use markers and transition words (first, next, then), and you’ll score well, regardless of substance. The program counts number of words per sentence and per paragraph, expected clauses and distance from punctuation, and looks for common errors entered into its database. You might suspect that it doesn’t do well with ESL students or students for whom Standard Academic Discourse is an L2. Furthermore, students have the choice between two prompts, which point to two kinds of essays: one more expository, the other more analytical. Some of my colleagues at Northern Virginia Community College analyzed some data from the tests, which was very difficult to obtain, as the company keeps results close to the vest — the student and instructors only see the resulting placement, not an actual score, let alone an explanation for how the score was derived. They found that students who self-selected the harder prompt tended to score lower on the essay portion, but substantially higher on the multiple-choice portion. However, since the two scores are combined for a placement (using an unknown algorithm), students with very high scores on the reading and sentence correction portion, who also challenged themselves with the more rhetorically difficult essay, were being placed in developmental English, while other students who took the easier prompt (which could be answered SOL-style) and performed poorly on the closed-response questions testing reading comprehension and textual analysis, could be placed into the credit courses. After uncovering this inherent testing bias at the Developmental Education Peer Group conference in Fall 2013, the VCCS requested that the prompts be changed, and has promised that they are “more aligned.” I have some grave concerns about outsourcing the scoring of essays to a for-profit company who refuses to share metrics or results with faculty.
As White notes, our students are already well-versed in writing to the SAT and AP readers, and using stringent rubrics to grade writing for in-common assessments across course sections invites further standardization. Students inherently understand the rhetorical nature of audience — they spend a great deal of time figuring out what the teacher wants to hear. If they are writing for a computer program for a grade, they will quickly figure out the triggers to obtain a good one, despite actually saying anything factual, accurate, or coherent. As I tell my students, you can check off everything on a rubric as being complete, but that does not determine if you have actually communicated to your audience. Writing is more than the sum of its parts, which, at this point, cannot be effectively measured by an emotionless algorithm that cannot decode symbolic representations.
Works Cited
Bernstein, Kenneth. “Warnings from the Trenches.” Academe. American Association of University Professors. January-February 2013. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.
Fain, Paul. “College Credit Without College.” Inside Higher Ed. 7 May 2012. Web. 2 Feb. 2014.
Independent Comprehensive Articulation Agreement Between Signatory Institutions of the North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities and the North Carolina Community College System.” Presidents of the Signatory Institutions of the North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities and the
State Board of the North Carolina Community College System. 2007, revised 2010. Web. 2 Feb. 2014.
Kolowich, Steve. “A University’s Offer of Credit for a MOOC Gets No Takers.” Chronicle of Higher Education. 8 July 2013. Web. 2 February 2014.
Lunsford, Andrea. “Foreword” Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation. Ed. Heidi A McKee and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2013. Web. 2 Feb. 2014.
“Transfer Agreements with Independent Colleges.” Sandhills Community College. n.d. Web. 2 Feb. 2014.
“SAT Reasoning Test – Essay Scoring Guide.” CollegeBoard. n. p., 2012. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.
“‘Watered Down’ MOOC Bill Becomes Law In Florida” Inside Higher Ed. 1 July 2013. Web. 2 Feb. 2014.
White, Edward M. “Afterword: Not Just a Better Pencil.” Digital Writing Assessment and Evaluation. Ed. Heidi A McKee and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2013. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.
So, I started thinking about the definition of Discourse that Foucault is using, and it isn’t the same definition of discourse that many of us would use today. Foucault’s definition of Discourse, and way of looking at language is fundamentally the linguistic one, and he is responding to Chomsky and other structuralists. The linguistics definition from the OED is closest :
Discourse: 8.Linguistics. A connected series of utterances by which meaning is communicated, esp. one forming a unit for analysis; spoken or written communication regarded as consisting of such utterances.
discourse analysis n. Linguistics a method of analysing the structure of texts or utterances longer than one sentence, taking into account both their linguistic content and their sociolinguistic context; analysis performed using this method.
discourse marker n.Linguistics a word or phrase whose function is to organize discourse into segments and situate a clause, sentence, etc., within a larger context.
So, it seems to me that he was putting forth ANOTHER theory about structure, that structure isn’t a static source of meaning, but a set of variables, units, and actionable items that can constantly be recombined to produce varying meanings, depending on context, and then returned to their individual units. Where Chomsky put the emphasis (if I’m remembering correctly) on phonemic units that combine to make sounds, then words, then clauses, sentences, paragraphs to create a cohesive and coherent system of language and meaning, Foucault seems to put the emphasis on a “statement” a unit where an action is taken. Statements can be shorthand, like bits of programming, that are combined in a dynamic system, which is not coherent and comprehensive, but contains infinite (or nearly so) possibilities for illimitable meanings. It’s still about structure, but it’s structure in the sense of lack of structure, in the awareness of and comfortability with building the wheel anew every time, although with the knowledge of how wheels have been built before.
So I have a big box of Legos, and I can build many different things, even though I may have received instructions for a certain planned project. And when I’m finished, I take them apart again for recombination later. A new structure may contain the same component parts, but it can (and generally will) look different. Language isn’t a puzzle to solve (like a Rubik’s Cube, where there is a correct way to use it, a single cohesive solution). Language is a dynamic system of interrelated parts that signify by their placement in conversation ( a more comprehensive use of the word discourse) with each other. And “uttering” now has new and varied meanings.
Foucault’s definition of discourse really is a computer science definition, where a “program” is a series of “statements”, each of which carries out an action and together brings a result. A statement is executable. A definition is a marker, a pointer, to something specific. What travels on the network then, are executables — statements that require something to be done — which are sent to nodes, specific and discernible and addressable actors who process the statement and take action. Thus, discourse, as a connected series of these statements, mitigates and creates action, which is what Bitzer said the purpose of discourse is to begin with. Foucault says that there is no authorial intent or raison d’etre, but who writes the programming? Both the statements, and how the statements are to be interpreted at the nodes? This process HAPPENS dynamically, based on exigencies, but it is predictable because of the series of it/then statements. Disruptions along the network are not tolerated; they are seen as aberrations. This seems to get back at Foucault’s other theories, about authority and discipline. You must do what the statement requires you to do. If you do not, you will be punished or assimilated or removed from the system.
Meanings are still constructed — indeed only are constructs. But unless the nodes are self-aware, all they are doing is following orders of authoritative programmers situated elsewhere and directing action through executable statements assembled for specific purposes. The USER of the statements may still be unaware, and even the WRITER of the statements may be unconscious of all meanings and intents that may result.
Humans are not logarithms, and may return the system to a pre-discursive state (chaos) by introducing or using another mode — an executable that is outside of the discourse. A disruptor — which is where innovation happens.
Since the embed code that worked last week isn’t working today (a change to the network was made by WordPress and now ShockWave isn’t playing nicely, apparently), here is a screenshot of the interactive Popplet. Clicking on the image will take you to the Popplet where you can move around.
So this thing is meant to be a map, but I don’t know where it is going. It seems to going …. nowhere:
But perhaps, like the Talking Heads, and even Mssr. Foucault, it isn’t the destination, but the representation of it that is what it is, that makes meaning.
And, if I believe Mssr. Foucault, then my concerns about the beauty of my map and what it says about the state of my mind are unfounded, since it isn’t designed to represent any other thing or idea, but as itself, nor is there authorial intent or authority. I am liberated from my “empirical consciousness” and instead an agent of the discourse.
I totally forgot to do the mind-map updating amid the various nodes of work this week. This one got left on the periphery, not fully connected to the system I interacted with. I added some nodes related to Foucault and connected them to the others: Foucault connects to Biesecker, but refutes Bitzer and Vatz. I’m beginning to use the terms “discourse” and “network” interchangeably, perhaps poorly. We shall see.
Here is a soundtrack for your reading of this blog post:
Bob Dylan sings about the human tendency to search for comfort, answers, stability, love, in an embodied and unified entity — a person, a lover — and announces that he cannot be that: “it ain’t me, babe, that you’re looking for.” Foucault would argue that not only is it not Bob, it’s not anyone, for that idea of document, something concrete, something embodied with a distinctive meaning, a representation that has a meaning or a role is one that doesn’t fully exist, or at least exist over time. It isn’t about the artist. It isn’t about the meaning s/he intended or the meaning you ascribe. In other words,
It’s not a pipe. It’s not even a picture of a pipe. It’s not an oeuvre. It’s not Henri Magritte. It’s not a representation of Henri Magritte’s mind. It doesn’t mean “pipe” or “painting” or “art” or “webpage.” It is a set of rules and protocols that we use to call it so. The rules create the event, which creates the thing, which creates the meaning. It’s a monument — a visible marker of a moment in time, a form and manifestation of a concept demarcated in the chaos by discourse.
“Behind the visible facade of the system [the systematic ordering created by language], one posits the rich uncertainty of disorder; and beneath the thin surface of discourse, the whole mass of a largely silent development (devenir): a ‘presystematic’ that is not of the order of the system; a ‘prediscursive’ that belongs to an essential silence. Discourse and system produce each other –” (76).
In this quote, Foucault seems to be saying that discourse does not equal a symbolic system to encapsulate and systematize thought, nor a representation of some purity of thought or original meaning or essence . Discourse, rather, is a set of rules that creates (or attempts to create) a sense of order from a state of “devenir” or the potentialities — the possibilities of becoming, of what something might develop into, become or mean. The WORD gives rise to the situation; the discourse creates, becomes, and perpetuates the system that evokes it. So, to Foucault, a “rhetorical situation” seems to happen because someone speaks and the language creates it. Before, all the parts were there, but the situation is constituted (the parts gathered together) through the act of using language.
He continues this thread with: “Archaeology … does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. ” (138-139). This process of archaeology that Foucault narrates is not for the purpose of discovering the meaning behind or the truth within; a document does not signify something else. It is. It exists. It is a monument — a marker that something has happened, been created, left its mark.
And, “archaeology does not try to restore what has been thought, wished, aimed at, experienced, desired by mean in the very moment at which they expressed it in discourse; it does not set out to recapture that elusive nucleus in which the author and the oeuvre exchange identities; in which thought still remains nearest to onself, in the as yet unaltered form of the same, and in which language (langage) has not yet been deployed in the spatial successive dispersion of discourse” (139). And “The authority of the creative subject, as the raison d’etre of an oeuvre and the principle of its unity, is quite alien to it [archaeology]” (139). Alors, the premise that language bastardizes or corrupts otherwise pure thought or truth is bogus to Foucault, as is the idea of original intent and authorial purpose. Rather, a text is the result of a “network of causalities” (139) that bring it into being (and as quickly tear it apart).
It reminds me of my favorite passage from Jack Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity: ““Everything’s alright, form is emptiness and emptiness is form, and we’re here forever, in one form or another, which is empty. Everything’s alright, we’re not here, there, or anywhere. Everything’s alright, cats sleep.”
Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge seems to be him narrating (often in dialogue with himself, as his own co-creative discursive partner) a process for reading the world. In it, he advocates deconstructing a situation, identifying its constituent variables, isolating them, and then manipulating them into various iterations, each time searching for new ways of seeing and knowing (sight and insight). The original and temporal unity is reconstituted again and again, into new temporary unities, not looking for an original truth or a primal Truth, but for variance and relationships among the constituent parts. He suggests a sort of iterative regression analysis being performed on various combinations of enunciative formations, which I see as delimited strings of meaning, much like an algorithm breaks text into strings or an image into pixels, and each further into a series of zeroes and ones which are then reassembled. This iterative exploration of potentialities and probabilities is now infinitely more doable with Big Data and powerful computing. We have the capability to break something into smaller and smaller components, and to combine every more variables, and to manipulate in more ways. Our ability to see is technologically enhanced — no longer is this discourse between human and language, but with the mitigation by and enhancement from technology. We see with cyborgian eyes.
Foucault’s notions relate to my Object of Study because live-action role-playing exists in this sort of realm of delimited concepts and enunciative formations. A gamemaster sets up a situation and characters are created. Meaning is derived through the play and interplay in the game. Meaning is constituted temporally and contingently, depending on the discursive practices (and all the relationships, constructs, prior knowledge, etc.) of the characters. It is constructed relationally, not individually. And then it is over, and if one looks to the documents left behind (character sheets, rules, scenarios) one can never recreate or even understand the discourse that was the game. It is a true “you had to be there” situation. An outcome is an outcome, and that is not to be judged as “good” or “bad” or “real” or “unreal.” It is what it is. It is a set of contingencies enacted.
I leave you with an excerpt form Act 2, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet gets Foucault. Foucault gets Hamlet. The two share an idea, but have given it new form:
HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one.
HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Why then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too
narrow for your mind.
HAMLET: O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.
GUILDENSTERN: Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very
substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
HAMLET: A dream itself is but a shadow.
ROSENCRANTZ: Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a
quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
HAMLET: Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and
outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows. Shall we
to the court? for, by my fay, I cannot reason.
And neither, any more, can I.*
*Though there is a whole other entry on savoir and connaitre that I must write. Those words must attempt to form from chaos on another day.
References:
Dylan, Bob and the Hawks. “It Ain’t Me Babe.” Live at the Hollywood Bowl. 1965. Video. Posted by colonslappy, YouTube User. 27 January 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_y9FB3O7j0
Foucault, Michel, Alan Sheridan, and Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge ; and the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Print.
Kerouac, Jack. The Scripture of the Golden Eternity: Pocket Poets Number 51. Vol. 51. City Lights Books, 1960. Google Scholar. Web. 28 Jan. 2014.
Magritte, Henri. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” 1948. Web. 27 January 2014. http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/rene-magritte/the-treachery-of-images-this-is-not-a-pipe-1948
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.2.2.html Web. 27 January 2014.
This is my quick stab at where I store all of my stuff. The entire page is my brain — it encompasses and accesses all item. My Memory Game is remembering where something is stored (and crying when one peripheral fails … USB jump drives — you’re dead to me).
The memory activity was interesting, as I realized that I have fragmented myself to too large of a degree, constrained by real and perceived limitations of the devices (e.g. capacity in Dropbox, functionality in Drive). Daniel has suggested I funnel all my items through a single Gmail, which I think Shelley does, too. I currently segment VCCS stuff on my VCCS Drive, ODU stuff on my ODU Drive and “other” stuff on my personal Google Drive. I would like to consolidate, but Google doesn’t make it easy at this point, other than sharing among them. I can chip away at downloading and reorganizing over time.
I rely increasingly less on physical items (such as CDs, DVDs, and USB drives) and rely much more on the “cloud.” But I’ve got to figure out some more parameters — currently iCloud thinks I have two iPhones, and I don’t have enough storage space to complete a backup. I haven’t allocated the time to figure out how to fix that. I know I’m playing with unbacked-up-data fire, so I have some sense of urgency, but not enough to prioritize it higher on the list. Blind trust in devices that they will not fail. Playing with fire, indeed.
