Rhizomes

I was reading the following article, which discusses Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome metaphor--one of the topics in our readings this week:

Folsom, Ed. “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives.” PMLA 122.5 (October, 2007): 1571-1612. 41 pp.

Folsom adapts Deleuze and Guattari’s “preferred image of the rhizome” as a metaphor for online database because of the lack of centrality and endless potential of rhizomorphic growth (1573). The rhizomatic structure of database, according to Folsom, allows unexpected and previously impossible connections for the researcher, often because texts can be experienced in juxtaposition that would have heretofore been less likely for a researcher to experience. I’ll call it “rhizomorphic knowledge structuring,” which I see as encouraging serendipity (idea—performativity and research methods?)

Folsom refers to Manovich’s The Language of New Media, in which Manovich considers database as a genre. (I read the Manovich chapter and respond later.) Folsom is especially interested in how Manovich sets up a paradigm of database versus narrative. (I see database as allowing multiple narratives, which might give the author less “control,” privileging the audience—of course, this is within the constraints of the author-created site. The question is, is this a more “democratic” system than traditional, written texts have allowed?)

The idea of the ideal is at play, the notion that archives are somehow open to infinite authorship; a site can be added to or can link to a massive (perhaps endless) web of information. I know, this is utopian rhetoric, for which Folsom gets criticized . . . I’m going to go with the idea that while choices made by scholars in what “gets” represented speak volumes about institutional or cultural power, the reader might have power never before possible—again, within certain constraints, which I know presents a paradox.

The article leads me to consider how genre itself operates as a container. What are the borders of genre? Consider Lakoff and Johnson’s ontological metphors…

Not so Naturally Speaking

I'm glad I didn't pay the $100 for this gadget gone awry. Dragon Naturally Speaking is a speech recognition program that I'd hoped would help me get quotes out of books and into Word easier. Wasted hours of training it to listen to me, and $25 dollars later, I was breathing fire.

What a terrific idea...but not for the kinds of jargon I deal with using scholarly discourse. I suppose I could train it to learn words such as "rhizomatic," but I just don't have time to teach it to save me time....

So, is this technological determinism, that our gadgets control us?

Technological Determinism

McCluhan, “Two Selections...”
Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory...”
Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,”

All three readings address the effect of technology on society and include observations about the communication process, from the relationship between individual human perception and media to political and cultural shifts that emerge in communication.

McLuhan relies on historical and literary examples more than Enzensberger and Baudrillard, who concern themselves more with the Marxist implications of media in this particular set of writings. At the center of all of this (I’m being deliberately facetious by positing a center) is how the individual’s experience becomes altered by technology—the Frankenstein effect. Is technology a curse or a savior? No easy binaries here, so maybe we can propose a dialectic, as Enzensberger and Baudrillard discuss.

All three writings address Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction” at least once, in which Benjamin considers the ability of a work of art to contain an “aura,” which he defines as the sense that a work has of belonging to a particular space and time. Aura posits a value in art that traditionally created a distance of the art object from the viewer, which was a metaphysical, even mystical, power of art held over from art's historical association with ritual and religion. Aura creates a paradoxical distance that is experienced in the presence of the original art and is not a distance of physical proximity. But new technologies allow more audiences to see an original work of art in a reproduced form, such that aura is lost. This loss is, however, democratizing, since more people have access to a work of art than in the past. The "loss" of aura signifies a liberation of art from elitism and marks its "ownership" by the public. Such public ownership is not unlike that of audiences of publicly available online literary texts, works of art that could potentially be more accessible than ever before in the past.

The individual’s response to art thus reflects—or is part of—the process of automation, a transitory and ever-moving, evolving, self-reflexive relationship. But it’s critical to see that technological determinism is at work in these readings. (I wrote the following on a class wiki last semester.) Technological determinism is a phrase used to describe the belief that technology shapes (determines) the course of a society. It posits that more than any other force, technology causes social change, a view which subsumes other controlling factors, such as economics, patriarchy, or class, for example. Not only could technological determinism be seen as opposed to social determinism, it could also be seen as robbing the individual of agency.
In Remediation, Bolter and Grusin (2000) argue that Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1969) constitutes technological determinism, as well as McLuhan's work (including Understanding New Media, 1964). Bolter and Grusin outline their view of technological determinism explicitly, arguing that they "propose to treat social forces and technical forms as two aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic facets" (p. 77).

There are a number of topics that develop from these observations—one could consider Taylorism and Fordism; power and Foucault; the huge topic of intellectual copyright and the Internet….the author and the artist…

Vietnam Veteran Interview

Sound Project--Learning how to edit sound using my personal interview with a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Link to hear the file:
http://www.box.net/shared/static/q29crvf5wc.mp3

For my sound project, I interviewed a family friend, John Brickhouse, who had served as a crossbow sniper in Vietnam. The original interview lasted for 71 minutes, and at first I was unsure how to edit the raw material, as it was difficult to decide what to keep, to cut, or to rearrange.

I researched the Vietnam Archive Oral History Project run by Texas Tech University (http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/oralhistory/participation/). Their site includes guidelines on how to conduct the interview,along with an extensive questionnaire of 115 questions. Per their suggestion, I gave John a copy of the questionnaire in order to prepare him for the interview. I was especially concerned with making him comfortable, and circled which questions I was planning to ask; I encouraged him to let me know if any questions made him uncomfortable, and I did not waiver from the planned questions during the interview.

I also prepared by listening to interviews on the shows This American Life and StoryCorps, and based on the examples, I chose to edit my own voice as much as possible from the interview. The one time I am heard on the track is when I ask him if he has ever visited the Wall, and I included it because his answer would not make sense without the context of the question. My intended outcome was to edit the material to create a cohesive narrative, which focused on John’s words and not my questions. I had to be careful as I deleted segments of the interview that what I retained made sense. As it stood without editing, the interview had a narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end, as the questions created by Texas Tech encouraged an exposition, clear development, and closure.

As a writer, I instinctively knew which parts to cut or keep based upon which themes emerged. I was aware of the interview as a composition, not only as it was happening, but during and after my arrangement. I chose not to rearrange questions and responses, even though I considered it a number of times, because the questions already followed a narrative pattern. Instead, I spent most of the editing time removing pauses, and as many “ums” and “ahs” as I could. I found that some of those utterances could not be removed without making obvious clipping sounds, even if I tried to “clean it up” with some smoothing tricks in Audacity.

I have several versions of the interview saved, including the raw original of over an hour, a 45-minute version, and a 13-minute version. I had originally planned to submit the 45-minute version as my project and to share the short version in class, but after cutting it, I prefer its impact in the shorter form and submit that as my final project. Cutting material took at least ten hours over a three-week period. By not working on it for extended periods of time, and instead approaching the material in short fragments of time, I was able to “hear it anew,” so to speak, the same way as when a writer sets down a late draft of a paper to let it rest a few days before the final edit. It is always easiest to reconsider edits afterwards.

The most dissatisfying aspect of the interview is the hiss on the track. I used Audacity’s noise removal option with some success, but removing any more hiss created an uneven wah-wah distortion. After visiting a number of forums online, I realized that I had to accept the hiss as it was, as a number of other Audacity users had encountered to same problem and concluded that little could be done (and that for a free program its strengths far outweighed its weaknesses).

I’m extremely satisfied with the final composition and am pleased to publish it to the class when we meet and on my blog. I considered which statements would most affect my classmates when we listened to it as a group, but I also considered that the long version of the interview could be published to the Texas Tech archive. Because I believe that oral histories are a vital part of the ongoing story of America, I plan to ask John’s permission for that publication after I share the interview with him in person. I am honored that he shared his personal—and often painful—history with me.

No Respect? Multimedia Publishing & Pedagogy

Joyce Walker writes about how “we do not yet have a a very good understanding of what happens to our efforts to write in scholarly ways when we move into digital environments” in a recent issue of Kairos (10.2). Walker’s article (composition?) enacts new media scholarship, and is thus what Ball calls for in her article, “Show not tell,” in which Ball argues for the academic use of multimedia in the classroom and in publication. Such publications need to (must) garner institutional respect, especially considering how sometimes they don’t “count” as publications at all for tenure-track faculty.

Katie Retzinger, Ashley Hall, (and more) & I authored a pretty substantial wiki post on this article last semester for Texts and Technologies. Here’s the link: http://courses.kathiegossett.com/fa07/engl801/index.php?title=Ball%2C_Cheryl:_Show%2C_not_tell:_The_value_of_new_media_scholarship
I hope you’ll visit that wiki because it has a lot of info on it that the class created together!

Walker’s article is genuinely interactive and invites readers to travel to different online spaces. It is non-linear and non-sequential and functions as a database. In The Language of New Media, Manovich considers database as a genre. Manovich sets up a paradigm of database versus narrative. I see database as allowing multiple narratives, which might give the author less “control,” privileging the audience—of course, this is within the constraints of the author-created site. The question is, is this a more “democratic” system than traditional, written texts have allowed? Is narrative “under threat” by database?

Such a question would buy into Manovich’s metaphor of a battle between narrative and database. In this battle, narrative needs protection, as chronologies and traditional scholarship comes under attack. Certainly, online publications like Kairos remediate traditional textual venues. Bolter and Grusin’s term “remediation” refers to the overarching tendency of new media to imitate and incorporate forms they “seek to supersede” (1593). I see a relationship here to the tendency of quotation in postmodern art, which is at once an homage and a departure. (class wiki link to Bolter & Grusin: http://courses.kathiegossett.com/fa07/engl801/index.php?title=Bolter%2C_Jay_David_%26_Grusin%2C_Richard:_Remediation:_Understanding_new_media.)

See what Katherine Hayles says in a recent issue of PMLA in her article “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts” (PMLA 122.5 (October, 2007):

“The indeterminacy that databases find difficult to tolerate marks another way in which narrative differs from database. Narratives gesture toward the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable, whereas databases rely on enumeration, requiring explicit articulation of attributes and data values” (1605). So, there’s this vital paradox at work, that databases are simultaneously flexible and inflexibile. But I disagree with Hayles because I think databases can still “invite the unknown” in the same way narratives do, and as with narratives, it’s in the usage (that is, in the reader’s work). Hayles cites a few famous literary examples of unknowns, but I see these as constrained by authorship as any database could be—constrained by authorship and the physical pages of a book which is like the constraint of data in a database.

For how long will scholarship and pedagogy privilege the physical pages of a book?

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Mixing the Memory: Individual, Cultural, Public Memory & Sound

I’ve often heard that smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory. And you hear about how people will ask you if you remember where you were when you found out about Kennedy being shot, or the Challenger blowing up, or September 11. But what about remembering sounds? Do certain sounds trigger memory? Can that memory be both individual and public, or cultural? How does or can new media participate in an evolving relationship between memory and sound?

Regarding cultural memory, Sturken (2004) argues that its “forms of remembrance” indicate the “status of memory” within a culture, a convergence point at which the “shifting discourse of history, personal memory, and cultural memory” meet (p. 401). And in a discussion of public memory-making, Prelli (2006) outlines the importance of rhetorics of display in rhetorical study, arguing that rhetorics of public memory try to resolve tensions between showing and hiding, remembering and forgetting.

We all can hear a song and remember and event in our lives, or a certain time of our lives—songs of our childhood, teenage years, or songs from a wedding, funeral, or movie. DJ Spooky’s c.d. from Rhythm Science features sampling from old films and songs. Such sampling is not just about sound but is about sampling the past itself. Original audiences of the sampled clips mix memories of the original with the experience of listening to the new composition. Think how much films and television have affected our memories, not only of visuals, but of sound. I wonder how much new media will contribute, such as YouTube. Can it be that out of the thousands of videos containing pet-tricks and angst-filled diaries, something might emerge that writes the script of public and cultural memory?

Sturken, M. (2004). The wall, the screen, and the image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In C. Handa (Ed.), Visual rhetoric in a digital world: A critical sourcebook. Boston: Bedford.

Prelli, L. (2006). Rhetorics of display. Introduction. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

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