At this point, rhetoric’s relationship to attention is perhaps self-evident. One of the more recent treatments of rhetoric and attention is Richard Lanham’s The Economics of Attention, which argues that rhetoric is a key tool for attracting and managing attention, our most scarce resource.[note]Lanham, The Economics of Attention, xi.[/note] This argument is part of a long history in rhetorical theory, one that has been concerned with how attention is allocated, marshaled, and controlled. Perhaps rhetoricians have been focused on attention because it is so clearly linked to the art of persuasion—one must manage the audience’s attention by way of claims, evidence, and tactics. Or maybe this attention to attention is due to accusations that rhetoric is itself a distraction. Still, we know that Lanham would not make the argument that rhetoric is on the side of attention and that its “other” is distraction, for this would result in what he’d call a “weak defense” of rhetoric—there is “good” rhetoric and “bad” rhetoric. Mine is good; yours is bad.[note]Lanham, The Electronic Word, 158.[/note] A “strong defense” would instead insist that rhetoric is as much about how distraction pulls apart (“a drawing or being drawn asunder”) as it is about how attention attaches to things.[note]“Distraction, N.”[/note]

Given this, what does the rhetorician have to say about distraction, a topic that has encouraged a cottage industry of books and thinkpieces? This was one question our working group brought to Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, and it was an apt one given that Crawford himself argues for an interdisciplinary and synthetic effort when tackling what he calls the “cultural problem” of attention.[note]The World Beyond Your Head, 5–7.[/note] Crawford’s book attempts “an ethics of attention for our time,” an ethics that is primarily concerned with ethos, with our contemporary environment. He positions the book as “a capacious reflection on the sort of ethos we want to inhabit.”[note]Ibid., 7.[/note] Crawford’s ideal ethos is concerned with “the right to not be addressed,” and one of his more provocative proposals is for an “attentional commons.”[note]Ibid., 13.[/note] He argues that we have ceased to see our own attention as something to be defended, and his primary concern is the “mechanized” demands made on our attention from afar: “The ever more complete penetration of public spaces by attention-getting technologies exploits the orienting response [of humans] in a way that preempts sociability, directing us away from one another and toward a manufactured reality, the content of which is determined from afar by private parties that have a material interest in doing so.”[note]Ibid., 10.[/note] He goes on: “The valuable thing that we take for granted is the condition of not being addressed. Just as clean air makes respiration possible, silence, in this broader sense, is what makes it possible to think.”[note]Ibid., 11, emphasis in original.[/note] Crawford’s attentional commons would preserve and protect the right to not be addressed so that we might have time and space to think.

When Crawford describes the noise that crowds us on a daily basis (advertisements at the airport, the buzzing of electronic devices, the crush of email), I identify. But this identification points directly at the larger cultural problem that rhetorical theory can and should help address. This narrative of distraction is an extremely privileged one. The first person plural of Crawford’s book (and of similar texts by Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, and others) does not always acknowledge that “our” narrative of distraction is not a universal one.[note]Turkle, Alone Together; Carr, Nicholas, The Shallows.[/note] By this, I do not mean that “we” are not distracted. Indeed, everyone is distracted—some more than others. But the call for a less distracting ethos does not always recognize the imbalances in the system, the unequal distribution of distraction.

Distraction names the demands that we do not want to face. These are demands we have not chosen, and they arrive whether or not we have invited them. What do such demands announce? For one, it announces an answerability that was always there. This is the affectability or exposedness theorized by Diane Davis in Inessential Solidarity: “an affectability or persuadability that precedes and exceeds symbolic action.”[note]Davis, Inessential Solidarity, 19.[/note] Distractability is another word for persuadability—an unavoidable openness to the other.[note]Crawford likens distractability to obesity, since it feeds on “hyperpalatable” stimulation. The World Beyond Your Head, 16.[/note] However, something else is at work here as well. Distraction announces, even if only for a moment, that you are mismatched with the environment, that something about this space at this particular moment is out of whack for you. To distract is to pull apart, to pry you away from what you were trying to do. It is an uncoupling of you and your environment. You are trying to pay attention, and a distraction arrives. If distraction pulls apart, then attention seeks out connection—the Latin attendere means to turn or stretch towards something. If I am paying attention to something, I turn toward it and connect with it. Distraction disrupts the circuit. If our contemporary environment has encouraged ruminations on the dangers of distraction, it is an indication that those of us accustomed to seamless interactions (interactions with a world seemingly form-fitted to our body) are being pulled asunder.

Crawford proposes an attentional commons that values the “right to not be addressed.” It should be noted here that Crawford recognizes the impossibility of such a proposal. Others will arrive to address us. The ethos he describes is aspirational. However, to even aspire to such an ethos indicates a position of mastery. A cursory glance at our contemporary ethos makes it clear that the right to not be addressed is actually best understood as a privilege. There are numerous examples we might point to here.[note]This was the most distracting part of writing this essay. I wanted to point to so many examples: Anita Sarkeesian being “addressed” with threats of rape and murder for pointing out misogyny in videogames; Ta-Nehisi Coates’ story in Between the World and Me of his five year old son being shoved by a white woman in New York City; accusations that Black Lives Matter protestors at a Bernie Sanders rally were distracting from the fact that Sanders is a champion of civil rights. Each of these cases points to the question of distraction in a different way, and in a longer essay I would hope to tie them together.[/note] But here is one. In an essay called “Slow Poison,” Ezekiel Kweku recounts his thoughts while driving up the coast of California. Kweku was thinking about the deaths of Sandra Bland and Samuel DeBose, two unarmed African-Americans killed by police officers:

If stopped by the police, I thought to myself, I would set my phone to record audio and put it on the passenger seat. I would send a tweet that I was being stopped and had every intention of complying with the police officer. I would turn on Periscope and livestream the stop, crowdsourcing witnesses. I would text my family and tell them that I was not feeling angry or suicidal, that I was looking forward to seeing them soon. There would not be time to do all of these things, but maybe if I prepared in advance I could pull off one or two of them. What all of these plans had in common were that none of them were meant to secure my safety, but rather to ensure that my death looked suspicious enough to question. I was figuring out how to enter evidence into the inquiry of my own death.[note]Kweku, “Slow Poison.”[/note]

Minutes after considering these various strategies, Kweku was pulled over by police. When the flashing lights appeared, he did not carry out his plan: “Instead, I rifled through my last few minutes on the road, trying to work out what I’d done to draw the officer’s attention. I quickly ruled out everything I could think of.”[note]Ibid.,[/note] The police officer said he’d made an unsafe lane change but later admitted that it might have been another driver. Kweku was free to go. This episode could not be more different than Crawford’s discussions of distraction, and this is primarily because the world is much better suited for Crawford’s body than it is for Kweku’s. Think of the attention it requires to live in a world so ill-fitted for your body. Think of how distracting it must be. Think of Kweku’s right to not be addressed.

Crawford might respond that this is a different kind of demand on our attention, that he is concerned with mechanized and manufactured attempts to capture our attention from “afar.” His preferred ethos would insist that the distractions of virtual reality (representations) that pull us away from one another be set aside in favor of engagements with reality. That reality involves both face-to-face interactions and engagements in skilled craftsmanship. Crawford links our contemporary problem of distraction to the Enlightenment impulse (his primary villain is Kant) to see the world as a set of representations: “The creeping substitution of virtual reality for reality is a prominent feature of contemporary life, but it also has deep antecedents in Western thought. It is a cultural project that is unfolding along lines that Immanuel Kant sketched for us: trying to establish the autonomy of the will by filtering material reality through abstractions.”[note]Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, 73.[/note] Kant’s disregard of the noumenon in the name of the phenomenon lands us in the realm of information overload. We are inundated with representations, leading us away from reality. Crawford’s solution to this problem is a focus on an engagement with reality by way of skilled practices that help structure our attention (practices such as glass blowing and organ making).

By engaging with the real (and here he primarily means wood, glass, and metal) we can re-center our attention and attempt to stave off distraction. For Crawford, such skilled practices are not about achieving autonomy—quite the opposite. They are about “submitting” to material constraints and about seeing oneself as part of a longer history and tradition of craft, traditions that offer methods of tuning out immaterial, virtual noise and focusing in on material reality: “External objects provide an attachment point for the mind; they pull us out of ourselves. It is in the encounter between the self and the brute alien otherness of the real that beautiful things become possible.”[note]Ibid., 27.[/note] This choice to submit to material reality is an attempt to attach to objects and to fend off being pulled asunder by the unwanted address.

This choice does not present itself to everyone. When Crawford describes “submitting” to material constraints in order to experience agency, or when he argues for the value of listening to teachers and elders (when learning the traditional techniques for playing the violin, blowing glass, or constructing organs), I’m thinking of Kweku’s encounter with the material constraints of law enforcement and of the cultural traditions he drew upon in that moment. This encounter is perhaps not the “skilled practice” that Crawford has in mind, but “The Talk” that African Americans have with their children about what to do when they are approached by police is a very different way of dealing with the uninvited address. The skilled practice of not being killed by police requires an attention to detail. Here’s Kweku again, after being pulled over:

I did not want to directly contradict him, which might anger and provoke him. But neither did I want to admit to an infraction which I did not commit. I did not want to know the consequences of that admission. It occurred to me how little was under my control.[note]Kweku, “Slow Poison.”[/note]

In an encounter with “brute alien otherness,” Kweku draws upon the lessons learned from “The Talk,” but the result was not so much beauty as survival. The differences between organ-making and “The Talk” are obvious. However, maybe the similarities are more compelling. They both structure attention through rituals that “relieve us of the burden of choice and reflection, as when we recite liturgy.”[note]Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, 23.[/note] They both rely on a tradition passed down from experts to apprentices. They both involve a very direct engagement with material reality.

Maybe I’m being a killjoy. Maybe this whole conversation has been a red herring, pulling Crawford’s argument away from its proper focus on the distractions of a hypermediated world and the value of skilled practices. I don’t think my argument here is unrelated to Crawford’s, but even if what I have offered is a distraction, it would still serve my methodological ends. In “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects),” Sara Ahmed suggests that the feminist killjoy is part of the broader project of a queer phenomenology—a phenomenology that would aim to defamiliarize and estrange:

Phenomenology helps us explore how the familiar is that which is not revealed. A queer phenomenology shows how the familiar is not revealed to those who can inhabit it. For queers and other others the familiar is revealed to you, because you do not inhabit it. To be ‘estranged from’ can be what enables a ‘consciousness of.’ This is why being a killjoy can be a knowledge project, a world-making project.[note]Ahmed, “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects).”[/note]

The willfulness of a queer phenomenology results from a desire to reveal that which is concealed. In a different essay, Ahmed suggests that this revelation can be especially difficult “when a whole world is organised to promote your survival, from health to education, from the walls designed to keep your residence safe, from the paths that ease your travel, you do not have become so inventive to survive.”[note]Ahmed, Sara, “Selfcare as Warfare.”[/note]

A queer phenomenology would offer rhetoricians a way to turn their attention to distraction. It would, by definition, be distracted. Queer phenomenology is “a disorientation device; it would not overcome the disalignment of the horizontal and vertical axis, [instead] allowing the oblique to open another angle on the world.”[note]Ahmed, “Orientations,” 566.[/note] This is a method for seeing the red herring not as a distraction but as a reminder that the smoothness and continuity of a space is fictional—that my right to not be addressed is not a right but a privilege. The task of such a research program would be to focus not so much on the content of the distraction but on the affective experience of being distracted, which announces that the world you inhabit is not a matter-of-fact one—that this moment of distraction that you are experiencing is worthy of your attention. Perhaps rhetorical theory’s focus on attention has led to theorizing the experience of those for whom the world was built. This theoretical effort should be reoriented toward, in Ahmed’s words, “that which slips.” It should be more open to the embodied experiences of distraction and to the bodies that never quite easily slotted into place.

Demands on our attention are announcing something. But what? Who or what is addressing us, and who are “we”? From where does this address come? We don’t know, but an answer that involves sealing ourselves off from the address is one that is only available to a select slice of the population. Thus, it is not a solution at all. Perhaps “we” have not been distracted enough.

References

Ahmed, Sara. “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects).” Scholar & Feminist Online 8, no. 3 (2010). http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/print_ahmed.htm.
———. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 543–74.
Ahmed, Sara. “Selfcare as Warfare.” Feministkilljoys. Accessed August 28, 2015. http://feministkilljoys.com/2014/08/25/selfcare-as-warfare/.
Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Crawford, Matthew B. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations. 1st ed. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.
“Distraction, N.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed August 28, 2015. http://www.oed.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/view/Entry/55730.
Kweku, Ezekiel. “Slow Poison.” Pacific Standard. Accessed August 28, 2015. http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/even-if-the-police-dont-kill-me-a-lifetime-of-preparing-for-them-to-just-might.
Lanham, Richard A. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. University Of Chicago Press, 1995.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. First Trade Paper Edition edition. Basic Books, 2012.

I wrote a coda for the talk that won’t be quite as rhetorically effective a few months from now. It took up some questions about polling and algorithms that emerged in the wake of President Obama’s victory, and I had hoped to link my discussion of robot writers to these questions as a way to link my talk to recent events. But the kairotic window is quickly closing on that discussion, so I thought I’d post the coda here. I’ll find some new material for the coda in the spring. It shouldn’t be difficult, given that we are inundated with algorithms, narratives, and databases.

The bulk of my talk deals with the algorithmic journalists developed by Narrative Science, a company that transforms data into narratives by way of software. Many see the emergence of robot writers as a threat to the supposedly “human” realm of writing and narrative. That threat is often quickly dismissed, since robots can’t do what “we” do. However, I see these algorithmic journalists as exposing more than just another iteration of the “robots vs. humans” battle. After all, any piece of writing is the result of an algorithm that transforms data into narrative.

The scope of the data, the complexity of the algorithm, and the angle of the story may all change based on who or what is writing. But we are not all that different from robots. And if we imagine all writing as algorithmic, then we can begin to think of algorithmic thinking as a way to toggle between the worldviews of narrative and database. Lev Manovich famously developed this theoretical pair in The Language of New Media to describe how new media stages a kind of battle between narrative and database. The narrative worldview posits a single path through data, making sense of data by way of selection and exclusion. The worldview of database is more inclusive (though it makes some determinations as well) and allows for more pathways through the data to exist simultaneously.

Algorithmic thinking provides a way to sit in the liminal space between narrative and database, and rhetoric presents a long tradition of algorithms that help us sit in that space. With rhetoric, we can toggle between these two approaches to the world. So, this is the talk in a nutshell. Obviously, I’ve moved quickly through this argument, and I’ve skipped some of the hard work of showing how rhetoric is algorithmic. But I’ll save that for my visit to Milwaukee in the spring. Instead, I want to jump to the coda mentioned previously. While I spend much of the talk on the robots of Narrative Science, the coda took up a different robot:

This robot has served, simultaneously, as hero and villain in recent weeks. Nate Silver, baseball stats geek turned political forecasting geek, has been the target of derision (and celebration, depending on your political leanings) during election season. Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com (and if you’re like me, you have burned Silver’s site into your laptop screen during the past months) examines the vast database of available polling data and combines it with numerous variables (the biases of certain polls, jobs numbers, historical voter turnout numbers) to project election winners. Like Narrative Science’s “meta-writers” (who write algorithms that generate stories), Silver and his team author algorithms which process data and generate narratives. He tells us stories about all of this data, helping us make sense of it. But if the hospitable network enables this kind of analysis, opening up databases to anyone willing to author algorithms that make sense of it, that same hospitality has been extended to those who believe that Nate Silver might be a witch. In the lead up to the election, Silver defended himself against those who for various reasons—partisan leanings and television ratings chief among them—insisted that the 2012 presidential election was a “tossup.” He even bet MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who refused to believe Silver’s projections of a relatively easy Obama victory, $1,000 that his projection of an Obama victory was accurate. Scarborough was just one of many pundits who pitted their “gut instincts” against Silver’s sophisticated statistical models. This was essentially a replay, on a different stage, of the battle between stats geeks and old, crusty baseball scouts. Numbers vs. “the eye test.” As we know, Silver came out on top as his model correctly predicted the electoral vote count.

Two weeks ago, Silver told Charlie Rose that he believes he knows why he is the target of people like Scarborough: “I think I get a lot of grief because I frustrate narratives that are told by pundits and journalists that don’t have a lot of grounding in objective reality.” This is how many of us have understood this controversy in the wake of Tuesday night’s result: Nate Silver uses data. Joe Scarborough uses narrative. The former always trumps the latter. But this draws too clean a line between database and narrative, splitting the two along a human/nonhuman axis. Thus, Silver might be a “witch” because he uses data, and Scarborough was safe (or safer) from being put on trial because he relies on his human instincts. But both Silver and Scarborough author algorithms that transform data into narrative. Silver’s narratives may have been proven more accurate and may have been grounded in “big data,” but we closely watched election returns on election night because the news media had convinced us that the election was close—a toss-up.

The algorithms of Scarborough, Hannity, and a host of pundits across the political spectrum generated narratives that persuaded many of us to hesitate before proclaiming the election to be “in the bag.” This is not to say that all algorithms are created equal or that the narratives spun by various political noise machines should be treated the same as those generated by logical claims and sound evidence. In fact, this is precisely the problem. We are struggling with ways to sift and sort these narratives, which are sometimes spun from the exact same data.

And there are narratives that are more accurate than others. Silver, after all, was right. But we should also recognize that Silver’s success was not an indication that “big data” will always triumph or that narrative is flawed and “all to human.” That success was the result of a sound algorithm, an authored artifact that stood as an argument for the best way to move between database of polling data and narratives about the winner of the election.

The very fact that no explanation of data can claim to be the explanation means that citizens and media consumers are in a difficult position. How are these various, competing, conflicting narratives to be judged and compared? Which narrative should be trusted? What choices is an algorithm making when generating a narrative? How might we reverse engineer that narrative and speculate about the what motivates it? How does one oscillate between the competing spheres of narrative and database?

Rhetoricians have spent millennia building a vast library of algorithms that can help us understand the motives at work as data is used to spin narratives. These procedures have not necessarily been put forth as algorithms, but reframing rhetoric as a body of theory that generates reading and writing machines presents us with a particularly useful approach to our contemporary predicament. If our present environment is hospitable to conflicting narratives, then we require ways of sifting through those narratives. Databases grow, meaning that narratives proliferate. Determining how one might judge those narratives is an urgent problem for those hoping to make informed decisions about information. Rhetorical theory, which has always been algorithmic, provides one way of dealing with this struggle.

Text:

Ontography

Let’s listen to Henry Petroski’s description of the cables that run the length of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge:

Each cable was spun in place and was made up of 20,000 individual steel wires, which meant that the spinning operation had to handle almost twice as many strands as on any previously built suspension-bridge project. When compacted, the finished cables measured 30 inches in diameter, which made them half again as large as any then built. (410)

And now to Jonathan Farnham’s description of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge’s anchorages:

Each 200,000-ton anchorage receives the two cables from the adjacent tower and redirects them downward over an H-shaped silicon steel cable bent to a field of eyebars. The eyebars are secured to the reinforced concrete mass and, through caissons, to the bedrock of ground. (266)

These are not really examples of ontography, but they indicate the difficulties of an ontographic approach. As Nate has explained, via Ian Bogost, ontography is “the revelation of object relationships without necessarily offering clarification or description of any kind.” Petroski and Farnham are not committed to “latour litany” approach or to Matthew Fuller’s paratactic lists. They are, in fact, offering clarification.

But these descriptions do show us how language strains against the effort to capture the relations between cable and bridge deck or between anchorage and bedrock. Language is only one tool, and we know it is an imperfect one. What other tools do we have to account for such relations, and what would such tools have to do with rhetoric? This is the question I’d like to address in the next 15 minutes.

Oscillatio

Richard Lanham argues that the rhetorical paideia allows us to oscillate between looking AT texts (noticing style and surface) and THROUGH them (reading for meaning). Classically, the decorous style allows us to look through it. But Lahham aims for something more fluid, a bi-stable decorum that involves the ability to oscillate between AT and THROUGH, to shift attitudinal worlds. A rhetorical education cultivates this ability. But while Lanham discusses oscillatio in terms of how humans learn to shift between attitudinal worlds, he also opens up the possibility that oscillatio describes how all objects behave. Lanham argues that the objects themselves oscillate:

“A text or painting can present itself as ‘realistic,’ a transparent window to a preexisting world beyond…or it can present itself frankly as an invention, as pure fantasy…The object will invite a certain [reading] but we can decline the invitation [and] ‘read’ a fantasy as if it were a realistic description of a world as yet unknown, if we like” (14).

It seems that oscillatio is not only on the human side of the circuit. This is Graham Harman’s argument when he describes all objects as “tool-beings.” Drawing on Heidegger’s famous tool analysis, Harman argues that Heidegger’s discussion of technology as “present-to-hand” (looking AT) and “ready-to-hand” (looking THROUGH) is not only about a human’s perception of a tool:

The key result of Heidegger’s analysis of tools is not that ‘equipment becomes invisible when serving remote human purposes’…instead the transformation takes place on the side of the tools. Equipment is not effective ‘because people use it’; on the contrary, it can only be used because it is capable of an effect, of inflicting some kind of blow on reality. (20)

For Harman, all objects (including humans) move between present-to-hand (AT) and ready-to-hand (THROUGH). If both humans and technologies shift amongst attitudinal worlds, looking AT and THROUGH other objects, then we need not decide who owns oscillatio. Instead, we might take this as an opportunity to use bi-stable decorum to describe all relations.

‘The spirit of steel is not the spirit of stone’

In his account of Paul Cret’s architectural work on the Delaware River Bridge, Jonathan Farnham explains that the Bridge was built in the midst of a battle between engineers and architects. The architect, argued the engineer, could not stop looking backward, relying on classical forms instead of building a contemporary style. “Battle” is perhaps not the best word, for it was engineers who seemed to be landing the most blows. In fact, even architects noticed the problem. Henry Van Brunt presents an example of this self critique:

“With the distractions furnished by his familiarity with history he cannot adjust himself to his own environment with the frankness and naïveté by which the masters of the classic and medieval times developed architectural style. In this respect, the modern engineer enjoyes a distinct advantage over his brother, the modern architect.” (260)

Paul Cret disagreed with this caricature, but he did insist that collaboration between the architect and the engineer was essential. For Cret, that collaboration would couple remembering with forgetting, historical form with contemporary aesthetics.

But in addition to making this argument in print, Cret presented the Delaware River Bridge, his collaboration with engineer Ralph Modjeski, as an argument in itself. Specifically, the bridge’s anchorages stand as an argument in the form of an object. In his print arguments that architects collaborate with engineers, Cret argued that the architect “cannot allow himself to forget…that the ‘spirit’ of steel is not the ‘spirit’ of stone” (Farnham 263). The anchorages demonstrate this concern, linking the steel towers with massive stone structures. Most importantly, Cret allows the materials to stand separate even as they work together, not allowing the architecture to be collapsed into engineering (or vice versa). The anchorages stand tall against the current of the Delaware river, but they are also the site of a fierce struggle between the cables and bedrock. As Modjeski explained the anchorages “are probably more difficult to design than any other part of the structure…They must remain immovable under the uplifting and horizontal sliding efforts to which they are subjected” (266).

The anchorages are simultaneously tool and sculpture, and this is not only because we humans look AT and THROUGH them. It is also because stone and steel “look” AT and THROUGH one another (or in Harman’s terms, withdraw from one another), doing a delicate dance to ensure that cars and pedestrians remain suspended over the Delaware River. Assistant engineer for the bridge, Clement E. Chase, described the anchorages as “patient giants, passive participants in an endless tug-of-war” (Farnham 267). As Farnham explains, these anchorages are Cret’s argument for collaboration:

“He dressed each anchorage in a rough granite costume, translating it from a concrete and steel machine to a granite house. Transforming the technological device into an architectural form that elicited as well as de-pended upon memories, he shaped an anchorage that resisted not only the pull of the cables but also the passage of time” (267).

Not everyone was willing to be persuaded. Artist Joseph Pennell called the bridge “the ugliest bridge in the world” and master bridge engineer Gustav Lindenthal thought the anchorages were designed “too much on the utilitarian principle of braced telegraph poles or derricks, holding up ropes” (Petroski 409). Maybe this inability to please both engineer and artist only demonstrates Cret’s success. In fact, such arguments push against descriptions of the bridge in terms of “beautiliy,” both beautiful and useful. For Cret’s anchorages do not show objects collapsing into one another. Instead, they remain separate or, again Harman’s term, “vacuum sealed.” Cret combined steel and stone (engineering and architecture) without allowing either to swallow the other.

Carpentry

Do objects persuade one another? Do they identify with one another? How could we know? We need not turn to philosophy for ways to consider this question. In fact, we need only turn to Diane’s Inessential Solidarity, a text that attempts to account for the address of the other, an address that overwhelms. As Levinas explains in Totality and Infinity, the other always “brings me more than I can contain.” The truly other arrives without mediation, and this presents methodological problems. As Diane argues:

The task here—to expose a solidarity that precedes symbolicity—cannot be accomplished through representation (alone), through tireless exegesis, the constative work of describing and explicating. (15)

She goes on to say that this work of explicating must, of course, happen. But she also points to the limits of language in tracing our contact with the other. This is one version of a larger problem: How do we account for the relations between any two objects? One way to address this problem is by asking yet another question: What if we augmented our primary tool—language—with other ways of doing rhetoric? Perhaps this is what Paul Cret gives us with the anchorages of the Benjamin Franklin bridge.

In Alien Phenomenology, Bogost suggests that understanding the relations between objects requires more than watching, listening, and reporting. It requires more than language. It requires tinkering, or what Bogost refers to as carpentry:

In the context of alien phenomenology, ‘carpentry’ borrows from two sources.
First, it extends the ordinary sense of woodcraft to any material whatsoever–to do carpentry is to make anything, but to make it in earnest, with one’s own hands, like a cabinetmaker. Second, it folds into this act of construction Graham Harman’s philosophical sense of ‘the carpentry of things,’ an idea Harman borrowed in turn from Alphonso Lingis. Both Lingis and Harman use that phrase to refer to the ways things fashion one another and the world at large.

Carpentry here is both about humans making things and about nonhumans fashioning one another. Bogost suggests that carpentry offers an alternative to attempts to render object relations in language, and it is another way to deal with the straining of language that we discussed at the beginning of this presentation. I should say that I’m stretching Bogost’s notion of carpentry just a bit here by suggesting that Cret as a carpenter. Cret was not position girders or cables with his own hands. Further, a more complete use of this theory would not involve writing a paper about rhetorical carpentry but would involve making something. This is an approach that Nathaniel Rivers and I are currently working on in another project. Still, the concept is useful as a way to do rhetorical history as well as a way to build and make things. We can retell story by way of objects and their relations. And while Bogost’s focus is on philosophical carpentry, I am suggesting here that Paul Cret has given us an example of rhetorical carpentry. Rhetorical carpentry constructs objects (and conversations among objects) in order to demonstrate approximations of the strange, alien conversations happening around us.

Carpentry offers one answer to the problem raised by Diane in Inessential Solidarity. By engaging with objects and putting them into relation with one another (and by understanding that we are enmeshed in this process rather than in charge of it) we can consider how objects act differently in different rhetorical situations. If all objects, humans included, exist by way of oscillatio, perhaps carpentry offers a way forward for OOR. This approach would offer a better account of how objects shift amongst attitudinal worlds and adapt to situations. It would attempt to understand how objects act upon one another in unpredictable ways, interlocking and releasing, oscillating and diverging. The project of rhetoric has always been tied up with trying to understand the attitudes and motives of others. And in this sense, OOR is not controversial at all.

Tacoma

While Modjeski acted as head of the Delaware River Bridge Commission, it was another engineer who put a more direct stamp on the bridge’s design. Leon Moisseiff acted as consulting design engineer for the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and his “deflection theory” meant that he helped design most suspension bridges built in the early part of the 20th Century. Petroski explains Moisseiff’s deflection theory:

This theory, by taking into account the interaction of the cables and roadway of a suspension bridge, enabled design engineers to make a more accurate determination of how forces were distributed among the various parts of the structure. By knowing more accurately the distribution of these forces among the parts of the structure, the steel components could be designed more optimally and hence the bridge built more economically. (409)

Moisseiff, it would seem, had an object-oriented design theory, one that accounted for the relations happening amongst cables, bridge decks, and trusses.

But Farnham shows us that Moisseiff’s deflection theory was ahistorical, and in more ways than one. With the success of the Delaware River Bridge (and many others) under his belt, he carried the deflection theory to its limits with the Tacoma Narrows. The engineer aimed to construct a suspension bridge that looked only forward and that was not bound by the shackles of stone. Instead of large anchorages, the Tacoma Narrows bridge used “sleek plate girders instead of the bulkier trusses” (Farnham 273). This was a bridge of the future. But the bridge’s design wasn’t the only object that had little concern for time. The deflection theory itself had no theory of time. It only accounted for gusts of wind happening at any given moment and took no account of the effects of wind over time. This sleek ribbon, cutting across the sky succumbed to a wind storm on November 7, 1940.

Tacoma Narrows was not only an engineering failure, it was a rhetorical failure. And that rhetorical failure was not only about what the bridge meant to the humans who drove across it (many did so prior to the collapse to experience the undulations of what became known as “Galloping Gertie”). The rhetorical failure here was also about an engineer not understanding the decorum of objects, the peculiar way objects act when in particular configurations. While Cret’s anchorages staged, in Jonathan Farnham’s words, the “tragedy of time,” they were also a work of rhetorical carpentry. The anchorages demonstrated an understanding that a bridge is about constructing relations amongst objects of all kinds: cables, eyebars, steel beams, stone trusses, engineers, ideas about engineering, architects, ideas about architecture, wind. All of these, from the perspective of object-oriented ontology are objects. And a rhetorical carpenter understands that these relations are as important as the human eye gazing upon the bridge or the New Balance tennis shoe tapping its walkways or the hand gliding along its railing or the tire rumbling across its deck.

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print.

Davis, Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Print.

Farnham, Jonathan. “Staging the Tragedy of Time: Paul Cret and the Delaware River Bridge.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57.3 (1998): 258-279. Print.

Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Open Court, 2002. Print.

Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. University Of Chicago Press, 1995. Print.

Petroski, Henry. “Engineering: Benjamin Franklin Bridge.” American Scientist 90.5 (2002): 406-410.

During the past year and a half, Dale Smith and I have been working on a project entitled “Rhetorical Distributions: The Event and the Archive.” This project began as an essay that attempted to link Alexander Galloway’s work on protocol and networks to conversations about public culture, rhetoric, and the circulation of discourse. We’ve also extended this research into discussions of code, digital poetry, and constrained writing. We have presented portions of this work at the 2011 Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies Symposium and the 2011 Computers and Writing Conference.

The essay version of this research has already been cited by one print publication, Byron Hawk’s essay “Curating Ecologies, Circulating Musics: From the Public Sphere to Sphere Publics” (which appears in the edited collection Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media: Writing Ecology). Additionally, we have received at least five other requests for manuscript versions of this essay. People who attended the aforementioned conferences or who have found reference to the project on the conference websites want to read it and/or cite it. The problem is that Dale and I have had difficulty finding a publication venue for this essay. We’ve submitted it to various journals, each time getting different advice. Each set of reviewers recommended citing different scholarship, making different changes to the argument, and changing the focus of the essay. Part of the problem is that we are hoping to address various audiences in the essay, which is sometimes a difficult thing to do in scholarly journals.

This is the nature of scholarly publishing, and we’re not complaining. We will grant that there are flaws with the essay. However, we have decided to publish it online.

We’ve decided to do this for two reasons: 1) It is already being distributed through various scholarly networks (an interesting thing to consider, given the essay’s discussion of circulation and distribution); 2) We’re open to hearing more feedback about the argument. In fact, perhaps we’ll revise the piece and publish another version.

So, to this end, we’re releasing the essay in two different ways:

1)  As a WordPress installation that uses Commentpress

Commentpress is a WordPress plugin developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book that allows readers to post comments on the entire piece and on each individual paragraph. We welcome feedback on the essay.

2) As a PDF. The version we’re posting was last revised in November 2011.

We’re hoping that this experiment yields feedback and continues the life of this project. We look forward to hearing from scholars in various fields as we think through the argument.

This is a presentation I delivered at last week’s Conference on College Composition and Communication. It was part of a panel called “Procedures, Play, and Possibility Spaces,” which also included Alex Reid and Matt King.

The presentation examines Gorgias’s famous Encomium of Helen as a procedural argument. Gorgias begins the encomium with a proposition, a procedure that shapes his speech. In the closing lines of that speech, Gorgias explains that it has been a “paignion,” which can be translated as “child’s toy” or “plaything.” Gorgias establishes a possibility space and then plays within it. I argue that the encomium offers us an example of an immersive style of engagement, one that is of use to rhetoricians interested in thinking about where rhetoric intersects with design.

I’ll be attending the University of South Carolina Conference on Rhetorical Theory in mid-October. This is a unique conference for a couple of reasons. For one, the conference invites a small number of scholars (about 35) from various disciplines to discuss contemporary issues in rhetorical theory. But the conference also organizes invitees into working groups, and those groups discuss a topic prior to the conference. During the summer, working groups conducted discussions virtually, and each attendee was tasked with composing a position paper. Those papers were submitted last week, and they will all be published at the conference website. Presentations at the conference are not papers but are rather brief reflections on these position papers. This last part is what I’m most excited about: No snoozing through the reading of papers. We’ll have actual conversations.

I am participating in the “Relations” working group along with Steve Mailloux, Diane Davis, Erin Rand, and Kelly Happe. Going into the summer, I was not sure what I’d address in my position paper, but in the course of our virtual discussions I found myself gravitating toward discussions of Object-Oriented Rhetoric. If our group was going to think through rhetoric’s relations, then it seemed appropriate to ask whether rhetoric could have anything to say about the relations between non-human objects.

So, my position paper continues the conversation about how the insights of speculative realism might affect the world of rhetorical theory. This is very much a first attempt for me, and I’m already seeing things I’d like to rework and revise. Given some more space (these are supposed to be relatively short papers), I would have incorporated Tim Morton’s discussion of delivery and object-oriented rhetoric (see his essay “Sublime Objects” in Speculations II) along with various other work on OOR.

But enough with the caveats. I’m including my position paper below. It’s entitled “The Decorum of Objects,” and it will also soon be available at the conference website.

For those who’d prefer not to scroll, here it is in pdf form.

The Decorum of Objects

In recent years, a number of rhetoricians have drawn upon work in speculative realist philosophy in order to build an object-oriented rhetoric (OOR). That OOR would, among other things, attempt to account for the rhetorical relations amongst objects. Though speculative realist philosophies continue to proliferate (indeed, it is often difficult to fit all of these thinkers under one umbrella), they all share one common project: they attempt to grapple with what Quentin Meillassoux calls correlationism. Correlationist thought relies upon “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from one another” (5). Meillassouxâ€s correlationist argues that “we cannot represent the ‘in itself†without it becoming ‘for usâ€, or as Hegel amusingly put it, we cannot ‘creep up on†the object ‘from behind†so as to find out what it is in itself” (4). Speculative realism is searching for a way to combat the correlationist argument and account for how objects exist, persist, and relate regardless of “human access.” But these philosophers all have very different ways of grappling with the problem. As Graham Harman, who coined the term “Object-Oriented Philosophy,” puts it:

Please note that the speculative realists donâ€t even agree about what is wrong with correlationism! For example, what Meillassoux hates about correlationism is its commitment to ‘finitude,†the notion that absolute knowledge of any sort is impossible. But he doesnâ€t mind the correlationist view that ‘we canâ€t think an X outside of thought without thinking it, and thereby we cannot escape the circle of thought.†(He simply wants to radicalize this predicament and extract absolute knowledge from it…) By contrast, I see the problem with correlationism as the exact opposite. I donâ€t mind the finitude part, which seems inevitable to me. What I hate instead is the idea that the correlational circle (‘canâ€t think an unthought X without turning it into an X that is thoughtâ€) is valid. I see it as flimsy.†(Harman, “brief SR/OOO tutorial”) [1]

This paper will not attempt to review and compare all of these philosophical arguments. Instead, my hope is to use the questions raised by the speculative realists to continue the task of theorizing OOR. Rhetoricians such as Scot Barnett, Jennifer Bay, Thomas Rickert, Byron Hawk, and others have already begun this task (Barnett; Hawk; Bay & Rickert). This paper is an attempt to continue the conversation.

Given this work in speculative realism, rhetoricians are asking: What might rhetoric have to say about the relations between objects? Rhetorical studies has had a great deal to say about the human-to-human relationship and the human-to-world relationship, but how often have we tackled the question of how objects relate to one another. Do objects persuade one another? Do they identify with one another? Is it possible to speak of rhetorical exchanges between objects? OOR as Iâ€m discussing it here would build a vocabulary for understanding relations amongst all objects (humans included). This project is, for me, a thought experiment in the best way. It is speculation. It is an exercise in dissoi logoi. But it is also much more than this. It is an attempt to provide a richer understanding of what Jenny Edbauer-Rice calls “rhetorical ecologies” (Edbauer). It is an attempt to account for the persuasions and identifications that are happening all around us, in strange conversations that we may or may not be able to understand.

And so, my aim is to account for what I call the decorum of objects. Rhetoricians have had much to say about how speech or writing might be best fit to a particular occasion. My aim is to ask whether objects can be thought of in a similar light. If a rhetor chooses amongst various possibilities and fits her discourse to the situation, then perhaps we might consider how objects conduct themselves in particular ways for particular occasions. In the terms of Richard Lanham, I am attempting to account for how objects (human or otherwise) shift between “attitudinal worlds.” To do this, I turn not only to speculative philosophy but to Lanham, who used the notion of decorum in his discussion of “the electronic word.” Lanhamâ€s discussion of the digital is no doubt dated. Further, it would seem odd that I turn to Lanham, who is nothing if not a humanist. He is interested in “the electronic word” because it offers humans a model for rhetorical education. Still, Lanhamâ€s discussion of bi-stable decorum (what he calls oscillatio) and the electronic word presents a starting point for thinking about the decorum of objects.

Oscillatio and Objects

Writing in 1993, Richard Lanham was hopeful that digital technology could help humanists offer a strong defense of rhetoric. That strong defense would offer a convincing answer to what Lanham calls “The ‘Q†Question” (named after Quintilian, itâ€s most famous non-answerer): Is the perfect orator also a good person? Lanham argues that the history of rhetoric is littered with weak answers to this question and, therefore, weak defenses of rhetoric.  Those weak defenses typically argue that there is good rhetoric and bad rhetoric.  Mine is good; theirs is bad.  For Lanham, this weak defense makes rhetoric ornamental—something one hangs on their argument in order to make it persuasive and/or ethical.  And he argues that we need a strong defense of rhetoric, one that recognizes how rhetoric creates truths and realities.  The True is not “out there” prior to rhetorical action. Rather, truths are created by rhetorical action.  Thus, a rhetorical education would not teach content (Great Books). It would teach a method of understanding how rhetorical realities are created.  For Lanham, the electronic word offered hope that such a rhetorical education (one that had fallen out of favor after rhetoricâ€s various restrictions and banishments) could be revived.

Lanham argues that the manipulation of text on screen reminds us of how the electronic word draws attention to itself, forcing us to look AT it and THROUGH it. This toggling of AT (noticing surfaces and style) and THROUGH (reading for meaning) is, for Lanham, what a rhetorical education has always offered, a method that trains us to constantly shift between “attitudinal worlds” (6). Lanham does not argue that technology has created this situation. Rather, the electronic word has reminded us of what was always there. Still, his focus is on digital technologies. Lanhamâ€s book, The Electronic Word, plays with fonts and typefaces to make this point, and itâ€s important to remember that the essay was first published in 1988. Lanhamâ€s discussion of the electronic word is certainly dated. But his notion of AT/THROUGH or oscillatio still resonates today. In fact, he continues to make use of the concept in a more recent work entitled The Economics of Attention. [2]

But while Lanham discusses oscillatio in terms of how humans learn to shift between attitudinal worlds, he also opens up the possibility that oscillatio describes how all objects behave. That is, Lanhamâ€s discussion of technology allows us to theorize the decorum of objects. An example: Lanham sees digital textbooks as promising “not the spindled mutilation that the sixties feared but an incredible personalization of learning, a radical democratization of ‘textbooks†that allows every student to walk an individual path” (10). That is, Lanhamâ€s digital textbook would shift between attitudinal worlds depending upon the student—it would deploy algorithms so that it might toggle amongst possibilities, adapting its discourse to its audience. And while this example still involves the relationship between technology and human interactor, I would like to make the speculative leap that considers how digital technologies would practice this same oscillatio in their relations with non-human objects. Throughout The Electronic Word, Lanham describes his “bi-stable decorum” of oscillatio as something that digital technologies do. That is, Lanham argues that the objects themselves oscillate: “A text or painting can present itself as ‘realistic,†a transparent window to a preexisting world beyond…or it can present itself frankly as an invention, as pure fantasy…The object will invite a certain [reading] but we can decline the invitation [and] ‘read†a fantasy as if it were a realistic description of a world as yet unknown, if we like” (14). It seems that oscillatio is not easily situated on the human side of the circuit.

It is unlikely Lanham would grant that such oscillatio happens in relations between non-human objects, and I am not trying to put words in his mouth. Instead, I am trying to follow a path that he opens up but does not pursue: If Lanhamâ€s AT/THROUGH oscillation happens in the humanâ€s encounter with the electronic word, then how much of this oscillation can be attributed to the technology and how much to the human? Oscillatio could be situated purely on the human side of this relationship, it could be posited as a purely technological, or it could be conceived as an emergent property of the encounter between human and technology. But the possibility that Iâ€d like to pursue here is that oscillatio is everwhere at once. That is, it describes the existence of any object, human or otherwise. This is Graham Harmanâ€s argument when he describes all objects as “tool-beings.” Drawing on Heideggerâ€s famous tool analysis, Harman argues that Heideggerâ€s discussion of technology as “present-to-hand” and “ready-to-hand” is not just a trait of “equipment.” Instead, it is generalizable to all objects. Heideggerâ€s tool analysis is typically interpreted to mean that a tool is ready-to-hand while we are using it and present-to-hand when it breaks down. We can easily put this in Lanhamâ€s terms: a text is ready-to-hand when we are reading it for meaning and present-to-hand when we notice its surface or style. But Harman provides a different reading of the tool analysis:

The key result of Heideggerâ€s analysis of tools is not that ‘equipment becomes invisible when serving remote human purposes the crucial insight has nothing to do with the human handling of tools; instead the transformation takes place on the side of the tools. Equipment is not effective ‘because people use itâ€; on the contrary, it can only be used because it is capable of an effect, of inflicting some kind of blow on reality. In short, the tool isnâ€t ‘usedâ€â€”it is. (Tool-Being 20)

For Harman, all objects (including humans) move between present-to-hand (AT) and ready-to-hand (THROUGH). This means that all relations involve objects, which “withdraw” from one another: “All individual beings withdraw into the contexture of equipment, where they execute their cryptic reality” (Tool-Being 68). If both humans and technologies shift amongst attitudinal worlds, looking AT and THROUGH other objects, then we need not decide who owns oscillatio. Instead, we might take this as an opportunity conceive of a flat ontology, one in which the human is but one entity that engages in decorous activity. And if the electronic word exposes a bi-stable decorum that, in Lanhamâ€s words, “happened everywhere else first,” then we know itâ€s not only about digital media (302). Lanham himself would grant this, for he is always offering historical precedents to his bi-stable decorum (from the Futurists to environmental artist Christo Javacheff). But there is something else we might draw from Lanhamâ€s discussion: the bi-stable oscillation of decorum is not situated solely the domain of the human. It defines all tool-beings.

Carpentry

But positing a flat ontology in which humans are one object among many is only one part of theorizing OOR. The question still remains: How would one do OOR? And how would they do it without falling back into correlationism? In his forthcoming book, Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost offers us one possibility. Bogost admits that the speculative realist philosophies of Harman and others are difficult to put into practice. These theoriests are focused on first principles and have not focused on ways to do speculative realist metaphysics. Bogost is interested in pursuing the latter. He is seeking a “pragmatic speculative realism, not in the Jamesian sense, but more softly: an applied speculative realism, an object-oriented engineering to ontologyâ€s physics” (34). This is not to say that Bogost is willing to skip past the problem of correlationism. Like other speculative realists, Bogost insists on attempting to understand the relations between objects without reducing those relations to human access. However, he also grants that our attempts to do so will mean that we can only ever trace “the exhaust of [objectsâ€] effects on the surrounding world” (113-4). When pursuing the relations between objects, we do not find “thin, flat plate of glass onto which a layer of molten aluminum has been vacuum-sprayed” but rather “a funhouse mirror made of hammered metal, whose distortions show us a perversion of a unitâ€s sensibilities” (36).

Most importantly, understanding the relations between objects requires more than watching, listening, and reporting. It requires tinkering, or what Bogost refers to as carpentry:

The phenomenologist who performs carpentry creates a machine that tries to replicate the unit operation of anotherâ€s experience. Like a space probe sent out to record, process, and report information, the alien phenomenologistâ€s carpentry seeks to capture and characterize an experience it can never fully understand, offering a rendering satisfactory enough to allow the artifactâ€s operator to gain some insight into an alien thingâ€s experience.” (114)

As a videogame designer, Bogostâ€s brand of carpentry is computer programming. But this is only one possibility. The materials are less important than the practice itself. Rhetorical carpentry would construct objects (and conversations among objects) in order to demonstrate approximations of the strange, alien conversations happening around us.

And so perhaps the best way to begin an investigation into the conversations amongst objects is to make those conversations happen. An object reveals itself and conceals itself, and observing this oscillatio is one important part of understanding objects. But this is only the first step. By engaging with objects and putting them into relation with one another (and by understanding that we are enmeshed in this process rather than in charge of it) we can consider how objects act differently in different rhetorical situations. In a sense, this is counter-intuitive. An attempt to model object-to-object relations (conversations between, say, between falling rain and the basil plant in my back yard) would require inserting ourselves into that conversation. This is not a removal of the human by any means. Rhetorical carpentry would be conducted in a way that paid close attention to how objects relate to, persuade, or identify with one another.

If all objects, humans included, exist by way of oscillatio, perhaps carpentry offers a way forward for OOR. This approach would offer a better account of how objects shift amongst attitudinal worlds and adapt to situations. It would attempt to understand how objects act upon one another in unpredictable ways, interlocking and releasing, oscillating and diverging in unpredictable ways. The project of rhetoric has always been tied up with trying to understand the attitudes and motives of others. In this sense, OOR is not controversial at all.

A Malian woman builds a small tent for her family so that her guests can sleep in the family’s home.

Photo Credit: “Hospitality II” by Arriving at the horizon

In my book project I use the phrase “hospitable code” (this also serves as the title of the project) to discuss software that addresses the problem of the other. But this phrase requires some unpacking, and I’d like to work through that unpacking here. My hope is that readers will respond to this post so that I can continue to refine this idea/concept.

First, let’s tackle “hospitality.” Hospitality is typically considered in terms of the choice to welcome another into our home. Thus, the picture above indicates the hospitality of the Malian people. The photographer describes the image this way:

“When we got to Mohammed’s campement, the women instantly got very busy dragging out cloth and sticks, destined to become a provisional tent. Great, I thought, we get a little tent for ourselves. And a little tent there was, but to my great surprise and embarrassment the whole family — Mohammed, his wife, their six children, and two visitors — moved in there, and left the big tent to us. Then women from surrounding campements came over with beautiful pillowcases and essabbar and other wallhangings, and decorated the tent! I think it was the nicest-looking tent I have ever seen. Desert hospitality at its best. More about it here.”

This kind of hospitality assumes a clean separation between “my home” and “my guest.” ��It suggests a definite threshold, a border between inside and outside. But I am attempting to discuss software in terms of hospitality, and there is no real “home” or clear threshold when it comes to software. So, let me try to explain how I’m using the term hospitality

The hospitality I have in mind is less an intentional, welcoming gesture than it is a predicament. In networked environments, others will continually arrive. This situation has its promises – the crowdsourcing of various problems and the possibility of a more inclusive conversation are two such promises – but it also has its pitfalls. Which others will arrive and when? What are their motivations? Who are they? How do I engage them? What will they do to me or my “home” or my text? Networked software is forced to deal with all of these questions in ways that an application such as Microsoft Word does not. To be sure, other writers can enter and edit my word document; however, this is not necessarily an integral part of the software platform. Word can be a perfectly useful piece of software on a machine that is not networked. Media Wiki, on the other hand, would be much less useful in a non-networked environment. One could use Media Wiki as a kind of content management system or as a personal CVS repository (I myself have used wiki software in this way), but this does not change the fact that the software was designed for networked environments and thus takes particular ethical stances with regard to other users/writers.

My case study in “Hospitable Code” is Wikipedia and its software platform, Media Wiki. Media Wiki is hospitable in that it deals with the question of the other much more explicitly than an application like Word. Whether or not Media Wiki is sufficiently hospitable or whether it welcomes all others is a more difficult question. No software platform teaches a pure hospitality (what Derrida would call absolute hospitality). This is an unreachable ideal. Nonetheless, hospitable code addresses the question of the foreigner in particular ways because the arrival of others is part of its functionality. Media Wiki is just one example of hospitable code. We could consider a variety of software platforms that deal with a similar set of questions: Google Documents, Google Wave, networked videogames, Twitter, Facebook, and many others. Further, given the recent trend toward online applications, it seems that more and more software platforms will be forced to deal with the question of the other. My book is an attempt to think through the implications of that shift and to understand the ethical stances built into software.

But the second part of the concept of “hospitable code” is worth unpacking as well. While this term has been dissected in various places (Kittler’s mediation on “Code” in the Software Studies Lexicon is but one example of this), I’d like to explain the two senses in which I’ll be using the term. My use of code evokes both software (code as ones and zeros) and the idea of an ethical code (code as ethical constitution). Given Lawrence Lessig’s argument in Code that “code is law,” separating these two notions of code is difficult:

In real space we recognize how laws regulate—through constitutions, statutes, and other legal codes. In cyberspace we must understand how code regulates—how the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is regulate cyberspace as it is. As William Mitchell puts it, this code is cyberspaceâ€s “law.” Code is law. (5)

Building upon this definition of code as law, I am arguing that software makes ethical arguments – code establishes ethical codes. Those ethical codes are not the final word, and my project demonstrates how users grapple with and interrogate those codes. Nonetheless, code establishes a groundwork or a context in which we deal with one another, and in this sense code establishes an ethical dwelling (an ethos) in which rhetors/users/writers interact with one another. Those interactions are, in my view, inherently rhetorical.

But it will be necessary to define a couple of more terms as well: rhetoric and ethics. Stepping through the various definitions of rhetoric would be nearly impossible. This term has morphed over and over again over the past 2000 years. At various historical moment, rhetoric has been understood as the faculty of discovering the available means of persuasion (Aristotle), the study of misunderstanding and its remedies (I.A. Richards), the art of speaking well (Quintillian), and “a powerful instrument of error and deceipt” (Locke). This list is by no means exhaustive, but even these few examples exhibits the range of the term “rhetoric,” and the various ways in which it is put to use. However, I would like to indicate that “Hospitable Code” makes use of a modern definition of rhetoric developed by Kenneth Burke. Burke famously expanded the realm of rhetoric for 20^th century rhetoricians, and his framework is particularly useful considering my discussion of how rhetoric and ethics intersect. At its most general level, Burke’s definition of rhetoric encompasses all attempts to make meaning: “Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.”

But Burke’s definition goes further than this by redefining rhetoric in terms of identification. In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke explains this framework: “A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not jointed, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so” (20). Thus persuasion is happens (whether the result of an intentional effort or not) through identification, but this identification is not one of fusion or communion. When ‘A’ identifies with ‘B,’ they are substantially one, but each remains a unique individual locus of motives, joined and separate” (20). By understanding persuasion, and thus rhetoric, as identification, we can begin to see the relationship between rhetoric and ethics. Rhetoric as identification implies that we are simultaneously joined and separate from various interlocutors, and any understanding of this predicament will have to engage questions of ethics and how we relate to one another. Persuasion involves “the use of stylistic identifications to establish rapport” between rhetor and audience (46). That rapport is in constant tension as we make and break various identifications and as we deal with various others. We are consubstantial with one another, but we are never fused in any final way.

Understood as identification, rhetoric becomes the indissociable from how we relate to one another. Any time we are making meaning, any time we are attempting to communicate, we are in the realm of identification and we are determining how we can or should relate to one another. Questions of rhetoric and ethics are thus intertwined. This would seem an odd claim given certain definitions of rhetoric. Given a definition such as Locke’s(an instrument of “error and deceipt”), rhetoric is decidedly unethical. And certain rhetorical moves are indeed unethical. However, following Burke’s lead, I see no communicative act that is not shot through with rhetoric. And thus I see no way in which communication does not imply questions of ethics. The study of ethics is the study of how we treat the other (that other can be human, but it does not have to be). The question of the other is the question of ethics. In Derrida’s terms, the question of the “foreigner” (the foreigner here is a kind of metaphor for all of the various others that arrive on our various scenes…or on our desktop) is the question that continually presents itself to us. How we engage the foreigner is directly tied to how (or whether) we identify with the other. The difficulty here is that we do not always choose our identifications. As persuader or persuadee, we are constantly dealing with various, conflicting identifications. We are persuaded (or, better, persuadable) over and beyond any decision to agree or disagree, and we our own acts of persuasion entail identifications that we may or may not have “stylistically” deployed. In this sense, we persuade and are persuaded more (and less) than we ever intend. Thus regardless of whether we are in the “sender” or “receiver” slot, we are in an ethico-rhetorical predicament.

So, hospitable code is rhetorical and ethical; it makes ethical arguments. To some extent, all software makes ethical arguments and determinations. But the networked software that I am most interested in must explicitly address the question of the other. In networked environments, the question of the other is part of the software’s design. When we enter the rhetorical dwelling of a space like Media Wiki, we are put into relation with various others. Those various relations are rhetorical and ethical.

There is much, much more to say here (thankfully…if there wasn’t, then I’d be hard pressed to turn this into a book-length argument), but I’m hoping this can be a starting point. I’m hoping that some readers can help me continue to refine this set of ideas. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome.

Photo Credit: “Cool Runner” by Nirmal Thacker

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of rhetoric, writing studies, and rhetorical theory in the emerging field/subfield of software studies. Software studies was launched by Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media, fleshed out by Katherine Hayles in My Mother Was a Computer, and then extended by scholars like Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Matthew Fuller, Matt Kirschenbaum, and various others. Kirschenbaum provides my favorite description of this emerging subfield:

“What is software studies then? Software studies is what media theory becomes after the bubble bursts. Software studies is whiteboards and white papers, business plans and IPOs and penny-stocks. Software studies is Powerpoint vaporware and proofs of concept binaries locked in time-stamped limbo on a server where all the user accounts but root have been disabled and the domain name is eighteen months expired. Software studies is, or can be, the work of fashioning documentary methods for recognizing and recovering digital histories, and the cultivation of the critical discipline to parse those histories against the material matrix of the present. Software studies is understanding digital objects are sometimes lost, yes, but mostly, and more often, just forgotten. Software studies is about adding more memory.” (153)

While Kirschenbaum’s version has definite “book history” feel to it, I think it helps us think of a broad range of methods that fit under the software studies umbrella. Software studies allows scholars across a broad range of disciplines to examine the far-reaching ramifications of code. Kirschenbaum’s focus is on mechanisms and Wardrip-Fruin’s is on computational processes. As I see it, software studies can be a big tent.

But Collin Brooke notes in Lingua Fracta that Manovich significantly reduces the role of rhetoric in new media studies, making it difficult to see how rhetoricians might fit with the emerging field of software studies. It’s worth briefly revisiting Manovich’s treatment of rhetoric in The Language of New Media. In a discussion of hyperlinking and the Web’s non-hierarchical arrangement of texts, Manovich argues that “the printed word was linked to the art of rhetoric” (77). Traditionally, Manovich argues, texts have “encoded human knowledge and memory, instructed, inspired, convinced, and seduced their readers to adopt new ideas, new ways of interpreting the world, new ideologies” (76-7). Manovich suggests that this approach becomes obsolete with rise of new media and hypertext. After citing Roman Jakobsen’s reduction of rhetoric to “metaphor and metonymy,” Manovich argues that hyperlinking has reduced rhetoric even further by “privileg[ing] the single figure of metonymy at the expense of all others” (77). While he eventually suggests that a “new digital rhetoric may have less to do with arranging information in a particular order and more to do simply with selecting what is included and what is not included” (footnote, page 77), Manovich still bases this discussion on a particularly narrow definition of rhetoric.

Collin suggests that Manovich’s definition of the rhetorical canon of arrangement (and of rhetoric, more generally) is based on a straw man. On the Web, the argument goes, writers/orators no longer painstakingly arrange things in order to persuade in a particular way; therefore, rhetoric is dead. But Collin argues that “the links that allegedly demonstrate the irrelevance of rhetoric are rhetorical practices of arrangement, attempts to communicate affinities, connections, and relationships” (91). As Collin sees it (and I’d agree), arrangement is not an “all or nothing” thing. Arrangement may be further complicated in new media environments, but it still happens. Rhetoric changes in new media environments, but it’s still there.

We can hardly blame Manovich for this reduced rhetoric. Manovich inherits (from Jakobsen and others) a reduced rhetoric, or what Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen would call a “restricted rhetoric.” As Borch-Jacobsen argues, rhetoric’s history is defined by a constant oscillation between “primary rhetoric” and “secondary rhetoric”:

The history of rhetoric is not the continuous and closed story of its progressive restriction, but the discontinuous and indefinite one of permanent tension between two uses of the term: one of extreme generality (and therefore also extreme vagueness), which makes it an art of persuasion (this is its oratorical, pragmatic, or ‘impressive’ pole, corresponding roughly to what G.A. Kennedy calls ‘primary rhetoric’); the other of more restricted scope, which makes it an art of speaking well (this is its literary, poetic, ornamental, or ‘expressive’ pole, corresponding roughly to what Kennedy calls ‘secondary rhetoric’ and V. Florescu letteraturizzazione). Between these two poles there is constant oscillation punctuated by ‘deaths’ and ‘renaissances’ of rhetoric. (128)

Manovich’s rhetoric is still about persuasion, but it is mostly a secondary rhetoric of ornamentation. However, if we accept Borch-Jacobsen’s more complex historical narrative of rhetoric’s constant oscillation, how might we rethink the role of rhetoric in new media studies and, more specifically, software studies? What would a primary rhetoric offer software studies? What does the art of persuasion offer those of us interested in “fashioning documentary methods for recognizing and recovering digital histories”?

I’d like to offer a brief, provisional answer to this question. If rhetoric is bigger than tropes and figures and if it is about how the art of persuasion morphs and changes, then a study of digital histories might trace out the origins and iterations of rhetorical strategies. These rhetorical strategies are shaped by software. Design choices enable and constrain certain rhetorical practices, and a study of these emerging practices would attempt to understand how persuasion and communication can happen in emerging environments.

Let me provide a brief example. The Wikipedia controversy of Essjay is well known, and it is one I dealt with in detail in a recent College Composition and Communication article. That article does not address Wikipedia’s software (Media Wiki) directly, but a consideration of Wikipedia’s code allows us one more way to examine this “scandal.” To recap: Ryan Jordan claimed to be a tenured professor of theology. He used this identity to guide discussion on Wikipedia and to work his way up the Wikipedia food chain. It was eventually discovered (with the help of wiki-critic Daniel Brandt) that Jordan was not a professor, and this opened up a public discussion about how identity operates on Wikipedia.

In the CCC article, I argue that the Essjay controversy demonstrates how ethos operates in Wikipedia and how this community deals with textual origins. Wikipedia’s rules attempt to outlaw any claims to an ethos of real life (RL) expertise. That is, no one can claim to be the origin of an utterance. Writers are not supposed to dictate discussion by pointing to their RL credentials, and they are not allowed to include “original research” in a Wikipedia article. Instead, Wikipedia’s rules require that a contributor build an ethos of citation. Instead of pointing to his or her credentials, a Wikipedian should be pointing to verifiable sources.

This argument is geared toward an audience of rhetoric and composition scholars who are concerned with issues of writing, argument, and intellectual property on the Web. But a discussion of Essjay’s ethos would shift in a software studies conversation. We would have to account for how Wikipedia’s code allows for (indeed, encourages) the building of virtual identities and actively discourages any claim to RL identities. We would have to track the development of Media Wiki software and a number of design decisions: the creation and maintenance of user accounts, access control settings, security settings, and permissions.

For instance, Media Wiki’s rules with regard to user identities and “anonymity” are quirky (these rules expose what Galloway and Thacker might call an exploit…but that is another blog post). Creating a username on Media Wiki masks that user’s IP address. Thus, I can edit without a user account and have my IP address attached to each edit, or I can create a username that is linked to each edit. Only users with CheckUser access can link usernames with IP addresses. Thanks to Virgil Griffith’s Wikiscanner tool, we can link IP addresses with physical locations. But this still doesn’t provide a clean way of linking edits with particular writers.

Media Wiki’s dealings with user accounts are confusing and counterintuitive. What does it mean to edit Wikipedia anonymously? What can anonymity even mean when an “anonymous” user is more easily tracked than a user who creates an avatar. When Ryan Jordan created the identity of “Essjay,” he was able to create an entire identity. That identity was not necessarily tied to a real world location or a real world person. And he was able to do this because of a particular design decision on the part of those who designed Media Wiki. Contrary to what most will say, this policy with regard to RL identity is not in place for all wikis. In fact, the original wiki, Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb, insisted on “RealNames” because “people who use online nicknames care less about what they write.” This is an arguable claim, but for the time being it’s important to note that Media Wiki’s design is but one way of dealing with user identities. This design decision has shaped the rhetorical situation in which each Wikipedian finds herself.

Using episodes such as the Essjay controversy as starting point, we can track the history of Wikipedia’s code. This history will help us better understand code influences rhetorical action and how the ethics and rhetorics embedded in code bubble to the surface as software is put to use. Essjay made particular choices about how to persuade other Wikipedians, and many of those choices involved a strategic deployment of ethos. But that strategic deployment was not only about Essjay’s (or Ryan Jordan’s) “choice.” It was much more about the code that allowed for and encouraged such a rhetorical strategy.

And I’d like to go one step further here. Even this brief discussion of Essjay’s ethos and how it opens the door for a rhetorical approach to software studies only scratches the surface. Beyond a study of rhetorical strategies and how they’re shaped, a rhetorical approach to software studies would also have to be a discussion of how persuasion happens, regardless of or beyond any conscious choice on the part of the digital rhetor. Yes, we should consider Essjay’s attempt to game the system and persuade. But what about all of the persuasion that happens over and beyond such strategic attempts?

In electronic spaces that invite various digital writer/rhetors regardless of credentials, Web denizens are put into contact with various others regardless of any choice to do so. I do not know who is editing “alongside” me when I contribute to Wikipedia, and this opens up a long list of rhetorical questions: How does persuasion or communication happen amongst a group of writers who may not share the same agenda? How does one track the motives of a writer without knowing his or her identity? What kind of community is a text like Wikipedia?

There are more questions to pursue here, but my hope is to open up a discussion about how rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and writing studies might contribute to the emerging field of software studies. I see a number of openings, and I will be looking to pursue many of them in future blog posts.