Cynthia Haynes once wrote that in the teaching of argument, everything is up for argument except the teaching of argument. One might say something similar about assessment.

As a WAC director, I hear a great deal about assessment. It’s a major topic of discussion at the WPA conference. It is a major topic of discussion at IWAC. The journals show numerous pieces devoted to assessment. Discuss new media and writing and the first question you get is, “how do you assess that?”  Assessment is the great mystery for WPAs. It is magical (it supposedly can save or destroy programs on its own). It is a safety net (good assessment supposedly will keep programs from being cut), it is an obligation (the mantra of some “mandate” from some place else). It provides standards (it supposedly keeps us following goals or set outcomes). WPAs are obsessed with assessment. They assess their programs. They assess student work. They view the field through the lens of assessment.

The topic of assessment, however, is seldom put under assessment. Take assessment methodology as example. There is a widespread assumption that quantitative data analysis is the method of assessment.  Such methodology might include gathering data about GPA correlation, might be based on rubric matching, might involve communal reading of student work, and might involve the collection and communal reading of student portfolios (with matching to a rubric following). This methodology depends on keywords: reliability, validity, measurement. These keywords provide a specific type of focus or lens. It is, though, a limited focus.

Typically, this work is meant to demonstrate to a supposedly hostile administration the value of the instruction being done. The work provides value to the WPA her/himself who often feels under the gun, unappreciated, and undervalued within the academic infrastructure for one reason or another. The work makes writing instruction slightly more “scientific” (we are gathering “data” after all) and thus on equal par with other university work. Thus, the keywords noted above. They are the keywords of science studies (to some extent). Assessment is posed as science.

One problem, though, is that in this type of conversation, assessment is treated as a given or a Barthesian mythology. The assumption being that assessment (at least of this sort) is “just something one does.”  Or those involved in assessment follow the Sammy Hagar mantra and change “there’s only one way to rock” to “there’s only one way to assess.” Another problem is that the gathering of such data (often done through reading student work and matching it to a rubric, student surveys, faculty surveys, GPA correlations) demonstrates causality. Indeed, causality - doing X caused one to write better or worse - is almost impossible to prove (see ANT).

Assessment depends too strongly on the concept of proof. Proof is a topos. Our values and world views depend on communal topoi (or we would have, as McLuhan noted, psychosis). As one WPA-L listserv comment notes, “gain” is the goal of this world view. Assessment should “prove” something called “gain” which tends to mean “improvement” or “skill” acquisition. Again, see ANT.

I write this because I share the contradictory spaces of WPA and cynic regarding assessment. To put it another way: While I may run a major writing program, and while I am always interested in understanding how our program functions, I am cynical of the assessment practices familiar to our field. They are repetitive (many reach the same conclusions), involve tedious work (laborious collections and reading of papers that are solved by paying readers since no one person can ever read all this work), never fully demonstrate proof (even as they claim otherwise) and in the end are done mostly because of programmatic insecurity (”we’re good, we’re really good!”). I, too, though am engaging in assessment. Our program is assessing itself. But we aren’t following this tradition I briefly outline above. Instead, we are following a practice I am calling “Networked Assessment,” a practice that treats the program as a network and that poses assessment as the network practice of tracing an account (see Latour). We are not out to prove value. We are working to trace the relationships of our program in order to better understand how our program works (the way Latour does with law in The Making of Law or with the failed Aramis project in Aramis). Value could be found in such a tracing, and likely will be found as relationships are discovered within the network, but it is not the goal. And in such a tracing, validity, reliability, and measurement are not the keywords that provide a lens. The main keyword is description.

I’ve given a couple of talks on this subject and have had a piece  that outlines the concept and approach recently accepted for publication. I want to write more on this topic in the next few days, but for now, this post introduces the challenge to assess the concept of assessing. Who watches the Watchmen, and who assesses the assessors? Let’s trace the assessors. Let’s provide an account of their work and relationships. Let’s put assessment under assessment.

Still reading Latour’s The Making of Law. If Latour has taught us in the past to describe, here his descriptions are in hyperdrive. In Reassembling the Social, he wrote, “If your description needs an explanation, it’s not a good description.” The Making of Law describes everything about the French legal process. It is a massive description. Description, Latour told us previously, is difficult to do. “To describe, to be attentive to the concrete state of affairs, to find the uniquely adequate account of a given situation, I myself have always found this incredible demanding.”

I am looking for a way to describe so that I can at least begin drafting the next project.  In my notes, collections of materials, readings, I need to start describing. But this description, unlike Latour’s project, is not meant to focus only on the details. It has to focus on the affective dimensions of craft. It has to be emotional, personal, and about obsession. It is not about the reader (as in an argument or move to persuade) but it is about me (narrative of sorts).

In a recent Details essay on the artisanal, we read that technology is at the heart of a renewed interest in all things craft.

For all its Amish-like affectations, the artisanal movement is clearly driven by technology (see “Artisanal 2.0,” opposite). What would all those people with niche obsessions do without the organizing power of the Web? It brings a nation of local crafters and consumers together, and intimacy, however far-flung, is the glue of the artisanal community.

Technology is the pattern found amid descriptions of craft. In Abstracting Craft, McCullough made a similar observation. The editors of BeerAdvocate call the current state of the industry Beer 3.0. A tab on my browser is always open to Ratebeer.com. A little description, even this little bit of description, reveals a pattern. I, the reader, find a repeating moment, idea, item, concept that will motivate and guide my work.

But the kind of description Latour advocates and/or performs - as he notes early in the book - is not reader-centric. Latour knows that the average American reader will not understand the references nor find familiarity with the French legal system. For me, the average reader will not find familiarity with craft beer nor with my obsession. So what is the point of such writing?

Method.

I finished David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect, and despite is repetitiveness and breezy history, it contributes to the continuing question regarding writing, expression, and where we choose to express ourselves. Facebook’s contribution is recognition of the need to be involved, as McLuhan might say. We are now involved with one another at levels never before possible. We make ourselves known to each other (thus, canceling our own privacy concerns) all the time. I’m here. I’m there. I’m reading this. I’m eating that. If there is indeed a Facebook effect, it is the continuation of making ourselves known.

Weblogs helped initiate the process at levels the book could not do. This activity occurs among friends, those we know, and those we know because of some level of celebrity (we know them, but we don’t know them). Notice a fact I know about food writer Ruth Riechl. On July 12, she had lunch with food celebrity and chef Marcus Samuelsson.  Riechl decides I, or someone like me interested in food, should know this. She also decides that I should know that Samuelsson “inhaled” a Swedish hotdog with shrimp salad in three seconds.

I know about one thing they discussed over lunch (” the online site he’s creating, aimed mostly at men”), that Sameulsson has an assistant and Reichl doesn’t, that Reichl has an iPhone (”sent from my iPhone), and that Sameulsson likes hotdogs with shrimp salad. I don’t know these people outside of image (writings, TV). Now I know these items.

Where and why do we express ourselves? School promotes the essay. Online writing promotes the weblog (and subsequent favorite genre of online writers, the review). Facebook promotes status. Activity. Interests. Connections. Tastes. It is not the only outlet for such writing, but it is the most dominant because of the concept of “friend” connectivity. Its logic mixes with that of the weblog and Twitter: I must make known what I think, what I’m doing, what I like, what I dislike, who I know, etc.

Reichl is not my friend. Neither are most of the writers whose blogs show up on my RSS feed. Given the popularity of weblogs, Twitter, and Facebook, should we assume that the desire to “make known” is new? Or that for some time, people kept such desire bottled up (expressed in private diaries or unpublished work)? Schooling has done its best to interpellate writers as private thinkers. Invention and innovation works in the opposite direction. The Facebook effect is closer to that of the entrepreneur who needs to make known a given thought or idea than an essay about the meaning of a text. For some reason, we want to know and make known someone’s taste for hotdogs. Treat the photograph as metaphoric of a larger process of making and distributing information.

This morning on the Mike and Mike show, Mike Greenberg critiqued last night’s televised LeBron announcement. Greenberg took offense at the hyperbole and hype that the show promoted, arguing that LeBron had ruined his image in the process. Greg Doyle, at CBS Sports, feels the same, calling LeBron a “coward” for the media event. Others have chimed in as well.

The irony is not lost on us. Those that made LeBron “King” now complain that he has gone too far. ESPN, who pays Greenberg, televised LeBron’s high school basketball games. ESPN plays LeBron commercials all the time (my favorite is the one where he plays multiple characters at a swimming pool). For the last two years, ESPN has hyped a finals meeting between LeBron and Kobe (which has yet to occur) via speculation and further airing of commercials portraying the two as puppets. CBS Sportsline, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and every AM Sports talk show in the U.S. have been discussing LeBron’s free agency since last year. Once this season ended, the conversation went into overdrive. You couldn’t turn on a sports show (and often a news outlet like CNN) without hearing the question: Where will LeBron go? Speculation ran wild. At the heart of this speculation was the concept of promotion. If LeBron goes to place X, he will be able to promote his image better than he can in Cleveland. So said the talking heads.

So why the hate over the one hour special? Celebritacy is made. It does not emerge out of nowhere. Those that made this King now argue against his rule. They created the meaning of the figure (after all, LeBron has never won a championship), and then complain when he fulfills that meaning (kings should rule; they should be arrogant; they should promote their image). Of course, most of sports talk is People magazine for athletics.  I have heard Greenberg complain previously about an athlete receiving too much attention, as he gives that athlete yet more attention. Interviewers, unable to find anything to ask about, ask provocative questions then turn off the cuff remarks into scandal. Image is circulated, circulated, circulated, then circulated some more as those who generate the image ask: is X over-exposed?

I couldn’t care less that LeBron went on TV. Promotion is the heart of the celebritacy moment. Promote meaning. Even though I have been a Heat fan since day one (they started playing the year after I graduated high school; my only positive connection to the city I grew up in is my love of the Heat), I spent last night watching a crappy movie on Netflix rather than the announcement. I’m used to promotion. It doesn’t faze me. The LeBron announcement is what the commentators wanted even as they say otherwise. They will promote and circulate the “scandal” of LeBron going on TV for an hour, critique the image they created, and keep alive this work well into next season. Hype can last a long time.  Good for them. Why should we pretend that news is otherwise? News, sports or other, is the promotion of a celebritacy moment. The event (Israel), the figure (LeBron), the movement (Tea Party) - news outlets turn the minor into the over-exposed. They create many, many kings. LeBron is only one such creation.

Most of my writing focuses on invention. How do I come up with an idea? My mentor sent me down this path of thinking, and it has shaped the way I research and write, as well as how I teach. Whatever I do in my writing, I teach as methodology at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

We know about rhetorical situations and exigence, but we spend little time considering methodology. “Hip Hop Pedagogy” posed temporality as a method for invention. Exploration of the categories of experience found in a given year, when juxtaposed, will produce an insight not previously known.  That method produced the dissertation and eventually the book. The date I chose was 1963. Since then, I’ve experimented with a variety of methods, all of which are based on two key principles:

• Juxtaposition
• Networked logics (connectivity)

I’ve done this with McLuhan’s concept of sounding out or the idea of an urban mapping or the notion of a taxonomy that is not only folksonomic, but personal as well. The project on Detroit treats the city as a space of networked meanings (each meaning, when juxtaposed with other meanings of the space, teaches me something about networked rhetoric). The best way to explain this method of invention, I’ve found, is performance. Do the theory you are describing.

The principle asks writers to work with categories of experience. Ulmer points to Family, Entertainment, Discipline, School as four such areas. We can expand those categories to others. A paper I delivered last year on Ong’s noetic juxtaposes noetic (heroic) figures as informed by affective motivations (the personal) in order to invent a practice outside of argument. Here the categories came from:

• Theory (McLuhan)
• Writing (Burroughs)
• Rhetoric (Plato)

The categories are informed by a physical place (St. Louis/Missouri which all three are connected to) as well as the three noetic figures for me who occupy this space, and are juxtaposed in a space (conceptual, writing space of networked narrative). A thread runs through these three categories (food) because of how I allow my research to sample details from each writer and juxtapose them with personal moments (dining in St. Louis with my daughter). The insight produced is one that makes St. Louis into a narrative about food, me, and the pattern of rejection. This essay (based on the linked talk) has yet to be fully understood by reviewers who want argument or reject the inclusion of the personal. Such is a topos of academic writing, as Ong tells us, the legacy is traced to Peter Ramus; remove the personal. The noetic, as Ong also tells us, is, however, a personal response.

A recent issue of Saveur magazine offers a similar approach toward understanding the concept of “market.”

Here the categories are film, poetry, children’s rhymes, song, fiction. Each category produces its own topos, but when networked, another meaning can emerge.  The editor has chosen to fill in these categories with these specific details because of his own personal experience. Other choices, by someone else, could have been made; the result would be a different network of meaning. From the popular to the academic, we are talking about invention. What to produce? How? I draw from various examples (Darwin, the creation of Sim City) when giving local talks to students or colleagues. But mostly, I draw from my own practices.

At times, I knowingly substitute juxtaposition for network, network being the more powerful heuristic since it allows for shifts, movement, and changes among the insights and materials gathered for producing insight. Topoi, even when juxtaposed, do the opposite. The pedagogy of all this is what is at stake. It could be used to engage with critique, of course, but the decoding of representation or practice is too often a futile or self-satisfying gesture. Its pedagogical value for generating meaning, for teaching how to generate meaning, is limited (we produce generic critics or the same old same old analysis). What we need, instead, are networked pedagogies and methodologies. We need folksonomic explorations of material that motivate inventional practices, not responses to prompts or clever ways of uncovering discrepancies or refuting previous positions.

The best pleasure writing circulates. This is most true for the family album. The digital image in some ways makes the materiality of the album less important. We owned stacks of the binder-albums when I was a kid. Behind each sticky cellophane piece of plastic, we ordered the photographs. Currently, we may only own one or two such albums. The rest are stored on Flickr, on hard drives, on weblogs, Facebook, etc. I browse from file folders on my laptop looking for just the right image of my daughter. I do searches (guessing at keywords I may have used in image titles). I look through folders by their titles (often dates or the names of family trips). Circulation is easier without the burden of materiality.

What circulates overall, in photograph or digital image, is the iteration of family member. From baby to toddler to adolescent to adult. I asked “How does a ruthless historical figure become a counting vampire made out of foam?” No less emotional is the trope of “where did our baby go” or some such variant. “My how you’ve grown.” “You used to do X.” “Remember when you….”

One’s ethos moves from “cute” to “embarrassed” as the image circulates over time. Without the constraints of time, we produce other kinds of effects.  I once posted this picture from when I was a teenager

in order to force my own embarrassment. Or novelty. Or to project my sense of taste (rock and roll, The Rolling Stones) against the backdrop of family vacation (Disney World).  Or maybe to project my recognition of what I now lack (hair). Or maybe to be funny. Or maybe to be nostalgic (”What a great vacation!”) or to lament (”What a terrible vacation!”). To do any of this, I need to rediscover or even discover the other relationships circulating within and without the image.

The “Family” or “Personal” quadrant of Ulmer’s popcycle identifies one area of identity formation (or discursive production). What circulates is a pattern that moves from one quadrant to another (Entertainment, School, Discipline, Religion, etc.). Of course, even in one quadrant such patterns might circulate. Even “Family” is a network of circulated imagery. Its ethos is constructed out of various iterations. Something pricks us or moves us to use found details in order to identify the circulation that has meaning. The meaning is the tracing of the network.  The pedagogy of personal writing then is not confession (as Barthes warns us against) but circulation.

Gilligan’s Island

Lost

Fantasy Island

The image of TV opens Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. If a Professional ethos might be understood as a network of agents (the human and non-human) forming an identity, then why would a pleasure experience not be understood similarly?  The thousands of hours he could have experienced engaging with others online - if the online world had existed - Shirky notes he spent as a child watching TV. The choice is obvious, the book begins: being online is preferable to being in front of a TV.  One’s ethos is better than the other. One is participatory/the other is not. McLuhan, of course, thought differently. TV, as he told us, is a cool medium. Regardless, Shirky’s book begins with a very non-networked account of pleasure.

What is the ethos of pleasure based habits, like watching TV (or web surfing, chatting, tweeting, status updating, etc.)? Partly, circulation. Within a circulation, the idea moves from one space to the next, changing shape, becoming slightly different while maintaining the commonplace that began the move. Iterations with movement. An island (South Pacific? Fantasy). The feeling of being stuck (We have to get off, I have to live out this idea). The rescue (Success, I learned something about myself). We can identify other patterns that move and change with this circulation.

There are many examples of entertainment circulation. A favorite:  Vlad the Impaler, George Hamilton’s Dracula, Andy Warhol’s Dracula, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Count Chocula, The Count from Sesame Street. How does a ruthless historical figure become a counting vampire made out of foam? The pleasure circulates from blood to children’s workshop. Circulation can tame the image. Or it can explode it (Jenkin’s example of the Osama/Bert poster in the early pages of Convergence Culture).

The best pleasure writing circulates. We may pretend otherwise (plagiarism). Or we may teach otherwise (thesis claims). Pedagogy, as I argued in The Rhetoric of Cool, too often circulates the wrong way. It doesn’t change its initial commonplace. Entertainment can do that, too, of course (boy meets girl/boy loses girl/boy gets girl…..the holy trinity of dramas: cops, hospitals, law offices). Rhetorically, it is more interesting to tease out the iterations or make one’s own. If we produce more, will you consume more, Shirky critiques early 20th century media. I should hope so. Circulation extends the ethos of the production only via consumption. Consumption is what activates the iteration. To circulate, the text must be consumed.

Critique, Bruno Latour once told us, has run out of steam. It has run out of steam as it becomes merely an expression of the paranoid and not the gathering of influence, agency, materiality, etc. It has run out of steam as it achieves nothing. No better point could be made about what I have come to call “non-representational critique.” Traditionally, we think of critique as a gesture toward or against something. A critique has a referent. It refers. In its reference to something, it works to locate a new discussion and thus create a new reference point. In that location, it often works to persuade. To argue. To shift location or position.

There are, however, moments when critique has no referent. It does not refer to anything. Mostly, such gestures exemplify the hyperbolic. These gestures, as well, are epideictic. They are not working to persuade, but rather to confirm already established beliefs or ideological positions. For that reason, they do not need a referent. They need an emotion. They need a pre-existing emotion to appeal to.

A prime example: MIA’s “Born Free” video.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Like a great deal of non-representational critique, the appeal seems to be a critique. People are being rounded up because of ethnicity (the red-headed hair acting as a metaphor for some specific ethnic group or for a variety of ethnic groups). The exaggerated gesture, though, does not perform a critique. Instead, it locates a non-referential moment - this act is not being committed in America, for instance, the site of the gesture  - and projects it as a gesture/comment on something possibly akin to legislation targeting illegal immigration. That is the image we are likely meant to digest. But the gesture is not a critique of such legislation since it never deals with the facts or issues surrounding the problematic laws being passed. The gesture is hyperbolic. Non-referential. We may think we are seeing a critique of a practice, but we are not. Never does the video draw upon those items that would ground it in the moment of an actual critique. It grounds us in an already established emotion and fear: we will be rounded up one day for being different.

Lewis Black made a similar nod to non-representational critique in his critique of Glenn Beck.

Black accuses Beck of having “Nazi-tourettes” because every “critical” gesture Beck makes is one that calls someone or something Nazi. Obviously, the objects of Beck’s scorn are not Nazi. Health care proponents, global warming issues, etc. are not examples of Nazi behavior or beliefs. The fear of Nazi aggression, though, remains an emotional feeling among those who fear that the American government will become so large that it will be fascist. There is no evidence to support this claim, but there are feelings, panic, hyperbolic responses.

The point is further exemplified by the opposite political spectrum, those who critique Israel. It is one thing to find fault with a country’s politics or behavior toward another group. It is quite another to call that country “Nazi.” Israel is not Nazi Germany. They share nothing in common. Israel has not exterminated over 6 million people, started an imperialist war with Europe, nor built concentration camps. It has made errors and mistakes, but it is not a Nazi ruled country. To argue against a complex conflict by using the term Nazi is to argue without reference, to ignore context, to avoid details, and to merely make emotional gestures. This gesture avoids complexity (complexity demands reference) and embraces non-reference.

Referring to Israel as Nazi is like Beck referring to Al Gore as Nazi. There is no reference point for this critique. Its purpose is emotional (”What is worse than the Nazi”),  racist (”Equate those who suffered the most under the Nazis to the Nazis”) and appeals to already held emotional responses (”Jews are evil”). When Beck attributes global warming to Nazi behavior he does likewise. Black traces the various moments of this appeal (and The Daily Show is very good at such tracings) as effort to show how non-referential Beck is when he goes off on a rant. Non-referentiality is strongest when it repeats itself. Tracings reveal the repetition.

Emotional appeal is nothing new to rhetorical studies, nor is the power of the epideictic appeal novel. I am not as versed in Agamben as I probably should be, but Jenny tells me of a relevant argument Agamben makes about Tiananmen. For those who are concerned with the critical gesture - as one who makes it or studies it - they should also be concerned with the non-representational critique and how it prevents discourse from reaching a solution to problems or from even engaging with a given issue. Jameson argued that pastiche was non-representational, but American Graffiti is not a critique of the 1960s; it is a non-referential showcase. We have numerous examples of non-referential showcasing, and we have commentary and responses to such acts. The non-referential critique, though, alludes are attention. We assume it is, as Barthes argued, a natural gesture, when it is, in fact, a mythology. It refers to nothing.