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.

In the latest issue of CCC, Robert Johnson takes up the concept of “craft knowledge.” Returning
to craft as techne (a place of invention), Johnson re-aligns it with phronesis while also highlighting craft knowledge as the basis of something called “interdiscipline.” The interdiscipline, we are told, is

Where two or more disciplines combine to create new disciplinary formations in the pursuit of solving problems associated with the fields involved, as an intellectual working space where various forms of knowledge are brought forward in a mutually respected manner for the purpose of creating new knowledge. (682)

To do this work, Johnson proposes a heuristic taxonomy posed as an “economy” (economy suggesting a lack of static or fixed presence). Craft, Johnson writes, is associated with “the making of products” and “the making of processes. ” To this, and as part of this heuristic,  Johnson wants to add “the making of selves” and the “making of cultures” (684). The heuristic is below:

I’m confused by Johnson’s quest to associate something called “craft knowledge” with disciplinary work and identity. Calling this heuristic an economy does not change its static nature (Do we read these as the principle contributors to craft knowledge? Are these the categories to engage with? And if we don’t engage with these categories, is there chance for craft knowledge? Must we be located in the identity of this grid?). There is also the question of the interdiscipline and its value here. What Johnson calls interdiscipline might better be described as “network.” And where Johnson writes “economy,” we might be better off writing “relations.” To do that, however, would collapse the above grid as its static presence would not have much meaning in the network (these items shift and change and thus alter the economy as quickly as it is presented for invention purposes). An interdiscipline seems like a very limited space to generate something called craft knowledge. It also doesn’t seem like anything we have not already engaged with.

I write this post because I am interested in craft as well, that is, craft beer.  The craft of writing is already well documented (and less an oxymoron, as Johnson’s piece begins). The exigence for Johnson’s exploration seems to be the quest for cross disciplinary collaboration at the level of writing and invention  (itself a taxonomy in university work, or we might even say, a commonplace). Johnson assumes collaboration is a good thing, a “craft” thing. Craft beer already exhibits collaboration (Stone being the principle figure in some of the more interesting collaborations; De Proef, Dogfish Head, etc. as well). But leaving aside the supposed importance of collaborating or crossing disciplinary (taxonomic) boundaries, what is a craft beer knowledge? It is the basis of social media.

In Abstracting Craft, Malcolm McCullough poses craft as participation. In particular, he aligns this participation with technology.

How to operate technology is not enough; it might be better to ask how to be when using technology. If it were possible to summarize this psychology in a single word, that world would be “participation.” As is increasingly acknowledged by managers and technologists alike, effective satisfactory work depends on conscious involvement. This very sense is perhaps all that is meant by the new usage of the word “craft.” (139).

McLuhan tied involvement and participation to the rise of new media as an organizing principle. Social media, the most dominant online space of organization, makes us all involved in each other (as McLuhan would note). In this sense, craft is not the end product (what Johnson wants to move away from) but nor is it some kind of intersection space where disciplines find their point of convergence (and which the table helps direct). Craft is the space of involvement. The craft beer space exemplifies this process (the point of this next book which is in its early stages of development). That exemplification teaches us a rhetoric generalizable to other types of social media oriented practices. Johnson concludes with a return to the artifact (and a vague notion of reflection as engagement). I look to the craft beer movement to learn more about 1. Digital rhetoric (invention, delivery, arrangement) but also 2. Myself (my own engagement and obsession). One might assume, then, that I, too, turn to craft knowledge as a making of the self. But I don’t.  I am not made. I am within a larger network of shifting practices (taste, Twitter, collecting, travel, rating sites, etc.).

I submitted this to The Chronicle, and no surprise, they rejected it. So here are some thoughts on English and networked ethos.

—–

When I accepted my current position as Director of a campus wide writing program (a position that holds similar status to department chair), my wife urged me not to hang up my poster of Frank Zappa sitting on the toilet. There exists a long standing professorial tradition of hanging items (posters, postcards, newspaper clippings, bumper stickers) on doors and walls of offices. The reading of these items, we assume, reveals something significant about the faculty member’s identity: Leftist, feminist, supporter of one or another ethnic group’s struggle, opponent or proponent of government policy, fan of artistic movement, admirer of a writer or two, former speaker at national event, and so on. Similarly, a professor’s office as a whole projects an identity: shelves of books, awards on the wall, a degree on display, neatly arranged or completely disorganized papers. Entering the professorial office, we can say, differs from entering the bank manager’s or doctor’s office. Eccentricity is somewhat expected as, at least, partial to the identity of the professorial space and the person who occupies that space. In my case - I am an English professor- such eccentricity is particularly expected. When, then, would be the problem with hanging a poster of Frank Zappa sitting on the toilet, whether I am located in the English department or in an administrative unit like the one I direct? What would be the problem with demonstrating this aspect of my identity, fan of a rock star who is willing to show himself half-naked in a private situation?

The answer, of course, is ethos. Credibility determines a number of institutional factors, from one’s ability to gain respect from staff or colleagues to one’s ability to successfully argue in front of one’s superiors. Without credibility, we are less likely to succeed in our professional quests. A professional ethos in English Studies, for instance, involves publishing in certain journals, presenting at specific conferences, maintaining academic currency, remaining active within the department, receiving good teaching evaluations, reading trade publications like The Chronicle, and so on. In this way, ethos is determined by one’s ability to project a unified imaged (I am a professional) and the ability to participate in conversations that circulate around that image. When I advise graduate students about their future employment prospects, when I work with undergraduates on their writing, and when I review publications for various journals, I encourage credibility because said credibility strengthens the message each person attempts to deliver. Rhetorical expression is strengthened by authorial credibility. My desire to hang this specific poster, however, is not a gesture away from credibility but rather one toward credibility. The ethos I project can be interpreted as hip administrator, wild and crazy director, or rebel against the system. More than likely, though, what I really intend to project is fan. Even more than that point, however, what I want to project is something akin to member of the networked society we live within.

The networked society, as many have written, alters the concept of fixed identity. Blogs, webpages, chat, Facebook accounts, and Second Life avatars, all help individuals produce multiple identities in multiple spaces. Shelly Turkle, Howard Rheingold, and others have written extensively on such matters over the last twenty years. Despite this point being fairly commonplace, our assumptions regarding identity and ethos are often problematic because of the ways we juxtapose expectations (what we believe something is) against the presentation of identity (what is presented to us). When Salman Kahn is highlighted for his YouTube university (Chronicle June 6, 2010), the impulse to dismiss the 33 year old’s efforts is felt quickly. The assumed ethos of the “professor” is advanced degree, institutional setting, and a CV that demonstrates achievement and disciplinary knowledge. Kahn lacks all of these items. When faculty and students project their identities on social media spaces like Facebook or Twitter, the writerly impulse may be to demonstrate political awareness (i.e., sharing links or sympathy with contemporary causes) or personal moments (travel observations, favorite music, desire to have an alcoholic drink as soon as possible). As readers of such social media demonstrations, we form unified assumptions about the writer based on a fleeting moment of observation or what the film critic Roger Ebert recently called a frisson, a brief and intense reaction. Even though many new media critics have alerted us to the role of multiple identities in online spaces, many readers of such spaces assume they are reading a stable identity. Such readers depend on the frisson in order to draw a conclusion regarding ethos. Such readers believe that the brief, and apparently individualized moment, stands for a particular identity or ethos.

The response to a poster of Frank Zappa sitting on the toilet might, then, be the brief and intense reaction of shock. “Is this really the office of the Director? It can’t be. . .” The sociologist Bruno Latour teaches us that every space is a networked space of relationships. What might feel like a frisson is, therefore, a failure to trace out the relationships within the networked moment one experiences. In other words, all moments, experiences, identities, spaces, and so on are networked. Indeed, to frame my identity as wild and crazy because of a poster would exemplify the problems of brief reactions and the failure to account for the network. Such a reaction would ignore the other items within my office which are part of this network: copies of theoretical works, journals from my discipline, novels, and popular non-fiction, framed pictures of Bob Dylan and Elvis, two Mac computers, letters from the Provost, the walls and floors of the 19^th century home my office is in, pictures of my daughter when she was born, a Spiderman Doll, a degree from when I graduated both the University of Florida with a PhD in 2002 and a degree from when I graduated kindergarten in 1975. This network of items shapes an ethos. If I add non-office items into this network (conference presentations, publications, conversations, reviews of my books, my love of craft beer, my knowledge of NCAA basketball), I can alter the ethos I have just shaped. There does not exist one word or phrase to capture that ethos because it is not based on a known or fixed entity. It is based on the given items gathered in my space at a specific time as I or others encounter them within another specific moment. As I move, add to, or replace items, that identity changes. Networks are not stable entities. They constantly shift.

Such is the case with identity as it is shaped by social media. In his recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr wants us to believe that the Internet (of which social media is a part) is dumbing us down and destroying some sense of professional ethos. Carr, like others before him, supports a fairly clichéd understanding of media that ignores the network’s role in structuring complex notions of ethos. In this narrative, media is either good or bad. Identity is either superficial or of overwhelming substance. The identity of our time period, Carr argues, is stupidity. The identity of the time that preceded new media is intelligence. In academia, we find such reductionist claims regarding ethos in our classrooms when we depend on the frisson in order to perform commonplace acts such as addressing student writing (“Students are cheaters”), announcing our lack of appreciation for television (“it’s junk”) or reminding others how suspicious we are of the Internet (“It is full of unreliable sources”). These are all frisson based moments. They say nothing of ethos. They ignore the complexities that network a given moment of credibility.

If I were to adopt the alter ego ethos of media scholar Marshall McLuhan, I might call all of these assumptions print based. McLuhan argued that print perspective is a fixed perspective inherited from the Renaissance; media perspective, on the other hand, is based on patterns, involvement, and connectivity (items that typically make up a given network). Following McLuhan, to understand the identity of an Internet application like Facebook, of a college student, of a professor, of a professor’s office, or even of an academic program or discipline, our perspective would have to account for the variety of networked connections and patterns we discover across a broad range of material. Much like my brief description of my office space, each one of these items is composed of a variety of items, and these items may change daily.

In this long analogy, my purpose here is to draw attention to an aspect of identity often ignored at the professorial and, consequently, disciplinary level, but that is prompted by my initial anecdote. What is the identity of academic work in the age of the network? More specifically, what is the identity of my own discipline, English Studies, in the age of the network? Like my anecdote of the Zappa poster, English, too, struggles with the frisson of its own identity. The fixed perspective the discipline has of itself is hermeneutical study. This study is fixed on the discussion and analysis of stories, poems, plays, films, cultural moments, documents, politics, and ethnicity. While I have no objection to such objects of study, the ethos of this work has greatly eroded within the profession itself even as the profession projects this self-styled image. As most of us have known for some time, there are not enough tenure track jobs in English for those who have based their professional identity on this occupation or, for the most part, these areas of study within English. I don’t want to rehash the arguments already in circulation about the awful state of English Studies and the job market. Instead, I note that what English faces is no different than what a status update on Facebook faces or a poster on an office wall faces when not treated as part of a network. Without the ability to be traced within a larger network of meaning, the identity of the object will be read in a brief and fixed manner. Those who choose to occupy that identity, too, become fixed in an identity that resists belonging within a larger set of meanings and identities. Ethos, then, suffers. What makes the status update not fixed is its connection within the larger set of Facebook friends, the posted links and videos, the information shared across members spaces, and other features the application supports. What makes me professionally more than someone who likes a picture of a rock star on the toilet are the numerous items that make up my work space. While there have been many responses to the crisis of English Studies’ fixed identity (the movement toward Digital Humanities, the dominance of Rhetoric and Composition, the shift to Ethnic Studies), English still is English. At least, English is still English to the department of English.

Thus, in the discursive circulation of hand wringing regarding the future of English Studies, what is seldom discussed is the networked makeup of the field’s identity and how it can be traced to the field’s advantage. Instead of doing such a tracing, English Studies argues that its ethos depends on shifts in perception regarding individualized moments such as labor (Marc Bousquet), textual reading (Franco Moretti), or digital computing (Cathy Davidson). These ethos-driven moments, however, are treated separately, as nodes without any network to belong within. When the recent 10^th anniversary issue of the journal Pedagogy posed the question of “the most pressing pedagogical issues facing teachers and university citizens in 2010 and beyond,” the responses published reflect the fixed perspective I have been arguing here against. That is not to say that economic shifts, teaching focus changes, and the redefinition of “work” are not important topics to reflect upon and interpret. Instead, it is to say that these items are part of a network in which they all have relationships with one another as well as with other, as of yet, unmentioned items. For whatever reason, we are not understanding the field’s future as the tracing of such relationships so that a networked ethos can be developed. We have yet to understand the ethos of a networked professional and disciplinary identity.

What would a networked English Studies look like? As Latour would argue, the network is already there. We only need to trace it out, to identify its relationships we are not yet aware of, and to describe that tracing so that we might shift our perspective and future ethos. The problem, though, has been the discipline’s unwillingness to do that tracing. Bound to the project of hermeneutics, the discipline is less interested in tracing its internal and external relationships than in focusing mostly on textual interpretation, including the interpretation of its own identity (i.e., “We are English”). Because of this, English remains fixed in a static identity. “We look at the present through a rear view mirror,” McLuhan famously noted. In that fixed perspective, we become trapped in an ethos that does not represent the networks we operate within but rather locates itself in a non-media past. The consequences of such fixed perspectives range from inabilities to mesh with contemporary conditions (as the job market issue demonstrates) or to develop new kinds of identities that will further our work. In sum, disciplinary ethos cannot remain fixed in a media-driven culture that is based on the moving, ever changing network. What would a networked English Studies look like? Not what it looks like currently.

The research question: what will prepare me for this project? The obvious answer to the question is to match your readings with your subject. In my case, a book on craft beer should mean reading books on craft beer. That answer doesn’t do it for me. This type of taxonomic research methodology, while popular in various pedagogical moments, does not take into account the complexity of research. My readings extend outward from the representational (beer) to the associative (the other areas of experience that will inform my thinking about beer). Research, as I’ve argued before, is a folksonomic practice. At the early point of research (exploration), I know I have some kind of exigence (personal obsession) and an early understanding of what might motivate that need to write:

• Technology - namely, Web 2.0, social networking
• Networked logic
• Roland Barthes’ quest for meaning outside of any structural system (Why do I like craft beer? There is no logical response)
• Personal obsession
• Craft

These categories function as the heuristic for writing. Substitute other categories (or other actors in the network, as Latour might argue), and you have a different kind of writing that will emerge. I have no idea how and if these texts will do this work. But I read them anyway. In the last few weeks or months, some of those texts have included:

• Complexity: A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell
• Piracy - Adrian Johns
• The Craftsmen - Richard Sennett
• Obsession - Leonard Davis
• Communication Power - Manuel Castells
• Old Jack Erickson beer travel guides
• The Neutral - Roland Barthes
• Various books published by Brewers Association (Farmhouse Ales, Brew Like a Monk, etc.)

In writing (or doing the work before actual writing for) this project, I continue to outline both impressions and thoughts (Make Mine Potato) and occasional thoughts on methodology (here in this space).

Liz Rohan’s “Everyday Curators: Collecting as Literate Activity” (Composition Studies Spring 2010) speaks to some of the gestures I’ve made here in the last year or so. Those posts focused on the collection of dates and photographs pulled from my personal history. 1965. 1921. 1982. 1983. The logic behind such writing, as Rohan points out in her own pedagogy and writing, is the exploration of some idea prompted by the exigence of a photo. In this sense, the photo follows Barthes’ fascination with the detail ( a point Robert Ray translates for film pedagogy). The detail is not meant to undercover an argument or perform a deconstruction or a representation/idea but rather to further a type of thought motivated by pleasure (punctum, jouissance, third meaning) not captured by denotative or connotative meanings.

The collection has long served writing purposes. Benjamin’s Arcades, Harry Smith’s unfinished Anthology project (a massive folk music collection), Sirc’s Virtual Urbanism, and so on. To collect is to conduct research. It is to, as Latour notes, gather. In the age of new media, gathering, collecting, and aggregating have become like-minded rhetorical gestures. The Web has exemplified this point to an extreme: Google News, RSS feeds, Facebook Top News/Most Recent News status feeds, and so on. Most of the Web is a collection.

What cannot be lost in this collecting, though, is the detail. The moment that pricks. The moment that sparks some kind of reaction. Rohan points to the Credit/No Credit markings on a school assignment in 1984. In each temporal photograph I showcased, I pointed to some detail (like my father’s unexplained apron in 1965).

This was the project of The Rhetoric of Cool (cool functioning as a detail that motivates a collection of 1963 moments). It is also a project of my obsession with craft beer, an obsession marked by a collection: visits to places, bottles, photographs, ratings, blog posts, etc. I don’t need to remind anyone that most writing pedagogy ignores the logic of the collection in favor of the logic of the single stated thesis statement. In the world of thesis statements, research is treated as a projection outward from that statement (confirmation favored over exploration). And as many times as I’ve given the lecture to fellow teachers regarding a pedagogy of the collection (the collection, which, in turn, produces the claim or position; not the other way around), I seldom see shifts in practice. As early as 1963, the very non-compositionist Ted Nelson was preaching the collection as a new media practice driven by hypertext. McLuhan made such a case in his writing (books that collected) and theories.  As recently as now, sampling provides a popular example of the process. To follow the RZA’s compositional process in The Wu-Tang Manual is to follow a writer collecting from a variety of areas of experience.

To collect, though, is not enough. A pile of documents is only as useful as the details discovered, the details which form patterns and connections (showing the obvious and the novel) and thus generate some form of writing (the way a Mystory does so via narrative or Latour’s tracing does via description).

T.R. Johnson reminded us of the pleasure of research (”School Sucks”). The pleasure of the image is the detail, but also the projects/writings/ideas sparked by the detail. Barthes obsessed over the collar and the big head. I might do the same for an apron or the staged photo of a tasting. I placed my daughter’s cup in the photo for effect. The effect is still there when I look at the photo after some months. I know the photo was staged. Still, the cup stands out for me in a way that differs from how it stands out in the photo. It is not an issue of the cup not belonging per expectation (the way Luria documented oral communities’ understanding of place and order among tools). Bottles. Child’s cup. There is a relationship here. But what? That relationship might be teased out further by other collections I have made (mental and physical). These collections might be found among the other photos stored on Flickr, or they might emerge as I reach into other types of collections (i.e., databases) of experience: theory, popular culture, personal anecdotes, space, etc. In other words, what I don’t understand now (why do I like my own staged photograph), I will understand at some point by how I form relationships among my collections. Such is the pedagogy of collection based writing.