Juxtapose a box labeled “Electronics Junk” with two of its items, one remediating the terrorist appropriation of electronic devices formerly neutral and irrelevant to the differentiation between evil and positive uses, and the other a more complex interconnection between the old but still in use RCA audio stereo phono jacks and category 5 twisted pair (used for IEE 802.3 Ethernet).
Foreword: Elementary Cool
Gregory L. Ulmer
(XI) The research (and teaching) challenge for the language and literature disciplines today is not to follow in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle but to seek what they sought. . . . One may learn all the tricks of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, CSS/DHTML and still be anelectrate. The Rhetoric of Cool is an invitation to Composition Studies to take up this paradigmatic project: the invention of electracy.
(XI-XII) Heuretics (the term is related to “eureka” and “heuristics”) uses theory for the generation of new kinds of works, as distinct from hermeneutics, which applies theory to the interpretation of existing texts. . . . The poetic generator producing these innovations may be described with an acronym: CATTt, standing for Contrast, Analogy, Theory, Target and tale.
(XIII) Analogy in this case is filled with an array of the creative practices that Rice summarizes in the term cool, defined, as he notes, chorally (that is, using every meaning of the term). . . . At one level the approach reminds us of one of the peculiarities of our discipline, which is that we study about our inventors but rarely consider learning anything from them with respect to our own practices.
Introduction
(3) Why composition studies has not integrated these meanings into its curriculum and why composition studies has not felt cool to be an important rhetoric are questions that motivate the development of what I call the rhetoric of cool.
(6) I am attempting to write against that status quo by arguing the cool writer as not cool for her identity (or how she has adopted the popular cool identity) but rather how she is cool for the ways she uses specific rhetorical practices to make meaning in electronic environments.
(8) With cool, I find that chora, appropriation, juxtaposition, commutation, nonlinearity, and imagery are the rhetorical moves that comprise a specific new media writing I am inventing.
1 The Story of Composition Studies and Cool
(11) My story is about how cool and composition studies maintain overlapping narratives that commence in 1963.
(13) Marshall McLuhan employed “cool” to describe the high-participatory nature of certain media forms (TV, the telephone, comic books) as opposed to the low-participatory characteristic of other forms he called “hot” (film, radio, print). At the same time, in Blues People, Amiri Baraka used “cool” to describe the African-American reaction to a white, oppressive authority as calm, noninvolved, detached. Meanwhile, Robert Farris Thompson, working in West Africa and later recording his observations in Flash of the Spirit, discovered that African-American terms like cool have their origins in indigenous, African societies such as the Yoruba, who use it as a form of visual writing in order to express in art and aesthetics a lifestyle characteristic of appeasement, conciliation, and calmness. Together, these writers discover cool as something beyond its immediate and established connotations of popularity or personality. . . . Yet why have these moments found themselves excluded from composition studies' historical narrative?
The Grand Narrative
(14) What Havelock calls “the oral problem” (the importance of orality and its history to literacy and meaning making), I call the digital problem, the understanding that rhetorics of digital culture have been circulating and discussed since the field's rebirth even if composition studies has not paid attention to these rhetorics in a significant way.
(16) I'm not critiquing North when I problematize the grand narrative; I am critiquing how that narrative remains unchallenged and accepted as de facto history, how its recitation continues to be sounded out in our conferences, journals, and work, how it has become, in Foucault's language, the permanence of a theme.
1963
(18) What I pose, then, is one alternative, one re-presentation, one sub/version meant to draw us out of a dominant re-presentation in circulation today.
(21) The practice I call the rhetoric of cool will not be instrumental . . . . Instead, this book will define a rhetorical practice conducive and generalizable to digital culture.
Rhetoric and Writing
(22) Academic figures like Weaver, Booth, and Corbett searched for ways to change the apparatus. They chose, though, to reinstate an old form in place of the emerging new.
(23) Basing their studies on the concept of the student as variable, these texts [Research in Written Composition and Themes, Theories, and Therapy], which have become two of the most influential 1963 theoretical works on composition pedagogy, attempt to transfer composition pedagogy from a hodgepodge collection of anecdotes and teaching stories to the clear and coherent reasoning of how classroom practice can best succeed. They keyword in this kind of research is control, control over who and what are being studied, and control over how these studies are employed to maintain some degree of standardized practice.
(25) I am curious as to how those individuals writing in 1963 could have missed the technological, visual, or cultural influences occurring around them as they made their claims.
(27) The unification of theory and practice is a widely circulated trope seldom acted upon in the manner I am attempting: to write both a textbook and a theoretical book on the same subject.
(28-29) Like Lev Manovich in his influential text The Language of New Media, I want to draw attention to specific rhetorical features conducive to new media what Manovich calls the “general tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization” (27). In place of Manovich's interests in databases, variability, transcoding, and other applications, I discuss these six rhetorical principles I have found conducive to cool. . . . To produce knowledge in what McLuhan names “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” we are obligated to learn the rhetoric of a newly emerging electronic apparatus centered in acts of appropriation, sampling, hacking, and other related moves.
2 Chora
(33) The topoi have served print-based writing instruction by allowing students (and often instructors) the ability to work from a common repository of ideas. . . . But, as I will show, the danger might be more with our dependence on the topoi in the age of new media.
(33-34) Cool as cultural studies, cool as technology, and cool as visual writing all individually operate from different topos-based positions. My usage of all these positions at once is associative, not categorical or permanent, as the Aristotelean method demands. Gregory Ulmer names this strategy I employ chora, a hyper-rhetoric practice that updates the topoi for new media. . . . Ulmer names this electronic writing practice “chorography” and offers a set of instructions for how to be a chorographer: “do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings” (Heuretics 48).
(35) Cool media operate by a choral logic: Users of a given term's various meanings must actively engage with those meanings in rhetorical ways, discovering unfamiliar and unexpected juxtapositions of these meanings as they compose. Readers, too, respond to chora in a participatory manner unlike typical definitions of meaning or analytical understandings.
(35-36) The link is indicative of a new media push to reorganize space in terms of meaning construction. Through new media applications, like the hyperlink, chora displaces how a given topos represents one idea for one situation. . . . Th performative nature of the rhetoric of cool demands that I, too, enact some portion of that activity throughout my own theorization.
A Choral Introduction to Cool
(36) Reading Eric Havelock's description of 1963 as an important moment in writing instruction, I found myself focusing on his comment that “startled recognitions of a host of related facts” can be located within any given moment deemed consequential for one reason or another.
(38) Like American Graffiti, these types of songs construct the feeling of cool through writing; they are compositions.
(39) This initial recognition, that cool can be situated in 1963 in a manner unlike the tough guy or stereotypical African-American (or even white) male image, prompted me to identify its rhetorical potential as chora. . . . The larger implication of this discovery is the awareness of how an idea crosses several genres (film, music, popular beliefs) while maintaining its overall meaning structure.
(40) To create a chorography of cool, I realize, is in many ways to create a modified keywords for new media. It is to write a word through its connections and meanings, and not necessarily to only write about that word.
Chorography
(41) Baraka's identification, however, does not do that but instead contextualizes Brown's writing in terms of political and social response, thus evoking the project of cultural studies at the same time the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies was establishing itself in Birmingham, England, as a site of cultural analysis and pedagogical practice. . . . The relationship between media and society is prominent in Baraka's definition of cool. Cool, Baraka writes, includes the specific kind of early 1960s African-American inability to control political and cultural oppression. . . . Baraka's description of cool as nonparticipatory contrasts McLuhan's notion of cool as a highly participatory media form. . . . The conflicts in meaning regarding participation are not obstacles but rather potential moments for invention.
(42) Cool, or ituti, indicates a form of visual writing employed in order to express in art and aesthetics a lifestyle characteristic of appeasement, conciliation, and calmness. Yoruban culture articulated cool as a visual aesthetic in sculpture, weaving, and dance. . . . Any kind of computer-oriented rhetoric must account for the iconic display of information. . . . My visualization of cool, which I start to map out in this chapter, opens up a new arrangement for me to compose with, one that is chora-based and not topos-based.
Ironically, his map is all made of words.
The Handbook
(43-44) Too concerned with the division and arrangement of separate and distinct categories to study (which we can today recognize as modes, process, punctuation, or types of grammatical error), the Ramist tradition hinders the handbook's potential to voice inventive rhetorical moves and gestures. . . . Both McLuhan and Burroughs situate the handbook as a new media collection whose role is to demonstrate and teach rhetorical production.
What did Foucault say about the specificity of Greek hypomnemata?
(44) The focus of these assignments is the exploration of a given term (which is up to the student's discretion) relevant to the student's area of study (Nursing, Education, Accounting, Biology, etc.).
(45) Placed on the Web, students can further explore the choral moves they discover through hyperlinks and image placement. . . . While it is “open” in the sense that it encourages readers to contribute to its development, Wikipedia's entries, layout, and organization do not convey multiple meanings and choral possibilities.
Clearly an API to Wikipedia could render fascinating new organizations and layout of entries.
(45-46) Each chapter signifies a rhetorical dimension of cool but also stands for another choral move I make. In other words, The Rhetoric of Cool is itself a handbook. The significance, therefore, is twofold: to demonstrate the rhetoric of cool (and thus evoke the performative nature or writing) and to pose a model that can be appropriated for other kinds of hyper-rhetorical work (the writing itself).
3 Appropriation
(48) there exists a different type of rhetorical stance I am seeking to create, one dependent not on balance but on how terms or ideas are appropriated (cool as appropriated from media, from music, from Yoruban visuality).
Cool Cities
(51) Because both Detroit and Netscape appropriate cool to perform these tasks, I will use this chapter to include appropriation within the rhetoric of cool. The overlap of my work on cool, my own move to Metro Detroit, and the initiation of Detroit's urban renewal plan mark a focal point for thinking about how the rhetoric of cool functions through the city's appropriation of the word.
The Cool City
(54) Detroit is a cool city not because of anything specific it has done (or not done) but rather because of how one individual appropriates imagery and ideas in order to construct a new place of meaning. I'm particularly interested in how Granholm's appropriation of cool marks an extension of what Amiri Baraka critiqued in 1963 as the consequence of white cultural appropriation. . . . I want to situate Baraka's identification of appropriation as cool within a rhetorical strategy suitable for electronic writing.
Baraka
Appropriation
(59) These kinds of discrepancies regarding appropriation in popular culture are detailed by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool, Malcom Gladwell in “The Coolhunt,” and Douglas Rushkoff in his PBS documentary Merchants of Cool. These writers note how the rhetoric of cool is often transformed into a complacent discursive strategy when coherence is the ultimate goal.
The same docile bodies as those conditioned by traditional rhetoric (calmed down by selecting thesis statement and clearly arguing through it from introduction to conclusion).
The How-To
(63) In digital culture, the cut-up is best exemplified in practices ranging from Web site construction (appropriating images and HTML code from other sites to create new sites) to Weblogs (cutting and pasting links) to hip-hop and DJ culture (appropriating sounds and music, remixing them, and generating new compositions).
It is also exemplified in the IT integrators mash up of operating systems, and programmers remixing source code modules.
The Sampler
The DJ
The Mix
(72) Using appropriation within the rhetoric of cool allows writers to write outside of the limitations of student writing and, therefore, to fully enjoy other forms of writing that occupy their media lives; in other words, writers juxtapose these other forms to their lives.
Making useful, durable digital media objects from assignments projects the student's interest beyond the limited scope of throw away homework assignments principally tutorial and not necessarily practical or even sound taken at face value.
4 Juxtaposition
(73) In this 1963 essay “A Conceptual Framework for Augmenting Man's Intellect,” Douglas Engelbart proposed that juxtaposition be the focal point of writing with computers.
(79) The ideology of the thesis - that writing (and thus research) depends on a single statement or idea - has led the initial CCCC call to not be fully answered. Indeed, the call for debate regarding composition pedagogy (generalized in the research paper issue) never has extended to include how writers juxtapose, or how writers organize ideas spatially, as Lev Manovich argues in The Language of New Media. Spatial composing, Manovich's term for multilayered new media composition, reflects how new media artifacts contain a “hierarchy of levels” (xxv). . . . Spatial composing is a process - the ability to navigate and display disparate elements on encounters - as well as compositional - the writing one does. McCrimmon's pedagogy of the thesis, however, is not spatial; it directs writers to see each step of writing as a separate, distinct moment (first the facts, then the conclusion, then the organization).
Hypertext
(81) The cool writings of Everything2.com actualizes much, though not all, of Nelson's initial concept of hypertext as a writing space outside of what Nelson calls “the paperdigm.”
The DJ (Remixed)
(91) writers must perform juxtapositions, not just offer critical analysis of juxtapositions' effects on a given readership.
Hip-Hop Pedagogy
5 Commutation
(93) Commutation is the exchange of signifiers without concern for referentiality. In the 1964 English translation of Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes defines commutation as an important writing strategy writers employ to make specific choices regarding meaning construction.
(96) Cool discourse, as Baudrillard defines it, challenges writing instruction to reimagine the notion of a permanent writing space based on a fixed (and real) experience.
All meaning exchangeable like memory in a computer. The importance of the dynamically redrawn video screen supplanting the teletype and static, printed page.
Commutation
Scorpio Rising/Flaming Creatures
The Mix
6 Nonlinearity
(113) “The structure of ideas are not sequential. They tie together every which way. And when we write, we are always trying to tie things together in non-sequential ways” (Dream Machine 29, emphasis Nelson's).
Compare to computer systems structure as appearing to try to tie together the overall sense of the system including worlds beyond the system input and output interfaces: supervisory control models may be among what we try to tie together in non-sequential ways. The point is that they do exhibit virtual sequences depending on how they are interpreted.
(115) Nonlinearity asks, as Manovich might argue, that writers identify complex sets of data and form multiple texts out of the data.
(116) what matters is the various overlapping, nonsequential strands that one does not choose among but composes with simultaneously. In other words, even though I tell a narrative about composition studies and cool, I do so from multiple strands (technology, cultural studies, and writing), rather than one strand of causality or narrative progression, or, as traditional hypertext studies emphasizes, individual, alternative routes. I see these multiple strands not as something that hypertext or any other new media form brings to writing but rather as the very relations among ideas that comprise new media itself - that is, the multiplicity is the rhetoric.
(116-117) “Data banks are the Encyclopedia of tomorrow,” Lyotard writes. . . . Among choices and alternatives, among differing threads of data, then, hypertext opens up the possibility of writing. The search engine embodies one possibility, but there is the potential for other possible writing formations as well. . . . Google might serve as one example of this database logic, as Johnson-Eilola notes, but nonlinear writing in general can perform this work as well.
(118) Burroughs's media environment is a database too large to call itself anything other than an “intersection,” at content and sentence structure levels. A writer following Burroughs's logic presens strands of thought and ideas compiled to a given audience, noting where they intersect instead of where they tell a story.
(11) Taking McLuhan's usage of nonlinearity, then, I want to concentrate on how it rhetorically functions in cool, and how it suggests alternative narrative forms. . . . In general, nonlinearity challenges our understanding of how we order information in the digital. It also poses complex methods of information construction and distribution beyond what current writing instruction allows. . . . Janangelo's response to the everything-can-be-included nature of nonlinear hypertexts is to ask what kinds of models composition studies might learn from in order to teach this open-ending writing.
The Kerouac Model
(120) Jack Kerouac represents a specific 1963 literary moment when writing adopts nonlinearity for rhetorical purposes.
(122) The formation of associative, nonlinear thoughts is itself a composing process reflective of digital media. To bring together these experiences at once, Big Sur instructs, write them as nonlinear points.
(122-123) Berners-Lee's concept of URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers, transitive addresses that tell browsers where to find information) as opposed to the currently used URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, the version in place today on the Web that is more static than URIs) relies on a semantic system of writing (like Ulmer's chorography or Kerouac's associative linking) at the level of cool.
(123) In an interview with Technology Review, Berners-Lee . . . we'll be able to write programs that will actually help because they'll be able to understand the data out there rather than just presenting it to us on the screen. (Frauenfelder)
(123) At the technological level, the “relationship” tag, rel=”,” is introduced so that the tag that links pages and ideas, , becomes . At the content level, the connections writers generate come from how the data is associated to other data and how writers actualize those associations in their rhetorical choices. . . . In these systems, markup tags (meta information attributes attached to a word or image) function as semantic exchange. . . . The emphasis, in choral fashion, is not causal effect but meaning relationship, however arbitrary such meanings may, at first, appear.
(134) The absence of visuality in composition studies' rebirth narrative and its consequent delay in reaching our disciplinary vocabulary can be associated with a long-standing tradition in rhetoric and writing of favoring the word over the image, what Jacques Derrida terms logocentrism.
(137) Ivan Sutherland's 1963 invention of Sketchpad (and related doctoral dissertation Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System) equated writing with visual expression.
(138-139) Sketchpad began the process of demonstrating the rhetorical potential of the visual to all writers (and not just painters and artists). A writer is asked to use Sketchpad, not to analyze its merits or compositional potential.
(142) “The typewriter,” McLuhan writes, “fuses composition and publication, causing an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word” (Understanding Media 228). . . . The ability to produce new knowledge via the mechanics of the typewriter - be it typographic or visual - leads to the kinds of visual knowleddge computing can allow for via its manipulation of programmed language into alternative kinds of representations. . . . The computer display, McLuhan contends, allows writers to become involved in a visual composing process in ways movable type (which is performed elsewhere, and not by the writer) did not allow.
(143-144) The Research in Written Composition claim is that the tool is either not applicable or it must be studied in depth empirically before it can be evaluated for pedagogical usage. Its usage must be controlled for its value to be determined. Meanwhile, generations grow up using these tools daily, generations learn their application without controlled study, and, in turn, generations grow up internalizing new kinds of thought processes (the visual functioning by a different logic than the typographic) that affect communicative practices outside of a given classroom situation. The mass proliferation of Weblogs and related applications reflects this point. . . . What television was for McLuhan - “With TV, the viewer is the screen” - the Weblog or social software variant is partly for current electronic discourse (Understanding Media 272). And this has all occurred without “further study.”
(149) the pedagogical decision to not teach students how to work with imagery reflects not only an anti-visual ideological position but also a desire to use print in order to de-emphasize the existence of nonconventional or disruptive subject matter along with perceived nonconventional forms of writing (like images).
(154-155) In his textbook Internet Invention, Gregory Ulmer contextualizes the cool writer as a participant in electracy. . . . Cool writing signifies more than sucking or being good; it stands for an electronic rhetoric.
How does Rice's cool writer compare to Heim's cybersage?
(156) And here lies composition studies' greatest dilemma regarding media. Are media a counterinfluence, or are they, in fact, influences? . . . to make the claim for broad influence, we have to expand the types of writing students do so that they better reflect the kinds of writing media generate.
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