Abstracts for Biotechnosocial Identities

Haraway, Donna J.  “Cyborgs to Companion Species:  Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience,” The Haraway Reader,  New York:  Routledge, 2004. 295-320.

In this essay, Haraway expands upon her Cyborg Manifesto to consider the broader interactions of humans and technologies with the animal kingdom.  Addressing issues of identity and difference, and our relationship to ourselves and others, she thoroughly blends what are normally seen as “distinct” categories between humans, animals, nature, and technology.  Haraway argues that we are constantly (re)creating ourselves based upon our social interactions with others (be they animal, human, plant, or machine).  It is both the recognition of the Other as not-us, and yet still somehow part of us through the process of interacting, that is essential to the creation of meaning, and how that meaning is the basis of what we call culture.  Since meanings can never be “fixed,” self and Other are constantly changing, and thus changing culture.  Haraway briefly traces an evolutionary theory about how certain genetic traits in wolves actually "encouraged" the development of the domesticated dog alongside humans.  

Haraway, Donna J.  When Species Meet.  Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press.  2008.

When Species Meet is a further exploration of Haraway's Companion Species Manifesto (which grew out of the Cyborg Manifesto).  Haraway analyzes various meetings of humans and animals, from the relationship of a zookeeper with his/her animals, to cloning animals for scientific purposes, to her personal interactions with her dogs in the agility ring, to the raising of livestock for food.  Perhaps most important for understanding Haraway's theories, however, is section II:  it illuminates how Haraway grew into the cyborg and companion species manifestos, by discussing her relationship with her father.  Here we find out that her father had been paralyzed from tuberculosis as a child, and so grew up using crutches as an extension of his body; the family never saw the crutches as external devices; they were a part of him, of who he was.  She explores how these webbed interactions, these kinships, make new categories and unmake others; citing Mary Pratt, she calls these interactions contact zones and situates them both historically, socially, and politically.  For Haraway, there is never an individual; it is always an individual-in-context, a context that includes the entire web of life and the constantly shifting relations of all species in a dance of co-creation.

Brooke, Robert.  "Ethnographic Practice as a Means of Invention," Voices and Visions:  Refiguring Ethnography in Composition.  Kirklighter, Vincent, Moxley, eds.  Portsmouth: Boyton/Cook, 1997. 11-23.

Brooke argues that ethnography is politically and historically situated, and therefore no ethnographer's findings can ever be "objective."  He addresses issues of representation and power -- who is representing whom and for whom?  He asks us to consider where the categories we study come from and how they change as we write.  What are the possibilities of seeing something as meaningful when we must consider how we locate ourselves when we write?  Brooke states that, "because science cannot be neutral, the politics of the researcher must be explicit."  After analyzing some of his classroom observations and what he wrote, he then discusses the significant changes a publisher required of his work, and asks us to consider what we surrender in order to meet the needs of our audience(s).  Most significantly, Brooke notes how, as a young researcher, he saw what he had been trained to see.  Now being aware of that training, he asks that we consider how we approach our subjects and our classrooms, if we see them one way and not another. 

Rhetoric of the Mind

The blogging cat is back on my lap, so I guess it's time to blog. 

Jess pretty much summed up my reaction to this week's readings/viewings.  They also nicely fit in with a session I attended at Cs talking about multimodal learning in FYC.  Alexander's article does echo much of Gee's work and I think  reintroduces the concept of play in the classroom.  No one takes issue with children playing; in fact, most primary school classes are designed around daily activities that are "fun" for the students.  They can "play" at being different people, taking on different roles in the classroom.  I learned all about good and evil and racism and questions about race/identity issues through my model horse battles with my childhood best friend.  The elaborate back stories and ongoing duals we "wrote" -- albeit verbally and in our minds -- were very similar to what players experience in WOW or other MMORPGs. 

One interesting question Alexander brought up is one I can answer:  he asks, "whether the game designers are consciously inculcating particular values in their game designs, or if their narratives (such as storylines involving race conflicts) arise out of a political unconscious" (52).  At least in the professional world of game design, the answer is absolutely a "yes" -- on both accounts.  My cousin designed the number one selling PS3 game last year.  While he admits that his focus on values became much more of a conscious effort once his children were born (they're 2 and 4 now), he said many times he'd be partway through a design and suddenly realize a political point he had unintentionally built into it. 

Alexander also brings up (and fails to answer) two other key questions about online gaming and the Internet in general:  "What, exactly, is extended from one 'world' to the next, and is the 'real world' perhaps its own extension of the 'virtual world'?  More specifically, and critically, whose 'worlds' are we talking about, in terms of both the 'real' and the 'virtual'" (58)?  Since this nicely ties into my Cs presentation, I have to ask, is there really any way to separate our experiences in these worlds?  Are experiences any less "authentic" in a virtual realm?  Certainly I don't believe so.  Vivian Sobchack states that since the Internet is “[a]ll surface, electronic space cannot be inhabited by any body that is not also an electronic body” (Carnal Thoughts 159), so in order to participate in online worlds, we have to create an electronic self.  But in keeping with phenomenology (and paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty), we can't think of a space without existing in it -- without some part of our selves being in that space.

 

Selfe's literacy narratives project also reminded me of the multimodal learning in FYC session at Cs.  One lady presented on the videos she has her FYC students do for their final project -- in place of a final paper.  These videos are 2-5 minutes long and can be about anything.  She stated that her students had a lot of fun and became much more aware of visual rhetoric; in fact, the project had received so much attention that now, at the end of each semester, they hold a public viewing and the entire school administration shows up.  However, I didn't see a lot of the reflective literacy in her examples that Selfe highlights.  One of these videos was just the camera following a guy running sideways and flapping his arms about; he ran across campus, into a dorm, into the elevator, got out of the elevator and ran past other students, then it cut to a shot of the dorm exterior where you could see the guy through the windows and he ran out of side, and then through 3 stories of windows, he falls, head over feet, to the first floor, then we see him run out the door, still flapping arms and running sideways, out of the shot.  What is the purpose of such a video?  The instructor was particularly proud of it and how the students used a dummy for the fall, but she seemed more impressed by the videography than any meaning the piece may have had.  I think I would consider such a project, but if it was going to be the final work of the semester, I would have the students include a written rhetorical analysis of the piece

.

So, do I side with Hesse or with Selfe?  Selfe, for the most part, but since I am teaching Technical and Professional Writing (I inform the students on the first day that it is Technical and Professional Communication, and that there's going to be much more than just writing involved), the need to focus on certain forms of writing is essential.  Interestingly, Julie Meloni does not teach her 402 students anything about web design, because she feels like they'll mostly be writing memos, lab reports, etc., and web design and visual design will be taken care of by experts in those fields.  If the students end up working for large corporations, that's pretty much how it will be.  However, my first permanent job out of college was for a small office design firm, and I quickly went from executive secretary to Novell network manager, and then to migrating their ancient accounting system into a integrated software package that began with the proposal, through design, electrical, delivery, setup, and the accounting.  And so far, my students have agreed that learning basic web design (if it's only google sites) is beneficial, because that's one more skill they have that might help them get a job or move up the ladder. 

I really liked Selfe's emphasis on writing being one rhetorical tool and that "'writing is not simply one way of knowing' but rather 'the way'" (609).  In 402 we deal with the CRAP principles throughout the semester (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity), because corporate newsletters and write-ups from science experiments or even building plans always have photos and/or graphs imbedded in the text, so we consider how to best present text and graphics to "sell" the project or findings.  Students quickly see the differences in resumes with borders versus those without -- anything that brings a visual element to the text is more likely to be memorable.   And I then have them extend those principles beyond tech writing to other visuals, such as this photo of my cousin taken by her husband:

The students can immediately see the CRAP principles at work, and how important they are to all visual design. 

I think incorporating other media into rhet/comp classrooms is essential.  In my 101 classes, I use the adbusters website to show students how powerful rhetoric can be -- a simple picture can say far more about our society and our values than a 1,000 word essay.

  

The Interdependent Self

This week I'm writing my post in Blogger, instead of Word, just out of curiosity -- I want to see my comfort level with the different environments. And I'll warn you -- I'm going to be all over the place in this post, because the articles brought up a number of different issues for me.

"It is a miracle that curiosity survived a formal education."
 -- Einstein

First, I'm going to start with rebuttals to two arguments Ong made.  On page 52, he states that "[w]e know that formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing, and so made a permanent part of its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible."  This is the Western notion that ancient Greece is where it all began.  The Phoenecian and Semetic alphabets preceded the Greek alphabet by several centuries, and arguments can be made that the first alphabet was created in Egypt as far back as 1800 BCE (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/521235.stm).  Since we can't fully translate these other alphabets, we have no way of knowing that they didn't have "formal logic."  But if Ong's statement that the culture "interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing," we have no reason to think that these older cultures didn't have logic.

Second, on page 54, he discusses how the "illiterates" in Lurias's study struggled with self-analysis.  "Self-analysis requires a certain demolition of situational thinking.  It calls for isolation of the self, around which the entire lived world swirls for each individual person, removal of the center of every situation from that situation enough to allow the center, the self, to be examined and described."  This is, once again, looking at definitions through a Western lens.  I would argue that "the center, the self" can certainly be analyzed and described within the context of the situation (especially since we can never be out of a context), but it is a different form of analysis and is expressed in different ways from traditional Western expectations.  If you ask an indigenous person a Western-centered question, of course the person is not going to provide a Western answer.  But if you were to rephrase it into that person's cultural traditions, you would get a "valid" answer.  Case in point: in my non-western rhetorics course I took, my professor had spent years studying Chinese rhetoric.  When I asked her if the I Ching could be considered rhetoric, she said no way.  But with some research, I was able to prove that this "book of mysticism" had actually been the most powerful rhetorical tool for the Chinese for thousands of years.  As I mentioned in class, Chinese leaders would actually consult the I Ching before making major political decisions such as going to war or marrying a daughter off to another clan to avoid future battles.  So the book was absolutely a rhetorical tool, but it was used in a manner foreign to Western tradition.  

One quote I really like in Ong's article was that "[o]ral folk assess intelligence not as extrapolated from contrived textbook quizzes but at situated in operational contexts" (55).  This is very much the American Indian belief that you cannot separate yourself from the land; once you do that, you are headed on a path of destruction. Or as Monroe mentioned in "Plateau Indian Ways with Words," "the Plateau Indian self is also a relational, interdependent self, a construct that also manifests in many ways, often simultaneously with the independent self" (w324).  There is an "independent" self but it is always connected to the social; it is interdependent.  What I took from Monroe's article was a clear definition of my philosophy of self, and I'm definitely a holistic thinker.  But what also intrigues me is that my brother is not; we are definitely yin and yang.  His life, as a Naval commander, prosecuting attorney, and a police officer, is all about right and wrong; there is no in-between.  For me, there is only in-between.  We both have the same blood quantum, yet I identify AI and he identifies white.  And our self-identities showed in school as well:  I always listened to the teacher and didn't speak out-of-turn (although I was taught to look at the teacher so that she or he would know I was paying attention); my brother was argumentative, and while he would take his disagreements with what another student said "outside," it was an absolute "I'm right and you're wrong" attitude that several times resulted in physical violence.

Both articles also answered a question I posted on FB yesterday: how could a student produce such a beautiful resume and have such an incredibly wordy cover letter?  Re-reading her letter in light of oral culture, I can see that she was writing exactly how she would speak, and she did repeat herself several times and included information that wasn't pertinent to a cover letter, but information that would come up in conversation.  So now, my job is to explain "the values [a cover letter] embodies" (w340) without engaging in "rhetorical imperialism."  Any suggestions?




P. S. In case you were wondering, I prefer Word because it checks grammar.  This editor didn't catch when I typed "rhetoric" instead of "rhetorical."

Mixed (I)dentities

Walled In or Walled Out?

There were a number of things I really liked in both readings this week.  Both articles deal with the concept of points of view and that we can see different things in the same situation simply by shifting our perspective.  I was immediately reminded of a couple of readings from a course in ethnography I took a few years ago.  Robert Brooke, in an article about an ethnographic study he did, asked, "who would I become, as teacher and writer and member of the classroom community I had been in, if I explained what I had seen one way rather than another?"  Similarly, in her essay, Ethnography and the Problem of the "Other," Patricia Sullivan asks, "how can we conceive and reflect the "other," the not-us, in the process of inquiry such that we convey otherness in its own terms?"  We have to learn about these other cultures in order to start to see from their perspectives.  I think Swearingen's and Mao's article nicely summed up traditional Western issues with Chinese (and Asian) rhetoric, although I'm not sure if they really stated flat-out (pun intended) that all the allusions made in Chinese rhetoric are the writers displaying their knowledge of the subject, and since there is no private ownership of material, there is no plagiarism, so using direct quotes without citations is standard practice.  Imagine how difficult it must be for Chinese American students to have to learn our academic English, when their culture talks "around" a subject rather than addressing it directly. 

What I really liked about the interview with Gloria Anzaldua was her focus on identity and that there are many different traditions within each of us.  "I cannot disown the white tradition, the Euro-American  tradition, any more than I can disown the Mexican, the Latino or the Native, because they are all in me" (52).  Perhaps this comment resonates with me because in a mere two generations, my family went from being American Indian to being white; of course, as the colonized people, assimilation was far more likely to guarantee survival than trying to retain the old traditions.  And the desire to fit in is certainly seductive (I love her use of that term), but I really like that she emphasizes that we can't ever disown parts of our cultures because they are a part of ourselves. 

I think Anzaldua's focus on changing and shaping our identities is a key point to discuss with our students.  The realization that, oh, this isn't the only way to write and the person I've always been can change, that "if you see that shed and that sky and that sea and all that happens in it from this other angle, then you will see something else.  You can recreate reality" (67) is a very powerful one for students (and everyone else).  It is also why I love Ursula LeGuin's work so much, because it is always dealing with issues of identity and seeing the same situation from different perspectives.  Since I read it in a science fiction literature class my freshman year of college, The Dispossessed has changed my perspective on so many issues.  It opens with this description of a wall around a landing platform for space ships:

Like all walls, it was ambiguous, two-faced.  What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on…[t]he wall shut in… the rest of the universe.  It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres:  the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

Prior to reading that novel, there were a lot of cultural walls in my life that I had never recognized and therefore never questioned.  Now I'm constantly seeing them and (usually) jumping on top of them to see what it looks like from the other side, and doing my best to rewrite the culture surrounding the walls.

Further reading:

Brooke, Robert. “Ethnographic practice as a means of invention” in Voices and

Visions: Refiguring Ethnography in Composition, Cristina Kirklighter, Cloe Vincent, &

Joseph Moxley, Eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997.

Sullivan, Patricia.  "Ethnography and the Problem of the 'Other'," Ethics & Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy, Mortensen, P and Kirsch, G Eds.  IL: NCTE, 1996. 

Are there really any clear boundaries?

"Understanding is always relative to the whole grid or map" (Gee 32).

Both articles this week really focused on Discourses and the intersection of various Discourses in the classroom.  While Gee's article defined Discourses (and discourses), and explained how we use them to define ourselves, Monroe's article really brought to light the values of various discourse communities and how easily those values can be misinterpreted in the classroom. While I had been aware of the various "dialogues" many African American students have in class conversations, no one had actually spelled out for me why these students acted in specific ways, and Monroe's explanation of putting oneself on Front Street really outlined it.  The same Black student poet I mentioned last week used every one of the behaviors Monroe outlined, including all the joking going on in his "personal" (it wasn't) narrative.  I just wish I knew then what I know now, because I definitely would have been able to respond to his actions much better.  The UM/Detroit study showed that the students (on both sides) were conversing with a group identity rather than their personal identities, which makes sense since they didn't know one another.  Monroe states that, "interactants work most consistently from their group identities, defined by both race and gender" in email conversations (43).  I immediately thought of the people I've met through Twitter and how they convey themselves online.  Last spring I did a discourse analysis of one specific Tweeter (@academicdave) and found that nearly all of his tweets fell into one (or more) of three categories:  academia, social commentary, and personal.  However, unlike the approach of the college tutors in Monroe's study, and (unfortunately) unlike so many social networking users, @academicdave always treated his tweets as public conversation; it was very apparent that he knew that anyone could be reading his tweets, so even the personal ones tended to be about a good run, or watching Top Chef.  But what really interested me about the Detroit students is that they treated email as public, even though it was only being sent to one specific person.  From that aspect, I think their home Discourses may have actually better prepared them for online writing than the college students who viewed the communications as private.  Any thoughts on that?

Two points in Gee's article really struck me, one of which is the quote at the top of this posting, about contextualizing understanding.  I mentioned in class that I was born extremely nearsighted, and that wasn't discovered until I was five.  But unless there is something about blood quantum and the way one relates to the world, I would have to say that those first five years shaped my view of the world very much as Gee describes Discourses placed on a map always being relative to all the other countries on the map (32).  Because I was so nearsighted, there were no distinct boundaries between objects (including people); I take off my glasses now and I see vague fuzzy grey lines on the screen, the monitor's black border blends into the white desk, which blends into the carpet, which blends into the sleeping cat.  They are all components in one continuous whole; there are no individual items.  The second point, which marries with the first, is "which comes first, recognition work or Discourses?  Neither.  They are reflexively related, such that each creates the other" (29).  This concept of Discourses creating each other is very similar to Donna Haraway’s concept of cyborgs: she stresses that we cannot separate ourselves from the technologies and machines that we create.  Because we make them, they are a part of us, and we are a part of them.  She furthers this idea with her concept of companion species, of which she says cyborgs are a part (Haraway 299).  “Companion species take shape in interaction.  They more than change each other; they co-constitute each other, at least partly” (307).  I think these are important points to discuss with students, so that they can start to see how we change through the process of relating both in and out of the classroom, and also to start to see that they have the power to change me as much as I have the power to change them.

Additional reading:

Haraway, Donna J.  The Haraway Reader.  New York:  Routledge.  2004.

What Versus Why, Said the Cat

(I'm going to play a bit today, mostly because I'm trying to write this blog with one cat insisting he sit on my lap and lick my fingers.)

I will vote with Pearce and argue that Gee is wrong when he states that technology is neutral.  Since we cannot separate our minds from our bodies and the "logical" portions of our mind from the emotional, the concept of "objectivity" is a fiction.  Technologies are therefore created by subjective people, with a specific use in mind.  The result may be adapted to unforeseen uses (like satellites now being used for cell phones in the public sphere, instead of remaining strictly under government control), but the technology was created for a specific, subjective purpose.  Gee's notion of neutrality is based on the concept of, "it is how we use them that matters."  What he overlooks, though, is that technologies have very specific limitations, so we can't necessarily adapt any given technology to any given use.  I can't print out this blog from my microwave.  Just as no pedagogy can be neutral, no technology can be neutral.  However, what I do really like about Gee's essay is his analysis of the types of learning and cognitive thinking that occur in the technologies of video games. 

(Successfully booted the cat onto the return, thanks to the birds outside.) 

This point  came up in Chris Ritter's and Shawn Lamebull's colloquium last week.  One literature professor in the audience could not understand how the learning principles and issues of sex, race, and gender in video games could be compared -- in nearly any way -- to the literacy involved in reading a book.  As Monroe noted, "[g]enres from the entertainment domain employ different rhetorics of information that require complex literate behavior" (103) and Gee demonstrated with the example about Brian playing Pikmin:  the boy "was aware that the changes signaled that he needed to rethink some of his strategies, as well as his relationship with the game" (27).  How many six year old kids rethink their strategies of reading and relationship to a narrative in a book?  I'm bringing this up because most of our students have grown up playing video games, and analyzing the learning strategies and the rules of the games can, I believe, help us find a "way in" to academic discourse for those children whose home discourses are at odds with what is expected of them in school. 

In my "remedial" ( I hate that word) writing course that I taught in California, I had a young black man that had a terrific sense of humor, he could tell stories to the class, he was great at interjecting some satirical comment while I or anyone else was speaking (and then we'd all be laughing), but he really struggled to write.  Following the structure for that course, the students read from a text that was composed of personal narratives written by students from other cultures who were struggling with American society and the American school system.  One of the first big assignments was a personal narrative, and while this student had a great story to tell, his sentence structure and punctuation were, in the "traditional" academic sense, atrocious.  I had him work with a tutor in the writing lab each week, in addition to the one class our the entire class spent working with tutors every week.  His writing improved a bit, but his persuasive and expository essays were still poorly structured.  He tried very hard, but having grown up in a very oral culture, as with some of the examples we reviewed in class last week, structuring what he was saying was very difficult.  But as an extra-credit assignment, he had co-written (with another "poor" writer) a poem that was beautifully done.  Since it just had line breaks and no punctuation, there were only minor spelling errors, and he was able to communicate exactly what he wanted.  He turned in another poem that was again, beautifully written, and I knew that I had a very talented poet on my hands.  When I submitted his portfolio for review, I had him include the two poems because I knew the panel of teachers would immediately fail him if it wasn't made obvious that he was an excellent writer, just not a "standard" writer.

(The cat is back and now his front paws and his head are on my left forearm.)

In the same course I had a Chinese girl who wrote beautiful essays, but in the traditional Chinese way:  her points were never stated outright and the essay would sort of spiral it's way around what we wanted to say.  Being familiar with that style allowed me to appreciate her writing and compliment her on it, while also showing her how the Academy would want her to structure her essays.  The textbook also helped with these issues, because the authors complained about the same things: not understanding how they could write well enough to earn A's in their country, and then not even get into FYC here. 

(Just booted the cat.  Again.)

What I really liked about Monroe's article was the discussion of what-questions versus why-questions, and the parallels she draws between the why-questions and different cultures, as well as the individual computer usage versus family computer usage.  My personal experience with students and a Mexican boyfriend completely align with her generalizations (always aware of there being exceptions)

(the cat came back)

about different cultural literacies at home, but I'd never broken it down into "what" versus "why."   I used to frustrate my mother with why-questions because I always had to find another why (as a result, I was frequently sent outside to play, or off to read a book, so that she could have some time free of a pestering child).  But so many of my friends from other cultures did not question; they simply accepted, and so for them, not only did many of them struggle with written academic English, they also never saw the ideologies at work in their lives, which meant they simply accepted the cards they were dealt without realizing they could discard some and hope for a better hand. 

("But WHY do you have to boot me to type?" asked the cat.  "WHY can't you take a hint and let me get my work done?" I replied.  "Because," the cat said, "you're the one that's always singing, 'But the cat came back, the very next day. They thought he was a goner, but the cat came back. He just couldn't stay awayyyyyyy'")