I’m not really paranoid about what my handwriting says about me so much as I am interested in the question of digital literacy. That’s not a conceptual jump, I promise. It’s just that in thinking about digital literacy, which I do on a daily basis, I’ve been thinking a lot about digitality in its other sense - of digits. The fingers. Attached to the hand. Attached to an arm attached to a whole body. Every time I think about my own relationship to literacy, digital or otherwise, it seems I’m always coming back to the body, my body, and how my own literacies are very much physical experiences of reading, writing, texts, and tools. Since I’ve just assigned my Web writing students the task of writing a digital literacy narrative, I figure it’s high time I write my own and my own starts with physical discomfort and bodily discipline and ends with the same. Somewhere in between, I hope to tease out some ideas about the way literacy - digital or old-fashioned - is always an embodied practice with some interesting implications for our posthuman present and future.

I don’t remember them (them being my teachers and parents) noticing that I wrote “wrong” until I was in the third grade. Perhaps they did - I should ask my Mom. But in the third grade, the year we learned to write script, the fact that I’d been writing wrong for several years came back to slap me in the face pretty hard. I’m not sure how it came to anyone’s attention, but I’m thinking it must’ve been related to the cursive lessons that were part of the third grade curriculum in those days at my elementary school. Memory’s a tricky thing and lots of the details have become blurry in the 34 years that have elapsed since I was 9 years old, but some things still do stand out, more as images or impressions, but I remember the cursive lessons, the lined paper, the worksheets and letter guides we traced before trying out the letters on our own. Two years of learning block lettering and here we had to learn a whole new way of writing. Whether it was my teacher - Mrs. Rollins, I believe - who alerted her or whether she just noticed it as I did homework, my mother realized that I held my pencil wrong. I have the vague impression that this was something she knew already, had had pointed out to her by a previous year’s teacher, but she had chosen, for whatever reason, not to deal with. Perhaps. Like I say, memory’s fuzzy.

It didn’t matter anyway. She noticed it now…then. (Whatever. Narrating the past can also get tricky.) I guess she figured that at this point in my writing life, as a budding cursive writer, I could no longer afford to play fast and loose with the physical rules and she took it upon herself to correct my error through a series of writing lessons focused on forcing my hand to conform to the proper way of holding a pencil. I remember becoming increasingly distraught, angry, tearful. I definitely cried a lot, so much that she finally gave up and my mother is not one to give up easily. I went back to (well, I never left it really) my way of holding my writing instrument and, to this day, I hold my pen wrong.

The question is, what is wrong and why does it matter? Apparently, one is supposed to hold a pen or pencil between the thumb and index fingers, with the instrument resting lightly on the inside of the middle finger, as illustrated in this lovely image I found through the magic of Google image search (accompanied, notice, by stern advice about the importance of teaching kids to hold a pencil “properly” and the adverse consequences of a failure to do so). I held - hold - my pencil with my index and middle finger both, with the instrument resting on the first knuckle of my ring finger. That middle finger - the one I would have given to my mother during those writing lessons had I known what that hand signal meant at the time - apparently increased the pressure on the pencil, causing it to press harder on the poor, benighted ring finger while also forcing the index finger to contract further up the pen. Instead of a nice, relaxed, easy guide, my hand gripped the pencil hard (I’m number five in the incorrect section of this chart).

I certainly understand that there is a reason why kids should be taught to hold a pencil a certain way. If one does so, apparently, it really does make writing more physically comfortable and less a conscious action. Maybe I have sentenced myself to a lifetime of discomfort through my inability to learn this basic literacy skill. But at the time of the great pencil battle between my mother and me, all I could think was that I was being punished and a power that I thought I had successfully acquired, the ability to write, was quite literally slipping out of my grasp. Try as I might, I just could not write when I held the pencil the way my mother so desperately wanted me to. I remember feeling stupid and incompetent. To make matters worse, my mother had the most beautiful cursive handwriting I had - have - ever seen. It’s perfect. It’s even more perfect than those sample worksheets Mrs. Rollins gave us in class. When I tried to hold the pencil the way she said, the way she did, I couldn’t even form basic block letters, much less cursive script. At least when I held it my way I stood a chance. My cursive might never be as beautiful as hers, but at least I could do it. I can be willful and stubborn and, in this battle, I held my ground. It might be wrong, but I was going to hold my pencil my way and no one was going to make me do otherwise.

So I held my pencil wrong, but at a certain point it stopped mattering so much. That point probably came in the very early 90s when I started writing directly on a word processor and then a computer. I was late to the computer table, which I now find extremely ironic considering my current status as a computers and writing specialist. Actually, there may a lot of irony there from a lot of different angles. How did I get from being completely inept at using the tools and tech of writing to this point? Tracing that path highlights the relationship between my hands and the tools they wield in an interesting way. Obviously, I mastered cursive in spite of my disobedient hand and breezed along to the eleventh grade, at which point I learned a new way to write: typing. I took a typing course that year mainly to acquire a skill everyone said was a good and practical one. This was 1984, the year Apple released the Macintosh with that mesmerizing Super Bowl commercial, but I wasn’t interested in computers. I was interested in Prince, but that’s another narrative altogether. I may not have been thinking about computers, but the typing class I took was, in fact, preparing me for a future in which I could break free from shackles of handwriting and its attendant pain and discomfort (for I would be lying if I said that my mother wasn’t right about the physical consequences of holding the pencil wrong - it did and does always hurt when I have to write by hand for any length of time).

Typing class, however, brought its own physical punishments and disciplinary regimen thanks to the fact that I got stuck in old Mrs. Cole’s class instead of the younger and more enlightened business teacher’s section. Mrs. Cole was old school and in her class there would be no fancy electronic typewriter. No. Manuals. I learned to type on a manual typewriter. In 1984. It’s kind of unbelievable to me still since I knew that manual typewriters had long since gone the way of the dodo. My father’s law office was stocked with smoothly efficient electric typewriters, no manual in sight. It’s entirely possible that my mother is to blame for this, too, since she was pretty notorious for going over to my school and insisting that I be put in the hardest teachers’ classes. And it would be in keeping with her M.O. for teaching her kids new skills. Just the year prior she had taught me to drive in her VW convertible, insisting that I could not drive unless I learned to drive a manual transmission. The car I got for my 16th birthday was a stick shift. But back to Mrs. Cole’s class. Manual typewriter keyboards require physical strength to operate. No gentle tapping as I’m doing now on the sensitive keypad of my Macbook Pro. No, you had to strike the keys of those old machines with a good deal of force in order to get them to leave their inky imprint on the typing paper. You had to manipulate a lever on the side of the roller to move to the next line. They were these big, black, metal machines and I felt somewhat like a factory worker, making my repetitive motions on the assembly line.When I tried my new skills on the electric typewriter we had at home, I was amazed at how much easier it was.

My typing skills were probably average, at best, but they were good enough that I could begin to type some assignments and, in college, I used the communal typewriter we kept in a locked closet at the sorority house where I lived to type up my major papers for classes. I resisted the computer throughout my college career even as my peers slowly began to become computer literate by taking the basic computer science courses to satisfy their core “foreign language” requirement. The sorority house had a computer, but I figured it was best to leave that device to the treasurer who often hunched over it reviewing the spreadsheets that told her who had not paid her housebill that month.

I’m not sure why I steered so clear of computers for so long, but I managed to get all the way through college and the first year of my master’s program at NYU without using one. I did buy a word processor that was a kind of midway point between an electric typewriter and a computer as it stored the text I typed into it to a disc and had a small screen that enabled easy formatting and corrections (it looked kind of like this). When I realized that I wanted to stay on in NYC after finishing my degree, I found the job that would finally force me to become a computer user and that would bring yet another physical writing challenge.

My job as an administrative assistant for a tiny research firm required me to use several computer programs and I’d never even sat down at a computer before. As I have a tendency to do, I just threw myself into learning things hands-on. I learn by doing, so I did. It wasn’t easy, though, since the word processing program we used was DOS-based and I didn’t know all the stupid commands. My boss, mistakenly thinking I was just a slow typist and not simply ignorant of the program, insisted that I improve my typing skills and gave me a book of exercises to increase my keying speed. I figured that, even though that wasn’t really the problem, it certainly couldn’t hurt to be a faster typist, so I did the exercises and, once I figured out how to use the damn Xywrite program, was thrilled at my speed and prowess at the keyboard. I worked there for over five years, moving up to become director of research, but because it was such a small company, I always did a ton of writing and data entry myself and, over the years, I suffered from terrible tendinitis in my wrists from all that typing. I’d come full circle. I could write with felicity, but I suffered bodily pain in the process. My literacy - my ability to write, to communicate - came at a cost. My fingers and hands always forced into unnatural acts against which they rebelled.

These days, for some reason, I don’t suffer from the tendinitis anymore. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I use a laptop and my hands rest more naturally and comfortably on it as I type or some other factor. Instead, I have what I call “mouse arm.” My right hand hurts from my hand to my shoulder, my thumb contracting inward as though I’m holding my mouse even when I’m not, my hand cramping up into a claw and sending a dull pain shooting up my arm and into the right side of my neck. It’s not anything horrible, more a constant humming through my arm than anything. Sometimes, after a particularly long day at the computer, it becomes sharper, but I really have gotten good at ignoring it most of the time. Kind of like I got good at ignoring the pain in that ring finger after handwriting a long essay for school. Pain just comes with the territory of writing for me.

I don’t see this as a bad thing. In fact, the more I think about it (and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately), the more I realize that it’s critical to remember the relationship between the physical body and reading and writing. Literacy is an embodied practice - we discipline our bodies into it and it disciplines us into certain cultural practices and ways of knowing and those practices and knowledge, in turn, discipline our bodies in various ways (see pretty much all of Foucault’s oeuvre). The tools of literacy, our technologies of reading and writing, are not just material themselves, but have material effects. Anyone who’s ever felt eyestrain after a particularly long reading session knows this. But what does this mean in a larger sense and in thinking about the digital/new media literacy that I’m always talking about with my writing students. What kinds of physical practices and embodied knowledge are the newest tools creating?

I’m not sure I have some grand answer for that yet, but I can think about it in relation to my own experience and perhaps that’s a starting point. I know that when I write, it is and always has been a physical act that I have had to discipline my body into, just as I do when I run or swim or take a horse over a jump. In fact, my experience as an equestrian may be revealing here as it similarly places me in a symbiotic relationship with another object (a living one in that case) in order to achieve a particular goal. I have to use my body in specific and highly prescribed ways to get the horse to do what I want and need it to do. If I make a wrong physical movement, I can send the wrong signal and end up somewhere I don’t want to be. Same with writing - one wrong keystroke and the message gets messed up (especially when writing computer code). McLuhan viewed media as “extensions of man.” Following that line of thought, I’d argue it’s a mistake to view our tools as separate and distinct from ourselves. We extend ourselves as humans through our tools and technologies and they become part of who we are. Our bodies are intertwined with our tools and we forget that at our own peril. So I think that is what I would add to the concept of digital or 21st century literacies - that we need to be aware of the embodied practices enabled and constrained by new technologies. The pain, as well as the pleasure, of the text.

in thinking about my own writing and my guilt over not updating my blog “enough” (whatever enough means in blogging in the first place). In fact, when I really look at my writing from a broad perspective, I am, of course, writing everyday and putting that writing out there as part of a conversation. In light of all the recent debate about reading and writing in the new media age, I’ve been thinking about how much reading and writing the average person does on a daily basis and, it seems to me (absent any quantifiable data here, only observation and anecdote) that most of us are probably reading and writing as much, if not way more, than we ever did.

To use myself as an example here, despite the fact that I haven’t updated my blog since June, I’ve been writing extensively everyday for the past couple of months. Not just “formal” writing like the article proposal I just submitted or the recommendation letter I just knocked out for a former student. No, I wrote all summer long in the form of extensive comments on my summer school students’ work. In fact, I’ve been thinking that if I actually compiled those comments, they’d form something very much like a scholarly article, dealing as they do with the questions and topics we were pursuing in our class discussions and in the students’ individual projects. As do most teachers, I was pushing them to think further, suggesting new avenues of research, posing theoretical questions, analyzing their arguments and the effectiveness of their texts. The written record of all this would add up to dozens of pages of text were I to compile it.

In fact, that writing is part of my writing output, but it isn’t counted as such for a number of reasons. The main reason, of course, is that the student-teacher relationship is confidential to a certain extent. I can’t just publish a record of these conversations that took place within the confines of our online class space (Blackboard, <emma>, etc.), at least not without jumping through a lot of legal hoops starting with getting IRB approval, written permissions from individual students, etc. But what are the other reasons? Is it that we think of the writing that goes on in the classroom not as valuable or significant as the writing we do in pursuit of our research agendas? Isn’t there supposed to be a recursive relationship between research and teaching in the academy? We conduct research and bring that into the classroom in order to disseminate new ideas and knowledge. Most of us who take our teaching seriously are constantly researching, even for courses we’ve taught multiple times, in order to teach effectively and to keep pace with developments in our field.

My daily scans of the technology headlines from a variety of sources are part of my classroom work. I tweet links to articles that I think are relevant and useful for students in my classes and bookmark online resources on Delicious to add to my “bibliography” of resources and research. Those tweets, too, are part of my writing output, short as they are. I have to find a way to frame each link for my followers so that they see its subject matter and relevance to them, not an easy task when you’ve got such an extreme character limit as Twitter imposes. I really do think Twitter may be one of the best ways to develop certain writing skills, but that’s another topic altogether, so I won’t digress too much here on that.

The fact is, writing and reading are changing. That’s not in dispute even though the how and why certainly are. So why shouldn’t our notions of what counts for writing productivity change, too? When I was in college, professors wrote comments in the margins of the hard copies of papers we turned in. Limited by space, those comments were pretty brief and we didn’t really engage in extended written exchanges with our instructors the way students do now through online writing spaces like class blogs, e-mail, CMS discussion forums, etc. So I guess it made sense to think of a scholar’s written output as solely what they wrote formally for publication. But if many instructors are like me now (and I know they are), they write constantly, often in exchanges with students, but also with their peers and colleagues on discussion boards, listservs, and blogs. I think the new tool, Anthologize, that humanities scholars participating in the “One Week, One Tool” workshop at GMU developed, is an indicator that we will be viewing academic blogging as a legitimate and countable writing activity sooner rather than later. And who knows what tools we will develop to compile or incorporate things we write in other new media spaces like discussion forums, listservs, and social media spaces into publishable and “legitimized” forms.

As Clay Shirky points out in this WSJ op-ed and elsewhere, the early days of print technology also produced a surplus of texts, most of which were, as we might call them today, crap. We currently think of much online textual production as crap and a lot of it is. Those who tweet trivially about what they had for lunch are certainly not contributing anything of significance to the larger body of human knowledge. However, that does not mean that Twitter itself is useless anymore than saying that just because garbage is published in book form the form of the book is garbage. So when scholars use new media tools and spaces for writing that is significant to their work as researchers and teachers, that writing also has value and, hopefully, will become more and more legitimized and recognized and count as part of the body of that scholar’s work. I don’t know which new media genres and forms will ultimately win in the Darwinian struggle for legitimacy, but I’m just going to keep writing in all of them (even if only intermittently in some cases - hello, my poor, neglected blog!) and just see what comes out in the wash. The important thing is that we’re writing - in many places and spaces. It’s a lot of chatter to wade through, but I think I’d rather have too many ideas than too few. Might make it harder and it might make us feel stupid sometimes like poor old Nicholas Carr but, following Shirky, I think surplus is better than scarcity.

this message came across the listserv during Computers and Writing 2010 where I was giving a presentation that really had a great deal to do with performance and social media composition as an interactive performance in which the rhetorical canon of delivery is foregrounded and, in turn, creates an oscillation between what Richard Lanham calls AT and THROUGH vision (see Economics of Attention), or what Jay Bolter and Diane Gromola frame as reflection vs. transparency in their Windows and Mirrors. I used a couple of examples - a spring semester Web Writing student’s Twitter storytelling experiment and my friend Hayden Black’s use of Twitter/Facebook to compose what will be soon turned into an iBook for the iPad and iPhone devices - to explore the way this social media platform allows for the creation of texts that engage the audience with an immediacy that can have a significant impact on the compositional process for the writer. S/he can get instant feedback that can, as in the case of my student last semester, cause a writer to alter her/his composition even as it is unfolding. Ultimately, I connected this to the concept of performance and embodiment in a very brief and un-fleshed-out way by thinking about the way Judith Butler and Katherine Hayles emphasize that bodies are, in a sense, mediated texts that contain information. In Butler’s case, that information is created by performance - by the re-iteration of gendered norms that produce and naturalize gendered bodies. I then connected that to the “bodies” of work - the portfolios - that my writing students produce in order to suggest that these ports represent performances - compositional processes that result in mediated texts - and that social media could be integrated more fully into those bodies of work in order to highlight the process and performance of composition (including the failures that we might analogize to Butler’s abject and unauthorized bodies) and, thus, instantiate a more explicitly reflective rhetorical/compositional project.

So I think my C&W paper really is the foundation of something that I’d like to develop for the CCC Online special issue on performance. Obviously, I think it fits with the theme and I have the theoretical framework set up already. However, what I’m struggling with now is the form the text should take. I’d like it to be a more interactive Web text (as would the journal), but I’m just not sure how that might work. I was thinking about the stuff we discussed at the C&W workshop I attended coordinated by the wonderful editors of Kairos - Cheryl Ball, Douglas Eyman, Mike Edwards, and Madeleine Sorapure - on composing digital scholarship. They talked about the importance of having the design of the text enact the argument (something I’ve emphasized to my own students), so I really do feel like there needs to be an interactive and vividly performative aspect to this text. But I’m not really sure how to go about that in terms of what application or software platform will best enable that. I’ve certainly already got some clear visual metaphors I could use since I’m drawing so heavily on the mirrors and windows concept from Bolter and Gromola and the Prezi I created to go along with my paper at my panel consisted of a lot of images of mirrors and windows and windows as mirrors.

The due date for proposals is 6/15, so I guess I’ve got this coming week to come up with a textual design concept/idea so that I can provide a description of how this text will be mediated/presented. Thinking cap, time to work.

and think about my own writing and research while I’ve got an easier schedule. Not that that has been on hold, really, since I presented work at three conferences this spring in the midst of my teaching and writing certificate administrating. But I’m getting ready right now to head off to Computers and Writing, my favorite conference, which is being held this year at Purdue University. I am looking forward to being inspired, stimulated, challenged, and entertained by brilliant colleagues in the field, as I always am at C&W. And I’ve been writing and researching furiously for the past week, too, to get my presentation ready. Here’s a little taste of what I’ll be talking about:

Performance, of course, introduces physicality – embodiment – back into the rhetorical equation and, though I can’t really go into a lot of detail on the subject of emodiment here, I do want to gesture (pun intended) to it briefly. Virginia Skinner-Linnenberg calls compositionists to re-connect delivery to the rhetorical process from which she argues, following Welch, it has been detached, by reinstating the physical body in the writing classroom and making writing an embodied performance that is “more than simply moving a hand across paper (or typing at a keyboard)” (55-56). Though social media – and all computer-mediated – interactions may appear to also sublimate the physical body and materiality, as Katherine Hayles reminds us that “for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium” (13). Bolter and Grusin, similarly, point out that media are real, real objects in a real world. And, of course, Judith Butler has called on us to consider the way performative iteration and re-iteration work to constitute the material body (2). So when we compose – perform – our new media texts, we are always bringing embodiment (often of various kinds) into the process. In Windows and Mirrors, Bolter and Gromola criticize the notion that the act of writing “leaves [the] body behind” in favor of a disembodied abstract ideal self (168). Using the example of Gromola’s dynamic typeface, Excretia, in which characters morph and change on the computer screen, they argue that “we cannot leave our embodied selves entirely behind when we enter cyberspace in any of its forms” (169).

I’ll post the whole paper later as well as a link to the Prezi visual presentation. And I’ll be tweeting, FB’ing and blogging from (and certainly after as it all percolates in my brain) from C&W.

Well, my first reaction to last week’s month’s Supreme Court ruling which declared a ban on corporate political spending as an unconstitutional violation of free speech was outrage. However, I know that first reactions are not always to be trusted, especially when the issue is a complicated one with lots of legal, ethical, and moral angles, as this one certainly is. So, after my initial fury subsided, I’ve been trying to look at the majority opinion’s view with an objective eye in order to determine what I really think here. While this issue may not seem related to the topics I address on this blog (e.g., writing, narrative, technology), it does, in fact, intersect with one of my areas of interest as a scholar: posthuman theory. Since I am currently working on an essay that draws heavily on the work of such posthuman theorists as Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Chris Gray, and Judith Halberstam, among others, the question of who - or what - gets to be called a person is very much top-of-mind for me right now, so the Supreme Court’s ruling was actually one of those nice moments of scholarly serendipity for me.

So, who - or what - does get to be called a person and given all the rights and responsibilities thereunto appertaining? It was this question that first started nagging at me to rethink my gut response to the ruling. Posthuman theory has long posited a notion of subjectivity that allows for multiplicity and associative forms of consciousness, something that I have found to have exciting possibilities for reframing our idea of who/what counts as a subject in the eyes of society and the law. This is a crucial question, as anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with American history ought to know. A person, a subject, is granted certain rights. A 3/5 person, as slaves were once counted, is not granted the full rights and responsibilities of the legally authorized subject, which, at the time of the Civil War, was only the white male (and the propertied white male in most places). As we’ve seen with African-Americans, with women, with the ongoing struggle by GLBTQ persons to obtain full civil rights under the law, the question of who is legally authorized as a person is of the utmost importance.

Posthuman theory has been at the forefront of rethinking what constitutes a subject, a “person,” in our increasingly technologized society that is on the verge of being able to create things that we don’t currently have solid legal definitions for - such things as AI, robots, clones, disembodied consciouness, cyborgs of all types. What posthuman theory has been successful in doing is in showing how the long history of human beings’ relationship with technology proves that we have actually been posthuman for quite a long time. In recognizing that, in our culture at least, we are not purely biological, natural entities untainted by the unnatural products of our hands and imaginations (things like medicines, prosthetics, interfaces of all kinds with machines of all types), posthumanists have been able to construct a legal and ethical ground on which to base arguments for the civil rights and legal status for emergent and yet-to-be-thought-of “beings.”

The cybernetics movement in the 1940’s and 50’s, of whom Norbert Wiener is the figurehead, is a critical moment for much posthuman thought because of the emphasis that cybernetics placed on the notion of processual systems, viewing everything from computers to electrical systems to neural networks as being constituted and reconstituting through loops of informational feedback. Add in the workings of discourse as articulated by Foucault and his theoretical heirs, and you’ve got an argument that subjects and bodies

“emerge at nodes where bodies, bodies of discourse, and discourses of bodies intersect to foreclose any easy distinction between actor and stage, between sender/receiver, channel, code, message, context”(Halberstam and Livingston 2).

So certainly there is an argument to be made that subjects are, in a sense, collectives or at least emergent from multiplicities: processes, systems, networks, discourses. And there is also an argument to be made that collectives are potentially, in some instances, unified in purpose and intent enough to be considered singular entity (I mean, just look at the way we treat collective nouns in grammar - the subject-verb agreement issues with collective nouns are legions, take it from a writing teacher!).

Associations of individuals do have certain rights and, as a free speech purist in almost every dispute on the subject, I am loathe to limit the ability of anybody - or anybodies - to voice their views, no matter how different from mine, no matter how objectionable, distasteful, repellent. So, I think to myself now, how can I deny the free speech rights of corporate entities and other associations (e.g., labor unions, political nonprofit orgs, etc.)?

This is the question I’ve been turning over in my mind for the last several days and I have finally come to a position that, interestingly, brings me full circle to my initial anti-ruling position, but with a more considered argument based on reasoning and not just on my instinctive antipathy toward Big Corporate America. The key factor here, I think, is the notion of embodiment. It’s very easy to let posthumanism take one off on sci-fi-esque flights of fancy in which individual consciousnesses are uploaded (or downloaded, depending on your preference) into a computer network, liberated from the confines of the meat of the human body and - hallelujah! - become immortal. But thoughtful posthumanists have been very adamant that subjectivity is an embodied experience, no matter what form that body may take. There’s no mind that doesn’t have a materiality, no disembodied consciousness that exists outside lived, physical realities. In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles writes:

“The very theorists who most emphatically claim that the body is disappearing also operate within material and cultural circumstances that make the claim for the body’s disappearance seem plausible. The body’s dematerialization depends in complex and highly specific ways on the embodied circumstances that an ideology of dematerialization would obscure” (193)

She notes the way inscribing and incorporating practices mirror the mind/body split that has been embedded in Western philosophical thought since Descartes, but in fact, body and mind, inscription and incorporation, are connected and the abstraction - mind, the sign - emerges from a material instantiation, but becomes separated from that materiality in the transformation into a concept. It’s significant that Hayles uses the term incorporation to describe embodied practices and knowledge. That’s what this ruling is all about, right. Businesses are incorporated in order to become legally authorized “bodies,” collectives with the power to act in a unitary fashion (i.e., as an individual)  and with specific legal rights and privileges.

To be continued…

What struck me about Cohen’s editorial was his praise for Avatar’s much-heralded technological achievements. His point that the technology actually works in service of the story, that form and content are inextricably bound up and work together to advance the movie’s major themes, naturally appealed to me, as the form/content relationship is one that I deal with daily as a writing teacher and a specialist in rhet/comp/new media. What tools do we have in our arsenals for composing texts and how do we use those tools most effectively and wisely and consideredly for the stories we wish to tell? How do we ensure that form reinforces and reflects our content and how do we see to it that content makes the most of form? Composing a text isn’t just about choosing words to put on a page anymore, rather it’s about choosing a medium, a platform, an application. Composing texts in the digital age brings the issue of form to the forefront. Certainly there have always been questions of form for writers. Selecting a genre is about form. Experimental writers have played around form/content using the latest technology to do so for ages. Advances in technology inspire certain kinds of artists and they are the ones who push the envelope in ways that often lead to the development of new genres or in breakthroughs in narrative or poetic technique. And at certain moments, with certain texts, we see the power a new technology has for conveying messages. This is Cohen’s point about Avatar: that the technology, the form, in this movie works brilliantly in the service of the theme, which he identifies as a message about seeing - in this case, about seeing the “humanity” of the Other (here the 9 foot tall, blue-skinned alien Na’vi).

I think Cohen has a great point and I have to agree with him that the way Avatar so beautifully and seamlessly creates this fictional race of beings is truly one of its strengths. As I watched the film, the Na’vi were real to me, as real as the people sitting beside me in the darkened midtown Atlanta theater. Of course, movies (and novels and TV and many other narrative genres) have been bringing alien races and other nonexistent beings to life for a long time, but I think the Na’vi really are a step forward for fiction’s ability to make the unreal real. They seemed so real as I was watching the movie that it seemed unimaginable that they were not real, that they didn’t really exist. And when technology can make us believe, truly believe, that there are such beings, so different from ourselves in so many ways and yet so alike in others, then perhaps something has fundamentally changed for storytelling’s power for evoking empathy.

Empathy is, of course, one of the aspects of ourselves that stories helps build and strengthen. The ability to put ourselves in another’s place, to see our own emotions reflected in the struggles and triumphs of another, to feel someone else’s pain, to hurt for someone else - our fictions help us do these things and this ability is paramount to our progress as a species. When we can see another person’s humanity, understand that others feel the same things we feel, struggle with similar things that we do, rejoice in love and triumph like we do, then we have a much harder time doing them ill. Or so the story goes. But I do believe in that line of thinking and I do agree with all those who have seen literature’s (taking this term broadly to cover lots of narrative genres and media) power to help us learn to empathize and sympathize. And that’s Cohen’s point in a nutshell. Avatar succeeds because it makes us believe so fully and empathize so completely with the radically Other.

However, while I loved the experience of the movie and see its revolutionary use of technology as a good thing,  I was troubled (even as I watched the movie) by the simplistic-ness (as opposed to simplicity) of the basic story and the way it reinforces some negative ideas even as it seemingly turns the tables on us by making the humans the bad guys and the aliens the heroes. In a nutshell, my complaints are the very ones Brooks articulates so nicely. I agree with him that the movie trades in some imperialistic “White Man’s Burden” stereotypes in the way it uses the human protagonist as a messianic figure, without whom, the Na’vi would be annihilated. It also brings back the Noble Savage stereotype, a figure that decades of postcolonial theory has exposed as just as racist and damaging as any depiction of the abject and degraded tribesman, no matter how “noble” your intentions, Cameron.

My concern, my problem, with the Noble Savage stereotype and the way it is mobilized in Avatar, in particular, is largely that it potentially reinforces the nature/technology binary. However, one of the commenters on Brooks’s op-ed noted that the Na’vi plug themselves into a repository of information about their society and their planet via the interface of their neural tendrils and a special tree, thus the Na’vi are not illiterate or non-technological. Another poster writes:

The planet’s technology, in which inhabitants of every species take part, which proves superior to that of the invaders, and it is by mastering this alien technology that this human proves himself worthy to become one of these higher beings.

Both of those comments, among others, recognize (rightly, I believe) that technology and literacy are not necessarily “unnatural.” I’m not entirely convinced that something that arises out of evolutionary processes (which, presumably, the Na’vi’s cool plug-in head-tails did) can be correctly labeled a technology if we define it as an “art,” which the OED does, by the way. Art is artifice. Not natural. Man-made. An extension of man (hat-tip to Marshall McLuhan). But certainly we co-evolve with the technology we create, so, in a certain sense, technology does become part of our natural environment and I believe very strongly that reinforcing the dichotomy between nature and technology is naive, if not dangerous. But there’s no indication in Cameron’s film that the Na’vi had any part in creating the neural net that seems to connect all life on Pandora. Still, what I think is important to consider here is the idea of the information that is passed through that neural net. Information, in whatever form it takes, be it twisty strands of DNA or binary computer code or text or images or neurotransmitters, is everywhere and in all kinds of forms. We need multiple literacies in order to read the genome, the program, the book, the film, the mind. So the poster who noted that the Na’vi are not necessarily presented as natural and untainted, in opposition to the technologically advanced humans, has a point. Once we learn to interface with informational systems and to read the code contained within - in whatever form it takes - we are literate. And literacy is an effect, a product, of technology and, I guess, a new technology in and of itself. Plus, the Na’vi speak. Much is made in the film of the human efforts, particularly those of the hero, to learn their language and, pace Walter J. Ong, “language is a technology.” I suppose that may blur the lines between natural and unnatural more, really. Well, good. As I say, we have co-evolved with the tools we have made and language is, I would argue, the most valuable and indispensable tool we have created. And it has become so naturalized that the vast majority of us probably would never consider it unnatural or artificial. I’m still not convinced that the representation of the Na’vi is not a romanticizing of nature over technology, but I think the fact that it is at least raising that question is good. Now we can grapple with the question of just what technology and nature are and how they are related.

So Avatar is a dazzling, yet flawed, creation. I think that it is a first step, though, toward figuring out where we take storytelling now that we’ve developed these amazing digital capabilities. It doesn’t do anything radical in terms of the story it wants to tell, but I think it does radically, for some of us, unsettle our sense of what is real. It doesn’t break new ground in terms of narrative technique, either, but I think that is something that comes only with time and with artists who are more willing to experiment with the technology in ways that will not produce blockbusters, but difficult art. I can’t wait to see what’s to come.

Anyway, all this talk about process and composing is really just to say that I’ve found I haven’t been writing in my blog as much as I’d hoped/intended. However, what is interesting is that I seem to have adopted Twitter as a note-taking/research compiling application. As I review my tweet stream from the past several months, it’s crystal clear that Twitter is where I bookmarked articles and items of interest for future reference. It’s like a little note-taking app for me and it was a great way to share stuff with the Web writing class, although the fact that I can’t pull up the tweet stream for our hashtag is frustrating and suggests, as one of my colleagues put it, that Twitter is more interested in the now than in the past.  But I’m going to keep using Twitter this way, both with a hashtag for my class and through the new list function, because I think it’s been really good - better than a blog even - for noting stuff I want to go back to later.

So I’ve been thinking about what Richard Lanham’s account in The Economics of Attention of Christo’s Running Fence installation from 1976. As a work of art that existed in its original form for only two weeks, it seems very much like the ephemera that fizzes into being and then just as rapidly dissipates online - all those Tweets, all those blog posts, all those discussions and chats: they may be archived somewhere, but for all intents and purposes, they might as well have disappeared entirely for as much as most of us care. We see, we read, we move on to the next link, the next click of the mouse. The RSS feeds us new rivers of information to scan, to hold in our minds for a moment, only to move on to the next in a seemingly endless stream of bits and pieces of data, lore, scoop, and score. Likewise, Running Fence existed for a couple of weeks, stretching through almost 25 miles of Sonoma and Marin counties in California, and then was gone. Of course it still is archived. The sketches, the plans, the photos of the finished product are meticulously documented and archived and will be featured in an upcoming Smithsonian exhibition. But the fence itself is now only a memory, captured and stored in our digital tools.

But what is really interesting to Lanham, and to me, is the fact that this was a participatory work of art. While the concept and inspiration may have been Christo’s, the work itself would never have become manifest were it not for the collaboration and effort of many, many people in the counties in which the fence was built. Lanham writes:

This work of art, as [Christo] said repeatedly, was composed of the human behavior that was required to create it, not only the building of the fence but also the hearings, lawsuits, rulings, reports, meetings, and pleadings that were necessitated by the project. To create the fence he needed a myriad of permissions and to obtain those permissions he needed to persuade a myriad of people to grant them. The fence was created as an attention structure that dramatized how persuasion works in human society. It was not only a thing of beauty that did not last forever, it was, as well, a model of how persuasion works in human society, which is to say a model of rhetoric, which should last, if not forever, at least as long as such things can last. He persuaded people of what? What rhetoric has always persuaded people of: to share a beautiful attention structure. To cherish eloquence. (57-8)

I think we are beginning to see how artists and innovators in new media are bringing us into positions to share those “beautiful attention structure[s].” I think there will be those who figure out how to use the Web to tap into the same kinds of social cooperation that Christo did in the years he spent developing Running Fence and bringing it into its unlikely existence. I think they’ll create the same kinds of “participative drama[s]” (Lanham 59) and we’ll all gasp in wonder and awe for a moment. Or a couple of weeks. And we’ll take our pictures and we’ll move on.

Work Cited

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hil, 1964.