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.

For those of you who are behind the curve (sorry, don’t mean to be insulting, but, seriously, have you been living under a rock?), this video, Buffy vs. Edward: Twilight Remixed, has become a minor online sensation in the last few weeks. It concerns one cool California chick, Buffy Summers, and terribly pale emo kid named Edward Cullen (apparently from some popular series of romance novels!). Created and posted on YouTube by rebelliouspixels (aka Jonathan McIntosh), this mash-up of clips from the classic television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the first film outing of the Twilight series, does a brilliant job of exposing the neo-Heathcliffian, stalker-y subtext at the heart of the Twilight romance. Edward’s possessiveness and obsession here are not “protective” and romantic. He’s just creepy and gross and Buffy gives him what he deserves - a proper staking!

This is what good mashups and remixes do: they provide commentary, make an argument, shine a light on a dark corner, present a new perspective, a new way of looking at a text or group of texts that helps us to see something we might otherwise have missed. This is why remix is such an important genre and textual practice and why we need to ensure that writers, vidders, and artists and critics of all stripes have legal right to the fair use of the creations of others in order to provide these fresh perspectives and creative transformations. Rebelliouspixels makes a point of noting, in the info section on the Buffy/Edward vid, that his use of the clips from Buffy and Twilight qualifies as fair use under current U.S. copyright law, and he provides a number of links to information about copyright and to organizations like Creative Commons and the Organization for Transformative Works that can help others navigate the tricky waters of current law.

I’ve also been fascinated lately by an event happening in an online fan fiction community I follow (but do not actively participate in - I’m a just a lurker!). The event was actually called a “remix” and it offered fan fiction writers the opportunity to rewrite a story originally written by a fellow fanfic author. [And, of course, fanfic is itself a rewriting of an "original" text in the first place, one that fanfic writers generally acknowledge via a self-protective pronouncement that declaims the derivative nature of their work.]  The rules of the game were pretty basic: fic writers let their fellows in the community know which of their stories they were willing to put into play (i.e., which ones they were willing to let others rewrite), writers chose stories on which they wished to put a different spin (i.e., by changing the narrative point of view or expanding details, but not changing the basics - the plot, the characters involved, the general setting), and finally the new stories were posted to a common space (in this case, a Live Journal community set up specifically for this remix challenge) so that everyone could see the results.

What’s been most interesting to me as an observer (as opposed to a writer who’s actually involved in the process of all this) is the resulting reaction of the fanfic authors to the revisions to their work. Far from being outraged or even merely vaguely disgruntled at what another writer did to their original creation, the general sentiment has been of gratitude and pleasure at the way another person was able to tackle a problem with the original text - livening up a story through the addition or subtraction of detail, untangling a previously knotty plot point, changing the reader’s whole understanding of a situation through a simple shift in POV.

Here’s the truly radical, revolutionary thing: these writers relished the rewriting of their texts. Seriously. Not only relished, but were grateful for the way their texts had been opened up and made more vibrant, more interesting, more complex. Henry Jenkins of MIT has written extensively on fan fiction and the value systems that arise in fanfic communities and has referred to participatory cultures (the neo-folk cultures of the Web world)  as often using a “gift economy” (Convergence Culture 136) model as their mode of exchange. I can certainly see that at work here in the recent remix challenge. There is no expectation of any kind of quid pro quo on the part of participants in the remix challenge, and the response of the writers struck me as particularly similar to the reaction of those who have received a gift: what a nice treat/surprise, thanks and gratitude, how lovely! The remix author asks for nothing in return (save that others might similarly gift them by selecting one of their own stories to rewrite; however, there is no guarantee, it seems, that all participating authors will be so “gifted” with a rewrite).

I think this remixing and rewriting and revision that happens in mashup vids, fanfic rewrites, and an internet phenomenon that has arisen only recently, the “re-Tweet,” all have a great deal to teach us about the important writing and literacy skills and practices that we need to critique, hone, and develop in order to produce writers and thinkers who are able to compose effectively in a culture that is going to be increasingly remixed and, thus, a culture that is, as Jenkins argues, one of convergence, participation and collective intelligence (2).

I want to talk more about re-Tweeting, but I’ll save that for my next post. Stay tuned…

Works Cited

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.

“How might an RSS feed produce new art and digital literature? The automatic delivery of text fragments can generate new patterns of reading that come to be interspersed with regular life.”

A poetics arising out of a constant, ever-changing stream of fragments? An art, a narrative, a poem that is ultimately and solely the product of an individual reader/writer’s parsing of bits and pieces of information, of text.

Armstrong calls this literature “generative” because it conflates author and readers, but it is the reader who controls the work, not the author (as classical theory would have it) or the work itself (as some postmodern theory would):

“It is the reader who has the last word, because the work – after it is released from the control of the author and dissolved into a model of generative distribution – lands with the reader and accumulates there in a completely individualized shape. Not only is the final outcome individualized by becoming attached to the reader as s/he experiences the work, but the work becomes individualized as it blends with and is absorbed into the stream of information that is already coming to the reader. This is why it gets beyond the “work” – the work itself dissolves into experience. It is not only about remixing the world or the work, but remixing the world into the work, and the work into the world.”

Embedded in and inextricable from the context of lived experience, can it be that a new conception of literary art is arising, in the age of Twitter, that is intimately connected with the reading (and writing) practices of everyday life? Armstrong suggests the answer is yes and Carpenter’s remix of the original print journal into a hybrid blog-archive-RSS feed provides support for Armstrong’s claim.

As I noted in my presentation at C&W 09 (also available as a podcast on iTunes U’s UC Davis channel: Computers and Writing 2009, E2. Blogs 2), the practice of everyday life, following Michel de Certeau, produces new forms, and methods, alternate ways of knowing that often resist or subvert the mainstream narrative. Certeau argues that reading is “poaching” and argues,

“Whether it is a question of newspapers or Proust, the text has a meaning only through its readers; it changes along with them; it is ordered in accord with codes of perception that it does not control.” (The Practice of Everyday Life 170)

He goes on to note that reading practices - the poetics that arise out of the reader’s “constructions of a text” (172) - introduce a creative function on the part of the ordinary or common reader into the act of reading. When an everyday reader interacts with a text outside of the structures of what Certeau calls “social hierarchization” (for instance, the literary and educational establishment that seeks to control the message of a given text, to dictate the way a text should be read and interpreted), then a “silent, transgressive, ironic or poetic activity of readers” is born (172).

And, in our remix culture, readers are even more capable of not just silently and invisibly creating collages of bits and pieces of the texts they have poached that coalesce in the no-place of the individual mind, they can now make visible that bricolage through re-Tweeting, h/t-ing, blogging of links, all of which create new experiences of reading, new arrangements of text that will be poached and reconstructed by new readers.

There’s a poetry in the deluge of text that rains down on us in flickering pixels each day. An art created by our arrangement and rearrangement created by the scattershot and frenetic reading habits cultivated by digital media. As Certeau noted even in 1984, the pace of everyday life has introduced speed into everything, including reading (176). A quarter century later, we are ever more mobile (as is our media) and our physical mobility has implications for our reading:

“Emancipated from places, the reading body is freer in its movements. It thus transcribes in its attitudes every subject’s ability to convert the text through reading and to ‘run it’ the way one runs traffic lights.” (176)

I like the idea of “running” a text. It hints at technology (running a program, a running feed like RSS) and at transgression (running away, running a stoplight in Certeau’s formulation). Certainly remix culture is fostered by technology and, due to our conception of authorship as proprietary (e.g., intellectual property, copyright law, etc.), it is often explicitly transgressive. I want to continue this exploration of the way these feeds and streams of text and our parsing and remixing of them might be creating a digital age poetics by looking at some more examples of remix in upcoming posts. Stay tuned…