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07/13/2004 Archived Entry: "draft"

The plagiarism debate surfaces again on WPA-L!!!!!
I can't get involved. Not this time. Oh it is so sad to read.
Instead, draft of Chapter Four rewrite beginning...the chapter introduces juxtaposition as a principle of the rhetoric of cool.

The category of “more radical innovations” includes the digital computer as a tool for the personal use of an individual. Here there is not only promise of great flexibility in the composing and rearranging of text and diagrams before the individual’s eyes, but also promise of many other process capabilities. (9)

Engelbart developed his idea of “composing and rearranging text” into a series of window-like boxes meant to resemble the size of actual paper, which, projected onto a display, a user could juxtapose and overlap. In turn, users could augment the strategy of comparing and manipulating texts through juxtaposition, a process difficult to do in a print-based environment which supports the separation of text and image by unconnected paper as well as logic. The potential of this juxtaposing-windows system, Engelbart argued, would allow writers the ability to work simultaneously with a variety of versions of the same text, each contributing differently to the learning and discovery process writing evokes. Juxtaposition, therefore, would be central to a computing-based heuretics.
I call this method of writing Engelbart proposed cool for how it replicates the same logic behind Marshall McLuhan’s 1963 insistence that cool media involve the rhetorical act of juxtaposition because of “its promise of depth involvement and integral expression” (Understanding Media 40). Moreover, the juxtaposition strategies central to Engelbart’s windows-based system theoretically resemble the cool-oriented writing machines suggested by William Burroughs.

The Burroughs machine, systematic and repetitive, simultaneously disconnecting and reconnecting – it disconnects the concept of reality that has been imposed on us and then plugs normally dissociated zones into the same sector - eventually escapes from the control of its manipulator. (Burroughs and Gysin 17)

In The Ticket that Exploded, Burroughs describes this machine in detail, noting how it brings together unlike text and image for rhetorical output.

A writing machine that shifts one half one text and half the other through a page frame on conveyor belts – (The proportion of half one text half the other is important corresponding as it does to the two halves of the human organism). (Ticket That Exploded 65)

My own interest in creating a rhetoric of cool reflects the Burroughs method of composing; the meanings of cool which direct my thinking all stem from an initial temporal juxtaposition. The very process of juxtaposition, McLuhan felt, is a cool one for how it forges readers (and writers) to interact with the unexpected textual and visual associations juxtapositions force us to encounter. Composition studies in 1963 was unable to recognize not only the power of juxtaposition for rhetorical purposes, but also the need to juxtapose composition with other interests in writing, like computing (Engelbart) or media (McLuhan).
The windows system Engelbart hypothesized materializes in the operating systems of contemporary computing, and in the interfaces of many web browsers. That we accept juxtaposition today as the basis of electronic writing is not as obvious, though, as it may seem. The nature of new media composition represented on the Web, TV, film, iPods, digital sampling, and elsewhere is the result of the complex juxtaposition of images, texts, and sounds. We do not need not look outside of popular composing practices to find juxtaposition, yet composition studies continues to resist these practices because of how they fail to fit within the field’s rebirth narrative. That narrative maintains a division, rather than juxtaposition, of writing interests; North’s categories of composition practioners and theorists are separate entities whose overlap is little speculated on and whose interests are restricted to classroom writing practices.
An anti-juxtaposition ideology can be found as well in the year’s own writerly output or pedagogical innovations. Even as the authors of the 1963 Conference on College Composition and Communication’s report (published in College Composition and Communication that year), encourage “debate on the long research paper, its purpose, its place in the program” (CCC 182), dominant responses like that of James McCrimmon’s popular textbook Writing with a Purpose ignore media based rhetorics such as juxtaposition. Even though research itself supports the juxtaposition of unlike ideas which, when synthesized, generate new knowledge on a given topic, the research paper, James McCrimmon notes, results from the very specific organization of information into linear argumentation, an organization where ideas are separated and categorized as distinct entities.

The writer of a thesis research paper is studying the facts to draw a conclusion from them; this conclusion becomes the thesis of this essay; and he selects and organizes his material to develop his thesis. (McCrimmon 240)

A teaching machine or a programmed text is a device that presents one item or frame at a time; that is, it allows students to see one sentence with a critical word left out or one statement followed by a question. The student writes the required answer on the program itself or on an answer tape or booklet. If he has been using a typical teaching machine, it then activates a mechanism that moves his answer under a clear plastic window (where he cannot change it) at the same time that it reveals the correct answer. (Themes, Theories, Therapy 85)

I’m caught between these two visions of writing machines: The Burroughs juxtaposing machine and the Kitzhaber drill and answer machine. To more fully understand juxtaposition as a major feature of the rhetoric of cool, I choose to work with the Burroughs vision, to explore its power as a new media rhetorical device. The most immediate place to explore a Burroughs-oriented writing machine for the rhetoric of cool is hypertext for how it allows writers to juxtapose ideas, texts, sounds, images, and animation in ways print cannot accommodate. To do so, I turn to Ted Nelson who coined the term “hypertext” in 1963.

For another vision of the writing machine, take a look at this interview, published today, with Alan Kay---the fellow who pretty much invented WIMP (windows, icons, menu, pointer). Kay wants computers to be used as creative tools---simulation machines. But he doesn't allow that writing can be creative and generative---writing can be simulation.

I wonder if the software Squeak mentioned in the article would scale out of its target market of elementary education to the post-secondary courseware stuff I'm fooling with...

Posted by cbd @ 07/13/2004 07:45 PM EST