Moving day.

Binary Inventions is moving to www.twopointommen.com.

Trying to get the brand back together.

The politics of the interficial (or, when is a picture essay not a picture essay?)

Here's a little scrap of a project I had in the top drawer:

What does digital rhetoric look like?

Is it a digital rendering of a representative image of rhetoric, like this?

Is it a refiguring of classical rhetoric via digital devices
(understood as the digitial devices represented in the image
and the digital devices implied by the image's presence, i.e. Photoshop)?

Is it a rhetoric that performs in (and not just through) binary code, a rhetoric of the code?

Minding the gap: private and public vectors of consumerism

Aluminum casting by Anissa Mack,
from Canon Fodder, a show for the 2013
UND Arts & Culture Conference

As a college senior, I would spend time in the office of my advisor, Arthur Doederlein. Heady with a mix of middle-class, college-student poverty (which is to say, I was broke but my folks weren’t) and thinly understood critical theories, I once complained about the crass acquisition of stuff and the problems of conspicuous consumption. Dr. Doederlein casual dismissed my gripe, saying only “It’s nice to have stuff.”

And ever since, I’ve tended to agree. Stuff, especially nice stuff, or quality stuff, or valuable stuff, is nice to have. However, there’s still this pinging moral signal fighting through the noise of my own consumption. It’s fuzzy and faint and persistent. It originates in part from the democratic recognition that the consumer-marketplace is not egalitarian (but is increasingly stylistically so). It originates, in part, from a tension between what the marketplace categorizes as “nice,” “quality,” or “valuable” and my own taxonomy of worth.

All this is to say, I like to shop, and I want to live in a democracy, and I need to figure out how to resolve the tensions between the market and the polis while trafficking in a communication environment that increasingly blurs the difference between politics and consumerism (and not consumption, because that’s tuberculosis).

Paripatetic Production: Dessa

Dessa at the North Dakota Museum of Art

To open my series on interesting cultural producers, I turn to an artist of various stripes from Minneapolis, Dessa. Dessa is a great example of the 21st-century peripatetic producer. She’s a recording artist—a name we give musicians who’s principle mode of production (and therefore earning scratch) is based on cutting records. It’s almost certainly an industry term, and so maybe it doesn’t apply to Dessa. Her albums, after all, all come courtesy of Doomtree Records. Doomtree is a hip-hop collective that includes Dessa (they just released a new track today). What is a hip-hop collective? Sometimes it’s a crew or a clan or a label or a publishing house or a houseful of people or a performance group. It is whatever its members need and want it to be at a particular moment. In many ways, then, we could argue Doomtree is a prime example of the kind of institutional signifier we need in a multimodal age: it flexes and bends. It isn’t beholden to industry jargon but is instead nimble enough to leverage that jargon when it suits individuals within the institution. You can listen to more of what the collective means by checking out Dessa and her clan in the KEXP studios.

"So you decided to be a bum" and other interesting developments

When I turned down tenure and left UND (as opposed to being on leave), a friend from graduate school said there was something romantic and rewarding about what he called the “peripatetic intellectual.” The peripatetic is nomadic, working in many places for relatively short periods of time. Those of us schooled in the arts and history of rhetoric can appreciate why this is a romantic notion. We are Aristotle moving and teaching, the itinerant sophists who go where there is demand and work for as long as the students need us and the locals will tolerate us (as I write that sentence, it makes perfect sense why I was destined to leave North Dakota).

Farewell to Academia

As I pack up my North Dakota life and head back to Illinois as a resigned academic, I made one last push to produce something for the field of rhetoric (or, for Twitter users, #TeamRhetoric).

I've been hinting at this project for a few months, and I'm happy to conclude my time as a Rhetoric Professor by putting my comic "Isocrates Against the Sophists" out into the world. I think there's great promise in this digital comic. It reminds us that we've always been fretting the quality of education and education policy. It might help somebody teach or learn about the value of classical rhetoric. It offers a case-study in visual rhetorical choices (like what might it mean to represent sophists as clowns, to ape the cover of Amazing Fantasy that introduces Spider-Man, or--in the image above--to make Isocrates Charlie Brown to the Sophist's Lucy). It might serve as a nice way to bridge the classical tradition with a mediated approach to rhetoric. It might represent a mutli-modal form of criticism, where Isocrates isused to send up current academic experts. It certainly performs an argument about aesthetic quality in the democratization of technologies of visual production.

Anyhow, I've made the file available on my academia.edu page. I hope it serves rhetorical studies in some small measure.

Against the Sophists

My podcasting colleague and collaborator, Joel Jonientz, passed away last month. Joel was famous at UND for being a kind of Swiss-Army-Knife scholar. He could write, draw, build, talk, paint, animate, shoot, record, design, and conceptualize any number of projects with any number of people. One reason he was so useful to everyone who met him was that he was unafraid of experimenting, of trying something new, of learning on the fly.

In that spirit of risk, I've been working on turning Isocrates' "Against the Sophists" into a comic book. Joel would have scoffed at the quality of the artwork, but he would have appreciated the creative spirit that calls this artifact into being.

But why a comic book, and why Isocrates? While so much of our pedagogy is urging us to consider the rhetoric of risks (and crises and strategies and on and on), I offer these early pages up as a different rhetoric of risk, a risky rhetoric of production for a complex multimodal rhetorical environment.

I also think Isocrates is useful now because so many of his critiques about Sophistry are applicable to higher education. In the first page, I put the words of E. Gordon Gee, former head of Ohio State, now President of West Virginia University, in the mouth of the clown-sophist. The plan for the comic has numerous instances of invoking education professionals to demonstrate the lasting value of Isocrates' thoughts on pedagogy.

Finally, I like the idea that as I work through my own complicated relationship to the academy, I can provide an artifact of potential value to my rhetoric colleagues who have provided so much value to me. The comic will be available to all as a pdf formatted for tablet devices. The final product should provide an updated version of "against the Sophists" that brings classical rhetorical theory into contact with contemporary issues in higher education (MOOCs and for-profits and the 10k bachelor degree to name a few).

The comic will also allow students of rhetoric to ask questions about the representational and juxtapositional logics of visual communication while it works through a classic rhetorical text. I hope it serves as a reminder that the ancient and the new can exist in the same spaces at the same time, that we can "do" Isocrates and new media together, that classical rhetoric can still be productive of something. I hope (and this is self-serving) it marks the ways rhetorical scholarship can fall in-between disciplinary categories without falling out of view.

So to all the rhetoric folks heading to San Antonio this weekend for RSA (the Rhetoric Society of America conference for more casual readers of this blog...assuming any readers at all exist), enjoy the first three pages of ISOCRATES AGAINST THE SOPHISTS and take some time to discuss digital rhetorical production over a beer.