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.

On the value, discernment, and durability of the humanities

When I announced to friends and colleagues that I was leaving my job, few seemed shocked and even fewer seemed sad. In fact, many declared it a moment for congratulations, a moment of profound bravery for me and of envy for some. I take these reactions as an indication that many a rhetorical scholar is dissatisfied with their job, and many an academic wonders at the world outside the ivory tower. I am less convinced that my letting go of what many regard as brass ring of intellectual life is brave. The Avett Brothers have a line in “The Perfect Space” that boasts: “I want to have pride like my mother has, but not like the kind in the bible that turns you bad.”  I’m not sure of its valence, but my departure is certainly a function of pride.

I assert that one of the fundamental traps academics let themselves fall into is the idea that we have value (or have access to negotiate value) only when there is another academic job offer on the table. That’s foolish in any number of ways. First, it suggests that we can only understand our value as a measure of competition between two academic institutions. Considering that institutions hire in tiered slots (with fewerand fewer advanced and even tenure-track slots offered every year), academics have the potential to become undervalued because of a stagnant marketplace (to say nothing of the marketplace being willing to risk hiring in new directions). Second, value as a measure of academic competition undercuts our particular articulation of the universal value of humanities education. Many of us don’t merely teach in the service of the university (though we certainly do that). We are committed to the fundamental portability and contingency of rhetorical and communication education. And yet, we understand our value based on an increasingly fleeting and servile notion of employability. As a result, we tend to be complicit in devaluing ourselves.

But that’s a boastful statement. That’s the kind of pride that might turn you bad. I believe rhetorical education is a value in and of itself, and that my contributions as a scholar and teacher of rhetoric are valuable. The University of North Dakota does not share this view. Increasingly, the curriculum privileges an empty and industrial notion of “strategic” communication. Rhetoric courses were written out, and my value to the university was clearly measured not in terms of my expertise but in my labor. The provost went so far as to encourage me to think of my research and my teaching as separate practices. Students increasingly want a utilitarian education. I think my classes are rewarding for students, but none of my students stood on their desks and recited Whitman when I announced my departure. None of my colleagues advocated for rhetorical scholarship and coursework. Everyone shrugged their shoulders and went about their business. And I don’t point that inactivity out to indicate apathy or passivity but to note that such is the articulation of value in higher education. But that’s only one way to discern value.

When discussing my departure with friends in the university, the notion of discernment came up quite a bit. Colleagues would consider the intractable members of the professorate that exist in any university and wonder how it is the administration couldn’t discern the difference between collaborative scholars and the other kind of scholar. I’m not sure I’m one kind of scholar or another. One terribly honest colleague explained: I was a pain in the ass of the administration, but a pain that seemed reasonable considering what I did on campus. Of course, there’s a certain amount of pride in recounting that conversation.

Less proud is this question: why should the administration be able to discern my value? Set aside the fact that I’ve seen three deans and three provosts in six years at UND. Even without the resets in institutional memory, administrators are increasingly focused on top-level issues: assessment, funding, legislation, and on and on. Why would they be able to discern between the pain in the ass that collaborates and does rhetoric and any other pain in the ass on campus? If there are fewer and fewer tenure and tenure track jobs, it seems that there is also an increasing gap between university administration and curriculum delivery. So it is silly to think that administrators would have the time, wherewithal or expertise (especially in a field as broad and rough as Communication) to discern rhetoric from strategic communication, pain-in-the ass version one from pain-in-the-ass version two, and on and on.

And so rhetorical scholars, humanity scholars, and even scholars in general have a discernment problem. It is a problem of the administration not being able to discern the value of scholarship. It is a problem of scholars’ failure to discern the gap between administrators and educators. And finally, it is a problem of discerning our own value in a broader economy of ideas and possibilities. When I decided to leave UND, I sent an email to the one person I thought would have solid advice. I reached out to a former professor who is now on the Board of Trustees at the university that denied him tenure. He wondered: why is it more and more humanities professors are leaving universities in pursuit of professional careers? Why don’t they try to develop those professional interests in the classroom?

I appreciate the questions. If we believe we have something to offer industry, why don’t we teach it in the classroom? But that’s a discernment problem. What we have to offer is a function of an education that focused less on industry training and more on a broad range of intellectual questions. We believe a commitment to the humanities demonstrates its value outside of training metrics. And if we’re going to be asked to do the industrial work of training and utility, we might as well be valued appropriately. Academic work is the best work in the world if you feel properly valued. You think and work in tandem. The hours are great (in that you decide how much you want to think…which is usually quite a bit). But if you aren’t valued for your expertise but only for your labor, the hours are terrible (because you keep thinking, but not passionately). The pay isn’t great. And the contempt is unbelievable.

If you’re going to feel contempt, feel under-appreciated, and feel overworked, you might as well end up with more to show for it than an academic career offers. No one will care that you have a Ph.D.? The provost doesn’t care that my Ph.D. is in rhetoric and my students are equally suspicious. I’m just some guy delivering content in a classroom. I can be some guy and get paid more and live in a place where my family has access to a broader set of cultural experiences. It’s time we discern the value of the humanities otherwise, and one way of discerning that value is to recognize that we have value outside of the academy. A value that pays off in different ways and that doesn’t require us to abandon our commitment to humanities education (or, if we’re going to abandon it, we can abandon it on our terms).

One gigantic caveat. The above is marked by a whole lot of pride. I’ve tried to draw attention to that pride. My leaving UND is a condition of pride: I feel I’m worth more than UND has shown, and I feel the kind of work UND has offered me is beneath my expertise (this last one sounds positively awful and elitist). A more charitable version of that caveat: value and discernment needs to find a more durable home than the life of the mind. The greatest challenge to the humanities is our relatively weak ability to demonstrate our durability because we produce so little that is materially durable. We can argue about the long history of the academic model (much older than capitalism). We can talk about the history of ideas. But—and this is supremely interesting—when Wrage writes about rhetoric as a history of ideas, he concludes his essay by explaining how that concept plays out in the classroom. Rhetorical studies seldom connects research to the classroom. As such, it is understandable why a provost would recommend something as ridiculous as separating your teaching and your research. In the words of Radiohead: “you do it to yourself, you do, and that’s why it really hurts.” We have abandoned a durable notion of humanities and rhetorical scholarship. And so perhaps the best way to remind ourselves of rhetoric’s durability, if we will not do it in our scholarship, is to go out into the world and embrace Aristotle’s notion of practice. It’s time, for me at least, to go out and do rhetoric, to seek value in other ways.

I’m looking forward to it.

Against the Sophists

A while back, I had posted a mock cover for a comic book based on Isocrates' "Against the Sophists." The whole piece is likely beyond my talents to complete, but the first line seems really fitting for the contemporary higher education environment.