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.