Two Virtuals, The

Alexander Reid

Description

In THE TWO VIRTUALS, Alex Reid shows that to understand the relationship between our traditional, humanistic realm of thought, subjectivity, and writing and the emerging virtual space of networked media, we need to recognize the common material space they share. The book investigates this shared space through a study of two, related conceptions of the virtual. The first virtual is quite familiar; it is the virtual reality produced by modern computing and networks. The second, less familiar, virtual comes from philosophy. It lies in the periphery of more familiar postmodern concepts, such as deconstruction, the rhizome, and simulation. In drawing the connection between the two virtuals of philosophy and networked media, Reid draws upon research in computers and writing, rhetoric and composition, new media studies, postmodern and critical theory, psychology, economics, anthropology, and robotics.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 30 juillet 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602355323
• Langue: English

Extrait

New Media Theory
Series Editor, Byron Hawk
The New Media Theory series investigates both media and new media as a complex ecological and rhetorical context. The merger of media and new media creates a global social sphere that is changing the ways we work, play, write, teach, think, and connect. Because this new context operates through evolving arrangements, theories of new media have yet to establish a rhetorical and theoretical paradigm that fully articulates this emerging digital life.
The series includes books that combine social, cultural, political, textual, rhetorical, aesthetic, and material theories in order to understand moments in the lives that operate in these emerging contexts. Such works typically bring rhetorical and critical theories to bear on media and new media in a way that elaborates a burgeoning post-disciplinary “medial turn” as one further development of the rhetorical and visual turns that have already influenced scholarly work.


The Two Virtuals
New Media and Composition
Alexander Reid

Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2007 by Parlor Press
Cover Illustration: “Absorbed” © 2005 by Eva Serrabassa. Used by permission.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reid, Alexander, 1969-
The two virtuals : new media and composition / Alexander Reid.
p. cm. -- (New media theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60235-022-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-023-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-024-3 (adobe ebook)
1. Mass media--Technological innovations. 2. Rhetoric. I. Title.
P96.T42R445 2007
302.23--dc22
2007026553
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 8 1 6 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail e [e-mail].


For Rhonda, Mirabel, and Jameson


Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: The Two Virtuals
Cognition, Consciousness, and Subjectivity
Learning to Live with New Media
2 The Evolution of Writing
Speech and Gesture
The Evolution of Writing
3 Nineteenth-Century New Media
The Discourse Machine Gun
24 Frames Per Second
4 Cybernetics
Homeostasis
Autopoiesis
AI-AL
5 Into New Media
Simulation
Digital Cinema
From Digital to Analog Virtuality
6 Waking Up in the Machine
Multiplicities and the Becoming of Thought
Cartesian and Topological Spaces
Paranoia and Simulation
Choice and Free Will
Machinic Enslavement
Virtually Autonomous
7 Virtual Composition
Ripping.Contagion.Mushrooms
Mixing
Burning
Electracy: Creative Affects
Rhythm Science
Burning Copyright
8 The Pedagogic Event
Pedagogic Communication
The “Teachable Moment”
Inventing New Media Pedagogy
9 Whatever Discipline
Excellence and Control
Whatever Discipline
Endit
References
Index to the Print Edition
About the Author


Acknowledgments
I must begin by thanking my fine colleagues at Parlor Press: Byron Hawk and David Blakesley for their excellent feedback as I wrote this book and Marc Santos for his close reading.
Certainly I could not have accomplished this work without the support of my friends at SUNY-Cortland. David Franke and Vicki Boynton have built a Professional Writing program with me, and I could not have written this book without their encouragement. Teaching and building that program has served as a necessary touchstone for what I have written here. Thanks also to those faculty who played an important role in our writing program and have been willing to hear me out: Mary Lynch Kennedy, Karen Stearns, Ross Borden, Bernie Earley, Tim Emerson, Mario Hernandez, Homer Mitchell, and Jane Richards. I also thank the students who have been open-minded and willing to take on the challenges of technology with me.
Of course new media is about more than writing. Paul van der Veur and Charles Heasley have helped me understand in practical and local ways what it means to say that new media breaks down the boundaries between disciplines. Lorraine Berry’s work with our NeoVox project has increased my appreciation of the international dimensions of networked education. And there are many others across our campus, folks who support our technology. If there is one thing I have learned about teaching with technology, it is that I cannot do it alone. In that respect, it is much like writing this book.
I must also acknowledge the great value of the community of bloggers with whom I have been fortunate to associate over the last few years. Collin Brooke, Jeff Rice, and many others have offered me a genuine appreciation of the broad and lively nature of our field. My thanks to those people and those who have read and commented on my own blog. The energy of this blogosphere has kept me going.
Finally I thank my family, my parents and my sister, as well as my in-laws, who didn’t have to believe in me, but did. And, of course, my kids, Mirabel and Jameson, and my wife, Rhonda, for their love and patience. Thank you all.


1 Introduction: The Two Virtuals
There are two virtual “realities,” neither of which is reality in the way we have traditionally understood it. Nevertheless, both have a dramatic effect upon our professional lives and the future of higher education. The first virtual is quite familiar; it is the virtual reality produced by modern computing—the broad range of technologies from cell phones to mainframes that have transformed culture in the U.S. as well as around the globe. While the adoption of these technologies has been widespread, there is also some apprehension about the cultural and personal impact they will have. This is certainly the case in higher education, which is divided between enthusiasm for the integration of technology into education and concerns about the effects this technological emphasis will have on traditional, especially humanistic, educational values. The second virtual is likely less familiar; it is the virtual of a minor philosophical tradition that one can trace back to pre-Socratic philosophers, to the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, to Spinoza and Leibniz, to Bergson and Simondon, and many others, including Deleuze and Guattari. It lies in the periphery of more familiar postmodern theories and concepts, such as deconstruction, the rhizome, simulation, and so on. This virtual does not specifically refer to computers or even technology in general; instead, it is no less than an alternate theory of cosmos, of matter, time, and space. As I argue in this text, the second, philosophical virtual provides us with a theory of materiality and thought, a theory of composition (of the way in which thoughts compose as media and media composes as thought), that allows us to approach the first, the technological virtual, in critical and productive ways.
Speaking on the issue of technological virtuality, Derrida (2002) poses the following question:
This new technical ‘stage’ of virtualization (computerization, digitalization, virtually Immediate worldwide-ization of readability, telework, and so forth) destabilizes, as we have all experienced, the university habitat. . . . Where is to be found the communitary place and the social bond of a ‘campus’ in the cyberspatial age of the computer, of the World Wide Web? Where does the exercise of democracy, albeit a university democracy, have its place in what Mark Poster calls ‘CyberDemocracy’? (p. 210)
As Derrida observes, the university has been a significant site of transformation. Not only must one think of new computer majors and courses, computer classrooms, computerized class presentations, online course materials and discussions, and entirely online courses, but also all the other aspects of university life: online advisement and registration, online grading, online libraries, campus networking, wireless campuses, networked computers for every student in every dorm room. Nearly all of these are phenomena of the last twenty-five years, many of the last ten years. Indeed, there are entirely online universities. What does it mean to say they offer a “virtual education” and hand out “virtual degrees”? How “real” is an education that takes place largely or totally online? These are legitimate questions asked by skeptical academics, for clearly a virtual education is different from one that takes place in a physical classroom.
It is necessary for us to engage with the “second” virtual. Where the virtual-technological deals with producing simulacra of reality, this philosophical virtual, which I call the virtual-actual (following Deleuze and Guattari), addresses the production of materiality itself. Briefly put, where traditional Western philosophy describes a world of discrete objects organized by inherent characteristics and fixed, me