Kathleen Blake Yancey and Networked Composition Pedagogy

As all of the authors in this week’s readings have shown (and which is evident in the slashed nature of its title), the field of rhetoric/composition/writing studies is inseparable from its struggle over a variety of epistemological, administrative, and pedagogical issues. As a result, RCWS is rather unique in its disciplinary status as a field which, in many ways, can be defined by the way in it continually seeks to (re)define itself as field. In other words, the circuitous, messy, and revisionary nature of the disciplinary debates surrounding the role of RCWS are constitutively bound to its focus on writing, a phenomenon which RCWS itself was integral in exposing as circuitous, messy, and revisionary.

Although I aligned at certain points with all of the pedagogies I encountered this week, I most identify with the claims put forth by Kathleen Blake Yancey in “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” I appreciated Yancey’s approach to composition in this article because she considers the current culture of writing (the proliferation of multimodal/social/networked communication) as a vital “moment” with which composition should partner rather than a divergence that should be analyzed and resisted.

Yancey articulates a composition pedagogy grounded in a notion of writing which considers circulation within a network of other writers and readers as one of the constitutive characteristics of writing in the 21st century (300). Yancey also claims that composition pedagogies that engage with writing communities outside of the classroom not only encourage a focused rhetorical purpose in student writing but potentially supply students with a readership that can critically engage with their writing in a manner beyond that of the teacher (310-11). For Yancey, writing is a deictic activity, and its meaning is inseparable from the localized, rhetorical contexts through which its effects play out.

Finally, I appreciated Yancey’s article because it strikes a balance between critical and instrumental pedagogies that I find lacking in a pedagogy like Berlin’s. Because Berlin’s pedagogy emphasizes the liberation of student consciousness, it subordinates the instrumental (teaching students how to communicate in a variety of cultural discourses) to the critical (resistance to hegemonic cultural discourses) in ways that our counterproductive to both (“Rhetoric and Ideology,” 490). Yancey, on the other hand, seems to operate under a notion (which is one that I agree with) that although composition pedagogies should encourage students to grapple with the ways in which power and ideology are produced in a society through a variety of discursive modes and contexts, this critical subjectivity is more effectively evoked by pedagogies that encourage students to become co-producers of those very discourses (imagistic, textual, auditory, etc.) rather than passive consumers who analytically resist it.

Hacking Writing Studies with Gilbert Simondon

In her introduction to the concept of technogenesis in How We Think, Hayles departs from her focus on digital media and travels back to the mid-twentieth century, building her analysis off of the theories of the French mechanologist Gilbert Simondon who categorized technology into three interrelated, but distinct, areas: technical elements, technical individuals, and technical ensembles.

To give the most basic definitions of these terms, a technical element is a part of the object, a technical individual is the unity achieved through the collection of all of the parts, and a technical ensemble is a technology necessary to create the object. Thus, in the case of an ax, a technical element could be its handle, the technical individual would the ax itself, and its technical ensemble could be the tool used to sharpen it or even the craftsmen using the sharpening tool.

For Simondon, innovation occurs when technical elements (parts of the object) are placed into new contexts, thus initiating the creation of new technical individuals that are either more efficient iterations of the technical individual from which it originated or an entirely new technical individual. Hayles describes the former move to efficiency (which Simondon refers to as “concretization”) as the integration of “conflicting requirements into multipurpose solutions that enfold them together into intrinsic and necessary circular causalities” (88). In other words, the objects themselves become subordinated in a Heideggerian sense to the various goals for which they were created.  

As technology become more concrete and complex, there is a corresponding decrease in the visibility of technical elements (parts) and an increase in technical individuals (wholes). Although complex technology is not bad in itself, it undoubtedly requires an increased amount of time in order to understand how it operates, and not only that, it also forecloses productive engagements with other technical elements due to the increased specificity and integration of its parts. This increase in technological complexity is also compounded by burdensome patent laws that restrict innovation by perpetuating the fear of technological plagiarism.

Although subcultures devoted to promoting technologies which emphasize part interconnectivity and exchangeability (technical elements) are beginning to emerge in the form of hacker/maker spaces in cities and universities across the country, the dominance of global capitalism has largely determined the conditions of technological change in its continued emphasis on the creation of discrete (and profitable) technical individuals.

In his chapter “Rethinking Repair,” Steven Jackson locates the material consequences of this increased emphasis on technical individuals over technical elements in Apple’s release of the 2012 MacBook Pro, a device which was widely criticized for using parts that couldn’t be recycled and sticking to a design aesthetic that made parts too difficult (if not impossible) to replace (Jackson, 235). The aesthetic and functional appeal of Apple-esque technology (minimal, integrated, and intuitive) not only propagates an ideology of technological illiteracy (thus stifling innovation), it also leads to unsustainable models of technological production.  

Bridging off the technical taxonomy provide by Simondon and my brief analysis of technological innovation, I want to take what might seem at first to be a strange digression to the field of writing studies as a way of exploring how conceptualizing writing as a series of technical elements rather than isolated technical individuals can generate the kind of complex ecological approaches to the study of writing that Sid Dobrin describes in Postcomposition.

Technologies of Writing

There is theoretical potential for writing studies within Simondon’s concepts of technical elements, technical individuals, and concretization. What happens when we blur the borders between these terms?  Or are they already blurred within their application to technology? Although one could definitely make the claim that an ax head could be both a technical individual and a technical element, the important idea (at least for composition theory) is that these definitions are applied relationally rather than ontologically. In other words, its function as an element (part of an ax) or individual (a technical object in itself) is determined by its role within a particular system rather than by the limited possibilities that might be prescribed upon it.

Hayles describes this contextual determinacy of technics as “materiality” which she writes “is unlike physicality in being an emergent property. It cannot be specified in advance, as though it existed ontologically as a discrete entity” (91).

However, when looking at writing as a technology, there is greater fluidity between technical elements and technical individuals, determined largely by the degree to which the writing is deployed and perceived in a specific context. For me, it seems that writing is often assumed first as a technical individual. Although we are in a supposedly post-structuralist era of textual theory, even the most poorly structured piece of writing is typically approached as such (a structure). Thus, the default conception of a text appears to be fairly generous. A piece of writing works unless it is proven to be broken. Similar to Derrida’s claims about the purpose of deconstruction, the point of composition theory is not to tear throw a wrench in a functional system but merely to show that it was never functional in the first place.

However, I don’t want to preach the salvation of Derridean deconstruction for the future of writing studies. What I do want to do is think about how shifting our conception of writing and reading from technical individuals to technical elements can initiate innovative and individuated approaches to the production of writing similar to the way that shifting our relationship to technology can result in greater experimentation with previously separate technical elements.

Similar to the parts of a laptop, there needs to be an increased emphasis on the interchangeability of the parts used to make a piece of writing. Instead of viewing writing (especially technical writing) as an organic form of discourse that emerges naturally from the writing subject, compositionists should develop open source, collaborative networks of technical (elements of) writing that encourage the kind of processual thinking that composition theory has been championing for decades.

In viewing writing as a series of technical elements, the field of composition can also begin to re-conceptualize its approach to plagiarism which too often ignores theoretical critiques of textual originality. Composition traditionally assumes that by allowing students to intentionally plagiarize they may not develop themselves as original writers capable of producing original texts. However, these is little proof that remixing text necessarily leads to a decrease in originality. On the contrary, many scholars of rhetoric and new media, such as Collin Gifford Brooke, view originality itself as undergoing an definitional shift with the advent of new media and the proliferation of instant access to large amounts of networked information.

In Brooke’s estimation, originality is no longer the ability to individualistically produce ideas within text (which Brooke argues falls prey to the presence/absence binary criticized heavily by Hayles in How we Became Posthuman) but rather the ability to collect and synthesize information produced “originally” elsewhere (a move which aligns with Hayles’ claim that pattern/randomness is the pivotal binary of the twenty first century).

The problem is not that we ask students to build something before we ask them to repair it, the problem is that we are asking students to build technical elements (the paragraph, the sentence, the word) while at the same time building technical individuals (the essay, the research paper, the synthesis essay). This is the most difficult part of writing: the element and the individual coevolve and co-terminate (sometimes simultaneously) for writer and reader alike.

But what if teaching writing foregrounded pattern identification over content production, or, in other words, emphasized technical elements rather than technical individuals? Instead of teaching writing through the capitalist imperative of ownership (i.e. patents), or any other political ideology for that matter, we need to teach writing as an ecological system which reacts to (and acts upon) those who engage with its complexity.  

Tracing Complex Bio-Ideologies with N. Katherine Hayles and Byron Hawk

I recently finished two books by two incredible writers/thinkers: How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogensis by N. Katherine Hayles and A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity by Byron Hawk. Hayles and Hawk, although they are writing for slightly different fields, nonetheless converge at crucial points related to the exigency of mapping the bio-ideological constitution of posthuman subjectivities. Although Hayles work (with which I am more familiar) is valuable for its typically impressive ability to synthesize various theoretical and empirical approaches to digital media, I ultimately found the implications of Hawk’s analysis more compelling due to what I saw as a greater emphasis on bio-ideological mapping in order to actively produce constellations of subjectivity rather than mapping bio-ideologies in order to consume and/or resist them.

In her most theoretical chapter, “Tech-TOC: Complex Temporalities and Contemporary Technogenesis,” Hayles foregrounds her methodology in a cartographic rhetoric, writing that she aims to “explore the coordinated epigenetic dynamic between humans and technics” (85). Throughout the chapter, she collates snippets of various thinkers working in the philosophy and sociology of technology, such as Mark Hansen, Bernard Steigler, and Bruno Latour, arguing that technology is the manifestation of a “complex temporality” which she defines most intriguingly as “temporary coalescences in fields of conflicting and cooperating forces” (86). In this move, Hayles collapses the constitutive distinction between human and non-human entities, a distinction which she challenges in greater detail in How we Became Posthuman. Hayles argues that in the same way that a technical object is a synchronic constellation of “conflicting and cooperating forces” of socio-cultural desires, so too is human subjectivity. Although not as pertinent to my uses here, Hayles concludes her chapter with an illuminating analysis of the interactive electronic novel TOC, illuminating its critique of the effects of computer technology on human perceptions of time.

Where I tend to depart from Hayles is in her move to what I see as an overly reductive model concerning the influence of technology on human cognition. Her central binary is conscious/non-conscious cognition, with external factors of one’s environment such as technology and language providing the majority of non-conscious forces upon one’s cognitive state.  Although the neurological and psychological research she draws from is compelling, it seems to set up a unidirectional flow of forces from exterior forces to interior unconscious that subordinates the role of human agency in meaningfully intervening in this process.

Essentially, Hayles fails to consider how our non-conscious states are also influenced by our conscious states which are then fed back into the non-conscious (both exterior and interior) realm. Although she uses the term “reciprocal causality” throughout this chapter, this term is primarily confined to the intertwined relationship between humans, technology, and society. However, the two cognitive states she prescribed (conscious/non-conscious) are also interrelated to such an extent that it seems pointless to privilege the influence of external factors in determining one (non-conscious) more than the other (conscious).

Referencing her previous work on the attentional shift taking place from deep to hyper attention in younger generations, Hayles focuses in on the neurological effects of digital media and begins to veer into the realm of bio-technological determinism (99-102). Much like her initial article in ADE, Hayles privileges the neurological principles of “synaptogenesis” and “neuroplasticity” in effecting epigenetic changes in cognitive structures which then presumably lead to changes in other psychological processes. As is increasingly becoming the case in reductive models of human consciousness, the complexity of thought is subordinated to neurology.

Reacting to these external factors of posthuman consciousness formation, Hayles posits her technologically assisted solution by distinguishing it from neuro-philosopher Catherine Malabou’s implications in The New Unconscious. Malabou’s guiding claim is that the structure of human consciousness is beginning to mirror the structure of global capitalism. Because Malabou does not offer a technologically assisted method for resisting the neurological effects of one’s economic system, Hayles denigrates Malabou’s implicit assumption that neural plasticity can be monitored by nothing more than conscious awareness of the plasticity of unconscious influence.

Conversely, Hayles proposes that we utilize the same technologies that are affecting these neuropsychological changes to map their influence on cognitive functioning. She writes, “Another possibility, implicit in the concept of technogenesis, is to use digital media to intervene in the cycles of continuous reciprocal causality so that one is not simply passively responding to the pressures of accelerating information flow but using for different ends the very technologies applying the pressure” (102). Hayles briefly mentions two such mapping technologies: the sociometer, created by Alex Petland of MIT, which can sense subtle, unconscious movements such as influence, mimicry, activity, and consistency; and the somameter, a device developed by Mark Hansen at Duke which reports unconscious biological states to the user.

Hayles interprets all of these technological influences through a focus on attention. Building off her thesis in a previous article concerning the value of both hyper and deep attention, Hayles mostly wants to map the effects of technics on human consciousness in order to redirect our collective cognitive trajectory away from complete hyper attention and towards a more balanced emphasis on both hyper and deep attention.

However, I don’t think I am as quick to part with Malabou’s ideological resistance in favor of Hayles’ technophilic cartography. Although technologically assisted mapping may be valuable to a certain extent, it should not be privileged over conceptual entities such as ideological and political structures.

From Mapping as Resistance to Mapping as Invention

Byron Hawk makes a compelling case in A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity for a renewed emphasis on the role of invention within composition pedagogies. I say “pedagogies” because I agree with Hawk that one of the fundamental difficulties of teaching writing is creating a generalizable link from local, classroom specific techniques, ideas, and assignments to a global theory or method. Indeed, with his emphasis on Ulmerean heuretics in his pedagogy chapter, Hawk explicitly supports a move away from “a pedagogy” of generalizable methods of invention and towards “pedagogies” of individuated methods particular to each student’s context: “the goal should be to learn about one’s place in the circuitry and to invent a method particular to these circuits” (248). For Hawk, mapping the complexity and formation of posthuman subjectivity only works by providing individuals (students in this case) with the technology necessary to create their own map rather than showing them the place they should end up (Berlin’s citizen-rhetors) and then hoping they eventually get there.

Although his complex-vitalist theory of composition pedagogy relies heavily on experimental compositionists such as Gregory Ulmer and Cynthia Haynes, I believe that his primary theoretical underpinning rests on a binary separating general/particular (global/local) which he builds off of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the molar/molecular. Hawk privileges the molecular for its emphasis on the local linkages, or Deluze-Gauttarian “desiring-machines,” which intersect and create a multiplicity of subjectivities within the same individual. Although Hawk doesn’t draw from The Three Ecologies in his book, I think this quote from Guattari conveys the concept: “it is important not to homogenize various levels of practice or to make connections between them under some transcendental supervision, but instead to engage them in processes of heterogenesis” (34, Guattari). The translator goes on to define Guattari’s notion of heterogeneity as “an expression of desire, of a becoming that is always in the process of adapting, transforming and modifying itself in relation to its environment… However much organizations attempt to homogenize desire, something always escapes or leaks out (the ‘line of flight’)” (95).

Guattari’s move from homogeneity to heterogeneity is connected to the pivotal concept of the body-without-organs. Organs organ-ize and prescribe the limits of action for a particular entity, whether that be an individual or group of individuals. Theorists attempting to map the complexity of posthuman subjectivity have located these organs in various contexts, sometimes including, as is the case with Hayles, actual organs (the brain). For Hawk, although biology is included as an important factor, the predominant organ-ization of student subjectivity for him is ideological.

Thus, drawing on experimental composition pedagogies such as Ulmer’s mystory genre, Hawk proposes an approach to bio-ideological mapping as a series of pedagogical tools designed to generate a multiplicity of potential subjectivities rather than as a means for preventing undesirable states of future subjectivity (such as Hayles’ hyper attention).

Database and Narrative with Lev Manovich

In The Language of New Media Lev Manovich operates within a limited notion of “narrative” that prevents him from recognizing the semantic potential present within the term to which he opposes it: the database.  Setting up the contrast between these two terms (database/narrative), Manovich writes:

As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world. (225, emphasis added)

Although Manovich defines a database early in this chapter as “a structured collection of data,” he quickly differentiates it from the kind of linear, cause-effect structure of narrative, which he describes as simply one method among many others for “accessing data” (220). Manovich then condenses these various methods of accessing databases into the more general term “interface.” As an example of interface, he describes a database of images being represented by a page of hyperlinked thumbnails which provide the user with a structured interface to access the underlying data.

For Manovich, the database and interface are mutually constitutive elements of new media. The interface relies upon the database for its content, and the database relies upon the interface for providing the user access to its content. In locating this symbiotic relationship between database and interface, Manovich argues that the ability to construct alternate interfaces over the same database (what he terms “variability”) “places the opposition between database and narrative in a new light” (227). Indeed, it is not so much that alternate interfaces create alternate narratives, but that even within a single interface there exist “multiple trajectories” that a user could potentially construct. In other words, the narrative that an interface actualizes in relation to its database is highly contingent upon the actions of the user.

However, Manovich’s limited notion of narrative begins to reveal its frailty when he describes the inability of random access (the user contingent narrative described above) to generate a narrative structuration of database content. He writes, “if the user simply accesses different elements, one after another, in a usually random order, there is no reason to assume that these elements will form a narrative at all” (228). And again when he writes that “a database can support a narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself that would foster its generation” (228). In short, a database holds the potential for narrative but does not in itself create this narrative.

However, I think Manovich is neglecting the degree to which a meaningful narrative is dependent upon the user’s interpretation. Although there may appear to be limitations contingent upon the database material itself, this limitation is predominantly subjective. The onus of determining what constitutes a narrative falls upon the user/reader.  

In this way, one can see how the “variability” which Manovich claims occurs at the level of interface also occurs at the level of the user, and even more so if we consider that Manovich’s notion of narrative stems from Mieke Bal’s general definition of “ ‘a series of connected events caused or experienced by  actors’” (228).

For Manovich it is the role of the author, or programmer, to “control the semantics of the elements and the logic of their connection so that the resulting object will meet the criteria of narrative” (228). Thus, Manovich neglects the database’s potential for generating alternative narratives in favor of the author’s pre-“programmed” interpretation of what constitutes one.

Manovich’s most prescient analysis of the relationship between database and narrative occurs in his inversion of the materiality of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic functions of new media. Bridging off of the semiological definitions of the two terms provided Barthes and Saussure, Manovich describes how the syntagmatic is the actual set of words that are strung together in a materialized sentence or phase, and the paradigmatic dimension is the set of potential words for which they could be exchanged. As Manovich puts it, “syntagm is explicit and paradigm is implicit; one is real and the other is imagined” (230).

New media, however, construct opposite functions of paradigm and syntagm by inverting their underlying material structures:  “database (paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is dematerialized” (231). In a database, the range of possible elements (paradigm) with which one could construct a narrative (syntagm) is the only stable, material reality of a new media object. As each syntagmatic construction appears and disappears, the underlying material with which it was formed remains consistent for the user. “On the material level, a narrative is just a set of links; the elements themselves remain stored in the database. Thus narrative is virtual while the database exists materially” (231). 

However, Manovich’s linguistic correlation is complicated once again by the nominal difference he sets up between narrative and interface. Undoubtedly, the majority of database elements that a user is likely to encounter in new media have already been constructed within a navigable, user friendly interface which not only accounts for possible trajectories but oftentimes explicitly encourages them. In addition, as new media databases increase in quantity they often decrease the amount of possible trajectories. Consider for example the innovations made to video databases such as Netflix and YouTube. The massive amount of elements stored in each database necessitates an efficient interface that corresponds to the particularities of individual users. They offer suggested videos and even (as in the case of Netflix) entire genres based off your viewing history. Thus, for Manovich, I would propose a new formula for new media: as the paradigmatic increases in quantity, the syntagmatic increases in prominence.

As another example, consider the many changes made to Facebook’s news feed option which many users initially decried because it was “too cluttered with excess information” (Wikipedia). In a 2006 blog titled “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you,” Mark Zuckerberg defended the increasing syntagmatization of the user’s Facebook experience writing that “information people used to dig for on a daily basis” is now “nicely reorganized and summarized.” The exploding popularity of Facebook combined with the proliferation of smartphone technology resulted in an overwhelming database of information that necessitated a more limiting and narrativized interface. 

Review: How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

There is a certain irony in writing about a book that explicitly encourages its reader to form opinions about texts with which he is only slightly (if at all) familiar. Indeed, it would only seem fitting to write a review of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read without actually reading it.

For me, the major contribution of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is its implicit commentary on a sort social hermeneutic which takes into account the interpretive ecology which surrounds a text. As a result, Bayard argues that we should be less focused on the negative consequences of falsely recollecting past texts than with the potentially generative value of creatively (mis)remembering them.

It is through this sort of social hermeneutics I believe Bayard displays great acumen in parsing out his distinction between reading and close reading. At the surface, Bayard appears to argue for a level of reading that is anything but “close,” but his brilliance lies in the fact that his method argues otherwise.

The book’s initial chapters are formed around specific types of “non-read” books (e.g. skimmed, forgotten, etc). 

As a way into each type, Bayard recalls a specific literary scene from a prominent work of literature in which this situation has been depicted. For example, in his chapter “Books You Don’t Know,” Bayard presents defense for not reading books at all by way of a Robert Musil character who adamantly refuses to read any of the books within his vast library for fear of losing sight of the whole collection and how the books relate to one another.

Through these specific examples, Bayard is able to circumvent an explicit defense of close reading by putting it on display within its proper environment: writing. By enacting the contradiction of his thesis (skimming or non-reading), Bayard defends close, critical approaches to texts without watering down his argument with gratuitous qualifications which would certainly distract from the books playful tone

.

Depending on your degree of affinity with Bayard’s ideas about non-reading, it is either an illuminating and candid portrait of our relationship to past texts, or an indulgent apologetic for poor scholarship. 

Interpretive Force in Melville's Bartelby, The Scrivener

Herman Meliville's Bartleby, The Scrivener is a fascinating little story that is concerned with what I term the paralysis of interpretation. If we look at the story as an analogy for the act of interpretation where Bartelby is a stubborn text and the narrator an overzealous critic, it seems that Melville is saying that there is no true method for interpreting a text because a text will always “prefer” to remain just as it is in its present state.

The relationship between Bartleby and the unnamed narrator couldn’t be simpler: Bartleby, a former employee for the narrator, has decided to abstain from any kind of work, yet refuses to leave the office, remaining in an almost permanent stasis throughout the greater part of the story. The narrator, on the other hand, is less persistent in his actions. Perhaps it is because the reader is granted such unfettered access to his thoughts (it is written in first person), but the narrator is as inconsistent in his interpretations of Bartelby’s actions as Bartelby is consistent in acting them out. The narrator best describes the crux of their relationship when he says near the end of the story, after many futile attempts to prompt Bartleby to alternate courses of action, that “[e]ither you must do something or something must be done to you” (29). In short, Bartleby must evince a preferred path for future actions (text speaking for itself) or the narrator must force Bartleby onto a course of action that runs counter to his “preference.” In both scenarios, the prospect of acquiescing to Bartebly’s preference is not entertained as a permanent and final option.

The irony of their relationship is that the narrator is no different from Bartleby in his indecisiveness. He refuses to enforce what seems to be the only clear course of action for ridding himself of the scrivener: calling the authorities to remove him. In fact, upon learning of the subsequent landlords decision to do just that, the narrator says that he “almost approved” for “it seemed the only plan” (31). For the later landlord, the decision was simple. Ask Bartleby to alter his actions, and if he does not, force the actions to alter Bartleby. The landlord responds to the paralysis of interpreting Bartleby by simply rejecting the prospect of interpretation altogether. 

Writing Technology with Derrida

For me, Derrida’s analysis in Paper Machine of computer mediated writing drifts along the border between refreshingly succinct and disappointingly narrow. Beginning with the former characterization, I found his final analysis of the (then) burgeoning shift from traditional, book oriented publishing to online publications to be quite equitable in its resistance to a totalizing evaluation of the publishing industry. Derrida deftly recognizes that although the move to online publishing breaks down some of the distribution barriers erected by traditional publishers, it simultaneously (and inevitably) opens the door to the much maligned glut of narrow minded, unoriginal opinion that has become synonymous with web based texts. As he puts it, “A new freeing up of the flow can both let through anything at all, and also give air to critical possibilities that used to be limited or inhibited by the old mechanisms of legitimation” (32).

Conversely, Derrida’s notion of the necessity of formalization (printing must eventually happen) is limited by it misconception of the radically processual nature that exists (at least potentially) within digital technologies. Although I agree with Derrida that a piece of writing must be formalized or “cutoff” at some point, I do not think that this “interruption” is contingent upon the manifestation of writing in a material form (a book or a CD-ROM). Rather, within the digital sphere, this formalization (although certainly necessary for meaning to happen) takes place in the act of reading. Digital texts have the potential to shift forms between many discrete reading acts, thus perpetuating a much more diachronic notion of writing than previous publication technologies.

Finally, Derrida seems to betray a certain deterministic relationship to emerging digital technology when he sets up the opposition between the ability to use a machine and knowing how it works. As a way of setting up this binary, Derrida uses the example of a pen versus computer/word processor. He says that most of us know how pens (or a typewriter) “respond” but that very few of us are aware of how “the internal demon” of the computer operates and “What rules it obeys. We know how to use them, and what they are for, without knowing what goes on with them, on their side” (23).

I do not follow Derrida’s historical nostalgia for the ease with which the ontology of past technologies could be “grasped.” As an alternative, I would propose a more functionalist analysis of mediating technologies. In our relation to any writing apparatus (pens, typewriters, keyboards, etc.) the particular material substrates that in-form the technology are only of significance insofar as they affect the function for which it is intended. The user’s awareness of the material substrates is irrelevant.

Derrida’s example of the pen as a “knowable” technology is tenuous because it assumes that knowledge of technological construction necessarily entails increased control over that technology’s function. Following this logic, wouldn’t it then be true that a person who makes computer hardware would be the best computer programmer? Not necessarily. In many ways, Derrida’s blind spot is one that he often reveals at work within language; essentially, what language is is not the same as what language does. In fact, taking this one step further, language is what it does.