DELIVERY@MACHINES: TOWARD A RHETORIC AND DECOMPOSITION OF NEW MEDIA By SEAN W. MOREY A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2010 1 © 2010 Sean W. Morey 2 To @ubrey 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank my advisor, Sid Dobrin for his constant encouragement, suggestions, and mentoring toward this and other projects, including those academic, but also those off the university’s shoreline. Without his guidance, feedback, and support, this project and others would not have developed. I am also indebted to Greg Ulmer, whose ideas I have clung to like a barnacle on a ship, and I am very thankful for him never scraping me off of his keel. My thanks go to Raúl Sánchez, who always gives me new ways to think about my work, as well as how I approach my work within the field and under the classification “composition theorist.” I am also grateful to Andrew Wolpert who has given me his invaluable expertise, and has started me off on paths I would not have noticed without his help. At the University of Florida in general, I thank the entire English Department, but especially John Leavey, Kenneth Kidd, and Pamela Gilbert for sticking by me in troubling times and helping me to get this far. I also thank Richard Brantley for inspiring me toward academic work in the first place. I am grateful to Kyle Hall, Jordan Robson, Rob Robins, Rui Coelho, Joana Fernandez de Carvalho, and the whole gang at the Florida Museum of Natural History. I am also beholden to Clay Arnold, Lindsey Collins, Carol Steen, Christopher Hazlett, Patrick McHenry, and particularly Nic Guest-Jelley, without whom I would never have finished. Finally, I thank all of my family: my brothers, Tim and Andy—their brilliance and excellence provides me with constant motivation; my parents, Frank and Susan, for supporting me in all my endeavors (even the dangerous ones), and for moving us to the Keys; and my ever extending family—Nancy, Jim, Julie, Jess, Nick, Megan, Sarah, Emma, and Kelsey. I thank Coach and Penny Wise (as well the whole Keys crew) for 4 providing me a house back home, and for always having the boat ready and the bonefish scouted. I am grateful to the Zaffke family for their support and challenging me in new and interesting ways. I owe my best friends Cathy, Milo, Dusty, Skye, Toss, and Kip for everything, but especially for reminding me that there is nothing too important. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Aubrey, for hanging in there with me and making this project worthwhile. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 10 Toward Electracy .................................................................................................... 10 Methodology and Chapter Outline .......................................................................... 15 2 REMIXING HYPOKRISIS . PICKING UP WHERE THEOPHRASTES LEFT OFF......................................................................................................................... 22 Aristotle and Hypokrisis (Getting Under His Skin) ................................................... 25 The Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero’s Flute .................................................... 42 Quintilian’s Body Language .................................................................................... 53 3 DELIVERY-MACHINES .......................................................................................... 70 Schizophrenia ......................................................................................................... 76 Positive Symptoms ........................................................................................... 77 Delusions. .................................................................................................. 77 Hallucinations. ............................................................................................ 79 Disorganized Speech ................................................................................. 80 Grossly Disorganized or Catatonic Behavior .............................................. 82 Negative Symptoms ......................................................................................... 82 Cognitive Symptoms ........................................................................................ 85 Schizoanalysis/Desiring-Machines ......................................................................... 88 Machining the Code ......................................................................................... 90 Machining the Unconscious ............................................................................ 100 Body Without Organs ..................................................................................... 107 4 BECOMING SHAMAN .......................................................................................... 115 The Spirit World .................................................................................................... 123 The Shaman’s Machines ...................................................................................... 134 Drum .............................................................................................................. 136 Costume ......................................................................................................... 146 Fringe ............................................................................................................. 154 Being Shaman ...................................................................................................... 164 6 5 BECOMING AUDIENCE ....................................................................................... 170 It’s Not Delivery. It’s DiGiorno. ............................................................................. 178 The Soloist ............................................................................................................ 184 Delayed Delivery: The Edge ................................................................................. 194 Teleporting an Unknown State: Invisible Subjects, Invisible Audiences ............... 200 6 THE MONKEY’S T@IL ......................................................................................... 212 @Twitter ............................................................................................................... 213 The T@il ............................................................................................................... 216 Lance T@il(str)ong ............................................................................................... 218 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................... 260 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 265 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy DELIVERY@MACHINES: TOWARD A RHETORIC AND DECOMPOSITION OF NEW MEDIA By Sean W. Morey August 2010 Chair: Sidney I. Dobrin Major: English Delivery@Machines theorizes a new media practice (that is, electrate practice) for the rhetorical canon of delivery. Delivery, in both orality and literacy, has traditionally been undertheorized by scholars of rhetoric, beginning with Aristotle’s reticence for the practice of delivery as a whole. This makes sense, given that Aristotle was trying to invent delivery practices pertinent to the technology of alphabetic print, and not rely upon the technologies of the body. Our present situation is analogous to Aristotle’s: a new language apparatus, electracy (as developed by Gregory L. Ulmer—the skill set necessary to use all the communicative technologies of new media) is emerging, and new practices, or at least theories, should also emerge to make use of new media technologies. While many scholars in rhetoric and composition studies, or even writing studies in general, attempt to fit new media technologies into the existing logic of literacy, Ulmer notes that each language technology works within a unique language apparatus, and so many scholars of “media literacy” are looking in the wrong places, trying to retrofit the logics developed specifically for alphabetic print to work for a technology that uses print, image, and sound, coupled with the digital internet. Thus, scholars of rhetoric, finding the same problem as Aristotle, try to theorize delivery at the 8 dead end of literacy; that is, they look to understand how the visual aspects of writing become aspects of delivery rather than ask what new kinds of delivery does electracy make possible. Delivery@Machines, then, does not attempt to recover the canon of delivery as it was before literacy, but to invent delivery practices specifically for the developing communication apparatus of electracy as understood through the lens of grammatology. 9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Toward Electracy Delivery keeps reaching dead ends. That is, whenever scholars take up a study of delivery, its intended usefulness is almost surely