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Time & Cinematics in an Age of Rhetorical Memory

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Time & Cinematics in an Age of Rhetorical Memory Clemson University TigerPrints All Dissertations Dissertations 5-2010 Screen/Writing: Time & Cinematics in an Age of Rhetorical Memory Joshua Hilst Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations Part of the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Hilst, Joshua, "Screen/Writing: Time & Cinematics in an Age of Rhetorical Memory" (2010). All Dissertations. 538. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/538 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SCREEN/WRITING: TIME & CINEMATICS IN AN AGE OF RHETORICAL MEMORY ______________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University ______________________________________________________________________________ Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Rhetorics, Communication & Information Design ______________________________________________________________________________ by Joshua C. Hilst May 2010 ___________________________________________________________________________ Approved by: Dr. Cynthia Haynes, Dissertation Chair Dr. Victor J. Vitanza Dr. Todd May Dr. Christina Hung Abstract This essay argues that part of memory is external to ourselves. This memory, which began with writing but has since grown to encompass digital media, the internet, and other forms of new media, faces a two-fold problem in the information age. The first is privatization, which is represented by copyright, and has heretofore received a greater share of scholarly attention. Regulation is represented through the concept of protocols, which are the rules digital media execute in order to perform functions. Protocols are a regulation of external memory, which I argue also represents a threat to deliberation, the form of rhetoric that deals with the future. In order to contend with such controls, we must look to the possibility of the unexpected, which unfolds along the thought of Gilles Deleuze, and in what are known as aleatory methods. ii Dedication The question of this project is, “How might one live?” No one has taught me to ask this question better than Liz, to whom this project is affectionately dedicated. iii Acknowledgements First of all, I wish to acknowledge Cynthia Haynes, my dissertation chair, for her patience and generosity and assiduous work as my chair. This project does not happen with her help. Also to the other members of my committee, Victor Vitanza, Todd May, and Christina Hung, each of whose signature on this essay is, I hope, obvious. I wish to acknowledge other professors from the Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design (RCID) doctoral program at Clemson who have been so influential on my life and research: Art Young, Steve Katz, Andrea Feeser, Jan Rune Holmevik, Summer Taylor- Smith, and Sean Williams. I also wish to acknowledge my colleagues in the RCID program who came before, including Amanda Booher and Justin Hodgson, for their valuable insight and advice. Also, to colleagues who are behind me: Sergio Figureido, Joshua Abboud, Randy Nichols, Alicia Hatter, Josephine Walwema, Jimmy Butts, Anthony Collamati, Nicole McFarlane, Wu Dan, and others. To my friend and greatest collaborator, Jason Helms, I give my sincerest thanks for his insight, kindness, and friendship. Lastly, I wish to thank my parents, Peter and Gayelyn, as well as my brothers and sister (Brandon, Christy, Matthew, Geoffrey, and Tim) for their enduring support. Also, I thank my wife’s parents, Mark and Theresa, and her siblings (Nathan, Tyler and Marcus) for their support and friendship. iv Table of Contents Page Prolegomenon: A Conceptual Starting Place……………………………….1 Cicero’s Storehouse: Memory……………………………………………...26 Vir(tual) Bonum Dicendi: Invention……………………………………….75 Rhetorica Ad Kinesis: Arrangement………………………………………112 El(ectr)ocution: Style……………………………………………………...168 Hyper/Kresis: Delivery……………………………………………………208 Conclusion: What Hath Technology Wrought?...........................................255 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….....265 v Prolegomenon: A Conceptual Starting Place The entry point for this essay will be the rhizome, which, in this context, refers of course to the famous non-hierarchical model of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who theorized the rhizome as a structure for countering the tree diagram. The arboreal diagram presents a top-down model, a hierarchical model of power in which appeals must be made to the top. Beginnings and endings, stops and starts, are all made abundantly clear. The rhizome, exemplified by different forms of life, such as the kudzu vine, has no beginning, no end, just a series of middles. Deleuze and Guattari pose this model in the spirit of urging us to form new connections, to refuse to start at the beginning and cease at the end, but rather to find new ways into a matter from any and all points. In precisely such a manner, I have elected not to start this project with a beginning, but rather offer each of three reasons as an impetus, a way into my project. Any one of these middles will work just as well as the other because each describes equally well what I am trying to do in this study. These motivations are quite interrelated and interwoven. However, they are each a separate issue that provides motivation for the entire project. My hope is that the reader will see each as they thread throughout the entire work. I will discuss each of these motivations in turn, and they will then deposit us at the doorstep of chapter one, where I will begin to delineate the problem of memory. The problem of memory, as I articulate it, is a fundamental problem to rhetoric/ composition in the digital age. Memory is an oft-neglected rhetorical canon, and for the most part, we tend to conceptualize memory along ancient lines: as a means for memorizing speeches through mnemonics, markers, etc. However, if I am correct, then there is much more to memory than what we hold in our head, but also what is external to 1 us in the form of writing. Moreover, that digital media represents an ever newer form of external memory. But through various operations, but external and internal to the technology itself, we are discouraged from making this memory into a resource for rhetorical invention. Additionally, rhetoric/composition has inadequately conceptualized digital media as memory itself. Films, television shows, websites, music, and much more are all forms of external memory: memory we hold outside of ourselves. This is not a new conception, but is at least as old as the author of the Ad Herennium. We have no shortage of textbooks and pedagogical theories that demonstrate how to write about this external memory, but are much shorter on theory that explores composition that works with and through this external memory. I will show how, through operations of technology and copyright law, memory is both regulated and privatized, both of which are devastating opponents of deliberation. It would seem a nefariously perverse formulation were I to tell you that you are not allowed to use your own memory to write and to think, or that you had to pay me whenever your memory intersected with mine. Worse still, I might tell you under what conditions your memory could be useful to you, how it is allowed to unfold, and to regulate your intentions. Yet these are precisely the conditions in which we find ourselves. While rhetoric/composition has looked at the vicissitudes of copyright law, it has looked less to the forms of social control that arise in the digital age. These two properties are interrelated, they demand our attention, and we must begin to think through them, as rhetoricians, to help spur invention in the digital age. This project is about memory—memory as a resource for invention. It conceptualizes external memory, and asks what we need in order to be inventive, deliberative beings in an age of ubiquitous computing. 2 The first question is always where to begin. There are at least three related issues that provide ways in to this project. The first way is to say that this project is a deliberative rhetoric for a digital age. No doubt all rhetoric is susceptible to technology. However, in an age of digital media, the question of how one deliberates becomes increasingly important because, as we shall see, digital media (in certain respects) do not encourage active deliberation on the part of its users. The second motivation for my project is a desire to update the concept of electracy to account for protocol. Electracy is Gregory Ulmer’s concept, while protocol Alexander Galloway’s; these two concepts need to be thought in light of one another. The third way in is a composition based on logics of the screen. Gunther Kress has suggested that the screen will dictate what writing looks like in the next century, but we must work out what that will be—what such a writing might look like. Deliberation in the Digital Age Descriptive terms for the role of media in our age vary widely: ubiquitous computing, the digital age, the information age, and even “secondary orality,” Walter Ong’s phrase. Certainly each of these ideas conveys that some kind of change (or kinds of changes) are afoot in the ways that we communicate, brought to bear by the advent of electronic media. These media have set in motion an age where print is less and less a dominant mode of discourse, as Gunther Kress notes: “Until the last two or three decades, the page—usually as a part of the medium of the book—was the dominant site of appearance of text” (Literacy in the New Media Age 48). Visual discourses, electronic discourses, and hybrids of the visual and the verbal are increasingly the dominant forms of communication (face to face talking notwithstanding, of course, but it’s early yet). 3 Rhetoric, and specific to my purposes here, deliberative rhetoric, is fundamentally transformed by these changes in technologies of communication.
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