sign in sign up
<<
Home , Betty Draper, Digital rhetoric, Mad Decent, Mob Wars, Pastiche, Public rhetoric

MIAMI The

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

Dustin Wayne Edwards

Candidate for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

______James Porter, Director

______Heidi McKee, Reader

______Jason Palmeri, Reader

______Michele Simmons, Reader

______James Coyle, Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

WRITING IN THE FLOW: ASSEMBLING TACTICAL IN AN AGE OF VIRAL CIRCULATION

by

Dustin W. Edwards

From prompts to share, update, and retweet, platforms increasingly insist that creating widespread circulation is the operative goal for networked . In response, researchers from multiple disciplines have investigated digital circulation through a number of lenses (e.g., affect theory, transnational feminism, political economy, theory, and more). In and writing studies, scholars have argued that writing for circulation—i.e., envisioning how one’s writing may gain speed, distance, and momentum—should be a prime concern for teachers and researchers of writing (e.g., Gries, 2015; Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009; Porter, 2009; Sheridan, Ridolfo, & Michel, 2012). Such work has suggested that circulation is a consequence of rhetorical delivery and, as such, is distinctly about futurity. While a focus on writing for circulation has been productive, I argue that that writing in circulation can be equally productive. Challenging the tendency to position circulation as an exclusive concern for delivery, this project argues that circulation is not just as an end goal for rhetorical activity but also as a viable inventional resource for with diverse rhetorical goals. To make this case, I construct a methodology of to retell stories of tactical rhetorics. Grounded in the cultural notion of mêtis (an adaptable, embodied, and wily intelligence), the framework of tactical rhetorics seeks to describe embodied practices that pull materials out of circulation, reconfigure them, and redeploy them for new, often political effects. Blending historical inquiry with case-based methods, I assemble an array of stories that include practices of critical , , tactical media, , digital hijacks, and protest bots. In retelling these stories, I show how tactical approaches are inventive in their attempts to solve problems, effect change, or call out injustice. In the process, my project pushes toward a critical circulation studies, where scholars investigate how circulation gatekeepers (e.g., YouTube’s Content ID) influence the flows of in networked publics. My project closes by articulating directions for future circulation studies research and , including calls to pay attention to ecological understandings of writing, as well as to infrastructures of circulation and of (re)circulation.

WRITING IN THE FLOW: ASSEMBLING TACTICAL RHETORICS IN AN AGE OF VIRAL CIRCULATION

A DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

by

Dustin W. Edwards

The Graduate School Miami University Oxford, Ohio

2016

Dissertation Director: James Porter

©

Dustin W. Edwards

2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables………………………………………………………………………iv

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………....…v

Dedication………………………………………………………………………….vi

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………..vii

Chapter 1: Tactical Encounters………………………………………………...... …1

Chapter 2: A Rhetoric of Intervention for Circulation Studies……………...……..26

Chapter 3: Mêtis Stories; or, the Makings of a Tactical Historiography………...... 44

Chapter 4: The Political Work of Digital Bricoleurs ……………………………...73

Chapter 5: Circulation Gatekeepers: Regimes, Corporate Authorship, and the Cultural of YouTube’s Content ID………………………………..95

Chapter 6: Toward a Renewed Vision of Circulation in Pedagogy and Research………………………………………………………...... 118

References…………………………………………………………………………135

iii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1: Models of Circulation……………………………………………………….37

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1: Feminists Read Mean Tweets…………………………………...... ….2

Figure 3.1: The Yes Men’s GWBush.com……………………………………....57

Figure 3.2: Set Me Free Political Video Remix……..…………………………..61

Figure 4.1: An Initial Call: #MyNYPD……………………………...…………..78

Figure 4.2: The Public Response to #MyNYPD………………………………...79

Figure 4.3: The Irreverance of #MyNYPD……………………………………...80

Figure 4.4: @OxfordAsians Account…………………………………...83

Figure 4.5: The Real @OxfordAsians…………………………………….……..84

Figure 4.6: Reappopriating Racist Social Media Discourse……………...……...85

Figure 4.7: Horse_ebooks: “Everything Happens So Much”.…………………...90

Figure 4.8: Randi_ebooks: Tactical Bot……………….………………………...91

Figure 5.1: Picking a Wild Salad: YouTube Responds.....……………………..102

Figure 5.2: YouTube’s Copright School………………………………………..107

Figure 5.3: Content ID Process by EFF………………………...…….………..110

v

DEDICATION

For Clare

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many fortuitous encounters have helped bring this dissertation to life. So many people, ideas, things, and places have influenced the arguments assembled throughout these pages. Though my writing debts are too many to fully acknowledge, I want to offer special thanks to those who have made this work possible. I must first thank my dissertation chair, Jim Porter, who has been a steady source of reassurance and guidance throughout this project. His rapid feedback always sharpened my ideas and often moved me to think about why my research could, and should, matter. Jim’s dedication to my work has made me a better, more thoughtful scholar, and I will always be grateful for his mentorship. I have no doubts that I’ll look back on our discussions—in the classroom, over , and especially at King Café—as some of the most formative of my scholarly career. Thanks also go to my committee. Michele Simmons always had a way of sending me on the most delightful and rewarding of paths, which eventually led to many of the ideas forwarded in this dissertation. She gently nudged me in the direction of circulation studies—and I will always be grateful that she did. More than this, Michele has been a calming presence throughout my time at Miami. I often left her office feeling rejuvenated to tackle the next big thing. Jason Palmeri has been constant in his support, encouragement, and kindness. Jason’s good humor, radical thinking, and commitment to justice have motivated me to do better work. I thank Jason for always remembering and practicing good pedagogy, and for realizing that good and meaningful writing is a life-long project. I thank Heidi McKee not only for her insightful feedback on this project, but also for her time and dedication to shaping my identity as a professional in the field and in the university. Heidi always took care to help me navigate the challenges and opportunities of academic life. I marvel at her fierce support for writing in the university, and I know I will continue to learn from her for years to come. I am grateful for Jim Coyle’s enthusiasm for serving as an outside reader for this project. His presence and expertise have been much appreciated. The time for writing this dissertation would not have been possible without the fellowship support I received during my fourth year. I thank the Miami University Department of English for the gift of time. I am also grateful for the opportunity to teach courses such as “Digital Writing and Rhetoric,” where I had the good fortune of talking through some of the ideas in this dissertation. Many thanks go to the numerous students whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with while at Miami University. A special shout out to my friends and colleagues at Miami who offered praise, humor, and support during all stages of this project. I especially thank Bridget Gelms (a master of GIFs and emoji in times of need), Gretchen Dietz, John Silvestro, Jon Rylander, Kathleen Coffey, Erin Brock, Enrique Paz, and Ryan Ireland. I met a great community when I came to Miami—and I’tag">m hopeful that it will endure for years to come. At Miami, I am also grateful for LuMing Mao and Linh Dich—both of whom influenced my thinking in profound ways. Thanks also go to Leigh Gruwell, Jonathan Bradshaw, and Chanon Adsanatham for showing me how they tackled the oh-so-many occluded of grad school.

vii I am also appreciative of those I learned from during my time at New Mexico State University. Special thanks go to Heather Lang (a grad comrade from the beginning), Kathryn Valentine, Jen Almjeld, and Jenny Sheppard. Jenny was the first one who approached my ideas as genuine contributions to the field of rhetoric and . She saw in me a scholar—an identity I had yet to invent for myself. If not for her confidence and enthusiasm in the early stages of my graduate , my path would have likely taken a different direction. Thank you. My family has been unwavering in their support. They trusted me when I drove across the country to pursue my degree (and even shipped me green chile on occasion). They celebrated all of my little milestones. They have been routine reminders of the good in life. I thank my mom, Kelly, who taught me to listen; my dad, Ron, who taught me to question; and my sister, Ashley, who taught me to laugh. I am grateful, also, for Hoover and little-boy Sam. I also thank the Gruszka clan for their love and support. And then there are the pups. Lily, my sweet Lily, left too soon, but she was a persistent source of joy and comfort—always at my feet or by my side, patiently waiting for dad to finish his work in hopes of a walk or a belly rub. Pop came at an important time, breathing new life and happiness into my everyday routine. I’m thankful for her (even when she chews on things she shouldn’t, like library books). My deepest gratitude goes to Clare for her patience, support, and love. She has listened to me, she has believed in me, and she has encouraged me. Our — on our little walks, over cooking meals together, after binging a Netflix series—have been folded back into the writing of this project in more ways than she can know. I’m thankful for her wisdom, her empathy, and her ability to follow me down abstracted paths. This dissertation is dedicated to her.

viii Chapter 1 Tactical Encounters

Composing in an All Things Viral World: An Opening Story In 2012, Jimmy Kimmel Live went viral. Or, to be more precise, the year 2012 marked the production and distribution of a new Jimmy Kimmel Live segment on ABC called “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets,” a three-minute video that experienced rapid circulation and transformation once released on YouTube.1 The premise was simple enough. Celebrities such as Will Ferrell, Kristen Bell, Louis CK, and others, repeated, word-for-word, messages that everyday people posted about them on micro-blogging platform Twitter. As celebrities read the short, sharp blasts about their appearances or perceived lack of talents, R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts” played softly underneath their voices. That “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” has garnered view counts in the millions is not all too surprising. Kimmel, now a late-night staple on a major television network, has much social clout—and, of course, it doesn’t hurt that the video features popular celebrities making jokes at their own expense. What is more surprising, however, is how this segment has inspired participation from everyday people. The video has motivated a panoply of offshoots: college professors read mean tweets, female athletes read mean tweets, fraternity members read mean tweets, pornstars read mean tweets, you get the point. The video, in effect, has not only circulated at massive rates, but has also become something of a rhetorical ,2 spawning appropriative iterations from different social groups, each a little different in message but all resembling the style of Kimmel’s initial production. One particular extension of the meme is “Feminists Read Mean Tweets,” a video that was published on YouTube two years after the initial began to circulate (see Figure 1.1). This video, produced and compiled by the media company Mic, gathered feminist voices on Twitter to redeploy the mean—or, for a more accurate descriptor, violent—messages these women had received on social media platforms. Using the of Kimmel’s circulating video, women appropriated the misogynistic words that had been directed at them to make an argument about the very real dangers women face in online spaces. While the video still maintains an irreverent , the messages each woman repeats are far from joyful. From comments of slut shaming to threats of death and rape, it becomes apparent that the video is a more serious statement than Kimmel’s initial production. Interestingly, “Feminists Read Mean Tweets” offers something of a double logic of . One the one hand, the feminists featured in the video appropriated Kimmel’s popular segment as a way to invent from and generate traction for their cause (see Figure 1.1). On the other hand, they also appropriate already circulating messages directed at them to show violence, encouraging others to do the same reappropriation. Or, as one person explained toward the end of the video, “it’s so much easier to show people this exists than try to explain the climate of what it is. And I think it’s very important to allow these people to reveal who they are,

1 At time of writing, the video has generated more than 43 million views on YouTube. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRBoPveyETc. 2 In her short but rich book, in Digital Culture, Limor Shifman (2013) made the point a viral object (be it a video, photo, or joke) should be understood differently from memes. For Shifman, virals denote a single unit that spreads at rapid rates (i.e., the single “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” video released on Kimmel’s YouTube page), whereas a meme is “always a collection of texts” (p. 56). In other words, a viral object transforms into a meme when many people appropriate, imitate, and alter the viral object for other uses.

1 Figure 1 .1. Pictured on the left is a screenshot from “Feminists Read Mean Tweets,” a video that circulated two years after “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets,” a screenshot of which is pictured on the right. rather than us having to explain it” (n.p). We see, then, that this video serves a larger purpose than achieving virality—it repurposes circulating messages to critique patriarchal values and offer support for other women facing similar forms of harassment in online spaces.

Writing in the Flow: A Guiding Aphorism This opening story, as I hope to show, troubles recent explorations of circulation in rhetoric and writing studies. In 2012, David Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony Michel positioned circulation as a concern for both rhetorical scholars and public writers, arguing, “Rhetors look forward in time to the moment when their compositions will hopefully achieve a kind of circulatory success that will allow for optimal rhetorical impact […] The critic, on the other hand, looks backward at rhetorical compositions already circulating” (p. 82). In our present moment, I see this bifurcation between the critic and the rhetor as largely representative of scholarly approaches to circulation. Broadly understood, circulation can be defined as the movement of rhetoric and writing, a spatiotemporal process of spread, exchange, and transformation. When tied to rhetorical practice, as Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel’s work intimated, circulation is often positioned as belonging to the temporal logic of futurity. Laurie Gries (2015), another scholar whose recent work has carved space for circulation in theory, pedagogy, and research, has argued along similar lines, claiming that rhetoric increasingly needs to consider “strands of time beyond the initial moment of production and delivery” (p. 14). Circulation, as such, is about how a given rhetorical object may gain exposure, movement, and speed as it travels throughout public space and digital networks. Through this frame, as Gries mentioned, circulation is unequivocally connected to delivery. The line of thinking goes something like this: one delivers writing so that it may acquire a high degree of circulation. In short, this is writing for circulation. This is an incredibly powerful—and empowering—line of thinking for public writing and rhetoric pedagogy. It shows that writing matters, that it has reach, and that it can travel and enter networks far beyond its point of origin. While this focus has been productive, I can’t help but think that there’s another dimension for how circulation informs rhetorical practice, one that Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel assign to the role of the critic. Circulation, indeed, is also about navigating and inventing from what’s already there, kairotically surfing and plucking from vibrant archives to make anew out of moving materials.

2 Such is the case of “Feminists Read Mean Tweets.” Materials in circulation— particularly, the “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” video meme and a selection of misogynistic tweets—were sources of invention; yet also, as a recomposed object, “Feminists Read Mean Tweets” depends on its own future circulation so that people may interact with, and possibly recompose, its message. We might think of this as both a tactical and strategic rhetorical process. Tactical, because it depends on items already present in a circulating field: it recycles genres and texts already in motion. Strategic, because it anticipates and makes possible its own circulation: it was uploaded to YouTube, composed with appropriate metatags, distributed on various social media platforms, and produced with a sense of participation and remixability. Of course, as mentioned and as the curious dichotomy made in the opening epigraph illustrates, rhetorical scholars certainly recognize that circulation also entails looking “backward at compositions already circulation” (p. 82). But, as they suggested, this is largely thought of as an activity for the rhetoric critic or researcher. Gries’ project, her innovative iconographic method for tracking and following the circulation of Obama Hope, certainly relied on this assumption. Looking backward at circulation, Gries uncovered much about the circulation of how the iconic image became much more than its author ever intended. Interestingly, though, similar to Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel, Gries’ brief chapter on pedagogy explicitly pairs circulation with delivery, and does not fully acknowledge how composing out of materials already in circulation can be a viable rhetorical tactic for joining public discussions. I certainly do not wish to disregard the importance of constructing texts to achieve circulatory success. What I do want to do, though, is to begin to shift the about circulation to include a broader range of rhetorical activity. In this dissertation, I challenge the tendency to position circulation as an exclusive concern for delivery, and I call for rhetoric and writing scholars to see widespread circulation not just as an end goal for rhetorical activity but also as a viable inventional resource for writers with diverse rhetorical goals. Indeed, I work throughout this project to look both backwards (connected to memory) and forwards (connected to delivery) at circulation, arguing that paying attention to the whole of circulation is a productive way to teach and theorize this increasingly important rhetorical concept. Put simply, I argue an emphasis change is in order: not writing for the flow, but writing in the flow. Such a slight change in preposition—the aphorism that guides this project—signals a small but significant change for the study of circulation as it informs rhetorical theory, practice, and pedagogy. Writing in the flow encompasses a range of rhetorical activity. On the one the hand, writing in the flow suggests that rhetors must keep their eye on the backflow—that they must follow, trace, and investigate circulating materials, being aware that already moving archives can become fodder for future compositions. On the other hand, it also suggests that rhetors must be aware of future-flow—that distributing their writing enters their discourse into a circulatory path (or set of circulatory paths) that has consequentiality partially beyond their control. In short, navigating both—being in the flow—is key to how circulation informs practice, especially because it connects to the rhetorical canons (especially invention, memory, and delivery). In an age of networks and social media platforms, looking both backward and forward at the dynamic flows of circulation to (re)compose and (re)distribute one’s writing is an increasingly prevalent, yet undertheorized, dimension of digital rhetoric. In many ways, this chapter works to more comprehensively outline how rhetoric and writing studies can begin to articulate this model of circulatory intervention.

3 In what remains of this chapter, I introduce key concepts, definitions, and goals for Writing in Flow. In addition to articulating the methodology guiding my project, this chapter also situates my larger argument within three increasingly interrelated lines of scholarship: digital rhetoric, , and circulation studies. In particular, I describe how an expanded notion of circulation—one that looks both forward and backward at dynamic flows of discourse—can be productive for digital and public rhetorics. By more concretely linking circulation to the rhetorical canons and exploring how circulation informs, or can inform, rhetorical practice, I describe how this project is invested in articulating a generative rhetorical framework for writers intervening in digital public arenas. Here, drawing on Frank Farmer’s (2013) of the “citizen bricoleur,” I gesture toward an understanding of the digital bricoleur as an interventionist par excellence, arguing that such figures perform important political work by reimagining and reconfiguring already circulating digital debris for new purposes. From here, I work to build a theoretical framework of tactical rhetorics to explore the inventive dimensions of circulatory response and adaptation, particularly noting how digital bricoleurs navigate and invent from what I call the backflow of circulation. This requires that I connect circulation more rigorously with the canons of memory and invention. As such, drawing on emerging work on the dynamism and mobility of archives in online spaces—what Jussi Parikka (2012) has called “archives in motion”—I seek to frame circulation as a tactical field of encounter, one that necessitates navigation, adaptation, and reconfiguration.

Introducing Tactical Rhetorics Since there is already a strong showing of scholarship that explores the strategic dimensions of writing for circulation (e.g., Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009; Porter, 2009; Sheridan, Ridolfo, & DeVoss, 2012), my main effort in this work will be to unpack the tactical aspects of composing with materials in circulation. While I can imagine a number of projects that investigate how practitioners, students, or public writers navigate the complexities of writing in the flow, I narrow my focus in this dissertation to examine how public writers leverage already flowing rhetorical objects toward political ends. Yet, in both scholarship and pedagogy, we lack a useful and comprehensive framework to discuss how navigating and inventing from circulation can be fruitful for rhetorical studies and generative for public writers. Of course, one reason for this lack may be due to the above critique of circulation studies—that is, we often talk about circulation in terms of futurity alone, not in terms of a tactical field we may invent from. Yet another reason—and I suspect a more cumbersome one—is that circulation is always already in flux, moving and flowing at divergent rates of transformation. Objects in circulation, by definition, are constantly on the move, even if some travel at much slower speeds than others. Consequently, we need a flexible framework that respects the unpredictability and volatility of dynamic archives, but that simultaneously recognizes the inventive quality of kairotically navigating flows of circulating . A key argument of this dissertation is that such a framework lies in mêtis, a concept that the Greeks used to describe the embodied responses of navigating changing and uncertain terrains. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1984) likened his notion of tactics to the ploys of mêtis. Indeed, de Certeau’s tactics are largely synonymous with mêtis; they are the “tricks of the ‘weak’ within the order established by the ‘strong’” (p. 40)—clever, resourceful, cunning, and necessarily in a position of defense. Responsive and temporal, tactics, de Certeau told us, play on and with a terrain already imposed to “make do” with what’s given, resembling the “artisan-like inventiveness” of (p. xvii). In my discussion below, I

4 argue that rhetoric, as tactical, as mêtis, conveys the kind of informed knowledge needed to navigate and intervene in circulation, because it denotes inventive adaptability, appropriate timing, the ability to deal with conflict, and a trickster ethic of operating in the world. As such, I use tactical rhetorics as a conceptual frame to (a) forge a vocabulary for navigating circulation and (b) describe a repertoire of embodied practices that pull object out of circulation, reconfigure them, and redeploy them for new, often political effects. As I use the phrase, tactical rhetorics can be understood from two perspectives. On the one hand, it is meant to represent a kairotic of invention and intervention, a generative framework for traversing the backflow of circulation to re-work and redeploy already circulating objects. This understanding will largely be the focus of this introductory chapter. On the other hand, tactical rhetorics also signify particular composing practices—what can otherwise be understood as political acts of recomposition—that are explicitly appropriative in approach. This understanding will largely be the focus of Chapters 3 and 4. A study of tactical rhetorics represents an important shift for circulation studies because it begins to articulate how textual and material flows are dynamic fields of rhetorical encounter. Jenny Edbauer (2005) concluded her highly influential article, “Unframing Public Models of Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” by stating, simply, “we encounter rhetoric” (p. 23). I take this to mean that circulating and public affects are always in play in any given rhetorical exchange, and that practitioners of rhetoric need to hook-in to what already in motion in order to effectively participate in daily life. While I’m certainly building off of Edbauer’s work, as I’ll discuss more fully in Chapter 2, I also want to push the argument a little further into digital realms by paying particular attention to the vast archives of ever-changing materials in digital spaces, archives that allow for reconfiguration and redeployment, archives that allow for tactical invention. Increasingly, these dynamic archives— YouTube channels, Twitter feeds, image repositories, , comment threads, and so on—are not only encountered, but they are put to use, reimagined, repurposed, and remixed for new rhetorical undertakings. It is the work of this dissertation to outline a rhetorical framework conducive to navigating such archives, as well as to assemble the many composing practices that explicitly and rhetorically make use of them.

A Tactical Repertoire: Assembling Political Acts of Recomposition Scholars have certainly recognized the inventive potential for repurposing, remixing, reusing, and recycling already existing texts and materials (e.g., Arroyo, 2013; Banks, 2010; Dubisar & Palmeri, 2010; Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2007; Swarts, 2009; and many others). Yet, the direct mention of circulation in these discussions, save for a few exceptions (Dubisar and Palmeri included), is largely absent. My claim is that fusing studies of reuse, remix, and appropriation more closely with circulation will prove generative for scholars interested in both remix studies and circulation studies. In a 2016 article, “Framing Remix Rhetorically: Toward a Typology of Transformative Work,” I bridged the study of circulation with remix. My aim there was to situate remix practices under the rhetorical frame of imitation (/imitatio). I argued that in classical rhetoric, imitation was part of a process that asked rhetors to navigate, decipher, and critically examine a cultural reservoir of knowledge, components of which were to be redeployed to fit the occasion of future acts. I further noted that imitation was often carved up into different typologies—compilation, paraphrase, reproduction, etc.—and, as such, imitation served as suitable framework for understanding remix practices. This dissertation continues the work of

5 outlining rhetorical practices that are explicitly appropriative. In particular, in Chapters 3 and 4, I trace the embodied practices of critical imitation, collage, , remix, appropriation, digital hijacks, and hacktivism. When assembled together, I consider these to be a repertoire of tactical composition. My hope is that building such a repertoire can have heuristic value for teachers and scholars of writing and rhetoric. Writing in 2009, et al. argued that “schools remain hostile to overt signs of repurposed content […] and they often fail to provide the conceptual tools needed to analyze and interpret works produced in this appropriative process” (p. 57). I agree. And I find, unfortunately, that Jenkins et al.’s assessment largely still stands in 2015. By looking outside of academic contexts as I’ll do with particular cases in this project, I hope to show how this hostility manifests outside of school as well. These show up in the forms of cease and desist letters, calls of unoriginality, claims of slavish imitation, and lawsuits, to name a few. Otherwise put, responses to tactical approaches often flare up with social hostility. The work of assembling these practices together, juxtaposing them side-by- side is meant to forcefully capture such pushback and hostility. Yet, and perhaps more hopefully, such a repertoire also signals how tactical approaches are inventive in their attempts to solve problems, effect change, or call out injustice. If I’m successful, the stories and cases folded throughout this dissertation will provide evidence for tactical rhetorics as being viable—and often political—forms of writing.

Articulating a Methodology of Assemblage Throughout this dissertation, I work to gather rhetorical performances that outline tactical composing approaches. As such, I describe my approach as a methodology of assemblage. Clay Spinuzzi (2003) articulated the difference between method and methodology as such: “a method is a way of investigating phenomena; a methodology is the theory, philosophy, heuristics, aims, and values that underlie, motivate, and guide the method” (p. 7). Sandra Harding’s (1987) earlier discussion is similar in approach—for Harding, a method is a “technique” used to “gather evidence,” whereas a methodology is a “theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed” (pp. 2-3). In Opening Spaces, Patricia Sullivan and James Porter (1997) articulated methodology as praxis—a notion that contends methodology is a critical doing, not a dogmatic approach to research but a flexible and situated approach to generating knowledge. Clearly, as these scholars have suggested, method(s) and methodology intersect and inform one another. With this in mind, I deploy assemblage as a methodological approach in two key ways—first, in designating the action of gathering data (i.e., assembling), and second, in describing a desired outcome by way of an amalgamation of practices (i.e., an assemblage). Assemblage as verb, assembling as action. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber (2007) described assemblages as “texts built primarily and explicitly from existing texts to solve a writing or problem in a new context” (p. 381). Although not discussing assemblage from the vantage point of research methodology, Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s definition is useful for my purposes because it describes how the act of assembling “existing texts”—and I would add existing rhetorical practices—can be presented in a new context to solve a particular issue at hand. Certainly, Bruno Latour’s (2005b) project understands the act of assembling and dis-assembling as being a useful methodological stance (see Simmons, Moore, & Sullivan, 2015, for a helpful primer on Latour’s methodology for rhetoric and writing research). Although Latour is undoubtedly interested in following and tracing all actors, or actants, in particular matters of concern, Latour’s “risky accounts” attempt to “reassemble the social”—put

6 otherwise, using a particular methodological tract, written accounts attempt to piece together the makings of a research site. Indeed, in the 2010 , “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” Latour distinguished the difference between critique and composition: “While critics still believe that there is too much belief and too many things standing in the way of reality, compositionists believe that there are enough ruins and that everything has to be reassembled piece by piece” (pp. 475-476). Working from a somewhat different tradition, much qualitative methodological work has nodded to bricolage as a metaphor to describe crafty, interdisciplinary research. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (2011), for example, likened the “researcher-as-bricoleur” to the quilt maker, one who uses “the aesthetic and material tools of his or her craft, deploying whatever strategies, methods, or empirical materials are at hand” (p. 4). The end result, the quilt, the bricolage, is a “sequence of representations connecting the parts to the whole” (6). As Joe Kincheloe (2001) explained, research bricoleurs “pick up the pieces of what’s left and paste them together as best they can” (p. 681). In seeking to develop a unified theory made up of many diverse parts and practices, the notion of researcher-as-bricoleur accurately describes the kind of methodological approach my dissertation engages. That is, it sees promise in connecting and layering diverse rhetorical practices and understands that no one method can best accomplish this task. How will I assemble? I primarily draw on two methods. The first develops a historiographical approach called “mêtis storytelling” to recount the rhetorical actions of four paradigmatic tactical rhetors, including the abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass, the collage artist Hannah Hoch, the tactical media duo the Yes Men, and the political remix artist Elisa Kreisinger. Attuned to mêtis itself, this method seeks to provide an adaptable “theater of operations” (de Certeau) to account for how tactical rhetorics are practiced in particular social and cultural locations. The second method examines the current digital landscape by reviewing several networked stories of tactical composition: the case of the Real @OxfordAsians, the @myNYPD hijack, and the tactical bot @randi_ebooks. Aiming to recontextualize each case (what might otherwise be described as a rhetorical event), I draw on a range of data, including published news articles, archived social media posts, and interviews with research participants to offer thick of how members of diverse publics tactically intervened in the circulation of dominant discourse. I discuss the parameters of both of these methods in greater detail in Chapters 3 and 4. Assemblage as noun, assemblage to make something happen. According to political theorist Jane Bennett (2010), assemblages are “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements” whose effects are “emergent in their ability to make something happen” (pp. 23-24). While Bennett’s project worked to show how material assemblages have agential force in the world (i.e., the assemblage of the 2004 North American Blackout), I leverage her definition of assemblage to draw attention to how the sum of this dissertation seeks to have persuasive effects. At a meta- level, in other words, an assemblage methodology is powerful and productive not because of any one element, but rather because of the larger conglomerate that it helps to form. What will the assemblage woven here show? For one, it shows that we should be teaching circulation, and perhaps differently than other scholars have presented it thus far. As I will argue more fully in Chapter 6, writing and rhetoric teachers might think of more inventive ways to allow students to encounter circulating materials so that they may rework, repurpose, and redeploy writing in digital networks. In an issue I take up more fully in the latter half of this dissertation, I also hope the assemblage of practices can intervene in discussions of authorship.

7 In particular, by juxtaposing an array of recomposition practices—ones that are rhetorically savvy, socially situated, and politically imbued—this dissertation continues the work of articulating alternative visions of the “” paradigm that trenchantly remains in U.S. writing contexts. Additionally, as I describe more in the next section, I hope the end result of this dissertation gives way to a more critical circulation studies, one that not only explores how multimodal compositions move in digital economies but also investigates why others experience blockages and occlusions.

Goals, Definitions, and Disciplinary Foundations This project builds out of three increasingly interrelated lines of scholarship: digital rhetorics, public sphere theory, and circulation studies. In what follows, I briefly situate my project within each, articulating definitions as well as complexity along the way.

Defining Digital Rhetoric and Writing At its most fundamental level, this is a project about digital rhetoric—looking at how circulation invigorates the rhetorical canons, and particularly the canons of invention, memory, and delivery. Whole volumes (e.g., Brooke, 2009; Eyman, 2015; Warnick, 2007; Welch, 1999), expansive articles and chapters (e.g., Haas, 2007, 2012; Losh, 2009; Prior, et al., 2007; Zappen, 2005; WIDE, 2005), and conference symposia (e.g., the Indiana Digital Rhetoric Symposium3) have worked to define and articulate a trajectory—or better yet, trajectories—for digital rhetorics. An obvious connection is that digital rhetoric, as Eyman recently stated, is drawn “first and foremost from the tradition of rhetoric itself” (n.p.). Yet of course, as Eyman himself admitted, this still poses complexities for defining and delimiting the scope of digital rhetoric— what do we mean by “rhetoric”? And what do we mean by “digital”? Embedded in these questions are epistemological, ontological, and ideological tensions. As decolonial, comparative, and cultural rhetoric scholars have so importantly pointed out, rhetoric need not—and should not—pertain to Greek practices and histories alone (e.g., Baca, 2008; Mao, 2014; Powell, 2010). As such, we need to acknowledge a diversity of definitions of digital rhetorics. Haas’ (2012) definition of rhetoric nodded in this direction. “I understand rhetoric,” she wrote, “as the negotiation of cultural information—and its historical, social, economic, and political influences—to affect social action (persuade). I also believe that every culture has its own rhetorical roots, traditions, and practice” (p. 287). In other words, there is no general theory or static notion of rhetoric; it is always situated, practiced, and adapted in particular social, cultural, and technological contexts. Importantly, following this perspective, it is important to acknowledge how traditions of rhetorical practice have been silenced or relegated in histories of rhetorical education and theory. As we stand on the cusp of more definitively outlining what we mean by digital rhetoric, I believe it is crucial to be mindful of Greek and Roman rhetoric’s dominance—recognizing, like recent work in comparative and cultural rhetorics, that cultural practices outside of the Greek tradition contribute to more capacious ways of knowing and doing. While I work extensively with Greek terms and concepts in this dissertation, I also endeavor to be mindful of diverse cultural practices and histories. One key way I do this is by carefully and reflectively engaging in rhetorical storytelling as a method of historical inquiry (see

3 This conference symposium, an important event for the study of digital rhetoric, was live-streamed in April 2015. Video recordings of all speakers have been uploaded to YouTube by one of the conference organizers, Justin Hodgson. They can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/user/philosophister/videos.

8 Chapter 3). Recently, in a performative essay published in Enculturation, the Cultural Rhetoric Theory Lab (2015) noted, “the practice of story is integral to doing cultural rhetorics” (n.p.). By this, they mean that stories help to “investigate and understand -making as it is situated in specific cultural communities” (n.p.). When retelling specific stories, I hope to draw readers into a scenario with vivid detail in an attempt to contextualize particular social and cultural spaces. In other words, I hope that my approach doesn’t erase difference, but rather draws out differences as they occur in particular historical, technological, and cultural locations. The term digital, too, is likewise thorny to define. Popular accounts of the word are synonymous with computerized and . More technically, as Eyman (2015) articulated, “digital” refers to “the encoding of information in binary digits (bits), which may occupy only two distinct states (on or off, 1 or 0)” (n.p.). According to Eyman, digital transmission has advantages over analog signals: it is easily replicated, easily compressed for storage, and more secure than analogue signals. In a somewhat different approach, Haas (2007) contended that digital, etymologically, refers to an embodied way of doing and knowing. The digital, according to Haas, “refers to our fingers, our digits, one of the primary ways (along with our ears and eyes) through which we make sense of the world and with which we write into the world” (p. 77). This reading helps point out the always material and embodied nature of digital composition. While it may be tempting to divorce the digital from a material grounding, digital are made and put to work in particular cultural and social milieus. This is to say, “technologies are not neutral or objective—nor are the ways we use them” (Haas, 2012, p. 288). In this project, “digital” will largely be used a kind of shorthand to denote material and embodied practices that are primarily constructed using an array of technologies and distributed primarily via online networks. When I say “writing in the flow,” I am gesturing toward a broad understanding of writing to include composing practices that move beyond traditional notions of the printed word on a page. My understanding of writing is indebted to the rich line of scholarship in , , and digital writing (e.g., Alexander & Rhodes, 2014; Palmeri, 2012; Shipka, 2009; WIDE, 2005; Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, & Sirc, 2004; Yancey, 2004; and many others). And while there are many ways to define digital rhetoric, this project pays special attention to the rhetorical canons as they are practiced in digital spaces. In this regard, drawing on Collin Brooke’s (2009) influential work of regarding the canons as “ecologies of practice,” I work to more comprehensively connect circulation with the rhetorical canons. Brooke noted that a generative notion of rhetoric insists that the canons are not as boundary-driven as they may seem. They blur in practice. Other scholars certainly make this point as well. Debra Hawhee (2002), for example, argued along similar lines when she worked to position the canons as a “clustering,” revising the assumed linearity of the canons as such: “rather than the five-step program (‘invention, then style, then arrangement …’), the canons would cluster around ‘ands,’ held in tension, and enacted only through the movements […] of discourse” (p. 32). While the rhetorical canons figure into my discussion at a conceptual level, the actual process, as these scholars argue, is less linear than the ordered arrangement we typically rehearse.

The Complexities of Defining Publics A second goal of this project is to describe and outline a tactical repertoire for repurposing materials already in circulation. More particularly, this goal is committed to discussing how distinct practices of reuse, remix, and appropriation can be leveraged to politically intervene in public spheres. In this regard, my project crosses paths with public

9 rhetorics. Rhetoric, of course, has its roots in public intervention: meeting in public places (the polis) to discuss political matters, using rhetoric to deliberate about the common good. Yet, as many feminist, cultural, and scholars remind, this “common good” historically benefited a select body of individuals (the male, the able-bodied, the economically elite) and this “rhetoric” was of a particular kind (critical-rational debate or argument). Recognizing this elision of difference, my project builds off of the consistent critiques of Jurgen Habermas’ (1989) model of the public sphere, namely in an attempt to open up what it means to participate in “public” life. Particularly, by slightly reframing Frank Farmer’s (2013) figure of the “citizen bricoleur,” I work to establish a different kind of public participation in digital public spheres through an articulation of the digital bricoleur. The notion of the public sphere has a rich intellectual history, one I cannot hope to comprehensively cover in this brief introduction. Nevertheless, I commit here to detailing what I mean by public intervention, and as such, briefly sketch some of the complexities involved in defining “the public sphere,” or better, “public spheres.” Most discussions of the public sphere begin with Habermas and his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In that work, Habermas traced the historical and cultural roots of the bourgeois public sphere, locating the development of the public sphere in Europe (particularly Britain, France, and Germany). In retracing these origins, Habermas set up what would later be critiqued as an idealized public sphere by discussing specific sites (coffeehouses and salons) where private individuals would come together to discuss public issues. As such, Habermas’ public sphere assumed all citizens have access and are on equal footing to deliberate on public issues. Habermas’ model has since received considerable criticism from theorists who ask important questions about access, equality, equity, and the artificial divisions between public and private spheres. These theorists place those who are and have been historically marginalized at the center of their work. Seyla Benhabib (1992), for instance, saw a problem with the issues that are considered out of the scope of the public sphere. Making a distinction between public and private, Benhabib maintained, ignores issues that have long been relegated to the private domain. As such, Benhabib argued that under Habermas’ model issues of reproduction, housework delegation, and care for children, sick, and elderly are considered private matters and thus do not receive attention as topics of deliberation in Habermas’ public sphere. Nancy Fraser (1990) made a similar argument, noting that the construction of Habermas’ public sphere inherently privileges men and dominant heteronormative values. More specifically, Fraser offered critique and offered correctives of Habermas’ notion of the public sphere on four fronts: (1) his notion of “bracketing” inequality when deliberating is naïve and should be recalibrated to an elimination of inequality as a necessary condition for democracy, (2) his conception of the public sphere should be recalibrated to multiple public spheres because there should be areas where subordinated groups have discursive space for deliberation, (3) publics, to be more just for all, would do well to include private matters as well, and (4) publics need not always include a sharp divide from the state, for such a conception renders a “weak public” unable to effect change. Due to the shortcomings of Habermas’ ideal theory of the public sphere, theorists have worked to discuss other possibilities for public deliberation, decision-making, and world- building. Both Fraser and Michal Warner (2005) discussed the transformative and community- building potential of subaltern counterpublics and counterpublics, respectively. For Fraser, subaltern counterpublics are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their

10 identities, interests, and needs” (p. 123). Fraser’s prime example of a subaltern counterpublic is the academic American Feminist community—a subaltern counterpublic that circulated issues of concern for subordinate groups (i.e., issues regarding rape, sexual harassment, and domestic responsibilities) and advocated for widespread social change based on those issues. In sum, Fraser saw counterpublics as spaces where marginalized groups can come together, determine their own needs, and ultimately enter into dominant publics to have their needs met and their voices heard. Warner built on Fraser’s theory of subaltern counterpublics but questioned the end result of public activity. As he put it, when counterpublics enter dominant discourse “they require agency in relation to the state. They enter into the temporality of politics and adapt themselves to the performatives of rational-critical discourse. For many counterpublics, to do so is to cede the original hope of transforming not just policy but the space of public life itself” (p. 124). Revising the criticisms of Habermas’ model, both Fraser and Warner theorized the spaces for marginalized social groups to have their voices circulated in both queer and dominant spaces.

An Emerging Kind of Public Participant: The Digital Bricoleur With these critiques of public sphere theories in mind, this project works to open up what constitutes public participation. Much work in rhetoric and writing studies has provided me an avenue to do so, exploring how people can facilitate change in publics using a wide array of rhetorical practices. Writing back in 1995, Julia Allen and Lester Faigley worked to challenge the notion of critical-rational debate being the benchmark for social change. They worked through several other models in their essay, contending that challenging dominant discourses “requires alternative strategies than those offered by the mainstream rhetorical tradition” (p. 143). Coming from a slightly different but related angle, Michele Simmons and Jeffrey Grabill (2007) contested a commonplace belief that everyday people cannot do important work to effect change in communities. Simmons and Grabill articulated a civic rhetoric wherein citizens must have access and infrastructure to invent valuable knowledge in order to effectively participate in complex settings. Such a model of participation draws attention to the inherent rhetorical nature of public participation. Rhetoric’s purpose, as Simmons and Grabill argued, “is to enable transgressive acts of the least powerful” (p. 442). Within recent years, similar lines of argument have been extended to digital spaces. Erin Dietel-McLaughlin (2009), for example, described the Internet as a kind of public sphere, describing how alternative rhetorical forms of public participation, what she called “irreverent compositions,” work to challenge “official, institutionalized discourses” (n.p.). She defined irreverent compositions as “texts that ignore or mock the authority or character of a person, event, or text, with the effect of offering commentary on those entities” (n.p.). Here, McLaughlin endeavored to broaden “what counts” as public participation. For McLaughlin, there is no idealized public sphere; similarly, so-called “critical-rational” debate is not a benchmark for effective public deliberation. Along very similar lines, David Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony Michel (2012) labored to describe multimodal rhetoric as a viable option for public participation. Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel drew on Warner’s notion of poetic world making to acknowledge a larger array of legitimate discursive forms for public work, including multimodal composing strategies—e.g., “films, animations, fabricates objects, games virtual reality compositions, and mixed-media performances” (p. 20). Along with these projects, this dissertation is particularly indebted to a recent articulation of an emerging kind of public participant. In his remarkable After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, Frank Farmer (2013) offered a conceptualization of

11 the “citizen bricoleur,” a compound title that effectively opens up both the meaning of citizenship as well as the discursive forms that qualify as public participation. Drawing on many articulations of bricolage (especially Michel de Certeau, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Dick Hebdige), Farmer offered the figure of the citizen bricoleur as one who uses all available materials “at hand” to make and make better in public arenas. According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1966), the French word bricolage denotes a kind of practice that stands apart from modern science. Levi-Strauss told us that the bricoleur is a maker of things composed from already existing debris. “The rules of his [sic] game,” said Levi-Strauss, “are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’” (p. 17). The bricoleur, in other words, is an assembler of readymade objects, craftily making use of a “heterogeneous repertoire” that is “nonetheless limited” (p. 17). The compound citizen bricoleur, Farmer argued, “is a title that is meant to enlarge our commonplace ideas as to who counts as a citizen and indeed what citizenship means for our time and place” (p. 160). Included under this understanding are many more discursive practices and cultural identities than “critical-rational debate” and “private citizen”: “punks, zinesters, anarchists, grrrls, and others who pitch camp on the outskirts of public esteem” (p. 160). For Farmer, the citizen bricoleur practices a micro- politics of resistance, working within what’s given to “challenge orthodox” ways of doing and making. This figure, as Farmer intimated, can also be felt in digital spaces. Farmer briefly mentioned the potentiality for digital bricoleurs, noting, “perhaps the internet has its own forms of do-it-yourself that we have yet to fully appreciate” (p. 78). Farmer ultimately settled on the bricoleur as his preferred title, for he argued an absolute divide between digital and offline is antithetical to the work of the bricoleur. For Farmer, bricoleurs’ work is to “get the job done” by using “whatever tools or resources are available, handy” (p. 78). While I certainly agree, my project works to untangle the particular affordances of digital bricolage, a move similar to Jan Rune Holmevik’s (2012) discussion in Inter/Vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy. There, Holmevik described the digital bricoleur as a hacker: “someone who works with what is available to create new and exciting possibilities because he or she finds that interesting and entertaining, and because of a personal need or desire to make those possibilities reality” (p. 44). While my view is largely in concert with Holmevik’s, I prefer reserving the term hacker for specific acts of digital re/working (usually a tinkering with code). The digital bricoleur, as I’m using the term, is meant to capture a broader range of rhetorical activity. The digital bricoleur is one who reverse engineers computer code, one who rewrites popular culture, one who turns racist tweets against themselves. The tactical re/worker of digital objects, the digital bricoleur, is an interventionist par excellence, “making do” with whatever is available and reimaging the possibilities of the digital ruins circulating in digital public spheres. It is her movements, her prowess in navigation, adaptation, and redeployment, that I seek to more capaciously acknowledge in this dissertation. The screen shot, the hijack, the remix, the , the —these are some the tools of the digital bricoleur. While the entirety of this project is about how bricoleurs navigate the dynamic flows of circulation, I particularly pay attention to digital bricoleurs in Chapter 4.

Toward a Critical Circulation Studies Finally, a last goal is to take a more critical look at how circulation systems and gatekeepers influence the flows of discourse in networked communications. While it may be tempting to consider social media platforms as mere distribution systems, I argue that

12 technologies of distribution and circulation are neither neutral nor passive. As I work to show (especially in Chapter 5), circulation is made possible and constrained by material systems, including social media platforms (their politics, their proprietary algorithms, their censorship policies, etc.), intellectual property and discourses, global networks, mobile and hardwired Internet infrastructures, and more. Assembling and disassembling these material systems, as I see it, can be a valuable avenue of research for scholars invested in circulation studies. While Fraser, Benhabib, and Warner (and many others) remind us of blind spots in Habermas’ theory regarding public participation, other scholars have recently pointed out another missing dimension of public sphere theories: nonhumans. For example, Bruno Latour’s (2005b) project has pointed out the need to “bring back things” into considerations of politics, of what he has called public matters of concern. Jane Bennett (2010), too, has argued for the need to “devise new procedures, technologies, and regimes of perception that enable us to consult nonhumans more closely, or to listen and respond more carefully to their outbreaks, testimonies, and propositions” (p. 108). Bringing these discussions more directly within the purview of public rhetoric scholarship, Nathaniel Rivers (2014) argued the following: “our analyses of public rhetoric should embrace equally the nonhuman, not simply as artifacts of rhetorical production, or as vessels of cultural meaning, or even as containers for rhetorical action, but rather as active participants in what Latour calls an object-oriented democracy” (n.p.). Taken together, such analyses are useful for scholars wanting to study the complex assemblages that make digital circulation possible in the first place. In this dissertation, I adapt Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley’s (2013) notion of “network gatekeepers” to think more deeply about the assemblage of actors involved in moving discourse in networked environments. As Nahon and Hemsley argued, “Network gatekeepers have a tremendous impact on information flows: by choosing which information can or cannot pass, by connecting networks or clusters to one another, or in general by regulation the movement of information” (p. 43). In an age of social media platforms, investigating the logics and mechanisms by which information flows is an important component of the circulation process. It’s not enough, in other words, to claim that writing increasingly has the potential to circulate. We need to begin investing more energy untangling circulation gatekeepers in digital networks.

A Matter of Framing: A Look Back at Circulation This dissertation is invested in articulating how circulation may inform rhetorical invention. Certainly, scholars have noted that achieving circulatory success requires one to be inventive (e.g., Gries, 2015; Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009; Porter, 2009; Sheridan, Ridolfo, & Michel, 2012). However, this understanding is quite different from what I’m gesturing at here. The focus for these scholars deals more with the potential for circulation. Under this frame, when bringing circulation into the invention process, one would want to consider how the design, production, and distribution of writing might impact its circulatory potential. Invention here, then, looks forward at circulation—what we might think of as invention for the future-flow of circulation. How can I design my writing so that it may spread? How can I appeal to my audience to gain widespread circulation? How might I build participation into the design of my writing? When would be an appropriate and well-timed occasion to release my writing? Renewed concerns for rhetorical delivery are highly relevant here. As Laurie Gries (2015) noted, having “forethought about delivery” is important if rhetors want to “accelerate the spread” of the their messages. Further, Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss’ (2009) notion of rhetorical velocity (a strategic theorizing for a text might travel and be recomposed by third parties) is no

13 doubt another helpful partner in this regard, for it calls on rhetors to look “beyond the moment of delivery” and anticipate how their texts may circulation (Sheridan, Ridolfo, & Michel, p. 75). While I no doubt see such a focus as important for writers today (and discuss it more fully in the following chapter), I simultaneously want to consider circulation as a tactical field from which rhetors can invent anew. To do so, requires that I work to momentarily detach circulation from its common posture, futurity, and work to position circulation through another of rhetoric’s canons: memory. It also requires that I find a rhetorical theory of invention that sees generative value in navigation, adaptability, and intervention. As such, in what follows, I trace scholarship on digital invention, particularly as it relates to navigating and adapting materials from digital archives. I specifically attempt to describe how recent excursions of choric invention, coupled with emerging work in media archeology on “archives in motion” (Parikka, 2012), are a useful grounding for my approach. Yet because the chora remains a purposefully murky concept that resists definition, I supplement my discussion with another topographical and material invention: mêtis.

Invention, Memory, and Moving Archives A major claim shuffled throughout this work is that materials already flowing in circulatory paths can be viable sources for rhetorical invention. At its base, positioning circulation as a source for invention would seem a fairly conventional claim in invention studies. Since the social turn in rhetoric and composition, scholars have been discussing the inherent social nature of meaning making (see, for example, LeFevre, 1987)—an understanding that all invention work is made possible via a thick web of other texts. Scholars have continued this line of work into digital contexts. Bre Garrett, Denise Landrum-Geyer, and Jason Palmeri (2012), for example, argued that invention in new media contexts involves juxtaposition, embodiment, and social participation. Put otherwise, Garrett, Landrum-Geyer, and Palmeri noted that already existing materials—juxtaposed in radical ways—can work to incite inventive (re)action in the body. We see hints of circulation informing invention in social models like Garrett, Landrum- Geyer, and Palmeri’s. However, to my knowledge, an explicit connection between invention and the emerging study of circulation has yet to be made. Or at least not in such terms. A close affiliate, however, lies in emerging work on the chora. Studies of choric invention represent a move to recalibrate invention in an age of new media and information (over)abundance. Working from theorists such as Plato, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Gregory Ulmer, scholars have developed rich understandings of choric invention as being an suitable for digital rhetorics. While the chora (roughly translated from Greek to “third space” or “receptacle”) is a difficult concept to define, Marc Santos and Ella Browning (2014) described choric invention as “prioritiz[ing] the unpredictable, affective elements of personal experience across particular places and times as central to the inventive process” (n.p.). As Thomas Rickert (2007) reminded, choric invention attempts to break from rhetorical invention theories that are heavily indebted to mind/body dualisms. According to Rickert, a traditional or reductive notion of invention disregards the ecological. Such an approach assumes that “the mind utilizes an external symbolic resource to generate and organize rhetorical discourse” (Rickert, p. 251). For Rickert, as for many other contemporary thinkers, a way out of a dualistic invention tradition lies in the chora. The chora, as Rickert’s early contribution articulated, is a theory that “transforms our senses of beginning, creation, and invention by placing them concretely within material environments, informational spaces, and affective (or bodily) registers” (p. 252). According to

14 Rickert, “a choric rhetorician will attend to memory, networks, technologies, intuitions, and environments (places)” (p. 267). Put otherwise, choric invention does not divorce a rhetor from her material environment or the places and spaces she’s traversed. Indeed, as Santos and Browning noted, “choric invention often stresses the importance of traversing places and spaces” (n.p. my emphasis). Or, as Rickert further explained, “The radical expansion and externalization of memory in cultural discourse, electronic networks, and creates an ocean of information, which in turn requires navigation” (p. 268). Thus, because choric invention pays attention to acts of navigating and traversing, I see it as being essential for thinking through how circulation is tied to invention. That is, this traversing and navigating involves moving through both web spaces and material environments, dynamic archives where rhetorical invention can take root. Let’s interrogate what Rickert called the externalization of memory a little further. Often depicted as a vestige of oral culture, memory (memoria) was a revered art, or , central to invention. As Frances Yates’ (1984) monumental study reminded, “the art [of memory] belonged to rhetoric as a technique by which the orator could improve his [sic] memory, which would enable him to deliver long from memory with unfailing accuracy” (p. 2, her emphasis). The author of Rhetorica ad Herennium described memory as the “treasure-house of ideas” and “the guardian of all the parts of rhetoric” (p. 207). For all of its utility and praise in classical rhetoric, memory has become, until recently, something of a relic of rhetoric’s past. Though, similar to delivery, scholars have increasingly begun to take an interest in memory (e.g., Banks, 2010; Haskins, 2007; Pruchnic & Lacey, 2011; Rhodes & Alexander, 2015). In a move to recalibrate memory for a digital age, Collin Brooke (2009) worked to reframe memory as practice by arguing that memory in the age of new media can be understood as “persistence.” For Brooke, persistence involves “retaining particular ideas, keywords, or concepts across multiple texts, be they websites, journal articles, or chapters of the same book” (p. 157). But it also involves “forgetting,” for there is always an overabundant amount of information that one traverses. Brooke likened this act of “practicing” memory, of persistence, as an act of bricolage—taking bits of information from disparate sources to forward a new rhetorical object. Memory, in this case, is not as static as the word storage might imply; the rhetorical act of relying on and redeploying information from digital archives is, once again, a practice tied to invention. While Brooke worked to reanimate the rhetorical act of practicing digital memory, others (largely outside of the field of rhetoric and writing) have worked to animate the digital archive itself. In Digital Memory and the Archive, media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst (2013) explored how digital archives differ from the more traditional sense of the concept. According to Ernst:

Although the traditional archive used to be a rather static memory, the notion of the archive in Internet communication tends to move the archive toward an economy of circulation: permanent transformations and updating. The so-called cyberspace is not primarily about memory as cultural record but rather about a performative form of memory as communication. [...] Repositories are no longer final destinations but turn into frequently accessed sites. Archives become cybernetic systems. The aesthetics of fixed order is being replaced by permanent reconfigurability. (p. 99)

15 While one can certainly quibble with Ernst’s interpretation of “traditional archives” 4 (especially the claim that such archives are static), his take forcefully describes both the immense mutability of and the increased access to digital archives. It also describes how digital archives are far from stable; they are in a constant state of change, being written and revised by a swarm of participants. This is because, as cultural theorist David Beer (2013a) has argued, digital archives are more like digital data flows, which he described further as “infrastructures of participation,” made possible by an “unbounded archive” that is subject to revision (p. 60). Scholars in rhetorical circulation studies certainly acknowledge this point as well. For example, Laurie Gries (2015) used the metaphor of tumbleweed moving about the desert landscape as a way to conceptualize digital circulation. The tumbleweed, Gries noted, flows and moves throughout time and space, picking up other elements and spawning responses from other people and things. Things flowing in digital circulatory networks, in a similar way, are dynamic and mobile. Along similar lines, Jussi Parikka (2012) described digital archives not as static sites of storage but as dynamic “archives in motion” (p. 120). Crucially, in addition to storing digital memories (family photos, videos, notes, and so on), Parikka noted how archives are increasingly sources for production, what rhetoricians would call sources for invention. According to Parikka, “the political economy of the archive is connected to production in one more sense: remixing as one key feature of digital aesthetics is reliant on there being something to remix, and the appreciation of repositories as potentials for repurposing, remixing, and remediation” (p. 134, my emphasis). Likewise, in her Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Jose van Dijck (2007) made the point that accessing externalized memory today relies “topology and navigation” (p. 167). In other words, these moving archives allow for materials of all kinds to be encountered—and thus redistributed or repurposed—by everyday people. So where does this leave us? The backflow of circulation—connected to memory more so than delivery—can be described as dynamic and mobile archives of encounter. These are largely unbounded and open to participation, allowing for traversal, navigation, and reconfiguration. For all of its attention to navigation and traversal, the chora is an incredibly helpful theory for investigating how invention can take place across moving spaces. Yet, as scholars working with term have noted, the chora remains a murky concept, and perhaps powerfully so. According to Santos and Browning, the chora is an “elusive ideal that escapes clear, consistent, [and] articulable practice” (n.p.). As such, in the section that follows, I work to describe another, and I would argue largely congruent, notion of invention that foregrounds navigation, embodied response, and movement: mêtis.

Another Topological and Material Invention: Mêtis and Its Web of Allied Terms Mêtis is often translated as wily, cunning, or adaptive intelligence. It is frequently described as being applied in transient circumstances of conflict or struggle—or, as Detienne and Vernant’s (1991) foundational study put it, mêtis is applied in a “world of movement, of multiplicity and of ambiguity” (p. 21). In such a world, one must rely on “flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years” (Detienne & Vernant, 1991, p. 3). According to Detienne and Vernant, no direct treatises on mêtis exist but its weight can be felt throughout

4 I prefer Jose Van Dijck’s (2007) approach to traditional archives and memories. For her, memories are always embodied, but also mediated by memory objects and technologies, which, like digital archives, are always prone to revision. Further, she noted that memories are reconstructed in particular cultural locales.

16 rhetorical histories. They noted that mêtis is polymorphous from its very origins, referring to both a kind of informed intelligence, a way of knowing, and the Greek goddess Metis, who, in Greek mythology, was swallowed by Zeus in an effort to procure her superior cunning. Both of these points, mêtis as a kind of intelligence and Metis as an embodied figure, help paint a clearer picture of the significance of mêtis. Put otherwise, bodies apply mêtis in particular material environments. Compared to many other rhetorical concepts, mêtis has made poor showings in rhetorical histories. Jay Dolmage (2009) surmised that a key reason for its absence in rhetorical histories involves rhetoric’s disavowal of the body. Mêtis, which is always endowed to some body, is contingent, enacted, and sometimes deceptive. It is for the latter reason why Detienne and Vernant argued mêtis suffered from direct discussion, elaboration, and theorization from the so- called classical tradition. Plato’s denigration of rhetoric as trickery, they noted, is a direct condemnation of mêtis. Moreover, mêtis is often brought to life through animal and mythic stories, which is another reason why Detienne and Vernant speculated that mêtis fell out of favor—especially when Christian ethics and traditions began to take root. Recently, though, metis has experienced something of a mini resurgence, thanks, in large part, to Detienne and Vernant’s study, a work that opened up trajectories for studying mêtis rather than providing a definitive path. In effect, a range of scholars have discussed mêtis in relation to different projects—e.g., disability studies and disability rhetoric (Dolmage, 2014), performative pedagogy (Kopelson, 2003), corporal rhetorics (Dolmage, 2009; Hawhee, 2004), posthuman and material rhetorics (Ballif, 1998; Rickert, 2014), user-centered technology and adaptable professional communication tactics (Johnson, 1998; Pope-Ruark, 2014), and animal rhetorics (Walters, 2010). It may seem odd that many disparate projects find utility in mêtis. I believe this is because, as Detienne and Vernant noted, mêtis appears within a “” of other concepts, ones that, taken together, bring mêtis more fully into coherence. Some scholars pull out certain mêtic traits and leave others dormant, thus leading for a range of scholarly utility. A consistent, albeit contested, connection to mêtis appears in work on technê. In her work, Michelle Ballif (1988) set up a binary between mêtis and technê, reading mêtis as a “Third Sophistic” rhetoric capable of adapting to a postmodern condition and technê as a more systematized, dogmatic, and inflexible understanding of rhetoric. But other scholars paint a much more flexible and nuanced picture of technê. Though typically defined as “art” or “craft,” scholars like Janet Atwill (1998) and Kelly Pender (2011) have defined technê along many axes. As these scholars make clear, technê, like mêtis, is a complex concept with a web of meanings. One of Atwill’s defining characteristics of a technê is that it is an art of “intervention and invention” (p. 48). Elaborated further, Atwill described technê as that which “intervenes in an already existing procedure, method, or calculus of value,” which, in turn, allows one to transform “what is” to “what is possible” (p. 70). Interestingly, Atwill argued that “the significance of technê often lies in the power of transformation that mêtis enables” (p. 56). In other words, the art of rhetoric (as a technê) is made possible by mêtic intelligence. In Atwill’s schema, we can conclude that mêtis (a cunning and adaptable intelligence) brings forth a technê (a flexible and practical knowledge). Although the connection between mêtis and technê is a subject of much scholarly debate,5 following Atwill, I see them as allied terms that work in concert.

5 This is likely because, as Kelly Pender (2011) argued, techne is rhetorical studies’ Rorschach term—for some, it represents an attempt at mastery, stabilization, and codification (see especially Ballif, 1998), while for others, quite oppositely, it represents a more flexible and in-flux body of knowledge and way of doing (see especially Atwill,

17 As we will see, kairos and tuche are other allied terms that inform mêtis. Both deal with temporality, though with subtle differences. Certainly, the former term, kairos, often defined as opportunity, has seen a great deal of scholarship in rhetoric studies. John Poulakos’s (1983) oft- cited “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” for example, articulated a definition of rhetoric that is explicitly tied to kairos, which he defined as the opportune and appropriate moment for discourse. Yet, like all of the rhetorical concepts I’ve discussed thus far, kairos is “a complex and richly generative concept that stubbornly resists simple definitions” (Sheridan, Ridolfo, & Michel, 2012, p. 6). In their review of the concept, Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel explained that kairos includes both “temporal and spatial dimensions” (p. 6)—for example, theorists typically use phrases like “the right moment” and the “right” or “appropriate time” to describe kairos, yet they also trace its meaning to the art of weaving or archery. For Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel, this second meaning helps to show how kairos is “the opening or gap that allows passage to a goal or desired destination” (p. 6). In this way, many kairotic factors are out of the rhetor’s control. Here is where deploying one’s mêtis, one’s adaptive intelligence, at the right moment and time becomes key. Another related concept, one that makes far less of a showing in rhetorical theory, is tuche, which is often defined as chance or luck. Much like mêtis, tuche appeared as a Goddess in Greek myth, and according to Detienne and Vernant, Tuche is a daughter of the sea and a sister of Metis. Jay Dolmage (2014) defined tuche as “luck, happenstance, metaphorized as the wind itself, calling for both navigation and artisanship” (p. 162). Tuche, then, is often paired with kairos: “kairos is also the idea of invention only within shifting contexts, only in the world of tuche—of the winds of chance” (Dolmage, p. 165). The line of thinking here, then, goes something like this: one applies mêtis to seize the moment (kairos) in a world of chance (tuche). Taken together, technê, kairos, tuche, and mêtis, describe a world in which rhetors are able to adapt to changing and unpredictable fluxes. Dolmage (2014) perhaps put it best by using a story of navigating and steering a ship in uncertain seas to illustrate how all of these concepts work in concert:

kairos requires mêtis, a way to be even more mobile, polymorphic, and cunning than the world itself. Like an experienced sailor, the person with mêtis perceives the world of tuche (swirling seas), harnesses kairos (a prevailing wind), and has the ingenuity required to think of cutting and building the tiller itself, to steer the ship instead of simply being blown around the sea. Further, the building of tillers as a form of folk knowledge and industry could be an example of utilizing mêtis to create a technê. (p. 165)

Dolmage’s passage wonderfully illustrates a world always in motion, a world where one works within what is given in inventive, agile, and adaptive ways. But why the long detour here? Why dig up and re-evaluate the meanings of Greek culture and society? In short, because, as I’ll argue more fully in the next section, mêtis serves as an apt and generative rhetorical framework for intervening in the fluxes of circulation, for adapting to the always in motion flows of discourse. Scholars like Ernst, Beer, Parikka, Rickert, Gries, and van Dijck all point out how digital discourse moves in networked environments, creating a dynamic and mobile flow of discourse. Archives here are nowhere near static; they are in flux and always on the move. How does one manage such movement?

1998). Karen Kopelson’s (2003) work also illustratively pointed out the complexity in situating these terms (see especially her second and third footnotes).

18 According to Detienne and Vernant, the sea is the most “mobile, changeable, and polymorphic space” (p. 222). Yet, time and again, they showed how such a moving space can be negotiated and navigated via one’s metic orientation, their seizing of kairos, their adapting to tuche, their building of a technê. At risk of stretching this analogy too far, I want to consider how we might think of navigating circulating digital materials along similar lines. Like Dolmage’s articulation of the changing tides of the sea, Jenny Edbauer (2005) described public rhetoric as “a circulating ecology of effects, enactments, and events” (p. 8). And like Dolmage’s story of the sea, Edbauer’s notion of an ecology with circulating elements suggests that rhetors are always already enmeshed in a material world and that their interventions in that world are both made possible, constrained, and otherwise impacted by moving elements. Rhetoric, as she put it, is encountered. Mêtis, as I see it, is a way to tactically navigate and invent from the flow, to adapt and repurpose materials moving in dynamic archives of encounter.

Tactical Rhetorics: A Framework for Circulatory In(ter)vention

Things, especially in a digital age, simply, or rather complexly, flow. –Laurie Gries, 2013, p. 335

The radical expansion and externalization of memory in cultural discourse, electronic networks, and databases creates an ocean of information, which in turn requires navigation. –Thomas Rickert, 2007, p. 268

Because the human condition is often characterized by change and the ungovernable forces of nature and fate, mêtis equips the possessor with the ways and means to negotiate the flux. –Michelle Ballif, 1998, p. 65

Taken together, the three quotes above illustrate the central premises grounding my discussion so far. In an age of networks, social media platforms, and spreadable media, one’s writing can flow well beyond its point of origin. Revised notions of digital memory, which grapple with the dynamics of externalized archives, suggest everyday people increasingly have the means to encounter a vast array of material. Such archives—otherwise understood as moving data flows—impose the need for rhetorical navigation, which we might further qualify as a kairotic, adaptable, and agile rhetorical practice. To effectively intervene in the backflow of circulation, I argue one must possess the “the ways and means to negotiate the flux” (Ballif, 1998, p. 65)—or, put simply, one must possess a mêtic way of knowing, doing, and being. The word intervene is important here. As I will argue more fully in the next chapter, a rhetoric of intervention is important for circulation studies for it helps describe how the backflow of circulation can inform rhetorical practice. With an already circulating ecology of materials, the need for rhetorical intervention—the prospect of rerouting, changing, or challenging circulating discourse—becomes a crucial, yet undertheroized, practice in a digital age. Stuart Moulthrop (2005) defined intervention as “a practical contribution to a media system (e.g., some product, tool, or method) intended to challenge underlying assumptions or reveal new ways of proceeding” (p. 212). As noted, we see scholars like Janet Atwill (1998) pointing out how the art of rhetoric is both one of invention and intervention. Such a mode of intervention is similar to what Debra Hawhee (2002) called “invention-in-the-middle”—which, for her, is “not a

19 beginning, as the first is often articulated, but a middle, an in-between, a simultaneously interruptive and connective hooking-in to circulating discourses” (p. 24). Situating circulatory intervention as an applied mêtis, as a tactical rhetoric, is useful then, for it denotes a range of qualities for working within what’s already given, including inventive adaptability and appropriate timing. Further, as a way to challenge dominant discourses and , mêtis also marks the ability to confront conflict by employing a trickster way of operating in the world. In what follows, I discuss each quality in turn by grounding each to the “Feminists Read Mean Tweets” story with which I began this chapter. In so doing, I seek to more explicitly outline a tactical mode of circulatory intervention. Mêtis refers to the ability to adapt to and invent from material situations as they unfold. According to Detienne and Vernant, mêtis is applied in situations that are shifting, transient, and ambiguous, where one’s mêtic intelligence is set into motion to navigate “whatever comes up” (p. 44). Indeed, as James C. Scott (2003) has argued “mêtis knowledge is often so implicit and automatic that its bearer is at a loss to explain it” (p. 329). This is likely because mêtis operates in a world of becoming; it is the sideways, backwards, and forward navigation through this material world that provides the circumstances for mêtis to be put into action. Or, as Thomas Rickert (2014) acknowledged, “mêtis calls us to navigate the twists and turns of what’s given as it evolves—a form of catalytic enaction” (p. 487). In short, navigation, with its ties to embodied response and timely adaptability, is a key facet of mêtic inventiveness.6 Carolyn Miller (2000) also evoked imagery of navigation, and more particularly of hunting, when describing how mêtis relates to invention. In her rereading of the Aristotelian topos, Miller placed invention within ’s broader metaphysical system. It is within this broader system, Miller argued, that Aristotle’s departure from Plato placed rhetoric (and physics) not within a realm being, but instead within one of becoming, a realm where venatic (hunting) imagery persists. Characterized as such, topical or inventive thinking, for Miller, concerns the “epistemology of the hunt,” which include those clever, resourceful, and inventive (read: mêtic) tactics that operate in a world of becoming (p. 138). As she put it, “hunters may know what they track or may unexpectedly discover new game, but they do not, presumably, create their quarry” (p. 141). Grounding this language in terms of circulation, we can see how “hunting for novelty” takes place within an already active and mobile archive of circulating material. Tactical rhetors may not know what to expect, but they won’t be totally surprised either—they will track, follow, and intervene when necessary. Another thematic of invention we see across the stories of mêtis deals with the action of forging, with the conception of artisanship. As Ballif mentioned, in Greek myth the god and metalworker Hephaestus embodied an understanding of an artisan who forges new meanings out of given elements. Hephaestus is regarded for his mêtis.7 In their version of retelling his story,

6 In fact, Michelle Ballif (1998) noted that the etymology of the word “navigator” leads to mêtis. Moreover, she pointed out that we derive the word “cybernetics” from a word with a similar meaning, “kybernetes,” which means pilot or steersman. 7 According to Jay Dolmage (2004), in some retellings of Greek myth, Hephaestus is said to be the son of both Hera and Metis. As he noted: “Hephaestus is born of Zeus and Hera. In this version of the story, he is also the son of the goddess Metis because she lives in Zeus’s head. Zeus ate the pregnant Metis to consume the cunning intelligence that bears her name, and after this meal, all cunning must channel through Zeus. Because of this lineage, Hephaestus (and Athena) carry Metis’s mêtis and are thus a constant threat to Zeus’s control of this, the most powerful form of intelligence” (pp. 126-127).

20 Detienne and Vernant regarded Hephaestus as the “most famous of Greek blacksmiths” who was often associated with the work of the crab. As Jay Dolmage (2004) articulated, Hephaestus’ connection with the crab has symbolic value: a “double and divergent” orientation that allowed him to move backward and forward to “harness fire and invent metallurgy” (p. 121). James C. Scott regarded such forging as a bricolage, a “making do” with what’s at hand to solve a particular problem. Certainly, de Certeau (1984) nodded toward a similar meaning when he described bricolage as “an artisan-like inventiveness” (p. xvii). Here, then, we see that a tactical rhetoric invents from what’s available—and often, as bricolage denotes, by piecing together bits and pieces of circulating material. To recall Hephaestus, the tactical rhetor, the digital bricoleur, moves like a crab when composing his or her work: looking backward and forward at the dynamic flows of circulation to forge new possibilities out of given elements. Let’s consider mêtic inventiveness in terms of “Feminists Read Mean Tweets.” Obviously, those involved in composing the video did not generate their argument from out of nowhere. The so-called “mean tweets” were encountered, as was the already circulating Kimmel video. Indeed, much of the content for this video was already there. Yet I would argue the “Feminists Read Mead Tweets” video can be positioned as a novel argument, an inventive approach to countering misogyny online using a vehicle (the Kimmel meme) with proven circulatory success. As digital bricoleurs, the makers of the intervention “made do” with a circulating archive as a way to participate in a public discussion, forging an alternative vision of safety for women online by repurposing and altering circulating texts. Of course, timing for this intervention was key, which brings me to another quality of circulatory intervention: mêtis, as operating in a field of movement, indicates the ability to seize the moment. Here, again, we see how mêtis is enfolded with kairos. Debra Hawee (2002) worked to describe kairos as a conceptual tool to invent from forces of encounter, not a rhetorical mode of premeditation but a mode of response, what she called “rhetorical cuttings, interventional piercings of particular moments to produce discourse” (p. 24). She connected this understanding with the god Kairos. Describing his stance in a particular visual depiction, Hawhee noted, “his excellent balancing skills are key: Kairos must remain in the middle, ever ready for a moment of intervention. The God thus illustrates what I would call a ‘rhetorical stance;’ he is on his toes, prepared for action and attuned to the forces at work at a particular time. The god Kairos stands as a figure of in(ter)vention […]” (p. 25). Hawhee’s argument here certainly breathes new light on an understanding of one’s rhetorical stance. We can read into this the following: To seize a kairotic encounter, then, one must possess mêtis to appropriately intervene at the right moment. They must work from and with a force of encounter, “hooking-in,” as Hawhee argued, “to circulating discourses” (p. 24). You might see where I’m going with this. A rhetorical framework attuned to circulation would not only pay attention to how one might create an object worthy of circulatory success, but also how one might effectively intervene in the flow of moving materials. This is a rhetorical stance of what Hawhee called invention-in-the-middle, what I would call writing in the flow. Writing in the flow, as “Feminists Read Mean Tweets” illustrates, necessitates good and appropriate timing. The video was responsive, adapting already circulating materials to make an argument. As a collective, they gathered their voices to show online harassment in a particular moment in time. In other words, this intervention did not occur blow-by-blow; it was carefully planned, looking both backward and forward at circulation. According to Detienne and Vernant, “the man [sic] of mêtis is always ready to pounce. He acts faster than lightening. This is not to say he gives way to a sudden impulse […]. On the contrary, his mêtis knows how to wait

21 patiently for the calculated moment to arrive” (p. 15). Examining the release of “Feminists Read Mean Tweets” provides telling evidence that the intervention was delivered at a rhetorically savvy time. The year was 2014, and women had been experiencing massive amounts of online harassment due what became called the Gamergate controversy. One top of this, as a title screen shows at about the midpoint of the video, a Pew Study released in the summer of 2014 described the staggering amount of women who had reported experiencing various forms of harassment online that year. We see, then, that the composers of the video found acted quickly to release the video—not in an impulsive way, but in a studied and goal-directed way. This aspect of mêtic inventiveness also nods toward delivery. Karen Kopelson’s (2003) interpretation argued that mêtis involves “mastery over” kairos, denoting an ability “not simply to seize the moment but to seize it with forethought, preparedness, and thus with foresight as to how the events should unfold” (p. 130, her emphasis). It would be easy to write off mêtis as purely opportunistic, a playful trick to win the day; however, the one with mêtis often works in reflective, situated, and forward-looking ways. As Deteinne and Vernant wrote, “instead of floating hither and thither, at the whim of circumstance, it anchors the mind securely in the project which it has devised in advance thanks to its ability to look beyond the immediate present and foresee a more or less wide slice of the future” (p. 15). Mêtis is often put to work in situations of conflict, giving so-called “weaker” opponents the opportunity “to turn the tables on those with greater bie (brute strength)” (Dolmage, 2009, p. 9). Although strength here typically signifies brute might (i.e., having the physical strength to overpower the other), rhetorical scholars have picked up mêtis as a concept to describe how those from historically marginalized social positions—women (Ballif, 1998), people with (Dolmage, 2014), those who identify as LGBTQ (Kopelson, 2003), and Native Americans (de Certeau, 1984; Powell, 1999), to name a few social groups—have outwitted the ones they oppose (or the ones who oppose them) by subversively “making do” with what’s available. Indeed, as Detienne and Vernant note, mêtis, like sophistry, captures the ability to “turn an argument against the adversary who used it in the first place” (p. 42). As the author Oppian wrote in The Treatise on Fishing, “those which have not been allotted strength by some god and which are not equipped with some poisonous sting to defend themselves have as their weapons the resources of an intelligence fertile in cunning tricks and stratagems” (qtd. in Detienne & Vernant, p. 28). It is telling, I believe, that Karen Kopelson’s (2003) discussion of mêtis turns to Judith Butler’s (1997a, 1997b, 2000) notion of resignification to talk about an opportunity for agency. Butler’s project, what she refers to as a critical mimesis, “does not engage in the fantasy of transcending power altogether…[but instead works] within the hope and the practice of replaying power, of restaging it again and again in new and productive ways” (p. 741). As Butler consistently makes clear, marginalized individuals have historically claimed a sense of agency by recasting an original subordination into one of temporary empowerment. For example, in her Excitable Speech, working from an Althusserian notion of interpellation, Butler (1997a) showed how one, paradoxically, can gain agency through a process of radical resignification. Using as her exemplar, Butler (1997a) wrote, “the terms by which we are hailed are rarely ever the ones we choose […] but these terms we never really choose are the occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an imaginary subordination for another purpose, one whose future is partly open” (p. 38). In other words, by reusing a discursive utterance, by reiterating it for a new purpose, a rhetor can upset the original power of oppressive discourse and turn it into a moment of powerful resistance.

22 In 2000, Butler explored a personal example of such radical resignification in an interview with JAC editors Lynn Worsham and Gary Olson. In it, Butler detailed an experience she encountered walking down the streets of Berkeley wherein a passerby harassingly shouted from a car window, “Are you a lesbian?” Butler explained how she accepted the term in the affirmative, which shocked and stunned the person whom asked the question. Of her accepting of the term, Butler stated, “it was a very powerful thing to do. It wasn’t that I authored that term: I received the term and gave it back; I replayed it, reiterated it” (760). Importantly, Butler (1997b) noted that such acts of resignification have the potential to reinvoke further trauma—and, for Butler, herein lies the paradox: the rhetorical work of resignification can “rework and unsettle” an interpellation aimed at harming or disenfranchising but it must do so by reusing the original utterance (p. 105). My reasoning for rehearsing Butler’s work with resignification is that it details a kind of agential opening made possible by tactical rhetorics. Despite not originally authoring discourse already in circulation, everyday people can perform, at least temporarily, some sort of agency by redeploying, and thus reframing, dominant narratives, texts, and histories. It must be noted that such acts are not assimilatory. Audre Lorde’s (1984) famous line, “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house,” perhaps rings a clear critique of the rhetorical moves coiled throughout my dissertation. However, as Kopelson wrote of the same line, Butler’s radical resignifications, acts of critical mimeses, are “more than mere imitations or extensions of hegemonic authority” (p. 124). It could certainly be argued that repetition—the redeploying of misogynistic tweets— isn’t doing much in the case of “Feminists Read Mean Tweets.” By and large, the women featured in the video are simply re-reading the inflammatory remarks already in circulation. Yet, we see in both the off-handed quips8 and the embodied performances—the raise of an eyebrow, the change of intonation in the voice, the pursed lip—that this restaging, as Butler might put it, is not repeating for lack of a purpose: it’s repeating with a difference, and for a difference. As pointed to both in the video and in the YouTube of the work, the women composing the video know this well. The description, for example, reads: “While many have tried to describe what it’s like to be the target of constant, horrible online, sometimes it’s easier to just show, not tell” (n.p.). As I see it, this showing—this drawing on what’s already there for another purpose—is an important tool of the tactical rhetor, the digital bricoleur. I must acknowledge that mêtis is not without its problems. A concept that has invoked trickery and deceit must be dealt with carefully. It is a position that rhetoric has been up against since its very origins. Mêtis, an imprecise art, with its ties to trickery and cunning, may invoke, for some, negative connotations that rhetoric has been up against since its origins. To put it another way, this view may paint rhetoric as disruptive and malicious tricks to win the day. However, the kind of mêtis I invoke here has an ethic—it is not disruptive trickery for its own sake, but what we might think of as being a trickster with a cause. Indeed, the final mêtic quality I wish to discuss involves the figure of the trickster, which I argue exemplifies the ethic at play of tactical rhetorics. Discussions of tricksters have persisted throughout many cultural traditions (Coleman, 2013; Gates, 1988; Hyde, 1998; McLeod, 2014; Powell, 1999). This is important, for as Robert Johnson (1998) argued, mêtis is “not ‘owned’ by Greek culture” (p. 53). As he briefly gestured toward in a footnote, “the connection between the

8 For example, toward the middle of the video one woman, after reading a tweet directed at her, stating, “I personally want to rape you and think you deserve it,” she remarked. “I actually went to the police for that one. And they did nothing” (n.p.).

23 uses of the term mêtis from culture to culture are unclear and would be an interesting and a valuable avenue of research” (p. 53). Although a robust cross-cultural understanding of mêtis has yet to be written, much work has been done to move mêtis beyond the Greeks. For example, Dolmage (2009) traced the etymology of mêtis across several figures, including the Goddess Metis, Helene Cixous’ Medusa, and Gloria Anzaldua’s understanding of mestiza consciousness. Malea Powell (1999) examined mêtis as it appeared in Native American culture and practice. In particular, she drew on Joseph Bruchac who pointed out that metis is a Lakota word that refers “to a person of mixed blood” (p. 8). Translated to English, Bruchac noted, metis means “translator’s son”—one who can “understand the language of both sides, to help them understand each other” (Powell, p. 8). Powell harnessed this story to posit a “mixed-blood rhetoric,” which she noted is bound up in an understanding of the trickster. Many have written about trickster figures across cultures (e.g., West African cultures, Native American cultures, Greek cultures, and Internet cultures, to name a few). Tricksters often appear in myths, folklore, and other stories and are embodied or anthropomorphized in animals, objects, humans, , and spirits. According to Powell, “the trickster is many things, and is no thing as well. Ambivalent, androgynous, anti-definitional, the trickster is slippery and constantly mutable” (p. 9). For Powell, the trickster helps “reveal the deep irony that is always present in whatever way we choose to construct reality” (p. 9). In his often-cited Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde (1988) argued that tricksters have functioned “to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on” (p. 9). In other words, trickster figures have worked to reveal that which is difficult to see or grasp—conflicting ideologies, unjust social conditions, and otherwise different ways of being, acting, or doing. Indeed, as Kembrew McLeod (2014) argued, those who employ trickster or prankster ethics often have a pedagogical goal in mind: “although ‘good’ pranks sometimes do ridicule their targets, they serve a higher purpose by sowing skepticism and speaking truth to power (or at least cracking jokes that expose fissures in power’s façade” (p. 3). In other words, a trickster ethic, tied to mêtis, is “reflective, goal oriented, and decidedly serious in its play” (Kopelson, p. 134).

Conclusion and What’s Ahead My discussion thus far has made use of the Greek concept of mêtis, (with ties to tactical intervention, to adaptable practice, to forging new materials from what’s available, to seizing the appropriate moment), Butler’s agential view of critical mimesis (the re-staging of power for a new purpose), and cultural discussions of trickster figures (the desire to uncover or expose a particular worldview) to set a theoretical foundation for what I call tactical rhetorics. By tactical rhetorics, I mean rhetorical practices that reuse and redeploy discourse already in motion toward a new end. Tactical rhetorics, I have argued, shifts the frame of focus for the study and practice of rhetorical circulation. As I’m articulating it, not only do tactical rhetors keep their eye forward on futurity, imagining how a particular intervention might play out, but they also keep their eye on the backflow of circulation, adapting and forging anew from what’s already in motion. Chapter two more fully explores the literature on circulation, looking both within and outside the field of writing studies to understand the implications of the term and concept. In particular, this chapter zooms out to look at four overlapping intersections of circulation— delivery, economy, publics, and power—to arrive at an understanding of how circulation is informed by many theoretical vantages points. Working from these intersections, this chapter zooms back in to the field of writing studies to present two key views of circulation: (1) circulation as strategic outcome, which sees circulation as something to be achieved based on the

24 rhetor’s wishes and (2) circulation as already underway process, which sees circulating objects as undergoing an in-process sense of rhetorical becoming. Drawing on both, I situate the conceptual frame of tactical rhetorics as outlined in this introduction as a third model for how circulation studies can inform rhetorical action. Chapter three investigates the notion of tactical rhetorics in historical contexts. Developing a method called performative metis storytelling, this chapter recounts the actions of four rhetors from distinct cultural communities and social locations. These include the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the collage artist Hannah Höch, the tactical media duo The Yes Men, and the political video remix artist Elisa Kreisinger. In telling their stories, I aim to amass a tactical repertoire (Hawhee & Olson, 2013; Taylor, 2003)—a set of portable scenarios that value embodied performance and experience, and that seek to enliven the social, cultural, and political spaces within which tactical rhetorics are practiced. Such an approach offers rich descriptions of how rhetors have long looked at both the backflow and future-flow of circulation to accomplish their rhetorical goals. Chapter 4 continues building a repertoire for tactical rhetorics by examining the current digital landscape at greater length. Yet it switches the frame of analysis from the stories of individual rhetors to cases that describe events in an attempt to capture the networked, distributed, and collaborative nature of tactical rhetorics in a digital age. In particular, this chapter focuses on three cases: the case of the Real @OxfordAsians, the #myNYPD hashtag hijack, and the trickster Gamergate bot @randi_ebooks. From community-based interventions to viral counterpublics, this chapter shows how participating in circulating events through tactical interventions can do important affective and political work. Chapter 5 explores how circulation systems impact the flow of discourse in networked publics. While I explore in preceding chapters some specific institutional challenges for tactical rhetorics (e.g., cease and desist letters or social denouncements of unoriginality), this chapter investigates how digital circulation is constrained and made possible in digital contexts. More specifically, it investigates the cultural politics of YouTube’s Content ID system, arguing that many cultural, legal, and institutional agendas align to justify a copyright filtering system that often has chilling effects. The sixth and final chapter explores the implications of my argument, offering suggestions for teaching and avenues for future research. In particular, in line with ecological theories of composing (e.g., Cooper, 1986; Dobrin, 2011; Edbauer, 2005; Rivers & Weber, 2009), I call on writing teachers to think critically and innovatively about how we can embrace a pedagogy of intervention when teaching circulation. If we start in the middle of things, as ecological frameworks have it, we should resist the urge to ask students to create widespread circulation from scratch. Instead, following Miller’s (2000) articulation of venatic invention, we should ask students to embrace the hunt, the search, the track—and tactically intervene when necessary. Such a pedagogy, I argue, displaces hierarchies of authorship and arms students and public writers with a more robust tool belt for kairotically participating in diverse publics and communities.

25 Chapter 2 A Rhetoric of Intervention for Circulation Studies

In this chapter, I seek to open up circulation studies in rhetorical theory. To do so, I first recount the many ways in which circulation has been theorized and defined both within and outside of writing studies scholarship, recalling key overlapping intersections—delivery, economy, publics, and power—that reveal the theoretical and definitional complexities that comprise the emerging disciplinary conversation that has recently been called “circulation studies” (Gries, 2013). My point here is to show the sprawl of research on circulation, and point toward loosely bound trajectories of circulation research. In the process of reviewing this work, I provide a useable and flexible definition of circulation to get at its many nuances. From here, to help make sense of such sprawling, interdisciplinary literature, I split the scholarship into two key views of circulation as relating to rhetorical production: (1) the creation view of circulation (circulation as strategic outcome), and (2) the ontological view of circulation (circulation as already underway process) After fully delineating these two views of circulation, I conclude this chapter by positing a third view of circulation, circulatory intervention, which borrows from both views to connect and augment the theoretical argument presented in Chapter 1. I argue that an intervention model offers digital writers a robust framework for contending with the dynamic flows of circulation. This model, as I’ll show, understands that circulation can be a viable field for tactical invention; yet, it also recognizes that reworking and redistributing already flowing writing necessitates delivery knowledge for how to get writing to spread further. A rhetoric of intervention for circulation studies pushes beyond the critic/rhetor binary I mentioned in Chapter 1. A rhetoric of intervention acknowledges that acts of kairoitically slicing into the movement of discourse require writers to navigate and anticipate circulatory flows. Finally, a rhetoric of intervention avoids pitfalls of the originary genius and recognizes that cutting into the velocity of in-motion discourse can do important rhetorical and political work.

Defining a Concept, Defining a Field: Circulation Studies and Its Intersections Evidence for the importance of circulation within rhetoric and writing studies is growing. In her recent introduction to a special issue on rhetorical circulation in Rhetoric and Public Affairs, communication scholar Mary Stuckey (2012) wrote that “circulation impinges upon every aspect of theory and criticism” (p. 609). Within rhetoric and writing studies, David Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony Michel (2012) argued for a need to “move circulation from the margins to the center of rhetorical theory” (p. 601). And Laurie Gries (2013) claimed, simply, “circulation matters” (p. 334). With such a burgeoning interest in recent years, it would seem that circulation does matter to rhetoric and writing scholars. Yet, as an emerging concept, circulation remains quite open for further conceptual development. As I’m defining it, circulation refers to a process of spread, exchange, and transformation. To be sure, this is a broad definition, one that leaves open, for now, many questions: When we talk about circulation, what is circulating (texts, affects, value)? What drives actors to further circulate? And who (and what) is involved in the process? These questions attest to the scope and complexity of circulation, as it is a phenomenon that intersects with many lines of inquiry. Indeed, as Gries (2013) has recently defined it, circulation studies is “an interdisciplinary approach to studying discourse in motion” (p. 333, my emphasis). In employing such an approach, “scholars investigate not only how discourse is produced and distributed, but

26 also how once delivered, it circulates, transforms, and affects change through its material encounters” (Gries, 2013, p. 333). Production, distribution, delivery, transformation, change, materiality: these complex keywords—from the epistemic, to the ontological, to the ethical— make up the trajectory of circulation studies. It is the goal of this chapter to begin to unpack the theoretical sprawl of this emerging field. Though, in an attempt to not lose sight of my overarching purpose for my dissertation, my discussion of circulation is not exhaustive; rather, I hope the following treatment of circulation is expansive enough to (a) account for its complexity, (b) note its importance for contemporary rhetorical study, and (c) point to what I see as being the key intersections that comprise its reach. In the process of reviewing this work, I hope to add nuance to the definition given above, while also adding insights as to why a wide-encompassing definition remains productive for further pedagogical and theoretical inquiry. Circulation, most obviously, has roots in the living body—the circulatory system—and has been used in medicine and biology to describe the ways in which blood and other substances flow through living organisms. But the study of circulation has moved to encompass many other directions. Circulation studies has a rich foothold in rhetorical theory, particularly within work on rhetorical delivery (e.g., Brooke, 2009; DeVoss & Porter, 2006; Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009; Porter, 2009; Trimbur, 2000), as well as many other allied disciplines, including transnational feminisms (e.g., Digno, 2012; Queen, 2008), political economy (e.g., Dean, 2005), contagion theory (e.g., Sampson, 2012), memetic theory (e.g., Dawkins, 1989), affect theory (e.g., Ahmed, 2004; Massumi, 2002; Stewart, 2007), and public sphere theory (e.g., Habermas, 1989; Fraser, 1992; Warner, 2005). In effect, the uptake of circulation from scholars across disciplines has yielded the use of many metaphors, including ecology, systems, assemblage, space, and publics, to describe the where of circulation—that is, the material spheres in and through which things flow. These metaphors, which I will return to later in this dissertation, attest to the sprawl of circulation as an important concept for many disciplines. As such an interdisciplinary concept, why do, or should, rhetoric and writing scholars care about circulation? John Trimbur (2000) provided perhaps the clearest and earliest answers to this question. For Trimbur, theorizing the circulation of writing offers rhetoric and writing specialists a way to detach writing from a “domestic” space of the writing classroom, affording the opportunity to consider larger cycles of “production, distribution, exchange, and consumption” (p. 190). To think through these cycles, Trimbur told us, is to more fully take up the social, economic, and political implications of modes of production, arming students and writing teachers with practical knowledge on how to navigate publics outside of the so-called domestic space of writing classrooms. Trimbur’s article serves as a threshold argument for rhetoric and writing scholars arguing for the benefit of studying, theorizing, and/or privileging circulation within modern writing economies. What’s particularly striking about Trimbur’s early contribution is his attention to many of the issues that make up the scope of rhetorical circulation studies, including issues of delivery, economy, publics, and power, intersections I explore in greater detail in the next section of this chapter. Much like the methodology of assemblage that undergirds my dissertation, the next section assembles an understanding of circulation by conjoining distinct, yet interconnected, treatments of circulation to approach a robust view of why and how rhetoric flows in public spheres.

Circulation and Delivery To relate circulation to delivery is to make a direct connection to rhetoric. Delivery has always been part of rhetoric’s history. To be sure, it often remained in the shadows of other

27 canons—notably, arrangement and style—as oral cultures gave way to print. Ben McCorkle’s (2012) analysis of delivery as a technological discourse is an especially revealing look at why delivery has ebbed and flowed as a worthwhile endeavor for rhetoric. McCorkle’s central point is that delivery is more likely to be theorized when technology is hypermediated—that is, when rhetors are highly aware of technology. In recent years, the canon of delivery has experienced something of a revitalization in rhetorical studies, as scholars have discussed the need to re- theorize delivery for digital communications (see, for example, Brooke, 2009; Porter, 2009; Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009; Trimbur, 2000; Welch, 1999; Yancey, 2004). As scholars have wrestled to recover and remediate delivery, they often do so by pairing it with its contemporary cousin, circulation. Trimbur’s landmark work, for example, used the terms interchangeably. Arguing against the common conception to pair delivery solely with the speaking body, Trimbur wrote, “delivery can no longer be thought of simply as a technical aspect of public discourse. It must be seen also as ethical and political--a democratic aspiration to devise delivery systems that circulate ideas, information, opinions, and knowledge and thereby expand the public forums in which people can deliberate on issues of the day” (p. 190). In effect, Trimbur’s move to connect delivery with broader ethical and political concerns, what he equates as issues of circulation, redirects the relegated status of delivery. Other scholars have made subtle distinctions in theories of delivery and circulation. For instance, James Porter (2009) positioned circulation, which he pairs with distribution, as a key topos, or invention commonplace, for delivery. In other words, circulation is subsumed within the broader canon of rhetorical delivery. Porter relied on Doug Eyman’s (2007) distinction between distribution and circulation, noting that distribution refers to the choices rhetors make in presenting their texts in digital spaces, whereas circulation refers to the possibility of texts to have a life beyond the initial moment of delivery. As such, distribution and circulation are related terms that are connected to the generative canon of delivery. David Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony Michel (2012) also embedded a consideration of delivery within their discussion of circulation. According to Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel, “public rhetoric is successful only if it effectively negotiates the material-cultural challenges of circulation, including the challenges related to production, reproduction, and distribution” (63, my emphasis). Although they don’t directly evoke delivery in this passage, it’s clear that Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel are discussing issues of delivery, wherein rhetors negotiate, that is, make choices about, how their discourse enters circulatory paths. This point becomes clearer when the authors present their theory of rhetorical velocity, which they define as “the way rhetors strategize about the potential recomposition and redistribution of a text” (p. 79; see also Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009). In other words, delivery choices—how rhetors conceive of, design, and distribute their work—will impact how their texts circulate in broader spheres. Delivery, yet again, encompasses circulation. Yet, other rhetoric scholars have made more stark divisions. Eyman, for example, made a sharp divide between circulation and delivery—for Eyman, circulation is a “separate process” from delivery, and instead can be considered a “rhetorical meta-canon” (p. 6). Other scholars similarly verge on this distinction. In her “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Jenny Edbauer Rice (2005) eschewed the canon of delivery altogether, working instead from ’s notion of reflexive circulation and Margaret Syverson’s conception of writing ecologies, to describe the means by which rhetoric moves as it encounters elements within social and cultural fields. In other words, for Edbauer Rice, rhetoric isn’t as neat as traditional models typically have it (especially notions of the

28 rhetorical situation as inherited from Lloyd Bitzer and Richard Vatz). As Edbauer Rice argued, “a given rhetoric is not contained by the elements that comprise its rhetorical situation (exigence, rhetor, audience, constraints). Rather, a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field” (p. 14). Here, Edbauer Rice hinted at a view of circulation that de-centers the human rhetor, and thus the rhetor’s delivery choices, as the locus of rhetorical attention. Delivery gives way here, in other words, because it is seemingly tied to traditional models of rhetoric (i.e., a speaking body delivering a message to flesh-and-blood audience at a certain time and place) and doesn’t attend to other elements within a given ecology (for Edbauer Rice, these elements include public moods and feelings; for other writing ecology theorists, these include environmental issues and other human and nonhuman actors). This is not to say that scholars have yet to place delivery within a rhetorical ecologies model of rhetoric. Collin Gifford Brooke (2009), for example, retooled delivery in his discussion of the rhetorical canon from an “intransitive” or performative point of view. For Brooke, circulation falls within the purview of delivery, especially if we re-calibrate delivery not as a “transitive, instrumental process of transmission” (p. 177), but instead recognize, as Edbauer Rice does, that our notions of how to deliver texts are already influenced by cultural, social, technological, and material conditions (by the relationships of an ecology). We are delivered as much as we deliver. This is especially true for digital communications—for example, Brooke noted that delivering discourse on is performative, it is ongoing, changing, and built through a series of circulating exchanges. As such, Brooke argued that with new media we might benefit from seeing “discourse as circulating rather than something we circulate” (p. 192). In sum, the intersection between circulation and delivery has been productive for a number of reasons. Initially, it served as way for rhetoric and writing scholars to study how writing moves in spaces beyond the confines of the classroom. Delivery scholarship has also helped name the needed knowledge rhetors need for distributing and spreading textual work in networked publics, giving us useful terminology and concepts for explaining how discourse moves in broader publics (e.g., distribution, rhetorical velocity, rhetorical ecologies, and circulation). In this way, the connection between circulation and rhetorical delivery, to my mind, helps assert a degree of human agency within the process of what flows and what doesn’t flow in broader publics. Rhetors can negotiate, strategize, theorize, and anticipate how the delivery of their texts might be interpreted, used, remixed, and/or redistributed. Of course, as already hinted at by scholars like Brooke and Edbauer Rice, what’s already in circulation also impacts how rhetors might go about delivering their materials.

Circulation and Economies Another common connection scholars make with circulation deals with issues of economy, or the mechanisms or means by which writing is valued, exchanged, and spread. Certainly, such a view has a rich history within Marxist frameworks (cf. Trimbur, 2000; Eyman, 2007), but more recent accounts have described the means and logics by which digital content is exchanged and circulated in online spaces (see, for example, Benkler, 2006; Bruns, 2008; Lessig, 2008; Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). In other words, when scholars connect circulation with economy they often refer to both the material structures that make circulation possible and the social, cultural, and political motivations that propel, or don’t propel, (re)distribution,

29 consumption, and exchange.9 From the outset, I must address the common misconception that economy deals with monetary exchange alone—indeed, as James Porter (2010) noted, the economics of writing/rhetoric involves “value more broadly defined,” including “desire, participation, sharing, and emotional connectedness” (p. 176). Economy, in this way, captures the social and cultural motivations that impact the circulation of discourse. Within a digital age, scholars have created useful frameworks to approach economy within this broader conception of the word. These include Yochai Benkler’s (2006) notion of the networked information economy, Axel Brun’s (2008) work with produasge, Larry Lessig’s (2008) model of hybrid economies, and Trebor Scholz’s (2012) discussion of “playbor,” to name a few. For these scholars, fundamental tenets of this emerging economy include: the increase of cooperative sharing, the possibility for ad hoc group formations, the growth of specialized niche communities, and the likelihood of (often unknowingly) mixing play with labor (i.e., gamification), among other things. An underlying assumption in all of this work More recently, in Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (2013) investigated economies of circulation to describe what moves content on social media platforms like YouTube, , , and Twitter. Key here, for them, is viewing circulation not as viral contagion, a view that equates widespread circulation to luck or that promotes circulation to a mystical status, but rather in terms of what they call appraisal, which can be understood as “the process by which people determine which forms of value and worth get ascribed to an object as it moves through different transactions” (p. 85). As Jenkins, Ford, and Green argued repeatedly throughout their book, successful circulation is largely dependent upon content creators tapping into the social motivations that produce or facilitate value for . Whereas Jenkins, Ford, and Green largely discuss economy from its value-added standpoint (though, to be sure, they touch on the darker sides of the digital economy), others have focused on the emerging digital economy as facilitating neoliberalism, promoting unjust labor practices, and engaging in problematic privacy tactics. Political theorist Jodi Dean (2005), for example, argued that circulation of content in a networked economy promotes a “fantasy of participation” (p. 51). While the circulation of more and more content seems promising for an engaged and responsive polity, Dean argued that swarms of over-congested content leaves no room for political response. She puts it this way: “The proliferation, distribution, acceleration, and intensification of communicative access and opportunity, far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite – the post-political formation of communicative ” (p. 53). Dean’s model of communicative capitalism suggests that market-based logics have been inserted into politics. As she claimed, “communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to democratic politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production” (p. 56). Dean maintained that because communicative capitalism has given way to an overwhelming and overabundant influx of voices (through , comment threads, group forums, etc.), the screeching flow of information leaves no room for genuine response from interested parties. In effect, for Dean, the promise of participation, facilitated by mass circulation on many corporate-owned web platforms, threatens political action in the age of late capitalism. While Dean’s argument is important to keep in mind, I am more apt to recognize the micro-moments of

9 This intersection of circulation highly relates to delivery; in fact, James Porter (2009, 2010), positions issues of economy within the realm of delivery. For my purposes here, while I recognize they are highly connected, I separate delivery from economy to get at some of the more nuanced concerns of economies of circulation.

30 resistance that take place on corporatized platforms. I explore these moments in greater detail in chapter four, and make the point that important changes can still occur on corporate-owned web platforms. Nevertheless, the corporatization of the web—and the platforms on which much information circulate—demands that scholars be mindful of how often-invisible forms of digital labor are always present when we circulate writing. Along similar lines to Dean, Mark Andrejevic (2012), Tiziana Terranova (2004), and Trebor Scholz (2012) noted how the new digital economy uses a faux-rhetoric of participation to promote what Terranova calls “free labor” or what Scholz calls “playbor.” In these cases, scholars focus their gaze on the complicated or unjust labor practices that have emerged in digital economies. For example, Andrejevic worked to show how some practices within the emerging digital economy (e.g., data tracking and mining) exploit the labor of those who participate in building content on social websites. I note Andrejevic’s contribution to discussions of digital labor, because his notion of exploitation makes clear that there are “different types and levels of exploitation” (p. 151). As he writes, “it is the sign of a certain kind of material luxury to be exploited online—to have the leisure time and resources to engage in the activities that are monitored and tracked” (p. 162). This point, I believe, is important to keep fresh in mind when discussing illicit digital labor practices. Still, the appropriation of user data in online spaces warrants deeper inquiries into the multiple actors who profit/benefit from our participation online. In other words, while we might benefit somehow from circulating content online, it also comes at a price when considering issues of privacy and ownership. In economic terms, Jessica Reyman (2013) put it this way, “the appropriation of user data creates a particular economy for writing, and establishes a particular value and exchange system for user contributions on the social and participatory Web. Current data-mining practices create an unequal exchange between unequal partners” (p. 523). Reyman’s point here is that the tech companies of Silicon Valley largely set the conditions of exchange within many digital economies of writing. Put another way, the infrastructure that makes spreadable media possible—e.g., ease of participation online, folksonomic building of content, collaborative technology interfaces, and so on—propagates a rhetoric of sharing and participation that, though advantageous or valuable to individual users in certain ways, ultimately tips the scale in the hands of corporate entities that literally define the terms of service for exchange. As Reyman argued further, such a landscape sets up “an economic dynamic in which users contribute content and other information of great value to technological systems over which they have very limited control” (p. 530). As I see it, the rise of circulation being a somewhat hot topic in rhetoric and writing scholarship in recent years no doubt stems from the emerging digital economy—and choose your favorite here: networked information economy (Benkler, 2006), peer-to-peer economy (Bauwens, 2012), hybrid economy (Lessig, 2008), and so on—that makes (re)distribution, exchange, and further circulation possible (or, at the very least, much easier for individuals with access to the internet and web). In short, the thread of economy and circulation provides us with a great understanding of why people circulate content today, including adding value to communities and deriving some sort of pleasure or sense of worth from the process. It also allows us to capture some of the more problematic aspects of circulating content within an emerging economy, including issues of uneven exchange that demonstrates users’ lack of agency on web platforms that are designed for increased circulation.

31 Circulation and (Digital) Publics Circulation is also tied to conceptions of public spheres; more specifically, publics are said to be made via a process of circulation. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, the notion of the public sphere is undoubtedly connected to Jürgen Habermas’ (1989) work with tracing the historical conditions of the bourgeois public sphere, which can be roughly understood as a kind of social space where private citizens come together in public venues to discuss issues of common concern by engaging in a process of critical-rational debate. Since Habermas, much scholarship has provided counterpoints and critiques to early conceptions of the public sphere. Nancy Fraser (1992), for example, has taken issue with Habermas’ lack of attention regarding access, disparity, and problematic private/public divides, while Michael Warner (2005) has argued that we should extend what “counts” as meaningful public interactions. These important critiques are well documented in work in public writing and rhetoric (see, for example, Farmer, 2013; Rice, 2012; Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel, 2012), which I point to because my intention here is not to offer a robust review of scholarship focused on publics per se or the sticky, yet incredibly important, baggage that the term brings with it. Instead, I aim to recount how many public sphere writers have included a discussion of circulation within their theories and models of public spheres. In following this connection, I aim to show why circulation is an important concept for building and maintaining publics. Indeed, both Fraser and Warner include conceptions of circulation within their (counter)public sphere theories, noting that textual/discursive circulation is critical for forming and sustaining publics and counterpublics. Circulation figured into Fraser’s definition of subaltern counterpublics, which provided a counterpoint to Habermas’ notion of the public sphere by attending to issues concerning non-dominant social groups. Fraser’s subaltern counterpublics are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn allows them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (p. 67). Although she did not expand upon circulation in her essay, it is clear that the counterdiscourses Fraser mentions are made possible by moving, exchanging, and building upon discourse—they are made possible, in other words, via a process of circulation. Whereas Fraser did not expound upon circulation in great detail, Warner spent the greater part of his chapter “Publics and Counterpublics” discussing the concept. In fact, like Fraser’s implicit argument, the notion of “reflexive circulation,” for Warner, is a key characteristic that builds and sustains publics. As Warner wrote, “a public is understood to be an ongoing space of encounter for discourse. Not texts themselves build publics, but the concatenation of texts through time” (p. 90). In other words, texts need to be circulated for publics to emerge; or, put differently, publics require circulation. Warner believed this is why print publications were of great importance for the emergence of Habermas’ public sphere. Here, Warner’s key example is the Spectator, a daily publication that built up an active public in its readers by including them in the reflexive changes of the publication process. Letters, essays, and installments from readers, Warner explained, revised and sustained what was already in circulation, which in turn gave rise to the imaginary of an active public. While this model might seem like common publication practice today, this was historically significant as it “mark[ed] what can now be taken for granted: that public discourse must be circulated, not just emitted in one direction” (p. 100). The example of the Spectator helps underscore another component of Warner’s conception of circulation, which involves an understanding of punctuality or rhythms within circulatory flows, a temporality where texts can be revised, built upon, and altered. In this way,

32 publics must include what Warner called “feedback loops” wherein participants can contribute to the ongoing formation of a public. “Publics have an ongoing life,” said Warner, “it’s the way texts circulate, and become the basis for representations, that convinces us that publics have activity and duration” (p. 97). The process of circulation—distributing, refining, and revising a concatenation of texts—animates publics and gives them a sense of life. It is in this sense that that Warner describes publics as a kind of poetic world-making, a lively exchange that is necessarily not defined by critical-rational debate. By building off of Warner’s work, Frank Farmer (2013), from a rhetoric and perspective, explores how textual circulation makes publics of all kinds—the subversive and anarchist scene, the composition classroom, the “disciplinary counterpublic” of composition studies. As Farmer wrote, “publics— all publics—are created, sustained, and revised. Publics must constantly be ‘under construction’ if they are to persist” (p. 144). Thus, to repeat, part of making and sustaining publics involves the continual circulation of texts, and such circulation contributes to the poetic world-making of a public. Yet, a problem arises when bringing Warner’s notion of circulation within the realm of new media or digital publics. Because Warner’s notion of circulation depends on an understanding of punctual rhythms in print culture (that is, a circulatory cycle of public discourse that allows for ongoing revision), Warner is skeptical of theorizing public formation via circulation in digital spheres. Part of the problem for Warner, who wrote this chapter just prior to Web 2.0 (his original essay was published in 2002), is that there is no historical dimension of circulation in digital spaces: “Web discourse has very little of the citational field that would allow us to speak of it as discourse unfolding through time” (p. 97). Byron Hawk (2012) argued differently. Hawk contended that Warner’s understanding of time needs to be recalibrated for discourse that unfolds in digital spaces. Whereas Warner’s time, based on print models of circulation, can be “plotted on a timeline,” Hawk argued for a notion of time that is not “grid- like” but instead a “qualitative becoming that affects the text, sender, receiver, and overall context at every moment of connection in its movements and circulations” (p. 172). In other words, the affordances of networked publics10 (archivability, searchability, visibility, etc.) render a sense of “timeless material” that can be refined, revised, and re-circulated in ways that may not be as tidy as the punctual rhythms Warner described within print culture but that nonetheless allow for revision, change, and transformation. Instead of using the logic of print-based punctuality, scholars have recently turned to discussions of affect to understand how publics arise in digital spheres. Zizi Papacharisi (2015), for example, argued that the connective capacities of social networking sites provide an “always- on” ambience that allows participants to tune-in to “affect mini-worlds” (p. 117). Papacharisi maintained that publics are still rhythmic-based, but that publics have emerged in digital spheres based on “sentiment-driven modalities” (p. 134). For Papacharisi, as for most affect scholars, affect11 should not be understood as emotion alone, but rather a kind of intensity that swells when discourse is circulated. In this way, to think of publics being sustained by the circulation of affect helps to bind, at least to some extent, the duration of intensity for publics emerging via digital networks. For example, we can remember that an affective intensity swelled concerning

10 I draw here on danah boyd’s (2010) conception of networked public spheres. 11 Affect is an incredibly complex concept that many scholars from multiple disciplines have been investigating for quite some time (for what I see as key discussions, see Ahmed, 2004; Massumi, 2002; and Stewart, 2007). Heather Lang and I (in press) define affect as “a kind of surging pulse that moves through and among bodies of all kinds to accumulate, pass through, or gum up, provoking sensations, attachments, and intuitions as it circulates” (n.p.).

33 the Occupy Wall Street movement (both in on-the-ground publics and digital publics), and while certain sentiments are no doubt still being circulated, the affective intensity has since drastically slowed to a mild hum. To recap, what a publics view gives us is an understanding that the circulation of texts and affect works to bring about change, build life worlds, and signal affective (and somewhat durational) intensities. For Fraser, this includes the ability of subaltern groups to invent, circulate, and sustain counterdiscourses that help bring about productive and needed change. For Warner, this includes the capacity for strangers to continually revise public discourse, which, in effect, leads to a kind of poetic world-making. For Papacharissi, this includes the recognition that theorizing the circulation of affect might help render a sense of reflexive circulation into global, networked public spheres. As I see it, to pair circulation with public sphere theory is productive for rhetorical circulation studies because it highlights how circulation figures into political spheres, and thereby emphasizes the importance of thinking about writing and rhetoric can be transformative both within and beyond the classroom.

Circulation and Power Earlier in this chapter, I defined circulation as a post-distribution process of spread, exchange, and transformation. My hope is that this definition has been further elaborated through the preceding discussions of delivery, economy, and publics: rhetors make decisions that can boost the likelihood of discourse to spread and reach other people beyond the initial moment of delivery; such decisions are often based on a sense of adding value to communities and individuals; and the reflexive nature of sharing, updating, and transforming valuable discourse maintains and sustains publics. This description, however, does not quite capture another aspect of circulation. Upon first glance, we might read an inherent positive quality to all things circulating: to circulate, to flow freely, represents a healthy, active ecology and an engaged public sphere. Yet, as Julie Jung (2014) reminded in her critique of description-based methodologies that study networks, ecologies, and assemblages: “not everything is circulating, because not everything can” (n.p., her emphasis). Indeed, another dimension of circulation, one that, to my mind, has received far too little attention, involves the intersection of circulation and power. To be sure, scholars have, within recent years, been developing methods and methodologies to examine the ways in which the circulation of discourse impacts individuals at multiple levels of scale, and how such circulation can benefit certain actors over others. One important intervention involves the work of rhetoric and transnational feminism. Mary Queen (2008), for example, argued feminist scholars should pay attention to the ways in which digital texts circulate in global contexts, maintaining that feminist work in the U.S. may not work for women in other parts of the world. In particular, Queen proposed we examine circulation through the frame of fields because it “helps us visualize the effects of forces” (p.474). Drawing from physics, Queen noted that fields encounter “interacting forces”—including historical, ideological, cultural, geopolitical, and so on—that have “very real effects on objects” (p. 474). Queen developed a methodology, what she calls rhetorical genealogy, that aims to untangle the “cultural practices and rhetorics through which particular representations and interpretations gain validity and power” (p. 476). Put differently, she explored how various forces within a field of circulation impact and change cultural and rhetorical representations. Rebecca Dingo (2012) similarly developed a method of rhetorical analysis that sets its gaze on the transnational--paying attention to how the circulation of gender policies and initiatives “shift and change depending

34 upon the contexts in which policy makers and development experts use them” (p. 8). In short, Dingo’s analysis showed how widely circulating policy initiatives manifest materially in different ways according to the contexts in which they are interpreted and deployed. While Dingo and Queen’s work is useful for thinking about discourse already in circulation, and the many ways in which rhetorics in motion can benefit certain actors over others and the forces that impact such circulation, it does little to tell us about the material and institutional mechanisms that provide the conditions for circulation in the first place. After all, public discourse, as Warner reminded us, “requires preexisting forms and channels of circulation” (p. 106). Although, as already mentioned, Warner’s analysis is focused largely on print culture, the same premise, I take it, holds true for digital writing. Although individual rhetors likely experience greater ease to distribute and redistribute materials in online domains, institutional apparatuses or systems, as I prefer to call them, make possible the (often invisible) conditions for circulation. Seen from this perspective, the notion of circulation is fundamentally a concern for access. What systems grant or block the circulation of writing? What systems make the conditions for circulation possible? What systems interfere with the circulation of discourse? By systems, I mean a broad set of institutional, material, cultural, and technological forces that impact how discourse travels. While these systems might seem abstract (e.g., intellectual property laws or social media community norms), they manifest in concrete ways (e.g., YouTube’s copyright Content ID or the censorship practices on Twitter). As I will describe more fully in Chapter 5, I find the notion of “circulation gatekeeper” to be a compelling and useful framework for pedagogical reasons. The rhetoric of gatekeepers, I believe, gives writing and rhetoric specialists leverage in pedagogy and public spheres to talk about how circulation is constrained and made possible within certain systems (distribution systems, institutional systems, legal systems, commercial systems, political systems). When I talk about gatekeepers of circulation with my students, for example, I talk about YouTube’s Content ID (a system wherein copyright owners upload their content to a -maintained database that YouTube uses and scans against when determining if a new video is infringing upon copyright); I talk about Facebook’s algorithms (computational tools that, in Tarleton Gillespie's [2014] terms, “channel” or “funnel” certain types of content that gives rise to the “production of calculated publics” [n.p.]); and I talk about Twitter’s interface and genre constraints (the 140-character limit and the micro syntax that enables and constrains information). Briefly put, I talk about how we navigate circulation gatekeepers largely without taking notice, but I also underscore that such systems have a very real impact on what gets circulated. In other words, when Obama Hope or #YesAllWomen or a student’s video essay circulates, it necessarily negotiates systems of circulation. And while the makings of these systems are sometimes encountered by the rhetor when distributing a text (e.g., providing tags for a video on YouTube or deciding on a creative commons license for a photo on Flickr), often times many of the inner workings of circulation systems remain largely invisible (e.g., commands that are written in code or functions that are carried out through proprietary algorithms). However, such systems are rendered visible when something goes awry in the circulation process: a web page fails to load, a database detects copyrighted material, a platform censors a post, and so on. In sum, circulation necessarily involves issues of power, including how discourses travel in multiple contexts and thereby impact people in asymmetrical ways. While important work has

35 emerged to study the intersection between circulation and power, I contend that more energy should be spent investigating the conditions that make circulation possible in the first place. In developing a critical look at the systems of circulation, rhetoric and writing scholars and teachers can contribute to a) building institutional critiques (e.g., Porter et al, 2000) that aim for change in broader political arenas and b) developing critical literacies (e.g., Selber, 2004) for students writing and exchanging texts in the digital age. I will return to this discussion in part 3 of this dissertation, where I more fully and in much greater detail explore regimes of textual flow and circulation.

Models for Understanding Rhetorical Circulation My hope is that the proceeding sections of this chapter provide a sense of scope and complexity for further developing circulation studies. So far I have demonstrated that circulation is a key rhetorical concern within the emerging digital economy. And that people distribute, redistribute, and build upon material already in circulation for a number of reasons: it adds value to communities, provides a sense of worth or satisfaction for participants, it maintains relationships and connections, and so on. To this end, tied to the making of active public discourse, the circulation of texts, and the affective intensities they bring with them, can lead to change, transformation, and world making. Too, it must be noted that institutional and material systems create, maintain, occlude, or block the conditions for circulation. Taken together, these overlapping intersections generate a multifaceted trajectory for scholars invested in rhetorical circulation. As my survey of the scholarship makes clear, circulation is a complex concept that has been theorized in diverse, sometimes unharmonious, ways. This is partly because, as I hope to show, positions on circulation are entangled in assumptions of agency and definitions of what is possible for human rhetors. Thus, to further make sense of circulation, especially as it relates to generative rhetorical practice, I turn my attention to naming central focal points or models for understanding circulation. Each model, respectively, tells us how rhetors can produce texts that circulate widely and how rhetors might better understand circulatory paths of texts already in motion. After providing key features of each, I posit a hybrid view of circulation that attends to both models and draws on the argument presented in chapter 1.

We often think of circulation from the standpoint of something entering circulation: an image enters circulation when it is uploaded to social media sites, a book enters circulation when it is returned to the library, a CFP enters circulation when it is emailed to various listservs. In this sense, circulation refers to a set of pre-formed channels where textual materials can move throughout various networks. Yet, we also talk about circulation from a more active point of view—the objects themselves are circulating (an image flows, a book moves, a CFP spreads), and, therefore, such objects do not merely enter a channel of circulation as stable entities but instead take on a more active and transformative role. This distinction is at the heart of the two models of circulation I present below: 1) circulation as strategic outcome, which sees circulation as something to be achieved based on the rhetor’s wishes and 2) circulation as already underway process, which sees circulating objects as undergoing an in-process sense of rhetorical becoming (see Table 2.1).

36 Description Delivery Focus

Strategic Circulation is something to be achieved—or not—based On an initial text to create Outcome on rhetors’ choices based on applied procedural, circulation technical, and cultural knowledge

Already Circulation is seen as an ongoing process—that is, as On post-initial text to Underway objects circulating, not objects to be circulated participate in ongoing circulation

Table 2.1: Models of rhetorical circulation from a production standpoint.

These two views can be understood as interdependent—and many thinkers of circulation would likely place themselves in both domains depending on their focus. In other words, I do not believe it is productive to pit these perspectives in binary opposition to one another. Indeed, as circulation is a reflexive process of distribution and redistribution, both perspectives add to a more complete understanding of how discourse unfolds through time and space. This point cannot be emphasized enough. Moreover, both positions, to be clear, understand circulation to be somewhat out of the individual rhetor’s control. Where the major difference lies between the two, however, is in focus: is a rhetor building a text to be circulated (strategic outcome) or is a rhetor responding to/interacting with an object already in circulation (already underway)? I explain the two views in greater detail below, pointing to key scholarship representative of each focal point.

Circulation as Strategic Outcome This view understands circulation as the strategic outcome of a rhetor’s distribution of a text. In other words, circulation is something to be accomplished—or not—through rhetors’ strategic planning of how their texts might get picked up, remixed, and spread further. As briefly described earlier in this chapter, much work attending to digital delivery invokes this conception of circulation. In fact, key delivery scholars have argued that a rhetor can design, build, and distribute his or her texts in such a way that encourages broad circulation and high levels of rhetorical velocity (e.g., Porter, 2009; Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009; Sheridan, Ridolfo, & Michel, 2012). That is, under this view, if circulation is desired, the rhetor can take rhetorical, procedural, and technical steps to encourage such wide uptake. Under this view, a couple of notable concepts deserve further unpacking. The first involves clarifying the term distribution. Porter (2009) argued that distribution refers “to the initial decision about how you package a message in order to reach its intended audience” (p. 214). Distribution, for Porter, involved the early steps in determining or anticipating circulation—these include making those seemingly banal decisions (i.e., what file type to use, what license to use, what privacy settings to use, etc.) that nonetheless have very real and important effects on the potential for a text’s circulation. But they also include decisions regarding audience, timing, and kairos: what will be appropriate for an audience and at what time will this be best received? Jenkins, Ford, and Green similarly explored connections between distribution and circulation. For them, distribution and rhetorical design choices are key for creating widely circulating content. They wrote:

37 content creators do not work magic, nor are they powerless. Creators don’t design viruses, nor do they simply wait for something to happen. Successful creators understand the strategic and technical aspects they need to master in order to create content more likely to spread, and they think about what motivates participants to share information and to build relationships with the communities shaping its circulation. (p. 196)

Like Porter’s (2010) “Rhetoric in (as) a Digital Economy,” Jenkins, Ford, and Green noted that understanding the economic value undergirding spreadable media is advantageous for content creators. They explain content is likely to be shared if it is:  available when and where audiences want it  portable  easily reusable  relevant for multiple audiences  part of a steady stream of material (pp. 197-98) These are undoubtedly distribution choices—ones that if taken up by individual rhetors might increase the likelihood that their digital material will circulate widely. In sum, distribution choices—from the technical to the economic—are all rhetorical choices that impact how an audience will engage, value, and potentially spread material further along. A second concept that needs further clarification is Jim Ridolfo and Danielle Nicole DeVoss’ (2009) notion of rhetorical velocity, which, from a rhetoric and composition standpoint, is perhaps the clearest proponent of the strategic outcome view of circulation. They defined rhetorical velocity as “the strategic theorizing for how a text might be recomposed (and why it might be recomposed) by third parties, and how this recomposing may be useful or not to the short- or long-term goals of the rhetorician” (n.p.). In other words, rhetorical velocity is a heuristic to think about the potential spread and uptake of texts once they are distributed, and, for Ridolfo and DeVoss, designing a text with an anticipatory mind for how it might get spread further has become a key skill for digital writers. The concept of rhetorical velocity and its connection to circulation is extended in Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel’s The Available Means of . In both publications, rhetorical velocity is theorized from the vantage point of creating velocity, of entering a text into circulation, with anticipation that others will remix, appropriate, and alter it. Indeed, rhetorical velocity privileges designing texts with an eye toward future remixability. Yet, in both publications, remix is touted as the goal of the writing exchange, not the compositional method of choice when composing with rhetorical velocity in mind. Some of their examples make this point clear. In their 2009 publication, Ridolfo and DeVoss used the example of the press release as their model. One press release, they note, can set off a chain of remixed texts via the speed and strength of its rhetorical velocity; that is, once that initial press release is distributed, it can experience positive and negative appropriations. Similarly, in their 2012 work, Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel focused on texts that create the initial jolt of rhetorical velocity: the first tweet from the #watchitspread campaign, the origins of the D Brand, and, yet again, the start of a press advisory. With its focus on distributing texts in such a way that creates circulation and anticipates remixability, what view of agency does the strategic outcome view of circulation uphold? Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel disclosed a kairotic vision of agency that helps align their discussion of rhetorical velocity within messy networked and distributed environments. By

38 drawing on the rhetorical concept of kairos,12 Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel argued that rhetorical agency refers to “the ‘struggle’ of the prepared rhetor within complex and multifaceted contexts that are simultaneously material, discursive, social, cultural, and historical” (p. 11). In other words, they rejected the naïve assumption that humans are all autonomous agents guided by a rational self, suggesting instead that we should think of agency, following Latour, as distributed among many actors—human rhetors, then, become a “point-of-articulation” among a web of other elements (including, in their discussion, audience, exigency, genre, mode, media of delivery, media of reproduction and distribution, other compositions, and collaborators). The rhetor, then, can enact a kind of agency via a kairotic process of negotiation.

Circulation as Already Underway Process Another position focuses on circulation as it is already underway—that is, as objects circulating, not objects to be circulated (Brooke, 2009). This view is more interested in theorizing and researching discourse post-distribution—how a textual object morphs, spreads, and transforms through time and space. In effect, this view sees circulating things as rhetorical actors in their own right, ones that can “spark identification, persuasion, and collective action” (Gries, 2015a, n.p.). Scholars who explore the already underway process of circulation tend to gravitate toward an ecological understanding of rhetoric (e.g., Brooke, 2009; Edbauer Rice, 2005; Rivers & Weber, 2011), especially one infused with object-oriented or thing-based theories of agency. As a context for this view of circulation, the metaphor and framework of ecology is productive because it “provides a systems-based view of both the environments and the relationships that take place through digital circulation mechanisms” (Eyman, 2015, n.p.). Gries (2013, 2015, forthcoming), undoubtedly the most notable proponent of the already underway view, sees circulation as a process whereby nonhuman things experience a sense of rhetorical becoming, amassing, via their divergent movements, what Jane Bennett (2010) has called “thing-power:” or, “the curious ability for inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects both dramatic and subtle” (p. 6). More pointedly, Gries (2015) noted that circulating things “must be studied as divergent, unfolding becomings” (p. 19). Following a new materialist sensibility, Gries noted that things acquire unique meanings as they circulate and propagate throughout time as space, mutually transforming other entities they encounter as they travel. As this brief description alludes to, Gries’ work is complex and rich in its theoretical groundings. Therefore, I want to further elaborate two points from Gries’ discussion of circulation. Although I weave in other scholarship cognizant or supportive of this view, I use Gries as a base because she has most directly taken up the already underway view of circulation. The first point of clarification involves Gries’ use of things as a signifier. Instead of using familiar humanist terms like text, artifact, or even object, Gries used the word thing in a specific way. For Gries, the use of thing is important for a couple of reasons. For one, following Bruno Latour (2005), to evoke the word thing, to trace its etymology, is to reveal that it has a curious dichotomous meaning: on the one hand, it means a discrete object (in Latour’s parlance, a matter of fact), and on the other hand, as Ding, or Thing, it means a gathering or assembly (in Latour’s vocabulary, a matter of concern). Following Latour, Gries wanted to trace how nonhuman things—together with a wide arrangement of other actors—can come to shape what she calls “collective life.” Gries’ key exemplar is Obama Hope, a nonhuman thing, that when circulated,

12 The authors disclose that kairos is a complex concept not easily reduced to a set of formulae, but that can be described as “an approach that seeks to discover in each situation what kind of rhetorical action is appropriate” (p. 20).

39 has come to impact the greater collectives with which it is associated. To use the language of publics, the reflexive circulation of Obama Hope, a seemingly stable entity, has impacted a wide array of publics (within politics, , transnational protest, commercial exchanges, etc.). By tracing and following the circulation of things, Gries argued, following Latour, that we should bring the nonhuman into publics. To this end, Gries’ use of things stems from her desire to decenter the human from rhetorical study, to give things their due, and to attempt to “disclose the rhetorical life of things” (2015, p. 109). Indeed, as Thomas Rickert (2013) has told us, a turn toward things “gives back a sense of voice, of ‘objectness,’ to the thing, so that it is not understood exclusively within human meanings. The thing has a material thrust that coexists with and emerges within the surrounding ambient culture but is not exactly equivalent to it” (p. 22). In other words, a turn to things helps us approach how nonhuman materials have agential qualities, or “modes of doing,” where diverse materials engage in many relations that coexist with humans (Abrahamsson, Bertoni, Mol, & Martin, 2015). This attention on things is especially important from a circulation as already underway standpoint, as the focus here is more on the thing circulating—and the relations it forms via its movements—than on the initial human rhetor’s rhetorical decisions. The second aspect of Gries’ work that demands further elaboration is her notion of “rhetorical becoming,” for, she argues, widely circulating things--viral things--experience a sense of rhetorical transformation and becoming. According to Gries, this process requires us to take a nonmodern perspective regarding time and space, and especially requires that we abandon transmission views of delivery. Such abandonment, Gries explained, helps us understand that the affective capacity of a widely circulating thing, its thing-power, does not derive “solely from… rhetorical design” (forthcoming, p. 27). In other words, under a rhetorical becoming view, things experience divergent and unpredictable transformations as they circulate throughout time and space, and such transformation can come to stand apart from its original design purpose. To make sense of the notion of rhetorical becoming, Gries described how Shepard Fairey’s now- iconic Obama Hope image has experienced a rhetorical life far beyond the intentions of Fairey. This can be described, following Deleuze and Guattari, as a virtual-actual process. Gries (forthcoming) marked the distinction between image and picture to describe virtual-actual: the virtual, she notes, can be represented by image (an immaterial entity, a ghostly, fantasmatic appearance), whereas the actual can be described as picture (the material support that brings the virtual/image to life). For Gries, virtual-actual represents the ability for things to exist in multiple, potentially infinite configurations. For example, Obama Hope is what she described as “single multiple”—both one and many. In other words, although still recognizable as a coherent entity, the Obama Hope image has actualized in multiple ways—i.e., as a “commodity fetish,” an “advertising strategy,” a “genre of social and political critique,” a “transnational sign of protest,” and so on (Gries, 2013, p. 340). Under an already underway model of circulation, the notion of rhetorical becoming helps describe the unpredictability of viral things. In this model of circulation, agency is an emergent phenomena that arises from “a dynamic assemblage of entities” or from a “distributed dance [...] in and across dynamic assemblages” (Gries, pp. 57-58). Working from a new materialist sensibility, we can say that widely circulating things amass a kind of agentive force--a sense of thing-power--that affects other actors (both human and nonhuman) within assemblages. While assemblage was introduced in the introduction of this dissertation as a kind of methodology, the notion of assemblage for my use here demands further clarification. Assemblages, for Manuel DeLanda (2006), are comprised of heterogeneous components. They are “wholes” in a sense, but not in a totality kind of way

40 (e.g., the State or the Market). Rather, they come to form identities. It is useful to speak of assemblages in a pluralized way, as the discrete elements within any assemblage can detach from one assemblage and join another. Jane Bennett’s (2010) lucid take showed how diverse elements can emerge to form an assemblage to “make something happen” (p. 24). She called this the agency of the assemblage. But how does a new materialist approach relate to digital circulation? Think of circulating that have inspired mass conversations and political dialogue (#Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, #ICantBreathe, #YesAllWomen)—these hashtags are powerful not because of any one tweet or Facebook post, but rather because of the mass, ongoing assemblages that each message loosely helps to form. Under this model of circulation, then, agency emerges within various configurations, within various assemblages, and while a circulating thing might have a kind of affective force, the possibility for rhetorical action emerges due to the relationality of components within a given assemblage.

Toward a Synthesis View To summarize the above models of circulation, the strategic outcome view focuses on the delivery knowledge needed to distribute an initial text to create a circulatory life (rhetorical velocity) without the rhetor’s direct intervention (think Call for Proposals, press releases, scholarly articles, email flyers, etc.). We can read a view of agency in this position that sees agency as a “kairotic struggle” of the “prepared rhetor.” The already underway viewpoint provides an interpretation of delivery as distributed and ongoing—where an individual rhetor’s contributions help to shape the larger collective at work (think the circulations of a certain hashtag, the movements of Obama Hope, the transformations of an Internet meme). This focal point similarly sees agency as distributed but the emphasis is made more on the larger collective circulating than a human rhetor’s intentions or choices. To offer a more comprehensive view of circulation, I suggest that we need to more carefully fuse these two perspectives together. Both perspectives, in other words, can inform one another. Although Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel’s view of agency sets up a useful way for thinking about how rhetors can intervene in circulation (as part of a “kairotic struggle,” as intervening in rhetorical velocity), the authors’ examples routinely point to the initial distribution choices rhetors make to create a widely circulating text (i.e., the first tweet that spurred #watchitspread, the initial press release, the origins of the D Brand). To borrow the visual metaphor used in their book, the attention is placed on the creation of the ripple in the pond, not in the movement already underway in the pond. In , a thing-based view of agency helps describe how materials themselves gain agentive capacities in their abilities to catalyze divergent materializations throughout time and space. While Gries’ work helps disclose a widely circulating thing’s dynamic consequentiality, it presents a somewhat limited view of human delivery. What we need, then, is a synthesis view that focuses on the delivery and rhetorical knowledge needed to redistribute/rework a text already in circulation, a charge I take up in the remainder of this chapter.

Tactical Rhetorics as Circulatory Intervention Intervene, according to the OED, means “to come in or between so as to affect, modify, or prevent a result, action, etc.” Etymologically, the verb intervene can be traced to the Latin intervenīre, meaning to come between, come upon, interrupt. Within an already underway field of circulating discourse, how can one affect, modify, or interrupt? One way to answer this

41 question is to develop a hybrid view of circulation—circulatory intervention—that would fix its gaze both on the rhetorical knowledge needed to create widespread circulation (distribution, kairos, rhetorical velocity, etc.) and also on the ability to follow, analyze, and kairotically act upon already circulating things (including an understanding that viral compositions, once unleashed, can become dynamic actors themselves). Scholarship on remix is undoubtedly helpful in this regard (e.g., Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2007; Dietel-McLaughlin, 2009; Dubisar & Palmeri, 2010), as such work explores how material already in circulation can be fodder for future compositions. Within rhetoric and composition, however, research on remix largely focuses on either crafting arguments that assert the value of remix in writing pedagogy or exploring various types of remixed forms of writing. As mentioned, Ridolfo and DeVoss’ is a notable expectation, as they fold in important considerations of delivery within their discussion of remix and rhetorical velocity. But their focus is placed on creating initial paths of circulation. To slightly modify a discussion from Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel, circulatory intervention would not focus on rhetorical moves that create new ripples in the pond, but instead focus on those that intervene in the ripples already underway. More recently, Ridolfo (2013) has developed more terminology to take up such a task. Ridolfo’s recent work explores what he calls “textual diaspora,” which focuses on “how to strategically leverage texts that have been already circulated or delivered” (p. 137). I follow Ridolfo’s work, and the rich work on rhetorical delivery, remix, and circulation, to offer another model of circulation: circulatory intervention. Such a model, I contend, can be further complemented by the theory of tactical rhetorics presented in Chapter 1. As already argued, tactical rhetorics represent a focus for rhetorical theory that pushes us to examine the many ways in which bricoleur rhetors “make do” with circulating discourse. Connected to metis, tactical rhetoricians are resourceful, crafty, and cunning—they are endowed, so to speak, with a certain kind of embodied knowledge that is necessary for navigating the process of redistributing and repurposing already-circulating discourse. Tactical rhetors assume a conjectural and ventatic worldview. As Carolyn Miller (2000) argued such a worldview embraces the hunt, where rhetors “may know what they track or may unexpectedly discover new game, but they do not, presumably, create their quarry” (p. 141). When tactical rhetors do intervene, they do so for very purposeful reasons: critique, parody, ridicule, objection, and so on, and they often do so by using particular composing techniques. From a tactical rhetorics standpoint, coupled with the two views of circulation discussed above, we can arrive at a useful framework for understanding circulatory intervention that would emphasize the following:  a venatic invention sensibility, where rhetors hunt, track, and (re)claim found material already circulating  a kairotic mode of doing, where rhetors act, respond, and intervene in timely and appropriate ways  a bricoleur composing arsenal, where rhetors deploy rhetorical techniques of all kinds in their efforts to effectively ͆make do͇ with what’s available  an ethical sense of purpose, where rhetors cunningly leverage and redeploy already circulating material in an effort to disturb and resist dominant regimes  a savvy understanding of redistribution mechanisms, practices, and economies, where rhetors make use of multiple channels of circulation depending on a desired outcome  an appreciation of unpredictability, where rhetors understand that, once redistributed, circulating discourse can amass a rhetorical life of its own

42 In essence, a circulatory intervention view shows us that circulating discourse exists in a tactical field. And that what’s already in circulation can become viable ground for further rhetorical action. Rhetorical intervention is not an altogether easy endeavor, and as such, I believe it is one aspect of public rhetorics that we should spend more time theorizing and utilizing in pedagogical contexts. Since the late 1980s, rhetoric and composition has been laying claim that we should push against narratives of the solitary author—that we should invest in collaborative, dialogic, polyvocal writing practices, ones that push against notions of the lone genius that have long been etched into Western ideals of authorship. We have great scholarship that pushes this into the digital age: remix, participatory cultures, bricolage, culture jamming, the list could go on. Yet, often times, even when pushing against the solitary paradigm, we can easily, and likely unintentionally, reinscribe notions of : create rhetorical velocity, create a concatenation of texts, create circulation. Instead of promoting a rhetoric of creation when it comes to circulation, we should embrace a rhetoric of intervention.

43 Chapter 3 Mêtis Stories; or, the Makings of a Tactical Historiography

A storyteller falls in step with the lively pace of his fables. He follows them in all their turns and detours, thus exercising an art of thinking. —Michel de Certeau (1984, p. 81)

“This is a story” so often begins the historical work of Malea Powell (e.g., 1999, 2008, 2011). Powell’s rhetorical move here, or one of them, is to resist the urge to tell history as a grand narrative,13 finding pleasure and resistance in the micro, in the partial, and in the fragmented. My historical story, or the historical story I want to tell, likewise sees value in the micro, and even more so in the fragmented and in the partial—or, rather, in the movement from one partial fragment to the next. This chapter thus unfolds in a somewhat unconventional way, weaving a series of micro-stories, what I call mêtis stories, to set a larger scene and announce the key players of my tactical history. The end result seeks to give historical depth to the theory of tactical rhetorics presented in the preceding pages of this dissertation. In particular, it attempts to show how rhetors have long been using the back-flow of circulation for invention purposes, effectively reframing diverse materials already in motion for new and often cunning purposes. Indeed, one of my objectives in this project is to more fully bring mêtis (a cunning intelligence marked by adaptability, change, disguise, and opportune timing) into digital realms, to present it as a useful concept to frame the tactics everyday rhetors use to repurpose and redirect a panoply of materials already in circulation. So why think about history if my ultimate objective is focused on the present and future? I look at history to think about how the always- contextual, always-cultural lived practices of the past might tell us something about the present and the future. As scholars such as James Berlin (1988) and John Poulakos (1995) have argued, doing history can be an important project for understanding current rhetorical situations. Yet, as Jacqueline Jones Royster (2000) reminded, when we try to make sense of history, we are investigating “the material evidence of lived experience” (p. 257). I opened with Powell’s articulation of seeing history as story because she recognizes how histories are alive—how they have material consequences for cultural ways of being, doing, and knowing. Stories, complete with details about the cultural, economic, and political contexts, can help honor the lived experiences of those we study. During the process of writing this chapter, I have agonized over how best to present historical materials, how best to make a historiography that stays true to the kinds of rhetorical tactics I explore throughout this dissertation. Ultimately, I have decided upon a historiographical approach that is deeply attuned to the ever-adaptable mêtis, setting in motion a series of interwoven stories that enliven tactical rhetorics by exploring a field of operations from the past three centuries. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, the methodological approach of story recognizes that rhetorics are practiced within specific cultural communities. As I’ll point out below, scholars seeking to give life to mêtis often fall back on story as methodology to array the different contexts in which mêtis is practiced.

13 As many feminist, cultural, and disability rhetoric historians remind us (e.g., Baca, 2008; Dolmage, 2014; Glenn, 1997; Powell, 2011, to name a few), the grand narrative is often enough a problematic one, for it privileges certain rhetorical practices over others, and nestles diverse rhetorical practices into a coherent chronology (a narrative of progress) that often exclude or silence whole traditions of rhetoric. Commentators on the politics of historiography remind us that we should turn the history of rhetoric into diverse histories of rhetorics.

44 The “main characters” of this tactical history, of these stories, include the abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass, the collage artist Hannah Höch, the tactical media practitioners the Yes Men, and the remix artist Elisa Kreisinger. At first blush, this might appear a strange smattering of figures throughout history. That is, they may not seem to fit together in a neat way: they’re not bonded by a time period, by a “clear” identity category, or by a geographical location. They lived (and some are still living) very different lives, spanning three centuries, two continents, and vastly different cultural and political contexts. How they do fit together, how they add up, is a kinship in their remarkable rhetorical tactics, in their abilities to intervene in the circulatory paths of texts, objects, and things already in circulation in the name of political and social critique. In their recent chapter, Debra Hawhee and Christa Olson (2013) argue that there is value in sweeping history to follow and track particular rhetorical activities that share resemblance or connectivity throughout rhetorical histories. They call this “pan-historiography”—an approach that “leaps across geographic space, tracking important activities, terms, movements, or practices as they travel” (p. 90). Hawhee and Olson make a powerful case for uncovering depth and texture in the choice to track particular rhetorical activities by “time-splicing” throughout history to report on the evolution of rhetorical “repertories” (a concept borrowed from performance theorist Diana Taylor). I adopt their “time- splicing” approach, only with a twist. Instead of spanning thousands of years, I focus on four important moments that outline tactical rhetorics within the last three centuries. This move helps amass a tactical repertoire—a set of portable scenarios that value embodied performance and experience, enlivening the social spaces within which each rhetor navigated. It’s important to underscore how different the social, cultural, and political milieus are for each rhetor. While I feel justified in arguing that each rhetor politically intervened in dominant publics, performing some kind of micro-act of resistance as (1978) might have it, I also believe it is important to underscore that each lived/are living in vastly different cultural contexts. In other words, in linking these four together I in no way want to suggest their embodied ways of being—their struggles, triumphs, vulnerabilities, and so on—are alike or even similar. Instead, what I want to reflect upon is the relationship among their rhetorical practices, specifically regarding their composing techniques, political interventions, abilities to navigate circulation, and the oppositional social and institutional forces they encountered. By the end of this chapter, I aim to offer a more robust historical understanding of this tactical repertoire by assembling together four mêtis stories. Those I assemble here are meant to represent a range of composing practices and political purposes. The texts they build, while similar in approach, are distinct in form, ranging from to speeches to political video to hacktivist web pages. In other words, their composing styles, each unique and responsive to their situated lives, can be classified as different iterations of bricolage, as they craftily repurpose, reuse, and reimagine residual debris already in circulation toward new ends. Moreover, each represents diverse political issues—from abolitionist rhetorics, to LGBTQ representations, to women’s rights, to antiwar interventions. In effect, each is responding to dominant ideologies from his or her cultural situation, reimagining and reinvigorating the material scraps of dominant culture in ways that are certainly a little more than cunning. To follow these rhetors, to trace their stories, also demonstrates how all confronted challenges— legal, social, cultural—in deploying their rhetorical tactics. As such, in addition to exploring how each used tactical means to enter into political arenas (better exposing the bricoleur arsenal, so to speak), this chapter also details the institutional, social, and cultural pushback Douglass, Hoch, the Yes Men, and Kreisinger faced.

45 This chapter unfolds in three parts. The first part attends to articulating my historiographical approach, which can be understood as performative mêtis storytelling. By mirroring how historians have explored mêtis in Ancient Greece, I argue that a series of micro- stories is appropriate for setting an adaptable “theater of operations” for tactical rhetorics (de Certeau, 1984). This method of writing history, I contend, is harmonious with mêtis itself— adaptable, shifting, always on the move. The first part of this chapter also explores the disciplinarily makings of historiography within the extant literature on writing rhetorical histories. Specifically, it explores how historians have used various re-use metaphors (i.e., pastiche, collage, remix, and assemblage) as a way to write/make history. In exploring and drawing on this work, I will articulate my own approach for performing mêtis storytelling. From here, the second section of this chapter begins to tell the stories of the four rhetors mentioned above. In assembling their stories, I draw on published scholarship, interviews, autobiographies, films, and my close- of their surviving texts. While I first hold back in linking these rhetors together in a clear way (though I hope readers will begin to make connections on their own), I will frames in the third part of the chapter to investigate what the greater assemblage of stories provides for a theory of tactical rhetorics. In particular, I focus on four points of convergence, including how each story (1) emboldens a tactical composing repertoire; (2) contributes to outlining cunning circulatory interventions; (3) adds to broader understandings of circulation; and (4) underscores the institutional, social, and cultural pushback rhetors using tactical interventions often encounter. In all, this chapter sets up historical precedence for understanding the political value and the institutional roadblocks experienced by those who employ a tactical sensibility when it comes to intervening in public circulation.

Mêtis Stories: Assembling a “Theater of Actions” It is common for those writing about the rhetorical concept mêtis to share stories to give life to its wonderful complexity: a ship captain navigating the changing tides and winds of the sea, a fishy fight between an elusive eel and a polymorphous octopus, a doctor using a cutting instrument at the right moment, a fox playing dead in times of conflict, or a sophist engaging in dissoi logoi to win the case for the day. Stories are the favored vehicle of mêtis for a reason: “its field of application is the world of movement, of multiplicity and of ambiguity” (Detienne & Vernant, 1991, p. 20). The stories of mêtis, in other words, attempt to grasp at its wide-ranging field of movement. Put otherwise, mêtis stories are multiple scenes that patch together to form something, a common thread, that can’t easily be categorized; rather, mêtis stories are best experienced as a series of accounts, unfolding in fragments that when pushed together meld into a kind of coherent meshwork of practices, contexts, and practitioners. It is Michel de Certeau (1984) who linked the method of storytelling to mêtis in a clear way, writing, “storytelling narrativity is also something like mêtis” (p. 80). De Certeau particularly marveled at the storytelling ability of Marcel Detienne, who, along with Jean-Pierre Vernant, wrote the foundational work on the concept, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. In describing Detienne’s approach to writing history, de Certeau notes that Detienne has “deliberately chosen to tell stories” (p. 80). The stories Detienne recounts, de Certeau added, are not interpreted blow-by-blow—that is, Detienne doesn’t stand back from his stories and reveal some kind of Truth or interpretation as they unfold. Rather, for Detienne, stories “form a network of operations whose formal rules and clever ‘coups’ are outlined by an enormous cast of characters” (de Certeau, p. 80). As anyone who has read Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society can attest, Detienne and Vernant do, in fact, credit a wide cast to the makings of

46 mêtis in Ancient Greece: gods and goddesses, mammals and sea creatures, everyday artisans and medical practitioners, and basket weavers and metallurgists. Simply put, mêtis appears in multiple scenes, is applied by multiple figures, and is set into action for many reasons. Mêtis, in short, is a rhetoric of change; it is applied in moments of change and it changes in new moments. As such, by the end of Detienne and Vernant’s book, we don’t have any clear-cut, stable definition of mêtis; it’s always on the move, shifting in new situations. Yet we do approach, through Detienne and Vernant’s deft storytelling, a massively populated and astoundingly active account of mêtis. We get a strong sense of what mêtis means, how it operates in the shifting world of Ancient Greece, and, crucially, what it might mean in new situations. In this way, Detienne and Vernant’s historiography is performative: that is, their writing and method for arranging their data matches the object under study. In other words, since mêtis is itself a polymorphous concept, it follows that the method to bring it to life should likewise seek polymorphism. Anthropologist Helga Wild (2012) put it this way: Detienne and Vernant, in narrating the use of mêtis in Greek ancient times, revert to a language use that is itself tactical and full of ruses: there is no definition or description, no straightforward course of an argument. Instead they approach obliquely, retell what others told on the subject and through rhetorical means – elisions, inversions, puns, word plays – invite the reader to enter into the narration, but they themselves cannot be tied down. In doing so, they performatively weave a complex history of mêtis, exploring sites, people, animals, things, practices, and activities that activate its complex web of meanings. I take Detienne and Vernant’s performative mode of storytelling to be similar to what de Certeau called creating a theater of operations. For de Certeau, a story, firstly, must designate a “field of operations” (p. 78)—that is, it must set a foundation for operations to occur. As de Certeau wrote, this founding aspect of a story “opens a legitimate theater for practical actions” (p. 125, his emphasis). To be sure, de Certeau’s theater is not totalizing or all-encompassing; rather, it is a set of actions that populate the theater with a range of people, places, and things, potentially giving rise to number of micro-stories or reconfigurations within the theater (p. 125). Certainly, as mentioned, Detienne and Vernant have done well to describe a robust field of operations for mêtis—so much so that we can imagine what mêtis might look like in new situations, how it might be applied with new actors, how it might be adopted for new technological advances, and so on. As a method of writing history, a storytelling approach—the resolution to tell a number of stories to outline a (coherent) theater for (new) actions—is useful for historiographies committed to attending to rhetorical problems of the present. In other words, by setting a foundation of a comprehensive field of actions, the writing of many stories proffers a powerful adaptive quality. To borrow an example from Detienne and Vernant, while I might invoke some of their micro-stories in a particular way (paying attention, for example, to stories related to timely intervention), others can put Detienne and Vernant’s stories to work in a number of other ways (paying attention, as Lydia McDermott [2015] has, to stories regarding maternal metaphors). And indeed, since Detienne and Vernant’s study, scholars in rhetorical studies have plucked the stories of mêtis for various reasons, retelling mêtis to align it with a number of projects. Jay Dolmage, perhaps the most wily contemporary mêtis storyteller, has persuasively turned to the stories of Hephaestus to attach mêtis to disability rhetorics; Janet Atwill (1998) has retold mêtis stories to embolden an understanding of rhetoric as techne; Debra Hawhee (2005)

47 has engaged in mêtis storytelling to tie the moving body to rhetoric’s history in Ancient Greece; and, as mentioned in Chapter 1, Powell (1999) has invoked mêtis to forward an Indigenous mixed-blood rhetoric. However, few have offered new stories to bring mêtis into the 21st Century.14 For most invoking the concept, mêtis stories are retold for current issues (Dolmage’s use of mêtis, for example, is very much tied to current needs). To this end, some have adopted principles of mêtis for postmodern/posthuman rhetorics—Michelle Ballif’s (2001) work, for example, pulled mêtis into Donna Haraway’s figure of the Cyborg, denouncing philosophy’s obsession with truth in favor of shifting and seductive sophistry as a way to navigate ethical differences. I call for more stories—and begin to tell a few of my own here. True to mêtis, I assemble an array of stories to pull together select fragments out of a much larger “theater of operations”—in an effort to give more life to the theory of tactical rhetorics I introduced in Chapters 1 and 2. What I seek to do is provide an adaptable foundation for tactical rhetorics, but not a grand narrative that forecloses other possibilities. How I arrange these stories—and find evidence to make them—is also in a performative mode. The figure of the digital bricoleur, the tactical rhetor who applies mêtis, was introduced in Chapter 1 as a kind of do-it-yourself handyperson of the digital realm. Borrowing from Frank Farmer’s (2013) conception of the citizen bricoleur, I asserted that digital bricoleurs cobble together new compositions from the scraps of circulating materials in online spaces. The same could be said of the historian. Despite not employing the term bricoleur, many rhetoric historians assert the value of bricolage as a methodological concept for doing historical work. Victor Vitanza (1994), for example, described his approach to doing history, among other things, as a kind of postmodern pastiche. Vitanza’s Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (1997) reads like a collection of stitched together fragments, juxtaposing diverse quotes/genres to perform a kind of sophistic-postmodern history. Jane Sutton (1994), another scholar reinventing the sophists, used the aesthetics of collage to render rhetorical history that redefines—and represents—the “Tradition” as we typically inherit it by juxtaposing pieces of Greco-Roman rhetoric with postmodern theorists. Dolmage (2014), in his work retelling stories of disability across rhetorical histories, similarly called for rhetoricians to rebuild history as a “tenuous and temporary collage,” one that forgoes “the forward march of history and its heroes” (p. 68). In re- seeing the annals of composition scholarship, Jason Palmeri (2012) presented history the way a remix artist would, finding unexpected pleasures in the otherwise dusty shelves of composition archives. Finally, Byron Hawk (2013) made the case for seeing history as an “assemblage of events,” one that threads fragments from the past to reconcile current rhetorical situations. Taken together, these historians not only make powerful calls to reuse objects from history but also to perform histories in such a way that is cognizant with a reuse aesthetic. My approach, building from the storytelling method articulated above, also utilizes the composing sensibility of bricolage—not only in how it makes stories (“making do” with the material traces of these rhetors’ tactics), but also in how it ultimately constructs an entangled story by jumping from scenario to scenario the way a mashup might. While I hold off on linking the series of stories that follow, I don’t wish to forget my audience or purpose here. As (1966)

14 To be sure, a couple of key exceptions have told new mêtis stories. Karen Kopelson (2003) explores mêtis in the identity and rhetorical actions of writing teachers, suggesting teachers should make do with resistant moments to difference for pedagogical purposes. Her cunning pedagogy inserts mêtis into the realm of teaching students in the U.S. university. In addition to Kopelson’s work, Robert Johnson (1998) recites a wonderfully mundane story of a mechanic applying mêtis to cunningly troubleshoot with a car owner.

48 reminded, any terministic screen filters out, but it also sharpens and focuses. It gives a scene full color and life. Therefore, after presenting these micro-stories, I switch the filter—moving from diffraction to reflection15—ending with a reflective meditation on what this entangled story provides for rhetorical theory and practice. But before we embark, let me say a few more words on our itinerary. De Certeau remarked that the people of modern-day Athens move from point A to point B on vehicles called metaphorai. “To go to work or come home,” de Certeau wrote, “one takes a ‘metaphor’—a bus or train” (p. 115). The word metaphorai, as George Kennedy (2007) explained in his of Aristotle’s The Rhetoric, is “itself a metaphor and literally means ‘carrying something from one place to another, transference’” (p. 199). This connection is not lost on de Certeau. The moving rides of Athens’ transportation system are his metaphor to describe the movement of a story. Stories, like the train moving from one point to the next, invite the reader or listener to be carried from place to place, from context to context. In what follows, I invite readers to “ride the metaphor”—to be carried from place to place, from story to story. And by the chapter’s end, I hope to outline a number of characters and operations relevant for the makings of a tactical rhetorics history.

Frederick Douglass and The Calculated Arts of Eloquence In July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass spoke in Rochester, New York on request of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. The crowd was mainly comprised of white bodies, listening to the words of a former slave, a black man invited to speak on the occasion of Independence Day in the of America. The irony was palpable, and was certainly not lost in Douglass’ remarks. On this day, the fifth of July, Douglass seized a moment to confront the contradictions inherent in America’s celebration of freedom. In his speech, Douglass frequently drew attention to the fact that such celebration is not his own. His pronoun choice makes this clear: Your fathers, your celebration, your freedom, and your destiny, effectively emphasizing that his audience’s cause for celebration is not shared by all. Though biting in critique, Douglass was careful to not ostracize his audience. He built ground with them first, citing from the Declaration of Independence, regarding it for its tenets of freedom, peace, and honor. And then Douglass paid tribute to his hearers’ “fathers,” nodding at their accomplishments with gratitude, awe, and humility. He remarked, “the signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too—great enough to give frame to a great age [...] They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory” (p. 192). Here, as Patricia Bizzell (1997) has remarked, Douglass attempted to “build rhetorical bridges” with those gathered around him in Upstate New York (p. 47)—a cultural meeting point at which black and white people can unite. Yet, this rhetorical bridge—the ability to recite a trove of cultural knowledge valued by his audience—is not mere assimilation. After sampling themes of the Declaration and honoring the writers thereof, he flipped the scrip and offers condemning remarks about the disparity between him and his audience. He stated, “This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice,

15 Karen Barad (2007) differentiates these methodological metaphors as such: “whereas the metaphor of reflection reflects the themes of mirroring and sameness, diffraction is marked by patterns of difference” (p. 71). Although Barad makes the argument that diffraction is the superior methodological choice, I take it that there are many benefits to reflection as well.

49 I must mourn” (p. 194). Later, his message grew sharper still, driving deeper divides between him and the crowd gathered in Rochester:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. (p. 196)

Douglass used these words to underscore the contradiction of the notion of independence in the United States of America circa 1852. As he mentioned early in his speech, “[your fathers pronounced] the measures of government unjust, unstable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers” (p. 190). Douglass not only knew the documents, cultural mores, and tenets of government that are built into America’s history but he also made out of them new uses, turning well-circulated commonplaces into rhetorical weapons to counter the prevailing ideologies of the dominant class. Pulling from a common cultural storehouse the themes, people, and texts that would be expected for any Independence Day speech, Douglass, teetering between cultural observer and staunch critic, made of his material a different purpose—and in adapting and redirecting Fourth of July materials, Douglass revealed that he cannot celebrate freedom despite such ideals circulating among his white audience. That Douglass amassed great oratory success in his lifetime has been well rehearsed in rhetorical studies.16 His autobiographies, journalistic pieces, speeches, and fiction have been the subject of much scholarship. His oratory has been characterized by Jacqueline Bacon (1998) as both “adaptory” and “advisory”—that is, it is common in his speeches for Douglass to first build common ground with his hearers by referencing culturally revered texts and values, while, at the same time, interweaving a message that challenges the dominant culture. His fiction work, The Heroic Slave, performs a similar critical move. Keith Miller and Kevin Quashie (1998), for example, argue that Douglass constructed an effective rhetorical system of what they call “interargumentation.” To explain this system, drawing upon Kenneth Burke’s “perspective by incongruity,” Miller and Quashie maintain Douglass succeeded in his rhetoric because of two key moves. First, he set up binary oppositions to “demonstrate that whites’ most cherished values demanded the repeal of slavery” (p. 201). Second, he challenged racist stereotypes by mixing up the racial roles of the binary—for example, in his speeches (such as The Fourth of July), Douglass often evoked the Declaration of Independence, stating that he valued its principles but that the principles were not being upheld.

16 His inclusion in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg’s (2001) second edition of The Rhetorical Tradition notwithstanding, several other rhetoric historians have entered Douglass into rhetorical histories for a number of purposes. Major themes include his use of irony (Terrill, 2003), his setting of a precedent for African American rhetors to follow (Miller & Quashie, 1998), and, what I am especially interested in, his imitative and appropriative rhetorical prowess (Bacon, 1998; Bizzell, 1997; Dorsey, 1996; Miller & Quashie, 1998).

50 Douglass, born into a political and social system that denied him respect and human dignity, had to make do with the tools and resources available to him to gain access to speak and write. While this claim can be substantiated through a close reading of the speech discussed above, it is perhaps most vividly demonstrated in a published letter to his former slave owner Thomas Auld. Toward the end of his letter, Douglass spoke directly to Auld, writing, “I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery—as a means of concentrating public attention on the system, and deepening their horror of trafficking in the souls and bodies of men” (n.p.). Douglass’ declaration to “make use” of Auld “as a weapon” shows how Douglass often leveraged the available means to bring about greater social change. Indeed, this making use out of practice—the ability to work within, yet against, dominant culture by repurposing texts, values, and, as his letter indicates, larger systems of oppression—became a signature rhetorical move for the 19th Century abolitionist leader. Douglass, assumed to be born in 1818, held many identities throughout his lifetime. Born a slave in Maryland, Douglass went on to become an abolitionist, public orator, newspaper publisher, and politician. His life history has been chronicled in his three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, and the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. In these three accounts, Douglass wrote about his childhood, offering details about how he acquired literacy and the effects thereof. In his Narrative, Douglass stated he succeeded to read and write by seeking literacy instruction whenever and from whomever he could. He recalled being instructed by his former slave-owner and, when his lessons from her abruptly ceased, he continued his literacy instruction from white boys he met in his neighborhood. Douglass escaped slavery in 1838, and went on to become one of the most powerful abolitionist voices of the 19th Century. His road to becoming this voice involved, among many other things, much informal rhetorical training. Douglass remarked in his Narrative that as a young boy he read, time and again, Caleb Bingham’s (1797) rhetoric textbook, The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces; Together with Rules; Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence. As the lengthy subtitle suggests, The Columbian Orator forfeited classical Greek rhetorical treatises in favor of examples of exemplary speeches and prose from British, American, and Roman orators. Indeed, Bingham’s introduction notes that the variety of selected materials should “inspire the pupil with the ardour of eloquence, and the love of virtue” (p. 1). Its intent, according to William Cook and James Tatum (2010), was for “the young American student to study, memorize, and imitate” (p. 51). Essentially, the text was equivalent to the Greek progymnasmata, a set of rhetorical exercises that were “essential grounding for anyone who wanted to learn how to be an orator” (Cook & Tatum, p. 51). Although it’s important to note that Douglass borrowed and repurposed his hearers’ cherished texts and beliefs, his imitation goes much deeper than that. As Cook and Tatum argue, Douglass’ oratory grew more sophisticated as he aged, and his Meaning of July Fourth speech represented his magnum opus. What’s important to note here in terms of his imitative oratory is not only his citation of valued texts but also his speech patterns and delivery. Cook and Tatum put it this way:

By studying the examples of classical oratory which constitute the bulk of the Columbian Orator Douglass learned from his imitation of those models not only how to reason and to argue but also how to structure his ideas and his argument according to clear patterns

51 widely used in American public discourse in the decades leading up to the Civil War. (p. 55)

In other words, in order appeal to his audience, Douglass made use of the discourse, speech patterns, and oratorical flair commonly practiced in the dominant public sphere in which he spoke. Or, as Peter Dorsey (1996) put it, “Douglass emphasizes that resistance to oppression requires a degree of imitation: to change their position, the oppressed must at some level copy the metaphors, the behaviors, and even the thought processes of the oppressor” (p. 436). While Douglass’ rhetorical prowess granted him access to the podium, he would later experience denouncements by white elites. Kirt Wilson’s (2003) study, for example, explains that many white intellectuals of the 19th Century deemed Douglass’ rhetoric as inferior to the white mind. This was not only an attack on abolitionist leaders but also on imitation as a whole.17 Although imitation once held a rather venerable position in Western education and practice, Wilson outlines that the 19th Century saw a downturn in the public and intellectual reception to imitation. It is during this time period, Wilson argues, that imitation in U.S. public spheres begins to be coded as servile, ape-like, and non-inventive.18 In other words, imitation began to be “redefined for political purposes,” losing steam in rhetorical theory yet gaining influence in other disciplines (notably, anthropology and sociology), only to be “reformulated…to label people of color as ‘others’ regardless of their legal status” (Wilson, p. 104). In 2010, Adam Banks wrote about the figure of the DJ as a griot storyteller—one whose rhetorical agility imbues their work as they build cultures through sampling, remixing, and repurposing. As Banks argued, “DJs are not mere ventriloquists, playing or retelling other people’s stories for us, rather, their arranging, layering, sampling, and remixing are inventions too, keeping the culture, telling their stories and ours, binding time as they move the crowd and create and maintain community” (p. 24). Like Banks’ figure of the DJ, Douglass’ critical imitation tactics were much more than assimilation. He repurposed what was circulating in his cultural context—repeating with a difference and for a difference. A leader of the abolitionist movement, Douglass made do with circulating tropes and texts, but he adapted his message to condemn the violence of slavery. Douglass, practicing rhetoric in his distinct cultural moment, can be positioned as a prime example of a tactical rhetor in public arenas where print and oratory held sway.

Hannah Höch Cuts into The Political (with a Kitchen Knife) In 1920, Hannah Höch worked part-time for Ullstein Verlag, a Berlin publishing house known for its illustrated newspaper BIZ, what would later be called a precursor to the American Life Magazine.19 It was known for its photo essays, a relatively new form of

17 Certainly, other reasons exist for imitation’s decline. Scholars also point to , scientism, changes in technology, and, more recently, expressivist and cognitivist composition as factors leading to the fallout of imitative pedagogy and practice (Farmer & Arrignton, 1993; Howard, 1999; Sullivan, 1989). The romantic formulation of “author as genius” is perhaps the most pervasive account for imitation’s decline (Howard, 1999; Randall, 2001; Sullivan, 1989). 18 To substantiate his claims, Wilson quoted and surveyed public documents from education leaders and other professionals of the time. For example, Wilson turned to Harvard professor Louis Agassiz who wrote that the blacks were “submissive, obsequious, imitative,” noting, “the negro exhibits by nature a pliability, a readiness to accommodate himself to circumstances, a proneness to imitate those among whom he lives” (p. 95). 19 See Audrey Sands (2014). http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/publications/786.html

52 circulating, in part, due to advances in photography and printing technology.20 Apart from her day-job, something else occupied Höch’s world: the First International Dada Fair, an exhibition that showcased her massive photomontage with an equally massive title: Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany. Her day-job had cut through her art—she made of her canvas the spectacular already circulating BIZ photos, only in her art they are clipped, cropped, pasted, and rearranged in such a way that, as her title makes clear, critiqued the status quo of post-World War I Germany. She made of her day job a new purpose; the commercialism of the images are wrung out, twisted and reconfigured to present a political statement operating on many levels. Crafting compositions made entirely from the leftovers of already produced—often mass- produced—materials circulating in the popular press (magazine pages, product catalogues, newspaper clippings, and journal articles), Höch faintly made a name for herself in the German Dada movement21 of the 1920s by wielding a pair of scissors, adhesive, and a wily design aesthetic. Höch (1889-1979), a German , activist, feminist, and artist,22 amassed a long career with a collection of work that can be characterized as sharp, biting, political, and evolving. Her early work, depicted along the same dimensions as other Dadaists23 (e.g., Tristan Tzara, Raoul Hausmann, and George Groz), used elements of photomontage and collage to slice into political scenes of wartime Germany—literally cutting up images and texts circulating in the popular press and pasting them together to create a new scene, one stitched together in such a way as to critique well-established narratives about women, gender, race, class, art, and war. According to art historian Maud Lavin (1993), Cut With the Kitchen Knife, perhaps Höch’s most famous work, represents a “Dadaist manifesto on the politics of Weimar society” (p. 19). A sizable photomontage, with a length at just above three and a half feet and a width of nearly three feet, Cut With the Kitchen Knife is a vast composition that represented Höch’s view of post-World War I Germany (Lavin). On the one hand, the photomontage appears chaotic:

20 Julie Nero’s (2013) doctoral dissertation worked with much of the published German scholarship on Höch’s life and work. Nero explains that the Weimar Republic was over-saturated with images circulating in popular press, noting that “over 2,000 magazine titles circulated in Berlin alone during the 1920s” (p. 3). Certainly, Höch made of this mass circulation, only reinventing the uses of images for more critical purposes. 21 In her brief autobiography, Höch describes Dada as erupting toward the end of World War I, a time at which Berlin’s young people, in Höch’s words, “had become politically rebellious and were searching for new intellectual orientations” (p. 212). As Höch further describes, the Dada movement encompassed lectures, performances, and exhibitions. 22 Certainly, as a rhetoric and writing scholar, I don’t claim to be an artist or art historian (especially in the more common understanding of “art”). Nor do I claim to have a particularly strong handle on the historical context from which Höch artistically and politically responded. Rather, my interest in reading Höch as a rhetorician stems from her method of entering social and political scenes: photomontage and collage. As recent work in composition scholarship that has made strong cases about expanding our understandings of what constitutes writing (e.g., Palmeri, 2012; Shipka, 2011; Yancey, 2004), I take it that multimodal practitioners like Höch deserve more attention by rhetoric and writing scholars, especially because the material practice of collage is often positioned as a precursor to some of today’s multimodal composing practices (e.g., remix and assemblage). 23 Many writers link new media activist practices to Dada tactics. Leah Lievrouw (2011), for example, noted Dada forms the historical base of what she calls alternative new media activism, which she defined as “new media [that] employ or modify the communication artifacts, practices, and social arrangements of new information and communication technologies to challenge or alter dominant, expected, or accepted ways of doing society, culture, and politics” (p. 19). Lievrouw described the Dada movement as one that used the “gratuitous gesture”—a repurposing tactic that used found objects and materials “to disrupt the commonplace and compel new ways of seeing reality” (p. 32). For Lievrouw, these practices are similar to ones used in new media domains, including hacktivism, political remix, culture jamming, etc.

53 figures here and there, words spliced upon the page, clumps of grey and black that are pasted one on top of the other. On the other hand, a careful look, such as the one Lavin’s trained eye might see, Cut With the Kitchen Knife is “remarkably elegant” in its composition, forming unique quadrants whose cut up pieces form composites representative of key themes: Dada artists are pasted together with revolutionary figures like Karl Marx, while “anti-Dadaists,” such Weimar Republic President Friedrich Ebert, are positioned together with repressive imagery and words. But the most central theme of Cut With A Kitchen Knife involves the role of women. In her collage, women take center stage at a time when they were often relegated to the sidelines. Her title comments on gender tensions that would later come to characterize her work: Höch uses a kitchen knife (a cutting instrument stereotypically used by women) to cut into the beer-bellied (male-dominated) society. A quick detour into Höch’s own life and journey to showing Cut With a Kitchen Knife at the Dada Fair reveals that her embodied experience of being a woman Dada artist was not without a few roadblocks due to gender disparity. While an article in the art section of The Guardian has recently called Höch “art’s original punk” for her ability to comment on gender issues, many art historians have noted that Höch was often overlooked in a scene dominated by men.24 Indeed, Julie Nero (2013) notes that Höch was depicted as “a ‘good girl’ who served sandwiches and coffee during Dada-meetings,” and explains that the tendency for men to characterize her as such was “symptomatic of the misogynism of the early twentieth- century avant-garde” (p. 20). It is documented that Höch was originally denied a spot to show her work at the fair, and that her eventual entry was made possible, in part, by her romantic relationship with Raoul Hausmaann, another Dada artist who threatened to pull out of the exhibition if Höch’s work were denied entry.25 In her collage, however, Höch made new possibilities for women. The central figure of the piece is a picture of the German dancer and child celebrity Niddy Impekovern, twirling in movement—only her head is amputated, replaced by a picture of Kathe Kolkowitz, a political activist, artist, and the first female professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Germany. While some, such as Lavin, have understood this figure as a positive juxtaposition representing women’s liberation, Matthew Biro (2009) noted that others understand Höch as commenting on women’s lack of agency; it’s only through acts of recomposition where women can negate prescribed gender norms. For Biro, the debate over representation about this figure, what he called an early vision of the cyborg, is exactly what Höch was after in her early artistic practice—an ambiguous and elusive identity that holds multiple meanings depending on one’s standpoint. Whatever the case may be, Höch’s compositions are teeming with representations of gender and sexuality that have garnered much attention. Höch was an innovator of sorts, as she has been credited as one of the first artists to use the technique of photomontage. However, as with most “new” forms of composition, Höch knew that her form of resistant art was not her own to claim. She wrote, “Although photomontage is not as old [as photography], it is not, as is often thought, the product of the postwar era. The first instances of this form, i.e., the cutting rejoining of photos or parts of photos, may be found sometimes in the boxes of our grandmothers, in the fading, curious pictures representing this or that great uncle as a military uniform with a pasted-on head” (“First Photomontage,” p. 219).

24 See Brian Dillon’s (2014) article: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/09/hannah-hoch-art-punk- whitechapel 25 Julie Nero (2013) explores the blatant of this event. After eventually letting her back into the exhibition, the organizers poked fun at her work in the catalog that described the exhibition, even using cruel language that hinted at Höch’s abortions.

54 Here, Höch locates the history of what becomes her signature art practice in the mundane, realizing the legacy of subversive art is found in practices of the everyday. Because these traditions will come to exemplify her composing practices, it is no surprise that Höch especially calls out the work of women—of many grandmothers’ wily practices and crafty handiworks. Indeed, Höch had a fascination with what might traditionally be assigned as feminized practices. For example, she wrote a short essay on the arts of embroidery, calling attention to the ways in which the work of “sweet female hands” can serve to document the lives of women. At one point, Höch directly addresses the women of her time, writing, “you, craftswomen, modern women, who feel that the spirit is in your work, who are determined to lay claim to your rights (economic and moral), who believe your feet are firmly planted in reality, at least y-o-u should know that your embroidery work is a documentation of your own era!” (p. 72). Höch, herself an embroider by trade and hobby, stands as an early advocate of politicizing craft work,26 for, as Maureen Daly Goggin (2002) explained, needlework can represent both “an innocuous pastime and a powerful political weapon” (p. 312). Höch advocated for the latter. In fact, she mixed her handcraft work with her avant-garde art by making what she called “Dada Dolls.” By act of bricolage, that is, literally using the scraps of leftover materials, Höch forged dolls whose “costumes were partially made of cheap cardboard and mismatched buttons, and [whose] facial features are grossly simplified” (Nero, 2013, p. 27). Contrary to first impressions, these dolls were sharply political. As Nero explained, “their exaggerated breasts foreground Höch’s perennial interest in the cultural construction and fetishization of femininity” (p. 27). As these detours into other realms of her life make clear, Höch sees political force in work that might be cast aside as a “woman’s work.”27 It can be said that Höch embraced and made of feminized practices, turning the mundane into micro acts of resistance, effectively making do with the available means. In many ways, Höch could not be pinned down; as her life changed so too did her artistic aesthetic. Her autobiography tells a brief glimpse of her life—looking at her romantic relationships with Hausmann and the Dutch writer Til Brugman, a woman with whom she shared 10 years of her life, and, finally, her brief marriage with the much younger Kurt Matthies. She also spoke of the brutalities of war, describing that the pressure from the Nazis, combined with a hyperactive thyroid, made her feel like “a creature struggling for life” (p. 214). Of war, she would have much to say—in dairy entries and in interviews. But it was her artistic practice that was perhaps the most dangerous. Indeed, the rebellious art of Dada, of her political photomontages, were not looked upon favorably by the Nazi regime. In an interview, she would later comment that the practices of Dada were “evidence enough, in the Nazi era, to have [Dadaists] tried and condemned as communists” (p. 186). In their Techne: Queer Mediations of the Self, Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander (2015) briefly mentioned Höch’s aesthetic and embodied practice as a kind of productive play. Rhodes and Alexander argued that Höch queered normalized modes of production, pushing toward new ways of being, knowing, and doing. Though Höch faced social

26 Handcraft work is experiencing something of a revival in rhetoric and composition. For example, the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication featured a workshop called “Handcrafted Rhetorics: DIY and the Public Power of Making Things.” Moreover, a special issue of Harlot of the Arts, titled “Craft Rhetorics,” is forthcoming (, Condis, Prins, Brooks-Gilles, & Webber, 2015) 27 Quoting from historian Merry Wiesner, Maureen Daly Goggin (2002) describes “women’s work” as an ideological construct that signals “the boring, mundane, domestic tasks beneath the dignity of a man,” which, Goggin argued, explains “why needlework has not attracted much attention from rhetoric scholars” (p. 312).

55 and cultural obstacles, her life’s practice of what Rhodes and Alexander called productive play worked to cunningly challenge the status quo by making anew out of the mundane. A prelude to contemporary cut up and assemblage techniques, Höch recognized the radical potential of remaking new possibilities by making use of discarded pieces of circulating materials.

The Prankster Antics of the Yes Men In May 1999, Texas Governor George W. Bush was running for president of the United States. Upon launch of his candidacy, his campaign registered a domain for a website (georgewbush.com) that provided information about his qualifications for the office of president. But shortly after georgewbush.com began to circulate, another website surfaced with a similar domain name. The website, GWBush.com, used similar images, had a similar design aesthetic, and proclaims to be Bush’s campaign website. Only this website sought to explain “in more honest terms the real reason Bush want[ed] to be president.”28 This website—GWBush.com—is the work of the Yes Men. To construct the website, the Yes Men paired with the activist-artist collective ®TMark (pronounced “art-mark”), which went on to release two versions of GWBush.com.29 The iterations of the website playfully performed a presidential-hopeful satire, detailing “Bush’s” platform, his background, and his general message. While at first glance GWBush.com appeared like the official website of the presidential candidate, it quickly became apparent that the website repurposed the design layout of Bush’s official website to offer a critique of Bush’s politics (see Figure 3.1). The website featured content that is unflattering to Bush, and made new uses out of details about Bush’s past, including his drug use as a youth and his staunch support of limited government in the regulation of corporations.30 While GWBush.com purported to be Bush, at times, the website broke with the Bush persona to present a renewed vision of U.S. politics, and called on readers to participate in the mission of GWBush.com:

GWBUSH.COM [...] asks you to become involved in the issues, asks you to help out with the strategies [...] to participate in this great experiment of ours called Democracy. It is an active website, meant to be used by human people. But wait—why do we speak of "human people"? Isn’t that redundant? Well, it should be... but corporations are people too! It is a little known fact (among human people) that corporations enjoy all the rights that human people, like you, have come to expect: freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, etc. Today, non-human people have much more of a say in politics than do human people, and that say has been getting steadily louder over the years. We at

28 This quote is from the Yes Men’s website, which describes their take on GWBush.com. See http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/gwbush. 29 Although the web domain is now defunct, ®TMark has archived the website. However, since there have been multiple iterations of the website, it’s difficult to tell what the live version might have looked like circa May 1998. The story I present here seeks to describe the website based on testimony from the Yes Men, ®TMark, and various news stories published about the website, See http://rtmark.com/gwbush/. 30 GWBush.com content not only criticizes Bush but also takes jabs at American politics in general. For example, one section of the website includes a “research initiatives” page in which the Yes Men playfully approach the subject of public opinion polling, stating, “As you know, an essential part of any Presidential election campaign—or of any campaign whatsoever, whether it be for a new soda-pop brand, an electric stove safety appliance, a cigarette that (supposedly) enhances ‘appeal,’ or what have you—is the Public ” (n.p.). Bush, or rather the Yes Men’s adaption of Bush, goes on to propose a “grassroots” form of public opinion polling, calling on readers of the website to “circulate” questions that cunningly critique Bush’s public stances.

56 GWBUSH.COM hope to reverse this trend, and give elections back to the human people democracy was designed for. How can we do this? Only you can say... (n.p.)

Here, the Yes Men clearly presented GWBush.com as a separate entity from the official Bush campaign, temporarily breaking the veil of the Bush facade to invite others to participate in their grass-roots operation. Similar to the goals espoused by tactical media practitioners, the Yes Men forgo an easy-to-understand identity, and instead constantly shift to “engage with the changing, normalizing forces they oppose and to drop tactics that have lost their effect” (Renzi, 2008, p. 72). One of the Yes Men’s main objectives was to get mainstream media attention to further propel their cause.31 And they indeed received media attention for GWBush.com—so much so that Bush himself was questioned about the satirical website during a televised news conference prior to his election in May 1999. When pressed about the Yes Men’s tactics, Bush gaffed, “There ought to be limits to freedom.” In a report from The Washington Post, Terry Neal (1999) wrote that “Bush's reaction produced the exact opposite of what he intended,” pushing the view count of GWBush.com to more than 1 million by May 1999.

Figure 3.1 Screenshots of George W. Bush’s official campaign website in 1999, featured above, and the Yes Men’s adaptive web prank version, featured below.

While web traffic saw an increase after Bush’s comments, the blowback from the Bush campaign did not stop there. The Yes Men received a cease and desist letter from a representative of Bush’s Exploratory Committee, declaring that the website violated intellectual property laws. They demanded the website be removed, writing, “In your wholesale

31 This is an objective of many tactical media practitioners. In their “The ABCs of Tactical Media,” David Garcia and Geert Lovink (1997) assert that tactical media operations occur when popular channels of circulation are “exploited” by those who “feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture” (n.p.). They continue, “Tactical Media are never perfect, always in becoming, performative and pragmatic, involved in a continual process of questioning the premises of the channels they work with” (n.p.). Certainly, the Yes Men’s oeuvre can be characterized within this same tradition of tactical media.

57 misappropriation and imitation of the georgewbush.com web site, you violate a host of copyright and trademark laws […] we must demand that you immediately cease and desist your misappropriation of the materials on the Exploratory Committee’s copyright and trademark- protected web site.”32 Although the letter went on to mention the Fair Use Doctrine, it argued that the Yes Men’s repurposing of Bush’s web materials would not hold up as Fair Use. In fact, the letter argued that the Yes Men’s “use of the Exploratory Committee’s web site material is so substantial that there is a real likelihood that a person ‘surfing’ the web could be confused into believing, somehow, that [GWBush.com] represents or is authorized by the Exploratory Committee” (n.p.). Following the cease and desist letter, the Yes Men make changes to the website. But instead of taking down the website altogether, they reinvent their tactics by changing the design layout and mockingly calling attention to Bush’s official website. A prominently placed banner warns, “FYI: Recently, a rogue website ensnared many visitors into thinking it was the official GWBUSH.COM site. After a stern warning from GWBUSH.COM lawyers, that site has removed lookalike content, and has now turned itself into an ad for ” (n.p). Although GWBush.com was the Yes Men’s first political prank, they have gone on to produce a number of activist interventions, challenging several major global corporations and organizations, including McDonald’s, The New York Times, the World Trade Organization, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While their targets change, the use of satire via website hoaxes has remained the baseline of their tactics. “What we do,” the Yes Men declare in their 2009 documentary that describe their more recent tactics, “is pass ourselves off as representatives of big corporations we don’t like. We make fake websites, then wait for people to accidentally invite us to conferences” (n.p.). Once at these conferences, the Yes Men, masking their identities by playing outrageous versions of corporate caricatures, attempt to expose wrongdoings by major corporate entities. Through all of their performances, the Yes Men follow a pattern: mimic a target, grab attention, change tactics, move on to another target, repeat. The men behind the Yes Men, Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, also known as Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, respectively, among many other names,33 have been at this game for quite some time. And they’ve been called lots of other names along the way: political pranksters, tactical media practitioners, activists, culture jammers, lawbreakers, public nuisances, and garbage men,34 among others. They employ what Christine Harold (2004) has called prankster rhetoric. “The prankster,” Harold argued, “resists less through negating and opposing dominant rhetorics than by playfully and provocatively folding existing cultural forms in on themselves. The prankster performs an art of rhetorical jujitsu, in an effort to redirect the resources of commercial media toward new ends” (p. 191). Kembrew McLeod (2014) located the pranks of the Yes Men within a much longer tradition of fusing humor with politics. McLeod describes the prankster ethic along a pedagogical axis, writing, “although ‘good’ pranks sometimes do ridicule their targets, they serve a higher purpose by sowing skepticism and speaking truth to power (or at least cracking jokes that expose fissures in power’s facade)” (p. 3).

32 ®TMark has uploaded the letter to their website. The letter, addressed to Zack Exley (an ®TMark contributor), is signed by a lawyer representing the Governor George W. Bush for President Exploratory Committee. See the following link for the whole letter http://www.rtmark.com/bushcnd.html. 33 The Yes Men often use aliases as to not draw attention to themselves. With each new stunt often comes a new name. 34 This particular name comes from George W. Bush. When asked by reporters what he thought of the faux web site GWBush.com, he stated it was made by a “garbage man.”

58 In both Harold and McLeod’s work, the Yes Men serve as a prime exemplar of the figure of the prankster. Before becoming “the Yes Men” both Servin and Vamos had a penchant for prankster mischief in the name of political critique. For his part, Vamos led the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), an elaborate culture jamming stunt staged in 1993 that transplanted prerecorded audio boxes from Barbie Dolls to G. I. Joes and vice versa. After altering the voice boxes of the dolls, Vamos and his collaborators distributed them throughout department stores in two states. Writing for The New York Times, David Firestone (1993) reports the BLO “surgically altered 300 dolls” with an aim to “startle the public into thinking about the Stone Age world view that the dolls reflect.” Firestone continued, “the result is a mutant colony of Barbies-on- steroids who roar things like ‘Attack!’ ‘Vengeance is mine! and ‘Eat lead, Cobra!’ The emasculated G.I. Joe’s, meanwhile, twitter, ‘will we ever enough clothes?’ and ‘let’s plan our dream wedding!’” (n.p.). Firestone’s coverage, along with many other reports from mainstream news outlets, is important to note for this story, as Vamos asserted in the 2003 documentary The Yes Men that getting mainstream media attention was his main goal with the BLO prank. Toward this end, Vamos distributed phone numbers and mailing addresses of local news stations urging people who purchased the surgically enhanced dolls to contact the news media. Although the ephemeral tactics of the BLO have dissipated, its residual effects live on in blogs, websites, and books detailing the high-profile prank (for a scholarly take on the BLO, see especially Harold [2004]). The other half of the Yes Men, Servin, similarly participated in activist activities with a prankster flavor. Servin gained notoriety for his programming work for the computer game company Maxis, makers of the popular Sims franchise. The particular bit of programming that gained Servin attention has since been called the “SimCopter Scandal.” Working on the 1996 flight simulator computer game, SimCopter, Servin was charged with designing characters for the game. Unbeknownst to others at Maxis, however, Servin designed male characters on the game to appear shirtless and kiss each other during certain moments of the game. After SimCopter was released and players discovered the hack, Servin was fired from Maxis and subsequent releases of the game removed Servin’s design surprise.35 Interested in similar works of tactical media, Vamos and Servin joined forces, and in 1999, the Yes Men were born. While they have described that their end goal is to spark public debate through acquiring mainstream media attention about their outlandish pranks, not all have found their tricks amusing. In fact, they have received numerous cease and desist letters for mimicking trademarked and copyrighted materials on the web. Although the Yes Men claimed in 2009 that they had only been sued once by a corporation,36 recent run-ins with the law highlight, yet again, the legal risk of their tactical enterprise. Recently, for example, the Yes Men, using similar tactics to GWBush.com, produced a fake website that mimicked the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s trademarked material to draw attention to their refusal to admit . The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who provided legal counsel to the Yes Men in the suit,

35 Servin retells this story in the 2003 documentary The Yes Men. 36 This is according to the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum, aka Jacque Servin. See his 2012 chapter in the edited collection Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution.

59 report that the Chamber of Commerce pressed charges against the political pranksters on the grounds of trademark infringement.37 Though the Yes Men have routinely faced legal pressures, the Yes Men’s prankster tactics are designed to perform on-the-fly interventions in public life. In tandem with an elusive identity, the Yes Men satirically adapt circulating materials to garner attention, challenge prevailing ideologies, and temporarily upset power relations. Their tactics are always shifting, on the move, and kairotically attending to their next target. Exploiting multiple channels of circulation (from mainstream media to early Internet websites), the Yes Men practice a kind of do-it-yourself activism whose goal is to temporarily yoke critical thinking with everyday consumption practices.

Elisa Kreisinger Pirates Pop Culture In March 2012, on the crest of the release for Season 5 trailers of the hit AMC television series , pop culture hacker Elisa Kreisinger worked to complete a project that reimagined central characters of the series. The hit centers on the hyper-masculine , an advertising executive based in New York City whose tales of womanizing, debauchery, and alcoholism are played out for audiences in weekly installments. The show, often hailed as a triumph by critics, can be read as a commentary on male-dominated workplaces of the 1960s and 1970s, chronicling, the conditions under which women, people of color, and gay and lesbian individuals found themselves during those decades in urban workforces, even if such storylines serve a secondary purpose to the main story arc. Whatever the case may be, Kreisinger, also known as the Pop Culture Pirate, wanted to see new possibilities for characters on the show. Mad Men had been on a lengthy hiatus due to licensing fees, but it was gearing up for the release of its fifth season. As the already filmed four seasons continued to circulate, Kreisinger seized the time of Mad Men’s stalled release to work on two video remixes that incorporate found footage from the show. She titled her remixes “Queer Men: Don Loves Roger” and “Set Me Free.” Once they began to circulate on YouTube, Kreisinger’s remixes, before being flagged for copyright violations and eventually removed from YouTube, amassed a greater view count than the AMC-official trailers for the series.38 To make “Queer Men,” Kreisinger used existing footage from Mad Men to create a subversive narrative based on two central characters of the show. More than a retelling of a particular event, Kreisinger reappropriated clips from all four seasons to tell a cohesive 5-minute story about Don Draper’s love affair with . Don and Roger, who are both portrayed as misogynistic straight men in AMC’s original, are recasted as gay men having an interoffice love affair. In Kreisinger’s retelling, after Don and Roger are outed by their wives, they both face office harassment and eventually, depending on how it’s read, either lose or leave their jobs. As a reapproptiated text, Kreisinger’s “QueerMen: Don Loves Roger” relies on the original texts only insofar as they provide source material to pull from. Her newly articulated vision of Mad Men, pieced together using video , has made of AMC’s vast archive of footage a new purpose, rendering queer representation into a storyline that commonly pushed LGBT characters out of the show.

37 The lawsuit, according to the EFF, lasted four years—and only recently was dropped. See Corynne McSherry’s (2013) report on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/chamber- commerce-abandon-spurious-trademark-lawsuit-against-yes-men 38 Kreisinger reported this in her 2015 chapter in The Rutledge Companion to Remix Studies.

60 Figure 3.2 Screenshot of Elisa Kreisigner’s “Set Me Free,” a political video remix that reuses footage from Mad Men to critique gender norms.

To compose “Set Me Free,” Kreisinger, teaming up with Marc Faletti, similarly used archived video footage from existing seasons of Mad Men—only this time, she focused her gaze on women and the stifling gender roles under which they find themselves on the show. Using the background music and the tune of the 1966 Supremes’ song “Keep Me Hangin’ On,” Kreisinger remixed soundbites from the series to match the lyrics of the song. The result is , Betty Draper, Joan Holloway, and others characters crooning, among other things, the words “set me free,” “you don’t really need me,” and “you just keep me holding on,” signaling that women deserve to be released from normative representational confines. To further simulate rigid gender constrains, Kreisinger used thick borders to frame the characters of the show into small boxes (see figure 3.2). This illustrates, as Kreisinger (2012) put it, “how the show, and by extension, society, isolates and marginalizes women’s voices within pop culture narratives” (n.p).39 Kreisinger (1986-), a self-described appropriation artist, feminist, writer, and fair use advocate, lives in Brooklyn, New York, and has participated in many ventures to get her work and the work of other remix artists into mainstream viewership. Previously, she helped run the popular video remix website, RebelliousPixels.com, and has been invited to speak about the power of video remix all over the world. Kreisinger’s arrival on the scene of video remix has helped to define how feminist praxis informs the compositional form of remixing. Specifically, calling herself the Pop Culture Pirate, Kreisinger invokes Mary Daly’s notion of pirating patriarchy. This mantra, which was featured on an earlier edition of her website, can be found in Daly’s words: “it is necessary to Plunder—that is, righteously rip off—gems of knowledge that the patriarchs have stolen from us” (see Coppa, 2010, n.p.). Kreisinger (2014) claimed, simply, “remix and feminism go hand in hand” (n.p.).

39 Kreisinger describes her rhetorical decision for this remix on her , which can be accessed here: https://elisakreisinger.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/mad-men-set-me-free/

61 Splicing together and apart the archive of a popular television series, Kreisinger makes a new purpose out of textual material that is already in wide circulation, and in the process of doing so, not only draws attention to issues of queer and feminist representation, but also performs it by turning familiar characters into unfamiliar story lines. In a blog post explaining her compositional choices for the Mad Men remix project, Kreisinger (2012b) explained her decision to re-use already circulating materials as such: “When you’re culturally ‘poor’ for representation, both queer and feminist, you have to reuse the things you have access to, whether it be for subtext, your own entertainment, or for critique” (n.p.). For Kreisinger, this philosophy guides her practice: “I became an appropriation artist,” she (2012a) explained in an editorial for Origin Magazine, “out of a desire to be simultaneously included and ostracized by mainstream American culture” (n.p.). This desire, a teetering between informed critic and unrepresented fan, drives her work to recast popular hegemonic narratives into queer renderings. She writes, “appropriating mainstream media texts and re-editing them into subversive stories […] gives us an opportunity to see ourselves and our communities included in popular culture in a way that no longer demands we compromise our politics to be entertained” (n.p.). Kreisinger, put simply, has clear goals for what she wants her remixes to accomplish. Her aims are to subvert, to resist, and to challenge the status quo by demanding her viewers interrogate normative representations of gender, class, race, and sexuality that are in wide circulation. Although Kreisinger’s political re-editing of Mad Men was appreciated by many on YouTube and Vimeo, not all were happy with her decisions to cut up a popular television series—especially Lionsgate, the copyright holder for Mad Men. After briefly circulating on YouTube, Kreisinger’s videos were flagged for copyright infringement and ultimately removed from the video sharing service. Kreisinger (2014) described that the culprit responsible for determining her “copyright violation” is YouTube’s Content ID system. Google, the parent company of YouTube, has explained Content ID as a system where copyright holders can “identify and manage” their content. Under this system, all videos uploaded to YouTube are “scanned against a database of files that have been submitted to us [YouTube] by content owners” (“How Content ID Works”, 2015). Essentially, when new videos are flagged as having potential copyright violations, users receive a “Content ID claim”—a notice that informs users about materials in their videos that are under copyright. Copyright owners, such as Lionsgate, can take several actions if content matches their copyright: • Mute audio on the video; • Monetize the video by running ads and collecting revenue; • Collect statistics about the viewership of the video; or • Block the video from being viewed In Kreisinger’s case, Lionsgate chose to block both remixed videos, effectively preventing the circulation of her work on the world’s largest video sharing platform. Although Kreisinger’s compositions remained on Vimeo, she had to dispute the claim on YouTube for them to be circulated again. In the end, while Kreisinger’s dispute proved successful (she argued that her work did, in fact, constitute a fair use), she argues that YouTube’s Content ID has potentially chilling effects. As she (2015) puts it, “the flaws of Content ID threaten fair use’s effectiveness as an important legal exemption to copyright, leaving fair users confused about their rights with little choice but to abide by the interests of the copyright holder” (p. 485). She went on to share findings from a nationwide survey that show that the majority of respondents who have received copyright

62 claims have done nothing to dispute them. She continued, “while we live in a participatory culture where everything is a remix, the reality of content creation is that YouTube users are so often presumed guilty of copyright violation upon upload that they have given up defending their work” (p. 484).40 As a tactical rhetor, Kreisinger’s story shows how circulating materials can be fodder for new compositions. She shows that repurposing in-motion archives can achieve political valence by yoking the familiar with the unfamiliar. She also demonstrates the importance of developing rhetorical knowledge to get her compositions to circulate in a digital economy. Because her cultural moment is one marked by corporate authorship and extreme lockdowns in intellectual property (see Chapter 5 for more), a tactical practice that relies on explicitly on remix techniques requires one to be familiar with the legal landscape. The need to continually reassert the value of remix notwithstanding, Kreisinger’s tactical practice works to insert her identity into a normalized media sphere that denied her representation.

Reflections on An Entangled Story: Toward a Tactical Repertoire Throughout this chapter I’ve resisted the urge to link the above stories together in a straightforward way, letting each stand on its own as a distinct metic story. But now I want to make a few remarks in drawing connections among all four stories in terms of composing techniques, cunning intervention, circulation, and social/institutional pushback. In what remains of this chapter, I discuss each of these connections in turn.

On Composing Techniques Certainly, the four rhetors chronicled above amass a wide range of techniques that can come to represent the composing arsenal of tactical rhetorics—imitation, collage, tactical media, and remix. Douglass’ story displays one of the older reuse rhetorical practices—that of imitation, what we might think of as critical imitation. Although imitation today is often stripped of its rhetorical, social, and inventive heritage, imitation once played a central role in rhetoric education and thought (see, for example, Clark, 1957; Corbett, 1971; Murphy, 2012; Sullivan, 1989). The significance of imitation rests on early observations from classical Greek thinkers, including Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and was extended by Roman rhetoricians, such as Cicero and Quintilian, and was practiced by Renaissance scholars like Erasmus. These rhetoricians observed that humans tend to model those they admire (Bender, 1996). Quintilian (2001) puts it this way, “from these authors, and other worthy to be read, a stock of words, variety of figures, and the art of composition, must be acquired; and our minds must be directed to the imitation of all their excellences; for it cannot be doubted that a great portion of art consists in imitation” (X.II). In other words, imitation was part of a process that asked rhetors to navigate, decipher, and critically examine a cultural reservoir of knowledge, components of which were to be redeployed to fit the occasion of future speech acts. As James Murphy (2012)

40 In many ways, this run-in with copyright has fueled her political actions in public spaces. In 2014, for example, Kreisinger launched an exhibition in New York City called “Fair Use(r),” an art installation and performance that commented upon the relationship among Content ID, fair use, and her larger body of work. The exhibition featured oil paintings that “represent the exact frame and timecode that YouTube’s Content ID system claimed [Kreisinger’s] videos as a copyright violation and allowed AMC and HBO to both block and monetized them depending on the views” (n. p.). A press release for the exhibition describes the material presence of the oil paintings as emphasizing “the unique challenges facing artists working in the digital realm and presenting work on the Internet as compared to artists working in traditional media.” See https://www.arthaps.com/show/framed-the-attack-on-fair-use-and-digital- artists-on-the-internet_1

63 explains, imitation was “a carefully plotted sequence of interpretive and re-creational activities using preexisting texts to teach students how to create their own original texts” (p. 54). From its origins, then, imitation was a skill that inspired productive and new discourse—even if it was practiced through rote memorization and/or copying. Douglass’ imitation prefigures the remaining rhetors I explored above and can certainly stand as a foundational tactic that the remaining rhetors go on to extend. Although imitation was once a central practice for those with access to literacy, scholars examining African-American rhetorics (e.g., Bacon, 1998; Dorsey, 1996; Miller, 1992; Wilson, 2003) and women’s rhetorics (e.g., Donawerth, 2000; Southward, 2011) have made contributions to understanding how imitation became an important tactical maneuver for those entering political arenas with little to no respect or agency. Douglass’ exposure to literacy early in life and his routine practice of the oratory patterns found in the Columbian Orator no doubt imbues the speeches and for which Douglass has left his mark. While imitation has been criticized for being a move of assimilation—of substituting “blackness for whiteness,” as Wilson puts it (p. 105)—others see imitation as a viable political art. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1988), for example, explains that African-American rhetoric “always repeats with a difference,” using available Western traditions to “rename,” “revise” and re- signify (p. xxii). This is similar to Adam Banks’ (2010) discussion of remix in Digital Griots. He wrote, “The beauty of remix as is that in its focus on renewed vision, on re-vision, those doing the remixing never discard the original text. The antecedent remains an important part of the next text, the next movement; ancestors and elders remain clear, and even central, to the future text” (p. 156). As such, I position Douglass’ imitation as critical imitation—the reuse of dominant texts, values, traditions, and speech patterns by those who lack power to gain political status or agency in public arenas. Höch’s practices are distinct to her cultural moment, as her practice exploits the proliferation of widely circulating images for new uses. Indeed, if Douglass locates tactical practices in speech and oratory, Höch presents her’s within the visual, as her practices are tied to collage and photomontage. Höch herself defined collage in rather simple terms, writing, “it means: stuck down, adjoining. The process of remounting, cutting up, sticking down, activating—that is to say, alienating” (p. 16). Höch’s definition alludes to both compositional process/activity and rhetorical effect. That is, she explains how people can make collages— cutting up, re-adjoining pieces of materials into new configurations. But she also hints at how collage renders its effect—through the process of alienating, or disrupting a perceived symbolic order through an estranged aesthetic, collage can set critical thinking into play. Höch has also described her practice as photomontage. The French word montage, according to the OED, etymologically refers to the “operation of assembling the parts of a mechanism to make it work.” Adding photography to this definition, we arrive at an understanding of photomontage as meaning the process of (re)assembling photos together. Höch’s assemblages certainly have a political effect—from providing women new roles and reinventing tropes of femininity, to critiquing government leaders and misogynistic art circles. From a rhetorical standpoint, Frank D’Angelo (2009) likens collage (along with bricolage and photomontage) to pastiche, which he defines as a “contemporary rhetorical form of borrowing, imitating, and pasting together other forms” (p. 41). Collage, then, can be defined as rearranging and reassembling (often visual) materials in such a way as to critique the status quo or make new possibilities out of the scraps of already circulating materials.

64 The Yes Men operate in their cultural location, and especially within the culture jamming practices of the early Internet/Web. Their rhetorical activities particularly help describe the actions of tactical media practitioners. Tactical media arose in the early 1990s in the United States and Europe when collection of activist-scholars began to think of ways to use proliferating technologies and media channels to tactically intervene into mainstream politics. According to Gert Lovink (2002), “tactical media are forced to operate within the parameters of global capitalism, despite their radical agendas” (p. 257). In an early manifesto of tactical media, David Garcia and Geert Lovink’s (1997) explain how those practicing tactical media must cunningly use the available means of dominant culture to temporarily “revers[e]…the flow of power” (n.p.). This position, as Rita Raley (2009) notes in her book-length study of tactical media, is deeply rooted in Foucault’s understanding of resistance. As Foucault writes in the History of Sexuality, “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (p. 95). For Foucault, as well as those practicing tactical media, “there is no single locus of great Refusal […] Instead there is a plurality of resistances” (pp. 95-96). In other words, it is within systems and networks of power (behaviors, practices, discourses) where change is made possible through sporadic but ongoing instances of resistance, not revolution. Indeed, the Yes Men’s tactics are made out of preexisting networks of power. Their interventions are responsive and always on the move. The Yes Men’s reuse of George W. Bush’s platform—not only the textual materials associated with his campaign but also his status as major figure in American politics—is a prime example of the malleable interventions of tactical media. As Raley put it, borrowing from the Critical Art Ensemble, tactical media “are pliable”— and such pliability “allows for on-the-fly critical intervention: statements, performances, and actions that must continually be altered in response to their object” (p. 6). The Yes Men’s ability to adjust the design aesthetic of GWBush.com when threatened with a lawsuit is great example of such on-the-fly pliability. Not only do they react to Bush’s response but they also make do of it by announcing the spurious letter on the second version of their webpage, effectively seizing a situation that might otherwise stall their political purpose. Tactical media, as many scholars have noted (e.g., Lovink, 2002; Raley, 2009; Renzi, 2008), is a type of performance and action that cannot be easily categorized. Raley listed many forms of tactical media (e.g, hacktivism, denial of service attacks, digital hijacks, reverse engineering, and contestation robotics), but she also noted that tactical media is a mutable category that shifts and changes depending on its purpose. The Yes Men’s particular brand of tactical media has been categorized as culture jamming, which Christine Harold (2004) described as “disrupt[ing] existing transmissions” (p. 192). Culture jamming typically implies, for Harold, “an interruption, a sabotage, hoax, prank, banditry, or blockage of what are seen as the monolithic power structures governing cultural life” (p. 192). With these scholarly connections in mind, the Yes Men practice satirical adaptation, a kind of tactical media that mirrors the language and aesthetic dimensions of more powerful opponents for the purpose of exposing ideological differences. Finally, arriving at the most recent example of tactical rhetorics, Kreisinger displays the composing technique of remix. In rhetoric and composition, the notion of remix has elicited scholarship from many angles. Recent work has positioned remix—as a concept, as a practice, as a genre, as a method—in wide and varied ways: as a means to enter and participate in political exchanges (e.g., Dietel-McLaughlin, 2009; Dubisar & Palmeri, 2010), as a method of making arguments, solving problems, and effecting social change (e.g., Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2007;

65 Kuhn, 2012), as a way to participate in communities (Jenkins et al, 2009; Stedman, 2012), as a research and conceptual method (e.g., Palmeri, 2012; Pough, 2010; Yancey, 2009), as a way to think about learning transfer (e.g., Robertson, Taczak, & Yancey, 2012) and as a theoretical frame to view culture, authorship, and intellectual property (e.g., DeVoss & Porter, 2006; Lessig, 2008; Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009). If the increasing frequency of scholarship on remix is any indication it appears that remix in composition has hit the “mainstream” as far as disciplinary conversations and pedagogies go. Yet, Kreisinger’s body of work displays remix’s critical, and perhaps more subversive, dimensions—that is, as she positioned it, her particular approach to remix is both feminist and queer. Feminist for investigating gender roles and power structures, and queer for its ability to “challenge, question, or provoke the normal” (p. 481). She defined her practice as “a DIY form of grassroots media production whereby creators appropriate mass media texts, reediting them to comment, critique, satirize, or pay to the source material and produce a newly transformed piece of media intended for pubic viewing on video sharing sites such as YouTube” (p. 480). Such approach to remix allows for “the deconstruction and recontextualization of popular culture’s depictions of gender, race, and sexuality” (p. 481). In other words, the remixes she makes, even if entertaining and humorous, are attuned to social justice issues. This brand of remix as come to be known as political video remix. Henry Jenkins (2010) described political video remix as do-it-yourself production that “challenges power structures, deconstructs cultural norms and subverts dominant social narratives by transforming fragments of mainstream media and popular culture” (n.p.). This is similar to what Erin Dietel-McLaughlin (2009) has called “irreverent composition”—a vernacular discourse that uses the rhetorical trope of irreverence to intervene in public spheres via Web 2.0 platforms. Remix, as a compositional technique falling under the umbrella of tactical rhetorics, can be defined as the process of re-editing two or more pieces of already circulating media into new forms, setting critical thinking into motion by challenging, inverting, or subverting established narratives or beliefs.

On Cunning Interventions All the above stories embrace trickster ethics and help illuminate mêtis at work in diverse contexts, for, as James C. Scott (1998) argued, “each practitioner [of mêtis] has his or her own angle” (p. 332). Höch, under scrutiny from government, veiled her political arguments by folding them into the more accepted form of art (though, to be sure, it would later be classified as communist by the Nazi regime), and to understand her political statement required a sharp eye for allegory. Although the Nazis would later call her art practice degenerate, she cunningly included in her compositions what would have been censored if she were more forthcoming in her opinions (Lavin, 2001). She also turned the mundane into everyday acts of political resistance, suggesting that the everyday arts practice by “grandmothers’ hands” can have political impact through the seemingly simple act of documenting the status of women’s lives. For his part, Douglass’ critical imitation—his ability to adapt to an audience’s values but then turn them against themselves—represents a metic orator par excellence. According to Debra Hawhee (2005), mêtis, at its core, is “a mode of negotiating agonistic forces” (p. 47). Navigating the public spaces where he had once been denied access, Douglass, a man who lived under the constant threat of violence, relied on mêtis to negotiate the agonistic forces of his sometimes

66 hostile audiences.41 Detienne and Vernant (1991) noted that mêtis has the ability to “give the weaker competitor the means of triumphing over the stronger, enabling the inferior to outdo the superior rival” (p. 27). And indeed we can see that although Douglass was born into a position that denied him political agency, his critical imitation allowed him to temporarily “outdo” the dominant class of his time, temporarily shifting the tides of a cultural and political landscape in his favor. In addition, Douglass mirrored sophistic dialectic, allowing him to stay one step ahead of his opponent at all times. This tactic is certainly employed in his Meaning of the July Fourth for the Negro—a resolution to settle and then unsettle the notion of freedom throughout the oration. However, Cook and Tatum argued that this tactic is also found in his letter to his previous slave master, Thomas Auld. Cook and Tatum explained it this way: “the Socratic trick is to keep pushing the other speaker off any comfortable resting point, constantly revealing the inadequacy of every attempt to come to rest content with a half-understood idea” (p. 73). We indeed see a master at “bending and interweaving logoi,” as Detienne and Vernant put it, in the works of Frederick Douglass (p. 42). More than this, de Certeau's “warlike” tactics are echoed in this letter. To make a weapon out of Auld, to turn his violent actions and deeply held beliefs against themselves, is a powerful move of resistance. It is, as de Certeau stated, “putting one over the adversary on his own turf” (p. 40). In Chapter 1, I mentioned that the figure of the trickster often guides the ethic of tactical rhetorics. In that chapter, I pointed out, following scholars such as Malea Powell (1999), that trickster discourse can reveal deep ironies and unsettle common ways of doing and knowing. And that such discourse often operates through a series of playful, yet deadly serious performances. As Lewis Hyde (1998) has argued, Douglass elicits a trickster consciousness for he often “uncover[ed] hidden duplicity” (p. 231). And he often did this through articulating the contradictions among the cultures in inhabited and critiqued. But more than this, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (1989) argued in his critique of biographies on his life, Douglass’ life—his polymorphous identity—was more complex and mutable than the heroic tale that often shows up in his biographies. As a boundary crosser, as a trickster, Douglass’ trickster went beyond the texts of his speeches and writings; it is an embodiment and slippery identity that marks his life’s work. The Yes Men also uphold a trickster identity to cunningly intervene in political realms. As mentioned in Chapter 1, trickster figures work to reveal that which is difficult to see or grasp—conflicting ideologies, unjust social conditions, or otherwise different ways of being, acting, or doing. And they often do so through unconventional means. Lewis Hyde (1998), for example, explores how the Greek word for trick, dolos,42 was often connected to a very old trick indeed—baiting a trap to catch prey. The Yes Men gained the most notoriety not from their initial launch GWBush.com, but instead after Bush reacted to the website by declaring that “there ought to be limits to freedom.” In other words, we might think of GWBush.com as a kind of digital trap art—that is, in leaving the bait upon which Bush stumbles, the Yes Men, whose status in American politics is nonexistent at the time, are catapulted to a national level as their website, and thus their mission, sees a surge in visitors after Bush’s comments. Such cunning trickery is also evidenced in their multiple aliases. Indeed, because they are often unnamed or faux-named, the Yes Men, like the many-faced sophist (Hawhee, 2005),

41 His autobiographies, for example, note his need to escape the United States for fear of his life. 42 Detienne and Vernant (1991) noted that dolos is a word that corresponds with mêtis, often appearing in the semantic web of meanings.

67 disguise themselves in order to adapt to a situation at hand. Detienne and Vernant connected such metic dissimulation to the poluplokos (many coiled) being of the octopus—put in such terms, in order to outwit their targets, the Yes Men, like the octopus, must be “capable of adapting to the most baffling situations…[by] assuming as many faces as there are social categories” (Detienne & Vernant, p. 40). Relatedly, another trickster/metic characteristic of the Yes Men is the ability to be supple and agile. After being threatened with a lawsuit, for example, the Yes Men recalibrated their tactics. As Detienne and Vernant put it:

In order to dominate a changing situation, full of contrasts, [metis] must become even more supple, even more shifting, more polymorphic than the flow of time: it must adapt itself constantly to events as they succeed to each other and be pliable enough to accommodate the unexpected so as to implement the plan in mind more successfully. (p. 20)

As mentioned, the modus operandi for tactical media—plotting a course for “the next five minutes”43 in an attempt to stay ahead of the opponent enough to reevaluate the rhetorical effectiveness of the tactic at hand. It is also evident in their inability to sit still. It is no coincidence that the Yes Men are always on the move, navigating new terrain as they go. Using Deleuze’s notion of the “nomad,” John Poulakos (1995) noted that the sophists—Detienne and Vernant’s metic human figure par excellence—are nomadic in their overall approach to political intervention. Of the nomadic sophist, Poulakos wrote that the sophists were neither geographically nor intellectually stationary. The Yes Men’s later political interventions, the ones with which they have come to be known, directly inhabit this nomadic way of being in the world. They target the World Trade Organization in Europe one month, and then move on to challenge the U.S. Chamber of Commerce the next. In this way, they might be read as modern-day sophists, nomadic tacticians who stay one step ahead of their opponents as they travel along. Although humor can be read into all these rhetors’ tactics, the Yes Men and Elisa Kreisinger, perhaps more than the others, used humor as a device to effect change. Working in a Web 2.0 economy, Kreisinger is well aware that humor is a strategy digital writers and media producers use to get their content to spread (c.f. Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). Additionally, Kreisinger’s tactic of turning the familiar into the subversive highlights a productive form of rhetorical invention—by harnessing the familiarity of established characters and themes, Kreisinger flips the script to make new narratives in order to set critical thinking about representation in popular culture into play. This tactic is similar to what Kristie Fleckestein called, via Susan Zaeske, agentive invention. She quotes from Zaeske: “[agentive invention] is the means by which ‘rhetors/subjects/agents formulate rhetorical strategies to break free from dominant subjectivities’ (p. 120). By leveraging the tools of video remix, Kreisinger is able to invent a kind of agency where it may have not been possible before.

On Circulation Although years separate each, the above mêtis stories show how circulation is tied to both invention and delivery. In other words, these rhetors look both backwards and forwards as they

43 Rita Raley (2009) drew attention to this phrase, which originated from a series of international conferences and festivals in which tactical media artists/practitioners gathered. The conference was appropriately called Next Five Minutes. See http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/n5m4/about.jsp.html.

68 repurpose already flowing materials (back-flow of circulation) in hopes that their repurposing might gain additional traction and further movement (future-flow of circulation). On the future- flow side of circulation, some show how already existing channels of circulation (i.e., mass media or web 2.0 platforms) can be leveraged to achieve wider audiences. The tactics of the Yes Men, for example, demonstrate how rhetors without immediate access to platforms of wide circulation can nonetheless make do with already established channels of mass circulation to get their messages across. Certainly, their prankster stunts have the potential to effect change in the immediate contexts in which they are deployed and circulate (e.g., those who visit GWBush.com by happenstance), but what the Yes Men do best—and in fact what they claim to do—is get mainstream media coverage to get their message to spread even further. While the Yes Men exploit pre-established channels of circulation, Kreisinger, practicing her craft in a post-Web 2.0 era, shows how everyday rhetors can leverage platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and blogging websites to get their messages to spread. Moreover, Kreisinger’s decision to release her videos during the long hiatus of the popular television series she uses to critique gender and sexuality norms in popular culture also demonstrates the importance of kairotic intervention. As discussed in Chapter 2, in order to get messages to spread, rhetors increasingly need to respond in timely and appropriate ways to further propel their texts. Put simply, the Yes Men and Kreisinger use rhetorical knowledge to achieve mass circulation. Yet, they also do so by examining and making of the backflow of circulation—inventing from texts already in motion, and thereby harnessing the cultural relevance of materials already in flow. Relatedly, Höch showcases how a wide variety of already circulating materials—images from popular press and headlines from news stories—can be rerouted in their circulatory paths to breathe new meaning out of texts that once moved in very different contexts. In other words, in her collage work, Höch transformed commercial images with a high circulation rate into a composite text that traveled in a vastly different rhetorical ecology. To this end, Höch’s focus wasn’t so much on creating ways for her collage to circulate widely; rather, her tactical work slowed the circulation of mundane yet quickly moving texts in order to mediate on the gender roles circulating in the then-exploding genre of photo magazines. In this way, Höch shows that the delivery side of circulation—i.e., achieving widespread circulation—is not the only feature of material flow. Although Höch’s “Cut With a Kitchen Knife” ultimately became an object of mass circulation (many years later thanks, in part, to digital technologies), she certainly paid more attention to the back-flow of circulation. Douglass, a well-known rhetorician in rhetorical studies, illuminates the productive practice of harnessing cultural texts already in wide circulation. Though his archives were not digital, Douglass nonetheless makes out of a cultural storehouse that includes many different writings, speeches, rhetorical figures, and oratorical styles—all of which, as his use of the Columbian Orator showcases, were already in wide circulation during the time in which he delivered his speeches (c.f. Cook & Tatum, 2010). Indeed, it can be said that his knowledge and use of the back-flow of circulation propelled his public interventions to resonate with wide audiences and thereby travel in new political arenas. Taken together, the compositional and rhetorical practices of all four stories attest to a reliance on circulation. Douglass, Höch, the Yes Men, and Kreisinger, using varied aesthetic forms and iterations of new media, perform circulatory intervention by repurposing texts, images, web materials, and video archives, respectfully. Starting from a tactical field, each rhetor is able to hunt for novelty by recombining found materials and redistributing them toward new ends. Certainly, circulatory intervention practices change in new contexts—based on changes in technology, genre expectations, and cultural situatedness. Nevertheless, a connective through

69 line understands that tactical rhetors work with what’s circulating in their immediate sociopolitical contexts using the technological resources and media of their day.

On Social/Institutional Pushback The assemblage of stories constructed here not only details composing techniques relevant for intervening in public spheres but also shows how each rhetorician has faced legal, social, and cultural obstacles when deploying their rhetorical practice. As such, in addition to exploring how each rhetor has used tactical means to enter into political arenas (better exposing the bricoleur arsenal, so to speak), their combined stories also describe what’s at stake for not recognizing the political value of tactical interventions. Höch’s experience as a woman navigating a deeply sexist artistic tradition of Dada at a time of political and institutional unease illuminates how so-called “women’s work” can be relegated as a practice irrelevant to political conversations. She was cast aside at the first major Dada festival in Berlin, because of her position as a woman—the only woman—within the male avant-garde in Berlin. What Höch shows, then, and what deserves to be underscored, is that dominant cultural and institutional values can silence marginalized groups regardless of their rhetorical practice. A drawback of Douglass’ practice, as Kirt Wilson (2003) explained, is that the use of imitation as a political strategy by people of color has historically coincided with racial stereotyping, coding imitations as cheap knockoffs or as being inferior to “original” thinking. Indeed, to imitate today is often thought of as being second-rate, lesser, unoriginal—and, as Wilson persuasively argues, African-American public intellectuals, politicians, and writers have often been perceived as copiers, not creators. Keith Miller’s (1992) study of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s posthumous charge of for his doctoral dissertation illuminates a well-known example of failure to recognize and appreciate imitation as a valuable political and intellectual resource.44 Although imitation can achieve profound political effects such as propelling Douglass into public spotlight, the rhetorical tactic runs the risk of being denigrated through racially classified tropes.45 Intellectual property laws in the United States also present an obstacle for tactical rhetorics. As scholars of authorship and intellectual property have made clear, copyright laws and the discourses surrounding them, help to (re)inscribe the notion of the autonomous and creative genius, propagating a culture where creative content is heavily policed by copyright holders and locked down through the use of enhanced technologies (see, for example, Boyle, 2008; Lessig, 2004; Reyman, 2012; Rife, 2013). While copyright is meant to inspire creativity and protect the rights of authors, the fear of copyright violation or the wrongful claim of infringement can have adverse effects for promoting active public participation. Elisa

44 Miller argued that King, like Douglass, had to “merg[e] his voice and his identity with a highly prestigious tradition of the white majority” in order to reach his white hearers and other white intellectuals (p. 65). 45 The same can be said of other marginalized groups using imitation. For example, Belinda Stillion Southward’s (2011) work examining the political strategies of the National Woman’s Party during 1913-1920 revealed that political imitation can inspire violent backlashes. Although Southward described political mimesis as a tactic “particularly amenable to the rhetorical processes through which marginalized groups negotiate power and constitute identities” (p. 18), she also provided evidence for its denigration once women sought political power via imitative rhetorical processes. In one particular case, Southward outlined how women of the National Woman’s Party mimicked the ritual of an inaugural parade to insert their platform into mainstream politics. However, the parade was met with a “violent backlash,” for when women took to the streets in an act of political mimesis passersby reacted to cause a “riotous atmosphere” (p. 87). Southward reported that some women received violent death threats, some were told to “go back to the home,” and some suffered violent attacks to the head and body.

70 Kreisinger’s frequent run-ins with major copyright holders—what Andrea Lunsford (1999) has called “corporate authors”—demonstrates the potentially stifling effects of digital intellectual property practices in the United States. Kreisinger’s story particularly shows how advanced technologies are preventing rhetors from fairly using materials under copyright law. In rhetoric and composition, scholars have increasingly recognized the importance for paying attention to how intellectual property laws and discourses shape writing and rhetoric in our classes and beyond. So much so that Martine Courant Rife (2013) called intellectual property an issue of invention. And we see this in Kreisinger’s story—if digital writers cannot effectively navigate systems like YouTube’s copyright ID, their abilities to produce meaningful and effective public exchanges can be severely threatened or even silenced. As such, we see that tactical rhetorics—even in what has been deemed a —experience pushback from copyright holders and corporate authors. When digital writers and producers upload their materials to online sharing services with built-in copyright detection databases, the threat of copyright infringement presents tactical rhetorics with the unique challenge of defending one’s compositional choices before circulating them in broader web spaces. That is, of course, if they go through the hassle of defending their claim under the Fair Use Doctrine. Yet, “Fair Use,” as Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (2012) have recently noted, “becomes real only when people actually use it; like a muscle, it can shrink with disuse” (p. xi). To push their analogy, with systems like Content ID, the copyright muscle grows larger, while the fair use muscle wastes away.

A Tactical Repertoire for Political Intervention In his introduction to the first Octalog, James Murphy (1988) reminded that we inherit the word politics from the Greek polis. Through such an etymological reading, Murphy contended that politics refers to “the examination of how communities work together toward their commonly perceived goods” (p. 5). For the critical theorist Jacques Ranciere (2001), “politics makes visible that which had no reason to be seen, it lodges one world into another” (n.p.). By way of concluding, we see that rhetorical practices of all four rhetors chronicled above partake in political work. That is, tactical rhetorics as displayed by Douglass, Hoch, the Yes Men, and Kreisigner have profound political utility in their abilities to enter public arenas to promote critical thinking and move their audiences toward a new kind of common good, often through the process of illuminating that which remained under the radar or invisible. Put differently, by exploiting and making use of materials in circulation toward new ends these rhetors have transformed existing materials to express a new articulation of the “common good.” Yet, their approaches, like any rhetorical practice, are not without their obstacles. In the case of the stories woven here, institutional, social, and cultural pushback have coincided with their rhetorical practice. This chapter is merely the beginning of discussing obstacles to tactical rhetorics (for more, I direct readers to Part 3 of this dissertation). In all, this chapter, through the process of telling a series of micro-stories, has attempted to amass a repertoire of tactical rhetorics, outlining a number of practices, people, and contexts relevant to the makings of its art and practice. According to performance theorist Diana Taylor (2003), “Repertoire, etymologically ‘a treasury, an inventory,’ also allows for individual agency, referring also to ‘the finder, discoverer,’ and meaning ‘to find out’” (p. 20). A tactical repertoire, then, is not meant to be all encompassing or totalizing; rather, it outlines a number of approaches that might lead to future discoveries or findings. For my purposes, though, in what remains of this dissertation, I intend to make of this inventory a pedagogical purpose in the fullest sense of

71 word—shedding historical light on the rhetorical value of reusing materials already in circulation toward new and political ends.

72

Chapter 4 The Political Work of Digital Bricoleurs

The bricoleur resists the compartmentalized roles by which public participation is typically authorized and will use all available tools at hand, even if this means (as it does) transforming received, identifiable roles into uses, methods, and tactics. For the bricoleur, the point is to get the job done, to accomplish a task. —Frank Farmer, 2013, p. 151

While the previous chapter explored how bricoleurs performed political work in a range of contexts (oral, print, and digital), this chapter centers exclusively on digital practices—and, in particular, it explores digital bricolage as it has been practiced on social media platforms. The digital bricoleur, as argued in Chapter 1, is a figure who works with already circulating materials in crafty, responsive, and adaptive ways. Digital bricoleurs—often unnamed or unsung—perform political work by retooling and reimagining the possibilities of digital discourse already in motion. The digital bricoleur, endowed with a kind of metic intelligence, kairotically surfs moving archives to “make do” with available materials in their rhetorical endeavors. What I attempt to show in this chapter is the unique affordances and challenges for tactical rhetorics in an age of social media platforms, as well as the political work accomplished by tactical approaches in a digital age. To do this work, I explore three stories in this chapter—the hashtag hijack of #MyNYPD, the embodied response of the Real @OxfordAsians, and the political bot of @randi_ebooks. Though all are responsive and adaptive, composing out of a circulating field, each makes use of different composing tactics to accomplish unique goals. While far more examples of digital bricolage can be observed in digital publics, the sampling of these three stories is intended to offer exemplary cases of how already flowing discourse has, in part, provided rhetors the means for public intervention. Further, these stories illuminate how dominant discourses can be countered, challenged, or critiqued through tactical means. In other words, these cases detail how a range of digital bricoleurs have leveraged already flowing discourse to intervene in political discussions about race, police brutality, gender, and sexual violence. Paying attention to these stories, I argue, is important for writing and rhetoric scholars and teachers for a number of reasons. These stories help to counter the prevailing notion that circulation falls exclusively under the purview of delivery and futurity. More importantly, the rhetors writing in the flow of these stories demonstrate how the backflow of circulation can be prime sources for invention, demonstrating how bricoleurs activate social change through rewriting and redistributing dynamic archives in motion. Such invention work functions doubly—on the one hand, rhetors are able to make new texts from ones already in circulation, and on the other hand, rhetors are able to imagine and work toward new social futures by calling into question the impetus behind the initial distribution of source materials. As such, these stories open new doors for future research and, with attention to kairotic intervention, expand pedagogical strategies for digital writing teachers. In this chapter, I first outline my methodological approach for examining and comparing acts of tactical rhetorics on social media platforms. In particular, working from the framework described in the previous chapter, I describe my approach as digital metis storytelling of networked events, which seeks to contextualize stories of tactical rhetorics in action. This part of

73 the chapter also touches on some of the complexities of defining social media platforms. The next section of this chapter retells three networked events—#myNYPD hashtag hijack, The Real @OxfordAsians, and @randi_ebooks. All stories wherein digital bricoleurs made anew out of already circulating materials, these tactical approaches demonstrate how rhetors have tactically intervened in public issues regarding race, ethnicity, gender, and violence. After retelling these three stories, I close the chapter by reflecting upon what the assemblage of stories provides for rhetoric and writing theory and pedagogy.

Digital Metis Storytelling: Retelling Networked Events In the previous chapter, I examined four rhetoricians who exemplified a tactical composing sensibility. I traced how each rhetor performed in his or her social and cultural location in an effort to better understand the political motivations behind each figure’s rhetorical acts. This chapter extends that work into digital contexts. Unlike Chapter 3, however, this chapter examines tactical rhetorics that are more networked, diffused, and distributed among many different actors. As such, I find that a framing not so much focused on one individual person, but instead one attuned to an event wherein many actors participate to be a more advantageous level of analysis for this chapter. As such, I use the phrase “networked event” as a way to signal a particular discursive activity that was made possible via networked technologies. Both terms—network and event—have complex meanings within contemporary scholarship. Therefore, I briefly unpack what I mean by each term when considered separately and together. By event, I mean a discursive unfolding, loosely bounded within a particular duration of time, that gathers around a particular public issue. Phil Bratta’s (2015) notion of “lived events” informs my approach. For Bratta, lived events capture how “rhetorics unfold in public places and spaces within an ecology of affective processes and intensities” (n.p.). As Bratta made clear, such an understanding of events is slippery, for one “can never articulate the exact temporal-spatial dimensions of lived events. The issue also lies in the fact that lived events are ongoing and in constant flux. They are embodied intensities and ephemeral” (n.p.). Bratta’s understanding of lived events, which relied on work from Malea Powell, Barbara Biesecker, Brian Massumi, and others, is largely focused on public performances where bodies are moving and interacting in a collective place. Bratta, in other words, largely eschewed the potential for events to occur via digital networks. As such, I supplement his discussion by considering how digital networks allow for events to take root. The notion of the network (or networks) has exploded in recent scholarship (especially with Bruno Latour and others’ configuration of Actor Network Theory)—both as a methodological concept used to trace activity as well as a conceptual apparatus to account for complex, connected phenomena. In rhetoric and writing studies, and especially in research, the network has risen as a powerful concept to describe the configuration of multiple actors at play in a given context. As Sarah Read and Jason Swarts (2015) put it, “Appropriation of the term network […] reflects a theoretical use of the term as a context of action as well as the product of that action. A network is a working, coordinated configuration of actors in a setting that affords such a configuration” (p. 15). Working from a capacious understanding of the term, Jeff Rice (2006) described networks as “spaces […] of connectivity” (p. 128). For Rice, networks are “ideological as well as technological spaces generated by various forms of new media that allow information, people, places, and other items to establish a variety of relationships that previous spaces or ideologies of space (print being the dominant model) did not allow” (p. 128). Here, Rice pointed out the unique affordances of

74 digital networks, especially noting how digital networks reconfigure how relationships are made possible via networked technologies. Networks, to be sure, are not particular to the digital (they have existed in pre-digital contexts), though their possibilities are expanded by digital technologies. John Jones (2015) described it this way: “As a medium, networks are not contained in any particular technology. However, digital technologies have had a significant effect on networks and their importance to communication practices” (n.p.). Jones noted that digital technologies “allow for a dramatic increase in the level of complexity that networks can support, represented either by the number of nodes in the network or the density of their interactions” (n.p.). Jones and Rice both use the network as a kind of metaphor to describe writing that is highly associative—interconnected and linked with other people, texts, and discourses. And as Jones indicated, digital networks signal complexity and breadth, connecting greater amounts of information and people together. Taken together, a networked event46 describes a unit of analysis that is marked by interconnected discursive activity that emerges and unfolds around particular public issues. They are propelled and circulated on networks via digital technologies, which connect people, information, and spaces together. While my analysis switches from individual rhetors to networked events, the overall metis storytelling approach I laid out in the previous chapter remains. This framing allows me to add more stories—more context, more people, more practices—to the repertoire of tactical rhetorics I began assembling in Chapter 3. To construct these networked events, I draw on multiple sources of data, including published scholarship, news articles, social media discourse, blog entries, and interviews. In particular, for each event I (a) analyzed news articles and published scholarship, and (b) analyzed discourse on individual social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.47 In line with work on Internet research ethics, I have been careful to consider the ethical dynamics involved in studying the publically available discourse that has made this research possible. Yet, as Heidi McKee and James Porter (2009) argued, the very notion of “public” is tricky to determine in online domains. As such, I follow the understanding that researchers must not assume that all information available online is “public”—Internet discourse, even if such information is found on “public” social media platforms and sites, oscillates between public, private, and semi-public. To help navigate these complications, I utilized McKee and Porter’s rhetorical-caustic approach when considering the ethical dynamics of researching people’s writing online. In particular, I found their modified heuristic that considers private and public concerns, as well as sensitive and non-sensitive information to be useful. Largely, because much of the discourse I analyzed for much this chapter is “intended as a public act or performance that invites recognition for accomplishment,” I felt comfortable analyzing writing on social media platforms (Ess, 2002, p. 7). At the same time, I examined discourse on a case-by-case basis, and especially

46 Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley (2013) used the construct “viral event” to describe something similar to what I am gesturing at here. They wrote, “viral events are naturally occurring, emergent phenomenon facilitated by the interwoven collection of websites that allow users to host and share content, (YouTube, , Flickr), connect with friends and people with similar interests (Facebook, Twitter), share their knowledge (Wikipedia, blogs) (p. 2). They further described viral events as exemplar cases—viral collections of content that are remarkable because of their spread, reach, and speed. I am similarly examining exemplar cases in this chapter; however, I am not particularly interested in virality as being the marker of a case. Rather, I am working to describe how bricoleurs compose out of circulation, viral or not. 47 This was accomplished by searching individual platforms via the search feature. Additionally, I observed and analyzed social media aggregators such as .

75 considered the impact of “harm, vulnerability, [and] personally identifiable information” when incorporating people’s writing into this chapter (Markham & Buchanan, 2012, p. 6).

The Evolution of (Defining) Social Media

Since at least 2004, the Internet, and more specifically the web, has witnessed a notorious and controversial shift away from the model of the static web page towards a social web or Web 2.0 model where the possibilities of users to interact with the web have multiplied. It has become much easier for a layperson to publish and share texts, images and sounds. A new topology of distribution of information has emerged, based in ‘real’ social networks, but also enhanced by casual and algorithmic connections. —Tiziana Terranova and Joan Donovan, 2013, p. 297

The rhetorical tactics described in this chapter were all circulated on social media, and especially on social network sites/platforms. As such, it is worthwhile to describe some of the key features of social media, noting some of the evolution in terminology used to describe this ever-evolving landscape. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein (2010) defined social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (p. 61). In his review of social media, Christian Fuchs (2013) noted many uses for online sociality: “collective action, communication, communities, connecting/networking, co- operation/collaboration, the creative making of user-generated content, playing, sharing” (p. 37). Often, researchers make distinctions among types of social media—for example, it is convenient to distinguish social network sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and LinkedIn) from user-generated sites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia). In other words, social media is often the container term for numerous types of platforms—some of which are designed for interpersonal contact (i.e., social network sites), while others are designed for information spread (i.e., user-generated sites) (van Dijck, 2013). Other types of social media include those whose primary interest is selling goods (e.g., Amazon and Ebay), as well as those that facilitate online gameplay (e.g., Farmville and Words with Friends). By and large, this chapter explores composing practices performed on social network sites. According to danah boyd and Nicole Ellison’s (2007) social network sites are “web-based services that allow individual to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others with the system” (p. 211). What’s important for boyd and Ellison’s definition is the focus for certain platforms to showcase and privilege an individual’s connections (e.g., “friends,” “followers,” “connections,” and so on). However, as Jose van Dijck (2013) noted, boundaries between types of social media are increasingly difficult to make. YouTube, for instance, is a prime example of a platform designed for the distribution of user-generated content, yet also built into its architecture are features congruent with social network sites (e.g., the ability to follow others and the potential for ). Such bleeding boundaries are represented in many of today’s top platforms. Because social media, as defined above, have emerged as major sources of connectivity in people’s everyday lives, many scholars have begun exploring the more problematic aspects of social media. For example, Tarleton Gillespie (2010) untangled the discursive work behind the word “platform” in his influential article, “The Politics of Platforms.” Using YouTube as his exemplar, Gillespie noted how the discursive positioning of “platform”—a notion that has

76 increasingly taken hold to designate variations of social media—is not a natural or neutral term. Indeed, Gillespie described how embedded in the word “platform” are competing interests. On the one hand, platform can mean a social platform from which authors can speak or spread their ideas. On the other hand, platform is also a notion that carries appeal for advertisers and corporate interests. According to Gillespie:

A term like ‘platform’ does not drop from the sky, or emerge in some organic, unfettered way from the public discussion. It is drawn from the available cultural vocabulary by stakeholders with specific aims, and carefully massaged so as to have particular reso- nance for particular audiences inside particular discourses. (p. 359)

In short, as I describe further in Chapter 6, the trope of platform appeals to multiple competing interests—and these competing interests matter, for they can have profound impact on how companies behind platforms design their user architecture, circulate their content, and develop algorithmic procedures to connect others together. My point in rehearsing the evolution of social media—especially in delineating some of the more critical takes underpinning it—is twofold. First, it demonstrates that the framing of social media matters, that there are competing interests involved in designing the architecture behind the social web. Though early Web 2.0 ushered in a somewhat utopian attitude regarding empowerment and participation (somewhat akin to early discussions of the World Wide Web itself), the often invisible or taken-for-granted dimensions of social media have an impact on the discursive activity present on any given platform. Second, and relatedly, this evolution in scholarship also helps underscore a methodological problem. As Gillespie (2015) argued, “We study what content these platforms circulate, but we too often describe it as what ‘returns’ as search results or ‘goes viral,’ rather than seeing them as the result of strategic actors selecting and assembling user content into a particular composite” (p. 2). In other words, circulation gatekeepers themselves (a notion I further explore in the next chapter), have a profound impact on what gets circulated in the first place. With this brief unpacking of methodological concerns as well as details about social media platforms, I now turn to the three stories that animate how bricoleurs perform political work in digital public spheres.

#MyNYPD: Hijacking Institutionalized Texts to Circulate Counter-Narratives On April 22, 2014 the social media team at the New York Police Department (NYPD) initiated a call for participation from the public. The official account for the police force, @NYPDNews, tweeted, “Do you have a photo w/ a member of the NYPD? Tweet us & tag it #MyNYPD. It may be featured on our Facebook” (see Figure 4.1). Once in motion, this tweet activated a series of responses that members of the NYPD did not anticipate.48

48 Many news articles reported on NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton’s response to #MyNYPD. Bratton noted that the response to #myNYPD was not anticipated. Moreover, he dismissed the backfire of the tag; he called it a “brouhaha” and noted that many of the photos were “old news.” Bratton continued, “the reality of policing is that often times our activities are lawful but they look awful.” For more on Bratton’s response, see https://soundcloud.com/wnycradio/nypd-commissioner-bratton-on-mynypd-on-twitter.

77 Figure 4.1. The NYPD Twitter account issued a call to the public using the hashtag #myNYPD.

Although it was intended to improve the public image of the police department, one increasingly scrutinized for its inability to maintain nonviolent citizen-police relations,49 the flood of tweets that occupied #MyNYPD painted a much different picture of the New York City police. Instead of photographs with peaceful bodies standing together with connected arms, the tag saw images of police officers using excessive force and violent tactics—and they were often against people of color (see Figure 4.2). What was once meant to inspire a public relations boost quickly motivated a new, unanticipated set of responses. #MyNYPD was flooded with bodies in pain, bodies in tumult, and bodies in struggle. And while some posted appreciative or positive messages for the members of the NYPD (especially moments after the initial tweet was distributed), many of the textual responses attached to the #MyNYPD tweets were far from joyful. In fact, many took an ironic turn. For example, one Twitter participant stated, “NO ONE MAKES ME BLEED MY OWN BLOOD. Well, except #MyNYPD. They do that a lot”. Another participant noted, “Here the #NYPD engages with its community members, changing hearts and minds one baton at a time” (see Figure 4.3). In effect, the hashtag #MyNYPD was hijacked50—redirected, repurposed, and recirculated for another cause. Thousands took to Twitter to re-use the circulating hashtag for a purpose counter to what its originators planned, inserting a vision of the NYPD that sharply differed from the sanguine call for participation of the initial tweet. Hashtags, or inline metadata

49 This was especially evidenced by multiple participants referencing the Occupy Wall Street movement, which occurred three years before in 2011. In fact, many of the images that were attached to #MyNYPD were captured at Occupy Wall Street events. 50 Many corporations have experienced hashtag hijacks, wherein everyday web writers redeploy a corporate- sanctioned hashtag for a new purpose. McDonald’s official Twitter account, for example, launched the hashtag #McDStories as part of a “Meet the Farmers” campaign where followers were poised to get an insider view of the corporation’s farming practices. On January 18, 2012, the official McDonald’s account tweeted, “‘When you make something w/ pride, people can taste it,’ –McD potato supplier #McDStories.” Within minutes, the tag was flooded with less than flattering #McDStories. In addition to corporation falling prey to hashtag hijacks, politicians running for the 2016 presidential election, have also had many of their launched hashtags go awry. For example, in 2015, presidential hopeful Jeb Bush released the #JebCanFixIt. As with the other hashtags, it was hijacked almost immediately, as social media writers re-used the tag to post jokes, critiques, and scandals about Bush’s campaign.

78

Figure 4.2. Twitter users respond to #myNYPD with messages that run counter to the initial call for participation. The above response showcases brutal police tactics against people of color. that allow for easy searchability and linking,51 are commonly used and promoted on Twitter to frame trending conversations or allow for participants to discursively join-in to an interconnected topic. In this case, many digital bricoleurs saw an opportunity to “make do” with the circulating tag—to counter, rewrite, and reroute a narrative that a dominant sought to inject into public conversations about citizen-police relations. But what kind of political work did this do? The hijacking of #MyNYPD may be understood as a networked form of political protest and dissent. According to communication researchers Sarah Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles (2015), the discursive activity of the #MyNYPD hijack constituted a “networked counterpublic.” The notion of a “networked” counterpublic draws attention to how innovations in technology and Web-based platforms have provided new outlets for coalition building, dissent, and critique. Jackson and Welles build their definition of networked counterpublics from ’ (2012) understanding of “counterpower”—a form of resistance made possible by subversive networks organizing and participating in online spheres. Participants in networked counterpublics, then, are able to “leverage the architecture of the social web to advance their cause” (Jackson & Foucault Welles, p. 4).

51 Historically, the most direct connection to the current use of the hashtag originated in (IRC) as way to name conversation channels. The “#” typographical mark was, of course, used prior to IRC and the Web—for example, the (also known as the octothorpe, pound sign, or hash symbol) is found on typewriters and touch-tone phones. Within the last decade, the symbol was adopted on Twitter—first, as a kind of user-born way to group like-messages together, and then, as a formal feature built into the architecture of the platform (they have since spread to other platforms, including Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram, to name a few).

79

Figure 4.3. Pictured above is an image that shows the ironic turn of the hashtag hijack of #myNYPD.

Certainly, this was the case for the #myNYPD hijack. Participants used the affordances of Twitter’s architecture—particularly the hashtag function—to key-into the already in motion set of tweets about the NYPD. This required that Twitter participants surf the moving archives of trending topics already in circulation on the platform; then, acting kairotically by leveraging the virality of the initial tweet, users intervened in the flow of #MyNYPD to offer counter portrayals of police-citizen interactions. In so doing, the swell of activity, the re-direction of the hashtag, offered citizens a networked counterpublic to circulate their concerns and critiques, as well as other affective responses connected to race relations and the state. While hashtag hijacks are increasingly frequent, #MyNYPD is unique in that it continues to circulate today—and is often deployed by everyday writers. In many cases, participants use the tag as a kind of watchdog for the NYPD, as Twitter users will often include the hashtag when linking to news stories or telling their own stories about unfavorable police-citizen interactions— particularly those in New York City. After the killing of Eric Garner by the hands of an NYPD officer, for example, people used the already in motion #MyNYPD to insert new stories about police brutality and racial profiling. For another example, after a grand jury failed to indict police in the killing of Tamir Rice, the tag was redeployed when protestors took the to the streets of New York out of protest. To this end, the tag is often paired with other activist hashtags attached to broader public discussions about race, police violence, and structural , including #BlackLivesMatter, #ICantBreathe, and #SayHerName.

80 In addition to keying-in to stories about high-profile deaths of black people in the United States, more everyday examples of redeploying #myNYPD are present on Twitter and other platforms. Some examples include citizens posting images of police officers parking illegally in bike lanes or sidewalks, while others introduce stories of officers using racist language in public places. For an example of the latter, one Twitter user, a reporter for Motherboard, included the hashtag when she wrote on her public account, “Just had the pleasure of standing next to three (loudly!) Islamophobic police officers for the entire duration of my commute to work #myNYPD.” She followed with another message: “Free story idea: there’s no way to anonymously report NYPD officers, they hand them a transcript of your complaint with your name & address.” This kind of open critique about the NYPD on platforms like Twitter no doubt took place before the #myNYPD hashtag began to circulate. What’s important here, though, is that the hashtag serves to compile and organize a collective swarm, as Jane Bennett (2010) might have it, of vernacular discourse aimed at protesting and challenging everyday police operations. While those who use the hashtag toward social justice ends did not make the initial distribution of #MyNYPD, its subsequent circulation—its tactical reuse—is undoubtedly tied to inventive rhetorical practices aimed at challenging and changing the status quo about race relations in the United States. Indeed, the rhetorical work of the #MyNYPD hijack—a seemingly simple and reactive intervention—should not be overlooked, for such tactical interventions perform important inventive work. In a Present Tense special issue, “Race, Rhetoric, and the State,” editors Alexandra Hidalgo and Donnie Johnson Sackey (2015) argued that our current moment demands rhetorical invention to dismantle systems of structural racism that violently and disproportionately affect people of color on a daily basis. As they put it:

The confluence of race, rhetoric, and state turns our attention toward communities of distress, resulting from generations of socially-engineered structural inequality. This is a moment that calls for rhetoric and action. Rhetoric is often associated with analysis and critique. [We], however, think about this rhetorical moment as one that calls for story and invention. (n.p.)

Hidalgo and Sackey argued the inventional dimensions of rhetoric must be put into action to not only challenge systems of racism, but also to invent new social futures for bodies that have historically been oppressed and marginalized. I see the continual re-circulation of #myNYPD performing this kind of story and inventive work. What started as a reactive and adaptive response has morphed into a kind of mobile topos out of which new critiques and stories arise. By topos, here, I draw on Carolyn Miller’s (2000) rereading of the Aristotelian term. For Miller, topoi are devices that teeter between the known and the unknown: they are inventive “borderlands” where rhetors “hunt” for novel uses, “vantage point[s]” that can “reveal or make possible new combinations, patterns, [and] relationships that could not be seen before” (p. 142). Interestingly, in her rereading, Miller invoked metis in her articulation of topical invention. Specifically, she drew out a connection between metis, topoi, and hunting. From this converged standpoint, a topos “is a space, or located perspective, from which one searches” (p.141). As Miller put it using the metaphor of the hunt, “what the hunter finds is never completely unexpected but may be startling or surprising— and may be put to novel uses” (p. 143). To position #myMYPD as a topos in this sense would suggest that everyday writers can trace, follow, and track the movement of the hashtag—and intervene when necessary. This is a

81 kind of metic invention for the digital age, where rhetors navigate the circulation of social media platforms in order to hook-into already circulating discourses. As discussed in Chapter 1, this mode of invention can be understood through Debra Hawhee’s (2002) notion of “invention-in- the-middle”—that is, invention, for Hahwee, is made possible through rhetorical or kairotic encounters. This is not to suggest that such encounters always occur out of happenstance. Rather, by tracing the circulation of the hashtag #MyNYPD—its ebbs and flows, its related discourses, its affective attachments—rhetors are subject to what we might think of a series of rhetorical encounters that “mandate response” (Hawhee, 2002, p. 25). Through kairotic splicings into the circulation of #myNYPD, much inventive rhetorical response has taken place. We see this in forms of networked protest and dissent, to affective and embodied responses of solidarity, pain, and anger, to larger critiques about dominant . Unlike the other examples of tactical rhetorics I’ve explored in the previous chapter, the hijacking of #MyNYPD shows how tactical action need not be accomplished by any one individual. Indeed, this story highlights how the collective action of many bricoleurs can propel counter rhetorics into dominant publics. As Welles and Brooke argued, “No single tweet introduced alternative narratives of policing, but a collection of tweets created and spread by a networked counterpublic allowed these narratives to temporarily gain traction in the public sphere” (p. 17). As high levels of circulation for individual texts is increasingly more attainable due to the distribution opportunities afforded by social media platforms, so too are opportunities for tactical intervention and redistribution. In all, hashtag hijacks represent a distinctly digital version of tactical rhetoric. Hashtags are premier rhetorical objects that circulate in public spheres. By making do with a feature so prevalent on today’s social media platforms, the inventive act of hijacking already in motion hashtags affords digital bricoleurs the opportunity to join-in public and counterpublic discussions. More than this, hashtag hijacks also allow everyday writers to question the status quo, to network with others, and, as seen in the case of #MyNYPD, to question institutions that have routinely used violent tactics against black and brown bodies.

The Real @OxfordAsians: An Embodied, Multimodal Performance That Repurposed Circulating Discourse In the spring of 2013, a Twitter account under the handle of @OxfordAsians began circulating at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The account played on racist stereotypes of a growing population of students within the region—namely, international students from Asian countries, and particularly those from . The circulating tweets, however, would soon be reconsidered—recycled for another reason, one aimed at challenging the ideological assumptions underpinning the words and images circulating on the @OxfordAsians feed. The OxfordAsians account, like the name suggests, characterized a diverse cultural and ethic group of students into a single vision of “Oxford Asians.” And it did so largely through the use of stereotypes. The racial stereotyping of this account was accomplished in many ways. Much was done through its use of visuals. For example, the background image included a tiled image of a sushi roll and the profile picture featured an image of an Asian man with long hair and a mustache—what I later found out was an image of the “Asian Prince” meme (see Figure 4.4). Know Your Meme, a website that purports to “research and document” viral phenomena, described the Asian Prince meme as a “fake Internet personality” whose Mandarin name

82 translates to “I am so ugly” (n.p.)52 On top of the displayed on the Twitter account, the alphabetic writing on the Twitter page included racist discourse that homogenized all “Oxford Asians.” The tweets—many of which included broken English—included stereotypes about Asian culture and food, as well as characterizing all Asians as being obsessed with grades, honor, and money. For example, one of the tweets read, “I ask professor 7 questions in a row. New record!” Another tweet read, “Father say key to success is in USA is drive fancy car even if I can’t drive good.” And another tweet stated, “I found the cutest cat outside Thompson Hall. I made him lunch box special”.

Figure 4.4. Pictured above is a screenshot of the profile image and background of the @OxfordAsians Twitter account.

The Twitter account was eventually deactivated—but not before it gained more than 1,000 followers. According to The Oxford Townie, the individual who started the Twitter account, Sam Kornau, a white male student at Miami University, claimed it was a “parody” feed that satirized the Asian population of the local community. In a statement written for the news publication, Kornau defended the Twitter page, claiming, “satire is meant to bring to light social issues (and, in this instance, stereotypes) in a witty way in the hope that it will promote self examination and constructive dialogue about the issues presented” (Krause & Averett, 2013, n.p.). Though its circulation worked to further isolate and segregate a growing population of international students, @OxfordAsians faced multiple critiques once members of the university and the local newspaper discovered the account.

52 Know Your Meme is a staffed website that also relies on user-generated entries, much like Wikipedia. To see more on the Asian Prince meme, see http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/asian-prince.

83

Figure 4.5. Pictured above is a photo from the Real @Oxford Asians campaign, a multimodal response to the Twitter account @OxfordAsians from the Asian and Asian American Association.

One such critique was an intervention launched by a student group that tactically repurposed the circulating tweets to draw attention to how the Twitter account served to further marginalize a of students. Following the removal of the Twitter page, members the Asian and Asian American Association (AAA), launched a campaign, “the Real @OxfordAsians,” aimed at countering the harmful tweets (see Figure 4.5). In addition to writing a lengthy editorial regarding the racist Twitter page, the group also distributed a slideshow that contained images of Asian, Asian American, and allied students holding signs that reappropriated some of the hurtful language expressed on the Twitter site. Written on the signs were the original tweets taken verbatim from the Twitter feed; however, the signs also included additional words aimed at challenging the offensive language of individual tweets. For example, one sign read, “I ask professor 7 questions in a row,” but then continues, “at least I’m learning in college” (see Figure 4.6). In another example, playing off an original tweet that stated, “Confucius say man who drop watch in toilet has a shitty time,” a member of the campus organization crossed out the latter half of the message and wrote, “Confucius say it is easy to hate and difficult to love.”

84

Figure .. Pictured above is a tweet posted from the account @OxfordAsians, which reads I ask Professor questions in a row. New record! Below is a re-appropriated response, which was part of the Real @OxfordAsians campaign. It reads I ask professor questions in a row…at least I’m learning in college.

What kind of rhetorical and political work is being accomplished here? One way to understand the rhetorical work occurring is through Kenneth Burke’s (1954) notion of perspective by incongruity. For Burke, perspective by incongruity involves breaking “piety”— what Burke described as “the sense of what properly goes with what” (p. 74). In Burke’s terms, piety, as Julia Allen and Lester Faigley (1995) explained, does not signal religious connotations. Rather, Allen and Faigley described the rhetorical practice as such:

By juxtaposing incongruous ideas, Burke says, we “shatter pieties.” In other words, by juxtaposing one ideological correctness together with another, of a different ideological stripe, the two call each other into question. And it is more likely that the less powerful one will act upon the other in such a way as to reduce its power; the piety will thus be shattered. (p. 162)

The campaign by the Real@OxfordAsians, then, sets two ideologies into stark opposition with one another with the goal being to, in Burke’s terms, “shatter piety” of the problematic . Moreover, the juxtaposition of seemingly disembodied discourse (accomplished through the anonymity of the account) with the embodied performance of the student works to show that the original tweets in circulation have consequentiality for the flesh-and-blood people of the community. I also read this intervention as an example of metic adaptation. While members of the Asian and Asian American Association did not originally compose the discourse found on

85 “OxfordAsians,” they nonetheless “made do” with it, and in such a way, were able to claim a sense of agency by occupying and redeploying the circulating words. As I noted in Chapter 1, agency in metic/tactical approaches can be understood through Judith Butler’s notion of radical resignification. Like much critical theory, Butler draws upon the Althusserian notion of interpellation to explain how people become subjects by being hailed into discourse by an authoritative figure. To put this in to terms of hate speech, a subject becomes oppressed or injured when a dominant figure hails them into a position of subordination. For Butler, though, this ambiguous power does not alone lie with the one who interpellates the other. Instead, Butler argued that racist speech is “citational,” that it has a history. She wrote, “racist speech works through the invocation of convention: it circulates, and though it requires the subject for its speaking, it neither begins nor ends with the subject who speaks or with the specific names that is used” (p. 34). In the case of @OxfordAsians, members of the Asian and Asian American community were hailed into particular subject positions. Yet, as “the Real @OxfordAsians” shows, the potential for agency (or something like it) is possible when one draws on—and subsequently redirects—the citational power of how they were hailed into a particular position in the first place. To put it another way, the accepting of the label “Oxford Asians,” and the subsequent redeployment of it, offers a sense of agency and resistance. That is, by temporarily occupying the label imposed, students perform a radical transformation of the original slur. In addition to the discourse written on the signs, the corporal dimensions of the Real @OxfordAsians should not be overlooked. As described throughout this project, a tactical rhetoric, as informed by metis, is tied to the body. As scholars like Jay Dolmage (2014) and Debra Hawhee (2005) have argued, the cunning of the body allows for rhetors to contest opposition through responsive, adaptive, and performative gestures. Dolmage drew on de Certeau to explain metis as the “use of embodied strategies, what Certeau calls ‘everyday arts,’ to transform rhetorical situations” (p. 5). As the students responding to the OxfordAsians account elected to include visual representations of their bodies—to put their bodies on the line—they aimed to transform the rhetorical situation into a pedagogical undertaking. Indeed, in an interview53 I conducted with Mimi, one of the members of the AAA, I was told that the @Real OxfordAsians campaign was pedagogical in its aims. In our interview, Mimi expressed the desire to challenge the notion that the OxfordAsians account didn’t have a real effect on people on the campus. As she put it, “People think if you’re not [physically] hurting somebody, than it’s fine […]. We were challenging that they were talking about actual people.” Thus the embodied response—of using portraits of individuals who were, in one way or another, affected by the Twitter account—was very purposeful. Mimi explained to me that the portraits were meant to individualize members of the Asian and Asian-American community on campus. Certainly, the act of making handwritten signs that repurposed the circulating tweets further accomplished this individualized aesthetic. Both moves served to directly challenge the all- encompassing rhetoric espoused by the original Twitter account. It’s also worthwhile to draw attention to the delivery choices of the Real @OxfordAsians intervention. Interestingly, the members of the AAA chose not to respond to the OxfordAsians account directly on Twitter—that is, they did not repurpose the circulating tweets using the affordances of the platform itself. While one reason for this decision was likely due to the deactivation of OxfordAsians on Twitter, many other factors went into their decision. According

53 This semi-structured interview was approved and exempted by Miami University’s Institutional Review Board in Spring 2014. I’ve used a pseudonym for the interviewee.

86 to Mimi, the @OxfordAsians response—the decisions they made regarding the campaign’s delivery as well as its overall message—involved a carefully planned and much discussed approach. It could be assumed that the AAA’s decision to intervene was quite linear: i.e., 1) the racist Twitter account begins to circulate, 2) campus community gets wind of the page, and 3) the AAA responds directly to the Twitter account. This linear progression, however, obscures the more nuanced variables that led to the group’s deployment of tactical rhetoric. In our interview, Mimi described that the AAA spent much time deliberating about the most effective approach to take and was especially cautious about how to respond. In particular, Mimi noted that prior to the discovery of the Twitter page at her university, her group was made aware of an especially volatile situation that happened at the nearby Ohio State University called “OSU Haters.” According to a Jorge Rivas, a contributor to the activist news organization ColorLines, OSU Haters is a Tumblr page that “takes hateful and/or racially insensitive tweets posted by other Ohio State students and lays them out for the world to see” (n.p.). Mimi explained that her organization did not want to take the same approach as OSU Haters: “we didn’t want to fight racial slurs with more racial slurs.” Instead, the group decided to “attack the general mindset, not the individual person” in what Mimi described as a positive approach. The delivery and distribution decisions—i.e., composing a slide show on a blogging platform and using embodied images with handwritten signs—allowed the AAA to circulate a concerted, coherent, and relatively controlled message. In other words, members of the AAA were able to collaboratively design and distribute a unified message that represented the views of the group. Moreover, I suspect that responding directly on a platform like Twitter would certainly subject individual members of the AAA to potential harassers. Indeed, the architecture of Twitter has become infamous for permitting mobs of people—often anonymous—to harass single users. Yet, the decision to distribute the response on the blog platform still allowed for members of the AAA to develop a portable message, as many within the local community at Miami University posted links on social media platforms that allowed the intervention to circulate beyond its initial distribution. For example, many within a community of mine—the English graduate program at Miami University—posted links to the blog, along with supporting messages of the campaign. Finally, this story also shows that circulation need not “go viral” for it to have impact on communities. That is, the original @OxfordAsians account did not circulate at viral rates— nevertheless, its circulation negatively affected many people in a local community. I draw on Laurie Gries’ (2015) description of virality, which she argued should be reserved for media content that are “highly mobile, contagious, replicable, metacultural, and reflexive” (p. 285). Although @OxfordAsians certainly circulated rapidly within the local Oxford and Miami community, it didn’t experience some other features that are the mark virality (such as being replicated and transformed). Yet, this story illustrates that tactical approaches need not compose out of viral content to have political power in a community. As I see it, this story offers an important reminder for digital rhetoric scholars and teachers. When we talk about circulation with our students and in our research, we should resist the urge to talk only about objects that achieve viral circulation. We should instead be mindful of how the circulation of rhetoric in local ecologies can have profound impacts on everyday people. To this end, if want to encourage writers to intervene in the flow of ongoing discourse, to experiment with tactical approaches, we should not limit that to the latest and greatest viral event.

87 @Randi_Ebooks: A Twitter Bot that Tactically Confronts Misogyny Online54 In 2014, the GamerGate tag began to circulate on Twitter, , , 8chan, and IRC channels. Although origin stories somewhat differ,55 most accounts suggest GamerGate emerged as a response by those within videogame cultures who took issue with so-called progressive journalistic voices in the industry (i.e., those who began to question the male-dominated gaming industry). In response, mobs of people hooked-in to the circulating tag, GamerGate, to offer their opinions—often sexist, violent, and vengeful—on the subject of “ethics” in journalism. Many of the responses took the form of violent death or rape threats against women and their allies. In effect, GamerGate has become synonymous with massive swarms of online harassment targeted against women in or connected to the gaming industry, and particularly against women within the industry who speak out against misogynistic themes inherent in many popular game franchises. As The New York Times reported in 2014, many women have been targets in the GamerGate campaign.56 To be sure, though, a handful of women have become “the face” of GamerGate. These include media producer and critic Anita Sarkeesian, gaming developer Briana Wu, and gaming journalist Zoë Quinn. In the wake of GamerGate, the news media began reporting on the multitude of abuse these women received online. In addition to death threats and rape threats, a common tactic used against women has been doxxing—or, the act of publishing private information about people on public forums in an effort to shame or humiliate them. Not only did women face harassment online (which in and of itself, of course, has severe real-life consequences), but the threat of violence entered many women’s professional and physical lives on a regular basis. Several media events by women in the industry were canceled as GamerGate began to circulate at more viral rates. Sarkeesian, for example, was forced to cancel a speaking engagement at Utah State University because a representative from the university received a threat claiming “the deadliest school shooting in American history” would occur if Sarkeesian gave her lecture (McDonald, 2014, n.p.). It appears that this threat, as well as others, had connections to GamerGate. In the days preceding her public lecture, Sarkeesian tweeted, “Multiple specific threats made stating intent to kill me & feminists at USU. For the record one threat did claim affiliation with #gamergate.” Nearly a year after Sarkeesian was forced to cancel her speaking engagment, another major event, this time a panel on online harassment at the annual Conference, was canceled for “safety reasons.” I put this phrase in quotes because many were unhappy with the way South by Southwest handled the cancelation—especially the larger message it sent in regards to women in the gaming industry. These cancelations—and the reasons behind them—point to the very real dangers connected to GamerGate. While there are many who faced, and continue to face, harassment in the wake of the circulation of GamerGate, I focus on the story of Randi Harper, and her development of a

54 I want to express my deepest thanks to Les Hutchinson for pointing me to @randi_ebooks as an example of a trickster bot. 55 A common origin story suggests the hashtag was created on Twitter by actor Adam Baldwin. I hedge here because the story is more complex than an actor coining the hashtag. Indeed, the GamerGate story is said to begin with a blog written by Eron Gjoni about his breakup with game developer Zoe Quinn. After the fallout from this blog, Baldwin coined the hashtag in response to the story—citing a perceived lack of ethics in the gaming community. See Adrienne Massanari’s (2015) essay, “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” 56 See Nick Wingfield’s (2014) “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘GamerGate’ Campaign.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/technology/gamergate-women-video-game-threats-anita-sarkeesian.html?_r=0

88 Twitter bot coded to interact with harassers by recirculating phrases from Harper’s own Twitter archive. The idea here was for Harper’s bot to deal with harassment, not Harper herself. But before I detail Harper’s unique tactical intervention, I want to briefly explain how she herself became the target of GamerGate violence. A DevOps engineer turned social activist turned CEO of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative, Harper has explained57 that she couldn’t stay silent about abuse women receive online, especially in the wake of GamerGate. As a way to offer her support and challenge misogynistic voices on Twitter, Harper began tweeting about the real effects of harassment for many women who are active online. As she explained in a public lecture given at a conference (BDSCan 2015), she experienced a surge of online abuse after tweeting in support of women online. And the harassment has not stopped. “Because I’m very public about my goals,” Harper wrote on her blog, “I am constantly under fire from GamerGate and other hate groups. I can’t go to a conference without a security escort. I had to move to a different state and go into hiding…” (n.p.). A quick Google search will show how harassers have doxxed Harper, writing smear pieces and web entries that criticize Harper (often related to her appearance) and include deeply personal details about her life. As she put it in her blog, when swarms of people online attempted to accost her (more than 45 thousand mentions in five weeks, according to her estimates), it became “literally impossible to have a ‘healthy discussion’ with that many people.” She continued, “Even if it was possible to talk to everyone, the value of the conversations was not substantial enough to justify the energy and time. Your right to be heard is not greater than my right to not be harassed by a mob of people.” In response to the very real threats she has received, Harper has explained that she felt dissatisfied with Twitter’s procedures for blocking users—so much so that she developed her own blocking tool: Good Game Auto Blocker (also called ggautoblocker). Harper described the history of the tool on her website:

A major problem with social media is the lack of flexible filtering controls. Twitter has a block mechanism, but a user has to initiate contact in order to be blocked. For most forms of harassment, this is an effective way of moderating conversations. Unfortunately, as more social campaigns use Twitter as their basis for communications, this approach becomes less effective. While it’s suitable for use against a single harasser, it’s useless against a large number of accounts targeting a single user. These tweets needed to be stopped before they land in the user’s notifications. (n.p.)

In other words, in instances where people receive massive swarms of harassment online—as with what became common with GamerGate—Twitter’s platform-based blocking procedures are unsuccessful.

57 This information is found in both public news articles, as well as public entries on her blog. See http://blog.randi.io/.

89 Figure 4.7. Pictured above is a screenshot from the Twitter bot upon which @randi_ebooks is based. The horse_ebooks account famously tweeted phrases from a circulating archive of ebooks about horses, which produced textual fragments such as everything happens so much.

Enter Good Game Auto Blocker. As Harper described it, “Good Game Auto Blocker compares the follower lists for a given set of Twitter accounts. If anyone is found to be following more than one of these accounts, they are added to a list and blocked” (n.p.). In other words, if a Twitter user is following many known GamerGate supporters, the ggautoblocker will block the user, preventing the one who installed ggautoblocker from interacting with the user. What’s important to note here is that users who are blocked are added to a list that is shared widely— especially with those most caught up in the GamerGate vitriol. In other words, not only does ggautoblocker work for Harper’s own account, keeping potential harassers out of her social media feed, but it’s a tool she designed to be shared with others facing similar online threats. She posted the open-source code to her Github account, and has invited others to sign up for “Block Together,” a service that allows Twitter users to share block lists. While Good Game Auto Blocker has received much attention as being a positive force for confronting abuse and harassment online, I share Harper’s story to emphasize another intervention she made while getting caught up in GamerGate harassment: the coding of the Twitter bot @randi_ebooks. The discursive marker “ebooks” relates to the Internet phenomenon “@horse_ebooks.” Like many spambots on Twitter, @horse_ebooks was programmed to include links to sell products online—in this case, e-books about horses. To avoid automated spam detection, however, @horse_ebooks would intersperse tweets that pulled fragments from the e- books it was trying to sell. The idea is to get people on Twitter to believe the bot is a real person. To do so, the @horse_ebooks bot was repurposing textual fragments already circulating in e- books hosted online. The result was a series of almost poetic tweets, such as, “Everything happens so much” and “We speak and breathe everything” (see Figure 4.7).58

58 In a somewhat controversial turn of events, it was later revealed that the horse_ebooks account was sold to the performance artist Jacob Bakkila in 2011. As such, much the horse_ebooks tweets were not automated by a software agent but were carefully crafted by a human. Nevertheless, intense appreciation for the earlier iterations of the bot remains. See Susan Orlean’s (2013) “Horse_ebooks Is a Human After All.” http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/horse_ebooks-is-human-after-all

90 Figure 4.8. Pictured above is a screenshot of a Twitter participant engaging the bot @randi_ebooks, an interaction of 31 back-and-forth messages between a bot and a human.

Following the same protocol as “horse_ebooks,” Harper programmed @randi_ebooks to tweet randomly assembled phrases from Harper’s personal Twitter account. In addition to the ebooks handle, she used the screen name “Generic Gamer Girl.” Not only would Harper’s bot tweet a phrase every twenty-four hours, but it would also respond to those who tried to interact with it. And because Harper had often tweeted about GamerGate and online harassment, many of the bot’s tweets included common hashtags and phrases that were connected to circulating discourse about GamerGate. In effect, Harper programmed a kind of tactical bot—a program that repurposed Harper’s own Twitter archive to distribute phrases that regularly garnered attention from GamerGate harassers. As she told a reporter for Buzzfeed, her blocklist kept her from having to interact with harassers on a daily basis, but her bot hasn’t stopped. “She kind of handles this garbage for me,” Harper explained.59 And indeed, with @randi_ebooks in circulation, GamerGate supporters have frequently attempted to engage with comments made by the bot. Because @randi_ebooks was programmed to respond to every mention made by Twitter users, many ensuing conversations happened between would-be harassers and the bot. Perhaps one of the more “lively” and lengthy strings of tweets occurred on January 30, 2015, after the bot tweeted “hunters remain a problem with women.” In response, a Twitter user under the handle “@FeministSpanker” replied to the tweet, asking, “how are hunters harming women exactly?” (see Figure 4.8). Harper’s bot shot back with a rather nonsensical reply: “addresses of the women that are tired of being an ‘ally’ – and is one of the women he targeted and dismissed.” @FeministSpanker replied back, and then the bot, and so on. By the end of the exchange, 31 back-and-forth comments between @randi_ebooks and @FeministSpanker had take place. Finally, toward the end of the exchange, @FeministSpanker tweeted, “What does that have to do with anything…. It’s as if you’re generating random phrases or something.” When

59 See Ryan Broderick (2014). http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/do-androids-dream-of-ethics-in-games- journalism#.boay2Op7A2

91 @randi_books replied, like she’s programmed to do, the bot retorted with yet another random phrase. Read as a kind of metic trick, @randi_ebooks works through disguise. According to Detienne and Vernant,

In order to dupe its victim [metis] assumes a form which masks, instead of revealing, its true being. In metis appearance and reality no longer correspond to one another but stand in contrast, producing an effect of illusion, apate, which beguiles the adversary into error and leaves him bemuses by his defeat as by the spells of a magician. (p. 21)

As a source of metic invetiveness, @randi_ebooks beguiles her adversaries by tweeting Harper’s own messages. Rearranged and rearticulated, the stream of tweets was coded to resonate with GamerGate supporters. As the 31-comment exchange points out, such a tactic has the ability to leave the adversary bemused by his defeat—or, at the very least, may make him ponder his embarrassment. This is an interesting tactical approach for a number of reasons. Unlike any of the other stories I’ve explored in this dissertation, Harper re-used her own circulating discourse in an effort to challenge the massive swarm of harassment she and many others faced online. As I see it, such a crafty approach to confronting the unique issue at hand is the mark of Frank Farmer’s (2013) notion of the citizen bricoleur. As Farmer argued, bricoleurs have no pre-formed rules to go about their tasks; they use what’s available to get the job done. In Harper’s case, as a woman facing a mob of harassment online for speaking out against GamerGate, the job to be accomplished was not only to block a mob of harassers but also to keep them busy from harassing others. Certainly, @randi_ebooks accomplished the latter, and although interactions between the bot and would-be harassers sometimes verged on the comical, the goal of reducing noxious interactions with GamerGate supporters was better reached through Harper’s deft programming and technology knowledge. What’s more, the bot serves a dual purpose in that it maintains a list of who’s been blocked via the Good Game Auto Blocker tool. According to Harper’s github account, @randi_ebooks is the account connected to ggautoblocker. As she explained, “The easiest way to check if you’re on the block list is to verify if @randi_ebooks is blocking you. This is the account that maintains and shares the block list” (n.p.).60 This means that Harper’s bot functions as a kind of public service for others facing online harassment. Those who wish to avoid interactions with probable GamerGater harassers can install the same block list as @randi_ebooks, which includes more than 10,000 Twitter users. I want to point out that, due to Twitter’s blocking policy, @randi_ebooks is still able to interact with those it blocks. In other words, blocking a user on Twitter still allows for interaction. Those who block users, however, won’t receive notifications from the ones whom they have blocked. This allows the bot to both block users and interact with them, both necessary features for the purpose of this bot. Another aspect of Harper’s story that merits note is the deployment of automated software agents—or bots—as a tactic for social change. Mark Sample (2014) has begun to categorize the range of bots that operate on the web, and he’s particularly noted the rise of a class of bots he calls “protest bots.” For Sample, protest bots “take a stand” on social issues and can be understood as a kind of tactical media. Drawing on Rita Raley’s (2009) influential work, Sample theorized protest bots as forms of media activism that engage in “a micropolitics of disruption,

60 See https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker.

92 intervention, and education” (n.p.). Though Sample’s work is particularly invested in protest bots that are “neither playful nor nonsensical,” I consider @randi_ebooks a kind of protest bot—it certainly works to disrupt and intervene, and I would argue that @randi_ebooks inserts a form of education into public spheres. The goal here, though perhaps lofty and not always attainable, is that once harassers on the web discover they have been duped by a program, tricked by a bot, they may, at least temporarily, reconsider what their attempts to accost unknown women online actually accomplish. Certainly, one can quibble with how much social change Harper’s bot actually accomplished. Did @randi_ebooks sincerely make GamerGate supporters recognize alternative points of view and change their minds? Probably not. But like Raley’s (2009) articulation of tactical media, Harper’s protest bot offers an “on-the-fly critical intervention,” disrupting the overwhelming flow of harassment in the wake of GamerGate (p. 6). Raley quoted from the Critical Art Ensemble to note that tactical media are responses that are “constantly reconfigured to meet social demands” (p. 6). If you were to look up @randi_ebooks on Twitter today, you would notice that the bot has retried, as the last tweet was distributed in 2014. As the overwhelming mass of GamerGate activity has dwindled, the kairotic moment for Harper’s bot to intervene is less critical. When considering how Harper’s bot worked toward social change, like all tactical media projects aimed at disruption in the here and now, we can interpret it as “hopeless desperation” or as a “strong battle against the currents” (Raley, 2009, p. 8). I choose the latter. It may have not been the best way to move forward, but it was a way forward: a kind of performance that cedes the fantasy of overcoming power, but instead works within what’s given to change unfavorable outcomes into temporary modes of resistance. In sum, @randi_ebooks represents a programed version of tactical rhetoric, an inventive, resistant, and perhaps unexpected tactic for combating the onslaught of misogyny Harper faced during the GamerGate controversy. Read as a form of tactical media, randi_ebooks infused disruption into the circulation of GamerGate, setting a target on “the next five minutes” (Raley, 2009, p. 6), operating blow-by-blow, tweet-by-tweet. These tactical maneuvers, though verging on playful and nonsensical, are more goal-oriented than they might first appear. Harper’s trickster bot keeps the harassers at bay. In the meanwhile, Harper can focus her efforts on larger collaborative efforts to curb online violence.

Conclusion This chapter has told an array of stories, and has thereby explored a range of public interventions made by digital bricoleurs. From the inventive work of a high-profile event aimed at challenging race relations, (#MyNYPD), to the local performance of a community groups aimed at upsetting racial stereotypes (The Real @OxfordAsians), and finally to the crafty tactics a programmed bot aimed at confronting gender harassment (@randi_ebooks). There are certainly many other political forms of digital bricolage, from blow-by-blow social media redistributions to more advanced coding tactics. Similarly, as I’ll explore more in Chapter 6, tactical approaches can be used for ill, for coercive ends. To be sure, this chapter just scratches the surface of digital tactical rhetorics. Yet, the three stories told here can provide rhetoric and writing researchers and scholars with important takeaways. Chiefly, the dynamic circulation of archives already in motion provide public rhetors with unique opportunities to join publics and counterpublics, and, when repurposed and reimagined, they especially afford opportunities for critique, civic and community performance, and disruption. To this end, tactical rhetorics performed on social

93 media present occasions for networked coalition building and protest, a way to connect bodies, discourses, and sentiments together. These stories also demonstrate the kind of metic inventiveness I discussed in earlier sections of this dissertation. That is, each story explores how writers intervened in public discourse by composing out of circulation—by forging together new compositions out of already circulating ones. In the case of the #myNYPD networked event, digital writers have continued to repurpose what began as an institutionalized hashtag to counter how the New York Police Department positioned themselves to public constituents. The initial tactical response of the hashtag involved redeploying already circulating images—many of which were captured at Occupy Wall Street protests—to comment on the tactics used by officers on protesting citizens. The continual redeployment of the tag has since morphed into a kind of topos that offers digital writers a commonplace to circulate messages of dissent and protest. In the case of the Real OxfordAsians adaptation, community members were able to turn an offensive and insensitive stream of tweets into a pedagogical moment that sowed criticism and education into a community increasingly marked by cultural and national segregation. Using a distinctly embodied aesthetic, the inventive tactics of the AAA made anew out of circulating tweets by turning the racist discourse against itself, challenging both the author of the original tweets as well as the greater campus community who tacitly endorsed the tweets to rethink how Asian students are discursively and materially positioned within a predominately white and class-privileged student body. Essentially, the AAA harnessed and reimagined a prevailing ideology that simultaneously exoticized and homogenized all Asian and Asian American students into a single vision of “Oxford Asians.” Rearticulating “Oxford Asians” into the “Real Oxford Asians,” the AAA kairotically adapted a disparaging Twitter archive into a campaign that signaled resistance and empowerment. In the case of @randi_ebooks, perhaps most different from the other two stories, we see a kind of programmed inventional tactic that an already circulating archive to attract would-be online harassers. Harper’s bot turns her own circulating tweets into a kind of bait, luring potential interlocutors to engage in what will inevitably amount to a nonsensical debate. This is a responsive and adaptive invention—a working within what’s given in perhaps an unexpected way—to challenge the multitudes of misogyny Harper and other women faced online in the wake of GamerGate. In conjunction with her Good Game Auto Blocker tool, her tactic of programming an ebooks bot helped Harper deal with the problem at hand. Frank Farmer (2013) articulated a vision of an everyday citizen activist, one who practices “a micropolitics of bricolage—a politics of those dispersed, imaginative, and clandestine acts of making do” (p. 53). My hope is that this chapter began to detail how a micropolitics of bricolage manifests in digital spheres. Adaptive and responsive, the digital bricoleur searches moving archives and makes use of a repertoire available to best approach the issue at hand. The toolbox of the digital bricoleur can never be known once and for all. From crude ploys to complex technological innovations, the digital bricoleur’s interventions are wily and constantly morphing. One thing is for certain: the acts of the digital bricoleur, as I posit this figure, are committed to improving the social conditions in which she finds herself.

94 Chapter 5 Circulation Gatekeepers: Copyright Regimes, Corporate Authorship, and the Cultural Politics of YouTube’s Content ID

Culture has always had its circulations – of shared symbols, images, and trends – but these circulations are now material in form: they are data within a cultural assemblage. We need to understand the underlying politics of these circulations of data, we need to understand how these data are sorted, filtered, and directed. —David Beer, 2013b

Social media platforms don’t just guide, distort, and facilitate social activity—they also delete some of it. They don’t just link users together; they also suspend them. They don’t just circulate our images and posts, they also algorithmically promote some over others. Platforms pick and choose. —Tarleton Gillespie, 2015

In Still Life with Rhetoric, Laurie Gries (2015) used the vibrant metaphor of a tumbleweed moving about the desert landscape to describe the process of circulation. In her new materialist account, Gries noted how tumbleweeds capture the dynamic nature of moving objects—how such objects pick up other entities as they move across time and space. The tumbleweed mixes with other debris; it moves, morphing and changing as it accumulates and loses mass throughout its circulatory life. As Gries maintained, the lively movements of the tumbleweed encapsulates Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of intra-action—that is, as a tumbleweed travels and moves within its material space, it and the other matter with which it encounters are mutually transformed. Tumbleweeds are transformed as they move; yet they also transform that which they encounter. This process names why circulation can be a powerful force in the world. As rhetorical things circulate throughout time and space, they transform and are simultaneously transformed by their material encounters. But what about materials that don’t spread—materials that can’t circulate? In a rather memorable moment in her discussion of tumbleweeds, Gries wrote:

I have had many encounters with tumbleweeds and have always been amazed by their movement and their capacity for change. When I lived on eighty acres outside Santa Fe, for example, tumbleweeds would roll through my property, pausing by a barbed wire fence on the side of my house—sometimes for hours, sometimes for days—before moving on. […] This may sound kind of strange, but I often felt sorry for the tumbleweeds caught there on the fence, blowing in the strong New Mexican winds. At times, I even walked out and ‘freed’ tumbleweeds, helping them reenter circulation. (71)

While Gries’ ultimate point in this passage is to describe how tumbleweeds acquire “new, significant meaning” during circulation, I want to use this chapter to mediate more on the metaphorical fence—on that which blocks, controls, or otherwise influences the circulation of materials in digital domains. The particular “fence” I investigate in this chapter is YouTube’s Content ID—a copyright filtering technology that affects the flow of videos on the world’s largest video-sharing platform. Importantly, though, what I want to show is that YouTube’s Content ID is not merely a digital

95 technology divorced from other sociopolitical actors. Situating Content ID within its broader cultural assemblage reveals that many cultural, economic, and legal factors have influenced the platform’s implementation of a system that has profound gatekeeping control over everyday people’s circulations. Indeed, Content ID, a system that’s not quite a decade old, is entangled within a much longer history and economic system—one predicated on distinct notions of sole authorship, proprietorship, and ownership, and one protected by expansions of copyright technologies, laws, and discourses (see, for example, Gillespie, 2007; Reyman, 2009; Rose, 1993; Woodmansee, 1984). Even in a so-called remix culture, where everyday writers can relatively easily distribute and redistribute materials via social media platforms, the promise of circulation is not a sure bet. There are many barriers—many fences—that rhetors today must navigate before their writing can move in networked economies, even if such barriers go largely unacknowledged or unexamined. My wager in this chapter is that untangling the intricacies of Content ID—and other systems like it—can provide a new line of inquiry for circulation studies, both in terms of research and pedagogy. As such, I pose the rhetorical framing of “circulation gatekeeper” as a heuristic that can be applied to many other social, cultural, economic, and technological regimes that influence the flow of discourse. Through a rhetorical analysis of Content ID, I aim to show how this particular gatekeeping technology gains discursive power through its alignment (Gillespie, 2007) with other entities, including strong rhetorical reframing from the content industries. The case I explore in this chapter is just one case of many in a set of larger, ongoing attempts to control the circulation of digital content online. At the heart of Content ID is a debate that rhetoric and composition scholars have long been paying attention to: the increasing use and abuse of copyright law, technologies, and other regulations to suppress and control the flow of digital materials. Indeed, this debate—and what has been called the copyright regime—has been on rhetoric and composition’s radar for more than three decades: in special editions of journals (e.g., Gurak & Johnson-Eilola, 1998; Kennedy & Howard, 2013; Rife, Westbrook, DeVoss, & Logie, 2010), in edited collections (e.g., Rife, Slattery, DeVoss, 2011; Westbrook, 2009), and in full-length manuscripts (e.g., Herrington, 1991; Logie, 2006; Reyman, 2009; Rife, 2013). As copyright scholarship has intensified in recent years, so too have the protections and extensions of copyright law. In tracing the evolution of United States copyright law from 1790 to the early 2000s, for example, John Logie (2011) identified four laws that have radically shifted the terms of U.S. copyright:  The No Electronic Theft (Net) Act of 1997—prompting the possibility of criminal (as opposed to civil) penalties for copyright infringements  The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998—extending the length of copyright protection by 20 years  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998—criminalizes activity that attempts to circumvent Digital Rights Management measures, heighted copyright infringement penalties, and provided safe harbors for Internet service operators to limit their copyright infringement liability  The Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act of 2002— limiting the kinds and amounts of materials allowed to be used in distance education settings In addition to Logie’s recounting of these major laws, other scholars have paid attention to particular court decisions. For example, James Porter and Martine Courant Rife (2005) and

96 Jessica Reyman (2009) have explored the MGM Studios v. Grokster case, a Supreme Court decision that held peer-to-peer services such as Grokster could be held liable for copyright infringements made by people using their software. While Porter and Rife explore the Grokster case in relation to the university and teaching, Reyman explored how powerful actors within the copyright debate—especially the content industry made up of record and movie companies— influenced the Court’s decision. This is all to say, the basic underlying assumption of this chapter—copyright laws, technologies, and stakeholders within the debates affect the circulation of writing—is not new to researchers in rhetoric and writing. What is changing, however, and what deserves more attention, are the ways in which specific social media platforms employ copyright systems that further align with entrenched copyright regimes to hold significant sway over the circulation of digital content. In this chapter, I begin by outlining YouTube’s short history, paying particular attention to how the platform implemented Content ID. In particular, I describe how Content ID is a mechanism that regularly falls short in accommodating fair use, and, more distressingly, its broad-strokes approach has given way to countless instances of copyright abuse. After describing Content ID’s key features and some of its inherent problems, I then frame it as a circulation gatekeeper by drawing on media scholars’ Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley’s (2013) understanding of “network gatekeepers,” a concept that is helpful for untangling the actors— both human and nonhuman—that influence the flow of digital materials. While this notion is a helpful starting point to begin asking critical questions about circulation flows in relation to YouTube’s Content ID, I articulate how Content ID derives its power through a “regime of alignment” (Gillespie, 2007), wherein various sociotechnical forces have justified its use and abuse. Specifically, I argue that Content ID privileges corporate authorship over alternative forms of authorship, and that such coding into its technological system is neither neutral nor coincidental. I show how mutual interests aligned—both Google as a company and media companies as an industry—to support Content ID through framing unauthorized use as legally and ethically transgressive (and particularly as a form of piracy), through reframing legal pressures and DMCA ambiguities into a “win-win” for multiple parties, and through maintaining an intricate, platform-specific discourse on copyright. Together, these alignments have technologically, ideologically, and materially justified a system that unabashedly controls and influences the digital flows of videos uploaded by citizens across the globe. I close this chapter by meditating on why we should care about circulation practices on one of the largest proprietary platforms on the social web. While an easy “fix” or resistant practice might be to avoid YouTube altogether, I want to point out how YouTube’s platform politics (Gillespie, 2010) make avoidance a more complex decision. From here, I discuss some possible ways we may resist copyright regimes, including efforts already underway by YouTube users and advocacy groups. Finally, I ask rhetoric and writing teachers, scholars, and activists to consider the role other circulation gatekeepers play in our daily lives, offering the frame I’ve set up in this chapter as a model that may be applied to other gatekeeping mechanisms in networked publics.

97 YouTube’s Content ID Since its humble beginnings of being launched in a Silicon Valley basement in 2005, YouTube has grown to be one of the most recognized platforms for video sharing and delivery. Statistics from 2014 indicated that YouTube has more than 1 billion users, and that more than 400 hours of content are uploaded to the platform every minute. Increasingly, the platform positions itself as a kind of public service—an entertainment and news source akin to television networks and cable programming. In addition to YouTube growing to be one of the premier distribution and circulation systems on the social web, it also has catapulted many of its users— often called “content creators”—to fame and financial success. Many popular YouTube content creators are quite entrepreneurial in their approach, using the platform to market and circulate their brand (see Burgess & Green, 2009). As many scholars have pointed out (e.g., Burgess & Green, 2009; Gillespie, 2010; van Dijck, 2013), YouTube underwent a major shift in 2006 when Google purchased it for $1.65 billion. This acquisition came with stark changes to both its digital branding and site architecture—most significantly, YouTube slowly moved from a predominantly “amateur” video-sharing website fueled by user-generated content to one that had major corporate media stakeholders in mind. In other words, as scholars such as Tarleton Gillespie (2010) have argued, Google’s purchase had consequences for multiple YouTube constituencies: YouTube no longer solely catered to amateur makers of user-generated content, but instead to both amateur and professional content makers alike. One of the major changes that coincided with Google’s acquisition of YouTube involved a systematic overhaul in how YouTube regulated intellectual property concerns. In addition to appealing to major media companies to monetize and distribute their content, YouTube faced legal pressures to protect the rights of copyright holders. A key case, Viacom v. YouTube, brought increased pressure for YouTube to develop procedures and mechanisms to control copyright holders’ materials.61 This case, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), involved Viacom suing YouTube in 2007 with a $1 billion copyright lawsuit. Viacom alleged that YouTube should be held responsible for thousands of copyright infringements made by YouTube users. But YouTube had some wiggle room. YouTube, like many other websites, is protected by “safe harbors” outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which essentially allow online content providers to host media content without fear of copyright infringement. As the EFF explained, “The whole idea of the DMCA safe harbors was to provide legal protections for online service providers like YouTube who otherwise would hesitate to create the online platforms that have revolutionized creativity culture and commerce.” 62 However, the Viacom v. YouTube case threatened to diminish or change the conditions of those established safe harbors. The Viacom v. YouTube case was eventually settled in 2014, and while the exact terms of the case have yet to be disclosed, it’s important to note that preceding

61 Of course, the move to staunchly control copyrighted works has a long history that is not particular to YouTube alone. YouTube, like many of the peer-to-peer file sharing technologies that preceded it, represents a notable shift in distribution. As Jessica Reyman (2009) has argued, older content distribution models “relied on an imbalanced power differential between producers of content and consumers of content” (p. 4). In contrast, peer-to-peer file sharing technologies began to put distribution power in the hands of everyday Internet users. In response, U.S. copyright laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) have imposed tighter restrictions on the use of digital works on the Internet. YouTube, as a kind of distribution intermediary, has not been exempt from corporate entities using the law to tighten copyright. 62 See https://www.eff.org/cases/viacom-v-youtube.

98 cases had ruled in favor of YouTube. Still, as a platform that has increasingly needed to appeal to major copyright holders, YouTube has increasingly broadened its own procedures for managing copyright concerns. Most notably, in the same year as Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube, the platform launched its use of a copyright filtering technology called “Content ID.” According to YouTube, Content ID is a system that “gives copyright holders choices about whether and how their content is shown on YouTube” (n.p.).63 To maintain such a system, copyright holders can provide YouTube with “reference files” of their copyrighted works (both audio and video works), which are then uploaded to a database. When users upload new videos to YouTube, uploads are scanned against the Content ID database for possible copyright infringements. Essentially, the idea here is to give copyright holders a way to protect their copyrighted materials without the human burden of searching all of YouTube’s archives for potential infringements. But more than this, Content ID also allows copyright holders to take action when new videos match reference files. If an upload matches a reference file, the user receives what YouTube calls a “content claim” that stipulates the copyright owner’s preference on how to manage their material. Copyright owners’ options include: muting audio for matching music, blocking the whole video from being viewed, monetizing the video by running ads, or tracking the viewership statistics of the video. If content owners choose to monetize their copyrighted works, YouTube receives a percentage of the ad revenue (roughly 45%). While YouTube touts Content ID as a selling point for its “partners” (listed as “major network broadcasters, film studios, and record labels”), it has been criticized as a mechanism that significantly affects everyday users’ abilities to claim fair use. To be sure, Content ID does allow users to dispute content claims if users “believe the system somehow misidentified” their uploaded video, or if users “have all the rights to use that copyright-protected content” (n.p.). What’s important to note here, though, is that power of deciding the status of the claim is tilted in the copyright holder’s favor—and it is ultimately the copyright holder who determines the validity of the dispute. That is, disputed claims are re-sent to copyright holders who have 30 days to uphold or release the claim. While users can appeal copyright holders’ decisions, the copyright holder again decides the appeal decision. Throughout this process, YouTube acts as an intermediary—using bots to flag copyrighted material, and bringing the attention to copyright holders who ultimately have the end decision on how claims will be managed.64 This move allows the platform to act in accordance with the DMCA’s safe harbors. Yet, this process begs the question—what about fair use?

Content ID, Fair Use, and Copyright Abuse While most scholars argue that a balanced view of copyright has the potential to advance and reward innovation, recent copyright laws—together with strong political and cultural discourses—have increasingly given rise to a chilling landscape where copyright is used to lock down cultural advancement (see, for example, Gillespie, 2007; Lessig, 2004; Reyman, 2009; Vaidyanathan, 2001). It is for this reason that scholars, teachers, and activists have pushed for

63 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370?hl=en 64 It will be interesting to see if precedent set by Lenz v. Universal Music Corp (2015) will affect copyright holders’ abuse of takedown notices. This case involved a wrongful takedown of a 30-second home video of a mother’s small children that included the artist Prince’s music playing in the background. Universal Music Corp, the copyright holder, removed the uploaded video from YouTube. After years of litigation, a United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that copyright holders must act “in good faith” to consider fair use before sending a takedown notification.

99 the importance of the Fair Use doctrine as legal recourse to challenge overreaching copyright infringement claims. As I describe more fully in the conclusion chapter, Fair Use, as outlined in Section 107 of the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act, allows for certain unauthorized uses of copyrighted materials—in other words, fair use allows people to forgo asking for permission to use copyrighted works, so long as they adhere to certain re-use standards (especially for transformative uses such as criticism, parody, news reporting, education, scholarship, etc.). In short, fair use allows for a kind of safety valve for everyday authors to reuse copyrighted materials without direct permission from or payment to the copyright holder. Yet, it’s important to note that fair use must be put to work in order for it to have any utility. As Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (2009) have put it, “Fair use becomes real only when people actually use it; like a muscle, it can shrink with disuse” (p. xi). So what happens when technologies make it significantly more difficult to claim fair use? While fair use is briefly mentioned on YouTube’s “help” web page that explains the processes for navigating content claims (through a link that points users to a dedicated page explaining fair use), YouTube warns users that both legal and platform-specific action could be taken if users fail to make the case for fair use. As it states on its help page, “YouTube can’t help you determine whether you should dispute a claim, so you’ll probably want to seek your own legal advice if you’re still not sure what to do.” Despite this legal disclaimer, the platform does direct users to a self-produced video that explains copyright and fair use. The video, titled “YouTube’s Copyright School,” explains copyright from the vantage point of Russell, an animated cartoon character dressed in pirate garb. The video runs through many examples of potential copyright infringements, including uploading whole copyrighted works to YouTube, recording and subsequently uploading live performances to YouTube, and even uploading remixes and mashups of copyrighted materials. In addition to potential legal pressures, those flagged by Content ID also face hardships with maintaining their accounts on YouTube. If users’ videos are not deemed to be in accordance with fair use by copyright holders, the rightsholders can request YouTube to issue a “copyright strike” on individual accounts. Such strikes put accounts in “bad standing,” which limits the functionality of users’ accounts. If an account receives three copyright strikes, the account will be terminated altogether and the account holder will be permanently banned from the platform. Undoubtedly, YouTube’s copyright claim and strike system poses quite the threat for those who make a living off of their YouTube channels. And it is especially problematic for channels whose content depends on fair use—i.e., those who produce reviews, , and news segments. After accruing three strikes, YouTubers can lose their channels—their livelihoods—in one fell swoop. Certainly, YouTube’s copyright strikes are problematic for content creators to navigate, but initial copyright claims are also troublesome for those who distribute lots of content. Claims pose difficulty because YouTube imposes artificial rules on the appeals process. For example, YouTube users can only appeal three videos at one time, and for those who post daily videos of transformative works (parody, news segments, reviews, etc.), the potential of getting flagged for nearly every video is high. In a popular video, Doug Walker, aka “The Nostalgia Critic,” explained his strife with the three-rule process. He stated, “there are countless videos on my channel that I was unable to monetize for several months just because of how long the claims process takes” (n.p.). He continued, “it’s gotten to the point where we’ve had to change our content dramatically” (n.p.). Walker has stated that his current movie reviews often use reenactments instead of movie clips to

100 avoid Content ID claims. In other words, similar to what Martine Courant Rife (2013) has argued, copyright laws and technologies have made content creators re-think their invention processes. Content ID also poses problems for the casual or spontaneous user. It imposes the need to acquire a complex kind of literacy, requiring intricate knowledge of both copyright law and YouTube’s own procedures. As legal scholar Michael Sawyer (2009) has speculated:

YouTube’s Content ID system will deter casual or spontaneous fair uses […]. Motivated infringers, however, will still be able to circumvent the automated blocking scheme, just as motivated infringers could crack DRM [Digital Rights Management]. Those committed to fair use or infringement will still be able to upload significant portions of copyrighted content simply by understanding how the technological filter works. Users who lack technological savvy will be denied distribution for their lawful content. (p. 394)

Put simply, navigating Content ID requires a specialized kind of knowledge, and responding to Content ID claims and strikes can be time-consuming and anxiety provoking. More than this, YouTube uses its own copyright discourse (claims and strikes), and it requires users to be familiar with its procedures on responding to such language. As the EFF has put it, “The current Content ID regime on YouTube is stacked against the users” (n.p.). Not surprisingly, copyright scholars—and especially left-leaning copyright activists— have questioned the chilling effects of YouTube’s Content ID (see especially Sawyer, 2009). There have been countless cases where Content ID has permitted rightsholders to make copyright overreaches, sometimes to nearly comical effect. One such case involved a video titled “Simple Living: Picking a Wild Salad” (see Figure 5.1). This video, as the title alludes to, features a man, Daniel Unedo, foraging through a field in his quest to find ingredients for a salad. There are neither musical tracks playing underneath the video, nor are there any external images or videos accompanying Unedo’s footage. You only hear ambient noises of the natural environment: birds, wind, and the narration of Unedo’s voice. Nevertheless, Content ID matched a music reference file made by the copyright holder Rumblefish. The problem, however, was that Content ID misidentified a natural birdsong for a copyrighted song whose rights belonged to Rumblefish. After receiving notice of the reference claim, Rumblefish began collecting ad revenue for all views of Unedo’s video.65 Unedo wrote about his next steps in the “about” section of the video:

Since there’s no music in my video, I disputed the claimed copyright violation, and Rumblefish was sent a link to my video to check it andsee if YouTube's automated system had made a mistake. They checked the video, and told YouTube that there was no mistake, and that they do own the music in the video. So the dispute was closed, and there was seemingly nothing else I could do. (n.p.)

65 This is another deep flaw in Content ID’s monetization process. Those who issue copyright claims with the preference of monetization will immediately begin collecting ad revenue from their claim. In other words, the YouTube user is given no time to dispute the claim—to argue for fair use or a wrongful claim—before the claim issuer begins collecting revenue.

101

Figure 5.1. A screenshot of a video that was wrongly flagged for copyright infringement. Content ID misidentified the birdsong playing in this video as copyright protected music owned by rights holder Rumblefish.

Unedo’s case is unique in that he finally got his claim released (this is difficult to do because those who receive claims can only appeal to the supposed rightsholder)—but not until he detailed his experiences in blog entry, which eventually began to circulate widely on the web. After news spread of Rumblefish’s abuse of the Content ID system, they issued an apology and retracted the copyright claim. Many other ironic examples of Content ID’s oversteps exist, including a Content ID claim on one of Lawrence Lessig’s videos describing how copyright threatens creativity (von Lohmann, 2010). Certainly, there are deep flaws in Content ID’s system—it can’t accurately determine fair use, it puts copyright holders in a position of control and users in a position of permission, and it often misidentifies copyright matches. Despite these shortcomings, Content ID has been an indispensable technological tool for YouTube, as it appeals to corporate buy-in, and thereby alleviates, or at least lessons, threats of litigation from major media companies. In the section that follows, I argue that Content ID is more than a copyright filtering technology; it participates, also, in building an aligned set of stakeholders and material conditions that exercise gatekeeping power in the circulation of digital content on the social web.

Content ID as Circulation Gatekeeper Fair Use is, of course, a copyright issue, but it’s also a circulation issue. When it becomes harder and harder to circulate compositions that make fair uses out of copyrighted materials because of technological barriers, claims to legal recourse, and powerful corporate interests, digital cultures become more constrained to critique and build off of already existing content. Content ID is a system that directly impacts the flow of digital content, imposing an algorithmic and automated gatekeeping function that favors the interests of corporations and media

102 conglomerates over everyday users. Fair use, here, is an afterthought—an appeal process—that demands intricate knowledge of not only fair use principles (as it should), but also technological literacies that are particular to the YouTube platform itself. In short, Content ID exercises powerful gatekeeping power. But what do I mean by gatekeeping power? In Going Viral, Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley (2013) articulated the ways in which certain actors in networked economies have strong influence over the flows of digital materials. They called these actors network gatekeepers, and they defined them as “people, collectives, and institutions […] with the discretion to control information as it flows in and among networks” (p. 43). Furthermore, Nahon and Hemsley argued network gatekeepers “can choose which information they let flow and which information they withhold, and more generally they can choose the extent to which gatekeeping is exercised” (p. 43). While Nahon and Hemsley’s articulation of network gatekeepers are said to have power over networked communications, such gatekeepers don’t have absolute power. As Nahon and Hemsley wrote, “their power depends to a large extent on the gated, on those subjected to their gatekeeping” (p. 43). In other words, network gatekeepers have the ability to control information flows because of a situated assemblage of people, texts, and technologies. And this assemblage is in a relatively constant state of flux. Nahon and Hemsley further explained this dynamic power differential through an example of one of the author’s use of a social network platform:

Facebook can use its gatekeeping power efficiently and have a major impact on people, because Jeff and millions of other people have decided to use it as a social network platform. If Facebook lost its ability to hold our attention, a scarce resource in our world today, it would also lose its power to exercise gatekeeping. (p. 44)

The notion of network gatekeepers is useful, then, because it underscores the shifting nature of agency involved in circulating materials on social networks. Of course, video compositionists can choose to distribute their videos elsewhere—e.g., Vimeo, Facebook, or Vine. Or they can bypass video sharing on social networks altogether, and elect to distribute their videos directly to viewers via .mp4 format. But YouTube, a platform that has grown to be trusted, convenient, stable, and portable, holds much cultural capital in today’s online media sphere. At least for now. With this in mind, I borrow from Nahon and Hemsley’s understanding of network gatekeeping to analyze how YouTube’s Content ID controls the flow of digital media. But I also append Nahon and Hemsley’s notion of network gatekeepers with the work of Tarleton Gillespie in an attempt to draw attention to the ways in which YouTube’s “platform politics” (Gillespie, 2010) align with many other historical, cultural, technological, and economic factors to justify its gatekeeping control. In this way, I frame Content ID as a “circulation gatekeeper,” which is given power, I argue, via these overlapping, and sometimes competing, rhetorical, material, and technological forces. Gillespie (2007, 2010, 2015) has been at the forefront of studying regimes that regulate, control, and otherwise influence cultural production. While his early work examined the cultural politics of intellectual property regimes, especially with regard to Digital Rights Management (DRM) software and hardware, his more recent work has explored how social media platforms influence digital activity through a range of discursive and material ways. Indeed, what Gillespie routinely makes clear is that “the shape of digital culture,” to borrow the subtitle from his 2007 book, takes form through a “regime of alignment.” What Gillespie is getting at here is that

103 activity is “choreographed,” as he frequently put it, through many intersecting factors—“the interlocking of the technological, the legal, the institutional, and the discursive to carefully direct user activity according to particular agendas” (p. 102). Such a regime of alignment, as he put it, can justify measures that overstep the aims of copyright law. Let’s relate this to YouTube’s Content ID—and begin to ask what particular agendas influence YouTube’s policies and implementation. An implicit argument for Content ID has always been grounded in what we might think of as a rhetoric of excess. That is, YouTube is a website that handles extreme volume—and managing that volume with a sensitivity to intellectual property has become a central concern, and problem, for the platform. YouTube inserts this line of argument into their explanation video “How Content ID Works.” According to YouTube, “With hundreds of hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every minute, Content ID works around the clock. It scans hundreds of years of video everyday. Now, copyright management is easier and more accessible for rights owners” (n.p.). Content ID, which essentially mandates a filter-everything approach, is the “technological fix” (Gillespie, 2007) for dealing with excess that the content industry was inept at controlling with individual take down notices. Yet, the technological dimension is just one part of this story. While it may be tempting to think that Content ID as technology is single handedly controlling circulation on the platform, there are many other pieces that make up the gatekeeping puzzle. Or, as Gillespie (2007) wrote,

In the most recent battles over copyright, content owners have been turning to technological strategies, but the ability to successfully intervene cannot rely on the technologies alone […] It involves the careful deployment of technological artifacts, social institutions, and discursive justifications, in a sociotechnical arrangement of material and ideological resources that facilitates some behaviors and shut down alternatives. (p. 100)

In what follows, I attempt to disassemble the assemblage that discursively, materially, and technologically constitutes what is simply called “Content ID.” Unbundling Content ID’s regime of alignment, I argue, more accurately allows us to understand not only how gatekeeping functions but also how YouTube has justified its implementation and frequent abuse.

Privileging the Corporate Author As discussed in the previous section, Google’s buyout of YouTube’s in 2006 coincided with major overhauls to how it handled copyright issues. Prior to 2007, YouTube did not have an automated, technological system to check against copyrighted material—instead, rightsholders had to use an appeal process as designated by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Google’s takeover transitioned YouTube into a platform that needed to appeal to a different set of stakeholders than it had previously. As Jose van Dijck (2013) has noted, YouTube’s evolution in governance is evident in its change of branding. YouTube once branded itself as a platform to “Broadcast Yourself,” a tagline that appeared next YouTube’s logo, but the platform has since ditched the motto, signaling a model that went from production to consumption. This also ushered in a profound shift—the emergence and reign of corporate authors on the platform. As many scholars have argued, Western copyright is predicated on notions of original, autonomous, and proprietary authorship (Rose, 1993; Woodmansee, 1984). That entrenched view—which came about in Western cultures due to technological, economic, and philosophical

104 changes during the 18th Century—holds that a discrete figure is the sole owner of his or her work, and therefore deserves monetary and cultural rewards because of it. This construction of the author is certainly one to which YouTube’s Content ID adheres. As YouTube’s copyright support page explains, “when a person creates an original work that is fixed in a physical medium, he or she generally automatically owns copyright to the work. The owner has the exclusive right to use the work in certain, specific ways” (n.p.). But YouTube also creates an authorship hierarchy in its deployment of Content ID. While an author originally referred to the creator or originator of a work, copyright law has bent the term to also refer to the copyright holder. As Jessica Reyman (2009) explained, “when copyright law offers rights to an ‘author,’ this author is a legal appointee rather than necessarily the person who created a copyrighted work” (p. 48). , in other words, can belong to creators themselves, or through work-for-hire provisions or contractual agreements, they can legally belong to other people or entities such as corporations (Reyman, 2009, p. 48). Because it is a system that caters to major media industries, YouTube privileges what scholars Andrea Lunsford (1999) and Jessica Reyman (2009) have called the “corporate author.” As Lunsford wrote, “large [corporate] entities now claim ‘author’s rights’—and they have squads of lawyers working around the clock to help them” (p. 532). Writing ten years later, Reyman described corporate authorship through the frame of “authorship code,” which she described as “the ways in which digital technology (or technological ‘code’) has been used to control the terms of authorship by determining who creates, distributes, and consumes content and under what conditions” (p. 17). Reyman conceded that copyright laws, such as the DMCA and MGM Studios v. Grokster, have reinforced this notion of corporate authorship, giving way to technological structures that control the digital landscape. Following Reyman, we might say that Content ID codes authorship by determining not only who gets granted authorship status and who doesn’t, but also by designating where they stack up on the authorship totem pole. An author is an author on YouTube when their video is free of reference file matches. But there’s a shadow of a different kind of “author” that’s coded into the system—those who hold reference files, those who are eligible for Content ID. This is the mega author, the corporate author, who sits high in the authorship hierarchy and enjoys privileges of an automated system that works in its favor. In other words, YouTube sets the parameters for those who can use Content ID in the first place. According to its policy, “YouTube only grants Content ID to copyright owners who meet specific criteria. To be approved, you must own exclusive rights to a substantial body of original material that is frequently uploaded by the YouTube user community” (my emphasis, n.p.). The implication in YouTube’s policy—both stated and unstated—is that the needs of large- scale rights holders (those with a “substantial body of original work”—the Lionsgates, the Sony Corps, the Viacoms) are more important than the everyday YouTube user. Incidentally, this discursive positioning rewards and strengthens the corporate author, and suppresses other types of authorship on YouTube. In fact, 2014 statistics from YouTube indicated that Google “has paid out $1 billion to rightsholders who have chosen to monetize claims since Content ID first launched in 2007” (n.p.).66 More than this, citing numbers from July 2015, YouTube recognizes “there are 8,000+ partners using content ID – including many major network broadcasters, movie studios, and record labels – who have claimed over 400 million videos, helping them control their content on YouTube […]” (n.p.). Based on YouTube description of who qualifies for Content ID, in tandem

66 See https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html.

105 with the above statement, we can deduce that these “corporate partners” are largely the ones who have access to Content ID. Or, as Chris Maxcy, an executive at Google, told Reuters in 2007, “The technology was built with the Disney's and Time Warner's in mind.”67 This privileging of corporate authors—stakeholders who have routinely sought to control and regulate digital culture—is neither neutral nor coincidental. It has profound consequences for controlling and regulating the circulatory flows of the world’s largest video sharing network.

Buying into a Rhetoric of Piracy In addition to and in alignment with the privileging of corporate authorship, YouTube’s discussion of copyright often reinforces a rhetorical frame that has already been well established by stakeholders in the content industry: that of piracy. More specifically, YouTube’s discourse on copyright, and its automated filter-everything approach, upholds an original/piracy binary. It goes something like this: that submitted to YouTube via content industries is original, while that flagged by Content ID as matching reference files is piracy. No middle ground, no nuance—at least not through its first round of automated filtering. This binary is coded into Content ID’s system. Indeed, to convince YouTube that reuse of copyrighted material is different than piracy, one has to issue a dispute through an appeals process. While YouTube does not mention the word “piracy” in its explanations of Content ID, its visual rhetoric and explanations of copyright infringement bundle many forms of reuse into such a rhetorical frame. This is especially evidenced in YouTube’s “Copyright School,” a video YouTube requires users to watch after they receive a “copyright strike” on the platform. But, with nearly six million views, it’s also a promotional video used to describe copyright more broadly. As mentioned earlier, this video features a cartoon character named Russell, who has a strong proclivity for infringing on the rights of copyright holders. To make it apparent that Russell’s activities are thieving, distrustful, and menacing, Russell is (of course!) dressed in pirate attire—complete with an eye patch, hook for a hand, and a crossbones-embroidered hat (see Figure 5.2). What’s particularly striking about the video is that Russell is positioned as a stand-in for the everyday user. For example, the video claims, “Even though YouTube is a free site, you can get in serious trouble for copyright infringement. You can be sued and found liable for monetary damages” (n.p., my emphasis). The video continues in a similar fashion, walking Russell (“you”) through various copyright scenarios, positioning YouTube’s everyday users in the subject position of the pirate. Of course, Russell, and by extension users, are pirates when they upload whole copyrighted works to YouTube. They are also pirates when they record and upload live performances. But, oddly, YouTube users are still pirates when they reuse, remix, or mashup copyrighted material, a textual practice that is often, but of course not always, associated with fair use. While YouTube briefly mentions fair use in this video, it errs on the side of a permissions culture (Lessig, 2004), suggesting users remixing copyrighted materials would be wise to acquire permission from the copyright holder(s).

67 See http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-youtube-idUSWEN871820070612.

106

Figure .2. Screenshot from YouTube’s Copyright School, a video that explains copyright and copyright infringement by walking a Russell, a cartoon character dressed as a pirate, through various copyright scenarios.

And this supports a rhetorical frame that powerful corporations had already been injecting into the copyright debate of the Napster era (see DeVoss & Porter, 2006). As scholars such as John Logie (2006) and Lawrence Lessig (2004) have argued, the rhetoric of “piracy” began to be coded as any unauthorized use. This frame of piracy did not fall out of the sky, but was adopted when peer-to-peer technologies (such as Napster) posed a threat to the content industry. According to legal scholar Jessica Litman (2001),

Piracy used to be about folks who made and sold large numbers of counterfeit copies. Today, the term “piracy” seems to describe any unlicensed activity— especially if the person engaging in it is a teenager. The content industry calls some behavior piracy despite the fact that it is unquestionably legal. (p. 85)

107 YouTube, especially with the use of some of its visual tactics, pushes for a original/piracy binary that has the discursive power to elicit fear into users whose work may fit in a more nuanced position on the original/piracy pole. To rid users of the subject position of pirate, YouTube suggests to “make your own video.” The implication here is that reuse—in any and all forms— doesn’t amount to authorship. But more than this, reuse is always already piracy. As Gillespie (2007) has argued, “copyright and the fear of piracy offer a powerful rhetorical justification for a system that, in truth, regulates activities outside of the scope of copyright and distant from the aims of the law” (p. 266). My experience as a teacher who frequently asks students to upload videos to YouTube—often videos that use remix techniques to make arguments or critiques—has demonstrated to me how Content ID can illicit fear and anxiety. For example, when students include copyrighted music in their video projects, even if briefly sampled, they often report that YouTube has either taken their video down or put a copyright claim on their YouTube account.This is anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but even after long discussions about Fair Use and transformative work, students often report that they are wary when Content ID flags their work for potential infringement. The rhetorical barrier here, even if students have strong cases to dispute Content ID claims, is one that routinely makes them rethink their delivery and distribution choices. In other words, the fear of infringement, unfounded as it may be, can guide and control users’ distribution decisions. The Content ID system itself may be one barrier, issuing automated and algorithmic responses, but the rhetoric of YouTube’s policies and explanations thereof present another, aligned control mechanism that informs and directs user activity.

A “Win-Win:” Legal Pressures and DMCA Ambiguities Lead to New Forms of Monetization As noted, the implementation of Content ID occurred after the start of a major copyright suit between YouTube and Viacom in 2007. But even before this lawsuit YouTube faced copyright problems, and, in fact, encountered copyright infringement woes from its very origins. In 2008, The New York Times reported that Content ID’s model directly addressed concerns of piracy on the platform. The Times stated, “after years of regarding pirated video on YouTube as a threat, some major media companies are having a change of heart, treating it instead as an advertising opportunity” (Stelter, 2008, n.p.).68 At the heart of YouTube’s legal pressures is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). As stated earlier, safe harbor provisions in the DMCA provide YouTube a route to avoid being held liable from copyright infringements made by users on its website. Importantly, though, YouTube has to meet certain requirements and adhere to certain guidelines to maintain its safe harbor status. And this is what Viacom’s legal suit was all about. According to legal scholar Michael Sawyer, the DMCA section 512(c) outlines five requirements that, if met, place the burden to police copyright infringements on content owners. Yet, for Sawyer, gray areas in the safe harbor provisions require user-generated content (UGC) websites such as YouTube to be vigilant about copyright issues on their websites. Perhaps the largest indeterminacy for YouTube’s status of maintaining safe harbor eligibility concerns a clause that reads UGC sites shall receive no direct financial benefit from infringing activity. As Sawyer explained, case law has demonstrated that “using infringing content to build or expand a user base constitutes a direct financial benefit” (p. 373). This is where YouTube finds itself in an ambiguous realm, and where Viacom had some legal wiggle room. As Sawyer stated, “YouTube does not display ads next to potentially infringing content. But YouTube may attract users with

68 For more, see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/technology/16tube.html

108 infringing content, and these new users may then venture to view other, ad-supported, noninfringing content” (p. 373). This was a key aspect of Viacom’s lawsuit, as they alleged that YouTube stepped out of its safe harbor provisions by financially benefiting from the copyright infringement activity regularly posted on YouTube. Enter Content ID. With its option for copyright holders to monetize copyrighted materials through a scalable and automated system, it has not only lessoned the burden for copyright holders to police copyrighted materials, but it has also allowed media companies (and, of course, YouTube itself) to profit from what essentially amounts to free labor on behalf of everyday users. In other words, while legal pressures no doubt had a part to play in forcing YouTube’s hand to develop Content ID, the copyright filtering technology’s longevity can likely be attributed to its abilities to help copyright holders turn a profit. Otherwise put, YouTube didn’t so much close the gap on the DMCA ambiguity regarding direct financial benefit, but it did provide a mechanism to allow rights holders to more easily collect revenue from so-called unauthorized uses. We often don’t talk about the monetization of circulation, but that’s exactly the platform on which Content ID is built. And earning money off the circulation of information is essentially the funding model for Google’s and for YouTube. Gatekeeping, of course, isn’t just about shutting down circulation, but it’s also about promoting it, and often in very directed and controlled ways. But this form of gatekeeping is no less problematic. I want to take a quick detour to explain why. In their recent article, Michael Soha and Zachary McDowell (2016) discussed how Content ID facilitated the monetization of the “” meme, a recognized cultural phenomenon that spawned numerous appropriative variances throughout its circulatory life. Soha and McDowell noted that, at its circulatory peak, the Harlem Shake experienced nearly 4,000 YouTube uploads per day. As Soha and McDowell noted, the initial circulation of the Harlem Shake video “spawn[ed] remakes from all over the world, filmed in playgrounds, offices, high school cafeterias, and many, many college dorm rooms” (n.p.). The Harlem Shake videos typically shared common characteristics: a 30-second video with people dancing in particular pattern to the song “Harlem Shake.” Although the little-known DJ and producer Baauer and his record label Mad Decent initially released the song “Harlem Shake” as a free download, both parties (along with YouTube) went on to make large amounts of money from the virality of the Harlem Shake. In fact, Soha and McDowell estimated that Mad Decent earned $1.5 to $4.5 million by harnessing Content ID (and of course YouTube made nearly the same amount). Soha and McDowell, however, question the labor practices involved in this profit margin, largely because they claimed the traditional notions of authorship on which copyright are based do not “encapsulate the large collections of digital labor that go into Internet memes” (n.p.). More than this, Soha and McDowell argued:

Content ID allowed Mad Decent to harness millions of hours of creative free labor. The millions of hours of creative labor that went into producing the tens of thousands of Harlem Shake meme videos were a creative undertaking the scale of which not even the largest record companies could muster. While no one person created the Harlem Shake meme, the ability of Mad Decent to control and profit from the phenomena through Content ID gave them a kind of de facto ownership of the collective production, as they not only remain the majority profiteer but also control whether or not to block the video. (n.p.)

109

And herein lies another major problem with Content ID: it takes advantage of networked, distributed labor (what Nicholas Carr [2006] called digital sharecropping), but it is built for, and rewards, singular authors and owners. YouTube frames this as a “win-win” for both the content industry and fans on YouTube. But the problem: as fans compose and make the content, only a select few benefit from their labors. To return this to Gries’ (2015) metaphor of the tumbleweed and the fence, Content ID might increasingly be seen as a fence that is easily passed through because aligned interests seek monetization on videos that have so-called unauthorized use. But we would do well to not misread this as being no barrier at all. Content ID’s system, as algorithm and database, tirelessly selects if, how, and under what circumstances new videos will circulate, and who will gain from its spread.

Platform Copyright Literacy In order to understand the full weight of copyright on the platform, you have to be well versed in YouTube’s own copyright language. Such language is different from, although informed by, legal copyright discourses, but it uses a distinct vocabulary nonetheless. From claims to strikes, YouTube has invented a platform-specific governance model for how it regulates copyright issues. To recap: Content ID claims are less serious copyright infringement notification, but they can have profound impacts on how videos circulate. As mentioned, Content ID claims are automated, using the copyright holders’ policy on how to handle matching content.

Figure 5.3. The above figure, composed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains the process users can take when they receive a Content ID claim. See https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to- youtube-removals.

110

While this may seem straightforward, Content ID claims—and especially the dispute process—are quite intricate. Allow me to walk you through this complexity. Essentially, if those who upload videos to YouTube receive a Content ID claim, they can either (a) accept the restrictions or (b) dispute the claim. If the dispute the claim, the rights holder has 30 days to either (a) release the claim or (b) uphold the claim. From here, the user can either (a) accept the restrictions or (b) issue an appeal. At this point, the rights holder can either (a) release the claim or (b) submit a DMCA notice. This process also hinges on YouTube users’ accounts being in “good standing.” To keep accounts in “good standing,” users have to be free from copyright strikes, from community guidelines strikes, and have more than one video blocked by Content ID. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has visually represented how this process works (see Figure 5.3).69 Importantly, Content ID claims largely ask users to assume a passive role. In fact, YouTube lists “do nothing” first in its explanation of what users can do when receiving claims. There are four other options YouTube states users can choose, depending on the claim, including removing the music, swapping the music, sharing ad revenue, and, finally, disputing the claim. Although copyright holders have the option to block videos when users uploads match a reference file they have stored in YouTube’s database, I read Content ID claims largely as a mechanism to monetize copyrighted material. According to YouTube,

In most cases, getting a Content ID claim isn’t a bad thing for your YouTube channel. It just means, “Hey, we found some material in your video that’s owned by someone else.” It’s up to copyright owners to decide whether or not others can reuse their original material. In many cases, copyright owners allow the use of their content in YouTube videos in exchange for putting ads on those videos. (n.p.).

Copyright strikes, on the other hand, are more severe. Copyright strikes move beyond Content ID’s automated system—those filing copyright strikes must submit a copyright takedown notification. This notification process asks claimants to submit their personal information, as well as a link to the infringing content and agreements that their considerations have been made “in good faith.” If users receive a copyright strike, YouTube reports that they have three options to resolve the issue: (1) wait six months for the strike to expire, (2) receive a retraction from the entity who first issued the strike, or (3) file a counter notification. As mentioned, receiving one copyright strike puts accounts in “bad standing,” which significantly limits the functionality of the users’ account. If users choose to wait for the strike to expire, but want to get their accounts back in good standing, they must watch YouTube’s “Copyright School” video and complete a short multiple-choice test about copyright issues. If YouTube users receive more than one copyright strike, their accounts will be terminated and the will be banned from YouTube. This is all to say, YouTube has invented its own copyright discourse—and navigating that discourse to some modicum of success requires a kind of literacy. Users must not only know how to navigate the technological interface, but they also have to understand how YouTube manages copyright issues. They have to know how strikes and claims work and they have to know how disputes and counter notifications work. I’ve been studying YouTube’s copyright policy for some time now, and I often get overwhelmed when trying to sort out its policies. As

69 For more, see https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-youtube-removals.

111 mentioned earlier in this chapter, YouTube users who frequently upload videos to the website similarly are overwhelmed with the process. When users are fearful for losing their account functionality and/or anxious about dubious legal action, they have had to resort to changing their invention processes. This may not be full-blown censorship, but the literacy, the time, and the patience required to navigate YouTube’s copyright discourse does nudge users into different directions.

When They Align… When all of these elements come together—when they align—they present a formidable gatekeeping power that directs user activity. And this direction of activity is even more menacing than a technology that filters all reuses, fair or not. It is control guised as copyright law, but it regulates activity on the platform with a much broader brush. It makes submitting to filtering technologies the norm. It reifies a cultural landscape where the corporate author reigns supreme. It solidifies years of the content industries’ efforts to codify unauthorized use as piracy. Most of all, it is a system that decides what will circulate and how it will circulate, including whether or not a third party and YouTube will profit from its spread. Here’s a reasonable objection to some of the arguments I’ve been making: We willingly submit to this system when we upload our videos to a proprietary platform. So why focus so much attention on a Google-operated system if we can, ostensibly, pack up our videos and go elsewhere? The next section takes up this question and also notes how users, activists, and teachers may resist the greater copyright regime we all face when we write and circulate our materials online.

Navigating the Fence: A Plurality of Resistances In this section, I discuss what can be done, and what has been done, to push against unfair and unbalanced takedowns or monetization claims that are regulated through Content ID. While I focus on YouTube here, I want to point out that there are certainly other platforms that use similar copyright filtering technology (such as Soundcloud for audio texts). What I argue is in line with Reyman’s (2009) Foucauldian approach to unbalanced intellectual property regimes. As she forcefully argued in The Rhetoric of Intellectual Property, rhetorical insights into the discourses and technologies of copyright can be put into action. In other words, critique should lead to action. Reyman drew on Foucault to argue that “change, such as copyright reform, can be set into action only by a dense web of forces of resistance” (p. 31). In addition to echoing some of Reyman’s suggestions for resisting copyright regimes writ large, I also provide a couple of takeaways that are specific to the YouTube platform itself. But first I want to juxtapose two recent developments in YouTube’s dealings with copyright. I do this because I want to draw attention to some of the complexities involved in circulating videos on YouTube. On the one hand, YouTube figures itself as a platform for free speech and the circulation of ideas; it’s a platform on which one can spread their views (Gillespie, 2010). Yet, on the other hand, YouTube positions itself as partner to content industries; it is a platform through which content can be distributed and sold (Gillespie, 2010). This ambiguity, as I will argue, is why all parties are not ready to leave the platform. The first copyright development paints YouTube in a positive light, as a fighter and proponent of fair use, and as an ardent supporter of amateur content creators. Here’s the story: in November 2015, YouTube announced its plans to help video creators fight legal fees in unfair takedowns. In a public blog post, YouTube’s parent company, Google, argued for the importance

112 of fair use—and part of their argument rested on the notion that reusing content in certain, transformative ways can have social value for others. To better protect fair use on the platform, YouTube announced that they created a program it has called “Fair Use Protection.” Essentially, through this program, a small number of content creators will have YouTube in their corner—of up to $1 dollars in legal fees—should legal action be taken against their videos. As The New York Times reported, “YouTube is starting small, initially supporting four video creators, but it said it might expand its program” (Kang, 2015, n.p.). This can be read as a legitimate effort to protect fair use, or it can be interpreted as a ploy to build, sustain, or perhaps repair platform loyalty in at a time when greater options exists for video sharing (e.g., Facebook or Vimeo). The second development I want to highlight is a campaign that prominent members of the YouTube community began in February 2016, four months after YouTube’s announcement for increased measures to protect fair use. The campaign is loosely organized under the hashtag: #WTFU (or “where’s the fair use?”). In February 2016, the popular YouTuber Doug Walker, who also goes by the alias “the Nostalgia Critic,” uploaded a near-20 minute video titled “Where’s the Fair Use?”. Walker’s video, which at time of writing has gained more than 1 million views, outlines many of the problems inherent in the Content ID system—and it particularly pays attention to how Content ID limits the potential for claiming fair use. As Walker compellingly argues, “What started out as means to protect studios and content creators is now being used as a means to silence and steal” (n.p.). Walker’s video—and his larger call— has gained much steam, as many other YouTube participants and allies joined them by sounding off on social media with the hashtag #WTFU. So what do these two developments tell us? YouTube, in some respects, is always playing a game of appealing to multiple constituencies at once. It cares about the little guy, or so it would like to claim, for these are the ones who have created a vibrant community on the platform. At the same time, though, YouTube has a bottom line—and that bottom line favors the stakeholders who bring revenue to Google. Yet, at the same time still, YouTube’s ethos rests, paradoxically, as a platform for free speech—more than this, it’s a platform on which amateur creators can “make it big” (Justin Bieber, for example, made his debut on YouTube years ago.) As Gillespie (2010) argued, such a competing agenda is coded into the very word “platform” itself: “Whatever possible tension there is between being a ‘platform’ for empowering individual users and being a robust marketing ‘platform’ and being a ‘platform’ for major studio content is elided in the versatility of the term and the powerful appeal of the idea behind it” (p. 358). YouTube goes back and forth between appealing to competing interests, and it attempts to build loyalty among its constituencies in the process. Such is the issue with many social media platforms. According to Jessica Reyman (2013), “For access to many social Web technologies there are trade-offs: tacit agreements that users enter into, and a set of unspoken assumptions that governs who owns what is created and how it circulates” (p. 514). In other words, we know there are inherent problems—tradeoffs— with proprietary social networks, especially when we circulate our compositions on them. Not only do they control the circulatory flow of materials online, they also financially benefit from it by harvesting and selling user data (see Beck, 2015; McKee, 2011). But there are many reasons why people use social platforms—they connect others together, they build affinities, they allow for the writing of identities, they allow for personal advertisement and marketing, and so on. For YouTube users, as I’ll show below, these reasons are enough to fight for YouTube, to make it a better platform, to change the policies and mechanisms by which it circulates content. What can be done and what is being done? I turn to these questions in what follows of this section.

113

Change From Within the Community There are already major discussions underway about Content ID —and largely, these are taking place on YouTube itself. Type “Content ID” into YouTube’s search bar and scan the first few pages and what you will see is video after video of YouTubers expressing extreme dissatisfaction with the platform’s copyright filtering system. Many popular YouTubers, whose channels have millions of subscribers, have composed videos in response to Content ID. Video titles on the first page of results include:  “YouTube Copyright Disaster! Angry Rant”  “Proof of a MAJOR flaw in the YouTube Content ID/Copyright System”  “Content ID and YouTube’s Copyright Catastrophe”  “YouTube’s Content ID system SUCKS! On top of affective responses from passionate content creators who have been negatively affected by Content ID, there are have been more concerted and organized efforts to initiate change on the platform. For example, #WTFU, as discussed above, is a YouTube-born movement with popular YouTube users (or “content creators” as they’re often called) participating in its cause. #WTFU originated from Walker’s video wherein he compiled many stories of copyright abuse on YouTube. His video ends with a call for participation: “These are just a few of many stories. Help raise awareness and ask Where’s the Fair Use? #WTFU” (n.p.). And spread awareness this campaign has. Many YouTube users have expressed how the system has (a) changed the way they make videos, (b) stunted their abilities to timely counter overreaching copyright claims, and (c) increased the likelihood for monetization abuse to occur (e.g., a copyright holder wrongfully earning ad revenue on their videos). #WTFU has spread outside of YouTube as well, as many have taken to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to express their grievances with YouTube’s copyright technologies and policies. Organizations like the EFF have supported the cause: in addition to adding to the hashtag on Twitter, they wrote a blog post, titled “Content ID and the Rise of the Machines, on how Content ID constrains free speech. It appears that #WTFU may be prompting some change, or at least the appearance of change. On February 26, 2016, the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, tweeted the following: “Thank you @YouTube community for all the feedback. We’re listening […]” (n.p.). In addition to mentioning Walker’s Twitter handle in the tweet, Wojcicki included a link to a longer explanation of what YouTube’s plans are for addressing #WTFU concerns. Below is an extract from YouTube’s policy team on the matter:

The good news is that the feedback you’ve raised in comments and videos on YouTube and beyond is having an impact. It’s caused us to look closely at our policies and helped us identify areas where we can get better. It’s led us to create a team dedicated to minimizing mistakes and improving the quality of our actions. And it's encouraged us to roll out some initiatives in the coming months that will help strengthen communications between creators and YouTube support.

Of course, it remains to be seen what kind of changes, if any, will actually come from #WTFU or other arguments leveraged by YouTube’s community. However, I believe organized dissent such

114 as the recent #WTFU campaign offers some of the best opportunities for systematic change for copyright on the platform.

Advocacy and Support of Advocacy Groups Collectives—especially those with specialties in law and public policy—are important partners in intellectual property debates. As Heidi McKee (2011) argued in her article “Policy Matters Now and In the Future,” there are some important steps we can take as citizens, as professionals, and as teachers to advocate for a more free and open Internet. Supporting organizations such as the EFF and others can be one such step in advocating for change on YouTube. Other organizations include Luman, a research project for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society that collects and analyzes complaints about the removal of online content, as well as the Center for Media and Social Impact, a research center and public clearinghouse that offers education and codes of best practice for fair use in different industries (e.g., online video, , etc.). 70 Of course, people can always donate to these organizations, which is important, but they can also circulate position statements and updates that provide information on unfolding digital rights developments. As a scholar of rhetoric, not a specialist in law, I have found the EFF’s coverage on Content ID to be immensely beneficial to my understanding of how YouTube and the content industry can easily overstep the law. Other professional groups, such at the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Committee on Intellectual Property, can also be important avenues for rhetoric and writing scholars to collectively brainstorm strategies for resisting entrenched IP regimes. As a community of scholars and teachers of writing, we need to think collectively about how navigate these thorny issues—both inside the classroom and beyond.

More Action Research While my hope is that this chapter has been useful for documenting and untangling some of the complexities involved in YouTube’s Content ID, I believe that more research could be valuable—especially studies that seek person-based data on how YouTube users (both casual on semi-professional) have navigated YouTube’s copyright system. As such, a future empirical study I plan on conducting, which is outside the scope of my current project, would seek to interview participants whose livelihoods and everyday production practices have been affected by YouTube’s “regime of alignment.” If rhetoric researchers and teachers can learn strategies and tactics employed by those most affected by Content ID, we might be in a better position to advocate for change and productive resistance. Martine Rife (2013) has argued that digital writers employ mêtis as they navigate copyright issues. As she wrote, practical and legal reasoning, at its best, relies upon mêtis. The same can be said for digital writers navigating Content ID. That is, the changing landscape of copyright, together with more robust technologies designed to lock down creativity, require digital writers to be agile and adaptable to solve problems and effect change. While these mêtic qualities necessarily change from situation to situation, learning the strategies public writers have used to navigate systems like Content ID—including how, if at all, they respond to takedown notices, copyright claims, and more—can be useful for continuing resist and react against unbalanced copyright regimes.

70 For more on the Center for Social Media and Impact, see http://cmsimpact.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes. For more on Luman, see https://lumendatabase.org/.

115

Teaching Digital Writers about Copyright and Fair Use It’s easy to feel hopeless when reading and researching the evolution of intellectual property in the United States. Equally, it can be disheartening to closely examine how corporate- owned social media platforms align with copyright regimes to influence the circulation of digital discourse on the web. Yet, I remain hopeful that there are opportunities for resistance and change when it comes to teaching digital writers. Similarly, Reyman (2013) closed her study on the rhetoric of intellectual property on a hopeful note, and part of her optimism was rooted in the possibilities of pedagogical practice. As she put it, “in our teaching practices, writing instructors need to more openly acknowledge the range of ‘allowable’ copying, reuse, and remixing of copyright works that is inherent to much digital composing” (p. 145). Indeed, we should not shy away from teaching tactical forms of composition, nor should we forgo supporting students as they encounter circulation impasses like Content ID. Of course, asking students to upload videos with reused copyrighted materials is tricky business. We are implicating them in a legal realm where consequences may be beyond our control. Yet, as Dànielle Nicole DeVoss (2015) recently argued, “whenever and whatever we write, we are always already implicated in intellectual property” (n.p.). As such, I believe it’s important to teach students rhetorically about copyright and fair use—and, importantly and increasingly, part of our responsibility to teach copyright involves helping students analyze and navigate the appropriate distribution systems that reach their rhetorical goals. Navigating Content ID can have its teachable moments—but, of course, such moments should not undermine students’ own goals. Whatever the case may be, as students enter their various writing roles and identities (in our classes, beyond our classes, and well into the future), they will be better prepared to disseminate their writing if they acquire the rhetorical means to interrogate and navigate circulation gatekeepers.

Conclusion The relatively new subfield of “circulation studies” (Gries, 2013) in rhetoric and writing is beginning to gain more traction. While there are have been calls to study how arguments travel (Dingo, 2012), how images transform and spark change (Gries, 2015), and how rhetorics move and shift as they spread (Edbauer, 2005), relatively little research has sought to investigate systems that control, regulate, and influence digital flows in the first place. My hope is that this chapter can begin to open up more critical conversations about circulation. More than this, I hope it may serve as model to interrogate other circulation gatekeepers on the social web—Facebook’s algorithms, Twitter’s censorship policies, Reddit’s community guidelines, and so on. As rhetoric and writing teachers, we not only have to circulation in a rhetorical way, but we also have to provide moments for students to grapple with circulation gatekeepers. Asking hard questions about why writing circulates, its underlying economics and the stakeholders who influence its contours, becomes an increasingly important practice for digital composers. In their civic, professional, and extracurricular lives, students need to be able to promote their writing, and part of that work increasingly involves effectively navigating the material, technological, and cultural systems on which their writing will travel. As rhetoric and writing researchers, we are well poised to develop rhetorical, praxis- driven methodologies to untangle systems of circulation, to interrogate the stakeholders, the

116 histories, and the political motivations that influence the movements and occlusions of writing in online spheres. Developing research agendas that disassemble these systems of circulation can be an important and useful trajectory for writing and rhetoric research. We have a responsibility to make our critiques matter, to effect change, and participating in redirecting the rhetorics that influence and control digital production and circulation. This work is not an altogether easy undertaking: it will require us to stay up-to-date on policy, it will require us to carefully research the often-tacit politics embedded in social media platforms, and it will require us to think more critically about circulation practices in an all things viral era. But this work is needed, for it allows us to better understand the discursive flows on which digital cultures are built.

117

Chapter 6 Toward a Renewed Vision of Circulation in Pedagogy and Research

We are always in the middle of things—in the mangle. –Susan Hekman, 2010, p. 38

We start in the middle of things, in medias res […]. Action had already started; it will continue when we will no longer be around. –Bruno Latour, 2005b, p. 123

My central goal throughout this project has been to articulate a theoretical framework of tactical rhetorics by assembling stories that put that framework into action. In the process of doing so, I have attempted to nudge the study of circulation in different directions. I’ve suggested circulation is undertheorized as a mobile source of invention, and have thus posited it as an always-on-the-move field from which rhetors can build new materials out of moving ones. I’ve pointed to both historical and current cases wherein bricoleur rhetors tactically navigate and invent from circulation in their efforts to challenge, upset, and reimagine dominant discourses. I’ve also described how digital writing is mobilized, and demobilized, due to an assemblage of material, cultural, technological, and legal realities. In this concluding chapter, I want to discuss further implications of my study for pedagogy and research. In particular, from a pedagogical standpoint, I pick up on the notion of tactical encounters as discussed in Chapter 1. More specifically, I argue that writing and rhetoric teachers should begin thinking of innovative ways to provide what I call moments of circulatory encounter in their classrooms. My argument hinges on a basic premise that writers in their academic, civic, professional, and extracurricular lives will at some point need to attend to what Sidney Dobrin (2012) has called the “hyper-circulatory condition of writing” (p. 7). As Dobrin’s use of the word “hyper” well indicates, the overload of circulation—its excess—poses new challenges and opportunities for writing teachers, an overabundance with which we haven’t adequately grappled in pedagogical scholarship. As such, as argued in Chapter 1, and extended here, I frame circulation not only as something to accomplish, but also, and increasingly, as something to navigate and adapt to through rhetorical encounters with its dynamic and emergent fluxes. In this chapter, I make the case that navigating what I earlier called the “backflow of circulation” is especially congruous, though not thoroughly examined as of yet, with ecological frameworks for writing. After making a connection to writing ecologies scholarship, I’ll sketch a possible assignment that prioritizes tracking, tracing, and following as vital rhetorical habits for participating in public and digital life. Such habits, as I’ll argue, give way to the possibility of kairotic interventions where writers adjust and adapt to the ongoing flows of public discourse. To encourage this kind of rhetorical activity in our classrooms, I ultimately suggest we provide assignments, activities, and discussions where students can develop mêtic intelligence, because, as argued in Chapters 1 and 2, the notion of mêtis is useful for describing how rhetors navigate complex, always-on-the move fluxes. After providing pedagogical strategies, I explore implications for future research, and, specifically, articulate possible directions for a renewed circulation studies agenda. In keeping with such an agenda, I have identified two broad areas that warrant more attention in rhetoric and writing research:

118  infrastructures of circulation: distribution materialities, network topographies, policy issues, rhetoric of the platform, etc.  ethics of circulation: social consequences of virality, ethics of recirculation, ethics of reuse/appropriation, etc.

Broadly understood, the research area I label infrastructures of circulation refers to the material conditions that facilitate, curtail, and block circulation. While my case analysis in Chapter 5 looked at one particular subset of such research, I explore how more work in this area can be productive for writing and rhetoric researchers. The research area I label ethics of circulation refers to how decisions to distribute or redistribute writing bear social and cultural consequences. While the tactical rhetorics I’ve showcased in this dissertation are guided by a particular ethic (what I called a trickster ethic in Chapter 1), there are countless examples of problematic appropriative rhetorical practices. As I’ll argue, practicing a more self-reflexive ethics of appropriation is one way to tease out ethics of circulation issues, but rhetoric scholars might also begin to delineate case examples of (un)ethical appropriation. Although I detail two directions for circulation studies research, there are certainly more avenues that would warrant more investigation. For one example, rhetoric and writing scholars might think more critically about cultures of circulation. As cultural anthropologists Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma (2002) argued circulation is often conceived as processes that “transmit meanings, rather than as constitutive acts themselves” (p. 192). Lee and LiPuma posited the notion of “cultures of circulation” to move beyond a transmission model, arguing, “circulation is a cultural process with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them” (p. 192). An promising line of scholarship, then, might ask questions about access—circulation not only requires technological know-how, but it also necessitates cultural know-how. In all, I believe our current moment presents a thriving need for circulation studies research. Of course, as mentioned in Chapter 2, circulation is neither a new phenomena nor is particular to the digital. However, notions of circulation have changed with the emergence of digitally networked technologies and social media platforms. Those with access can relatively easily distribute their writing for networked others to see—and not just see, but also interact with, remix, and spread further. Circulation changes with the digital, then, in terms of speed, reach, and increased opportunities for participation. Circulation matters because it gets us thinking about how writing matters, how it comes to matter. Research in circulation studies can show how the movement of writing catalyzes publics, how it affects communities, and how it discursively and affectively connects and attunes bodies with other bodies. While I see much promise for circulation research, a key undercurrent of my dissertation has contended that we need to think more deeply, critically, and comprehensively about how we frame circulation in pedagogy and research. This chapter shows directions for that work.

Pedagogies of Intervention: Providing Moments for Circulatory Encounter In chapter 2, I discussed two views of circulation that have been prevalent in rhetoric and writing scholarship. To recap my discussion from that chapter, I further qualified these two views as such: 1) circulation as strategic outcome, which sees circulation as something to be achieved based on a writer’s strategic rhetorical planning; and 2) circulation as already

119 underway process, which focuses on following/accounting for objects already in circulation. Whereas the strategic outcome view focuses on the delivery knowledge needed to distribute an initial text to create a circulatory life, the already underway view provides an interpretation of circulation as always already ongoing. To bridge both perspectives, I advocated for a synthesis view—what I called circulatory intervention. In this chapter, I want to reflect on how circulatory intervention can be incorporated in writing and rhetoric classrooms. Despite years of scholarship that has pushed against the creative genius author, we still far too often insist on new, original writing. This entrenched perspective—call it the will to originality—has the potential to manifest in the ways in which we teach circulation. And so it has. Writing for circulation is a much different task than writing in circulation. I have advocated for the latter view throughout this dissertation. Writing in circulation recognizes that circulation is not just a delivery goal but also an inventional resource. It recognizes, like Kenneth Burke (1974) understood, that writing is part of an “unending conversation,” and that joining communities involves dipping your oar into an already ongoing sea of discourse, one that was in motion before you arrived and that will persist once you leave. Challenging the will to originality, I suggest we need to do more work to encourage students to intervene in circulatory flows. As such, in the paragraphs that follow, I briefly describe how ecological pedagogies support the premise that, in Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) words, “we encounter rhetoric” (p. 23). Tracing digital circulations—following rhetoric as it unfolds— can prompt students to develop and/or refine rhetorical practices of navigating the emergent flows encountered via the social web. The idea here is that through encountering rhetoric by tracing its circulation, students may make meaningful rhetorical interventions in the writing ecologies in which they find themselves. To promote this view in our classrooms, we would do well to situate our assignments and activities in ecological terms. For some time now, scholars in rhetoric and composition have argued for an ecological understanding of writing and rhetoric (e.g., Brooke, 2009; Cooper, 1986; Edbauer, 2005; Syverson, 1999; and many others). The basic tenets of these ecological understandings hold that writing takes place within complex systems, that writing is relational and material, and that writing is a distributed act. While notions of ecology have been part of rhetoric and composition scholarship since the 1970s, Sidney Dobrin (2012) has pointed out that the emergence and now ubiquity of the Internet has expanded the need for ecological theories. “Writing studies requires a complex notion of ecological methodologies in order to account for the complexity of writing as system,” Dobrin explained, “particularly as the current hyper- circulatory condition of writing now demands more complex theories than composition studies has previously provided” (p. 7). Ecology has been an especially helpful metaphor to untangle such a “hyper-circulatory condition of writing,” because it allows scholars to conceptualize the environments in which writing moves and the relationships impacted by such movement (see Eyman, 2015, for an especially lucid take). In addition to writing theory and methodology, the turn to ecology also extends to writing and rhetoric pedagogy. For example, Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber (2011) argued for public writing assignments to be placed within particular ecologies, advocating that such an approach is useful for pedagogies interested in effecting rhetorical change. As Rivers and Weber put it:

We want to push students to write multiple, intertextual documents that could affect specific institutional changes. Within an emphasis on the ecological and the mundane, students can identify workable changes and collaborate with others, hopefully creating

120 more ethically aware, more rhetorically robust work than assignments that just ask students to share opinions with an indeterminate audience. (p. 190)

To illustrate their point, Rivers and Weber convincingly described how institutional change brought about by the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, though seemingly initiated through the acts of Rosa Parks, was the consequence of a complex circulating ecology. In this way, “intense and effective advocacy,” Rivers and Weber argued, “requires not just solitary rhetorical action but an ongoing ecology of documents, symbolic actions, interpersonal and professional networks, and organizations” (p. 202). I want to dwell on Rivers and Weber’s study for a bit longer, largely because I find its pedagogical implementation to be at odds with its basic theoretical assumptions. That is, while making a strong case for how change happened from within an already circulating ecology, when Rivers and Weber turn to their own assignment they fall back on assumptions that seem to belie their earlier arguments. They do this when they recall how they asked students to create an ecology of circulating texts, instead of participating in or intervening in one already underway. Rivers and Weber succinctly put their approach as such: “In short, we want students to create their own concatenation of texts and consider how these texts might circulate and coordinate within their ecology” (p. 204, my emphasis). While the authors do articulate a rhetorical analysis component of their assignment, I cannot help but ruminate on the action and ownership in the writing portion of their assignment. When Rivers and Weber ask students to create their own concatenation of texts for circulation, they are asking students to stimulate change by generating a public ecology, instead of asking them to seek out changes from within an already circulating ecology. Certainly, asking students to consider circulation requires that they imagine how their own texts will acquire velocity within a given ecology. For example, in a course titled “Digital Writing and Rhetoric: Composing Words, Images, and Sounds,” I asked students to theorize how their final projects, which were multimodal videos, might circulate and gain resonance in certain communities. I asked them to consider common rhetorical considerations like kairos and audience, but I also asked students to think more critically about digital delivery and rhetorical velocity as they designed and distributed their texts. Asking students to do this delivery work may be an important first step for getting students to think critically about circulation. But I also can’t help but wonder how the acts of tracing, tracking, and following an already circulating ecology may better harmonize with an ecological understanding of rhetoric. Not change from scratch, but change from within—subtle, kairotic, and tactical rhetorical moves that emerge with the flow of circulation. What might assignments look like if we asked students to encounter circulatory flows before they produced any text? How might we cultivate habits that validate rhetorical navigation and intervention? How might we encourage timely, rhetorical practices that participate in the emergent and ongoing becoming of particular rhetorical ecologies? To approximate answers to these questions, I suggest we invite students to take a page out of Laurie Gries’ (2013, 2015) approach to rhetorical research by asking them to employ research methods similar to iconographic tracking. In Still Life with Rhetoric, Gries described research sensibilities for tracking the circulation of material things, and she elected to use descriptors such as “following,” “tracing,” and “de-scribing” to depict what such research entails. For Gries, the notion of following suggests researchers should track a rhetorical object as it “transforms across form, genre, media, and function as it actualizes in divergent versions” (p.

121 90). Tracing, as Gries described it, involves accounting for the rhetorical frames that come to outline where a material thing has travel and what actualizations it has spawned. Finally, Gries offered the notion of de-scribing as the act of the researcher writing thick descriptions outlining where a circulating object travels—the idea being to “offer such rich detail that little theoretical explanation is needed to account for how their actions are distributed across proliferating and fluctuating collectives” (p. 101). This, to be sure, is ecological research; it asserts that we always start in the middle of things—in medias res—and that much can be uncovered from such a disposition. While Gries called on other rhetoric scholars to take up her iconographic tracking method, I see much utility in extending such research sensibilities to students in writing courses. In our age of hyper-circulatory writing (Dobrin, 2012), following, tracing, and describing can be, I argue, generative steps toward rhetorical intervention by allowing students to get a richer and fuller picture of the rhetorical ecology in which they’re participating. What I’m trying to say here is, let’s include students in on the action by asking them to track, trace, follow, and describe the circulation of particular objects that hold public significance to them and their communities. From my point of view, such research practices can lead to meaningful interventions made possible through cultivating what I describe more fully below as kairotic stances and mêtic ways of thinking and doing. Of course, I’m not advocating that students can perform the same kind of book-length case study Gries accomplished in Still Life with Rhetoric. Rather, I’m suggesting that conducting smaller-scale research by following a particular circulating object can be a productive for joining public discourse. Allow me to point to an example of what I mean here by exploring an assignment that asks students to follow and intervene in the circulation of a hashtag.

Encountering Hashtags From the fleeting capitalist-driven #NBCVoiceSave to the ever-accumulating and world- building #BlackLivesMatter, hashtags, those words or strings of words preceded by the pound or number sign, have emerged as near-ubiquitous markers of digital-material life. In fact, on any given day, you would be hard-pressed to not see a hashtag. You see them when logging into your social media accounts should you have them, but also when watching television, listening to your radio, shopping online, strolling down your street, reading a paperback book, or even opening up your refrigerator. From their categorizing function on social platforms—or, for a more technical definition, a type of metadata to group like-data together—to their circulation outside of digital networks (Coke bottles, clothing, course syllabi, and bumper stickers), hashtags, it seems, are everywhere. In fact, I don’t think it would be too bold of a statement to say that we live in the age of the hashtag. From marketing campaigns to social justice initiatives to conference handles: hashtags help organize our collective lives, connect us with diverse others, and bring about collective change. For writers interested in advocacy work, public relations, advertising, digital branding, community work—any new media writing, really—critically thinking about the cultural affordances of hashtags, and the publics that coalesce around them, is an increasingly worthwhile endeavor. From a pedagogical perspective, the particular angle I sketch here attempts to bring concepts of navigation and intervention to the fore. In other words, it attempts account for how circulation can inform a more comprehensive range of rhetorical activity. The assignment proceeds in three parts: analysis, production/intervention, and reflection, and I imagine that such an assignment would work well in digital writing, professional writing, and/or public writing

122 courses. To begin, if teaching an assignment similar to this one, it would be helpful to read widely about hashtags—from readings about the political potential of hashtags (e.g., Penney & Dadas, 2013) and case studies about hashtag activism (e.g., Weiss, 2014), to stories about how hashtags have gone awry (e.g., the #MyNYPD case discussed in Chapter 4). While students may well have experience and knowledge about hashtags, these readings would help to situate the importance of how hashtags can come to matter in public life. Mirroring Gries’ discussion of following, tracing, and describing, the analysis portion of this assignment would ask students to seek out an already circulating hashtag that holds significance to them. For the purposes of this assignment, I would work with students to select a hashtag that has picked up a lot of traction—one that many people are using in a campaign-like fashion, and perhaps one that has amassed different iterations (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter/#AllLivesMatter or #YesAllWomen/YesAllWhiteWomen). Using a variety of social media platforms and search engines (Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Google, DuckDuckGo, etc.), I would then ask students to follow how the hashtag circulates—paying attention to the contexts in which they see the tag being deployed, understanding that “context” is not limited to one platform, but certainly crosses platforms. After rigorously following and tracing the circulations of hashtag for a sustained amount of time (say, two or three weeks), students would be prompted to write about the circulatory journey of their chosen hashtag. Similar to Gries articulation of de-scribing, I would invite students to offer thick descriptions of where the hashtag traveled, how it was used, and the key rhetorical frames that guided the circulation of the tag. Analysis of this kind would be especially well suited for an aggregator website like Storify, a platform that would allow students to curate and comment on hashtag circulations. In this analysis, students could include key posts that detail the circulation of their chosen hashtag. Following the analysis of a hashtag’s circulation, students would be in a prime position to consider how they may intervene in a given hashtag campaign. A deliverable for this assignment would be the intervention itself—the hashtag and an accompanying message, which, depending on each individual case, might include other images, videos, or some other new media object (e.g., GIF, Vine loop, etc.). While the intervention portion of the assignment might be relatively short, I would stress the importance of an accompanying rationale to explain how they see their intervention working in a particular ecology. Importantly, I would ask students to consider the when, how, and where of their interventions in an effort to cultivate writers’ kairotic stances and develop mêtic intelligence. By a kairotic stance, I’m building off of Debra Hawhee’s (2002) discussion of what she called a “rhetorical stance,” a position in which a rhetor is ready to move and act in particular discursive arrangements as they unfold. Hawhee’s discussion focused on the material embodiment of kairos, which, she noted, is metaphorized in the god-figure of Kairos himself. She wrote, “the mythical figure of Kairos epitomizes decision- and incision-making in that he is usually depicted bearing scales and razor blades, tools for measuring and cutting” (p. 25). Hawhee maintained that Kairos must be “ever ready for a moment of intervention”—and that his interventional tools are poised to “transform the outcome of a particular encounter” (p. 25). The slicing into a particular encounter, Hawhee pointed out, comes to bear on both ethical and timely actions. In other words, a kairotic stance is a position in which one “hooks in” to a particular encounter in meaningful, well-planned, and timely ways. Although this kind of assignment is undoubtedly a constrained way to ask students to think critically about circulation, the hope is that the undergoing of such processes would aide

123 students in developing mêtic knowledge useful for navigating and inventing from the flows of circulation. Mêtis deals with the province of change—so much so that it’s difficult to pin down, onerous to classify. As such, in many ways, teaching students to cultivate mêtis is a very difficult, if not unlikely, task in university settings. As Rebecca Pope-Ruark (2014) argued, “Situations in which mêtis is necessary are complicated, messy, chaotic, changeable, and ambiguous. They are not clinical and academic” (p. 337). As such, I argue providing pathways for circulatory encounter—where students must grapple with the messy, dynamic, and emergent flows of writing—can be one way to support the development of mêtic ways of thinking and doing. In a related vein, I see this assignment as being grounded in what Carolyn Miller (2000) called “the epistemology of the hunt,” which includes those clever, resourceful, and inventive tactics that are put to use in a world of becoming (p. 135). In her discussion of venatic invention, which she connected to mêtis, Miller quoted from Carlo Ginzberg to describe its basic premise: “the hunter squatting on the ground, studying the tracks of his quarry” (p. 138). Hunting down the circulations of an already-in-motion hashtag becomes such an inventive exercise. Tracking, following, and navigating the circulation of a hashtag can yield generative, and indeed, sometimes unexpected results. As Miller put it, again referring to hunting imagery, “hunters may know what they track or may unexpectedly discover new game, but they do not, presumably, create their quarry” (p. 141). The vast majority of those who tap into the circulation of trending hashtags don’t create the hashtag—rather, they join in, intervene, make do with. Yet, well- circulated hashtags still allow rhetors to follow, to be curious, to be inventive. Taking the hashtag as its exemplar, a pedagogy of intervention would ask students to trace, follow, and describe how a certain hashtag circulates, transforms, and materializes. A pedagogy of intervention, in this regard, would not ask students to miraculously come up with a new hashtag campaign—it would not ask students to create widespread circulation. Rather, it would embrace the hunt, the search, the track, and intervene when necessary. It would start, as we always do, in the middle of things, and realize that the potential for novelty—invention—can emerge from seeking out what’s already given. This pedagogy not only favors an ecological sensibility to writing, but also promotes a rhetoric that is deeply collaborative, responsive, and attuned to the world’s becoming. This is just one assignment that promotes a full range of circulatory activity, and certainly it is one that can be pared down into a set of smaller activities. Still other assignments and activities may be developed to encourage similar rhetorical habits and practices. For example, a robust remix project offers another avenue for teachers. With heightened attention to navigating circulation and distributing projects into circulation, such a remix project may include the following steps:  analyze and deconstruct existing remixes,  compile a thoughtful digital archive for possible recomposition,  compose a remix, and  write a reflection that characterizes key goals for the remix, including possibilities for it experiencing rhetorical velocity. Whatever the assignment or activity may be, I have attempted to argue throughout this project that we need to theorize and teach circulation in a fuller capacity. Circulation, for writers, isn’t just about constructing messages worthy of circulatory success; circulation is also about making use of circulatory fields and searching out ways to resonate with others.

124 Trajectories for Circulation Studies

In chapter 2, I explored circulation studies from a number of different perspectives, and I presented four overlapping intersections that are common among existing circulation research and theory in rhetoric and composition. In that chapter, I noted how disciplinary conversations on rhetorical delivery, economies of writing, public writing, and power have contributed to how we understand, theorize, and teach circulation. In this concluding chapter, I explore two further trajectories that advance a more robust circulation studies: infrastructures of circulation and ethics of circulation.

Infrastructures of Circulation As rhetorical studies of circulation grow more sophisticated and numerous, we need to specify what, precisely, we mean by circulation. As discussed in Chapter 2, circulation cuts across many disciplinary boundaries. Scholars can’t assume, therefore, that everyone’s on the same page when it comes to studying circulation. Thus, I propose we begin studying circulation at different levels of scale. For example, we might break down circulation in terms of the pre- discursive/affective, the discursive, and the infrastructural. Whereas the pre-discursive/affective level would explore how affective energies71 circulate in daily life, the discursive level would investigate the production and consumption of visible circulatory flows. The infrastructural level, which I believe has received the least amount of attention from rhetorical circulation studies, would disclose the often-unseen material conditions on which circulatory flows are sustained. The notion of levels of scale, of course, doesn’t alleviate the need for nuance and disciplinary positioning, nor does it suggest that circulation cannot be studied from overlapping levels of scale. On the contrary, parsing out circulation in this way, I believe, would help create lines of inquiry that coalesce around shared trajectories. A worthwhile trajectory, one I explore further here, is at the infrastructural level, which requires a deeper look into the materialities of circulation. This line of inquiry understands that material assemblages of all kinds—plastic, metal, flesh, mineral, and so on—are at play when we circulate writing. While this project has largely focused on circulation at the discursive level, the deeper infrastructures of circulation present opportunities for rhetorical analysis and action as explored in Chapter 5. There, I untangled a deeper, infrastructural sense of circulation by unpacking how the cultural politics of YouTube affect the flows of digital discourse on its platform. Certainly, more work can be done in this arena—especially work that considers the roles policy and legislation play on the free circulation of writing. Copyright is one such area, but we’re also facing alarming threats like net neutrality that, if undermined, would disproportionately redistribute the speeds at which everyday users access information. Net neutrality is the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should treat all websites and services equally. In recent years, net neutrality, in the United States, has been under threat as ISPs have proposed creating so-called fast and slow lanes to regulate and further monetize the flows of the Internet. This disregard of net neutrality would mean that when you connect to the Internet via your ISP (e.g., Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, AT&T, etc.), you would be able to access some websites (read: those with big pockets) at quicker speeds than others. In rhetoric and

71 Catherine Chaput (2010) expanded on the affective dimension of circulation, as she wrote, “affective energies […] operate on an entirely different level than rational deliberation and self-interested choice. Affective energy precedes our conscious decisions, cajoling us into habituated movements that are valorized through repetition and that are separate from our ‘slower linguistic consciousness’” (p. 15).

125 composition, Heidi McKee (2011, 2016) has been perhaps the strongest advocate of net neutrality, arguing that net neutrality, and the potential danger to undermine it, matters to writing. More specifically, McKee (2016) put it this way:

How we are able to connect (or not) to the world’s largest digital network and what data we can download and upload and at what speeds matters. And what matters even more is who controls those networks and thus the delivery of information on those networks. (n.p.)

In terms of circulation, this infrastructural concern considers speed and access—and the decisions that affect this infrastructure largely play out in the realm of law and policy. As McKee explained, the legal classification of the Internet has profound impacts on how ISPs can (or cannot) control the flow of information. Thankfully, for now, the Internet is classified as a common carrier and regulated under Title II of the Act—meaning that ISPs must follow certain rules as laid out by the Federal Communications Commission. Yet, as McKee warned, many would like to see net neutrality legislation overturned, making net neutrality an issue of ongoing relevance. On top of policy and legal issues, the algorithmic nature of digital writing presents another needed line of inquiry for rhetorical circulation research. Algorithms matter not only because they play a role in circulating content, but also because they influence broader cultural practices via their calculated circulations. As Tarleton Gillespie (forthcoming) argued, “algorithms, particularly those involved in the movement of culture, are both mechanisms of distribution and valuation, part of the process by which knowledge institutions circulate and evaluate information, the process by which new media industries provide and sort culture” (p. 2, emphasis in original). Gillespie noted that “trending” algorithms on social media platforms don’t give an accurate depiction of what’s circulating most, because their computation practices are sorted out by a different calculus. For Gillespie, then, circulatory practices on social media platforms, governed by proprietary and invisible algorithms, give way to “calculated publics”—a public algorithmically produced to match a user’s particular stream of data. What’s “circulating” or “trending” for me isn’t necessarily the same for you. This calculated nature of circulation matters in terms of visibility and attention. In an essay titled “What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson,” Zeynep Tufecki (2014) wrote about the emergence of the #Ferguson hashtag, and the ways in which algorithmic filtering affected her Facebook and Twitter feeds. Tufecki reflected on how her Twitter feed—which she noted closely resembled the same affinity groups she has on Facebook—circulated stories about the shooting of Michael Brown and the systemic racism present in the community of Ferguson, Missouri well before her feed on Facebook. While the hashtag #Ferguson eventually made its way to Facebook, Tufecki pondered a scenario without a competing platform with a different set of algorithms controlling its circulations. “I wonder,” she wrote, “what if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook? Maybe, but with no transparency to the decisions, I cannot be sure. Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?” (n.p.). Tufecki’s speculations aren’t that far off, I believe, for in today’s age of social media, algorithms impinge upon what we encounter and we encounter it. While the same line of argument is necessarily true for pre-digital circulations (i.e., an editor making decisions about what will circulate in a newspaper), the relatively mysterious and hidden nature of algorithms

126 poses new questions for information access. This is to say, I believe scholars interested in rhetorical circulation studies might begin to more readily interrogate how algorithms increasingly influence the circulation of digital writing. The study of algorithms might be nestled into what in Chapter 5 I described as, following Tarleton Gillespie (2010), the politics of the platform—what I’ll pose here as the rhetoric of the platform. As noted in Chapter 5, the word platform itself is fraught with meaning: it has emerged as a discursive marker that simultaneously caters to varying stakeholders (i.e., a platform to speak from/on, a platform for entrepreneurial work, and a platform in a technical/computational sense). The slippage of the word platform, as Gillespie argued, has worked in the favor of major Internet companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, because they can position their networks—as platforms—as meaningful and relevant for a range of constituencies. From the standpoint of circulation, the rhetoric of the platform calls on us to interrogate how different platforms order, filter, and arrange content, how the circulations individual users encounter are sorted by an assemblage of business practices, algorithms, interfaces, censorship policies, and so on (see, especially, van Dijck, 2013). Data circulations differ from platform to platform—and, because platforms themselves are constantly updating, understanding the precise inner workings of how data travels on individual platforms is an onerous, if not an altogether impossible, task. Nonetheless, being aware that the platforms increasingly shape circulatory flows is an important caveat for researchers, teachers, and writers invested in putting circulation at the center of their work. This is certainly an infrastructural element that gets put to work at the level of code, but such coding is entangled within a broader assemblage of practices and discourses that make up the “platform” itself. Infrastructures of circulation go deeper yet. For example, in The Undersea Network, Nicole Starosielski (2015) traced the contours of the wired Internet by following how data travels transcontinentally across sea floors via undersea cables. As Starosielski pointed out, undersea cables are “the backbone of the global Internet” (p. 3)—yet, as she noted, greater publics often perceive global connectivity as taking place via airwaves and satellites,72 if they consider the infrastructure of data flows at all. As she put it, her book “traces how today’s digital circulations are trafficked underground, rather than by air. It follows signals as they move at the speed of light through winding cables the size of a garden hose” (p. 2). Starosielski pointed out that tracing the topographies of these circulations reveal how digital data circulations get caught up in geopolitical conflicts and colonial histories. “En route,” she wrote, “[digital circulations] get tangled up in coastal politics at landing points, monitored and maintained at cable stations, interconnected with transportation systems and atmospheric currents, and embedded in histories of seafloor measurement” (p. 2). Undersea cables, a seemingly banal materiality of networked data flows, are more consequential than what meets the eye. Such cables route data from point to point, so of course these cables matter for accessing the Internet. But a deeper engagement with these cables shows that how we access the global Internet is inextricably bound to the environments in which the cables pass, the ownership of landing points, and the histories of prior telecommunications networks. As Starosielski noted, researching the geographies of the current transoceanic cable

72 Even mobile connections are more hardwired than we may acknowledge. As Jason Farman (2015) unraveled in his study of mobile connectivity, once cell phones reach signal with cell towers, the remaining journey of the flow of data takes place “entirely through the material, hardwired, tangible infrastructure of the hardwired Internet” (p. 48).

127 network reveals that they follow the same path as older telegraph systems—a strategic move in the name of security (i.e., keep cables out of harm’s way, both in terms of possible environmental harm from the ocean and the potential for human disruption). The problem, however, is that cable laying practices, which rely on cable routes already in place, have left us “with a global system that is relatively centralized and not very diverse” (pp. 229-230). The expansion and decentralization of cable routes—a necessary task for developing a more robust, secure network—must contend with the undersea and coastal topographies in which the cables pass. Starosielski’s fascinating study is what we might think of as deep circulation—the material infrastructures that traffic data flows via a networked topography made of cables, gateways, network centers, human bodies, and more. These materialities are embedded in what Starosielski called “turbulent ecologies” that affect and are affected by their environmental surroundings. The notion of deep circulation suggests flows of information aren’t as ethereal—as “cloud-like”—as Internet communications are increasingly positioned (especially by telecommunications companies themselves). Scholars interested in rhetorical circulation haven yet to pay considerable attention to such deep infrastructures of circulation. Yet, as James Brown (2015) recently put it, “infrastructural concerns are ethical ones, since they actively shape the relational spaces of networked life” (n.p.). Following these material infrastructures, as Starosielski argued, can, among other things, unveil the centralized nature of the global Internet. And, in turn, allow rhetorical scholars to advance praxis-oriented studies designed to support advocacy efforts to promote a more robust, decentralized Internet. For some time now, scholars in rhetoric and composition have considered the role infrastructure plays in new media composing, classroom writing, and the building, support, and sustainment of writing programs (e.g., DeVoss, Cushman, & Grabill, 2005; DeVoss, McKee, & Selfe, 2009). This research has argued that “infrastructures are absolutely necessary for writing teachers and their students to understand” because the possibilities for new media composing rest on infrastructures at various levels of scale (DeVoss, Cushman, Grabill, 2005, p. 16). Infrastructures of circulation represent another node in this research, asking critical questions about the possibilities for writing to move, and about the stakeholders involved in supporting the often-invisible material infrastructures necessary for information access and distribution. Ultimately, rhetorical research with an eye on these infrastructures can enrich our understandings of circulation.

Consequences of Virality, Ethics of (Re)Circulation, and Mindful Textual Reuse In early 2015, Collin Gifford Brooke delivered a closing keynote at the Indiana Digital Rhetoric Symposium, an inaugural meeting that gathered emerging and recognized scholars to establish key questions, definitions, and futures for digital rhetorics. Brooke, having the task of delivering the final words on the state of digital rhetoric in 2015, told his audience that he saw questions of virality as being crucial for digital rhetoricians. Citing viral videos and memetic images, Brooke asserted, “more than ever before, the idea of going viral—of exceeding one’s initial audience—is a marker of rhetorical success, at least for those who produce the content” (n.p.). As Brooke proceeded through his remarks, though, it became clear that he wasn’t altogether sanguine with this idea. Part of Brooke’s larger argument was the pressing need for rhetoric scholars and teachers to be critical about how cultural logics of virality creep their way into everyday practices. Among Brooke’s central concerns involved the cultural and ethical consequences of producing viral content at all costs, especially when the desire to spread one’s

128 content outweighs other rhetorical concerns, including, among others, ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Like Brooke, I am wary about how virality has come to mark “rhetorical success.” Widespread circulation, while important for digital economies of writing, should not be the benchmark for “good” or “successful” rhetorical practice. This concern is made palpable in examples of viral compositions that spread for racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, or otherwise problematic reasons. For example, Robert Leston, Geoffrey Carter, Sarah Arroyo, and Sherrin Frances (2013) explored the case of Alexandra Wallace, a former UCLA student who distributed to YouTube the infamous video “Asians in the Library.” In this video, as the name suggests, Wallace used racist tropes to rant about Asians studying and living in her local community. Within hours of posting it to YouTube, Wallace’s video began to circulate at viral rates. As it continued to spread, many on YouTube circulated counter responses and parodies of the video as way to confront Wallace’s blatant racism. As Leston, Carter, Arroyo, and Frances pointed out, “Wallace’s case illuminates how most people often do not understand the rapid impact that digital delivery can have on their lives” (n.p.). Indeed, following the viral event of her video, Wallace eventually chose to stop attending UCLA for fear of her personal safety. While Wallace created and distributed a composition that eventually went viral, digital delivery also affords the opportunity for people to participate in the further circulation of problematic messages. For an example, we might consider the circulation of images of wrongfully identified bodies in the #BringBackOurGirls movement. A little background on the #BringBackOurGirls movement might be in order. In 2014, #BringBackOurGirls began to circulate as activists sought to bring action against the abduction of more than 200 Nigerian girls by the terrorist group Boko Haram. According to most reports, the girls, between the ages of 14- 18, were taken from a boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria, and have since been kept in captivity and/or sold into sex slavery. #BringBackOurGirls, then, was a rallying call for intervention—a way for a broader public to do something about the injustices suffered by those affected by Boko Haram. While the attention of #BringBackOurGirls may be lauded as an humanitarian effort, some of the images that went viral as part of the campaign involved misappropriated images of girls who were not captured by Boko Haram. In a 2014 interview published on The New York Times’ photoblog Lens, the photographer of the images, Ami Vitale, explained the significance of the images:

There were three photos that were taken from either my website or the Alexia Foundation website, and someone made these images the face of the campaign. But these photos had nothing to do with the girls who were kidnapped and sexually trafficked [...] Can you imagine having your daughter’s image spread throughout the world as the face of sexual trafficking? These girls have never been abducted, never been sexually trafficked. This is misrepresentation. (Estrin, 2014, n.p.)

In fact, the girls featured in the photos lived some 1,000 miles away from Nigeria in Guinea-Bissau. In her interview, Vitale described her original story as one of hope, noting that the photographs were meant to showcase how girls’ lives in Guinea-Bissau were getting better with more opportunities for school and education. Yet, if you were to plug #BringBackOurGirls into a website like Google Images, you would likely find that the images have indeed become “the face” of the campaign. What happens when (misappropriated) bodies get caught up in the

129 sprawl of a viral event? Indeed, virality can take on a life of its own, and the neoliberal effects of circulation can bring about unwanted attention and possibly even harm to individuals and larger sociocultural groups. Another example that touches on the ethics of (re)circulation hits close to my disciplinary home. This case involves a rhetoric and composition professor at Oberlin College, Dr. Joy Karega, who has received much media attention after the circulation of anti-Semitic images/posts on her social media accounts. Although this incident was widely discussed in both news articles and on social media by those within the rhetoric and composition community, I want to focus here on responses made by someone who interacted with Karega and analyzed her messages. In two public blog posts,73 Jim Ridolfo (2016) explained how Karega posted an image that supported conspiracy theories that suggested Jewish people were responsible for the 2015 terrorist attacks in France. The image Karega circulated—along with a message that supported its visual rhetoric—was of an ISIS member pulling of a mask to reveal Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggesting that the 2015 Paris attacks were part of a covert operation orchestrated by Israeli leadership. Ridolfo explored Karega’s use of already circulating images through his frame of rhetorical velocity (see Chapter 2 for a summary). As Ridolfo’s argued, this case “provides an interesting if not disturbing case example of image appropriation and recomposition, denial of its origins and other uses, and, I would argue, support and advancement of racist tropes” (n.p.). While Karega didn’t compose the photo-shopped image, participating in its circulatory spread with positive, supporting messages that agree with its tropes suggests she is complicit with its underlying ethics. Ridolfo put it this way:

Dr. Karega has made clear in her public responses that she has no problem sharing images and texts that appear to be created by white supremacists, (and are most certainly circulated by white supremacists). I have made clear that it’s racist and antisemitic to take these images, present them in some pseudo-progressive veneer, and deny their tropes and origins. (n.p.).

In his post, Ridolfo’s larger point is that Karega’s redistribution of problematic images serves as a teachable moment for digital rhetoric scholars, teachers, and students. I agree. And I believe this case sheds needed light on what we might consider the ethics of (re)circulation—of contemplating how distributing or redistributing writing is always caught up in a process of relating to networked others. This case, in other words, raises important issues when it comes to one’s social media circulation and the underlying ethics such circulations entail. It may seem obvious to some readers, but I want point out that acts of recirculation, like all rhetorical acts, are not ethically neutral (as if such a stance is possible). As James Porter (1998) noted, “all acts of writing are also ethical actions […] in that they always inevitably assume a ‘should’ for some ‘we’” (p. xiv). In Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing, Porter developed a rhetorical ethics by contending that ethical actions are kairotic; they are contingent, situational, and circumstantial. Negotiating ethical decisions, asking what is right and what should be, is always entangled in rhetorical practice.

73 While Ridolfo’s blog is public, I sought permission to cite and quote his work. He graciously agreed—and I thank him for his analysis and public intellectualism. His blog can be accessed here: http://tiuta.rid.olfo.org/2016/03/09/dr- joy-karega-and-rhetorical-velocity/.

130 Building from Porter, though diverging from him by grounding his discussion in Derrida’s notion of hospitality, Jim Brown (2015) argued that we would also do well to account for how writing spaces themselves configure ethical relations. As he put it, “Any attempt to account for ethical action in networked life must account not only for individual choice but also for the digital environments that determine how those choices take shape.” Indeed, Brown’s larger argument contended that network infrastructures come to bear on ethical relations: they shape how we relate to and encounter one another. Brown figured his discussion of ethics in terms of “ethical programs,” which he explained has a dual meaning, evoking “both the computational procedures of software (a computer program) and the procedures we develop in order to deal with ethical predicaments (a program of action)” (n.p.). Further, for Brown, “an ethical program, computational or otherwise, is a set of steps taken to address an ethical predicament” (n.p.). Like Porter’s discussion of rhetorical ethics, ethical programs, when considered from the perspective of the human rhetor, are not easily arrived at—they demand a kind of puzzling through, a questioning that won’t arrive at absolute answers. In an age of retweets, shares, and reblogs, it’s often easy and expedient to re-circulate already flowing content without fully interrogating its origins or anticipating what its further spread may accomplish. As Ridolfo pointed out, recirculating content without much research into its initial starting point is common practice on social media platforms. It’s complex, too. For example, retweeting a problematic message doesn’t necessarily imply that the retweeter ideologically supports that message; rather, the retweeter may be further circulating the message for purposes of exposure or protest—so that others can interrogate the message in question. There are no clear-cut answers here; we need to explore ethics of circulation on a case-by-case basis. Providing case examples like Karega’s, which is still unfolding, as well as other cases of recirculation might be worthwhile avenues for considering and teaching the ethics of circulation. In addition to considering the social consequences of virality and the ethics of (re)circulation, the study of tactical rhetorics throughout this dissertation suggests we need to think more critically about the ethics of reusing/appropriating others’ work. Importantly, as scholars like James Porter (2011) have argued, we need to draw out differences between legal aspects of using others work, as well as ethical aspects of reusing others’ work. From a legal standpoint, when it comes to determining what’s legally acceptable when reusing already existing textual material, many point to the Fair Use Doctrine as delineated in Section 107 of the United States 1976 Copyright Act. Section 107 stipulates that the following four factors that serve as a heuristic to determine if a particular use is “fair”: 1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; 2. The nature of the copyrighted work; 3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work. In addition to this four-factor heuristic, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (2011) have noted that the concept of “transformativeness” is a crucial guide for determining whether or not a use is fair. They write, “These days, the judicial assessment of fair use typically relies on an inquiry into whether material has been ‘transformed’ (or in nonlegal parlance, repurposed) rather than simply reproduced for the same audience” (p. 80). In other words, to be deemed a fair use, the new work must be significantly different from the original text.

131 From a disciplinary perspective, Martine Courant Rife (2007) has argued persuasively that composition teachers need to “equip” students with an understanding of the law by teaching digital writers how to conduct a Fair Use analysis (p. 161). This analysis, for Rife, involves students interrogating their work in relation to the four factors discussed above (often called the “four factor test”). More recently, Susan Delagrange, Ben McCorkle, and Catherine Braun (2013) provided assessment criteria that are specific to remix practices. Like Rife, their chapter suggests the Fair Use four-factor test can serve as “an evaluative instrument” for teachers—a heuristic that can be used throughout the composing process to help students “conceptualize, plan, and revise work” (n.p.). And like Aufderheide and Jaszi, Delagrange, McCorkle, and Braun turned to the concept of “transformativeness” to delineate responsible remix practices. The question of Fair Use is increasingly important because circulating repurposed materials in digital spheres implicates writers in a legal realm. Put otherwise, circulating materials that can’t make a strong case for Fair Use imposes writers to potential legal trouble. At the same time, as discussed in Chapter 5, it’s also important to know one’s rights and be able to respond to feckless takedowns in an age of unbalanced copyright, where technological, economic, and cultural forces align to squelch the possibilities that Fair Use provides. Because access to web archives have made many materials available for reuse, knowing the basics of Fair Use is an important part of composing and delivering public writing. Writers today need to be able to self-assess the legal landscape, but they also need to consider textual reuse from an ethical perspective. Of course, one ethical consideration for appropriate reuse in academic settings has long been couched in discussions of plagiarism. As many within the field of rhetoric and composition have argued (see, especially, Howard, 1999; Johnson-Eilola & Selber, 2007), our conceptions of what constitutes plagiarism are largely based on Romantic conceptions of authorship—of the lone genius creating texts ex nihilo. As such, plagiarism, from an ethical standpoint, is often, and mistakenly, conceived as a rather black and white phenomenon: writers assume an ethical stance if they don’t plagiarize and an unethical one if they do. Of course, we know this binary is much more complex, and considering what constitutes plagiarism differs from context to context, from culture to culture, and from discipline to discipline (see Howard & Robillard, 2008; Jamieson, 2008; Valentine, 2006). Understanding appropriate textual reuse and documentation practices is a deeply contextual and culturally embedded activity. While avoiding and understanding plagiarism is undoubtedly complex, there has nevertheless been a fair amount of scholarly work investigating how we may puzzle through such complexity in pedagogy, administration, and scholarship. But what about questions regarding one’s positionality vis-à-vis the texts he or she is appropriating? Scholarship on imitation proves useful in this regard. Robert Terrill (2011), for example, argued that a rhetorical pedagogy of imitatio has the potential to help students foster “rhetorical judgment” (p. 309) in that they constantly have to put themselves in relation to the exemplar text at hand. That is, pedagogies of imitation often ask students to navigate, decipher, and critically examine a cultural reservoir of textual material. In this way, imitation pedagogy calls on students to set themselves in relation to others as they analyze and emulate others’ texts. For Terrill, this process can help cultivate a sense of ethical mindfulness. What we need to start sounding—louder and better—is a self-reflexive ethics of appropriation, calling on students (and ourselves) to consider both the ethical and legal implications of reusing or redistributing others’ work in each individual case. Indeed, the very notion of “self-reflexivity” could be useful here. As comparative rhetoric scholar Mary Garrett

132 (2013) has suggested, self-reflexivity, or the idea of being aware of one’s social and cultural position in relation to others, can be approached in at least three ways. First, she recommended practicing mindfulness or attempting to be self-aware; second, she advised to inquire for differing perspectives; and finally, she suggested practicing empathy or putting yourself in others’ positions. In thinking more critically about the ethics of appropriation, the following questions, and still others, might be a useful way to discuss the ethical considerations of tactical approaches. Whose discourse are you leveraging? What social position do you occupy in relation to the one you are reusing? What is the potential harm in reusing certain texts? We live in a world inundated with flows of information, a dense and dynamic archival sea filled with textual and material debris. Social media platforms—with commands to update, reblog, forward, and retweet—encourage us to push information further along. Twitter asks if we want to expand our reach; Facebook informs that we have received another share; YouTube chimes that we have reached extraordinary view counts. It would seem that the spread of information is a kind of barometer for rhetorical success in our current moment. Go viral or go home. Or, as Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford (2013) put it, “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead” (p. 1). While these maxims no doubt have a certain ring to them, the kind of gold rush mentality to create viral content at all costs engenders ethical and social consequences that deserve further unpacking by rhetoric and writing scholars and teachers.

At the End, But Ever in the Middle

As I write the final words of this dissertation, I find myself in the middle of many things. Public and digital life is circulating all around me. My social media feeds, amid the particularly contentious presidential election cycle of 2016, are bursting with political messages. Images, GIFs, videos, alphabetic messages, and hashtags—all circulated to make interventions in public life. Some roar on for days and months; others fizzle out as soon as they’re released. In the middle of these circulations, it’s easy to grow suspect of what they may actually accomplish. The cacophony is overwhelming. Not to mention—whether I want to admit it or not—that circulation is deeply embedded in a capitalist enterprise. With every move I make on the web, I am simultaneously writing my digital identity profile. That is, the actions I take while online—every link clicked, every word typed, every page visited—are transformed into a kind of circulatory capital. Underneath my everyday online activities are circulations of data, bits and bytes of information that are tracked, sorted, packaged, and harvested for use or sold to third parties. Never mind the “texts” I circulate in digital spheres, bits and pieces of me—book preferences, browsing patterns, political affiliations, dining predilections—are rendered as a kind of currency, which are circulated and remixed in ways that are mostly invisible. In an age of mobile media and “always-on” devices, these circuitous flows of data are unremitting and ever-present. Google Maps reminds me of this when it tracks my body’s movements and locative positions. When I return to my car after a long walk in the park across town, for instance, my phone tells me I will arrive at my home in nine minutes. My data know my life better than I do. All writing contends with competing layers of circulation—no matter what the goal. When we circulate messages of resistance or critique on social media, we are also sharing personal bits of data that will be harvested and sold to the highest bidder. When we search out circulations of moving content, we are also implanting our digital footprints and packaging our traces into sellable data. When we join-in a participatory or memetic event, we are also

133 benefiting the bottom lines of online platforms and content producers. Of course, we may reach new audiences when we circulate our writing. But then again, we may not. Whatever the case may be, our circulations, in the all-seeing eyes of proprietary platforms, aren’t for nil. As Nishant Shah (2015) put it:

Nobody might like your status, or share your tweet, or heart your blog, but you can be sure that deep in the heart of a server farm is a predictive algorithm that listens to everything that you say, keeps track of everything that you do, and waits, patiently, more sincerely than your parent, partner, or psychiatrist to record your everyday life. (p. 2)

Yes, it’s easy to grow skeptical. Before I let this dim path grow too dark, let me remind us of the stories I’ve shared throughout this project. Let’s remember the rhetorical actions of digital bricoleurs—those who don’t somehow stand outside of the circulations in which they find themselves, but instead make resistant, tactical changes to the circulatory flows they encounter. Let’s remember that bricoleurs attempt to make the world a better place by making anew out of the what’s at hand. Let’s remember that participating in daily circulatory flows doesn’t mean that one is giving up, but rather it means that one is working within what’s given to change the conditions of everyday life. Claude Levi-Strauss (1966) reminded us that the French word bricoleur is derived from the old verb bricoler, which, Levi-Strauss pointed out, often concerned actions one would take in response to unforeseen movement. This older meaning was often used to describe the world of sports, designating how a sportsperson would navigate and respond to the extraneous movements of a ball moving in an odd direction or the wind taking a sudden change in direction (Hase, 2014). In its newer sense, a noun, the definition of bricoleur evolved to mean a “handy- person”—those who use their hands to work with what is available, indeed, with what is “at hand.” Both meanings are instructive for the tactical rhetorics I have woven throughout this project. Digital bricoleurs find themselves ever in the middle of circulations—both visible and invisible movements that impinge upon the work they may do. But out of these circulations, digital bricoleurs make new compositions to craft identities, forge possibilities, and disturb boundaries, confronting unexpected circulatory movements using only what’s at hand. Practitioners of mêtis, digital bricoleurs relish in their emplacement in the unpredictable and always-mobile world. Practicing a micro-politics of bricolage, of tactical rhetorics, digital bricoleurs are comfortable starting in the middle, knowing full well that their project is never quite complete. As researchers and teachers, too, we find ourselves caught in the middle. Mired in mess, we have to contend with the complexity of the places in which we study, teach, and work. The task of theorizing, teaching, and researching circulation will be an ongoing project, for, by definition, circulation is always in flux, demanding new questions, new methodologies, and new pedagogies. There’s much to be skeptical about and there’s much we don’t yet know. But before we let skepticism overtake us, I suggest we, like the figure of the digital bricoleur, work within what’s given to make our research and teaching matter, if even in small and kairotic ways. As Donna Haraway argued (1997), “The point is to make a difference in the world […]. To do that, one must be in the action, be finite and dirty, not transcendent and clean” (p. 36). And so here we are: at the end of a dissertation, but very much in the middle of the task at hand.

134

135 References

Abrahamsson, Sebastian, Bertoni, Filippo, Mol, Annemarie, & Martin, Rebecca Ibanez. (2014). Living with omega-3: New materialism and enduring concerns. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, 000-000. Ahmed, Sara. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York, NY: Routledge. Alexander, Jonathan, & Rhodes, Jacqueline. (2014). On multimodality: New media in composition studies. Urbana, IL: Conference on College Composition and Communication/NCTE. Allen, Julia M., & Faigley, Lester. (1995). Discursive strategies for social change: An alternative rhetoric of argument. Rhetoric Review, 14(1), 142-172. Andrejevic, Mark. (2012). Estranged free labor. In (Ed.) Trebor Scholz, Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory (pp. 149-164). New York: Routledge. Arroyo, Sarah J. (2013). Participatory composition: Video culture, writing, and electracy. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Atwill, Janet. (1998). Rhetoric reclaimed: Aristotle and the liberal arts tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Aufderheide, Patricia., & Jaszi, Peter. (2011). Reclaiming fair use: How to put balance back in copyright. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Baca, Damien. (2008). Mestiz@ scripts, digital migrations, and the territories of writing. New York, NY: Palsgrave MacMillan. Bachrach, Doro (Producer), & Bichlabaum, Andy, Bonanno, Mike, & Engfehr, Kurt (Directors). (2009). The Yes Men fix the world [Motion picture]. USA: Renegade Pictures. Bacon, Jacqueline. (1998). ‘Do you understand your own language?’ Revolutionary topoi in the rhetoric of African-American abolitionists.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 28(2), 55-75. Ballif, Michelle. (1998). Writing the third sophistic Cyborg: Periphrasis on an [in] tense rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 28(4), 51-72. Ballif, Michelle. (2001). Seduction, sophistry,‐ and the woman with the rhetorical figure. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. Banks, Adam J. (2010). Digital griots: African American rhetoric in a multimedia age. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Barad, Karen. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bauwens, Michel. (2012). on digital labor in an emerging P2P economy. In (Ed.) Trebor Scholz, Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory (pp 207-210). New York: Routledge. Beck, Estee N. (2015). The invisible digital identity: Assemblages in digital networks. Computers and Composition, 35, 125-140. Beck, Estee N., Crow, Angela, McKee, Heidi, Reilly, Collen, deWinter, Jennifer, Vie, Stephanie, Gonzales, Laura, & DeVoss, Danielle Nicole. (2016). Writing in an age of surveillance, privacy, and net neutrality. Kairos 20 (2). Retrieved March 22, 2016 from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.2/topoi/beck-et-al/index.html. Beer, David. (2013a). Popular culture and new media: The politics of circulation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Beer, David. (2013b). The new circulations of culture. Berfriois. Retrieved March 2, 2016 from http://www.berfrois.com/2013/07/david-beer-new-circulations-of-culture/

136 Bender, Daniel. (1996). Imitation. In Theresa Enos (Ed.), Encyclopedia of rhetoric and composition: Communication from ancient times to the information age (pp. 343-346). New York, NY: Garland. Benhabib, Seyla. (1992). Models of public space: Hannah Arendt, the liberal tradition, and Jürgen Habermas. In (Ed.) Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 73-99). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Benkler, Yochai. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bennett, Jane. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlin, James. (1998). The politics of historiography. Rhetoric Review, 7(1), 5-49. Bingham, Caleb. (1797). The Columbian orator: Containing a variety of original pieces and selected pieces; together with rules; calculated to improve youth and others in the ornamental and useful art of eloquence. Retrieved August 19, 2015 from http://www.classicapologetics.com/b/BingCO3.pdf Bizzell, Patricia. (1997). The 4th of July and the 22nd of December: The function of cultural archives as shown by Frederick Douglass and William Apess.” College Composition and Communication, 21 (4): 44-60. boyd, danah, & Ellison, Nicole. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230. boyd, danah. (2010). Social network sites as networked publics. Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In (Ed.) Zizi Papacharissi,‐ Networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39-58). New York: Routledge. Bratta, Phil. (2015). Rhetoric and event: The embodiment of lived events. Enculturation 19. Retrieved from http://enculturation.net/rhetoric-and-event Brooke, Collin Gifford. (2009). Lingua fracta: Toward a rhetoric of new media. New York, NY: Hampton. Brown, James J. Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Retrieved March 29, 2016 from https://www.press.umich.edu/8305860/ethical_programs Bruns, Axel. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From production to produsage (Vol. 45). New York: Peter Lang. Burgess, Jean, & Green, Joshua. (2009). YouTube: Online video and participatory culture. New York, NY: Polity Press. Burke, Kenneth. (1966). Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and method. Oakland, CA: University of Press. Butler, Judith. (1997a). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York, NY: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (1997b). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. de Certeau, Michel. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Chaput, Catherine. (2010). Rhetorical circulation in late capitalism: Neoliberalism and the overdetermination of affective energy. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 43(1), 1-25. Clark, Donald Leman. (1957). Rhetoric in Greco-Roman education. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

137 Coleman, Gabriella. (2014). Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: The many faces of anonymous. Verso Books. Cook, William, & Tatum, James. (2010). African American writers and the classical tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cooper, Marilyn M. (1986). The ecology of writing. College English, 48(4), 364-375. Coppa, Francesca. (2010). Interview with Elisa Kreisinger. Transformative Works and Cultures 5. Retrieved February 1, 2014, from http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/234/170 Corbett, Edward. (1971). The theory and practice of imitation in classical rhetoric. College Composition and Communication, 22(3), 243-250. Cultural Theory Lab. (2014). Our story begins here: constellating cultural rhetorics. Enculturation 18. Retrieved from http://enculturation.net/our-story-begins-here D'Angelo, Frank. J. (2009). The rhetoric of . Rhetoric Review, 29(1), 31-47. Dawkins, Richard. (1989). The selfish gene. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Dean, Jodi. (2005). Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of politics. Cultural Politics, 1 (1), 51-74. DeLanda, Manuel. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. New York, NY: Continuum. Denzin, Norman K., & Lincoln, Yvonna S. (2011). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research. Sage. Detienne, Marcel, & Vernant, Jean-Pierre. (1991). Cunning intelligence in Greek culture and society. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press. DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole. (2015). Academia, Academe, and intellectual property: Faculty action protecting intellectual property must come soon. Academe. Retrieved March 2, 2016 from http://www.aaup.org/article/academia-academe-and-intellectual- property#.VtcOL5MrKqA DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole, Cushman, Ellen, & Grabill, Jeffrey T. (2005). Infrastructure and composing: The when of new-media writing. College composition and communication, 14-44. DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole, McKee, Heidi A., & Selfe, Richard. (Eds.) (2009). Technological ecologies and sustainability. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press. DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole, & Porter, James E. (2006). Why Naptster matters to writing: Filesharing as a new ethic of digital delivery. Computers and Composition, 23(2), 178- 210. Dietel-McLaughlin, Erin. (2009). Remediating democracy: Irreverent composition and the vernacular rhetorics of Web 2.0. Computers and Composition Online. Retrieved January 28, 2014, from http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/Dietel/irreverent.htm Dillion, Brian. (2014). Hannah Hoch: Art’s original punk. The Guardian. Retrieved August 19, 2015 from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/09/hannah-hoch-art-punk- whitechapel Dingo, Rebecca. (2012). Networking arguments: Rhetoric, transnational feminism, and public policy writing. Pittsburg, PN: University of Pittsburg Press. Dobrin, Sidney I. (2012). Introduction: Ecology and the future of writing studies. In (Ed.) Sidney Dobrin, Ecology, writing theory, and new media: Writing ecology (pp. 1-23). New York: Routledge.

138 Dolmage, Jay. (2006). “Breathe Upon Us an Even Flame": Hephaestus, history, and the body of Rhetoric. Rhetoric Review, 25(2), 119-140. Dolmage, Jay. (2009). Metis, mêtis, mestiza, Medusa: Rhetorical bodies across rhetorical traditions. Rhetoric Review, 28(1), 1-28. Dolmage, Jay. (2014). Disability rhetoric. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Dorsey, Peter. (1996). Becoming the Other: The mimesis of metaphor in Douglass’s ‘My Bondage and My Freedom.’ PMLA, 111 (3), 435-450. Douglass, Frederick. (1999a). Letter from Frederick Douglass to Thomas Auld, September 3, 1848. In (Ed.) Philip Foner, Frederick Douglass: Selected speeches and writings (pp. 111-117). Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books. Douglass, Frederick. (1999b). The meaning of July Fourth for the Negro. In (Ed.) Philip Foner, Frederick Douglass: Selected speeches and writings (pp. 188-206). Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books. Douglass, Frederick. (1983). The narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. In (Ed.) Michael Meyer, Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and selected writings. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Dubisar, Abby, & Palmeri, Jason. (2010). Palin/pathos/Peter Griffin: Political remix and composition pedagogy. Computers and Composition, 27(2), 77-93. Edbauer Rice, Jenny. (2005). Unframing models of public distribution: From rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(4), 5-24. Edwards, Dustin, & Lang, Heather. (Forthcoming). Entanglements that matter: A new materialist trace of #YesAllWomen. In (Eds.) Laurie Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke, Rhetoric, writing, and circulation. Ernst, Wolfgang. (2013). Digital memory and the archive. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ess, Charles. (2002). Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee. Retrieved from http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf. Estrin, James. (2014). The real story about the wrong photos in #BringBackOurGirls. Lens. Retrieved March 22, 2016 from http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/the-real-story- about-the-wrong-photos-in-bringbackourgirls/?_r=0 Eyman, Douglas. (2015). Digital rhetoric: Theory, method, practice. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Eyman, Douglas. (2007). Digital rhetoric: Ecologies and economies of digital circulation (Doctoral dissertation). Available from ProQuest and Theses database. (UMI No. 3282094). Farman, Jason. (2015). The materiality of locative media: On the invisible infrastructure of mobile networks. In (eds.) Andre Herman, Jan Hadlaw, & Thom Swiss, Theories of the mobile Internet: Materilaities and imaginaries (pp. 45-59). New York, NY: Routledge. Farmer, Frank. (2013). After the public turn: Composition, counterpublics, and the citizen bricoleur. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Farmer, Frank, & Arrington, Phillip. (1993). Apologies and accommodations: Imitation and the . Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 23(1), 12-34. Fraser, Nancy. Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109- 142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

139 Fleckenstein, Kristie S. (2009). Vision, rhetoric, and social action in the composition classroom. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Foucault, Michel. The history of sexuality: Volume 1. (1978). Trans. Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Garcia, David, & Lovink, Geert. (1997). The ABC of Tactical Media. Accessed December 9, 2014 from http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html Garrett, Bre, Landrum-Geyer, Denise, & Palmeri, Jason. (2012). Re-inventing invention: A performance in three acts. In Debra Journet, Cheryl Ball, & Ryan Trauman (Eds.), The new work of composing. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. http://ccdigitalpress.org/nwc/chapters/garrett-et-al/ Garrett, Mary. (2013). Tied to a tree: Culture and self-reflexivity. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 43(3), 243-255. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. (1987). Figures in Black: Words, signs, and the racial “self.” Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. (1988). The signifying monkey: A theory of African-American literary criticism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Gillespie, Tarleton. (2007). Wired shut: copyright and the shape of digital culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gillespie, Tarleton. (2010). The politics of ‘platforms’. New Media & Society, 12(3), 347-364. Gillespie, Tarleton. (2014). Algorithms, and the production of calculated publics. Comparative . Podcast accessed August 19, 2015 from http://cmsw.mit.edu/podcast- tarleton-gillespie-algorithms-production-calculated-publics/ Gillespie, Tarleton. (2015). Platforms intervene. Social Media+ Society, 1(1), DOI: 2056305115580479. Glenn, Cheryl. (1997). Rhetoric retold: Regendering the tradition from antiquity through the renaissance. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Goggin, Maureen Daly. (2002). An essamplaire essai on the rhetoricity of needlework sampler- making: A contribution to theorizing and historicizing rhetorical praxis. Rhetoric Review, 21(4), 309-338. Gries, Laurie E. (2013). Iconographic tracking: A digital research method for visual rhetoric and circulation studies. Computers and Composition, 30(4), 332-348. Gries, Laurie E. (2015). Still life with rhetoric: A new materialist approach for visual rhetorics. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Gries, Laurie E. (Forthcoming). On rhetorical becoming. In (Eds). Casey Boyle and Scot Barnett, Rhetorical ontologies: Rhetoric through everyday things. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Gurak, Laura J., & Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. (1998). Intellectual property [Special issue].Computers and Composition, 15(2). Haas, Angela. M. (2007). Wampum as : An American Indian intellectual tradition of multimedia theory and practice. Studies in American Indian , 19(4), 77-100. Haas, Angela. M. (2012). Race, rhetoric, and technology: A case study of decolonial technical , methodology, and pedagogy. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3), 277-310. Habermas, Jürgen. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

140 Haraway, Donna. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@ Second_Millennium: FemaleMan_Meets_ OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York, NY: Routledge. Harding, Sandra. (1987). Is there a feminist method? In (Ed.) Sandra Harding, Feminism and methodology: Social science issues (pp. 1-16). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Harold, Christine. (2004). Pranking rhetoric: “Culture jamming” as media activism. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21(3), 189-211. Haskins, Ekaterina. (2007). Between archive and participation: Public memory in a digital age. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37(4), 401-422. Hawhee, Debra. (2002). Kairotic encounters. In Janet Atwill and Janice Lauer (Eds.), Perspectives on rhetorical invention (pp. 16-35). Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Hawhee, Debra. (2005). Bodily arts: Rhetoric and athletics in ancient Greece. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Hawhee, Debra, & Olson, Christa. (2013). Pan-historiography: The challenges of writing history across time and space. In (Ed. Michelle Ballif) Theorizing histories of rhetoric (pp. 90- 105). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Hawk, Byron. (2013). Stitching together events: Of joints, folds, and assemblages. In (Ed.) Michelle Ballif, Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric (pp. 106-127). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Hawk, Byron. (2012). Curating ecologies, circulating musics: From the public sphere to sphere publics. In (Ed.) Sidney Dobrin, Ecology, writing theory, and new media: Writing ecology (pp. 160-179). New York: Routledge. Hekman, Susan. (2010). The material of knowledge: Feminist disclosures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hidalgo, Alexandra, & Sackey, Donnie Johnson. (2015). Introduction to Race, rhetoric, and state special issue. Present Tense 5 (2). Retrieved from http://www.presenttensejournal.org/editorial/vol-5-2-special-issue-on-race-rhetoric-and- the-state/ Höch, Hannah. (1993). A glance over my life, July 1958. In Maud Lavin, Cut with the kitchen knife: The Weimar photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Höch, Hannah. (2014a). A few words on photomontage. In (Eds.) Dawn Ades & Daniel Hermmann, Hannah Höch (pp. 141-142). New York, NY: Prestel. Höch, Hannah. (2014b). On collage. In (Eds.) Dawn Ades & Daniel Hermmann, Hannah Höch (p. 16). New York, NY: Prestel. Höch, Hannah. (2014c). On embroidery. In (Eds.) Dawn Ades & Daniel Hermmann, Hannah Höch (p. 72). New York, NY: Prestel. Holmevik, Jan R. (2012). Inter/vention: Free play in the age of electracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Howard, Rebecca Moore. (1999). Standing in the shadow of giants: Plagiarists, authors, collaborators. Stamford, CT: Albex Publishing Group. Hyde, Lewis. (1998). Trickster makes this world: Mischief, myth, and art. New York, NY: Macmillan. Jackson, Sarah J., & Foucault Welles, Brooke. (2015). Hijacking# myNYPD: Social media dissent and networked counterpublics. Journal of Communication, 65 (6), 932-952.

141 Jenkins, Henry, Ford, Sam, & Green, Joshua. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York: NYU Press. Jenkins, Henry. (2010). DIY video: Political remix (part one). Blog post retrieved August 23, 2015 from http://henryjenkins.org/2010/11/political_remix_video_can_empo.html. Johnson, Robert. (1998). User-centered technology: A rhetorical theory for computers and other mundane artifacts. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan, & Selber, Stuart. (2007). Plagiarism, originality, assemblage. Computers and Composition, 24(4), 375-403. Jones, John. (2015). Network* writing. Kairos 20 (1). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.1/topoi/jones/index.html Jung, Julie. (2014). Systems-rhetoric: A dynamic coupling of explanation and description. Enculturation 17. Retrieved from http://enculturation.net/systems-rhetoric Kaplan, Andreas M., & Haenlein, Michael. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business horizons, 53(1), 59-68. Kennedy, Krista, & Howard, Rebecca Moore. (2013). Introduction to the special issue on western cultures of intellectual property. College English 75(5): 461-469. Kincheloe, Joe L. (2001). Describing the bricolage: Conceptualizing a new rigor in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(6), 679-692. Kennedy, George. (2006). On rhetoric: A theory of civic discourse (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kopelson, Karen. (2003). Rhetoric on the edge of cunning; Or, the performance of neutrality (re) considered as a composition pedagogy for student resistance. College Composition and Communication, 55 (1): 115-146. Kreisinger, Elisa. (2012a). Mashing up Mad Men by the Pop Culture Pirate. Origin Magazine. Retrieved August 23, 2015 from http://www.originmagazine.com/2012/10/18/mashing- up-mad-men-by-the-pop-culture-pirate/ Kreisinger, Elisa. (2012b). Mad Men: Set Me Free. Blog retrieved August 23, 2015 at https:// elisakreisinger.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/mad-men-set-me-free/ Kreisinger, Elisa. (2014). [Interview with Suzanna Bobadilla]. Feministing. Interview retrieved August 23, 2015 from http://feministing.com/2014/03/22/feministing-five-elisa- kreisinger/ Kreisinger, Elisa. (2015). Remixing the remix. In (Eds.) Eduardo Navas, Own Gallagher, & xtine burrough, The Routledge companion to remix studies (pp. 480-486). New York, NY: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. (2005a). From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik. In (Eds.) Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Making things public-atmospheres of democracy catalogue of the show at ZKM (pp. 14-44). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. (2005b). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. (2010). An attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”. New Literary History, 41(3), 471-490. Lavin, Maud. (1993). Cut with the kitchen knife: The Weimar photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lee, Benjamin, & LiPuma, Edward. (2002). Cultures of circulation: The imaginations of modernity. Public culture, 14(1), 191-213.

142 Lessig, Lawrence. (2004). Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York, NY: Penguin. Lessig, Lawrence. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. New York, NY: Penguin Press. Lestin, Robert, Carter, Geoffrey, Arroyo, Sarah, & Frances, Sherrin. (2013). The idiocy of videocy. Itineration. Retrieved March 22, 2016 from http://tundra.csd.sc.edu/itineration/videocy. Levi-Strauss, Claude. (1966). The savage mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. LeFevre, Karen B. (1987). Invention as a social act. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Logie, John. (2006). Peers, pirates, and persuasion: Rhetoric in the peer-to-peer debates. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. Logie, John. (2011). Response to part 1: “An act for the encouragement of learning” vs. copyright 2.0. In (Eds). Martine Rife, Shaun Slattery, & Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Copy(write): Intellectual property in the writing classroom. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Lorde, Audre. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press. Losh, Elizabeth M. (2009). Virtualpolitik: An electronic history of government media-making in a time of war, scandal, disaster, miscommunication, and mistakes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lovink, Geert. (2002) Dark fiber: Tracking critical Internet culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lunsford, Andrea A. (1999). Rhetoric, feminism, and the politics of textual ownership. College English, 61(5), 529-544. Markham, Annette, Buchanan, Elizabeth, & AoIR Ethics Working Committee. (2012). Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Version 2.0. Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee. Association of Internet Researchers. Mao, LuMing. (2014). Thinking beyond Aristotle: The turn to how in comparative rhetoric. PMLA, 129(3), 448-455. Massumi, Brian. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCorkle, Ben. (2012). Rhetorical delivery as technological discourse: A cross-historical study. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press. McDermott, Lydia. (2015). Birthing rhetorical monsters: How Mary Shelley infuses mêtis with the maternal in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein. Rhetoric Review, 34(1), 1-18. McKee, Heidi. (2011). Policy matters now and in the future: Net neutrality, corporate data mining, and government surveillance. Computers and Composition, 28(4), 276-291. McKee, Heidi A., & Porter, James E. (2009). The ethics of Internet research: A rhetorical, case- based process (Vol. 59). New York, NW: Peter Lang. McLeod, Kembrew. (2014). Pranksters: Making mischief in the modern world. New York, NY: NYU Press. Miller, Carolyn. (2000). The Aristotelian topos: Hunting for novelty. In (Eds.) Alan Groz and Arthur Walzer, Rereading Aristotle’s Rhetoric (pp. 130-146). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Miller, Keith. (1992). Voice of deliverance: The language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and its sources. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

143 Miller, Keith, & Quashie, Kevin. (1998). Slave mutiny as argument, argument as fiction, fiction as America: The case of Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave.” Southern Communication Journal, 63(3), 197-207. Moulthrop, Stuart. (2005). After the last generation: Rethinking scholarship in the days of serious play. Retrieved May 12, 2016 from http://mural.uv.es/mopasa/essay1. Murphy, James. J. (2012). Roman writing instruction as described by Quintilian. In James Murphy (Ed.), A short history of writing instruction: From ancient Greece to contemporary America (3rd ed.) (pp. 36-76). New York, NY: Routledge. Murphy, James J., et al. (1988). The politics of historiography. Rhetoric Review, 7(1), 5-49. Nahon, Karine, & Hemsley, Jeff. (2013). Going viral. New York, NY: Polity. Neal, Terry. (1999). Satirical Web site poses political test: Facing legal action from Bush, creator cites U.S. tradition of parody. The Washington Post. Retrieved August 24, 2015 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-11/29/002r-112999-idx.html Nero, Julie. (2013). Hannah Hoch, Til Brugman, lesbianism, and Weimar Sexual Subculture (Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University). Olson, Gary A., & Worsham, Lynn. (2000). Changing the subject: Judith Butler's politics of radical resignification. JAC, 727-765. Palmeri, Jason. (2012). Remixing composition: A history of multimodal writing pedagogy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Papacharissi, Zizi. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Parikka, Jussi. (2012). What is media archaeology? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Pender, Kelly. (2011). Techne, from Neoclassicism to : Teaching writing as a useful, teachable art. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Penney, Joel, & Dadas, Caroline. (2013). (Re) Tweeting in the service of protest: Digital composition and circulation in the Occupy Wall Street movement. New Media & Society, 1461444813479593. Pope-Ruark, Rebecca. (2014). A case for metic intelligence in technical and professional communication programs. Technical Communication Quarterly, 23(4), 323-340. Porter, James E. (1998). Rhetorical ethics and internetworked writing. Greenwich, CT: Albex. Porter, James E. (2009). Recovering delivery for digital rhetoric. Computers and Composition, 25(4), 207-224. Porter, James E. (2010). Rhetoric in (as) a digital economy. In Ed. Stuart A. Selber, Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication (pp. 173-197). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Porter, James E., Sullivan, Patricia, Blythe, Stuart, Grabill, Jeffery, & Miles, Libby. (2000). Institutional critique: A rhetorical methodology for change. College Composition and Communication 51 (4): 610-642. Porter, James E., & Rife, Martine. (2005). MGM v. Grokster: Implications for educators and writing teachers. NCTE. Retrieved March 8, 2016 from http://www.ncte.org/cccc/committees/ip/2005developments/mgmvgrokster Pough, Gwendolyn. (2010). The remix: Revisit, rethink, revise, renew. CFP for Conference on College Composition and Communication. Louisville, KY. Poulakos, John. (1995). Sophistical rhetoric in classical Greece. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

144 Powell, Malea. (1999). Blood and scholarship: One Mixed-Blood’s story. In Keith Gillard (Ed.), Race, rhetoric, and composition (pp. 1-16). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Powell, Malea. (2008). Dreaming Charles Eastman: Cultural memory, autobiography, and geography in Indigenous rhetorical histories. In (Eds.) Liz Rohan and Gesa Kirsch, Beyond the archives: research as a lived process (pp. 115-127). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Powell, Malea. (2011). This is a story about a belief. Rhetoric Review, 30 (2): 120-123. Pruchnic, Jeff, & Lacey, Kim. (2011). The future of forgetting: rhetoric, memory, affect. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 41(5), 472-494. Queen, Mary. (2008). Transnational feminist rhetorics in a digital world. College English 70(5): 471-489. Quintilian. (2001). Institutes of oratory. In (Eds.) Patricia Bizzell & Bruce Herzberg, The rhetorical tradition: Readings from classical times to the present (2nd ed.) (pp. 364-427). New York, NY: Bedford St. Martins Raley, Rita. (2009). Tactical media (Vol. 28). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques, Rachel Bowlby, and Davide Panagia. (2001). Ten theses on politics. Theory & Event 5(3). Read, Sarah, & Swarts, Jason. (2015). Visualizing and tracing: Research methodologies for the study of networked, sociotechnical activity, otherwise known as knowledge work. Technical Communication Quarterly, 24(1), 14-44. Renzi, Alessandra. (2008). The space of tactical media. In Megan Boler (ed), Tactics in hard times: Practices and spaces of new media (pp. 71-100). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reyman, Jessica. (2009). The rhetoric of intellectual property: Copyright law and the regulation of digital culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Reyman, Jessica. (2013). User data on the social Web: Authorship, agency, and appropriation. College English, 75(5), 513-533. Rhodes, Jacqueline, & Alexander, Jonathan. (2015). Techne: Queer mediations of the self. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University press. Retrieved from http://ccdigitalpress.org/techne. Rice, Jeff. (2006). Networks and new media. College English, 69(2), 127-133. Rice, Jenny. (2012). Distant publics: Developmental rhetoric and the subject of crisis. Pittsburgh, PN: University of Pittsburgh Press. Ridolfo, Jim. (2013). Delivering textual diaspora: Building digital cultural repositories as rhetoric research. College English 76 (2): 136-151. Ridolfo, Jim, & DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole. (2009). Composing for recomposition: Rhetorical velocity and delivery. Kairos 13(2). Retrieved January 27, 2014 from http://www.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/ridolfo_devoss/intro.html Rickert, Thomas. (2007). Toward the Chōra: Kristeva, Derrida, and Ulmer on emplaced invention. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 40(3), 251-273. Rickert, Thomas. (2013). Ambient rhetoric: The attunements of rhetorical being. Pittsburgh, PN: University of Pittsburgh Press. Rickert, Thomas. (2014). Parmenides, ontological enaction, and the prehistory of rhetoric. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 47(4), 472-493. Rife, Martine C. (2013). Invention, copyright, and digital writing. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

145 Rife, Martine C., Slattery, Sean, & DeVoss, Danielle N. (Eds.). (2011). Copy (write): Intellectual property in the writing classroom. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Rife, Martine C., Westbrook, Steve, DeVoss, Danielle N., & Logie, John. (Eds). (2010). Introduction: Copyright, culture, creativity, and the commons. Computers and Composition, 27(3), 161-166. Rivers, Nathaniel, & Weber, Ryan. (2011). Ecological, pedagogical, public rhetoric. College Composition and Communication 63(2): 187-218. Rivers, Nathaniel. (2014). Tracing the missing masses: Vibrancy, symmetry, and public rhetoric pedagogy. enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture 17. Retrieved from http://enculturation.net/missingmasses Rose, Mark. (1993). Authors and owners: The invention of copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. (2000). Traces of a stream: Literacy and social change among African American women. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Sample, Mark. (2014). A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit: A call for bots of conviction. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@samplereality/a-protest-bot- is-a-bot-so-specific-you-cant-mistake-it-for-bullshit-90fe10b7fbaa#.b1nv058t8 Sampson, Tony D. (2012). Virality: Contagion theory in the age of networks. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sands, Aubrey. (2015). About the publication. MOMA.org. Retrieved August 23, 2015 from http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/publications/786.html Santos, Marc, & Browning, Ella. (2014). Maria Kalman and/as choric invention. Enculturation 18. Retrieved from http://enculturation.net/kalman-choric-invention Sawyer, Michael. (2009). Filters, Fair Use & feedback: User generated content principles and the DMCA. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 24(1), 363-404. Scholz, Trebor. (2012). Digital labor: The Internet as playground and factory. New York, NY: Routledge. Scott, James C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shah, Nishant. (2015). When machines speak to each other: Unpacking the “social” in “social media”. Social Media+ Society, 1(1). Retrieved March 22, 2016 from http://sms.sagepub.com/content/1/1/2056305115580338.short. Sheridan, David Michael, Ridolfo, Jim, & Michel, Anthony. (2012). The available means of persuasion: Mapping a theory and pedagogy of multimodal public rhetoric. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. Shipka, Jody. (2011). Toward a composition made whole. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Shifman, Limor. (2013). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Simmons, W. Michele, & Grabill, Jeffrey. (2007). Toward a civic rhetoric for technologically and scientifically complex places: Invention, performance, and participation. College Composition and Communication, 419-448. Simmons, W. Michele, Moore, Kristen, & Sullivan, Patricia. (2015). Tracing uncertainties: Methodologies of a door closer. In (Eds.) Paul Lynch & Nathaniel Rivers, Thinking with Bruno Latour in rhetoric and composition (pp. 275-293). Carbondale, IL: SIUP.

146 Soha, Micahel, & McDowell, Zachary J. (2016). Monetizing a meme: YouTube, Content ID, and the Harlem Shake. Social Media+ Society, 2(1), 2056305115623801. Southard, Belinda Stillion. (2011). Militant citizenship: Rhetorical strategies of the National Woman's Party, 1913-1920 (Vol. 21). College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. Starosielski, Nicole. (2015). The undersea network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sullivan, Dale. (1989). Attitudes toward imitation: Classical culture and the modern temper. Rhetoric Review, 8, 5-21. Sullivan, Patricia, & Porter, James. (1997). Opening spaces: Writing technologies and critical research practices. Greenwhich, CT: Albex Publishing. Sutton, Jane. (1994). Structuring the narrative for the canon of rhetoric: The principles of traditional historiography (an essay) with the dead’s differend (a collage). In (Ed.) Victor Vitanza, Writing histories of rhetoric (pp. 156-79). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Stelter, Brian. (2008). Some media companies choose to profit from pirated YouTube clips. The New York Times. Retrieved April 25, 2016 from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/technology/16tube.html?_r=0. Stewart, Kathleen. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stuckey, Mary E. (2012). On rhetorical circulation. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15 (4): 609-612. Swarts, Jason. (2010). Recycled writing: Assembling actor networks from reusable content. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 24(2), 127-163. Syverson, Margaret A. (1999). The wealth of reality: An ecology of composition. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press. Taylor, Diana. (2003). The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Terranova, Tiziana. (2004). Network culture: Politics for the information age. Ann Arbor, MI:Pluto Press. Terranova, Tiziana, & Donovan, Joan. (2013). Occupy social networks: the paradoxes of corporate social media for networked social movements. In Eds. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch, Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives (pp. 296-311). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Terrill, Robert. E. (2003). Irony, silence, and time: Frederick Douglass on the fifth of July. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 89(3), 216-234. Terrill, Robert. (2011). Mimesis, duality, and rhetorical education. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 41(4), 295-315. Trimbur, John. (2000). Composition and the circulation of writing. College Composition and Communication 52(2), 188-219. Tufekci, Zeynep. (2014). What happens to# Ferguson affects Ferguson: Net neutrality, algorithmic filtering and Ferguson. Medium. Retrieved March 22, 2016 https://medium.com/message/ferguson-is-also-a-net-neutrality-issue- 6d2f3db51eb0#.ler5bwu4l Vaidhyanathan, S. (2003). Copyrights and copywrongs: The rise of intellectual property and how it threatens creativity. New York, NY: NYU Press. Van Dijck, Jose. (2007). Mediated memories in the digital age. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

147 Van Dijck, Jose. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press. Vitanza, Victor. (1997) Negation, subjectivity, and the history of rhetoric. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Walters, Shannon. (2010). Animal Athena: The interspecies “Mētis” of women writers with autism. JAC 30(3), 683-711. Warner, Michael. (2005). Publics and counterpublics. New York, NY: Zone Books. Warnick, Barbara. (2007). Rhetoric online: Persuasion and politics on the World Wide Web (Vol. 12). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Weiss, Sasha. (2014). The power of# yesallwomen. The New Yorker. Retrieved March 22, 2016 from http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-power-of-yesallwomen Welch, Kathleen E. (1999). Electric rhetoric: Classical rhetoric, oralism, and a new literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. WIDE. (2005). Why teach digital writing? Kairos 10(1). http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/10.1/binder2.html?coverweb/wide/index.html Wild, Helga. (2012). Practice and the theory of practice: Rereading Certeau’s “Practice of Everyday Life.” Journal of Business Anthropology. Retrieved August 19, 2015 from http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/jba/pages/view/books_and_reviews Wilson, Kirt H. (2003). The racial politics of imitation in the nineteenth century. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 89(2), 89-108. Woodmansee, Martha. (1984). The genius and the copyright: economic and legal conditions of the emergence of the “author'” Eighteenth-century studies, 17(4), 425-448. Wysocki, Anne, Johnson-Eilola, Johndan, Selfe, Cynthia, & Sirc, Geoffrey. (2004). Writing new media: Theory and applications for expanding the teaching of composition. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. (2004). Made not only in words: Composition in a new key. College Composition and Communication, 56(2), 297-328. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. (2009). Re-designing graduate education in composition and rhetoric: The use of remix as concept, material, and method. Computers and Composition, 26(1), 4-12. Yates, Frances Amelia. (1992). The art of memory. New York, NY: Random House. Zappen, James P. (2005). Digital rhetoric: Toward an integrated theory. Technical Communication Quarterly, 14(3), 319-325.

148