sign in sign up
<<
Home , Asari (Mass Effect), BRAIN Initiative, Kill Screen, Levi Bryant, Logology (science), The Bird and the Rifle

MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

Kevin J. Rutherford

Candidate for the Degree:

Doctor of

Director (Jason Palmeri)

Reader (Michele Simmons)

Reader (Heidi McKee)

Reader (Kate Ronald)

Graduate School Representative (Bo Brinkman)

PACK YOUR THINGS AND GO: BRINGING OBJECTS TO THE FORE IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

by Kevin J. Rutherford

This dissertation project focuses on object-oriented rhetoric (OOR), a perspective that questions the traditional notions of rhetorical action as solely a human province. The project makes three major, interrelated claims: that OOR provides a unique and productive to examine the inclusion of the non-human in rhetorical study; that to some extent, rhetoric has always been interested in the way nonhuman objects interact with humans; and that these claims have profound implications for our activities as teachers and scholars. one situates OOR within current scholarship in composition and rhetoric, arguing that it can serve as a useful methodology for the field despite rhetoric’s traditional focus on and human symbolic action. Chapter two examines rhetorical to demonstrate that a view of rhetoric that includes nonhuman actors is not new, but has often been marginalized. Chapter three examines two videogames as sites of and practice for object-oriented rhetoric, specifically focusing on a sense of to understand the of nonhuman rhetors. Chapter four interrogates the network surrounding a review aggregation website to argue that, while some nonhumans may be unhelpful rhetorical collaborators, OOR can assist us in improving relationships with them. Finally, chapter five argues for object-oriented changes in practices and approaches in both teaching and . PACK YOUR THINGS AND GO: BRINGING OBJECTS TO THE FORE IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Department of English

by

Kevin J. Rutherford Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2015

Dissertation Director: Jason Palmeri

Table of Contents List of Figures ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... vi Chapter One: Object-Oriented Rhetoric as Methodology ...... 1 Why Object-Oriented Rhetoric Now? ...... 3 What Objects Are ...... 4 Considering Our Relations to Objects ...... 5 Rhetoric as Anthropocentric Discipline ...... 6 The Nonhuman Turn in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory ...... 10 Key in Object-Oriented Ontology ...... 14 Ontology as First Philosophy ...... 15 A Flat Ontology Equalizes Objects...... 16 Objects Have Agency; They Act ...... 18 Objects Withdraw; We Orient Toward Them ...... 21 Identifying Uncertainties ...... 24 Overview of Chapters ...... 26 Chapter Two: Uncovering Objects in Rhetorical History...... 29 Approaches: How to Find Intriguing Moments ...... 31 Giambattista Vico: Imagination as an Object ...... 33 : Motive as Withdrawn Object ...... 38 Young, Becker, and Pike: Multivalent, Recursive Objects ...... 46 Conclusions: Searching for Objects ...... 51 Chapter Three: Thinking with and against AI: Representations of in and Deus Ex: Human Revolution ...... 54 Why Video Games? ...... 55 Video Games and Rhetorical Scholarship ...... 55 Video Games and Object-Oriented Ontology ...... 58 Posthumanism and ...... 60 Mass Effect: Narrative Representations of Machine Consciousness ...... 63 Deus Ex: Understanding Machine Experience through Mechanics ...... 71 Theorizing Object Consciousness through Games ...... 80

ii

The Possibilities of OOR and Games ...... 82 Chapter Four: Humans Writing for Writing for Humans: , Exploitation, and Agency ...... 84 Developing an OOR Approach to Machine Readers/Writers ...... 85 Why Metacritic? ...... 87 The Metacritic as Networked Rhetor ...... 91 Our Very Own Metacritic: Machine Reading in Composition ...... 100 Counterexamples: Other Digital Systems ...... 104 Conclusions ...... 107 Chapter 5: Implications for and Research ...... 109 Guideline One: Begin with Objects ...... 110 Guideline Two: Humbly Collaborate ...... 115 Guideline Three: Practice Metaphorism and Rhetorical Carpentry ...... 121 Conclusions ...... 126

Works Cited ...... 128

iii

List of Figures Figure 1. , left, with a male ...... 64

Figure 2. Shepard inside the Geth collective consciousness. While the environment is differently stylized, the player's control of Shepard is the same...... 67

Figure 3. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Heads-Up Display...... 72

Figure 4. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Augmentation Upgrade Screen...... 74

Figure 5. Deus Ex: Human Revolution interrogation dialogue choice...... 75

Figure 6. Metacritic’s creators explain the algorithm’s power to simplify...... 88

Figure 7. A "visual representation" of the algorithm...... 89

iv

Dedication

To my mother, who taught me that great things can emerge from simple parts.

v

Acknowledgements

It seems appropriate that this acknowledgements page has proved to be the most stressful writing in the dissertation process, as it asks me to step back and enumerate the wide variety agents that have helped this project emerge – a seemingly impossible task. First, I’m extraordinarily grateful to Jason Palmeri, who has been a source of support and encouragement throughout my as a graduate student, but especially as a dissertation chair. Thanks also to my committee, Michele Simmons, Heidi McKee, and Kate Ronald, for their patience, kindness, and advice, as well as their willingness to follow my work into places that have often seemed strange. Special thanks to Bo Brinkman for serving as an outside reader and graduate school representative, and for his valuable input as I started working toward this dissertation. I’m also indebted to the English department for awarding me with a fellowship, as it allowed me important time to work. Additionally, I would like to thank my colleagues here in Oxford, who have patiently helped me to think through my ideas (and at , I’m sure, endured my thinking through them), especially Beth Saur, Morgan Leckie, Patrick Harris, Leigh Gruwell, and Ann Updike. They’ve been invaluable in extending and challenging my claims, and have kept my morale up during the process; in particular, I want to thank Beth, who has truly humbled me with her attention, patience, generosity, and affectionate interpretation. Thanks also to the English department staff, especially the late Debbie Morner, who have made it possible for me to stay grounded. Finally, it would be hypocritical of me not to acknowledge the vast array of nonhuman things that have been part of a network that helped this dissertation to come to fruition, so thanks also to coffee, wine, cats and dogs (those still here and those that have moved on), search engines, word processors, sunlight, , breath, body.

vi

Chapter One: Object-Oriented Rhetoric as Methodology

Sometime early in 2012, I ran across a writing prompt on the social media site, Reddit, asking “if you could speak to inanimate objects, what would they say?” The discussion largely consisted of jokes (being rebuffed by an ATM for insufficient funds, analogous to being turned down for a date), and although it was an interesting thought , two stories stood out in particular. In the first, the writer imagined a character discovering that there was a stash of drugs in the wall of his house. The house (the speaking inanimate object) told him the history of the drugs – that the criminal who stashed them would be soon released from prison after a twenty-five year sentence and would kill anyone in the way – and encouraged the character to move. The story was a teary goodbye between the man and his house, where they reminisced of the time they’d spent together; the house, looking out for his owner’s well-being, sent him away. In the second story (written by a different author), a detective was the only person capable of speaking to inanimate objects, and used his ability to question household items about a murder. Most of the story was spent with the detective speaking with a knife – the murder weapon – about whom it stabbed and who held it. As opposed to the conversation with the house, the knife’s perspective was not warm or invested in human existence, but instead alien and nearly impossible to parse. The detective’s skills were strained to the limit to ferret out relevant and meaningful to both the knife and the investigation. When discussing the knife’s handle responding to the grip (e.g., he must have been left handed and male to hold the knife like that) and what the knife’s experience in the stabbing was (e.g., “it was like a watermelon” – our victim was stabbed in the lung), the character’s confusion and eventual triumph was compelling. As much as we would like to live in the world of the first story – where objects are ancillary to the human experience and our houses only really care about our well-being – we live in a world much closer to the second story, where knives experience the world as knives and know nothing of human . The tendency to hold on to the first story’s perspective of caring objects does more harm than good; it reduces a complex to a series of human-centered stories rather than the hard work of trying to understand things different from us. The talking knife holds alien possibility (Bogost) and requires us to think outside ourselves, whereas the

1

house only requires that we focus on ourselves and our . The second story’s author seems to have recognized the problems involved in rendering any nonhuman experience intelligible to humans, and used his writing as a way to analogize that experience; he realized that, while imperfect, it was necessary to try to use discourse to explore the knife’s world (in many ways, similar to the kinds of forensic police use in actual murders). In other words, the author of the second story chose to use writing to undertake the impossible task of approaching a nonhuman experience beyond his reach. Exploring this alien possibility – and recognizing the difficult work involved in it – is the goal of object-oriented rhetoric, which attempts to explore the complexity of interactions between and among human and nonhuman objects. This chapter presents a general overview of the basic terminology and perspectives of object-oriented rhetoric. I begin by outlining how the current moment provides a unique exigence for object-oriented rhetoric. Next, I briefly explain that “object” is a term that can describe any real thing (including concepts, ideas, or systems) and how rhetoric is especially poised to work with objects as agents in their own right. I then examine rhetoric’s historical through critiquing the discipline’s commitment to epistemology over ontology. From there, I move to an examination of some of the broad movements in contemporary rhetorical theory which attempt to upset or complicate this anthropocentrism. Drawing from and extending contemporary rhetorical theory concerning the nonhuman, the chapter outlines where my work both converges and departs from current approaches (especially approaches put forth by scholars such as Collin Brooke, Byron Hawk, Alex Reid, and Nathaniel Rivers). Like others interested in nonhuman agency in rhetoric, I am interested in its possibilities to destabilize anthropocentric notions of agency; however, I argue that these attempts have so far been ultimately constrained by a focus on epistemology. Finally, the chapter provides a theoretical overview of object-orientation while also outlining this project’s central arguments: that object- oriented rhetoric provides a unique and productive methodology to examine the inclusion of the nonhuman in rhetorical study; that to some extent, rhetoric has always been interested in the way nonhuman objects interact with humans; and that these claims have profound implications for our teaching and research as well as our being in the world.

2

Why Object-Oriented Rhetoric Now? In a world that increasingly relies on nonhuman objects not merely for manual labor but for progressively more complex intellectual and cultural work, object-oriented rhetoric provides a methodological framework for questioning and making claims about interrelations among a multitude of objects. The that my connection, cell phone, and word processing program are involved in nearly every aspect of my work and personal life means that the already fuzzy definitions of “human intellectual labor” are becoming fuzzier – where does my agency end and the tools’ begin? This isn’t even to mention the nonhuman objects which don’t make themselves known, but which are equally necessary for our existence – the dams, generators, carburetors, -producing algae, and sodium of the world. In other words, given an understanding that already acknowledges rhetoric as a complex activity arising out of a network of associations between and among people and things (as the trajectory that, for instance, Brooke’s, Edbauer’s, Hawk’s, and Reid’s respective scholarship indicates), the question lingers what to “count” as rhetorical action, and how to approach those interrelations. Consider a we use almost daily (especially in the early stages of an article draft): the search engine. Search engines could be viewed as tools for writers looking to research specific resources, but often they are also generative instruments. That is, the second and third pages of a search – even for a very specific phrase – reveal the things we may not have been looking for at the outset but which can end up being more fruitful than our initial ideas. An object-oriented perspective is interested not only in the human element of the search process – how do I effectively create queries, how do I separate relevant from irrelevant results, how do I reframe my query to better my results, and so on – but is also interested in the experience of the search engine itself. In other words, how does the search algorithm itself react to the human presence? How does its actual function and structure create particular results? How does it learn from communicating with multiple human agents (or the same human agent multiple times, in the case of many search engines), or learn from specific machine instructions, or from the webpages it mines for ? While the results of these different investigations may point to similar directions for human action, they importantly begin at different places. In the traditional rhetorical approach, human agents are the only actors; the technology exists at our disposal and for our use. In an object-oriented approach, the search engine and a multitude of other objects exist on their own before humans enter their orbits. The search engine

3

responds to and communicates with a human interlocutor, exploring its relationship with the data it has gathered through crawling the Web, acting in a decidedly rhetorical fashion as it does so. Other examples abound, and not only in digital , but the presence of digital objects – and especially ones that are created with rather than for us – make digital things salient examples. As a result, in this project, I specifically (though not exclusively) focus on digital applications of object-oriented rhetoric, because I find that the most recognizable connections and most timely examples of an object-oriented perspective emerge from recent technological developments.

What Objects Are Before progressing much further in defining an object-oriented rhetoric’s use as a methodology, it may be useful to outline some terminology. To begin with, the term "object" is a complicated one, carrying a variety of meanings dependent on discipline. For instance, computer programmers might see objects as one kind of programming , whereas those of us in the may see the term as oppositional to a human subject. In object-oriented ontology, the term "object" can refer to any thing. The grade school of a noun as a person, place, thing or idea applies, but objects in OOO can also refer to properties of things as well as the relationships between them. In short, the "object" in object-oriented ontology can refer to anything that exists, keeping in that symbols, systems, people, material things, fictional characters, and daydreams can all be viewed as equally real objects in an ontological sense. Objects can be animate or inanimate; they can be living or non-living; they can be material or ethereal; they can be created by humans or exist without us. My coffee mug, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, Sir Alexander John Maxwell Arnott, the atomic mass unit, Scooby Doo, azaleas, and darkness are objects. All such objects have equal ontological status: they are all equally real. As puts it, “All entities are on exactly the same ontological footing.” For Harman, this understanding of objects “ends the tear-jerking modern rift between the thinking human subject and the unknowable outside world” (14). This understanding of objects encourages rhetoric to ask different, potentially more productive questions. Rather than beginning with a question of representation (“with what model might we best represent rhetorical action?”) we can begin with a question of being and substance (“what is the rhetorical act?”). By starting from a question that encourages us to re-see the foundational notions of our discipline, we can begin to rethink what it

4

means to practice rhetoric and to practice rhetorical criticism; in so doing, we have the opportunity to draw more relevant connections that can be grounded in lived experience. Additionally, we can ask these productive questions not only about discourse among humans, but also about human-object and object-object interactions.

Considering Our Relations to Objects Object-oriented rhetoric allows rhetoricians to admit the rhetorical agency of objects into our research. Doing so provides us with a potentially richer picture of reality. We begin to consider nonhuman objects as complex and unattainable, in the same way we think of other humans as complicated and beyond easy interpretation. Whereas object-oriented ontology attempts to account for the existence of varieties of collectives composed of human and nonhuman agents, rhetoric can provide some ideas for how we should concern ourselves with objects. That is, rather than being merely concerned with whether and how things exist (the province of ontology), we can turn our attention toward how we might productively interact with things and enable them to productively interact with each other. Essentially, because of rhetoric’s concern with uncertainty, , and metaphor, it is uniquely positioned to contribute to an object-oriented perspective by illuminating the relationships between and among objects – and to provide some guidance for how those relationships might best take place. Importantly, this guidance proceeds from a non- anthropocentric, non-paternalistic trajectory; rather than imposing human will on nonhuman things, object-oriented rhetoric would begin with an examination of relevant actors in any situation and evaluate their stakes and perspectives, only then attempting to arrive at some considerations of how best to develop relations between the objects of study. In this way, object- oriented rhetoric forms a methodology that guides the application of various research methods and selections for objects of study. (As an example of this methodology at work, chapters three and four of this project both demonstrate how traditional rhetorical research methods can be guided by a research methodology invested in paying attention to things.) Obviously we care about humans, and we should; we are human, after all. Anthropocentrism isn’t necessarily bad; in fact, I might argue that it is inevitable for humans to be anthropocentric. Attempting to avoid a disruptive, destructive, and paternalistic anthropocentric perspective is the goal – recognizing that human experiences are central to

5

humans but not central period. In other words, we can operate from our human perspective (how could we not?) while recognizing that perspective is not inherently more real nor necessarily more important than any other object’s. Admitting the rhetorical agency of objects into our research provides us with a potentially richer picture of reality. Object-oriented rhetoric is linked to object-oriented ontology (Bogost; Bryant; Harman) in that it recognizes and attempts to account for the existence of varieties of collectives composed of human and nonhuman agents, but rhetoric can do something that ontology cannot: it can provide some ideas for how we should concern ourselves with objects. For example, how should we consider the writing process, given that language, tools, and ideas each have their own agency and act on a writer (and on each other)? This question begins with the supposition that each object in the assemblage has its own rhetorical power and to be investigated on its own terms rather than being yoked to the production of text by the rhetor – rather, each object is a rhetor, and each needs to have its (metaphorical) voice heard. Ontology may describe relationships between objects (which is of course necessary), but rhetoric can provide us with context-specific for creating and sustaining relations while maintaining an ontological perspective.

Rhetoric as Anthropocentric Discipline As a discipline, rhetoric has overemphasized notions of human consciousness and especially language use. Definitions of rhetoric have always seemingly been concerned (one might say overly concerned) with these supposedly unique qualities of “humanness” – that is, for there to be a “good man speaking well” (Quintilian’s “vir bonus”) there must first be a good man, which means we to understand not just what it means to be good but also what we mean by “man.” For Quintilian, vir likely meant someone who was Roman, educated, land- owning, from the equites socio-economic grouping, able-bodied, male, and generally a follower of social convention. In fact, according to Alan Brinton, Quintilian’s vir bonus was not actually human – instead, Quintilian was making a philosophical statement in the sense of a Platonic of good oration, rather than in the sense of instantiated human existence (167-168). More to the point, however, when Quintilian defines the rhetorical act in terms of humans, he also defines humans in terms of the rhetorical act. What women do in public speaking, by Quintilian’s definition, is

6

not rhetoric. Because women cannot perform this fundamental human activity, they are positioned as not fully human. Similarly, part of what defined a culture as a “barbarian” in antiquity was its supposed inability to practice rhetoric; in a very real way, rhetoric is what made humans human. This sense that human activity is defined by rhetoric and vice versa works to reduce those who are not “correctly” practicing rhetoric to the of nonhuman object, and considering the anthropocentric viewpoint common to traditional rhetorical approaches, the result is that those humans join a category of passively ignored or actively maligned things. Similarly, when defines rhetoric as “the faculty” of observing the available means of persuasion, he means human faculties – and that these faculties are what make humans human. Definitions of rhetoric are, in general, preoccupied with humanness. For object-oriented rhetoric, these familiar definitions of rhetoric are insufficient – whether Quintilian’s “good man speaking well,” Burke’s emphasis on humans as “the symbol using animal,” Richards’s “the study of misunderstanding and its remedies,” Kennedy’s “the art of effective expression,” or Foss’s “human use of symbols to communicate.” These definitions omit the nonhuman parts of the world, which also function rhetorically. Put another way, object-oriented rhetoric opens the possibility for rhetoricians to study relations between things without necessarily restricting their study to symbolic action or to human actors. This project’s ultimate goal is to outline object-oriented rhetoric as a methodology usable to examine the inclusion of the nonhuman in rhetorical study. I argue that an object- oriented perspective provides a different trajectory, away from anthropocentrism, allowing us to focus less on “being human” – a notion with its own thorny set of historical contingencies – and more on “being,” period. If rhetoric can move past its preoccupation with defining humanity in terms of rhetorical agency, it can begin to reexamine its fundamental notions of how rhetorical action functions. Essentially, an object-oriented rhetoric allows rhetoricians to focus on relationality and misunderstanding, inclusive of both nonhuman and human agents, in an attempt to broaden the possibility for rhetoric to make productive and ethical interventions in a broader world. In more contemporary discussions of rhetoric, this focus on what makes humans human continues. One of few positions shared between cognitivist and social-epistemic rhetoricians is the sense that rhetoric and writing are provinces of human consciousness. This shared notion is problematic because it encourages a perspective of anthropocentrism – a position that overlooks

7

the complexity of materiality and nonhuman objects’ roles in reality. This is not to say that these two competing perspectives overlook the complexity of human thought and its relationship to a larger environment, of course. In defining a cognitive process theory of writing, Flower and Hayes outline the “task environment” as ultimately part of the writing process itself: “The task environment includes all of those things outside the writer's skin, starting with the rhetorical problem or assignment and eventually including the growing text itself” (369). Their diagram separates the environment from the actual writing process, however, implying that human consciousness is influenced by its environment but is also somehow separate from it. From the social-epistemic perspective, James Berlin also places human consciousness – whether individual or collective – as the basis of rhetoric. His focus on rhetoric as ideological and social recognizes complexities of language and ideology, but simultaneously excludes nonhuman reality except as it exists for humans; for Berlin, all reality is brought into an orbit around humans through language. Berlin criticizes other rhetorical approaches because they argue for “composing in personal terms as the expression of an isolated self attempting to come to grips with an alien and recalcitrant world," a view that he believes "denies the social of language and experience” (Rhetoric and Reality 185). For Berlin, this social character relies on language,1 and experience can only be parsed through language. This “alien and recalcitrant” world can be brought into human experience through language and society, but is otherwise forgotten. The common denominator in these perspectives – the thing that underlies their anthropocentrism – is their privileging of epistemology over ontology. While Berlin argues that the cognitivists are naïve positivists who fail to recognize that reality is ideologically constructed and instead believe that “the existent, the good, and the possible are inscribed in the very nature of things as indisputable scientific ” (687), some cognitivist notions trouble this simple definition. Flower and Hayes’ work does seem to suggest that and empirically verifiable data provide more reliable access to reality, but it also focuses on theory-building and

1 In fairness to Berlin, it’s true that he was interested in historical (Marxist) materialism. Because of Berlin’s timely role in normalizing rhetoric’s stake in critiquing ideology, it’s understandable that he focused on human discourse’s role vis-à-vis capitalist production and consumption. As Jane Bennett points out, however, the project of historical materialism still searches for human discursive agency that is merely projected onto materiality in a process she identifies as “demystification” (xiv). Regardless of that caveat, Berlin’s forays into materialism undoubtedly helped open a for the kind of work in this project. 8

interpretative strategies for writers and treats this theory-building as a social endeavor. In fact, cognitivism’s supposed naïve seems less evident than its narrow focus on the processes of the human mind (irrespective of any reality outside the mind). Moreover, Berlin’s attack on cognitivism is made within the framework of a larger argument against its refusal to examine ideology. His problem with a cognitivist perspective seems to largely be a problem with its leading to (seeking to accomplish a task efficiently rather than questioning the task), but he agrees with cognitivists that questions of epistemology are more important than questions of ontology. In this way, both cognitive and social-epistemic rhetoric have embraced a narrow epistemological focus on debating the best ways to understand how humans make through writing and have set this focus as a binary opposition to positivist realism. Rhetorical scholarship has characterized the positivist position as its diametric opposite because positivism is “interested solely in scientific statements” and so “ignor[es] other uses of discourse caus[ing] all of them to be lumped into the general category of nonsensical or meaningless” (Kinneavy 304). With rhetoric’s traditional interest in non-scientific, ideological, social statements, it comes as no surprise that we in rhetoric wish to position ourselves against a positivist viewpoint.2 However, I would argue that like many binaries, the division between the epistemological position of rhetoric on the one hand and the scientistic “purity” of a positivist position on the other may be an illusory one. We in rhetoric are no strangers to breaking binaries, and yet this binary between rhetoric and positivism persists. Rather than seeing rhetoric as purely epistemological – in other words, purely the province of human actors – we should be examining perspectives that admit a fuller reality into our study. Epistemologically, we can acknowledge an anti-positivist leaning (we rely on incomplete observation and experience to draw social and linguistic conclusions) while embracing a realist ontology (reality exists apart from linguistic construction and apart from human sensory presence); this third way makes room for the non-linguistic and nonhuman while

2 I don’t mean to suggest that rhetoric is uninterested in ; rather, I see the discipline as focusing on the discourse surrounding science. That is, rhetoric is more interested in the discussion and process of scientific discovery in ways that often elide the discovery itself - we are usually more interested in how geologists arrive at conclusions about rock formation rather than examining the formation of rocks. However, recent work in the (Bazerman; Graham and Herndl; Keranen; Lynch) and Lynch and Rivers’s Thinking with in Rhetoric and Composition collection suggest a move in a different direction. 9

recognizing the limits of human perception and experience. Importantly, this perspective is not reductive – it is merely mindful of limitations rather than seeing those limitations as the limit of the real. The important point to take here is that we as rhetoricians should understand that human and human perception are not the sole kinds of communication or perception, nor that human rhetorical action is necessarily the sole kind of rhetorical action. Beginning with an ontological viewpoint encourages us to treat nonhuman objects as potential rhetors in their own right rather than to assume that our epistemological framework is a necessary precondition for rhetorical being. We can see ourselves as collaborators with nonhuman objects rather than as their arbiters.

The Nonhuman Turn in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory In recent years, scholars have begun to question the primacy of the human in rhetorical study. Following the social turn in rhetoric in the 1980s and 1990s, in concert with the subsequent post-process movement, rhetoric has become more interested in investigating and modeling complexity, relationality, and nonhuman action. This interest has taken shape in ecological models of writing (Brooke; Cooper; Dobrin; Edbauer), embodiment (Banks; Bay; Fleckenstein; Harrington; Hawhee), the revival of (Hawk), the application of actor- network theory (Hart-Davidson; Rivers; Spinuzzi), animal studies (Hawhee), distributed cognition (Johnson-Eilola; Reid; Van Ittersum), rhetorical analyses of interfaces (Arola; Carnegie; Selfe and Selfe; Spinuzzi; Wysocki), critical studies of technology (Feenberg), and more. This emerging scholarship has done valuable work to complicate the notion of rhetoric as a humanistic discipline – and by that I mean a notion of “humanism” as it is often defined: as arguing for the inherent value of humans over other things in the world, recognizing and affirming individual human agency, and arguing that human existence is the epitome of being. Each of these in turn has questioned at least part of the humanist doctrine. However, each of these perspectives also tends to still privilege and value human perspective over those of nonhuman objects, often to the detriment of the very complexity these authors seek. Scholars of computers and writing have long called for us to recognize the influence of nonhuman on writers. For example, in Selfe and Selfe’s landmark article “The of the Interface,” the authors emphasize the discursive, ideological, and representational

10

power of computers in order to make the argument that composition instructors (and our students) should function as technological critics and not as mere users. They emphasize the varied nature of the ways computers are designed and used: “Indeed, from the work of computers and composition specialists, it is clear that computers, like other complex technologies, are articulated in many ways with a range of existing cultural and with a variety of projects in our system, projects that run the gamut from liberatory to oppressive” (2). In so doing, however, Selfe and Selfe situate computers and their interfaces as merely the product of these “cultural forces.” Rather than seeing human-computer interaction as a complex network of relationships between not only human actors but also the nonhuman actors of manufacturing machinery, computer hardware itself, and the code with which interfaces are written, Selfe and Selfe unintentionally position human users as the sole agents of change. The material conditions and constraints surrounding the computer as an object, and its interaction with users, are secondary. In other words, Selfe and Selfe seem to view the computer and its interface as tools of translation between human designers and human users, without granting any agency or power to the machines themselves. Clearly, being a critical user of technology is important, but overlooking the technology’s own perspective and agency makes it even more difficult to effect change for users. Selfe and Selfe’s position is emblematic of a larger conversation in computers and writing, a conversation that frames human users as the primary (and often only) beings with agency vis-à- vis technology. While rhetorical theorists of interfaces have tended to focus on the cultural forces that shape interface design (Carnegie; Grabill; Haas and Gardner), advocates of distributed cognition (Johnson-Eilola; Reid; Syverson; Van Ittersum) have been exploring ways in which the human mind interacts with a range of nonhuman objects. Alex Reid, for instance, argues that “thought processes not only occur throughout the body but also in the external, ‘smart’ environment” but more importantly that objects in the environment “expand and shape …cognitive function” (10, emphasis in original). In other words, objects have agency in human affairs. Reid makes the argument that language is a technology, developed and adapted by humans in order to better and more thoroughly articulate our thoughts, but notes that the logical conclusion of this belief is that because language is a technology, it cannot be human: “This does not mean that ‘our’ thoughts are not our own but rather that ‘we’ are products of our bodies

11

situated in a smart environment of distributed cognition with material, cultural, and historical dimensions and contexts” (11). Reid discusses technologies other than language – and in setting language alongside various analog and digital technologies, he cleverly draws our attention to the ways in which language functions like them. For Reid, language, like other (tangible) technologies, exists outside humans and acts at once in concert with and independently of us – it acts with its own agency. Part of the goal of an object-oriented rhetoric is to study that agency (and others) on its own terms, from a different perspective that does not rely on notions of stable subjectivity or illusions of absolute human control. However, Reid seems to stop short of a complete rejection of an anthropocentric perspective in that he treats objects as drawn into human cognition rather than existing on their own (and so still puts humans at the center of his model).3 He argues that “cognitive processes enter into conscious awareness” (12, emphasis added). For him, subjectivity is articulated through a complex (cultural, historical, and material) process, and this subjectivity in turn produces consciousness. While he is careful to separate subjectivity from language as such (“many thoughts… cannot be fully articulated in language”), he nonetheless imagines a human being (being is the operative term here) as the de facto center of this process. Although Reid importantly makes allowances for a virtual, distributed consciousness that emerges from a complex system but is not itself that complex system, he still emphasizes the importance and necessity of individual embodied consciousness as nodes in a network which only peripherally includes the nonhuman. Reid’s work is valuable; however, his practice of consistently beginning an examination from the perspective of humans (that is, leaving humans as an unmarked center) may lead to exclusionary practices that ignore potentially equally important nonhuman actors. Emerging ecological models of rhetoric also dwell within complexity, but most often still clings to a world by and for humans.4 Jenny Edbauer’s model of a “rhetorical ecology,” for instance, emphasizes that elements of a situation do not operate independently from each other

3 It is worth noting that in his recent work (especially in his blog), Reid has developed this line of thinking, and has turned toward OOO and OOR as ways to recognize the existence of objects outside of human perception. 4 This is not to suggest that ecological models of composition exclude nonhuman objects. On the contrary, texts like Syverson’s The Wealth of Reality are explicitly interested in methodological models that recognize complex systems, distributed cognition, and interrelated human/nonhuman agency. My point is that these texts often collapse or elide the agency of nonhuman objects in order to explain rhetoric and composition as fundamentally human acts, with nonhuman objects as understudies or extras rather than full actors. 12

but rather in relation to each other (7-9). According to Edbauer, “this ecological model allows us to more fully theorize rhetoric as a public(s) creation.” (9) Ultimately, however, Edbauer’s model considers the social and political dimensions (that is, the human dimensions) of a text or its circulation. Her publics are fundamentally human ones, and moreover ones where humans are the actors that “do” rhetoric. Her emphasis is on the “social field,” and although she does expand notions of the social from static sites to actions and activities (a praiseworthy undertaking), humans are ultimately the ones providing movement, rather than encouraging us to move beyond the linguistic to examine non-discursive and nonhuman objects that also have a stake in or participate in a rhetorical situation. In contrast to Edbauer’s tendency to collapse nonhuman and human action, Collin Brooke recognizes the rhetorical movement of nonhuman objects in Lingua Fracta by arguing for a transition to the interface, rather than static text, as our primary unit of rhetorical analysis. Brooke believes that “what we think of as products (, articles, essays) are but specialized instances of an ongoing process at the level of the interface” (25). Brooke’s perspective endows texts with both action and agency, although the human analyst is implicitly still in charge of making sense of and animating these interfaces. With that said, Brooke’s aim is to provide rhetoricians with a new set of perspectives and language to discuss media more productively, not to complicate questions of human agency. Nevertheless, he reconsiders rhetorical practice as moving away from the idea of rhetoricians examining passive texts and ideas and contends that those ideas are actively circulating. His example of ’s tag cloud and database technologies suggest, at the very least, that he recognizes there is more transpiring than only human action. While Brooke’s treatment of nonhuman technology as integral to rhetorical study is laudable, his ultimate focus on human control over that technology is still problematic. Similar to Brooke, Byron Hawk’s work in recovering an ontological history of rhetoric has deep sympathies with this project (especially the historical work I undertake in chapter two). Hawk’s argument that vitalism’s alliance with complexity and ontology ultimately marginalized it resonates with my own perspectives on rhetoric’s history. His perspective de-centers rhetoric by attempting to move away from a focus on a subject-object gap, especially in terms of how he positions the process of listening as “a basic rhetorical and ecological reality” (232). That said, Hawk is less interested in developing a rhetorical approach that deals with the effects and agencies of nonhuman objects and is more interested in recognizing ways to empower individual

13

students through focusing classrooms on student goals and desires (as opposed to subsuming student desires in curricular desires). His emphasis on “hope” and “desire” in A Counter-History of Composition’s final chapter suggests a tension between complex, distributed agency on the one hand and control over the design of classroom experience on the other. To be fair to Hawk, A Counter-History of Composition is a work of enormous complexity, and perhaps the single best example of a rhetorical perspective that acknowledges the necessity of an ontological perspective in both scholarly and classroom work. However, Hawk still focuses almost exclusively on human mastery and agency over reality; in this case, rather than being an oversight, this focus is likely a consequence of limited space and authorial agenda. In sum, although each of these theories pushes the boundaries of an epistemological, anthropocentric focus in rhetoric, each also ultimately draws back from (or leaves unsaid) a more radical departure from traditional perspectives of rhetorical action and still situates rhetoric as primarily (if not solely) the domain of humans. In other words, while each attempts to recognize and ameliorate the problem of a hierarchized, exclusionary rhetorical tradition, each still excludes the majority of reality. When we continue to exclude what Bruno Latour has called the “missing masses” of physical reality from rhetorical study, we perpetuate the very thing we fight against – an inclusive, widely-applicable rhetoric which makes room for empowered and disempowered rhetors alike. I argue that it is necessary to reconsider rhetoric not solely reliant on discourse and human interaction, but instead to imagine it as a process of attempting to understand diverse beings, their perspectives, and their relationships. I believe object-oriented rhetoric provides such a lens.

Key Concepts in Object-Oriented Ontology The general concept of object-oriented rhetoric (OOR), as taken up by scholars such as Alex Reid, Scot Barnett, Nathaniel Rivers, Jim Brown, or Timothy Morton, owes its existence to object-oriented ontology (OOO), a branch of the philosophical movement called . While Reid, Barnett, Rivers, Brown, Morton, and others have explicitly called for an object-oriented rhetoric, the majority of these calls have been in the form of conference presentations, blogs, interviews, reviews, and other short pieces, rather than in journal articles or . Part of the goal of this project is to respond to those calls in the form of a longer work. Speculative realists are loosely allied in their resistance to the dominant

14

philosophical position, one that French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has referred to as “correlationism.” The correlationist perspective, as Meillassoux defines it, holds that “we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (90). In rhetoric, this correlationist perspective is perhaps most visible (though certainly not exclusive) in the work of Berlin. Social-epistemic rhetoric (as articulated by Berlin) is an inherently correlationist position: For social-epistemic rhetoric, the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence. Knowledge is never found in any one of these but can only be posited as a product of the dialectic in which all three come together … Most important, this dialectic is grounded in language: the observer, the discourse community, and the material conditions of existence are all verbal constructs. (488) There is undoubtedly some nuance in Berlin’s thinking about materiality in that he accepts the existence and importance of material things, arguing that they are an important part of the dialectic of knowledge, but ultimately, for Berlin, material reality is secondary; human social interaction and language win the day. We can’t talk about reality – we can only talk about humans talking about it. In seeking to outline an alternative to human centered, epistemological rhetoric, I will focus on several major arguments of object-oriented ontology: ● a focus on ontology rather than epistemology decenters our focus on the human; ● a flat ontology necessitates continued argument for and observation of real objects because of their vast, inherently equal nature; ● complex interrelated assemblages of active objects encourage us to dig deeper to understand more of reality; ● objects’ inherent withdrawal requires us to recognize how objects seek but ultimately evade fundamental connection to each other.

Ontology as First Philosophy In addition to challenging anthropocentric correlationism, OOO theorists attempt to move philosophy away from a single-minded focus on epistemology by expanding the philosophical

15

conversation to include not only questions of how we know the world but also questions of what the world is. Arguing that ontology is “first philosophy” (Bryant 51), object-oriented ontologists refocus the philosophical enterprise to engage a variety of human and nonhuman objects on equal ontological grounds. In this way, OOO enables theorists to ask more complex and difficult questions about ontology by repositioning humans as one kind of object among many, rather than as the ultimate arbiters of reality. This decentering of the human perspective, argues Bryant, pushes us toward “what anti-humanism and post-humanism ought to be” (22-23). One can see, then, how working from a correlationist philosophy that privileges human cognition leads to an inherent anthropocentrism. OOO theorists reject this anthropocentrism on the grounds that humans and other objects are not fundamentally different in terms of their existence. The notion that humans are incapable of fully accessing reality is the foundation of postmodern anxiety, but to an OOO theorist, an inability to access reality is not unique to humans; rather, this condition is shared by all objects—human and nonhuman alike.

A Flat Ontology Equalizes Objects The idea that we can use an object-oriented perspective to ask questions about multitudes of different objects, rather than making a bright-line division between humans and nonhuman action, arises from the OOO concept of a flat ontology. When OOO theorists reference a flat ontology, what they mean is that all objects in reality are equally real – there are no degrees of “realness.” In other words, no one object is responsible for the creation of all other objects – there is no hierarchy of being. As Levi Bryant puts it, “there is no super-object that gathers all other objects together in a single, harmonious unity” (32). Next, a flat ontology argues that relationships between objects are no different in kind, no what kinds of objects they are. As part of this , the interaction of subjectivity with objects is not a necessary precondition for reality (in other words, reality need not enter into discourse). Finally, flat ontology argues that no object is inherently more valuable than any other – they may have more importance in their relationships with certain objects, but that does not influence the fact that all objects are equally real. Similarly, OOO argues that objects are composed of smaller, equally real objects, all of which have equal ontological status but which can enter into relationships to produce other objects (which have their own being apart from, but dependent on, their constituent parts). In

16

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett clearly outlines this scaling, emergent property of being. For Bennett, the emergence of complexity results in agency; more to the point, Bennett argues that human agency, which we have traditionally focused on, is only possible as the result of interrelationships of other objects.5 Bennett uses this perspective to argue for the value of nonhuman objects alongside humans, a project she describes as “raising the status of materiality of which we are composed” (12). In Bennett’s estimation, this heightened status leads to a reconsideration of our fundamental understanding of agency itself; within a flat ontology that recognizes the necessity of larger and smaller networks to provide “vitality” to all being, agency is a matter of relation, not subjectivity. Drawing from both Latour and Deleuze, Bennet argues that agency is a process of “not fully predictable encounters between multiple kinds of actants” (97), which suggests that agency arises from complexity and cannot truly be said to reside within singular subjects. In other words, for Bennett, agency is simultaneously a distributed and an inherent quality of all matter. Because OOO is a flat ontology, the same principles govern all objects, and thus any object can be explained in terms of any other. This notion applies to humans as easily as to anything else. As Ian Bogost suggests, “human perception becomes just one among many ways that objects might relate. To put things at the center of a new also requires us to admit that they do not exist just for us” (9). Objects are not mere representations that are apprehended by humans functioning in the epistemic domain of culture; they exist on their own, and human subjects are a distinct kind of object in an ontological domain. Humans and human subjectivities are objects among objects, and with this theoretical move “we get a variety of nonhuman actors unleashed in the world as autonomous actors in their own right, irreducible to representations and freed from any constant reference to the human where they are reduced to our representations” (Bryant 23). For rhetoric, this articulation of a flat ontology holds promise in that it allows us to begin with any object – not necessarily only humans – as the center of study. In other words, we can decide to examine the birth of the film industry, for instance, without jumping immediately or

5 Bennett actually argues this emergence of human agency from both directions – human being is contingent on human bodies being composed of smaller networks of objects, and is only real and meaningful within a larger network than a single individual human body. 17

solely to socio-political context. We might instead decide to focus on the material relationships between celluloid and early projectors, including their production and distribution chains, as a way to understand and situate traditional notions of human rhetorical action. Approaching these objects as fundamentally no different than we might approach the humans involved in the film production process, we would recognize their agency and their capability to meaningfully interact with other objects related to them. We would recognize their contribution to a larger rhetorical situation, whether we characterized that situation in human terms or not. (Once we had established the nonhuman agents at work in this network, we might then move on to human concerns within it.) In Bryant’s conception of flat ontology, there is no fundamental difference between “subjects, groups, fictions, technologies, institutions … quarks, , trees, and tardigrades” (32). This lack of a fundamental difference leads us to reconsider the starting points of research in rhetoric. Rather than beginning with human agency, we can instead choose any point in a wide range of actors, attempting to understand objects on their own terms and from their own positions before understanding their relationship to other objects (including humans, if appropriate); we can follow objects in an attempt to understand their worlds and thereby bring more richness and fullness to our own. If there is no fundamental difference between humans and anything else, we are forced to reconsider a with us at the center, and to empathize with the of objects – with the eventual goal of recognizing our own place and actions relative to them and to each other.

Objects Have Agency; They Act In OOO, objects are distinct, unique entities. They are neither clouded representations of an ideal form, nor are they merely the empirically observable phenomena that constitute our apprehension of them. Each of those phenomena is itself an object, equally real and equally worthy of investigation; each object is composed of further objects, and so on. Objects interact with others to produce complex networks of interrelated but distinct things, each of which is constantly acting on and acting against the others. These networks are themselves objects, and their complexity is greater than the sum of their parts. While OOO theorists reject any fundamental difference among types of objects, they nevertheless also recognize that all objects exert autonomous agency. Harman argues that an

18

object must “have a sort of independence from whatever it is not. An object stands apart – not just from its manifestation to humans but possibly even from its own accidents, relations, qualities, moments, or pieces” (Prince of Networks 152). Perhaps the most familiar treatment of objects as autonomous agents is in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, and appropriately, Harman argues that Latour is effectively (if not expressly) an object-oriented ontologist (Prince 16). For both Latour and Harman, objects are separate beings, each autonomous and unified, but are also composed of an infinite number of other objects in infinite regression. These individual objects have their own agencies, and are constantly exerting their mediating forces on the objects in relation to them. For rhetoric, this ontological position opens up a wide vista of study – no longer must we be constrained by a supposed necessity to examine human symbolic action in discourse around and among humans, but instead we can allow ourselves to examine the rhetorical lives of all objects. In other words, we can develop a rhetoric that plumbs the depths of relationships between human and nonhuman objects alike, in many of the same ways we have traditionally been interested in the symbolic relationships between humans. It allows us, essentially, to pay attention to things that have been on the margins of rhetorical study. In so doing, it encourages us to return to and re-envision some basic rhetorical concepts – for instance, if nonhuman objects have rhetorical , how do we retheorize concepts such as the rhetor or the audience? We might begin by seeing audience as an object that emerges out of a relationship between a speaker and hearer and that includes (and is shaped by) nonhuman elements such as the medium of communication, and that those objects are active participants in creating a message. Using such a methodology, an object-oriented rhetoric examines the rhetorical nature of objects and makes room for them at the table. It extends the work done by authors like Alex Reid or Andy Clark, who rely on distributed cognition models to explore how human and world intersect. Reid and Clark’s perspectives are especially worth investigating as they recognize the agency of objects in human cognitive processes. Like Reid, Clark defends his distributed cognitive perspective from complaints of technological by noting that “it is crazy to think that a pencil might think.” However, he points out, “it is crazy to think that a V4 thinks” as well (87). For both Reid and Clark, human cognition is a kind of complex system, one where subjectivity exceeds the sum of its parts. Both also recognize that the parts of human subjectivity

19

include pencils, V4 -, , books, and eyes. For Clark, especially, extended cognition means that just as pencils become part of the cognitive processes of humans, humans also function as agents in the cognition of the “” of other objects. In other words, the models of Reid and Clark open the door to consider objects not as merely tools that encourage human thought or discursive practices, but as things that rhetoricians must consider on their own terms in order to fully understand the connection humans always already have with them. An object-oriented rhetoric seeks to understand how humans are drawn into the orbits of other beings. The sense is one of perpetual movement (again, something familiar to readers of Latour), with all objects at all levels of scale (each equally real) constantly sensing and reconstituting each other. Objects do things, in other words. This sense of constant action means objects do not wait passively to be brought into human experience, and more importantly, that they influence human attitudes and actions in the same ways that other humans do (or, more precisely, that there’s no fundamental difference between humans’ influence and the influence of other things). For Latour, in particular, it is necessary to refigure what we mean by “social” to include nonhuman objects. We must recognize, he says, that even within the scope of human activity, nonhuman “implements, according to our definition, are actors, or more precisely, participants in the course of action waiting to be given a figuration” (71). Although for Latour these nonhuman actors do not determine the course of action, they are nonetheless participants and have their own power. In terms of rhetorical study, this active character of objects underscores (and validates!) our interest in complexity. Because we can no longer merely consider the influence of human actors in any situation, we can no longer subscribe to an anthropocentric view of rhetoric. Humans, in other words, are not in total control of any situation in which they are involved. On the other hand, neither is any nonhuman object in complete control of any relation it enters into. Instead, there is a constant process of communication (or translation, or mediation) involved, and this process is happening constantly and at all levels of interaction. Because this process is one of translation, it is necessarily imperfect; no object can perceive the totality of another. This imperfection creates uncertainty, and uncertainty is the realm of rhetoric. We might (somewhat ambitiously) describe all interaction as rhetorical interaction, but the practical effect of this understanding of object-relations is that their uncertainty creates a

20

need for rhetoricians to intervene – at the very least, among other humans. We can apply our expertise in developing and processes for approaching uncertainties about the ontological existence of nonhuman objects. In contrast, rhetoric has traditionally drawn a sharp distinction between the social (and epistemic) on the one hand and the material (and ontological) on the other. When Berlin argues that real things are always found in a relationship between human observers, their social setting, and their ideologically-determined material conditions, he is disavowing the existence of an objective reality (since reality cannot exist before discourse or ideology). On the contrary, an object-oriented rhetoric would embrace the existence of an objective reality, because it would be hubristic to assume that reality can only exist for humans. Moreover, an object-oriented perspective would assert that it would be impossible to understand the effects of ideology by only studying human social interaction and epistemic work; instead, we must avail ourselves of the action of nonhuman objects that work alongside us in order to fully understand how ideology acts on us. In other words, materiality and embodiment are not merely ideological or epistemological concerns – they are real concerns, and to treat them as merely things to be brought into human province through language diminishes their reality. By instead treating these and other objects as actors in their own right, we realign human subjectivities to avoid merely talking about talking and writing about writing, and position ourselves to understand and act on objects of all kinds.

Objects Withdraw; We Orient Toward Them Withdrawal is one of the most important concepts in OOO. Essentially, withdrawal in OOO refers to the idea that any object is separate from reality; its essence is inaccessible because no situation exists wherein it could project all of its possibility. We in the humanities are familiar with one specific manifestation of this idea, through postmodern . Postmodern theorists tend to apply the idea solely to human consciousness. We recognize that humans are not the sum of their perceivable characteristics – that is, I can spend my time talking to someone and not presume that I know the fullness of their being. For postmodernism (and correlationism), this is due to a unique human subjectivity producing a chasm between my mind and the world. In OOO, however, these concepts are applied to all objects. Objects are not the same thing as our perception of those objects: my presentation of self and my subjectivity are objects

21

in themselves, each separate from the fullness of my mind, for instance. Neither can I know everything about a table by its surface. Most importantly, in OOO, this separation from reality and from other objects is decidedly not a unique characteristic of humans. All objects are fundamentally unknowable, to us and to other things. Because one object cannot fully access the reality of another, OOO emphasizes the ways in which objects’ external qualities emerge through their relations with other objects. No object can ever fully express its qualities, and even if it could, those qualities could only be partially accessed by other objects. In a substantial way, OOO is about the intersections and interactions between objects, because object interiors are inaccessible. Similarly, Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) is structured to engage with and trace such object relations. Latour is disinclined to believe that objects essentially exist apart from their relations; on this point Harman disagrees. For my part, I would side with Harman, as otherwise it would suggest that parts of things cease to exist when not in relation. In Latour’s actor-network theory, objects are their relations because ANT is concerned with tracing actions within networks, not with attempting to understand the essences of objects. In other words, while ANT does allow us to identify objects that perpetuate inter-object relationships, its focus is on relationships between objects rather than the objects that create those relations. In contrast to Latour, Harman describes the relations between objects as “vicarious causation” – they do not directly interact but require some intermediation (Guerrilla Metaphysics 48). Harman’s prime example is the case of fire and cotton: these two objects are withdrawn from the essence of each other and can only understand certain surface characteristics (what Bryant has called “local manifestations” (69)) of the other. In this particular case, fire can only enter into a relationship with cotton in terms of its flammability, and requires mediation (here, burning) to enter any relation at all (Harman 77). Relying on Harman, Ian Bogost develops the concept of metaphor to describe this process of vicarious causation. For Bogost, humans and other objects “never understand the alien experience, we only ever reach for it metaphorically” (66). Metaphorism is a method by which humans might begin to understand other objects on their own terms, recognizing that such understanding will always be incomplete. (Similarly, the experience of the object apprehending the human will also necessarily be metaphorical and hence partial.) Metaphorism relies on seeing things as if they were understandable, while simultaneously realizing that the essences of objects

22

– all objects – are unknowable. Because objects are inherently unknowable, forever out of our reach, in order to attempt to understand them, we must orient ourselves toward them. Practically speaking, this shift in perspective means that rhetoricians can utilize our expertise in the kinds of metaphorism Bogost mentions, and can do so in a variety of object relations. For example, we can attempt to use metaphor to understand the nature of communication between software and humans. From an object-oriented perspective, we no longer focus on the intent of humans to accomplish some activity but examine the connections and occurring between human agent and software agent: we look at how keyboards function, the haptic experience of typing (from our perspective as well as the machine’s), the translation between code and interface, and the processes that occur in the experience. The result is a fuller picture of any particular act, and one that positions humans and software on equal footing, with each responding to the other metaphorically – the human understands the machine interface through language and sense perception, but the machine understands the human as input indistinguishable from other input. OOO’s emphasis on metaphor as a tool for translation among disparate entities could be seen as an extension or analogue to some pre-existing rhetorical concepts. As much as rhetoric is about uncertainty, it is also fundamentally concerned with communication between unlike parties. For instance, I.A. Richards’ definition of rhetoric –“the study of misunderstanding and its remedies” – presupposes translation, shifts in meaning, and slippage in ideas – not as flaws of an imperfect language, but as necessities of the process of translation. In other words, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature; these moments of translation allow for multiplicity, , and progress. For Richards (and others), rhetoric is a group of tools useful for making some sense of imperfect, necessary misunderstandings. Although Richards focuses on the misunderstandings that occur between humans, there is no why the same set of tools and theories need to be restricted to those particular modes of misunderstanding. An object-oriented rhetoric attempts to prepare us to remedy the misunderstandings between nonhuman objects as well as human ones – whether those objects are computers, animals, architecture, or ideas. For rhetoric, this orientation encourages us to envision a different kind of rhetorical situation: through the lens of metaphorism, we can formulate an object-oriented rhetorical situation that begins from a variety of perspectives, not just our own. For instance, we might review the standard elements of a rhetorical situation (i.e., rhetor,

23

exigence, constraints, and audience) and ask: can we view a computer as a rhetor? What is its exigence for producing a text? What constraints work on its messages? What are its varied audiences? Does viewing interaction in this way provide us with more information to make our own decisions? Unmooring these questions from a human perspective provides us with an opportunity to see nonhumans and humans as operating on the same plane. Rather than seeing separation from an ultimately inaccessible reality as a unique trait of human experience, OOO theorists’ idea of withdrawal democratizes incomplete access across all objects. As a result of this democratization, we can begin to see relationships between objects as fundamentally similar – their withdrawal requires mediation and translation. This translation and mediation requires metaphorical understanding (since no object can understand any other except through its own lenses of being), and this area of uncertainty and misunderstanding in translation has long been the province of rhetoric. In other words, an object-oriented rhetoric would seek to examine and mitigate misunderstanding, not merely on a discursive level, but on the level of relationships between objects of all kinds. This broadening of rhetorical study enables us to apply our expertise not merely on local levels of human-human relationships, but also in terms of human-object relationships (and, ideally, with heuristics and that also apply to object-object relationships).Using the previous example of the computer’s rhetorical situation, we might look to its particular affordances and constraints: what kinds of language can it produce that is intelligible by humans? By other machines? Does the same kind of communication happen for each? What kinds of translation must be overcome for each (cross-system incompatibility in the case of other machines, or unparsable messages for humans)? In other words, we would view the acts of nonhuman objects as acts with rhetorical force – as a kind of “communication.”

Identifying Uncertainties Object-oriented rhetoric allows us to identify the uncertainties that lurk at the edges of traditional rhetorical theory. One of the that rhetorical theory involving nonhuman objects seems so strange and alien is because we tend to consider rhetorical work in terms of consciousness and discursive activity. While we may be willing to admit to the reality of nonhuman objects having agency – and why not, since we can observe and demonstrate the effects of Wikipedia on memory and culture, for instance – we’re less ready to admit objects into

24

our special clubhouse of conscious thought. For that matter, we have trouble admitting that even other organic beings experience consciousness in the same ways we do. (For instance, Descartes famously believed that animals were not actually conscious, to the extent that he argued that animals are incapable of truly experiencing .) These anxieties seem to stem from a distinctly (and damagingly) anthropocentric viewpoint, which sees humans as special cases of withdrawn existence. The important thing to take away from these anxieties is the way in which they predispose us to relegate other objects to the background to the detriment of a richer reality – we’re dismissing conversations before they can be had. The concern, in other words, is a practical one. OOO theorists Graham Harman and Levi Bryant embrace a philosophy that is concerned with real effects. This necessarily follows because the interiors/essences of objects are inaccessible, so of course we only care about effects, since effects (i.e., translations between objects) are all that we can access. I would argue that an object-oriented rhetoric is concerned with effect while simultaneously acknowledging that we must be mindful of ethical concerns. Whereas OOO may initially seem divorced from , we (as humans) value the possibility of consciousness, want to minimize pain, etc.; so, with a potentially complicated understanding of consciousness, we have to be mindful of how our ethics affect our decisions. That is, ethics are ethics for us because they matter to our particular subjectivities, but that doesn’t make ethics meaningless; it makes ethics a humanist project. The sense that an object-oriented approach to ethics no longer places humans as the de facto center may provoke some anxiety. Jane Bennett acknowledges this potential discomfort, noting that its critics suggest it seems to “authorize the treatment of people as mere things; in other words, that a strong distinction between subjects and objects is needed to prevent the instrumentalization of humans” (12). Bennett recognizes that an anthropocentric worldview legitimizes privileging humans on an ethical plane. However, as she also points out, the track record for human treatment in an anthropocentric worldview is not exactly enviable. She presents a different approach to ethics that accounts for those humans and nonhumans currently suffering under an anthropocentric ethical system. For Bennett, an object-oriented ethical perspective is non-hierarchical, shared, and open to constant negotiation. As humans, we have the potential to modify human values, which also includes choosing to value objects (bodies of different kinds and things of different kinds) in ways that advance the core tenets of a humanistic agenda.

25

Humanism is not necessarily bad – it’s about doing human stuff, which makes sense, since that’s what we are. Trying to apply our ethics to cats would be counterproductive, because cats need cat ethics (that they develop themselves). This sense of ethics yoked to particular ontological experience is pretty easy to derive from a non-anthropocentric view. In other words, OOO doesn’t solve ethical problems for humans in and of itself. It just tells us “the stuff of the has unknowable internal existences that are just as valuable as ours on an ontological level.” OOR exists to ask those ethical questions – starting with “does equal ontological value necessitate equal ethical value?” In response, I would argue: no, not by necessity – but I would also caution that individual cases need to be explored, and that complicating the argument of humanism isn’t moot because of pre-existing ontological hierarchies. As humans, we operate from an assumedly shared frame of reference, in terms of how we apprehend things in the world and admit them to our minds. Socially, we also recognize this as a convenient fiction, because we are aware that our frames of reference diverge from one another. This diversion comes in a variety of ways: simple subjectivity (we exist in different places and times), history (we have different experiences which influence us in a variety of ways), physical ability (I may be colorblind and you may be not, so our experiences seeing a particular thing differ). These relatively small differences (small in comparison to, say, the way I experience the environment versus how my cat does) could still diverge fairly radically. Because we recognize that these sources of consciousness differ, we recognize the difference of individual human consciousnesses themselves. OOR argues that if we recognize that this is true of all objects, and that this divergence is a universal rather than human condition, we can productively engage difference not just between humans, but between objects of all kinds.

Overview of Chapters The remainder of this project attempts to enact some of the theoretical positioning outlined in this chapter. By demonstrating specific sites and instances of object-oriented rhetoric at work, I hope to make its usefulness clear to rhetoric and composition. Simultaneously, I attempt to use this project to respond to calls for an object-oriented rhetoric. Rather than attempting to build a theoretical superstructure, I can provide concrete examples of how an object-oriented perspective functions in our field.

26

In chapter two, “Uncovering Objects in Rhetorical History,” I use an object-oriented perspective to re-see the history of composition and rhetoric, specifically treating the work of Giambattista Vico; Kenneth Burke; and Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike. The chapter especially pays attention to the way these scholars’ texts figure nonhuman objects and gesture toward an object-orientation. Extending and complicating the kinds of recovery work done by historians of rhetoric, composition, and (Hawk; McCorkle; Palmeri), I argue that rhetorical conceptions of objects have had moments of rupture, where objects have been assessed as having a rhetorical character of their own, independent of human intervention; however, until recently, those moments of rupture have been subsumed into an epistemological narrative. Chapter three, “Thinking with and against AI: Representations of Machine Intelligence in Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Human Revolution” uses two major release video games as its primary sites of study. I employ close narrative (Hayles) and procedural (Bogost) analysis to examine the representation of nonhuman objects in these games. These representations provide unique opportunities for players to critically examine their relationships with nonhuman objects and the boundaries between human and nonhuman action. Ultimately, I assert that the games (both as and through their representation of nonhuman object agency) complicate player notions of power and agency: both games question the nature of what it means to have agency and to constitute personhood. In comparing these two games’ perspectives on personhood and ethics, as well as their mechanics, I provide an example of the kind of work possible with object-oriented rhetorical analysis of texts. Moving from the worlds within games to the world of the games industry, chapter four, “Metacritic: Humans Writing for Machines Writing for Humans,” turns toward the intersection between human and nonhuman rhetors to examine material, political, and economic . The chapter examines the videogame review aggregator site, Metacritic, as an example of the way power is contested between machines and various human authors. With this chapter, I demonstrate how object-oriented rhetoric can question and complicate real-world efforts of both human and nonhuman actors. Metacritic’s review aggregate mechanism has been embraced by the videogame industry and its consumers as a metric to determine quality of and compensation for games, leading to unintended consequences and problematic positioning of machines as readers. Ultimately, I use an object-oriented methodology to argue that machine writing, human

27

writing, and human-machine writing each function as a site of rhetorical action with different affordances, constraints, and persuasive strategies. Finally, in Chapter Five, “Implications for Pedagogy and Research,” I discuss the potential of an object-oriented approach from a teacher-scholar’s perspective. This concluding chapter serves as a call for composition and rhetoric to embrace object-oriented rhetoric by outlining specific ways that object-oriented rhetoric might apply to composition and rhetoric, especially by discussing classroom spaces and scholarly approaches. I particularly focus on practical strategies, tools, and activities that fit well into a classroom that acknowledges an object-oriented perspective. Rather than providing an entirely new structure for teaching, this chapter encourages instructors to reconsider and re-see their as informed by and informing the nonhuman objects surrounding them.

28

Chapter Two: Uncovering Objects in Rhetorical History

In the previous chapter, I argued that rhetoric has traditionally focused on epistemology at the expense of ontology and that the discipline has been preoccupied with definitions of humanity and human agency – at the cost of ignoring the wealth of nonhuman things enacting their own (rhetorical) agency in the world. While I pointed to some specific examples where a more capacious conversation is taking place, especially in the recent “nonhuman turn” in the humanities, I nevertheless asserted that rhetoricians need to do more to realign our beliefs and practices in ways that recognize and value the contribution of nonhuman objects alongside human agency in rhetorical interaction. Given that argument, this chapter may seem contradictory: having made a strong case for rhetoric’s de-emphasis of ontology, I now turn to our history to demonstrate how some scholars in the field did indeed have a vested interest in an ontological approach – specifically, Giambattista Vico; Kenneth Burke; and Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike. This move to a historical perspective is not as contradictory as it might first appear, however. While these writers explore ontological concepts and make their own arguments for the value of rhetorical considerations of being, and while some of their perspectives resemble aspects of the object-oriented rhetoric I outlined in the previous chapter, there are important caveats in terms of both their arguments and the field’s treatment of those arguments. First, the authors I examine in this chapter have had their ontological interests largely ignored by the field, and when those interests have been acknowledged, they are often co-opted into an epistemological narrative. Secondly, while these authors embrace an ontological perspective, their beliefs about human and nonhuman object agency are more anthropocentrically aligned. In other words, while the writers whose work I examine in this chapter do seem to recognize the value of rhetorical scholarship as ontological exploration, they have less interest in developing ontologies that recognize the agency of nonhuman objects as fundamentally similar to human agency. I begin by examining the work of Giambattista Vico, the Italian Enlightenment-era rhetorician. I explore Vico’s reaction against a simple Cartesian worldview and his argument for the inclusion of a kind of distributed nonhuman cognition in his treatment of the imagination. Additionally, I argue that Vico’s views on metaphor align with an object-oriented perspective. Vico demonstrates that the turn toward materiality and ontology in rhetorical considerations is

29

neither unique to the nor to the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Similarly, the relative lack of attention paid to Vico as a figure in rhetorical history may suggest that his work is difficult for rhetoricians to align with purely epistemological perspectives. Moving from Vico, I delve into the work of Kenneth Burke. Beginning with Burke’s “paradox of substance,” I contend that Burke recognizes the limits of a purely epistemological worldview. Additionally, I argue that Burke’s pentad is an ontological structure as much as an epistemological one. Related to the pentad, I examine the idea of “motive” arising from the interaction between (human) “action” and (nonhuman) “motion.” Although Burke’s insistence on a definition of rhetoric that privileges humans as “symbol-using animals” may suggest a stance unfriendly to an object-oriented perspective, quite the opposite is true. In many important ways, Burke presages the emergence of an object-oriented rhetoric. Each of his ideas I treat here paints a picture of a scholar concerned not only with symbolic action, but also with the nature of the real. Finally, I turn to Young, Becker, and Pike’s Rhetoric: Discovery and Change as an example of the power of an object-oriented perspective as a for reading and interacting with the world, in order to move toward productive recognition of the probabilistic and relational nature of rhetorical interaction. In other words, I contend that Young, Becker, and Pike advocate an approach that focuses on discovering probable about both material and conceptual worlds and, using their particle-wave-field heuristic, demonstrate that reality is both scalar and relational. As my brief sampling of rhetorical history will suggest, in many ways, rhetoric has always been interested in materiality and its effects on human agency, as well as in the rhetorical capacity and character of nonhuman objects. Vico, Burke, as well as Young, Becker, and Pike are certainly not the only ones enacting a perspective resembling an object-oriented one. For instance, Debra Hawhee, in “Toward a Bestial Rhetoric,” points to George Kennedy’s interest in the rhetorical activity of nonhuman animals, discussing his 1992 “A Hoot in the Dark.” While Hawhee characterizes Kennedy’s interest in animal rhetoric as “untimely” (82), she argues that while Kennedy may have been too far afield for mainstream rhetoricians in the early 90s, it is important for us to make similar moves: For Kennedy knows well what Kenneth Burke intuited decades prior: that nonhuman animals invite those of us (human ones) interested in questions of

30

rhetoric and communication to suspend the habituated emphasis on verbal language and consciousness. Animals instead offer models of rhetorical behavior and interaction that are physical, even instinctual, but perhaps no less artful. (83) According to Hawhee, Kennedy’s interest in recognizing the rhetorical power of animals was roundly derided: “By the time he visited our campus, Kennedy had no doubt become accustomed to such responses, having been greeted on at least one occasion with a wry ‘Dr. Doolittle, I presume?’” (82). Kennedy may have been treated a bit more uncharitably than others in the field (Hawhee describes Victor Vitanza’s witty incredulity in a response to Kennedy’s article, for instance), but the general shape of this narrative occurs with some frequency prior to the beginning of the nonhuman turn: first, a scholar recognizes and investigates the value and contribution of nonhuman rhetorical agency; next, that scholar makes a strong argument for an ontological focus for rhetoric; finally, the scholar’s work is either taken up apart from that argument (as with Burke, as we shall see later) or treated with confusion and summarily ignored (as with Kennedy’s foray into animal rhetoric).

Approaches: How to Find Intriguing Moments My methodology of historical research is informed by the scholarship of Byron Hawk, Ben McCorkle, and Jason Palmeri, each of whom undertakes similar “reinterpretation” (McCorkle), historical remix (Palmeri), or “counterhistory” (Hawk), and each of whom also recontextualizes previous conversations in light of emerging interests. As Ben McCorkle puts it in his discussion of the influence of technology on rhetorical delivery, “the momentum of this current conversation should compel us to return to other historical moments in the rhetorical tradition … to uncover analogues, patterns, or even exceptions” (xii). The importance of this historical recovery work in the sense of providing additional context and in the sense of providing inventional space for ongoing conversations in the field cannot be emphasized enough. I follow in McCorkle’s footsteps as he describes his book as “not a project of historical recovery, then, of finding lost artifacts and texts that would help chart the terra incognita on the map of rhetorical tradition. Rather, it is a project of reinterpretation, one that considers various historical ‘case studies’” (13). I am similarly interested not merely in unearthing texts, but also in reconsidering how those texts inform and shape the state of object-oriented rhetoric as it develops in the field. The impetus for such a rereading grows out of current scholarship in OOR,

31

which – while extremely useful for informing the scope and direction of this project – often situates itself in the context of technical communication, either explicitly or implicitly (Mara and Hawk; Moore and Richards; Rivers; Spinuzzi; Swartz; Weber). Additionally, these technical communication scholars tend to figure this attention to nonhuman objects as something new rather than a persistent undercurrent in rhetorical history. I choose, then, to direct my attention toward authors outside the sphere of technical communication in order to make a stronger case for OOR to the broader field. Like McCorkle, Jason Palmeri is interested in the history of media technologies. Although Palmeri is also interested in reading historical moments and the technologies that characterize them as movements in their own right, with their own contexts, constraints, and affordances, he is primarily invested in the generative utility of re-seeing past work. For instance, Palmeri returns to the process movement of the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that its influence is still an important part of writing pedagogy: “After all, many of the core practices of writing teachers … continue to reveal the enduring influence of the process theories developed in the 1970s and early 1980s” (25). Recognizing the power of these theories, he argues for the importance of reconsidering their integration in the current moment: “Thus, as we begin to redefine the landscape of composition to incorporate digital multimodal production, it makes sense to return to these key theories to see how they might inform this shift” (25). I return to Young, Becker, and Pike, Burke, and Vico for similar purposes – each is an influential contributor to the history of rhetoric, but given the emergence of object-oriented rhetoric within the field’s cultural consciousness, it makes sense for us to revisit these theorists to see how they might inform current theoretical positions. Palmeri also encourages those of us who engage in historical scholarship to be generous, inventive readers, and it is this advice that I attempt to follow here. As Palmeri puts it, we too often tend to focus on critiquing and categorizing. … Although this kind of critical mapping can productively cause us to question our basic assumptions about writing pedagogy, it can also limit our ability to make reflective and inventive use of the vast historical resources – the articles, the textbooks, the monographs, the workshop reports – lying in our dusty archives. (12-13)

32

I am interested in, as Palmeri puts it, uncovering “an intriguing moment” (13) in the work of the scholars I address here – moments that resonate with or gesture toward an object-oriented perspective. Byron Hawk shares Palmeri’s interests in recovering historical moments for current use in the field. Hawk, in A Counter-History of Composition, focuses less on reframing those previous moments within their own contexts as much as on making use of their ideas currently – in other words, Hawk challenges prior readings as he makes a new case. Although my rereading is neither as extended nor as thorough as Hawk’s, his resituating and questioning of vitalism’s treatment in the history of composition and rhetoric has much bearing on this chapter. That is, Hawk begins with the sense that one must take a stance directly counter to the dominant historical reading in order to make change to it. As he suggests, "Once a way of thinking becomes so ingrained that no one bothers to question it, the most effective way to make it show up is to attempt the opposite argument that no one would even consider investigating" (10). My purposes here align with Hawk’s in that, by reading oppositionally in terms of the field’s general perspective, I am attempting to uncover prior moments of complexity that have been relegated to more convenient narratives. However, I am not attempting to recover a maligned and misrepresented perspective as such; rather, I am interested in making a case for an object- oriented rhetoric lurking where it might not have been seen before. Like Hawk, I am interested in arguing for “a new category or paradigm” (6) that rhetoricians can use to re-examine the previous work of the field; I am similarly interested in reimagining the work of Burke, Vico, and Young, Becker and Pike in ways that transform their reception by the field and provide a method by which they can be considered more productively in contemporary moments. In sum, then, I hope to use the historical examination performed in this chapter to subtly shift attitudes toward the scholars I treat, to recontextualize them within the context of contemporary discussions, and to read them generously with an eye toward uncovering exciting and surprising moments that point toward a more capacious understanding of rhetorical action – one that includes or, at least, gestures toward the nonhuman. I begin with Giambattista Vico.

Giambattista Vico: Imagination as an Object Vico’s treatment in rhetoric is ambivalent. Although included in The Rhetorical Tradition, he has received little attention from rhetoric and composition scholars. A few

33

noteworthy exceptions exist – Catherine Hobbs’s Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity, for instance. For her part, Hobbs focuses mostly on Vico’s study of the of language, his pedagogical inclinations, and his emphasis on public speaking; while I am also intrigued by these ideas, I am mostly interested in their application to Vico’s proto-object-oriented thinking. Apart from Hobbs’s treatment of Vico as a basis for reconsidering twentieth century rhetoric, for the most part, Vico seems to have been treated as a historical curiosity. His visceral reaction against Descartes’ cogito ergo sum construction has been discussed in rhetorical scholarship (D’Angelo; Gardner; Golden), but with much more attention in philosophy (Carravetta; Goetsch; Verene). In general, philosophy has seemed significantly more interested in Vico, especially in terms of his approach to hermeneutics. Even though rhetoricians have paid less attention to him, Vico’s contributions to an object-oriented rhetoric are significant. Specifically, Vico’s concept of the imagination, his anti- Cartesian stance, and his treatment of metaphor are worthy of investigation. Each of these perspectives marks Vico as a writer interested in exploring approaches that generate knowledge from what Donald Verene calls “recollective universals,” as opposed to formal, logical, or rational philosophy based in mathematical, scientific reasoning. In other words, Vico’s viewpoint is one that appreciates the and uncertainty of reality rather than placing his faith in an emerging of thought. In contrast to Vico’s beliefs, Cartesian thinking holds that humans can arrive at through applying reasoning processes to rational thinking; Descartes preferred “mathematical certainty as opposed to syllogistic ” (Golden 151). Cartesian philosophy was based on the notion that mental faculties alone could be used to “determine truth and discipline the imagination” (151) and that minds were superior to matter in that they could “regulate the senses” (152) and thereby arrive at certainty (although, notably, by reducing all problems to epistemological problems). In his Ancient Wisdom, Vico treats Descartes and his rational scientific approach directly; rather than accepting “I think therefore I am” as a given, Vico instead calls into question the difference between certainty and knowledge: Yet the skeptic does not doubt that he thinks. On the contrary, he professes that what he seems to himself to see is certain … But he contends that the certainty that he thinks is consciousness (conscientia), not knowledge (scientia) … For to know is to grasp the genus or the form by which a thing is made, but

34

consciousness is of those things whose genus or form we cannot demonstrate. (Ancient Wisdom 54-55) In other words, Vico rejects Cartesian on the basis that there is a difference between self-knowledge and self-consciousness; the Cartesian is aware that he thinks but not aware of the cause of this thinking. As Vico puts it, “although the skeptic is conscious that he thinks, he nevertheless is not conscious of the causes of thought or of how thought originates” (55). That is, the object of subjectivity and consciousness cannot be directly studied; it can only be surmised. In this way, Vico’s outlook aligns more closely with an object-oriented one – Vico disavows a positivistic approach to consciousness in favor of one that recognizes that its complexity cannot be approached through simple rationalism. Vico refuses to reduce consciousness to its component parts, recognizing instead that consciousness is an object separate from subjectivity. Essentially, Vico embraces a reality that defies rational categorization. In contrast to a Cartesian viewpoint, which argues that the mind exists on a plane separate from the body and understands the world through arrival at metaphysical truth, Vico sees the Cartesian detachment from sensory experience as damaging: “the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses … by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our abound in … it is beyond our power to form the cast image of this mistress called ‘Sympathetic Nature.’ Men shape the phrase with their lips but have nothing in their minds” (New Science §378). For Vico, the reliance on rationalist language and abstract, theoretical notions, as opposed to the cultivation of imagination, is the force that separates human minds from the outside world (and from their own bodies). The “civilized mind” reduces our ability to understand reality by creating new barriers between our senses and our worlds. Vico’s reliance on sensory input and lived experience over rational thought marks another object-oriented move in his work; Vico recognizes the importance of dealing with reality on its own ontological terms, rather than reducing all reality to the epistemological. Vico also links embodied experience to the imagination, arguing that humans must embrace both affective and sensory imaginative experience in order to make sense of the world: “...the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun with a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination” (§375). Noteworthy in this passage is Vico’s emphasis on the imagination – for Vico, the

35

imagination is the only faculty that allows human minds to reach outside themselves in any true sense. This “vigorous imagination” contains and creates individual objects; that is, the imagination is an agent of its own that does creative work outside (and sometimes alongside) a human subject. As Vico scholar James Goetsch puts it, Vico believes it is only through imagination that “we can contact the unfamiliar and make it our own; it is the only route of escape from the of conceit which constricts reality to our image” (41). Importantly, Vico argues that imagination is the initial gateway to human creation – the work of creation is accomplished first through imagination, then through demonstration (Verene 38). Rather than seeing imagination as yoked to the subject, Vico sees it as an agent of inspiration, one that can eventually communicate with a critical human actor in order to produce knowledge and experience. This knowledge and experience can never be directly accessed – rather, the products of the imagination are only intelligible through metaphoric relation. As Vico argues in The New Science, metaphor is the master trope through which all experience functions, and this sense of metaphor creates a fuller experience of reality: The most luminous and therefore the most necessary and frequent [trope] is metaphor. It is most praised when it gives sense and passion to insensate things, in accordance with the metaphysics above discussed … as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them; and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (§405) In Vico’s philosophy, metaphor exists as a necessary tool for unintelligibility rather than intelligibility. Metaphor renders the world strange and inaccessible, or rather highlights the always-already inaccessible nature of reality. Reacting against Cartesian thinking that figures the world as ready for the approach of a rational mind, Vico instead turns to the productive capacity of imagination and argues for a an approach to reality that sees things as actively moving but out of reach, rather than the Cartesian sense of passively waiting for human interaction.

36

In other words, Vico’s thinking aligns with Bogost’s articulation of metaphorism’s productive capacity for alien phenomenology. Like Vico, Bogost argues that reality can only be approached through metaphor: “Unlike objective phenomenology, alien phenomenology accepts that the subjective character of experiences cannot be fully recuperated objectively. In a literal sense, the only way to perform alien phenomenology is by analogy” (64, emphasis in original). Metaphorism (of the kind both Vico and Bogost champion) asks us to accept the fundamental separation between the rest of reality and our own subjectivity, but also asks us to invite that reality to come as close as it can through our reaching out with an imperfectly shared experience. We can begin to identify with a thing, but will always be conscious of our fundamental difference from it. As Vico says, we can only “become [things] by transforming [ourselves] into them” in the sense that we imagine some shared unit of experience. Growing from his interest in the imagination as a gateway to a larger reality, Vico believes in an interdisciplinary and networked approach to education in order to nurture the imagination. In his work “On the Study of the Methods of Our Time,” Vico articulates a holistic philosophical perspective on education, one that argues for a return to holistic (and humanistic) education alongside a Cartesian educational system. For Vico, then-modern educational systems succeed in compartmentalizing knowledge but lack sufficient perspective to allow students to think on, essentially, the level of systems and networks. To emphasize his point, Vico argues for an educational and philosophical system that upends the notion of beginning with instruction in reason and method first. Instead, according to Carravetta’s summary, Vico begins with lived experience: “Humans first know by actually having done or made a given … In brief, humans listen to experience as if itself a living being, as a living process, which means we begin at the bottom” (246). This emphasis on creating in order to understand signals another moment of object- orientation in Vico. For Bogost, the idea of “carpentry” is an important part of an object-oriented project. Bogost argues that “philosophy is a practice as much as a theory. Like mechanics, philosophers ought to get their hands dirty” (92). This sense of carpentry is one in which a philosopher creates something – anything – that is “constructed as a theory, or an experiment, or a question – one that can be operated” (100). Vico’s sense of making seems strikingly similar; we make things in order to understand how they might affect both their external realities and the internal experience of humans. In other words, Vico sees reality as a complex and shifting

37

network of relations, one that can only be understood through the sensory exploration of creations and through metaphoric imagination. Vico’s emphasis on “making” has implications for our scholarly practice, and especially in our roles as teachers of rhetoric and writing. As teachers, we can encourage our students to explore their worlds not only through analysis, but also by equipping them to create projects that demand interaction in order to reveal their arguments – projects that can only be understood through experience and operation. (I explore these ideas more fully in chapter five.) In sum, then, Vico embraces a reality that is contingent, shifting, and reliant on objects outside human consciousness; these objects are not only a part of how human minds apprehend reality, but are the only way for that process to occur. Rather than beginning with consciousness, Vico begins with the imagination as a not-fully-human force that bridges the gap between subjectivity and other objects. In other words, while Vico does not go as far as to explicitly admit nonhuman objects as agents, he recognizes the importance of an ontological perspective that precedes an epistemological one. For object-oriented rhetoric, this first step toward an object- oriented perspective is an important one. While the Cartesians ultimately won the day, for those interested in OOR, Vico presents a valuable resource; by tracing his influence (and the influence of those like him), it may be possible to uncover even more nascent object-oriented perspectives in rhetoric that predate the twentieth century and that lie outside our relatively short disciplinary history in the United States.

Kenneth Burke: Motive as Withdrawn Object Attempting to provide any comprehensive treatment of Kenneth Burke’s scholarship or influence in rhetoric and composition is, frankly, a fool’s errand, especially in a space as limited as this chapter (or, indeed, the whole of this project). Burke is a monumental figure in the history of rhetoric: a society holds conferences solely to discuss and apply his work; his terminology is a commonplace in rhetorical criticism and theory; his work’s complexity and breadth are staggering. As Samuel B. Southwell puts it in the opening lines of Kenneth Burke and Martin Heidegger, Most of what has occurred in the explosive development of critical theory in recent decades has been anticipated and often quite fully developed in the work of one man, Kenneth Burke. A revised Marxism, a revised Freudianism,

38

hermeneutics, structuralism, semiotics, reader-response theory, theory of ritual, speech-act theory, even a kind of deconstructionism, and much else that is called postmodernism – it is all to be found in Burke, however improbable such an accomplishment may seem. (1) And yet I find myself in the unenviable position of arguing for Burke as none of the things Southwell lists – instead, I argue that Kenneth Burke was at least in part an object-oriented rhetorician. Nevertheless, this claim is not as outlandish as it might initially seem. According to Bernard L. Brock, Burke’s scholarship is already performing ontological work. Brock claims, “During his over seventy years of scholarly writing … Burke’s focus has gradually shifted from epistemology toward ontology.” Even his earlier work was oriented ontologically: “Specifically, while Burke’s early writing developed an epistemology, it simultaneously reflected an ontology” (309). Rather than seeing Burke’s scholarship as binary, with human symbol usage on the one hand and external reality on the other, Brock believes that Burke’s philosophy evolved to encompass a unified ontology: “... Burke’s philosophy has changed from an earlier dualistic emphasis in which human symbol using is distinct from but a response to an external reality, to a more unified system in which the human process of symbol using integrates, shapes, and controls both external and internal realities simultaneously” (310). In other words, Burke’s emphasis shifted from seeing symbolic action as a separate sphere, separated from the material world, to a perspective that acknowledged the interactivity and interrelation of discursive and non-discursive action within the same reality. Before I travel too far down the rabbit hole of Burke’s scholarship (and the scholarship about his scholarship), I want to point out the three things I am most interested in exploring in his work, at least in terms of this chapter. I am primarily invested in Burke’s concept of the “paradox of substance,” his discussion of dramatism and the nonhuman in the pentad, and his work in defining motive through concepts of “action” and “motion.” Of course, each of these ideas is related – then again, what work of Burke’s isn’t? – and some discussion will necessarily overlap as a result. While Brock and a few others (Bertelson; Biesecker; Crusius) argue for Burke as an ontologist – to varying degrees – perhaps the most salient perspective on Burke’s ontological character is his own. In A Grammar of Motives, Burke remarks that any symbolic action can be seen “ontologically, or in terms of being … in terms of permanent principles that underlie the

39

process of becoming” (73). Furthermore, in the same text, he argues, “The transformations which we here study as a Grammar are not ‘illusions,’ but citable realities. The structural relations involved are observable realities” (57). For Burke, then, symbolic actions are not merely representative of reality; they are part of reality – they have a character and quality of their own. Similar to an object-oriented perspective’s insistence on the equal realness of all objects, Burke insists on the reality of the symbolic. Breaking from a truly flat ontology, however, Burke also argues that the symbolic and the material are irreducible to each other: The Self, like its corresponding Culture, thus has two sources of reference for its symbolic identity: its nature as a physiological organism, and its nature as a symbol-using animal responsive to the potentialities of symbolicity that have a nature of their own not reducible to a sheerly physiological dimension. (“(Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action”, 815) In other words, for Burke there is a non-dialectical relationship between the symbolic and the physical. Subjectivity is comprised of and informed by two distinct sources – the physiological dimension and the mental/social/cultural dimension. A traditional reading of these two sources would then recognize a simple body/mind split in Burke, but it is important to recognize that these two sources are non-hierarchical and interanimated in Burke’s view; they are not reducible to each other but are simultaneously reliant on each other. That is, the fact that the potentialities for symbols have “a nature of their own” means – for an object-oriented perspective – that they act on their own. While Burke doesn’t explicitly note that each of these dimensions acts without the other (in the sense of each having individual agency), he does gesture toward a sense of self and culture that accounts for materiality alongside (and not beneath) human mental activity. Burke seems to be moving toward a sense of subjectivity’s essence being expressed through both material and mental action, and simultaneously exceeding either container. Indeed, Burke’s Grammar of Motives also appears to recognize a form of withdrawn essence – the notion that manifestations of objects in the world belie their fundamentally complex . While discussing what he calls the “paradox of substance,” Burke examines the of the word “substance,” arguing that it is “something that stands beneath or supports the person or thing” (22). However, Burke recognizes that we can only ever interact with the exterior or presentation of things – not their essence, which “substance” would suggest. Burke sees an “inevitable paradox of definition, an antinomy that must endow the concept of substance

40

with unresolvable ambiguity” (24). In other words, substance is “subsistence, reality, real being (as applied to mere appearance), nature, essence”; on the other hand, we can only surmise substance through negation, “a word designating something that a thing is not. That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it” (66). Burke attempts to overcome this paradox of substance by recognizing the limit of human experience and relying on our own faculties of negation. Specifically, he argues that “To tell what a thing is, you place it in terms of something else” (24). Burke makes distinctions between various kinds of definitional strategies (contextual, familial, etc.), but each carries the force of metaphor, with the human agent dealing with the separation between the substance of the thing itself and the presentation of that substance in a local manifestation. In other words, Burke seems to recognize the fundamental division between the presentation of an object and the interior or essence (“substance”) of an object – an idea that authors such as Graham Harman and Levi Bryant put forward as one of the fundamental components of an object-oriented perspective.6 While Burke may not resolve the paradox in a strict metaphysical sense, his definition of the paradox of substance emphasizes the inability of human agents to step outside their own perceptions. Burke is interested in the symbolic, of course, but the symbolic takes on its own character and exists apart from humans. Even in Burke’s definition of man, he points to humans as “separated from [our] natural condition by instruments of [our] own making” (Language as Symbolic Action 13). While the nature of symbols being “of [our] own making” is a thorny issue at best, the sense that humans are fundamentally separate from reality because of the nature of our sensory experiences and subjectivity is a perspective that aligns with OOR. Importantly, Burke’s insistence that the symbolic is real – not representational – gives it an existence separate from human experience. Burke’s symbol-using animal is not, after all, a symbol himself, nor are any other non-symbolic things. In other words, keeping with the theme

6 In fact, Levi Bryant explicitly makes reference to Burke’s “paradox of substance” in Democracy of Objects. Bryant recognizes the “paradox” and moves to resolve it (as he suggests Burke can’t), by arguing that an ontological perspective of substance allows the essence of an object to express different qualities in different contexts, but an epistemological perspective - one wherein “the standpoint of what is given in experience” is paramount - recognizes but cannot overcome the paradox. My reading here builds upon Bryant’s, although I suggest that Burke’s supposed inability to overcome the paradox is based in his investment in humans rather than in a basic reliance upon epistemology. 41

of humans negotiating the world through negation and metaphor, “all words for the non-verbal must by the very nature of the case discuss the realm of the non-verbal in terms of what it is not” (Rhetoric of Religion 18) – that is, the word for a thing is not the thing itself. So for Burke rhetoric is, according to Bertelsen, fundamentally translative, and rhetoric’s function is “to express the ineffable in terms of something which it is not. At the same time, the language we employ alters and limits the possible interpretations of events available to us – we understand events in a way that obscures their essence” (237). Human experience is withdrawn, and human experience with language is similarly withdrawn. That is, the fact that humans employ language in order to understand reality means that we draw the non-symbolic into a symbolic realm, and in so doing limit the expression of objects. Similarly, our specific choices of words to describe and define events create new objects, and those objects are no longer the objects in question – remembering that symbols are not representations but are realities of their own. For Burke, the process of symbol use creates a new strata of reality (one that is equally real, but not the same as, the nonsymbolic), and that new strata in some ways effaces material reality. Even given this, however, Burke recognizes the importance (and immanence) of materiality and nonhuman motion. For instance, in his discussion of the pentad, Burke admits the importance of a nonhuman reality separate from the symbolic: “Do shooting ‘move’ or ‘act’? The theory of suggests that even though we might, when asked, say that they simply ‘move,’ we attribute action to them when we empathetically move with them in our imagination” (Grammar 233- 234). Like Vico, Burke recognizes the work of the imagination as a third space, one wherein the nonhuman elements of the “scene” are drawn into relationship with the human “act” – and he highlights this sense of human intentionality being constrained by materiality when he says that “the scene contains the act” (3). That is, the scene implies the existence of particular human intentionality; it creates and constrains that intentionality in a network of human and nonhuman things. Burke suggests this containment is ambiguous, and through the course of elucidating the drama, the scene articulates the action: “One could not deduce the details of the action from the details of the setting, but one could deduce the quality of the action from the quality of the setting” (7). In other words, there is a constitutive relationship between the nonhuman “setting” and the human “act” that throws each into relief of the other.

42

Burke recognizes that individual humans are part of this network in both the sense of their being individual actors and in the sense of their being material bodies – in fact, Burke recognizes other human agents as potentially belonging to the scene, insofar as they help to create and constrain others’ action: “For the characters, by being in interaction, could be treated as scenic conditions or ‘environment,’ of one another; and any act could be treated as part of the context that modified (hence, to a degree motivates) the subsequent acts” (7). In other words, Burke moves humans between “act” and “scene” within the pentad, arguing that intentionality is ultimately a matter of perspective: “No instrument can record or gauge anything in the realm of action (‘ideas’), except insofar as the subject-matter can be reduced to the realm of motion” (234-235). Because ideas or “action” can only be perceived through their manifestations of material objects in “motion,” the scene-act ratio is one constantly in negotiation between human intentionality and networked materiality; rather than seeing this as evidence of a mind/body split with mind as the stronger term, we can instead see human action as dependent on and in a constitutive relationship with the nonhuman. Burke’s emphasis on the interrelationship between action and motion aligns with OOR (and ANT’s) ideas of remaking reality constantly through re-enacting networked relations. Early in Grammar of Motives, Burke outlines the concept of “action” as distinct from and opposed to “motion.” For Burke, “action” is constitutive of human experience – humans act; things move. It is admittedly tempting to simply map “action” to “agency” – in which case Burke’s perspective here is not compatible with an object-oriented one, which admits all objects into agency. Indeed, for Burke, “action” carries “connotations of consciousness or purpose” (14). However, this relationship is not quite as straightforward as it might seem. According to Barbara Biesecker, ...for Burke human acts as such are nonsimples. That is to say, human actions are not pure in the sense that their identity is an effect of the absolute displacement or overcoming of motion. To the contrary, human acts are composites whose congealed form is the outcome of the finessing of or subtle negotiation with both an irreducible action or “purpose” component and an irreducible motion component. (27) Essentially, agency is constrained by material things and vice versa; there is a relational (but not dialectical) quality at work where subjectivity is always mediated through symbolic action and

43

non-discursive motion. Once again, we see that for Burke the nonsymbolic (the “motion” component) is both equally real and is also exerting force on human subjectivity. While Burke does not explicitly admit the body (the physical constraint) into the realm of agency, he does note its real effect on the networked effects of a human subject’s agency. Rather than seeing the relationship between motion and action as a dialectical one, the relationship “is one of pure difference” according to Biesecker (28). That is, the subject is withdrawn from and engaged in a process of ontological and material negotiation – what Biesecker calls “finesse” – with his or her own body. Rather than a simple relationship between a willful mind and a passive body, Burke instead implicitly recognizes that motive is an emergent object that arises from the interaction between “human” (in the sense of human subjectivity) and “nonhuman” (in the sense of something apart from the mind – in this case, the body). This sense of motive as a relational and emergent quality is one of the clearest examples of Burke’s nascent object-orientation. Because the pentad is a tool we can use to describe and understand motive (in the sense that it is dramatistic, and drama for Burke is a way to interrogate motive), we can thereby read this kind of relationality into each element and ratio of the pentad. Burke seems to believe that human action is both negotiated and translative across boundaries of pure difference – in other words, since “motive” effaces itself (as it is an essence of a relational quality), we can read Burke as at least tacitly recognizing the distributed nature of agency, if not fully admitting nonhuman agency. That is, Burke might be open to an account of motive that recognizes the motivational character of nonhuman actors, because motive renders itself invisible through its execution and connects two irreducible, real but unlike structures. Levi Bryant calls this notion of an object’s contingent expression a “local manifestation” – a metaphoric understanding and relation between a withdrawn interior of an object (the actor) and its apprehensible qualities (the in-the-mess “motion”). Admittedly, Burke himself (with his emphasis on specifically human action) might have some pause before making this leap; however, an object-oriented deployment of the pentad is both possible and generative. For example, imagine a virus – in this case, our actor – moving through a bloodstream. Remember that unlike Burke’s pentad, an object-oriented pentad would allow for the possibility that nonhuman objects contain the capacity to act, not merely move. In the case of this deployment of the pentad, we anthropomorphize the virus and metaphorically relate it to our own understanding of communication; we imagine that its chemical signals are analogous to our own

44

writing, speech, or gestures. Through this metaphor, we can examine a virus as a rhetor, and can apply models of rhetorical analysis to its communication. The act of the pentad, in this example, is the virus infecting a cell. The scene is the bloodstream, inside a body, inside a larger environment. The various agents involved in this communicative drama include the virus, other virii competing to infect this particular cell, the cell itself, other cells in the bloodstream, and any other objects in the bloodstream (antibodies, for instance). Under the category of agency, we find the mechanisms of action for each of the involved agents – the interaction between the virus and the cell wall; the signals sent into the environment by the cell; the replication of viral DNA in the cell; etc. Finally, the purpose is reproduction of the virus. Viewing this interaction through a rhetorical heuristic, we can see the negotiated, contextual, and contingent nature of each ratio of the pentad. Investigating the act-scene ratio, for instance, would prompt questions about how the virus is able to effectively navigate the environment and what hazards it might hold. The virus sends a complex series of messages to the surrounding environment in order to mask its own presence, and likewise to the cell in order to overwrite the DNA in its nucleus. Effaced in this process is motive – that is, we’re not able to actually understand the experience of the virus, and can only guess at how (or whether) it might perceive its communication. Certainly, we need not leave our scientific instruments behind, and virology can tell us much about the drama unfolding around this cell. However, what it cannot tell us is what the virus’s experience might be like. An object-oriented reading of the pentad can begin to approach that experience, figuring these interactions as rhetorical interactions, and explicating them in an intelligible (if strange) way for a human audience. Relying on science can provide us with more evidence to begin to construct a thoroughly rhetorical drama, and relying on Burke’s dramatism can render withdrawn experience through discourse in a way that we can begin to reach for (if never fully grasp). Essentially, when viewed through the pentad, what seems to be a simple mechanical interaction (from a scientific perspective) is instead shown to be a process of negotiation, conflict, and drama. In this way, the pentad can be used to reach toward discovery and understanding among and between nonhumans as easily as it can be used to trace activity in humans. While Burke may not have seen the pentad as an opportunity to study and trace the associations of nonhuman objects in rhetorical terms, it may prove to be a valuable tool to do so.

45

Young, Becker, and Pike: Multivalent, Recursive Objects7 Published in 1970, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change purports to be a rhetorical handbook. In fact, the book seems to be a much more complex and comprehensive affair; it offers what amounts to a holistic theory of rhetoric. As the preface of the text relates, “Pike suggested that one particular linguistic theory, tagmemics, could make a much more extensive and fundamental contribution by supplying the theoretical principles and problem-solving procedures necessary for a distinctly new approach to rhetoric” (xi). Young, Becker, and Pike explicitly apply this “new approach” to the whole of the educational enterprise, arguing that their text is a transformative one for its reader: “The aim [of this book], rather, is to teach the student to solve and see, and share what he has seen” (xii). Expecting one text to accomplish so much might seem hubristic, but the authors do their best to create formalized but widely adaptable heuristics, ostensibly useful in many areas of life (that is, not merely in composition classrooms). What is of interest about these heuristics is their emphasis on the “thingness” of composition – especially the widely-cited particle/wave/field heuristic. The heuristic itself is based in uncovering and analyzing probability, but it has a strong ontological character. Through their heuristic, Young, Becker, and Pike position rhetoric as serving both epistemological and ontological functions. Rather than a happy accident, however, this move seems to have been deliberate; in other words, the authors went out of their way to include the material, probable, and relational nature of nonhuman objects in their work. Citing “discovery” of things as the primary focus of rhetorical work, Young, Becker, and Pike point to Augustine: The most succinct summary of our concept of rhetoric is the one St. Augustine made of his own rhetoric over 1500 years ago. ‘There are two things necessary…a way of discovering those things which are to be understood, and a way of teaching what we have learned.’ Despite significant differences between our concept of rhetoric and Augustine’s, we share his views that the process of discovering knowledge must be yoked to the process of communicating it and that, of the two, the first demands greater attention. (xiv)

7 Portions of this section are adapted from Rutherford and Palmeri, “‘The Things They Left Behind’: Toward an Object-Oriented History of Composition” in Rhetoric through Everyday Things, forthcoming from Alabama UP. 46

Rather than seeing rhetoric as a process based primarily in the communication of discovered , Young, Becker, and Pike contend that discovering knowledge about reality is ultimately what rhetoric is (or should be) about. This notion is surprisingly ontological: the authors essentially argue that rhetoric is constitutive, or at least investigative, rather than representational. While it is possible to read this moment as anthropocentric, the important point is that the authors gesture toward rhetoric’s primary function as ontological, and its secondary function as epistemological. As part of this argument to refocus rhetoric toward discovery, Young, Becker and Pike turn toward the particle/wave/field heuristic as an attempt to reconcile humanistic and scientific ways of apprehending objects. They describe the heuristic this way: “a unit of experience can be viewed as a particle, as a wave, or as a field. That is, the writer can choose to view any element of his experience as if it were static, or as if it were dynamic, or as if it were a network of relationships or part of a larger network” (122). The heuristic itself hinges on the notion that lived experience, material things, and conceptual objects can all be reduced to fundamentally similar components; the collection of objects they mention as possible nodes of includes both traditionally rhetorical things (sentences, readers, democracy), but it also includes things traditionally outside the scope of rhetorical discovery (houses, trees). In other words, Young, Becker, and Pike outline a flat ontology as the basis for their approach to rhetoric, using the notion of a “unit of experience” as their . The “unit of experience” is strikingly similar to the notion of an “object” in OOO; for Young, Becker and Pike, a unit might be a book, a pen, a house, a human reader, a sentence, or an abstract concept such as democracy (137). Young, Becker, and Pike’s argument hinges on the scientific necessity for heuristic procedure, and they attempt to apply the same to rhetorical discovery as is in place in scientific discovery. Supporting their interpretation of rhetoric as an art that is first and foremost about inquiry, they argue that “although the today employ a well developed heuristic procedure, the scientific method, rhetoric seldom makes use of one. The art of inquiry in rhetoric has declined; the need for it, however, has not” (120). By “the art of inquiry,” Young, Becker, and Pike seem to mean discovery of what is rather than necessarily how we know it. By relying on and suggesting commonality with a scientific method, it appears as though Young, Becker, and Pike see rhetoric as primarily an ontological process.

47

In fact, the first foray that Young, Becker, and Pike make into using their heuristic is with material objects rather than writing tasks or concepts – a house and an oak tree, specifically. An oak tree is reducible to component objects – “each part is composed of subsystems (which again are not discernible and constitute unknowns)”; however, it can also be seen as a dynamic wave changing over time – “It is now old, nearly leafless, with one broken limb and numerous scars where others have fallen off”; finally, the tree is apprehensible as a field when seen as one agent interacting in a broader ecological network – “A system in itself, it fills a place in a larger system, a niche in the ecology of the area” (128-129). This explication of the heuristic in material terms is reminiscent of an object-oriented perspective, but perhaps more interesting is the fact that the heuristic itself resembles the notion of scalar ontology present in Bryant and Harman’s OOO work. While Young, Becker, and Pike understand the tree as a singular unit, they also express its reality at different levels of scale – the tree is a singular object composed of particles, each singular objects in their own right, and it is likewise part of a larger singular object (its networked ecology). This perspective acknowledges its own limitations; it recognizes the interrelatedness of each object studied, arguing for rhetoricians to embrace complexity but to also be aware of the partial nature of their perspectives: The perspectives in the chart supplement each other; each reveals a partial truth about the unit being investigated. Approaching a unit from different perspectives gives us some assurance that we are thinking well, that we have not overlooked important data. Finally, notice that the procedure is infinitely recursive. Any feature of the tree (one of its components, a system of which it is part, a particular stage in its development and so on) can itself be a new unit of investigation. (130) Through their arguments about the recursive nature of objects, Young, Becker, and Pike not only align themselves with an object-oriented perspective, but also express that perspective explicitly to the readers of their text. Through this work, they position rhetoric as a method by which its practitioners can examine the relationships between and among objects of all types; the heuristic both generates connections (by encouraging users to step back and examine how objects interact as one part of a larger field) and encourages focused attention (by allowing users to narrow the scope of their investigation to smaller and smaller component objects). This for discovery, as Byron Hawk notes, encourages students of rhetoric to recognize and account for complex relations (38). As Hawk also points out, however, the

48

heuristic can also efface complexity in some important ways – Hawk describes the process as “too rigid” and argues that the authors’ focus on creating a method that is both easily taught and scientistic ultimately results in undue attention to the role of perception, figuring humans as the center of a universe that awaits their approach and investigation. For example, in another explication of the heuristic, Young, Becker, and Pike describe Pike’s house. Their description leads the reader to imagine the house as a static and reactive object, waiting for (and perhaps desperate for) some kind of human interaction rather than an object acting without human intervention. In this way, Young, Becker, and Pike’s heuristic fails to achieve its potential from an object-oriented perspective; they even go so far as to claim that “a unit without some formulation of it in a mind” (122) is nonsensical. (“A mind” here is undoubtedly a human mind.) Nevertheless, the particle/wave/field heuristic still allows for a certain freedom and can be applied in other ways than the ones Young, Becker, and Pike intended. For instance, the heuristic could be applied from the points of view of nonhuman objects (with some metaphorical work, of course). Rather than asking how a tree is figured in our mind, productive questions could be framed from its vantage point. How does the tree sense the world? How does it consider and/or react to the various systems it helps constitute? How does its existence vary over time, from its perspective? The attempt to understand this alien perspective reinvigorates the particle/wave/field heuristic with a distinctly object-oriented character, and can further be deepened with the addition of object-object relations – for instance, how might a bird see the tree instead? Ultimately, the heuristic could function as a way to encourage rhetoricians (and our students) to recognize ontological complexity with more nuance. Of course, rather than merely using the heuristic to examine nonhuman objects, Young, Becker, and Pike are also interested in human action, specifically human discursive action. In particular, they are interested in refiguring an approach to audience in a proto object oriented way: A reader, like an oak tree or a house, has contrastive features that separate him from other people, features that identify him. He also varies over time … By encouraging the writer to note a number of the reader’s contrastive features, to observe the way he actually changes over a period of time, and to examine the various contexts in which he acts and is acted upon, the heuristic procedure tends to correct the writer’s . (179)

49

Aligning themselves again with an object-oriented perspective, Young, Becker, and Pike argue that (human) agents are not singular subjects; rather, they are comprised of a multitude of shifting and complex features. This concept (i.e., a complex understanding of audience) is hardly unknown in rhetoric and composition, but the degree to which the flat ontology outlined by the heuristic works even in reference to humans is interesting regardless. Although the authors are primarily interested in moving beyond one-dimensional understandings of audience in composition, the consequences of their heuristic are profound: they argue that “change between units can occur only over a bridge of shared features” (172). Through an explication of Rogerian rhetoric, Young, Becker, and Pike encourage their readers to attempt to understand objects (human and nonhuman alike) on their own terms, reciprocally: “the characteristics of an actual bridge over a river can give us insights into a rhetorical bridge. We can travel over an actual bridge in two directions; because traffic seldom moves in one direction only, changes may occur at either end of the bridge” (177). In this case, Young, Becker, and Pike see rhetoric as an art that is primarily about the formation of reciprocal relationships. They argue, “Shared features, then, are prerequisites for interaction and change” (172) and suggest that creating and utilizing appropriate “bridges” is the basis of that interaction. In other words, an attempt to understand something that is by default unlike the rhetor is necessary for any meaningful rhetorical action. Recognizing both the difference and interactivity of objects (admittedly, human objects by and large) acknowledges the complex nature of object interaction, and furthermore recognizes the difficulties in creating identification between unlike things. Most importantly, however, interactivity in this metaphor is figured as a co-constructive process, whereby some new relationship (itself an object) emerges from the complex interaction of other objects. If we put this idea into practice when teaching the concept of audience, we would highlight the reciprocal nature of rhetorical interaction – perhaps first focusing on the kind of change that occurs within human communication, but then pushing students to consider how they address themselves to varied nonhuman audiences (for instance, how they approach and interact with voting machines, and how they engage with democracy itself), asking how they and their writing change and are changed. Such an activity would focus on what “shared features” allow for rhetoric to happen, and what differing features impede it. Ultimately, while Young, Becker, and Pike make strides toward a rhetoric that accounts for and values nonhuman objects, they still figure rhetoric as an art that exists within humans and

50

that is solely practiced by humans. However, the heuristic and they use can provide an important starting point for an object-oriented rhetoric that considers human and nonhuman interaction alike. In an object-oriented deployment of the particle/wave/field heuristic, we might ask students to begin in the upper-left cell (contrast-particle) and, as they move down and across the heuristic, to attempt to track the objects that emerge. As the heuristic leads to more and more complexity, more and more interconnected objects will emerge. Rather than reducing the work of the heuristic as Young, Becker, and Pike suggest – as a way to “prepare the mind for the discovery of hypotheses that may solve a problem” (130) – we can encourage students to see the objects that emerge as co-constructive and active in the rhetorical process. That is, we can encourage them to dwell in a more complex perspective that values differing (human and nonhuman) viewpoints and recognizes the emergence of new objects from complex networks of interaction.

Conclusions: Searching for Objects As part of the work of moving outside digital spaces, in this chapter I have attempted to recover some of this ontological focus in the work of a few foundational rhetoricians. I am interested not merely in pointing to a group of fellow-travelers, but in examining the specific benefits of their perspectives for informing current discussions of object-oriented rhetoric. In other words, I want not simply to unearth the work that has been done, but to examine its applicability and thereby make a stronger argument for work in similar veins. By that, I mean two things: that as a field we should be undertaking work that resembles the work done by these scholars and that we should continue to engage in the important work of recovering historical perspectives on nonhuman objects. If the relatively limited selection of scholars in this chapter is any indication, these perspectives are more common in our history than we might initially believe. It would be fruitful to look further (and more extensively) back in rhetoric’s history – whether to classical authors like Aristotle and Augustine or to more recent writers like Bitzer or Kennedy – to trace the emergence of the nonhuman turn in rhetoric and composition. I believe, as demonstrated in this chapter, that tracing connections and associations made during our history would provide further useful context for current discussions. I contend that these undercurrents of object-oriented thinking have always been responding to felt needs; they have been articulating a perspective compatible with and necessary for rhetorical work, even if

51

they have been largely dismissed in scholarship. Given the emergence of computers and writing scholarship in the latter part of the twentieth century, the views of the field have shifted subtly to accommodate a perspective that has always been working beneath its surface. The metaphors of human-computer interaction tend to make object-oriented perspectives more accessible and understandable (as can be seen by the focus of more than one chapter in this project); however, work outside that milieu is equally valuable for the field. After all, not all of us are “digital scholars” in the sense that we research digital spaces (although we likely are digital scholars in the sense that we employ digital writing tools). Rather, given our roles as actors in a diverse world, we need to focus our attention on expanding the scope of object-oriented rhetoric to be similarly intelligible outside digital spaces. Ultimately, this foray into recovering ontological rhetors is only a first step. Young, Becker, and Pike, Burke, and Vico are important figures, and this treatment of their work is necessarily partial and necessarily brief. Burke alone deserves at least a full article-length project examining synergies between his work and object-oriented perspectives – if not a . However, I hope that the investigation done in this chapter opens the way for a more involved and prolonged examination of the history of rhetoric’s engagement with both the ontological and the nonhuman. Primarily, however, I hope that this chapter has demonstrated the utility of looking to rhetorical history to not only uncover object-oriented perspectives in the field’s past, but also to recognize how those perspectives can inform and shape the current conversations surrounding object-oriented rhetoric. While the authors discussed here undoubtedly faced different challenges in their local and temporal contexts, their investments in making space for a more capacious and nuanced understanding of rhetorical action serve as effective models. Young, Becker, and Pike’s applicability to a reconsideration of composition classroom practices, especially in terms of presenting ideas of audience through the particle/wave/field heuristic (with some modification) seems promising. Similarly, Burke’s notion of the pentad, framed correctly, seems a productive lens through which to parse the initially strange and off-putting ideas of a rhetoric that deals with ontology. Finally, Vico’s reaction to Descartes and his concepts of metaphor and imagination would fit well within an upper-division rhetorical theory class that has some interest in engaging with the alien experience of nonhuman objects. In other words, the work of these scholars has some practical utility beyond either recovery work or theory-building. These scholars are only a

52

starting point; future historical projects might examine rhetoricians within other historical periods and within other traditions – for instance, within the rhetoric of indigenous peoples of the Americas. Additionally, the work in comparative rhetoric by scholars such as Ashby, Mao, and Stroud seems a productive space for investigation, within cultures that ascribe objects different levels of agency than the Western philosophical tradition. Finally, I hope that this initial foray into uncovering object-oriented perspectives can allow us to re-envision the history of the field. Essentially, I hope that we can craft a new narrative of rhetoric’s past – one that includes nonhuman objects beyond the digital ones we recognize now, and that also includes authors whose approaches to those objects may so far have gone unrecognized. An object-oriented perspective can allow us to do this important work by refocusing our attention and allowing space for the nonhuman actors lurking at the edges of our conversations, and valuing an object-oriented approach can allow us to see the ways in which we may already have begun those conversations.

53

Chapter Three: Thinking with and against AI: Representations of Machine Intelligence in Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Human Revolution

In this chapter, I argue that video games present unique opportunities to advance our understanding of object-oriented rhetoric through emphasizing ethical and rhetorical implications of human-object interaction. In other words, video games, by the nature of their interactivity and mechanisms, have the capacity to make users conscious of the degree to which they are relying on other objects to effect change, even in a relatively contained system. Furthermore, in addition to being sites where rhetoricians can study object-oriented rhetorical practices, video games can also theorize object-oriented rhetorical concepts themselves. The two games I draw on in this chapter, Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, do just that. These two games demonstrate video games’ promising capability to explicate object-oriented rhetorical principles, but they also fall short of that promise by showing reluctance to follow their arguments about nonhuman agency to their logical conclusions. I use perspectives from posthumanism (Braidotti; Hayles; Wolfe), procedural rhetoric (Bogost), and an object-oriented view of consciousness (Chalmers) to perform a close narrative and procedural reading of some key moments in these video games’ approaches to technology, subjectivity, and object-orientation. I further explore what these games reveal about an expanded, complicated view of consciousness; the anxiety over subjectivity formation and emergence; and the potential problems of a technophilic approach that can reinforce inequality. For the first game, Mass Effect, I’ll be largely focusing on narrative analysis; for the second, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I’ll be primarily using procedural analysis. I should note that, as a result of these lenses focusing on analysis of “text” (whether in the sense of narrative or rules- based experiences), they are necessarily limited and partial. That is, the analyses I present here are my own interpretations, guided by my experiences as a player of each of these games and a participant in games culture and scholarship, not the result of person-based research involving designers or other players. That said, I believe the partial perspective I present here provides evidence that these games (not to mention others) can contribute to better understanding and deploying object-oriented rhetoric. Broadening this attempt to situate OOR, I argue that an object-oriented rhetorical approach can allow us to more productively engage consciousness generally.

54

Why Video Games? Game studies scholar and object-oriented philosopher Ian Bogost has outlined the usefulness of computers as sites of theorizing an object-oriented perspective, pointing to their capacity for autonomous action and interaction with a user (Alien Phenomenology 22). Building on the work done by Bogost, I hope to further demonstrate the ability of the medium of video games to meaningfully contribute to discussions of object-oriented rhetoric. Video games (and computing in general) confront users with examples of persuasion that exceed or trouble notions of human symbolic action, and so offer a recognizable moment of intervention for object- oriented rhetoric. This moment of intervention is important not only because of its value to expanding notions of rhetorical action, but also because it functions as a point of connection between three distinct fields: rhetoric, object-oriented philosophy, and game studies. As a discipline, rhetoric has existing connections to object-oriented philosophy (Barnett; Brown; Reid; Rivers), and also has connections to game studies (Alberti; Alexander; Colby and Shultz Colby; Johnson; Moberly; Sherlock; Selfe and Hawisher), but the former connection is young and the latter is unfortunately limited. Using games as a site of study can serve to strengthen rhetoric’s connection to object-oriented perspectives while also broadening rhetorical scholarship’s relationship with games and game studies.

Video Games and Rhetorical Scholarship Although video games have increasingly been attended to by rhetoricians in the last decade (Alberti; Alexander; Colby and Shultz Colby; Johnson; Moberly; Sherlock; Selfe and Hawisher), they have often been treated merely as texts for cultural criticism or as tools for learning rather than as complex systems worth investigation in their own right (e.g. Ken McAllister’s Game Work or Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp’s The Everquest Reader, which, while insightful, see games as merely cultural products). Rebekah Shultz Colby and Richard Colby critique the reductive nature of an approach that only views games from a perspective, reacting against a history of games in composition classrooms that neglects the nuances of interactivity in favor of simple textual critique. Shultz Colby and Colby, writing with Matthew S.S. Johnson, note that while some compositionists align themselves with game studies and the use of games in writing classrooms, those compositionists often collapse a broad collection of interdisciplinary scholarship to a handful of “hot-button media issues” (764).

55

Efforts to consider games within rhetoric and composition have often focused on games’ capabilities to challenge traditional definitions of “writing” and “reading.” For example, Kevin Moberly argues that interaction with complex symbolic screen objects makes playing games a form of writing. Discussing the oft-suggested “absence of writing” in games, Moberly suggests this is likely effacement instead, as “games are written to disguise the fact that their complex symbolic environments are constructed almost entirely through writing” (285). Moberly recognizes the use of games as cultural instruments by which student player/readers can critique systems of capitalist consumption and can explore the discourse communities that arise and support such systems, specifically pointing to the generation of economies in massively multiplayer games (294-296). Moberly’s eventual goal complicates the cultural critique model, however, by using simulated systems to interrogate complex real-world ones, in an attempt to encourage his students to consider ideology in their own lives. However, an OOR approach to game analysis also focuses on system thinking, using the capacity of games to model and represent complex systems as ways to try to metaphorically engage with those systems, providing new ways to interact with unfamiliar objects from new perspectives. Further departing from a cultural studies perspective, John Alberti notes the reliance of video game “writing” on the visual, arguing that this reliance is in many ways a return to an already visual medium (265). Additionally, Alberti notes that games use their interactive, experiential qualities to emphasize the dynamic nature of texts – something that, he suggests, is shared by even “static” texts (266). Alberti focuses on interactivity as a mode that makes the dynamic nature of texts clear, but in his description the texts themselves are still passive objects waiting for human intervention and interaction to enliven them. In other words, Alberti does not articulate a sense of object agency. An OOR approach would attempt to emphasize both the shifting nature of texts and the idea that the text itself performs work in the world, not only the humans that read it. Similar to Alberti’s focus on video games’ power to broaden perspectives, Matthew S.S. Johnson outlines games as methods for civic engagement of students by exploring students’ extra-curricular game-related writing. Johnson argues that the writing done by gamers outside classrooms is meaningful and motivated, contending that “gamer-authored texts [are] significant examples of public writing and the gamer-authors’ practices as instances of civic participation [are] not unlike that which many composition instructors hope to foster in their classrooms”

56

(271). Johnson’s study is useful and interesting, especially in that it is an attempt to broaden what “counts” as writing and what “counts” as civic engagement. Johnson’s perspective is valuable for rhetoricians; however, an object-oriented perspective would also want to emphasize the ways in which the games and systems of circulation themselves have real influence on the writers – that is, the moment of civic engagement is a point of connection between two objects (the writer and the game) and each perceives the other differently, and is shaped by that interaction. Collin Brooke recognizes this interplay in Lingua Fracta. Brooke effectively modulates Alberti’s and Johnson’s approaches to digital objects, and in many ways views them how an object-oriented rhetorician might. In discussing a reading of hypertext fiction, he notes: “Criticism of ‘the content of the story’ relies on an implied social contract among critics, enforced by the publishing industry and intellectual property , that fixes textual objects, thereby making them available for readers in different locations and at different times” (11). Brooke’s claims here are a sort of proto-object-orientation, given his notion that critics should be examining these textual objects on the objects’ own terms rather than “fixing them” for their sake within ready schemes of classification. While Brooke does ultimately put power in the hands of readers (even when they themselves are part of a shifting system of textual activity), he nonetheless gestures toward the activity and agency of nonhuman objects in such a system. Brooke’s idea that we need to begin with “interface as our unit of analysis” (25) means that we have to approach new media objects such as video games on their own terms, acknowledging that we can only access the object by interacting with its surface features – that we might not be able to access “products” because the objects we’re interested in are actually processes (rather than stabilized notes of meaning). Brooke worries that current practices emphasize static products “which can then be decoupled from the contexts of their production” and that supposedly static texts “are but special, stabilized instances of ongoing process conducted at the level of interface” (25). Brooke’s emphasis on interface as unfolding process – especially the inability to understand objects outside of relation – echo object-oriented theorist Levi Bryant’s notion of “local manifestations” of objects always being an action. Bryant’s example is that of a blue mug “blueing” rather than simply being blue (87). In other words, the mug is not merely a static to be read by an observer; it is instead an object which is actively producing color through virtue of its having the essential quality of color-producing. However, it can only exercise that quality in relation with another object which has the quality of color-

57

comprehending. Reframing media analysis as a reciprocal, active process requires us to relinquish our supposed control over media objects – in other words, we have to decenter ourselves from the system. Bryant’s notion of objects perpetually acting resonates with Latour’s idea that all actors in a network are constantly establishing themselves and therefore constantly redefining and reorganizing networks (even though they may appear to be stable entities). Brooke’s sense of texts acting on their own and on their own terms leans in this direction, but doesn’t quite go so far as to explicitly grant them agency. That is, Brooke stops short of theorizing that texts have internal worlds in the same sense that living objects might. Brooke’s approach to media objects does stand out, however, for its seeming sympathy to an object-oriented perspective and for its understanding of media objects as active participants (even if not active in the ways humans are) in their systems of circulation and apprehension. Ultimately, rhetoricians such as Johnson and Brooke, who treat games and other similarly interactive digital texts as sites of theory as well as action, are relatively rare. Jonathan Alexander argues that “many in the larger field of composition studies are not yet aware of the possibilities for transforming the way approach writing instruction that emerge when critically considering the potential place of video and computer gaming in the composition classroom” (36). Although video games have been becoming more acceptable as sites of study, they are still often treated as curiosities or are approached in the same ways as “non-interactive” texts (although as Brooke points out, the very idea of “non-interactive” texts is already a problem). I believe that an attempt to incorporate object-oriented methodologies, and especially to understand the role of video games differently as rhetorical objects, will help to broaden perspectives of rhetoricians. By understanding that games operate as systems of objects, exist on their own terms, and relate with humans and nonhumans in particular ways, rhetoricians will more confidently, capably, and effectively incorporate video games into our classrooms and research. In other words, an object-oriented rhetoric can provide a useful connection between rhetoric and game studies.

Video Games and Object-Oriented Ontology Ian Bogost’s notion of “procedural rhetoric” opens a conversation between rhetoric and game studies – one that is also friendly to object-oriented perspectives. As Bogost defines it,

58

“Procedural rhetoric is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes. … its arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models” (Persuasive Games 29). Essentially, procedural rhetoric focuses on the way rule systems (and the interfaces that allow interaction with those systems) make arguments. For instance, the game Arkham Horror is set in H.P. Lovecraft’s pulp horror universe, in a 1920s Massachusetts town that is slowly being overrun by supernatural forces. In Lovecraft’s estimation of the world, human knowledge was intended to have limits, and probing too deeply into the mysteries of the universe would reveal too much: that reality is a terrifying, alien thing which would drive the orderly human mind incurably insane. Forbidden knowledge leads to chaos and fates worse than death in a universe that isn’t just uncaring but is actively hostile. As a result, in Arkham Horror it’s quite possible (though not quite inevitable) to spend the game making intelligent decisions and still eventually lose due to random chance. The game makes the argument through its rule system that life is unfair and unpredictable, and sometimes tragedy is unavoidable. This particular element – the highly random nature of the game leading to loss – is a good example of procedural rhetoric, and also an example of what Bogost calls an “ontographic machine”: Arkham Horror’s match between its theme and mechanics give its players “a compelling account of an ontological domain” (Alien Phenomenology 53). Given procedural rhetoric’s differences from established rhetorical approaches, Bogost does not intend it to supplant, but to support, other methods of rhetorical analysis. In the same way that filmic analysis relies on visual rhetoric in conjunction with more traditional configurations of rhetoric, procedural rhetoric opens a space to apply specialized rhetorical tools toward understanding a particular kind of persuasion that occurs (often, but by no means exclusively) in computer-mediated interaction. Drawing on Burke’s theory of identification and his expansion of rhetoric to potentially infinite domains (bounded only by meaning-making activity), Bogost argues that the symbolic system of computational processes requires a different type of rhetoric (Persuasive Games 20-21). Bogost’s notions of systems expand beyond digital systems, and in that way he is allied with those in rhetoric and composition who pursue complex systems as rhetorically meaningful and worthy of investigation (Cooper; Dobrin; Hawk; Jung; Syverson); however, his idea of procedural rhetoric has specific application to video games.

59

Bogost’s object-oriented perspective on video games offers a way for game studies scholars (and rhetoricians interested in games) to break free from merely talking about discourse in the medium. However, procedural analysis still requires a set of analytical tools and heuristics to work with the metaphoric systems and altered subjectivities produced by games. Rhetoricians, with our emphasis on relations and uncertainty, are particularly poised to bring unique and productive perspectives to procedural analysis. In this chapter, I synthesize procedural rhetoric with narrative analysis to examine the persuasive power of Mass Effect and Deus Ex in terms of interface and user experience.

Posthumanism and Consciousness The final theoretical piece in this chapter’s analysis is posthumanism. Because the two games I’m examining each discuss notions of personhood and digital consciousness – not to mention explicitly involve literal flesh-machine-graft cyborgs – I would be remiss not to situate my argument in relation to posthumanist approaches to literary and media analysis. In my articulation of posthumanism as methodology, I focus on Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman, Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism?, and Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman. Each of these works provides a slightly different, though related, perspective on the concepts of “human” and “posthuman.” Each also examines the underlying concept of subjectivity through slightly different, but again related, perspectives. For Hayles, humanity and posthumanity are each embedded in particular historical situations and technological configurations. In Hayles’s estimation, the primary difference between a human and posthuman perspective is the ways in which each framework models subjectivity: in a humanist framework, humans are “in control” of their autonomy, and “conscious agency is the essence of human identity” (288). Most importantly, humans occupy a special (natural) place at the center of being in a humanist vision. In contrast, in a posthuman framework, cognition is distributed through a network of human and nonhuman actors (chiefly technologies). As Hayles explains, To conceptualize the human in these terms is not to imperil human survival but is precisely to enhance it, for the more we understand the flexible, adaptive structures that coordinate our environments and the metaphors that we ourselves

60

are, the better we can fashion images of ourselves that accurately reflect the complex interplays that ultimately make the entire world one system. (290) Hayles’s posthumanist perspective aligns fairly well with an object-oriented one. For Hayles, the posthuman subject is embodied, contingent, and embedded; although its cognition may be distributed, it avoids “being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied mortality” (5). In other words, the posthuman subject recognizes its separation from other objects, but also its embodied interconnectedness. Where Hayles breaks with object-oriented perspectives is in her use of the posthuman subject as an unmarked center, one that is naturalized in some ways even through its distribution. That is, for Hayles, distributed human consciousness still functions as a central point of reference, one that spreads its influence over other objects. These objects mostly serve as points of connection rather than fully-realized actors.8 While Hayles’ posthumanist perspective does still (implicitly) exclude nonhumans from this system of consciousness, her work is an important contribution to considering notions of complex and distributed subjectivity – subjectivity that may also include nonhuman actors. Rather than focusing on embeddedness within systems, Cary Wolfe sees humanity (and posthumanity) as a process of becoming through differentiating the self from surrounding systems. He is ultimately more invested in the specifics of decentering the human than Hayles – or rather, on the specific methodological means by which that decentering is accomplished. Wolfe coins the phrase “postanthropocentrism” as one way to emphasize this shift away from a split between human/posthuman and toward a framework that values and recognizes other beings as “with” humans. In Wolfe’s estimation, humanity is “fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not- human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is” (xxv). Wolfe does tend to privilege those “not-human” things that are either a creation of humans or are fundamentally linguistic and discursive as necessary in this process of becoming and differentiating subjectivity. However, he still recognizes the breadth and depth of (explicitly living) nonhumans, referring to “our taken-for-granted modes of human experience” as a stumbling block to our

8 Hayles has, however, continued to develop her thinking about subjectivity and object-relation. In a recent article in Speculations, she outlined a series of arguments concerning aesthetics and human perspective that more fully embrace an object- oriented framework. For my purposes, it is worth noting that she never refers to this line of thinking as “posthumanism” of any variety. 61

thinking. Despite Wolfe’s emphasis on these ideas, though, thinking still seems to be at the center of his sense of subjectivity. Even when that thinking is distributed, and even when it is rendered broadly, Wolfe still seems to see a ‘postanthropocentrism’ that includes humans alongside other animals, and not other objects broadly figured. Wolfe additionally makes the argument that posthumanism must embrace a new epistemology to achieve this postanthropocentrism. For instance, he contends that otherwise well-meaning discussions of animal and disability rights may unintentionally reproduce “the very kind of normative subjectivity – a specific concept of the human – that grounds against nonhuman animals and the disabled in the first place” (xvii). Without this new epistemology, he argues, posthumanism continues to perpetuate a special place for normalized human subjects by differentiating them from non-normalized ones. This complaint could be leveled against some posthumanist work, in fact: the formation of subjectivity through differentiation can run the risk of highlighting difference unproductively. Especially given posthumanism’s focus on broadening conceptualization of human subjectivity (sometimes at the expense of nonhuman objects’ own agency), a posthumanist perspective should be treated carefully. Rosi Braidotti attempts this kind of care through her treatment of posthumanist subjectivity. Although Braidotti focuses on “elaborating alternative ways of conceptualizing the human subject” (37) as the project of posthumanism, she largely avoids the commensurate problems of reifying structures of marginalization. Braidotti focuses on Deluezian theory and on subjectivity, but she has an inclusive view of what constitutes subjects. For Braidotti, posthumanism means that we need to think differently about ourselves. I take the posthuman predicament as an opportunity to empower the pursuit of alternative schemes of thought, knowledge and self-representation. The posthuman condition urges us to think critically and creatively about who and what we are actually in the process of becoming. (12) Braidotti recognizes the utility of a postanthropocentric mode of thought; she argues that capitalism works to equalize the subject positions of humans and nonhumans alike: “contemporary bio-genetic capitalism generates a global form of reactive mutual inter- dependence of all living organisms, including nonhumans” (49). At the same time, she puts forth

62

a specific brand of humanism: a humanism of empowerment in a social and political sense, one that emphasizes human agency’s power to work “for sustainable futures” to “construct a livable present" (192). In other words, she deemphasizes the capacity of nonhuman subjects to influence human systems of power in meaningful ways. While Braidotti is the most current of the aforementioned authors in terms of her treatment of technology (she discusses new media in particular as a way to energize the humanities), she follows Wolfe and Hayles in focusing her analysis almost exclusively on traditional literary texts (with the occasional film). Given posthumanism’s interest in subjectivity and in distribution of human action through technology, this oversight is somewhat surprising. As I hope to demonstrate, games – as sites that clearly manifest the distributed, networked subjectivity posthumanists assert – have much to contribute to theorizing what it means to be a posthuman subject. My analysis of these games, especially Mass Effect, owes a great deal to the methodologies outlined by Braidotti, Hayles, and Wolfe, and other posthumanist scholars.

Mass Effect: Narrative Representations of Machine Consciousness The first game I turn to, Mass Effect, is important to object-oriented rhetoric because of the questions and arguments it raises about emergent consciousness and the mechanisms of organic and inorganic persuasion. 9 The game attempts to address fundamental concerns about the nature of self-awareness. Although Mass Effect eventually embraces the idea of a stable, persistent, unitary self, the game raises object-oriented rhetorical questions beforehand. Specifically, Mass Effect asks: how might humans think about “persuasion” in regards to nonhuman objects? How might reconsidering other objects’ inner existences cause us to rethink our own meaning-making power? What efforts should humans make to understand the withdrawn experience of other objects, and how might those attempts change human behavior? Mass Effect was originally released for the Xbox 360 in November of 2007. In the game, players take on the role of Commander Shepard10, a rising in ’s System Alliance Navy

9 Mass Effect, and particularly the conversation it begins about some of the issues I raise here, has prompted numerous responses from gamers and game journalists. E.g., Culp; Kaiser; Kim; Hernandez; Lejacq. Although these pieces are salient criticism, ranging from gender relations to ideological dissonance to retrospectives on dialogue and characterization choices, popular authors haven’t considered Mass Effect from the perspectives of rhetoric and persuasion explicitly. 10 Shepard can be either male or female, as the player chooses; as a result, I attempt to avoid gendered pronouns in this analysis. 63

in the year 2183. Humanity has only recently (within the past 30 years) joined a galactic community of starfaring races, and Commander Shepard is poised to be the new face of humanity. While dealing with galactic politics and the demands of a position, Shepard is also embroiled in an emerging conflict with a of artificial called the Geth. Mass Effect’s galaxy is composed of a wide range of organic species, from the familiar- looking Asari (who resemble blue human females), to the stranger Hanar (ambulatory jellyfish who must use cybernetic implants to be able to “speak” telepathically, as they have no mouths). Every species, no matter how dissimilar they are from each other, distrusts , and its production is universally banned – even by those species that don’t belong to the galactic “United Nations.” Mass Effect goes to great lengths to distinguish the synthetic Geth (as artificial intelligences) from all the organic life forms. For inhabitants of the Mass Effect universe, artificial intelligence is a problem because the conflict between organics and synthetics is perceived as inevitable.

Figure 1. Legion, left, with a male Commander Shepard.

At one point in the game, Shepard recruits a Geth squadmate, “Legion.” (See Figure 1.) Like all Geth, Legion is actually made up of hundreds of networked programs rather than a single intelligence. It is through conversing with this mobile platform (which organics

64

mistakenly identify as a single individual) that the player learns about Geth culture, society, and mode of being. After spending most of the game with the Geth as antagonists, Legion provides a sympathetic perspective: it discusses similarities with organics (in terms of long-term goals for peaceful coexistence, desire for material resources that will support its species, and incomplete access to reality through sense perception and cooperative decision-making) as well as differences (especially in terms of different perception of emotions). For instance, Legion recognizes the necessity of co-existence and cooperation with organic life, rather than seeing conflict as inevitable: “Organic life acts on emotions. We do not judge them for being true to their nature. We cannot make them think like us. Both creators and created must complete their halves of the equation. The Geth cannot solve for alone.” While recognizing its difference from organics, Legion values the unique characteristics of organic life, even going so far as to “admire” the irrationality of hope (an emotion it cannot experience) when it speaks of achieving peace with organic beings. Through its portrayal of Legion, Mass Effect makes an argument about the characteristics that all objects share; the game gestures toward a flat ontology, at least in terms of consciousness. In particular, the game argues that complex networks exceed their component parts. In OOO, this notion of emergence is important because it allows for the separate existence of objects at differing levels of scale. In other words, a neuron in my exists as an independent object that possesses agency and is separate from the rest of reality, but it is also the case that my brain itself is a single object that cannot be reduced. As Levi Bryant puts it, no object “ever retains its identity or self-sameness when transported from one entity to another, but rather becomes something different as a consequence of being translated” (179). In Mass Effect, this concept of translation is expressed through Legion’s sentimental attachment to Commander Shepard’s armor. Before meeting Shepard, Legion finds a scrap of Commander Shepard’s armor and uses it to repair damage to its chassis: LEGION: This is the impact of a rifle shot. … Organic transmissions claimed your death. We recovered this debris from your hardsuit. SHEPARD: That doesn’t explain why you used my armor to fix yourself. LEGION: There was a hole. SHEPARD: But why didn’t you fix it sooner? Or with something else? LEGION: [short silence] No data available.

65

Legion’s lack of available data gestures toward its inability to fully fathom its own internal existence. That is, the machine intelligence, which is composed of a gestalt of hundreds of individual programs, exceeds the sum of the interaction of those programs. It is possible for Legion to not understand itself despite possessing perfect knowledge of its components. As Levi Bryant puts it, “there is no special category referred to as ‘the subject’ that is necessarily and irrevocably attached to an object. Rather … being is composed entirely of objects” (130). In other words, Legion’s mystification at its own decisions is a necessary feature of the withdrawal of objects even from themselves. Subjectivity – even the alien subjectivity of an artificial intelligence – is an object, and like all objects it has only limited access to the real. In order to make it possible for human players to interact with artificial intelligence species such as the Geth, the designers have constructed Legion in somewhat anthropocentric ways. For instance, Legion responds to orders and is interacted with in the same way as other characters in the game, and in addition appears roughly humanoid. However, the writers have successfully made Legion alien in that its decision-making process is discussed at length as not the decision of a single consciousness but the logical conduct of a gestalt consciousness comprised of almost 2000 different semi-sapient minds. With this decision, the writers are giving players a glimpse into an actual reasoning process they are familiar with but doing so in a way that makes that familiar process strange. The game initially focuses on creating distinctions between the thinking processes of Geth and organics (another AI attempting to connect to the Geth network describes it as “a thousand voices talking at once”), but eventually the discussion of how Geth reach decisions – through building consensus between component programs – is compared to an organic “making up his mind.” By likening Geth cognitive function to human cognitive function, Mass Effect makes an argument that human thoughts too are objects – that human thoughts are capable of activity in and of themselves (as with individual Geth programs), and are separate objects as well as parts of a whole. Mass Effect also deals with the important OOO concept of metaphorism. Given that all objects are ultimately separate from reality (and from themselves), metaphor is a necessary vehicle to translate between them. Ian Bogost discusses this concept at length in Alien Phenomenology, specifically referencing ’s on what it might be like to be a bat. For Bogost, imagining what it might be like to be a bat is as close as we will get to being a bat, since it is impossible for us to actually experience bat-being. In other words, “even if

66

evidence from outside a thing … offers clues to how it perceives, the experience of that perception remains withdrawn” (63). Late in Mass Effect, Commander Shepard is tasked with entering the Geth consciousness. Shepard must insert his or her consciousness into the collective and cleanse it of the influence of another antagonistic artificial intelligence species in order to secure the Geth’s help. Although this segment of the game should be completely different in terms of player experience – the character has never interfaced with a machine in this way – it is not.

Figure 2. Shepard inside the Geth collective consciousness. While the environment is differently stylized, the player's control of Shepard is the same.

Players still control Shepard in the same way, shoot enemies, walk around in the game world, etc. (See Figure 2.) Part of this similarity is undoubtedly due to budget concerns (it would be expensive to code a new engine for a small section of the game), but what is noteworthy is the explanation. According to Legion, Shepard can only experience the Geth consensus through human cognition: “We have installed filters to allow you to make sense of this server’s raw data. Your mind receives our world as something familiar. ” In other words, Shepard can never truly know what it is like to be an artificial intelligence interacting with another artificial intelligence. The perception of a different object is denied to Shepard, as the opposite is denied to the Geth.

67

Each is at an impasse to fully understand the other, and yet Mass Effect makes a claim about object-orientation as a methodology to productively bridge that impasse: through (technology- assisted) metaphor, and through critical attention to the position of the other, Shepard is able to engage with the Geth collective in meaningful ways. While further exploring concepts of consciousness and agency, the game presents the player with an ethically complex, object-oriented rhetorical situation. Late in the game, the player accompanies Legion to a space station containing “heretic” Geth – ones that support the major antagonists of the series. Initially the player believes the only option is to destroy the station, but upon arrival, Legion modified its assessment to include the possibility of “rewriting” the heretics. The rewritten heretics will be re-assimilated into the mainstream Geth collective, and will no longer believe in following the series’ antagonists. In a series that already emphasizes thorny moral issues, the rewrite/destroy choice is one of the most complex and ambivalent decisions. Geth are nonhuman objects (and given their special status outside normal organic , the player likely thinks of them as “just machines” at this point in the narrative), but they are resting in a sort of “uncanny valley” (Mori) between being inanimate and being conscious. By creating uncertainty about the inner being of the Geth and presenting the player with a “delete/rewrite” choice, Mass Effect is calling into question our ethical approaches to all nonhuman objects. Legion specifically downplays the severity and immediacy of the rewriting event: “They will agree with our judgments and return. We will integrate their experience. All will be stronger.” This reaction, while it focuses on the eventual effect of the choice, elides moral problems about the means of change. As another squadmate puts it, “Either way, what makes these Geth individuals dies. If you change who someone is, how they think, you’ve killed them. They will be something new in the same body.” The implication for human interaction with nonhuman objects is profound. The Geth won’t experience rewriting or destruction as humans would, as Legion acknowledges, but the organic characters have problems with this perspective because of their inability to understand the alien perspective of the Geth. Interestingly, the “paragon” choice – which the game associates with heroic and compassionate action – is to rewrite the Geth rather than destroy them. Throughout the game, “paragon” moral decisions are those that preserve life (as rewriting the Geth arguably does), but also those that respect the rule of and individual autonomy (which it arguably doesn’t). In

68

this case, the metric for determining the paragon nature of the choice seems to be based in perspective. The human perspective would argue that brainwashing another sentient being is not a heroic or compassionate action. However, when viewed from Legion’s logical, consequence- based morality, rather than viewing the rewriting as equivalent to brainwashing, the game acknowledges the “paragon” nature of that decision. By setting the stage for this choice not as a one between right and wrong, but rather as between valuing the perspective of the in-game nonhuman character over that of the (presumably human) player, Mass Effect seems to be making an argument about the value of recognizing the perspective of nonhuman objects. Although the Geth are closer to human than are some of the nonhuman objects we interact with, this emphasis on attempting to listen to and understand the experience and values of objects that are unlike us is important. The rewrite/destroy incident also repositions and complicates familiar ideas of “persuasion” – rewriting the Geth literally changes their minds; however, other squadmates voice their concern that this rewriting is arguably a kind of violation. Undoubtedly, the difference between the Geth and organic creatures is significant, and it would be presumptuous to assume any simple correspondence. However, while the Geth themselves may not believe that there is any problem in merely replacing currently held beliefs with a new opinion or thought, Legion does make a direct comparison to this process in organic minds: “The minds of both forms can be shaped. Organics require time and effort. With synthetics replacement of a data file is the only requirement.” Perhaps unintentionally, Mass Effect directly links the mechanisms of human persuasion to reprogramming. This comparison prompts some uncomfortable questions about the nature of persuading other humans, but also simultaneously further encourages us to reimagine relations between humans and other objects as rhetorical relations. If we accept Legion’s comparison, we accept that rewriting the Geth is a rhetorical act (that is, it is fundamentally similar to organic persuasion). In other words, the game seems to make an argument that rhetoric is about relations between things, not merely human symbol use. In turn, if we accept the similarity between reprogramming and persuasion, it means we are forced either to acknowledge that interaction with other humans is mechanistic or to suppose that the kinds of mechanisms underlying systematic change in the act of reprogramming something might be more complex. The first conclusion is unsatisfying (and potentially depressing), but the second aligns with an object-oriented perspective quite well. The complexity involved even in a straightforward act

69

like reprogramming creates an object which exceeds its components, and may prove unpredictable (or at least in some sense unknowable). Ultimately, the events in the game and resulting conversation about persuasion may initially seem to unsettle human agency, but what they actually do is reinforce a broader view of object agency; it moves “persuasion” (understood broadly) outside of some special faculty of humans. That is to say, Legion’s claims about human persuasion being fundamentally similar to the “persuasion” of rewriting a program mean that either human minds are like computers (staid, predictable, simple) or that nonhuman experiences incorporate some of the things we think are uniquely human (agency, unpredictability, complexity). Despite its interest in posing complex, potentially unsettling questions about object experience and persuasion, however, Mass Effect ultimately still positions the notion of a stable, unified self as both desirable and possible. In the game, the Geth are seduced by the major antagonists of the game with the promise of “true individuality” wherein they will attain full consciousness rather than exist as a networked collection of programs. The fact that the Geth are portrayed as finding this a desirable notion already suggests the game’s stance. Additionally, the game treats this outcome as the “best” outcome (i.e., it is the most mechanically rewarding for the player, in terms of resources). This narrative move seems to betray the previously complicated notions of self, and can be seen as a retreat into a more comforting sense of sentience. Even with the effort Mass Effect puts into convincing players that nonhuman objects like the Geth can have complex, unknowable, rich inner worlds that rival human minds in terms of their complexity and unpredictability, the game still looks to organic existence (or at least organic intelligence) as the model to which all should aspire. Mass Effect takes important steps to challenge notions of stable subjectivity and of uniquely human access to consciousness, but stops just short of making those claims ring true. However, rhetoricians can take this experience as a teachable moment. The medium stands poised for new voices interested in delving into meta-medium questions about the nature of player experience and the experience of software (not to mention software design), and OOR is especially well-equipped to intervene in these design conversations.

70

Deus Ex: Understanding Machine Experience through Mechanics Like Mass Effect, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is interested in the interaction between organic and synthetic life forms. Unlike Mass Effect, however, the primary site of this human/nonhuman interaction is internal to the player experience rather than external. That is, the game directly asks complex questions about the player’s considerations of consciousness through narrative moments but also through mechanics and interface decisions. Specifically, the game asks: what is it like to model an experience of shifting perspectives on what “humanity” means? What does humanity mean? Does technology grant control over the environment or control by the environment? Deus Ex: Human Revolution was developed by Eidos Montreal and published in 2011 by Square-Enix. Set in a near-future Detroit, it tells the story of Adam Jensen, the head of security for leader Sarif Industries. The cybernetics industry has revitalized Detroit by the year 2027, although the city is depicted as still attempting to overcome problems of white flight and unrest resulting from enormous economic disparities between its remaining citizens. At the beginning of the game, despite working for a cybernetics company, Jensen is unaugmented. In fact, he has misgivings about Sarif’s business practices and the popularity of cybertechnology in general; he sees potential problems with the fact that Sarif makes most of its profit through military contracts and unintentionally contributes to the socio-economic divisions between those who can afford augmentation and those who can’t. After being told that Sarif’s mission is to help “people overcome their physical limitations,” Jensen argues that “most of our clients are [Department of Defense].” When told that “we work with teachers, doctors, and construction workers,” he sees a demonstration of a weapon that showers opponents with explosive charges. “You’re right,” Jensen deadpans, “A teacher would just love one of those.” At the conclusion of this opening sequence, a squad of heavily armed, cybernetically augmented commandos invade the building and indiscriminately attack its occupants. In the chaos, Jensen is severely wounded; he is subsequently augmented by Sarif to unprecedented levels. Throughout the rest of the game, Jensen’s ambivalence toward cyberware is put into conflict with the fact that he is almost entirely a machine. In many ways, the narrative and procedural journey of the remainder of the game are processes of assimilation and acceptance of a new subject position. This sense of wrestling with distributed cognition and becoming comfortable with being a collection of objects rather than a simple unified self is reminiscent of

71

Mass Effect’s anxieties about the Geth’s “true sentience.” The introduction of inorganic elements as part of what constitute “Adam Jensen” shatter the character’s (and potentially the player’s) comforting notions that “Adam Jensen” has special properties that allow access to reality in special ways. Instead, Jensen (and the player) sees that apprehending reality is fundamentally similar in quality for Jensen’s artificial eyes and limbs as it is for organic ones.

Figure 3. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Heads-Up Display.

Deus Ex explores a shift in the character’s perception, which further emphasizes the degree to which technology has become integrated with and co-conscious with Jensen’s augmentations. For instance, when characters speak to Jensen through the communication implant in his brain, we hear and see the images Jensen does (since the game is usually in first- person perspective), and gain an awareness of the seemingly “natural” way this technology presents itself. (See Figure 3 – David Sarif, currently contacting Jensen, is in the upper right corner of the screen.) By the end of the game, the visual overlays of his heads-up display (of which the implant is one part) seem a normal part of the experience of the character. Previously, Jensen was a competent but limited head of security. Once augmented, he is able to discharge to stun opponents, shoot explosive ball-bearings from his torso,

72

jump a dozen feet vertically, render himself invisible, or lift and throw metal dumpsters, among other abilities. In a sense, Jensen has unwillingly become an object-oriented rhetor; he relates the experience of nonhuman objects to human ones (including himself) and through social interaction emphasizes the emergent nature of “Adam Jensen” as an object separate from and exceeding his component parts. Jensen’s reluctance at his augmentation is clear from the start: when he meets his ex-girlfriend’s mother for the first time after his operations, he remarks “I never asked for this. They say they saved me, but I’m not sure saved is the right word.” When his boss comments that Jensen “looks like a new man,” he sourly replies, “Right. Fresh out of the package.” Despite his misgivings, however, Jensen can (depending on player action) accept his new perspective and the promise it holds: In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few. But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again? … To turn away from it now – to stop pursing a future in which technology and combine leading to the promise of a singularity – would mean to deny the very essence of who we are. Jensen recognizes the problems and tensions inherent in technological “progress,” but also sympathizes with those who advocate that progress, seemingly due to his own (admittedly still privileged) experience of empowerment and new perspectives as an augmented person. By putting players in a position where they can experience Jensen’s changing perceptions and perspectives, Deus Ex successfully deploys a metaphorical framework for the player to identify with Jensen’s evolving consciousness. Through the use of metaphorism, Deus Ex presents Jensen as both a collection of objects and as a singular being. Players are forced to manage internal reserves for Jensen’s augmentations, forcing them to make decisions about what parts of their “body” they need to use at the moment (see Figure 3’s battery icon, in the upper left corner of the screen).

73

Figure 4. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Augmentation Upgrade Screen. Similarly, players must make decisions about which body parts they wish to upgrade throughout the game, making the player conscious of the ways in which Jensen is composed of parts that must be managed, maintained, and improved (see Figure 4). Paradoxically, the ways these interactions with cybernetics unfold in Deus Ex serve to remind players of their human bodies and how those bodies are separate from them but simultaneously are them. By positioning players as caretakers of Jensen’s body at the same time that they are the inhabitants and controllers of Jensen’s body, and by integrating the player’s and Jensen’s agency through an always-on heads-up display that Jensen also sees (the visual overlays in Figure 3), the player is conscious of Jensen’s limitations in a way that produces symmetry and dissonance with their own embodied experiences. While players may not personally be in the position to install dermal plating (as they can when playing Jensen), they can understand the experience of being tethered to technology (at the very least in the way they interact with the game world). Rather than positioning the player as an observer of the interaction between objects (as with the Geth’s multiple programs) and suggesting that humans and other things may not be so different, Deus Ex procedurally positions players as themselves constituted by an interaction between objects through its interface. In addition to drawing attention to the overlap between Jensen’s experiences and their own, this design decision creates productive dissonance for players’ interpretation of their own roles vis-à-vis Jensen’s actions. While the player’s role is technically to control Jensen, the game seems to deliberately trouble the notion that players are Jensen in the sense video games so often aim for. By introducing repeated references to the protagonist’s lack of control over his situation, and by 74

crafting an interface that allows players to see through Jensen’s eyes but that also allows players to manipulate his body in a way he can’t, Deus Ex highlights the fragmentary nature of player/character interaction. At some points, the player and Jensen seem to be the same entity – when making decisions about whether to sneak through an air duct or use a door for a frontal assault, for instance, Jensen’s will and the player’s overlap. However, Jensen is an incredibly reserved and taciturn protagonist. Even when players can choose his responses in dialogues with other characters, his thoughts remain hidden. In key scenes where Jensen interrogates suspects to progress the plot, players choose a demeanor (e.g., “charm” or “appease”) rather than detailed choices. For instance, at one point Jensen must approach a former colleague from the police force, Wayne Haas, in an attempt to investigate a body in the department’s morgue. Several years before, Haas and Jensen were part of a SWAT operation and were ordered to kill a cybernetically augmented fifteen-year-old. When Jensen refused to take the shot, Haas did; although Haas was initially promoted, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was relegated to desk work. Haas blames Jensen for his breakdown and demotion. During Jensen’s interaction with Haas, the player sees Haas’s psychological profile and personality traits, and is presented with ambiguous icons that determine Jensen’s approach to the conversation, rather than being able to select specifically worded responses (See Figure 5).

Figure 5. Deus Ex: Human Revolution interrogation dialogue choice.

75

In other words, Jensen’s thoughts are his own even while he serves as an avatar of someone else. Late in the game, a scene occurs wherein Jensen’s body is controlled by an agent of the global conspiracy,11 which puts the player in the position Jensen has been occupying throughout the game (being controlled by the player as an outside force). The scene serves to highlight the object-oriented idea of withdrawal: the player is made conscious of the complexities and uncertainties of being able to interact intimately with an object but still not access its interior. Suddenly, players are forced to realize that they are not Jensen, nor are they Jensen’s augmentations; instead, they are as fundamentally separate from each object as the objects are from each other. While they can form networks of relation, they are nevertheless withdrawn. Jensen’s loss of control over his augmentations not only makes it clear that they are withdrawn objects, but also that whatever control he believed he had was illusory – the augmentations were always really answering to the shadowy conspirators, not to either Jensen or the player. It’s no coincidence that Jensen mentions technology benefiting only a few in his defense of augmentation. Essentially, the game articulates an object-oriented Marxism, where nonhuman objects prominently play a part as agents of class-based oppression – what we might figure as a third space between a purely posthuman perspective and a correlationist one. Obviously, this is not a new idea – Marxism has always been interested in the material – but Deus Ex ties materiality to the social in a way that seems to suggest that they are the same thing. The mechanisms of control employed by the worldwide shadowy conspiracy group in the game are, on the one hand, social controls: they buy politicians and puppet them, for instance. The mechanisms are also material control: they employ assassins and small units of troops, and they own stakes in various corporations. Finally, technology itself is a major part of the conspirators’ control mechanisms – they control the LIMB clinics, which are the primary medical facilities that implant cybernetics. However, the game ultimately makes the case that none of these kinds of control can exist without the others, and in fact that they are ultimately indistinguishable from each other. Deus Ex makes the argument that media, technology (specifically cybertechnology),

11 Specifically, Jensen’s augmentations are taken offline and he is unable to use any of his superhuman abilities. The scene in question is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP-jkwGpnRg. 76

and social notions of ownership and control all operate at the same level of reality, albeit with differing local manifestations. In other words, Deus Ex argues for a necessary space in object-oriented perspectives to recognize and consider power relations, even if that recognition may not resemble theories of power relations with which we are familiar. The sense that all material and social forces are elements of the same type is already a well-utilized idea in video games, although Deus Ex seems to do so with much more deliberation than most. Deus Ex relies on a sprawling conspiracy theory to articulate a hidden logic to seemingly unrelated events and dystopian behavior. Sarif describes this shadowy organization as one that has “had a finger in every corporation, organization, or initiative that has defined modern society.” These conspirators are noteworthy precisely for their anonymity – in many ways, their actual identities are unimportant, because they are only stand-ins for ideals of expanded surveillance, wealth inequality, unregulated science, and undermined democracy, among others. Primarily, the conspiracy is an embodiment of post-industrial excess and corruption; the conspirators represent everything wrong with global capitalism in the early twentieth century, and their systematic exploitation and control of a growing underclass is one of the overarching themes of the game. Class struggle is one of the touchstones of Deus Ex, but the idea is complicated when one considers the Jensen’s inevitable victory, not to mention his privileged position and relatively free access to supposedly scarce resources. In other words, although the player is made aware of the problems of class, he or she is not subjected to the mechanics of that struggle. Kevin Moberly’s Marxist cultural critique of gaming can help articulate the contradictions present in Deus Ex. In his analysis of video games’ ambivalent portrayal of material resources, Moberly discusses aesthetic commodification in video game worlds. Specifically as that idea relates to class, he notes that the manufactured conflict and evident chaos in video game worlds is merely spectacle that masks the unified economy (in multiple senses) underlying the logic of the world (“Commodifying Scarcity”). Deus Ex seems to fit into this analysis nicely, but it also seems to recognize the nature of the medium in which it operates, as it utilizes that medium to make a more pointed argument about the nature of spectacle – that spectacle can be a way to create uncertainty and grant increasing power to systems of authority – while capturing the player’s attention through the very tactics it outlines. That is, Deus Ex does exist on its own, but is also a part of the problematic capitalist interchange Moberly discusses.

77

Deus Ex actually outlines this very problem within the game itself, through its discussion of the conspirators’ control of government and media (at one point, a pirate radio host in the game even criticizes people for using video games to escape problems in reality), pointing to the very techniques it uses to highlight inequality while also being a part of a real technological inequality. I agree with Moberly’s analysis of how games often fail to deliver on a promise of meaningful material criticism, although I also believe that he focuses on human interaction at the symbolic level (aesthetics, narrative spectacle, commodified desire, etc.) while overlooking the real material aspects of a Marxist critique of games. What would be more interesting is to look at the system itself (which Moberly treats as merely a tool of capitalist ideological work), as itself a material agent in capitalist interchange. In other words, the medium of video games is also an object; it exerts its own pressures and pursues its own agency in regards to both designers and players and exists as a site of tension for each group. What if we fully consider the medium as having agency? How would that affect our thinking about players’ complicity (and designers’ roles) in policing their own ideologies? Although Deus Ex primarily emphasizes class, and handles those class issues with relative depth, the game mishandles what could be an equally interesting commentary on race (and especially the interdependent nature of race, gender, and class). The most egregious oversight is a minor scene just after Jensen completes his first mission and is free to wander the streets of Detroit. Jensen, a former police officer, occasionally runs across a person he knew when he was on the force. The first such person is a former informant, Letitia – a homeless Black woman who is represented, unfortunately, as a badly-characterized . As one game journalist puts it, what is especially bothersome about Letitia’s portrayal is that it is a complete caricature – not merely racist, but “weirdly racist” (Hamilton). Letitia is more anachronistically reminiscent of a Jim Crow era minstrel show than a resident of Detroit in 2027.12 Effectively, Deus Ex encourages players to identify with Jensen’s whiteness in ways that efface more complex issues of race and gender. In particular, the Letitia scene seems to suggest that the game’s designers have overlooked the perspectives of players of color (an unfortunately

12 The Letitia scene is accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He09JaBVZdE. 78

ubiquitous problem in the games industry). Deus Ex falls into a pattern Lisa Nakamura recognizes in Digitizing Race, one wherein “white users enjoy a privileged relationship with digital networked interfaces, either eschewing the use of the interface altogether or interacting with it sans keyboard, mouse, and other hardware devices and instead using gestural computing. In contrast, black users are depicted as witnesses and support staff to these feats of interface use” (97). Letitia’s role in the game is to support Jensen’s progress by providing him with information, and her dislocation from technology marginalizes her both within the story and within her world. Ultimately, although Deus Ex: Human Revolution contains a compelling mechanical structure that highlights the fragmentary and complex nature of embodiment and consciousness, and although it draws limited attention to the ways in which politics, class, and materiality interrelate with those complex considerations of subjectivity, it falls short of a robust object- oriented rhetoric in some noteworthy ways. While allowing players to limn the edge of being Adam Jensen and productively drawing the distinction between his interior and their own, the game fails to consider the lived experiences of the marginalized people supposedly at the center of David Sarif’s grand vision. Rather than a deliberate decision, this lack of perspective seems to be an oversight on the part of the writers and designers. I see this oversight as a moment for object-oriented rhetoricians to intervene in the production and development of games but also in their reception and criticism. An object-oriented perspective has the potential to broaden representation and inclusion of marginalized humans, certainly, and can additionally open ways to see machine intelligence (and its interaction with these marginalized groups) with more complexity. Future projects should look to the intersection between object-oriented rhetoric, Marxism, and critical race theory to better articulate an approach to interactive media design that can acknowledge the presence of a wider variety of interested human and machine stakeholders. Introducing an object-oriented framework within the games industry will produce more self- aware and capacious perspectives for designers; simultaneously, equipping students with the methodologies to examine games from an object-oriented perspective will lead them to become more savvy players.

79

Theorizing Object Consciousness through Games Part of the goal of engaging games like Mass Effect and Deus Ex is to introduce an object-oriented perspective on consciousness. These two games directly deal with what it means to “be human.” Both games also feature relatively in-depth (but still non-confrontational, given their fictional status) discussions of artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence. Each wrestles in its own way with how consciousness arises and what constitutes “true” consciousness. Of course, even outside of fiction, we have serious problems defining consciousness in many meaningful or consistent ways. Philosopher of mind and neuroscientist David Chalmers refers to the “hard problem of consciousness,” but perhaps it is better to explain the “easy problems” first – for Chalmers, the “easy problems” are the problems of . For instance, cognitive can explain how memory storage and retrieval work in the by examining the physical phenomena of making a new memory. Neurons fire, information is processed, etc. For these “easy” problems, Chalmers says, “Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work” (201). Deus Ex, for instance, initially focuses on this “easy problem” with its portrayal of implants that influence speed of thought and recall of information. However, the game eventually begins to explore the “hard problem,” which involves questions like: why does being awake feel how it does? In other words, the “hard problem” is a problem of subjective experience. This concept of consciousness is one that goes beyond humanity, and potentially beyond biological experience altogether. It is undoubtedly difficult to attempt the kind of mental gymnastics required to imagine the subjectivity of another kind of animal (or a machine). With animals, however, there are shared features – sensory organs, for instance. For digital beings, our modes of interaction and cognition are even more alien. Perhaps it would be easier, for the time being, to sidestep the idea of “consciousness” in general and instead to look at digital objects such as the internet as complex and interrelated groups of parts which inevitably give rise to networks which exceed those parts – much in the same way Mass Effect discusses the networked intelligence of the Geth. Proceeding from this idea, we can begin to argue for the rhetorical action of digital objects. We traditionally associate rhetorical action with conscious intentionality and agency, but if at least some of those things aren’t given as purely human domains anymore, then what does that mean for rhetoric? As Mass Effect and Deus Ex demonstrate, this kind of question is clearly

80

percolating through popular video games; these game’s meditations on object consciousness in media suggest an underlying need to engage with these questions in scholarship as well. I don’t mean to suggest an overly sentimental or technophilic notion of “but the computers feel, man!” – on the contrary, part of the point is that we can never know if computers feel or not, and we can guess that they don’t feel in the same ways that humans do (but, then again, neither can we guess that other animals feel in exactly the same ways that we do). Nevertheless, the fact that we recognize our participation in a reality where computers might feel, or might have some process that’s like feeling in some sense, means we have to ask much deeper ethical questions: should our behavior toward digital objects change as they become more advanced? If so, how and at what threshold of reactivity? Do we have any responsibility to maintain or archive data for its own sake rather than ours? While the games I’ve examined in this chapter present a domain to begin to think through these ethical questions – and do so in some impressively nuanced ways – they are only a starting point for a larger theoretical conversation. An object-oriented rhetoric will be prepared, on the basis of its understanding the object-based nature of reality, to assist in answering these questions. When beginning to discuss what we mean by consciousness, we have to allow for a broader definition that includes things other than humans – in a similar vein to the goals of posthumanism. These broadened definitions can challenge the underlying correlationist assumptions at work in current rhetorical thinking. A correlationist perspective makes it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile a notion of nonhuman consciousness worthy of equal consideration (regardless of the outcome of that consideration) because it insists that other things can only exist for us – that any object must first be given to be considered, and can only be considered in limited terms. The rejection of an independent reality that can exist on its own terms leads even the most well-intentioned correlationist into a paternalistic perspective in regards to nonhuman things, because those things aren’t part of a special group of privileged beings that can access that correlation. Even entertaining the idea of a nonhuman consciousness is at odds with a correlationist perspective, and given rhetoric’s investment in the good, it is necessary to break out of that frame. Object-oriented rhetoric attempts to broaden that conversation again. Object-orientation can do more to address the hard problem of consciousness than science can (because without measurable phenomena, science can do very little). One way to do this is to acknowledge the

81

fundamental withdrawal of objects, and so to acknowledge the possibility that consciousness may exist outside externally verifiable phenomena, but exist nonetheless. This isn’t to say that everything in the world is conscious (although Harman, as a pan-psychic, may argue just that); rather, it is to acknowledge the uncertainty of humans (or organic species, or only primates, or any other division) as the only conscious beings. The implication of the hard problem of consciousness is that our definitions of what constitutes consciousness may be inadequate – in the same way we can posit something that looks and acts human but doesn’t have the “awake” feeling that accompanies human consciousness, we can imagine the reverse: that there may be things which experience certain kinds of consciousness, but which we can’t access. The point of this discussion of consciousness is not to provoke anxiety or inaction (what if the programs on your hard drive are alive and reformatting it is murder), but rather to attempt to establish a new baseline for rhetorical considerations of pragmatic, ethical human action. Our understanding of neuroscience isn’t sufficient to explain how consciousness works, and may never be. When OOO theorists argue that objects also can’t fully know themselves, it’s this sentiment they seem to echo. If we can’t understand how consciousness arises (even if we can point to specific things that we believe are necessary for a very specific kind of human consciousness, and of course there’s debate about even that), then that creates a degree of uncertainty about how we should act. An object-oriented rhetoric attempts to supply us with some basic principles to resolve some moments of that uncertainty.

The Possibilities of OOR and Games Through my analyses of Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I have demonstrated how an OOR approach to gaming can help us to rethink rhetorical notions of consciousness, not only by representing alternate modes of being, but also by allowing us to experience those alternate modes of being metaphorically. Games present unique opportunities for object-oriented rhetoricians, especially those of us interested in investigating the connections between human and nonhuman consciousness and the practical effects of those connections. The intersection of OOO, game studies, and rhetoric is one that provides space for a variety of perspectives, facilitated by the games themselves in several important ways. First, video games help to make object-oriented situations evident. They rely on machine consciousness implicitly due to being built on software and hardware frameworks, and do so in

82

ways that allow players and critics to recognize their own relationships to the experiences of those software and hardware objects. More importantly, games can make the experiences of nonhuman objects visible to human players: although players’ decision-making may be based in symbol systems, they are nonetheless often aware of the non-discursive nature of their interaction with machines. Games teach players to recognize systems of feedback, which “mean” different things to machine and human interlocutors. Secondly, games can model complex material and ethical systems that draw attention to objects. Even with its flaws, a game like Deus Ex encourages players to consider the sprawling, interconnected, and fractured nature of reality through drawing attention to the power of human and nonhuman agency alike. Similarly, when Mass Effect asks players to consider the ethical ramifications of their interaction with nonhuman objects, it opens the door for more nuanced and developed thinking about their interaction with nonhuman objects in their own lives. With more input and involvement on the part of rhetoricians in the games industry (and in games criticism), designers can push these promises even further. Finally, video games allow designers to reach a wide audience who are clearly interested in exploring the interaction between human and nonhuman objects, even if the players themselves might not express their desires in those terms. In other words, games offer an opportunity to explore a worldview which decenters the human outside an academic setting, one wherein players are encouraged to – if only for a moment – set aside their static notions of being and embrace a world where humans and nonhumans alike have agency and a stake in reality. Whether in the classroom or in the industry, games present transformative possibilities; they merely need to be more fully realized and explicated.

83

Chapter Four: Humans Writing for Machines Writing for Humans: Metacritic, Exploitation, and Agency

In this chapter, I rely on object-oriented rhetoric to consider questions of human/machine collaboration from systemic, economic, and ethical perspectives. Specifically, I examine sites and practices regarding machine production and analysis of human-readable text, which I argue are a nexus of collaboration and contestation between machine and human authors. In particular, I focus on the videogame review site Metacritic, the most popular and comprehensive review aggregator for the medium. Because the videogame industry has largely accepted Metacritic as the de facto standard for reviews, and Metacritic’s review scores have significant influence over customer, publisher, and developer financial decisions, it presents a unique and productive site for examining rhetorical practices – not merely the practices of games journalists, industry professionals, publishers, and consumers, but also those of the nonhuman infrastructures and software objects involved in the review aggregation process. In other words, this chapter interrogates a networked intersection of human and machine rhetors in order to understand material, political, and economic realities resulting from nonhuman rhetorical action, especially within the videogame industry. I trace this network of associations from a perspective that includes the nonhuman rhetor of the Metacritic algorithm as a powerful contributor to a larger communication process. Although Metacritic is my initial case, it is also not the only such contested space, and it is my belief that conclusions about Metacritic can inform other machine/human collaborations. Ultimately, I argue that we should not approach machines’ reading or machines’ writing as a simple matter of whether humans can (or should) be replaced; rather, we should recognize the ubiquity and embeddedness of machine readers and writers in our lives, and consider how we can approach their difference in productive, ethical ways for better collaboration. I begin the chapter by situating this argument in the broader scholarly conversation surrounding games. Next, I turn toward Metacritic as a salient example of the way power is contested between various human and machine readers and authors. Within this analysis, I trace the network of associations surrounding Metacritic as a rhetorical agent: first, I examine the site itself, then discuss video game developers’ experiences with the site, focusing on the troubled release of Fallout: New Vegas in particular in order to illustrate the potential problems with

84

relying on Metacritic’s influence. I then interrogate video game journalists’ reservations and reactions against the site. Thereafter, I argue for object-oriented rhetoric’s vested interest in intervening in systems of machine authorship and reading – as part of the larger project of positioning nonhuman objects as rhetors in their own right. As examples, I turn toward machine- produced journalism and algorithmic music identification to demonstrate productive models of machine/human collaboration, demonstrating that these issues are not relegated solely to spaces in the videogame industry and that such networks need not be damaging. Finally, I specifically examine composition and rhetoric scholars’ engagement with machine reading, suggesting that our current approaches may reduce the complexity of such networks. Ultimately, I argue that machine writing, machine reading, human writing, and human reading each function as a site of rhetorical action with different affordances, constraints, and persuasive strategies, and that these unique contexts hold special promise for rhetoric and composition’s attention, especially in reconsidering the possibly productive potential of machine readers and writers as collaborators instead of competitors.

Developing an OOR Approach to Machine Readers/Writers As I have discussed in other areas of this project, much work has been done to position games as objects worthy of academic study, particularly in relation to rhetoric. For instance, researchers have claimed that we should see games as a media form with their own literacy practices (e.g., Aarseth; Alberti; Gee; Sabatino; Selfe and Hawisher). Others have focused on how the medium demands new methods of analysis (e.g., Chapman; Jones; Juul; Murray; Squire). Within composition and rhetoric, scholars have argued for the inclusion of games in composition curricula (e.g., Alexander; Colby and Colby; Jackson; Lamberti). However, very little scholarship has analyzed popular game criticism or examined the process by which that criticism reaches players, despite the fact that most players rely on this kind of information to make decisions about their own media experiences. This chapter partly serves as an initial foray into analyzing popular games criticism, specifically through the lens of OOR to demonstrate the utility of tracing a network of associations (Latour) and seeing nonhuman actors as important parts of that network. In the previous chapter, I used an object-oriented perspective to argue that games can be seen as nonhuman rhetors. In this chapter, I suggest that we can broaden that view to examine

85

game review aggregators as objects in their own right, with their own rhetorical power. This perspective helps to place games within their broader rhetorical ecology. Specifically, studying the Metacritic algorithm and its network of relations through an OOR lens extends games scholarship: since reviews and critical reception function as part of a media object’s paratext (Genette), OOR allows us to deeply examine the assemblage of actors surrounding the reception of games. As I argue below, Metacritic’s practice of providing singular numerical scores works against gamers’ ability to engage with a rich gaming ecology, which could better serve participants in the game industry (including game studies scholars). Through my analysis of Metacritic, I also aim to develop the discourse in OOO by looking at a machine author as a powerful agent in its network and situating human activity in reference to it. When Ian Bogost examines games as objects, he argues that object-orientation requires us to understand code-level decisions from the perspective of individual games, their machine logic, and their hardware structures (Alien Phenomenology 101-105). In my exploration of Metacritic, I extend this sense of structural examination from games to the methods by which games are presented to consumers. I effectively “zoom out” to the larger object of the industry, but still with an interest in the machine logic and hardware structures that rhetorically inform it. In other words, the work in this chapter contributes to the ongoing work within OOR to consider the agency of nonhuman actors, to recognize their specific rhetorical action, and to provide strategies for how humans might best relate to them. I also emphasize this reframing of human/machine interaction as a rhetorical interaction because of composition and rhetoric’s longstanding critique of machine reading of student essays. While I oppose the currently problematic deployment of such technologies, I believe this exploration of the network surrounding Metacritic can help our own field better consider analysis of relationships between human readers/writers and machine readers/writers in our local contexts; I return to this notion later in the chapter. For now, however, I begin with an OOR reading of Metacritic as one instance of practicing a kind of critical metaphorism, pointed toward building more ethical human/machine collaboration.

86

Why Metacritic? 13 In the following pages, I study the discourse surrounding Metacritic, the preeminent review aggregation website in the videogame industry. Specifically, I explore the economic and cultural effects of Metacritic: Why is Metacritic an industry standard in determining the quality (and financial reward) for games? What kinds of cultural and economic work is it doing in the games industry - to whose benefit and to whose detriment? Do stakeholders believe the site represents public opinion and aesthetic judgments about games accurately? Do developers, journalists, producers, and consumers think about Metacritic differently? How might the site be improved to better serve the interests of its stakeholders? Does the site privilege the rhetorical work of machines (specifically, calculating review scores) over that done by humans (in individual reviews), and if so, what does that mean for the games industry? Metacritic is a site that collects and organizes data from a variety of other sources. News aggregators, for instance, collect streams of news stories from multiple media outlets and present their headlines on a single page in order to “centralize” a user’s news, for ease of access. Aggregators intend to make user experiences more convenient, and often function as portals to the original content. In the case of Metacritic, the site collects professional (and, to a lesser extent, amateur) reviews for films, television, and video games. Notably, Metacritic differs from other aggregators in its proprietary “Metascore,” an attempt to provide a singular numerical value representing the quality of a media product. As the site puts it, “Metacritic's three founding members—all former attorneys … launched the site ... to reflect their experience distilling many critics' voices into the single Metascore, a weighted average of the most respected critics writing reviews online and in print” (“About Us”). Although a single numerical score, at first, seems the most straightforward and useful metric for measuring quality, the Metacritic algorithm’s method for doing so has been controversial within the industry. The process of working with human journalistic output and collating it into a singular score has garnered significant attention within the video game industry in particular, and perhaps because of this attention, Metacritic has felt it necessary to outline what this work entails: “Creating our proprietary Metascores is a complicated process. We carefully curate a large group

13 For clarity, in the remainder of the chapter, when I refer simply to “Metacritic,” I mean the company or the website. When I refer to “Metacritic’s algorithm” or “the algorithm,” I mean the machine logic by which Metascores are produced. 87

of the world’s most respected critics, assign scores to their reviews, and apply a weighted average to summarize the range of their opinions. The result is a single number that captures the essence of critical opinion in one Metascore” (“How We Create the Metascore Magic”). Metacritic seems to argue that this “complicated” process removes the ambiguity from judging the quality of media objects and instead offers users a “simple” alternative to that complex intellectual work (See Figure 6). They focus on the respectability of their chosen critics and the complexity of the algorithm they deploy for laying bare the “critical opinion” of major journalistic outlets. (While users can contribute to Metacritic’s site, their votes are not included in the calculation of a Metascore.)

Figure 6. Metacritic’s creators explain the algorithm’s power to simplify.

The site’s curators “assign more importance, or weight, to some critics and publications than others, based on their quality and overall stature” (“How We Create the Metascore Magic”). The specifics of these decisions, and the ways they’re applied to individual media types, are unclear. Metacritic does point out that the actual work of creating a Metascore is done by a computer and not by its site administrators: “When you tell a computer to compute the average of B+, 45, 5, and *****, it just looks at you funny and gives an error message. When you tell a computer to compute the average of 83, 45, 50, and 10, it is much, much happier” (“Frequently Asked Questions”). In other words, Metacritic converts all reviews to a percentage scale in order to include them in calculations. This conversion usually means collapsing reviews that use any other metric into a 100-point scale to arrive at a more granular number – for instance, a review that gives a product a grade of “B” is read as “80” in calculating the Metascore.

88

This response suggests some level of transparency; however, the specifics of determining what an “A-” might be or how other review metrics might specifically translate are left ambiguous. Similarly, and perhaps most importantly, Metacritic conceals its judgment on what constitutes a “respected” media outlet and to what degree that respect translates to weight within the average. On the frequently asked questions page, they clearly explain their lack of transparency: “Q. Can you tell me how each of the different critics are weighted in your formula? A. Absolutely not” (“Frequently Asked Questions”). This unwillingness to disclose the algorithm’s method has led to serious misgivings about its function as a force in the games industry, especially given its increasing power as an agent to construct the economic climate and to make or break individual games and their development studios. Of particular importance to this project is the question of whether (and how much) agency over Metascores belongs to humans and how much to machines. Given the lack of transparency in Metacritic’s other areas, it’s not clear whether all review scores are always interpreted individually by a machine or sometimes by a human agent, although with Metacritic’s emphasis on machine reading, either (or both) could be true. Whether their interpretations are assigned by a human or machine agent, Metacritic’s website makes it clear that even scoreless reviews are included as part of the Metascore calculation: “For those critics who do not provide a score, we'll assign a score from 0-100 based on the general impression given by the review” (“Frequently Asked Questions”). Although this page suggests the involvement of a human agent (“we assign”), a separate page explaining the Metacritic algorithm leaves users with the impression that critics’ reviews are merely fed into a computer, which then “distills” them into a single aggregate score (“How We Create”; See Figure 7). In other words, there seems to be some contradiction in the way Metacritic’s designers position the algorithm as under the power of primarily human or machine agency. From an OOR perspective, the writers’ Figure 7. A "visual representation" of the algorithm.

89

seeming contradiction may actually indicate some lurking knowledge of the distributed nature of their agency in the score creation process; they may recognize that they are not fully in control of the algorithm’s behavior. As previously mentioned, the Metacritic company holds its algorithm as a closely guarded secret. Essentially, all that they make public is their reliance on “respected” critics and the use of a 100-point scale; everything else is guesswork. However, despite the opaqueness of the Metascore creation process, it’s still clear that the algorithm has agency and plays an important role. The designers, at least as they present themselves on the Metacritic website, position themselves as the true authorities behind the machine’s work - everything is written in first person plural, with the implication clearly being that only human work is being performed, with the algorithm as a convenient tool. However, relying on an object-oriented lens, I suggest that the algorithm itself is a key agent in control, and its designers are as just as beholden to it as are others within the games industry. In other words, with my claims that Metacritic is a powerful agent, I don’t simply mean that the Metacritic company alone has that power; rather, I mean that the algorithm itself is an agent that makes judgments based on criteria that don’t necessarily map onto the same criteria that a human reader would use. And, not being human, the Metacritic algorithm expresses different values and capacities than its designers -- or than its designers might intend. Fundamentally, the Metacritic algorithm is the center of its own network – and the actor with more rhetorical agency – not its designers. However, my claim here is not that the differing capacities and values of a machine (as compared to a human) inherently necessitate its omission from the review process. Instead, my intention is to demonstrate how the Metacritic algorithm, in its current state, serves as a cautionary tale of the damaging potential of runaway power in the hands of nonhuman collaborators. In fact, this state of affairs suggests a moment for OOR to intervene and to reconsider the unequal power balance in this network. That is to say, we can engage with Metacritic’s algorithm on its own terms.14 The Metacritic algorithm’s view of the world can be represented through a metaphoric relationship to its data: the algorithm sees reviews like numbers. By beginning with and keeping in mind this simple fact, we can try to understand its

14 Specifically, here I am advocating something close to Ian Bogost’s concept of metaphorism (as discussed in depth in previous chapters), which he outlines as a way to recognize and attempt to grasp the withdrawn experience of nonhuman objects. 90

perspective. Do we value numbers? Do we value numbers more than other data? The answer to the first question is, of course, yes. The answer to the second question depends on context, and Metacritic does not seem to understand context. This leads to the question: is it possible to build a collaborator that might understand context? If we attempt to understand Metacritic’s algorithm from its own perspective, we can then understand how its flattening scores into a simplified number is a necessary consequence of its capacities, and that we can envision ways to broaden those capacities. My point is that empathizing with the algorithm is only the first step in an OOR attempt to address the larger problem, but it is an important first step: attempting to understand how all actors within the network approach their realities. In other words, the object-oriented concept of metaphorism allows us to trace the key actors and to see their values, then to judge those values based on whether they bring us closer to what we want the network to accomplish. While the algorithm, by its nature, privileges numbers, humans in the industry see game reviews in other terms. The algorithm is intended “to help consumers make an informed decision about how to spend their time and money on entertainment” (“About Us”) through providing consumers with an easily digestible number rather than a surfeit of individual reviews. The site argues that “multiple opinions are better than one, user voices can be as important as critics, and opinions must be scored to be easy to use” (“About Us”). This last claim - that reviews must be scored to be usable - has prompted practices and arguments within the video game industry that make Metacritic’s influence so deeply felt. The site has become a standard for judging game quality amongst publishers, often tied to specific financial rewards and punishments, and shaping the reactions of consumers, journalists, and developers as a result.

The Metacritic Algorithm as Networked Rhetor I rely on an object-oriented approach throughout this reading of Metacritic’s algorithm and the network it supports, because I believe OOR can help clarify the rhetorical action of the algorithm - its agency as a rhetor with its own perspectives and values. Within that framework, and as part of tracing the ecology surrounding the algorithm, it’s necessary to examine its effects - in this case, the real financial effects it has on the industry. As a site that has far-reaching effects within the videogame industry, Metacritic and its algorithm influence the lives of a wide variety of stakeholders, but none in such a measurable financial way as game developers. The games industry, like other media industries, typically relies on producers in order to create a

91

product. Development companies usually include programmers, artists, sound engineers, and managers (often former programmers, artists, or sound engineers themselves); they don’t often include business people or liquid assets. So, developers court production companies to obtain funding to develop a product, which the producers then arrange to market and sell.15 The result is that the developers receive a cut of the profits, can pay their salaries, and can re-invest in further development. For many years, that process was a relatively stable one. Certainly there were contract disputes, and in the case of major flops, development companies sometimes folded. Recently, however, the terms of developer contracts have begun to change. The site Gamasutra, which covers the business side of the games industry, published an article in 2012 detailing a contract agreement (for a franchise of games) between developer Bungie and their publisher Activision: “Bungie has to make good on each release and if they do they will be contractually granted an additional $2.5 million dollar bonus if the game gets a 90 or above on Metacritic” (Curtis). In other words, without reaching a specific point of approval within Metacritic’s ranking system, Bungie would receive only their initial (presumably lower) payment.16 Given Bungie’s overwhelming success with previous games (the best-selling Halo series, especially), the company is likely to remain afloat financially even without making the Metascore required for a bonus. Other developers, however, are not so lucky, and the practice of attaching payment to performance on Metacritic is increasingly common. For instance, the game developer Obsidian relied on a similar (if somewhat harsher) contract for its game Fallout: New Vegas, released in 2012. As technology news outlet Engadget put it: Business sucks, alright? It's cold and rigid and occasionally unfair. Such is the case with Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas contract with Bethesda, wherein the developer only received royalties if the game matched or exceeded an 85 rating on Metacritic. … Unfortunately for Obsidian, Fallout: New Vegas currently has a

15 Here I’m describing the “independent” model of game development, where developers work with different studios on different projects. Some developers have more permanent relationships with publishers - that is, they’re owned by them. For most purposes, this relationship is similar, since major publishers often shut down unproductive in-house developers. The takeaway is that game development is a precarious existence. 16 As of this writing, the game in question, Destiny, has a 76 Metascore. 92

Metacritic average of 84, a single point below the average that would've earned the company royalties on its product. (Gilbert) Rather than merely attaching performance to a financial bonus, Obsidian missed out on the significantly more important revenue of royalties for Fallout: New Vegas. As a result, the studio found itself in a dire financial situation and was forced to cancel at least one project and lay off a significant percentage of its staff (Usher, “Obsidian’s Chris Avellone Talks”). Avellone has remained fairly stoic and reserved in his reaction to New Vegas missing its target score by one point, but has occasionally aired his opinions on the problems with the scoring mechanism: “Usually, my issue with Metacritic is that the review scores across sites can be wildly inconsistent (50% being average for X publication, for example, which can certainly torpedo a score)” (Usher). Obsidian has also recently moved away from traditional publishing pipelines, opting instead to fund their latest game through the crowdfunding site . In terms of their relationship to publishers in more traditional arrangements, Avellone says that the studio has “a general whenever we're talking to different publishers now: we don't do anything that has to do with Metacritic,” thereby sidestepping the problematic relationship of publishing in an industry increasingly focused on Metascores. This move toward the Metascore as the standard for contracts and remuneration has prompted a more vocal response from game journalists themselves, whose reviews are being collected for the production of those scores. While developers seem to have largely chosen to keep their heads down and seek other avenues for success (in Avellone’s case, at least), games journalists have gone on record to point out what they see as problems with Metacritic’s power.17 For instance, journalist and author Leigh Alexander argues that for media, “I generally think is a ridiculous notion” (“Scoring Sentimentality”). Alexander points to the problems inherent in the games industry in particular, where she argues that fans develop a personal attachment to their opinions and want to see them validated as though they were objective truth. I would argue that part of that impulse is reinforced by Metacritic, given that the site purports to distill reviews to a singular opinion in the form of a numerical score. In other words, from an OOR perspective, the algorithm is facilitating the simplification of conversation because

17 While I would locate that power with the algorithm itself, journalists usually refer to the company; I complicate that notion below. 93

simplification is its only available means of relating to data. Rather than allowing humans within the system of reviews, marketing, and publishing in the industry to arrive at their own conclusions, the Metacritic algorithm provides a conclusion for them based on an opaque and somewhat arbitrary system. Metacritic’s algorithm is, in effect, encouraging people in the gaming community to adopt its own logic of objective measures of quality rather than encouraging them to engage in complex, nuanced dialogue about games’ particular strengths and weaknesses. In a way, it is influencing the industry’s rhetorical action by collapsing the conversation about game quality to a single number and effacing the underlying complexity. A mutually beneficial relationship between the humans in the video game industry and Metacritic would look very different. In essence, when Metacritic’s algorithm collapses reviewers’ opinions into a single number, it effaces the human labor of those reviewers in favor of the machine’s computational labor. In other cases, this effacing might be useful, perhaps even desirable. For instance, we might not want to know about the comments in the code - the vestiges of human hands - of our spreadsheet program; we merely want the program to effectively total a column. In the case of the games industry, however, human stakeholders have a vested interest in continuing to be aware of the multiple sources of opinion. That is, removing the personal, individual perspective from reviews decouples them from their purpose, which is to provide a consumer with many voices, not just one. In other words, Metacritic’s algorithm does the work that journalists within the industry would encourage consumers to do: arriving at a form of consensus, and doing so as a way to determine the quality of a product. As Alexander writes, “I think for the most part the most interesting work in gaming culture gets done when we let go of this distant idea of games as only product; they are so personal, so subjective, so experiential” (“Scoring”). Because the Metacritic algorithm cannot understand this human experiential quality, because it is an object fundamentally withdrawn from that kind of sensation, Metacritic encourages an instrumental, capitalist system to develop further, not only by collapsing the nuance of journalist’s reviews, but also by placing those reviews in a network easily exploited by publishers (often at developers’ expense). While Alexander admits that “there are aspects of a game that are governed by quality rules,” she nevertheless argues that the impulse to assign essential numerical values to games collapses the distinction between not liking a product and declaring that product not good. Additionally, Alexander notes that the sampling for Metacritic’s scores - apart from being a

94

limited, weighted sample - also only capture the opinions of those people who are writing reviews. In her feed, she notes that “Metacritic is often led by the writers with the least experience, because most of us would rather move to features/editorial.” In other words, Metacritic’s curation draws only from reviews, which are often written by the least seasoned journalists, or by freelance journalists – further distancing Metascores from accuracy (assuming any kind of objective accuracy could exist in the first place). My claim is essentially this: the Metacritic algorithm is not a problem because it relies on computation to arrive at a number nearly everyone realizes is flawed because it erases the nuance of the criticism that creates that number; rather, Metacritic is a problem because the algorithm is a bad collaborator within the games industry. From an object-oriented perspective, in other words, we can reimagine the relationship between the human and nonhuman rhetors as just that - a rhetorical relationship, with the same components as other rhetorical contexts. Within that framework, because the machine logic doesn’t value the same things as its human interlocutors - artistry, complexity, understandability - it cannot contribute in an effective and ethical way to the conversation surrounding game reviews. It can only provide one thing - a number - as a way to supplant that conversation. Unfortunately for the financial and artistic health of the industry, Metacritic and its algorithm have come to dominate the conversation in a way that has changed the nature of that conversation. Rather than relying on the site as one contributor, as one agent with an opinion on “what game should I buy” or “what are the most interesting games released recently,” Metacritic instead threatens to eclipse all other sources of input. I’m not suggesting that the algorithm is somehow evil and is out to destroy the games industry; I take its designers seriously when they claim that they wanted to provide consumers with a better, more manageable media experience. Instead, I think that the Metacritic algorithm was created to respond to a particular set of questions, and has done exactly that, whether or not those questions were actually the most productive ones to ask. That is, I am claiming that Metacritic’s designers initially created an algorithm, and (following an object-oriented perspective) after the moment of creation, that algorithm has worked on its own to help operationalize and normalize the most financially-motivated (and often anti-creative) elements of the video game industry. It has contributed to the continued emergence of a reductive, sometimes exploitive system, despite whatever original intentions its designers may have had. Because the designers created a machine logic only capable of a limited set of behavior, and because they

95

were themselves limited by the network they were part of and the technology available to them, when the algorithm emerged from that complexity, it took on a “life” of its own and began to build and interact with the network it was now part of. Essentially, I believe that the algorithm does this work apart from its designers, having created a network that reinvigorates itself with new game releases and reviews. Again, while this relationship between Metacritic and the industry is ultimately reciprocal, with various journalistic outlets receiving bumps in traffic and publishers receiving higher sales based on high scores, it is not necessarily positive. IGN journalist Keza MacDonald discusses this concept of the industry’s health and Metacritic’s responsibility. She takes a system-level view of the site’s influence, pointing to the variety of stakeholders affected: Ideas – we’re talking creative ideas about what to put in a new game, here - are pitched and green-lit based on how they might affect a projected Metacritic rating. PR people are evaluated on how effectively they’re doing their jobs by looking at the aggregate number they’ve managed to ‘achieve’ for games they’re publicising. (“Is Metacritic Ruining the Games Industry?”) Although MacDonald echoes some of Alexander’s concerns about the state of journalistic contribution to the algorithm’s aggregation (as MacDonald puts it, there are “varying standards of professionalism”), she ultimately takes issue with Metacritic’s claims to objectivity and repeatability. “You can’t average out opinions,” she writes, arguing that the problem with a singular metric for measuring quality erodes the complexity of the process: “It punishes divisive games – and honestly, most interesting things are at least a bit divisive” (“Is Metacritic”). The problem, she claims, is the Metacritic algorithm’s fundamental operation: “it’s a number, an easily quantifiable value. You can put it in front of anyone and they will understand what it means.” MacDonald argues that Metacritic creates a system whereby complexity is presented as simplicity, and this system creates inequality for its participants. MacDonald’s reading also seems to point to the algorithm as an agent; although she takes issue with some of the specific individuals involved in its creation and use, her problem is ultimately with the action of the software itself, again reminiscent of an object-oriented perspective. In other words, she appears to recognize that on some level, Metacritic’s algorithm is acting on its own to perpetuate a system she can’t extricate herself from. The site is both creating and reifying problematic assumptions and stances within the industry.

96

While MacDonald sees herself as trapped within a system that the algorithm controls, Adam Sessler, a media consultant and games journalist, is interested in ways industry participants can understand Metacritic in order to work more effectively with it. He discusses attending a Metacritic panel at the Game Developer’s Conference “that tried to dissect what the weighting is that comes up with a Metacritic score. … I don’t know who’s right or wrong in this. [Employees of] Metacritic did acknowledge that there is some weighting that goes to various sites over others, but that people on the panel had gotten it wrong, ‘missing the forest for the trees’” (“The Real Problem with Metacritic”). The problem, he says, is not that Metacritic exists, but rather that it wields such financial power over success in the industry: “That doesn’t seem right, that my opinion … can somehow go into something that’s mathematical that then in turn doesn’t give someone the paycheck that they deserve.” Sessler seems to take issue with the idea that subjective writing is fed into a system that supposes to make it an objective calculation. An object-oriented perspective would complicate Sessler’s critique: he overlooks the fact that the algorithm has no choice but to perform those functions, and so the fault is not with Metacritic’s algorithm itself but with a system that supports the subjective to “objective” transformation as a valid and reliable metric for measuring success. Sessler does acknowledge that the industry has, in a way, asked for a metric like the Metascore in order to provide more easily accessible information about reviews, noting that “we’ve created this monster.” With this suggestion, Sessler appears to be talking about the algorithm, but I would complicate this statement. Sessler, other journalists, consumers, Metacritic as a company, and the hardware and software infrastructure have all taken part in creating the monster: a system that values only certain types of data. He also argues that Metacritic’s limited sample size of “predominantly white men who play video games for a living” poses serious questions about whether the algorithm - even if it does present scores accurately - is truly of any value. Sessler has a background in television work, and he compares Metacritic to the Neilsen rating system in that industry, referring to it as “the god that ruled [his] life.” It’s in this comparison that he begins to articulate an object-oriented reading of Metacritic, working from the recognition that the site’s relationship with humans in the game industry is withdrawn. He describes his relationship with the Neilsen system as “anxious” and as “something I could not understand and I definitely couldn’t control.” Sessler seems to adopt the perspective that, with the unequal power differential involved, even a partial understanding of

97

the algorithm’s workings remain out of reach; importantly, he doesn’t appear to mind that Metacritic is responding to a desire in the industry, but that its work promotes an unethical and unintelligible environment. Journalists and developers alike seem to agree that the issue with Metacritic isn’t that it collects and aggregates review data. It isn’t even that the aggregator serves a fundamental economic function within the games industry. In fact, according to Sessler, such a function is a necessary one in order to provide some grounding for consumers. The issue at the heart of journalists’ and developers’ concerns with Metacritic instead seems to be a disconnect between what information the algorithm provides (or emphasizes) and what information the participants in the games industry most value. How, then, might we as object-oriented rhetoricians (and, at least in my case, as people who care about the health of the games industry) respond to these issues? I suggest that we take much the same action we would with any other unhelpful collaborator. When faced with bad human collaborators, we either remove ourselves from the collaborative relationship or attempt to change the nature of that collaboration to more mutual benefit.18 In the case of Metacritic, I would suggest some combination of the two approaches. In an attempt to change the nature of the collaboration, rhetoric can apply its expertise with human relationships - making arguments to publishers, developers, journalists, and consumers alike to address their particular reasons for continuing to be a part of the system Metacritic supports, and to increase their awareness of the site’s faults. From the nonhuman direction, we need to engage in and encourage the practice of rhetorical carpentry. In Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost discusses carpentry as a method to understand and operationalize object experiences, arguing that “philosophy is a practice as much as a theory” (92). In practicing philosophy (or rhetoric), we need to be prepared to create objects that operationalize a positive relationship to our values. This is not to say that the objects “share” our values; rather, that we “must contend with the material resistance of [our] chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy” (Bogost 93). In other words, our creative practices can utilize an object’s translative potential (a general principle of Bogost’s metaphoric approach) to demonstrate our rhetorical positions, through collaboration with that object -

18 I don’t mention the option of simply continuing to work with a bad collaborator because of extenuating circumstances, although that does sometimes happen. I would rather remain optimistic about the possibility of bettering the situation. 98

although that translation and collaboration require constant rhetorical work. Basically, I’m suggesting we can create objects that express particular values that, through the rhetorical functions the objects perform, reveal something about the withdrawn essence of those values. For instance, we might create a website that operationalizes complexity and multivocality in much the same way as Metacritic’s algorithm emphasizes supposed simplicity. Such an object would metaphorically relate those complexity back to us (although the essence of that value would, being translated through the material of the object, remain withdrawn). If we value an ethical, less exploitive relationship in the games industry, we must approach creating a different object as part of that process, recognizing that “objects do affect one another, do enter into causal relations with each other, do somehow nurture or damage each other in every instant” (Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics 72), and after their creation, they affect each other without our intervention. In other words, we need to create a system that better operationalizes the values we want it to embody, by first tracing the experience of the Metacritic algorithm as an agent, and then reimagining how that agency might be reformed. With that work complete, we can envision (and might even be able to build) an interlocutor that can care about and make use of other data beyond simple averages. One way we might imagine engaging in that creative process is through sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, is a developing field in computing that creates programs that read and organize writing. An outgrowth of natural language processing, sentiment analysis uses a corpus of data to arrive at some conclusions about opinions, thoughts, , attitudes, etc. about some event, product, or experience (Medhat, Hassan, & Korashy 1094). Sentiment analysis tracks certain words, phrases, and syntactical constructions in order to arrive as some basic conclusions about a group’s thoughts. For instance, researchers might use sentiment analysis to scour Twitter for responses to a movie on the day of its release, looking for associated hashtags or the name of the film. From that dataset, they would look for word frequency. Researchers would see what the most frequent words are, be able to see them in context, and make some judgments about the film’s response. Meanwhile, the program itself would check those words against a list to arrive at some guess as to whether the response was generally positive or negative. In other words, sentiment analysis uses a computer to provide some sense of what people might think about a given thing.

99

My suggestion here is not that rhetoricians necessarily learn to build programs that perform sentiment analysis (although that would be ideal); rather, I argue that we need to be involved in the production of those programs and develop the methods by which they can be used accurately, practically, and ethically. We have a vested interest in producing ethical systems of (human and machine) labor – systems that devalue neither the human nor nonhuman participants – and sentiment analysis may allow us to do so. If the Metacritic algorithm worked through opinion mining rather than collapsing reviews into single numerical representations, at least some of the nuance of those reviews would be retained, rather than the current system that privileges a few digits at the expense of the work of games journalists, and to the detriment of game developers and consumers. Obviously, such a system would not be perfect. However, part of our field’s work is to constantly interrogate the expressed and acted values of systems, to be attentive to ways they might improve, and to analyze their underlying warrants. In the case of Metacritic as it exists now, those warrants seem to be at odds with the goals and values of the games industry writ large: it is rhetoric’s responsibility to intervene.

Our Very Own Metacritic: Machine Reading in Composition While Metacritic and its algorithm have sway within the games industry, similar machine actors are increasingly part of the network of teaching writing in our local contexts. As a result of this continually developing relationship, and viewing Metacritic’s algorithm as one example of how such a relationship might proceed, compositionists have a vested interest in thinking critically (and in an OOR fashion) about machines that read human-produced text and that make judgments about that text’s content and value. Here, I’m specifically referring to machine- assisted or automatic essay scoring. As a field, composition and rhetoric has a rich history of considering machines’ involvement in networks that produce and receive writing. As early as 1968, there was discussion of machines being used to read student writing, in a report written by Ellis Page and Dieter Paulus, and sponsored by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Office of Education. The response to the report, published in an issue of Research in College English released the next year, was not particularly kind. Ken Macrorie argued that the kind of assessment Page and Paulus had outlined moved composition instruction back to the bad old days, the days that had students writing stale themes and instructors focusing on : “Rating the writing involved making distinctions between papers without distinction. And no one

100

has ever done well at that job. The teachers did badly, and Page and Paulus talked the computer into doing the job just as badly” (232). Macrorie saw this move to machine reading as potentially disastrous, as it destroyed the students’ possibility to produce lively, interesting writing, forcing them to cater to a machine that could only read essays of a certain kind.19 Macrorie’s response, years earlier, seems to have set the tone for the conversation in the field. While a small number of scholars and reports advocated the use of computers in at least a limited sense, as methods to check style and correctness within essays (Kelly; Roy, “Evaluating Placement Exams” and “Computerized Scoring”; Shermis and Barrera), most researchers in composition approached the idea with ambivalence at best, and more often outright hostility. In a review of machine readers in 2001, Herrington and Moran voiced their “serious concerns” (495) about the ventures, citing several issues, but chiefly the lack of an adequately developed rhetorical context: As we wrote to the machine, writing became reduced, degraded, just a demonstration, not words that might have an impact on another person and in some small way change the world. An institution that adopts the machine reading of student writing sends its students two messages: human readers are unreliable, quirky, expensive, and finally irrelevant; and students' writing only in a very narrow range: its length, its vocabulary, its correctness, or its congruence with the of a semantic space. (497) Like Macrorie, Herrington and Moran argue that machine reading was an untenable solution that reified many of the problems it attempted to address. Similarly, Wolcott and Legg echoed these sentiments, although they seemed to recognize the increasingly real (and perhaps inevitable) encroachment of computers in reading and evaluating student writing. Although they argued against machine readers in general, they advocated a strategy whereby “teachers can

19 The conversation begun by Macrorie was mostly dormant for nearly two decades afterward. The rise of the personal computer, in the 1980s and early 1990s, invigorated the field’s approach to computers. Some writers engaged with assessment directly (e.g., Hawisher; Huot; Lunsford; Sirc and Bridwell-Bowles); however, much of the scholarship surrounding computers in the writing process focused on differing strategies for instructors to evaluate digitally-produced work (e.g.,Hilligoss and Selfe; Kirkpatrick; Takayoshi). This scholarship tended to focus on the new affordances and constraints offered by writing in a digital medium, emphasizing the new potentials for collaboration and decentering instructor authority in the evaluation process – undoubtedly an important moment in defining computers and composition as a field, and a valuable contribution to the development of composition and rhetoric’s role in the university broadly. However, it wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s that compositionists revisited the prospect of machine-reading essays with significant attention, at a point when such programs started making their way into the university and high schools. 101

nonetheless push strongly for human scorers so that computers, with their mechanical counting of syllables and words, do not become substitutes” for humans (177). In other words, for Wolcott and Legg, machine reading may be inevitable, but humans have a responsibility to be involved somewhere in the process. Current attitudes toward machine readers have remained largely consistent: machine readers are seen as the enemy of good composition practices, teaching students to write in a rhetorical vacuum and to focus on surface correctness rather than complex thinking, and this sense of machines as a poor audience for student writing has been demonstrated publicly. For instance, in Doug Hesse’s 2005 CCCC chair’s address, he used a program to first automatically generate, then automatically score, an essay, demonstrating that what is written by a machine – although effectively unintelligible – was read favorably by a similar machine (339-341). More recently, in 2013, a discussion on the WPA listserv resulted in a petition to draw attention to the practice of automatic essay scoring, eventually culminating in a site that articulates a position on the practice, humanreaders.org. The site makes its position very clear: “Let's face the realities of automatic essay scoring. Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others” (“Human Readers”). Like Hesse, the petitioners accuse automatic essay reading of a litany of problematic practices, arguing that it “rat[es] essays only on surface features such as word size, topic vocabulary, and essay length” and that it “discriminat[es] against minority groups and second-language writers” (“Human Readers”), among others reasons. Fundamentally, I agree with the organizers of the petition and with others in the field’s history: computers cannot read in the same ways humans can. They are currently incapable of valuing the same things that compositionists value in writing. I also agree with Hesse’s problems with machine scoring: that it serves to reduce writing to an acontextual, nonrhetorical activity and that it separates the writing task from any kind of further purpose, especially in the sense that a machine doesn’t respond to this kind of written persuasion (341-342). However, from an OOR perspective, I do wonder if our approach to machine reading has been one that too simply emphasizes a binary - where there are machines on one side and human readers on another - framing us as advocates for students and the machines as their unfeeling enemies.

102

I wonder if we can reconsider the challenges and contributions of machine readers as formative rather than antagonistic, by recognizing the perspective of machines as unique readers with their own sets of values – values that we must be involved in negotiating and recognizing. In other words, from an object-oriented perspective, I additionally realize that this sense of machines as “bad readers” is itself reductive, preventing us from engaging in a more productive and potentially rewarding relationship with them as collaborators. Rather than seeing machine assisted scoring as an enemy of compositionists, I suggest that we can use OOR as a lens to see its potential as one agent in the writing process. We certainly care about writing assessment as a field, and if machines are going to be involved in that process, we need to be sure that they are part of a supportive and productive network of relations. Ultimately, I believe we can apply the same strategies and principles I outline in response to Metacritic’s problems, dividing our efforts between both human and nonhuman persuasion. Given the support of some administrators and lawmakers, we can make our case for the importance of developing a useful model for machine reading before implementing it – essentially, “we shouldn’t do this until it’s ready” – while at the same time working with programmers to make sure that some of our values (if not, ideally, all of them) make their way into such a system. Drawing on an OOR approach, I believe that our assessment of machine reading should be one that recognizes the power of the objects themselves to act, treating them as collaborators rather than as frustrating impediments to our work, with the understanding that we must constantly negotiate and renegotiate how they deploy that power. A pervasive (and currently, understandable) is that, if machines are given too much power over reading and evaluating human writing, they’ll badly perform the same tasks we perform. Metacritic is a cautionary tale that demonstrates just such a relationship, but part of my goal in undertaking the preceding analysis of Metacritic is to demonstrate that things20 are more complicated. Creating a productive network first relies on a frank assessment of our own partial experience of reality. In general, human readers are good at looking at some moments in context, but we tend to focus on some details to the exclusion of others. Computers, however, attribute no special value to any one piece of data by default, and while that can be a problem in some

20 I mean “things” here both in the sense of “the current state of affairs” and in the sense of “objects.” 103

contexts, we can productively collaborate with that capacity as a way to support and complicate our own hierarchical methods of reading. Recently, work at the intersection of the digital humanities and digital rhetoric (Hart; Hoffman and Waisanen) has recognized the affordances offered by computer-assisted text analysis and natural language processing, arguing that it can be a research tool as well as (or perhaps, currently, better than) an evaluative one. Text analysis and natural language processing are useful for working with large datasets to render patterns and trends, but they are not successful at evaluating individual student projects. Text mining can put to use the fact that computers don’t read for “meaning” in the same ways a human reader does and can make judgments about importance via proximity and frequency in ways human readers can’t, since human readers focus on symbolic action rather than seeing language as more ordinary data. For instance, in assessment, we might look at computer-identified frequency and proximity of words or phrases as ways to gain perspective on concepts students value; we might look at indices of sentence complexity to make claims about changes in student writing over semesters or through their undergraduate careers; or we might use sentiment analysis to help determine student attitudes toward the subjects about which they write. Of course, I hasten to add that even the advocates of text mining other methods of computer-aided textual analysis make clear that this is not a “one size fits all” solution; we value human intellectual labor, and machines should support those values, not eclipse them. Still, though, I believe we have much to learn from productive, ethical collaborations between rhetoricians and machine authors. Can we not see machines as a way to do better at the tasks we do badly? Can we not see them as a contributor that looks for and values different things than we do, and also acknowledge that those things may have value for writing? In other words, can we not acknowledge their contributions as we might acknowledge the contributions of another reader when evaluating, carefully considering their positionality, their in reading, and their faculties?

Counterexamples: Other Digital Systems Although it has been the focus of this chapter thus far, Metacritic is only one example of a space wherein machines have significant control over human-read output of information. As I mentioned previously, I believe Metacritic provides a localized and contextualized example that can contribute to investigations of other such spaces – ones that affect rhetoric and composition’s

104

practices in potentially more immediately measurable ways, especially programmatically and financially. I include the examples below in order to emphasize that, while we can learn valuable lessons from the ways Metacritic’s algorithm fails to value its human collaborators, we can also learn from existing, more ethical systems. The following networks, rather than being reductive or exploitive, can serve as models of more reciprocal, nuanced, and generally productive human/machine collaborations. In one instance of a more productive and collaborative relationship, machines have begun to work as journalists. A recent NPR story detailed a competition between an NPR contributor and a program called WordSmith, which automatically produces human-readable text. Each writer was challenged to compose a story detailing the quarterly financial earnings for the restaurant company Denny’s. NPR’s coverage of the competition focused on two elements: readability (in terms of interesting prose, especially) and time. Unsurprisingly, the human author produced a story that was more stylistically interesting (at least from my perspective; it included a few puns on Denny’s menu offerings, paired with the financial data), but the machine performed more quickly (Smith, “An NPR Reporter Raced a Machine”). The program that produced the Denny’s story was created by software company Automated Insights, and within the past year, the Associated Press has deployed WordSmith to take over the often “monotonous and stressful” task of writing quarterly earnings reports (Miller). However, the AP claims that this automated text production has not resulted in any job losses; rather, the goal is “freeing up writers to think more critically about the bigger picture” (Miller).21 That is, the Associated Press is automating tasks that computers excel at: reading, processing, and delivering information that requires little high-level interpretation or abstract conceptual work. Meanwhile, AP business reporters are focusing on lateral thinking, complex associations, and contextualizing – the things humans do better. In other words, the relationship the AP has developed between its machine authors and its human authors is productive; it recognizes the unique agency of WordSmith to accomplish specific tasks and the agency of humans to accomplish others. While neither the AP nor Automated Insights explicitly articulate the relationship between human and machine authors as

21 I’m not naïve enough to assume this stance on employment will always be the case, but I do think it noteworthy that the AP has articulated its reallocation of human writers in a way that emphasizes their critical thinking ability as compared to machines. 105

a collaboration, it certainly appears the AP is interested in developing one. From an OOR perspective, explicitly recognizing the rhetorical power of the machine author to perform in specific ways, and seeking to understand its perspective in that process, could allow for an even more beneficial network to form; for instance, the program could point human reporters toward data that seems to form a pattern, leaving it to human judgment as to whether that pattern is noteworthy. Essentially, the AP has begun to leverage this collaboration, but through also exploring the program’s position and context in more concrete ways – by treating it as a rhetor with its own unique capabilities – it could be developed further. In another context, the app Shazam offers an example of a productive collaboration between human and machine rhetors, this time primarily in “reading” rather than writing. Shazam is “a mobile app that recognizes music and TV around you” (“Shazam Company”). The app functions by allowing users to hold a device’s microphone toward audio, at which point the program searches a database to match the audio to its source. In other words, the app seizes upon users’ experiences of wondering what a song is in order to provide them with appropriate information: the name of the song, the band, the , the year of release, etc. Of course, Shazam also points users to places they could buy the song or see the band in concert; Shazam receives a percentage of those sales. In that capacity, Shazam is delivering a useful , but what is perhaps more interesting from an object-oriented perspective is the degree to which the Shazam software creates a connection between music consumers and the music industry. Record industry scouts are attending to the frequency of “tags” – when users identify a song using the app – in order to determine what kinds of songs people are interested in hearing more of (Thompson, “The Shazam Effect”). Shazam has helped to create a productive network, guiding music industry decisions by transmitting individual listeners’ preferences and desires to industry authorities in new ways. As Derek Thompson puts it, “data about our preferences have shifted the balance of power, replacing experts’ instincts with the wisdom of the crowd” (“The Shazam Effect”). While Thompson has misgivings about trusting this popular opinion too strictly, he admits that the network delivers content to users that they prefer. I would go a step further: Shazam functions as a kind of mediator, focusing the power of a nonhuman rhetor in a way that emphasizes its unique connective possibilities. In other words, not all machine/human relationships need be exploitive; the challenge is recognizing the particular affordances and constraints of the rhetorical situation and guiding both

106

human and nonhuman rhetors to operationalize their potentials in the most effective ways. Within this process of negotiation, we need to first consider how we can identify and operationalize the most productive questions for nonhuman rhetors to address - a task for which OOR is especially suited.

Conclusions Certainly, there are points to critique even in the examples of nonhuman collaboration that I’ve suggested are heading in the right direction. For instance, Shazam helps to support an often exploitive capitalist enterprise in the recording industry. WordSmith and the Associated Press may not have resulted in job loss yet, but I have misgivings about that being the case forever. In other words, as I’ve suggested throughout the chapter, we must be critical of how and to what ends such collaboration occurs. However, machine reading and machine writing are, at their cores, laudable goals – attempts to bring computing into a setting where it can contribute meaningfully and effectively to human intellectual labor. In composition’s case, in an ideal world, implementing such programs would help students become better writers and also help instructors do their jobs more efficiently. Similarly, Metacritic seems to have been an attempt to empower consumers by providing them with all the information they might need in order to make a purchasing decision more efficiently. Unfortunately, the current problematic implementation of these systems demonstrates the fundamental gap between the value systems of humans and machines, and furthermore demonstrates the dangers of attempting to map a human value system onto models that damagingly oversimplify complex processes. However, rhetoricians can see these problematic situations as opportunities that encourage us to work more closely with designers and programmers to create systems that leverage the unique capabilities of machine authors while also valuing the contribution of human authors. Partially, we can do that by building more bridges between our discipline and the software industry, actively working to raise awareness of the power of nonhuman objects as rhetors in their own right. Additionally, we can encourage students in areas such as professional and technical communication to develop expertise in OOR and to apply that expertise in their career settings. From another direction, we can work with policy makers to ensure that these systems are implemented only when they perform as expected, continuing to make the arguments similar to that put forth by humanreaders.org, but also relying on the additional context that an

107

object-oriented understanding of machine readers provides. That is, we can articulate our resistance not based on the fact that machines aren’t human, but that they are not yet suited for the specific tasks they’re being asked to perform. Finally, we can work with scholars in rhetoric and related fields to continually reevaluate our response to and use of these systems as well as the networks they help support. Because of its emphasis on viewing human and nonhuman actors as equal contributors, OOR provides a particularly useful lens for that evaluation. Regardless of the context or audience we approach, machine involvement with human intellectual labor is a matter of persuasion, system analysis, and relationality. Given our investment in viewing such relationships rhetorically, with an emphasis on relationality and context, one of the most effective ways to ensure the creation of productive human/machine collaborations is to address the issues surrounding them within a composition classroom. Pedagogically, it's our responsibility to educate students to be more reflective producers and critical readers of machine-assisted content, specifically encouraging them to recognize the differing skills and abilities that human and nonhuman rhetors can contribute. For example, we can rethink our composition curricula to provide more space for students to interrogate their networked relationships to nonhumans in their practices, then ask them to trace how that network does or does not value their intellectual labor. While Metacritic might also be a useful specific case to examine in a classroom, it is by no means alone. Pedagogical practice in rhetoric and composition classrooms should include a more robust discussion of how non-human rhetors complicate the writing process, not merely as tools but as active collaborators at the levels of individual documents and systemically (e.g., what power does Yik Yak exert over the content of its writers? how do genre labels in Netflix pre-structure viewing experiences?), in order to better position students to understand and navigate the complexity of their own distributed agency within that process. I address some of these pedagogical concerns and strategies at length in the following chapter.

108

Chapter 5: Implications for Pedagogy and Research

In previous chapters, I have argued that rhetoric and composition scholars should reconsider their approaches to and evaluations of nonhuman objects in order to allow for a richer and more productive perspective that accounts for the experiences and rhetorical agency of nonhumans and humans alike. In this chapter, I suggest ways in which we might implement these considerations in rhetoric and writing classrooms and in our own scholarly work. Much of this project has been framed in theoretical terms, and while I believe altering our approaches at those fundamental levels is a necessary first step, I also want to demonstrate how that alteration might influence both our classroom practices and the ways we enact our own research agendas. In other words, if we reconsider how nonhuman objects act rhetorically, we will teach and practice rhetoric differently; if we reconsider nonhuman influence in the writing process, we will teach and practice writing differently. I believe these different approaches can help equip students and researchers alike to understand their own places within larger complex systems of objects and to productively work within those systems. In this chapter, I outline some specific examples of those differing teaching practices and research strategies, including some descriptions of possible assignments that might appear in writing courses that value an object- oriented perspective. The claims I make here build on and extend those in previous chapters in order to make three central (and overlapping) arguments about an object-oriented rhetoric and composition classroom as well as an object-oriented approach to scholarship in the field: first, that such spaces initially attend to objects in order to guard against problematic anthropocentrism; secondly, that they humbly see nonhuman objects as collaborators to be valued, rather than as merely objects to be studied or tools to be used; and finally, that they employ metaphorism and rhetorical carpentry to work at the intersection of human and nonhuman rhetorical agency. I argue that if we make room for not just including, but valuing and differently theorizing, nonhuman agents when teaching writing, we can help students adopt perspectives that are more complex, more ethical, and more cognizant of their own places in material systems and systems of power. Specifically, I believe an object-oriented perspective enables rhetoricians and students to see the ways in which they are, to quote Margaret Syverson, “actually situated in an ecology, a larger system that includes environmental structures, such as pens, paper, computers, books,

109

telephones, fax machines, photocopiers, printing presses, and other natural or human constructed features” (Wealth of Reality 5). This recognition of situatedness may lead students to productively actualize their own agencies, given their knowledge of agency’s distribution and reliance on a wider network of human and nonhuman actors, and may lead us to do likewise. I believe, given rhetoric’s interest in helping to create more just and ethical human behavior, we have a responsibility to highlight human positions as networked and interdependent. The remainder of this chapter articulates each of these claims in turn as guidelines for classroom practices and research, first outlining what each might mean to instructors and to students, then providing some suggestions for how that practice might be accomplished through particular assignments, and finally discussing how these guidelines are (or can be) enacted in scholarship. It seems appropriate to begin at the beginning.

Guideline One: Begin with Objects In chapter one, I outlined how an object-oriented approach functions on a theoretical level and described some ways in which rhetoricians might use it to study and work with nonhuman objects more productively. Because rhetoric has often been concerned with questions of epistemology at the expense of ontology, I presented object-oriented rhetoric as a way to admit ontological questions into our field by beginning with nonhuman objects, thereby allowing us to examine the real alongside the known. Specifically, I outlined the key elements of an object-oriented rhetoric and how those elements might apply to rhetoric as a field, focusing on the notion that all objects are equally real (“flat ontology”), the sense that all objects have agency, and the understanding that all objects are fundamentally inaccessible (“withdrawal”). I also introduced the concept of metaphorism, a method by which we can attempt to relate to objects, albeit always in limited ways. I want to extend the argument that rhetoric and composition should pay attention to objects as fully realized agents. In teaching, I’d like to make the stronger version of that case: we should attend to objects first. By this, I mean we should encourage students to begin projects by first exploring nonhuman actors involved in what they want to study or accomplish. I’m essentially suggesting that we flip the script. As I pointed out in chapter one, rhetoric has had a tendency to value epistemology over ontology and, as a result, human rhetorical action has tended to serve as an unmarked center of our . Human agency has received so much

110

attention that it has eclipsed the agency of nonhuman actors; too often, we both begin and end with humans, at the expense of the real and important nonhuman presences in our (and our students’) work. Thus, beginning with nonhumans encourages us to productively step outside ourselves, if only partially and temporarily. To take a cue from classical rhetoric, we can argue the opposite case (or “make the weaker argument the stronger”, as Protagoras might phrase it); if doing so prompts some discomfort, we can begin to question from whence that discomfort might arise. One reasonable source of anxiety might be that this approach abandons human concerns. To take a step back, I should clarify that beginning with nonhumans doesn’t necessarily mean students should necessarily end their projects with them (and them alone). Rather, student projects would begin by tracing the nonhuman elements of whatever network has caught their attention, and once those connections are traced, they should move to examine how human agency complicates (or, in all likelihood, is inherently bound up in) that network. Importantly, however, we should encourage students to recognize (and also do our best to recognize) that objects act on their own without a necessary human agent actively directing their action. As Jane Bennett puts it, we need to encourage students to develop a sensitivity to objects acting on their own: “Without proficiency in this countercultural kind of perceiving, the world appears as if it consists only of active human subjects who confront passive objects and their law-governed mechanisms” (xiv). Bennett’s nod to a “counterculture” is precisely what I’m suggesting here – a kind of reading against the grain, with the sense that nonhuman things are important enough in their own right to serve as a starting place for rhetorical study, even if they might eventually make way for human subjectivities. I should also echo Bennett’s caution that simply because we believe that nonhumans are important, we need not see them as more important than humans. In other words, introducing a bit more relativism to agency and rhetorical potential doesn’t mean that everything is up for grabs. We needn’t “horizontalize” objects (as Bennett admits she is unable to do, given a vested interest in humans), but we also needn’t marginalize them. However, encouraging students to begin their inquiry with nonhumans doesn’t necessitate either extreme; it merely changes their perspective, making the familiar strange and encouraging them not to pre-inscribe composition and rhetoric as solely the province of humans. The important point is that we should encourage students to begin with nonhuman objects in order to trace networks as they are rather than

111

beginning from an assumption of human agency and radiating outward. To encourage students to adopt this perspective, we might use a variety of assignment prompts designed to foreground nonhuman agency. For instance, we can ask students to dwell in simply describing what objects do. We might imagine this as two short writing prompts. First, we could ask students to describe an object’s experience: how it was formed, what sensations it might experience, whether it would have a sense of a world beyond itself, whether it would have any mechanism of communicating with nearby objects (e.g.., the internal mechanisms of a car provide information for gauges; flowers generate smells to attract bees), and other generally ontological questions. Students will likely be tempted to anthropomorphize their object of study. While this impulse could be useful, it is also something that should be reflected upon – that is, to ask students to consider whether they could represent the inner world of an object without resorting to anthropomorphizing it. After students write through the experience of an object, they could write through the experience of the human interacting with it: what level of awareness does a human have of the object’s internal workings, its communication, and its experiences? How silent does human interaction render the object, and what might that interaction efface? This activity bears some similarities to one Ann Berthoff describes in Forming Thinking Writing, wherein she asks her students to “address yourself to [an] object” (13). Such an activity would be suitable for an introduction to object-oriented perspectives, and would also afford students a chance to stretch their descriptive and stylistic muscles – it’s easy to imagine how this short assignment could prompt some engaging and creative writing. Building from such an assignment, we might next ask students to describe and trace a network that doesn’t include humans, paying attention to the ways in which the actors in such a network communicate with each other – “communicate” being used in the broadest possible sense. Students would attempt to describe the perspectives of several objects in the network, in an attempt to understand how each object contributed to the emergent character of the network (for example, each letter in the network of a word has its own singular existence but emerges into something more complex; each honeybee has a unique perspective, but also makes up part of a hive). The focus would be on examining the relationality and uncertainty present in such complex interaction – how any single object (the word, the hive) is a constantly re-instantiated and renegotiated assemblage of smaller objects, yet also stands on its own. Students could then

112

be asked to do the same with a network that included human and nonhuman elements (e.g., voting; dissemination; migration of peoples; food production) and encouraged to think of how nonhuman actors similarly work alongside human agency to produce complexity, rather than humans being fully responsible. In the process of investigating these networks, students would also practice their research skills, given that they would have to accurately describe highly complex and likely unfamiliar processes. As a final example, we could ask students to begin the research process for a traditional persuasive paper by exploring the nonhuman aspects of the rhetorical situations they would enter in their writing. My own campus, for instance, recently had a debate regarding demolishing a building constructed near the end of the nineteenth century. If a student were to choose the demolition (and subsequent discussion) as a public writing project, I would first encourage them to begin with the nonhuman stakeholders – especially those stakeholders left out of the debate. Little attention was paid to the animals which make their home in and around the building, for instance, but surely those animals would suffer through a demolition and construction project. (That’s not to suggest that their concerns are more important than human ones – merely that those concerns are at least worthy of consideration.) The building was acquired by the university in the 1970s and currently serves as a museum that houses art, photographs, and memorabilia. Within the single object of the building exist many other objects, each with unique , and while they would be relocated if the building was demolished, they also had a history in that space. A student could trace this history and these objects’ individual histories, along with the building materials, the local landscape (i.e., the building’s spatial relationship to other buildings and to its ), the plans for new construction and how that construction might influence the local environment, to name a few. All of this research would take place before beginning to ask other, more traditional questions: who made the decision to demolish the building; why did they make that decision; what alternatives are there; what problems do those alternatives entail; etc. In fact, similar questions could be asked of the local environment historically: how did the landscape invite initial construction of the building in the first place (access to water or stable ground); what problems could have been encountered in initial construction; what other space was available; what problems did that space present, and similar questions. Not all of that research might make it into a final project, of course. However, that background knowledge would provide the student with a more complex perspective that

113

accounted for a wider variety of stakeholders, and would likely change the methods the student used to make his or her argument. Knowledge of the material components of the building, for instance, would help to enhance a multimodal project’s appeal through images and video; dwelling in the uniqueness of the building’s foundation and its potential loss could be a compelling, persuasive tactic to sway an audience. The approach I’m articulating here may seem to destabilize the field’s traditional focus on human agency and discourse, but part of my point is that rhetorical scholarship already values approaches that interrogate our own scholarly practices and assumptions. In our scholarship, rhetoricians try to be reflective, to situate ourselves, and constantly question our roles as researchers (e.g., Alexander & Rhodes; Lather; Porter et al., and many, may others). Rhetoric and composition scholars routinely explore our own practices, and we often find fault in our initial positions in the process. Why, then, should including the nonhuman be any different? Even if we aren’t able to fully embrace a perspective that begins with objects, we can make the attempt, and can additionally see an object-oriented perspective as one that functions as a complementary methodology to support something else. For example, we might envision a project that begins by approaching institutional forces and pressures as agents in their own right, modifying a project of institutional critique to accept and make room for nonhuman objects as equal partners in both reifying and dismantling oppressive institutional practices. We could reframe the process of “postmodern mapping” (Porter et al. 623) beyond spatial metaphors and designed spaces, toward metaphors that recognize the agency of the spaces (and “spaces”) themselves as agents in institutional work. We could complicate the idea of institutional change only coming from “users” (i.e., humans) and begin to examine the collaboration and conflict happening even without human intervention. Such work would require rhetoricians to build alliances with diverse nonhuman agents (e.g., how do we encourage the physical space of the campus to support our goals?) and with diverse human ones (e.g., how do we encourage more inclusive information technology practices in order to design software that more readily collaborates with us?). In other words, we can modify our practices to allow for the exploration of both the familiar and the unfamiliar. Alex Reid adopts this strategy of introducing the familiar to the strange in an attempt to encourage scholars to attend differently and more closely to the tools we use. Asking us to think more capaciously about the agency involved in the process of taking a digital picture, Reid notes:

114

Here we can see my iPhone camera is seeing part of the audience … Where do we locate the agency that produces this image? How do we describe the cognitive work involved in its composition? It is certainly more than my decision about where to point the lens. It’s not so simple as saying that the lens has agency or thinks, but it is also not so simple as saying that I am the lone thinking agent in this compositional network. (“Composing Objects”) Here, Reid contends that thinking and agency are distributed between and among human and nonhuman objects, and gestures toward a scholarly model that takes this contention as its starting point. If we not only encourage our students to begin with nonhuman objects, but also attempt to adopt that same approach in our own scholarship, our approach to rhetoric changes significantly. We can pay attention to the influence of the nonhuman in our own theorizing, starting with many of the same activities I’ve suggested above for students. A scholarly project that began by dwelling with the technologies and other objects involved in its subject, as well as in its production and reception, would allow rhetoricians to explore the limits and effects of human and nonhuman rhetorical agency. For instance, if writing about the rhetorical effects of a visual design, a rhetorician might examine the typography, investigating the actual procedure used to produce the fonts (What programs were used? What practices?), then move on to looking at her or his own typography, then the font choices of the target journal – asking the same questions about production and material consideration of font choice – in order to arrive at some conclusion about the agency of fonts themselves to co-construct knowledge. Rather than treating font choice as radical choice by a human agent, we could see fonts as actors in their own deployment, persuading us through their aesthetics and their material considerations. Such a project would broaden the field’s scope in productive ways, not least by re-emphasizing the influence of the material and conceptual objects working alongside humans in producing and deploying knowledge.

Guideline Two: Humbly Collaborate In theorizing object-oriented rhetoric, I’ve worked to recover historical moments of nascent object-orientation in the field, specifically pointing to the work of Vico, Burke, and Young, Becker, and Pike. Each of these authors dealt with the nonhuman in ways that broadened rhetoric’s scope to account for and engage with nonhuman agents as a part of the human

115

experience of understanding and practicing rhetoric. I suggested that these historical moments offered promise and potential models for those of us interested in an object-oriented perspective in the present, in that the historical treatment of nonhuman objects represented the discipline’s response to a felt need – a need that arose from the realization that human rhetorical action relies on nonhuman collaborators. This need has become even more palpable in our contemporary technological moment where nonhuman objects make themselves known and involved more forcefully in digital spaces, but the need itself has existed as long as we have studied rhetoric. I argued that rhetoric has in some ways always been interested in objects and their capacity for agency. Considering that Young, Becker, and Pike’s Rhetoric: Discovery and Change is actually a handbook, the connection to classroom practices and assignments might seem clear. Indeed, some of the arguments I made in chapter two gestured toward practical applications of the particle/wave/field heuristic in a composition classroom interested in nonhuman objects. However, I would push even further. In terms of classroom practices, I would suggest that we can take this historical interest as something more than mere curiosity. I see the moments of interacting with and recognizing the importance of nonhuman objects as historically and theoretically significant not only because they suggest that rhetorical scholarship is equipped to adopt an object-oriented rhetoric; rather, I see these as gestures of humility. Each of the scholars in chapter two recognized the inherently collaborative nature of rhetorical action, and how nonhuman objects’ influence is always present in human lives – even our rhetorical lives. I believe that this humility – approaching an object not as simply a thing to be studied but as a collaborator to be valued – can provide a new and fruitful perspective in classrooms by decentering human agency and acknowledging the ways in which we are always collaborating with nonhumans, whether intentionally or not. In other words, allowing objects to “speak” reminds us (and our students) of humans’ place in reality, not as controllers or shepherds, but as partners with nonhuman objects. We can encourage our students to recognize this wider view, one in which we relinquish the convenient fiction of our mastery over reality, and instead embrace a world where we allow ourselves to be perturbed, delighted, and persuaded by objects’ behaviors. We needn’t search behind a supposed curtain to find the wizardly designer; we can instead recognize that an object itself can affect us in uncertain and surprising ways.

116

Rather than beginning with nonhuman objects, as the above guideline suggested, this approach instead focuses on how humans and nonhumans influence and co-construct one another’s experiences. An assignment might ask students to examine how objects inscribe human behavior due to their materiality or design – to encourage students to trace the human contours of an object. For instance, students might choose an item of particular emotional significance and explore both its history and function. How have humans influenced the course of development of this object? How has it in turn influenced the course of human development? For example, my mother recently sent me a text message searching for a bowl her father owned. For him, it was likely nothing more noteworthy than any other bowl; for her, it had influenced her behavior in measurable ways (she had been drawn into its orbit when she took care to pack it while moving multiple times; she made specific foods in it; she was aware of its absence). The bowl had spent part of its existence encouraging a certain kind of behavior, but now it was a locus of emotion and a collaborator in the production of those feelings for my mother. Neither could have happened without a collaboration between the human agent and the bowl as an object.22 Alternatively, we might ask students to examine the ways in which spaces constrain and enable certain behavior through collaboration with humans. University architecture is often designed to encourage certain behavior. For instance, we might ask students to read the “strategies and tactics” of De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life through an object-oriented lens. Strategies (essentially, institutional practices of control from the top down) and tactics (grassroots efforts by individuals in response to these institutionalized strategies) then become collaborations with the environment; footpaths are trod in part because of the particular network of buildings, grass, and humans and their relationships to one another. Within buildings themselves, students might investigate the relationships of storage rooms, offices, elevators, and classrooms and how communication between humans (and what kind of human communication) is influenced by those relationships. Each of these examples incorporates some designed element (whether pottery, landscaping and placement, or architecture). However, each also relies on an understanding that designed objects act with their own agency beyond the merely extended

22 If a student were to take on a project like this one, I would also encourage him or her to go beyond this kind of sentimentality, to examine how the bowl was constructed, where, and when, to determine what other kinds of effects it had had during its existence. On a personal note, unfortunately, my mother’s bowl appears to be lost. 117

agency of a human creator. If students have begun with objects, then they may already be open to the notion that all objects act in larger networks and with their own agencies. On the other hand, rather than asking students to seek out other objects beyond the writing classroom, we can make room for collaborations with diverse technologies in our classes and provide space for student reflection on their effects in the writing process. For instance, I have productively made use of the search engine Bananaslug in my classes. Bananaslug’s page describes it as a “long tail search engine.” Essentially, the site uses Google’s application program interface, but appends a random word (chosen from several available categories, including “great ideas”, “jargon words”, and “themes from Shakespeare”) to the query. The idea is “serendipity: finding the unexpected in the trillion+ web pages Google indexes” since “pages way down the list [may be] relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path”. Google’s results can already be serendipitous, in the sense that the search engine provides lists of other searches it sees as relevant. However, Bananaslug highlights for students the ways in which Google is an active participant in the results they see or don’t see. The experience is similar to searching for and receiving an electronic copy of a book (via Kindle, for instance) as compared to searching through the stacks at a library: sometimes, it’s actually the book next to your search result that is the most helpful. Many students have reflected on this moment as the one in which they were able to grasp how objects themselves help to structure and guide human action in much the same way they had considered the opposite. In addition to search engines (often seen as part of the research process rather than the text production process), students can examine the collaborative relationship they share with their word processors. Some are collaborative in a more transparent and human sense (the sharing and real-time editing functions of Google Drive), but asking students to reframe their interaction with word processors as collaboration encourages them to reconsider how the technology may have a significant, collaborative influence on their produced text. For instance, we might ask students to consider how and how often they use the spell-check, grammar-check, and thesaurus tools in Word. Each of these tools serves to direct the writing process in significant ways. Having students make note of each time they use such a tool encourages them to be mindful of the ways in which their text is actually co-produced – the ways in which they share agency and ownership of their text with a program rather than it being the result of their acting with sole authority.

118

Similarly, graphic design and publishing software such as Photoshop and InDesign can present students with opportunities to observe their collaboration with nonhuman objects as equal participants. Imagine an assignment that asks students to rely on pre-digital technology to alter photographs or to assemble a brochure, then asks them to perform the same tasks in Photoshop or InDesign. Apart from the almost inevitable frustration at being unable to properly apply a filter in an analog space, students might come to the realization that these programs don’t only allow for easier work, they do work apart from a user’s direction. Pictures are aligned; gutters are marked; elements are automatically cropped. Photoshop and InDesign are not only taking orders, but making aesthetic suggestions. We might ask students to reflect on their different products and to examine how their collaboration with analog technologies, which make less directive suggestions, differed from digital ones. As a final example of digital technologies as collaborators, we might ask students to go twenty-four hours without a cell phone (or tablet, laptop, etc.). Ubiquitous computing changes our interaction with other humans and with nonhuman objects, although even I – a person who remembers when it wasn’t possible to instantly look up a fact I couldn’t remember – am often surprised by how drastically it does so. Replacing students’ devices with notebooks (for actual note-taking) can demonstrate how their external loci of memory are active collaborators in their day-to-day living rather than merely containers for their thoughts. Although the examples may seem to merely replace the digital with the analog, on the contrary, framing “technology” as a broad concept is an important component of the reflective practices students should engage. That is, students should be encouraged not merely to treat their analog photo editing as “Photoshop does this better,” but to see this other technology as a collaborator with a different set of strengths and a different agenda. The tactility of a notebook, for instance, affords a different experience than the glass screen of a cell phone. Students may come to find that certain collaborators work better in certain circumstances, but the important thing is that they see their own agency as always already interrelated and distributed among the other objects in their environments. For that matter, students should be encouraged to reconsider their relationship to language itself as an object that works alongside them to create meaning but is not entirely under their authority. As scholars, we should also reframe our thinking about human agency in our own work (within the and within the broader public), while not losing sight of our discipline’s

119

commitment to producing positive effects. Recognizing these challenges, Thomas Rickert outlines a new kind of author-producer that would rethink “relations between rhetoric, ontology, epistemology, and hermeneutics in the postmodern age in a way that does not stage a return to modernist narratives of authority, subjectivity, and agency in order to secure knowledge, power, and value” (682-3). Rickert sees this new subject as one that can respond to complexity and negotiate uncertainty while still working toward definitions of (and actions that support) freedom, justice, equality, and goodness. For Rickert, the point is to reframe unproductive hierarchies so that they work toward the good, but not to do so by reemphasizing an unproductive focus on singular human authority. In other words, he argues for a humble approach to these concepts, suggesting that we can move forward while also recognizing the objects that move along with us. We can practice a kind of generosity toward nonhuman objects in scholarship, explicitly looking for and subsequently tracing the influence of the nonhuman in our own projects. For instance, we might approach historical projects by asking what nonhuman objects contributed to and contained agency in the times and places we study, willingly acknowledging the vast network of things that contributed to and instantiated particular rhetorical action. Such a project might resemble the work of Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, focusing on a particular technology’s active influence in shaping and guiding culture, or might bear similariy to Fredal’s Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens, beginning with landscape and architecture’s role in a society’s development. In any case, an OOR project would provide additional emphasis on the nonhuman objects themselves having agency, rather than being a vehicle for human agency or a reflection of it. As an example, a rhetorician might decide to study the recent leak of domestic spying practices by asking how the networks of information sharing and the architecture of the Internet allowed for (or encouraged) the practices in the first place, and how they subsequently allowed for Internet activism – how the cell towers, routers, and cables both collaborated with human agents and exerted their own agency over the information shared. Such a study could lead to a better understanding of information architecture and its rhetorical valences, and potentially lead to more informed decisions in terms of both material resource allocation and in terms of . Effectively, I suggest that within our scholarship we should be remaining mindful of our own position as humans reliant on a network of nonhuman objects and vice versa. Future work in rhetoric and composition should focus (at least in part) on mapping this ever-present

120

collaboration in a much more robust – although never truly comprehensive – fashion than has been the case before now. Such projects would not only allow rhetoricians to recognize their own positions within a world composed of and emerging out of a network of human and nonhuman actors, but would also potentially allow us to more productively communicate with areas interested in empiricism – the sciences, , computing, etc. These interdisciplinary collaborations would focus on rhetoric’s capacity to render relationships between objects as metaphorical, and also drawn on empirical data to contextualize and further develop that metaphoric exploration. We might, for instance, work with programmers to create models of computing that allow users to experience the transfer of information as a machine might; we might work with scientists to help them understand chemical processes from the perspectives of the chemicals themselves; we might ask engineers to consider stakeholders that include their materials. In other words, OOR can help us to bridge gaps not only between the unlike things of the world, but also between the people who work with them.

Guideline Three: Practice Metaphorism and Rhetorical Carpentry Elsewhere in this project, I have demonstrated the real rhetorical influence of nonhuman objects. I argued that metaphorism provided a useful lens through which to analyze texts, as objects in themselves and within the text’s world, explicating Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Human Revolution as instantiations and explorations of a nonhuman rhetoric. In chapter four, focusing on Metacritic’s financial and cultural power, I asserted that an object-oriented rhetoric could lead to more ethical system design by outlining a design process that uses a metaphoric approach to take the power and agency of nonhuman objects into account. The uncertainty and power of these nonhuman rhetors demonstrated the need for metaphorism as a way to attempt to understand the experience of nonhumans and how we as humans can attempt to relate to and effectively collaborate with them. In each case, metaphorism offered an opportunity to understand the nonhuman rhetors on their own terms, while simultaneously recognizing that process as always partial and contingent. Ian Bogost suggests that there is “a considerable difference between accepting the truth of human accounts of object perceptions and recognizing that, as humans, we are destined to offer anthropomorphic metaphors” (65). That is, we can simultaneously deploy metaphor as a method to grasp at the withdrawn experience of objects and also realize that our reach will

121

always exceed our grasp. For Bogost, “objects make sense of each other through the qualities and they possess” (66). The experience is one of “caricature”, wherein we can only emphasize certain elements and remain aware that there are elements we must miss. However, he reminds us that we must exercise care: “A metaphor is a trope, not a copy” (72). When practicing (and teaching) an object-oriented rhetoric, in other words, we must be mindful of the difference between our perceptions of and representations of nonhuman things and the reality of those things. With that caveat in mind, however, we can reconceive of part of rhetoric and composition’s work as relying on a sense of metaphor as a means to (partially) understand the experiences of nonhuman objects and humans alike. In fact, Bogost’s caution to treat metaphor carefully is one we would do well to follow for humans as well as objects – recognizing the difference between the metaphoric representation of subjective experience and the actuality of that experience is ethical practice for all things, not merely for nonhumans. Object-oriented rhetoric calls for us to work at the intersection of human-nonhuman interaction as well as human-human interaction. As I argued in previous chapters, an object- oriented perspective helps to make us aware that we can never fully know the experiences of other objects – whether human or nonhuman – and can only approach, not apprehend, their essential being. Rather than seeing this as a limitation, we should see it as an opportunity – as the necessary reason for rhetoric to exist in the first place. The uncertainty and alien nature of humans and nonhumans alike demands our attention, and rhetoric provides us with the tools to begin to resolve some of those uncertainties (albeit contextually, contingently, and partially). As one way to introduce students to these uncertainties, we could consider a short assignment that deals with the exercise of describing a color to another human incapable of seeing that color, or even of describing a particular color to someone who can see it and being “certain” their experience is the same.23 Because we can only explain color in terms of readily understandable metaphor, rather than sharing the experience of color, we can point students to the limits of language as well as the limits of subjectivity. This exercise offers an opportunity for metaphorism and carpentry; by beginning with the limitation of color-seeing (or at least the

23 This question is often framed as a philosophical one, relying on the fact that individual subjective experiences cannot be directly communicated. In other words, how can I be sure that what you experience as the color red is the same as my experience of the color red? 122

certainty of its shared experience) and then branching out into other limitations, we might ask students to imagine that they are a nonhuman object and that they have to explain their own experiences only through metaphor (and through writing). For instance, a student might to imagine the experience of car key, and write about pushing past the driver pins and feeling the key pins click into place. She or he might try to imagine what the vibrations of grinding ignition switch feels like when the key is turned too far. The student might explore the key’s lack of care or awareness as the car is being driven, and how it might respond to or understand the purpose it’s designed to perform. This kind of object exploration serves two purposes: first, it pushes students to recognize the limitations of language as only one kind of being; secondly, it encourages them to fully explore those limits. Another way we might embrace metaphorism is by reframing our notions of “rhetorical situation” and “available means” to include nonhuman objects. We can ask students to see “available means” as something that objects and humans alike possess. To draw on an example from the previous guideline, this means that we ask students to describe the metaphoric persuasive potential of the pencil as compared to the cell phone. What qualities does a pencil possess that allow it to act on other objects (and humans) in unique ways? How might the experience of those qualities be represented? What can we learn about our interaction with the object through that representation? Students could engage in multimodal projects to attempt to demonstrate how various nonhuman objects might experience the composing process (whether the composing process of the students themselves or the “composing process” in the sense of one object interacting with another). Student work such as this could take many forms, from actual construction of physical things to videos, to computer programs, but they would all attempt to reproduce an experience apart from (but interrelated with) a human one. In addition to metaphorism, I have argued that Ian Bogost’s notion of carpentry is a method by which we can begin to mine the fundamental gap between objects. Essentially, the core idea of carpentry is that one way to approach understanding nonhuman objects is to produce them. “[C]arpentry entails making things that explain how things make their world,” (93) as Bogost puts it. That is, carpentry involves more than making something; it involves making a thing that analogizes, demonstrates, or examines the subjective experience of something else. For instance, Bogost created a computer program designed to mimic (and metaphorize) the experience of a video game system’s graphics chip from the late 1970s. Because the chip had

123

limited capacity (in comparison to modern chips), programmers were forced to use clever coding to fill the screen with images; in reality, the chip filled only part of the screen at a time. The chip only ever experienced part of an image, not the entirety of it. Bogost’s program produces this experience for a viewer so that he or she might better understand not only the experience of the chip but also the decisions of the programmers (and the constraints of their collaboration). Although such a project might seem a curiosity, it serves to trace the relationship of both the humans and nonhumans involved in producing a graphical effect. Following Bogost’s example, we in rhetoric can look at game analysis and production as useful methods to introduce object-oriented rhetoric to students. In my own classes, I have extensively used games for just this purpose (although not necessarily couched in object-oriented terminology). For instance, I have used the independently produced game Braid to explore differing perceptions of time and permanence, pointing to the player character’s time- manipulation powers and his fundamental disconnection from those who perceive time in a traditional chronological fashion, especially focusing on a level where time is revealed to have been running backwards (and therefore encouraging players to reconsider how sequence and may seem completely different for other subjects).24 Elsewhere, I’ve used the text- based game Galatea to examine the promises and complications of endowing objects with consciousness by asking students to consider whether a computer program that can argue for its own consciousness can actually be considered conscious. Additionally, I’ve used the major release Bioshock to interrogate free will and agency, as the game emphasizes the inability of a player to truly behave how she or he wants. Each of these games, and countless others, presents an opportunity to not only engage students (given games’ interest in being compelling media pieces) but also to encourage them to occupy different subjectivities metaphorically. Games resonate so well partially because of their hybrid nature as embodied experiences and virtual experiences. Similar to Andy Clark’s thinking about cognitive extension into the surrounding environment and tools, Mark Hansen argues in Bodies in Code that embodiment is present in virtual space (and with virtually-active objects, including digital objects). Rather than seeing embodiment as something occurring in one kind of space and not another, Hansen asserts

24 Incidentally, this game provided an excellent opportunity to discuss kairos and chronos. 124

that there is no fundamental distinction between realities – that “all reality is mixed reality” (1- 2). (This sentiment is similar to OOO’s idea of a flat ontology.) For Hansen, the ontological weight of reality for humans is focused in the body, and there is no fundamental difference between virtual reality and analog reality because both are equally processed, tested, and created by the body. He views the body as the genesis of an always mixed reality, suggesting that technical extension of the body’s perception through objects still relies on bodily perception. Games rely on this nexus of experience in order to translate virtual experiences into immediate, embodied experiences. So, my memories of climbing a building in the Assassin’s Creed games are just that – memories of climbing a building, complete with the anxiety of falling and the sweaty palms that accompany it. However, the translated nature of that experience leaves me once removed from it; I am able to simultaneously reflect on the activity in process analytically and also experience the activity as something other than myself. I’ve argued that games present one method to experience exploration of subjectivity, and Bogost deploys games in much the same way. In a chapter of Alien Phenomenology, he discusses a card game called In a Pickle. Briefly explained, the game involves playing cards with single words on them atop other cards to represent one object being “inside” another. So, there might be cards labeled “key,” “castle,” “sky,” and “movie.” While playing, a key might be in a castle and a castle might be in the sky – literally interpreted – but the key in the castle in the sky might be “in” a movie metaphorically. When I used this game in my own composition class, it allowed my students to “break with some of [their] own modes of knowing” (Bogost 67). Specifically, students commented on how the game demonstrated that all relationships are metaphorical, even supposedly literal ones. That is, the relationship between “key” and “castle” was straightforward, but the actual relationship between objects was anything but. Students used the game’s explication of metaphor in their writing, arguing that the game afforded a different experience than the kind of reading we had been doing, and one that particularly allowed them to develop a richer sense of metaphor as a concept. It’s partially because of my students’ responses that I continued to develop my interest in using games – both analog and digital – in my classes. Much later, I recognized their potential as a way to practice rhetorical carpentry. I believe that as a discipline, rhetoric and composition can embrace this potential – we can be more directly involved in the production and development of games, especially videogames, as objects that can metaphorically demonstrate and explore the

125

experience of human and nonhuman objects alike. As games advance, especially in their capacity to model intelligence, the videogame industry continues to be chiefly interested in creating more spectacle rather than deepening conversation about the nature of beings and their communicative practices. In our own scholarly practices, we can similarly explore these concepts of metaphorism and carpentry through games. Imagine that a rhetorician created a game where the goal was to convince political leaders to adopt clean energy policies – a game that modeled the behavior of leaders based on drawing data from voting records, keyword searches of their speeches, and their campaign contributions. Imagine that the game modeled what the outcomes were for each year that went by without adopting such a policy. Currently, all the data is available; the modeling of argumentation, however, is not. Hence, scholars of rhetoric have a vested interest in the production of games. Moreover, we can see games as ways to practice rhetorical carpentry to enable us to better understand the rhetorical perspectives of nonhuman actors. We might imagine a game wherein players experience the world as various nonhumans- a game where players actually take the role of a search engine, for instance. A player would need to explore and understand the complex network involved in producing results for a given query, all without actually knowing what that query represented to a user (since search engines themselves only read data and don’t process it as humans do). Such an environment would require players to – if only briefly – inhabit the subjectivity of an object that makes decisions and communicates to beings completely unlike it, thereby illuminating such an experience from an unfamiliar perspective. Admittedly, this game would require significant time and effort from a rhetorical scholar; however, the possibilities for exploring object-oriented rhetoric through actual game production are intriguing.

Conclusions In this chapter, I’ve made some initial steps toward pedagogical approaches and scholarly practices that pay more attention to nonhuman objects in composition practices. The moves I make here are, of course, merely beginning gestures. In future work, rhetoric and composition scholar-teachers should continue to refine our attitudes toward including nonhuman objects in our work. This chapter serves only as a demonstration that the work within the rest of this project can serve as an effective model for the kind of investigation an object-oriented rhetoric makes

126

possible. Whether we are personally interested in historical recovery work, critical interrogation of rhetorical practices in specific systems, media site analysis, or any other rhetorical focus, object-oriented rhetoric provides us with a perspective that values the real and important contributions of nonhuman objects alongside our own. It helps us to admit our own distributed agency and authority, to emphasize the relational and uncertain nature of all interaction, and to build a perspective that views all such interaction as rhetorical interaction. In other words, object-oriented rhetoric positions us to better make an argument for the relevance and power of our disciplinary practices – whether we make that argument to students, to other scholars, or to a wider public. More than that, though, it encourages us to approach our reality with a bit more humility and wonder, to imagine an alien experience that exceeds our understanding, and to try to conceive of how we best relate to it. Object-oriented rhetoric allows us to consider things apart from us and to ask: how can humans best move within this complex, constantly negotiated world? How, in other words, can we be the best humans – and rhetoricians – we can be?

127

Works Cited Alberti, John. “The Game of Reading and Writing: How Video Games Reframe Our Understanding of Literacy.” Computers and Composition 25.3 (2008): 258–269. ScienceDirect. Web. 31 May 2015. Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming. Alexander, Jonathan. “Gaming, Student Literacies, and the Composition Classroom: Some Possibilities for Transformation.” College Composition and Communication 61.1 (2009): 35–63. Print. Alexander, Jonathan, and Jacqueline Rhodes. “Queerness, Multimodality, and the Possibilities of Re/Orientation.” Composing (Media)= Composing (Embodiment): Bodies, Technologies, Writing, the Teaching of Writing. Ed. Kristin L. Arola and Anne Francis Wysocki. Utah State University Press, 2012. 187–211. Print. Ashby, Dominic. “Uchi/Soto in Japan: A Global Turn.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43.3 (2013): 256–269. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web. 31 May 2015. Banks, William P. “Written through the Body: Disruptions and ‘Personal’ Writing.” College English 66.1 (2003): 21–40. JSTOR. Web. 31 May 2015. Barnett, Scot. “Toward an Object-Oriented Rhetoric.” Enculturation. N.p., 2010. Web. 8 Sept. 2011. Bay, Jennifer L. “Screening (In)Formation: Bodies and Writing in Network Culture.” JAC 24.4 (2004): 929–946. Print. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A of Things. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2010. Print. Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900 - 1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Print. Bertelsen, Dale A. “Kenneth Burke’s Conception of Reality: The Process of Transformation and Its Implications for Rhetorical Criticism.” Extensions of the Burkeian System. Ed. James W. Chesebro. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. 230–248. Print. Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. Berthoff, Ann E. Forming/Thinking/Writing. Second edition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1988. Print. Biesecker, Barbara A. Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of

128

Social Change. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Print. Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25 (1992): 1–14. Print. Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Second Edition. : Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. Print. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It’s like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: Press, 2012. Print. Posthumanities 20. ---. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007. Print. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, USA: Polity, 2013. Print. Brinton, Alan. “Quintilian, , and the ‘Vir Bonus.’” Philosophy & Rhetoric 16.3 (1983): 167–184. Print. Brock, Bernard L. “The Evolution of Kenneth Burke’s Philosophy of Rhetoric: Dialectic between Epistemology and Ontology.” Extensions of the Burkeian System. Ed. James W. Chesebro. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. 309–328. Print. Studies in Rhetoric and Communication. Brooke, Collin Gifford. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Cresskill, N.J: Hampton Press, 2009. Print. Brown, James J. Jr. “The Machine That Therefore I Am.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47.4 (2014): 494–514. Print. Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, Mich: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2011. Print. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Prentice-Hall, inc, 1945. Print. ---. Language As Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Print. ---. “(Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action.” Critical Inquiry 4.4 (1978): 809–838. Print. ---. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Print. Carnegie, Teena A.M. “Interface as Exordium: The Rhetoric of Interactivity.” Computers and Composition 26.3 (2009): 164–173. CrossRef. Web. 31 May 2015. Carravetta, Peter. Prefaces to the Diaphora: Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of

129

Postmodernity. West Lafayette, Ind: Purdue University Press, 1991. Print. Chalmers, David J. “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (1995): 200–219. Print. Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print. Cooper, Marilyn M. “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” College Composition and Communication 62.3 (2011): 420–449. Print. ---. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English 48.4 (1986): 364–375. JSTOR. Web. 31 May 2015. Crusius, Timothy W. Kenneth Burke and the Conversation after Philosophy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Print. Rhetorical Philosophy and Theory. Culp, Jennifer. “Why You Should Love Mass Effect‘s Dr. Chakwas.” N.p., 31 July 2014. Web. 31 May 2015. D’Angelo, Frank J. “The Four Master Tropes: Analogues of Development.” Rhetoric Review 11.1 (1992): 91–107. Print. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Third Edition. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2011. Print. Descartes, René. A Discourse on the Method. Trans. Ian Maclean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print. Dobrin, Sidney I., ed. Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media: Writing Ecology. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print. Edbauer, Jenny. “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 5–24. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web. 31 May 2015. Eidos Montreal. Deus Ex: Human Revolution. N.p., 2011. Print. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Print. /Bioware. Mass Effect Trilogy. N.p., 2014. Print. Feenberg, Andrew. Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print. Fleckenstein, Kristie S. Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching.

130

Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Print. Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 32.4 (1981): 365–387. JSTOR. Web. 31 May 2015. Foss, Sonja K. Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice. Fourth edition. Long Grove, Ill: Waveland Pr Inc, 2008. Print. Fredal, James. Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon Demosthenes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Print. Gardner, Leslie. Rhetorical Investigations: G. B. Vico and C. G. Jung. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. Goetsch, James Robert. Vico’s Axioms: The of the Human World. New Haven: Press, 1995. Print. Golden, James L. The Rhetoric of Western Thought: From the Mediteranean World to the Global Setting. Kendall Hunt, 2003. Print. Grabill, Jeffrey T. “On Divides and Interfaces: Access, Class, and Computers.” Computers and Composition 20.4 (2003): 455–472. CrossRef. Web. 31 May 2015. Haas, Mark, and Clinton Gardner. “MOO in Your Face: Researching, Designing, and Programming a User-Friendly Interface.” Computers and Composition 16.3 (1999): 341– 58. Print. Hamilton, Kirk. “That Weirdly Racist NPC in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.” . N.p., 1 Sept. 2011. Web. 31 May 2015. Hansen, Mark B. N. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. New York ; London: Routledge, 2006. Print. Harman, Graham. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. Print. ---. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press, 2009. Print. Harrington, Dana. “Remembering the Body: Eighteenth-Century Elocution and the Oral Tradition.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 28.1 (2010): 67–95. JSTOR. Web. 31 May 2015. Hart-Davidson, Bill. “Shaping Texts That Transform: Toward a Rhetoric of Objects, Relationships, and Views.” Technical Communication and the World Wide Web. Ed. Carol Lipson and Michael Day. Malwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,

131

Inc., 2005. 27–42. Print. Hawhee, Debra. Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in . University of Texas Press, 2005. Print. ---. “Kenneth Burke’s Jungle Book.” Minnesota Review 2010.73-74 (2009): 171–182. CrossRef. Web. 31 May 2015. ---. “Toward a Bestial Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 44.1 (2011): 81–87. Project MUSE. Web. 31 May 2015. Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe, eds. Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century: Literate Connections. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Hawk, Byron. A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Print. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University Of Chicago Press, 1999. Print. ---. “Speculative Aesthetics and Object-Oriented Inquiry (OOI).” Speculations (2014): 158–179. Print. Hayot, Eric, and Edward Wesp, eds. The EverQuest Reader. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Print. Hernandez, Patricia. “Mass Effect, Played Without Firing A Single Shot.” Kotaku. N.p., 8 Sept. 2014. Web. 31 May 2015. Hobbs, Catherine L. Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, Monboddo. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Print. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward A New Theory Of Online Work. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005. Print. Johnson, Matthew S.S. “Public Writing in Gaming Spaces.” Computers and Composition 25.3 (2008): 270–283. CrossRef. Web. 31 May 2015. Kaiser, Rowan. “It’s All Too Much: Why ’s Extended Cut Ending Can’t Possibly Fix Everything.” Engadget. N.p., 29 June 2012. Web. 31 May 2015. Kennedy, George A. Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print. Kinneavy, James E. “The Basic Aims of Discourse.” College Composition and Communication 20.5 (1969): 297–304. JSTOR. Web. 31 May 2015.

132

Lather, Patti. Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy Within/in the Postmodern. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print. LeJacq, Yannick. “Why the Ending of Mass Effect 3 Started a Furor.” . N.p., 27 Mar. 2012. Web. 31 May 2015. Lynch, Paul, and Nathaniel Rivers, eds. Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. Print. Mao, LuMing. Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2006. Print. McAllister, Ken S. Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture. University Alabama Press, 2008. Print. McCorkle, Ben. Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study (Paperback) - Common. Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Print. Meillassoux, Quentin, and . After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Print. Moberly, Kevin. “Commodifying Scarcity: Society, Struggle, and Spectacle in World of Warcraft.” Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture 4.2 (2010): 215–235. Print. ---. “Composition, Computer Games, and the Absence of Writing.” Computers and Composition 25.3 (2008): 284–299. CrossRef. Web. 31 May 2015. Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” Energy 7.4 (1970): 33–35. Print. Morton, Timothy. “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19.2 (2011): 163–190. Web. ---. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print. Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print. Ogden, C. K., and I. A. Richards. Meaning Of Meaning. Reissue edition. San Diego: Mariner Books, 1989. Print. Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Carbondale:

133

Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Print. Porter, James E. et al. “Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change.” College Composition and Communication 51.4 (2000): 610–642. JSTOR. Web. 31 May 2015. Quintilian. The Orator’s Education, Volume I: Books 1-2. Trans. Donald A. Russell. Cambridge, Mass: Press, 2002. Print. Reid, Alexander. “Composing Objects: Prospects for a Digital Rhetoric.” Enculturation (2012): n. pag. Web. ---. The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition. West Lafayette, Ind: Parlor Press, 2007. Print. Rickert, Thomas J. “Engaging Modernisms, Emerging Posthumanisms, and the Rhetorics of Doing.” JAC 20.3 (2000): 672–684. Print. Rivers, Nathaniel A. “Future Convergences: Technical Communication Research as .” Technical Communication Quarterly 20.4 (2011): 412–442. EBSCOhost. Web. 31 May 2015. ---. “Some Assembly Required: The Latourian Collective and the Banal Work of Technical and Professional Communication.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 38.3 (2008): 189–206. CrossRef. Web. 31 May 2015. Selfe, Cynthia L., and Richard J. Selfe Jr. “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones.” College Composition and Communication 45.4 (1994): 480–504. JSTOR. Web. 31 May 2015. Sherlock, Lee. “What Happens in Goldshire Stays in Goldshire: Rhetorics of Queer Sexualities, Role-Playing, and Fandom in World of Warcraft.” Rhetoric/Composition/Play Through Video Games: Reshaping Theory and Practice of Writing. Ed. Richard Colby, Matthew S. S. Johnson, and Rebekah Shultz Colby. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 161–174. Print. Shultz Colby, Rebekah, and Richard Colby. “A Pedagogy of Play: Integrating Computer Games into the Writing Classroom.” Computers and Composition 25.3 (2008): 300–312. ScienceDirect. Web. 31 May 2015. Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming. Southwell, Samuel B. Kenneth Burke and Martin Heidegger: With a Note Against Deconstructionism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1988. Print. Spinuzzi, Clay. Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in . Cambridge ; New

134

York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print. Stroud, Scott R. “ and the Methodology of Comparative Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39.4 (2009): 353–379. CrossRef. Web. 31 May 2015. Syverson, Margaret A. The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Print. Van Ittersum, Derek. “Computing Attachments: Engelbart’s Controversial Writing Technology.” Computers and Composition 25.2 (2008): 143–164. CrossRef. Web. 31 May 2015. Verene, Donald Phillip. Vico’s: Science of Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell Univ Press, 1991. Print. Vico, Giambattista. New Science. Trans. Dave Marsh. Third edition. London ; New York: Penguin Classics, 2000. Print. ---. On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Language. Trans. L. M. Palmer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Print. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism?. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2009. Print. Wysocki, Anne Frances, and Julia I. Jasken. “What Should Be an Unforgettable Face….” Computers and Composition 21.1 (2004): 29–48. ScienceDirect. Web. 31 May 2015. 20th Anniversary Special Issue Part II. Young, Richard Emerson, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike. Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970. Print.

135