The Pennsylvania State University the Graduate School Department

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of English REMIXING THE LOST BOOK OF RHYTHM A Thesis in English by Herschel C. Conner, III Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2006 The thesis of Herschel C. Conner, III was reviewed and approved* by the following: Richard Doyle Professor of English Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Robert Yarber Distinguished Professor of Art Paul Youngquist Professor of English Jennifer Edbauer Assistant Professor of English Robert Caserio Professor of English Head of the Department of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT Remixing the Lost Book of Rhythm focuses on sea-changes in communication, collaboration, and education. Writers today increasingly deploy digital and "musical" techniques such as sampling and mixing to share and transform information and ideas, and I look to diverse rhetorical traditions for clues to a digital pedagogy. I select from primary and secondary source materials— Ancient Greek musical practice, Indian Tala, disciplines of Yoga, global polyrhythmic traditions—as I seek to formulate a theory and pedagogy of "wiki" space. Students and teachers seeking to compose and dwell in the densely interconnected space of digital ecologies, I argue, can learn much from the creative and rhetorical practices found in interactive communities of sound and music today, which form a musical, technological, and rhythmic archive for composers training in the art of rhetoric. My archive suggests rhetorical practices of "rhythm," a long neglected rhetorical effect, are crucial to techniques for navigating the assemblages of technology and community that articulate our classrooms and workplaces today. Relying on theoretical work in technology studies, I amplify the role of rhythm in diverse areas of scientific inquiry and technological development, and look, for guidance, to the interconnectivity and fundamentally rhythmic practices of peer-to-peer networks. Teaching students to write in rhythm, I learned, proceeds by making and breaking links. Each of the five segments has its own flavor, and each segment addresses different effects that Remixing the Lost Book of Rhythm could have on contemporary composers. Readers learn, by watching my trial by (rhythmic) fire, how diverse practices of rhythm can work as way to form a commons with students and with ourselves, and discover that it is remarkably simple to bring rhythm and its respect for interconnectivity into our teaching and our learning, and to delay, embed, jam, divert, and remix rhythms in our own lives. Part I tells the story of the "filesharing subjects" that populate our writing classrooms today, and position peer-to-peer culture, where computers cluster and ambient networks compose themselves, as a topos and model for writing instruction. Penn State's licensing agreement with Napster provides atmosphere, and I forecast the segments that make up the rest of The Lost Book of Rhythm. In Part II, I take readers back to Ancient Greece, and outline a Greek treatment of rhythm. This chapter begins with a sample from Athens' rhythmic theorist, Aristoxenus, and builds into a vertiginous wall of sound—a swarm of cicadas singing unto Socrates—before it applies a magnifying glass to the terminology and concepts that seem to haunt rhythm and give it so much promise. This segment ends with a short practicum on some of the basic compositional gestures for finding balance when we lose our rhythm in contemporary information ecologies. Part III investigates the resonant aspects of rhythm in communication ecologies, based on an experiment mixing social bookmarking with wiki. The rest of the chapter is a bottom-up grapple with the phenomenology of delay and the stochastic dimensions of wiki—and other rhythmizable media—from the perspective of a musicians, students, scientists, teachers, and rhetoricians. Musical tools of composition have been around for a long time, and pop songs, commercial jingles, and Hollywood soundtracks barely scratch the surface of the global historical musical bandwidth. Recently, analog and digital tools for selecting, combining, tuning, and rendering media have made these templates available to the commons again. In Part IV, I evaluate the rhythmic principles of minimalism and their technologies for their interactive potential, and extract recipes and principles for teaching with technology. Part V, an experiment in “lossy compression,” seeks to transduce wiki's effects on teaching to the page. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................v Chapter 1. FILESHARING SUBJECTS .......................................................................1 Chapter 2. SONIC STIGMERGY AVAILABLE ORDER, AVAILABLE MEANS FOR COLLECTIVELY COMPOSING WIKIS.........................38 Chapter 3. TROLLING FOR EXERGY/RESONANCE TECHNOLOGIES.............65 Chapter 4. DRAW A STRAIGHT LINE AND FOLLOW IT?.................................163 Chapter.5. WYRD TO THE WIKI! LACUNAE TOWARD WIKI ONTOLOGIES..............................................................................185 References ..................................................................................................................218 v Acknowledgements This dissertation emerges out of an ecology of friends, family, students, and teachers. Rich Doyle, through his teaching, musicianship, friendship, and unending capacity to share, showed me the Way. My better half and best friend Angie Conner never stopped believing in, making sacrifices for, and supporting the process with love, kindness, and serenity. Our children, Odessa and Aeden, brought nothing short of pure magic to the mix. No doubt about it, this mix was heavily populated by a cast of musical characters whose gifts are the kind that never stop giving, and without whom I could not have even considered this research: I thank you all. Finally, I'd like to thank my parents, Joan and Herschel Conner, for their unending love and support. 1 CHAPTER 1: FILESHARING SUBJECTS Napster Miscue: A New Trope for Teaching in the Commons The first part of this dissertation narrates how an observation, a hypothesis concerning the "filesharing subjects" that populate our writing classrooms today, turned out to be a bit of miscue, and how, in wiki, miscues themselves trope observation towards participation in ways that allow new rhythms emerge. Wiki practice turns our attention to peer-to-peer culture, where computers cluster and ambient networks compose themselves, synching into self organization. Peer-to-peer networks provide one topos for wiki pedagogy, which asks us how we might teach writing as the creation of links. With wiki, such connections can now unfold heuristically, as rhythm; the creation and interruption of connections. Penn State's licensing agreement with Napster provides atmosphere for wiki pilots, and I forecast the segments that make up the rest of the Lost Book of Rhythm. In “Listening to Napster,” investment advisor and technology pundit, Clay Shirky (2001), writes: “Definitions are useful only as tools for sharpening one's perception of reality and improving one's ability to predict the future. Whatever one thinks of Napster's probable longevity, Napster is the killer app for this revolution” (emphasis added, p. 26). Why do I emphasize “this revolution,” in this sample? Imagine the time it takes for a hit record to make on revolution on a phonograph player: one revolution holds enough information for one short sample,not much more. So it is in the “infodynamic” space of the worldwide web, where writing happens today. Indeed, “if the Internet has taught technology watchers anything,” Shirky continues, “it's that predictions of the future succcess of a particluar software method of paradigm are of tenuous accuracy at best” (p. 26). A simple and somewhat obvious observation, to be sure. That's just it though; observation is not as 2 effective as participation in the dynamic just-in-time/space of the worldwide web. Whether measured according to anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson's pragmatic units of information (“the difference that makes a difference”), the conjugates of thermondynamics, Technorati hits, or global warming, observations about linking practices don't render the novelty or use value that narratives grown from a practice can. However, Shirky (2001) makes a very important point for those of us focused on the question of writing and writing instruction that would take such an ontology seriously because there is something more important than “getting it right” when it comes to developing and sharing descriptions and defintions about infodynamic ontologies. Movement is created and sustained by working and writing in rhythm—that is to say, together. On the move, rhetoric becomes an art of interupting each other; knowing when to cut in on a developing sequence, and how to detach from a deeply felt major premise when another premise arrives unexpectedly, with a clang. In “Order from Rhythmic Entrainment and the Origin of Levels Through Dissipation” philosopher John Collier and musician Mark Burch introduce rhythmic entrainment to describe the emergence of regular, predictable patterns within or between systems. Rhythmic entrainment realizes symmetries of information by means of sharing, but the production of information also manifests in moments of symmetry breaking. Collier and Burch offer this

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