coda: scholarship and the digital
do these chapters and my response count as scholarship?
purdy and walker suggest that scholarship is often equated with argument and they find plenty of evidence of, markers of, argument in the different digital formats they consider.
but they also argue for going beyond traditional metrics of argument, for considering the value of speculation, the value of applying and enacting ideas burnished in chains of scholarly inquiry and communication, the value of dialogic practices of meaning generation.
gresham and aftanas also press this question as they suggest a shift from persuasion-inducing argument to meaning-generating rhetorical invitation
and, as i've noted, so did bridwell-bowles in the 1990s.
yuri lotman (2009) (mentioned earlier, at least from my perspective) stressed the notion that semiosis is fundamentally about generating new meanings through polyvocality and heterogeneity. lotman challenged the very notion that infuses so much of our school rhetoric, that you should write/speak/image so clearly and transparently and consensually that your reader/hearer/viewer will clearly and transparently and consensually understand your intentions.
let's call that bee rhetoric because that's what a bee dance does (at least as far as we can tell): the bee dancing tells other bees the direction and distance to go to some degree of food source, but it can't tell another bee, 'hey, something funny happened on the way to the pollen' because that would be outside the codes of food and identity.
but we can do that.
on the other hand, we can't really get that perfect overlap of meaning, that venn diagram of intersubjectivity with 100% overlap, though we often mythologize ourselves as if we could.
forging a rhetoric -- one that includes but is in no way limited to the digital,
that is not another bee-rhetoric,
that is grounded in something like the model of literate activity in functional systems in laminated chronotopes i pointed to earlier --
is a meaning-generating, society-generating challenge.
these chapters, among other things, and read collectively with one another, can move us toward forging that kind of rhetoric, that kind of social practice.
where am I?
in my dining room on a gloomy september sunday listening over and over to miles davis's miles runs the voodoo down, on repeat on itunes®, through bose® noise-canceling headphones, with a cup of dark ugandan fair trade coffee nearby and a serious tightness in my upper back, but feeling somewhat uplifted by the hope embedded in these chapters that index a field pushing for change.
where am I?
at the end of this response.