Where Melvin-Davis and White-Farnham interrogate the connections between literate identities and community literacy spaces, Heidi McKee introduces corporate spaces into the literacy conversation, focusing on the increasingly digital nature of contemporary literacy. The title of McKee’s article—“Policy Matters Now and in the Future: Net Neutrality, Corporate Data Mining, and Government Surveillance”—identifies three key national-level policy issues that already affect writing and the teaching of writing, the importance of which will only increase over time. We need only note the political and cultural uproar over Edward Snowden’s 2013 exposé of the U.S. government’s covert practice of recording metadata about Americans’ phone conversations to demonstrate the significance of these issues. By linking net neutrality, corporate data mining, and government surveillance to concerns about freedom of speech/information, personal/financial security, and warrantless seizure, McKee argues the field must deal with them as research and teaching in composition and rhetoric increasingly takes place in networked digital environments ranging from the World Wide Web to corporate social media platforms like Twitter, Google Docs, and YouTube. Finally, McKee calls on members of the field to get involved in these issues outside the classroom by joining organizations that monitor and agitate against the loss of net neutrality, the rise of corporate data mining, and the covert practice of government surveillance.
While the pieces in Part 2 question existing values and practices in composition and rhetoric and call us to advocate for change at the level of personal, educational, and social policy and beliefs, the work featured in Part 3: New Methods and Approaches for Advancing the Field offers new methods and approaches to research, composing, and teaching that can help to realize this kind of change. These pieces, all of which, interestingly, were published in webtext format only, represent novel ways to view the subject matter(s) of the field, canonical figures and texts, and the field itself. In “The Meaning of the Motivorum’s Motto: ‘Ad bellum purificandum’ to ‘Tendebantque manus ripae ulteriorisamore’” Richard H. Thames re-examines the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic and how the “nature of poetics (which weaves the two together) [is] discerned.” Thames analyzes the etymology of Latin words found in the epigraph and text of Burke’s Motivorum to redefine the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic. He reads the history of these terms against the body of work surrounding Burke’s unfinished Motivorum text, including letters, articles, and annotated versions of Burke’s manuscripts to uncover the theorist’s conception of language. Thames’ two-part approach helps him re-open the classic text to argue that in the Motivorum, language depends on the pursuit of beauty through dialectic (as in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus) as well as on the pursuit of war (as rhetoric has traditionally been defined). This combination of etymological inquiry and close reading allows Thames to reread the Motivorum, providing a new perspective on one of the field’s major theorists.
Like Thames’ reappraisal of Burke, Rex Veeder’s “Re-reading Marshall McLuhan: Hectic Zen, Rhetoric, and Composition” examines what another major figure, Marshall McLuhan, has to offer the field of composition and rhetoric as a whole. Although McLuhan’s influence on the field has thus far focused on media and cultural change, Veeder argues that McLuhan’s approach to textual production has much to offer the wider field. Specifically, his “artistic, complex, and holistic form of exploration, writing, and thinking” provides Veeder with a model for what he calls “Hectic-Zen” composing. Hectic-Zen reflects the “allatonce”ness of media-saturated contemporary life by drawing out and documenting the patterns that emerge from this ubiquitous din. Veeder offers mosaic as an example of how Hectic-Zen composition might work. Because mosaics are made up of bits and pieces from various sources, they contain multiple perspectives that represent patterns found in the chaos from which their disparate elements are drawn. Furthermore, Veeder argues that a mosaic’s modular nature embodies Hectic-Zen methods because it lets composers “suspend judgment” as they work piece by piece without having to envision the whole, allowing composers to resist totalizing understanding and explanation in favor of playful exploration. Veeder’s essay itself models the mosaic-style, Hectic-Zen mode he advocates by 1) interspersing references to McLuhan and the other scholars who populate Veeder’s intellectual universe (such as Burke, Ann Berthoff, and Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work embodies the Hectic-Zen mode) and 2) breaking up his written text with playful doodles that abstractly illustrate his concepts.
The exploratory, experiential composing method Veeder derives from McLuhan reflects the kind of rhetorical environment Noah H. Roderick describes in “Analogize This! The Politics of Scale and the Problem of Substance in Complexity-Based Composition.” He argues that the complex adaptive network or ecological world view found in recent composition scholarship that draws on complexity theory (seen in the work of Byron Hawk, Sidney I. Dobrin, and others) ushers in a new kind of writing subject, the eco-subject. The eco-subject is not a self-contained, autonomous being but the nexus of social, material, and biological factors that distribute activity across multiple components of the physical and virtual networks within which we are embedded. Roderick’s rhetorical ecologies parallel the patterned, allatonce mediascapes from which Veeder’s Hectic-Zen compositions emerge. Both describe complex adaptive systems in which “relationships between writing subjects, media audiences, institutions, and kairotic moments” and the texts they produce “are constantly co-evolving.” Roderick argues that the co-evolution Veeder describes results from the connections that feedback loops create between seeming disparate material and cultural elements ranging from “information flows, [to] social networks, [to] animal metabolism.” For Roderick, these linkages between local and global conditions offset the neoliberal agenda some critics ascribe to network theory and complexity theory. Tying together micro and macro concerns allows for the “continuous invention of [eco-]subjectivity,” in which humans function as participants in complex networks that help shape other network components, even the large ones like institutions and ideologies, through mutually influential feedback loops. These feedback loops allow Roderick to argue for a postmodern ethical dimension of posthuman network culture, presenting a new philosophical and pedagogical point of departure for composition and rhetoric.
The patterns which Roderick and Veeder focus on bring us back to Mueller’s article, where this introduction began. Mueller analyzes the annual CCCC Chairs’ speeches from 1977 to 2011, using word clouds generated from the published versions of their speeches in order to examine when various terms appear, rise, and recede in these “views from the center,” which Mueller uses as barometers of the field’s intellectual climate. The word cloud methodology Mueller describes allows for a “distant reading” practice that focuses strictly on patterns of word use without examining their context. Word clouds’ “distance” from the meaning of the source texts distinguishes them from Ellen Barton’s and Duane Roen’s thematic analyses of the same texts, providing for a new, digital humanities approach to the field’s intellectual history. Mueller also compares word cloud-based distant reading to article abstracts, which seek to capture the essence of a piece, attempting the kind of explanation Veeder discourages. Because word clouds measure term frequency, Mueller argues that they can capture the “gestural build-ups, micro-turns, and anomalies to the larger patterns” that close thematic reading can miss, thereby harnessing the data-processing power McKee associates with corporate data mining for the benefit of the field. Such a distant reading method offers, therefore, one way to represent and investigate the complex rhetorical situations Roderick describes and even embodies the kind of exploratory (rather