Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Mar 1, 2024
This article considers some ways that encounters with everyday objects in a home can generate a f... more This article considers some ways that encounters with everyday objects in a home can generate a feeling of intimacy. The emerging range of "smart" devices marketed to exploit personal connections with the appurtenances of domestic spaces, we argue, effectively make the home into a platform for such intimacy. That intimacy is often achieved through the implied animacy of objects that might otherwise be regarded as asignifying, thereby enabling meaningful narratives to be built up around the likes of toasters and floorboards. The article suggests that such platforms complicate the distinction between public and private spaces, as the makers of smart technologies seek not just to insert their devices into our daily lives, but to make them feel intimate while extracting data about us in return.
This article considers some ways that encounters with everyday objects in a home can generate a f... more This article considers some ways that encounters with everyday objects in a home can generate a feeling of intimacy. The emerging range of "smart" devices marketed to exploit personal connections with the appurtenances of domestic spaces, we argue, effectively make the home into a platform for such intimacy. That intimacy is often achieved through the implied animacy of objects that might otherwise be regarded as asignifying, thereby enabling meaningful narratives to be built up around the likes of toasters and floorboards. The article suggests that such platforms complicate the distinction between public and private spaces, as the makers of smart technologies seek not just to insert their devices into our daily lives, but to make them feel intimate while extracting data about us in return.
This essay engages with Lauren Berlant's scholarship by considering its contributions to media th... more This essay engages with Lauren Berlant's scholarship by considering its contributions to media theory. Despite Berlant's beloved following and many key impacts on critical theory, affect theory, and otherwise, media theory is not typically among the first things that come to mind about her work. By reading Berlant's interest in affect as conceptually homologous with the interest of more material media theorists in media as conditions of being, the essay raises the possibility that affect theory is a variation of media theory, which would make Berlant a key media theorist in disguise.
UNIVERSITY OF UTAH Readers of Capacious are probably more prone than most to field, on occasion, ... more UNIVERSITY OF UTAH Readers of Capacious are probably more prone than most to field, on occasion, a deceptively difficult question. For those curious enough to ask it, the question must seem straightforward enough: "What is affect theory?" Over the last several years, really for almost a decade now, this is a question I've been posed more times than I can remember. Yet, somehow, every time, whatever answer I've managed to get out seems to elude satisfying me-and often, I fear, whoever's looked to me for an answer. And that's a curious predicament to face for someone, at least measured by much of what I publish and teach, who should probably know just how to respond to such questions. How can I write about and train students in affect theory without having a definitive answer about what it even is? The truth is, I think the not knowing of affect theory is part of the point, that is, part of why-and how-affect theory matters. The key question to ask isn't what affect theory is, but what the doing of affect theory does. There was a time, early on (from here in 2023, we'll say the mid-1990s count), when a set of practices and questions grouped under the vague heading of something called "affect theory" was becoming a semi-stable enough interest among scholars to be visible across different academic disciplines and sites of inquiry. Mind you, these weren't the earliest days-the ones that historical renderings anachronistically tend to evoke via Spinoza, Freud, or various other bellwethers who didn't realize "affect theory" was what they were up to-but they were early enough in the concrescence of something resembling a veritable field that Brian Massumi, writing in 1995, could reasonably observe a sort of discursive wild-west in studying affect. "The problem," he wrote then, "is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has de-INTRODUCTION
From its outset in antiquity, rhetorical energy has been a protean concept: energeia concerning t... more From its outset in antiquity, rhetorical energy has been a protean concept: energeia concerning the vitality of speech, and the related enargeia referring to vivid description. Recent interest in affect, the Anthropocene, new materialism, and the more-than-human has only made "energy" more salient, yet more promiscuously evoked than ever. Notwithstanding the concept's centrality to some major works of contemporary scholarship, the importance of energy to rhetoric has remained widely underexplored. This essay traces some of the quiet history that energy has played in the rhetorical tradition and charts some points of its ongoing importance.
Advances in linguistics and communication studies, Mar 14, 2014
Insofar as algorithms are digital problem-solving operations that follow a set of rules or proces... more Insofar as algorithms are digital problem-solving operations that follow a set of rules or processes to arrive at a result, they are constrained by the rules that determine their parameters for operating. While an algorithm can only operate according to its instructions, however, the potential rules that might govern an algorithm are inexhaustible. An algorithm's design thus makes rhetorical choices that privilege the importance of some information or desired outcomes over others. This chapter argues for a way of thinking about algorithmic rhetoric as macro-, meso-, and micro-rhetorical. Along these lines, it would be beneficial to think more about algorithms as digital rhetorics with terrific power to sway what counts as knowledge, truth, and material reality in the everyday lives of people across an astonishing range of global communities in the twenty-first century.
This essay makes a case for more critical inquiry in mobile media research around the privilege o... more This essay makes a case for more critical inquiry in mobile media research around the privilege of taken for grantedness. As a critical supplement to Richard Ling's important work on the taken for granted dispersion and embedment of technologies such as the mobile phone or automobile into everyday life, we examine the precarity that such reliance involves. Taking certain media for granted makes other, more invisible vulnerabilities harder to see and acknowledge. We make this case using the example of TikTok, a short-form mobile streaming app that has rapidly become a go-to social media platform worldwide-as well as a massively "visible" infrastructure due to its associated geopolitical tensions and security concerns. In light of recent conversations about banning the platform, TikTok offers an instructive case study for the privilege of taken for grantedness and the deceptively precarious nature of our mobile media practices.
In a time when personalised newsfeeds and automated recommendations foreclose the exposure people... more In a time when personalised newsfeeds and automated recommendations foreclose the exposure people have to political, cultural and social encounters outside their existing predilections, it is more important than ever to think about the ways we come across the unexpected, online and off. This essay accordingly explores the shape of serendipity in a time so bent on personalisation and findability that our techniques of discovery have attained great consequence for the affectability of that which we discover. Serendipity is typically understood as an instrument of invention: the unanticipated but fortuitous incidents that inspire a wise insight or innovation. In this view, the serendipitous is not a boon in itself, but only as it leads to something else. Such thinking, I will argue, neglects that serendipity is fundamentally a mode of encounter, and one that can be as affective and autotelic as it is cognitive and instrumental.
Virtual reality (VR) storytelling, particularly in its nonfictional modes, promises a sensory imm... more Virtual reality (VR) storytelling, particularly in its nonfictional modes, promises a sensory immersion among others whose lives and ways of being a privileged viewer might not otherwise experience. In this essay, by focusing on the Emmy-nominated 2018 VR film Traveling While Black, we explore how the immersive power of VR storytelling can enact ethnographic encounters premised less on the impulse to extract meaning from other people and their ways of life than on the sensory and affective force of being with others in an unfolding experience of both similitude and difference. Without wishing to overstate VR's empathy-inducing potential, we suggest that by situating viewers at a paradoxical threshold between proximity and distance, the affective power of VR derives in part from a narrative form capable of fostering nonappropriative relations.
Arguments about the future of libraries are more trenchant than ever. Yet questions about the nat... more Arguments about the future of libraries are more trenchant than ever. Yet questions about the nature of public libraries are inseparable from questions about their public character. Historically, competing arguments about the ideal relationship between libraries and their publics have mirrored evolving technologies that affect a library's potential content and accessibility. But today, when socially excluded populations need libraries to gain the cultural capital necessary to participate in civil society, threats to public libraries also threaten the public sphere's viability as a way for the disenfranchised to address the state.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, Jul 19, 2023
As the problems wrought by anthropogenic global warming have become more urgent, scholars of rhet... more As the problems wrought by anthropogenic global warming have become more urgent, scholars of rhetoric have turned more than ever before toward environmental topics and ecological perspectives. These interests have influenced the contemporary study of rhetoric enough that it is now possible to identify some different yet overlapping strains of research at the nexus of ecology and rhetoric. Doing so, however, is not without ongoing contestations, including over the nature of ecological thought, expanding systems of rhetoric, environmentalisms, ecofeminisms, and critical eco-futures. Despite these challenges, rhetoric and ecology may pair so well together because each is a capacious figure of thought, capable of accommodating others. As a way of thinking about interconnectedness in particular, "ecology" has been taken up by many scholars in diverse fields and disciplines. As a result, the ways the concept is mobilized in studies of rhetoric reflect an unruly assortment of approaches to, and understandings of, ecology, the influence of which cannot be traced to any pure or universal version of the term, because, as with "rhetoric," no such common meaning exists. Grappling with the complex convergence of both terms might help scholars to constellate a semi-stable image of what it can mean and involve to study these topics together.
Drawing from its author's experience as Wayne Booth's archivist, this essay explores the rhetoric... more Drawing from its author's experience as Wayne Booth's archivist, this essay explores the rhetorical and performative relationship between an archive and its subject's legacy. Archives are fixed collections of historical artifacts that preserve an evidentiary ''truth'' about their subjects; meanwhile, they are unstable and dynamic spaces where the past is only imperfectly reanimated through a researcher's rhetorical invention. Using Booth's archive and autobiography, My Many Selves (2006), this essay suggests Booth's life and scholarship make an especially salient case for theorizing the archive as a performative dialogue wherein a plausible harmony can be achieved among archive, subject, and researcher.
Critical Studies in Media Communication, Dec 17, 2021
Streaming media are often placed in a lineage of electrical technologies that promise connectivit... more Streaming media are often placed in a lineage of electrical technologies that promise connectivity at a distance. We argue, however, that the material-discursive entanglement of streaming is a technological descendent of pre-electrical attempts to control essential resources through flow. Inspired by John Durham Peters's emphasis on elemental media, we examine streaming media practices that date to antiquity in order to assess infrastructures of flow today. By considering material technologies that capture and channel critical resources to be the "original" streaming media, we demonstrate how the idealized metaphor of streaming conceals the imbrication of human-technology-nature that underpins the capture and channel of flows. Consequently, we position streaming media as infrastructural, indebted to environments, and as part of a lineage that includes not only the telegraph, telephone, television, and film, but also rivers, canals, aqueducts, and pipelines.
Recent interest in platform studies has called attention to the ways technologies both afford and... more Recent interest in platform studies has called attention to the ways technologies both afford and constrain creative ways of participating in social and cultural life. Digital platforms have become adept at collecting historical data and using it not just to predict future outcomes, but to produce the present through cultivated expectations of what it will have been. By exploring the case of amateur sound-recording media such as the mixtape, the writable CD, and online playlists, this paper explores how the material constraints of these media change the possibilities for what curated music can communicate. If one result is to mediate different temporal experiences by using timely music to elevate moments into events, then algorithmic music recommendations foreclose the affectability of experience by circumscribing it in advance as deliverable.
Drawing from in situ fieldwork in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the northernmost settlement on Earth, t... more Drawing from in situ fieldwork in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the northernmost settlement on Earth, these notes bring out the affective, ambient, and atmospheric power of extended darkness during the polar night, when the sun does not appear above the horizon for several months at a time. Each entry is composed of 113 words to reflect the number of days without light in Longyearbyen during the winter of my visit. Through a mixture of ethnographic observations, researched academic scholarship, and some endeavors of poetic worldmaking, these notes attempt to evoke the ineffable force of global warming by performing the sort of acutely observed and felt attentiveness to planetary being that is needed for our time.
Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Mar 1, 2024
This article considers some ways that encounters with everyday objects in a home can generate a f... more This article considers some ways that encounters with everyday objects in a home can generate a feeling of intimacy. The emerging range of "smart" devices marketed to exploit personal connections with the appurtenances of domestic spaces, we argue, effectively make the home into a platform for such intimacy. That intimacy is often achieved through the implied animacy of objects that might otherwise be regarded as asignifying, thereby enabling meaningful narratives to be built up around the likes of toasters and floorboards. The article suggests that such platforms complicate the distinction between public and private spaces, as the makers of smart technologies seek not just to insert their devices into our daily lives, but to make them feel intimate while extracting data about us in return.
This article considers some ways that encounters with everyday objects in a home can generate a f... more This article considers some ways that encounters with everyday objects in a home can generate a feeling of intimacy. The emerging range of "smart" devices marketed to exploit personal connections with the appurtenances of domestic spaces, we argue, effectively make the home into a platform for such intimacy. That intimacy is often achieved through the implied animacy of objects that might otherwise be regarded as asignifying, thereby enabling meaningful narratives to be built up around the likes of toasters and floorboards. The article suggests that such platforms complicate the distinction between public and private spaces, as the makers of smart technologies seek not just to insert their devices into our daily lives, but to make them feel intimate while extracting data about us in return.
This essay engages with Lauren Berlant's scholarship by considering its contributions to media th... more This essay engages with Lauren Berlant's scholarship by considering its contributions to media theory. Despite Berlant's beloved following and many key impacts on critical theory, affect theory, and otherwise, media theory is not typically among the first things that come to mind about her work. By reading Berlant's interest in affect as conceptually homologous with the interest of more material media theorists in media as conditions of being, the essay raises the possibility that affect theory is a variation of media theory, which would make Berlant a key media theorist in disguise.
UNIVERSITY OF UTAH Readers of Capacious are probably more prone than most to field, on occasion, ... more UNIVERSITY OF UTAH Readers of Capacious are probably more prone than most to field, on occasion, a deceptively difficult question. For those curious enough to ask it, the question must seem straightforward enough: "What is affect theory?" Over the last several years, really for almost a decade now, this is a question I've been posed more times than I can remember. Yet, somehow, every time, whatever answer I've managed to get out seems to elude satisfying me-and often, I fear, whoever's looked to me for an answer. And that's a curious predicament to face for someone, at least measured by much of what I publish and teach, who should probably know just how to respond to such questions. How can I write about and train students in affect theory without having a definitive answer about what it even is? The truth is, I think the not knowing of affect theory is part of the point, that is, part of why-and how-affect theory matters. The key question to ask isn't what affect theory is, but what the doing of affect theory does. There was a time, early on (from here in 2023, we'll say the mid-1990s count), when a set of practices and questions grouped under the vague heading of something called "affect theory" was becoming a semi-stable enough interest among scholars to be visible across different academic disciplines and sites of inquiry. Mind you, these weren't the earliest days-the ones that historical renderings anachronistically tend to evoke via Spinoza, Freud, or various other bellwethers who didn't realize "affect theory" was what they were up to-but they were early enough in the concrescence of something resembling a veritable field that Brian Massumi, writing in 1995, could reasonably observe a sort of discursive wild-west in studying affect. "The problem," he wrote then, "is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has de-INTRODUCTION
From its outset in antiquity, rhetorical energy has been a protean concept: energeia concerning t... more From its outset in antiquity, rhetorical energy has been a protean concept: energeia concerning the vitality of speech, and the related enargeia referring to vivid description. Recent interest in affect, the Anthropocene, new materialism, and the more-than-human has only made "energy" more salient, yet more promiscuously evoked than ever. Notwithstanding the concept's centrality to some major works of contemporary scholarship, the importance of energy to rhetoric has remained widely underexplored. This essay traces some of the quiet history that energy has played in the rhetorical tradition and charts some points of its ongoing importance.
Advances in linguistics and communication studies, Mar 14, 2014
Insofar as algorithms are digital problem-solving operations that follow a set of rules or proces... more Insofar as algorithms are digital problem-solving operations that follow a set of rules or processes to arrive at a result, they are constrained by the rules that determine their parameters for operating. While an algorithm can only operate according to its instructions, however, the potential rules that might govern an algorithm are inexhaustible. An algorithm's design thus makes rhetorical choices that privilege the importance of some information or desired outcomes over others. This chapter argues for a way of thinking about algorithmic rhetoric as macro-, meso-, and micro-rhetorical. Along these lines, it would be beneficial to think more about algorithms as digital rhetorics with terrific power to sway what counts as knowledge, truth, and material reality in the everyday lives of people across an astonishing range of global communities in the twenty-first century.
This essay makes a case for more critical inquiry in mobile media research around the privilege o... more This essay makes a case for more critical inquiry in mobile media research around the privilege of taken for grantedness. As a critical supplement to Richard Ling's important work on the taken for granted dispersion and embedment of technologies such as the mobile phone or automobile into everyday life, we examine the precarity that such reliance involves. Taking certain media for granted makes other, more invisible vulnerabilities harder to see and acknowledge. We make this case using the example of TikTok, a short-form mobile streaming app that has rapidly become a go-to social media platform worldwide-as well as a massively "visible" infrastructure due to its associated geopolitical tensions and security concerns. In light of recent conversations about banning the platform, TikTok offers an instructive case study for the privilege of taken for grantedness and the deceptively precarious nature of our mobile media practices.
In a time when personalised newsfeeds and automated recommendations foreclose the exposure people... more In a time when personalised newsfeeds and automated recommendations foreclose the exposure people have to political, cultural and social encounters outside their existing predilections, it is more important than ever to think about the ways we come across the unexpected, online and off. This essay accordingly explores the shape of serendipity in a time so bent on personalisation and findability that our techniques of discovery have attained great consequence for the affectability of that which we discover. Serendipity is typically understood as an instrument of invention: the unanticipated but fortuitous incidents that inspire a wise insight or innovation. In this view, the serendipitous is not a boon in itself, but only as it leads to something else. Such thinking, I will argue, neglects that serendipity is fundamentally a mode of encounter, and one that can be as affective and autotelic as it is cognitive and instrumental.
Virtual reality (VR) storytelling, particularly in its nonfictional modes, promises a sensory imm... more Virtual reality (VR) storytelling, particularly in its nonfictional modes, promises a sensory immersion among others whose lives and ways of being a privileged viewer might not otherwise experience. In this essay, by focusing on the Emmy-nominated 2018 VR film Traveling While Black, we explore how the immersive power of VR storytelling can enact ethnographic encounters premised less on the impulse to extract meaning from other people and their ways of life than on the sensory and affective force of being with others in an unfolding experience of both similitude and difference. Without wishing to overstate VR's empathy-inducing potential, we suggest that by situating viewers at a paradoxical threshold between proximity and distance, the affective power of VR derives in part from a narrative form capable of fostering nonappropriative relations.
Arguments about the future of libraries are more trenchant than ever. Yet questions about the nat... more Arguments about the future of libraries are more trenchant than ever. Yet questions about the nature of public libraries are inseparable from questions about their public character. Historically, competing arguments about the ideal relationship between libraries and their publics have mirrored evolving technologies that affect a library's potential content and accessibility. But today, when socially excluded populations need libraries to gain the cultural capital necessary to participate in civil society, threats to public libraries also threaten the public sphere's viability as a way for the disenfranchised to address the state.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, Jul 19, 2023
As the problems wrought by anthropogenic global warming have become more urgent, scholars of rhet... more As the problems wrought by anthropogenic global warming have become more urgent, scholars of rhetoric have turned more than ever before toward environmental topics and ecological perspectives. These interests have influenced the contemporary study of rhetoric enough that it is now possible to identify some different yet overlapping strains of research at the nexus of ecology and rhetoric. Doing so, however, is not without ongoing contestations, including over the nature of ecological thought, expanding systems of rhetoric, environmentalisms, ecofeminisms, and critical eco-futures. Despite these challenges, rhetoric and ecology may pair so well together because each is a capacious figure of thought, capable of accommodating others. As a way of thinking about interconnectedness in particular, "ecology" has been taken up by many scholars in diverse fields and disciplines. As a result, the ways the concept is mobilized in studies of rhetoric reflect an unruly assortment of approaches to, and understandings of, ecology, the influence of which cannot be traced to any pure or universal version of the term, because, as with "rhetoric," no such common meaning exists. Grappling with the complex convergence of both terms might help scholars to constellate a semi-stable image of what it can mean and involve to study these topics together.
Drawing from its author's experience as Wayne Booth's archivist, this essay explores the rhetoric... more Drawing from its author's experience as Wayne Booth's archivist, this essay explores the rhetorical and performative relationship between an archive and its subject's legacy. Archives are fixed collections of historical artifacts that preserve an evidentiary ''truth'' about their subjects; meanwhile, they are unstable and dynamic spaces where the past is only imperfectly reanimated through a researcher's rhetorical invention. Using Booth's archive and autobiography, My Many Selves (2006), this essay suggests Booth's life and scholarship make an especially salient case for theorizing the archive as a performative dialogue wherein a plausible harmony can be achieved among archive, subject, and researcher.
Critical Studies in Media Communication, Dec 17, 2021
Streaming media are often placed in a lineage of electrical technologies that promise connectivit... more Streaming media are often placed in a lineage of electrical technologies that promise connectivity at a distance. We argue, however, that the material-discursive entanglement of streaming is a technological descendent of pre-electrical attempts to control essential resources through flow. Inspired by John Durham Peters's emphasis on elemental media, we examine streaming media practices that date to antiquity in order to assess infrastructures of flow today. By considering material technologies that capture and channel critical resources to be the "original" streaming media, we demonstrate how the idealized metaphor of streaming conceals the imbrication of human-technology-nature that underpins the capture and channel of flows. Consequently, we position streaming media as infrastructural, indebted to environments, and as part of a lineage that includes not only the telegraph, telephone, television, and film, but also rivers, canals, aqueducts, and pipelines.
Recent interest in platform studies has called attention to the ways technologies both afford and... more Recent interest in platform studies has called attention to the ways technologies both afford and constrain creative ways of participating in social and cultural life. Digital platforms have become adept at collecting historical data and using it not just to predict future outcomes, but to produce the present through cultivated expectations of what it will have been. By exploring the case of amateur sound-recording media such as the mixtape, the writable CD, and online playlists, this paper explores how the material constraints of these media change the possibilities for what curated music can communicate. If one result is to mediate different temporal experiences by using timely music to elevate moments into events, then algorithmic music recommendations foreclose the affectability of experience by circumscribing it in advance as deliverable.
Drawing from in situ fieldwork in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the northernmost settlement on Earth, t... more Drawing from in situ fieldwork in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the northernmost settlement on Earth, these notes bring out the affective, ambient, and atmospheric power of extended darkness during the polar night, when the sun does not appear above the horizon for several months at a time. Each entry is composed of 113 words to reflect the number of days without light in Longyearbyen during the winter of my visit. Through a mixture of ethnographic observations, researched academic scholarship, and some endeavors of poetic worldmaking, these notes attempt to evoke the ineffable force of global warming by performing the sort of acutely observed and felt attentiveness to planetary being that is needed for our time.
This field guide seeks to identify and question these points of intersection, to explore algorith... more This field guide seeks to identify and question these points of intersection, to explore algorithms and the worlds of code, function, structure, and outcomes they inhabit as another of Cargile-Cook’s (2002) layered literacies. As curator of this collection, I invite you to read these contributions and the responses they generate, and to respond in kind, to become part of a conversation that seeks to understand what it means to be an algorithm in a world of organisms — and to be an organism in a world of algorithms.
This book explores how gestural participation in public life builds the affective commonwealths t... more This book explores how gestural participation in public life builds the affective commonwealths that prefigure the political. Treating affect as rhetorical and rhetoric as affective, Gestures of Concern argues that before social and political change can occur, the conditions amenable to its flourishing must be created through forms of sociality not always limited to symbolic communication and meaning. Although symbolic orders of communication can be especially persuasive, the affective orders that traffic in expressive gestures are no less influential for being less instrumental. Advancing the idea that more recessive “idiot rhetorics” are a viable means of orienting people toward a sustainable way of being-in-common, the book shows how the ordinary citizen’s expression of social and political concerns is being refracted through creative and critical engagement with the arts. The affordances of digital communication technologies have seen the social and the aesthetic converge for ordinary citizens in everyday life at the same time that communicative capitalism across western liberal democracy has encouraged communicative participation in public affairs. The arts and public exchange have never been more intertwined. In turn, cultural public spheres have become robust sites for political activity. Chapters explore TED Talks; stickers as cultural techniques; the history of curation, participatory art, and relational aesthetics; literary social media; vernacular protests to save libraries; and artistic tinkering with Google Street View, among an assortment of other examples and cases.
Clickable Media in a Plastic World (Introduction), 2020
This is the introduction to LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media, a book I co-edited with Nick Tayl... more This is the introduction to LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media, a book I co-edited with Nick Taylor for Bloomsbury (2020). The book engages media studies book by way of arguing that LEGOs are materially digital media.
Book Review of Ancient Rhetoric and Digital Networks, edited by Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith... more Book Review of Ancient Rhetoric and Digital Networks, edited by Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister (University of Alabama Press, 2018)
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