About
I am an Associate Professor at Texas A&M in the English Department. My current research project is a media archaeology of computer bugs. My first book focuses on the rhetoric of transhumanism. I am broadly interested in rhetorical constructions of fate and human destiny in response to the radical technological changes of the digital. My research and pedagogical work touches on facets of digital rhetoric, digital humanities, emerging media, and technical communications.
Transhumanism
Published Book
My first book project (published by University of Minnesota Press, Fall 2017) explores the rhetoric of the transhumanism movement with regards specifically to its Utopian content. Order Transhumanism on Amazon!
Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia
Order Transhumanism on Amazon!
This project develops the rhetorical mode of “evolutionary futurism” and the rhetoric of the transhumanist movement. While transhumanism is usually dismissed by scholars of rhetoric, technology, and culture as a fringe movement with limited scope, my project instead argues that “transhumanism” is a name for a much more pervasive rhetorical mode that considers technology as a vector for evolutionary change operating on society, consciousness, and biology. I call this rhetorical mode “evolutionary futurism,” and, in tracing this formation throughout 20th and 21st century culture, I suggest that transhumanism, rather than a fringe movement of renegade scientists and philosophers, is actually a postmodern form of Utopia in line with Fredric Jameson’s discussion of the concept in Postmodernism.
My book then traces the rhetorical, Utopian mode I call “evolutionary futurism” through a number of important moments in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Chapters Summaries
- The first chapter considers the origin of evolutionary futurism in continental modernism. Specifically, the chapter traces out the reception of Nietzsche’s übermensch as a figure for radical evolution rather than enlightened self-interest. Theosophist P.D. Ouspensky and Futurist Mina Loy are considered as guides for this particular uptake of Nietzsche.
- The second chapter explores evolutionary futurist rhetoric in pre-WWII American science fiction during the “superman boom,” my term for the period immediately before and during the start of the war in which John W. Campbell solicited a considerable mass of stories about genetically evolved superhumans for his magazines. Concomitant to this publishing fad, SF fan culture also became intersted in actualizing this evolutionary futurist in its calls for an evolved “fannationalism.”
- The third chapter is about the role of suffering and hedonism in an evolutionary futurism. Questioning the dominant transhuman rhetorical mode in which evolving beyond the human will be blissful, I explore the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit who first coined the term “transhuman” in its modern usage, as a model for an evolutionary vanguard not tied to dubious notions of winner-take-all evolution.
- The fourth chapter asks after aesthetics and evolutionary futurism. In the realm of high art, I consider the impact of Natasha Vita-More’s manifesto for transhuman art and the work of Arakawa and Gins, who adopt principles of evolutionary futurist rhetoric to art and architecture. I juxtapose this aesthetic with the “transhuman inaesthetic,” my term for the often bland and beige futurism of transhumanists such as Raymond Kurzweil and Zoltan Istvan. Finally, I conclude by arguing that this inaesthetic blinds many transhumanists to the evolutionary futurist aspects of online “low art” movements, such as meme culture.
- The book concludes by discussing accelerationism and xenofeminism as recent examples of imagining an evolutionary futurist vanguard politics.
Teaching Philosophy
Teaching
My goals in teaching classes in both rhetoric and literature are intimately connected with my research interests.
Teaching Philosophy
“His dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program for pure computers.”—Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
My goals in teaching classes in both rhetoric and literature are intimately connected with my research interests. In my first book, I write about “transhumanism,” a discursive community aimed at grappling with humans as objects of ongoing evolutionary processes. Often, these evolutionary processes have, specifically, to do with the evolutionary pressures exerted by new and emerging, digital technologies. As such, my motivation as a teacher is to better equip my students to deal with these pressures. Overall, I view my teaching as a chance to direct students in ways of living in a digital media ecology and preparing them for a future of ongoing, accelerating technological change.
This goal expresses itself differently, depending on the class being taught. For instance, in teaching Technical Communication, which I have done four times so far, I made an interesting discovery regarding my students and their attitudes towards writing. In conducting classroom discussion, I found that, thanks to Penn State’s various internship and co-op programs, my students mostly had experience writing in a professional, scientific capacity. What they lacked, however, was basic knowledge of digital document production. As such, I’ve retooled my teaching of this subject to focus on combining content production and document design. In this fashion, students spend as much time focusing on how they write as on what they write. The class includes assignments in both report writing and webpage design. I find that students benefit more from this approach, as they can leave my course with marketable, new media skills in addition to a better understanding of the rhetorical stakes of technical writing. More importantly, I stress the importance of developing digital problem solving strategies, rather than specific tool use, so that students in my classes can be better prepared for a changing, evolving digital workplace.
My teaching of science fiction, which is a new experience for me, affords another opportunity for dealing pedagogically with the tenants of transhumanism. Where the technical communications classroom becomes a workshop for applied transhumanism, I view the science fiction classroom as focusing on the philosophical implications of this discourse. By focusing on close analysis of various texts that grapple with the nature of a radically altered future, I attempt to direct students toward thinking seriously about the ethical, moral, and philosophical issues raised by the rapid technological change experienced by the United States following World War II (which corresponds to the high point of American SF). Additionally, as many of these processes of change and acceleration are ongoing (especially with regards to emerging Internet technologies and mobile computing), I view science fiction pedagogy as an opportunity to raise my students’ awareness that the issues raised in SF are, increasingly, being raised in their lives and their futures.
In both of these cases, I find focusing on the ongoing evolution of the human condition, by viewing my pedagogy from a transhuman perspective, both personally rewarding and hugely beneficial to my students in the classroom and beyond. While also helping them learn the course material at hand, my transhuman perspective allows students to step out of the classroom and the university with highly valuable “take-away” skills that can be applied in their future lives as students and as professionals. As such, I look forward to continue to explore this perspective in new and exciting pedagogical environments.
The Ethos of Mr. Robot
Published Article
This article discusses the presentation of anti-corporate resistance in Mr. Robot.
The Ethos of Mr. Robot
This article considers Mr. Robot as an important moment in the presentation of the outsider ethos in contemporary cultural texts. Specifically, the article doubly considers the show’s presentation of the hacker as a revolutionary outsider, co-opting the language and imagery of the collective Anonymous and it’s situatedness as part of USA Network’s successful corporate rebranding as an edgier network that appeals to millenials. By considering the show’s blatant commodification of dissent, the article asks after the true shape of anti-corporate ethos in the present and questions the revolutionary potential of popular entertainment in a network, globalized era.
“We twiddle … and turn into machines”: Mina Loy, HTML, and the Machining of Information
Published Article
Chapter on Loy, HTML, and the emergence of contemporary information.
“We twiddle … and turn into machines”: Mina Loy, HTML, and the Machining of Information
This chapter argues that Mina Loy—avant-garde poet, fierce critic of Italian futurism, collage artist, and mystic—anticipates in her poetry written between 1910 and 1930 the turn from a concept of the machine as physical to the machine as information, a transformation also developed in 20th century Marxist thought. I base Loy’s informatic futurism on discoveries made in translating her typographic fractals into HTML for online consumption. Loy’s usage of an informatic machine critiques both the masculine ethos of her Futurist interlocutors but also interrogates the rational afterlives of this machismo in web design practices that inherits principles developed by avant-garde movements. Thus Loy’s poetic account of machinic being serves as a potent site for exploring and resisting informatic rationality in the present.
Collection is edited by Shawna Ross and James O’Sullivan and published by Palgrave.
Insect Capital
Published Article
Uses the pattern of insect imagery in William Gibson’s Neuromancer to talk about a theory of corporate culture informed by German Media Studies.
Insect Capital
Tracing an inhuman theory of the corporation, this article uses Friedrich Kittler’s understandings of media (that they shape humans, not the other way around) to argue that the corporation in postmodern, cyberpunk literature is a media form for adapting the human to the inhuman registers of global data. I trace this through the repeated invocation of the wasp hive as a metaphor for transnational corporation in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Ultimately, I show that, contra many readings of the novel, the book is actually a celebration of humanity’s inability to adapt to new technologies, a common theme in Gibson’s work.
Computation
Forthcoming Article
Chapter in The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology that explores the relationship between the early history of computation and modernist literature.
Computation
This chapter considers the relationship between computation and modernist art. Specifically, it explores the modernist turn in mathetmatics at the dawn of the 20th century and how this turn contributed to the development of digital computation as we know it today. From this history, I consider modernist engagement with automatic writing in the context of these innovations. While automatic writing is primarily considered a response to the automation of the body in industrialism, I show that modernist art engages with automatic writing as a way of grappling with the automation of the mind represented by computation.
Translating the Future
Published Article
Article theorizing the use of ES6 transpilers (Babel & Traceur) in contemporary JavaScript as examples of novel machine translation systems.
Translating the Future: Transpilers and the New Temporalities of Programming in JavaScript
This article discusses the use of translating compilers (transpilers) such as Babel & Traceur, which are used to implement the recently approved ES6 standard for JavaScript, represents a novel temporality for translation. Following Vilém Flusser, who argues that the waning of writing and the rise of the technical image signals a shift from progress as a narrative of future-to-present instead of past-to-future, I discuss how transpilers, which allow developers to write present code in a future language (that does not yet exist in production web browsers), enact this shift temporality, by bringing future code into present development. The article also argues that these new temporal rhythms represent potential mutations in the way standards are made and risk is managed in the post-national global economy.
Invoking Darkness
Published Article
This article argues for a turn-to-darkness in the rhetoric of the nonhuman.
Invoking Darkness: Skotison, Scalar Derangement, and Inhuman Rhetoric
Read this article on JSTOR. Read this article on Project MUSE.
This article argues that the turn to new materialism in rhetorical theory, specifically when inspired by object-oriented ontology, actually fills a need to address what this paper labels “boundless agencies”: ecosystems, climates, pandemics, economies, etc. Our object-centric language lacks rhetorical strategies for dealing with these new inhuman agencies and, as they come to dominant our cultural rhetoric, we lack persuasive strategies to address them. Instead of a model of object rhetoric focused on rhetorical carpentry (Brown and Rivers), a strategy that proposes the enlistment of simulating objects to understand the nonhuman, this article nominates Lanham’s concept of skotison—deliberately obfuscatory speech—as a key figure for rhetorically invoking these boundless agencies. Rhetorical invocation provides a strategy for thinking about the rhetoric of the inhuman, rather than the nonhuman, which is the more salient object for an extra-human rhetorical theory in our current age of horrors.
Events in Flux
Published Article
What can the way Facebook writes software—at the level of the code itself—teach us about how we argue online?
Events in Flux: Software Architecture, Detractio, and the Rhetorical Infrastructure of Facebook.
This article considers the design of software platforms—emergent, commodified digital publics that leverage crowd effects into profit—through the lens of “rhetorical code studies” (Brock 2013) to test whether compositional effects are algorithmic byproducts. It focuses on Facebook’s Flux architecture. Flux is a design pattern—a term borrowed from architecture to denote repeatable solutions to reoccurring problems—meant to facilitate feed-forward state management, a solution necessary in very-large-scale data-driven applications. The article considers Flux, which simplifies a programmer’s expressive potential, an example of rhetorical detractio, the process of saying less in order to focus audience attention. By exploring Flux as detractio, it is possible to make specific arguments about Facebook’s role in shaping public argumentation. Facebook is often accused of being a space in which it is difficult to argue because the software discourages reflection and encourages a series of escalating hot takes. Flux removes the process of feedback from platform algorithms and contributes to this lack of feedback at the user level. The article concludes that rhetorical code study is a crucial methodology for studying digital writing that accounts for discursive effects and the manufacture of rhetorical situations by platform algorithms at the level of the code itself.
Image Credit: “Facebook Press Conference” by Robert Scoble
Homework Copia
Rhetorical Algorithm
A Twitter bot that invents homework excuses for the truly desperate.
Online at: http://oncomouse.github.io/homework-copia/
On Twitter at: @HomeworkCopia
Homework Copia
This project algorithmically generates an example of what Desiderius Erasmus called a copia. Specifically, it randomly iterates through copious versions of the famous excuse “My dog ate my homework.” You can also follow this flowing stream of eloquence at @HomeworkCopia).
In De Copia, Erasmus suggests practicing the “abundant style” by imagining copious variation on given phrases. Famously, Erasmus offers 195 variations on the sentence “Your Letter Pleased Me Greatly” as an example of stylistic abundance in De Copia. James J Brown, Jr. argues in “The Machine That I Therefore Am” that Erasmus’s copia are tiny rhetorical algorithms and, as an example, discusses @YourLetterBot, which produces further versions of pleased letter recipients.
Project source code: https://github.com/oncomouse/homework-copia
Mina Loy Online
Online Edition
Online edition of Mina Loy’s poetry and manifestoes formatted in HTML to be typographically correct, retaining the structural elements of Loy’s writing that is often not produced online.
Online at: http://oncomouse.github.io/loy
Mina Loy Online
This collection of Mina Loy’s poems and manifestoes documents the canon of futurist works identified by Janet Lyon as crucial to understanding Loy’s complicated relationship with avant-garde modernism. Additionally, Loy’s usage of typography contains clues to how to interpret the poems, but many of these innovative, concrete features are lost when the poems are translated online. This online edition rectifies this lack by using CSS 3, HTML 5, and advanced web fonts to format Loy’s poems in as close a format to their original publication as possible.
Edition currently includes:
- “Aphorisms on Futurism” (1914)
- “Feminist Manifesto” (1914)
- “Parturition” (1914)
- Songs to Joannes (1917)
Online at: http://oncomouse.github.io/loy
MLA Talk: Security Through Transparency: Minimal Computing in the Jungle of the Real
Recent
Blog Post
I couldn’t make MLA 2018 this year due to a “bomb cyclone” in NYC and multiple flight cancellations from DFW. Through the superhero efforts of presider Élika Oretga, I was able to participate virtually in my panel, #304 “Activist Infrastructures”. Below is the screencast of my talk and slides I made and then, below that you can find the transcript.
My DHSI 2018 Course Description
Recent
Blog Post
I am really excited to announce that I am on the schedule to teach at DHSI next year in Victoria. The class still has to make, of course, but otherwise it should be a go. According to Shawna, some people have been asking for the course proposal, so I thought I’d share it here.
Making Twitter Bots w/ Cheap Bots Done Quick
Recent
Blog Post
Twitter bots, are great, right? Of course they are. People are talking about them at #cwcon in Findlay this weekend. I was talking about them with people at RSA. I run a few (here, here, and here). They are a really great way to get into the world of programmable rhetoric and to play around with some simple coding.
Composition not Inheritance: Imagining a Functional Digital Humanities
Recent Presentation
Call to think through digital humanities practices using methods derived from functional programming.
Composition not Inheritance: Imagining a Functional Digital Humanities
Presentation At: DHSI Colloquium, Victoria, BC
Taking a piece of advice from the 1994 software engineering classic, Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides, this talk imagines a digital humanities that favors composition over inheritance in the design of its systems. In object-oriented programming, inheritance is the design pattern in which objects that share functionality inherit their shared functionality from a common ancestor (e.g. guppies and goldfish both inherit the “swim with fins” behavior from a common fish ancestor class). Such a design pattern gives us big, rigid, and complex hierarchies of data and structure a lot of thinking about digital objects in text encoding and metadata-heavy projects. One source of anxiety in regards to future-proofing digital data can be traced to why Design Patterns recommends avoiding inheritance: if the needs of users change, the entire pattern of inheritance can be disrupted (in the fish example, how do you get the “swims with fins” behavior to a whale or a shark, both of which are not fish?). Instead, composition is the preferred pattern for designing complex systems. Rather than define what data is, in composition, object features are determined by what they do. This model of data focuses on function and behavior rather than ontology. It is more extensible and nuanced because arbitrary functions can be concatenated to describe novel behaviors (in the fish example, there would be a “swims with fins” class that could be composed into goldfish, shark, and whale regardless of what each type was). In this paper, I connect this idea of functional composition to Jacques Derrida’s “Signature, Event, Context,” which I argue is the only essay from the post-structual period that has anything interesting to say about computation. There, Derrida suggests that the primary importance of writing is revealing language’s iterability, the way it always repeats but always repeats in new contexts. Using these two concepts—functional composition and linguistic iteration—, I conclude by arguing that while many DH archiving projects and the infrastructure that supports them (such as TEI and Islandora) have done a very good job of getting digital versions of a variety of humanistic objects onto the Internet, but the ability to chain, play with, remix, manipulate, and cross-pollinate from different data-stores and through different media, which is after all the true promise of the digital, is lacking. By thinking about our projects less as future-proof ontological hierarchies and more as compositions of functional behaviors, I speculate that we may start to imagine a version of digital humanities practice that is more in tune with the affordances of the digital itself.
Alien Megastructures
Recent Presentation
Considering recent announcements of the discovery of possible extraterrestrial “megastructures” as evidence for how we construct hope in an age of ecological crisis.
Alien Megastructures: The Possibility of Extraterrestrial Life and the Rhetoric of Hope in the Anthropocene
Presentation At: 18th Biennial RSA Conference, Minneapolis, MN
This presentation draws on popular press accounts of Tabby’s Star, officially designated KIC 8462852, to discuss rhetorical discussion of hope in an age seemingly dominated by cultural conversations of hopelessness. Tabby’s Star, first discovered in 2015, has been popularized in the press for its unusual behavior: light from the star has dimmed in ways that are highly unusual to astronomers. This behavior is so unusual that it is widely held (and widely reported) that the star might be an alien Dyson Sphere. First theorized by physicist Freeman Dyson, a Dyson Sphere is a megastructure that could be constructed by advanced, space-faring societies to completely encase a star and harness 100% of its solar energy, venting unusable infrared light as waste heat. Though debate about the nature of Tabby’s Star is ongoing, several proposed theories for the behavior do not conform to Occam’s Razor, ie. they are more complex than the solution of “aliens.” In this presentation, I use the popular press accounts of this possible alien megastructure as a model for what hope looks like in an age marked by human-caused climate change, mass extinction, and the general decay of capitalist society. Drawing on John Durham Peter’s account of alien communication as a model for radical community, Nathaniel Rivers’s account of wild objects and deep ambivalence, and John Poulakos’s assertion that sophistic rhetoric constructs futures based on desire, I construct a strange conversation about the nature of the future and the role the alien plays in constructing a hopeful future in a high technology, high crisis age.
Image Source: “Alien” by John Fowler
Security Through Transparency
Recent Presentation
Does minimal computing mean minimal complexity in the age of the accident?
Security Through Transparency: Minimal Computing in the Jungle of the Real
Presentation At: The Modern Languages Association Convention, New York, NY
Paul Virilio has argued throughout his oeuvre that on the speed-obsessed contemporary globe, the industrial accident (an explosion at a fertilizer plant, say) becomes indistinguishable from terrorism. With this indistinguishability in mind, this paper argues that minimal computing, as a paradigm for designing information systems, functions as a security measure against the proliferation of accidents documented by Virilio. In thinking about information systems and minimalism, I argue that one cluster in Jentery Sayers’s definitions of minimal computing is “minimal complexity,” a strategy for designing information systems to minimize accidents. This turn to minimal complexity, of which the turn to immutability in JavaScript development is one example, is a response to a recent, and dangerously overlooked, revision to the way we think about digital technology. Where Jean Baudrillard famously declared that media technology produce a desert of the real, recent work in infrastructure studies has instead manifested the jungle of the real in which we live. As ecologists know, jungles are densely entangled, information rich systems that sustain a staggering complexity of life forms. Where scholars of Baudrillard’s generation saw the digitization of life as an evacuation of the real, we find in studying infrastructure a tangle that sustains this virtuality that is rich in complexity and, also, ripe for accidents. As such, I conclude by proposing that minimal computing is a paradigm for securing infrastructure in an age of accidents.
Image Source: DennisM2
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