Stacey Pigg made me feel a tiny bit less neurotic when she acknowledges that many writers, and not just me, battle their bodies in order to get something written down. Writing as a bodily discipline is something that most academics likely have to deal with daily. That much, as well an identification with “the psychical anxiety of needing to check e-mail, Facebook, or IM just one more time” are bodily experiences that I know all too well.
She argues that “Texts are always embodied in relation to physical production and consumption” (241) – and since our reception of texts is always mediated by our bodies, it is impossible to separate one from the other. I get this. Crowley, she reminds us, taught that rhetoric isn’t in the texts themselves, but in our reception (and production) of them. Describing materiality in this way, as I see it, is another way to think about affect, but, funny thing, I didn’t really see that word come up much in the article).
These embodied realities map easily into mediated spaces. “For example,” Pigg writes, “at the simplest level, online writers stomp their feet by writing in all capital letters, they signal pauses with ellipses. This physical sensory element of digital writing often is clear in the actual texts that students create while writing online media…” (241). Again, I get this. She then moves us through a variety of assignment prompts, each with elements encouraging students to remediate, use a variety of voices or perspectives, and/or blur the lines between work and play in the electronic artifacts they produce. These assignments as she presents them give students a variety of rhetorical analysis opportunities, all of which I think are useful in one way or another.
But what is missing here, again, is an acknowledgement of the reasons that these textual variations produce different rhetorical results. Why does using the words “haven’t passed shit” on a blog and then using the more official version of that phrase in a different context (see p. 249) result in a different embodied response? There is such a close tie between embodied experience and emotion, that it seems almost ludicrous that that connection goes unacknowledged here. Is it that we have become so reticent to discuss emotional response that we have had to come up with a new phrase (“embodied materiality”) to discuss it? Maybe I missed the point here somewhere.
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I’m still processing the Sorapure piece. I clicked around the web and found a few of the projects she cites are still available on the web:
Bouchard’s “Autoportrait”
Nold’s “Greenwich Emotion Map”
Perhaps the most interesting connection here is the way in these examples that the database (that virtual filing cabinet of facts and figures) is utilized by artists to create what I would call rhetorical artifacts (isn’t all art, after all, rhetoric?). The reason that this seems to connect is that the database seems to be the furthest thing from an object capable of producing affect, but Sorapure’s examples all show potential ways of eliciting emotional response using unembodied information. I’m kind of amazed that I used the word database and artist in the same sentence, but there it is.
Thanks for those links, Jon–”Grey Area” seems to work best at this point, hmn?
I might add, as an aside, that being able to put text and the digital together in one document is the reason that we’re so intent on providing CCDP as a publishing venue.