FoolsCap

Though research has yet to strictly begin, I’ve been trying to put some thought in order about my vaguely defined metaphor/composition/tachnology project.  Here are some of those preliminary thoughts:

Loyal readers know the project was inspired by an earlier post about the metaphors I’d encountered thus far in reading rhetcomp/new media scholarship.  As I first thought of the project, I imagined it would be centered on a claim something like this:

In an effort to introduce new media-based compositional practices to a skeptical, if not hostile, tradition of print-literacy based academic writing, composition and new media theorists have relied on metaphor to describe potential models for new media work in the composition classroom and beyond.  The use of these metaphors reflect the discipline’s awareness of the skepticism with which it is met, and something about remediating composition with new media practices yadda yadda justify to the academy blabbity blab.

Okay, so even there it wasn’t really that fleshed out.  While the project may still have that kind of claim, my meeting with Rice (Like My Dinner with Andre?) suggested new and more intriguing (read: demanding) directions in which to take the project.  I think Rice’s suggestions are more interesting (and demanding) because they resist the cynical and simple urge toward polemic, and leave the project with more ways to inspire future work (my own, that is). 

The virtue of serendipity in research: while searching for an antonym for monologic in a previous post, I discovered the theory of polylogic.  To summarize, from the Wikipedia entry on the subject:

Polylogic is an inveted term by Peter Krieg, when trying to put in words the technology invented by Erez Elul.

Here is what Peter Kreig says: Polylogic is the integration of more than one logic domain in a single structure that still allows differentiation between each logic domain. Polylogic is not a new logic, since it respects the rules of logic in each domain, but rather an architecture of logic that allows the coexistence of different logic domains within one structure. A characteristic of a polylogic structure is that every node has at least two parents instead of just one in a classical logic structure. A polylogic structure therefore cannot be described as a tree or a hierachy, but as a forest or an intersecting system of different hierarchies (meta-hierarchy).

Polylogic, then, might be argued to be the logic inherent to the network; each node retains its own necessary logic while connecting to other that retain their own logic.

Why is this significant for my thoughts on metaphor?  Well, I was originally thinking that one thing to argue would be that new media comp scholars have each proposed models of remediating comp studies without any individual model taking precedence.  But this reflects a monologic understanding of the stakes of the discourse, and, further, I don’t really think that Sirc advocates virtual urbanism over Rice hip-hop pedagogy, nor does Rice trumpet is model over Ulmer’s mystory.  The topos that each occupies in such studies is inherently polylogic, and each describes one kind of model, one kind of composition, that instructors can employ pedagogically. 

So it is not the case that there are various models competing for the hegemonic stance over theorizing new media comp, but rather that new media comp can be understood as a place of polylogic (both many voices and many logics) copiousness–to borrow from another colleague.

Also, in the "Score one for obvious" column: topos, space, voice. . .all of these terms which rhetcomp uses reflexively are metaphors.  Now what do I do with that?