Queer Dis-Composition On #WeirdTwitter

Situationism is the avant-garde continental movement in the mid 20th century that centered reclamatory aesthetics through a proto-queer reimagining of culture. Rhodes and Alexander want us (researchers, instructors, etc) to détourne by creating our own multimodal texts, which they themselves have done in various “professional” spaces throughout their careers. The authors are adamant that instructors must explore our own spectacular technai, our selves, and digital rhetorics in tandem. Alexander and Rhodes spend time advocating “for the power of images and mashups to create rhetorical possibilities that… question standard narratives” (Rhodes and Alexander 109); in brief, remix is totally queer.

#WeirdTwitter does its own version of détournement: using public digital space for surrealist purposes, undercutting the networking value of social media, of a public digital persona, instead implementing another Situationist technique of dérive, or what Guy Debord described as "a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances," to subvert the intended purpose of Twitter by using its constraints to make something that challenges normativity, that queers dominant narrative.

Laura R. Micciche

McRuer posits that composing itself (as a practice) is messy and dis-composed; he then advocates for connecting the agitation of the composing, laboring body into composition classrooms (49) and even claims that enforcing “programmatic” and compulsory performance of rote forms and docile bodies (51) in composition classrooms, we are serving capitalist interests. This service strips composition of any radical political possibilities, and composing’s innate connection to embodiment renders this disconnect highly problematic.

For McRuer, it is in composition that we have a political obligation to challenge hegemonic identities and narratives; there is an opportunity for embodiment to be taken seriously, and McRuer holds that engaging student writers in moments of otherness, what he terms “queer/disabled moments,” opens possibilities of resistance. He further advocates for queering or “cripping” texts,  challenging essentialist ideologies within cultural artifacts (59), invoking Sedgwick to explicate his use of “queer” as a verb: “‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances… [that] aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’” (57).

Interview excerpt with @nolanallan 

Highlights: 

genre as space for digital community

search for a formthat fits a voice

Another attempt; note the dearth of <3s/RTs

William I. Wolff

William I. Wolff’s webtext “Baby, We Were Born to Tweet: Springsteen Fans, the Writing Practices of In Situ Tweeting, and the Research Possibilities for Twitter” in Kairos details his research practices for analyzing a corpus of tweets for evidence of shared composing strategies, and the difficulty of terming thematically-related Twitter content as part of a “community.” Woolf wants to explicate processes of composing that are voluntary and inherently social, and asks the questions “how does one know how to ‘compose a tweet’? And who is going to read the tweet? There are no contextual clues, no hints toward possible grammars or audiences.”  The long-held tenets of genre are challenged by digital composing spaces: without a clear audience, do we even have a rhetorical moment?

The “rhetorical situation as a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which strongly invites utterance” (4); Bitzer views participation as a crucial form of social engagement, as rhetoric occurs within a cultural moment; genre is inextricably tied to social situation, and, in fact, cannot exist without a generic situation in which to engage (3).

“[A] work of rhetoric is pragmatic; it comes into existence for the sake of something beyond itself; it functions ultimately to produce action or a change in the world; it performs some task” (emphasis mine, 3)

exigence → “an imperfection marked by urgency” (6)

audience → “those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse” (7)

constraints → influences which “have the power to constrain decision and action” (8)

The futile attempt to constrain and define #WT (by @koala_hugs)

RGS thinks of genre as “rhetorically and socially dynamic, ‘stabilized for now’ (Schryer, “Genre and Power”), ideological, performative, intertextual, socio-cognitive, and responsive to and also constructive of situations” (61) and has thus questioned the relevance of explicit genre instruction without a socio-political element, or recognition of “‘interactionally produced worlds’” (Bazerman qtd in Bawarshi and Reiff 61).

Burke → “rhetoric is a form of symbolic action” (61)

Rhetoric is also “contingent and dynamic” on the relationship b/w rhetor and addressee, specifically w/ relation to identity, and flux of identity too (61)

*so how does this link to the specific rhetorical situation of the Twitter Bio?*

Rhetorical situations “call… forth rhetorical discourse” (63)

Bitzer → “‘power of situation to constrain a fitting response’” (qtd in Bawarshi 64); “‘rhetorical forms are born [through recurrence] and a special vocabulary, grammar, and style are established...the tradition itself tends to function as a constraint upon any new response in the form’” (Bitzer qtd in Bawarshi and Reiff 64)

RGS (Rhetorical Genre Studies)

Carolyn Miller --> “[genres are] forms of social action” (58)

RGS explores “how genres enable their users to carry out situated symbolic actions…[and] to perform social actions and relations, enact social roles, and frame social realities” (59) AND ALSO “how genres, through their use, dynamically maintain, reveal tensions within, and help reproduce social practices and realities” (59)

CONTEXT→ reveals “communicative purpose(s), discourse community membership, genre nomenclature, or even genre chains and occluded genres”(59) → “viewed as an ongoing, intersubjective performance, one that is mediated by genres and other culturally available tools” (Bazerman’s “Textual Performance”) (59)

*With “intersubjective performance” in mind, how does Twitter engage on the level of performance? How do individuals convey identity and voice through manipulation of genre to address the rhetorical situation of their own construction? Is this move possible?*

RGS wants to know about “the role that genres play in how individuals experience, co-construct, and enact social practices and sites of activity” (59); “understanding contexts (and their performance) is both the starting point of genre analysis and its goal” (59)

Genre as action, verb, and noun: genres provide both tools and frameworks for navigating “‘the constant social construction of reality’” (Schryer citer in Bawarshi 60); genres “‘structure our management of time/space’” (same 60) →  Bakhtin’s literary chronotope

Is this extra true for digital genres?

Campbell and Jamieson → “situation demands… should serve as the basis for how we identify and define genres” (65); thus, genres emerge as needed, in dynamic relation to ongoing rhetorical situations and demands (often more static) (65)

Campbell and Jamieson → “‘a genre is composed of a constellation of recognizable forms bound together by an internal dynamic’... ‘[w]hat is distinctive about the acts in a genre is the recurrence of the forms together in constellation’” (20-21 qtd in Bawarshi 65)

C&J → genre is also a “cultural artifact” that marks the ways in which individuals engage with rhetorical culture at large; how these demands are perceived and how communities are formed from the accumulation of rhetorical demand/supply “‘in time and through time’” (C&J 26 qtd in Bawarshi 65); the dynamic nature of genre as reflexive groundswell can (and does) reveal cultural trends outside of the discipline

*how does Twitter reveal cultural trends? Through content? Uptick in insularity of community, RTs, <3s, etc.?*

Miller → meta-awareness of genre and rhetorical situations; “actions are inextricably tied to and based in interpretations” (70) and these interpretations are linked to cultural norming or typifications; “social construction of situation… [and] social construction of exigence” (70), exigence functions as a stripe of “‘social knowledge’” which is shared within a discourse community, thus variable across communities (Miller 30 qtd in Bawarshi 70).

“Our ability to recognize, make sense of, and respond to exigencies is part of our social knowledge, and part of how we come to shared agreements on what situations call for, what they mean, and how to act within them” (71), and, according to Miller, it is genre knowledge that allows us to “recognize situations as recurrent and… [to] provide the typified strategies we use to act within them” (71)

*how does Twitter frame these typifications, and how is genre awareness replicated and enforced by constraint, within communities, etc.?*