Our Writing Program colleagues discuss AI, ChatGPT, and emerging Large Language Models, including their potentials and pitfalls for the doing and teaching writing and rhetoric, as well as the relation to writing program administration. This episode, like Episode 8 last year with Jonathan Alexander, is part of the 4th annual “The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival,” hosted by Charles Wood. This year’s theme is “AI: Applications and Trajectories.” Here, we hope to illuminate through an extensive discussion the uncertain future in regard to powerful technologies that will likely reshape writing practice for writers, teachers, and students alike.

Attendees

Stephanie Bower

Zen Dochterman

Nik De Dominic

Mark Marino

Tanvi Patel

Maddox Pennington

Patti Taylor

Ryan Leack

Ellen Wayland-Smith

Notable Quotes from Our Colleagues

Nik De Dominic: In the same way that COVID-19 presented all of these challenges to us from an instruction point of view, I think LLMs will do the same. It will be up to faculty to familiarize themselves and create literacy for something that they most likely had no idea was on the landscape a year ago. And we really want to empower instructors to make choices that get their students somewhere.

Patti Taylor: I think it's really important to have a mix of people who are experimenting and dealing with these issues and trying things, especially here in these early stages so that [instructors] have the ethos to be able to persuade and say, here's what it's doing to our students. Here's what's useful.

Mark Marino: I think we should not ban [AI/LLMs]. I think we should bring these things in. I think we should build a boat and not a wall to when the flood comes, which is here.

Stephanie Bower:

Margherita Long, Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches courses on Japanese feminism, the modern novel, war narratives and peace activism, and eco-semiotics, discusses the introduction to her manuscript Care, Kin, Crackup: Fukushima and the Intrusion of Gaia. In 2018 she won a five-year grant from the Japan Foundation for a faculty line and a series of international symposia on Japanese Environmental Humanities at UCI. Her interest in the ethics of material indebtedness dates from her first book on psychoanalysis and the maternal-feminine in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, by Stanford University Press, 2009. Here, she discusses the tension between a politics of resistance and a literature of affirmation in the post-Fukushima work of feminist writer Tsushima Yuko (1947-2016).

Attendees

Selected References

Notable Quotes from Margherita

“In turn, when we read activist texts as narratives that make themselves responsible to the event of radiation by affirming and channeling rather than resisting and turning back, I think we can say they become ‘literary’ in a distinctly environmental way. That is, they become artful and philosophical—they move us as art and philosophy—in proportion to their ability to think with the material world, to attune themselves to ‘life.’”

“Kohso sees revolution shifting from something that takes place in defiance of a totalizing capitalism to something that takes place in humble and tentative co-production with the Earth’s ‘omnipresence.’ What does this co-production look like? It’s a compelling question for those of us who teach literature because it connects so clearly to Tsushima’s love of aboriginal Dreamings, and the way they enact a kind of thinking that ‘takes place in the relationship between territory and earth.’”

“If radiation epitomizes the kind of vastness that deranges our thinking even while it prompts and fuels it, how could some other encounter be more profound? I call these feminist questions because they are tightly bound to questions of care-work vis-à-vis the intensity of the encounter, and the need both to honor this work in the those whose texts we study, and to practice it when we read these texts with our students.”

“That is, if the merciless temporality that the Aboriginal dream-world had no choice but to traverse is a timeline of invasion by modernity, why do we feel it moving so powerfully also in the opposite direction? After the nuclear explosions, it is the voices of the Aboriginals that arrive in Tsushima’s ears, riding the same connections, the same power lines, the same ‘flow connecting everything’ that she describes as a force of colonial erasure. Could this force be something else in addition? Something useful? Something ‘environmental?’”

Nathan Stormer, a professor of rhetoric in the Communication and Journalism Department at the University of Maine, discusses with us his article “Rhetoric by Accident,” published in Volume 53.4 of the journal Philosophy & Rhetoric. Here, he articulates a view of accidents that shape rhetorical work, but which themselves are not purposive, motive-driven, directed, or ethical. As extra-moral events and material and/or discursive happenings, accidents are indifferent to purpose. Staying with accidents and our material openness and vulnerability to them, Stormer sustains a space in which to think about accidents, and the accidental, apart from their agential and ethical usefulness, thereby disentangling the accidental from core rhetorical formulations that orbit intentionality on the human stage. In doing so, Stormer illuminates the power of accidents beyond our responses to and appropriations of them.

Attendees

Nathan Stormer

Selected References

Alfred North Whitehead

Notable Quotes from Nathan

“You cannot explain how rhetoric is the way it is—even if you understand it as language use among individuals and people, and in social contexts—and at the same time say every experience, every feeling that I have is intended for me and meant for me as an audience. It is not. It cannot be that way. That’s literally impossible as a statement. So, you’re left with this problem that we are in fact influenced by things that were never meant for us, that don’t even know that we exist.”

“The point is that if you’re going to explain that rhetoric is driven by human interests you’re left with the fact that you can’t explain all the things that shape people through those interests, which means there’s a problem of the accident that goes unexplained. We just don’t have ways of talking about that… If you’re concerned with that issue, I think you confront the fact that there’s a lot things that just happen without any interest in an outcome that shape people.”

“Part of the issue is that you can’t think about the accident without destroying it as an accident… To recognize the accidental as accidental, you have to just leave it alone… You can’t do a rhetorical criticism of an accident without not really talking about an accident. You’re going to talk about what it did to people, why it mattered to them. Well, now you’re in the purposive again, which is perfectly fine, but, again, conceptually the accident’s still there. The accidental still exists. So, I think we do run into the ethical because that’s what people are concerned with, and rightly so, but conceptually we don’t actually engage the problem of the accidental.”

“[Accidental rhetoric does not] displace our understanding of rhetoric or what we think of as intentional. It’s to argue that the intentional, and the design, and the directed and the purposive, is always feeding out of accidents. It has to.”

Jonathan Alexander, Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, director of the Humanities Core Program, and author, co-author, or co-editor of 22 books, discusses his new book, Writing and Desire: Queer Ways of Composing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). In this episode we discuss both the introduction to his book and the broader project. As part of the 3rd annual “The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival,” this episode speaks to the Carnival theme, “Rhetoric: Places and Spaces In and Beyond the Academy.” Challenging both modes of writing and desire, Alexander conceives of writing itself as desire in the form of an ongoing opening out onto possibilities. In this way, writing, especially as figured in rhetoric and composition pedagogy, transcends narrower argumentative and persuasive modes. Furthermore, desire is not conceived of as a lack to be fulfilled, or as an essentialized need to be unleashed, but rather as a fundamental openness, inclusive of critical reflection that makes different conditions and futures possible. Exploring the histories and modalities of writing and desire, we discuss both as unending processes of thinking and being otherwise in and beyond the classroom.

Susan Jarratt, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, shares her rich experience as a writer and scholar, and also as an editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, the official journal of the "Rhetoric Society of America," which will be of great value to those of us working in rhetoric, composition, and related fields, whether in returning to unfinished projects or in taking up new ones. Here, she discusses several of her major projects, including Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991) and Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019), which inform the experience she imparts to scholars tackling difficult and complex projects that often involve expansive scholarly terrains and traditions. Her practical advice will help writers navigate the limits of time and space, but also some of the psychological struggles, including the urge toward perfectionism, that can have the effect of stopping writing before it begins, or else before it is finished, thereby giving scholars tools to work through the trouble spots of their craft.

Daniel M. Gross, Professor of English at UC Irvine, Campus Writing and Communication Coordinator, and Director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication, joins us to discuss his newest book, Being-Moved: Rhetoric as the Art of Listening (University of California Press, 2020). If rhetoric is the art of speaking, who is listening? In Being-Moved, Daniel provides an answer, showing when and where the art of speaking parted ways with the art of listening—and what happens when they intersect once again. Much in the history of rhetoric must be rethought along the way. And much of this rethinking pivots around Martin Heidegger’s early lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric where his famous topic, Being, gives way to being-moved. The results, Gross goes on to show, are profound. Listening to the gods, listening to the world around us, and even listening to one another in the classroom—all of these experiences become different when rhetoric is reoriented from the voice to the ear.

In this episode Lynne Huffer, Professor of WGSS at Emory University, discusses Foucault’s Strange Eros (2020), the third book in her trilogy on Foucault. Reading Foucault as a Sapphic poet who makes “cuts” in the archive, Huffer argues that in the West “eros is to sexuality as unreason is to madness,” or, in other words, that eros forms an elusive background out of which sciences such as sexology extract objects of sexual knowledge which they can then presume to study. Eros, as that which is “other to the West although also at the origin of the West,” is thus also that which is “strange.”

Attendees

Lynne Huffer

Selected Sources Referenced

Deleuze, Gilles. “Desire and Pleasure,” Two Regimes of Madness, 1977.

Notable Quotes from Lynne

“Eros is strange.”

Stuart Murray, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, shares his talk with us, “In Hearkening the Dead: A Rhetorical Disaffirmation of Biopolitics,” which he describes as follows: Foucault defines biopolitics as the differential state power “to make live and let die.” The politics of life is, ironically, a sacrificial economy that produces death as its silent compact, its law. Those we let die rarely figure in our biopolitical “affirmations.” They are tendered as line items and statistics: collateral damages, opportunity costs, daily pandemic death counts. COVID-19 is an object lesson in differential dying, affirmed by the state as much as by the anti-mask and anti-lockdown protestors. How, then, might we on the Left suspend our impulse to criticism—perhaps even despite our own pain, identity, politics—in order to rethink resistance outside of biopolitical logics, and without further implicating ourselves in them or reaffirming them unwittingly? In other words, how might we critically disaffirm biopolitics, disclaim its claim over us, without quite capitulating to and recirculating its tropes?

Attendees

Ryan Leack

Sources Referenced

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer, 1998.

Notable Quotes from Stuart

"Biopolitics kills, albeit indirectly and in the passive voice. It kills in the name of life. And its dead are disavowed as collateral damage, opportunity costs, or negative externalities."

In this episode we discuss Brian Massumi’s “Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn’t,” the introduction to his book Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2005). Among the (un)timely topics we explore are the nature of embodied movement as it affects and effects our subject positions, and how those positions can seem “gridlocked” when we retroactively pinpoint a “self” at the intersection of race, gender, and class identities. How do we acknowledge the strategic importance of such positions while not being captured by them? How can movement, affect, and sensation bring attention to the body in productive ways? How do we avoid the “cultural freeze-frame” of an identity politics that threatens to solidify certain identity constructions? Furthermore, how might field-friendly concepts from the sciences facilitate a more comprehensive and generative sense of embodied movement vis-à-vis becoming? In that effort, how do we “poach” scientific concepts without reducing them to mere metaphors? Finally, and perhaps most importantly for our podcast, how does Massumi’s experimental writing perform the very trans-disciplinary and radical empiricist philosophy that he encourages, thereby bringing movement, affect, and sensation to the writing process itself?

Ryan Leack

Notable Quotes from Massumi

“Take joy in your digressions” (Parables for the Virtual 18).

Vorris Nunley, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, discusses with USC and UCI faculty a talk entitled “Re-Doing Rhetoric: Incivility, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and the Limits of Persuasion (?).” Here, he discusses AOC’s response to Representative Ted Yoho referring to her as a b***h to think with and through trope, incivility, affect, and the neoliberal composition classroom. In conceiving of rhetoric beyond persuasion, he examines the ways in which tropes, in circulating preconsciously in cultures throughout various realms, use us just as much as we use them. In this way, tropes are not simple figures or metaphors individual rhetors deploy toward specific persuasive ends. Rather, that tropes permeate social fabrics as potentialities in the domains of (non)discursive rhetoric means that we “choose” tropes for a particular reason only insofar as they have already affected, shaped, and influenced us in definite ways. Vorris closes on the uses of his work in the multimodal composition classroom and on what he terms a “pedagogy of discomfort,” one which unsettles students in the pursuit of transformative education.

Attendees

Ryan Leack

Sources Referenced

Alexander, Jarratt, Welch. Unruly Rhetorics, 2018.

“I’m interested in what tropes do . . . . When the congressman saw AOC, he didn’t see her, he saw a trope, and he responded to a trope because tropes like that, they erase, they deprivilege the personal.”