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inter.Virtual.Vitalism.views: Aural Encounters with Byron Hawk, Victor Vitanza, and Alex Reid

 Geoffrey V. Carter

The exigency for this “inter.Virtual.Vitalism.views” grew out of a desire to put Byron Hawks’s and Alex’s Reid’s award winning scholarship in conversation with each other. Both authors had recently been honored by the Journal of Advanced Composition’s 2007 Ross Winterowd Award. Hawk’s focus on “vitalism” in A Counter-History of Composition: Towards Methodologies of Complexity (winner) and Reid’s focus on “virtuality” in The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition (honorable mention) seemed to be themes that might speak to each other in provocative ways.  

Indeed, the more I thought about the “V’s” of “virtuality” and “vitalism,” the more I thought about the encounters of a no longer existent on-line forum at the University of Texas at Arlington—Re/Inter/View. This site was hosted by a figure in Composition Studies well known for the twin “V’s” of his signature—Victor J. Vitanza. Given that both Hawk’s and Reid’s work both paid tribute to Vitanza, it seemed natural for me to try to negotiate an encounter that might perform along the lines of R/I/V. In its best moments, R/I/V was able to get beyond the sharp divides of dialectical argument and engage, I think, a manner of the “Whatever Discipline” that Reid explores in The Two Virtuals through Vitanza’s “third (interval) wayves.” This “whatever” spirit (or “wavyes”) inflects Hawk’s view of the “counter-history” of vitalism, especially as his title echoes the title Vitanza’s Contending with Words essay, “Three Countertheses: A Critical In(ter)vention into Composition.”   

So. I contacted Hawk, Reid, and Vitanza about the possibility of their reading passages from their works and my putting these passages in (virtual) conversation with each other. They each generously agreed. Over the course of several months, they each entrusted me with a number of sound files of their reading of various passages for me to use in this experiment. In Reid’s case, he also provided an illuminating meta-commentary on what such a process might reveal about composing practices. Needless to say, it was very interesting to conduct an interview with various senses of what was being said—at the time, it certainly felt more like a secular séance than a science.

Still, as first-time listeners may note, I used Reid’s meta-commentary as an audio thread to help negotiate this experimental interview. My goal was to showcase the ways-cum-wayves in which these rhetors speak to one another. In looping phrases like Hawks’s “unseen ghost,” Reid-Vitanza’s “third interval wayves,” and Vitanza’s “humming on the screen,” I sought an overlap between notions of virtuality and vitalism. Certainly their respective print-based scholarship does a much better job of outlining the depth of these terms than my modest mashup does. Nevertheless, perhaps, my remix may serve as a trailer to their important work. Ultimately, I tried to generate something song-like in these aural samplings, and, indeed, my original attention was to layer music over-top of phrases like Vitanza’s “something else.” In the end, the additional music made my recording too muddy and dense. In future experimental interviews, if this sort of thing catches on, remixing interviewers might attempt to integrate more music. In fact, it would be interesting to see/hear if this very inter.Virtual.Vitalism.views may yet find a way, if only in part, of emerging in another, unexpected soundscape... one which may take the implications of these ideas even further… further into the zig-zagging paths of V’s … up, up, and awayves… !

    Acknowledgement: In addition to thanking the interviewees, I want to say a special word of thanks to Isaac Schreier, a creative writing student at Saginaw Valley State University, who helped me prepare the aspects of the Prezi and transcript for this work. Isaac has been experimenting with sound and video mash-ups of his own under the pseudonym “MCZephy” on YouTube. 

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inter.Virtual.Vitalism.views Transcript – Part 1

Vitanza: There is a need for a competing and complementary post-philosophical rhetoric

Hawk: From Aristotle onward, vitalism is an attempt to theorize a self-organizing or self-motivating system…

Vitanza: There is a need for a competing and complementary view of rhetoric as being non-disciplinary…

Reid: In thinking about the concept of this kind of experimental interview approach, I find that it resonates quite well with not only with the kinds of things I try to talk about as compositional practices in The Two Virtuals but certainly my own compositional practice…

Vitanza: For a non-Platonic a non-Aristotelian approach to composition theory…

Reid: …which is one where I often look at two or more passages -- cuts if you will -- from texts and see how they resonate with one another or where the dissonances or…

Hawk: …From Aristotle onward…

Vitanza: ….a non-Platonic a non-Aristotelian approach to…

Reid: …figuring out how to write from one to the other and thereby creating a new plane, or a new kind of space…

Hawk: From Aristotle onward, vitalism is an attempt to theorize a self-organizing or self-motivating system.

Reid: So here we have a number of different texts working in cutting into one another…

Hawk: …as Greek philosophy developed up to the Renaissance a paradoxically combined Aristotle’s more material answer to this problem with mystical connotations…

Vitanza:  …a non-Platonic a non-…

Reid: Between vitalism and the virtual, I think, you begin with seeing vitalism as something that historically has worked against or in relation to a mechanistic or a materialistic theory of the universe…

Hawk: This connection laid the groundwork not only for the link between vitalism and mysticism, but also for modern scientific ideas and practices…

Reid: …and so in that way historically it’s been opposed to scientific practices (to a degree) and in some cases you could even look at vitalism as a kind of mysticism or spiritualism or religious belief…

Hawk: …it led to astrology based on an ecological congruence between celestial and terrestrial events

Reid: In fact, one could even imagine intelligent design as a kind of vitalist principle that one would oppose to a more mechanistic theory of evolution…

Vitanza: …and yet something else kept appearing, haunting…

Reid: I see Byron’s book [A Counter-History of Rhetoric] as taking up a similar kind of approach…

Vitanza: ...humming on the screen…

Reid: …in describing the mainstream path of Composition’s recent history, anyway, as one…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Reid: …that has ascribed to a more mechanistic and materialistic conception of the compositional process

Vitanza: ...humming on the screen…

Reid: …and devalued or occluded the idea of a more vitalist perception…

Vitanza: ...humming on the screen…

Reid: …but what we can see in Byron’s use of the concept of the vitalist…

Hawk: Composition has been haunted by an unseen ghost.

Reid: …is a very different conception of vitalism from the one I just described…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Reid: …which is one that takes a more secular, I guess, approach to the concept of vitality…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Hawk: …by an unseen ghost…by an unseen ghost…

Reid: …and it’s here that I think we can see the development of the concept of the virtual…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Hawk: …by an unseen ghost…

Reid: ...virtuality as being a way in which…

Vitanza: humming…. Humming… Humming on…

Reid: ...the vitalist philosophy…

Hawk: …as the continual positing of “some more”…

Reid: …intersects with a certain kind of…

Hawk: …some m-, some m-, some more…

Reid: …materialist or mechanical philosophy

Hawk: of some more, of some more

Reid: …so that you have

Hawk: some mo-, some mo-

Reid: …a kind of vitalist theory of the mechano-sphere, which is I think what we ultimately see in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, for example…

Hawk: Deleuze and Guattari write, “We will never ask what a book means as signified or signifier…

Reid: I imagine that many rhet-comp students and scholars have come to theory through reading Victor Vitanza’s work or studying with him…

Vitanza: …post-philosophical rhetoric…

Hawk: ….will not look for anything to understand it. We will ask what it functions with.” … Vitanza, for example, applies one of Kenneth Burke’s historical attitudes, casuistic stretching to the history of rhetoric…

Vitanza: …post-philosophical rhetoric…

Hawk: …in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensity…

Reid: Vitanza and particularly…

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inter.Virtual.Vitalism.views Transcript – Part 2

Hawk: …to the history of rhetoric…

Vitanza: …post-philosophical rhetoric…

Hawk: …in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensity…

Reid: …Vitanza and particularly through his essay in Contending with Words…

Hawk: …he sets up the categories first, second and third sophistic… “In which other multiplicities, its own intensities are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own intensities converge…

Vitanza: …there is a need for a competing… humming on…

Hawk: …a book is not an isolated or unified object.” Categories such as first second and third sophistic have no fixed content… “but an assemblage or body without organs…”

Vitanza: …humming on…

Hawk: …which allows theories and theorists to be casuistically stretched in connection with other assemblages from one category or time period to another… Likewise a name and a date are not simply facts to be listed…

Reid: Ulmer devotes much of his discussion of entertainment to the practice of impersonation…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Reid: Elvis impersonation in particular…

Hawk: …but terms that signify a collection of statements practices and their affects and effects…

Reid: …just like the lip curl is necessary for impersonating Elvis…

Hawk: …in the larger constellations to which they are connected…

Vitanza: There is a need for a competing and complementary view of rhetoric as being non-disciplinary…

Reid: Perhaps, as Vitanza suggests, one way to respond to the challenges of the excellent university, as well as our intra-disciplinary struggles, is to forego these dialectics and the problems they announce and not forget these (Quote) “third (interval) wayves.”

Vitanza: Humming on… What is it that you want?

Reid: “Third (interval) wayves.”

Vitanza: What is it that you want… that you want…

Reid: “Third (interval) wayves.”

Vitanza: …a wandering and wondering from the notes…

Reid: “Third (interval) wayves.”

Hawk: ….rather than pure chance or chaos, kairos is complex and requires the rhetor’s ability to participate in the co-adaptive development of a situation…

Reid: “Third (interval) wayves.”

Hawk: …by infusing discourse into it…

Reid: “Third (interval) wayves”…. The compositional process I am describing…

Vitanza: …a wandering…

Reid: …is the same whether one is producing an experimental video or an office memo…

Vitanza: …and wondering…

Reid: This kind of experimental interview…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Reid: …it is not a deterministic process; it is completely abstracted from the content of the composition…

Vitanza: I began writing this book [Chaste Rape] so many times. I would sit and type what I thought I was going to type, and yet out came something else…

Hawk: …life is not linear or static, but a continuous process that folds over on itself and produces increased complexity and individuation…

Vitanza: …more often than not something else…

Reid: …that is just as a singularity that draws materiality into states of lowest energy might unfold both soap bubbles and salt crystals, these compositional processes might unfold in a non-deterministic way…

Vitanza: …something else…

Reid: …into a wide range of media…

Vitanza: …something else…

Reid: …depending upon the other materials and multiplicities with which they intersect in the compositional process.

Vitanza: …humming on…

Hawk: …by an unseen ghost…

Reid: …that said, understanding the operation of these multiplicities opens the opportunity to engage strategically with their affects…

Hawk: rather than pure chance or chaos, kairos is complex and requires the writer’s ability to participate in the co-adaptive development of a situation…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Reid: In addition, this compositional process of ripping, mixing, and burning allows us to rethink how we teach composition…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Reid: …ripping is a process of copying quoting or citing. It is the slicing of material from one context and its insertion into another. As I will discuss, this process creates conditions for the spread of contagions…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Reid: …that is by ripping two or more pieces of media open and inserting them into one another…

Hawk: For example, one puncept that can be built out of my name is hawk--eagle (American ideology); hawk--to sell one’s wares,” (an economic practice); ha--laughter (Diane Davis’s Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter); Wak—or WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum), an aspect of my teaching…

Reid: …one creates the possibility for information to flow from one into the other causing mutation…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Reid: …this is akin to the process by which multiplicities mutate. In this way, ripping leads into mixing, whereby the contagion spreads from the immediate site of the rip through the intersecting media…

Vitanza: …for a non-Platonic and non-Aristotelian approach to composition theory…

Reid: …this proliferation typifies the mixing process as the multiplicities mutate and unfold in a fractal-like pattern…

Hawk: From Aristotle onward…

Reid: …though eventually this proliferation slows down and the multiplicity returns to a relatively stable state…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Reid: …the mixing is done…

Vitanza: …humming on…

Reid: At this stage, the composition is burned. The burning process is also one of involution, that is, one both the shrinking but also involvement. Literally the file size shrinks through a process of data compression. Also the burned files can be made accessible on the informational network where the process may be reiterated. It is certainly possible to view the burned file as a finished product that might be copyrighted. However, technically the process can be stopped at any moment and the existing text copyrighted; notes I write on a cocktail napkin are copyrighted. In compositional terms, the burned file is simply a site for ripping in an ongoing iterative process.

Vitanza: …humming on…

Hawk: …by an unseen ghost…

Vitzanza: Rhetorics still have their desires…

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