Live Theory Ryan Leack & Ellen Wayland-Smith

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:
I think we again want to be looking at these things and all of their complexities, and we don't know what's going to happen, but I think, rather than being pulled over and drawn into it, either with the sense of enthusiasm or doom, I think we also have to recognize that we have agency, too. The future isn't inevitable, and we can create it.

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

Margherita Long
Bert Winther-Tamaki
Jonathan Alexander
Stephanie Renee Payne
Yuki Nagamine
Ryan Leack
Ellen Wayland-Smith
Selected References

Anna Tsing
Baruch Spinoza
Donna Haraway
Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy (2010)
Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art (2008)
Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies (2016)
Friedrich Nietzsche
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1969)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1991)
Giorgio Agamben
Henri Bergson
Isabelle Stengers
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (2010)
Judith Butler
Kenzaburo Oe
Michel Foucault
Ogata Masato
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies (1923)
Sabu Kohso, Radiation and Revolution (2020)
Simone Weil
Slavoj Žižek
Tanizaki Jun’ichiro
Tsushima Yuko
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
Vorris Nunley
Ryan Leack
Ellen Wayland-Smith

Selected References

Alfred North Whitehead
Barbara Cassin
Baruch Spinoza
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves (1989)
Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity (2010)
Édouard Glissant
Emmanuel Levinas
Eric King Watts, Hearing the Hurt (2012)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gaston Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant (1932)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Hannah Arendt
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966)
Heraclitus
I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936)
Isocrates
Jordan Peterson
Kenneth Burke
Leonard Susskind
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1980)
Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (1932)
Peter Elbow
Rainer Maria Rilke, “On the Edge of Night”
Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric (2013)
W. E. B. Du Bois

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.

Attendees

Jonathan Alexander
Ryan Leack

Selected References

Aristotle
Audre Lorde
Andrea Lunsford, Let’s Talk… A Pocket Rhetoric (2020)
Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken (2004)
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961)
Félix Guattari
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1901)
G. F. W. Hegel
Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure” (1977)
Glenn and Ratcliffe, Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts (2011)
Gottschalk Druschke and Rivers, “Rhetorical Drift” (2022)
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
Jacques Lacan
James Crosswhite, Deep Rhetoric (2012)
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)
Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening (2005)
Linda Brodkey
Marilyn Cooper, The Animal Who Writes (2019)
Mary Louise Pratt
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (2002)
Miguel Abensour
Plato
Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (2011)
Socrates
Victor Vitanza

Notable Quotes from Jonathan

“What if we understand writing as . . . less driven by thesis and more driven by exploration? What if we asked students to think about writing as, well, I’m not starting with something that I’m going to try to convince my readers I know. I’m going to start, like many wonderful writers do, with a question and a recognition of what it is that I don’t know, and then allow the writing to serve as the very modality of thought and of feeling toward insight, toward the generation of knowing.”

“Maybe part of the political task is not to liberate our particular desires, but instead to understand how they have already been shaped and formed, and ask ourselves the critical questions. Are we okay with that? Is this flow of desire the way that desires within us have been formed and set down in certain pathways? Are we satisfied with that? Is that appropriate? Is it ethically sustainable? Is it ecologically sustainable?”

“I speak a lot in the first part of the book about connection, about the movement of self toward other, not with an anticipation that that other will fulfill or will provide for a lack, but that that other will excite, will surprise, will perhaps open up vistas, possibilities that had not otherwise been understood, or seen, or felt, or experienced. And it seems to me that that’s really a way to understand what writing is.”

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.

Attendees

Susan Jarratt
Ellen Quandahl
Daniel M. Gross
Ryan Leack

Selected Sources Referenced

Gorgias. Encomium of Helen. c. 400 BCE.
Gross, Daniel M. Being-Moved: Rhetoric as the Art of Listening, 2020.
Hume, David. The History of England (6 Volume Set), 1754–61.
Jarratt, Susan. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured, 1991.
—. Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire, 2019.
Kerferd, G. B. The Sophistic Movement, 1981.
Lee, Mi-Kyoung. Epistemology After Protagoras: Responses to Relativism in Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus, 2005.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Communication
Quandahl, Ellen, and Susan Jarratt. “To Recall Him … Will be a Subject of Lamentation”: Anna Comnena as Rhetorical Historiographer,” 2008.
Taylor, C.C.W. The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus, 1999.

Notable Quotes from Susan

“That’s another thing to maybe think about in academic writing is the urge toward perfectionism—to be able to say the most definitive thing, and say it in the very best way possible, and refute all the critics. And I think it’s good to think that that’s really not possible, and so you do something that is responsible and has been vetted, as I’ve been saying, and makes a contribution but probably leaves some questions open, or has some conclusions that are rather tentative, and waiting for other people to contribute.”

“Another very conventional but very important spur to the writing process is that there’s a narrative out there that you don’t think works well, and you want to correct it, and that gives you the angle, or a terministic screen.”

“When you read article after article and you see the same scholarly sources being quoted again and again and you say, okay, I’ve got that one, I’ve got that one. So that’s a sign of getting the research, or the terrain, known.”

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.

Attendees

Daniel M. Gross
Sarah O'Dell
Steven Mailloux
Susan Jarratt
Vorris Nunley
Meridith Kruse
Ryan Leack

Selected Sources Referenced

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism, 2011.
Borsch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect, 1992.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech, 1997.
—. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, 1996.
Cooper, Brittany. “Black Women’s Eloquent Rage: A Lecture from Brittney Cooper,” 2021.
Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972.
Fiumara, Gemma C. The Other Side of Language, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1953.
Gleason, Maud W. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome, 1995.
Gross, Daniel, and Kemmann, Ansgar. Heidegger and Rhetoric, 2006.
Gunderson, Erik. Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self, 2003.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 2009.
Lucian. Rhetorum Praeceptor, c. 160 CE.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, 2011.
—. Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception, 2015.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, 2017.
Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974.
Plutarch. Exercises Suitable for Scholars, c. 110 CE.
Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening, 2005.
Weil, Abraham. “Trans*versal Animacies and the Mattering of Black Trans* Political Life,” 2017.

Notable Quotes from Daniel

“I started to think increasingly about the ways in which the long traditions of many different sorts focused primarily on the prestige of voice, what it is to embody and identify with the speaking and writing agent, the power of voice, the power even to manipulate, to form other people’s psyches by way of that agency, the activity involved, and at the same time I wondered, okay, with all of this speaking, vocalization, writing, who’s listening?”

“The irony, of course, is that all of those folks, all of us—speaking, writing, acting—just sort of flip around 180 degrees and we’re on the other side. We are listening, we are reading, we are learning, we are being affected, and the puzzle as a historian of rhetoric and someone also thinking about the classroom is why this disconnect, and it struck me pretty quickly as a kind of psychological puzzle. There seemed to be a profound identity with the agent position, the position of voice, writing, and activity, and a disavowal of the other side.”