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Vol. 2, No. 1: Contents

Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature

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  1. In this essay, I have looked for ways to educate the teaching machine by entering the machine. I have proposed new feminist alliances among cyborg feminism and deconstructive feminism. I have asked composition to invite such cross-hatchings in order to reveal the rifts in our teaching practices and theories. I have suggested coalitions of technology, feminism, and pedagogy that break open contested sites of meaning. I have shifted the shape of identity and writing to propose, like Elam, a "groundless solidarity" among feminists and compositionists. I have pondered the problematic nature of location and movement, space and agency, modernity and postmodernity. What questions remain to be asked? What precautions should be taken as we move out into a morphologic teaching machine?

  2. Computer and composition theorists like Cynthia Selfe, who calls herself a "nomadic feminist cyborg guerilla," work diligently to bring technology into the forefront of composition studies. But, like Lester Faigley, who understands that responses to postmodernism are "deeply contradictory" and a mixture of "simultaneous exhilaration and terror" (5), Selfe tempers her enthusiasm with an equal amount of caution. In a 1992 interview she describes herself as "a kind of English teacher-activist who uses computer technology, a politically active being who employs the available technology as a medium for effecting political and educational change to support the expanded project of radical democracy" (Handa 76). Selfe's work is unique in that her perspective on feminism and composition pedagogy blends an important element that is often missing when others rush to incorporate technology into their teaching. For Selfe, computers serve "as an entry point, a catalyst for thinking about how to enact classroom change," but, she argues, there are "points of antagonism -- ruptures... -- sites of disruption that make you pay attention to what's happening in computers and networks....They point out to me singularities or disruptive knots in the fabric of my life and the lives of others" (Handa 79).

  3. Thus, the other side of the technology coin concerns the need to guard the question of technomania, that is, the tendency to embrace technology in our pedagogy without examining our motives and our theories. Using MOOs in the classroom, for instance, also allows a teacher to "spy" on her students. Surveillance merely reverses a binary women have been subjected to for too long. Being the surveilled subject is a subject position we are all too familiar with. One example of a woman guarding this question is Julia Scher, a German surveillance artist and businesswoman.

  4. In a 1993 interview with Constance Penley, Scher calls herself a "cyborg anthropologist," one who studies the way people respond to and interact with new cultures of science and technology. Scher investigates disparate but merging cultural practices -- like the hate industries and the security industries -- to reveal that the only available subject positions in the "modern panoptic world are prisoner, guard, and voyeur" (Penley 36, 39). For instance, such industries "don't share explicitly identical manifestos but share the same jumbo data bases . . . . [and] use their computers to troll for information and harvest bodies" (36). Her surveillance art installations are designed to call attention to a carceral culture, or "a world of control and surveillance that is fully sexualized and always about power and its abuses" (39); thus, the texts displayed in her work use lines taken from surveillance manuals, biomedical texts, and police reports to evoke something like a "murderous womb." Scher claims that "like a mother, surveillance accommodates everyone, then selects . . . We are born into the arms of technology, which are supposed to take care of us, the same way we are midwifed into life and mother's protection. But neither technology nor mothers always take care of us . . . . I want to make [the dangers of the apparatus] palpable" (39). Echoing Ross and Scher, Haraway advocates that we take responsibility for the social relations of science and technology, but that we refuse to embrace an anti-science metaphysics, or a demonology of technology (Simians 181). Mark Dery terms it the "technometaphobic fear of inhuman eyes," a phenomenon that exists in a cybernetic society that gives rise to a culture of scopophilia, voyeurism, and retinal fetishism (48).

  5. As I have argued, while virtual reality radically redefines politics, identity, sociality, and pedagogy, it also raises serious questions. What happens when rival gangs of cyberpunk hackers drop into your serene pocket of space uninvited? Do you call the datacops, or just delete the intruders? Is it enough in MOOspace to eject and gag other players? Are the emotive possibilities in text-based virtual reality limitless, or should there be limits to how this kind of writing can be used to subvert oppressive discursive power relations in composition classrooms, whether real or virtual? Cyberpunk manifestos claim that "information wants to be free." Is, then, the debate over authorship and ownership over? Are teachers destined to become ludic performers in the "consensual hallucination," waiting for some student to jack in and trigger our program, flipping into our sensorium? Have we ignored Cixous' warning against simple reversals of patriarchal domination by appropriating their instruments, their concepts, or their place? Not if we accept her challenge to "dash through and fly" by interception, rather than appropriation, by morphing and shape-shifting, rather than reversing the subject binaries. Not if we understand that to enter the teaching machine is to put on the machine.

  6. As a different order of signification and subjective experience, Stone contends that penetrating cyberspace "translates into envelopment . . . .to enter cyberspace is to physically put on cyberspace. To become the cyborg, to put on the seductive and dangerous cybernetic space like a garment, is to put on the female" ("Will" 109). Actual feminists, as historically surveilled subjects, must fly into the teaching machine not to merely reverse the politics, or traverse the terrain, but to penetrate the no-fly zone, to fly in a "quaquaversal," to fly in every direction simultaneously, to fly the offline coop.


[Introduction] [@dig] [@move] [@gender] [Conclusion] [Biblio]

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