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MOVING “NETWORKS” INTO THE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM
Jessica Clements English 626: Postmodernism, Rhetoric, Composition
March 7, 2010
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In Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Jodi Dean (2009) argues that
“imagining a rhizome might be nice, but rhizomes don’t describe the underlying structure
of real networks” (30), rejecting the idea that there is such a thing as a nonhierarchical
interconnectedness that structures our contemporary world and means of communication.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009), on the other hand, argue that the Internet is an
exemplar of the rhizome: a nonhierarchical, noncentered network—a democratic network
with “an indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of interconnected nodes [that]
communicate with no central point of control” (299). What is at stake in settling this
dispute? Being. And, knowledge and power in that being. More specifically, this paper
explores how a theory of social ontology has evolved to theories of social ontologies,
how the modernist notion of global understanding of individuals working toward a
common (rationalized and objectively knowable) goal became pluralistic postmodern
theories embracing the idea of local networks. Furthermore, what this summary journey
of theoretical evolution allows for is a consideration of why understandings of a world
comprising emergent networks need be of concern to composition instructors and their
practical activities in the classroom: networks produce knowledge.
Our journey begins with early modernism, and if early modernism had a theme, it
was oneness. This focus on oneness or unity, on the whole rather than on individual parts,
derived from Enlightenment thinking: “The project [of modernity] amounted to an
extraordinary intellectual effort on the part of Enlightenment thinkers to develop
objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their
inner logic.” Science, so the story went, stood as inherently objective inquiry that could
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reveal truth—universal truth at that. Enlightenment thinkers, such as Kant, believed in the
“universal, eternal, and . . . immutable qualities of all of humanity” (Harvey 1990, 12); by
extension, “equality, liberty, faith in human intelligence . . . and universal reason” were
widely held beliefs and seen as unifying forces (13). In fact, Kant ([1784] 1983) believed
that Enlightenment (freedom from self-imposed immaturity, otherwise known as the
ability to use one’s understanding on his or her own toward greater ends) (41) was a
divine right (44) bestowed upon and meant to be exercised by the masses. Later
modernists began to acknowledge the fragmentation, ambiguity and larger chaos that
characterized modern life (Harvey 1990, 22) but, perhaps ironically, only so they might
better reconcile their disunified state. This later modernism was labeled “heroic”
modernism and was based on the precedent set by romantic thinkers and artists, which
accounted for the “unbridled individualism of great thinkers, the great benefactors of
humankind, who through their singular efforts and struggles would push reason and
civilization willy-nilly to the point of true emancipation” (14). Yet heroic modernists still
seemed to ascribe to the overall Enlightenment project that suggested that there exists a
“true nature of a unified, though complex, underlying reality” (30). Even the latest “high”
modernists believed in “linear progress, absolute truths, and rational planning of ideal
social orders under standardized conditions of knowledge and production” (35).
Ultimately, modernism was about individuals moving in assembly-line fashion toward a
(rational and inherently unified) common goal. This ontological understanding rested on
what Lyotard would call a “grand narrative.”
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Lyotard (1984) sees “modern” as fit for describing “any science that legitimates
itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some
grand narrative, such as the dialectic of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the
emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth” (xxiii); in
other words, Lyotard characterizes “modernism” as a hegemonic story that defined and
guided the ways in which humans lived their lives. Further, Lyotard defines
“postmodernism” as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv). Lyotard is not
suggesting that totalizing narratives suddenly stopped existing in our postmodern world
but that they no longer carry the same currency or usefulness to the people creating and
living by and through them. One of the key theoretical understandings driving this change
is that, according to Lyotard, postmodern knowledge is not “a tool of the authorities” as
knowledge (specifically, scientific knowledge) may have been for the moderns;
postmodern knowledge allows for a sensitivity to differences and helps us accept those
differences rather than proffers a driving urge to eradicate or otherwise unify them (xxv).
Lyotard notes that science, then, no longer has the power to legitimate other narratives
(40); it can no longer be understood to be the world’s singular metalanguage because it
has been “replaced by the principle of a plurality of formal and axiomatic systems
capable of arguing the truth of denotative statements . . .” (43). Lyotard is invested in
these (deliberately plural) systems, these “little narratives” (61) that operate locally and
according to specific rules, and he calls them “language games.” The modern (or, more
accurately, postmodern) world is too complex to be understood beneath the aegis of one
totalizing system, one goal imposed through one grand narrative: “There is no reason to
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think that it would be possible to determine metaprescriptives common to all of these
language games or that a revisable consensus like the one in force at a given moment in
the scientific community could embrace the totality of metaprescription regulating the
totality of statements circulating in the social collectivity” (65). Paralogy, learning how to
play by and/or to challenge the rules of a specific language game is the means fit for
postmodernity, not consensus, according to Lyotard (66). Ultimately, in his invocation of
plural systems rather than a singular system, Lyotard’s attitude toward grand narratives
invites a way of thinking and a way of understanding the world with inferences of a
networked logic. Stephen Toulmin, too, tackles an understanding of contemporary
sociality based on (competing) systems rather than a singular hegemonic system.
In Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Toulmin (1990) challenges us
to consider how such different systems, different ways of viewing the world, come to
hold sway at different points in time. Like Lyotard, he suggests that we cannot simply do
away with grand narratives but that we are making progress if we interrogate how and
why they came to be as well as accede to the fact that there might be more than one way
of interpreting those seemingly domineering capital “S” Systems. Additionally, Toulmin
discounts the vocabulary of narratives (grand or not) and games and instead prefers the
term “cosmopolis.” “Cosmopolis,” according to Toulmin, invokes notions of nature and
society in relationship to one another; more specifically, a cosmopolis is not a thing in
and of itself (it is not nature, it is not society, it is not a story, and it is not a game) but a
process, an ordering of nature and society (67-68). Unlike the seemingly stable
cosmopolis of modernity that Kant and others present, Toulmin suggests that
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cosmopolises are always in flux because communities continually converse in an effort to
shape and reshape their understanding of their ways of being in their universe. Dominant
cosmopolises do emerge to characterize a particular state of persons at a particular time,
but that should not prevent us, argues Toulmin, from reading into the dominant rather
than with it. Dissensus, then, has a place in Toulmin’s postmodern understanding, too,
just as in Lyotard’s. We might, in fact, suggest that Lyotard and Toulmin both see the
world in its interconnected and localized intricacies but use different language to forward
their unique interests. While Lyotard is out to critique Habermas and his insistence on the
value of consensus, Toulmin seeks to disrupt the common narrative of modernity as
whole by interrogating its structuring features. What we need ultimately note is that
Lyotard’s and Toulmin’s ontological commonalities are interrogated by another
important thinker, Michel Foucault.
In “What is Enlightenment,” Foucault (1984d) writes, “Thinking back on Kant’s
text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a
period of history. And by ‘attitude,’ I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality;; a
voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a
way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of
belonging and presents itself as a task” (39). Foucault (1984a), too, questions that there
ever was some objective means to an end of unified truth; rather, Foucault suggests that
the moderns voluntarily embraced and enacted that vision. Foucault’s unique
contribution, however, was to suggest that a “disciplinary” society most accurately
described the way contemporaries were relating, acting, thinking and feeling their world.
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Rather than a voluntary and even blind acceptance of any such vision, Foucault suggests
that a metacognitive understanding or metawareness of the way power flowed in our
disciplinary society would make room for resistance, despite the bleak picture that he
often gets accused of painting. We may say “bleak” as Foucault writes that “discipline
‘makes’ individuals;; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both
as object and as instruments of its exercise” (188). This is a far cry from Descartes
nostalgic “I think;; therefore, I am” that informed the Enlightenment and most of
modernism’s utopian vision of powerful individuals coexisting in a perfectly rationalized,
truthful, and unified world.
In his grand splitting from Descartes and other Enlightenment and modernist
thinkers, Foucault (1984a) suggests that that the instruments of hierarchical observation,
normalizing judgment, and examination are what drives our contemporary disciplinary
society (188). He asks us to consider how seemingly mundane and beneficent institutions
as hospitals and schools (and also asylums and prisons) enact these instruments. Even
architecturally, he insists, these institutions are built to “permit an internal, articulated
and detailed control . . . to make it possible to know [individuals], to alter them” (190).
Such systems work as networks, according to Foucault: “[disciplinary society’s]
functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain
extent from bottom to top and laterally;; this network ‘holds’ the whole together and
traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors,
perpetually supervised.” Yes, this represents a hierarchical network (hospitals and
schools have administrators, asylums and prisons have their own care staff and guards,
Use square brackets to add clarifying words, phrases, or punctuation to direct quotations when necessary, but, before altering a direct quotation, ask yourself if you might just as easily paraphrase or weave one or more shorter quotations into the text.
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too), but the important thing Foucault wants us to remember is that power is never
possessed; it flows “like a piece of machinery” through the network (192).
Further, Foucault (1984a) suggests that the threat of penalty lies at the heart of a
disciplinary system (193). It is a “perpetual penalty that traverses all points and
supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions”;; that penalty “compares,
differentiates, hierarchies, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (195). In the
end the disciplinary system is interested in creating well-behaved objects (not subjects,
per se). It does the work of unification and disunification at the same time: “In a sense,
the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it
possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialties, and to render the
differences useful by fitting them one to another” (197). A disciplinary society is
interested in producing citizens that will perform productively. But, in addition to
observation or surveillance and normalizing judgment, such an end can only be
accomplished through examination, which goes hand-in-hand with documentation: “It
engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them” (201). This turns
us as individuals into “cases”: “It is the individual as he may be described, judged,
measured, compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual
who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc.” (203).
Ultimately for Foucault, “Power was the great network of political relationships among
all things,” (Thomas 2008, 153), and Foucault (1984a) represents a powerful figure in
postmodern thought because he asserts that power is what produces our reality; a
hierarchical network of power is our contemporary ontology: “In fact, power produces;; it
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produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and
the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (205). Foucault has a
grand legacy of sorts, no doubt, but that does not mean his work has not been challenged
or, perhaps more accurately, extended.
Nikolas Rose (1999), author of “Control” in his Powers of Freedom: Reframing
Political Thought, buys into Foucault’s understanding of contemporary society as
networked, but he does not believe we have much to gain by understanding it as a
disciplinary society; rather, Rose proposes that we live, work, and breathe as a control
society: “Rather than being confined, like its subjects, to a succession of institutional
sites, the control of conduct was now immanent to all the places in which deviation could
occur, inscribed into the dynamics of the practices into which human beings are
connected.” We no longer need hospitals, schools, asylums or prisons to monitor and
correct our activities; instead, our way of being in the world is now personally connected.
We are a society of self-policing (by prompt of none other than the everyday networks in
which we partake) risk managers: “Conduct is continually monitored and reshaped by
logics immanent within all networks of practice. Surveillance is ‘designed in’ to the flows
of everyday existence” (234). Rose challenges Foucault by suggesting that, in a control
society, power is more potent, more dangerous, even. Rather than an institution using
disciplinary intervention to correct deviant individuals, control societies work on the
premise of regulation. This makes power more “effective,” according to Rose, “because
changing individuals is difficult and ineffective—and it also makes power less
obtrusive—thus diminishing its political and moral fallout. It also makes resistance more
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difficult . . . [;] actuarial practices . . . minimize the possibilities for resistance in the name
of . . . identity.” In a control society, deviants are targeted as a collective, and techniques
of control, rather than those of discipline, are meant to preempt crime and risk (236).
Foucault did not get it quite right, says Rose, because “. . . the idea of a maximum
security society is misleading. Rather than the tentacles of the state spreading across
everyday life, the securitization of identity is dispersed and is organized. And rather than
totalizing surveillance, it is better seen as conditional access to circuits of consumption
and civility, constant scrutiny of the right of individuals to access certain kinds of flows
of consumption of goods” (243). We are our own tentacles of surveillance; we grant our
own access to being, knowledge, and power.
Rose (1999) eloquently sums up his argument in the following quotation:
In a society of control, a politics of conduct is designed into the fabric of existence itself, into the organization of space, time, visibility, circuits of communication. And these enwrap each individual life decision and action— about labou , purchases, debts, credits, lifestyle, sexual contracts and the like—in a web of incitements, rewards, current sanctions and foreboding of future sanctions which serve to enjoin citizens to maintain particular types of control over their conduct. These assemblages which entail the securitization of identity are not unified, but dispersed, not hierarchical but rhizomatic, not totalized but connected in a web or relays and relations. (246)
In addition to clarifying Rose’s understanding of how individuals instate their own risk
management (a new form of “surveillance”) in noncentered, nonhierarchical (non-
institutionally-sponsored) networks, this quotation also highlights the significant issue of
visibility, or, rather, invisibility of said networks, which is picked up by Giorgio
Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
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Agamben (1998) calls for the replacement of Foucault’s prison metaphor with the
idea of the “camp” and suggests that “the camp as dislocating localization is the hidden
matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that
we must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d’attentes of our
airports and certain outskirts of our cities” (175). The camp is hidden, more ubiquitous
than we recognize, and it is the camp as social construct, the camp as paradigm of
contemporary existence, that should capture our attention because “it would be more
honest and, above all, more useful to investigate carefully the juridical procedures and
deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their
rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a
crime” (171). Agamben here argues that power, and the flow of power through networks
and its capacity to construct reality, should be discussed in terms of “homo sacer.”
“Homo sacer” is “sacred man” and is analogous to a bandit, a werewolf, a
colossus and refugee (something that is always already two things in one). It is someone
who is stripped of the laws of citizenship and can be killed by anyone for any reason
without penalty but, at the same time, that person cannot be sacrificed. It is someone who
is removed of all sanctions of the law except the rule that banished that person in the first
place. Homo sacer represents inbetweenness with possibility. It is to be a Mobius strip,
“the very impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and
exception, physis and nomos” (Agamben 1998, 37). Perhaps the most significant
statement Agamben makes about homo sacer is that “if today there is no longer any one
clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually hominess sacri”;;
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we are all homo sacer (115). Agamben, here, is deliberately augmenting Foucault by
addressing the power of law. If the government denies a place for the refugee in
contemporary society, and we are all refugees, where does that leave us? (132-33). We
should be alarmed by such a realization, Agamben argues, because “in the camp, the state
of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis
of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such
nevertheless remains outside the normal order” (169;; emphasis added). Agamben sees
permanency in the camp metaphor, and we can see affinities between what Agamben has
to say and what Rose has to say when Agamben states that “in this sense, our age is
nothing but the implacable and methodical attempt to overcome the division dividing the
people, to eliminate radically the people that is excluded” (179). We might bring in Rose
to ask, then, whether we are self-destructive in our self-policing: “It was more accurately
understood as a blurring of the boundaries between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the
system of social control, and a widening of the net of control whose mesh simultaneously
became finer and whose boundaries became more invisible as it spread to encompass
smaller and smaller violations of the normative order” (238). Rose readily admits that
there are “insiders” and “outsiders,” processes of “inclusion” and “exclusion,” in a
control society, and “it appears as if outside the communities of inclusion exists an array
of micro-sectors, micro-cultures of non-citizens, failed citizens, anti-citizens, consisting
of those who are unable or unwilling to enterprise their lives or manage their own risk,
incapable of exercising responsible self-government, attached either to no moral
community or to a community of anti-morality” (259). What is at stake in heeding
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Agamben’s ontological call to notice the camps in contemporary society, is also about
recognizing our precarious status as permanent homo sacri at risk of being (self-) shoved
out of a network of privileged “citizens” in our society to a network or counterpublic of
delinquent and at risk non-citizens. Yet, to complicate our understanding of our being in
our postmodern world even further, Manuel DeLanda and Bruno Latour ask us to take
our focus away from people, per se.
DeLanda (2006), in A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social
Complexity, specifically wants to argue that theories of social ontology should not be in
the business of arguing for seeing the world through a particular metaphor; the
contemporary world is far too complex for that. Rather, his theory of assemblages offers
“a sense of the irreducible social complexity characterizing the contemporary world” (6).
DeLanda argues that far too many theorists have tried to put forward “organic totalities”
based on “relations of interiority” in which “the component parts are constituted by the
very relations they have to other parts in the whole” (9). This means fitting parts to
predetermined wholes, and this produces a false notion of a “seamless web” (10).
DeLanda works from Deleuze to offer a theory based on relations of exteriority in which
network parts are autonomous and can be plugged into different networks for different
outcomes;; and, importantly, “the properties of the component parts can never explain the
relations which constitute the whole” (10-11). Another important feature of assemblages
(the term DeLanda uses for “networks” to account for their foundational property of
being emergent) is that assemblages can be described on two specific axes: parts play
material or expressive roles and are involved in processes that can territorialize or
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deterritorialize (18-19). The important difference between material and expressive roles
is that the expressive role cannot be reduced to language and symbols. For example, there
may be the material content of a discussion but also the bodily expression of attendant
cues. Material and expressive functions can be exercised individually or together and at
different places and times by the same “parts” of an assemblage. Similarly, to
“territorialize” is a part’s process of stabilizing a network, while to “deterritorialize” is to
destabilize a network, and “one and the same assemblage can have components working
to stabilize its identity as well as components forcing it to change or even transforming it
into a different assemblage” (12). Coding and decoding are also discussed as important
variables of assemblages. Coding, which can be performed by genes or words, works to
further stabilize the identity of assemblages, while decoding does the opposite and allows
for further expression of personal convictions and styles (15-16). DeLanda emphasizes
that all of these processes are recurrent (16), assemblages account for nonlinear results
(20), and that an assemblage can affect is parts retroactively (34).
What we gain from DeLanda (2006) is an understanding that it is important to
look at the links that (however temporarily) bind the assemblage or network rather than
the “parts” themselves, necessarily: “It is the pattern of recurring links, as well as the
properties of those links, which forms the subject of study, not the attributes of the
persons occupying positions in a network” (56). DeLanda is not interested in essences,
and he is not interested in natural kinds. He is interested in possibilities: “The notion of
the structure of a space of possibilities is crucial in assemblage theory given that, unlike
properties, the capacities of an assemblage are not given, that is, they are merely possible
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when not exercised. But the set of possible capacities of an assemblage is not amorphous,
however open-ended it may be, since different assemblages exhibit different set of
capacities” (29). It is not about what humans think of the world but about describing how
the world organizes itself at any given (perpetually dynamic) moment.
One might argue that Bruno Latour (2005a) is even more vocal in highlighting the
“world” as actor upon itself (regardless of human interpretation of that acting and their
part in it). In “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public,” Latour
states, “In other words, objects—taken as so many issues—bind all of us in ways that
map out a public space profoundly different from what is usually recognized under the
label of ‘the political’” (15). Latour is clearly interested in doing away with any notions
of a modernist, foundational truth when he says “we don’t assemble because we agree,
look alike, feel good, are socially compatible or wish to fuse together but because we are
brought by divisive matters of concern into some neutral, isolated place in order to come
to some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement” (23). Further, in Reassembling the
Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Latour (2005b) describes this “coming
together” as “concatenations of mediators”: “Action is not done under the full control of
consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many
surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled” (59). Latour’s view,
“action” runs haphazardly among humans and objects in contemporary localized
networks (75). Yes, says Latour, “. . . any thing that does modify a state of affairs by
making a difference is an actor—or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant” (71). DeLanda
and Latour are ultimately after similar things; they seek to challenge any sort of social
Both in the text itself as well as on the references page, a title is treated with quotation marks or italics based on the type of work it is. Book and periodical titles (titles of larger works) get italicized while titles of articles, chapters, and shorter works get enclosed in double quotation marks. Notice here how italics are used to indicate foreign words within an article title.
A colon can be used to introduce a direct quotation, but it usually accompanies “thus” or “as follows” and implies a heightened level of formality. Use it sparingly. If you merely need to introduce the speaker (i.e., “Latour says”), follow with a comma before introducing the quotation.
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ontological theory that is not emergent. Both DeLanda and Latour find that “being” in the
world is best described in the rise and fall of action, in the links as they are in the
processes of linking, and that our ontological understanding must include objects as
veritable actors; things impact that network just as much as people do, and it is the
process of “impacting” that we should be interested in.
So why, as composition teachers, should we be concerned with how our way of
being in the world is differently described from modernism to postmodernism? Because
ontological understanding has a direct impact on how knowledge is created and circulated
through texts. Such ontological postmodern developments have helped us come to
understand the “death” of the singular author. Foucault (1984c) confirms that “criticism
and philosophy took note of the disappearance—or death—of the author some time ago.
But the consequences of their discovery of it have not been sufficiently examined, nor
has its import been accurately measured” (103).
Ijessling (1976) is particularly helpful in briefly but effectively summing up the
transformation in thoughts on subjectivity and authorship from modern to postmodern
times. The first and oldest or most “modern” (in the sense of “modernist” rather than
“contemporary”) understanding of authorship suggested that “the author as subject is the
autonomous and irreducible origin and master of his own monological speech.” In other
words, the author (in the romantic sense) was the individual genius behind the concrete
work he produced. In a second and later sense, authorship was considered the product of
dialogue: “Subjectivities come about in one’s being spoken to by others and in speaking
to others” (132). This view suggested that since speakers and writers are constantly
Direct quotations should be integrated into your text in a grammatically correct way. For example, the first word in a direct quotation should be capitalized if it begins a sentence, even if it was not capitalized in the original quotation (and vice versa). This can be done “silently” (without demarcation) if it does not affect the meaning of the quoted material; otherwise, indicate the change by placing square brackets around the newly capitalized or lowercased letter.
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discoursing, it is difficult if not impossible to locate an irreducible, singular source. The
third, most postmodern sense and the definition that has direct connections to the ways in
which Latour and others call for viewing our contemporary disposition of being in the
world comprises intertextuality. Intertextuality “conceives all that one says as a fabric
woven into a much wider network of interrelated texts with references to each other. The
speaker or writer is also woven into this fabric.” In this sense, it is clearly impossible to
suggest that an “author” originates a work; rather, the author and his or her words are
“carried along by the network of words in circulation.” “Authors” are no longer
considered to “own” words;; instead, the author is considered to be a product of the larger
circulation of narratives (133). “Literary output,” according to Ijessling, can be defined
“not as the work of an author, but as a web of meanings. On the one hand, it results from
a network of previous arguments and assertions and, on the other hand, it opens up
unlimited possibilities of new arguments and texts” (132). The same networked logic that
defines our general ontological sense of being in the world also defines the way in which
texts (with implications for knowledge and power) are produced and circulate in the
world: “At the pinnacle of contemporary production, information and communication are
the very commodities produced; the network itself is the site of both production and
circulation” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 298).
This paper has been an exercise in acknowledging the significant changes that
have occurred on a theoretical level in our understanding of how society functions from
modern to postmodern times; this paper has also shown how these changes are paralleled
in our understanding of what it means to “write” in a contemporary world. So, when Lisa
For multiple authors, use the conjunction “and”—not the ampersand (&)— both in the text itself as well as on the references page. Only invert the first author’s name on the references page.
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Ede and Andrea Lunsford (2001) among others ask us to pay attention to the fact that said
theories do not align with the pedagogies we practice in our contemporary composition
classrooms, I think we need to pay attention.1 If we, as composition teachers, are charged
with teaching our students how to effectively communicate in “writing” (which now
involves a multitude of modalities beyond the “print” that dominated modernism), we
need to get with the “networked” program;; as we have seen in this paper, it is, indeed,
power that is at stake. We are not just teaching our students how to “write”;; we are
teaching our students how they might consciously work within these networks and gain
some control of whether they will be included or excluded in power-filled and power-
constituted postmodern world. Perhaps the “story” of “student empowerment” may be
considered cliché, but what seems more apparent than ever is that in a postmodern world
full of homo sacri and “camps,” being a “good” writer has greater consequences than
ever.
1. Ede and Lunsford (2001) note that we all agree that writing is inherently social,
yet we still rely on individualistic praxis; we still ascribe to pedagogies that encourage the independent author producing concrete (original, honest and “truthful”) works.
The first line of a footnote is indented .5” from the left margin. Subsequent lines within a note should be formatted flush left. Leave an extra line space between notes. Citations within such notes are treated the same as they would be in the text itself.
When it comes to multiple competing punctuation marks, Chicago prescribes commas and periods inside quotation marks and colons and semicolons outside quotation marks. The placement of question marks and exclamation points depends on whether they clarify the meaning of the quotation or the surrounding sentence as a whole.
Footnotes or endnotes or endnotes can be used to supplement the Author- Date References style—to provide additional relevant commentary and/or to cite sources that do not readily lend themselves to the Author- Date References system.
In the text, note numbers are superscripted. In the notes themselves, note numbers are full sized, not raised, and followed by a period. Superscripting numbers in both places is also acceptable.
Note numbers should be placed at the end of the clause or sentence to which they refer and should be placed after any and all punctuation except the dash. Note numbers should also begin with “1” and follow consecutively throughout a given paper, article, or chapter.
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References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative
Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.
Ede, Lisa and Andrea A. Lunsford. 2001. “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship.” PMLA 116 (March): 354-69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/463522.
Foucault, Michel. 1984a. “The Means of Correct Training.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 188-205. New York: Pantheon.
—. 1984b. “Panopticism.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 206-13. New York: Pantheon,
—. 1984c. “What is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 101- 20. New York: Pantheon.
—. 1984d. “What is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 32-50. New York: Pantheon.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. “Postmodernization, or the Informatization of Production.” In Empire, 280-303. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, David. 1990. “Modernity and Modernism.” In The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, 10-38. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Ijessling, Samuel. 1976. “Who is Actually Speaking Whenever Something is Said?” In Rhetoric and Philosophy in Contact: An Historical Survey, translated by Paul Dunphy, 127-36. Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Kant, Immanuel. (1784) 1983. “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” In Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, translated by Ted Humphrey, 41-48. Reprint, Indianapolis: Hackett.
Latour, Bruno. 2005a. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public.” In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 14-41. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
The 3-em dash (—) should be used to replace authors or editors’ names who hold multiple, successive entries on a references page. Arrange such entries chronologically, oldest publication to newest publication. Note that multiple entries to the same edited collection can be cross- referenced. See section 15.37 of The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.).
Label the first page of your back matter, your comprehensive list of sources cited, “References” or “Works Cited.” Two blank lines should be left between “References” and your first entry. One blank line should be left between remaining entries, which should be listed in letter-by-letter alphabetical order according to the first word in each entry. Sources you consulted but did not directly cite may or may not be included (consult your instructor). Entries are formatted very similarly to those in Chicago’s Notes-Bibliography style, but the date is moved immediately after the author’s name.
For electronic journal articles and other web sources, DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) are preferred to URLs (Uniform resource Locators). DOIs are to be prefaced with the letters “doi” and a colon. If you must use a URL, look for the “stable” version assigned by the journal.
Note that no access date is required to be reported for electronic sources. They can’t be verified;; therefore, only resort to using access dates when date of publication is unavailable. If you cannot ascertain the publication date of a printed work, use the abbreviation “n.d.”
For two to three authors or editors, write out all names in the order they appear on the title page of the source. For four to ten authors, write out all names on the references page but use just the first author’s name and “et al.” (not italicized) in the text itself.
Journal articles are usually cited by volume and issue number and date of publication. In the event that pagination is consecutive across a volume, the issue number and/or month or season can be omitted. Ede and Lunsford’s volume and issue and page range could be formatted as is, as 116 (2): 354- 69 or as 116:354-69.
Identify editors and translators and the like (on the references page only) by spelling out the phrases “edited by” and “translated by.” Only capitalize these phrases if they follow a period. When the editor’s or translator’s name takes the place of the author’s name, follow the name with a comma and the appropriate abbreviation for the noun form: ed., eds., trans., etc. Standard terms such as “volume” (vol.) and “number” (no.) are always abbreviated when used.
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—. 2005b. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rose, Nikolas. 1999. “Control.” In Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, 233-73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, Nicholas. 2008. “Pedagogy and the Work of Michel Foucault.” JAC 28 (1-2): 151-80.
Toulmin, Stephen. 1990. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Publishers’ names are generally written out in full but may be abbreviated.
There are some sources that are traditionally left out of bibliographies, such as personal communication s;; however, it’s better to ask permission than forgiveness on this one (consult your instructor).
For more information on Chicago’s Author-Date References style, please see the following OWL resource: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/01/. You might also consult the University of Chicago Press’s The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) and/or Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (7th ed.).
When you do not know the author or editor of a source, begin that references page entry with the title of the source. Note that an initial article is ignored in alphabetization.