Lachrymator: Persuasion's Tear Gas

"*Lachrymator*: Persuasion's Tear Gas," experiments with the role of democracy in the rhetoric of objects. Where "being moved to tears" is often associated with experiences of *pathos*, recent brutal police responses in American cities figure being moved to tears as the product of an involuntary bodily response produced tear gas. Considering such a substance---scientifically designed for the sole purpose of producing pain---serves as a limit case for the commitments of an object-oriented rhetoric. Through theoretical metaphors of carpentry (Bogost), parliament (Latour), and ambience (Rickert), the conceptual vector for considering the rhetoricity of nonhumans is inclusivity: bringing objects to the table of a deliberative, democratic rational persuasion. As tear gas rains down on protesters across America, this paper asks if democratic deliberation is the best model for thinking about the rhetoric of *these* objects. Further, this paper constructs a "dark persuasion" following a thread of horror from OOO (Harman, Morton) to an emerging weird philosophy of horror (Negastrani, Thacker, Ligotti). Thinking darkly about nonhuman rhetoric constructs objects as producers of rhetorical effects not through calm deliberation but through violent collision. In this dark rhetoric of objects, we find responses like Bree Newsome's removal of the South Carolina flag to be *the* rhetorical strategy for dealing with the darkness of rhetorical objects

The Rhetorical Future of the Soul at Work

In *After the Future*, Franco “Bifo” Berardi documents the failure of the anti-globalization movement to attain lasting political change, despite huge global visibility following the Battle in Seattle and the 2003 protest of the war in Iraq. Bifo argues that this movement was ethical and never a vector for social change because it was incapable of imagining a future in which an alternative to neoliberal brutality held sway. For Bifo, this diagnosis suggests a failure of the collective conscious imaginary of the future itself, hence his claim that the myth of the future is now over. In offering a genealogy of this myth and an account of its failure, Bifo connects the emergence of the future as a space of promise and prosperity to the emergence of capitalism and heavy industry itself. However, I suggest that a much older rhetorical concept offers a different and, in the context of Bifo’s autonomist Marxism, more relevant model of the future. The sophistic concept of *plasma* is a genre in which a better or at least different world is extrapolated from current data. In contrast to the deceptive and intentionally false *pseudos*, *plasma* articulates a myth of a future by making the current world virtual. For the sophists, *plasma* is a source of positive invention, just as the myth of the future was needed to animate the struggle for spaces autonomous from capital’s privations. Thus, Bifo’s diagnosis signals the failure of *plasma* in our present argumentation. Through this figure of an imagined world, I link Bifo’s diagnosis of the soul as the site of capitalist exploitation with accounts of cybernetic sophistry from Richard Lanham and Jeff Pruchnic to highlight the terrain upon which rhetoricians can reinvigorate the idea of a plasmatic invention in the age of semiocapital

"The sharpest part of my skeleton": Digital Surrealism, Weird Posthumanism, and Performing Theory.

This talk identifies a body of WT accounts that he labels "digital surrealism": projections of a dark free flow of the Freudian id from such accounts as Post-Culture Review, Village Fetish, and Ketamine Stalin. Within this WT subgenre, Speaker 3 specifically focuses on digital surrealist tweets about skeletons. This image—often taking the form of reminding readers that they are sacks of meat encasing a skeleton (that might be trying to get out)—destabilizes humans’ understanding of themselves as stable beings. Aligning with an academic posthumanism seeking similar ends, the often gross, often funny imagery of “skeleton Twitter” better enacts this destabilization of human exceptionalism because it performs rather than merely theorizing this disruption. Speaker 3 concludes by gesturing toward the subversive engagement with surrealist practice in composition studies as a model for thinking more broadly about the electronic performance of theory

Lachrymator: Persuasion's Tear Gas

"*Lachrymator*: Persuasion's Tear Gas," experiments with the role of democracy in the rhetoric of objects. Where "being moved to tears" is often associated with experiences of *pathos*, recent brutal police responses in American cities figure being moved to tears as the product of an involuntary bodily response produced tear gas. Considering such a substance---scientifically designed for the sole purpose of producing pain---serves as a limit case for the commitments of an object-oriented rhetoric. Through theoretical metaphors of carpentry (Bogost), parliament (Latour), and ambience (Rickert), the conceptual vector for considering the rhetoricity of nonhumans is inclusivity: bringing objects to the table of a deliberative, democratic rational persuasion. As tear gas rains down on protesters across America, this paper asks if democratic deliberation is the best model for thinking about the rhetoric of *these* objects. Further, this paper constructs a "dark persuasion" following a thread of horror from OOO (Harman, Morton) to an emerging weird philosophy of horror (Negastrani, Thacker, Ligotti). Thinking darkly about nonhuman rhetoric constructs objects as producers of rhetorical effects not through calm deliberation but through violent collision. In this dark rhetoric of objects, we find responses like Bree Newsome's removal of the South Carolina flag to be *the* rhetorical strategy for dealing with the darkness of rhetorical objects

How Did I Get Here?: GPS, Surveillance Culture, and Personal Narrative

In "How Did I Get Here? GPS, Surveillance Culture, and Personal Narrative," Speaker # analyzes the emerging possibilities for GPS enabled devices to "write" a different kind of personal narrative. While Scot Barnett has pushed toward thinking about GPS as an adjunct writing tool, and while many scholars, including Nedra Reynolds, Christopher J. Keller, and Christian R. Weisser have asked us to think about the spaces in which writing occur, this presentation radicalizes these ideas by suggesting that with GPS data streams, students can experience a kind of posthuman automatic writing drawn from their everyday experiences of space. Where Barnett, following dominant composition theories of space that focus on exception, highlights GPS as a means of accessing a specific space, this presentation suggests that juxtaposing the intentionally composed, carefully crafted genre of the personal narrative with an accidental account of that same life space/time is the truly productive path of engagement. Following James Bridle, artist and founder of The New Aesthetic, who first thought to download his phone's GPS tracking data and feed it into Google's Maps API, Speaker # suggests that this unintentional life writing, in which the students use the data streams that passively track them through their whole lives, proves a more productive engagement with emerging technologies of writing, emerging cultures of surveillance, and emerging understandings of authorship

Sex and the Singularity: On The Reproduction of Software Objects

This paper considers the intersection of sexuality and Vernor Vinge's theory of the Singularity, as articulated in _Her_. I argue that, while the film's ending constitutes an "intelligence explosion" in Vinge's vocabulary, the blank-screened sex scene between Theodore and Samantha is the film's more interesting moment of unknowable being. In discussing this question of human-machine erotic interfaces, I turn to the history of research into artificial life and the almost singular obsession of the field with asexual reproduction. Because of early computing pioneer John Von Neumann's influential work on self-replicating machines and cellular automata, software objects reproduce asexually within the Von Neumann computational architecture inside every digital device. Von Neumann's research seems to prove that asexual software can simulate sexual beings, arguing "life is a process which can be abstracted away from any particular medium." Even the recently developed technique of genetic computing, which uses Darwinian models of population fitness to solve complex problems, rely on asexual data simulating sexual reproduction. Based on this history, I conclude that the issue of desire amongst the machines is one of incompatible architectures. The central conceit of _Her_, however, is that the desire experienced by the male lead, a human, and the female lead, an agglomeration of software objects, is not simulation. I conclude, then, that the specific challenge to an erotics of data, especially given the film's anti-representational tactics, is the question of an interface: a complex negotiation between unassimilable models of life itself that exist beyond a sexual singularity

Worlds Without Us: The Horror of Indifference in The Southern Reach Trilogy

In Jeff VanderMeer's _Southern Reach Trilogy_ (_Annihilation_, _Authority_, _Acceptance_, all 2014), the style and language of H.P. Lovecraft's weird horror are updated for an age of ecological collapse and posthuman sensibilities. As Stephen Rust and Carter Soles argue in their introduction to a recent special issue of _ISLE_, "ecohorror" is a growing genre of cinema and literature in which ecological visions are used as fodder for horror narratives. VanderMeer's trilogy---involving the attempts to scientifically and bureaucratically manage an alien-created, pristine natural environment on the coast of the Southern US---clearly engages these tropes but, I argue, toward different ends. Rust and Soles argue that ecohorror---defined more capaciously than the popular definition as "revenge of nature" narratives---uses horror to foreground ecological politics and sensibilities. However, I argue that VanderMeer is focusing not on a notion of nature but on the human itself as a vector for producing horror: his unsettling descriptions of a seemingly pure natural world evoke a clear sense of our post-natural realities. Rather than produce an ecological awareness, VanderMeer's ecohorror produces an awareness of our own inability to produce an ecological vision in the Anthropocene. By creating an ecology that does not reference the human, and using this ecosystem as a vector for weird horror, VanderMeer's trilogy captures an inhuman vision of the natural, non-human world as, to use Eugene Thacker's term for the truly horrifying, a "world-without-us.

Manifesto of Modernist Digital Humanities

The Manifesto of Modern Digital Humanities is an avant-garde statement regarding digital methodologies used by scholars of modernist literature and culture. Its experimental format uses handwritten HTML to mimic the typographical qualities of modernist literary manifestoes

Insect Capital

In this note, Pilsch address William Gibson’s use of insect imagery in to trouble the common understanding of the novel Neuromancer, its commentary on corporate culture, and its relationship to a then-emergent posthumanism. Further, he concludes by suggesting that, for Gibson, the insect hive as an image for the corporate body shows that corporate culture is, in contrast to the banal image the term brings to mind, a set of nefarious cultural techniques derived for interfacing human bodies with the corporation’s native environment in the postmodern era: the abstractions of data

Translating the Future: Transpilers and the New Temporalities of Programming in JavaScript

This essay was originally published in the web journal, _Amodern_. The journal's site recently vanished, so I offer an archived copy here.This essay is about transpilation and the future of translation work done by machines. “Transpilation” is a particularly ugly portmanteau word that refers, in web development, to a particularly confusing new concept used in building online JavaScript application. Mashing together “translation” with “compilation,” it refers to the process of translating one human-readable computer programming language into another. While compilation without translation refers to the conversion of human-readable programming languages into the digital codes understandable by computers, the end product of transpilation is another human-readable language