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Subjectivity:

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Victor Vitanza's Countertheses

Victor Vitanza's Countertheses

With this incredibly helpful infographic by Nathaniel Rivers, we can see the breakdown of Vitanza's Countertheses. Arroyo uses these countertheses throughout the text as a starting (and repeatedly connecting) place for articulating participatory composition and the shifts in the field of composition itself.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

"There is only desire and the social. Nothing else." This desire (drive) creates singularities (not the subject) and these singularities create assemblages ("aleatory connections that happen among singularities brought together from several directions and discourses"). These assemblages reflect the community of singularities that you see in participatory cultures like YouTube.

Community of Singularities

Community of Singularities

In these online environments, subjectivity becomes complicated since one may seem to self-present, but one's self is exposed, recreated, and remixed based on the actions of others' comments, remixes, and parodies--subjectivity works by way of participation.

The Whatever Being

The Whatever Being

Giorgio Agamben confirms the deoedipalized subject as the whatever being, which remains in a state of constant becoming. The whatever being is a radical singularity-it is neither individual nor generic--it adds to the singularity and represents a threshold and can only exist in relation to another whatever being. "Whatever singularities do not identify with essential qualities (race, class, gender, etc.); rather, whatever singularities occupy innumerable potentials and portals for invention"(37)

Myth of Immanence

Myth of Immanence

D. Diane Davis insists that we must move away from the myth of the transcendental immanent subject or the idea of "a singular being driven by the notion that he's equal to his signature" and that he presents himself by that inscription (34). This myth can no longer operate because we cannot separate writers from the spaces in which they write in post-Oedipalized communication. Instead, she offers a metaphor for the self-present subject as a "morning mirror check."

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Lyotard put forth the idea that "human beings do not speak, they are spoken" (81) and Arroyo uses his 3 Pragmatics to work through the idea of "Who speaks when something is spoken?" Lyotard names 3 pragmatics of control in communication: 1-addresser (speaker in control of language; 2-addressee (obliging listener); 3-address (with no addresser, a receiver without a sender). It is the third pragmatic: speaking as a listener that comes to life with electracy.

Haeccity

Haeccity

Based on the latin haec (this thing), haeccity is a term employed by Deleuze and Guattari for a third temporality and resides outside subject-object relations (like singularities). Haeecities are part of the "becoming" and are formed with the act of grasping, touching, linking, or connecting. They "mark the potentiality of becoming along each composition;" they do not create subjects, but create the conditions for a becoming to occur. Haeccities are storm conditions, not the storm.

Pedagogies of Power

Pedagogies of Power

With communities of singularities, questions about how power, knowledge, and discourse operate are important--The pedagogy of severity occurs when a listener gains new power of speaker (peer response) and reacts harshly with their new control. The pedagogy of demand looks at how desire functions in the discourse of mastery--what will a listener do for the authority? Post-conflict pedagogy is a new game that "jams" the problem with thinking

Thomas Rickert

Thomas Rickert

Rickert questions the effectiveness of critical pedagogy and suggests that the problem lies with Oedipus...well, with the Oedipalized subject. There is a disconnect between the current post-Oedipalized or de-Oedipalized subjects and the Oedipalized subject of critical pedagogy since they are actively resisting the dominant forces of power. This plays into online users who seem to be apathetic to social or civic issues, but as de-Oedipalized subjects they can't actively resist those authorities.

Incorporeal Transformations

Incorporeal Transformations

Since online identities and images are made and remade in front of our eyes through community dynamics, users are never truly in control of their subjectivities. Deleuze and Guattari name incorporeal transformations as "theoretical constructs that give images to thoughts" (90). These transformations often occur online when users transform who they are and how they behave based on other users' comments and is seen especially with "flaming" or "hating" in online communities.

Vlogging

Vlogging

Arroyo turns to vlogging to demonstrate subjectivity as singularity and notes that nearly 40% of the Most Discussed videos on YouTube are vlogs. This popularity among the community shows that the writing (composition) was created for something other than the self. The social is folded in with the self (desire) and that singularity is created and recreated with every subscribe, like, comment, or remix--the "so-called self present subjectivity {is remade} right before our eyes" (48).

*This website is a reading and interpretation of Sarah Arroyo's Participatory Composition. It is NOT an official website for the text and was created as a classroom presentation and heuristic.
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