As in: Composition , Reading

From de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life:

Rather than remaining within the field of a discourse that upholds its privilege by inverting its content (speaking of catastrophe and no longer of progress), one can try another path: one can analyze the microbe-like, singular, and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization. (96)

Booyah! That's why I like M-de-C. This paragraph describes precisely the activities of the baroque (as Ray would call us) chroniclers of electracy. Some phrases that hyperlink for me:

• "speaking of catastrophe..." sounds like the Rhet/Comp plagiarism conversation to me. "Students are downloading their papers! We need some TechnoGotchas!"
• "swarming activity" sounds like mixing, filesharing, blogging, podcasting: the web's ecstatic flurry of new stuff.
• I would love for my students to harness "surreptitious creativities."
• "frantic mechanisms" echoes the catastrophe quote above. RIAA lawsuits, the Broadcast flag (recently defeated!), anti-Wi-Fi.

If we follow de Certeau's lead here, perhaps the internet isn't the Global Village, but rather the Global City. It's the nameless city from The Matrix.

Posted by briley at May 10, 2005 10:15 AM