The CHATS conference at Albany this weekend was an interesting interdisciplinary investigation into technoculture with some emphasis on the changing shape of the humanities in higher education. The best part of the conference was getting to catch up with Collin and Derek and meet their colleague Madeline. They’ve all managed to post about the conference, so I guess I’m the slow one here.

The roundtable discussion on Friday evening addressed the way the concept of the "public sphere" has evolved since Habermas in these terms. There was some debate over whether it is appropriate to think of the college classroom as a public sphere or even if we should want the classroom to become such a space.

The conversation initiated the expected concerns regarding Foucault and other postmodernists on the issues of power, knowledge, and discourse. From my view, one of the more interesting aspects of the conversation was the introduction of the topic of affect. The Habermasian public sphere occludes affect, identifying instead the sphere as a site of rational discourse. However, while Foucault’s disciplinary society my focus on the rational management of discourse, it is also clear, as is highlighted in Deleuze’s "Postscript on the Control Society," that the micropolitical management of affects constitutes one of the most pervasive and effective modes of contemporary social-ideological power. Unfortunately the panelists weren’t prepared to take the conversation in that direction.

The conversation did however enter into the changing role of
the humanities. And this was of interest to me, not only in terms of my
research, but in terms of my work at Cortland as well. Specifically,
they discussed the relative value of disciplinarity. They ackowledged
that interdisciplinary work was among the most interesting going on in
the humanities. They made the astute observation that
interdisciplinarity is engendered by disciplinarity.

Rather than thinking about this work as interdisicplinary, one might understand it as postdisciplinary.
The shift is integrally related to new media. As I believe McLuhan
obervers, the structures of prior media become the content of the new
media that organizes them in a new fashion. Though secular humanism
emerges to replace scholasticism prior to Gutenberg’s invention, I
believe it is fair to say that the modern humanistic university is
structured by print media: the divisions of the unversity mirror the
organization of books in the university library.

Hence the remediation of the humanities.

I have no, there are no, remedies to the aporias of consciousness,
symoblic behavior,and distributed-embodied cognition. These material
processes are irreparably other than the subjects, communications, and
ideologies that are extracted, in some sense from them. On the other
handf, few want to give up pursuing a just, egalitarian community,
particularly when injustice and oppression are so common in the world.
That is, the humanist project is difficult to abandon.

Which, of course, is why no one suggest an abadonment. The point, it
seems to me, is to better understand the material, affective, and
cognitive intensive and extensive spaces we commonly articulate as
communal, just, free, etc.

I see the remediation of the humanties as an integral part of this,
as it will allow us to dismantle the calcified and arbitrary boundaries
of disciplinarity. Fortunately, I think (I hope) we are well beyond the
era of saying "look I can make a hyperlink or stick an image or a video
into my essay! I’m free!"

If we  have a notion of the university serving as a modified "public
sphere," as a site for the open exchange, consideration, and production
of knowledge, and we believe that new media networks will facillitate
this function, it cannot (or at least should not) be grounded on the
assumption that the Internet or hypertext automatically creates freedom
or disassembles disciplinary structures.  Instead, we have to
medi(t)ate on the opportunity technologies offer us to rethink
space-time-consciousness. And we have to develop new critical and
compositional practices that take advantage of those opportunities.

I believe that if you examine the 17th and 18th centuries, that’s
what you’ll see going on. From the first novel and the Protestant
Reformation to Descartes, Newton and the beginnings of modern science
and Enlightenment. So yes, although humanism begins in the Renaissance,
it takes its modern form with the modern university. This is also the
period to which Habermas looks in identifying the Public Sphere, which
is also foundational for modern democracies and our essential freedoms
of speech and association.

I suppose one could argue for the blogosphere as a public sphere. It
is hypothetically even free in that  one could go to the public library
and set up a free blog at blogger or some such. It is equally
hypothetically possible that one could get the minimal training to
start a blog through a free workshop at the same library. On the other
hand, getting the knowledge and rhetorical expertise to become an
effective blogger? That’s not free. At the very least it requires a
fair amount of individual labor.

However I suppose the same was true of the public sphere 300 years ago.

In any case, even if you agree for sake of argument that the
blogosphere has this potential, one still must confront the ideological
process of affective management and disciplinary-discursive regulation.
This brings me back to where I was before though now I am phrasing the
question in terms of practice.

How do we employ the material unfolding of symbolic behaviors (from
speech and gesture to new media) so as to extricate ourselves from, or
at least temporarily disrupt, state apparatus of capture (to use
Deleuze and Guattari’s term)? Only in doing so, do I believe we can
approach the affective-cognitive ecology that humanism has tried to
understand by the terms freedom, community, justice, etc.

To put it in Felix Guattari’s terms (in Chaosmosis; my emphasis)

The
future of contemporary subjectivity is not to live indefinitely under
the regime of self-withdrawal, of mas mediatic infantilisation, of
ignorance of difference and alterity–both on the human and the cosmic
register. Its modes of subjectivation will get out of their homogenetic
"entrapment" only if creative objectives appear within their reach. What
is at stake here is the finality of the ensemble of human activities.
Beyond material and political demands, what emerges is an aspiration
for individual and collective reappropriation of the production of
subjectivity. (133)

Coming out of this conference I see this as the primary intellectual question for rhetoric, if not for the humanities.