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14. Affording New Media: Individuation, Imagination, and the Hope of Change
- Utah State University Press
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a f f O r d i N g N E w m E d i a Individuation, Imagination, and the Hope of Change Kristie Fleckenstein On a dark stage, postindustrial music characterized by screeching electronic feedback loops and assorted noises fractures the silence. The skree of a computer connecting via modem to the internet complements the dissonant pulse of sounds. Then, an LED display, situated above the stage but still a part of the set, breaks the darkness, locating the play and the audience virtually. It flashes: “Welcome to Trangress O Yes.Com . . . that’s www.TOY. com! Real*Live* Bodies* Make* Art *4 * U!” In the midst of the cacophonous sounds and disorienting visuals, two actors emerge from the wings, responding to the off-stage instructions of an invisible manager to change into their costumes for the night’s activities. So begins artist-activist Coco Fusco’s searing one-act drama The Incredible Disappearing Woman (IDW), a traveling social protest that Fusco has performed at four different international venues. Combining feminist performance art, activism, and twenty-first century multimedia, IDW takes advantage of the possibilities of new media technologies for social change and weds those possibilities to embodied actions. As an example of social action, this dramatic protest demonstrates new modes of citizenship and civic participation that integrate material and virtual technologies in ways that hold implications for the composition classroom, especially for teachers who envision writing as a tool for social action. My goal in this chapter is to explore those implications, focusing specifically on the interface of identity, symbol systems, and new media, which I define as any technology or combination of digital technologies that enables easy manipulation, replication, and distribution of representations of reality. As my title suggests , I ask how we might teach with new media so that we emancipate identity without repressing social action or denying the need for social action. Drawing on Fusco’s performance art project, I claim that new media can serve liberatory goals—both individual and collective—and can be taught in ways that serve those goals when aligned with what legal ethicist Drucilla Cornell calls the minimum qualifications of individuation: bodily integrity, access to symbol systems, and protection of the imaginary domain. I use Fusco’s multimedia IDW to illustrate the activist possibilities of melding media sensitive to this triad of qualifications. I conclude by 14 240 composing (media) = composing (embodiment) abstracting from this union of theory and activist-artistic performance a set of heuristics to generate classroom strategies for using use new media to foster individuation, invite participation in social change, and nurture collective action. T h E aCTi Vi ST POTEN Ti al Of NEw mEdia Circulating throughout Fusco’s IDW are three intertwined elements integral to social action—identity, symbol systems, and technology—and these three elements are equally significant to writing instruction, especially when the focus of that instruction is social action. Teaching writing as a means of social change inevitably requires dealing with identity: its constitution , its options, and its possibilities. For, if there is no agent of action— individual or collective—how, then, can there by any action? In addition, identity is also bound up in symbol systems; constructing identity involves access to and mastery of a particular array of organized symbols shared with a community. Psychologically and rhetorically, identity is created from the raw materials of those systems. This relationship between identity and symbol systems is rendered even more complex when we factor in the additional complication of technologies of production and dissemination. The means by which any identity is fashioned—the instruments through which symbol systems are physically manifested and distributed—influences the nature of the identity and the nature of the social action. For instance, the choice to create an identity via words through quill and foolscap or via images through Photoshop affects the material representations of the self. In addition, the means by which an identity is delivered to the audience —while standing in the agora, performing on stage, or contributing to a MySpace page—also influences the identity an author can create and the social action an author can advocate. Any mode of fabrication opens up or curtails options for identity and social action, highlighting that some identities are more readily available through particular media and less available through others. In a neat sleight of hand, media, then, are potentially both emancipatory and repressive, enabling some options while disabling others. Fusco highlights the contradictory potential posed by...