Participatory Composition: Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy

2. Recasting Subjectivity for Electracy: From Singularities to Tubers

29 2. Recasting Subjectivity for Electracy: From Singularities to Tubers Two specters are haunting the discipline of Writing Studies. Those specters are the unified subject and the hegemony of communitarian thinking. These specters come in the guise of process theory and ideology critique. —Joe Marshall Hardin, “Putting Process into Circulation: Textual Cosmopolitanism” Yet critical pedagogy has been part of composition for nearly twenty years now. Is it fair to ask: At what point are you no longer blundering for a change? At what point are you simply blundering? —Russell Durst, “Interchanges” Doesn’t she know people are making fun of her? She doesn’t even know the words! Why is she doing this? She should stop making videos. —students in a digital rhetoric seminar In 2010, ToshBabyBoo’s video—dedicated to her friends on the live video chat site Stickcam and posted on YouTube—circulated around the Internet and created an instant buzz. This video, which is over six minutes long, simply features ToshBabyBoo singing along to a popular song coming from her headphones, so we only hear her voice and not the music from the song. What turned the video into an Internet meme was ToshBabyBoo’s unrelenting singing, mumbling, missing words of the song, and making up others with no seeming effort to improve. She also appears oblivious to the embarrassment her viewers vicariously feel for her. In effect, her video is the epitome of the rise of the amateur and what Alexandra Juhasz sees as the “shallow” content of YouTube that repels any type of serious learning (“Why Not (to) Teach on YouTube”). Yet, even though the video itself will most likely fall from popularity, I begin this chapter by referencing it because it offers a lasting exemplar for how subjectivity works in electracy. R E C A S T I N G S U B J E C T I V I T Y F O R E L E C T R A C Y 30 Of course, we may think the subjectivity of ToshBabyBoo is more self-present and self-indulgent than ever before, since she assumes that people will want to watch her videos and become participants on her channel. And her assumptions are correct. Her videos receive numerous comments, ranging from the supportive to the extremely vile, and ToshBabyBoo keeps on posting. As Clay Shirky has pointed out, the subtle in-your-face style, or we might say, sheer bravado involved in posting a video like this might elicit us to wonder, who has the time (to be so self-centered) (Cognitive Surplus )? However, as both Henry Jenkins and Shirky rightfully argue, active participants on social sites believe their contributions—in any shape or form—matter to others (“Confronting the Challenges”; Cognitive Surplus), and this simple force is what drives YouTubers to continually post videos that, on the surface, appear to be damaging and embarrassing. This brings me to another point. I would argue that ToshBabyBoo’s subjectivity is more accurately reflected in the idea of the singularity who is not separated from the community of singularities calling her subjectivity into appearance, rather than in traditional notions of self-indulgence. The comment that she should quit posting videos because they are wrecking her self-presence is not at all applicable, since the community itself is creating and re-creating her image. The issue of who is in control in this situation remains an issue. The interactions taking place on many sites continue to shift both the subjectivity of the YouTuber and the thousands of people who have contributed to the life of this video. This double whammy of communities of singularities, appearing to be self-present but actually becoming exposed through the actions of others’ comments, remixes, and parodies, is certainly complex and deserves unpacking. I begin with a discussion of the rhetoric of empowerment, so prevalent in and out of the field of rhetoric and composition. The idea of subjects-in-control who can change beliefs and actions based on critical reflection and act in their own best interests changes drastically in video culture, since the ideas of sharing and reciprocity (see Lange “Achieving Creative Integrity”) drive action and cannot be separated from the subjects and the content themselves. In my discussion, I weave in theoretical elements about subjectivity from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Giorgio Agamben, since they have been arguing for the idea of “singularities” for quite some time. I connect these ideas to specific practices in video...