Composition Forum 52, Fall 2023
http://compositionforum.com/issue/52/
On Play, Mindfulness, and Tending to Complication: A Conversation with Jackie Rhodes
Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Jackie Rhodes (known as “Rhodes” to her grad students) is now the Joan Negley Kelleher Centennial Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work on the intersections of rhetoric, sexuality, and technology has been published in journals such as College Composition & Communication, College English, Computers & Composition, enculturation, JAC, and Rhetoric Review. Her co-authored and co-edited books have won a number of awards, including the 2015 CCCC Outstanding Book Award (for On Multimodality) and the 2015 Computers & Composition Distinguished Book Award (for On Multimodality); the 2016 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship (for Techne); and others. In 2022, she was awarded (with frequent collaborator Jonathan Alexander) the CCCC Exemplar Award “for exemplifying the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the profession.” She is also a filmmaker; her documentary Once a Fury, which profiles the members of a 1970s lesbian separatist collective, is currently in streaming distribution. Over the course of her 30+ year career, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorical theory and history, multimodal composition, writing pedagogy, and LGBTQ+ studies.
I first met Rhodes at Cal State San Bernardino in 2014 as an undergrad in a grad seminar on Western Rhetorical History. I had no idea what was happening in class; the majority of my learning happened outside in hallways, offices, and smoking sections as I followed Rhodes around with questions about the readings. Is there a such thing as thought without language? Is agency real? Does matter make arguments? Later, during my MA at Cal State, I worked with her in several seminars as well as on an independent study of entirely too much Foucault, and then was her research assistant for a project on feminist critiques of object-oriented rhetorics. I had more questions. I then joined her at Michigan State University for my Ph.D. Both the difficulty of my questions and her generosity in exploring them with me increased. Rhodes believes that there are probably “bad” questions, but also that those questions also need exploration. It makes for a good scholar, a good professor, and a good conversationalist.
I didn’t know when or if I would ever formally interview her, but I had my first question ready early on, over a cup of Turkish coffee on her back porch. We were throwing a Frisbee for her Irish Wolfhound mix Tegan back in 2018. She stepped away to answer a phone call from one of her own interviewees for a film she was working on. When she came back, I had my question. In what follows, I finally get to ask it, and then go on to find out about Rhodes’s thoughts on her upcoming and past projects, play, mindfulness, teaching, and filmmaking.
Derek Mkhaiel (DM): Hi, Rhodes. I've been looking forward to this. I believe it was sometime in 2018, we were hanging out, and you had to step away for a phone interview for your new documentary, Once a Fury. I remember you mentioning that interviews had specific rhetorical moves that you were building a distaste for. I asked you, “Well, if you could be asked any interview question, what would it be?” You replied, “I’d ask ‘what do you think about?’” So, here we are in an interview and I ask you: What do you think about?
Jackie Rhodes (JR): I think I should have thought harder about that [laughs]. It was off the cuff. What do I think about? I just celebrated a birthday, and I'm reaching a certain age, along with my friends and family. I’m reflecting a lot on how I survived (and loved) rural Montana and how I survive and love now. Different friends and family members are suffering from some serious health issues. Our mental and physical systems are becoming more complicated. I'm thinking a lot about those complications, about how actions and feelings have become harder: doing X is really hard, getting up is really hard, making dinner is really hard, talking to my friends and family is really hard—not because I don’t enjoy talking to them but because we’re at an age where talking consists of talking about trouble. And yet we laugh a lot, too. It’s complicated [laughs].
DM: So it's not the physical act that's challenging. It's the content that's becoming complicated or hard.
JR: It’s the content, because it’s a hard recognition that a certain time in life has passed, or is passing now.
Figure 1. Jackie Rhodes, with her cat.
DM: I'm intrigued by the overlap of past and present that you're exploring.
JR: I’ve been thinking a lot about that overlap. Birthdays do that. I just turned 58, pushing towards 60. Not old, just older, and a lot of my waking moments involve thinking about what to do next and why and why now. I’m trying to be mindful; I pay a lot of attention to the complicated reasons for and ethics behind my actions. It’s hard—complicated—to question every action and yet still move. I haven’t done this so vigorously since my 20’s, but now every move is a complication in a constellation of complications.
On a more material level, I think about my job, playing my guitar or my piano, going back to Montana. I’m on a research leave now so I’m not thinking a lot about teaching in a specific classroom sense, although it lurks there, always. And these are just the very material level of thought. But as I sit alone with my thoughts at 4 a.m. (I don’t sleep well), I think about the actions and the effects of action or inaction, sort of like a raindrop effect. A raindrop plops into the water and knocks things around.
DM: A diffractive effect?
JR: Exactly!
DM: You mentioned a research leave. What are you working on?
JR: I have two big projects coming up. There’s the one that this leave is about, specifically: a sample chapter and a book proposal for a project on women’s liberation rhetoric, particularly Shulamith Firestone’s work in the late 1960s. I want to work rage into the title because there's a good amount of rage in feminist rhetoric of the late 60s. I wrote about this in my first book, Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency (SUNY, 2005), when I was exploring the elision of rage and confrontation in rhet/comp’s discussion of feminism. It has been an interest of mine for 20 years so I love Firestone and her work with different feminist groups in Chicago and New York, including New York Radical Women and the Redstockings–she helped found those groups and led them for a while. She organized some of the first pro-choice protests in the country. Firestone was huge in her day, a progenitor of radical feminism, and I mean that very much in a 1960s way, not in the way that the definition of radical feminism has morphed over the last 50 years. I look to Alice Echols’s Daring to Be Bad for a nuanced discussion of those definitions. Firestone is not talked about much now (although xenofeminists are recovering her 1970 Dialectic of Sex). Why isn’t she talked about, written about and with? That’s a central question in my project.
Firestone’s thought and work is complicated and sometimes enraging, as a lot of activist work from that era is. So my project has first to do with histories and their complications, looking at the past through Halberstem’s historical method of “perverse presentism,” a method that “avoids the trap of simply projecting contemporary understandings back in time, but one that can apply insights from the present to conundrums of the past” (53-4). If you’re successful with such a method, it ends up being not a purely hermeneutic move, but more an attempt to explore what the context produced, warts and all. Firestone edited three anthologies, more magazines or large pamphlets than books: Notes from the First Year, Notes from the Second Year, Notes from the Third Year (with Anne Koedt). I love the titles because they insist rather emphatically on the significance of early actions as a movement–it’s the first year and we’re off. These anthologies are crucial moments in feminist print history. These anthologies were where Kate Millett’s work from Sexual Politics first appeared. You also find Judy Syfers’s satire I Want a Wife, several years before it appeared in the first issue of Ms. and many years later in a number of first-year comp readers. There are notes from consciousness raising groups; there are Firestone’s speeches at different protests. There’s the first appearance of Anne Koedt’s frequently anthologized essay The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. And so for my project, I do a lot of digging around in these now-obscure collections. Luckily they’ve been archived and digitized at a number of special collections libraries, like Duke’s Sally Bingham Center.
I’m also very interested in Firestone’s 1970 Dialectic of Sex, in which she presents a feminist-Marxist justification of technological solutions to the problem of patriarchal oppression in the U.S. Specifically, she thought women should seize the means of reproduction, since she thought that we needed to be liberated from the labor of laboring. She advocates the elimination of gender entirely, the development of artificial wombs, the necessity of collaborative/group parenting, etc. It was hugely provocative and much of what she advocated has actually come to pass. And as I said, there’s a bit of a resurgence of interest in The Dialectic of Sex in particular by today’s xenofeminists. They don’t look at her earlier, on-the-ground feminist work so much, though, and that’s crucial to explore as context and intent.
But as I said, this is a project about our problematic histories. Firestone is complicated. Exhilarating and infuriating. She doesn’t mention lesbians, for example, the discussion of trans women is nonexistent, and her Freudian analysis of U.S. race relations is just ridiculous (Angela Davis wrote a very spot-on critique of Firestone’s infamous chapter 5 in Women, Race, and Class). What, then, do we do with Firestone and her contributions? You look back at people and wince, and you say, “Wow, I can't believe X wrote that, they weren't very enlightened.” Firestone is overwhelmingly radical in some thought; not so much in other thought.
DM: Yeah, we have epistemic limits, right? We can only know so much at certain times depending on our contexts.
JR: We can only know so much. But I think that taking a critical look at our histories–not just trying to bury them because they’re “wrong” in some way–is important. Otherwise, it's this stricture of contemporary theory, right? That we can only think within this particular stricture, and we’re not going to explore our problems and how those problems are part of the bedrock of a lot of contemporary feminist thought, such as it is.
My second project is actually a series of short films called I Am My Beloveds. Each film is about 10 minutes long. It’s both about me and not. My friend Steve describes it as “curating my own absence.” I'm interviewing people who are very important to me, but I don't appear in the films. They are ordinary and fascinating people. Fascinating because “ordinary.” An audience might wonder….“Well, why do you find her fascinating? I don't see it on the surface.” My job is to reveal that. Somehow [laughs].
DM: That really reflects your value of material thought. And this raindrop effect. All these individuals are part of a larger context of your narrative of your life.
JR: Absolutely, absolutely. And it's all part of a song cycle. I was looking at examples like Beethoven’s 1816 cycle “An die ferne Geliebte” (To the distant beloved), a set of six through-composed songs set to poetry. The idea is that you have these separate pieces that can stand on their own, but they make much more sense when you listen to all of them together. Each of the separate pieces is in a different key. It has a different tempo, The whole cycle is through-composed, as I mentioned. And yet it’s not repetition even of motifs through the different pieces. How do you do that visually? That’s an exciting challenge to me.
DM: Who's one of the ordinary people that you really look forward to filming?
JR: One is my friend, Connie Monson, who I collaborated with years ago on “Risking Queer.” Connie is a Lutheran minister in the middle of North Dakota. It's not a future I would have anticipated for her but that was the future that she chose. I flew up to North Dakota and hung out in the town of Rugby with Connie. We drove around in what appears to be a very bleak late-winter landscape, looking at solar farms and small towns. It is bleak to an outsider–not so much to me, I grew up in a place with a similar vibe. I have film of a sagebrush rolling down Connie’s street in Rugby. Of course I know it's a cliché but there it is.
I met Connie during our undergrad days at the University of Montana. She’s been a neo-hippie, a DJ, a literary scholar, an herbalist, a journalist, a mother. She knows a number of languages. She's ABD. She was working on her doctorate, and then at some point said, “You know what this is not it. This is not fulfilling. This is not satisfying. This is not scratching the itch.” So she left academia. She's one of the smartest people I know, and she turns that intelligence on everything, from herbal medicine to theology, to knitting, to queer theory, to just seemingly random topics. It's hard to convey, even in speech. She knows and is so much, and is ever a fascination because of that, in part. How does a filmmaker tell that story in 10 minutes of impressionistic interview?
And the details: I am surprised by how she knows how to slice tomatoes perfectly; how she can use masa for pie crust when flour is absent. So, trying to get those details like, okay she cooks, she prunes her roses. She writes and delivers sermons and presides over a really surprising number of funerals in her parish. There's a lot of different kinds of work that she does.and she does it all mindfully, in her very Connie way. And I'm puzzled and fascinated by that as somebody who struggles with mindfulness.
DM: So all those things you just mentioned really sound like the labor of “tending to.”
JR: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm not sure how it's going to turn out. She is now the Reverend Connie Monson so I wanted to title the short film Reverence because of that sort of mindfulness where you treat the tomato plant, or the rosebush, or your congregation with a sort of reverence. It’s not so much that someone is “the Reverend,” but that all around you is reverent and reverential. I’m trying to capture that sort of attention that she pays to things. So yeah, I think it's going to be hard. But you know what's a project without a challenge?
DM: It sounds really exciting. There's something really awesome about you working through these different material relationships and their consequences, but also composing the overall project in such a fascinating way, where they stand on their own as they do in your own life right? They have their own sort of importance and value.
JR: Yeah. I think It's going to be weird in a great way. It's going to be weird and playful.
DM: It sounds pretty awesome. Speaking of awesome, you were recently given an award because of your awesomeness. Congrats to you and Jonathan Alexander for being awarded the 2023 CCCC Exemplar Award for all your work individually and together. Looking back on your career, what would you say were exciting moments? Also what were some moments you wish you could revisit and think through some more?
JR: Working with Jonathan is always exciting in its way, because we bounce off each other really well. So creating Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self is something that I would love to revisit just for the creative energy. It was everything, from sitting across the table and airdropping files to each other, to hanging out in alleyways and taking pictures of graffiti, to these brainstorming sessions in person and over email, to just hanging out with a good bottle of red wine. In one chapter of Techne, we write about our composing routine, which included Jonathan taking the train from Irvine to Redlands (where I lived at the time). We would go out for Indian food. Then we would go wander around downtown Redlands, to Augie’s coffee shop and the art association store and the comic book store. There was just like this loose but predictable structure to it. But in having that structure we could really bounce, we could really play. That sort of collaboration, I think, is something that I value very much, and that composing process was an exciting one.
I think that when I look back at my career I'll say (then I’ll unsay it): I wish that I had played more when I was a younger scholar. When I look at my old stuff now, I think “Oh, that's well-written, but it's so contained.” But here’s my unsaying of it: I think that that containment is not a necessary but a predictable step. It happens when you come from the working poor and you push yourself to work harder and better so nobody will notice you don’t belong [laughs]. I wanted to be a good girl. Play was not my option early on.
But that drive happens to some extent to all of us when we get lucky and land a tenure-line job. There's such a push to publish all your thoughts, to do it and to do it quickly, and not to play too much and sometimes do it before you’ve thought everything through. So in an ideal world I would have luckily gotten a tenure track job and then been told “Oh, you don't have to publish for five years. Take some time to actually think about what you want to say before you say it cause it's going to be out there forever.” But we don't have that luxury.
It’s a privilege and luxury now to be a tenured full professor, late in my career, and to be able to play the way that I do. I just thought it was weird that being young in the profession was not my time of play–being older is playtime. That’s a young person’s thought. I suspect that I’m finding out now what my elders already knew about play. [laughs]
There’s some really exciting and playful work going on in the field right now (for both junior and senior folk). It doesn't always translate well to conference papers or academic articles, but it’s there in the wind. You ask someone what are you working on now? “I'm making tomato pies, rehabbing old cameras, teaching non-digital making. I’m contemplating and doing.” I’m referring, of course, to Jody Shipka, who actually is making tomato pies (among other things) these days. But if you start looking at Shipka's work in non-digital multimodal composition. It's really exciting what she's trying to do. I'm thinking about work by Timothy Oleksiak, who does very good academic work on queering rhetorical listening. Then he’ll write playfully and well about the rhetoric of bottoming or ”composing in a sling,” and an audience might think “Oh, you can't talk about that. Oh, it’ll offend people” and he does, and it's playful, and it's fun, and it pushes us in exciting directions. So there are these impulses to sort of push against that structure. I'm excited to see what Timothy and others like him are going to be doing in 10 years, 20 years when they really start playing. That’s exciting. I remember Susan Miller had said to me once that she thought that people published too early, because, you know,early on, we haven't had time to think enough.
DM: That makes sense. When I look back at my interactions with you and the value you placed on play and revision makes me realize that you were really trying to emphasize this idea of slowing down with my thoughts, developing them more and really pay closer attention to their possible trajectories.
JR: Kristin Arola is doing really interesting work on “slow composition.” In her keynote at the 2023 Computers & Writing Conference, she said that “a slow composition revels in the process itself, acknowledging all the relations and actors that contribute to, and hold us accountable for, our making. A slow composition recognizes the strength and wisdom that comes through reflection, through making, in community, and for our collective future” (Arola). Kristin is one of the main people who emphasize the necessity to be mindful rather than engaging in that sort of telos-thinking of “I'm working really hard, and it's going to produce something!.” What if you contemplate instead of just doing, doing, doing? It gets back to the question: “What do I think about?” It’s all those complications, all those complicated relationships, and how every intra-action sets off chains and ripples of other intra-actions. How can you possibly “compose” productively in that? I'm not sure you can or should. I mean, that gets back to Jonathan and I saying “Queer is an impossible subject for composition” right? Pushing against composition is where you find the really generative ideas. You know you’ve been given this corral, or the Chuck E. Cheese ball pit, if you will, and you need to play, test the limits, see what you can do, what you can jump from or throw or bury yourself in.
DM: What is the relationship between mindfulness and play? Your description of mindfulness is being attached to this idea of slowing down and revision. But then there's also this desire to engage and play in thoughtful ways. Do you see them working together?
JR: Absolutely. I should say I am really bad in my personal life about being mindful. I am so anxious all the time I work on it like “Jackie! Quick! Slow down!” [laughs]
DM: “Sit down, drink your coffee, relax! Now!”
JR: Right. In my personal life it's a lot of worry. And I'm trying to get better about that. Right now, my meditation involves making lots of detailed to-do lists [laughs]. I’d like to change that, and I am, very slowly. I'm thinking about walking meditation, and you know, mindfulness and play. My friend Donna Strickland was a great rhet/comper for a long time, and ended up leaving the field to become a counseling psychologist. She was doing work in mindfulness toward the end of her comp career and that's sort of where I picked up on some of this alongside working on process-oriented pedagogies. I’m trying to pay attention to the process whether that's a composing process, a walking process, a playing process. I ask myself What are you doing, right now, in this second? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you smell? What do you hear at this very moment? It’s an attention to a moment’s instantiation–trying to hold on to that moment temporarily while you think/feel “oh, that's kind of cool.” Donna has been really good at talking through how that might translate to pedagogy. My old colleague Jan Stryz at Michigan State is great at that, too. I learned from her, but I’m still working on it. I do like to think that I've encouraged play in my classroom. Maybe not direct mindfulness yet, but play definitely because I see play as a way to that end.
DM: Yeah. Speaking of mindfulness and play and teaching, I imagine that your work on Once a Fury blended those activities, considering the fact that your filmmaking involved a lot of archival work, interviews, and composing across multiple modalities. What did making your movie teach you about teaching?
JR: Hmm. That's a good question. First of all, it was definitely work, but definitely play, too. It was fun, even at the level of messing around with all the cameras and mics and Adobe Premiere. And then it taught me a lot about revision as a composer. It taught me about revision because it's a documentary involving 11 people telling their stories which lead into one story right? A very complicated story with conflict and high points and low points, and people who still love and hate each other after 50 years.
That play and work was necessarily mindful because of my desire not to control. That is, it was a complicated composing process, but I wanted very much for each of them to be responsible for their own stories. I didn't want to be the narrative voice. I didn't want to be the omniscient one telling the story. I wanted it to emerge from each of their stories, which is easier when you're composing the first draft. I like to think of my first draft as the 19 hours of recording that I have—that’s where the full story is, or at least a better slice. But when you start editing that to a realistic composition length (for this, 83 minutes), that’s a lot of cutting. You cut out a lot of nuance and context, and you are using the editor's hand which becomes that sort of omniscient force. To continue with the corral metaphor,: this is the story you are herding into a particular chute. So I got it down to around an hour and a half, and I still wanted them to tell their own stories; that ended up happening through revision. I sent out drafts to each of them. They got to see multiple drafts and they offered revisions, ideas, and critique. It was great. It slowed down the process immensely, but that was a good slowness. At one point I had an early two-hour draft that I tossed out after the Furies’ input. I had spent hours working on that early draft, but my commitment to having them tell and voice their stories (an idea drawn from feminist ethnography–meant that I had them responsible for editorial decisions, too, along with me.) So it was slow. Absolutely necessary, but slow. I learned a lot.
DM: Perhaps this is one of those moments where this is your rosebush that you were tending to.
JR: Yeah, absolutely. And it taught me both as a composer and a teacher because I wondered Wow. how do you take that into a classroom and not be the omniscient teacher who is directing the revision. How do you create a space where students voice their stories and also voice their revision and voice their editing and voice how it's told and what is told. I think that leads to another sort of slow composition. It's one of those terribly inconvenient, inefficient sorts of ways to teach, and unfortunately the university system emphasizes efficiency above much else. As long as we're on a quarter system, or semester system, and as long as there are requirements across a department or a university that writing courses have to have X number of words assigned, or X number of papers assigned, we're going to have a hard time doing slow composition “perfectly.” What we do in the classroom, though, is necessarily imperfect, if your definition of perfect is “in step with theory.” I think a lot of what goes on in classrooms is a snapshot of what we know is theoretically informed. It's not our full theory. It's a snippet of it. It’s what we can do at that moment. And you know, when I think about people like yourself who are teaching four courses a term or people like my friends in the Cal State system who are teaching five courses a term, or my friend Laura who teaches eight courses across two universities each term, there is less of a chance to play. There's less of a chance to use your snippets of theory. So there's a lot of constriction around your best pedagogical intentions, and I'm not sure how to fix that. There are just huge changes that would have to happen to higher education to make that possible. And I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime.
DM: The current systems don’t necessarily afford the opportunity to slow down in the ways you were able to when composing your film. Our academic world doesn’t often make that pace possible.
JR: I was very fortunate in that the film didn’t really “count” in the same way as my articles and books did. Not really. I had the film as a secondary project composed over three or four years. That’s a lot of time. It won awards, which was cool, but it wasn’t the “meat and potatoes” of my career. It was a side hustle. [laughs]
Another note on time: I really feel for students these days, who enter the university and are forced essentially to choose a major before they even hit the ground. Choose a major, stick to it. There are penalties for changing your major, either financial or time-wise. You know, when I did my undergrad back in the ‘80s, I changed my major six times. I was exploring, I went slowly, partially by necessity, I was working full time and going to school full time. It took me five years to get out of my undergrad but I was able to change my major easily. Forty years later, that’s changed a lot–it feels more like “No, you get in and you get out because we're paying attention to how quickly we flip tables.”
DM: It definitely makes being mindful of one's writing practices and of one's ideas a lot more difficult.
JR: It makes it so that you can't really slow down. But I wonder if there's still going to be the opportunity for those moments of awakening, of mindfulness, of, you know, the sun hitting your laptop just right. The poet Jane Hirshfield talks about these as “window moments” in poetry, when a poem directs your attention, sometimes quite literally, outside a window and the world becomes bigger, the poem becomes bigger. That glance expands your world. One such glance for me is in the opera Roberto Devereux. I’ll talk about my favorite recording of it. Beverly Sills, in the third act is playing the queen who goes mad. Long story. But it's in the tradition of sopranos going mad in the last act. Anyway, she hits these notes in “Quel sangue versato” (That spilled blood), and she's way up here and there's a full eight-part chord underneath her, where the chorus is singing with her, and the orchestra is playing, and there's that resonance that is this chilling moment of audio awareness. How do you get to that? Or how do you approximate it? I guess that's my goal. Because maybe the reach is more important than the grasp?
DM: Yes, moments. Composition as epiphanic production.
JR: Exactly.
DM: You’re just finishing up your term as editor for Rhetoric Society Quarterly. I just wanted to give you the opportunity to sort of reflect on that. What did you expect going into that position? How has it turned out? Do you feel disoriented and oriented in new ways? Lastly, do you have any advice for people who want to be editors?
JR: I'm not sure I have advice for people who want to be editors, I had done a lot of editing of books before, which is very different from editing a journal. I had this idea that I might participate through that editorial eye in the conversations in the field, and you don't have as much chance to do that with journals, because you really are reliant on what comes in. You become humbled, like: “Oh, the conversation is happening, and I'm not participating because the conversation is happening and it doesn't include me—but that's okay.” So I think going in with some humility about knowing exactly how much you can accomplish would be good. RSQ has been a lot of work. A lot of good work with some very good people, at Taylor and Francis, who published it, with RSA people, and then especially with Rebecca Conklin and Tristan Hooker and Tristan Hansen, who were my editorial assistants. They did fabulous work.
This may seem small, but a big frustration was with how the ScholarOne system “counted” submissions. We were trying to do more developmental editing. When things came in and the author received a revise and resubmit. Then the revision would come in and we would send it out again, and it might get another revise and resubmit, and they would send it back, and we would send it back. It would go into the editorial queue, where the editorial assistants and I would go through again and offer suggestions. So these essays were getting a lot of reviews and a lot of revision suggestions until they were finally published or formally “accepted.” Well, each time we sent something back with an R&R or provisional accept the technology would count that as an acceptance. So if you look at the acceptance rate for RSQ, the system says it’s something wild like 30%, when in reality it’s more like 8%. That’s huge. It's very difficult to find out what the actual publication rate is. Why is that important? Because those people who are lucky enough to get tenure-line jobs have to show that they got their stuff in a journal that's picky. We were picky! However, within the confines of that pickiness we wanted to do as much developmental editing as possible. I think that's important. I like working with the authors who are newer scholars. I like working with the older, and I'm including myself in older here, older scholars, but a lot of the stuff that came in, I had no idea there was a conversation about XY and Z. And now I know. So it was cool to see people play with ideas that I hadn't even thought about. It's rewarding, but it is a lot of work.
My next editing gig will be the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminist Rhetoric with Suban Nur Cooley. Again, editing books is very different from editing journals. I would say for me, editing books is a bit more rewarding. I realize that’s my preference, and others are happier with journals. But I find that there’s more of a sense of actual agential collaboration in editing a book. You issue the call for papers. You do the selection, you invite people to fill gaps, there’s more back-and-forth with drafts, things like that. So there's more participation in the content. It's also a slower process, when you're editing a journal, there's a fairly quick deadline all the time.
DM: On another note, In Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self, you and Jonathan build this really interesting argument about multimodal composition and disorientation in the context of Jean Cocteau's Parade. You reflect on the various artistic technologies implemented in the orientation process of the audience—music, art, dance, story—while reflecting on Parade’s dream-like modern elements whose aim seems to be to disorient spectators. You claim “Cocteau wants our composing our, our multimodal poeticizing, to be disruptive even to disorient, perhaps, in a word to queer. Such reorientation is inevitably about paying attention to the world around us, how it always re-orients us, and we it” (Techne). Our technological landscape has transformed a lot since Techne’s publication in 2015. How do you feel about this concept of disorientation and composing in a multimodal context in our present technological context? Do you think it's more possible, more necessary, or has our imbrication in technology potentially reduced our capacity for re-orientation in new ways?
JR: Yes and no [laughs]. It’s a very complicated question. My first thought is to ask in return: what is the mindful use of technology?I can't claim to be a mindful user of technology. I'm trying. I'm much more mindful when I'm outside not playing with my computer. The constant reorientation of say, doing a walking meditation (which, again, I don't often do successfully) and it's like “I am walking along and suddenly tree!” and now I'm reoriented toward “tree” momentarily, because the next thing I see is “root.” and I'm not thinking about it like, “Oh, I saw a tree, and I saw a root.” It's like the entire self is sort of reoriented in its relation. That's a very personal thing which is easier than being on the computer, which is, you know, essentially talking back to me a lot in ways that trees don't yet. I think my response is probably a typically Western one. Right? I'm saying, the computer talks back to me and the tree doesn't but when I'm on the computer, there's so much coming at me and the reorientation is like this *snaps fingers* constantly, and it's orientation exhaustion.
DM: Like how since Covid-19, a lot of people have been talking about screen exhaustion and Zoom exhaustion
JR: Yes, and a sort of decision exhaustion, because you're making constant decisions about what to look at along (and what not to). This is not new. It’s new/old, since it’s traceable at least back to the beginning of hypertext and the ability to to cruise around on the Internet and to see multiple things in layers all at once.You're constantly moving, What's new might actually be things like Covid, where we were thrust into an environment where we had to do it all the time.
DM: Yeah. There was no reprieve.
JR: And now, as far as window moments go, in the face of the effects of climate change, I can tell you I don't wanna go outside right now. Not just because it's depressing to see the change. It's blisteringly hot, it's dry. Austin had a month and a half of above-100 temperatures and no rain. There's the threat of fire constantly, or energy blackouts if the grid fails. So I don't want to go outside and be mindful because I go outside and I'm sweating and I'm hot and it's uncomfortable and all I want to do is go back inside. Meanwhile, my computer warns me about UV exposure outside. My body, apparently, would prefer air-conditioned mindfulness. [laughs]
DM: So even the warnings of “outside” have followed me into this technological interface.
JR: Yeah, I think that the constant reorientation is at the level of exhaustion. And again, I offer an argument or plea for some way to slow down. Is there a way to slow ourselves? How do you slow yourself quickly? I think it's really important, and yes, I see the irony. At this stage, we really need to pay attention, just as Cindy Selfe was saying two decades ago about technology and literacy: we have to pay attention. It’s our ethical responsibility. But I only have so much attention and it's constantly directed as fast as my eyes can move.
If you think about the value of your attention, it’s one of the best gifts you can give. Who are we gifting? We are in a crisis moment of giving our attention all the time to technology, not to the people and things behind the technology. So those relations are fractured in a way, because, when I’m faced with, “here's all the tech,” and it begs for my attention, and it makes it really rewarding in a dopamine-level way to pay attention, to give attention–I go for the dopamine. I think it's changed our relation to people. And that's part of the mindfulness and the slowness I yearn for and sometimes get.
At the same time, it’s not an “either/or” or “tech/no tech” decision. I strongly believe that people in MMORPGs form connections, for example, just as 20 years ago we formed connections in MOOs and MUDs. We give attention to each other there, and that's real attention and it's a real relation. I don't want to say that it's “either/or technology” because there are people in the technology. I would ask people, including myself, again, a failed meditator, to pay attention to how you pay attention.
DM: Perhaps when it comes to the context of the classroom, multimodality provides students with different tools to capture attention or presentness.
JR: It’s what I’m trying myself in my new film project, the “film cycle.” I have to ask myself: “How do you convey the experience of someone? How do you communicate that value underneath your skin?” I think that multimodality gets you closer to it. I don't mean just digital multimodality–again back to Shipka’s work with food and old cameras. I think that communication is always sort of like the Invisible Man, the H.G. Wells book, where you can't ever see the essence, the man, the thing. All you can see are the wrappings around him.
The more opportunity you have to enhance those wrappings around, the more complicated the outline becomes and we might have some hope of communicating, because the outline is there. I think with multimodality, when you use visuals, audio, or tomato pies, whatever you're working with you have to convey something, not necessarily an essence, but something contained.
DM: Any final thoughts?
JR: The hardest question! [laughs]. What am I thinking about, finally? I’ll quote E.M. Forster: “only connect.” Only connect. That’s it.