Download Jeff Pruchnic: Dissertation Description

Jeff Pruchnic: Dissertation Description
The Transhuman Condition: Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age
Value of Research:
Scientific theories and discourses have long been invoked as a “limit case” for
rhetorical analysis that protects distinctions between reality and representation
or truth and persuasion. By attending to the roles rhetoric plays in the
development of science and technology, rhetoric of science scholarship does not
so much seek to disrupt these boundaries as to highlight the complex
interrelationships between modes of persuasion and technoscientific
epistemologies. In practice, rhetorical accounts of technoscience provide
methods for analyzing contemporary realms of knowledge production (how
innovation and invention take place in technoscientific work) and strategies to
intervene in the political and ethical controversies emerging around current
science and technology. This perspective as well as the interdisciplinary reach
and broad range of subjects engaged by my research (new media technologies,
artificial intelligence, legal discourse, neurological and pharmacological sciences)
have prepared me to teach both highly specialized courses and more general
classes in rhetoric, composition, critical and cultural theory, and technical
writing.
Argument of
Dissertation:
Emergent technoscientific reconsiderations of human bodies and categories
of human agency have challenged traditionally humanist conceptions of ethics
and epistemology as well as more contemporary postmodern and
poststructuralist critical and cultural theory. My study provides an analysis of
this rhetorical ecology and argues for a transhuman rhetoric that productively
deploys new capacities for persuasion, interaction, and conditioning made
possible by contemporary science and technology. This principle is then applied
to a variety of phenomena currently at the center of debates over human
subjectivity, humanist politics, and praxis within the humanities: new media
technologies, rhetorical theory and criticism, composition pedagogy, public
policy development, and legal discourse.
Contribution of
Dissertation:
Rhetorics of science and technology typically focus on the emergence and
circulation of technoscientific knowledge and practice. By combining this
approach with broader concerns about contemporary subjectivity and ethics, I
am able to
 expand the role of rhetorical theory and praxis to encompass affective and
non-discursive phenomena, such as human interactions with contemporary
technology and the use and effects of psychopharmaceuticals;
 illustrate how “networked” perspectives of human and mechanical agency
and cognition are altering the contemporary roles of human identity,
responsibility, and accountability.
Relevance to
Future Research:
My current research on the networked relationships between technoscience,
rhetoric, and ethics has provided me with a large amount of new material and a
range of publication options. Future projects include an analysis of court cases
contesting the validity of scientific claims and a genealogy of cybernetics and
early neuroscience based on planned archival research.
Jeff Pruchnic / Dissertation Description / 2
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1
Toward a Grammar of Transhumanism; or, Why the Future Needs Us
Organized around a series of theses that are invoked and supported throughout the
dissertation, this chapter analyzes the rhetorical dilemma at the center of endeavors to
think in a non-humanist and non-anthropocentric manner: the seemingly paradoxical
attempt to conceive of an ecology in which human conception will itself have
undergone radical changes. The chapter narrates the emergence of populist and
academic movements writing under the banner of trans- or posthumanism as they
develop in the wake of mid-century cybernetic sciences and then contextualizes them in
reference to broader movements in rhetoric and contemporary critical and cultural
theory. Writing partially in response to Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy’s influential
essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” — an argument for the affirmation of
traditional liberal humanist values as a defense against a coming age of massively
destructive technologies and scientific practices — I argue for a transhuman rhetoric
that productively deploys new capacities for persuasion, interaction, and conditioning
made possible by contemporary science and technology.
Chapter 2
On Seeing Differently: Cybernetic Knowledge Production and the Blind Spots of
New Media Theory
This chapter analyzes methods of knowledge production and critical practice developed
by the cybernetics movement in reference to contemporary methods of critically
engaging contemporary technologies of electronic mediation. It begins with a critical
reading of the Turing Test, Alan Turing’s influential 1950 thought experiment that
assays whether a human participant could guess the identity of an artificially intelligent
computer solely through textual interaction. Turing’s test and subsequent responses to it
in media theory and science studies create the framework for critical engagements with a
variety of technologies and arguments that traffic in material and analogical practices of
vision: the “black box” method that served as a crucial conceptual device for first-wave
cyberneticists; biologist Jerome Y. Lettvin's canonical investigations into the
physiological components of animal vision; virtual reality role-playing games; and Steve
Mann's EyeTap technologies, wearable computing devices that alternately diminish and
augment a user’s vision. I argue for a set of critical and pedagogical practices focused on
our ability to manipulate our and others’ affective and cognitive responses to visual and
electronically mediated material rather than our abilities to interpret or critique them.
Chapter 3
Neurorhetorics: Articulating Life during the Great Anti-Depression
In this chapter I examine the interrelated development of scientific research in artificial
intelligence and neuropharmacology in reference to the contemporary use of
antidepressants and related ethical and political controversies. Parallels and intersections
in the genealogies of AI and neuropharmacology resulted in the production of
numerous “neurorhetorics,” techniques of persuasion and transformation inspired by
research into neural nets and the establishment of the network as a conceptual
paradigm. I argue for a conception of “cybernetic subjectivity” integral for the early
formulation of this research and necessary for our contemporary ability to respond
productively to the use of neuropharmaceuticals such as antidepressants.
Jeff Pruchnic / Dissertation Description / 3
Chapter 4
Rhetoric, Cybernetics, and the Work of the Body in Burke’s Body of Work
The next two chapters examine explicit engagements between rhetoric, cybernetic
science, and transhuman thinking, beginning with the co-terminus development of
Kenneth Burke’s early rhetorical theory and the first-wave cybernetic research to which
Burke was often implicitly and explicitly responding. Burke’s (primarily negative)
responses to cybernetic research are pivotal to understanding his early attempts to
construct a rhetorical subject embracing affective and nonrepresentational vectors. The
chapter argues that the recuperation of this often neglected aspect of Burke’s canon is
salutary for intervening in contemporary rhetorical scholarship on subjectivity and
similarly instructive for approaches to affective experience and new media technologies
developing in contemporary cultural and critical theory.
Chapter 5
Coldness and Criticism: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Pedagogy
This chapter develops the conclusions of the last chapter in reference to current
pedagogies for writing and critical thinking. I take the contemporary “conservative
backlash” against Liberal Arts instruction (and composition classes in particular) as a
point of departure for forwarding a pedagogical program based on an “aesthetic” rather
than “critical” view of pedagogy. This perspective, developed around the ethical works
of Hannah Arendt and the lessons learned from contemporary open-source software
production and open-author writing systems, contains both a theoretical framework and
discrete strategies for teaching in the contemporary writing classroom.
Chapter 6
Hacking the Self: Burroughs, Deleuze, and the Limits of Control
The next two chapters expand the itinerary of the study to broader political, cultural,
and ethical domains. “Hacking the Self” stages an intervention in the emergent concept
of “control” or “cybernetic” societies, a critical mapping of contemporary economies of
social control first formerly introduced through theorist Gilles Deleuze's last published
works. Although Deleuze is explicitly working from Michel Foucault's studies of
disciplinary power, his use of control society as a periodizing concept is very similar to
canonical cyberneticist Norbert Wiener's predictions of the future of social control, and
he credits American author Williams S. Burroughs for first anticipating the emergence
of control societies. In this chapter, I first trace the connections between cybernetic
theorizing and Deleuze's philosophical writings before arguing for an alternative
concept of control societies drawn from Burroughs’ work. The chapter concludes with a
proposal for fomenting political activity without recourse to traditional tropes of
critique and protest.
Chapter 7
“My Hands”: Capacitation, Culpability, and Transhuman Ethics
This concluding chapter surveys the grounds for an ethics of transhumanism and its
possible pragmatic application in jurisprudence. After foregrounding the exigence for
such an investigation through the close reading of recent court cases dealing with the
altered states of human capacitation and culpability augured by contemporary
technoscience, it turns to the figure of the sleepwalker and the problems it has posed
for three interpretive domains: medicine, literature, and the law. Court cases involving
sleepwalkers that have committed violent crimes are then deployed as a historical
antecedent and contemporary test case for transhuman ethics.