"The language [I] use depends on whom I write to or what I want to search or research about. In terms of English, I often do three things: (1) e-mail contact with my international friends, (2) searching for shopping information on-line, and (3) academic writing." (Yi-Huey, quoted in Hawisher, Selfe, Guo, and Liu, 74)

The summer I moved to Boston, I did two things of note while not wandering the dark streets of JP: read Capital v.1 and figured out how to illegally download Rosetta Stone v. 3. Fifteen blogs, three viruses, and ten anti-virus blogs later, and I had successfully downloaded Rosetta Stone, installed the crack that gave me access to more than its trail levels, and began talking awkwardly to my computer in incredibly rusty German. Rosetta told me that I could not pronounce my R's - especially in the word lehrerin. She and I chatted about my favorite colors, reading books, buying groceries at the supermarket, cooking in the kitchen, and going to the movies. We really were hitting it off, chatting almost every day. I felt things were going well. But then... (and isn't there always a but then...) school began to pick up, I met some people who were a bad influence (graduate students)... I have a litany of excuses, but our budding relationship died. I have been lucky enough to have a friend in Germany, Miriam, with whom I can occasionally practice my German. We, too, chat about films, but usually French New Wave (she loves Godard where Rosy would watch any ol' movie). It is always a very different kind of German from the kind Rosy and I used to speak.  My brief fling with French the next summer went much the same way, only without a connection or link to someone else.

Perhaps this is an odd way to talk about learning a language, but I can't help but feel like my relationship with Rosetta Stone is important. When I read about the information age, or new media, it is always focused on how the "connections and resources that structure the lives of individuals" and how these "connections and resources are linked ... to the related ... formations that structure the information age" (76). Which sounds good, but the taxonomic categorization of "both personal and economic" - human relationships and technologies/mechanisms/resources - seems odd to me. It seems to always dedicate human-human relationships as the goal. Resources and the economic, technological literacies, etc. are always tools that help one achieve better networks between humans. That focus seems to hide things, but I'm not sure what.

I built a relationship with Rosetta Stone. I certainly spent more time chatting with it than with girls I was going on dates with (sad though that makes me to write). I was grumpy when I started writing this post (and I still am to a degree), so I'm tempted to say that the relationship I built is a codified social relation dreamed up by individual workers in corporations which embody the ideological influences and values of the place and time in which it was created; if a group of Tibetans were to develop a language acquisition software, what conversations would we have? But I don't know why I am tempted to say that this is bad. People who live partially in the realm of fantasy - for example, those who live for their time in Adria, the world of Renaissance reenactment, started in So Cal - build relationships. And its not just with the people there, though it is tempting to shrink it down to that. The thing that most people find odd about it is their relationship with the time - a snapshot of history which has been codified historically, much like how the snapshot of German language has. Does that invalidate the experience or its use? I loved my time with Rosy. And believe it or not, I'm not being facetious.

For most of my usage of other languages, there is no dependence on "whom I write to" or speak to. When there is, it is a radically different experience. I'm a radically different person.

An Unexpected Value in Studying Composition

A package arrived for me and was left on the front porch today. Someone tore it open. But left it because the content was "The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925: A Documentary History." A benefit of studying composition: things you find valuable are so boring to others that they aren't worth stealing even after committing a felony.

After the string of burglaries, I figured I should share this uplifting story.

Prendergast vs Trimbur?

So I've been reading the beginning of Manuel Castell's Communication Power, and I think I'm starting to understand exactly what about the division Gallagher was drawing between Trimbur and Prendergast that was starting to bother me.

Gallagher set up a transition narrative for how we talk about and understand language use with three stages. (1) We used to search for an underlying universal grammar (which linguists still search for). (2) We stopped looking for pure language and began treating language in terms of discourse communities (Burkean Parlor). Here, it wasn’t that language was a specific way universally and structurally, but that it had certain conventions for proper use that allowed you to get access to a community’s conversation. These conventions were contextually determined, but there were centers or clusters of conventions (see Trimbur’s issue with Kachru on p. 110; replace nation with community and you have it). (3) This second approach to language excludes many uses of English that don’t fit the norm of whatever community we are looking at: “The establishment of a new variety of PCE, in other words, requires working out a relationship of mutuality between a variety of language and its host population that, as Pennycook puts it in his critique of the very idea of national varieties, ‘leaves out all those other Englishes which do not fit the paradigm of an emergent national standard’” (118).  The shift to networked understanding of language recognizes the splintered and disconnected spread of capitalism and language, acknowledging the disconnections as well as the connections through the idea of the splintered metropolis. By thinking about the use of language through “styling” rather than a type of language as we tend to when we talk of “varieties” or “flows,” we can more effectively represent the circulation and enactment of English in not only South Africa but “the splintered metropolis of globalized capitalism” (119).

We thought about Prendergast in terms of the second category of how we’ve approached language, and Trimbur in terms of the third. When we were talking about how Prendergast and Trimbur approached language, our conversation centered on language like "spread" and "distributed."  When we talk about language as spreading, we use a metaphor of territory - though, perhaps because I'm hungry, I'm now thinking of spreading butter over bread. Language starts in a central space and moves to other places, filling in the gaps and crevices of a society slowly. This way of talking about and conceptualizing language solidifies language as a concept separate from practice and encourages us to assign agency to language (maybe). And this issue is compounded when we analyze, use, or believe the myth of a standardized English. SAE moves and spreads, and it forces people to adopt the language. So the consequences of this approach to language can be thought of in terms of the following: 

1.     It solidifies a language as something that can exist separate from practice by social actors in a specific context. 

2.     It gives agency to language over people.

3.     When coupled with the idea of a standard or native English, it encourages assumptions about correctness and deficiency, and those deficiencies can be assigned to people, to language practices, and to social markers like geographic origin, nationality, race, gender, etc. 

4.     In neoliberalism, deficiencies are most commonly discussed in terms of effective tools for accomplishing something. The modernization project. So language spread throughout time (a la Baca) can be thought about in terms of periods: Christianizing, Civilizing, or Modernizing. But each of these hinges on superlatives and comparatives - better or best. 

5.     These superlatives and comparatives do much of the work in establishing center/periphery relations by metaphorically territorializing language and assigning values to different locations. Even without our realizing it.

6.     Because of this valorization and territorialization, English’s spread is considered inevitable.

7.     With this way of discussing language, consequences number 3-6 become the focus of scholarship and conversation - either disproving myths or focusing on the relevance of the myth in everyday life.

8.     As a result of the emphasis on a language removed from practice, we forget to look at innovative ways in which language is being used now and opportunities for gaining agency (cue Trimbur).

I think this division Gallagher created was exaggerated (I don't think he necessarily believes that Prendergast thinks of language as having agency and people not in quite so stark of terms as depicted here) in part to bring up a point about approach to language. But, as I think Brandon's comment about agency being limited points out, not all agencies are created the same. The question for me is why - what is limiting. 

If agency is one’s capacity to act to bring one’s will, interests, and/or values to fruition, agency is at its core about relationships and power. Agency is about one’s relation to social structures (or, to put it another way, one’s position within competing institutions, organizations, networks, social actors, etc) and to what extent this relation affects your ability to influence other social actors/structures. Castell defines power in a similar way: “power is the relational capacity that enables a social actor to influence asymmetrically the decisions of other social actor(s) in ways that favor the empowered actor’s will, interests, and values” (10).

Two things I appreciate about Castell’s approach to power relations at the beginning of his book are (1) his focus on human actors rather than disembodied powers like an apparatus or institution and (2) his emphasis that one’s “relational capacity of power is conditioned, but not determined, by the structural capacity of domination” (10, my emphasis). As Castell explores exactly what he means by a social actor, he points out that social actors can be individual or collective, organizations or states, etc, but he argues that “ultimately[…] all organizations, institutions, and networks express the action of human actors, even if this action has been institutionalized or organized by processes in the past” (10-11). Institutions, states, organizations, and networks are in a sense the partially crystallized power relations of human actors in some capacity – even if the originating human actors are long dead.

Castell’s emphasis on “conditioned, but not determined” leaves room for resistance to domination. Domination is a power relationship supported by two main mechanisms of power – violence (or the threat of) and discourse. Violence can be understood fairly easily in terms of force and coercion. Discourse can be understood in the drive of institutions to “construct meaning” in service of specific interests and values. Think Foucault. This is where we get the compliance and acceptance of those who are dominated.

When I take this and think back to the issue we discussed about Prendergast vs. Trimbur, I have issue with how our conversation seemed to say that there is no use in studying language the second way. While I do appreciate the third approach to language’s innovation and perhaps more accurate representation of language usage and its critiques of the ideas of varieties of English (poor ol’ bastardized versions Darwinian metaphors) and flows (mistaken assumptions about the homogenization of space), I worry that tossing the second approach to the side entirely would lose something incredibly important. A standard language might not exist. A central discourse might not exist. But their discourses structure and construct how people understand and interact with the world. While it would be logical then to argue that we should critique the discourses and change them (which we should), it is not as if they are simply discourses. Types of English (that may not exist as a living English, but still exist in codified form like classical and ecclesiastic Latin does) are spread through institutions that actively promote a specific understanding of English. Publishing companies that produce grammar and style books, for instance.  Educational non-profit organizations.

It is right to critique how the way we talk about language can lead to assumptions of inevitability and universality. It is right to critique how our scholarly approaches can create communities that exclude in the process of including and legitmating Englishes (Trimbur’s response to Kachru). But that doesn’t mean there isn’t space for the kind of analysis that challenges these institutions and discourses that do materially exist (even if in a globe-hopping way). 

Space, Place, and Gallagher's House

When speaking about how "the reform of the maturita would rearrange social relationships in the country and would (contrary to the promises of the Ministry) alter the culture," Prendergast focuses initially on the ability to share student information as a form of social security for students, how this information "had become a casualty of the postcommunist transition" (122). However, then she makes an odd transition that I don't know what to do with. She says "Tellingly, when the groups arranged their exam environments, each group had its own idea of where the desk should go, and of how the chairs should be arranged, but all agreed there should be flowers somewhere in the setting, because there always were. The exercise could not proceed without the flowers, a symbol of cultural continuity for which no instrumental purpose need be offered and no international endorsement given" (122). Within the place of the testing site, social groups differed greatly on how to arrange it, but one point of unity for them is a use of the space that is not instrumental. This seems particularly important to me because even at the heart of instrumentalism – the location of assessment, an assessment largely constrained and created by non-Slovakian forces (i.e. EU’s CEF, British Council, etc.) – the use of the space within the location became a micro-site of resistance. Assessment and neoliberalism’s drive to account for everything (even the human in the economic) is subverted. Flowers are something with “no instrumental purpose.” The location and usage of space got me thinking about spatiality in general. Especially after Charlie’s great post last week.

I find I rarely go into anecdotes about my students, but here is an opportunity too perfect to not. Right now, I'm working with an AWD student - we'll call this person Prime - who's an architecture student. He's interested in researching what he calls "Post-apocalyptic architecture" - by which he really means a paper on sustainable architecture in extreme environments that uses a zombie apocalypse as an attention getting device. Toward the end of our conference the other day, we were chatting about what exactly was meant by sustainability. Prime said that sustainability was about maintaining live-able levels of resources - food, water, climate, shelter - in order to let life continue. Some of the principles for planning sustainable architecture were understanding the material constraints and resources of the environment, the orientation of its elements, etc. I responded by asking him what kind of life are you saving? Prime looked at me confused and said, what do you mean? I replied, I understand the importance of saving lives, letting life continue. But it seems like that task is impossible without thinking about the way of life you're preserving or creating through the architecture. What kind of relationship with the environment does the architecture encourage? How does the architecture facilitate cultural traditions (i.e. where is the village chief/priest/matriarch's building located and what does it look like compared to the others)? How does the architecture account for, encourage, or discourage religion or other cultural traditions? By sustainable do you mean bare subsistence or will the community cultivate and stockpile specific surplus resources? What type of economies and social relations do these create? If you stockpile resources, do you need to build additional security from outside communities? How does this encourage people to look at others? Life without a way of life is a comatose patient on a table.  Each of aspects of a way of life is highly dependent on the organization and arrangement of social space. And whether you factor it into your design or not, the design affects these aspects of the community’s life. Prime responded, “that’s an interesting way of looking at it.” And the subject dropped.

To me, location seems to have a huge impact on people’s identity, their social relations, the kinds of connections they form with nature, processes of production, etc. How their daily lives are (re)produced. But to Prime, these are all unnecessary concerns for sustainable architecture. I feel like Prime and I are approaching the topic with two very different sets of concerns, much like how the Slovaks and the international agencies and organizations approached assessment. And even though I am his teacher… in control of his grade… for whatever coercive affect that might have on how he approaches my class… the micro-economy of my classroom – what it values, what it questions, what it does – is still undermined by the bigger economy of American architecture as a field. But I have no idea how one could resist it. Perhaps, much like the test planners, I can’t. Not really. But perhaps I can only hold out hope that the use made of the space is different in some way. Boy… that’s really depressing. I don’t like that.

Let me think… so while I alone might not be able to change the space of something, perhaps – and this might be the idealist Marxist in me coming out – banded together with others, we could. For example, I hate giving presentations in the Barrs room. And to be honest, the idea of presenting in the new conference rooms just as dismal. A little brighter. But too hot and stuffy to be pleasant. The locations seem clinical and dungeonly at one and the same time. The locations don’t seem to promote the kind of atmosphere and interactions we say we want when sharing our ideas. When I picture sharing ideas there, I feel like I need to be on guard, fully formed, prepared to defend any challenges. In the Barrs room, it feels like I’m facing a firing squad with a blindfold on. In the conference room, I just imagine the blindfold will be removed. The kind of academic community I’d want to live in would be one where sharing ideas was among friends; one where we’d joke about my verbal flubs as if over coffee rather than sit silently as I wade through the next 5 minutes of my presentation. I guess in a nutshell, I’d want the academic community to literally be having a conversation, having fun, and relaxed. But in the locations we have in the English department, this does not seem possible. But why should we be limited to these locations? Why not present in a new location? Say, at Gallagher’s house. This may or may not surprise you, but I have long imagined what Gallagher’s house would be like. When they moved from Nebraska to Massachusetts, one of his daughters started a newsletter to stay in contact with old friends. And as time progressed, she talked with Gallagher about how the genre was changing to fit the situation. She was only… how old… 11? 14? Something like that. What about his home, the things that fill it, how they are arranged to emphasize and de-emphasize things (i.e. like where is the tv?), the people living there, how they interact, would lead a girl to imagine something like that? Hearing stories of the conversations he has with his daughters makes me feel like his house would be a great place to have smart academic conversations and presentations, relax, and joke around. Isn’t that what we want?

Defining Otherkin

For those of you who don't know, I'm exploring a cultural subgroup right now that call themselves otherkin. Right now they are debating what otherkin should be defined as. One person defined it as "Otherkin are people who believe themselves to be something other than a human being on a spiritual, psychological, energetic and some even on a biological level, and choose to identify with that non-human fragment of themselves to the point where they count it as a permanent and ingrained part of their personal mythology and/or identity." ~ Miniar/Freetha 


Here was my response. Otherkin is an interesting term.


When I hear kin, my mind thinks of kinship – the historic way in which social groups defined belonging. You belonged with your family because of some shared origin – biological, cultural, or historical. Kinship is usually talked about in terms of things like marriage and who it’s okay to sleep with (jokes about the taboo of sleeping with your cousin). But it can be thought of in terms of the Adam and Eve story which give humans a different origin from animals, giving humans souls (no souls for animals!) and dominion over animals. Kinship can be based on philosophies, like those of Kant and Descartes, which argue that humans belong to a superior and different category of “being” than animals because they have language and rationality. These cultural qualities supposedly cannot be found in animals; therefore, humans are distinct (and superior) to animals. Descartes went as far as to say that animals are machines, and their cries of pain are the same thing as the noise a clock makes when its gears aren’t in alignment.

How we define kinship-boundaries has almost always led to a difference in how the excluded group is treated. When the conquistadors would sleep with the Amerindians, the mixed-blood children were considered defective, just as the Amerindians were, because of the shared blood. And the human-animal division has long allowed the use of animals as machines to do work or to justify animal suffering for human gain. Just as the narratives of racial origin justified the slavery and exploitation of people.

I think if we make otherkin a quality that defines a person’s identity we will run into problems. Whether it’s a choice to be otherkin or not? What “others” count as otherkin (e.g. do machinekin count)? How authentic is someone being when they say they are otherkin? These concerns would be especially important if otherkin ever push for rights specific rights down the road.

But if instead of a quality, we make it about being open to other ways of defining and thinking about kinship, we get rid of those issues.Otherkin don’t talk about souls in the same way Christianity (and most other Western religions) do. Their souls were previously animal,astral being, or another creatures’ souls. People who identify as otherkin feel an affinity and belonging with other creatures that traditional human-only kinship didn’t account for or allow.

I guess what I’m saying is… I understand not wanting it to be a static belief system like a religion because those become exclusionary really quickly. But I’d be wary of talking about it like a quality that defines a person’s identity, too. Identity qualities lead to exclusion just as easily. Perhaps it is a critique of old forms of kinship and openness to accept those who it leaves out.

I don’t know that I have a good definition here. But these seem important to keep in mind. Especially if “going public” is ever going to be an issue that tries to fight discrimination or prejudice. Are you fighting for who you are at your core? To which I wonder, can we ever know that because it always seems to change for me day to day. Or are you fighting against a way of thinking that excludes people? Making space and accepting what fills it…

Defining Apparatus

Prendergast begins by noting that this is not a book that is concerned with "defining the effects of linguistic imperialism related to British and american colonial and neocolonial activity" (19). Instead, she's interested in the effects of "Soviet imperialism on English and English language learners" (19).  I feel like this is an important distinction because, when we tend to talk about the role of English in globalization, we tend to speak with a finger-wagging tone toward "English" or America or Britain or Composition or Capitalism - as if they were the sole arbiters and creators of English-ness. If that makes any sense. But what I think Prendergast's book does a remarkable job of doing is noting the multiple players involved in the construction of the various "imaginaries of English" (52). The geopolitics of language is not the geopolitics of English. And the geopolitics of English is not merely the geopolitics of (neo)colonialism. It is a conflict among different apparatus.

The apparatus - a delightful, obfuscating word - is almost always the same in structure and function, but the difference is to what extent do those operating in the apparatus use its various tools of control and whom is being targeted as unnecessary or marginal. Foucault is perhaps most known for his talking about the apparatus, but I haven't ever seen him try to define it. Deleuze tries to define it in Thousand Plateaus noting that a "social apparatus consists of lines of force" that "act as arrows which continually cross between words and things, constantly waging battle between them." The links define categories, "correct" curves, connect tangents, establish boundaries and spaces, and it is through this defining of space that is internal to the apparatus and space that is external to the apparatus that the apparatus itself is formed. Just as how power is formed. They both emerge from the spatial defining of knowledge. In "What is an Apparatus?" Agamben argues that there is a link between the Greek oikonomia (a word which refers both to the home [oikos, I believe] and economy) and the Latin dispositio (where Foucault gets his dispositif or apparatus), between the economy and apparatus. From what I can tell, he defines apparatti? apparatusses? as "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings."

It is through various apparatuses that the various imaginaries of English get defined. But the various apparatuses use different tools through which to create their definitions. In Soviet control, English was unnecessary and therefore okay to let shrivel and die through bureaucratic run-arounds. It was an existence that could be killed, but not sacrificed... Maybe... Maybe not... During the establishment of ethnonationalism, the nomination of Slovak as a national language seems at the same time to be a deliberate choice to make language a central part of national identity that allows an aspect of culture to become something that can be "left" to shrivel and die or systematically destroyed. Western capitalism establishes the periphery as well. Except instead of using language as an explicit connection to one's centrality, it uses one's geographic origin. One speaks English, but one is still from Eastern Europe. Or one speaks medical English, but not business. While in the imaginary defined by the Soviet apparatus all Englishes were defined as external and dangerous (or revolutionary and culturally free [pending on the person]), in Western capitalism various Englishes have become part and parcel of the division of labor. They are central to the linking and establishing of the a capitalist apparatus. But in each, the apparatus captures English(es) and puts it (them) to use for a specific purpose (e.g. the Soviet apparatus used English to mark out enemies of the party).

Perhaps the divergent experiences of the people could be defined in terms of the relative power and influence of each apparatus on their understanding of how the lines and links are formed. Maria understood the cultural utopia of America as part and parcel with English. However, as she adjusted to the new apparatus of Western capitalism, she discovered that language was not the only line that defined whether or not one is on the inside.

Prendergast's Great Names for Cars and/or Hazing Techniques:

1. The Educational Apparatus
2. The Velvet Revolution
3. The Velvet Divorce
4. The Imperious Vanity [of the administrative apparatus]

Networks and Links

Much like Chloe, I've been thinking about how networks and links continue to pop up in our readings. I'm not quite sure where I'll get with this line of thought either.

Dingo seems to pitch networks as a method for getting at neocolonialism. The "transnational networks symbolize the concentration of economic and political power of some countries and limitations on others. Some portions of these networks may be dense and clustered, others more dispersed. Communicative networks, as Grewal points out move logics from one node of power to another" (493). I guess this explanation makes me wonder what is dense or dispersed. What exactly are the "linkages among nations?" If we are talking about capital flows, communications systems (a la Outfoxxxed: The Rupert Murdoch Story), international policy apparatuses (i.e. GATT, WTO, the G8 [or now G20], IMF, World Bank, etc.), military presence, etc., fine. And I think this is what she means (though perhaps not military) because of her later reference to "policy networks" (494) and her focus on Bretton Woods. But... how exactly do these linkages "revise the familiar hierarchical top-down model of economic development wherin one nation controls, has power over, and directly influences another" (493). I mean, it removes the military might of traditional colonialism (kindof) because that is found mostly through privatized militaries and international peace-making forces, but aside from the direct threat of death via bullets, it's the same isn't it? The Washington Consensus is still top-down economic development where one nation (the US) controls, has power over, and directly influences another. And while microloans might have been invented in the global south, they have become a part of the Washington Consensus. As dingo notes, they are deployed to construct markets, but at the same time ensure that the markets (and those within it) are structurally marginal - what Ananya Roy has called "poverty capital" and the creation of the bottom billion market.

I guess I don't see what the revision is in Dingo. She seems to have just shifted the scale a bit. The hierarchy is still there in exactly the same formation as before. An elite group controling and influencing another. The same structure appears when networks are mentioned in Royster, and she argues that acts of civic engagement must recognize and utilize these networks: “Uses of public literacy are likewise compelled to recognize these interconnections. As Paula Mathieu and Diana George warn, “successful circulation of public writing is not achieved by going it alone, but through networks of relationships, in alliances between those in power and those without, through moments of serendipity” (144)"  (Royster 141). Reading Royster, it seems that she takes the approach that it is a "necessary evil" to work within the interconnections already there. We have to take advantage of the resources as they are already being used and hopefully can manipulate them in a way that is culturally sensitive and effective. There is a pyramid in which all of the material, economic, social, and whatever else power is controled by elites and passed down through these interconnections. Since all the power and resources emerge from the top, one must use the linkages they are using. Having read the Mathieu and George piece, I'm not sure that this is exactly what they are going for. But it's been too long since I read that to talk about it here.

I wonder if there is a way to imagine networks that doesn't recreate the hierarchies that we are picturing. Gallagher had an aricle in CCCs this spring that talked about how the rhetoric of the Spellings Commission undermined teacher expertise and decision-making power when it came to assessment (forgive me if I butcher this). The legislators and policy makers were the top of the pyramid and the students and teachers were the bottom. As a way of combating this power relation, he argued we could think about a school through the logic of the network. Rather than thinking of verticle hierarchies, we could think of horizontal structures. Rather than thinking of individualized positions, we could think about teamwork and collaboration. The danger of the network is that flexibility is useful to companies because it allows them to shift to wherever labor and work is of the least cost to them without regard to the workers. But the network isn't necessarily good or bad. It's just there. Teachers can use the same logic of the network to gain agency in debates about education policy, arguing that because they have the most linkages to different groups affected, their location and relations put them as the true experts. This should give them more clout in discussions about education policy than less.

If I remember right, the work Gallagher does with networks is radically different from the way networks are employed in Royster and in Dingo. For these authors, networks are already established material connections - through ownership of communication companies, martialling of money, or international policy. With this perspective, one cannot help but resign oneself to working within the system as is; a dutiful but subversive cog in the machine. But Gallagher sets up an alternate paradigm of values through network logic, one which clashes with neoliberal network logic, by starting with what the issue is (assessment of student writing) and looking at who has the most connections to people with stakes in the issue. Royster and Dingo's usage seems to be a bit fatalist to me (and I realize it's odd to group them together). I viscerally associate it with the logic of the trickster in discourse, another figure I'm skeptical of. But... I think I'm running out of steam... I guess this might just be an angsty post about why we start using new terms, like network instead of hierarchy, if we aren't doing something new with them. Maybe there's something else in here, too. I don't know.