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Dissertation What Can Automation Tell Us About Agency

Notes on “What Can Automation Tell Us About Agency?” by Carolyn R. Miller

• “Asked whether automated assessment could be acceptable under some circumstances, assuming technical advances could make it as reliable as human assessment, more respondents said no for speaking than said no for writing. Asked directly whether they think there are any specifically rhetorical issues that will make computer assessment of speaking less satisfactory than computer assessment of writing, more said yes than no. Their comments suggest that the heightened resistance to automated assessment of speaking derives partly from first-hand experience that the performative aspects of speaking are more complex than those of writing, and thus that the technology that tracks or models them is less likely to be valid or reliable (the incredulity factor, again); but resistance also derives from the greater visibility and materiality of the audience for speaking and the perception that speaking therefore requires interaction between rhetor and audience. The survey responses thus point to three dimensions of rhetoric that may help us understand what we want from a concept of agency, that is, what is missing from the confrontation of action with motion: these are performance, audience, and interaction. These are certainly not new ideas, but what I hope to do here is to suggest what we can learn from their conjunction.” Cool! Miller seems to suggest here that the encroachment of digital media technologies into the composition classroom suggests the posthumanizing of rhetoric.
• Good selection of recent discussions of agency following the above quoted paragraph:
  • Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science.” Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science. Eds. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 25-85.
  • Geisler, Cheryl. “How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency? Report from the ARS.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34.3 (2004): 9-17.
  • Geisler, Cheryl. “Teaching the Post-Modem Rhetor: Continuing the Conversation on Rhetorical Agency.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 107-113.
  • Greene, Ronald Walter. “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.3 (2004): 188-206.
  • Lundberg, Christian and Joshua Gunn. ’”Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?’ Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35.4 (2005): 83-105.
• Other things to read from this essay:
  • Leff, Michael. “Up from Theory: Or I Fought the Topoi and the Topoi Won.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36.2 (2006): 203-211.
• “Since agency has traditionally been understood as a property of an agent, the decentering of the subject-the death of the author//agent-signals a crisis for agency, or perhaps more accurately, for rhetoric, since traditional rhetoric requires the possibility for influence that agency entails.” Miller ignores the Greeks here, I think.
• “The AutoSpeech-Easy™ thought experiment challenges this double understanding of agency by radically truncating the pedagogical situation, leaving the student in a rhetorical desert, demonstrating her capacities to an “audience” capable only of motion, turning effects into algorithms. Can agency as rhetorical capacity survive when the possibility of agency as effectivity has completely dried up? (We might, of course, ask the same question about many other situations we put students into.) Automated assessment systems also cut to the heart of the theoretical and ideological concerns about agency. Can posthumanist theory disperse agency to a machine? What are our moral obligations to such hybrids? Is our resistance to the mechanized audience simply another example of rhetorical evangelicalism?” (my emphasis). Miller seems to be assuming that machines aren’t intelligent. How can we say that a machine that processes spoken language is only performing non-symbolic motion and not symbolic action?