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Deixis
In her Chair's Address to the 2004 CCCC, published as "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key," Kathleen Blake Yancey urges "that we move to a new model of composing" and she locates this model in "three key expressions": the circulation of composition, the canons of rhetoric, and the deicity of technology (311-312). The first two of these expressions are familiar ones; circulation itself has circulated as a key term in our field following the 2001 publication of John Trimbur's "Composition and the Circulation of Writing," and the canons remain one of our rhetorical inheritances from ancient Greece and Rome. The third expression, deicity or deixis, however, is probably not as familiar.
Deixis is also a term that we have inherited from ancient Greece. Aristotle identifies the three types of rhetoric as forensic, deliberative, and epideictic, and it is this latter that has deixis at its root. While epideictic rhetoric represents a "timeless present tense," the transcendence of the moment at which it is delivered, deixis or deicity represents that moment in a more immediate form. As Yancey explains, following Leu et al. ("Toward a Theory of New Literacies Emerging From the Internet and Other Information and Communication Technologies"),
Deixis, linguistically, refers to words like now and then, words whose "meanings change quickly depending on the time or space in which they are uttered" (Leu et al.) or read. The word Now when I wrote this text is one time; as I read the Now in San Antonio was a second time; and now, when this talk is published in CCC and who how many people do (or do not!) read this Chair's Address, it will be many, many other times (318).
Deictic terms address the immediate circumstances of their utterance, and as such, they are both immediate and temporary. And it is this quality of technology that Yancey and Leu et al. seek to capture in invoking deixis. According to Leu et al., "Today, technological change happens so rapidly that the changes to literacy are limited not by technology but rather by our ability to adapt and acquire the new literacies that emerge. Deixis is a defining quality of the new literacies of the Internet and other ICTs."
There is much to recommend in this definition, but there is another element of deixis that is relevant to our considerations of technology. Deictic terms do indeed address a specific time or place, and are thus transitory, but they must also address an audience capable of sharing that reference. And even when the moment has passed, the terms are capable of referencing that moment. As I read Yancey's account of several nows, I have no trouble identifying each one as a moment in a process, each instance summoning a specific scene. There is an immediacy to deixis that functions rhetorically as an invitation to shared experience: we are here, in this place, and now, at this time, and we are connected, however briefly, through the shorthand of deixis. I can only imagine how, where, and when Yancey "wrote this text," but her use of Now invites me to imagine it. However tenuous and transitory, deixis evokes the social.