Introduction

The fundamental question this study asked was how do technologies and individualities work dialectically to form identities in the composition classroom? More specifically, where do we draw the line/s between composition instruction and technology's impact on the self? At an institutional level, to what extent should we be concerned with the individuality of our students? Should we perceive our students as something other than"our students"? Must we be"serious faculty members"? The topic of lines within and beyond the academy has its presence in the history of composition studies (Derrida,1974; Ulmer, 1985) and this is increasingly the case today as we seek to formally articulate the value of technology in The WPA Outcomes Statement. Some scholars argue that technology is a tool for literacy and as such it is vital to the classroom (Adler-Kassner & Estrem, 2005; Harrington, 2005; Maid, 2005). Others contend that digital and electronic advancements are continually changing how individuals think at a fundamental level, which disrupts how we have been trained to think (i.e. literately) which forces, invites, and/or allows us to negotiate our cultural practices (Ulmer, 1985, 2014; Holmevik 2012). As such, these scholars shift away from literacy in order to advocate for post-pedagogies that do not presume literacy and its conventions. Literacy and its conventions exclude whereas post-pedagogies transcend academic boundaries while encouraging artistic creation and play with and through technologies.

WPA-OS

In The WPA Outcomes Statement: A Decade Later, Micheal Callaway (2013) asks:"What Role Should Technology Play?" (p. 271). His question follows the 2008 OS, which had been updated to include the section,"Composing in Electronic Environments" According to the new language, digital technology in particular should be harnessed for the processes of composing, researching, and critique (p. 3). Calloway contends, however, that the update presumes technology is merely a tool for writers. A passage from his critique is worth quoting at length because it has yet to be resolved in the 2014 OS amendment. According to Calloway:

Since new literacies and new technologies are rapidly emerging and meshing, the discipline bears the responsibility of developing outcomes that broaden and enrich the discipline's understanding of writing, one that acknowledges the interrelation of writer, writing, technology and self-formation, and that recognizes and encourages the multiple literacies that students bring with them when they enroll in composition courses" (p. 282-283).

The 2014 iteration does not situate the outcomes for digital technology in a separate section. Instead, the OS clarifies CWPAs definition of "composition" as"processes" that are contingent upon digital technology.  Indicating a new "understanding of writing," as Callaway puts it, the OS's Introduction now reads:

'Composing' refers broadly to complex writing processes that are increasingly reliant on the use of digital technologies. Writers also attend to elements of design, incorporating images and graphical elements into texts intended for screens as well as printed pages. Writers' composing activities have always been shaped by the technologies available to them, and digital technologies are changing writers' relationships to their texts and audiences in evolving ways (p. 1).

While the language updates technology from a tool for the processes to an element that's integral to the processes, the new understanding of"composing" continues to eschew technology's agency in the process of"self-formation," as Callaway puts it. Specifically, individuals remain institutionalized and codified as"faculty" or"students" and"writers" which neglects, as Calloway says, any reflexivity pertaining to"previous training, experiences and expectations" (p. 272).

OS-X Updates Available

Despite its immediacy, Calloway's concern is nothing new amongst scholars of"electracy," which is to say the digital"complement[s] and supplement[s]" of literacy, according to Gregory Ulmer ("EGS", 2015). In his 1995 essay,"One Video Theory: (some assembly required)," Ulmer explores how the self, as a construct, is being reconstructed not because of literacy or technologies that amplify literacy, but because of what he calls"the electronic epoch," of which, he insists,"does not come after literacy, but between, bringing literacy and orality into a potentially supportive rather than exclusionary relationship for the first time in history" (p. 259). In this context, Jan Rune Holmevik calls for a pedagogy of play, arguing that"play acts as a conductor for the invention of electracy" (p. 20). He is primarily concerned with the ways in which videogames, as modes of entertainment, disrupt institutional logics and spaces while simultaneously opening new territories for"aesthetic experiences that inspire new practices" (p. 20). Reflecting upon LinguaMOO, a gamespace that also functioned as a classroom, Holmevik and co-creator Cynthia Haynes describe the decorum in the electrate classroom as:" . . . a new type of learning environment that would facilitate collaboration, encourage communication, stimulate student interest in reading and writing, transcend geographical and cultural barriers, be a fun and creative place to work and socialize, and, last, provide a space in which to conduct as well as present collaborative research and writing" (p. 120).

Games as Aesthetic Education

Holmevik taught a course that I took during my first year as a doctoral student in the Rhetorics, Communication, Information Design program at Clemson University. We read a variety of books about play, electracy, and game theory; as a relatively new first-year composition instructor, I was sold on the passage in Inter/vention that reads:"Knowing there is a goal or destination, but not necessarily knowing exactly what that might be or how to get there is what sets us on the path to discovery" (p. 20). This sentiment encouraged me to experiment with videogames in the classroom. It also allowed me to engage with my students in a way that seemed friendlier and less hierarchal (I am a student, after all). What I expected from that experience, I wasn't sure. One book in particular, Gamer Theory by Mackenzie Wark, struck me as a text that could be the catalyst for a project that I would later call"Electrate Dream Interpretation." Wark laments the individual's loss of power when play becomes work and work becomes play (p. 16-17). He explains that the new challenge is:"ah, but even to phrase it thus is to acknowledge the game—to play at play itself, but from within the game" (p. 19).

To that end, Wark argues that games should not be taken seriously, that they are"not representations of this world. They are more like allegories of a world made over as gamespace" (p. 20), but these allegories are also algorithms, he says, which is to say the sum of both parts constitutes an allegorithm that is finite, contained in the gamespace itself, concluded when the technology turns off (p. 211). However, I wondered that if, like allegories, there's more to the digital story. Yes, Wark has a point:"In the guts of your machine you may spot some capacitors made by kemet, or maybe semiconductors from Intel" (p. 45). Yes, as he says,"these probably contain tanalum, a marvelous conductor of electricity also very good with eat. They were possibly made with coltan (short for columbite-tantalite) dug out of the ground in the Congo, where there's plenty of coltan, from which tantalum is refine" (ibid). But he also says,"the form of the digital game is an allegory for the form of being . . . it is not a question of adding games as the tail end of a history of forms but of rethinking the whole of cultural history after the digital game" (p. 225). This strongly suggested to me that there's a way to decode the symbols, the meaningless signs that"billow and float, pool and gather, arbitrary and useless" (Wark, p. 40-41) in a way that might provide some personal, cultural (and pedagogical) insight, while retaining the meaninglessness of the algorithms as data.

Similarly, Brian Schrank (2014) contends that videogames are not simply material; rather, they are inherently metaphorical:"Games, like paintings, have their own patterns of perception, interpretation, and participation" (p. 1). He argues that"games teach players how to engage and optimize systems as well as how to manage their desire in a contemporary world" (p. 4). That is to say, our critical engagement with videogames is contingent upon our own unique aesthetic experiences, and that experience has the capability to reconfigure commonplaces, but to what degree? To return to Callaway, he argues that the WPA-OS must indicate that"students do not only need instructions on how to use or apply technology, but also they need instruction on how to critically engage technology" (p. 272). Critical engagement has its dangers, to be sure, and it remains within the apparatus of literacy. In the context of electracy, Ulmer takes up the question I've raised about critical engagement in his 2002 essay,"The Object of Post-Criticism." Parodying (or perhaps locked in) criticism, he says:"What is at stake in the controversy surrounding contemporary critical writing is easier to understand when placed in the context of modernism and postmodernism in the arts. The issue is 'representation'--specifically, the representation of the object of study in a critical text. Criticism now is being transformed in the same way that literature and the arts were transformed by the avant-garde movements" (p. 83).

He speaks of the collage as a political weapon, one that shatters the agency of logocentrism into shards of glass, and one that brings"art and life closer to being a simultaneous experience" (p. 84). Echoing Claude Levi-Strauss, he calls the"operation" a kind of bricolage that by nature ruptures the ownership and conventions of critical thinking and artistic creation (p. 84). According to Ulmer,"Explanations lend a false sense of unity, homogeneity, universality, to a heterogeneous body of materials, ignoring or sublating real differences in the interest of an artificial verisimilitude of plausibility" (1995, p. 253). Therefore, Ulmer explores the allegory in relation to the subversive capacities of post-criticism. He observes that we commonly interpret texts via. the mode of"allegoresis" (x symbolizes y, etc.); we should, however, interpret texts via the mode of"narrative allegory," which"unfolds as a dramatization or enactment (personification) of the 'literal truth inherent in the words themselves'" (p. 95). Similarly, Shrank insists:"videogames are art . . . the avante garde emerges through videogames" (1). Of the game Night Journey, Schrank says: "There is a lugubrious sensual logic that the creatures and slow-dancing plants emanate. When a fish or bird hauntingly appears, for instance, it hovers there like some endearing bug-eyed hallucination. It is trying to communicate something that is just beyond the edge of making sense, and in order for the player to 'get it,' their sanity must slip a bit into that dreamworld" (p. 10).

Videogames are subversive pieces of avante garde art and they analogous to dreams; this is the fundamental assumption of EDI. Moreover, academic writing should be playful, subversive, and heterogeneous; it should stray and play within conventions, old styles, paper, uniformity, et. al. Carl Jung (1945) says: "Usually a dream is a strange and disconcerting product distinguished by many 'bad qualities,' such as lack of logic, questionable morality, uncouth form, and apparent absurdity or nonsense" (p. 6). When we view videogames as dreams, then allegorithms become more significant in many ways, particularly in relation to line/s, identities, and technologies. Moreover, when we use analytical procedure we also leverage the merits of literacy, electracy, and play. So after not knowing what to do with games, I now want to extend Carl Jung's dream interpretation procedure from dreams to the allegorithms of gameplay as a way to enable students and instructors to see how video games, as analogues to dreams, are not, as Jung says, "stupid, meaningless, and worthless" (p. 6). To that end, if we are to value what Jung calls the"emotional nature," "autonomy," and"self-knowledge" of the individuals playing out roles, or as he would say, selves playing out "personalities," as students in the composition classroom then a post-critical project that integrates video games and dream interpretation techniques can help us to accomplish just that (p. 145).

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