Last week, we were pleased to welcome to campus Jeff Rice, Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. Professor Rice’s talk, “Craft Identities,” was part of the 2015-2016 CWS Colloquium Speaker Series. To say that Rice’s talk was about craft beer would be like saying Discipline and Punish is about prisons. It is and it isn’t. Taking craft beer as a kind of carabiner, Rice’s talk weaved through anecdotal repetitions, interruptions, and multiple beginnings, a kind of Burkean perspective by incongruity that demonstrated how identities are crafted across print, digital, and material spaces. In “One Always Fails in Speaking of What One Loves,” Roland Barthes writes “Music constitutes a kind of primal state of pleasure: it produces a pleasure one always tries to recapture but never to explain; hence, it is the site of the pure effect, a central notion of the Stendhalian aesthetic.” If music is the degree zero in Stendahl’s Italian system, beer may be said to be the degree zero of Rice’s craft network, both signifying and producing anecdotes, identities, relationships, events.
While there was much to reflect on in this talk (especially as someone who is herself both constructing and constructed by the network of craft beer), I find myself repeatedly returning to the role of the personal in Rice’s work, the way he stitches together pleasure, surprise, and desire with the logics and narrative gestures of both craft beer and social media. He says, “In this sense, I’m also searching for an identity outside of an industry’s identity: mine, and that of experiences that I want to share. I call this identity a “craft identity,” for it is based in the logic of craft beer, consumption shaping a sense of who I am, as well as social media, that RateBeer experience that marks my initiation into shared participation. The basis of a transmedia identity is that various items that shape who I am come from disparate sites and create conflicting, almost mythic meanings.” Through what he elsewhere calls “personal weaving,” Rice not only explained, but performed this craft identity, through interruptions and contagions of grand narratives and by scanning not for the confident ethos of grand narratives, but for “the mystical and mythical nature of craft relationships.”
If you'd like to listen to "Craft Identities," a recording is available to stream in the CWS Colloquium Archive.
