“When you wish to discover the new unexpected actors that
have more recently popped up and which are not yet bona
fide members of ‘society,’ you have to travel somewhere else
and with very different kind of gear.”
—Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (2005), p.22

With the rapid changes in writing technologies, the need to concentrate on technology is certainly important, but what I’m articulating here is the need to interrogate related narratives and activities that may seem peripheral, at least at first. As Bruno Latour (2005) suggests, we need to recognize the less obvious actors in our everyday lives.

On first glance Shaw’s early twentieth-century narrative appears far removed from new media and the rhetorical canons. My interest in it, however, is not as a literary text but as cultural narrative that relentlessly resurfaces across a range of media and contexts. I use the narrative to show its circulation materially, historically, and culturally.

Shaw was, of course, himself retelling a cultural narrative, the Pygmalion myth; among his modifications was the use of language as a significant, though not exclusive, mediator. Other mediators in Shaw’s play include dress and manners, as well as the tools that populate Higgins’ laboratory such as singing flames with burners, tuning forks, and a phonograph. Our call for remediated and resituated canons is, in part, to account for the complexity of distribution. Using the Eliza narrative, I will consider several remediations. But first let’s begin with two definitions of the term:

Redefining Remediation

1. “The act or process of correcting a fault or deficiency.” —dictionary.com

2. how “one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon the other.” —Bolter and Grusin (1999), p.59.

The first definition is familiar: the defective student who is “transformed” through a host of disciplines including language. Eliza’s story is suggestive of this narrative. Also suggestive is the sometimes laborious ways in which writing is conceived as punishment (for example, the child who must write again and again, "I will not talk in class"; see video below).

The second definition has been used liberally in discussions of new media. As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) explain, “What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (p.15). Yet Bolter and Grusin point out another phenomenon: Remediation does not simply change new media; it changes old media as well, underscoring the dialogic relationship between media new and old. Implicit in this theory, however, is the suggestion that our remediations keep getting better. Michelle Kendrick (2001) argues that a consequence of the discourse of remediation is that technologies are celebrated and fetishized as the ‘tools’ that enable progress.

This, of course, is a matter of opinion. Few Shavians would prefer My Fair Lady (1964), the film adaptation of Pygmalion, to the original play. In the “Shaw as Superman” frame below, you can hear Richard Nickson, editor of The Independent Shavian, profess his preference for the original play.

I would like to suggest a third meaning of remediation, one that grapples with the two definitions above. If we think of remediation as the endless social and cultural shifts that happen in our everyday lives, then we need to contend with a wider spectrum of activity that includes Eliza and her technologies.

N. Katherine Hayles (2005) finds the term intermediation useful in its refusal to set up a narrative of linear progress: “‘Remediation’ has the disadvantage of locating the starting point for cycles in a particular locality and medium, whereas ‘intermediation’ is more faithful to the spirit of multiple causality in emphasizing interactions among media” (p. 33). The reconsideration of a linear landscape also extends beyond media, to motives, histories, and narratives. Our proposed conception of delivery also shifts the focus from technology to the networks of activity that structure rhetorical action. In the next section, I discuss several ways in which Eliza's story circulates in narratives of literacy.

Remediations (counterclockwise): 1. Photograph of Shaw (public domain; photographer unknown); Audio clip of Shaw on education, Talks for Sixth Formers (1937); 2. Continuously playing footage: Stage designs by Richard Finkelstein,1999 (http://www.rfdesigns.org/); 3. "Shaw as Superman," Lia Nickson, illustration; Richard Nickson on the musical adapation of Pygmalion; 4. Continuously playing footage: "Writing as Punishment"; 5. Kim Parker, doctoral student in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Berry read from Pygmalion.