Education in Ruins; a War of Nerves

I've talked about my love for Bill Reading's The University in Ruins on this blog before. Today I came across a disturbing news item on Facebook that made me think of Reading's warning, a warning echoed by Mark C. Taylor in The Moment of Complexity: that if, after the decimation of the Modern Enlightenment project (Lyotard, etc), educators failed to provide a robust and compelling justification for education, then one would be constructed for them. Kant's institution sealed faculty from public scrutiny, provided they obeyed State laws. The old motto: "think but obey." That was the deal Kant and Humbodlt struck for institutions of higher learning in their seminalConflict of the Faculties--the public stays out of curriculum, and the educators stay out of politics.

Increasingly, however, the State (the polis) has rescinded this contract. The fiasco in Texas regarding history textbooks in 2010 was a clear shot across the bow: no longer will faculty be free to determine what gets taught in classrooms. Those decisions will now be made outside the discipline. With the deconstruction of the Modern University, and its goals of universality and assimilation, goes the forcefield that shielded academics from the realm of politics. Of course, there's more going on here: the radical shift in Universities from centers of conservative values to liberal critique, the massive increase of students attending University, the increasing polarization and invective of political discourse in the electric era, etc. My point is simply that the classroom is no longer isolated from politics. In fact, the classroom is a political hot spot, if the events in Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida tell us anything.

Now we can add New Hampshire to the list. Huffington Post:

The Tea Party dominated New Hampshire Legislature on Wednesday overrode the governor's veto to enact a new law allowing parents to object to any part of the school curriculum.

There's a small part of me, a Levinasian part, that argues we could interpret such a law as inviting alterity--forcing educators to consider different perspectives. But that voice is drowned out by another part of me, screaming that school is supposed to be a center for challenging beliefs, encountering difference, and inspiring change. Again, we call them the liberal arts for a reason (and have all the way back to Cicero, who saw oratory as the art of adjusting the convictions of the republic).

But there's another aspect here that really bothers me--the lack of respect it affords educators to determine what should be taught. The article indicates that parents are responsible for paying the costs of alternative curriculum--but think of the amount of time and energy that will be dedicated to Intelligent Design (which, I would argue, is one of the real intentions here--not "whole language" or "everyday math"). FTA:

Hoell stressed the new law could allow parents to address both moral and academic objections to parts of the curriculum. The lawmaker said he could imagine the provision being utilized by parents who disagree with the "whole language" approach to reading education or the Everyday Math program.

"What if a school chooses to use whole language and the parent likes phonics, which is a better long-term way to teach kids to read?" Hoell said to HuffPost.

What about the fact that education, both curriculum and pedagogy, is an intense area of study and that those who shape curriculum have years, if not a lifetime, of training? As if we needed more evidence of how little respect some people have for the difficulty of educating well. As if education didn't require expertise. The emphasis placed on standardization and assessment by No Child Left Behind and the Spellings Commission influences, at least implicitly, how we teach. But, to me, the events in Texas and now New Hampshire are much more invasive--directly assaulting what we teach.

We should see this for what it is. Burke would remind us that this is war, a logomachy over the logos guiding our nation's identity. It is a war from which the Modern University provided academia amnesty. In the 21st century, it is a war we must be willing to fight.

Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Fahrenheit 451

Digital Humanities

A friend emailed me Feisal G. Mohamed's response to Fish's recent discussion of digital humanities. Here's my response.

I think there's two basic genealogies to digital humanities/technology studies. Reductive? Sure. But helpful.

The first traces back to Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology." Heidegger argues that modern technologies can be traced all the way back to a Greek emphasis in "techne," doing, production. This has marked Western history, creating an overwhelming insistence upon using/consuming things. Often these scholars misread Heidegger's skepticism of techne-ology to be an absolute dismissal, a return to naturalism. I don't read Heidegger quite this way. His point is that we cannot get outside of "techne" and consumption, but can learn to dwell within it at least semi-consciously. Doing so allows us to open ourselves to other ways of Being in the world.

The second traces back to McLuhan. Que the optimism for a global village, connectivity, ethics, etc. We are how we consume. Blah, blah, blah. We all know this camp, because most of us in rhetoric and composition were reared in its wake.

Clearly, Mohamed's skepticism is rooted in a hardcore Heideggerian misread that believes the answer to our problems lies in a kind of Thoreau-ian naturalism far away from machines and their evil influence. The expectation that we "fully disarticulate" notions of innovation and progress is the give away--as if innovation and progress were really just ideological fantasies; note too that the author rigorously divides ethics and spirituality from materiality and digitality--as if the two were streams that could never be crossed. Boo. Of course, a lot of the writing I do is built upon the premise that new technologies make possible new ways of considering ethics and metaphysics, which I would argue melds, to some extent, the Heideggerian and McLuhan threads together. On the one hand, our dwelling within Being is always, already mediated by the technologies through which we experience and interact with beings; but, on the other hand, digital technologies have exponentially expanded our encounters with other beings and other ways of considering how to be (ethics).

Web writing, postpedagogy, social expressivism, and Grassi

Leahy and I have been writing an article on web writing. Here's one of my conclusions (I think I have 3 write now) for the theory section:

We began this explication of social expressivism by highlighting Socratic traces in Elbow’s expressivism and end by referencing Ernesto Grassi’s concept of ingenium and metaphysic of the public sphere. We hope this shows that the questions of web writing and (post)pedagogy aren’t new, even if they are emphasized by our explorations of new media. They are the fundamental questions of Greek history, handed down through centuries, via multiple and transforming institutions, in the shadows of which we continue to dwell, teach, and write.

King Moonraiser

"Unlike playthings a living creature cannot hide himself on an island."

Dreams of Your Life

An installation site Dreams of Your Life to share with my New Media class next semester.

Davis on Derrida; What Levinas Offers Latour

Via Blogora, a video lecture by D. Diane Davis on Derrida, deconstruction, gratitude, and debt:

Derrida and gratitude: thinking always has a debt. "The image of the trail blazing subject, self sufficient and completely independent is, of course, a metaphysical figure. But it is always a figure or for some traditions ideal" […] "But what Derrida marks constantly is that he does not stand on his own. He stands on a mountain of debt and conditions of possibility."

Davis resists labeling deconstruction as a simple textual methodology--but I think her discussion of close reading and the encounter with an aporia comes close to framing deconstruction as a method, albeit a "choratic" one (to use Hawk and Rickert's term). In other words, Davis' framing of deconstruction marks it as a fluid form of approach that cannot--and does not aim to--guarantee a certain result. Davis stresses: "Thinking is not knowing."

I tend to think of deconstruction in more spiritual terms--that it becomes a spirit for navigating the world (and not just reading texts). Like Davis, I am drawn to the notion of undecidability. In my grad class this week, I contrasted Augustine and Plato against Lanham's notion of "strong" rhetoric, McComiskey relativist, Consigny's anti-foundational, and Jarratt's materialist explications of sophistry. On the one side, Truth is derived through a certain methodology (biblical hermeneutics, dialectic) and then transformed by rhetoric (audience analysis, arrangement, style, delivery). On the other side, truth is something produced through what Lanham calls social dramas, it cannot be decided in advance and cannot be considered "certain" (although, Lanham stresses, this does not mean it is either arbitrary or trivial--human dramas set the bounds of existence).

To get to the second, "strong" rhetoric, one must operate within an uncertain, undecidable metaphysic. This is why I am particularly drawn to Levinas, since his metaphysic incorporates a relation to transcendence that neither eliminates the possibility of transcendence (as people like Lanham and, more recently, Latour have done) nor insists upon its certainty. God as enigma, perpetual, perpetuating question--Levinas's phenomenological ethics do not seek to produce a knowledge (or a method of knowledge) as much as what Aristotle might call a disposition (what Aristotle marks as the first part of a rhetorical performance that sets the mood): how does one act in the shadow of a perpetual, unanswerable question? Tentatively.

Of course, to those of an absolute foundationalist position, Levinas's appreciation for uncertainty might seem heretical. I do not think, in other words, that Levinas presents us with a solution to the problem of transcendence, faith and politics. But I do think, by acknowledging the transcendental as a question, he contributes to our understanding of the intellectual and political, philosophical/scientific and humanit(ies)(arian), right and might divides that Latour argues plagues our contemporary moment.

Internet Metaphor

I posted a link to this NYT article to Facebook, but I wanted to keep this paragraph someplace where I could find it:

Then again, the Internet is a new kind of barometer for keeping track of exactly how old you feel: how many things you don’t get, how many mini-Internet worlds you can’t find the door to; exactly how many crickets in the world you can no longer hear chirping. Unlike in generations past, when (I imagine) you just kept doing what you and your same-aged friends did, and aged into obscurity in comfort on a cloud of your own tastes and generational inclinations, until you died either thinking you all were still the coolest or not caring anymore about being cool, these days the Internet exists in part to introduce you to all these things you didn’t know about, but in part to remind you how much there is out there that you’ll never know about. The Internet is basically like being at a house party and trying to find the bathroom and opening up a door to a room where a bunch of kids are playing a game or doing a drug or having an orgy (metaphorically) or something and you get all flustered and say, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry!” and they all look at you like, “You pervert,” and you quickly slam the door shut. Everywhere you go on the Internet there are rooms you don’t understand, people playing games you don’t know the rules to, teenagers doing drugs you’ve never heard of and can’t even pronounce. And you just walk through the halls of this house party, aging in fast forward, until you open the one last door at the end of the hallway and it’s Death. Ha, ha.

The focus of the article is on the way that the Internet "ages" us. I think the scope can be changed however, to suggest how much the Internet potentially exposes.