Insignificant Wranglings

Education in Ruins; a War of Nerves

2012-01-06T09:00:00.010-06:00

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Increasingly, however, the State (the polis) has rescinded this contract.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

2011-12-29T08:07:00.006-06:00

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

2011-12-18T12:30:00.003-06:00

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

2011-12-12T17:14:00.001-06:00

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

Dreams of Your Life

2011-12-10T08:04:00.001-06:00

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

Davis on Derrida; What Levinas Offers Latour

2011-11-16T09:43:00.005-06:00

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

2011-11-13T12:46:00.002-06:00

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.

Joe Paterno's Apology

2011-11-09T14:00:00.007-06:00

I've seen a number of posts dealing with Paterno on Facebook today. I'll admit my knowledge of the subject is a bit sketchy--coming mostly from a few minutes of Dan Patrick's radio program the past few days. From what I understand, 10 years ago a member of the football program was caught fondling a young child in the Penn State locker room by a graduate assistant. The assistant in turn notified Joe Paterno, who notified administration. No one, to my knowledge, ever notified the police.

I have a very hard time processing that last sentence.

Given what I have heard on sports radio, so does most of America.

Today, Joe Paterno released a statement:

I am absolutely devastated by the developments in this case. I grieve for the children and their families, and I pray for their comfort and relief.

I have come to work every day for the last 61 years with one clear goal in mind: To serve the best interests of this university and the young men who have been entrusted to my care. I have the same goal today.

That’s why I have decided to announce my retirement effective at the end of this season. At this moment the Board of Trustees should not spend a single minute discussing my status. They have far more important matters to address. I want to make this as easy for them as I possibly can.

This is a tragedy. It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.

My goals now are to keep my commitments to my players and staff and finish the season with dignity and determination. And then I will spend the rest of my life doing everything I can to help this University

What bothers me about this statement, the first public statement by Paterno in the aftermath of this story, is its political maneuverings. While an apology, it is also an attempt to bargain with Penn State's Board of Trustees, who themselves have scheduled a meeting on Friday to determine Paterno's future. Regardless of whether I believe Paterno should coach the remainder of the season, I do not think he should use an apologetic statement as a forum for implicitly pleading his case.

My RSA proposal this year centers around public apologies, specifically apologies by athletes. In short form: my argument is that many public apologies fail when the speaker attempts to implicitly argue their innocence rather than completely accept fault for their actions.

In Paterno's apology, as in the apology of so many athletes testing positive for performance enhancing drugs, there is an argument. Albeit an argument of a different level of stasis, but an argument all the same. In each case there is a self-centered exertion to control and limit judgement. I don't want an argument here. I want sincerity. I want submission. Say you are sorry, more than sorry, and leave it to the mob to decide your fate. My guess (and, my hope) is that, outside of the Penn State faithful, the majority of sports fans will dissect and dismiss this "apology." Though it is not nearly as inadequate to this situation as his "response" was to a horrific situation nearly a decade ago.

Happy Accidents

2011-10-28T08:09:00.001-06:00

Donald Murray, "Writing Badly to Write Well," Expecting the Unexpected:

You do have to write badly to write well. Of course. Badly in the sense of neatness and completeness, for effective thinking isn't neat and complete. This word processor thinks neat and complete. It is dumb, everything is programmed. It follows orders, everything is a simple matter of yes or no. We think by leaps, by inference and intuition, by hunch, by guess and accident, especially accident. (46)

Silly Dad

2011-10-20T09:57:00.003-06:00

Rowan: Is today a sleep over night with Mommy?

Me: I don't know.

Rowan: Well, Mommy doesn't have to go to work tomorrow. So she doesn't have to get up early. So she can sleep over.

Me: Yes, but I'm not sure. We probably have to wait to ask Mommy.

Rowan (tapping forehead): No Dad. We just have to think with our minds. Silly Dad.

Obligatory Post on "Occupy Wall St."

2011-10-05T11:59:00.005-06:00

One of my graduate students, Adam Breckenridge, posted a link to Douglas Ruchkoff's CNN article "Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase?" to facebook this morning. The article deserves some quality attention. I was particularly inspired by this paragraph:

What upsets banking's defenders and politicians alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.

That's because, unlike a political campaign designed to get some person in office and then close up shop (as in the election of Obama), this is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc. As the product of the decentralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability. It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion and groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet.

I've never read Douglas Rushkoff before, but now I will. Soon.

Sometime ago I wrote a post on the Tea Party that argued it was an emergent response to the rigidity of America's ~~two~~ party system, saturated in waves of cynicism, disaffection, and outrage. Of course, then the Tea Party was incorporated into the tradition media-political networks, and it lost its initial affective groping for something other than politics-as-usual. So here, again, I think we see the seeds of a desire for another politics.

Here, here.

Goodbye to Terry Francona

2011-10-04T08:26:00.005-06:00

I've been meaning to find time to write this for a few days. Here goes in enthymematic form:

The collapse was historic.
A historic collapse requires blame.
Blaming is often not a rational process.
Terry Francona is willing to accept an irrational amount of blame for the Red Sox collapse.
Terry Francona is a great manager.

This team started the year 3 and 9. They ended the year 7 and 20. For the other 123 games, they played very well. It is easy to blame Francona for those other 39 games. Too easy. I am not too disappointed or shocked by the collapse. Again, this team started 3-9, and had they made the playoffs they would have set a record for overcoming the worst start to a season. To even get close is impressive. If you flipped the Sox record in September with their record in July, then Francona would be celebrated as a gritty manager who kept his team struggling through adversity.

This team couldn't pitch. After Buchholz went down in early August, they were left with two quality pitchers (Lester and Beckett). It September, even those two struggled. In the past I have questioned how long Francona rides his starters. But there is nothing he can do about Lackey's (understandably, given his personal situation) dismal season, Wakefield's increasing age, Dice-K's Dice-k-ness, etc. The manager says who will pitch, when they'll pitch, and sometimes where they should throw it. But he doesn't make the (repeatedly) bad throws.

Put simply, this team didn't have the talent it thought it had. I have written record regarding my skepticism toward this pitching staff and Carl Crawford from last spring (for all those who defended the Crawford signing--how's that remaining $130 million looking now?).

I am very sad to lose Terry Francona. Like Joe Torre, there are questions regarding Francona's "X's and O's" strategy. But what can't be questioned, I think, is his ability to handle the vicious Boston media and fan base. I think the character with which he ended his tenure in Boston speaks volumes. He will be missed. And he will be difficult to replace.

The soul of Boston might be reinvigorated this off-season. Let's face it, we were never accustomed to winning. We didn't always handle it well. And, while the $170 million dollar payroll prohibits us from becoming lovable losers ever again, at least Boston gets to be what it is comfortable being: pissed.

Facebook is Down

2011-09-29T07:39:00.002-06:00

A quick post to let everyone know that my Facebook is down right now. I probably won't be back on until next week. So if you are sending me stuff, I'm not ignoring you. Feel free to email me at insignificantwrangler at gmail dot com.

Unless you are attempting to contact me about last night. You can keep those sentiments to yourself.

Addition not Subtraction

2011-09-24T11:53:00.002-06:00

Latour:

The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. ("Why Critique Has Run Out of Steam" 246)

Latour and Risk

2011-09-22T09:55:00.004-06:00

From Pandora's Hope::

Speech implies by definition the risk of misunderstanding across the huge gaps between different species. If scientists want to bridge the two-culture divide for good, they will have to get used to a lot of noise, and, yes, more then a little bit of nonsense. (17)

And, for a nice parallel, D. Diane Davis' opposition to philosophic logocentrism from Breaking Up [at] Totality:

An ethics of decision in a world that has lost its criteria for responsible action begins with straining to hear the excess that gets drowned out, sacrificed for the clarity of One voice, One call, One legitimate position. A post-humanist ethics ought not be about shutting down the flow but about opening it up, pulling back the stops. (19)

Risk and nonsense, nonsense and risk.

Walking Notes: Latour on Heidegger

2011-09-09T08:13:00.007-06:00

I was thinking today about Latour's move to Heidegger in "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam". He notes that it might strike many as odd, a hyper-realist turning to one among the most speculative of phenomenologists. But Heidegger's fourfold moves us away from matters of fact because it moves us away from a conception of the Real (of) Being in terms of abstraction.

Yesterday, in my new media class, I introduced Ulmer's anti-definition assignments via a discussion of tables. Aristotle, if chasing down the "reality" of the table, would seek to cut away anything peculiar to a particular table. These he would call accidental qualities. His aim would be to arrive at the elements common to every table (the essentials). Western philosophy spent the better part of 2000 years following Aristotle's lead.

But the 20th century saw a turn away from Aristotle's quest for the Ideal table. Slowly, an appreciation grew for the peculiarities of particular tables. A cut in the wood from the time your brother ran his tricycle into a table leg, for instance. Tables become permeated with memories. So, the question I pose to my students was this: "don't tell me what you think when I say table, spend sometime telling me how you feel when you hear that word. What is the first memory that pops in your head? This is what Ulmer might call the affective table." To which one student responded: "yes, but why are we talking about tables at all? Why does this matter?" Aristotle would be proud? This question I leave open to them.

Back to Latour: his interest in the fourfold lies in its opposition to chasing down the one Ideal, abstracted table, divorced from time and space. The fourfold represents for Latour a method for reconceptualizing our relation to the world (see Rivers here for an extremely smart explication of how "world" in Latourian discourse deconstructs the West's foundational nature/culture binary, 196-197). Method is actually too strong a word--what we are talking about here isn't even a heuristic--rather I would identify it with Ulmer's term heuretic. It is a way of opening a way of thinking about the world. As Hawk emphasizes, it is not a predetermined system but rather a kairotic sensibility to the possibilities a context makes possible (see Hawk 206). Its elusiveness, which Bay and Rickert explicate so wonderfully, is its very charm (which, to a positivist, will stink of magic, deception, and pastry-baking).

SF Zero

2011-08-03T09:15:00.003-06:00

I'll be putting more up soon about SFZero. For now, I need to post the URL for Rowan and I's first mission.

Mission Completion.

When the world becomes art

2011-08-01T14:11:00.004-06:00

Artist Rodrigo Derteano's robot constructed Ciudad Nazca in the deserts of Peru.

Via Coudal Partners

Writing

2011-07-26T12:27:00.003-06:00

I spent most of today writing up my Nussbaum/Sloterdijk/Ulmer/SF Zero article, turning handwritten rough draft into (sloppily) typed rough draft. A fun process. Essentially, I critique Nussbaum's connection between critical thinking and empathy, and argue instead for a post-pedagogical, non-critical, self-explorative thinking alongside a call for local action. More on this to come.

A colleague stepped in and returned a book he borrowed last year--Mark C. Taylor's Moment of Complexity. Flipping through the pages, I came to a passage that rifted nicely with my writing; Taylor:

Through his deconstructive analyses, Derrida attempts to disrupt digital technologies and the systems they produce by turning the digital divide into a rupture that can never be overcome. However, his critique is, in the final analysis, ineffective: deconstruction changes nothing. While exposing systems and structures as incomplete and perhaps repressive, deconstruction inevitably leaves them in place. This is not merely because deconstruction involves theoretical analyses instead of practical action but also because of the specific conclusions reached by the theoretical critique. Instead of showing how totalizing structures can actually be changed, deconstruction demonstrates that the tendency to totalize can never be overcome, and, thus, that repressive structures are inescapable. For Derrida and his followers, all we can do is to join in the Sisyphean struggle to undo what cannot be done. (65)

Essentially, I accuse Nussbaum of something similar to what Taylor accuses Derrida--of a kind of navel-gazing philosophy that does not adequately address the complications of real world change. I do think Taylor is intentionally under-reading (is that a thing?) Derrida here in order to set up his later articulation of complexity (one that draws quite heavily on this "useless" deconstruction). Deconstruction, I think, can suggest to us the necessity of approaching change on a local and concrete level--it is not necessarily inevitable that we leave structures in place.

Fall 2011 Reading Lists

2011-07-25T12:22:00.003-06:00

I was doing so well posting here. I even got a comment from Dave Weinberger. And then last week happened.

I spent most of today finishing my syllabi for the fall and submitting my book orders. Here's how my two classes shape up:

Historical Rhetorics

Week One (summer reading, discussed week one): Gorgias, Republic VII
Week Two: Phaedrus, ???
Week Three – Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book 1-2
Week Four – Aristotle's Rhetoric, Book 3, Isocrates' "Against the Sophists"
Week Five – Isocrates' Antidosis w/ Welch "An Isocratic Literary Theory" and Vitanza “Isocrates, the Padeia, and Imperialism”
Week Six - Paper Day #1
Week Seven - Gorgias / Protagoras, Dissoi Logoi, Plato's Timaeus (w/ Ulmer, Heuretics 61-78; Schiappa “Toward an Understanding…” 64-85)
Week Eight - Vitanza (chapters 1, Ex. 6) / Jarratt (all of Rereading the Sophists) / Poulakous “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric”
Week Nine - McComiskey (chapters 1 and 2) / Consigny (Chapters 4, 5, and 6)
Paper Day #2
Week Eleven – Cicero (De Oratore, Book 1 and 3)
Week Twelve – Quintilian (from books 1, 2, and 10) / Lanham, “The Q Question”
Week Thirteen - Augustine's On Christian Teaching
Week Fourteen - Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue
Week Fifteen - Grassi's Rhetoric and Philosophy (w/ Proctor on Petrarch)
Week Sixteen - Paper Day #3

Yup. That's a lot of reading.

Last time I taught the course, I concluded with Locke and Campbell, Whatley, and Blair, to give some frame of the Enlightenment's disparagement of rhetoric (and its later emphasis on rhetoric as style). But I think Ong's explication of Ramus does that sufficiently; this time I want to dig into the humanist rejection of Cicero's "civic obligation" as our concluding note.

New Media

My undergrad students will read four books next semester:

Kalman, Maria. And The Pursuit of Happiness 1594202672
Stolley, Karl. How to Design and Write Web Pages Today 0313380384
Weinberger, David. Everything is Miscellaneous 0805088113
Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention 0321126920

I've already read everything here. This will be my first time teaching Weinberger, but I think it will compliment our New Media Wiki project nicely.

So that's what I am reading this fall--what are others looking forward to?

"Unschooling" and David Weinberger

2011-07-12T12:37:00.004-06:00

Today a student shared a piece appearing over at the Washington post on education, focusing on debates over class sizes. The piece details two general approaches to education--the first teacher driven, the second student driven. This second approach the article refers to as "unschooling," since it emphasizes how learning has to involve developing independent initiative Coincidentally, I was reading through David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous today (at student asked about the books I would be teaching in my New Media class this fall, I've decided to try Weinberger). Flipping through my Weinberger, I came to the following page contrasting what Weinberg identifies as social knowing to traditional, teacher-driven notions of knowledge and education:

Now poke your head into a classroom toward the end of the school year. In Massachusetts, where I live, you're statistically likely to see students with their heads bowed, using no. 2 pencils to fill in examinations mandated by the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System. Fulfilling the mandate of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the MCAS measures how well schools are teaching the standardized curricula the state has formulated and whether students are qualified for high school degrees. Starting with the third grade, students' education is now geared toward those moments every year when the law requires that they sit by themselves and answer questions on a piece of paper. The implicit lesson is unmistakable: Knowing is something done by individuals. It is something that happens inside your brain. The mark of knowing is being able to fill in a paper with the right answers. Knowledge could not get any less social. In fact, in those circumstances when knowledge is social we call it cheating.

Nor could the disconnect get much wider between the official state view of education and how our children are learning. In most American households, the computer on which students do their homework is likely to be connected to the Net. Even if their teachers let them use only approved sources on the Web, changes are good that any particular student, including your son or daughter, has four or five instant-messaging sessions open as she does homework. They have friends with them as they learn. In between chitchat about the latest alliances and factions among their social set, they are comparing answers, asking for help on tough questions, and complaining. Our children are doing their homework socially, even though they're being graded and tested as if they are doing their work in isolation booths. But in the digital order, their approach is appropriate. Memorizing facts is often now a skill more relevant to quiz shows than to life.

One thing is for sure: When our kids become teachers, they're not going to be administering tests to students sitting in a neat grid of separated desks with the shades drawn.

At least, we hope they won't. Weinberger's book was written in 2007--and the changes to education I have seen in Florida since moving here makes me wonder if Weinberger's certainty is so certain.

Teaching a Philosophy of Life

2011-07-11T08:23:00.002-06:00

Today's snippet comes from a student's paper defending the value of his liberal arts major. One of the questions I posed this semester, while reading Academically Adrift and Not For Profit was whether Universities' missions included teaching values, or whether teaching values was the province of other social/cultural institutions (family/church). For the most part, my students resisted discussing this question. But one student took up the question in his paper, and noted how research points to a decline among students in prioritizing values; he cites a 2000 study by Pace and Connolly ("Where are the Liberal Arts?"):

In 1966 the percent of students saying that ‘developing a meaningful philosophy of life’ was an essential or very important goal was 80%, but in 1996 it was down to 42%. The materialist goal of ‘being well off financially’ was regarded as essential or very important by 45% in 1966, but in 1996 it was up to 74%” (Pace 54)

I'm looking forward to reading the whole article because I am especially interested in the parameters of those numbers. Of course, the social demographics of college enrollment have transformed significantly since 1966, especially in light of Vietnam spikes in enrollment. And our economy has transformed as well, such that now there are fewer career options available to those without college education.

Rotten With Perfection

2011-07-05T08:55:00.001-06:00

Burke fans will probably enjoy today's offerings from one of my favorite sites, Slaughterhouse 90210.

Ethical Learning, Responsibility, and Assessment

2011-07-05T07:59:00.010-06:00

A long time ago, when I first became enamored with the possibilities of digital communication and deconstruction, I remember constructing a piece on spectrality and student work. I was proud when the piece won a Parlor Press award at Purdue for Best Multimedia Project, and a bit disappointed when it was rejected for publication at Kairos (though I can't blame them, the thing is a mess). Essentially, the piece emphasized how rhetorical practice involves more than a knowledge of and ability to enact Aristotelian tactics--that interacting with real, responsible (que Levinas) human beings requires a pathetic sensitivity and strength, and that the only way to gain that strength is engage in situations that leave us "weak," out of control, beholden to a spectral other/future over which we can have no mastery or assurance.

I remembered this piece today reading over a Chronicle piece on Assessment and Ethical Learning. One cannot materialize ghosts, nor can one accurately measure an individual's response to the affective rush of alterity, the traumatizing experience of facing an Other that calls a self into question, the infinity that interrupts totality (etc), outside of the radical encounter itself. Recreating that situation is (virtually?) impossible. I'd link to think--in the best cases--that the blogging pedagogy I've been working on approaches the problem; but I certainly wouldn't claim it solves it, or that it in anyway ensures ethical responses. Rather, it makes possible this kind of encounter, and aims to cultivate a responsible (que Levinas again, in this case a response that weighs the other to the neighbor while recognizing the inevitability that violence will occur) response. As the article intimates, there is an issue of kairos to ethical learning largely irrelevant to critical and epistemological pedagogies:

"It is really hard to measure ethical learning because it's not declarative or semantic knowledge, but, like any expertise, it is knowing the right thing to do in the right way at the right time," says Darcia F. Narváez, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame. In her research, she has found that intuition plays such a big role in moral decisions that she argues it is a mistake to ignore its influence.

As the article further complicates, such attempts run into trouble once they begin to determine what/whose particular values are right. One reason I enjoy Levinas so much is that his work doesn't articulate a morality (hence, it does not belong to logos). Rather, it attempts to establish, via pathos, a mood from which we can hospitably approach those impossible, but necessary questions. Levinas' phenomenological account of subjectivity dis-posess us of any claim to a spontaneous, autonomous foundation, thus, I hope, generating an embodied dis-position from which we can ethically approach argumentation (remembering that we dispute with other people, rather than with mere ideas). Ethics, when I deploy the term, doesn't mean to signify a list of truths, or even an accepted collection of moral laws. Rather, it speaks to the cultivation of a spectral subjective attitude, a pre-condition to productive human encounters. Referring to yesterday's post on Tim Morton, it is the cultivation of a dis-position both open and weird. Irrational though it may be, argumentation is not a matter of simply deploying proper arguments or upholding the proper morality.

As I continue to work on my Nussbaum article, its articulation of post-pedagogy, and the emphasis of ethics over critique, I am caught up in contemporary will to assess. I am trying, hard, to avoid adopting an intellectual position anti-thetical to standardized assessments, especially after reading Academically Adrift such a move would feel reactionary and stupid. Thinking about the kinds of qualitative assignments in Academically Adrift, I am beginning to have new appreciation for the CLA test they endorse. I feel much more obligated to acknowledge and endorse such maneuvers; if we do not cultivate more sophisticated forms of assessment, then we could be burdened (in the post-Spellings Commission, hyper-attentive, economically-crisised-driven University) with something much worse. In my article I deal with recent "reforms," by the CollegeBoard, in Florida's primary and secondary schools--they are now driven by a scripted, day-to-day program accompanied by standardized tests leaving little room for kairos and invention on the part of teachers. To say that such rigid policing could not come to higher education is, I believe, a dangerous stance.

And, if you haven't read Academically Adrift yet, and you teach writing, then I cannot emphasize enough how important this book is. Sure, there are methodological issues with their study (I remember Pat Sullivan emphasizing how, when people want to reject a conclusion, they begin by attacking the methodology), but the picture they paint of learning on contemporary campuses warrants attention and response.

Very Large Finitude and Ecological Irony

2011-07-04T16:42:00.005-06:00

Figure/Ground is featuring an interview with Timothy Morton, professor of ecology, theory, and literature. Morton was first brought to my attention last fall by a grad student in my Contemporary Rhetorics class. This snippet from the interview grabbed my attention, especially given my interest in Levinas' concept of (metaphysical) infinity and posthumanism (something fairly anti-thetical to Levinas' own thought).

No, what is ironic enough is ecological awareness. Why? Because we have a situation in which we have enormously increased knowledge of the nonhuman—global warming, evolution, extinction, on and on. Yet we are also overwhelmed by these nonhumans, and, to top it off, for precisely the same reasons. The ecological age is what I call the age of asymmetry. We have a huge amount of knowledge and there is a huge amount of objects, and those things are like giant asymmetrically related spheres. The more we know, the more we realize how embedded we are in radiation, pollution, the biosphere, risks of all kinds on huge inhuman time scales. Like the half-life of Plutonium is 24.1 thousand years. One hundred thousand years from now seven percent of global warming effects will still be happening as the carbon is slowly absorbed by igneous rocks. Infinity, inner space, Kantian stuff is so much easier on the ego than this, which I call very large finitude.

Ecological irony is realizing how caught in your reality you are. It’s like finding out that you’re frozen inside some gigantic Perspex paperweight. You can see everything—I can Google Earth the fish in my mum’s pond in London for heaven’s sake. Yet for this very reason, you just can’t peel yourself out of the Perspex.

[...]

Ecological irony doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means doing something and feeling something very intense, yet open and weird. “They were going to make me a major for this, and I wasn’t even in their army anymore” (Apocalypse Now).

Post-Pedagogy and Kairotic Techne

2011-06-30T08:31:00.004-06:00

Today's post builds off yesterdays in connection with a conversation on Facebook. A friend tagged me in a query on teaching blogging, so I pointed her toward my blogging syllabus as an example of post-pedagogy. What marks that curriculum as post-pedagogical to me is that it requires students to make rhetorical decisions not only about their topic (what will I write about?), but also their audience (who will I write with?) and their methods (what kind of writing does this group employ? how should I write when writing to them?)

Byron Hawk ends his chapter on "Technology / Complexity / Methodology" by arguing that methods of invention sensitive to affective, vital, complex, network dynamics

[...] must start with the structure of particular constellations and the invention of techniques for and out of those specific occassions; it is thus more attuned to co-responsibility, kairos, emergence, and ambience. Composition theorists should be striving to develop methods for situating bodies within ecological contexts in ways that reveal the potential for invention, especially the invention of new techniques, that in turn reveal new models for action within those specific rhetorical ecologies. Method in this context is happening at two levels when approached pedagogically: the techniques or heuristics that teachers use to situate students in learning contexts, and the techniques the students produce in and through those specific contexts--some of which are conscious, some of which remain bodily and intuitive. (206)

The blogging class we've put together tries to speak to both of these levels--there is a negotiation between myself and the students while they generate topics. I have clear parameters for what constitutes an "A" project--these expectations are imposed top-down. But I also stress the wide variety of inventive approaches students have used within these parameters: blogs on bar hopping, shooting shit (the actual title), MMA training (title: "I lift things up and put them down"), Sun Tzu, representations of female fashion and bodies in Victorian literature, parenting, etc. And, beyond just the variety of topics, there is a variety of writing style and voice developed through the blogs--from intellectual to hipster to authoritarian to neighbor. The course, I believe, holds true to post-pedagogical aspirations by explicitly articulating its impositions while also making space for legitimate student invention.

Post-Pedagogy as Performing Empathy

2011-06-29T12:47:00.002-06:00

Week two of trying to post something every day. I spent this morning working on an article responding to Martha Nussbaum's Not For Profit. Here's a snippet dealing with post-pedagogy.

In place of pedagogies of control insisting upon the traditional forms of cultural/Socratic critique, Rickert advocates a pedagogy of surprise in which

[...] we might advocate our own particular pedagogies with insight into education's general culpability [its will to control and ironic performance of compulsory liberation] to the extent that we grant students possibilities for a writing that would be their own Act. This asks us to acknowledge that we do not always know best how to rectify social problems for them, and this further necessitates a partial relinquishing of control and learning from students. (Acts of Enjoyment 165)

Rickert's qualifying hedge is important here, since he makes it clear that he is not merely echoing calls for a decentered classroom in which students and teachers share power (or where power relations are dissipated, etc). Rather, he calls for what he terms a remodification of power relations, such that teachers reflexively inhabit their authority and explicitly discuss that inhabiting with students. The egalitarian classroom is an ideal made impossible by the institutional demands placed upon us. Unless one is willing to give up grading (or convert all courses to pass/fail), then the teacher will always occupy a hierarchical position of authority--and virtually any attempt to subvert that power, no matter how noble the intention, is more likely to amplify the cynicism pervading 21st century life. Of course, the remodification for which Rickert calls requires an appreciation for risk that runs counter to the economic model of contemporary education--one that increasingly turns to standardization as a form of investment insurance. But this is the battleground for post-pedagogic education: a realization that empathic training concerns both what and more importantly how we teach; our institutional and disciplinary systems have to be comfortable with the surprising possibility of alterity if we hope to foster a citizenry appreciative of difference.

Yeah, We Already Knew That

2011-06-28T18:51:00.003-06:00

Via the Blogora today, a piece in Newsweek on evolution and irrationality. It probably shouldn't irk me that the piece makes no mention of rhetoricians, but it does (its got philosophers and cognitive scientists, but no rhetoricians). Its clear the article wishes for a rational world (which, if I remember my Jonathan Swift, isn't necessarily utopian), but at least it concludes recognizing (somewhat) the priority of human emotion.

I wish, however, that the article lived up to its title and endorsed our "fallen" emotional flaws as a necessary component to social and cultural development. I was writing today about Burke and Alphonso Lingis--respectively the ideas that identification requires division and that the construction of a "universal rational community" requires the exclusion of the strange(r). In both cases, there is a recognition that the violence of exclusion is essential to any act of defining, and the hope that we can acknowledge such an act--live up to it, so to speak.

Blogging Pedagogy & Academically Adrift

2011-06-24T08:49:00.007-06:00

Today is the final day of my summer Expository Writing class. I build all of my classes around themes; this semester was dedicated to blogging. Mxrk, Ryan P. Weber, and I will be putting together an article dedicated to the class in August (did you know that Ryan? Mrxk and I will bang out a draft and send it to you once he gets here). I constructed a pretty rigorous course site for the blogging class, with almost daily notes. One of my colleagues, Carl Herndl, will use my site and syllabus to teach Expository Writing later this summer; I think that will be a great test for the pedagogy since Carl is an admitted techno-novice and has never taught blogging before.

On a side note, I required us to read two books during the course: Nussbaum's Not For Profit and Arum and Roksa's Academically Adrift. I'm writing an article responding to Nussbaum, so I'll hold off commenting on that one here.

Arum and Roksa's book is a worthy read for anyone working in higher education. It is by and large and empirical study documenting just how little the majority (80%) of today's college students are learning. They use a comprehensive and (by my limited judgement) reliable qualitative test to measure students' gains in writing, complex reasoning, and critical thinking during their freshman and sophomore years. They acknowledge that many students might be learning other things, particularly things geared toward their majors. They openly acknowledge in several places that the importance of their study lies in the reader prioritizing writing, complex reasoning, and critical thinking as central to University learning (and they show that the professional sector is calling for increases in these abilities, so there's a rhetorical element to this prioritization).

One point: many of us working in rhetoric and literature would not identify what they call "critical thinking" as critical thinking. For instance, one of the qualitative assessment tests asks students to read ten documents dealing with a specific kind of plane and its likelihood of crashing and then write a memo to their boss arguing whether s/he should buy the plane.

Arum and Roksa spread blame for the lack of learning on students, faculty, and administration:

Students simply are not studying enough. The average student studies around 12 hours a week, with much of their remaining time going to socializing activities (data collected via self-reporting).
Faculty are too committed to research. Less than 60% of students at selective and less selective schools reported having to read more than 40 pages a week for a class, and less than 50% reported having to write more than 20 pages for a course over an entire semester (the numbers were 75% and 95% at highly selective institutions, respectively).
Faculty, however, aren't solely to blame for their focus on research and slighting of teaching. Arum and Roksa note that administrators--increasingly drawn from outside of academic ranks to focus on recruiting, branding, investment, and publicity--have increasingly edged tenure requirements toward publication and away from the classroom. I think a naive reading of Academically Adrift would frame it as an argument against tenure. I do not think this is the case. Rather, I believe they advocate for the transformation of tenure to place a greater emphasis on teaching. This argument deserves more time than I can give it this morning--but, recognizing how much of our research goes unnoticed or uncited (90% of Humanities scholarship),, I don't have a problem with such a move (I address this directly in my response essay on Levinas, metaphysics, and D. Diane Davis' Inessential Solidarity, currently in process with JAC, but there I argue for institutional recognition for inhabiting dialogical spaces rather than solely for individual publication). This is not to say that research and scholarship aren't important. But it is not the only important thing. Whether it is the most important thing is a question I am honestly not ready to answer today.

To reiterate, this is a book worth your time, and probably your students' time. I anticipated that my class would be a bit hostile to the book. But they weren't. And when I started to talk about how my blogging class stems from a recognition of many of the book's arguments, they were not only receptive but (dare I say) appreciative. There's always going to be the bottom 20% students who are unprepared, unmotivated, and unteachable. But, following Arum and Roksa's advice (the way to get students more invested is simply to raise expectations and assign more work), I think we can all acknowledge that we aren't teaching as much as we could (...should?), and we can do better.

P.S., my summer blogging course asks students to write 550 words a day (not counting in class writing) and a final 10 page paper. That's about 55 pages of writing in 6 weeks. So, while I'm always failing at something, at least I can tell myself I'm assigning a lot of writing. Now if only I could get a teaching assistant to grade it all...

Zakaria and Political Reality

2011-06-24T08:16:00.004-06:00

I missed a post yesterday, so two posts today. First, a brief comment on Zakarias' article "How Conservatism Has Lost Touch with Reality. A friend has a rather scathing response to Zakarias over at his blog, arguing that Zakarias is practicing a kind of revisionist history, devoid of spirituality, and is hiding behind as ideological fantasy. I don't agree.

First, I think Zakarias' history shows something I've pointed to a number of times on this blog. Tax rates on the wealthy have never been lower than they are today. The current economic crisis is in large part connected to globalization of labor such that trickle-down profits, taxed less than any other point in industrial American history, are no longer fed into strictly an American system; as Casey notes--this makes labor a global rather than local issue, and makes any attempt to address inequality even harder. But that does not mean we should just throw are hands up and do nothing. Yes, the global median income is $9000, and the average American earns significantly more than that. Throwing contextualization issues aside (factors such as cost of living etc), this tells us that, even as we argue for increased taxation on the domestic scene, we keep remain open to global factors. We live in the meantime. One of my favorite aspects of sophistic rhetoric is that it is the art of the mean(ness) of time (and existence), addressing how we dwell with each other everyday, haunted by Idealism's search for absolute foundations, plagued by the problems that call us to be.

Second, spirituality is a complex matter. I think there is a rising "leftist" spirituality--the ecological turn I'll call it. It is a fundamental recognition that every entity on the planet comes into existence through infinite relations with other entities, nothing is born whole, autonomous, or ex nihilio. Of course, this dove tails with my work with Levinas. Such as metaphysical understanding of our Being does, I believe, generate ethical principles, even if the academic left has been slow to articulate them. But I don't think many of us are "postmodern" in the "classic" sense anymore. There's new problems and agendas. One of which, following Latour, is to move beyond critical thinking and critique (debunking, etc) and toward collecting problems (as Dr. Rivers puts it). As Gregory Ulmer puts it: "problems B us"; by articulating the problem, we kairotically emerge inhabiting the problem that infects/affects us. Any attempt to articulate a problem is always an act of self-fashioning. We are the people our problems make us. This, I believe is a thoroughly spiritual orientation, even if it suspends the issue of transcendence. One can be spiritual without a beyond. In fact, I would argue that assuring the presence of a beyond (whether it is God, Truth, Love, etc) reduces the infinity of the beyond to a known object. But that's a Levinasian argument, and a whole post itself.

Third, I think Zakarias is trying to collect such a problem, and the actants that form it. As I indicated in #1 above, I think Zakarias "collects a reality," Zakaria is referring to the increasingly cumulating statistics documenting 1) the rise of unemployment alongside increasing trickle-down economic and 2) the increasingly economic divide between classes. I don't think there is a "Utopian" vision underlying this problem--there is no suggestion that the solution to this problem lies in any kind of communist re-organization of capital. In fact, I think Zakarias' article implicitly calls for a moderate response to the problem he articulates: a better balancing of centralist infrastructure and free market investment and innovation similar to that operating during America's economic boom in the 1950's and 1960's.

A Troll Who Cares--Jonathon Paige & the Ethics of Blogging

2011-06-22T07:44:00.005-06:00

Day two of my effort to put something here everyday.

Today I point to a very interesting post sent to me by mxrk, one that relates to our blogging class/project/article. An internet troll details how he created Jonathon Paige's twitter persona and corresponding SummerHoopScoop blog as an ethical experiment. Mxrk and I have our students do something similar in our blogging class, without the overtly critical and potentially unethical angle.

Near the end, the troll draws several morals to his story, and I think two of them lie at the core of my teaching and research:

Only trust PROVEN sources that have a track record and accountability.
Keep your ears open to bad news as well as good news. When you hear negative news about your school's chances with a recruit from a trusted source or all the facts don't add up in your favor, don't go in to denial about it. Just accept what you are seeing and hearing. A Scout.com analyst is not wrong just because he brings bad news. A random recruiting twitter account is not right just because it tells you what you want to hear. Be smart about what information you hear and where it comes from.

I'm thinking especially of the second bullet in connection with Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment. I've been using Rickert's final chapter (an expansion of his "Hand's Up, Your Free!" article) to point out a contradiction in Martha Nussbaum's Not For Profit, namely that critical thinking can foster empathy (I'm arguing that the Socratic critical disposition actually requires the suspension of empathy). But Rickert and Nussbaum share one assumption: that human beings are not fundamentally "fixable" creatures, that psychoanalysis begins with the assumption that we come with problems (Ulmer: "Problems B Us"), and that the "good" life (or the good pedagogy) begins by dwelling within this fallen condition (rather than seeking to remedy it once and for all, as if any such final solution was possible). Levinas also frames the individual as fundamentally flawed (in terms of his/her debt to alterity, a debt too great to ever be completely repaid)--and I think that overlap resonates with me.

I have a special place for trolls in my heart, since they occupied an important part of my dissertation; there I used Internet trolls to demonstrate that there isn't necessarily an essential "goodness" to digital connectivity. At the same time, I argued that digital trolls were the inheritors of the cultural studies/Socratic/counter-culture/American Transcendentalist/critical tradition. While I appreciate their intentions, I remain torn on the issue of their methods. But I like this piece for the way that it demonstrates the fluid nature of ethos in the digital age. What I take away: every individual needs to be savvy, attentive, and open.

Jameson's New Book

2011-06-21T09:40:00.004-06:00

Blogora's sporting a link to Jameson's preview of his upcoming book today. I've never considered myself a Marxist nor a fan of Jameson, but I nod my head to this paragraph from the preview:

Now we can step back and assess the meaning and import of Capital as a whole. This is a book about unemployment: its conceptual climax is reached with this proposition that industrial capitalism generates an overwhelming mass of potentially uninvestible capital on one hand, and an ever-increasing mass of unemployed people on the other: a situation we see fully corroborated today in the current crisis of third-stage or finance capital.

I think Jameson's got his finger on the problem, but not necessarily the solution.

I'm working on an article skeptical of critique today. And while I am enthusiastic about investing energy in empathic pedagogies, I'm missing the ole ideological fantasy of liberation.

No Life Is Good

2011-05-31T12:40:00.006-06:00

In The Philosopher's Magazine, David Benetar argues that "No Life is Good." A cynical (and, I hope, playful) argument against the mechanical life. His conclusion isn't to kill yourself, just to stop having babies (and thus bringing more people destined to suffer into the world). But doesn't misery love company?

From the comments:

If I take this article at its meaning, it’s not merely that human lives are simply devoid of the quantities of mere pleasure that would make them more worth living; I also take it that most human lives are devoid of real meaning, period. Consider how so few people really contribute anything in the way of a lasting legacy, a benefit to others that keeps on giving decades, centuries after they’ve passed on. On the contrary, most people accomplish nothing, and by the reckoning of others who perhaps have not known or befriended them, may as well have never lived at all, for they have made such waste of their lives! Note how most of us–too many of us–grind through a cyclic process of self-sustenance, eating, sleeping, waking, going to work, contributing nothing at work that will affect people’s lives in any meaningful way for any duration of time. The cycle continues unabated, through generations.

We're reading Nussbaum's Not For Profit in my summer class; the previous chapter dealt with learning to accept human frailty and oppose myths of perfection and grandeur. I think this short piece compliments Nussbaum nicely.

Insane Job Add

2011-05-23T13:30:00.003-06:00

Blogora has a link to The Philosophy Smoker's discussion of a crazy philosophy job add. Two things:

I can't wait until we all ~~bow down before~~ work with corporate sponsors.
Are visiting associate positions even real?

Burke, Sophistry, and Ecological Rhetoric

2011-05-19T10:13:00.002-06:00

I wrote this in response to a graduate students' project on Kenneth Burke. I didn't want to lose it, so I'll stick it here:

Burke shares quite a bit with the Sophists because they both believe that rhetoric is metaphysical, rather than representational. That is to say, language doesn’t simply report on an already existing reality; rather, language participates in bringing reality into being. This does not mean that all reality--for Burke or the Sophists-- is merely language (a critique often thrust upon poststructuralists); there is a material world out there. But we do not have direct access to that material world, we always engage it through our consciousness, through our culture, through words, ideas, preconceptions, expectations, moods, ideologies, identities, technologies, locales, dispositions, injuries, etc.

Its Crap

2011-05-04T09:37:00.005-06:00

Today I learned that a friend from grad school--a dedicated high school teacher--lost his job yesterday, along with about 80 other teachers, when his town voted against a tax increase.

To echo David Harvey's conclusion to his RSAnimate talk, "its crap."

We cannot sit by and accept an economy and government that increasingly stratifies wealth. As I have written before, no one earns a billion dollars (or even a million dollars) in isolation. Please endorse the sharing of wealth as a fundamental human value. Every human being on this planet should deserve a chance at food, healthcare, and education more than particular individuals deserve the right to earn billions of dollars.

What is Rhetoric?

2011-04-20T10:22:00.004-06:00

Our FYC program writes and publishes their own textbook every year. This year, they asked me to write a short introduction addressing what rhetoric is and why one might study it. Here's my answer (probably rife with errors, it could use some quality revising).

Why Study Rhetoric?

I have been tasked with the question “why study rhetoric?” Crafting a response to this question is in fact tricky, because “rhetoric” has referred to different things in different eras. In today’s popular parlance, the term is often analogous with “bullshit,” to grab the title of Harry G. Frankfurt’s recent sequel to his earlier book, On Truth. “That’s just empty rhetoric” the pundits say in response to the politician’s apology. But this perks me to ask: “is there full rhetoric?”

In what follows I will answer this question by briefly sketching the art of rhetoric’s complex history. My history is in no way comprehensive—I hope to give a long view of a very complicated, and conflicted, intellectual conversation about the purpose of education, people, and language.

Few people are aware that, until only about 200 years ago, rhetorical training comprised the first three years of higher education (and practically all of elementary and secondary education). But , even though it was the focus of education, “rhetoric” hasn’t been one stable thing for the last 2,500 years. In fact, what I hope to tease out in this brief historical overview is how rhetoric’s uses change in connection to an era’s dominant information-communication technologies.

What is Rhetoric?

I’ll claim that there are three different historic uses of rhetoric—each corresponding to a different era and communicative media (progressively: orality, literacy, and post-literacy or electracy). In the era of orality, before written language, rhetoric operated primarily in terms of persuasion. The job of the rhetorician involved captivating and purposing human attention, either to remember history, celebrate achievements, encourage change, or consider legal matters. In the era of literacy, rhetoric formally concerned itself with interpretation (what is called hermeneutics). The job of the rhetorician involved carefully reading texts and engagingly sharing the products of that reading. Religion, history, and law where no longer contained is stories and speeches—now they found their homes in letters and books. The rhetorician was tasked with writing, reading, and interpreting these new technologies. In the contemporary electrate era, rhetoric emphasizes the importance of ethics, focusing on responsibility and relations. Under this developing rhetoric, the task of the rhetorician is to analyze social systems and maximize opportunities for engagement, sharing, and diversity. These aims, I would argue, are affordances made possible by digital connectivity (through radios, telephones, televisions, computers, mobile phones and whatever comes next).

How Far We Going Back? Way Back…

Rhetoric’s first major appearance in the West was in ancient Greece. Ironically, our knowledge of this time period comes almost exclusively from books, since the Athens of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Gorgias represents the moment when orality and literacy operated side by side. Most famous of the Greek thinkers on rhetoric was Aristotle. Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, had famously castigated rhetoric as manipulation and trickery, arguing that if philosophy is medicine for the mind, then rhetoric is merely baked goods—quite tasty, but ultimately unhealthy. Rhetoric, Plato asserted, kept people trapped in a cave, in which they could not differentiate between good and evil, truth and falsity.

Aristotle’s response to his teacher was a bit pragmatic: sure, in a perfect world, we could do without rhetoric. But in a real world, one composed of human necessities and desires, permeated with joys and fears, rhetoric is a necessary evil. Aristotle argues that philosophy focuses on discerning matters of absolute truth and falsity, while rhetoric explores “greyer” issues of probability and possibility. Contrary to Plato’s ideal, matters of politics are almost always “grey” matters; therefore, we need rhetoric to help navigate the inevitable ambiguities of complex, social problems. Furthermore rhetoric, for Aristotle, is inoculation against maliciousness and trickery. It forefronts the obligation of all citizens to protect themselves against corruption in order to maintain a healthy civic body.

Aristotle’s rhetoric attuned students to two major elements of public persuasion: the appeals and the topoi. Aristotle identified three primary appeals and attached each to a particular performance. Logos, an emphasis on logical argument, pertained mostly to deliberative, or what we might call political, matters. Ethos, the study of communal values and individual character, was the principal material for juridical rhetoric. Finally, pathos, the fostering of human emotion, most concerned epideictic, or ceremonial rhetoric. Topoi, which literally translates as “places,” refers to Aristotle’s system for finding common argumentative positions and propositions, and learning how to situate a set of circumstances within these inventive parameters. Aristotle’s topics might seem elementary today (generate a definition, make a comparison, highlight a contradiction, etc), but these elements were first explored in writing in Ancient Greece and revolutionized public discourse.

While, historically, Aristotle and Plato loom as the largest figures in classical rhetoric and philosophy, it is important to highlight that they were not the dominant intellectual figures in their own era. Sophistry, recent scholarship has shown, represented a far more robust intellectual movement than Plato’s representation. It is unknown how much of Aristotle’s rhetoric was in fact plagiarized from the (illiterate?) sophists who preceded him (unlike Plato and Aristotle, the sophists didn’t seem to believe in writing things down; it might be that, as dedicated oralists, they distrusted writing as cold and distant from human memory). For the sophists, rhetoric didn’t simply describe a real world existing independent of language; rather, rhetoric—by focusing human attention and energy—produced the world. Independent of language and human energy, the world does not exist. Humans, through their interactions with each other, with objects and technologies, with animals and plants and sunshine and coal and words and images and jellyfish, call worth the world in which they dwell. As such—contra Plato—there is no philosophical “Truth” to be found outside of the realm of human judgment and language, no Ideal realm opposed to this one, no outside to our “cave.”

Plato, Aristotle, and the sophists greatly influence the practice of rhetoric in the Roman Republic. In Cicero’s Rome, one might argue, rhetoric reached its high point, since the entire education system was designed around rhetorical training and performance, preparing students for the rigors of participating in the Roman Senate. Consider Quintilian’s response to Plato’s castigation of rhetoric:

Under such a mode of reasoning, neither will generals, nor magistrates, nor medicine, nor even wisdom itself, be of any utility; […] in the hands of physicians poisons have been found; and among those who abuse the name of philosophy have been occasionally detected of the most horrible crimes. We must reject food, for it has often given rise to ill health; we must never go under roofs, for they sometimes fall upon those who dwell beneath them; a sword must not be forged for a soldier, for a rubber may use the same weapon. Who does not know that fire and water, without which life cannot exist, and (that I may not confine myself to things of earth,) that the sun and moon, the chief of the celestial luminaries, sometimes produce hurtful effects? […] And so, although the weapons of eloquence are powerful for good or ill, it is unfair to count as evil something which it is possible to use for good” Institutes of Oratory II.xvi.9- 10).

Rather than thinking of rhetoric as even a necessary evil, Quintilian’s analogies suggest that it is a vital, necessary good (and, like many things that are good for us, it becomes poisonous if misused).

A more contemporary development for persuasive rhetorical theory is Kenneth Burke’s notion of identification. Nutshell: any act of persuasion requires a rhetor to create an identity that can be shared between speaker and audience. Very often, “I can’t agree with that idea” is a function of a deeper, subconscious “I can’t be that person.” Thus, 20th century rhetoric has dedicated significant attention to how rhetorical performances create habitable identities. Much of contemporary advertising, politics, art, and culture hinges upon crafting, connecting, challenging, and collecting our different identities.

From the Ear to the Eye

The second movement in rhetoric might be as old as the first—although I would want to properly mark its inauguration in the work of St. Augustine of Hippo. Unlike Aristotle’s Greece or Quintilian’s Rome, Augustine’s Holy Roman Empire was a feudal monarchy rather than a democracy or republic. There was little reason for the populace to learn rhetorical persuasion, since the day’s political and social organization offered few opportunities for deliberative engagement. But the rapid increase in literacy—particularly the increasing centrality of the Bible in legal, political, and social life—called for robust training in textual interpretation. It is quite difficult for anyone living in the 21st century to imagine a time when reading was considered a technology, but it was an unwieldy complex technology for the majority of people in the middle ages.

Augustine tackled these problems by formalizing methods for textual analysis. He took the tools for audience analysis developed by oral-persuasive rhetoric and applied them to reading texts. His focus was on resolving ambiguities and conflicting passages. This version of rhetoric would be called “hermeneutic” and is particularly invested in the development of literacy. The printed word calls for close interpretation in a way that orality does not (Ong)—allowing for critical reflection, abstraction, and intense precision. Augustine’s rhetorical system was not only designed to help priests deal with conflicts in biblical meaning but also drew on persuasive rhetoric to help priests engagingly deliver their interpretations to their parishioners. The Humanities reading strategies are all descendents of St. Augustine of Hippo’s early treatises on signs, language, and human feeling.

The emphasis on interpretation and reading developed by Augustine is amplified in the Enlightenment. While the development of the study of vernacular literatures (such as English, Italian, and French) call for robust interpretive tools, the scientific foundations of the Enlightenment call for a form of rigid argumentative reading and writing (to facilitate the sharing of new knowledge across universities, countries, and continents). Enlightenment rhetoric develops an emphasis on clarity of expression and structural procedures (such as the thesis) that remain fundamental expectations for scholarly writing to this day.

The emphasis of hermeneutic rhetorics transform significantly in the 20th century. Rather than searching for the one, ultimately True reading of a text, scholars began investing attention into multiple readings of a text, noting that all reading involves a degree of writing by the reader. Theorist Roland Barthes refers to this as wreading a text. This pluralist shift in interpretation is generally referred to as a facet of postmodernism, which can be hastily described as an increased distrust of objectivity, an interest in diversity, and an aversion to essentialist, binary systems of classification (i.e., right vs. wrong, man vs. woman, white vs. black). Ironically, rhetoric finds itself back in an Aristotelian/sophistic world of grey ambiguities.

From the I to the Alliance (and, hey, there is an I in alliance)

The third and final rhetorical movement I want to cover develops out of this subjective wreaderly approach to hermeneutics. It attempts to move beyond “human centric” activity—one that begins to pay attention to how ecologies produce humans as much as humans produce environments. In a sense, this introduction is a function of this third movement, since one of my presuppositions concerns the relation between the media we use and the ideas we explore (such that using writing generated an entirely new set of intellectual concerns, using computers and the Internet will generate new questions). It is factually accurate to say that, once upon a time, humans created television. From this third perspective, however, I would argue that it is equally accurate, today, to say that televisions create humans.

This third movement, still in its infancy, strictly concerns itself with neither persuasion or hermeneutics. Rather, it concerns maintaining ethics, in the sense that it seeks to ensure that humans learn to attune themselves to all the voices, objects, and forces that permeate decisions. Given the increase in complexity of political, economic, social, and educational institutional systems, we require new ways, and attitudes, of ensuring all voices receive representation. This third rhetoric, that which I am naming ethical rhetoric, a rhetoric of alterity, ensures that all entities are accounted, represented, and—most importantly (and what distinguishes this somewhat from hermeneutic activity) are offered the opportunity to respond. Others have called this rhetoric dispensation learning how to listen. In my remaining space below, I would like to focus on one theorist of this new rhetorical movement.

Sociologist Bruno Latour’s 21st century work addresses the growing disconnect between academic research and political problems. Latour sees this disconnect as a rhetorical problem attributable to the rise of the 19th century research University (itself created in the image of Plato’s metaphor of the Cave). The research University positioned itself outside of the realm of politics, as an institution seeking knowledge for knowledge’s sake. This protected the research university and its faculty from religious or political persecution. However, it also distanced the university from political activity, since to be an academic meant to be something of a hermit, holed up in a library or laboratory and far from public forums.

Latour’s work advocates a resurgence in Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric to combat this disconnect. His emphasis is on the importance of fostering alliances between ideas, people, and things (since, for Latour, something is real only to the extent that other entities recognize its reality). Latour insists that Plato was wrong—there is no outside to the Cave, there is no such things as an abstract, Ideal truth beyond the realm of human decision making. For Latour, rhetorical training isn’t simply a matter of dragging the unenlightened to the Truth. Rather, it is a matter of collecting participants in one place to work out what will be accepted as true. The differences might sound subtle, but they have incredible impacts on how we view the relations between higher education, rhetorical training, and political activism.

Rhetorical scholarship in this third movement retains persuasion (how to foster partnerships) and hermeneutics (how to read social systems) and adds to it an emphasis on inclusion, participation, and responsiveness. It focuses less on the products of an individual I, and more on the possibilities contained within any collection of we’s. If orality focused on persuasion, and if literacy focused on interpretation, then it is the radio, television, and especially the Internet that has peaked rhetoricians interest in ethics, alliances, networks, and relations.

So, Why Study Rhetoric?

I’m still not sure there’s any single answer to this question. In closing, I would suggest that you might be interested in studying rhetoric if you want to influence social decision-making, improve your ability to read, analyze, and respond to arguments, and/or combat tyranny and social oppression. And that, I believe, is no meager “bullshit.”

St. Augustine of Hippo

2011-04-20T08:49:00.002-06:00

Even in 400 AD people were in too much of a hurry:

Careful consideration of many other such things (which can be done by those who are not hard-pressed by the need to finish a book!) reveals that the basic principle of Christian healing is one of contrariety and similarity. (On Christian Teaching I.30)

I guess its not surprising that the father of hermeneutics would ask use to read less, and thereby learn more.

How I Pick My Battles

2011-04-16T09:54:00.003-06:00

One of my friends asked a provocative question over facebook this morning. Those familiar with this blog's history will likely know its source. But it is a great question. My answer might be a little "blue," but I think it is pretty direct.

Here's the question (edited a bit):

I'm still sort of unclear about the process "Rhetoricians" (y'know, Sophists, etc.) practice *before* they get to arguing. That is, how do they decide which side of the debate they'll take?

Here's my response:

Somewhat in my Kairos piece, and explicitly in a few other things I am trying to finish, I argue that rhetoric _should_ take the side of the less empowered other. Rhetoric becomes a tool for identifying and combatting hegemony. Of course, we can't universally back the other, because sometimes the other is bat shit crazy. So part of the rhetorical process that I inherit from Levinas calls for us to compare the other and the neighbor. The basis of the comparison concerns which is more attentive to the other's respons-ability. Who acts in a gesture of welcome? Who seeks to totalize and control? An ethical rhetoric, I argue, always view control, disembodiment, Idealism, etc. skeptically.

Quintilian Responds to Plato

2011-04-13T12:13:00.003-06:00

Addressing the idea that rhetoric be forbidden because it is capable of evil:

Under such a mode of reasoning, neither will generals, nor magistrates, nor medicine, nor even wisdom itself, be of any utility; […] in the hands of physicians poisons have been found; and among those who abuse the name of philosophy have been occasionally detected of the most horrible crimes. We must reject food, for it has often given rise to ill health; we must never go under roofs, for they sometimes fall upon those who dwell beneath them; a sword must not be forged for a soldier, for a rubber may use the same weapon. Who does not know that fire and water, without which life cannot exist, and (that I may not confine myself to things of earth,) that the sun and moon, the chief of the celestial luminaries, sometimes produce hurtful effects? […] And so, although the weapons of eloquence are powerful for good or ill, it is unfair to count as evil something which it is possible to use for good. (Institutes of Oratory II.xvi.9- 10)

And to think, he wrote that almost 2000 years before Heidegger or the Nazis.

Rowan on New Car Smell

2011-04-13T07:55:00.002-06:00

Me: "This is the first time you'll ride in dad's new car"

Rowan: "Why does your new car smell like dog poop?"

Me: "That's called new car smell. A lot of people like it"

Rowan: "A lot of people like dog poop?"

...

Rowan: "Why are you laughing dad? Did I say something funny?"

Aaron Schwartz on education

2011-04-11T06:03:00.007-06:00

Aaron Schwartz has a short piece today ("Individuals in a World of Science") on what I consider a rhetorical problem--finding an acceptable balance between individual (agency) and synthesized (agency). This seemed to be the driving question at a number of panels I attended last week. From Byron Hawk's discussion of the Texas, Arlington tradition (drawing from Randall Collins' work) to Nathaniel A. Rivers' discussion on American psychological disorders emerging in China, there was an emphasis on non-human forms of agency, the importance of our surroudings as something more agentic than mere backdrops for human action, and on the power of location. In our field, given the current movements, there's the question of how we recognize contextual contigency as something more than mere accidental background noise. In Aaron's post, the question is how--as (mass) science strips individual power, we find a way to balance individual agency against mass directives.

Aaron's post directly concerns another important topic at CCCC's this year: the increase in standardized forms of assessment. And I largely agree with his position; while we need a system that promotes accountability and identifies poor teachers, we also need to ensure that in constructing such a system we don't drain spontaneity, creativity, and joy out of learning. In Florida, administrators have failed to strike that balance. Our secondary education system is a Kaplan-ian dream of test after test, accompanied by a day-to-day scripted curriculum.

Here's Schwartz's final two paragraphs:

The other alternative is to put your trust in teachers, to assume they can tell the difference between a class that’s learning and a class that isn’t, and then give them a chance to do better. Take them to some of the best-run classes in the world and let them absorb the lessons for themselves. Have them meet regularly with their fellow teachers and discuss how they can make their teaching better. This is the humane response to those who want to reduce teaching to a rote question of merely reading off a script (no joke—this is literally what happens in the most test-driven schools…because, after all, science shows the script is best for test scores).

In both cases, I sympathize with the humane aims: I don’t want doctors to become shills for pharmaceutical companies, I don’t want poor kids to grow up unable to read. But I blanch at the inhumane means proposed to carry them out. As Seeing Like a State describes, the history of high modernist utopian projects has not been a pretty one. The quest for policy designers, then, is how to promote huge positive changes without crushing the individuals involved underfoot.

Of course, as those of us in education know, this alternative is quite expensive compared to rote drilling and testing. Like anything else requiring personal care, quality education is expensive. Increasingly, despite NCLB rhetoric, we see an aversion to education's expense. We need to construct better rhetorical talking points for the future of education--and we need to make sure that rhetoric directly confronts the "assessment driven" mantras--as if the link between quantifiable assessment and quality education holds absolute causality.

Here, Hear Ulmer (Or, U Might Learn Electracy, Really)

2011-03-25T13:38:00.005-06:00

Today professor Ulmer visited University of South Florida to give a talk on electracy and have a discussion with our graduate students. I had the pleasure of introducing Professor Ulmer. Here's my introduction (I have some notes from the talk that I will post tomorrow).

Here Hear Ulmer, or U Might Learn Electracy, Really!

I consider it an honor and a pleasure to introduce Professor Gregory L. Ulmer.

Professor Ulmer visits us from the University of Florida, where he’s a professor of English and Media Studies and participates in a number of critical, aesthetic, and institutional projects concerning electracy, a term he coined to target the transformation of agency and the public sphere by television, hypertext, new media, and digital communicative technologies.

The explication of electracy and generation of inventive methods for electrate netizens are the central concerns of his two most recent projects— his 2005 Electronic Monuments and 2003 Internet Invention. He offers an anecdote early in Internet Invention I find particularly relevant to our own kairotic moment (as scholars and teachers in the humanities living during the political, economic, and social challenges in Wisconisn, Michigan, Ohio, and likely coming to a Florida near you).

In the opening to Internet Invention, Ulmer relates telling his pragmatic father (proud possessor of a degree in Civil Engineering) of his decision to change his major from Economics and Political Science to English. The decision was not well received. For his father, “real work added value to the world by taking something and making it useful to society,” something to which the poet had no claim. This personal scene provides a sense of the purpose that unites all of Professor Ulmer’s work—the line between art and instrumentalism, between exploring our values and creating objects we value. This search continues to inspire scholars and teachers in rhetoric and composition; Ulmer’s post-pedagogy and electracy influence recent projects by Thomas Rickert, Sarah Arroyo, Byron Hawk, Jeff Rice, Bradley Dilger and others. [Learning and discovery only begin when we stop teaching, when we allow students to write and stop telling them what’s right.]

Ulmer’s electrate methods explore the relation between the personal and the public: exemplified by the two genres central to his electrate EmerAgency: the MYstory and the MEmorial. His methods are reflective of feminist research methods elaborated by Sullivan and Porter; they work in hopes of a new discipline of H/human(ities) that, instead of aiming at the work of self-fashioning, invites a playful self-exploration (what I might call, channeling Levinas—self-de/Facing).

Aristotle's theory of argument (the topoi) is built around the idea that we inhabit common "places" of argument. And, of course, one thing that 20th century theory, philosophy, rhetoric, sociology highlights is that, peeling back the layers of our psycho-social onion, we are arguments “all the way down” (or, as professor Ulmer puts this, that “Problems B Us”). Ulmer's work in Internet Invention stresses this--the four components of the Mystory [career, home, entertainment, school] interrogate four different personal-cultural domains (to stick with the geographical discourse). Ulmer's mapping of the subject points to the places common to our childhood, our school, our entertainment, our neighborhoods. The question his work poses is: where else might I have gone? Where else might I go? Where else might I will-have-been?

The value of such a “geographic” approach is that it allows introspection without the immediacy of critique. There is no default command to criticize in Ulmer, and those with more traditional expectations of cultural studies often object to the work on these grounds. Here I would agree with Thomas Rickert, who emphasizes that the questions brought to Ulmer's work by those in Cultural Studies "demonstrates the extent to which Ulmer has achieved a real advance" (Acts 116).

His methods can be disorienting at times, involving complex networks of anagrams, acronyms, puns and neologisms. But disequilibrium is the goal—only by transgressing commonplace expecations (rhetoric’s insistence upon the Aristotelian topoi) that we can move to inhabiting new (dis)positions (vital possibilities of the Timaean chora). Get off the beaten path. Rhetoric makes spaces, for welcome, confrontation, creation, relation. Ulmer argues in Applied Grammatology, how Derridean deconstruction aims “to submit ‘reality’ to the extremes of human imagination” (27). Such a re-imagination “might have” Ulmer qualifies, “the power to guide transformation of the lived, social world” (Of Grammatology 27).

With a Little Help from My Friends

2011-03-09T11:09:00.005-06:00

I have other things that need to get done. Deadlines that have passed. Deadlines that approach. But I'm going to take 30 minutes to write something. This has been brewing for awhile, but I have neither energy nor time to allow it to mature. I'm thinking this will be quick and painful.

The immediate exigence for this post is quite commonplace: another massive, sweeping educational cut. They are everywhere these days. One doesn't have to read the Chronicle to find them. They have become commonplace in the worst way. Today's comes from Las Vegas, where UNLV plans to cut 300+ total jobs, over 100 of them faculty positions. Additionally, they'll lose 77 graduate students. Entire departments will be eliminated in the process.

Yesterday I read an article on gambling in Las Vegas. Apparently, lawmakers there do not think casinos should be held responsible for gambling addictions.

Louisiana approves layoffs for faculty.

In Florida, we face an over 3 billion cut to our state education fund. Additionally, the state is voting to wipe out tenure at the primary and secondary levels--teacher retention will be tied directly to test scores. This is considered good for learning. No wonder why people don't want to be teachers anymore. And no wonder why, supposedly, students don't want to learn.

I'm not even going to touch Wisconsin. There's more going on in Wisconsin than my brain can handle. Friends pass me articles such as this one, by Ed Kilgore entitled "Republicans want Wisconsin to Become Just Like the South," and a piece of my soul dies. I want to vomit in my mouth. Or break something.

I'm not even planning on going pedagogical here; I wasn't planning on sending you to watch Sir Ken Robinson's excellent animated lecture on education in the 21st century. You probably should watch it. But that's not what this post is about, not today.

Today is more about showing a graph I found while collecting visualizations for my Visual Rhetoric class. This graph has been haunting me for quite some time, since I first saw it last week. I can't get away from it. I came across it through a friend's feed on Facebook--part of a series of 11 visualizations exposing income inequality in America over at Mother Jones. All 11 of the visualizations are telling, but one is specific stood out to me:

I never thought I'd say this: but lets go back to 1945. If you make more than a million dollars, then its time to pony up and pay to support the people around you. Sharing is fundamental to existence (seriously, metaphysically, it is--that's the kind of writing I'm supposed to be doing right now, a review of this book).

On a melodramatic note, I'm reminded of Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous statement:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Maybe I am speaking of Wisconsin after all. Maybe they are speaking not just for teachers--but for Americans--men, women, and especially children everywhere who deserve a quality education, doctor, home, and dinner. More than anything, children deserve a chance. In terms of education, a chance requires attention.

I'm sick of hearing that we can't afford education. I'm sick of hearing we can't afford "Obama Care." We can't afford not to care. We need to care. And we need to stop putting greed ahead of sharing.

Help Save the National Writing Project

2011-03-05T07:15:00.004-06:00

David Beard called attention to the killing of the Striving Readers and National Writing Project over on the Blogora today. I repost an email posted by David:

David Beard,

Federal legislation for Striving Readers and the National Writing Project passed in both the House and Senate and signed by the President zeros out funding for these two important programs. Unless legislators are convinced by an outpouring of outrage, these programs have little chance of being restored.

NCTE members need to call or write their Representative and Senators NOW to explain the importance of funding these programs in the final budget.

Striving Readers enables the currently established 44 state literacy teams to apply for federal funds; then each state's neediest districts can apply to the state for funding for local literacy projects in preschool, elementary, middle, or secondary schools.

The National Writing Project provides summer institutes in local communities that reach 65,000 students annually and other professional development activities for 130,000 educators who reach 1.4 million students each year.

Call or write immediately for the most impact. We need thousands of NCTE members to take action.
Restore funding for the Striving Readers Program.
Restore funding for the National Writing Project.

Sincerely,
Millie Davis
Division Director, Communications and Affiliate Services
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
1111 W. Kenyon Rd.
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: 800-369-6283, ext. 3634, or 217-278-3634
Fax: 217-278-3761
E-mail: advocacy@ncte.org
Web: http://www.ncte.org

Join NCTE in Celebrating Literacy Education Advocacy Month!

If you teach in an English department, then you likely know that these are crucial programs we cannot afford to lose.

Please take the time to write your senators and representatives in support of these programs.

Music / February / 2011

2011-02-28T11:31:00.005-06:00

Keeping with my new year's resolution to listen to more (and new) music, here's what I picked up in February:

Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: I picked this up because I respect any album that gets a perfect 10 from Pitchfork and appears on virtually any informed "Album of the Year" list. It doesn't hurt that Kanye's famous critique of George W. Bush ranks high as one of my favorite examples of highjacking kairos. The album lives up to its praise--anyone who has ever appreciated a single hip-hop track will likely appreciate MBDTF's care to detail and creativity ("Hell of a Life"'s electronica-infused Sabbath sample would epitomize these qualities).
G. Love - Lemonade: I just grabbed this album last week and I remain a bit undecided. Initially, I was drawn to his brand new Fixin to Die, but, previewing a few tracks, I was a bit turned off by the bluegrass feel. I think I still harbor a subconscious fear that listening to anything remotely related to country music will make me want to drive a pickup and purchase firearms. A few of the iTunes comments praised Lemonade, so I figured I would grab that one instead. Its a very funky album, as opposed to Fixin's twang, but its also highly polished, and feels a bit too commercial. Admittedly, its a very fine line--between carefully constructed and commercially manufactured. But something about this album doesn't feel quite right--it misses Electric Mile's spontaneity (something that I suspect the new album might supply, being a collection of covers assembled with and produced by the Avett Brothers).
…And you Will Know Us By the Trail of the Dead - Tao of the Dead: Given the amount of electronic music I've been listening to lately, I wanted something that rocks. A few searches later, I found this offering. As much a continuous rock opera as a collection of individual tracks, Tao of the Dead delivered what I was looking for (sans large haired guitar solos). I'm quite pleased with the purchase, and will probably dig deeper into their catalogue.

I've also picked up a few other oddities this month. First, I downloaded Ramen music's free debut issue. The project is essentially a peer-reviewed, independent music publishing collaboration; a number of the 12 free tracks are quite impressive--especially Graham O'Brien's "CFC's...". I'm still debating whether to subscribe to the magazine (I give myself a 10$ a week music budget and a yearly subscription to Ramen would cost me almost an entire month's allowance). I also came across, via Metafilter, the Nerdcore Now project. Take Weezer's "In the Garage," remix with some Run-DMC, repeat. This provided some nostalgic amusement, but there's really no reason to keep going back.

Thanks to the shared iTunes library at work, I listened to quite a bit of Cut Copy and Arcade Fire last month, too. I like the former--its seems perfect for sitting outside or on the beach in nice weather. There's nothing especially wrong with the latter, though I can't say I'm in a rush to purchase it either.

Latour, Gorgias, and Levinas Take 15

2011-02-09T09:55:00.005-06:00

This article keeps beating me up--every time I think I know what I am doing, it runs away. I believe I am finally whipping it in to shape, but I want to make sure the following paragraphs make sense to someone else beside me. Here's what I think my thesis is...

Bruno Latour, Gorgias of Leontini, Emmanuel Levinas. At first glance, such a union might seem antithetical. Casting aside Platonic misrepresentations of Gorgias as a swindler and a cheat, how can Levinas’ Humanism, so intense that it fails to recognize animals as having ethical status, be reconciled with Latour’s Actor Network Theory, which refuses to distinguish any hierarchical ontological distinction between a human being and a laboratory beaker? Without dismissing these differences, I reconcile Latour’s challenge to Humanism’s traditional anthropocentrism with Levinas’s humanism of the Other person by highlighting how each shares a strong aversion to the isolated and autonomous Cartesian self operating at the core of much Western philosophy and rhetoric, an aversion shared by Bruce McComiskey and Scott Consigny’s versions of Gorgian sophistry.

The essay first reviews Latour’s challenge to the late 20th century critical tradition, calling instead for a renewed invest in political practice that he terms “concern.” Working in response to Graham Harman’s disavowal of any connection between Latourian politics and ancient sophistry, I will highlight how Latour’s turn toward “concern” shares both metaphysical and practical overlays with Gorgian sophistry (if, unlike Harman, we attend to recent studies of Gorgian sophistry and do not rely on the tired, cliché, and impoverished image of Gorgias offered to us by Plato). Gorgian sophistry offers an ethical defense for agonistic encounter. Finally, I turn to Levinas’ opposing obligations of responsibility (infinite hospitality to the other) and justice (inevitable violence stemming from the infinite obligation to both the other and the neighbor) to construct an ethical disposition requisite for the concerned political-sophistic-agonistic practice advocated by Latour and Gorgias.

Bruno Latour and Metaphysics

2011-01-31T11:56:00.003-06:00

I don't remember this passage in Harman's Prince of Networks, but its a nice one from Latour's Laboratory Life:

Specific to this laboratory is the particular configurations of apparatus that we have called inscription devices. The central importance of this material arrangement is that none of the phenomena "about which" participants talk could exist without it. Without a bioassay, for example, a substance could not be said to exist. The bioassay is not merely a means of obtaining some independently given entity; the bioassay constitutes the construction of the substance. [...] It is not simply that phenomena depend on certain material instrumentation; rather, the phenomena are thoroughly constituted by the material setting of the laboratory. (64)

In the article I'm working on, I connect Latour's interest in assemblage/emergence to Levinas's ethical metaphysic. Ethical in the sense that the ethical relation instantiates existence, such that belonging, precedes being. There is no self without relation to the Other/other/others for Levinas. Similarly, as Harman stresses in his explication of Latour, objects exist in for Latour only as far as we can trace their alliances. Metaphysically, I believe the resonances to McComiskey's Gorgias are quite strong.

With a bit of luck, I'll have this monstrous article submitted by the end of the week.

Music / January / 2011

2011-01-29T09:31:00.009-06:00

In keeping with my New Years resolution, here's the albums I've picked up since my last post:

Black Keys' Rubber Factory - A very solid album, rarely do I find myself skipping a track when this comes up on a shuffle. This band knows what they want to do, retro- blues rock, and they do it well. Given my recent purchases, it is refreshing sometimes to hear a low-fi rock album without a sample, loop, or synthesizer.
Vampire Weekend's Vampire Weekend and Contra - Put simply, I love both of these albums. They're collections of short, smartly arranged up-tempo songs. Take the Pixies, replace the outsider angst with hipster urbanity and the punk guitars with layered synth, and you have Vampire Weekend. My current favorite band.
Joe Cocker's With a Little Help From My Friends - I think listening to the Black Keys got me on a retro kick, manifesting itself in Cocker's 1969 album. I felt foolish about 2 seconds after I downloaded the album, seeing as I could probably pick it up for a dollar at any used music store. But, the album is great--there's some deep tracks here I'd never heard before and really enjoy (like "Sandpaper Cadillac"). So, go ahead Joe, enjoy the royalty and have a glass on me.
The Brew's At Showcase Live (June 16th 2010) - This band came recommended by an ex-student; I downloaded a freebie off of Internet Archive (I pledge to buy an album at some point in the future, karma people). After 4 or 5 listens, I'm pretty sure I'd like the studio material better. The live stuff gets a bit jammy/Phishy for my tastes, although I'm going to tag any band that plays 3 minute solos with a Paul Reed Smith as Phishy. After effects of going to Clark University.
Arctic Monkey's Humbug - I bought this album with a sinking feeling in my stomach. Their last album, Favorite Worst Nightmare, was one of my favorites from grad school. After a quick preview, I pretty much knew this one wouldn't live up. The liner notes highlight how the Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Josh Homme produced the album--and it shows. Arctic Monkey's frenetic energy is subdued with a QotSA kind of deep pump. It doesn't work quite as well for me, but I've only listened to the album once. We'll see.

Alright, so that's what I picked up this month, along with a few old Kanye singles. The National, Arcade Fire, and Deerhunter all remain on my radar. I'm thinking of picking up Kanye's latest album next week. Pitchfork gave it a perfect 10.0, and for those that don't know Pitchfork, that's about as likely as snow in Florida.

Harman's Tool-Being

2011-01-21T10:06:00.003-06:00

Graham Harman's Tool-Being (along with several other of his works) is on my radar, although I have no idea when I'll find time to read it. I came across a review of Harman's book today at Dark Chemistry, and this excerpt from Harman has my attention:

"In any case, we are left with the following scenario-the world as a duel of tightly interlaced objects that both aggrandize and corrode one another. As Bacon expressed... "For since every body contains in itself many forms of natures united together in a concrete state, the result is that they severally crush, depress, break, and enthrall one another, and thus the individual forms are obscured." The movement of philosophy is less one of unveiling (which would rely on a sort of as-structure that I have argued does not really exist) than of a sort of reverse engineering. Often, teams of industrial pirates will lock themselves in a motel room, working backward from a competitor's finished product in an effort to unlock and replicate the code that generates it. In the case of the philosopher, the finished product that must be reverse-engineered is the world as we know it; the motel room is perhaps replaced by a lecture hall or a desert. Behind every apparently simple object or concept is an infinite legion of further objects crushing, depressing, breaking, and enthralling one another. It is these violent underground currents that one should attempt to counter, so as to unlock the infrastructure of any entity or of the world as a whole" (TB: 290).

Week One, Spring 2011

2011-01-14T10:14:00.004-06:00

Our first week of classes is coming to a close. My New Media class read Walter Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" and will be remediating the essay into (x)html this weekend. I haven't read that article in a few years (gasp), since I finished the dissertation (which contains a chapter essentially dedicated to Ong); I forgot how darn concise yet incredible that essay is. Written after a nearly 30 years studying the epistemological and ethical impact of writing upon human consciousness and sociology, it is a 14 page tour de force. Stylistically, it is quite quotable, and I think that's why it will lend itself to the kind of intense condensation that my remediation project demands (reducing the 14 page essay to a series of ten sentences and images).

My visual rhetoric class meets only once a week, and that is a tricky format for an undergraduate technology driven class. Their first project (due next week) asks them to perform a rhetorical analysis of an image (whether an advertisement, an artwork, a book cover, a movie poster, whatever. Nothing revolutionary there. I do ask them, however, to mediate the analysis as either a Prezi, a movie, or a flash presentation. Last semester I did two to three (student choice) of these projects, and they got much better each time. This semester I am only doing one--but there's a number of other cool projects I want to try. Their first reading is from Presentation Zen Design, and I must say, I really like this book so far. It combines concise instruction harmoniously with a minimalist design scheme, practicing what it preaches.

In terms of research, I spent the first week back working on my book review for TCQ (I'm reviewing Selber's collection Rhetoric and Technologies; short, short version--go order a desk copy, its great). I also spent a few hours working on a second book review of Davis' Inessential Solidarity for JAC. Working on the reviews was a nice way to ease back in to the semester. My rough draft of the Selber review is checking in around 3500 words, the final version needs to be around 1800. So, I've got some cutting to do this weekend.

I'm also excited because this week I joined an interdisciplinary project at USF centered in our new School of Global Sustainability--Resilient Tampa Bay. The group seeks to foster connections between academics at USF (from english and communications to civil engineering and the sciences) and community stakeholders from around the Tampa area. My new media class will help design a new website for the group after their 3rd conference this February; my visual rhetoric class will work on designing a complete branding for the group. Should be fun and productive.

Well that's my first week back. Hope everyone out there is able to get through the snow. I've got one last letter of recommendation to compose this afternoon (at least, I hope it is the last one), and about 7 to submit online. Then I might actually take a few hours to (gasp) read a few journal articles.

Trying to Listen to More Music

2011-01-09T08:59:00.003-06:00

Meg got me a new iPod for Christmas. I haven't really bought any new music in probably 5 years (I think the last new album I purchased was Arctic Monkey's Favorite Worst Nightmare in 2007). So I'm trying to reconnect with music in 2011. My plan is to buy an album a week. I started with an iTunes gift certificate, here's the albums I have purchased so far:

Kings of Leon, Only By the Night - A great album. I was expecting something with a bit more edge to it, so it took a few listens. But its haunting sound grew on me.
Crash Kings, Crash Kings - A complete one-hit wonder. "Mountain Man" is a great song, but the rest of the album tries to hard to emulate every other alternative band out there.
Mumford and Sons, Sigh No More - I loved the single "Little Lion Man." The rest of the album is solid, but they certainly picked the right track to release as the first single. The band is at their best with up-tempo tracks.
My Chemical Romance, Danger Days - I am an unapologetic My Chemical Romance fan, I love their harmonic-punk style and experimentation (their last album, Black Parade, has a punk-polka). This album is quite different than the two previous albums. I listened to it about 5 times and am not sure what I think about it--its certainly a good album, but I think I'd prefer carefully arranged and mixed punk rock to carefully arranged and mixed electronica.

I just bought the Black Keys' 2004 album Rubber Factory and a friend provided burns of two Vampire Weekend albums, so I have plenty to listen to this week. Next week, I'm thinking of grabbing The National's High Violet, but I am open to suggestions.

M&M Eat

2011-01-05T08:55:00.003-06:00

As I said in the previous post, Meg and I have talked about creating a food blog since we moved to Florida. Call it New Year's initiative, because I finally made one: M&M Eat.

Happy New Year everyone, good luck with your syllabizing.

M&M Eat Out / 717 South

2011-01-02T18:32:00.005-06:00

Meg and I have talked for awhile about writing a food blog. Its mostly because I have the world's worst memory and can never remember if I liked a place or not. Here's a quick start.

Tonight we went out to 717 South in Tampa--an italian/asian fusion restaurant. Meg ordered the crab cake for dinner with jalapeno sweet potatoes; I had the miso and sake tilapia with wasabi mashed potatoes. We both had the house salad (the highlight of the night for me). My fish wasn't bad, but wasn't memorable. Meg's crab cake was quite good, and the jalapeno sweet potatoes were great. For desert, Meg had an excellent creme brulee, I had an uninspired key lime pie. Good news--I only ate about half the pie, and they took it off the bill without us asking. That was appreciated. With one glass of wine each, the bill came to a reasonable 70 dollars before tip (that's with the two deserts).

All in all a nice meal, though I'm not in a big rush to go back.

End of Semester Blues

2010-12-06T08:50:00.007-06:00

Tomorrow night is my last night of Fall 2010--which has been my favorite semester thus far at University of South Florida. My Contemporary Rhetorics class was awesome; we enjoyed a guest interview with Thomas Rickert, read D. Diane Davis' new book Inessential Solidarity weeks after its release, and I experimented with open reading weeks in which the students could decide what they wanted to bring into the class. I got the opportunity to read several new(er) books I have been waiting to read, including Brooke's Rhetoric for New Media, Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment, and Harman's Prince of Networks. I've enjoyed the class so much that, despite the incredible amount of energy it requires, I'm sad to see it end (especially knowing that I am unlikely to get the opportunity to teach it again for several years).

My undergrad class in Visual Rhetoric was also, I think, successful--although I will be making changes for next semester, when I will be teaching undergrad sections of Visual Rhetoric and New Media. I've decided that I will only do (x)html and css in New Media--but that is the only technology we will work with for the entire semester. This semester in VR I tried too many things--Prezi, InDesign, Photoshop, Premier/iMovie, and (x)html and css. Next semester, Visual Rhetoric will focus on photo and print technologies (with a few presentations in either Prezi or Premier) while New Media will involve both avant-garde and service learning projects in (x)html and css.

Inspired by Nathaniel Rivers' snazzy (and informative) site, Karl Stolley's recent digtial facelift and plea, and the work of my Visual Rhetoric students on a new USF Rhetoric and Composition Program site (link coming soon), I spent the weekend updating my site for the first time in a few years. I'll probably put the new site up tomorrow. I've got a book review for TCQ to finish this week on Selber's new edited collection Rhetoric and Technologies. I've read the preface, introduction, and the first three essays by Marilyn Cooper, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, and Geoff Sirc--all three were excellent. That makes it easier to finish the collection! I've also got to finish an essay on Latour, Gorgias, and Levinas; the essay has been 95% complete since October, but I've been holding on to it until after I had the opportunity to read Davis and Harman.

Well, there's my near-to-end-of-semester update. Hope all is well on your end. I'll try to post again after the upcoming swarm of grading.

Update:I put up the new version of the site. It still needs polishing work, but if I waited until it was finished it would never see the light of day

Poor, Neglected Blog

2010-11-01T09:00:00.003-06:00

Sorry I haven't been kinder to you. Right now I'm trying to finish two articles, complete revisions for an accepted piece, finish a book review, write a gaggle of letters of rec, teach my contemporary rhetorics grad class for the first time, teach my visual rhetoric class for the first time (including a service learning project), submit something for C&W, attend meetings, and maintain occupational sanity. I'll try and be nice to you sometime soon.

Berlin, Vitanza, and Self/Assessment

2010-10-13T06:30:00.004-06:00

Last night my graduate course on Contemporary Rhetoric spent some time in 1996; we discussed two important treatments of postmodern theory in Rhetoric and Composition--Vitanza and Berlin. Below is the lecture I gave. Those who shared a former life with me will hear familiar notes.

In University in Ruins, Readings highlighted the growth of excellence following the deconstruction of traditional University meta-narratives. Left without an absolute(ly Good) transcendent rasion d’etre, the University has fashioned for itself (perhaps paro/a/logically?) a new meaning to inhabit (since, as Berlin summarizes, rhetoric and postmodern theory begin from the position that we all exist mediated through language and discourse). That the new meaning cannot itself be qualified or quantified, exhausted, limited, or even defined, makes it a particularly apt response to the postmodern dilemma (the lack of meta-narrative, the disappearance of the autonomous subject): in Ulmer's parlance, We B Excellence.

In Postmodern Condition, Lyotard predicted the rise of an administrative class within academia. We have already discussed the ramifications of this process—particularly, the emphasis on production and assessment. These two related ideas surface in Berlin, particularly in his discussion of Post-Fordist education. Lyotard’s administrative class is Berlin’s managerial student/teacher. There are differences—for Lyotard, the development of the administrative (dedicated to performativity and efficiency) is considered as a move in a language game, an almost Darwinian adaptation to survive according to the “new” rules laid out by the changing conditions of the game. It is a struggle for survival.

In Berlin, it is cast as a more overt and conscious exercise by those in power to regulate and control—rather than a kind of “naturalistic” evolution it is a political strategy (take, for instance, Berlin’s remarks on Foster, Butler, and Blitz and Hurlbert(48-49)). It is not surprising, in Berlin’s narration, to see corporate interests speak to the need for (and only for) “the ability to speak and to hear, to read and write the English Language fluently and with true comprehension and true ability to articulate ideas” (48). Those familiar with such discussions will see the code: English Language instruction as a dedication to clarity, to efficiency, to hegemony. Riffing on our past, to obedience more than to thinking. To teach “clear” expression is to teach/craft a Conservative (read: submissive) subject.

Post-Fordism calls for workers without any specialization. It destroys unions by declaring that any shmoe can do the job. Think of how today’s large corporations (McDonalds and Walmart come to mind) actively developed a strategy called “zero-skilled labor,” such that the corporations could easily negotiate the high turnover in the workforce. That most difficult resource, the human resource, ideally becomes little more than standing, breathing, welcoming, and thanking. Provided enough institutional scaffolding, the parts are completely and immediately replaceable. Not just burgers but students. I argue that there is a desire, a will, to automate teaching, too.

Berlin draws upon Harvey’s term “flexible accumulation” to describe this Post-Fordist reordering: In flexible accumulation, markets are as much created as they are identified and so “control over information flow and over the vehicles for propagation of public taste and culture have likewise become vital weapons in competitive struggle.” (Harvey 1989, 160). (46)

I will return to notions of weapons and struggle later. Here, I would stress that education operates as a market, that this is not news—that Heidegger, Lyotard, and Readings have already made this argument quite clear to us. There is always the question of whether postmodern theory is simply new grist for the mill, flexibly accumulated and regulated.

But the rise of assessment, as I have been referring to it, is an intensification of the principles of flexible accumulation (as struggle over information and subjects in-formation) in the arenas of education. By and large, this intensification largely reserves itself to primary and secondary levels, but we can also trace its presence in higher education as well. We are not too far from the Spellings Commission for Higher Education, and its gentle nudges for Universal Exit Exams (in the name of customer satisfaction…err…accountability to prospective students). Continuing national economic hardship will only intensify such desires. Account for everything, down to the minute, down to the sentence. Ensure student outcomes. Program Study. This phrase Program of Study takes on new meaning in the Excellently Assessed Performative University in Ruins. No longer a map drawn by the autonomous protagonist-student as they weave their way through the disciplinary landscape (narrating their own story), it now speaks to identity formation regulated within a discourse. Those of you who read Foucault can fill in the blank. Those of you hit by Foucault can too.

But let’s recast this regulation in a more sensitive light—let’s say that, instead of a last gasp to consolidate power and legitimize expenses (hey, we need money because we need teachers because we need to craft subjects over here), let’s say that it is a humanistic response to shifting conditions—one that challenges the Post-Fordist assumptions of interchangeability. Not anyone can be an engineer. In fact, it takes four years of micromanaged, I mean carefully planned, curricula to begin to produce one. It is, no doubt, a humanist response that I here describe—one that seeks to make the student, as a function of an Enlightened curricula, special and irreplaceable. Such aspirations do not necessarily have to be an mendacious or nefarious as Berlin suggests (see 47, and his discussion of Foucault 63). Perhaps Victor’s committee, composed to ensure writing doesn’t fly awayves, speaks here.

Berlin invests himself in critical citizenship and critical pedagogy. I commend him for not backing away from these terms. But we have to recognize the impact of such a commitment. Sure, critical could be deployed in some neutral way a so as to suggest an apolitical-way-of-seeing. Berlin rejects such a fallacy. Every way of seeing and of teaching is always already drenched in a political—curriculum and pedagogy. Its political down to where you put the desks.

And Berlin’s use of “critical” never comes without a politics. It’s a determined politics. For those of you who have never flipped through Freire, or even more so, spent some time with Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Bourdieu’s Distinction, Williams’ Culture and Society or Stuart Hall’s Representations, or any of the other seminal texts in the new/old tradition we would call Cultural Studies, critical means Liberal. Socialist. Progressive. Was anyone even a tiny bit surprised to see Berlin ground this theoretical recommendations for English Studies (notice: Cultural English Studies) on socialist economic theory? Or to see him deploy terms like superstructure, base, capital, corporate hegemony?

Berlin names his politics—his aspirations, his goals, his raison d’etre, his telos.

My sneaking suspicion in preparing this lecture (and we will see how this plays out tonight), is that most of you will choose Berlin over Vitanza. We shall see. Why? Because I suppose you will find solace in Berlin/West’s condemnation of Vitanza’s theoretical play/language—the repeated haunting charge of “bourgeious mysticism.” White, affluent, secure theorists play a highly Sophist.icated theoretical game because they are divorced from the pain and necessity of lived reality. Such games turn our energy and attention away from the real problem and from real solutions. Lacan once argued: the zero form of sexuality is masturbation. Theory cast as Vitanza (and Derrida, Lyotard, and anyone else who engages in that theory, that turn attention away from the weapons and the struggle) is masturbation par excellence; for each plays their own game, and each plays alone. Hence Berlin’s repeated effort to emphasize, in the face of postmodern deconstructions of the subject, the “shared” subject position (again and again he hammers this point). Berlin makes it clear that, to avoid paralysis by analysis, we need a metanarrative and a vision (67). His project is thoroughly Modern. I hope you all noticed this. Berlin conserves even if not a conservative. Why? To change things for the better, of course. And who would question such things? What kind of monster?

Vitanza. Who writes, as Cixious, as a beast. But I will return to this shortly.

First, back to Berlin (insert pun about fascism in service to a revolution with another pun on a revolution returning to the repressed and the re-pressed as students in molds /pun). What Berlin ignores is a principle of which he is very much aware—consubstantiality Burke would call it. It is the Derridean binary opposition, the idea that the signifier, more than reaching back to a signified, reaches out to other signifiers in the network of its circulation—particularly, Burke stresses, to those signifiers against which it emerges (simple: try to think of hot without cold, don’t think of an elephant). By conserving attention to Harvey’s weapons and struggles he does little more, in my opinion, than recirculating, reconstituting, replicating, extending the status quo. Berlin would use postmodern theory to provide new terms for the old war.

If read across Cornell West, then this is an admirable, human cause. Berlin:

Against the plea for the abandonment of comprehensive historical accounts and the denial of any significance in the myriad details of everyday life, I would propose the necessity for provisional, contingent metanarratives in attempting to account for the past and present. Here Vitanza and I totally part company. While history may be marked by no inherent plan or progression, it is the product of complex interactions of disparate groups, social institutions, ideologies, technological conditions, and modes of production. To abandon the attempt to make sense of these forces in the unfolding of history is to risk being viticimized by them. (73)

Clap. Fist pump. Go get 'em tiger.

But wait a minute. Defer a minute. There is an explicit teleological end to Berlin’s ideal—history is the future too (and if we listen to Derrida, history is the future first, the sight/cite/site of deferment, the judge, the present as the will-have-been (81); Berlin proposes to reveal to the student sites of conflict (sights, cites, sites oh my). Berlin doesn’t just(ice) reveal conflicts, he proposes to write/rite/right them. Does one not conclude that there is a precise determination of the Good every time Berlin deploys the term “democracy”? What if a student in his class used Glenn Beck’s Americanist mantras to attack Cornell West’s call for rhetorics forefronting the marginalized and the oppressed? Anyone want to venture how that would go? One need look no further than Berlin’s explication of differance and alterity: “we are asked to locate heretofore silenced voices” (71). Notice where agency lies—in the “we.” Always with Berlin, agency lies in the self and is never deferred to the other (precisely because Berlin’s goals are determined and not dialogic, narrated and not spontaneously emergent). And, many times, Berlin’s self is not only multiple but plural (such that students are a collection of selves-to-be) in a very singular way (see also 100).

Berlin’s utopia and certitude do frighten me. It is a call to arms, and a pedagogy that marches. To war. For all its pretensions to multiplicity, it threatens to cleanse.

Nevermind the fact that, based on my personal experience, social epistemic rhetoric doesn’t work. It leads to performativity and resentment. Students delivering what the teacher wants. Many have written on this point, most notably Marshal Alcorn (Changing the Subject in English Class, see also Sloterdjyk's Critique of Cynical Reason). Alcorn stresses Berlin’s reliance on an autonomous subject, one who will make the write/right/rite choices once the path has been opened. Berlin, according to Alcorn, fails to appreciate the depths of ideology. It is not a mere software that can be reprogrammed. Ideology permeates the very Being of the machine. This paragraph could be much longer, and much better.

Vitanza, building from Lyotard (and my Heidegger, but not his), would chose to play a differant game than Berlin, to invent new practices, engagements, styles. Yes, seen from Berlin’s perspective, Vitanza’s language is elitist rather than egalitarian. But we might also stress that Vitanza’s language is sophistic in the sense that it is developed for a very particular audience—it makes no aspirations to a Universal human movement, it idealizes a conception of language in which each person takes ownership of words and invents—meanings, histories, hysteries. Notice how Vitanza opens agency and defers determination to something other than humans. If not as a Human, then as animal. (This is base, but not the base of Berlin’s discourse, not the base binarily determined through superstructure).

More than anything else, what I hope you take away from your encounter with Vitanza is the line “we would no.” We would kNOw the other, and hence negate her:

The negative—or negative dialectic—is a kind of pharmakon, and in overdoses, it is extremely dangerous. (E.g., a little girl is a little man without a penis! Or an Aryan is not a Jew! And hence, they do not or should not—because in error—exist) The warning on the label—beware of overdoses—is not enough; for we, as KB says, are rotten with perfection. We would No. That is, say No to females, Jews, gypsies, queers, hermaphrodites, all others. By saying No, we would purchase our identity. Know ourselves. By purifying the world, we would exclude that which, in our different opinions threatens our identity. (12-13)

We would locate (know) the other’s silenced voices and speak for them. Or, we could resist knowing. We could recognize the desire that builds behind our kNOwing. This is Vitanza’s complex response to Berlin’s question “what do you want?” He wants Berlin to confront his desires, to learn to listen to what students desire in a way that doesn’t pre-judge or determine. Of course-one cannot rigorously assess desire! One can, however, assess writing (but not desire as expressed in W-R-I-T-I-N-G). Berlin would reprogram what we study. Vitanza would study our need to Program. In his “Three Counter-Theses” essay, Vitanza identifies three primary drives for R/C that he would oppose: the will to systematize language, the will to be language’s authority, the will to teach systematized, authorized language to students. I hope, looking back at this week’s readings, you can see how he implicitly indicts Berlin for continuing all three.

Yes, I think Vitanza would accept the charge that he masturbates. Probably without guilt. And in public. In, of all places, a per-versity. I’m pretty sure he enjoys it (perhaps, Levinas would argue, too much—and without the goal of fecundity--but that question comes from my own ghosts).

We could develop rites that write it (desire) more than right it (kNOwing). Perhaps. Maybe. In a future. In a future that resists the call to assess and secure, measure and validate. Always in a future in which “we are only just beginning to write” (Nancy, qtd in Vitanza).

Burke, Purpose, Rubric

2010-10-07T09:14:00.003-06:00

Taking a break from work I have to finish, I grabbed Burke's Grammar of Motives off the shelf. I found this great paragraph from the chapter "Agency and Purpose" challenging notions of neutral instrumentalism (that our instruments measure without purpose or perspective, that they measure substance rather than create it). My next major project concerns increasing assessment and standardization, and I think I'll use this passage juxtaposed against the call for rubrics:

Though our laboratory instruments may transcend human purpose, they exist only as the result of human purpose. And we might even say that they perform satisfactorily without purpose only because they have purpose imbedded in their structure and design. An instrument like a thermometer has its purpose so thoroughly built into its very nature, that it can do its work without purpose, merely by continuing to be itself. (281)

Exerting purpose simply by being there, such that purpose (power, force) becomes invisible.

Deconstruction, Responsibility, and Greek-Europeans

2010-10-01T07:02:00.005-06:00

Thanks Casey--I have a sneaking suspicion that when it comes to books, we have divergent tastes. When it comes to teaching, we share quite a lot. Like my last post, this started as a comment and grew into a long one.

The early/late Derrida question is quite the question--whether his entire opus is oriented toward ethics or whether this marks a significant turn in the later works. Personally, I think he was always concerned with ethics--but early in this career he was more interested in destruction (because that high tower had grown so high and presented itself as impervious to critique) and later in his career much more interested in construction (since he had pretty much succeeded with objective #1). Its also important to remember that the anthologized stuff in America primarily deals with literature and language, and tends to pass over elements of the early work invested in metaphysics. To simplify, Derrida's career can be read as a tension between Heidegger's poetics and Levinas's ethics--he starts closer to the former and ends closer to the latter.

In Learning to Live Finally, his last interview before his death, Derrida shares a very candid and lucid (wait, Derrida, lucid--yes!) depiction of deconstruction. Its pretty long, but here we go:

Deconstruction in general is an undertaking that many have considered, and rightly so, to be a gesture of suspicion with regard to all Eurocentrism. When more recently I have had occasion to say "we Europeans" is is something quite different and is always related to a particular set of circumstances: everything that can be deconstructed in the European tradition does not negate the possibility--and precisely because of what has happened in Europe, because of the Enlightenment, because of the shrinking of this little continent and the enormous guilt that pervades its culture (totalitarianism, Nazism, fascism, genocides, Shoah, colonization and decolonization, etc.)--that today, in the geopolitical situation in which we find ourselves, Europe, an other Europe but with the same memory might (this is in any case my wish) band together against both the politics of American hegemony (in the configuration of Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfield and so on) and an Arab-Islamic theocratism without Enlightenment and without political future (though let's not minimize contradictions, the processes underway, and the heterogeneities within these two groups, and let us join forces with those who resist from within these two blocs). Europe finds itself under the injunction to assume a new responsibility. (40-41)

Derrida locates this new responsibility in Kant's original "hesitant" Enlightenment--this is something one of my graduate students, Adam Breckenridge, pointed out in my Contemporary Rhetorics seminar--that Kant's original work was suspicious of meta-narratives much more than many postmodern theorists have been (and thus, postmodern theory, very much against some wills, transformed into its own monolith resistant to critique through its presumed attention to foundations... have I heard this line before? It is possible to be a bad anti-foundationalist--bad in this sense would not only indicate a sole commitment to destruciton, but also a lack of self-reflexivity).

Speaking toward a Kantian inspired geo-cosmopolitanism (one dedicated to the planet and not the nation as polis), Derrida writes:

What I call "deconstruction," even when it is directed toward something from Europe, is European; it is a product of Europe, a relation of Europe to itself as an experience of radical alterity. Since the time of the Enlightenment, Europe has undertaken a perpetual self-critique, and in this perfectible heritage there is a chance for a future. At least I would like to hope so, and that is what feeds my indignation when I hear people definitively condemning Europe as if it were but the scene of its crimes. (44-45)

There is a small strain of optimism here that recalls for me Kant's conclusion to "What is Enlightenment?": "If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism." Notice Kant doesn't say "reach Enlightenment." He's aiming low. Given humanity's track record, that's probably high enough.

Finally, I should address all this talk of Europe--I hear it ring with an echo of "Greece"; we are all still European (to what extent is debatable) just as we are still Greek, still Roman. Not all of us, for sure. And we are more than just Greek, just Roman. But these are the times (more than even places) from which our values were drawn, the heart of our cultural, political, and legal landscape. Those veins still pump. There resonances heard in the walls of our institutions.

But I am especially rooted in Europe (never mind that I was born in bred in Plymouth, MA--the self-proclaimed birthplace of America proud to have help kill the Red Coats). I have mentioned, from time to time, that the Holocaust remains the single event that motivated my entry into scholarship. Everything I have written lies in its shadow. It haunts me with questions: why, how, when? It is this last question in particular that haunts me--when might it return. We know that genocide has surfaced in other places in the 20th century. I find it impossible to think such hatred. It is the face of the other for me-I cannot totalize it, understand it, come to terms with it. I quake thinking about it. And so I do the only thing I know how to do. I read. I think. I write. I question. I teach. I wait. I listen.

Practicing Deconstruction Responsibly

2010-09-30T12:19:00.002-06:00

I think deconstruction, when practiced well, is both destruction and construction. Derrida's later work provides numerous examples of such positive practice. But this would just get us into a tired, commonplace exchange.

In terms of changing the University, I am quite concerned about the increase of standardization, particularly in terms of assessment. I told my class Tuesday night that assessment is becoming the new "excellence" (in Bill Readings' very particular conception of the term). This might not be the case for you, since you work at a small, private school.

But Florida is a bureaucratic nightmare (I've been trying to get a course approved for two years! Its on committee 3 of 6. That is not an exaggeration). Additionally, the administration is calling for rubrics to assess all classes and levels of instruction; they want us to demonstrate "inter-relator reliability" for dissertations. We try to explain that this is near impossible: on the last round of PhD exams, for instance, I am the only person really qualified to assess the quality of a classical response; the other people on the committee specialized in composition theory. And I had to spend a week reading up on the student's list so I could evaluate the quality of the responses.

No matter how hard we try to explain the narrowness of our specializations, they just frown at the deviations in our numbers. No matter how much we argue that our work is aesthetic and indeterminate, they expect evaluation to operate according to definitive measures. It gets frustrating.

But that's how I am practicing deconstruction here, by identifying the presupposition that grounds "assessment as excellence." Those grounds are that aesthetic disciplines can be quantitatively measured. Elements of these disciplines can be--but ultimately I believe we teach processes of engagement more than we teach products of knowledge. I might be in the minority on such a position, but I don't think so. Note--there's nothing wrong with assessment, nor could a University likely operate without it, but there's assessment as operation and then assessment as meta-narrative. There is no absolute, determinate line between the former and the latter. To honor such indeterminacy, we need to keep attending to where that line might be (keep it in language so that it keeps moving in the fore ground, so that we are aware of its stake as a grund).

Such deconstruction (as challenge) does risk defacing my commitment to Levinas's ethics--but I challenge the other in this case out of defense for an other other (a neighbor), my students. My primary commitment is in providing them the best education possible, and I believe the best education is one that responds (holds itself responsible) to the students--providing them the most paths, the most freedom to develop. I don't think the emphasis on standardized outcomes does this. In fact, I think it is a violent reduction of pedagogical possibilities. That's why, as I concluded in my previous post, I am willing to fight. But I also try to keep my argument as open to the other as possible--recognizing the legitimacy of their mission, recognizing that it might be quite applicable for others, recognizing that I cannot with assurance dismiss their claims. I am willing to discuss. As I describe Levinas--I am trying to create a mood, a disposition, out of which a positive exchange could take place.

On another note, I'm looking forward to picking up Nussbaum's book, Not-for-Profit as the reviews I've read (from a variety of perspectives) seem to be quite positive. I think they will support my preference for skills based conception of the humanities. I quibbled with Nussbaum's conception of "world citizens" as a grad student, since it seems to replicate a homogenizing cosmopolitanism and re-centers the human in first position (I would prefer instead "citizens of the world," which holds out for the possibility that the world is larger than the people on it). Regardless, I believe Nussbaum's Socratic/deconstructive interrogation of the Humanities early 21st century travails will attract attention. And these days, attention is everything, right?

Institutional Responsibility

2010-09-28T13:22:00.006-06:00

The other day a colleague and I were discussing what to teach in this post-postmodern age, generally agreeing that rehashing the theory-science wars was counterproductive, and that teaching deconstructive critique (as a purely epistemological exercise) was out of steam. See Latour. But I did urge that practicing deconstruction be considered as a still important element of our being instituted, being in institutions, instituted beings. Such play is obnoxious. But I think it important to remember, across Burke's "way of seeing is a way of not seeing" that the institution continues to enforce barriers and boundaries instituted in the late 19th century. For all the talk of postmodernity, the University changed little, if at all, in its expectations and operations.

In preparing for my graduate class tonight on Contemporary Rhetorics, I chose to read Derrida's "University in the Eyes of its Pupils" (in a move toward post-pedagogy, each student was asked to read three different essays related to postmodern theory, their choice). I first read this piece in Thomas Rickert's Institutional Rhetoric course, and I must say it remains my favorite Derrida essay. At one point, Derrida makes an argument that I think succinctly expresses Heidegger/Lyotard/Reading's critique sof an increased technological/efficient/excellent university and Foucualt's arguments for how the increased discursive-institutional dispersion of power complicates resistance. Derrida:

A State power or the forces that it represents no longer need to prohibit research or to censor discourse, especially in the West. It is enough that they can limit the means, can regulate support for the production, transmission, and diffusion. The machinery for this new "censorship" in the broad sense is much more complex and omnipresent than in Kant's day, for example, when the entire problematics and the entire topology of the university were organized around the exercise of royal censorship. Today, in the Western democracies, that form of censorship has almost entirely disappeared. The prohibiting limitations function through multiple channels that are decentralized, difficult to bring together into a system. The unacceptability of a discourse, the noncertification of a research project, the illegitimacy of a course offering are declared by evaluative actions: studying such evaluations is, it seems to me, one of the tasks most indispensable to the exercise of academic responsibility, most urgent for the maintenance of its dignity.

A few posts ago, I made mention to Richard Miller's open ended slow reading, something I would equate with the arguments for post-pedagogy advocated by Byron Hawk and Thomas Rickert. But we have to be ready to fight for such possibilities, because I fear the increasing drive for "excellence" (scare-quoted to summon the specter of Readings) in assessment will not be open to the open-ended and student-directed. It wants teleological ends and directed students. In an atmosphere of accountability and expediency, teachers teach and students learn from teachers--how can students learn and teachers learn from students? I don't think the Power that is will legitimate the impetus of such a question.

But I increasingly feel the call to fight for it.

The Multitude Speaks

2010-09-23T13:21:00.003-06:00

Today, before heading out of the office, I wanted to check Facebook. And, oh my, I got a big DNS error page. Surprised, I turned to almighty Google with the search "Facebook DNS failure." Lo and behold, Google's top response was a twitter feed displaying dozens of people tweeting the DNS failure (including a witty "not a good omen for The Social Network's opening weekend). There's truth, multitude style--even if it isn't necessary True. (Que Casey's rejection of everything).

Steven Johnson and Creativity

2010-09-23T08:02:00.006-06:00

Meg sent me this short YouTube promotion for Steven Johnson's upcoming book on creativity. Its worth the time. My one-line response: one book's distraction is one browser's connection.

I like this talk because I've been thinking of Richard Miller's recent discussion of "slow reading" (which I discovered browsing through Facebook, and then browsing over at the Blogora). From what I gather, Miller developed the idea out of Roland Barthes' Pleasure of the Text (in my quick searching, I couldn't find anything by Miller on this subject, but I did find a recent ADE Bulletin article by Jonathan Culler on Close Reading). From what I gather from reading about it, Miller's idea is for students to read one book over the course of the semester (about 15 pages a week). There's no pre-planned syllabus, student assignments develop from the reading on an idiosyncratic basis, negotiated by teacher and student. As a commenter on Facebook gestured, I have a fun time thinking about how USF's recently minted "Office of Assessment" would respond to such an idea (but I dwell in a completely enframed, technological, bureaucratic UNIverse). Such an idea, however, seems connected to the premise of Johnson's upcoming book--that great ideas are a result of careful contemplation and chaotic encounter.

Thankfully, today, our libraries provide opportunity for both.

Visual Rhetoric InDesign Project

2010-09-20T11:04:00.004-06:00

I'm teaching an undergraduate course in Visual Rhetoric for the first time at USF this semester. Our first few projects involved analysis and manipulation in photoshop. Our fourth project requires students to work in groups of 4 to design a cover and typography for a work in public domain using InDesign. We're going to watch an episode from Bravo's Work of Art this summer in class today as a way of introducing the project.

My guess is that others out there have tried a similar project--I'd appreciate any commentary you might be able to provide. I use this project to introduce concepts of visual research, teamwork, and to get them to play with a new technology. Here's the assignment sheet:

Assignment 4: InDesign Project

Dr. Marc C. Santos | ENC 3310 | Fall 2010

Our 4th major project is our first team project. You will be placed in teams of 3 to complete this project. The project has two major stages: pitch presentation and delivered product.

The final group deliverable will be an InDesign file (.indd); individuals will submit a Project 4 Postmortem. Each group will be responsible for selecting a work from the Gutenberg Top 100 downloads (all works in public domain) and giving it a modern re-design fit for print publication.

What Needs to Be Done for Monday, September 30th

Next Monday your project has to give an 8 to 10 minute presentation on your text that includes at least 3 design possibilities for the final project. The presentation should also cover whatever genre research you have compiled for your project (I am expecting 8 to 10 different images). Research should also speak to genre trends—think about size, color, font selections. In the presentation, you might want to have some kind of chronology that speaks to recent republications. Someone might want to look into font sizes typical for print publications. Start looking at books like a good chef eats.

All group members should speak for at least a portion of the presentation (although speaking time does not have to be evenly distributed). Following your presentation, the class (emulating a corporate board) will vote for which of the mock-ups they would like to see continued to completion.

The visual portion of the research presentation should be collected into some kind of media that can be “turned in” for evaluation (be it a website, a powerpoint, a prezi, a flash presentation, etc). Additionally, each group should design a handout for the presentation (note: too much text can make a handout difficult to read, too little can make it useless). Grading for the visual presentation will be based on: 1) the sophistication of the visual used in class, 2) the depth/quality of research grounding design decisions, 3) the quality of the mock-up selected by the class for additional development, 4) the professionalism and preparation of the group’s presenters.

What Needs to Be Done for Monday, October 4th

The group will email me one InDesign File (.indd) containing their project. A finished project will include a front and back cover design (fit for paperback printing), formatting for the book’s first 100 pages (if you are doing a book, this should be a minimum of 2 chapters). In addition to the cover, the book should include page numbers. If you are working with a book longer than 100 pages, there is no need to format all of the text.

The group project email should also include any research files or working files used to complete the project. InDesign is by and large a “finishing” technology. Groups will likely have to use other technologies (Photoshop for image editing, Word for rtf formatting) to create their projects.

Additionally, every person will turn in a Project 4 Postmortem sheet that documents their time spent on the project and speaks to group dynamics. This form will be distributed on Monday, September 30th.

How to Turn it in

As usual, a completed project should be sent to me on Sunday, October 3rd, at 11:59 pm. Please include your team name in the subject line. Postmortems should be sent in at the same time and include the team name in the subject line.

That's Not O.K. Purdue Exponent

2010-09-19T07:47:00.004-06:00

So I am a fan of Lanham's theory of Attention Economy (link to interview) and I tend to enjoy a raunchy joke. As other's have noted, Purdue's student newspaper, the Exponent recently tried their hand at both. In a perverse way, they succeeded at both.

To the former, they have attracted at lot of eyeballs. I am contributing to that exposure. Controversy has gravitational pull.

There might be a context in which the cartoon (and I link back to Mxrk, since I can't find a copy online), might be a critical commentary on an atmosphere of hyper-masculine conquest generated by contemporary youth culture. Maybe. But this ad, as many others on Facebook note, seems pretty happy with itself. There doesn't seem to be a trace of irony to be found.

Hence the latter perversity. Its all too cliche for me to even spell it out here. In fact, it is so over the top, that it almost seems biblical to me (see how sex has become so impersonal, see how we have embraced debauchery, etc). It commands such a conservative heteronormative response that it performs something reminiscent of the sentiment of the "church" from this "if God were on Facebook" snippet:

As my wife pointed out, if you search "cartoon" on the Exponent site it becomes readily apparent that they don't like women. Even without the cartoon in question, there's plenty of other evidence. I think it enough for me to say: "that's not o.k."

Assessment from a Poetic Perspective

2010-09-01T11:49:00.005-06:00

My wife today sent me a link to Heather K. Phillips MFA thesis project. Heather is a recent graduate of RISD; her project speaks to the legitimation of critique and the ubiquity of assessment at all levels of education. Here's a great paragraph from her abstract:

In my work, I co-opt the vocabulary of critique, cloaked in niceties and reinforced by repetition, to demonstrate its limitations. Using a hyperbolic approach, I identify and mirror the language back to expose the veneer of objectivity and test the limits of subjectivity. I replay feedback in exaggerated form, to challenge the perception that critique is an infallible process.

Last night my Contemporary Rhetorics course focused on Lyotard's Postmodern Condition. One of the student presentations highlighted an interview with Lyotard in a 1996 issue of JAC in which Lyotard declares PMC an abysmal failure and expresses extreme regret for every having written it. In a response to the interview, one of my colleagues, Deborah Jacobs, argued that Lyotard's regret stems from his aversion to definition and "theory" (as Lyotard defines the term) in favor of philosophy and questions. She also notes that Lyotard's dismissal of his writing "unsays" what was "said"--calls it into question, challenges its being. PMC, after all, is a book that attempts to define a particular movement, catalogue a series of transformations, and offer a possible (paralogical) response. It all sounds quite positivist. But it is also a slippery book that defies promises and undermines a few of its own pretensions (last night we discussed whether paralogy can exist as its own meta-narrative, or whether it is a parasitic operation, orientation, or attunement brought to an existing narrative-game). Lyotard jests in his introduction:

It remains to be said that the author of the report is a philosopher, not an expert. The latter knows what he knows and what he does not know: the former does not. One concludes, the other questions--two very different latter games. I combine them here with the result that neither quite succeeds. (xxv)

The passage reminds me of a saying of one of my more sardonic friends from graduate school: "you are always failing at something." Phillips' project speaks to this lingering postmodern challenge to the ideals of human autonomy and truth, particularly her "Stamps of Disapproval." I'm pretty sure I gave Casey one of these stamps not so long ago (but in my defense, his argument was entirely tautological).

Let Me Tell You a Story

2010-08-24T09:28:00.007-06:00

Me (reading Lyotard's Postmodern Condition)

Rowan: "What are you doing daddy?"

Me: "I'm reading a book about why people go to school."

Rowan: "Oh."

Me: "Why do you go to school?"

Rowan: "I go to school to BE QUIET!"

Casey's got a recent post up about how "Emerging Adults" are having difficulty making decisions. Perhaps because no one has ever helped them encounter a question, only fed them answers?

Jonathan Swift

2010-08-07T11:30:00.004-06:00

Working with Ulmer's Internet Invention this summer, I've had a number of projects exploring students' crises of faith. Responding to these projects got me thinking of Swift's later poem "Day of Judgment," written near the end of a career as a Protestant minister in Catholic Ireland. Enjoy.

With a whirl of thought oppressed,
I sunk from reverie to rest.
A horrid vision seized my head,
I saw the graves give up their dead!
Jove1, armed with terrors, bursts the skies,
And thunder roars and lightning flies!
Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
The world stands trembling at his throne!
While each pale sinner hangs his head,
Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said:
'Offending race of human kind,
By nature, reason, learning, blind;
You who, through frailty, stepped aside;
And you who never fell—through pride:
You who in different sects have shammed,
And come to see each other damned;
(So some folks told you, but they knew
No more of Jove's designs than you)
The world's mad business now is o'er,
And I resent these pranks no more.
I to such blockheads set my wit!
I damn such fools!—Go, go, you're bit'

Every Once in Awhile...

2010-07-15T07:59:00.005-06:00

I read something and hear in my brain a voice:

That can't be fucking true. No way.

It is usually triggered by an internet news story with dubious sources. I heard the voice this morning while scrolling through my slash.dot feed. A nice little post:

"The Pacific Ocean trash dump is twice the size of Texas, or the size of Spain combined with France. The Pacific Vortex as it is sometimes called, is made up of four million tons of Plastic. Now there's a proposal to turn this dump into 'Recycled Island'. The Netherlands Architecture Fund has provided the grant money for the project, and the WHIM architecture firm is conducting the research and design of Recycled Island. One of the three major aims of the project is to clean up the floating trash by recycling it on site. Two, the project would create new land for sustainable habitation complete with its own food sources and energy sources. Lastly, Recycled Island is to be a sea worthy island. While at the moment the project is still more or less a pipe dream, it's great that someone is trying to work out what to do with one of humanity's most bizarre environmental slip ups."

I admit that I don't really keep a close eye on the news. Its just not my thing. But I'm surprised I haven't heard about a trash island larger than France and Spain combined before today.

That can't be fucking true. No way.

But the links in the post seem legit.

And so do all these other links to Mother Nature Network, CNN World (although its a story by an independent news group VICE buried on the site), and The Times Online.

Wikipedia already has a scientific name for this phenomenon "The Pacific Ocean Vortex," which sounds much nicer than its original moniker: "The Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch." George Carlin just let out a chuckle from the grave. (See about 57 seconds in on the distancing ourselves from reality. I'm becoming increasingly interested in this as I think of the legacy of modernity and postmodernity as we move into the era of posthumanism, globalization, and actor-network theory/ecologies). For those that haven't read/heard/seen Carlin's bit on war and shell-shock, its worth a few moments.

And so, if any of you care, I will be in a delirious fit of rage for the rest of the morning. Rest assured I'll feel powerless and apathetic by tomorrow.

SERIOUSLY WTF THERE'S AN ISLAND OF TRASH TWICE AS BIG AS TEXAS JESUS CHRIST WHY ARE WE SO AWFUL.

/rant

Some Good Web Comics

2010-07-13T09:13:00.006-06:00

The web comic "Stuff No One Told Me" has become my daily little moment of Zen. He's on vacation for awhile, but that doesn't mean you can't take a stroll through the archives.

And there's always a quick visit to "My Milk Toof" if you need a heart-warming pick me up.

If you are into comics, or new media, you should check out balak01's "About Digital Comics" and the sequel (which doesn't rip off Twilight) "About About Digital Comics." They're both really worth your time. I found them via workspace.

Ulmer Riff: Recipe

2010-07-09T11:27:00.003-06:00

My class is progressing with our mystories. In an effort to help them grasp Ulmer's approach to relay and imitation, I crafted what I call the recipe assignment. Its inspired by a visit from poet Robert Pinsky this past Spring; in response to a question on how a young poet can improve her skills, Pinksy advised: "learn to read like a good cook eats." Its not just about savoring the flavor, but about tasting the technique. Beyond understanding what something is, its about tracing how something becomes.

Ulmer uses a number of examples in his chapters, what he calls relays. Along the lines of classical and neo-classical imitation, these relays provide models for approaching the larger assignments. I've asked my students to break into groups. Each group is required to take one of Ulmer's extended quotations and re-mix it into a recipe, distinguishing ingredients, equipment, time, and step-by-step directions.

Judging by the temperature of the room, it seems to be going well.

Ulmer Exercise: Term Extensions

2010-07-02T08:34:00.003-06:00

Today in class we are working on two exercises from Ulmer's Internet Invention; the first of which is his Term Extensions exercise.

Using the history of the term "culture" as a model, select a different craft (other than agriculture) and develop its figurative possibilities as a new extension of the meaning of the term culture

[...]

If human development of learning can be like agriculture, what else might it be like? Or, if human development in general may be tended in the manner of a crop or herd, what about your particular specialized area of work? What sort of craft makes a good metaphor for developing knowledge in your career field? (35)

For my term, I picked "assembly." Here I admit I didn't pick a "good" term, but rather an unfortunate one. This keeps with the logic of my career site since I am examining the Scantron machine as my disciplinary invention. The assembly line, in connection with Fordist industrialization, appears as a trope for contemporary education in a number of places, particularly Aronowitz's book The Knowledge Factory. It is also the underlying trope driving Asimov's short story "Profession."

To help with this assignment, I used the Oxford English Dictionary.

Without getting too much into specifics, there's essentially two historic meanings for assembly. The first, whose origins date back to around 1333-1436 and is still in use today, speaks to bringing some things together. It can refer to assembling an army, a governmental body, or a flock of birds singing in a tree ("The byrdes..syttynge in assemble vpon an hye tre").

The second meaning refers more to the industrial process and emphasizes putting something together. Unlike with the first meaning, the parts here constitute little if taken separately. It is only in the right combination, guided by the proper process, that the parts gain utility or significance. This meaning begins to develop around 1914. From a 1914 Engineering Magazine article: "The boards travel..down the line, growing in completeness as they move, each ‘team’ working simultaneously on opposite sides of the board, adding some step to the assembly."

As with Ulmer's definition of culture, we have two different intonations here. If we consider education in terms of the first, then we think of students as individual entities whole before they arrive in the classroom (be it to fight, deliberate, or sing). If we follow the second, then students are incomplete entities before they arrive on our doorstep. Students lack. Teachers provide.

There are, of course, distinct overlaps to the definitions of culture Ulmer highlights--Arnold's and Taylor's. Recall that Arnold's specifies a particular and higher culture as the aim of education/enculturation. Arnold's students lack. Taylor, however, sees culture as something central to all humanity everywhere, he isn't interested in articulating a particularly proper culture as much as he is in identifying those things that all cultures do (even if they do them differently).

My objections to Scantron were routed in its homogenization of education, its dedication (and glorification) of efficiency and singularity. It makes sure students are getting what they lack.

Rosenbaum on the New Agnosticism

2010-06-28T18:02:00.004-06:00

Ron Rosenbaum has an article up on Slate.com that speaks to the possibility of a New Agnosticism (as a response to the New Atheism). Pretty much speaks to how I read Levinas, and why I was interested in his metaphysics. A highlight:

Humility in the face of mystery has been a recurrent theme of mine. I wrote most recently about the problem of consciousness and found myself allied with the agnostic group of philosophers known as the Mysterians, who argue that we are epistemically, flat-out unable to know the nature of consciousness while being within consciousness. I'm reluctant to call agnostics Mysterians, much as I like the proto-punk ballad "96 Tears" by ? and the Mysterians. But I do like that agnosticism, which in fact can be more combative than its image, does have a sort of punk, disruptive, troublemaker side.

Penny Arcade, Technology, and My Life

2010-06-28T13:15:00.002-06:00

The following appeared on Penny Arcade today. Yup.

It is always dangerous to make assumptions about people's basic philosophies, and those assumptions tend to (quite conveniently) track with the way you, yourself see the world, so maybe I should limit the scope to myself purely for safety. I tend to think of technology as a force. It's not so much a physical object as it is a manifested capability. Having serviced technology, and having loved it for years beyond that, and now utterly dependent on it for both my livelihood and leisure, my relationship with it has an (ironically) pre-industrial quality. When I actually think about it, of all the ways it intersects with my being, I wouldn't know what else to call it but worship. I'm not trying to be a poet. I believe that statement to be accurate.

Of note: the same post also mentioned a "deck of many things." You get to add an extra pin to your dork vest if you can describe that one (hint: my vest has no more room for any more pins).

Levinas, Ethics and Infinity

2010-06-25T10:30:00.004-06:00

I'm currently reading through Levinas's Ethics and Infinity, one of my summer reading books. I've still got a few chapters to go, but so far I appreciate Levinas's concision. I like this book for the same reason that I like Walter Ong's late essay "Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought": its rare that a great thinker gives a survey of their entire career in a digestible (if reductive) form. This post focuses on Cohen's introduction and his attempt to define ethics and yet avoid essentialism. I'll put up a post Monday on how Cohen, Nemo, and Levinas each discuss the saying and the said (the transitive and substantive dimensions of being).

Cohen's translator's preface to the work is noteworthy, particularly this attempt at defining what isn't:

Ethics, in Levinas's view, occurs "prior" to essence and being, conditioning them. Not, however, because the good is installed in a Heaven above or an identity behind identities, for this would just take the ontological move one step back, would again fall into onto-theo-logy, once more confusing ethics with ontology, as if what "ought to be" somehow "is." What ethics is does not survive the end of metaphysics--but only because ethics never was anything. Ethics does not have an essence, its "essence," so to speak, is precisely not to have an essence, to unsettle essences. Its "identity" is precisely not to have an identity, to undo identities. Its "being" is not to be but to be better than being. Ethics is precisely ethics by disturbing the complacency of being (or of non-being, being's correlate). "To be or not to be," Levinas insists, is not the question. (9-10)

How does one designate what resists designation? Is it possible? Those familiar with Levinas know that these are the questions that haunt his first major work, Totality and Infinity. I really appreciate Cohen's grace and concision here. I think the framing of ethics as a disturbing shows up in many places in Totality and Infinity--particularly in the lines that I think best summarize the entire book: "we name this calling into the question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics" (T&I 43) and "the presence of the Other is equivalent to this calling into question of my joyous possession of the world" (T&I 75-76). The joyous possession here is in terms of essentialism, to reduce the world to substantive rather than transitive being--noun rather than verb--and to synthesize the alterity of the other into a similitude with the same. Being is/as to settle things. Ethics unsettles (note: Levinas's rejection of the later Heidegger can be reduced to the simple statement: it takes more than one to ask a question).

I also feel that Cohen risks under-reading (is that a thing?) Levinas's rejection of Hamlet. The question is not "to be or not to be" because we have no choice but to be. Being is the price all manifestation demands. And we cannot simply choose to abandon being or become otherwise or whatever wish we would will to the potential terror of the Il y a. There is not only no easy answer, or even no carefully concealed essential answer, there's no answer at all. Being, all the way down.

An Insignificant MyStory (Part 3)

2010-06-22T11:06:00.004-06:00

In between posts with Casey today, I did manage to get some work done. Particularly, I'm working on prepping for my summer course. I will be teaching a 6 week upper-division expository writing course. Usually, I teach expository writing as digital citizenship (essentially a course in feminist research, digital ethics and social construction). This semester I am trying something new--Gregory Ulmer's Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. As the title intimates, Ulmer's pedagogy is not caught up in traditional interests with the thesis and the paragraph. Rather, it is a creative attempt to translate these kind of structural units into digital practice (they are respectively replaces by the assemblage and the image). It is very hard for me to summarize Ulmer's project with an justice to its philosophical ambitions and pedagogic invigorations in a sentence or two. So instead, a display. Although I am a bit suspicious of this work (across Levinasian lines, Ulmer is drawing on Heidegger and Derrida, and while Levinas and Heidegger-Derrida share an interest in interrupting hegemonic epistemologies, they also differ on the role of the other and the obligations of the self), I admire it.

The book's assignments all aim at designing what Ulmer dedicates a wide image, a kind of psycho-social cognitive map that helps a student recognize multiple (and likely hidden) elements of their identity. There's four primary lens through which students image-ine their identity (referred to as the Popcycle of the Mystory). These categories have resonance to literary modes articulated by Frederick Jameson. They are:

Literal = School "This history represetns the memory of the collectivity"
Allegory = Entertainment "The discourse learned is that of cultural mythology encountered in popular genres" [Ulmer notes in several places that this could be religion for some people. It is meant to target the locus of cultural identification--what teaches you who you are supposed to be?]
Moral = Family "The individual is considered in terms of his/her family upbringing, with the language being the one learned in the home (English, Spanish, Creole) and the discursive regime being the habits and customs specific to that family"
Anagogy = Career [Disciplinary knowledge] "The collective meaning of history is determined in mystory ... by the world view embodied wihtin the specialized knowledge that one acquires as an expert in some given career field... This knowledge is the means by which one earns one's livelihood (work), but the knowledge of an avocation may be used instead. (81-82)

In preparation for teaching the mystory, I have been creating one. Its quite fun--and exhilarating. My initial experiences emphasize that Ulmer has discovered an exteremly effective methodology for encouraging creativity.

Today I spent time on the third assingment:

Make a website documenting the details of a movie of TV narrative some part of which you still remember from your childhood years. (127)

Ulmer notes that books can be used in place of cinema and television. He also explains:

the first purpose of the documentation is to record the part of the story that you remember. Once you have inventoried the remains of the work in your memory, view it again and record what you notice in this fresh viewing. The memory is the site of a sting, in Barthes's sense [...] When reviewing the work, note especially the problem or conflict organizing the drama, and the way it is resolved. Memory tends to form around problems, whether the problems are large or small. All narratives are structured by conflict (the protagonist confronts a problem).

In preparing for my summer course, I work on my Mystory for an hour at a time. I also tend to break up my work into categories a bit as I go (I think this kind of genre/structure might be beneficial to undergrads). Here's what I produced in my first hour focus on Assignment 3. (Sorry, I lost the links in the cut and paste, Google Site's HTML function is hopelessly bloated).

What I remember

For my story, I choose an old cross-over series of Marvel comics: the mutant massacre. This story line crossed over several interrelated titles: X-Men, X-Factor and The New Mutants. I rarely read comics these days, although I'll pick through a few issues or a graphic novel every year. But I read quite a few comics during my youth--and whenever I think about all those comics, sitting in the bottom of my guest bedroom closet, this is the series that comes to mind.

In the story, many mutants have taken to living in the tunnels under New York City. Rejected by society-at-large, on account of their difference, they chose to withdraw themselves. While I forget the particularities of their motives, a group of mercenary mutants is contracted out to massacre the mutants living under the city.

The X-men work alongside other mutant heroes (X-Factor, The New Mutants) to stop the genocide. I remember particularly that Wolverine kills his nemesis Sabertooth in a very anti-climactic way. Unfortunately, there's very few other specific details I remember.

Why I Am Selecting It

For as long as I can remember, I have been haunted by genocide. It motivates my scholarship. It is what directed me to academic study. How could a group of people murder another group of people? How could they desire the extermination of an entire people? Such questions are amplified by the Nazi Holocaust. For here, it is not a simple matter of greed (at least, I don't think it is). It is not competition for resources or longstanding political conflict (such as what I understand of Riwanda). This is not to diminish the horror of other atrocities, which I realize it might. Rather, this is to amplify the cold, technical precision of Nazi death camps--more factories than camps. Places that manufacture death.

As an eleven year old, I was drawn to this story line. This was not Spider-Man beating an enemy set on world domination or on acquiring wealth. Those are simple human motives, motives, I speculate, that any eleven-year-old could understand. But hate at this intensity, hate as a motive, that is something that didn't show up in Spider-Man, Scooby-Doo, the Incredible Hulk or any of the other stories that I recall from my youth. Yet one of the pivotal moments of the 20th century was nothing but pure hate.

As I write this, I can think of other places where pure hate shows up in 20th century aesthetics. Tolkien's Sauron, for instance. Wikipedia offers up an interesting tidbit from Tolkien:

Tolkien noted that "it had been his virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall ...) that he loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction." Thus "it was the apparent will and power of Melkor to effect his designs quickly and masterfully that had first attracted Sauron to him."

Order and coordination. Industrialized death. Efficiency. For as long as I can remember being alive, I have been suspicious of these terms. IBM and the Holocaust does nothing to sway me otherwise. Here, quite literally, accountability and efficiency are the servant of industrialized murder, all in the name of world order.

I will never forget the line by Wiesel in Night, reflecting on eating soup after watching the dreadfully prolonged hanging of an adolescent. "That night, the soup tasted of corpses." The taste lingers.

Further Research / Loose Notes

Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the storyline. I am going to hold off on reading it until after I have re-read the stories (mainly to avoid spoilers).

Unanticipated: Intentional vs. Functionalist perspectives on the Holocaust (found in Wikipedia while searching for Order as a theme of Mein Kampf). There is a separate page dedicated to the debate. The intentionalist argument, I would guess, is more well-known: that Hitler's intentions for killing the Jews traced back to his earlier writings/thoughts. Put simply, he always envisioned the genocide. This is referred to as the straight line to Auschwitz. The functionalist argument, which I had never heard before today, seems a bit more probable to me (it is also a more rhetorically-ecologically complex argument, which I find appealing). This argument is based off of evidence that Hitler originally envisioned a deportation of all Jews to Madagascar. Once the war on the Eastern front disrupted transportation, the "storage" of Jews began to pose a serious problem. Detainment facilities were short-term (ewww...) solutions. For functionalists, the idea for genocide developed after a few, localized massacres at these camps.

The final solution wasn't an initial plan, but rather an unfortunate, unanticipated, accident. This is referred to as the "twisted path" or the "crooked path" to genocide. This is also, unfortunately, an electrate model of creativity. Ulmer's work approaches composing in terms of linkage (assemblage, maintaining disorder) rather than linear Order (synthesis). But, in the word's of Shakespeare's Prince, "all are punish'd." Thinking tastes like corpses.

Harman on Latour, Socrates, and Sophistry

2010-06-18T08:47:00.003-06:00

The first of my summer reading books have arrived from Amazon. Last night I read the first few chapters to Brooke's Lingua Fracta and the Pandora's Hope chapter of Harman's Bruno Latour: Prince of Networks. Both are really good, although Harman's book agitated me (and, yes, it was an affective response--quivering hands, underlining margins, restlessness). I slept on it, then re-read/drafted a response to Harman for my "Callicles, Latour, and Levinas" article. Here's the rough stuff.

What appear below is my initial reactions/notes to Harman's chapter. Many grammatical fragments and oddities likely follow. Please proceed with tolerance.

Harman, Graham. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. re.press: Melbourne, AU: 2009.

Latour's commitment to democracy is not a form of pandering to the spirit of our age, but is an intimate part of his metaphysical position. The universe is nothing but countless actors, who gain in reality through complex negotiations and associations with one another: not as one against a crowd but as one in the shape of a crowd of allies. We cannot appeal to some authority (geometry, power) lying outside the shifting alliance of networks. (88).

And:

"For Latour all reality is political, not because human power inexorably shapes the truth, but because truth and reality are assembled through chains of actors in the same way that bills go through Congress: slightly transformed and translated at each step, and failing as often as they succeed. All reality is political, but not all politics is human" (89).

It might be difficult to appreciate how Latour's third position differs from that of the second--Plato's morally and intellectually bankrupt Callicles. I would offer this distinction: it is a matter of where we locate agency. Agency cannot be isolated in the rhetor, who through skillful manipulation, lies, and pandering molds the crowd. Rather, agency is located in the crowd, who through yea or nay determine a course of action (think of Consigny's robust definition of agonism, a game in which all participants agree to honor the contest's determination). In Harman's language, power cannot be located solely in the hands of the sophist who acts upon the crowd, but is dispersed throughout all the actors (rhetor, opponent, audience, scene, time, podium, screen, temperature, etc) composing the rhetorical ecology.

Harman citing Latour: "A politics that does not rely on experts citing impersonal law 'requires a disseminated knowledge as multifarious as the multitude itself. The knowledge of the whole needs the whole, not the few. But that would be a scandal for Callicles and Socrates, a scandal whose name has been the same at all periods:democracy" (89, Pandora's Hope 229).

Harman's rehabilitation of Socrates, particularly in light of Latour, is to stress "Socrates' contempt [not] for the mob, but to his contempt for power" (90). Thus wisdom for Socrates: "only wisdom governs these virtures in such a way that they always reach for the sake of which they act; and in the end only a god is wise, no human experts" (92). He concludes:

The power of a tyrant or rhetorician is insufficient, because these are merely superficial efforts at the mercy of a reality that only wisdom can probe, not power. The guiding insight of Socrates is the notion that reality is more than its current status, its current impact in the world here and now, its attributes, its relations, its alliances with other things. And here we find a more genuine point of opposition between Socrates and Latour. (93)

Here Harman does not seem to ask the obvious (sophistic) question--isn't wisdom itself an expression of power? Despite these conceptual differences, Socrates' transcendental non-humanism leads Harman to conclude that "the similarities between Latour and Socrates are much greater than those between Latour and the Sophists" (95). Quarreling with Harman's depiction of sophistry is not my primary aim. Quarreling with his depiction of sophistry is; unlike Latour, Harman fails to pull back the Platonic theatrical veil and question Plato's depiction of sophistry as mere, pandering, power-grubbing foolery. (My initial affective annoyance stems from the fact that I really appreciate the complexity and nuance of Harman's work--I wish he paid some attention to some contemporary rhetorical theory, particularly a 25+ year rehabilitation of sophistry, rather than simply echoing Plato's dismissal).

Joseph Pew and Latour's Third Position

2010-06-17T17:56:00.004-06:00

Dave Weinberger has a live blog up today from Google's Chief Technology Advocate Michael T. Jones. Jones quotes Joseph Pew (1946): “Tell the truth and trust the people.” A quick search for the quote led me to the Pew history page, where it is accompanied by another quote by another member of the Pew family:

“No subversive forces can ever conquer a nation that has not first been conquered by ‘subversive inactivity’ on the part of the citizenry, who have failed in their civic duty and in service to their country.”

Another interesting point reported by Weinberger- "The [Pew] site shows that since 1980, the viewership of the evening news in the US has halved. Broadcasters ask where the audience went and how to get them back, which is the wrong question, he says; they went away by choice and you can’t force them back."

Rather than attempts to force them back (such as Rupert Murdoch's pay-for-access approach), Weinberger notes Jones's bullets:

How to solve the great problems of the publishing industry? 1. Please users. 2. Please customers. (Advertisers are the customers.) 3. Ask the right questions. 4. Accept change. 5. Embrace failure. 6. See the essence. Be sure you’re solving the right problem.

In some ways, I'll always remember Mxrk's take on this--just make it easier for people to pay. I'd add to that, only make us pay when we want to. If its good enough, then enough of us will want to. But, for that, you need to trust the people.

Plato's Laches

2010-06-17T11:59:00.003-06:00

In an effort to put more up on this blog, I'm going to start publishing my reading notes from Evernote. Today, I came across a reference to the Laches dialogue in Brad McAdon's 2004 article "Plato's Denunciation of Rhetoric in the Phaedrus." I was interested in this dialogue precisely because its central concern is courage--a quality I think central to Plato's distrust of sophistry, Latour's socialization of science, and Levinas's intersubjective ethics. In brief: Plato misunderstands sophistic notions of courage as either 1) denigration of the masses or 2) propensity toward power. Latour and Levinas (and recent depictions of the historic Gorgias by people such as Bruce McComiskey and Scott Consigny) offer us a third option: courage as the willingness to approach the many from a position of weakness rather than [epistemological, rational, etc.] strength.

What appear below is my initial reactions/notes to the dialogue. Many are grammatical fragments. Please proceed with tolerance.

The dialogue opens with Lysimachus querying two Athenian generals, Nicias and Laches, as to whether his sons should learn to fight in armor. Nicias says "yes" (for the sophistic reasons). Laches says no (can't fake it to real soldiers, looks foolish). Lysimachus calls for a vote, who should teach his sons courage, he asks Socrates to join the discussion.

Nicias--all men should learn to fight in armor (182e). Long passage suggests learning to fight in the terms that the sophists argue for learning to speak--preparation for combat, self-defense against the accusations, err, attacks of the one and the many. Nicias identifies combat among the

...forms of exercise especially suited to a free citizen. For in the contest in which we are the contestants and in the matters on which our struggle depends, only those are practiced who know how to use the instruments of war. And again, there is a certain advantage in this form of instruction even in an actual battle, whenever one has to fight in line with a number of others. But the greatest advantage of it comes when the ranks are broken and it then becomes necessary for a man to fight in single combat, either in pursuit when he has to attack a man who is defending himself, or in flight, when he has to defend himself against another person who is attacking him. A man who has this skill would suffer no harm at the hands of a single opponent, nor even perhaps at the hands of a larger number, but he would have the advantage in every way. [...] And we shall add to this an advantage which is not at all negligible, that this knowledge will make every man much bolder and braver in war than he was before. And let us not omit to mention, even if to some it might seem a point not worth making, that this art will give a man a finer-looking appearance at the very moment when he needs to have it, and when he will appear more frightening to the enemy because of the way he looks. (182-a-d).

How closely does this echo the defense of sophistry found in the Gorgias? Couldn't 'this skill' be logon techne? As the dialogue progresses, it becomes clear that Nicias is meant to stand for sophistry (particularly his association to Damon and Prodicus).

Socrates's response to Lysimachus's call for a vote: "So I think it is by knowledge that one ought to make decisions, if one is to make them well, and not by majority rule" (184e). As in the Gorgias (specifically Polus), a rejection of majority. And, of course, a rejection of the sophistic aspiration that the "better" course consists of the one that can be more persuasively presented to the masses. Better is trans(cendentally) human here.

Interesting note by Socrates' own education: "...concerning myself, that I have had no teacher in this subject. And yet I have longed after it from my youth up. But I did not have any money to give the sophists, who were the only ones who professed to be able to make a cultivated man of me, and I myself, on the other hand, am unable to discover the art even now" (186c).

Translator Rosamond Kent Sprague notes the overlaps between Socrates's rejection of learning in Laches and in the Gorgias (in both instances, a reference to pottery--learn how to craft small items before moving on to the larger one's. In this case, explore how to teach minor things before teaching the student?). More evidence for my interpretation that this dialogue, ostensibly on military training, is more about education and sophistry.

Nicias--who represents the sophist position, on dealing with Socrates: will question and question on something that seems quite removed from the original subject. To engage Socrates is to

...keep on being led about by the man's arguments until he [Socrates's interlocutor] submits to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. And when he does submit to this questioning, you don't realize that Socrates will not let him go before he has well and truly tested every last detail. I personally am accustomed to the man and know that one has to put up with this kind of treatment from him, and further, I know perfectly well that I myself will have to submit to it. I take pleasure in the man's company, Lysimachus, and don't regard it as at all a bad thing to have ti brought to our attention that we have done or are doing wrong. Rather I think that a man who does not run away from such treatment but is willing, according to the saying of Solon, to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life." (188a-b).

What I notice here is that the Sophist (like Gorgias in Plato's dialogue), submits to Socrates. Honors his response. Invites the alterity that Socrates brings. And does so without running away, with courage, faces.

To note, Laches is interested in speeches that sound harmonious. He will not do well, I fear.

Socrates--let's investigate an element of virtue, particularly "ought we to take the one to which the technique of fighting in armor appears to lead? I suppose everyone would think it leads to courage, wouldn't they?" O.k., so Nicias has already warned us how the show works. This will lead to anything but courage. (190d)

Laches: courage is a willingness to "remain at his post and to defend himself against the enemy without running away" (190e).

Socrates: looking for a more abstract definition for courage, one that could count the man in the assembly as well as the solider at his post. (191d).

Laches's response (take 2): "an endurance of the soul" (192c).

Socrates rebuts: "it would be wise endurance which would be courage" (192d). Here I am already thinking that wide endurance is something, from a sophistic perspective, that amounts to obstinance. Think: Apology.

Socrates's aim is to show, almost ironically to my reading, that holding out in the face of defeat (that which Lache's originally identified as courage) is not wise but foolish. (193b).

Laches, unused to dialectic deliberation (oh, the drug of the soul): "But an absolute desire for victory has seized me with respect to our conversation, and I am really getting annoyed at being unable to express what I think in this fashion. (194b).

Nicias: courage is wisdom (but not in particularly musical arts--flute playing or lyre playing, Platonic-Socratic metaphors for Gorgias's style). As with Gorgias in the Gorgias, sophistry is reduced to a kind of mystical performance that, stripped down to notation, carries no force.

Laches expresses confusion/outrage at Nicias's assertion that wisdom and courage are the same thing.

Nicias's "wisdom" is equated to something mystical--to the "magical" gift of the seer. Think: idiotic things Plato's Gorgias says vs. the things that Gorgias's actual texts indicate he would probably say.

Laches responds that Nicias is simply twisting words to avoid defeat. Such a demented practice is only suitable for a court of law.

Nicias: "My view is that very few have a share of courage and foresight, but that a great many, men and women and children and wild animals, partake in boldness and audacity and rashness and lack of foresight." (197b) [Like Callicles, sophistry as a denigration of the common in favor of the superior, a typical Platonic representation of sophistry].

Socrates positions Nicias within a tradition of sophists (Damon, Prodicus). Laches: "well, Socrates, it is certainly more fitting for a sophist to make such clever distinctions than for a man the city thinks worthy to be its leader" (197d).

It is unlikely that a sophist would agree to Socrates's distinction that fear is only a product of future evils, not present ones. (198b). Fear is also a product of the present, part of the mood of the scene, the kairotic moment. Fear is not simply a state of mind, but a mode of being.

Also, Socrates tricks Nicias. The logical conclusion would be that fear and hopelessness also have a past and a present, and that wisdom of courage is an understanding of what made us fearful, why we are fearful, and what we might come to fear. Instead, Socrates limits fear and hope to the future, searching for completely different qualities (dimensions) of courage in the present and past. (See 199d-e)

The funniest part of the dialogue might be that Socrates wins the argument (and the endorsement as the teacher of Lysimachius's sons without himself offering even a definition of courage!). But, of course, he has offered a demonstration of armored combat, adorned by the sparse speculations of dialectic rather than the lavish shine of sophistry.

There is also, at the conclusion of the dialogue, what I think can be read as a clear swipe at Isocrates's complaints of Socrates as an old-school boy: "What I don't advise is that we remain as we are. And if anyone laughs at us because we think it worthwhile to spend our time in school at our age, then I think we should confront him with the saying of Homer, "Modesty is not a good mate for a needy man. And, not paying any attention to what anyone may say, let us join together in looking after both our own interests and those of the boys." (210b)

I appreciate Socrates's sentiment--particularly that first line: "what I don't advise is that we remain as we are," Anyone in rhetoric, I assume, forefronts the propensity toward change. As the sophist-monster often points out--the difficult part of social discourse isn't the argumentation, but the inclination. How do you get someone to care? And, once they care, how do you get them to listen? And, once they listen, how do you get them to contemplate (rather than antagonize?). We cannot be so silly as to take the disposition toward change for granted, as something that merely precedes the real work of rhetorical theory.

At the same time, however, is Socrates really an emblem for change? When in the course of a single Socratic dialogue did Socrates ever change his thinking on anything? Socrates is a master antagonist, but he targets the other and insulates the self. That line should really read: "what I don't advise is that you remain different from my transcendental ideal."

Lessig Quotes Huxley

2010-06-16T10:08:00.003-06:00

Lawrence Lessig quotes Huxley (1927) in his OpenVideoAlliance webside chat:

"In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity."

In brief, if you want a populace that speaks, then you need to provide them with the tools, permissions, and incentives to speak. Copyright is responsible for creating a read-only culture rather than a read-write culture.

The pre-supposition here is that being creative (in-the-world) establishes a positive relation with others (sharing, expressive, empathic) and makes us more satisfied and fulfilled than mere consumption.

Particularly as an educator in the humanities, I feel I have a responsibility to promote a read-write culture by "all available means." Beyond the technological, this also means promoting theory that speaks to our "being-in-the-world" and intersubjective existence as a metaphysical defense for fair-use.

My RSA presentation this year focused on Latour's reading of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. Latour's reading shares an extremely interesting overlap with Lessig's vision for 21st century political practice. Lessig cites two principles: first, we need an increase in the ability to see the dependencies between political agents and corporate/private profits. Second, we need the courage to act upon such visions. Seeing and courage, philosophy and sophistry, are for Latour the oppositions Plato lays out in the Gorgias (philosophy has insight, but not the courage to face the crowd. Sophistry might lack insight, but courageously faces and works with the multitude). What we need, then, is a commitment to the integration of what Latour identifies as the philosophic and the sophistic.

A few other interesting Lessig pieces I dug up in my travels today:

First, an appearance on the Colbert Report (copyright as a "totally failed war").
Second, 2007 TED talk in which he's pretty clearly rejecting the moderate position laid down in Free Culture (around 2 minutes in he describes copyright culture as silencing the expressive ability of the millions in favor of aggrandizing the wealth of the few).
Third, a very brief article on Lessig's recent battles with Youtube and Time Warner on fair use.

Derek Fisher

2010-06-14T12:42:00.002-06:00

A few people commented on Facebook that Derek Fisher's daughter has the same disease as Rowan. Unlike Rowan's case, they were able to use a radical procedure (injecting chemo drugs directly into the eye) to save his daughter's eye. Even if our doctor used such a method (and I don't believe he does), Rowan wouldn't have benefited from this--her tumor's location would have pretty much eradicated any chance to see out of the eye again.

Derek Fisher contacted us during Rowan's illness to make sure that we were satisfied with our medical care and to inquire into whether we financially needed assistance for her treatment. We responded that we were happy with our care and that we fortunately did have insurance.

Still, his kindness pretty much necessitates that I root for one Laker this postseason. But only one.

Post Conferences Post

2010-06-02T08:51:00.007-06:00

I just got back from RSA and Computers and Writing--two great weekends that left me both socially and professionally refreshed. I'm working today towards advancing both papers (one on social media, ethics, and Rowan's cancer, the other on Latour, sophistry, and Levinas) toward publication. With that in mind, here's my summer reading list:

Lingis, Alphonso. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. I read this one on my plane rides, but lost it. Argh. Given how much I write in my books, this was a painful loss.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo. I love Levinas's candor in interviews, so I am looking forward to this collection.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Humanism and the Other. I read this one for my diss, but want to return to it as I prepare to transform the diss into a book proposal. So much of the great work I saw this weekend at RSA uses Heidegger, Latour, and Harman to advance a rhetoric of the non-human. I want to revisit Levinas's challenge to the Human more intimately--because I feel the Heidegger-Latour-Harman work risks repeating what Levinas's ethics so desperately opposed--liquidating humans in our search for The [non]Human. (and, yeah, that line will probably appear in an article soon...)
Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre-Nous. Why stop at two Levinas?
Harman, Graham. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Anamnesis). As I said above, Harman was a significant node in my RSA network this year. This book explicitly picks up an argument for a metaphysical rhetoric. Harman's other books look great too, but I have to start somewhere, and I don't have time to read all three (I would also like to read Tool-Being and Guerilla Metaphysics, but those two will have to wait).
Brooke, Collin Gifford. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media.. Collin won the C&W best book award, and I think I am going to teach it in my Contemporary Rhetoircs course this fall (I want to read it first to see how much it draws upon postmodern theory--my hope is that it draws upon and advances us beyond pomo while formulating praxis for digital environments).
Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Two talented graduate students included this one in their independent studies with me (one on rhetoric's relation to post-coloniality, the other on a rhetoric of abjection). I recommended the book without having read it. Time to read it.

In addition to these seven, I'll be teaching Gregory Ulmer's Internet Invention for the first time. I'm reading through it now, and beginning to construct my first MyStory. I contacted Ulmer about the work (looking for some examples, which he readily supplied!), and he strongly advised that I construct a MyStory before I begin trying to teach them. I had already planned to do this, hopefully I can post an update regarding my progress soon.

Happy summer reading all!

Galloway and Thacker on Video Games

2010-05-06T08:49:00.002-06:00

Skeptical of any "democratic" or "liberatory" elements to networks, Galloway and Thacker write:

In this sense, forms of informatic play should be interrogated not as a liberation from the rigid constraints of systems of exchange and production but as the very pillars that prop those systems up. The more video games appear on the surface to emancipate the player, raising his or her status as an active participant in the aesthetic moment, the more they enfold the player into codified and routinized models of behavior. [...] Just as the school, in Foucault, was merely preschool for the learned behavior necessary for a laboring life of the factory floor, so games from State of Emergency to Dope Wars are training tools for life inside the protocological network, where flexibility, systemic problem solving, quick reflexes, and indeed play itself are as highly valued and commodified as sitting still and hushin up were for the disciplinary societies of modernity. (The Exploit 115)

I'm down with the critique of school--John Taylor Gatto's Against School is one of my favorite essays to teach. And, thanks to Foucault, we know that discursive disciplinary practices produce their own counter-discursive practices.

But here's my question here--and this is authentic--what is wrong with "flexibility, systemic problem solving, quick reflexes, and play"? This is in many ways my one sentence rebuttal to Gallaway and Thacker, whose insights into the underlying hierarchical nature of networks is a lively and interesting read. What are you looking for? Is there any form of social organization that you wouldn't critique? And perhaps their honest answer would be no--that the very purpose of critique is to always push for something better, or to cast attention on the unattended. But I'm with Jim Gee on this one: unlike the silent conformity demanded by "school," video games teach skills and ethics valuable for social life. Perhaps they define flexibility differently than I (they do at one point argue that "we are tired of being flexible" (98).

There's more I'd like to write about this short but interesting book (particularly their sensitive reading and misapplication of Levinas's concept of the Face), but I've got two conference papers to write and a pile of papers to grade.

Hope everyone else's semester is ending well.

Made My Day

2010-05-04T12:28:00.001-06:00

A student wrote me this note while submitting his final paper for my upper-division expository class:

This was by far the hardest paper I had to write in my collegiate career. I'm not complaining, I really enjoyed writing it but the difficult part was stopping. I felt that I could explain my story in book form. I felt like I needed to commit more time to it because it needed so much thought and proccesing which made it hard. Your class has been my favorite since I started college and I thank you.

That made my day. "The difficult part was the stopping." Thank you, too.

Toward Kair-erotically Thinking Techno-Determinism

2010-05-03T11:45:00.004-06:00

I spent the morning today doing some reading/writing on my Computers and Writing presentation, which will deal explicitly with how social media played a role in diagnosing and dealing with my daughter's cancer. One article that I read today was John Potts' "Who's Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory." I like this article for its compact summary of Marshall McLuhan, and for its guilt-free recognition that technologies can have intrinsic properties and structuring effects on consciousness. Summarizing the woks of Havelock, McLuhan, Goddy, Watt, Ong, Eisenstein, Kittler, and Meyrowitz, Potts identifies one constant proposition: "as media technologies change, profound cultural effects ensue. These effects operate on both the level of the individual psyche and the social formation as a whole. The effects may be observed in the long historical span of inventions from literacy to interactive multimedia."

Human thinking of thought comes to resemble the media we use to capture, express and exchange that thinking on thought. At one point in time, humans created television; I might call this thinking "being-chronoslogically." But let's recognize that, at this moment, it is equally true that television creates humans, which would be thinking "becoming-kairoserotically. Chronological and Kairotic. History and Phenomenology. Logos and Eros. Kairos, phenomenology, and eros are the web (presented colloquially as transience, interactivity, plurality respectively in my dissertation). This is precisely why rhetoric, and more particularly Levinas, are central to my understanding of what the web could help us be-come.

Whether the relation between technology and subjectivity/sociality is a good thing is another discussion altogether. My reading today consisted of a number of cultural studies / neo-marxist / critical / materialist objections to the "social" media dominating today's communicative and cultural landscape. In short: the Web 2.0 honeymoon is over. Its a bit depressing, but requires our attention. I won't give it that attention right here, right now (but I will try to in the coming days). I will argue in a few weeks at C&W, these important analyses of the Internet's relation to capitalism and hegemonic power fail to account for the affective dimensions of the social web. Nor do they take into account the possibility that such affective and ethical relations could come to challenge their ontological-materialist-technological grounds. These critical theorists read "the medium is the message" quite literally--they track who owns and economically benefits from the medium at hand. I have Levinasian objections to this, but I will save those too for another post.

For this post, I'll follow Potts' suggestion that a little technodeterminism might not be such a bad thing if we want to reveal "the most profound and long-term cultural effects of those media." I say so provided we attempt to balance the "inherent properties of technologies" against economic, political, and social [and I wish I could here explicate this as Levinasian] considerations of media. We have to be responsible for the whole bag. Of course, I will recognize that the precise "inherent" properties of any medium are indeterminate--and we are talking in a speculative hermeneutic riddled with desire. This complexity does not make it a futile, irrelevant or dangerous task. Well, perhaps a dangerous one. But given that things so often become within the realm of possibility we imagine for them, it makes it all the more important a task. An essential task. Heidegger critiqued of Marx: "before a change in the world comes a conception of change in the world." Let's use technological determinacy as a vehicle for initiating-continuing-popularizing the construction of such a change.

Returning to my initial quote from Potts, perspective and scopes are the keys here ("the long historical span of inventions"). Materialist critiques focus on interpreting a now with a (linear) eye to the future. As one such theorist, David Golumbia offers in response to posthuman notions of transcendental change: "the more things change, the more they stay the same." His pessimism is routed in a narrow view of recent history (say 200 years) that documents how corporate and capitalist interests continually usurp individual choice into hegemonic, centralized institutions of power. From such a perspective, individuals are currently contributing (via free content) to their own subjugation, and the forms of power subjugating them are becoming increasingly invisible. Such a history becomes linear in the sense that there is little chance to break free (except, perhaps, for unplugging all our computers and reading all the Right [and by that, of course, I mean Left] books--sorry, couldn't help one cynical jab).

Against this pessimism, media theory would project a future from meager traces of the now and an interpretation of then. Its optimism is grounded in a long-look at human history documenting how media technology transforms social, political, and economic life. Most of those transformations are, in the long run, for the better for everyone involved. These transformations, however, did not take five, ten, or even twenty years. They took centuries. I would like to argue that this is thinking history (chronos) kairotically--to think of history as producing a present that generates the past, rather than thinking how the past caused the present. Either case, I would argue, is within view of infinite spectral futures that incessantly haunt us (that is, whether we are functions of the past or its originators, we are always, already haunted from the future, from the judge beyond the horizon of the time that unfolds).

And I would conclude by stressing that the future is as indeterminate as the absolute inherent properties of technologies. We will have to fight for any future we wish to come to be. The kairos for a potential chronos always begins now, in the stories we tell ourselves we are to Be-come.

Congrats to the Black Mask

2010-04-28T08:44:00.003-06:00

I have a feeling things might grow silent over at Both Wearing Black Masks (are there three masks now?), so I thought I would try to commune with the spirits that reside there and throw up a thoughtful post.

What would Casey do?

How about Emerson:

Women are, by this and their social influence, the civilizers of mankind. What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.

I hope this doesn't offend contemporary sensibilities. I guess Casey wouldn't care.

Congrats, Dad.

Steven Johnson Strikes Again

2010-04-23T11:23:00.002-06:00

I'll take a quick second to point to an extremely important article by Steven Johnson. Why is it so important? Because in the digital/intellectual property conversations, in which so much debate over control is at stake, attention is rarely paid to media other than music and movies. But Johnson highlights another "invisible" form of control with Apple's new iPad (and not Kindle). Succintly, the iPad does not allow you to cut and paste material--or, in the case of online publications, to even select and highlight text.

What I appreciate about Johnson's article is that he doesn't oppose such a limitation in contemporary, digital terms, but rather in a far more classical matter. He connects the practice of cutting and pasting to the Enlightenment practice of the commonplace book: a running collection of interesting, inspiring, or important material from which to draw. I do this myself with a number of technologies--this blog, delicious, facebook, and even evernote. Technology should make this practice easier--but we can see how reactionary concerns over intellectual property are leading to design/technology decisions that impinge upon this potential.

Now I have even more reasons not to buy an iPad.

Tebow a Character Pick?

2010-04-23T08:25:00.004-06:00

I have nothing against ethos, and I'm sure, after recent events, Josh McDaniels is looking forward to working with a contentious, diligent, and respectful player. As one of the many talking heads I listened to this morning said: Tebow is never going to say an improper word back to his coach. If you listen to any commentary this morning, then you are going to be fed the rationale that Tebow was picked over "better" quarterbacks because he is a nice guy.

But I would quickly like to suggest that I think Tebow was picked ahead of Clausen and McCoy because he is a dynamic player who, in the hands of the right coach, could flourish in the NFL. His unique skill set translates perfectly into a hybrid/wildcat offense. And remember, too, that Tebow trained under Urban Meyer. Belichick spent a great deal of time with Meyer to learn that offense, and that time directly translated into Tom Brady's success in the shotgun (the Pats use the shotgun more than any other team). Who was the offense coordinator while the Pats were doing all that shotgunning? Oh yeah, it was Josh McDaniels.

Of course, Tebow is a risky pick, and, until very recently, option-inspired offenses have been terrible in the NFL. But I'll admit that I was secretly hoping the Pats drafted Tebow, and I will be rooting for him to succeed in Denver, if only because it will make Mel Kiper (et al) look foolish.

Won't Somebody Please Think of the Corporate Executives?

2010-04-15T10:57:00.004-06:00

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has a Mxrk-style annotated post up concerning the "Comments of the Creative Community Organizations."

Thoughts: I think we all agree that artists deserve to be compensated for their work and that outright stealing is wrong. But, once acknowledged, the "Comments of the Creative Community Organizations" relies on many presuppositions and premises that are anything but "natural" or "shared common sense." We don't currently allow police officers to stroll into a home any time they want (even though we might all agree that this would make their jobs a heck of a lot easier).

Working within the constraints of conservative economics, what I hear in these requests is the death-throws of an industry begging the federal government to bail it out. Perhaps, like the auto industry, we will. The EFF is certainly nervous (if a bit over the top rhetorically in a few places) that big government will continue its trend. The difference, for me, is that without government intervention the American automotive industry would have likely collapsed. Yet we need cars, and the people who need cars need those jobs. The entertainment industry, however, seems ready to transform itself in a number of different ways. To allow issues of copyright to develop without direct government intervention (such as, say, unconstitutionally extending copyright well beyond its original 20 year scope) would not lead to the death of the music industry. It would lead to its rebirth. There will still be plenty of jobs and plenty of music, even if those jobs are in different places. And that's what scares the hell out of an army of CEOs, executives, and middle-men who live off of other people's talent.

Update

On the heels of yesterday's post, the Guardian features an article today by Cory Doctorow on the recently passed Digital Economy Act--it sounds very close to the kinds of control measures sought in the Comments of the Creative Community Organizations. Doctorow has a unique ethos for this discussion, in that he is a writer who gives books away for free and a publisher in the new digital economy. I like the tone of his conclusion:

I'm not such a techno-triumphalist that I believe that the free and open internet will solve all our socio-economic problems. But I am enough of a techno-pessimist to believe that baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell.

A Not-So-Radical Approach to Teaching Final Papers

2010-04-12T09:12:00.006-06:00

In my last post, I mentioned that I was trying something a bit different with my current expository writing class. I should say upfront that State and programatic expectations for the course don't give me too much wiggle room. The syllabus I inherited was quite traditional EDNA, and my approaching to teaching expository writing as blogging (attempting to emphasize social [ethical] practice alongside knowledge [epistemological] production) seemed experimental enough. The past times I have taught the course, the final paper has been a traditional 8 to 10 page argumentative research paper. I felt I needed to have something traditional to turn over in case my course was selected for SACS accreditation review.

For whatever reason, I feel less concerned over this matter this semester. Not that what I am proposing here is "radical" by any means. But its a new approach to teaching research and scholarship that I am trying out, and I figured I would share. The influences on this approach are, I think, people like Geof Sirc (his essay from Writing New Media), Pat Sullivan (her discussion of feminist research methods in Writing Spaces, and Gregory Ulmer (pretty much everything he's ever written). And, of course, there's a good bit of Levinas and his intersubjective ethics (over, might I call it, institutional epistemology) operating in this one too. I also used ed. Sherry Turkle's recent collection Evocative Objects as model essays for approaching the project (particularly Jenkins' essay for the way that it folds together reminiscences on childhood comic books with an exploration of our relation to death). I've also discussed Foucault's genealogical approach to history as a particular inventive method for approaching the project.

For the final project this year, I am asking students to construct 8 to 10 page essays that fold five different requirements into their writing.

Research: The paper must present attention to something(s). Think: I looked at A (and B and C) in X.
Personal: The paper must disclose/explore a personal investment in/relation to the research. Think: I looked at A and B and C in relation to X.
Argument: The paper must include some kind of argumentative proposition directed toward a particular person or idea. Think: X says A and B but C or D is better in relation to X.
Theory: the paper must move outside of the particular object or idea at hand to offer a more philosophical exploration of what it means to be a human being.
Kairos: The paper must offer some rational for why it is particularly important for us (and "I" from bullet two and an audience identified through this very articulation) to read the paper now, at this time, at this crucial, reflective, boring, tense, vital, transitory, resistant, opportune time).

As I said, I don't think I am recreating the wheel here. It is the theory bullet that I think is the most compelling--and the most difficult to "teach." But, in working with several students in drafts, I've seen the proverbial light-go-on--a moment where an investigation into X produces a deeper understanding of Y or when investigating X requires us to consider how we are already invested in Y or... well, I hope you (and my students) get the point. This kind of approach speaks to the writing I have been doing lately--writing on Levinas's potential benefit to Rhetoric and Composition in a political-curricular era evermore concerned with standardization, [mass] assessment, and accountability. Rather than connecting writing with the will-to-master, I'm looking to connect it with an obligation-to-alterity. I've been downplaying the Argument section as much as I can, but still feel compelled (both by State expectations and personal orientations) to teach some kind of thesis. Perhaps this too shall pass.

PS. Theory bullet. Irony alert?

Foucault for Thursday

2010-04-08T07:24:00.004-06:00

Most of my leisurely writing lately has been dedicated to baseball, but I spent some time this morning preparing the following for a undergraduate student reading Foucault for the first time. Her project this semester has been dedicated to queer rights, and this is her first encounter with queer theory. I suggested she start with either Foucault or Butler, and she chose Foucault. My undergrad students are required to do am 8 to 10 page final paper on any topic of their choosing, so long as it meets specific criteria (more on that later). Here's what I gave her to help her think of how to use Foucault for a project inline with her semester long project.

Foucault and Sexuality

Here’s a few specific passages to help you think your way through this material. First, from page 105 of the 1990 Vintage Books edition (Part 4, Chapter 3 “Domain”):

Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. (105-106)

These long sentences essentially say the same thing—that “sex” isn’t something either a) completely natural or b) entirely cultural. Hence why sex isn’t something “real” and “really hidden” that we can uncover. Rather the act of trying to “uncover” sex produces (or, if I was using Foucault’s language, discursively constructs) sexuality itself. Hence his statement of a “great surface network.” In short summation, we can’t really know anything about sex, but we can pay close attention to the ways in which people talk about, represent, practice, and contest sexuality. This work was written in France in the mid-1970’s. You might want to look at sexual politics and representations in the 1970’s and then compare them to today.

The second passage comes from page 56:

The important thing, in this affair, is not that these men shut their eyes or stopped their ears, or that they were mistaken; it is rather that they constructed around and apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment. The essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and falsehood, and that the truth of sex became something fundamental, useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short, that sex was constituted as a rpblem of truth. What needs to be situated, therefore is […] the progressive formation (and also transformations) of that “interplay of truth and sex” which was bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century, and which we may have modified, but, lacking evidence to the contrary, have not rid ourselves. Misunderstandings, avoidances, and evasions were only possible, and only had their effects, against the background of this strange endeavor: to tell the truth of sex. (56-57)

The “they” in the opening sentence referes to early psychoanalysts such as Freud. They were exploring “pathological sexual deviance” and other such “problems.” We might ask ourselves, 25 years after Foucault’s writing—is/are there still (a) "truth(s)" to sex? Where does it/they emerge?

A Little Levinas for Monday

2010-03-22T10:38:00.003-06:00

From the interview "Violence and the Face," published in the 1999 Alterity and Transcendence. Levinas responds to a question on how his work differs from traditional philosophical investment in "historicism, materialism, structuralism, ontology":

I don't say that all is for the best, and the idea of progress doesn't seem to me very reliable.

I thought that part deserved to stand there on its own. Sometimes I think the most powerful statements to me are quite simple. My favorite line from Derrida is a simple under-appreciated sentence from Archive Fever: Order is no longer assured. The line above isn't quite as sublimely simple to me, but its close. Anyways, here's the rest of the passage:

But I think that responsibility for the other man, or, if you like, the epiphany of the human face, constitutes a penetration of the crust, so to speak, of "being persevering itself in its being" and preoccupied with itself. Responsibility for the other, the "dis-interested" for-the-other of saintliness. I'm not saying men are saints, or moving toward saintliness. I'm only saying that the vocation of saintliness is recognized by all human beings as a value, and that this recognition defines the human. The human has pierced through imperturbable being; even if no social organization, nor any institution can, in the name of purely ontological necessities, ensure, or even produce saintliness. There have been saints.

Now replace saints with students. Or with teachers (both! at the same time!). Perhaps "learner" would work. Replace saintliness, especially in that final sentence, with education. I go back to my writing.

This is Much Better than a Flying Car

2010-03-16T11:03:00.003-06:00

Remember Geordi Laforge from Star Trek?

Well there's an article in the Guardian.uk on a device that translates impulses on the tongue into visual data, effectively allowing blind people to see. Seriously, sometimes science rocks.

Chickens, Eggs, Opinions, Identities

2010-03-04T12:29:00.003-06:00

Today I asked my classes which of the following is more true:

I pick my friends based on my beliefs
I pick my beliefs based on my friends

We were discussing the opening chapter to Crowley and Hawhee's Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, paying particular attention to the emphasis C & H place on ethos: "Communication researchers have discovered that people generally adopt the opinions of people they know and respect." What comes first (pardon the pun): the knowing or the people? I thought this a particularly interesting question when put aside C & H's supposition that you can change opinions without changing your identity. I'm not sure about that one.

I like the Crowley and Hawhee as a primer on rhetorical theory, and it matched up nicely with a number of the readings we have already done this semester (almost all can be traced back to Burke in one way or another): Corder on ethics and narratives, Lanham on "fluff and stuff," Lakoff on frames, Booth on the distinction between evidence and reason, and Tannen on agonism. But there was one part of the reading that rubbed me the wrong way--the statement: "we mean no disrespect when we say that religious beliefs and political leanings are ideological." I get skeptical whenever I hear the preference "we mean no disrespect" since that often means that the next clause contains the possibility of significant disrespect. I find that the case here. Putting religious belief and political leanings (leanings, could there be a more demeaning word here?!?) in such close proximity equates the two. Is it the same thing to be a democrat and to be a Christian? Even as a heathen, I'm going to guess the answer is "no." Nor do I think religious people would be likely to explicate their faith in the terms of C & H's follow-up sentences: "Quite the contrary: human beings need ideologies to make sense of their experiences in the world. Powerful ideologies such as religions and political beliefs help people to understand who they are and what their relation is to the world and to other beings."

Of course, two pages later I believe C & H expose their own [metaphysical] orientation (one that allows for such an easy equation between ideological necessity and religious conviction) when they describe Protagoras:

...the Older Sophist Protagoras taught that "humans are the measure of all things." By this he apparently meant that anything which exists does so by virtue of its being know or discussed by human beings. Because knowledge originates with human knowers, and not from somewhere outside them, there is no absolute truth that exists separately from human knowledge. Moreover, contradictory truths will appear, since everyone's knowledge differs slightly from everyone else's, depending on one's perspective and one's language. Thus Protagoras taught that at least two opposing and contradictory logoi (statements or accounts) exist in every experience.

They are speaking my language here--my metaphysical language. But I think identifying Protagoras as a metaphysical position is to acknowledge the explicit disrespect that such a position potentially engenders for someone of faith. At least, that "no disrespect" had my Levinasian sense tingling--to understand how orientations toward language and truth, rather than shielding themselves from offense, have to acknowledge their violence. Such is the ethical sensitivity that rhetorical training can make possible.

Skepticism Toward Logic in the Wake of the Holocaust

2010-03-03T12:59:00.002-06:00

The nicest part of teaching expository writing as blogging is the great variety of student projects I get to enjoy. This semester, I have one particularly talented student working on absurdist and existential literature. She recently read and commented on Ionesco's play Rhinocerus, connecting the play's critique of logic to a distrust of herd mentality and the Holocaust. I was writing on Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida this morning, particularly Levinas's distrust of positivity in "The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other," and I think traces of that essay can be found in my response to the student's post. Here it is:

The second half of the 20th century is dominated by the specter of the Holocaust. The values of the Modern Enlightenment are considered especially suspicious. Chief amongst them is the emphasis on logic--particularly on abstract thinking divorced from contextual reality. If you think about what we were talking about briefly in my office, then I think you can already see this. Heidegger's treatment of Being in terms of a verb, for instance, is an effort to put the philosopher's attention more on matters of movement than stasis. Movement requires a field of activity, and elements of time. Pure abstraction does not.

How this concerns the Holocaust is a more difficult question! But, I think it is safe to say that the divorce of philosophy from the practicalities of everyday life initiates an answer. Also, of course, is the matter of an unwavering faith in logic (since, logically, syllogistically, one can argue for the termination of an entire people.

Jews are evil.

Evil needs to be eradicated.

Eradicating evil is righteous.

Therefore, it is righteous to eradicate Jews.

There is an immediate need to discredit the possibility of such a syllogism, and to devalue any kind of thinking that resembles such form. What is needed is a philosophy dedicated to calling first principles to attention, to putting them under scrutiny, to rejecting the possibility of an unquestionable first principle.

And, as you point out, one way of doing this is to question, irrevocably, the herd mentality. But I am sometimes skeptical here--the idea that it is only in groups that evil occurs. That sounds to me sometimes like too much of a cop-out (i.e., none of us could produce such horror individually, it is only when in a group that such atrocity could occur). I firmly believe humans to be capable of atrocity no matter the number. But, I also like to hold onto the possibility that they are equally capable of love. It is a matter of rhetoric: kairos, identification, and mood. Most importantly, it is an orientation, an approach, an attitude (Burke fans nod here, right?). Here, of course, I am understanding rhetoric as a particular way-of-being-with-the-world, one that self-reflexively takes into account the unaccountability of others and conceptualizes power as a group process.

New Ok Go Video

2010-03-02T11:31:00.002-06:00

Honestly, I'm not really a big fan of this band. I thought their first hit, "Here it Goes Again," was catchy but borderline annoying. The video was engaging. That said, the single extended shot chicanery in their new video is quite cool:

And I appreciate the self-referential jab at the success of "Here it Goes Again" around 2:40.

There Can Only Be Five

2010-02-27T09:42:00.004-06:00

Yesterday an MFA student considering a PhD in R/C asked me for a short list of articles to introduce her to R/C. She has been accepted to several strong programs, but is debating between pursuing R/C or Creative Writing Studies. I came up with a list of five:

"The Politics of Historiography: Octalog"
Hairston, Maxine. "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing"
Worsham, Lynn. "The Question Concerning Invention: Hermeneutics and the Genesis of Writing"
Corder, Jim W. “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love”
Yancey, Kathleen. "Writing in the 21st Century"

My idea was that articles 1 and 2 would give an idea of the goals, obligations, purposes of rhetoric/composition, article 3 provides an example of how critical theory can interrupt those goals, article 4 represents Burkian rhetoric and an engaged response to the cliched Platonic "rhetoric is unethical" argument, and article 5 suggests the directions the field will be attending to over the next decade.

So, how did I do? Anyone propose a swap? (Don't add anything without taking something out please). What are other people's lists for five significant essays to introduce someone to the scope of Rhetoric and Composition?

And, if I could add a sixth, it would be Jarratt's "The First Sophists and Feminism." But decisions had to be made.

Penny Arcade on DRM and Piracy

2010-02-19T10:12:00.002-06:00

An outstanding post today over at Penny Arcade dealing with Ubisoft's most recent measure to combat piracy. Essentially, the game requires you to have constant access to the internet--any break in connectivity, and "poof" you lose all your progress. I spend quite a bit of coin on a top of the line Verizon connection, and I can say that my connectivity is in constant flux. I can't imagine a real world scenario where this kind of DRM isn't going to drive someone batshit crazy. As PA's Tycho comments, it will fail fast and hard.

But I really recommend Tycho's post today precisely because it points to the need for cooperation, and not competition, between the two sides (publishers and pirates). Publishers have to recognize, as mxrk indicated a long time ago, that most people are willing to pay for a product so long as it is convenient and the price is reasonable. And pirates have to realize that continually justifying the outright theft of property will undermine any validity to their initial objections (accessibility, owner's rights to transfer and duplicate, time displacement, fair pricing). If things continue to escalate, then, as Tycho writes, "nobody wins."

Climategate...

2010-02-15T09:56:00.003-06:00

...clearly the work of some committed philosophizers, right Casey? I'm glad John Quiggin has the rhetorical ability to set the record straight. But, seriously, yeeesh.

Lanham on Style

2010-02-10T12:23:00.006-06:00

Here's some brief snippets from Richard Lanham's 1974 Style: An Anti-Textbook. 30 years old, Lanham's scathing assessment on the academic and public valuing of prose style perhaps rings more true today than at the time of its publication (during the "birth" of R/C). I say "perhaps" because, as Lanham's more recent publications suggest, the development of new media and digital communication suggest possibilities for reinvesting a wider interest in elements of style. Reconfiguration generates new ways of seeing [appreciating].

On Why Freshman Composition courses are destined to fail:

The usual Freshman Composition course takes as its subject something called (old-fashion) Rhetoric or (new-fashion) Basic Communication Skills. New or old, it is basically the medieval trivium, or first arts course, a progress of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The medieval student spent all his time on these three until he got is B.A.. Students now get ten [or sixteen] weeks. (10)

On a cultural aversion to revision/artistry as feminine or superficial [irony alert]:

Only a child would do this. What's the point in spending a lot of time prettying things up? The thought is what counts. Style is for English teachers and editors. To be interested in it, especially for a man, is like being interested in furnishing his house--women's work.

On the social criticism of writing, good and bad:

Good prose does not come from a one-time inoculation. It has to be sustained by the standards of a society, by that society's sense of style. It has to be encouraged, appreciated, rewarded. Its countervailing ugliness has to be mocked. None of this now happens in America.

I am thinking particularly of this last point after my upper-division writing classes' previous workshops. In short (and I have a post on this coming), I had the class look at the first sentences to all of the posts written during the previous week (about 40 in total). Out of the 40, I would say about 32 of them were terrible. And I told my students this explicitly--that I was holding the first sentences workshop because these sentences were terrible. One student, a budding future English teacher, suggested that this was not good pedagogical practice (as did one of my colleagues). But I am calling Lanham to my defense--don't I, as a writing instructor--have to blame as well as praise? Doesn't my honest assessment lend more value to my feedback? Because I can say that, after the workshop, the amended first sentences I saw displayed far more sophistication. (Here again I nod to my own personal pedagogical narrative, my ties to Dr. David Zern's emphasis on disequilibrium culled from Freudian psychoanalysis-- although this time I am clearly back in the mode of making my students uncomfortable).

On another note, more and more watching Project Runway influences my teaching persona.