End of Semester Blues

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

Institutional Responsibility

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.

Assessment from a Poetic Perspective

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).