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