More of Mischievous Mike’s Mental Miscellany:
On Psychogeography
I was thinking about my own post a while back about the search engine Kartoo and its claims to "map" the results of your search. The word Benjamin uses (that I couldn’t recall) is "psychogeography." I think the idea of mapping the information (ala Kartoo) interested me because it recalled Benjamin’s idea of psychogeography, that, in a sense, one might be able to conduct a mental cartography and find the lay of one’s own land, to jumble up my metaphors.
In my earlier post, the question I tried to pose (and failed to do so) might be rendered thus: Does using this map/geography metaphor accurately represent the way that Ulmer/Sirc et al base their work on Benjamin? That is, given both Ulmer and Sirc see something of value in Benjamin’s work (Ulmer associating the psychogeography with the chora/widesite of the mystory; Sirc modeling box-logic on The Arcades Project) does the metaphor stand up to scrutiny?
Perhaps. At first, my reaction was no; if mystory/box-logic/virtual urbanism is about finding value in the unknown, then shouldn’t our "maps" be marked "Here there be dragons" or "terra incognita?" Which is to say, the mapping metaphor has its limits, given the ostensible purpose of the Ulmerian/Sircian theories. If our knowledge is mapped, there’s nothing to discover–only to see what others saw before us.
But. . .Part of the appeal (at least in Ulmer’s work) is the insistence not on generating "original" work, but finding patterns that are meaningful to us within the established field of knowledge. Which is to say that maybe the mapping metaphor still works, with a little twist. Let’s say (using Sirc as an inspiration) that our psychogeography is a map of Paris. (The real Paris, not Le Corbusier’s modernist grid.) Perhaps our maps only show the landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, l’Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre. It remains up to us to fill in the roads, the paths that we take to get from spot to spot. Each of us may find ourselves cutting through different rues and [insert different French word for street]s, but we still see the same monuments–just as we each approach a text (here, Parisian sites) coming from our own discursive experiences. In the end, then, our maps will each show the winding, circuitous paths we’ve taken as we wandered through the city; while we maye have each visited the same sites, our experience of arriving there (and how that affects our relationship with the destination) will be unique.
On Pedagogical Pleasure
A week or so ago, I put a call out to Jeff in one of my posts asking for some recommendations for things to read about the pleasure of pedagogy from the instructor’s POV. [I won’t keep you in suspense: he very indly obliged.] But I was thinking: was I too quick to enforce the student/teacher binary?
Hm. On one hand, I don’t mean to suggest that teachers find the same pleasure in the writing classroom that students do. On the other, I realize that my earlier question sort of separated the two issues in a way that might not hold true. [I admit here that I haven’t had a chance to pursue Jeff’s recommendations, so it’s possible [nay, probable] that I’m unconsciously drawing on someone else’s work.]
For example: let’s say I assign a given paper. We’ll call it Paper X. My students hate Paper X. Whether through faulty assignment design, ill defined expectations, unrealistic demands, whatever: this paper is just plain bad. So my students do it, but the work they produce is really poor (for reasons that are not really their fault). I, in response, think that my class just utterly botched Paper X rather than admitting its faults as an assignment. I (might) resent their (perceived) failure to comply with my (poorly explained and unjustified) expectations for Paper X. Their displeasure becomes my displeasure becomes their displeasure becomes. . .
So, it would appear, then, that one goal behind trying to teach toward student pleasure (both taking pleasure in writing and applying pleasure to writing) is, in effect, also an attempt to guarantee my pleasure. As I inadvertently discovered in an earlier post: If it’s something I’d want to write, it’s something I’d want to read–and vice versa.
Intertext & Archetypes
So, I was thinking abot Jos. Campbell earlier. I try not to, but it happened. (Hey, I’ve got to have someone to whip on now that I’ve discovered Derrida.)
Campbell’s (by way of Jung) stress on mythic archetypes started me thinking about intertextuality. On one hand, the very idea of archetype seems to coincide nicely with intertext; in a way, it’s the ultimate intertext, forming the model for every subsequent variant of the archetype–all texts derived from the archetype share that structure.
But I wonder if that’s not a limited reading of both intertext and archetypes. First, my feeling is that the archetype is something more than mere model. . .there’s the collective unconscious aspect to it that suggests that somehow humans, as story-telling and story-consuming creatures, are wired to respond to certain given narrative forms over others: the quest, the dying god, whathaveyou. The archetype transcends text (if that is possible?) and exists. . .elsewhere?
Second, does intertext simply means that two texts have something in common? Hm. On one hand, I think yes, at its most basic level, that’s exactly what intertext means. More specifically, it’s less that the two texts share any given "objective" feature than that a given reader recalls textual details that texts share and forms the association between texts. But, for intertext to work, I think, that association has to be applied–it has to affect our responses to the texts. I can recognize that any given two texts both use a common motif, but does that matter if I fail to understand the differences/similarities in how that motif is used in each text? Which is to ask: is intertext in the text, or in the reader?
