FoolsCap

Loyal readers shouldn’t express surprise at the awful pun today: you should have seen it coming.

Some afterthoughts from the HASTAC panel "Remediating English Studies" held today in the UGL’s Bernath Auditorium:

First: I was disappointed Grusin was unable to attend; I would like to have heard his comments about his work (although Shaviro did a fine job explaining the theory of remediation, I thought).  I’m already somewhat familiar with Rice’s and Shaviro’s work (see, oh, I dunno, any random post herein), and I was looking forward to hearing more about Grusin’s scholarship.  I’m sure another opportunity to do so will present itself anon.

Second: While I think both Rice and Shaviro had valuable contributions, I admit I didn’t hear much that presented something new for me to think about.  This is not a failure of scholarship on either speaker’s part, to be sure; rather, many of the issues they addressed I’ve already read/seen/heard explored in their work elsewhere.  So, maybe I wasn’t part of the audience that the panel was aimed at.  Nevertheless, it never hurts to hear familiar ideas in new ways (to be remediated?).

Still, a couple of points I found worth considering:

I find Rice’s interest in eroding boundaries intriguing.  In particular, of course, the boundaries that exist between disciplines.  If Rice is right that academia is invested perpetuating divisions between research interests, it seems to leave itself little room to grow: If rhetorical practice is moving toward a networked/databased (?) model of work, then the old print-based, linear, monological (and mono-logical–one form of logic) form of scholarship is moving toward obsolesence.

What Rice advocates (often explicitly) is a form of scholarship that is electrate, radial, and polylogical (mental note: remember to read Peter Krieg on polylogic).  It is the openness of new media work in rhetcomp that attracts me: my interests lie in literature, language, film, television, sequential narrative art, media. . .rhetcomp work (admittedly inspired largely through the work Rice has exposed me to) seems to allow for these disparate interests far more readily than specializing in any one of them would allow.

Shaviro’s second presentation, on Second Life, was far more provocative (for me) than the earlier presentation on blogs.  This SL presentation I found was aso of more interest to me than last month’s Shaviro talk on MMO communities and commerce theory (only because I often felt in over my head at the earlier talk).

I admit, based on Shaviro’s earlier talk on SL, that I hadn’t conceived of it as a space for pedagogical work.  It seems the potential is certainly there, and already being capitalized on.  (Although, from my own experience of SL’s interface, it will be at least several years before I incorporate it into my pedagogy.  But still something to think about.)  Despite not making the connection explicit, I think Shaviro’s demonstration of SL’s pedagogical potential neatly dovetails with elements Rice discussed about thinking of information as networked or databased, and things I picked up from Rice in 6010.  Teaching in SL means we expand the pedagogical site of the university; literally, of course, a SLU (Second Life University) could have students enrolled globally.  Yet it also points to another expansion: by collapsing the divide between classroom and life (whether real, first, or second), our pedagogy can aspire to teach in (or maybe through) new spheres of personal interaction and social engagement.

This is what Rice means (or what I understand him to mean) in answering my question by saying that everything is a pedagogical resource.  (I see what he means, but I should have been more specific in my question; I didn’t really get the answer I was looking for.  Alas.)  In a sense, this is an extension (or at least a correlation) of Ulmer’s popcycle/mystory and Benjamin’s psychogeography, both attempts to reflect that subjectivity is not isolated into monologic strands of meaning, but that it is often (if not usually) a tangled knot of associations, influences, and connections (hence Shaviro’s book).  If there is any unique thread to the new media theory I’ve read (admittedly not much), it is this willingness to embrace and occupy the spaces where discourses overlap and inform one another.