FoolsCap

My brain has been fried by all the writing lately, what with seminar papers coming due.  But I still want to write here, in this space–indeed, I often had to resist writing here while drafting seminar papers.  This venue seems, in some ways, so much more compelling.  Is it the promise of instant feedback, or that I can respond to people’s comments–where I can’t exactly write Dr. Flatley a note about his comments on a seminar paper. . . .

Interesting things afoot on Rice’s blog of late to which I want to respond, at least in brief:

1) The emphasis not on what is new or not new, but rather on the changing work/writing space that shifts from hypertextual paths (Bolter) to networks (managing these environments/synching them/seeing them in relationship to one another on the desktop/browser).

Hmm. . .while my first instinct is to freak out–just as I’ve started getting some thoughts together on hypertext, networks come along and shift the whole paradigm–I’m not sure that it’s as big a leap as that gut reaction suggests.  In a sense, we might think of networks (and someone please correct me if I’m wrong) as hyper-hypertexts.  That is, if hypertext is the creation and use of connected texts, one way to think of networks is as the connection of texts that comprise connections–and, as Rice suggests, mananging those connections-within-connections, putting them to work in increasingly flexible, movable, and personalizable writing spaces.  What is compelling (for me at least and, understanding some of Rice’s interests, him as well) about these new spaces is how they seem unbounded by questions of genre (as he notes in his post) and just sort of unbounded generally.

For example, what does it mean to have a kairotic moment if your writing moves with you across writing spaces?  Marback pointed out in seminar last semester that kairos is at least somewhat dependent on physical space, and this leads to interesting questions here–mot only about kairos (is kairos the same at different workstations, or the same at work and home, or . . .?) but about the very "space" metaphor itself.  There is a tendency, at least from my limited exposure to the metaphor, to equate space with either

• medium:the blog is one space but print is another

or

• genre: the academic essay as space vs. (say) the personal narrative as space.

Of course, material spaces become spaces for writing as well–I’m thinking here of Rice’s HASTAC presentation, with his layered metaphors  of space, networks, and databases.  I’m not criticizing the space metaphor, here: I’m interested, in one hand, on its flexibility, but on the other I’m wary of getting too accustomed to one metaphor, regardless of its flexibility.  Still, the space metaphor seems to have some life in it yet, so the question then becomes more about how we adapt the space metaphor to acknowledge an increasingly unbounded understanding of writing.  One thing might need to be thought of: is our use of the space metaphor dependent on assumed boundaries?  If so, how do we work past that or accomodate those boundaries into new forms of writing–or, should we have boundaries?  Hmm.

And as long as I mentioned networks here, I can include the quick blurb for a thought on a possible project about them:  Heidegger mentions Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the first practical study of being-together (god I hate H’s neologisms).  If we can think of networks and network theory as also a study of being-together, how can we use that link to Aristotle to construct/perform a rhetoric that is inherently and essentially of, in, and, for the network?

2) And yet there comes a time when calls for awareness and activism must acknowledge not only their desire for change and eye-opening but the limitations of such acts in of themselves.

Admittedly, I sort of chose this sentence at semi-random to serve as the jumping-off point for something of my own.  It is tangentially related to Jeff’s post though.

In designing my FYC syllabus for this semester, I deliberately avoided doing the semiotics/cultural studies approach specifically because I couldn’t really convince myself that it was my responsibility to show my students how they’ve been oppresses and exploited by the culture industry.  For one thing, I’m not sure I buy the whole culture industry hypothesis.  For another, it seems awfully presumptuous of me to assume I can do so anyway.  I admire Berlin’s idea of social-epistemic rhetoric, but (maybe naively) I just don’t feel that cultural production is all that sinister.  (Though Marcuse’s "Affirmative Character of Culture" has been a big influence on me of late–but that is more about the ideological uses of culture than an outright suspicion of culture.)  Liberation sounds like a great ideal, but from who or what am I meant to be liberating my students?  Ideology?  Big Business?  Globalization?  The Man?  Whitey?

One trope I’ve observed in my students’ writing this semester is the rush to condemn popular culture/the media (or often, "The Media" as though it’s the brand name of an international conspiracy) for ideological constructions.  "’Culture’ teaches us . . ." or "’The Media’ tells us . . ." are usualy how such sentences begin.  On one hand, I admit, this might point to a weakness in my pedagogy–did I accidentally somewhere suggest that such a conspiracy was taking place?  On the other, I think it points to a certain degree of student awareness that we (as instrucutors) often teach with the aim in mind of bringing students into "awareness" or "critical consciousness" or something similar–and if students just plug in the buzz word du jour (the Media, Popular Culture, Ideology) they’ll show us, gosh darn it, that they’ve been enlightened and (in Townshend’s words) won’t get fooled again!  I find the appearance of this trope so interesting specifically because it’s been so absent from what we usually talk about in my class–which is more about texts and their relationship to other texts we’ve read.  It must indicate something, then, that students are recognizing this trope and exploiting it–not always (or even usually) with great accuracy or efficacy . . . but I wonder why it pops up so much.