FoolsCap

Desperation for subject lines sets in when I find I’m resorting to homonyms.  Homonyms!

I know I’ve been the object of some fun-making regarding my devotion to a certain prof’s work, both in the classroom and out of it; of course, much of that is self-deprecating fun-making too: I admit I’ve been sort of in thrall to the prof in question.  I try not to use this space for too much self-analysis anymore, so I’ll spare my reader(s?) my third-rate psychoanalysis on why that should be the case.  In any event, while it seems fruitless to deny his or her influence on my work, this prof is soon to be leaving my institution, it seems like a valid opportunity to start crafting–or at least, looking for ways to craft–a scholastic identity apart from being this prof’s acolyte but still admitting his or influence on my research interests.

And no, dear reader, I don’t kid myself that all the efforts toward ambiguity and anonymity in the above paragraph mean you won’t figure out to whom I’m referring.  Hint: with all due respect, it’s not Cannon Schmidt.

Anyway, as I have so often in the past, I start with this prof’s work as a way to begin my own post.  Particularly, what is written here:

Those conversations, implicit and explicit, can occur in a shopping list (which is one example Trimbur provides from his textbook; a writing some students dispute and label irrelevant) or on a website or in an encounter, or in a book, and so on. This writing, however, is not, as Trimbur offers, symbolic. Its process or flow does not represent another experience or encounter. It is writing itself. The challenge is to ask: how does one generate or maintain such relations with references? How does one teach that writing within an already established network that poses references as proof or confirmation?

I was revisiting this post (from January 07) because I’ve been using Trimbur’s textbook, The Call to Write, for one of the courses I’m teaching this summer.

Granted, I’m still a new teacher, so I don’t make any claim to owning an expertise or even having the necessary body of research to draw from when framing some question and comments that follow.  My goal here, if anything, is to ask some questions about my pedagogy and (hopefully) get some helpful feedback from more experienced readers.

I’m teaching two classes this semester.  One is good ol’ 1020.  No problems there (but I am growing bored with the syllabus so might draft a new one for fall).  The situation for my other course is a bit more interesting: I’m teaching a writing workshop for my university’s Center for Chicano and Boricua Studies (CBS); the program & the workshop (there’s also a maths workshop) are designed to lay the groundwork so that students can enter collegiate level courses in these subjects and be prepared to perform at the expected level.  I’ve decided to teach the course as sort of a prelude to 1010; in fact, I’m already committed to teaching a CBS-sponsored section of 1010 in fall with these students and a handful of other CBS students.

What has been instructive for me, thus far, is the difference between expectations in teaching for CBS and for my own dep’t.  My dep’t (at present at least) allows its GTAs an extremely wide latitude in how/what they teach in their composition courses.  For example, I teach from Scholes/Comley/Ulmer’s Text Book and have a very strong emphasis on technology and hypertext (in this syllabus at least); many of my peers from this year’s crop of GTAs opted for World is a Text and took a more conventional cultural studies approach.  My dep’t, to the best of my knowledge happily accomodates both pedagogies and that has been a source of much pleasure and relief for me.

The organizer and administrator of the CBS program, a friend and colleague named Ethriam Brammer, has been very gracious about my role in the program.  While the CBS program has specific goals of its own, Ethriam has made very clear that I have pedagogical autonomy in both this workshop and in the fall 1010 course; CBS sets no expectations from me other than academic rigor and a commitment to the mission and goals of the Summer Enrichment Program.

This will be my first time teaching 1010 and in drafting the syllabus I moved away from the sort of textual research work used in Text Book to (what I assume is) a more conventional stance of writing pedagogy.  Why? 

One thing I’ve picked up from teaching two courses from Scholes et al. is that students have expectations of their own; on the recently returned student evals from last semester, one student complained that they didn’t think they’d learned anything about academic writing from my course.  (I had expected this reply, but it still stung a little.)  This could mean at least a couple of things.  First, this student didn’t understand the connection between the research and (sorry, Jeff) critical thinking I was asking of them and conventional forms of academic research.  This, in turn, would indicate a gap in my pedagogy: I failed to make clear these connections or to establish their value.  Another suggestion, one that is most problematic for my formative pedagogy, is that the value of such text work for academic use is nil.  (As Jeff might counsel, drawing on Sirc: But do we choose to teach writing simply for school or for life?)  Of course, I don’t thinkthat such theories of writing and research are without value, but having a student make that claim so emphatically gave me pause to consider the possibility.

Given, then, that students have expectations of their own, as do departments and centers of study and universities, the experience of the novice instructor (like myself) can sometimes seem a precarious one.  While I like the emphasis on textuality, mystorical work, and poststructural theory that Scholes et al. incorporate into Text Book, I didn’t really feel it was appropriate for the CBS course.  I think, in part, it had to do with my own boredom with parts of the syllabus that uses it, but also because I had some uncertainty about what level of writing development I would see in these students.  (Thus far, results have been encouraging.)  So I wanted to approach the workshop (and 1010 as well) in a somewhat more. . .eh. . .conservative fashion in order to be able to better help any students who were having particular difficulties with the assignments.  That is, I wanted to be able to focus more on improving student writing than on explaining the theories and value of and behind the work I ask students to do in my current 1020 syllabus.

But, at the same time, and after looking at some sample 1010 syllabi, I didn’t want to just push the 5P theme on these students either, and the sample syllabi that I looked at relied too hevaily on that model and texts that taught that model for my interests.  So I chose Trimbur’s The Call to Write for its emphasis on context and connectedness in writing as well a stress on the flexibility of the essay form.

The word essay is derived from the French word essai, which means to try or test out.  This derivation captures the spirit of the essay as a genre of writing in which writers invent forms to embody their purposes.  Many examples of writing in this book might be described as an essay as well as, say, a memoir, a commentary, or a proposal.  The exact meaning of the term essay has been debated by scholars in literary studies, rhetoric, and composition.  Some want to restrict it to a particular type of literary or journalistic essay that uses a personal voice and other self-revelatory features to fashion experience and observation into writing.  Others use it more broadly to refer to writing tasks where the form in open and flexible.  In this chapter, we’ll use the term essay in its broader sense, as a catch-all category that includes a range of other genres.  For our purposes, the defining feature of the essay will be the openness and the flexibility it gives writers to shape their thoughts, feelings, and experiences into written forms.

I quote Trimbur at length here because I think the explanation of the essay here reveals something important of both why I chose this text and why I’ve always like the essay personally.  Pedagogically, I like Trimbur’s emphasis on openness and flexibility and invention–that form is something that is created by the writer rather than something the writer is slavishly beholden to.  In this sense, then, I could (if I chose) teach the "Discourse" assignment as an example of the endless mutability of the essay form–or the cut-up, or, or. 

There’s a lot more I’d like to say about Trimbur and 1010 and pedagogy, but my thoughts are drifting.  Perhaps later.

So, for a couple of weeks now I’ve been wanting to post about Grammatology and haven’t.  No suspense, it’s just ‘cos I’ve been lazy.  I am trying to commit myself to the following for July:

1. One article per day
2. 25-30 pages of a major text per day
3. At least one, and hopefully two, substantive blog posts a week in response to my reading.

So, any "You can do it!"s from readers and friends would be encouraging.

So: Derrida.  I’ve read through Spivak’s intro, the "Exergue," "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing," and about halfway through "Linguistics and Grammatology"–right now, I’m stuck in the middle of "The Outside Is the Inside."

My text is marked on every page, a crazy mish-mash of underlined passages and marginal notes, so rather than go through on a note-by-note basis, I’d like to just throw out some ideas that Derrida seems to be working through–playing through might be more appropriate of course.

It’s hard to know where to start, because as I try to describe one idea, I recall another, and that seems to be the proper starting point.  Which, from what I can understand, is at least part of Derrida’s goal through deconstruction: to complicate our assumptions of genesis and of telos.  This is fitting, giving Derrida’s aversion to binary epistemology: alongside in/out and presence/absence, we should include begin/end.  (Here, as throughout this post, I seem to offer an ineloquent and reductive version of Derrida’s text.  So it goes.)

Which is, at least in part it seems, crucial to the idea of the text (as opposed to that of the book).  The book begins and ends, and in this sense offers an epistemology of limited scope: limited, isolated, solitary.  What I’m not wholly sure I understand yet is the mechanism JD uses to move from book to text–I think I understand, or am beginning to understand, what each represents for JD, but the precise moment of transition seems vague.  For me, the answer rests somewhat in the use that Derrida makes of his own sources: Hegel, Saussure, Rousseau, Nietzsche.  Derrida doesn’t simply summarize and condense their respective arguments so that he can move into a stance of mere comparison and contrast; rather, he moves in and around and between and through these sources (playing with them, as it were–frolicking almost in the pleasure of the text) to demonstrate their own points of deconstruction and then–through that play–building his own claims about speech, text, and writing. 

What Derrida offers, then–or at least the offer that I see on hand–is an idea(l) of an infinite text, an unbounded text that accumulates and accomodates contradiction and conflict through its complex structure.  That is, for Derrida (and I admit I might have learned this through Spivak or another source, but it rings true after reading the text), conflict, ambiguity, and contradiction are. . .okay.  His project doesn’t seem to be finding a way to eliminate contradiction nor to (as Adorno/Horkheimer suggest about the culture industry) demonstrate its cooption and commodification, but rather maybe to ask whether texts aren’t in fact built on contradiction–that contradiction is on some level a necessity in textual production?

Of course, it’s an easy gesture to point to the Web as a prototypical "infinite text."  I think that makes sense, but it seems too easy as well–as though recognizing the scope and scale of the Web is the end of the task.  The question I would ask, then, is whether the Web (if we want to think about it as The Infinite Text and hence reify it and leave it uninterrogated) functions in the way that Derrida demonstrates texts can and do.  This is the germ of what could prove an interesting project, assuming of course noone has beat me to it.

Actually, a question about my own idea in the previous paragraph that makes me wonder whether I’ve understood the grammatology or not.  Is JD’s idea that text in infinite or rather that the boundaries we impose upon it are arbitrary and socially constructed?  By saying "the outside is the inside" or even "the outside is the inside" is Derrida necessarily offering a rejection of inside-ness or outside-ness or rather just demonstrating that the boundary is fluid and permeable?  In either case, the question of how to treat the textuality of the Web remains, but obviously the answer(s) would differ greatly depending on which reading of Derrida is right.

[I think, too, that the idea/l of the infinite text is in some ways a Romantic one, in which the text replaces nature as the inspiration and measure for humanity.  In turn, if this notion of the infinite text has any merit, it would bear an interesting comparison with the Kantian aesthetic and sublime.]

Another point of interest: deconstruction is, among other things, an invention strategy.  On two levels, too.  First, of course, deconstruction gives us something to do with texts: to deconstruct them as Derrida does to discover their  contradiction and ambiguities.  Of course, if we think of deconstruction simply as a hermeneutic in this fashion, we realize that all branches of theory are invention strategies.  The problem, of course, is that working with them merely as hermeneutics is sort of a one-trick approach, right?  I have my feminist/poststructural/modernist/postcolonial lens and that’s how I’ll view this text.  So in that sense a hermeneutics seems contrary to Derrida’s project because a hermeneutics (apart from assuming a particular value for the logos) only understands a text through its own lens rather than opening it up to show how it creates meaning.  This, however, points to deconstruction’s value as a heuristic: if we can understand how texts build meaning and construct meaning, then we can employ those strategies for our own ends: as Rice might say, we can re/appropriate them, rearrange them. remix them.

Finally–for this post at least–I’m interested in something Derrida suggests and alludes to but hasn’t (and perhaps might not) addressed directly: the connection between writing and epistemology.  Derrida is critical, of course, of the logos, presence, and phonocentrism, which I guess do constitute certain assumptions about the organization, validity, and construction of knowledge.  But given that Derrida establishes "writing" as an alternative to the tyranny of the logos, how does that effect rhetoricians and other scholars of writing?  I don’t have an answer, but another idea that’s been brewing in me little head of late is precisely this point where rhetoric and epistemology overlap–for Aristotle, (as I’ve suggested before via Heidegger), rhetoric is the task of establishing persuasively valid knowledge–which plainly points to questions of epistemology anyway.

Oh yeah–metaphor is just all over the place.  I’ll have to do a special "All Metaphor" post on JD’s comments on metaphor.

I just finished reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five for the first time.  At a later point, perhaps, I’ll share some thoughts on it.  Today, however, just a brief sample from the text, one I found rather attractive in light of other interests.

From Vonnegut, Kurt.  Slaughterhouse Five, or, The Children’s Crusade.  1969.  New York: Dell, 1991.

. . .Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message–describing a situation, a scene.  We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other.  There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.  There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.  What we love in our books are the depths or many marveous moments seen all at one time.

There is first the echo (or rather, prefiguring) or Sirc’s box logic, as well as (interestingly) a rejection of the seriality his C & W talk seemed to advocate.  Yet this also recalls (for myself at least) Rice’s hip-hop pedagogy, in "1963 Hip-Hop Machine:" a temporal invention (as I think Rice as described it elsewhere) that chooses as its topos (here heavily metaphorized) a year, a moment, and event and parses out its significance in different discursive registers.  No particular insight here, just echoes.

Some afterthoughts from a conversation M. Karcher and I had during C & W.

M. was trying to find the so what? question for her upcoming presentation and we were batting some ideas around.  She was presenting on the online Snakes on a Plane phenomenon (or maybe phenomena) but hadn’t yet found a way to make it of pedagogical/rhetorical interest.  One question we were both interested in: How to make available a forum for students to use that encouraged the sort of self-sponsored, invested, creative writing that was evidenced by the fan communities around this film?  What made this difficult to answer is also pointed to in the fate of the film itself: New Line, the film’s producing studio, co-opted the fan creations and incorporated fan art, fan writing, fan music etc into their own marketing strategies–and, famously, into the production of the film itself.

Quinn–whose last name, sorry, I don’t have at hand–had by this point joined our little discussion, and he ruled out blogs, since his experience had been that student blogs just become reified as class work–his past students didn’t invest in blogs in a substantive way and the resulting work was little more than a typical reading journal, albeit in a digital medium.

[While I admit the journal-ization of blogs is a very real risk for instructors using them, I still like using them.  Even if the content is little more than reading journal entries, they’re still journals I don’t have to carry to and fro and every week.]

the problem, M. and I decided, was that students cannot escape the institution of the classroom.  Even were we to assure our pupils that we were taking a solely observational role in opening a forum to them, we would still be present as observers, and as Heisenberg teaches us, even an inactive observer changes the nature of that which is observed.  This is important, because what M. and I had suggested was a forum in which students could feel free to offer critique and feedbac on the instructor’s pedagogy, syllabus etc. without fear of reprisal.  Another problem, of course, is the obvious potential for conflicts of interest in such a forum being created by instructors–to be of any value (to students) it seems as though it would have to be student generated.

But the phrase I used to describe the instructor willing to implement such a forum has stuck with me since the conversation: "transparent pedagogy."  I’m not claiming to have coined it, but the idea has been floating around in the back of my mind of late.  What would constitute a transparent pedagogy?  Is it appropriate to incorporate different levels of transparency?  How might different participants in the university–students (both undergrad and grad), instructors, administration–benefit or be harmed by transparent pedagogy?  And, perhaps of more immediate interest as a possible entry for future C&W work (if noone beats me to it), how have students imposed their own forms of transparency via such sites as Rate My Professors?  How do/should instructors make the reasons for their pedagogical choices and their course material apparent to students?

Do we more to gain or to risk by becoming transparent pedagogues?  Feedback, as always, is appreciated.

So here’s some [further and more elaborate and specific] things I’ve gleaned from the C & W experience.

This conf seems to fall into a more practical area of the broader field of C&W, in that many of the presentations were oriented toward reporting on new software packages, new websites, classroom practices, online social trends, etc.  In addition to this, I observed a strong interest in literacy and literacy practices and how they’re changed by an engagement with computers and writing and associated pedagogical practice.  While all of this is of interest, I found it limiting in that I’m developing a keener interest in theory.  This suggests neither that the C&W presenters aren’t grounded in theory nor that I’m dissociating theory from practice.  Rather, I found myself longing for some presentations that were more invested in theory–part., of course, those theorists I’m interested in right now–and that used individual teaching practice or software models or whatever as examples of theory put into practice or as reflecting certain theoretical tropes or something.

Why?

Well I think part of it is that I’m still catching up to a lot of the folks at the conf, so there might very well be references to theory embedded in their talks that I didn’t recognize–what my class and I discussed as passive intertext (as opposed to active intertext–a great discussion, but I’m not sure, on second thought, if itext can be passive after all.  More later.).  So there’s that.  Also, however, other than outright stealing someone else’s assignment, I’m not really sure yet how to turn what I learn at a conf into my own pedagogy and practice.  This will come in time, I am sure, but for now (curiously) I’m more inclined to approach theory and make that work into pedagogy/practice.

The other lesson here, of course, is that one needs to learn the details/goals/strengths/weaknesses of confs just as one must learn the same of journals . . . if C&W is more praxis and empiricist, I might need to choose on occasion which I attend, esp since as Rice mentions, there will on occasion be scheduling conflicts.

What follows is some feedback and commentary on the panels I was able to attend.

So I have a possible line on joining a 4C’s panel submission with some colleagues from Fresno (some of whom will be joining MSU in the fall).  The theme of the panel is "Writing the Material(ity) of the Body: Inscribing Change through Rhetoric(s) of Corpo(reality)."  I think this might be a good place to use the Lennon project–I’m thinking now of using the Lennon project to investigate the role corporeality (in this case, the celebrity body) in persuasion and rhetorical critique–and I could even do some new media work here by focusing on the role not just of Lennon’s body but specifically of his mediated body as the site for rhetorical critique–what Lennon does with his body should be what the reader-viewer does with his or hers . . .

Feedback from the unusual suspects is welcome–er, usual suspects.  That’s the ticket.

As a post script to an as-yet-unscripted post: the Lennon project is proving suprisingly versatile.  I’ve been able to think about in at least several dimensions thus far:

• as protest rhetoric
• as material/embodied rhetoric
• as mediated rhetoric
• as celebrity rhetoric
• as site of rhetorical critique
• as pop cultural rhetoric
• as entry into looking at historical rhetorical scholarship
• as avant-garde-influenced rhetoric

On one hand, I think it’s great that one project has proven so copious in terms of possible scholarship . . . maybe, in this instance, I can (finally) say I’m thinking rhetorically?

On the other . . . I don’t want to get known as "The John Lennon Guy" and have this one (versatile) project define my early scholastic career.  Similarly, I don’t want to get too absorbed in Lennon and lose sight of my other interests in metaphor, psychogeography, new media, and technology.  So, things to keep in mind.

So, astute readers will notice, I’ve deleted a recent post.  Why, Mitch? I expect those same astute readers to ask.

Some bits of my rationale:

1. I want to note it wasn’t a political decision.  That is, I didn’t remove the post because I was fearful of rubbing someone the wrong way or because I felt I was crossing some line I hadn’t intended to.  In turn, I’m not stressing this point in order to make myself seem like some fearless crusader for grad student autonomous speech or anything like that–’cos I’m not.  The post in question was carefully composed in order to show respect and appreciation for those faculty and colleagues to whom I made reference–so what I’m saying now is that I don’t think I crossed any line.
2. Faithful readers will no doubt recall the early days of FoolsCap when every other post was devoted to self-pity and professional anxieties.  Although I maintain that neither was my goal in the deleted post, several responses to that post felt like–and that’s my own feeling about them, not the authors’ intentions nor their motives–I had been reduced to a blubbering sop and needed consolation.  Having said that. . .those who responded to the post (all both of you), your words of encouragement etc. are greatly appreciated.
3. Nevertheless.  Grading student papers, I came across a fascinating typo that’s been stuck in my craw: "I happened to me."  There’s something there that I find compelling–that subjectivity/selfhood is an event that befalls us.  Heidegger writes: "A mood assails us."  I think there’s something like that Heideggerian moment happening here: there are times when, despite our best efforts to maintain whatever composure we fancy, moments of blatant self-concern and self-involvement and self-interest overwhelm us.  I think that is what sort of got reflected in the deleted post: I happened to me.
4. And, finally: I have sort of a fatalistic outlook on things: que sera, sera and so on.  Yet although I feel like our control over our fates and destinies is somewhat limited, one thing I think we have some control over–or at least I like to think we do–is how we represent ourselves.  And, in the end, that’s the most important reason behind the deletion: I just didn’t like the image of Mitch that post presented.  Two thoughts connected to this: First, a return to earlier comments about Meish.org … the blog is me(ish), it’s sort of me, parts of me etc.  And I want to control how much of me it is.  Second, and connected to that, the blog–or any writing space, really–is thus a metaphor for the writing subject.  Writing is the space where I am (me)diated.  Now there’s an idea to dig into.  There’s a potential something there, right, yo?  Assuming noone’s beat me to it.

Oh, and a shout-out to Rice: My copy of More than Cool Reason is on its way from the friendly folks at Amazon, along with Of Grammatology and A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds.  I’m planning a very theory summer reading list.