Misunderstanding Ethos: Revenge of the Guy Who Knows X

Don’t call me a zero/I’m gonna be hero/like Phil Esposito/or the Kennedys…

-BNL

So my recent adventures with a number of people—not to name names—have brought me back to something I started discussing back in the first incarnation of the blog but tangled my feet up in not wanting to name names and sort of tripped over. I feel like maybe today is a good day to revisit it.

Is there something about having to write a lit review that makes some people in the academy think that if they can catalog that they know X,Y,Z suddenly their opinion and theorizing is superior? I consider it a broken attempt at establishing ethos, but apparently some people think it’s the best way to handle a discussion.

A point in case: discussing texts in a graduate seminar. Now I mean no disrespect to my peers. I’m really glad that some of the people I work with have read exhaustive amounts of specific scholars, but just as  I don’t think it’s useful for me to point out my exhaustive reading and research of Jay David Bolter before commenting on a Deb Brandt book, I don’t think it’s all that important that some people are in love with articulation theory.

We did a reading for material rhetorics this week on the Imperial Archive. One of the points it made over and over is that knowledge—in that archived form that never really, truly existed—was viewed as a fantastic power. It makes me wonder if that’s not what some people in the academy do. Maybe they create a theory-rich blanket to carry, Linus style, so that when they engage in conversation they have something that will protect them?

I wouldn’t mind this tendency, IF it didn’t seem to stifle conversation (and hence learning). But if I’m discussing something with a group of people, I want to know what they think of that thing. I don’t want to hear yet another interpretation of Latour (I can read Latour’s work) UNLESS it works in an interesting way to make new sense of what we’re discussing.

Now for those who don’t know me or my life at this point, please realize that what I’m saying is a direct response to people I am currently working around/with; I am by no means trying to cast judgment on those of you who have a favorite theorist that you carry around with you and dust off for important projects. I owe many of my ideas to the tools provided by people like Cindy Selfe, Carolyn Miller, Stuart Selber, Jim Porter, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Danielle DeVoss, Heidi McKee, Malea Powell and others.

But I don’t just randomly toss Dr. Selber’s triad of digital literacies on the table while we’re discussing Isocrates to deflect the fact that I’m not all that well versed in Isocratic scholarship. Instead I stay quiet until I see an entrance into the conversation. It’s not a performance piece, and I doubt anyone is keeping score.

I maded you a puzzle

But it wasn’t a rock/it was a rock lobster!

-The B52s

Bonus: What’s With the Remix Disrespect?

Pack my car/and leave this town/who would notice that I’m not around?
-BNL 

So I’m sitting at Julie’s place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice:

So students who can only remix don’t get practice thinking critically about culture — and it’s certainly possible to recognize remix culture and design assignments that ask them to think critically about it, without rejecting it out of hand as plagiarism.

I hate to take up the position of the Jeopardy judge and simply say “bzzzzzz, wrong!” but… that’s just wrong.

And I don’t mean to hurl an insult at Dr. Jerz, but… this is a case of looking in at something from the outside (I would assume, based on the admission later in the post that Jerz knows little about music) attempting to critique something without ever getting the insider’s perspective.

I would argue the exact opposite of the first portion of the quote (before the dash). But let’s also be realistic; if Jerz has encountered, or thinks he will encounter, a student who can only remix, he’s failed to keep track of public high schools in America. Every student who makes it through that system with any success—meaning 95% of our trad students—will know how to write a five paragraph essay. They will also try to do anything—including remix—in five paragraph form before they do anything else. And they will scream at us if we tell them five paragraph form is a thing of their past.

But beyond that, REMIX is a cultural rhetoric. I’ve taught classes with a number of texts (leading to research assignments, a practice I think first year college composition needs to abandon). With “classic” novels (The Grapes of Wrath, for example), students were less likely to engage with culture than with poetry (I taught a collection of Dickinson poems, a set of “minority author” poems consisting of Silko, Baraka, Hughes, etc., a book of Dylan Thomas), and were less willing to engage culture with the poetry than they were with film or comic books.

Then I started teaching using remix and the concept of comedy to shape how my students approached issues. If you show a classroom “Black Bush” by Dave Chapelle, and you discuss what it means to lampoon and remix a political situation in that way, the students will engage our culture on a profound level.

If you ask them to make their own remixes, you end up with things like the video below. Now I know some scholars would cringe at the idea that this reflects sophisticated thought, but let’s think for a moment about what a student would have to do to create this:

1.   Watch the Brokeback Mountain trailer carefully
2.   Scrape the music for use
3.    Find enough footage from the Star Wars films to create replacement shots
4.   Frame, edit, chop, screw, and remix

And while this is, on one level, very funny, there’s a sophisticated cultural critique that I think many traditional educators miss. The person who created this video has made a rather profound statement about our cultural understanding of same sex relationships by porting the issue from our expectations to something our culture holds sacred in a different way.

I realize there’s a terrible fear of plagiarism, and as someone who spent four years teaching—and three prior to that as a TA/writing tutor—at an open admissions college, I know it’s an issue we have to literally drill students about. This is not an excuse to avoid remix, though. That’s a strawman built by people who don’t want to embrace the changes digital media, web 2.0, and a whole generation of children raised on the internet bring to the table.

Quintilian, the sage of Rome, advised that we teach our students by having them copy the oratory (and writing, I suppose) of those who were highly successful.

Shall I charge him with encouraging plagiarism now, or does someone else want to get right on that?

Or should we maybe consider the highly valuable skills students of writing can learn from doing things that aren’t just standard researched essays, knowing that they aren’t idiots. They WILL understand that they still have to cite research. Give students a little credit. We all started in first year comp.