Attempting to break the non-silence

I wanna be in a band/when I get to heaven/anyone can play guitar…
-Radiohead

I mentioned in a post somewhere lost to the archive that I have a course taught through video conference this semester. I’ve actually done this before with a larger lecture course, but never on the small scale. One of the problems I noted early on was that there’s a real sense of disconnection between the groups. I also think there’s a bit of animosity (maybe the class needs a third space!).

In another post I talked about speaking space in courses. I have long thought that the biggest problem with graduate pedagogy is that instructors seem to forget what we do with our first-year students (or in the case of some remember all the bad things and forget the good things). For example, a “professor” should faciliate discussion. As an instructor, that’s what I do. I don’t lead, but I don’t allow trainwrecks, either.

In the video class there are a few people on the other site– where the professor is– who like to perform. I certainly don’t begrudge them that. I know there are students among us who enjoy speaking for long periods of time and being heard in spite of the topic. The more quiet, I-want-that-in-my-notes people like me sort of need them. But they create a situation where I feel the professor MUST intervene.

I’ve tried to be extremely careful and courteous about this course. I’ve mentioned to the professor that we feel alienated at the remote site and feel like we don’t have a space to speak (and that we’re received harshly by the students in the actual classroom in some cases). The professor did mention it to class, but there was not real change.

So today, I decided to try to turn what I do in a regular classroom into something that works with a camera and speakers. In a normal class, if someone is rambling off-topic and I want the right to speak, I make “ready to speak face.” Those of you who have taken grad classes and have been the person who doesn’t shout over everyone else know the face I mean— eyebrow darted, hand on chin, lips curled slightly… maybe one eye squinting if it’s just critical that you get the floor. This look doesn’t work on TV.

But mumbling into the microphone does.

I started innocently enough. Someone made a REALLY outlandish metaphorical comparison, and it wasn’t working, so I mumbled “the metaphor is falling apart.” I hoped someone in the other room would say “what?” and perhaps someone else could speak, but no one did. Later someone contradicted the book, and I said to the person next to me, over the mic, “that’s not what the book says.” Again– I was trying, in a subtle way, to work my way into conversation.

Eventually I’d had enough, and I interrupted someone to make my point.  I felt bad, but I did it. Because my point (illustrated in my previous post) needed to be made. It was quickly buried by people who were positive that there had to be all sorts of slack in spaces 1 and 2, but at least I got the idea out there.

But the story doesn’t end here. If anyone’s heard the Dane Cook joke about cutting in line, this one goes like that. One of the other students in our remote classroom tried to speak. And was ignored. And she tried again. And she was ignored. A third time, someone raised their voice to speak over her. So I mumbled, into the microphone, “Just talk if you want to talk. They aren’t going to leave a space.”

Finally the professor intervenes, giving me the usual response to a smart-ass: “Phill, do you have something to add?” tacking on “we can hear everything you’ve been saying,” as if I should feel some sense of intense shame for mumbling about course content while one person monopolized a three hour seminar. I also found it funny that he asked if I had something to add while clarifying that they heard everything I said, but that’s just because I like riddles.

Without pause I responded with “no, I don’t, but *name removed to protect the innocent* does. People keep talking over *person.*” And though she blushed out of talking in that moment, she FINALLY got to say what she wanted to say a few seconds later as people reacted in confusion to the class being derailed.

It seemed obvious to the others in our classroom that I had offended our professor. I hope that isn’t the case, but I have to be honest: if I did, I am not sorry. All of us in that class paid money to learn the material and to discuss it. We didn’t pay to listen to a single voice rant about off-topic personal politics while bashing the book and the concept of the course. I don’t ever want to be remembered as the Bart Simpson of a grad program, but if someone had to snipe and snicker to get the conversation to be an actual conversation and not a monologue, I’ll gladly take the ire of a professor for the sake of everyone.

Don’t have a cow, man.

 

Trying to get back on track– more third space

I could/I/I could… turn you inside out…
-R.E.M. (it continues)

Okay, before I start what is going to end up being a rant, a simple concept. I think it’s simple, anyway. It’s entirely possible I’m an idiot.

We read, as I mentioned in my previous post, Third Space…

The author starts the book by proposing that two spaces are essentially “us” and “not us” or “in” and “out” or however you’d like to express it. This is a staple of American (US) Political Philosophy, as the whole of this nation’s under-culture is a huge binary. Good guys and bad guys. White hats and black hats. Vader and Luke. Lex and Clark. Binaries.

The third space, then, is the abstract area where things exist outside that.

Image time:

Bear in mind I quickly whipped the image above up in Photoshop, so I know it’s not beautiful.

But here’s how *I* saw those relationships. I mentioned Ventura and the fishers/hunters in the post before. That is a binary. It’s fixed and situated. Ventura basically said “you’re one of us or you’re them.” Those aren’t areas that allow for gradation. They are bounded boxes. If I say “you’re Phill, or you’re not” there isn’t a way for those of you who are not me to enter the box of “Phillness.” It’s closed to you. You’d have to remove my skin or steal my identity to get into the box, and then you’d change it.

So 1 and 2 are “closed.” They’re solid states, fixed within the greater system of this concept of third space. I didn’t designate which is the United States and which is the independent tribe, if we’re using the book’s binary. I think attributing the number shows bias. But those are fixed. Sure, those which constitute the group could change their definition of “us,” but in so long as we theoretically believe in an “us,” they are fixed boxes.

The third space is everything in the middle, but it isn’t fixed. It’s gradation. It’s fades and mixes and violations, and those who would hope to be both (in the construction the author addresses, one cannot be both– us or them, not “us and them”). I chose to represent it triangularly, instead of as a straight line, because the spacial movement indicated by the triangle is more indicative of how this would work than a bar is.

So in class, what seems like a pretty simple idea basically fell apart. Someone placed the “first space” of this system inside her head (which is fine on an individual level, but it violates the rest of the system if that person wants to talk about spaces with everyone else) and we somehow ended up talking about how the US forces want to take the souls of Muslims who they torture.

I maintain my belief that sometimes as powerful as theory is people do bad things with it. The author of this book is a Political Scientist. In the Poli-Sci world, this sort of concept makes good sense, as the binary is the enemy of true political understanding (us/them has dominated much of human interaction). If we yank away the Poli-Sci frame and don’t pay attention to what the author is saying, suddenly third space becomes really confusing when it actually isn’t. It would shift, depending on the binary (there is no “third space” we can always assume; we can only assume that every binary creates a third space of some manner).

Or maybe I just don’t get it.

 

Sometimes I just don’t get it…

…pour my life into a paper cup…

-RHCP

We had an “interesting” discussion in class today. One person dominated (look back over the blog for my thoughts on this) and I’m not entirely sure we discussed what was a very interesting text (Blood Narrative by Chadwick Allen), but there was a long breakdown interdisciplinary debate over this:

Should a “minority” writer identify as a writer, as a minority, or as both.

I felt like saying “this is shockingly similar to the dilemma I’ve been batting around on my blog, as to who can write about what, and I think it’s important to think about perception,” but I was mostly silenced by someone who needed to point out, among other things, that human beings just “deficate excrement.”

Yeah– I didn’t get that either.

This was a moment where I think the view of the rhetorician was really useful. Let’s say, just as a random example, that bell hooks were to stand up and say “I am a writer.” She is (she’s more than JUST a writer, and she’s fantastically talented), but her neglecting to say “African American” wouldn’t have nearly the impact that some of the other students in class thought it would. Anyone in the room, with the ability to see, would identify her as such, and her subject matter would also illustrate this point. It’s not like her author functionality (can we employ that term this way) can erase race. Of course I don’t think hooks would ever try, but I wanted a well known example. It might have been more ironic to choose Morrison, now that I think about it.

That is, of course, not to neglect the relevance of how one wishes to package and present herself (himself). There are many “minorities” as it were who “pass” (I’ve often asked people if I qualify as either one of these things– it’s not clear that I’m part Cherokee if I don’t point it out, unless people notice that I’m acting like a Cherokee, and that becomes a long performative argument for another post). In some sense, it becomes powerful for those people to declare themselves to be “X type of writer.” We see much more of this with gender/sexuality issues (the power of being “out” as it were, or declaring that one is transgender).

I wonder, though, if the other disciplines represented at the table (history, anthropology, American studies, Native American studies, architecture and library science) don’t give a little too much authority to what the author claims. Several people were trying to claim that one could erase ethnicity by claiming to simply be a writer.

That doesn’t work, I don’t think. Maybe small scale. Perhaps I could, in a gaming studies article, erase my Cherokee-ness (I tend to think I’d more be leaving it dormant than hiding or removing it), but if one is talking about issues of ethnicity, and is an ethnic minority, the audience is going to figure it out/construct that.

That’s why Aristotle created that triangle, isn’t it?

I really didn’t get why it was such a savage argument. It sort of distressed me, since there were a number of great things in the text (including a triangular relationship I’m going to try to write about here tomorrow– I need Photoshop and I’m too tired to Photoshop right now).

*sigh*

If anyone from that class is reading, sorry to dog it. I just don’t GET it sometimes.

And now, a little ranting…

You do it to yourself/you do/and that’s why it really hurts/you do it to yourself/just you/you and no one else…

-Radiohead

I recently received a few response papers back with comments. Now I know it’s taboo to talk about comments from an instructor to a graduate student, as all of that is supposed to be kept under wraps, but two things came up. They were “term” corrections.

One was when I said “America” which prompted “Do you mean The United States?”

Another was when I said “Native American” and was told “American Indian.”

Mundane things, right? Yeah… not earth shattering. I’m not going to cry myself to sleep over such “errors,” nor do I feel particularly slighted. But… it reminded me of a presentation I gave last semester on John Locke. The philosopher, not the awesome bald dude from LOST.

Locke had a lot to say for politicians and for other social scientists, but for rhetoric, his grand contribution is his sense of language. Now I’ve been told by some that I’m not reading Locke right, so feel free to slam me in response (as if you’d hold back had I not given you permission! ), but this is what I took away from Locke’s work as being important.

We have words, in our language. We seek, through those words, to express things to each other. But our words lack precision, and our attempts to say things in attractive– or high minded– ways often clouds understanding. As academics we might be the worst offenders of all. We say “heuristic” when we could say “tool” in many cases. We claim something is “structural linguistics” when no one needed to know. We pontificate upon how something has “concrecience” (did I spell that right, Dr. Latour?) or is “polemic.”

Clarity, Locke claimed, would lead us to much easier communication. And to get to that clarity, we had to know what words mean.

Right now I’m having a word war with my own mind over the term “practice.” I know what it means… generally. I also know that in high school I went to both basketball and speech team practice. I know that David E. Kelly wrote a fantastic TV program called The Practice. I know that practice makes perfect. I know that De Certeau is concerned with The Practice of Everyday Life. But when we talk about practices… what do we mean?

The answer– which I find maddening– is that it varies wildly from scholar to scholar.

Which is why it’s funny that “America” and “United States” didn’t parse across a set of two academics.

I think Locke was being idealistic (and that he had lots of other problems), but I’m thinking that the desire to have clear, concise language might be the smartest thing anyone ever asked for.

Or as my tenth grade honors English teacher said, “Phill, brevity is the soul of wit. You witless punk.”

 

MacGruber Version Web 2.0

Read the scene where gravity is pulling me around…

-R.E.M. (again)

I bought a new laptop. It’s huge, which is both good and bad. It’s good, because it can handle my digital media demands (I’m still downloading WoW to see if it runs well). It’s bad, because the thing weighs like 10 pounds.

But my reflection here isn’t so much on my new machine (which I’m calling Orange Crush– a big ol’ Gateway PX from Best Buy), as it is on the lack of the machine. I know Lac(k)an talks about the phallic lack, but this isn’t quite the same. I’d compare being a digital rhetoric student without his laptop to the cliche nightmare about being naked in front of a bunch of people.

I have one class, in particular, where I use my laptop as a sort of “defense.” Due to the devisive nature of the people in the class, sometimes in addition to needing my reading notes and the ability to type (I cannot “write” notes anymore– I’ve lost the ability to write quickly enough to keep up with my own thoughts and a professor’s speech), I need a place to sort of hide/shield myself.

But it goes deeper than that. I am not personally a fan of some aspects of current cyborg theory. I think it’s fascinating, and that in some applications it’s brilliant, but before last week I would have called user-to-computer a relationship that cannot be seen as cyborg. I’m rethinking that now.

I read most of my class materials in PDF. I use Microsoft OneNote to record my thoughts while reading, my thoughts from class. I have folders on my desktop for each of my courses and each of my projects. My academic life essentially happens on this screen.

So maybe I AM a little more cyborg than I thought.

I felt an instant comfort when I started configuring my new system. Even if it is really heavy and part of me wishes I’d spent the extra money on the lightweight Mac. Because tomorrow is Monday, and I have a 3 hour class. A three hour class where I’ll have all my materials at my disposal and won’t feel naked in front of everyone.

Because really… naked Phill does no one any good.

 

Come on, Vogue!

And that’s when I know/she’s gonna be pissed when she wakes up/from terrible things I did to her/in her dreams…

-Ben Folds

 

Okay, before I say much, here’s an image, linked from http://concreteloop.com/2008/03/comment-spotlight-lebron-the-vogue-cover (interesting mix of comments there, btw… well worth your time to read).

 

I’m a fan of LeBron James, though he’s not one of my once beloved Pacers. I’m not so much a fan of Gisele, as she dates that Brady fellow, but I’d like to think LeBron didn’t mean to be presented the way Vogue presented him on their current cover, and I’m not entirely sure Gisele should be comfortable with it, either.

I’ve read many comments around the net, so I won’t claim I have some brilliant observation, but my first thought was “oh, great, LeBron is King Kong stealing Tom Brady’s girlfriend.”

But let’s take a look at this cover, visually. The “real” cover, obviously, is the image to the left, while the alternate cover image uncovered by ConcreteLoop.com is  the tasteful photo on the right. On the actual cover, there’s brighter lighting (which brings the skin tone differences into starker contrast), and there are wildly conflicting facial expressions. LeBron looks angry, or beastly, while Gisele looks like she might well have been caught laughing at how ridiculous the image is. LeBron is hunched over, simian (also like one might drive with a basketball, to be fair), and he’s handling a ball. It’s a confusing composition, as I suppose we’re supposed to think we see the “essence” of the two (the intense athlete and the smiling model?) or perhaps that LeBron Kong has taken a woman as he streaks down the court. It’s also interesting that Gisele is wearing a dress that is roughly the same shade as the Statue of Liberty, not that anyone would be playing up the King Kong thing.

Contrast that to the other image, which looks like an actual fashion shoot. The colors are muted, the poses are relaxed and seem human. LeBron’s muscles are highlighted, as is his face (which doesn’t look animalistic in this shot) and Gisele’s figure is showcased without her being presented as if she is being seized and controlled (as a male, I have to say I think she looks better in the white dress, too). The composition has good lines, and other than the awkwardness of placing  Vogue’s header on the page, the spaces for the other cover text are all natural. If the image were cropped right at LeBron’s knees and some extra space were airbrushed in at the top, it’d be a perfect cover.

It looks like Vogue dropped the ball.  So to speak.

 

What we do

I don’t wanna feel so different/but I don’t wanna be insignificant/I don’t know how to see the same things different now…   
-Still Counting Crows, still new album, still awesome   

So I’m about to rush over to a reading group about De Certeau (Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty). I’ve been looking at his work, thinking through the tiny chunk we read for today (and planning to finish The Practice of Everyday Life over the weekend). And I’ve been thinking about the field I’m in.

Rhetoric.

 I wonder if many of us don’t have it “wrong” on a certain level.  If you talk to a scholar in our field, he or she could probably say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if you asked “is this rhetoric?” and rambled off a list of potential topics for discussion. We know what’s in our field. Mostly. Some people argue that some of what I– and what my mentors– do is not “really” rhetoric, but I think of those people the same way I thought of myself when I, upon entering my first algebra class, pointed out that X is not a number and shouldn’t be part of math. Sure… there’s a logic to it, but it’s a little short-sighted and immature.   

I made this argument in my history of rhetoric seminar last semester, and it was received with a mix of horror and interest. So… I’m going to toss it out again for my readers. I think in rhetoric we do ourselves a disservice by not acting like our field IS a field.  

Here’s what I mean.

Go watch Stephen Hawking speak. He’s not going to spend the first half of his presentation tracing physics from the start of the field to his particular brand of science. He’s not going to explain to us how gravity was “discovered” and documented. It would be foolish; that crowd KNOWS that physics is a thing. They came to hear a genius speak about his contributions.  

If you saw this recent news story about the near-retirement-age math genius who solved the “directions to anywhere” problem (I’ll link this later– I have the bookmark at home), you won’t catch him starting by saying “once upon a time there were two numbers, and *insert name* realized that by placing a plus sign between them one could indicate a desire to join them into a single number that was the sum of the two.” In fact if someone started a lecture by doing the basic “here’s six apples. I take two. How many are left?” math explanation we all get in elementary, we’d feel appalled and cheated.  

So that makes me  think that perhaps the answer to many of our problems is to simply stop trying to justify what rhetoric is. Stop tracing back to Plato and Aristotle, and stop charting through the Roman era into the enlightenment. Instead of trying to link everything back to the origin point, let the fact that the field exists do some of the heavy lifting for you.  

I get the feeling this will still be received poorly, but I ask you to consider it. A little field confidence could go a long, long way.

a Portrait of the Blogger as a not-so-young-Rhetor

Nail in my hand/from my creator/you  gave me life/now show me how to live…-Audioslave, almost always misquoted 

Today I want to get semi-deep and reflective. I’ve been thinking about something and resisting saying it to much of anyone because I’m afraid of how it might be received, but I’m quickly finding that in my field, at this level, it’s the time to say things without worrying so much about how people receive it. To comment back to someone who responded to one of my posts, I guess I just don’t “know better.”

I’ve been trying to decide lately what sort of rhetorician I am (will be). People keep saying that as a first-year PhD I probably shouldn’t know. I should be experimenting and digging into things and becoming instead of claiming I have become. My response to that is this: I am what I am.

I don’t talk much about my past. The truth is it’s not a story I think anyone really needs to dwell on, but if one wanted to write my biography, it’d read a lot like the story of the kid from a bad neighborhood with an absent father and a working single mother who learned he was good at basketball and rose up. Only when I learned I was good at basketball, I learned I was good at basketball… for a six-foot-tall slowish guy. I’m good with words, so I’m told, and I pick at the right things when I do research (so I’m told). Because of that, and a lot of work, and a lot of help from people along the way, I’ve made my attempt at rising up. But people should make no mistake; when I identify myself as a mixed-blood Cherokee poor kid from Indiana, the product of two broken families and a broken city, that is not an identity I take lightly or wear as some sort of plumage. That is who I am.

In much the same way, I think I know what sort of rhetorician I am. I have found over the course of the last year that elements of what I do upset many in the field (there’s some evidence of that here on this blog, and there are seeds for much more). I am generally unapologetic on that point; I never mean to insult someone personally, but no one says “with all due respect” before mocking the things I value, so if my criticism of some idea any of you hold dear feels bad, that’s academia for you. I find it interesting, though, that all of the “legends” or “celebrities” I’ve met in the field find my ideas either interesting, “fascinating,” “exciting,” or tolerable. It’s people who are just a bit ahead of me—or people who are doing the same sort of research in ways I would characterize as sloppy or incomplete—who seem to take such issue with me. People have presented to me theories for this breakdown in who is angry with me, but I’m not going to speculate.

Here’s where I “live” as a rhetorician:

 

1.   I think it’s important to investigate popular culture, specifically video games, television/film, and comic books. I do not, however, see a particular use in creating academic versions of these technologies (though I enjoy researching those products and respect the people who create them).
 

 

2.   I think there is a great deal that academia in general is missing about digital technology and fans of popular culture because so many researchers stand at the outside and lean over/peer in instead of diving in. There’s too much privilege still being granted to “high” culture in a world where America, at the very least, ditched high culture for “git er done” a long time ago.

 

3.   I want to help to expand the smallish field of Native American rhetoric, but I think it’s useless to try to generalize it too much (beyond building frameworks). There is no singular Native American rhetoric.

 

4.   I’m mixed-blood, so furthermore I want a mixed-rhetoric.

 

5.   I think the use of theory just for the sake of packing it in is pointless and anyone who does it should be ashamed. The same is true of jargon. Rhetoric doesn’t need to be hard to read to be “smart.”       

 

6.   I think we need to dig beyond “the tradition” (western rhetoric) to find the actual “tools” that constitute rhetoric so that we can use them to look at new things instead of constantly going back to Aristotle as if he’s the origin point.

 

7.   We need to blend more; hybridity and remix aren’t just buzzwords. These are things that create new understanding. We won’t re-create Aristotle’s wheel, but we’ll shy away from riding in Judith Butler’s car? Why?

 

8.   We need, as a field, to start saying “oh, I don’t know,” when we don’t know. Since I study things that people don’t know in many cases, I hear all manner of hedging and attempting to characterize things incorrectly. I won’t tell you Sassure is wrong if you don’t claim that the gamer community I’m studying isn’t a community, m’kay? Note: I don’t know if Sassure is wrong; I don’t know him well enough to make that judgment. It’s an example.

 

9.   Sometimes ambition kills. We’d all be better served by smaller, well-crafted studies than attempts to totalize by doing over-blown, super-crazy research projects. Don’t try to talk about anything “in America” or “In this century” or “on the World Wide Web.” We tell our first-year students to focus. Why don’t we? 

 

10.                  We have to embrace the sad possibility that we’re wrong about a few things. I see so many scholars who won’t entertain ideas that challenge existing structures. I also see people who think it’s “weak” to change their position. No one is going to sick the Swiftboat Vets for Truth on any of us. We need to, as a field, start saying “whoa, I totally got that wrong” when we totally get that wrong.

 

11.                 The “paper” is dying. It might not ever vanish entirely, but we’re quickly learning that all the things we ask for in a paper can be created virtually allowing for interesting new affordances (sound, video, image, more control over text shape and where the eye goes, color, etc.) and less dead trees. I know that many people want to burn me at the stake when I say that the traditional double spaced, Times New Roman essay isn’t long for our world (at least as a mainstream genre), but it’s important, as Cindy Selfe says, to pay attention. The newest generations communicate in such ways that email is becoming too formalized and restrictive for them. The way they perceive communication is changing, and pinning them to a sheet of paper for our sake would be akin to stunting their growth. The concepts behind writing an academic paper will live on to evolve, but the paper itself… I don’t think it’ll last.

 

12.                 We are going to fail at understanding communication and rhetorical practices in 2008 and beyond if we resist entering new digital/technological spaces. IDK, my BFF Jill might not be positive what is happening, but IIABD (it is a big deal). Much like we need to consider underlife in our classrooms, we need to consider “underculture” in our academic world. There are people  reading and writing as much as a lit grad student without ever touching a sheet of paper. If we miss that, we neglect the nature of reading and writing.

 

13.                 There is no “literacy.” It’s “literacies,” and they’re interdependent and recursive. We have to understand that or we’re just boxing people in.

 

14.                 To understand how certain people in this world of ours think, we have to collapse “space” and “place.” Sometimes geographical location becomes entirely secondary to an imagined/virtual space.

 

15.                 The same buzzwords that impress people can make one look foolish. If you claim, for example, that you’re a “digital rhetorician,” you better know what that means. If you don’t, you insult yourself and you insult me (as a digital rhetorician). And if you write a book called “Digital Writing in France,” it better not be based on five case studies of people who send email from cybercafés in Paris. I know it’s a rhetorical choice sometimes to overblow (I do it here), but some things shouldn’t be fodder for that.

 So that’s me. It’s too blunt to be part of a professional document, like my teaching philosophy (contrary to what some might think, I DO understand the field and how to behave within it), but that’s what I’m about. I don’t see this changing dramatically as my education progresses. I’ve been around 31 years, and I’ve seen a great deal. I’ve had to survive, and I’ve had to fight and claw. I’m fairly set in my academic ways, just as I’m fairly set in my personal politics and my spirituality. I will flex and bend, as we all have to in order to survive, but this is who I am. I ended up here, where I am right now, because I feel this way about things.

If this place, and the process of finally being ushered into the field, takes these major points from me, I don’t think I did it right. I’m rough around the edges, to be sure, but I didn’t come here to be smoothed. I came here to get sharp.  

Memories, dear Watson (conference)

I got nowhere but home to go/I got Ben Folds on my radio/right now…

-Counting Crows 

Recent events have me thinking back to the last Watson Conference at Louisville. There was a large panel consisting of three of my favorite scholars in one room (or at least three of the people I frequently cite—Dr. Gee might take issue with me claiming to be a fan of his given the ways I’ve addressed his work, though I respect him to no end): Cindy Selfe, James Paul Gee and Gunter Kress. Dr. Selfe presented her most recent research on audio-composition (which is fascinating; I hope a book is forthcoming). Dr. Gee presented on World of Warcraft and Okami (his WoW presentation prompted one of my papers this semester and a presentation I hope to give at the next Watson conference). Dr. Kress gave a fascinating lecture on time, sequence and duration in visual images vs. time, sequence and duration in a textual sentence. When the presentations ended, I was very much looking forward to the question and answer session.

Oops.

It seems the Q&A could have been subtitled “High School Teachers Claim Responsibility for the Movement and Traditionalists Hate Cindy and the Gs.” There were a few questions in the mix that were about the content (including one rather insistent man who claimed that things aren’t claimed to have happened in the order the words are presented in a sentence), but most of the “questions” were veiled attacks on the idea of composing with sound or image in a college classroom.

I don’t have anything particularly profound to say about this other than to share that I was shocked then, and that having spent almost two more years in the field I’m not as shocked now but I still think it’s a shame. The field IS going toward technology. It doesn’t mean we’re abandoning writing (just as the move from oratory didn’t invalidate the Greeks and Romans), it simply means that the types of writing we do in this society are different.

Why fear it? It’s still composing.

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.