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.

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.

Marxism: no can has

Everybody here/comes from somewhere/that they would just as soon forget/and disguise…

-REM

Okay, so the first step of doing this “right” is actually writing an entry every day. And I’m down with that.

 Today’s entry is going to be my attempt to drive a friend and fellow PhD student insane: I’m going to point out why I think Marxism isn’t such a wonderful thing for the study of rhetoric.

Now before I get too deep into this, I will willingly concede that almost all of us use the term “hegemony” now, and there are a number of Marxist based ideas that spread across the discipline. That, however, makes sense in a second way: Marxism is a commentary on capitalism, and other commentaries on capitalism, had they arisen independent of Marxism, would almost assuredly have noticed some of these same concepts.

And other than “he was wrong, since the revolution should have happened by now,” I like Marx, as a thinker. His work with Engels is essential to understanding political thought in the West. I think some of the things Marx said are a touch on the obvious side (but again, I’m the guy who almost got punched in a lit class because I said Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow” was only respected so much because he was the first person to be vague and poetic at the same time in a published venue, so I do on occasion blurt things out that people don’t like). It was clear long before Marx said it that the masses were “duped” by the few (just as Machiavelli pointed out in his reflections on power and fear).

The economic additions that Marx makes are a fascinating step, but again, it’s not as if the earth moved and the skies parted because Marx put into text “human workers are capital.” Slave traders knew that for years and years and years.

But at the same time, I have deep respect for Marx as a thinker. Here’s my problem with him: you have to be worried about the West, and about Western thought, for his ideas to take on primacy.

I had this discussion with someone when talking about Native American baskets at one point last week. This person—bless his heart—was trying to read the pre-colonial production of baskets by a tribe through a Marxist lens. And it was troubling him.

So I pointed out “Marxism is about capitalism, and these basket makers weren’t capitalist.” It froze him up.

It shouldn’t freeze anyone up to think that systems exist that aren’t Marxist.

Marx was responding to capitalism specifically. He wasn’t responding to everything that ever existed or ever happened. Why do we only remember Kairos half the time? Would that be Kai? Ros?

And the fact that Marxism has such a grip on part of our field that people become frustrated when they have to NOT be Marxist for a second irks me. Particularly when Marxism, as a theory, is based on a concept that didn’t work. If Marx had really figured it all out, the revolution would have happened. It was an unavoidable end in his theory. This is not to say that thinkers after Marx haven’t reworked his ideas in interesting new ways, but the foundation of the work is still, to some degree, a buggy (I won’t say faulty—Marx sealed it off himself as potentially untenable) premise.

It’s like people who spout Burke quotes randomly. Yes, everyone views the world from behind a series of terministic screens.

But people were talking about subjectivity before Burke gave it a fancy name. Burke shouldn’t be a godhead, just because he slapped a pretty name on something that is an obvious concept. At least not when the comment is a one-sentence throw away like “it’s sort of like Burke’s terministic screen.”

I wish people in our field would spend more time building new knowledge and less time trying to make the same old knowledge fit everything they see. It’d make us more productive. And I hope someone shatters my teministic screen and kicks me in my means of production if I ever start abusing theorists as my own personal mapquest to the world of understanding.

A second pass at SCALPED or How The Fun was Lost

how’s the weather/how’s my father?/am I lonely/heavens, no!

-Tracy Bonham 

Image from flickr, taken from SCALPED writer Jason Aaron's blog 
at: http://jasoneaaron.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html

About a month ago, give or take, I wrote an entry about the comic book SCALPED from DC. At the time I wanted to reserve full judgment until I’d seen more of the series. Now that I’ve read the first “chapter” in graphic novel form, I feel better talking about it.

At the same time, I’ve recently met a fellow scholar who works for a comic company that attempts to present things in a more positive light. I’m going to keep from naming that group just yet as I don’t want to sound as if I am singling them, or this fellow scholar who I respect a great deal, out in this particular post. I will be talking a bit about this scholar’s work later, though.

I return to the point I was trying to make initially. In fact that point has been galvanized by reading more and seeing that SCALPED actually does get somewhat worse in its depictions of things. The final page of the first graphic novel is of a woman who has been scalped.  I find of late that either what I am trying to argue to some degree is considered highly-counterproductive to people in my field. But I want to restate it, because I feel this is important. I think it might be CRITICAL to ever really making sense of things in this world.

As academics, we walk in a different space. I will not call our space ‘better’ than anyone else’s (that’s been done forever by people who presume there is an Ivory Tower and we live in it), but it is certainly different. We think about things that we seem to assume others don’t (often incorrectly, but sometimes correctly) and we press for meaning in places where meaning isn’t usually saught. When one of us– as I am, as so many are now– tries to go into a more mainstream or “popular” arena, there are things we have to remember.This is rule number one for me: if I’m studying something, I’m studying it. I’m not studying it while figuring out how I can co-opt it, and I’m not studying it reading an agenda onto it. I will read with lenses that reveal agendas (we all do– that’s how the best revelations result), but I won’t come to something and say “because this does X, it is obviously Y.” This is my defense of SCALPED; it’s a story. I have decided that I wish it were just a touch less gritty, but I continue to have nothing but love for the two most commonly associated pieces of contemporary fiction: FX Network’s The Shield and HBO’s The Sopranos. In fact I have posters from each of those two programs (they aren’t currently on my wall– they’re back in my old apartment).

I have no tie to Italian Americans, so I cannot speak from the position of their culture. I have, however, addressed general Italian-Am responses to the Sopranos in this blog before. My father, may he rest in peace, was a cop (in fact my father was a “dirty” cop, though he didn’t go as far as Vic Mackey). As such, I feel that I can fairly say that The Shield isn’t meant to speak for all police officers. The Sopranos specifically screams that it doesn’t wish to speak for all Italian Americans.

These are stories.

Given these are not stories that carry the sacred material or spiritual understanding that the stories of the Cherokee might carry, for example, but these are not meant to be depictions of what is “real.”Fiction is a form of social commentary, but it’s also a form of entertainment and can be seen in a way as the fantasy of the best and worst of us.

I doubt Stephen King was trying to besmirch the name of the automobile industry when he wrote Christine.

I don’t think Clive Barker was trying to ruin the concept of solving puzzles forever when he wrote The Hellbound Heart and spawned the Hellraiser movies.

 I will agree with what many have said about SCALPED; I don’t want anyone  to think my people ALL behave that way. Sadly, however, I know there are bad Cherokee. I’ve seen them, met them, faced their behaviors. As such, I wouldn’t want a comic book about the cliche Noble Savage to try to depict my people, either (or that part of me, anyway– a small portion of my people are Euro).I disagree that SCALPED should be boycotted, though, or that it should be outright defamed.

If you don’t want to read it, don’t read it because it’s only a marginally good story (I sort of like where it was going while simultaneously wishing it wasn’t going there). If you don’t like that Aaron is portraying a tribe as corrupt, write commentaries about it.

But I think it’s wrong to say “WE shouldn’t be presented this way,” which is what I hear many, many people saying.As a kid, I went through a period as an outcast where I identified strongly with the villains in the stories I read. I wanted to be Lex Luthor. I wanted to be Darth Vader. I wanted to be the Joker so much I asked my parents for a big black trench coat (thankfully I was old enough that the stigma that goes with that look now hadn’t hit… imagine that as a faux pas). Why should any group of people be exempt from representation as the villain?

Perhaps it’s just my twisted postmodern view, but I think part of decolonization is saying “sure, we want to appear in this medium the way anyone else does.”

Of course I’d feel better if this were an Indigenous artist creating the evil mafia-like tribe with their corrupt casino, but I think it sets us– all of us– back to claim that something should be off-limits.

The second problem is that when we start twisting things so that they fit a popular genre but they are entirely positive, we ruin the recipe. I see this all the time with educational video games (which are growing exponentially). The reason a game like Grand Theft Auto is fun is because it’s a specific sort of fantasy release for the gamer. It doesn’t mean that gamer will want to go actually commit crimes (there’s research that proves this, btw… I don’t have the citations handy but will gladly fish them up if you email me).

On some levels yes, we can sanitize and reappropriate popular genres. But on another level, we risk rupturing what is appealing about them for the sake of our tinkering.

Use SCALPED as an example of what Native Americans aren’t, but think carefully about the implications of saying “we won’t be depicted like the Sopranos or like the cops on the Shield” is really saying. It’s asking to be removed from a specific conversation.If you’re someone who wants us out of that conversation, I extend to you all the respect in the world. But I feel like *I* am embedded in that discourse. It’s part of the tapestry of my life. And in order to use it, to study it, and to feel a part of it, I see no choice but to allow things like SCALPED to become a part of what we consume and accept.  

There’s a move in the field of rhetoric to attempt to bring about social change. At times I find that sort of a strange call to arms. I love the concept, but we should be bringing about social change every day by virtue of the fact that we’re teaching others to read and write, to look at things critically and to understand how to interact with the world around them. But commenting on something like SCALPED can provide a space for social change. Sure… it’s a negative way to see any tribe, even a fictional one.

But it opens a number of illuminating dialogues:
-What does it mean to leave your land and go back?
-What does it mean to lose respect for your land and your ways?
-What is the brutal history of scalping? How does that sit in comparison to current society?
-If life looks bad on this fictional reservation, what does it look like on a real reservation?
-If a non-NDN is writing this story about a fictional tribe, how would, say, a Cherokee who liked the Sopranos write the same story? What is lost in a cultural translation? What is gained?
and the most important question…

-Why is it out there, why is it selling, and why do people keep reading?

There’s much to be learned. I don’t think we learn that by simply saying “what it says is bad.” Sure, that’s pretty obvious. I doubt anyone will read it and say “I want my people thought of this way.”But it starts a valuable conversation, and more importantly, it shows us in mainstream American culture in a way that isn’t as the Lone Ranger’s sidekick, or the X-man with the knives, or the guy in the headdress who gets big as a superpower. It’s an opening to appear in a different way. I consider it empowering. And I know some of you disagree. I love you anyway. 🙂 

Phill365 v2.0: Reboot

Half of the ring lies here with me/But the other half’s at the bottom of the sea …

-Vampire Weekend

Okay, so… massive failure on my part. I figured out what went wrong: I got too structured. As much as I like games,  I set too many rules for myself. It got to the point where some entries were going to take longer than others, and I just sort of tapped out.

*sigh*

So, okay. No biggie. We live, we learn. We engage in a practice, we get better.Today was the due date for my first PhD annual review. In honor of this date… I start again.365 days, 365 entries. I will attempt to hit on at least tangentally scholarly points here, there and everywhere, but less structure this time. I just want to hit the blog every day for that span.I’m starting this with my laptop dead (of all the laptops I’ve ever known he… was the most… human). That could lead to some timing/posting issues.But I’m making the blog my homepage, as a reminder every time I login. WRITE! WRITE WRITE! WRITE WRITE WRITE! In honor of our dearly passing Phill365 v1.0, I provide this sexy, dangerous tag cloud of the first month and 3/4 of Phillure: 

A second rant, since I’m doing this in twos: when interdisciplinary goes wrong

I want a girl with shoes that cut/and eyes that burn like cigarettes... -Cake

I’m trying this year to work on a project that is considered “interdisciplinary.” I’ve been asked to look at it “as the rhetorician.” That’s no problem for me. I like being the rhetoric person. My take on rhetoric is a little different than many, but I can justify the moves I make, going back to fountainhead Aristotle and twisting from him.

Here’s the problem, though. Rhetoric is not a well-defined discipline. If I walk into a room with a chemist, a cartographer and a plumber, no one’s going to ask the chemist to explain, from the origin of his field to now, why he’s mixing the silver nitrate with the hydrocholoric acid. No one’s going to want the cartographer to trace back to cave paintings to explain why he can make a map, and no one will expect the plumber to reference natural stone formations as he talks about how water is bent.

As a rhetorician, we’re still expected to define what rhetoric IS before we do it. Imagine if Kobe Bryant had to stop and explain the history of basketball before taking a fall away jumper. Imagine if Tom Brady had to explain what “metrosexual” meant before hitting the street with his manpurse. It’s unheard of.

So in this interdisciplinary project, people keep asking me why I don’t use this or that… or why I can’t go back to this or that theorist. And I have to explain “I’m not looking at it THAT way.” I am attempting, in this project, to look at things through a Native American (actually a Cherokee) lens, THEN pulling in a few select western theorists to expand the scope.

Perhaps I’m becoming too… arrogant, but I feel like as a PhD student, this is the time for me to start saying “okay, here’s my thinking, and I want to defend it and see where it goes.”

I love the idea of interdisciplinarity, but if we’re going to come together, it seems like we shouldn’t try to box each other in. Or in other words, I won’t ask the math guy to explain to me why there are digits from 0-9 if he doesn’t ask me why I can’t just use Foucault for everything.

🙂

Listen when I’m talking to you…

How does it feel to realize/you're all alone behind your eyes?/seems to me if you can't trust/you can't be trusted -Ben Folds

I’ve had this problem since… well, since forever.

Let me get one thing out there before I start explaining this. I am shy. I always have been, by nature, a little nervous around new people and in large groups. I had to fight this in order to ever be any sort of student; I almost killed myself with fright and anxiety in high school doing three years of speech team (I got so good I went back to coach once). The shyness is mostly gone. It used to be a big problem with the ladies, but I even found one of them I’m not shy around anymore.

Okay, that said… I have a problem talking in classes.

It’s NOT related to my being shy. It’s NOT related to not having read (though I was horrified when my MA thesis chair and mentor Heidi thought I was being quiet because I hadn’t read; her’s was one of the few classes where I read every-single-word with attention because it was digital rhetoric and pedagogy, my bread-and-butter).

It’s cultural.

Let me explain. I’m a mixed-blood Cherokee (and perhaps Navajo… we’re trying to figure out what, exactly, my mother is).  I was raised in such a way that certain things were valued. One was the wisdom of elders. You let your elders speak, and you pay attention. You don’t sit anxiously waiting for your chance to blurt something out. You listen actively and attentively. Another was that you don’t talk over anyone, even if you’re the elder. That’s rude. And the last was that if you don’t have something to add– if your comment would just be for your sake– you save it.

This doesn’t work particularly well in a graduate seminar class. And this past week, thanks to some people who can’t really respect the greater needs of the class, I had to do something that horrified me. I had to talk over someone.

I’m in a course right now that I would call too large. I sort of like the subject matter (it’s tough, and I don’t agree with a lot of it, but I like it) and I adore the professor. I would love to sit and just talk to the prof and a few other students about the material. The problem is that there are students in that class that I’d call “peformers.” They are concerned with how they are received and how often they can speak.  Their need to constantly be the center of attention is fine, generally, in graduate school. Someone has to fulfill the role of “person who speaks when no one else wants to.” But these fellow students take it to an art form (I feel bad speaking ill of them, but no one who reads this blog will figure out who they are, as this is not a “standard” course I’m speaking of and none of my regulars really know these folks).

This week, in that course, I was making a point, as was someone else. The performers wanted to go somewhere else with the idea. So I did what I was taught not to do, something which I felt was terribly disrespectful and outright hostile– I raised my voice and continued talking. For like three minutes. Finally, someone had to say “wait, there are two conversations going, we need to stop.”

I am hopeful that my rattling on over the others proved the point to the professor that space is not being given to everyone due to what is essentially academic bullying (not that I feel bullied– I just feel like it’s a shame. I get my answers by talking to the prof at other times).

I know that we’re about multi-culturalism these days in the academy; maybe one of the things we could stand to absorb from other cultures is the idea of listening first and speaking second.