Funny how CEB leaks this on the day we met with department heads to propose our New Media/ Integrated Digital Media major. My head (English) didn't show. I think he had an excuse, but then, I'm not completely sure. At least the Dean loves our program!
12.18.2008
12.16.2008
Master's Thesis
I get a kick out of the persistence of this thing. It's a decade old, but folks keep checking it out from the library. Maybe Laura is showing it to students. Or Sibylle. It's not like it is all *that* great, is it? Well, for whatever reason, I am thankful!
11.19.2008
Introduction (Draft)
I'm soliciting feedback on a draft for my intro. In footnotes, I mention that 1) all names of people are pseudonyms and 2) Goodman’s use of past tense here indicates how even a careful researcher and a document published by Sinte Gleska University can relegate native cultures to the past rather than admit their “survivance” in the present. For the sake of simplicity, I retain his past tense but work against it in my own characterizations of Lakota culture.
Let me know what you think!
epigraph:
“though the principles of symbolism are not reducible to sheerly physical terms… the meanings cannot be conceived by empirical organisms except by the aid of a sheerly physical dimension”
--- Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man”
We slept most of the day before Jim Jacobs came back to talk with us. The night before, we walked the trail up Mato Paha, or Bear Butte, an ancient, granite laccolith rising 1200 feet from the high plains like a lone advance scout of the Black Hills, some six miles distant. Rising as it does so distant from the other Black Hills, Mato Paha is extremely exposed, almost isolated from its sisters. It is truly a unique mountain and it serves as a spiritual site not only for Lakota, but also for many other plains cultures. We were at Mato Paha during June, one of the holiest months of the Lakota calendar. Jim was there as a member of the Lakota nation to participate in ceremonies marking the end of a three-month procession of spiritual renewal and rededication. According to Ronald Goodman (1992) “the Lakota lived between stories and symbols written in the sky and mirrored on the earth” (9) and traditional Lakota still gather at sites around in the Black Hills between the spring equinox and summer solstice, “synchronizing their movements to the motions of the sun along the elliptic” (2). In other words, traditional Lakota culture, like many other cultures around the globe, teaches that the heavens and the earth mirror one another. In this view, the Black Hills, as a geographic area, mirrors that part of the sky dominated by the sun during spring. Places such as Mato Paha have stellar analogues in Lakota constellations so that to map the heavens is to map a mirror image of the earth and vice versa. As a matter of religious practice, traditional Lakota may mirror the path of the sun as it journeys through these constellations by embarking on a ceremonial procession through the Black Hills. Mato Paha, according to both Goodman and Jim Jacobs, was usually the culmination of a three-month series of ceremonies designed to balance earthly and spiritual matters.
This practice bears a certain resonance with Burke’s quote that opens this introduction. The sheerly physical dimensions of land and sky, the physical correlation between geography and astronomy are necessary preconditions for the symbolic tapestry of traditional Lakota culture. Likewise, as a ceremony some may partake in for the benefit of the whole culture, the physical movements through these dimensions is necessary for the Lakota, as “empirical organisms,” to conceive meaning in areas of life beyond the ceremony itself. For traditional Lakota, as it is true for many peoples, the physical land is important not for what it represents and not because it stands as a symbol for something else. Rather, it is the opposite: the land is important because without it there can be no symbolic. Without the physical movement across the land concurrent with the movement of the sun across the sky, traditional Lakota would fail in the very real and important re-creation of a symbolic order. The journey across the Black Hills no more represents the sun’s journey as any reading of a text represents the process used to write it. Both movements are necessary and, to some degree, mirror one another, but they cannot be said to be representative in any true sense of the word. Rather, each depends upon the other: place and symbol, hills and stars, reading and writing, stitched together in time and space. This re-creation should not be understood as a return to an original or a static form of mimesis. Rather, because of the double movement involved, this is a dynamic re-creation that affirms change and remains at least partially open to what cannot be captured or contained within any iteration of the order itself.
This helps me understand some of why the Lakota have yet to accept any monetary settlement to the breaking of the Fort Laramie treaties by the United States, a settlement now worth over $570 million. Their denial of the money officially rests on their belief that one cannot sell sacred land and we should respect that position. But when viewed from the position that to accept that money would be to enter their land into the symbolic order of economics, thus eradicating the very foundation of their culture, we might better understand this decision despite the rampant poverty, violence, despair, unemployment, and other social problems, that the money might help alleviate on each of the Lakota reservations and in Lakota communities across the upper Midwest. Rather than the inverse double movements of land and sky, accepting a monetary representation of the land replaces the entire equation with a foreign order.
This raises a whole set of important questions for rhetoric and composition studies as well as other areas of inquiry that focus on the relationships between place and the symbolic – areas such as geography, environmental sociology, and ecocriticism. Much of this, I argue, has been distracted by an endless play of signifiers, focusing too much on language and symbols and not enough on the physical structures upon which those symbols depend. While I do not claim to have discovered a “ground” upon which we might rest our postmodern feet, I do claim to make some further progress in understanding how our discourses literally matter in the world. If we can only know the world through discourse and discourse is just an endless play of arbitrary signifiers, then we are fundamentally cut off from creation. But such an extreme version of postmodernism has come under scrutiny in the past decade and more and more scholarship is turning to the material world and the ways it is involved in making meaning every bit as much as social material. This leads me to inquire into material places: are they also involved in the production of meaning and, if so, how? And what might that mean for research into writing or for the teaching of writing?
Let me know what you think!
epigraph:
“though the principles of symbolism are not reducible to sheerly physical terms… the meanings cannot be conceived by empirical organisms except by the aid of a sheerly physical dimension”
--- Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man”
We slept most of the day before Jim Jacobs came back to talk with us. The night before, we walked the trail up Mato Paha, or Bear Butte, an ancient, granite laccolith rising 1200 feet from the high plains like a lone advance scout of the Black Hills, some six miles distant. Rising as it does so distant from the other Black Hills, Mato Paha is extremely exposed, almost isolated from its sisters. It is truly a unique mountain and it serves as a spiritual site not only for Lakota, but also for many other plains cultures. We were at Mato Paha during June, one of the holiest months of the Lakota calendar. Jim was there as a member of the Lakota nation to participate in ceremonies marking the end of a three-month procession of spiritual renewal and rededication. According to Ronald Goodman (1992) “the Lakota lived between stories and symbols written in the sky and mirrored on the earth” (9) and traditional Lakota still gather at sites around in the Black Hills between the spring equinox and summer solstice, “synchronizing their movements to the motions of the sun along the elliptic” (2). In other words, traditional Lakota culture, like many other cultures around the globe, teaches that the heavens and the earth mirror one another. In this view, the Black Hills, as a geographic area, mirrors that part of the sky dominated by the sun during spring. Places such as Mato Paha have stellar analogues in Lakota constellations so that to map the heavens is to map a mirror image of the earth and vice versa. As a matter of religious practice, traditional Lakota may mirror the path of the sun as it journeys through these constellations by embarking on a ceremonial procession through the Black Hills. Mato Paha, according to both Goodman and Jim Jacobs, was usually the culmination of a three-month series of ceremonies designed to balance earthly and spiritual matters.
This practice bears a certain resonance with Burke’s quote that opens this introduction. The sheerly physical dimensions of land and sky, the physical correlation between geography and astronomy are necessary preconditions for the symbolic tapestry of traditional Lakota culture. Likewise, as a ceremony some may partake in for the benefit of the whole culture, the physical movements through these dimensions is necessary for the Lakota, as “empirical organisms,” to conceive meaning in areas of life beyond the ceremony itself. For traditional Lakota, as it is true for many peoples, the physical land is important not for what it represents and not because it stands as a symbol for something else. Rather, it is the opposite: the land is important because without it there can be no symbolic. Without the physical movement across the land concurrent with the movement of the sun across the sky, traditional Lakota would fail in the very real and important re-creation of a symbolic order. The journey across the Black Hills no more represents the sun’s journey as any reading of a text represents the process used to write it. Both movements are necessary and, to some degree, mirror one another, but they cannot be said to be representative in any true sense of the word. Rather, each depends upon the other: place and symbol, hills and stars, reading and writing, stitched together in time and space. This re-creation should not be understood as a return to an original or a static form of mimesis. Rather, because of the double movement involved, this is a dynamic re-creation that affirms change and remains at least partially open to what cannot be captured or contained within any iteration of the order itself.
This helps me understand some of why the Lakota have yet to accept any monetary settlement to the breaking of the Fort Laramie treaties by the United States, a settlement now worth over $570 million. Their denial of the money officially rests on their belief that one cannot sell sacred land and we should respect that position. But when viewed from the position that to accept that money would be to enter their land into the symbolic order of economics, thus eradicating the very foundation of their culture, we might better understand this decision despite the rampant poverty, violence, despair, unemployment, and other social problems, that the money might help alleviate on each of the Lakota reservations and in Lakota communities across the upper Midwest. Rather than the inverse double movements of land and sky, accepting a monetary representation of the land replaces the entire equation with a foreign order.
This raises a whole set of important questions for rhetoric and composition studies as well as other areas of inquiry that focus on the relationships between place and the symbolic – areas such as geography, environmental sociology, and ecocriticism. Much of this, I argue, has been distracted by an endless play of signifiers, focusing too much on language and symbols and not enough on the physical structures upon which those symbols depend. While I do not claim to have discovered a “ground” upon which we might rest our postmodern feet, I do claim to make some further progress in understanding how our discourses literally matter in the world. If we can only know the world through discourse and discourse is just an endless play of arbitrary signifiers, then we are fundamentally cut off from creation. But such an extreme version of postmodernism has come under scrutiny in the past decade and more and more scholarship is turning to the material world and the ways it is involved in making meaning every bit as much as social material. This leads me to inquire into material places: are they also involved in the production of meaning and, if so, how? And what might that mean for research into writing or for the teaching of writing?
11.13.2008
Graduate Texts
Here's what I'm thinking of teaching for my first graduate seminar, "Rhetoric, Writing, & Teaching." It is designed for newbies to rhetoric, especially teachers who need continuing education credits or who are in our Teaching Secondary English master's program. However, TAs, creative writers, and literary students will no doubt also find something of interest.
11.05.2008
Go, Gopher State!
I love Minnesota politics. And not just because my grandpa was part of it, but b/c of its contributions on the national stage, too. Gene McCarthy's anti-war stance (and Humphrey's tepidness on that very issue as Johnson's VP), Mondale choosing Ferraro, Governor Ventura... and this:
It'll be days before we know the end result, but Franken has done an amazing job and this is testament to the ways in which, as a population, Minnesota is open to some creativity.
It'll be days before we know the end result, but Franken has done an amazing job and this is testament to the ways in which, as a population, Minnesota is open to some creativity.
10.27.2008
What About the NEXT Election?
Normally, I don't like to dabble in fear. But there is a nasty underbelly to American society that I think we're being a bit Pollyanna-ish about. It's called the Christian Right. Now, I don't mean the decent church-going folks who spend hours of their week organizing or participating in church activities, nor folks who pass along literature such as Gideon's Bibles to college students, nor even the ideal-minded voter who uses abortion as a litmus test for choosing a candidate. By "Christian Right" I mean the organized and fairly well structured affiliation of groups, causes, and leaders who misconstrue the U.S. Constitution as a religious document, who see the world only from their Christian ideology, who don't separate Christian doctrine from American and Western social norms, and who are currently using irresponsible scenarios to fan the flames of hatred and intolerance. See these two links in particular.
While it seems that this presidential election is offering many of the changes it promised (on both sides), what I fear is what happens in four or eight more years. I admit it seems unlikely that in 2012 or even in 2016 that we will be faced with President Palin, I admit that these years are frought with uncertainty. Hard times call for desperate measures, as the saying goes and the base supporting Palin will likely take this to heart as Paosner's article notes. This base feels that they -- and only they -- are the "real America" in Palin's own words. They are the base from which home-grown terrorists are likely to come in the guise of defending that real America.
Janet Folger, for example, has argued that her opponents are "not advocating tolerance. If that were the case, they'd live and let live. Instead, they do things like demand that the Boy Scouts change their position by accepting homosexuality. And they will sue anyone who doesn't agree with them. It's basically forcing people to embrace their behavior" (source). She conflates "tolerance" with maintaining an intolerant status quo, something which lost in the Boy Scout case anyway. But Folger was funded by Rev. James Kennedy and there are more like him -- from Pat Robertson to Rod Parsley, to James Dobson. These are the names of the Christian Right who have their own funding, their own access to power, and their own versions of what the political fringe understands as madrasahs -- radical schools of fundamentalism -- in order to inculcate their inflexible ideology.
On its own, I'd imagine this ideology might wither and die. I certainly don't think it is popular when exposed for what it is. However, the issues it raises resonate with a lot of voters -- even folks who are now going for Obama. Note how even the good Senator from Illinois has bluntly stated that marriage is between one man and one woman; anything else is just too secular for much of America, despite the fact that sanctioning committed relationships between people is the government's job. A marriage license is, after all, a legal document. Tolerance would be accepting ALL forms and religious sanctioning of the practice, regardless of gender and if you don;t want homosexuals to marry, then don't marry them! Furthermore, the McCain campaign has been warning its base about total democratic control of "all branches of government.. no checks and balances." This is malarkey of the first-order as the Court is still famously balanced, if tilting right for now and even in that center-right tilt, it often rules against the Bush administration. Further, there will still be a minority power in Congress and so the deals will not be signed, sealed, and delivered with no input from the Republicans.
Again, though, the point is how this will all unfold itself in the social fabric. Will a coalition of intolerance form under the guise of "real America" and a "real alternative" sort of like a perversion of the Green Party in 2000? Will home-grown terrorism shift the "War on Terror," apparently further legitimating the charges of government persecution? Or, will economic difficulties once again stir age-old racial tensions and divisions, thus muting the progress we have seen under an Obama candidacy? I think the answer remains murky at best, but I have hope that Obama is smart enough to already see this coming. However, there is a lot not within his control: the economy, the massive shift he proposes to a more eco-friendly manufacturing base, the confluence of intolerant ideologies and ideologues, and public perception of how we collectively handle these and other challenges.
While it seems that this presidential election is offering many of the changes it promised (on both sides), what I fear is what happens in four or eight more years. I admit it seems unlikely that in 2012 or even in 2016 that we will be faced with President Palin, I admit that these years are frought with uncertainty. Hard times call for desperate measures, as the saying goes and the base supporting Palin will likely take this to heart as Paosner's article notes. This base feels that they -- and only they -- are the "real America" in Palin's own words. They are the base from which home-grown terrorists are likely to come in the guise of defending that real America.
Janet Folger, for example, has argued that her opponents are "not advocating tolerance. If that were the case, they'd live and let live. Instead, they do things like demand that the Boy Scouts change their position by accepting homosexuality. And they will sue anyone who doesn't agree with them. It's basically forcing people to embrace their behavior" (source). She conflates "tolerance" with maintaining an intolerant status quo, something which lost in the Boy Scout case anyway. But Folger was funded by Rev. James Kennedy and there are more like him -- from Pat Robertson to Rod Parsley, to James Dobson. These are the names of the Christian Right who have their own funding, their own access to power, and their own versions of what the political fringe understands as madrasahs -- radical schools of fundamentalism -- in order to inculcate their inflexible ideology.
On its own, I'd imagine this ideology might wither and die. I certainly don't think it is popular when exposed for what it is. However, the issues it raises resonate with a lot of voters -- even folks who are now going for Obama. Note how even the good Senator from Illinois has bluntly stated that marriage is between one man and one woman; anything else is just too secular for much of America, despite the fact that sanctioning committed relationships between people is the government's job. A marriage license is, after all, a legal document. Tolerance would be accepting ALL forms and religious sanctioning of the practice, regardless of gender and if you don;t want homosexuals to marry, then don't marry them! Furthermore, the McCain campaign has been warning its base about total democratic control of "all branches of government.. no checks and balances." This is malarkey of the first-order as the Court is still famously balanced, if tilting right for now and even in that center-right tilt, it often rules against the Bush administration. Further, there will still be a minority power in Congress and so the deals will not be signed, sealed, and delivered with no input from the Republicans.
Again, though, the point is how this will all unfold itself in the social fabric. Will a coalition of intolerance form under the guise of "real America" and a "real alternative" sort of like a perversion of the Green Party in 2000? Will home-grown terrorism shift the "War on Terror," apparently further legitimating the charges of government persecution? Or, will economic difficulties once again stir age-old racial tensions and divisions, thus muting the progress we have seen under an Obama candidacy? I think the answer remains murky at best, but I have hope that Obama is smart enough to already see this coming. However, there is a lot not within his control: the economy, the massive shift he proposes to a more eco-friendly manufacturing base, the confluence of intolerant ideologies and ideologues, and public perception of how we collectively handle these and other challenges.
10.06.2008
Two-Minute Love Songs
Going into it, I thought Michael Cera is getting typecast, Mark Mothersbaugh soundtracks have run their course, and I questioned what could come of the oft-used plot where uber-hip youths embark on a journey throughout NYC while set to glamorous music and shots of cultural landmarks. Happily, and while these things might indeed be true, the movie is alright. In some respects, it relies upon and is about reinventing the tried and true narratives. Rather than looking for the next big thing, the characters, like Thom, are focused on classics like The Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" because they celebrate the little things. It's not about sex and orgasm, but spending time with someone, holding their hand. The movie echoes this same ethos in its concern with the neighborhood places of NYC as opposed to Times Square or Rockefeller Center's ice rink. It's -- and Mothersbaugh's -- love for the mix tape (or CD) reinscribes this ethos. It's not about the next big CD, but the untold little ones, the shifts between bands and songs and the way they get interwoven with our lives.Sounds a little McCartney-esque, I know, but the movie pulls it off. Where McCartney's ouve suggests it is all about the silly love songs, this movie starts to get at the tension between the big and little. The characters are self-consciously hip, they *do* want (and have) sex, they seek fame to what degree they can. But the self-conscisous attempts at labeling, crafting an image, selling a defined product, or wanting what others want all come to naught. Fame, it would seem, come out of some other activity, some other creative process that eludes the regulated and regulating switchboards of control and mastery. Even more, when the big things rule our lives, we are ruined in the process.
So, the trick is to live within the tension between Desire (big-D) and our desires (little-d). Accept jouissance when it comes (pun intended), but don't ruin it by making it a foundation for action. This seems timely to me, if only because our social jouissance has led us to some grim times. Not long ago there was talk of an endless rise in the market, a swift victory in the middle-east, and an endless Republican majority in government. Yet, for all the values and ethics of Karl Rove, George W., and Dick Cheney, no one ever told them it wasn't about national orgasm. Politics, at its best, is about holding hands.
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