Advanced Writing Theories

2011-11-11T14:32:00.001-06:00

I have begun a new blog that takes up many of the same themes and issues, but in a different context. Check it out!

Dvd

Landscape and Expression

2011-04-08T19:03:00.002-06:00

After attending Juliet Schor's talk on the New Plentitude this Wednesday, I kept thinking about the differences between a place like Cedar Falls, where I live, and Winona, MN, where I still maintain several close friendships. Others have inquired about this as well, including one young woman, a current student at UNI, but from Marshall, MN, who expressed curiosity over the differences between what, on the surface, are largely similar small cities. Cedar Falls, Iowa; Marshall, Minnesota; Winona, Minnesota. All three have a relatively small, public university focused on providing a liberal arts education. None are major metropolitan areas, but are local centers near more regional hubs (Marshall is near Mankato, Cedar Falls adjacent to Waterloo, Winona near LaCrosse, WI). All three are midwestern cities with an economy tied to agriculture and local industry.

Yet, despite these similarities, my experience of these cities is one of great difference. Winona has a much more vibrant craft movement, anarchist collectives, three intentional communities, downsizing, alternative education, and much of what Schor cites as beneficial and sustainable. Cedar Falls, despite in a slightly larger urban area and with a slightly larger university, nonetheless is comparably more conservative in this regard, if "conservative" is the right word. There are some excellent things in Cedar Falls, but not the kind of informal networks that provide support for building an alternative economy Schor argues for. Moreover, things have not always been this way. My friend, Matthew, shows in the "Secret History of the Cedar Valley" that musically, Cedar Falls was once a stop on many punk touring circuits. People in both Winona and Cedar Falls describe regular commerce, travel, and interaction among "progressive" individuals from both cities in decades past, but a resulting decrease as many of these individuals left Cedar Falls. So, I wonder about this. What conditions allowed these things to develop and grow in Winona and the surrounding areas? What conditions might have inhibited their growth in Cedar Falls?

In talking with several folks about this in recent days, there are certainly some not-so-surprising variables:

students attending UNI are about 90% from Iowa, many from very small communities where alternative economies are largely unknown,
without an influx of out-of-state students, as in Iowa City and Ames, there is less exposure to new ideas,
Cedar Falls has less heavy industry than Winona, though John Deere is nearby in Waterloo. This maintains a higher land/ housing value and average income.
The population of Cedar Falls is more organized around churches than might be the case in Winona.

I agree with all these, but I also think the landscape itself is a significant factor. And I feel this way for two reasons: 1) the way the land is used as a geographic site is markedly different and 2) the way individuals feel themselves related to a community of land, people, buildings, and potentials is also quite distinct in each. The first reason, as it relates to self-expression is similar to Nedra Reynolds' findings in her research on student writers at Leeds. However, my second reason extends more into the terrain of "speculative realism," because it is concerned with how students "prehend" the khora or inventive potential of emplacement.

Taking first things first, Winona is situated on the Mississippi River and its historical legacy as well as its current identity is intimately tied to it. Travel along the river takes on a mythological dimension from Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, blues music, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and the like. Since its settlement by people of European ancestry in 1851, Winona has been a wayplace for transients, drifters, "river rats," and, according to some, even gangsters. This continues today with Winona being the fourth-largest port of call in Minnesota, a terminus for the DM&E railroad, home to Watkins, Inc., RTP, We-no-nah Canoe, Hal-Leonard Corp, and several electronics factories.

Cedar Falls, located on the Cedar River, sees only small watercraft passing along its watercourse, though it did accommodate some riverboats in the 19th century. Moreover, the access to water traffic is limited by two features: the small bluff along the south shoreline of the river where the main part of town is built and the bottomlands of North Cedar which separate this community from the town's center. With the construction of the Highway 218 interchange, the Cedar River is pinched between the higher southern shore and the built up ramparts supporting the interchange. This probably led to greater flooding in North Cedar during the 2008 floods. Still, the landscape is simply not able to accommodate river traffic in the same way as Winona.

Aside from the river, Winona's geographic location is part of the Driftless Area, a highly distinctive landscape of bluffs deeply cut by small rivers, creeks and other drainages. Such a landscape is not as conducive to large-scale factory farms as the young drift plains around Cedar Falls. Within the cities, Winona's development is marked by immigration patterns quite different from Cedar Falls. Notably, Winona has several, small neighborhood taverns interlaced with residential areas.By contrast, drinking establishments are more concentrated in the downtown, College Hill, and 18th Street areas in Cedar Falls. The cities are shaped, in some degree, by geography and history. The landscape presents some opportunities for its use as opposed to others. These, in turn, shape population flow, income, socioeconomic interactions, and the like.

This is all well and good, though it doesn't satisfactorily explain the differences to me. More accurately, the ways in which these explanations might be offered seem overly deterministic, failing to explain why there are several individuals in Cedar Falls, myself included, who seek and work toward alternate economic and social relations but who are regularly frustrated with the opportunities. My theory I work out here relies on speculative realism, a concern with ontology or "being" in a set of complex relations that exceeds the epistemological, or "ways of knowing." In short, my contention is that the way individuals relate to the landscapes -- the way landscape affects rather than the effects of landscape -- is what needs accounting.

In Winona, the bluffs offer an easily discernable place "outside" the hub of the city. One can see the densely wooded bluffs from any point within the city proper. In Cedar Falls, such wooded areas like Hartman Nature Preserve or Big Woods Lake are hidden due to a flattened topography. Horizon lines are quite different and, as such, offer a very different "sense of place," an affect of inhabiting a particular location. In Winona, as in mountain towns where I have lived, or large cities with skyscrapers, there is more of a sense that one can travel outside those horizon lines and see things differently. In Cedar Falls, moving outside those horizon lines simply brings one to more of the same. The horizon may have shifted, but what it encompasses is largely the same content.

Such an affective sense of place might also work more reflectively on a Cedar Falls subject since it feels true that, as the old saying about small towns goes, everyone can see your business. There are no hidden valleys, protrusions to hide behind, or geographic location with which to shield one's self from the business of the city. Such affective dimensions to thought appear secondarily in written and other forms of expression. Different perspectives, insights, or ways of being are difficult to come by in one's daily life if one sticks within "the grid" of a small city like Cedar Falls. They simply do not have the opportunity to arise in our consciousness as a result of our daily interactions with our environment.

From a speculative realist standpoint, inhabitants of such areas might "prehend" their place quite differently. That is, an individual's sense of place becomes one complex machine by which possibilities are grasped and with the ability to grasp some possibilities but not others (to have some possibilities readily "at hand"), a specific skein of thinking and expression is woven from the khora. This always generates new possibilities and the conditions may one day be ripe for Cedar Falls to have a network similar to Winona. So, the sense of place one gets from certain horizon lines is never determining, but nonetheless real in the way it is ultimately woven into the forms of expression and life chosen by individual dwellers.

Perhaps this means, for teachers on the plains, be they coastal or interior, we need to keep this in our minds as we formulate lesson plans and pedagogies. We might add new things for students to weave from and into. We might work to give them places to hide, peaks to scale, reference points in the distance that could help re-orient them within space and place, offering new possibilities for expressing and living.

Different Readings of Gorgias on (not) Being

2011-03-09T17:40:00.003-06:00

Previously, I posted a rough sketch of my argument about Jim Gee's definition of literacy as "ways of being in the world." Below are a few more paragraphs that spell out the argument in more detail.

In short what I want to ask is “What does it mean to Be literate?” a question which entails a shift from epistemic questions to ontological ones. We might productively shift our attention to how we understand Gee’s statement about literacy as a way of Being in the world and inquire into how literacy shapes, influences, and perhaps even constitutes some part of our Being. This has been rather prohibited from the standpoint of social construction and cultural studies, which understand the world and Being (physis) as separate from any discursive representation or identity. Strong versions of social construction reduce everything to nomos, to matters of convention or law, denying that we can ever have access to physis itself. However, recent scholars in philosophy and rhetoric have begun theorizing Being and ontology in ways that admit the arbitrariness of the sign, to its function within social systems such as language and literacy. These discussions are not completely compatible nor are they yet fully worked out. One debate, between object-oriented ontologists (OOO) and process-relational theorists (PRT), occurs via weblogs of scholars advocating for their understanding of being. Because these are ongoing scholarly approaches to Being, I am not going to advocate for any one “correct” version of understanding Being or Being literate. However, I do want to outline some of these discussions and relate them to Gee’s description.

Such a project can explore an area described by Victor Vitanza (1991) as a Third Sophistic. For Vitanza, this is not a chronological movement stemming from an originary “first sophistic” of ancient Athenian rhetors and following the subsequent Roman “second sophistic” of the second century CE. Rather, a third sophistic, as Vitanza describes it “is not necessarily sequential” (emphasis in original), but inclusive of Gorgias, Nietzsche, Lyotard, de Man, Foucault and Lacan (117). A third sophistic counts to “many things” rather than simply one or two, a move that breaks up monist and binarist patterns of thinking. Such thinkers “theorize about the ‘impossibility’/ ‘Resistance’ of the Logos (reason, logic, law, argumentation, history) to Theory/Totalization, because of the Gorgian Kairos and the Lacanian Real — both of which enter the Logos and break up the cycle of the antitheses,” thereby breaking with the given patterns of difference and creating something new (117). Elsewhere, Vitanza argues that the history of rhetoric has been founded on negation or lack and a Third Sophistic can re-think the writing of rhetoric’s history with careful concern for the “negative essentializing” done within monistic or binaristic ways of thinking (1997, 12). While Vitanza critiques how logos has been used for such negative essentializing, he takes this one step further by pointing out this has often been done “to varying degrees in respect to physis and nomos” (12). Vitanza, then, offers clues as to how we might look at and understand Gee’s definition of literacy as something that encompasses more than just representation.

Gorgias and Classical Rhetoric on Being

Scott Cosigny argues a point similar to Vitanza, noting how “several scholars argue that Gorgias’ remarks on language, knowledge, and truth anticipate the views of such twentieth century thinkers as Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Rorty, and Fish” (1-2). For Cosigny, Gorgias presents us with an antifoundational account, one which coherently posits reality as the effect of various language games. Cosigny argues that as a result, “the most fundamental element of discourse is the maneuver, or trope; and discourse as a whole is composed of various maneuvers that may be used in various games” (77, emphasis in original). This is in sharp contrast to Aristotle who “sees tropes such as metaphors and puns as ‘deviations’ from the proper function of language, that of naming essential features of the world itself” (77).

We can see similarity here not only to Vitanza, but to Gee’s descriptions of Discourse and semiotic domains. For Gee, Discourse and semiotic domains are always a social network of practices and ways of making meaning from within a specific situation rather than from an abstract, decontextualized one. Gee describes semiotic domain as “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols. Sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings” (18). Like Gorgias, Gee downplays the specific content of the communication in favor of the maneuver involved, a maneuver that is not completely arbitrary but potentially given within the semiotic domain.

Just how these maneuvers work, though, is something not always clear given either Cosigny’s or Gee’s arguments. While Cosigny admits his reading “underwrites Vitanza’s assertion that Gorgias is the principal precourser to our own Third Sophistic” (210), his articulation and defense of how Gorgias viewed nomos appears at odds with Vitanza’s critique of negative essentializing. Much of this critique proceeds from disenabling qualities of negation, diaeresis, negative dialectic and the like. But rather than fight against or negate that which does the negating, Vitanza embarks upon a theory of “denegation,” or affirming the negative. For Vitanza, “It is not just a matter of doing away with physis, some universal notion of it, and accepting nomos, our differences, but of perpetually denegating both physis^neg.and nomos” (15). Thus, even those things which will necessarily be excluded from logos and by virtue of the imperfections of language, are still present and affirming that present absence is not only a strategy common to members of a third sophistic, but required to address the problems inherent to the hierarchies and domination of monistic and binaristic thinking.

Cosigny, however, while admitting Gorgias does not hold the views of Plato’s Callicles “in which the ‘weak’ members of a community agree to adopt various conventions such as morality and law in order to prevent the ‘strong’ individuals from overpowering them,” nonetheless argues that Gorgias sees nomos as the exclusive realm of being and change (130). As Cosigny reads Gorgias, nomos shapes identity, though this does not mean Gorgias argues for the status quo. Rather, Gorgias “promotes the institution of the agon, an institution in which people advocate opposed viewpoints and which is therefore an institution of change that encourages people to challenge established beliefs” (131, emphasis in original). Moreover, Cosigny points out that the agon is not in need of any justification from Gorgias with regards to its ethics or political foundation since to do so would admit to foundationalism, a first principle, or a counting to one. Tellingly, Cosigny supports his argument by citing John Rawls’ concept of “reflective equilibrium,” which is seen as “an ongoing hermeneutic project” about what seems the most reasonable belief about the world. In other words, by theorizing the agon as a hermeneutic project of opposed viewpoints, Cosigny emphasizes nomos and leaves little room for physis.

Being and Unions

2011-02-23T11:41:00.006-06:00

Whew! Spent a couple days in Madison, protesting Walker's proposal to strip collective bargaining from public employees and presenting at the NCTEAR conference. By the time my presentation was scheduled on Sunday, thundersnow and sleet had started, sending participants scurrying to their phones and computers to rearrange flights or just outright leave. Nonetheless, I still got some helpful feedback, even some in the form of perplexed looks on why I separate "being" from "identity."

My paper laid out a small critique of Jim Gee's definition of literacy as "ways of being in the world," a definition followed by Colin Lankshear, Michelle Knobel and others. While these folks start with "ways of being," that phrase is quickly shifted to "identity" and take the difference to be something ontological vs. something presenced through representation. Now, I admit that even a representation might have its own ontological status, but that status is certainly different from the ontic of the human that uses that identity for various purposes, some of which humans are not entirely aware. By focusing on identity, research is tilted toward epistemology and discovering how we know and differentiate between identities. This is certainly fruitful research and any theory of being, in my mind, has to grapple with this at some point. However, as folks like Graham Harman and Levi Bryant point out, it has its limits: everything is so radically politicized and subjected to endless hermeneutics that it is often more intractable than it opens up any new horizons.

My main claim is that for literacy, composition studies, and rhetoric, an ontological as opposed to an epistemological approach may be in order. This isn't entirely new. In fact, as Victor Vitanza has argued, this extends the project of a Third Sophistic, notably the work of "nonpositive affirmation" that might shift the history of “negative essentializing” especially with respect “to physis and nomos” (Vitanza 12). If physis is the world (nature, material reality) and nomos is the word (law, custom), how do we move from one to the other in such a way that we retain some measure of correspondence or fidelity? If nomos is decoupled from physis and the relations are only arbitrary, how do we manage our effects on and from our spatial and material environments? For Vitanza, this is one of the fundamental discussions that runs throughout and constitutes the history of rhetoric and, I would add, the history of Western thought's attempt to theorize the connection between "the word and the world."

As I claim, identity is not sufficient to account for such a connection. Instead, we might look to being (or Being) as a basis. This won't disregard epistemological work by any means, but would extend the conversation in different ways. As Vitanza has pointed out, and as more recent work has detailed, Gorgias is one of the key rhetorical theorists to look to in formulating such a project. For Gorgias, in a precoursory refutation to Descartes, thought and being are certainly not the same, since not everything that is thought comes into being. Rather than posit a kind of nihilism, however, Gorgias' other extant writings detail the ways in which logos (word, language, discourse) operates not as content, but as variable maneuvers within social situations. Thus, according to Scott Cosigny, he "anticipates Wittgenstein's characterization of language as a family of games; that his construal of inquiry as rhetorical debate within socially sanctioned agons anticipates an array of contemporary hermeneutic theorists such as Gadamer, Rorty, and Fish" (210).

Interpreted this way, Cosigny does not account for the social sanctions themselves. Nor does he go as far as Vitanza in following the implications of the split in logos that Gorgias recognizes (the split between physis and nomos, which always produces a paradox and a "dispersion/ scattering of the antitheses that leads to 'something new, irrational'" Vitanza 243). For Vitanza, Gorgias' On Non-Being can be read more as pastiche than parody since a parody always implies an original whereas "One of he primary conventions of pastiche is that there is no origin, original, that is, no No" (261). Through the double-bind of kairos-logos, something else is produced from the available materials. Such new things, however, are not entirely present, but always part of the "will to power as falsehood." Through the mixing of kairos and logos, a being becomes something new, though still unified as a subject -- still affirmative in its Being as a being. Here, Vitanza follows Deleuze's follow-up to Nietzsche that "the living world is the will to power, will to falsehood, which is actualised in many different [forces]. To actualise the will to falsehood under any power, to actualise the will to power under any quality whatever, is always to evaluate, to lie, to interpret, to measure]" (279). Logos can only distort, evaluate, and lie. Kairos, however, is ambient in the environment and inserts its own operations within any situation of logos, dispersing them, opening the way onto the lie.

Within such kairotic moments, thought, we have a lot going on. In a follow up post, I will draft how I see current ontological debates informing this process with a special eye to differences (if any) between Process-Relational Theorists (PRT) and Object-Oriented Ontologists (OOO). But for this kairotic moment, I am tired and need to attend a meeting...

Pandora is Gaia: Nature as the Oldest Hypertext

2010-09-07T09:28:00.005-06:00

My apologies for being absent for far too long. I hope starting the blog up again can not only get me talking with several folks, but also help with several projects I have going. I need it and hope you will contribute!

I find it interesting that Byron Hawk's work A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity has not been taken up by more mainstream environmental thinkers in English and the humanities. As far as I can research, ISLE hasn't published a review and I am fairly certain a search of works cited in their pages since its publication will produce little to no results. The same could be said of Gregory Ulmer's work in chorography, one of Hawk's influences. Ulmer radically revises notions of place and environment as real forces of invention, a point Hawk takes up in his book on vitalism. Add to this, Thomas Rickert's essays on kairos ("Inventing in the Wild") and khora (in Philosophy and Rhetoric), and we have some well-argued and carefully thought out ways to rethink place, environment, and nature.

Before I detail this a bit more, I have to note that I have fallen prey to the same ideological blinders that may be hindering folks in ecocomposition, ecocriticism, and environmental communication (let's call these and their allies the "eco-humanities"). As Hawk notes, Dobrin and Weisser failed to push the concept of ecology to its limit, keeping to representational notions of discourse and thereby dividing the discursive from the environment, a point I came to in my own chapter in Goggin. But I had to talk with Hawk before getting to this understanding. There is still a premium in the eco-humanities on representation, cultural studies, etc. that serves to maintain the nature-culture binary. My contention is that this has limited scholarship in the eco-humanities because Ulmer, especially, but also Hawk and Rickert have been taken up so readily by folks dealing in technology, hypermedia, video games, and computer interfaces. In other words, many eco-humanities scholars see them as "technological culture" and, perhaps because of their ideological love of "nature" (read as "those things relatively untouched by human culture"), they skip over the important insights offered from their colleagues thinking about (and with) computer technologies.

I won't detail Hawk's vitalism here, having made notes on it in an earlier post, nor will I recount my argument in Goggin's book. Suffice to say that, as Raul Sanchez argues, we have a crisis of representation and one of the foremost areas this crisis affects is thinking about the environment. I think Zizek is right to point out that an environmental discourse founded on representation has all the makings of a new opiate of the masses. But what Ulmer, Hawk, and similar scholars point out is a fairly simple argument that if everything (including nature) is a text we read/ write in non-linear, non-book ways, and that the sum total of the read/ write situation - if what is written/ read is a product of an emplacement, a total environment, if you will, - then this is perfectly applicable to our own scholarly work in the eco-humanities. In short, the world around us, our total environment from cities to prairies, to corn fields, oceans, rivers, and highways are a hypertext with which we interface but must invent ways to navigate trough, following its connections, links, and databases.

I admit that this is awfully close to James Cameron's imaginary world of Pandora, a world that functions as a vast database for memory, culture, and information. But aren't these imagined worlds important because they reveal truths about our own? We certainly don't have the same species or biological morphology that allows us to download memories of our elders, transfer consciousness from one body to another, or meld our neurological pathways with that of companion species. But we can and do interface with our environments, be they technological or not. And the "non-technological" is as linked together, if not more linked together, than any network yet devised by humans. Isn't the astrology-astronomy continuum indicative of how we use the natural world as calculator and computational tool linked to interfaces with planting, hunting, and ceremonial activity? Don't we use landscape as repository for memory, as Simon Schama has argued at length? What, then, is the difference between digital and natural hypertext?

My question, then, is what happens when we view the environment through the lenses articulated by Ulmer, Hawk and others? If we see the environment - built as well as "natural" - don't we get around the questions of ideology posed by William Cronon, the problems of cultural politics pointed out by Bruce Braun, and the (im)possibility of sustainabile development posed by Timothy Luke? We certainly don't "solve" these problems or questions, but wouldn't we understand them in a new way? Wouldn't we be able to reconfigure our interfaces with nature?

To me, this sounds at least worth exploring. Plus, it resonates with the work of Latour, Haraway, Hayles, and some of our foremost thinkers of how we understand and move through our worlds.

yeah... that's about it

2008-12-18T18:35:00.000-06:00

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!

Master's Thesis

2008-12-16T09:27:00.000-06:00

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!

Introduction (Draft)

2008-11-19T14:25:00.000-06:00

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?

Graduate Texts

2008-11-13T09:09:00.000-06:00

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.

Go, Gopher State!

2008-11-05T10:14:00.000-06:00

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.

What About the NEXT Election?

2008-10-27T13:01:00.000-06:00

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.

Two-Minute Love Songs

2008-10-06T09:54:00.000-06:00

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.

Sophomore... slump?

2008-09-18T10:01:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm learning my lesson about pacing myself as an academic. Not only do I have to complete my revisions for a book chapter, I have to revise a report for the Iowa Writing Project, complete two conference presentations for this weekend, another in November, I have been appointed chair of the writing committee, co-chair of the Focus on Excellence Learning Dimension committee, am on the curriculum committee for the next curricular cycle, plus I need to keep up with teaching and somewhere in all this, finish my book prospectus so I can at least set out a reasonable timeline.

So, there's no time for a sophomore slump!

After, not Before

2008-08-26T09:39:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned last year, I would show a pic of me at the beginning of my first year as Asst. Prof. and at the end. Well, I'm late in getting to it, but I took this pic in my office in order to yearbook myself.Not much new, I know, but the office has been cleaned up and my desk moved. Oh, and the Yearbook picture? If you're not on Facebook, here it is:

Keeping Up With the... Well, not Joneses

2008-08-17T11:42:00.000-06:00

Another blogger wrote about her trip up north and included pics to boot, so I feel kind of obliged to keep the two or three folks who actually read my blog updated with like info. So, here are some pics from Slim Lake in the BWCA:

Solon's 15 inch northern pike. Good eats, if a little bony! It looks like I'm more proud of this accomplishment than Solon, but it may also be his dislike of getting his picture taken.

The calm after the thunderstorm! Perfectly calm, mist on the water and a gorgeous sunset!

My mom took this as we portaged out.

Now, folks might call such experiences with nature, especially in "wilderness" areas sublime. But, like William Cronon, I would have to disagree -- at least, if they are sublime, they are not the kind of sublime Kant would say ultimately gives purpose to reason. It seems "sublime" is often very close to "wonder" in philosophical discourse. Really, at the base of it, doesn't Kant's sublime simply re-inscribe the 'gap' in knowledge Descartes says (like Plato before him) is caused by wonder? Doesn't "wonder" then, also point toward something transcendent? Yet, curiously, it is the emplaced, bodily, sensuous aspect of these experiences -- a heightened affect of being-in-a-(different)-place and living within unfamiliar rhythms -- that is often pointed out as what makes them worthwhile and often connects them to ethics.

It would seem to me that an argument for "wonder" as something that points toward transcendence of gaps or fissures in knowledge, even ethical knowledge, can only happen in a mind-body duality. But, given the writing on critical potentials of outdoor activity from recreation and leisure studies and ecopedagogy, wouldn't it make more sense to follow other critical theorists in a rejection of Cartesianism and thereby arrive at a sense of wonder that is immanent as opposed to transcendent? Wouldn't this seem to be more ethically consistent in terms of its ontology? Wouldn't this radically alter philosophy?

Catching Up

2008-08-11T11:29:00.000-06:00

I need to blog about so many things. Georgia, U.S. politics, the rise of neo-Nazism in Germany... the list is long and so very complex, but I also have TONS of writing for others -- for the Iowa Writing Project, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Green Theory and Praxis, and don't forget my syllabi for Fall semester! And that's just the stuff due in the next month! What about my book proposal! *sigh*

Well, one way to get at some of this might be through comics. "What?!" you say, "How does writing about comics get at the complexity of international and national politics, the timely production of knowledge, and educational planning for fifty students? Well, as an undergrad I bought into some of Joseph Campbell's Jungian analysis of myth. And comics, it seems -- especially when translated onto the big screen as Deleuze would no doubt agree -- offer us some mythic structures that guide our times. So, without further ado, let me take you to a convo over at Culture Monkey.

BWCA Bound

2008-08-02T22:10:00.000-06:00

I'm off to the almost-Great-White-North, eh! I have to say that I am very excited since i haven't been up to the BW in over a decade. First., living in AZ, then kids have kept me away. I plan to do a lot of introspection on wonder and reorganize the diss/ bok around its rhetorical implications. It's the prefect place to do so and a, linked with travel as it is, a kairotic moment. Maybe I can also finish that review for Green Theory & Praxis.

OK, see me next week for pics!

The Future of Invention

2008-07-24T10:30:00.001-06:00

WARNING: This is NOT a review... yet!

I just picked up my copy of John Muckelbauer's book, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change. Sadly, it's only available in hardcover and e-book. I had trouble getting it in e-book, so I had to get the print version. It seems that Publisher's Row, the e-distributor of choice for SUNY Press, requires an Adobe Acrobat plug-in that doesn't work very well with Macs. When I questioned them about why I couldn't open the file I downloaded, they suggested I use Outlook Express as my browser. Great! Make me use an outdated Microsoft product. Anyway, they were kind enough to refund my $20 with no questions asked... but still.... aaargh!

OK, the first chapter of the book is available online and I've read that. Muckelbauer does a great job outlining Deleuze's stance on difference and repetition. And it stands as a nice critique of the "third-way" approach. If change is something rhetoric strives for, either in an audience or in learning, then how do we enact change that doesn't come back to haunt us by repeating the same mistakes as before. This, I take Deleuze as saying, is ultimately the problem with Hegel. The spirit of history haunts us all. And, if we're not careful, we run away from Hegel's spirit only to find he has already arrived at our destination (kind of like Old Man Willow along the Withywindle).

So, I'm hoping Muckelbauer opens new paths and connections out of the Hegelian Old Forest. I'm also hoping to see how it can act as a companion piece to Byron Hawk's A Counter-History of Composition since that argues for a vitalism Deleuze used to escape the forest (by tunneling under it? a rhizome?). And, as has been my project for a couple years, I hope Muckelbauer points some possible connections for an immanent composition. It may seem obvious to argue, but, like Hegel's spirit -- hell as Hegel's spirit -- transcendence still haunts composition. The critical potential is often cast in transcendent terms and leads us toward certain pieties we should be loath to embrace.

"The Written Word is a Lie"

2008-07-11T20:04:00.001-06:00

Tom Snyder's interview with John Lydon has to be one of the most sublime moments in all of television. The only was to save rock 'n roll was to kill it.

Snyder's insistence that Lydon defines himself and PIL simply demonstrates his inability to grasp what punk was all about and that Lydon and Levine intuited the postmodern condition. "There should be no difference between who's onstage and who's in the audience" (4:40).

This is an aesthetics consonant with much of deleuze's thinking. PIL, in Lydon's description is pure difference.

Snyder's query about "What do you like?" could easily be "what are you for?" as opposed to what are you against; be positive Snyder demands, but Lydon doesn't give up. He only against, only a rebel without a cause and endlessly at that. With so many having gotten the Sex Pistols wrong, there is more to the end of rock 'n roll. and PIL's endeavor is to expose that pure difference by melding with it. It is anti-stardom and Lydon is a consummate writer of anti-stardom.

Lydon's writing, of course, is preceded by Artaud and followed by Cobain. And Sirc has traced out how Cobain's writing is important as a heuristic. We might go so far as to follow Cobain back to Artaud through Lydon and apply the same description to them as Sirc does to Cobain: Orpheus, all of them, gazing from below and exposing the world of the dead.

Anger is an energy
May the road rise with you
Anger is an energy
May the road rise with you

Subdivision/ Line of Flight/ In-be-tween

2008-07-03T14:46:00.000-06:00

Dissonance at the water park -- I am becoming-tween, repeating naive sexuality and desire balong the waves of music coming over the loudspeakers

Be cool or be cast out
Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth

An adult transported here, only even that was not it, but a repetition, different from 1982. Both it and me have traveled along different lines even though we are conjoined twins within Rush's music.

Subdivisions, conformity, escape; segmentations, molar bodies, lines of flight. There is desire and delirium at the water park. Seeing and desiring flesh like at a carnival, which is always also seeing and desiring a different flesh for the self. A desiring drawn from a delusion of one's own self-image, that seizure necessary from which we draw our name.

Drawn like moths we drift into the city
The timeless old attraction
Cruising for the action
Lit up like a firefly
Just to feel the living night

Nothing is quite so tween to me than Rush. Not the standard pop/ country of my youth, nor the alternative music of my teens, but the "intelligent," vaguely escapist rock of Neil Peart. A cumming-to-social-consciousness be-tween two segments in life. But this in-be-tween hasn't passed. The spirit hasn't marched on or how would the song evoke that affect, virtually replicate the feelings from over twenty years ago? It is this in-be-tween-ness that has defined this moment and already foretold of its coming. How else do you explain my family, my career, my location in a small town in Iowa where everyone prides themselves on keeping this town "safe"?

Somewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights...

Natural Links, Linking Nature

2008-06-24T12:57:00.000-06:00

I've been on a reading kick lately, and the author's name in John Urry. Funny that I did a Google search for "deconstructing nature" and can't quite recreate which text I found that referenced Urry's work The Tourist Gaze. I then checked my local library and found several other titles that really interested me in my project of theorizing journal writing in our post-human, post-process moment.

Lately, Urry has been working with complexity and mobility as extensions of his sociological viewpoint. What interests me is not only how he situates "tourism" as increasingly blurred into other life activities, not only how he stresses that structures promoting mobility for some also stress fixity and stasis for others, not only his overall thesis that sociology has been too long focused on "static populations," but that all of this mobility has "the effect of reconfiguring humans as bits of scattered informational traces resulting from various 'systems' of which we are unaware" (2006, p. 222). To me, this is of course social, but also socio-natural.

Taken alongside Plato's emphasis on arrangement in Phaedrus, a dialogue that puts Socrates in "strange" arrangements -- outside the city, as madman, as rhetor -- only to demonstrate Plato's critique of Athenian urbanity, Urry's work points up the importance of thinking through New Media not as just a techno-social project, but as a socio-natural one. In other words, a lot has been done already on the techno-social aspect of New Media. I'm thinking everyone from Anne Wysoki to Howard Rheingold, George Landow to Jeff Rice. But all of this seems overly concerned with social environments and new arrangements of social bodies via technology. If, following Bruno Latour, we need to reassemble the social so that what we previously called "nature" is brought into our processes and integrated with our "dwelling" on the planet, then we need to recognize that part of that reassembling means looking at our socio-natures.

I've already begun part of this.

Tortured/ Torture/ Ecology

2008-06-19T11:26:00.001-06:00

I'm teaching a summer course (FYC) which has all the impossibilities about it and then some. But I suspect what really concerns me here would happen in any writing class. One student is Congolese and was imprisoned and tortured for his role in student demonstrations against Mobutu Sese Seko in 1990. This student describes being beaten, sleeping on a wet cement floor, enduring harsh daylight with no shade, etc. before he was released through pressure from Human Rights Watch. Rather than write the expected, an essay condemning the horrors of torture and arguing for humane treatment of prisoners, his essay is about his coming to the realization that torture is, under certain circumstances, necessary in that it promotes social regulation and control.

Now, my intention here is not to silence this argument. For whatever reasons, Pierre (pseudonym) needs to write this. However, the question is really one of my response. I have tried to be authentic and "me" in pointing out that my understanding of torture 1) harms the torturer (both individual and state) as well as the tortured, 2) has a specious connection with obedience and control, 3) opens up political questions about the individual relationship with the state, and 4) needs to be moire clearly defined in just about all of these cases, including Pierre's. There is rather wide-spread consensus in many circles (all circles but the Federal Government and Republican party, it would seem) that "enhanced interrogation" is torture. It also stands that Pierre suffered in several of the ways described. While he may not have experienced waterboarding, there are also no doubt other traumas he is dealing with. But where and how do we draw the line between torture and harsh punishment? Is there a difference? Does it make a difference that Pierre's case didn't seem to be tied to the extraction of any information?

More importantly, what effects does torture have on the torturer and the state which condones such activity on its behalf? When we oppose torture, when we try to negate it, we run the risk of its return. To put it another way, what is the ecology of torture and how should instructors act to stop its effects if not oppose it?

Online Reading

2008-06-19T11:25:00.000-06:00

I liked this article. 'Nuff said.

Younger than McCain

2008-06-10T11:26:00.000-06:00

Pretty funny song, but I think the images make it funnier. It's a good use of multimodal literacies.

Summer

2008-05-22T12:24:00.001-06:00

Well, late spring anyway. It's already started, though: the busy time of year when there's an absence of (teaching) work which leads to an abundance of other activities. We just got back from Omaha, where we saw the Malcom X birthsite (a vacant lot that has some greenspace added), Children's Museum, Henry Doorly Zoo, and the Botanical gardens. Ate at McFoster's Natural Kind cafe and Jane's Market. Omaha isn't a great town, but it's not bad -- at least not as bad as I had imagined. The areas around UNO are pretty nice and despite the lack of recycling, there is a growing bike trail system. So, it's win some, loose some.

Still on deck for this summer: thesis committee & defense (I'm 3rd reader), submit "Toward Sustainable Literacies" (article) to editor, meet with local writing project director, teach my summer section of College Research & Writing, Solon's birthday, camping at Backbone State Park, 3-week level-one course through Iowa Writing Project, finish Comp theory syllabus, locate and revise master's thesis into article (yes -- after 8 years!), research English Department mission statements and organize for first dept. meeting, organize Brown Bag topics for fall semester, meet with Digital Arts Interdisciplinary committee, oh and find some time to write somewhere among all this!

Whew!

Places, Everybody

2008-05-05T10:24:00.004-06:00

I've been thinking about place a lot. Not surprising. My research is all about place. But I've got other thinkers lately, like Ydog. He's got a lot to say about hometowns. And recently while walking through the exhibit hall at 4Cs, I heard someone shout in my direction: "Now there's a man after my own heart!" I looked over and saw a woman looking at me, maybe pointing. The exact details are blurry, but she then said, "Your hat" and I remembered I was wearing my Twins baseball cap. I went over to her and she introduced herself, "Kay Halasek." Turns out she's a big Twins fan, but stranger yet, she's grew up in Owatonna, the small city just down the road from Waseca, where I graduated from high school.

Now, I'm in Iowa, Kay is in Ohio, Jeff in Missouri and generally, at things like 4Cs, we look at and see where someone is now -- who employs them, generally (unless you're a very notable composition scholar who *still* gets the affiliation on his name tag wrong!). This is to say that we often make associations with where folks are for right now. There is, after all a considerable deal of transiency (word?) in our profession and this often tells us very little about that person except that they are able to hold a job at University of X where the scenery/ weather/ shopping is Q, or that are brave/ talented/ lucky enough to self-label as "Professional Independent Scholar." What we don't see is where the person is from. Sure, where they live now has an immediate effect, but so does where they have been. Take Mina Shaughnesy for instance and how much her hometown of Lead, South Dakota has been seen in her use of frontier metaphors. Where are their roots? How might those early years of figuring out this crazy life have situated that person? Like Kay and I, who might be practically neighbors and never even know it? What kind of insights or revisions might this literal choragraphy reveal?

So, I've created a Google Maps page titled "Hometown Composition" that I invite you all to add to. I hope I have the permissions set right. You will need to search the maps for it, but once you do, please add or change the markers. Click on the green colored link "Hometown Composition" below the names that are listed as the main headings. Jeff and Kay, I presumed yours already.

Anthimeria

2008-04-29T08:52:00.000-06:00

My wife and I were talking religion in the hot tub the other night (I'll leave the rest to you) and I was shocked to learn that her denomination, Moravian, used grape juice and not wine for communion. Having grown up Episcopalian, I was obviously shocked and appalled. After all, what's church without booze? Less sacrilegiously, the wine, once blessed, is no longer wine, or so I had been told. That made it OK for the entire family, one of the objections Jess raised about using real wine.

The result of this conversation was a little bit of what I now know as anthimeria. In light of this conversation, I made the quip that Episcopalians were really just Catholics who didn't believe in the Pope. I went on to say that "we don't Pope."

No Popeing allowed.

The Pope stops here.

Pope happens, but please keep it to yourself.

Does a bear Pope in the woods?

Have you been Poping?

Feel free to add your own...

I hope to add more tropes after grading! Oh, Pope!

"what doesn't happen when you're drunk?"

2008-04-17T11:27:00.000-06:00

Sadly, this news item from the BBC reinforces a lot of negative stereotypes about Russian people. But -- true story -- my cousin-in-law was knifed by his fiancée and stayed with her during the two weeks he worked after giving notice. Talk about job loyalty. They weren't drunk as far as I know. Still, what doesn't happen...?

14 Kids in a Fight

2008-04-09T12:28:00.000-06:00

Not to be outdone by Scot's post, I found one by the same folks which is well worth taking for the entertainment value alone:

14

Nawlins

2008-04-05T14:01:00.000-06:00

Bedford St. Martin's party at the Aquarium of the Americas.

Napoleon Inn where the Sharon Crowley retirement party was held. The building dates to 1814.

Local houses just off Royal in the quarter.

Like Division I Matters?

2008-03-29T20:06:00.000-06:00

Since Wisconsin lost to Davidson, this makes it all better.

RIP Gary Gygax

2008-03-05T10:06:00.000-06:00

I am of the generation that grew up playing D&D -- first as a preteen, and even on into college and after when other games like Vampire: The Masquerade, Call of Cthulhu, and Cyberpunk offered more range and stimulation. They were a far cry from even AD&D and early incarnations of RPGSs like Metamorphosis Alpha. So this news certainly bears attention. Thanks, Gary, for all the fun.

Undergraduate Composition Theory

2008-02-26T17:03:00.005-06:00

I finally get to teach the course for which I was ostensibly hired: Theory and Practice of Writing. This is a required course in the Professional Writing Program but serves other students in the Major and in the Graduate Programs. I have already been tinkering with the syllabus based upon my interactions with students and faculty. As the course description indicates, it has largely been a survey through the accepted modes of composition. I want to change that. I want students to get less coherence in each major approach and more of the push and pull that often generates the interesting debates in composition.

So, I have a couple histories (Nystrand, Greene, Weimelt; Reynolds, Bizzell, Herzberg), Berlin's taxonomy, and outlines of composition's purpose (Emig, Bruffee, Ackerman, Dobrin) as opening moves and the rest mostly complicates the accepted storylines. Of course the real trick in all this is to get them to understand the reception of poststructuralism in composition -- certainly "Winds of Change" is key, but I'm wondering how much original material is needed. Do I assign "Signature Event Context"? Plus I need a full-length text and despite my own education, not to mention partiality to the text, I cannot in all good conscience assign Fragments of Rationality.

So, I'm looking for good texts that can speak to where composition is post-millenium. I'm toying with the idea of Sanchez's Function of Theory, but I'm wondering if that might be too much for undergraduates. For whatever graduate enrolls, it has a lot to offer, especially if they are thinking of becoming a TA in our program. Related to this though, from what I can find, is the overall lack of undergraduate composition theory courses. I have consulted several comp theory courses from all around, but most of them are directed toward graduate students in a comp-rhet program. I need to make this accessible to undergads as well.

Added Postscript: There are articles about developing coursework at the undergraduate level, however, and they are helpful. But, maybe part of what I am running up against are some audience constraints. Many comp theory courses I have reviewed look similar to our teaching methods course "The Teaching of Writing". This is required for teaching majors and deals specifically in the pedagogical application of theory/ies in K-12 curricula. Also, several prof writing programs seem to farm out the concentration of theory to Communications Studies courses, like here. While we are looking to do much of the same thing in regards to Electronic Media, we still have our theory course as its own requirement.

Not Again...

2008-02-15T10:28:00.001-06:00

NIU... let's all of us work for peace among ourselves, our students, and our communities. We are all in this together.

The Politics of Hope

2008-02-05T11:23:00.000-06:00

I'm posting this here and in other places because while it seems fairly slick and is professionally done, it is also why I support Obama. The message and the vision he has combats the cynicism in which we live and breathe in America today. If you watch this and are not moved, if not by the professional and amateurs who freely gave of their talents, then by the message itself and the hope it brings for current and future generations, then you are worthy of pity and I hope something awakens your heart to what is possible and how that is so very different from what has gone before.

If nothing else, something is waking up. You can feel it and hear it on the news. Even if Obama loses the nomination, what stirs will not go gently back to sleep.

Book Meme, Webpage, and A Year Without A Dog

2008-01-30T13:51:00.000-06:00

I.
See K8s and her friend's blogs. I've been tagged with the book meme, so here it goes:

1. Name one book that changed your life.
A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari.

2. Name one book you have read more than once.
Lord of the Rings Trilogy

3. One book you would want on a desert island.
American Indian Myths & Legends, Erdoes & Ortiz.

4. Two books that made you laugh.
Even Gowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins
The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

5. One book that made you cry.
Truth & Bright Water, Thomas King

6. One book you wish you'd written.
Writing Without Teachers, Peter Elbow

7. One book you wish had never been written.
"The Song of Hiawatha" by H. W. Longfellow

8. Two books you are currently reading.
Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Saving our kids from Nature-Deficit Disorder
Allison Wallace's A Keeper of Bees

So, who to pass this on to? Maybe Scot and Sarah.

II.
Oh, and I have my very own webpage. Some links are still forthcoming.

III.
Plus, it has been a year now that we have lived without our dog, Page. We miss her still.

Southern Climate

2008-01-24T07:31:00.000-06:00

I've live farther north and, on a couple occasions seen colder weather. But, hey, at least this gets some of the invasive species out of their encroaching range, no?

Current Conditions

Updated: 6 sec ago
» Disable Rapid Fire — About Rapid Fire

Observed at:	IowaPonds by the Soccer Complex, Waterloo, Iowa
Elevation:	886 ft / 270 m

-22.9 °F / -30 °C

Clear

Humidity:

55%

Dew Point:

-34 °F / -36 °C

Wind:

2.7 mph / 4 km/h from the SW

Wind Gust:

4.0 mph / 6 km/h

Pressure:

30.42 in / 1030.0 hPa (Rising)

Visibility:

10.0 miles / 16.1 kilometers

UV:

0 out of 16

Clouds:

Clear -

(Above Ground Level)

Raw METAR

Stochastic Quantitative Reasoning

2008-01-10T09:39:00.000-06:00

Still on the political thought-train... but I'm thinking of using this article in my writing classes. Holland does a good job of working not just with evidence, but also with the vagaries of probability. Since so many of my students want to just put up some percentages or polling data in support of their argument, I'm thinking this might 1) show them how it's done and 2) open up a space for talking about why Holland chooses to make clear the limits of his speculation.

Beyond that, he's probably right. The media was caught up in Obamamania. Women turned out in greater numbers than in 2004 (57 v. 54 percent) and coupled with a switch in Biden voters (I can attest that in my own caucus precinct, we nabbed over 50% of Biden voters largely on the theory that supporting a clear front-runner in our precinct, Obama, might help erode a third-place show so that Biden might make up ground elsewhere in the scramble for that #3 spot. Risky and ultimately it lost, but that was what the Biden precinct captain advised, so I let him go with it.

First Caucus!

2008-01-04T16:54:00.001-06:00

Wow is about all I can say!

Senator Barack Obama : 37.58%
Senator John Edwards : 29.75%
Senator Hillary Clinton : 29.47%
Governor Bill Richardson : 2.11%
Senator Joe Biden : 0.93%
Uncommitted : 0.14%
Senator Chris Dodd : 0.02%
Precincts Reporting: 1781 of 1781
(Percentages are State Delegate Equivalents.)

Becoming 2008

2008-01-02T11:44:00.000-06:00

I had thought about doing a list of things that distinguished 2007 for me: Top albums, books, movies, etc. However, I have been reading too much Deleuze and criticism on Deleuze, so I figured Top-whatever lists were pretty segmentary. As an alternative in a more becoming sort of way, here is what is rattling around with those things now:

Let's jump right to music: After 15 years of listening to Rage Against the Machine's eponymous first album, I finally used a Best Buy gift card to buy it (oh, the irony!). Fascinating how it is only recently that I have had the need to buy it because of its ubiquity. Along with this, I picked up Patti Smith's Twelve, a cover of twelve classic rock hits from the Beatles to Nirvana. It's a bit heavy on sixties rock, covering "Within You and Without You," the Stones' "Gimme Shelter," the Doors' "Soul Kitchen," Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" and Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" These are all excellent remakes, as is her cover of Dylan's "Changing of the Guards" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The one I could do without, though was the remake of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." On top of that, I checked out Kings of Leon's recent album, "Because of the Times." They are new to me, but I like their grit and sound.

Right now, I am re-reading Into the Wild since i assigned it for my Expository Writing course. I like the different ways Krakauer builds a case out of his research. It is an excellent model, I think for students in that it blends his researched data into a definite perspective, using multiple rhetorical appeals and strategies. While the weakest in terms of logic might be his own personal relation between him, his father, and his experience climbing Devil's Thumb, it is nonetheless HUGELY engrossing and persuasive. Here at the office, I am also skimming William Germano's From Dissertation to Book, which I highly recommend to anyone undergoing this process. He's more readable than the authors in The Thesis and the Book and for that, I appreciate his candor and style. Oh, and Deleuze? Criticism, mostly: Clare Colebrook's article from Topoi, Zizek's Organs Without Bodies, and Rajchman's (Again) Deleuze Connections. I also cracked Michael Smith's Toward the Outside, a book on Levinas. My main concern in the theory here is 1) that ecocomposition acknowledges what I think is a real thorn in its side: the connection between its subject and its object. Broadly, ecocomposition finds it to be socially constructed all the way down OR posits some reality that can be accessed and must be saved from all this constructivist nonsense. How, then, can we remain committed to "sustainability" or saving the planet? 2) to get at this, I am researching what the links are/ have been/ and how we might look at writers as ecologically situated. This means 3) that they are at the intersections of ecologies rather than their interfaces. It's not enough these ecologies meet clash and grapple, but that they are, in the figure of the writer, virtually indistinguishable.

While I have been interested in Deleuze, I haven't seen too many movies. I got a HDTV for Christmas, so LOTR looks better as does my gift copy of Easy Rider. Jess is going back through Harry Potter, both books and films, so we just got through half of Sorcerer's Stone.

Ah, well, there is more to become and I could go on about politics and war and environmentalism, which are also part of my work and life (volunteer for Obama, community screening and discussing War Made Easy in February, organizing Focus the Nation in January). But my syllabus for Professional Writing needs attention before a 2pm meeting.

The Power of Dreams

2007-12-19T10:05:00.000-06:00

Part of moving to Iowa (at least this year for me) means a renewed attention to politics. Arguably, I haven't been as politically minded or active since volunteering for Nader/ LaDuke in 2000 (and more her than him, really). The Kerry/ Edwards ticket just wasn't all that: too entrenched, too old school and a re-hash of hippie visionaries v. straight-laced Americana. Nader and LaDuke both had remarkable policy insights and a far-sightedness that I still don't see in Edwards and only saw as a glimmer of a possibility in Kerry. From my then Madisonian perspective, Kerry/ Edwards were certainly better than Bush/ Cheney, but between 2002 and 2004, we had slid so far back into despair it looked to me that we were willing to settle for middle-of-the-road.

Things are different now, and not just because I'm looking out from Iowa instead of Madison (which is, as I imply, it's own little sphere only technically part of the state). Currently the mediasphere is ablaze with talk of Oprah's endorsement of Obama. Normally, I wouldn't care. Kevin Bacon was just here stumping for Edwards (yawn), but Obama has swayed Cornell West to follow up Oprah's appearance in Cedar Rapids. Despite the fun in 6 degree games, the Obama campaign is not only putting together a collection of the finest African-American thinkers and speakers, I think it has some of the finest American thinkers and speakers.

More importantly, with the support of Oprah, there is a sense of dreaming again -- not just a dream of schadenfreude where we get back to a democracy before our current fascist interruption, but a real dream that recognizes the democracy we had before Bush II was itself broken. We shouldn't forget how the rich grew richer under the "Clinton I" regime, how he signed NAFTA, and how corporate profits supported Clinton policies. As this article from The Nation points out, there is a real dream awakening here and I think the anger directed at Oprah is part of that awakening. As the article says, even if Obama doesn't get the nomination, it is always "not too much to hope that the redemptive power of an intelligent dream might reinvigorate the exhaustion of our embattled political landscape."

Sustainable Post-Humanity

2007-12-10T10:00:00.000-06:00

Has it really been almost a month since my last post!?? Yargh! Things have been hectic adjusting to a heavier teaching load, winterizing the house, celebrating Ruby's birthday, organizing UNI's Focus the Nation events, plus coordinating Thanksgiving and Christmas festivities! I've still got to write the test for Native American Rhetoric & Literature, but the papers for my writing courses are done and I am just waiting on portfolios.

In the meantime, I have been moving slowly on my sustinability article for Writing the Earth. While much of it is a trimmed-down chapter from my dissertation, I am contextualizing it in critical takes on sustainability like Luke's (2005) critique that "for ecological debates [sustianability] is now being used, and perhaps abused, in webs of questions to refocus national economic prosperity as well as reposition present-day cultural identity in a corporate material culture of more efficient, but still unsustainable, consumption" (228). I just wish he wouldn't mince words...

Still, how might we reconcile this with being post-human or cyborg? If we are and have been contiguous or co-terminus with our technologies, can we keep those technologies and still remain sustainable? We can't simply glorify the web and computer technology without also recognizing the systems of briefly containing bio-hazards and dumping them on Third World and developing nations. While these technologies are affordances for first world capital, communication, and social organization that sometimes spills over to those privileged people in developing nations or that sometimes is harnessed by people living within what we would call less technological systems (remember Sting's posing with the Yanomami to save the rain forests?), it seems to me that it is more often an affordance for cancer, poverty, and ecological devastation among the least privileged of our species.

Ulrich Beck (1995) might argue that the market will work itself out here since I raise here a pretty classic example of distributing away the poisoned cake. But how many have died or been diseased since Beck argued this? How many more motherboards are destined to kill those who have little recourse other than to sift through a pile of toxins?

Of course, I write this at my Macintosh, knowing that Apple Computers has resisted market pressures to be more green. So, it's not an option to simply resist and say "Well, I'm going to make smarter purchases [or have my University make them for me] and therefore add my two cents to the marketplace in an effort to steer it in a way of my own choosing." I already do that by riding my bike to work, eating local and/or organic foods, conserving energy [passive solar, layering in winter, some wood heat, lower hot water temps, higher freezer temps, etc.], recycling, composting, and a fifteen year-old TV, not to mention other older electronics. Even with all that, I'm not perfect. But then, who is? It's not a matter of being "perfect" according to anyone's standards -- even your own. That's just an awful lot to live up to.

Still, we can do better and I'm trying to understand if there could be a sustainable post-humanity. It may even be the case that there can be no sustainability -- no concept of it at all -- without occupying a post-human position or consciousness. As N. Katherine Hayles argues, simulation is a binary to "nature" and cannot be divorced from it. However, if we follow her in locating the self "neither contracted inside the body nor unproblematically projected outside it, but at the cusp between the beholder and the world" (1995, p. 412), then these vast networks of technology are mere extensions of the body -- just prosthetics that we, in their novelty, use clumsily, just as my two-year-old daughter spills her cup of water on herself or on the table.

These prosthetics are not just cups of water, though. They are far more deadly -- even more deadly than cars and airplanes. Yet anyone can use these prosthetics. Of course anyone can have as many children as they want, too, which has its own impact on sustainability (sorry for the Malthusian interjection...). Like birthrates, though, we can affect them with out resorting to Malthus. We know there are economic and cultural influences on birth choices. Just as women and their partners learn to use their bodies to bear more children or not, what conditions might it take to affect the choices we make about technological prosthetics?

Narrative and the Ghost of Deleuze

2007-11-14T14:32:00.000-06:00

Two things, really in this post. First: my horoscope for this week as it appears in full (click on the icon to go to the most current horoscope):

Leo Horoscope for week of November 15, 2007

Stories interest me more than beliefs. I'd rather hear you regale me with tales of your travels than listen to you recite your dogmas. Filmmaker Ken Burns agrees with me. He's worried about the increasing number of people who love theories more than stories. "We are experiencing the death of narrative," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We are all so opinionated that we don't actually submit to narrative anymore. That's the essence of YouTube: Abbreviate everything into a digestible capsule that then becomes the conventional wisdom, which belies the experience of art." Your assignment, Leo, is to help reverse this soul-damaging trend. Spout fewer opinions and tell more stories. Encourage others to do the same.

Are we over-theorizing? Certainly in academe, theory is the name of the game. But to what extent does narrative intersect with theory? As one of my professors asked me (on more than one occasion), "Do students need a theory in order to write?" Maybe I see this question in a new light (I never said I was quick on the uptake). Could it be that students don't have a theory, but a narrative -- what Marilyn Cooper called the "solitary author" narrative -- about writing, and this narrative sometimes functions as theory, but isn't really? And is Burns-Brezny right in claiming that as a society we are so good at speaking about explanations of narratives that we have lost the stories themselves? If so, aren't we then loosing multiplicity or, at least, the habits of living with multiplicity and contingency?

I struggle with this as I revise my dissertation because all through its writing and now during its revision, I feel the current of narrative pulling at its theoretical aspirations. The kind of empirical research I conducted lends itself to narrative quite well, if only in the positivist/ structuralist tradition of anthropology. However, where I arrived was anything *but* positivist or structuralist and, as I increasingly find out fits more and more with Deleuze -- one could say (cry, even over the fact) that while I did not cite Deleuze even once, his thinking haunts the entire work like a ghost shambling around an attic. If Deleuze posits being (becoming) as creativity (Hallward 2006), then we may turn toward a poststructuralist re-creation studies (Rojek 1995). Further, if Zizek is right in characterizing Deleuze's becoming "within those magic moments of illusory freedom (which, in a way, were not precisely illusory)" (xii), then there is a politico-educational turn to this that doesn't settle neatly within humanism, logocentrism, or any other -ism. It simply doesn't settle.

So, maybe, following Deleuze, Zizek and Burns-Brezny, we might stop "doing theory" for a bit. Isn't this why Deleuze detested Hegel? An avoidance of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, of "debate" over meanings, of explaining in endless dialogue? Wouldn't a story tell us just as much, if not more, about our worlds? Doesn't narrative carry those multiple and contingent meanings so that the story itself ceaselessly becomes something other? Could this be a better way to talk about transcendental empiricism?

And, to stir the waters one more time, is transcendental empiricism and the virtualities of Deleuze like the Greek chora?

His Imbecible Lying Ass

2007-11-09T08:44:00.000-06:00

Just thought the image was too good not to distribute. It's from alternet.org.

Ill Risks

2007-11-05T10:19:00.000-06:00

I have a fever and so, instead of teaching today as I normally would, I am staying home. This isn't so bad as it allows me time to finish Thomas Rickert's book and start on Jane Smiley's Moo. I'm a little embarrassed I haven't read the latter, but glad to recommend the former. Rickert's work on cultural studies in composition is sorely needed. The cool part is how he so admiringly points out the flaws of icons in the field -- Berlin and Faigley in particular.

I am also interested in what he calls "pedagogies of risk," or the idea that as teachers we need to allow for the unexpected. It seems a very playful move to confront the limits of control and see how the classroom and curricular games we play depend on some form of risk -- the risk of disclosing one's own neuroses, biases, and (as Rickert is wont to say) modus vivendi. But I have to wonder how this meshes with the notions of risk proclaimed by Ulrich Beck. In my reading of Beck, this risk is everywhere and that underwrites our social functions, thus we are a "risk society." However, at the risk of oversimplifying the case here, Beck says this is what drives current progress. At length, he claims

the battle to distribute away the “poisoned cake” turns capital against capital – and,
consequently, occupational group against occupational group. Some industries and regions
profit by this, others lose. But a key question in the struggle for economic survival has
become how to win and exercise power, in order to foist on others the consequences of social
definitions of risk (1995, p. 10).

So, like the neo-Lacanian theory of Rickert, at the heart of contemporary society is the fissured un-whole that spawns only fantasies of societies yet to come -- societies where there is no racism, sexism, classism, or -- to point to Beck's field of influence -- no environmental destruction. But these are just that -- fantasies -- and the hope is that they are powerful enough to assuage any lasting damage we might do to ourselves and those around us. In any even, the tenuous relationships here urge us to work through these fantasies, always inventing fresh approaches to old problems that are continually dressed in new guises.

It is at once lamentable and heartening. I think Rickert is certainly right in saying that we will never be rid of threats to our social and biological beings. However, Beck urges a new Enlightenment and a renewed commitment to the dispersion of power to identify and mange environmental risk so that it can be dealt with through a democratic socious. Rickert is not so Habermasian here. Rather, Rickert still holds out hope for the power of the savvy individual or group -- the continual emergence of Dadaists, Situationists, hackers, and the like. Those may be risks I can take.

Braiiiins!

2007-10-31T20:54:00.000-06:00

Into the Wild

2007-10-30T11:57:00.000-06:00

OK, disclaimer: I haven't yet seen the movie. I have two kids, the Halloween season is here which means parties and costume making and, of course, the beginning of baking season (are you listening, K8?). However, I have read the book and want to assign that in my Expository & Report Writing class next semester. Like his other book, Into Thin Air (see original excerpt here), Krakauer does a good job of reporting on an event he finds illuminating about the human condition, its frailty, and, therefore, preciousness. In that regard, it also makes an argument out of the "facts" he gathers; in this case, that local Alaskans were too quick to judge the actions of a young man on his own personal and inward search.

My concern is, though, that the movie's appeal will distract from the book (at least until it comes out on DVD and I can show it in class with references to its visual rhetoric). Fortunately or unfortunately, this genre gets taken up pretty quickly into Hollywood (e.g., Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm and Warner Brothers' adaptation about the 1991 event). Hmmm. maybe that's a better assignment... I dunno. Anyway, I'm just wondering about these migrations of texts across genres. It seems really interesting to get students to think about and compare how each does what it does, why it does it, and to what ends or limitations. What I don't like, however, is the hype surrounding these multi-million dollar movies and/or the cynicism that lends itself to something that is "just a movie" and therefore not worthy of spurring action (see Rickert 2007 for more on this, which, BTW was what MBD used to grill me during my defense.. thanks, Mike!).

Accomplishments of a Decade

2007-10-25T08:26:00.000-06:00

While also receiving my diploma this week, I also obtained something else for which I have waited a decade:It is healing nicely, but now my body, when seen as a canvas, cries out for more design.. ;)

Sheepskin

2007-10-22T21:04:00.000-06:00

Observations

2007-10-10T19:44:00.000-06:00

While my posts have slagged off a bit, I'm still here. I just have to deal with my performance evaluation -- a lengthy document that assembles my 2.5 months of experience at UNI into a narrative of progress toward tenure. There are three broad areas: Teaching, Research, and Service.

While I am assigned to 2 departmental committees, they have yet to meet. However, I am conducting a "listening tour" in regards to perceptions of writing on campus. So far, I have met with the Director of Writing Programs, colleagues in the department, the department chair, the Director of the Writing Center, and - tomorrow - the Dean of the College. Not bad for service, eh?

Research is similarly hefty: a book review due out in JAC, an abstract for a chapter in Writing the Earth: Rhetorics and Literacies of Sustainability, and acceptance to next spring's 4Cs.

Teaching is always the tricky bit, isn't it? Not that I have nothing to show for my teaching. I think I have plenty, but the question is, will my observers see it? And, to be clear, there are worse alternatives than the observations required here. I *do* get to write my own narrative that clues my observer's in to my pedagogical philosophy and, hopefully, things they should look for. Plus, after this year's assessment, the observations are also seen alongside those dreaded student assessments administered via bubble sheets at the end of the semester. I can also take liberties to create my own assessment tools to supplement (or offset) these other tools (especially the bubble sheets which, given my high general education load, hold potential to be especially damaging). Starting with year two, then, there is a greater emphasis on holistic measures. So, I'm not griping. I am, however, being self-reflexive.

For me, teaching is a lot about knowing when to step out of the way. It also isn't something confined to the classroom. But here I am arranging for the required observations and I have qualms about the very notion of teaching upon which it is predicated -- largely a lecture-based "performance" whose first act begins at the top of the hour and comes to a curtain call fifty-minutes later. How do we generate an awareness -- with our students, colleagues, administrators, and even in the wider public -- that good teaching often takes place behind the scenes, so to speak? What, exactly, indicates "good teaching"? Does it always appear within the confines of the classroom? For that matter, where is "the classroom" located?

Wondering

2007-09-29T19:43:00.000-06:00

Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Heidegger all traced the beginning of philosophy back to wonder. Rodolphe Gasche, a student of Derrida's links wonder to aporia -- that moment where our current way of thinking gets stuck in its own devices. So, how do we cultivate wonder? If wonder precedes and informs philosophical thinking, what makes wonder? And, as some read Gasche, philosophy hovers behind play, then wonder precedes even play. What, then, does it mean to wonder?

To Heart or Hate Grading

2007-09-11T12:45:00.000-06:00

I got my first stack of papers this week and set out to get at least halfway through over the weekend. Usually, any attempt at tackling the majority of a stack leaves me wiped out and grumpy. However, this weekend, I had almost all Saturday to pace myself while the family was at the Renaissance Festival (the font while loading is the best part of the page, I think). As I graded, I realized "Hey, I like this." And then I had to ask why I liked it. Usually, as Nedra Reynolds points out in her book, Portfolio Keeping, I am one of those professors who really doesn't like that part of the job. I'd rather just sit and talk about the writing and what the student can do to improve it, like a tutoring session. Alas, students want written comments and, I think it provides a record of my reactions we can both reflect upon at the end of the semester when they argue about what they learned and I distribute grades.

So, there I was, totally jazzed about grading. Only I realized was doing more than that. The essays my students wrote provided me with an opportunity I hadn't really gotten in the first two weeks of class. I got to sit down with them and know them through their writing. I wasn't rushed into evaluative mode, but, rather, settled into a mode that was open to their texts, their voices, and the choices they made as they wrote.

Sadly, this didn't last as long as I hoped it would. After I graded half the papers, I had to grade the rest in smaller increments during the week. That meant under more time pressure -- after conferences with the students whose papers I had already completed, in between teaching classes, or -- more often -- in front of the TV after the kids had gone to bed. I tried to remain as open and relaxed about the grading process, but I don't think I accomplished that. I felt more quick to judge and less accountable to each student as an individual. I still graded on the same criteria and often pointed out many of the same things in the last half of papers, but somehow I feel the quality of my responses didn't match their predecessors. I'll have to grade the next stack in reverse order from this one.

We're Beer! We're Here!

2007-09-10T20:02:00.000-06:00

Newly available in Iowa:Here, look closer:
And we are oh, so happy! The 22 oz. commemorative bottles bear a label that reads "FIGBRAI: Fat's Inagural Bike Ride Across Iowa." Mmmmmmmmmm.

A Happy Shambles

2007-09-04T19:48:00.000-06:00

I had figured my new job would involve a fair bit of repairing an old or damaged system. After all, the WPA person here had a degree in literature, taught women's lit courses and published in women's lit; the director of the state Writing Project: an Americanist; director of the writing center: former grad student.... There is a minor in professional writing, but that is administered and taught largely by a wonderful colleague whose degree is in professional and technical writing. She has her hands full there, but outside of us two, there are no other faculty or staff with specialties in writing.

Much of this I knew when I accepted the job. I liked the potential and the room to grow. Where others may have blanched, I saw challenge. So, during the first three weeks here, I have scheduled meetings with the WPA person, the Department Chair, the Director of the Writing Center, a retiring specialist in writing (by way of a minor), and the Dean of the college. So far from what I have learned, the administration realizes its predicament. Certainly, the President of the university wants to replicate the atmosphere he was used to at Iowa State. My chair is behind me and as far as WPA and Writing Center folks, I am enthusiastic about their creativity and open attitude.

In my meetings, I have been using the phrase "initiating a conversation about writing" at this university and I think this is apt. From what I can tell, until fairly recently administration did not take writing seriously and/or relied on a basic skills theory of writing. At one point, what was supposed to be an entrance exam assessing student writing skills had a 50% rate of student failure. Another 50% failed it after taking it a second time. The 25% who could not pass the exam often had to take FYC as a remedial course and/or during one of their final years as an undergraduate. Currently, everyone has to take FYC, even though it still is taught mainly by adjuncts, a few graduate students, and some full-time faculty. However, FYC is still considered remedial by a large segment of the university community. So, there is one thing that needs to be discussed.

Part of this conversation is deeper, though. During orientation lunch, I brazenly (perhaps too brazenly) discussed how rhetoric was the foundation of a liberal undergraduate education, even the foundation of the scientific method. There was some silence at the table, but some curiosity, too, before the Provost interrupted and began her speech. Thankfully, I was off the hook. However, it seems that the conversation about writing here is still fairly shallow: its a basic skill that students ought to have been taught in high school or community college. Then they get upset when students can't write. Worse, they lump all these students together: second language writers with minority writers working against hegemony with less privileged economic class writers with those who just don't know the material. No wonder the administration has that desperate look in their eyes.

I am listening, happily, amidst the shambles.

First Week

2007-08-24T19:33:00.000-06:00

So, I'm done with my first week as Assistant Professor. Can't say it wasn't anything terribly new. But it was kind of alienating in a weird way. Not because the folks here aren't nice -- they are. But the first week is a transition.

The first department meeting isn't until next week and the small day to day stuff just isn't in place yet. Other faculty stop by intermittently with a tentative look and questions of "Are you settled in yet?" or comments about how busy and hectic the first week usually is (it's not for me, really, until I get papers). There's a tension between folks wanting to welcome you but not be taking up too much of your time, either. On top of this, students don't know me yet and are not likely to stop by and talk about the issue I raised regarding portfolio keeping. Even the grad students I have aren't lining up for my office hours or stopping by to discuss their thesis project.

And why would it be any different? I am sure these things will happen in time. I am getting to know and talk a more with students in the major. I even chatted with a grad student of mine in the Department office today. Still, the experience of it can be odd. I am here but not of here, if that makes sense. I must let my roots grow down.

My Birthday with Barack

2007-08-18T20:32:00.000-06:00

Yes, I had a BBQ dinner with Senator Obama. I have to admit it ranks up there with meeting Sting as far as brushes with fame go... or at least admittedly with men far better looking than I. Now, that it was my birthday was even cooler but I assume you don't really want to know all that. You want to know: What did you think? Will you vote for him? Was he "real"? Maybe even, why should I vote for him so early in the race to '08? I can't honestly say this guy has some magic quality that demands anyone should support him beyond the policies he has already outlined. But, I can tell you what I know. But first, a funny story...

A Funny Story
When Obama arrived in his RV, he had to wait for the media to set up.

From inside, we could see them file past the front windows lugging their boom mics, cameras, etc. After they did, the Senator came out and began greeting relatives of the hosts who had assembled on the front lawn. Then, we saw the media folks file the other way past the windows and rather hurriedly. From out the side window, then, we could see Barack at the neighbor's porch -- suddenly filled with about ten people wielding their own personal cameras and craning their necks. Definitely a political move, but what else ya gonna do?

Character
First, he's cool, but in that politician way. He's no dummy. He knows the tricks of persuasion as any politician does. He's very gracious when he meets you and takes time to say your name, to get it right and to make you feel included. He makes eye contact. He's also casual and yet careful in his speech and movement. As I said, he's a politician. He's "on" at venues like this and unavoidably so.

But what he takes time for and what he does in the interactions spoke a lot, too. As we were running overlong in our group conversation, he made a concerted effort to politely remind us that he wanted to get everyone's question in. At that moment, he knew there were still three people who had not asked their question and -- here's the important point -- he knew which three people out of the ten of us.

Third, he really thinks about what he says when he talks. He does not spout platitudes or talking points. His speech is less polished and he doesn't hesitate to stutter a little, backtrack, or clarify. In this forum, at least, he seemed to genuinely respond to questions he said he had not heard before that moment. Jess, who saw him speak last Wednesday, said she had the same impression.

But I think what I have written here could be said of most politicians, at least the good ones, no matter which side of the aisle they claim to sit. So, why Barack? Why not Edwards? Why not Clinton? Hell, why not go for Kucinich at this point just in the hope that it moves the Dems more"left"? Responses to the first two candidates should be obvious -- Edwards is a hypocrite (even if a well-intentioned one) and Clinton is just too polarizing. The difference between Kucinich and Obama, though is a tough one.

Economy
Where Obama is inexperienced, Kucinich is at least a veteran of political office. Yes, Kucinich is the strongest supporter of unions on nay ticket, he's vegan, he's a member of the Green party in all but name. But Naomi Klein's recent talk "Lost Worlds" and her book, The Shock Doctrine, has been weighing heavily on my mind. I think her analysis is sharp, her view of history insightful, and she's one of the sharpest thinkers we've got. But, if unfettered capitalism is bad for recovering communist countries, why should we think we can shock our own economy out of its excesses? If we withdrew from NAFTA and GATT as Kucinich has declared he would, what would happen? What void would be left and what would move into it?

Obama, on the other hand, recognizes the wide berth needed to steer the ship of the U.S. state. He may be inexperienced compared to some, but he's got a clear picture of just how much can be accomplished without precipitating disaster. Obama's health care reform works similarly -- we can't go to single-payer without untold consequences from large players like Blue Cross/ Blue Shield. He admitted that were he design a health care system from scratch, single-payer would be it. But we have to work with what we have.

Education
As far as education goes, I have both the most respect for his plan and the most questions. He talked a lot about including actual teachers in formulating education policy -- something other Dems are only just now starting to do. I also like his stance on limited standardized testing, whole child education, and pairing experienced teachers with newer ones as a form of merit for the experienced ones AND as a professional development opportunity for the newer. But this is where my question comes in -- he characterized this pairing and professional development model as a form of "assessment" instead of how NCLB does it. But I was confused over what was being assessed -- the teacher, the student, or the school. And how does an assessment of one bear on an assessment of another? Moreover, when I pressed him on the question of who does the assessment, he said he was in favor of a nation-wide consensus agreed upon "by experts." This puzzles me, too. Who determines an "expert?" Moreover, I tried to steer him toward some response regarding the diversity of the U.S. population and honoring different cultural norms. Sadly, his consensus response doesn't seem compatible with this.

That criticism aside, he is capable of seeing these points. He commented on how disillusioned teachers are under NCLB and on how the students who fail do so largely because they do not "fit" anywhere in the current was we school our children. Yet, his response seems to be simply that we educate poor and disadvantaged earlier and earlier like their white, middle-class counterparts. In effect, it's a 0-12 public education system. I would agree with him on the problem, but not the solution. The ways we assess child, teacher, and school have to accept difference -- racial, cultural, economic, regional, etc.

Fin
Explanations like the ten of us got are hard to come by on national news. So, it will be up to his team to see how he gets the message out. Certainly, he has the money. I think he's got the talent and the drive. He's better than what we have now, but what isn't? But I think I learned something today about this whole crazy election stuff -- it really is just a big job interview. That's all. Who do you really want to do this job? Does experience matter over principles? Does crude pragmatism translate to success? Or does the past record at many different levels transfer to the one being sought out by a candidate? If you have really looked at all the available candidates and you have a favorite, vote for that person. No. Matter. What. Anyone. Else. Says.

Chill Out!

2007-08-08T12:08:00.000-06:00

My sympathies to those of you in places like St. Louis, Nashville, and Georgia!

Before... not After

2007-07-24T10:59:00.000-06:00

Like my friend, Krisitn, I have an iMac through the university. She took pics of herself as Assistant Professor both before and then a year later. I somewhat duplicate that here.

Check back annually...

The Office

2007-07-15T21:28:00.000-06:00

From inside the doorway.

From next to the desk.

5 Things I've Learned

2007-07-06T11:54:00.001-06:00

Some things I've learned about Iowa and/ or Cedar Falls:

1) For many folks, faith/ religion is a very public part of their lives (coming from someone who moved from "secular" Madison, WI)
2) While the climate is the same as Madison, it is noticeably susceptible to hot prairie winds
3) RAGBRAI is a big deal.
4) Having only 3 public universities makes for strong allegiances.
5) Both public education and public radio are strongly supported.

House

2007-06-30T16:01:00.000-06:00

We are offically Iowegians now, although you can still tell in the reflection my true state calling, like a ghost. What I like best about this picture is something else, though. I love states that put the county name on the license plate as Iowa does. What's even better is, as in this pic, the county name is two words: Black Hawk. It is not Blackhawk as earlier license plates (i've seen them hanging in garages) put it. Now that we have the space, if we can just get "Sparrow" inserted there, all would be square with history.

Moved In

2007-06-26T21:31:00.000-06:00

To my house and my office. Office is an old dorm room from the turn of the century. Nice, original woodwork. I'll post a picture soon.

Success

2007-06-08T19:50:00.000-06:00

And with only very minor revisions!

Jess made the shirt. It says "Helen C. is my (Ex-) Lover." Wait 'till she finds out I have my eye on a lover named Baker Hall...

Anxiety

2007-06-06T21:31:00.000-06:00

It's been an anxious day. Tomorrow I defend my dissertation. What can I do to prepare? I wrote some notes for a response to my chair's opening question. Beyond that, I have to think on my feet. As with my last post, I have some ideas to work out and so i hope to use that to my advantage.

Good news, though... and bad. I realized last week that the course I studied will be at Wounded Knee the day I defend. This was one of the sites where student journals really took off as a result of "serious play". However, as with the '05 trip, the wakinyans paid Shannon & Bennett Counties a visit. There is no doubt they had to seek shelter as did we in '05. I hope everyone is safe. I will be thinking of them tomorrow.

Phinished (Almost, that is...)

2007-05-24T22:05:00.000-06:00

What I mean is that I got final drafts of my dissertation to committee members today. I had to stand around and make 1240 copies, essentially. Then, I had to deliver them across campus. 3 in my home department, 1 across the street (but up 3 flights, down a state agency corridor and into the "secret" faculty lounge), and one about 6 blocks away. Not too bad, really. I just hope everyone can give it a good read between now and 7 June. I expect revisions, but no great overhauls - mostly the last chapter, It's difficult to put it all on the line: where do tepid claims depart from carefully worded limitations of your study? Where does crowing about your work turn into grand exuberance?

Anyway, there are last minute things and methods that really helped put it all in perspective, so I can't really complain about spending the extra week to smooth things out. Plus, my horoscope was really spot on for this week. Whew! Now to grade my students' papers... oh, shit, I only have until midnight tomorrow! :)

Happy? Birthday Helvetica

2007-05-09T09:43:00.000-06:00

Yes, fonts have birthdays. Helvetica, the font of choice for the modern(ist) age is now 50 years old. Yes, the font for neo-fascists enjoys its golden days in an appropriate age. It's so sleek, so efficient, so easy to read, so... everywhere. It even has its own film.

We composition(ists) don't often talk much about typeface, but we should. I know, I know, computer and writing folks have been talking about fonts for a while now and *everybody* has the disclaimer on their syllabus to use one of the "appropriate" fonts like Times New Roman but NOT like Wiesbaden Swing Dingbats. But we really haven't theorized fonts, have we? Graphics are so much more cool.

But sometimes we need that Buffy the Vampire Font to make our point, to persuade our audience that this is really a cool thing we're doing. Of course, it can backfire, too. Fonts are to content like dress is to a speaker's ethos, n'est-ce pas?

Given Fleckenstein's argument that literacy involves image and word, what better place to start than looking at how font use signals a particular relation to the subject, composing or composed? What about Wysocki's "I Can See Clearly Now: The Visible Form of Academic Texts and the Invisible Form of the Subject." It's been eleven years since she made that point, so maybe we should revive it. It seems to connect typeface to larger social flows of power and desire, so maybe we can get a critical angle on what we do when we provide appropriate versus inappropriate fonts or when we say explore fonts in this part of the course, but not in this other part.

Anyway, happy birthday fonts everywhere. No exceptions.

Gender Bias in Language Research?

2007-04-28T21:06:00.000-06:00

On the WPA-L, someone sent around the link to The Gender Genie, a program that uses an algorithm to determine if the author of a text was male or female. First of all, I think the whole thing is hugely dubious. It is based on statistical analysis of the British National Corpus, so there is nothing remotely innate about the correlation between gender and "the use of pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers" (Argamon, Koppel, Fine, Shimon [.pdf document]). The conclusions are rightly stated as "socialization of gender."

However, even this claim needs to be tempered. I ran my own little test using the Gender Genie. When submitting blocks of text, one must choose the type of text it is from broad genre categories of fiction, non-fiction, or blog. Since I don't really have a great deal of fiction to submit, I first took a piece of this blog and ran it through the Genie. It claimed the author was female. As a comparison, I took a piece of my dissertation. It claimed the author was male. Why the difference?

It maybe that the samples I submitted were too short. The blog was 289 words and the section of my dissertation was 382 words. So, I ran another test, this time with a different blog entry and a different section of my dissertation. They were 816 and 900 words, respectively. I achieved the same results with these samples as with the first test. My blog entry was seen as "female" and my dissertation was seen as "male."

My dissertation discusses theory and empirical data while my blog tends to remain more theory oriented. However, I would think this would actually score a difference the other way around with real experience scoring as more "feminine," assuming the Gender Genie reinforces the stereotype of abstract discourse as a penchant for males and experiential or intuitive discourse as something innately female. Moreover, since both blog entries and my dissertation involve academic thinking about discourse, the fact that any difference was detected strikes me as patently odd.

Now, to be fair, my dissertation involves more conclusive theorizing than the two blog entries I used previously. So, I ran a third test, this time involving only one strongly argued (and firmly believed) blog entry since we know the dissertation is "male." Based on only 441 words, mind you, the Gender Genie found this one to be "male" as it did my dissertation.

Conclusions? Beyond that the Gender Genie is absolute bunk (like you needed me to tell you)? That what is being measured here are stereotypes. The dissertation sections and the lone blog entry that scored as male did so because of the conviction and assured manner in which they were argued, not the more tentative and speculative manner of my blog entries. As such, the algorithm picks out a degree of certainty with which the author uses language to relate the reader to the subject matter being written. That is it. There is another step required to make the leap from that measure to the conclusion that these are indicative of the ways in which British or even Western societies socialize along gendered lines. The authors of the Gender Genie makes that step, equating a self-assured manner of writing with gender characteristics. But, in doing so only reinforces sexist stereotypes about women's and men's ways of writing.

Don't believe me? As a final check, I ran two more texts: Gwen Ifill's op-ed about Don Imus' derogation of the Rutger's women's basketball team and this blog entry. Ifill's op-ed that took Imus to task was 765 words and was seen as male. This entry? 618 words and written by a male.

Hyperides Speaks!

2007-04-26T10:38:00.000-06:00

It is amazing that someone who lived in the Classical Greek world wrote something down, and that, despite his words being abraded off to use as parchment for medieval writing, the text still exists! Apparently, philosophers are going over the commentary on Aristotle here (requires Windows Media Player so Mac folks like me are SOL). Hyperides wrote about Aristotle's taxonomy and classification of animals, so there may be important contributions not only for philosophers of science, but also for those interested in the rhetoric of science and nature. Stay tuned!

VTech, Violence, and Writing

2007-04-17T22:59:00.000-06:00

As the news trickles out about the killings at VTech, I know we are all pretty saddened, shocked and alarmed. For me, I find it disturbing that Cho Seung-Hui had written extensively for his courses as an English major and that he even was referred to counseling by his writing teacher. These things hit real close to where I spend a good part of my day, a day I often share with many like you.

So, I want to ask what our response might be at this time. We might think about revisiting some scholarship that has been published on dealing with violence in writing. I can't remember the title of it, but I recall an article about a piece of writing that described beating up a homeless man. It turned out to be fiction, but the teacher's response and thinking about appropriate action was really insightful. This may be a good place to start.

We may even look at Cho's writing. Distasteful as it may seem, it is posted online. We may ask what separates it from other writing that is also predicated on violence or just ask what we would do if a student handed in something like it in our courses.

My hope is that we can at least take an opportunity to inform ourselves on the possible situations we face as instructors.

So, I guess I am open to suggestions or ideas at this point and have a lot of questions about how to make this happen. If you have an article, a suggestion, a clue, or word of wisdom, please share! All I ask is that this not turn into rampant theorizing or polemicizing. Please keep the politics to a minimum.

Dvd

Prayers Go Out (V Tech)

2007-04-16T13:44:00.000-06:00

My heart goes out to all the students, faculty, and staff at Virginia Tech today. The events of 16 April are truly horrible and will impact the school and its members for some time. As you grieve and begin the steps toward healing, I think of you and hope for your future.

Vonnegut 1922 - 2007

2007-04-12T09:39:00.000-06:00

We will miss him.

Rutgers, Imus, and Critical Consciousness

2007-04-10T10:18:00.000-06:00

I was going to post some exploration on the language of cephalopods. But with the whole Rutgers women's b-ball-Don Imus-Al Sharpton thing, and teaching this week on the power of language and how students sometimes have to read into texts in order to understand the power differentials, I found something more pertinent. Here it is reprinted from CommonDreams.org:

Trash Talk Radio

by Gwen Ifill

Let’s say a word about the girls. The young women with the musical names. Kia and Epiphanny and Matee and Essence. Katie and Dee Dee and Rashidat and Myia and Brittany and Heather.

The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University had an improbable season, dropping four of their first seven games, yet ending up in the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball championship game. None of them were seniors. Five were freshmen.

In the end, they were stopped only by Tennessee’s Lady Vols, who clinched their seventh national championship by ending Rutgers’ Cinderella run last week, 59-46. That’s the kind of story we love, right? A bunch of teenagers from Newark, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and, yes, Ogden, Utah, defying expectations. It’s what explodes so many March Madness office pools.

But not, apparently, for the girls. For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded “nappy-headed ho’s” — a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The “joke” — as delivered and later recanted — by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.

The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he’s done some version of this several times before.

I know, because he apparently did it to me.

I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton.

Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program.

It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

I was taken aback but not outraged. I’d certainly been called worse and indeed jumped at the chance to use the old insult to explain to my NBC bosses why I did not want to appear on the Imus show.

I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me.

It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult.

Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus’s program? That’s for them to defend, and others to argue about. I certainly don’t know any black journalists who will. To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.

Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well.

So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.

Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.

Gwen Ifill is a senior correspondent for “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and the moderator of “Washington Week.”

Animal Communication

2007-04-08T20:41:00.000-06:00

Has it really been that long since I posted? Wow! Lots has happened, though: a new job, house hunting (unsuccessful so far), another chapter done... now if I can just finish grading papers by tomorrow.

Until then, I was watching Nature again, this time about cephalopods, those foot-headed protoypes for Cthulhu. Anyway, some species communicate through rapid color changes in skin pigmentation. This reminded me of insects and pheremone use, not to mention elephant's ability to register infrasound frequencies. So, with other species, we have ample evidence of systems of communications that are radically different from our own. Or are they?

Applying Gibson's theory of perception, I have to ask if communication is really just an affordance. Since an affordance is some potential that exists in one's environment -- defined so that one's "perceptual array" includes one's own body -- then manipulating the body to signal meaning would be the basis for communication, at least the basic unit.

Of course, this puts the onus on organisms as meaning-making animals and I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate assumption. It implies intent. Even we humans sometimes communicate unintentionally. So, taking ecological perception one step further and seeing other organisms as part of the perceptual field, sometimes affordances themselves (crabs use other organisms and myriad insects see others as good egg laying sites, i.e., seeing them as locations with potential in the environment, not as "food source").

So, with this in mind, we might test whether or not organisms read rather than write. If they do, then the world is abuzz with (pun intended) and literally saturated with meaning. Organisms are still meaning-making but not as intentional. Derrida would be more right than even he might have claimed.

But this isn't really my point since putting this to any kind of testing would be difficult beyond compare. Rather, my point here is that this disrupts writing theory to a large degree, making visual script (just) one more system among systems and, more importantly, less a methodical means to transmit meaning as an elaboration of

Welcome and Wopila Wakinyans!

2007-03-21T20:52:00.000-06:00

Thunder returned today, flying over as slow as geese.

Sage and cedar smoke adorn our spirit plate.

Real Virutal Worlds (RVWs)

2007-03-08T10:28:00.000-06:00

I don't know if anyone else has yet used the phrase "real virtual worlds" (RVWs), but according to some folks at the2007 Game Developer Conference, something like this is about to happen because of what they see as a huge influx of corporate capital into MMO sites like WoW. Maybe there's another term for it, but it seems to me that, in the mid-range forecast still, with Web 2.0 (more here expounding on O'Reilly) and this economic shift, we are entering the the planning and early testing stages of our imagined futures. These are futures where we live in real virtual worlds, where the "real" and the "viritual" mesh ever more seamlessly and with less effort -- of either the physical or imaginative kind -- with each other. It sounds as if designers want daily activities like banking and shopping to soon be a matter of entering the "viritual" portal and performing these functions within an imaged space accessible by thousands.

The question this poses, of course, is just how close we will actually live up to the hype and horror of virtual reality. I doubt we're moving toward a Matrix-like dream state society, but I also doubt the visionaries who claim we're about to move into the wonders of full-body immersion experiences. As physical creatures, we're just not that smart. Look at the future visions of the twentieth century. We live in nothing like the worlds of imagined by H. G. Wells or Phillip Knowlan. We won't ever live in the world of William Gibson, either.

This isn't to dismiss these writers. In fact, it is to point out their importance and, in so doing, point out the importance of critical academic research about video games. SF writers, authors of graphic novels, producers of MMOs, even hypester-historians like Rheingold all produce the template -- the imaginative plans by which we shape these RVW technologies and our futures.

OK, but here is what I have been laboring to argue for many a year now. As we follow this path, we continue to loose sight of the physical consequences of our actions. Each of the virtual literacies upon which such a future and a design for society depends holds potentially devastating consequences for our physical bodies -- the real platform upon which all this depends. What use is virtual banking if we're all riddled with cancer? Seriously, the computer is a toxic beast! And they persist!

Part of the optimism in techno-ideology though is the unshakeable belief that humans are capable of overcoming their problems through technological advancements. Just look at the "non-toxic computer." The amount and kinds of chemicals that go into making computers and other devices is amazing. Add to that the entire production chain of making plastics, silicon chips, aluminum casings, power generation, battery production... well, the list goes on and on. Even if the computer itself has a low toxicity, it can still leave a huge toxic footprint through its manufacture. Let's not calculate the magnitude of this problem by simply looking at the number of computer users. We have to add in the servers, routers, cables, satellites, plus the systems that provide care and maintenance for the system itself.

My point is that all of this has an effect on the physical world. It affects not just "nature" by poisoning streams and lakes, seeping into groundwater, attaching itself to soil particles, and becoming airborne through dust, but in doing so, it also enters our most precious bodily systems. This is simply not on the radar of those pushing for ecological modernization who shift the debate from the ethos of the perpetrator to the ethos of the critic or who make changes within the system without changing the system itself.

Does this mean I'm selling my Mac, dropping my weblog, or ditching my minivan? No. But my Mac is almost five years old and will be recycled and I bike, bus, or carpool whenever possible, plus we use only one car for four people. The fact is that our society is organized around its technologies. Cities are set up to be car friendly and my career, like the careers of many in an information economy, pretty much determines that I use a computer or be left way behind. And this is critical, for perfection may be impossible. We are, after all, human and that means limited. We cannot live in such a way that we do no damage. Even vegetarians live off the lives of others. What we can do -- what we must do -- is teach others how to juggle what determines them with ways to resisting them. In the end, we won't ever reach the imagined future utopia, but with a bit of hope and luck, we won't reach the dystopia, either. Instead, we can use the original RVW, our imagination, far more wisely.

Gadamer, Games/ Play, Phronesis

2007-03-02T10:45:00.000-06:00

Ahhhh.... finally some time to, well, work at my job! Being "on the market" can be fun, but not always a cakewalk. Still, my latest presentation got me thinking about the liberal educational aims of ethos and the relationship between rhetoric and phronesis. Within an ecology of language -- one that admits not just the social constructionist systems of discourse but also the physical systems of living ecologies -- one's ethos may depend less on abstract social values or principles of behavior and more on the regular maintenance of relations with both social and natural phenomena. Since the physical part of this whole thing is, ultimately, unable to represent its own interests in any social forum, the practical manifestation of that relationship must necessarily be poetic (I'm following Caruth and others here who have argued that language's inability to represent reality is a trauma with which we must all deal). So, Environmental Impact Statements can be said to be a form of poetry.

That's all well and good. But judgments about that poesis are still vexed by social systems of language and then how do we deal with naively Romantic versions of "wilderness" or utilitarian versions of animal rights? Aren't we still left holding the bag in its entirety because we are the only ones with the capacity of judgment?

Maybe... Rather than follow Kant here, we can suppose Gadamer offers us something with his concept of play and his rehabilitation of Aristotle's phronesis. While I might agree with HGG that we can choose our play, I would admit that he's right when he says in Truth & Method that

the self-presentation of human play depends on the player's conduct being tied to the make-believe goals of the game, but the "meaning" of these goals does not in fact depend on their being achieved. Rather, in spending oneself on the task of the game, one is in fact playing oneself out. The self-presentation of the game involves the player's achieving, as it were, his own self-presentation by playing -- i.e. presenting -- something (108)

and

Thus it is not really the absence of a fourth wall that turns the play into a show. Rather, openness toward the spectator is part of the closedness of the play. The audience only completes what the play as such is (109).

Of course, we see here an emphasis on ethos as performance -- as the performance of a relationship between other characters, props, audience, etc. This can be scripted (just look at the choice of colors and styles in children's clothes and toys - is there no more insidious marketing of binary gender relations that those aimed at the fourth wall of children?) or improvised (as when we learn a new discourse, culture, etc. and can't rely on internalized scripts). In different arenas, theaters, or situations we perform differently.

The task with human-nature relations, or more accurately with the social-physical relationship (which captures the "ideal" and abstract social semiotic systems as distinct from the always particular and potentially living physical systems which generate those ideas -- thus our physical bodies are one thing and our representations of them as gendered, raced, classed, able, etc. are something else entirely), is to not judge the physical according to the play of the ideal.

What we might be able to do, however, is see ideal playing as open to and playing for the physical. We thus establish a feedback loop or dialogic relationship between physical and social. Moreover, this feedback loop depends upon the phronesis of the performer -- one's knack at getting the physical to respond in a particular way.

Maybe this is as far as Gadamer can take us since we can see the scientific method as a kind of exploitative play or racism as a potentially worse play that exploits others. There is nothing here to guide judgment except "results" however those results are defined -- again, social and ideal. But, if we are trapped within paradigms of judgement that 1) are always social and thus 2) can never be commensurate with the physical (Caruth again), then 3) our judgments can never be "pure" but at best mere approximations or attempts at proper action. If this is the case, aren't we also involved in a play with our own capacity to judge? Given game theory's explanations of rational behavior systems, wouldn't goodwill (eunioa) and virtue (arete) be those qualities demonstrably suited for judging phronesis?

Who me?

2007-02-24T23:25:00.000-06:00

So cool to see so many I know named here with their (newer) titles like "Professor" or just the circles of people and the circuit of desire traced by these names. And yet so horrifying to read her following post and feel so inadequate about being on the market.

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

2007-02-20T21:04:00.001-06:00

Here.

Flatland Meets Elephant

2007-02-18T13:30:00.000-06:00

I remember Carl Sagan's Cosmos series and I still have the book. In it, he used Abbott's thought experiment regarding Flatland, a 2-dimensional world with 2-D inhabitants, and what they would experience in a 3-D universe -- placed in a box, they could not climb out since they were unable to experience "up." This clip follows in the same tradition.

Sublime Americans?

2007-02-11T20:57:00.000-06:00

I went to the Farm Toy Show in Verona today. It's a collection of collectors packed with their merchandise into a high school gymnasium and not limited to farm toys. It's really pretty expansive and includes Hot Wheels, baseball cards, beanie babies, Elvis, and sundry Americana. While it was exciting that my son came in second place for his age bracket in the pedal-tractor pull, I guess I never really critically noticed events like this.

First, it's interesting as a form of play and that has its own merits. However, it occurred to me as I stood there that there was something both alarming and wonderful about the spectacle. I head Snyder's words, "America -- your stupidity. I could almost love you again." Everyone had their own collection of things: big metal 1940s trucks, tiny plastic tractors, tables covered with astro turf and sets of mini-houses and dairy barns. It was as communal as it was individual. Folks cared about their neighbors and talked to us not to make one more sale, but to hear our story or connect with us as people instead of customers. Even the hipsters in Madison -- who have perfected the art of converting chit chat into greenbacks -- have the air of superficial interest. In the gym, though, were those seventy year olds who knew the pleasure of getting to know another human being, sharing together a brief moment of a long life.

Second, the resources: we're on the verge of war with Iran, already at war in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and involved in military strategy, skirmishes, support, or occupation in countless other places. Most of this is under the stated goal of "spreading democracy," and it's certainly part of the unstated goal of making the world safe for business. Yet, the plastic, the money, the time people spend looking at *things.* I can imagine their homes: a room or rooms formerly occupied by sons and daughters, the basement loaded with boxes and the table top scenes, living rooms adorned with china hutches and porcelain dolls. This is what people do to occupy their time, to stave off boredom, to connect.

So, the desire here -- the desire to connect, the desire to fight loneliness, the desire to not die alone. The gregarious American -- sublime? pathetic? a menace? Is this even just "American"?
Have we moved away from the frontier American who longed for the open plains, the miles between him and his neighbor, the lover of space? Has the frontiersman taken over the living room and in the name of conquest and commensurability tried to halt the space between him and his family?

ghosts in the machine

2007-02-06T13:58:00.000-06:00

This clip over-hypes the Web a bit, but as Rebecca Moore Howard comments, it is "worth a watch." I may use it on Friday in my 201 course.

Animal Thoughts, or The Case of the Sri Lankan Elephant

2007-02-05T21:41:00.000-06:00

I was watching Nature last night – an episode about whether or not animals can predict disasters. The 2004 Indian Ocean (and beyond) tsunami was used as a test case scenario to augment historical contemporary anecdotal accounts. It is an interesting question and I think basic prima facia evidence suggests that, like humans, animals respond to their environment yet unlike humans have varying ranges of senses through which to apprehend environmental cues. What distresses me, though, is that as a negative case they present a radio-collared Asian elephant in Yala National Park, Sri Lanka. At 9am, the transponder receives the elephant’s location near the coast. Shortly after 9am, the tsunami hits the coast and at 10am, the elephant’s position has moved but is equidistant, if not closer to the coastline.

Again, this may seem prima facia as evidence that elephants cannot detect infrasonic cues sent out from massive earth movements thousands of miles away. But – and this is the distressing part – it denies that elephant any real computational ability or decision-making capacity. In short, it denies the rhetoric of earth-organism interaction.

Margaret Syverson’s ecological theory of composition uses complexity theory to talk about writing as a system. She differentiates 3 types of systems in the literature she read: simple system such as a pendulum, complicated systems such as a motor engine, and complex systems such as a lake or population of organisms. Complicated systems are static and simply run how they are supposed to unless something monkeywrenches their operations. Complex systems can adapt. Think of blackbirds alighting en masse and how they move as a whole yet avoid a speeding car on the road. Organisms themselves can be seen as complex systems, adapting to different environments and conditions. There is a rhetorical moment in complex systems, even as that moment may be extra-discursive. There is some form of communication beyond stimulus and response. It seems that in the case of the Sri Lankan elephant, we are definitionally given an elephant that is a complicated, but not a complex system.

So, this elephant is a priori unable to think, make decisions, or even contemplate the exquisite grass she is eating and zone out from the plethora of stimuli she receives from her environment. Such scientific reasoning makes an object of animals and denies them any agency. Is this type of thought why we see the number of species in such rapid decline? Or am I being too utilitarian? No doubt Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer would agree with me. But I don’t think I agree with them. Even those pathogens which infected my child obey some communicative patterns. DNA, when treated as information, is also a complex system and what are viruses but almost raw DNA?

So, this is how I see the process by which we slowly deny agency outside the human, limiting not only language but rhetoric and even thought itself to our own species. Diagram courtesy of http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/cells/virus.html

Page Kayenta Arizona 1995- 2007

2007-01-30T22:05:00.000-06:00

It's been a hard day. Ruby has a massive ear infection in each ear, but is thankfully on amoxicillin and will be better in a couple of days. This was the morning.

In the afternoon, we had to put down our dog, Page. This was tough. Very tough. We had been deliberating this for at least a month, perhaps really since she had a cluster of seizures a couple months ago. She has lived with epilepsy for most of her life -- she wasn't quite a year when she had her first seizure. We treated it with phenobarbitol until the cluster. When the cluster came, we had, in fact, already discussed a change in medication with our vet. Her dosage had gone up to 240mg! This was a cause for concern, so we decided to switch over to some potassium bromide. Because this wasn't on our vet's shelf, and because there was no immediate cause for alarm, he had to order it. However, it didn't arrive in time. Still, the vet hospital switched her over when we brought her in.

This worked well to control her seizures; she only had a few during the two months she was taking it. However, her liver panel suggested some stress from the years of Phenobarb and the KBr wasn't going to do much good, either. Furthermore, she could no longer walk well on the hard wood floor, the linoleum, and sometimes the carpet (probably from the KBr). When she was on the carpet or outside, getting up for her was a chore. When she was on a slick surface and sometimes outside, getting up was impossible. She would often become stranded and simply bark incessantly until someone moved her.

So, we chose euthanasia. It sucks. It not at all how I expected it to end. It is still hard.

I'm working on an obit, though, since there are so many people who loved Page and love us but are far away. They will want to share in the passing of a dear friend. Here's a draft:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
-- Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

Page Kayenta Arizona, 1995- 2007.

A survivor in spirit, a gentle heart, a friend, died January 30, 2007. Rescued from under a porch in the high desert of Arizona, Page was what locals there call a “purebred Navajo Shepherd.” She lived through the mange, epilepsy, and a corncob lodged in her intestine, but was never defined by these things. Until the end, she fought back at the squirrels and loved to be outside whenever possible. We are happy to have given her twelve years she would otherwise never have seen. With great remorse, we chose to euthanize her after continued complications from a cluster of seizures two months ago. We plan a memorial service in the spring. All dogs will be welcome.

Winter??

2007-01-29T21:05:00.000-06:00

Wow, we actually have winter. Finally! Maybe there is hope for the seasons yet. Patience.

Funny conversation: Mom: Did you know Mr. Roger is a vegetarian? Son: Does that mean he walks everywhere? (True story!)

Dilemma: Apply to the RSA Workshop on "Rhetorics of Place"? or stay focused on defending my dissertation? I know it ought to be the latter, but the workshop calls me. And I already know John Ackerman.

I can see why folks end up ABD. By a certain point, writing out your intuitions can get dull. Yet, that's academe, no? The communication of the idea is the payoff. Otherwise, you're greedy for keeping knowledge to yourself. Even though I love it and glad for my job, it's still work:)

Back to Basics

2007-01-24T22:53:00.000-06:00

A pretty good day all around, despite still being plagued by this head cold. Class discussion on "place" was fantastic! My 201 students read Yi Fu Tuan's (1991) "Language and the making of place: a descriptive narrative approach" alongside an interview with Vandana Shiva that appeared in Yes! magazine. I had to lead discussion on Tuan since the student who volunteered decided to drop th course. However, Megan, the student who led discussion on Shiva did a great job and the other students responded well, adding their own experiences, perspectives, and even some criticism - a rare thing to see on the second day of class.

On the bus, I got a better response to Rosa Eberly's question about the exigency for my dissertation. At the brownbag (a 9 am brownbag? who ever heard of such a thing?) I responded the context of the conversation. We had discussed critically examining outsider/ insider literacies and rhetorics and I said that motivated what I was writing. However, it didn't sit well with me and I knew it. There was a larger exigency motivating my work but I couldn't spit it out in the room with the sun glaring off both the snow on the capital and the ice on Lake Mendota, with my head cold making my voice sound like a 50s DJ, and with the roundtable discussion of professor Eberly and my peers -- all high level work and a little intimidating.

So, thinking back on my first chapter, where I gave an overview of what Tim Taylor called the EAS and EAM approaches within ecocomposition, I realized that this was the kernel for real exigency: the grit for the pearl, if not the nacre, as it were. What I wrote on the bus and revised later (just before writing this, really) was that yes, "the arrangement is bifurcated. Two views are simply juxtaposed and held in relation to one another. But, how are these views connected? To ask this is not necessarily to urge a totalizing narrative. Rather, it is simply to inquire into relationship between two areas of ecocomposition. On one hand, if nature is discursively constructed, we can view those constructions and reveal the ways they fail or succeed to accomplish given rhetorical tasks. On the other hand, if language is ecological, we are always already pawns in a system that supercedes the merely human. Both of these are worthwhile views and their respective projects are to be commended, even necessary for the well-being and survival of many species, not least of which is our own. But, the question becomes one of how we get from an analysis of the ways we talk about our environment to making part of that analysis a reflective recognition that our talk already bears traces of its environment."

Home Order

2007-01-21T21:24:00.000-06:00

So, I added some content (see left) and changed things around. Let me know if you like it. I've been concentrating on content and decided to have a bit more fun. Also, be sure to check out my cronies and spread the amour viral.
I'm a little disappointed in the clouds. Maybe I haven't said it enough: ecology, ecology, ecology, ecology, ecology. It's all ecological. There is no separation between natural ecology, social ecology, political ecology, viral ecology, language ecology... any of it. Bakhtin was onto it right before he died. Deleuze explained it. No boundaries. No limits. Everything is connected. Ecology is what makes the postmodern condition sublime. Thought affects matter affects biology affects language affects nature affects... well, you get it.

Le Grand Content

2007-01-19T21:19:00.000-06:00

Anne Wysocki had a post on her blog about this film, Le Grand Content (also available on You Tube). It's funny and creepy and pretty bizarre, but I like it nonetheless. Like others have said, it pokes fun at a culture devoted to Power Point, USA Today, and useless factoids that strive for gravitas. Students might learn something about argument from it, but maybe using it in a classroom would neuter its comic potential. I dunno... it's revealing as a process of (admittedly bad) theorizing, but to what degree do we all fall into the problem it points up? For those of us in the Western cultures, the triadic spheres are no accident, nor are the graphs. It's a pithy bit of satire on contemporary thought, really. Sad & depressing, but ain't it the truth?

Spring Semester

2007-01-18T11:39:00.000-06:00

Well, it is officially underway with the staff meetings, syllabus workshops, planning, etc. I have to be careful this semester, cuz even though I'm only teaching my one course (English 201), I still have campus visits to do. I'm not publishing where just yet since this is a public site.

With that in mind, I *can* talk about the hiring here at UW. We have an excellent slate of candidates for the English 100 Director position. While there is a pretty strong literacy focus, we are a small department and really need someone who works in rhetorical theory and classical rhetoric. That, combined with my ecological outlook on language, leads me to Debra Hawhee. Her work on bodily rhetorics is first-rate. Recently on her blog, she linked a study that tracked the pitch and tonality of Dr. King's speech. We often forget, as Hawhee notes, that language is grounded in the body and its rhythms. There is a dance that happens when we speak as well as when we listen. We are affected -- not just moved along (bound by?) chains of reason, but moved in our emotions and bodies. I don't see this reflected in activity theory (see below) but I do think it is part of the ecology of language.

Maybe this is a strange point to (finally) get on to Ulrich Beck, but his argument is that we now live in a risk society. The future-orientation planning and designing "safe" futures generates the notion of risk. This is quite evident, in my mind, with the Bush administration's harping about security -- of troops, U.S. citizens, borders, etc. However, it works by extension: if a sovereign nation poses a perceived threat (real or imagined) to any body (individual or corporate and so deemed worthy enough of action, for not all U.S. bodies are equal in the eyes of the administration) then the U.S. can claim the right to assume "management" of that risk. Curiously, though, as Beck discusses about ocean management, no one is actually responsible for the consequences because the argument is that everyone (or at least a network) is contributing to the problem. This is what Beck calls "organized non-liability," which plays a role in his argument that "the nuclear power or chemical industries etc. are their own most powerful and enduring adversaries" (1995, p. 12). As these segments of the economic and political order try to "distribute away the 'poisoned cake'," capital turns against capital and such segments of the order can come crashing down.

Or, so goes his analysis of social rhythms within the era post-Enlightenment. Certainly, he has the legacies of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Love Canal, DDT, the Endangered Species Act, etc. on his side. But isn't the dilemma here troubling? Armed with an ecological perspective and to preemptively avert damage to a citizen body, the state claims the right to move beyond itself, into the realm of some other nation-body if need be, to disrupt that body and do violence to it. After all, if my neighbor is stockpiling uranium and I may be dosed with unacceptable levels of radiation as a result, aren't I permitted to do something about it? Or, maybe that's not the best example. Rather, we might ask who is responsible for global warming? What is to be done to stop it?

So, I think what we see is a divide between paradigms of thought here. In the post-Enlightenment version that currently reigns from corporate boardrooms to the Bush administration (and even the Democratic Party), bodies are discreete, stable entitites that are separate from each other but can move into or across other lines and segmentations under certain circumstances. Concepts such as justice, and responsibility become key ethical terms. Someone has to take the blame, and if it's not really the body responsible, then a suitable scapegoat will be found. In the neo-sophistic version -- which may include Hawhee and certainly includes an ecological outlook on reality -- everyone is responsible and must act accordingly, consciously, and with respect for all Others. What we do to one reverberates and echoes through the systems of bodies, from sub-individual organs (often sustained by non-human bodies), to Others we recognize, to the social and cultural systems -- the guts and organs -- that sustain those Others.

MLK Jr.

2007-01-15T22:17:00.000-06:00

Well, after a long hiatus, I'm back and just in time to give props to the Reverend. It took me a while to remember how to get back in my account, but thankfully, I did it.

First, I want to not only talk about the continuing racial and economic disparities in the U.S., but also about how an ecological perspective DOES account for these inequities and is not just a white, male, middle-class obsession with leisurely pursuits.

First, I think the Dr.'s dream is fulfilled in name only. Victor Villanueva posted a great article about the new racism. To me, it seems he's either been reading or come to the same conclusions as did Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire. While the social narratives insist Dr. King's legacy was success in making the lives of African-American's better, folks like Alonzo Kittrels knows that there are real problems. Black folks are still impoverished, still marginal in our society. Yet, to many students I see and to many people I have talked to, civil rights is a thing of the past. There are almost no marches, racism rarely makes the news, and many students can't really spot it when they see it. That's why Peggy McIntosh's essay is important for a lot of students to read here in the midwest. Racial and economic inequity are linked.
But this is also why an ecological approach is important. Racism has become embedded in the way we organize ourselves -- as an effect, if not an outright cause. We can call the playing field level because we have Affirmative Action, color blind bankruptcy laws, etc. But at the end of the day, racial minorities are the ones who get screwed. Blacks, Latino/ Latinas, Native Americans, muslims, etc. are structurally marginalized in our society and the average college student, much less the average voter, is unable to recognize how the system works to the disadvantage of many. It's a systemic problem and a systemic approach is the only way to challenge it.

Playful Writing

2006-12-28T21:43:00.000-06:00

Could the way we play affect society? Could the rules-free version of US play lead to aggressive, a-social hyper-individuals fueling a “me-first” social Darwinism?

In relation to writing, though, I think play is important not only because it can invite engagement within the zone of proximal development, but because of its affordances (Gibson 1989). In this sense, I make a differentiation between “consequential” and “inconsequential” types of play (following Barab & Roth 2006, Barab, Sadler, Heiselt, Hickey, Zuiker 2006). For play to always afford engagement within a ZPD, the players must take their play as having real effects; their actions within the bounds of play must produce results that they perceive as having meaning. An outsider may see the play as all completely irrelevant, but that does not matter. What matters is the “-emic” perspective.

Take, for example, academics. Many students see the academic system and their daily classrooms as inconsequential. The school is a place different from “the real world,” grounded in abstract theory and idealism, not concrete problems and pragmatism. They thus do not fully engage with the problems and challenges presented to them, worrying more about how to “beat the system” of this artifice than actually accomplishing the tasks it has laid out for them. To this extent, we can say that learning does, indeed, occur. It may be very high level learning, indeed, but because it tries to step outside the realm of play, it is doomed to failure by the very system it seeks to figure out.

However, in consequential play, the player has a stake in the outcome of the game. She sees her actions as meaningful and may even see the rules as necessary, if not “natural.” This approximation of play and nature is important, since it is by this route that we often 1) devalue play in relation to academic or other forms of “work” and 2) fail to notice the ways play is socially organized. I will get to how consequential play affords engagement in a bit, First, though, let me elucidate this point about play and nature.

First, conventional play theory usually defines play as "not serious," opposed to "work," or a quality rather than a discrete activity. However, play theory and education have a long history. Playing is seen as a mode of learning, perhaps the mode by which we humans learn. However, there are some points to make here. First, defined as antithetical to work or other activities or qualities, play becomes a cultural construct. What is play in one culture or society is work in another. Even across individuals, this definition of play yields to relativism. Second, it is assumed that "play" is somehow a basic component of human development. This second point is potentially radical in its implications and I don't mean to disparage them. However, with this all too brief a sketch, we can see the naturalistic tendencies of the way "play" has been used in Western educational theory. Moreover, we can also see the problems this poses if we take play as a cultural construct.

So, do we need to revise play theory? Is play a strong basis for human development or just a weak one? Intuitively, I would say that play is, indeed, a fundamental attribute of learning and development in both humans and non-human animals. However, "play" might be redeemed as an activity is we put it in relation not to an objective set of criteria, but in relation to a surplus of meaning in an organism's environment. Thus, we arrive at Gibson's affordances: an environment always contains affordances for play, but those affordances are differential according to the organism's ability. A pen might contain affordances for grasping and marking surfaces, but if the organism has no appendage with which to grasp, the affordance is moot. Similarly, an optical illusion might contain affordances for tricking one's perception until one has seen the image enough to know the trick.
Once we are conscious of being played with, the game becomes inconsequential. What matters is the surplus of meaning -- the excess of meaning that we struggle to make sense of, yet must fail in our attempts. This is the real meaning of play and its real importance. With out such surplus, we react to a finite set rather than an infinite one. And a finite set can be manipulated and rigged.

Pilamiyaye!

2006-12-20T12:33:00.000-06:00

I give thanks to whichever techno-spirits have rushed to my aid recently. After two days without my PowerBook, I rebooted and, voila!, the screen lights up -- a beautiful sight for sore eyes! My friend says her family thinks Macs can be moody... I dunno. I've seen the reverse to be true.

Anyway, mock interview today. No time to blog about Ulrich Beck just yet!

Crash!

2006-12-18T21:54:00.000-06:00

My Powerbook isn't feling well, so I had to borrow my mother-in-law's Dell Latitude. Luckily I had already sent out my writing sample to MTU earlier, so I'm good with that. Nothing I *need* it for until next semester. However, I'd like to have access to my files. The Mac store opens at 10, but my son has a ballet recital at 10:30. Even if I get it in right at 10, the guy can't promise me he can figure out what's wrong before we leave for Minneapolis on Friday. Long story short, I'm going to wait until we get to Minneapolis and fix it there. Maybe it'll work itself out.

I'm pretty happy with the MTU sample, too. ("Hear me, baby, hold together."). Anyway, I had planned to to talk about Ulrich Beck, but that will have to wait.

Happy Solstice! Honor the Light

Bruno Latour and Ecocomposition

2006-12-15T21:21:00.000-06:00

This is probably too geeky a post to even take seriously: I am at home on a Friday night (hey, at least I have kids for an excuse), eating ice cream (Chocolate Shoppe!), watching Clerks II, and blogging about Actor Network Theory. Anyone have the number for Beauty & the Geek ? Anyway, as I promised...

Latour may be one of our most ecological thinkers. He's certainly keen on the role of rhetoric in contemporary knowledge if, by rhetoric, one means the techne as descended not from Aristotle and Cicero, but through the sophists. But sophistry does not equal ecological... at least I think.

Anyway, Latour wants to bring the sciences into democracy and he wants to do so by acknowledging nature in our society. So, it's not so much that Pasteur "discovered" germs as that he figured out a way to elicit a conversation about the phenomena surrounding them. In short, science is socially constructed and if science is just a social convention, then we only have accepted narratives about nature, not "objective" knowledge.

So, ecocomposition is all the more important because nature is a construct. It is the conventional patterns of language by which we deal with existence, not trees and rocks themselves. The more we know about this language by which we deal with existence, then, the more we know about "nature."

Astute readers might notice the swarm of logical conundrums in the above paragraph: does language refer to anything? Does "existence" imply a physical reality? How does language relate to something "in itself" and is that ratio something we can rely on? And, does this imply that discourse is all there is; some ultimate force "between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere. Yes, even between the land and the ship"?

Yeah, that's where it bogs down for me. I agree language mediates reality for us, thus making it impossible to ever claim to know "reality," but I don't accept this as a reduction to language, which by the very constructionist thinking is also ultimately unknowable. Following the postmodern thinkers who returned to Kant, there are concepts that are supersensible. Perhaps "nature" is one. Experience of nature, then, is noumenal rather than phenomenal. And this, I would venture to say is Latour's point. In The Politics of Nature, Latour argues that we can *all* go outside Plato's cave thereby affirming routes to the supersensible beyond scientific reasoning. This gets more of society working on understanding "nature," thus allowing nature greater representation in what Latour calls the Assembly.

I'm inclined to follow Latour as an ecological thinker. He certainly is important for anyone in scientific and technical communication to understand. However, politically, he's nuts. Given the world and the power investments in circulation today, Latour's political divisions are cumbersome and unpractical. Not that unpractical ideas are bad -- they just offer hope for the future rather than solutions for the present. I like that Latour gives, in theory, room for intelligent designers, but what hedge is there in Latour against a consolidation of their route to the noumenal?

Ecocomposition and activity theory

2006-12-13T21:34:00.000-06:00

Ecocomposition can be horribly misunderstood. To paraphrase Arlene Plevin, it is more than just smuggling in a few texts about trees. Yet more and more, we are beginning to understand writing as an ecological endeavor. By this, I do not mean "context." Marilyn Cooper made that fairly clear in 1988. Rather than an abstract set of categories operating on writing, the act of writing itself generates such categories in specific configurations. Writing becomes shaped by these things in a kind of feedback loop -- a dynamic interaction between writing and the world.

This is different from the ways others have theorized complex networks of writing. Yjro Engrström, for example, proposed this diagram
to describe any act of communication. Engeström's model follows activity theory. Stemming from Vygotskyian psychology this understands consciousness not a separate from the environment, but in relation to it. As such, it goes quite a great deal toward establishing an ecological system in which a consciousness uses socially given symbols in an attempt to accomplish a goal within that system. Since the system is social, the accomplishment of a goal requires the enlistment and coordination of others; it is thus an activity rather than an action.

It is also true that this system is dynamic and not static. Bakhtin's concept of refraction holds that the system is necessarily changed with each utterance. However, the environment in such theories is limited to the social. As in social construction, there is no recourse to an outside reality, or, if there is, it is one of physical limitations that impede the social. Amos Hawley's sociological theory of human and natural relationship does just this.

If "nature" just places limits on the social, then is this relevant to writing studies only insofar as nature provides available resources such as ink, papyrus, or silicon? Not quite. Researchers such as Paul Prior might point out how nature constitutes the "artifacts" plane of his pentagonal model. However, such theories are predicated on an exploitative relationship between nature and society. Nature imposes limits that society continually seeks to supersede.

There is, then, an ethical dimension in ecocomposition that activity theory does not address. If writing is a dynamic interaction like a feedback loop, then how can we understand that interaction without resorting to exploitation? This is one of the central concerns of ecocomposition, though not the only one.

Thus, for my dissertation, I wanted to see just how that feedback loop between "nature" and individual writers occurs. So, I selected a course where students actually wrote in as well as about nature. And the most immediate place to see this was in student journals.

Introductions are in Order...

2006-12-11T23:21:00.000-06:00

Welcome and all that stuff....

This blog stems from my research as a writing instructor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison where I am in the Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and Composition. While I teach courses in composition and Native American literature, I researched for my dissertation a course that combined both. Students enrolled in this course traveled to various locales in and around the Black Hills of South Dakota, the land sacred to the Lakota people.

What got me blogging, though, were the student journals. The academic papers were pretty typical and they responded to instruction in pretty typical ways. I tried to look at both the writing products and processes by combining participant-observer methods with independent analysis using grounded theory. Moreover, I used a theoretical framework that drew from recent studies in literacy, writing, and learning as ecological activities, namely the New London Group, embodied literacies, and ecocomposition. By coding the journals in relation to my field notes and experience of the trip, I was trying to understand and theorize what students were actually doing with these journals.

The assumption is that journals are places where students begin drafting. Part diary and part commonplace books, academic journal writing is a fairly common assignment for courses in composition, literature, and other courses where writing is a mode of learning. Blogs, of course, are being heralded as the "new journal" mode for student reflection. This may or may not be true - an awful lot of research needs to be done in order to assess such claims.

My position is that such research is warranted, but with special attention to the kinds of reflective activities that are assigned. I came to this conclusion through my research because what I saw in student journals was a tendency to really wrestle with ethical, moral, and spiritual questions in ways that largely vanished from their formal responses. To me, this was really exciting since this is often what compositionists argue for in student writing. Here were students actually doing it!

So, in the pages that follow, you'll get some theorizing about how and why I think these students succeeded in their journal writing. Moreover, I hope to make the case to the more tech savvy that very non-technological writing can be just as beneficial. This isn't a critique, since I obviously feel computers and online communities valuable. I intend, rather, that it be a cautionary moment where we can stop and ask ourselves critical questions.