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.
8.11.2008
8.02.2008
BWCA Bound
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!
OK, see me next week for pics!
7.24.2008
The Future of Invention
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 Make me use an outdated Microsoft product.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.
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.
7.11.2008
"The Written Word is a Lie"
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
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
7.03.2008
Subdivision/ Line of Flight/ In-be-tween
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...
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...
6.24.2008
Natural Links, Linking Nature
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.
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.
6.19.2008
Tortured/ Torture/ Ecology
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?
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?
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