Politics

Big Shoes

preterite Culture, Politics

I’m taking a break from my struggles with the Computers and Writing presentation: thanks to a heads-up from Doctor Daisy, I picked up New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the, er, sequel to Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which itself was originally intended as an appendix to the excellent Culture & Society: 1780-1950. When I first heard about New Keywords (I saw a draft version of the entry on “Economy” in a graduate economics seminar), my immediate thought was: them’s some mighty big shoes to fill.

Despite the high caliber of J. K. Gibson-Graham’s entry on “Economy,” as well as a few other entries, my misgivings were not misplaced: New Keywords suffers from the same spotty, slapdash quality as most sequels, and it doesn’t even begin to live up to the standards of Williams’s original text. Certainly, the Revised Vocabulary fills in some of the gaps of the past thirty years, with entries like “Network,” “Power,” and “Self”; and there are some heavy hitters among the contributors. But far too many of the entries barely scratch the surface of their topics (the three-pager on “Class” I’ll save for a longer rant: suffice now to say that both in terms of quality and in terms of depth of coverage, it would still be complete and utter crap even were it not compared to Williams’s original, and it adds practically zero understanding to the topic) and end with empty platitudes.

Consider Karim Murji’s vapid concluding thoughts on “Race”: “The idea of race has been tainted, discredited, valorized, reclaimed, and contested. It retains positive and features that are both anachronistic and contemporary” (296). Or Craig Calhoun’s last words on “Private”: “The idea of ‘private’ remains contested” (282). And then on its counterpart, “Public”: “In short, both the ideas of what the public is and what is in the public interest remain subject to public debate” (286). There seems to be a consistent tendency here, evident again in André Frankovits on “Development”: “Development is bound to remain a contested term” (81).

One simply has to admire such breathtakingly steadfast commitment to equivocation.

“Harmful” Books

preterite Politics

Discovered via this MetaFilter post: “National Conservative Weekly” Human Events Online has put together a list of The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. I’m sure you can readily imagine some candidates that conservatives would dislike: of course Marx is going to be on there, et cetera, et cetera, and yeah, we know what to expect.

But.

But.

Coming of Age in Samoa?

The Kinsey Report?

John Dewey’s Democracy and Education?

What the hell is wrong with these people? To paraphrase re6smith: one has to wonder about an ideology that, in a supposedly free-thinking democracy, can declare books harmful or dangerous. Or, more to the point, taz’s comment: “This is a good beginning. Now, does anyone know where I can find ‘The Ten Most Harmful Musical Compositions’ and ‘The Ten Most Harmful Works of Art’ of the 19th and 20th Centuries?”

Razor Wire Writing

preterite Politics, Writing

Elvera, you’ve taken the lead, and you and Cathy and Danielle and Mary and Kristol and everyone else who’s commented have helped to make this a place where people can fight back against T-Netix. My brother is in the Maryland prison system at Jessup, and your comments and cooperation and collaborative research are doing so much more for him, and likewise for your families and loved ones, than any of us could have done alone. I’m glad we can all help one another out, and I’m hoping that your faces are some of the faces I see when we’re in the visiting room. With these comments, we’ve got a huge resource of information that we can use to help other people in similar situations, and the more we speak up, the more power we’ll have.

As a graduate student who studies rhetoric, I’ll observe that the curious thing is that every one of us — everyone who comments here, whether on the despicable behavior of T-Netix or on other topics — is talking to multiple audiences. We know tattoos and we know discourse communities. Hermeneutics and lock-in. The beef and the critique. A Thousand Plateaus; three forty on the bench.

So let’s talk mutual interpellation, specially you folks who might want not to venture outside teaching writing. You want literacy? You want a discourse community? We got your discourse community right here, in the populations of the prisons. So talk to me about Discipline and Punish as rhetorical reality rather than literary metaphor.

Talk to me about security-glass literacies.

Personal, Political, Economic

preterite Economics, Openness, Politics, Writing

Geoffrey Nunberg just did a fine piece on NPR about the discourse of the “personal” versus the “private” and the accompanying rhetorical concerns of ownership. His piece stands as good evidence why copyfighters — of whom, yes, I’ll finally admit to being one — need to be thinking about the work of both Peter Elbow and J. K. Gibson-Graham, about how the act of engagement with ongoing discussions about intellectual property constitutes the seam or suture joining personal, political, and economic concerns.

Sorry I’m late.

4Cs: Political Pedagogies, Public Citizens

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Politics, Rhetoric

I was interested in this panel primarily because of the interrogation of the privileging of alleged civic discourse in the composition classroom that its description promised: recall Doug Hesse’s contention that we’ve tamed civic rhetoric into a school genre by having students write about the public sphere rather than in it, and my concern from the Weblogs as Social Action panel that teacherly delight at the possibilities offered by weblogs for political deliberative rhetoric should be tempered by the apparent predominance of dialectical — rather than deliberative — classroom ends to which many teachers are applying weblogs. But it certainly didn’t hurt that my friend and former University of Pittsburgh colleague Chris Warnick was presenting, and that I’ve really come to enjoy the “literary” style (as another former Pitt colleague put it last year) of Pitt CCCC presentations. It’s an interesting split: every panel I’ve seen from Pitt people involves paper handouts for the audience and the presenters reading from a highly eloquent pre-written paper, whereas most panels I’ve seen from the CCCC computer folk have involved presenters talking through bullet points and using a video projector for PowerPoint slides or Web pages. In some ways, it’s almost a split between hypotaxis and parataxis — which is perhaps appropriate, since Pitt’s program carries a deep cultural studies and critical theory influence, and such an influence necessarily lends itself to the careful subordination of hypotaxis and deductive reasoning rather than the and/and/and of parataxis and inductive connections. And I gotta say, when I’m trying to follow along and take notes at the same time, sometimes the rich and complexly subordinated discourse Pitt folks are so good at comes too fast and too smart for me to be able to adequately follow: in between listening, thinking it through, and attempting to quickly render it into my own words, I found I sometimes lost the thread.

Still, I hope the brief summaries and thoughts I offer here might begin to offer at least a thin hint of the panel’s quality. All four presentations more than lived up to the promise of their program description, firmly grounding their formidable theoretical sophistication in careful considerations of the realities of classroom practice.

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Gendered Language

preterite Politics, Writing

In my first two posts on CCCC presentations, I tried a tiny experiment: referring to female presenters by their last names and male presenters (well, Doug Hesse) by first name. I did this partly because I noticed some slight, unconscious racism and sexism on the part of some big-shot compositionists here this time, and partly because of an awareness of my own learned sexism: in weblog entries and elsewhere, I’ve seen myself sometimes feeling more comfortable referring to female scholars by their familiar first names, and to male scholars by the more disciplinarily conventional (and therefore authoritative?) last names. And I don’t like the split that sets up: women as friends and allies, men as scholars and authorities. Hence the inversion: Doug Hesse as Doug, Clancy Ratliff as Ratliff. In terms of the writing, it makes Doug Hesse feel more approachable (which I’m sure he is), and it makes Clancy Ratliff feel more authoritative (which I know she is). But especially in the latter case, it also felt extremely uncomfortable writing it, because Clancy’s a good friend, and calling her “Ratliff” in writing felt like a huge distancing move. For me, this serves as yet another reminder that the discriminatory tendencies of academia run also through the blogosphere, but also as a reminder that the language I use here negotiates between the scholarly and the familiar in ways I often don’t know quite how to manage. Anyway: it’s something I’ll continue to monitor (and perhaps experiment with) in my own writing, but it might make an interesting discoursal analysis project too; looking at the archives of academic bloggers male and female and mapping use of familiar versus formal naming patterns against gender.

The Money Shot

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Politics

(Warning for grownups: this is, by insinuation, a deeply crude post.)

I thought it was initially unremarkable: nothing more than the paper of record doing a little editorial slobbering over the way those two adorable NYU moppets were embarassedly pretending (well, not really: of course they’d never be so distasteful) to be poor. I mentioned it to the Tutor, who has his own fine take on what’s going on. But then I saw an English professor who talks about herself in the third person reference Paul Fussell’s rather obnoxious work on class in relation to that story, and y’know, she’s pretty funny, until she gets to the declaration that “Americans have wealth.”

It’s really a shame that the English departments and the sociology departments don’t talk much these days. They used to be so close.

But what Margaret Soltan did for me — yes, I know it’s a betrayal, dear liberal reader — was to set me on a search that ended at the doorstep of the Volokh conspirators. While the Olsen twins fashion story might serve as one possible primary argument, here’s the supporting evidence that the New York Times is a fluffer for wealth and privilege: gosh, making six figures sure is tough, and trying to find an apartment on a six-figure budget is even worse!

Please, somebody fetch The Gray Lady a warm washcloth. She’s fixin to head out for the Hamptons, but she’s got wealth bondage all over her face.

On Booth 3

preterite Politics, Rhetoric, Rome

Another brief recap: after Wednesday night’s characterization of Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Rhetoric as focusing more on the content of the rhetoric and the motives (which, Booth repeatedly asserts, must be pure) of the rhetor than on the style of the rhetoric and the character of the rhetor, I spent Friday’s post exploring connections in Booth’s book to the Roman rhetor Quintilian, who characterized the ideal orator as “a good man speaking well,” and wondering why — though both Booth and Quintilian are deeply concerned with ethics in rhetoric — Booth focuses on action’s doing, while Quintilian focuses on character’s being. I see Booth’s focus on ethical motives and rhetorical content particularly clearly in his “commandment” that

It is ethically wrong to pursue or rely on or deliberately produce misunderstanding, while it is right to pursue understanding. To pursue deception creates non-communities in which winner-takes-all. To pursue mutual understanding creates communities in which everyone needs and deserves attention. (40)

But I think implicit in that quotation is an idea that one’s rhetorical style should ideally be absolutely pellucid, although I’m not entirely sure: I mean, it sounds like he’s saying, “Be as clear as possible,” which implies a sort of super-style that presents the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — no?

Well, part of the difficulty is that I’m trying to separate style from content in the context of understanding. As anybody who’s ever hemmed and hawed when telling a lie knows, that’s difficult (if not impossible) to do. We need only consider recent presidential rhetoric (not just the Bush administration examples Booth relies upon, but Clinton’s “is”) for examples of this difficulty, but it’s one that exists throughout the history of rhetoric: Cicero, speaking of the Pro Cluentio, boasts that he threw dust in the jury’s eyes, and examination of the text demonstrates a stylistic reliance upon vagueness and insinuation coupled to a clearly deliberate bending of the facts. Neither one would be useful without the other.

One reason I bring up Cicero here is to begin making a point about rhetoric’s multiple audiences. Cicero began his career under the dictator Sulla and ended his career during the fall of the Republic and the beginnings of the principate, and his mature rhetorical theory is deeply concerned with how rhetoric ought to function and flourish for public purposes in a free state. The fascinatingly convoluted ethos he brings to bear in the Pro Ligario, given before the dictator Caesar (who, in a sense, was both plaintiff and judge) in the fallout following the the battle of Pharsalus, alerts us to the fact that the political conditions under which rhetoric is delivered do much to affect its style and content. Booth is certainly aware of this, in the examples he offers us of “Osip Mandelstam, in a Soviet prison, commanded to write a poem honoring Stalin” (54) and of George Mangakis (49), but his arguments seem to me to often constitute rhetoric as a two-party system: rhetor and (monolithic) audience. (Again, there are plenty of exceptions, as in his consideration of how the rhetoric surrounding Iraq played out with various national audiences.) But I’m thinking about how in Plato’s Philebus, the character Protarchus asserts, “I have often heard Gorgias constantly maintain that the art of persuasion surpasses all others for this, he said, makes all things subject to itself, not by force, but by their free will, and is by far the best of all arts.” Yes, it does that — but the free will, and the understanding Booth desires, go beyond its recipient. This is part of the reason, I think, that Booth is so worried about “rhetrickery” — but there seems to be a part of the equation missing. What if I convince an audience that a thing is dangerous, but my audience has a different reaction to danger than I do? What if my audience is willing to use force to make that thing subject to herself?

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