Affect and Pedagogy

preterite Class (Cultural), Economics

As a student or a teacher, are you emotional in public?

And if so, what did you make of the fierce review offered by James D. Williams in the November 2005 College English? I was looking at it again for its angle on the personal, but on a second read, it struck me as absolutely blistering in its privileging of rationality above all else, and it made me — someone who scores so far over at the “T” end of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that it’s not even funny — uncomfortable in that regard. Williams was talking about standards of evidence for academic texts, and while I agree that careful analysis quantitative data for such purposes is essential, I’d also propose that alternative forms of evidence are equally as important. In fact, I wonder whether the bruising critique Williams offers, in its supreme privileging of hyper-rationality and alleged objectivity, fails to allow for alternative possibilities.

Laura Micciche, in an essay I find somewhat problematic for its generalizations (“When Class Equals Crass,” in Blundering for a Change, Tassoni and Thelin, eds., Boynton/Cook 2000), suggests that working-class students are encouraged to “exercise ‘appropriate’ emotions” (25) because “emotions such as anger, rage, and sorrow are generally considered unacceptable in the classroom” (31). But the perspective Micciche offers is important for its view on the work of affect, although I worry that it’s too easy to perpetuate a binary that equates emotion with the working class and logic with the middle class, and I think that’s a class-bigoted simplification — not that Micciche is performing it, but I worry that the distinctions she sets up make it an easy place to which to go.

There’s an simple question: Are working-class students more emotional?

It’s a bad question, and the wrong question. Lynn Worsham argues (nod to the recent UMass guest speaker) that people separated by the reason/emotion binary are taught that emotion should be subordinate to reason and so that people categorized as “emotional” should take subordinate positions in society as well. Indeed, Micciche cites Spelman’s observation that “while members of subordinate groups are expected to be emotional, indeed to have their emotions run their lives, their anger will not be tolerated” (Spelman 264, qtd. in Micciche 33).

I’ve quoted before Hardt and Negri’s assertion that in today’s emerging economy, there are three varieties of immaterial labor: first, “an industrial production that has been informationalized,” second, “analytical and symbolic tasks,” and third, the emotional work involved in “the production and manipulation of affect” (293).

Political economy is personal, and the economy is affectual. This holds true for the classroom as much as for any other space.

Upgrading

preterite Computers

Just moved to WordPress 2.01. It’ll take a little while before everything’s back the way I like it, but I’m hoping it won’t give you all those problems we were having with posting and reposting comments. Let me know what works and doesn’t?

(Most important things on the agenda: getting recent comments to show up in the sidebar, putting the sidebar in proper order so links to recent comments are near the top, and — probably last — putting together a nice theme with lots of bright green, inky black, and bold sans-serif fonts.

Cause I love that green and black.)

Update: Things seem to be edging back to normal. Firefox misaligns the footer image by 1 pixel, and only on the main page and on post pages with comments — posts without comments seem fine, and no other browsers I’ve tried do the same thing, so I’m puzzled. Archives are broken, so I’ll have to check the WP support forum.

The FaceBook Storm

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Culture

On Tuesday, March 30, I’ll ask my students to read an introductory collection of essays that introduces the “Adding to a Conversation” essay, where they survey the breadth of research and discourse and written conversation (in academic journals, popular press, and elsewhere) on a topic of interest, attempt to find the lacunae and interstices in that conversation, and add their own perspectives. The current edition of the textbook that I helped our Writing Program to construct includes model or sample conversations about guns and school violence, censorship and youth culture, and debates about stem cell research and evolution. I’ll have left the program by the time next year when they start thinking about revising the textbook, but on March 30, I think I might test-run an initial unit of readings that focus on the recent two-month perfect storm of controversy swirling around the Facebook and notions of academic and pedagogical freedom and restraint, with an eye towards suggesting it as a possible addition to the textbook.

Student Life on the Facebook
Teens’ Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools
Facebook Face-Off
Facebook Drama at SU
Of Free Speech and Student Materiality
When Journalists Attack!
Facebook, Online Student Networking, and Strategically Designed Student Selves

There are interesting subtle resonances, for me, with the things I’ve had to say about affectual labor and the commodification of identity, so I’ll be curious to see how it plays out and what my students’ reactions might be. Additionally, while I never, ever want to be the kind of teacher who requires his students to read his own texts, I wonder if there might be some way to get that article Casey and I did (if you want to make me happy, ask me for the link) on commodification and online identity in there, since it seems to be on (rather long) hold in terms of publication.

Now with Even More Sexism!

preterite Asides

So I watched the SuperBowl with my attorney, and we were both struck by the even-more-sexist-than-usual tone. Bill DeGenaro has already had smart things to say about the sexualization surrounding the game environment itself, but even my relatively unenlightened sensibilities were amazed by all the advertising violence against women’s bodies, explicit (the Mission Impossible commercial) or implicit (Burger King says women are tasty in sandwiches), and all the ogling and leering. On the other hand, my attorney was pleasantly surprised at the fact that the Steelers don’t have a cheerleading squad. I don’t want to come across as some grim, puritanical sourpuss here — I definitely got a kick out of some of the advertisements’ surrealism, and I’ll confess to a weakness for women in knee-length skirts and calf boots — but I gotta ask: was it just us, or was the misogyny in this SuperBowl’s advertisements even more over-the-top than usual?

Everybody Knows

preterite Politics

Everybody already knows how good Michaél Bérubé’s blog is, which is why I don’t put it in my blogroll: doing so would be like linking to Google and saying, “Check out this cool search engine!” But I gotta say, his extended piece last week on academic freedom merits the linkage anyway. If you haven’t seen it, check it out.

Best New(ish) Music

preterite Asides

My dad got me Gramophone magazine’s The Classical Good CD & DVD Guide 2005 for Christmas, which I’ve been enjoying flipping through, but here’s what I’ve lately had in heavy rotation on the CD player.

Gogol Bordello. These guys proudly proclaim themselves to be “Gypsy Punks,” and that’s about as apt a description as you’ll find. Imagine the Clash getting together for a jam session with the Moldavian gypsy-brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia and some accordion and fiddle and saxophone and several crates of strong Ukrainian vodka thrown in for good measure and you’ll have an idea of what these folks sound like. Totally infectious, over-the-top, exuberant stuff, and it doesn’t hurt that the singer has the sort of Eastern European accent usually only heard coming from James Bond movie villains. They’ve got these stomping Romany rhythms and some fierce guitar, but you’ll also hear bits of ska and flamenco in there, and they’re far too good to take themselves too seriously.

Firewater. Ever since New York alt-metal band Cop Shoot Cop dissolved (they had an almost-hit in 1993 with “$10 Bill” but I was always more fond of the creepy, operatic “Room 429” and the bitingly funny “It Only Hurts When I Breathe”), I wondered what had happened to vocalist/songwriter Tod A and his gargle-with-razors voice and wickedly sharp lyrics, and then I heard him singing a cover of “Folsom Prison Blues” on the radio a while back and had to immediately find the album. As it turns out, their first effort, “Get off the Cross… We Need the Wood for the Fire” is the album to have; Tom Waits-style cabaret and klezmer are obvious influences, especially with the instrumentation (bazouki, djembe, saxophone, clarinet, accordion, violin, in addition to the usual drums-bass-guitar), but you’ve really got to hear “Bourbon and Division” for its relentlessly catchy, swinging nihilism. And my personal favorite, “When I Burn This Place Down,” is a wonderful tango (a tango!) with the pricelessly bitter line, “And baby if you were drowning / I’d throw you a funeral wreath.”

Secret Chiefs 3. Members include Mr. Bungle veterans Trey Spruance, Trevor Dunn, and Danny Heifetz, so you know what you’re getting into. Think freak-out Middle Eastern / West and South Asian techno beats and instrumentation mixed with thrash-metal guitars and achingly lush Ennio Morricone arrangements and melodies performed by an amazingly tight band. “Book of Horizons,” “Book M,” and “Second Grand Constitution and Bylaws” are all brilliant and really, really strange.

A Digital Working Class?

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

In Cory Doctorow’s excellent short story “Anda’s Game” (which Michael Chabon included in the 2005 Best American Short Stories), a Tijuana labor organizer named Raymond explains to the title character that the missions she’s being hired to complete in a massively multiplayer online game similar to World of Warcraft are actually destroying the avatars of in-game sweatshop labor, who lose their (real) day’s wages when “killed.” Unfortunately, the scenario isn’t only fictional: such sweatshops actually do exist, and stand as remarkable evidence of the ways in which virtual online economies are increasingly intersecting with today’s “real” economy of individuated production and consumption — and having real and concrete effects on the ways people experience socioeconomic class.

Today’s individuated economy is making newly heightened demands on certain classes of people (the in-game sweatshop workers; the people holding down two jobs who take online higher education classes when they get home at night in the hopes of securing better employment) while opening up new opportunities for others (those who exploit the in-game sweatshop workers; the digerati who have the access and training to construct and manipulate new digital texts). So the immediate question to ask would seem to be: who are the new digital working classes, now that increasing efficiencies of production and the changing economy are reducing the ranks of such conventionally working-class occupations as machinists, farmers, and factory workers? Besides online in-game sweatshop workers, who else might we understand as being working class in the context of digital technologies — and how might composition pedagogies account for such people?

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Generation-Gapped

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Economics

Note: I’ve somewhat revised this rather overstated post in response to Kelly Ritter’s generous comment, although I’ve left what I originally wrote intact and visible for honesty’s sake, since I think it’d be unethical for me to here do any retroactive erasing of my mistakes.

Clancy points to a new article on online paper mills from Kelly Ritter, an article that covers much of the same ground and invokes much of the same ideologies as Ritter’s original CCC article. I was intrigued by Ritter’s first article because of the way in which its use of the term “economics” stands as usefully characteristic of composition’s conception of economic concerns: for Ritter, and for most scholars in composition, economy is discursively equated to cash-based market commerce.

(A wonderful exception to this is Amy Robillard’s brilliant January 2006 College English piece, which I hope to have more to say about soon, particularly in terms of the ways it draws together notions of affectual immaterial labor with theories of economy and class.)

Ritter proposes that “the advent of digital technologies that allow access to completed papers… has created valid concern among faculty, especially among those involved in the teaching of writing” (25), constructing digital reproducibility as the lightning to Walter Benjamin’s Dr. Frankenstein, with the monster being Plagiarism Itself. The problem, however, lies not merely with the technology: rather, “student patronage of [online] paper mills is reinforced… by students’ disengagement from academic definitions of authorship” and by “their overreliance on consumerist notions of ownership, especially in Internet commerce” (26). For Ritter, the brain of Frankenstein’s Monster, and its destructive potential, is embodied in the “consumerist” economic ideologies of today’s students.

But what are “students’ definitions of authorship”? Are today’s first-year composition students, in their literate practices, as venal and avaricious as Ritter makes them out to be?

I don’t think so. Look at (as Danielle Nicole DeVoss has done) the hundreds of revisions of the Star Wars Kid video; look at (as Casey Burton has done) collaboratively-authored fanfic and commons-based peer icon creation; look at, again, Robillard’s recent examination of Young Scholars. As much as I admire the rigor of Ritter’s work, it seems immediately apparent to me — particularly given her prominent citation of Bartholomae — that she has no desire or intent to inhabit the emerging perspective of today’s student. (Added after her comment — see below: Kelly does, in fact, clearly seek to understand the emerging perspective of today’s student, such being the purpose of the assignment she proposes.

In fact, Kelly Ritter, you’ve been generation-gapped. Today’s information economies of individuated production and consumption, and their constituent students as economic agents, have left you fulminating without a target in their wake. (Added after her comment — see below: OK, that direct address really came across as being in full-on attack mode. And it’s unfortunately vague, as well.)

For Ritter, the student’s values must bend to the will of the academy, and the academy can apparently never shift to accomodate alterations in societal values brought about by technological and economic change: the culture of the academy always drives change in the culture of the student, and never the other way around. This, in itself, is an ideology of mass capitalism; a superannuated ideology — and is it any wonder that the students Ritter writes about so wholly reject an ideology that makes no attempt whatsoever to engage their (Lessig, Barbrook, Benkler) values?

In fact, Ritter’s repeated assertions that first-year composition lacks a subject might surprise teachers and scholars in nationally-recognized writing programs who have long argued with force and rigor that the subject of the first-year composition course is, in fact, writing. But perhaps that is illustrative of the values Ritter brings to her pedagogy — which is, after all, the subject of her essay. I might suggest that a teacher who thinks her course doesn’t have a subject will likely send a strong message to students about the value of the work in that course. (Added after her comment — see below: I stand corrected.)

But what is the value of that course? What’s it for? Ritter describes “the highly valued commodity of academic agency that academia seeks to bestow on students and employers” (47), and makes the problem quite clear: she constructs academic agency as a commodity for exchange, rather than seeing students as literate agents already critically producing culture. Ritter’s economic ideology — that the only value for the product of the labor of writing is its exchange value — is, in fact, precisely the thing that creates the problem she seeks to critique. When she argues that “Our task as writing faculty is to strike a balance between helping students to become literate professionals and shaping their writing consciousness in ways still palatable to our own ethics” (32), she presumes that students have no ethical agency of their own. (Added after her comment — see below: OK, I overstated that some, although it still seems to me that there’s an opposition being drawn, with the old-school ethical stance of faculty being privileged over students’ emerging ethics of the remix culture and the economy of individuated production and consumption.)

Wrong answer.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: students are political, economic, and ethical beings, and they don’t shed that status when they cross the transom into the classroom.

Kelly Ritter would do well to recognize that. (Added after her comment — see below: she does recognize it, and in fact she suggests that it’s strongly implied by her argument.)

Campus Visits

preterite Asides

It’s campus visit season for job seekers, so I’ve been busy with travel, writing and presenting job talks, and attempting to be dazzling for nine hours at a stretch. I got turned down for my dream job, which is a disappointment, but it was a bit of a reach for someone in my situation. Still, I really, really like the institutions with which I’ve been lucky enough to have visits — each, in their way, nationally known — but for very different reasons. Everybody always says the visits are grueling, which I guess they are, but there’s also something genuinely pleasant about talking to a bunch of super-intelligent people about the dissertation upon which you’ve been chipping away in solitude for so long.

(He says, crossing his fingers, knocking on wood, hoping they liked him.)