Help Me, Gertrude

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

(With sincere apologies to Gertrude Stein.)

Position that is in wood. A research called philosophy shows shudders. In the job letter there is falling whereas the reference has no cut of all the fallings. It is not cheese except when it is and when it sleeps. To consider a lecture, a dissertation abstract, when it is cooked is so anxious, and not mildly, shows the force of application and a reason. A recommendation always inside a conundrum, meaning an embarassment, belongs to the deadline and the time that makes time of reference change visibly. Burnt abstract applies behind curriculum. A letter makes cheese for an eyesight casserole and an exchange. The instruction is to stop: there was not yet December for the sample and the hotel. There are not crashes beyond tape and food or the bar. When we talk we know that teaching is green for dentistry and nodding. There are flowers that are projects.

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Not Working Class

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Class (Marxian)

A few weeks ago, Bill asked in a great post about poetics, rhetoric, and the logic of affect, “Is a ‘working-class rhetoric’ even possible?” I’d like to see more from Bill in this vein, partly because I’m not entirely comfortable with the implicit parallel I (perhaps mistakenly) infer from Bill’s post between poetics versus rhetorics and working class versus middle class (that seems to be hinted at in a heart-versus-head way in Julie Lindquist’s recent College English piece, as well), but largely because I agree with a lot of what he’s saying, especially the statements that “Our culture doesn’t have a vocabulary for having non-fiction discussions about class status. We lack terms with agreed-upon meanings. Statements about class (especially working-class) status are politically divisive, perpetually contested.”

We learn from Raymond Williams that class distinctions are inherently contradictory: the working class is characterized by its activity, while the middle class is characterized by its position. Yet there is a rhetoric of the working class academic, a status-claim performed in books, articles, listservs, and conferences.

I can’t perform that status-claim. I am not a member of the working class.

In saying that, I am not suggesting such claims are wrong or misguided. I am in no way trying to perform the rationalization of economic inequality in self-indulgent praise of the inherent moral superiority of the middle class that one prominent scholar in my discipline has deemed necessary. I am not attempting to indict the admirable scholarly work in such excellent volumes as This Fine Place So Far from Home and Coming to Class. I’m just saying: I can’t claim that. I won’t claim that. And I don’t want to claim that.

Why not? I’ve still got my Class A Commercial Driver’s License. I can still drive the biggest rigs and biggest loads out there. I hauled 72 tons plenty of times, and that’s bigger than most peoples’ houses. I worked construction as a teenager and temped in my 20s. I went into the regular Army as an enlisted trucker, and came out Sergeant Edwards. With a cross wrench, I can change a tire faster than anybody you know (well, OK, except for maybe Rob) outside of NASCAR. And I wouldn’t be finishing my PhD right now if I hadn’t had the Army’s GI Bill.

But I’m not working class.

And it’s obvious, from Raymond Williams, why not. The working class is defined, synchronically, by its activity. What it does. According to such a synchronic definition, I’m a teacher and a scholar; a professional; a member of the professional class. Position is diachronic. Where one stands, culturally, is not about the now of activity but about the history of position. Claims of working status are placed in the present — as I think they should be, since studies of class are inescapably political and aimed at remedying contemporary inequalities — while positional claims are necessarily based upon a historical foundation.

In other words: I’m not a working class academic because I’m an academic. And my commitment to political change is based on that awareness of difference. For me, to claim working class status would be to endorse an inherently conservative position, a position that privileges and celebrates a cultural identity rooted in the past, rather than to pay attention to my own labor and the classroom labor of my students. And I refuse to misname my own work, because I refuse to misname the work of my students. Economic change isn’t about who we’ve been: it’s about what we do.

I am not working class. We work.

Eldritch Elder Gods

preterite Friday Fun

I dropped in to see my attorney, and in the context of our billable discussion I happened to idly mention something I’d seen in the news about Kevin Federline.

She spat her ice cube back into her tumbler of bourbon.

“We don’t speak that name round here,” she said.

End of discussion. The receptionist hastily showed me out, with security behind her.

I should have known better. I’d seen my attorney’s library; her editions of the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Justin Geoffrey, the Livre d’Eibon, Remigius and Della Porta, De Vermis Mysteriis, even a facsimile of fragments from the Philetas translation of the Al-Azif. Living in western Massachusetts, with Miskatonic less than two hours away, I should have known better.

I got on I-90 and pointed my car east.

You’d never expect to find a department of Media Studies at a school like Miskatonic, not when its library’s restricted collection is its chief draw, and especially not in a haunted and gambrel-shrouded tiny New England town like Arkham. But there it is, the newest building on campus, all glass and steel in a weird almost non-Euclidean geometry, not curvy like Gehry but just off in its angles.

“Oh yes,” a TA whispered to me. We were talking, quietly, in her cubicle after I’d found not a single professor with an open office door. “K-Fed’s not the only one. They have titles, you know. And ranks.”

Me, clueless: “Ranks?”

Her, impatient: “Ranks. Principalities, powers, virtues. You know. Dominations, thrones, cherubim, seraphim.”

Me: “No. I don’t know.”

Her: “The ranks of angels. Only these aren’t angels.”

And the TA, whose name I swore I would not print, told me of the eldritch elder gods from the shining rhombus beyond which black gulfs lie, and their avatars.

Bono the Unspeakable. The Sentient Toxic Mist that is Nicole Kidman. Steve Jobs, the monstrous nuclear chaos who dances in the madness outside angled space. Katie Holmes, Bride of He Who Must Not Be Named. The Many-Tentacled Toad-God Jon Stewart. Gretchen Wilson, who is The Key and The Gate. The Mother of Knives, Martha Stewart, who is also The One Who Rends Veils. Bill O’Reilly, The Father of Abominations. The Source of Uncleanliness corporeally embodied as Jenna Bush. Chris Rock, the yellow-scarved High Priest Who Is Not to Be Described. The tenebrous daemon-sultan Kato Kaelin, with his great and terrible Herald and Envoy.

And beyond these, there are names one dares not write.

I must type quickly, now.

My Dinner with Terry

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

Last week, Terry Eagleton gave our English department’s annual Troy Lecture on the Humanities and Public Life. It was a great talk, and I was one of the grad students who got invited to come along to the faculty dinner with Eagleton afterwards, which was excellent as well, though I’ll cop to being star-struck and tongue-tied. But Eagleton was charming and funny and brilliant and intensely charismatic, and I’m glad to have gone to both the talk and the dinner, especially since my dissertation work owes so much to the theoretical inheritance — via Eagleton and others — of his mentor, Raymond Williams.

His lecture focused on two terms: terror and tragedy. Terror, of course, in its modern rhetorical deployment as “terrorism,” and tragedy in its literary sense. The term “modern” is essential, according to Eagleton, because terror (as a political idea and a philosophical concept) and modernity are “twinned at birth”: the word “terrorist” was first used by Edmund Burke in reference to the French Revolution, the founding of the first modern bourgeois state. But — of course — in that case, terror was the Jacobin state. As Eagleton put it, “Terror has an impeccable bourgeois pedigree.” He pointed out, as well, that our contemporary rhetorical references to “9/11” have their own predecessor in the September 11 death of Salvador Allende in the coup d’etat that installed General Pinochet and Milton Friedman’s Los Chicago Boys 28 years earlier. (Yes, again with the economics — but with Eagleton, the first and second Paris Communes, Friedman, and Chile, how could it not be?)

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My Good Teaching Day

preterite Composition Pedagogy

We had a terrific discussion in my FYC section today, and I’m still excited about it, to the point where I feel guilty that my students so greatly exceeded my expectations: how could I have dared to underestimate them so?

We wrapped up Essay 1 and they turned in their final drafts with letters to me reflecting on the process of writing the essay. One student, whose classroom adversarial stance makes me grin every day and warms the vile, burnt and stunted little spleen in my chest that passes for a heart, accepted my offer and addressed me in the salutation of her letter as “Dear Needlessly Cruel Pedagogical Oppressor,” while another — OK, I’m embarassed to admit how much this pleased me — opened the letter with the Dead Poets Society standing-on-the-desk appellation (see the comments: the name rather than the act) the students gave to Robin Williams.

I love this job.

It was a wretched iron-gray thunderstorm of a rain day, and I’d expected to spend the last forty-five minutes of class on a dull plod-through of definitions of “text” and “difficulty” and the productive intersections of such, using the first section of Gertrude Stein’s “How Writing Is Written” as an applied model of such analysis, with me being the note-taker and facilitator and recording the discussion on the whiteboard.

They collaboratively knocked it out of the fucking park.

In ten minutes, we had a wealth of terrific material from them up on the board plus totally unexpected brilliant analyses of stuff that I’d (rather stupidly) thought was gonna take thirty minutes of teacherly guidance. In twenty minutes, we had an insightful class-authored summation and critique of Stein’s argument regarding contemporaneity that I’d put off until Tuesday on the syllabus (PDF). And by minute thirty, I had to put a halt to their fantastic riffing on Stein and pop music in order to give the homework.

I love this job.

The Preterite Proletariat

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric

I hadn’t realized how busy I’ve been, but looking back and seeing that I haven’t posted in a week — well, I guess I’ve been busy. I’ve kept meaning to respond to the excellent things Clancy and Jenn have had to say about Kelly Ritter’s CCC plagiarism article, but revisions to dissertation chapters, getting the class weblogs going, gearing up for the job search, and prepping two pieces for publication have kinda gotten in the way.

So a quick thought tonight while I’m working on one of those pieces for publication: in his response to my three posts on the Wayne Booth rhetoric carnival Collin Brooke hosted (could that really have been only seven months ago, with John’s comments there and him now gone?), the Happy Tutor scolded me (in his generous and inimitable manner) for suggesting that a rhetoric that said different things to different people could be useful or ethical. My comment was in response to Booth’s caution “that one form of careful listening can produce one of the worst forms of deception. Really skillful rhetors can invent language that is intended to mean one thing to ‘insiders’ while appeasing ‘outsiders’” (121), and I offered in response Shadi Bartsch’s suggestion that “the discourse used before powerful figures, especially on occasions when it had an audience ready and willing to find unstated meanings, could undermine its own contents and the authority of the addressee. The meaning granted a given act, in interactions with emperors or their agents, was not always and not necessarily the sole province of the powerholder” (Actors in the Audience 65). The Happy Tutor wondered whether that wasn’t rather Straussian of me, to suggest that texts could or should be simultaneously (to use Strauss’s terms) esoteric and exoteric; that texts could communicate radically different or even opposite things to different audiences. (My favorite example is Cicero’s Pro Ligario, but Bartsch invokes the Dialogus de Oratoribus of Tacitus as another excellent example, as well as Quintilian’s borrowing from Cato the Elder of the ideal rhetor figured as a vir bonus dicendi peritus.)

And that made me think: Bartsch, Booth, and Strauss. All University of Chicago professors. Is there some institutional habit of thought that turns people at the U of Chicago towards problems of hermeneusis? But more significantly: isn’t this attention to the meaning-behind-the-meaning and the complexities of the hermeneutic unveil — isn’t this exactly the same thing that critical pedagogues purport to do? To show the text-behind-the-text, to help students see how ideology and interpellation truly function in today’s popular texts of advertising and mass media? Doesn’t critical pedagogy necessarily construct an excluded preterite proletariat who may never see the truth of how they are constructed/oppressed by discursive forces, as well as an elite who (having been coached by the insightful academic) speaks the shibboleth and “gets it”? Have left intellectuals like Giroux and Shor made the cultural-studies inheritors of Freire into the inheritors of the arch-conservative Strauss, as well? In sum: has Freire’s ideal of critical pedagogy, through a conception of texts simultaneously esoteric and exoteric, been co-opted into yet another instrument of domination?

I wish Booth would have had more to say on the topic.

Publishing Land Mines

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers

Some good, smart people have already noted the troubling nature of a certain journal publisher’s attitude towards intellectual property, as well as the troubling nature of said publisher’s business practices. It’s rather more difficult to describe as merely “troubling” the fact that said publisher is involved in connected (via parent company Reed Elsevier; see comments below) to the international arms trade.

It might be worth thinking about the ten million land mines and eight thousand amputee children in Angola before submitting that article to Computers and Composition.

Underway

preterite Composition Pedagogy

So here we go again. Now that it’s fall, I’m excited to be teaching again, although setting up all these student weblogs and getting them running smoothly has been a substantial task. That’s actually one of the things that I like about having student weblogs running in a centralized space, though; the coordination and attention to detail. Maybe there’s a little bit of what Donna would call the managerial mindset going on there, which wouldn’t be a bad thing: the Army trained Sergeant Edwards to be a logistician, and the times I was happiest were when I was running convoys and coordinating missions, making sure the right trucks went to the right places with the right cargo and the right soldiers. So there’s some pleasant overlap between what I do now and what I did then.

While we’re on the topic of composition, I feel obliged to observe that Joanna’s been handing out a lot of gifts lately, so I thought a composition-related gift for her might be appropriate.

Battered composition book

And it’s such a cool picture that I couldn’t resist.