A REINTERVIEW with Geoffrey Sirc, 3.

The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View

with Geoffrey Sirc  about his  article published in P/T

during November, December, January of 1994-1995.

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Date:         Fri, 2 Dec 1994 10:58:54 -0400
Reply-To:     "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      gs->la, rs, vb:The Butter Battle

_____On teaching students more and beyond black & white, in the
post-Revolutionary. (kinda long, sorry if it's a drag, but you've got me
thinking about this stuff; and more Duchampian nonsense, too, which I am
*really* sorry about)

And now, by Rot, the mattering.  Which, for now, is the buttering; Linda would
make the scene of the buttering a contested one: "above all else I'm a
pragmatist, and I think I recognize which side my bread is buttered on."  Ah,
The Butter Battle, one of my favorite narratives.  So, which side *is* your
bread buttered on, Linda?  Are you a Yook or a Zook?  Side up or side down?  My
position: Let them eat cake, and wash it down with Dom, nigga.   Renounce bread,
and all its unholy accoutrements.   Ban the big-boy-boomeroo.  I wasn't kidding
about the fatal flaw of Shaughnessy to ignore rock, cause "Rock's creed is
*fun*.  Fun forms the basis of its apocalyptic protest. . . . The work ethic
produced the A-bomb.  It must be abandonned" (Patti Smith).  (I include rap as
rock, of course.)

I currently rewrite Charles Deemer's original 1967 allegory, "English
Composition as a Happening" because the pedagogical goals of the Happening
artists seem relevant-yet-forgotten to me.  They only wanted intensity, to get
people "simply to wake up to the very life we're living" (Cage).  What happens
when students leave my space, Linda?  I don't know.  I mean, there is tracking
information; you could track all my students and find out over time.  I'm not
sure what that would tell you.  How determinate is my class, among all their
others and among their lives?  You could do some quantative research, but don't
bother--the Happening artists did all the experiments.  They have excellent
results.  Rauschenberg (e.g., "Map Room II," 1965) said, "What's exciting is
that we don't know.  There is no anticipated result; but we will be changed."
Ann Halprin (e.g., "Birds of America or Gardens Without Walls," 1959) drew on
chance relationships in her happenings because she believed in "the possibility
of discovering in chance relationships some new ways of releasing the mind from
preconceived ideas and the body from conditioned or habitual responses."
Oldenburg (e.g., "The Store," 1961)  used simple parataxis to pile up images,
which sounds like the progression of my course materials: "I throw up images one
after another or on top of one another and repeat them until it is evident I am
asking, 'What are they, or what do you think you are watching?' My theatre is
therefore undetermined as to meaning."  La Monte Young's (e.g., "The Tortoise,
His Dreams and Journeys," 1964) bottom line for evaluating his performances is a
good way for me to judge my effect as teacher: "My own feeling has always been
that if people just aren't carried away to heaven I'm failing.  They should be
moved to strong spiritual feeling."   Robert Whitman (e.g., "American Moon,"
1960) said the same thing: "you could talk about what happens when some person
doesn't know what in the hell he's seen, but is excited by it.  He doesn't know
what it means, but he really doesn't find that important.  Something has
happened; he's had an experience that's different."

As the language for judging composition, it sounds a lot like what Paul Goodman
was looking for but didn't find in the writing Macrorie's early (pre-Third Way)
students wrote: "This isn't a very spirited group of essays, and I cannot award
a prize to any.  Nothing sends me--neither original idea, acute observation,
accurate analysis, unique attitude, warm feeling, nor vivid expression . . .
their dissent is stereotyped, griping rather than radical, snobbish rather than
indignant, do-goodish rather than compassionate.  There is little sign of
careful, painful perception, personal suffering, or felt loyalty and disgust"
(_Uptaught_ 17).  But in Macrorie's Large Glass, we watch as the gas from this
student-as-Malic-Mould fires in the 3rd way: "Born in the darkness of the malic
molds, having suffered through the sieves, having fallen into disgrace down the
toboggan, the gas now ignites, burns with desire, and emitting his own inferior
illumination, sets out to declare his passion to the Bride" (Susquet 101).
Macrorie's students, then, go from the grind of writing "mechanical exercises .
 . all dead" (6) to "the time to pursue some truths, when student and professor
share their expert knowledge and their experience" (168).

I want a medium for the sublime, a machine of the Milky Way as much as possible.
Ice T makes the useful distinction between the gangster and the hustler.  The
gangster has the power/poverty mind-set, he wants to stay in the hood, on the
streets, drinkin' a forty-ounce; the hustler has luxury on the mind, wants to
leave the hood for Beverly Hills, and is "tryin' to drink Dom nigga" (188).  I
want my students & I to get together and "elevate the mental," in Q-Tip's words.
As Ice puts it, "there's an elevation that happens . . . That [movement from
gangster to hustler] is what I'm about.  I ain't tryin' to go back that route
'cause hustlers have learned to be invisible.  You can see the gangbangers and
the workin' brothers and OG's who are still bangin' never learned to put no
finesse in they game, and they found a home in those streets.  Ain't nothing fly
about that.  Players always want the finest shit, that's it" (188, _It's Not
About a Salary . . . _).  I'm through bangin'; my teaching now is strictly a
player thing.  I teach the hustler code of writing to students: "A hustler can
make anything out of anything" (189).  Or Macrorie: "I can make sense of
everything" (74).  So it's how to pass when you need to (how to bear up when the
waterfall, the hard rain, comes down too hard) and the finesse, the finest, the
divine (the illuminating gas).  These people who want to empower students by
teaching them some kind of discourse--so they can succeed in college,
employment, etc.  That's bangin'.  I'm (a )Cage(-)as(s) player, G; who the hell
wants to have to work?: "not the promIse/of giviNg us/arTificial/Employment/but
to use ouR technology/Producing/a sociEty/based on unemploymeNt/thE purpose/of
invenTion/has always been to diminsih woRk/we now hAve/The/possIbility/tO become
a society/at oNe with itself" ("Composition in Retrospect").

What happens when students leave my space?  Who knows?  Duchamp writes in his
Preface of the ultimate outcome of his machine:  "nothing perhaps" (SS 28).  But
if it works, this happens:  they have been intensified.  They leave my space as
flaneur-hustler, going in and out of the rooms of rich and poor, feeling the
attraction and repulsion of the psychogeographic field a bit more keenly.  You
call my writing "new," Linda, but it's pretty old, actually.  I do nothing that
Macrorie and Coles didn't do ("Exhuming Macrorie," the second REM song I've
posted to this list).  I simply look at (Our) Composition in Retrospect(:
"My/mEmory/of whaT/Happened/is nOt/what happeneD/ . . . what i
aM/rEmembering/incorrecTly to be sure/is wHatever/deviated frOLm/orDinary
practice.")  I want to mis-remember those writers who are our Bride panel (even
that sweet silly bullshit from CCC '68 like "A Freshman Paper Based on the Words
of Popular Songs": "Every college English teacher ought to tune in to a local
popular radio station once in a while [during class, preferably] . . . one must
be human to bring Humanities to the masses" (Kroeger 337--the song he uses, "Eve
of Destruction"!!).  You ask, Linda, what happens when my students get into a
class with a prof. whose ideas of writing are different than my own.  But do I
really have to teach to lousy pedagogy?  And anyway, a hustler-student can make
anything out of anything.  I can't empower anyone, Linda.  But I can intensify.
In my post on Shaughnessy, I cited that book-jacket hype-blurb about students'
rights to all the advantages of literacy.  I asked what those advantages were,
and I would also ask what literacy is--is it knowing how to reproduce forms
correctly?  If it is, I can't really do that cause how in the world can I re-do
a failed elementary and secondary education in ten weeks?  But if literacy is
somehow this intensity, illuminating the gas, that I can do.

And, my students have (I hope) learned to take the alternative seriously.  My
curricular authorities are the culture's non-authorities:  Malcolm X & rappers.
They are black, they have been called criminals (most have even done jail time),
they speak in the non-mainstream dialect.  Their key issues are things the media
avoids.  I gladly use them as material 1.) to upset the normal order, and 2.) to
provide my students with something genuinely interesting.  My
arch-compositionist, Allan Bloom, talks about when his students leave his space:
"One of the most flattering things that ever happened to me as a teacher
occurred when I received a postcard from a very god student on his first visit
to Italy, who wrote, "You are not a professor of political philosophy but a
travel agent."  Nothing could have better expressed my intention as an educator.
He thought I had prepared him to see.  Then he could begin thinking for himself
with something to think about" (63).  There is such an emphasis in composition
studies on seeing--hand, eye, brain; from sight to insight; re/vision.  Bloom
speaks of the "lens" (eg, 47) which his books-based "truth" (60) provides
students, so they can see "the real nature of things" (60).  I am no travel
agent, unless it's the free-lancing I do for Trans-Love Airways.  I have no
lens, nothing to reveal to students.  I don't want em to see nothin; I just want
em to be fly.

They leave me being able to now see not much more than they could otherwise, but
they hear better, maybe?  Hear the sounds within the silence: "ouR goal/all
that's needed is a fraMe/a change of mental attItude/amplificatioN/wAiting for a
bus/we're preset at a Concert/suddenlY we stand on a work of art the
pavement/musIc/Never stops it is we who turn away." I want students to re-turn.
Where before, there was just silence--either they heard nothing in Malcolm or
rap, or the media let us hear nothing of them.   Now they know there are words
there, letters fly to them.  My class, I think, is a pleasure-able
subject/setting/frame.  Just a waterfall of text falling on them, paratactic
piling of texts, enough to get the gas of those malic moulds released.  Then,
once the definitively unfinished machine of my pedagogy kicks in, I hope for the
cinematic blossoming.  I know that they might choose otherwise, it's always a
choice of Possibilities.  But what else can I do?  A parking-lot rhetoric is as
least-determined as possible; we take only two things as given, that waterfall
and the gas.  Through them, I hope to cause a delay in my students, a silence in
their world.  So they can hear the allegory.  It's not "new" at all.  It's the
basic principle behind the Large Glass, as outlined in one of Duchamp's notes in
_The Green Box_ (1934):

"Given  1st the waterfall
                     2nd the illuminating gas,
*we shall determine* the conditions for the instantaneous state of Rest (or
allegorical appearance) of a *succession* [of a group] of *various facts*
seeming to necessitate each other under certain laws, *in order to isolate the
sign of the accordance between*, on the one hand, this *state of Rest* (capable
of all the *innumerable* eccentricities) and, on the other, a *choice of
Possibilities* authorized by these laws and also *determining them*. (_Salt
Seller_ 28)

I can only hope to charge the air a little, so whatever there is in the
bachelors in terms of interest or desire, might spark.  In the allegorical
appearance of "Composition as Large Glass," the little engine of my class is
located somewhere around the "Wasp Sex Cylinder" (the mechanism which "controls
atmospheric pressure/ secretes love gasoline from dew (by osmosis)/ controls
spark of desire magneto").  Some people leave my rap class thinking rappers are
immoral and incite violence and they should be banned and what's more they can't
sing very well.  But others (more of them) feel differently.  Like Olga, my
50-yr old ex-Communist Nicaraguan, who told me this was the most stimulating
class she has ever taken and she's really pissed it's over cause she is raging
to think and write more about the macro-economics of rap.

Maybe my students will only be able to produce a mediocre formal essay when they
leave my class, but I can't be that concerned with the aesthetic object (its
*inferior illumination*), because from the Large Glass we know that a work is
always "definitively unfinished."  A whole bunch of them, though, can write a
great e-mail message, a great reading response, a great informal paper
(*informe*-al writing).  Macrorie: students are made to write formally "even if
formal is not necessarily better than the informal" (185).  What can I say?  I
shoot my paint-tipped matches with my toy cannon at the same target, 9 times (I
don't shoot during that first week of classes), and that lets me know where to
drill the holes.  Then I muse on the koan of holes drilled through glass--would
they be more transparent than the transparent?  Sparking the deire-magneto,
igniting the illuminating gas; that's the only "contact zone" I'm interested
in--the promise of the Milky Way.  I do not resolve the tension around economic
(or miltary) power, as I do not know that power.  I know the Milky Way, though,
the divine, the sublime.  That butter-battle between cultures, between
discourses, that big-boy-boomeroo-charged "contact zone" between the Yooks & the
Zooks, that's a battle I think most all my students will lose; most everyone
does, don't they?  It's a big battle, a battle royale, way too big for ten weeks
with me.  In the original drawing for the Large Glass, there is that "Boxing
Match" indicated at the top of the bachelor panel, right at the horizon of the
Bride panel.  But Duchamp left it out from the final (unfinished) work: "The
drawing *Boxing Match* was certainly not intended to be transferred as such onto
the Large Glass.  It is an elevation, and nothing indicates that it is on a 1:1
scale.  In order to validly integrate it, one would have to redraw it in
rigorous perspective from the same viewpoint that rules over the bachelor space"
(Susquet 115).  I can't draw that well; I'd have to redraw the entire
sociopolitical perspective of my students.  But I'll keep it as elevation.
Macrorie saw me in his glass: "there are individuals stirring who see
educational power as something different from economic or military power" (158).
I see it as the bachelors & the Bride; the two who would be one, the *nue*
(nude) who would be *une* (one), the MARiee & CELibataires who would be MAR+CEL.
I know ultimately that struggle is a lost one, too, but hey, I'm a player:
"humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat" (Ellison).
Duchamp, the artist who was almost tiresomely interested in making us laugh, who
couldn't resist an opportunity for wordplay and puns, saved his absolute, most
killing joke for last.  Could it be the firm faith underlying CCCC?  On
Duchamp's tombstone one reads, "Only the Others Die."

Geoff


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Date:         Fri, 2 Dec 1994 17:18:47 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      tr->gs: [counterargument]

I must admit that I'm less than thrilled by the propositions for pedagogy
and social action suggested in Sirc's article (and by those suggested by
some responses to same by several others).  I will be frank.
I think Sirc's deployment of Baudrillard, Bataille and Situationism
reduces that work to giddy and untroubled applause for the joys to be
found in the unhazardous (and non-transgressive) banalities which often
take place in parking lots and in 'free form' classrooms--and I
think that work is more troubling (and troubled) than that.  I *am*
quite interested in what sorts of things happen in the interstices
of the institutional classroom, and also quite interested in
what these things might have to say about our pedagogies, but I
don't share Sirc's opinion of what he provided as 'evidence' of
the 'intensity' of the writing in his classroom--it rather looked to
me like banal hallway banter.  More on this in a moment, but if we are now
going to unproblematically define that as the kind of writing to be
pursued in the writing classroom, I think many people might just quit their
jobs and find something else to do with their time, because students hardly
need them around to tell them how to chatter about the big dance on
Saturday night (or even how to do it in an "intense" manner).  This
is not to say that there is not value in those experiences and even
value which can and should be treated in the writing classroom--far from
it.  But to unproblematically suggest "intensity" alone as the
raison d'etre of the counter-status quo writing classroom seems to
miss more than a few important issues.   It is, for example, no
secret that more than a few pieces of work have been done on pedagogies of
the sort Sirc advocates as unproblematically transgressive which point out
how race and class (and other such mess-makers which he refrains from
discussing in the article except in his choice of Malcolm X and rap artists
as source materials for his class--but all the while seemingly presuming
student *responses* to these source materials are rather uninformed by
differences in race and class) mess up the nifty picture of 'look how
wonderfully this unrestrictive pedagogy stuff works!'--i.e., working class
students and students of color aren't fooled by the pedagogical move to
suddenly *value* their thoughts on eg., MTV, nor to suddenly decide that
the classroom isn't hierarchical and/or 'traditional' (and that therefore
the links between the classroom and *other* institutional matrices, of both
class/racial domination *and* opportunity, however limited, needn't
be considered in the working out of the goings-on in the classroom)
when they know what's at stake here is getting a credential
and a way in to a bourgeois world which has been all about keeping
them out (and now seems to have devised another, even more clever
way to do so--i.e., the 'radical' teacher who doesn't want to 'oppress'
his/her students by having them pretend that they're students and s/he's
the teacher).  I would venture to guess that the students who 'get'
Sirc's course in the way he wants them to get it are among the same
group who 'got' writing-as-process:  that is, middle class white
kids who had already been socialized into this particular game of writing
and education.  So Sirc's goal of "letting [students] eat cake and
wash it down with Dom" seems in my view doomed by his inattention to
the mundane sociology of his classroom to providing fare for those
whose bellies are already full.

At my most cynical, I am quite prepared to read articles like Sirc's as
simple (if perhaps unintended) rationalizations for letting students do
whatever they feel like doing on the pretext that they've really already
figured it all out anyway.  I somehow don't think they have, not only because
I know from my own experience that I absolutely *didn't* already have even a
fraction of 'all of it' figured out when I was 18 (and at least partially
because I hadn't read Marx--and let the snide comments about "neo-Marxists"
fall where they may here) and not only because I am at least skeptical
enough about the most crude populist attacks on 'elitism' to say unabashedly
that if the majority votes for something I think points toward the undermining
of the entire project 'democracy' purports to be about I start wondering
about the ends of this kind of 'democracy' (see Prop. 187 in California, for
example),  but also because I have had too many experiences with students
who obviously *have* gotten important things from my class which they didn't
have when they came in (and a goodly number of them have to do with these
horrible pedagogical methods Sirc so disparages involving the assumption that
the teacher *does* perhaps know some things the students *don't* which *can*
perhaps prove useful to them if they can be troubled *not* to behave like
they're in a parking lot, at least for a little while).  I am not convinced
at all by Sirc's inference that since ond can't "empower" anybody, one should
be about forgoing any attempts to a) inform students about the possibilities
of *critique* in the interest of pursuing "intensity" (critique can be pretty
damn intense too!) and b) recognize one's role in a complicated set of
institutions and socialization processes (this is the sociologist in me, who
contines to fume perhaps too often at the anti-sociological musings
of avant-garde artists who somehow manage to forget that not
everyone comes into their social space informed by just the same set
of social and historical circumstances) and at least let one's
students know that the kind of writing which they are going to have
to do in the 'real world' (that is, in order to 'make it'--I wonder
how many of Sirc's students, and *especially* the working class
students and students of color, if asked, would choose the hustler over
the bourgeois--or is it just Sirc's choice that counts?) has little to do
with Sirc's kind of writing.

I'm sometimes tempted to pretend to be Pierre Bourdieu at these moments and
start an analysis of the social, cultural and historical situatedness of
various kinds of estadounidense academic (myself included) in order to
get a better grip on exactly *why* propositions for pedagogy like Sirc's
paean to the avant-garde are (re)emerging (because after all didn't
we see this once or twice before?) in this particular socio-spatial
locale.  I have the rudiments of such a theory, but it needs further
development before I would feel at all confident sharing it (a
portion of it, though, seems to revolve around the peculiar ways in
which cultural symbols of black expression and resistance like hip
hop become tools to be used not only by middle class white kids in
suburbia but apparently by some pedagogues and 'persons of authority' as
ways to demonstrate their 'fly-ness' in a manner which, again, often is in
my experience viewed rather skeptically by those who don't just *listen*
to Ice-Cube, but have *lived* him). Still I wonder how it is that a specific
variety of academic theorizing and practice (i.e., US academics self-
labelled "post-[fill in the blank--Marxist, structuralist, modernist") has
managed to so appropriate and remake a strand of social and cultural theory
as to imagine that it informs us that 18 year old college students *already*
have the *same* insights into the world as eg., Jean Baudrillard and so
they have no need to be subjected to the indignity of being "taught" by some
haughty pedagogue of critique (or even to the equally elitist chore of having
to *read* and *critique* what Baudrillard has written). When I have some
evidence that my 18 year old students come to me having read as much Marx
(and having thought as hard about the ways in which the social and political
are structured) as Baudrillard has, having been involved in political events
even roughly akin to May '68 in Paris or the Algerian and SEAsian Wars in
their domestic French and US impacts, having worked their way (and often
"critically" at that, although I know that is perhaps a bad word to use in
Sirc's view) through a rather vast amount of political and cultural history
in order to formulate some fairly complex and (again) in many ways *critical*
notions of the social, when the evidence shows me that their *histories* (a
notion which seemingly disappears in Sirc's understanding of pedagogy) have
led them to a rejection of critique and a valuing of "intensity" because they
*know* enough about the former to make the choice meaningful, then I might
start taking the parking lot metaphor a bit more seriously.  Maybe.  I
just would like to provide my students with the opportunity to become
thoroughly cynical about all potential utility of critique on their own,
through their own encounters with this notion which some seem to find so
specious as to not even merit presentation to students, before I
begin converting my classroom into avant-garde art loft.

Someone else, can't remember who, wrote something in response to another
response about how pedagogies of critique assume "deep down" the
possibility of the Revolution.  I think this is more wrong than I'm
able to say in just a screen or two of e-text.  Foucault provides some
salient responses to this claim, in my view.

One parting question which came to me immediately after reading the Sirc
and which came up again in reading his most recent (and entertaining, if
only remotely responsive to the questions put to him by others)
effort--what's the justification, if any, for maintaining composition
classes (and by implication composition *teachers* and their salaries) if
the students cannot possibly imagine getting anything from the classroom
which they can't already get in the parking lot or by sitting around trading
tales of sexual escapades or favorite hip hop tunes (unless it's just the use
of the computer technology which they mightn't otherwise have access to, and
which still leaves me wondering how *Sirc's* presense in the room would be
justified, since according to him his students obviously don't need him)?
Duchamp after all hardly needed any such didactic nonsense, eh?  He
rather played billiards during his brief stay in the Ecole des Beaux
Arts and in short order proudly joined the ranks of its "innumerable flunks"
(Cabanne, _Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp_).  Perhaps Sirc will reply that
he is there to *guide* them to "intensity" (or at least to let them all know
when they've achieved it)--but why do they need him to know how to get
'there'? They do it best, after all, in front of the (M)TV screen, watching
vids and talking about them and the day's activities in the dorm.
Perhaps the only thing left for "the teacher" in Sirc's world is to
write clever essays with lots of citations of avant-garde artists
for one another in which they explain at great length (even if they
*do* tend, as I've said, to avoid touching upon the mundane and
*sociological* in their quest to be "fly") why they are in fact not
needed in their classrooms.  Maybe there'll even be a parking lot solely
for the gathering of former teachers of composition wherein this group can
endeavor to create its own transgressive rituals of sacrifice and
destruction.

Tristan


==================================================
Date:         Fri, 2 Dec 1994 21:02:06 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      vjv: announcement

from: vjv
re: sirc's article

if anyone should need a copy of geoff sirc's
article--the work that we are presently discussing--
please send me a note and i will send you five
files.

please write to my private address.

victor j. vitanza, moderator, REINVW
SOPHIST@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
===================================================
Date:         Fri, 2 Dec 1994 22:08:31 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      fk->gs/t: @ breathing

Having read Geoff and Tristan, and Tristan and Tristan and
Tristan, I choose Geoff's position.  Easier breathing.

Fred Kemp
Texas Tech
ykfok@ttacs.ttu.edu

===================================================
Date:         Sat, 3 Dec 1994 12:24:46 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      vjv: fwd @ Guy Debord

To:  re/inter/viewers
From: vjv
Re:  post about Debord

I just downloaded (from the Florida Derrida list) the following alleged
wire from the AP.  On the net this kind of stuff goes out all the time
and in many cases proves to be a hoax.  However, for what it is worth,
I sent it out here (given our discussion of un/certain personages).



PARIS (AP) -- Guy Debord, an avant-garde essayist who influenced
the upheavals of French society in the late 1960s, has committed
suicide. He was 62.
        Town officials in the village of Champot where Debord lived
announced an investigation Thursday into the suicide. No details
about how Debord took his life Wednesday were disclosed.
        Little-known outside France, Debord denounced what he called
``the show-biz society'' and declared that performing arts should
be based on powerful emotions, passions and sexual desire.
        His ideas were influential among theoreticians and essayists who
achieved prominence in the May 1968 student-led cultural revolt
that shook French society.

==================================================


Date:         Sun, 4 Dec 1994 00:37:23 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->t:not me

_____Unproblematic Classroom?

Tris, I did not recognize myself, my courses, or my students in what you wrote.
I never call for an "unrestrictive pedagogy"; I wouldn't know how that works.
To say I think there is anything unproblematic about teaching writing is to
speak of someone other than myself.  I think it's always problematic to bring a
bunch of people together to make evaluated verbal meaning.  To say I don't
attend to students' histories is simply wrong.  Maybe it's not apparent in the
article or my few posts, but you might see it if you read some of my other
stuff.  Particularly I think it's troubled around the very notion of race.
Discussing Malcolm X for ten weeks gets very very messy, for students of every
race and both genders; some days I find myself speculating about which students
probably have guns in their backpacks.  To call my pedagogy a "clever way" to
keep students out of whatever position in the world I can help them achieve
simply describes someone else.  I have tried to devise a course to allow any
student (once made aware of general university expectations) to pursue whatever
textually substantive agenda he/she wants to pursue, as long as it reveals them
as an engaged scholar, of rap or Malcolm.  Before universities became trade
schools for defense-related industries, this used to be a noble goal.  To depict
me as a smile-button who cares more about seeming hip to his students than
teaching them sensitivity to language and its function, to see me as someone who
allows vapid prose to pass as informed writing--this is simply not me.

I wrote my "A & P" article out of a frustration that writing courses too often
seemed built around either quasi-belletristic story-telling or critiquing
systems of oppression.  I choose neither.  I don't think narratives are a good
structure around which to build a required university writing course, nor do I
think students shold have to learn about issues of verbal form in (what is often
to them) a dull political context.  I have tried to devise topics that allow an
entree by everyone and which might seem of sufficient interest to as many
students as possible.  Rap music & Malcolm X's autobiography seem to do that,
offering rich texts to analyze, especially in conjunction with other texts.  I
will change my topic when sufficient numbers of students tell me to, but so far
students are very enthusiastic.  So I say to students, for example, here are a
bunch of rap songs, old and new; here's a bunch of articles by people, some of
whom would criminalize rap, some of whom laud it; here's some interviews with
rappers, and here's the words of the head of Morality in Media; here's some
interviews with gang members, here's Cornel West on nihilism in black America,
Bell Hooks on rap music and misogyny, Elijah Anderson on the code of the
streets; here's an MTV special on gangsta rap; here's some data about album
sales, and some Newsweek cover stories, and letters to the editor, and ads for
records, and fashion spreads from The Source, and fans' comments and on and on.
And meanwhile students bring in a whole bunch of other stuff.  And they find
spaces to fit themselves into the dialogue, in terms of expository analytical
prose.  Instead of me presuming naivite on their parts and feeling I have to
inform them how life works, I choose a topic they know a great deal about and I
say to them, You tell me.

It's not all that different from what other people do, just basic critical
writing.  The only difference might be that I urge students to draw on material
they have (abundance), their knowledge & languge and experience with the topic,
rather than focusing on the material they need (poverty), as we see in the
writing of people who would use first-year writing as a place to teach students
how to critique dominant culture.  I could give two-thirds of two pieces of
lizard shit if students can critique dominant culture.  If I taught a class
called Intro to Marxist Thought or something, then I would really care.  I like
some of those articles in _Ways of Reading_, but even the ones I like I wouldn't
feel comfortable using with my students.  It's not like I don't give them a
range of prose to construct their textual spaces with, it's just that I want
there to be some inner logic for why we use what we use; "Stabat Mater" (or
Baudrillard, your suggestion) has too much contextual baggage to generate
substantive prose in ten weeks.  Those sorts of Greatest Hits essays B & P use
would prove too tiresome to me and my students after a while.  I'm not to into
masterpieces.  But rap always surprises, you know?

I write the pieces I do because I'm tired of students having tiresome places to
learn writing in.  I am trying to urge other teachers to care less about what
they feel they need to inform students of and care more about student desire,
student knowledge, student experience, student language.  Venturi, you know?
Enthusiasm for common materials.  I think the student-everyday is a very
valuable resource.  I want to know where student interest and disinterest is
because I want them to leave my class more attuned to what they can do in a
verbal performance, where they fall apart, where they glide.  You seem to choke
on the word "intensity"; it must conjure up some cliched scene to you or
something--me as aging cool-guy up there listening to students read some drivel
and nodding "Oh man, heavy!"  By intensity, I mean I strive to allow students
the space to feel more aware of their language and how they use it to read the
world.  I have a loosening in my formal expectations, yes, because I want all my
students to have the basic ability to enter a college writing situation and not
embarrass themselves--I think that if they know basic structural issues (and
know where to find help with other stuff) they might achieve that state.  I wish
I could solve everything in a first-year writing class, but you have to pick and
choose among those things most important and most do-able in ten weeks.  I'd be
interested to hear what you do, Tris.

Geoff

===============================================
Date:         Sun, 4 Dec 1994 00:39:09 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      Vjv->readers of sirc's article, A&P

Vjv->readers of sirc's article, A&P

RE: "reading," reception

_____Are there other readers of Sirc's article who have a similar,
though perhaps different in some ways, "reading" of Sirc's
"A&P"?

CaVeat:  I am not asking if there is an Isolde out thar, nor am I asking
for a vote or a resolution between Tristan's reading and Sirc's.  I
hope, by now, that I would be "received" as someone  neither
Jew nor Greek, but situated in the differences, in the _hypocrisy_.

I am very interested in *how* we receive what we read ... whether
here on the net (which is problematic enuf, given the medium) or
off the net ... in so-called real places.

Recently, we invited Donald Morton (Syracuse U) to speak at UTA.
While and after he spoke about Lyotard, Sedgwick, Foucault, J.
Butler, etc., I sat there in the audience wondering whom he was
talking about!  As I finally said to Morton, "I've read these people,
many times over, and I do not recognize them when I listen to you
'use' them."  It was clear, at least, to me, that Morton was not *arguing*
for or against (in any sense of critique or, as he said, critical analysis)
but was massively *redescribing* these "bourgeois" (his word)
writers.  He was, as KB would say, "casuistically stretching" them,
and for his own purposes.  Now, when I told him that, he--I was not
surprised!--suggested that my "reading" was tainted by the same
taint that covered these critics' reading of the world.  I am not
speaking outof class here, when I say that I was greatly disappointed
when Morton made such a claim, though, on the other hand, de-
lighted, because the next question was handy, namely, Where is
your metastance? At that point, which was later in private, he started
talking about Science (in a rather dogmatic Marxist sense of the
word.)  It was all very disappointing.  (If Morton were here, in all
fairness to him, I'm sure that he would have a different account
from this (my) account!)

As Collin, a few posts ago pointed out, he and some of the other
graduate students met with Morton ... and it was more of the same.
Evidently, there was no realization of differences of reading or
any "interest" in them.

Morton summed up his talk by saying that he wanted truth, equality,
justice, etc.!  (And many of us said to him ... yea!  That's what we
desire and need, as well!  Many of us shared his critique of Capitalism,
but not, again, his "reading" of other critics.)

I mention all this becuz--i will say again--i think that occasionally we
need to stop and ask ourselves and others

_____*What* or *Whom,* indeed, are we reading?

Lest there be some misunderstanding, I am *not* at all suggesting
that Tristan's reading is wrong.  I would not know how to make
such a claim finally stick.  It would be easier, after a while of talking,
to perhaps give an account (logos) of how Tristan arrives at his
reading of "A&P."  I am *not* at all suggesting that Sirc's reading
is right or wrong.  Etc. Etc.  I think that as we continue to discuss
his (eventually, our) article, the thing is getting rewritten.
Redescribed!   And perhaps with a level of consensus.  (And yet,
when " 'consensus' happens," if it happens, I'm going to feel that
I must stir the pot some more.)

Therefore, I would now ask Tristan and also others on this list ...

_____How would you describe your attempt to realize your  "interests"
in the university's (State's) classroom?  (There are lots of loaded words
in that question! Please feel free to rewrite it, if you wish.)  And...

_____When you read Sirc's article How did you respond?  (I am
not asking for a protocol here of your reading, but something closer
to you as a reader responding!

_____Did you have a similar response to Sirc's article, similar to
Tristan's, or another qute different response that no one yet has
expressed, or whatever?


Please don't let these questions, however, stop the flow of questions
being asked.  Multivalent ... I would hope that we would remain in
this polylogue.


---victor j vitanza
================================================
Date:         Sun, 4 Dec 1994 01:45:34 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      s->gs/t

I was really taken with Tris's message in reply, and find Geoff's response to
it confirming Tris's objections.  Having just spent the day on an "only ten
weeks" class syllabus, albeit "tiresome," I have a couple of thoughts:  that
you can probably make money betting that the sharks taking courses where the
dominant culture trains its young are not studying rap and that you can similar
ly guess that they don't ever have teachers who think of them as "fitting into
the spaces" of existing discourse, at least not in   a way that teaches read-
 ing [coded as "critical writing" here] rather than writing, coded as taking on
 the sharks with the good training they have had in it by some of us whose ways
of entering dominant discourses have depended on many tiresome hours and many
patient, willing to be disliked, teachers and classes, although not necessarily
required ones that confirmed us in the culture's idea that we were too dumb to
buy beer OR select a future.  S

==============================================
Date:         Sun, 4 Dec 1994 14:15:20 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      rs->tr->gs: [counterargument]

On Fri, 2 Dec 1994 Tristan Riley wrote:

> I would venture to guess that the students who 'get'
> Sirc's course in the way he wants them to get it are among the same
> group who 'got' writing-as-process:  that is, middle class white
> kids who had already been socialized into this particular game of writing
> and education.

And probably those students will 'get it' no matter what kind of writing
course you throw at them because they know the system.  They figure out the
prof's angle and can adapt to it fairly easily, having been culturally
cornfed for this kind of performance from the beginning.  And good for
them.  It would be nice if we were all so fortunate, so capable of
"learning" according to the discourse of the dominant, maybe.  However,
we're obviously not.  And there's nothing inherent in a University that lets
it do much of anything but reproduce this discourse.  Hence, as I read it,
Geoff's description of disruption from within, the refusal to play the game,
the suggestion that there are different games to be played, since it's
unlikely that the University, acting as institutional checkpoint for
social conformity, will alter its game plan significantly.  For instance,
new departments in this or that subject are cool, but they signal both death
and life.  Maybe it's like a sort of vampirism.  We feed on the new field,
draining it within an ounce of its life, then offer it eternal life on the
third floor of some building, maybe close to the library.  Or it lives in the
office of the occasional writing teacher, hungry for some composition subject
matter.

In composition specifically, we're taking part in the sucking of all of this
new and/or different knowledge (Ice Cube, etc.) into the institutional
curricular vein and rendering it analysis-friendly, in which case it comes to
have more in common with "Once More to the Lake" than perhaps it should if we
really want to shake up in the University in our students' minds, if we
really want to get make a parking lot out of the place.  But parking lot or
ivory tower, the University is still the place to be, offering
credentialization, legitimation, a neat place to hang out for four years or
more.  And the students who are prepared to adapt to whatever's happening do
well.  Those who aren't, don't.


> Still I wonder how it is that a specific
> variety of academic theorizing and practice (i.e., US academics self-
> labelled "post-[fill in the blank--Marxist, structuralist, modernist") has
> managed to so appropriate and remake a strand of social and cultural theory
> as to imagine that it informs us that 18 year old college students *already*
> have the *same* insights into the world as eg., Jean Baudrillard and so
> they have no need to be subjected to the indignity of being "taught" by some
> haughty pedagogue of critique (or even to the equally elitist chore of having
> to *read* and *critique* what Baudrillard has written). When I have some
> evidence that my 18 year old students come to me having read as much Marx
> (and having thought as hard about the ways in which the social and political
> are structured) as Baudrillard has, having been involved in political events
> even roughly akin to May '68 in Paris or the Algerian and SEAsian Wars in
> their domestic French and US impacts, having worked their way (and often
> "critically" at that, although I know that is perhaps a bad word to use in
> Sirc's view) through a rather vast amount of political and cultural history
> in order to formulate some fairly complex and (again) in many ways *critical*
> notions of the social, when the evidence shows me that their *histories* (a
> notion which seemingly disappears in Sirc's understanding of pedagogy) have
> led them to a rejection of critique and a valuing of "intensity" because they
> *know* enough about the former to make the choice meaningful, then I might
> start taking the parking lot metaphor a bit more seriously.  Maybe.

This sounds like a sort of Great Events course, an updated version of the
Great Books deal.  I don't think the point is that 18-year-olds are
already as sophisticated as Baudrillard.  I think it's that
some 18-year-olds and this French intellectual guy are somehow groping at
similarly envisioned horizons.  Baudrillard has Marx and the rest, a much
richer vocabulary with which to articulate his "vision."  Eighteen-year-olds
have Beavis & Butthead and some other stuff, like their lives, which, we
shouldn't have to remind ourselves, are filled with lots of fucked-up
experiences that their folks never had (or at least never acknowledged,
the talk-show culture not yet having been perfected).  And if we still
think that's nothing compared to Marx, maybe we should listen to the
Offspring and Pearl Jam and Ice Cube more often, although we probably would
not get it.  None of this means that Baudrillard and 18-year-olds can't or
shouldn't or could never be connected, but neither does it mean that this
connection can't take place in a parking lot.

> Someone else, can't remember who, wrote something in response to another
> response about how pedagogies of critique assume "deep down" the
> possibility of the Revolution.  I think this is more wrong than I'm
> able to say in just a screen or two of e-text.  Foucault provides some
> salient responses to this claim, in my view.

That was me.  I'll try to explain.  I wasn't refering to Foucault or any of
the "primary" theorists.  I was refering to the way some postmodern
discourses get shipped into composition for what appear to be old-style
purposes.  Yes, Revolution was too strong a word, and I apologize for
having banged it out in haste.  What if I write that composition's
pedagogies of critique echo more of the same hopeful calls for
justice that seem to have been in the air since the sixties?  The difference
is that now we have a more sophisticated vocabulary with which to
articulate them.  (Ack--familiar.)  We can now talk about difference and
the other and marginalization and the like.  And in a profession heavily
populated with baby boomers I'll surely catch hell for that, so I'll try
to explain further.

It's not that a call for justice is a bad thing--far from it.  But I think
the weight such a call carries in the minds of our students has diminished
greatly.  Maybe that's because they've become immune to it, having heard it
in various forms throughout a popular culture which caters to baby boomer
nostalgia, which is increasingly run by people of that age.  Or maybe the
idea just ran out of steam when it became apparent that not much justice was
being acheived anywhere.  I guess what I'm saying is that I like Geoff's
vision because I think it accounts/provides for the cynicism and/or sense of
irony I find in so many of my students (whether we think they've earned
these stances or not) while simultaneously allowing teachers to suggest that
things can be looked at, talked about, dealt with, and even operated
differently.


Raul Sanchez, Jr.
USF--Tampa

==================================================
Date:         Sun, 4 Dec 1994 14:21:50 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      skr -> gs & vv


Geoff,
I wrote this before reading your response to Tristan, wh ich responds
to some of my questions as well.  Victor's call for reaction encourages
me to  post without regard to your response.

As I read your pedagogy,

1. Students come to university not underprepared but wrongly prepared,
damaged, wounded, at best professing a literacy that serves whom you
do not want to serve.  You have 15 or so weeks to do some thing about
this situation.

2. One thing, or the best thing, or at least the some thing you have chosen
is to reinvent readig and writing for them by appealing to desire/affect.
Your goal is for students to experience affective intensity without your or
their passing judgment on that experience.

3.  The means of arousal you have chosen is this:  bombard them with texts.
Rock, including and especially rap, are the most effective stimulants.

4.  The result:  Two choices here:  a) you don't care what it is and so will
not examine it, and b) students are removed from the quicksand of their
former understandings of literacy and set free.

I deliberately reduce your words because my affective response to textual
bombardment (you use your technique not only in the way you teach but in the
way you write professionally) is often negative.  Having done s, I can
say that I am deeply sympathetic with
number 1.  What indeed is to be accomplished in a short 15 weeks?  And
how?  However (moving a half step toward number 2), I prefer to caution
myself before writing off every literate experience students have had prior
to my class. Fully aware of the damage that is done in our public schools,
I offer this counter-example: a cynical 14-year old family member (the
one who drenches himself in Snoop Doggy Dog and Public Enemy from
4 pm to midnight each day) begins to read words closely and carefully
because of the pedagogy of a 75-year-old high school teacher whose
staple is our nemesis the multiple choice test.  I his mother am filled with
hope that he will read closely and *critically* the misogyny of some rap
lyrics as he experiences intensely the nuanced rhythms of the genre.
He gives evidence of doing so.  As for me, I do the best I can to respond to
rap--yes, the rhythms and also the use of pastiche.  We overlap our
 literacies--the
teacher, the kid, and I.  But we will put them together differently.

number 2.  I am interested in your adherence to the affective but think
this part of your representation of your pedagogy bears more careful
theorizing.  As you can tell from the example above, I live in words; I
do not disown them.  Please tell me--are you after a zen-like rejection
of words themselves and of the dualism and logic they embody?  Please
say why, and how you came to this position and where you think it will
take us and why it is important to move in that direction.  Would you
advocate this word resistance for First-year Comp classes throughout the
US? the world?  The publication of your article implies advocacy.

number 3.  My sense is that you generously plan the circumstances
of liberation as they have worked for *you* (don't we all) forgetting that
our students will plan and execute liberations in ways you and I will
never dream of.  You privilege rock/rap so strongly as *best* text.  Your
strong preference makes  me very uneasy.  As Tristan has pointed
out, in the name of liberation by intensity alone, you remove from
students  venues for representing their own historical and social
positions with the literacies they may already own or need and want
to acquire.

number 4.  As for results, I think you want it both ways. You claim a
liberatory pedagogy and yet will not address its liberatory effects.

Susan Romano

=============================================
Date:         Sun, 4 Dec 1994 22:02:22 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      cgb-skr->rs->vjv->s->gs->tr->->->!

Wow! Clearly "critique can be pretty damn intense too," in Tristan's
words.  I have a story, a couple of comments, and an question or
six to contribute:

When Donald Morton met with a few of us after his talk (which VV
refers to) on the following day, he told us a tale of a class he taught,
which was seminar-size, and fairly evenly distributed between men and
women, and between European- and African-American students.
There was one point in the middle of the semester, where the lights
went on upstairs in one white male, and he announced to the class that
a) he finally understood what the big deal about Marxist critique was,
and b) he wasn't going to change.  The best part of the story was that
one of the women in the class responded by telling him, "We already
knew that."  I'm torn by the discussion so far, because I find myself
really drawn to both sides.  On one hand, I share Geoff's skepticism
about whether a pedagogy of critique "gives important things" to
students whose bellies aren't "already full," either.  That is, without
sounding snide, much of this discussion seems to hinge upon what
exactly those "important things" are.  Tristan implies that they are the
tools with which we can understand and problematize historical and
social relations; Geoff implies that there must be a desire to do so, and
that a course which doesn't begin to address desire won't result in that
understanding or critique in the first place. On the other hand, I'm
tempted to embrace the position of having acknowledged and accepted
student cynicism, maintaining all the while *my own* desire to engage
in critique.

And so.  My first comment is that I thought Geoff's article was less
about pedagogy and more about the building of a written text.  An
unimportant distinction to some, perhaps, but it is read (and can be) by
Tristan and SusanR as a statement of pedagogy, a statement which is
found to be lacking from that position.  I don't entirely disagree here,
though.  I think one of the dangers that we run into as teacher/writers is
a tendency to blur the very different types of building that go on in a
classroom.  I am very conscious, as S(usan) is, of going through the
oft tiresome process of building my courses.  But it is the blurred
distinction which enables her to read Geoff's "fitting into the spaces"
as purely a student project (which is reading) rather than a pedagogical
project of presenting a conversation with visible seams which the
students can critique.  It can be read, and perhaps should be read, both
ways, precisely because the architexture of the teacher is different from
that of the student, whether we found those differences on social
history, institutional apparati, or identity claims.

Which leads me to a second comment, about that distinction, and that
concerns at what level we are willing to interrogate and understand our
own desires.  I allude to this above, and Tristan does in his post as
well.  To what extent are we simply indulging our own desires,
whether that pedagogy is avant-garde, Marxist, current-traditional,
etc.?  My sense is that Tristan's critique is intense because he
responded to Geoff's article so negatively.  That is, because of affect.
And yet, my sense of Geoff's intensity is that his scholarship is backed
up with serious critique.  Like rap or not, it is as complex a cultural text
as any today, and the variety of materials Geoff cites surrounding that
is demonstrative.  I'm interested in having Geoff address the issues
surrounding his own desire, but I'd be interested (hi, VV) in everyone
else's desires ("interests") as well.  I think one of the virtues of
Geoff's article is that it attempts to focus some of our discussion on the
students themselves, rather than dismissing them as unworthy.

I'll finish this in a second post.
Collin Brooke
cgb1046@utarlg.uta.edu

===========================================
Date:         Sun, 4 Dec 1994 22:09:36 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      cgb-> ? <-cgb

Whew!  Back again.

Okay. Having gotten my division and definition topoi off my chest, let
me move on to a bundle of questions...

_____Raul, do you think that "a call for justice" is compatible with
Geoff's program?  I don't think that desire and justice need be
mutually exclusive (that is a pretty ridiculous thing on my part to even
propose, after all).  Given that they are not, do you see points of entry
in Geoff's article for justice?

_____S(usan), this is probably going to seem less genuine a question
than it really is, apologies ahead of time for that, but I'd be interested
in your thoughts on how deterministic you perceive education to be. To
a certain degree, we all teach at or have experienced the schools where
"the dominant culture trains its young."  Is it really that "us and them"
on the macro-level of universities? This isn't a "can't we all just get
along" question, but rather a question of front lines vs. supply train:
do we take on the sharks?

[[ "S" unsubscribed from the list this morning, so cannot respond
to this section of the quetion that cgb asks.  Moderator, vjv.  ]]

_____Tristan, speaking as one who has *listened* to rather than
*lived* Marxism, could you speak to the potentially equal skepticism
that might be raised about our academy's appropriation of Marxism?  I
don't mean to be vicious, but I could rewrite part of your post to
express my hesitancy to share your pedagogy "(a portion of it, though,
seems to revolve around the peculiar way in which textual expressions
of Marxist theory and resistance become tools to be used apparently
by some pedagogues and 'persons of authority' as ways to
demonstrate their solidarity in a manner which, again, often is viewed
rather skeptically by those who don't just *listen* to theories of class
struggle, but have *lived* it)."

_____Geoff, I already tipped you off to my question.  Could you
address the distinction between our-chi-text-ures, and the building that
I think you advocate for students?  That is, do you find that there is
any tension or friction between the two in your classrooms?

_____Susan R, why are there only two options in number 4?  I read at
least four different options within your comment:  whether we should
care, whether we should examine, whether students should be
removed from the quicksand of their literacy, and whether they should
set free?  It seems to me there are probably others as well, but can't
the quicksand rescue either be a function of caring (empowering
students) or not caring (prescriptive, technical approaches to pedagogy
which nevertheless provide students with firmament)? Certainly there
are liberatory pedagogues whose practices go largely unexamined?
What about simply awareness of quicksand (KB seems to argue for a
more fluid approach to language in Attitudes Toward History)--to say
nothing of assuming that there is an escape? Examination itself is not a
monolith, as I think the last few posts have demonstrated. Nor do I
think we (and I include myself) have fully looked at the form of
liberation (from composition textbooks) that prefaces Geoff's article,
which leads me to my final (yes! finally!) question:

_____I read Jasper Neel's book on Plato and Derrida this semester,
and I see echoes of "both sides" here.  On the one hand, I see Geoff
being asked to defend a post-structuralist conception of writing, and
on the other, I see what seems to be a Marxist position on the other
echoing some of the Platonic traces in composition (defining
rhetoric/pedagogy according to its ethical intent rather than its effects,
bifurcating our available options (us/them, desire/justice,
liberation/masturbation)).  My final question is this:  does anyone feel
the same need that Neel does, to keep some of each, but to try and
find a position that is less beholden to one side or ther other?  If so,
are there accounts of such a position?  Neel, as I recall, appeals to
Protagoras' notion of "strong" and "weak" discourse.  I read V's
caVeat as an appeal to other voices, to keep from falling into the us 'n'
them traps, but I fail to do so for the most part.  What does everyone
else think?

Collin Brooke
cgb1046@utarlg.uta.edu

============================================
Date:         Mon, 5 Dec 1994 10:56:09 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      ddm-->[sr], cgb, gs...etc!


Pardon the tardy entry into this conversation, as I just
finished the "A&P" article and finally read all of those
REINVIEW messages about it that have been piling up. (Since
SR pulled out, I'll slide into her [emptied] space...sort
of. Interesting playing out of tensions going on here, and
though I hear what SR is saying [I get it], my desire will
be following the intensities that work off an/Other tensor.)
Right now, I feel like chattin' (rappin') rather than askin'
questions, but I promise to get to two by the end: one for
the group and one for Geoff.

[["SR" has NOT left us; a poster that signed its name "S"
has left us.  Again SR is still here, and we appreciate that.
--moderator, vjv]]

First, let me say that I don't hear Geoff dissing "pedagogy"
or "authority" or "writing."  Though, I hear this concern
come up frequently in posts to Geoff.  Rather, what I hear
is his carnivalesque celebrations of the possibilities of
exploding each of these [restrictive] terms into overflowing
excess (like Bataille: from a restricted to a general
economy)--through laughter, through parody (or pastiche),
through an affirmation that will not Not.  Donald Morton
would no doubt be UNamused by this display of "ludic"
"nonsense," but I'm tickled ta death!

Btw, I do, Collin, hear some incredible pedagogical
implications in this article...for a pedagogy that would be
Other/Wise.  If "pedagogy" gets extricated from the "will-
to-pedagogy" from all the baggage that loads down the "will-
to-teach," we get a radical redefinition not only of
pedagogy but also, in this case, of writing.  When
"teaching" starts with desire, not the teacher's but the
students', everything we've built this (univer)City on
starts to crumble, to mutate.  An arresting thought. An
EXCITING thought. (Sorry, Geoff, for talking about you as if
you're not here.  Don'tcha just HATE that?)

But let me explain.  I don't hear in this article any
suggestion that we give up "authority" in the writing
classroom, as if we have nothing to "teach" and as if simply
*giving it up* were even possible.  Rather, I hear the
attempt at a redefinition of this notion. As I read this
essay, I thought I could hear Geoff's heels dig in.  I
thought I heard the sounds of a screeching HALT of
previously marching feet and clicking heels, leaving us in a
repose and reprieve from the UNIversity party line, from the
fight-for-literacy or -pedagogy or -empowerment. (Which
remind me of mini-wars, like the war on drugs, which have,
for all their good-will, forgotten[?] how to tell the
difference between totalitarianism and revolution.)

Rather than suggesting that we "give up" authority in the
writing classroom, Geoff seems to suggest that we might
inhabit the authority inherent in the pedagogical position
Other/Wise.  Performing authority in a way that mocks it,
that parodies it, that TEASES it and so exposes it as a
reality *effect* of the pedagogical position may, he seems
to suggest, make a space for the voice of the Other.  And it
may indeed be time to attend to the Other, to take a break
from our mini-wars and become-open to what it is in our
students that wants to be said.  This place, we must admit,
is going to look a lot different when Generation X takes the
reigns.

To say that one would prefer Not (like Bartleby) to live
next to a parking lot may be to simply say that one would
prefer (to) Not, that one would prefer to say No to
Nietzsche's "great sweep of life."  And, woah, we've likely
all been there at some point.  Yet, what we attempt to
repress shows up again and again, eeks outta crack, every
rupture.  And there are ALWAYS ruptures.  If we ask students
to turn off their desire while they take on the seri-ass
task of writing and thinking, we are asking the impossible;
the alternative is boredom, disengagement.  Desire WILL seep
in, it seems to me, if writing takes place; even if we X it
out with our red pens, we can't erase its presence.

But Geoff, I think admirably, suggests that we *start* by
saying to their desire, "c'mon in!"  I see this as a radical
affirmation of who they are and as an invitation, in the
space of the libidinalized classroom, for them to make
something of what has already been made of them.  That, to
me, sounds WAY MORE revolutionary in this post-humanist
world than Morton's brand of Marxist resistance.

We may, as Derrida says, still be haunted by the spirit of
Marx; yes, I believe that we are.  That haunting motivates a
good bit of my own work.  But I think that many of our
students are ALSO, more explicitly and more significantly,
haunted by the spirit of, say, Kurt Cobain.  And to silence
that haunting in order to privilege an/other seems not only
wrong-headed but also quite futile.  We have no
metalinguistic criteria from which to establish such a
privilege.  It seems necessary to notice that the battles we
learn to love to fight are protean; they're metamorphs.
Geoff's article seems to articulate a desire to let em go,
to say that we're *lucky* when old battles dis/solve, when
they fade from view.  There will always be others/Others.

This is choppy and elliptical (and, fyi, each line of the
above should have an "IMHO" attached). But I think I have
finally worked my way to a coupla questions.  First, to the
group:

_____Geoff says he opens the floodgates of students' desires
in the classroom TO rigorous "academic" analysis, which
seems to me an admirable feat.  Can we perhaps attempt to
articulate what it is that we, as teachers, as academes,
feel we are protecting by trying to hold off, to suppress,
and/or to subordinate what it is in our students that wells
up and aches to be said--whether it be about rap or about
who's banging who?  Can we, in other words, articulate what
it is that we have invested in our desire to keep out their
desire?  (I'm including myself in this "we."  I'm hardly
immune to this will-to-pedagogy.)

And this for you, Geoff:  I'm curious about how you actually
perform this clash of cultures in your classroom--that is,
how you invite mr. cheese factory to be a part of student
conversations about, for instance, rap music.

_____Do you, perhaps, invite your students read Bloom (!)
*across* their choice of a cultural artifact (rap, or cyber-
surfing, or whatever)?  I'd be interested to hear more about
that when you get a chance.

Also:
_____The last chapter of my dissertation is on a pedagogy of
laughter.  In it, I suggest that a laughing pedagogy is not
apolitical but simply political other/wise.  I would
appreciate your take on this idea and your thoughts about
its connection, if any, to your notion of the "classroom-as-
carnival."  Morton has vehemently opposed the notion that
laughter has anything to offer politics or The Revolution.
He thinks it takes the bite outta the fight.  How do YOU see
laughter and the "carnival" as potential points of
explosion, as capable of, as you say, "overturn[ing]
official culture"?

Thanks!

Diane Mower(y)
ddm1792@utarlg.uta.edu

===========================================
Date:         Mon, 5 Dec 1994 11:09:07 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      tr->lots of folks

Let me start by further preparing myself for the role of uptight
archaic leftist spoilsport refusing to engage all the jouissance of
hip avant-y word play by requesting to be called "Tristan", as that
is in fact the *signature* I provided.  One might, I know, go into a
long bit here on the power at stake in the business of (re)naming
(as Sirc has done by opting to call me "Tris"--in the interest of
presuming a familiarity which is not there?  or in order to make me
into a young whipper snapper? or...?), but I'll (mostly) resist that
particular variety of textual play and try instead to respond to a few
things in Sirc's response.

(just in case I've not been particularly good above at this game,
let me here warn that one should be careful of reading the
above paragraph *too* dreadfully seriously--even us dry un-hip
'Marxists' (more on this below) have a sense of humor, however
dependent it might be on jokes about the intellectual bourgeoisie)

I really said most of what I had to say in my first post (despite
the length of this)--and Sirc has IMO either not really responded to
central concerns I raised there or affirmed what I thought about his
presumptions about pedagogy and the fact that our two versions likely
cannot be reconciled.  Nonetheless, some attempts at elaborations,
directed to the specific things Sirc wrote last time which provoked them,
then responses to Victor, RSanchez, Collin, and maybe even others, for
all I know:

Sirc writes:
>To say I don't
>attend to students' histories is simply wrong.  Maybe it's not apparent in the
>article or my few posts, but you might see it if you read some of my other
>stuff.

But it *is* what you've written here that we're discussing, no?  It
seems to me that referring me to "other stuff" you've written as a
response is less than to the point.  I think Susan R's recent
post gets at one particular take on the "students' histories", and
perhaps also disturbs the ease of your claim that "any student" can
get a comfortable way in to these texts, *and* points back again to
my wariness of the idea that simply valuing student discourse on
volatile issues like racial and gender politics when it's "intense" is
a *good* *thing* pedagogically; i.e., what happens when/if women in the
class are troubled by the misogyny of Snoop Doggy Dogg or Malcolm X
(and perhaps also by that of some of their fans in the room) and are
disabled from responding by (among other things) the praise being
doled out to the "intense" (if subtly misogynist) work of their male peers
and/or the absence of any available method in the classroom (other than
that of "intensity", if one can call such a method) for making sense of
the argument/s in a text and for evaluating its constituent elements in
the interest of critical analysis? You indicate in this latest post
that in your view everybody seems to find space to talk to/about
these texts, but I wonder how much of that is about what's really
going on and how much is what you'd *like* to be going on--inasmuch as we
all sometimes like to think what we can't see in the classroom isn't
there, even when it's silencing (further) enabled by our pedagogy.
I also wonder whether you really expect anything *other* than rave
reviews from many students in a class where the texts at issue are
largely fresh from MTV--and whether you imagine that 10 weeks of
"intensely" responding to these texts they already know a fair
amount about, without any instruction as to particular strategies
for reading them which they likely *don't* already know or for
responding to them via techniques which they also likely *don't*
know, does more for them than give them reason to tell friends how
"cool" their writing class and teacher were.

It seems to me that the problem of the myriad political complications
of the texts you examine in your class (and the numerous ways in which
they can enable silencings and uncritical reception of notions cultural
and political in dire need of critique) is dealt with not at all by simply
allowing students to just come and talk about these issues off
the tops of their heads (in the interest, of course, of tapping
"abundance" rather than "poverty" as you say).  With no more careful
consideration of what sorts of histories the students bring with
them to class or to the *immense* difficulty entailed in simply
*talking* about race in ways which aren't trivial or reinforcing of
discriminatory received wisdoms or both, it strikes me
that one is most likely to get the kinds of discussions of the topics
typical of the popular media (since it is familiarity with *these*
texts which the students come to class equipped with in abundance)
and all that entails.

I will unabashedly say that I am completely uninterested in having
my students come into the class and talk off the tops of their heads
about race, gender, class, etc. Nor do I care to read papers in
which they write about these issues completely in the conceptual
terms and parameters which they brought with them on day 1.  This is
not to say that their experience doesn't matter--in fact it will
probably always be *the* determining factor at the end of the day as
to what they think (which perhaps is a stronger criticism of
education generally than I'm prepared to get into now).  But if they
do not have some access to various non-MTV generated ways to engage
in discussion of race, gender, class, etc., and if they/we do not
have some agreed upon grounds on which to read our own work and the
work of others and on which to write (again beyond those of "intensity"),
my guess is that they/we will not often be troubled to move beyond the
narrow limits of their comfortable ways of talking these issues and
that in fact my classroom and its discourse/s will almost certainly wind
up simply regurgitating tired old versions of race, gender, class, difference
without being troubled to move beyond being "intense" about rap or
Malcolm X to the realm of making cases for *why* they think various
things about the two and what the two are arguing and how.  Again, my
interest is in providing them with some possibiities for making critiques
and evaluating arguments/texts critically--"intensity" in my view can
just as easily (perhaps more easily) be reactionary as critical or
considered.  And my experience is that it's the former which is
more readily available from the texts and discourses generally
informing 18 year old first year undergraduate students' perceptions
of race, gender, class, etc. in the first place.

Later Sirc writes:
>It's not all that different from what other people do, just basic critical
>writing.  The only difference might be that I urge students to draw on material
>they have (abundance), their knowledge & languge and experience with the topic,
>rather than focusing on the material they need (poverty), as we see in the
>writing of people who would use first-year writing as a place to teach students
>how to critique dominant culture.  I could give two-thirds of two pieces of
>lizard shit if students can critique dominant culture.  If I taught a class
>called Intro to Marxist Thought or something, then I would really care.

This is confusing indeed in light of things you've written
elsewhere.  Here your pedagogy is "not all that different from what
other people do", meaning presumably that you *do* perhaps offer some
guidelines for critical writing and reading to students, that you
*do* perhaps tend to the game in which you are a teacher and your students
are students and you know things of import which they do not--earlier it
sounded rather like you were simply valuing student writing on these
issues on the basis of its "intensity" without regard for its
critical facility or content.  I'm curious as to which one it is.
It *does* matter just a little bit in the discussion going on here,
after all.  I'm also curious as to how you manage so surely to decide
that only Marxists (or those interested in Marxism) ought be interested in
"critiqu[ing] dominant culture" and the institutional and historical
arrangements which make it dominant.  Perhaps you assume this all
happens elsewhere in the university (when your students get around to
taking "Intro to Marxist Thought"); perhaps you really don't care
if your students are *ever* presented with any notions regarding how
dominant culture works, how institutions like the university and
teachers like Sirc (and Tristan) contribute to the maintenance of
the institutions necessary for its continued predominance (with room
of course for some negotiation by the Sircs and Tristans and the
other participants, if they can be bothered); perhaps you think
critique has some other tasks which necessarily separate it from the
(obviously disdained) business of mere Marxist demagogues and cadre
leaders.  This is the site perhaps of the crux of our disagreement.  I
consider critique, and even the critique of "dominant culture" and its
historical and institutional supports, something essential to
present to students in the course of my class, if only to give them
the information that they might then choose not to pursue it (does
that make me a Marxist or someone who ought be teaching Intro to
Marxist Thought rather than writing, Geoff?) and not only because I
think it important information about the world we're in but because
I'm unable to imagine how we would begin to write or think outside
of the parameters set by these issues about which you don't give a
"lizard shit".  I also never imagine that students will necessarily run
into these notions anywhere else in the university--you see, I know *you*
are out there teaching too!--so I try to at least introduce them in the
course of my class as fundamental components in the very possibilites of
writing and especially writing from this particular intellectual
(and bourgeois, if I may) space.  It is entirely possible that my students
will take from these notions very different things than I can possibly
imagine them taking from them--that's fine by me.  Many will (do) take them
as part and parcel of a way into the university from a point outside
(eg., the working class student who just wants "in")--that too is great
by me.  Some will perhaps take them as ways to express and act upon
their general if usually or formerly inarticulable rage at historical
and social conditions around them which stink--that's great too.
Unlike Sirc, though, I'm willing to acknowledge that a measurable
portion of my students might well be unhappy with what goes on in
my classroom--*because* it informs them of the privilege of their
position in no uncertain terms and *if* they are unwilling to take that
as something other than an assault on their persons.  I gladly
assume this responsibility rather than Sirc's apparent readiness to
convince himself that everyone is benefitting in his class simply
because no one is making noises about being "bored" by having to
deal with the "dull" political.  In fact it is quite the exception in my
class that students evince boredom when the business of
institutional critique comes around to looking at the university
itself--they're *more* than interested to inquire into and argue
about how and where *they* are stacked in this particular set of power
relations.

Other lines of inquiry:

Sirc writes:
>By intensity, I mean I strive to allow students
>the space to feel more aware of their language and how they use it to read the
>world.

Since it is your "intensity" which has been a major stumbling point
for me, I thought I'd speak a bit to this.  I must admit though that I
haven't the slightest clue what this means or how one would be able to
evaluate whether or not it had been achieved.  Can you help here?


> I am trying to urge other teachers to care less about what
>they feel they need to inform students of and care more about student desire,

Really though, if it's their *desire* you're interested in tapping,
there are theoretical resources you might find more appropriate than
eg., Baudrillard (who has only *bad* things to say about desire in
_Seduction_ and elsewhere).  Perhaps it's Reich and orgone rays
which might better help organize your syllabus--certainly this would
speak to a pretty powerful source of student knowledge (even if at
18 some of them are limited to knowledge which *isn't* informed by
direct experience).  And this is meant only half (or maybe 1/4)
jokingly--if it's after all "intensity" which is driving your
classroom, well, why not have some "*intensity*" for gosh sakes?

Onward to Victor, who writes:
>-----*What* or *Whom,* indeed, are we reading?

>Lest there be some misunderstanding, I am *not* at all suggesting
>that Tristan's reading is wrong.  I would not know how to make
>such a claim finally stick.  It would be easier, after a while of talking,
>to perhaps give an account (logos) of how Tristan arrives at his
>reading of "A&P."

Victor, it seems rather an unnecessary move to avow your
impartiality on this--since in fact it was partially your
mega-celebratory post following Sirc's article which prompted me to
start ranting.  I know, just from what I know of you here, from
having read some of what you've written on theory and pedagogy, that
you do not share many of the ideas I have about those things and
that you certainly share more along those lines with Sirc than with
me.  That's ok.  I already know that doesn't make me "wrong" or a dopey
Marxist (see below) or whatever.

I'm not sure, though, what you're after here--I think I've already
done in some detail the things I find "wrong" with Sirc's article if
it is in fact an advocacy piece for a variety of pedagogy (which
Susan R. and I at least think it is, but Collin does not) and why I
think them so given my own ideas about pedagogy.

On to RSanchez, who cites me:
>>  when the evidence shows me that their *histories* (a
>> notion which seemingly disappears in Sirc's understanding of pedagogy) have
>> led them to a rejection of critique and a valuing of "intensity" because they
>> *know* enough about the former to make the choice meaningful, then I might
>> start taking the parking lot metaphor a bit more seriously.  Maybe.

Then writes himself:

>This sounds like a sort of Great Events course, an updated version of the
>Great Books deal.  I don't think the point is that 18-year-olds are
>already as sophisticated as Baudrillard.  I think it's that
>some 18-year-olds and this French intellectual guy are somehow groping at
>similarly envisioned horizons.  Baudrillard has Marx and the rest, a much
>richer vocabulary with which to articulate his "vision."  Eighteen-year-olds
>have Beavis & Butthead and some other stuff, like their lives, which, we
>shouldn't have to remind ourselves, are filled with lots of fucked-up
>experiences that their folks never had (or at least never acknowledged,
>the talk-show culture not yet having been perfected).  And if we still
>think that's nothing compared to Marx, maybe we should listen to the
>Offspring and Pearl Jam and Ice Cube more often, although we probably would
>not get it.

I'm afraid you've gotten something from my "Baudrillard/18 yr. old
comparison" which I didn't intend and missed what I *did* intend.  I
do not mean that students *must* read Marx (or any other particular
text/theory) or *must* wait for their own Vietnam before they can
have reached the position at which they can make the informed choice
to embark upon the "intensity" Sirc celebrates without being
bothered by the nuisance of critique.  I mean that in my view it is
imperative to at least give them the relevant options before deciding
*for* them (which is the reading I made of Sirc's pedagogy) that they're
really just pessimistic French intellectuals who've already been
there, done that and now just want to bury themselves in MTV hip hop
specials (and maybe even write "intense" papers for their writing
class about it).  Without some evidence that the 18 year olds (and
especially the middle class white students, who generally tend to put on
the most cynical airs of anyone in the classroom in my experience) have
travelled some interesting trajectory to get to cynicism (i.e., that
they've *earned* it, rather than simply copping it as a cool
attitude from a hip hop group with whom experientially they have
*nothing* in common--see below), I think it quite impossible, indeed
silly, to talk of any "similarly envisioned horizon" shared by them and
contemporary French theorists.  And yes, I'm unconvinced, as much as
some folks might want to claim and claim and claim it, that Beavis &
Butthead and Pearl Jam stack up as theoretical and critical texts to Marx
or any other number of such sources.  That doesn't mean I think they're
"nothing"--it means I think by themselves they generate writing I'm
not interested in reading on the part of my students because I think
it almost always completely uninformed by any sort of critical
perspective which they can IMO much more easily get from sources
which are *about* that, criticism, rather than primarily entertainment
(this is a point I would imagine more people who actually write
intellectual stuff on hip hop, which necessitates quite a lot *more*
than just those texts, would acknowledge, but quite a few still seem
very interested in depriving their students of just the critical
resources they make use of in their work in the confused interests
of 'going to the source, to the texts the students know most about
without all the clutter of eg., Marx, et. al'). Those texts certainly
*can* be used to good effect, to generate good writing, IMO *if* they
are explored as arguments/cases and if they are opened to critique
which is informed by some method/s beyond "intensity".  Sirc explicitly
says, though, that he thinks it sufficient just to get students into
the "intensity" of talking to these texts--and that in fact it is a Bad
Thing, demonstrating our sycophantic worship of Tiresome Old Pedagogies,
to hook them up to a critical method. I might respond to this
by saying *some* parts of education remain less exhilarating than watching
vids on TV; reading _The Order of Things_ takes (sometimes tiresome)
effort; building a house is hard work; deal with it.

>It's not that a call for justice is a bad thing--far from it.  But I think
>the weight such a call carries in the minds of our students has diminished
>greatly.  Maybe that's because they've become immune to it, having heard it
>in various forms throughout a popular culture which caters to baby boomer
>nostalgia, which is increasingly run by people of that age.  Or maybe the
>idea just ran out of steam when it became apparent that not much justice was
>being acheived anywhere.  I guess what I'm saying is that I like Geoff's
>vision because I think it accounts/provides for the cynicism and/or sense of
>irony I find in so many of my students (whether we think they've earned
>these stances or not)

I would respond to this by saying that in my experience it's rather
the *teachers* (and especially a certain species of same who I've
already ranted at a bit) who seem to have become immune to the call for
justice (and who then often feel compelled to try to immunize their
students as well).  Also (to bring my 'Marxism' back into this)
class and race and some other things come into play here--that is, I
agree that lots of my students seem "immune" to calls for justice if
by "students" you mean upper bourgeois white kids who've never really seen
injustice except on TV and while walking downtown on the way to the
cinema and so have sometimes a hard time imagining it is real.
The working class kids, the black kids, and quite a few other kids,
on the other hand, sure as hell know about injustice's existence and are
a very long way from seeing it as an idea "out of steam".

As to cynicism, the key point here for me *is* in fact earning it.
It is not a valid option in my class unless it *is* earned--that is,
if such a position cannot be articulated argumentatively, supported,
entered into dialogue with other positions, and made open to
critique, then I insist that students find another place to be
cynical without having earned the right to be so.  I do not think
most manifestations of student cynicism clever or interesting--I
think them (mis)informed by a media culture catering to a specific
social class but masking this as a universal appeal and motivated
frankly by an unwillingness to examine core assumptions about
society and their place in it (reinforced in part by an educational
system which largely tells them "don't worry, we won't ask you to
examine them--just be sure to pick the right answers on the multiple
choice tests").

Finally (really),
Collin writes:
>_____Tristan, speaking as one who has *listened* to rather than
>*lived* Marxism, could you speak to the potentially equal skepticism
>that might be raised about our academy's appropriation of Marxism?  I
>don't mean to be vicious, but I could rewrite part of your post to
>express my hesitancy to share your pedagogy "(a portion of it, though,
>seems to revolve around the peculiar way in which textual expressions
>of Marxist theory and resistance become tools to be used apparently
>by some pedagogues and 'persons of authority' as ways to
>demonstrate their solidarity in a manner which, again, often is viewed
>rather skeptically by those who don't just *listen* to theories of class
>struggle, but have *lived* it)."

Well, I suppose I should have been better prepared to become a Marxist
at the mere mention of Karl's name and my attention to the little problem
of social class in the classroom and the inadvertent slip or two of
"ideologues of the bourgeoisie" (whoops, I guess I didn't do the last
one--well, now I have) on a list which, I take it, has a rather
substantial number of self-labelled post-something-or-others on it.
Actually though I don't think of myself as any more a Marxist than say
Foucault or the Baudrillard of _For a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign_ are Marxists (nor any *less*, mind you)--they
also sometimes used the dreaded terminology ("class struggle",
"bourgeoisie", "proletariat", etc.) and (crime of crimes, for some
of the folks I was excoriating in my last post) obviously had read a
fair amount of Marx and taken him very, very seriously in putting
together their own trajectories.  I simply find indispensable the
notion of social class and privilege in the daily business of my class
(and the rest of my life, for that matter) and I am quite concerned that
some of the issues and critical notions Marx and some (not all) Marxists
spent so much time considering (and which quite obviously have contributed
to an inescapable portion of the present world situation, "fall" of
communism or no) be there for disposal and discussion by my students, at
least in introductory form.  This perhaps makes me a Marxist in this
rather Marxophobic environment, but strangely the Marxists in my
department dislike me at least as much as the Sirc-eans I encounter.
And I *am* rather concerned about the accuracy of calling *anyone* who
endeavors to talk of such things a Marxist--certainly as I've said
some of my Marxist colleagues would be surprised if not horrified to
learn that I've joined their ranks.  I think actually it is a
problem of the US post-whatevers I've met and read in that they are
so hostile to *any* reference to Marx and the terminology that they
become mightily invested in making anyone who questions them from a
historical and/or critical and/or conflict (eg., not just Marxist
but any theory which accepts conflicting social classes as
fundamental to a picture of society) perspective a dopey (and
theoretically unsophisticated, and non-avant-y) Marxist.

All of which is to say that I don't really think your question
speaks to me at all.  I am as aware as anyone of how Marxism in the
university has become a very strange and eminently attackable
entity.  But I'm not speaking from that position, nor am I even
saying "teach your students Marx".  I am saying that I am unwilling,
in my pedagogy and elsewhere, to dispense with the utility of Marx
despite the silliness of some Marxists (just as I have no intention
to throw out Foucault, Baudrillard, Bataille, et al because of the
utter foolishness which is very often committed in this country's
university system in their names).

And I've gone on and on and on.  But it seemed like a smart thing to
do at the time.  Hope I got everyone's name right.

How's your breath now, Fred Kemp?

Tristan
**********************************************************************
Agreement is an altogether tiresome constituent of conversation
         Michel de Montaigne
**********************************************************************
==============================================
Date:         Mon, 5 Dec 1994 17:56:53 -0400
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From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      cgb: protocol(lin)s

Uh-oh.
I've been found out!
It must be time to get that "lazy I" of mine fixed.  Maybe I need a new
prescription.

First things first.  If I misread the following:
> I know from my own experience that I absolutely *didn't* have
> even a fraction of 'all of it' figured out when I was 18 (and at
> least partially because I hadn't read Marx--and let the snide
> comment about "neo-Marxists" fall where they may here)

when I should have read it as
> the mere mention of Karl's name

that's my own fault, I suppose, and I consider myself duly chastised
for it.  But I would ask for the same precision in return--I'd like to
think that "post-whatever" is as inadequate a label to discuss activities
or agendas as Marxism is in your case, Tristan.  I don't personally
consider Marxism to be dopey or unsophisticated--I consider it a
particular discourse with a particular agenda (among them placing
need above desire, justi(ce)fication above exploration, and resistance
above ludic theory (a la Ebert, Morton, Zavarzadeh, etc.)).  I saw
those concerns in your post, and jumped to a conclusion I should not
have.  My question probably didn't speak to you in that case.

But my concerns were there too.  One of those deals with the binary
you set up between listening and living, and whether we can actually
teach anything that we live.  I don't know the answer to that one, and
it's a concern I have when I teach.

A second concern was how our own desires affect what we perceive
as our students' needs, and how Kurt Cobain (borrowing from Diane)
might serve as a more productive intersection of both their desires and
our own perceptions of their needs.

A third concern (from my question re Neel's book) was whether
anyone else saw (again with my lens) the same type of debate going
on here that he describes between Plato and Derrida.  He doesn't
abandon either, or suggest that one is dopey and one is hip.  There are
benefits to each, and each has drawbacks as well. Neel's concern was
finding space where composition could exist without being
subordinated to either force.  At least, that's *my* desire speaking
through *my* reading of his book.

A fourth concern was that I didn't intend to say that there were no
pedagogical implications to Geoff's article.  Really, I didn't.  Rather,
the distinction I was trying to draw was between pedagogy as our
own theory/practice and student experience in the classroom.  Geoff,
this is a reduction, but I saw you describing in your article the effects
you'd like to achieve with your pedagogy.  I don't think that this
implies a lack of critique--I do think it implies certain pedagogical
choices (which Diane is far better than I am at picking up on, precisely
because she is writing a dissertation chapter on the subject), but I
don't think those choices are as mutually exclusive as they're
sometimes presented, and that was my response to Susan R's post.
But I saw S's post (I don't mean to speak ill of the unsubscribed here)
intepreting what I interpreted as teacher-speak (Geoff's reply post was
much more explicitly pedagogical for me than his essay) and turning it
around to suggest that he has his students "fit in."  I don't think (nor
would anyone else, I'm pretty sure) that our pedagogy enables us to
determine our students' classroom experience--we can influence it
certainly--and Geoff's essay spoke to me about what types of
experience he'd like his students to have.  One where their desires
aren't killed off, and assumed to be banal, trivial, pathetic,
uninformed, shallow, or ignorant.  That list is taken from adjectives
that I've used too, at one time or another.  I didn't feel like I knew any
better *how* to do that as a pedagogue than I did when I started--
although I appreciate(d) Geoff's use of "allegory" as a potentially
useful reading strategy for dealing with discourse I might normally
dismiss as incompetent.

Finally, I'm no more ready to assume I understand Geoff's pedagogy
because he mentions Bataille than I am to assume I understand
Tristan's because he mentions Marx.  Perhaps now I'm even less
ready than I was when I first posted.  Which is probably a good thing.
But I'm more interested in reflecting on pedagogy than I am in
watching another "resistance on one side, ludic on the other side"
battle waged on the level of misreadings and speaking at cross-
purposes.  Although I may not have done so to anyone else's
satisfaction, I've been trying to ask questions that speak to issues of
pedagogy rather than to who's dopey.

And I'll stop asking and backpedaling and explaining myself now.
Maybe tomorrow I'll speculate about D's question regarding the will-
to-pedagogy.

See youse then.
Collin Brooke
cgb1046@utarlg.uta.edu
============================================
Date:         Wed, 7 Dec 1994 14:46:10 -0400
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From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      tr->ddm->gs

Just a few [!] more words on this--I recognize that for the most part it
seems my concerns with the Sirc are indeed merely *my* (singular)
concerns on this list so I'm prepared at this point to shut up and let
you all do other kinds of things with his work.  I
want though before slipping back into the void to try to focus some of
these concerns (again) through comments made recently by Diane, comments
which seem to me to get at some of the most problematic claims I see
often being made apropos of some of these 'new pedagogies'.  I have
once or twice tried, however bumblingly, to raise the issue of what
I perceive as a very strong skewing of Sirc's pedagogy in the
direction of a certain *kind* of student (identifiable in part
via that archaic old discourse of social class) and at the
(continued) expense of other kinds of student--he has not responded
to this in my view.  I think Diane's good words for Sirc's article
evince the same skewing, so I will try again via response to *her*
reading.

Diane writes:
>
>Btw, I do, Collin, hear some incredible pedagogical
>implications in this article...for a pedagogy that would be
>Other/Wise.  If "pedagogy" gets extricated from the "will-
>to-pedagogy" from all the baggage that loads down the "will-
>to-teach," we get a radical redefinition not only of
>pedagogy but also, in this case, of writing.  When
>"teaching" starts with desire, not the teacher's but the
>students', everything we've built this (univer)City on
>starts to crumble, to mutate.

You will perhaps forgive me if I am unable to read this at this
point as much more than clever word play without much of substance to
apply to the concrete business of pedagogy and/or social change.  What
*is* this difference you posit between "pedagogy" and "will-to-pedagogy"?
Why is it important in your view?  How might one go about separating them
out, assuming the difference in fact even exists?  If, as I suspect, this
is an effort to get Nietzsche into the fun and games (since we've
already got a few of the other usual suspects), I feel mightily compelled
to start asking lots of questions about the appropriateness of the
particular diremption of the notion of will-to-power you've (as far as I
can tell) attempted above.  Just a few of them here though:  what in
Nietzsche (or in his French disciples) makes you believe he thinks the
"baggage" of willing is something to get "extricated" from, or that
that is a notion which one can fruitfully adapt from him?  In N.'s piece
on his own greatest teacher, Schopenhauer, he has a few words on education
which I would argue are part and parcel of his thought generally, and which
are chopped out in order to serve up simple "desire" based theories of
pedagogy only at the risk of a very ahistorical, decontextualized
deployment of his thought.  He writes "Each of us bears a productive
uniqueness within him as the core of his being...Most find this something
unendurable, because they are, as aforesaid, lazy, and because a *chain*
*of* *toil* *and* *burden* is suspended from this uniqueness".  Here is
a Nietzsche who clearly sees education as anything but simply a matter of
unchaining "desire"--there is in fact *labor*, *drudgery* to be endured
on the road to learning (not to mention a necessary funnelling out
of the "lazy", an anti-democratic 'proof of the pudding' on the road
toward education). I should be curious to know
how this, the element in Nietzsche (and arguably in Bataille as well) which
reads the possibility of the Sirc-ean festival *only* at the *end* of a
road which is traversed via *discipline* and *drudgery* and *labor* (see
Bataille's heroic grappling with Hegel under the direction of Kojeve)
because only then can it possibly tap the depths they want to (must)
tap, fits into the idea that simply turning undergraduates loose to talk
off the tops of their heads about hip hop music leads somehow to something
interesting in Bataillean/Nietzschean terms.  The easy way to deal with
this, I know, is to say something along the lines of "I can do whatever
I want with this theory--there's no user's manual"--I will simply hope I
can get something more than that from you, if only because I'm so troubled
by the way your (and Sirc's) deployment seems in my view to detach
the theory from a set of practical and material considerations or
conditions of possibility which Nietzsche and Bataille themselves were
careful *not* to detach.  I think there's a larger concern here on my
part having to do with what I think is the *massive* difficulty of getting
from these theories a pedagogical theory which is anything but elitist
and aristocratic (notwithstanding the Deleuzian and other readings of
Nietzsche, which I find entertaining and quite inventive as
philosophical interpretation but hardly something I think
translatable into an educational theory and practice), but that one
I'll keep to myself right now.

There is, though, in this entire discussion and in other encounters
I've had with some folks seeking to use these theoretical sources to
construct 'radical pedagogies' and such, something really troubling
in the failure (IMO, need I add?) to theorize explicitly, in addition to
the goings-on in the classroom, the points of connection between the
class and other points *outside* the classroom (at least in a way
that moves beyond unproblematized romantic paeans to shopping mall
and parking lot culture).  That is, not only is there (often) a glossing
of important situating variables and factors regarding the source theories
being deployed (so eg., Nietzsche is unproblematically yanked out of the
socio-historical space within which his thought is arguably anchored and
turned into a rather simple pluralistic democrat), but much seems to ride
on the assumption that conditions *outside* the classroom, in their very
inscription in the bodies of our students, will simply play along
nicely or in any event won't catastrophically impact our
"Other/wis[ing]" and "teasing" and "carnival[ing]" and such *in* the
classroom.  I think this a *major* failure in this sort of thought
on pedagogy--it's as though our classrooms are laboratories in which
we can try out all of this nifty new and very trendy pedagogy, all
the while seemingly not thinking much about how it will rub against
students' lives when they leave our labs and re-enter a world where
nobody is much interested in listening to people wax poetic over the
possibilities of "teaching Other/wise" but rather just want to know
if the students can *produce*.  And perhaps the worst thing, as I've
said over and over, is that I think a goodly portion of our students
are hip to all of this and to us.

As for the walls "crumbl[ing]", nice evocative picture, but
hardly anything new or compelling IMO.  As I mentioned in another
post, I think we've seen this move to pedagogies of desire at least
once before in some of the 60s experiments--which (correct me if I'm
wrong) hardly resulted in the walls of the university tumbling down
(but *did* result in getting Bob Dylan on the syllabus, eh?).

>As I read this
>essay, I thought I could hear Geoff's heels dig in.  I
>thought I heard the sounds of a screeching HALT of
>previously marching feet and clicking heels, leaving us in a
>repose and reprieve from the UNIversity party line, from the
>fight-for-literacy or -pedagogy or -empowerment. (Which
>remind me of mini-wars, like the war on drugs, which have,
>for all their good-will, forgotten[?] how to tell the
>difference between totalitarianism and revolution.)

This is not quite so subtle as a ton of bricks.  So we "empowerment"
folks are akin to the Drug Nazis of the federal government, eh?  Let
us pass on from this before I think up some clever comparative for
the "desiring-pedagogy" crowd and start a war or something.

>Rather than suggesting that we "give up" authority in the
>writing classroom, Geoff seems to suggest that we might
>inhabit the authority inherent in the pedagogical position
>Other/Wise.  Performing authority in a way that mocks it,
>that parodies it, that TEASES it and so exposes it as a
>reality *effect* of the pedagogical position may, he seems
>to suggest, make a space for the voice of the Other.

How is it, I often ask myself, that people can get themselves to
write such things--plenty hip, to be sure, sexy, sleek, all that
stuff, but in my view utterly devoid of any real application to what
empirically goes on in the classroom--and imagine that any but a
very select portion of their students are *ever* in a position viv-a-vis
them (the teachers) and the institution which they inhabit to appreciate
(or even give a damn about) any "TEAS[ING]" or "mocking" of authority
being attempted by the Sirc-ean teacher except insofar as it might
be entertaining (for a minute or two) to see the teacher behave in this
bizarre fashion? They *know* who you are, regardless of how much you'd
like *not* to be that (to be Other, isn't that how it goes?)--and they
*know* (or at least the working class students, students of color, etc.
know) what you can best do for them, and it ain't "parod[y]" authority.
I've already gone over at too much length what I think it *is* in other
posts, but again I'm led back to talking about class difference and
other differences of privilege among students.  This entire way of
talking about pedagogy and the university and 'what is to be done' in
the classroom is absolutely dripping in my view with class privilege--
it presumes that *all* students upon which it might be applied will be
unanimously "desir[ous]" of Less (or Different) Authority on the part
of the teacher (rather than say "desir[ous]", if I may borrow the term
only in order to break it, to learn how to get *in*), that *all* students
will be just ecstatic when a teacher tells them "hi kids! guess what?
we're going to change things around in this class and, instead of talking
about the things you need to learn in order to 'make it' in the (bourgeois)
world and perhaps also to critique things about it you don't like, we're
going to talk about your private lives and the music you listen to! isn't
that great!".  This latter seems to me to say something important about
what the pedagogue/theorist assumes re: both how the student views the
school and the possible parameters for making change from within
institutional boundaries--here, the student is uncritical enough about
(friendly enough toward) the school as institution to even consider
talking there about things of vital importance to her/him as something
other than an attempt by the authorities to gather information about
her/him and to generally butt into her/his life (and/or ruin 'good stuff'
by domesticating it and turning it into *schoolwork*) and the classroom
is envisioned  as a scene for change wherein it is "tearing down walls"
which is the goal (rather than, as envisioned by some of us 'empowering
folk' less convinced that the school is such a mutatable site, the more
limited goal of presenting critical tools, especially to those who lack
and might really *use* them due to class and other inequities).

>To say that one would prefer Not (like Bartleby) to live
>next to a parking lot may be to simply say that one would
>prefer (to) Not, that one would prefer to say No to
>Nietzsche's "great sweep of life."  And, woah, we've likely
>all been there at some point.  Yet, what we attempt to
>repress shows up again and again, eeks outta crack, every
>rupture.  And there are ALWAYS ruptures.  If we ask students
>to turn off their desire while they take on the seri-ass
>task of writing and thinking, we are asking the impossible;
>the alternative is boredom, disengagement.  Desire WILL seep
>in, it seems to me, if writing takes place; even if we X it
>out with our red pens, we can't erase its presence

This strikes me though as the sort of either/or proposition which the
'new pedagogues', one would imagine, should be more careful of falling
into--why is it *either* desire *or* critique for you here?  Who has
proposed that here (other than Sirc, as I read his initial article)?
I've tried (however unsuccessfully) to argue that students (at least
*my* students) don't seem to just come into class poised either to
do "desire" and Have Fun or submit to the dreary boredom of
critique--they in fact are often quite "desir[ous]" of getting hold
of the sort of knowledge which might be of some use in other
endeavors outside the walls of our little classroom. So as to the
"seri-ass" tasks of education, my own experience is that these *serious*
tasks are often taken up quite enthusiastically by students, and again
especially those who really know what's at stake--in fact I think what
you've written here is in some sense a bit of an insult to the ability
of students to be genuinely interested outside the parameters of MTV.

>But Geoff, I think admirably, suggests that we *start* by
>saying to their desire, "c'mon in!"  I see this as a radical
>affirmation of who they are and as an invitation, in the
>space of the libidinalized classroom, for them to make
>something of what has already been made of them.  That, to
>me, sounds WAY MORE revolutionary in this post-humanist
>world than Morton's brand of Marxist resistance.

"WAY MORE revolutionary"?  But isn't the revolution and the
revolutionary something Bad per the 'new pedagogies'?  (Just trying
to keep up-to-date as to the latest shifts in the intellectual
political wind).

The matter-of-fact claim that we're in a "post-humanist" world I
find simply astonishing in its hubris.  You see (as perhaps some
have already guessed) I'm *not* a literature person, but rather a
social science person (one of *those*--The Enemy!) and so I sometimes
like to have some *evidence* to go on before I start making claims
about grand sweeping epistemological, political, and social changes
in the world.  And I'm not at all convinced that this purported
"post-humanist" world exists for many outside of a few small
enclaves of intellectuals--certainly I've yet to meet my first
"post-humanist" undergraduate.  But maybe I'm just in a backwater
here in San Diego...

>We may, as Derrida says, still be haunted by the spirit of
>Marx; yes, I believe that we are.  That haunting motivates a
>good bit of my own work.  But I think that many of our
>students are ALSO, more explicitly and more significantly,
>haunted by the spirit of, say, Kurt Cobain.

"More explicitly"?  Certainly--this is at least partially because there
are no Marx videos on MTV.  "More *significantly*"?  Hardly--when Cobain
(or more likely, since he's dead, his remaining ex-Nirvana bandmates)
sits down and manages an effort at theorizing the social in 1/10th as
much complexity, when there is a world political and cultural legacy of
Nirvana-ism even approaching that of Marxism (which, whether they
realize it or not, impacts even those middle-class writing studetns
in Des Moines and Salt Lake City and elsewhere in more ways than
Nirvana *ever* will), then perhaps we can talk about the greater
"significance" of Cobain.  See, this is another thing we social
scientist types are really keen about--we like to measure "significance"
by more than just what the individual actor *thinks* is most
significant.

  And to silence
>that haunting in order to privilege an/other seems not only
>wrong-headed but also quite futile.  We have no
>metalinguistic criteria from which to establish such a
>privilege.

On the contrary.  My "metalinguistic criteria" has to do with the fact
that *everything* about the US (and of course its residents, your/my
writing students), its political structure, its culture/s, its economic
structure, its history, its educational system, and the ways we do and
reasons we give for writing for at least the last 70 years has been
*profoundly* shaped by Marx and Marxism.  Cobain can't hold a candle to
that IMO.  The simple fact that my students don't *know* how
Marxism or more properly per my argument class conflict and institutional
structures impact their lives is in my view *zero* reason to start
claiming I have no criteria by which to differentiate and rank the
two in terms of significance.

That's about all, I suppose.  I guess if the Sirc article *was*
successful in some sense for me, it was in the way it capsulized for
me a whole lot of other contemporary work on pedagogy (and other
topics) which I find really in need of *critique* (that word again)
and so this flood of words it wrung from me.  So as paper prompt the
article seems to have done a good job.

There.  See?  I've not said *everything* was wrong with it, now have I?

Tristan
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
What are we calling post-modernity?  I'm not up to date...
    Michel Foucault
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
===============================================
Date:         Wed, 7 Dec 1994 14:53:07 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET

Subject:      gs:allegory 1

3 ALLEGORY-SCENES as SPIRITUAL PEDAGOGY

_____We are talking about pedagogy--as Collin wisely notes, the pedagogical
effect.  So I offer three posts, trying to discuss points brought up around this
issue.  I think this has been a most excellent discussion from all of you, and I
hope to keep up its spirit.

PREFACE:  Malcolm X cobbled together a home-made education in a narrative so
compelling, so educational, I never tire of reading it or teaching it.  You know
me, I would have the divine.  I want the Milky Way.  So I have cobbled together
a home-made spirituality, a definitively unfinished religion-machine.   The
sublime inform(e)s me; people do not live by bread alone, but by the word of
Goddess.  The word of Goddess = the Bride's letter-box: "a blue and pink
outflow, undulating and tormented, which resembles more than anything the
convolutions of gray matter: the Bride blows her letters from the *head*.  In
other words, she speaks, she murmurs, she shouts the *blossoming imagined by
her, Bride desiring* (Susquet 99).  Language (in Victor's terms, "hypocrisy"), a
carnated language of an intellectual desire, an optical unconscious.  See the
last chapter of Diane's dissertation, as this is a language charged by humor,
for right at the base of the Bride panel, there is what Susquet sees at the key
to the Large Glass, the juggler of gravity, the *gueridon*: "And what balm, what
alcohol, what liquor sits on the gueridon at the Bride's bedside?  Humor is the
answer.  Just call this gueridon's name out loud and bite the pun: "Gueris,
donc!" ["So, heal!"]  "Et si tu es gai, ris donc!" [And if you're happy, then
laugh!"]  To recover from gravity is to laugh" (Susquet 105).  It is the action
of the rolling black ball on the table of the juggler of gravity which joins the
blossoming of the Bride to the bachelors.  And cheap little nothing humor like
those word-plays is what does it.  Duchamp is clear on this, no monuments:
"There is no question of symbolizing this happy ending by an exalted painting."

Word play is big among at least one compositionist:  Mike Rose bemoans how the
basic writing curriculum teaches developmental students "that the most important
thing about writing--the very essence of writing--is grammatical correctness,
not the communication of something meaningful, or the generative struggle with
ideas . . . not even word play" (_Lives on the Boundary_ 211).  Thanks Mike, but
really, "even" word play?  *Especially* word play!  But to get that compostion
text, the text of especially word play, we need to turn to word play's Other
Rose, the Double(-R')d Rose, Rrose Selavey.  She's an excellent compostionist,
because composition studies would insist on what students SEE and she is the
Precision Oculist--but of course the emphasis there is on the CUL; precision
oculism implies the optical unconscious.  (That's what I feel about so much of
compostion studies, where's the cul?)  So, then, from this spritual site of
composing (thank you, Jan Swearingen et al.), I offer three allegorical scenes.

Allegory-Scene 1:  Darlene the Yoga Teacher as Pedagogue.

Yogi Fred Kemp has reminded us of the importance of breathing in this entire
enterprise.  I cannot agree with him enough.  I learned that in my yoga class.
Collin is interested in reflecting on pedagogy.  I would say that pedagogy (like
philosophy for Wittgenstein) is not a theory but an activity.  So some pedagogy
in action, then?  Can I tell you about Darlene, my yoga teacher?  I would do
this because yoga, in its allegorical appearance, has much to offer composition
pedagogy.  One of Darlene's hand-outs gives good advice for architects intrigued
by the notion of writing-class-as-meditation-center: "In yoga, there is no
competition.  This is your opportunity to practice relaxed awareness of body,
breath and mind.  Be gentle but firm with your body.  Do not strain or go beyond
your capacity.  Be regular in your practice.  Do not expect overnight results or
feel that you must master any practice quickly."  My teacher leads us in a
visualization at the start of each class.  She says:

Let us observe the flow of breath as it enters our body, warmed as it passes
through the nose, and down into the chest, filling the lungs, pressing down on
the diaphragm.  And then let us follow the breath as it empties from the lungs
and goes out into the air and the environment that surrounds us.  And then the
same gentle, regular cycle starts again.  Let the breath be smooth, no jerks or
irregularities, and let the breath be constant, no pauses between inhalations
and exhalations.  And as we focus on our breathing, let us also imagine a circle
of golden light surrounding our bodies in a counter-clockwise direction,
encircling us three times, to create a safe sacred space in which to focus on
your body.  You will notice sounds from the outside, and for now, just observe
them, do not focus on them.  Focus on the breathing, on the body.

So Darlene.  She taught me about that sacred space of light to help intensify my
classroom.  Still Body.  Serene Breath.  Focussed Mind.    There are other
sounds--university-sounds, world-sounds, relationship-sounds, money-sounds.  But
for now, we will just observe them.  I want to create a sacred space for
students, a dwell-able space.  Many of these sounds are the students' histories,
and I am no fool--I know I cannot shut them out.  But maybe a delay, a moment, a
stoppage of standards (a standard-stoppage)?  Susan Romano asks many important
questions, some with a cautionary tone that I greatly appreciate, a tone
informed by immense concern for students.  She wonders about the wholesale
discounting of students' prior literate experience.  Yes, of course, Susan; I am
sorry if it seemed I was wholly discounting.  My thoughts are formed not only by
what I read generally about public education in this country, but what I have
seen by raising a child (now 14) through K-8 in the public schools (in
Minneapolis, in supposedly one of the best public school systems in the
country).  My wife and I are very active in his school, volunteering for many
in-school activities and teaching options.  There has been much to celebrate in
my son's schooling.  But there has been much (more) that is bad.  I don't want
to blame any source.  Except I will remark that for some students, I can't help
but see the bad far far outweighing the good--and here, the ones I've watched
who stick out the most, are the young African-American boys.  Let me tell you
quickly about three.

Napoleon was a young boy who we heard about before we saw.  Always getting in
trouble, always supposedly sabotaging anything the teachers wanted to do.  When
I met him, I noticed a kind of creativity I him (in terms of language and
energy, a glint), which was thwarted, bored by a curriculum geared to clever
mainstream-type kids who were willing to meet the teacher more than halfway
(lots of independent work, lots of generic materials, lots of stuff that needed
immense support from parents at home & money too--projects, reports, etc.)  I
used to watch as Napoleon--and I should tell you that he was never called
Napoleon; he was always referred to as "Nay."  That killed me--the negative, the
not, the X-ed out--from a conqueror to a nothing.  I used to watch as Nay got
bored.  I'd go over and try to interest him in something, but he had perfected a
coping strategy.  He always had to go somewhere: "Toure has my jacket, I gotta
go and get it."  Teachers, I noticed, were only too happy to let Nay leave
class.  Then I'd see him later, hangin in the hallways.  Nay was learning to
live on the streets in the halls of school.  School was teaching him how to
bang.

Then there was Michael T.  who, when my wife and I were doing the papier-mache
puppet-making option at Christmas-time, was a splendid presence in our group.
He saw the puppets we brought in to show what the final outcome of our option
would be, and he knew he had to have one of those puppets.  It was a joy working
with him (although, again, his reputation as disruptive presence had preceded
him).  This was in the 3rd or 4th grade, and he was already a master mimic, he
could do Eddie Murphy or Prince or any other teacher's or kid's voice.  He'd
repeat all the rap songs he had memorized--every word, the whole damn song.
When it came time to paint his puppet (he chose to do a person puppet), there
was the question of what shade to paint the face.  I had painted the puppet I
made as an example brown-skinned; he was supposed to be an Egyptian wizard.
"Should we paint it to look like mine?" I asked.  "Hell no," said Michael, "I
don't want that raggedy-assed color on my puppet."  And earlier this quarter
there was a black kid who I heard about from my son.  Their teacher, Jay, is an
unreconstructed hippie who loves to sing and play songs for his kids.  Trouble
is his repertoire stops around 1973.  This act has played well for kids the past
twenty years.  But increasingly there is a different crowd.  Evan, my oldest
son, came home and told me that when Jay played "Alice's Restaurant" this time,
some black kid yelled, "This sucks.  Don't you know any Warren G.?"  Evan knew
I'd be interested in this story.

Rap is more oppositional than I'll ever be.  I was interested to see how much
people on this list wanted to write about rap once I mentioned that I used it as
the basis for one of my writing courses.  This is fine with me.  People like
writing about rap.  I have noticed that.  It is an irresistible subject.    You
want histories?  Here is my reception-history of rap; my rap-literacy narrative.
Staring back in 1979, with "Rapper's Delight," I would buy one or two rap songs
a year (inveterate fan of R 'n' B), some years none--until early 1990, when a
friend urged me to get NWA's _Strait Outta Compton_.  I did, and my life has
since been altered.  I had never heard music like that before.  It was such a
Fuck You to everyone that I couldn't quite figure out where it was coming from.
Just poverty?  But Cube & Dre were middle-class.  Misogyny?  But so many black
women liked it; was I to discount them as somehow deluded?

For a long time I've used Malcolm's text as the central text in the first half
of my two-quarter first-year writing sequence.  I tried and tried to come up
with a good topic around which to organize the second half of my course.  I
wanted it to be something that naturally led from Malcolm.  Last year I hit upon
the idea of rap.  To prepare myself for the course, I asked if any students
would lend me a couple of the more current rap albums to use as textual bases
for discussion/writing.  Jo-Jo, one of my football players, lent me Snoop's
record and Dre's.  Playing Snoop's record affected me like nothing had since
NWA.  I had to turn it off the first time through.  And the second and third.  I
went over to friends' houses despairing of the choice of course topic I had
made, wondering how I could weasel out of it.  The music is unlistenable I told
people.  The words are too incredible.  I could never use this in a class.  But
I persisted.  I played it when I had my baby alone with me in the mornings, and
you know sometimes I shut it off cause I didn't want even my 1 yr-old even
exposed to it.  At first, it is a waterfall, a torrent of Fuck You.

But then I started hearing it more fully, in the context of the entire record.
I realized my initial listening was wrong.  It became more interesting,
extremely listenable, very funny.  Then a lot of the pain came through, the
social theorizing that Snoop does so well.  Collin is so very right; discussions
of pedagogy should move beyond that resistance/ludic split.  The tension will
always be there, though; I am not one who feels this tension can be resolved.
Compostion from the 80's on has done, I feel, a fine job with resistance, but
has elided the ludic.  I wrote A & P as a response to all work and no play.

I have become quite a fan of rap since the first time I taught it--way back last
year.  And I think I'm a good student.  I want to cite an evaluation of my
proto-scholarly behavior in rap, given to me after the first quarter I taught
the class, by one of the greatest experts I have yet met--my student Henry
Moore.  He and his twin brother took my class that first time I taught it.
After the first day's class, in which I did a course introduction, disclaimer
(lot of bad words, graphic scenarios, if you don't want to take it, you don't
have to), and then threw a little historical survey out, Henry came up to me and
put his hand out to shake mine.  "This looks like it will be a very interesting
class," he commented, a little condescendingly maybe, but warmly.  Over the
course of the quarter, Henry would bring different chunks of his rap magazine
library in to use (and let other students use) during paper writing.  He even
brought some of his friends in to hear some of the lectures and discussions.  I
know--this is too corny and dis-trustful.  Suspect it immediately.  Imagine the
idea of a student bringing another friend to class to actually soak up some
knowledge.  The very thought is too incredible.  Anyway, here's his evaluation
(which means nothing, I realize):  "Being that this is the first class Geoff
Sirc has taught on the topic of writing in the texts of rap music, I think he
did an incredible job.  His short-term knowledge dealing with this topic was
over-ridden by his research on various articles and other helpful resources.  I
would like to commend him on his performance on teaching this class."  This is
one of the most meaningful feedbacks I've ever received on my teaching.  He was
grading my research!  Don't you love it?  (Not to mention insights into how I
over-rode my short-term knowledge.)  Rap takes the scene of college writing and
turns it maybe not inside out, but in a direction I like and my students like.
Golden circles form.

I read Tristan's cautions about this course with much interest.  Of course I
will get raves, he feels, with maybe much deserved cynicism; of course they tell
their friends how cool it is.  They will write off the top of their heads and so
mirror "the kinds of discussions of these topics typical of the popular media."
They do write off the top of their heads, in the electronic conferencing, in the
e-mail (but after a few weeks, there is a lot of reading and listening and
talking weighing on the top of their heads).  What is so objectionable about the
top of Clare Malloy's head?  Here's an e-mail post she gave me a couple weeks
into the course as she tried to gather research material at the public library
and magazine stands:  "I found it very discouraging that when I went to research
material in the library on the media I couldn't find one magazine that is
primarily writted for a black audience.  It was always articles by white
magazines that interpreted the black music /culture.  I am thinking of writting
to the public librarys on their selections.  Magazines that are primarily based
on fashion, sports, cooking and gardening which are important to a lot of
people, but really were talking about a subsection of our nation.  We don't have
hardly any magazines that are solely dedicated to black Americans.  I think that
it is sad that we have all of these magazines [she means like _The Source_, _Rap
Sheet_, _Rap Pages_, etc.] that would help us (white) to understand more the
trobles and wins in the culture and they really aren't acessable.  I have found
that this isn't only a problem in the librarys, it is a problem in the stores as
well . . . I went to two different stores and was unable to find one magazine
dedicated to the black culture.  Yet they did have magazines on everything else
in this world."  (And formally, I would also like to say that this is a nice
chunk of good academic writing on an important subject.  She is in that
Jew/Greek space between the poles of desire and resistance.)

Students may rave cause it's cool, or they may rave cause I put a good course
together (my "research on various articles and other helpful resources"), and it
may be that my course looks cool by comparison to others.  One of the other
second-half courses taught by another instructor here (they're all organized
around topics) deals with technology.  Ebony came in the other day and was
laughing and said, "You know my boyfriend was trippin' cause he has to write
this paper on watches.  Believe it, eight pages on the history of watches.  He
said, 'What you writin' on?'  I smiled and said, 'I'm doing an analysis of Kool
Moe Dee.'  He said, 'No way.  For real?'  I showed him my articles."

And mirroring the poular media?  Depends on which media.  Clare found nothing
interesting in the library and in her stores,  but it's out there, and students
like Henry and many others know where to find it.  The editorial in the January
1995 issue of _The Source_ is worth searching out.  Ronin Ro sums up worst
trends in East and West Coast rap.  Talking about East Coast rappers' reliance
on the phrase "Keepin' it real," he offers a devestating critique of simulation,
of how the culture reproduces itself through market-forces, in this case the rap
video:

"the word 'real' is as played as rap-rock.  Half of the artists using it,
though, are smart.  They know that it's a catchphrase that'll appeal to the
wannabes, or the 'real' kids skipping school, smoking blunts or commiting petty
crime.  The reality is that most of what youth emulate--rap video scenarios
re-enacted through anti-social behavior towards peers--are simply get-rich-quick
ideas of some video director scraping up stereotypes to appease an artist's
bloated opinion of his or herself.  Knowing that this industry is filled with
nothing but starving artists, the would-be director sits around and recalls
every stereotype of the ghetto (as seen in countless episodes of *Baretta* or
*Kojak*) and fills his proposal (job app) with vivid descriptions.  'The camera
pans over THE RAPPER holding a large gun in a smoke-filled dark alley, menacing
OTHER NIGGAZ and keeping his tough image intact.'  Reps at a record label read
this sort of thing, and pass it to the artist, who does not know that he/she is
just a stepping stone in someone's film career.  All they see is 'Oh shit! I'm'a
look cool!'" (Ro 12).

Rappers and rap scholars don't really need Marx or Baudrillard; they've invented
them long ago.  It's like that critique is inscribed in the music.

Geoff

=========================================
Date:         Wed, 7 Dec 1994 14:57:18 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs:allegory 2

Allegory-Scene 2:  Snoop Doggy Dogg as Political Scientist

Tristan builds his classroom on a certain economic base.  He establishes a
credit cycle in which some writing/thinking is privileged over others based on
earnings.  Authority is established the old-fashioned way, it's earned.
Tristan, my students & I very much like to engage in critique; I'm sorry if I
gave the opposite impression.  It's hard to write about rap or Malcolm, these
oppositional voices, and not critique something.  (Some do, though.  Some will
write on the creative aspects of rap or its origins in African verbal forms,
which even has a certain critique inherent in it.)  I just cannot in good
conscience make my students responsible for learning or practicing my politics.
Or learning to see as I do; it seems an unfair course goal.  But I mean, why do
I use rap & Malcolm?  So students can hear some fools talk stupid shit?  No, as
I said, I would use it as *informe*.  It's so students can learn about issues in
academic writing in a context that lets them get a most sophisticated message
about the life they live today, in a most accessible form.  And they may also
unlearn (Victor, sign me up!  I want truth, justice and all those other things
too!)  Susan, I don't think rap/rock is the best text.  I'd like to use
Coltrane; I personally think that's the best means to teach anything in the
context of the sublime.  But I've tried to play Coltrane, Billie Holiday, et al.
for my students, like Bloom did Mozart, but it just didn't work.  They hated it.
And anyway, Coltrane's is a wordless linguistics.  Maybe, Tristan, Marx (or
Foucault or whoever) presents critique in a way you find denser and richer and
meatier.  But rappers and Malcolm are saying the same exact thing: "Fuck all
y'all" (Ice Cube).  The fact you think one reflects more some hard-earned
difference, well that's taste and style.

My idea of a typical university knowledge space is one where the ideas of
European or Euro-American mainstream white men predominate.  I would have mine
be a different space.  (And I deeply wish S. had not unsubscribed; there is a
real discussion that should happen about the value of shark-oriented pedagogy.
Did you know, by the way, Papa Shark himself, Harvey McKay, the Great White
Shark-Man, was a graduate of my college?)  Does my scheme work?  (A typical
evaluation: "This was one of the few courses I have taken @ the U of M where I
feel I have learned a lot of things relevant to my life.  Thankx!")  Should I
teach to school or life?  This is Elbow's question.  Can I possibly (try to) do
both?  I don't know.  Could what I do be even more different?  Of course.  I
could focus on women or Asians or Native Americans.  But first, I am embodied
male and feel I know that content-base better, I speak with more authority
there; students who hear me talk of that reality are hearing someone who knows
something.  I think college courses which students pay money for should be
taught by people who know something.  And I race-traitor my white, Euro-American
self to my textual African-American self cause I feel immensely simpatico with
that style, content and agenda.  And again, I have a *degree* of authority
there.  Of course this lets me in for all kinds of criticisms of appropriation.
I think Raul wisely surfaced some earlier.  But I respond simply that I am
trying to teach important material and always, ALWAYS give props where they're
due.

A university space where Kurt Cobain & Pearl Jam are just as good?  Just as
authoratative?  A leveling?  Could such an architecture, a critical demolition
of sorts, actually be a strategy that results in a livable, dwellable house . .
 ?  These are erotic thoughts.  Have Cobain et al. earned their authority?
Tell me, Tristan, who is the cashier, the work-boss?  Who determines the
work/reward earnings?  Richard Ellman would have had Malcolm X not at all as
literature, and only grudgingly as sociology.  I say, fine, as sociology, then.
But of course the world will not even let him be that.  It's de Chirico deja-vu
all over again.  Is there an allegory where Snoop is actually a very interesting
political scientist?  Michael Eric Dyson thinks so:  "What you have in Snoop
Doggy Dogg, Dyson explained, 'is a second-generation Mississippi drawl in the
postindustrial collapse of L.A. trying to come to grips with what it means to
make the transition from a stable life to one that's been undermined by forces
of economic misery, economic immiseration, and class division.  Those are the
real culprits here" (Doug Simmons, "Gangsta Was the Case: Shaping Our Responses
to Snoop Dogg," 66).  Ah, but Dyson's a professor of divinity, of the
sublime--he sees according to the Large Glass.  Tristan, you would say, maybe
that Marx earned his right to be an authority, canonical?  But I think so did
Snoop, so did Cobain, so did Henry Moore and Clare Malloy.  "Love is where you
find it," says what's-her-name.  Yes Diane, it is other/wise, other wisdom.  The
reason I am bored with so much of composition-studies composition--and I am
sorry, sorry if I seem so jaded--is there are so many other interesting
composition texts.

I want to build a course where students know the content is up for grabs,
definitively unfinished.  I don't kid them that I'm not the ultimate arbiter of
their written contributions.  I lay out the criteria, explain it, and we get to
it.  They know where they stand, that I'll grade them, but also that I'll give
or connect them up to any help they need to shape that written performance, that
I'll withold nothing, that I will neither patronize nor scold.  I will tell them
when and why the university would or would not like their writing, but I will
tell them why something they did, which the university might not like, is
actually very interesting.  I let them know that here, in this space, we close
our eyes and imagine a golden circle revolving three times around us.  I know
that is a naive metaphor, that there are things I can't protect them against,
but in this space of my course, I try to delay the outside a bit so we can learn
better to read and write (and write on) that world.  I like Duchamp's Preface to
_The Green Box_ because he talks about the choice of possiblities "authorized by
these laws and also *determining them*" (SS 28).  I want literacy as more
two-way street than bridge.  I want sudents to know they can write the world.

You speak of students, Tristan.  Like the woman in the class troubled by the
misogyny and disabled from responding.  Are these people you know, people you
have had in classes?  For I have never met a student like that (and of course,
they may have silently suffered in my class; but it is hard to see how I can
control for that.  I give as much of a sacred space as I can).  I have seen
every quarter the feminist responses to Malcolm and rap grow very strong in my
class--there's so much there to construct it with--in terms of textual support,
fellow-student support.  If a student wants to follow that, I do everything I
can.  But there are things, finally, that are out of my control.  I can't put
brain-helmets on students or anything.

Geoff
====================================================
Date:         Wed, 7 Dec 1994 15:00:11 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs:allegory 3

Allegory-Scene 3:  "English Composition as Mode of Behavior"

A Native American colleague of mine distrusts the notion of social construction
in a modern American university; she wonders, can you really have social
construction leading to needed knowledge (truth, justice, Victor's stuff) with
socially sanctioned texts?  Maybe you can, but I know what she means--the walls
become so apparent.  The parameters, the limits.  Composition Studies
(particulary the last ten years or so) to me is a series of articles all using
the same texts--Friere, Foucault, Bartholomae, Pratt, Susan Miller.  I don't
think the new is going to come from it.  When is it coming?  I don't know.  How
will we get it?  I don't know.  With the same as usual texts?  I just don't
think so.

Those texts had a powerful effect on people, taught them how to see.  I know
spirituality, I know religion, I know the almost irresistible urge for
fundamentalism, for the sacred-ization of texts given to the acolyte so the
revelation may be repeated.  I just don't see it happening.  Or I see that
revelation repeated, but the new knowledge we need not coming from that
revelation.  Let's try it other/wise.  Let us try the sacred-ization of spaces.
And let us try other materials.  Who knows, you know?  That's my pedagogy.
Straight Shaw:  "You never know."  You never know what certain materials are
capable of building.  Here's Congressperson Maxine Waters on rappers as
potential new material/voices:  "For decades, many of us have talked about the
lives and hopes of our people--the pain and the hopelessness, the deprivation
and destruction.  Rap music is communicating that reality in a way we never
have" (Kierna Mayo Dawsey's "Caught Up in the (Gangsta) Rapture" 60-62).

The arguments academics and other interested parties make over using rap in a
writing class and what sorts of readings/writings students are capable of--our
field has heard these all before.  A year before we had my compositionist's _The
1914 Box_ (with its wonderful vision of chance over intention, of the Three
Standard Stoppages: "If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a
height of one meter onto a horizontal plane distorting itself *as it pleases*
and creates a new shape of the measure of length" SS 22), we had Fred Newton
Scott, composition's primal half-stepper.  The argument then was in terms of
popular media (newspapers and magazines) and whether they should be allowed as
course material in a compostion class.

Tom Reynolds, a graduate student here, has a terrific historical study on this,
which finds that even when instructors did allow their courses to "draw from
student-centered reading practices, almost all serve[d] to shut out or heavily
regulate student expression in the preocess" (2).  Reynolds uses Newton Scott as
one who is seen ostensibly (by Berlin and others) as a transactionalist, but in
this case, Scott's transactionalism went only so far.  He would not be budged
from his focus on the standards of good behavior and citizenship he thought
popular media, and the writing done around them, would erode.  Ultimately says
Reynolds, "Student language was looked upon with suspicion" (6).

Scott saw through those magazines and students so well.  He was perhaps peaking
at Duchamp's _1914 Box_ (not!) because he sets up his own Large Glass:  two
panels, student language in the lower one, formal prose in the upper one, and
the mechanism Scott envisioned would have had some gas from each bleed into the
other; as Reynolds sees it, Scott hoped for more "restraint and proportion" in
the student-language panel, and more "sociability and quick commmunication" in
the upper, formal panel.  But the basic flaw in Newton Scott's Glass, according
to Reynolds, was his refusal to ever see student langauge as other/wise than
"childlike and, indeed, animal-like.  Despite its spontaneous, almost
Wordsworth-ian virtue, the child's language does not suggest much in the way of
thinking skills [to Scott]" (10-11).  Scott in his early compostion allegory,
"English Compostion as a Mode of Behavior," put forward this notion of the
student as "a great emptiness to be filled and a great dumbness to be made
vocal" (Scott 26).  Then, as his 1913 Presidential Address at NCTE's annual
meeting, Scott delivered "The Undefended Gate," where he ranted against
newspapers as a contributing to student illiteracy and as an insidious
replacement of the bible as shaper of student character.  (Mr. Cheese Factory
strikes again!)  Character as course goal?  This is a tough one (S! where are
you?!).

Newton Scott was very savvy; he saw through American media, he saw through
student writing.  Tristan now would see through it again.  Go ahead.  I work on
glass; it should be easy to see through.  Same story all over again, though,
whether you call that behavior-mode citizenship or critique.  I am tired of the
same story, I want the other story.  I am as tired as Collin of this pedagogical
tension.  The tension in Malcolm, for example, is almost too much to stand.
Nationalist/humanist.  Integration will never work/it has to work.  Is there any
way out of this tension?  I don't know.  I hope so, but it looks dim.  Tristan,
you name my work as the second or third go-round on this, and I agree (or fourth
or fifth, maybe).  There will always be the postmodern in the work of modern.
It entered, as I said in my initial abstract, when Picasso brought the absinthe
glass, the vulgar *informe*, the readymade, into the museum's forms.  There may
never be anything but this charged space--the avant garde vs. the tradition;
Fred Newton Scott vs. magazines; Duchamp vs. Greenberg; rap vs. anti-rap.

I will tell you what I really want as pedagogical effect.  I want to stop crying
for my students.  I want Snoop to count as serious academic writing, cause I
know it is.  I want people to stop killing each other.  I want to know, as at
least one black woman student a quarter asks in the course of our discussions,
whatever happened to respect.  I really want to know why "something sad has
happened to the street code known as 'heart.'  It used to mean the strength to
fight back, the courage that came from a still-thriving self-worth, but now
having heart means weakness and all that remains is the capacity to be vicious
when called upon" (Ed Morales, Rap Critic).  That is my pedagogy in a nutshell.

I cry for my students, as I feel many on this list do.  I cry because I don't
want whatever kind of authority they've found with me lost once my student
leaves our golden circles of light.  How do I do that?  I can only teach them
the best way I know how, but also the most *informe*-ed way I know how (with rap
& Malcolm, texts that are not socially sanctioned) because I know there are
pressures going out and coming in.  The form and the *informe*, the determined
and the determining, breathing in and breathing out.  And by writing the stuff I
do--as Bove says, "our task as teachers is to do whatever we can to let
institutions hear what students and others know, even though they are often
saying it in ways the normative order of disciplines cannot hear" (19).  In my
A&P piece I simply tried to spread the gospel of student-credit, cause whether
hard-earned or ill-gotten, gang-banged or hustled, a Grant is still a Grant,
y'know what I'm sayin'?

Geoff

==============================================

Date:         Thu, 8 Dec 1994 15:14:17 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      jw->gs/tr [outcomes?]

The exchange between T and GS has been arresting and illuminating. But I
haven't been able to tease out of it the degree to which outcomes in fact
drive GS's thinking, exactly what those outcomes are, and the degree to
which he thinks he succeeds. (This question was raised early on by T, I
believe, but when GS responded to it, his answer seemed to slide away from
how students would in fact profit having taking his class and toward how GS
felt about his own agenda -- the subjects of the sentences seemed to shift
from "they" to "I." (Don't hold me to that last point; it's based on
memory, and I can't locate the posting.)

I wish it were possible to put this next question in terms less commercial,
but there you are:  Students -- or someone in their stead -- decides to
devote a substantial amount of resources that they have derived from their
-- or someone's -- labor, away from, say, a new car or even a night out now
and then, to us.  It is not unreasonable for them -- or someone -- to ask
whether our use of their resources has outcomes that those students -- or
whoever provides those resources -- think they desire. I understand that
they may misunderstand what they -- or we -- think they should desire, and
that maybe they do not in fact desire "the right thing." I can imagine
trying to enlighten them about a culture that has made them desire the
wrong thing.  But in the end, I also cannot imagine not finally respecting
what many of them say they want in exchange for their -- or someone's --
resources.  I think I could imagine them saying something like this:

"At the end of this class, I want to be able to have choices that I do not
now have.  If I think I want to be able to choose to join the bourgeoise
and write reports for GM and succeed in doing that, then help me learn
something now that will help me do that then.  If I think I want to be able
to choose to become a revolutionary and undermine GM, then help me learn to
do that, as well.  I -- or someone -- is paying you to help me have more
choices than I now have and, as I understand it, my ability to make those
choices will depend on how well those whose assent I seek judge my writing.
If that is true, I want those readers of mine to say that what I have
written is persuasive, even if I am challenging their deepest beliefs. What
I want you to do in exchange for the resources I -- or someone -- is giving
you is to help me learn to write well so that I can achieve that end.  I
understand that you think intensity is important, that I should feel
strongly about things, that dullness is bad and intellectual excitement is
good, that I should question the whole social and cultural system in which
colleges and GM and revolutions exist, and that current popular culture is
a way for me to see that culture more clearly than I do.  But five years
from now, I think I'll be able to manage my
ideological/emotional/intellectual health on my own, thank you.  What I
want you to do right now is help me learn to do what I can't do right now.
If you have another agenda, please tell me, so that I can choose to do
something else if I desire."

I think that what may concern T about GS's argument is expressed by a
variation on the joke about work in the former Soviet Union:  "They pretend
to pay us, and we pretend to work."  When smart students understand that
what is rewarded in a class is apparent intensity, commitment,
enlightenment, etc., they quickly enough learn to provide the signs of it.
("When you can fake sincerity, you have it made.") Seeing the signs of
intensity and commitment, teachers who enjoy talking about rap more than
they do about [fill in the blank with a difficult text written by a dead
white guy] assume that those students are in fact intense and committed. In
hands less skillful than those of GS, perhaps, his pedagogy creates a world
in which teachers  pretend to teach, and students pretend to learn.

And so to finish with my last question:  How does GS -- or for that matter,
T -- know when they succeed?  Try this as a thought experiment:  In a large
ballroom (invent the reason they are there) are 200 people from about 30 to
60 years old.  Half of them were in GS's classes and got out of that class
exactly what GS wanted them to; half of them were in T's classes, and they
got out of T's class exactly what T wanted.  But they have all forgotten
that they were everin a class with either GS or T.  We walk in, eavesdrop
on their conversations -- they are talking about a lot of things, but
mostly about those issues in which  writing is involved.  They speak
candidly, fully, saying whatever we (as eavesdroppers) would want them to
say, accurately representing what they think and how they feel.  What
criteria would GS give me to identify his former students?  What criteria
would T give?  If they turn out to be the same criteria, then we don't have
an ideological struggle here, "only" a matter of choosing among pedagogies.
 And that is a purely -- well, relatively -- empirical question. Do we in
fact achieve those outcomes by using rap or Federalist #10?  Maybe they
both work.  Maybe one does and one doesn't.  Maybe neither does.  But until
I can understand what anyone counts as success and criteria for deciding
whether they have succeeded, I am not clear about what is really at stake
in the exchanges. My own position, obviously enough is T's.  (And T is
correct that this debate rehearses that conducted in the '60's and '70's.
Read "Beatles" for "Snoop.")

Joe Williams
U of Chicago
=================================================
Date:         Fri, 9 Dec 1994 16:58:24 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      jdh->2 camps [debate?, build bridges?]


One of the more annoying things about this discussion is that it has taken
on, ever so gently, the dimensions of a debate, rather than a conversation
wherein the participants learn from each other.  It might be that in a
debate we learn, for example, how to clarify our own positions, but I'm not
sure if we ever come away feeling as though we have learned (or are will to
confess to having learned) something from the other side.

On the one hand, I see a pragmatic, utilitarian, perhaps even capitalist
ideology from the posts that are 'pro-Tristan' - help the students to
succeed (primarily economically!) in their future careers by giving them
the necessary skills and tools in writing (according to the contexts
[audiences, discourse expectations and practices, etc.] they choose).  This
has some merit to it, insofar as a critical ability to assess (or create) a
rhetorical situation and respond to the exigence effectively is a vital
means of survival in any situation.  On the other hand, like the grammar
school pedagogues of the Agora, it also succeeds in turning education into
programmatic toolkits and exercises (progymnasmata) of rote drudgery.  [We
may also not the transformation ofthe role of educator to production-line
factory worker who turns out 'quality' products (students) all ready for
consumption (employment).]

I'm not a Marxist, but I'm tired of the blindness to our monopoly
capitalist culture.  Education is inescapably tied to power systems of the
greater society, be they the classism of Greek polis, the monarchy of the
Carolingian reforms, or the Indusrialism of the 19th century.  To that
degree, I see an idealistic philosophy at work in the 'pro-Sirc' camp - the
belief in agency, in personal engagement, in the celebration of the
cultural icons and practices devalued in academented systems of discourse
power.  We academy types are so thoroughly socialized into our roles, our
understanding of acceptable discourse practices and pedagogies, it strikes
us as absurd that maybe there is something acceptable in the uncouth lives
(raw materials) of our students from which we might draw.  My own
experience in teaching leads me intuitively to appreciate the notion of
'intensity' of which Geoff speaks, because so often students walk in only
wanting to jump through the hoops.  Maybe a spark of personal engagement
and interest is exactly what is needed to give these students a jump-start,
and maybe, just maybe the culture-clash between 'real world' and
'academented world' is exactly what causes them to dull out.  The
socialization into our acadamned culture may not be what is needed for some
of them.

On the other hand, I would agree with the 'pro-Tristan' side that raw,
unreflective and undisciplined experience/thought/writing, etc., isn't
exactly what education is about.  Letting them determine what they want to
do in the future is important, and 'we' are the ones whose skills are such
as to help prepare them for their future.  And if we don't do it, we are
doing them a great disservice.

I personally, however, have yet to see the real difference between the two
sides of this debate, other than whether we will impose a syllabus of
writing exercises or whether we will surrender to the students and allow
their own sub-culture discourse into the classroom.  It seems to me that
the point is to get them to learn how to express themselves effectively.
And, to that end, it seems to me both sides (if taken to the extreme) are
'wrong', and yet both side (if brought together in conversation) are
'right'.

Do you think, maybe, we could try to build more bridges between us and
learn from each other, if not for consistency sake (we are, after all
educators, and what's the point in teaching if we aren't willing to learn),
then at least for our survival's sake?  Elite arguments between elite peers
concerning how best they can patronizingly 'help' (poor, defenseless)
students are not only dull, but serve only tear the educational landscape
up into little, irrelevant fiefdoms of high walls and deep moats.  Maybe
letting the drawbridges down every once in a while will help us see how
dependent we are upon one another.

 - Void Boy
   GTU Berkeley


===============================================
Date:         Fri, 9 Dec 1994 17:21:49 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      Vjv->voidboy, TR, JW, etc.: a Differend

Vjv->voidboy, TR, JW, etc.

Re: speaking at cross purposes

My sense, to extend void boy's comment, is that the discussion
is *still* being performed at cross purposes.  And I would add, in
respect to void boy's comment, that there does not have to be
nor is there necessarily two "camps."

What is going on, and perhaps void boy might agree, is that the
research/thinking/writing protocol of social science, or perhaps
academia in general, is being brought to bear *exclusively* on what
geoff is attempting to say in his article.

Why?  Why is this the case?  Is it our collective trained incompacities
as academics.  Geoff's article, as Geoff announces over and over
again *in* the article, does NOT follow this academic protocol.
If, however, his respondents keep insisting that he and his
article be *processed* according to a traditional protocol, then,
what gets established, besides speaking at cross purposes, is
what Lyotard refers to as a *differend.*  Lyotard writes:

        "As distinguished from a litigation, a differend ... would be a
        case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot
        be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment appli-
        cable to both arguments. One side's legitimacy does not
        imply the other's lack of legitimacy.  However, applying a
        single rule of judgment to both in order to settle their
        differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong
        (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side
        admits this rule)."  (_Differend:  Phrases In Dispute_ xi)

Any attempt by Tristan and others to insist, for example, on
*evidence* for what Geoff says, is finally to beg a question, which
has to do with the appropriateness of evidence in Geoff's language
game.  Geoff has repeatedly responded that evidence is really not
his concern in this particular article, which is written in an allegorical
(very open) style.  Therefore, we have a war of genres here, with
one user of an academic genre demanding that his rules *be applied*
 to a quite different genre.  A Litigation here is very inappropriate, as
it would be, say, between a writer of *feminine ecriture* and a writer
of a traditional academic article.

Look, geoff makes this point over and over again when he says that
he is not working from a *restricted economy* but from a *general
[libidinalized] economy.*  He explains this at length (from Bataille's
_Accursed Share_ (3 vols)).  Again if you *judge* (read) geoff from
a restricted economical protocol, you don't get geoff, and quite
naturally he cannot *recognize* himself when you speak about him.

We are not in the academy in his article; we are in the a&p parking lot!
Which means that we are out there in the *pagus,* "a border zone
where genres of discourse enter into conflict over the mode of
linking" (_Differend_ 151).

Also, Tristan et al., please reconsider HOW you have *historicized*
geoff and his article as a mere going back to the 1960s!!  Is what
geoff talking about something that just goes back to the 60s?

May the pagan gods help us!

What I have said that you have done to geoff, I think, that you have
also done to Diane and her response to geoff's article.

If there were whirl enuf and kairos!

-----Victor j. Vitanza
==============================================
Date:         Fri, 9 Dec 1994 19:57:33 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      vjv->gs:  belief in agency, etc.?

Vjv->(void boy) GS:  belief in agency?, etc.

Geoff, Void Boy writes:

"I see an idealistic philosophy at work in the 'pro-Sirc' camp - the
belief in agency, in personal engagement, in the celebration of
the cultural icons and practices devalued in academented
systems of discourse power."

Geoff,

_____Would you put this statement into questions, your phrasing,
and respond to the allegations?

If someone else, whoever s/he might be who is in the " 'pro-Sirc'
camp," would like to do the same, please do.


---VJV
==============================================
Date:         Fri, 9 Dec 1994 20:15:46 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      vjv->gs & tr: Desire?

Vjv->gs & tr:  Desire?


Geoff and Tristan,

_____would you each give us some sense of what you mean,
variously mean, by the word "desire"?

Are you thinking as Bataille does, as Kojeve does (is there a dif-
ference between seminar participant and leader here?), ... are
you thinking as D&G, or as Kristeva, or as Marcuse, or in any of
the ways that J. Butler (in _Subjects of Desire_) surveys and gives
an account of?  In other words, what variation on or combination of
Aristotelian desire (opening lines of _Metaphysics_) or Hegelian
desire (_Phenomenology_)or Nietzschean desire/force/will
 (_Will to Power) or whoever's desire  (wherever) are you thinking
of when you call on the word "desire"?

I ask because I hear you (two) speaking differently about the
concept-metaphor "desire."


---VJV
=========================================
Date:         Sat, 10 Dec 1994 11:57:58 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      jw->vjv: [beyond boundaries]

>---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
>Poster:       "Victor J. Vitanza" 
>Subject:      Vjv->voidboy, TR, JW, etc.: a Differend
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Vjv->voidboy, TR, JW, etc.
>
>Re: speaking at cross purposes
>
>My sense, to extend void boy's comment, is that the discussion
>is *still* being performed at cross purposes.  And I would add, in
>respect to void boy's comment, that there does not have to be
>nor is there necessarily two "camps."
>
Indeed there are not two camps, only two extreme positions, with a great
many others scattered along a continuum.

>What is going on, and perhaps void boy might agree, is that the
>research/thinking/writing protocol of social science, or perhaps
>academia in general, is being brought to bear *exclusively* on what
>geoff is attempting to say in his article.
>
I think that what you are reading in the posts are attempts to go beyond
the boundaries of the article to what some see as its implications. And the
exchanges take on a life of their own with their own agenda and content.
Ideas have consequences.

joe williams
================================================
Date:         Sat, 10 Dec 1994 20:33:51 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      mvu -> vjv [other readings], gs [narrative]

Victor asked several posts ago how others read Geoff's article.  I read
Geoff's article ambivalently.  Two camps -- I find myself a mole, though my
primary allegiance shifts.  I read/inhabit the parking lot (a metaphor I
find alienating -- I'd prefer real dirt beneath my feet instead of asphalt)
as both teacher (composition, seven years) and student (doctoral student,
rhetoric and technical communication).

As teacher:  I, like others who've posted, know my students face a 'real
[academic] world' where some instructors will stop reading papers and
return them as unsatisfactory at the fifth mechanical/grammar error, where
anyone wanting to declare an education major must pass a rule-dominated
writing clearance exam, where the first cut on a stack of job applications
may be determined by the presence of even one typo.  I know, too, that if
students are engaged with what they're writing/researching/thinking about,
they -- and I -- feel tremendous energy in their work.  Do I play Snoop
Doggy Dogg or Ice-T?  No ... but the Indigo Girls, Tracy Chapman, the
Police, Queen Latifah, Primus, Pink Floyd.  Some of their issues, too, are
[as you said, Geoff, on 2 Dec. of the rappers you play] "...things the
media avoids."  I also use a reader -- essays: Woolf, Didion, Baldwin,
White ....  The juxtaposition works for me, the resonance between the
'popular' and the 'academic'.

As student:  I am facing *the* assignment -- *the* dissertation.  I am
planning a dissertation that I hope will challenge the [un]written rules
about what sort of language / voice is acceptable in dissertations.  Part
of my struggle is to find, exercise, free, develop, claim [what verb do I
choose?] a voice that I have only within the last few years understood to
have once been a potential -- a voice that at a particular moment I came to
understand I'd never learned to speak.  Insight:  the agonistic / academic
language I've learned to speak fluently and well is a second language.
[What is my 'mother tongue'?]  And there were/are things I could/can not
say in that language -- things that for all of my skill with subordinate
clauses and prepositional phrases, for all of my knowledge of commas and
semicolons, for all of my cleverness at deriving thesis statements and
appropriate defenses ... t h i n g s  I  c o u l d  n o t  s a y.  These
things, I am discovering, find expression in narrative, in an infusion of
autobiography, in a profusion of dashes, ellipses, fragments, in dots of
clip-art and variations of typeface -- but 'honky-tonk'?  I don't know.


_____Geoff, at one point you said "I don't think narratives are a good
structure around which to build a required university writing course" (4
Dec.).  I wish you'd elaborate, particularly since storytelling takes on
considerable importance in the writing of some feminists: Donna Haraway who
writes about the importance of good storytelling in science; Kathryn Abrams
about the "call of stories" in critical legal discourse; Pamela Cotterill
and Gayle Letherby about auto/biographies in feminist research, to name
only a few.


A conflict -- and where for me at least the camps divide:  Although I'm
ready *now* to challenge [can't get away from agonistic language completely
;-) ] the hegemony  [hey!  I know some of the words, too] of academic
discourse, I already knew [most of] the rules before I got to this point.
Knowing them, I can break them.  Reminding myself of this, it's balance and
tension and resonance I work toward as I teach and as I write/think my
dissertation.  How many of the rules?  How rigidly observed? How boldly
flaunted?  How many Hypercard spiders do I cut and paste onto the title
page of my comps answer?  Do I really care whether University Microfilms
doesn't like the typefaces I want to use?  I read Geoff's article
ambivalently.  But all the time through an awareness of my own position of
privilege because I KNOW the rules.  All the time through an awareness that
I am still limited in what I can say *because* I not only learned but
internalized the rules.  An awareness, too, as I head off to the parking
lot, not of the A&P, but of Midtown Foods to buy groceries for dinner, that
we visit parking lots for different reasons.

Marilyn

===============================================
Date:         Sat, 10 Dec 1994 20:37:14 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.
Subject:      mal->sirc san which?


I wrote the body of this shortly before reading VB's
and VJV's last posts............i'm glad i read them before
posting because VB says some of what I am trying to
express here far more tactfully.  Also, VJV points out
that Geoffrey's article precludes some kinds of
criticism with its form.  That's ok for me because
when an argument is not concerned with evidence it
also must relax its right to make certain kinds of
claims.  In the following, I proceed in kind, loosely.

Geoff:
*Standards trip me out, you know what I'm saying?
*I almost always resist the reductive reconstruction
*they attempt, the fictional autonominization.  I
*would hate to start styling as "impressive" a
*certain cut of textual cloth and discounting the rest
*as somehow not as valuable.  Therefore, I would
*hate to think about a "right" answer lurking
*beneath your other comment/question regarding
*"if we as a group have actually learned how to
*conduct electronic discussions yet? . . . do we need
*to learn?"  Can't we leave the door open a little
*longer?

these words, geoff, suggest to me a possibly healthy
protocol for "classroom discussion," whether we be
in first year comp or here in electronic space. while
i am not interested in being nailed to the cross for
my naivety, it seems to me patience, tolerance,
(do i dare say humility) are called for. We ask that
of our students when they do group work, when
they share the same physical space with those they
are interacting with.  We share space here, i
believe, but i do not have the benefit of your body
language, your facial gestures, your tone of voice, so
shouldn't i be all the more care-ful?

i take the previous tone, not because i haven't
found the agoniaceremonycontestplaycontestetestari-
contentioncombat competitionstrugglepolemic-
agression fun............i have............its just that such
activity can slip into THE MAKING OF OTHER(.....and
there comes a time to slip out again..............................

the name of vjv's journal comes to mind.......Though
the issue has been printed, aren't these ideas still
becoming?  "can't we leave the door open a little
longer?"..........or must we decide right away whether
these ideas make you...........say.........
a COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY PIGDOG! (oh boy....now
i'm gonna get it)

you know, g, my initial reaction to your joint wasn't
so great because i was locked in the immediacy of
my own classroom frustrations.  but this converse-
ation is virtual is it not?  that is not to say it isn't
real but just that it is pre/textual.....it is becoming...
now need i ask Will It Solve THE PROBLEMS Now?
Or should i just participate in the ideas and ?
........resist nailing it up their on the door of the
church, or on the tree?

while we have no choice but to mis/interpret
geoffrey's article to fit our schema's, along with that
comes the (yes) responsibility to NOT clap shut the
door when we get our first or second grasp.........

suddenly I feel like Potok's Asher Lev, a jewish
artist who finds it necessary to rely on christian
symbols in his art.......specifically because the
binding of Isaac didn't have the same power as the
crucifixion to express his mother's wait in
torture when his father was away--just there:
waiting
waiting
waiting
waiting

............my real name is matthew Asher Levy.

_________________________________________
_________________________________________

ive been wandering in moos lately and a phrase
keeps recurring in lambda moo.......it's a "bonk" by
which one player does something to another
........"Sheila E drops her lag [the computer delay] on
BigMAN, crushing him instantly!"--> and i hear:
"Jacques Derrida drops the lag on the Western
Metaphysics of Presence, crushing it instantly!"
The speed of LANtalk makes the theoretical
implications of time all that more immediate,
doesn't it?

__________________________________________
__________________________________________

so it's time for a Confession (oy vey....the christmas
spirit has got me):

i hate parking lots, and am among those who will
never like the stripaesthetic.  and in addition i am
not sure that your syllabus (if i can use that word
loosely) would speak to the biggest problems i face
*right now* trying to give my students what i can
only guess they need from me. obviously i don't
have what they need, but i do have some skills they
could use, not the least important of which is the
ability to make unfamiliar discourse important to
me, to make what is public private.

so obviously we share some concerns despite
the fact that you use an architectural metaphor that
is doomed with me (i like those boring buildings
AND those boring books----because i'm a
modernist?!!---welcome to the pigeonhole, mattie)...

FINALLY:
i'd like to ask you a question that has been popping
up lately for me.  let me stress that i am not on one
side of this........
_____Is it possible that the very notion that we
have any responsibility for our students' desire
dangerous to the *ick* credibility of what we are
teaching?  Math teachers teach skills and generally
don't worry about whether the students find it fun.
The necessity of the math for moving on in certain
academic lines is taken for granted........it's regarded
as often unpleasant work that must be done.

_____Do you think going electronic in the classroom
might move us in the right direction towards
having are students recognize the NECESSITY of
what we are teaching?  Should we care?

mal4299@utarlg.uta.edu

========================================
Date:         Sat, 10 Dec 1994 20:40:08 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->vv:desire

_____Victor asks, what of desire?

Let us go back, please, to Max Ernst, so anxious in 1920 for a Paris showing.
Failing to connect up with Tristan Tzara, he is contacted by Andre Breton about
exhibiting at a show in a Paris bookstore.  Breton is at Francis Picabia's when
he receives from Ernst fifty-six works, most of which are collages, but some of
which are done in Ernst's "overpainting" style, in which he takes some
already-imaged readymade and paints over enough of it until only the surreal
image he wants is left showing.  The force of the works overpowered Breton and
Picabia.  They saw in Ernst's works, as Krauss tells it, "a group of objects
through which nascent surrealism would understand something of both its identity
and its destiny" (42).

Why?  It is important you understand the pictures.  In one, Ernst takes an old
French school-chart, filled with animals and other objects, and leaves unpainted
certain animals and a bed, table, armoire and tree, overpainting "around" them a
simple room-in-perspective scene.  What Ernst shows in this is a total reversal
of the perspectival mechanics of vision.  It is no more a question of "vision's
spontaneous opening onto the external world as a limitless beyond" (54), no more
simple, transparent projection, but rather a retrojection into the cluttered
memory-screen.  After Ernst, there is no such thing as a blank canvas, a blank
screen.  Again, in Krauss's words, the ground of the painting is "not a latency
but a container already filled, so that the gaze is experienced as being
saturated from the very start" (54).  Seeing is desired, carnated, bodied.  It
is not so much vision, but vision's other scene.  Every text becomes a Wolf-Man
text.

This is my scene of desire.  This is why I can't see student writing as
*logically* this or that.  And it's not simply a matter of students' desired
seeing (what Krauss calls, rhyming on Jameson, the optical unconscious), but of
theorists'/instructors' as well, all texts as informed by vision's other scene.
It's like the Zizek reading of the Highsmith story in which the townsfolk
"project" onto an abandonned house their most primal fears and desires.  In his
notes for his last work, _Etant donnees_, Duchamp referred to his viewers
explicitly as *voyeurs*, as guilty, shamed, desiring-machines.

I think my arche-text of writing on students, Bloom, shows this well.  We go
from students as utter blanks suddenly to a "passion" (79) for  Mick Jagger and
his pouty lips: "male and female, heterosexual and homosexual . . . he could
enter everyone's dreams, promising to do everything with everyone" (78).  From
clean slates to dirty ones?  Bloom's comments (as being gripped by his
associations) don't tell me nearly as much about his students as they do about
him, in the particular narrative and imagery he chose to novelize students.  So,
the various vision-desires at work in a writing class (student ->university,
student ->paper, student->me; me->student/paper/university/discipline) make it a
far more complex scene than just a logical reading informed by discourse and/or
power might have it.  Vision-scenes, then, are already inscribed, fleshed-over.
This surplus of desire I see Bill Coles very much aware of, naming it the
"nonsense" in his course: "a peculiar fusion of pattern and anti-pattern, of
ordered disorder . . . the wispish suggestion of a meaning which cannot quite be
realized, the sense of a sense that is never absent at the same time it is never
quite there" (28, CCC 1970).

A desired reading of students places the theorist/instructor not only at the
keyhole peeking in (voyeur) but also hearing the footsteps in the background
announcing he/she has been caught in the act.  Such a reading, then, a shamed
one, interrupts the interpretation.  To (much too briefly, Joe, I will get back
to this) answer Joe Williams' question, it's not so much a read of students as
pro-GM or anti-GM, but of, say, our student Jenny Holzer, who didn't know quite
what she wanted to do at Duke, who was there "to see what would happen" (Auping
69).

Geoff

=================================================
Date:         Sun, 11 Dec 1994 14:15:38 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      ddm<-->tr, round two/to talk


Tardy, again.  Sorry for this long delay, Tristan.  Been
buried in end-of-the-semester-overload.  But here I am, and
may I just say W-O-A-H(!) to your "response" to my reading
of "A&P." !!  Um, it seems safe to say ya *hated* it.
HAHAHA!  Ok, so we'll go from there....except that ya hated
so much of it and so thoroughly that I'm having a difficult
time deciding where to start.

But actually, that may be a telling difficulty. Beginnings.
The enormous miscommunication I see "happening" between us,
Tristan, attests to the incommensurability of our
discourses, our language games.  There must be some common
space back there somewhere, where we could return and then
begin this conversation again by negotiating a way together.
Given our current positions, I'd say we've charted very
different courses from wherever that common space may once
have been, though. Soooo.....where from here?  I'm not sure
we can speak to each other without doing tremendous violence
to the discourses of the/each Other along the way. And yet,
we're here to give it our best shot, no?  So I'm not going
to throw your words-against-my-words back upon the screen
for a joyful skewing (tempting as it may be >:>--I don't
claim to be an uber-folk).  Because it's not worth yet
an/Other differend.

And yet, I'm reminded of an/Other kind of differend, a
differend that is, as Avital Ronell says, "beyond the
politics of ressentimental phrasing."  "This version," she
says: "talks and negotiates; it listens and articulates
itself responsively rather than reactively.  In fact, to the
extent that it explores the limits of the differend in the
mode of positivity, it is questionable whether it
constitutes the differend as such, or whether the differend
can indeed guarantee the conditions of colegitimacy that it
promises" (_Finitude's Score_ 262).  Ronell (with Lacoue-
Labarthe) calls this an "affirmative differend" that says
"let's talk" rather than "shut up" or "I win."  And I want
to shoot for that by addressing just the parts of your post
I think we may have a chance of *discussing.*  It may be
idealistic, but it seems worth an effort. So...

Re: Pedagogy/will to pedagogy: By suggesting that the two
aren't identical, I was hoping to create a space in which
the first might be re/fashioned and re/formed. The problem
for me with the pedagogical imperative is that it exists as
a demand that *every* way of knowing/speaking/writing be
absorbed into a form of systematic knowledge that can be
taught. I see the will to pedagogy as a symptom of our HOPE
that we might finally MASTER everything and usher in
paradise.  (Btw, Void Boy, this touches on your question
about pro-Sirc-ers harboring an idealistic belief in agency,
with which I totally disagree. But perhaps more on that
later.)

I see the pedagogical imperative as the follow-through of a
fascist impulse: Ye shall know The Truth (which WE--as
pedagogues--already HAVE) and The Truth will set you free
(if WE are good enough teachers and generous enough spirits
to GIVE it to you).  I see this as incredibly problematic.
The answers are always already contained in the questions we
ask--and the will to pedagogy has a huge investment in
continuing to ask the SAME questions. Knowledge is power,
after all.

Marilyn says she uses the Indigo Girls and Pink Floyd to do
much the same thing Geoff does with rap--but the telling
difference for me here is that she's doing it with HER
music, the music that speaks to HER (and I've done the same
thing many times). Student desire, though, still may be
getting the shaft, still may be subjugated. Geoff, on the
other hand, starts with whatever it is that his STUDENTS are
into. A "pedagogy" that would be Other/Wise, that would not
be synonymous with the pedagogical imperative, would be
*willing* to see where those Other topoi might TAKE US ALL,
where those Other intensities might flow, and what questions
might arise on these Other roads.  This is not an
abandonment of old questions, of old truths.  It is simply a
libidinalizing of them, a willingness to let them GO and see
what they do in other spaces, under other circumstances:
from a restricted to a general economy.

You see, when I said that our students may be more
explicitly and significantly haunted by the spirit of Cobain
than they are by the spirit of Marx, that was not to say
that they aren't, *by way of Cobain*, still haunted by Marx.
Cobain was as much a product of Marx's haunting as
Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard, and WE are.  But, at least
for my students, Cobain speaks to them in a way that
Baudrillard could NOT.  So, why not start with Cobain?  Read
Cobain across Mr. Cheese Factory (Bloom) and see what gets
opened up there?  If the fear is that we won't have any
answers ready-made for the questions that will arise, I'd
say PERFECT! But if the fear is that we'll lose sight of
what it is that our students need to get from us, how to
read culture, how to resist cooption, how to become
"literate," I'd say I disagree: they'll learn more than we
could ever TEACH them.

I read Nietzsche's celebrations of the will to power as an
affirmation of life's sweep, of a willingness to "shed one's
old bark" and "grow not in one place only but everywhere"
(general economy).  He uses that hammer of his, however, on
the will to truth--which is a negation of life's sweep,
which wants to stop everything, to settle it (restricted
economy).

Your take on "desire," btw, is not my take on "desire."
We're using the term very differently.  I think I hear you
assuming that desire lacks something, that it is the desire
FOR something.  I don't.  But Geoff has already offered a
very nice explanation of his take on desire as wanting only
itself, lacking no/thing (which Deleuze and Guattari "rap"
about in Anti-Oedipus), so I'll let that strand
go....*After* this:

It is VVery easy to become-Domestic Catle.  It's the easiest
thing in the world to leap into what Heidegger calls the
"They," to become one of the heard, to follow, to let that
"productive uniqueness" (DESIRE) be smothered in the pillowy
embrace of conformity.  So my question for you, Tristan, is
this:

_____Isn't it more difficult (and more fulfilling), isn't it
more "labor[ious]" and more full of "drudgery" to
perpetually hurl oneself through the borders of the
institutional safety zones, which block self-creation?

Because THAT'S what I envision as Geoff's classroom-as-
"festival" and/or "carnival."  Therefore, I see a LOT of
"drudgery" and, yes, *critical thought* hanging out in
Geoff's parking lot.  I also see a LOT of self-creation, a
LOT of re/fashioned "revolution," a LOT of
affirmation.....and I see a pedagogy struggling to separate
itself from the pedagogical imperative.

But....."let's talk" about it.

Diane Mowery
ddm1792@utarlg.uta.edu

=============================================
Date:         Sun, 11 Dec 1994 13:42:33 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      vjv->gs:  students writing narratives, redux

Vjv->gs

Re:  students writing narratives

Geoff, like Marilyn, I would ask for an explanation for

_____Why you do not "think narratives are a good
structure around which to build a required university
writing course"?

In addition to the reasons that M gives, I would add the recent
study by David Schaafsma, _Eating on the Street:  Teaching
Literacy in Multicultural Society_ (U of Pitt P, 1933), in which
narrative writing is stressed and I think for some good reasons:
One, being that narratives allow virtually everyone to participate,
to function as story teller, listener, and even as trickster.  (With the
latter, I have in mind Lyotard's discussion of little narratives
in his references to ethnographic studies of the Cashinahua,
whom you do mention in "A&P.")

I don't know if you are familiar with Schaafsma's work, but if
not you might take a look at it, for the central metaphor, para-
narrative is whether or not "eating in the streets" is
*a    p    p    r    o    p    r    i    ATE* and whether or not
 those students (minorities) should give it up and join the
dominant way of eating in what, heretofore, is considered
the proper  locus for E  A  T  I  N  G!

There are some powerful potential connections (linkages)
that can be made between what you, Geoff, are saying
about the so-called proper  locus for teaching,
class(genus)room or "A&P" parking LOT and the so-called
proper locus for  kONSUMPTION.


---VJV
==========================================
Date:         Sun, 11 Dec 1994 17:18:22 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      tr->vv: camps, cops, etc.

This latest from Victor seems to me a fairly direct attempt to rule out of
bounds readings of the Sirc which are not the readings he (Sirc? Victor?
both?) *intends* (an odd theory of reading, that one--more below) as
necessarily inappropriate here (or at least merely conducive to the
production of "cross purposes" and "camps" and other conflict-laden
stuff rather than ??? more *desirable* end), so I wonder how much anything
that I might have to say here can possibly count in that scenario
as anything more than yet another round of Lawspeak reproaching
Sirc's parking lot antics. I have become, it would appear, the Law, the
Cop in this interchange to the wild young lustful hedonists--all they
wanna do is have some fun, after all, no?--played by Sirc and Victor, and
this certainly shouldn't have been unexpected.

The Cop will try to be brief this time:

Victor J. Vitanza writes:
>
>
>What is going on, and perhaps void boy might agree, is that the
>research/thinking/writing protocol of social science, or perhaps
>academia in general, is being brought to bear *exclusively* on what
>geoff is attempting to say in his article.
>
>Why?  Why is this the case?  Is it our collective trained incompacities
>as academics.  Geoff's article, as Geoff announces over and over
>again *in* the article, does NOT follow this academic protocol.
>If, however, his respondents keep insisting that he and his
>article be *processed* according to a traditional protocol, then,
>what gets established, besides speaking at cross purposes, is
>what Lyotard refers to as a *differend.*

So is one to take from this that a *reading* has only (or even
primarily? even *measurably*?) to do with what an *author* says you
must do in order to successfully *read* him?  Geoff then, simply by
his "desire" to do so, shrugs off his status *as* an academic, his
place in a social and historical institutional site, the fact that
his piece indeed *will* be read (*only*, one might even hazard) by
*academics*, the fact that there is a vast network of discourses and
practices of reading and writing which we might (far too loosely)
call "academic writing/reading/protocol" within which his work
*necessarily* fits (given his status, and especially given the
location and distribution of his piece)--he's able though to remove all
this from his shoulders and write "Other/wise" simply because
*that's* *what* *he* *wants* *to* *do* and the social and the
historical be damned.  I do not, it should come as no surprise,
subscribe to such a theory of reading/writing/discourse/
intentionality.  Sirc cannot simply wish away readings like mine
because he wants to be writing "Other/wise"--*there* *he* *is*.
And there *we* are.  To decide as academic writer that you want by
some magic stroke to rule out of bounds 'academic' readings of what
you write entails in my view essentially *forcing* parts of your
audience into some rather harsh actions with respect to what you've
written, actions which I'd guess *some* such writers mightn't be so
careless about forcing--more on this below.

>Any attempt by Tristan and others to insist, for example, on
>*evidence* for what Geoff says, is finally to beg a question, which
>has to do with the appropriateness of evidence in Geoff's language
>game.  Geoff has repeatedly responded that evidence is really not
>his concern in this particular article, which is written in an allegorical
>(very open) style.

The  L  I  T  T  L  E   problem here, as far as I'm concerned, has
to do with the *topic* Sirc takes up in his article, as I've tried to
indicate one or twice or seven times and which others (Susan R., for
one) have also asked about.  He certainly may write according to the
rules of his particular "language game" when, to follow the
invocation of Wittgenstein to its "sociological* conclusions
('cause, much as one might like to Victor, just ain't no gettin' away
from little old sociology), the particular 'socio-linguistic'
group he's speaking in/to is "hip literary theory folks who
don't care to have to be bothered with mundane issues of
evidence because of course rhetoric trumps argument every time and
who the hell is Habermas to say us nay anyway?"--and if *that* is the
only group who's reading he cares about, then fine.  *I* can safely stick
his article in the "this is completely irrelevant to the actual social
practice of pedagogy and education precisely *because* it won't be bothered
with evidence and therefore it *cannot* be challenged or tested" file and
get on with my business.  It strikes me, though, (and again as I've said
several times before) that he *is* interested in speaking (and in
many ways *must* *necessarily* speak) to a 'community' larger than
this "hip literary theory folks" group, that is, to a group we might
call "folks interested in the construction of pedagogical spaces and
experiences which challenge the traditional educational function of
strictly reproducing the existing social arrangements outside the
classroom via what goes on *in* the classroom".  And this group, or
at least a measurable portion of it, is *fundamentally* interested
in the mundane issues of evidence which you Victor have ruled out of
bounds in the discussion of Sirc's work.  See, I'm just not
interested for two seconds (the equivalent of Sirc's pieces of
lizard shit in another post) in talking about pedagogical methods
and practices and theory with someone if they tell me "oh, by the
way, you cannot ask me to supply evidence for what I'm saying about
my method/practice/theory because that ain't my language game, Jack"
because I have this investment (silly me) in avoiding simply trying out
any idea I think is cool or stylish or whatever if there's no way to
actually make a case (other than by invoking lots of references to
obscure Dadaist artists) that it's a Good Thing to do given my ideas as
to what my pedagogy should attempt to do.  There are in my view
issues of responsibility here which outweigh your (and Sirc's)
seeming eagerness to do away with the "restrictive" economy of
evidence.

>
>Look, geoff makes this point over and over again when he says that
>he is not working from a *restricted economy* but from a *general
>[libidinalized] economy.*  He explains this at length (from Bataille's
>_Accursed Share_ (3 vols)).  Again if you *judge* (read) geoff from
>a restricted economical protocol, you don't get geoff, and quite
>naturally he cannot *recognize* himself when you speak about him.

You know, one of the things about the Bataille-invoking that has
*REALLY* bugged me a lot in all this, and which is probably not
obvious in other things I've written because I've primarily been
concerned with other things there, is the way that domesticating his
theory to make it into a nice little "protocol" for talking about
The Writing Classroom takes from it just about everything that's
interesting and *dangerous*, in my view.  This is a body of work which
speaks of human sacrifice, Sade, secret societies, ritual violence,
death, the *literal* burning down of the Old Regime--and here it
becomes part and parcel of the everyday functioning of a set of
fundamentally normative and oppressive educational institutions
(Sirc is after all *not*, I presume, offering students the space to
contemplate the real joys to be had in LITERALLY burning the
motherfucker down) albeit with the little twist that we sit at our
desks reading bell hooks rather than Shakespeare.  Bataille was
willing to face--EMBRACED--the risk of being criminal, of being
fascist in his quest--perhaps some of the hip hop artists Sirc uses
in his class are likewise, and I wonder what they (and Bataille)
would think of the move of turning them into *homework*.  I realize
of course that above I've attacked theories of reading which give
too much weight to the intentions of authors as to how they should
be read, but I'm still left greatly disappointed every time Bataille
or Situationist thought gets turned into a something with nearly all
the substance torn out, leaving only a rather thin series of
metaphors regarding "transgressive rituals" which look an awful lot
like business as usual classroom behavior and the like.  As I've
already said, this likely says something about my own pessimism
regarding the limits of interesting things that can possibly go on "in
the classroom"--I think the gestures one can make from within the
bounds of that particular institutional space are quite a lot more
restricted than our libidinal economists apparently do (someone
said earlier Sirc-eanism seemed 'idealist' in their view--I agree
that something which isn't enough concerned with the material and
the historical is going on when our Saint Geoff (not so obscure Marx
reference) can read eg., Bataille as a kind of moment in the social
which could conceivably get played out in the heads of his first
year undergraduate students from their seats right in the middle of
the disciplinary training apparatus called the school).

Another point:  strangely enough, Victor, as I'm sure you know,
Bataille himself, in the very work you cite above as the legitimacy
for Sirc's inattention to evidence and the oh-so-droll discourse of
sociology, *acknowledges* the need to speak to "political economists"
of the "restricted" variety and frames his *argument* (which indeed
it is, and with chapter titles--horror of horrors--alluding to the
"Historical Data") in large measure for and from the perspective of
Durkheimian sociology (with a lengthy treatment of Weber, as well).
There is no "desire" in this work to get around the little issue of
providing evidence nor to reject as off limits the possible
criticisms from the mundane sociologists and such--one wonders how
in such a work one finds a license for the sort of claim you make
for Sirc's work above.

>We are not in the academy in his article; we are in the a&p parking lot!

The short response here is "You wish".  Are you sitting in the
parking lot typing your posts to the list, Victor?  Where did you
write your article, Geoff?  And why the profound need to *not* be in
the academy?  Why is it so troubling to you that *here* *you* *are*?

>
>Also, Tristan et al., please reconsider HOW you have *historicized*
>geoff and his article as a mere going back to the 1960s!!  Is what
>geoff talking about something that just goes back to the 60s?

Victor, if you will read more closely what I have written, I think
you will have a hard time indeed finding anything I have said which
matches the above.  Rather I spoke of Sirc-eanism having appeared a
time or two or three before--one such manifestation having come in
the 60s, but by no means as necessarily the first.  I know you'd
quite like Sirc (and yourself?) to be dredging up Dionysian spirits
from the dawn of Time, and much as I find that idea
rather...silly at times, I never said anything about the origins of
pedagogical Sirc-eanism to contradict such a reading.

>What I have said that you have done to geoff, I think, that you have
>also done to Diane and her response to geoff's article.

This is quite the most effortless way to 'deal' with any of the
criticisms I tried to raise.  If Diane is happy with this reading,
that is if the problem is just that I'm not *reading* you libidinal
economists the way I *ought* to be reading you, that's fine by me.
As per above, though, I think this might have some implications for
which file you will *automatically* get stuck in by folks in the
audience of pedagogues who, for lots of reasons, don't think it
appropriate to claim for themselves the right to speak *outside*
the rules of evidence and the sociological when they're speaking
about what sorts of experiments they've devised for their students
or when they make claims about our "post-humanist world" and its
necessary implications for pedagogy and social practice, but maybe
that's cool with you.  It's cool with me.

Apologies in advance if the tone of this rubs some folks a bit
harshly--it's this mode I get into when folks who are *objectively*
figures with authority handle criticisms by deftly ruling out of
bounds the ground from which the critic speaks and then tack on
implications that in fact it's the critic, authority-less figure
that he is, who is really the Cop in the interaction and the
authority who is the hapless young rebel youth.  Doesn't wash down
well for me.


Tristan
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
What are we calling post-modernity?  I'm not up to date...
    Michel Foucault
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


=================================================
Date:         Sun, 11 Dec 1994 18:23:19 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      vjv->tr:  OHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?

Vjv->tr:    Ohhhhhhh!

Tristan, Oh, Tristan, How(l) disap/POINTing...

oh, vvhat a victim you are.  The big bad copy
(sic) beat you up!!  Ohhhhhhh!  And I thought
it was you who were beating up people!  Oh,
so it goes with resentment!

anyway, 'tis fun, n'est pap(a)?

******

I found this in a book about Sociologists by a Soci-
ologist, which and whom I like very much:

<>

-----Bryan S. Green, _Literary Methods and Sociological
Theory:  Cases Studies of Simmel and Weber [real cool
kats]_.  Chicago:  U of Chicago, 1988:  110.

Any lessons here, TR?  V Very cyber ... n'est pap(a)?


******

All that I can get from you last harangue, Tristan, is that

--you don't like some of us (and perhaps don't like your
        self), contrary to your closing disavowing-paragraph
        (TR, you should become a Sadist!  It gets a lot
        easier that vvay!  Sally, what would Ann Rice give
        us for a metaphor here?!);

--you think that  I am an authority (father, cop) figure, and
        you don't like father-figures (I don't either, but I
        will try not to mirror you on that one!, this time).
        If you are suggesting that victor-as-cop, "I," have some
        authority/standing in my field!!,  I can't stop laughing
        here far left-right now.  I have zilch authority with
        the left or the right or the middle, but definitely with
        the muddle ... why else would I continuously
        quip, to my 'selphs,' that I am far left of what is
        human-istcally possible?!  Tristan, I am tolerated
        in my field, and that's really something to be great-
        ful for (and I am! [I love these people!  Why?
        Because they tolerate me as the fool at court!],
        and that TR is a position to be enVied!!);

--you think that I (and perhaps others) don't like the socio-
        logist's language game (nothing could be further
        from the case, as I indicated above with my en-
        trance (there's a pun here!) ... and yes Bataille
        offers something that might be called "evidence"
        but in the context of those 3 volumes, I would not
        see it as what commonly goes for that convention
        employed in forensic discourse).  If people start out
        with different warrants, *as is* continuously happen-
        ing here and elsewhere, what counts as "facts" or
        "evidence" varies greatly;

        ... One more point, if you keep asking for evidence,
        H O W  then, as I stated in my response that you just
        responded to, WOULD YOU, if differently, respond
        to _ecriture feminine_?  What you are saying about
        Geoff and his article (forget me) is what is, more often
        than not, said about feminine discourse in the akademy!

        If we take your conclusion about evidence and HOW
        you expect/demand to read Geoff to its logical
        conclusion, then, pray tell, TRISTAN, what's going
        to continue to happen?  Negative dialectic is mainly
        good for one thing:  understanding/congregation
        by way of exclusion/segregation.  Much is going to
        be purged.  This *is* the point of Bataille of other
        libidinalized Marxists, namely, that the conditions for
        the possibility of searching for "truth"/"consensus"
        by way of *the negative* will more likely than not end
        with purges.

        Get real, TRISTAN, Isolde is not going to show! This
        is not a succesful love story, for none is.  But if not
        a love story, but a tragic-comedy, then, we better
        be careful about HOW we are going to develop con-
        sensus (or whatever stand-in) we might need or desire.
        But let's get back to *your* needs as negated desire:

        If evidence is your Isolde, which is a convention (right?),
        ... if evidence is important to you in all or most or some
        venues of discourse, if this *is* what you are saying,
        then, what is your evidence for evidence other than
        convention?  Yea, I know this is not fair, but all's fair in
        a public court. So yes, I am asking the same sane
        question that you are asking, but not asking of yourself.

--you think that Geoff is going to have problems with his
        audience in the field of rhetoric and composition
        and similar fields (I could not agree with you more!
        But what else is new?  The field is very conserva-
        tive but generous, and on someoccasions will attempt
        to think sympathetically, consubstantially, at least, for a
        while with some one.  What more could Geoff or I
        or someone else hope for?)  You know we, you and
        I andothers, have a mutual colleague, whom I respect
        very highly and, like many of us, have followed in
        "her" and "our" plight:  I am speaking of Lynda Brodkey
        at your university, whom was once again, and quite
        recently, smeared, this time, by Richard Bernstein
        in his _The Dictatorship of Virtue_, in a full chapter.
        Do some of us have problems with audience?!?!  Yes,
        anyone, most anyone who steers (pun intended)
        away from the accepted norm into whatothers con-
        sider to be the ab-norm (yea, Saint Geoff, St. Genet,
        St. Cixous, St. Brodkey, St. Tristan the Roiler, and most
        assuredly St. Etc.).

*****

Well, so it goes, Tristan.  If you attend the CCCC or something
comparable, I would be more than happy to buy you beer(s) and
talk over all this and more about our un/in-common profession.

-----VJV
============================================
Date:         Mon, 12 Dec 1994 12:25:52 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      skr->gs, vv, tr


 Geoff,

There are pieces of your A&P article that I can second and affirm:  that
 students' literacies, what they bring with them to FYcomp, will and
 should alter academic practices and forms, that our typical writing prompts
stifle, that student LAN production is excess that we have not quite
figured out how to gather up nor can we resist the impulse to do so.  For
many teachers in LAN classrooms, student literacies are very evident,
in their faces, strange, fascinating, and yes, an excess that we ponder over,
wondering indeed how to name it and how to make it work for us.  I am
much dissatisfied with explanations of LAN conversations that corral
this excess into comfortable schemes (Example: "It's invention; they
use the network to brainstorm and then they write their essays.") and
with explanations that dump the discomforts of LANtalk into the
category "behavioral problem."

Your essay is an attempt to gather up this excess and explain it to us in
 very academic terms (citations fromMIT and other U presses, Semiotext(e),
C&C, CE--my academic training tells me I should hold off and check out
each source for the citations practices that typically mark publication for
academic audience in order to make my point, but there is no time).
So I'm not quite sure about Victor's claim that we are outside of academic
discourse here.  Certainly the discourse of desire, so naturalized for UTarlg
 students and faculty, is academic.  Or am I wrong?  Does it circulate outside
 the academy in some circles I do not know about?

Geoff, before going back to your A&P article and reading it carefully,
 I was impressed by the differences in representations in your various
posts--less put off than I first was, but wondering how to turn the topic
to the academic task of representing our pedagogies usefully in
professional writing (and I don't think you would quibble with this term
"useful" because you are advocating a pedagogy that others can and should
use).  About midway through my first semester of teaching I became
uncomfortably aware that my version of what was going on in the classroom
was a far cry from students' versions.  I do not think we can escape this
phenomenon; certainly you do not, since you would not say that your
students are caught up in pondering the correspondences between Bataille
 and Baudrillard and their own writing.   What I call different representations,
you call allegorical writings.  You ask us to read all texts--yours, others, and
students', allegorically, which means in part without judgment, allowing each
its own unfittingness and lack of correspondence.  But this is very difficult
even for you, who are quite willing to read Venturi against student text and
 find perfect fit (and give gold stars) but then go on to read Bartholomae
against Sirc and student text find not a good fit (give check minus).  I do
not blame you for doing this as it is part of advocacy.  But
I cannot be satisfied with, much less embrace, a pedagogy by which
teachers simply rejoice in students' "implicit" philosophical knowledge.
I  agree with you that they do "have" it and I have often pulled out student
net bites similar to those you cite wondering what to do with them, how to
validate them.  It seems to me, however, if you are going to pleasure yourself
by reading everything as allegory, then you have
to make available to students the source of your joy, which is (again Tristan's
point) entails exposure to the texts that contitute the correspondences to
 student
texts, without which you would have no paper, no pedagogy, no pleasure.
 Otherwise,
what is the point?  As
Tristan says, they can do sound bites in the real parking lot (did you say
that, Tristan? I've not time to go back).

I am standing with you in your impulse to rethink the value of the essay
form and to validate student production, but I balk at ways of validation
that seem (as has been carefully pointed out already) to collapse or ignore our
(teachers/students at different institutions) own historical circumstances.
Tristan's point about historicizing the theoretical frames we borrow before
we carefully/lessly apply them to our own circumstances can be extended
to a call for a more careful historicizing and differentiating of our own
 current
 situations.  What is your student population like?  I was curious when you
pulled out the Central American 50 year old woman as example.  Is she typical?
 Or just useful because of her age, gender, ethnicity?  And I do not find the
women's conversation on pp. 37-38 typical of my women students, although
occasional, yes, because my experience has more often been that women
students of diverse classes and ethnicities speak up to complain about the
"fuck you" attitudes/tough talk/street talk on the net.  Or when I think of
middle aged women coming back to university with "their" texts--PTA
notices, PBS specials, a favorite author or two, home fixit manuals--I
wonder how a validation of these texts will reform the academy if we
apply your principles and privilege them.  It also occurs to me that in
some institutions, during some years, innovative teaching within the
academy--experiments such as yours--survive only because of the front
that more traditional classes provide for public viewing.

A rule for POMO talk:
If you don't like what's being said, invoke the differend.
If you do like what's being said, call it a language game, one necessary for
disruption of the hegemonic forces.


That rule I learned from you, Victor.


Shaughnessy and Bartholomae: what a disservice to these your
precursors in the turn to validating student writing to ignore
the contexts of their production. Ask Shaughnessy to write about
the Sex Pistols?? I guess she had other stuff on her mind or
maybe she could have and well, but maybe she saw her
Sex Pistol chapter as counterproductive given her agenda.


The above to Geoff. Sorry for the choppiness. I'm in unix.

Susan Romano

==============================================
Date:         Mon, 12 Dec 1994 12:28:58 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->vv, m



_____Narratives (Marilyn, Victor)

We study narratives in my writing classes.  Malcom's narrative, the narratives
of rap.  We write on narratives.  And in many instances--e-mail messages,
informal writings--my students do write narratives.  But I have resisted a more
privileged place for narrative as a genre students rehearse and perform, a genre
I teach to, because it seems problematic to me.  I will tell you why, but if
some of you want to explain otherwise, do--I'm very open as a writing teacher to
new things.

I would ultimately not know how to grade a narrative performance in students.
In the late 70's and the early 80's, I taught writing in other places, under
other systems, where students did have to write narratives--describe a moment of
triumph--that sort of thing.  (If any of you read the article I wrote on gender
and writing for _Freshman English News_ in 1989, you know that study was based
on these kinds of writing.)  Often in those settings, we'd do freewrites and
other kinds of invention strategies to get students to come up with interesting
ideas.  I was struck by how often students would say something like, "You know,
I've had a really boring life."  Now, it's easy to discount that response as an
initial boredom with the assignment, which maybe I could work through to a
Zion-in-a-waterbead kind of mystical view where there's potential interest in
anything.  But I find it hard to shake any systematic student repsonse.  What
criteria would I lay out in a narrative assignment?  How would I prevent it from
getting belletristic, from closing on, well I really want you to write this sort
of counter-narrative or little-narrative--don't you see how improtant these are?

Last spring, Lawrence Davis wrote a little narrative in my rap course that still
sticks in my head.  I had students read Cornel West's "Nihilsm in Black America"
and then we listened to two rap songs--a so-called positive one (Arrested
Development's "Mr. Wendal") and a negative one (NWA's "Gangsta Gangsta").  We
talked about them in class, students noting (as it's impossible not to) how the
positive one had a very weird negative current, and the negative one was in many
respects very positive.  Then I asked them to fill up a page in which they ran
West through a reading of one of the songs.  It's a nice exercise, gets some
interesting intellectual prose out of students.  I got an e-mail message from
Lawrence telling all about how he thought some of the class's comments on the AD
song were wrong, how it really was a positive song (it's about the knowledge you
can get from a homeless person) and he told me a very strong story to explain,
about when he was in Philadelphia and he met a homeless guy who claimed he was
in the Nation of Islam back in the day and he knew Malcolm and then he was
kicked out when Malcolm was killed, and they took everyhting, and the bum said
stuff to Lawrence about Malcolm and who you could trust, and if only Malcolm
were alive.  Lawrence told the story sort of half-believing the guy, but he
seemed changed as a result of talking to him, and I was as a result of reading
it.

I'd love that kind of writing from students, but I know not all of them could
give it to me, not all of them have had that kind of un/conventionally
interesting, nicely form-able experience.  The narrative can be conventional,
some students have strong narrative schemas.  I would (it seems, but am I
wrong?) have to spend a lot of time un-learning these schemas.  After a while I
would find it hard to explain to students why I was doing this.  New knowledge
will come, I might say.  And if my course was an elective (see Crowley's P/T
article) I could see lots of stuff like that, but in a course every first-year
student has to take, I feel the need to balance my own theoretical certitude
against a notion that indeed, there are students like many of you have said, who
are very anxious about starting university work.  So teaching them how to write
a sustained stretch of intellectual discourse, how to reach a point where they
can enter a complex text-event (one mediated by prior text events) and be a
little better preapred to make a kind of stand, to meet the complexity, seems
like enough.

_____Ambivalence?

Hey, join the club.  This whole enterprise of teaching college writing is
drenched in it, as this reinvw has shown.  Most ambivalent course in the
curriculum.  A very interesting article published in composition in the 80's,
for me, was Coles' piece in that MLA book on _Literacy for Life_ (sounds like a
prison sentence), his piece subtitled, "An Alternaive to Losing."  Coles very
much has ambivalent felings about hs role as a writing teacher: "I thought for a
long time that I was unique in being as good a teacher as I know I am and in
being unsuccessful in teaching writing as I know myself to be" (260).  Coles
sees how many leave his class not getting as far as he wanted, but yet he drives
home happy and looks forward to doing it again tomorrow.  Because he's reached a
space where he's gotten clear about student desire, need, ability, materials,
assignments.  He knows he's done what he could to show a view of writing as
something that one would want to be able to do; even if students can't do it
well at the end, they've understood why they might want to.

He's eliminated ideas about discourse conventions and success and correctness;
he's made the scene of college writing a de-determined space (pkg lot): just "an
ability to conceptualize, to build structures, to draw inferences, to develop
implications, to generalize intelligently--in short, to make connections, to
work out relationships" (253).  He wonders, as I do, how you make writing play
for students in structly conventional terms.  Coles is in a pedagogical space
"when techniques and principles won't do" (261), and so he comes up with a
negative-space theory: "writing not as a way to be a winner, or even as a way to
win, but as an alternative to losing" (262).  This counter-loss theory of
writing makes sense to me.

I think a lot of us, from some of the posts I read, think we can do more.
You're giving yourself, I think, too much power/responsibility.  Marilyn, do you
really feel that you can get your students in a place where they know the rules,
where they can put every comma in place, etc., and then know why they would want
to break them?  That's a tall order, and I really don't think it's my job.
That's the broader educational culture's job.  Or society's job.  It's not my
fault we've made a mess of the primary and secondary schooling, and the
socio-economic context that would make that system work.  It's not my fault, for
instance, someone decided to run commercials getting you to buy stuff every few
minutes on TV rather than grammar and punctuation mini-lessons, like they used
to on Saturday mornings ("Conjunction Junction, what's your function?").
There's only so much I can be responsible for.  Can I send students out of my
classes more aware of the kinds of non-fiction prose problems they might
encounter?  Yes.  Can I send them out more aware of how to encounter
text-events?  Yes.

I'd like to write more about the variety of conflicting truisms that seem to be
underscoring our discussion of the scene of college writing.

Geoff

===============================================
Date:         Mon, 12 Dec 1994 15:57:35 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      dbd > gs on narratives and grades

_____Isn't it a good thing that narratives are not easy to grade?

Just to jump in here:  I've been following this reinterview with some interest,
and the positions at least have seemed pretty clear (say, Geoff vs. Tristan),
but Geoff's last posting completely tripped me up.  I read the paragraph, and
then reread it, thinking it must be someone else now speaking.  The paragraph
I'm talking about is the one that begins:

        "I would ultimately not know how to grade a narrative performance in
students..."

Geoff, I thought the configuration of the A&P parking lot, the libidinized
pedagogy, the search for intensity all had to do with trying to create a space
be(out)side modernist criteria, insitutional systems of accountability like
grades, standards, conventions, correctness, etc.  Of course, as Tristan keeps
pointing out, we work within the academy and all its grades lurking in every
evaluation, but I have seen your whole effort as seeking working environments
that tricked the system enough that you could avoid making decisions strictly
on their grade-ability.  Why else think about a parking lot?  My sense is that
it's because narratives are so ungradeable that gives them such value--   So
when you ask: "What criteria would I lay out in a narrative assignment?", I
hear the institution lurking a bit too closely.  Hasn't the point been to get
to the A&P ("a de- determined space"?) so we can create some space for Other's
criteria and other narratives?  And the risk is right there in the A&P: you
might not get what you want, you might even get the racist, sexist,
belletristic narratives that we want to resist.  Indeed, some students have
"strong narrative schemas", But isn't that part of the encounter with student
interests, student desires?  There are, it seems to me, an awful lot of
narratives that live out in the experience of the parking lot and many other
elsewheres.   There's often a lot of contact in the contact zones.  Isn't
narrative all around us, but often resistant to being disciplinized?  Isn't, in
fact, narrative one way for students to find themselves located within and
beside and a part of other similar and larger narratives?  In this sense, can't
narrative often be a way of "making a stand," of being self-reflective, as you
wish them to do?  Ask them to tell the story of their pain and boredom of being
in required literature courses and some at least will tell a story of taking a
stand they never knew they could tell or that anyone would care to listen to.
        So this one part (paragraph) of your reply seemed so unSircean and so
Tristanian, I was hoping you might say a bit more about this grading can of
worms.  Isn't it a case of a differend, as vjv says, between the discourse of
the parking lot and the grading system? And, if so, shouldn't we be especiallly
circumspect about how we commensurate them as we must when we hand in grades
(next week, in my case)?  And shouldn't we (to be consistent with Tristan's
portrait of us as postmodern alter- flakes?) be especially wary of not doing
certain things for worry that we won't know how to grade them after we do them?
Don't you have more ambivalence about this grade- criteria than you indicate in
this paragraph?  Perhaps you would just pour all the ambivalence you speak of
in the next paragraphs back into this one?  Perhpas I have gotten lost amid the
"vaiety of conflicting truisms," but this connection between grades
and narratives seems like it might need a shot of ambivalence or clarification.
I would welcome either.  Thanks in advance.
        David Downing

==================================================
Date:         Mon, 12 Dec 1994 17:31:09 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      VJV->SKR:  desire? &  differend as POMO talk?

VJV->SKR:  desire? &  differend as POMO talk?


Parenthetically, Susan Romano says:

<>

Yes, we are *inside* the akademy, no doubt about it, especially
in this discussion that keeps insisting on bringing geoff's
article before a sort of T&P tribunal in *order* to hear or really
bring a litigation against the article.  Obviously, a lot of the
talk about the article is being shouted, in some cases, from the
window of the uni-versity out into the a&p parking lot.  But all this
has been said.  (And I have yet to insist on the protocol of
speaking to each other here, which is in our introduction to the
PTCs; if I were to insist, would I be a mean olde cop?!)

Yes, we are in the akademy ... even here ... as some insist in
cyber-ville.  It's this kind of colonization of cyberspace that I would
and will continue to resist and, if necessary, disrupt.  Much of
the early logs of PTC have concersations of this sort in them, so
there is no reason to go over them here.
...

At a unversity, I think that it is possible to think of being an out-
sider  inside, like, as I keep saying here and mostly elsewhere,
a topological Klein jar, that takes on the unnatural configuration
of all outside but maintains the fantasy of an inside.

The problem with this viewpoint, however, is that,
like all such points, it can lead to an alibi such as "I am a
victim of this discipline and, therefore, blah, blah, blah, etc."
But victimage--the popular  topos or even Gerard's scholarly
topos--seems to have a brief shelf-life ... especially when every-
one (including George Will) begins to see him/herself as a victim.

Whom do I have in mind about outsiders in an inside?  Well, for
example Hayden White and Dominic LaCapra in History depart-
ments.  This is an old example!  There are many others.  How do
these people get read?  The same way that geoff is getting
read here.  LaCapra has a wonderful article in _Boundary 2_,
in which he includes all of the readers' reviews of his mss sent
to journals and university presses.  The article is a hoot, given
the responses that he, like geoff, gets.  There are plenty of
other examples, Susan, and I am sure that you are well aware
of them.

...

The discourse of desire ... Does it live only at utarlg?, you
ask:  No, I find a lot of people, more and more, beginning
to talk in terms of "desire."  And in fact, a lot of people in
classics have been talking about it for a looonggg time, tho
they tend not to talk about it as some of us do.  When I go places
to read papers on the subject(s) of desire, lots of people have
read in that area and are able to join in on the discussion and
in an intelligent way.  I find on many net-lists there are all kinds
of different people talking about it!, e.g., philosphers, rhetor-
icians, gay-lesbian theorists/activists, etc.  And I bet at the flag-
ship university, you yourself can find people talking about it
and very intelligently.  Now , whether or not people feel com-
fortable with the issues raised by Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault,
J. Butler and all those that she surveys is another question!

If not, then, I wonder WHY?

Susan states:

<>

Our Students, Susan, come back to make such claims!
N'est pas?  But,

Susan, have you read Lester's book? (I will not refer
to my work on the subject, since you would question what
i--crazy POMO victor would say.  Or have you read Lytoard's
_The Differend_?  Do you need some more examples other
than the ones that I have pointed out as occurring here
in dis/respect to gs's article, examples of how  a differend
occurs?  In Lyotard, there are numerous examples, but a
primary one at the beginning, one that deals with the Nuren-
berg trials and the Holocaust, where long time ago and still
now, there are some German revisionists who say that those
people who "testified" at the trial about the Holocaust could
not properly do so, that what  they said should not have
counted as "evidence."  Hence, there is an attempt to rule
them out of court ... given what counts as rules of evidence.
((And there has been since the trial an uproar among legal
scholars about how that trial was conducted.  In other words,
there is a large body of literature on it.)) But this problem--and
this is more to the point--will not go away indis/respect to the
Holocaust, because and for some time now, there has been
a  group of  German and French historians, a group of so-
called revisionary historians in the recent German
*Historikerstreit* who raise the question of the "actuality" of
the Holocaust (its reality or its reported degree and kind),
so that they might  rewrite history.  These historians are still
asking for evidence!  And when it is put forth, they attack it
as NOT evidence!--given the rules of engagement in the
court or in scholarly historical circles.

When I read a paper on this subject and explained the im-
portance of the concept of the at N. AZ state, when Sharon
was there (she can testify to this claim, if you want evidence!),
my reading of the paper on the differend just happen to co-
incide with the Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas hearings.  Both
faculty and students at N. AZ were very quick to say that Hill was
being ruled out of court just as so many others before her
had been ... and ruled out in terms of evidence ... and
consequently a differend was being established, which
(given the mascuLeninist structure of the committee) was
instructive ... for some of us.  Look, I could point to Katherine
MaKinnon et al on the same point, but ....

I do not think that I am (at all) being unfair when I say that
a differend has been established in the discussion about
geoff's article.  I mention that there is a differend because
of the unfair position that geoff has been put in (wittingly
or unwittingly).  Our "grounds" for carrying on what is a dis-
cussion about his article are different.  This happens all the
time, and we need to recognize that it does.  If Tristan (and
you) wish to continue along those lines, that is fine.  As
I keep saying, we are all fools, it's just what kind of fool you
want to be.  What Tristan sends in gets posted, not re-
turned!  But I cannot not respond, pointing out what I see
to be a problem here, and then go on to other ways of think-
ing about geoff's article, which I will do.

About calling something a PO MO strategy  (you
say: "If you don't like what's being said, invoke the differend.")
seems ridiculous.  If I have misused the term, then, point
that out, but use, as in all language games, is determined
provisionally by the rules of that game.  See again, Lyotard,
_The Differend:  Phrases In Dispute_.

I think that the idea of the differend is important (to famales
and males, and thirds) and I would hate that your attitude
toward me (PO MO, as I said has become a devil term for
you) would spill over onto the concept of the differend.  If
you do not wish to take my exposition and my use of the
term as being offered in good faith, then, give the concept
a chance, at least, when it is  associated  with and used
by others.  And it is being used by others not on this list!

-----VJV
============================================
Date:         Tue, 13 Dec 1994 10:08:18 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->dd:grades

_____Narratives/Ambivalence About Grading?

Oh David, yes, yes, yes, to everything you say.  Did it seem like I was
contradicting myself?  You know, Duchamp went out of his way to contradict
himself in interviews; he claimed it was a good way to prevent a style from
stabilizing.

David, I loathe grades.  I've tried every which way I can in the past twenty
years of teaching to figure out a way to finesse them that would be fair for
students.  I haven't come up with one.  I used to love to listen to David Bleich
on the subject.  My students have told me resoundingly over twenty years that
they want grades, moreso each year.  I listen to students.  I try, then, to make
the criteria as humane but significant enough that a range of possible writing
behaviors and interests is covered.

I have lots of room for narrative in my courses.  And yes, pain and boredom of
education is actually the very first series of writings students do for me: in
my Malcolm-based course (which has a theme of education, various social
sites--Malcolm overall--as schooling us) they write informally on where school
worked or didn't for them, then use each other's stories (and Malcolm's early
school years) to comment on American education as they understand it.  Yes,
David, those are amazing stories, quite depressing mostly.  In the rap classes
I've taught, students, especially those who live the poverty- and crime-dramas
rapped about, tell their stories very eloquently.  Many many times in writings,
students will slip into a narrative frame and (in the Lawrence Davis example I
cited) really make intense meaning.  And I will respond to that, in many ways.
Show students how it can be used, shaped, what it said to me, how it speaks to
other issues.  It's just that I would hate to put students in a situation where
they would be forced to come up with a powerful narrative or else.  When it
happens, though, I share it, value it.  What I meant in the post that had you
tripping was that I don't have units or lessons or whatever on here's how to
write a narrative.  But, hey, maybe I will.  If David, Victor & Marilyn think
this is a good idea, then I will have to re-think this.

I thought the question Victor & Marilyn raised was one of dumping intellectual
or academic prose utterly in favor of narratives.  That's why I said I would
have trouble with that.  My course is required.  I hear from students over and
over their fears about writing, their fears about college (my students, by the
way, are open-admissions remedial students mostly).  I want to give them an idea
of what sorts of prose they might be asked to write--which varies, of course.
But primarily concentrating on having students' rehearse narrative patterns
would freak me a bit, cause I know some of my students would come back and say,
Geoff, this assignment from my art history class doesn't look at all like what
you taught us, what's up with that?  What I try to do is what I've said over and
over--here are some texts, lots of what will happen to you in other classes is
you'll get these texts, you'll have to write on/around/through them, you'll have
to engage them somehow.  I mean, I have students who have an immensely difficult
time knowing who is speaking when a writer quotes another writer in a piece.  So
how can we find what's going on in these texts, first of all; then find a place
where we can speak with a sense of authority, figure ways to "sample" these
texts a little to add a layer of intellectual texture to our writing, but also
try to go for a buzz in the stuff we write.

I go at this from many different sites or whatever term you want to
use--responses to readings, informal papers (where I throw out what I hope are
interesting occasions to make a verbal shape), e-mail, e-conferencing, sometimes
parody (which always works incredibly well) and yes, of course, serious essays
(where I want a stretch of servicable intellectual prose).  In each of these I
give some criteria--of course in the less-formal papers the criteria is quite
loose; in the essays, the more institutional criteria comes in.  I just don't
know how else to do it for students that's fair; students respect me for this,
so I keep doing it.  When I say I can't really teach to narrative, what I mean
is the way I can't "teach" to an informal paper.  But when I get really good
informal writing (or writing in any genre) I share it with the class so we can
learn from each other, so we can see interesting possibilities.  And yes, David,
you put it very well about the narrative all around us; it made me think of the
times I go over writing with students and try to re-construct what I feel the
"story" informing the piece was.

I am not living wholly in the parking lot, I shuttle back and forth between
worlds.  But oh yes, Victor is right, A&P was written in the parking lot; I have
a snapshot of the commemorative anti-monument plaque I commisioned to prove it.
I will not teach wholly in the parking lot until my college allows the elective
writing class I have been begging for (and which students beg for).  Until then,
I of course render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, but while I'm doing that, the
*informe* of the class (the informal writings and the topics and students'
exuberance and humor) allows me to render unto the goddess what is hers.  I have
learned from yoga that there has to be an opposite tension for any given
tension, or the exercise is a failure.  People who accuse me of cavalier
disregard for students' later success or failure in the university must know how
much I try to send students out ready to face anything that comes upon them.  I
just do it in what I think is the best way.  As I said before, my A&P article is
written primarily to pressure what I see as growing cracks in ideas around
academic discourse (witness Pat Bizzell now renouncing her early work), to allow
the academy to be informed by student discourse.

Geoff

=================================================
Date:         Tue, 13 Dec 1994 14:31:14 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      dbd > gs, grades and narratives redux

_____Is the yes-machine working?

Yes.

Oh, Geoff, yes, yes, yes, to everything you said back.  Clarifications can
sometimes do wonders, and thanks for yours.  In fact (1), I'm no longer tripped
out because I concur with literally everything you said--we are often caught in
the shuttle between parking lots and grade books, and it requires a real
trickster act to negotiate that dance.  In fact (2), I can see where the
differences arose: I never thought it was a case of "forcing students to come
up with a powerful narrative" (although I can see how it would be possible for
someone to exercise such pedagogical force, and thus kill the narrative force
before it's told); and I never thought it was a case "of dumping intellectual
or academic prose utterly in favor of narratives," although I can see how you
might have thought it was.  In fact, the latter would play against any sense of
the multivalent, the differences, the differend, if we were to insist on
narrative over and against any other form, just as it makes no sense to insist
on the analytical over the narrative (even though the institution usually
does).  So I see that you agree with all this, as I suspected you would.
        cheers, David

=====================================================
Date:         Tue, 13 Dec 1994 23:38:33 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      lh->gs Of fire and water


"The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I
say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they'll
stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero.  They keep right on going,
into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across
the lot to their car....

I saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed
the night before and the door heaves itself openutside the sunshine is
skating around on the asphalt.  I look around for my girls but they're
gone, of course, there wasn't anybody but some young married screaming
with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a
powder-blue Falcon station wagon.  Looking back in the big windows
over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on
the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking
the sheep through.  His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as
if he had just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell
as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter"
(John Updike, from "A & P")


I came to explore the wreck
the words are purposes
the words are maps
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail....

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
(Adrienne Rich, from "Diving Into the Wreck")


"But first, I am embodied male....."
       "You know me, I would have the divine....."
              "These are erotic thoughts.....
                              (Geoff Sirc, PTC)


When I opened the black book and turned to your text, Geoff, the
first thing I thought of was Updike's story...  what my brain has
related to A&P's, I guess...  it was a story often anthologizes
and often fought over between the sexes in my first year classes
(back when lit was something we did in that class)...   I guess
I'd be the young married, too.. another image to shrink from...
But the story does bring up my point...   I moved your parking lot
to MacDonalds in my mind, the place where in high school everyone
came or cruised by...  the lot where flirtation was everywhere...

What I'm trying to say, here, is that there aren't enough girls
in your parking lot to make it interesting... oh there are some there..
the tired feminists who write people off...  I'd like to suggest
a flirtation, a corps-a-corps as Irigaray would say, in your
parking lot...

"Writing-as-derive is a cruise taken in the unremitting expectation
of a miracle; in its randomness, its suggestiveness, it styles itself
according to nothing except emotional response" (47)...  I read
this and immediately thought of ecriture feminine (which I heard
VV bring up around her but no one answer)...Could we introduce these
two lovers?

writing-as-derive...  writing-the-body
you are fire, desire...   i am water, fluidity...
            what would happen to our theory if the two could connect?

[From the I CHING]:

___ ___
______
______
______
___ ___
______

Ko/ Revolution (Molting)

..."the great man changes like a tiger..."
"A well must be cleaned out from time to time or it will become
clogged with mud.  Therefore the hexagram Ching, THE WELL,
which means a permanent setup, is followed by the hexagram
if Revolution, showing the need of changes in long established
institutions, in order to keep them from stagnating...

The Judgment:  Revolution: On your own day you are believed..
The Commentary on the Decision: Water and fire dwell togethet,
but their views bar mutual understanding.  This means revolution.
The Image: Fire in the lake: the image of revolution.
          (The I Ching: The Book of Changes, #49)


Much of what you write describes women's place (lack of place)...
without invoking he feminine...  but she is there, in your excess,
in the exchange, the consumption, the luxury of desire..

"we can allow students the seduction of texts in a carnival classroom
or we can train them to create writ used in the production and
marketing of bombs" (61)....  how lightly do you use that word, seduction?
and are you seduced into allowing for the feminine to emerge from
subsisting your theories?  the latter writing is a production
system..  the ivory tower you left was never my home...  man produces,
woman (re)produces...   can the dwelling of fire and water
bring change?


"Love can be the becoming which appropriates the other for itself
by consuming it, introjecting it into itself, to the point where
the other disappears.  Or love can be the motor of becoming,
allowing both the one and the other to grow.  For such a love,
each must keep their body autonomous.  The one should not be
the source of the other nor the other of the one.  Two lives
should embrace and fertilise each other, without either being a
fixed goal for the other" (Irigaray, *Elemental Passions* 27)


_____Geoff... are you gonna be my unsuspected hero?  Or are you
gonna put my name in your book?


Love,

Lynda

===============================================
Date:         Wed, 14 Dec 1994 12:52:06 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      void boy->gs, lh: Another country heard from...


Geezus, Lynda, that last post was absolutely beautiful.  I'm too damn
overwhelmed by the sudden change in the conversation to even log it into my
brain.  It moves there, like a sound, like an image.

I wonder, too.  What seduction, Geoff?  Freud's seduction?  The *fact* of
incest or rape behind the neuroses, the repression of a memory, not a
desire?  Who educes? How?  The text seduces?  Does the anal-yst the
analysand seduce  Does the active (passive?) reador seduce, the student?  Or
does the passive (active) author seduce the student?  And what/who desires?
Where?  Male?  Femyle?  Fe/male? In whose parking lot?

Just wondering/wandering through, peeking into the fogged windows of the
parked cars...

 - Void Boy
====================================================
Date:         Thu, 15 Dec 1994 10:28:57 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->jw,sr:truisms

(These thoughts were prompted by Joe's GM puzzle, but they move away from it (or
maybe they don't).  Anyway, this writing allowed me to mediate on some of the
comments people have made about my piece, particularly Susan's.  Sorry, it's
long.  (And I just logged in & saw Lynda's heart-breaking Water-Music & Void
Boy's echo; sorry these might not touch on those.  Or they might--is Jenny
Holzer's ecriture feminine?)

Joe Williams wonders, how do you teach the student who wants to work for GM as
well as the student who wants to blow up GM?  As I thought about that, I
remembered another comment made by a student, about her goals for college. The
student was Jenny Holzer, who was not there at Duke to get a GM job or to join
an anti-GM revolutionary cell, or even (yet) to be an artist, but just as she
tells Michael Auping "in school to see what would happen" (69).  A lot of the
comments surrounding my article concern my responsiveness (or lack thereof) to
student want.  What students want/need is . . .  How would we name our
foundation of student want?  I know this foundationalist/anti-foundationalist
stuff can get tricky.  Students want to be sharks, they want to kill
sharks--which truism do we play to?  One?  The other?  Both?  Or maybe another?
Maybe one of Holzer's "Truisms":  PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT.  (Hereafter
all-cap phrases are from Holzer's "Truisms").

Do you know Holzer's work?  I just love it whenever I see it: in a gallery or,
even better, chancing upon it in a public space (I remember sitting on a bench
in Boston with my wife and son, after a day's worth of 4C's sessions, and
realizing we were sitting on a Holzer bench; we went up and down the street,
reading them all.)  Her project appeals greatly to me:  Michael Auping sees her
as "part of a profound psychologizing of art that has been evolving during at
least two decades.  Over this period, we have seen an impassioned attempt by
artists in Europe and America to reinvest art with a new humanism, using basic
forms of symbolism, allegory, figuration, and language" (11).  Holzer's work
does this by re-theorizing the sound-bite, the word-flow that forms our world.
She takes the media of the authoritarian social-knowledge-system (posters,
billboards, LED signs, TV ads) and uses them to speak her content (as *informe*)
to try and delay or undo the meaning-flow to the point where we can "think about
how we feel about the world we live in" (11).

So instead of the usual banal media lie or double-speak or consumer-hype, Holzer
offers an/other form of message.  In the grammar and media of authority, she
delivers a message that is, as Auping says, "anomalous . . . Her 'product' is a
nervous, apocalyptic consciousness carried in a variety of voices that range
from the cooly logical to the explosively mad.  From the beginning, Holzer has
made no bones about her preferred themes, 'sex, death and war'" (11).  Her art,
then, is language, which appears in public spaces, in reception-sites where we
are used to seeing messages like "DRINK COCA-COLA," only now we read instead a
Holzer message like "YOUR OLDEST FEARS ARE THE WORST ONES".
Holzer's subversive
sound-bites first started appearing in the late 70's, in a series called
"Truisms," and I think the collection of her poly-vocal sound-bites might be
nice to read into our reinvw at this point, in order to reflect on the truisms
that underlie the claims we make about students and writing and literacy and
desire, students' wants and needs.  Also, I think about Jenny as student.  What
if she were my student?  Or one like her, who doesn't really know what she wants
yet.  No "what if," really, cause so many of my students tell me this is where
they're at--undecided, indeterminate.  I want my space to be important for them,
too.

Part of a parking-lot rhetoric is questioning the received, the stuff left
behind, the stuff we've inherited (INHERITANCE MUST BE ABOLISHED), those
buildings that keep popping up all over, those signs.   I question the
over-saturation; I'd strip it away, silence it.  Too much clutter prevents me
from hearing and savoring.  I'd like to travel as lean and light as I can (IF
YOU LIVE SIMPLY THERE IS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT).  Call it packing for
survival--"The Survival Series" was Holzer's project after "The Living Series"
(two works she did after "Truisms").  Both are grounded in the everyday, the
need for a quite rhetoric, reflecting daily life.  As she says: "*Living* used
an everyday tone.  I wanted to retreat from the ideological extremes . . . I
wanted to focus on what happens in daily life and show how this ties into a
larger social or political reality.  I thought I'd drop the rhetoric and use
quiet language.  I'd start with humble subjects and spiral outward.  Then I
worried that *The Living Series* was too bland.  Maybe living wasn't the issue.
Survival was" (89).  So maybe it's not being a shark at GM or killing sharks
with the Red Brigades.  Maybe it's just surviving.

Trying to clear the clutter from compostion studies is part of what I'm about.
If you de-disciplined it so that it was just basic notions of composition, then
who would you look to for interesting insights--Bartholomae & Shaughnessy?
Really?  I'd choose others more basic.  We have too much stuff in composition
studies, the field is too crowded.  I like excess, but in terms of Inner
Experience, not outer.  It's an economics of energy formula for me: if I'm
reading/studying Bartholomae or Shaughnessy, I'm not readying/studying something
else.  I prefer to read and use people who tell me much more basic things about
life and composition than the specialized, disciplined rarification of most
compositonists in our field (A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS).

I know my work is heavily citational, but I do this in the hopes of collapsing
disciplines; organizing a body of useful texts for something called simply
compostion.  And I cite my students as often as I cite anyone else, cause I
think IT'S BETTER TO STUDY THE LIVING FACT THAN TO ANALYZE HISTORY.   I want to
LEARN THINGS FROM THE GROUND UP.  I grant you, there's a place for specialized
discourse--sects, cults, *frontes*--but can't it go too far?  More and more I
think the standard compositionist discourse goes too far into a specialization
whose pressurized piling-up of ecstatic texts, signs and discourses explodes out
of life (or implodes beneath life) into an abstract mythology, a Secret City, a
fiction.  I just don't like to get too deep into stories like that because DRAMA
OFTEN OBSCURES THE REAL ISSUES.

In one of Bruce Nauman's pieces he lists three givens, which capture my
unwillingness to accept too many fact/fictions in my compostion theory:

1.  Fiction erodes fact.
2.  Fact becomes the way we have behaved in the past.
3.  The way we have behaved in the past congeals into the consummate mask of
rock.

I don't need *that* much knowledge to live any more.  I don't want to be
over-determined: A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE CAN GO A LONG WAY.

It is deeply affecting to see Holzer's words on big LED signs above Times Square
or in Candlestick Park or in the Bourse or (most wonderfully) in Venturi's
primal scene, the Caesar's Palace parking lot.  To see LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE
FATAL on the "now appearing" sign outisde Caesar's Palace, instead of Wayne
Newton or Sigfried & Roy, is to see *informe* as concrete-eating virus, the
uncongealing of the consummate mask of rock.  Some of you point to GM/U of M's
power at building walls and raising stone structures (consummate masks of rock)
and then shrug and go off to train sharks.  I shrug and point to the wrecking
ball and the 900 more layoffs announced in today's paper.  I can only go so far
into the fact/fiction of GM; I don't want to think too much of my students'
choices because I might try to influence them.  And Joe, you misunderstand me if
you think, as you have your fictive student imply, that I want to manage
students' "ideological/emotional/intellectual health"; quite the opposite, I
feel DON'T RUN PEOPLE'S LIVES FOR THEM.  I simply assume all students want the
best for themselves and that's all I need to know.  Anything else starts
determining things too much for me.  I prefer indeterminacy.   The
shark-trainers in my profession, I feel, think they have a hand on the levers of
power; that they can make these enormous differences in people's lives and
single-handedly control students' destinies.  I guess that's a flattering
narrative to cast oneself in.  Another truism, of course, holds that PEOPLE ARE
NUTS IF THEY THINK THEY ARE IMPORTANT.

And, sure, some disciplinary inheritance is inevitable, some textual influence
is desirable.  But rather than a strict continuation of the discipline's
fact/fiction narrative, how about a delay, a difference?  Susan responds with to
my questioning Shaughnessy's elision of John Lydon & Sid Vicious with a frisson
of disgust; I don't blame you, Susan, DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO
MOST SITUATIONS.  But a steady narrative being built following on the work of DB
& MS?  Susan, I just don't think that steadily continuous, progressive
precursor-narrative is going anywhere.  We keep building on the same references,
those ways we have behaved in the past, until the whole thing congeals into the
mask of rock.

Duchamp, in 1946, saw as "the great trouble with art in this country" that there
was "no spirit of revolt--no new ideas appearing among the younger artists [who
were] following along the paths beaten out by their predecessors, trying to do
better what their predecessors have already done. . . A creative lull occurs
when artists of a period are satisfied to pick up a predecessor's work where he
dropped it and attempt to continue what he was doing.  When on the other hand
you pick up something from an earlier period and adapt it to your own work an
approach can be creative.  The result is not new; but it is new insomuch as it
is a different approach" (SS 123).

This very reinvw discussion, of course, legitimizes the specialized discourse,
legitimates B&P & Shaughnessy.  I will go this far with it: There is a tribe; it
needs its young taught literacy.  I'll legitimize it that much.  Anything else
gets too disciplined for me.  Bartholomae, in that P/T piece I cite in my
article, excludes the everyday from his professionalism.  I read Coles a lot
because he, too, barely legitimates.  He's classic parking lot:  he says the
everyday is precisely what you build it with.  He cites a grand total of five
sources in that 1983 MLA piece, and that's a lot for him (only one is a
so-called compostionist).  The article itself never leaves the everyday of
Coles' 12-step group, his race-track habit, and his classroom.  Getting too far
away from the everyday unnerves me (ABSTRACTION IS A TYPE OF DECADENCE).

What are the worlds we're trying to capture in our work?  What referentiality do
we absolutely need.  I'm aiming for Coles' 0 - 5 citations.  Until I can get
there, I will take Duchamp & Cage over Bartholomae & Shaughnessy anytime (yes
and the Sex Pistols, too, still.  Counterproductive to Mina's agenda?  Susan,
they were counterproductive to *every* agenda; I've seen what the mechanisms of
production have done to this world, bring on the machines of
counter-production).  I think you can learn a lot more interesting stuff about
writing from painters and musicians and architects than you can from writers
(Duchamp: "I saw at once I could use Roussel as an influence.  I felt that as a
painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter"
SS 126).

And one person's "obscure dadaist" is another's source "of a twentieth-century
position that views language as dominating the use and meaning of an artwork. .
 . An artist who has a profound respect for Duchamp's strategies, Holzer has
addressed the language-image dialectic with a bold and fresh intensity . . .
offer[ing] a new level of critique, if not an assault, on established notions of
where art should be shown, for whom, and with what intention" (Auping 9).  I
think the language-dominated movement (central to twentieth-century art) that is
the Duchampian Legacy, the Duchamp Effect, should cause compositionists to
re-examine the visual-verbal texts it's produced.  The artists who understand
the Duchamp Effect, I think, like Holzer and Nauman and Levine and Beuys (and on
and on) have given our culture powerful, general texts for life, far more
significant and applicable than "Inventing the University" or _Errors &
Expectations_.  (Holzer's "Truisms" series and all her work after that
originated in her desire to "try to find a way to talk about real world issues
to a general audience" 76).

Some folks in our field get a lot of mileage out of looking at old university
course descriptions for composition classes; and that's cool, makes for a witty
turn up at the podium.  I'd never put stuff like that down.  But how about a
different approach?  How about looking at course descriptions of Cage's classes
in Composition, Beginning Compostion, Advanced Compostion, and Experimental
Compostion at the New School from 1956-1960?  Cage even finesses Joe's
Pro-GM/Anti-GM dilemma (which we can now name traditional/experimental) pretty
well: "The legacy of the Cage class extends to more than chance compostional
methods, to more than the use of everyday objects and a focus on ordinary
actions and situations. . . . It consists in the spirit of freedom, openness and
humor that Cage created in the classroom.   [Stephen] Addiss, a serious composer
who was interested neither in writing 12-tone works nor in working as Cage did,
felt able to pursue non-radical tonal composition, and credits this to Cage's
ability to free the students in all ways, toward the traditional as well as
toward the experimental" (Altshuler 21).

The basic pedagogical philosophy underlying the Cage Class was very parking lot:
"I didn't want to transmit any body of information, I simply wanted to stimulate
the people to do experimental work" (17).  Freedom, openness and humor--nice
truisms, John.  I've read in this discussion posts from some who almost seem to
boast that they are above such concerns as whether students like the learning
space they give them; another truism holds BEING HAPPY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN
ANYTHING ELSE.

Geoff

===========================================================
Date:         Thu, 15 Dec 1994 12:44:21 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)"
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->lh:her words

Lynda, last night as the strong waterfall of your words washed over me, I was
filled with the molten fire of illuminating gas.  I thought, one thing they can
never take away from me that my article did was that lovely collage.  Your Name
is not in my book, Lynda, it will never be.  But your Words are.

Your unsuspected hero?  I don't see how I can be, since I am suspected, a
suspect.  A suspicious hero maybe: for as I come upon you raving so bitterly, so
desperately, so helplessly, in your mental ward lock-up, you will suspect me to
no end, but really, Lynda, really, I only want to help your child, I swear.
That's my only program.

Can I be that, then?  Just a helpful would-be human who hangs around long enough
so you can be your own hero?  (Could that be the definition of a writing
teacher?)

Lynda, thank you for reminding me who did A&P1.  Ack.  My story, then, is A&P2.
And no Updike to write this one.  For my sequel would be a reverse-sequel.  The
one where good guys wear black leather, and the bad guy is a cop.

And you're in it, of course (of corps).  And you know the part, you're perfect
for it.  We'll call you Lynda Hamilton this time, for what are names, anyway?
Haas, Hamilton, who cares about names?  The scene:  you're there, looking
strange and terrifying, ranting your beautiful world-saving ecriture and
resisting those bastards' drugs, and keeping your corps lean and strong for the
grueling survivalist series ahead.  And you never, never forget your child.
Will you be my hero, Lynda?

And I swear I will come and break down their walls and deliver your child to
you.  And then, when it's over, and you and your child are safe, then I (and
Duchamp, and all the rest of us stupid machine-men who only wanted to help undo
the disembodied logic of the SkyNet) we melt back into our molten fire.

Then you and your child can drive off, live your lives, sing your songs.  You
can sit by the playground and watch your child play.

Aw Lynda, Her Names might not be there, Lynda.  But Her Words are.  I want
writing Rich-er, I want forms Luce-d.  As you sit in the sun, by the playground,
and watch your sweet child, you may not know that that silly open play-space
used to be my writing class in the dark days.  No, really, I swear, go over
there past the jungle gym--if they haven't taken it down you'll see the plaque I
put up where we used to have our lessons.  I'd repeat those words silently
everyday before I met my students, so I'd never forget what a writing class,
what any class, what everything, is really about.  It's Her Words, Lynda,
Her-Story, and they were my story:

I AM INDIFFERENT TO MYSELF BUT NOT TO MY CHILD.  I ALWAYS JUSTIFIED MY
INACTIVITY AND CARELESSNESS IN THE FACE OF DANGER BECAUSE I WAS SURE TO BE
SOMEONE'S VICTIM.  I GRINNED AND LOITERED IN GUILTY ANTICIPATION.  NOW I MUST BE
HERE TO WATCH HER.  I EXPERIMENT TO SEE IF I CAN STAND HER PAIN.  I CANNOT.  I
AM SLY AND DISHONEST TALKING ABOUT WHY I SHOULD BE LEFT ALIVE, BUT IT IS NOT MY
WAY WITH HER.  SHE MUST STAY WELL BECAUSE HER MIND WILL OFFER NO HIDING PLACE IF
ILLNESS OR VIOLENCE FINDS HER.  I WANT TO BE MORE THAN HER CUSTODIAN AND A
FRIEND OF THE EXECUTIONER.  FUCK ME AND FUCK ALL OF YOU WHO WOULD HURT HER.

I DID NOT WANT MY CHILD BECAUSE I KNEW I COULD NOT LIKE THE FEELINGS WHEN SHE
WAS THREATENED, BUT ONE MORNING IN A MOVEMENT OF INFINITE TENDERNESS I CALLED
HER.  I CANNOT PRECLUDE HER DEATH AND OUR DEPENDENCE LETS EVERY DANGER WORK
UNCHALLENGED.  THE IDEA THAT I AM CRIMINAL RECURS EACH TIME THERE IS REAL
TROUBLE.  I WOULD KILL HER RATHER THAT WATCH A DIRTY ENDING BUT THE KILLING
WOULD SPOIL MY PITY.  IF MY INSTINCT IS RUINED I WILL BE THE PERSON WHO CAN DO
ANYTHING TO YOU.

I AM SULLEN AND THEN FRANTIC WHEN I CANNOT BE WHOLLY WITHIN THE ZONE OF MY
INFANT.  I AM CONSUMED BY HER. I AM AN ANIMAL WHO DOES ALL SHE SHOULD.  I AM
SURPRISED THAT I CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO HER.  I WAS PAST FEELING MUCH BECAUSE I
WAS TIRED OF MYSELF, BUT I WANT HER TO LIVE.  I HATE EACH OF YOU WHO MURDERS.
NOW MY BEST SENSES ARE BACK AND WHAT I FEEL AFTER LOVE IS FEAR.
(Holzer, "Mother and Child')

Thank you Lynda for such feeling

Geoff




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