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 frien