A REINTERVIEW with Geoffrey Sirc, 4.

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.

=========================================================================
Date:         Thu, 5 Jan 1995 11:32:28 -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:      glue: URL for heuretic experiment

Hello PTers,
  During my reinvw I mentioned that I was trying out some of my pedagogical ide
as in the computer lab at U of Florida.  The final projects from my freshman wr
iting class may be read on Mosaic.  They are hypertext versions of mystories,
adapted to a course called Writing With Popular Culture.  The syllabus and
additional commentary along with the student work is available at the following
URL
   
http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~gulmer/
Feedback welcome!
best
glue
(Greg Ulmer)
 
================================================ 
Date:         Fri, 6 Jan 1995 15:36:57 -060
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      vjv->gs: Oh, uncanny stranger!

To: gs
From: vjv
RE: STARtin* up mo trouble on the re/inter/views with
        geoff sirc...


Hey, geoff, vvhat's shakin'?

I am writing a paper right now on the tail/tale (end) of which I call
"the hermeneutics of abandonment," and I went bk to nyeat-sky in
dis/order to read the opening section of WILL TO POWER, which
goes like this:

<<1. Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest
of all guests?>>

'tis a good question, is it not? My sense, and this may be only my
reflection, is that you and your article ("writing classroom as a & p
parking lot") are a-knockin at the door(s) of the school house--you,
so uncanny (not Red) stranger!--and ...
        --no one either can hear you
        --or wants to acknowledge your very presence.

(As Bataille says, it is best not to be recognized. 'Tis my favorite
rationalization! I take part in it at least once a day)

If you were to be acknowledged, the event of nihilism would have
to be acknowledged, that is, the event that would challenge all the
very basic *values* of lower/higher education, specifically, in literacy
(writin', thinkin', speakin', listenin', etc).

... as if they have not been and are still not being challenged, if not
all but replaced with we know not what, already....

For example, some of the questions that you got bk in early
December were predicated on very basic economic
assumptions: One being, we teach students literacy so that they
can go out and fit into the market.  Students should have some
sort of exchange value out there. Blah, blah, blah, you know the
argument!


*****

_____Do you think that your students, coming out of your class,
have any exchange value with your colleagues, or with the greater
market itself? Does this bother you? Is this important to you, etc.?
(Do you think, perhaps, that your students might become greater
purchasers of rap CDs?)

Forget that question!

One of the very different paravalues that Bataille has, and reaches
for, is to *produce* something/anything that would be *useless,*
without exchange value, that could not be appropriated by either
kapitalism or socialism.

*****

I mean, geoff--oh, strange guest here on reinvw--I really like the
fact that you have selected for your parking lot, NOT the schools'
parking lot, or any other parking lot, which would be attached to,
or adjacent to a place of HOMEness, but the A & P parking lot.
A & Ps have gone the way of the market, right? There used to be
lots of A & P stores in the D/FW area, consequently, lots of parking
lots:  now, either these lots are serving as lots for other businesses
(other HOMES) or they are just vacant, sort of useless except for
young, punk "troublemakers" who would park there on Friday and
Saturday nights, doing no good, at all .  It's the place where some
people go who do not fit in, who are restless, suffering, perhaps from
homesickness, or who are not in a statelessness of suffering but in

                exuberance,
                excess,
                more intense

than what use to count for .... etc. Later, as their parents want, they
will get a job, or will they? But in the meantime, one more time in the
A & P lot, this Friday night. (Or: are we to think, just fix the economy
and then this lumpenproletariat will have both a job and justice?!  HOW
does someone signify LAUGHTER here on the screem (sic.)?


*****

But the question, implied in all the above, that I want to ask is ...

_____Do you understand why it might be inevitable that you would
have problems with your audience, or a large part of it, in any case?
I mean, Geoff, you have chosen, as the locus of education, a parking
lot!

What a screem (sic.)! Parking students!! Atlantic and Pacific!! Oh,
you are so irreverent!!

The locus, for the time being, is where the punks, the refuse, the
trash, the economically purged (a&p, gone the way of the market)
... sit.  Home on the range, from A to P.

Some readers can claim that you, geoff, are a Nihilists, in the sense
that you want to negate their values by placing/situating education
in such a site, vvhile of course you can counter-claim that you are not
the negating force of their values, only the messenger of the uncanny
stranger at the door.  In your article, then, you would be saying,

        "LISTEN....  Do you now hear him....  Rap, rap, rapping at
our door? (...Quoth the rapper 'NEVERmo!')"

Nihilism knocking at their (our) door is the event of the loss of what
previously counted (and accounted for) values. Those values were
only from the discourse that, for a while, dominated the schools. Now
from outside, from the parking lot itself, from the media, comes not
Bennet's book(s) of virtue, but ...

        "Knock, Knock, Knock...."

Oh, Geoff, Geoff, Geoff, take thy vvicked beak from our sick-felt hearts!
How(l) could you have done this to us?

Now, where's richard bernstein ... when we really need him??

.)>.)>.)>.)>,)>

.)>.)>.)>

.)>,)> .)>      .)>.)>.)>,)>

.)>.)>.)>.)>,)>                         .)>.)>.)>

.)>,)> .)>.)>

.)>.)>,)>        .)>.)>.)>.)>,)>                 .)>.)>.)>

.)>,)> .)>.)>.)>.)>
                        ,)> .)>.)>.)>.)>,)


        > .)>.)>.)>.)>,)> .)>.)>.)>.)>

,)>
______

-----victor, maderator (sic/k)
SOPHIST@UTARLG.UTA.EDU 
 
======================================================
Date:         Sun, 8 Jan 1995 17:50:15 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      REINVW gs->vv:Think Not

_____Nihilism, Audience Problems

The subtitle of everything I write is lifted from Tupac Shakur:  "Holler If Ya
Hear Me."  Victor, thanks for the shout.  Of course I understand the response I
will get from so many people in my field.  I'm a field rhetorician, not a house
rhetorician.  When the HOME catches fire I pray for a strong wind.   I like a
rhetoric *du champ*.

May I say more about where I'm coming from?  I got into the field in the late
70's/early 80's when process theory was in full blossom.  It made much sense to
me, but then I saw it start to warp into the cognitive process theory stuff, the
ritualized process theory stuff, and that made no sense to me.  By the time the
social construction/cultural discourse lit-crit stuff hit, I was almost wholly
alienated from the field in terms of finding voices I felt rhymed with the real
of students and writing and me.  So I can only say, "But I think not."  In my
current scholarship, I've traveled to other fields where I hear that song I
liked so much then.

Trimbur says (after Cornel West) that what the field of compostion studies needs
is a dose of vulgar Marxism.  But I think not.  What it needs is a whiff of pure
Dadaism.  Here is Duchamp in '46--"Dada . . . was a sort of nihilism to which I
am still very sympathetic.  It was a way to get out of a state of mind--to avoid
being influenced by one's immediate environment, or by the past: to get away
from cliches--to get free.  The "blank" force of dada was very salutary.  It
told you "don't forget you are not quite so blank as you think you are!"
Usually a painter confesses he has his landmarks.  He goes from landmark to
landmark.  Actually he is a slave to landmarks--even to contemporary ones.
           Dada was very serviceable as a purgative" (SS 125).

"But I think not."  That's not just an empty cliche, actually; it's a quote.  A
citation from what I think is easily one of the greatest things written in my
field.  May '68 was a pretty intense time globally, and locally too.  Why, in
April of 68, 4Cs was right here in Mpls, reeling with the news of Martin's
assasination.  The next day Ernece B. Kelly stood up and read "Murder of the
American Dream" to the Mpls C's crowd, a short paper on why she was not having
it any more, why she had to leave the C's.  It's in the May 68 _CCC_ and well
worth your time.  In it Professor Kelly talks about what it's like to sit and
listen to the silly drama at 4C's, all the while knowing the drama is really a
*trauerspiel* of the loss of hope and opportunity.

The April 68 conference was a watershed, purgative moment for her--she came as
an English instructor, she says, and she left as a Black woman.  In a few brief
lines she traces her own brand of tedium with the C's (Hey Victor, whatever
happened to the PTCz chronicle of boredom?  Here's another entry, a boredom so
acute as to amount to a difference . . . ):  "I am tired, very tired of being
the object of studies, the ornament in professional or academic groups, the
object to be changed, reshaped, made-over.  I feel sure that thousands of Black
students would echo those words" (108).  Word, Ernece, and so would thousands of
students of every other color.  She wants to end her cold appraisal with hope,
but she has none; ending instead with "But I think not" (108).  Rap, rap, rap,
eh V?  Nevermo'.

So for me, composition studies is a scene haunted by the disappearance of Kelly,
Macrorie, Coles, et al.  It's very difficult for me to write sometimes, knowing
it's all been said before in Macrorie's UPTAUGHT--"the live, squirming papers"
(1) his students write; the class he offers in which "student and professor
share their expert knowledge and their experience" (168); his musing on how
bombs being planted at the time in campus ROTC headquarters should "more
properly" be planted "in professors' offices" (185).  His class is very much the
Cage Class, as I see it; Macrorie wants a tail-gating party where no one needs
re-shaping, where a student finds s/he "is capable of seeing the world, human
and natural, in a way valuable to others.  And capable of learning from others
to see it even more sharply" (186).

I said in A&P (67) that *trauerspiel* is the perfect allegory for contemporary
compostion.  Steiner, in his intro to Benjamin's *Ursprung*, traces the
difference between *Tragodie* and *Trauerspiel*--briefly tragedy is mythic,
heroic, monumental, ritualistic; *trauerspiel* is rooted in history, it's
"counter-transcendental; it celebrates the immanence of existence even when this
existence is passed in torment.  It is emphatically 'mundane,' earth-bound,
corporeal" (16).  Kelly, Macrorie, those folks are very much rooted in the
situation of students, their torment at having to undergo what Macrorie calls
the "astonishing failures" of compostion classes.  And what Kelly sees as a loss
of the "richness and values" (107) of the ghetto street in composition classes.

I appreciate that you put it in terms of exchange value, Victor.  I'm more
interested in simple use(less) value.  And what I see with much of contemporary
compostion is a profound emphasis on exchange value.  On writing as capital.  I
don't like to keep singling out David B, but he captures things so well--in this
case with his constant emphasis on "the writing that I value" ("Negotiation as
Revision"), or, in "Inventing the University" (the Bleak House of comp studs)
"the writing we favor."  It might as well come from the little mustachioed guy
on the Monopoly cards.  It's the Monopoly Man's allegory, "The Study of (Bank)
Error (in Your Favor)."  I'm not surprised DB was the first one to move
composition studies into the cargo culture of Pratt's contact zone, where one
discourse meets another.  I feel we need to move beyond simple notions of
discursive interface.  We need an awareness of the speed of technology, the
on-coming crash-site of the uptaught machine.  We have to go beyond the
obviousness of the contact zone to the inevitability of the panic-zone.

Do I feel weird for sending students out not being able to shark-write?  Not
really, cause I'm not sure I do.  Not trying for self-aggrandizement here, but
my college's Curriculum Director did a survey of students who successfully
transferred from our open admissions college and are well on their way to
finishing, asking them what in the college's two years helped most, and my name
came up far more than any other instructor's.  I'm happy & sad at that, of
course.  It's the Bataillean paradox, as you (and Stoekel) note, Victor--the
ultimate use-fulness of the use-less.  All I can do is give students what I feel
is an exciting space to think about compostion.  While we do that, I over-dub a
quick-and-dirty course in the basic technology of writing.  I think that's
important, technology as opposed to technique.

Back to the architectural metaphor, then.  Technology causes a re-thinking of
the whole program of architecture.  Ours is an age when physical space is
rendered meaningless by technology: the house, for example, becomes re-thought
with the garage as the centerpiece (Virilio 80).  Composition studies insists on
the grammar of the monument, despite the "complete disintegration of the
building" technology ushers in.  Better to teach student-cyborgs how to adapt in
the ruins of our techno-speed crash-site.  We must, then question exactly how
much writing is to be done in the composition class, when weighed against how
much attention should be focused on working with the already-written.  (As
Joseph Schwartz said _CCC_ 68, in his review of Christensen's _Notes Toward a
New Rhetoric_, "Most people do not learn to write well, as the journals in any
field will testify."  Yet compostion insists on the perfectability of student
writing.)  So maybe a shift from production-centers to reception-sites?
First-year comp may come to mean understanding how compostions work rather than
producing new landmarks.  This would mean a return to the idea of compostion in
general.

Problems with my audience, Victor?  Yeah, well.  May I say one more thing about
where I'm coming from?  I neglected to mention this story in my PTCz
autobiography, and I see now I should have.  My mother, Peggy Lee, was going
nowhere in her career in the mid-fifties, and so decided to go back to school.
She chose Western Michigan, in order to be in the same state as that Detroit
Sound, which she loved so much.  There she met, though never married, my father,
an English instructor, whose name I promised them both I would never reveal.
She once told me she loved the way he read Thoreau to his class.  They would
meet often at the campus Snack Bar, reading to each other their favorite lines
from King Lear, and soon began an affair which lasted several years.

My mother had two children by this instructor--me and my sister, Dusty
Springfield, who became a fine entertainer in her own right.  After a few more
years in Kalamzoo, she decided to go back on the road, and tearfully she left my
sister and I behind.  My father, too, was saddened that his life (he was
married, with kids of his own) had no room for us, either.  There was a very
tearful time as Dusty and I said good-bye to them for the last time.  Mom gave
me an 8-track tape of James Brown's _Hot Pants_ which was quite popular at the
time, and which she and my dad danced to often.  And Dad, well, my daddy, he
didn't leave me much, you know, he was a very simple man, but what he tell me
was this, he did say, son, he said, he say, "You know it's possible to become so
defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you and if
that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your own ways."
As the years have passed, and I too have followed my daddy's career path, I
always wondered if, in those final words, he was talking to me or to the
professional organization he was heading at the time.

Geoff 
================================================== 
Date:         Mon, 9 Jan 1995 22:41:13 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      pfg->gs: a simple question

Geoff,
_____What are the implications of your pedagogy for writing center people like
me?

_____What would be different about a session with your students, provided they
were working on texts they polished outside of the LAN context?

_____How could my tutors and I be sure we were helping your students do what
your class has set up to accomplish?

My one simple question grew and grew.  I'll stop now.  You get the gist.

Paula Gillespie
gillespiep@vms.csd.mu.edu

 
                     
================================================ 
Date:         Tue, 10 Jan 1995 19:33:11 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->pfg:wtg ctrs

_____How writing centers can help when you try to do something different in
compostion.

Paula, that's an excellent question.  I'll speak from experience.  One problem
of course is this sort of scenario: the student who comes back from writing
center session(s), and then we talk about his/her paper/process, and I say, "Oh,
gee, why did you change that?  That was very strong.  I thought it really
captured things well."  And the student says, "They told me to cut that out
downstairs."  So how do we finesse this cross-purposes thing?  How do we stop a
student from being further frustrated?

As I've said, I try to maintain a strong tension between formal and informal
writing in my class.  "Here is the way the university would want this," as well
as "Here is what writers do which is maybe not so prized by the university, but
which is pretty powerful, pretty meaningful."  Keeping that tension is hard, but
important.  But the use of certain readings, songs, videos, interviews, helps.
I don't want to imply that writing centers can only help with the
university-sponsored side of things, but they certainly can help there, of
course.

In my 4-5 formal assignments, other than topic and the readings we've used to
develop our con/textual discussion, I'm really pretty ordinary, so there might
be nothing different, Paula, in a session with my students.  The university
(I've talked to a lot of faculty in various departments to verify this) still
wants a focused discussion, not a discontinuous series of journal-style
observations.  It still wants ideas developed, usually by using prior-textual
support.  It still wants SWE, punctuation, grammar.

I spell out things very carefully in assignment sheets for students, as well as
in on-going discussions.  We review basic structure of writing, seeing what
holds it together, so I think I keep those frustrations I spoke of above to a
minimum.  I try to have assignments/readings build on each other, so the
students can gradually be immersed in a dialogue or question that they want to
explore in writing.  When they go to another space to get help, they have a kind
of on-going history or energy with a topic to discuss, a question that grows in
them.

Those are the sessions, it seems, that work best--the student who is gripped by
a topical discussion and is a more active participant in a dialogue with a wtg
ctr consultant.  A student who can help guide the discussion there.  I'd like to
think that might be different, Paula.  That a student is more enthused to
explore a scene.  And I have many students who report on successful sessions in
the wtg ctr based on this strong sense of exigency.  I also encourage students
to draw on a variety of sources, even degraded ones, so that might be different
too, a student pondering a broader range of textual support.

The textual source thing is a problem, and I've met with the guy who heads our
wtg ctr (David Healy) many times to figure out a way that his folks can give
even better feedback, teaching, to my students.  Outside of having one or two of
his employees read all the readings my students do, there seems no way out of
the content gap between my students and the wtg ctr people.  This causes an
aphasia or ultimate breakdown in the session, as students and wtg ctr people
often report.  I don't know how to get around this.  Other than use texts
familiar to everyone.

I want to hope my students know where and why they have richness in their work
and how they can best draw on that liveliness in their formal papers.  I want
them to know what good, generalizable ideas about the technology of compostion
are, and how to ask for them, how to know where they need basic structural help.
As they learn/review how to build a basic shed, they also see some of the
interesting ways people can decorate their sheds.  They realize, I hope, what
interesting ideas for shed-decoration they already have.  The wtg ctr staff has
a certain rate of turn-over, but those who hang around for any length of time
get familiar with the decoration part of my pedagogy.

Geoff

 
==================================================
Date:         Wed, 11 Jan 1995 16:13:30 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      voidboy: A simple request

_____Geoff, I wonder if I could have a copy of your syllabus?  Maybe seeing
your theory in action would help clarify some things for me.  I read your
articles and responses and think, "Absolutely!!!"  Then I leave to go work
and think, "Uh...duh...huh?" and get quite frustrated.

Pragmatically yours,

  The Void Boy

===================================================
Date:         Fri, 13 Jan 1995 17:38:08 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->vb:syllabus

_____A Syllabus of the Ugly & Ordinary

Void Boy & interested others.  I'm flattered and embarrassed that you ask about
my syllabus, since I think it's so nothing.  I will give you readings,
assignments, and the overall dynamic for the first of my two courses, though,
since you asked.  (If you want stuff for the second--which readings I use on
rap, which songs--or if you want full citations for anything mentioned in
here--e-mail me at sircx001@maroon.tc.umn.edu.  The methodology for my second
course is very much that of my first, just more student responsibility in terms
of finding materials.)  I remind you I teach a two-quarter sequence for
first-year, open admissions students.  Both courses were departmentally given
theme-y sorts of hooks around which to button-hole student inquiry.

Course 1 discusses ideas of literacy and education.  In my course, we read
Malcolm X's autobiography throughout (if you are really intersted in this
course, you can read an article I wrote about it in Journal of Basic Writing,
13.1 (Spring 1994), for more info, snapshots, etc).  I break the book up into 5
thematic arcs, which the writings and supplemental readings play to.  For each
"formal" essay students write, they also write a couple of informal papers on
related topics and do e-mail messages to me, and have e-conferences (on
significant points in the reading)--so there's a bustle of textuality we can
talk about.  Also, as soon as a batch of formal papers comes in, we look at a
couple as structural samples.

First, as we read about Malcolm's formal schooling and early life, students
write informal papers on various subjects--their own literacy (including certain
key points in its evolution), why did school work/not work for Malcolm.  We also
read a couple of overviews on Malcolm (since some students have a dim
representation of him), which are from Emerge Magazine & Newsweek of Feb. 1990
(25th anniversay overviews).  The Emerge thing is great cause it's a collection
of brief, person-on-the-street sound-bites on Malcolm, of wildly varying
accuracy and sympathy.  We also read Ted Sizer's article on "What High School
Is".  Students write a first formal paper on Why School as They Know it
Works/Doesn't Work.

2nd Arc--as Malcolm gets more and more of his education on the streets, we talk
about other ways our culture schools.  We have a lot of fun bringing in stuff
that schools us--we have one or two days where I bring in a few popular texts
(ads, magaizines, catalogues, TV Guide, comics, a song lyric, etc.) and ask a
few questions, then students each bring in something they think shows how we're
being schooled, and they present it to the class and we all discuss (it's
great!)  Students do informal papers on Malcolm's informal schooling and the
things they brought in.  Besides Malcolm's hustling years, we also read articles
like "How Seventeen Magazine Undermines Young Women," an article on the
criminalization of rap, Leon Bing's interview with Bloods & Crips, and
selections from the secret fraternity logs of the Deke's (all of these dealing
with non-formal kinds of schooling--the skull beneath the skin of contemporary
culture).  Then they write a formal essay on what they think our culture is
teaching us, drawing on a couple sources.

Arc 3--As Malcolm in prison learns the NoI's ideology,  we talk a little about
ideology, how constructions of reality become reality, especially as this plays
itself out in education.  So we read the first chapter from Hirsch's Cultural
Literacy and a chunk from Bloom on The Clean Slate, to see how they construct
what students are and what education should be.  For informal writings, we write
Dear Mr. Hirsch, Dear Mr. Bloom letters.  We also read interviews with rappers
Ice Cube and Chuck D (which present a view of education wholly opposed to
Hirsch's), an article from Jet magazine in which Houston Baker talks about how
students could learn more from rap music, also a great editorial by James
Bernard from The Source magazine on the national dialogue and who has access and
who gets suffocated.  Students also find and report on articles about Hirsch
and/or Bloom.  The they write a formal paper (drawing mainly on H and/or B, but
using everything we've read so far, incorporating any informal writing or
e-conferencing or e-mail) on the Representation of Students.  Around this time
we have an in-class midterm essay exam so they can practice how well they'd do
in a timed university writing situation.

Arc 4--(I'm probably gonna change this, but this is what I've been doing for the
past couple of years).  We're deep into Malcolm's critique of the
socio-political in America.  We keep our educational focus by looking at how
Malcolm's ideas are played out on campus today.  So some of those "politically
correct" cover stories from Newsweek and New York mags of three years ago.
Also, the cover story on Sexual Correctness in Newsweek of October 93 (which
students are VERY interested in writing about/reading about).  Snapshot articles
from a variety of places where the impact of race and/or gender comes into play
in academia, Banks on multicultural ed, Shelby Steele sometimes, Maxine Hairston
sometimes (on what a writing course should be about--not politically charged
material), there are so many things to use.  Then, students informally pick one
or two "scenes" and discuss them.  They also find an article in the same vein
and report on it.  Then they write a formal essay (a tissue of whatever texts so
far seem relevant) trying to speak to the problem of why these problems exist in
education today.

Arc 5--We've finished Malcolm's book.  We read some reviews of the book
published in Nov 65, from Newsweek (hysterical) and Saturday Review (quite
incisive), Penn Warren's 1967 piece in Yale Review on X as humanist, Rev. Albert
Cleage's eulogy in Feb. 67 (refusing to see X as humanist, insisting on
separatist), Joe Wood on how diffcult it is to fix an interpretation of Malcolm.
We write informally on what's one thing we liked about Malcolm, one thing we
disliked.  Then we write a formal paper that springs from a brief article by
Peter Bailey, Malcolm's disciple in the OAAU, where he calls Malcolm a "master
teacher"--we write on what exactly Malcom was a master teacher of.

That's the first ten weeks.  Sorry it's so dull.  But much of the excitement
comes in the attitude I bring and students bring, on the in-corporation.

Geoff

 
================================================ 
Date:         Mon, 16 Jan 1995 16:47:20 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      vjv->gs: aesthetics, 1 of 2 [Long]

VJV->GS (part 1 of 2, long)
re: follovv-up, aesthetics and the a&p
        writing class(room)
re: and belly-dancing, etc.


Geoff, before carrying on with this discussion, I would like (need)
to respond to a couple of your aside-questions, dealing with
*audience* and *PTCz.*

_____problems with audience?

... not to vvorry, because I don't, and I really doubt that many
people do. As I have said repeatedly, "Audiences are highly
over-rated."  So go with your drift (_de'rive_) of things.  We are
drifting--given the fate of the sign--whether or not anyone else
wants to admit of such a drift.

_____PTCzzz (the pretext conversations of the hystery of
boredom)?
        Well, vve are *doing* it, alvvays doing it.  And yet, how about
the GE-net? We will have done that too in time.

Now that things have been (a) setup....

*****

_____Bellydancing banned on PTCs (REINVW)?

GS, given the responses to you in Nov and early Dec, there is,
as you don't need to be told, no reason(s) to don your _hijab_.
What? Well, here is the  (another) context.

 The other night, I was reading one of my favorite mags,
other than P/T, which is _Allure_ (a wonderful sophistic mag that,
given the ed policy, is able to make fun of itself). *Allure* is about
cosmetics, or sorta metacosmetics for a world that knows better
than to live in boredom, knows the fate of the sign (_apate_)
for some time now, and gives instructions in how to prepare the face
to meet the faces, etc.

But, anyway, the world demands boredumb.

Anyway, there is this wonderful article in it entitled


                *B  E  LL  Y  '  S    LAST JAM*.

(...Drifting, de'riving, and jammin')

It is all about how "The art of belly dancing is under siege from
Islamic fundamentalists."

Now, this is a long quote, so if any other reader would not like
the longness of this post, then, now is the time to DELETE.

(...The article is by Geraldine Brooks and is reprinted from
her book _Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic
Women_.)

GS,

Here is how it begins:

<>

...now with the pretext out of the way, turn to part 2....

*****
================================================== 
Date:         Mon, 16 Jan 1995 16:55:57 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      vjv->gs: Aesthetics, part 2 of 2 [Long]

VJV->GS
part 2... [long]

Quoting this passage (in part 1) and its subject--I am very much
aware--**is**--and especially in relation to your article--tricky.
Did I say tricky?  Or strickly dangerous!

But I want to talk about belly dancing (without bellying up, bellow-
ing, belching out what cannot be digested, without bellcurving it!,
and perhap/less as belluchi might have).

It seems to me one of the problems--at least, for some members
of the audience (people who teach writing)--might be understood
in terms of *aesthetics.*  In other words, instead of dealing with the
problem of literacy in terms of true reasons or 'good' reasons, you
go (paradoxically) to aesthetic reasons (both beautiful and ugly
... and to be sure/less monstrous).

To begin with, aesthetic approaches to anything, but esp edu-
cation, have been held in the highest suspicion. So-called
Aesthetic States end up being fascists in the long run. I have
Schiller and his *Marionettentheater* and the Marinetti and the
Futurists, in mind.

(So as to keep to a minimum a total mis/understanding (Ha!) here,
I do not think that fascism necessarily follows, and spend my time--
most of my time--as you well know, going with the aesthetic, and
for ethical-political, nonfascistic purposes. And yet, I am still well
aware of the danger, just as I am aware of the dangers present in
the so-called true and good reasons, as well. There is no locus
without danger.)

Therefore, let's leap to the point....

_____What's the distance, if any, from fascism (in all its historical
manifestations) and gangsta rap?

[[** For me fascism, as Foucault conceives of it, is the love of
power, the love of *the very thing* that dominates us! ]]

state fascism vs gangsta rap?

Or between unwearing the _hijab_ or wearing it? (Having a big bank
account, no matter what?) For me, Brooks's article on belly dancers
says many, many things about power, different kinds of power.
To be un/sure, the contents of the article can be read in one single
way--correctly--just as, unfortunately, gangsta rap can be
read flatly!  One way: is there not another, yet third way? Is the choice
simply disjunctive: taking it off, so to speak, or wearing the _hijab_.
The third choice, What might it be?  Liberation?  What would that
be?  Do we know?  How might it be represented? Much, much, much
has been written about this question.  How would liberation (from
ignorance to enlightenment) be represented here ... thirdly?


It can easily be said that *either choice* (to take it off and shake it or to
totally cover it up ... both get lots of money ....) is determined by way
of submission to power.  What would the other, third way look like ...
as Marx might say in the classlessroom?

Baubo raises her skirt, and we get to laugh!?  What is this laughter?
Gangsta rappers unrap their tunes about rape and other forms of
violence, and they laugh (at 'us')!? What is this laughter?  A corporate
CEO closes a company in Flint and destroys thousands of human
beings' lives, and he laughs? What this laughter? (Is Gangsta rap a
parody of human beings now  without flint or ways and means?)

Are gangsta rappers home-grown revolutionaries?

_____In relation to gangsta rap: Is the choice disjunctively between
in the classroom building or out in the parking lot? Between Natty
Hawthorne ("the minister's blackveil"!! In class) or gangstarapper
(blasting away, out in the a&p parking lot)?  Thirdly?

_____How might these rap(ture)toons open up the conditions for the
possibilities of thinking about third options ?  Have your students
intimated?

_____Again, Is IT (what are we talkin' about?)  representable?

Liberation through the dominant discourse? Or through the dominant,
also violent counter-discourse?  After all is said and undone, money
(Kapital) is being tossed at both! By the market shakers and movers.
Thirdly? Without Kapital?

_____Again, have your students intimated? What this 'liberated'
literacy might be ... like?

__________

vjv, un/saVVy
SOPHIST@UTARLG.UTA.EDU


be ... like ... uncynthetically?
==============================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Jan 1995 18:44:43 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Organization: Miami University (Ohio USA)
Subject:      VoidBoyz->vjv: @ 'Laughtear'

Reading through V2 (Rocketman's) most recent post, I was struck by all the
hilarity.

It reminded me of Milan Kundera (of course):  The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting.  There are many kinds of laughter:  Of joy, of the Sublime, of
mockery, of callous disregard and hatred, of mind numbing and forgetting.

There is a great story about Karl Barth (theologian extrodinaire), how he was
the only person to make so furious as to reduce him to tears.  How?  By
laughing at him.

I am reminded of the teenagers in the East Bay (KKKalifornia) who, upon
seeing a rather gruesome scene from "Schindler's List" of a womon being shot
in the head by a Nazi, *laughed*.

Isn't Satan also the great jokester?  And I wonder why Jesus is never thought
of as laughing; he cracked a good joke or two...

Ah, our aesthetics can be so mixed a bag of goodies (and baddies).  Couldn't
we envision liberation as one Great Big joke?  The laughter of freedom, and
the freedom to laugh.  Strictly dangerous; the kind of thing that got Cynics
killed.

Dont' smile.  People might worry about you.

--The Void Boy

=======================================================
Date:         Tue, 17 Jan 1995 18:55:40 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->vv:rap as delay

_____State fascism vs. gangsta rap; beyond the disjunctive

Victor, I can only respond, gesture towards a third way, in terms of silence.  A
pause, a stoppage, a delay, inertia.  To hear what we are missing.  The moment
that would give us pause.  The sick joke behind the Rodney King/LAPD coverage
was how these media folks would solemnly shake their heads and ask, "Who knew?"
Well, lots of people, but a certain flow maybe swept up too many, did not give
them pause.

Rap is one way that would give us pause.  Sure, Victor, rap can be a simple
mirror of power and oppression.  Violence and racism and anti-feminism.  But it
can be something else.  A first step in an emptying, a depletion of the aura
around those notions.  A language move that might make language stop.  An
inertia, in Baudrillard's terms, "defy[ing] the world to be more" (_Ecst of
Comm_ 100).  The laughter of rap can be the joyful laughter of black style or
the hollow laughter of black nihilism.  But each of those laughs give pause, in
that they are other than.

You ask about students.  My student Kathy saw the need for a delay, a delay that
might be brought about first by rap's reversibility:  "Oppression is a social
problem an[d] like many other problems such as homelessness, unemployment, and
poverty, it feeds dual temptations.  On one hand, we try to ignore it as long as
it doesn't immediately affect us.  On the other hand, we are overwhelmed and see
it as inevitable and intractable.  We must resist both temptation[s].  Our first
step in overcoming our problems of oppression is to understand what black
America is going through and see it through their point of view.  This is why it
is important to be knowledgeable about rap."  I think she's getting beyond the
disjunctive in there, Victor.

My student Ebony offers her view on Ice Cube's lyrics for NWA's "Gangsta,
Gangsta" ("Cause I'm the type of nigga that's built to last, fuck wit' me, I'll
put my foot in your ass"): "I think lyrics like this are pretty interesting,
because it seems to try to show so much power.  At no other time in history has
a black man in this country been able to make such a statement without having to
worry about being lynched.  It seems like Cube, as a black man, has just
expressed what millions of black men before have wanted to say, whether it rings
true or not."  She sees the power-infatuation in the lines, the fascism, but
she's seeing it as an interruption.  She sees, I'd say, not the beauty of
violence but what Duchamp calls "the beauty of indifference" (_SS_ 30).  I hope
Ebony does not want to stay in this world (I know she doesn't, based on other
things she's written/said.)  I sure don't want a world where Cube is prevented
from voicing those sentiments, just as I don't want a world where Cube has to
make those sentiments (they're the same world, right?  just as the violence of
gangsters co-habits with the violence of state fascism).  I don't want to live
in the negative, the reverse-image, of course.  And I think that's where a lot
of people have problems with gangsta rap.

The world gave the situationists pause, made them realize the world had to be
changed.  We see that in rap.  The pause of Snoop at the beginning of his
record; his simple pleasure in the bathtub with his significant other; then,
when his boys drop by, Snoop confesses how he is thinking about getting out of
the gang, how the gangster's version of the American Dream (power, money,
fascism) just doesn't ring true anymore.

Jean Susquet captures how a delay, in the form of allegory, can lead to an
other-ness, to life beyond mere reversibility, when he comments on the
"allegorical appearance" of the Large Glass, how its allegory becomes a delay,
"exalting above all a single moment . . . when everything is *possible* but in
suspense" (110).  And La Monte Young advocated "listen to what you'd ordinarily
look at," a dislocation that would be interesting but ultimately trivial unless
there were the relocation of perception in a place where it had never been so
that the world would be more.  In the same way, Blanchot does not want trash and
banality simply for their own sake, but in the way they return us to existence
in the way it is lived, "the moment when, lived, it escapes every speculative
formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity" (_Yale French Studies_ 73,
14).

There was no delay in "Rapper's Delight" (1979), the jam most people point to as
the first truly popular rap song.  Wonder Mic sings about how much he loves
living for the weekend when as MC he can really rock a party.  The line my
students laugh at (choke on) the most is when Wonder Mic, behind the bounciest,
most infectious beat you've ever heard, blithely raps, "Skittely be-bop, we
rock, scooby do, guess what America we love you!"  The notion of a rapper loving
America these days is . . . well, never mind.  It was three years later that
Grandmaster Flash & Co. disrupted the groovy flow of rap-as-funky-dance-track,
to rip a delay through it, using the lyrics not to boast about how fabulous they
were as MC's but to chronicle life in their neighborhood.  Image after image of
daily life ("broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stairs you know they
just don't care") leads to the mind-numbing refrain, "It's like a jungle
sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under."  It's as simple as
Marvin Gaye giving us all pause to wonder "What's Goin On?"

Chuck D has that delay.  Stop the flow, he says ("I'm past the days of yes
y'allin'").  Reverse the flow: "They tell lies in the books you're readin'"  I
just read an article calling Wayne Campbell's ". . . Not!" the most influential
trope to enter contemporary language.  I'm not surprised.  One of the best books
I've read recently is Cornelia Lauf & Susan Hapgood's catalogue for their Fluxus
retrospective called _FluxAttitudes_, and it's not so good for the articles in
it (a couple nice ones; Bruce Altshuler on "The Cage Class" is in there), but
it's great for the textual strategy of having Nancy Dwyer's "Heckling Catalogue"
underscore every page of the book.  So the words on each page aren't printed on
blank paper, but on already-filled paper: each page is under-printed with a
different saying from Dwyer's Heckling Catalogue," like "NONSENSE," "A WASTE OF
TIME," "GET OVER IT," "DON'T BELIEVE A WORD," "GET A LIFE," "SAYS WHO?" etc.
While you are reading, you are unreading; Bokononists understand this.

I think that's what rap at its best does--it provides us with a heckling
catalogue to contemporary media, a reversibility.  We have a couple of examples
of radio stations in Minneapolis that play so-called "alternative" music, and
some of the stuff is great, sure, but it always kills me to see how they've
narrow-casted these stations--the music is all by white groups, roughly the same
age.  There's never a rap cut played, and I always think, "*This* is
'alternative'?  Rap's not 'alternative'?"  There's no real flow-interruption
with most of that music, no real heckling catalogue (except, say, Nine Inch
Nails or Kurt Cobain croaking that Ledbelly tune, which sure as hell gives me a
moment of utter stoppage every time I hear it).

How do students respond to this, Victor?  Does it bring about liberated
literacy?  Well, there are a lot of students who appreciate the moment of
suspense given by rap's heckling catalogue.  I often have students that write
like Tom: "Although I didn't like rap before this class and I don't like it now,
I have a greater respect for the performers of rap."  I don't care if they like
rap (in fact, one of my most interesting students last quarter said, "I used to
like rap a lot more; now after this class, I don't like to listen to it all that
much"--same sort of response, I think); but I do care about respect.

I think an attitude of respect for the words and lives of others can be
personally liberating.  One of the songs we listen to is Arrested Development
(the Delay!)'s "Mr. Wendal," which is a rap about how Speech (the rapper) knows
this bum who he likes to give money to, in exchange for the stories and stuff
Mr. Wendal tells him.  We discuss that scenario--is he making a bum a hero?
Should we romanticize the homeless?  Is that good or bad?  Students really like
turning this puzzle-song around.  But the puzzle ends with something as simple
(I would say liberating) as the realization that Mr. Wendal is "a man, a human
in flesh, but not by law," a person who deserves "dignity to stand with pride."
I think all the news about Quibalah Shabazz is fascinating.  We will keep coming
back to Malcolm for the rest of our lives.  Life will always be underscored by
his X, his ". . . Not!" until we accept the challenge of making life more.  ". .
 to be a human being . . . to be given the rights of a human being, in this
society, on this earth, in this day . . . by any means necessary."  Go 'head,
Mr. Wendal.

Geoff

===================================================
Date:         Wed, 18 Jan 1995 10:39:47 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      SAvvY->gs&voidboyz: laughter #1

Dancing, duncing, krying, tearing, laffin (Laugh-In!), pissin', f/arting,
dissertating ...

ETC.

Collection #1

from: SAvvY

to and for: gs and VoidBoyz

-------------------


1. A Fragment

"One must destroy one's adversaries' seriousness with laughter,
and their laughter with seriousness."

------Gorgias


2a. THE DANCING SONG

"Do not cease dancing, you lovely girls! No killjoy has come to you
with evil eyes, no enemy of girls. God's advocate am I before the
devil:  but the devil _is_ the spirit of gravity.  How could I, you light-
footed ones, be an enemy of godlike dances? Or of girls' feet with
pretty ankles?

[...]

Do not be angry with me, you beautiful dancers, if I chastise the little
god [cupid] a bit. He may cry and weep--but he is laughable even
when he weeps. And with tears in his eyes he shall ask you for a
dance, and I myself will sing a song for his dance; a dancing and
mocking song on the spirit of gravity, my supreme and most
powerful devil, of whom they say that he is 'master of the world.' "

-----Nietzsche (Zarathustra), "The Dancing Song" in _Thus Spake..._


2b.  THE FUTURE

... our _laughter_ may yet have a future.

-----Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_


3a. THE KIND OF THE WOOD

I'm only the laughter that  takes hold of me. The impasse I sink into
and into which I disappeared is only the immensity of the laughter.

-----Georges Bataille, _Gulty_.


3B. I'M TREMBLING, LAUGHING

Can someone really _laugh to death_? (The image is bizarre, but
I don't have another.)  [...]  You can't keep up your laughter--keeping
it up is ponderous. Laughter hangs suspended, it doesn't affirm
anything, doesn't assuage anything.
        Laughter is a leap from possible to impossible and from
impossible to possible. But it's only a leap. To maintain this leap
would be to reduce impossible to possible _or the other way
around_.

-----Georges Bataille, _Guilty_.


4. "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes"

(title of article in response to Wayne Booth, who had attempted
to explain him.)

-----KB


5.   A FUNCTION OF LAUGHTER

"Text: my body--shot through with streams of song; I don't mean the
overbearing, clutchy 'mother' but, rather, what touches you, the equi-
voice that affects you, fills your breast with an urge to come to
language and launches your force; the rhythm that laughs you. [...]
a force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out of the codes."

-----Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa"


6.  SCHIZO

Laughter--and not meaning. Schizophrenic laughter or revolutionary
joy.

-----G. Deleuze, "Nomad Thought"


7.  (ON TWO KINDS OF LAUGHTER)

        Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and
angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels.
Things are clearly more complicated.
        Angels are partisans not of Good, but of divine creation.
The Devil, on the other hand, denies all rational meaning to God's
world.
        World domination, as everyone knows, is divided between
demons and angels. But the good of the world does not require
the latter to gain precedence over the former (as I thought when
I was young); all it needs is a certain equilibrium of power. If there
is too much uncontested meaning on earth (the reign of the
angels), man collapses under the burden; if the world loses all its
meaning (the reign of the demons), life is every bit as impossible.
        Things deprived suddenly of their putative meaning, the
place assigned them in the ostensible order of things (a Moscow-
trained Marxist who believes in horoscopes), makes us laugh.
Initially, therefore, laughter is theprovince of the Devil. It has a
certain malice to it (things have turned out differently from the way
they tried to seem), but a certain beneficent relief as well (things are
looser than they seemed, we have greater latitude in living with
them, their gravity does not oppress us).
        The first time an angel heard the Devil's laughter, he was
horrified. It was in the middle of a feast with a lot of people around,
and one after the other they joined in the Devil's laughter. It was
terribly contagious. The angel was all too aware the laughter was
aimed aginst God and the wonder of His works. He knew he had
to act fast, but felt weak and defenseless. And unable to fabricate
anything of his own, he simply turned his enemy's tactics against
him. [[Ahhhhh, Gorgias got to the devil!!!!]]He opened his mouth
and let out a wobbly, breathy sound in the upper reaches of his
vocal register  ... and endowed it with the opposite meaning.
Whereas the Devil's laughter pointed up the meaninglessness of
things, the angel's shout rejoiced in how rationally organized, well
conceived, beautiful, good, and sensible everything on earth was.
        There they stood, Devil and angel, face to face, mouths
open, both making more or less the same [Rappin'] sound, but
each expressing himself in a unique timbre--absolute opposites.
And seeing the laughing angel, the Devil laughed all the harder,
all the louder, all the more openly, because the laughing angel was
infinitely laughable.
        Laughable laughter is cataclysmic. And even so, the
angels have gained something by it. They have tricked us all with
their semantic hoax. Their imitation laughter and its original (the
Devil's) have the same name. People nowadays do not even realize
that one and the same external phenomenon embraces two com-
pletely contradictory internal attitudes. There are two kinds of
laughter, and we lack the words to distinguish them.

-----Milan Kundera, "The Angels" _The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting_


8.  THE THEATER

It may seem comic to say it, but every laugh you hear in the theater
is a semiotic break. Which is to say that _meaning stops for that
moment_, as if in homage to more than meaning, which is the
millennial fantasy of coherence in language as the play of an
ultimate form.

-----Herb Blau, _The Eye of Prey_


9.  ON LAUGHTER AND HYSTERY

Seriousness--this serious laughter, laughter beyond joking--is
endemic to our academik discussions of our history, that is, our
_history of rhetorik_. (Is this seriousness not doubly serious?--
in that the history of rhetorik is already "a lack"; after all, we know
so little of our history! But then again, ironically in the face of this
lack, I often hear this (fragmented) history referred to as _The_
History of Rhetorik!) It has become a very _serious_, monolithic-
totalizing narrative! (Has it not?) this business of obsessively "re-
hearsing" the history of rhetoric! It's a symptom of what is not, but
sub/junctively what could "nontheless-hysterically become."

-----VJV, "What's 'at stake' in the Gorgian Fragment on
Seriousness/Laughter" _P/T_ 10.1-2


10.   " 'Breaking Up' [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter for Politics
and Pedagogy."

(Title of Brilliant Dissertation being written by Diane Mowery, UTA)


 

 
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