The problem (?) of commentary
There was an interesting point of intersection between the assignment at the end of Sirc’s “Virtual Urbanism” and those that began George’s “From Analysis to Design,” although the two essays’ practices–particularly with regard to the presence of commentary–would seem instead to diverge at a critical point. Both, I think it’s safe to say, deal in encounter. More specifically, the assignments are geared toward an emulation of how information is received, an arrival at understanding not through a solitary and passive encounter with the “text” but an encounter with those texts/textualities that surround what is being written about, that are, in a sense, lived in rather than (or, perhaps, in addition to) contemplated. What are the ways to present understanding, both seem to ask. And both locate these ways within the student rather than within the textbook/the formula. But it’s the point at which they seem to diverge (and what I actually see as an intersection) that interests me. For while Sirc lobbies “to eliminate all commentary and to have the meanings emerge solely through a shock-like montage of the material,” George does not resist the impulse to comment on the meanings/analyses that emerge from the visual assignments her students produce. Irreconcilable? Hardly. I would trace the genesis of Sirc’s “Mood Sketch” assignment a couple paragraphs back in the essay, to his vision of the “Writing Classroom as Cyber Coffee Bar” that operates as the ideal model. His placing academic stress on the multitude of textual encounters that “interest [the student]” rather than on the assigned text and the paper that follows still yields one familiar idea: the existence of a discourse community. (The same discourse community that exists when each of George’s students’ work is placed in a framework of juxtaposition, product and analysis.) I would hazard a guess that, within Sirc’s model, the individual student assumes accountability for the component parts that he/she introduces to the classroom discourse. The classroom becomes, then, an interesting metaphor for “the cyber.” It is a map of spaces of interest, almost like the New York tale that Ghostface lays out. But it likewise offers students the opportunity to treat each space as an encounter worthy of pause and discussion (the cyber-conversations that happen within the internet as map/vessel). As such, each stated interest is a call to both defend itself and to revise itself based on encounters with other, simultaneous defenses. It is a space of a commentary that resists singular truth, that gathers momentum when ideas spill into other ideas and, of equal importance, when discussions of an interest link up to discussion of other interests. In a certain way, to say that such a classroom resists commentary understates what I find to be the unique capabilities of this model. What it seems to resist is that commentary which sequesters the student into that parental relationship with the teacher that is driven by uncirculated ideas. The classroom-as-cyber cafe is, in my mind, thus a mirror of George’s commentary. How? Because the idea of commentary in her essay links to an understanding that emerges from the synthesis of multiple understandings. Her students encounter one another’s outputs. And of equal importance is that her students become familiar with those texts outside the assigned text (the flag, the map, the table setting–all as texts/points of reference) that their classmates encountered on the path to understanding/extracting meaning from King Leopold’s Ghost. The pulse of learning, in both cases, becomes the overlapping of conversations which, I think, is likewise an overlapping of I’d call why-based-questions. And these are questions that could productively enact the exchange of commentaries, ast his exchange could yield, at worst, to healthy debate and, at best, to a re-shaping of ideas around encounters.