Sampling as Pedagogy
What drew me most to the idea of sampling as a pedagogy is an idea that traditionalists would invert as a means to rally against it. That is: it seems to me to be a pedagogy that very much discourages and, more precisely, absolutely prevents critical laziness. The fear regarding this pedagogy, as I imagine it could be stated, is that the assignment might invite arbitrary juxtaposition such that the ideas of claim and argument are entirely unengaged. The essay, however, provides a twofold response to this: 1) In acting out its own process, the essay proves the degree to which sampling pedagogy requires a full understanding/reading of each of its parts both alone and against one another. The sampled essay thus presents an argument that exists only through a participation with its components–a seeking them out, a meditation on them, a forging of connections between them and, finally, their placement in a very particular arrangement–an arrangement whose re-iteration, it is understood, would yield an entire other outcome (heightening, then, the stakes of organization). This establishes it as a more highly evolved form of the linear essay form that, in its codification, allows for a certain paint-by-numbers enactment, where the student is not engaged with the manipulation of source materials toward an argument but rather with a knowledge of how to turn a structural phrase so as to just get by (how to insert quotes into the right places with the right transitions such that the essay bears resemblance to the thought that is desired by the teacher). It [the essay by sampling] is a form that requires the utmost amount of accountability. Because it doesn’t present it’s claim outright, it places the student in a position of responsibility wherein, if called upon, they could, in effect, justify each decision (structural/analytical/stylistic) that they made. It also, in its being shared in the classroom on the internet, requires a certain amount of critical rigor from the student readers of the essay. The claim isn’t given to them and, as a result, they have to search it out. They have to uniquely attend to the essay’s decisions (structural/analytical/stylistic) as readers of the essay, which, in turn, multiplies readings/meanings in a way that creates a discourse community around each produced work. 2) Given all of the accountability that it demands from its producer/writer, the essay by sample does, in a certain way, invite arbitrary juxtaposition. Or, maybe more accurately, it allows for arbitrary juxtaposition so long as it is purposeful or critical. The arbitrary juxtaposition may well lead to the most advanced form of thought emerging from this form. The essay, in that case, is understood in terms of a theoretical unity, the ability to communicate even at the breaking point of convention.
The form, as it can be found in any number of spaces, is also conducive to assignments that involve the reading of outside texts and a short writing response to them. There is, as I’m thinking about it, some degree of the reductive thought that we had discussed in class–an attention and assignment of meaning to “parts” of the text in isolation of one another. But it’s an isolation that is predicated upon the re-convening of these parts. The assignment of meaning in isolation is very temporary; Once assigned, it is re-evaluated within the context of the meanings with which it was juxtaposed. It is, as I see it, an exercise in recognizing the failure of the fixed metaphor. The meaning-in-isolation, which could easily tend toward a tired reading of a familiar symbol (a fixed metaphor), gives way to a new reading that is informed by those texts which surround it. I’m thinking in particular, of the Crime Mob video for “Circles” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6vk1y2d25k). In isolation, the individual elements are familiar and could be evaluated as such. But when considered at once, as images/sounds informing juxtaposed images/sounds, the video, as I’m reading it, is a re-framing of conventional gender politics in hip-hop. Or, on an unrelated but kind of also related note, it’s part of a greater movement that nods to “sweetness” in a form that prizes “toughness,” suggesting, just maybe, that these two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. And it’s an idea that, I think, requires juxtaposition. It requires the naked sentiment of the Friends of Distinction sample in conversation with the Georgia production quality that is not necessarily associated with naked sentiment (or maybe it’s moving that way; you could make that argument, which is just another reading that could emerge from the juxtaposition). It requires the juxtaposition of club dress and Sunday dress, adult and child in places that, given the disconnect of images involved, seems like an anomaly, but one worth considering.