compositional-minded

Just a quick note on something that I’ve found helpful with regard to the long assignment sheet. Especially since we’re sometimes dealing (as was noted in class) with some pretty tough concepts, one thing that I’ve done–and which has worked to some success–is to contextualize/provide an example of what I mean on the assignment sheet. For instance, on my technology assignment I’m working with the idea of translating an icon’s specific identity traits into general criteria that kind of frame how the person is acting out ‘cool’ through these traits. I worked with the idea of criteria this semester and was met with a host of blank stares. So, on the assignment sheet for my future class, I just provided a brief example. Let’s say they thought someone’s tattoos were cool. They wouldn’t say “Cool is tattoos” (the criteria come in the form of Cool is… statements) but instead they might say something like “Cool is the redefinition of the artistic canvas.” Obviously, this comes with the disclaimer that my specific criteria is not to be used as their own, but they have a model to work with/a general idea of what I’m looking for when I say ‘criteria’ and how it [criteria] should make room for examples similar, but not identical, to tattoos. And I don’t necessarily think this is leading the witness too much because it’s specific enough that it resists close emulation but (hopefully) informative enough to give the student a model for how to go about their own task.

I had written about this earlier, and finally got a chance to (somewhat) apply it in the classroom. After reading the Harris article from a few weeks ago, I was struck by the importance of what I’ll call “light interrogation” in the classroom and, likewise, in response to student writing (it’s a method I also saw as particularly successful, perhaps in a different iteration, in the Convergences textbook I reviewed). What I mean by ‘light interrogation’ is the reformulation of statement as question such that pathways of analysis are opened up. In a sense, it likewise provides a method for approaching cliches along the lines of Skorczewski’s argument.

The paper that my students are working on now is a kind of extended metaphor that begins with an everyday object, moves to how this object is a metaphor for a significant condition of the society they participate in and then locates texts (broadly construed) that address this significant condition in different ways. The proposals that I got were great, but in that “almost there” sense. The movement from object to metaphor was strong but it leant itself to a paper in which the subsequent sections reiterated rather than toyed with or triangulated the significance of the metaphor. In almost every case, however, I found that encouraging the students to reframe the metaphor in terms of a question unlocked the ability to locate texts that didn’t simply imitate their thought process but represented different angles of reckoning with it. For example, one student began with a roadside cross and ended with the metaphor of our tendency to participate in a public form of mourning. Interesting ground, for sure, but also conducive to simply locating other examples of public mourning. Rephrased as a question–”What effect does a memorial have on a public who can’t identify with the specific loss that is being commemorated (i.e., those people who drive by the roadside cross who have no knowledge of the deceased)?”–led to an examination of the contreversy surrounding the Vietnam memorial, the visual rhetoric of the memorial itself (vs. for example, the Iwo Jima memorial), the odd phenomenon of the traveling memorial, the problem of how to memorialize ground zero, a Sontag essay on ethics and war photograph, etc. In short, the simple act of questioning his conclusion, of suspending a final decision/thesis, led to a discussion of everything that a memorial does when it’s not mourning. The question created a critical space into which a whole host of ideas could enter. And perhaps this is conventional wisdom that I’m stumbling upon as a first-timer, but it was a dramatic pointing out of the way in which interrogating the idea/the thesis is a gesture that doesn’t require the abandonment of an original thought but has the potential to greatly expand upon it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29959747@N03/sets/

Here are my three flickr sets. They should actually be read right-to-left (beginning with ‘Imagism and Art History’ and ending with ‘Williams Collage.’) The goal was kind of twofold: 1) to see how abstraction in modernist/Vorticist art translated to the Imagiste poem, as the two were affiliated movements and 2) to see what would happen to the Imagiste poem if it were translated visually, either more fully abstracted or “written” with visual representations of the contained images.

There’s a term in the Haynes that I latched onto as critical to understanding the movement toward abstraction and away from argumentation (toward the center-sea, away from the ground), and it’s a word that I can trace back/into my responses to a number of pedagogies we’ve encountered in essays over the course of the semester, most notably the social process. The term: ‘counterhope.’ The way I’m reckoning with this term ties in specifically to Vitanza’s Countertheses, “…to proceed without foundations and without criteria,…without knowing a subject and without conventional theory and pedagogy” and, subsequently, how these countertheses enter into, for me, a discussion of reproduction versus invention (as the second of these ideas should be privileged). In thinking about the social process, one concern that tape-looped in my mind was the degree to which it could fall into a trap of playing by those same rules that it attempts to subvert. At the end of her essay, Haynes draws a distinction between a form of writing that “advanc[es] a course of action” and a form that operates within the constructs of a “formulaic problem/solution argument.” It is the latter that I saw social process leaning toward and it was a leaning that could potentially (and easily) treat the problem at the expense of the solution. More specifically, there’s a way in which I saw it using the language of the oppressor to frame the problems of the oppressed. The goal was on identifying transgression and, in doing so, gathering a consensus that understood this transgression as such. And this is an important location of voice–a powerful statement, for sure. But, thinking in terms of my reaction to Haynes, it is a gesture that points out the breakdown of reason through reason’s own vocabulary. It is a reasonable argument against a situation in which reason is precisely the medium that allows transgression to recur (or, alternately, the medium that cannot actually address or explain the ills that the transgression presents/visits up on us). It proposes a solution from within the discourse that created the problem and this seems to me a reproductive act (a solution that allows, in protecting reason, other problems to arise). Enter: counterhope. Much like the social process, a pedagogy (un)grounded in counterhope would seem to have exigence at its center. But the counterhope essay would, as I see it, reverse the order of operations. The exigence/problem would be viewed as endemic, its terms inescapable in the arenas (social and writerly) where we familiarly operate. As such, its solution/advanced course of action would need to invent new terms with which to address the exigence, a new space in which to act out the possibility of counterhope.  Conceiving of the essay-as-space, the ideas of “correct” structure and taught argumentation would need to be abandoned because they are the same tools with which the exigence is dictated to those whom it effects. As Haynes points out, such a codification of ‘how to write’ simply teaches writers to teach writers how to communicate dissatisfaction without conceiving of how this reproductive teaching allows solution to remain dormant, subordinated to the proper identification of a problem. In terms of structuring a stance/developing of an idea, the counterhope essay would, in a way consistent with Ulmer, simply explore. It would be bound not to a criteria of logical cause-and-effect but a logic of imagination that interrogates what might happen if we proceed from a point of exigence without constraint or caution, activating unused spaces for the purpose of new use. Conceiving of the essay-as-language, co-opting the langugage of the oppressor, as strong a gesture as this is, would be replaced, in a pedagogy of counterhope, by inventing a language of the oppressed, a means of communicating that cleaves the writer from, not to, a vocabulary that has proven uninterested in and impotent to addressing needs.

And in this sense, in the sense of exploring the unused, I don’t think a counterhopeful pedagogy that is necessarily without reason. I just think it’s a reason that has no foundation on which to ground/prove itself. Or, to use Haynes’ terms, the foundation for such reason is yet unbuilt. And this term, unbuilt, is an important one to understanding counterhope. The counterhope is unreasonable because it is untested. But, in the same stroke, it is potentially reasonable in that it might be built, in that, by abstracting, by moving to the sea, it might find a suitable refuge for the refugee, a solution that actually solves. And this is what drew me into Haynes stratosphere–the idea that a radical imagining (a seemingly preposterous architecture) might address exigence in ways that argumentation has failed to. What if the essay simply went? What if it was a space in which ideas were explored without concern for their conceivable execution? Because the idea of executing solutions requires an attention to those methods that have been proven executable. But, even with new parts, these old methods are limited, reproductive. Could the indulgence of a fantasy of inventing new methods, new infrastructures, new words stumble upon a solution that could be executed? Absolutely. And I think Haynes rightly points out that such an indulgence/fantasy begins with reorienting how we communicate ideas, reorienting the essay to follow paths, to be un-adversarial simply because it is too busy seeking out to replace that institution/logic that is its adversary. It doesn’t cease to identify the enemy; It only understands that identifying the enemy doesn’t remove the abyss as a violent presence. Identification relies on old, reproduced terms while counterhope requires an invented language that the enemy can’t possibly understand.