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.

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.

Ulmer “Glossary”

(it is important that this glossary be organized chronologically rather than alphabetically as it follows not the definition of terms but “a thread rather than a story or argument”; as ficelle, the thread of a plot)

 chora  a sacred space, a space of mediation (where order emerges from chaos); it is definable only through metaphor, not appearing but that which makes appearance possible

            ? a space where rhetoric/invention is figured by chora (evocation of the sacred)

 stimmung  a tuning of the lute that, at the same time, mediates as does chora; it’s a tuning toward harmony, a statement of “where we are ‘at’” (atmosphere, mood, etc.)

 digesis  like Xanadu, it refers to a hybrid whole; it is thus an attunement of multiple places into a composite; likewise it is a metaphor along the lines of chora, an exotic space that collects the sacredness of multiple exotic spaces

            ? does the internet present circumstances in which the exotic is interactive

 uncanny  the encounter of the familiar in the unfamiliar (that Gainesville is among those spaces collected and reformed as Xanadu)

 home page  “a composite digesis of four distinct places ‘sacred’ to the individual user”; a principle of internet authoring; also, the intersection of Paris-Moscow-Naples-Berlin for Benjamin as, through digesis, they “formatted his imagination,” were tuned to his mood of invention (his founding mood)

            ? “the application of Xanadu to the problematic of the home page as an interface metaphor for screen design has shown me how to use   the mystory as a guide for disciplinary research.”

 allegory  the repetition that appears by “chance interferences of [an individual’s] historical circumstances” in the mystory; choragraphically, the allegory is the cognitive style of the individual, the founding mood that is generated “by locating [a] material position within each of the [pop cycle’s] discourses”; a personal signature

 figure  the center ego/subject position of the author as discovered only through following “the many entrances leading into the interior.”

            ? achieved, alternately, when, from disorder, emerge the evocative repetitions of the mystory (the thread followed across boundaries of experience); the digesis of Home as achieved through the historical persons transformed into concepts that, together, solve for the author “problem of the narrative world”

 Home  what is evoked at the intersection of metonyms/material axes; as house-trailer, KATL-KOMA all assume different significances, there can exist a digesis (Home) that considers each significance together and apart; a sacred scene; an essence

 syncretic invention  a crossing of country with samba; the identifying of familiar elements of an old culture with elements of a new culture

 research  to work with all meanings of a term; a following of ficelles

            ? to compose electronically, all the meanings must be addressed and, moreover, must be tuned to a stimmung/harmony

 middle voice  if the active voice makes clear the authority and identity of the author and the passive voice cedes this authority, the middle voice allows the boundaries of identity to dissolve (become fundamentally permeable); it addresses the way in which, because of the access to information that is incumbent to electronic writing, selfhood can include more donors, more historical figures/ideas that become informing concepts of the self

 steel guitar  the essence of Home for Ulmer; the opportunity to complicate this essence through research that creates encounters, that finds the familiar in the unfamiliar

 open tuning  DBGDGD; the multiple voices that are created when “the steel rod is pressed on the strings with the left hand to produce a harmonious sliding sound”; the movement from the fifth to the seventh that occurs with research

          ? an instruction for how to write in choragraphy; the sliding between chords (harmonies) being theinvocation of the middle voice

         ? it is a question not only of the tuning but the dissemination of the tuning

 packet switching  the breaking up of messages into parts; the distribution of these parts through all available channels; the resolution into a whole (see also: the dream work by which “the impulse of signification is routed and reassembled in the understanding by means of dis-placement and symbolism) (see also: the Black Atlantic, a reassembling of old cultures from the at-hand materials of the new) (see also: syncretism) (see also: apparatus catastrophe)

 choral device  “The computer connected to the internet is a choral device, mediating, supplying a place to sort the different materials of the chaos of world cultures into a signifying order (Hank Williams : Hawaii: King Sunny Ade : the steel guitar soaring over the persistent beat of world music); the pattern emerging from the pop cycle requires a tool that allows one to trace paths through “the destroyed, ruined quality of the [mind’s] network”

 interface metaphor  the movie or the home page or world music; where we act out the syncretic; in electronic design, it is the place in which “trade routes” can be traced; where an essence can be tuned to its researched correlatives; “a postcolonialized version of pidgin language”

 byteracy  composing in tuned parts, simultaneous voices creating essence on the home page

 pidgin language  two languages converging so that communication between unfamiliars might take place; antecedent of Creole; pidgins arise in special spaces of confluence, thereby making them akin to the home page as it interacts and gathers information from (exchanges with) the community of online composers

            ? an internet pidgin language must celebrate hybrids rather than exist as an apparatus that denigrates creolization, that colonizes toward purity

 ideal society  structured around exchange and also the “intense, vibrant, loud, buzzing and fluid” feel of such an exchange

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.

In thinking more about Latour–and, in a general sense, a number of the readings that we’ve done throughout the semester–there’s a point that the classroom discussion never got to that I think is an interesting one. As we move away from deconstruction as a reductive process, as we multiply the vantage points from which approach each text, what happens to the idea of conclusion? And by conclusion I mean the subjective assignment of meaning to a text/parts of a text–the fact. Does it still fit into this model of an essay that we’ve created? I kept on mulling over the Crash assignment that dealt with race in the movie, and how it doesn’t work because it reduces and because it encourages (almost demands) rote response. And I thought about the clear advantages of addressing instead how the movie simultaneously deals with race, urban sociology, the police as an institution, and countless other “angles.” But as we named vantages from which to analyze, there was no discussion of what would be the endgame of this stockpile. Because it seems like, an interpretation/meaning–maybe even a fact–could be produced after this rigorous process of investigation. Not only an interpretation, but an interesting one. But at the same time, there seems to exist some hesitance in terms of being conclusive in this way, a way that reduces this process of investigation to a single statement. And I understand how this conclusion, this process of forming a thesis, excludes, other meanings (viable meanings) from entering into the frame of the essay. It is linear and prescriptive in a way that turns analysis into something that it’s not (i.e, static). Still, I also can’t shake the feeling that this rigorous investigation is also one-step shy of a finished product. Lingering with me is the thought that something else could be done with it. As I was reading the most recent Ulmer essay/assignment (”Kubla Honky Tonk”), I was taken by the way in which he could conceive of the mystory both as a labyrinth and as an allegory of sorts. It would seem (and this is something I want to get to in next week’s presentation) that the simultaneity of these two things (labyrinth and allegory) reconciles the concern to the fact, the wandering to the conclusion, in such a way that the one does not preclude the other. And this was an idea that I found myself drawn to: that the stockpiling of sources and angles and threads doesn’t single out the assignment of meaning/fact as a reductive process but rather ensures that meaning is made responsibly, that it takes into account enough factors that its purpose becomes one of substance. And I don’t think Ulmer was treating this idea of allegory as a fixed and final conclusion. It was simply one conclusion that came along the way, a conclusion that functioned almost as a suggestion, an invitation for other readers/observers to form other conclusions.

And perhaps this anxiety is all born out of a certain old-fashioned-ness, a clinging to the deconstructive essay as it’s something that I’ve grown familiar with/comfortable in. Nonetheless, I can’t help but think that there’s a way to salvage what is intellectually stimulating and productuve about deconstruction, about meaning assignment, about conclusion while simultaneously places these ideas within a framework the aim of which isn’t reduction but multiplication. And I think Ulmer approaches these ideas–namely meaning and wandering–in a way that begins to alleviate some of this anxiety that I’ve been experiencing.

Also, an interesting article about Lil’ Wayne and New Orleans students (http://oxfordamericanmag.com/content.cfm?ArticleID=390&Entry=CurrentIssue) that my friend wrote recently. I think it’s especially interesting in that Wayne is characterized as a shape-shifter, an intellectual wanderer/meaning un-fixer, in a way that seems consistent with a lot of the pedagogy we’ve been dealing with. He kind of creates new hip-hop by refusing to recycle methods (by refusing to let meaning become predictable through familiar medium/method). At the same time though, there are a few brief but close readings of some of his songs that do a little work of deconstruction, assigning meaning from, perhaps, a study of cadence alone. And I think there’s a quality to his work that lends itself to such thinking. It becomes okay, in a certain sense, because we realize it’s just one interpretation of many that will emerge from this song/his body of work. So I guess Lil’ Wayne and Gregory Ulmer, together, are constructing a pedagogy that eases my mind a little bit. Unexpected, but certainly pleasant.

The self-claim that it “develop[s] the critical tools necessary for understanding how a wide variety of verbal and visual texts are conceived, composed, targeted, interpreted, and evaluated” (2) is a modest, almost mis-statement of the critical and pedagogical questions with which Robert Atwan’s Convergences engages. In building the book’s methodology around the idea of a convergence (think, perhaps, of a confluence of rivers), the author creates a metaphorical punct for that moment of invention from which, in Joseph Harris’ “Revision as a Critical Practice,” the essay emerges. It is not then, as its self-claim might suggest, a book that simply guides readers through various interpretive practices. Instead, it is a book that, in its rigorous and almost taxonomic system of interrogation, navigates toward that Harris-ian moment of epiphany at which a unique stance on a given text appears (or at least can be pointed out) to the reader. In treating analysis as an act of laying questions over one another, Convergences locates, in a sense, a network of physical spaces/intersections in which a text’s meanings reside. More importantly, it treats meaning as existing in direct proportion to both the volume and intertextuality of the questions asked, such that the process of interrogation—as it exists in multiple, nearly countless, iterations—rather than a (pre)-fixed understanding of the text becomes the force that births and shapes the essay. The scope of the essay, here, is not determined from a point outside the work that it analyzes but instead arrived at after a series of interactions that take place from a point very much within the contours of the text.

In its framing each individual question as a method of analysis that attends to different aspects of the text, Convergences could be placed in the context of a critical theory primer. There is, for example, something of Aristotelian poetics in Chapter 2’s discussion of how the arrangement of component parts of a narrative lead the emotional response of the reader; There is something of new criticism’s close reading in the undivided attention that imagery and metaphor receive in Chapter 1’s proposition of a method for analyzing Ortiz Cofer’s poem “Lessons of the Past”; There is something, perhaps, of a new historicist’s attention to what is outside of the text in the book’s consistently directing the reader toward an examination of context as an analytical tool. An important distinction should be drawn here, however, that steers the book away from an oversimplified critical theory foundation: methods of analysis are not introduced for the purpose of discounting those that were introduced prior—there is no sense of privileging a single mode of thought/line of questioning as more correct, more enlightened. Instead, the book accumulates methods so to apply them simultaneously on/to whatever text the reader encounters. A better analog for understanding the book’s context, then, might be that of a Socratic dialogue. By responding to an answer with a subsequent question, meanings are built, complicated, critiqued, re-oriented and enhanced. To say, as I did earlier, that the book is engaged with a Harris-ian moment of epiphany is thus a bit misleading; the book, in a certain sense, actively discourages any process that does not locate an abundance of such epiphanies within a single text. That the reader can question each answer—each essay—that he/she arrives at destabilizes any behavior that treats the individual essay as a sufficient or comprehensive capturing of meaning. The reader is, without question, asked to pause and extract/record original thought that responds to the texts in the book; but in the same gesture, he/she is made aware that this is, in fact, a pause that inspires or prepares one for further entry, a pause that is part of a much larger process.

Before looking at a specific example from the book, it’s important to note how, in its very nature as a reader, Convergences actively engages cultural studies. In a basic way, the comprehensiveness of the texts that it chooses demands that the reader expand his/her ideas on, for example, southern gender-identity to include the vantage point of the range of persons operating within this sub-category. Portraiture thus becomes a shrewd place to begin the book, as it forces a reconciliation of the concerns of both portrait-taker and portrait-sitter. This environment of inclusion and the manner in which it extends or expands the resources an individual draws upon to assign meaning is likewise played out on a level of intertextuality. To use another example from the book, the ways in which we “make meaning” from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are not the exclusive result of our watching the movie. Meaning is influenced by the stillness of the movie poster, the poem that personalizes the movie within the context of a specific history of violence, its [the movie’s] bearing on violence in the present cultural moment—to name only three factors. Referring back to what I see as the central methodology of the book, an essay on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is productively complicated four times over by laying question over question so to find a common point—a convergence—at which the answers to these questions meet. What occurs here, in lay terms, is a “teasing out” or locating of potential meanings and potential essays by way of interrogation. And it is this term (locate) that one should keep in mind when looking more specifically at an offering of the book.

(*Note: Rather than exhaustively examine the many texts that the book offers, I will choose one, John Edgar Wideman’s “First Shot,” and diagnose the process by which the questions posed not only locate and extract meanings from this single text but likewise position it in relation to what has come before and what will come after it in the book—to show how the book is cumulative in its activity, using the questions asked of other forms to aid in understanding what is immediately in front of the reader. In isolating some of the questions that surround this particular essay, I will show how, in its attention to moments of intersection, the book locates and almost immediately complicates meanings so as to emulate a process by which the essay can occur and then begin to re-occur before the process of writing has even started.)

 The pre-questions: Perhaps best employed in the fourth chapter of Convergences, before the book poses questions related to a given text, it first interrogates the form/genre (portrait, story, history, etc.) of which the text is a part. Here, in the introduction to a chapter devoted to “shaping spaces,” the reader is asked: How, as individuals and as groups, do we define ‘space’? How do the objects located within a space help to define its functionality and, subsequently, its meaning? Particularly in the way that this second question relates back to the idea of material history in Chapter 1’s approach to “All My Life for Sale,” these pre-questions creates an intersection point between space and personal identity in such a way to prepare the reader for how meaning might emerge in the texts that follow.

The marginalia-questions: (1) “What significance do you think the window at 7415 has for Wideman? What does it mean to him as a child? What has it come to represent from an adult’s perspective?” (252). By reading this essay in conjunction with those texts that precede it, the window becomes not a narrative detail but a metaphor as they were examined in the book’s first lesson. In this particular line of questioning, the reader’s attention is, then, drawn to the adult Wideman’s identification of the window as a gendered dividing line, creating two spaces in which behavior patterns emerge and social/gender identity is expressed or submitted to. In layering these questions upon the pre-questions to the chapter, the book creates a new intersection, one that problematizes the initial idea of space and self-defined identity to include the question of location within a space as an instance of imposed identity. (2) “Why do you think Wideman raises the issue of truth and fiction in this final paragraph? How do you think memoir is different from fiction based on personal experience? How much of this essay is composed of things Wideman admits he didn’t see or can’t exactly remember?” (254). The metaphor of the window, in these questions, is re-adjusted from being one of dividing line to being one of the photographer’s subjective camera lens. The reader is, in this moment, asked (perhaps subliminally urged) to remember the way in which Dorothy Allison’s essayistic self-portrait established meanings that were not conveyed in the photographer’s still-life. Here, the intersection of self-defined and imposed identity is expanded to include how Wideman was, in fact, outside the context in which this imposed identity was formed, how, then, the imposed identity might (or might not) be congruent with self-defined identity, how the social/gender identities of the present might unnecessarily revise readings of the past toward a negative connotation (a quesiton that very much carries over into the book’s reckoning with the historical Hollywood movie).

The post-questions: And, oh yes, there was a common thread of basketball. (1) “Why do you think he spends so much time describing the geography of his neighborhood? What do those details have to do with basketball?” (2) “Look closely at the photographs by Paul D’Amato, Brad Richman and Dana Lixemberg…Use the concept of framing to identify the focus of each photograph…Does basketball represent something different in each, or is the court essentially the same?” (255). And here, we have evidence of the taxonomy I spoke of earlier. Having established a general (one might say on a level of genus), multi-layered relationship between space and identity, the reader must now attend to the space’s species—the basketball court—and thus re-reconsider  this relationship of space and identity as it is now acted out within these specific confines. As such, the act of interrogation takes on a more focused trajectory that only further complicates that essay which, in truth, has not yet even begun. How do the objects and expressions of the photographers’ subjects convey the court identity as one that is different from and perhaps in response to the identity expected in the other spaces one might inhabit (work, home, etc)? How does the explicative capacity afforded Wideman in the written form clarify the expressions of the photographed subjects? How does the center-seeking tendency of the photograph idealize the court identity? In the simple terms that the book lays out, how do media, method and message converge at this moment to enable a unique interpretation of the texts (here, photo and memoir) the reader has just encountered? We are thus forced, in the closing moments of the text, to attend to and account for those voices that Wideman’s memoir form, by nature of its genre, might silence.

There is, I think, a critical conclusion with regards to the pedagogy of Convergences that can be arrived at through acting out the interrogative processes of the text. And it would be remiss not to, at this moment, turn back to Harris and include in the discussion Diane Davis’ essay “Finitude’s Clamor.” In looking at the intersections above, it’s important to note that any one of them could serve as an epiphanic moment in the mold of Harris. At any of these points of intersection, the student writer could retreat from the text, armed with questions and contradictions from which a sound essay could be formed. But in its persistent questioning—and I think this is a method that Harris would endorse—the book casts such an essay not as wrong or unimportant but as a moment for even further thought. What emerges, then, is a pedagogy of interpretive revision, wherein the question is the mechanism that introduces new information into the interpretive frame and, as such, demands that the original idea/meaning be re-worked so to acknowledge what changes in thinking the question induced. It is the suspended-thesis model of Davis applied to the textual analysis that Harris prizes. And perhaps most importantly (and this applies directly to Davis and a certain anxiety with regard to the interpretive text), it does not treat the product as an endgame. The essay is itself subject to interrogation, a single moment of convergence that, when juxtaposed with other texts or further questioned in isolation, will inevitably yield new intersections and meanings.

There are countless other ideas that could be pursued with regard to Wideman’s piece. For instance, the book treats it, in its assignments, not as an occasion for an essay but rather an autobiography, either written or filmic. Or one could consider how the silenced voices that factor into our reading of Wideman are those same voices that, when considered in relation to Susan Sontag’s essay in Chapter 4, allow us to simultaneously question the use of war photography as evidence of a full account of history and employ it as an ethical imperative to the viewer. In conclusion, however, I’d like to turn to the book’s introduction as, in essence, a metaphor for the rigorous critical work that it asks of the reader. In framing its purposes around three primary questions—What is it saying? How it goes about saying it? Why it is delivered to you in a particular way (and I would add the affiliate question, what other ways could it be delivered)?—the book slyly reduces its aims. Even considered in a simultaneous manner, one could answer these questions in a relatively straightforward manner (without too much wrangling). But, almost immediately, the book begins questioning its own terms, not doubting, but interrogating for nuance. It asks what “internal contradictions” a text’s messages might contain. At the moment of arriving at meaning, it begins to question the meaning at which it arrived. And it is this emphasis on the interrogative process, this privileging it over any given outcome, that is at the heart of the pedagogy outlined here.

An easy reading of McLuhan’s the medium is the massage might lead to a dismissal of the classroom essay as a model of inefficacy. It is, after all, driven by the sentence, an almost a Romantic bastion to linear, singular and, in the disconnect between its composition and introduction to the reader, expiring thought/meaning. And a similar [easy] argument could be made in opposition to the still image, a bounded information form that doesn’t reflect the current mode of information dissemination. Such readings, such calls for radical or wholesale change in the classroom, however, would do little justice to how McLuhan puts the sentence and the image to work. In reading, there was a way in which the text resonated with elements of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” particularly in its division of old/new methods and needs. If its guiding concern was how new methods were being put to old uses, then I think one has to take into consideration an underlying idea regarding the possible benefit of the inverse to this statement: putting old methods to new uses. And in this way, it very much does concern itself with Eliot in its belief that the familiar, placed within a new context, has the potential to shift (even if slightly) an entire discourse.

There’s a way, however, to be more specific in discussing this, and I think it comes down to the central place that juxtaposition holds within the text. It is, in a number of ways, the form that is implied when McLuhan discusses the manner in which we receive information. It is no longer a private, linear process in which sentences combine to form (and, more specifically, dictate) a privileged meaning. Instead, we receive and process information through a concurrent exposure to multiple discourses or ideas (singular meaning becomes, in a sense, impossible because of the rapid and constant introduction of new discourses which must be integrated into our understanding of the whole). Thought and writing, then, take on the form not of linearity but of multi-directional negotiation. The still sentence is replaced by an ever-expanding circuit or, perhaps more accurately, a constellation whose shape shifts with the inclusion of new stars. (In this sense, I also read McLuhan as an interesting and maybe even pre-emptive defense of cultural studies’ demand that we account for the volume of information that shapes and re-forms not only the individual’s identity but his/her perception of identities outside of his/her own). As such, for the written form (or the essay in any media for that matter) to be not only successful but relevant, it has to more closely emulate the circuitousness of modern thought; it has to be draw upon something akin to that primary effective quality which Marjorie Perloff located in cubist collage: meaning cannot “happen” prior to or outside of the essay, but must be established in the process of reading. And this, I think, is where juxtaposition comes into play (and does so in a way that simultaneously allows the author to establish and call into question a “unique stance”). The act of juxtaposition, whether written or visual, does not dictate but rather suggests meanings–meanings that are arrived at, variously, in the viewers’ process of negotiating multiple ideas at once. It is an author’s statement of a unique but un-fixed stance and, even more importantly, it is an admission that such a stance could (and likely will) shift with the passage of time, as new ideas come to inform how we treat/experience the individual components within the juxtapositional frame. It is also, as McLuhan’s critique of the classroom would demand, a form that actively invites a certain interdisciplinary- ness. There are no boundaries dictating what can or cannot included in the form. Consistent with the flood of available information in an electronic society, it is more a statement of “I learned this by way of this,” an expression of identity whose source material is anything but static. The message, then, is one of immediate and future variability and potential expansion; it is dictated by the form/media in which the ideas are presented rather than the precise achievement of the singular idea. It’s not that it simply includes multiple media but that it forces thinking into a context of activity rather than framing it as a passive act of receiving. It can be metaphorized, perhaps, in the nightly news which is treated, at points in the book, as evidence of new media (television) serving old forms (narrative). However, I would argue that the juxtaposition of abbreviated narratives that occur during a news broadcast removes a certain privilege from the single narrative and instead treats its juxtaposition with other stories as central to its message. We must negotiate how local/world/athletic/entertainment news all shape a worldview, and, more importantly, how the introduction of each subsequent story within the thirty minute block shifts this worldview (which shifts again, as soon as the television is turned off). There is an inherent kinesis in juxtaposition, what Pound might call energies flowing through multiple form, and it is this kinesis that allows multiple media to emulate thought in such a way to make them reliable and relevant in a space of mutating/evolving sensibilities and thought patterns.