b l o g o s

in-class work: cave art

Socrates:  Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up that is open to the light and as wide as the cave itself.

They have been there since childhood, with their necks and legs fettered, so that they are fixed in the same place, able to see only in front of them, because their fetter prevents them from turning their heads around.

Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the prisoners and the fire, there is an elevated road stretching. Imagine that along this road a low wall has been built--like the screen in front of people that is provided by puppeteers, and above which they show their puppets.

Glaucon: I am imagining it.

Socrates: Also imagine that there are people alongside the wall carrying mutlifarious artifacts that project above it--statues of people and other animals, made of stone, wood, and every material. And as you would expect, some of the carriers are talking, and some are silent.

 

Glaucon: It is a strange image you are describing, and strange prisoners.

[text by Plato (The Republic, Book VII, 514a-c); illustration by Anora Johnson of Champaign, Illinois. Please do not reproduce the images without artist's consent.]

Spring 2007!?

Yeah, yeah, all of us in academia have a rather odd relationship to the future: we don't really have time to think much about it until we are forced to by associations' deadlines for grants or paper proposals or departmental deadlines for things like course descriptions and book orders. And since those deadlines are often so unfathomably early, most of us quite frequently find ourselves in the state of panicked deferral during which we commit ourselves to ideas, topics, and lines of inquiry for months, even years down the line.

In English our course descriptions for spring are due tomorrow, so I wrote mine moments ago. My collaborator, Ralph Cintron (UIC) hasn't exactly seen it just yet, so I figured I'd just toss it up (this will only appear in the UIUC catalogue unless Ralph wants it for his). Ralph and I did consult with each other on the title and the divisions at some previous, inspired moment, when Spring 07 seemed a faraway fairy tale.

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Rhetoric and Interdisciplinary Inquiry over the Last Decade

This seminar will examine rhetoric as an affinity discipline, which is to say its capacity to function as a fruitful and flexible locus of interdisciplinary inquiry. This point, of course, emerges from more than two millennia of handwringing over rhetoric's disciplinary "contentlessness," dating back at least to Plato. And yet in the context of the contemporary university where interdisciplinarity has received more attention of late, what Plato deems rhetoric's limitation starts to look more like a strength. In order to learn about rhetoric these days, we would do well to study it in its "natural habitat"--i.e. as it joins with other disciplines. Following an introductory unit on "disciplining rhetoric," then, the class will be divided into six two-week sessions, each of which will focus on recent  disciplinary couplings newly formed or re-formed in the last 10 years. Those include: rhetoric and philosophy; rhetoric and sensual studies; rhetoric and religion; rhetoric and space; rhetoric and political theory; and rhetoric and culture (Rhetoric Culture Project). This seminar will be linked with a graduate seminar taught by Ralph Cintron at U of I Chicago.

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Also, I have no idea what we are reading. I think Ralph wants to read some Michel Meyer in the rhet and philosophy section, and since he came up with the title "Rhetoric Culture Project" for the last unit (a title that ultimately got parenthesized out of my commitment to parallel structure), I figure he has some good ideas.  I guess we'll hash out the rest when the book orders come due. Suggestions, of course, are WAY welcome.
 

To the anonymous party responsible for sending us a cd recorded by the purported "love child of Patsy Cline and Jeff Buckley":

Thank you.

We love it.

styles of engagement

Today I taught my grad seminar and then rushed over to Greg Hall in the philosophy department for the first meeting of a faculty reading group on Plato's Timaeus, and I have this to say:

Going from a room full of smart, energetic people who have read the same set of texts and have been building a conversation for a few weeks and who really take seriously the challenge of being open minded, believe in the value of augmentation, and thrill at combining knowledges across the table to make something new, moving from that to a room full of smart people who have read one small section of one text and have arrived ready to defend their own readings to the end--defend them to the end!--can be, well, stunning.

exuberance and academic writing

I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between these two things, especially in a recent conversation with an advisee who loves the research part so much more than the writing part, and also in a recent reader's report in which a reader, much to my fury, diagnosed my writing style as that of someone "who loves the sound of [her] own voice."

Whatever that means.

That criticism seems to be leading up to a rather lighthearted tug-of-war with the editor over a few phrases deemed grammatically incorrect by the reader, phrases that I feel are actually doing something for and with my argument, and that frankly, were fun to write. I feel pretty strongly that the stakes here are very different from this questionable idea of 'my own voice.' What those phrases and sentences are doing is difficult to say, but it has to do with a kind of liveliness. As it happens, liveliness and energy in language is precisely the topic of my manuscript, hence my more-resolute-than-usual insistence that I get to keep certain sentences as I wrote them. If any of them end up getting contested, I will probably blog about the specifics.

Today, reading the introduction to Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual in preparation for Monday's seminar helped me to see the link between these two recent scenarios (the conversations with my advisee and with the journal editor), and what is dropping out of them both: something like joy. Too often we let the difficulty of writing or a notion of the 'right' kind of writing get in the way of what could actually be fun. And while Massumi is talking about a certain style of criticism (what I affectionately term 'whack-a-mole' scholarship), I also believe that what he's saying has to do with writing and style more broadly. Here's Massumi:

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So why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-seriousness, set aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking--and enjoy? If you don't enjoy concepts and writing and don't feel that when you write you are adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending its growth, in however small a way, however really abstractly--well, just hang it up. (p. 13)
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Yes. That's all for now, because Blake and I are off to the water slide.

yay

What joy it is having Blake Scott on our campus this week. Thankfully he has extended his visit so we can have some play time, and so I don't have time to go on and on about what a great talk he gave, what buzzy energy he's generating among the rhetoric types here, and how awesome it is to catch up on our grad school days together, but damn. As I said to the Writing Studies and Rhetoric grads and faculty when I introduced him, the affective bonds formed early on can be mighty and enduring.

Today and tomorrow are all about fun: Tillie has already wrapped herself around his neck; we have made an important stop at the wine store, and tomorrow we have but one thing on the agenda: we're going down the water slide.

Oh, yeah.

anxious googling

It's that time of year, I suppose. Here's a google search that brought someone to blogos this afternoon (third page of results at that):

ivy league grads vs state school grads

reduplication

In ancient greek, the perfect tense has a morphological quirk called "reduplication" whereby the initial consonant of a verb gets repeated. The favorite paradigm verb, luô (I loosen), in perfect tense becomes leluka. When my greek professor introduced this to oddity to my class years ago, he was inspired to package it with an old familiar joke about how reduplication as a term belongs in the department of redundancy department. Ha. Ha.

I have since personally adopted the term to indicate unnecessary--annoyingly redundant--duplication, and today I had to reduplicate my own labor. Twice. The results weren't nearly as amusing as my former professor's jokes. I spent 2.5 hours this morning going through a piece of my advisee's writing, providing copious marginal comments using Word's insert comment feature. But when I went to print the piece with comments--there were more than 70 in all (it was a long piece in a relatively early stage)--the comments were no longer there. I must have committed an egregious saving error without even realizing it. And so this afternoon I have begun the process of rewriting the comments.

I took a break from rewriting the comments to start some pizza dough, combining yeast and flour and honey with hot water and while that activated I started cleaning up the kitchen. About 10 minutes in, while cleaning, I knocked the bowl off the counter and had to clean the counter and floor again, in addition to starting the yeast anew. Now that's reduplication.

geometry and the job market

Tonight's insights are brought to you by this evening's Odyssey class, in which we read Book VI of Plato's Republic, where Plato's Socrates delineates the characteristics of a good ruler, and also where the theory of forms is presented: IOW, the meat of the dialogue. We started class with a little geometry lesson.  I asked the students to draw a circle and used the notion of 'circlehood'--that form we all had in our minds which we knew we were trying to achieve but which our lame little renderings never could: my circle's ends didn't quite meet, and one students' circle looked a lot like an egg. But something like circleness or what Soc. would call 'the circle itself' helped to illustrate the theory of the forms, while the formulaic rigidity of geometry helped us get at the difficulty (impossibility?) of the dialectic method.

But the better lesson of forms was driven home for us when a student raised her hand during the second part of class and pointed out that Plato/Socrates' description of an ideal ruler sounds an awful lot like a job ad.

That's exactly right. Job ads, with their glittery prose about what bright and positive (and multiple) qualities and capacities the ideal candidate would have, are the perfect everyday contemporary instance of the 'candidate-itself'--and its impossibility--i.e., the candidate that only exists in the abstract realm of Platonic form.

The wobbly ovals and the rounded line with ends that don't quite meet are far, far more interesting to me. I suppose that's why I study rhetoric.

uncanny

[cross posted at the body blog]

So today was space day in my seminar, and it started with an email from a student in class asking that I sit in a different spot at the table. The room is in fact pretty small, and I do recall last time having to crane to see certain people in it, and so I happily obliged. I hope that went better.

But what I really signed on to write about is the uncanny post over at Working Blue in which Jenny Edbauer writes about actor network theory. In response to today's reading, which, among other things, included Lefebvre, a piece on Lefebvre by Ackerman, and also Edbauer on rhetorical ecologies, one STS/Latour/rhetoric person in our class actually called this new affinity by suggesting that Latour's notion of actant seems important for what Edbauer is doing with ecologies (which, by the way, we all really grooved on, especially the business about 'verbing' rhetoric). IOW, the rhetorical situation needs to be thingified even more, or to account for what Jane Bennett calls "thing power."

There were more affinities to be sure--like the specific analysis Edbauer offers along with Elizabeth Grosz's meditation on bodies-cities, but because I need to eat in order to make it in time to tonight's new materialisms group, where we're talking about some really great stuff (courtesy of Jane Bennett and Brian Massumi), I'll just settle for pointing out the uncanniness of that affinity detection and say rock on, Edbauer.