Marzipan, my adorable kitty. She’s been with me for nearly five years, ever since I got her as a six-month old kitten. When my roommate Alex and I first took her, she would suckle on our necks and drool everywhere (you wouldn’t notice the slobber till she pulled away)—an act I was certain meant she was weened too early or something. Now, she slobbers less and meows more, but she’s still as energetic and rambunctious as ever: trying to stand on the top of doors, jumping from the top of one bookshelf to another, begging for catnip, and stealing pieces of pizza and bread from our kitchen table. I don’t know what life would be like without her. She’s traveled across the country with me, and been my company when I’ve felt the lowest. I adore her.

Right now she’s napping on my roommate’s lap. Last night, when I got back from Ohio, she was mewing for me, and then when I sat down, she crawled and walked all over me, purring like crazy before we both settled down for a two-hour nap. I can’t imagine life without her awesome companionship.

I booked my hotel, clear across town, when I thought I was going to drive to Louisville. I thought driving across town would be no big deal. But then, I realized I would be very tired, and a nine-hour drive would be very hard, and then I thought about how much work I could get done riding a Greyhound, so I took the Greyhound to Louisville. The Greyhound wasn’t a mistake, but not switching hotels was. It’s an hour-long bus ride, if not more, from my hotel to downtown, and then a 15-minute bus ride to the U of Louisville campus. Thus, I didn’t see as much of the conference as I had hoped. Next time, I definitely get a hotel closer to the conference, even if it’s a bit more expensive.

During my panel, someone asked a great question about what our three talks could teach us about what we do in order to counter the effects of online rumours, media’s framing of events in order to blame certain folks, and online uncivil discourse. A few people in the room chimed in, and the traditional idea that we want our students to be able to read texts and not be duped was an answer. But I like the answer proposed by our chair, that we should be thinking about how we and our students can produce texts that do evoke emotion; as Sharon Crowley has made so apparent in Toward a Civil Discourse, liberal rational arguments are not effective.

And I’ve begun wondering about how I focus so much on rational argumentation in my writing classroom. Certainly, I do value some emotional appeals in the paper, and try to help students work with those effectively, but many times, I fall back on the rational. It’s that dratted hermeneutics of suspicion training that keeps me in the rational mode. Also, I think the focus on the printed page is particularly limiting in that it pulls us toward the logical….

I’ve been struggling between my training in criticism and my desire to move toward design (a la Gunther Kress, Jeff Rice). I think the course I teach next term will help me with this quite a bit (more about that at a later date).

I was struck by Anne Wysocki’s presentation during a plenary session on Friday. Among other things, she made a call for returning to a focus on labor and craft, returning to Hegel’s idea that in making things, we fashion ourselves and recognize ourselves. I took some notes, but even after a day, I’m having a hard time recalling what my notes meant, or how the ideas worked together in Anne’s talk. But her talk resonated with some of the arguments I made about texts and figures, and understanding some of the visceral/bodied reactions to the figural aspects of texts. Anne asks us (drawing on JW Mitchell, I believe?) to question the visual/textual and body/mind dichotomies.

In most situations, white people are very comforted by seeing their own kind. However, when they are eating at a new ethnic restaurant or traveling to a foreign nation, nothing spoils their fun more than seeing another white person.

Many white people will look into the window of an ethnic restaurant to see if there are other white people in there. It is determined to be an acceptable restaurant if the white people in there are accompanied by ethnic friends. But if there is a table occupied entirely by white people, it is deemed unacceptable.

Funny, right? That’s not even the best one, but it’s one that’s making me giggle at the moment.

But let’s consider this further: what makes this funny? what makes this humor appropriate when other humor about other races or social classes is often deemed inappropriate (because it maims the dignity of those without institutional power).

So let’s think “on paper” or “with my fingers.” Racialicious has a discussion of this blog, in which they link to an interview with the the creator at The Assimilated Negro (part 1, part 2). From the interview:

TAN: do you consider yourself aligned with the white people you profile? You’re white, but are you whom you describe/study?

SWPL: oh yes. this site pokes fun at ME. that’s why I use pictures of myself. those aren’t taken out of irony. this is the shit that I do. I need to call myself out for all of the stupid shit that I take for granted. why do I need $300 bike rims? why is a $10 sandwich considered normal?

I’m not sure where to start, so I’ll start with SWPL’s claim that these photos aren’t “out of irony.” It strikes me, though, as very ironic to poke fun at oneself for behavior one finds ridiculous and continue and document that behavior. “Here I am, doing the ridiculous, and I’ll continue it, and document it!” A $10 sandwich for lunch and $300 bike rims? Ridiculous in its privilege, but let’s revel in it.

I’m not trying to critique this from some moral high ground; in fact, I largely identify with many of the things SWPL writes about. Though I rarely buy $10 sandwiches (adjuncts don’t get paid that well), I do recycle and find myself annoyed when recycling isn’t around (not asking why I’m buying the plastic bottle to begin with).

Let’s continue: What does it mean to be white? Or, perhaps, is this blog an accurate picture of whiteness? SarahMC left a comment on Eric Stoller’s blog stating that perhaps this would be more aptly titled, “Stuff Coastal Yuppies Like.” Commenters on Racialicious echo similar sentiments: this blog is more about class than whiteness. Certainly, by focusing on whiteness, the author obfuscates issue of class: This is not white behavior he is mocking, but a certain, contextual (though rather extensive) white behavior. This is not the behavior of my parents, a farming couple in rural Iowa. The behavior being lampooned is that of somewhat socially conscious middle class people, probably largely white. One comment on Racialicious asks:

What do other[s] think about this constant equating of ‘white’ with ‘young, middle-class, trendy, urbanite’? I don’t think this is unique to the SWPL website.

And I would concur. This site draws attention for its witty self-referencing and self-deprecating, but it does move in a larger field of discourse on race and class, wherein whiteness is equated with certain middle class and trendy, urban standings (which leaves the poverty of rural and certain urban white folks largely invisible, a general point made even by many conservatives I’ve read — though they are usually ignoring the issue of race).

This becomes evident in the interview:

TAN: How do you explain Bush? White people who love their prius, recycling, and being aware … they can’t like Bush, right?

SWPL: Bush was elected by the wrong kind of white people.

Whereas, for SWPL, a white person supports Barack Obama, the “wrong kind of white people” support Bush. If we look at the blue/red map by county (which I’m not going to bother to look for), it’s pretty evident that “good white people” are urbanites, whereas “wrong white people” are ruralites.

I think I’ll try to wrap up this rambling a bit. I’m most impressed with this response from ebogjonson on Racialicious:

Stuffwhitepeoplelike represents a trajectory where it becomes increasingly possible to imagine “color without coloreds.” The title of Greg Tate’s recent anthology Everything But the Burden gets to a similar point:

Q: What is it white people are taking from black culture?

A: Everything but the burden.

The author of Stuffwhitepeoplelike has his “whiteness studies” jargon down pat, but the thing about whiteness studies is that it exists to dismantle white supremacy (or at least purports to). In contrast, Stuffwhitepeoplelike in the main seems to exist to display the author’s erudition and self-regard. (Is a trade paperback book deal far behind? Will Racialious blurb the back cover? ” A hilarious, satirical Wikipedia-esque guide to exactly what the title says, filled with dead-on observations that make you laugh in surprise and recognition?”) In the best whiteness studies, identification of what constitutes “white culture” treats unique/demographically distinct cultural practices and comes part and parcel with a sometimes difficult examination of things like white privilege. Here it mostly comes with a high five, a pat on the back and endless blather about how smart some random white dude is for making funny about sandwiches. Talk about lowered expectations. Talk about affirmative action!

How does this blog circulate, and what are the effects (reinforcements?) of this discourse in fields of dialogue on race and class? Does this site just prop up whiteness as not something to be interrogated, but rather something to be ironically celebrated? Does the attention to this site feed into a field of discourse of de-racialization, wherein, rather than breaking down race for how they are constructed, race is made equal: all races are worth mocking and self-referencing. I’m not saying SWPL isn’t funny, but how has this humor been already somewhat determined by structures, and how does the circulation and re-circulation of this humor affect how we conceive of whiteness… Still pondering…

• There is a viral video going around that is supposed to be disgusting. Viz. refers to it as “That-Viral-Video-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named.” I particularly like the response at Viz. because it focuses on the reaction videos that are popping up on YouTube. These videos tend to showcase the performance of disgust, often with a hand over the face or someone running to the bathroom to vomit (whether or not they are actually doing so is up to interpretation). An article at Slate includes a series of these videos, but I found Kermit the Frog’s reaction to be of particular interest. Actually, the one I found most interesting was when Kermit shows Rowlf the Dog the video. This particular video, I think, reveals quite a bit about the affective reaction of disgust. Why is this video disgusting? Frankly, yes, it’s disgusting to most people, but as Rowlf’s performance points out, disgust is a situated and constructed physical reaction.

• Back in January a 16-year-old boy in Australia threw a party while his parents were out of town and wound up making news big: 500 people showed up, they destroyed a lot of property, and the police fined this boy, Corey Delaney, and his parents almost $20,000. I just heard about this, despite the fact that this hoopla has been going on for a month. He was interviewed by A Current Affair, an interview I found astounding not only because a kid is being interviewed because he threw a party, but because issues of gender and age play out so strongly in this video. The interviewing, rather than acting as an interviewer, begins to act as a moral authority, chastising Corey and asking that he apologize. She becomes the master discourse, and this kid rebels — immaturely, perhaps, but in a way that parades the ridiculous behavior of the interviewer. It gets more interesting: these guys created a fake MySpace page for Corey, and many people thought it was real. Check out this post for a chronicling of the responses to the fake page, including requests for interviews and party planning. Also interesting is discussion on Wikipedia as to whether to include a page on Corey Delaney (via news.com.au). Gawker posts a timeline of events.

A lot to think about in regards to these events, but I have to work on teaching.

An example of this, of course, is Obama Girl, who first created a video about her love for Obama, and now has developed super powers that allow her to punch out the enemy (being all other politicians, it seems, as well as the “status quo”).

Another example is this remix, created by will.i.am of the Black Eye Peas:

It’s rather moving and inspirational, I think.

Of course, ignoring institutional power as we talk about the viral nature of these videos and other texts would be a detriment. will.i.am has money and notoriety, which helps him to gain media access, but even those without this kind of fame have had boosted attention from the mainstream media. For the most part (though there are exceptions), many of these digital texts have gained media attention, which helps them get more attention on the Internet.

And buried in all this is a complete lack of attention to issues, which I believe are increasingly getting lost in the move from politicians as policy setters to politicians as celebrities. We might even understand these digital texts as celebrations of the candidates’ celebrity, a case of what Jürgen Habermas would call the refuedalization of our lifeworld.

Ignorance of the issues and focus on candidate’s “electability” or “charisma” also obfuscates their rhetoric. The prime example of this, I think, is Barack Obama’s monopoly on the words “change” and “hope,” two commonplaces that are circulated to such a degree that they have lost most (if not all) denotative meaning and instead connote and associate. (This monopoly is made nearly complete with Edwards dropping out and Clinton’s ineffectiveness as making the terms part of her campaign.) What do these terms mean?

Obama Girl’s super powers video makes this exceptionally clear that not only does Obama have this monopoly (she is fighting not just Bush, but both Bill and Hillary Clinton, the former of whom ran on a campaign of “change”), but also that this term has no meaning. If on the side of “hope” and “change” are Obama and his supporters, and every other politician, with the exception of Ted Kennedy (who paradoxically seems to stand with “change” while still being part of the old guard of the Democratic Party) stand for the “status quo” (again, another undefined term; as John Dewey warns, there is no “status quo” because culture is not static, but ever-changing), what do “hope” and “change” mean?

(videos via Chuck Tryon here and here.)

Today, one of those professors is revisiting the (until now) dormant debate. After protesting the pink locker room at a Hawkeye home game in November, Jill Gaulding plans to file a complaint under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions, now that a new Iowa presidential administration is in place.

“I don’t think this is about Hayden Fry or his intention in the 1980s; I think this is about how people understand the locker room in 2007,” said Gaulding, who has since left Iowa and now practices employment discrimination law in Minnesota. “This [is] understood as a funny version of the slur that goes on in athletics about playing like a girl, playing like a sissy” — and worse, she said, the university has perpetuated the insult in “a very official, permanent way.”

“It’s based on a concept of gender hierarchy that says not only are boys and girls different, but more important it’s better to be a boy than a girl; it’s shameful to be a girl,” said Gaulding, who is researching a book on cognitive bias and gender discrimination. “Anyone who’s not deeply in denial understands and acknowledges that the pink locker room taps into this very long tradition of using gender as a put-down.”

What does pink mean to “us” in our society? Certainly, I think Gaulding is correct in that the use of pink taps into the feminization of the color, and the correlated demeaning of manhood associated with it. Why does pink make us more docile? Because of the codified affective regime that goes along with it. Some are saying that Gaulding needs to pick her battles, that this one isn’t worth fight for. This may be correct — it seems like a battle that probably can’t be won, and might only calcify those who think this is a ridiculous claim. On the other hand, it might be a great educational moment about the use of color and the construction of manhood.

I often wonder about the use of pink: its adoption by many gay and queer men, its use by straight men on shirts that read “Real Men Wear Pink,” and its use to demean men in attempts to make them “not manly enough” — as is what is happening during football games at the U of I campus. Frankly, I think that the locker room should not be painted pink — but then again, if we go deep enough into critical gender studies of male behavior, is the ultimate end the end of sporting events like football that have been built around concepts of competition, domination, manhood, etc.?

• Sometime I need to read Craig Bellamy’s new Fast Capitalism article he discusses here

• Is affect becoming a commonplace term in the humanities, to the point that it’s various definitions are being conflated? Jenny Edbauer Rice speculates on this.

• From Viz.: Discussion of fashion as visual rhetoric. Excerpt:

Yet fashion is a form of self-(re)presentation in which everyone engages–even when they think they are rejecting it, or at least “not thinking about it.” (Nudist colonists are maybe an exception, but even they have to get dressed sometimes.) The best expression of this point I know of is Meryl Streep’s monologue about the blue sweater in The Devil Wears Prada. Fashion implicates everyone in its complex social, cultural, even political networks: of capital, class, gender, race, sexuality, globalization…the list could go on.

• Nels links to a couple recent posts on academic masculinity. They’ve certainly got me thinking more about embodiedness, masculinity, and dress. And I think I have a new blog I have to follow.

Saturday:

O.02 Technologies of Writing: Rhetorics of Place

Jeff Rice‘s talk, “Spatial Identities: Writing Cities,“ was really engaging. He called into question the way Google Maps or MapQuest constructs our ideas of place, arguing that there is something more than just the map and the route. Place should also take into account various information databases that we have in our heads: databases of people, places, associations.

A great follow-up to his talk was Jenny Edbauer‘s (The Pennsylvania State University) talk “Dense Feelings: The Affective Metonymy of Local Places,“ in which she argued for a new way to think of feelings and place: that places are structured affectively. Places frame affect as structural in two ways, she said: 1) affect as metonymy (places stand in for a scattered body; i.e., neighborhoods orient people in an expansive place; affect simplifies a complex area); 2) affect as structural legitimization (place meanings are legitimized through affect). Great ideas for thinking about place.

Dennis Lynch (Michigan Technological University) then talked on “Feeling Indirectly: Writing to Discern,“ during which he asked how literally we should take the relationship between ethics, rhetoric, and place. I didn’t quite follow all of his talk, but he draw on Judith Butler’s work on ethics (which I should look into).

P.05 Negotiating Cyber Faces for Social Spaces: Constructions of Individuals Inside Online Communities

Three graduate students at Miami University-OH shared their research on online identity work. Wioleta Fedeczko shared her research on Hoodwink’d, a website community in which users have to solve riddles to join (it’s somewhat difficult, she says) and then can comment on other people’s sites in ways that only other Hoodwink’d members can see. Gina Patterson shared her research on working class queer folk and their online use, drawing from queer theory (Judith Butler: what forms of community have been created and what violence was done to create those communities?; Judith Halberstam: defines queer as non-normative). Abby Dubisar discussed her interviews with first-year students who used Facebook and who saw Facebook as part of the college experience (which is very interesting to me, as I went to undergraduate school just before Facebook, though it does make sense).

She works from the theories of Sartre and John Deigh on shame. Quoting Sartre, she writes that “To be ashamed is to be in the position of ‘passing judgment on myself as an object that I appear to the Other” (227). Thus, shame is the recognition of yourself as an Other’s object. “Shame,” Bartky writes, “is the distressed apprehension of the self as inadequate or diminished.” John Deigh says that we should “conceive shame, not as a reaction to a loss, but as a reaction to a threat, specifically the threat of demeaning treatment one would invite in giving the appearance of someone of lesser worth” (qtd in Bartky 227).

Bartky notes that shame becomes a “cringing withdrawal from others” (228).

This is interesting in light of a 2004 USA Today article which states:

At bottom, shaming punishments are wrong because they constitute an unhinged assault on the shared and exalted moral status — the dignity — all human beings possess simply by virtue of being human.

Dartky argues that a pedagogy of shame for women is particularly damaging because they have been shamed throughout their educational career (and, I might add, throughout their lives as a whole), but it seems that shaming is inherently wrong because it is an assault on the dignity of others, and because it reduces other people to our objects. When you feel shame, you realize that you are someone else’s object: you do not live up to their judgments (or their perceived judgments).

It is worth nothing that shame and guilt are two different things. Dartky writes that “Shame, then, involves the distressed apprehension of oneself a lesser creature. Guilt, by contrast, refers not to a subject’s nature but to her actions: typically, it is called forth by the active violation of principles which a person values and by which she feels herself bound” (229).

Bartky, Sandra Lee. “The Pedagogy of Shame.” Feminisms and Pedagogies of Everyday Life. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996. 225-241.

Habermas, Jürgen. “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism“ and “Social Action and Rationality.“ Translated by Thomas McCarthy.

Marcuse, Herbert. “Liberation from the Affluent Society.“ in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 276-287. New York: Routledge, 1989.

A classmate began Tuesday’s class with the question that we hard largely left unanswered at the end of the previous week: where can we find resistance in today’s society, according to Herbet Marcuse’s vision? The class discussion that followed was a really good discussion, and as Orosco pointed out, was one that has been held among Marxists for quite a while. However, I was extremely frustrated during this discussion. The class, for the large part, seemed to want to focus the discussion on whether we should focus on reform or qualitative change, and how, and what acts constituted which. I thought this discussion was fruitful, but I was frustrated because I didn’t feel that we were enhancing our understanding of Marcuse’s vision of resistance and qualitative change, but rather continuing the debate between those in class who I might identify as liberals and those in class who are or have been radical.

I wanted to hear about, in particular, the ways in which we can change the ways our bodies function and move in society. How can we focus on desire and changing what/how we desire so that was can create qualitative change? I felt that this was central to Marcuse’s vision of qualitative change, and I even quoted it in class to try to move the conversation that way, but no one else wanted to go that way.

And I am left wondering why. I have three formulations to answer that why: 1) I am stressing Marcuse’s focus on bodies more than I should be; 2) everyone had moved on mentally to Habermas and his more reform-oriented model (at least more reform-oriented than the other theorists we have read); or 3) the class hasn’t actually undergone transformative change because this class hasn’t undergone bodily changes, only mental ones. If I am wrong in stressing Marcuse’s passages on the body, then I would greatly appreciate correction; however, I feel, after reviewing the text a few times, that I am correct in my reading. I would refer to the text now, in this moment, but I have left my book at home. As for the second formulation listed here, I don’t know if I believe that one because I had a hard enough time understanding Habermas, and this focus on reform in class discussion was occurring before the shift to Habermas.

So, I’m left with the third: this class hasn’t changed the way students’ bodies function, so the learning is all knowledge and not bodily. I’m reading a great book by Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., titled Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Constructions of Desire, which discusses the way supposedly transformative cultural studies composition courses don’t incorporate changes in desire. Of teaching new knowledges and ideologies, Alcorn writes: “Such knowledge will always be used in accordance with existing ideologies and their respective desires and identities. In order to use knowledge for social progress, desire must bee mobilized to use knowledge. Desire itself must be altered if knowledge is to be effective in solving social problems“ (5).

As I write this, I worry that it might come across as a critique of the course, and I suppose it is, but more of transformative courses in general. Mostly, as I write this, I am trying to answer the question: why would we read all this, understand the way Western society works in a more complex, critical way, and still only call for minor reforms and not envision a society without suffering? And the only answer I can come up with is that our desires haven’t been altered. We still desire the restaurant down the street, to get an A and a degree instead of actually transformative experiences, to get a job when our degrees are over, to date and have relationships in the same way we did ten weeks ago. We still desire the same privileges that we have been desiring before the class. And when I consider who I think is grasping the material the best, based on my observations during discussion (I’m trying not to be too hubristic and assuming that I grasp it all), are those who have less invested in dominant culture: the queers and Dave (?), who seems pretty anarchist in his viewpoints. (An aside, as I think about it, I realize I could probably only name half my classmates’ names. Hmm… how could this class be more of a community, changing the way we function as students?) Well, this observation of who I think gets it is based on mostly Marcuse’s work, I think.

What would a classroom look like where desire was shifted? That I do not know. Perhaps and hopefully Alcorn’s book will help me address that (he comes from a Lacanian perspective, something I have little familiarity with). But I think I’m starting to formulate what I want to write my paper on for the course: transforming desire in the critical pedagogy classroom, drawing from Critical Theory.