I’m at a brainstorming stage. I’m very confused on what I want to write about. Because of these, I think that asking many questions, and freewriting at least 15 minutes every day is a great idea.

Questions:
What does it mean, as a teacher, to engage in conscientious moral revolt (Camus’s term)?
How much should politics be explicit in the classroom?
How does one enact change ethically?
How can one teach ethically? How does one teach without reinforcing too many paradigms that one believes are oppressive?
How do I teach without reinforcing oppressive paradigms?
How does one get people to listen?
How does one get people to think?
Is thinking the only form of rebellion left?
Does capitalism, the Enlightenment, and the cultural industry co-opt everything? Are they totalizing?
Can one teach in an educational institution ethically?
Is there room in education to effect change?
How can discourse be changed to effect change?
How can poetry as an artform and as a polemical public act engage with ideas and cause change?
How does hyptertext do the same?
Does art effect change more quickly/more effectively/more radically than other polemics?
Is there such a thing as art anymore?
What effect does playfulness in writing change what is valued in writing? In thought? In “logic”? In polemics?
To what degree do we need to dangle ourselves in controversy, in confusion, in ambiguity?
Is questioning values and ideas effective? Is this polemical?
What does it mean to be polemical? Do I understand this word?
What should be changed? Why?
What causes oppression? Does the cause matter? Is there a root? Does understanding a possible cause help illuminate a possible solution?
Are there solutions?
If any pedagogy can be perverted, is there hope that I can come up with an ethical pedagogy?
Should teaching and education be removed from institutions? What does education do now?
What is the goal of me getting an M.A.? What is my goal when I get a PhD?
Is it ethical for me to engage in higher education?
How can one act in an oppressive society in which one must engage?
How do the polemics/arguments/ethos of counterculture movements inform pedagogy? How does punk ethos inform pedagogy?
When we are asking to query and confuse, how much are we asking to queer?
How can we make ethical arguments? Is it ethical to persuade? Is it violent to persuade?
Is violence always bad?

I’ll have to write more later. I have to go pick up a friend at her house.

Polemics and Irenics in Argument – it’s a start?

In her essay “The Womanization of Rhetoric,“ Sally Miller Gearhart writes that she believes “that any intent to persuade is an act of violence“ because the persuader has an intention of changing someone (53), and proposes that instead we should “forsake all this and think of ourselves not as bearers of great messages but as vessels out of whose variety messages will emerge“ (60). I think this is an interesting position, and the reason I bring it up isn’t because I completely agree with her. In fact, I strong believe that everything is an argument, as is often argued, which makes Gearhart’s position problematic (isn’t everything violent if these two ideas merge?). (However, if the dominant metaphor, “Argument is war,“ is a subtext to our lives [Lakoff and Johnson, right?], then perhaps this idea of everything being violent is something to pursue?) I am interested in this because I feel it gets at a very important question about arguments, and that is how aggressive or violent should they be? Perhaps another way to look at this might be how much is the arguer collaborating with the audience and those with different opinions, and how much is the arguer working against the audience and those who disagree.

In Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness, Walter J. Ong writes:

Contest is a part of human life everywhere that human life is found. In war and in games, in work and in play, physically, intellectually, and morally, human beings match themselves with or against one another. Struggle appears inseparable from human life, and contest is a particular focus or mode of interpersonal struggle, an opposition that can be hostile but need not be, for certain kinds of contest may serve to sublimate and dissolve hostilities and to build friendship and cooperation. (15)

Johan Huizinga adds, “All knowledge…is polemical by nature“ (qtd. in Ong 45). At this time, I am inclined to agree, that all of our knowledge is created out of struggle and conflict. However, to what degree can this struggle be too aggressive or violent? I know this feels vague at this time, and I’m looking for some sort of guidance (both from myself by writing this out, and from you).

Another valid concern is how we might become too irenic. Ong believes that we have become “unabashed irenicists“ (24). Here I am inclined to agree. Americans tend to fear conflict, viewing it as something that must cause separation. While we often value differences (or is this merely lip service), we don’t really value differences in ideas. This is true from the introspective (how many people struggle to dispel conflicts within themselves?) to the large scale (you’re either with us or against us – a minimization of choices, of differences). In groups, we try to dispel conflict through means such as voting, consensus, and compromise, all of which I believe just serve to mask conflict (voting hides the needs/wants of the minority who has lost; consensus is more a contest of who can last the longest; compromise masks the fact that neither party actually got what they wanted).

Which brings me to polyphony (multivocality) and collage in texts, including hypertexts and multigenre essays. I like these texts because they don’t mask conflict – in fact, it is usually right there, in multiple voices and from multiple pints of view. In fact, an author can be upfront about his/her/hir own conflict within the self; the author doesn’t have to take a singular view on an issue, but can rather express all the voices in his/her/hir head. Additionally, I like these texts because of their potential to be, in my own made up phrase, “texts that listen.“ By creating this term, I am drawing on my belief that we often do not listen to texts or to people, but rather wait impatiently to “counter-argue.“ If a text has multiple viewpoints, perhaps it can quell this urge to “read“ with an eye for what you can attack in a counterargument.

Some ideas that I would like to intersect as I research and write include gender, aggression, verbal and psychological violence, polyphony, polemics, irenicism, collage/montage/bricolage (sp?), hypertext, texts that “listen,“ and the metaphor “argument is war“ (Lakoff and Johnson). Questions I have at this time include:
1. Does this make sense at this time?
2. I know this is a huge topic – does anyone have suggestions for ways to focus?
3. What suggestions do people have for sources? I am considering Barthes and Bakhtin, but would love more ideas.

Works Cited

Gearhart, Sally Miller. “The Womanization of Rhetoric.“ Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Gesa E. Kirsch, Faye Spencer Maor, Lance Massey, Lee Nickoson-Massey, and Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

Ong, Walter J. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.

Note on blogging: I wish that Blogger were as cool as WordPress, or even LJ, and I could have “cuts” or “extended entries” so that longer entries don’t fill up the page. Eh. Back to reading some Elbow.

I wonder if I could have my students write about this and get their feedback? Is that appropriate? Is that reasonable? Could I ask such a thing of freshmen? Of course, the sample is skewed because these students have had me for six weeks, and I haven’t focused on audience any more than they are preparing to write for an academic audience.

But if we’re only preparing students for academic writing, what good is that? I mean, does the world need another million academics every year?

No, we should be teaching students to write with authority. So, the question is, does writing for different audiences (e.g., friends, grandparents, teachers) help students find their authority?

But something that I’ve really been thinking about, especially after I wrote my first entries in this and thought about people making comments, and the potentiality of a community of research weblogs where people were constantly leaving comments and ideas…okay, so I’ve been thinking about the “communality” of the author, how the author is only actually writing, well, what I am doing here, a collage of citations, a series of references, whether explicit or implicit, to previous authors and thinkers and communities. I mean, I ripped off the term collage from Lance Olsen, who probably got it somewhere else.

My friends Jesse and Tom and I were talking once about citations and referencing sources. I argued that everything is a citation, that all our ideas come from somewhere, and then Jesse said something that was like a huge eye opening for me. He said “If everything is a citation now, then it’s not so much what we say, but how we say it,” or something to that effect. Of course, I still think what we say matters, as I’m sure he does, but it’s how we put together those citations that makes up what we say.

But, to link this collage and citation idea back to the course: language, technology, and culture. So, I’m wondering how technology is being used in general discussion of collage and citations and such. I know I’m still being vague, as I was before, but I feel more assured in my focus, and this is something that really excites me. I definitely need to look as some of Ede’s suggestions for reading, especially on authorship and such.

Okay, I’ve got to go meet someone for lunch.