• via Clay Spinuzzi, Hello, My Name is Bob, and I Check My Email While on the Toilet. Excerpt:

In many recovery programs, one of the first steps to overcoming an addiction is to admit there is a problem, “Hello, my name is Bob and I check my e-mail while on the toilet.” That may sound comical but without acknowledging the worship of the urgent, there can be no change. Man must re-build the walls of his digitally infiltrated castle. He must find his place of quiet, of solace, of meditation, and of focus. The important must supersede the urgent once again; it starts with the off switch.

Spinuzzi asks (rightly so): Are they going to preach against reading magazines on the toilet next?

• Also from Spinuzzi, a presentation he gives to students on how to argue your way to a better grade.

• Via my office-mate Jeremy, funniest typos in résumés. I may have to share this with my classes next term.

• Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes about feminism and faggotry. Excerpt:

I’m trying to talk about faggotry and feminism, how they intersect so clearly in my life but elsewhere they’re rings around one another. Feminism taught me to politicize every choice, including the ways in which I claim desire. I want to say that faggotry taught me to claim desire, including the ways in which I politicize every choice. Just because that sounds symmetrical. It would make things easier.

Another note: What am I thankful for?

• Chosen families and the wonderful times I’ve had with them
• The wonderful opportunity I have this year to teach full time
• Feminism, which has saved me
• Anti-racist activists here at OSU
• Cigarettes
• The trip to the hot tub earlier this week, which seemed to help my foot out a lot
• Coffee
• Rhetorical theory, especially Judith Butler as of late
• Genderqueer politics

Sarah, Luke, and I have been in Little Rock for only a few hours Wednesday night and decide to see what the city’s like. With the help of Google, we find a piano bar that seems kind of fun, though it is kind of empty. When asked how we managed to hear about the bar, since we’re from out of town, our compositions come to the forefront. I had googled “queer bar” and “little rock,” but what is the safe terminology here? How do we compose our [queer] bodies so that it is safe for us? The bar seems queer friendly, but is “queer” a safe word here? I state instead that we googled “cool bar” and “little rock.”

The owner tells us we should go to a bar called Midtown, touted as one of Esquire Magazine‘s top 100 bars in the country. The bar is so dive, and how we sit, how we talk, and how we move are all suddenly more self-conscious. We find that much of the time we are Little Rock, we are concerned with self-presentation for the sake of self-preservation. Where are we safe? What streets will lead to our criminally queer bodies being the object of violence — verbally or physically? We meet a very drunk man named Jeff who is obsessed with our Oregonian-ness. As to why we are visiting Little Rock, we decide to soften the blow — the Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference is suddenly just “a conference on rhetoric” to him. We don’t call him out on the use of the words “gay shirt” and “art fag.”

We leave later; our only scar is the red smear on Sarah’s elbow: having placed her elbow on the table, she found it sitting in a pool of red. We at first hoped it was ketchup, but once she had wiped it on her shirt to clean her elbow and it dried a bit later, it was the deep brown of dried blood.

Scene 2:

We are in a taxi Friday night. The driver introduces himself as Chicago Tom. He develops his Chicagoan ethos, telling us he moved to Little Rock because he got shot at twice in Chicago. He’s been in fights. He says he threatens other drivers who dare to damage his car. In Chicago, he tells us, he used to carry beer in the front seat, offering it to riders for only $2.00 a can. He confides in us as well that he used to drink while working. Not as much as his day off, when he’d drive the taxi anyway, because police don’t pull over taxis, and he’d get drunk as all hell and then drive home in his taxi. Sarah is terrified and squeezes my hand. As we are dropped off at a bar, he gives us his own personal phone number so we can call him specifically for a ride back to the hotel. Luke punches his phone number into his cell phone. He does not hit save.

Scene 3:

Friday afternoon. We have thoroughly enjoyed all the panels we have gone to and feel our panel was a success. We are now sitting in the Featured Panel: Civil Rights/Civic Discourse with Joyce Elliot (Director of Legislative and State Outreach for the Southwest Region of the College Board and former Arkansas House representative), Rita Sklar (Executive Director, ACLU Arkansas), and Minnijean Brown Trickey (one of the “Little Rock Nine” and activist, speaker, and writer). I fall in love with Minnijean Brown Trickey for the wonderful things she says. Overall, the panel is amazing and great.

One thing is said that causes our row to inhale so strongly the air pressure surely changed in the room. One of the panelists is discussing an out lesbian who is currently in the Arkansas legislature. She has been hugely successful, the panelist says, in part because she does not “toss her sexuality in others’ faces.” We all gasp. This is the language we have heard to denigrate queers and people of color: You are fine as long as you do not throw it in our faces. What does that mean? Hiding a partner? Not talking about cultural homophobia or racism? The citation has been made, whether intentionally or unintentionally; I wonder who else in the room is disturbed. I would ask about it, but I wonder if it wouldn’t come out as rage, and there is such a long queue of questions that it appears impossible to ask.

Scene 4:

We are walking and I am told once again that I do not have an accent so stop it. I find myself unconsciously adopting a slight southern twang. I pull in the inflections of those around me, and the slight southern Iowa twang I had as a child comes out, exaggerates (it was hardly noticeable to begin with), grows. My vowels change and I kind of like it. I want to move to the South, develop a Southern accent, continue to attend these dive bars, wear my cowboy boots that are killing me after walking all over downtown Little Rock over three days, breathe in the humid air. I am sweating out the Oregon and breathing in the drawls around me.

I’m reminded of some of my writing I did on another blog about homophobia, sexism, and the cultural act of “being annoyed” and how it led to great discussions at an open mic I attended around those issues and how it (might have) changed the mind of a friend who found people who were “very gay” very annoying. We used literacy and language to communicate to each other and come to a better understanding. I think I’m going to expand on this story and use it in my thesis.

Cushman points to an important distinction that I would like to keep in mind: “the difference between missionary activism, which introduces certain literacies to promote an ideology, and scholarly activism, which facilitates the literate activities that already take place in the community” (13).

Another issue I have found at stake is that of the dialogues around “false consciousness.” Cushman notes that critical pedagogues can label students and citizens as having false consciousness and then dismiss them. “Yet,” she writes, “the many scholars who do immerse themselves into the daily living of people find, predictably, hidden ideologies — belief systems that contain numerous, clever ways to identify and criticize onerous behavior” (23). The engagement in society that Cushman calls for would allow us to understand that there is resistance in the population to dominating forces, that everyone isn’t caught up in “false consciousness” (or perhaps, totally caught up in it), and thus should not be dismissed.

(I’m reminded of the Grimshaw article I blogged about a few weeks ago that argued against the “autonomous self” that liberalism so loudly touts.)

Cushman also quotes from Freire, that “To affirm that men are persons and persons should be free, and yet, to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce” (24, quoting Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed 35). Cushman believes tangible to mean activism and questions if the cultural studies’ and critical pedagogy’s stress on “critical consciousness” is activism. “My sense is that we’re not doing enough because we’re acting within the role of the teacher that has been perpetuated by the institution, and thus keeps us from breaking down the barriers between the university and community” (24).

Vitanza has written and spoken about the “cynics” that cultural studies might be creating because perhaps working for “critical consciousness” is not enough. This is largely due to the flow of desire and how analysis often does not do enough to confront and change desire, to change the way our bodies function (remember to go back to Alcorn’s book).

Cushman, Ellen. “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change.” CCC 47.1 (February 1996): 7-28.

Wednesday night, after a short week of classes before Thanksgiving, I sat in Bombs Away, one of my favorite bars to sit and chat with others in. Two other English department GTAs and I were holding a lively and hopeful discussion about what we were doing at GTAs and as future teachers. We lamented our theses, how there was little “so what“ to them because no one would read them. I countered that we could use them to learn for ourselves, use them to earn privilege (our degrees) and then continue to educate others, create spaces for discussion, create spaces for critical thinking, and also write and engage with the world in more engaged ways than a thesis sitting in Valley Library. My take on all this was informed, of course, by Habermas and Young. I have really begun liking both of them.

But what happened next really sold me on Iris Marion Young’s work. I felt like I was honestly in a salon, holding discussions about gender, graduate school, social change, sexuality, and so much more and coming to agreement and similar terms in a bar — if only more people were there. I also felt like I was learning more in that hour and a half conversation than I had in most of my classes (perhaps only this one and a few others have been as engaging). But then a friend of ours sat down, and the way we communicated changed. It wasn’t bad at first — just different. But then she called a professor of ours an “insecure pansy,“ and I said, “I’d like you to reconsider the use of the word pansy,“ explaining the way it is used to categorize feminine men and make a strict definition of masculinity — that, and it used a feminizing word, akin to pussy that equates feminine characteristics to negative characters. Also, I stated that the word had been used against me and was insulting to me, and quite possibly to other men in the bar.

I soon found that our friend and I were engaged in an ever-increasing performance of agonism, going back and forth, the stakes and argumentative style becoming more structured as we went. I noticed that my friend Sarah was not able to get a word in edge-wise because she is not as aggressive a communicator, and it became very uncomfortable as our friend made her last argument backed up by claims, furthermores and therefores, and insistent movements of her hands. I said, “I have to stop here because I am uncomfortable. I am uncomfortable because we are still tossing around the word pansy and even the n-word [which was used in comparison] and because our conversation is increasingly agonistic [a word which I realized was a mistake and jargonistic when she stated she didn't know what that meant].“ I’ve always wanted to value narrative and other forms of argument, but I realized that what was being valued in that instant was an academic-agonistic style of argumentation that was very off-putting to me, to Sarah, and I think to our friend Nate as well, who remained silent throughout the debate. I think the word debate is accurate here instead of dialogue because the way we talked continued down the road of back-and-forth claims and defense. It appears that the type of discourse we valued in order to make meaning was not the type of discourse that is used by the majority of people, and the type of discourse that I wanted to value. I don’t know where our friend learned to argue like this — whether it is cultural (she is an immigrant), from her family, or from her years of schooling — but it became a style that was used, even unintentionally, to exclude those who were not versed in it.

I’ve read parts of Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe, which pretty much argues that we are in an argument culture and that we should explicitly teach our students what the conversations in our fields are and how to argue within those conversations. He takes to task Deborah Tannen in her book The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue because she argues against polemics, but does so in a way that Graff thinks is polemical. I haven’t read her book, but from what I am beginning to understand of Young, it appears that Graff is engaged in the type of deliberative democracy that Young notes is exclusionary: one of debate among those who can debate. Graff of course wants to include more people in that debate, but it seems it is not through valuing different types of discourses, but rather, through teaching more people to construct an academic-style argument. It is akin to saying: you will be smarter and more well-respected and listened to if you argue the way we do, and not saying, as I think it should, we should deconstruct the way we listen and the ways of speaking/writing we value so that we can include those who deserve to be included.

I’ve been interested for some time in listening and how we can listen more to each other. I think as long as we are engaged in this style of I must prove my point, we won’t be a listening culture. We stop listening in order to formulate our next argument. We aren’t interested in changing ourselves, but in changing others. We cannot give time to others to make arguments indifferent types of discourse, and, perhaps worst of all, we have no time to listen to suffering and pain because it is not part of the logical ways in which we argue. When I say, “What you say hurts me,“ and you do not listen because I have not properly defended an argument, you have not listened to me.

Of course, this brings me back to the body, and changing the way we desire and feel. Does this require more compassion? Does it require more attunement with our bodies to what others are saying and doing? Do we need to refocus with our eyes on what is going on around us and how so many people aren’t included in the conversations? Do we need to change where we stand: go and hold these conversations not in city halls and courthouses, but in ghettos and on farms? I’ll be happy when we all stop and say, “What I am hearing you say is…“ — a form, I think, of Young’s “Greeting,“ a recognition of the other person’s experiences, but I don’t think this can merely happen by telling people they must start doing it. I think it can only happen through emotive changes in society.

Alcorn offters “a third model for change… esentially a psychanalytic model, [that] suggests that discourse or language is, in itself, a highly heterogeneous substance. On one hand, it can operate as coded information, able to influence political identity largely in terms of the old liberal categories of knowledge and truth” (20).

In order to change oneself, one has to, according to Alcorn, reduce the unconscious conflict within oneself. Alcorn notes that “ideology works best when it manages to keep such conflcited libidinal experiences fully repressed” (22). “Subjects will develop freedom and rationality only to the extent that they are encouraged to discover, recognize, and take responsibility for the unconscious libidinal codes of desire and repression that underwrite their own subjectivity. This freedom requries work that analysts call grief work…. The giving up of libidinal attachments is always a form of mourning” (23, 27).

Drawing on Freud, Alcorn notes how we are beings of attachment, and that we remain attached to things, people, and events even if they cause suffering, because removing ourselves from those attachments is also painful (26-27). Here I am reminded of counseling theories that discuss how one does not change behavior or thought until the pain surrounding the current situation becomes greater than the fear surrounding the change.

Alcorn calls for a teaching that is both political and personal: “Because ideology operates at the level of personal and emotional experience, it needs to be explored at that level” (28).

Alcorn, Marshall W., Jr. Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Construction of Desire. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2002.

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.

So far, I’m liking it a lot. I’ve read the introduction, in which Alcorn lays out some groundwork and explains what he will do in each chapter. Alcorn discusses the political objectives of cultural studies composition classrooms, but notes the lack of discussion of desire in them. For Alcorn,

The problem of politics is a problem of desire. It is an argument about who gets what and why. If politics is to be fair, we must fashion a culture in which everyone understands who suffers, why they suffer, and what those who suffer desire. Politics then requires a real, on-site understanding of human experience and a form of public discourse that can effectively communicate that difference. (4)

Alcorn firmly believes that we shouldn’t be teaching a specific/set/certain ideology, but rather develop an “anti-ideological identity.” Like Victor Vitanza, who was concerned that cultural studies classrooms were teaching knowledge but not making change, Alcorn believes that “Such knowledge will always be used in accordance with existing ideologies and their repsective desires and identities. In order to use knowledge for social progress, desire must be mobilized to use knowledge. Desire itself must be altered if knowledge is to be effective in solving social problems” (5).
Because “Teaching a particular ideology oversimplifies the quest for political justice and the real power dynamics behind any oppressive discourse,” Alcorn “want[s] to advocate a theory of democratic participation that allows information about human experience to circulate in discourse comunities with the least amoutn of pathological distortion — that is, without the translations and libidinal coercions that all ideologies make in order to justify and maintain their power” (7).

So, If I could sum up this chapter, I’d say Alcorn is arguing that rather than teach a specific ideology (say, anti-Humanist, or anti-Enlightenment, or anti-Capitalism), we should interrogate our identities and “give up identifications with the master” (6), which is emotional work and emotional understanding of ourselves. Thus, we can change the way we desire somehow, and we can begin to understand the suffering and desires of others.

Alcorn, Marshall W., Jr. Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Construction of Desire. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2002.