Wandering through the city of the Internets, considering various interests of my own, I stumbled upon a band I used to listen to occasionally: Propagandhi (wikipedia), a Canadian punk bad that espouses anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobia, anti-capitalist, pro-animal rights values. They fucking rock.

This song could have come out of John Stoltenberg’s work, as well as other academic feminist and queer theory (not that I’m claiming it did or even needs to):

I’m not going to try to tell you that I’m different from all the rest. I’ve been subject to the same de-structure of desire and I’ve felt the same effects; I’m a hetero-sexist tragedy. And potential rapists all are we. But don’t tell me this is natural. This is nurturing. And there’s a difference between sexism and sexuality. I had different desires prior to my role-remodelling. And at six years of age you don’t challenge their claims. You become the same. (Or withdraw from the game and hang your head in shame). I think that’s exactly what I did.
I tried to sever the connections between me and them. I fought against their further attempts to convince a kid that birthright can bestow the power to yield the subordination of women and do you know what patricentricity means? I found out just a couple of days/months/years/minutes ago. It means male values uber alles and hey! Whaddaya know… sex has been distorted and vilified. I’m scared of my attraction to body types. If everything desired is objectified then maybe eroticism needs to be redefined. And I refuse to be a man.

…punk culture’s lived appropriation of the everyday as a refusal to let the dominant culture encode and restrict the meaning of daily life suggests the first instance of a form of reistance that links play with the reconstruction of meaning. This particular popular form, filled as it is with abortive hopes, signifies within bourgeouis culture a “tradition of the scorned.” That is, punk culutre (or for that matter any lived relation of difference that doesn’t result in dominance or infantilization) reuptures the dominant order symbolically and refuses to narrate with permission. It is scored by the bourgeoisie because it not only challenges the dominant order’s attempt to suppress all differences through a discourse that asserts the homogeneity of the social domain but presents the possibility of a social imagination in which a politics of democratic difference offers up forms of resistence in which is becomes possible to rewrite, rework, recreate, and reestablish new discourses and cultural spaces that revitalize rather than degrade public life. Whether conscious or not, punk culture partly expresses social practices that contain the basis for interrogating and struggling to overthrow all those forms of human behavior in which differences becomes the basis for subjecting human beings to forms of degredation, enslavement, and exploitation. Of course, there is more at work in punk culture than the affirmation of difference; there is also teh difference of affirmation, that is, affirmation becomes the precondition for claiming one’s experience as a legitimate basis for developing one’s own voice, place, and sense of history. (168)

Giroux, Henry A., and Roger I. Simon. “Popular Culture as a Pedagogy of Pleasure and Meaning.“ Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. 2nd ed. Henry A. Giroux. New York: Routledge, 2005. 157-184.

Anzaldúa contrasts the view of art by the West with the view of art by tribal cultures. Western art “is dedicated to the validation of itself…is individual (not communal),“ whereas tribal art is “treated not just as objects, but also as persons“ (90). Western ethnocentrism often takes the power away from tribal art by putting it in a museum, making the art “a conquered thing, a dead ‘thing’ separated from nature and, therefore, its power“ (90). Anzaldúa still has hope for art, though: “Let us hope that the left hand, that of darkness, of femaleness, of ‘primitiveness,’ can divert the indifferent, right-handed, ‘rational’ suicidal drive that, unchecked, could blow us into acid rain in a fraction of a millisecond“ (91).

Can we view “academic” writing as the same as other Western arts? Devoted to the validation of itself? I agree with Sirc that the classroom should not be a museum because museums are not about using and power, but about removing power and viewing. Sirc writes of teh museum metaphor: “students are ‘invited’ in to sample the best that has been thought and expressed in our language and maybe even, like the art students we see poised in galleries with their sketchbooks and charcoals, to learn to reproduce the master’s craft” (2). There is a certain degree of “Look how well MLK writes. Now, try that” in the classroom. Even the “minorities” chosen are largely ones that agree with dominant ideology (or at least the academic version of it) and write in the standard academic style. Where is “the multicultural reader featuring a Tupac retrospective” (Sirc 3)? Why is Maya Angelou so revered as an African American writer? Yes, she’s great, but why her over another African American who write less Standard English-y? (I use MLK and Angelou because they are in our Writing 121 reader).

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999.

Sirc, Geoffrey. English Composition as a Happening. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 2002.

Optimism One builds off of Seth Kahn-Egan’s “principles of ‘punk’“ (DIY, sense of anger and passion, attack on institutions of oppression, willingness to endure pain, and and the “pleasure principle“) to construct what ze believes should be happening in a first-year writing classroom. Production becomes about “content and heart“ not about an “easily consumable package“ (361). Punk lets out emotions that dominant culture often forces us to hide and control (362). Qts bell hooks and Anzaldúa. Students have minority status in university, and academic writing erases the self, while revolutionary, personal writing can exert the self.

I’m too tired at 3:15 a.m. to say much more intelligent about this essay, but I do like the incorporation of bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress, which I have checked out but haven’t yet read and really want to. Optimism One quotes hooks: “whenever we address in the classroom subjects that students are passionate about there is always the possibility of confrontation, forceful expression of ideas, or even conflict” (qtd. 363). Also quotes Anzaldúa: “Write with your tongues of fire. Don’t let the pen banish you from yourself. Don’t let the ink coagulate in your pens. Don’t let the censor snuff out the spark, nor the gags muffle your voice. Put your shit on paper” (qtd. 363, italics here).

In this essay, Sirc compares local hip-hop to writing, claiming that hip-hop gets at having to say something, explores the desire to understand our pleasures, is real, and understands reality metaphorically. Students can also learn that local hip-hop has what popular hip-hop has lost, and in effect, let one of their selves die when they leave popular hip-hop for local. Sirc wishes students liked the arts he likes, but he has to be happy that they like hop-hop, which he also enjoys.

They practiced an art which interrupted the passivity of the spectator so that, as McLuhan & Fiore put it, “the audience becomes a participant in the total electric drama” (101). It was an art that frustrated conventions in order to allow other meanings to surface. It involved a re-appreciation of everyday material in order to complicated the distinction between art and life. This attempt resulted in new compositional forms: Assemblages, Combines, Neo-Dada works, and, most genre-blurringly, the Happenings. (5)

Sirc cites McLuah, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Meaning is the Message. New York: Random House, 1967.

Sirc’s book is also a reminder to read Jerry Farber’s The Student as Nigger (of which I’ve read a portion) New York: Pocket Books 1970.

Also, Sirc cites an article by a U of Oregon grad student in the 1960s, Charles Deemer, titled “English Composition as a Happening,” College English 29 (November 1967): 121-126. This essay is a collage of various soundbites expressing frustration and espousing the discontent of the 1960s (Sirc 6).

On the fact that English journal articles discuss how biologists write and not the “wonderful stuff—raising and reflecting on key compositional issues—” of Duchamp, Pollock, and others: “Frankly, I don’t care how a biologist writes” (8). Wonderful!!!!

“This is not Freshman English as a Happening, this is Freshan English as a Corporate Seminar” (9).

“I like how the blurring [of genres] messes up a stable reading; it energizes a text or scene, preventing it from becoming fixed” (12).

Lisa notes that one of Sirc’s phrases has always bothered her—something along the lines of we can either train students to make bombs or we can open them up to punk carnivalism. She sees this as a dichotomy, which is always a problem, but also as dismissing students’ control and choices. What does this perspective assume about student control and student desire?

I am glad Lisa brought this up, because student agency is important to me, and something I want to consider. Also, this quote reminds me of Deleuze’s essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” in which he discusses education as corporation and how we have changed/are changing education into a training facility meant to perpetuate the war-machine. I think there might be connections here to play with later.

Lisa also asked me to think about how to apply this to the actual classroom, to what is feasible. Additionally, just as we might ask if a feminist classroom has to be explicitly feminist, does a carnivalistic classroom need to be explicitly carnivalistic?

Carmen Luke, in her book The Struggle for Pedagogies, on the struggles between feminist and critical pedagogies, redefines the word pedagogy as the construction of knowledge in the classroom. Giroux, in an essay working on a similar definition of pedagogy, writes about his own pedagogy and how it falls short of his own expectations.

Lisa also suggested Victor Vitanza, whom I’ve already checked out some books by.

Sirc, Geoffrey. “Never Mind the Sex Pistols, Where’s 2Pac?“ CCC 49 (February 1998): 104-108.

I just finished reading these two essays. As I read Kahn-Egan’s, I liked some of what he was saying, but some things he wrote bothered me (and when I read Sirc’s essay that followed it up, I totally understood what was bothering me). Kahn-Egan is interested in making a classroom that studies punk and in “advocating a classroom where students learn the passion, commitment, and energy that are availabe from and in writing; where they can learn to be critical of themselves, their cultures, and their government—that is, of institutions in general; and, most importantly, where they learn to go beyond finding out what’s wrong with the world and begin making it better” (100). This sounds good, but I worry that Kahn-Egan wants to “maintain some civility” (100). As I read this, it felt that Kahn-Egan was taking what Sirc had written in “Never Mind the Tagmemics” and watered it down to something palatable. Kahn-Egan seems to be advocating a critical classroom by using punk.

Sirc replies that this rubs him wrong in two ways. The minor one is that Kahn-Egan’s class is “sentimental” because it is focusing on what Kahn-Egan enjoys, punk music, which Sirc equates to students having to listen to Mozart because Alan Bloom likes it (105). Sirc uses gangsta rap because it is the music his students enjoy, and, like punk and Malcom X, “is all about using a kind of plainseak grammar and lexicon” (104).

Sirc’s major issue with Kahn-Egan’s perspective is that it rehabilitates “negation.” Sirc asks, “Can the academy really be a site for reform? Then why would the Clash and Too $hort feel the way they do? Is there a meaningful, established cultural site for reform anywhere?…What if the world as it now stands can’t be made better but only undone?” (105). Kahn-Ehan’s pedagogy “rehabilitates” “negation” (105), turning it into social action for change, which the punk aesthetic never did. There is not so much hope in punk and rap perspectives as their is concern that there is “no future.” Sirc writes that he “hate[s] to see negation rehabilitationed” (105).

This is in itself exciting to me, as I think sometimes we just need to be angry for anger’s sake. Sirc writes:

I suppose I should work very hard in my class to teach students effective ways to critique, say, the dominant white media. But too often I can’t stomach the dominant white media enought even to care to do that project. It seems laughable. Is enabling students to do our oh-so-clever cultural critiques—an ad analysis, say—ever going to do anything except reaffirm the media’s top-dog status or the primacy of various race, class, gender, and preference roles? (106)

My god, my students are working on analysis essays at this moment. The critique is great. The critique is academic-self-indulgent.

Sirc expresses the same sense of loss and confusion I feel:

I really don’t know what to do in a writing class anymore, what makes real sense, escept to play 2Pac records, all those songs where he talks about “no future” and hwo “my attitude is shitty”… (106)

Sirc defines “punk” writing as “traumatic writing that explores the wound” (108).

Sirc concludes, “Such writing thrills me, and I’m bugged that it too often happens only accidentally…I still don’t know what I was waiting for, as the song says, but I continue to continue, working to provide a context for this sort of heartfelt pensée, composition not meant to take a stand or fix a problem, but simply to reflect on possibility, to chronicle changes, just changing and having the chance the change” (108).
(pensée means thought)

What I would give for heartfelt thought in all my students’ (and my own) writing!

Under Rhetoric and Composition Theory:

144. Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.”

163. Brodkey, Linda. Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.

167. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1950.

174. Elbow, Peter. “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” CCC 46 (February 1995): 72-83.

206. Owens, Derek. Resisting Writings (and the Boundaries of Composition). Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1994.

212. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.”

222. Vitanza, Victor, ed. PRE/TEXT: The First Decade. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburg P, 1993.

Under Literacy:

254. Daniell, Beth. “Against the Great Leap Theory of Literacy.” PRE/TEXT 7 (Fall-Winter 1986): 181-93.

274. Ong, Walter J., S.J. “Literacy and Orality in Our Times.” ADE Bulletin 58 (September 1978): 1-7. Rpt in Enos (449 below).

275. Ong, Wlater J., S.J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982.

276. Pattison, Robert. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.

283. Taylor, Denny, and Catherine Dorsey-Gaines. Growing up Literate: Learning from Inner-City Families. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1988.

286. Yagelski, Robert P. Literacy Matters: Writing and Reading the Social Self. New York: Teachers College P, 2000.

Under Basic Writing:

442. Bartholomae, David. “The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum.” Journal of Basic Writing 12 (Spring 1993): 4-21. (Here Bartholomae argues that the basic writing classroom should adopt the arts of the contact zone, from Pratt, which is what I blogged about recently.)

449. Enos, Theresa, ed. A Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers. New York: Random House, 1987.

451. Fox, Tom. Defending Access: A Critique of Standards in Higher Education. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999. (“John Ogbu’s theory of oppositional culture explains, in part, why initiation doesn’t work as a curricular strategy. What is needed are constant critiques of the ideologies that reduce writing courses to service and skills.”

455. Harris, Joseph. “Negotating the Contact Zone.” Journal of Basic Writing 41.1 (1995): 27-42.

461. Lu, Min-Zhan. “Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies of Preconditions of Basic Writing?” CE 54 (December 1992): 887-913. (“…the real task of the basic writer is neitehr to conform to nor abandon a monolithic discourse community, but to find innovative discursive strategies for negotiating the boundaries.”)

Under Gender, Race, and Class:

494. Gibson, Michelle, Martha Marinara, and Deborah Meem. “Bi, Butch, and Bar-Dyke: Pedagogical Performances of Class, Gender, and Sexuality.” CCC 52.1 (September 2000): 69-95.

Under Cultural Studies:

514. Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring English Studies. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1996.

516. Cushman, Ellen. “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change.” CCC 47 (February 1996): 7-28.

520. Rosteck, Thomas, ed. At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. New York: Guilford, 1999.

521. Sirc, Geoffrey. “Never Mind the Tagmemics, Where’s the Sex Pistols?” CCC 48 (February 1997): 9-29.

Almost everyone will be upset by this book. I feel that I’m a part of teh audience Sirc seeks, and I have been deeply disturbed—and prompted to careful thought—by his critique of the cultural studies tenets that I hold dear. Good books, of course, DO upset people, and they should. -Patricia Harkin

When Kevin Brooks left a comment here (aside: what is here, the physics of this blog as a space?) a few weeks ago stating that people are either very excited or very horrified by Sirc’s work, he was right.

I am not more than two pages in, and I’d already like to quote:

…designing spaces, I think, is what it’s all about. It’s a matter of basic architecture: Robert Venturi has shown that simplified compositional programs, programs that ignore the complexity and contradiction of everyday life, result in bland architecture; and I think the reverse is true as well, and perhaps more relevant for Composition: bland architecture (unless substantially detourned, as Lutz’s) evokes simplistic programs. The spaces of our classrooms should offer compelling environments in which to inhabit situations of writing instruction, helping intensify consciousness in the people who use them. Can such intensification happen in a conventional writing classroom? The architectural design for the conventional classroom has become soberly monumental, charged with the heavy burden of preserving the discursive tradition of “our language…the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (Bartholomae, “Inventing” 134). We erect temples to language, in which we are the priests among initiates (of varying degrees of enthusiasm), where we relive the rites of text-production for the nth time, despite the sad truth that the gods have fled so long ago that no one is even sure that they were ever there in the first place (in Composition, the gods are called, variously, power, athentic voice, discourse, critical consciousness, versatility, style, disciplinarity, purpose, etc.). (1-2)

Sorry for that extended quote, but I think that Sirc uses a powerful metaphor here. I’m not really sure what I’d like to say about this as of yet (I am not far into Sirc’s argument), but the connection to architecture seems important, and I am trying to rack my brains for the last time I talked about architecture, because it seems sometime today or yesterday I discussed it with someone.

Today at the University of Oregon, Lisa Ede, Suzanne Clark, and I talked about the architecture of English buildings on campuses (particularly U of O, Ohio State, and Iowa State), and how awful the often look, but that’s not the conversation I’m trying to bring to mind (but isn’t it important that English buildings are so utilitarian in style, because why is an English program important to a university, as now so often structured: for its utility: teach our students to write).

Sirc also reminds me that I have been meaning to read some Situationist thought to better understand the idea of detournment.