From the back of Sirc’s book:
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.
