Following the lead of my mentor, I treat Barthes as a manual. If you have to flip through the text, what does it teach you to do?

Anecdote #1. Our class wiki is acting up. Students are suddenly unable to login or save pages. Some can. Some can’t. Some can from one computer, but not from another. It is as if there is an infectious IP address flagging our accounts. How to solve this problem, I ask? “A Lover’s Discourse,” a student says. “Yes. I say. We could do it the instrumental way and check the online mediawiki guide, but instead we will do it the Barthes way. I will use my “insistent” reading to tell me how to fix the wiki.” I still haven’t fixed the wiki.

Anecdote #2.  What is it about academics that cause them to reject consumerism? The passage that returns to me over and over is the one from Pleasure of the Text. What would an aesthetic of the consumer look like? Vered,  forced to stay home today because of an inch of snow, and I went to the grocery store today. “We need chocolate milk,” she said. Chocolate milk is an in house code for soy milk. “There it is!” she noted pointing to the boxes. She was right.

Anecdote #3. I reach for a citation, but I come up with an anecdote. “You call this snow!” I say to the clas.  All of these anecdotes function as citations. The biggest fear writing teachers have is plagarism. Such teachers forget that a citation is an anecdote. Each time we quote, we tell a story that is meaningful. These stories are our relationships with the text. “What wounds me are the forms of the relation,” Barthes writes. We do not teach the relationship. We teach credit. But paying credit is not the same as having a relationship with a citation. Paying credit is a form of respect, true, but also a forced respect. I may not respect you, I may barely know you, but I am being told to write your name down. “I am jealous of the book,” Barthes writes. Teach that as citation. Be jealous of your references.

“Imagine an aesthetic based entirely on the pleasure of the consumer” (Barthes).

Moment #1. A newsletter. Every few weeks a newsletter from South Bay Drugs and Pharmacy arrives via email. Each newsletter highlights a current sale item. South Bay is a major point for craft beer purchasing, in San Diego or online. For instance, from the other day, I received this note:

The Bruery Mischief 750ML

Their new year-round offering. Big citrus hop flavors balanced by a tropical fruit-like maltiness with a kick of Belgian yeast. I’d call it a cross between a West Coast IPA and a Belgian Golden Ale. Very tasty stuff.
$10ea, 8.50%abv

Items drive desire, whether they be featured as advertisements or on shelves. The other element that pushes me to hit reply and order something is: I have never had that before. I want to experience it. What is this, I ask. And when can I have it? If consumption is a distraction, I welcome that distraction. It is an aesthetic I find pleasing.

Moment #2. A commercial. Cultural studies ruined commercials for academia. McLuhan, too, is a culprit. The Mechanical Bride set in motion years of critique of the advertisement. Advertisements interpellate. Interpellation creates identity. The problem, we are told, is that identity cannot be tied to consumerism. We must liberate ourselves from the yoke of the purchase. Cultural studies, in this way, resembles a high school version of Buddhist thought. Break your bonds. Yet we are all consumers. We are not nearly opposed to bonds as we like to believe. For instance, I opened my MacBook to write this.

Moment #3. A Bud Lite commercial. I don’t believe I have ever had a Bud Lite. When I open an email newsletter like that from South Bay, I am not drawn to a new shipment of Bud Lite (not that the store would even stock Bud Lite). Still, despite no intersted in Bud Lite,  I return to the one beer commercial where a penguin is hiding in a speaker. Doo be doo be doo, we hear. It is the sound of Sinatra coming from somewhere. Doo be doo be doo. When the voice is revealed, we find the Bud Lite penguin. Someone shrieks in horror. The commercial is repeated in a number of ways (one version involves a phone call; the person who picks up the phone yells, “WHO IS THIS!”). The aesthetic of the consumer is often the aesthetic of the unexplainable. Why do I like this commercial? Why does it speak to me? Why does it interpellate me in a specific way? I won’t buy Bud Lite, but I will remember the product. Who is this, I might ask of myself. Why does it please me?

This semester I’m teaching an upper division writing course called The Rhetoric of Pleasure. Like the version I taught at Wayne State, it is mostly about Roland Barthes and writing.

The question/role of pleasure I take from The Pleasure of the Text, but also Barthes’ notion of a “situation of writing” in Empire of Signs. This pleasure is not satisfaction or being happy, but instead it is the space in which the text desires me, I am the reference of every image, the role of the image-repertoire, and other gestures Barthes introduces into rhetorical production. Affect? Yes. Imagination? Yes. Writing. Of course.

The pleasure of the text is also exigence. The will to write. When Cory Doctorow responds to social media critics by saying that, yes, social media is banal by nature, he is correct. And yet, social media, in addition to highlighting the banal, highlights the need for exigence. That exigence is often motivated by I want. I want to respond. I want to say something. I want to show what I’m thinking.

Pleasure might be contrasted with scholarship. They are not natural opposites (and for me, they are not, in fact, opposites). They are more like….following Barthes….mythological opposites. We assume that they are natural taxonomies in opposition. In the so-called scholarly model, I want is removed. We have the myths of objectivity and argument. Graduate students struggle to find topics to write about when their exams are completed. Undergraduates shuffle through non-contextualized assignments that ask them to critique cultural representations, write about X, or simply construct a thesis, all without the element of I want.

Don’t fear the I want. I want to write. I want to have a beer. I want to go to St. Louis. I want to write about my daughter reading menus. Is there a limit to this desire? Of course. All practices come with limitations. But what, in fact, are we limiting right now? What we have yet to allow.

A great deal of my academic writing can be summarized via the simple rhetorical concept of topos. The place of meaning. What we draw from in order to make meaning. Commonplaces. For the most part, fixed meanings.  In pedagogy, topos is translated into thesis. In argument, it often becomes cliche. There are various alternatives in theory to the topoi (chora is a dominant one). And Barthes and Williams went to great lengths to breakdown topoi as fixed places of meaning (Mythologies, Keywords). Folksonomies are the challenge to the basic premise of a topos’ dependence on taxonomies: what does this mean? More than one thing. As Barthes writes, as if things shuddered with meaning.

The Rhetoric of Cool was an exploration of a specific disciplinary meaning: Composition studies was reborn in 1963. Digital Detroit is meant as a challenge to an urban, spatial meaning: Or Detroit is a scene of ruins; or Detroit is on the verge of rejuvenation. Craft Obsession, as I now imagine it, will be a look at the basic meaning of the “socialness” of social software (as it has informed the craft beer movement). But each major project has been a challenge to a fixed meaning in general: cool, Detroit, beer. None of these book projects were meant to be about cool, Detroit, or beer. They are about something else (disciplinary history as it affects current practice, networked rhetorics, rhetorical obsession as it is created by social software).

A current article rejection leads me down this path of thinking. Whatever the merits of the article may be (my bias is to say it is good because I wrote it), the reviewers were too caught up in a specific topos (composition studies) to actually comment on the article as a composition studies article.  “It’s a great read,” the reviews said, “but it’s not composition studies.” The articlee itself questions such an assumption as it explores a type of digital writing informed by Ong’s sense of the noetic - composing with monumental figures that are often what drive memory. Indeed, dependence on the topos (whether by a commonplace like “composition studies” or by another place of meaning, as I try to spell out in the article) is a noetic practice. Our writings are informed by grand figures (”composition studies,” for instance) which shape our emotional and personal reactions to meaning. These figures can be people (Obama, Reagan) or institutions (a discipline or specific readings that come to mind as “grand” - such readings a reviewer will suggest not because they might add to an argument but because they are noetic; they come to his/her mind) or as I was trying to do, tied to a space (St. Louis).

McLuhan ties the topoi to perspective. Fixed perspective, he wrote, is challenged by the ways new media generate pattern formation (perspective no longer fixed but spread out as patterns). Others have draw upon narrative or hypertext to work around the problems topoi create regarding how meaning is formed and disseminated. Another article I am working on treats the problem as an assessment problem.  Maybe my own perspective tilts here (the sting of rejection) but the point I return to from a disciplinary perspective is the same point I tried to address in The Rhetoric of Cool: the dominance of a topos in the field of composition (though the point is easily generalizable to any field of study). At some point, one has to be able to draw on a taxonomy (”this is composition”) or else we have no meaning (”it is everything”). On the other hand, too much dependence on the taxonomy leads to empty meaning (”it is always X” to the point that it can no longer perform meaning, like asking a student to write an argument about gun control, parking on campus, or abortion; the student paper has no meaning; the meaning, as Maffesoli writes, is over saturated).

And this brings me to our cat. Every time I sit down on the couch, that cat has to sit on my lap. She waits for me to sit down. She walks back and forth across the room until I sit down. I cannot cover my lap or tell her to go lay down. She will sit on my lap. Even as I write this post, she is meowing at me that she wants to get up in my lap. What is the meaning of this gesture? Why my lap? She was not my cat when my wife and I were married (she belonged to my wife). Is this love? Or merely the desire for my lap? Is it a cat gesture? A pet habit? Or my imagination?

All of my disciplinary moments, thus, are interpreted by the personal. In this particular article I refer to, the personal (which is, of course, the basis of any noetic experience) involves eating in restaurants in St. Louis with my daughter. Brodkey recalled sewing. Corder recalled mowing his lawn. Ulmer remembers the gravel operation in Montana.  Indeed, some of our own disciplinary figures write from a position of the noetic. Their grand figures of memory guide the ways they write. They, too, become noetic for me. My memory situates them as figures of writing. This has been my biggest conflict with personal writing. I have long rejected the expressivist investment in the personal (like the kid in Macrorie’s class who gripes “I don’t want to hear about what some sorority chick had for lunch”). Yet, everything I write now is shaped by the personal: my daughter, a cat, living in Detroit, living in Missouri, drinking beer. My own topos (personal writing) is bent and reshaped by a folksonomy (what does it mean to write about the personal).

Imagine that student in the writing class being taught the topos in the guise of the thesis. There are few noetic, if any, figures to draw from. Invention is reduced to a commonplace. I imagine the anonymous reviewer of an article doing the same. The problem with a taxonomy, of course, is that is too ideal. It is all form and no meaning. We have so many terms that are all form and no meaning in our field: multimodal, thesis, assessment, argument, cultural studies.

Still. One can assess this type of blog post with what Haynes once called that general desire to complain about everything. Or with being 40. To choose the latter would, too, be to draw on a topos. At 40, we start lamenting more about everything: the kids today, body aches, literacy, a profession that seems unwilling to accept ideas that don’t fit its topoi.

The cat has left the room. She has given up on my lap for now. For now. I’m sure that as I finish this post, head over to the couch, and continue reading Pollan’s The Botany of Desire while watching the snow fall outside, she will be right there at the base of the couch again. Meowing. Wanting to sit in my lap. What does it mean?

Somewhere, I’m sure, there is a metaphor that equates child raising with food. I am guessing that metaphor will border a cliche at some point - it will find a parallel between the devotion and hard work needed to raise crops and a similar process for raising children. My metaphor - still forming in my head - might be the way I try to “hail” my child into a way of food thinking. I want her to have a food mentality. I tell my wife that I want our daughter to be a famous chef. “Then she will be tatted up and cook pork,” my wife responds, and my heart sinks. My dreams are ruined!

I frame my daughter’s activities as my own. Menu reading, for instance, is what I like to do. Pouring beer from an imaginary tap in my imaginary brewery is what I want to do.

My point is not novel. We push children to be what we are not or what we are, for that matter. Should she develop mad grocery skillz? Should she go to the grocery three or four times a week like her father or get excited when on vacation and she runs into a grocery store she has never heard of?

I’m listening to David Bowie’s Alladin Sane while I write this. The genre of academic writing is the essay. The genre of popular music is rock. The genre of the blog post is the personal statement or the response (to some moment, text, event, issue). The genre I want is the mix. The mix is a theorized concept in media studies, but one point is lost in its discussion: sometimes, we don’t know why we mix. A blog post. Thinking about my daughter. Photos from a trip to the Denver Children’s Museum. A David Bowie album. The pleasure of the text, my pleasure of the text, is this mix.

On this album, Bowie sings in “The Jean Genie,” “He says he’s a beautician and sells you nutrition.” Why am I listening to Bowie? Why do I admit that point here? Rebecca Blood notes that the blog is “the particular mixture of links, commentary, and personal observation.” The Facebook status update is the most personal gesture of them all (”I get up”/”I sit down”/”I’m mowing my lawn”/”I’m mad”). At times, the blog post serves me better as an extended mix since it is not based in a personal observation at this very moment. Its situation of writing can take more time; it can mix as it writes. The blog post, then,  is the forgotten genre of academic writing. When Robert Ray titled his collection of essays “How A Film Theory Got Lost,” I thought I might borrow it for a second: “How an Academic Genre Got Lost.”

When she comes home for school, my daughter does not ask to eat. She wants “a dress” and her Target, plastic jewlery she is not allowed to wear to school. Two bracelets. A princess necklace. A headband. She says she’s a beautifican and sells you nutrition. “I don’t want to like that,” is her response to food she is unsure of. She pushes aside the barley from the lamb meatball soup and eats only the lamb.  But no! I think. I always say: I want to like it when I search out new eating. No matter. We are in a moment of a mix here, father and daughter, contrasting ideas, photos and text, music and writing.

The moment you sit down to eat, your eyes are drawn to the menu. When eating in a restaurant, I look away from my dining companions, and I examine the list of foods. What do they have? What is listed? What is good?  What is new? Jack Goody traced early literacy practices to the list. The list organizes experiences in writing. The menu, a list, extends our food literacy. It extends various experiences. Some menus, like in a coffee house, fast food restaurant, Middle Eastern restaurant, or Asian restaurant in a food court, are on the wall. You look up to read the list (which may include pictures of what you are supposedly ordering), rather than down as a traditional paper menu might require.

Some menus reduce language to elements. Note an Alinea menu:

• Matsuka: Pine, Otoro, Mango
• Trout: Monseigneur
• Pheasant: Apple, Shallot, Burning Leaves
• Lamb: Pumpkin, Eggplant, Rosemary, Aroma

The easiest analysis is: simplicity. A pleasure in the minimal. A pleasure in the experience of believing in the minimal while experiencing the maximum (as Kevin, contestant on Top Chef, was told last night about his food). The Alinea menu showcases experiences you cannot order. As if one could ask the waiter: Can the chef add extra aroma? Barthes writes:

Food is never anything but a collection of fragments, none of which appears privileged by an order of ingestion; to eat is not to respect a menu (an itinerary of dishes), but to select. (Empire of Signs 22)

On the old, Japanese Iron Chefs, prior to cooking, Hiroyuki Sakai would often write out his menus in stunning calligraphy. He took the time to write before he cooked. He wrote in a minimalist, yet maximum form of writing: calligraphy.  In the American version, this situation of writing is never shown. The menus have been composed off camera, when the “secret” ingredient is revealed in a very non-secretive way.

I am wondering about the menu as an early reading - or literate - experience. Learning to read by reading food collections. Learning to be literate by choosing from courses. Learning simplicity (Alinea) and exaggeration (most others that depend on adjectives to persuade you to order).  I delight in pictures of my daughter ordering from menus.

She loves to hold out the list of choices. To order. To organize. To select. As parents, do we not do the same? Here, read this Avery menu as opposed to another. I am selecting for her. As a parent, I delight in every moment she organizes some part of her day (dress, food, toys). But the menu. The menu. It adds something else. It adds my particular ordering. I like food. I want her to like food. I want her to like what I like (as many parents do). The menus I put in her hand before snapping a picture are my efforts at encouraging interpellation. Identify with food, I say. Hear it call you, hail you.

Earlier this week, I wrote to a friend (in response to a listserv forward that revealed the original writer’s neurosis and pedagogical inability): I am so bored with the project of first year writing.

We - the Campus Writing Program at Mizzou - work in an old home once owned by a 19th century dry goods merchant named Conley. The current building manager decided, at some point, to have all the windows sealed shut. This was due, most likely, to security. Academics often leave their windows open (in Detroit, a window left open in the winter meant pipes bursting; here, I’ve heard of a computer overrun by bird shit as pigeons made a home in the faculty member on leave’s office). Still, our office-house is warm, even on a nice November day. It is stuffy. Uncomfortable.  I’d like to break the window and get some air.

I wonder where they stored the food. Was it in my office? Were there shelves here? Surplus from the store? Bags of rice? Am I named? Was this a comfortable home? The kitchen is gone. I refuse to drink coffee made here because the pot is washed in the bathroom. The house is big. The owners likely never went hungry.

The starving artist is a popular metaphor for the arts, which might include creative writing. First year writing seems to always be hungry. Hungry for practice. For ideas. For more money. For more respect. For smaller classrooms. For students who do what they are told. For…for….for…First year writing airs its grievances as hunger. We need a UNICEF for first year writing programs. “A dollar a day may keep this program’s belly full.” If Conley was still alive, I’d ask him to be first year writing’s Sally Struthers.

Swift wanted to eat the children. My child and I have spent the last few days together while my wife was out of town. We eat together. The first night we ate pasta with eggplant/tomato sauce with baked trout. The second night she ate hot dogs and blue berries, and I ate a salad made from odds and ends (and leftover trout). My parental pedagogy revolves around food. What can I get her to eat? I beam with pride when I mention that she once ate sweetbreads. She likes blue cheese. Olives. The pickles I make. She has a desire for strong flavors.

How did I get so bored with first year writing? Its hunger repels me the way a UNICEF ad is not supposed to. I am uncomfortable with first year writing’s stuffiness, its lack of air. Air is the quality Roland Barthes attributed to the punctum. The sense of the fleeting meaning that remains powerful. If there is what Barthes calls the second punctum (air), here it is the need to feed first year writing.  “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” Kafka’s Hunger Artist says. But he doesn’t really want to be admired. “I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” Does first year writing want to eat? A few weeks ago, in the graduate seminar on new media that I am teaching, I made an allusion to the Allman Brothers Eat a Peach. Admire my inertextuality, I seem to suggest when I make such allusions. I sometimes can’t find the food I like either. As an administrator, I eat in my office. “What will I make for lunch today,” I ask myself each morning. Cheese sandwich? Potato and cheese sandwich? I suddenly feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to be hungry at noon, I think. “Vered,” I ask my daughter, “what would you like to eat?”

“Poop,” she says and laughs. “I eat poop.”

The question and answer hang in the air.

These photo posts, of course, name me. They interpellate me into an identity: me as child, parents, grandparents. Family is but one of several areas of discourse that call us into being. We are told repeatedly how popular culture interpellates (Adorno will have us believe in the evils of this process/Hall will not pose the process as evil, but still, he finds it problematic; popular culture cannot call us into being; it must be decoded).  Places interpellate as well. Gainesville. Miami. Tel Aviv. Detroit. Columbia, Missouri.  A memory of a Belgium trip taken several years ago on our honeymoon reveals my own sense of being “hailed.”

In this instance, food is the obvious site of naming. TV calls me further: be a top chef, roast, braise, grill. Causality does not play a role here; association does. Such accidental associations, of course, do not have to dominate our sense of identity. We can say we are named by photos and chance encounters, TV images, and celebrity culture, but also by taste. The taste can be elusive (as Barthes would have it) or literal:

Or more generally:

The moments hail me - regardless of whenever the photo was taken. Beer. Beer culture. Craft beer. More moments of identity being called into being.

These moments of being hailed return us back to the personal. For so long, cultural studies has argued that consumers of culture abandon the personal. Give up taste. Give up being hailed into being. Resist, the key word declares. Decode. Critique. The blog, naturally, troubled the best of the cultural critics because of how it foregrounded interpellated stances (”I like film,” “I like comics,” “I like Lost,” “I had this happen to me today…”). The situation of writing, as Barthes called it, became pleasure. We return to ourselves and reject the Ramus legacy of writing (depersonalization). The bloggers gathered up matters of concern (and turned their backs, at times, to the matters of fact). They offered the highly personalized experience as writing, and when Facebook emerged, they took this writing to a new place, opting to be be hailed by the status update: I get up, I go to work, I eat, I talk to so and so.

I have grown tired of mantras of resistance. I welcome the moments of interpellation (as if we can really resist such processes anyway; “resistance,” too, serves as an interpellative moment). Photographs, Chance moments. Details. Updates. I am learning to write as such.

Or to pose it in a comfortable phrase of pedagogy: I learn new media writing.