On the Politics of Being Silly
It might be among the silliest professional conversations I have seen. For a listserv notorious for such discussion (everything from “How do I get to my hotel” to the public, email clogging, one liner of “right on” and “yes”), this one just stroke me as really silly. Months earlier, I had sworn of the addictive impulse to continue the rhetoric of snark (spoken in true Bugs Bunny fashion: “What an ignoramus, what a nincompoop, what a….”). My posts will now be only about my whimsical fly by night ideas, I pledged. No more critique. Down with critique! So as I read through the WPA-L archives and saw how silly these professional folks are, the momentary, write for the moment, REO styled exigence hit me: Blog post.
How a field so dependent on its own commodification could get so up in arms over a paid service confuses me. Colleagues rush to make deals with textbook publishers. Others willing adopt books for their programs whole scale, thus putting plenty of money into the publisher’s pocket. Others become “advisers” to such companies. Others start their own education companies on the side. Others take AP money so that they can vacation in Daytona. Others pay homage to placement tests and other such commodifications of college entrance. Others merely continue being the Boss Compositionists they are, commodifying a way of life for each entering class of fresh “people.”
But they are worried over this particular paid service.
Silly is wonderful. The Three Stooges. Strange Brew. My wife’s Facebook posts. Silly putty. I love the silly. The listserv conversation, however, takes silly to the level of absurd. Or to the level of “no sense of self-reflection.”
“We need to be more rhetorically active,” one contributer remarks. It seems, however, that they already are rhetorically active. Their fears are the agents of talk: Oh no, look out, isn’t this awful, what should we do, the sky is falling. It’s silly putty rhetoric. You press it over an image, and you get something like the image back.
Plus, it has that funny smell.
I believe the word you were looking for was “ultramaroon.”
It’s not about commodification (as if commodification were some kind of ongoing process, rather than a historically accomplished element of social existence!), but control of commodities. Which shouldn’t be particularly surprising, given that people have fallen all over themselves for twenty years to write the next great article on a thing they call “agency.” In any case, you’re right, of course. It doesn’t help that the theoretical understanding of the commodity seems to be on a level with Bill O’Reilly’s “War on Christmas.”
Comment by topspun — April 2, 2009 @ 1:28 am
Well, this is the inevitable problem of WPA-L: these end up being things everyone feels like they need to chime in on (heck, I did) and WPA-L does have a way of getting pretty self-righteous. And you’re completely right about the relationship that far too many of us have with the textbook industry: it’s pretty easy to get all holier-than-thou about fighting ‘da man’ on the list, but it’s a lot harder to do that when cashing the textbook companies’ checks or eating their free food.
Still, I think that this particular “StraighterLine” product is pretty awful.
Comment by Steve Krause — April 2, 2009 @ 5:20 am
This whole argument - that we are beyond commodification - is just silly. No one is beyond the commodity. Why should we be? My house is full of commodities. I am typing on a commodity.
There is a control issue for every question of the commodity….but these folks act as if they have no agency. They have agency. They go on paid engagements, they sign textbook contracts, they make deals to have one textbook for the program, they buy all kinds of products, and I don’t care that they do any of that. But to get so self-righteous over one product - which may be awful, but so are countless other products circulated within the composition industry - is silly. StriaghterLine or Everything’s an Argument. Who cares?
And me? I’ve done some of these things too. And if for some odd reason I had pulled a whopping paycheck off of Writing About Cool (my textbook) - which I didn’t - I wouldn’t complain about the book’s commodification.
I don’t care anymore about these stupid arguments as if composition is a holy site of work. Nothing in the university is holy. If you don’t want commodity X, then ignore it.
But those that yell the loudest about something like StraighterLine….let’s see what they agree to buy for their programs tomorrow.
Comment by jrice — April 2, 2009 @ 9:40 am