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06/29/2005 Archived Entry: "Carnival II"

Carnival II
I'm happy to see the carnival picking up at Donna's and Derek's. I expect Collin and Jenny and Clancy to jump in soon....Steve maybe not since he's on the road.
I also want to say a little about what Derek calls Fulkerson's "itineraries." A good deal of what Fulkerson is doing reminds me of the draft Collin posted a few weeks back on the fallacy of scale. How we determine what we are doing at certain times in our field can often produce a fallacy because of how we come to that judgment (though I have to include my own judgments in that process as well, right?).
With Fulkerson's work, this judgment is that cultural studies drives the profession (assumingly as we move into the 21st century). It's a judgment David Bartholomae made as well in the first 21st Century collection that came out of the WPA conference - "What Is Composition…and Why Do We Teach It?" Geoff Sirc took Bartholomae to task for some of the observations he makes regarding critique and for the absence of technology in this 21st Century vision.
I might say something similar about Fulkerson. I don't know that the "social turn" (as Fulkerson writes) makes our work more "problematic." The influence of cultural studies (along with deconstruction) has become so quotidian, that we fail to see that we do it when we, in fact, do it.
Instead, the so-called problematic force has been technology. Technology is the pedagogical untouchable. Despite is heavy impact on communication, it is the last item to be discussed or taught. We’re either “too busy” or “too disinterested” to work with technology and writing (unless it replicates what we already do). Notice its absence in this essay? One of the two pedagogical collections Fulkerson works with (and which I have taught several times), Tate's A Guide to Composition Pedagogies places technology last in its table of contents, and Moran's contribution is out-dated and out of touch with writing and technology issues. Technology, if thought about, is an after thought. Here, it’s such an after thought that it doesn’t even exist.
Fulkerson ends with a “menu” metaphor regarding how we construct curricula (Donna notes it as well on her blog):
“Planning a composition course isn’t quite like ordering from a menu.” To re-quote Ulmer (his critique of Seigel’s Designing Killer Websites, which also uses the menu metaphor): What about when you choke on something you ate from the menu? You need the Heimlich to get that piece out. The Heimlich represents (via Freud) the familiar. Instead of asking for the Heimlich (the familiar) maneuver, we need an Un-Heimlich (unfamiliar/uncanny) maneuver. I.e. our menus are too familiar. Thus, technological innovations cause us to choke because of their unfamiliarity (they stick in our throat). But that choking experience is necessary. It is in the uncanny that invention occurs.
So here is where Fulkerson needs cultural studies as well. It can serve as the tool to induce choking (just as Derridian deconstruction can do the same with language). The uncanny is not dangerous at all, as Fulkerson suggests. Instead, it is the uniformity idea he clings to by essay’s end which is dangerous. Uniformity expects the menu to be so bland, so tasteless, that you will never choke (you will never question or rise above the same-sameness as Sirc says). The constant desire for uniformity is what is dangerous.
More later.

Posted by joanna @ 06/29/2005 12:34 PM EST