Friday, September 30, 2005
Posted by jrice @ 01:23 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, September 29, 2005
What?
The still is from the final scene in "Subterranean Homesick Blues," a clip from Don't Look Back. A question for digital rhetoric: How important is meaning? What about meaning that ends with a final "WHAT?" as in "What the hell?" This is always a challenge for digital work. "What is the reason for digital writing?" The mistake is to answer the question with proof, for proof is never satisfactory. Logic does not always come to our rescue. "I don't believe you!" crowds shouted at Dylan as he plugged his electric guitar in (the electric a sign of an emerging digital culture). Of course not. We never believe when presented with proof as to WHY digital rhetoric is necessary. There exist moments outside of logic, moments of "What?" The crowds which booed Dylan in 1965 were, in effect, saying, "What?" "What the F is going on?" That dismay is really a response to changes in new media. New media, as McLuhan noted, always bring on confusion and anxiety.
This is a question Barthes raises as well as he challenges the conventional method for personal classification, the autobiography. In Roland Barthes, the autobiographical taxonomy is redone, remade, rethought, in light of technological innovation. Barthes notes:
Constant (and illusory) passion for applying to every phenomenon, even the merest, not the child’s question: Why? but the ancient Greek’s question, the question of meaning, as if things shuddered with meaning: What does this mean? The fact must be transformed at all costs into idea, into description, into interpretation, in short, there must be found for it a name other than its own.
This moment of confusion, or of allusiveness, is an important component of digital rhetoric. Traditional taxonomies which depend on exact or fixed meanings no longer feel sufficient. Thus, the lure of folksono(me) which works to understand such shifts in light of personal investment, an investment highly affective (a point stressed throughout Randall Collins' Interaction Ritual Chains and Jenny's work on rhetorical ecologies).
Posted by jrice @ 01:05 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
No Direction Home III
Like Chuck, I caught the second part of No Direction Home last night. And despite the cheesy editing Scorsese falls back upon over and over again (ok! We get it! "Mr. Tambourine Man!" How about something from Blonde on Blonde? How about "Rainy Day Women?"), I still came away with ideas and motivation for a new essay.
What intrigues me is:
Posted by jrice @ 09:08 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
No Direction Home II
Scot begins the talk on last night's airing of part I of No Direction Home.
I love the allusive nature of Dylan as interviewee. The way he avoids telling the interviewer what he wants to hear:
"Just because you take someone's side who's oppressed, that doesn't mean you're political."
"I know the stories about why I took that name. I don't know if they're true. The name just came to me. I was from nowhere being no one."
"They're just songs. They don't mean nothing."
There is no direction here; rambling, associations, turns, stops. This is the opposite of the celebrity interview the Howard Stern show ends with most days - a mockery of cliché and trite interviews set up to promote a new film: "How was it working with X?" "It was so wonderful. X is such a professional!"
SNORE.
Our best moments are often found in allusiveness or moments which lack a meaning we can pinpoint or clarify. Why did my parents bring home Blonde on Blonde for me when I was 12? Why were they going to a record store anyway (my parents in a record store?). It's an allusive personal moment - a moment tied explicitly to popular culture and my own sense of identity. I can’t explain it, but I remember it, I use it, I work within it.
In No Direction Home, I see a lot of that process at work. “Something is happening/And you don’t know what it is…” Whether Dylan fakes it or not doesn't matter to me. No matte how hard Scorsese tries to frame Dylan in a cliché way (Civil Rights/the ‘60s/Newport/Baez), Dylan somehow sneaks back in as the weird, drifting figure who is not really beyond all this; he's just not a part of any of this.
Another way of thinking about this title: HOME is the comfortable dwelling place(s) we choose: Our ethos. Dylan is a comfortable home for American culture when he is framed as champion of the ‘60s/”Blowin’ in the Wind kind of folk hero.
But that’s nowhere, man!
Nowhere home is the uncanny experience of not having this fixed dwelling, of not giving a damn about the ethical/ethos experience. It is allusive-identity formation.
Posted by jrice @ 10:08 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, September 24, 2005
On Being a Nerd
Posted by jrice @ 03:33 PM EST [Link]
Friday, September 23, 2005
Starved
I like the weird. There's a scene in Ed Wood in which Wood hosts a party for a film that's been completed. He invites every 1950s freak/outcast he can think of (and consequently his girlfriend yells "enough" and leaves him). That's my kind of party. A book like Mark Dery's The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium places such oddness in the middle of American culture; a comic strip like Achewood transfers our cultural oddities to an underground world of stuffed animal cats. No matter. Point taken. Burroughs was my kind of weird: nice suit, crisp hat. Midwestern origins. Harvard educated. Junkie.
So as some folks get to talking about TV shows they like, I have to give a shout out to FX's latest, Starved, a dramedy about people with eating disorders.
This show is odd. Almost every episode begins with these folks getting yelled at by their drill-sergeantesque group therapy counselor (YOU DISGUST ME YOU OUGHT TO BE SHOT) and ends with them vomiting or stuffing their faces in a disgusting binge.
I like it.
Its other FX cousin It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is also odd, but its oddness is more of a Scrubs oddness: witty dialogue, eccentric characters, bizarre plots. Starved is a comedy about people with mental disorders!
Sorry. But I like that. As the popular film once said: "That's Entertainment."
Shhhh. The Howard Stern show is almost over. Got to get back to it. . . .
Posted by jrice @ 09:46 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Watching Scratch last night. At one point DJ Shadow is rummaging through the basement of a record store - stacks and stacks of records no one wants - searching for "beats." This is the metaphor for research. The DJs with their vast knowledge of sounds (Afrika Bambata being able to pull "The Clapping Song" from Shirley Ellis out of nowhere) represent the sense of cultural literacy Hirsch tried to promote but fell flat when he reduced it to "what you must know." Instead of the "what you must know" to be culturally literate, the DJ method works with "breaks," those snippets of information we collect and internalize, then reformulate for new work.
Media culture foregrounds the breaks through search engines, tags, television, film, etc. Of course, that simple fact is not as obvious as it mean seem; the various moments of cultural recognition that go unnoticed professionally or in the classroom seem odd and frustrating. We ask colleagues or students: how can that be, you never heard of that?
This scene with DJ Shadow was striking for that very reason; digging in the crates is the basic premise of research, of discovery, of finding those bits of information that you really don't know what you will ever do with, but you know to put it aside for now. It is the process of cultural recognition: I remember once hearing, seeing, feeling, knowing. . . it is the process of writing.
But the other interesting thing here is that these DJs are nerds. They have allowed information collection to command their lives. Maybe in that there is reason why this is not an example of cultural literacy. But I'd like to see some kind of mix of the two. At what point should you not be a nerd about the ideas you are developing or putting forth? Nerdliness is a trait of knowing, but also of the pleasure of knowing. You don't just become a nerd; you are invested in what you are doing.
Posted by jrice @ 10:08 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
No Direction Home
Awaiting the arrival of Dylan's No Direction Home. Somwhere in a Netflix que it sits.
"Everything you knew about Bob Dylan is about to change," the promo promises. Serious hyperbole. The biography-documentary often falls into hyperbole/praise too quickly. Part of the rhetoric of fetish, of course.
Like all things affective, the title lures me in. No direction. Home. We talk about place a lot among our weblogs. I've mixed and remixed homes: Miami, Detroit, Gainesville. Never Lawton, though. It was home, however brief. There are the cities, the banal places, the imaginary places, but how do the birth places affect an ordering of space, especially when they feel like "no direction" places. On the Web, where there is always some sense of direction (Google, a9, deli.cio.us, the weblog, the homepage), how does a specific physical space become no-space (in Auge's terms and then some)?
To imagine this space? Google Images? But which is Lawton?
It is a bit of fetishistic rhetoric as well. I fetishize the imaginary no-place because of one very important connection that always puts that place in front of me: Where were you born?
Posted by jrice @ 02:52 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
The Practicum
For those of you blogging at home. . .
A course I've enjoyed teaching here at Wayne is the practicum. I write this knowing (or hoping) that students in the class read my blog. . .only as part of the larger meta-related issues I try to foreground throughout the semester. If I talk about blogging and pedagogy, invention and pedagogy, technology and pedagogy, theory and pedagogy, or any other issue, it is because I, too, am caught within this thinking and because I find the issues relevant for not only first year writing (or any level of instruction), but for ourselves as well.
Part of that means dealing with those theories we encounter - whether we find them attractive or not. One such theory is expressivism. In an essay (chapter actually in a collection) due out within the next couple months, I critique the logic of expressivism as it has made its way throughout graduate practica. That logic has been too centered on the self - on the William Coles model that all knowledge is already within us. And yet, the basic tenet of expressivism is the recognition of personal writing. We cannot avoid the personal.
There is no way to avoid the personal. Blogging highlights that point; most weblogging always begins/involves "I." The essay, too, was designed that way, but in High School English and many areas of first year writing, that "I" is denigrated in favor of something called objective distance (the journalism trope which fails).
A pedagogical moment is to foregournd the the personal as one investigates the theoretical: I realize, I think, I don't get it, I wonder, I notice, I ask, I feel, I disagree, I juxtapose, I distort. . . . there is, of course, an affective dimension to this kind of writing. For that, I find Barthes the most attractive theorist of writing. You don't remove pleasure or the personal from the theoretical/pedagogical. Instead, you complicate these aspects of composing. All composing is pedagogical. The mistake expressivism made is that it simplified matters too easily (Elbow preaches that out of chaos comes clarity). We don't ask for the simple; we require the complex. In that complexity, we find moments worthy of any kind of teaching, moments of insite and ah-ha, of invention and innovation.
And the weblog, updated from the essay, seems an ideal (for now) place to begin that kind of writing.
Posted by jrice @ 05:38 PM EST [Link]
Monday, September 19, 2005
Worst Interchange Response
Peckham accuses Miller of being elitist because Miller favors "intellectual" stuff over manual labor.
Huh? The dude is talking about writing in the university, not building fences.
Posted by jrice @ 07:34 PM EST [Link]
On the Essay
Richard Miller in the latest CCC Interchanges section writes that the essay serves as a space for one's own thoughts, opens up the "landscape" for exploring ideas, is full of "balderdash" at times, asks impertinent questions which are considered, reconsidered, and sometimes rejected, and is a space for the pent up imagination, allows us to work with political, social, environmental, and economic issues. The essay, Miller writes, is often wrong. It makes errors. It corrects itself at times.
Sounds like a weblog.
Posted by jrice @ 01:44 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Xhedos Blog-ku
The girl and I sit in Xedos today drinking coffee. Lunch at Fly Trap. Arts fair on 9 Mile. Chris Ware now has a comic in the NY Times about a house. On Sundays, they wait on you at Xhedos.
Posted by jrice @ 12:32 PM EST [Link]
Friday, September 16, 2005
IT
We have a fantastic IT person here at Wayne who handles all the IT issues. I've been scratching my head over something that brought down both my Moodle and Wiki sites - even though I wasn't working on them. Joe, who I feel I've bothered way too much, got them back up and running.
Not yet sure what happened, but there seems to be a bug in MediaWiki 1.47 that affects the Skins directory.
Posted by jrice @ 02:12 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Just political issues?
Bradley asks: "Just political issues?" after my last post. Good question. For now, I keep getting drawn back into this area I resist being sucked into. I avoid the political - but, of course, can we avoid the political? I don't want to engage in a binary of yes/no, right/left/, pro/against, etc. In terms of perspective, the majority of political positions (mine as well no doubt, though that, too, I try to resist) can be too fixed. Less search-oriented, more fixated. So just political? No, but the political dominates in the academic sphere, particularly when we take causes close to our hearts, think of ourselves as supporters of some "just" position, emerge "liberal," or whatever. “We must consider the BLANK first!” Is neo-liberalism in fact no-liberalism? Probably. Some of the best racists are liberals.
In a desire to not be conservative, academic positions become themselves conservative, tropes of celebrated causes. At its worst, we hear the triumph of "always historicize" by the theorist who himself may not historicize enough. Or the Said blanket declaration of colonialism/occupation which somehow becomes a Western phenomenon rather than the human phenomenon it is (Said forgets the Ottomans? or the Arabian conquest? Or 20th century Arab imperialism? America is hardly the only imperialist on the block). So take it to the right then? No, of course not. Mirror politics? No answer there.
English academics struggle enough to understand their place in the world. They venture quickly into a political arena which has little resemblance to the theories of textual analysis. The World is a Text? Only when that text is marked by contradictions, affect, hypocrisy, overlap, etc. Meaning? I found no meaning when I stood in an occupied territory overlooking a trade show among countries with no diplomatic relations who were at war with one another. A trade show? If there are "what the..." moments here was one. Logic? Where? Politics are not about logic. When I see listserv or academic discussion reduce geo-conflict to logic, I am quite confused. The players in the conflicts don't use logic. Should we?
Enough rant. More blog.
Posted by jrice @ 03:40 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Blog Search
Google's Blog Search. This is indeed the age of the search. The search is about finding out stuff ("How do you spell..." "What's the capital of..." "Who wrote...." "I wonder what happened to...") but it is also an extension of celebritacy ("Who's talking about me!" "Who links to me!" "Where am I on the Web!"). There are now search engines for all kinds of tasks. How much information, however, do we find, think about, connect to, consider. . .There are random searches ("I feel lucky") and searches done for us (blogs like Metafilter or BoingBoing). The randomness of the search, the fight for top billing, the anxiety some folks feel when words they regret writing pop up on a search return, the innovative juxtaposition of searches (like a9.com or the mapping features of finding stores in your city), the feeling that you've been left out ("Why, when I type "Yellow Dog" into this new Google search engine, this blog doesn't show up?"). If the point of new media, as McLuhan noted, is the dramatic shift in perspective which occurs (the seamless web of experience, the everything at once global village), then the implications of the search include the perspective of always looking, always wandering, always moving. Fixed perspective yields to searched perspective.
Update
On the other hand, I am reminded by a recent thread on our field's main listserv that this sense of perspective as search is by no means universal (yet). The tendency for fixed positions/perspectives is, of course, still dominant. It irks me most in terms of the political. Most academic discourse which surrounds political issues - local or global - is quite fixed in perspective; the dominant issues divided into quick binaries, simplistic understandings of complex affairs, and that which one objects to are often reflected in one's very position. There is as well some show-boating here (lots of politics as performance) but also knee-jerk responses which are as fixed as they come.
But then again, academic culture is hardly new media oriented. It shouldn't shock too much to see academic knee jerk responses.
Posted by jrice @ 08:03 AM EST [Link]
Monday, September 12, 2005
Documenting Mythology II
The encounter is a main principle of digital methodology. What you encounter becomes what you write.
Barthes reminds us of the impact of encountering - phrased in his understanding of the punctum whose encounter is always felt as a prick or cut - as the non-signifying moment: "I dismiss all knowledge."
I place that statement at the center of some kind of digital methodology which - for now - poses visual writing as a goal. The preference for the visual comes from Barthes, but it also comes from the large number of writing textbooks which call themselves "visual" or which profess "visual rhetoric" as a goal for some reason or another. The "popularity" of visuality seems indicative of the superficial meaning of cool. While cool is dismissed as anti-knowledge (in Alan Liu's work), the visual cool (oooh images) is framed by textbook publishing as knowledge based: you must learn how to read images (we leave aside for now the economic pull flashy images has for increasing sales). This knowledge is hardly visual since its origins are in literary readings, text based analysis for meaning.
That said, I still feel drawn to this statement: I dismiss all knowledge. What does it mean to engage with a methodology which dismisses all knowledge? What kind of visual rhetoric is one which is not based on knowledge? Or, at least, not based on understanding a certain notion of "meaning"?
Mythology. "What I can name cannot really prick me." This "third meaning" is impossible if based on naming. The purpose is not to name, then, but to imagine. To mythologize.
In terms of cool, I have spent time identifying a visual tradition in 1963, part of which is found on Blue Note record covers. Not one 1963 Blue Note record was recorded in Detroit, despite the presence of the nation's oldest Jazz club, Baker's Keyboard Lounge (8 Mile and Livernois). Most of the '63 recordings were done at the Rudy Van Gelder studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
I'm not satisfied with this knowledge. I want to mythologize these recordings so that a digital tradition of visual production is not in New Jersey (also site of a well known composition studies publisher), but near Baker's on 8 Mile, at the now infamous Studio 8, where Eminem first recorded and where owner Amjed "AJ" Abdallah was murdered this year. I mythologize Herbie Hancock recording My Point of View at Studio 8. I document this as the beginning of visual rhetoric - for Hancock echoes the question of point of view triumphed by McLuhan in his two texts which surround '63, The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. McLuhan tells us that in electronic culture, visuality transforms "fragmented and specialist extensions into a seamless web of experience." Renaissance fixed point of view yields to everything at once point of view.
One track on >My Point of View guides me in this echo: "The Pleasure is Mine."
Pleasure. Pleasure motivates this kind of work which encounters in order to generate "webs" of experience, moments like seeing something allusive in a long converted Woodward Ave synagogue or a bizarre coincidence in one's place of work (from synagogue to the Maccabees). The pleasure is not word play (to stop at this point is not enough), but "what the..." As in "what the hell..." Because that moment of astonishment - why this encounter - is quite pleasurable as well as odd. It grants enough pleasure that it serves me as always the beginning of the invention process….what the hell/let me figure out what this is. The “what the…” is the new media principle of perspective, of point of view.
Posted by jrice @ 08:18 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Documenting Mythology
Temple Beth El:
Designed by Albert Kahn in 1902. Kahn's signature is all over Detroit; those buildings which have fallen and those which remain are traces of his sense of design.
This is the oldest synagogue in Detroit. Now owned by Wayne State University, it has served in the more recent past as a theater. Today, you can make it out slightly when you sit inside Atlas Bistro near the window on the Woodward side. Look across the street.
I drive by or near this site several times a week. But this is not my photograph; it comes from Wayne State's Virtual Motor City collection. This image as well comes from that collection:
They are both images of two synagogues named Temple Beth El. The second one is today a church (The Lighthouse Tabernacle), and sits at Woodward and Gladstone. Its size dwarfs its predecessor; its style Greek and ornate in a neighborhood which reflects neither today. This building, which sits just prior to the New Center area, caught my attention the first time I drove down Woodward. The inscription on the building's south side (which escapes me right now) indicated it was a synagogue at some point in its past.
I've been wanting to stop and photograph the larger Temple Beth El. That I haven't is as intriguing to me as the site itself: I feel something allusive.
I cannot find much information on either site - outside of basic history. My borrowed copy of Ferry's massive Buildings of Detroit has no listings for synagogues or Jews in its index. Among its many pictures of sites and buildings, I cannot find a single synagogue. I am wondering about the people who met at the Beth El sites on weekends, who celebrated here, who mourned here, who prayed here, who recognized their identity's importance here. Without a physical trace of history or these people, what kind of history can I imagine?
All history of place is imagined. Each imaginative moment is an encounter with place, whether or not I physically enter the place in question. But that imagination is also framed by what Barthes calls the "I" of every reference. Those moments of "I" (what I also want to call the basis of folksono(me) ) are fragments. Barthes popularizes the fragmented "I" as encyclopedic entries (A is for....B is for...) contextualized by juxtaposed moments of history, culture, literature, desire, etc; I want to situate those fragments as places. This situation makes for a documentary of sorts - an effort to document place. But it is a mythological documentary because, following Barthes' sense of myth, "its language does have a meaning, but this meaning is the empty form of a conceptual signified, which here is a kind of technological unsatedness" (135). My desire to document leaves me unsatisfied; I cannot achieve any sense of total meaning; I cannot project a claim or support that claim. I can only write with a series of fragmented impressions, thoughts, observations, contexts, situations, places. This is choral documentation as well then. Its technological basis is not in finding an exact meaning system from which to work within, but in working within empty systems of meaning: meaning without resolution, meaning without agreement. That is what I understand by a meaning established by encounter. The lack of permanent meaning is the result of a continuing set of encounters; each encounter changing meaning.
In this type of writing, the question is where does one begin? With impression, or with intuition – without regard or fear of a wrong intuition. One merely begins with a first feeling. That feeling, which I may develop here (or elsewhere) is with the odd and troubling relationship between Temple Beth El’s outspoken rabbi, Leo Franklin, and the anti-Semitic Henry Ford. The odd relationship whose core, at first, seems based on contradiction and paradox makes for a provocative metaphor for mythological documentation: encounter and work with incongruence when such moments arise. That encounter is not meant as a moment of exposure or ah-ha (the unveiling of codes of meaning - a staple of most cultural studies work) but instead the exploration of unexpected encounter (a proposed digital methodology).
Posted by jrice @ 08:59 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Katrina Photos
Really interesting photo-narrative of Katrina. Photos of the destruction, but also of the calm just after the storm (before the flooding began), moments of humans breaking down, moments of panic, realization of the need to flee.
Media story telling - fragment by fragment.
Posted by jrice @ 04:14 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, September 7, 2005
Pedagogical Gems
Ah, Inside Higher Ed. You never disappoint. Here's a gem the educational site found worth linking to:
Dealing with rude students as the semester starts, in Pretty Hard Dammit. Only nine years as a graduate student, this teacher shows us a how a little love and a lot of yelling can make the first day be just swell! Yet another anonymous academic blogger wows us with her take on the pedagogy of the first day of class.
It was a little hectic in the morning because my printer stopped working at 10:00 a.m. and I had to print out three different handouts in time to photocopy them by 11:15. I called IT services and they got somebody over there toot-sweet with a new printer, that didn't have ink. Nice.
