Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

The “mindless and depraved” refer not to anyone in particular. Richard Butsch has an interesting introduction in his book The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, and Individuals and I need to spend more time in the book itself. Consider these few notes as a summary of his argument, how socio-economic class identifies itself (or has its identity crafted) in the social sphere. This tension between classes can explain how some in the college institution see community college students as mindless and depraved crowds instead of intellectual publics, thus shifting attention and resources from the needs of the community to the skills of the few who meet the expectation of administration and faculty middle class ethos. By seeing the multicultural student's body as depraved and "other" (though Butsch doesn't address Said's orientalism), the tension exhibited in the passive-aggressive monitoring of the college student's body by the dominant-culture mind can be expla...

Some Publics are Not Spherical Since Habermas (really, Dewey, with another lexicon), we've been talking about publics and publics spheres, and most people discuss the public sphere without considering both terms sufficiently to critique Habermas's basic metaphor -- that private individuals, coming together in informed, rational discourse, create a public that counters the state's discourse and engages through literacy to shape the democracy. But what if, instead of "sphere," the public is another shape, either two- or three-dimensional? Daniel Brouwer and his co-authors address the geometry of publicity in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life . Considering my own experience in a public education institution and engaged with students largely invisible in public, the question of the shape of public discourse becomes an essential one, because I see less spherical influence and something more wobbly, less perfect, less egalitar...

Previous post on Hannah Arendt and action = promise + forgiveness If I accept Arendt's proposition that action requires promise and forgiveness in an ideal public, or even to nurture a nascent public, then I also need to define that public as an associative one, not an agonistic one, such as our current social constitution today. Seyla Benhabib explains this where he argues that Arendt's vision of public is a liberal one, in the Kantian sense, such that liberalism is a culture where the question of legitimacy is paramount and necessarily consistent. Calling upon Ackerman “Whenever anybody questions the legitimacy of another’s power, the power holder must respond not by suppressing the questioner but by giving a reason that explains why he is more entitled to the resource than the questioner is” [Ackerman 14]. Ackerman understands liberalism as a way of talking about power, as a political culture of public dialogue based on certain kinds of conversational constraints. The m...

A quick review. Others such as Dr Chris Bateman do Arendt more justice. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men…corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life. ( The Human Condition  7) Action : HA here defines action as the interaction between people "without the intermediary of things or matter" (7), which has some semblance to Habermas' public sphere and the ideal speech situation and inevitably comes with plurality. The principle of action is it requires freedom , in a political and economic sense, and produces political power. Consider what this means to us in our communities. Labor (human as Animal Laborans ) is what we do to survive; it never ends. It's the ...

Globalization/ Neo-liberalism as Opportunity for Public Sphere-Making? In Ackerman and Coogan's work on public rhetoric, the editors argue that the  public turn of writing since 1970 originates with or at least was focused at the Wingspread Confernce which addressed rhetoric’s epistemic crisis. “... the departure point was that neo-Aristotelian methods valorized persuasion and made exemplary the political speech within historical context of the state” and to see the message as larger than just persuasion, but also the rhetorical functions of ego-defence, knowledge-making, values expression (4).  Herbert F. Johnson, Jr., Wingspread, residence in Racine, Wisconsin. House reflected in pool. Library of Congress Prints and Photograph gsc 5a03863 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/gsc.5a03863  Communication/Speech was stifled in this tradition, but compositionists had moved beyond structure and form, current-traditional approaches. Then we see enter into the discipline the cogn...

Rambling, Part I I'm rereading Long's  Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics  and thinking about how the institution of the community college fails in its approach to literacy because of its allegiance to the state system and not to the community which it claims to serve. They make two claims, both which meet the cultural expectation that "education leads to success": Community colleges are inexpensive institutions that provide accredited courses which transfer to four year institutions; the assumption there that it's the four-year degree -- not the two-year degree or certification -- that fulfills the promise that a college education leads to success "Careers, not jobs." Here, the claim is that, instead of starting entry-level in retail or the service industry, with few skills to meet the demands of globalist corporate practices that hire and fire at will, the community college student will gain skills that prepare for long-term ...

"School Board" sounds quaint, but the Aldine Independent School District can't be described as quaint. It's about 110 square miles of variously developed and undeveloped suburbia north of Houston. Aldine -- Largely Latino, 2012 In my second semester course, students choose a local "concern" -- local being limited to sub-county level administration -- and perform various rhetorical analyses on their peer stakeholders (similar community members; not the government entities), the "state" (gov), and texts the "state" produces to address the concern. Plenty of reading genres they've never seen, talking to neighbors they've never spoken to, understanding local political structures they've never heard of. Ironically, Texas insists on multiple exposures to state government and history through secondary and higher education, but apparently little education is provided to actually empower citizens in their local ecology -- where t...