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...

Parce que le crayon sera toujours au dessus de la barbarie... The reality of the American academy is that the public institution creates so many meetings to justify itself, its bloated administrative bureaucracy, as well as meeting demands of the state's own bureaucracy that the central mission of learning-through-teaching is obscured. One can rationalize the necessity of learning objectives and accreditation, especially within the language of competition, standards, and other jargon, but ultimately the arguements end up in a cul-de-sac of ad absurdum  when the collaborative relationship between/with students and professors is erased. That's pretty much how my last week went. Part I and Part II of this mini-series. The Study of Literature as a Critical Thinking Dialog Irvin Peckham quotes Freire: “Finally, true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking-thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people a...

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 ...

What Is the Relationship between Critical Literacy and Citizenship? Part I of this mini-series As I continue to draft the syllabus and calendar of my "Literature of Resistance" course for 2015 Spring, I ask myself what I want from the students -- not in the form of assessment material, not as quizzes and papers -- but what they will teach me about their own literacy in 2014 2015 from their life experiences. My students are among the people I respect most in this world -- honest, frank, true, loyal, friendly, scared, vulnerable, brave, and full of humor. These are people -- humans, adults -- I want to surround myself with in my life. Their experiences with literacy and citizenship are different than mine, and so they have much to teach me. I hope to present the entire course, then, as a form of critical literacy where we all learn from each other. It's my place to facilitate discussion and to teach writing strategies, but I expect to learn from their discussions and l...

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...