You can't have Romanticism without Antics

Three a.m. Sunday. Geez. What a time to be thinking about rhetoric and Romanticism.
I took the course because at some point during the Summer of Insanity 2004, while reading A Grammar of Motives I began to realize that I could only go so far with the rhetoric of dystopian fiction without refering to the traditions of revolutionary rhetoric. Specifically, what I didn't know, but had a sneaking suspiscion about, was where/who/when/why we (Anglophones?) began to see literature as an opportunity not only for social criticism, but to provoke a desire for change in our audiences.

So I went through that table in my head of the Periods of English Literature. While the Restoration folk had a lot of political commentary, I decided, they were mainly members of the elite, literate class. Major social revolutions had yet to happen. What I needed was something around, say, the American and French Revolutions, which, luckily occured relatively close together. The British and Americans were entrenched in (some form of ) the revolutionary spirit. And then he appeared in my head.

William Fuckin Wordsworth
And his precious The Prelude.

Good old WW exemplifies the Romantic spirit, by which I mean a focus on the individual (i.e. Agent) that goes along with both revolutions. Romantics believed in the power of the imagination, of personal transcendence of surface phenomonen. In saying "Screw the city; I'm going to go sit in Nature for a while" there is an implicit social criticism.
What's more, WW and friends wrote many treatises defending the place of poetry. From WW's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" which asks his audience to be open to his use of "common" language for poetry to Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" which is doing so much that no one can agree on its main thesis--something about Poetry's ability to transcend and give truth/beauty/god through the imagination of the poet--the Romantics are deeply concerned with what their poetry is doing. And while they do not use these terms, that, my friends, is the sphere of rhetoric.

What did WW assume poetry could do? He saw himself as the poet who could bring the sublime to others. But what, I wonder, happens after readers (what kind of readers were they?) recognize with WW in that 13th chapter, the true nature of the sublime, of imagination? Are we to all run to the Alps or an Abbey and leave behind the choking cities? What of the fact that WW details the joy and intense violence of the French Revolution? What did he want his readers (mainly his close friends and family at that point) to do? What, in Burke's terms, is the Representative Anecdote, the "equipment for living" we are to take from this?

And of the abolitionist poetry, which lacks the subtlety of WW's political arguments in The Prelude, we see actual, real, political debate revolving around what the politicians read in those poems. Real social controversy and dialogue emerge from something some chicks (okay, some dudes) put down on paper and published. And while they lack the sophisticated anecdotal rhetoric, we see poetry as power because poetry is being disseminated to the masses, who are gaining the power to act politically

No wonder in the Victorian era, then, Ruskin (or was it Pater?) believed that declining culture of England (his words, not mine) could be saved by moral education from the arts? That painting and poetry can save us all, if the masses can all be moved at once by the representative anecdotes (my words, not his) art gives us. No wonder the medium most accessable to the masses in the 1930s and 1940s--the novel--boasted some of the most revolutionary rhetoric ever.

The beliefs about poetry and social action that the Romantics left us with--specifically, I think, there is something about the special ability of a poet-hero to notice the problems around him and write so as to stroke the Imagination of a "vulgar" audience--have declined little in popular understandings of "the writer." While in the academy we know that there is no magical Author(ity) any more, that writing is always plural, that there is nothing new under the sun--still, the public imagines a Thoreauian poet who says "Damn it all to hell" and shrinks hermit-like into his woods to contemplate the earth's troubles before transmitting (translating?) those to us. CSPAN has a few hours of Book time because of this; authors of nonfiction books are invited on Jay Leno and praised for their insights because we stil believe that we need these Authors to save us from our own stupidity.
As long as someone is still writing critically, poetically, beautifully, tyrany can't take hold. Our vigilance is in our "poets."

Plato wanted no poets in his Republic because they were too apt to stir up the masses. For literature in English, the idea that we can use that to our advantage seems to have emerged with the political revolutions (which came first, chicken or basketball?) of the 18th century. A little more than 200 years later, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix became the best selling dystopia EVER (I plan on writing an essay explaining how it is a dystopia, but if you've read it, you should know what I mean). Harry Potter is the poetry of our masses, the tentative situation with the "War" on "Terror" is symbolic of larger political stirrings, and Jon Stewart is our Mary Wolstoncraft. And this rhetorical situation, with all of these tensions of symbolic acts (writing, and now, television and film) being the constant force against acts of total domination, is just how we like it. There will be no revolution unless we move from the Attitude (i.e. "latent Action") we learn anecdotally through Harry and Jon to the Action that those in power are able to have.

The spirit of Romanticism, often connotative of "naivity," is still in our language. If we still have the ability to talk about Revolution, we'll be okay. As much as I hate it for its dependency on some grandiose white male genius moment, we need the rhetoric of Romanticism because it is our founding ("constiutional") rhetoric, without which there is room for rhetorics of apathy or domination to take hold.
The End. For now.

Uneven pigtails and Inquisitive Beavers

It's a carnivalesque atmosphere here in the computer lab, in the 10th week of Fall Semester 2005. Graduate students have collectively given up on academic rigor, and have given into burlesque (it's an "esque" day) cavalierism.
And I have no idea what any of those words meant, or if they go together.
Those dissertating (a word?) are a bit hysterical; those teaching have given up on their students. A check of my own roster seems to indicate that five of my 19 students have withdrawn. That explains the lack of attendance.
At least there are fewer papers to grade.
Is it my fault? Not likely. Yes, I've been sick for a few days, and was being the binary opposite of the Energizer Bunny the weeks before that, but here in week 10--White Sox breaking a curse, NFL taking over downtime discussions--everyone seems to be faltering. I'm glad it's not just me.
The Burke paper remains unfinished. My focus is that of a fish. A three second memory.
I cancelled conferences this morning, and asked the students to email me their stuff before noon. Half of them did so. Not bad.
It was surreal riding the bus in the daylight, wearing messy pigtails and my 2003 Witmarsum sweater with the reporter-beaver on the front. Witmarsum: A town in Friesland, Netherlands; birthplace of Menno Simons.
Witmarsum Reporter: Bluffton College [sic] student. With poised pen and Professional Reporter's Notebook on the track of something like truth (which "makes free").
God, I miss being an undergrad. I miss Gerald telling me that there is something like truth about God in all that theory. "Logos!"
Teaching started out good. I think I need to return to a rhetorical construct for this. Rhetoric grounds me in that there are heuristics, ways of categorizing, the world is ordered into ethos, logos and pathos. And the deconstructionist's voice who is situated in my right frontal lobe is not silent, but quenched by a pragmatism for a moment. Truth doesn't matter. What matters is what we see as action and re-action to texts.
So Monday I will frame our little attendance problem as a rhetorical situation. Together we will do a pentad on the computer screen. We've never done a pentad before, but teaching by osmosis like that sometimes worked. It did for me, when Gerald would rant at me during dinner about church history, post modernity and Anabaptism, and the rhetorical constructs that make up our language. Lacan goes with the cross. Foucault explains the gate of heaven.
I don't know how anymore. But it worked back then.

Technology, Literature, Rhetoric, the "human"

Tarez sent me an email about the 2006 Pacific Rim Conference on Literature and Rhetoric. This year's topic? Technology, Humanity, and Change. One of the pannels? Techno-Dystopias in Film and Literature. The others? Electronic composition.
So, of course I'm going to send in a proposal. Not that I have any clue as to how to do that.
But how to narrow my large freakin projects of doom to something suitable for a 20 minute presentation? And which project of doom?
Part of me really wants to stake my claim as a Burkeian doing the rhetoric of literature. Another part of me wants to hold off until I feel I can talk about Burke more freely without getting confused. For the Love of Johnny Damon, I don't want my Burkeian debut to be a disaster.
On the other hand, I can talk about identification without being a complete Burkean, right? My work on the film aspect has been minor (one paper), and it has lots of room for improvement and other resources. One thing I fail to talk about in that paper is the "Green" that is necessary. The ideology-spreading ability of film in that paper is glossed in two paragraphs. The comparison to literature is too quick.
So, something like: "Identification in Techno-Dystopian Film: Tempering the Revolutionary Spirit"??
Or, if I delay my entrance into that discourse community, what are my options? I'd have to research the hell out of what has been said about fan communities.
Which is why I'm sitting in the computer lab, running library searches like there's no tomorrow (there may be no tomorrow). What has been done? Am I repeating someone already?
Oh, please, not repetition.

Frustrated? Why, yes!

(teaching week....oh whatever it was 10/12-10/15)

Frustrations are, of course, to be expected if one wants to treat the Act of teaching as a dialogue or dialectic. There will be misrepresentations, false starts, and questions of authority. And, as goes the quantum theory that at any one moment there is a slight but significant possibility that you could end up putting your hand through a door when attempting to knock on it--given a random ordering of atoms and their constituent parts all deciding to be somewhere else simultaneously--there is a signficant and not so slight possibility that student entropy will occur all at once as well. Particularly when certain environmental factors push the student-atoms to one side in a convincing manor (Motion, says Papa KB, not Action!).
So when only twelve students appeared in class on Thursday, and only a slight majority of those appearing had done the rough draft for peer reviewing, another rare, but significant event spurred by environmental factors ocurred. I stopped playing the "believing game" (Elbow) and started doubting the hell out of just about everything. And I got just about as pissed off as I ever do at students; as a pacifist and social justice promoter, I rarely find myself doubting humanity's ability to create together, but this must have been a final straw. Nice, forgiving, patient Teacher Amy (who is, some how, much more patient with students than with family or friends) removed the students sans essays from the room and proceded to reward those who remained.
Hence, the stratified due dates. Those appearing in class on Thursday will have an extra three days to write the verbal portrait. After all, they have feedback to work from.
Oh, the complaints! Amy has logical fallicies, they say! Those who have done work need less time than those of us who haven't started yet! And, in the standard Western philosophy, the premise of this argument is sound. But because my purposes are more abstract than simply producing essays, the two arguments talk over/under one another.
At least, I think I'm feeling better. My sleep habits don't make sense to anyone but me anymore, but I guess to a certain extent that doesn't matter. If my body wants to sleep from 6 pm to 3 am, I guess that's what it needs. My reading makes more sense to me at 3 am. My energy is peaking around 8 am...which is problematic for that 3:30 Romanticism class, but disability is about negotiation. Give and take.
Humans are not immortal; we are all "disabled" in the sense that our bodies are fallible. What the masses can do, however, is what is considered "normal human ability" despite the internal variations of that ability. We recognize this, and the relatively healthy do not have to negotiate consciously; it is built into our society.
Those of us with differing abilities must actively negotiate, however, and because we are less in certain areas, we must make choices that sacrifice one aspect or another. Those of us not stuck in bed--The doctors can't believe I'm actually succeeding; their surprise is offensive and flattering--are the ones who negotiate successfully because our particular abilites and disabilities can be managed within certain categories. I can go to grad school because I have the flexibility to sleep when I need it; I have a fairly good brain that has been adapting to physical pressures since 1986; my work can be done sitting or standing, and more and more from home via the internet.
If I chose a different occupation, I would seem more disabled. What would you do if you were cured tomorrow? The answer hasn't changed in 10 years. I'd quit grad school and be a journalist in Boston.
This negotiation, the give and take of energies and abilities, has become so engrained (what a weird metaphorical word) in my habits and speech that when students fail to meet my expectations--and, particularly, when it happens all at once--a part of me does not understand. How can healthy beings not manage the tasks I've set? If I did it, they should be able to, too.
It's in those moments that I hate myself. My friends joke that I have no compassion, and it is in this sense they mean it; I have plenty of compassion for the oppressed, the dispossessed, those suffering from ailments of body, mind, or nation, but when I see people wasting their abilities on things I deem frivolous, that I've had to deem frivolous to maintain my sense of self worth I become some Other Amy.
Not that these negative feelings are all bad. The students are there to learn, and it is, apparently, my job to make sure they do learn something. Anything. And it's hard to do that when they seem to have given up on the class, and, by extension, me.
It's enough to make one descend into anime so deeply that one never emerges. Too bad I've got three papers due this week.
Enough "woe is me." I slept from 9pm to 1 am, and am now working on three projects at once. It's invigorating, a reminder of what I am capable of when healthy. And who knows why I'm sicker now than I ever was in undergrad. It's the random arrangement of electrons. Entropy and all that.
Burke never talked about ability. Addiction as Symbolic, yes (it's not that "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is about Coleridge's drug addiction that he didn't have yet; it's that both are symbolic expressions of something else. Why didn't Burke think about Coleridge's vaguely defined "rheumatic pains" and pain's ability to incite symoblic reActions?). He can't help me here. Be quiet, Burke! In due time!

Late night: Theory and Teaching?

By theory in the title, I mean Rhetorical theory, or even Critical theory, but especially theories of science and philosophy. And teaching? Well, given how much attention I've given the kiddos lately (maybe two percent of my time....) it seems strange that I'd have a late night revelation about teaching while reading Bruno Latour's "We've never been Modern."
Oh, Bruno. You'd think he was a pro-wrestler, not a theorist. Weenie theory nerds don't have names like "Bruno."
We (I like Burke's use of "we" because I don't feel so alone in this venture of theory) first encountered Latour way back in the Fall of 04, when I felt pretty damn good, was losing weight rapidly and could lift more weight than my male students. So Bruno has some positive associations with me. Bruno gave us (me) the idea of "Immutable mobiles" as tools for "inscription"--that is, every document is immutable (unchangeable) but can be moved around. Within that document (text, whatever) the Scene (damn, I'm mixing Burke in) that the document was created in is implicitly inscribed. That inscription is immutable, which makes documentation an act of stabilization. Particularly, we said in the class, of identities of organizations. Memos, as immutable mobiles, inscribe the company, its beliefs and practices, the people, etc, and provide a blueprint of sorts for the future. Meaning is made static within the document.
The benefit of immutable mobiles is that they can be put side by side for comparison. Or, they can be laid atop one another hierarchicaly (both physically, with pieces of paper to the ceiling, or metaphorically). We can see through the layers to create depth of the inscription.
What the hell does this have to do with teaching?
Well, my students don't seem to be getting (so say their emails) what this whole "portrait" thing is about. Oh, they get the visual part. They really get that part because stupid amylea is so fascinated by visual rhetoric (and, apparently, so good at explaining it) that she devoted the whole class time to the visual part of the "Verbal/Visual Portrait."
Oh, and now the kiddos are trying to write outlines for tomorrow (Amy style outlines--I'm perpetuating the Amylea Method of Composition. Because Lester Faigley--THE Lester Faigley--describes a similiar process in the newest edition of the Penguin Handbook. So it's not only valid, but one of the top rhetoricians recoomends it. HA, Jeff Gundy!). And it's not going well. They don't know how to verbally create a "dominant image."
And, I think, without Latour's understanding of the job of ethnography, I wouldn't have managed much beyond a "Dateline" sounding drabble myself. Because the theory is there, however, I can see the scope of the project. What it does. And the dangers of inscription.
So, do I teach them about immutable mobiles? I guess not. But I can let that idea inform (ugh, I hate that word) how I teach them about the dominant impression.
That doesn't help me with conferences tomorrow. I guess the theory/practice divide is a useful (i.e. pragmatic?) one; even if we are going to go all PoMo and say that the center of that binary does not hold, we in practice (ugh! it's so circular!) do divide our minds that way. See. I just did it. Theoretically, there is no difference between theory and practice. Wow.
Practically, or pragmatically, I know that the theory is beyond my students (at least 90% of it is beyond 90% of them--whee, empiricism!) but that the practices of inscription and their end results are quite obvious. What can I do to present that to them?
I already discussed the use of the Chinese in early anthropology; how they were used in museum displays. If I bring in more evidence of that, then have the students generate some ways in which those stereotypes have remained (because they're so darned immutable and mobile), we might get at the point--that we can write (create...image-ine) a person or group of people in a way that is not just a re-presentation, but a definition. You are re-creating that person. And your re-creation is the one that's immutable and mobile.
That might help. Now. Where were all those articles I used last year?
Oh yeah. In Bonnie Tu Smith's office. In Holmes Hall. On Leon Street. In Boston, Mass.
Damn.

A bag of mixed nuts

      Somewhere in here I should post about my teaching this week. The confidence I gain when planning activities is usually enough to sustain me through actually doing the activities. Usually. I'm much better at creating activities than seeing them through, though.
      I wasn't surprised when my plans for Tuesday were met with confusion and silence. At least I managed to do more whole-class activity and discussion; until now, it's been small groups. Talking in a large group always scared me as a freshman (okay, only the first semester), and I don't want to shut down conversation. However, it's getting harder for me to monitor several small groups at once; I must be losing my touch.
      Doc Henry taught us a lot in journalism class in high school...some of it was perhaps not quite ethical. Gather information however you can. It was in this way that I decided to learn to read upside down, to eavesdrop even better than what Mom taught me in all the endless doctors' offices, to put people at ease by allowing facial expressions to show through, even when those expressions were all an act. Whatever it takes.
      But I seem to be losing some of those "skills." It's probably for the best; I can't be a badger for life. It's probably better for the students--I think I seem less crazy when I'm not standing in the middle of the room with my eyes closed and a smirk on my face. Now I stand off to the side, head tilted puppy-like, and zero-in on one thing at a time.
      It could be that I'm just distracted as of late, by the mass of Burke. It's hard to think about hearing six things at once when Papa KB is echoing. I think I'm channeling a dead rhetorician.
      The cold weather reminds me of football season. This always makes me melancholy, puts me in the mood for Romanticism. Yes. You read that right. That sort of self-centered, makes-no-sense-to-anyone-else stylized and strategic response (damn you KB!) is appropriate for football season. When I think of all my dead bandmates.
      Dead or destroyed, what's the difference? I'm told a large chunk of the military-type went to Iraq. And came back someone else. Destroyed by Iraq, destroyed by Ashland--prisons of our own making. Etc. A bad Creed song goes here. Some are at the county jail. Poo Tee Wheet.
      I'd try to count, but the end number's possible height is too scary. It makes more sense to watch the Classmates.com page change as people die, or enlist, or try to find each other in some weird quarter life desperation.
      Oh, there are births and joys and marriages. I'm sure. But those don't go with football season. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" does, and when I saw it written in front of Heavilon, I almost burst into tears for no good reason, except that it felt like fall and the best minds of my generation weren't being destroyed, but were destroying themselves.
      Act vs. Agent, Kenny says. The agent/act ratio is very important when we want social change. The right person with the right ability. What should I do about the Scene-Act ratio, Kenny? It's football season, and I keep remembering things I was sure I'd forgotten when I moved to Boston. Like how the Midwest makes me want to run to a new Scene. The Act required of the Scene is a change of Scenery.
      In Boston I never wanted to run. Boston is safe, even as the crowds swarm and people breathe down each other's shirts and the students party forever and ever.
      I'm distracted. And it's not just because my muscles seem to have minds of their own. It's the feel that something is missing--or too present. Absence and presence are the same, right Derrida? Can one be distracted by the fact that one is distracted?
      What goes with what? KB asks. Football and fall and cold air and missing best friends and losing hope and the need to run. They signify each other, so in the fall wind I can't help but feel distracted by things that aren't there now.
      In Boston, the fall was different. It was a New England fall, short and wet and windy, dark by 5 pm. The lack of twilight saved me.
      How do we fix things that are too pious? Papa KB says "perspective by incongruity." That damn confusing preposition in the middle. In Japanese, there are fewer prepositions, and the connections between modifiers and what they modify make more sense to me. I break the piety by symbolically mixing things that don't go together. I symbolically change the equation in hopes that as a symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, the associations break accordingly.
      Football should be replaced in spring. Not symbolic death of the season, but life. And the missing best friends, I remind myself, happened in winter, too.
      Your connections are faulty. The binaries at the center don't refer to anything but other words. the centre falls apart; it cannot hold. Can a bad poem be a good symbolic action? Let's find out.

A symbolic of motives
"I love you"
when you are like this, I mean.
When the fall wind is in your hair
and there's nothing to worry about except
plumes and spats and the orange electrical tape
holding my hand together, I love it.
"Oh hold my hand
together" for at least the next nine minutes
and when it starts to bleed, just as they bleed
that we are bleeding together, letting out
the bad spirits making us sick of this town.
"Let's leave together"
To Florida or Hell, or your basement,
it doesn't really matter here at week nine
with Jeff's lips split six ways and my legs
betraying me to the camera.
"I'm never coming home"
Did you even hear me say it over
the victory songs that engulfed us so totally?
It's nice within the music, safe and warm
where we're all shouting together.