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.