i am a racist technocrat

This week’s post from Pruchnic’s seminar, in response to Adam Banks, Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground.

I Am a Racist Technocrat

Or,

Will the Real Slim Shady Please Sit Down?

I am not the person to respond to this book because I have little investment in identity politics—and what investment I do have makes me seem like a reactionary, anti-diversity rube who thinks that certain folk are gettin’ uppity when they start talkin’ ‘bout how they ain’t got access. And really, that’s not me. My qualms about identity politics stem from the fact that I want to argue for the constructedness of whiteness as unmarked but the rules of the game are against me. Yes, I understand that categories like African American, woman, subaltern, homosexual are constructed as Other from the perspective of an assumed heteronormative, unmarked white rational masculine subject position. But my interest is not in defending the HUWRMSP as somehow “victimized” by the discourses of legitimation for other subject positions so much as is it rests in arguing that we should recognize the constructedness of all subject positions—but the last time I suggested such a thing in a seminar I was roundly derided.

I start with this preface only because I’m thinking through some issues in relation to Banks’s work that are inevitably shaded by my antipathy toward identity politics. I want to emphasize my interest in the constructedness of all subject positions because I am troubled by Banks’s use of what might be read as an essentialized Black subjectivity in his chapter on the website BlackPlanet and African American discourse tropes. Banks argues in favor of Smitherman’s earlier claim that Black English is intimately tied to a unique “Black” experience; Banks, via Smitherman, maintains that “Black English, as expressed through its oral traditions, represents distinctively African American worldviews” (70). As Banks would have it, the Black worldview, expressed in both oral and literate Black English, can be understood as a scene of resistance and political liberation struggle:

The continued focus of many on the oral in Black English, then, is not a resignation that written English is somehow the exclusive domain of Whites . . . but a matter of remaining true to the roots of the language, no matter what forms it might take now. Maintaining that focus is also an act of self-determination, of resistance, of keeping oppositional identities and worldviews alive, refusing to allow melting pot ideologies to continue to demand that Black people assimilate to the White notions of language and identity as the cost for access to economic goods or a public voice in American society. (70)

This passage is worth citing at length because we here see what I am suggesting is problematic. Yes, Banks does write of Black identities, but not in the sense of a variegated multiplicity of Black subjectivities; rather, the “Black Experience,” it would seem here, is yoked to “authentically” Black literate and oral practices as the site of resistance to (monolithic) White notions of discourse and the subject. Later in the chapter, Banks gives in a little bit, admitting that “the names [of BlackPlanet members] reveal complexity and diversity in notions of exactly what constitutes a Black idenity”; Banks, though, still insists that there is such a thing as a discretely identifiable Black subject, for “all of the users [of BlackPlanet] . . . participate in and claim a Black identity for themselves” (75). I’m left wondering which argument Banks wants us to believe: that the Black subject is a space of contested, negotiated meaning, or that there is something we can call “Black identity” in a non-problematic, non-essentialized way?

And now, a left turn. I know I’m kind off the technology trope here, but really the technological argument Banks is making seems fairly innocent. We need to redefine the Digital Divide; see “access” as a rhetorical problem that can be understood across multiple levels; and read the Civil Rights struggle as a technological, rather than a “merely” legal one? Okay. I’m on board. Back to my left turn.

What makes Banks’s claims about Black English and Black identity so challenging is that it seems to tie racial identity to discursive production, in either the oral or literate genres. It is not difficult to consider two test cases (incongruous though they may be) for the claims Banks is making here. The first is the 313’s own Marshall “Eminem/Slim Shady” Mathers. In his track “The Way I Am,” Em taunts his white critics who accuse him of appropriating a traditionally Black art form: “And I just do not got the patience / to deal with these cocky Caucasians who think / I’m some wigger who just tries to be black cause I talk with an accent . . . .”. Here, Em makes, in a roundabout way, an argument similar to the Banks/Smitherman postulate: what his critics deride is a (perceived) wish to be Black, to be other, but Em refutes that haterade because, he argues, he naturally talks with an “accent”—which here, we might conjecture, means that Em—child of South Warren, friend and student of the Black population across the 8 Mile border—is a native user of Black discursive traditions and therefore, is not a “white nigger” but has some claim to Black experience by virtue of his participation in Black discourse genres. And while I am not Black, I can imagine taking some umbrage at such an argument (even while being dazzled by Em’s flow and mastery of the rap genre); that is, does participation in, and mastery of, the discursive production equate to Black identity?

Alternatively, Barack Obama offers the other test case. While such questions have since grown silent (or at least much quieter), Obama’s candidacy was plagued in its early days by the question of whether he was “Black enough.” Take, for example, the opening to a story from Time magazine from 1 February 2007:

But this is a double-edged sword. As much as his biracial identity has helped Obama build a sizable following in middle America, it’s also opened a gap for others to question his authenticity as a black man. In calling Obama the “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” the implication was that the black people who are regularly seen by whites — or at least those who aspire to the highest office in the land — are none of these things.

The “not Black enough” trope takes two forms: first, the argument that Obama isn’t “Black enough” is due to his immigrant heritage: not the child of slaves, but the child of an immigrant student and a white (native) mother. He is African comma American, but not African hyphen American. The other version of the trope, expressed here in its most odious form by conservative hack pundit Warner Todd Huston, is that what makes Obama insufficiently Black is his relationship to “the low trending culture developed by the native born:”

Obama isn’t “black enough” not because he might have an immigrant background but because he is educated, eloquent, smooth, and associates with whites. He eschews the thug, rapper lifestyle, the discounting of education and the general downgrading of achievement that is currently accepted by popular black culture in America today.

So, Blacks do not distrust Obama because he is an immigrant and therefore not “black enough”. They distrust him because he is able and successful, smart and educated so that is what makes him not “black enough”.

While I am not qualified to rule on Obama’s “Blackness quotient,” I can still say that I find both versions of the trope distressing from a critical point of view. Here, we have the corollary of the Banks argument; what makes Obama “not Black enough” is his background, and, in particular, his acceptance of “mainstream” or “standard” White discursive forms. While the Huston quote goes some distance to validate Banks’s argument that African Americans are often written off as being uneducable or irredeemably illiterate, Huston’s argument—distasteful as it may be—posits, like Banks, an essentialized Black identity.

The argument I am trying to make here—to the extent that I am making one and not just thinking through some issues—is that any essentialized Black identity becomes problematic. It is either a derogatory assessment of “us people,” or a blanket acceptance of “us folks.”

got me an idee-er

Partially in response to reading Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud for JP’s seminar (followed this week by Rice’s Rhetoric of Cool), and partially in response to leafing through a book whose title and author escape me at the moment (for a project in RM’s seminar), I’ve been toying with the idea for a piece called “New Media Composition in the Corporate University: An Historical and Polemical Essay.”  The central question of said piece is to bring together threads of thought about the contemporary, post-Fordist corporations and modes of work with ideas about the appropriate forms of New Media work in the comp classroom.  I’m sure someone’s beat me to it, though–the idea’s just been stirring in my head for the last day or so.  The title, as some of you will doubtlessly recognize, alludes to Crowley’s Composition in the University.

I’m open, as always, for possible sources for such a project is anyone’s got any.

talkin’ edward p.j. corbett dissertation blues

Apologies to Dylan for the bastardization of the title.

I’m waiting for feedback on the first finished draft of the MA from my advisors.  As I’m waiting, I asked a fellow grad (and new GTA, congrats!) to take a look, since he and I have some similar interests but also enough differing views that I was interested to see what he might make of it.

Actually, that paragraph isn’t really necessary, ‘cos this isn’t about his response so much as it is something I wrote to him in  response to a particular comment he made about the draft (a suggested revision he was right about, btw).

I mentioned to him that (in addition to the several other ideas I’ve mentioned before), one thing I might be keen to do for a diss to look at the way the categories of “rhetoric,” “resistance,” “social change,” “protest” et cetera  might be challenged by recent developments in critical theory.  I had explained that had I read Hardt/Negri’s Empire, Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude, and some of the interviews in Critical Intellectuals on Writing before beginning, my MA would likely be a very different beast.  Still focused on the bed-ins, but with a different spin on them entirely.  (I am heartened, though, by seeing that much of what I build to in the current draft is largely anticipated by these works, so there is clearly a framework for it).

I find the open hand/closed fist metaphor (and its various permutations, like Byron Hawk’s here) to be worth further investigation.  This is not surprising, I suppose, given my earlier interest in metaphor, my exposure to theories of the body & critical theory via Pruchnic, and my (limited) work with Marback, whose own essay on Corbett-Browne inspired some of own use of that debate.

Just flitting thoughts.  In closing, my own remix of Dylan iconography:

Pardon the crap photo-edit job: it's my first foray into such things.

bookses

Here’s the list of books I’m working on reading right now:

1. Hardt and Negri, Empire. I’m committed to reading 50 pages a day, which means I should be done with this bad body on Wednesday.  Comments to follow.
2. bell hooks, Talking Back.  Yes, I know I struggled with Teaching to Transgress, but I thought I owed her another chance.
3. Olson and Worsham (eds.), Critical Intellectuals on Writing.  Excerpts from JAC interviews.  Not nearly as exciting as it sounded.
4. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude.  I’ve read most of thise bfore, but now that I’m into Hardt/Negri I want to revisit it.  Also, it looks like it might be on JP’s fall syllabus, so a refresher would be in order anyway.
5. John Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change.

So, the last book I’m reading as preparation for likely/possible inclusion as our next Rhetoric Reading group text (though when that will be, I don’t know, esp. if Whirlball takes precedence).  I’ve only read the intro and first chapter, but I’m already kind of puzzled at one of Muckelbauer’s main claims–not so much the content of the claim, but the structure of it.

Muckelbauer begins with the argument that, even in postmodernity, our notion of change is still bound to a modernist, Hegelian dialectic insofar as “change is always and everywhere the effect of overcoming and negation” (x).  This is a point he returns to in Chapter 1, writing that, despite the attempts of pomo theory to overcome dialectical binaries, there is nevertheless a fundamental binary to which pomo theory remains committed:

While most contemporary critiques are directed toward realizing some particular change–whether in social dynamics, institutional structures, or eben just in intellectual landscapes–most also fail to attend to the implications of the movement of change that drives such work.  Another way of saying this is that depsite the incessant and justifiable concern for problematizing a whole series of binary operations throughout the social field, the one binary that has remained firmly intact is that between “the same” and “the different.”  (3)

His project involves engaging the question of change and the problematic surrounding it, but “engaging these questions has less to do with simply accepting or rejecting the content of any particular proposition and more to do with altering the style through which we engage in the everyday practices of reading, writing, and responding” (x-xi).

So far, I’m on board.  Postmodernity has yet to exorcise all the ghosts of the modern era, and we need a change in practices–invention practices, for us rhetoricians–to move beyond the dialectic.  Moving on.

In various arguments, Muckelbauer argues, the move to negation/overcoming typically takes one of three forms:

1. Advocacy: Emphasizing a  Traditionally Privileged Concept
2. Critique: Advocating a Traditionally Underprivileged Concept
3. Synthesis: Valorizing the Indeterminate “in-between” (6-9)

I take the first two here to be fairly self-explanatory.  The third is glossed as follows:

Through concepts such as “intersubjectivity,” “hybridity,” “dialogue,” or the recently popular terminology of “networks” and “ecologies,” this response focuses on the indeterminate space between positions.  …  What warrants attention is not the content of the nodes, but the generative, ambiguous space tht exists between them, the blending of contingency and universality, the conjunction of interpretation and knowledge, the indistinguishable aspects of subjectivity and sociality.  Thus, rather than simply reproducing an oppositional structure, this indeterminate in-between attempts to offer a way of disorienting the repetition of dialectical change.

An yet, in the very effort to redner this is-between, the existence of poles are still presumed.  The disorienting, synthetic move is already oriented by the positions it synthesizes.  …  The indistinguishable blending that occurs . . . assumes that there is a distinguishable separation somewhere other than the boundaries.  In short, to demonstrate the indeterminate or ambiguous in-between is to simultaneously reproduce the oppositional dynamics that characterize the nodes or poles “between” which something exists.  (9)

No, I’m no expert on network theory (though my first Latour book is on its way from Amazon), but I think from what I’ve gleaned second- or third-hand about networks is that Muckelbauer is unfairly tossing “networks” into the phenomena he’s describing here.  My sense (largely from Rice, though from Shaviro’s Connected and from Galloway’s Protocol as well) is that a network doesn’t exist between two points; that (duh?) is not a network but just a link, a connection, a binary.  The network is built from an infinite number of infinite links, from one subject/object to multiple others.  A binary is not a network, no matter how much Muckelbauer wants it to be so here.  I take his point about “synthesizing” arguments, but I think that he reveals a lack of understanding here about networks.

(Update–I just brought in the mail; my first Latour book has arrived from Amazon–yay!)

So Muckelbauer’s project then, is “Moving Beyond the Dialectic” (10).  He is careful to note that, although this seems like it is a simple matter of “overcoming” the dialectic, “any effort to overcome binary logic or move beyond the Hegelian framework simply reproduces this framework” (11).  As he notes further down the page, “any attempt to refuse dialectical change or to move beyond it is necessarily destined to remained trapped within its repetitious negation and trapped by the ethical and political dangers it eables (11-2).  The solution, Muckelbauer argues, is to instead invent a practice of “affirmative change”  that is “irreducible to this repetitous dialectic of negation”.  Here’s where things get a bit crackers for me:

Now, it is extremely important that this affirmative change not be thought of as something that is simply different from dialectical negation–such a gesture would repeat the very problems it wants to address (“that was the old version of change; this is the new one”).  Instead, the key challenge for responding to “the problem of change” is to both articulate and demonstrate an affirmative sense of change that is neither the same as dialectical change nor different from it. (12)

I grant that I’m only 15 or so pages into a 150-odd page book.  I grant that Muckelauer has not yet come to the promised passages of “articulation and demonstration.”  But . . . but . . . isn’t he still, for all his protestations, working within the dialectic?  Instead of the binary same/different, stable/contingent, he’s substituting affirmative/negative.  Oh, this change is qualitatively not-same as negation, but it’s also not-different.  So, it’s kind of a . . . synthesis . . . of the two, an indeterminate in-between?

I don’t get it.  I think what he’s done is wanted to make an argument for a particular practice of reading, writing, and invention,  then yoked it to a critique of the dialectic.  But I think he’s still doing what he claims he’s not.  I understand the problematic he’s trying to address, but I don’t think his proposed “affirmative change” is different non-dialectic (at this point), just because he says it is.  I give him credit for anticipating my critique–which I admit it fairly obvious–but his answer to it at this point seems to be something like “‘Cause I say it’s not, that’s why.”

Hmm.  More updates on this story as we get them.  Back to you, Tom.

starting point

The other day I had a tiny idea, but one I want to at least record here in case I do something with it later. Consider this a starting point, a tentative foray, a thought out loud.

Here’s Aristotle:

It is clear, then, that rhetoric is not bound up with a single definite class of subjects, but is as universal as dialectic; it is clear, also, that it is useful. It is clear, further, that its function is not simply to succeed in persuading, but rather to discover the means of coming as near such success as the circumstances of each particular case allow. In this it resembles all other arts. For example, it is not the function of medicine simply to make a man quite healthy, but to put him as far as may be on the road to health; it is possible to give excellent treatment even to those who can never enjoy sound health. Furthermore, it is plain that it is the function of one and the same art to discern the real and the apparent means of persuasion, just as it is the function of dialectic to discern the real and the apparent syllogism. What makes a man a ‘sophist’ is not his faculty, but his moral purpose. In rhetoric, however, the term ‘rhetorician’ may describe either the speaker’s knowledge of the art, or his moral purpose.

…

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art. Every other art can instruct or persuade about its own particular subject-matter; for instance, medicine about what is healthy and unhealthy, geometry about the properties of magnitudes, arithmetic about numbers, and the same is true of the other arts and sciences. But rhetoric we look upon as the power of observing the means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us; and that is why we say that, in its technical character, it is not concerned with any special or definite class of subjects.

Here’s Malcolm X:

One of the first things that the independent African nations did was to form an organization called the Organization of African Unity. […] The purpose of our […] Organization of Afro-American Unity, which has the same aim and objective to fight whoever gets in our way, to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western hemisphere, and first here in the United States, and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary. That’s our motto. […]

I’m interested here in the two uses of “means.”  Not that the word is used significantly differently (though surely Aristotle and Malcolm are talking about different means) but I’m interested instead in the similarity of the phrases used: “in any given case the available means” and “by any means necessary”.  What would happen–as a thought experiment–to remix the two?

Aristotle remixed:

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing persuasion by any means necessary.

Malcolm remixed:

. . . bring about the freedom of these people by observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. That’s our motto . . . .

I’m not sure what the effect is.  In part, I find, it is difficult to separate my own association of “any means necessary” with the agenda of militant Black nationalism; likewise, my association of Aristotle’s definition with the promise of rational deliberation makes it hard to assess what the Malcolm Remix might be saying.  If anything, Malcolm here seems kind of toothless, while Aristotle–while suggesting a much broader rhetoric than he usually does–picks up an alien air of threat, of possible violence.  Of course, these evaluations are colored by my understanding of the two remixed phrases.

I’d be interested in any thoughts.  Maybe this isn’t as promising a move as I’d thought . . . hmm.

tho’ this be madness

A long-promised response to Crowley’s The Methodical Memory, written in response to, if not necessarily tribute to, the occasion of her retirement.

At first, I admit, I was taken aback by this book.  Where was the Crowley who wrote the history of composition in the university with such wit and nerve?  Who was this Crowley, prattling on about the history of outlines, interminably, with no purpose in sight?  Why had this been recommended to me?

But then I tried thinking through these questions, or, more accurately, tried to think around them.  As I am coming to learn, (especially in response to Crowley) an argument need not be written at the superficial level of the text itself–it can reside too in the metadiscourse around the text, and I think that that is a valuable lesson for me: that frustration with what may appear at first to be a difficult, dull, or uninviting text may be the fault not of the author or the text but of my own reading.  Or, to sing the death of the author a little louder, the text is not exclusively what is written but what is read.

rsa preview

I’m compiling notes and getting ready to start writing the text of my RSA presentation. Some observations.

• I have 35 pages of notes for what’s meant to be a 13-16 minute presentation. WTF?
• Although I understand the problematics surrounding outlines (as noted by Crowley and Rice), I find that sometimes they help me to organize material. The problem they pose, perhaps, is when invention is made to serve outline rather than the reverse. That is, if the outline is presented as the 100%-surefire-guaranteed way to produce research work, that’s a problem. If (as I think I’m doing) the outline is more a question of arrangement–how do I associate this passage with another in a way that is productive–then maybe it can be made to serve in less problematic ways.
• Until this past semester, I haven’t typically found it very hard to write. I am wont to chalk it up to events in my (im)personal life, but I think that, more realistically, I’m getting distracted more often while I write (by blogging for example–hahaha) and that the more I read composition the more conscious I am of my own writing processes . . . which in turn has made me very self-conscious about writing and the choices I make. Good, on one hand, since I find now I’m more likely to pay more attention to some details of my writing than I have been in the past, but bad because it takes me forever to produce anything.

This will be (barring the easily-forgotten Saturday morning Roundtable at C&W07) my first conference as a professional scholar. Cool. But I’d be lying if I said I was confident of the rhetorical situation here. I am reminded of something Rice has written on the matter of reading a conference presentation as opposed to giving a talk or performing a piece of scholarship (Rice provides the following links here, here, and here on the matter). The distinction is a subtle one but one that I’m not sure how to effect in my work. While I’ve been told that I am an effective reader, I also have been given feedback that my presentations are too much a “paper” and not enough a “talk.” Okay. So, another genre to learn. I’d be interested from my (I suspect) dwindling number of readers to see any suggestions or advice they have on making a paper into a talk. On one hand, I assume it’s a matter of diction, tone, style–see Rice’s comments on using humor in a 4Cs talk. But then, I am afraid that it’s a narrow bull’s-eye, and that trying to craft a talk (rather than a paper) might lead to a too casual, too informal approach to the work . . . and since my essay is about ethos (among other concerns) I’m very conscious of the way I/my work am/is being presented.

A preview of what might be the value of considering ethos in context with star studies:

1. Star studies encourage us to understand a star’s persona has a de-naturalized construction rather than an essentialized subject. If ethos (as Corder has suggested) is troubled by poststruc versions of the subject, then star studies might offer a model methodology for understanding the way ethos works in public discourses.
2. On a related note, we can learn from star studies’ emphasis on how star images reflect ideological concerns to understand how and why ethical appeals find traction, moving beyond Burke’s idea of identification or, at least, suggesting that identification as Burke understands it, and as it is key to understanding ethical appeals is an ideological question as much as it is a rhetorical question.
3. I don’t have a number three yet, but I feel like just two points is kind of lame.

call to arms

From Sirc, Geoffrey. English Composition as a Happening. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2002.

Elbow reminds us of the relative duration of academic-life to real-life. Just because the rest of the curriculum has banned enchantment in favor of a narrow conception of life-as-careerism that doesn’t mean we have to go along, does it? Can’t we be a last outpost? a way station for poetry, ecophilia, spiritual intensity, basic human (not disciplined) style? (28 )

I’ve been reviewing some notes for Dr. Ray’s final exam essay, trying to decide which option to pursue. Shall I write a statement of teaching philosophy? Shall I return to an argument from our discussion board and parse it out further? Don’t know yet. But I was reminded how much I like Sirc’s little calls to arms scattered through Happening, even if at times I think the polemic gets in the way of his argument–or, rather, it crops up at odd moments and creates a disjunction in the text. Although, I actually sort of like that too–it’s as though he’s latched on to an idea or image or scene that excites him so much that the thread of his argument falls out of sight for a moment, and he’s just compelled to proclaim something like the above, in spite of the body of work (like, say, Smit’s The End of Composition Studies) that insists on a utilitarian purposefulness for rhetoric and composition.

It’s not, then, that Sirc doesn’t see composition as owning utility, but rather a different kind of utility: a utility of affect, pleasure, mystification. Disjunction. It is, then, not the utility of disciplinarity, not an institutionalized utility. I note this thinking of my own writing, here and elsewhere–the M.A., the exam, eventually the dissertation, articles I don’t even know yet that I’ll be writing. I am compelled by the work of Sirc and Rice and others who have argued for a writing like this, a writing that (at the very least) reorganizes what it mans to write disciplinarily. Consider Rice:

In composition studies, rhetorical practice is often defined as acknowledgment of audience, purpose, and, even as many in the profession dispute its influence, ability to engage with one of the so-called modes: compare and contrast, definition, classification, narrative, or argument. None of these points prevents writing from being taught in constructive ways. These points’ dominant position within our pedagogical apparatus, however, is a topos of instruction in need of updating. We can no longer assume that the modes (or any variation of the modes) are appropriate for the sake of being appropriate. Chora, in particular, challenges each point’s relevance to digital writing because its focus shifts to a hyper-rhetorical method that displaces much of the fixity we currently associate with print culture. (Rhetoric of Cool 34)

While I understand that my writing is still developing (whose isn’t?), I look at the work of folks like Rice and Sirc and I’m driven mad with shame. Their work looks effortless, in some ways, even though I know that seeing only the end product of something mystifies its origins (the logic of the commodity concealing labor). This is particularly angst-ridden for me because I typically do find writing easy–or, at least, not difficult. But writing my M.A. essay this semester–my much delayed and fussed over M.A. essay–has presented a challenge that, frankly, I hadn’t anticipated. On one hand, I’m frustrated by my haphazard writing of this project; on the other, I think it’s great to go through it because I’m learning the writing process all over again, in some ways. I’m trying to appropriate something from Rice and Sirc that I find appealing, a method, a tool, a construct, and I’m not yet sure I’m deploying it as effectively as they have.

Turning back to the Rice and Sirc passages above, what I aspire to do is produce the choragraphic, spiritually intense writing that drew me into composition and rhetoric in the first place, but I keep struggling against what feels to me like a limit of imagination. Look, there’s Rice, finding rhetorical moments in P-Funk albums! Over there, Sirc’s dropping science with Situationist psychogeography. And Ulmer–Ulmer! Like a mad scientist, tossing together poststructuralists like Barthes and Derrida with the flotsam and jetsam of different discourses–hey, how did Einstein invent? throw it in!– with Hank Williams, Sr. tracks blaring as he coasts the wild silver ride of choragrapy to a transcendant wabi-sabi mood. I haven’t found my way into that space yet. The Lennon project might be a start, but I want to not just use the choragraphic method as others have before me, but I want to find the space where I can be–like Rice and Ulmer and Sirc–an Inventor, searching for, experimenting with, mixing together forms and genres and Situations to create new ways of writing. But I haven’t yet.

Don’t misunderstand me, dear reader. This isn’t one of my pity-me posts. I’m trying to articulate an ambition, a desire yet unfulfilled. Sirc, Rice, Ulmer . . . they’re not idols. They’re . . . what? Inspirations? Guides? I sort of like, if you can excuse the cultural appropriation, the image of them as spirit guides in the Native American tradition. Their work resonates with me; I identify with something they represent (even as they challenge the way writing is represented in the university); and there’s something of the way they do what they do that inspires the way I do what I do.