Resource-Control

STARTING FRESH (7-29)

Jason — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:39:50 +0000

Design Indeterminacy (05-20)

Jason — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:04:30 +0000

Some emergences between Buchanan’s “Rhetoric, Humanism, and Design” and my initial Arcade idea…

Indeterminacy

My Arcade Possibility:

Writing Indeterminacy: John Cage(‘s)/Composition, (My) Pedagogy, and (Occupied) Space

In his (4Cs ‘08) presentation, You Want Me To Teach What?, David Sheridan (MSU) called for “an opening up for critical reflection…at least four distinct areas of” multimodal composition/rhetoric. Two of these (maybe all) struck me in encountering (surfing?) in the moment of ‘08 and in the moments of (adjunct) teaching a developmental writing course at a local community college:

The division of rhetorical work into disciplines and institutional-organizational schemes. [Might a Compositionist drift to environmental psychology? Art?]

The function assigned to modes, media, and technologies by various and overlapping cultural logics. [Might a student's/teacher's walk/bail out on May Day be a "first-year" composition - Writing Project #2?] (Sheridan)

In light of Sheridan, I find myself sitting with the recent 4Cs call and the assumptions of possibilities. First, “…San Francisco, a fitting site” in its complexity of occupation and tradition of “dissent[s]…the Beat Rhythms at City Lights…the Black Panther Marches, the songs of Haight-Ashbury’s…Dead, the anti-war protests at Berkeley, the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz, and the recent demand for same-sex marriage…” What emerges: the Beats and the Dead are probably assumed composition(al), although not without some dancing and tug-boating. But the Panthers and Indians and Queers? How seriously does institutional-organizational Composition take “Black Panther Marches” or “Indian Occupation of Alcatraz” or “Same-sex marriage” to function as compositions, writing, texts – public writing?

As Nedra Reynolds (The Geographies of Writing) has explored, Composition as a discipline struggles to navigate within and through metaphor to materiality – to move within and through text to beyond text and into public space, from text to action. In this paper/project I discuss an attempt to theorize indeterminacy as a requisite and viable compositional stand, in the context of the digital, of new media, of new “in-between” metaphorical and material spaces. This attempt jumps off from John Cage’s 1952 composition, 4′33, and moves through the ‘69 Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and into the work of designing and implementing a first-year composition course – “Writing the City.” It is my speculation that opening the work of English Composition to indeterminacy will allow for the reflection called for by Sheridan, and open the composition class room as space in which students move from action to text/text to action.

This spew is an idea I’d been trying to develop for a 4Cs proposal, potentially thesis work…what this project needs is to steer clear of “essayist prose” (for the time being, maybe forever…) and instead dive head-on into “the art of annotation and note-taking” (Sirc), the art of gathering…

Here’s a first bit…

From Buchanan’s “Rhetoric, Humanism and Design”:

Why is the indeterminacy of subject matter in design significant? There are several reasons. First, it immediately serves to distinguish design from all of the natural and social sciences, which are directed toward the understanding of determinate subject matters. … Second, it directs attention to the exceptional diversity of the products created by designers and to the continual change going on among those products. The subject matter of design is not fixed; it is constantly undergoing exploration. Individual designers extend their vision to new areas of application or focus on one area of application and refine a vision. In general, design is continually evolving, and the range of products or areas where design may be applied continues to expand. Third, indeterminacy of subject matter serves to characterize design as a discipline fundamentaly concerned with matters that admit of alternative solutions. Designers deal with matters of choice, with things that may be other than what they are. The implications of this are immense, because it reveals the domain of design to be not accidentally but essentially contested. The essential nature of design calls for both the process and the results of designing to be open to debate and disagreement.

A question: A “liberatory” binary?…if the “essential nature” of something “calls for” being “open to debate and disagreement”?

Alteration/Appropriation of Buchanan:

Why is the indeterminacy of subject matter in [ _____ ] significant? There are several reasons. First, it immediately serves to distinguish [ _____ ] from all of the natural and social sciences, which are directed toward the understanding of determinate subject matters. … Second, it directs attention to the exceptional diversity of the products created by [ ______ ] and to the continual change going on among those products. The subject matter of [ _____ ] is not fixed; it is constantly undergoing exploration. Individual [ _____ ] extend their vision to new areas of application or focus on one area of application and refine a vision. In general, [ ______ ] is continually evolving, and the range of products or areas where [ _______ ] may be applied continues to expand. Third, indeterminacy of subject matter serves to characterize [ _______ ] as a discipline fundamentally concerned with matters that admit of alternative solutions. [ ________ ] deal with matters of choice, with things that may be other than what they are. The implications of this are immense, because it reveals the domain of [ ________ ] to be not accidentally but essentially contested. The essential nature of [ ____ ] calls for both the process and the results of [ _____ ] to be open to debate and disagreement.

Blank/box out “design” “designers” … replace/remix/box with “English studies” or “composition” or “compositionists” or “composers” or “writing” or “writers”

Buchanan argues that the braketed spaces couldn’t be filled in with “the natural and social sciences” (say, biology)…but could we fill them in with “English studies” or “composition”?

What is composition’s relationship to indeterminacy? or determinacy?

How, if at all, do our own pedagogical stances reflect these relationships? (How does Sirc’s?)

Revised “Literacy Essay” (05-19)

Jason — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:49:37 +0000

Here’s a link to a revised version of the “Literacy Essay”

“writing with” Katie/Notes on Ambience #1 (4-28)

Jason — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:58:10 +0000

When I sat down to read through the emerging 658 posts this week, Rogoff’s notion of “writing with” rumbled around my head. I think the blog space potentially lends itself to “writing with,” so I’ll attempt to take up some form of it here (although, admittedly not entirely in the form Rogoff suggests). My impulse here is to attempt to engage a colleague’s text in what is meant to be an “open” or “extending” or “curious” move…because Katie’s post got me thinking and I don’t simply want to respond in a “closed” way by saying “good” or “I disagree” or “What Rogoff is really saying is…”

And I guess a question that I want to pose in attempting to do this – What kind of composing/writing creates conditions for “open,” maybe even “action” oriented situations for reading and extended composing?

(A note: As this post will take up, as a starting point, some ideas from Katie’s writing, specifically her post “Beating Authenticity: A Fragmented (Frustrated!) Response” – go check out the original text here.)

A central question of Katie’s:

Rogoff claims that she prefers curiosity (preferring the curious eye to the good eye) because it is unsettling and likely because it works to defeat the binary of good/bad (386). This position makes the most sense in terms of attempting to remove power from the (assumed) powerful. It keeps one from labeling – from determining something as good or bad. Chaos finds a home in art/representation as Lanham notes “The arts are non-linear systems” (467). “Art” (defined as whatever by whomever – nevertheless, art has a definition, even if it is just as art) strives to break, push, merge boundaries. Okay, but it still acknowledges those boundaries in order to break them… How can we stop acknowledging boundaries is my ultimate question?

***

Boundaries and Form

We’ve been quick to set up the poles of the “visual” and the “verbal,” as much of our reading attempts to posit and argue the values of each. Let’s be careful, however, not to over simplify our notion of form. In other words, while yes, we can understand “form” to broadly be the primary medium of the text object itself (i.e. photograph = visual; novel = verbal/alphabetic), ultimately, other “forms” are always present, for example:

- the institutional/spacial form where a given textual materiality has currency (the classroom, the movie theater, the gallery, the interstate billboard…);

- the form(s) of response/response(s) as form(s) – …intellectual, social, spatial … – afforded by the intersection of (all) the present forms

(there are more manifestations of form to consider, but even if we start with these…)

If we simply continue to frame our inquiry into “new media” or “digital composition” as the visual vs. verbal, we leave vast areas of both “forms” and the possibilities within each un-questioned and unexplored

***

To further explore Katie’s question of doing away with boundaries, and to take up at least a portion of a recent post by Sarah who writes:

…the “thesis” of ENG 658. Instead of degrading visual texts “as the less-important and less-intellectual sidekicks of alphabetic texts,” composition instructors need to recognize visual text as equal to “conventional” text. As composition courses continue solely to devote instruction to the “essay,” students will increasingly wonder how this type of writing will help them in the “real world.”

Let’s play around with “reading,” or let’s play around with the avoiding of degradation of, two “visual” texts that deal with, among other things – marriage.

Remember, pay attention to our “eyes.” I want to invite your “curious eye,” and I don’t think we’ll be able to turn-off our “good/bad” eye all that easily or completely, so let’s also note what emerges there too – what our good/bad eye and our curious eye do.

***

Loose(!) Context(!):

a few “technical”/Form specifics of the texts and loop back to Katie and Rogoff and Kress, maybe to help contextualize, hoping that contextualization will encourage response…

Jason writes:

Both texts – “Commitment Ceremony” and “In the Days Preceding and Following Our Wedding, Packages Arrived.” – primarily em(de)ploy video w/sound; both have the same duration (4′44″); both are post-able to YouTube…maybe there are other “generics” in “form”?…both are, at least, generally “visual”; both in some way deal with “marriage”; both were composed by “white” people …

Katie writes:

I find it ironic that deconstructionists strive to break apart binaries in order to affect chaos, disharmony, unsettled feelings, etc. to enact fluidity, motion, (maybe) progress because in human psychology, it seems that when feelings of chaos are paramount, the desire to have control grows stronger – as the cyberculture seems to be enacting: this obsession with CONTROL. So, we are moving towards freedom of expression, of infinite possibilities with visuals, sounds, colors, texts, etc.; yet, all this concludes in is having control over visuals, sounds, colors, etc. AND how we want to see them. Hmm.

Kress writes:

“…the school-subject English need[s] an encompassing theory of text, in which the texts of high culture could be brought into productive conjunction with the banal texts of the everyday…

… This is a much more “generative” notion of genre: not one where you learn the shapes of existing kinds of text alone, in order to replicate them, but where you learn the generative rules of the constitution of generic form within the power structures of a society.”

Remember, Sarah writes:

Rogoff writes:

“To some extent the project of visual culture has been to try and repopulate space with all the obstacles and all the unknown images, which the illusion of transparency evacuated from it. Space, as we have understood, is always differentiated: it is always sexual or racial; it is always constituted out of circulating capital; and it is always subject to the invisible boundary lines that determine inclusions and exclusions. Most importantly it is always populated with the unrecognized obstacles which never allow us to actually ’see’ what is out there beyond what we expect to find. To repopulate space with all of its constitutive obstacles as we learn to recognize them and name them, is to understand how hard we have to strain to see, and how complex is the work of visual culture.”

Jason writes:

(some) Existing (generic) shapes/forms (in “Commitment Ceremony”): the music video, the short film, pop rock, butch, femme, air drums, monogamy … there are more …

(some) Existing (generic) shapes/forms (in “In the Days Preceding and Following Our Wedding, Packages Arrived.”): the home movie, the short film, wedding registry, the single family home, 2nd Day Air, monogamy … there are more …

***

Notes on Ambience #1: Ambience not as ‘mood’ but as “repopulated space”

***

So …

Here are the two texts…remember – “curious eye”/”good eye” (Rogoff) and “boundaries” and “degradation” and “productive conjunction”

Julie Goldman and Kate McKinnon’s Commitment Ceremony

[youtube]WE6UtcJtqE4[/youtube]

Jason Loan’s (Me!) In the Days Preceding and Following Our Wedding, Packages Arrived.

[youtube]2fo5_GIfx_s[/youtube]

“curious eye” … ?

“good eye” … ?

“boundaries” … ?

A return to Katie’s question: “How can we stop acknowledging boundaries … ?” (Again, go here for the full text of Katie’s post.)

Words as Instruments (4-21)

Jason — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:30:35 +0000

Here is another “cover” of Cage’s 4′33″

Instruments: KEYWORDS (pulled randomly from Cynthia Selfe’s “Toward New Media Texts”); listener’s available sound/space; KEYWORD/tag generated YouTube offerings

This performance hopes to (begin to) speculate on what Cage’s “minimal compositional frame” makes possible (and perhaps consequently what the concept of “minimal compositional frame(s)” in connection with digital media might make possible for English Composition). One premise: Cage’s turn to language posits words as instruments. Subsequent premise: English Composition’s turn to “new media” begins to posit writing as action.

(I have posted Cage’s score to 4′33″ elsewhere in the blog; if you haven’t yet read it, you might, but not necessarily, go there first.)

Notes on my “transfer of responsibility for the experience”:

you could listen to the composition as is, simply push play for each movement, a contact of KEYWORDS and emergent sounds will occur if you listen…

another option…foreground your space as instrument by changing the space (turn up your speakers and move into another room, for example)…or don’t move, but alter the available sounds in your space…generally, invite new sound…

another option…foreground the YouTube instrument (via each movement’s KEYWORDS) by advancing the KEYWORD video to its end and experience each movement via the other textual/video options YouTube offers you in response to the KEYWORDS tagged to the original image…

…generally, extend this performance…

I: 33″

[youtube]8PmTLqqAzmg[/youtube]

II: 2′40″

[youtube]AjOmIhIT0J0[/youtube]

III: 1′20″

[youtube]JMU3yG1BjWE[/youtube]

What did you hear?

Writing Indeterminacy (4-20)

Jason — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:17:32 +0000

Opening Shot:

(pulled from Liz Kotz’s Word to Be Looked At. No permission)

This post will attempt to both respond to recent reading and to make an initial (vague/tentative) proposal for a larger project. The project has two tentative names at this moment: “Writing Indeterminacy” or “John Cage and English Composition.” I imagine “Writing Indeterminacy” to take, at some point, the form of a writing course (first-year/any year). An alternate name (or subtitle) for this course might be ‘Wide Open (Public) Spaces.” What might such a course look like?

(sketch)

In her recent book Words To Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (2007), Liz Kotz argues that the event scores of the 1960s (by such artists/composers as George Brecht and La Monte Young) “reflect the strange duality of language that is both autonomous text and an instruction to do something” (9)

I argue that “digital” in English Composition contexts allows for a full-on undertaking of this duality – autonomy and action. “Writing Indeterminacy” would explore how more questions could be generated from the questions: How are Composition classrooms spaces of “autonomy” – spaces performing and rehearsing “reading” and “writing” relatively free from, but in relation to, the everyday? How are Composition classrooms spaces of “action” – spaces performing and enacting the experiences of “reading” and “writing” the everyday?

(Liz Kotz is awesome.)

We’ve recently read Gunther Kress (”Multimodality, Multimedia, and Genre” – 2003). I would like to explore how the composer John Cage (as early as 1952 with his composition 4′33″) anticipated the “great [and productive] simplification of syntax for writing” that Kress asserts emerges with multimodal composing. Such a “simplification of syntax” might be something to fear, but what compositional possibilities does it open?

For Cage, a silent composition such as his 4′33″ “provid[ed] a minimal compositional frame that would open up the performance to unanticipated environmental sounds and transfer responsibility for the experience on to the perceptual capacities of the audience members” (Kotz 15).

Within this space, visit the page 4′33″ (Covers) for performance(s) of 4′33″…

Listening Events/Listening as Invention Site

Jason — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:13:27 +0000

In the context of our course the tag “listening event” is appropriate for Neimeyer’s webcasts.

What we tend to label as the “problematic” elements of our experience with Neimeyer’s webcasts – the disembodied voice, etc. – made, I think, the text incredibly rich, although in ways that wouldn’t meet a standard “distance learning” criteria. I think our experiences of such a “listening event” invite some speculation about the kinds of readers/listeners, and consequently writers, that ‘new media’ deployments challenge us to be. How do we design learning spaces that encourage people to be generous “readers” of the ambient?

Neimeyer’s Lecture

Jason — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:13:30 +0000

As some colleagues have commented, this listening event – the webcast lecture – invites some difficulty. We can’t see Neimeyer or the class. The peak of such difficulty might be in last third/quarter of the second lecture when the class screens films and as listeners to the webcasts we are (at least) doubly removed – we have only the film soundtrack de/re-contextualized by Neimeyer for his lecture; we may have no memory reference of the (total) film itself. Have we all seen Tron or Ghost in the Shell?

I would suggest that these webcasts/listening events are in many ways suited for the ‘new media’ label as defined by Wysocki – that new media texts are those that foreground materiality. And I would argue that these “texts” can even fit this definition without a high degree of intent/purpose because of a high ambient capacity.

While maybe Neimeyer hasn’t produced the webcast version of these lectures to “make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody” (Wysocki), they do, in not accounting for the “vision” of the listener, make the listener aware, to varying degrees, of “the range of materialities of texts” (ex. sound, apparatus, finding a way to ask a question in 50-person lecture class, etc.) and the ever present possibilities/limits of both literal and virtual classroom space.

I wonder about the ideas of purpose and intention in working with new media texts. Maybe the possibilities of material awareness become radically possible in digital ‘new media’ because, in working digitally, materiality can be foregrounded simultaneously (in- and un -) intentionally via the presence of large spaces of “textual” ambience. Even “failed” texts, then, seem ripe with space and possibility for reading and further invention.

Or at least we have to be careful in how we define “failed” new media texts.

(My mind wanders here to how much advertising has come to understand the possibilities of ambience – to simultaneously foreground/vanish the product, or maybe better said – to foreground the product (and its infinite “possibilities”) by utilizing ambience as a site for invention.)

Ambience as site of invention.

I found myself mesmerized by the ambience of Neimeyer’s lectures. Voices creeping in to offer suggestions for troubleshooting the DVD player.

Links, Blogroll, etc.

Jason — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:21:01 +0000

Just a word about links form here. At the moment I have two basic categories:
“658 Muster Roll” – these are blogs of students in the 658 course
“Others Outside” – these are links to sites and blogs “outside” the class.

“Others Outside” is a mix at this point, but as I tend to cast the ‘what’s relevent’ to the work of this space (or composition) pretty wide and I think all could offer contexts; however, I should note that I am beginning to link to writers who are very specifically working in English Composition – welcome to the roll Jeff Rice (U of Missouri, Columbia) and Mike McGinnis (Wayne State U) – and these might be of more explicit interest to folks in the 658 scene. So I anticipate a revised link scheme soon.

I’m not clear if there is really an etiquette for posting links in the sidebar, so I’ll air that I do not necessarily have any affiliation with the creators of all the spaces linked to, but instead might have what we could call some form of (real/desired) affinity. If I’ve put a link to you, and you’d rather not be, just give word and I’ll make revisions.

thanks.