I started writing this blog post, responding to Rex Veeder’s Re-reading Marshall Mcluhan: Hectic Zen, Rhetoric, andComposition (published by Enculturation), by summarizing the main points put forth by his article.
I then realized how foolish such an approach would be.
What I think I’ll do, instead, is restate in Veeder’s own words some points, which I found especially valuable and insightful, points which resonated with me and, I believe, resonate with “our” discipline and, perhaps more importantly, the community at large. I think it’s appropriate, though, to start with some background “snippets” of Veeder’s work in and outside of the university.
Rex Veeder received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1992 after earning his MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Currently, he teaches at St. Cloud State University, in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where he also serves as Director of Composition. His work has been published in Rhetoric Review as well as Rhetoric Society Quarterly of which he also edited. His work in the past has “focused on the history of rhetoric and composition as well as composition theory, especially on cross-cultural rhetorical theory. He was an Assistant Vice President for Faculty relations for eight years and served briefly as the Vice President for Academic and Student Life at a community and technical college.”
If we went to see him today, I would like to imagine that we would find him on the Veranda Lounge, smoking a cigarillo and drinking a cup of coffee, “riffing” to students and colleagues.
What I find so inspiring about Veeder’s work is that his work occurs and had direct implications for those outside of the university. I’ve included links to two examples, below:
The Head Water Blues Opry written and directed by Veeder and “marketed” by a group of his J-Comp students.
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Now would be a good time, I think, to dig into the article we’ll be discussing in class. As I previously stipulated, I’ll try letting Veeder represent himself in this space by offering up some of what I believe are his most powerful moments in the essay (unfortunately screening him); later, I will post some questions that might be worth exploring in class on Tuesday.
(Part of me wonders if it’s appropriate to provide some background music while we listen to Veeder riff???).
Please note that all pagination comes from the downloadable pdf version of the article.
“...the environment and work site for composition becomes a rhetorical space where what is complex is massaged into meaning through the recognition of patterns (relationships) so that the complexity is revealed as more than chance” (1)
“Participating in McLuhan’s consciousness is an exploratory venture. IN a situation where knowledge making is more important than knowledge explaining, exploration is essential, exploration in keeping with the McLuhan universe, which is the universe of the new physics where Strange attractors make more sense than conventional organizational models” (8).
“The mythology of the well-made and orderly universe and the clock maker is clearly an idea McLuhan identifies as bankrupt. That mythology is countered by the mythology of the new physics, where all elements of the universe are subject to change through relationships with everything else. It is a mythology of “Wow” and “Oh. Oh.” Surprise delight, and devastation are wrapped in the same package and the frail, emotional and psychological worlds of human beings must learn to account for this disruptive and volatile universe. Our universe is either fragmented or mosaic” (9).
“Proximity scholarship denies familial and tribal sharing, whereas (w)holistic and auditory scholarship encourages it” (11).
“Aristotle’s intolerance for sophistic rhetoric and the popularity of is Rhetoric consigned the sophists and the epistemology of Homeric rhetoric to the back room closet of academics and public life and law. The Rhetoric, which separated mythos and poetics from the appeals of and the epistemological foundations of western civilization…” (11).
“’Be an Artist or die” (18).
“”’When I write, I try to maintain a sense of ‘discovery,’ of being on the joyful Road to Serrendip; or to maintain a sophistic sense of the motion of the whole’ (245). Do we sense the beat in this, the dealing with fragmentation in parallel comparisons, the resistance to a conclusion, and a playful (witty) engagement in a language seeking some unifying moment of repose in the complexity?” (20).
“Hectic Zen troubles those who want something particular. In Zen compositional if you want something you will not get it; what you do get might be better. What is hectic? If you don’t get it, you aren’t hectic enough. Incompatible-juxtaposition, pun and metaphor, diremption, Russian ostramenie. Be a stranger and you are there. You see what it is that you were enveloped in and breaking. It’s a break out and tearing up with a moment of making. To say it this way is not the experience, but saying it this way reminds me of it. We get there or we do not. We get it, or we do not” (19).
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I don’t pretend that I’ve got “it” but I’d like to confidently say that I’m interested in trying. This text, regardless of how many times I read it, inspires to be more ambitious (in my pedagogy and in my research) than I am probably capable or have the right to be. Perhaps I’m acting young and idealistic by entertaining the idea that “revolution by evolution” exists or is even happening right now.
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I said earlier that I was going to pick snippets of the text that seemed to “resonate” with our community and our in-class discussions. I would now like to pose some questions, which we might, again, explore on Tuesday.
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What I’d like to suggest before we start, and this might run counter to Veeder’s ideas or insights, is to avoid assimilating these theories into our current conceptions of our (individual or otherwise) classroom spaces. That is, I don’t think it would be particularly beneficial or useful to conjecture “how is my class already ‘Hectic Zen’” therefore casting the theory aside (as we might do when considering introducing multimodality or an increased awareness of style) because I think that this “consciousness” provides us more as pedagogues and scholars than as Veeder would writes “exotic titillation.”
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The piece at once attempts to restructure consciousness as well as contemporary scholarship/ composing processes. How effective is it in changing those who “want something particular?” Do we care? Should we care? Why/ Why not?
It seems to me that while the student is not absent from this piece, her voice certainly isn’t the emphasis (which I don’t assume undermines the piece’s strengths). Still, how might we, keeping in line with Veeder’s vision of a Hectic Zen consciousness, bring the student voice more predominantly into this conversation?
Does this kind of research (ie. research attempting to draw connections among two “parallel” lines of inquiry) devalue empirical work (or, perhaps, certain kinds of empirical work [if so, what kinds?]), and if so, what are the detriments of that move? What are the benefits?
At its core, this piece resonates with genre theory: “...the environment and work site for composition becomes a rhetorical space where what is complex is massaged into meaning through the recognition of patterns (relationships) so that the complexity is revealed as more than chance” (1). In what ways could we draw “parallel lines” between Veeder and other scholars in that “subfield” or “sub-subfield” (ie Bawarshi)? Veeder brings in Anzaldua, Yancey, Selfe, among others.
This piece breaks disciplinary boundaries more than any I have read before (even if Veeder does primarily use rhetorical scholars [we should remember that it was published in a rhetoric journal]); I would be curious to hear how (or if) others responded to this aspect of the piece.
It seems to me that Veeder might like Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening (certainly it resonates with her piece). How might we put her into conversation with Veeder?
What about the linear model is oppressive? How does or does a Hectic Zen act as liberation? That is, what is necessary (imperative to our survival/growth as a discipline) about Hectic Zen? What’s wrong with scholarship as usual?
Can we take a moment to consider this statement: “Be an Artist or die” ?
I’m sure that we’ll have more questions to add to this list on Tuesday (and after discussion), and I look forward to hearing what questions those in other subfields/departments/disciplines pose to the text.
Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteI can definitely feel the resonance with Ratcliffe's work, particularly her suggestion that we need to be able to inhabit multiple subject positions in order to "listen" rhetorically to multiple discourses that relate to one another but can't, and shouldn't be, "resolved" into a single position through dialectic but rather have to remain separate in order not to silence any of the speakers.
When I think of the phrase "Be an artist or die" in relation to the topic of genre theory (and I might be thinking too literally), artists before their work under genres all the time whether intentionally or not. If the latter, their work is given one based on the audience of the piece. And that's not just for visual art. That's for any artistic form (writing, music, etc).
ReplyDeleteJonathan,
ReplyDeleteI was also interested in the phrasing, "Be an artist or die." My curiosity lies even more with his conception of death than his conception of what it means to be an artist (although the two seem largely interdependent in some ways). My sense, and I would love to know what others think of this, is that "death" in Veeder's conception means silencing, in the silencing of the self (by the self or others) or silencing of other discourses--the death one suffers in not being an artist may not even be ones own.