I Don't Always Write Blog Posts, but When I Do, My Writing Defies the Hegemony of Logocentrism

Prelude

In all its various forms, the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation. Lanham (1993) calls this the tension between looking at and looking through, and he sees it as a feature of twentieth-century art in general and now digital representation in particular (3-28, 31-52). A viewer confronting a collage, for example, oscillates between looking at the patches of paper and paint on the surface of the work and looking through to the depicted objects as if they occupied a real space beyond the surface” (Bolter and Grusin 41).

This post was intended to be a quick response to Ashley Evans’ thought-provoking blog post entitled “Discussing Right from Wrong with Lynch (and a guest appearance by Ryan Gosling)” but it kept growing and growing until it started to invoke notions of intertextuality that Matthew Vetter revisits in his “One More Post?” post.  My hope is that by meshing these responses I might posture a post that makes intertextaulity hypermediate.

In doing so, this post seems to generally follow the following tenants:

This is a sophistic blog post (hopefully in a “good way).

I, Jonathan Harris, am not writing this blog post (whew!).

This is an attempt at a Hectic Zen composition (and should therefore provide an experience of hypermediacy).

First (Move)ment

Ashley’s post was engaging and made me question how I interact with students in these kinds of critical classroom moments. For whatever reason, I had trouble coming to grips with the Lynch article, so I'm glad that she gave him some space on the blog.

First, I want to copy Ashley’s brilliant move in the beginning, where she repeats/remixes? our colleagues’ blog posts, but, instead, I want remix two lessons from in-class discussions (I apologize in advance if I misquote or misrepresent [I welcome everyone to participate in the creation/writing of this text (thankfully Blogger lets us do this]). I hesitate doing so for the obvious reasons (misrepresentation and the distrust of orality) but there is always space to critique me in the future (again, I welcome it).

The first is from Ashley (again) who said in Dr. Nelson's class last quarter (replying to a colleague's mistrust of student survey responses, which were fantastic btw) that "we don't give our students enough credit to voice their own opinions" (I’m terrified of using the quotation marks here) by which I think she meant that our students are very comfortable as agents, to speak up and voice their opinions.

The second comes from Sarah who conjectured (and here, I think I'm extremely guilty about misrepresenting her ideas [I should have taken better notes]), during our discussion on Postman, that it might be possible to bring up positionality and then set it aside." Here, I believe that she was speaking about assessment/ classroom authority.

Second (Move)ment

I bring in these two lessons/gifts from my colleagues because they continue to roll around in my head (and probably will for some time) when I think about authority in the classroom space). I don’t bring these up counterargument or instances of aporia. Rather, as Veeder writes of the Hectic Zen Space, “writing in a Zen space is always writing away from understanding—exploring rather than explaining, waiting for the plop of a frog in a pond of the mind/ This is rhetoric in the acoustic—a rhetoric in an new key” (Reading Marshall McLuhan).

Which brings me to my second “plop” in the pond of my mind.

I find interesting the ways in which our conceptions of author/ity chance when we’re in the classroom (as teachers) in the classroom (as students) and outside of the classroom (as writers). All of the writers on this blog probably have realized by now that I’m unbearably quiet in the seminar classroom but that I’m long-winded as a writer. Almost none of you know that I’m confident (if a little Ludacris) in the classroom (as a teacher).  

All of this leads me to question how our enacted roles fatalistically determine out students’ responses to our critical stances on controversial issues, etc. This quote from Ashley’s post is extremely telling:

“As a teacher, I am easily frustrated when my colleagues tell me they have every right to be politically open in their classroom. One even said something along the lines of “they believe everything we say, so we should tell them what to think.” No. No no no no no no” (Evans “Discussing Right”).

I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that I find myself both disagreeing and agreeing with Lynch vis-à-vis Ashley’s post. Making a political status known/having strong opinions when engaging students in discussion is not a terrible thing to do for all teachers, and it is a terrible thing to do for some.

For example, one of my goals as a teacher is to get students to accept some of the power in the classroom, and part of the way that I do that is by announcing my political take as an individual and then as a cog in an institutional machine. In doing so, my students hopefully see that I can inhabit multiple positionalities in a recursive-critical stance without giving up my ideological stake in certain issues. Certainly this stake, this understanding might change as a result of this recursive process, but that’s really not the goal of the course or the discussion, is it? I am both allowing students right to their own political/cultural ideology and “pushing an agenda” that advocates this recursive, meta-cognitive process.

Coda

“In all its various forms, the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation. Lanham (1993) calls this the tension between looking at and looking through, and he sees it as a feature of twentieth-century art in general and now digital representation in particular (3-28, 31-52). A viewer confronting a collage, for example, oscillates between looking at the patches of paper and paint on the surface of the work and looking through to the depicted objects as if they occupied a real space beyond the surface (Bolter and Grusin 41).

It seems to me that there are many ways to go from here. Do we talk about this writing space and its affordances for intertextuality? Do we talk about post-modernity and my remediation of in-class discussion? Do we talk about Vetter’s notion of the earwig and apply it to our writings here?

If you stuck with me until now, I thank you/apologize./? Also, thank you Ashley and Matt for your engaging posts. If you didn’t (or meandered through, I don’t blame you).

Good Luck everyone on writing your finals!