Still not ready. . .set, go!

This class has felt like a contemplative journey; and as we close on the readings, I feel like I am back at the starting line. It was good to end on these articles because they are in many ways a realist stance in the face of the hope for academic awareness of alternate discourse and contact zone rhetoric. Elbow does sum up the sustaining question that always splashes cold water on the fiery passion of those arguing against traditional academic discourse: “how can we change the culture of literacy yet also help all students prosper in the present culture?” (126). When this question continues to arise, I wonder whether the academy really is ready (as the editorial note states on page 175 of Spooner’s article) for alternate discourses (even though it claims to be). I still have this sense that I am some benign actor in the academy attempting to go against established policies that will never truly bend to my wishes (but is more than happy to accommodate my rebellion so that it appears inclusive). I look at these brick buildings on campus and I think of those sturdy structures as the concrete ideologies that I can’t seem to knock down; my thoughts, my rhetoric, are like a tree branch I that keep beating the side of the building with, and (though I am doing nothing but breaking the branch against the building) I keep hearing someone yell out a window of the building, “There you go! You’re doin’ great! You just keep whacking away at the building, you’ll knock it down eventually!” When I graduate, I’ll throw the stick away and get an office on the sixth floor.

That’s how it feels. Jacqueline Jones Royster gets at this when she discusses that we have “naturalized the academy” as a space we must conform to. But, I like what she says about how “current research is compelling us [. . .] to move interpretively (emphasis mine) to alter” preconceived ideologies (Royster 26). In the above paragraph metaphor, I can actually re-interpret the brick building to be a paper building that I can rip through with my baseball bat. That’s why we love ideology—so powerful and so easy to re-imagine!

The response to Elbow’s ubiquitous question is, ‘how then do we see the academy and how can it be re-imagined?’ It can be seen as an exclusive entity that (as Paul says) invites us into it. Hence, why should the academy change? On the other hand, the academy, like language, is dynamic and socially-constructed. New generations of thought and time have and will change the academy. Alternative discourses will find a way; they already have much more than in the past. Paul and I want to discuss this. It’s a good concluding discussion that grounds us in the current constraints that we are dealing with. I’ll let Paul bring up his ideas on this question; I am going to air out my thoughts here (and then in class).

In our discussions this semester, there is a seeming consensus that we in the class agree that alternate discourses should be acknowledged. Further, we want alternate discourses to be practiced in the academy. Bizzell’s article echoes the sentiments of many others we have read over this course: “a diversity of intellectual approaches is exactly what we need. . .we should be welcoming, not resisting, the advent of diverse forms of academic discourse” (9). Nobody said this was an easy transformation, but it is at least comforting to know that some have paved the way for resisting traditional discourse.

On the other hand, I have this weird frustrations that Elbow and Fox are just being academic hypocrites and that argue that alternative discourse is necessary but. . .seriously. . .alt dis cannot be a final product. Fox’s argument for perceiving discourse as an amalgamation of the blurred lines between western and world majority thinking is overshadowed by the fatalistic declaration that “the U.S. university is still based on a powerful, but at the same time, extremely narrow conception of thinking and communicating that has made possible all sorts of scientific explorations and ideas and inventions” (64). Elbow does the same thing when he invites students to play around with alternative discourses in the pre-writing and drafting phase (which I would argue is a phase that the academy doesn’t care about because it is usually not part of the visible final product of writing, it’s just the ‘behind the scenes’), but he still claims that the final product should be in SWE (131). This is the same sort of crap that sometimes academics say about new media composition and texts—that it is all fine and good to screw around with and use for metaphorical purposes, but the final product still needs to be a traditional academic paper. And nothing gets students more excited about reading texts than having to write a paper about it with a minimum of eight sources (internet sources are unacceptable). This is where I get angry: I don’t like it when members of the academy are interested in alternate discourses that they never intent to apply. While alt dis keeps struggling for legitimization, academics will keep these alternative modes of thinking in cages at the academic thinking zoo—where we can look at the specimens through a plate glass window, but we’ll never interact with them. (Alright. . . take a deep breath. Relax, Jim.)

So, Spooner sees this issue in terms of writer v. reader privilege. The privilege of the reader (as Spooner frames it in the context of editing being comparable to writing instruction) maintains the gate keeping function of the writing teacher and the academy as a whole (158). We’ll ask, who is the audience? And the academy will say ‘I am,’ and reinforce that one should write the way the academy wants. The academy wants salience: a thesis, clear points, a conclusion. On the other hand, alternative writing “raises participation to a new level by deliberately disorienting the reader. Alt. style will not be taken for granted, even if that means risking rejection or misunderstanding by its readers” (166). I like when Spooner uses Alexander’s term ‘organic’ to describe how alt dis can facilitate a grasp of context for the reader. Though disorienting, alt dis should be, in a sense, a natural mode of communication; whereas, traditional academic discourse is artificial and, in many ways, not as salient as logic (established by oppressive western ideology) would tell us.

In conclusion, changing the academy is not just a matter of re-interpreting the building, it is also a matter of pushing the limits until modes become legitimized. Today, I will try a tree branch. Tomorrow, I will try baseball bat. The next day I will try something else. Eventually, I will knock that building down.

Another Bad Sports Metaphor

I was watching the NCAA march madness games this week while I was writing a conference paper. There is this urgency that you can see in basketball players when the final seconds tick away, and I felt somewhat the same as the deadline for my paper crept forward. The players start fumbling with the ball, missing easy shots, making stupid mistakes because it seems like they can’t keep up with the pace. In the final seconds of one game, I saw a player drive to the basket and just trip out of bounds. I felt bad for that guy, and I also felt like that guy. My game is rhetoric and composition: trying to understand language and keep up with language. I am always behind, and every paper seems to be some sort of stumble out of bounds at the deadline. I just can’t keep track of language’s evolution, and that’s why I love this game.

In accordance with Bakhtin’s ideas regarding evolution of discourse and Bizzell’s notions of hybrid/mixed discourse, language is not static. Even between Bizzell’s two articles, she noticed that she was not fully comprehending how contact zones are operate in discourses and that “academic discourse has continuously evolved over time” (215). Bizzell was on the right track in referring Lyon’s “Contact Heteroglossia” in that discourse is an explosive intersection of texts & experiences that are constantly mixing and reforming. But Bizzell first article (“Hybrid Academic Discourse”) is right in pursuing the change that is occurring in the academy. Academic language ain’t just some old dead white guy’s language anymore; it is changing because the social dynamics of our world are changing. My question for Bizzell is whether she is making a space in mixed discourses for visuals and online/digital virtual spaces. She seems focus on linguistic text, and part of mixing discourses is mixing modalities.

What interested me with Gee’s chapter 7 is his discussion on the new capitalism and the millennial generation. I always thought shape-shifters were weird superhero folk, and apparently we are teaching these creepy shifters. I do feel immersed in a superficial, new capitalist generation. As I have been reading Rebekah Nathan’s "My Freshman Year: what a professor learned by becoming a student" (a sociologist’s ethnography of undergraduate life as she enrolls as a college freshmen and notes current transitional issues that arise in this generation of undergraduates), she has claimed that the academy is a place where students perform but do not feel they necessarily deem as a hub of learn. Nathan says:

"The undergraduate worldview [. . .] linked intellectual matters with in-class domains and other formal areas of college life, including organized clubs and official dorm programs. ‘real’ college culture remained beyond the reach of university institutions and personnel, and centered on the small, ego-based networks of friends that defined one’s personal and social world. Academic and intellectual life thus had a curiously distant relation to college life [. . .] While most students [she] interviewed readily admitted that they were in college to learn, they also made clear that classes, and work related to classes, were a minor part of what they were learning [. . .] the great majority of students saw elective social activities and interpersonal relationships as the main context for learning.” (100-101)

So if the academy has become a superficial world, does the academy then become a more pedagogically friendly place—allowing for more virtual social spaces and less rigorous gatekeeping—or is the academy becoming such a certification-centered place that it is quickly becoming obsolete. I mean, we can already get degrees over the internet; is a new form of the academy on the horizon?

Despite all my big talk on how I want non-discursive forms in the composition classroom and how I want technology as a central mainframe for pedagogy, I do fear that English composition will become so technologized that the English department will become the Technical Writing department (and technical writing will just be offered as minor or a certification). All I got to say is keep those kids reading Harry Potter and promote strong literate models for narratives in video games.

I am Bitter that We Ignore the Game Aspect of Learning!

(Left: snippet from an article featured in this month’s Real Simple magazine by Adam Bluestein called “Go ahead and. . .” This article discusses several rules that parents should ‘lighten up’ on, including letting their kids play video games.)

Jim’s Academic Memoir, Volume 1:

I didn’t really care about school until my first semester of college. Up until then, nothing really sparked my interest. I enjoyed writing, but only to document my own escapist fantasies of places far from educational systems. I look back on most of my K-12, and the most lucid times for me were moments of sheer emotional acceleration (oh god, my girlfriend dumped me!) and the moments of ‘recess’ where I was given time to ‘play’: to depart from the orderly classroom and depart from skills and drills that only seemed to frustrate me, separate me from my peers. I got decent grades only because my parents wanted me to, and because every once in a while I would get rewarded (ice cream party for those who completed their multiplication tables in less than 15 minutes!).

I cared about school in college when I felt motivated to excel at the game of life. The game became ‘how can I get an A in this class?’ Sometimes I was engaged in the class; sometimes I could care less. Still, it was a game: show up to the class every time, do the work, ask the instructor what you can do to improve your work, show a consistent and strong effort, and make sure to always show that you are concerned about your grade (whether you are or not). Gee would say that I was acting out a certain identity, and was playing within the academic space. I excelled at the academic game. (I assume we all did to get this far)

But I got tired of playing the game. To me, it was (and still is) tiresome at times to play the academic game in graduate school: playing the game doesn’t matter if you don’t actually feel invested in what you want to study. Honestly, I felt like I could go through the motions, get my PhD, and still not have any real purpose or direction in what I am doing. This terrified me, so I turned to the only solace that I had during my K-12 days: games. I went to football games, basketball games, watched games on TV, played video games, played card games—games, games, games. What I thought was leading me away from my academic study led me straight towards what I needed to pursue: games. And then I found James Paul Gee.

A Response to Gee

Games work for me. I am a kid that Gee is talking about in this book. I didn’t grow up in a household that that was highly academic. My dad was a plumber and my mom did the books for the business. I wasn’t a very good reader, but I could kick ass at Super Mario Bros. I found a way to pass my classes by being afraid of what my parents would do to me if I failed a class. But I saw other kids, the kids typically from lower income homes, that resisted any display of intelligence to authority figures in school. I can see now that they were resisting this identity the school was trying to impose on them or the school was trying to separate them from the mediums they best learned through. As Gee states, “children will not identify with—they will even disidentify wth—teachers and schools that they perceive as hostile, alien, or oppressive to their home-based identities” (36-37). As I stated in an earlier blog, I was pretty bitter when my junior high teachers confiscated my basketball cards. Even then, I was angry that schools devalued my true home-based identity as a sports playing, baseball trading, video gaming kid. It only mattered whether I could memorize terms that I was not invested in. At least rebellion against the system made kids feel like they had some sort of power, control, action in their education. Hence, we will reject what seems unreal, inauthentic to our identity and our preferences to learning. To detention, young man!

Sadly, because of the hegemonic forces at work socially and economically, we will forfeit engagement with learning to get a degree in order to get a job. And on graduation day, you will hear people mutter, ‘I never want to read another book again.’ And why would many of those low income students want to keep participating in this game?

Academics were on the right track with multiple literacies that appeal to more than one sensory mode. But Gee takes it further: that the process of learning needs to be embodied (“academic language[. . .] is not really lucid or meaningful if one has no embodied experiences within which to situate its meanings in specific ways 44). Students need simulator spaces which to engage and make learning applicable (“knowing the general meaning [of words] is nearly worthless, unless you can recognize the word’s applications in specific cases” 41). He argues against types of education that is not only alien to students’ sensory modes, but to the experiential world of those students. To me, Gee makes sense. Yet, many academics still don’t get it.

A Brief Note Written in Anger

After reading this book and thinking about my experiences in academics, my theory is that instructors don’t want to learn the embodied discourses that students bring to the classroom because they spent so damn long learning the traditional modes of learning that they can’t handle the fact that some kid can show principles of literacy in a video game. Especially in an English department, stale academics are so hesitant to change or deconstruct the canon because they spent so damn long studying Milton. Just now, academics are sort of warming up to the idea that graphic novels can be considered ‘literate’ reading; but video games are still scoffed at. Its that power differential that we (the liberal and socialist academics) perpetrate by not seeing the popular tools students engage everyday (television, movies, comics, digital media, video games, internet sites, etc.) as spaces where critical thinking and learning are taking place. If teachers are using these popular modes as tools, I think they are going to connect with students and experience embodied learning. If they are not, perhaps they are afraid of being uncomfortable with the material (just as students have had to endure years and years of uncomfortability with Shakespeare).

Questions (because I haven’t asked many)

-How do we realistically bring video games into the classroom? Systems and games are expensive, and many games are time consuming? Will video games just remain a good metaphor for learning and will be encouraged as a supplemental activity (see above article)?

-Do students even want these home-identities to cross over into the educational system? I wanted simulatory activities to become more part of learning, but some just want school to be school and stay the hell away from home life. Then, how do issues of sovereignty play into the polemic between traditional education and embodied literacy? Do students want their education to be separated from cultural processes, do they just want the skill and drill (ex: international students who just want a degree to work a certain vocation in their home countries)?

-(This one is for Paul) What does Gee do to our notions of discursive knowledge? If he says that meaning is born from the experienced, this seems to imply that meaning is born from the non-discursive and our understanding of symbols are then non-discursive.

(Supplementary note: Two educational events that I remember most in my K-12 years were 1) when I played the Oregon Trail game on the Apple IIe lab we had at our elementary school, and 2) when my sophomore high school History teacher simulated a stock market trade to teach the class about stock trade and the great depression. That’s it. Those simple simulatory activities have stuck with me for several years—way more than any grammatical workbook ever did.)
-

The Violence of Contact Zones

While reading Lyons, I was struck by two elements surrounding rhetorical sovereignty: 1) the ‘reinterpretation’ that occurs while people seek rhetorical sovereignty, and 2) the conflicting discourse of peoples vs. individual motives/rhetoric. Furthermore, if rhetorical sovereignty is ‘the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit, to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse,” how can we begin to give sovereignty to discourses that are contact zones (449-50)? Am I still not understanding contact zones? Aren’t they places of intersection, interaction, intermingling? How then can a discourse truly be fully sovereign and fully dictate its own communicative needs as a contact zone? I know Lyons seeks “a renewed commitment to listening and learning,” but from a purely theoretical standpoint I am having difficulty understanding how sovereignty can occur. It is a paradox that seems a preserving measure which denies the permeating function of discourse.

First of all, hegemony is unrelenting and it is crucial factor in contact zones. (I am truly being the devil’s advocate here, but I do think I have a point here) Example: a bunch of Europeans hop on boats and travel over the Atlantic ocean and ‘discover’ a new chunk of land where people were already living; these Europeans not only physically seek to dominate this land and the native peoples, but also semantically. Hence, in the 1800’s, the ‘U.S.’ (as these European people are now called) and their established law courts begin a “reinterpretation of Indian sovereignty”: physically manifesting domination over native peoples by reworking the meaning behind the word ‘sovereignty’ (451).

Lyons sees the dominating ideology, but I just don’t think he addresses the issue of contact zones very well. I see the understand the desire for rhetorical sovereignty, but I don’t see the plausibility.

Dear Paul,

I got your letter. How are you doing? I am fine. I don’t think you are crazy; I think you are right. How can there be such a thing as the discursive if semantic situations such as the ‘reinterpretation’ of sovereignty exist. Lyons’ whole article is discussing bodily issues, community issues, issues of corporeal interpretation of freedom, rights, and law. For me, the concept of the discursive is way too limiting. Especially in the discussions during this course involving contact zones, establishment of identity involves so much interpretation and reinterpretation. How can contact zones be discursive? How can they be sovereign? And when are we not in a contact zone? Pardon the Syllogism, but. . . if we are always in contact zones and contact zones are non-discursive, then we must always be in the non-discursive. I mean, cmon! We live in the non-discursive--the discursive is just artificial.

I liked your ideas and we should talk some time.

Platonic Love,
Jim

Anyways. . .what I got from Lyons was a lot of miscommunication in the “power imbalances between whites and Indians”(453). Along with the troubles of reconciling individualistic motives and community motives, what do we do with failed attempts to ‘communicate’ about and within Native American rhetoric (i.e. Kennedy and Ballenger)? You re-interpreted Kennedy as portraying differences in the medium; I am going to re-interpret Ballenger as one who (although restrictive in scope and a ‘user’ of Native American culture) constructs a contact zone. Through storytelling, Ballenger tries to communicate non-discursively with native peoples. He uses experiences and imagery to intermingle with the native peoples experiences. Lyons calls it appropriation, but I can’t help but call it communication too—a type of contact zone.

By no means am I advocating dominating ideologies, but I am stating that these dominating ideologies are a part of the contact zone to the degree where I don’t think there can be sovereignty from them. Like Paul, I question Lyons’ function of rhetorical sovereignty because it causes problems in educational environments. It seems like Lyons is not being realistic with the term. If you want to be truly rhetorically sovereign, how do you reconcile the need to communicate with other rhetorics? There has to be a mesh, and (as I agree with Paul again) language does re-colonize the mind in order to communicate across other communities.

One Order of Rhetoric. Hold the Logic, please.

I watched the movie Idiocracy this weekend. It’s one of those futuristic, Sleeper-type comedies about a guy who is frozen in the present and wakes up in the future. The twist is that humanity got a whole lot dumber over time, and the main character, Joe, finds that he is the smartest guy alive in 2550. One particular scene struck me: Joe gets thrown into prison for not having a tattoo on his arm stating his identity; when he enters the prison he sees two lines—one line for those entering prison and one line for those getting out of prison—and so Joe hops into the line exiting prison and tells the guard that he is leaving; the guard sees that he is in the exit line and lets him leave. This scene made me laugh at the pure absurdity of logic sometimes: the use of ‘logic’ will determine factual circumstances and attempt to render other aspects of perception incorrect or ‘illogical.’ Hence, the logic that Joe was in the line to leave the prison made it illogical that he was truly supposed to remain in prison.

What does this long example have to do with this week’s readings? Everything. Thanks to those Greek founders of Western thought logic and rationality are the means in which we measure credible arguments. Hence, logic becomes the very means to exclude opinions and ideologically manage the recipient of ideas and arguments. This is the case in much of the new racism, stereotyping, and lexical manipulation mentioned in Intercultural Communication. All three ideological strategies utilize a certain logic to persuasively guard from certain social realities. Racism is deemed obsolete and is replaced by a view that “minorities are not biologically inferior, but different” (Holliday et al 122); stereotyping will try to scientifically classify a group by what are deemed to be common traits and “reduce everything about [a person in the group] to those traits” (Holliday et al 126); and lexical names for peoples are changed to portrait those people negatively or vilify them. Though these means of bigotry are socially inaccurate, many people do see them as logical beliefs. The simple rhetorical power of presenting a seemingly logical claim can be so dangerous and powerful—powerful enough to be so engrained in students’ minds that it is difficult to help them unlearn these thoughts.

What I think is interesting/frustrating is that in addition to students believing such false reasoning, they don’t trust a lot of reasoning from an instructor in a classroom. They are somehow trained to leave their reasoning unquestioned but immediately question the logic of certain authority figures. How do we as teachers fight logic with logic? Or do we fight logic by analyzing logic and letting them come to logical conclusions?

Educational institutions can be the worst users of false logic. Looking at the example of Tlaltelolco, the Spanish missionaries had a “mandate to institutionalize” the indios (Romano 260). Here, the Spanish rationalized that truly educating the indios in rhetorical studies would “endanger colonial society in unspecified ways” (Romano 263). The logic that the communal society (established in oppression) was more important than the empowerment of the indios creates a justification to control the educational experience of the indios, hence depriving the opportunities for contact zone educational experiences where the differing mentalities of the Spanish and indios could interact. So, in what ways do instructors manifest such rationality today?

As Bizzell states in her article, reason became the central means to argue for power between the Christians and Jews in the 13th century. However, her article highlights how logical arguments can be used to fight the power. Nahmanides recognizes the need to utilize logic in his arguments against Friar Paul, attempting to prove that “this Christian story is irrational” (Bizzell 23). Rationality wins Nahmanides respect and graces for the Jewish people essentially under Christian rule, which illustrates the need for logical rebuttal.

At the same time, how logical is any religion? Most religion is based in the irrational because the spiritual is beyond human understanding. Because the material world differs from the spiritual world, the material world refers to the spiritual world as irrational—it does not follow the rules that the spiritual world does. The same could be said of differing cultural discourses. When a different discourse comes into contact with Western discourse, that discourse tends to be dismissed as irrational. It does not follow the rationality of the dominant discourse.

Mao details much of this struggle of discourses in his piece. Especially when he discusses indirectness v. directness, he expresses frustration towards how Western discourse tends to rationalize indirect communication into a feminized discourse. In this, Mao shows how dominant discourse sees something as irrational by its definition and begins to rationalize it in order to legitimize it. All the while, this reductive strategy dismisses the possibility of contact zones. The same sort of thing happens with ‘correlative thinking’—it is not the way the dominate discourse does it, and so it is seen in some way irrational.

Logic is often used as a means of legitimization, rhetorically negotiating within mixed discourses. Each of the articles (Romano, Bizzell, and Mao) show this struggle of legitimating: the non-dominant group is legitimizing itself with the dominant discourse. The indios were prevented from legitimizing themselves; Nahmanides helps somewhat legitimize Jewish claims, and Mao states his case for legitimizing Chineze American rhetoric.

But how do we distinguish between legitimization and oppressive rationalization? How do we teach students the difference? Is there a difference?

Me, Myself, and the Other

I can’t just focus on one reading. I tried, but it just felt like trying to play ping-pong with myself. The readings just won’t allow me to separate them. What I mean is that they speak to each other. I used to think that I was crazy trying to link life experiences and textbook terms, comparing television shows to established academic theories. Believe me, many teachers made me feel crazy. As a said in a previous blog, much of my early education attempted to segregate cultural life aspects and educational drills. What I first thought was an appropriate separation of work and fun is now what I view as a form of otherization—a divide and conquer tactic. Separate them, and then make one superior to the other

This is the key scheme of otherization, as the Edgar and Sedgewick state in the Intercultural Communication text, that it remains as a “cultural projection of concepts” that “constructs the identities of cultural subjects through a relationship of power in which the other is the subjugated element” (93-94). Perhaps the sneakiest element of otherization is that it does acknowledge the other, but it acknowledges the other in a condescending, dismissive manner. Much like the Detroit educational system in Monroe’s Front Street chapter forbidding “street culture” to enter into the classroom, the culture of the other is known as a iniquitous part of the student’s lives (53). In this way, the ‘street culture’ is forbidden to interact with the dominant white culture and language. Divide and conquer. The other is not given voice because the other is not considered worthy to enter into the conversation.

Dominant ideologies seek a monolinguality; it fears a code switching (because it questions the supremacy of a sole ideology). But both the Front Street chapter and Lunsford’s interview with Gloria Anzaldua highlight that one’s lives and one’s writing are never tied to monolinguality. As Anzaldua notes of the other, “now I think that ‘us’ and ‘them’ are interchangeable. Now there is no such thing as the ‘other.’ The other is in you, the other is in me” (Lunsford 52). We can’t perform surgery on ourselves to take out the other (or kill off that part of us—as I mentioned last blog with the Ribeyro piece); rather, the other is in dialectic interaction with the dominant ideology. Not one or the other: both. Anzaldua says of her exercise of cultural multiplicity in her writing, “It’s a hybridity, a mixture, because I live in this liminal state in between worlds, in between realities, in between systems of knowledge, in between symbology systems” (Lunsford 65).

The dialectic continues, mostly within the self. Anzaldua discusses how we address this, but it is still a complicated issue in the classroom. Students still lean away from discovering one’s multiplicity and gravitate towards the dominant discourse because they want to get a job or they want to rid themselves of the stigma of being othered. It frustrates me that education at times is so ideologically opposed to understanding one’s social self outside of a business modal.

The Outsiders (That's Right, Ponyboy!)

I played football in high school. Yes, I was an athlete in a former life. Form whatever assumptions you want about me; many of my friends certainly did. One buddy of mine (the same fellow that ended up being the best man at my wedding) told me once that all football players are arrogant pricks that only join the team to get popular and get unearned scholarships to big universities. I knew my friend’s assumptions regarding the football team were founded mostly on the actions of 5 or 6 guys that I tended to avoid at practice; and I know that my buddy didn’t intend to include me in his insulting remarks, but he ultimately did (I never got a scholarship for athletics, but a TAship is way better!). I told him that his blanket statement didn’t hold up because he didn’t know what it was like to be on the football team—not everyone is like that. Regardless, he didn’t budge: to him, football players are all bastards. It’s funny, I still run into instructors that have carried a similar animosity into their adulthood and feel that student athletes in their classes are all arrogant jerks.

Though athletic communities in a specifically American context are only microcosmic examples of cultural differences, I can’t help but realize in the above situation that my friend was an outsider whose assumptions of an insider culture were stereotypical and simplistic while attempting to exert a certain intellectual superiority over the insider group. In the readings this week, I was brought back to the same observation. All of these pieces were written by academics looking in on cultures in which they are situated as an outsider or an ‘informant.’ For me, this brings into question whether the academic is really equipped to observe culture. It seems like a fine line that academics walk between essentialism and non-essentialism, and just a slight bend in their focus can produce what I believe to be a detrimental and essentialist piece (which sadly tend to have good intentions).

Take for instance Bliss’ work, “Rhetorical Structures for multilingual and Multicultural Students.” Although Bliss recognizes that multilingual and multicultural students often conflict with traditional western academic rhetorical patterns in writing, her good intention of trying to assist these students in navigating academic discourse ends up being an allegiance towards essentialism and patronizing to multilingual and multicultural students. What begins as a kind (yet patronizing) attempt to bestow “some extra tricks and some different structures” (16) to negioate academic discourse digresses into a critique of the logical structures or ordering in different cultural rhetorics (see pages 23-24). In this, Bliss demonstrates the academic inclination to ‘help’ students by westernizing them—any reference to other contrastive rhetorics seems to be a nod with the intent to eventually kill off that portion of the student’s identity and replace it with a crisp, thesis-driven western academic profile.

Speaking of killing one’s identity off, I was particularly struck by Ribeyro’s excerpt in Intercultural Communication. The narrative describing Lopez’s desire to distance himself from Peruvian culture demonstrated a certain dialectic in action; however, this dialectic didn’t involve a dialectic fusion of culture but a dialectical opposition resulting in one culture trying to extinguish the other within an individual. I wonder: is this the academic tendency? With good intentions, are academics (and I should start using ‘we’ here, because I ain’t divorced from this criticism) with trying to kill off the culture that doesn’t seem to fit the western academic structures.

Let’s step back for a moment. What am I really trying to say here with this critique of the academic? In Martin and Nakayama’s piece, we see three different approaches taken to the studying of intercultural communication (Social Science, Interpretive, and Critical). I hate to dwell on the negative here, but I saw substantial problems with each of these views. The similarity in these problems seemed to be that any outside group is going to have a flawed or skewed view of an another cultural simply because whether an etic or an emic approach is employed, one is still an outsider. Though an etic approach can produce bigotry, the emic approach doesn’t seem to produce an authentic understanding of culture either. I believe the emic approach falls apart because many cultures (if not all to a certain extent) want to preserve their culture from exploitation by being exclusive.

A case in point is the Weider and Pratt piece. What I find odd and a bit disturbing is that the article highlights the great exclusivity of Native American culture, and yet the article itself seeks to unveil this exclusivity. Pratt is even dubbed an “informant” (48). What is the benefit of these non- real Indians writing to other non-real Indians about a culture that seeks to distance itself from the dominant culture. I had the same thoughts about the Lareau article because the observers took an emic approach which they admit “changed the dynamics” of the families being studied (9). Lareau seeks to acknowledge that cultural lens are a skewing factor in all studies (see pages 10-11) and the American family would be more accommodating to an American scholar in their home (I wonder if a researcher from an institute in China would be as welcomed in as an observer), but the underlying factor in this type of study is that cultures are rightfully exclusive and outside observation can often lead to inaccurate depictions of a culture. In fact, I would venture to say that no outside perspective of a culture is ever accurate. This makes me wonder, as an academic, when am I butting in too much for the sake of ‘research.’

So, (prepare yourself—this is where I bring it all back around) as I sat there eating lunch and listening to my friend rant about how football players are total jerks, I felt that dialectic reinvention that Bakhtin discusses revolve within me. At first, I wanted to either choose whether I was a football player or not; disown myself from a community/culture or own up to it, stating that ‘yes, I am a jock.’ But it is much more complex than that. Here I discussed in terms of insider and outsider, but dialectics don’t allow for such clear distinctions. We are all insiders and outsiders, and we have inaccurate depictions of ourselves. Ugh. . .my brain hurts. It was much easier focusing on sacking the quarterback.

The Essential Call to Oppose Essentialism

In reading Pratt’s article, I was taken back to my youth. In some distant time, I too was a big baseball card collector. A collecting phenomenon typically engrosses the collector in a discourse community that maintains a healthy form of exclusive (to preserve the community) and inclusive (to broaden the community) behavior. My favorite team was the Chicago Cubs and I bought several books on Cub lore and Chicago history. The Windy City would have never caught my attention otherwise. I yearned to incorporate this knowledge I was acquiring of not only trading and stats but history into my writing as an elementary and junior high student. And I too was disappointed when the educational system separated baseball card collecting from reading, writing and arithmetic. Card collecting was a hobby—it was play time; and when the bell rings those two shall divorce. I can still hear the teacher say: “don’t bring those baseball cards to class. If you do, I will put them in my desk drawer until June.”

In the American-Western culture that I am accustomed to, it doesn’t seem like contact zones want to be tolerated. We want to segregate and let few voices speak. Let’s taxonomize and then make sure that these zones don’t touch. Yet, contact zones seem unavoidable. There is such a natural tendency to nurture “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” in educational systems, though the scientific method has taught us to dissect instead of teaching dialectics (Pratt 2). We have seen countless examples, including Guaman Poma’s New Chronicle, of cultures and languages evolving, meshing, melding. Contact zones are inescapable, and seem foolish to resist. I guess this resistance proves the existence of hegemony. Hegemony isn’t just some ethereal theory that conveniently works into Marxist thought; it is prevalent in squelching what occurs natural in communities and language. I would assume many Structuralists would understand English-only legislation as hegemony manufacturing a certain status quo that opposes what naturally occurs in language. I mean, no language is isolated: English is not a pure bred language by any means. But many insist that we take the ‘easy’ way of creating one national language as an attempt to phase out other languages in education. Good luck.

Such a resistance of contact zones exists to the point where essentialism is embraced. Much of what Holliday, Hyde and Kullman discuss in Intercultural Communication is resisting an ‘easy’ approach to communication, one that assumes that everyone communicates the same way. Of course, this essentialist attitude encrypts what is really going on in this mentality: a imperialistic view that everyone should think the way a dominant culture thinks. Ultimately, essentialism saddens me because it is an attempt to not only segregate and squelch community but it blatantly contests any notions of individual identity. I like the way Holliday, Hyde and Kullman discuss it: “we are all, as individuals, members of a vast number of different cultural groups [. . .], and hence have multiplicity of identities” (17). This gets back to how contact zones are unavoidable—involvement in several communities is inevitable (unless you choose to obtain from communities), and this involvement molds ones identity.

Contrastive Rhetoric comes into the picture when these varied identities, communities, and cultures need to be recognized instead of essentialized. Panetta notes in her article within Contrastive Rhetoric Revisited and Redefined that it is a daunting task to understand all of the varied forms contrastive rhetoric (in fact, I would say it is impossible). The point, however, is not to understand every contrastive rhetoric; the point is to recognize that the dominant discourse is not the only discourse.

Gotta Blog!

While I recieved my BA from Cal State University Long Beach in English Literature, my tastes have drifted away from Ralph Waldo Emerson and moved more towards Richard Lanham and Susanne Langer. My true obsession with rhetorical analysis and investigations into how the mind composes in different platforms began when I started working at the WSU writing center in Spring 2003 (which provoked me to apply to the Rhet/Comp graduate program here at WSU). Working with so many different students at the writing center who had such diverse composing and (ineffective and effective) rhetorical strategies cultivated a fascination for composition pedagogy and rhetorical research.

Nonetheless, I have found it difficult to focus my interests. I tend to be most preoccupied with the relationships between digital technology and rhetoric. My masters project was devote to digital composing communities, specifically regarding ipod playlists and the writing portfolios. I am attracted mainly to what Susanne Langer considers 'non-discursive' modes of communication; and I love contrasting the discursive and the non-discursive. Hence, I wish to expand my previous research to investigate the internet and video games as sites where communities non-discursively and discursively interact.

That brings me to this class: I am generally and specifically interested in this course because it contrasts non-dominant zones with EuroAmerican zones that dominate technological interfaces (Microsoft, macintosh, myspace, etc.). I mean, I really want to address the question of how contrastive rhetorics influence digital technologies. Bring it On!