After reading Lessig’s final chapters, I find myself still grappling with the issue of indebtedness, maybe now more than ever. Today in class we circled around several issues concerning remixes. Some of us were disinclined to call them essays as such, but I’m going to plunge out on a limb and claim that they are just that: “attempts” in Montaigne’s sense of the term. What they are attempting and what they actually accomplish aren’t necessarily congruent, but they attempt nonetheless. As I mentioned before on Tim’s blog this week, I found Lessig’s example (92) especially relevant.
If these “attempts” are being fielded, and they’re essays, they most probably have at least some shadow of a *perspective*. So who gets to take credit? In terms of copyright assignments, Lessig is critical of artists who allow remixers to use their original work, but fail to give those authors any sort of rights over their remixed creations. He’s especially critical of LucasFilm, who set up a fan-fiction web site, encouraging users to expand the Star Wars universe, but without retaining any creative rights (247). And why shouldn’t these remixers have rights? Weird Al (whose name keeps popping up tentatively during class discussions) seeks the appropriate permissions and is able to get royalties for his parodies.
But does Weird Al “do” Remix? Think I’ll ask him….
Sliding down this slippery slope, I wonder to what extent agency matters in constructing Remix AS Remix. Jessica and Rachel brought these questions up severally, so I’ll try to distill them into my own anxiety: Must we take agency and intention into account when discussing what we call “Remix?” We were talking about *10 Things I Hate About You.* Clearly, the film appreciates Shakespeare, but based on the vast majority of student papers I read, they were familiar with the Ledger-driven teen film prior to experiencing Shakespeare’s play. Can *10 Things* operate in a vacuum? Yes and no. If *10 Things* seeks to be in conversation with Shakespeare (or in conversation about him), then the “original” *Taming* context is necessary for a broader understanding of what the makers of *10 Things* are getting at. As much as I’ve been abused by *10 Things* references in a variety of ways, I would like to give the film makers the benefit of the doubt regarding intentionality. In other words, Shakespeare wasn’t incidental to their plot.
But is *10 things* a remix? What is a remix? Since Lessig came up with so many good things to say about particular remixes, I wonder what will happen should we extend that definition. Let’s try.
Language—as would be the case for all symbolic systems of communication—relies almost exclusively on its own solipsistic context. Languages eventually learn to talk to one another, but those normally form new languages, still based on symbols and still what most Anthropological linguists would call arbitrary (only in the sense that there’s nothing about the word “pen” that screams “call me pen!”). Languages recombine, sentences recombine, words recombine to form sentences, chords combine to form harmonies, notes combine to form chords and melodies—what we see as holistic (and rightly so) still must be composed of parts.
But those parts aren’t necessarily independent from the whole. Anyone who cooks knows that once you introduce a certain combination of ingredients into a mixture, you’ll end up with something that doesn’t necessarily reflect the discrete units of creation you put into it. The same phenomenon applies to Chemistry: take an “H” out of H2O, you don’t have anything remotely *close* to water. Not at all.
Bringing this insane garble back to the notion of Remix, can we call a REMIX something that forms a new whole—a piece of work that isn’t just the sum of its parts? Maybe that definition is problematic too, but if we find ourselves questioning whether a work is ‘original,’ maybe as an audience we exert our agency and decide, “NO, that certainly isn’t remix.” Somebody else may decide otherwise, however.
But who gets to take credit in R/W culture? I remember the Vanilla Ice *Under Pressure* controversy. We can safely say that those songs in question aren’t the same. And who was ultimately responsible for the playing of that background track, anyhow? Hard to say, even with ‘80s studio magic. Most probably, the parts in this case can’t be removed from the whole to show us just *who* is responsible.
Maybe if we can’t sort out the particulars, we can identify some kind of perspective. Maybe that perspective manifests from multiple authors, but it serves as an outlook, a kind of combined worldview. Remix texts, it seems, should be aware of each other. That’s the only way language works, so why shouldn’t it be the case for Remix, even if we decide *everything is Remix*?
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Everything is Copyrighted (for 9-23)
Okay, so I jumped the gun for next week’s post (which I should’ve held off until before the 23rd). Chances are I’ll be mercilessly crushed by waves of grading, so better to do this now before my mind turns to mush.
The strands connecting notions of plagiarism, copyright law, and organizational systems are manifold. However, before I jump in please let me take a moment to express what I *really* feel about all of this, in one word:
“Fuck.”
I say this not because the author is dead, nor because there isn’t any sensible way of acknowledging indebtedness, but rather because the borders of what counts as intellectual property are changing in some pretty abstract and difficult to pragmatically approach ways. Weinberger’s mix tape—and his very notion of how we are beginning to organize information in “the third order” faces not only intellectual scrutiny, but mounds of legal issues as well. John Logie, in his rather depressing essay on copyright law, computers, and the composition classroom, exhumes a long legal history documenting the seeds that would lead to a market and intellectual climate dominated by “permissions.” He sees the expansion of copyright laws as a “response to the development of novel communicative technologies,” (137) culminating with analog tape decks and the internet. In short, Logie argues that the vague outlining of the “fair use” statutes in the 1976 Copyright Act fail to fully protect scholarly and non-profit uses of copyrighted material and other intellectual property (139-140). In effect, writing teachers can suffer stiff penalties for violating a poorly defined law. Teachers could even be sued by students for using their work in class exercises (anonymously or not).
‘Better break out the blanket waivers,’ suggests Logie.
To complicate matters, the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) attempted to strengthen the rights of individual intellectual property holders in an effort to protect third world investors and inventors (143-44), a move supported by President Bill Clinton at the time. As Logie puts it, WIPO cast “the public as passive recipient rather than the grantor of authorial rights” (145). This outcome and the series of court decisions to follow were decidedly “top down” by Weinberger’s standards.
Though it should come as no surprise to note that legal prattle can complicate matters rather than resolve them, composition teachers have inherited a heavy burden to pass onto their students. Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati, in their essay on plagiarism and the web, outline the web climate that fosters accidental plagiarism. They argue, vast arrays of information are readily available to students looking for ‘more correct’ perspectives than their own, and that the temptation to copy and paste is high due to the text being right at their fingertips (156). So not only are students in this case plagiarizing, violating academic laws, but they are also violating the terms of “fair use,” effectively putting them in double jeopardy. And, even if the plagiarism proves unintentional, students aren’t safe from violating authorial permissions. If avoiding plagiarism means acknowledging indebtedness, how do we then respond to publishers and authors who demand monetary compensation?
The definition of plagiarism—as both Logie and DeVoss and Rosati point out—has expanded via the internet and copyright law. DeVoss and Rosati in particular advocate viewing plagiarism via an intellectual property lens (159). The rationale here is to speak to the web and its content on the web’s, and capitalism’s, own terms using a ‘real world’ approach: property, and by implication, money. While this approach seems sensible enough, the reality is far more complex. In Chapter 7 of *Everything is Miscellaneous* Weinberger points to sites such as Wikipedia and Flickr who rely primarily on user content, instead laying copyright claim over the systems of organization themselves. Though DeVoss and Rosati argue that anyone can become a published ‘expert’ online (157), Weinberger might argue that the “democratized” spaces online (those characterizing tagging, wikis etc.) defy the very notion of individual authors. Sites such as Wikipedia foster a multi-author landscape—anyone (who is registered) can modify others’ work. Thus, the landscape of intellectual property has expanded not just to ideas themselves, but to the frameworks those ideas occupy (should we see ideas as discrete intellectual units).
So again, I ask, how do we teach students to acknowledge indebtedness when we’re all in so much debt, both legally and intellectually? How do we describe ideas versus frameworks for ideas? While some might argue that academic uses of broadly applied theoretical lenses (postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc.) are similar to how students might engage a framework like Wikipedia, those lenses very often don’t include the baggage of as many copyrighted facets: images, sounds, words, paragraphs, phrases in and out of different contexts, and even the page layout containing them. Therefore, it might be tempting all over again to tell students not to use the web. However, such rationale ultimately only perpetuates the problem—students will continue to use the web, and will continue to steal from it both purposefully and accidentally. Though understanding intellectual property law provides a useful if Machiavellian approach to acknowledging indebtedness, this lens doesn’t necessarily help to resolve or foster an understanding of broader intellectual property issues and laws.
Once more, for the last time, what do we do with this mess? Resurrect the author?
The strands connecting notions of plagiarism, copyright law, and organizational systems are manifold. However, before I jump in please let me take a moment to express what I *really* feel about all of this, in one word:
“Fuck.”
I say this not because the author is dead, nor because there isn’t any sensible way of acknowledging indebtedness, but rather because the borders of what counts as intellectual property are changing in some pretty abstract and difficult to pragmatically approach ways. Weinberger’s mix tape—and his very notion of how we are beginning to organize information in “the third order” faces not only intellectual scrutiny, but mounds of legal issues as well. John Logie, in his rather depressing essay on copyright law, computers, and the composition classroom, exhumes a long legal history documenting the seeds that would lead to a market and intellectual climate dominated by “permissions.” He sees the expansion of copyright laws as a “response to the development of novel communicative technologies,” (137) culminating with analog tape decks and the internet. In short, Logie argues that the vague outlining of the “fair use” statutes in the 1976 Copyright Act fail to fully protect scholarly and non-profit uses of copyrighted material and other intellectual property (139-140). In effect, writing teachers can suffer stiff penalties for violating a poorly defined law. Teachers could even be sued by students for using their work in class exercises (anonymously or not).
‘Better break out the blanket waivers,’ suggests Logie.
To complicate matters, the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) attempted to strengthen the rights of individual intellectual property holders in an effort to protect third world investors and inventors (143-44), a move supported by President Bill Clinton at the time. As Logie puts it, WIPO cast “the public as passive recipient rather than the grantor of authorial rights” (145). This outcome and the series of court decisions to follow were decidedly “top down” by Weinberger’s standards.
Though it should come as no surprise to note that legal prattle can complicate matters rather than resolve them, composition teachers have inherited a heavy burden to pass onto their students. Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati, in their essay on plagiarism and the web, outline the web climate that fosters accidental plagiarism. They argue, vast arrays of information are readily available to students looking for ‘more correct’ perspectives than their own, and that the temptation to copy and paste is high due to the text being right at their fingertips (156). So not only are students in this case plagiarizing, violating academic laws, but they are also violating the terms of “fair use,” effectively putting them in double jeopardy. And, even if the plagiarism proves unintentional, students aren’t safe from violating authorial permissions. If avoiding plagiarism means acknowledging indebtedness, how do we then respond to publishers and authors who demand monetary compensation?
The definition of plagiarism—as both Logie and DeVoss and Rosati point out—has expanded via the internet and copyright law. DeVoss and Rosati in particular advocate viewing plagiarism via an intellectual property lens (159). The rationale here is to speak to the web and its content on the web’s, and capitalism’s, own terms using a ‘real world’ approach: property, and by implication, money. While this approach seems sensible enough, the reality is far more complex. In Chapter 7 of *Everything is Miscellaneous* Weinberger points to sites such as Wikipedia and Flickr who rely primarily on user content, instead laying copyright claim over the systems of organization themselves. Though DeVoss and Rosati argue that anyone can become a published ‘expert’ online (157), Weinberger might argue that the “democratized” spaces online (those characterizing tagging, wikis etc.) defy the very notion of individual authors. Sites such as Wikipedia foster a multi-author landscape—anyone (who is registered) can modify others’ work. Thus, the landscape of intellectual property has expanded not just to ideas themselves, but to the frameworks those ideas occupy (should we see ideas as discrete intellectual units).
So again, I ask, how do we teach students to acknowledge indebtedness when we’re all in so much debt, both legally and intellectually? How do we describe ideas versus frameworks for ideas? While some might argue that academic uses of broadly applied theoretical lenses (postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc.) are similar to how students might engage a framework like Wikipedia, those lenses very often don’t include the baggage of as many copyrighted facets: images, sounds, words, paragraphs, phrases in and out of different contexts, and even the page layout containing them. Therefore, it might be tempting all over again to tell students not to use the web. However, such rationale ultimately only perpetuates the problem—students will continue to use the web, and will continue to steal from it both purposefully and accidentally. Though understanding intellectual property law provides a useful if Machiavellian approach to acknowledging indebtedness, this lens doesn’t necessarily help to resolve or foster an understanding of broader intellectual property issues and laws.
Once more, for the last time, what do we do with this mess? Resurrect the author?
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Cyborgs and Foucault vs. the Digital Divide
Interface is a lens, and that lens is crafted by a developer. This may sound like a quasi-creationist reading—especially if I were to say that our very eyes are interfaces through which we process data—but we aren’t born cyborgs. We have to become them.
In several respects, computer users have become cyborgs. When using computers, we adopt another set of eyes (via monitors), hands (keyboard and mouse), and even voice(s) (representative of both our words on a web page or voice through a mic). We can remove ourselves from our cybernetic state, yet it’s still a remediated (if limited) form of perception.
Interfaces and the tools through which we navigate them carry their own sets of cultural assumptions and privileges for people who are used to navigating those kinds of cognitive structures. Selfe and Selfe point out that computer interfaces have been constructed for a privileged class of American English speakers (74). In this course, we’ve made much ado about how modes and media affect composition. So, what does computer literacy mean for oppression?
I think that expecting certain computer literacy can be just as oppressive as demanding an absolutely particular grammar structure. Do any of you remember having the word “aint” bashed from your skulls in elementary school, despite it being a perfectly functional version of “isn’t”? Did anyone really tell you why? Even Word is enraged at me for using it—red lines abound! Maybe this is a silly example, but we can come up with grim historical analogues. America, like other conquering nations, understands the tactical value of culture-kill and language death. How do you think the “West” was won?
I’m not saying (and neither are Selfe nor Banks for that matter) that we should abolish all standards of interface, mode, grammar—what have you—in favor of a free-for all blab-spree of jubilant, self-indulgent, supposedly free-speechy democratized flying robot freedom. However, we can and should teach, as Selfe and Selfe and Banks promote, how to be critical of the existing systems. And no, we don’t have to immerse ourselves in computer programming to do it.
Selfe and Selfe contend, “computer interfaces…enact small but continuous gestures of domination and colonialism” (69): the digital age, a term that sounds almost utopian, hasn’t benefitted everyone, and certainly doesn’t represent everyone. Adam Banks points out that the Digital Divide, a term that has fallen under much critical scrutiny post-Clinton administration, hasn’t been breached. He poses, “access to technologies and the discursive practices that determine power relations in our society, the Digital Divide, and the larger history of African American is, essentially a rhetorical problem…the rhetorical problems that dominate understandings of race in our discipline are technological problems” (12). This relationship between rhetoric and technology doesn’t merely concern access, but also the forms and uses this access takes. For victims of the Digital Divide, current interface models are insufficient.
Richard Ohmann is right to point out that not everyone necessarily benefits from computer technology, and such technology, doesn’t necessarily promote the kinds of literacy that writing teachers strive to convey. Adam Banks uses a particularly striking example that illustrates these fears. In Camden school district (New Jersey), administrators paid over ten million in site licenses for educational software that teaches little more than remedial grammar exercises, which are too narrowly focused to promote compositional skills or critical thinking except for how to navigate the interface itself (19). Effectively, these exercises could democratize student opportunities about as well as the burger button on registers at McDonald’s.
Simply having material access to computers doesn’t alleviate the Digital Divide. According to Banks, users “must also have the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools effectively” (41). Like Selfe and Selfe, he promotes understanding both the benefits and problems/dangers of using any technology (42).
But how do we identify the loci of those dangers? Maybe I have a partial answer, or at least a partial thought.
I don’t really want to abuse Foucault, *but* we should consider the implications that the Digital Divide has on a panoptic society. I’ll go out on a limb (and not much of one), and point out that computers—as are any other FCC regulated modes—can (and do) function as an ideal panoptic cell in many respects. IP addresses can be tracked, purchases online are constantly recorded, computers can be hacked into and their contents stolen, illegal downloading and other thievery is punished and internet users can in general assume the presence of some kind of observer (be it an administrator, moderator, or government tracking system). Worse for the Digital Divide, there’s no obvious central tower to take, no clear map of what cell leads where.
Learning to navigate a panoptically observable interface—in many respects a material factor in the Digital Divide— can be treacherous to identity construction online. While I don’t believe that the internet is a place where ideas of represented gender, race, and class don’t necessarily come to bear, the interfaces through which users access the internet certainly try to make us believe that this is the case. Selfe and Selfe explain some of the particulars (68), but their most salient points concern representing agency through interface. For example, demanding American Standard English and ASCII character sets in word processing programs can seriously damage agency. Sure, character packs are available, but not everyone will know how to go about accessing them, much less installing them. Furthermore, as Banks contests, students need to have regular access to computers in order to exert any sort of agency (41). I’m writing this blog post from my home “office,” ensconced amidst my writerly accoutrements—it’s a comfortable (well…not really) place where I can sit and think and type on my own terms in my own time. I have agency in constructing this space.
I feel as if I’m drifting, so I’ll do my best to tie this all together. Interface mapping involves a kind of cybernetic relationship with computers. That relationship is dictated by the designers of technology in some pretty specific ways, at least until we as users learn to navigate it and define the terms of that relationship. The Digital Divide can’t be solved purely by providing access—that solution simply introduces students to an interface that can’t readily be interfaced with. The Digital Divide will be better bridged when users can become agents who understand their potential roles in the panoptic construction, and use these gazes to their relative advantage. The tower in the middle loses just that much more power the more those lateral cell walls are broken down. But victims of the Digital Divide have to break down those walls in their own ways—like everyone ultimately—then those lateral connections will become clearer, and their uses available. A critical understanding of this mode will help agents become agents—to become themselves in essence—when putting computer technology to specific use.
In several respects, computer users have become cyborgs. When using computers, we adopt another set of eyes (via monitors), hands (keyboard and mouse), and even voice(s) (representative of both our words on a web page or voice through a mic). We can remove ourselves from our cybernetic state, yet it’s still a remediated (if limited) form of perception.
Interfaces and the tools through which we navigate them carry their own sets of cultural assumptions and privileges for people who are used to navigating those kinds of cognitive structures. Selfe and Selfe point out that computer interfaces have been constructed for a privileged class of American English speakers (74). In this course, we’ve made much ado about how modes and media affect composition. So, what does computer literacy mean for oppression?
I think that expecting certain computer literacy can be just as oppressive as demanding an absolutely particular grammar structure. Do any of you remember having the word “aint” bashed from your skulls in elementary school, despite it being a perfectly functional version of “isn’t”? Did anyone really tell you why? Even Word is enraged at me for using it—red lines abound! Maybe this is a silly example, but we can come up with grim historical analogues. America, like other conquering nations, understands the tactical value of culture-kill and language death. How do you think the “West” was won?
I’m not saying (and neither are Selfe nor Banks for that matter) that we should abolish all standards of interface, mode, grammar—what have you—in favor of a free-for all blab-spree of jubilant, self-indulgent, supposedly free-speechy democratized flying robot freedom. However, we can and should teach, as Selfe and Selfe and Banks promote, how to be critical of the existing systems. And no, we don’t have to immerse ourselves in computer programming to do it.
Selfe and Selfe contend, “computer interfaces…enact small but continuous gestures of domination and colonialism” (69): the digital age, a term that sounds almost utopian, hasn’t benefitted everyone, and certainly doesn’t represent everyone. Adam Banks points out that the Digital Divide, a term that has fallen under much critical scrutiny post-Clinton administration, hasn’t been breached. He poses, “access to technologies and the discursive practices that determine power relations in our society, the Digital Divide, and the larger history of African American is, essentially a rhetorical problem…the rhetorical problems that dominate understandings of race in our discipline are technological problems” (12). This relationship between rhetoric and technology doesn’t merely concern access, but also the forms and uses this access takes. For victims of the Digital Divide, current interface models are insufficient.
Richard Ohmann is right to point out that not everyone necessarily benefits from computer technology, and such technology, doesn’t necessarily promote the kinds of literacy that writing teachers strive to convey. Adam Banks uses a particularly striking example that illustrates these fears. In Camden school district (New Jersey), administrators paid over ten million in site licenses for educational software that teaches little more than remedial grammar exercises, which are too narrowly focused to promote compositional skills or critical thinking except for how to navigate the interface itself (19). Effectively, these exercises could democratize student opportunities about as well as the burger button on registers at McDonald’s.
Simply having material access to computers doesn’t alleviate the Digital Divide. According to Banks, users “must also have the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools effectively” (41). Like Selfe and Selfe, he promotes understanding both the benefits and problems/dangers of using any technology (42).
But how do we identify the loci of those dangers? Maybe I have a partial answer, or at least a partial thought.
I don’t really want to abuse Foucault, *but* we should consider the implications that the Digital Divide has on a panoptic society. I’ll go out on a limb (and not much of one), and point out that computers—as are any other FCC regulated modes—can (and do) function as an ideal panoptic cell in many respects. IP addresses can be tracked, purchases online are constantly recorded, computers can be hacked into and their contents stolen, illegal downloading and other thievery is punished and internet users can in general assume the presence of some kind of observer (be it an administrator, moderator, or government tracking system). Worse for the Digital Divide, there’s no obvious central tower to take, no clear map of what cell leads where.
Learning to navigate a panoptically observable interface—in many respects a material factor in the Digital Divide— can be treacherous to identity construction online. While I don’t believe that the internet is a place where ideas of represented gender, race, and class don’t necessarily come to bear, the interfaces through which users access the internet certainly try to make us believe that this is the case. Selfe and Selfe explain some of the particulars (68), but their most salient points concern representing agency through interface. For example, demanding American Standard English and ASCII character sets in word processing programs can seriously damage agency. Sure, character packs are available, but not everyone will know how to go about accessing them, much less installing them. Furthermore, as Banks contests, students need to have regular access to computers in order to exert any sort of agency (41). I’m writing this blog post from my home “office,” ensconced amidst my writerly accoutrements—it’s a comfortable (well…not really) place where I can sit and think and type on my own terms in my own time. I have agency in constructing this space.
I feel as if I’m drifting, so I’ll do my best to tie this all together. Interface mapping involves a kind of cybernetic relationship with computers. That relationship is dictated by the designers of technology in some pretty specific ways, at least until we as users learn to navigate it and define the terms of that relationship. The Digital Divide can’t be solved purely by providing access—that solution simply introduces students to an interface that can’t readily be interfaced with. The Digital Divide will be better bridged when users can become agents who understand their potential roles in the panoptic construction, and use these gazes to their relative advantage. The tower in the middle loses just that much more power the more those lateral cell walls are broken down. But victims of the Digital Divide have to break down those walls in their own ways—like everyone ultimately—then those lateral connections will become clearer, and their uses available. A critical understanding of this mode will help agents become agents—to become themselves in essence—when putting computer technology to specific use.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Going Modal
I’m convinced of aurality’s pedagogical merit in any compositional academic context. Even just today, when talking to Tim and Rachel today about new media, I explained that I often have to use music as a compositional metaphor when lacking some other baseline shared experience with my students. The rationale here is to appeal to a different compositional environment, one that must be coherent in certain respects, constructed to have form and meaning understandable by other people. However, such approaches are rifle with peril. Not all students will understand every such approach, and therefore numerous should be considered. While I feel savvy enough using my music example, others may not roll off my tongue as well.
Cynthia Selfe defines her approach as “civic pluralism” (Response, 607), a reaching-out process that avoids privileging writing as a form of expression, extending its pedagogical value to a variety of peoples who may have been educated with different systems of privileged modalities. She’s right in noting not everybody writes to compose meaning, and cognition is inextricably linked in many respects to expression through a given medium. Modality molds expression.
Doug Hesse, in his response to Selfe’s essay, expresses concern over the teaching of multiple modalities in a writing context. He argues in favor of exploring these various modalities in a rhetoric class, noting that each has its own “best fit” (603) depending on the context. Hesse distinguishes writing as a subset of rhetoric, therefore treatable/teachable chiefly in the context of written language. He’s rightly worried about “stakeholders”: students need to learn how to compose through writing in a writing class; Hesse employs the analogy “If I am to teach German, noting the world’s economic drift…I decide instead to teach Chinese, I shouldn’t be surprised if some stakeholder’s object” (603). He sees Selfe’s aim as “nothing short of calling for an expansive redefinition…of composition as rhetoric” (603). On this point, though, I’m not sure exactly what Hesse is concerned about. He himself points out that writing is a subset of rhetoric, and writing composition necessarily entails the study of rhetoric. So how is composition being “redefined”, as such?
To me, there’s nothing wrong with advocating attention to multiple modalities. True, incorporating a systematic classroom treatment of these modalities is daunting, but certainly not impossible to undertake. No single instructor could cover every modality, regardless. It’s therefore our job to at least acknowledge these different means of composition. Even simply juxtaposing writing with some other modality can serve to highlight the strengths and uses of both. Perhaps, as Hesse suggests, Selfe advocates for a system-wide redefinition of composition teaching. However, such a change would necessarily have to cross departments, cross campuses, and intellectual boundaries. She herself admits, “I try to design my composition classes as places where students begin the complex process of learning how to make use of all sorts of design resources” (Response 606). This way, she effectively raises the stakes for students, not as much teaching them the specifics of modal rhetorical sovereignty (whew!), but instead how to recognize and possibly learn how to take advantage of that freedom (cf. “The Movement of Air 618).
But even when teaching someone how to fish, somebody has to cast a line, and it’s no good to send students out unprepared. The specifics of particular modalities must be taught in some respect, and it seems highly unlikely that an interdepartmental alliance would form to bridge the gap between compositional strategies. Selfe insists, “The time that students spend in composition classrooms is altogether too short” (“The Movement of Air” 643). Of course we don’t have enough time, and therefore Hesse’s critique stands on this point especially. Not only do we not have the time, but we also don’t have a specialized knowledge of all modalities in question. We have to ask ourselves, how do we prioritize modalities? Setting such priorities, especially when considering a pluralistic student audience, is not a simple matter to say the least.
But why do we have to limit composition to the composition classroom? If we are indeed Gatekeepers, why can’t we approach Selfe’s ideas in a forward-looking, introductory manner? College composition can take many forms, and writing should of course maintain institutional priority if nothing else for the sake of our student’s survival the academy. Hesse worries that stakeholders (namely students) need to have maximum investment in a “high conceptual level rather than an accretive one” in order to effectively approach multi-modal learning (603). Again, this notion calls into question the matter of modal specialization: we’re writing teachers, and maybe we’re familiar with some of these other modes, but not necessarily enough to bridge the conceptual gap between these modes for students.
But where we lack the specialized knowledge to help us teach other modalities, other teachers can help fill these gaps in many respects. Since nearly all college courses demand some sort of work production—written or otherwise—aren’t we all composition instructors in a sense? If English 101 and other intro writing courses maintained a sense of forward-looking self-awareness, we’d still get to teach writing while paying appropriate critical attention to other expressive modes. Students need to learn how to be effective rhetorical agents before they can master any given modality.
Despite clear hazards to her approach, Selfe’s appeal to understanding the pertinence of other compositional modalities trumps many of Hesse’s concerns, being the most important point of her argument. While his apprehensions are valid and applicable, little is lost through writing instructors teaching students how to approach/understand/recognize other modalities, even if those teachers can’t function within those modalities themselves.
Cynthia Selfe defines her approach as “civic pluralism” (Response, 607), a reaching-out process that avoids privileging writing as a form of expression, extending its pedagogical value to a variety of peoples who may have been educated with different systems of privileged modalities. She’s right in noting not everybody writes to compose meaning, and cognition is inextricably linked in many respects to expression through a given medium. Modality molds expression.
Doug Hesse, in his response to Selfe’s essay, expresses concern over the teaching of multiple modalities in a writing context. He argues in favor of exploring these various modalities in a rhetoric class, noting that each has its own “best fit” (603) depending on the context. Hesse distinguishes writing as a subset of rhetoric, therefore treatable/teachable chiefly in the context of written language. He’s rightly worried about “stakeholders”: students need to learn how to compose through writing in a writing class; Hesse employs the analogy “If I am to teach German, noting the world’s economic drift…I decide instead to teach Chinese, I shouldn’t be surprised if some stakeholder’s object” (603). He sees Selfe’s aim as “nothing short of calling for an expansive redefinition…of composition as rhetoric” (603). On this point, though, I’m not sure exactly what Hesse is concerned about. He himself points out that writing is a subset of rhetoric, and writing composition necessarily entails the study of rhetoric. So how is composition being “redefined”, as such?
To me, there’s nothing wrong with advocating attention to multiple modalities. True, incorporating a systematic classroom treatment of these modalities is daunting, but certainly not impossible to undertake. No single instructor could cover every modality, regardless. It’s therefore our job to at least acknowledge these different means of composition. Even simply juxtaposing writing with some other modality can serve to highlight the strengths and uses of both. Perhaps, as Hesse suggests, Selfe advocates for a system-wide redefinition of composition teaching. However, such a change would necessarily have to cross departments, cross campuses, and intellectual boundaries. She herself admits, “I try to design my composition classes as places where students begin the complex process of learning how to make use of all sorts of design resources” (Response 606). This way, she effectively raises the stakes for students, not as much teaching them the specifics of modal rhetorical sovereignty (whew!), but instead how to recognize and possibly learn how to take advantage of that freedom (cf. “The Movement of Air 618).
But even when teaching someone how to fish, somebody has to cast a line, and it’s no good to send students out unprepared. The specifics of particular modalities must be taught in some respect, and it seems highly unlikely that an interdepartmental alliance would form to bridge the gap between compositional strategies. Selfe insists, “The time that students spend in composition classrooms is altogether too short” (“The Movement of Air” 643). Of course we don’t have enough time, and therefore Hesse’s critique stands on this point especially. Not only do we not have the time, but we also don’t have a specialized knowledge of all modalities in question. We have to ask ourselves, how do we prioritize modalities? Setting such priorities, especially when considering a pluralistic student audience, is not a simple matter to say the least.
But why do we have to limit composition to the composition classroom? If we are indeed Gatekeepers, why can’t we approach Selfe’s ideas in a forward-looking, introductory manner? College composition can take many forms, and writing should of course maintain institutional priority if nothing else for the sake of our student’s survival the academy. Hesse worries that stakeholders (namely students) need to have maximum investment in a “high conceptual level rather than an accretive one” in order to effectively approach multi-modal learning (603). Again, this notion calls into question the matter of modal specialization: we’re writing teachers, and maybe we’re familiar with some of these other modes, but not necessarily enough to bridge the conceptual gap between these modes for students.
But where we lack the specialized knowledge to help us teach other modalities, other teachers can help fill these gaps in many respects. Since nearly all college courses demand some sort of work production—written or otherwise—aren’t we all composition instructors in a sense? If English 101 and other intro writing courses maintained a sense of forward-looking self-awareness, we’d still get to teach writing while paying appropriate critical attention to other expressive modes. Students need to learn how to be effective rhetorical agents before they can master any given modality.
Despite clear hazards to her approach, Selfe’s appeal to understanding the pertinence of other compositional modalities trumps many of Hesse’s concerns, being the most important point of her argument. While his apprehensions are valid and applicable, little is lost through writing instructors teaching students how to approach/understand/recognize other modalities, even if those teachers can’t function within those modalities themselves.
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