How to Value the Other

"I'm curious why James uses 'narcissism' when talking about 'how much of ourselves we see in the Other.' Isn't the very point of doing that act ('seeing yourself in the Other') to be reflexive and see both similarities and differences in someone as elements in interactions? In essence, I see narcissism as an elitist ideal where one values themself more than others, and I think this conflicts with how I imagine Spivak, for instance, to define 'seeing yourself in the Other.' Rather than conflating self/other i see this as a way to expand our conceptions of both of these terms and their relations to each other, whatever that may be." --Jess Pausek
....


I'm still not happy with my answer here. But perhaps I can use this as a productive discomfort for thinking about how Lillis and Curry are different in their presentation of findings from Canagarajah. Perhaps. 


Both the texts are ethnographies. And their ethnographies seem to fit with James Holstein's idea that ethnography is a form of critique. The critique is not about what is right or wrong in the world, but it is a process of de-familiarization. Both texts we read seem to take what is familiar about knowledge production and make it strange. And Canagarajah also seems to push ethnography to suggest reforms as well. We see him struggle with his role as double agent, trying to frame himself as an "insurgent architect" (an image I pull from David Harvey's Spaces of Hope). By insurgent architect, he doesn't mean an architect, but he means everyone involved in the production of space and spatial relations. We see Canagarajah trying to be both a cog in the machine, and able to move that machine, to change it. That to me is a useful conceptualization of these ethnographies. 


Another thing that is interesting... and perhaps full of tension... is how these ethnographies are not really focused on locations and the people in them. They are focused on circulations and processes, on how knowledge is produced, circulated, and valued in different areas of the world. For both, the topic seems to be the globalization of publishing and knowledge production as a set of ideas and practices revolving around language usages. Bound up in this is the dynamic circulation of different types of capital - social capital, monetary capital, cultural capital. So, we see the scholars wrestling with academic prestige, cultural authenticity, and material constraints. But... at the same time... the ethnographies themselves are participating in an active process that makes hitherto invisible subjects (both in terms of the people they represent and the topic they explore) visible and knowable to the knowledge making processes. So, we see scholars of the Global South who historically have been (are?) excluded from publication being made know-able and creating space for their integration into publishing. The ethnographies participate in making the global know-able. 


This bring to wonder how we can move from an ethnography of locations (where we focus on a people in a place) to an ethnography of circulations. Particularly, how universals are constructed and circulated. How something like "English as lingua franca" is constructed and then circulates. How something like "global publishing is for new findings" gets constructed and circulated. So, not just how the market is created, but how its rationals are constructed and circulated. I worry about this type of ethnography because it seems in the shift from location to circulation we run the risk of losing touch with the Subaltern. Losing touch with the Subaltern is an anxiety that haunts Canagarajah, felt in his colleagues dissent and his pushy justification for the "necessary evil" of publishing speak to this shift. This shift (in the ethnographer's role as insurgent architect and in focus of study) seems to make the audience for both Canagarajah and Lillis and Curry the embodied expert, the editor who sets up the process of knowledge production. People who are a part of the apparatus of power, but who are at times able to articulate a critique or engage in acts of subversion. For example, even within the anonymity of review processes, "editors certainly have access to scholars' identities, and editors play a powerful role in mediating reviewers' practices and decisions generally" (Lillis and Curry 149). This is fine, as long as the acts of subversion encouraged or the critiques made are viewed as legitimate and proper by the Subaltern themselves. In this way, I agree with Canagarajah that it is a necessary evil. But at the same time, I wonder how much the form of presentation - how the two texts were written - dramatically affects the legitimacy and proper-ness of their critiques and encouragements.


Canagarajah lays out all the data he was hoping to gather on page 14 and how it changes to more of an auto-ethnography or mangled practice by page 20. Lillis and Curry seem to have a more traditional ethnography going for them - with multiple interviews that they can analyze. Twelve subjects interviewed that are cited, if I remember right. However, the two texts read dramatically different in how they present their ethnographies. Canagarajah tells stories about other in third person. He tells personal accounts. He reflects on the situation. But he doesn't quote his periphery colleagues very often at all ("his indian colleague from immunology" perhaps shows up the most). Nearly everything is narrated and framed through Canagarajah's interpretive lens.  He crafts a portrait for us of life in Jaffna. He crafts a portrait of the cultural complexities. The dominance of Canagarajah's voice throughout might explain C's student and A.J.'s response. His writing from his perspective ends up speaking for his colleagues. But Lillis and Curry seem to go out of their way to quote and integrate the words of their interview subjects, providing profiles and integrating their subject's words into analysis.  


I guess what all this rambling has led me to is what form should representing another take? Pastiche? Dense quoting? Speaking for? What is gained through these choices? And what are the ethical binds that happen because of these choices? 

since feeling is first - e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
when Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis.

Commenting on Papers...

Distributed Cognition - Matsuda = X

Sitting in French class, I think I realized exactly why I was so disappointed with Matsuda. And it may or may not have to do with my issues in the post below with how we frame or think about a problem. Matsuda spent most of his time doing one or two things. One, giving us the language for what we do (i.e. direct instruction, indirect instruction, socratic methods, etc.) and connecting that with how it is percieved and recieved by second language users. Two, pointing out that we need to change how we interpret second language user's responses to our strategies because we are too likely to judge them as inferior, unintelligent, or untalented because of miscommunications or poor choice of strategies for their particular needs. Neither of these really suggests changes to the processes of tutoring or teaching composition. They both largely raise awareness. If someone is to blame for second language user difficulties, the location of the blame is with the individuals and their social relations. (Though, I admit that in his example of himself and his tutor, Kim was it?, he said that she was doing everything by the book [i.e. Lerner, et. al.'s book]. He also explicitly connected our harsh grading of grammar without teaching it to how teachers think about students, other disciplines, and the job market, and he argued multiple times that we are too quick to judge second language users as inferior or unintelligent because of their responses or lack of responses (both written and verbal) in class.)

This fits most clearly into the second of the three approaches to framing the problem of writing and publishing within Western conventions that I talked about in the last post: (1) apolitical/free market, (2) social relations, and (3) systems theory/distributed cognition. Framing the problem in terms of social relations would make the strategy of raising awareness effective because largely the problem isn't with the tools or processes (though these can always be improved). Instead, the problem lies with how the tools are used and how the feedback is interpreted. However, if the third approach I talked about (distributed cognition) were applied here, raising awareness would only be part of the solution. The biases against second language users and the drive to interpret their feedback in the way that we do is not solely because of who we are or the culture that we grew up in. It would also be fostered within us by the system/tools/processes - as these are the first thing that elicit and filter feedback from students. If we teach a specific thing, we are asking for a specific thing. And we measure that thing in specific ways. If the process of translating thoughts into the written page is complicated by writing in a second language, why would the process of translating thoughts into written English be further complicated by the purpose that demands the writing's creation and the tools through which we gather and interpret it? Getting rid of grammar instruction and evaluation might be a radical idea that addresses part of this, but we are still left with the stated goals of the teaching of American academic writing that we find in texts like WoR by ol' Barty and Petrosky. We teach to fit in to a specific group's genres. How can we expect a prejudice against students to disappear when we keep taking diverse students, some of whom grew up navigating these genres and some of whom are first experiencing them, and molding them to fit what we think American academic writing is? It seems to me parts of the system itself would need to change to eliminate prejudice and discrimination. It can't just be raising awareness.

Conventions, Serviettes, Distributed Cognition, and Fault

This is a warning that this will be a very bizzare post. This is a warning because most of you are not used to reading the ramblings of this partially sane graduate student. Poor, old Gallagher, on the other hand, has become used to my antics and idiosyncracies.

As I read Canagarajah, I feel very weird. That might be a weird thing to say in a post that is supposed to "think through ideas," but if Canagarajah is all about the position from which a writer is coming from and the materiality of publishing, this is the materiality of me. I feel weird reading him. Not in a I'm-a-bad-person-because-I'm-the-man kind of way, and not in a awkward-guilt kind of way. I feel as if I see similarities in how Canagarajah thinks about issues with how I do at times. And I'm not sure this post will make any sense, but Charlie's post has made me start considering different ways in which we talk about the same phenomena, how these metaphors or frameworks impact the values we place on it, and how they affect the assignment of agency and blame. Perhaps I should be more specific.

Charlie: "As I read this, I was struck with how I have always sub-consciously viewed conventional standards in writing to be apolitical; applied indiscriminately to everyone partaking in a particular intellectual exercise, the entire group is subjected to the same restraints."

James's Mind: "How curious... Maybe its the ornery, paranoid Marxist in me, but I always viewed conventional standards as a tool of those in power used to maintain their power. As class divisions deepened in England and America, there was an explosion of books about etiquette. While the elites signified their power and maintained a distance from the lower classes through certain social and linguistic conventions - Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt's guides both encouraged the use of the term 'serviette' instead of 'napkin' when in certain milieus - the lower classes hoped that by learning them they could pass and gain social mobility and standing. The serviette is Western academic conventions."

Charlie: "Going a step further, I would argue that this illusion of increased access has effectively cemented the elite, exclusive nature of Western journals."

James's Mind: "Wow... Creepy... I just thought that. Get out of my head."

(a moment passes)

James's Mind: "But wait... I feel like that discription seems to put a lot of agency into the hands of Western journals. Or elites. Even in the case of serviettes, I can't help but wonder about how the processes and conventions operate on those with power as well. Just like the coercive law of competition in capitalism (even if the capitalists want to play nice with workers, they can't because they won't maintain enough competitive edge to remain part of the capitalist class.)" [My mind does have asides in it's internal dialogues]

This left me pondering for a while. Here I had the beginnings of three ways of looking at conventions and processes. (1) As neutral and blanket applied. Much like aestheticism in art. (2) As politically invested perspectives that "constitute discourse" and perform "ideological functions" (83). More specifically with a the-man-is-keeping-us-down vibe (go revolutionary mythologies!). And (3) as a process and system of knowledge production that was constructed to vet knowledge, but is biased because of its historically situated construction (one undoubtedly that was originally biased against people who were not elite). That perspective though does not necessarily lend to finding fault with the people. Which is perhaps why Canagarajah focuses on conventions and journals.

This third perspective got me thinking about distributed cognition - especially since Canagarajah calls the conventions "a way of thinking" (83). From what I can remember about distributed cognition, it can be categorized in several ways: (1) cognitive processes can be spread across people and/or animals, (2) cognitive processes may be spread between the internal and external (brain structures and the environment), and (3) cognitive processes occur throughout time in such a way that the products of earlier events change the nature of similar events. Conventions and publishing processes could be thought about historically through this framework. They were originally how knowledge was vetted by an elite group of people. This how became externalized and institutionalized in procedures and journals. This "way of thinking" - literally embodied in the submission process - is biased, especially against those who it was opposed to at the time of its creation (e.g. women and their battle against the blind review process in the 90s). The old biases in the process affect the nature of similar situations, like the encounter of scholars from different cultural contexts that the original process did not anticipate, even if the scholars running the process are liberal minded people who don't assume a scholar from China is "inferior" because his/her writing doesn't match convention. The result is the same because part of the thinking structure is the same. The processes themselves literally filter and value the knowledge without human agency. To a degree.

I feel like option 1 for interpreting the situation is... well... naive. Which isn't bad unless one has been afforded a view or experience of the system that should challenge that perspective. But it seems to support the kind of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality. Or the idea of a free market in which intellectual ideas compete on the basis of their merits alone and the best ideas win and the best ideas lose and there is nothing else but good common sense and the mystical hand of the market guiding us. By treating conventions as an equal playing field, this approach focuses solely on mental concepts and eliminates the material constraints that form social relations. It puts the blame on those struggling against material constraints. I feel like option 2 is a bit reductive - even though it is always my gut reaction. It so heavily focuses on social relations (and perhaps the myths of revolution) that it overlooks how the processes impact everyone involved. It tends to put the blame on those who have power or success in the system, regardless of their situation. I feel like option three... I'm not sure. It seems to have the most balanced approach to me. But at the same time, the emphasis on the system risks removing agency or blame from the people do have some control over how the system is run. Yet, at the same time, it's focus on the processes seems to lend itself to reforms that are more likely to be implemented because it isn't blaming the people with control over the system (as much as my gut reaction does anyway).  It does allow leeway for not all in power to be prejudiced, but it also argues that prejudice still exists - as part of the system, and as a result of the system in the minds of those who use it.

I'm not happy with any of them though. I'm not sure what to do with this.

Dodging Questions

Matsuda, Matsuda, Matsuda, Matsuda, Matsuda, MATSUDA.... Well... Several things come to mind when I think back on lunch and the two talks I was able to attend:

1. Damn that guy ages well. I hope I look that good when I'm his age.
2. Using google search to learn articles... Freakin' brilliant...
3. He was surprisingly shy at lunch.
4. I felt like he analyzed his audience well for the two talks I saw: the public lecture and the tutoring lecture. But, and perhaps because of that, I felt like his talks just covered basic stuff about working with second language users. Affirming, yes. Comforting, yes. Refreshing (my memory), yes. But exciting or new, no. 
5. I wish he'd been able (willing?) to respond to Gallagher's repeated questions about changing the university. While Matsuda seemed interested in what a diversifying student population means for how we teach and think about students, Gallagher seemed to want to start a conversation about what we teach and how the linguistic practices of the world and of the diverse student population (declining [social] capital of American English, the linguistic legitimacy of other languages and Englishes, preference for functional Englishes for economic gain, etc.) should make us alter it. That is, what our curriculum is, how we actively involve second languages/Englishes in composition, how would we assess this kind of composition, etc.
6. I wish I wasn't bashful sometimes. I know, shocking, but I am on certain days, and so I didn't feel comfortable asking questions like I usually do.
7. When he spoke about how a Chinese student with a certain proficiency in their language might have an easier time transitioning to writing in English than another Chinese student, I took him to mean that the literacy practices that are common across languages are what we do (and should be) teaching. Analysis of the rhetorical situation and whatnot. We should teach those literacy practices first, then formal language.
8. But he also seemed unwilling to discard formal language instruction. His emphasis on not grading grammar if we don't teach it doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't teach it. It just means if we don't we shouldn't punish students for not knowing it. Where is the balance between these two for him?

All this rambling is to say... Meh. My response to his presentations are perhaps best summed up by "Meh." He is an excellent presenter. His technique great. His demonstrations captivated the audience (esp. the hand to you chin one). He's more articulate than I normally am. However, his content was safe. It was as if he was trying to catch everyone up to where we are for certain in knowledge: don't assume students are dumb or inferior because of errors; don't grade something you don't teach; do recognize that American English is at the very least declining as a global lingua franca; do realize that English teachers are the harshest judges of ESL writing and that is largely due to our desire to help them... But he was unwilling to venture out into uncertain territory, to make claims about what changes should be made. To all the Trekkies out there, he wouldn't boldly go where (hu)mankind had never gone before. I think his talk was great - especially for people who haven't had much exposure to ESL tutoring and teaching scholarship - but he was no James Tiberius Kirk.

A Week of Manifestos

*Note: Sorry about the length. But there's a comic at the end. 

Villanueva’l s question from “Rhetoric is Politics”: “How do nice people abide by and maintain not nice things, like a system in which certain groups are consistently relegated to the bottom of the structure in disproportionate numbers?” (Powell 2)

There are two things that jumped out at me from this week’s readings. First, they all provide responses to oppressive language practices. Baca takes our minds back to the early stages of European colonialism and the brutal, violent takeover of a civilization which began with the gatekeeping device of the Reqeurimento. Life or death. Speak well enough to convert or death. “This legacy is partially why the Eurocentric myth linking the Western Roman alphabet – and eventually, English alphabetic literacy – to agency, and democracy can potentially mean little, and when it does, it brings with it baggage of global proportions” (230-31). Powell’s nation-based focus on the oppression of Native Indians implicates those of us who stand idly by Academic imperialism. Horner, Lu, Royster, and ol’ Joe Trimbur take issue with perceived norms of SAE or EAE, arguing that this fallacy allows for the marginalization of languages and students as either deficient, incorrect, or inferior to the “norm” and ignores the actual conditions in which language operates. These norms are historically contingent and constantly changing, and adherence to SAE or EAE does not ensure effective communication – especially in a country (and a globalized economy) where various languages and Englishes proliferate and non-norm versions are preferred among certain groups.

Each promotes a rhetorical response. Baca argues that new technologies use pictographic manuscripts that have the potential to “resume historical trajectories independent of Western global expansion” (whatever page 5 is in the pdf). Powell argues academics should adopt trickster rhetoric that works within and outside the system, ironically pulling at and cutting across the narratives that string together our rhetorically created reality. It should inhabit the “wild space over and between sounds, words, sentences, and narratives.” Horner, et. al. argue for a shifted perspective of translingualism that values linguistic difference as a classroom resource rather than a problem to be corrected. Each of these seems a bit sketchy to me.

Baca’s belief that we can resume historical trajectories independent of history seems… well… ridiculous. You can’t erase the past 500 years of colonialism and start from scratch. That’s like Marxists who dream up utopias of what could be without engaging the current material conditions of the situation. Perhaps a more generous reading of Baca is that he believes technology has allowed people to puncture the monolithic dominance of Western alphabetic and literacy by returning images to a central place in communication, and that has opened space for making his topic an area of study. He is engaging in what Powell described as the two responses to a lack of American Indians: a collective effort to re-create those voices, and as an effort to penetrate and thereby legitimate the counter stories, seeing them as explicable objects of study.” I am sympathetic to the desire to escape the idea that entering the public sphere with sufficient literacy leads to power. It’s like a classic critique of Habermas. There really isn’t a space in which you can leave behind social signifiers that influence how those in power hear your message. No matter how fluent you are. You’re always marked as not those in power in some way. But I’m skeptical that technology is a fix (which I’m not sure he’s arguing, but I get the feeling he’s more gung-ho about it than I). Technology seems to me to have emerged as another part of the public sphere, but one just as politically, economically, and socially connected to the Western history of colonialism as alphabetic literacy was originally. Who gets it? Who sets its dominant conventions that make certain websites seem gross? Where is this power centralized? Is it possible to use the internet to create a counterpublic to this dominant group… yeah… sure… but you could make the same claim about the practice of literacy, alphabetic or no. It was possible to create counterpublics that continued to use pictographic language. But in both cases the sustainability seems questionable and the material risk to one’s life seem obvious.  Powell and Horner et. al. both work within the national frame. Both argue for a specific language practice and interpretive schema that will (hopefully [though for Powell, questionably]) affect change that will lead to less… bad things happening… But both seem to put their hope once again into a rhetoric that they doubt. Powell seems accepting of the likely possibility that her words will not move us at the end. Horner et. al. notes that “dominant ideology is always indifferent to the invalidity of its claims.” While Horner et. al. say that we need not accept its sway, one cannot help but ask how do we fight it? Relying on rhetoric to persuade academics or policy makers by engaging in the public sphere seems to run into the same conflicts that the use of pictographic writing gets on the internet. Both can’� t erase the social signifiers that mark them as marginalized perspectives, and thus engage in public dialogue from a weakened position for changing behaviors and policies. Hence, the indifference. It’s as if each approach, Baca’s pictographic writing, Powell’s trickster rhetoric, and Horner et. al.’s translingualism each argue that a letter to the editor will change things, but differ on what the letter should say and how it should say it.

Another qualm I have with Horner et. al. is their adherence to the nation-state framework. Baca at least notes that we must also interrogate why and where for a new geography of reason and invention, a geography that cannot be divorced from economy and the material realities of living experience which are undoubtedly legitimate components of rational thought.” Implementing translingualism seems like a good idea. But I worry about companies viewing translingualism as a costly endeavor. Potential miscommunications internally and externally. Increased use of materials (paper, etc.) because of language uses, clarifications, etc. The additional time spent during these semiotic negotiations. The expense of adjusting policies, providing training about language policies, etc.  Global capitalism is so incredibly fast and flexible geographically with how it rearranges to reduce costs that it seems unless translingualism as a policy was globally implemented, companies would literally change locations. The US, as one of the largest economies, may (and I’m not sure to what extent) be protected from this corporate flight, but even within states and regions, companies shift to cut costs. I guess I’m not being clear right now, but I wonder to what degree using the nation-framework as the starting place weakens the effectiveness of the solution argued for by Horner et. al.

Finally and relatedly, the second thing I noticed is that, despite all of their references to war, violence and death, the material consequences of English-only policies on immigration, education and economics, and bodies, bodies, bodies, bleeding bodies that are unseen and unheard, there are little to no references to bodies in their solutions.  When there (in Powell), they are justifications for the approach, not part of the solution. If rhetorical approaches to change language practices and language policy is limited because of the concerns I have about the public sphere, how can material bodies make this visible? (Read: protests). This is of course complicated by my qualms about the geography of global capitalism, but how might we reimagine locations of protest to deal with the new forms of capitalist production that are emerging. If we can’t rely on the factory as a location of protest because it is too easily closed and moved (it is cheaper to close and move a factory that is protesting than to break the protest), how should we imagine organizing protests? Who should protest and where? Food is produced across multiple states, in multiple places, and moved through multiple modes of transportation, could we organize along chains of production? The logistical costs of shifting that many different operations would be crazy hard to swallow.