Welcome back from vacation, everybody!
I asked you all to turn in self-assessments before break, and I've read them all over and wanted to share trending issues as well as my own aggregate/meta self-assessment based largely on what you've told me.
Some interesting facts:
12 of you said that you think your participation in class is not good enough. Most of you believe that you don't contribute enough; some of you believe that you talk too much or without enough of a clear structure to your comments.
6 of said that you feel stressed out by discussions at times - especially when they become too abstract, difficult, heady or "Oberlin."
8 of you described your classmates as "brilliant."
14 of you said that you like our class discussions.
All of you said that you're meeting at least one of your course goals; none of you had met all of your course goals yet.
Things you plan to do differently second module:
4 of you plan to take (more or different kinds of) notes before class in order to help organize your discussion comments in advance
1 of you plans to try freewriting for one page after reading/viewing assigned texts rather than taking notes at the same time
9 of you would like to spend more time on the readings for class.
Things you'd like us to do differently in class:
2 of you propose working in small groups during part of in-class discussion
1 of you requested concrete definitions for theoretical terms
3 of you requested tying together course materials and concepts on a more regular basis
1 of you proposed setting unified discussion goals in advance
1 of you proposed having a different student each week make a shared doc to track class discussions (e.g. theme-web, word/question cloud)
My Self-Assessment:
From my point of view, a large seminar on an interdisciplinary topic is always a tricky thing to facilitate. In our case, the diversity of different majors and areas of expertise coupled with the advanced level of the course and high theoretical content makes it a challenge to address everybody's needs, abilities and interests.
In particular, the need for structure (crisp, complete conceptual mastery, definite meanings, a sense of clear progress) can often compete with the ethical encounter with the "other" (dwelling in uncertainty, abiding not-knowing, going out of your comfort zone). I am well aware that this happens not only in our class, but also in relation to other classes and responsibilities (and to life, in general). My goal for you is not to resolve this tension but simply to notice how it works and, when possible, try to do something different with your reactions. You might try not taking notes if you always take notes, or vice-versa if you rarely do; you might try putting theory into your own words, even if you know you're probably getting it wrong or especially if you feel frustrated with it, or with yourself - practice poetic malapropism, practice mistranslation, practice making mistakes. My goal for myself is to stay open to making changes even when the very fact of making changes is somewhat disruptive to the class, and to try to affirm what can get better even at the risk of losing control over what is working well enough.
I really enjoy teaching this class. All of the theory with which the course engages is intended to be equipment for living. I want you to question it - it's even good to disdain it at times, or disavow it, especially if that leads you to look for its flaws and rough edges - and the main point is that engaging with theory in this critical, dialogic, messy way trains you to be able to theorize. Critical thinking is a buzzword in liberal arts education, and certainly critical thinking is part of theorizing. But sometimes critical thinking languishes in the litany of the negative - everything is "problematic," nothing feels particularly possible. Yet to theorize is also to affirm something, not just tearing down what we know to be ideologically suspect or incoherent or icky. To theorize is to move in the direction of building something else, creating something that expresses yourself engaging with the world, not merely deploying or applying an existing critical tool (or weapon) but forging it anew. When you engage critically with theory, you are remaking its tools, so that the ideas are always fresh, and properly your own.
In terms of my self-assessment, I feel good about the measure in which the class has cohered as a group since the first days of the semester, developing the ability to discuss difficult concepts together with a high level of mutual respect and quite a bit of theoretical rigor, and I think I've succeeded in facilitating a type of discussion that maintains mutual respect in an environment that is reasonably inviting. I have tried to be available outside of class time to discuss individuals' particular needs and learning styles.
In terms of improvement, I would like to incorporate each of the suggestions listed above: small groups in class; a lexicon of theoretical terms; setting agendas; describing discussions; and tying together big ideas with particular texts more frequently in class. I have enjoyed all of your assignments and honest self-appraisals as well as your suggestions for improving the class, and I think it's worthwhile to discuss these suggestions briefly in class in order to make sure we're all on the same page.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Friday, March 28, 2014
Update from Punk ACLA and Avant-Garde Academics
The American Comparative Literature Association conference at NYU was interesting.
The program made a late-breaking attempt to link the conference to punk rock. You might not think that punk had a precise birthdate, but apparently it was March 31, 1974, when the band Television played at CBGB. Therefore punk is 40 years old.
It's not a particularly punk way of approaching punk to historicize an anti-historicist movement, but then again this is academia. And if you look at the small print at the bottom of the one ACLA seminar devoted to punk, you'll see that anyone who wanted to attend the conference - even to see one meager talk about the birth of punk rock, or community theater - had to pay $35. And that "low" rate was only for students with valid student ID.
I wrote to the conference organizers asking for permission for students to attend the conference for free. A couple people in our class had said they might want to come. The organizers told me that students would be welcome to attend but only if they paid the $35 undergraduate student registration fee. No exceptions could be made... because of "security." I tried to think my way around this rule, proposing registration without a fee, or perhaps Oberlin paying the fee, but no dice.
I just couldn't swallow that, so I didn't bring up the conference again in class. In all honesty, I was ashamed of the ACLA and of academia more generally. I thought it was unbelievably stupid to require undergraduate students to pay anything to attend an academic talk. And it only increased when in my ACLA seminar on community theater we ended up discussing the insane monetization of academic labor today.
The seminar papers also had other themes in common, many of which we have been discussing in our class: the search for new ways of researching and writing the history of cultural movements that have been elided or outright erased from public histories; the meaning of the avant-garde in relation to the popular and the non-dichotomy of the two; and how theory can help to rethink the political dimensions of art.
Yet the overarching theme for me - punk's birthday notwithstanding - was the monetization of both art and academia: I couldn't help thinking of how - for most of us scholars, but also for our students - the most important parts of education are intensively dialogic experiences. Education happens, in other words, through encounters and dialogues, doing unfamiliar things and discussing the experiences. And yet this is rendered almost entirely invisible in the metrics that assess faculty productiveness and student learning. (The very word "metric," used as noun by educational administrators, makes me tense up.)
It's hard for me not to relate the excessive flattening of education so that it fits into overly simple quantitative metrics to its monetization. There is an attitude that because the cost of education has skyrocketed (tuition, but also living expenses, books, resources and materials, and money for access to opportunities, especially in the age of the unpaid internship), therefore "we" (professors) must be sure to give students what they are paying for. And there is a kind of subtle judgment involved, particularly for those of us who teach in the humanities - and even more particularly the less "practical" our subject matter. As though somehow our very fields - literature, theater, let alone marginalized forms and genres - are hurting students, preparing them to fail to get jobs.
Education is not the same thing as "hirability" by the standards of some random asshole who wants someone to be a personal servant, or even a tractable and serviceable assistant, or a coffeemaker.
Yet at Oberlin we don't seem to take seriously enough the idea (which to me is obvious, as it was to administrators at Harvard in 2008, and then at Yale, and then elsewhere) that the high cost of tuition is simply unethical, and needs to be lowered. That, furthermore, a living wage should be non-negotiable for faculty, and that the reliance on part-time and adjunct labor at colleges should be a last-ditch solution, not the new norm at the expense of sustainability. That it is unacceptable that some students not have enough money to take advantages of key educational opportunities at college, even if they were fortunate enough to get the financial aid to attend.
The avant-garde resists identification with money (check out Value-Form and Avant-Garde); and selling out is one of the most obvious forms of capture. Doing anything in life - let alone trying to make a living as an artist - involves quantum leaps from line of flight to capture to line of flight, and it isn't always obvious which is which. Just look at the Wu-Tang Clan's new album.
In my ACLA seminar, we discussed the idea of creating an avant-garde academic collective or workshop (workshop in the sense of the Brecht collective's sense of collaborative creation, not in the sense of being subjected to a powerpoint presentation on uses of Blackboard for expository writing while eating lunch out of a bag). We are still talking now about how to potentiate meaningful, ongoing collaborations when the very idea of it flies in the face of the academy's myth of the lone scholar as the unit of production, the sole genius, the single author. How to do this when we aren't given the time to do it, or the money to do it, because it isn't already monetized. How to build a movement that is not "just" a labor movement nor "just" an intellectual movement, but a truly avant-garde movement in the measure that it is always both simultaneously.
The program made a late-breaking attempt to link the conference to punk rock. You might not think that punk had a precise birthdate, but apparently it was March 31, 1974, when the band Television played at CBGB. Therefore punk is 40 years old.
It's not a particularly punk way of approaching punk to historicize an anti-historicist movement, but then again this is academia. And if you look at the small print at the bottom of the one ACLA seminar devoted to punk, you'll see that anyone who wanted to attend the conference - even to see one meager talk about the birth of punk rock, or community theater - had to pay $35. And that "low" rate was only for students with valid student ID.
I wrote to the conference organizers asking for permission for students to attend the conference for free. A couple people in our class had said they might want to come. The organizers told me that students would be welcome to attend but only if they paid the $35 undergraduate student registration fee. No exceptions could be made... because of "security." I tried to think my way around this rule, proposing registration without a fee, or perhaps Oberlin paying the fee, but no dice.
I just couldn't swallow that, so I didn't bring up the conference again in class. In all honesty, I was ashamed of the ACLA and of academia more generally. I thought it was unbelievably stupid to require undergraduate students to pay anything to attend an academic talk. And it only increased when in my ACLA seminar on community theater we ended up discussing the insane monetization of academic labor today.
The seminar papers also had other themes in common, many of which we have been discussing in our class: the search for new ways of researching and writing the history of cultural movements that have been elided or outright erased from public histories; the meaning of the avant-garde in relation to the popular and the non-dichotomy of the two; and how theory can help to rethink the political dimensions of art.
Yet the overarching theme for me - punk's birthday notwithstanding - was the monetization of both art and academia: I couldn't help thinking of how - for most of us scholars, but also for our students - the most important parts of education are intensively dialogic experiences. Education happens, in other words, through encounters and dialogues, doing unfamiliar things and discussing the experiences. And yet this is rendered almost entirely invisible in the metrics that assess faculty productiveness and student learning. (The very word "metric," used as noun by educational administrators, makes me tense up.)
It's hard for me not to relate the excessive flattening of education so that it fits into overly simple quantitative metrics to its monetization. There is an attitude that because the cost of education has skyrocketed (tuition, but also living expenses, books, resources and materials, and money for access to opportunities, especially in the age of the unpaid internship), therefore "we" (professors) must be sure to give students what they are paying for. And there is a kind of subtle judgment involved, particularly for those of us who teach in the humanities - and even more particularly the less "practical" our subject matter. As though somehow our very fields - literature, theater, let alone marginalized forms and genres - are hurting students, preparing them to fail to get jobs.
Education is not the same thing as "hirability" by the standards of some random asshole who wants someone to be a personal servant, or even a tractable and serviceable assistant, or a coffeemaker.
Yet at Oberlin we don't seem to take seriously enough the idea (which to me is obvious, as it was to administrators at Harvard in 2008, and then at Yale, and then elsewhere) that the high cost of tuition is simply unethical, and needs to be lowered. That, furthermore, a living wage should be non-negotiable for faculty, and that the reliance on part-time and adjunct labor at colleges should be a last-ditch solution, not the new norm at the expense of sustainability. That it is unacceptable that some students not have enough money to take advantages of key educational opportunities at college, even if they were fortunate enough to get the financial aid to attend.
The avant-garde resists identification with money (check out Value-Form and Avant-Garde); and selling out is one of the most obvious forms of capture. Doing anything in life - let alone trying to make a living as an artist - involves quantum leaps from line of flight to capture to line of flight, and it isn't always obvious which is which. Just look at the Wu-Tang Clan's new album.
In my ACLA seminar, we discussed the idea of creating an avant-garde academic collective or workshop (workshop in the sense of the Brecht collective's sense of collaborative creation, not in the sense of being subjected to a powerpoint presentation on uses of Blackboard for expository writing while eating lunch out of a bag). We are still talking now about how to potentiate meaningful, ongoing collaborations when the very idea of it flies in the face of the academy's myth of the lone scholar as the unit of production, the sole genius, the single author. How to do this when we aren't given the time to do it, or the money to do it, because it isn't already monetized. How to build a movement that is not "just" a labor movement nor "just" an intellectual movement, but a truly avant-garde movement in the measure that it is always both simultaneously.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
If you are struggling with the First Assignment
I've spoken individually to most of the class about the first assignment, in one form or another. Something that comes up fairly often is the perception that not having mastered the theory we have read is somehow a problem - either a problem with the student or, if not with the student, perhaps with the class itself. I on the other hand do not see this as a problem at all.
The North Star of the class - the goal toward which I want us to move - is an increasingly subtle understanding of the same theoretical concepts we have already introduced. The practice happens by grappling with theory in different instances, even arguing with it, approaching it with a questioning mind. A subtle hand with theory takes practice, and it takes this kind of disagreement, the willingness to change your mind, not taking anything for granted as the authoritative truth. It takes practice to use the power tools of theory not to bludgeon defenseless artifacts into submissive signification within a total interpretation but - on the contrary - to see how, all around us, in every area of human endeavor, theory is already being used, all the time, for all kinds of purposes. To practice theory in an integrated way is to be aware of the uses of theory, to denaturalize the hidden uses of theory, such as how master narratives eat away at historical knowledge, continually revising and eroding it to convert the "common sense" version of that history into soundbytes in the service of the powerful; to see how vulnerable art is to the many forms of capture and also how resilient it is; to see that something can be both captured and capturing, both avant-garde and popular, and that these identities depend on perspective and are not set in stone. To see that "minor literature" is about what it does, rather than what it is. To arrive at an integrated practice of theory is to be able to see different points of view at once, and allow multiplicity rather than needing it to all signify in the service of one interpretation - much as Tevye does by mixing registers (Yiddish and Hebrew, second-person, first person, reported dialogue, etc.) and - on the contrary, many critics want to capture Tevye to "mean" and embody their particular interpretation of "modern Jewish identity" and nothing else.
The first assignment is not where you do all these things. Rather it is the first of several (yes, admittedly obligatory) opportunities to think with theory, to try it out wherever you are in a process of learning about many new things. Thinking with theory, or practicing theory, is more like driving a car than solving a puzzle. The assignment is not supposed to show everything you have learned, nor are you expected to form a definitive opinion on any of these things, but rather to take it out for a spin and see what happens.
I am very much grading the assignments based on what each person is able to do rather than based on what they didn't do or "should have done." I think you will all feel better once the first assignment is done with and you receive my feedback as well as the dreaded grade (the latter of which is, as you probably already suspect, merely the institutionally mandated analogical translation of what you have done as if all class work across all disciplines in the college existed in perfect analogues of each other).
Let me stress that I view the assignments as a progression through the semester, and that I don't expect you to engage with theory in the same way in the first assignment as in the last. I consider it a learning process, and the assignments are meant to be a way of both articulating and deepening the learning process. They are not meant to be finished, total products with airtight arguments, or anything like that. If you were learning to play the piano, would you expect that your first performance would be at the same level as your third? Please allow yourself to learn, and be compassionate with yourselves. I promise to be compassionate with you as well. In short, this is a somewhat meandering pep talk. You can do it!
The North Star of the class - the goal toward which I want us to move - is an increasingly subtle understanding of the same theoretical concepts we have already introduced. The practice happens by grappling with theory in different instances, even arguing with it, approaching it with a questioning mind. A subtle hand with theory takes practice, and it takes this kind of disagreement, the willingness to change your mind, not taking anything for granted as the authoritative truth. It takes practice to use the power tools of theory not to bludgeon defenseless artifacts into submissive signification within a total interpretation but - on the contrary - to see how, all around us, in every area of human endeavor, theory is already being used, all the time, for all kinds of purposes. To practice theory in an integrated way is to be aware of the uses of theory, to denaturalize the hidden uses of theory, such as how master narratives eat away at historical knowledge, continually revising and eroding it to convert the "common sense" version of that history into soundbytes in the service of the powerful; to see how vulnerable art is to the many forms of capture and also how resilient it is; to see that something can be both captured and capturing, both avant-garde and popular, and that these identities depend on perspective and are not set in stone. To see that "minor literature" is about what it does, rather than what it is. To arrive at an integrated practice of theory is to be able to see different points of view at once, and allow multiplicity rather than needing it to all signify in the service of one interpretation - much as Tevye does by mixing registers (Yiddish and Hebrew, second-person, first person, reported dialogue, etc.) and - on the contrary, many critics want to capture Tevye to "mean" and embody their particular interpretation of "modern Jewish identity" and nothing else.
The first assignment is not where you do all these things. Rather it is the first of several (yes, admittedly obligatory) opportunities to think with theory, to try it out wherever you are in a process of learning about many new things. Thinking with theory, or practicing theory, is more like driving a car than solving a puzzle. The assignment is not supposed to show everything you have learned, nor are you expected to form a definitive opinion on any of these things, but rather to take it out for a spin and see what happens.
I am very much grading the assignments based on what each person is able to do rather than based on what they didn't do or "should have done." I think you will all feel better once the first assignment is done with and you receive my feedback as well as the dreaded grade (the latter of which is, as you probably already suspect, merely the institutionally mandated analogical translation of what you have done as if all class work across all disciplines in the college existed in perfect analogues of each other).
Let me stress that I view the assignments as a progression through the semester, and that I don't expect you to engage with theory in the same way in the first assignment as in the last. I consider it a learning process, and the assignments are meant to be a way of both articulating and deepening the learning process. They are not meant to be finished, total products with airtight arguments, or anything like that. If you were learning to play the piano, would you expect that your first performance would be at the same level as your third? Please allow yourself to learn, and be compassionate with yourselves. I promise to be compassionate with you as well. In short, this is a somewhat meandering pep talk. You can do it!
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Capture in the News
I thought it might be useful and fun to create a platform where we could discuss theory off the cuff, outside of class. It is purely optional, non-graded, and not something to worry about.
It could be a place to put late-night thoughts about theory that you might not remember otherwise. It could be a place to connect your individual content interests with the critical framework of the class. It could be a place to ask questions and hear each other out about whatever might be percolating, but with (perhaps) less of a sense of pressure about getting off a fully-formed comment during class time.
I'd like it to be a place where it feels relatively safe to put out ideas that aren't fully formed. If you have suggestions about how to make it more of such a place (such as using a different platform, or changing the settings on this one), I am open to making changes.*
So here's what I was thinking about with theory today:
Protest at the Guggenheim Museum
The Guggenheim Museum in New York incarnates (in its distinctive architecture) and continually reaffirms its programmatic relationship with the avant-garde.
I mean, look at it.
At the same time, the history of the museum is a history of capture. (In fact, I don't know of any famous museum that isn't primarily about capture, although there have been avant-garde attempts at museums that could be about flight, dispersal, non-authenticity, such as the Virtual Museum of the Avant-garde).
The foundation that originally housed a "Museum of Non-Objective Painting" in rented quarters in the late 1930s has become a mammoth global art institution, its brand identity remaining quintessentially "New York" yet its name ever-expanding to grace new museums opening worldwide. It has spawned "sister museums" elsewhere - in Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and Abu Dhabi.
The protest above - staged accidentally (but appropriately) during an exhibit on the Italian avant-garde movement known as Futurism - called out the museum for the disconnect between its ostensible/original artistic mission and its current practices. In order to do so, the protestors make visible this disconnect, and in doing so they reveal the nature of the museum as an apparatus of capture.
 |
| banners are dropped |
 |
| pamphlets flutter down |
At the same time, their protest also resignifies the museum as an avant-garde space. Some museum-goers were undoubtedly excited to see a takeover of the museum during an exhibit of the (historical) avant-garde, to see the disruption of the capture, or its fruitful incompleteness, to experience the unruliness of the avant-garde erupting even as its historical meaning appears to be sealed.
*I am going to try to make everyone in the class an author of the blog. If I have understood the FAQ correctly, that means that you can also change settings on the blog. Please feel empowered to go ahead and do so. Right now the blog is "public" but we could set it to "private." We could also talk about having the blog be public vs. private.
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