March 31, 2015 - 10:35
Caleb is situating us in the classroom on this chilly, rainy day...
I. coursekeeping
* Ariel's report on last Thursday's class, in the classroom,
noted less movement (more vulnerable and exposed than
we were in the smaller space of the basement; in contrast,
this established "learning space" seemed more intimidating,
you were missing a "certain glow," less eager and engaging...
* Marian selects class site for Thursday, when we have a real treat,
a visit from Eli Clare (whose book, Exile and Pride, Rosa and Nkechi
both read w/ me--in different classes--last semester:
tell us who he is, what you learned from him, got from his writing?)
@ 7:30 p.m., tomorrow night, in TGH, Eli will be delivering the
Annual LGBTQIA+ Keynote, "Resisting Shame, Making Our Bodies Home"
For our class the next day, he's asking you to read a newer text, an essay called
Meditations on Disabled Bodies, Natural Worlds, and a Politics of Cure.
We started this class by asking what difference being embodied meant,
by naming the particular ways in which being raced/classed/gendered
affected our experience of the natural world. Eli turns this upside down:
what might thinking ecologically, about restoration of the tall-grass prairie,
tell us about the desire for a cure of disability? For "restoring" the
"natural" body to someone, like himself, born with cerebral palsy?
We'll start class with a read-around, so please come having selected
(and ready to read) a sentence, a phrase, and a word from the text
that have "energy" for you--plus one word of your own to describe
the text, or your experience of reading it. Of course if you have
questions for Eli, bring those, too, but we decided to start w/ this
reading, to get us all in the shared space of his text, as refracted by y'all.
* This morning I read 8 proposals for a collaborative web event, due next
Monday, that challenges the genre of a conventional paper.
Four of you want to look @ how different people interpret the same events:
Maddie suggests having one person write a short, neutral narrative with just facts,
then she (and one/several other?) people rewrite it into something more elaborate and personal;
Liz suggests giving multiple people a photograph or list, asking them each to
write a paragraph connecting the pieces, then comparing the stories;
she also offered a second proposal, running a piece of text through several in-person
or on-line translations, then comparing the grammatical structure and/or word
meaning in the original and end texts (getting less @ individual than language-based difference).
Amala also wants tocreate some form of photography gallery, to demonstrate
how humans are ecologically intertwined with different aspects of the world,
and follow each photo with a different genre of writing (resembles Liz's first proposal);
Teresa wants to stay away from writing, to see how sketching/drawing
can constitute a class paper, and lead to different interpretations of meaning
Four others of you proposed making some sort of multi-media work:
Tosin, inspired by Meeker's description of comedy (not as funny, but as "muddling through" to survive),
proposes writing "the comedy of the college student," incorporating visual documentation (a stop-motion slideshow...?)
Marian and Abby, who are in the play "Equivocation," also want to use multimedia--maybe film an outdoor performance?--
to represent fluidity between characters, of genres, of "equivocation," of wild writing.
Caleb wants to experiment presenting “nature” through video, or by juxtaposing audio and still photographs,
using sound as his primary vehicle, combining the meditative and contemplative,
maybe focusing on decay, death, "ugliness"; there'd be no single central character and no specific narrative arc.
Ariel, Celeste, Joni, Nkechi, Rosa....?
I have two general responses to these proposals:
* Those that highlight the idea that different people interpret the world differently would
have been great for your first web event, when we were exploring what difference race/class/gender
make in how we see the world. But I've been trying to move us on, by focusing in this section less
on individual difference and more on what difference shared structures, especially the shared
conventions of language, make in representing the world.
I want to nudge you to move in that direction, and ask what structures--you are using,
how your representations are structured by the way you've been socialized to see, read, write, draw.
Not asking how Maddie sees the world differently than Teresa, but rather how the language that
both Maddie and Teresa have been taught makes them see and represent the world in a certain way
(trying to make a paper with sketches, or photographs, or recording sounds
instead of words would be a great way of doing this).
* But that alternative "making" needs to have a critical element.
All of the proposals so far focus on using forms that differ from those of a conventional paper.
I want to give you a bit of advice drawn from the current Tri-faculty
seminar I'm doing on "Critical Making." This is a new way of doing intellectual
work that focuses on making things (with our hands, or with on-line technologies),
but doing so with a critical eye, a notion of intervening in and altering the world.
"Critical Making" refuses the langauge of "creative" (because that implies "not critical"),
and insists on students finding projects in which they are invested,
not just by observing things, but by interacting with and manipulating them--
in order to critique and alter what is. They are interventions in the world,
and I am thinking of these projects not just as "windows," but as interventions.
I also have one concrete piece of advice,
in response to Amala's question about length:
how judge what's comparable?
how many photographs or poems equal a 5-page paper?
(by the amount of time put into the project?)
How to move forward on this, figure out your collaborations?
(The remainder of this work needs to happen outside of class;
we won't have time to work together on this when Eli's here on Thursday.)
II. (by 3:00) For today, Andrew Goatly's essay on “Green Grammar,
Mary Schleppegrell's response, “What Makes a Grammar Green?”
and Goatly's reply to her. I'd given you a bunch of questions to think about,
so let's rip through 'em, in four groups (3 each):
1) what was the Newtonian world view, and how does
contemporary physics describe the nature of the world differently?
2) what (does Goatly think) is the relationship between that world and our grammar, and
what sort of grammar (does he think) would be more consonant w/ ecological ontology?
3) what (does he argue) is the difference between "congruent" grammar and metaphor;
and what role do metaphor and "nominalization" play in his argument?
4) what different directions do Goatly and Schleppegrell suggest for "critical language awareness"?
(by 3:15) then we're going to do a "jigsaw": re-mix,
in order to explain this to one another...
III. (by 3:30) Now comes the fun part: application! (do this as a large group)
your site sites were much more fun-and-engaging this week-->
Liz’s ‘land and sea’—photos and poem
Maddie’s emoticons
Joni’s ‘it’s lit’ drawing—of cloud colors, temperature, with esp. attention to sounds
Amala’s ‘cold sunflower seeds’ (told from 2nd person p.o.v.)--> "the happiness kept coming" (nominalization!)
Abby’s observational exercise re: 'frequency'--> "trying to imagine an egalitarian story told equally by the grass, trees, squirrels, me, the trash, the Haffner construction worker smoking, the half-finished building, the dramatic sky, every water molecule comprising each inch cubed of the eighty percent humidity, because maybe I we all are foolish to think we can somehow express all or any of it."
Tosin's 'thoughts at the ford'--a series of questions. and pauses...
Caleb's photographs, 'shrine to chronic social indigestion': Plastic, glass, cotton, rubber. Rinse, vomit—repeat?
Ariel's excerpt from a letter: "is it so wrong to spoil myself in my imagination?"
Marian's "being wild and leaving "space" for interpretation [=silence!]
Teresa's "look @ these geese"-->too many sensations, can’t focus on anything except the sound of my voice in my head--> need silence!
Nkechi: bored, feel like I'm writing a book report...be so much more interesting to geocache with yourself, create a project that lives at your site sit that you can add to every week...push myself over the next (last) few weeks to make my posts be more than the assignment, and to really think creatively about postings.
Celeste, Rosa?
first target text: Caleb's series of four photographs
re-doing some of these, first in Schleppegrell's mode, clearly identifying agents of action.
re-do it again, in accord with Goatly's guidelines for "green grammar":
congruent structure uses agent as subject, process as verb, and affected as object:
cause and effect are separable; one permanent entity affects another one =
incompatible w/ current scientific theory
he suggests, instead, "nominalization" and getting rid of "anthropocentrism";
let's try his suggestions for environmentally friendly alternatives to goal-directed grammar:
false division into agent-> affected, false unidirectionality of cause-> effect:
location is affected; process and things are not separate categories
conflate medium w/ process: "it's winging" instead of "birds are flying in the sky";
state a process w/out a participant: "there's been a death" instead of "someone died";
use plural subjects, reciprocal verbs: "Anne and Krygs collided"
promote location to subject: "the bed was crawling with ants..."
ergative forms (medium does the process, provides own energy;
human as instigator, not agent): "the rice cooked," "the meat went on boiling"
_____
IV. Anne’s reading notes
Goatly's proposal for an "ecological critical discourse":
agrees w/ Bohm that ordinary language is inadequate to represent
the world of modern scientific theory and ecology; but also thinks that
more adequate grammar can be developed (which Bohm failed to do...):
nominalization and metaphor can be used to emphasize the primacy
of process and to downplay anthropocentrism
cf. congruent= literal w/ metaphoric = equating unlike things:
a discrepancy/incongruence/incompatible tension
metaphors make new meanings possible, expand the range of meanings by flouting conventions
congruent structure uses agent as subject, process as verb, and affected as object:
cause and effect are separable; one permanent entity affects another one =
incompatible w/ current scientific theory
the congruent/ metaphoric distinction is arbitrary:
it depends on conventional classification that selects some
similarities as valuable, ignores others (so what is "literal" is an illusion)
speech is seen as closer to reality, metaphor as more "abstracted"
Newton focused on the laws of motion = experiences of the infant body
language reinforces this sense of an external force acting on an object to set it in motion
Later scientific theory challenges 3 dimensions of the Newtonian world view:
* nature is passive and controllable (there's spontaneous change)
* basic building blocks of nature are permanent rigid bodies extended in space
(particles are events and processes)
* man is outside nature he describes/acts on (the living observer is part of the system).
Primary emphasis is on undivided wholeness, not separation
increasing focus on evolutionary biology, open systems, increase in order, complexity
(vs. entropy of closed systems)
Gaia theory sees world as large self-regulating organism, defying 2nd law of thermodynamics
("Mining the earth for minerals is as sensible as eating your liver for nutrients")
false division into agent-> affected, false unidirectionality of cause-> effect:
location is affected; process and things are not separate categories
Looking for environmentally friendly alternatives to goal-directed grammar:
conflate medium w/ process: "it's winging" instead of "birds are flying in the sky";
state a process w/out a participant: "there's been a death" instead of "someone died";
use plural subjects, reciprocal verbs: "Anne and Krygs collided"
promote location to subject: "the bed was crawling with ants..."
ergative forms (medium does the process, provides own energy;
human as instigator, not agent): "the rice cooked," "the meat went on boiling"
nominalization recodes processes as nouns, suggests their permanence-->
or might they be seen to represent self-generated processes?
"water condenses" -> "condensation occurs" (medium absorbed in process)
seeking an image of the world in which processes prodominate and human actors disappear
Conclusion: congruence represents a Newtonian, anthropocentric, infantile ideology
grammar more consonant w/ ecological ontology can be constructed
2 possible directions for critical language awareness:
name actors responsible for environmental degradation
more radically, target anthropocentrism, focus on interrelated process
(overcome the "thingification" of the world)
deconstruct things into processes, transitive effective clauses into reciprocal actions
Schleppegrell: purpose of a green grammar is to represent
real relationships in the world, in order to change patterns
a truly green grammar reveals real forces, institutions that result in env'l destruction
nominalization diffuses responsibility, suppresses social agency, obscures those relationships
Goatly: nominalization can obscure agency of non-specific human actors,
carry inference of general, not specific institutional/corporate destruction
but no grammer can represent the real relationships in the world,
all are models for what's "out there," mediations
Newtonian model is flawed, outmoded, reactionary
@ least nominalization is ambiguous!
(does it turn processes into things, or does it indicate the processual nature of all things?)
cf. Blackfoot = post-relativity models of the physical universe