In our first project, we worked with Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy and Walter Ong’s notion of literacy. I shared a reading from Ulmer’s Heuretics in which he argued that a major consequence of literacy was a shift to issues of method. Rather than bask in the magic of a long, persuasive speech (as the oral mind would), the literate mind wanted to know how the speech worked, how to (re)create the speech. The literate mind wanted not magic, but method.
Ulmer’s argument–one I enjoy–is that the development of electrate tools opens up possibilities for new genres and new methods (since a genre can be understood as a collection of typical/expected/productive methods). In project two, I am attempting to invent–or at least delineate–methods for a new genre (which I am calling Affective Objects). How does one affectively explore the affectivity of an object?
This is not a question to which I have an answer. I have ideas, but not answers. My goal is for you to develop an idea that approaches an answer. As I indicated in our last class, I have put together some readings that can help us do that. Today’s readings get us started, albeit in different ways.
The Shouse reading “Feeling, Emotion, Affect” gives us a robust sense of what we mean by “affect.” This is important.
The Jenkins reading gives us a model of one way (not THE way) to trace and explore the affective resonances of an [objective?] object. I am being intentionally coy here a bit.
I have created a discussion forum in Canvas, and I would ask that you get started by free-writing on the Jenkins for 10 minutes. I want you to explore NOT what Jenkins says, but what he DOES. How is this essay constructed? What does it do? How might I reduce it to a recipe: what are the ingredients? What are the procedures? What special instructions do I need? How do I make this essay? HINT: In your response, do not use the word “comics.”
Literacy:Writing::Electracy:Affect
In her 2000 book Breaking Up [at] Totality, Diane D. Davis advocates rethinking the ways we teach writing in Universities. Her argument is complicated, but I will try to offer a summary here. She argues that despite the fact that philosophy and technology undergo incredible transformations across the 21st century, the ways we teach writing, and what we consider writing to be by and large do not. She writes:
Writing gets codified, disciplined, domesticated in the typical composition course; indeed, writing is often sacrificed in the name of “composition,” in the name of this “discipline’s” service-oriented and pre-established requirements. As Lester Faigley notes in Fragments of Rationality, what passes for “good student writing” in the typical composition course is still the “modernist text,” the linear and progressive narrative written in an authoritative voice and arising from accepted conceptual starting places (topoi) (15-16). The point here is not to suggest that there is no longer a place in this postmodern era for the “modernist text”: rather, our concern is that this very particular style of writing has been allowed (even encouraged) to masquerade as writing itself. Though we-teachers have attempted to incorporate postfoundational ways of knowing into our pedagogical strategies, as far as I can tell, we have not allowed what Lyotard calls “the postmodern condition” to radically refashion our pedagogical goals themselves. Though we have, for instance, begun to design writing courses that encourage collaborative learning, emphasize process [METHOD], foreground rhetorical situation [KAIROS], and make room for personal experience, the motivation behind these surface-level revisions typically remains the same: to better help students produce the same old modernist texts. Our criteria for “good writing” and our motivation for “teaching writing” have remained virtually unaffected by these updates in pedagogical style. (p. 6)
I introduce this passage as a way of introducing affect because I offer this assignment as a response to Davis’s call for postfoundational ways of knowing (which, after project one, I would call “electrate” ways of composing) that do not seek to replicate or reinforce “the same old modernist texts” (or, the already existing genres/methods of literacy). I want to see if, inspired by Ulmer and in response to Davis, we can make something new. And hope that the something new does something useful (though we may have to think about what makes a project/method/genre/composition useful).
There is a more direct connection between Davis and affect though. I want to turn our attention to her discussion of “physiological laughter.” In the linked passage, Davis posts a question of “who laughs?” I have similarly raised a question of trauma and crying–asking “who cries?” In both of these questions lies a specter of who/what transcends our rational control. It asks a question of the extent to which we are master of our own experience, and to what extent the objects, forces, and others inside and around us possess control. To the Shouse reading: “What is remarkable about the story of the woman whose leg danced all on its own is not so much that afect trumped will in this particular case, but that this is just one example of the way in which affect precedes will and consciousness.”
